by Ninie Hammon
Voices. A nurse—the cute little one?—screamed.
The room was suddenly filled with people, stepping around something by his bed, but when Michael tried to see what it was, his view was blocked. He struggled to sit up, but nurses pushed him firmly back on the pillow. Then, for a moment, the crowd of people parted enough for Michael to catch a glimpse of what was on the floor. It was Ronnie Martin, lying face up. The three-inch, garden-hose needle that had been in Michael’s hand when he fell asleep was buried up to the syringe in Ronnie’s left temple.
Then Michael Rutherford let go. With what little air he had, he wailed a wordless cry of horror and revulsion, and gave himself up to mindless hysteria.
* * * * * * *
“What happened on Valentine’s Day?” Theresa echoed Daniel’s question. “Why, that was the day the world come crashing down around my head and I liked to never dug my way back out.”
The knock on the door come so early it couldn’t have been nothing but bad news. You don’t get woke up at four o’clock in the morning to find out you won the lottery.
Bishop got up, put on his robe and started downstairs with Theresa right behind him. But he told her, “You wait here. I got this.”
Translate that: “If it’s something awful, I want to take the first staggering blow.”
Theresa sat where she was on the top stair, apprehension such a heavy mantle she couldn’t stand up under it.
Count your blessings, she told herself. It ain’t Bishop. He’s right here. It ain’t Isaac, he asleep in his room.
But beyond that it could have been anybody—a lifetime of working with boys, mentoring them, growing them up into fine young men had populated Bishop and Theresa’s world with dozens of possible victims for a catastrophe.
She heard Bishop’s rumbling voice and another man’s voice. Then Bishop appeared at the bottom of the stairs with the county sheriff behind him.
And in that pregnant moment before Bishop opened his mouth to speak, Theresa took the last pain-free breath she’d ever draw in.
“They say they found Isaac’s car all smashed up at the base of Scott’s Ridge,” he said.
That was crazy. Isaac was—
“Musta got stole out of the driveway in the middle of the night,” she said and her voice sounded high-pitched and squeaky.
Then Theresa couldn’t get down the stairs fast enough. Shoving Bishop and the sheriff out of her way, she thundered down the hallway and flung open the door to Isaac’s room. His bed was still made. He hadn’t slept in it all night.
“My Isaac went missing on Valentine’s Day,” Theresa said, and tears sprang into her eyes. “Ain’t nobody seen him since.” She looked at Jack, “Shoot, for six months I wouldn’t even admit he was gone, tole myself all kinda stories about where he’d run off to and how he’d come home all apologizing, saying he’s sorry he made us worry.”
She looked from Jack to Daniel. “Either one of you boys remember Isaac?”
Jack did. The image of a tall, broad-shouldered young man with Bishop’s strength and Theresa’s kind eyes. He could hear the sound of his laughter—rich and full, and recall how he could throw a pitch so fast it’d burn right through the leather of a catcher’s mitt.
Jack remembered something else, too, and the pit of his stomach was suddenly hollow. Whatever it was that had happened to Isaac…it had been Jack’s fault. He was absolutely certain.
Theresa must have seen the look that washed over Jack’s face—gone as fast as it had come.
“You boys been remembering other things about that summer?”
After a fashion, yes. Jack was beginning to see holes in the blackout cloth that hid that summer from him, like a pair of worn jeans where the last frayed threads finally break and the fabric separates. Memories were surfacing that way. Oh, not big ones. He suspected if he recalled anything important it’d be flung out of his mind like a shot put. Smaller ones, though, were escaping through the frayed fabric.
He remembered trying to sneak a water gun into school for the last day of class and having to spend that glorious day of almost-freedom cooling his heels in the principal’s office. He remembered a mishmash of other totally inconsequential things—the fruit aisle in the grocery store, making paper airplanes out of old church bulletins and sailing them out of the balcony of Daniel’s father’s church, and Daniel’s little sister running around the sanctuary trying to catch them, squealing with delight. Something bad had happened to that little girl, but Jack couldn’t remember what it was.
“I’m glad to tell you what I know about that time,” Theresa said, “but it’ll only be tatters and snips.” She paused to focus. “I remember a lot of things about you boys, of course, but the others not so much. Being an all-star team, the players come from all three of the schools in the county—the two private schools and the public school where you three went. We didn’t know none of them boys from the Catholic school or Brewster Academy, and you boys didn’t know each other. So we had us a barbecue for the team in our back yard on the Friday before practice started on Monday so you could get acquainted. Them boys from Brewster Academy kinda stuck together and I seem to recall you and Daniel getting into an argument with them that first night.”
“About what?” Jack asked.
“I don’t think I knew even at the time. Some chests-out and shoving was all. Bishop broke it up. Seems like they’s calling you two names—sissy, chicken, things like that. Do you boys remember?”
Both men shook their heads.
“You will ’cause they’s a angel out there wants you to remember. Needs you to remember.”
“I want to talk about that”—Jack swallowed hard—“angel.”
Daniel silenced another call on his cell phone.
“Andi says there was a demon on Jacob Dumas. She saw it, but I didn’t. So is there an angel around here somewhere, too, that I can’t see?”
It took a great force of will to keep from peering into the shadows, as if he expected a being with a halo and wings to materialize. And he was struck, yet again, by the otherworldliness of the question. He was asking an old woman if there was an angel in the room, for crying out loud.
Theresa read his mind. Well, all right, his face.
“You remember what Scripture says happened to yore namesake?” she asked Daniel.
“Well, yes… what are you talking about in particular?”
“I’m talking about when the angel appeared to Daniel on the bank of the Tigris River and told him God had heard his prayer on the first day he’d prayed it—three weeks before. You remember that part?”
Daniel nodded. “And the angel said it had taken him twenty-one days to get there because…”
“…because ‘The prince of the kingdom of Persia was withstanding me for twenty-one days,’” Theresa completed the Scripture.
Jack didn’t like where this conversation appeared to be heading, but he hadn’t liked the direction of most of the conversations he’d had lately.
“So you’re saying a battle between an angel and a demon delayed the angel for three weeks?” Jack asked.
“It ain’t what I’m sayin’,” Theresa said. “It’s what Scripture says. And they’s a whole lot more references to angels fighting demons in other books like the Koran. ”
She paused and looked deep into Jack’s eyes. “You don’t b’lieve that, do you?”
“Does it matter?”
“You think it don’t matter what you b’lieve, that you can deny the truth and it’ll go away and leave you alone?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” Jack said.
“Good!” Theresa said, and that surprised him. “That’s a right fine place to be. Rather be there than all puffed up knowing ’xactly what you believe and it’s all wrong.”
She paused again, then quoted words she said came from the end of the tenth chapter of Daniel. “‘The secret things belong to the Lord, our God, but the things revealed belong to us.’ God don’t let us know all of it by a lo
ng shot, but what he does let us know is ours to make use of, to help us live in this here supernatural world.”
The room grew quiet. A rumble of distant thunder sent a chill down Jack’s spine. A nameless dread, like a swarm of winged creatures, flew around and around in his stomach, fluttered in his bones.
Get a grip, Carpenter. It’s a thunderstorm!
Daniel ran his fingers through his hair in frustration.
“This is certifiably crazy. What does this demon, or this herd of demons, want Jack and Becca and me for?”
“Ain’t you figured that out yet?” Theresa said, cocked her head to the side and then shook it. “They always was boys quicker on the uptake than you was, Daniel Burke.” She leaned closer to him and said softly, “Them demons don’t want you for nothin’, son. They want to know where the three of you is so they can kill you.”
Into the profound silence that followed, Daniel’s phone rang again. This time he answered the call.
CHAPTER 23
The cute little nurse with the turned-up nose put the telephone receiver back on the hook and saw that her hand was trembling. Another nurse stopped at the nurses’ station counter where she was seated, leaned over and asked quietly, “Well?”
“You think I did the right thing?” she asked, still holding the receiver, reluctant to let go.
“Couldn’t do any harm,” said the second nurse. She glanced down, noticed the top button on her uniform was undone, but didn’t bother to fasten it, merely nodded toward the door of Room 109—where a heavily-sedated Michael Rutherford slept. The room where he had been for the past two weeks was still a beehive of activity. The coroner had only removed the body a few minutes ago. “You saw how he calmed down when I told him I knew that guy he was hollering about.”
“You sure it’s the right guy?”
“Has to be. My mother watches Rev. Daniel Burke preach on TV every week, even drove all the way to Cincinnati one Sunday to see him—him being a local boy and all.”
The cute nurse looked at the room where even from the nurses’ station a puddle of blood was still visible on the floor. She’d have cleaned it up hours ago, but they wouldn’t let her. Said it was a crime scene. She turned back as the other nurse continued. “If you hadn’t promised you’d call the guy, Mr. Rutherford would probably still be hollering. What’d the preacher say?”
“At first, I talked to the church hotline volunteer, had to convince him this was a real emergency. He gave me the preacher’s cell phone number, but I had to try three or four times to get him to pick up, and by the time he did I’d decided I wasn’t going to tell him about…” she nodded toward the room where policemen talked in low voices. “I just said an old classmate of his was dying and was crying out his name. He sounded real concerned; said he’d be here first thing tomorrow.”
* * * * * * *
As Jack and Daniel crossed the bridge over the Three Forks River into Caverna County, Kentucky, Jack felt like he was taking a ride through more than space, that he was traveling through time as well, back to another era and into a world that was profoundly different from the one where he had conducted his life since his grandmother took him home to live with her in New York right before the beginning of school in 1985.
He hadn’t been back in Bradford’s Ridge since then—not surprising since he couldn’t remember any childhood friends and had no reason to go “home.” But after what had happened lately, he suspected that even if he’d had a reason to return, he’d have avoided it. Something…bad had happened here, something he and Daniel and the mysterious Becca had been a part of—Theresa and Bishop too, apparently. And getting near that bad made him uneasy, the kind of gut feeling that’d make a police officer look over his shoulder and pat the Glock in his holster.
Jack glanced up at the gigantic sign beside the road, featuring a smiling Chapman Whitworth and his slogan, “You’ll have to go through me,” and grimaced. Daniel saw the reaction.
“Not a fan of our native son made good?” Daniel asked.
“Nope,” Jack grunted.
“Me neither,” Daniel said.
Jack raised his eyebrows in a question.
“No reason,” Daniel continued. “Well, at least not a good one. My parents took me to see Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom in Louisville when it came out. After supper that night, my father—we’re talking my father, here, who never had an unkind word to say about anybody—said the big ugly dude who stole the Shankara stone reminded him of Chandler Whitworth.”
Daniel smiled. “You notice how I casually dropped that childhood memory into the conversation, like I was one of those people who actually have childhood memories.”
“Things are coming out of the mist for me, too,” Jack said. “Just not important things. My only retrievable memory of Chapman Whitworth’s father is that my father was convinced he was rich. That little house on Peach Tree Lane that’d belonged to Granny Whitworth—my father thought it was full of all kinds of treasure. Called Whitworth ‘an archeologist with sticky fingers and a deep pocket’ who always came back from a dig with something for himself.”
“Think your father was onto something?”
“He was never sober long enough to be onto anything. He and Chandler Whitworth would have been about the same age, though, maybe went to school together. But they weren’t friends. White kids didn’t have black friends, not in the fifties in Kentucky.”
Something occurred to Jack. “You do remember that the Twin Oaks fire that killed Chandler Whitworth was the summer of 1985,” he said.
Daniel looked like he’d had bad sushi for breakfast.
“I do now.” He paused. “And I remember I wasn’t there. We weren’t there, none of the three of us. Everybody else in town watched it burn, but Becca and I…something. We went somewhere together, but it’s ‘lost in the mist.’”
They passed the Twin Oaks memorial—a granite monolith with a big plaque inscribed with the names of all who died. It was tasteful—surrounded by flower gardens and benches.
“I used to go with my father to Twin Oaks on Saturdays to serve communion to the old people,” Daniel said, a note of wonder in his voice. “I just remembered that. And one Saturday, when I was filling the tray of communion cups in that little room off the kitchen, I spilled juice on the plank floor and it slid down through the cracks and was gone—like there was a hole there or something.”
Daniel warmed to the story, describing a movie he’d never seen before that was now playing in his head.
“So I tried to pry up on one of the planks and it was a trap door. Most of it was covered by a rug, but as soon as Dad was busy on the second floor, I pulled the door up and crawled down through it.”
“And you found a basement like the one under the opera house in Phantom of the Opera?”
“Nope. I was sorely disappointed. Nothing but an empty dirt basement where there must have been a furnace once because there was a coal chute.”
The two men rode on in silence, Jack’s GPS telling him to “turn right on Beckley Street” and to “bear left at the crossroads.”
It seemed to be a prosperous community, with wide streets, big trees in the lawns of old, well-kept houses. Certainly, there was a poorer section of town than the one they were driving through. There was in every community. But what they saw bespoke old South and old money, not new subdivisions, but families that had been here for generations.
They didn’t comment on what had changed, since neither could remember much of what it used to be like. The hospital was obviously a new addition, though. Its architecture was jarring—all glass and sharp angles—and didn’t fit the old charm. A sign out front proclaimed “Bradford’s Ridge Regional Hospital, a member of Midland Health Care’s family of fine medical facilities.” Big corporations never got it, or got it, but didn’t care when their trendy modern architecture didn’t suit the nature or the topography of the communities where they did business.
The look on the face of the woman at the rec
eption desk when Daniel asked for Michael Rutherford’s room number primed Jack’s something’s-going-on-here alarm. When they got to the third floor and stepped out of the elevator, the man in a brown sheriff’s uniform who greeted them set the alarm off: clang, clang, clang.
“You’re Reverend Daniel Burke, I take it,” the officer said, his pleasant face neither smiling nor frowning. He extended a beefy hand to Daniel and then to Jack. “I’m Caverna County Sheriff Hezekiah Lincoln.” The sheriff was a stocky man, squat, built like a fire hydrant with reddish brown hair in a semicircle around a bald dome usually hidden by a hat, and deep-set, intelligent eyes.
“Jack Carpenter,” Jack said. Since he wasn’t in uniform, he added. “Sergeant Carpenter, Harrelton, Ohio PD.”
The man’s eyes widened.
“You’re the guy capped that school shooter,” he said. Police officers always kept up with news about their own. Jack nodded. “Good job,” the sheriff said, and meant it. “And you’re here because…?”
Jack could have bobbed and weaved, but something about the sheriff struck a chord and he decided to shoot straight with him. “I don’t have any idea why I’m here. Daniel’s here because Michael Rutherford has been calling for him, but we both went to grade school with Michael and…let’s just say there’s been a lot going on lately with our former classmates.”
The sheriff lifted his eyebrows, but said nothing. Jack played tit for tat. “And you’re here because…?”
“Because a guy named Ronald Martin, who lives in Montana, but grew up here, tried to kill Mr. Rutherford last night.”
Daniel gasped. Jack didn’t blink.
“Apparently, he didn’t succeed,” Jack said.
“Nope, Rutherford offed him with a hypodermic needle.”
Jack liked the sheriff. He often made snap judgments about fellow officers—like Trooper Purvis—and he was seldom wrong. “Sounds like quite a story,” he said. “I’d love to hear it.”