High Lonesome Sound

by Jaye Wells

  The man stilled and narrowed his eyes. Peter wasn’t sure exactly what it was about Sharps that got his back up, but he’d instantly disliked the man, and his patronizing attitude toward Bunk had done nothing to redeem his first impression.

  “That may be, Mr. West. It may be. But Bunk here got other business t’ tend to this afternoon.” To Bunk, he said, “Need you to come on with me. There’s been some trouble at the mines.”

  Peter’s story-hound nose couldn’t resist the whiff of drama. But before he could ask what had happened at the mines, Bunk replied.

  “Welp,” Bunk exhaled the word as he pushed himself off the chair, “guess that’s that then.”

  Something in Peter’s gut tightened—some deep, unknowable source was telling him if he didn’t get the rest of the story about Alodius Fry and the demon right then that he’d never get it. “But I was hoping you’d finish—”

  “C’mon now, Bunk,” Sharps spoke over him. “Deacon’s waiting.”

  If the deacon was involved in the trouble at the mine, Peter definitely wanted to know what was happening. But his instincts told him to keep his mouth shut. Bunk had been friendly enough, but judging from Earl’s tone whatever happened at the mine was town business, which meant it wasn’t any of Peter’s.

  “Later.” Bunk said the word low and quick, as if he’d hoped Sharps hadn’t heard him. But his boss had definitely heard, and looked ready to intercede again.

  It grated Peter’s nerves to see Bunk cower under Sharps’ intimidation. His instincts told him to make a scene. According to his ex, that’s what he was best at, right? Despite what she’d said, there was one skill Peter excelled at even more than throwing one of his “temper tantrums,” as she’d called them. Like a lot of writers, Peter was an expert at reading people. And right then, his read was telling him that Sharps was a lackey, and that forcing the issue with him would only get back to the real power behind this play—his new friend Deacon Fry—and encourage stronger tactics in the future.

  He stepped out of the way to give Bunk an escape route. “See ya soon, Bunk.”

  The old man paused and met his eyes. Despite his obedient demeanor, a spark of rebellion made Bunk’s eyes twinkle with mischief. “Count on it, city boy.”

  17

  The First Rebellion

  Ruby

  As Ruby turned toward the door leading into the library’s office, her limbs felt not her own. She walked past the bathroom door and went, instead, toward the desk where the library computer buzzed under a humming fluorescent light.

  That was her hand clicking the mouse on the icon for the library’s ordering system. Her cold fingers typed Peter West’s name into the search box. And, finally, it was her fingertip that clicked on the button to confirm an order of five copies of each of his three novels to be delivered to the Moon Hollow Public Library on rush order.

  Once it was done, electricity buzzed under her skin. It was sort of like the feeling she’d had seeing Peter West for the first time—the thrill of the forbidden.

  No one ever beat Sarah Jane at anything. No one was allowed to. The unspoken rule of Moon Hollow was that if you’re going up against a Fry, you’d best lose or they’d make you sorry you was ever born. Sarah Jane might be the prettiest girl in town and she might have the most handsome boy, but in a few days, she’d have to explain to her father, who funded all of the purchases made by the library, why she’d ordered fifteen books written by a known sinner. As far as victories went, it wasn’t much, but to Ruby, at that moment, it felt like everything.

  “You fall in?” Sarah Jane’s voice carried back to the office. Ruby jumped out of the chair and ran toward the restroom door, but before Sarah Jane could come closer, the bell over the front door dinged.

  “Hi, Mama!” Sarah Jane called.

  Ruby ran the rest of the way to the bathroom door, which gave her a view of the main library room. Sharon Fry’s eyes were red and she wrung her hands together as she walked toward her daughter.

  “What’s wrong?” Sarah Jane stood frozen halfway to the door. Her mother’s face was white as marble with thin veins of black mascara crawling toward her trembling jaw.

  “Mama?” Sarah Jane whispered.

  “Oh, honey.” Sharon rushed forward and grabbed her daughter in a hard hug. Sarah Jane laughed but the sound was hollow, as if she was unused to such displays of affection from her mother. “It’s Jack.”

  Snakes writhed in Ruby’s stomach; the warm thrill of rebellion gave way to chilly foreboding. “Oh no,” she whispered. “No.”

  In the other room, Sarah Jane’s posture had gone stiff. “What about him?” Her voice was high, bordering on hysteria. “What about Jack?”

  Sobs burst from Mrs. Fry’s mouth, and now it was Sarah Jane’s turn to hug her mother, as if she were the child. “Calm down and tell me what happened,” she demanded in a tone that sounded a lot like her father’s. Her delicate fingers with their pink-tipped nails curled around the older woman’s arms and shook her. “Tell me!”

  “He’s … oh, Sarah Jane, Jack’s dead!”

  Sarah Jane’s scream was so loud and so long that it reached every dark nook and dusty cranny of the library. But Ruby barely registered it as her knees gave out and she collapsed to the ground.

  18

  Writer’s Block

  Peter

  It took longer than Peter expected to finally hear the details of what happened in the mines. He’d spent most of the day wandering around town, walking the trails leading into the woods. He’d taken a two-hour nap on the hammock of the front porch—a luxury he’d never experienced before but hoped to repeat as often as possible while he was in town. He drove into Big Stone Gap to buy some food and alcohol. Most of his evening was taken up ignoring his email and staring at his word processing program’s blinking cursor. It taunted him like a bully.

  Whacha gonna write, pretty boy? How you gonna hit the list if you can’t even write one fucking word? Where’d your mojo go, hot-shot?

  Last time he’d talked to his therapist, she’d warned him not to force it. “Remember, Peter, the subconscious is like a crab. The more you poke at it the more it’s going to refuse to come out of its shell.” At the time he wondered why he paid so much to a woman who came up with such awful similes.

  The steeple. The steeple—the story’s in the steeple. Wait, no. There’s power in the blood. That’s how the hymn went, right? There’s power in the blood. But was there a story in the blood?

  Vampire stories were so 2009. Every writer who liked affording groceries had moved on to zombies, or hell, they’d abandoned horror altogether and started writing young adult novels. Those jokers were getting huge advances and movie deals. Young adult—like that strange girl Ruby. Was there a story about her? But what could be written about a backwoods girl with minimal education who had no ambition or prospects in life. Jesus, it was depressing.

  But she’d been scared.

  What did a mountain girl have to be afraid of? Amorous cousins?

  No, that was too stereotypical. Lazy-assed hacks relied on stereotypes. Real writers focused on authentic details, not generalizations.

  He fisted his hair in his hands and pulled, as if the move might encourage much-needed blood circulation to his brain.

  There’s power in the blood.

  What if she was scared of a secret being revealed? What sort of power did Ruby Barrett carry in her blood?

  He paused and tapped his pencil on the legal pad he kept next to his laptop. “Mountain magic. Power in the blood.”

  A knock sounded at the screen door. He jumped at the unexpected sound, and his elbow clipped the glass of bourbon he’d been nursing. It fell to the scarred vinyl flooring, where it bounced without breaking but spilled its contents all over his shoes.

  “Shit,” he said before he remembered himself.

  A salty chuckle came from the door followed by the screech of the screen’s ornery hinges as a woman let herself in like she owned the place. He
realized that meant she was probably Lettie Arbuckle. He rose to his full height and turned toward her.

  She had the ruddy complexion of a heavy-drinking Anglican preacher. She wore a purple tank top under a pair of camouflage-print overalls. Her feet were shoved in a pair of brown rubber boots with strips of mismatched argyle socks peeking out. The sides of her gray hair were pulled back in daisy barrettes. The only other adornments on her were a pair of glasses with smudged lenses and a cross hanging around her neck from a chain that was probably once gold-colored but which had faded into a tarnished pewter color.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said, hoping the apology would suffice for the spill as well as the liquor.

  “Aw, hell, no use crying over spilled bourbon.”

  “Pour you a glass?”

  “About damned time you offered.”

  Just like that, Lettie Arbuckle became his favorite resident of Moon Hollow. He grabbed a dishtowel from the counter and threw it at the small puddle.

  While he poured, she settled herself into one of the metal chairs and rested her hands on her belly. “See you settled in okay.”

  “So far so good.” He handed her a glass.

  She tipped her chin in thanks before taking a belt from the bourbon. It was cheap stuff he’d bought at the ABC store in Big Stone Gap.

  “Sorry I wasn’t here yesterday when you got in. I was visiting some kin ’round Blacksburg.”

  “Bunk told me. It’s no problem.” He took his own seat and settled back, mirroring her posture. They fell in a companionable silence. He had questions he wanted to ask about the town and the cabin, about her history, but he refrained. Lettie struck him as the kind of woman who didn’t like wasting words. So they drank and the old cuckoo clock on the wall ticked the seconds away.

  Finally, she set her glass on the table. “You heard we had some trouble at the mine today?”

  “I knew something happened but not what. Nothing serious, I hope.”

  She clucked her tongue. He realized he hadn’t heard that done in years. “Sad business. A boy named Jack died down the mine. First day on the job.” She leaned forward to whisper, as if speaking out loud was a sin. “They didn’t find all of him.”

  Peter moved in until their two heads were as close together as co-conspirators. “What do you mean?”

  “I just heard when they went down to git him he was real tore up.”

  Demons in the mines. The phrase from the Appalachian folklore book that had sent him on this journey popped into his head like a revelation.

  “Did he fall down a shaft?” He asked this because it was the obvious question, but he really wanted to know if the body betrayed any sign of demonic attack. What the hell would those be anyway? If he were writing a story about it, there’d be black burns on the skin, maybe a mocking stigmata. And symbols. Yes, symbols written on the mine’s walls in the boy’s blood.

  “ . . . one of the deepest mines they don’t use no more,” Lettie was saying. “Can’t figure out how he got down there.”

  “Did a forensics team—“

  Before he could finish the question, Lettie started hooting. “Forensics? Son, this ain’t New York City. All we got is a sheriff and deputy that work out of an office fifteen miles away. The sheriff came by to help get the body out, but the only investigation will be done by the mining company to be sure the boy’s family can’t sue them. Jack ain’t the first man murdered by the mines, and sure as hell won’t be the last.”

  Despite the numbing effects of the bourbon, he could have sworn he felt every individual cell in his skin vibrated with excitement. He couldn’t wait to get this down on paper, but until Lettie left, he needed to play it cool so she wouldn’t think he was a psychopath. Normal people didn’t understand why writers got excited about gruesome mining accidents or the prospect of demonic possession. Hell, he wasn’t sure he understood it either.

  “How old was he?” he asked.

  “Nineteen. Such a shame. He was real famous ’round here on account of him being the star quarterback at the high school. He even got a scholarship to Virginia Tech, but he didn’t make it six months as a Hokie before he ran home with his tail ’tween his legs.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t rightly know. His mama won’t speak of it. You want my opinion, he couldn’t handle the big city.”

  Peter was pretty sure Blacksburg, Virginia wouldn’t count as the “big city” to anyone but a resident of a backwater as small as Moon Hollow.

  "So he came back to work in the mines?"

  "Oh, he resisted that for a while,” she said, “worked some odd jobs. ’Course he wants to marry Deacon Fry’s girl, so the mines were really his only choice to make enough money to earn her hand."

  "Wait, you're telling me that the dead boy in the mine was Deacon Fry’s future son-in-law?” Peter realized then that Jack’s death was likely the reason the deacon never showed for their meeting that morning.

  “That's right.” Her tone lowered, as if she was telling secrets. “Not that I like to gossip, mind, but there folks around here who was surprised the good deacon even let that boy near his girl.”

  "Well, I sure am sorry to hear about the town’s loss. Do you know when the funeral will be?"

  “That ain’t been decided yet. Decoration Day’s coming, so that needs to be taken into account.” She spoke as if talking to herself. “Of course they could just combine the two.”

  The folklore book had mentioned the mountain tradition of having an annual “Decoration Day” where the community came together to honor their dead. He assumed it was sort of like Memorial Day, only instead of honoring veterans they celebrated all their deceased kin. “What exactly happens at a Decoration?”

  “Oh, they’re real fun. First, the men clean up the cemetery and make it look real nice. All the ladies make paper flowers to decorate the graves. Reverend Peale always says a few prayers and we eat at big picnic right in the cemetery.”

  “I’d like to see that,” he said.

  She pulled away and brought her glass closer. “Actually that brings us to why I came to talk to you. I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut your rental short.”

  “What do you mean cut it short? We have a contract." He rose and walked to the computer bag next to the recliner in the living area. He pulled out the contract and waved it in the air for emphasis. “I prepaid for two weeks with the option of adding more.”

  She didn’t appear ruffled by his agitation. “I understand, but that was before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before Jack.” She said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  He softened his tone because he figured Lettie was the kind of woman who wouldn’t put up with being sassed. “Can you please explain what that has to do with me staying in this cabin?”

  She hefted herself from the chair with a groan. Her right hand touched her hip, as if the move had tweaked her sciatica. “I’ll give you your money back.”

  The quickening in his chest felt a lot like panic. “No. I can’t leave. Not yet.”

  She frowned at him. “Why not?”

  Because I haven’t felt this excited about writing in months. An outcast girl with magic in her family line? Demons in the coal mine? Picnics in cemeteries? Pure story gold.

  He kept his tone even, so as not to betray his eagerness. “I told you when I rented the place. I’m writing a book.”

  “Don’t see why you have to be in this particular cabin to do that. There’s motels in Big Stone Gap.”

  “Whether you understand it or not isn’t the issue. We have an agreement and I paid you for two weeks.”

  She pursed her lips and looked him over. Then, to herself, she muttered, “I told him.”

  Peter stepped closer and forced her to look at him. “Who—Deacon Fry? Did he tell you to get rid of me?”

  “No, I—” She cleared her throat and backed up a step. “Look, I’ll honor your contract, but don’t be surprised if you don’t last the
full two weeks.” The words weren’t delivered in a threatening tone that implied bodily harm if he stayed, but she sounded fairly confident in her prediction.

  He lowered his voice, a trick he’d learned while teaching writing at the community college in Raleigh. Students always ignored raised voices, but a lowered voice worked like magic to get their attention. “Why does Deacon Fry want me gone, Lettie?”

  She licked her lips. “You’re gonna have to ask him that. Thank you kindly for the drink. If you need towels or anything, just leave a note on the door and I’ll take care of it when I stop in to clean.”

  “Oh, I don’t need you to clean—“

  A shrewd little smile lifted the corner of her lips. “You were so hot about following our contract, right? I promised maid service three times a week.” With that, she turned and walked to the door, leaving him to stare after her with a slight case of vertigo from her mercurial shifts in tone.

  “Hey, Lettie?”

  “Mmm hmm?”

  “Am I in danger here?”

  She paused with her hand on the doorknob and watched him for a full ten seconds before answering. “No more than the rest of us.”

  19

  The Reunion

  Ruby

  The backpack over her shoulder held a bologna sandwich, a can of pop, and Daddy’s pistol. The old logging road hadn’t been used in decades, but the ruts still dug deep into the earth. Ruby stumbled over the grooves and rocks and dodged low-hanging tree limbs.

  The canopy above was dense, and the lack of sunlight made it feel cooler than it had been when she’d set out from the house at ten o’clock that morning. Late enough for Daddy and the kids to be well away, but not so late that she risked getting stuck in the woods after dark if her mission took longer than expected.

  It had been ten years since she’d last traveled this road. Back then, Mama had held her hand and guided her around the obstacles while telling her fairy tales about the wee folk who lived in the woods. Ruby’s memories of her last visit were hazy. What she did remember started out happy—a warm kitchen, feminine laughter, a cup of milk and Granny Maypearl’s pie—but it hadn’t ended that way. Mama always told her to keep their visits with Granny a secret, but she didn’t recall ever asking why. She’d just seen the whole thing as a grand adventure through the woods to the warm little house that always smelled of cinnamon, dried herbs, and Granny’s rosewater perfume. After they’d stopped coming, Ruby’s adventures were reduced to hiding under her covers at night as the thunder noises of Daddy’s shouts and the lightning sound of fist to flesh echoed downstairs.