by Ninie Hammon
Nope, not there, either.
The room had been redecorated … no that was too formal a term. Over the years, it had gradually been un-Charlied. The bed was the same — a huge four-poster oak cannonball that was so high off the floor her mother’d always been paranoid one of the girls would fall off and break her neck. And Charlie’s old, threadbare bedspread and bed skirt remained — though they should have been replaced with the curtains and the wall art. Most people who knew Charlie now would have trouble believing it, but she had been a very “girly” little girl — all about ribbons and bows and pretty dresses and always, always, always anything ballerina. Her bedroom walls had been covered with ballerina art. The bedspread was a soft, pale pink chenille, and the bed skirt that stretched from the mattress to the floor was made of poufy pink organza, three stiff layers of it sticking out like the bed was dressed in a ballerina skirt.
Laying Merrie down on the bed, she flicked on the bedside lamp and started to undress her, then changed her mind. She untied her shoelaces and removed her new shoes. The kid could sleep in her clothes. They were clean. She didn’t even pull down the sheets. She just picked up the Cracker Barrel quilt her mother’d bought with a tag that claimed it was handmade and maybe it had been, and snuggled the child up under it. Then she went to the window, unhooked the latch and raised it a couple of inches to let the room air out. It was stuffy. The house had been closed up when she’d arrived and it still smelled musty. She’d been systematically going from one room to the next boxing up anything that mattered, that she or Mallory might want to keep. She’d let the real estate agency handle everything else. She had planned to be finished in time to get the rental car back to the agency by five o’clock even though her flight wasn’t until nine.
The best laid plans of mice and men …
She paused before she turned off the light, looking down at the sleeping child. Oh, to be able to turn the world off so completely like Merrie could!
Charlie didn’t like admitting it, but with the wash of light and shadow over her face and the black curls, Merrie McClintock bore a striking resemblance to her father. She was biracial and that’d be an issue for her as she got older — though that kind of bigotry was blessedly fading out of American society. It wasn’t that Charlie wanted to deny Merrie’s African-American heritage. She would always help the child celebrate that. She just didn’t like being reminded of the handsome ex-football player who had charmed her, swept her off her feet and then—
Why was her mind going to all the places Where the Wild Things Are tonight? Maybe because her synapses were so fried that her automatic barriers had short-circuited and were down and all the stray cattle were now wandering out into the road.
She leaned over and planted a kiss on Merrie’s plump cheek, then switched off the light, plunging the room into darkness before she closed the door. Since she never woke up in the middle of the night, Merrie did not require a nightlight.
Once Charlie had Merrie in bed, her sense of purpose left her and she stood in the hallway trying to think what she ought to do. A fog rolled in off the sea into her mind and nothing was distinct anymore. Everything had bright haloes and soft edges. Well, one thing she ought to do was call the rental agency at the airport and tell them their vehicle would not be returning as per their prearranged agreement. She picked up the receiver off the wall phone in the hallway before it occurred to her that she didn’t know the number. It was printed on both the yellow and pink copies of the car rental agreement … which she had stuffed into the glove box of the car … which was … where? Somewhere. Everything had to be somewhere.
She didn’t have the phone number of the reservations department of American Airlines memorized either. It was on her plane ticket, which was in her purse, which was …
Yeah, that.
She replaced the receiver heavily. What was she thinking? Clearly, nothing at all. How many people had tried to call “out” somewhere outside Nowhere County today? Every one of them encountered the same phenomenon. The phone never rang on the other end, but there was no busy signal either. The phone just went dead, like somebody’d snipped the wires. And somebody had. Something. The Jabberwock.
Going down the hallway to the “guest” bedroom on the back of the house, she flipped on the light and flounced in exaggerated fatigue, spread-eagled on the quilted bedspread, which might also have come from Cracker Barrel. She lay there as she’d fallen, feeling her exhausted muscles begin to relax, and considered following Merrie’s lead. Just kick off her shoes and pull the bedspread over her. After all, her clothes were as clean as Merrie’s.
But she wasn’t clean. Didn’t feel clean, at least. In fact, as soon as she thought about it she considered that maybe she had smelled vomit after all — on her body, her skin or … oh, gross, her hair.
She practically leapt up off the bed and went to the bathroom — the hall bath with its charming antique fixtures, not the one off her bedroom with a shower. She didn’t want a shower; she wanted a bath!
The clawfoot bathtub was so big you had to drain the whole hot water heater to fill it to the top. Fine. That was just dandy. Charlie turned on the water, both handles, hot and cold, looked around, found a bottle of bubble bath and poured a more than generous portion into the water. The flower smell filled the room and Charlie inhaled it deeply. For some reason, the smell made her want to cry.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sam took the corner too fast and swerved into the oncoming lane, but she knew it was empty. If you were going to drive recklessly, too fast, suicidal fast, the mountains were the place to do it because you could see approaching headlights around corners and on the other sides of hills.
She didn’t even glance at Malachi, sitting tense beside her, but knew he had to be concerned about their speed.
“I’m a good driver,” she said without looking at him, regretting the words as soon as they left her mouth. What an absurd thing to say. Like he would believe her. Like it mattered.
They had to get to Charlie’s before …
“You don’t really think …?”
She let the question dangle, but he didn’t answer it so she completed it. “You don’t think Abby would actually … do something, do you?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Her eyes snapped to him for a moment and then back to the road. The certainty of that statement.
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because her mind is … because she’s had a stroke. Maybe it’s a stroke, but something’s definitely screwed up in her head and I am here to testify that when something’s screwed up in your head, there is absolutely nothing you won’t do.” Then he whispered softly, probably wasn’t aware that he was speaking. “Absolutely nothing.”
“But how could she possibly climb that mountain in the shape she’s—”
“She could climb it.”
She shot him a glance and he was looking at her now. “Same reason. You can do just about anything if you have to.”
“Merrie … she’s just a baby. Abby’s a sweet kid and she wouldn’t hurt …”
She looked at him and saw the same answer written on his face. The car fell silent. Sam could hear her own breathing sounding ragged in her throat and the pounding of her heart was surely hammering so fast each beat was visible on the front of her shirt.
“You were good out there today,” he said.
She shot him a more-than-a-second look, then back to the road.
“You stepped up and … we called it ‘doing the necessary.’ Means what it sounds. But not everybody’s willing to do the necessary. You were.”
“I wanted to become a doctor.”
Where did that come from? Why in the world would she say a thing … because it was true. She had wanted to be a doctor ever since she was a little girl. She was always taking the temperature of the baby dolls she and Charlie played with at recess every day. Bandaging their broken arms and legs, without giving a whole lot of thought, of course, to how a six-month-ol
d infant had broken both arms and both legs.
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.” She felt the need to go on. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like people are always saying, ‘I was always going to write a book someday.’ I really would have—”
“I’m sure you really would have. But a coal miner’s daughter …”
“Not so much.”
“You’d have been a good one.”
She didn’t know what to say to that so she didn’t say anything at all.
“It’s a good thing you’re here now. Folks are going to need you.”
That somehow had a sinister sound.
‘You don’t really think this thing—” she didn’t like the word Jabberwock, but it did seem appropriate -- “this Jabberwock thing is going to stay here.”
“And you don’t?”
It never failed. It was one of the great cosmic truths of life. As soon as you got into a bathtub, the phone rang.
That was the phone ringing, right? The bathwater was running, making so much noise Charlie couldn’t be sure. Maybe it wasn’t the phone. And if it was, they’d call back if it was important. Right now, Charlie had no intention of getting out of the tub and tippy-toeing little puddles down the hallway to answer it.
The tub was actually too big to be comfortable for a person her size. It was too long. If she leaned back against the back of the tub, her feet didn’t reach the other end and she slid down into the water. But she’d figured a way around that when she was a kid, and she’d had to shoo away the bats and blow dust off memories to recall. Then she looked in the corner behind the tub and it was still there! After all these years, it was still there. As a small child, she’d used a little three-step plastic stool to reach the sink. When she got older, she’d set the feet of the plastic stool against the front end of the tub — then she could stretch out in the tub, lean against the back, put her feet on the stool and not drown.
She leaned back now, the rumble of water raising mountains of bubbles. The air smelled sweetly of lavender, or maybe violets. She wasn’t up on her flower aromas like perhaps she should have been. It probably said on the bottle, but she was too relaxed to lift up and look at the bottle. As she lay in the warm water, the tension began to ease out of her muscles and the result was a rubbery sense that if she tried to stand, her knees probably wouldn’t hold her upright.
Once the tub was full, she turned the water off and could hear the phone ringing again. Or still. If somebody was that determined to talk to her, it must be important. She began to consider getting out of the water when the ringing cut off abruptly. She settled back against the back of the tub. If it was all that important, they’d call back.
The main reason her mother’d had a shower installed in Charlie’s bathroom was the issue of hair washing in the big clawfoot tub. You could get your hair wet, soap it up and get it clean, but the only way to rinse it was in the water you were sitting in. Well, if you were desperate for clean water, you could stick your head under the cold water spigot and get a brain freeze or under the hot water spigot and blister your scalp. One or the other. Pick.
Tonight, she’d be satisfied with clean hair, even if she wasn’t able to get all the bubble bath out of it. And she’d best get to washing it soon, while she still could. Every speck of her remaining strength had melted into a puddle in the hot water and her exhaustion was palpable. She might have trouble getting out of the tub and making it to her bedroom.
Besides, the water was getting cold.
She rinsed her hair one more time, sinking down into the water and came back up spewing, then stood and grabbed the bath blanket off the rack beside the tub. It was not as soft as her own bath towels but she knew why. She could smell sunshine in the fabric, knew it’d been dried on the line in the backyard instead of in a dryer.
She dried off, and slipped into the pajamas and robe she’d grabbed out of her suitcase — which she had never unpacked.
Wiping the steam on the mirror off with the edge of the towel, she looked at her own reflection and quickly realized that wasn’t a good idea. The words “death on a cracker” came to mind. What showed on her face was testimony to the reality of all she’d seen and experienced today and she really didn’t want to be reminded.
Rigorously drying her hair with the towel — her hairstylist had warned against that. “You damage your hair when you rub your head with a towel like you’re trying to buff a shine on a cherry red Mustang. Blot it dry.”
Blot it. Not tonight. Charlie couldn’t sleep with wet hair, had never been able to stand that. She opened the bottom cabinet beneath the sink, felt around and found the “mini blow dryer.”
She leaned against the high side of the clawfoot tub, leaned her head over and began to dry the underside of her hair, shaking her head and running her fingers through the wet strands. Then she stood, shook her head and felt of her hair. Still damp. But good enough.
Stepping out into the hallway, she instantly regretted not getting her house shoes out of her suitcase along with her pajamas and robe. The hardwood floor felt cold on—
The telephone receiver in the hall was dangling down from the phone by its cord, hanging there about an inch from the floor. Swaying back and forth.
Sam was so surprised she didn’t know how to reply. Did Malachi … could he actually believe the Jabberwock was anything other than a passing event, a mystery that’d probably never be solved? A conundrum.
“No! Of course, I don’t think it’ll be here long.” She actually stammered out the words. “Why on earth would it—?”
“Have appeared in the first place? That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”
“That nobody can answer. So why would you think that—?”
“I think it’s permanent.”
The words so totally knocked the air out of her lungs she had trouble formulating a sound and getting it out past her lips.
“Permanent?”
“Un huh. I don’t think it’s going away.”
“Why? It makes a whole lot more sense that some freak meteorological thing caused by that wacko, Looney Tune storm yesterday somehow caused … oh, I don’t know. I bet scientists are going to spend the next decade trying to figure it out. If they believe any of us when we tell them about it. And those kinds of things, storm things, they pass. Tornados don’t hang around day after day for a week. Much less … forever. Why would you—”
“I don’t think the Jabberwock has anything to do with yesterday’s storm.”
Now, there was a conversation stopper. Sam sputtered some sound, it wasn’t a ladylike one whatever it was, some aborted expletive.
“Why on earth not? What other explanation could there possibly be?”
“Does not believing the storm explanation require that I come up with an alternative?”
“Well, no, but … so you don’t have any idea what did cause it, you just know what didn’t — the storm?”
“Something like that.”
“I don’t understand …”
“Neither do I. Look, I don’t claim to know anything the rest of you don’t know. It was just, me and Pete talked about it and …”
“And …?”
“And doesn’t it bother you that nobody” — he made an all-inclusive gesture — “out there has noticed? People had places they were supposed to be.”
He ticked them off, rapid-fire: “Abner was supposed to be at work. Timmy Bessinger had a dentist appointment. Liam radioed the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Department to intercept the speeder and the speeder showed up but Liam didn’t. Grace was supposed to have dialysis, Pete had a chemotherapy appointment. Roberta was a no-show at her own birthday party and you know how big her family is. Abby was supposed to pick up her baby!”
He ran out of steam then and continued slowly. “Those are just the ones we know about. None of those people showed up where they were supposed to be … and nobody came looking for them. Why not?”
Of course Sam had though
t about that, wondered about it. They all had. But they’d been too busy and — admit it — too thunderstruck by it all, or maybe still too affected by what the Jabberwock had done to each of them individually to do much conjecturing.
Sam made a tire-sliding turn onto Barber’s Mill Road where Charlie’s mother’s house sat at the base of Little Bear Mountain, and she had to focus all her attention on the road. And into that focused attention dropped an understanding her conscious mind was studiously ignoring. In truth, she though Malachi might be right. From the very beginning, she’d sensed something about the phenomenon … a power. Reality was, Sam Sheridan didn’t think the Jabberwock would go poof with a sparkle like a soap bubble and be gone. There was more to it than that. It would not be that easily beaten.
“When we get there,” Malachi said, “I want you to wait in the car until—”
“I’m not waiting in the car. Charlie—”
“If Abby’s here, she’s got a gun.”
“She wouldn’t shoot me. I’m the one who—”
“She would shoot anybody. You don’t really get this, Sam, and you need to. That woman is insane. She has reached the ragged edge of desperation and there’s no turning back, nothing she won’t do, nobody she won’t kill. No boundaries of any kind.”
“What makes you think she’ll listen to you rather than—”
“Listen? You think I’m going in there to reason with Abby?” He shook his head and focused his gaze back out the windshield. “I going in there to take her out.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Now that was exceedingly weird!
Charlie stood in the hallway, her bare feet on the cold hardwood, and stared at the receiver of the phone, swinging slowly back and forth. And for a moment a wave of fear washed over her, but then it retreated back out to sea.
She could have sworn she’d hung the receiver up when she’d almost called the rental car agency. But apparently she—