by Ben Farthing
Sheriff Miller sneered.
She’d found his hot button: suggesting dementia.
“Hell yes, I got purpose. That’s what makes me different from people like you.” He tossed the noose at her feet. It thumped heavy on the ground to kick up a puff of dirt. “You float through life, not worried about the people around you. I saw your fancy car you can probably barely afford. And I bet you log onto Facebook and complain about bills like it’s someone else’s fault.”
Cessy almost took the bait. Ridiculous, saying she only thought about herself. She’d spent fifteen years keeping Fairfax safe. He should try living in northern Virginia on a cop’s salary. She cleared her throat. “I’ve got a purpose today. I’m here to find my sister.” She kicked away the rope. It uncoiled, one end remained at her feet, the other landed atop Sheriff Miller’s boot. “But when I asked my parents, they lied and said she probably ran off with Jackson Wilder. And then that’s what you said, too. It’s probably what Jackson’s father would have said, but his woodworking machines were too loud for him to hear your phone call and get the story straight. He went and told me the truth--Jackson died when his house collapsed in a sinkhole.”
Sheriff Miller spat. “That boy wasn’t fit to be crushed under my boot. He was spreading disease, cooking meth. Your folks tell you that?”
“No need to get defensive. I’m not accusing you of causing a sinkhole.”
“Accuse me all you want.” He pointed the pistol at her chest. “Put that noose around your neck.”
“Why? Because I asked the wrong questions. You’re covering up where Kate is, or what happened to her. God help this town if it’s the latter.”
The old man laughed. He wheezed. “Big threats from a little lady.”
“Tell your radio host friend that my questions aren’t idle. Kate came here after Jackson sent her those radio shows. They’re connected to her disappearance. And seeing how I can’t rely on the local law enforcement to investigate honestly, I guess it becomes my responsibility. My purpose if you like calling it that. Nothing idle about it.”
Sheriff Miller furrowed his white brow. “You shouldn’t say things like that. Lockler and the Maple Table are particular about respect.”
“You have that in common.” He’d jumped from defensive to worried. She had his emotions off balance.
Sheriff Miller jabbed the air between them with his gun. “Put the noose around your neck.”
The problem with distracting or aggravating the perp, was that it was only half of the necessary action. It created an opportunity that still had to be taken advantage of.
Cessy leaned down and picked up the rope with both hands, dragging the noose off of his boot. The cuffs clinked together.
Sheriff Miller exhaled. “About time you saw reason.” He let the gun droop, and his trigger discipline took over. He wasn’t about to fire, so his finger came off the trigger.
Cessy threw the noose at his gun hand. She leapt from her crouch, fists aimed for his sternum, left elbow aimed for his wrist.
The old man brought his left hand forward, open palm into Cessy’s nose.
Cartilage cracked. Her momentum compacted her neck. Sheriff Miller swung the pistol’s butt at her head, but her already-outstretched elbow knocked into his wrist bone. The rope tangled around the pistol and his arm.
He closed his massive hand around her face to shove her down. She caught herself on her knees, launched forward to headbutt him in the gut. He wheezed, then shoved her face into the dirt.
Cessy pushed herself back up, this time to find the pistol’s barrel pressed against her forehead.
“Not the useless old fart you think I am,” Sheriff Miller said.
“I should have gone for your life alert bracelet.”
“All you are is a smartass. Shame you missed you chance to do anything productive with your life.”
Cessy’s mind raced, looking for a way out. She’d been in life-or-death situations before, shot at by bank robbers, once by a man she’d pulled over. Never in anything this dire. But she was proud to learn her instincts were the same. Clawing panic clawed more frantically, but she kept control, looking for opportunities to turn the situation to her advantage.
“Rusty and Susie should be ashamed of you.” Sheriff Miller took the noose to the base of Maul Rock. He kept the pistol trained on Cessy. Awkwardly, with one hand, he wrapped one end of the rope around the stone handle and tied it off. He waved her closer with the pistol. “Come on now, put the noose around your neck.”
Cessy climbed to her feet.
“If you try to jump me again, I’ll put a .45 round through those pretty breasts of yours.”
She walked towards him.
“Pick up the noose.”
Cessy complied.
Sheriff Miller still held the slack rope. He stood between Maul Rock and the short cliff. The rope drooped between Maul Rock and his hand, and between his hand and the noose in Cessy’s hand.
She took a step closer. Wind picked up, shaking the undergrowth to her left, and the treetops level with the cliff to her right.
“That’s far enough.” Sheriff Miller aimed at her chest, finger on the trigger. He wouldn’t miss from eight feet away.
Cessy jerked the rope taught. She jumped to the right. Her bound wrists threw off her balance and she slipped on loose pebbles.
The rope pulled taught, ripped out of Sheriff Miller’s left hand, knocked into his right hand. The gun went off.
The clap was louder than Cessy’s service pistol. The round went up into the trees. The kick knocked the gun from Sheriff Miller’s unprepared hand. A finger bent crooked.
Cessy slipped on loose rocks. Her foot slipped over the edge. She looked down. Her head spun with vertigo. Rough gray rock straight down, ending at an old jagged stump. If she missed the stump, the drop might only snap her legs, but that would be enough to let Sheriff Miller finish the job.
She threw her belly on the rock for maximum friction. Air rushed out of her lungs. Her knees dangled off the edge. She wriggled forward. Pulled herself with her forearms.
Sheriff Miller looked around for his gun, but it’d bounced behind Maul Rock.
He looked over at her, only 10 feet away. He bared his teeth like a rabid dog. His aging wrinkled cheeks pulled tight. He rushed Cessy.
She scrambled onto the ledge.
With her teenage boogeyman bearing down on her, Cessy nearly gave into panic, devolved into one last animalistic fight for survival. Instead, Cessy forced herself to see Sheriff Miller as a tweaked out perp. “Stop or I’ll shoot,” she said out of impulse.
The old man lunged at her. She looped the noose around his neck--a clumsy attempt that also caught his arm. She’d intended to pin him down, but the large man came crashing down atop her. She responded by leaping up, straining to lift him with her shoulder.
His momentum combined with her lift sent him sailing over the cliff.
Cessy scrambled backwards.
The lanky, decrepit man in the sheriff’s uniform silhouetted against the sunny green treetops. The rope snapped taught. The noose hooked around the old man’s neck and armpit. Bones snapped.
Sheriff Miller shrieked. He pendulumed down out of sight.
His shriek cut off, echoed down the hill.
The rope stilled, remained taught. No swinging, no creaking. It bent sharply over the edge of the cliff.
He must have got caught on something. Cessy crawled forward to peek down.
She rubbed her eyes, unsure what she was looking at. The rope, stretched tight, ended five feet from the ground.
It ended in the cliff face. It was lodged into a crack where there was no crack.
The rock had swallowed Sheriff Miller.
25
Cessy climbed down the hill around the rock for a closer look.
The insects and birds had gone silent. Dead leaves crackled under her feet.
She kept expecting Sheriff Miller to leap out of the trees, but there hadn’t been ti
me for him to free himself from the noose. She was confident he’d ridden that rope down to the rock face.
Cessy slipped but caught herself on a tree limb.
The skin on her wrists was irritated from the scraping cuffs. Her nose bled, although she didn’t think it was broken. Her neck ached from the scuffle.
Wind rustled the undergrowth down at the base of the short cliff. She stood on the ancient stump she’d been afraid of landing on.
From this lower angle, the rope made even less sense.
It hung taught from above like a rock climber’s line. Except instead of a harness at the bottom, the rope went into the rock face.
Cessy tugged at it. It held fast.
She examined where it entered the smooth stone. There was no hole it had been sucked into. No space between the edges of the rope and the rock.
It was like a candle’s wick, as if the rock had formed around the rope.
Cessy briefly considered convincing herself that Sheriff Miller must have pulled free of the rope and jammed it into a hole into which it fit perfectly.
But if she wanted to find Kate, she couldn’t accept comfortable lies.
The facts were that Sheriff Miller had swung down, out of sight, and then the rope had been swallowed by the rock. Probably along with Sheriff Miller.
His shriek as he fell had sounded terrified. Like he knew what was coming. And then it had been sharply cut off.
There was some bizarre phenomenon going on with this rock, and Sheriff Miller had been planning on using it to execute Cessy.
Was he inside it now, molecules mixed with igneous formations?
Cessy sat on the stump.
The rock, an arm’s reach away, might still be dangerous. But the insanity of it paralyzed her. First Mom and Dad’s crawlspace stretched deep into the hillside, and now Sheriff Miller had been sucked up by a rock.
It was difficult not to picture Kate suffering the same fate. Swallowed by a sinkhole, lost in an endless basement, absorbed by a solid stone.
Cessy let her head fall into her hands. The day had started as a routine police task, a wellness check. Locate a runaway, make sure she’s okay. Then it was undeniably a missing persons case when Cessy found the minivan. But Cessy had held onto hope and determination. Then she found out Jackson was dead. No more perfect lead. But still, Cessy could question Valerie again, or search the mine, or canvas the whole town like any normal investigation.
Except, the past hour had shown her that nothing about this was normal.
An unfamiliar weight of helplessness settled upon her.
Cessy hated it.
She stood and walked briskly away from the rock.
She didn’t need to understand what was happening here to find her sister. She hadn’t exhausted her options yet, even if she was plowing into insanity.
Mom and Dad had lied to her. It all came back to that. If they lied about Jackson, they likely knew something about Kate.
She embraced alternative theories. Begged for one to make sense. She only saw them twice a year, but these were her parents and she loved them. They’d raised her. Sure, they’d screamed like banshees at each other when she was a teenager, but she’d long since accepted that was mostly her own fault. She’d called Mom when things went south with Pat, and Dad had called her once he’d heard that the divorce was finalized. He promised her that life hurts sometimes but happy times always return.
This morning, when he’d seen her waiting in the driveway, his surprise had been genuinely thrilled. So had Mom’s. That’s why none of this made sense. Mom and Dad weren’t brainwashed. They hadn’t changed who they were. They were being unreasonable, true to who they were, even if their aging stubbornness and paranoia was a little amplified. But they still loved her.
So why had they lied?
She wanted to drive straight back and demand answers.
But she’d already tried that.
And Mom had come at her with a gardening trowel. The look on her face had been one of painful disappointment, like Cessy used to see when Mom picked her up from the Sheriff’s office.
Had Cessy’s refusal to believe their lie about Jackson disappointed Mom?
A bird sang on a branch above Cessy. Speckles of blue behind a sky of green leaves.
Cessy’s gut stung, where she’d ripped out a living hole with a knitting needle.
Her heart hammered, and she imagined Kate lost among the insanity that Cessy had seen today.
Cessy took a breath. She walked back towards the rock and reviewed the facts.
Mom and Dad said Jackson had disappeared, and suggested that Kate had run off with him. But they knew that Jackson was dead. Mom had said that Sheriff Miller “owed her.” And when he took Cessy away, Mom demanded reassurance about his intentions, which had turned out murderous.
It suggested that Mom and Dad knew Sheriff Miller was capable of murder, as if he’d done it before.
Cessy said it out loud. “Did Sheriff Miller kill Kate? Do Mom and Dad know about it?”
The answer to the second question was almost certainly “yes.” If that was the answer to the first question as well, Cessy would drag justice out of this shit hole town.
But what did that even mean? Sheriff Miller wasn’t climbing out of that rock.
Cessy again imagined Kate swallowed by the wall of stone.
No. That didn’t feel true. Her parents and their friends were afraid of Cessy finding something out. There was no risk of her ever finding Kate if she’d been sucked into stone. So what did they want to keep hidden from Cessy?
She wanted to question Sheriff Miller, but he was gone. She hadn’t seen a deputy, or much evidence of a deputy in the office.
She should call the State Police.
Give them all her info. Cessy’s testimony that the local Sheriff had tried to kill her would be enough to spark an investigation. She could tell them that she knocked him off the cliff and he ran off.
And what would she tell them about the other bizarre events? The dense undergrowth walling off the trail up Black Gold Peak, and its new mine entrance. The endless crawlspace under her parents’ house. The living hole she’d ripped out of her skin. The local radio shows that spoke directly to Hamlin’s residents.
She didn’t need to say anything. They wouldn’t believe her, anyways. They could investigate without those details.
Except, they were relevant. Jackson had asked for help and sent the radio shows as proof he needed it. Kate came back to Hamlin because of Lockler and the Maple Table.
Sheriff Miller may have killed her over it.
Cessy closed her eyes and drooped her head. No. She wouldn’t accept that Kate was dead. There was no evidence of it yet.
Except that everyone was hiding something from Cessy. It was likely Kate’s murder.
“No,” Cessy said aloud. Her denial echoed off the rock.
She couldn’t call the state troopers yet. They’d tell her she was looking for a corpse, and Cessy didn’t need that holding her back.
She looked up, through the trees. She could see pieces of Black Gold Peak.
Valerie knew more than she’d let on. More than Cessy had been willing to listen to last night. That should be her next stop. As much as she wanted to go back and demand answers from Mom and Dad, she needed to talk to Valerie again.
Sheriff Miller’s Trailblazer should get her up the fire access road. Except his truck keys and handcuff keys were buried in solid rock.
So she’d walk back to get her 4Runner. Those keys were still in her pocket. If she walked straight down the hill, and skipped the roads, it’d be less than two miles. She could do that in half an hour.
She went to the top of the cliff to collect Sheriff Miller’s .45. There were five rounds left. She stopped by his Trailblazer.
Lockler had gone silent, but radio static still hung in the air. Undergrowth shuddered in the window. Static popped. Cessy couldn’t tell which direction it came from.
She rifled through the
truck until she found an extra handcuff key. She freed herself. She took a heavy flashlight from the truck, but couldn’t find anymore .45 rounds. In the back of the truck she found a shotgun and a box of shells. That’d work.
Cessy headed down the hill with the revolver tucked into one side of her belt, the flashlight in the other, and the shotgun in the crook of her arm.
Her phone buzzed. She pulled it out of her pocket.
Landis. She answered.
“Cessy. I got into Kate’s email.”
26
Cessy walked through the woods, in someone’s property in Rag Hill. Leaves crunched underfoot. An old RV peeked around a blanket of vines and dead leaves.
She held her phone to her ear.
Landis repeated himself. “I got Kate’s emails.”
“I can’t read them right now. What do they say?”
“Batshit crazy stuff. Was Jackson schizophrenic?”
“What do the emails say?” Cessy passed a raggedy tent. A blue tarp was tied to the trees above it. Camp chairs left out in the rain. It looked abandoned, but a tent and hanging tarp wouldn’t stay put, abandoned too long.
“Jackson wrote rambling emails. These things are novels. And the stuff he talked about, insane. Radio shows making everyone hateful. Tunnels underground. He says ‘worm’ a lot. Like, he’ll be typing out a sentence and the word ‘worm’ will just be stuck in the middle where it makes no sense.”
“Anything about where Kate might be?”
“Yeah, actually. But you’ve already looked there.”
Cessy’s stomach went light. “Spit it out.”
“Your parents’ house.”
She slumped, then hurried down the hill. “I’ve been there. They haven’t seen her. I searched the house, too.” Was Kate deeper in the crawlspace?
“Maybe she just swung by. I’m looking at it right now. After Jackson’s eighth email, she finally responded. ‘I’ll meet you at my parent’s house on Seventh Street.’”