“Was there anyone else you know of that Skaggs might have spoken with? Anyone else that might have had some influence over him?” Hick asked.
Ulredge Mallon shook his head. “Deem Skaggs had no friends that I know of. He had them he done business with, but—”
“Business?” Hick said. “We were told he didn’t work.”
Mallon shifted uneasily. “When a man’s convinced the world’s against him, he can pretend he’s above the law. He done business with folks, but that didn’t make them his friends. The way Deem did things made enemies, never friends.”
“You know the names of any of these enemies?”
Mallon’s Adam’s apple bobbed and he shook his head. “I can’t say.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Carol said.
Mallon shook his head.
“What sort of business are we talking about here?” Hick asked.
Again, Mallon just shook his head.
Carol leaned forward. “You won’t incriminate yourself. I’m simply here as Ernest Kelly’s friend.”
“I ain’t done nothing wrong,” Mallon said. “I ain’t worried about that. The law ain’t the only justice in these hills.”
Hick sighed with frustration. “Out of curiosity, you ever hear of a man by the name of Edwin Stephenson?”
Ulredge Mallon seemed momentarily startled, but quickly regained his composure. “No, I ain’t. Should I?”
Hick squinted and looked closely at the preacher. “Just curious is all. You sure?”
Brother Mallon licked his lips and said, “Yes, sir. I don’t know that name.”
Carol rose and extended her hand to Brother Mallon. “If you recall anything, if anything comes to mind about Nicodemus, anything he said that was strange or out of the ordinary, please contact us. Sheriff Lowell knows where to reach us.”
Brother Mallon rose to his full height and an aura of sadness enveloped him. He shook his head and closed his eyes. “Fear. It’s a terrible taskmaster.”
Hick started to question Mallon but saw he was lost in his own thoughts. When Hick and Carol got back to the car, Carol lit a cigarette and frowned up at the church. “Well, what do you make of him?”
“I’m not sure,” Hick said. “While your friends in Washington are checking on Kelly and Grant, can they get some information on Mallon, too? Like who he is and where he came from?”
“If you like. What do you think they’ll find?”
Hick climbed into the car. “I don’t know. I’m just curious, I guess.”
“Wonder what the hell kind of business Skaggs could be involved in?”
“Good question,” Hick said. “I’m pretty sure whatever it is, it’s not legal.”
Carol cranked down her window and threw the cigarette butt out. “I need to get back to the hotel and make arrangements to have Ernest’s body transported tomorrow. And we need to go through his personal effects and see if Lowell missed anything.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Hick agreed.
Back at the hotel, Carol opened the suitcase and began fishing out the clothes with one hand, while holding a sandwich with the other. “No papers, nothing but clean clothes and a shaving kit,” she said, her mouth full of sandwich. “What have you got?”
Hick opened a bottle of Coke with the bottle opener on his knife and handed it to Carol. He shuffled through the scant items inside Kelly’s briefcase. “There’s nothing here but some gum wrappers, crumbs from what appears to be a Honey bun, and various receipts from restaurants, drugstores, and filling stations. Looks like he came here straight from Little Rock.”
Carol stopped mid-chew. “Little Rock,” she repeated, and then swallowed. “I guess that’s where the rental car is now. And there’s no receipt from any hotel for Thursdsay night?”
“Nothing else,” Hick said with a shake of his head. “I wish we could have seen that rental car.”
“Even though Lowell said it was clean, don’t you find it odd that he just let it go?”
Hick shrugged. “He had no reason to hold on to it. I would have liked to look at it myself just the same.”
Carol took another bite and stared at Kelly’s clothes strewn across the bed. “I wonder … what was he looking for? How long was he planning to stay? I don’t even know if he was here for pleasure or to see Grant for some specific purpose.”
Hick replaced the contents of the briefcase, then stood and stretched. “Well, it’s getting late and I don’t think we’ll be finding any more than Lowell found. I reckon I’ll turn in.”
Carol nodded. “I think until we see Skaggs tomorrow we’ve done all we can do for now.”
Hick bid Carol good night and went to his room. He was not a praying man, so he didn’t pray for Maggie to stay away from his dreams. But he hoped with all his heart she would. He was tired of feeling the crushing despair that came with waking alone.
The dark, dreamless sleep began but was soon interrupted by laughter. As the scene before him brightened, Hick saw Maggie sitting up in bed with a beaming smile and a bundle pressed snugly to her heart. The laughter surrounded him again—Maggie’s laugh, but it didn’t seem to be coming from Maggie.
“Hickory,” she said in a joyful voice. “Look at her. Ain’t she a beauty?”
She turned the baby toward Hick and he gasped. The baby was Lettie Mae Skaggs. Someone pounded on the door and Maggie jumped at the sound and turned toward it. The pounding continued and she turned to Hick and suddenly began to fade. Boom! Boom! Boom!
He tossed the covers from him and sprang to his feet his brow covered with a cold sweat. He threw open the door and there was Carol, her face pale.
“What time is it?” His voice was sharp, annoyed.
“It’s 4:30. Get dressed. We’ve got to go.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s Skaggs. He’s dead.”
8
Wenesday, September 7, 1955
“Typical of jail house suicides,” Dr. Lyman was saying as they entered the brightly lit cell. Before them, hanging by a bed sheet from a pipe in the ceiling was Nicodemus Skaggs.
Sheriff Lowell glanced up from taking pictures of the crime scene when Hick and Carol entered. His face was pale, there was a deep crease between his eyes, and he was shaken. “I don’t know what happened,” he said.
Skaggs’s head drooped to the right. His face was swollen and congested and his tongue protruded from his mouth. A quick glance around the room showed a chair lying on its side.
“Dammit, Skaggs, why?” Carol muttered in frustration.
Lowell continued taking pictures of the scene. “Poor old fool,” he muttered when he was through. He wiped his hand across his eyes and seemed dazed.
“Let’s get him down,” Dr. Lyman said.
Hick retrieved the chair and, climbing beside the dead man, cut the sheet a few inches above Skaggs’s head with his hunting knife. Lowell and Lyman gently lay the body on the bed and Dr. Lyman knelt and began to examine him.
“The ligature mark is very deep,” Lyman said. He glanced up at Lowell. “He’s been hanging there a while.”
“Archie!” Lowell barked, bringing in a young and nervous deputy. “When’s the last time you checked on Skaggs?”
“He was sound asleep at 10:00. Never made a peep the rest of the night. I didn’t hear anything.”
Lowell put his hands on his hips. “How in the hell do you miss the sounds of a sheet being ripped up and a chair being kicked across the room?”
“I … I don’t know,” Archie said, his eyes shifting to the body of Skaggs on the bed. He exhaled and looked deflated. “I might have dozed off.”
“Dozed off,” Lowell muttered. “You could sleep through a goddamned tornado! Alright, go on.” Archie skittered from the room and Lowell turned to Lyman. “Can you roughly fix a time of death?”
“I think he’s been hanging there a few hours. Probably since midnight or 1:00.”
“Well, ain’t that pretty,” Lowell grumbled. “No
w I’ll get to read in the papers how one of my prisoners done himself a harm and no one noticed for hours.” He ran his hand over his forehead. “I need a bicarbonate of soda.” He left the room and Dr. Lyman continued his examination.
“Forgive me if I seem morbid, but I’m the coroner so I’ll need to be writing this down,” he explained opening a notebook and setting it on the bed beside the body. “Knot on occipital region on mastoid, that’s the left side of neck.” He palpated Skaggs’s neck beneath his beard. “Neck does not appear to be broken.” He wrote in silence another moment and then shook his head. “Poor old fool suffered. Death by asphyxiation. This took a while. It didn’t happen right away.” He picked up the book and wrote something, then stared at it. “Haven’t had to write ‘suicide’ on one of these in quite some time.” He looked at Skaggs’s face. “Wonder why he would just give up on life like that?”
“This is just great,” Carol said with an edge to her voice. “I need to go call Uncle Arthur.”
She left the room, and Dr. Lyman closed Skaggs’s eyes.
“At the café you said you weren’t really acquainted with Skaggs,” Hick said. “Have you ever spoken to him?”
Dr. Lyman rose from where he’d been kneeling. “No. I’ve only been in town a few months. My wife died two years ago when my daughter, Beverly, was just a toddler. It was a rough couple of years after that. The friends I had were our friends, the house was our house. I couldn’t take the constant grief and reminders any longer. I just wanted something new. My sister lives here and convinced me a small town would be a better place to raise our daughter, so I moved here last spring.”
Christ, Hick thought. Another reminder of all he was trying to forget. He lit a cigarette and stared at the dead man, then quickly changed the subject. “I’ve been a sheriff for eight years and in the war before that. No matter how many times I see it, I can’t understand what drives a man to kill.”
Lyman shrugged and bent over, putting the notebook in his bag. “There are a lot of prevailing theories on that. War … that’s another subject altogether, but in cases like Nicodemus Skaggs, well, there are some who believe that people like him can somehow justify their actions in their own mind by deciding their victims are somehow a danger to them or their way of life. They look at those people as less than human and, therefore, feel exonerated from any personal sense of moral wrongdoing.”
“How convenient,” Hick said, with a feeling of disgust. “And what do you think?”
Lyman closed his case with a snap. “I’m no expert, mind you, but I believe some people have an enlarged sense of entitlement. They don’t need to rationalize or justify anything. They kill because certain people are an obstacle preventing them from getting what they want or need.”
“I can’t imagine anyone so selfish as to believe they are entitled to eliminate a human being because they’re in the way.”
“Really? Can you not?” Lyman’s eyes seemed to bore into Hick. “But surely you’ve seen it many times. How can you discount what you’ve seen with your own eyes?”
Hick was unnerved by Dr. Lyman’s questioning. His heart began to race. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, you’re a sheriff. Surely, you’ve seen someone who has killed another because they didn’t want their lives or their plans disrupted?”
Hick shrugged. “I guess I never thought much about it.”
Lyman shook his head. “I have a hard time believing that. I can tell you’re smarter than Bob Lowell there in the other room. Surely, you’ve pondered why people do what they do. What about the war?”
Hick’s palms began to sweat. “What about it?”
“While you were over there, didn’t you ever wonder why? Why you were being asked to do what you were doing?”
“Duty called.”
Dr. Lyman rolled his eyes. “Duty. But let me ask you this, what do you do when duty asks you to do something against your conscience? How do you react?”
Hick swallowed. “I don’t know,” he said, with a frustrated shrug. “Why are you asking me all this, anyway?”
Lyman smiled apologetically. “I do get carried away. I’m interested in psychology, in what makes people act and behave in the ways they do. I would have liked to talk with this Skaggs and find out what motivated him.” He paused. “Oh, well.” He picked up the bag and faced Hick. “I guess we’ll never know. It appears Ernest Kelly’s killer has meted out his own justice.”
Carol and Sheriff Lowell returned to the room and Carol grabbed the cigarette from Hick’s hand. “Uncle Arthur was none too happy about this,” she said, taking a long draw, causing the end to burn bright red.
“If ya’ll could step away for a minute I need to take a few more pictures,” Lowell said. He snapped photos of the beam, the rope, Nicodemus Skaggs and then sighed. “Guess this makes me look pretty bad.” He turned to Carol with a questioning glance.
“You’re not the one they’re unhappy with,” she said, handing Hick back his cigarette.
“I warned you,” Hick said.
She narrowed her eyes. “Gee, thanks, Hillbilly.” She left the room.
“I need to have a talk with Archie.” Lowell said, following Carol and leaving Hick and the doctor alone once more.
“I guess I should remove this ligature,” Dr. Lyman said, taking a pair of scissors and cutting through the knot.
“Wait,” Hick said, but the knot was already cut.
“What’s wrong?” Dr. Lyman looked surprised.
If it had been Cherokee Crossing, Hick would have held on to the bed sheet for evidence. But he wasn’t in charge of this investigation. “Never mind,” Hick said with a wave of his hand as Dr. Lyman tossed the strip of bed sheet to the side and then covered Skaggs’s face with his blanket.
“I guess I should go, too.” Hick moved toward the door, but before he could leave the room Dr. Lyman caught his arm.
“I was wondering. About Miss Quinn…”
“What about her?”
“Are you and she … attached in any way?”
Hick looked at the smooth, chiseled features of Dr. Kenneth Lyman. He resembled Randolph Scott, tall and muscular, well-dressed and well-formed. “No. We are not.”
Dr. Lyman smiled foolishly and then shook his head. “I don’t suppose it matters anyway. I’m sure you’ll be leaving town now.”
Hick nodded. “That would be my guess.”
“Oh, well,” Lyman said gathering his scissors and his notebook and putting them in his doctor’s bag. “I wish you the best. Good day.”
Hick stood alone in the room with the body of Nicodemus Skaggs. Of course, Lyman was right; there was no longer any reason to stay in Birch Tree. The trip had been wasted and, yet, Hick wasn’t eager to go back home. Back to the same ache of his hollow life. Back to, as Dr. Lyman put it, the constant grief and reminders. He took a deep drag of the cigarette, closed his eyes, lowered his head, and rubbed his temple.
When he opened his eyes, he was looking at the floor beneath the pipe from which Skaggs hung himself. He shook his head, blinked hard, and looked again, then bent down and rubbed his finger across a deep gash in the floor tile. The tear appeared to be fresh, the edges still sharp and not pressed down. It looked like it had been recently sliced into the asbestos tile. Hick went to the bed and lifted the bottom of the blanket from Skaggs. The feet were bare.
“Okay, Skaggs,” he muttered. “What’d you do with your shoes? That’s a fresh scuff.” He glanced under the bed and found Skaggs’s shoes. They were old work boots with rubber soles, well-worn but not the cause of the gash on the floor. The scuff could not have been made by Nicodemus’s shoes. He turned over the chair. The leg bottoms were smooth wood, no nails, nothing that would scuff the floor.
Of course, that didn’t mean the scuff couldn’t have come from a previous prisoner, Dr. Lyman, Sheriff Lowell, or the deputy, Archie. Hick squatted on his haunches and studied the mark. “It does seem new,” he pondered out loud. Now that his attention
had been caught, he noticed a shower of dust on the floor and glanced up, again, at the pipe.
Hick placed the chair beneath the pipe and climbed up to study it more closely. A large swath of dust, almost a foot wide, was smeared off on both sides of the remaining sheet. He reached up and used his pocket knife to cut down what was left of the bed sheet hanging from the pipe and then looked at the knot. It was an elaborate knot, nothing like what Hick expected to find. Glancing around, he assured himself no one had seen him, and stuffed the remaining strip of knotted sheet in his pant’s pocket.
He ran his hand along the pipe. Why was such a large swath of dust disturbed? Reaching up, he mimicked tying a sheet around the pipe and estimated a three to four inch swath accounting for the width of the sheet and any movement from Skaggs. But this was over a foot wide. It didn’t make sense. His gaze went back to Skaggs. He wasn’t sure what to make of all of it, but something was wrong.
A horrible, sickening realization washed over him. A lynching. That is what this resembled. Happily, he’d never seen one in person, but he’d read about them. He’d read about what they looked like, the suffering the victim endured, the scars on the trees for the community to have to see every day as a constant reminder. He’d read about the amount of brute strength needed to hoist a man over a tree branch, rafters, or even a bridge. And he’d read about the evidence left behind.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered under his breath.
Carol stared straight ahead as Hick climbed in the car, clearly angry with him and everyone else in the world. “What took you so long?” she asked, not meeting his gaze.
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