The Devil Walks in Mattingly (27 page)

Daddy, he never shed a tear when Momma passed. I cried for months and cried more when he called me a boy and said that’s all I’d ever be. That’s why I went to the Hollow that day after school. I wanted to carve my name and show Justus I was a man. Then I decided mere carving wasn’t enough, instead I’d walk those woods all the way to the top of Indian Hill. I’d see if the end of the world truly lay on the other side, and then I’d etch my name. Generations of boys would bear witness to that deed. JAKE BARNETT would be the name darkest and deepest in the gate.

I stepped into the Hollow that day with my chin high and my shoulders back, just the way Justus walked into the VFW. I returned shaken and bloody. And in between . . .

Forgive me. Such things are hard to tell. The scar on my arm? I got that scar along the riverbank that day. And just like the scar, that day was imprinted on me. I carried it and always would. Kate had asked me at the kitchen table what happened the day I walked into the Hollow. I could not answer her. But if I had, I would have said what happened was I found more than the end of the world atop Indian Hill, I found the river and I found Phillip. What happened was I found him just after
Kate played her trick and the white butterflies were there and there was blood on my clothes and I ran home knowing my life was over because what happened was Phillip died and I had killed him.

Years later townspeople would still gather on porches and at storefronts to speak of weather or crops, and if their meeting drifted from mere passing by to getting comfortable, their talk meandered to how Phillip McBride’s body was found. They would puzzle over the strange phone call Sheriff John David Houser received three days into the search and a week before Phillip’s death was declared a suicide. They would describe the masked voice on the other end that said Phillip’s body lay along the riverbank in Happy Hollow. Some said that voice was Phillip’s own, a reaching out from the grave. But that was not so. That voice was mine, and even as I’d spoken the words I’d felt the first head winds of a remorse that would grow to a gale as the years went on.

Standing at the rusty gate so many years later, I vowed Phillip would be a secret I took to the grave. No matter how that secret rotted my insides and no matter how he haunted my dreams. No matter, even, the threat to my town. I knew it was selfish. And yet I knew I would rather let Taylor Hathcock run unfettered than glimpse the disappointment in my family’s eyes if they ever found the truth. Especially Kate’s. For her to know what I did would not only bring her rage, it would make her doubt I’d ever loved her at all. Because Kate had always laid Phillip’s death upon herself, but that debt was mine.

And Taylor knew that as well, and Taylor was close.

I stood at the gate for a long while before making the drive back to town. Had my mind been in the now, I would have no doubt seen that someone had been there, and recent. Taylor had erased the tracks made by Lucy’s car, but I would have
seen the evidence of the pine boughs he’d used. I would have followed that faint trail and found the black BMW they’d left hidden in the trees for the forest to swallow.

But I was not in the now. I was in the then, where I’d been all along.

5

What Zach told the school secretary was that he’d forgotten his homework and needed to call his momma. Rachel Fleming saw through the lie at once (especially after spying what Zach had written on the piece of paper clutched in his hand), but she slid the phone to him anyway and decided the papers on the other side of the office really should be filed. Rachel smiled as Zach curled his hand around the receiver and waited for Kate to answer.

Kate never wanted any attention for the help she provided the needy. She took great pains to let God see in private what she thought people couldn’t see in public. But there are few secrets in a small town, and Kate’s was almost as universally known as why Hollis spent so much time in his backwoods. Yet no one spoke of what Kate did, simply because they knew why she did it. That included Rachel Fleming, whose name could be found in the middle of page 74 in Kate’s notebook and who, some ten years prior, had woken one morning to find a box of clothes and three Barbie dolls on her crumbling front porch.

Zach told Kate that Harley Ruskin wasn’t in school that day, but Harley’s teacher (that would be Bobbi Jo Creech, whose name could be found halfway down page 52 of that very same shabby binder) had been more than happy to provide him
with the necessary information. Kate wrote it all down in her notebook—estimated clothing size, toy preferences, and the Ruskins’ address. She told Zach he was a good boy and that God would forgive his fib about the homework. Zach hoped both were true.

Most of Kate’s business was transacted at the Family Dollar, which was located a block from the sheriff’s office next to Wenger’s Pharmacy. The Super Mart in Camden offered a larger selection of wares, and Kate would likely have gone there over the years had it not been for Elmer Cohron, the Dollar’s owner. Like everyone, Elmer knew what Kate did with all those clothes and toys. Unlike everyone, he wasn’t shy about letting Kate know in his own way. He rung everything she purchased for the poor at cost, then would always slide the receipt across the counter, offer Kate a sly wink, and say, “You’re a good woman, Kate.” Elmer held fast to tradition that morning. As did Kate, who held fast to a tradition of her own and drank Elmer’s words as one dying of thirst.

6

She was on her way back to the sheriff’s office when Bobby Barnes’s red Dodge turned up Main Street. Justus rode with him. Kate wasn’t surprised the truck’s bed was empty of their quarry. In her mind, if Jake said Taylor had fled, then fled he had. The rest of Justus’s convoy trailed behind. They scattered for parking spaces along Main Street near the diner.

Kate had just decided to cross the street and avoid them when Justus raised his hand. He made his way over, stopping on the sidewalk before coming too close. A wide grin, which Kate translated as either arrogance or spite, crossed his face.

He pointed to the box in her arms and said, “That for my grandson?”

Kate shook her head. “You gave up your rights to a grandson when you left, Justus. You know that.”

Justus’s smile disappeared. He ran his tongue over his lips. “Ain’t found’m yet. We’ll regroup over dinner, then swing west to Hilltown. They’ll likely spot an interloper.”

“If there’s an interloper to be found,” Kate said. “Jake says he’s gone, Justus.”

“You believe him?”

“He’s never lied to me.”

Justus seemed to take that as truth, though he said, “Jake had a weight on him at that meetin’. He’s worn, Katelyn. ’Twas plain.”

“That had nothing to do with Taylor Hathcock.”

“Then what’s it to do with?”

“That’s family business,” Kate said, aware that she’d just stung him again. She waved at the trucks around them and the men walking into the diner. “And it’s made worse by all that, if it matters to you. You being here just makes Jake’s job harder. Can’t you see that? Why don’t you just go back to where you came from?”

“I’m settlin’ accounts,” Justus said. “Jake wants me gone, there’s an easy way. All he’s gotta do’s bring me in. And afore you say else, I’ll say it’s been as easy for him to find me all these years as it is right now. Jacob always knew where I was, just as he knows where I am now.”

“Turn your own self in, then,” Kate said.

Justus shook his head. “Gotta be Jacob.”

“Why?” she asked, and in a voice so loud that those near them paused in their coming and going to turn their heads. The box shook in Kate’s arms. She was happy it was there, and
not only because delivering it would count toward redemption. If her hands had been empty, Kate was sure they would ball into fists and wail upon Justus’s barrel chest. She would do it, and she would bear the consequences. “Why can’t you just leave us
alone
?”

“Jacob’s soft, Katelyn. That’s why. Because that man’s still out there, I feel it in my bones, an’ because my boy’s no good man t’catch him.”

“You’ve a nerve to speak of good men,” Kate said. “Jake never raised a gun in anger. He’s kind.”

Justus boiled. “We Barnetts owned that farm for generations, girl. We worked it, sweat and bled in it, prayed over it, ’til Big Jim cast his eye there and seen dollar signs. I knew the black in his heart. He wanted that land hisself. To
develop
it. An’ he knew about the note I took out when the crops failed. Miss two payments, that’s enough for him to make the bank call the loan, knowin’ I couldn’t pay. That’s when he sent those men out. They came on my land, Katelyn.
Jake’s
land.
Zach’s
land.
To take it
. You ask anyone in this town, they’ll say I was justified in what I done. All I wanted was my own blood to stand with me, but he refused. You say Jacob is kind, I say his kindness is panic without teeth.”

“Those men were just doing their jobs,” Kate screamed, and now everyone stopped. “You could’ve killed them.”

“If that was my aim. But it wasn’t.”

“But it was close enough. And what did all that cost you, Justus? You ran away when Jake begged you to stay and face what you did. You lost the farm anyway. You lost your freedom. You lost your
family
.”

“I ran because I had to,” Justus said. His voice cracked. “John David Houser called and said he had a warrant his heart wouldn’t allow him to serve. Said he was sworn by the law to
do his duty as sheriff, but he was sworn by the man he was not to arrest a man for something he’d have done hisself. I knew his mind. He was tellin’ me to go afore he got there. Jacob was the only one who said I was in the wrong then; Jacob should be the one to bring me in now. Because that’s his place. He wears the badge, Katelyn. That’s how it should be.”

“No, Justus,” Kate said. “How it should be is that you go. You go before it’s too late.”

Kate stepped around him. Her shoulders stooped under the weight in her arms. She turned when Justus called her name.

“Bernard Wilcox, husband of one, father of two. Harvey Lewis, divorced, father of three. Clancy Townsend, husband of two, father of four, grandfather of six.”

“What?” Kate asked.

“Those are the men I shot that day. I expect no one remembers them now, just as you. But know well I remember them, Katelyn. I see their faces in my dreams and I speak their names when I wake, an’ they’ll follow me until I stand in judgment from man and God. I’m sorry for what I done. That’s why I call. That’s why I’m here. I’m tired of runnin’. I pray for grace but I’ll abide by punishment, if that’s what it takes for me to move on. Do you understand?”

Kate hefted the box and walked away. She said nothing, but she understood. Kate understood well.

7

This time Lucy didn’t tell Taylor where she was going, and there was no bear at the edge of the meadow to greet her. There were eyes, though, always those eyes. Watching her the way neighbors will when strangers move in down the street—keeping distance,
waiting to see how things will go and if there will be trouble. Yet Lucy walked on unafraid and unbothered past the boulders that littered the dead ground and through the trees to the stonelined path. To the grove and to the Hole.

She sat cross-legged and watched that perfect black sphere, her pupils swelling and her breaths low and soft. It was a terror and a wonder, and both held a beauty. Lucy had been obsessed with many things over her short life—boys, love, attention. A dead mother. But now she understood that the Hole was no obsession. It consumed her. No, it
completed
her. In a way she had never thought possible. She felt a wetness on her leg and looked to find drool staining her jeans. Lucy wiped her mouth, understanding the hunger she felt.

One day, what consumed Lucy would be hers alone. One day, her own mark would be put upon the wall.

Her world in town had been snatched away by her father and Johnny Adkins. Lucy had once mourned that loss, but no longer. Now she understood that life had been taken away because a better life was coming, and she wanted nothing more than to see that life flourish. To do that, she would have to kill. She would have to kill like Taylor killed that boy.

But was it killing?

Was it really?

Taylor didn’t think it was. If anything, he thought what he did to Eric Thayer was the opposite of killing. Taylor said he’d given life to that boy, and if that was a sin it was okay because it let God forgive, and forgiving was what God did best. Lucy didn’t know about all of that. She’d grown up placing her faith in Nothing rather than Something, and the books she’d left shredded and ripped on her living room floor didn’t say much about a deity, except that there probably wasn’t one. But when she beheld the Hole’s solemn gaze, Lucy knew everything she’d
believed and all that those dead old men wrote was wrong. So very wrong.

Yet not so wrong that the question of whether she was about to become a murderer mattered to Lucy in the least. That she would do such an act was not questioned. People did horrible things every day in the name of love. They lied and killed to belong. She would be no different.

In the end Lucy saw it best to believe whatever would make the going easier. She would Wake, then. Not kill. The only thing left was deciding who it would be. And that was where Lucy faltered.

Whom among the town did she love enough to set free? Was there one whom she believed should be spared from further years? Someone whose heart hurt even worse than her own? Lucy thought no. She had loved many people in many ways, but she found that love did not extend to mercy.

Her eyes fell from the Hole to the footprint in the dirt that Taylor had shown her. Left, he said, by a magical some
(thing?)
one who had breached the line between the real and the not. Lucy leaned over and traced the outline of the shoe with a small rock she found at her feet.

Would a
thing
wear a shoe? Would a spirit? No, of course not.

Only a person.

She faced the Hole again and turned the pebble over in her hand. Taylor had said the Hollow’s few living things dared not approach the grove (Lucy took that as true, had seen the bear turn away herself), because it was holy and all else was soiled. And yet if one thing could breach that blackness, couldn’t another? What if that Hole wasn’t a hole at all? What if it was a gate? A
door
? And if that door swung open to this side of the world, could it not swing open to the side of another?