The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (20 page)

Stifling a yawn, she stood up and ambled toward the hall closet. She must make up the bed in the guest room before the little visitor arrived. Then she would make cocoa. She deferred her own grieving for later.

From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be

That no life lives forever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.

— SWINBURNE,

"The Garden of Proserpine,"

Tavy Annis sat at his dining-room table, sifting through a stack of white envelopes. "I reckon that about does it," he told Taw, tossing him the most recent addition to the pile. "North Carolina Environmental Protection Agency. I sent them the Little Dove analysis we bought from Carter Biological, and they thanked me for my concern, and said that the matter had been taken under advisement."

"Well, they may do something about it eventually."

"Not within my lifetime," said Tavy.

Taw McBryde looked away, pretending to study the deer in the painting above the stone fireplace. Not in Tavy's lifetime. How long was that? Two weeks? A month? Lately he had seemed to fade like a parchment drawing, until the only thing alive about him was the anger that still smoldered in his eyes. He wouldn't speak about the pain, but the lines at the corners of his mouth deepened, and he was given to long silences that seemed to indicate an inner struggle between himself and the thing inside him, but Taw knew better than to tell him 305

to give up the struggle. Tavy was not ready to let go yet, with nothing accomplished. But now it was hopeless. He had hung all his hopes on the EPA, and they had shunted him off with a form letter. His body was running out of time; even rage could not fuel it indefinitely. In spite of everything, he was weakening. The EPA would have to go into that factory with axes this afternoon to accomplish anything within Tavy's lifetime.

"What now?" asked Taw. "That's about everybody, isn't it? You've tried them all. What else can you do?"

"I'm not quitting. I never was one to do that. Do you remember the time that Doyle Weaver broke my Barlow knife on purpose, and I swore to get even with him?"

"I didn't know you ever did," said Taw.

"It took a while. We were growed up by then, and you were long gone, but I got him. We were fishing from the railroad trestle over the Little Dove, and I noticed the spinning reel was loose on his new fishing rod. Didn't say a word. A couple of casts later, he throws that rod over his shoulder and swings it out over the river, and splat! Off goes the reel into the river, and he's so off balance with the shock of it, that he goes and drops the rod in after it." The memory made him smile. "We never did find it. Course I didn't look too awful hard, myself."

"Well," said Taw. "I guess you can figure that sooner or later, somebody will give that paper company its comeuppance. I reckon I could—"

"That's not good enough. Now I've tried every 306

way that's peaceable and reasonable to get some justice in this. I even wrote them to personally plead with them to clean up their mess—wrote to Roger W. Sheridan, the president of the company. Not a word. Not even a form letter. And now I'm done with being reasonable. I'm out of time."

Taw rubbed his glasses against his sweater and put them back on. "All right," he said. "I'm with you. What are we going to do?"

Tavy Annis tottered to his feet. "There's a gun in the top drawer of that sideboard. You can put that in your coat, while I get us a couple of decent looking neckties out of my chifforobe. And you can drive that new car of yours. We're going to North Carolina."

"Of all the damned days for Spencer to be off!" said Joe LeDonne, helping himself to a peppermint from the jar on Martha's desk.

"What brought that on? The phone call?" said Martha. She switched off the electric typewriter, and leaned back in her chair. "Whatever it was, I'm sure you can handle it by yourself. Don't begrudge Spencer his concert. He can use a break from this place."

LeDonne perched on the edge of her desk, rubbing his chin with a thoughtful frown. "Yeah, but this is weird. You know I hate weird stuff."

"What was it?" Martha smiled indulgently. "The weekend warriors out there on the mountain?"

"No. That call was from a police officer from 307

Johnson City. He's checking on a complaint from a jeweler in town. According to him, two young adults entered a jewelry store with a human jawbone and asked the store owner to read a serial number on a tooth filling."

Martha's eyes widened. "People were toting around a human jawbone in Johnson City? That's about the last thing I'd expect. It sounds like Satanists, doesn't it?"

"I guess," said LeDonne.

"There aren't any Satanists around here, though, are there?"

"Not that I know of. Johnson City hadn't heard of any, either. But they got interested enough to look into it. Then, a couple of days later, somebody there in Records noticed that a parking ticket had been issued to a car registered to the Underhills of Wake County. Thanks to those murders last fall, the Wake County Underhills are notorious all over east Tennessee. They got to talking about it around the station, and this officer who called me— J. D. Lane—thought there might be a link between the couple with the jawbone and the Underhills. Just a hunch, but he asked me to check it out."

Martha's look of skepticism turned to a thoughtful frown. "Young adults? What sex?"

"Male and female. Dark-haired Caucasians."

"The two surviving family members were a teenaged boy and girl."

"Yeah. Lane knew that. He'd looked up the case in the Press-Chronicle. That's why he called us. He could have come over and checked it out 308

himself, but as a courtesy, he notified us instead. I told him I'd check on it."

Martha was unable to contain her laughter. "As a courtesy? Did you believe that?"

"Hell no," Le Donne growled. "I know why he called me. He thinks this case is going to be a can of worms, and he doesn't want to get near it. So he's trying to dump it in my lap."

"And you'd like to dump it in Spencer's lap, wouldn't you?"

"Yes, but I won't." LeDonne straightened his tie. "I'm going out to the cemetery and take a look at the Underhill graves. I hope to hell I don't find anything."

"Call me on the radio," said Martha.

He zipped up his sheepskin jacket and ambled toward the door. "You bet."

A four-lane interstate, less than twenty years old, meandered through the wide valley into North Carolina with all the effortlessness of a flatland road, with mountains on the horizon only for scenery. It came out just below Asheville and would take them across the state line in an hour or so, but they were in no rush, and the old, familiar two-lane road over the mountains was their road; the new featureless swath through the valley belonged to another generation; people who were in a hurry, mostly to get somewhere else.

Taw pulled out of Tavy's gravel driveway and

turned the car away from town, trying not to

think what the trip might do to his Mercury's

suspension system. The view, though, would be

almost worth it. The old-timers still called the one-lane blacktop the Drovers Road, a fading memory of its original purpose when it was only a trail cut along the ridges. When Appalachia was the West, there had been great herds of cattle and even buffalo ranging in these mountains, fattening on the maist of the chestnut trees. Great cattle drives had followed mountain trails from Greeneville, Tennessee, to Greenville, South Carolina—more cattle than ever went up the Chisholm Trail in the farther West of the late nineteenth century. Now the road was an indifferent blacktop, meandering along the ridge of the Smokies, and crossing the state lines without benefit of a welcome sign.

The Drovers Road began as a green tunnel, shrouded by oaks from the forests on either side. If you were good at noticing things off to the side, you might see deer skittering through the trees close to the road, spooked by the engine noise. After a few miles of gradual incline, the road leveled off on the top of a long, high ridge, where overgrown fields and crumbling barns testified to the ruined farmsteads that had once crowned the heights. The meadows were empty now, but beyond them, in the distance, lay miles of golden valley, flanked by an endless roll of mountains, green with pines, hazing to blue on the horizon. It was the top of the world; and they were alone in it.

"I had a mind to live up here once upon a

time," said Taw, slowing the car to a crawl as

he looked out across the mountains. "When I

was stuck up in De-troit, I used to see this view

in every country song. When anybody said home, I pictured this."

"Why didn't you move up here, then?" asked Tavy. "I reckon somebody would have sold you a couple of acres."

"I'm too old for it now. The heights is for young people. Looking out across that empty space there to those far-off mountains is like looking into the future, and I don't want to see that far anymore. It scares me a little. I think about getting snowed in come winter, and the winds that would whip across that valley and rattle the house like a Dixie cup. I think about getting sick up here alone with no one to look in on me. And having to drive ten miles for a loaf of bread. I'm too old for it."

Tavy snorted. "Young people can't live up here, either, Taw. Too far to commute to their jobs. No school bus to take the kids to school. No phone lines." He nodded toward the brown ruin of a saltbox house. "I guess nobody can live up here but ghosts. Maybe I'll take up residence here."

Taw reddened and set his jaw. "Don't talk like that!"

"Like what? About dying? It's not exactly a surprise ending, is it? It's not like I'd live forever if I didn't have cancer. I am looking at the future out there, like you said, and that's what I see."

"I know. I just don't like to hear you talk about it. It sounds like you're giving in."

"Nobody solicited my opinion," said Tavy. "But I don't reckon I mind all that much. I'm a 311

little tired of the world these days, with its silly music and its all-fired self-important technology. It's not worth all the pain I'm having to see another few months of it, I can tell you that. I think I'd rather see what comes next."

Taw almost said, What if nothing does? but he caught himself in time. It was not a subject to speculate on with the dying.

After five or six glorious miles of sprawling vistas like the view from heaven, the road began to twist downward again, between banks of pine trees, and they were enclosed again in forest, heading for the valley they had just seen spread out before them. It would take another six miles of switchbacks to reach it, though.

"Reckon we're in North Carolina yet?" asked Tavy.

"Near about," said Taw. "After that, it will be another twenty miles or so before we run into the four-lane that'll take us to Titan."

Tavy settled back in the passenger seat and closed his eyes. "Give me a shake when we get there."

In later spring even the valley would have been beautiful, with a sweep of green meadows curling around the rocky river, and cows lazing under white-blossomed apple trees, but in the last weeks of winter the fields were yellow with dead grass or brown with mud, and the black trees were bare. A crossroads hamlet huddled around a post office the size of a toolshed, as bleak as the end of the world. Taw flipped on the radio; the sightseeing was over.

Oakdale Cemetery was already tinged with green. Gold-tinted leaves sprouted at the tips of oak and maple branches scattered throughout the well-kept lawns, and green shoots of grass laced the brown stubble around the grave markers. Joe LeDonne tried not to think about why. He parked the patrol car on the circle near the new part of the cemetery, and threaded his way among the plots, reading the lettering on the bronze markers.

He avoided cemeteries when he could. Too many of his friends had ended up there well before their time, and he wondered sometimes if it was a form of arrogance to stroll among the dead, pretending that you would last forever. There was enough danger in his line of work without taunting fate. LeDonne believed in fate. In a twelve-month tour of duty in Vietnam, he had seen smarter men, braver men, and better men than himself go to their deaths, for no reason that he could discern, while he had been spared. He had learned not to question death's choices, but its presence made him uneasy. Sometimes he thought he might be an oversight and that if he got in death's way, it would notice him, and come back to tidy up the loose end.

He didn't pretend that this was just a scenic park, either. He had learned to respect death. But he wanted to get out of there before it noticed him. And before any of his old buddies dropped by for a visit. The way they did in his nightmares. Lanier or Mullins or Edmiston would appear, sometimes back in the jungle, 313

sometimes in his house in Hamelin. Sometimes the spectral visitor would be his regular old self, smiling and cracking jokes like nothing happened, and sometimes, Mullins wouldn't have a face, or Lanier would be gone from the waist down, and the sound of the Bouncing Betty would still be echoing around them. Then LeDonne would have to fight his way back from the place of dreams, and abandon his friends to the darkness. Again. Then Martha would brew him coffee, and hold him, telling him again and again that it was over, and he would nod and pretend to be convinced. Yeah, he thought, it's over, but it has a half-life of twenty years and counting.

In Southeast Asia people believed that ghosts were spirits of the dead who had died too suddenly to make the transition from one plane to the next. Those who died violently were the ones who walked. If that were true, the Underbills probably weren't resting in peace, either, he thought. But at least they didn't have to cry out for justice. Their murderer had sentenced himself and followed them into the next world. He hoped he would find an undisturbed grave.

UnderhilL One double marker bearing the names of Paul and Janet, on either side of them two smaller plaques for Joshua and Simon. Four identical dates of death. No flowers, not even plastic ones, adorned these graves, and un-swept leaves had drifted into the plot, making the site look long abandoned. How long had it been? Six months?