The Devil Walks in Mattingly (12 page)

She’d asked Jake how someone could do such a thing as hurt people and leave them to die, but Kate knew. She’d been a bully herself once, a monster to an innocent young boy, and because of that her life still smelled like fruit gone spoiled. The day she played her trick on Phillip behind the bleachers had never been far from Kate’s thoughts. Sometimes she still heard the laughter, that mocking cackle from the boys and girls who’d been so eager to watch. Kate had told Jake there was a special place in hell for people like Charlie Givens, but that was wrong. No, there was a special place in hell for those who believed hell wasn’t what they deserved. Because to hurt came easy to all, and that was why there was so much of it in the world.

She gathered the papers from her desk and crossed the foyer. The contents of the first-aid kit lay scattered atop Jake’s desk. He fumbled with a bottle of peroxide and an unopened package of Q-tips.

“Use the cotton balls,” she said. “Q-tips are for little stuff.”

A small but grateful smile crossed his lips. “Got it. Thanks.”

Charles Earl said nothing as Jake cleaned him, said nothing still when Jake stood him up and led him down the small hallway to Cell 1. There was no Cell 2. Stacks of aluminum softball bats, leather gloves, and buckets of softballs stored there for the church league lined the wall. Kate had left the lumpy cot and the broken rocking chair, though she thought those more than the monster deserved. She handed the papers over as Jake locked him inside.

Jake looked at the top page and asked, “Charles Givens?”

The monster sat in the rocker and smiled. “Charlie.”

Jake nodded and studied the report. “You been a busy boy, Charlie. Disorderly conduct, drunk in public. Three counts of petty theft.”

Charlie said nothing to that.

“Who’s the guy with you tonight?”

“Same guy’s gonna kill me ’cause I screwed up.” Then, in the same voice one would use to offer a comment on the weather, he added, “Taylor gonna kill you too. All you.”

Kate shuddered at that and moved closer to Jake, thankful for his quiet strength. And yet that strength seemed to leak away in the next quiet moments. She felt Jake’s body give way—only slightly, but enough to cause a small moment of confusion and worry—and heard a sound like a stricken boy coming from his mouth.

“Says you live up on Brody’s Lane in Camden,” Jake said. “That near Happy Holler, is it?”

“It is.”

The pages shook in Jake’s hand. He crunched the report into a ball and tossed it into a bucket of softballs along the wall. “Taylor,” he said. “That his first name or his last?”

“First,” Charlie mumbled.

“He got a last name?”

Charlie shook his head. “I’m done talkin’.”

Jake turned to Kate. “I gotta head down to Andy’s. Think you can watch this guy?”

Charlie smiled and shook his head. “You crazy, Sheruff? There’s danger about, an’ you gonna leave her here with me? Sure she’s safe?”

Kate didn’t answer, only walked back down the hallway and into the foyer. She grabbed the first weapon she found from the shelf by the back door. Jake’s eyes met hers as she walked back. He moved away as Kate racked a load into the
shotgun in her hands. She drew the barrel through the bars. Charlie Givens’s smile disappeared.

“You killed that boy and you hurt friend and family,” she said. “You so much as scratch an itch, I’ll send you to hell with a hole in your gut so big the devil’ll spend eternity twirling you on his finger.”

Jake started for the door. “Pretty sure she’s safe,” he told Charlie. “Not too sure about you, though.”

6

Lucy hummed. It was a song she didn’t know and that didn’t matter, because humming had always calmed her and that was all she could do. And then she couldn’t even do that when she faltered and pitched forward against another rock at her feet.

She fought gravity until her hips tilted too far, then let herself go limp. All Lucy could manage was to turn her head and hope this time she would meet soft dirt rather than sharp rocks. That rapturous feeling of letting go—of surrender—was replaced by the sudden jerk of someone grabbing her. Lucy’s feet steadied. The man nudged her on.

The last thing she remembered clearly were the names etched into the iron gate just beyond the hood of her car and thinking she had answered correctly. The man had asked if she was awake. Lucy had no idea what that meant, but the look on his face (it was the same jumble of anger, sadness, and longing she’d seen in her father only hours before) told her it was something important. She knew, too, that the man meant to have an answer. It was either yes or no, life or death. One flip of an existential coil that on some primitive level Lucy knew would be heads, he won, or tails, she lost.

So she’d answered, “Yes.” And when the man’s eyes widened and the sharp blades in his stare dulled, she’d added, “Of course I’m awake. You are too, aren’t you?”

That seemed the most appropriate thing to ask. And Lucy found that despite her fear, she remained curious for an answer. Yet the man had only led her into the trees, where the Hollow swallowed them.

Lucy had no way of knowing how long ago that had been, though she was sure they were miles into the wilderness by now. The night appeared thick and black like tar. Towering trees with gray, reaching limbs hid the moon and stars, giving Lucy the illusion of walking through space rather than forest. Her captor said nothing. There had been times she was convinced he was no longer there at all, that he’d left her to wander until either the elements or exhaustion felled her. But then the man would reach out and push her forward (twice, those pushes were nearer a gentle guiding), and Lucy would realize she was not alone. Now she felt his presence near and could smell the blood and stink on him. She realized, too, that even if she could see nothing, something could see her. Watching her, with what felt like a thousand eyes.

She had been in Mattingly long enough to know of the Hollow. It was a usual topic of conversation during those weekend parties when the bonfires began to die and the boys wanted to get close. One Friday night right before George Hellickson rounded third and found Lucy waving him in, he’d told her how Happy Hollow was cursed even before the Indians arrived. Ricky Summers had said much the same on another Friday night by another bonfire, adding that you could see the soft spire of Indian Hill from the gate but nobody knew what lay on its other side, that it might even be the end of the world or hell itself. And it had been Johnny who’d told her
how every boy in town could trace his first steps into manhood back to daring a walk through the Hollow and scratching his name into the gate. Johnny had laughed after, saying he supposed that tradition would fade now that Lucy had come to Mattingly. He said it was a whole lot more fun and a whole lot less scary to call yourself a man after bedding Lucy Seekins than walking through a cursed wood.

Lucy had taken no offense to that remark. She’d known Johnny loved her even as he’d said those words. Now she wondered if he’d ever loved her at all.

She had always thought those stories to be the sort of small-town superstition her friends in DC had warned her about. Yet the feeling of heaviness that overtook her forced Lucy to reconsider what she believed. The thick trees blinded her eyes, but Lucy’s ears worked just fine. That was what bothered her. Because she heard nothing—no rustles from the trees, no night birds, no wind. And there was that sense of watchfulness crowding her, those thousand eyes, as if the Hollow itself was
awake
.

She pushed that thought from her mind and concentrated instead on the feel of the ground beneath her. Lucy felt the man’s hand on her once more. She didn’t shrink from that touch, was glad to feel it in all that emptiness. She leaned against him as they made their way up a steep hill. Taylor led the way down the other side and grabbed Lucy again, this time with such force that it felt like the tips of his fingers had reached bone.

“Hush,” he whispered. “Tell me, lady, what walks here.”

He pointed to a small clearing ahead. A hulking mass of deep black edged its way out of the woods. Lucy swallowed a scream as the man let go of her arm. He took two steps forward, putting himself between the thing and Lucy, and turned
to her. There, free from the pressing trees, moonlight filtered through the long hairs of his beard and sparkled his eyes. His chest was thick and wide, the skin on his arms taut. To Lucy, the man looked godlike.

He turned away again and cupped his hands around his mouth yelling, “I have no quarrel” into the night.

The shape still blocked their way. The man dared not move closer, nor would Lucy allow him. This time it was she who took his arm. They watched as the shape moved from its place and silently shrank back into the trees.

“What was that?” Lucy whispered.

“You’d know if you was awake.”

He pushed her on, past the field where the thing had been. Lucy kept her hands to his arm as they passed. Rocks and brambles gave way to tall, brittle grass that clipped her bare legs. Then it was up again and more up, until Lucy heard the faint rumblings of white water far below.

The world along the ridgetop felt alien. Even the small cabin in front of Lucy looked to be little more than a mirage. Then the man pushed her through the open door, and Lucy knew this was no dream. She was alone with a madman deep in a haunted wood filled with a thousand eyes, and this was as real as anything she’d ever known.

7

I slowed near the BP and caught a flutter from the living room curtain of a nearby house. Kate had said nothing about calls from townspeople wanting to know what was going on, but I knew there’d been plenty. People had seen me with my light running, and no doubt many more had heard the sirens
from the squad trucks. But it was that small wave of a drape beneath a dwindling porch light that convinced me what had happened couldn’t be kept quiet. News spreads like a virus in a small town, bad news like an epidemic. And as much as I knew Mattingly had faced its share of mindless tragedy over the years, I also knew there had been nothing like what had happened at Andy’s.

The stone-faced trooper manning the lot’s entrance nodded as I drove in. In many ways, the BP was everything the Texaco was not. Andy Sommerville’s property was smaller, for one. As was the building—just enough room inside for a few booths, a drink cooler, and three rows of groceries that were always a few days short of expiration. A crime scene van and three county police cruisers were parked out front. Their roof lights (plural, mind you; I was glad not to have arrived with my puny single flashing atop a beat-up old truck) spun blue against the BP’s white walls. Yellow police tape stretched across the perimeter. Two technicians picked through Eric’s Jeep, parked near the side door. More techs busied themselves inside, measuring and dusting and snapping pictures. Two puddles of congealed blood lay in the middle of the store. Surrounding the stains was a series of tiny orange cones that looked like exclamation points. The air reeked of sweat and burnt flesh. Until I stepped through that door, I never knew loss had a smell.

Standing in the midst of all that violence and death was Alan Martin, a county investigator I’d known since our ball-playing days in high school. He motioned for the nearest tech, offered words I couldn’t hear, and scrawled something in a small leather notebook. An unlit cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He made his way over and offered a strong hand that didn’t seem real considering his thin frame. Somehow I managed a firm grip in return.

“Hey, Jake,” he said. “You know them?”

“Small town, Alan, I know everybody. The boy was from Away, but Andy’s a good friend.”

“Then I’m sorry,” he said. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

He cautioned me to mind my steps, which I figured wouldn’t be a problem since I couldn’t move. My boots felt like they’d been planted in cement. Many, I suppose, wouldn’t blame me. Many would say that anyone who hadn’t slept the night before and the days and weeks before that, who in the last day had been shot at by a moonshiner, dreamed a dead boy and some mysterious “He” were coming to wreak havoc, seen his brother-in-law beaten, made his first ever arrest, and been hounded by a fugitive wanted for attempted murder, wouldn’t be much expected to possess the full range of his faculties.

Maybe that’s right. But I would accept no understanding because none of those things was going through my mind. I stood frozen in place by the sight of smeared death on a floor I’d walked on since I was a boy, and I was plain scared. It wasn’t that same old fear either—the kind I’d always lived with and managed to hide well enough. This was something other.

I’d never felt called to sheriffing, never wanted to wear a badge. I’d taken the job six years before and a year after Justus ran, when Mattingly’s then-sheriff, John David Houser, decided he was getting too old to do nothing and wanted to try his hand at farming instead. I’d tried my hand at a landscaping business, wanting to be an entrepreneur like my brother-in-law, and was barely keeping the family above water. The sheriff’s job was mine for the having. I took it for the simple reason that I wanted no trouble. I needed a quiet life after Phillip. I needed a calm on my outside to balance the hell on my inside. Upholding a law no one ever broke had fit that bill
just fine. But charging into Timmy’s chicken cooler to fetch Charlie Givens had been too much. And standing there with my eyes full of what looked like two red snow angels on the floor and my nose full of what smelled like burnt copper, I knew my quiet life was done.

Alan stepped in front of the cones and spoke the obvious: “Happened right here.” He filled me in on the rest, adding that one of the suspects likely had a good-sized lump on his head. He showed me the broken broom handle as proof. It was the same broom Andy had been using around the pumps when I drove by that morning.

“That’ll be the one I brought in,” I said, and then, to myself,
The one I tried
to
get Kate to clean up
.

Alan nodded. “We got everyone looking for the other one, along with the Camden and Stanley police. Got a good set of prints off the knife he left behind. We’ll find out who he is.”