“Yes.”
“I mentioned your name to Lucas Gabriel. I asked him to call the sheriff’s office and get you and Increase Wintel up there. I mentioned your name. He said he had no need for Moon Run Hollow outsiders. He told me he didn’t know you.”
“He doesn’t. Not with this face.”
“I mean, I should’ve realized it then.”
Dave’s expression grew more disappointed. “You’re a terrible detective, you know that, Shad Jenkins? I said that I’d run into a couple of them snake handlers now and again. I never said I’d met Lucas Gabriel. You didn’t catch me in a lie. I don’t lie.”
Shad grimaced and let out a groan. Okay, he already knew he wasn’t cut out for this private investigator shit.
“That day you searched Megan’s room wearing your little latex gloves. You were looking for this letter, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” Dave said. “She didn’t send it to me but she read it aloud. I heard her.”
It was kind of a relief knowing you weren’t the only lunatic in the room.
“You looked high and low and didn’t check my room?”
“It was an oversight.”
So Dave Fox did make mistakes. He did have a weakness. He wasn’t infallible.
“I don’t lie, Shad. Once you accept that, you’ll begin embracing the truth about yourself.”
“You terrified Lucas Gabriel. He actually wanted you to have his daughters.”
“And so I took one. But I didn’t frighten him. He loved me. He still does even now. The same way he loves the rattlers. I came to him crawling on my belly through the thorns, with the face of a snake.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“Because a serpent is as much a part of Eden and man’s nature as anything else. Through our pain and forbearance we grow closer to paradise.”
It made Shad snarl with impotence. How many people would be alive if only he’d spent his first night in the hollow back in his own bed? He counted three, and who knew how many others were lying out in the woods?
“How do you kill them? Hold your hand over their faces? Suffocate them? Did you press your mouth over theirs so they couldn’t breathe?”
“You’ll understand eventually.”
“Is that why their lips are always screwed into a smile and there wasn’t a mark on them?”
“They smile because they’re happy. Fulfilled.”
“You stole Jerilyn right out from beneath me.”
“No, Shad,” Dave Fox said, and his voice was filled with as much honesty as you’d ever heard in one man before. “You let me have her.”
“What?”
“You helped me. Then you wrote yourself a note in the dust.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. You’ve probably written yourself other messages too, thinking they were from someone else. The hollow uses your body as well, to give them whatever they want.”
“Like hell!”
But you couldn’t argue when you were starting to believe a little. It was no more insane than talking to your dead Mama or seeing your murdered sister’s hand wherever you went. Chatting it up with the devil dressed in the warden’s finest suit and silk tie. Finding old beer bottles with notes in them written for you. Really, even at a moment like this, you couldn’t be that much of a hypocrite.
His mother had told him that they would take him.
She’d said there was someone in the hills who could demonstrate his belief on his belly. Who manifested nothing but poison. One of Mama’s prophecies had finally come true. Or perhaps Shad had suspected Dave all along, because they were so much like alike. Was that the joke here? Were they simply two schizophrenics trying to find common ground?
Dave Fox didn’t think he was human. Just another ill child with a sick brain, born or made into something that wasn’t quite right. Another damned part of the hollow like all the plague victims they’d brought up Gospel Trail and left there to become dust sifting into the river. The earth and water had gone bad. The flesh had gone wild.
You had to keep them talking. In the morality plays this was the scene where all the revelations were made right before the clouds parted and God came down in his wicker basket on a rope and solved all your problems.
“Why is it you’ve never shown yourself before, Dave? The real you.”
“I have many faces. Some are unfinished.”
“You’ve only got one, Dave. I’ve only seen you with one.”
“The one I wear now I show only to you. Nobody else but you.”
“You’re cracked. It’s the moon. The moon’s done it to us. It’s poisoned us. We’re all brain-damaged from it.”
“We’re changing on the road. It’s the way the hollow needs it to be.”
He tried to raise his voice above Dave’s but he didn’t have the strength. “That’s why there’s so many ill children being born. The dying gene pool. The diseased bodies thrown into the river and sinking into the ground. Into our food. Into the corn and the mash. We’re all monstrosities. But everything you did, you did on your own. You chose Megan.”
“She was favored.”
With his vision swimming, Shad bent and retrieved the sheet of paper and held it out before him. “She said you chose her, David.
“To my nature,” Dave admitted. “Same as you are to your own. That’s why you lay with both the Gabriel girls. Because it’s natural to perpetuate with your own kind. You’re no less a hostage than me or anyone. You gave Jerilyn to me, Shad. She was mine and Rebi was yours.”
“I didn’t kill Rebi.”
“Didn’t you?”
Being a jonah didn’t make you a murderer, but Dave was so damn sure of himself. “Ever think you’ve just gone insane?”
Dave Fox, for the first time since Shad had known him, hesitated. His mouth worked and formed a word or two, and a subtle ripple passed over his face. “No.”
“I’ve got to stop you,” Shad said.
“Don’t you think I’ve already tried to end it?”
He grabbed Shad by the throat, hauled him off the floor, and pinned him to the wall without any effort. Shad let out a cry and struggled vainly. Dave wasn’t even straining and Shad couldn’t breathe. “I don’t want it to be this way, but this is our world. You think I like doing this? The hollow won’t let me die.”
You could never beat someone as powerful as this.
Using all his strength, he tried to pry Dave’s fingers from his neck but couldn’t move him an inch. He was suffocating and in his terror strained even more, kicking out now, trying to scream. Nothing helped. Dave pulled Shad’s body forward and thrust him into the wall. Battering him once, twice, and again until the crossbeams splintered and Shad gave up any resistance.
Oh Mama. Oh Megan. He’s gonna plant one on me and I’m going to the grave a grinning idiot.
“Your eyes are closed,” Dave said. “Open them.”
Shad did, the blood flowing from his nose and mouth, down the back of his throat. There was smashed plaster on his face, in his hair, all over the floor. Dave really had put him through the wall, then yanked him out again. This wasn’t going to be like the other times. They were going to know he’d been in a fight.
Then, with an extraordinary amount of gentleness, Dave Fox laid Shad on the bed.
“I told you,” he said. “You’re my friend.”
That rasp of leather filled the room as Dave drew his.38 from the holster and held it to his own temple. “No matter what I do it never stops. I tried to kill myself for years before I understood and accepted my purpose. I’m theirs, same as you are. I get by all right bearing my sins, and you will too.”
