land to work with it you spent more time pulling it up out of the steep and eroded creek banks than working.
The rain was an annoyance, stinging her face. She wished she had remembered goggles so she could open her eyes fully.
If Dixie didn’t miss the turnoff and have to double back, Buck’s clearing was about a mile and a half away.
As she sped along, the ATV would go airborne when she hit a mogul or a rut, and rain in her eyes or not, she couldn’t help but smile. If the snotty little bitch stayed put, like Dixie warned her to, she’d be all right till Monday. Dixie doubted she’d try anything, because she was a soft little nothing. If women like that didn’t put it out, there’d be a bounty on them.
Anyway, if she didn’t stay put, she had her a real nice surprise coming that wouldn’t be nobody’s fault but her own.
By following Buck’s directions, Dixie found the spot where the twins had started digging the hole. She drove the ATV around the field and soon picked up the tracks of the twins’ four-wheelers. Soon she spotted their Hondas and stopped beside them.
She found them seated in an inch of rainwater with their broad backs against opposing ends of the hole. Burt and Curt Smoot looked like a pair of fat baby birds in a shoebox. They stared angrily up at Dixie, who stood in the loose dirt at the grave’s edge with her hands on her hips, shaking her head.
The ground was torn up where they had tried to claw their way out of the steep-sided grave. A section of aluminum ladder lay five feet away. The hole was deeper than it needed to be by two feet, but her father had said that the hole should be deep enough to prevent anything from digging up the Dockerys, and it certainly was that.
Since Burt and Curt weighed about three hundred pounds each, and the grass was wet and covered with the dirt from digging, there was no way they could get out without the ladder, or by one holding his hands for the other to climb out and get the ladder for the other. She didn’t have to be told that neither had been willing to depend on the other to get the ladder for them.
“You’re dumb as sacks of barn owl poop,” she said.
“It was him,” Burt said, pointing at Curt.
Curt said, “You started it.”
“You pulled me in!”
“You pushed me and I just grabbed hold of you and we both fell in. I
Dixie spat into the standing water between them. “I swear, if the good Lord swapped possums’ brains with yours, the friggin possums would get the short end of the stick.”
“Please put the ladder down, Dixie?” Curt pleaded. “It’s cold in here.”
“I ought to leave you in there,” she said. “Buck told me y’all was left to dig, but he came back and found you hadn’t dug anything. I saw back yonder where you started the hole. How’d you end up way the hell over here? If you hadn’t left the four-wheelers in plain sight, I never would have found you.”
“It wasn’t a good place to dig where he said to,” Burt said. “Where he said to dig was rooty as hell, and we didn’t have a pickax.”
“We’d a needed a damned backhoe,” Curt said.
“Dirt’s better here,” Burt said.
“Daddy’s gonna be pissed,” she said.
“You gonna tell him?” Curt chimed in, fear coloring his voice.
“It could have happened to anybody,” Burt said.
“It happened to a pair of idiot fools.” Dixie got the ladder and jammed it down in the grave between them.
“You don’t have to tell Daddy,” Curt said, standing.
“I sure don’t.”
“Thank you for not telling Daddy.” Curt climbed out and stood up, offering a meaty hand to his brother.
“Don’t thank me,” Dixie said, walking to her Honda and climbing on. “Buck went to call him.”
When the engine caught, she sped across the clover field like she was late for something.
28
Lucy Dockery had been certain for hours that she could sense rain in the air, but she had yet to hear it hitting the trailer’s roof. Maybe her mind was playing tricks on her.
She wondered if this going off and leaving her was a ruse on the woman’s part to see if Lucy did try to escape. She doubted the woman would stay gone long, or leave her totally unguarded. If the woman believed that Lucy was a frightened and helpless dilettante who would do as she was told, it still didn’t explain why she would allow her to try to escape. Could she be that crazy or that dumb?
With Elijah clinging to her, she hurried through the trailer, looking for anything she could use.
The main room-open kitchen and den-was decorated with stuffed deer heads. A layer of red dust seemed to cover every flat surface.
It was immediately apparent that anything with an edge she could use as a tool had been removed. The spoons, knives, and forks in the kitchen were all plastic. Cast-iron pots and pans were stacked under an island with a granite top with stools on the ends and along one side. Next to the gas range a potbelly stove sat on a bed of bricks. There was not even a steel poker or shovel for the stove.
Patterns made by the soles of boots and shoes covered practically every square foot of the filthy floor. In the den area a single couch with a wool blanket draped over it was shoved against a wall. Aside from that there was a playpen, and a new TV set perched on a coffee table.
A door opened into a room on the end of the trailer with two bunk beds and a stench reminiscent of high school locker rooms. Hunting clothes, pairs of mud-encrusted boots, grimy underwear and socks were in piles over the floor. There were no guns in evidence, and that was just as well since Lucy knew she could never use one. The idea of killing horrified her to the core. She had always been anti-capital punishment, antiwar; she didn’t even believe abortion was all right.
Maybe this was the sort of hunting camp Walter and his friends had sometimes stayed in. Walter had been a hunter and she’d been bored to tears when he and his hunting friends talked about it.
Lucy had never gone camping or even to the woods with her husband. Now she desperately wished she had become involved in that part of his life.
Lucy picked up a huge camouflage jacket with a hood and put it on to protect Eli and herself from the cool weather. She found an olive-colored compact flashlight that worked, which was good because it was dark outside. She put her bare feet into a pair of absurdly large leather boots and quickly wrapped the long laces around and cinched them at the ankles so they wouldn’t fall off. Anything was better than going outside in her bare feet.
Cautiously Lucy opened the outside door to the trailer and discovered that it wasn’t dark because it was night; it was dark because the trailer was parked inside an enormous building. It looked to be a warehouse with walls of fabricated steel. There were industrial fixtures connected to the beams, but all were unlit. Daylight illuminated narrow seams where some of the sheet metal panels joined.
The roof was supported by the kind of steel girders you would see in one of those warehouse stores.
