“What do you think Bessie meant, saying she wanted to see the cabin before she died?” I asked him, barely able to speak that last word.
He hesitated.
“The truth,” I said.
“The truth,” he said, and heaved a big sigh, “is that Bessie’s lived far longer than anybody thought she would.”
“Because of you.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. His gray eyes met mine. “I’m not being modest. Bessie’s hung on beyond all reason for a very long time. Her heart keeps going beyond medical understanding.”
We tramped along in gloomy silence after that. I thought about Mama dying and how hard it had been to lose somebody I didn’t love. I wasn’t ready to lose the first person I did.
Suddenly the sheriff yelled Henry’s name back of us, saying his deputy’d gashed his head. Henry told me to wait there and took off toward the sheriff’s voice at a trot. The distance grew between us until Henry disappeared and I was finally alone.
A few seconds later, I heard excited voices from the opposite direction. Thinking it might be Fred and Harlan or some of the other searchers, I headed for the sound. The voices were coming from the far side of some large boulders, but when I got close, I stopped, recognizing one voice’s ugly sound. Quiet as I could, I crept to the rocks, found holds for climbing up, and shimmied on my stomach to peer over the top.
I nearly cried out at the scene below me. Hargrove and his daddy, the mayor, stood in a big clearing about fifty feet from Sister, who was tied by her neck to a tree at the clearing’s edge. Without Wil to calm her, she was out of her mind with fear, but the harder she yanked to get free, the more the rope rubbed her neck bloody and raw. I scanned the trees for Wil, trying to see where he was, knowing he had to be the one who’d tied her there and wondering what idiot idea made him leave her that way.
Hargrove stood right below me, turned toward the pale roped creature struggling before him. I couldn’t see his expression, but beside him, his daddy, a shotgun by his side, beamed with pride, reminding me of Ray and the pleasure he’d taken in killing animals.
“I don’t have a white deer on my trophy wall,” he was telling Hargrove. “Wouldn’t she be perfect?”
“But Daddy, she’s—” Hargrove said.
“She’s what?” his daddy interrupted. “Don’t be soft, Hargrove. You’re too much like your mother that way. In fact, you take her,” his father said, handing his shotgun to Hargrove. “It’s time you took your first prize.”
Hargrove accepted the gun, and his daddy backed away.
“Well?” his father said. “Hurry up.”
“But she’s so beautiful,” Hargrove told him.
“Of course she’s beautiful,” his daddy said, as if that was obvious and Hargrove not very bright. “That’s the point. If you take her, she’ll be beautiful forever on the wall of my den. And you’ll be able to say, ‘I did that.’”
“Look what I found,” a voice called from the far side of the clearing. Curtis, the hunter from Thanksgiving, appeared, holding up Wil’s bow and arrows in one hand and nudging someone forward with the other. Wil staggered before him into dim light. I wondered why Wil seemed so unsteady, and then saw he was carrying something heavy stretched across both his arms. The weight of his load kept him planted, though he twitched in horror at the sight of Sister and the gun in Hargrove’s hands. I was about to shout to Wil when I made out what he was carrying. It was Bessie—Bessie, limp and still as death.
“I’m claiming that reward!” Curtis shouted.
“Hurry up and take your shot,” the mayor told Hargrove. “Then I’ll call the sheriff on my cell phone and say you’ve found Mrs. Montgomery and the boy who shot you. You’ll be the hero of the day.”
Hargrove squirmed and shifted from one foot to the other, not at all sharing his father’s rush. I remembered the afternoon behind the school when I’d seen Hargrove scratch Sparky’s belly and rub behind his ears. Hargrove looked from Sister to his daddy to Wil, from Wil to his daddy and back to Sister. Sister, though still bug-eyed with fear, had stopped thrashing since Wil had come into the clearing. My heart grew sick and near bursting with rage at the thought of what would happen next.
Hargrove surprised me then. He leaned the shotgun against the boulders behind him and walked slowly over to Sister, talking to her sweet and low, trying to reassure her. She stood quivering, wary and breathing quick, watching to see what he would do. He walked a wide circle around her and slipped a folding knife from his front pocket. Glaring hard at his daddy, he sawed through the rope at the tree and cut Sister free.
She stood for a moment, not sure of her freedom, but when the mayor lunged for the shotgun, she bolted into the woods.
I wish I could say I thought about what I did next, but I didn’t. As I stood up on top of that rock, Wil and Hargrove caught sight of me, amazement and horror on their faces. Curtis saw Wil glance up, and as Curtis looked up too, I shrieked and threw myself off that boulder right on top of the mayor as he turned to aim at Sister. I hit hard, felt a sharp pain, and heard the shotgun go off with an earsplitting blast just as Henry hollered, “Zoë! No!”—the last words I heard for a good while.
19
Bessie lay in the hospital bed not seeming at all like herself without her headscarf and quilts, looking more like a wrinkled child. I’d never seen her without a scarf. What hair she
