wouldn’t know anything. Who were the girls she used to be friendly with? He couldn’t remember.
“Maybe a new boy,” Shad said.
“If so, nobody ever saw them together.”
“A party?”
“I checked with all the parents. No one was gone for the night. No parties. One of the kids would’ve mentioned it.”
“A bonfire that night? In the fields?”
“No signs of one at all. No fresh tire tracks, no ashes, no trash. Somebody would’ve said something.”
“Even if they were trying to hide her death?”
With a slow, heavy breath Dave tried to reach out with his own will and composure and calm Shad down. “What group of teenagers can keep their mouths shut about anything?”
None. Shad realized it but was already grasping for whatever he could. In the can, locked down with assholes and killers everywhere, he never lost his confidence or ease. Now, standing here, he knew he was shaking apart inside. It was almost enough to scare him, but not quite.
“Was she raped?”
“No. There was no indication of a struggle.”
“Did you…?”
“You need to stop acting like a private eye, Shad Jenkins. You’re not very good at it. Stop asking so many questions.”
“You’re right,” Shad admitted, “but it’s not going to happen. Did you talk to Zeke Hester?”
“He was in Dober’s Roadhouse, same as every night. Drunk and causing his usual misfortunes and woe. Had one altercation with the bartender, threw a pool cue across the room.”
“He likes throwing things. The day I broke his arm he took off his boot and hurled it at my face.”
“He’s a sniveler, but twenty witnesses put him there until closing at two A.M. His mother says he got home quarter after. He tripped over her loom and busted her paint-by-numbers picture of Elvis and Jesus smiling on a cloud.”
“Not Conway Twitty?”
“I know Elvis when I see him. So Old Lady Hester hit Zeke with an iron skillet and he passed out on the living room rug. And she’s not covering for him. His mama hates him even more than you do.”
“Maybe.”
Mags’s hand, waving to him from the corner of his eye, snagged his attention. If he turned his head, he’d lose her, so he froze, kept her in frame. Dave kept going for another yard, then stopped and looked at him. Shad tried to inspect her nails, see if they were broken or caked with grime, maybe somebody’s skin.
It took a few seconds to slip into the shrouded, quiet place inside himself where he could handle whatever life threw at him. He couldn’t get all the way there, but the effort helped, even as Megan’s fingers flitted at the edges of his vision. Her hand looked clean. She drew it away.
Much calmer now, he asked, “Anything else out there? In those woods?”
“Not nearby. A few overgrown logging paths that lead to the old McMueller Mill. It’s only ruins now, even the stream has dried up. Some stunted orchards, I think. I’m not really sure.”
“Who lives over that way?”
“A few of the bottom hill families on the other side of the gorge. They stick to themselves, hardly ever come down into town. The Taskers. The Johansens. And the Gabriels too, as I recall. They have their own community, sort of an extended village up there near the briar woods. They’re snake handlers, way I hear tell.”
“I don’t know any of them.”
“I’ve met a couple and run into them now and again, but they keep their church goings-on to themselves. No phone among the bunch of them. Never cause any trouble. Red Sublett and his brood dwell nearby there, but he’s not a part of their camp. He’s got nine kids now. No wonder he looks half-dead when he comes in for supplies.”
Shad thought of Red’s wife, Lottie, hangdog and toothless, and he had to control a shudder from going through him. “Goddamn, he only had five when I went in.”
“He got himself a set of premature quadruplets last year. All of them with club feet and stunted legs, and none with the correct amount of fingers. That Lottie, she’s pushing them out too damn fast.”
Shad didn’t say aloud what they both already knew, that Red and Lottie were siblings though they usually denied it, but not always. Doing whatever they wanted to do, not out of love or even a fundamental need, but simply because of proximity. What a foolish reason to visit sins upon your babies.
He thought of Tandy Mae’s children, who were Megan’s deformed half brothers and half sisters, and so, somehow related to him by the narrow channels of blood.
“My grandfather used to tell me these hills were haunted,” Dave told him.
The woods thickened with ash and birch and more slash pine, the land wild with sprawled logs and lightning- struck trunks clotted with weeds. Tangled briars, rosebay, Catawba, and rhododendron and dogwood knotted in mad, awkward patterns. Shad sighted areas of bark scarred with bullet holes and buckshot. There were flashes of light winking in the brush, reflections from beer cans and broken jugs of moon.
“Maybe they are,” Shad said. It was true, at least for today. Megan, or something, wanted his pledge.
So now they were down to it. The milieu fluctuated a little, Dave taking full control again without having to do a damn thing.
“I don’t want you to cause any trouble out this way, Shad Jenkins.”
“I don’t intend to.”
“You’re a god-awful liar.”
“I have to find out what happened to her.”
“That’s my job.” Voice firm, putting some bite into it. “Leave this to me.”
It was Dave Fox’s way of saying, no matter what the official report might read, that he would never give up on the case, he’d work it until the truth finally broke free.
“Let’s go up there for a few minutes.”
“Where?”
“Top of Jonah Ridge,” Shad said.
“The hell for?”
“I want to take a look.”
Dave pulled a face that only cops knew how to make-like he was dealing with a wiseass brat and ready to visit great injury upon that kid any second. But he obliged, willing to give Shad just a little more slack.
They walked back to the patrol car and drove up the Gospel Trail. The expanse broke into numerous dirt paths leading into the thickets and scrub tilting away from the rise. A split-rail fence had been put up to keep people from wandering off the edge.
The Chatalaha had, by its scouring violence, formed one of the most rugged chasms for hundreds of miles in any direction. The steep walls of the gorge enclosed the river for almost fifteen miles, clear up to Poverhoe. On the other side of the ravine, the terrain grew extremely steep and rugged, covered by a dense hardwood forest.
They got out. Dave Fox showed no sign of tension, but Shad sensed he was getting antsy, wasting so much time talking, driving around, being idle, catering to a civilian. Shad did his best to ignore it.
The fence was weak and he could see black mold growing in the middle of the rotted slats. An ounce of pressure would send it over, and he could just imagine the rail giving away as he pressed his stomach to it, easing forward inch by inch, until he was plunging. Dave’s powerful arm struck out and braced him.
“How far up are we?”
“Elevation averages about thirty-four hundred feet along the rim of the gorge,” Dave said.
“Jesus-”
“Waters descend over two thousand feet before breaking into the open levels of the hollow. Jonah Ridge is on the other side of the chasm. My grandfather used to hunt grizzly and cougar up there.”
“Even though he thought the hills were haunted?”
“He was a man of contradictions.”
All of us are. You couldn’t get away from it.
