“Anybody live out that way?”
That tremendous torso filled with cold air, working like a bellows. Dave gave him that same look as before, sad and almost loving, but ready to backhand him hard across his nose if need be. “You going to hunt down everybody for a twenty-mile radius, Shad Jenkins?”
“If I have to.”
“You’re gonna cause yourself a lot of pain. That the way you gonna go at this?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s mostly wilderness on Jonah. The grizzly and the big cats were wiped out. Now you’ve really only got deer, grouse, quail, and coon. Living off red chokeberry and wild indigo, they don’t get as big as you might think. Plenty of timber rattlers too, in case you decide to go take a gander. Get yourself some real boots. They’ll strike through the heels of what you’re wearing and you’ll probably be dead in two hours without treatment.”
It was an exaggeration. Probably. “How much farther up is the trestle that covers the divide?”
“Maybe a mile. It’s hidden from our line of view right now by the scrub and pine. The Pharisee Bridge. They were pure brimstone with naming things in these parts, weren’t they?”
“They do appear to have been single-minded people back then.”
“And some of their inheritors still can be.”
“I suppose we can.”
“The trestle was never the most stable structure, but the county used it for fifteen, twenty years or so beginning in the late thirties. They tried a couple of mining operations up there on Jonah but nothing ever came of it, and the tracks were abandoned and pulled up. Now the hill folk use the bridge to cut their trips to town in half, when they come down at all. Which happens less and less now. Nobody else would dare try it, not even the hunters. Easier and safer just to cross the Chatalaha at the bottom and drive up the old logging roads.”
Shad stepped back over to the rickety rail fence and forced himself to stand there. To show whoever was pondering on him that he wasn’t going to lie still or back off. He was coming.
He scanned the vista on the other side of the gorge, the dying orchards clustered with snarled catclaw brambles and briars.
A scratch on her cheek.
Pharisee.
If somebody hadn’t taken Megan up to Gospel Trail Road, then maybe someone had brought her down from the back hills instead.
Chapter Five
THE LUVELL GIRL HIS FATHER HAD SPOKEN OF turned out to be Glide, who after dropping out of school in the fifth grade spent most of her days helping make sour-mash whiskey. She was a year younger than Megan-than Megan had been-but Glide already had 36C breasts and a natural cunning and understanding of men. Like her mother and sisters before her, she was built to bear children, designed by the hollow to pass on the burden of her general simplemindedness.
Shad remembered her as a crude kid always pouting and posturing, smelling of fresh cornstalk. She’d grown into a provocative teenager aware of her sexuality but too immature to do more than stick her chest in your face. She managed to hit all the right poses that accentuated her heavily freckled cleavage.
The Luvells had come out of the bottoms only to develop a taste for their own moon. Their patriarch, Pike Luvell, had blown himself up after drunkenly stuffing five sticks of dynamite in a chuckhole chasing down a gopher. His two sons were in various stages of chronic alcoholism. Instead of selling their moon they often never even finished distilling it, choosing to sit around their rock-strewn farm and eat the mash gruel.
It was an ugly sight. Neither of them had a tooth left in his skull. The oldest, Venn, was totally addled and rarely bothered to leave the barn. The younger, Hoober, yellow-tinged and bloated from failing kidneys, was a couple of years older than Shad and had reached the final stages of cirrhosis.
Their place crouched out on Bogan Road, nestled between a frog pond and a few acres of wire grass. Four shacks covered in crow shit faced one another.
Glide had a small potbelly but Shad couldn’t tell if it was baby fat or if she was already pregnant. He made his guess as she kept on affecting mannerisms that would drive the guys at Dober’s Roadhouse out of their heads. Shad hadn’t had a woman for two years, yet he was somehow disheartened by the display.
It gave him pause. He was struck again by the alarming fact that he now understood C-Block murderers better than he did his own people.
Glide lived up to her name, swirling around Shad as she sleekly eddied about the yard, working the vats of bubbling mash. He could see the bottom of Venn’s boots sticking out from beneath a thatch of hay in the corner of the barn. Broken pottery and mason jars littered the ground, half-hidden by tufts of crabgrass. Twisted lengths of converted radiator tubing connected the metal barrels and lay piled here and there among dried shucks of corn.
It sickened him thinking of how Mags must’ve walked around here, viewing this scene of despondency. Did she ever gaze into Hoober’s slack-jawed empty maw and listen to those befuddled slurrings? See Venn crawling around consuming his gruel? Could Shad have saved her from that at least?
He had to keep turning to watch Glide as she spun and circled the steaming drums. He wondered if he’d ever be able to drink whiskey again.
Glide stayed in motion, wriggling, the little belly quivering as she kept up a constant stream of chatter. Asking him ridiculous questions but showing a real curiosity. Wanting to know about the food they served in prison, the size of the cells, and if he’d gotten any jailhouse tattoos. If anybody had taught him how to break into a bank vault. She didn’t expect any responses, didn’t actually seem to need them. But it proved she kept her mind busy.
As she flowed closer to him, her shirt lifted, and he spotted a sloppy tattoo of a bumblebee on her left hip. Slightly below it, toward the base of her spine, a warm red devil face smiled affectionately. The needle hadn’t been clean and the tats had scarred considerably.
He stood waiting for her to wind down, and when she didn’t, he stepped over, got in front, and put a hand on her shoulder. It stopped her as if she’d run into a wall. She looked up, puzzled.
“Was Megan seeing anybody?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
It got depressing, having to explain every word you said. “A boy. Did she have a boyfriend?”
“No, nobody like that.”
“You certain?”
“A’course. After the trouble with that Zeke Hester bastard, she never wanted much to do with the boys. Except some in the Youth Ministry. She thought they were all right ’cause they didn’t do much ’sides go to prayer meetings.”
“Know of anyone who would’ve wanted to do her harm?”
“No, a’course not.”
“Think about it before you answer,” he snapped.
She blinked at him, tongued the inside of her cheek, and let a few beats go by. “Everybody liked Megan. And Zeke stayed away.”
He knew Glide was answering him marginally but honestly, and she wouldn’t offer anything more than what was simplest and fastest to say.
He had to come at it a different way. “Did you ever go up there in the back hills with her?”
“Where? Which hills?”
“To Gospel Trail. The gorge.”
With a surge of panicky strength, she snapped her arm away and broke free. “Hell no, I’d never go out that way.”
The vehemence surprised him. “Why?”
“You know the talk.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yeah you do.”
