The Witch of Gideon (Nowhere, USA Book 5) Read online

  Holding Douglas was like holding a fish on the end of a line, flipping and flopping around. He was still kicking his feet, but not as hard, and the swelling from the bite had now spread beyond his wrist and into his forearm. He was still screaming, but that had become ragged and sporadic. Rusty could hear him struggling to draw in enough air to scream.

  Over his shoulder, then. He muscled Douglas’s wiggling body up onto his shoulder, held onto his right leg and arm and staggered a few steps uphill. Once he got to the top of the ridge, he prayed he’d be able to see Douglas’s house. But even if he couldn’t, he could go down the other side of the ridge and he’d eventually come out on Bethel Park Pike where he could flag somebody down.

  Rusty tried.

  He had never in his life tried any harder to do a thing than he tried to carry Douglas, but he flat-out wasn’t strong enough. Even using his legs to lift and holding Douglas’s weight with his whole body and not just his arms he made it maybe fifty yards and his knees fell out from under him and both of them tumbled to the ground.

  Rusty rolled Douglas over onto his back, kneeling beside him and got a good look at his arm and hand. The swelling had reached the elbow. The hand was turning from fiery red to a deep, ugly shade of purple.

  Rusty burst out sobbing, rocking back and forth on his knees, crying like a little baby.

  The words from the report he’d written for the fourth-grade diorama floated up into the eight-ball window in his mind.

  “Rattlesnake bites are rarely fatal in a healthy adult with proper medical care. If antivenin treatment is given within two hours after the bite, the probability of recovery is greater than ninety-nine percent.”

  He tried not to see the remainder of the words on the white thing floating in the black eight-ball water. “Left untreated, a bite can cause internal hemorrhaging leading to death.”

  Staggering to his feet, he picked up Douglas’s foot and started to drag him, knew it was futile but did it anyway. Douglas was too heavy and the ridge incline was too steep. Maybe if it was downhill. But downhill was the county line.

  And the Jabberwock.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Downhill was the Jabberwock.

  A horrifying plan began to form in Rusty’s mind. Actually, it had been forming for some time, but he had managed to ignore it until now. But as he dug his shoes into the loose soil and dead leaves of the slope and pulled with all his might to drag Douglas along behind him, the thought stepped out into centerstage in his mind.

  It stood there, hot and stinking and demanded to be heard.

  Downhill was the county line.

  Downhill was the Jabberwock.

  … and what happened when you crossed the Jabberwock?

  You were suddenly sitting in the Dollar Store parking lot in the Middle of Nowhere desperately sick.

  In the Middle of Nowhere.

  The geographic center of Nowhere County was a far better place for Douglas to be right now than in the woods on the far side of Donavon Rock in Freeman Hollow.

  If Rusty carried Douglas into the Jabberwock …

  But they would be sick. Horribly, desperately sick. Everyone who’d ever dared cross the Jabberwock said the experience was one of the worst things they’d ever gone through.

  Yeah, it’d be awful.

  But as far as Rusty knew, Jabberwock sickness had never killed anybody. Correction, Willie Cochran, that old guy from Wiley who didn’t have thumbs, had died after coming through, but Rusty’s mom said he’d had a bad heart that couldn’t stand the strain.

  Well, Douglas had a rattlesnake bite. His whole arm was turning purple. Could he stand the strain? In his condition, would the Jabberwock kill him?

  Rusty dropped Douglas’s foot into the dry leaves and stood very still, looking back down the hillside. From here it wasn’t visible, but it probably wasn’t more than a couple of hundred yards to the shimmering mirage in the trees that marked the domain of the dragon.

  His mother had taken him with her out to the county line to show it to him, to a remote spot, on the other side of the one-lane covered bridge on Wiley Road. That was one of the multitude of things Rusty loved about his mother. She took him to see the Jabberwock, knew he’d be curious, thought he had a right to see it for himself. Other boys he knew weren’t so fortunate. Their parents — their mothers, they all came from “adult-male free” homes, which Rusty saw as infinitely preferable to being yo-yoed into and out of the lives of a string of men like Douglas was. His mother called it “sequential polygamy” and she thought he knew what that meant so he’d never asked.

  The day she took him to the county line on Wiley Road, his mom had walked with him slowly toward their mirror images in the wiggly shimmer in the road. She’d told him about how she had touched her hand to her own image, and described in gory detail what that had cost her. She’d pointed out to him what the Jabberwock looked like in the meadow beside the road, how it made the grass blurry where it touched the ground, and she’d shown him the sparkling spiderweb quality of the Jabberwock in the woods.

  That was the first but not the last time Rusty had seen it, though it was the first time he’d been out in the open where he could see his reflection in it. He was sure he could find it now in the trees at the bottom of the hill.

  What should he do? What did he dare do?

  He could keep struggling to carry/drag Douglas up the ridge, over Donavon Rock and back down the other side. In brutal honesty, that was futile. He could leave Douglas here, mark the spot somehow so he could find it again, and race off for help. And leave Douglas here in the woods alone.

  Or he could drag Douglas downhill to the Jabberwock, and let the Jabberwock do the transporting.

  It had a big price tag, but it seemed the only viable option. It would make Douglas desperately sick. It would make Rusty desperately sick, too. Please, a nosebleed — even if I bleed to death. Or blind. Not puking.

  “He’ll die if I don’t get this right.” Rusty said the words aloud, sobbed them out into the forest that was now mostly quiet. Douglas wasn’t screaming anymore.

  If the Jabberwock killed Douglas, it would be Rusty’s fault for taking him there. If he died of the snakebite after Rusty had struggled for hours to get help for him … well, that was just too bad. Rusty’d done all he could.

  But he wouldn’t let himself look at it that way. His mother had taught him better than that. This wasn’t about Rusty right now, about how he’d be judged someday. It was about Douglas, a life and death decision. What might happen to Rusty because of his decision wasn’t the point and he wasn’t allowed to let it influence what he decided.

  He thought he saw a sparkle, a twinkle in the trees. Maybe it was closer than he thought. He patted Douglas’s shirt pocket. Douglas always carried a pen in his shirt pocket. Rusty should have told him a long time ago that it made him look like a nerd, but he hadn’t wanted to hurt Douglas’s feelings. Rusty used the pen to write on Douglas’s pasty white forehead “Rattlesnake bite” because he was afraid he might be too sick to tell them what was wrong with Douglas at the other end.

  And then he turned around, grabbed Douglas under both arms, and began hauling him down the hillside, his heels making twin grooves like railroad tracks in the dirt.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Duncan Norman couldn’t breathe.

  The words screamed at him, leapt up off the page and attracted his very soul. His hands began to shake so violently he dropped the book into his lap, but he instantly snatched it back up and held it to his chest, hugged it to his chest, held on with the kind of fierce tenderness he would have held his precious Hayley if she had told him what happened.

  Dear God in heaven, his precious child had been raped.

  Raped!

  He couldn’t stand the knowledge. Reading the journal had been a ride through the hells of adolescence. Pain and humiliation were recorded in detail on page after page. The fat girl. Hayley Whaley. It wasn’t a diary, a record of events and activ
ities. It was a place where Hayley poured out her soul. The entries weren’t dated. Each new one started a fresh page, and rambled on. The final entry in the journal had been a description of the act that would lead her to her death.

  Duncan couldn’t stand the images the words drew in his mind, wanted to leap out of his skin with rage and horror. It was worse than knowing she was dead. Knowing she had been used that way, was worse than …

  The thought had been swirling around with all the others in his head, a cacophony of confusion, but it suddenly stepped out onto centerstage, stood in the spotlight and demanded to be heard.

  That’s why she was dead!

  Because she had been raped. She had been deflowered, had lost her virginity in a brutal act too horrific to contemplate. And it had shattered her, broken her. His sweet, precious baby … she couldn’t stand to live with the degradation. That’s why! That’s why she had killed herself, to escape the horror.

  He sucked in a sob, still clutching the book to his chest, the waves of horror and revulsion and grief slamming into him like breakers on the rocks.

  “Duncan …”

  It was Miriam, at the door. She had probably knocked but he hadn’t heard her. “Norman … please, honey. Come out, don’t stay locked up in there in Hayley’s room.”

  Miriam must never know. She must never find out that her baby girl had been ravaged by a monster and had been so devastated by the attack that she didn’t want to live anymore. No one must know.

  Precious Hayley had kept her secret, took it with her to the grave and he would honor that.

  If someone knew … that would be the end. The end of everything.

  “Not now,” he said, marveling that his mind could formulate words and his mouth articulate them, his throat form the sound to carry them forward.

  Duncan Norman had always been a private man. Suited more for study and contemplation than for the more hands-on part of ministry. In truth, he often wondered if it would have been better if he’d become a priest instead of a Pentecostal minister. Of course, that was out of the question. Priests were Cath-o-liks, they worshiped idols, statues of Jesus and his mother. They would burn in hell, every last one of them.

  But the priesthood, as Duncan understood it, held an enormous appeal. He would have been a monk, of course, like the ones at the monastery in Gethsemane in Marion County. A life of solitude and study, of denial of self, of contemplation and service. A life where he did not have to deal with the ugliness of life in the world God had given over to Satan, the prince of this world, for a time.

  The ugliness of sin in all its various forms and manifestations disgusted him. One reason he was so very stern, held onto himself so tightly, was because his whole body went into gritting-his-teeth mode when he was confronted with adultery and lying, stealing, fornication … The list went on and on. And if Duncan had been a priest, he would have been above such things.

  But he’d chosen ministry, and did his best to give of his limited amount of human compassion freely to the members of his congregation and to his family. It had taken a toll on him, but he had soldiered on, aiming for the prize, waiting for the crown of glory on the other side.

  If he shared with Miriam the horror of what he had discovered, the awful knowledge would flow right out through her to every person she came in contact with. Miriam had no filters, nothing held back the revelation of her every thought and feeling. She would exude the knowledge of Hayley’s humiliation, it would become a dark pall hanging over her as thick and putrid as stink rising up off roadkill.

  Hayley deserved better than that. Her memory deserved better. He would keep the awful knowledge from Miriam to protect the honor of his child.

  Except that’s not why.

  The why was that Duncan himself couldn’t stand for the world to know. He couldn’t stand the knowing looks, the sympathy, the understanding of all the whispered conversations that would go on all over the county, centered on her precious child and how she had lost her virginity to a—

  All his spinning thoughts stopped at the word.

  Rapist.

  Like the train cars behind a stalled engine, all his thoughts slammed into that one and then fell over onto their sides, unable to move forwards.

  Who?

  Who had done such a thing?

  Who had raped …

  He opened the book he had clutched to his chest and re-read the entry.

  A man had found Hayley at the Scott’s Ridge overlook alone. She often went there to be by herself. Duncan knew that but it never occurred to him she wasn’t safe there or he never would have allowed …

  No, he would not assume the tiniest portion of the blame for the horror that had befallen his little girl. All the blame for that belonged to the man who had violated her.

  Hayley described him as tall and dark. Said he had a rugged face, unruly black hair and piercing blue eyes.

  An oddly detailed description of the man she saw through tears after he had ripped her clothes off, threw her onto her back on the picnic table and had his way with her.

  When had it happened? How long had the poor child been carrying this burden alone? He understood why she hadn’t told him. How could a teenage girl tell her father a thing like that? She had been brave, kept her pain and humiliation to herself until …

  Until what?

  What had triggered the final desolation so complete she couldn’t stand the thought of life after it? Why had—?

  A thought so monstrous it made Duncan nauseous, crawled into his belly and began to gnaw at his guts, a lazy rat of horror.

  What if …

  What if … Hayley had been … pregnant?

  No. Absolutely not.

  The blows falling on him one after another left him reeling. He had stood up at some point, holding the book, clutching it to his chest, and he realized that now he was perched on the little pink stool in front of Hayley’s dressing table, where she sat to put on her makeup and curl her hair.

  He glanced into the mirror and saw how foolish he looked, a man in a dark suit — he always wore dark suits and white shirts. Other ministers he knew had given in to wearing pastel colors, what was it they called it — French blue. But not Duncan. Duncan …

  Pregnant!

  The word reverberated in his head, sounded like the resounding beat of a kettle drum between his ears.

  Surely, not … Why would he think such a thing? That was ridiculous. What—?

  Where had Hayley been going on J-Day? It was such an odd thing to do, something she had never done before. She had waited until he left for the church and then had taken her mother’s car … where? Where was she going when she hit the Jabberwock?

  Was she going to a clinic … somewhere to find out if she was pregnant?

  Or … oh, dear God— No.

  He couldn’t stand this, couldn’t stand where his mind was taking him, leapt up off the stool and began to pace back and forth across the room, up onto the Little Mermaid rug Miriam’d insisted they give Hayley for Christmas, the one she’d pretended to like but didn’t really. He knew Hayley thought it was too “little girl,” and she was right. It was. Miriam never wanted “her baby” to grow up. Now, she never would.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Abortion.

  It made sense.

  It all made sense.

  Hayley had been raped. She had conceived. And she had … been planning to get an abortion when the Jabberwock threw her into the Middle of Nowhere.

  And that’s why she had killed herself. When she realized she couldn’t leave the county, couldn’t get out to … she was carrying the child of a rapist.

  A rapist.

  Of course, she had seen no other out than suicide.

  There was another knock at the door. This time it wasn’t timid, it was assertive.

  “Pastor Norman, it’s me, Joe. Can I come in? Or would you come out? You hadn’t ought to be alone right now. Can we pray together?”

&n
bsp; Duncan opened the door, but instead of inviting Joe in, Duncan held out his hand.

  “Can I have the keys to your car? I need to borrow it for a while.”

  The Jabberwock had eaten one of their cars and Hayley had used the other to go … to the Scott’s Ridge Overlook. That’s where the car was. She had parked it in the lot there, walked to the ledge, and leapt off.

  “What … where do you need to—?”

  “Out. I have somewhere I have to go, someone I have to see.”

  “I’ll go with you, drive you. You don’t need to be driving—”

  Duncan brushed past him and strode down the hallway, took the stairs two at a time and approached the first person he saw — Mamie Butterfield, who was standing in the doorway to the parlor.

  “Mamie, I need to borrow your car.”

  “Why sure … what do you need the car for, Pastor Norman?”

  “Please don’t ask right now. I can’t … I have to see someone. Please.”

  Mamie was constantly losing things, so she wore her purse on a strap around her shoulder to keep up with it. She dug around inside it for a moment and then brought out a set of keys. The keys dangled from a keyring with a Papa Smurf fob.

  Miriam saw him heading for the front door and called out to him, but he only tossed a “I have to go somewhere” over his shoulder and continued to Mamie Butterfield’s old Pontiac parked out front. When he closed the door, he saw that several people had followed him out of the house and were standing on the porch watching him. With great effort, he managed the self-control to pull slowly out of the space in front of his house and drive cautiously down the street. As soon as he was out of sight of the house, he gunned it, driving so fast he could barely keep the car on the road.

  He was on his way to the Middle of Nowhere. Sam Sheridan would be there and if she wasn’t they’d know where he could find her. He had to talk to her, ask her what she knew, because she was the one person Hayley might have confided in. And Duncan had to find out if his little girl was carrying the baby of a rapist when she threw herself off the top of the ridge.