The Witch of Gideon (Nowhere, USA Book 5) Page 14

  Cotton began to empty the contents of the bag onto the table, deflecting all questions until “we got some food in our bellies.”

  “Cotton’s right,” Stuart said. “I have something resembling an appetite and I don’t think I want to hear the story of Rose Topple and the nursing home on an empty stomach.”

  They ate like they hadn’t had a meal in weeks. By mutual unspoken agreement, conversation was relegated to the relative superiority of original recipe chicken versus extra crispy, a Jolene soliloquy, “ode to a Colonel Sanders biscuit,” and general belly-aching about the cardboard nature of KFC fries.

  “There’s more flavor in a Styrofoam packing worm,” Jolene said.

  As they cleared away the greasy paper plates, Stuart and Jolene told Cotton that Jolene’s equipment was still there and there’d been no reception committee waiting for them at the Tibbits house.

  “Well, that’s good news!”

  “The only good news,” Jolene said. “The equipment was there. The readings weren’t. Everything we recorded, all the data had been erased.”

  Cotton recoiled from the words like from a physical blow, only then realizing how much he’d been banking on Jolene spreading the story to the world.

  “So we decided to get new data — at Charlie’s mother’s house,” Stuart said but hope died in Cotton’s chest before it had a chance to draw first breath.

  “Nobody home,” Jolene said. “Literally. Dead line. Not even a dial tone.”

  “It was just a house — an empty house,” Stuart said, his voice ragged.

  “No more paranormal activity there than all the ‘haunted houses’ I visited where I faked the presence of ghosts.”

  They sat silent for a moment, then Stuart plunged relentlessly forward. Cotton was impressed by his tenacity.

  “So spill … was Rose Topple senile?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  Cotton began his tale, told them the stories Rose Topple had told him. He’d been trying to organize it all in his head into some rational narrative, but had not been able to do much with the tangled tale but repeat it to the two of them as it was told to him. He described how the miner found bones, skeletons in the mine, and how the rest of the miners refused to go back to work, afraid they’d desecrated an Indian burial ground and the mine would be haunted.

  “A representative of the mining company showed up and told them the bones were the remains of a village of ‘jigger-dancers’ that’d been massacred by Indians.”

  “Jigger dancers?” Stuart asked.

  “I think he was talking about Shakers — a sect, some spinoff of Quakers … who, as we all know, were abolitionists and therefore not that Southern boy’s favorite people — so the miners tossed the bones in the woods, and Lily went home to find her little brother playing with her mother’s favorite pot. He broke it, she got the blame, and she ran away into the woods and got lost. The next morning when she came home … the town had vanished.”

  “So this Jabberwock thing gobbled up Gideon — did she say why?” Jolene asked.

  “I don’t think she knew.” Cotton paused, remembering what she’d said at the end — that the Jabberwock and her mother had talked. “She said her mother did something that kept her on the Jabberwock’s Christmas card list, but she wouldn’t tell me what.”

  “So the Jabberwock gobbled up a little mining town, and given there are no other suspects in the crime, we assume that a century later it did the same thing with a whole county,” Stuart said.

  “Why? What for?” Jolene asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cotton said.

  Stuart stood in frustration, went to the window on the kitchen door, pulled back the curtains and looked out at the stormy sky. Then he turned back, his jaw set.

  “What difference does it make why? If the Jabberwock in Fearsome Hollow is what made Nowhere County vanish … then the only way to get the county back is—”

  “To go have a come-to-Jesus talk with the Jabberwock?” Cotton said.

  “Something like that.”

  Stuart turned to Jolene.

  “That machine, the one stuck behind the others … the thingamabob that emits high-frequency sound waves, higher than a dog whistle, or something like that. You said it was bug spray for ghosts.”

  Cotton vaguely recalled the description of some machine they hadn’t taken into Pete’s house. “Yeah, bug spray — gets rid of them.”

  “That’s what you said, didn’t you?” Stuart said.

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Does it work?” Cotton had asked the same question when he first saw it. He got the same response now as he’d gotten then.

  “How would I know? I’ve never used it on a real ghost.” Jolene shrugged. “I’ve never done anything but fake readings to make it appear there’s paranormal activity when there really isn’t any, remember.”

  “But your equipment detected a real presence in your father’s house — it did, didn’t it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So is it possible the thingamabob could actually get rid of spirits?”

  “Well, it does disrupt electromagnetic energy, so …” She stopped. “Okay, theoretically it should work.”

  Stuart looked from Jolene to Cotton.

  “Anybody else got a better plan in mind, because if you don’t, this is all we’ve got.”

  They grew quiet.

  “I’m in for this, but before we go, I think it’s time to call Moses,” Jolene said.

  “The guy you said talks to ghosts?” Cotton asked.

  “What for?” Stuart asked. “You think he can zap ghosts better than your thingamabob?”

  “No, not to ‘zap’ the ghosts. Moses is … I don’t know what to say about him. He’s … the real deal, the only person I ever met who wasn’t faking.”

  “I’ve never heard of him so his television show must not—” Stuart began.

  “Television show! Moses? Oh, no, no, no. Moses isn’t trying to … he doesn’t use his … Nobody’s heard of him. He avoids publicity, has run from notoriety for fifty years. Moses is just an old man who … if there’s anybody on the planet who really can talk to dead people, it’s Moses Weiss.”

  “And you want to call him because …”

  “The people who vanished out of Nowhere County, they’re not all dead!” There was such force in her words, Cotton jumped. “They’re alive … somewhere.” She looked from one to the other for confirmation and they nodded. They all believed that. They had to believe it. “That little girl, Rose Topple, her father was alive for a few days and then …” She paused, seemed to screw herself up to what she was going to say next. “It’s going to take a while, with thousands of people instead of just a couple hundred, but I think the Jabberwock intends to kill everybody in Nowhere County eventually. I don’t want to believe that, but I do.”

  “So do I,” Stuart said softly. “And we’re running out of time.”

  “That’s the thing — they’re not all dead now, but it’s only reasonable to assume that some of them are. The Jabberwock has killed some people already — the Tibbitses, the Tungate brothers … I’m sure lots of others. Maybe Moses could talk to those dead people.”

  “But didn’t you say that this Moses guy is … that talking to dead people had driven him crazy?” Stuart asked.

  “Yes, I did. And yes, Moses is … peculiar. Strange, very strange.”

  “Half a bubble off plumb?” Cotton offered.

  “At least that. I might not be able to reach him. I have his old number in Nashville but I haven’t talked to him in years and he moves around a lot. Still, it’s worth a shot.”

  Jolene went to the phone on the wall in the hallway. Cotton could hear her talking but not what she was saying.

  “It’s the right number, but he wasn’t home so I left a message,” Jolene said as she came back into the kitchen. “I told him he could get in touch with me here,” she said to Cotton. “Gave him your name, phone number and address, so all
I can do is hope he calls back.” She shrugged. “But if I came home and heard a message on my answering machine like the one I just left on Moses’s …” She didn’t finish, just shook her head.

  Cotton looked past Stuart out the window at the darkening sky above the hollow. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but the only thing I can think of that’s scarier than going ghost hunting is going ghost hunting in the dark.”

  “Copy that.”

  “You want to wait until morning?” Jolene asked.

  “And spend another sleepless night on Cotton’s lumpy cot dreaming of my little girl as a rotting corpse?”

  That was a conversation stopper.

  Finally, Stuart spoke again.

  “You really don’t think that ghost-zapping equipment of yours will work, do you?”

  “Anything’s possible. But going out there armed with nothing more than my … thing-a-ma-bob … feels like going on a real safari with the toy elephant gun that fooled all the other little kids on the playground.”

  “But it could be more than a toy, couldn’t it?” Cotton hated the desperation he heard in his own voice.

  “The only way to find out is to shoot a real elephant with it,” Stuart said.

  Jolene let out a bleat of laughter. “I keep seeing the image of Elmer Fudd—”

  “Pulling the trigger on his shotgun and nothing comes out the end—” Cotton said.

  “Except a flag with the word ‘Bang!’ written on it,” Stuart finished. He glanced from one to the other, then turned and opened the kitchen door behind him, mumbling under his breath, “Kill da waaaaaaabit … kill da waaaaaabit …”

  Chapter Thirty

  Viola Tackett sat in the porch swing smelling the honeysuckle that grew on the nearby trellis so thick you couldn’t see through it, mingled with the scent of the roses that outlined the porch railing. Hadn’t never in all her seven decades of living occurred to Viola what a wonder and joy good smells was. She had spent her whole life smelling the stink of the outhouse in the backyard. Oh, it wasn’t nothing awful, overpowering, just part of the nature of the world. She had the boys pour lime in it — had to be careful not to get any on the seat or it’d burn your butt — sawdust and ashes from the fireplace so’s it was just the hint of a smell. But it was there in every breath, when you’s pulling an apple pie out the oven or even after a rain when the world felt all fresh and scrubbed.

  The stink was only something you noticed when it wasn’t there no more. When it’d been replaced by good smells, flowers and such. She lit ever one of them little candles in the bathroom every time she went in to do her business, but like she told Malachi, there wasn’t no stink to cover up in that shiny clean room where even the toilet was white and sparkling. One of them candles said “mini cannabis flower” on the label but it sure as Jackson didn’t smell like smoking weed!

  A part of Viola raged at the wonder of living in a beautiful home with everything nice and clean and tidy and good-smelling, and the eye never fell on a single ugly thing no matter where you looked. Raged that she was seventy years old before she ever got to experience it. That all them years, months and weeks and single days stacked up one on top of the other, Viola Tackett had been deprived of the good things life had to offer. She wouldn’t let her anger spoil the good of it now, though. No, sir. She was gonna breathe in every good smell, feast her eyes on the beauty of them little knick-knacks sitting around everywhere on tables and shelves, little ceramic birds and painted vases and the like. She was going to suck every speck of joy from the feel of them silk sheets on her skin and the feather mattress under her like she was a’layin’ on a cloud.

  Viola Tackett had finally arrived and wasn’t nothing in the world gonna take the joy away from her now.

  It was a shame, though, that Esther wasn’t fond of it as Viola’d thought she’d be. Girl hadn’t never lived nowhere but in Turkey Neck Hollow out by Killarney and soon’s it got dark last night she was ready to go back home. When Viola’d explained to her there wasn’t gonna be no going back home, that she and the boys lived here now, Essie melted in a puddle and started to cry. It scared her to be where wasn’t nothing familiar. She’d get used to it, Viola supposed, in a couple of days. But Viola’d had to put the girl in bed with her last night, her sniffling and snuffling, making smacking sounds when she sucked her fingers, and then danged if she didn’t wet the bed and Viola had to leave the sheets off to air out the mattress. She’d have to get a plastic sheet to put on it if Essie was gonna keep sleeping with her. And one to put on the top of the mattress in Essie’s room, too, soon’s Viola could get her to go to sleep in there. Essie didn’t wet the bed very often and Viola’d never done nothing before but let the mattress dry out when she did. It occurred to Viola to wonder how much pee had soaked into the mattress on Essie’s bed in the house on Gizzard Ridge over the years … but she let it go.

  This whole place unsettled poor Essie, especially the stairs. She’d gone up a couple of steps here and there in her life, to the courthouse or church sometimes, up on a porch or up into that building in Lexington where that doctor’d tried to do something about her hearing but Essie wouldn’t keep the hearing aids in her ears, pulled them out and cried. The log house Essie’d grown up in didn’t even have no porch steps, and here there was stairs ever which way. Three floors and an attic and a basement. Front stairs and back ones that lead from the kitchen up to the second and down into the cellar. Just about had to carry Essie up them to get her to go to bed last night and this morning Viola’d finally got irritated and put a pillowcase over her head, like you put blinders on a horse, and led her down.

  Essie didn’t like nothing about the Nower house. No! Wasn’t the Nower house. It was the Tackett house. That’s what it was and Viola was gonna get somebody to make a sign that said so and put it in the front yard, had already torn down that metal marker that identified it as a National Historic Site and told the story about the Nower family crossing the Cumberland Gap in the 1700s.

  Esther sat now on the porch steps of the Tackett house, rocking back and forth, singing that song that wasn’t no song to soothe herself, the two middle fingers on her right hand stuck in her mouth with that fat tongue so wasn’t nothing but garbled sound come out.

  Viola breathed deep, sipped on her cup of black coffee and thought about the news Obie had brought her about that preacher’s daughter. They’d found her body in the Rolling Fork downstream from the Scott’s Ridge overlook and folks was sayin’ that she’d jumped, was whispering she might have been in a family way.

  She’d gone missing Saturday so that’s probably when she done it, when she jumped.

  ‘Cept Viola Tackett wasn’t at all convinced she’d jumped.

  She turned what she knew over in her mind, examined it.

  That girl had been messed up something fierce — that’s what Skeeter Burkett, who found her, told Floyd Griswold who told Obie. Wasn’t nowhere on her didn’t have bruises, an arm and one leg broke, said she didn’t even have no face and the back of her skull was pulverized. That was the part Viola was puzzling over. Her head. How’d she manage to smash both her face and the back of her head jumping off that cliff face straight down into the river? She didn’t bounce off nothing on the way down, just hit the rocks in the river. It was possible, Viola supposed, but it didn’t seem likely. Seemed way more likely that one or the other, her face or the back of her head had already been bashed in fore she went over the edge. Which would mean, of course, that it wasn’t no suicide at all.

  Wasn’t a stretch to believe somebody killed her, ‘cause if she was knocked up, might be the father of her baby didn’t want no part of it nor her. He’d have a motive to kill her.

  So who might the father be?

  Viola swung the swing back and forth, listening to the comforting eeech-eeech of the chain on the S hook in the ceiling. Listening to Esther’s tuneless mumble.

  Now a big girl like that — you beat her up, she’s gonna fight back, right? Ain’t just go
nna sit there and let you bash in her skull. Maybe she got in a few licks of her own before she died.

  That’d have been Saturday night.

  And the next day, Howie Witherspoon showed up in the courthouse looking like he’d tangled with a mule. A mule with fingernails. He’d killed his wife and if he was banging a teenager, the underage daughter of the Reverend Duncan Norman … whew! Do a thing like that and you’d stepped in it for good. When they caught him, they’d have locked him up and throwed the key away.

  Yeah, it was Howie done it. Them was fingernail scratches on his cheek. It was Howie, alright.

  So what could Viola do with that information? How could she use it?

  She considered.

  Might be folks needed another object lesson, a show of force from her as was in charge now. Maybe it’d be a good thing to haul Howie’s butt into court and show how he killed his wife. Viola’d been smart enough to hold onto that purse. She didn’t miss nothing. Shoot, maybe Howie’d got rid of the boy by now, too — which would make him a triple murderer.

  If she strung him up, wasn’t she saving the poor residents of Nowhere County from falling into the clutches of a serial killer?

  Indeed she was!

  And Howie had, after all, killed the daughter of a minister — that ought to count for extra.

  “Neb!” she hollered out and Esther jumped in surprise, pulled her fingers out of her mouth and cried, “Mommy.” Well, it was “muh-muh” but that’s what she meant.

  “S’okay, sugar. You alright.”

  She could hear footsteps inside, but they were lighter than Neb’s. Likely Zach. He was the littlest. Neb was probably upstairs asleep. Ever one of them boys was lazier than the next.

  “You want somethin’, Ma?” Zach stepped out on the porch.

  “Yeah, I want something. Go rouse them good-for-nuthin’ brothers of yours and go out to Howie Witherspoon’s house. Get him and bring him back here. Me ‘n him’s gonna have ourselves a talk.”

  “Obie said his truck was ‘bout out of gas,” Zach whined. Obie’d come home earlier driving a shiny black pickup truck but Viola didn’t know who he’d stole it from.