Nowhere People (Nowhere, USA Book 7) Page 6

  He garbles the word “designated,” but smiles at her with such a winning smile that she takes the bottle from him. She turns it up and takes a long swallow, almost choking. The liquid burns all the way down.

  Chapter Eight

  Malachi listened in fascination as Sam told him and Charlie what she remembered about the night the three of them graduated from high school. She’d been the only sober one, so she remembered it all.

  As she spoke, vague images formed in his mind. Charlie instantly recalled that they had met in the high school parking lot to swap diplomas after the high school principal had given them the wrong ones. Malachi could fish a foggy image of that out of his mind, too. He recalled calling out to Charlie as she stood behind her car, the lid of the trunk up. And the rest of the memory took shape.

  “We have a problem,” he says, walking up to her, holding a diploma in one hand and his wadded-up black robe in the other.

  “How so?”

  “I got yours.” He extends the diploma toward her. “Old man Locklear couldn’t find his big toe with a tracking dog and a searchlight.

  “Then I must have gotten …”

  Leaving the trunk lid open, she steps around to the driver’s side of the car, opens the door and reaches inside, where she had dropped her diploma on the front seat.

  Malachi follows. “You don’t want to spend the rest of your life with a diploma on your wall that says Abraham Malachi Tackett. But be grateful for small favors; if it’d been my brother’s, you’d have had Nebuchadnezzar Ezekiel Tackett, which would have taken two, maybe three lines.”

  Neb hadn’t graduated, of course. Hadn’t made it out of eighth grade, even. And in those eight years of school, he had never even learned to spell the first name their mother had hung around his neck like an albatross.

  Charlie opens the diploma in her hand and giggles.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Well, actually, I wouldn’t have had to live with Malachi Tackett immortalized on my wall.” She straightens up out of the car and holds the folder out to him. He opens it and reads, “Martha Ann Sheridan.”

  “What the …?”

  Then Charlie laughs out loud. “You got mine. I got Sam’s. Which means …”

  “Sam got mine.” He joins her in laughter.

  “Guess I need to go track Sam down.”

  “Before you go, why don’t you have one for the road.”

  She goes back around to the trunk of her car, opens a grocery sack and extracts from it a full bottle of Jim Beam. She cracks it open and holds it out.

  “Don’t have a glass or ice or a mixer, but …”

  Malachi lifts the bottle.

  “I take my bourbon neat.” He turns it up and drinks.

  “I was soooo trying to impress you,” he said to Charlie. “All macho. Oh, I don’t need a glass or ice. I drink from a bottle all the time. Which was a total crock. Oh, I drank — beer, strictly beer. That whiskey was a new thing. Probably why I got so smashed.”

  “It wasn’t like I was an accomplished drinker myself,” Charlie said. “That’s why I’d been given the job of bringing the booze. Kim and Liza thought I could be trusted not to sample it before I got there.”

  “A tactical error on their part.”

  More silence. Both he and Charlie looked back to Sam.

  “Then what happened?” Charlie asked.

  Sam who looked … what? Awful. The dark circles under her eyes seemed to have deepened just since they’d begun the conversation. Maybe because there was color in her face now. She’d been pale, but now there was color. Her cheeks had flushed.

  She took a deep, almost shuddering breath and seemed to grab hold of herself. Her back straightened and she looked from one to the other. The haunted look in her eyes broke Malachi’s heart.

  “What happened was … we sat together on the porch steps of the house closest to the Carthage Oak, passing the bottle around from one to the other. It got very quiet. Still. I … wasn’t a drinker. Like, not ever. The basketball coach would have tossed me off the team if … so drinking whiskey straight from the bottle …”

  “… must have knocked you on your keister quick,” Charlie said.

  “It did. But later, not until after …” She took a breath. “Before I … lost it, I remember it was too quiet. There’d been crickets when we first got there. And the usual night sounds. Tree frogs, an occasional hoot owl. Like that. But the longer we were there, the quieter it got. I can see now … maybe I could even tell then, but wouldn’t admit it, but the quiet wasn’t natural quiet.”

  Sam looked away from them, focused on a spot high on the wall above Rusty’s bed.

  “I think … I think the mist came, too. But not then. Not until … later.”

  She stopped again, then turned slowly back to look at Malachi.

  “You don’t remember what happened? Really don’t remember a thing? Think about it?”

  Her gaze was penetrating and he called up the haze of memories back into the front of his mind. Examined the blurred images. The night flying by outside the windows of a car, where the wind roared and music blared.

  He tried to pull up later images. He could see the Carthage Oak. Charlie sat on one side of him, Sam on the other. They were on a porch.

  Blurred images. Movement. He’s walking … staggering away from the tree. His arm is around somebody, who’s holding him up. Sam.

  He’s singing.

  Then … nothing.

  “I can’t remember anything after … you and I walked away. To the car, maybe? Do you remember? What happened after that?”

  She takes one breath. Two. Looks directly into his eyes.

  “Charlie passed out on the porch. You and I went back to the car. We got in the back seat. And …”

  Then she just looked at him, couldn’t seem to say anything else.

  The images slowly washed back into his mind, like a wave moving up the shore and then retreating, leaving a delicate lace of foam on the sand.

  Her hair is so soft. She leans against him, puts her head on his shoulder and her hair … it’s so silky. He runs his fingers through it. Smells it, like fruit. She lifts her head and looks at him, her eyes bright. He leans in and kisses her.

  The shock of recognition, of sudden understanding must have shown on his face because Sam looked like he’d slapped her. She recoiled physically, made a kind of sound, strangled, like a sob, then dropped her chin and her hair fell around her face, hiding it. But he could hear her crying.

  “Oh, Sam …” It was all he could say. He shot a glance at Charlie and her face registered some combination of understanding, horror, recognition and sympathy. He saw her reach out toward Sam, then stop and withdraw her hand.

  Malachi knew Sam was mortified to call up a memory like that out of the depths of the past — in front of other people. But he had no idea what to say, how to put out the red glow of humiliation from her cheeks.

  “Sam … I never. I didn’t know. I … I’m so sorry.”

  She sniffed loudly, shook her head and looked up. Her fiery-red cheeks were wet.

  “Nothing to be sorry about. Consenting adults and all that. We were both eighteen.” He watched her force herself to go on. “Besides … you can’t be sorry, because I’m not. I will never be sorry about that night. If it hadn’t happened …“ Her voice trailed off.

  He followed her gaze to the boy, lying too still on the bed.

  And the whole bottom fell out of Malachi Tackett’s world.

  Stuart McClintock pulled his rented Lexus to a stop in front of a building in the Middle of Nowhere with a sign declaring Healthy Pets Animal Clinic and Hospital. He and Jolene Rutherford had been here yesterday, had put up the blackboard from Charlie’s mother’s kitchen on the wall in the waiting room.

  He turned off the motor but made no effort to get out.

  “You don’t want to see, do you?” Jolene asked.

  He said nothing.

  “Want me to go look and come o
ut and tell you?”

  Letting out a breath, Stuart shook his head.

  “I’ll wait in the car,” Cotton Jackson said from the back seat.

  Stuart and Jolene got out and went into the building. They had had a hard time getting the blackboard off the wall in Charlie’s mother’s kitchen the day before — only because Stuart had been determined not to mess up the paint. The blackboard was affixed with screws, the kind that fastened into expandable wing nuts inside the open space behind the drywall. If he just pulled one out, it’d leave a big hole in the wall.

  They’d been careful, left nothing but an empty space behind when they finally had the blackboard down. Clearly, it’d been there a long time. The paint was darker in the spot where it had hung. Sunlight over the years had faded the paint in the rest of the room.

  Then they decided what to write on it. Stuart did the actual writing, so Charlie would recognize his handwriting. He wanted her to know he was here! Being careful not to smear the words Charlie had obviously left on the blackboard on purpose, Stuart wrote the message in as small a script as possible, but even so, there wasn’t enough space to say all he wanted to say to Charlie. Of course, there wouldn’t have been enough space to do that on a blackboard the size of a football field.

  They hadn’t bothered to affix the blackboard to the wall in the waiting room of the veterinary clinic, just balanced it on the backs of a row of chairs and leaned it back against the wall. And it was still there, right where they’d left it. But the words he had written on it were gone. In their place was not a response to the message. It was … a child’s drawing.

  Merrie!

  Stuart sucked in an involuntary gasp of air. She’d drawn it. He was positive, absolutely certain it was his little girl’s artwork. A strange shape that might have been … maybe a tree and limbs. Or an octopus on the ocean floor. Whatever it was had a fat center and appendages extending out from it in all directions.

  A flower maybe.

  He couldn’t see it very well because his eyes had suddenly filled with tears. He walked slowly across the room and put out his hand, touched the chalk on the surface of the blackboard.

  Merrie had drawn this picture.

  Which meant … what?

  The only thing it could have meant was that the people on the other side couldn’t see the message he’d left there, the one he had so carefully crafted, using small letters so they could say as much as possible.

  Careful not to erase the message about bird seed, he’d put down who they are, that they were looking, that it appeared everybody and everything in the whole county had just vanished. He’d explained that the Jabberwock wiped out memories so people who left didn’t remember what they saw here. And about the suddenly-old houses.

  All of that had been erased.

  “Don’t guess there’s any sense in going into the Ridge to see if there’s a stickpin message on the map.” His voice was thick.

  They had come here first. It was on the way from Cotton’s house to Fearsome Hollow and Persimmon Ridge was the opposite direction. They’d decided if they found a message here, they would go there to see what message might have been left on the map.

  “Guess not,” Jolene said.

  Stuart grew still, closed his eyes. Merrie had been here. Right here in this room. Not long ago. She had drawn that picture on the blackboard. He was sure of it. And so he stood trying to … sense her. Feel her essence, some part of her essential being that still lingered in the air.

  Like her spirit.

  Yeah, maybe that.

  “We need to go,” Jolene said softly, and when he opened his eyes, he saw sympathy in hers.

  “Right, wouldn’t want to be late to the party where we’re going to be torn apart or get our heads shot off.”

  But Stuart didn’t turn to go. Couldn’t. He reached out his hand to the child’s drawing on the blackboard, touched the chalk and pulled his hand away, rubbing the chalk between his fingers. Then he picked up the eraser off the chalkboard shelf and used it to clean off a spot right in the middle of Merrie’s flower. He picked up the chalk and wrote in clear, block letters on the bare spot.

  Daddy loves, you, pumpkin.

  He stepped back, eyed his work and then turned for the door, walked out, got into the car and started down County Road 278 East toward Fearsome Hollow. The locals called it Lexington Road.

  Looking at his watch, he thought about what Jolene had said yesterday.

  A showdown on Main Street. High noon.

  Chapter Nine

  “Rusty?”

  Charlie didn’t mean to blurt it out like that, but surprise had exploded the word out of her throat.

  She shot a look at Malachi and back to Sam.

  Sam couldn’t possibly mean …

  “But I thought Jimbo—”

  Charlie hadn’t meant to blurt that out either. Would have done anything to grab the words back.

  She reached out, touched Sam’s knee.

  “Uh … would you wait here while I go get a crowbar to pry my foot out of my mouth?”

  Sam looked at her kindly. Malachi looked … like he had swallowed a live hand grenade and it had just detonated in his belly.

  “Everybody thought so. So I just let them. Jimbo was … he’d already been killed before I found out I was pregnant. And his mother … I think it might have been … a comfort to her before she died.”

  Jimbo’s mother had had cancer, if Charlie remembered right. Didn’t live until Christmas and she was the only family Jimbo had.

  Sam took a breath and looked at Malachi.

  “I’m sorry. I certainly never intended for you to find out … this way. Not now.”

  Malachi was staring at Rusty, his eyes unreadable.

  “You need to know, it’s not like I’m not sure. Like maybe Jimbo was …” She couldn’t seem to get it all out in one piece. “Jimbo couldn’t have been Rusty’s father because Jimbo and I never …“

  She let the words dangle out there in the air, and Charlie ached for her. What a horrible way to have to reveal your most private secrets.

  “We didn’t … I couldn’t because I didn’t love him. I wanted to love him. I tried to. I was supposed to, for crying out loud — we went together for three years. But it just wasn’t there. Everybody assumed he and I would get married and settle down and have babies, so let it be written, so let it be done, but I didn’t want that. Not with Jimbo. And Jimbo was pressuring me to sleep with him, so we kept breaking up. Then he would come back and apologize and I’d …”

  Malachi’s eyes snapped to Sam and Charlie realized what he’d just put together in his head.

  “That night … graduation. You and I … it was … your first …”

  Sam actually managed the scraps of a smile.

  “How about we save that conversation for some other time,” she said and coughed. Then the moment of levity passed as quickly as it had come and the haunted look returned to her eyes. “There’s more we need to talk about.”

  “Sam, I’m sorry, I …”

  “Let me finish because this is the important part.” She looked at Charlie and included her in what she said next. “The mist came. It was there. I saw it, outside the windows of the car while we … And I heard the whispers — them — like that day in the woods.”

  “The Jabberwock,” Charlie gasped. Sam nodded.

  She reached up and wiped her face, her jaw set, clearly would have given all she owned not to be here saying this. But she soldiered through.

  “And ever since J-Day … no, not then, but after Charlie showed us those pictures and we remembered when we were first-graders, I’ve been thinking about it. About what the witch said.”

  She took another breath.

  “When we were kids, the witch said we should not have come, ‘making it want.’ Want to play with us, to be like us … to be us. Carefree children.”

  She drew another shaky breath.

  “That’s what we made the Jabberwock want when we we
re seven years old.” She stopped again. “And the night of graduation, I think we made it want … more. Different. It wanted what Malachi and I had. It wanted the touching and the comfort and the affection. The humanity.”

  “Fish said it, that the Jabberwock was plural. Not an it. A them. More than one. Each individual. Like people. Maybe used to be people but isn’t anymore. And when Malachi and I … it wanted that — that most intimately human of all experiences.”

  “But then we were gone,” Charlie said. “I left the next morning and for the next dozen years it … what?”

  “Waited,” Malachi whispered.

  “And then we came back here, the three of us … the carefree children,” Charlie said. “And … the rest. It wants—”

  “What we have. What we are. And it won’t leave, it will never let go until we give it what it wants.”

  The room was silent then. Malachi’s breathing was rapid. Charlie knew his thoughts must be spinning around in pirouettes, ballerinas on a stage. His emotions showed on his face, a thundering waterfall of feelings that was probably making so much noise, thundering and vibrating, that he couldn’t shut any of it out.

  “We have to go there, don’t we,” Charlie heard herself say, and recognized it for the truth when she heard it. Her voice was shaky, but clear. “It’s the only thing we can do. We have to go there … and play with it.”

  “That’s what it wants,” Sam said.

  “If we don’t give it what it wants,” Charlie said, “it’ll stay here taking one person after another until … it will absorb us all.”

  “Today,” Malachi said.

  “At noon.” Again Charlie heard herself speak and recognized the truth. “High noon. While the others outside …” Her voice broke. “While Stuart and the others are there, we have to be there, too. All of us together, fighting together at the same time.” Charlie looked at her watch. “High noon … we better get after it.”

  Malachi got to his feet, crossed the space between him and Sam in two steps, then stood beside her. He put his hand on her shoulder.