The next morning, a Saturday, the sun rose on a clear, warm day over the mountains around the Needsville valley. Even the notorious mist that gave the Smoky Mountains their name was conspicuously absent. The dregs of the night wind tickled the treetops. Birds twittered, rabbits returned to their dens, and two groups of hunters, unaware of each other, prepared to seek out a monster.
Across the valley, in her family’s trailer home, Mandalay Harris stood at the kitchen sink. Still in her T-shirt and pajama pants, she looked out the little window at the morning. Something intangible was in the air. She couldn’t discern anything more detailed, and that bothered her the most. She’d had this feeling before, and about half the time, it amounted to nothing. The other half, though, it turned out to be something awful.
She knew her sort-of boyfriend, Luke Somerville, would be awake now as well, so she called his house. Luke didn’t have his own cell phone, so his father, perpetually cranky and tense, answered the house line. “Yeah?”
“It’s Mandalay,” she said, letting her authority shade her voice for the sake of expediency. “I’m calling for Luke.”
“Hold on.” Luke and his family were part of Junior’s group, and ordinarily would have had nothing to do with Mandalay. But their budding romance had forced both sides to new tolerance, something Mandalay appreciated and wanted to cultivate. The accumulated wisdom of generations of Tufa women ran through her head, but her emotions were all her own, and she often wondered if she was doing the right thing with Luke.
But all those doubts melted away as soon as his voice came over the phone. He was so clearly glad to hear from her, she could practically see his grin when he said, “Hey.”
“You have got to get your own phone,” Mandalay said.
“Daddy says we can’t afford it.”
“Well, he always sounds angry when he finds out it’s me on the phone.”
“He always sounds angry, period.” There was a pause; then he said, “What’s wrong?”
“I got that feeling again. The one that says there might be trouble brewing.”
“Better than the one that says there is trouble brewing.”
She closed her eyes and let the relief of his presence settle on her. He was always so supportive, even when he was teasing her. “Yeah, true enough,” she said. “You haven’t overheard anything from your people about anything on the horizon, have you?”
“All anybody’s talked about is that Rogers girl being killed. Do you think it has anything to do with that?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ll keep my ears open for anything else.”
“Thanks.”
“So we’re doing one-word answers?”
She smiled, and knew he did, too. “Yes.”
“Okay, I can play that. Want to hang out at the Pair-A-Dice later?”
She was glad he couldn’t see how happy this made her. She loved playing with him, harmonizing and jamming until her fingers cramped and her voice grew raw. “Yeah, that’d be nice.”
“That’s four words.”
“I’m feeling epic.”
“See you there around eleven. We can play and have lunch.”
“Okay.” Then, with no forethought, she added, “You care if Janet Harper comes along?”
“I guess not,” he said after a moment, his disappointment obvious. “She’s so much better than us, though, it’s hard to really enjoy it.”
“You don’t get better if you don’t play with better players. And…”
“What?”
“I promise we’ll go for a walk, just the two of us.”
She felt his excitement return. “That’ll be nice. But what will Janet do?”
“Play. That’s all she ever does anyway. She doesn’t need us around for that.”
They said their good-byes, and Mandalay again looked out the window. That uneasy feeling did not lessen, but now she had a new problem. How would she invite Janet to come along without either sounding weird or making it an order?
She knew the sudden urge to bring the girl along had come from the night winds, and that they always had a reason for things like this. But she wondered if all the prior women in her line, from Radella to Ruby Montana, had watched the tops of the trees wave just as she now did and wondered what the holy hell those reasons could possibly be? Because she did that a lot.
Still, it was better than the one time the winds had spoken to her directly, in human words. That had been the scariest moment of her life, and she’d lacked the courage to turn and see who or what was actually speaking behind her. So when it came right down to it, she supposed living with hints was probably the best way to go.
* * *
Adam checked over his Marlin 336 rifle, an older and more battered version of the one Bliss Overbay used, as they stood beside Duncan’s car on Dunwoody Mountain, looking down on Half Pea Hollow. This ridge was opposite the one that overlooked the Rogers house, and far enough away that no one would hear them approach.
Adam hadn’t gotten his dad’s Nosler, as Duncan suggested, because his dad would’ve known why without him having to say a word. The Marlin would be plenty of firepower, he was sure; he’d seen the way it shattered beer bottles and watermelons on the fencerow behind his house.
As Duncan put on his orange safety vest, Adam said, “Can pigs see color?”
“I don’t know,” Duncan muttered. His fingers fumbled with the Velcro, making the extra .30-30 shells in his pocket rattle. Sweat trickled down his neck under his hair, despite the cool morning. “I reckon not. Most animals can’t.”
“Wild animals, yeah,” Adam said as he slid the last of the four cartridges into the magazine. “But pigs aren’t technically wild, or at least not all-the-way wild.”
“Well, if we don’t find him, then we’ll know.”
Adam paused and gazed out over the hollow below. “You know this is a wild-goose chase, right? The chances of us finding this thing are fucking slim to none.”
“Too scared?” Duncan said, deliberately mocking.
“I’m just not sure why we’re doing this, man. Yeah, it sounded great over a table full of beers yesterday afternoon, but now—”
“We’re doing it for Kera,” Duncan said. “For what she meant to both of us.”
Adam nodded. He looked out at the woods, let out a breath, and said, “I need to talk to you about something.”
“What?” Duncan said, barely getting the word out past his suddenly constricted throat. Was Adam about to confess? If so, what would Duncan do then?
Adam looked down for a long moment, then said, “Ah, forget it. I promised I’d keep it a secret, so I reckon I better.”
“Does it have anything to do with the pig?” Duncan asked.
“No,” Adam said honestly. “Not a thing.”
“Then it ain’t important right now.”
Duncan slowly loaded his own Winchester 94, making each motion deliberate so that his trembling fingers didn’t drop the cartridges. “I’ll go around the rim and come in from the other end of the valley. You start down, and we’ll meet somewhere in the middle.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Adam said. “Shouldn’t we stick together?”
“We’d make too much noise,” Duncan said without looking up. Three shells were loaded, but it took him two tries to get the last one into the chamber. “And this way if he smells one of us and runs, he’ll run smack into the other one.”
Adam leaned against the fender of his car. “You know what they say about this place, don’t you? About all the ghosts and haints and whatnot.”
“You think that pig is a haint?” Duncan snapped.
“Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, Duncan, I’m just talking. I mean, there are so many stories about this place. Some say the Yunwi Tsundi still live here.”
“The Yunwi Tsundi aren’t real.”
“I heard some of them came to Bronwyn Chess’s wedding.”
“Did they catch a ride with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?”
“What about the story of Lorena Minyard?”
Duncan knew that story well enough; when he and Adam had been about eleven, Duncan’s older brother, Poole, had sent them screaming for the house during a night of backyard camping. Lorena Minyard had been a young mother living in Half Pea Hollow who grew sad and depressed after the death of her baby. She fell into a coma and supposedly died; however, when several other people experienced the same symptoms, only to recover, the family realized they might have buried Lorena alive. They exhumed her and, sure enough, it was clear she had awakened inside the coffin and tried to claw her way out. Now her ghost, as insane as she herself must have been in the last moments of her life, allegedly roamed Half Pea Hollow. Encountering her could send you into a similar deathlike coma, after which you were liable to wake in your own coffin.
“I think we’ve talked enough,” Duncan said. “Let’s get to hunting.” He hoped Adam mistook his nervousness for eagerness. He looked his friend over, imagining those casual motions stilled, that mobile face in a rigid mask of death. Could he really do this? Sure, his friend had betrayed him, but then again, so had his girlfriend. But he couldn’t avenge himself on her, not anymore. And didn’t his honor demand this?
“How big do you think he is?” Adam asked as he fastened the straps on his own orange vest.
Duncan held up his rifle. “Not so big a .30-30 won’t send him to that great barbecue smoker in the sky.”
Adam nodded, then gave Duncan a long, serious look. “You sure about this? You sure this is what you want to do? You’ll remember this all your life, whenever you think about Kera. Is that what you want?”
It took all Duncan’s self-control not to shoot the smug bastard right there. What will you remember? he wanted to ask. Those pictures she sent you? Fucking her in your truck while I trusted you both?
“It’s what I want,” he said without meeting Adam’s eyes.
“All right.” The forest was now visible, but there were still plenty of pockets of shadow down in the valley. “I’ll text you when I get to the other end. Then we can start toward the middle. Hopefully one of us will flush it out pretty quick.” He half saluted with the barrel of his rifle.
Duncan watched Adam proceed down through the briars and finally disappear into the thick trees. Duncan gave him time to get out of both sight and hearing; then he moved, almost running, along the trail that ran along the top of the ridge. He wasn’t planning to wait for Adam’s text; he intended to be there at the mid-valley rendezvous much, much earlier.
Half Pea Hollow was, geographically speaking, a fairly standard little sub-valley off the main one that held Needsville. A spring-fed creek ran through the middle of it, but most of its route was hidden by thick greenery, so it was seldom fished. There were a few trails, mostly deer paths wide enough for hunters to use if inclined, but the land belonged to no one. On paper, he knew someone held the title, but like a lot of Cloud County, it couldn’t be bought, or sold, or inherited. It simply stayed the way it had always been.
The air filled with gnats as he ran, spattering against his face. He spat out those that touched his lips, and wiped at the air with his free hand. He also disturbed a flock of wild turkeys crossing the trail, and sent them gobbling and squawking in every direction. So much for sneaking.
As he ran, the rifle clutched against his chest, a song rose in his mind over the sound of his breathing and his beating heart. It wasn’t one he’d listened to in months, maybe years, but it had been a favorite: Crooked Still’s version of the old chestnut, “Flora, the Lily of the West.”
Of course, as a Tufa, he knew the song by its older variation, “Handsome Mary.” But it was the same tune, and although it was told from a male perspective, Aoife O’Donavan’s plaintive voice carried more genuine ache than any man he’d ever heard sing it.
When first I came to Louisville, some pleasure there to find,
A handsome girl from Michigan, so pleasing my mind.
Her rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes, like arrows pierced my breast,
They called her Handsome Mary, the Lily of the West.
He was exhausted by the time he reached the other end of Half Pea Valley. Running with a gun was harder than he thought, and finally he had to sit down to catch his breath. He knew he was losing precious time off his plan, but he just didn’t have the endurance, and his residual hangover didn’t help.
Crows cawed overhead, and a cool breeze swept up out of the shadows below. At last he got to his feet, worked the lever to move a cartridge into the chamber, and started down the hill toward his rendezvous.