Forty-four

MARY AWOKE FEELING as if she’d been on a three-day drunk. Her head throbbed, her stomach churned, and she longed to do nothing more than drink gallons of cold, fresh water. Though she could not see, she could now move her body and she could feel that the same kind of tape that bound her wrists and ankles also sealed her eyelids shut. As time passed, her senses sharpened, and she became aware of a cold, mountain pine smell, then music. The rockabilly music her father loved. The Everly Brothers singing “Wake Up, Little Susie,” to be exact.

Suddenly she sensed something else. Move­ment. Fast, then slowing down. The whine of an engine, then a bump as the back of her skull thudded against something hard. Golden spirals of light whorled before her, then everything stopped—the music, the motor, everything but the smell of evergreen trees. She heard the squeaking of leather, then a dif­ferent smell assailed her nose. Something like burned chocolate and strong male sweat. Then that voice.

“Wake up, little Mary.”

Every nerve in her body tensed as fingers teased around her temples, then ripped some­ thing from her skin. She opened her eyes to see Stump Logan, risen from the dead.

“Long time no see, Logan,” Mary croaked.

He grinned, his scruffy beard and fish-scale eyes reminding her of the mad monk, Rasputin. “You’re a hard girl to get ahold of.”

“Really? You’ve seen me at the Deckard County Courthouse. Also in my grandmother’s kitchen. Also in Atlanta, at Lenox Mall.”

He leaned closer. “I mean really get ahold of. Up close and personal.”

“Well, you pulled it off this time. What did you use?” She looked around to see that she lay in the back of a van. Crumpled candy and fast­ food wrappers littered the floor, and several soiled plastic diapers had been rolled up and crammed under the driver’s seat.

“I disabled you with this.” He pulled some­ thing that looked like a garage door opener from his pocket. “Then I knocked you out with this.” He held up a plastic sandwich bag containing a square of white gauze.

“First a Taser,” she said, recognizing the electronic stun gun worn by a few Atlanta cops. “Then chloroform?”

He gave a modest nod. “An old trick, but effective. Just like me.”

“Okay. The next question is, why?”

“I’m taking you to a venue that you seem to have a real affinity for,” he said proudly.

“And that would be?”

He chuckled. “A place in the mountains. Deep and dark and hidden away. There’s a funny little spot up there with your name on it, Mary Crow. And that’s where you’re going. The only question now is, do you want to go there asleep or awake?” He held up his chloroform rag.

“Awake,” she replied, trying to keep from trembling in front of him.

He returned to the driver’s seat and restarted the engine. They drove along, Logan munching Krispy Kreme doughnuts from a green and white box, and humming a maddening tune that sounded like a polka played on slow speed. As she twisted her wrists against the tape that bound them, she wished she could wrap her hands around Logan’s porcine neck and squeeze the life out of him.

She struggled to sit up and get a better view out the windshield. She had no idea whether they’d been traveling for hours or days, and all she could see were the beams of his headlights through thick woods. No stars, no streetlights, not even the smallest glimmer from a distant farmhouse. She closed her eyes, fighting tears, then a boiling surge of rage swept through her. If Logan was going to kill her and complete his trifecta on her family, it was going to cost him, and cost him dearly.

“So what is it with you, Logan? Payback? Are you just pissed because I sent you running off into the mountains, hiding from the Feds?” Getting him talking was an old cop trick that he probably knew better than she did, but it was worth a shot.

His gaze met hers in the mirror. “Actually, it’s because you’re Jack Bennefield’s kid.”

Mary frowned. “Why does that make me so special?”

“Remember when you came back to the mountains and tracked that nutcase who’d abducted your girlfriend?”

Mary would never forget that October, two years ago, when a pleasant autumn camping trip with her two best friends had turned monstrous, leaving one of them raped and another disfigured, and had nearly cost all of them their lives. “I do.”

“You fucking amazed me that last day. You walked like Bennefield, laughed like Bennefield—hell, you even climbed into that chopper like Bennefield. But what scared the shit out of me was that you had his determination.”

“So?”

He grabbed another donut. “Sugar, that kind of determination is a dangerous thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“You want answers to your questions,” he said flatly. “And you won’t stop until you get them.” He swallowed the doughnut in two bites, reached for another. “I know what you’re like. I know you won’t rest until you find out what happened the day your mother died. I want to live the rest of my life without looking over my shoulder, fretting about you.”

She was amazed at how his words echoed her own, back at the gas station with Ruth. The hunter and the hunted, she thought. Both equally obsessed. “Okay. since you’re going to kill me anyway, tell me about my dad.”

Logan was so quiet that she feared she’d spooked him, then abruptly he began to speak. “I met Jack Bennefield in boot camp, at Fort Benning. We’d both been drafted. Me because I was too poor to go to college, him because he’d flunked out of Georgia Tech. Not because he wasn’t smart, he just didn’t want to be an engineer. Rock ‘n’ roll was Bennefield’s thing.”

“Thats alright, Mama,” Mary thought, remembering the wonderful old tape in her father’s bedroom.

“We went through basic training together. I hated the water; Bennefield swam like a fish. He saved me from drowning once on a night exercise. Pulled me out of the drink, sixty-pound pack and all.

“A couple of months later, I took him home with me on a three-day pass. We were going squirrel hunting. That’s when the trouble began.”

“The trouble?”

He glanced at her in the mirror, his good eye wide with surprise. “Did your mother never tell you this?”

“No.”

He veered over to the side of the road. Unbuckling his seat belt, he dug a small photo from his wallet, switched on the overhead light, and held the picture in front of her face.

It was a faded photo of a teenage couple at a dance. The boy looked gawky, bony wrists protruding from a suit too small, hair combed forward in an ersatz Beatle haircut. The girl stood regal despite her slight stature, smiling and wearing a simple pink gown with a modest wrist corsage. It was easy to distinguish between the lover and the loved; the boy was sorely smitten, the girl was simply attending a dance. Then Mary caught her breath. As she looked closer, she realized that the eyes beneath those Beatle bangs were Logan’s; the girl’s sweet smile belonged to none other than her mother.

“Senior prom,” Logan told her. “Hartsville High, 1965.”

She gazed at the photo, stunned. Her mother had talked so little about her old boyfriends that Mary had assumed she didn’t go out much until her father came along. But there Martha stood with young Stump Logan, eyeshadowed and coiffed in the stiff, bouffant style of the day. Mary would have cherished the image, were it not for the boy who stood at her mother’s side.

“I played first-string quarterback on the football team. Your mom played me like a short game of stud.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” said Mary.

“I was just another patsy in that little game all you gals play. Flirt with a boy, get his attention, make him fall for you. Then spit him out like a wad of old gum when somebody better comes along.”

“You and my mother were in love?” She spoke haltingly, reluctant to even give the words voice.

“We were until your father came along,” Logan said bluntly. “Then I made the mistake of bringing my good ol’ Army buddy Jack Bennefield home with me. Took Jack up to Little Jump Off to meet my girl. That’s when he turned my life to shit. Wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it, either.” Logan’s voice grew dreamy as he drifted back in time. “Bennefield walked into the store, Martha looked up from the cash register, and bang! It kicked you like a mule—those two just gawked at each other like there wasn’t anybody else in the world. You know how hard it was to stand there and watch that? And know that they never would have even met if it hadn’t been for me?”

His mouth turned down in a bitter line. “Until that morning, I would have trusted Jack Bennefield with my life. Ten minutes after we walked into that store, he dragged me out on the porch and said, ‘Say, if you two aren’t engaged, do you mind if I ask her out?’”

“Why didn’t you just tell him no?” Mary wondered how one simple word might have rewritten all their histories.

“I thought about it,” Logan whispered. “But I’d seen the look on her face. I could have sent your mother fifty roses a day for the rest of her life. She still would have loved only Bennefield.” Mary squeezed her eyes shut. So the great mystery of her life was as old as the mountains themselves. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl. The third act should have been boy finds girl again, but this one had taken a lethal twist. In this one the spurned boy hunts down and kills everyone who’s aggrieved him.

“Okay. My father stole your girl. That was wrong. But did you kill him for it? Was it just like Irene Hannah thought?”

Logan chuckled. “That old bird had it dead on. Bobby Wurth was in charge of clearing a minefield, just north of Song Be. I told him to leave a couple on the far edge and we’d fuck with Bennefield’s head. Wurth hated Bennefield, too, because he smoked dope and gave candy to the kids who hung around the camp. It was a nice day, as I recall. Cool, by Vietnam standards. We started tossing a football around. I told Bennefield to go long, cut right. He ran out fast, turned, then leaped like he had wings on his feet.” Logan shook his head. “When he came down, he didn’t have any feet at all.”

Mary pictured her father—the lanky Atlanta boy who sang like Elvis Presley—lying in a field in Indochina, bleeding his life away. She wanted to weep from the waste of it all. “How did you think this would help you with my mother?”

“With Bennefield gone, I could get Martha back. We would get married. I would raise you as my own.”

The idea of this man as her stepfather made her want to vomit. How wise her mother had been! How much better to have no man at all than a monster like this!

Logan tossed the prom picture to the floor.

“For sixteen years, your mother was up at that store, all alone except for you. No man helping her during the day, no man loving her at night. You two lived like little nuns. Do you know how crazy that drove me?” His eyes flashed with anger.

“Every day I would stop by while you were in school, take her little presents—smelly soap from town, candy, flowers. Never made a bit of difference. She was always polite, but never anything more. Finally, that last afternoon, I took a diamond ring up there. I had it made special, up in Asheville. I asked her to marry me. I got down on one knee, took out that ring, and said ‘Martha, I love you. Please be my wife.”’

Thank God she said no, Mary thought.

“She whipped out this letter she’d gotten. From some pussy I’d served with in ’Nam. He was asking the Army to investigate Bennefield’s death. Claimed I’d murdered him.

“Martha held up that letter and looked at me as if I were a cockroach. ‘Marry you,’ she told me, her mouth all twisted and sneering. ‘I hope the next time I see you will be at your trial for Jack’s murder.’”

“And so you killed her.”

He nodded, his gaze turning inward, as if he were watching a movie playing inside his head. “I killed her. But not before I got what I wanted for so many years.” His eyes slid back toward her. “You want to know what your mother was like, Mary Crow? Sweet. Tight. Clawed me like a wildcat, but it was worth every second. I finally took back what Bennefield had stolen from me.” Mary thought of the footsteps that had echoed in her head since that long-ago spring afternoon. An odd gait, she’d dutifully reported to Sheriff Logan, never realizing that she was talking to the killer himself. And the huge man-hunt that had rendered nothing—Jonathan and Billy Swimmer, combing the deep forest for days. What fools they’d been!

“Zudugina,” she whispered, the Cherokee word for devil bubbling up from her unconscious. She smiled a grim, ironic smile. The Mexicans’ devil wore black and carried acid. Hers carried fifty pounds of fat and an old torch for her mother that licked at her heels tonight, thirty-five years since the tragic day it had been lit.