Forty-Six
THEY DROVE FOR hours—Logan humming his bouncy polka while Mary’s thoughts churned. She wondered about Gabe in the hospital, Ruth now in Atlanta. Had Danika gotten to the airport in time? Had Gabe recovered from his illness? And Jonathan—what had become of him? As she was pondering everything that might have happened to her friends, she noticed that the pavement was growing bumpier, gravel began to pop under their wheels. Abruptly even that sound stopped, and she felt the van slide. Dirt road, she thought. Clay soil. Slick mountain soil. Logan had told her the truth. He was taking her home.
Clumsily the van corkscrewed up what felt like a forest trail. Tree limbs thwacked against the windows as they bounced over rocks and deep ruts in the earth. When she thought they could go no higher, he made a sharp right turn and continued on for another five minutes. Then he braked hard and turned off the engine.
He got out of the driver’s seat and slid open the cargo door. As she watched him, she found it hard to believe that this sour-smelling old man had ever danced at a prom or quarterbacked the Hartsville Rebels to a state football championship. By the same token, though he and her mother would have made an unlikely couple, she could imagine her mother going out with him a few times, then politely turning him down thereafter. Logan emitted no light; such a grim plodder would never have captured her mother’s heart.
He pulled a small knife from his pocket, cut the tape around her ankles, but left her wrists bound in front of her. “Okay,” he said, pulling her to her feet. “Jump down here.”
She did as he told her, her hips brushing against the sleek little Smith & Wesson he carried in his belt. A damp breeze cooled her face and carried the pine-cedar-earth smell of the Appalachians. Though she had no proof beyond her nose, she knew she was somewhere in North Carolina.
“Come on,” he said, pushing her toward a dark stand of trees. “This way.”
“What about Irene Hannah?” Mary resumed her questioning, again hoping to distract him. “Why her?”
“That moron Wurth needed a judge to kill. I suggested Hannah because she and your mother were such good friends. I figured Martha had probably shown her copies of the letter from that bastard who nailed me for your dad. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if you didn’t have that letter now.”
You’re absolutely right, Mary thought, remembering the pages she’d sneaked out of Irene’s closet and stashed in her lockbox in Atlanta.
She looked around, wondering if she might scurry around the front of the van. She could probably hide in the woods long before he could get a shot off. But as if reading her mind, he drew his weapon and pointed the stubby barrel of the gun at her.
“Over there.” He nodded toward a narrow footpath that led up the mountain “And for once, Mary, just cooperate. I don’t want to have put a bullet in that pretty brain.”
You and me both, you asshole, she thought.
He pushed her up a steep trail, full of switchbacks, through trees that had recently shed their leaves. Above her she could see stars twinkling in the sky, below her nothing but blackness. They were high and climbing higher.
By the time sweat began to dampen the back of her sweater, they reached the top of the mountain. Logan had to stop, to catch his breath.
She looked over her shoulder to find him bent double and gasping for breath. A hope kindled that he might be having a heart attack, but in a moment his wheezing stopped.
“Over to the right,” he gasped, his voice sounding like air escaping from a leaky tire.
They walked into a small meadow, bright in the moonlight. Fighting the muzziness she still felt from the chloroform, she struggled hard to stay alert.
He steered her through more pine trees, then the terrain began to slope downward. They came to a kind of clearing between the rocky face of a mountain and a mountain stream that was only a glistening ribbon in the darkness.
“Where are we?”
“Madison County, North Carolina.” He nodded at a dark gap in the rock that seemed to crack the mountain face in two. “After Russell Cave I ran north, mostly at night, mostly in the shadow of the Appalachian Trail. I got lost east of Hot Springs, but I also got lucky. Found me quite a little hidey-hole up here, and put it to good use, too.”
“What do you mean?’’
“I found me a cave with a hole so deep, I’ve never heard a rock hit the bottom. I pushed poor old Clootie Duncan down there some months ago. In just a few minutes, you’re going to join him.”
Mary’s heart began to pound like a drum.
Logan had hit upon the one fear neither Xanax nor Dr. Bittner had been able to help her overcome—her utter terror of tight spaces and total darkness. She would take a slug in her brain any day before she would die that way. Her mind raced, desperate for a plan. As she looked up to watch high clouds scudding across the moon, she had an idea. She turned to Logan. “Can I go to water in that creek first?”
He frowned. “Go to water?”
“Cherokees go to water,” she said. “Before battle, before we marry, before we die.”
“Your mother didn’t.”
“You didn’t give her much of a chance, did you?”
A curious look of sadness passed over his face, then he nodded. “Go ahead. But I’ll be pointing this at you the whole time. Try anything funny and I promise you’ll die in a lot of pain.”
With Logan on her heels, she walked toward the creek. They climbed down several layers of shale-like rock until they both stood on the bank. Ten feet wide, the dark water curled around smooth boulders, its voice a low rumble in the night.
She knelt and plunged her face into the stream trying hard to keep her balance with her wrists bound. The water was so cold, it made her skin burn. She held her breath and prayed for some way to kill Logan. She considered wrenching his pistol away, creasing his head with another rock, then she remembered what Czarnowski, her boxing coach, always told her. Find the sweet spot and nail it! She thought about that, then, when she could hold her breath no longer, she raised up, dripping and cold.
“Okay,” Logan’s voice came from behind her. “I think you’ve washed all your sins away.”
She shook the water from her face and rose to her feet, stepping up close to him.
“I’m not going in any cave, Logan,” she said calmly, staring into his ravaged face. “You’re going to have to kill me here, and you’re going to have to look me in the eye while you do it.”
He shrugged. “Not a problem.”
He raised his pistol, aiming it directly into her face. Just as his finger eased over the trigger, she lunged forward. She felt the bones of her left hand pop as she slammed both her fists into his jaw. The force of the blow thrust her sideways, but it took him totally by surprise. With rubbery legs, he collapsed on the ground, groaning as the wind whooshed out of him. She heard the gun clattering across the shale, rattling like bones in the night. Swiftly she lifted her right foot to punt his balls into the next county, when he rolled sideways and tangled his feet up with hers. She fell, her tailbone smacking hard against the rocky ground.
“You little bitch!” he gasped, scrambling for the gun.
She picked up a piece of shale and threw herself on top of him, smashing the rock into his skull. He roared with pain, then rolled toward the creek, desperate to shake her off. She scrambled up and started kicking. Kidneys, eyes, scrotum, whatever she could connect with. He rolled toward the water like a hewn log. In the darkness she heard him curse. Gasping for breath, she looked for the gun, but it was impossible to see. Now struggling to his feet, in the shadows he looked like some fat slug trying to crawl through salt.
With the bloody rock in both hands she flung herself at him again. This time he fell back into the water, thrashing and churning as he tried to regain his footing. She attached herself to him like a barnacle, holding him under the frigid water despite his blows to her stomach and breasts. “Don’t,” he sputtered, bobbing to the surface, desperate for air. “I can’t—”
“Is that what my mother said?” cried Mary. “Or was it my dad?”
“Swim—” he gurgled.
“I didn’t know that, Logan. But then, I’m as dumb a fuck as my dad!” With those words she crashed the rock into his temple. He sank again; she pummeled him twice more, the blows making sick, wet whacks against his head.
She lost her grip on him, then he surfaced a few feet downstream, the current now carrying him along. Blood gushed down his face and his one good eye held the wide, shocked stare of death as he made a grab for the last boulder that would save him. Though she knew she was pushing the limits of her own strength, she awkwardly splashed forward. She brought the rock down again and again, smashing his face, his hands, trying to break his hold on anything that kept him breathing air instead of water.
“No!” he pleaded, choking and coughing.
“Don’t like dying, huh?” She flailed at him like something gone mad. “Neither did Irene. Neither did Jack Bennefield. Neither did Martha Crow!”
He sank beneath the water for a moment, then rose again, blood covering his face, his fingers no longer able to find purchase on the boulder. “But she was mine!” he cried. “I loved her!”
For a second Mary almost pitied him, this singular monster for whom love had grown into a virulent cancer. Then she remembered that all the sorrows of her life had sprung from his heart, his hands, his sick brain. “But she never loved you back, Logan,” she told him.
She never knew whether he heard her or not. His eyes rolled back in his head, his hands slid off the boulder, and he sank beneath the water. She listened for the sound of anyone thrashing farther downstream, but all she heard was the endless roar of the water on its millennia-long journey from the mountains to the sea.
Chest heaving, she hoisted herself upon the boulder. She sat, shivering, still gripping the bloody rock, then she began to cry great, gulping sobs. It was finished. Finally, and completely. She’d killed the man who’d killed her mother and ended a malevolent love that had begun back when young men brought their dates fat corsages and combed their hair like Paul McCartney. A long time by human standards, but not long at all for the stars. She looked up into the sky and found Jonathan’s beloved Orion, Betelgeuse beaming centuries-old light down from the hunter’s shoulder. Finally she’d found the answer to the great question of her life. For the first time ever she finally knew the why.