“Thelma was sure Gideon vanished,” Cotton Jackson told Jolene Rutherford and Stuart McClintock. “She was absolutely certain.”
His words trailed a randomly firing synapse into the room where the three sat at Cotton’s kitchen table bleary-eyed from lack of sleep.
Jolene and Stuart didn’t appear impressed by that revelation, but maybe they were just too tired to show it. Coffee. And maybe some kind of pills — NoDoz or something like that. When Cotton went into Carlisle, he would stop by a grocery store and see what he could find. He didn’t like the thought of getting hyped up on some drug, but they needed something to keep them awake — sleep deprivation did strange things to a person.
He picked up his cup and took another sip — the coffee was so strong you could stand a spoon in it.
“In the short term, a lack of adequate sleep can affect judgment, mood, ability to learn and retain information, and increases the risk of serious accidents and injury,” Stuart said. “That last part’s the kicker. It’s how I won a case.”
Cotton stared at him.
“How did you know I was thinking about …?”
“I could say that I just guessed. A man who hasn’t gotten a decent amount of sleep since the Eisenhower Administration is staring into a cup of road tar — safe money’s on he’s thinking about sleep deprivation.”
Stuart got up and went to the counter where the coffee pot was still gurgling its contents down into the carafe below. He picked up the unwashed cup he’d been using for the past two days, looked in it, apparently decided it didn’t need washing, then poured himself a cup.
“But that’s not it. I didn’t guess.”
Cotton felt the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
“You gonna make me guess how you knew?”
“Ahhhh, snappy and short-tempered,” Stuart said, while he looked around on the counter, probably searching for the sugar he’d forgotten Cotton didn’t have. “Classic symptoms.” He either remembered there was no sugar or gave up on it, brought the black coffee to the table and sat back down.
His face was haggard, with dark circles under bloodshot eyes. The stubble of unshaved beard and a crumpled shirt added to the effect. Cotton was sure he looked equally exhausted. But he would have to get his act together, shower and get cleaned up, before he went into Carlisle. He couldn’t show up at the nursing home looking like he was homeless.
“It’s like … everything’s been dialed up,” Stuart said. “Like my brain’s an antenna and it’s picking up things it never picked up before.” He took a long drink of the coffee and grimaced. “Or I’m losing my mind. One or the other.”
“I’m glad one of us is dialed up,” Jolene said. She sat opposite Cotton at the table in a glorious state of bedhead. “Because my mind feels like it needs an oil change. Like it’s clogged and if you drained out what’s in there now it’d be so thick you could trot a mouse across it.”
Cotton’s head snapped up. He looked at her, started to tell her that he’d thought the same … no, he was too tired to go there. All he said was, “I think you’re picking up more than you know.”
“I had a few glorious moments of clarity this morning,” she said, sipping the cup of coffee she’d poured earlier that was likely cold by now. “I woke up, which would seem to indicate that I had actually been asleep, so there’s that. And for a few seconds none of this was real. People vanishing, bleeding ceilings, nightmare monsters. None of it. I was waking up in my bed, hoping I wouldn’t get stuck in rush hour traffic or I’d be late …” She stopped. “And when the bubble of that glorious few moments of forgetfulness burst, reality landed on my chest with both feet. In combat boots.”
She looked at them, almost pleading.
“This can’t be real. I mean, come on! It can’t. I want it to be over. I want normal back.”
“My mama always said—” Cotton said.
“Normal’s just a setting on the dryer,” Stuart finished for him. When Cotton shot him a look that asked did you just read my—? Stuart shook his head and said, “My mother told me the same thing.”
Stuart looked at Jolene over the rim of his coffee cup. “I’d settle for dryer-setting reality right now, too.” Into the beat of silence that followed his words, his voice turned ragged. “But I want my wife and my little girl! I want Charlie and Merrie back!”
Then the three of them sat without speaking, each a prisoner of his own pain.
Cotton recovered first, pushed back from the table and stood.
“My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to have a long conversation with the Witch of Gideon.”
“Run that all by me again,” Stuart said. “I know you told me who … I’m not tracking very well.”
“The Witch of Gideon is—”
“A melding of fact, fiction and folklore,” Jolene interjected.
“As the story goes, the day before Gideon vanished, a little girl ran away from home and spent the night in the woods, and when she came home, the whole town was gone. So she just stayed there, in the ghost town.”
“How did she survive?”
“Beats me, but apparently she did.”
“Stories abound about ‘witch sightings,’” Jolene said. “I mostly wrote them off because it didn’t seem possible. Gideon vanished, went poof … did something before the turn of the century, and if there was a witch wandering around in the woods when I was a kid in the 1980s, she’d have been collecting Social Security.”
“I found bits and pieces of information about that in Thelma’s old files — her genealogical research — in the storage building yesterday,” Cotton said, and turned toward a stack of boxes he’d set on the floor beside the back door.
Stuart waved him off.
“You don’t have to show me. Give me the CliffsNotes.”
“About fifteen years ago, Thelma went to Carlisle to talk to the witch’s daughter, who was transferred to a nursing home there after they closed the one in Nower County. Which means that for a time there were actually two Witches of Gideon in the woods of Fearsome Hollow.”
“Ahhhh, the Dread Pirate Roberts,” Jolene put in and actually got a smile from the other two.
“Thelma did the math,” Cotton said. “The little girl — her name was Lily Topple, by the way — was ten years old when Gideon vanished in 1895. She had a daughter, Rose, when she was twenty; that’d have been in 1905. The girl lived with her mother for a while, then I think some family raised her. I’m not sure — most of the records about Rose weren’t in the shed, they were here in the house.” He gestured at the emptiness. “But I remember Thelma saying at the time that Rose was seventy-five.”
“Fifteen years ago, that’d make her ninety now. You really think she’ll be able to tell you anything?”
“We’ll see. I called yesterday and they said she could have visitors. That’s what I meant earlier — after Thelma talked to Rose, she was convinced Gideon really did vanish overnight.”
“And you want to find out from Rose Topple … what?” Jolene asked.
“Anything she can tell me about her mother, Lily — who was there, an eyewitness, when a place disappeared just like Nower County. There’s not much information at all about her in Thelma’s stored records. Maybe Rose knows something about what happened then that’ll help us now. Help us … I don’t know, figure out what the thing is, I guess, come up with a way to get rid of it.”
“Our best chance of getting rid of it is in the equipment that we” — Jolene glanced at Stuart and he nodded assent — “are going back to Reece Tibbits’s house to get.”
“If it’s still there,” Cotton cautioned.
“Why wouldn’t it be? What would a guy with a mouthful of bugs do with it? And when I show the readings from that equipment on my show, there’ll be a whole lot more people in Nowhere County trying to figure this out than just the three of us.”