Duncan Norman had never been in more of a hurry in his life, never been driven by such a need in his life, but when he arrived in Mamie Butterfield’s car at the parking lot of the Dollar General Store in the Middle of Nowhere, the pandemonium he found there stopped him in his tracks.
Standing on the outside of the crowd gathered there, he grasped quickly that somebody had ridden the Jabberwock, as the kids called it, to the parking lot and that the crowd had gathered to care for them. But it was much bigger than that, as he found out when a second car careened into the parking lot minutes after his did and a woman leapt out of the passenger side door and raced to the spot where the caregivers were crowded around a body on the asphalt.
It was Claire Taylor. But that wasn’t her name now, he didn’t think. She and her little boy, Douglas, had come to Duncan’s church a time or two before she had married the last of … he didn’t know how many husbands. This one, whose last name was McArthur or McFarland, something like that, didn’t have any use for “religion.”
The hysterical scene that played out then as Duncan watched should have broken his heart. It didn’t. His pastor’s heart should have ached with compassion for the poor woman whose son had been bitten by a rattlesnake. He should have cared. But he discovered to his dismay that he had no caring left inside. He was a hollow man, his chest as empty as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Every feeling, every emotion he possessed, had died with his little girl.
He’d heard the grieving say things like that, but he had never before understood what they meant. Now, he knew that everything a parent was, all the emotional investment, the care, the love, the faith and hope they had invested in their child, vanished when the child died. And that left the parents with only a vacuum in their chests. Hollow and unable to give anything to anybody because they had not even sufficient emotional resources for themselves.
For the first time in … since he had entered the ministry, Duncan Norman was a spectator to human tragedy, an onlooker. Not a participant, not engaged in an effort to heal the grief. Just there, watching. And in truth, he just wanted the whole thing to be over, for Claire to summon sufficient emotional control — not likely — or for somebody else to take charge of her. He needed for her drama to be over. He needed desperately to talk to Sam Sheridan.
Sam would have sworn that it was impossible to feel any more helpless than she had felt when Judd Perkins hauled E.J.’s body into the clinic, his leg a gory mess. He’d been in agony and Sam couldn’t even ease his pain! Until she could. Malachi had provided a bottle of oxycontin. Sam didn’t even know how many pills were in the bottle but it didn’t matter because Malachi had a limitless supply.
But Malachi had no magic pills to relieve the suffering of the little boy who lay before her now. There was at least hope for E.J. Maybe they would be able to do something before it was too late. And they had time to try. At least try.
This little boy had no hope. It was already too late. A small boy and a big snake — she could tell it was huge by the size of the puncture wounds and the distance they were apart. Given the speed and amount of the swelling, the snake had injected a full load of venom into the bite. It would have been touch-and-go even if Sam’d been right there with a syringe full of antivenin and a cotton ball already dabbed in alcohol.
This little boy was going to die. Rusty’s friend. A friend her son had been willing to challenge the horror of the Jabberwock to save. She was so proud of Rusty.
It seemed to Sam that time turned into molasses — on a cold winter morning. It oozed by thick and slow. Every second took an hour to pass and during that hour Douglas’s symptoms worsened.
The boy would not last long in his condition. His breathing was labored and ragged, his heartbeat the flutter of a hummingbird’s wings. The exact nature of how he would die wasn’t yet apparent. He was in shock and severe shock could shut down the heart or lead to a catastrophic stroke. But if Sam had to guess, she thought it would be a sudden cascading of organ failures, one leading to another until his heart … just stopped.
Where was—?
A car careened into the parking lot of the Dollar General Store, and before it came to a complete stop, out leapt a woman with flaming red hair — a Sears color. She looked around frantically, spotted the clot of people clustered around the bus shelter and raced toward them, likely unaware that she had lost a shoe somewhere, and was proceeding aboard a lone flip-flop that came off before she reached them.
She saw the boy lying on the asphalt and screamed.
It was a horrifying sound, a primal, almost feral sound that made the small hairs on the back of Sam’s neck stand on end.
Dropping to her knees beside Douglas, she looked pleadingly at Sam.
Her words came out in a single hysterical babble, with pauses only when she ran out of breath.
“Is he alright, tell me he’s alright, that he’s going to be alright, dear sweet Jesus God look at his arm. You have to do something, give him something, fix that poor swollen arm. Dougie, Mommy’s here. Can you hear me? Open your eyes, sweet baby, and talk to me, tell me you’re going to be okay. Don’t just lay there like that, talk to me. Dougie, you’re scaring Mommy. Talk to me.”
When she paused for a breath, Sam put in as kindly as she could.
“He can’t speak right now, Mrs. McFarland. He’s unconscious. But he can hear. Talk to him. He can hear you.”
Mrs. McFarland leaned over her son and began to shout. Sam hadn’t said that it was hard for Douglas to hear but his mother must have taken it that way because she spoke to him like he was behind a closed door.
“Dougie! Dougie, I’m here, Mommy’s here. You’re going to be fine, just fine. You got bit by a rattlesnake but it was a little bitty one, not big around as a pencil. Didn’t have hardly no venom at all. Dougie, can you hear me?”
She took his hand in hers, the hand not swollen to roughly the size of a catcher’s mit.
“Squeeze my hand if you can hear me, okay? Come on, squeeze my hand.”
Apparently, she felt nothing because she then instructed him to blink his eyes if he could hear her, but there was no response.
Finally, Claire recovered enough of her reason to want to know what her Dougie was doing out here in the parking lot, why whoever brought him here had left him outside instead of taking him into the veterinary clinic for treatment.
“Nobody brought him,” Sam said. “He rode the Jabberwock.”
For some reason those words hit Claire McFarland like a drop of water in hot grease.
“Oh, no he didn’t! He couldn’t have. Why, the county line is more than two miles from our house and he wasn’t even in that part of the woods.” She looked at him, her eyes caressing his face. “And he wouldn’t have. I have told him about it. He knows to stay away. He couldn’t have.”
“Rusty used the Jabberwock to bring Douglas here after he was bitten,” Sam said, and the woman’s eyes snapped to her so fast there was almost an audible clacking in the sockets.
“Rusty took my Douglas into the Jabberwock?” She screamed the words.
“To get help for him. They were out in the woods and he—”
“If Douglas got bit by a snake, Rusty should have come and gotten me. They were only a little way from the house.”
She actually turned to Rusty then, who was totally unaware of her presence and didn’t respond, probably didn’t hear what she said to him.
“Rusty Sheridan, why didn’t you come get me?”
“If they was close enough to the county line to cross it, they couldn’t a’been playing in the woods next to your house,” Pete said kindly, trying to reason with the woman.
“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything. Dougie is an obedient boy and I told him he couldn’t go anywhere beyond sight of the house. He would never have disobeyed me. Never!”
She was still yelling now, probably didn’t know it or what she was saying but her voice stopped in mid-cry when Douglas made an odd sound.
A rattling, choking sound replaced his labored breaths. His body lurched upward as if he were having a seizure, and maybe he was, and then he collapsed to the asphalt and lay still.
“Dougie …?”
His mother had a look of such shocked denial on her face, Sam suspected she genuinely didn’t know that her little boy had just died. But Sam was wrong.
“Dougie!” she shrieked, wailed. She leaned over and pulled the child’s body up into her arms as she shrieked, made sounds a human voice couldn’t make as she held the boy and rocked his limp body back and forth.
“Nooooo!” She looked at Sam, pleading.
Someone knelt beside her, a man who must be her current husband. Sam had never met him.
He put his arm around her shoulders and said in a calm, quiet voice, “You got to lay him back now, Claire, let them folks see to him and tend to that bite. Put him down.”
She bought instantly into the fantasy.
“You’ll fix it, won’t you, Sam? You’ll make my Dougie better.” She looked into her husband’s eyes without seeing him. “He’ll be fine. Just needs to rest, that’s all. That bite is going to sting, though, when he wakes up. We need to stop by and make sure we got baby aspirin ‘cause I bet I’m going to be up all night, rocking him.”
Sam looked over Claire’s head and made eye contact with her husband. “Why don’t you take Claire inside, into the waiting room, while I … take care of Douglas.” The man nodded.
Sam looked up at Malachi, who was no longer holding Rusty’s head because the boy had finally stopped heaving, just sat with his head in his hands as if it felt fragile. Reaching into the pocket of her smock, she pulled out the bottle of oxycontin. It was neither a sedative nor a tranquilizer. Sam had none of either. Oxycontin was not designed to … but it would relax Claire, wrap her mind in a narcotic haze. It was all Sam had.
She opened the bottle, poured out a small handful of pills and gave them to the man kneeled beside Claire. “These will … help. No more than two every four hours. Let’s get her inside, get her some water for the pills.”
Claire allowed herself to be helped to her feet, turned and walked slowly between her husband and Malachi toward the animal hospital doorway.
Sam looked at Pete Rutherford, who seemed about to cry. She was glad Charlie wasn’t here. Charlie knew what it felt like to lose a child.
At that moment, the fragile pink bubble of unreality that incased Claire McFarland burst. She stopped in her tracks, whirled around and raced back across the parking lot.
Not to the spot where Douglas lay dead on the asphalt. She ran to Rusty.
“What did you do?” she screamed at the boy. Rusty lifted his head when she spoke, with the pinched look on his face that told Sam he had a needle in his brain like Liam Montgomery’d had when he showed up in the Middle of Nowhere.
Rusty didn’t try to answer, probably couldn’t talk and certainly didn’t know what to say if he could.
“Why did you drag my baby off to play in the woods where he didn’t want to go?”
She didn’t give him a chance to reply, even if he’d been able.
“Why didn’t you help him? Why didn’t you come get me? Why didn’t you carry him home to his mommy?”
“We were so far—” The words were a ragged whisper.
“So far? Far? My Dougie wouldn’t have gone so far if you hadn’t made him. He trusted you, looked up to you. He would have done anything you told him.”
Sam didn’t know when she had crossed the space between them, only knew that she had shoved her way in front of Rusty.
“Rusty did the best he could.” Sam’s husky voice was an octave lower, in a tone that would brook no argument. “Douglas is too big to carry—”
The woman turned on Sam with the speed of a striking snake.
“My Dougie is not fat! He’s just a little boy, not heavy at all! Rusty was too lazy to pick him up and carry him so he pushed my poor little baby into the Jabberwock! Why …”
And then the light of reason blinked out in her eyes. Insanity fired there in its place, as bright as a road flare.
“That’s what’s wrong with my Dougie. Not some little snake bite. People get bit by snakes all the time, it’s nothing. It’s the Jabberwock! Why Abby Clayton exploded when she—” She’d have lunged at Rusty if Sam hadn’t been in her way. “And you! You pushed him into the Jabberwock. You killed my precious baby!”
And then Claire McFarland began to howl.