Viola Tackett sat in the porch swing smelling the honeysuckle that grew on the nearby trellis so thick you couldn’t see through it, mingled with the scent of the roses that outlined the porch railing. Hadn’t never in all her seven decades of living occurred to Viola what a wonder and joy good smells was. She had spent her whole life smelling the stink of the outhouse in the backyard. Oh, it wasn’t nothing awful, overpowering, just part of the nature of the world. She had the boys pour lime in it — had to be careful not to get any on the seat or it’d burn your butt — sawdust and ashes from the fireplace so’s it was just the hint of a smell. But it was there in every breath, when you’s pulling an apple pie out the oven or even after a rain when the world felt all fresh and scrubbed.
The stink was only something you noticed when it wasn’t there no more. When it’d been replaced by good smells, flowers and such. She lit ever one of them little candles in the bathroom every time she went in to do her business, but like she told Malachi, there wasn’t no stink to cover up in that shiny clean room where even the toilet was white and sparkling. One of them candles said “mini cannabis flower” on the label but it sure as Jackson didn’t smell like smoking weed!
A part of Viola raged at the wonder of living in a beautiful home with everything nice and clean and tidy and good-smelling, and the eye never fell on a single ugly thing no matter where you looked. Raged that she was seventy years old before she ever got to experience it. That all them years, months and weeks and single days stacked up one on top of the other, Viola Tackett had been deprived of the good things life had to offer. She wouldn’t let her anger spoil the good of it now, though. No, sir. She was gonna breathe in every good smell, feast her eyes on the beauty of them little knick-knacks sitting around everywhere on tables and shelves, little ceramic birds and painted vases and the like. She was going to suck every speck of joy from the feel of them silk sheets on her skin and the feather mattress under her like she was a’layin’ on a cloud.
Viola Tackett had finally arrived and wasn’t nothing in the world gonna take the joy away from her now.
It was a shame, though, that Esther wasn’t fond of it as Viola’d thought she’d be. Girl hadn’t never lived nowhere but in Turkey Neck Hollow out by Killarney and soon’s it got dark last night she was ready to go back home. When Viola’d explained to her there wasn’t gonna be no going back home, that she and the boys lived here now, Essie melted in a puddle and started to cry. It scared her to be where wasn’t nothing familiar. She’d get used to it, Viola supposed, in a couple of days. But Viola’d had to put the girl in bed with her last night, her sniffling and snuffling, making smacking sounds when she sucked her fingers, and then danged if she didn’t wet the bed and Viola had to leave the sheets off to air out the mattress. She’d have to get a plastic sheet to put on it if Essie was gonna keep sleeping with her. And one to put on the top of the mattress in Essie’s room, too, soon’s Viola could get her to go to sleep in there. Essie didn’t wet the bed very often and Viola’d never done nothing before but let the mattress dry out when she did. It occurred to Viola to wonder how much pee had soaked into the mattress on Essie’s bed in the house on Gizzard Ridge over the years … but she let it go.
This whole place unsettled poor Essie, especially the stairs. She’d gone up a couple of steps here and there in her life, to the courthouse or church sometimes, up on a porch or up into that building in Lexington where that doctor’d tried to do something about her hearing but Essie wouldn’t keep the hearing aids in her ears, pulled them out and cried. The log house Essie’d grown up in didn’t even have no porch steps, and here there was stairs ever which way. Three floors and an attic and a basement. Front stairs and back ones that lead from the kitchen up to the second and down into the cellar. Just about had to carry Essie up them to get her to go to bed last night and this morning Viola’d finally got irritated and put a pillowcase over her head, like you put blinders on a horse, and led her down.
Essie didn’t like nothing about the Nower house. No! Wasn’t the Nower house. It was the Tackett house. That’s what it was and Viola was gonna get somebody to make a sign that said so and put it in the front yard, had already torn down that metal marker that identified it as a National Historic Site and told the story about the Nower family crossing the Cumberland Gap in the 1700s.
Esther sat now on the porch steps of the Tackett house, rocking back and forth, singing that song that wasn’t no song to soothe herself, the two middle fingers on her right hand stuck in her mouth with that fat tongue so wasn’t nothing but garbled sound come out.
Viola breathed deep, sipped on her cup of black coffee and thought about the news Obie had brought her about that preacher’s daughter. They’d found her body in the Rolling Fork downstream from the Scott’s Ridge overlook and folks was sayin’ that she’d jumped, was whispering she might have been in a family way.
She’d gone missing Saturday so that’s probably when she done it, when she jumped.
‘Cept Viola Tackett wasn’t at all convinced she’d jumped.
She turned what she knew over in her mind, examined it.
That girl had been messed up something fierce — that’s what Skeeter Burkett, who found her, told Floyd Griswold who told Obie. Wasn’t nowhere on her didn’t have bruises, an arm and one leg broke, said she didn’t even have no face and the back of her skull was pulverized. That was the part Viola was puzzling over. Her head. How’d she manage to smash both her face and the back of her head jumping off that cliff face straight down into the river? She didn’t bounce off nothing on the way down, just hit the rocks in the river. It was possible, Viola supposed, but it didn’t seem likely. Seemed way more likely that one or the other, her face or the back of her head had already been bashed in fore she went over the edge. Which would mean, of course, that it wasn’t no suicide at all.
Wasn’t a stretch to believe somebody killed her, ‘cause if she was knocked up, might be the father of her baby didn’t want no part of it nor her. He’d have a motive to kill her.
So who might the father be?
Viola swung the swing back and forth, listening to the comforting eeech-eeech of the chain on the S hook in the ceiling. Listening to Esther’s tuneless mumble.
Now a big girl like that — you beat her up, she’s gonna fight back, right? Ain’t just gonna sit there and let you bash in her skull. Maybe she got in a few licks of her own before she died.
That’d have been Saturday night.
And the next day, Howie Witherspoon showed up in the courthouse looking like he’d tangled with a mule. A mule with fingernails. He’d killed his wife and if he was banging a teenager, the underage daughter of the Reverend Duncan Norman … whew! Do a thing like that and you’d stepped in it for good. When they caught him, they’d have locked him up and throwed the key away.
Yeah, it was Howie done it. Them was fingernail scratches on his cheek. It was Howie, alright.
So what could Viola do with that information? How could she use it?
She considered.
Might be folks needed another object lesson, a show of force from her as was in charge now. Maybe it’d be a good thing to haul Howie’s butt into court and show how he killed his wife. Viola’d been smart enough to hold onto that purse. She didn’t miss nothing. Shoot, maybe Howie’d got rid of the boy by now, too — which would make him a triple murderer.
If she strung him up, wasn’t she saving the poor residents of Nowhere County from falling into the clutches of a serial killer?
Indeed she was!
And Howie had, after all, killed the daughter of a minister — that ought to count for extra.
“Neb!” she hollered out and Esther jumped in surprise, pulled her fingers out of her mouth and cried, “Mommy.” Well, it was “muh-muh” but that’s what she meant.
“S’okay, sugar. You alright.”
She could hear footsteps inside, but they were lighter than Neb’s. Likely Zach. He was the littlest. Neb was probably upstairs asleep. Ever one of them boys was lazier than the next.
“You want somethin’, Ma?” Zach stepped out on the porch.
“Yeah, I want something. Go rouse them good-for-nuthin’ brothers of yours and go out to Howie Witherspoon’s house. Get him and bring him back here. Me ‘n him’s gonna have ourselves a talk.”
“Obie said his truck was ‘bout out of gas,” Zach whined. Obie’d come home earlier driving a shiny black pickup truck but Viola didn’t know who he’d stole it from.
“We ain’t got to worry about gasoline. Now go on! Git!”
Viola had the gasoline problem solved, but she didn’t let on. She’d closed that loop three days after J-Day when she killed Edgar Paltrow.
Big Ed had a worthless piece of bottom land on Owl Creek Road right next to the Drayton County line. He’d been a welder by trade, back when he worked instead of lived off the gubmint dole and he’d got drunk at Viola’s whoop-ti-doo last summer and bragged how he didn’t never have to buy gasoline ever again. There was a little Jiffy Stop Grocery Store in Drayton County, up on a hillside probably wasn’t a hundred yards from the Nowhere County line — sold groceries, cigarettes, beer, lottery tickets, and had propane tanks for exchange next to the big ice machine beside the front door. There was also two gas pumps out front though hadn’t but one of them worked in ten years. Big Ed said he’d been called in when the gasoline storage tank buried in the ground under the pumps commenced to leak and the county health environmentalist had got his panties all in a wad because gasoline was seeping along the water table and showing up in folks’ wells two or three miles away.
It’d been a big deal, digging that tank out of the ground. The thing held almost thirty thousand gallons. They had to drain it, find the hole, fix it and re-bury the tank. The whole process took all one summer. It was Big Ed done the welding to fix the leak.
What with all the digging — huge piles of dirt and broke-up asphalt and concrete everywhere — didn’t nobody notice when Big Ed come back one night and attached a little pipe to the bottom side of the tank and buried a piece of plastic tubing from it that ran into the nearby woods. It took him a couple of months, but he run that tubing all the way to his place and had set himself up his own little gasoline spigot — had good pressure ’cause the Jiffy Shop was up on the side of a hill.
Viola’d figured out the day she set her boys at Foodtown to stop folks from hoarding that Big Ed’s personal gas station was a goose that’d lay golden eggs from now on. She’d gone out that very day and killed Big Ed herself, didn’t even let the boys know. Tricked him into climbing up into the back of her truck before she shot him so’s she could haul his body out into the woods and dump it.
Soon’s she got around to it, she was gonna get somebody to fix up his little gasoline spigot, attach it to a for-real gasoline pump … and sit back watching the golden eggs pile up.
That was for later, though. Right now, she needed to talk to Howie Witherspoon.