Shep’s head snapped up and he heard himself say to Claude, “We got to get out to Gideon.”
Shep was only surprised that Abby wanted him to go there, not that she’d spoken the words out his mouth to Claude — ‘cause it was Abby done all the decidin’ about things now.
Soon’s he started thinking about it, Shep realized it’d kinda been that way all along, from the very beginning.
He liked to think about them days when him and Abby was just kids, junior high school — the day his friend Earl slipped him a note in class saying Abby Letcher had a crush on him. Shep could remember it like it was yesterday, feeling the heat flood up his neck and into his face and he was afraid to look up from the words printed on the paper because he just knew Abby was looking at him. That the whole class was looking at him and when they seen his face go all red like that, they’d start laughing.
He was wrong, of course. Abby was just listening to the teacher, wasn’t looking at him at all. Earl was, though, looking and grinning, his lip pulled back from his buck teeth, eyes all squinted up. Shep asked Abby once, a long time after that, of course, if she’d put Earl up to it, to telling him that she claimed him. She said no, but he wasn’t never sure she wasn’t just embarrassed to admit it.
Abby’d been the one said they’d ought to get married, too. He wanted to, they’d talked about it, but it’d been Abby who was the one said the words out loud for the first time. Oh, it wasn’t like Abby’d led him around by the nose or nothing like that, but she’d been the driving force in most of what the two of them had done in their lives.
That’s why it didn’t surprise him when Abby took charge once he’d got where he could hear her voice clearly, sitting there in that old house, wishing he was dead ‘cause he couldn’t imagine doing life without his Abby. She started out just telling him what she thought he’d ought to do. Wasn’t long, though, before she just done it. Like he was a glove that fit perfectly on her hand and when she moved it was his fingers that wiggled.
“Say what?” Claude asked.
Claude had talked Ronnie, Jim Bob and Virgil into a poker game after lunch, while they waited for Abby’s cousins to come back with the guns they’d finally agreed to let Shep and Claude borrow. They’d come back half an hour ago, but Claude was winning, likely cheating, and he hadn’t wanted to leave in the middle of his streak.
“We need to go now,” Shep said. “They’s on their way now and we need to stop ‘em.”
“They who and stop them from what?”
“Them folks as is meddling. The away-from-heres. Cotton Jackson and Pete’s girl and him as married a white woman.”
If you pointed out a thing like that out there in the wide world, folks’d get their panties all in a wad saying you’s prejudiced or you’s a racist or a bigot. In the mountains, didn’t nobody care about such things.
“You looked outside?” Claude asked. “‘Pears it’s gonna come a gully-washer any minute. Why you want us to go right now?”
“Abby said.”
Shep looked at Claude, looked into eyes the same color blue as Abby’s. And he was grateful to see the shift there, the quarrelsomeness drain away. Maybe Abby was talking to her brother, speaking in Claude’s head, too.
Claude tossed his cards on the table, scooped his winnings off into his hand and started stuffing the bills and coins into his pocket.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Jim Bob said. “You can’t leave now. You gotta give us a chance to win our money back.”
Claude looked at him, then tossed the handful of bills and coins he had in one hand back onto the table.
“This here’s rent on them rifles,” he said. Then he turned toward Shep. “It ain’t gonna be easy to get a shot if it starts pouring.”
He was just stating facts, though. Not arguing.
Shep turned toward the door, hoping the windshield wipers worked on the truck he’d borrowed from his brother.
“We’ll git ‘er done,” Shep said. No, Abby said.
Sam made Malachi repeat what he had just said. Even though she had heard him clearly, she needed to hear the words a second time to validate the first.
“Douglas Taylor’s body is … missing?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Lester had stepped into the doorway beside Malachi. He’d removed the Cincinnati Reds baseball cap that covered his shaved head and stood with it in his hands. “I left it in one of the drawers and soon’s I walked in, I saw the drawer was pulled back out of the wall. It was empty.”
It was horrifying to think that the closed-up funeral home’d had to be transformed into a morgue because the bodies had … just kept piling up.
Willie Cochran had been the first, of course. Abby had been next … what was left of her. Lester’d gone into Persimmon Ridge and returned to the Middle of Nowhere with a body bag. And they had … she and Malachi, the Tungates … they had picked up the pieces.
Willie’s sons had buried him. Abby’s sisters and brother had claimed her body bag; her brother built a wooden coffin for it and they’d conducted a memorial service and laid Abby to rest in the family’s little cemetery.
After that, Mrs. Whittiker. Then Liam. Then Mrs. Whittiker’s grandson, Dylan Shaw. And two new ones today — Hayley Norman and Douglas Taylor.
Correction, one new one. Douglas Taylor’s body wasn’t there anymore. It was missing. Somebody had—
“Claire.” Sam heard the word come out of her mouth before she was aware of speaking it.
Of course. Who else would have broken into Bascum’s to take the child’s body?
“That’s who I was thinking,” Lester said. “What I can’t figure is why.”
“Because the poor woman is crazy with grief, that’s why,” Sam said.
“What would she do with it? Where would she take it?” Malachi said.
Sam heard Malachi ask the questions, but she didn’t process it. Her thoughts had bogged down when a single one of her own words hung on a nail in her head.
Crazy.
Sam shoved past Malachi and Lester in the doorway and started down the hallway to E.J.’s office and the phone. After a couple of steps, she was running. She picked up the receiver, put it to her ear and found that her hands were trembling and she had trouble dialing the number.
The phone rang and rang.
While it did, Malachi, Lester and Raylynn came into the office, were standing in the doorway when Sam’s own chirpy voice issued from the receiver.
“Hi, this is Sam Sheridan. Leave me your name, a brief message and your phone number and I’ll return your call as soon as I can.” Then she heard the clicking and whirring of the answering machine waiting for her to speak.
“Rusty’s home in bed, resting. He must not have heard the phone ring.”
He’d heard. A ringing telephone always woke him. He was the first one to it when there was an emergency call in the middle of the night.
Sam hung up and called again. And a third time.
Before she could call a fourth time, Malachi was beside her. He pushed the button on the phone, took the receiver out of her hand and replaced it in the cradle.
“We need to go find Rusty,” he said.