Sam kept turning around, craning to see. And her height afforded her some advantage in that endeavor. As the room filled with people, she watched the doorway for Malachi’s appearance. Sam had watched out the window of the clinic and saw him and Roscoe Tungate drive away to search for Harry, certain theirs was a hopeless errand. If Harry’s house had “aged,” it wasn’t likely they were going to find Harry out for a stroll or down at the creek fishing.
Harry had vanished.
And what, exactly, did “vanished” mean? If the people were gone, where did they go? And how did they get there? And what did it mean that their houses aged, a process for which Sam had a morbid fascination — a ridiculously creepy desire to watch the transformation, to witness the process. And why those particular people? Abner Riley … okay, he did, after all, live in Fearsome Hollow, and to Sam that one characteristic was enough to explain any out-of-the-ordinary experience. She’d finally gotten to hear the whole story about what had happened when Charlie, Malachi and the Tungates went there looking for Abner. The mist. The sparkling black forms. Whispers. Wails. The car picked up and moved!
But Harry Tungate didn’t live in Fearsome Hollow. Neither did Reece Tibbits. Liam had gotten sidetracked by a murder, and hadn’t yet had time to tell Grace that her son, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters were … gone.
Rodney Sentry, the pig farmer who’d stayed at the Middle of Nowhere to help out on J-Day, was missing, too. He lived with his elderly mother on a farm on Oldham Pike in Sawmill Hollow. Liam said the house now looked a hundred years old. And the Crumps. Willard and Ethel lived on Wiley Road on the other side of the covered bridge. Ethel’d stayed hidden in their basement the first week after J-Day, but had promised her sister Margaret she’d help her finish up a quilt two days ago. When Ethel didn’t show up, Margaret sent her husband, Willie, to check and he’d said the Crump house had become a dilapidated shack. Or so said Margaret, who’d told her neighbor Agnes Wheatley, who’d told her cousin, Gladys Copley, who had told her best friend, Effie Bennett, who had told her niece Raylynn, who had told Sam this morning at the clinic.
It was possible Abby Clayton’s had been the first house to undergo the transformation. After she … died, a couple of her sisters and a brother — her mother was dead and her wack-job father was blessedly out of the county — had gone to her house. Certainly not to find something to dress her in for the funeral, which was not an open casket affair. And they’d reported — hysterically, as Sam heard it from Liam — that Abby and Shep’s little house in Poorfolk Hollow was not the house Abby had left the morning of J-Day to buy onesies at the Dollar General Store.
Charlie and Merrie appeared at Sam’s side. Rusty had not come with Sam to the meeting, begged off with some excuse that was clearly an excuse and they both knew it. He didn’t want to go and she wouldn’t force him, but she would do her best to force out of him later why he hadn’t wanted to attend. The boy was withdrawn, seemed to have been pulling away from her ever since … No, that wasn’t fair. His response to the craziness was certainly a normal one and she needed to give him space and “permission” to feel whatever he was feeling. And she needed to spend more time with him, be available for when he opened up. More time than what she’d squeezed into this afternoon. She was neglecting her son — she was! And whenever the realization struck her she was remorseful and ashamed. And vowed to do better. But then another emergency …
“You’re easy to pick out in a crowd,” Charlie told her, gesturing at her red hair. “You’d make a lousy ‘Where's Waldo?’”
“Have you seen Malachi, heard anything about Harry Tungate?”
“No and no.”
“Why couldn’t I stay at the click-click?” Merrie asked Charlie. Click-click was her word for the animal clinic. “I wanted to play wiff the puppies!” Then she stuck out her lip in a pout. When that little girl turned on the charm she was absolutely irresistible, but she was clearly a “strong-willed child,” a handful, and Sam suspected Charlie had once been better at reining her in. Sam knew the experience of believing the child was dead still haunted Charlie, though, and she gave the child more rope than she should have.
“I told you, honey. Miss Raylynn is busy looking after E.J. She doesn’t have time to babysit you, too.”
“I need to go potty.”
Charlie rolled her eyes at Sam and led the child off into the crowd.
The room was filling up fast. Everyone was standing, of course, because the auditorium seats had been removed after someone tried to set them on fire years ago and they’d never been replaced. Why bother?
Why bother? The words hung on a nail in Sam’s head. That seemed to be the knee-jerk response to just about everything that was broken in the whole county. Why bother? Nobody cared.
Somehow that set off a soft, clanging alarm in Sam’s head. Maybe she’d missed her calling as an advertising copywriter.
The slogan for the Jabberwock: When you dial 911, nobody comes.
The slogan for Nowhere County: Why bother?
She had never before given consideration to how folks felt about Nowhere County. It was the canvas on which all their lives were painted: why bother? In some convoluted way she couldn’t explain, she had a niggling suspicion that the sentiment expressed by the slogan had come back to bite all of them in the butt.
There’d been seating for 600 in the auditorium, so without seats the same space could easily accommodate twice that many. And if folks jammed in around where the seats had been, in the aisles and the back of the room … there was definitely enough space for any county residents who wanted to attend.
Viola Tackett and three of her boys appeared out the door from backstage. She wondered how much Malachi was involved in his mother’s businesses. He had come home so “disabled” from Rwanda, she got the sense that he didn’t do much of anything. Which begged the question: Did Viola know Malachi was going to speak tonight? If so, did she know what he was going to say? Had they talked about it? She suspected not.
Turning around, she scanned the people coming through the two big doors in the back of the room. She spotted Rev. Norman and his wife Sophie and wondered if Hayley’d yet told them she was pregnant. Not likely. The couple was as somber as everybody else, far too composed for parents who’d just found out their sixteen-year-old daughter was going to have a baby.
The crowd had been “summoned” the same way they’d been warned about the Jabberwock. Phone trees almost explained it, but not quite. Sometimes Sam believed in the hundredth monkey … the philosophy that if ninety-nine monkeys know a thing the other one will know it too, just because the rest do. Mountain folk were intensely clannish, stuck to their own, their hollow, their mountain, their families. But if the lines were drawn between mountain folk and the rest of the world, they’d all line up together on the same side. The Jabberwock had done that to them.
The old voice of the public address system, that, in Sam’s memory, had never turned on without the awful feedback squawk, focused everyone’s eyes on the front of the room. Liam Montgomery was there standing beside Sebastian Nower, who had chosen his attire for the occasion as if he had come to be presented an Oscar. She knew Liam planned to rein in the old man before he could get on a roll, had seemed confident that he could manage it when he’d stopped by the clinic earlier with the bad news about Martha Whittiker. The old woman’s murder — murder! — had galvanized his determination to assert his legal authority. And his moral authority. He was “the law” and Sam knew he intended to man up to that responsibility.
The only question was: could he pull it off?
“Good evening, folks, thanks for coming,” Liam said into the squawky microphone.
Charlie and Merrie rejoined Sam, who craned her neck at the doors.
Where was Malachi?