As soon as the mood of the crowd turned ugly, Charlie carried Merrie out of the room in her arms. She stopped just outside the center set of doors, ready to rush the child to safety outside at the first hint that the chaos in the room was about to spill out of it into the hallway.
She had seen it all, watched in fascinated horror as the docile crowd had been whipped into a frenzy and then goaded into violence. That’s what it had looked like to her. The whole encounter hadn’t taken five minutes, and the level of hostility had increased in that time from zero to sixty. It had turned mean and ugly almost between one heartbeat and another, and the hostility was not confined to one place in the crowd with a couple of antagonists squaring off at each other. It was everywhere, like a grassfire that’d been lit in several places at the same time.
The tension in the room now felt like a thunderstorm building up to that first blinding flash of lightening.
Liam jumped off the stage and waded into the crowd, shouting, but his voice was drowned out by—
A gunshot! Abrupt silence.
From where she stood, Charlie couldn’t tell if anybody had been shot or if somebody had just fired a shot into the ceiling. But the crowd pulled back from a space in the front left of the crowd like a wave receding off the beach and she saw Sam, the top of her head and her red hair, shove her way through the crowd to that spot and then drop out of sight.
Somebody had been shot.
“Who shot Liam?” somebody cried.
Liam? No!
An instantaneous argument broke out, accusations, shouting; the wave that had receded away from the body on the floor instantly flowed back into the space and the opening vanished.
“It was them! The good-for-nothing Haywoods.”
“Don’t you dare accuse—”
Charlie was frozen in shock and horror when another shot rang out, then two more in rapid succession. She turned in the direction of the sounds and saw Viola Tackett and three men — her boys — standing on the stage with weapons trained on the crowd.
Viola had been at the back of the room. Charlie had seen her come out of the little door beside the stage and make her way to the back wall. She hadn’t been carrying a rifle then, Charlie was sure of it. But she had one now, trained on the crowd.
In the stunned silence that followed the gunshots, Viola ordered the crowd to put their weapons on the floor, and Sam saw men and women lean over to obey the command. Then she told the crowd to get back so Sam could tend to Liam and directed her boys to collect the firearms. Obie and Zach leapt off the stage to comply. Neb stood stalwartly beside his mother.
Liam!
Seconds ticked by. Only a handful of seconds. Charlie recognized the voice that squeaked out a small scream. It was Sam. Charlie’s voice joined the voices of other women in the crowd. Charlie took a couple of steps to go to Sam and Liam before it registered with her that she had Merrie in her arms, whose eyes where huge and frightened.
“Gimme the little ‘un,” said a voice beside her and she turned to see Mrs. Throckmorton, the woman whose cat had been a patient of E.J.’s on Jabberwock Day. The woman had hovered over her cat and had made friends with Merrie when the child took over the veterinary hospital and turned it into her own personal petting zoo.
“You ‘member me, doncha, sweetheart?”
“Mittens!” Merrie said.
Mrs. Throckmorton held out her arms to the child.
“Whadda ya say you and me go outside and I’ll show you how to put a June bug on a piece of string and fly it around your head like a model airplane.”
Merrie leaned toward the dumpy little woman, her arms extended.
“June bugs go bzzzzz.” Merrie made a reasonable facsimile of the cry of a June bug.
“You sound just like one!” She took Merrie out of Charlie’s arms and nodded with her chin toward the space on the floor where Liam Montgomery’s body lay. “You come get her outside when your … bidness here is done.”
Charlie tried to say thank you, but discovered her throat was too clogged to speak. The woman nodded and waddled toward the outside door with Merry babbling cheerfully in her arms.
She didn’t remember crossing the room to Liam and Sam, shoving her way through the crowd, mercilessly elbowing anybody who denied her passage.
Bursting out of the crowd, she found Sam on her knees beside Liam, bent over him, holding him. Crying.
She knelt beside Sam, reached out and took Liam’s lifeless hand and put her arm around Sam’s shoulders.
Viola Tackett was talking now, but Charlie didn’t pay any attention to her, shocked, staggered by the sudden violent death of her friend. Later she would remember how Viola had said she would find out who it was that’d shot Liam Montgomery and “see they got theirs,” whatever that meant. Then she said she and her boys were going to stand in the gap for the fallen officer, would keep the peace, “land with both feet” on anybody who done something against their neighbors.
“You got a dispute with your neighbor, you come see me,” she said. “I’ll judge fair, settle things without nobody getting up in somebody else’s face. But if’n you decide to settle your own arguments, you’re gonna get a little visit from one of my boys.”
Her boys. Malachi. Charlie looked around stupidly into the crowd, like he would miraculously appear there. He had agreed to meet her and Sam here at the meeting. The three of them had mapped out what Malachi was going to say, knew people would listen to him even if they didn’t like what he was saying. He was, after all, one of Viola Tackett’s boys.
But Malachi hadn’t shown up. She couldn’t imagine what could be important enough to keep him away, because somebody had to tell the crowd the information he’d intended to impart.
Somebody.
Charlie got to her feet and called out, “I have something to say.” She interrupted Viola right in the middle of her little speech. That did not sit well with Viola, who turned to look at her like she was a little kid who had just wet her pants in church.
“And what might that be, missy …?”
Charlie turned her back on Viola Tackett to address the rest of the crowd.
“I’m Charlie McClintock. Charlene Ryan McClintock.”
And after those two words of wisdom, Charlie couldn’t think of any way in the world to say the rest of what needed to be said.