The big crowd of people had dispersed after the meeting, quietly going out to their vehicles and driving away. Charlie had no idea if they had bought what she was selling or not. Before the crowd left, Viola did her best to discredit Charlie.
“Nowhere people ain’t like the rest of mountain folk. All mountain people got their own music, their own licker, their own dances, their own way of courting and their own way of thinking. But nowhere people are different from them folks. We’re the people the rest of the world forgot. We don’t matter — shoot, nobody even knows how many of us there are because we ain’t even worth sending somebody out to count noses. The world’s done passed us by. This Jabberwock thing, all it done was build a fence around us. It didn’t change who we are. We’re nowhere people and we look after our own.”
She had glared at Charlie then, a look that both threatened and challenged. A look that said, “Go ahead, underestimate me — that’ll be fun.”
“We don’t need some know-it-all who’s spent more time away from Nowhere County than she ever spent in it, to fill our heads with a bunch of hooey about people vanishing. Going poof, like a puff of smoke. Like they’s something out there trying to ‘eat us up.’ Them’s scared stories for around the campfire but they ain’t real life. There’s plenty of real stuff to be scared of. Are you gonna have enough to eat? Will there be heat this winter? Water? What’re we gonna do when we run out of gasoline? Ammunition? Them’s real scary things, not made-up ones. You can leave here assured that I got this, I got answers to all the real questions. I ain’t been chasing my own tail around looking for the boogeyman under the bed these past two weeks. I been figuring out how we all gonna survive.”
One final glare.
“And we are gonna make it, without no help from you, missy.”
Viola was just as hostile to the people who wanted her to return their weapons, the ones her sons had collected after she’d disarmed the crowd. “You got guns to hunt with. You don’t need these here and you ain’t getting them back until I decide to give them back.”
As the crowd thinned, it became clear not everybody was leaving.
Duncan Norman and his wife, Miriam, stayed. The reverend had ash-gray hair cropped “high and tight” above a lean, ascetic face with a hawk nose and heavy eyebrows better suited to intimidating scowls than to smiles. He was tall and scarecrow thin, his wife was birdlike, too, and fragile. That the two of them had produced an offspring like the enormous teenager who’d sat blind and deaf in the Dollar General Store parking lot on J-Day gave credence to Charlie’s long-held suspicion that the incidence of gypsies switching babies might be more prevalent than most people believed.
Lester Peetree, the hardware store owner who’d taken the kiln door off its hinges, stayed, too. So did two women Charlie didn’t know, along with Hank Bayless, whose pickup had been used to haul away Willie Cochran, the Jabberwock’s first fatality.
“We’ll have to take Liam, his body, to …” Sam was trying to get her emotions in check enough to think clearly, but it was clear to Charlie that Sam’s circuits had fried.
“To Bascum’s,” said Rev. Norman, who had knelt beside Sam. His voice was surprisingly kind and gentle, and Charlie readjusted her assessment of “severe.” He looked up at Lester Peetree, who took the handoff.
“We’ll see to it,” Lester said. He and Hank Bayless lifted Liam up off the floor and carried him out of the building, dripping blood off the back of his shirt, and put him in the bed of Hank’s pickup truck. It was only a couple of blocks to the funeral home and Mrs. Throckmorton kept Merrie occupied chasing fireflies in the dusk so Charlie could go with Sam and the others. They unloaded Liam’s body, carried it into the basement, placed it on the tray in one of the mortuary’s “body drawers” and slid the drawer into the wall.
It wasn’t the only body in a drawer. Martha Whittiker rested there, too.
The others left. Sam and Charlie stayed behind, reluctant to go.
“What are we going to do?” Sam asked.
Charlie noticed more and more often that Sam was thinking the same thing she was, that the bond of two little girls who played baby dolls in the shade of the old elementary school building had reconnected the women they’d grown to be.
“About a service and a funeral?” Charlie said. She put her arm companionably around Sam’s waist. “We’ll figure that part out.”
“Okay.” Sam let out a breath that was somewhere between a sob and a sigh. “You’re right. The rest will have to wait until later.”
“What rest?”
“What we do about Viola Tackett.”
“She’s clearly on the move to take over the whole county, but I don’t know what you and I can—”
“Not that,” Sam said. “You weren’t where you could see. I was.”
When Sam turned toward Charlie, Sam’s face was as hard as granite.
“The bullet hole was in Liam’s back. His back!”
Charlie’s mind stumbled, trying to figure out what that meant, the implications—
“He’d jumped down off the stage and weighed into the crowd and then — bang! I was looking right at him … could see past him.”
When Charlie got it, her eyes caught Sam’s and hung.
“And the person behind Liam … was on the stage.”
Sam nodded. Her husky voice seemed almost to growl. “Viola Tackett.”