P Deutermann - Spider mountain

After we’d gone for about ten minutes, I stopped and told Carrie to hold up for a moment. I caught my breath and then called in the dogs and told them to sit.

“Okay, guys,” I said, and they looked at me expectantly. “Wanna sing? Hunh? Wanna sing?”

The shepherds started to pant eagerly. I threw back my head and let go with a mellifluous wolf howl for about twenty seconds. As soon as I stopped, Frack stuck his muzzle in the air and did likewise, followed by Frick. I did it again, and the shepherds really got into it this time, yipping and rooing for a good minute.

“Okay,” I said, shutting off the serenade. “Let’s go.”

“What the hell was that?” Carrie asked, as we resumed our trot up the dark road.

“I wanted to spook those bastards,” I said. “Especially when Brother Tommy comes to and tells his tale.”

“Worked for me,” she said.

By sunrise we were hiding out in a barn about three miles upstream. We made contact with the DEA team on the radio and agreed to rendezvous on the southern slopes of Spider Mountain just before sunset. I debriefed Greenberg on the attack of the night before. He agreed to send a vehicle around from Marionburg to see what remained of the logging-truck wreck.

The old barn was concealed from the road by a knoll of trees and was about a hundred feet above it. We had taken turns keeping watch in case Nathan and his boys decided to get their own dogs and do some tracking, but there’d been no movement or traffic along the road until well after sunrise. We waited until midmorning, then set off up the hill.

Our excursion up the second valley produced six home sites, but only one person, an elderly woman, had been willing to talk to us. The rest either ran us off or wouldn’t come out of their trailers and cabins. When the old lady introduced herself as Laurie May Creigh, I’d been alarmed, but it turned out that Laurie May, although related, had no time for the likes of Grinny Creigh and all her evil works. She’d invited us onto her front porch, offered cold tea and some homemade muffins, and told us she’d be pleased to set a spell and talk. The porch was in shadow as the sun began its late-afternoon arc into the mountains.

She said she was eighty-and-some years old, and she looked it, although she displayed no visible infirmities beyond the measured movements of that great age. There appeared to be no electricity in the log cabin where she lived, but the place was clean and orderly, with freshly split firewood piled neatly all along the front and side porches and the yard free of the clutter we’d seen at most of the mountain trailers. There were three small outbuildings behind the cabin, one of which contained a dozen chickens. There was a curious circle of dense pines on the slope above the outbuildings. Her cabin was three-quarters of the way up the slope from the one-lane road and overlooked the crashing creek that had created the hollow in the first place. There was one more homestead above hers.

“ ‘At woman ain’t no damned good,” Laurie May pronounced, banging her cane for emphasis. “We’s kin, you know, but I don’t own to the likes of her. She and that no-good son of hers, that Nathan, they’s the reason folks ‘round here call this hill back yonder Spider Mountain. Real name is Book Mountain. The onliest spider is over yonder in the next holler.”

“We’ve heard some stories,” Carrie said, trying to make it sound casual. I sat on the front steps with the dogs, while Carrie sat in one of the rockers on the porch. I’d decided to let Carrie do the interview, although the old lady seemed willing enough to talk.

Laurie May reached under her rocker for a small leather bag, opened drawstrings, and pinched some dipping tobacco into her lower lip. “They call her Grinny Creigh, but her real name’s Vivian. Once her pap passed, she’n her brothers commenced to fussin’ and feudin’ over who was gonna run the ‘shine business in these here parts. Years ago, that was. The brothers turned up dead, all but one, and that’s when folks started callin’ her Grinny. The live one became sheriff down in Rocky Falls, and he’s of a stripe with Vivian.”

“Who was Nathan’s father?” Carrie asked.

“Some damn viper snake, spit itself out of a log,” Laurie May said promptly. “That boy is downright crazy.” She spat over the porch rail into a much abused flowerbed. “Goes around with a bag’a knives all the time. Nathan and his bag’a knives, folks say. They’s an old gold mine buried in the hill behind her cabin. All played out, of course, but folks say Nathan does things back in there, and I believe it.”

“What kind of things?”

Laurie May spat again. “Ain’t no tellin’,” she replied. “Bad things. Came around here back in the spring, lookin’ for some man ain’t no one ever heered of. I run him off, all right. I called him Dead Eyes right to his face, that’s what folks call him, b’hind his back, mind you. So I told him, I says, you git the hell outta here. Had my Greener right inside the door, and he knew it, too. Him and them damned ugly dogs. Not like these pretty things. Scared my chickens off their layin’ for a whole week.” She pulled an ancient lace handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped the side of her mouth. “Boy ain’t right,” she said, tapping her own forehead.

“We’ve heard the Creighs are running more than just moonshine,” Carrie ventured.

The old lady looked at her over her glasses. “What kinda cops you say you was?” she asked with a sly, toothless grin.

I laughed out loud. “Told you,” I said. The old lady positively beamed.

“We’re state police,” Carrie said, pulling out her credentials while finessing my status. “We came up here to talk to people who live around Grinny Creigh and her crowd.”

“That ain’t gonna happen,” Laurie May snorted. “ ‘Sides me, ain’t nobody livin’ this close to the spider’s gonna say nothin’, if they know what’s good for ’em. That damn Nathan’ll come creepin’ in the night and burn ’em out.”

“But you’re not afraid of him?” I asked.

“Lemme tell ye somethin’,” she said. “Once ye get my age? Don’t need much sleep, ‘specially at night. I watch. They know it, too. Any snakes come around here get they rattles shot at. They know that, too. ‘Cain’t hold that big ole Greener like I used to could, but I got me a Colt. 44. Come out here in the dark, set down in this here chair, put that thing up on the railing there, I can shoot the nut out of a squirrel’s mouth the long way, if you get my meanin’. Was that y’all they was after last night, all that mess over to the bottom’a Deep Creek?”

I shook my head in wonder. The hills were indeed alive. “Yes, ma’am,” Carrie said. “We think they faked an accident with a log truck, turned it over right where we were camping.”

Laurie May nodded. “That’ll be Nathan,” she said. “That’s his style. Fixin’ to mash ye. One night he came a’creepin up behind this old man’s trailer, over to Benson Bluff? He went and sawed him a tree right down on top of that poor man’s trailer. Wasn’t no chain saw, neither. Did it by hand, quiet, sneaky like. Took’m all night, prob’ly. Used him an oiled whip blade, him an’ one other boy. Patient damn snake, that Nathan. Mashed that old man flat. Folks thought they was gonna have to bury the whole trailer to git the job done right.”

“And the sheriff?” I asked. “Couldn’t he see that it was a murder?”

Laurie May spat again, and I noticed for the first time she was killing insects every time she spat into the flowerbed. “M. C. Mingo’s a Spider Mountain Creigh. Sees what he’s tole to see, that one does. Folks say Grinny’s got somethin’ on him, b’sides they bein’ brother and sister. He come around here, what, a year ago? Stood right out yonder, giving me what fer ‘bout talkin’ to strangers, like I’m a’doin’ right now. Didn’t figger on my boys bein’ home, did he. No, sir. I got four of’em. Big boys. There’s the twins, and then t’other two. Worked them coal mines, over to Tenn-essee. Coupl’a them gittin’ on, but just the same, they ran his potbellied little ass right off. He don’t come back up thisaway no more, I’ll tell you that.”