P Deutermann - Spider mountain

Janey Howard was waiting for us in the living room. She was sitting in a rocking chair and did not look up when we came in. I winced when I saw her face. Her body language was that of a small child who knows she’s going to be hit again and is resigned to the first blow. Mary Ellen and I took seats on the couch opposite the rocking chair, while Mrs. Howard stood next to her daughter. I had told Mary Ellen what I wanted to ask, but agreed to let her do the actual talking.

“Janey, you’re looking a little better than the last time I saw you,” she said gently.

Janey blinked but did not respond. Her mother patted her shoulder and the girl twitched. I saw that Janey was not as small as her mother, but she didn’t look old enough to have been a park ranger, or even a probationer. Her face was still badly bruised, one eye bandaged shut. Her knees were locked rigidly together and there was a noticeable tremor in her right hand.

Mary Ellen told Janey that I had come all the way from Triboro to find out who had done this thing to her. Janey shot me a quick, furtive look, but then resumed her thousand-meter stare. The tremor increased. The medical report had said that she had been raped, sodomized, and beaten. Four cracked ribs. Multiple hematomas. Broken nose. Four teeth permanently gone. Jaw dislocated. Retinal tear in one eye. Hearing damage in one ear due to a ruptured eardrum. Sunburn, insect bites, and a bacterial infection from contaminated water during the time she had wandered the woods.

“Janey, the ambulance driver told us you said two words when they took you to the hospital. Do you remember going to the hospital?”

Janey licked her puffy lips and nodded once, although she still didn’t look directly at either of us.

“He said the words were ‘grinning’ and ‘hangman.’ Do you remember saying that?’

Janey shook her head emphatically.

“She doesn’t remember anything,” Mrs. Howard said. Her expression said that that was probably for the best.

“Did they hang you?” I asked.

Janey looked at me for the first time. There was a tremor in both her hands now.

“She doesn’t remember anything,” Mrs. Howard said again. “Isn’t that right, dear?”

Janey took several breaths and then nodded. Mary Ellen had been right, I thought. This was a total waste of time. The poor thing had simply cleared core on all her memories of the incident. This was pointless. I nudged Mary Ellen and indicated with my head that it was time to go.

Mary Ellen looked relieved. She got up and went over to Janey. She took the girl’s hand and told her everything was going to be all right and not to worry. Nobody was going to hurt her anymore. Nobody was mad at her. As far as I could tell, very little of it was penetrating. The one question that was really bothering me was why she was still alive. Had the bad guy just let her go, or had she escaped? With all that damage, they may have just dumped her. So maybe this total amnesia was related to some final warning, such as You say one word and III come back and do it all again.

Mrs. Howard escorted us to the front vestibule. “I told you this wasn’t going to be of any use,” she said to Mary Ellen. “It’s only because it’s you and not that other ranger that I agreed to this.” She spoke as if I weren’t standing right there.

“I think she was warned off,” I said to no one in particular, but loud enough for Janey in the other room to hear me. “As in, she saw something and she was told to keep quiet or more bad things would happen.” I paused for a long moment. “And I completely understand,” I added. “I’d do the same thing. I’d just clam up.”

Mrs. Howard gave me an angry look. But as she started to reply, Janey said something from the living room.

“What’s that, dear?” Mrs. Howard asked, visibly surprised.

“Look in the lake,” Janey said, her voice breaking. “By the red rocks.”

Mary Ellen looked blank. I immediately wanted to go back in there to see what else I could elicit, but Mary Ellen shut me down. “We’ll just be leaving now, Mrs. Howard,” Mary Ellen said. “Thank you for letting us talk to her. A little bit at a time-that’s the way to take it, right? We’ll just be on our way.”

Mary Ellen had my arm now and was tugging me firmly toward the front door. I watched Mrs. Howard try to hide her confusion and then quickly agree. She’d made a big deal out of the fact that her daughter remembered nothing, and now the girl had told us something.

Back out in the car, I said nothing until Mary Ellen had had time to drive off and gather her thoughts.

“Okay, why’d we eject just when she started to talk?” I asked.

“I recognized that look in her eyes, Cam,” she said. “I’ve seen it in my own mirror. Telling us anything at all cost her. I don’t know what any of that means, but you wanted something more and you got it. I just thought one more question would be too much.”

I considered that and then accepted it. “You’re probably right. So: What lake, and where are those red rocks?”

The following morning, I decided to drive over to Robbins County and make a formal call on the notorious Sheriff M. C. Mingo. Mary Ellen had been undecided about following up on Janey’s cryptic information, as the Park Service had officially closed the investigation and her boss most definitely wanted the whole incident to stay in its box. She said she’d talk it over with some of the other rangers and call me later that day.

M. C. Mingo was in a meeting, so the desk officer asked me to come back in an hour. I went to a local diner for breakfast and then took a windshield tour of Rocky Falls. That didn’t take long. The town had sprung up along a two-lane road that paralleled the Roaring River as it cut its way down toward the Chance Reservoir. The river was about fifty feet wide as it ran noisily through Rocky Falls, dropping nearly five hundred feet in elevation along the two-mile notch occupied by the town. On one side of the road were most of the businesses and gas stations, with a single street of homes above and behind that. On the river side of the road were larger homes, interspersed with whitewater rafting outfitters, restaurants, B and Bs, and two motels. Across the river, the shoulders of Blue Home Mountain rose dramatically above the town, where they faced the slopes of Scotch Blood Mountain on the other side. There was a single rusted steel-trussed bridge crossing the river, and where it intersected the main street of town stood city hall and the sheriff’s office. I parked in the visitors’ area, opened the windows for the shepherds, and went back in.

The desk sergeant asked me to take a seat and then made a phone call. A few minutes later a young woman came out of the sheriff’s private office. She was very pretty in a disco-trashy fashion, tall, black-haired, lots of lipstick, sloe-eyed, and amply endowed in all the right places. She was wearing painted-on jeans, a straining halter top, and bright red cowboy boots. She smiled at the sergeant, who was unabashedly locked on to that lush body, gave me the once-over, and then sashayed out the front door with a very deliberate, traffic-stopping walk. An invisible stratum of flowery perfume lingered in the air behind her.

“That there’s Rue Creigh,” the desk sergeant announced, proudly. “Ain’t she somethin’, though.” The phone on his desk rang, and the sergeant, after clearing his throat, told me I could go in now.

Sheriff M. C. Mingo was in his early fifties and was about as plain a man as I had ever seen in a sheriff’s uniform. He was five-eight or -nine, wore large bifocal eyeglasses, and had the soft, round, mealy-mouthed face and superior churchwarden expression I usually associated with Carolina politicians, all smiling eyes and teeth with just a hint of B’rer Fox glinting behind the glasses. His hair was dyed an unnatural dark brown. He had tiny hands, but his grip when he shook hands with me was surprisingly hard. He wore a perfectly pressed khaki uniform, which could not disguise a tiny potbelly. He had a. 357 Magnum chrome-plated revolver on his hip, and his badge positively gleamed. I gave him points for not wearing one of those ridiculous four-star-general collar devices beloved of so many police chiefs these days. He indicated a chair for me and sat down behind his desk, which was piled high with neat stacks of paperwork.