Tom Piccirilli - November Mourns

“Not nearby. A few overgrown logging paths that lead to the old McMueller Mill. It’s only ruins now, even the stream has dried up. Some stunted orchards, I think. I’m not really sure.”

“Who lives over that way?”

“A few of the bottom hill families on the other side of the gorge. They stick to themselves, hardly ever come down into town. The Taskers. The Johansens. And the Gabriels too, as I recall. They have their own community, sort of an extended village up there near the briar woods. They’re snake handlers, way I hear tell.”

“I don’t know any of them.”

“I’ve met a couple and run into them now and again, but they keep their church goings-on to themselves. No phone among the bunch of them. Never cause any trouble. Red Sublett and his brood dwell nearby there, but he’s not a part of their camp. He’s got nine kids now. No wonder he looks half-dead when he comes in for supplies.”

Shad thought of Red’s wife, Lottie, hangdog and toothless, and he had to control a shudder from going through him. “Goddamn, he only had five when I went in.”

“He got himself a set of premature quadruplets last year. All of them with club feet and stunted legs, and none with the correct amount of fingers. That Lottie, she’s pushing them out too damn fast.”

Shad didn’t say aloud what they both already knew, that Red and Lottie were siblings though they usually denied it, but not always. Doing whatever they wanted to do, not out of love or even a fundamental need, but simply because of proximity. What a foolish reason to visit sins upon your babies.

He thought of Tandy Mae’s children, who were Megan’s deformed half brothers and half sisters, and so, somehow related to him by the narrow channels of blood.

“My grandfather used to tell me these hills were haunted,” Dave told him.

The woods thickened with ash and birch and more slash pine, the land wild with sprawled logs and lightning-struck trunks clotted with weeds. Tangled briars, rosebay, Catawba, and rhododendron and dogwood knotted in mad, awkward patterns. Shad sighted areas of bark scarred with bullet holes and buckshot. There were flashes of light winking in the brush, reflections from beer cans and broken jugs of moon.

“Maybe they are,” Shad said. It was true, at least for today. Megan, or something, wanted his pledge.

So now they were down to it. The milieu fluctuated a little, Dave taking full control again without having to do a damn thing.

“I don’t want you to cause any trouble out this way, Shad Jenkins.”

“I don’t intend to.”

“You’re a god-awful liar.”

“I have to find out what happened to her.”

“That’s my job.” Voice firm, putting some bite into it. “Leave this to me.”

It was Dave Fox’s way of saying, no matter what the official report might read, that he would never give up on the case, he’d work it until the truth finally broke free.

“Let’s go up there for a few minutes.”

“Where?”

“Top of Jonah Ridge,” Shad said.

“The hell for?”

“I want to take a look.”

Dave pulled a face that only cops knew how to make-like he was dealing with a wiseass brat and ready to visit great injury upon that kid any second. But he obliged, willing to give Shad just a little more slack.

They walked back to the patrol car and drove up the Gospel Trail. The expanse broke into numerous dirt paths leading into the thickets and scrub tilting away from the rise. A split-rail fence had been put up to keep people from wandering off the edge.

The Chatalaha had, by its scouring violence, formed one of the most rugged chasms for hundreds of miles in any direction. The steep walls of the gorge enclosed the river for almost fifteen miles, clear up to Poverhoe. On the other side of the ravine, the terrain grew extremely steep and rugged, covered by a dense hardwood forest.

They got out. Dave Fox showed no sign of tension, but Shad sensed he was getting antsy, wasting so much time talking, driving around, being idle, catering to a civilian. Shad did his best to ignore it.

The fence was weak and he could see black mold growing in the middle of the rotted slats. An ounce of pressure would send it over, and he could just imagine the rail giving away as he pressed his stomach to it, easing forward inch by inch, until he was plunging. Dave’s powerful arm struck out and braced him.

“How far up are we?”

“Elevation averages about thirty-four hundred feet along the rim of the gorge,” Dave said.

“Jesus-”

“Waters descend over two thousand feet before breaking into the open levels of the hollow. Jonah Ridge is on the other side of the chasm. My grandfather used to hunt grizzly and cougar up there.”

“Even though he thought the hills were haunted?”

“He was a man of contradictions.”

All of us are. You couldn’t get away from it.

“Anybody live out that way?”

That tremendous torso filled with cold air, working like a bellows. Dave gave him that same look as before, sad and almost loving, but ready to backhand him hard across his nose if need be. “You going to hunt down everybody for a twenty-mile radius, Shad Jenkins?”

“If I have to.”

“You’re gonna cause yourself a lot of pain. That the way you gonna go at this?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s mostly wilderness on Jonah. The grizzly and the big cats were wiped out. Now you’ve really only got deer, grouse, quail, and coon. Living off red chokeberry and wild indigo, they don’t get as big as you might think. Plenty of timber rattlers too, in case you decide to go take a gander. Get yourself some real boots. They’ll strike through the heels of what you’re wearing and you’ll probably be dead in two hours without treatment.”

It was an exaggeration. Probably. “How much farther up is the trestle that covers the divide?”

“Maybe a mile. It’s hidden from our line of view right now by the scrub and pine. The Pharisee Bridge. They were pure brimstone with naming things in these parts, weren’t they?”

“They do appear to have been single-minded people back then.”

“And some of their inheritors still can be.”

“I suppose we can.”

“The trestle was never the most stable structure, but the county used it for fifteen, twenty years or so beginning in the late thirties. They tried a couple of mining operations up there on Jonah but nothing ever came of it, and the tracks were abandoned and pulled up. Now the hill folk use the bridge to cut their trips to town in half, when they come down at all. Which happens less and less now. Nobody else would dare try it, not even the hunters. Easier and safer just to cross the Chatalaha at the bottom and drive up the old logging roads.”

Shad stepped back over to the rickety rail fence and forced himself to stand there. To show whoever was pondering on him that he wasn’t going to lie still or back off. He was coming.

He scanned the vista on the other side of the gorge, the dying orchards clustered with snarled catclaw brambles and briars.

A scratch on her cheek.

Pharisee.

If somebody hadn’t taken Megan up to Gospel Trail Road, then maybe someone had brought her down from the back hills instead.

THE LUVELL GIRL HIS FATHER HAD SPOKEN OF turned out to be Glide, who after dropping out of school in the fifth grade spent most of her days helping make sour-mash whiskey. She was a year younger than Megan-than Megan had been-but Glide already had 36C breasts and a natural cunning and understanding of men. Like her mother and sisters before her, she was built to bear children, designed by the hollow to pass on the burden of her general simplemindedness.

Shad remembered her as a crude kid always pouting and posturing, smelling of fresh cornstalk. She’d grown into a provocative teenager aware of her sexuality but too immature to do more than stick her chest in your face. She managed to hit all the right poses that accentuated her heavily freckled cleavage.