Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

“You mind my asking your interest in the old Harper place here?” he said. “Not to be particular, but you are trespassing. If we were to get technical about it.”

“Do we want to get technical?”

“Why don’t you tell me what we’re doing and we’ll see.”

Sully nodded. “I’n leave, no problem. I’s just looking around, nothing in particular.” He waved his arms around, demonstrating a lack of focus, a lack of knowledge. “I’m a reporter, like Jo-Ellen told you. You know, that Waters business? Casting a wide net. Imagine you guys been flooded with feds.”

He fished a card out of his wallet. The deputy barely looked at it, tucked it into his shirt pocket and ignored the opportunity to piss and moan about federal law enforcement.

“Casting a wide net for what?’

“A story. A feature. The Wicker Man. Anything. Jo-Ellen, she said the Harpers, they had an incident back in the day. There ain’t nothing else going on, so I came out here. You always want to show the home office movement, that you’re doing something. This is just local color.”

“We’re kinda local-colored out at the moment,” the deputy said. “Reporters from Japan to Germany, all of last week.”

“I bet.”

“Who’s the Wicker Man?”

“Nobody,” Sully said. “Well. An old horror movie. Locals in this little town had a weird cult, built a big wicker model of a man, put this guy inside it and burned him alive. Orgies and naked chicks. It’s sort of the idea that strange things are happening in little places that look normal. If that makes any sense.”

The deputy did not appear that amused. “It doesn’t. I was up there at Russell’s place just now,” he said. “Fresh tire tracks. That you?”

“It was. Late yesterday.”

“Most reporter types, even the ones from Japan, they came out last week, gone home. You sorta runnin’ late, ain’t ya?”

Sully smiled, recognizing the jibe for what it was. Man pronounced it “jap-ann.”

“The first wave, deputy, they come and they go. Then you get the second wave, the magazine writers, long deadlines.”

“So, the Harpers,” the deputy said again. He’d never offered his name, not at the beginning and not in return when Sully handed him his card. Sully couldn’t make out the name on the little silver bar on his chest and didn’t want to peer. Extending an arm from his side, putting a palm on one of the columns, the deputy leaned into it heavily, taking a load off, letting out a sigh. He was half looking at Sully, half squinting over the prairie, like he was expecting somebody on horseback to come galloping over the horizon. Sully put his age at maybe thirty-five.

“You want to know about the old lady’s suicide,” the deputy said. “Seems sorta women’s gossip, you ask me.”

“But I’m not asking,” Sully said. “I’m just interested in knowing what happened.”

“We’re not taking notes here, are we?”

“Not unless we say so.”

“We don’t.”

“Okay.”

“This place, it’s been abandoned since I was a kid,” the deputy said, and spit again, rolling the chaw over to the left side of his jaw. “The local haunted house. Your Wicker Man, you want that. Me, I was always thinking it was like, that place, you ever hear tell of the little town in Kansas where that family got killed and that little gay guy what wrote a book about it?”

“The Clutter family,” Sully said. “Capote. In Cold Blood. Holcomb, that’s the town.”

“That’s the one. Liked that movie. Don’t know why they made it in black and white. But what I’m saying, everybody talked about that. It got to be famous. This suicide here? It wasn’t like that. You a kid here, you didn’t want to ask your folks, your teachers. It was something you were supposed to whisper about, at least when the adults were around. Maybe because it was suicide, which out here, for the churchgoing, means you going to Hell. Everybody’s churchgoing out here. I don’t know. Anyhow. It got to be a thing kids would tell at campfires, spooky story nights, at the drive-in. If and when you got drunk, you’d dare somebody to come out here at midnight. I did it and had it done to me.”

“Everyplace you go,” Sully said, keeping him talking, his antennae picking up now, “there’s a spot like that.”

“I imagine. But this place here,” here the deputy leaned back to rap on the column with his knuckles, to look at the house behind them, “would scare the shit out of you. Off the road, in the dark, at night, wind coming up, coyote or a coon or something in the house, scratching around? It’d shrivel your pair right up tight, I can tell you that. Particularly if you’re fifteen and drunk.”

“I bet.”

“It’s a million versions of the story, but the way I’m going to tell it to you, I heard from Sheriff Lewis, he was the law at the time, and he was the one what came out here that day. So that’s the only firsthand account I know.

“And the way he’d tell it, this was seventy-two, seventy-three, right along in there. The Harpers, they weren’t here that much. The old man worked oil in the panhandle. They’d come here on your weekends, your holidays. Older couple. You’d see ’em out on the boat on the reservoir, people said. But they kept off to theyselves.

“So this one day, mid-July, the phone rings down to the sheriff’s. It’s Mr. and Mrs. Harper’s grandson. He’s powerful upset. Says his grandma hurt herself and the granddad’s been gone for two days down to Texas. Sheriff Lewis says, ‘Well, how you mean, hurt herself?’ Boy says, ‘With a knife.’ Sheriff says, ‘What, in the kitchen?’ Boy says, ‘No, she went in the bathroom, locked the door, and cut herself open.’ Sheriff says, ‘Well, how you know if the door’s locked?’ Who believes kids? Boy says, ‘’Cause there’s blood running out from under the door and she’s screaming.’ That lit a fire under the sheriff. He jumped up fast like, telling the boy to sit still and he was a-coming. He tells Bo-that was the deputy then, Bo Thompson-to call the hospital and he come out here, lights and siren blazing, ninety miles an hour. He comes running up these steps, right where we standing, barges in the door. And there’s the boy, right there in the hallway, slumped up against the door right behind you, right outside the kitchen.”

“You mean that washroom, the half bath?”

“I do. Boy was sitting there. Pool of blood. A lake and getting bigger by the minute. Boy looks up and says, ‘She’s dead.’ That’s the full business of it, whole and entire. ‘She’s dead.’

“The sheriff asks, like any man would, what, you looked in on her? Boy shakes his head. ‘She stopped screaming,’ he said. Well, the sheriff has to move the boy outta the way. He calls out to the missus a couple of times and then tries to shoulder the door open. But this is when they made things that lasted, and the door wasn’t no joke. Besides, the floor was too slick with blood to get any sort of head start. He tried to lean back and kick it open and damn near busted his ass. So he pulls out his gun and tells the boy to look the other way and cover his eyes, and he shoots the handle, blew it right apart.

“Now. The door swings open, he pushes it back. There’s Missus Harper. She’s sitting on the toilet seat, but with the lid down, it wasn’t like she was using the thing. Slumped up against the wall, right below the window ledge. Blood everywhere. Her right hand, it was still at her throat, the fingers up under the skin. The knife was still in her left hand. This butcher knife from the kitchen. Silver and sharp as shit. She had a death grip sort of thing on it. She’d been slicing at her neck, little cuts, like she was working up the nerve to go for the gusher. She’d finally hit it, though. Front of her dress was drenched, it had sprayed over on the wall, run down on the floor, a river right out into the hall.”