Shirley Murphy - The Cat, The Devil, The Last Escape

“What do you want? Get out of here. What do you want with Morgan, what does he have to do with your vendetta against me? He’s not of Dobbs’s blood.” Lee wanted to lunge at the figure but knew he would grapple empty air.

“Morgan’s little girl is of Dobbs’s blood. She is descended from Dobbs just as you are. There is no finer prize,” Satan said, “than a child. Now, through her father, I will destroy the girl. Through her father and soon through you as well.

“Oh, she dreams of you, Fontana. You are her kin. She saw you kill Luke Zigler, she saw his smashed face. She saw you and Morgan scale the wall; she was with you on your journey, suffering every misery you endured; she felt cold fear at the sight of the tramp’s switchblade, fear not as an adult would experience but as a child knows terror. Her pain, as she watched, is most satisfying.

“She saw you pull the cable around Falon’s throat, she felt your urge to kill him, she watched you smile and pull the cable tighter.”

Lee’s helplessness, his inability to drive back the dark spirit, enraged him. Nothing could be so evil as to fill a child with such visions, to torment a little girl with an adult’s lust.

But at Lee’s thought, the invader shifted. “ I do not give the child her nightmares,” Satan snapped. “ I have no control over her dreams.”

“How could she see such things if the dreams don’t come from you?”

The shadow faded, then darkened again. “ I do not shape her dreams,” he repeated testily . “I do not control her fantasies.”

But then he laughed. “Soon I will control them, soon I will break the force that gives her such visions, and then,” he said, “then I will shape the images she sees, I will shape her fears until, at long last, I use that terror to break her. To own her,” Lucifer said with satisfaction.

“In the end,” he said, “the child will belong to me. My retribution will be complete. You might resist my challenges, Fontana. You might have won a bargain, as you put it. But Sammie Blake won’t win anything. She will soon be my property. As I destroy her father, so I will destroy her. She is my retribution, the final answer to my betrayal by Russell Dobbs.”

39

I T WAS EARLYmorning in Georgia, the sun just fingering up through dense growths of maples and sourwoods. A Floyd County truck stood parked in the woods at the foot of Turkey Mountain Ridge, its tires leaving a fresh trail along the narrow dirt road. Agents Hillerman and Clark of the FBI and GBI respectively, and Deputy Riker of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Department, had already climbed halfway up the steep slope. Sweating in heavy khaki clothing and high, laced boots, they shouldered through thorny tangles and dense, second-growth saplings. Hillerman was perhaps the most uncomfortable in the hot protective clothing, with his thirty pounds of extra weight. Clark, the youngest, was fit and tanned, blond crew cut covered by a sturdy cap, his ruddy face clear and sunny. Each man wore a backpack fitted out with water, snacks, and the tools they would need if they found the hidden well.

Though the three men wielded machetes, cutting away the briars that tripped and clawed at them, still the thorny tangles ripped through their clothing, tearing into their skin leaving their pants and shirts dotted with blood, their hands and legs throbbing. They had driven up the old rutted logging road as far as the truck would go. When the incline grew too steep they had left the vehicle to climb the eastern slope on foot. Riker was in the lead, a rail-thin, leathery man as dry and wrinkled as if the cigarettes he smoked, two packs a day, were surely embalming him. Breathing hard, he led the two men back and forth, tacking across the steep hill searching carefully, stopping often to study the ground, the surrounding growth, and the mountain that rose above them. He was looking for signs of old, rotted fences, abandoned farm tools. He did not smoke while in the woods, he chewed.

Years ago Riker had hunted deer on this mountain. He didn’t remember any old homeplace up here, but often all that was left would be a few bramble-covered artifacts or, higher up the hill, fragments of an old rock foundation and the old well, both long ago covered by heavy growth. As they neared the crest he glanced back at the bureau men, cautioned them again to take care. “You step in a hidden well, you fall a hundred feet straight down.” They’d climbed in silence for another five minutes when Riker stopped suddenly, stood looking above them where a dozen huge oak trees came into view, towering above small, scrubby saplings.

“There. That’ll be it.” He moved on quickly, straight up the ridge until it leveled off to flat ground. There was no sign of a house or of fences or foundation, but Riker nodded with satisfaction, stood wiping his forehead with his bandana. “I’d forgotten this place. Watch your step, the well’s somewhere close.”

Hillerman, the FBI agent, stared around him searching for signs of a homeplace.

“These big old trees,” Riker said, “crowding all together in a half circle? That’s where the house stood, in their shade. And the brushy land that drops on down? That would have been cleared, that’s the garden spot.” The other two looked at him, questioning, but Riker knew these woods. And for the past hundred yards they’d been walking over old, worn terraces.

“There would have been crops here, too,” Riker said, “corn, beans, more tomatoes, collards. Off to your right,” he said, pointing, “those old pear trees gone wild? Someone planted those.” He paused beside a low-branched sourwood, took a small folding saw from his pack, and cut three long straight branches so they could feel ahead through the scrub and grass.

“The well won’t likely be near the bigger trees,” Riker said, “where the roots would grow in.” They moved on slowly, poking ahead, doubling back and forth watching the ground. Near the old homeplace, Hillerman shouted.

Riker and Clark joined him. Kneeling, Riker pulled aside a tangle of honeysuckle, revealing the remains of a crumbled stone curb. Carefully they pulled out long, tangled vines, clearing the stone circle beneath. It was some five feet across, the hole in the center yawning black and deep.

The sides of the well were lined with stone, too, the carefully laid rocks gray with moss where Riker shone the beam of his torch down inside. Tying a rope around his waist, handing the ends to Clark and Hillerman, he leaned down in until his light picked out the far, muddy bottom. He moved the beam slowly, looking.

“It’s there,” Riker said. “The ammo box.”

Hillerman fished a coiled rope from his backpack, a treble hook tied at one end, and handed it to Clark. Kneeling beside Riker, the younger man let the coil play out easy, down and down, the swinging steel claw catching torchlight as it bounced against the well’s stone and earth sides. When it reached bottom he let it settle, then eased it toward the dark metal box lying deep in the mud against the earthen wall.

It took seven passes, Clark gently finessing the hook, before he snagged one of the two handles. Slowly he pulled the box up, afraid at every move that he’d lose it or it would pop open and spill its contents. Keeping it clear of the edges, he at last lifted the dirt-encrusted ammo box above the well and out over solid ground.

Hillerman had to use the beer opener on his pocketknife to pry up the two heavy, rusty latches. When he had pulled the lid open the three men, kneeling around the box, looked at each other grinning.

Within lay the bundles of greenbacks, moldy smelling, each secured with a brown paper collar. They touched nothing. Tucked in beside the money was a tightly rolled canvas bag and a dark blue stocking cap. Hillerman picked this up carefully with the point of his knife, held it high, revealing its length, which would easily cover a man’s face. Two ragged eyeholes had been cut in one side. Underneath, where he’d removed the cap and bag, lay a .38-caliber revolver.