Morgan James - Promise McNeal 02 - Quiet Killing (28 page)

Susan answered. “Yes. We’re ready. I’ll take my cell phone. Hang on.” She held the phone out to me and put it on speaker. “It’s Daddy. They’re fanning out from MaMa’s side. He says for us to take the path from Fletcher’s side and then crisscross until we get to the top. Where should we meet?”

I spoke into the phone, sure now of the answer. “Meet us at January’s cabin. Mac can give you directions. Missy knows that area. I believe she’s found the cave. Remember the cave? The one the lady at the library said she and her brother found. It’s near a small waterfall. Missy will hide there.”

“Umm.” Daniel sounded skeptical. “Didn’t Fletcher tell you he’d not found a cave? The man’s owned the property for sixty years; he’d know if a cave was up there.”

I found myself shaking my head at the phone. “Fletcher’s lying. I don’t know why he would lie, but
I know he is. There is a cave. Trust me. Just meet us at the cabin, and we’ll search for the waterfall. It somehow marks the cave.”

“All right. I guess this is another one of those intuition things—like us chasing a thief in the dark down in Atlanta—where you tell me the rest of the story later, much later?”

“Just do it, okay?”

“No need to bark at me, Babe. I said all right. You two be careful and check in every fifteen minutes. Just hope our phones have service up there.”

Susan went out to her Jeep and came back with a black backpack, or, I guess more properly, a book bag. The Addams Family smiled at me as I stowed a thermos of hot chocolate, two bottled waters, and a handful of granola bars inside. “Better than a Bi-Lo plastic bag, I guess. Have you had this cute thing since you were a kid?”

Susan cackled. “Lord no, I found it last month at the flea market. Cool, huh? I love it. Funny show. Remember the episode when a neighbor kid tried to sell the Addams children Girl Scout cookies, and Wednesday Addams asked if they were made with real girl scouts?”

Believe it, or not, I did remember that show. “Why do I think you aspire to be Morticia? Hang on a second, I just thought of something else.” I ran to the bedroom closet and came back with an Irish wool sweater I’d tossed in with the regular laundry by mistake. What was once a roomy size large was now a tight size tiny— perfect fit for Missy when we found her. Then I added a handful of paper napkins, just in case anyone needed
toilet paper, and explained to Alfie that he was to stay behind and guard the house. From his napping rug, he raised his head just enough to let me know he’d heard me and then closed his eyes again. Susan strapped Morticia, Gomez, Pugsley and Wednesday Addams over her shoulder, and I checked my coat pocket to make sure I had my warm gloves. “Okay, let’s go.”

For the second time that morning I crossed the pine grove separating my property from Fletcher Enloe’s. Susan went ahead, circling the back of the barn, just as I had done earlier; except this time we walked out in the open, not concerned about prowlers, and waved to the single deputy still stationed on the property. We passed the house and quickly covered the distance to the end of Fletcher’s pasture line. Then we were on the narrow logging path, disappearing into mixed hardwoods and pines, climbing up Fire Mountain.

As soon as Fletcher’s house and barn were out of sight, my heart began to flutter. My breath caught in the back of my throat like a bellows choking for air. I told myself we were walking too fast, that I was out of shape. But I knew I was having an anxiety attack. The fear I’d felt when the Georgia convict attacked me, and tied my hands and feet, was back. Fear crested up, washed over me, and sucked the energy from my legs. I willed myself to keep moving. Scary memories, I told myself. Only a feeling—not a real threat. Breathe deeply. Think of now, not then. So much has happened since the attack, you haven’t had time to process it. The feeling will pass. The key here is that you lived through the fear when it happened; you can walk through it now.

We walked on. I counted my steps and visualized the blood flowing strong in my legs. Soon I was focusing on the worn down, narrow ruts in the road, as I followed behind Susan. This way up the mountain was much easier than the abandoned logging road snaking up the ridge from my side, and certainly better than climbing through dense laurels to reach the cabin. No big rocks in the pathway, no small trees volunteering out of nowhere.

“Susan,” I said, my voice spooking a pileated woodpecker into flight and a frenzy of eek-eek-eek-eek cries. “Does it strike you as odd that this old road is in such good shape? I mean, Fletcher says it hasn’t been used for years.”

She continued trudging uphill. “Deer probably keep it cleared down. Or, more likely, Fletcher told you that to keep you from using it to snoop around up on Fire. I guess you’ve noticed the old man just
has
to be in control.”

I agreed with her. My good neighbor certainly needed to make the rules, and he did seem overly invested in keeping me off Fire Mountain. Though to his credit, when we last spoke, he offered to take me back up to the cabin site and share what he knows. It was hard to stay angry with a man who had saved my life. If he hadn’t come along when he did…there was that panicky fear again. I began counting my steps again. Concentrating on anything other than the memory of being tied up. Seventeen, eighteen. Poor Fletcher— nineteen— lying in a hospital bed, injured—the Red Bird probably damaged beyond repair. Twenty—and
two men pilfering through his house looking for…looking for what?

We climbed slowly for perhaps another thirty minutes, the wind cold and the late morning sky bellied with snow clouds. Susan stopped beside a cairn-like pile of gray and ochre rocks stacked just off the narrow roadway. “Let’s rest for a second. I want to check something.”

I sat on one of the lower rocks. She perched on another to my left and dug a compass out of the backpack, carefully checking our direction. “We’re still headed northwest. That’s good.”

“Did you say,
still
? When did you check our direction the first time?”

“Back at your house, when I got the backpack from the Jeep. Daddy said to try and crisscross our search. Changing our directions every so often will help. Though actually, we don’t know exactly which direction the cabin lies from Fletcher’s house, so I’m still just guessing.”

“I think we are okay. This is the road the deputy brought me down after Fletcher had to…umm…well you know, shoot that guy. As I remember, it picks up a short distance below the cabin. I’m impressed you brought a compass. You have anything else interesting amongst the Addams family?”

“Actually, I do,” Susan replied and brought out two straightened coat hanger wires, each bent about a fourth of the way down the shaft to form a handle.

“And those are?”

“Dowsing rods. MaMa Allen made them for me years ago. They work pretty good. I’ll show you.
But first, let’s go over what you know about the cave. I heard you tell Daddy the lady at the library said she and her brother found the cave near a waterfall?”

“Yeah, that’s what she remembered. But then, that was when they were teenagers, a long time ago. She said they didn’t go all the way into the cave. It looked like a good place for bears, so they backed out and found other entertainment. She couldn’t remember if they happened on the cabin before or after they found the cave, though I don’t suppose that matters.”

“And you found the cabin after climbing through all that laurel thicket on your side of the mountain?”

“Yes, one minute I was stumbling over roots and branches, and the next the laurel just ended, and I stepped out onto a meadow plateau.”

Susan tapped the dowsing rods against her knee and looked me square in the eyes. She seemed to be forming a question in her mind.

The tapping was beginning to annoy. “What?”

Thankfully the tapping stopped. “Miz P., how do you know the waterfall and cave are anywhere near the cabin? They could be anywhere on the mountain.”

How did I know that? Something around the cabin made me think water was nearby. Oh yes, I remembered. “For one thing, when I was poking around the cabin, I saw an old piece of pipe exposed in the shallow ground. I assume it was running from the house, or rather to the house, from a water source.”

“Well, yeah, that could be, but the water source could be a shallow well or a rain cistern. Are you thinking January ran a water pipe to the base of the
waterfall? If he did, the falls would have to be uphill from the cabin, otherwise there would be no pressure to take the water to the house. You know, gravity and all that—plus, no electricity in January’s time for a well pump. See what I mean?”

“Yeah, I see what you mean. It is possible though. The cabin is built on a plateau cut from the side of the mountain, and the ground slopes uphill pretty fast behind it. But…” I tried to remember what I’d heard up on the plateau. All I could remember was thinking I heard a child singing:
Ring around the roses, pocket full of posies, upstairs downstairs, we all fall down
.

“But what?”

I felt a frown and a headache spreading across my forehead. “The but is: I didn’t hear water running up there at the cabin. You’d think if the falls were nearby, I would have heard the water. Still, I know the cave has to be close to the cabin. So the waterfall must be close.”

Susan took a swig of water from one of the bottles stowed in her backpack and offered me the second one. “But
how
do you know? I get the feeling there is something you aren’t sharing. We really need to work together on this. The temperature is dropping. Who knows how long a skinny little kid can survive out here.”

Susan was right. I had to tell the rest of it. I just wasn’t sure where to start. “Okay, here is the thing…umm…you know how much this January McNeal thing has been bothering me—him being asked to leave the Methodist church and all that. Fletcher started some of it by telling me he was sure my relatives lived here a hundred years ago—which I didn’t
have a clue of when I bought the house. I mean I’m not actually blaming Fletcher because it really started with my dream.” I paused, trying to think how to condense the long story into a couple of sentences.

Susan gave me a questioning sideways glance. “Your dream?”

“Yes. It was in the first dream.”

Susan shook her head as though clearing cobwebs growing there. “All right. Please don’t take this wrong, but you’re not making sense. Try to get to the point. Just tell me how you know the cave is close to the cabin. Daylight is burning and we’ve got to find this kid before she freezes to death.”

“The point. Okay. Short version. I’ve had the dream several times. January’s in jail. There’s a forest fire on the mountain. He’s calling out through the bars of the jail window to Reba. He’s screaming for her to take the baby and run for the cave. I believe the cave must be close to the cabin, or he wouldn’t think she could get there before the fire killed her and the baby.” I stopped talking when I remembered the baby did die. Maybe Reba couldn’t make it to the cave. Maybe I had the whole thing wrong. Oh God, what if I’m wrong?

There was only a two second hesitation before Susan replied, “Okay. Now we have something.
That
makes sense. The cave has to be close to the cabin.”

“Do you really think so? You don’t think I’m crazy to put my faith in information from a dream?”

Susan waved the dowsing rods in the air. “Well duhh…not when I know these converted coat hangers can find water.”

“How do they do that?”

She handed the rods to me and I ran my hand up and down the shafts. Felt like ordinary coat hanger wire to me. No spooky vibrations. “Lots of theories,” she said. “I don’t know, exactly. It just seems that if a person can relax and let the rods do the work, the metal senses something in the water particles… energy or something. I just know they work; I’ve located probably ten good well sites with this pair here. It’s common practice around here to get a well site dowsed.”

“And the rods can find the waterfall?”

“Sure. The problem is they find
all
water underground and running on top. With so much laurel growing up here, there has to be water everywhere. Laurels love water. We could crisscross Fire Mountain until we are too old to walk and still be finding water. That’s why we need a clue where to start. I say we start at the cabin, think about which way Reba could run, and work out from there.”

“Sounds like a good plan. I’ll call your dad and tell him we’re headed directly to the cabin.” When I flipped my cell phone open to make the call, the screen read: No Service. So much for that idea. We’d try again when we reached the cabin.

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