The Rosewood Casket (32 page)

“I should have gone with him,” said Kelley.

“No, I should have.” Garrett Stargill stood up. “I’m the one with commando experience. I’ve probably done more night tracking in a combat situation than all those men out there put together. I should offer to help.”

Debba Stargill grabbed at her husband’s wrist. “You can’t go, Garrett! It’s dangerous.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Lilah. “Surely that young woman is more frightened now than anything. She doesn’t want to harm anyone else.”

Garrett laughed. “Frightened people are the most dangerous folks on earth. Isn’t that so, Debba?”

She hung her head. “I guess so,” she whispered.

“Debba ought to know,” said Garrett, twisting his arm to make her let go. “Debba’s an expert on the hazards of fear.”

“Stop it.” Her voice was expressionless. She stared at the floor.

Lilah looked nervously at them, then at Kelley, who was taking shallow deep breaths, and looking about an inch away from hysteria. “Maybe we should call the hospital,” she said. “We could check on Daddy Stargill, and see how the poor sheriff is faring, as well.”

“I expect he’s gut-shot,” said Garrett. “When a frightened woman shoots, she usually aims for the belly. Or maybe she aims for the heart and misses, because she’s such a lousy shot. What would you say it was, Debba, intent or bad aim?”

She shivered. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I’m sure that’s a lot of consolation for the corporal’s family, Debba.” He turned to the others. “Debba here gets nervous when I’m away. She thinks the whole of west Tennessee is conspiring to abduct her in my absence. She keeps a baseball bat by the front door, and a can of Mace on the nightstand. A regular suburban terrorist is little old Debba Stargill.”

Garrett stopped talking, but no one interrupted him. His stare said that he wasn’t finished.

“So two years ago when I was gone … Haiti? Somalia?” He shrugged. “Somewhere. I was supposed to be in peril, and the people back at Fort Campbell were supposed to be safe and sound, but Debba Stargill
never
feels safe. So one afternoon she heard a noise. One
afternoon.
Not three o’clock in the morning. Not a dark and stormy night. One sunny, peaceful, goddamned afternoon. So she goes outside to see what monsters of depravity have come to ravish her. And there’s a kid in the yard. He’s maybe twenty. He’s looking for one of our neighbors. About the kitten ad. About the goddamned kitten ad in the newspaper. Which house. So he starts walking toward pretty, tiny Mrs. Stargill to see if she can give him directions, and that’s when she puts a .44 slug into him, all the while screaming that he’s trying to rape her.”

Debba buried her face in her hands. “He shouldn’t have come to our back door. He—”

“He was gut-shot, and he died before the ambulance could get there. Debba didn’t call 911; she just stood there and screamed until the neighbors found her. So maybe we deserve each other, Debba and me. I get paid to kill people for Uncle Sam, and Debba works for free.”

“I hate you,” said Debba Stargill from behind the palisade of her fingers.

“I’m going now,” said Garrett. “I’m going to try to get Kelley’s little girl back. The rest of you stay with my lovely wife here. Keep her away from the kitchen knives and from Daddy’s shotgun. I don’t want her mistaking one of the policemen for a hundred-pound woman, and killing him in ‘self-defense.’ Of course, she’d probably get off. The Tennessee legal system seems to be awfully sympathetic toward delicate women who cry a lot at the inquest. She didn’t even go to trial. Maybe Dovey Stallard can try that tack when they catch her. It might work. I doubt it, though.”

He turned and walked out of the room, and no one spoke.

*   *   *

The hills were dark, but the search continued.

Joe LeDonne had begun alone at dusk, looking for the trail up at the barn, where Dovey Stallard had last been seen by the eyewitnesses. He was trying to locate a recognizable shoe print, or signs of bent grass and broken twigs that would lead him in the direction she had fled. The trail could still be followed at night, but it would be slower, and much more difficult to discern. The trackers would use high-powered flashlights. Crouching close to the ground, they would search for blades of grass bent at odd angles, crushed out of symmetry by a running foot. It could take hours to go a few yards. To speed up the process, the members of the search team were stationed great distances apart, each looking for the same thing: signs of disturbed earth, showing that someone had passed that way not too long ago. The first tracker began his search a mile from the starting point. The others were spread out behind him, slowly, painstakingly looking for the slightest hint of a trail. When one of the searchers found that trail, he would signal to the others, and those behind him would move ahead from their old positions and fan out from this new starting point.

It was slow going in the darkness. Sometimes the trail that had been carefully followed for an hour would halt in a patch of soft bare earth—at the hoofprint of a deer. Then the searchers had to backtrack to the last known position, and begin again.

Joe LeDonne was farthest out in front, praying for daybreak. The tedium of following a trail an inch at a time made his jaw ache from clenched teeth, and his legs were sore from hours of unaccustomed stooping to see faint signs in the frosted grass. He had not eaten since breakfast, but he was damned if he was going to stop now.

The trail had to be located tonight, because when another eight hours had passed there would be no trail. Bent blades of grass would spring back into place, and night-roaming animals might dislodge twigs or obscure footprints with their own tracks. When the trail became cold, there would be nothing to do but wait for the fugitive to make a mistake: break into an empty cabin or steal a car. Then the search could begin again from that new location.

One of the state troopers approached LeDonne, careful to stay behind the light, away from any possible trail. “They sent me to give you an update,” he said. “The dog’s about ready to quit.”

LeDonne straightened up, scowling. A cold wind bit into him, and he wished he’d remembered his gloves. “The dog’s quitting. Already?”

“Those tracking hounds are only good for about an hour. Apparently it takes a lot of effort to read a trail with your nose, and they just burn out on it real quick.”

“So we can bring in another dog.”

“If one’s available. Your people are on the horn now trying to locate a K-9 squad that can be brought in to help. No luck so far. And the ATF plane is on its way, but there’s a storm system between them and us, and they may not make it until morning.”

“Fat lot of good they’ll be then.” He sighed. The trail was getting colder than the night wind. There were a couple of thousand square miles of Cherokee National Forest for Dovey Stallard to disappear into. If she were allowed to slip past the trackers on this mountain, the hunt could take weeks, not hours. Then there might be nothing for them to do but wait until the fugitive herself felt like quitting the chase. If she didn’t get help from unsuspecting hikers, if she didn’t rob somebody or steal a car, then she might get tired of being cold and hungry and hunted, and she’d give herself up. But if she managed to hitch a ride to Knoxville, say, or Charlotte, then she could disappear forever. LeDonne thought it was worth forgoing food and sleep for a couple of days to prevent that from happening. Because if Dovey Stallard did get away clean, he thought he might never sleep again.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Many dark and sleepless nights have I been a companion for owls, separated from the cheerful society of men, scorched by the Summer’s sun, and pinched by the Winter’s cold.

—DANIEL BOONE

Clayt was walking along an old logging road bordered by a marshy thicket of alders. Beyond it a hayfield lay in darkness. He wondered if the dew was heavy enough to show footprints in the dry grass. If he shined his flashlight close to the ground, he thought he might be able to see the traces of indentations worn across the wet field by someone walking. But could he tell deer tracks from human ones in the darkness? Probably not. And turning on the flashlight might be dangerous. The woods were full of gunmen tonight. They might mistake him for their quarry and open fire. He wondered if he should risk it. He had to find Dovey before they did. He stood still for a moment, waiting and listening, as he always did in the wild. A full moon was low on the horizon, and the air was beginning to take on the chill of night. He held his breath, listening.

The sound of the searchers did not carry to his ears; they were too far away. For a few moments, all was silent.

March was a quiet time in the hills. No crickets were serenading. Only a few night moths fluttered around in the moonlight. From the shadows of the hayfield, he heard a bird’s cry, a
peeb
that always made him think of a telephone busy signal. If it were daylight, and later in the spring—say, April—he’d have said the call was that of a nighthawk, but he had never seen one return to the mountains this early in the year. A woodcock, then. The old-timers called them
snipe,
much to the annoyance of local ornithologists, who reserved the term for a similar looking long-billed bird of an entirely different species. Snipe hunt: another term for a wild goose chase. Was he on a snipe hunt tonight?

He heard the
peeb
again, followed by a whistling sound that meant the bird had taken flight. It was courting time for the woodcocks: high spiraling dances above the fields, loud cries and whistling wings, all to impress the hens, watching below.

Clayt crouched near the alder thicket, cupped his hands to his mouth and made the whooo-ing sound of the great-horned owl. That would stop the revels. Nothing ought to be merrymaking tonight, he thought. Before the sound had died away, a dark shape rose up before him with a raucous cry. Its wings brushed his cheek as it soared upward, and he staggered back, gasping from the shock of that sudden encounter. It was a woodcock, of course, fleeing from his owl noise. He stood there for several moments, bent over, his heart pounding, while he waited for the feeling of panic to subside. “Only a woodcock,” he whispered, over and over. The mountain was a menacing place tonight, but he had to go on.

Clayt looked ahead to the darkness of the woods, and wondered whether it was more dangerous to use his flashlight, or to go on without it.

*   *   *

Kelley Johnson tapped on the bedroom door. Lilah was alone, she knew. After Garrett left, Debba had fled sobbing to her room, and no one followed her. Robert Lee found a basketball game on television, and he had turned the sound up to a deafening level. Charlie stayed in the room, looking at the screen sometimes, but mostly picking out chords on the Martin. Kelley slipped away, and left them happily watching the game, as if all the turmoil and anxiety had been confined to the previous cable channel, instead of there in the room with them. Kelley wanted to talk.

Lilah, in her turquoise caftan, opened the door and ushered her in. “Is there any news?”

Kelley shook her head. “I just came to see you,” she said.

Lilah indicated the little chair beside the mirrored dressing table. “You need company,” she agreed. “It’s best not to try to bear these things alone.” Lilah had brought a piece of the coffin quilt upstairs with her. She picked it up now, and began to make measured stitches like grains of rice against a background of green velvet.

“I feel alone,” said Kelley. “Charles Martin isn’t any help. He refuses to believe that anybody would harm Kayla, and he thinks that the police will catch that woman any minute now. He says Kayla will be home in an hour or two as if nothing had happened.”

“I hope he’s right.”

“So do I, but I can’t just sit back and watch basketball. That’s my baby out there.” Tears coursed down her cheeks, and she pushed them away with the back of her fist. “Charlie acts like he doesn’t care a damn.”

Lilah nodded with a sad smile. “That’s Stargills for you, honey. I think they learned early on not to show their wounds. When something pains Robert Lee—a rude remark by a customer, perhaps, or something going wrong with the house that’s going to cost money—you’d never know from looking at him that anything bothered him at all. Just for a second he gets a frozen look, and then he sets his jaw, and goes on like nothing happened. I’ve been with him thirty years now, and I can tell when he’s just aching inside from something that’s been said or done to him, but he holds it right in, and never lets on to anybody.”

Kelley looked puzzled. “But then they stay angry. They never get rid of it. Never stop hurting.”

“I think the old man taught them to be like that,” said Lilah. “I expect he called it courage. It isn’t easy on the rest of us, though, is it? It’s probably hardest on them, though, holding all that pain inside.”

“I had made up my mind to leave him,” said Kelley.

“Well, you need to make up your own mind about that,” said Lilah. “Ask yourself whether he’d be a good father to that little girl of yours, when she comes back safe. Don’t think he doesn’t care just because he didn’t go traipsing off into the woods and risk getting shot at. Charles Martin isn’t much on heroics, but would he be all right day to day? That’s what matters. That’s mostly the kind of bravery you need in this life.”

“If he loved her—”

“Honey, there’s a dozen policemen out there looking for the child. Do they love her? Or do they love the danger? Garrett went. Ask yourself why they’re out there.”

“I’m so afraid,” whispered Kelley.

Lilah nodded. “I was going to pray about it, but I really do feel that Kayla will be kept safe.”

“Why? Remember that box of bones the strange old woman brought here? Those belonged to a child. Maybe her folks prayed, too. Maybe they felt that she was going to be all right.”

“Times were harder then,” said Lilah. “Many a child sickened and died. We don’t know what happened to the owner of those little bones. A disease, perhaps.”

“Then why wouldn’t the old woman tell us anything about the bones?”