The Third Hill North of Town (16 page)

Mary’s heart began to pound in her ears. “And they think Elijah did
that?
”

Sam didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. His expression said it all.

The muscles in Mary’s legs gave out. She sank into a chair and stared at the clean yellow walls and the polished wooden cabinets of her kitchen, and she began to tremble.

“Oh, my darling boy,” she whispered. She bit her tongue hard enough to draw blood. “Why is this happening to you, of all people?”

Elijah was too fragile for his own good. Mary had always known this, and had feared, in secret, that someday something bad might befall him simply because he was much too vulnerable to protect himself. There were terrible people in the world, and you had to be strong to deal with them. She had tried to teach him this, but it was like trying to teach a tulip to be a machete. From the moment her son had been born it had been obvious to Mary she had been put on this earth for the sole purpose of protecting him; he had no defenses against those who might do him harm, and she had sworn to herself she would always keep him safe.

And she had failed.

Mary Hunter had no illusions whatsoever about what might happen to Elijah were he to be caught by the police. She had been born and raised in a town just eleven miles north of Birmingham, Alabama, and many young black men she had known during her childhood had ended up dead—or worse—after being accused of similar crimes. Most of these boys never even saw the inside of a courtroom; they were just hunted down and “dealt with,” someplace out of sight. Granted, New England was a long way from Birmingham, but her life experience had taught her to have precious little faith in white men with guns and badges.

It took her a moment to realize Sam had hung up the phone and was now sitting across the table, speaking to her. She had to ask him to repeat himself, and then she listened as best she could as he told her of Bebe Stockton’s death. Sam went on to describe the bloodstained, bullet-pocked Edsel, abandoned on the highway by the smoldering remains of a dairy farmhouse, and after that, in hushed tones, he told her of the fragment of a white shirt the police had found in the backseat of the stolen car.

Mary put her hands over her mouth to keep from crying out. She knew full well what Elijah had been wearing that morning when he left home to mail a letter to his grandpa; she had straightened his collar before he walked out the door. He’d looked so handsome and grown-up, and she’d given him a rare smile of approval.

Disregarded tears fell from her chin to the table, one after another. She couldn’t comprehend how the same child who had stood in the doorway that very morning as she inspected his appearance could now be so far away from her, and in such peril. She remembered picking lint from his breast pocket, too, having to reach up a little to do it. She couldn’t get used to his being so tall lately.

“My baby,” she whispered.

Sam’s face was the color of ashes as he looked at her. He reached out to her and tried to say something, but his voice no longer worked.

As bad as the tidings were about their son, it was far worse for Samuel to see the toll his words had taken on Mary. It was almost inconceivable to him that she could be so helpless. As a teenager Sam had once seen Mary stare down a pair of suspected Klansmen who attempted to harass her on the sidewalk in Birmingham, making them hang their heads and walk away in shame; as an adult he had watched her smack a bad-tempered bull between the horns with a milk bottle and frighten the beast into running for cover. She was easily the bravest person Samuel knew, and to see her like this was agonizing.

He should have known, though, he realized.

It was for Elijah that she and Sam had left their home in Alabama and moved to a place they thought would be safer and better; it was for Elijah she worked herself to exhaustion each and every day, to make sure he’d never want for anything, or be ashamed of who he was. Her love for her son eclipsed everything, even the love she had for Samuel himself, which was no small thing.

“Oh, Mary,” he whispered, grieving for her. “Just say the word, and I’ll do whatever you ask.”

Mary clasped his outstretched hands and sobbed aloud. She wept as she had never wept in her life; she wept as if she would never stop weeping again. She had thought she could bear anything, but she couldn’t take the idea of a world without Elijah. She was certain he would not survive this ordeal, and she would never again be able to speak to him, or hold him, or hear him singing in his room at night, when he didn’t know she and Sam were listening to his clear, sweet tenor voice from across the hall. This last thought, especially, was unendurable, and she wanted to die herself before such a thing came to pass.

But as she clasped her husband’s fingers in her own, the trembling in her body gradually subsided, and her breathing quieted.

Sam and Mary had known each other most of their lives. They had gone to the same church and school in the dirt-poor, ramshackle town of Bluff Ridge, Alabama; they were only a year apart in age, and had been constant companions since they could talk. There had never really been a question about the two of them eventually ending up together. They’d always fit together like butter and cornbread, and everybody, including Sam and Mary, just assumed they’d get hitched soon after high school, which they did. (Not even World War II was able to interfere with these expectations: Sam’s feet were flat as a board and exempted him from the draft.) Since their wedding day more than twenty-two years had passed, and their almost preternatural bond had gotten only stronger through the years.

But Mary had never needed Sam as she needed him now. Until this moment, she had never experienced despair. She had known sadness, of course, and suffering, but she had never felt anything akin to this utter wretchedness. In her life she had lost her parents (both to cancer), and two brothers (one to a car accident, the other to alcohol abuse), but she had absorbed these losses stoically, and to be truthful, a bit arrogantly. She had felt pride in her ability to “keep on going” no matter what, and she had cultivated, with hidden pleasure, a reputation for being hard-nosed and unemotional. And though she had been grateful for Sam’s support on these occasions, she hadn’t really needed it, nor ever dreamed there might be a time when she would reach the limits of her endurance.

“I am such a fool,” she murmured.

Sam tightened his grip on her hands, and Mary squeezed back with all the strength she had, trying very hard to remember who she was. She was humbled by the compassion and love she saw in Sam’s eyes, and felt ashamed of her weakness. Sam was hurting just as badly, she knew, and yet there he was, patient and solid as an old tree, doing what he could to help instead of sitting around feeling sorry for himself.

Her shoulders straightened almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she blurted. “I guess you married a great big baby who falls apart the second things go wrong.”

Sam considered this for a moment, then cleared his throat before answering.

“I don’t believe you’ve met my wife, ma’am,” he said solemnly.

There was a pause, then Mary snorted in spite of herself.

Klansmen and bulls weren’t the only ones Mary Hunter had outfaced in her tenure on this earth. When she was properly roused, as Sam knew all too well, it was a sight to behold. Her slight, five-foot-four frame seemed to swell to gigantic proportions and her eyes began to smoke and burn, and when she got going full force it was enough to make a stone gargoyle lose control of its bowels. In her time she had tangled with violent drunks, burglars, politicians, salesmen, Baptist preachers, mud wasps, and Dobermans, and not one of them had been a match for her. She had been born with a God-given genius for intimidation, and if Sam could just get the wind back in her sails, Elijah’s odds for survival would increase dramatically.

Mary drew a long, slow breath, and then another as Sam watched her intently, like a nurse caring for a wounded soldier. After another minute she was able to sit up straight again, and her brown eyes glittered in the bright fluorescent light.

“So,” she rasped. “I guess everybody’s out hunting for him.”

Her voice was still shaky, but Sam had a sudden, perverse desire to grin.

“Yes,” he answered. “Red said he’d do everything he could to bring him home, though, and that we should just wait for him to call.”

“No.”

Her tone sent shivers up Sam’s spine. Mary released his hands and rose to her feet in one smooth, graceful motion, like a ballerina.

Or a lioness.

That’s my girl,
Sam thought.

“Go start the truck, Sam,” Mary said. “We’re done waiting for somebody to shoot our boy.”

 

On this same Saturday evening in June, a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle was chugging along a lonely highway in upstate New York. The sun was nearly down, and the western sky was an immense, spectacular canvas of red, orange, and gold. The fields and hills surrounding the road were blanketed with thick green grass and wildflowers, and in the growing shadows Julianna Dapper could see the flickering of fireflies. It was an idyllic, stirring scene, yet she was the only one in the car who appeared to be enjoying it.

“Oh, my goodness!” she cried from the cramped confines of the backseat. “Would you look at that?”

Elijah Hunter, sitting up front in the passenger seat, chose to ignore her burst of enthusiasm. He took another bite of a cold meatloaf sandwich and gave the driver a forlorn look.

“Can’t you make this stupid thing go any faster?” he muttered around the food in his mouth.

Jon Tate shook his head and sighed. “Every time I try to go faster the engine starts to overheat.”

The Beetle belonged to Chuck and Bebe Stockton. Which meant, of course, it was stolen, but Jon wasn’t particularly worried about this. Considering he was now an accessory to murder and arson, the theft of a 1957 Volkswagen seemed rather inconsequential.

We’re all gonna die,
he thought. This blunt phrase had been running through his head in a monotonous loop for the last few hours, ever since they had driven away from the burning farmhouse.
We’re all gonna die.

 

Three-and-a-half hours earlier, Julianna had waited until Elijah was outside the house before doing what she believed was necessary. She first found a paper grocery bag and ransacked Bebe Stockton’s refrigerator, cramming as much food into the bag as it would hold. Bebe had apparently loved to eat; the refrigerator was jam-packed with leftover ham and meatloaf, pickles, deviled eggs, shepherd’s pie, cheeses, muffins, casseroles, bread, fruit, coffee cake, and green olives.

The boys will be starving,
Julianna thought, her mind racing.
And we mustn’t stop for a while.

Hands flying, she filled the bag in less than a minute, then closed the refrigerator door and stepped over to the window above the sink, wanting to make sure Ben and Steve were out of harm’s way. She located them by the barn, standing in front of the big sliding door that had until recently been padlocked.

“Günter is going to be
furious
with us,” she clucked. “Somebody should take a switch to Steve for breaking that lock.”

She was able to hear their voices through the open window, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. She smiled, though, to see Ben actually engaged in a conversation with the older boy; Ben had few friends other than herself and her older brothers, and she always worried about him being lonely.

Get on with it, girl.
She shook her head, realizing she was stalling.
The sooner you’re done, the better.

She took a final look around the bright, cheerful kitchen. The stove and refrigerator were so clean and white they were almost blinding in the sunlight coming through the window, and the muted-gold linoleum beneath her feet didn’t have a speck of dirt on it. A pair of delicate, blue glass swans were on the kitchen table, and a warm, fragrant breeze was blowing through the curtains. The entire house had the feel of a place that had been meticulously cared for, and loved, for years.

Julianna blinked back tears, then reached up and removed the wooden match from behind her ear.

 

Elijah had no idea what Julianna was preparing to do when she ordered him outside. He was far too rattled to even think of disobeying, though, so right after he snatched a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a box of bandages from the medicine cabinet in the farmhouse bathroom, he ran for the front door, doing his best to ignore the corpse of the woman in the hallway. (This took some doing, as Bebe’s body was splayed across the hall and he had no choice but to leap over it to get to the front porch.) His shoes, wet from his own vomit, made squishing sounds on the hardwood floor as he came down on the other side of Bebe’s chubby legs, and it was a tremendous relief to burst through the screen door and out into the early evening sunlight.

The sweet, sharp smells of honeysuckle and mint instantly filled his nostrils, and the sun on his skin was warm and reassuring. Bumblebees still hovered around the herb garden, cows lowed in the milk house, and a cheerful circle of yellow and orange marigolds ringed the base of the mailbox like a lei. It was all so serene and nonthreatening, and made the macabre scene he had just left behind him seem even more grotesque by comparison.

Jon was over by the barn, struggling with a massive sliding door. Elijah sprinted across the lawn to help, but as he neared the barn he slowed, dreading Jon’s reaction to the tale of the dead woman in the house. He came to a halt and set the hydrogen peroxide and the bandages at the base of the water pump, next to the plastic bag containing Jon’s belongings. He squirmed a little when the older boy glanced over his shoulder and met his eyes.

For his part, Jon had only just resumed his search for gasoline. His wild flight across the pasture and the jog back had winded him, and he’d needed to rest for a minute before finishing what he’d started when he’d broken the padlock. The barn door had proven obstinate, though, even when unlocked, and by the time Elijah arrived he’d only managed to budge it an inch or two.