The Third Hill North of Town (18 page)

“What on earth?” she murmured. She tried to make out what was being said, but could only distinguish a few angry words. She shook her head, wondering what her companions were arguing about. It wasn’t like Ben to yell, and this further example of aberrant behavior disturbed her. He was acting so erratically, and she simply couldn’t understand what had gotten into him. He was usually so good-natured and forgiving.

“It could be puberty, I suppose,” she muttered.

A picture on the wall caught her eye. It was of three well-dressed and groomed young children, two girls and a boy, standing in front of the house. Bebe Stockton’s “brood” had posed for Bebe on an Easter Sunday, long ago, as the Stockton family prepared to leave for church. The girls looked to be about nine and seven, but the little boy—Bebe Stockton’s son, Virgil—could only have been four years old or so. Julianna took a closer look at the boy in the photograph and almost dropped the grocery sack.

“Gabriel?” she whispered.

Coincidence loves to play with a disturbed mind.

The name had popped into her head for no reason she could comprehend. Nor did she have any idea why the sight of a child she had never seen before had given her such a shock. But the boy—towheaded and smiling, in an adorable plaid vest and dark pants—looked quite familiar to her, and she felt certain she had once known somebody very much like him, with an unruly cowlick and a gap-toothed grin. She clutched the bag to her chest with one arm and reached out her free hand to touch the picture, trying to remember who the darling little stranger reminded her of, but nothing else came to her.

Another bout of bellowing from the boys outside startled Julianna from her musing. The words were strident enough this time that she could hear most of them. “Retarded little douche bag” and “Big fat chickenshit” came through loud and clear, and she winced. She hated it when the boys were vulgar; it reminded her of Rufus Tarwater.

Her mouth went dry with fear, and she wished she hadn’t thought of Rufus.

The volume of the altercation ratcheted up even higher. It sounded to Julianna as if Ben and Steve might have actually come to blows, and she had to restrain herself from running outdoors to make sure they did no harm to each other. “Boys will be boys,” she reminded herself. Her brothers, Michael and Seth, often engaged in heated horseplay, and never seemed to be any the worse for it, no matter how much it seemed to Julianna that their intention was to kill each other.

Maybe it will be good for Ben and Steve to have a little tussle,
she thought.
They’ll get whatever’s bothering them out of their systems, and Ben might start to act more like himself again.

She suddenly wondered if Ben could be a little sweet on her. She had never considered such a thing before, but if it were true, he might be regarding Steve’s presence as a threat. She blushed at the notion of Ben feeling that way about her; they had always been the best of friends, but surely Ben realized the two of them would never be allowed to date. Still, though, it might explain why he had been so prickly and excitable for the last few hours.

Without really seeming to notice what she was doing, she stepped over to the table and removed the glass chimney from the kerosene lamp. She carefully set the chimney on the table beside an orange swan, then upended the lamp base, sloshing kerosene on the tablecloth and the rug. She walked backward, toward the newspapers, splashing the floor here and there as she went, but saving most of the fuel for the paper mound itself. After the lamp was empty she placed it on a bookshelf, directly in front of a copy of the King James Bible; her father had a bible just like it in his study.

With no warning, an horrific image flitted through her mind. For a long, terrible moment, she believed she could see the silhouette of a very large man standing on the lawn next to her own home in Pawnee, late at night. The man was holding a burning torch above his head, preparing to fling it through the open window of her father’s study; in his other hand was a rifle.

“Rufus,” she gasped, her face blanching.

She lost all track of time. She continued to stare sightlessly at the kerosene-soaked papers for what could have been days, and only regained her senses when a nasal car horn began beeping again and again in the driveway.

“Julianna!” Elijah’s voice echoed through the house. He was yelling through the screen door from the safety of the front porch. “Let’s go!”

She shuddered, shaking her head several times to clear it. “Don’t come inside, Ben! I’ll be right there!”

Like a seasoned smoker, she lit the match in her hand with a thumbnail and took one last look around the orderly, attractive living room. She peered into the flame as it crept toward her fingers, then she dropped the burning match on the newspapers. There was an instant
whoosh
as the kerosene ignited, and Julianna marched toward the door without so much as a backward glance, the grocery sack clutched in her arms like a sleeping child.

 

The sun was now entirely down in western New York, and the last of the vivid colors that had filled the sky at sunset and caused Julianna to gasp with pleasure had vanished, swallowed without a trace into the darkening sky. Jon Tate found the headlight switch on the Volkswagen’s dashboard and flipped it on, praying that both lights were working.

“If we get pulled over for a busted headlight, we can just say sayo-fucking-nara,” he murmured.

He needn’t have worried. Chuck Stockton had maintained the Volkswagen with an almost religious fanaticism ever since buying it five years before, although he really had little need of it. Chuck’s usual mode of transportation was the dairy truck, and as Bebe was unable to drive—the written part of the driver’s test had never made any sense to her at all, and after failing nine times to pass the exam she had given it up as a lost cause—the only time the lime-green Beetle came out of the barn was on Sunday mornings, for church. But Chuck treated the little car as if it were a Rolls-Royce, polishing it after every outing and tinkering with the engine before tucking it back under its protective tarp. His reason for doing this was a mystery to everyone who knew him, including Bebe, but the truth was he found the Volkswagen oddly erotic. From the first moment he had seen the car for sale on a lot in Portsmouth, there was something about its rounded roof that always made him think of a woman’s breast, or the sensual curve of a single, shapely buttock.

Bebe had her swans; Chuck had his Beetle.

This being the case, the Volkswagen was in fine condition. Jon and Elijah hadn’t been able to believe their good fortune when they discovered that the car in the barn was not only unlocked, but also had its key in the ignition. (Chuck always locked the door of the barn, but not the car itself. He liked knowing it was out there, “ready and raring to go” any time he should feel the need to pay it a friendly visit.) Without a moment’s hesitation, the boys had scampered back to the barn door and finished opening it, then Jon had settled behind the wheel and driven the vehicle out into the early evening sunlight. It was Elijah, however, who had insisted on taking the time to close the barn door again before leaving, and had also carefully rehung the broken padlock back on its latch, attempting to cover their tracks.

“Okay,” he’d said, getting into the car. “Maybe nobody will notice anything for at least a couple of hours.”

Except for the dead body in the house,
Jon thought darkly, holding his peace to keep from further upsetting the younger boy.

They retrieved Jon’s plastic bag and the medical supplies from beside the well before driving over to the porch to collect Julianna. Elijah worried when he got out of the car to summon the woman from the house that Jon would abandon him, but Jon had left the Volkswagen in neutral, idling, as Elijah leapt on the porch and yelled through the screen door. Julianna had appeared seconds later, toting a bag full of groceries, and crawled into the tight confines of the backseat.

“Is this your car, Steve?” she’d asked.

“Yeah,” Jon lied, knowing the truth would make no sense to her. “We couldn’t find any gas for yours, so I thought we should take mine instead.”

Julianna’s resolution to reprimand Jon for his act of vandalism to Günter’s padlock had not faded, but she was grateful to him for providing a vehicle, and didn’t want to start a row. Still, though, he mustn’t be allowed to believe she was the sort of girl who didn’t care about the wanton destruction of someone else’s property.

“I really wish you hadn’t broken Günter’s lock,” she’d chided, though with no real heat.

“Jesus Christ!” Elijah yelped as he’d leapt into the Beetle’s front seat and slammed the door. “The fucking house is on fire!”

Interlude

 

N
one of Emma Larson’s children looked a thing like her. They all took after their father, Eben, and Emma was thankful for that. Eben was tall and thin, with big green eyes and a lively, clever face. It always made Emma laugh when she caught him napping, because even when he was asleep his mouth and eyebrows never stopped moving. With his eyes closed and his breathing slow and steady, he still looked for all the world like a little boy who’d been caught making mischief and couldn’t decide whether to smirk or pout about it.

Emma was plain and stout, with round, unremarkable features and no neck or waist to speak of. Her lips moved so little when she spoke her children often teased her by calling her “The Ventriloquist.” Her brown hair was short and neat, and she cut it herself every week to keep it that way. She wore wire-rim glasses and was nearly blind without them, and she dressed mainly in black and white, except for church on Sundays, when she wore a bright green skirt and a dark green blouse—an unfortunate color combination for her, as it made her resemble a well-fed frog, floating on a lily pad. She was soft-spoken and wary with strangers, and people meeting her for the first time often forgot all about her within seconds of shaking her hand.

But Emma’s husband and children worshipped her, and with good reason.

In the Lone Rock church, two miles from Pawnee, Missouri, the worn wooden floors looked newly burnished in the sunlight pouring through the open windows, as did the high-backed, diabolically uncomfortable pews the congregation was required to sit on. A stuffed owl perched on a ceiling beam above the pulpit—put there by the minister in the vain hope its presence would deter bats and swallows from taking over the building—and Emma had spent the better part of the sermon this particular Sunday morning service staring up at it and trying not to fidget. The relentless sunshine was gradually turning the small, square church into a roasting oven; beads of perspiration stood out on every face.

Eben was on Emma’s left, Julianna and the boys on her right. As ever, Emma was proud to be seen with her family when they were all dressed in their finest. Eben looked unaffectedly elegant in his navy-blue suit, Seth and Michael were neat and handsome in matching black trousers and starched white shirts, and Julianna was radiant in a pink and white summer dress Emma had made for her earlier that spring. She looked to Emma like an exotic flower growing in the pew beside her.

An exotic flower with two black eyes, a broken nose, and a bruised upper lip, all thanks to Rufus Tarwater.

When Eben and the children had come to town the day before to tell Emma about Rufus’s assault on Julianna and their uneasiness about what else the man might do, Emma had been working in the post office. When her family all came in together she calmly put down the mail she had been sorting and hung the
Back in a Minute
sign on the door. She inspected Julianna’s face in grim silence and listened to their story; she asked a few questions and told them all to wait as she went next door to the telephone office to ring up Sheriff Burns in Hatfield. When she had finished this conversation and returned to her family, she raised a thin eyebrow at Eben.

“You’re thinking about buying a gun,” she said flatly.

Eben had stared at her for a moment, wondering how she’d guessed that, but in truth he wasn’t that surprised. Emma always seemed to know what people were thinking, and this was especially true when it came to the members of her own family.

He nodded. “I think I better, don’t you?”

They already owned a .22 rifle for shooting rabbits and other pests, but it was old and tended to jam, and wouldn’t be much good for anything else.

She’d studied his face for a long minute, and then the anxious faces of her children. Seth and Michael stood on each side of their sister, like a pair of sober, sunburned bodyguards. Julianna was watching both of her parents with a knowing half smile on her injured lips; Emma wasn’t the only one in the Larson family with the ability to read minds.

Emma had turned to Eben again and nodded back. “Yes.” She paused. “And you better teach me how to shoot it, too.”

That was yesterday, and she now had a revolver in her handbag as she ignored the minister in his pulpit and stared up at the stuffed owl in the rafters. The only things on her mind were Rufus Tarwater and what she would like to do to him for hurting her daughter and threatening her sons. She believed Eben had been right to not allow the boys to lose their innocence by skewering Rufus on the porch, but she herself wouldn’t scruple to murder the man if he were stupid enough to show his brutish face at her house again. She’d never shot a gun in her life until last night, but after two solid hours of target practice in the backyard, she felt certain she could at least point the thing in the right direction and have a fifty-fifty chance of hitting whatever she aimed at.

Eben had fallen asleep in the pew beside her, and he now snorted loudly in his sleep and woke himself up. Julianna and the boys giggled as every head in the congregation turned to look at their father, and in spite of herself, Emma stifled a laugh. She nudged Eben in the ribs and he flushed, and for a moment she almost managed to convince herself everything was fine, and nothing untoward had occurred in the last twenty-four hours.

She knew better, though. The trouble with Rufus Tarwater wasn’t over, and her family was in danger until she figured out a way to deal with him.

Unlike his mother, Michael Larson wasn’t thinking much about Rufus Tarwater that Sunday morning. Michael had been very worried the day before, but the shock of the confrontation with the big man on the porch was gradually wearing off, and he was feeling more like himself. Knowing that Emma had a loaded gun in her handbag was particularly reassuring, all the more so because she had proven herself to be a crack shot as they were practicing the previous night. Eben had purchased a matched set of revolvers at the general store, and after supper they had all gone out behind the barn to learn how to use them. Michael had taken his turn with the weapons, as had Eben, Seth, and Julianna, but none of them save Emma had shown any aptitude as marksmen. Julianna and Seth both missed the big Folger’s coffee can on the fence post ten times in a row, and Michael and Eben fared only slightly better, no matter how close they were to the fence or how many bullets they wasted. Emma, however—to Eben and Julianna’s delight, and the envy of Michael and Seth—became more accurate each time she tried, and by the end she was pinging the can again and again, even from as far away as twenty-five feet.

The main reason, however, that Michael wasn’t dwelling on Rufus that Sunday morning was because Sarah Ann Bowen kept turning her head to smile at him from across the aisle in the church.

The dating pool in Pawnee, Missouri, was severely limited, so Michael had little experience with girls. Be that as it may, he still knew enough to know he very much liked Sarah Ann Bowen, and he also knew how very much he wanted to see her naked. He’d imagined many times what she would look like without her dress; just catching a glimpse of her long black hair and dimpled chin was enough to make him cross his legs, flush the color of rust, and stop breathing. She was only a year younger than him, and she was the prettiest girl in town by far.

Does she want to see me naked, too?
he wondered.

The flush on his face deepened as he considered this, and he squirmed a little in the pew between his brother and sister. The church felt intolerably hot all of a sudden, and he couldn’t wait for the service to end.

He knew this would never happen, of course; the fishpond behind their house was in plain view from the back porch, and he’d never find a way to meet her without somebody seeing them. But the mere thought of sliding into the cool water with her, wearing nothing but their skin, was so delicious he almost couldn’t bear to let it go.

Julianna leaned close to whisper in his ear. “Sarah Ann uses pig manure for toothpaste, Michael,” she murmured. “I swear to God, her breath smells worse than an outhouse.”

Michael was jarred from his pleasant reverie and glared over at her. “Shut up,” he whispered back.

Michael’s infatuation with Sarah Ann Bowen had not gone unnoticed; both Julianna and Seth—overjoyed at being given the rare opportunity to provoke their normally easygoing middle brother—had been teasing him unmercifully for the past few weeks whenever they caught him mooning over her.

Seth bent his head to address Michael’s other ear. “Sarah Ann keeps looking at me,” he breathed. “Think she’d let me play with her titties if I asked nicely?”

Seth already had a girlfriend in Hatfield named Hessie Trotman—aka “Hussy Trollop” to Michael and Julianna—and Michael knew full well that Seth wasn’t the least bit interested in Sarah Ann. He also knew that both Julianna and Seth would only torment him further if he reacted badly, but he couldn’t help getting mad anyway.

“Sure,” he hissed back. “Hussy let me touch hers just last night, so I guess it’s only fair.”

Emma Larson, alerted to her children’s misbehavior by the frowns of fellow worshippers in the surrounding pews, put a warning hand on Julianna’s knee and wagged a finger at her sons and daughter. All three straightened immediately and resumed staring at the minister with attentive expressions. Emma kept her hand on Julianna’s leg as a precaution, knowing her brood would likely resume their whispered conversation the instant she dropped her guard.

Temporarily saved from the taunts of his siblings, Michael gratefully returned to daydreaming about Sarah Ann, and all the wonderful things they might do together if he could only get her alone.

 

Seth Larson was a natural-born worrier, but he, like Michael, was feeling much better that morning than he had the day before. Seth’s improved outlook, however, owed less to the revolvers Eben had purchased than it did to Emma’s phone conversation with Sheriff Burns. According to Emma, the sheriff had promised to speak to Rufus Tarwater, and had also sworn to “keep a close eye” on the man for the next few days until Rufus’s volatile temper had cooled. Seth wasn’t foolish enough to believe there was no longer any danger, but he trusted Burns to do what he said, and was relieved somebody in authority had been apprised of the situation. He felt that not even a dumb son of a bitch like Rufus would be so stupid as to try anything when he knew the county sheriff was watching him. Besides this, everybody who had seen Julianna that morning as she entered the church had noticed her bruises right away and were openly indignant after hearing what had happened; the news would spread quickly, and if Rufus decided to try something else, somebody was sure to see him coming and would either show up themselves or send help to deal with him.

A fly landed on a cowlick in Michael’s short blond hair and Seth automatically brushed it away. Michael didn’t notice; he had resumed gawping at Sarah Ann Bowen and couldn’t spare attention for anything else. Seth caught Julianna’s eye and grinned, and she shook her head with a disconcertingly adultlike amusement.

Seth and Julianna had never had any problem getting along, but until lately Seth hadn’t felt as close to his sister as he did to Michael. Over the last few months, though, Julianna had begun to mature at an almost alarming rate, and every time he saw her now she seemed to be a finer, more interesting person. There was a new look in her eyes, a curiosity and a directness, that reminded him of their mother, and when she spoke she sounded smart and thoughtful, just like their dad. Seth supposed she’d always had these qualities, but the four-year difference in their ages had kept him from really noticing it before. It was as if she’d been a little girl for fifteen years, and then bloomed overnight into an attractive, intelligent young woman.

His good humor slowly faded as he studied her face. Her bruises looked puffy and painful, and he found himself getting furious all over again as he remembered how she’d cried out when Doc Colby reset her broken nose. He understood why Eben had made them let Rufus go, but he couldn’t help thinking it was a huge mistake to do so. Eben was the wisest man he knew, but in this case he’d been too fair-minded and forgiving by far, in Seth’s opinion. Seth almost wished that they’d gone ahead and killed Rufus when they had the chance; he and Michael could’ve pinned the miserable bastard to the side of the house like a big, ugly moth, and put an end to him once and for all.

He became aware that Julianna was watching him. Her face had softened as his mood darkened, and she now gave him a reassuring smile, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. Seth blinked in surprise, then noticed that his little brother was looking at him, too. The goofy, love-struck expression on Michael’s face had completely vanished, replaced by a concern that made him, too, seem more like an adult than a teenager. Michael had always been attuned to Seth like this; whenever Seth was troubled he would show up and sit beside him in silence, just like this, for however long it took for Seth to work through whatever was bugging him.