The Third Hill North of Town (19 page)

Michael and Julianna both had Eben’s unsettling green eyes (as did Seth), and they looked very much alike, with long freckled noses and sharp, high cheekbones. Seth’s throat closed as he gazed at them, sitting side by side. He wasn’t normally sentimental, but every once in a while the unquestioning, routine love he felt for his brother and sister flared up inside of him, intense and startling, like a torch in the dark. His eyes began to sting, and he looked away quickly to hide what he was feeling.

Rufus better stay the hell away from them,
he thought.

 

The drone of the minister’s voice had lulled Eben Larson to sleep again. It was a troubled nap, though, and not just because he was sitting upright on a hard wooden pew in a stifling church. Eben had not slept any easier the night before; Rufus Tarwater had disturbed his dreams, and was disturbing them again that morning. In this particular one, Rufus was sitting on his horse in front of their house, just as he had done after striking Julianna. Where Rufus’s eyes should have been were two black, cavernous holes, and when he opened his mouth to say something, his words were lost in the sound of a savage, corrosive wind.

Eben awoke with a start, once again, to renewed giggling from his children and another jab in the ribs from Emma. He shook his head sheepishly and sat up straighter to avoid falling asleep a third time, and he pondered the fading fragments of his nightmare with a pounding heart. It was all he could do to stay seated; every nerve in his body was telling him to take Emma and the children and get as far away from northern Missouri as fast as possible. His eyes flitted around the room, and he half expected to see Rufus lurking in the corner, watching them at that very moment. Rationally, he knew Tarwater never came within a mile of the church except to beg food or money from the minister, but the sick feeling in his stomach was overmastering his customary reasonableness.

He looked down to find that Emma had taken his hand in her own. She was watching the stuffed owl in the rafters, not him, but her fingers were tight and warm in his, and very strong. Her free hand was resting on Julianna’s knee, and even as disquieted as Eben was, the wry symbolism of this image didn’t escape him—Emma as the link between himself and his children, Emma as the link between himself and everything he cared about. He squeezed her hand back just as tightly, and his heartbeat gradually returned to normal.

She’ll know what to do if Rufus comes back,
he thought.

Eben held to his wife’s hand in gratitude, as if it were a lifeline. Part of him was embarrassed that she was so much braver than he was, but he was an honest man, and thought it silly to pretend otherwise. Emma always knew what to do; it was one of the reasons he loved her as much as he did.

Everything will be fine,
he told himself, trying to believe it.
Everything will be just fine.

 

Julianna Larson was more at peace that morning than anyone else in her family, even Michael. Her face still hurt from being punched, of course, and she was still seething over what Rufus had done to their dog. But the fear she’d felt yesterday on the porch was gone. She was surrounded by family and friends, and it was a bright, hot summer morning, and she refused to have her good mood spoiled by a sorry excuse for a man like Rufus Tarwater. Her father had told her she could drive the Model T home after church, and Seth had promised to help her fix a broken drawer on her desk that afternoon, and Ben Taylor was coming to supper that night. After dark, too, was going to be fun; Ben would no doubt join her and her brothers in the hayloft to look at the stars through Michael’s telescope.

It was going to be a perfect, wonderful day.

She remembered watching her mother shoot one of the new revolvers last night, standing by the barn with her squat, slightly bowed legs rooted to the earth and her arms as steady as tree limbs as she aimed with two-handed, deadly accuracy at the coffee can. Rufus was a big man, but he wasn’t bulletproof, and if he tried anything stupid, Emma Larson would deal with him faster than he could say “Amen.”

“Amen,” echoed the minister, finishing his sermon.

Chapter 7

“I
’m going to stop for gas,” Jon said, pulling into a Phillips 66 service station on the outskirts of the torpid town of Sedling Falls, New York, less than twenty miles from the Pennsylvania border.

Elijah had been dozing in the passenger seat and he sat up, blinking at the bright light above the fuel pumps. “Already?”

He wanted to get much farther from the dairy farm before stopping, even though they had been driving for nearly four hours straight, excluding a quick piss break on the side of the road some miles back.

Jon nodded, too exhausted for more of a response. There was no gas gauge on the Beetle’s dashboard, but he figured they had to be almost empty by this point, even if they’d started with a full tank. His buddy, Tommy—from Toby’s Pizza Shack in Tipton—had owned a Volkswagen similar to this one, and Jon knew from experience the only way to tell when it was out of gas was to wait for it to lose power and die on the road. Flipping a switch on the dash would activate a reserve tank and maybe give them enough juice to get to a station, but it seemed smarter to refuel now while they had the chance.

“Thirty-one cents a gallon?” Julianna exclaimed in the backseat as Jon turned off the engine. “That’s extortion! No wonder Daddy always has gasoline delivered to the house instead of going to the filling station in Bethany!”

An attendant who was about Jon’s age stepped from the station and began walking toward them. As he got closer Jon could make out greasy blond hair and a pasty complexion.

“Shit,” Elijah whispered, digging in his jeans pockets. “What are we going to do for money? All I’ve got is a couple bucks.”

Jon glanced over his shoulder. His plastic bag with the stolen cash in it was on the seat beside Julianna, next to the groceries she’d looted from Bebe Stockton’s refrigerator.

“I’ve got it covered,” he muttered.

As the attendant approached Jon’s open window, Julianna leaned up between the seats to get a better look at him.

“Who’s that?” she hissed. “He’s not the usual boy who works here.”

The kid bent down to speak to Jon. “Fill ’er up?” He glanced over at Elijah and visibly recoiled.

“Yeah,” Jon said, frowning. “Check the oil, too, would you?”

The attendant nodded, then his eyes flicked over to Elijah once more before he slouched to the front of the Beetle to fill the tank. Jon turned to Elijah.

“What was that about?” he whispered. “You don’t think he’s heard about you on the news, do you?”

“Nah,” Elijah answered quietly. He and the blond kid were keeping a wary eye on each other through the windshield. “He just doesn’t like black people.”

Julianna pursed her lips. “If that’s the case, we should take our business elsewhere.” She tapped Jon on the shoulder. “Let me out, Jon, will you? I want to stretch my legs.”

Jon had told her his true name soon after leaving the dairy farm, but this was the first time she’d spoken it aloud. Elijah turned to her with irritation.

“How come you can remember
his
name but not
mine?
” he demanded.

She rolled her eyes as Jon, grinning in spite of himself, stepped out of the car and pushed the driver’s seat forward to make way for her.

“Don’t be difficult, Benjamin,” she pleaded. “It’s not funny anymore.”

She squeezed out of the Beetle’s backseat and stepped toward the station. The attendant called out that he was closing up for the night in just a few minutes, but if she needed the restroom it was on the left side of the building. She thanked him with a wave and disappeared around the corner.

Jon climbed back in the car. “Aren’t you going to use the can, too?”

Elijah shook his head, staring after Julianna with a bemused expression. “I’m okay.”

Jon reached back for his possessions with reluctance. He had been hoping the other boy would exit the car for a few minutes, because he didn’t want to be forced to explain why he had so much money with him. He sighed as he worked at the knot in the plastic handles.

“I ripped off my boss this morning,” he blurted. “I needed the money to run away, and I didn’t have any other choice.”

Elijah shifted in his seat to study him. He wasn’t surprised by this information, but he didn’t know what to say, either. A bead of sweat ran from his armpit down his side and he wiped it off his ribs, grimacing. The night was hot and sticky, and his skin felt as if it had a layer of oil on it.

“Is that why you lied about your name?” he asked at last.

Jon nodded. “Yeah.” He paused. “Well, mostly. I also got a fourteen-year-old girl pregnant. Accidentally.”

“Oh,” Elijah said. He looked away, blushing. Sex was still a deeply unsettling topic for him, even though wet dreams and masturbation had been a regular part of his life for the past two or three years. His father, Samuel, had not yet chosen to have a father-son conversation with him (to the dismay of Elijah’s mother, who did all the laundry, and had secretly been at Samuel for months to “talk to that horny little man”), and since he had nobody else he could discuss such things with, he had been forced to glean what information he could from what other boys at school said to each other in the showers following gym class. Needless to say, the things he’d heard had done little to demystify the subject.

Jon finally got the bag open and removed a ten-dollar bill from the loose pile of cash resting against his copy of
Walden,
then he quickly retied the handles of the plastic.

“Can you pay the guy when he’s finished?” he asked, handing the ten to Elijah and returning his belongings to the backseat. “I need to take a whiz.”

He paused and wrinkled his nose before getting out of the car. Now that they had stopped moving and fresh air was no longer pouring through the windows, there was a sour, unpleasant smell he hadn’t noticed before that seemed to be coming from inside the Beetle.

“What stinks?” he wondered, turning his head and trying to track the scent. “It smells like spoiled milk in here or something.”

Elijah blushed harder. “I think it’s my shoes,” he muttered. “I threw up on them.”

“You did what?” Jon squinted at Elijah’s formerly white sneakers, trying to see them in the shadows under the dash. “When did you do that?”

Elijah stared at his lap. “At the dairy farm.”

His stomach rebelled at the memory of the dead woman on the floor of the house, and it was all he could do to keep from vomiting yet again.

Jon winced. “You should wash them off, man. They’ll just get worse if you don’t.”

Elijah knew he was right, but he also knew he couldn’t bear to remove his shoes in a gas station restroom.

God only knows what kind of germs are on the floor in there,
he thought.

“Is there a hose or something I can use outside?” he asked desperately, scanning the brick walls of the station. The majority of the little building was a dark blur, well out of the range of the circle of light surrounding the pumps.

Jon shrugged and opened the door to get out again. “I dunno. Ask the guy.”

Elijah made a face and mumbled something. Jon didn’t hear what he said and asked him to repeat it.

Elijah bit his lip and spoke louder. “He won’t let me use it, even if there is one.”

Jon raised his eyebrows. “Why the hell not?”

Elijah didn’t bother to reply. The attendant was still shooting hostile glances at him every few moments, and the reason for this seemed to Elijah like the most obvious thing in the world.

Jon waited a minute, at a loss, then finally appeared to grasp the problem. He cleared his throat, feeling uncomfortable and naïve. “You could still clean them off in the bathroom sink. That would work just as well.”

Elijah looked horrified. “I can’t,” he whispered. “What if there’s pee on the floor, and I accidentally stand in it while I’m not wearing shoes?”

Jon gaped at him. “Are you shitting me?”

Elijah dropped his gaze to the ten-dollar bill in his hands and began twisting it. “No, I just mean what if I have a cut on my foot or something, and there’s some kind of disease in the pee? Couldn’t the germs get into my blood?”

Jon closed his eyes and rubbed his temples.
Oh, for Christ’s sake,
he thought.
He’s as much of a nutcase as Julianna.

“Give me your goddamn shoes,” he ordered, scowling. “I’ll do it.”

Dealing with someone else’s puke was not appealing, but Jon had a strong stomach; he had two younger brothers, after all, and when they were little and got sick he had helped his mom clean them up more times than he could count.

Elijah’s face fell. “I didn’t mean that,” he protested. “I just meant . . .”

“It’s okay,” Jon interrupted. “The guy’s going to close the station in a minute, and I’m not going to sit in this stupid car for the next four hours with your goddamn shoes smelling like
that
.” He gestured impatiently. “We’re in a hurry, so just give them here.”

Elijah was speechless. This was the sort of thing his parents would do for him, but for anyone else to make such an offer was unthinkable. He knew he should refuse, but there was no way he could perform this foul chore himself, and he couldn’t come up with an alternative plan. He felt terrible, yet he was deeply moved by the older boy’s generosity. He gawked at Jon’s waiting hands and swallowed, then reached down to tug off his sneakers.

“Socks, too,” Jon said tersely. “They must stink just as bad.”

Elijah nodded, not trusting his voice to speak. He peeled off his socks and tucked them in the shoes, then passed the whole evil-smelling pile to Jon, who accepted it without comment.

“Thank you,” Elijah rasped.

Jon got out of the Beetle and closed the door, but a second later he stuck his head back through the window. “Keep an eye on my stuff while I’m gone, okay?”

 

It was almost full dark outside when the policemen’s flashlight beams crisscrossed the blackened, limbless lump of Bebe Stockton’s body in the smoldering ashes at the Stockton Dairy Farm. Chuck Stockton—who had been out making deliveries in the boonies, and returned to a yard swarming with emergency personnel and a hellish inferno where his house should have been—had managed to maintain his composure while watching the fire consume the last of his home, but the moment Bebe’s corpse was spotted, he crumpled to the ground and became incoherent.

Bebe’s body was unrecognizable, of course, and it would be the following morning before the police could sift through the wreckage to recover her soot-coated wedding ring. Chuck knew it was Bebe, though, the instant he saw her lying there; there was something horribly familiar about the mound of burned flesh, and he needed no further proof to accept that the worst had occurred. He had to be led away from the site by his neighbors, leaving the police to speculate in vain as to the whereabouts of the Edsel’s driver and passengers.

The fire trucks had arrived in time to save the barn and the milk house, but they’d been too late to do anything at all for Chuck and Bebe’s residence. The blaze Julianna had set was fast and fierce; in less than an hour the entire house was reduced to a charred ruin, and there was nothing to do but wait for the coals to be fully extinguished. The fire marshal, a man by the name of Orville Horvath, deemed it unsafe to remove the body until first light, and so it would be the following afternoon before Bebe’s autopsy revealed she had died of a blow to the head, rather than burning to death as first thought. Because of the abandoned Edsel on the highway, however, foul play was suspected from the outset of the investigation.

This being the case, officers had combed all the other buildings on the property, even as the house fire was still raging. The broken padlock hanging from the barn door piqued their curiosity, of course, but since Chuck was not yet home when they entered the barn—and none of them knew the dairy owner well enough to be aware of his most prized possession—the absence of the lime-green Volkswagen Beetle escaped their notice. Orville Horvath had fully intended to ask if anything was missing when Chuck came screeching up the driveway in his milk truck, but Chuck refused to move away from the fire until he knew the fate of his wife, and after Bebe’s body was revealed he was too distraught to answer questions for well over an hour. Horvath tried several times to get him to talk, but Chuck simply stared at him, as if Horvath were speaking in tongues.

Hence the reason no one began to hunt for a missing 1957 Beetle until almost eleven o’clock that night, when Chuck at last recovered enough to inspect the barn with Horvath. Unfortunately, the theft of his beloved, erotically charged automobile hit the grieving widower almost as hard as the loss of Bebe. It was a devastating double blow, and nearly the death of him, too.

Many people had believed Chuck and Bebe to be a laughable mismatch. Chuck was tall and whip-thin, with a sparse, white mustache and stooped shoulders; his disposition was gruff and dour, and he seldom socialized with anybody. This aversion to company extended even to his own daughters. Chuck was fond of his girls, as he had been of his son, too, before the boy’s death in the war, but to be honest he had never given his kids much thought. He had a limited supply of love, it seemed, and was unwilling to share his small stockpile with anyone but Bebe. Bebe’s flightiness and forgetfulness were a constant source of aggravation to him, yet he’d find himself smiling at her sometimes, for no reason, and his heart always lifted a little bit when he’d come home in the evenings and see the light shining from the kitchen window.

He had fallen in love with her the moment he’d met her at an auction, decades before. She had been hovering around a table of glass figurines, and Chuck, surrendering to an odd, carnal impulse, had purposely bumped into her as he was strolling by. She had blushed and giggled, then scurried off with her friends, and he had watched her go in stunned silence, still able to feel the softness of her body where it had connected with his. He’d shown up on her porch the next day, carrying the small glass swan he’d seen her ogling at the auction. She’d flushed with joy and then burst into tears seconds later, overwhelmed to be courted by this earnest and attractive stranger, with such an obvious flair for gift giving. He didn’t care that she was silly and sentimental, nor that she was his polar opposite in almost every way imaginable.