The White Mountain (2 page)

Tucker’s cheeks were red from
the heat, but his skin looked dry.

Walls said, “Don’t you
sweat?”

“I don’t think I have any
left.  Here, look at this.”  Tucker stuck out his hand, holding a crumpled
napkin by a corner.  “Found this tucked in his sock.  Rain must’ve washed it
out a bit before he ran in here, but you can still read some of it.”

Walls took it from him, held
it close to his face and read as Mary looked over his shoulder.  “Looks like
some kind of list.  Like maybe a grocery list.  Powder?  Powder something? 
What’s that one?  Devil?  Does that say
devil
right there, up near the
top?”

“I can’t tell,” Mary said.  “Such
bad handwriting.  What about that second item?”

“
Hmm
.  Looks like it
says ‘The White Mountain.’”  He shrugged.  “The White Mountain?  Any idea what
it means?  Ain’t that some kind of flour?”

“Nah, that’s
White Fields
. 
There’s more down at the bottom, too,” Tucker said.  “I couldn’t read it.”

Walls squinted.  “I can’t
either.”  He handed it to Mary.  “You got better eyes than me.  What’s that
say?”

Mary focused on the handwritten
words, blue ink faded and bleeding at the edges, seeping out into the paper’s
thin fibers.  Her breath caught in her lungs as she realized what she was
looking at.  What the letters and numbers said, what they meant.  For her
situation, and her sister’s.  Walls’, too. 

There it was, a revelation
that changed every assumption they’d made up to that point.

“That’s Alice’s address,” she
said.  “Does that mean what I think it means?”

“What’s that?”

“They were here on purpose.”

Walls tilted his head,
thought for a moment, and then snatched the napkin from her.  He held it out to
Tucker, delicately, by the corner.  “Bag and tag,” he said.  “This just got
different.”

CHAPTER 2

Mary shuffled across the
yard as fast as her damaged leg would allow.  Going on five years now, she’d
refused any major treatment, allowing nothing more than homemade massages from
her fiancé Jimmy, which provided a smidgen of relief on occasion, and yet she
often pushed too hard and too far.  Blame it on her stubborn will or the desire
to punish herself for her failures, blame it on Sledge and his attacks.  Either
way, she knew the consequences of hustling around that morning would last for
days.  But she pressed on, swimming through the dense humidity.

She could hear Walls tromping
along behind her, struggling to get a good, deep breath. 

Above the front right corner
of the farmhouse, in contrast to the burnt-red bricks, gray shingles and blue
sky, a wall of black clouds approached and threatened more rain. 

A week ago, the barren creek
beds nearby and cracked soil in Alice’s garden begged for it after a month of
baking in the summer heat, but too much rain on packed and hardened earth had
led to flash floods and washed-out roads.  Storm after storm had been rolling
through, dumping more rain and dampening efforts to clean up around the
county.  The day before, a cluster of tornados, rare for southwest Virginia,
had ripped through a swath of land ten miles south, killing seven residents of
Ashton and leaving three times that number homeless.

Dreading another storm, Mary offered
a quick, silent plea to Mother Nature that her brother-in-law would get home
safe after hauling a load of furniture out to Sacramento.  The last she’d
heard, he was in Memphis and on his way back.

Randall hated being on the
road all the time, hated being gone away from Alice and a growing Jesse, but
driving a rig provided steady income.  Steadier than working in one of the
local factories that had seen more layoffs than production in the past six
months.  But, missing a t-ball game or letting the grass get too high were
minor infractions compared to what was happening at that moment.  A murder on
his property, a wife and son in need of protection, and the looming possibility
that something bigger lurked out there beyond his fifty acres were enough for
Mary to curse him for being gone, however unavoidable his absence may have
been.

She would do what she could. 
With years of experience in law enforcement and tactical training, and another
half-decade of surveillance and information-gathering capabilities as a P.I.,
she was better equipped to take care of her own flesh and blood than most
everyone in the local population.  However, her skill set was almost laughable
when compared to Randall’s. 

Former Marine Corps sniper. 
Veteran of countless off-paper, top-secret missions.  Third-degree black belt
in Tae Kwon Do and an eighth degree in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.  Survivalist. 
First responder.  And underneath it all, a backwoods farm boy that could shoot
a flea off a squirrel’s tail from three hundred yards.

At six-feet, three inches
tall, two hundred and thirty pounds of granite muscle, she had no doubt Randall
could clean and jerk the rotund bulk of Detective Walls over his head.  Randall
moved through crowds like a bowling ball through a set of pins. 

When he strolled down a
sidewalk, people got out of his way and thanked him for the privilege.

Mary adored him and
everything he’d done for her down-and-out sister, but all of his capabilities
didn’t amount to a hill of beans while he was almost six hundred miles away.

She reached the front porch
and stopped, wary of the climb.  Her leg throbbed and had grown stiff from
overuse that morning.  Each six-inch step was its own mountain.  Ascending
wasn’t so much the problem; her left leg was strong from compensating over the
years.  Balancing herself on her right one, even with the help of the cane, was
enough for stars to speckle her vision.

Walls stopped at her side and
gazed up toward the porch, holding his ribs.  “What’re you waiting on?” he
asked between gasps.

She offered the same question
in return.  “Me?  What’re
you
waiting on?”

“Sisyphus,” he said.  “I
might need the help.”

“Let’s go around to the back
porch.  Okay by you?”

“I won’t tell if you won’t,”
he said, and together, they marched through the side yard, past the honeysuckle
bushes and the thick forest of weeds encroaching underneath the limbs.  “We
should get them somewhere safe,” he added, climbing the single step of the back
porch.

Mary agreed as they entered
the breezeway, navigating around the century-old pile of tools, wooden crates,
and equipment that had seen regular use back when Randall’s grandfather grew
acres of tobacco as a cash crop.  Now the symbolic gears of farming production
sat in rusting heaps, gathering dust while they went unused.  Historical implements
of an honest day’s work cast aside and forgotten.

“Look at that hatchet,” Walls
said, pointing at a single short-handled axe.  “That thing some sort of
Cherokee tomahawk?”

“No,” Mary said, “they used
it to cut tobacco stalks a hundred years ago.”

“Doesn’t look like it would
cut butter, you ask me.”

“Would you please quit
gawking and hurry up?”

Walls puffed up his chest and
hiked up his pants.  “Don’t forget who’s in charge here.”

Mary stopped with her hand on
the doorknob.  “When it comes to my family, I think you have a pretty good idea
who is.”

“We can work that out later,”
he said, averting his eyes, suddenly interested in the contents of a decrepit
crate.

“Thought so.”  Mary pushed
open the door.  “Al?  Where are you guys?”

“In here!”  Her sister’s
voice came from somewhere within the house. 

Mary hobbled and Walls
waddled through the kitchen where the smell of fresh coffee permeated the
room.  The coffeemaker and microwave were the only new appliances introduced in
the last decade, and Alice often complained about having to defrost the ancient
refrigerator’s freezer. 

The stove hadn’t worked in three
months and since they couldn’t afford a new one, fast food bags and empty pizza
boxes populated the shelves instead of a spice rack and cookbooks.  Junk food
was the norm while Randall was out on the road.  He did most of the shopping
and cooking while he was in town, searing meats and vegetables on the grill out
back, serving Jesse fruit and yogurt for snacks.  Mary had taken note of the
way her nephew’s eyes lit up at the sight of a steak numerous times, and in contrast,
his shoulders would droop at yet another slice of limp, microwave pizza on his
dinner plate.

They found her and Jesse in
the den, where the shades were drawn and cigarette smoke hung as thick as the
air outside.

Sounds of gunfire and
screaming emanated from the flat-screen television mounted on the wall.  Mary
looked closer at the display and saw bright colors, a desolate city, and
neon-purple aliens scrambling to find cover behind burnt-out cars and crumbling
walls. 

Alice looked up from the couch,
flicked her ashes onto the floor and asked, “You find anything out there?  I
called Randall earlier.  Should be here soon.”

Mary said, “Tell you in a
minute,” and eased over to where Jesse sat in front of the coffee table, eyes
transfixed, thumbs pounding away at the controller.  “What’re you playing,
buddy?”

“Juggernaut,” he said.  “The
new one.”

Walls said, “My kids play
that thing.  Cost me damn near seventy bucks.”

Mary frowned, shook her head
to shut him up, then said to Jesse, “Sounds like fun.”  She bent down and put a
hand on his shoulder.  “Any chance you could pause it?  Maybe go upstairs and
play in your room for a bit?  We need to have a little talk with your mama. 
Grownup stuff.”

“But I’m almost to the end of
the level.”

“We’ll leave it alone, I
promise.  Just pause it and you can come right back when we’re done.”

“Okay, Auntie Lamb.  But if
you want to play, the blue button is for shooting and the red one makes you go
like this...see?”  Auntie Lamb.  It drenched her in cuteness whenever she heard
it.  Months ago, he’d latched onto the nursery rhyme, “Mary had a Little Lamb,”
and would sing it at full volume whenever she visited, endlessly on repeat. 
The nickname stuck.  She loved it.

Mary looked up at the screen
and watched the well-muscled hero crouch and crawl behind a trashcan.  She
couldn’t help but notice that the character resembled Randall.  “All under
control, little man.”

Jesse stood up and hustled
out of the room as Alice called after him, yelling to stay away from the
windows.

When he was out of earshot,
Mary turned to her sister. 

While Mary had gotten the
dark complexion, dark hair, and dark eyes of her distant Native American
ancestors, Alice had come away with the fair skin and light eyes of the German
immigrant side.  Deducing how two sisters that were so completely different came
from the same set of parents was an exercise better left to geneticists. 

Mary was thin and sinewy. 
Alice, once slender and strong, had slipped into a pudgy, bottle-blonde and
dark roots semblance of a former Homecoming queen. 

This, in part, was due to a
recent, short-lived addiction to methamphetamines and the aftereffects of
beating it on her own.  Job loss.  Wrong crowd.  Poor judgment.  Typical
Alice.  Randall had almost ended their marriage because of it and truly, it
surprised Mary that he hadn’t.

Yet, through whatever grace
or moment of clarity that saw fit to intervene, she’d managed to save herself
and her family.  Before Randall left with Jesse in tow, before Mary finally
decided that she could no longer keep the secret hidden.

However far she’d slipped physically,
she had a good heart and volunteered often at a Baptist church to pass the time
(and to thwart the pangs of compulsion) while Randall was away and Jesse was in
school.  But, now that it was summer, the two of them spent more time at the
lake fishing and playing on the beach than anywhere else.  Her tank top and
cut-off jeans showed patches of white, tanned, and sunburned skin.  It reminded
Mary of Neapolitan ice cream.

Mary said, “Are you kidding
me with this smoke?” and waved at the air.  “Can’t you at least crack a window
for Jesse’s sake?  Put a fan on or something?”

Alice sat up and stubbed out
her cigarette.  “Don’t give me any of your damn lectures, Lamb.  I ain’t
stopped shaking since I saw that body out there.”

“But you shouldn’t be—”

Alice shot up from the couch
and then pulled her tank top down to cover her belly.  “How many murders you
see when you were a cop?”

“Eight,” Mary said, without
hesitation.  Every single one of them an image seared into her memory.

Alice turned to Walls.  “How ‘bout
you, Henry?”

“That’ll be Detective Walls,
Mrs. Blevins,” he said, leaning back on his heels.

“Oh, bullshit.  I sit behind
you in church every Sunday.  Don’t give me that nonsense.”

“This is official police
busi—”

“I don’t care if y’all are
Miss Marple and Sherlock stinkin’ Holmes.  There’s a dead body out there and my
nerves are fried worse than burnt bacon, so cut me a little slack for trying to
settle down so I won’t flip my shit in front of Jesse, okay?”