The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (6 page)

He set down his cup of coffee and bent over the keyboard once again: Dear Naomi Judd: I cannot tell you how shocked and grieved I was to learn of your illness, and I hope . . .

Mark Underhill twisted his goosenecked study lamp so that its light shone on the wall above Joshua's bed. The stains were still there, faint traces of pink against a surface scrubbed whiter than the rest of the wall. He supposed that he could scour the rest of the wall, or even repaint it a gleaming white, but there seemed little point in the exercise. He would always know that the stains were there, no matter what cosmetic effects were used to disguise them. Joshua had forever tainted this room with his blood and brains.

Mark slept in the other twin bed, under the window, with a red-and-blue Lone Star quilt, and a threadbare tiger saved from his infancy. The brothers had not so much shared a room as halved it. Mark's side was messy, plastered with rock-star posters and devoid of books, while Joshua's had been tidy and bare, except for his reading material, everything from All Creatures Great and Small to Playboy. Odd that he hadn't left a note, Mark thought, as hung up as he had been on words. Not that Mark would have wanted to read it. What did the immediate whys matter? It was done. It was finished. And now he and Maggie were left in twelve rooms of silence, four of them haunted with fading red 103

stains and the indelible memory of bodies sprawled in death. Thanks a lot, Josh. Where am I supposed to sleep now?

It was all right for Maggie. He hadn't even entered her room. There were no bloody footprints to scrub away, no horrors to remember every time you looked at it. But the other three upstairs bedrooms . . . Well, Mom and Dad's bedroom wasn't exactly defiled. He'd got them downstairs, but Mark couldn't bring himself to move into their sanctuary. Even when their possessions had been removed, it still smelled of them; it was still their territory. Simon's little bedroom under the eaves—he would never set foot in there again. Let Simon haunt it to his heart's content, if his soul had ever awakened from that shotgun blast. Simon had been taken away, and buried miles from the farm, but as far as Mark was concerned, the little body still lay curled up in the pine sleigh bed, its blond curls spilling over the pillow, caked in gouts of red.

That left Mark's own room, the one he had shared with Joshua, where Joshua had come with a shotgun to sit down and consider the consequences of his killing spree before taking the easy way out, abandoning them without family to an indifferent community.

Mark wondered if any of that anguish still lingered, charging the air with despair. He dreaded going upstairs to sleep, afraid that if he opened his eyes in the darkness, he would find Josh standing over him, looking down with unutterable sadness. They had made a pact

once, when he was ten and Josh was twelve. They had been hooked on horror movies at the time, and after watching a ghost story on television—had the ghost revealed the location of treasure to his living buddy?—the brothers had come to an agreement, shaking hands to seal the bargain. Whichever one of us dies first will come back to tell the other what it's like to be dead. That was the deal. It had seemed very daring and romantic back then, when neither of them really believed they were ever going to die at all. The pact had been casually made: sixty, seventy years from now, drop in, why doncha? Who knew that quiet, intense old Josh would kick open the Steppenwolf door before he even hit twenty?

Mark Underhill stared at the faint outline of the bloodstains on the bedroom wall and spoke aloud. "Look, Josh, the deal is off, okay? I know we made a pact, but I'm canceling it now. If you're here, go away, all right? I don't want to see you! I'm going to shut my eyes now, and I want you to get the hell out of here. You've done enough. If you wanted me to know what being dead was like, you sure as hell could have arranged it. Like you showed Mom and Dad and Simon. Just get the hell out of our lives!"

He buried his face in Joshua's pillow so that Maggie could not hear him sobbing.

Nora Bonesteel sat knitting in the firelight. Knitting was a skill that didn't require the use of sharp eyes, the way needlepoint does. Nora's eyes were good enough for her age—with read-105

ing glasses—but she needed a strong light to see the stitches, especially in dark cloth. Tonight she felt like sitting in shadows, letting the peacefulness of the night come over her while her thoughts wandered. She just needed something to busy her hands; her generation was not raised to be idle. Fifty years' experience had taught her to guide the yarn with her fingers, a little stiffer now with rheumatism, but still sure. The pile of crimson wool in her lap was beginning to take shape beneath the arc of her needles: A little sleeve protruded from one knitted side.

The flicker of firelight through the two front windows made her house shine out like a jack-o'-lantern above the dark valley, while across the ridge the Hangman glowered in a sliver of moonlight. She didn't want to think about the holler tonight. Her gaze lingered on a pile of National Geographies stacked on the pine coffee table. She would like to have traveled. She'd done a little bit of "gallivanting" in her youth: a trip to Asheville to visit kinfolks in the forties, and once in 1956 an excursion to Myrtle Beach, chaperoning a church weekend, but the rest of her life had been spent within the shadow of the Tennessee mountains. She would like to have seen how the Alps or the Andes measure up to them. She might have got away back in 1932, when a summer of blackberry picking and dressmaking had given her enough money to go to college at East Tennessee State in Johnson City. It was the depression then, so nobody had any money, and she didn't feel too much out of

place with her country clothes and hill ways. The 1932 Buccaneer, a blue softcover yearbook of only a few dozen pages, shows a winsome girl with an oval face and black hair parted in the center and pulled back to the nape of her neck. She looks out of place among all the crimp-curled blondes, but there is a serenity to her features that almost transcends the sadness. She looks out from the page as if she knows something sorrowful about you, but she hasn't the heart to tell.

She had been studying to get her teaching certificate, but in late spring of her first year she took out her cardboard suitcase one night and starting putting all her belongings into it. The next day came word that Johnsie Bonesteel had died back in Dark Hollow. Nora was needed at home to see to her ailing mother.

She had never married. Occasionally, a teenager in calf love would ask her why, as if she'd missed out on the most marvelous experience imaginable, and she had a string of quick answers to reel off. / didn't know the last man to ask me would be the last man to ask me. My sweetheart was killed at Chickamauga. (She didn't use that one much these days. Young people had no sense of history and missed the joke.) / put the last stitch in a Lone Star quilt and doomed myself to spinsterhood. The real reasons were more complex. She was an only child who had learned early to live with solitude, and, finally, to like it. Her mother's illness kept her tied down for most of her twenties, and then she had inherited the house, so there 107

was no great need to wed just for the sake of stability. She made a little money with her needlework, her goats, and her garden crops, but on a rural farm a little money was quite enough. So the urgency was lacking.

Lacking on both sides, truth to tell. The young bucks in Wake County knew well enough about black-haired Nora Bonesteel and her knowing. Hadn't she smelled that Watson fire two days before it happened? And didn't she stop working on Flossie Johnston's wedding dress the day Jack Sherrod was killed at the Battle of the Bulge, though it was weeks before the family was notified? People didn't have anything against Nora Bonesteel: She was a good Christian woman, and she couldn't help the Sight. Some folks said the midwife had forgotten to put the salt in her mouth when she was born, and that left her susceptible to the visions, but most folks felt it was just the Bonesteel way. Her grandmother had been the same; but still and all, they didn't want to get too close to her. It would be like having Death as an upstairs boarder, somebody said. People were always afraid of what she'd know about them; and they didn't want to be reminded of it.

Nora looked up from her knitting. The fire threw long shadows against the white walls, shapes that seemed to writhe and beckon in the dimness. She stared for a few minutes in the direction of the fire shadow. "Yes," she said gently, as if continuing a conversation. "I know why you felt you had to, and it isn't my place to call you right or wrong. We're not to pass

judgment in this world. What's done is done." She hesitated for a moment in the silence, poised as if she were listening. "All the same, I'd let it go now. Go on now, just turn loose. Let the Lord work things out." Nora Bonesteel went back to her knitting.

I am but mad north-north-west;

when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw. — Hamlet

It wasn't often that Sheriff Spencer Arrowood played taxi service for a human skull. Occasionally, it had been his grim duty to convey someone's mortal remains away in a body bag, but usually the rescue squad could be called to carry out that task. This skull, however, was so clean and anonymous, and so departmental, with the little metal hooks at its jaws, and its steel-hinged cranium, that it did not carry with it any of the ordinary pall of death. As far as the sheriff was concerned, this hunk of bones had never been mortal. Since he would never know its past or even its identity, to him it was merely a stage prop. At least it was going to be.

The student drama group at Hamelin High was doing Hamlet as its fall play, and as a favor to the drama teacher, an old friend of his mother, Spencer Arrowood had been coerced into borrowing a skull from the hospital in Unicoi County, and delivering it to the school so that "Yorick" would be present for play practice.

As he drove past the courthouse, he automatically looked at the park bench under the elms 113

to see who Vernon Woolwine was today. Rain or shine, Vernon was always there, outfitted in an ingenious costume reflecting the condition of his psyche. "A welfare-funded exercise in street theatre," one of the county commissioners had called him, but it wasn't against the law to be crazy, and so instead of being sent to an institution, he had become one. By now the citizens of Hamelin were accustomed to the sight of Batman or Elvis lounging about in front of the courthouse, and they took a perverse pride in this civic peculiarity: Jonesborough might be a quaint little tourist trap, but it had nothing to compete with Vernon.

As he came level with the park bench, Spencer slowed the patrol car and gave an affable nod to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle eating a doughnut. Vernon had scrounged up an adult-sized Halloween costume, maybe on sale in the week after the holiday, and he was perched in his usual spot, resplendent in a Styrofoam shell tunic, tight green pants, and a red kerchief, tied around his forehead. Idly, Spencer wondered which turtle he was. Maybe he'd ask at the high school; it would be a good icebreaker with the kids. Better than trying to discuss Shakespeare.

Spencer smiled, remembering his own days at Hamelin High in the mid-sixties. In his senior year the play had been Macbeth, and Spencer had strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage as the avenging thane of Fife. Martha, who was now the dispatcher at the sheriff's office, had played the waiting woman to Lady Macbeth, a cheerleader named Tyndall Johnson,

suitably robed and wimpled for the role. But Spencer found that his most endearing memory of the school play was not his own theatrics, but James Jessup's discovery of Shakespeare.

Before the students began rehearsing the Macbeth, Mrs. Oakey had assigned them parts in English class and had them read it aloud, one act each day. Though none of them realized it at the time, it was a painless audition for the major roles. Those who read with the most expression and comprehension got the biggest parts.

James Jessup, as he recalled, ended up playing the cream-faced loon in the stage production, so that he hardly said anything at all, but Spencer believed that he had got more out of the play than anyone in the community. He was a wiry towhead from a farm family from way up the mountain in Pigeon Roost. He was probably the first person in his family to even get to the senior year in high school, and while his grades weren't outstanding, he was clever enough, and he could learn anything that captured his attention.

He had never heard of the play Macbeth, but the story of a murderous Scottish warrior in league with witches took his fancy as no algebra problem or French vocabulary list had ever managed to do. Once he grasped the story and the idea of the treacherous prophecy, he became consumed with the plot and with trying to figure out how it would end. Unlike the more cultured town students, Spencer among them, James Jessup had no idea how the play was go-115

ing to turn out. Each day in class he would listen to the cadence of the dialogue with all the alertness of an attorney following the opponent's testimony. Oddly enough, he seemed to understand the language better than the town students. Every so often, when a word in the text was questioned, it was James, not Mrs. Oakey, who supplied the definition.

"Palter," he would say. "That means fool around, don't it? My grandma used to say that every now and again."

It turned out that he was going home to Pigeon Roost every evening and telling the story of Macbeth to his family, acting out all the parts himself and giving them updates on each new development as the acts were read out in English class. The Jessups were in the same suspense as he was, waiting for the outcome. In those days before television in the hills, the Jes-sup family had spent long hours in front of the hearth, debating how the prophecy "none of woman born" would come to pass.

On the night of the play, three generations of the Jessup family turned up in their ancient Ford truck and took front-row seats, not so much for James's acting debut as to see the thane of Glamis get his comeuppance from a tree-bearing rebel army.

Now Spencer knew that satellite dishes ringed the hills above Hamelin, and that the present generation of Jessups probably watched MTV and maybe even owned a video of Orson Welles's Macbeth. He wondered if, in the process of assimilation, they had lost all their magic. That would be a shame.

Now, more than twenty years after Spencer Arrowood's acting debut, the Hamelin High play was Hamlet. The students would be familiar with the play's plot. Some of them would have seen the Mel Gibson version at the mall in Johnson City, but the trade-off was that the thread of language would have been lost. He was willing to bet that no backwoods student had heard words like bruited and boltered from Granny at home. Today's granny was a depression-era baby whose stock in trade was the Enquirer and "All My Children," not folk ballads and mountain legends.

Spencer decided that as long as he was going there, anyway, he would spend some time at the high school. It was good to stay in touch with the county's young people, the largest source of potential troublemakers in any constituency. The sight of him chatting affably in the lunchroom—with his badge on his uniform and a pistol on his hip—might deter any amount of boredom-driven vandalism in days to come.

It wasn't as if he had any urgent business elsewhere. LeDonne was on duty now and could easily handle the lost-dog phone calls and the trespassing complaints. Hunting season was still two weeks away. The last real police business they'd had was the Underhill killings two weeks before.

Making an entrance with a skull under his arm wasn't a bad idea, either. Some of the girls in the hallway giggled, but there was a note of respect in their eyes as he strolled past them and into the principal's office.

"Special delivery," he said to Ora Hayes, who had been the school secretary back in his students days.

She sprang up from her desk just as he was setting the grinning death's-head on the counter. "Honestly, Spencer Arrowood! Showing off at your age. I'll call Mr. Gilchrist on the intercom. Do you want to wait?"

"Might as well, Ora. As long as I'm here, I'd like a word with Sam Rogers."

Ora Hayes paused with her finger on the intercom switch. "What do you want him for? Not more hubcap thefts?"

"No. The high school kids are behaving as well as can be expected at the moment."

The secretary nodded toward a closed door labeled Mr. Rogers — vice-principal. "Go on in," she told him. "All he's doing in there is reading the paper."

Spencer tapped on the door to give Rogers time to stow the comic page before he entered. "Don't get up. I was just delivering the skull for the drama class," he explained, settling down in the visitors' chair.

Sam Rogers, a thin, worried-looking man in horn-rimmed glasses, half-rose out of his seat to acknowledge his visitor and then sat down again, tapping his fingertips together in a gesture of nervous anticipation. "We hope you'll join us for a performance, Sheriff," he said at last.

"Well, I might do that," said Spencer, smil-118

ing. "Not that I hold with Hamlet being a hero, after killing Polonius in—what was it? Act three?"

The vice-principal, whose teaching specialty was vocational ed., inclined his head in cautious agreement.

"I wanted to check on the Underhill children. It's kind of an unusual situation, them living out there by themselves, and I just wanted to make sure they were doing okay."

Sam Rogers blinked. "They're living alone on that farm?"

"There weren't any relatives, and they didn't want to be sent away. They did inherit the land, you know. And they seemed to be pretty levelheaded kids."

The smaller man digested this information. "I haven't heard of any problems," he said cautiously. "Their attendance seems to be satisfactory. Of course, we're two weeks away from a grading period, so I can't give you any information about that."

The man had no idea how the Underhills were, Spencer realized. Maybe only a vague idea who they were. "Maybe I should talk to them."

Rogers looked at his watch. "We're doing some standardized testing this morning, and I'd hate to have to pull them out of class, mess up the results and all. If you could come back around one-thirty ..."

Spencer Arrowood was on his way out the door. "It's not that important. It was just a thought. I think I'll drop by the cafeteria and 119

take first lunch with the students—a little goodwill mission."

"Sure. Glad to have an extra monitor in there."

"If there are any problems with the Underhills, though. Depression, absenteeism, whatever, you call me, all right?"

"I'll do that, Sheriff," said Sam Rogers, turning away. His mind had already moved on to the next item on his schedule.

Joe LeDonne liked patrolling in the winter, when there wasn't an endless vista of green to make him uneasy, and no sound of rain on big leaves brought back a flood of unwelcome memories. The sight of bare oaks stretched out against a crisp blue sky reminded him of his boyhood in Gallipolis, Ohio, when hunting was an afternoon's pastime and not the yearlong exercise in weary terror that it became in Southeast Asia. He slid his fingers across the butt of the .45 he wore at his hip. Odd still to be carrying a gun after all these years, he thought. There had been times in 'Nam, standing over things he would not picture in his mind, when he had sworn never to touch a firearm again. But a strange thing had happened to him while he thought he was outliving that one-year tour: He didn't so much survive it as mutate to accommodate its demands, and when he came home, he was somebody else entirely. Somebody who enjoyed the rush of crisis situations, and who used danger as a measure of being alive. Martha didn't understand this intoxica-

tion with crisis that kept him on the edge; she kept telling him to be careful, to drive slower. Lately he had been talking about getting a motorcycle and taking up sky-diving just to irritate her. It wasn't fair to her; she was loving him in the only way she knew how, but she had missed the whole point. Joe LeDonne didn't want to be safe: The only safe people are the dead ones.

Late autumn was a good time to patrol the outlying reaches of the county. Stripped of foliage, the woods were less able to conceal evidence of wrongdoing: The copper sheathing of a moonshine still might flash from the side of a mountain clearing, or a hunter's brake on national forest land would stand revealed in the barren woods.