Chapter Eight
Eight
It’s early still, so I wait a few hours before I set out to talk to Lo, but I never manage to go back to sleep. Instead I take a shower and wrap my damp hair in a towel to dry, then I pull that yellow legal pad out of my desk drawer. The one with the little slashes. One for every body I’ve pulled from the ground since the murders began. As my eyes move down the page, the red marks get closer and closer together. I look at each angry line and try to recall the name that goes with it. I do better than I think I will, but there are still too many I’ve forgotten.
I get up and head downstairs to dig that photo out of the shorts I left crumpled up on the bathroom floor, then I settle on my bed and smooth the wrinkled newspaper clipping flat to study it.
He has dimples.
Had dimples.
And a chin that looked like it was carved from stone. Full lips. A perfect smile. The kind of features it’s easy to get lost in.
I bet the girls back in Tulsa loved him.
“Riley Alden.” I whisper the name aloud before I add his red slash mark—number twenty-four—and slip the yellow pad back in my desk drawer. The echo of it seems to blow back to me on the breeze from the shuddering air conditioner in my window. Above my head those wild mountain keys jingle on their yellow yarn, and I wonder if anyone ever made a protective charm for the beautiful boy in the bright red hiking vest.
If they did, it didn’t do him one damn bit of good.
It’s just after nine in the morning when I tuck Riley’s photo back in my pocket and slip on my shoes to head downstairs. The shops on Mud Street open later on Sundays, because most of the town is at church, so Daddy is still sitting at the kitchen table finishing his coffee. His salt-and-pepper hair hasn’t been combed yet, and he’s still in his robe. “Mornin’, Bird,” he tells me without glancing up from his book. “You’re up early.”
“Goin’ up to see Lo,” I tell him as I fill up a water bottle for the walk.
Daddy closes the book when he hears Lo’s name and pushes his glasses up on top of his head to study me. “Everything okay with him?”
“Yeah.” I shut off the faucet and turn to face him. “Why?”
“He tell you where he’s been all this time?”
“Fayetteville,” I say as I turn back to dig through the drawer for the lid to the water bottle. Why is Lo suddenly the main topic of conversation around here? He’d hate it if he knew how all these tongues were wagging about him. “Workin’ for some lady who runs a healing shop down there.”
“The boy doesn’t seem right.” Daddy swallows a long drink of coffee. “Hasn’t seemed right for a long while now. All you gotta do is look at his eyes to know it.”
“It’s just Lo bein’ moody,” I tell him, as I finally find the lid I’m searching for and screw it on the water bottle. “You know how he gets sometimes.”
Daddy studies me for a second. “Secrets don’t do nobody no good,” he tells me. Then he goes back to his reading, and I slip out of the kitchen before he can ask any more questions about Lo, or anything else. I hear him yell for me to watch out for myself as the screen door slams and I head down the front steps.
Much as I hate to admit it, I know Daddy’s right. And Nana, too. Lo’s in bad shape, and if Daddy noticed it, it’s got to be pretty obvious.
If we don’t find a way to get rid of his shadow tormentors, real or imaginary, it won’t be long before I’ll have to add another red slash mark to the yellow pad—one more victim of these hills—because Lo won’t last much longer. He said it himself.
Mud Street is mostly deserted, and I’m glad to avoid the eyes and the whispers this morning, but as my feet hit the bridge over Lucifer’s Creek, I come to a dead stop.
Instead of sitting nice and quiet inside the church, with the ceiling fans twirling slowly overhead, the entire congregation—pretty much every soul in town except Daddy, Nana, and me—is gathered out front of the square, white building. They’re all crowded together in the grass below the wide steps.
One man, dressed head-to-toe in black despite the fact that it’s already close to a hundred degrees on this mid-July morning, stands atop the steps waving his arms and addressing his flock.
“We come before you, Heavenly Father,” Brother Turley booms in his best pulpit voice, face beet-red and dripping with the sweat of the righteous, “to ask your protection from the devil that walks these hills!”
A chorus of amen s bubbles up from the crowd as they stretch their arms toward the steeple that decorates the church roof, pointing like a radio antenna straight up to their God.
“Death has come to our doorstep once again,” the preacher continues, “and we lift up the family of Riley Alden.” Hearing Riley’s name feels like a punch to the gut, and it also makes me realize that, somewhere in the night, I started thinking of him on a first-name basis. “Today we leave the safety of the church behind to stand before you, Lord—outside in the open—to vow that we will make amends for the wrongs that we have done, and we will ask your forgiveness.” His breath hitches on that last word and it comes out all strangled and desperate, but it’s followed by a rumbling of amen s that peaks like rolling thunder. “Every last one of us.”
It’s a perfect scene. The boxy white church with the bell and steeple perched on top and the dead of Lucifer’s Creek resting peacefully in the background while the hills stretch out beyond their neat graves.
But something makes me uneasy. The simmering energy of the crowd feels off.
A little girl at the back of the group looks over her shoulder and sees me standing on the bridge watching them. She tugs on her mother’s skirt, and the woman leans down so the girl can whisper in her ear. Then the woman is looking at me, too. And she’s touching the shoulder of the woman next to her. That woman leans over to say something to one of the men. And that man nudges another woman.
In a matter of seconds, the entire congregation of Lucifer’s Creek Community Church is staring at me.
I don’t know why I’m trembling. I’m used to being eyeballed by my neighbors, and I’m no stranger to their whispers. Don’t pay ’em no mind , that’s what Nana always says.
The strong smell of sulfur drifts up from the water flowing beneath me. Usually I don’t even notice it, but today it burns my nose and makes me gag.
“And so,” Brother Turley says, “we cannot rest until all are brought into our fold. It is our duty to seek out those who need us most. For an enemy stalks these hills like a lion, looking for wandering sheep to devour.”
The little girl in the back starts to wail and her mother shushes her as a concerned murmur moves through the crowd. Someone starts the first verse of “The Old Rugged Cross,” and Turley descends the steps like Moses coming down from on high.
I hurry through the graveyard gate and make a beeline for the back fence. I’m almost there when I hear Brother Turley’s voice over the sound of the singing out front.
“This is a warning, Dovie Warner!” I look back over my shoulder and the preacher locks eyes with me across the tops of the tombstones. He’s left his flock to follow me around the corner of the church, and I can’t help wondering why he’s suddenly so interested in my every move. “Come home, child!” he shouts in my direction. “Before it’s too late.”
I turn and duck under the fence to leave Turley standing among the dead and the good people of Lucifer’s Creek heading home to their Sunday dinners and their afternoon naps.
Grasshoppers are jumping in the weeds growing up through the tire tracks in the dirt road and an old crow is making a terrible racket off in the trees somewhere.
The heat is miserable, but I can’t shake the chill in my bones. I keep thinking about Turley and that strange come-to-Jesus revival meeting on the church lawn.
I cross over Lucifer’s Creek, but I don’t stop to soak my feet today. I only pause long enough to pluck a few of the ripe blackberries that grow wild along a falling-down fence nearby, then I keep on walking. My mind is too uneasy to sit on the rough planks and enjoy the water.
The farther I get up into the hills, the better it feels to be leaving the narrow sidewalks and narrowed eyes of town behind. I can’t figure out why Turley called me out by name like that. It’s been a long time since any of my family has seen the inside of Lucifer’s Creek Community Church, and the preacher might not like it, but he’s always left us alone.
I kick at a rock in the road, and it goes flying out from under my feet to strike the bark of a huge oak tree. Probably the biggest one in this part of the hills. There are at least a hundred strips of tattered cloth—all different shades and prints of green—fixed to a hundred different branches. Green represents abundance. The decorations are supposed to bring prosperity to the one who ties the knot, especially if you bring a little fresh water to sprinkle on the roots of the tree as an offering. The sheer number of cloth strips blowing in the breeze is proof that, no matter who shows up in Turley’s pews come Sunday, there are still a ton of folks in these parts that hedge their bets with a little magic.
They’re also proof that most of them are poorer than dirt and absolutely desperate for money.
“Old Man of the Woods,” I say out of respect to the ancient tree, like Granny Pearl taught me and Lo when we were barely big enough to talk. “Luck and wealth fall from your branches.”
I may not believe in their power, but the words still come easy. Like the verses of a hymn I memorized a million years ago.
Lo said it yesterday. There are lots of things in the Ozarks that would seem flat-out bizarre anywhere else. But here, they’re just part of life. Made-up things, like the money trees and the Ozark Howler, but also real things like snake handlers who take up serpents in the service of Jesus and lakes with long-submerged towns sitting buried in mud along their murky bottoms.
We’ve got fairy rings.
And caverns full of nothing but endless dark.
Bottomless sinkholes that can swallow you up without any warning.
But the more I think about it, nothing going on in these mountains is as strange as whatever is happening to the hikers. Now that the seed of the idea has been planted in my head, I can’t figure out why it’s been so easy for all of us to ignore the deaths up to this point. We’ve all worked so hard at not giving a damn. Even me, the one who pulls their rotting corpses from the ground.
Nana’s words keep running through my mind.
Don’t wonder why the boy’s so haunted by them poor souls. What you oughta be wonderin’ about is why the rest of us ain’t.
Everyone in Lucifer’s Creek has a theory about what’s happening on the Aux-Arc Trail. They’ll talk about it in hushed voices when there aren’t any hikers around to overhear. But nobody is doing anything to stop it.
Could be a serial killer.
Or ravenous, inbred cannibals. That’s what people out in the real world would probably think if word got out, because most of them have seen too many low-budget hillbilly horror movies for their own damn good.
Might be something to do with one of the large-scale drug operations. People protect what’s theirs. Stumble across the wrong thing and you’ll wind up dead as a doornail. So that explanation probably makes the most sense.
Some people think it’s satanic sacrifices, but according to Daddy, that tired rumor has been the go-to for every dead dog or cow that’s turned up in the Ozarks since the 1980s. And nobody’s ever found hide nor horn of any satanists.
Then there’s the rogue bear theory. But I’ve seen the bodies up close. Bears don’t do the things I’ve seen. So it’s gotta be aliens, some people swear.
Some of the old timers are even convinced it’s the Ozark Howler.
The truth, after three years and more than twenty bodies, is that nobody knows shit about who or what is killing these hikers.
I’m trudging up the last steep incline before the old Wilder place now, and my mind has been racing so fast I’ve barely noticed how much I’m sweating or how hard I’m panting.
When I come around the bend in the road, the homestead clearing opens up to one side and I stop a second to lean against the rock face so I can take a swig from my water bottle and catch my breath. The air is thick and wet and it clings to my lungs like the stubborn film of grease on a cast iron skillet.
I flick a crawling tick from my forearm and lift my hair off the back of my neck as I take in the weathered, unpainted boards of my best friend’s childhood home. The tiny cabin doesn’t look like much from the outside. There’s a crumbling rock chimney and a wide covered porch runs the length of the front. A rusting tin roof slopes at an odd angle and the glass in the single front window is cracked and fogged over from age.
If I took a picture and showed it to someone who’d never set foot in the Ozarks, they’d have no idea what time period it was from. This cabin could exist at any point in the last two hundred years.
The door opens and Granny Pearl steps out onto the front porch. She stands on her tiptoes to hang a big copper pot out to dry on a hook above her head, then she squints against the sun and waves me toward her.
“Dovie Lovie,” she calls out in her high, quivering singsong voice. When Pearl Wilder talks, it sounds like someone plucking the prettiest notes on a mandolin. “I been ’spectin’ you.” That’s probably because she knew I’d be up to see Lo sooner rather than later, but Lo would say it’s because his grandmother is an Ozark mountain witch, and it’s her job to know things. Either way, I’m glad for the welcome. It makes me feel guilty for not coming up to see her during those two months Lo was gone. But I couldn’t be here, not without him. I guess Granny Pearl can read my mind, because she throws back her head and shouts over her shoulder, “Lowan! Come see what the mornin’ breeze blowed up.” Then she gives me a crooked little grin. “Well, girl. You gonna stare all day or are ya comin’ in to visit?”