Chapter Two
TWO
I’M ALREADY ON THE road, halfway to the Eastern Kentucky town of Mount Zion, when my phone buzzes. I tap the button to put it on speaker and Tina’s voice booms out at me.
“I can’t help but notice,” Tina says, “that Honey is no longer in my garage.”
“I said she was done with her tune-up,” Tina grumbles. “I also said I was getting Lewis in here for a detail later this week. Honey needs a fresh coat of wax and you know it.”
“Well,” I say. “I needed her. I have a case.”
“Annie, it’s Memorial Day weekend.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Shit,” she says, with the tone that also implies What have you gotten yourself into now?
Then I listen to her sigh, her exasperation as obvious as possible, before she finally says, “You’re not in Louisville anymore, are you?”
“No.”
I explain where I’m headed and why, trying to keep it brief. I tell her about Katie, Katie’s dead father, his snake-handling practice, his death, his lack of autopsy, and his quick funeral.
When I’m through, Tina makes a sound like sheewwwww. The noises of the garage have gone quiet and I’m guessing she’s stepped into the little office she keeps stacked with all the paperwork she’ll never do.
“How long have we known each other?” she asks, her voice suddenly measured.
Going by Tina’s tone, I get the sudden feeling I’m wading into a creek full of water moccasins. The answer is straightforward and she, of course, probably knows the exact number of years better than I do. We met in the Air Force, when she was on her way out and I was on my way in.
“Um—” I start, uneasily.
But she cuts me off and says, “I know when you’ve gotten into something nasty. Why did you really take this case?”
“I couldn’t tell her no,” I say. “She needs my help.”
After a moment, Tina asks, “Do you think she’s right? Do you think there’s more to the death of her father than a snakebite?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think she needs some kind of closure.”
“Don’t we all.”
I hear the groan of her chair as she sits behind her desk.
Tina’s a tall woman and built like a tank with huge, tattooed forearms and half-shaved hair that’s always some variation of eggplant or burgundy.
Hard as nails on the outside, she’s got a well-hidden ooey-gooey center that almost no one ever sees.
“You’ll take care of Honey?” she finally asks.
I smile at the care in her voice. The unspoken And yourself too?
Several years before, Honey had been towed to Tina’s garage around the same time I arrived in Louisville.
Nameless and neglected, she was a wreck.
And, after my stint in the Air Force, I wasn’t doing much better.
Tina recruited me to help with the job of fixing her up.
Together, we gave Honey her name and by the time we were finished, the little Datsun wasn’t the only one who’d undergone major repairs.
The moment Tina pressed Honey’s keys into my palm and told me she was all mine, I burst into tears.
Embarrassingly, I still get all welled up just thinking about it.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll take care of her.”
“Good,” Tina says. Then she sniffs and says, “The new AC running okay?”
“Like a dream.”
She laughs. “Well, you’re gonna need it. Looks like this heat wave’s gonna stick around a few more days.”
I groan and crank Honey’s new air conditioner even colder.
“Be careful out there,” Tina says.
“I will.”
She hangs up and I merge into the faster lane. Honey’s engine growls with the acceleration and I can’t help but smile. Already past Lexington and climbing into the hills that surround Red River Gorge, I pass a sign for Mount Zion, and see that it’s only a few miles away.
Before I’d picked Honey up from Tina’s, I’d put together Katie’s contract and sent it over, packed my duffel with a couple days’ worth of clothes, and slid my laptop and leather notebook into the satchel I habitually carry, all while chowing down on a turkey club to go from Roxanne’s.
I’d also brought my gun—a .357 Korth Mongoose, wood case and all—and slid it into Honey’s glove box.
Now, as I close in on Mount Zion, I consider again exactly why I’d taken this job. Yes, I was strapped for cash, boiling in my office, and bored with the paperwork. But, if I’m being honest, it was more than that.
My emotions about my father are conflicted, Katie had said. Do you understand?
More than she knew. More than I wanted to admit.
My emotions about my father are conflicted.
Is it Katie’s voice I’m hearing in my mind? Or my own?
After she left my office, I looked up Ezra King and found a simple website for Mount Zion Church of the Healing Redeemer.
A photograph of Ezra, in the pulpit, was plastered on the main page.
Very tall, lean, Ezra had raven hair and the same clear blue eyes as his daughter.
Clean cut and dressed all in black, he looked straight into the camera with an undeniable assuredness, a confidence that lent charisma.
His mouth curved up in a crooked smile that reminded me somewhat of a young Andy Griffith.
I’d combed through the website but the information was minimal, without even a mention of snakes. Instead, there was just a schedule of Ezra’s tent revival appearances and a number to call for inquiries.
He died of a snakebite, Katie had said. That’s what the police had told her.
I hadn’t even known snake-handling churches still existed.
And, though I’d imagined they were some relic of antiquity, according to Wikipedia the whole idea of snake handling was barely a century old.
It emerged in the 1910s as part of the Holiness movement and struck a chord with some of the economically depressed, insular, story-loving people tucked into the farther flung pockets of the Mountain South.
The practice is illegal in most states but that doesn’t stop folks from practicing, apparently.
Closer to my destination, I start seeing signs for hiking trails, cave tours, and bird-watching excursions, all offered as a consequence of Mount Zion’s proximity to the famed Red River Gorge, a canyon system spanning nearly thirty thousand acres tucked into Eastern Kentucky’s beautiful blue-green mountains.
I take the exit, make my way downtown, and pull onto Main Street.
Like much of the rest of rural America, this place has been hit hard by the loss of local production.
The factories that once employed more than half the region have been closed and the struggling family farms have been bought out by corporate operations.
Still, likely thanks to the ecotourism trade, Mount Zion seems to have escaped the worst of the desolation.
As I drive down the main drag, there are only two buildings boarded up.
In the center of town is a small village green, well tended and lush.
The businesses around the square are a hodgepodge of yesteryear Americana and recent additions.
An old pharmacy and bank are nestled next to a new-looking bookstore and hippy-dippy crystal shop.
There’s an attorney’s office, a bar, and a little sandwich place, all leading toward a courthouse that looks at least a hundred and fifty years old.
Farther down Main Street is the local police station.
I pull Honey into one of the spaces out front, then head inside, where I find more bustle than I’d have expected.
A woman at the front desk, with thick-framed red plastic glasses and intricate cornrows that flow down into long box braids, holds up a finger to me while she finishes her phone call.
“No, I got it,” she says. “That’s 1712 Conley Court.”
There’s a long pause. She keeps the finger up.
A nameplate in front of her says MELISSA CHARLES, DISPATCH.
“Well, hon, how many do you see?” she says into the phone. “And you say you already called Animal Control? Yeah, well, I know it. Goodness, I’ll try, but you know they don’t really deal with bears so much. Listen, can you hold on a minute?”
She puts her palm over the receiver and asks me who I am and what I need. I tell her and watch her eyebrows raise at Ezra King’s name.
“Ezra King?” she says. “Lord have mercy. Well, you go on back. Chief Dishman’s working the holiday weekend—same as me—but, far as I know, he ain’t half as busy.”
“Thanks,” I say.
She points and says, “Straight back and to the left, just down the hall.”
I walk past her desk and toward an open area with four old metal tanker desks almost identical to the one back in my office. A young man in a black polo and gray slacks leans against one of the desks, engrossed in something on a tablet.
The building is nice and cool inside and my boots make a squidgy sound on the tile floor.
I go down the hall, past one bulletin board with WANTED notices and photos grabbed from security camera footage and a second board with a calendar of town events, birthdays, and a big poster advertising MOUNT ZION MEMORIAL DAY PICNIC ON THE SQUARE!
Just past that, I read POLICE CHIEF MATTHEW DISHMAN on an office door. I knock and when I hear a baritone “Yeah?” I push the door open.
“Chief Dishman?” I ask, sidling into the room.
At the sound of my unfamiliar voice, he looks away from his computer and blinks at me, eyes narrowed, as if trying to remember whether he had a meeting with a strange woman today at this time. He stands and removes a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses as I approach his desk.
“I’m Annie Gore,” I say. “I’m a private investigator.”
“A private investigator?” he repeats. He’s wearing a regulation black polyester polo shirt, but his duty belt hangs, along with a jacket, on a hook behind him.
I take my card wallet from my bag and hand it over.
While he reads my PI license and concealed-carry license, I study his fair, freckled face.
Sunburned on the cheeks and forehead, with deep crow’s-feet and lines between his brows, I’d guess he’s pushing sixty, but he’s fit, broad shouldered and sturdy with a swimmer’s build.