Shadows of Pecan Hollow
Caroline Frost
Prologue
Round Top, TX, 1976
The young woman awoke to the sound of scissors. She blinked the haze out of her eyes, rolled over the tangled sheets to greet him. She was nineteen or so, but the crease between her brows and the wear on her skin hinted at a life not lived but endured.
He sat naked beneath the window, a stack of newspapers beside him, cutting. The light dripped down his slick black hair and pooled on his shoulders, the tops of his knees, but his face, which was bent toward his work, was only shadow.
“Morning,” she said, her voice dry as sand. She groped the nightstand for something wet and drank the rest of a warm Dr Pepper from who-knows-when. “What’s that? Did they see us?”
He continued to pump the scissors, long and heavy ones with black handles, and sniffed.
“You shoulda put ice on that,” he said.
She cupped her cheek, which was hot and swollen as a late summer plum. If she flicked it, she thought, it would split from eye to ear.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said.
“Well, it should,” he said. “The fuck is wrong with you.” He’d given the bruise to her yesterday, when she had rushed the getaway and stalled out. A sucker punch to the side of the head.
He arranged the cut pieces in front of him, flipped them over, and brushed glue along the backs. The fumes snaked across the room to her, a smell she had always liked. As he worked, a gold medallion necklace, one he’d lifted off a guy passed out behind a club, swung and tapped against his chest.
“If they got eyes on us, we should take off. Hang out in Louisiana for a bit,” she said. He paid her no mind. He was always tempting the law and the day would come he’d get them both locked up. This life was mean. The late nights, the constant running, and the sickening fear of getting caught. It was too mean, even for her, but she hadn’t figured out a way to lose the life and keep the man.
She sat up, gathered the motel sheet around her, and wrapped herself up next to him. He smelled like their violent tumble from hours ago, hadn’t showered. That was a good sign; when he showered, it usually meant he was going somewhere she wasn’t welcome. But he was cold this morning. She couldn’t stand when he was cold. Angry, fine. But cold she could not bear and would do anything to bring him back around.
He leaned away, shrugged her off. She began to pulse behind the eyeballs, something awful rolling up inside her.
“You wanna know if they saw us?” he asked. He put aside the scissors and glued the last of the papers to a card stock backing, then gave it to her. There was a tight arrangement of articles and a blurry picture below the headline texaco twosome caught on camera. In the image, two masked figures are driving away in a Mustang. One drags his leg out the open passenger door. The driver faces forward, her eyes reflected in the rearview mirror, her dark hair whipping behind her. “They saw us, but they’ll remember you.”
She wanted to end it all right there. Beg him to give up the life and settle down somewhere, change their names, get a dog. They could build something, maybe, instead of tearing off with other people’s things.
It didn’t matter what she wanted, though.
He peeled the sheet away from her, snapped it up in the air, and lay it over the floor beneath the window. Her skin goosed at the sudden cold.
The sun bounced off the blade of the open scissors in front of her. With two quick curls of his fingers, he gestured for her to hand them over. She picked them up and noted the heft in her palm, the metal smell.
“Kneel down,” he said, and she lowered herself at his feet. He gestured again, reaching out. She put the handle in his palm but didn’t let go of the blades. He yanked them out of her grasp and gathered her long hair in his hands. Burying his face into it, he inhaled. Then he sheared the hair away from her scalp, one section at a time.
Part I
Chapter One
Pecan Hollow, TX, 1990
Cicadas rattled the pecan trees over the listing ranch house where Kit Walker assessed her opponent, a mass of blackberry brambles. Their vicious tendrils snaked around the back porch, pried up floorboards, and wove between balusters, rendering the back door, now fully obscured by the fearsome thicket, defunct. She sluiced the sweat off her arms and rubbed her palms down the front of her jeans. She could have done this in January, when the scarlet canes had lost their leaves and the crowns would be easy to spot and remove by the fibrous roots. In January, there was no nuclear sun, no cloying humid air thick with the smells of manure and hot grass. January would have been better.
Although Kit was not one to brood, today a memory perched on her shoulder, taunting and elusive, a spectral crow that flapped out of sight each time she turned her head. It was a far-off thing, long forgotten, dismissed, or buried. Kit had survived by keeping a keen and suspicious eye on the present—planning was pointless, regret even more so. No patience for mystery, she dealt in concretes. Could she touch it, swing it, scrub it, crush it? Could she put it in her mouth and taste it? Track it down and skin it? Unless it was in her hands or on her back, unless it had a color or made a sound, she wanted no part. She pulled a few luscious black fruits clustered on the vine and ate them, juicy sweet and staining.
Compact and mule-strong, her jaw-length hair chopped in a careless arc around her face, Kit looked like an Aztec warrior. Her cheekbones high and sharp, narrow eyes that cut left and right, always scanning. Her skin was an earthy tapestry of marks. Burns and scrapes of wet red if they were fresh, pale pink and cruddy with scab if they were healing; nicks on all her knuckles; a crooked scar under her eye, like a wink. She plucked the machete from the soft pile of dirt into which she’d plunged it and began to hack. A pair of tit birds darted from their hidden nest, but she carried on. As she ran her blade, choppily at first, then in a long X formation, her mind went clear. The machete an extension of her arms, she sank into the feeling of destroying something that didn’t belong. Splinters and twigs sprayed around her, clung to her T-shirt, planted themselves in the layers of her self-cut hair.