“I … I was just gonna listen to the podcast interview. That is all, Darlene, I swear. We was not gonna do nothing. You know me.”
Darlene leaned forward and kissed him on his cheek. She placed her hand on his chest over his heart. “I do know you. And I know you weren’t going over there to cheat. I’m saying, if you loved me, you wouldn’t have gone over there at all. If you loved me, you would have sent someone to check on me after it happened. But it didn’t even occur to you, did it?” Darlene said. Tears shone bright like diamonds against her cheeks.
Titus didn’t have an answer for her. Because she was right. He dropped his head and closed his eyes.
“Darlene, I—”
But she cut him off.
“I’m leaving in the morning for Atlanta. My cousin has a bridal shop down there. Take care of yourself, Titus.”
She kissed him on the lips.
“Find somebody that makes you smile,” she said. She turned and went back in the house. He stood there as he heard her lock the door, and then he watched as a hall light came on, then was extinguished like a candle.
Charon County
The darkness won’t be denied.
Everyone feels it now. It slips unbidden into their hearts like a cold winter wind. It infects the days like an eclipse and the nights like a blanket made of dread.
Preston Jefferies has gone to the doctor over in Red Hill to get something, anything, to help him stop dreaming. He hasn’t awoken from a night’s slumber without screaming since finding that crazy white preacher in his field. He wonders if he’ll ever find peace beyond the wall of sleep again.
Paul Garnett has learned to be careful with the trash. There are bottles that clink together like castanets when he takes the garbage to the dump. Five, sometimes six bottles of Old Crow. He’s taken to sipping from a flask during lunch. He tells himself it’s the stress of the job. Times are stressful at the plant; sales are down from last year. The new president can’t get his act together long enough to put in an order for American flags for all the federal buildings and military bases around the country. Paul didn’t vote for the guy, but he never thought he’d be this bad. He tells himself that’s why he’s going to the liquor store three times a week. But it’s Cole Marshall’s skinned face that comes to him when he gets too close to sober.
Sundays bring little respite from the shadows swirling over Charon. From Methodist to Catholic to Baptist to Lutheran to Jehovah’s Witness, ministers and pastors and elders and reverends find their words of consolation and spiritual strength falling on largely deaf ears. What God would allow such a curse to befall his people? No one will say it aloud, but many, many congregants are having a crisis of the soul. Many are putting their faith in shotgun shells and .357s, not the carpenter from Galilee.
The killer has become the Weeping Willow Man for the kids and teenagers of the county. Arcane rituals to summon him have become common practice at bonfires and house parties. For the younger children he is the latest incarnation of the bogeyman, except they can see his work on the local news. Lavon Macdonald has secretly started carrying a paring knife in his pocket just in case the Weeping Willow Man comes knocking at his door. He misses his brother, who could impersonate any cartoon character Lavon requested. He misses him so much he feels like he might be going crazy, if he only knew what going crazy actually felt like. His father can’t seem to stop crying. Lavon wonders if that’s what it really looks like when you lose your mind.
Darlene drives past the statue of Ol’ Rebel Joe as she turns onto Route 18. She tells herself she is doing the right thing, even if she had to subtly threaten her parents to move into Patterson Walk by telling them she was leaving no matter what. She doesn’t regret what she said to Titus but, she wonders, if the Weeping Willow Man hadn’t tried to kill his ex-girlfriend, would she have broken up with him? Her girl Sandra called her brave for lighting out for Atlanta. She didn’t have the heart to tell her it wasn’t bravery or independence that was driving her. It was pure uncut terror. From the moment she heard about the attack, all she could think was, RUN.
Run from this town, from Titus breaking her heart inch by agonizing inch, from this killer who had targeted him and the people close to him. It wasn’t that she didn’t think he could protect her. It was the idea he might have to choose between her and his ex, or his father, or his brother. She couldn’t see a scenario where she was the one that he chose. It was this realization that drove her down Interstate 95.
The members of the Fall Fest Committee kept planning the event with the grim determination of the musicians playing on the deck of the Titanic. Death, darkness, terror: nothing would stop them from setting up the pie-eating booth and the crab-pot-pulling platform. Elizabeth Morehood, the chairperson, gave a rousing “Spartans at the Gates of Thermopylae” speech during the last planning meeting about how important the Fall Fest was to the county. How they couldn’t let a monster in their midst take this from them. How they couldn’t let him win.
She didn’t say how she had embezzled thousands of dollars from the committee treasury in the form of booth permits and the funds from the annual raffle. She didn’t mention how she was planning on moving money from the parking fees and the carnival rides to cover the shortfall. She didn’t say how she had no intention of letting that Black bastard slap handcuffs on her like he had bloody Alan Cunningham.
Ricky Sours found himself trying to talk down some of his most ardent followers who wanted to carry weapons on the day of the parade at Fall Fest. Talking to them now was like trying to pet a starving bear. There was a lust in their eyes that frightened him. They wanted a confrontation. They wanted to split skulls and rend sinew. They couldn’t do it to the person killing their neighbors, so perhaps anyone who dared to stand in opposition to them on the day of the parade would do.
He felt like that old Mickey Mouse cartoon with the dancing brooms. His creation was no longer under his control.
Mare-Beth Hillington tried to cry for her husband, but she found herself too overcome by the knowledge that an unwashed glass in the sink wouldn’t come with a backhand.
Dayane Carter welcomed the darkness. In its embrace she found peace. It was there she was safe. There she couldn’t see what he’d done to her flesh.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Fall Fest was in full swing.
Titus stood at the corner of Main Street and Courthouse Lane in front of the old pharmacy. Courthouse Lane had been blocked off for the festival. It stretched from the corner of Main Street to the Brickhouse Road, which ran parallel to Main Street. In between the two was the courthouse, the old colonial jail, the county treasurer’s office, and the courthouse green, a wide expanse of fescue with benches and water fountains. Courthouse Lane also ran past Ol’ Rebel Joe’s statue.
Most of the festival took place on the green. There were several carnival rides set up there, arts and crafts booths, the three-legged race, the pie-eating contest, food booths, cotton candy machines, and a bevy of accoutrements that saw the light of day only during a small-town community celebration.
The crab-pot-pull platform stretched thirty feet into the sky at the far end of the green, away from the crowds. Contestants would stand on the platform and see who could pull up the crab pots the fastest. Titus wondered if someone would finally beat his father’s time. Albert Crown had held the record for the fastest pull for nearly thirty years. Jaime Chambers, a big ol’ hoss of a boy who worked on the Busted Bottle fishing boat, had come close last year.
Titus watched as the crowd moved over the green and the closed street like some amorphous organism, flexing and relaxing, expanding and contracting as it enveloped the festival. There were way more people attending than Titus had expected. With everything going on, he would have bet the crowds would have been thin as hair on a balding man. It was rare for him to be wrong, but this was one of those occasions.
Titus heard kids shrieking, parents laughing, young people shouting. There was a breathtaking sense of jubilation that filled the air, like the scent of daffodils in the spring. Titus thought it felt forced. It was like the good people of Charon had all agreed they were going to have a good time or die trying.
Titus walked a little ways down Courthouse Lane and watched a few kids go down the carnival slide. He saw a group of high school kids taking their turn in the pie-eating contest. He saw faces he knew from the halcyon days of his youth, others he knew from the past two years since he’d returned home. Other faces were strangers to him, but they seemed to be reveling in the joy of attending a small festival in a small county deep in the Virginia lowlands.
It should always be like this, Titus thought.
He checked his watch.