CHAPTER 40
LUCY
Though the rain let up as soon as I got in the house, the sky stayed dark. Birdie would be worrying. I fetched the rifle from the front hall and checked the chamber, knowing the gun was little more than a rattle on a snake, a warning—a plea—to stay away. I wasn’t so worried about Emory, who’d already shown that he valued survival above retribution when he sped away from Crete’s. But Crete might not believe I’d call the law, that I’d forsake my family to save a girl I barely knew. He wouldn’t run on speculation; I’d never known him to run from anything. He was a man of confrontation. If Emory told him what I’d done, he’d want answers from me.
I dialed Birdie, and she picked up at half a ring. “I got caught in the rain out in the garden,” I said. “I’m gonna get cleaned up, and then I’ll head back.”
“I’ll come get you,” she said. “Radio says it’s gonna get worse.”
“No!” It came out harsher than I intended. “I’m fine. I don’t need your help. I’ll wait it out here if it gets that bad.”
Lightning flared, and her voice buzzed with static. “Well, at least turn on the radio.” She wasn’t happy with me, but that couldn’t be helped. I had to wait at the house until it seemed likely that nobody would come. Then I could start cleaning up my mess. I’d have to call my dad.
I stepped out onto the porch and inhaled the damp electric scent of the storm. Bruised clouds bulged overhead, leaving a gap of clear greenish sky along the horizon. All through the hills, the treetops swayed like the coat of a giant beast being stroked by unseen hands. I heard no approaching engines, no man-made sounds, just the swell and creak of the house, the shuddering wind, the rustle of ten thousand leaves. He’s not coming, I thought. He is letting me go.
A tender ache flowered along my cheek where Emory had struck me. I hadn’t bothered to check my face in a mirror, but now that I had time to think straight, ice seemed like a good idea. I went back inside and cracked ice cubes into a kitchen rag to make a compress. Remembering Birdie’s advice, I clicked on the radio and changed stations in time to hear the weatherman speak of a hook echo. His instruments and calculations had detected a pocket of rotation. I waited as he read the names of towns in its path: Theodosia, Isabella, Sundown, Howard’s Ridge, Henbane. The list kept going. I wondered if the tornado siren was blaring in the town square; we were too far out to hear it.
A tornado had torn through town when I was in grade school, and for a long while after that, every time a tornado watch was issued for Ozark County, I’d drag Dad out to the root cellar with me. We would huddle on the dirt floor and use the flashlight to count the preserves on the sagging shelves. If Birdie don’t quit with the pickled beets, he’d say, there won’t be any room left in here for us. I outgrew my fear, letting myself believe Dad’s assertion that twisters skipped right over the holler due to geography.
Now I imagined the tornado warning’s angry magenta blotch on the radar screen, and all my fears rose up inside me like floodwater. I didn’t want to be here alone, waiting for something terrible to happen. I picked up the phone, and it crackled at me. I jabbed the buttons until I got a dial tone and called Birdie. When she didn’t answer on the first ring, I knew she wouldn’t answer at all. I’d told her I was fine. She was probably already in her cellar with Merle. I didn’t want to consider the alternative—that Crete had shown up there looking for me.
I paced the kitchen floor in tears, marveling at my stupidity, my stubbornness. I was stuck here until the storm passed. I hoped that Jamie and Holly had already made it to Crenshaw Ridge, to some sort of safety. Outside the window, the trees were thrashing, eerie tendrils of cloud trailing down as the sky closed in. Hail pelted the yard, a scattering of pearls, and I knew that I should take shelter, just in case. I grabbed the rifle and opened the back door.
From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the truck. And Crete stepping out of it. Staying in the house wasn’t an option, so I dashed for the concrete mound of the root cellar, rain lashing me as I ran.
“Lucy!” He sprinted across the yard, catching up to me before I could push the cellar door closed. He wedged himself in the entryway so that I could neither escape nor shut him out. I backed into the darkness, holding the rifle in front of me, the safety still on.
“Lucy, honey, I just wanna talk to you,” he said. “Put that down.” He pulled the gun easily from my hands.
“Just leave me alone,” I sobbed. “Please.”
“I wanna tell you I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s been … misunderstandings. But I love you, and I’d never do anything to hurt you.” He edged into the small space with me. The wind howled at his back, tugging at his hair and clothing. It was absurd, him trying to carry on a conversation as the storm bore down. I scooted into the corner, brushing cobwebs from my face.
“You wanna know the truth about her,” he said. “Your mother. That’s what all this is about, all your poking around and causing trouble.” I covered my ears. Truth. It didn’t mean much coming from him. He would say whatever was necessary to distort the things he’d done, to lay blame on everyone but himself.
“Listen!” he shouted. “What happened to her in the cave … she didn’t kill herself. I know that for a fact. It was an accident, that’s all. It was black as pitch, and she fell. She was gone, and there was no getting her back. There was nothing I could do.”
I slowly grasped what he was saying. He’d been there when she died. He’d known all along that she was never coming back. He had known it my entire life and never said a word. If it truly was an accident, if there was some good reason he’d been alone in that cave with my mother when she died, he could have told me years ago.
I lifted my head and looked him in the eye. “What did you do to her?”
I felt the boom before I heard it, a reverberation in my chest, and then Uncle Crete fell to the floor, his face in the dirt. I thought at first he’d been struck by flying debris, but then Birdie dropped down into the cellar, her hair plastered to her head so I could see the pink scalp beneath. She set down her gun and wrestled Crete’s legs out of the way so she could bar the timber door. I didn’t move. My eyes struggled to adjust to sudden blindness. In the faintly lit circle beneath the ventilation pipe, Crete’s blood crept across the floor. There was a shift in pressure, a horrible sucking at the pipe, and my ears popped. The door groaned but held. And then Birdie’s arms were around me, cradling me so I couldn’t tell whether her body was shaking or mine, and we stayed there while the roar outside died away and for some time after that.
We stepped gingerly around Crete’s body and out into the gray evening light. “Are you all right?” Birdie asked finally. “I heard the warning on the radio, and I know you said you were fine, but I promised to look after you … and then I saw him there with the rifle …”
“He wasn’t going to shoot me,” I said. “It was my gun. He just took it away to keep me from doing something stupid.”
“We don’t know what he would’ve done,” Birdie said sharply.
When the phones came back up, Birdie called Dad. He was already on his way, having heard about the tornado. Birdie took him out on the porch when he arrived, and I couldn’t hear what she said to him. She had her hand on his arm and kept him facing away from the window so I couldn’t see his face. He pulled away from her at one point, and his shoulders slumped, but she kept talking, and a minute later, she was following him to the root cellar. Birdie came in through the back door and took me by the hand. She was trembling. “I tried to explain …” she said, trailing off. “He needs time. Let’s go to my place for a bit.” We rode in silence, observing the storm debris—shredded leaves, snapped branches, a lawn chair in the ditch—without comment.
Birdie plied me with tea and sugar cookies that I didn’t want but ate anyway, for the sake of doing something normal, familiar. Bite, chew, swallow. I could do that much. She didn’t eat anything, just sat in her chair watching me from the corner of her eye, knitting needles working an endless skein of yarn.
When night fell, I knew Dad was taking care of Crete. Wrapping his body in a tarp and dragging it from the cellar. Cleaning up the evidence. Mourning the loss of his brother, who, despite everything he was suspected of, everything he’d done, was still Dad’s blood, the last of his family. Except for me. I was and would always be a Dane, with all the good and bad that entailed, and like my forebears, I would keep the secrets entrusted to me until they slipped from my naked bones. But Birdie had taught me that I needn’t be bound by the unspoken laws of kin; that I could have a family based not on bloodline but on love. She had kept her promise to my mother to look after me. I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen it sooner, that Birdie loved me as she loved her own children—enough to take a life to save mine.
Frogs started up their courting songs. After a while Birdie took out her worn Bible and read aloud in a quiet, soothing voice until at last sleep beckoned. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
We took a somber tour of the storm damage the next day. The tornado had skipped through Henbane in typical fickle fashion, demolishing some buildings and leaving others untouched. A mangled pickup balanced precariously on the roof of the Great Southern Bank. One of the ancient gum trees on the courthouse lawn had toppled, smashing into the Donut Hole across the street. Sections of the blacktop road leading to the river had been scoured down to bare earth, and a handful of homes had been reduced to a confetti of insulation, splinters, and glass. The storm took pieces of Henbane with it, snatching up photographs and receipts and pages of books with greedy fingers and dropping them out of the sky as far away as Howell County.
Dane’s general store was intact minus a few shingles and the patio awning, but the landscape around the building had been swept clean—the hand-lettered signs advertising firewood and night crawlers, the planters overflowing with petunias, the trash can and ashtray and wooden benches, the old wagon where Crete had stacked melons and pumpkins for sale. Even the morning glories that climbed the walls and gutters had been stripped away. Devoid of all its familiar adornments, Dane’s appeared alien and unwelcoming. Cheri’s tree, along with countless others, had been uprooted and tossed in the river.
Several people had been wounded by flying debris. Arleigh Snell had been rescued from her crushed trailer after hours spent pinned under the rubble, and one person remained unaccounted for. Whispers spread through town that Crete Dane was missing. A storage shed behind his house had been ripped apart, the contents lost to the wind, and it was thought that he might have been borne away in the funnel cloud. The sheriff expressed hope that Crete’s remains would be recovered, but with thousands of acres of forest on all sides, it wasn’t feasible to launch a search.
An anonymous tip led to a raid on Caney Mountain, but no trace of Emory was found. While it was possible, authorities acknowledged, that a significant trafficking ring had operated in Ozark County, they were unable to locate the victims. They couldn’t even prove the existence of the suspect; his identity had never been captured on paper. I wanted Holly to come forward, but I couldn’t force her. Much of the experience was blurry for her, and she wasn’t ready to bring it into focus. I filled my journal with alternate endings, things I could have done to save her without letting Emory go. I felt the weight of the other girls I’d endangered with his escape. I hadn’t seen Jamie since he’d driven off into the storm, but Sarah told me he’d stayed by Holly’s side that whole night, watching over her, keeping her safe. He had stayed until I finally reached Ray and asked him what to do with her.
Ray had no trouble getting appointed as Holly’s temporary guardian, something her mother did not emerge to protest. He and his wife had been looking for a child to dote on for a very long time, and if they had their way, they’d adopt her. I still thought of Holly with her 4-H rabbits, waiting on the curb for someone to take her home, and I was glad she now had a family she could rely on. I didn’t know what it would take to heal her after all she had been through, but I believed the Walkers would do everything possible to mend her wounds.