The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (12 page)

Spencer smiled up at her. "He's a handful, isn't he? I'll keep an eye on him, if he wants to stay down here. See that the big kids don't get it all."

She blushed and looked away. "This is my first time coming to this," she said softly. "If my momma and daddy were alive, they'd have a fit seeing me here. They didn't believe in taking charity. It's just because of him." She nodded toward the blond boy, staring at the bend in the tracks. "My husband is overseas, see, and the money he sends back doesn't go too far."

Spencer felt himself blushing as he listened to the shame in her voice. "What do you reckon little Morgan wants for Christmas?" he asked her.

She squinted off into the sun. "Oh, some old weapon, I reckon. He just loves those Ninja Turtles on the television. He's been talking about getting a plastic Turtle sword. And a Ghostbusters Proton Pack, whatever that is. He sees all these commercials with his cartoons every afternoon, and he remembers every one of them. He's a smart boy."

"Well, that's good." Spencer was trying to

think of some way to find out where she lived

without being too obvious about it. He'd seen

Ninja Turtle swords at the Kmart in Johnson

City; they cost less than ten bucks—not much to pay to keep from being haunted by a solemn-faced ghost of Christmas present. Before he could resume the conversation, though, someone on the hill jumped up and yelled, "It's a-coming!" and the crowd surged forward, craning their necks as if they could see around the bend.

The sound was a low rumble at first, indistinguishable from distant thunder or an eighteen-wheeler half a mile away, but a few seconds later the sound sharpened to a rhythmic churning that seemed to shake the air itself, and then the scream of a whistle clinched the matter. "Here comes the train!"

Mothers grabbed the wrists of their toddlers, and walked down the length of track, until the whole group formed a line almost as long as the train itself. Spencer stayed where he was, keeping an eye on the little blond boy, who was dancing with excitement. "Will I see Santa Claus?"

"I wouldn't be surprised," said Spencer. "Why don't you wave at the train?"

The black locomotive rounded the bend, and blew its whistle again, this time in greeting to the people along the tracks. Young and old, they shouted and waved back. The train slowed down as it passed the first group of children standing in the weeds. Instead of the usual complement of coal cars, the locomotive pulled a couple of excursion cars and a caboose. Men in overcoats were standing on the platforms of the excursion cars, with large canvas sacks at 182

their feet. When their platform drew alongside the row of waving people, the men began to throw things onto the hillside, well away from the path of the train. Wrapped boxes. Red net stockings filled with hard candy and small toys. Footballs. Boxes of dolls and plastic tea sets. On the hill, the squealing children scrambled for the prizes.

"Let the little ones get some!" shouted the grown-ups.

Spencer put his hand on the little boy's shoulder. "Get ready!"

The men on the excursion car smiled and waved, then dipped into their sacks for new boxes to pitch. "Merry Christmas!" they shouted, tossing out a rainbow of brightly wrapped candy.

A box landed with a plop at the sheriff's feet. Inside the cellophane-wrapped cardboard lay a toy gun and holster, a pair of plastic handcuffs, and a tin sheriff's badge. The well-dressed man on the platform tossed Spencer a mock salute before he went back to waving at the shouting children. The train picked up speed now, hurrying on to another trackside rendezvous in the next little community, a donation from area businesses, the railroad, and the coal companies, bringing Christmas to the rural poor. On the porch of the red caboose, Santa Claus shouted Christmas greetings above the clatter of steel wheels.

The sheriff knelt down and picked up the cardboard box out of the dust. "There you are, 183

fella," he said, handing the box to the blond child. "Now you can have my job."

"Oh, boy! It's a gun!"

"Tell the man thank you," he heard Morgan's mother say as he walked away.

I wonder as I wander out under the sky How poor Baby Jesus was born for to die, For poor wretched sinners like you and like I, I wonder as I wander out under the sky.

—traditional Appalachian carol

Winter had come to the Tennessee mountains two weeks shy of the solstice marking its official advent. The glorious curtain of leaves fell to the valley in mid-November, so that hunting season took place on brown hillsides devoid of cover. The Hangman, barren as a skull, towered over Dark Hollow, and Nora Bonesteel's house looked as blank as a sleeping child, with only a breath of chimney smoke to indicate life. With a sigh of relief at having finished another summer, the people gave up their outdoor pastimes for another season. Gardens lay neglected in the wind, and fishing poles went into the hall closet until spring. Now was the time for quilting, watching football on television, and hunkering down to wait on spring.

The cycle of the seasons had been going on a long time for the mountain people. Not just in the Appalachians, with descendants of Germans, Scots, Irish, Welshmen, and all the other settlers, but long before that, when an ancient tribe, the Celtic hearth culture in Switzerland, had observed the changing year with similar customs, the ancestors of these people had been

together. In the centuries since their time, the descendants of that Celtic hearth culture migrated west to Brittany, to Germany, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall, taking with them fragments of the old beliefs. Taking along the Sight, they'll tell you. And the habit of lighting signal fires to pass along a piece of news from ridge to ridge over miles of open country. When they met up again in the great American culture stew on the eighteenth-century frontier, they didn't know they were long-lost kin, but it showed in their way of doing things. A folktale here, a superstition there, or a snatch of an old fiddle tune would be just recognizable enough for folks to see the family resemblance that traced their lineage back to the hearth culture of the ancient Celts, those mountain dwellers whose Appalachia was the Alps.

"Don't shoot the Scotsmen," George Washington had told his troops in the Revolution. "After the war is over, they'll stay."

Stay they did. But they didn't want anything to do with the flat coastal land where the English had settled, where the folks crowded their houses together in little villages and then went outside its boundaries to work the land. The Scots, the Irish, the Germans, the Welsh, all wanted land of their own surrounding the house, and space between neighbors. They especially didn't want a lot of well-to-do folks running their lives, and making laws right and left. So mostly the English stayed in flatland that could pass for Hampshire, where they could have big farms, needing many workers to

run them. The others settled for hilly land more suited to livestock and orchards than field crops, and they did the work themselves. They brought their fiddle tunes from Ireland, their knowledge of whiskey making from Scotland, and their quilt patterns from a time before history began.

The mountain and flatlander ways of life would clash head-on in 1861, when the Southern mountaineers couldn't see any reason to leave the Union, but no one saw that coming. Nor did the Sight apprise them of the coming of railroads, riverboat navigation, and the industrialization of the flatlands that would leave the settlers' descendants high and dry in their mountain paradise, with no jobs and no political power. As Nora Bonesteel often said, "The Sight never tells me anything I want to know."

Right now she wanted to know when her ride would come to take her to church, but the view from the front parlor window was blocked by the uphill slope of the meadow. She waited in her armchair by the fire, listening for a car horn on the road above. A silly red knitted tarn and brown woolen gloves lay in her lap beneath the spine of the Bible. Nora Bonesteel was reading Jeremiah. On the table beside her sat a square package wrapped in slightly rumpled Christmas paper; it seemed sinful to waste such pretty decorations by using them only once. That and a few cards set up on the mantelpiece were the only indications that Christmas was near. She was getting too old to fool with an indoor Christmas tree; so she strung popcorn on the 189

blue spruce in the side yard, so that her holiday tree was decorated with the colors of feasting birds.

When the knock came, she almost missed it, so intent had she been upon hearing the sound of a car horn. She snatched up the package, and hurried to the door, pulling on her gloves as she went, and found Jane Arrowood standing in the doorway making clouds with her breath. The cold had turned her cheeks as red as her woolen coat, and her carefully waved white hair sparkled with snowflakes.

'I've come to take you to church," Jane announced. "Though why we're fool enough to go out on a night like this is beyond me."

Anybody else might have said, "I'm sure we'll be all right," but Nora Bonesteel never said things like that. People were likely to take it as a guarantee. "Well, I like to hear the singing of the carols," she said at last. "Were the roads slick?"

"They're tolerable. Half an inch fell, but it's stopped for now. My son Spencer put snow tires on my car last week, though, so I didn't have any trouble. I knew you were expecting Laura Bruce to pick you up, but I told her she had no business being out driving tonight in her condition. She said she'll see you at church, though."

Nora Bonesteel closed the door behind her.

"Aren't you going to lock it?" asked Jane.

"No."

Although Jane Arrowood couldn't have been more than a dozen years younger than Nora 190

herself, she held the older woman's arm in a protective grasp and guided her down the porch steps to the yard, where the brown grass drooped beneath a dusting of snow. Up the hill in front of them, Jane Arrowood's gray car sat with its engine idling, and above it, just visible in the twilight, the pines on the mountain crest were wreathed in snow garlands. A few feet from the porch, Nora suddenly halted. She put out her hand to touch the bark of a sapling, its bare limbs silted white.

"Is that your chestnut tree?" asked Jane.

"One of them. I reckon it'll be all right. It's so hard to tell if things will make it through the winter." She wiped a line of snow from one of the slender branches and walked on up the hill.

Will Bruce's church was a white spiral in the darkness, illuminated only by the lights over the gravel parking lot. It had been built by the church members themselves in the 1890s, with solid oak floors and hand-carved pews. The builders had been craftsmen, but not wealthy people, so they had constructed a steeple to make the church look "fitten," but there was no bell to toll within its wooden frame. The church had two stained-glass windows; the rest were simple glazing. The picture of an angel hovering over two children on a bridge had been given by the local doctor in the thirties in memory of his wife; and the congregation had raised money for the other one in 1945, Jesus in Geth-semane, in memory of the boys killed in the two world wars. The stone walkway between the yew hedges was crowded with latecomers,

packing into the sanctuary in ever-tightening rows.

Jane Arrowood pulled into one of the few vacant spaces left, at the end of the lot farthest away from the church. "I'm afraid we're going to have to walk a bit," she told her passenger. "I must speak to the grounds committee about reserving some handicapped spaces."

"I wouldn't want you to take one on my account," said Nora. "I used to walk the whole way here not too many years back." She pushed open her door and stamped her feet into the thin crust of snow. "Ready if you are, Jane."

"I am, but I warn you, Miz Bonesteel, if there's standing room only in there, I'm going to pull age and rank on some of these young pups and get us seats. You see if I don't!"

In the darkness Nora Bonesteel smiled. "We-elll."

The last strains of "The Holly and the Ivy" were just dying away as the two women entered the darkened sanctuary. Two candelabra on either side of the pulpit provided the light for the evening service, illuminating the decorations of ribbon-trimmed pine boughs. The youth choir, a dozen adolescents in white robes, stood in their accustomed place behind the pulpit. Above them hung a red velvet curtain that covered only the white wall of the back of the church, the mystery being that there was no mystery.

True to her word, Jane Arrowood had marched up to two young men in the back row and gestured furiously until they relinquished 192

their seats. The sight of Nora Bonesteel just behind her may have speeded up the process. As the two women slid out of their coats and settled into the pew, Laura Bruce caught sight of them and smiled. Then she motioned for the congregation to stand to share a hymn with her choir.

" 'What Child Is This?' " whispered Jane Arrowood. "It's my favorite of all the carols."

"I heard it sung at a wedding once," Nora Bonesteel whispered back.

In one dazed moment Jane Arrowood realized that old Miz Bonesteel had made a joke, and then she had to hold her breath to keep from giggling out loud. Behind them, the two young men, now standing, exchanged disgusted looks and wondered why old ladies couldn't behave in church.

Farther toward the front Joe LeDonne stood beside Martha, balancing a hymnbook in one hand, but not singing. He looked uncomfortable in his dark suit, with the blue silk tie she'd given him knotted at his throat like a noose. You'd think he had been dressed by a taxidermist, Martha thought when she saw him, but wisely she had kept this remark to herself. They didn't go to church very often; for LeDonne, changing patrol schedules made a convenient excuse to be absent, and Martha, who had hardly missed a Sunday as a teenager, discovered that the demands on a working woman's time consumed most of her weekends. By the time she did the laundry (and his laundry), cleaned the apart-193

ment, and cooked a few casserole suppers to freeze for the week ahead, she barely had time to read the paper, much less think about getting dressed up and going anywhere. Once in a while she discussed this privately with God; ten years of reading Billy Graham's daily advice column had convinced her that it would be useless to discuss the matter with him.

The Christmas service was special, though. She wouldn't have missed that for anything. Hearing all the old songs took her back to the days when she was a little girl, with her wish list down like a litany: A BIKE-anda-BRIDE DOLL-anda-PAINT SET-anda-CARPET SWEEPER. What had she been that year, five? That Christmas was the one she framed in her mind, defining the word forever after. The year the tree had been a blur of icicles and colored lights and all the things she'd asked for had really turned up under its branches on Christmas morning. Daddy had been working then. She'd always fast-forward through the other Christmases, especially the married ones, still anticipating the one to come. But it wasn't so easy getting heart's desire after you stopped being a kid.

She stole a glance at LeDonne's solemn features, and smiled a little. They had bought a little white pine tree and decorated it together with ornaments she'd saved from home. Joe had even bought a cassette of country-music stars singing Christmas carols for them to play as they trimmed the tree. At home, the turkey was in the oven, with another three hours to go, and 194

there was a little gold box with her name on it hidden behind the cable box on top of the television. It wasn't a bad Christmas.

Joe LeDonne was watching Maggie Underhill. She was standing in the choir loft next to a chubby redhead, looking as oblivious to the congregation as a plaster angel. When she looked up, which was seldom, her dark eyes fixed on a spot high and to the back right of the sanctuary. Her brother wasn't in the pews; LeDonne had spent a couple of hymns looking furtively about for Mark Underhill, a scrutiny that had forced him to exchange smiles with half a dozen beaming strangers. The only thing that seemed to be in her line of sight was the stained-glass window with the angel. The craftsman who made it must have copied the design from a Victorian print; LeDonne remembered seeing the picture in the home of a great-aunt when he was a child. It was the sort of picture country people liked to hang in children's bedrooms: the pink-robed angel, with the face of a chorus girl and eagle's wings, bending tenderly over two toddlers, brother and sister, as they crossed the river on a swaying footbridge. Such sentimentality had gone out of fashion. You wouldn't find that picture in any modern church. He wondered why Maggie Underhill kept looking at it. The angel didn't look like her mother.

Maggie Underhill herself looked more like an angel than her mother had; more like an angel than the stained-glass kewpie did, for that mat-

ter. Her dark hair curled around a perfect oval face, still young enough not to need enhancing with makeup. LeDonne wondered what she was like beneath the demure exterior. "What Child Is This?" indeed.

He hadn't talked to her very much. Spencer questioned the two of them on the night of the killings, but LeDonne remembered the Underbills sitting silently in their colorless family room, watching television, and he'd wondered what emotion they were holding back. It was hard to tell: All strong emotions can look alike; sometimes even the person who has them can't tell which one he's feeling, love or hate, fear or rage. He'd bet against love, though, in the Underbills' case. Not that it mattered. Whatever the survivors felt toward any of the rest of the family, Joshua Underhill had done the shooting, and he was dead. LeDonne ought to be able to dismiss it from his mind, but he couldn't. The Underhill deaths still bothered Spencer, of course, but that was because the sheriff felt sorry for the two beautiful orphans; he was always meaning to drive out to the farm and check on them. LeDonne wondered if he had. He knew that his own preoccupation had nothing to do with concern for the welfare of Mark and Maggie Underhill. He kept replaying the scene in his mind: the dead rabbit that didn't look like any normal butchering for meat, the placement of the four bodies, the spatter patterns—he kept wondering if there was something they'd missed. Something that would make sense of the case. 196