The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (4 page)

C. W. Butcher was ready to deliver his message now. People could feel it coming. He gave them a hard look, talking louder now. "There are some in these hills and hollers who will say and are saying, This is God's will' I've always felt ashamed of my colleagues in Christ who would suggest that God somehow wills tragedy, war, death, or destruction. God has not willed the deaths of Paul and Janet Underhill and their sons Joshua and Simon. God is not the author of chaos, but of order. God is not the mother of darkness but of light. God is not the sister or brother of violence, but of peace. So to those of us with troubled hearts, the patron saint of troubled hearts, St. John, calls us to the many rooms of healing our Lord prepares for us in his mansion.

"Today we are gathered with troubled hearts for two purposes. First, we gather with troubled hearts to bury and say good-bye to our family members and friends. We gather to say good-bye to Paul, Janet, Joshua, and Simon. And second, we gather with troubled hearts to say hello to one another. Just as John came together with his friends and family after Jesus'

killing to offer and receive encouragement and comfort, so, too, we are gathered to remind Mark and Maggie that they are not alone. Troubled, yes, but not alone. God and the church and the members of this community are with you."

His stern eyes scanned the crowd, daring them to shirk their duty. Will Bruce's wife looked as if she might cry, but he saw her nod her head in agreement with his words. Someone murmured, "Amen!"

"It took John a lifetime with friends and family to get over the death of his friend Jesus. So, too, we are all called to do whatever it takes to help Mark and Maggie Underhill know that they are loved."

Spencer Arrowood thought, They don't look loved. They look about as alone as anybody I've ever seen. With a stab of conscience, he resolved to look in on them every now and again. Because he was the sheriff, C. W. Butcher would expect no less of him. This was his flock, too.

"We are not called on to untrouble them, or to fix them," C. W. Butcher was saying. "We are called to love them. This is the place our Lord prepares for those whose hearts are troubled. It is not an easy place, but it is a place of love. You, the Church, the Body of Christ, know the way. I bid you follow it."

The crowd had begun to sing "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," in the faltering voices of a group without a leader. Spencer thought he could discern his mother's lilting alto above the straggling sopranos. It was her favorite hymn.

She had come simply because the Underhills were fellow church members. He didn't want to talk to her now, though. She could always detect depression in him, but she mistook it for illness. He wasn't up to that conversation just yet.

After one verse the song trailed away, and after a brief silence, the lay preacher began to intone the final words of the funeral service. Spencer wasn't close enough to make out what he said. He saw Mark Underhill kneel down and pick up a clod of earth to throw down on one of the coffins, and then his view was blocked by a procession of onlookers who were heading for their cars. The wind had picked up a bit, and no one wanted to linger. He searched the crowd for Laura Bruce's navy coat and hurried after her.

At the sound of her name, she turned, and he saw that she looked as tired as he felt. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her cheekbones seemed more prominent than he remembered. She shivered in the wind, and pulled her coat closer around her, while he felt another pang of guilt about dragging her into the Underhills' tragedy.

"Hello, Sheriff," she said, summoning up a weak smile. "It was good of you to come today."

"We usually provide an escort for funerals," he said. "It's not like we have a whole lot of crimes to occupy us otherwise."

"I suppose not. Even this one involved more paperwork than detection, didn't it?"

He nodded. "They mostly do. I needed to speak to you so that I can finish up the last bit of paperwork on this one."

She looked bewildered. "You need to talk to me?"

"Yes." He saw her shiver again. "Look, you should get out of this wind. Would you like to go to the diner for coffee? If I'm not keeping you from anything else, that is."

It crossed her mind to wonder what the parishioners would think of a tete-a-tete in the diner with this earnest blond young man, but she scoffed at her own narrow-mindedness. He simply wanted to conduct police business somewhere warmer than a November cemetery. "I'll meet you there," she told him. "My car's just over the hill."

The rest of the mourners had left the cemetery. Spencer Arrowood watched the tottering figure in the navy coat until she disappeared from sight, and then he walked back to the graveside where the Underhills' oak coffins waited under the tent for the burial crew. He stood there in silence for a moment, remembering their faces as he'd seen them on that last night, and then he picked a white carnation from one of the standing wreaths. Twisting the flower absently in his fingers for a moment, he took a last look at the four caskets waiting to be lowered into the earth. On his way out of the cemetery he knelt at the grave of his brother— John Calvert Arrowood, killed in Vietnam in 1968—and placed the flower on the flat bronze marker.

Shall we gather at the river, Where bright angels' feet have trod

When Sheriff Spencer Arrowood walked into his office behind the courthouse, Deputy Joe LeDonne and dispatcher Martha Ayers stopped their conversation in mid-sentence and turned to look at him with solemn faces.

He froze in the doorway, all thought of mid-morning coffee gone from his mind as he waited for the news of whatever disaster was slated to ruin his day. "It's not a wreck, is it?" he asked wearily. He hated wrecks.

Martha took pity on him and went to pour the coffee herself. "Oh, sit down, Spencer," she told him. "There seems to be peace in the valley, like the old cowboy song says. We haven't had a call all morning. It's just something that we heard on the radio, that's all."

"All right," said Spencer. "What did you hear on the radio?"

"It's just show business news," said Martha, but she added, "It's still a damn shame."

When things weren't busy in the department, which was most of the time, Martha listened to WJCW in Johnson City, a progressive country station that could be relied upon to serve up

Dwight Yoakum, Don Williams, and Reba McEntire without too much bluegrass in between.

Joe LeDonne came as close as he ever got to smiling. "Let me tell him, Martha. I had a workshop in dealing with the bereaved."

Martha glanced through the open doorway at Spencer's empty office, and shrugged. "We shouldn't be flip about it. It is a shock."

Spencer took a long swallow of coffee and waited for the latest mayor-of-Nashville joke, or a sensational story from the morning's national news. "Fire away," he said.

"We heard it on the radio this morning," said LeDonne. "The Judds are breaking up. Sorry. No joke."

"The Judds?" repeated Spencer, as if there weren't a two-foot poster of the mother-daughter duo above his desk.

"The deejay just said so. They held a press conference—in Nashville, I think—and announced it. Naomi has liver damage from hepatitis, and she has to quit show business. The doctors want her to take it easy. They think she's going home to Ashland."

"Naomi is the mother, isn't she?" asked LeDonne, peering through the doorway for a look at the sheriff's poster. "Damn! She's the pretty one, too!"

Spencer turned to look at the photograph, a gag birthday gift from the staff last April but one he secretly prized. Two women in sparkling country-and-western costumes stood onstage, sharing a microphone. Both were dark-haired

and lovely, with a family resemblance that marked them as kin at first glance. But first glance said "sisters," which wasn't the case. The slender one on the right, the one with the darkest hair, the finest porcelain features, and a look of gentle sweetness that made you think of a doe—that was Naomi Judd. She was Wynonna's mother. "Well, they marry young in Ashland, Kentucky," people said philosophically, but the fact was that while Wynonna Judd was about twenty-three, Naomi Judd didn't look much over twenty herself. And she was beautiful, with that kind of fine-boned beauty that would last a lifetime. Wynonna was pretty because she was twenty-something, but Naomi was something out of a Renaissance painting, a mountain Madonna.

"It's a damn shame," Martha said again.

Spencer felt an irrational urge to swear, out of all proportion to his interest in music. What, after all, did it matter to him whether a total stranger continued to make records or not? "How'd she get hepatitis?" he finally asked.

LeDonne shrugged. "The deejay didn't say. Probably all that bad food singers have to eat when they're on the road. I hear seafood can be dangerous."

"Well, how long will it take her to get over it?"

LeDonne and Martha looked at each other. "I don't think she will," said Martha. "Liver damage is permanent. It's the one organ that doesn't get better, and you can't do without it."

Spencer looked down at his rapidly cooling 73

cup of coffee, trying to figure out who he was angry at—them for spoiling his morning with bad news, or Naomi Judd for her mortality. He walked into his office without another word.

Martha shrugged. " 'Mama, He's Crazy,' " she said to Joe.

He gave her half a smile to show that he recognized the title of the Judds' greatest hit.

After a few more minutes' silence, broken only by a Floyd Kramer oldie from the radio, Spencer called out, "Martha, can you get me the zip code for Ashland, Kentucky?"

Laura Bruce took a tentative sip of the tea-colored beverage in the earthenware mug. "What did you say this was?"

"Betony," said Nora Bonesteel. "Go on, drink it. It will do you good—in your condition."

She froze with the steaming mug inches from her lips. "My condition," she echoed. "You really do know things, don't you?"

"Some things." The old woman was not looking at her. She had turned to gaze out the big window at the meadow of brown stubble stretching down to the wood's edge. The lowering sky was gray with clouds, bleaching the color from the landscape. "When anybody says November, this is the image that always comes to my mind: bleak, as if the whole world was graveyard dead."

It had been a week since Laura's night ride through the holler in answer to the sheriff's summons. The color and animation had returned to the younger woman's face, and she no

longer seemed so tired. The burgundy sweater she wore complemented her dark hair, making her seem less pale. She was curled up on Nora Bonesteel's sofa, enjoying another "parish visit." She had set out to visit the Underhills' farm, but a twinge of nausea—and perhaps dread at the memory of her last visit—had made her turn off before she reached their road, and head up Ashe Mountain to spend a comforting morning with Nora Bonesteel.

Laura looked about her for the pet groundhog. "Has Persey gone out to hibernate yet?"

"She left last week. Waddled out into the backyard and dug herself a hole under the grape arbor. Sometimes I envy her that little death of hers. The world is always warm and green when Persey's in it. She never sees the bleakness. Autumn can be pretty, too, I know, but it's a brittle kind of beauty. I'm always surprised to see blue skies and sunny days in November; seems like they never stick in my mind the way this does."

"We had a pretty day for the Underhills' funeral," Laura said. "But somehow it felt just as desolate as today looks." She shivered, and ventured another sip of herbal tea. "I was sad for Mark and Maggie, left with not a soul in the world but each other. There was even talk of putting them out of their home because they were under age."

Nora Bonesteel's face remained impassive. She busied herself with stirring a dollop of honey into her own tea. Laura studied the high cheekbones and angular features of the still-

handsome old woman and wondered if she had Cherokee blood in her. The steel-blue eyes bespoke her Scots ancestry—and the Sight, of course. At last she spoke. "I'd have thought you had enough to keep you occupied without taking on grown young'uns to raise."

Laura squirmed under the tranquil gaze. "It didn't seem much to ask," she protested. "The sheriff came up to me after the funeral, and said that the Underhills had asked that I be appointed guardian. It's only until Mark turns eighteen in a few months' time. He said that all I have to do is check on them every now and then, and that he would do the same. He seemed so sincere and so worried about them that I couldn't very well refuse. How would it look if the minister's wife turned her back on two orphans?"

"You know best," said Nora Bonesteel in a tone that meant only that the discussion would end. She had finished her tea now and had taken out the workbasket of knitting that always sat by her chair. Her restless hands unraveled yarn as they talked.

"It's such a tragedy. They didn't talk about it, and of course I didn't ask them, but imagine! An insane older brother plotting to kill the family, and them escaping just because they had play practice at the high school. Living with him must have been a nightmare."

Nora shook her head. "Josh Underhill was a soft-spoken boy. Very earnest, though. I spoke with him up here a time or two. He liked to go out walking in the woods by himself. He wasn't

fierce or what you'd call crazy. Just the opposite, I think."

"You're lucky you weren't killed," said Laura with a shiver of dread. "What did you talk about?"

"Legends. He had never lived long in any one place before, and I got the feeling that he was trying to get to know the land. I told him some of the old Cherokee stories about the Bear child and the Medicine Lake, where wounded animals go to heal, and about the Nunnehi."

"What are Nunnehi?"

"My Scots kinfolk called them the seelie court. Maybe all the mountain folk in the world have tales about them. They're said to live under the streams and deep inside the mountains, invisible most of the time, but sometimes you can come upon them dancing in a forest clearing. Sometimes they'd help a lost Cherokee find his way back to the village, and Nunnehi warriors appeared a time or two to fight alongside the Cherokee when they were losing a battle. You've seen fairystones, haven't you?"

Laura smiled. "Sure. They sell them in gift shops on the parkway. A dark crystalline formation in the shape of a cross. They look as if someone carved them."

The old woman drew out a chain from the folds of her dress, and held it out for Laura to see. "I've had this one sixty years and more," she said. "The old woman who gave it to me said it was formed from the Nunnehis' tears. Some say they cried when Jesus was nailed to the cross, and some say it was in sorrow over

the Trail of Tears, when the Cherokee were force marched away to Oklahoma."

"Have you ever seen the Nunnehi?"

Nora shrugged. "It's not a Christian belief. It's just stories people tell to explain a thing they don't understand. Josh Underhill said he wished he could go off and find the Nunnehi dancing in a clearing and follow them home. No, you don't, I told him. They don't like people to know where they live. People who go there die soon after."

Laura gasped. "What did he say to that?"

"He said he didn't care." Nora stared for a moment at the tangle of crimson thread in her lap. "This was a good while back. I just thought it was the state of melancholy that teenage boys are so partial to. Sweetheart troubles, or grades and suchlike." Her eyes glittered in the lamplight. "I wasn't given to know."

"You know enough, Nora Bonesteel," said Laura. "Let's not talk about it anymore." With a complacent smile she placed her hand on the gentle rise of her belly. "I can't get over you knowing about the baby this early," she mused aloud. "I don't think I'm showing a bit. This skirt has an elastic waistband, but it still fits like it always did."

"You look all right," said Nora, looping the strands of wool over her knitting needle.

"I told Will when he called on Sunday evening. He's just over the moon about it. And worried about me, of course. I said I was fine."

"Did you tell him you'd been out gallivanting 78

on country roads late at night visiting crime scenes?" asked Nora.

Laura grinned. "He worries enough as it is. Anyway, I didn't want to dampen the news about the baby. Will it be a boy or a girl?"

Nora Bonesteel shook her head. "I only see things in flashes every now and again. Most things aren't meant for us to know beforehand. Trust the Lord, girl."

"It's just that I'm thirty-eight, and I worry in case the baby isn't quite normal . . . You're right ... It takes wonderful courage to care for a handicapped child, and I'm no saint. I'd go insane."

"Trust—"

"Trust the Lord. That's what Will would tell me, too, isn't it?" She tried to remember if she'd prayed about the baby, about its being all right when it was born.

"I hope Will Bruce would tell you not to dwell on it," Nora replied. "If you keep this up, you'll be mighty dull company for the next six months."

"Well, if I shut up about it, will you make me something for the baby? Booties or a little blanket or something? You make such beautiful things."

Nora Bonesteel seemed intent upon her knitting for a moment or two.

"It's due in April," Laura added. "No rush."

The old woman carefully untangled a knot of crimson wool. "I will make you something for the child you will have in April."

As boys, Tavy Annis and Taw McBryde had been fishing buddies. Now, half a century later, they had renewed the custom, still fishing at the same bend in the Little Dove River, five hundred feet downhill from the Clinchfield Railroad tracks that hugged the side of the wooded mountain. It was their favorite spot, not perhaps because the fishing was any better in the rock-studded depths of the river bend, but because the prospect of treasure lay in every cast of the fishing line.

The boys had grown up listening to tales from Taw's Uncle Henry, a railroad man from Pigeon Roost. That sharp curve on the tracks above the river bend had caused more train wrecks than you could shake a stick at, he told the boys. In the old days, when trains were the country's bloodstream, there'd be a wreck on that stretch of track every couple of years, sending a freight train full of coal and timber into the gravel-bottomed shallows of the Little Dove River. The train crews mostly survived, Uncle Henry assured them, but they had a struggle getting out, and they'd shed shoes and clothes to swim for it. That's where the treasure came in. The railroad salvaged the coal and timber, but what stayed at the bottom of the Little Dove were the heavy gold watches the railroad men used to wear. Why, there must be at least a dozen of them down there, Henry declared. And since gold didn't rust or rot, or do anything except get more valuable all the time, think what a fortune you'd have if you could get those watches up out of the river. For years Tavy Annis and

Taw McBryde fished the river bend, hoping for gold instead of trout with every cast of the line. They had spent the treasure a thousand time in daydreams as adolescents, buying phantom Daisy air rifles and ten-speed bikes. But the Clinchfield gold stayed buried in sand and gravel under the currents of the river, and only the dreams dried up.

They were fishing again now; same spot, same river, but many things had changed since the old days. They were sixty-five now, with little in common except childhood memories. Nearly half a century ago, they had reached their own bend in the river, and from then on their lives had taken different paths.