The Rosewood Casket (36 page)

“Hold it right there.”

Clayt froze, willing himself not even to look in the direction of the sound. “I’ve got a little girl here!” he shouted. “The hostage you were looking for. Dovey Stallard let her go.”

“Is she all right?” The voice was nearer now, but moving quietly. Clayt couldn’t hear any footsteps or the rustle of grass. He could feel cold sweat on his temples.

“She’s fine. I’m taking her home.”

A uniformed officer approached. Clayt couldn’t see well enough to tell what outfit the man belonged to. “You shouldn’t be out here wandering around by yourself,” the officer said. He had a deep-south drawl foreign to the Tennessee mountains. FBI? “This bunch of trigger-happy good old boys might shoot anything that moves. Might end up shooting each other before the night is out.”

In the moonlight Clayt could see a young black man with a pencil mustache. The black officer seemed calm, even a bit bemused to see them. His weapon was holstered, and he was smiling. Clayt relaxed a little. “Could you radio them our position? So they don’t shoot us by accident?”

“I’ll do that, sir,” said the officer. “But if you keep following this old trail along the back of the mountain, you’ll get to the farm all right. There’s nobody searching between you and home.”

Clayt looked doubtful. “How do you know?”

“Sir, it’s my job to know. Go on now. Get the child in out of the cold, and, when you get back, let your womenfolk feed her some cocoa. The rest of us can worry about what happens out here. My chief concern was making sure that you and the youngun made it safely off the mountain.” He turned and walked off into the darkness.

Clayt called after him, “Can I borrow your flashlight, officer?”

The answer sounded a good ways off now. “Never use one, myself!”

*   *   *

Garrett Stargill was calmer than most of the lawmen. He was in Special Forces; LeDonne thought he might have been in firefights more often. He squatted down beside LeDonne, watching the cave even while he talked. “So what’s your plan?” he asked. “Rush the entrance?”

A cowboy. LeDonne looked at him, expressionless. “No,” he said evenly. “We’re going to make one more try at talking her out. That’s where you come in. She’s alone in there.”

“What about Kayla Johnson?”

“I don’t know. Miss Stallard claims that she released the child, but we haven’t seen her. We have to assume they’re both in there. So for now we talk. I don’t want a firefight when there’s a hostage. A kid. No way.”

“Okay. What do you want me to say?”

LeDonne scowled. “Sir, I struck out with her. Now you’re supposed to be an old friend of hers. I was hoping you could tell us.”

“If you want me to try, I will,” said Garrett, shrugging. “I don’t think she’ll shoot me, but I really just came to help you locate her. I’m good at tracking, at night patrols. If you want somebody to soft soap her, you’d be better off getting my little brother Clayt. I think he’s carrying a torch for her. Maybe true love could bring her out.”

“Why don’t you try, sir? I don’t want to risk any more civilians than I have to. At least you have experience in an adversarial situation like this.”

“Yeah, I’ve been shot at on three continents. I’ll give it a whirl.”

“Good. Get about twenty feet from the cave. Stay as close to the trees as you can. And try to be upbeat when you talk to her. We don’t want her to panic, and we don’t want her to kill herself in there. Just play down the legal issues, and tell her we can fix anything if she’ll come out.”

“Can you?” asked Garrett.

“Who knows? Pretty woman. Rotten luck with the farm. A judge might let her off with probation.
I
wouldn’t. But it won’t be my call.”

Garrett Stargill sighed and stood up. “A pretty woman with a gun. God help us.” He walked out into the clearing. “Dovey! It’s Garrett Stargill. Long time, no see. I came to get you, Dovey. You know me. I’m not a badge with a gun. I’m one of the Stargill boys. I joined up with your brother Tate, and I’ve been in the army ever since, so you can trust me when I tell you that these boys out here are armed and serious. They mean business, Dovey. And I owe it to Tate and to your dad to see that no harm comes to you. Come on out.”

Nothing.

“I’m here for you, and I’ll stay right here with you the whole time until your lawyer arrives. And I’ll see that nobody roughs you up or gives you a hard time. I know you didn’t mean to hurt anybody, especially not the sheriff. Come on out now. You’re safe.”

As he spoke, he began to walk toward the entrance to the cave. Within it, all was silent. Garrett Stargill’s hands were down, palms out, away from his sides, so that she could see he was unarmed.

“What is that damned fool doing now?” muttered LeDonne. He stayed where he was though. If he ran after Stargill, or even shouted at him, he might frighten her into shooting. LeDonne leaned forward with his own weapon trained on the dark hole in the rock. Around the clearing a score of weapons were pointed at the same spot. “Stay out of the line of fire,” he whispered, as if Garrett Stargill, twenty feet away, could hear him.

But Garrett Stargill had eased into the mountain laurel bushes now, and his body blocked their view of the narrow adit in the rock. He was speaking more softly now. LeDonne couldn’t make out the words. There seemed to be no response from within.

Suddenly Garrett ducked out of sight.

LeDonne started forward, weapon in hand. “What the hell—” He began to run, clenching his jaw as he waited for the sound of a gunshot.

Garrett Stargill reappeared, hands high, in case any trigger-happy volunteers mistook him for their quarry. “She not there!” he called out. “She’s gone.”

*   *   *

Lilah Stargill had put on Randall’s old plaid car coat over her caftan, and an old scarf over her pink foam hair curlers. She stood in the entrance to the barn workshop, making little clouds with her breath, and watching her husband polish the rosewood casket. He had not seen her yet. His back was to the door. She could hear his ragged breathing, ending now and then in a sob, as he made circles on the coffin lid with the rag. He kept rubbing the same spot over and over, and looking away at nothing, as if his polishing arm belonged to somebody else.

Lilah went over and stood behind him. She put her arms around his waist. “I should have known you’d take it the hardest,” she said. “He loved you the least.”

He turned to face her, with tears coursing down his plump red cheeks. “Well, I tried to make him proud of the man I became. I wasn’t a war hero like Garrett, or a Grand Ol’ Opry star, or a college boy, but I have responsibility at the dealership. A new car every year. The house will be paid for in five years, and we have savings. I guess it isn’t much, but there’s a lot that have less.”

“He knew that, Robert,” whispered Lilah, hugging him. “And now that he’s in heaven maybe he knows more—that you are really and truly loved. The only one of the Stargills that has roots instead of wings. He could depend on you, Robert. More than he deserved, I often thought.” She took the rag out of his hand and laid it on the table. “That’s enough for tonight. There’ll be things to see to in the morning. The Stargill family is more than the land. It’s the people in the family staying together, and you’re the only one who can keep it together. Those other three are too wrapped up in their own problems to see above them, but you’re the head of the family now, and you’ll pull them together.”

“Do you think so?”

“Of course I do.” She patted his arm. “Now come in the house, Robert Lee. It’s too cold out here in the barn. I’m making some cocoa for Kayla, and you’d better have some, too.”

Robert Lee swallowed the last of his grief. “Kayla? Is she back then?”

“She’s on her way,” said Lilah, steering him through the door of the workshop and toward the barn’s open door. “Rudy told me.”

“Rudy?”

“Yes, Robert. Now hurry. If I burn that cocoa, he’ll just give me hell.”

*   *   *

“What do you mean she’s not there?” LeDonne pushed past Garrett Stargill, and stooped down beside the mouth of the cave, a little to the left, though, out of a direct line of fire. He clicked on his three-cell mag flashlight, and peered over it. No shots. No sound of scuffling feet against the rocks inside.

Where the hell was she?

He turned to Garrett Stargill. “Do you know this cave?”

“Thirty years ago. It’s only that one chamber there, just big enough to hold four or five kids. We didn’t go in it much. My brother Clayt thought snakes might live there.”

“There’s no back way in?”

“Not that I ever heard of. That’s something you should ask Clayt, though. I enlisted at eighteen, and I haven’t been back much since. Clayt’s been roaming around in these woods all his life.”

“All right,” said LeDonne. “I’ll send somebody to ask him. You go on home now, Mr. Stargill. And thank you for your help. We’ll take it from here.”

Garrett started to protest, but this deputy was clearly in charge. Arguing wasn’t going to do any good. He took a deep breath, mumbled, “Glad I could help,” and walked away. It wasn’t the heroic finish he had envisioned, but at least he had made the effort. If Dovey Stallard wanted to get herself shot, that was her problem, he thought. He had to get back to Debba. She’d be afraid with all the searchers crawling all over the mountain. He shouldn’t have left her alone. She never felt safe without him, and his first duty now was to protect her always, to make up for that one terrible time when he had not been there to save her. He didn’t know what hurt worse, the betrayal of a fellow soldier, or the unspoken reproach he had lived with ever since. Blaming her was the only way he could live with it.

*   *   *

Joe LeDonne walked back to the trees, where the rest of his men were waiting, weapons drawn. “I’m going in there,” he said. “She’s not in the part of the cave that I can see from the entrance. Anybody willing to go in with me?”

He waited through an uneasy silence, knowing that these men weren’t going to be anxious to volunteer for what could be a fatal ambush. Even an empty cave was dangerous; add an outlaw with a gun and it became a death trap. But with or without backup, LeDonne was going in.

“I’ll go, sir.” The voice sounded like a kid’s.

A young man in a leather jacket and camo trousers stepped forward. “I’ll go. What the hey.”

“Are you a police officer?” asked LeDonne.

“Yes, sir. Off duty when the call came in. Thought I’d come give you a hand. I live over here, work in the next county over. Figured I knew these woods well enough to help out from all the hunting trips I’ve been on up here.”

LeDonne looked at the kid, idly wondering if he even wanted to know his name. What the hell, in combat he had entrusted his life to kids younger than this, but that had been a long time ago. And he hadn’t known some of their names, either. Some of their faces, though, he would never forget. He had spent twenty years trying.

“Right,” he told the young policeman. “You’re with me.”

They walked away from the others. “I’m going in first,” said LeDonne. “I’ll have the light. You’ll go as backup, low to the ground, with your weapon drawn.” He looked again at the kid. “Don’t point it in my direction,” he added.

“No, sir.”

“Go slow and easy in there. The floor is uneven. Don’t trip on an outcrop of rock and shoot yourself, either.”

He knelt at the entrance to the cave. “I don’t know how far back she is in there, and I don’t know what the rest of the cavern is like. It may be narrower. It may be flooded. We may not be able to stand up in it.” He started to add that it was a perfect place for an ambush, but he thought better of saying it. Either the kid was smart enough to know that, or else he’d be spooked by it, which might make him more likely to do something stupid.

“I’m with you, sir.”

“If anything happens to me—a rockfall, for instance—you get out and go for help. You are not to try to carry on single-handed. Is that understood?”

The young officer nodded. “Got it, sir.”

There was nothing else he could say to postpone the inevitable Much as he dreaded it, it was time. LeDonne took a deep breath and plunged into darkness. He hated caves—any dark, closed, starless place made the back of his neck tingle, and tightened his throat muscles. In Vietnam there had been tunnels. They were used for hoarding weapons, for ambush and traveling by stealth, and finally, they were used as a last-ditch refuge by Vietcong. LeDonne had to go in such a tunnel once. Just once. Twenty-odd years ago now, but he was still fighting his way out of it in sleep. He knew that if he got out of this cave tonight, he would sleep with a light on for weeks, waiting for the worse darkness to come back for him in dreams.

He flipped on the three-cell mag light to get his bearings, and to make sure that the anterior chamber was empty. It was. He kept the light on, and turned to his backup man. “Okay,” he whispered. “We’re going through that opening in the back. Don’t make any noise as you advance.”

He threaded his way around a pile of small rocks scattered around the narrow opening. It looked as if the passage had been blocked at one time. He wondered if Dovey Stallard had uncovered it. The rocks had not been moved by tremors or ground water. He pressed his body against the damp rock on one side of the opening, and reached out to illuminate the interior cavern, holding the big light in the center of the opening, well away from his body.

He waited to a count of ten, listening to the kid breathing a few feet behind him. No shots. No sounds of scurrying in the darkness ahead. LeDonne edged forward and peered into the next chamber. He could see boulders near the wall of the cave. They blocked his light, leaving shadowy recesses at the far end of the passage. In the center of the chamber a wide section of floor had given way, leaving a jagged pit more than six feet across. He was too far from the edge to see into the crater, but he could see something sticking up on one side of the hole—a stick, perhaps. Nothing alive. He wondered if Dovey Stallard, rushing into this second chamber to escape her pursuers, had fallen into the pit. She might now be lying unconscious or dead on the rocks below. But in order to find out, he would have to leave the safety of the narrow opening, and venture into plain sight in the center of the cavern. Oh, this was bringing back memories. It was like having two nightmares at once.