The Third Hill North of Town (37 page)

Elijah peeked down at Jon’s injuries but quickly looked away, his stomach lurching at the sight of all the blood on his hands.

You better get used to it,
Elijah told himself bitterly. He couldn’t believe he’d almost forgotten his role in Bebe Stockton’s death the previous day. Who else was going to get killed before this was all over?

“What are we going to do?” Jon muttered, wincing as Elijah applied more pressure to his wounds. “After we get out of here, I mean?”

The combination of blood and sweat was making Jon’s skin slick, and Elijah was finding it difficult to maintain his grip. He apologized as he shifted his hands again, then he pondered the older boy’s question. He sensed Jon would want to get as far away as possible from the jailhouse, and he sighed before answering, anticipating an argument.

“I think we should help Julianna get where she needs to go,” he said at last.

Jon looked at him blankly. “To Pawnee, you mean?” He raised his eyebrows. “You
are
crazy, Elijah. You know that, right? I doubt the place even exists.”

“I know.” Elijah tilted his head to wipe his nose on the sleeve of his shirt (
Jon’s shirt,
he reminded himself belatedly). “But what else are we going to do? We can’t leave her alone, and she won’t go anyplace else unless we take her there first.”

Jon knew better than to try to talk Elijah into abandoning Julianna—and in truth, Jon no longer wanted to leave her behind, either. For better or worse, it seemed, the three of them were in this nightmare together, and he also knew there was no chance whatsoever of convincing Julianna to give up or even to delay her quest. Still, a gnawing feeling in his gut was telling him that Pawnee was the last place on earth they should go; he was almost certain that whatever was waiting for them there was far worse than anything they had already gone through.

He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Listen to me for a minute, okay?” He waited for Elijah’s nod, then pressed on. “Look, I want to help Julianna, too. I really do. But there’s no point in going to Pawnee, is there? We both know that even if it’s still there, which is a HUGE
if
by the way, then it’s not going to be the same place Julianna thinks it is. It’s probably only going to upset her to see it, and every second we waste chasing down the messed-up picture she has in her head is a second we should be using to get someplace safe.”

Jon could hear the desperation creeping into his own voice but he didn’t care.

“What if we head for Canada instead?” he urged, locking eyes with the younger boy. “All three of us, I mean. We can tell Julianna we’ll bring her back here in a couple of months, when things have cooled down. She might actually listen to you, if you just ask.
Please,
man. I know she might not go for it, but can’t we at least
try
to talk her out of this? We’re not going to get another chance to get away, and I’ve got a really, really bad feeling about where she’s taking us.”

Jon’s fear was palpable, and Elijah couldn’t help but be unnerved. He chewed on his lip, considering the possibility of reasoning with Julianna, but then sighed again, knowing full well what the outcome of such a discussion would be.

“It’s no good,” he said. “She won’t listen.”

The courage that was Elijah Hunter’s birthright as Mary Hunter’s son had been awakened in him that night, and it wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon. Risky or not, Julianna was headed to Pawnee, and Elijah was going with her. He didn’t understand why, exactly, but he knew it had something to do with the look on her face when she’d come back to them a few minutes ago. He couldn’t turn his back on her now, especially when she was so close to the end of her journey.

He hesitated, looking away as tears sprang to his eyes.

“You should take off after Julianna gets you patched up, man,” he said softly. He made himself go on, even though the words caught in his throat. “I’d miss you like hell, but I’d understand.”

There was a short, strained silence. He could feel Jon glaring at the back of his head, and a few seconds later the older boy began to swear under his breath. Elijah couldn’t hear most of what he said, but “dumbass” and “fucktard” came through several times, more clearly than the rest. Elijah wiped his eyes on his sleeve and gripped Jon’s shoulder tightly, unable to keep from smiling a little at each muttered curse. He knew what the oaths really meant, and that Jon was just frightened, and letting off steam.

Julianna bustled back down the hall with her arms full. In addition to a first aid kit, she was also carrying all the things that Bonnor and the sheriff had confiscated from the boys during their arrest—belts, wallets, Jon’s money and books, the keys to the Volkswagen. She was inordinately pleased with herself for unearthing all these treasures in the sheriff’s desk and file cabinet, but dangling from the index finger of her right hand was the find she was most proud of:

A spare set of keys to Sheriff Buckley’s squad car.

 

“Only thirteen miles to go!” Julianna rejoiced, easing the Volkswagen into first gear and pulling out of the Dairy Queen parking lot in Mullwein. Ronnie Buckley’s squad car was in back of the Dairy Queen, its exposed rear bumper concealed behind an overturned garbage can and a picnic table.

Yippee,
thought Jon Tate, slumping against the passenger door of the Beetle’s front seat. He felt as if he were on the way to his own funeral, and he couldn’t believe he was doing something so stupid of his own free will—even getting Becky Westman pregnant had been smarter than this.

“It’s nice to be back in the Bug again,” Elijah said from the backseat, enjoying the feel of the warm night air blowing through the open windows as they drove south on Highway 69, toward the Missouri border. He leaned forward to talk to Julianna and Jon. “When I buy my first car I’m going to get one just like it.”

Elijah was suddenly acting almost as jubilant as Julianna, and Jon scowled, not understanding how the younger boy could so easily shake off the sense of doom that was consuming Jon. Still, he supposed, it
did
feel better to be out of the dead sheriff’s car and on the road again; they had the highway to themselves, and the stars and the moon were out, and the only sounds were the hum of their tires on the pavement and the familiar purr of the Volkswagen’s small engine. It was peaceful and comforting, and he could almost convince himself everything was going to be okay.

Almost.

The Beetle’s high beams lit up the asphalt road in front of them, but everything else was in darkness save for an occasional porch light they passed on their way out of Mullwein. Jon rested his head against the door frame and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in his shoulder. There’d been some aspirin in the first aid kit at the jailhouse, but Julianna had only allowed him to take two of the caplets for fear of thinning his blood too much while he was still bleeding.

Remembering how deftly Julianna had dressed his wounds in the jail cell made Jon believe that Elijah may have been right about her being a nurse. She had told him the bullet had only damaged muscle tissue, miraculously missing his lungs, bones, and arteries; she’d also told him he was fortunate he hadn’t been wearing a shirt when Bonnor shot him, because otherwise the bullet might have left some cloth in his body on its way through, increasing his risk of infection.

Yeah, I’m one lucky son of a gun,
he thought wearily, opening his eyes again. He’d impregnated a fourteen-year-old girl; he was wanted for murder, arson, and rape by the FBI; he’d been beaten and shot by a redneck deputy; he was being chauffeured around by a woman with more loose screws than a lumberyard, and he was most likely going to be dead before the night was over.

Just call him Lucky Jon.

Julianna seemed to sense his disquiet. She turned her head and smiled at him, shifting the Volkswagen into high gear as they left the town limits and passed into the countryside.

“You don’t have to be one bit nervous about meeting my family, Jon,” she said, raising her voice to carry over the wind. “You’ll feel right at home the second you walk through the door.”

Jon tried to smile back at her, touched by the genuine sweetness in her expression. “Thanks,” he said awkwardly, ignoring Elijah’s grin. “I’m really looking forward to meeting them.”

“There are only five of us you have to deal with,” Julianna continued. “Momma and Daddy, my two older brothers—Seth and Michael, who are both about your age—and me. We live on a farm just north of town, in a big old house Daddy and some of our neighbors built right before Daddy and Momma got married. Anyway, I can’t wait for you to see it. I think it’s the best farm in Pawnee.” She laughed. “Momma tells me I’m biased when I say things like that, but I swear it’s true. We live on top of a hill, and the sky is so pretty at night it makes you cry to look at it. When I was little I used to think I could reach up with my bare hands and touch the moon and the stars.” She laughed again. “Seth and Michael both tease me about that all the time, don’t they, Ben?”

“Yep,” Elijah agreed, still grinning. “They sure do.”

Jon raised an eyebrow at Elijah, then turned back to Julianna. “So what are your brothers like?” he asked, surrendering to the absurdity of the conversation.

Julianna snorted. “Like little boys in big men’s bodies.” A rabbit darted across the road in front of the Volkswagen and she gasped, barely missing it. “They like to think of themselves as all grown up, just because they’ve gotten so tall, but they still act like two-year-olds. They show each other the food in their mouths when we’re eating, and the other day when we went swimming in our pond they got in a fight about whose turn it was to use the inner tube.” She pinched the bridge of her nose as if warding off a headache, then dropped her hand to the steering wheel again. “But they’re also very sweet. For Momma’s birthday this year they made a chocolate cake for her and decorated it with marshmallows and whipped cream, and they carried Momma around the kitchen in her chair while Daddy and I sang
God Save the Queen.
”

Jon and Elijah had stopped smiling. Julianna’s eyes were glistening, and in the scant illumination from the moon and the Beetle’s headlights the tears on her face looked like ghostly war paint.

“Julianna?” Elijah touched her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

She attempted to laugh. “I’m not really sure.” She blinked a few times and bit her lip to keep it from trembling. “I’m just homesick, I suppose. This is the longest I’ve ever been away from my family.”

Elijah squeezed her shoulder. He wanted to tell her they’d be in Pawnee in just a few minutes, but the feeling of certainty he’d had at the jailhouse about this being the right course of action was weakening. Maybe Jon had been right.

He sighed, leaving his hand on Julianna’s shoulder as he stared out the window at a scarecrow in the middle of a cornfield. Right or wrong, it was too late to turn back now; Julianna was driving, and Elijah had learned his lesson about trying to take the wheel from her when she didn’t want to relinquish it. Besides, if Julianna was right about how close they were to where she’d grown up, they’d be there in fifteen minutes, and surely the police wouldn’t be able to find them once they were off the main roads—at least not without a great deal of luck.

Julianna was already smiling again as if nothing had upset her, and a few seconds later she began to hum. Elijah blinked as he recognized the tune: It was something his mother had sung as a lullaby many times when he was little. He no longer knew the words, but he seemed to remember it was called “Goin’ Home.”

The hot night air suddenly felt cold to him and he shivered, recalling something else. He’d asked his mother to stop singing that song after he’d gotten old enough to understand what it was about.

Death,
he thought.
It’s about death.

Chapter 14

A
s Julianna Dapper steered the Volkswagen toward Pawnee on that late Sunday night in June 1962, the words to an old spiritual she had learned from Ben Taylor’s mother some forty years before kept repeating in her mind, though she didn’t sing them aloud. She was too preoccupied with the moonlit countryside around her to do anything but hum the simple melody as her eyes flitted over each tree, sign post, and farm pond they passed, taking everything in and trying to quell a growing feeling of unease in the pit of her stomach.

The late-night sky of northern Missouri was just as dark as it should have been, and the smells of dirt, cows, pigs, and wild flowers were no less pungent than what she expected. Something wasn’t right, though—she couldn’t put her finger on what it was exactly, yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be. As they passed a radio tower and a massive grain silo she stopped humming for a moment, perplexed.

“Where on earth did
those
come from?” she asked, frowning.

Ben Taylor’s presence in the backseat reassured her, as did a familiar intersection at the crest of a hill, followed by the welcome sight of Günter and Polly Miller’s dairy farm in the distance.

But we already passed the Millers’ farm,
she reminded herself, shying away from the disturbing images that came with this recollection. How had the dairy farm gotten in front of them again? Her eyes widened as they drew closer; she could make out half a dozen new buildings that didn’t belong on the property.

What in heaven’s name was happening?

Jon Tate said something to Elijah that Julianna didn’t hear, and she glanced over at the wounded boy in the passenger seat next to her. She remembered picking Jon up recently in her father’s car, yet she couldn’t recall exactly where or when, nor could she remember what they had done with Eben Larson’s Model T. Her eyes took in Jon’s naked chest and flat stomach and she flushed a little, grateful for the darkness in the car. His bruised knee was only an inch or so from the gearshift, and she found herself wanting to touch him.

Shame on me,
she thought with a rueful smile.

She resumed her humming, using her voice as a sort of sonar to navigate through all the anomalies of time continuously confronting her: a road that was much straighter and smoother than it should have been, hundreds of telephone poles that weren’t supposed to be there, a face in the rearview mirror that sometimes belonged to her dear friend Ben Taylor, and sometimes to a taller, more handsome boy named Elijah Hunter, whom she had met only the day before.

Even her own voice was a conundrum. To her ears, her humming sounded richer and deeper than it should have. She’d always been able to sing, but this was different, somehow, darker and more nuanced. It was the resonant, mature voice of a middle-aged woman, and it both thrilled and appalled her. She didn’t really sound like herself at all, she realized; she sounded more like her mother.

Julianna reflexively turned west onto Route 46. The hills grew far more pronounced and the road narrowed and roughened, changing from pavement to asphalt, and then at last to gravel. Potholes the size of washtubs forced her to slow down, and she gritted her teeth at each delay. The boys could feel her growing anxiety and they remained quiet, peering through the windows at the hayfields surrounding them.

“Almost there,” Julianna whispered after a few long minutes of silence. The large hill they were approaching sent a thrill of recognition through her, and she gunned the Volkswagen to make sure they’d have enough momentum to reach the summit of this last obstacle between herself and Pawnee. She had to downshift before they reached the top, but once there she eagerly looked for lights in any of the stores in the valley at the base of the hill, but she could see nothing, not even the stores themselves.

“Everybody must be in bed,” she muttered. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, though, as late as it is.”

Elijah and Jon looked at each other grimly. Aside from another gravel road that headed north at the foot of the hill where Julianna’s attention was focused, there was nothing except hayfields and an occasional tree. Julianna proceeded down the hill and turned onto the northbound road when they reached the bottom; the Beetle’s headlights allowed them to see a sign that read “County Road YY.”

“There’s the post office where Momma works!” Julianna told Jon, coming to a stop and pointing out his window as she allowed the Beetle to idle in neutral. “And there’s the bakery right over there. Tomorrow morning we can come back to town and buy a loaf of Nellie’s sourdough bread to have with breakfast. It’s so good you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven!”

For all of Julianna’s enthusiasm, every time she turned her head the familiar structures of Pawnee seemed to vanish before her eyes, replaced by shadows in the moonlight. Doc Colby’s porch could have been a patch of brush by the roadside, Lars Olson’s smithy a stand of Scotch pine trees.

“Julianna,” Elijah murmured. “I don’t see anything.”

She swallowed hard and eased the car into gear. “Benjamin Taylor,” she responded wearily. She was so tired she could hardly keep her eyes open. “The second we get home, I swear I’m going to slap you silly for giving me such a hard time today.”

“Where’s your house, Julianna?” Jon asked carefully, sensing just how fragile Julianna was becoming.

“Right down this road, about a mile and a half from here,” she answered. The Volkswagen was picking up speed as they headed north. “We always tell visitors to go to the top of the third big hill north of town and turn left at the mailbox. You’d have to be blind to miss it.”

After a few hundred yards, they passed a lonely farmhouse with a mobile home parked in its driveway. There were no lights on at the house and Julianna didn’t even spare it a glance. She was now staring straight ahead, refusing to look at anything except the road itself. It had no shoulders and was barely wide enough for one car; it wound up and down the steep hills just as it should, and she began to breathe freely again, reassured by the tractor ruts in the mud next to the gravel and the smell of wild roses and juniper bushes in the air.

The third hill north of Pawnee appeared in the headlights. She smiled joyfully as the Beetle struggled toward the crest and she began honking the horn to let her family know she was finally home. As they reached the summit she cranked the wheel to the left to pull into their driveway, still honking the horn.

“What on
earth?
” she cried, slamming on the brakes and stalling the engine.

The front wheels of the Volkswagen slid to a stop a few inches from a shallow ditch lining the edge of the road. On the other side of the ditch—looking like a military cemetery in the moonlight—was a cornfield.

Julianna’s skin was the color of wax as she gaped through the windshield of the Beetle at the knee-high rows of cornstalks revealed in the headlights. Her hands fell limply from the steering wheel into her lap and her breathing was the only sound in the car. Elijah reached out to touch her again, putting his hand on the back of her neck and murmuring her name.

Home sweet home,
Jon Tate thought bleakly.

The speed limit was twenty-five miles per hour, but Samuel Hunter—driving the “borrowed” 1959 Ford Country Sedan station wagon owned by Bonnor Tucker—barreled through the town of Mullwein, Iowa, at more than three times that speed, praying nobody else would be on the road at eleven thirty on a Sunday night. Sam knew he’d never forgive himself if he plowed into another car, or God forbid a pedestrian, but it was a risk he had to take if he, Mary, and Edgar were to have any chance at all of catching up to Elijah and his companions ahead of Gabriel and the police.

Mary was in the passenger seat, holding herself as still as possible by clutching the door handle with her right hand and bracing her left palm against the dash. Sam could sense the tension in his wife’s body as the public library and the Mullwein State Bank blurred past their windows, but he knew she wanted him to do exactly what he was doing, in spite of the peril to themselves and others. On the highway between the jailhouse and Mullwein, she had urged him to push the station wagon to its limit, but a series of hills and sharp curves had seldom allowed them to go full out for more than a few hundred yards at a time. The constant acceleration and frenzied braking had made for a stomach-churning ride, and Sam feared the rest of the journey would be no less harrowing.

“Oh God Oh God Oh God,” Edgar Reilly moaned in the backseat. To Sam’s surprise, the tightly wound psychiatrist had not suggested slowing down, but the roller coaster–like ride was clearly not agreeing with the older man at all. He had unwrapped at least a dozen lemon drops in the past ten miles, yet even with his cheeks packed like a squirrel’s he seemed unable to refrain from moaning under his breath every few seconds.

They sped violently over a set of railroad tracks, the headlights of the station wagon bouncing crazily on the asphalt road in front of them, and then shot down a steep hill; Mary gasped out a warning when she noticed how the highway veered to the left on the other side of a Dairy Queen at the bottom of the hill.

“I see it!” Sam said, stamping on the brakes and grappling with the steering wheel to control the turn. The tires of Bonnor’s car squealed in protest and the tail end slid madly on the road, but Sam held on with a death grip and a second later they were headed south, toward Missouri—going much too fast to notice the empty squad car tucked away behind the Dairy Queen.

“Oh God Oh God Oh God,” Edgar ground out through clenched teeth. The scent of lemons wafted over the front seat.

The highway before them was blessedly straight and devoid of other travelers, permitting Sam a quick glance at Mary. “She said another ten miles after we get out of Mullwein, right?” he asked. “And then look for Highway 46?”

Mary nodded. Dottie Buckley had told them she was only guessing where Pawnee might be found, and Mary knew Sam remembered everything Dottie had said as well as Mary herself did. The numbered roads and the distances between them were a kind of mantra for him, though, and she understood he was only repeating them to calm his nerves.

“We’ll find it, Sam,” she said.

“After that, though,” he continued, “I’m guessing we’ll probably have to stop and ask somebody who lives in the area for specifics.”

“We’ll find it,” Mary repeated.

Mary wasn’t just saying this to comfort Sam; she believed it to be true. If she had to, she would wake every farmer in the county until somebody told her what she needed to know. She was not about to get this close to her son, only to fail because the place they were looking for was apparently as elusive as El Dorado. Mary had grown up in farm country—though in the Deep South—and she knew what folks were like in such places: They stayed put forever, and they had long memories. With any luck at all, she and Sam wouldn’t need to knock on too many doors before they found somebody who knew exactly where Pawnee was. Or at least where it
used
to be.

We’re coming, Elijah,
she thought as Sam floored the accelerator and the speedometer crept over a hundred miles per hour.
We’re coming just as fast as we can.

Gabriel Dapper was driving even more recklessly than Samuel Hunter, but he was still five minutes behind Elijah Hunter’s parents and Edgar Reilly. Gabriel had no idea why Mary Hunter and the others were still so sure that Pawnee, Missouri, was where Elijah Hunter and Jon Tate were taking Julianna, yet he wasn’t about to lose track of the only hope he had of finding his mother.