The Third Hill North of Town (5 page)

“For God’s sake, Cecil,” Sarah was saying. “Stop pretending it’s fine she married that little weasel. I told you Wally would never make a good husband and provider for Tina, but did you listen?” She sniffed and stared out the open passenger window of their pickup.

Cecil knew what that snooty little sniff of hers meant. It meant she thought Wally wasn’t the only one who didn’t qualify as a “good husband.”
Damn her,
he thought.

The Towpaths lived in Bar Harbor, Maine. Their only granddaughter, Tina, had married Walter Abernathy three years ago and moved to New York, where Walter (“Wally”) had since shown himself, in Sarah’s words, to be “a worthless, free-loading skunk.” He couldn’t hold down a job, because he claimed to be an artist of some sort. What kind of art he did had never been clear to Cecil. It had something to do with half a dozen ugly metal-and-wood things in their backyard that Wally called “sculptures,” but if you asked Cecil, they looked a lot like a bunch of monstrous dog turds, lying in the grass.

Tina worked for a lawyer and supported Wally through thick and thin, and wouldn’t listen to a thing Sarah said about him. Cecil didn’t much care one way or another about Wally, but Tina loved him, so he, unlike Sarah, had decided to just let them be. Tina seemed happy about her life, and that was good enough for him.

And this irritated Sarah beyond all bearing.

A stop sign was coming up and Cecil tapped on the brakes to begin slowing. There was another vehicle getting close to the intersection, too, but it was headed the other way. It looked like an Edsel, he thought. The front bumper was separated in the middle by a silver, shield-like ornament on the grille.

Yep, it’s an Edsel,
he nodded to himself.
No other car has a grille like that.

“I swear to God, Cecil, you’re not listening to a word I say,” Sarah complained.

 

Now or never,
Elijah thought as they approached the stop sign. The white pickup facing them was slowing down, too, and he could see a man with a white beard driving it, sitting next to a woman with a big head of poufy white hair. Elijah had to get out of the car almost immediately to flag them down, or it would be too late. He didn’t want to hurt the crazy lady, but if he could just get hold of the wheel once they came to a full stop he was pretty sure he could aim the car into the little ditch at the side of the road if she tried to take off again.

His mouth was dry, and his heart was beating so loudly in his own ears he could barely hear anything else. He leaned forward and put his feet flat on the floor, readying himself to move as fast as he could. Julianna pulled up level with the stop sign and ground to a halt. The white pickup across the road from them stopped, too, and she waved politely at its driver, indicating that he should go first.

And Elijah, seeing his chance, popped up into the air behind her like a flushed pheasant and launched himself over the seat.

 

Sometimes Sarah Towpath’s husband, Cecil, made her so damn mad she couldn’t see straight. She’d been giving him a piece of her mind for what felt like eternity now, but it was like talking to a lump of coal.

If he had just put his foot down three years ago, their gullible granddaughter, Tina, would never have married that jackass Wally. But all Cecil had said was, “It’s her life, Sarah. Let her live it, for God’s sake.”

But just look what had come of
that
asinine strategy: Their granddaughter was working her fingers to the bone to support a useless, moronic slug of a man, that’s what. And Sarah, who had seen the whole miserable train wreck coming from the second she’d laid eyes on her future grandson-in-law, couldn’t even get Cecil to admit he’d been wrong.

She took a deep breath, preparing to fire off another volley, but before her tongue could get up and running again, she happened to glance across the road and see a car facing them at an intersection. A tall woman was at the wheel; her head was almost touching the ceiling of the cab.

My, she’s got a pretty car,
Sarah thought, admiring the cream-colored roof and the shiny brown hood.
Why can’t we have a pretty car like that, instead of this nasty old truck?

She started to say as much to Cecil, but her words were swallowed in a scream of shock. Right before her eyes, a young black man had just lunged over the front seat of the pretty car, and was viciously attacking the tall white woman driving it!

“Cecil!” Sarah wailed. “Do something!”

 

Shortly after Dr. Edgar Reilly had purchased his 1959 Edsel Ranger, he went through a belated midlife crisis. He found himself wanting to own a car with some “muscle,” and the Edsel’s Super Express V8 engine, though by no means lacking in the get-up-and-go department, wasn’t quite muscular enough to offset the decline of his youthful self-esteem. Rather than purchasing an entirely different car, however, Edgar had asked a gifted mechanic to make a few “modifications” to the engine, to satisfy his newfound lust for speed.

And the mechanic, who loved a challenge, had outdone himself. The specifics of the transformation were lost on Edgar, but he listened in a delighted trance as the mechanic uttered mysterious, manly words like “camshaft,” “differential,” “headers,” and “intake manifold” by way of explanation. Such terms were meaningless to Edgar, but he could sense the masculine potency in them, and each syllable was a balm to his aging soul.

Julianna knew nothing of this, of course (she had been going at a good clip down the highway, but hadn’t yet goosed the accelerator) and it wouldn’t have meant a thing to her even if she had been aware of it. But prior to this overhaul, Edgar’s Edsel could only do a standing quarter mile in 15.2 seconds. Afterward, it could do the same distance in 11.4 seconds.

In other words, when given proper inducement, it could haul ass.

 

Elijah made it halfway over the seat in his brash bid for freedom, but his crotch caught on the seatback just as his hands seized the steering wheel.

“Oof,” he grunted.

Julianna was too surprised to say anything at all. One moment she’d been humming to herself as they paused by a stop sign; in the next, Elijah was wrenching the steering wheel from her hands. Without thinking, she fought back, fearing he was going to wreck them. At the same time, she stomped on the brake, which she had just taken her foot from an instant before.

Unfortunately, she missed, and landed squarely on the accelerator instead.

“Oh!” Julianna cried.

“Oh, FUCK!”
Elijah gasped.

With Julianna pulling to the left on the wheel as hard as she could and Elijah cranking with all his might to the right, Edgar Reilly’s midlife-crisis-enhanced Edsel shot through the intersection and missed Cecil and Sarah Towpath’s pickup by less than eight inches. Julianna had only an instant to register the old couple and their panicked faces before they disappeared from view.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Elijah howled over the roar of the engine. He was no longer trying to gain control of the wheel; he was now only hanging on for dear life.

“Benjamin Taylor!” Julianna bawled back. “Have you lost your ever-loving mind?”

The intersection was out of sight by this point, and they were in the middle of the highway, swerving from one lane to the other and doing well over a hundred miles an hour.

“Let go of the wheel!” Julianna squealed.

“Not until you take your foot off the gas!” Elijah bellowed.

Julianna gaped at him. She at last realized she was responsible for their speed, and wisely abandoned the accelerator. At the same time she also decided, less wisely, to slam both feet down on the brake pedal.

The Edsel went into a chaotic skid as Elijah flew forward, banging his forehead into the dash and crumpling into a heap on top of Edgar Reilly’s bags of junk food. The car turned full circle nearly twice, but Julianna, her mouth open in a soundless scream, somehow managed to keep the wheels on the highway. When she at last fought the Edsel to a standstill, it shuddered once, in protest, then its engine stalled out with what sounded like a vast sigh of relief. Its right wheels were on the shoulder, but by some miracle the hood was still pointing in the direction they had been traveling before going into their spin.

Julianna collapsed against the steering wheel and closed her eyes, her whole body trembling. The peaceful sounds of early summer in the country wafted through the windows—birdsong, and wind in the tall grass by the side of the road, and the faint rumble of a tractor, far in the distance. Julianna stirred at last and sat up again, blinking in the sunlight, and her gaze fell on Elijah.

The boy was now entirely in the front seat. His upper body was on the floor with the groceries, and his knees were touching Julianna’s side. He wasn’t moving, and there was blood on his face. He looked like a child’s discarded doll.

“Oh, Ben,” Julianna moaned. “What have you done?”

She jumped out of the driver’s door—stopping to fight for a moment with the automatic lock before remembering to hit the release button—and ran around the front of the car. She flung open Elijah’s door and leaned in over his body, praying aloud.

His breathing was slow and regular, and his pulse was steady, in spite of a large, acorn-sized lump on his forehead and a small trail of blood running from his hairline to his cheek. She carefully inspected his head and neck, then moved on to his arms and legs. Her hands moved of their own volition, appearing to know exactly what they were doing. She tested all his joints and lightly fingered his spine, and only when she had finished her examination did she allow herself a tiny smile.

“Oh, thank God,” Julianna whispered.

She put her arms around his chest and dragged him out of the car, groaning with the strain. She was a strong woman, but the boy weighed nearly as much as she did. Once she had him free of the vehicle, she laid him out on the road’s shoulder and cradled his head in her lap.

“Oh, Ben. What am I going to do with you?” she muttered, looking down at his sleeping face with mingled anxiety and affection.

Crooning to him, she tugged his white shirt out of the waist of his jeans. She unbuttoned it and tore two long strips from the front; she wiped the blood from his face with one and used the other as a bandana for his injured head. The lovely, familiar smell of sweat and Ivory soap was rising from the skin of his torso; it reminded her of the way her brothers always smelled when they had been working in the hayfields surrounding their house.

“There,” she said, surveying her handiwork. “All better.”

He was still out cold, but Julianna was no longer worried. She somehow knew he would be fine. She raised him to a sitting position to free her legs, and once she had regained her feet, she half dragged, half carried his body over to the Edsel. The tatters of his shirt hung from his frame like rags on a scarecrow.

“Good Lord, Ben,” she grunted, struggling to stuff him into the backseat. “You’re much heavier than you used to be.”

 

Ever since Cecil and Sarah Towpath had witnessed the horrifying scene at the intersection, they had been speeding along in the opposite direction as fast as Cecil could make their pickup go, desperately hunting for a phone.

It was the first time in a long and difficult marriage that Cecil and Sarah were in agreement over anything, and this unfamiliar sense of unity was intoxicating. The silly quarrel about their granddaughter Tina’s marriage to Wally the Weasel had been forgotten, swept aside by an act of violence on a quiet country road. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the unforgivable crime they were on their way to report, they may have even found time to smile at one another, or to share a few kind words.

But for all they knew, the woman whom they had seen assaulted might even be dead by now, and this grim possibility was rendering them somber and silent. Their silence held even after Sarah spotted a farmhouse on a distant hill, and Cecil spun onto the gravel lane that would take them to it.

It galled them both to no end that they had been so helpless during the attack. Cecil had wanted to follow the Edsel himself, but he had been too afraid. He knew he was no match for the young Negro assailant, even if they had been able to catch up. For her part, Sarah was suffering from a bout of intense empathy; she believed that she could just as easily have been the victim of the assault. She had never felt so old and vulnerable in her life. This shared sense of helplessness had since festered into righteous indignation, and as a result the phone call they would make to the Maine State Patrol would be slightly hysterical. Words like “armed madman” and “murderer” would get tossed around with no circumspection or concern for consequences.

And the Maine State Patrol would begin a manhunt.

 

Julianna casually pulled the Edsel back onto the highway and resumed her journey home. In her backseat was a slumbering boy with a ruined shirt and a lump on his forehead. As she looked to the south, toward New Hampshire, she could see the sky before them was dark with thunderclouds.

“Oh, dear,” she clucked softly. “I do believe we’re in for a storm.”

Chapter 3

T
he rain was slowing to a drizzle when Jon Tate finally caught a ride. He’d been standing under a concrete overpass for over an hour, but it had given him little protection from the elements. Strong crosswinds had flung water at him again and again, mocking his attempt to stay dry. He was just as drenched and forlorn as he had been before he’d found this nominal shelter, and he felt feverish as he ran to catch up to the car that had pulled over and was waiting for him on the side of the road.

It was a cream and brown Edsel, but the side windows were fogged over so he couldn’t see inside. The front passenger door was locked the first time he tried it; he tried again after hearing a metallic click, and this time the door opened for him.

A tall, thin, middle-aged woman in an elegant green dress leaned across the front seat and he bent to talk to her.

“You poor thing!” she whispered up at him. “You look like a drowned cat.”

Jon responded with a tired nod and wondered why she was whispering. He waited for her to ask where he was headed, but she just beckoned him to get in. Her lack of curiosity was a blessing, but there were several grocery bags on the floor where his legs were supposed to go, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with them.

“Should I get in back?” he asked. He was lightheaded from hunger and exhaustion, and he felt stupid.

“Shh!” The woman put a finger to her lips. “Ben is taking a nap.”

He glanced in the rear of the car. A skinny black kid was sprawled across the backseat, faceup and apparently fast asleep. His white shirt was in shreds and he had what appeared to be a bloodstained bandana of some sort wrapped around his head. Jon gawked at him. The blood and the torn shirt caught his eye, of course, but the real attention grabber was the kid’s dark skin. Everybody in Tipton, Maine, was white, and Jon had never been this close to a black person.

The woman gestured at the groceries. “Just move this stuff to the floor in the back, then you can sit up front with me.”

As much as Jon wanted a ride, he hesitated. Hitchhiking with strangers was one thing, but getting into a car with a passed out, wounded black kid was quite another. A head injury like that could have happened in a fight or something, and the last thing Jon wanted right now was to be around a violent Negro.

He looked at the boy again, both fascinated and leery. “Is he okay?”

She sighed. “He’s fine. He just got a bump on his noggin when he was horsing around. He’ll wake up soon.”

She studied Jon’s gray eyes and his square jaw. His left hand was gripping a white plastic bag, tied tightly at the top; Julianna thought she could detect the outline of two or three books through the plastic. The protective way he clutched it to his side was endearing, and there was a vulnerability in his expression that reminded her of Ben. She took an instant liking to him, but something about the anxious way his eyes kept darting up and down the road made her guess he was in some sort of trouble.

“My name is Julianna,” she said. “What’s yours?”

Jon looked away. “Steve.”

Julianna suspected he was lying to her, but it didn’t bother her. Whatever his reason for standing out here in the rain on a deserted country road, Julianna didn’t believe for a minute he was dangerous. She lifted one of the grocery sacks and thrust it toward him.

“Here,” she said gently. “Put this in back.”

The rainwater dribbling from his legs into his shoes helped Jon make up his mind. He took the sack from her, awkwardly juggling it with his bag of belongings, and opened the rear door to tuck the groceries on the floor by the sleeping kid. On first glance, Elijah was so still he looked like a corpse, but as Jon set the sack down he could see the boy’s raven-black stomach moving as he breathed. Jon transferred the other groceries from the front to the back, too, trying to be as quiet as possible, then he closed the rear door and got in front with Julianna.

As he settled into his seat she hit the lock button for the doors and pulled back on the road without another word. It was hot in the car, but Jon was grateful for the heat because his sopping clothes were cold on his skin. He wished he had taken time to at least wring out his shirt before getting into the Edsel, and was kicking himself for fleeing his apartment that morning with nothing else to change into but two pairs of underwear and a pair of socks. He couldn’t even change socks now, either, because if he opened the bag to get his dry pair the woman might see the cash he’d stolen from Toby.

He wiped his forehead with a damp hand and studied the side of the woman’s face as she drove; the clouds ahead were breaking up a little and a ray of sun lit her long nose and her brown hair. He was pretty sure she knew he was watching her, but she didn’t seem to mind. The car smelled of cigarettes and sweat, so he cracked his window to get some fresh air. After a few minutes of this silence he could barely keep his eyes open, in spite of the discomfort from being so wet. He set his bag carefully on the floor, next to his feet.

“Where are you guys going?” he asked at last, yawning.

She glanced at him for a long moment and smiled. “Home.”

Something about the way she said this moved him, but it was probably only because it reminded him that he no longer had a home of his own to return to. He waited for more, but nothing came. He yawned again, remembering this time to cover his mouth for the sake of politeness. “Where’s home?”

She pointed at the road through the windshield. “That way.”

Mary Hunter was pacing back and forth on the front porch of their yellow farmhouse, waiting for Elijah to return. Her husband, Samuel, was inside, watching her through the screen door. It was early afternoon and a rainstorm from the southwest was headed their way, but the wall of approaching clouds hadn’t reached them yet and the sun was still beating down on the house, throwing shadows from the porch rails across the wooden boards at Mary’s feet. The shadows looked like prison bars. Mary kept shielding her eyes with her hand to see the gravel road half a mile away, at the end of their driveway.

She’s so pretty when she’s worried,
Samuel thought.

On the rare occasions when Mary was unsettled about something, the resemblance between her and Elijah became far more pronounced than usual. Their son had inherited his mother’s striking brown eyes and small nose, and a lot of her mannerisms—like how she tilted her head to the side when she was listening to things, or the way she stuck out her chin when she was annoyed. But Elijah’s fretful temperament was nothing like Mary’s. Mary was a polished stone with a few rough edges. Elijah was a hummingbird.

Even as a baby, he’d been like that. He’d yell and scream for hours in his crib if something startled him, and as he got older loud noises threw him into a tizzy, as did the sudden movement of a cat or a bird glimpsed from the corner of his eye. A fireworks display was Elijah’s worst nightmare, and Halloween was the end of the world. He’d shown some improvement in the last couple of years, but Samuel and Mary occasionally still found him hiding behind the couch or under his bed if he heard a sound in the house he couldn’t identify.

He didn’t get his disposition from Samuel, either. Samuel was a mild, quiet man, who could never figure out why his son was so nervous. Elijah had gotten Samuel’s height and his sharp, almost aristocratic cheekbones, but Samuel’s calmness hadn’t been handed down to his only child. It seemed a shame you couldn’t pick and choose what to pass on to your kids, but Samuel supposed the Lord had a reason for preserving some traits from generation to generation while dumping others off at the side of the road. He just wished he knew what that reason was.

He wished a lot of things at the moment. He wished he knew where his son was, for instance, and why he hadn’t come home for lunch. He was getting ready to drive into town and find him, but he hated to be an overprotective father, and was putting the trip off as long as he could stand it. Mary hadn’t told him to go yet, either, but she wasn’t likely to do that, no matter how worried she got.

Samuel adored his wife, but wished that they lived in the kind of world where she’d feel comfortable letting other people see her the way she was now, when Elijah was long overdue. Mary Hunter came across as cool and detached, and her face, though beautiful, was off-putting to strangers because it had so little expression in it. Most people thought she was haughty and they weren’t completely wrong; she had a chip on her shoulder about a lot of things. She could be snappish, for instance, if she thought somebody was “looking down” on her, nor did she have any qualms about letting people know when she believed they weren’t doing their jobs right, or were being lazy or stupid.

Like last winter, when the county was too slow getting their road plowed after a snowstorm. The Hunters were initially told it might be as much as a week, but Mary was on the phone with every elected official in Prescott, Maine, by the morning of the second day, and on the third day—while Samuel was down in the timber behind their house breaking up ice on the creek so the cattle could have water—she put chains on the tractor’s tires and drove into town to badger Mayor Bridge in person. Her protest proved effective, and shortly after she returned home, a snowplow showed up in their driveway to do her bidding.

“A lot of busier roads needed that plow first, Sam,” Mayor Bridge had whined later, when Samuel stopped by town hall to thank him for his help. “But Mary would have driven your goddamn tractor right through my front door if I hadn’t said yes to her.”

Samuel had just nodded. Mary would have done no such thing, of course (at least not without a lot more provocation), but he figured it didn’t hurt for people to be a little afraid of her now and again. Most of their neighbors were decent souls, but there were a few idiots in town who had a problem with black people, and Sam was glad Mary intimidated them.

The Hunters were no fools. When Mary had become pregnant sixteen years ago, they sold their farm in Alabama and moved to New England, to get as far away as they could from Jim Crow. Once there, though, they had raised Elijah to always be deferential and courteous, knowing full well that a black man with a smart mouth was more often than not a target for violence, even in a relatively tolerant place like rural Maine. Samuel, too, kept a low profile and was well liked because of it.

But both Mary and Sam believed the situation was different for Mary. In their experience, “nice” black women became victims just as often as outspoken black men, and so Mary purposely adopted an almost Amazonian demeanor when she was in public. Over the years she had gotten astonishingly good at projecting an aura of menace, and nobody in Prescott, Maine, ever thought twice about messing with her.

But she didn’t look so frightening right now, with their son gone AWOL. She was chewing on her lower lip, and her dark eyes, usually so steady and unblinking, were full of fear.

“He’s fine, Mary.” Samuel spoke through the screen door. “He’s probably just reading magazines at the library and trying not to upchuck from all the bad news.”

A hint of a smile played across her lips. “If that’s the only reason he’s late, he’ll get his share of bad news when he gets home, too.”

Both Mary and Samuel were spare and strong from physical labor; Mary cleaned houses in town and helped Sam with the farm chores when she could, and neither of them was any good at sitting still if there was work to be done. Lunchtime was normally just a short break in the day, but Elijah’s absence was so unusual it had thrown a two-hour wrench in their routine.

Samuel waited another minute, watching her pace. “Think I should go look for him?”

Mary squinted out at the road again, not answering.

Samuel opened the screen door and stepped out on the porch. She stopped pacing and leaned back against him as he put his arms around her waist. The top of her head only came up to his chin.

“He probably just lost track of the time,” Samuel said, gazing out at the field of knee-high corn that bordered each side of their driveway. “Teenagers are like that, remember?”

She shook her head. “Not Elijah,” she murmured. “This isn’t like him at all.”

Samuel sighed, knowing she was right, as usual. Both of them had been trying to encourage Elijah to be braver and have more self-reliance, but the boy remained a painfully timid homebody who would never go lollygagging around town when food was on the table and his parents were waiting for him.

“I’ll take the truck and go find him,” he said, squeezing her. “We’ll be back in a jiffy, you’ll see.”

Mary’s hands tightened on his forearms for a moment before she released him.

As Samuel got in his blue Dodge pickup parked next to the house, he waved at her reassuringly. She waved back but resumed her pacing on the porch as he drove down the long driveway between the rows of corn. He kept glancing in his rearview mirror at her. She was standing tall and moving slow, and from a distance she looked cold and formidable as always, like a sentry on guard duty. Anybody who didn’t know her wouldn’t have a clue that all kinds of terrors were going through her head.