Beneath Still Waters Page 5

  It was Tuesday, only four days since she had been found and yet, Wayne Murphy had been quick to point out in Monday’s paper that no one in town was safe as long as this killer walked among them. Somehow, Wayne’s words didn’t seem to resonate with the inhabitants of Cherokee Crossing. The journalist wanted to organize a recall election to have Hick removed from office, but his calls for a town meeting had been met with silence. Hick had heard the words more than once—“Something should be done. We need to get who did this.” But no one seemed to be resting the blame on him. In fact, no one seemed that anxious to find the killer.

  Far from taking comfort in this, Hick struggled with the town’s indifference. Where was the outrage? Instead of outrage, Hick got polite nods and timid questions. He would have preferred to have the whole damn town in front of the station with pitchforks demanding his resignation. But why should they care? After all, it wasn’t their child. He slammed the ashtray on the metal draining board of the sink and grabbed his car keys.

  Hick drove into town and parked in front of the station. Glancing at the diner, he noticed Matt Pringle’s car out front. He crossed the street and stepped inside the café, the bell on the door chiming, the smell of coffee and bacon perfuming the air. Even that couldn’t wake his dormant appetite.

  Matt sat at the counter, chatting amicably with Maggie. For a moment, Hick’s heart didn’t beat. It constantly tried to betray him. He told Maggie when he returned from Europe he no longer loved her. For a year he had lied to himself, desperately trying to believe that the racing of his heart was due to stress, or nervousness, that the sweaty palms came from the Arkansas heat. “I just need sleep,” he thought, trying to get his heart in line.

  He approached the counter and clapped Matt on the back before sitting on the stool next to him. “Morning, Matt,” he said in a genuinely friendly voice. With the help of a college deferment, Matt escaped the horror of war. He had married and lost a wife while Hick was overseas. In spite of what many viewed as preferential treatment, he was still well liked in town. Though spoiled and wealthy, he was no snob. A good man. He would make Maggie a good husband.

  Matt shook Hick’s hand. “Howdy, Sheriff. God awful weather we’re having, ain’t it?”

  Hick agreed, at once made easy by Matt’s disarmingly charming manner. Maggie approached and scratched the back of her ear with a pencil. “What can I get you, Hickory?” Her eyes stayed downcast, not straying from her order pad.

  “Just coffee, thanks.”

  After she left, Hick turned his attention to Matt. He was a fine specimen of a farmer, tall and strong, with dark eyes and a quick smile. His degree in agriculture helped make his one of the most successful farms in the state. “Matt, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a few questions about the baby we found up at the slough.”

  Matt took a drink and sat the cup back on the saucer. “Anything I can do to help.”

  Maggie brought the coffee and Hick poured in a drop of cream watching it curl in the black liquid before it dissolved. “In the past month or so, did you hear anything out of the ordinary or see anyone prowling around the slough?”

  Matt crossed his arms and glanced at himself in the mirror behind the counter. After a moment, he answered, “I ain’t heard anything strange. Generally, if I sit on my porch, I’ll see people wandering around ‘cause my side of the slough is the one you can get at easy by car. The kids’ll traipse around to fish or gig for frogs, but the men, they just come sit on the sandy bank where it’s nice and even and you don’t have to step through water.”

  Maggie filled their coffee cups and Matt asked her, “You seen anything funny up by the slough when you’ve been over?”

  Hick envied her for her dark complexion that didn’t flush red whenever she was distressed. Still, he had known her long enough that he recognized the faint downward turn of her lips that accompanied unpleasant, uncomfortable feelings. “I don’t remember seeing anyone. It’s been pretty quiet up there for the past week.”

  Hick shook his head. “The kids are afraid.”

  “Afraid?” Matt cried. “Of what?”

  Hick shrugged. “You know how kids are.”

  “Not really,” Matt replied, drinking his coffee. Hick watched as Matt glanced at himself, once again, in the mirror.

  He reached into his pocket to pay for his coffee, but Matt caught his arm. “This one’s on me, Sheriff. I’ll keep an eye open and if I see anything funny, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

  “Thanks,” Hick said, grateful to leave the diner and walk out into the thick morning air.

  He returned to the station to learn that Wash had found the Scott family at home. The older man wiped his head with his handkerchief and shook his head. “Miz Scott says her boy won’t take his shoes off since they found the baby. He even sleeps in them. She says it’s like he can’t forget how it felt to step on it. He ain’t been the same since it happened.”

  “Poor kid,” Adam responded, rising and walking to the window.

  “And no one heard anything,” Wash said, perplexed.

  “Could the baby have been dead when it hit the water?” Adam puzzled out loud.

  “I don’t think so,” Hick answered. “Doc says the only way she could have gotten that much dirt into her stomach and airways is if she were swallowing water.”

  “Then if she was alive, she was asleep,” Adam said simply. “It’s the only explanation.”

  Wash shook his head. “I still just don’t get it. What kind of person kills a child?”

  “Someone desperate,” Adam responded. “Someone who didn’t want anyone to know about that baby and couldn’t think of no other way.”

  “But how can anyone be so desperate they’d kill a little baby?” Wash wondered.

  “There could be a million reasons,” Hick responded in a short, tense voice.

  “Reason enough to kill?” Wash asked.

  “The will to survive is a strong thing,” Hick replied simply, turning to his desk.

  Adam approached him. “But what possible threat could a baby pose to someone’s survival?”

  “Maybe she was someone that wasn’t supposed to be here. Or maybe she just wouldn’t stay quiet,” Hick answered.

  Wash leaned forward, rubbing his chin, his eyes distant and perplexed. “The fact of the matter is, someone carried this child for nine months, unbeknownst to anyone, and then they killed her.”

  “So we need to talk to every woman of childbearing age,” Hick said with a tone of resignation.

  “We should start with the most likely candidates,” Adam suggested. “A married woman generally don’t need to hide a pregnancy.”

  Hick agreed. “We can start with the girls at the high school and work our way from there.”

  Adam shook his head. “If we start questioning their daughters, we’re gonna make a whole lot of daddies in town mad.”

  “No need to get anyone riled. We’ll check absentee records. They might tell us something,” Hick suggested.

  “School’s closed right now, but Gladys should be there,” Adam stated and laughed. “Hell, Gladys is always there. When I was a kid I reckoned she lived somewhere in the back.”

  Hick smiled remembering his father’s secretary. Even when he was young he believed her to be ancient. He couldn’t imagine what she’d be like now. “I’ll run by and get the records.”

  “And I’ll check with the older, unmarried women,” Wash volunteered. “Just talk to ’em and see what they’ve been up to.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to check with the farmers and see if they noticed anyone missing more work than usual,” Hick added. “More than half this town picks and chops for Otis Shepherd and Lem Coleman. They keep records on who gets paid. Claire Thompson should have her renter’s records. Those might tell us if anyone picking for them missed some work. We should talk to her again, too.”

  The men paused, the hard work before them seeming to weigh heavily in the air. “I’ll take the farmers,” Adam said gr
abbing his hat.

  “I’m off to the school,” Hick replied.

  He climbed into his car and headed toward the schoolhouse when a man caught his attention. Coal Oil Johnny was making one of his infrequent visits into town, and Hick made a wide U-turn, pulling over to offer him a ride.

  Johnny had been a fixture in Cherokee Crossing for decades, though most people had never heard him speak. He kept to himself and knew the backwoods and Cypress swamps as well as any animal. Self-reliant, he grew, hunted, or fished for everything he ate, and sold pelts to make the little cash he needed to get by.

  As a boy, Hick had been frightened of him. Johnny would show up at the Blackburn house at odd hours because he was convinced Hick’s father had healing qualities. Hick would hide in the kitchen and peer around the doorway listening as James Blackburn patiently chatted with Johnny, recommending he visit a doctor for his wart, boils, pneumonia or whatever ailment was bothering him at the time. Johnny, of course, would never go, believing that James Blackburn’s touch would do him more good than all of the medicine Jake Prescott could prescribe. Still, Hick’s father was unfailingly gracious and respectful to the old man. Generally, Johnny would stare at a person without answering if they tried to speak with him, but, because of Hick’s daddy, he accepted the offered ride.

  Now, Hick no longer feared Coal Oil Johnny. Instead, he regarded him as a man to be pitied; ignorant and backward. As Johnny climbed into the car, Hick wrinkled his nose and glanced in disgust at the filthy clothes and long, snarled hair.

  “Hey, Sheriff,” Johnny said in a thin voice.

  “How you been, Johnny?”

  “Gettin’ by,” he replied showing his odd, toothless smile.

  Glancing at the empty tin can, Hick ventured, “Goin’ to get your coal oil?”

  Johnny nodded, staring out the window. Hick noticed a flea jump on Johnny and the old man caught it between his forefinger and thumb, crushing it with his fingernail and flicking the carcass out the open window.

  “I hear you’ve been up at Jenny Slough quite a bit lately. You see anything strange while you were up there?”

  A change came over Johnny instantly. The color drained from his face and his hands began to shake. He turned his eyes to Hick. “Why you ask?”

  “Just been some goins’ on I’m looking into. Found a little baby up there in the water and we’re looking to find out where she come from.”

  Johnny’s eyes darted left and right in the squad car. He seemed almost disoriented, and his lips trembled around his toothless gums. “It was the eephus,” he said in a whisper.

  Hick was surprised by the fear in Johnny’s voice. “What?”

  “The eephus,” he said a little louder. “I seen the eephus with a baby up there.” His voice raised a little and he cried, “The eephus ate the baby.”

  “Nothing ate no baby,” Hick said trying to calm Johnny.

  Johnny grabbed Hick’s arm so hard the squad car lurched violently to the right, almost landing them both in the ditch. “Jesus, Johnny!” Hick exclaimed. He pulled the car over. Johnny’s eyes were wide, his face contorted with fear. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

  Johnny rubbed his long, wrinkled hands together, the dry skin flaking onto his lap. He licked his lips and began, “I was up there long about three weeks ago looking for coons. I was walking through the cypress swamp as quiet as can be when I heard it … the eephus was singin’. I come to the edge of the trees and saw it there in the moonlight. It was in the water, washing that baby so’s it could eat it. I knew right what it was and took to running as fast as I could go.”

  Hick ran his hand across his eyes. “Johnny, what did the eephus look like?”

  “It was dark,” he said in a small voice. “It had a woman’s voice, but I couldn’t see its body ‘cause it was covered in a shawl that hung in the water. It didn’t have no face that I could see.”

  “Was it tall? Was it short? This is important.”

  Johnny screwed up his wrinkled face. “The eephus ain’t like us. It can be tall one minute and short the next.”

  “Could you see its hair? Clothes?”

  “I only seen its shawl. It was black, like death, and it dripped down into the water like blood and it sang a death tome and it ate the baby.”

  “What was she singing?”

  “An old lullaby. One I remember as a boy … ancient, like the eephus.”

  Inwardly, Hick groaned. He had a witness, but it was Coal Oil Johnny. He put the car back in gear and began to drive again. “Why in the hell didn’t you report this?”

  “The eephus don’t just eat babies,” Johnny replied.

  “There ain’t no such thing,” Hick retorted, his patience coming to an end.

  “You don’t live out in the woods, boy. There’s things living in that swamp that you don’t know about. You think all the old ways is nothin’ but foolishness.” He wiped his nose on his shirtsleeve and gave Hick a reproachful glance. “They didn’t even call for the sin eater when your daddy died.”

  Hick bristled. “They didn’t need to.”

  “Ain’t no man without sin.”

  Hick turned to the window, his jaw clenched, overwhelmed by frustration and anger.

  “Your daddy was good to me, boy, but he didn’t understand the old ways neither. He didn’t know what it meant to have magic blood. He could have saved your brother, but instead he called for the doctor. He never forgive hisself for that. He should have just let it alone … all that medicine and the boy died anyway. I told him, I says, Mr. Blackburn, you just got to breathe on him. But it was all for naught.”

  Hick felt his stomach tighten in rage. A sudden desire to strike Johnny filled him, but he stared at the speedometer, praying the old man would stop talking.

  “When that boy died, I begged him to let me send for the sin eater, but he wouldn’t have no part of that neither.”

  Hick sighed heavily. “Johnny, can you remember anything else about the baby or the woman carrying it?”

  Johnny smacked his toothless gums together and wrinkled his nose. “It was a right quiet little baby. It weren’t scared of the eephus at all.”

  The hardware store came into sight and Hick pulled over. Johnny climbed out and then bent over looking at him through the window. “I know you think I’m a crazy old man, but they’s things out in the cypress swamp that I seen, things you cain’t explain away. You’ll see … the old ways are best.” Hick watched the withered old man limp into the store, and then he unhappily headed to the school.

  8

  Cherokee Crossing High School was a large, formidable brick building on the outskirts of town that served not only the children of Cherokee Crossing, but all of the smaller surrounding farm communities as well. At its prime, it boasted two hundred students and several dozen teachers.

  The student population decreased in the thirties. No one knew exactly when the depression arrived in Cherokee Crossing—it was a slow-spreading disease. More and more able-bodied men were at home during the day when they should have been out in the fields. People began leaving, a few at first, and then more and more, until only those who wouldn’t leave remained. It seemed as if everyone in town was waiting for something, though no one could say what.

  That was what Hick recalled about his childhood, that feeling of waiting. Waiting for summer or Christmas, waiting for something to change, some small spark to ignite his spirit and free him from the commonplace. He had wanted excitement back then. Now, he only wanted peace.

  As a small boy, he remembered walking from the grade school down the road to the high school every afternoon to wait for his father, the sound of the acorns crunching beneath his shoes in November, the cold air biting his nose. By the time his father finished the never-ending tasks of high school principal, Hick’s face would be red from the cold and his nose running.

  Hick paused on the steps where he had spent so much of his childhood. He could almost feel it again, the anticipation that began when the sun starte
d to sink. Then his father would emerge from the schoolhouse, coat unbuttoned, hat pulled down against the cold. He would greet his son with eyes full of love.

  “Hickory, if you catch cold, your mother will tan me.” He said the same thing each cold day. They walked home together, the older man’s arm across his son’s shoulders. The two had been uncommonly close and Hick told him everything. He talked about his Sunday School lesson or his math grades, complained about his sister, gushed about Maggie. His father would simply smile the patient smile that masked the physical pain of his cancer so well.

  As Hick stood in the foyer of the school building, that same smile stared out at him from the framed portrait that hung in the lobby. Beneath it was a plaque that read, “Principal James Blackburn, 1923–1944.” He had been there when the school opened and worked almost up until the end of his life.

  Hick had not been back in the school since his return from Europe. He was struck by the silence; he couldn’t ever remember being inside the building when school wasn’t in session. Little had changed in the five years since he’d been gone. The walls were newly painted, but were the same shade of yellow. The white linoleum floor still gleamed in the sunlight that poured through the glass doors, the trophy cases still held the trophies won by Hick’s baseball team.

  His steps echoed in the hallway as he made his way to the office. He paused in front of the locker that had been Maggie’s, remembering the kisses he would steal in the morning before school. There had never been another girl for him, he’d never wanted anyone else.