The twelve-year-old twins—Joshua, who could speak just fine but seldom did, and Isaac, who’d had his tongue cut out when he was nine years old for cussing at Papa-In-Grey—both nodded dutifully and hurried off toward the barn where they kept the stacks of old wood, a fragment of which the girl had used to end their brother’s life. In the rain, they were going to need kerosene to get the fire to catch, so Luke mumbled instructions to this effect to Aaron and watched his brother lumber off, shoulders hunched, toward the small ramshackle shed with walls of badly rusted corrugated iron where they’d hung and skinned one of the girl’s friends.
Then, with a shuddering sigh, he knelt briefly in a puddle of Matt’s blood, and said a short prayer, intended not solely for the dear departed, but for himself too. He asked for forgiveness, and courage, but didn’t wait to find out if either had been bestowed on him. Somehow he doubted it. Far too much had gone wrong for him to expect any mercy from God or anyone else.
Luke rose up and started up the steps into the house.
After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, Doc Wellman finally emerged from the bedroom he had once shared with his wife until her death in ’92. Nowadays he slept on a tattered sofa in his living room, and always with the TV on and the volume turned low. He couldn’t sleep without it. It was all he had for company. That, and the few patients willing to travel thirty miles outside of town to see him. He had witnessed much in his lifetime, not the least of which was the slow and painful decay of his wife in those endlessly long weeks before the cancer finally took her, but it was clear from the deathly pallor on his face as he stood before the old black man and his boy, that he had never seen anything quite like this.
Driven by equal parts excitement and impatience, Pete stood first, leaving his father sitting alone on the small wicker bench in the hall. “She alive?” the boy asked, searching but not finding the answer in the aged doctor’s expression.
Wellman was so thin his limbs were like broom handles snapped over someone’s knee, his chest a deflated accordion topped by a long face writhing with wrinkles in which small blue eyes, magnified by a pair of rimless spectacles, shone with surprising alertness. Those eyes looked troubled now as they found the boy’s face. Pete had expected to be ignored, that whatever the doctor said would be directed toward his father, and so was pleasantly surprised to find the doctor addressing him directly. “Yes,” he said in a quiet voice. “She is, but barely.”
“Will she make it?” Pete persisted.
“I think so, though she’s lost quite a bit of blood.”
The boy let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“Who did this to her?” Wellman asked, frowning. “I can’t imagine anyone…” He trailed off, and put a hand to his mouth as if censoring a line of thought that would yield answers he preferred not to hear.
“Animals,” Pete’s father said again, as if he’d been programmed to give that response whenever the question was put to him.
The doctor dropped his gaze from the boy to his father. “Not unless we got animals in this state can work a knife, Jack.”
Pete looked to his father to see how this news had affected him. It hadn’t, or if it did, he was doing a fine job of hiding the fact. In the dull gray light through the windows in the hall, all he saw on the old man’s face were shadows.
“No,” Wellman said, “Wasn’t animals did this. Poor girl’s been cut up something terrible. Beaten too. She’s got a concussion, multiple fractures, and a couple of busted ribs. Whoever took a blade to her used it to take out one of her eyes and lop off a few of her fingers and toes. If it was an animal, the wounds would be ragged, Jack. No.” He sounded as if he didn’t believe it was possible or didn’t want to believe it, but knew there was no other explanation. “Someone real angry wanted her to die, and die slow.” He shook his head and touched a pair of trembling fingers to the small silver crucifix that hung around his neck. Then he sighed and stepped away from the boy. “Either one of you called the Sheriff?”
Pete shook his head. “I guess we wanted to get her here ’fore it was too late.”
“Well that was the right thing to do, but we’d best give Hal a call now. Need to tell him he’s got some kind of lunatic out there running around chopping up women.” He started to move down the hall, but Jack stood and put a hand on his arm. Wellman looked at it like it was a strange species of exotic spider that had just dropped from the ceiling.
With a pained expression on his face, Pete’s father leaned in close to the doctor and said in a low voice, “You can’t. Not ’less you want more people in that room of yours tonight.”
Puzzled, Wellman slowly withdrew his arm from the man’s grip. “You know something I don’t?”
Jack licked his lips and nodded slowly. “I do, but might be better if you didn’t hear it.” His gaze, which Pete was shocked to see was one of fear, dropped to the floor. “Now if you’re sayin’ that girl’s gonna make it, I reckon me and Pete’s done about all we can and we’ll just head on home and leave her to you.”
Wellman studied Jack’s face. “What’s going on?”
“Leave it, Doc. Please. It’s the best thing to do.”
“The hell it is, Jack. Someone’s gonna be missing that girl and I don’t know where to start. That’s Sheriff’s work right there, and how’s he gonna help if he don’t know about it?” He glanced at Pete and a funny look passed over his face. “You boys didn’t have anything to do with this, did you?”
Pete felt as if he’d been punched. “Hell no, Doc. We found her just like that, honest we did. She was on the road, throwin’ up blood. I reckon if we hadn’t come along she’d be roadkill right now, or cooked in the sun. Me and Dad loaded her up and came right here, ain’t that right?”
“That’s right,” Jack said, his gaze still directed at the floor as if something down there was of fierce interest to him. “This wasn’t our doin’.”
“But you know whose doing it was?”
Jack said nothing for a moment, then raised his head and looked hard at his son. “Go on out to the truck.”
“But I want—”
“Now.”
Pete knew it would be unwise to argue. He’d been on the receiving end of the back of his father’s hand for less. But before he obeyed, he asked Wellman, “Can I come back’n see her?”
“If it’s all right with your Pa.”
“We’ll see,” Jack said, which Pete knew was as good as a “no”, and stepped aside to indicate the boy needed to get moving.
“Thanks for patchin’ her up,” Pete said to the doctor.
The old man nodded. “Wouldn’t have been a whole lot I could’ve done if you boys hadn’t picked her up. You saved her life, I reckon.”
“Will you tell her we was the ones brought her in?”
“Sure, son.”
Reluctantly, the boy did as he was told, passing between the men and through an invisible cloud of their intermingled scents: sweat, tobacco, and disinfectant. Once clear of them, however, he took his time making his way to the door, pretending to admire the sparsely furnished interior of the doctor’s house, hoping to hear just what it was his father knew, but they said nothing, obviously aware he was still within earshot. Aggravated by questions unanswered, he opened the front door and stepped out into the rain.