His watch said it was too early to bother with the bar; he wouldn’t find anyone useful to chat up. But Mrs. Pete? It wasn’t even suppertime yet, and she’d said he could swing by before nightfall. She knew to expect him but he would’ve liked to call first, as a matter of manners … but by her own admission, she didn’t have a phone. She took all her messages out of the museum’s line and appeared perfectly content with that arrangement.
Kilgore Jones did have a phone, but it was a POS without a GPS. He consoled himself with the knowledge that by the grace of God, Ducktown had made it onto Google Maps, and therefore a stash of home-produced printouts gave him an idea of what the area looked like.
Ammaw Pete lived within spitting distance of the mine—walking distance for someone more hiking inclined than Kilgore—but it took him fully twenty minutes to find his way to her driveway via the Eldorado. Her road was neither marked nor paved, and he stumbled upon it only after the process of elimination ruled out four other identical roads. How anybody got their mail delivered was a mystery to him, but small towns and out-of-the-way places all had their methods. When everyone knows everyone, things don’t often go lost or missing. And that made the situation with the UTK ecology students all the stranger.
Or then again, maybe it didn’t. Those kids were outsiders, and the community didn’t feel obligated to look out for them. They went missing more easily than the mail.
He engaged the parking brake and the car lurched hard, then settled with its customary squeaking.
Ammaw Pete’s place was an early craftsman in good repair, with a yard that didn’t get as much love as the hanging flower baskets on the porch. The baskets were emptied of everything but the purple and pink petunias; everything else had died for the season, and these would too, probably before Thanksgiving. But for now they gave the white house with its gray roof a pop of color that said somebody lived there, and somebody cared about the place.
Kilgore tried the steps and found them true, then knocked upon a red-painted door.
Behind the door, he heard a television mumbling what sounded like the local news; a chair squealed, a board creaked, and then a set of footsteps stopped long enough for an eyeball to appear in the small window that served as a peephole.
The door didn’t open. “Who’s there?”
He assumed his most polite pose, hands folded in front of himself, slight stoop to minimize his prodigious height. “Pardon me, ma’am—but I’m looking for Ammaw Pete. Would that be you?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I’m Kilgore Jones. We spoke on the phone this morning,” he told her.
“That’s right, I recall. You’re a big son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“What is it you do again? You’re not with the po-po, I remember that much.”
“I’m a machine-shop worker from Chattanooga.”
The eyeball narrowed. “And investigator of the occasional drowning …?”
“Not the drowning, ma’am. The thing what caused it.”
He heard a click, the twist of an old knob, and the scrape of a door being drawn back an inch. “You’ve got my attention, big man. Don’t waste it.” She opened the door enough to reveal herself. Small and old, but not elderly yet. Silver-haired and bright-eyed, in a tidy blue dress and gray slippers. “You ain’t a feeler, are you?”
“No, ma’am. I don’t detect anything I can’t see.”
“You’re a fighter, then. Got to be one or the other.” She sighed and tossed the door open all the way with a flick of her wrist. “I guess you’d better come inside.”
Withdrawing to make room for him, she turned and sauntered through a cluttered home that was not the least bit dirty or unorganized—only filled to capacity with whatever things moved her magpie of a soul. Here there were stacks of Time-Life books on the Civil War and the Old West, and over there, that series from the eighties about unexplained phenomena; figurines from nearby and faraway lands alike; rows of bells from assorted tourist traps; spoons with small emblems identifying them as collector’s pieces; photos of loved ones framed and arranged across all but a few square inches of wall space; a batch of prettily organized teakettles and pot holders; a latticework of diverse coffee mugs hung on the walls around the cabinets; handmade afghans with bright colors and unfortunate patterns; curtains sewn from bed-sheets; Christmasy villages with ice-skaters and post offices and train stations awaiting the next month with flickering lights and cheerful miniature residents, pets, vehicles—plus wreaths on every door.
“I’ll put the kettle on and you can have a seat.”
Of course she’d put the kettle on. Kilgore would never escape an old Southern woman’s home without tea, same as he’d never settle down to a young Southern woman’s company without coffee, now that he thought about it. It was like nobody could talk without something to sip for distraction.
But they’d done the same thing at the old First Baptist, hadn’t they? If not potlucks then communions, and that’s why they called it a Fellowship Hall.
Ammaw, whose name he’d first misheard as “Grandma,” gestured at the dining-room table, a well-varnished and rough-hewn piece that someone must’ve made for her. None of the pretty little chairs matched, and none of them looked like they’d hold Kilgore without protest and structural failure.
He was prepared to suggest that perhaps they could sit outside on the porch, but then he spied a cedar bench that probably belonged in a garden—but in Ammaw’s kitchen it was piled with folded hand towels and a stack of cast-iron skillets nested together. “You think perhaps I could just … clear off that bench? We’ll both be happier if I don’t break anything.”
She coughed the laugh of an octogenarian smoker, but her age wasn’t so advanced and Kilgore didn’t see any cigarettes. “Do what you gotta.”
It wasn’t just her laugh, he realized. Her words were offered up with that same ragged edge that sounded like more than age peeking through. While he gently adjusted her décor, he said, “I hope I haven’t intruded on you, particularly not if you’ve been feeling poorly.”
“Poorly?” She paused at the stove and shot him a look. “Oh, the cough, you mean? Hardly even a rattle, and I guess you ain’t been in town too long, or you’d have heard it by now. All us old folks who grew up here … we all got the voice.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Why? It don’t hurt, and I don’t mind. Makes you feel like part of a tribe,” she informed him, and she hauled a box of tea bags from a cabinet, then yanked two mugs off the wall. For herself she chose a soft pink jobbie with a nicely shaped handle. For him, Tweety Bird sitting in a bathtub. “Once upon a time, Ducktown and Copperhill had a big tribe between ’em. The mine took good care of its workers,” she insisted, her cough to the contrary. “Now it’s gone, and so are most of us. It’s just the way of things.”
“But the land’s come back real nicely,” he said, accepting a measure of steaming water and dipping his tea bag, prompting it to steep. “So there’s that.”
“There’s that, yes. And there’s snakes, and there’s rats and bugs, too. Didn’t used to have any of that nonsense, but here they come, creeping back. None of them worth the trouble of those goddamn trees. We liked our red dirt, I’ll have you to know …” She eyed him over the edge of the mug. “But you’re not here for tea or bitchin’. You want to talk about the crater, and what sleeps inside it.”