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  Maybe he’ll just leave, Emmie thought. Maybe he’ll just get in the car and go back to Mama. The thought was very nearly a prayer. Her heart sank when her father, after an extended conversation, followed the fat man into the house, leading the girl dog-like on her leash. The inner door closed behind the shabby screen porch door and Emmie could see no more.

  Steeling her courage, the little girl sneaked up along the driveway toward the garage, keeping out of the light, and circled the back of the garage to the darkest part of the yard. She darted to the side of the house, in the shadowed twenty-foot gap between the house and the garage.

  She crept to a side window. It was just low enough for her to stand on her tiptoes and look in, but the shade was fully closed and no light was on in the room beyond. No hope of seeing inside, and the dark window suggested the room was not in use anyway.

  There was a second window, though, farther back, yellow with muted light. Probably a rear bedroom. She went to it and found the shade was drawn down but ragged. Three holes penetrated the shade, too high up for her eye to reach, even when she stood on tiptoe.

  She spotted a metal bucket beside a backyard shed. This she fetched back to the window, and placed upside-down on the ground for a footstool. Edging up on her tiptoes atop the overturned bucket, she could get her eye up to the level of the lowest hole in the shade. She pressed her eye against the window and looked in.

  She stayed there nearly a minute, not daring even to blink and barely letting herself breathe, and watched what was happening in the room. Her heart sank and she felt ill. She stepped off the bucket and sank to the ground, where she sat a few moments, heartsick, tears streaming and shoulders heaving.

  “No, Daddy … no,” Emmie said in the quietest of whispers. “Please … no.”

  She got up, considering but rejecting a second look. She’d seen more than she wanted already. Emmie darted back around the rear of the garage and headed back toward the Winona Court on the run, so distressed that she had to pause to vomit onto the ground along the way. After that she forced herself to calm down, dried her tear-moistened face, and drew in long breaths until her respiration settled and her heart was beating at something close to a normal pace. She walked rather than ran for the rest of the distance. That was all that saved her from running, cartoon-syle, into the open space above a brush-filled sinkhole at least twelve feet wide and invisible in the darkness. It opened like some ragged wound in the land in the midst of an empty, overgrown lot. She stopped just in time, skirted around its edge carefully, then fell in anyway when the ground at the edge of the sinkhole gave way under her weight.

  She caught herself on roots coming out of the steeply sloped wall of the hole, and climbed out wondering how deep the depression was. She knew little about sinkholes, and wondered if some of them were like vertical cave entrances. What if she’d fallen into a crevice at the bottom of the sinkhole and vanished forever into some vast cavern?

  She climbed out with the greatest of care and continued on toward the Winona.

  Dale was smoking his fourth sneaked cigarette of the night outside the motel, and she caught him. They struck a bargain for her to keep quiet about the smoking if he’d do the same regarding her having left the motel. Back inside the room, where their mother remained unconscious on her bed, they fumbled with the TV some more, finally got a flickering, snowy picture, and in boredom watched an ancient western in black-and-white while listening for the crunch of the Mercury’s tires on the gravel parking lot.

  All that night, Emmie spoke not another word. She pretended to be asleep when her father finally came through the door, just so she would not have to look at him.

  THE FAMILY FELL APART the next day.

  Morning came, and Lorene awakened with a pounding headache, a sense of surprise at finding herself in a motel room rather than at her sister’s home, and the seeming notion, judging from her pitiful manner, that she must have acted in some unforgivable way the prior evening and infuriated her husband. She had no idea what she might have done, though, because she could remember almost nothing past the point she had begun guzzling beer in the car.

  Suffering from her hangover, Lorene behaved as she typically did at such times, apologizing over and over for imagined or unknown offenses. She spoke to Donnie in a sad, servile way, flattering him with compliments he would not deserve in his finest hour, if ever he achieved one. Emmie was disgusted as she watched, angry at her mother for groveling, angrier yet at Donnie because of what she had seen through that tattered window shade. Emmie knew who it was who truly should be fawning and repentant this particular morning.

  Donnie and the children gathered the luggage and stacked it by the door. Outside, the repaired Meteor sat waiting. Donnie opened the trunk to receive the suitcases, but did not go back to get them, instead lighting a Camel and sitting on the hood of the car to smoke. He’d make Dale carry the luggage.

  Just looking at her father made Emmie nauseous … what she’d watched through that ragged window shade the prior night remained vivid in her mind.

  Worsening it all was having to watch Donnie play the situation to his advantage like the experienced master of manipulation that he was, at least where Lorene was concerned. From the time they’d awakened he’d tossed out vague implications of specific insults and hurtful behavior from Lorene the evening before, things supposedly said and done at a time when, in actuality, the woman had been passed out on her bed, gripping the last of many emptied bottles, and Donnie had been off repairing the car and giving way to his lusts at the house of Millard. Lorene’s memories were drunken blurs, so it was easy for him to plant false impressions and even errant recollections in her mind.

  Dale had not forgotten his wish for a pancake breakfast, and asked his parents if they might go to “that place” for pancakes, this while pointing at the barn across the road. Painted on the side of it was a large, sun-faded advertisement for a business in downtown Tylerville, the county seat town a few miles up the highway. Emmie read the sign and turned on her brother a haughty stare. “You really are stupid, Dale,” she said. “That sign ain’t got nothing to do with pancakes. That sign’s for a jewelry store, see? ‘Spancake’s Fine Jewelry, 14 Railroad Street, Tylerville, Tennessee. Proprietor and Jeweler in Chief, Henry Spancake.’ Y’see? That sign don’t talk about pancakes at all. You can’t even read right!” She took a precautionary step away from him, then lowered her voice slightly to sarcastically mimic him. ‘Mama, can we go somewhere in the morning and have pancakes? Can we?’”

  Emmie had forgotten that Dale was in the midst of a growth spurt, so even though she’d backstepped, his arm was long enough to reach her and smack her flat-handed on her left jaw. It didn’t hurt much, but Emmie was surprised and embarrassed, and burst into tears. She ran to her mother and threw her arms around her waist. “Mama, he hit me! Dale hit me!”

  Donnie slid off the car hood, lunged at Dale and slapped him on the jaw just as Dale himself had slapped Emmie, but Donnie hit much harder. Dale’s head jarred violently and he lost his breath for several seconds, standing with eyes bulging as a broad red streak appeared and darkened on his cheek. “How you like it, you little sumbitch?” Donnie snarled at his son.

  Dale always tried hard not to cry in front of his sister, but this time it couldn’t be held back. He sucked in a hard, jerky breath and sobbed, reaching up to rub his slapped jaw.

  “Donnie! Don’t you be hitting my kids!” Lorene screamed, then groaned because screaming made her aching head throb.

  “Your kids? Hell, woman, they’re mine, too, and I got a right … Or are they mine? I ain’t ever been sure of it, slut that you are.”

  “I ain’t no slut, and I don’t want you hitting the children, Donnie.”

  “Hell, woman, he slapped Emmie! Right on the face! Little bastard deserves what I gave him!”

  Dale glared at his father. “You ain’t supposed to call me that name, mama says!”

  “Yeah? That’s just because it reminds her that
that’s exactly what you are, boy! That baby picture of you hanging in our trailer was took three weeks before the day I married your mother … three weeks before I made the damned biggest mistake of my life, trying to ‘do the right thing’ by her just because you’d come along! This mess of a life we got is your fault, boy! If it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have married such trash!”

  “Daddy, don’t you talk like that!” Emmie interrupted, furious at her father even though his punishment of Dale had ostensibly been in her defense. “She’s my mama! She’s good! I love her!”

  Donnie did one of his trademark sarcastic mimics. “She’s good! I love her! I loooooove her!” he intoned in a girlish, high voice. “I looooooove Mama even though she gets skunk-drunk and treats Daddy like garbage and squeals like a stuck sow if everybody around her ain’t doing to suit her – “

  “Well, at least she don’t go flirting with motel clerks and running off to … to do nasty things with some teenage girl who stands out on a porch wearing a leash!” Ellie exploded, recklessly venting anger that had been fermenting for hours. What she had seen her father doing in that back bedroom played across her mind with disgusting clarity, and at this moment her hatred of him outweighed all fear and prudence. “I know all about it, Daddy. I followed you and I saw!”

  “Why, you sneaking little …” Donnie’s voice failed him as he comprehended what this meant. Emmie knew. She actually knew. His confidence in his talents as a deceiver crumbled, and when he turned to his wife, who was trying to figure out just what Emmie was talking about, his face was was that of a man just kicked hard in the stomach.

  “Lorene, it ain’t true. She’s a damn little liar. It ain’t true!”

  Lorene looked utterly bewildered. What Emmie had just said was prodding up a memory from the alcohol-muddled murk of her brain. What, though? It was all hazy … something Emmie had claimed to see while they were traveling, and which had led to some sort of argument involving … what? Oh yes: a white dog confused for something else. A girl, Lorene abruptly remembered. While they were riding, Emmie had claimed to see a girl leashed up like a dog on a porch, and she and Donnie had maintained that what Emmie had actually seen was, in fact, merely a dog, because why would anyone leash up a person?

  What Emmie had said just now, though, implied there had been a girl on that porch after all, and that Donnie … no. No. Surely he had not … his picking up grown women in bars was bad enough, but surely he hadn’t … not with some unfortunate, misused young girl … he couldn’t have, mustn’t have …

  The look on Donnie’s face told her he had.

  She glared at her husband, ready to confront and accuse, but Donnie preempted her. Hastily he dug his keys out of his jeans, slammed the trunk closed, and got in the driver’s seat. “I’m going to run the car down the road a mile or two and come back … got to make sure that we’re running good before we take out for Nell’s. I paid for the room when we checked in, so just leave the key in the room and close the door when I come back for you, and we’ll get on the road.” He cranked the engine and gunned it, put the car in reverse, and backed away before Lorene had time to speak.

  He made a left turn out of the lot in the direction of Tylerville. His wife and children stood alone and watched the Meteor go out of sight. Silence held for nearly a minute.

  Dale spoke first. “He ain’t really coming back, is he, Mama.” He said it as a statement, not a question.

  “No, honey. I don’t think he is.”

  “Where is he going, then? Aunt Nell’s?”

  “Not there, no. I don’t know where he’ll go, but he’ll sure not go there. Anyplace away from us, that’s all I can guess.”

  Emmie cried softly and Lorene cried with her. Dale stuck his chin out and tried to look manly, but his lip quivered.

  “What are we going to do now, Mama?” Emmie asked. “We got no car, got no Daddy.”

  Lorene pulled herself together and looked over at the nearby diner, open now for the early crowd. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” she said in as firm a voice as she could muster. “We’re going to march over to that diner there and have us some breakfast. I hid away a few dollars Donnie didn’t know about, so we can pay for a meal without him. Then I’ll call Nell and have them come pick us up.”

  “Pancakes?” Dale asked.

  “All you want, son. With lots of syrup. Bacon, too.”

  THE FOOD WAS A WELCOME distraction, though Lorene secretly grieved over its cost. After some restorative nourishment, though, the departure of Donnie began to feel like something that might actually be a good thing. They lingered longer than necessary in the diner, enjoying a momentary escape from a tense and difficult family life. At a phone booth outside, Lorene called her sister, talking low and masking her mouth with her hand to keep the children from picking up what she said. As she talked she began to cry a little.

  Checkout was not until noon and it would take Nell some time to reach them, so they went back to their room to wait. By now Lorene was not only nearly sure Donnie would not return, but strongly hoping he would not. Emmie and Dale fidgeted and tried vainly to find something worth watching on television. Lorene, her emotions wrecked, continued quietly weeping and finally vanished into the bathroom, where she remained a long time.

  Emmie noticed that, when her mother came red-eyed out of the bathroom, the cheap engagement and wedding rings that she always wore were gone from her finger. She did not ask why, or what had become of them.

  DONNIE MOODY’S HEART WAS RACING when he sped away from the Winona Court and his family. He could scarcely believe what he was doing, and as he pondered it, experienced a gnawing, growing fear that crawled about in his chest like a worm.

  He’d just walked through a door that had slammed closed behind him, and would not open again. When he’d driven out of that motel parking lot he’d pushed Lorene out of his life. He knew it and she surely did as well. He was sure she would never let him return to her.

  His thoughts tumbled wildly through his mind. How many times have I thought about leaving, and imagined how it would be like being set free from prison? How many times have I wished I could live without having to please her? Or being afraid she might drive off drunk sometime and wreck, and hurt the kids … or herself? And now that I’ve gone and left her, why is it that all I feel is scared and sad?

  And so, driving the Mercury his grandfather had bought for him as a wedding gift only a month before the old man dropped dead from a bad heart and too many Lucky Strikes, Donnie Moody, man’s man, rugged tough guy … that same Donnie Moody drove alone along a rural highway with tears streaming down his face and sorrow boiling in his heart. He was an isolated man with no plans, little hope, abundant regrets, and too few dollars in his pocket. He’d spent most of what he had for a dalliance with a pathetic, soulless, drugged girl exploited by her own guardian. Fool, he snarled silently into the rear view mirror. Fool!

  “I miss you already, Lorene,” he mumbled to the empty passenger seat. “I wish you hadn’t drove me away from you, woman. But you did. You did. And what am I going to do now without you, Lorene? Huh? What now?”

  Part I

  TYLERVILLE AT 200

  Chapter One

  Kincheloe County, Tennessee, February, 1985

  THE RAMBLER WAS RUNNING SMOOTHLY. None of the roughness and missing of the previous month, when Eli Scudder had been convinced the aging car he had inherited from his father was about to shudder to a permanent stop at any moment. Amazing what a new set of plugs could do at the right time.

  Eli looked around the countryside of Kincheloe County on either side of the Gov. Heyward Sadler Memorial Highway and found nothing unappealing except the occasional dumpy trailer or rotted-out barn, and even some of the latter possessed a rugged and decaying charm. Western Kincheloe County, where he now was, was mostly valley pastureland drained by Blue Creek, which meandered through fenced grassland where cattle grazed along with a few horses and the occasional sheep or goat.
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br />   If little he saw was unappealing, neither was it familiar. He had not been in Kincheloe County since childhood, when he and his late parents had visited Eli’s maternal grandparents, also now deceased, at their small farm in an outlying area of the county.

  A roadside sign told him he was seven miles from Tylerville, the county seat; his watch put the time at 8:38. He was running early.

  Early was good, and for Eli, atypical. Now he had time to find the offices of the Tylerville Daily Clarion, get the lay of the land, scout out a good parking place. Maybe grab some breakfast. No fast food, nothing served beneath fiberglass arches. He’d find a café or diner with a local atmosphere. Have eggs and bacon and a look at the people of this town. See some faces he might come to know in coming days, if all went well in the job interview.

  He found the newspaper office by accident. An exit off the four-lane highway led onto a two-laner that made a straight shot into the western side of Tylerville. He passed a tire and alignment shop, a convenience store, a handful of modest houses, a decrepit baseball field. The road tipped and curved to the right before straightening again. Beside the straightaway was a fire hall with a city public works gas pump out front where a young policeman was fueling his squad car. Eli waved. His late father had been a policeman in Knoxville for thirty-five years; Eli seldom let an officer go ungreeted.

  A couple of blocks of small, old houses, an AME Zion church on the left, and Eli passed under a concrete-and-steel railroad bridge to enter Tylerville proper. A humble shopping center with a discount grocery was on the right, a post office and branch bank on the left. He drove under a traffic light, and before him, up a slight hill, saw the brick-fronted offices of the Tylerville Clarion to the right. He’d reached his destination.