Prayers the Devil Answers (23 page)

After half a dozen steps, Celia relaxed and lifted up the camera in both hands again. She called back to Lonnie. “It's not too bad out here. A little windy, I guess, but not enough to be scary. And the sun is warm. I'm going a little farther out. Are you coming?”

He stood there for a moment, staring out at the fields and forests beyond, and then at Celia's back, hunched a little as she bent over the camera. He could call out to her, tell her to come back to the ridge. There was a fallen log there at the edge of the woods. He could sit her down there, and say—what? He had never tried to work out what to say to her—not on the walk that afternoon, and not in the past few days when he knew that somehow it would have to be dealt with. Each time he tried to come to grips with it his mind shied away from the subject.

Then she called to him again and the moment passed.

He started forward, stumbling on a tangle of dried vines spilling into the path. “Coming? Oh yes.”

chapter twelve

H
e might have got away with pushing her off The Hawk's Wing and claiming that she fell accidentally, but it was his misfortune that a courting couple from the local college had decided to brave the chill and go hiking that afternoon. They had just reached the edge of the woods on the summit of the ridge when out on the rock they saw a young woman in a brown coat, holding a camera up to her face. She was standing close to the tip of Hawk's Wing, turning this way and that, apparently trying to choose the best scene for a photograph. Behind her, a few feet away, stood a sturdy, dark-haired man with his back to the ridge. He was looking in the woman's direction, first shaking his head and then clenching and unclenching his fists, but making no sound. Before the couple could get any closer, the man took a step forward with his arms straight out. He grabbed the woman, lifting her up by the back of her coat, and flung her over the side of the rock. As she fell, he took a step back and turned away, as if he did not want to see what was happening, but the pair on the ridge kept watching, though perhaps they wished they hadn't.

As the woman fell forward, she let go of the camera just as her companion pitched her over the edge of the rock and into thin air. The watchers said she didn't make a sound when she fell, but for an
instant they saw her hand reaching up as if she was trying to catch hold of the tip of the rock. She had fallen too far forward to grab it, though, and a moment later she was gone.

The couple heard no scream, and no noise when she hit the ground—the valley floor was too far below for any sound to reach them—but they heard it in their heads. It was the college boy's sweetheart who started to scream, and that's when the man on the rock looked up and finally saw them standing there. For a moment they froze, afraid he would either take a run at them or hurl himself over the edge, too, but whatever spurt of fear or rage had possessed him a minute before was gone now, and he sank down in the middle of the rock, covered his face, and wept.

First the young man persuaded the girl to stop screeching, knowing that her screams would only make matters worse. When her sobbing subsided, he let go of her hand and crept as close to The Hawk's Wing as he dared. When the boy was a dozen feet from the rock, he called out to the weeping man. As calmly as he could he offered to help, as if they were unaware of what had just happened. The man gave no sign that he heard.

He sat still, his body shaking with sobs, but the wary student ventured no closer to him than the edge of the ridge where the outcropping of rock began. He hesitated to get too close to a man they had just seen kill someone, and he knew it was no use going out there to look down to see what had happened to the woman. Nothing and nobody could have survived that fall, and he didn't want to see what was left of her, not even from a vantage point hundreds of yards above.

The student kept talking to the man, trying to sound unconcerned and sympathetic, not because he felt calm, but because he decided that there was no use in speaking any other way. Presently the man's cries subsided, and he began to stare off at the far mountains as if he couldn't hear anything at all. The student kept talking in quiet,
reassuring tones to him anyway, while he tried to work out what he would do if the man rushed at him or made a lunge for the edge of the rock.

Just as the sun was beginning to set behind the far wall of mountains, the student managed to coax the man back onto the ridge. The couple could see that he had no weapon, but even so they stepped back toward the trees as he stumbled toward them like a sleepwalker. The man was staring past them, as if barely aware that they were there at all. Once he was safely back on the solid ground of the ridge, they herded him along the path, one on either side of him, talking soothingly about the weather and the fact that it was getting dark. They suggested getting hot coffee and finding a warm place to sit down. The pair hurried him along as quickly as they dared for a few hundred yards, until they were well away from the ridge and into the woods farther down the mountain, where the trail wound down into a dense forest of poplar and oak.

There, the college boy sat down beside the man on a fallen log next to the path and waited for him to catch his breath. A few feet away the girl leaned against a tree, wondering if she ought to take the chance to run. The man had stopped crying by then, but he had not spoken a single word to them. He made no excuses or protestations of innocence, and he hadn't made any threatening moves toward them either. But there was no getting away from what they had seen. As a precaution, the college boy fumbled in the pocket of his leather jacket until he pushed open the blade of his pocket knife and grasped the hilt of it. Since the dazed man had no weapon and barely seemed to know they were there he felt safe enough to tell his girl to leave them and head down the mountain for help. When she opened her mouth to protest, he gave her a look, and she stepped away from the tree and stumbled off down the trail alone.

Now there was nothing to be done but to watch the sky grow darker and pass the time with the dazed man until help arrived.
The student waited for a bit in silence, thinking that surely the man would start talking soon. It was only human nature to want to explain yourself, especially if your actions put you in a bad light. He ought to have some justification for what he did. But the silence stretched on until the boy found it unbearable. He kept thinking about the woman being pitched over the edge of the rock. He couldn't bring it up, though. No telling what would happen if he did.

After giving the matter considerable thought, the boy decided that he would keep talking to the distraught stranger (he was careful not even to think the word
murderer
, because that ominous word would hinder his resolve to stay calm), whether he got any response from the fellow or not. He told himself that regardless of what he and his sweetheart had witnessed out on the rock, they really didn't know the facts behind the situation, and in any case, even spouting nonsense was better than waiting in this strained silence. In a friendly, casual tone, he started to talk, not to anyone in particular, it seemed, just thinking out loud really. He didn't sound concerned about what had just happened; he was just prattling about inconsequential things. He talked about the movie that was playing last week, and the subject of the term paper he was writing for American history. He went on to grouse about the cafeteria food at the college and to speculate about baseball season. He started to talk about his sweetheart, but after a sentence or two he stopped. The subject of girlfriends might bring forth unhappy memories for his listener. He hadn't even asked the man's name, nor given his own.

By the time half an hour had passed, the student had run out of personal observations and current events to comment on—one-way conversations didn't take up as much time as he'd hoped. Now he was telling his silent companion the story of “The Brave Little Tailor,” a folk tale he had been assigned to translate for French class.
“Sept d'un coup,”
he said, miming the swatting of imaginary flies. “That means seven with one blow.”
Swatting flies
 . . . When he
realized the ominous implications of the tale, he hastened to add, “Of course, it was only houseflies. People saw the phrase carved on his belt, you see, and they thought the tailor was a giant-killer, but he was just swatting flies, that's all.” He fingered the handle of the knife hidden in his jacket pocket, but the man maintained the dazed silence he had kept since he came down off The Hawk's Wing. The college boy didn't know if the man was listening or not, but at least he was keeping still, sitting on the log and staring at the ground. Occasionally he shivered. There was no wind, but since sunset the air had grown colder.

After nearly an hour a flash of light on the woodland trail caught his attention: bobbing lantern lights were advancing steadily toward them, and a minute later the reinforcements, a stout, red-faced farmer and his hired man, emerged from the trees, advancing cautiously. When they got close enough, the boy stopped telling the story. He stood up, nodding for his girl to go back down the trail again by herself—just in case there was trouble. They would meet up later on level ground at the bottom of the mountain.

As the farmer and his hired man approached the log, the student noticed the younger fellow was angling his body in order to conceal the length of rope behind his back. Satisfied that they were prepared to handle the situation, the student nodded to them and then took no more notice of them. He continued to tell the story of the brave little tailor, focusing his attention on the dazed man until the others were close enough to act. Only when they grabbed him did the student slide out of their way to watch from a safe distance while they trussed up the prisoner and hauled him to his feet.

“I told my wife to call the law,” the farmer announced. “Told her to have them meet us down the mountain, at the trailhead. The two of us can handle this fellow now, sonny, if you want to go off home. He'll not get away.” But the student stayed, determined to see it through. To leave now would be like walking out of a horror movie
before the ending resolved the danger: he would always wonder how it ended.

He followed a few paces behind the two men as they half led and half pushed the prisoner along the path. By the time they reached the field at the base of the mountain a sheriff's car was waiting.

A few hours later the searchers found the woman's body by lantern light. She had landed on her back, between a boulder and a laurel thicket, and her eyes were closed. The ones who found her hoped this meant she had passed out before she hit the ground, that she hadn't seen it coming and died in terror. Mercifully, the darkness concealed most of the damage to the body, but they could see the blood clotted around her nose and mouth.

The incident at Hawk's Wing took place on a Sunday evening, when I was home with Eddie and George, but as soon as Tyree Madden brought in the prisoner and settled him in a cell, he sent Galen Aldridge to fetch me. Nobody really expected me to do anything, I suppose, but sensational murder wasn't something that happened very often in a little mountain county, and people would expect the sheriff to be on hand to mark the occasion.

“I don't know how long you'll need to be there,” said Galen, hat in hand on my doorstep. “But I thought we could drop your boys off with Willadene on the way over. I know she'll be glad to give them supper.”

“They've eaten already. Hours ago.”

He smiled. “I never saw a young'un yet that couldn't eat two dinners. I'll bet they have room for pie, anyhow. After that, Willadene can put them to bed with our boys until we're done at the office. Or—late as it is—maybe we ought to leave them there for the rest of the night, and we can take Eddie on to school in the morning. Willadene can watch young George.”

I nodded. Galen seemed to have thought of everything. “All right, then, Sheriff, let's round 'em up and go.”

The county had its share of killings, same as everywhere else, but mostly they were fights that got out of hand, or domestic troubles, or a falling-out among lawbreakers about dividing the spoils, or splitting the profits, or a simple distrust of the principle of honor among thieves. This was different. A violent murder at a local landmark, witnessed by two horrified young people, generated more notoriety than a sheriff was likely to see in an entire term in office.

The wet streets shone in the car's headlights. The rain that had been threatening all day had finally arrived. As we headed for the station, Galen told me as much of the story as he knew—that the fellow's name was Lonnie Varden, and what had happened in general, based on the hasty account he'd been given by Tyree who had brought in the prisoner. The search-party members who stopped in later added their accounts of recovering the body. Tyree had sent the courting couple back to the college, after making sure he knew where to find them the next day.

When they had reached the office, Tyree put the prisoner in a cell, sent the searchers to deliver the victim's body to the county hospital, and ordered Galen to fetch me, even though it was quite late by then. He knew that between the town gossips and the radio station everybody around here would know most of the story by tomorrow afternoon, but of course, as sheriff, I needed to know ahead of everybody else. The prisoner wasn't Tyree's responsibility; he was mine.

“We just thought you ought to be there, seeing as how you're the sheriff and all.”

“Of course I should.”

“And it ought to be safe.”

“What do you mean, safe? The prisoner is locked in a cell, isn't he?”

“Well, it wasn't so much him that we were worried about,” said
Galen, carefully keeping his eyes on the road. “It's the possibility of a lynch mob.”

“A lynch mob?”

He glanced at my stricken expression and went back to watching the road. “Oh, we're pretty sure there won't be one. After all, it's just a man and wife killing, from what I hear, but you never know. Depends on who the wife's family is. Sometimes the grieving relatives get likkered up when they hear the news, and anything could happen then.”