The Third Hill North of Town Read online

  “You might not need a tourniquet, then. Just keep pressure on it for a little while.” There was a brief pause, and when she resumed speaking her voice had reverted to its girlish timbre. “You can use the rest of Ben’s cape as a bandage.”

  The boys looked at each other again.

  “Jesus,” Jon whispered. “We are so screwed.”

  Elijah nodded but said nothing. He tried to cover himself again with the pathetic remnants of his shirt, but so little was left of it that he soon gave up. Fresh tears welled in his eyes as he let the soft white cloth fall from his fingers to the floor, and he turned his head so Jon wouldn’t see him cry.

  “It’s not a cape,” he grated at Julianna, fighting to keep from having another panic attack. “It’s my shirt.”

  Jon had been watching him. He was almost as upset as Elijah, but at the moment he was less worried for himself than he was for the younger boy. For whatever reason, Elijah was the one being hunted by the police, and he looked so sad and vulnerable sitting there in his bare skin that Jon’s heart ached for him.

  “You want my shirt, man?” he asked. “It’s wet, but you can have it if you want it.”

  Elijah stared at him. The kindness behind Jon’s offer astonished and moved him, and he eyed the other boy’s blue T-shirt for a moment before shaking his head.

  “Nah. That’s okay.” He hesitated. “Thanks, though.”

  As much as he hated being unclothed, he hated the idea of wearing somebody else’s dirty shirt even more.

  Jon shrugged. “Sure.”

  There was a long, shy silence as they searched for more to say to each other. Julianna was humming what sounded like a hymn, and the trees on both sides of the road were blurs of green and brown through the windows.

  Jon finally cleared his throat and leaned closer to Elijah so Julianna wouldn’t hear him. The corners of his mouth turned up as he spoke in Elijah’s ear. “Just be glad she didn’t think your underwear was some kind of surgical gauze,” he whispered.

  Elijah flushed, but when he realized he was being teased he almost grinned, too, in spite of everything. He was still trying to think of an appropriate reply when the Edsel’s engine sputtered and died.

  “Oh, dear!” Julianna cried, wrestling with the wheel to bring them to the side of the road before they stopped moving altogether. “Now what?”

  Samuel and Mary Hunter weren’t the only parents on tenterhooks about a missing child in trouble with the law. One hundred and three miles north of Prescott, Maine, in the quiet little town of Tipton (home of Toby’s Pizza Shack), Earl and Marline Tate were praying as hard for Jon as the Hunters were for Elijah.

  The Tates felt they’d failed as parents. Their eldest child had not only run out on his responsibility to the underage, pregnant Becky Westman, but on his way out of Tipton he had also robbed Toby, his friend and employer, of nearly four hundred dollars. Because of this, he was now wanted by the police, and there was nothing Earl and Marline could do about it except wait for him to be caught, and fret about the consequences.

  Marline, especially, was so torn between agitation and rage she couldn’t sit still.

  “What will happen when the Westmans find out he’s skipped town?” She was pacing the floor in Jon’s apartment, pausing now and then to aim a vicious kick at various stacks of paperback books that kept getting in her way. “What if they decide to tell the police about Becky’s baby?”

  When the Westmans and the Tates had left Jon alone in the wee hours of the morning, the plan had been to meet again for lunch with both Jon and Becky to discuss their future. But before this meeting could occur, the Tates had gotten a call from the Tipton sheriff, informing them Jon had stolen cash from the Pizza Shack and was now a wanted criminal. The last thing Jon needed was for the sheriff to discover he was fleeing from more than a simple misdemeanor theft, so Earl and Marline had decided to go to lunch with the three Westmans anyway, to stall for time until Jon could be apprehended. Once there, they’d made up a story about his not being able to join them due to a sudden onset of flu-like symptoms. The Westmans were suspicious about his absence, but Marline was at last able to convince them she’d spent the morning nursing Jon herself, and that he was at home in his bed with a high fever and chills, and was clearly in no condition to be around a pregnant young girl like Becky.

  When Marline was desperate, she could be a particularly effective liar.

  “Calm down, Marline,” Earl grunted from Jon’s comfy reading chair. Earl was attempting to be stoical, but his hands were trembling on the chair’s arms. “Don’t borrow trouble.”

  “Don’t borrow trouble?” Her lips quivered. “Statutory rape, Earl,” she whispered. “They’ll charge him with statutory rape. He could go to jail for years.”

  She resumed pacing. Her small, thin legs were moving so fast it reminded Earl of those little tiny birds he’d seen the last time time he and Marline had taken their sons to the beach.

  What were those funny little birds called? he wondered, rubbing his temples.

  It bothered him that he couldn’t remember. They’d watched the birds for hours, though; the nervous little guys with their tiny stick legs fleeing the tide, then sprinting back onto the wet sand to hunt for food every time the ocean withdrew. Jon and his younger brothers, Billy and Evan, had made a game of imitating them, and Marline had laughed herself silly. The boys were all tan and handsome that day, and Earl had been so proud to be their dad.

  “What were those birds called?” he asked. “You know, the funny little ones at the beach a couple of summers ago.”

  “What?” Marline stopped pacing and stared at him. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  He shook his head, knowing it wasn’t worth explaining. “It doesn’t matter.” He swallowed. “I was just trying to remember something.”

  She kept staring at him. She’d already forgotten what he’d asked her; her mind was wandering as much as his was.

  They look so much alike, she thought. How can they be so different?

  The resemblance between Earl and Jon was remarkable. Earl’s face was puffier than Jon’s, of course, and his hair had gray in it, but the two of them were peas in a pod, from their wide shoulders and thin waists to their gray eyes and flat chins. If you saw their baby pictures, too, you’d swear you were looking at the same infant. Even Marline had trouble telling the photos apart if you put them side by side.

  But the similarity between her husband and her oldest son was limited to the surface. Earl was a model of sobriety and maturity, and Jon was nothing but a spoiled child. Marline mostly blamed herself for this; she’d let Jon have his way far too much of the time when he was growing up. He was her oldest and brightest son, but he’d squandered all his gifts, one by one, and now he’d turned into the kind of kid who ran away when the going got tough.

  He’s become a coward, she told herself, grieving.

  Earl didn’t notice that Marline was still staring at him. Jon was really something that day, he was thinking. He was good as gold to Billy and Evan.

  Jon had helped his younger brothers build a sand castle, and he’d played Frisbee with them, and when some other kids who were Jon’s age came over and asked if he wanted to join them for volleyball, he said no, because he knew how hurt Billy and Evan would be if he ditched them to play with the older kids.

  Marline started pacing once again, but then halted almost immediately to bend down and look at a book with no cover, resting on a milk carton. It was Anna Karenina. She’d adored that book when she was in college, and she thought this battered copy may have even been hers: Jon had been stealing books from her shelves for years. There was a small pyramid of empty beer cans by the milk carton, too, and something about the sight of those filthy cans next to her beloved book felt like desecration. It made her want to scream.

  “Where in God’s name is he?” she cried at the ceiling. “He’s ruining his whole life!”

  She picked up Anna Karenina and swung it like a ping-p
ong paddle at the aluminum pyramid. The beer cans went flying in every direction, making a horrendous racket as they bounced along the floor and against the walls. It took a long time for the last one to come to a standstill in the corner by the lamp.

  In the silence that followed, she slowly straightened. Her lungs felt as if they weren’t working; her breathing sounded odd to her own ears. But when she gazed over at her husband her throat closed, and she stopped breathing entirely.

  “Oh, my dear,” she whispered.

  Earl’s face was composed, but his eyes were brimming with tears.

  Plovers, he was thinking, knowing it didn’t matter. Those little birds were plovers.

  Julianna put the stalled Edsel in park and turned the key in the ignition to “off.” To the left of the car was a heavily wooded area; to the right was a stone fence, surrounding what appeared to be a dairy farm. Julianna sighed, then shifted in her seat to face the boys in the back.

  “I believe we’re out of gasoline,” she said, flustered. She very much wanted to get home, and she was uncertain how to deal with this unforeseen delay. “Daddy must have forgotten to refill the tank earlier this week.”

  “Wonderful.” Jon’s voice was tinged with hysteria. “We just killed a cop, and now we’re stranded in the middle of nowhere.” His eyes darted from window to window, as if he were expecting dozens of police cars to surround them at any moment. “That’s . . . yeah, that’s just great!”

  Fewer than twenty minutes ago, Elijah would have been thrilled at the notion of the Edsel failing them, but now all he felt was dread. He was thinking more clearly than he had been when Julianna first ran over the state trooper, and it seemed to him his sole remaining hope of living through this day was to get as far away as he could from the scene of the crime.

  And to do that, he needed the Edsel.

  He needed the Edsel right now.

  “How did this happen?” he demanded. “How could you have let us run out of gas?”

  Julianna seemed oblivious to their distress. She was making small sounds of dismay over the blood on her outfit.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “My dress is ruined! I’ll never get this stain out.”

  The cut on her forearm was superficial, but it had bled quite a bit. Both Jon and Elijah gasped in horror when they saw the large red splotch on her sleeve.

  “You’re hurt,” Elijah said, surprised. He temporarily forgot the direness of their situation as he leaned over the seat for a closer look. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  Jon’s head appeared next to Elijah’s. “Do you need a doctor?” he asked. “How bad is it?”

  Julianna was touched by their almost parental concern for her. But before she could thank them for their solicitousness, her forgotten years as an English teacher resurfaced, and her big green eyes flickered with amusement.

  “ ‘I bleed, sir,’ ” she quoted. “‘But not killed.’ ”

  Elijah frowned, not understanding, but Jon stared at her, taken aback.

  “Macbeth?” he asked.

  Her smile widened as she shook her head. “Nope. Othello. Iago says it at the end of the play. Good guess, though.”

  He studied her with curiosity, wondering more than ever who she was, and what she was doing here. “You know Shakespeare?”

  She giggled. “Not personally, silly.”

  Her little girl voice was back, and the adult woman had vanished.

  Jon stared at her for another long minute, then began to bump his forehead against the front seat over and over. “Great,” he muttered, between bumps. “Oh, yeah. This is just terrific.”

  The heat in the car was stifling; all three of them were dripping with sweat.

  Elijah clasped his arms around his naked stomach to keep from vomiting. “What are we gonna do?”

  Julianna peered out the windows, then gestured over the stone fence at the dairy. “Do you suppose the Millers are at home? I bet they might give us some lemonade, if we ask nicely.”

  Interlude

  Saturday, June 23, 1923

  Pawnee, Missouri, (population 137) was little more than a village wedged between steep, brooding hills, nine miles south of the Iowa border. Named after the Pawnee Indians—who’d been sent packing to a reservation in Oklahoma in the 1870s—the town was home to mostly Irish and Scottish immigrant farmers and their offspring. There was only one street to speak of, but it was a busy one. There was a smithy, a general goods store, a school, a doctor’s office, and a post office; there was even a telephone/telegraph office and a bakery (Nellie and Eunice’s Sweet Home Kitchen). Northern Missouri in the summer was as hot as a boiler room in hell, and in the winter it was bone-numbingly cold. Yet it wasn’t a bad place to grow up, especially if it was all a child had ever known.

  As was the case with Julianna Larson.

  Julianna was fifteen years old that summer, and had never been farther than twenty miles from Pawnee. Her father, Eben Larson, was the county tax collector, and her mother, Emma, was Pawnee’s postmistress and sole telephone operator. Julianna’s two older brothers, Michael and Seth, still lived at home and took care of the family farm; Eben had ceded the place to his sons after a hay conditioner shredded his left foot and permanently crippled him. The Larson farm was a mile and a half north of Pawnee, and their nearest neighbor was Clyde Rayburn, whose beat-to-hell old farmhouse was several hundred yards closer to town, hidden from sight by a high hill and a row of maple trees.

  If somebody had told Julianna she’d be fleeing Pawnee in three days and wouldn’t attempt to return for the next thirty-nine years, she would have thought the idea preposterous. She loved her family and friends, and even though her world was gradually getting larger—Pawnee’s school was for kids in the eighth grade or younger, so the past year she’d ridden her horse to Hatfield, five miles distant, to attend high school—she was still content with her life, and had no idea what kind of hell awaited her in the coming week.

  It all started with a large, angry farmer named Rufus Tarwater.

  In spite of Prohibition, Rufus was a drunk, and everybody knew it. Worse than that, he was a mean drunk, who was said to enjoy waling on his wife, Josephine, whenever he felt she was getting “uppity.” His farm was on good land and should have provided everything he needed, but Rufus was rumored to spend all his earnings on moonshine, so he and Jo were always strapped. The only reason they survived at all was because the minister of the Lone Rock church was a soft touch, who could always be counted on to tide the Tarwaters over with food from his very own pantry whenever Rufus came begging.

  Julianna’s dad, Eben, was new to the tax-collection business; the accident with the hay conditioner had just occurred the previous autumn. After his injury, the only job in the area he was still up to was tax collector, because it allowed him to stay off his bad foot most of the day. This meant, of course, that every taxpayer in the county came to call on Eben Larson in his home office at least once a year, and usually more often than that.

  Which is why Rufus Tarwater, taxpayer, came calling on a Saturday morning in June.

  Rufus was in his mid-forties, and therefore old enough to remember a time when no taxes had been imposed on his farm at all. It rankled him beyond reason to be forced to visit the tax collector every three months and make a payment of twenty-seven dollars; in his mind, that money belonged to Rufus Tarwater, and no one else. Twenty-seven dollars was worth a lot of moonshine, and he hated handing cash over to the government on demand—especially to a snooty little pencil pusher like Eben Larson.

  Rufus didn’t know Eben well at all, but he didn’t have to be overly acquainted to take his measure. Eben was said to be a brilliant man, who’d taught himself to read Greek and could do complicated math in his head, and Rufus believed that anybody who engaged in that kind of uppity horseshit was nothing but a cocky son of a bitch who thought he was better than people like Rufus.

  In truth, Eben did look down his nose at Rufus, but not for the reasons Rufus thought. Eben didn’
t mind that Rufus wasn’t educated, but he minded a great deal that he got drunk and beat his wife. Eben adored his own wife, Emma, and thought that any man who could hit a woman—especially a woman he’d vowed to love, honor, and cherish—was nothing but a scoundrel and a coward.

  Eben’s early life had not been easy. His father passed away before he was born and his mother died giving him birth, so he was taken in by an elderly couple named Charles and Lily Lamb. Charles Lamb perished shortly after Eben moved in with them, and Lily remarried a man named Zachariah Pittman, who only made it to Eben’s fifth birthday before having a fatal heart attack of his very own. Lily died of grief a year later, and Eben was forced to spend the rest of his childhood in an orphanage.

  But his life as a grown man had been altogether different, and blessed. He had a loving wife and three beautiful children; he and his sons had escaped the Great War by virtue of being both too old and too young, respectively; he had a fine intellect (that his daughter, Julianna, had inherited); and even though his foot had been mauled, he counted himself lucky to be alive, and never complained once about the chronic pain that came with the injury.

  Rufus Tarwater, of course, knew none of this about Eben Larson, but even if he had, it wouldn’t have changed what he thought of him. To be honest, Rufus didn’t much care for anybody else but Rufus Tarwater.

  He learned this attitude at the knee of his father, Tilson. Tilson Tarwater fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, and was one of those unhappy men who survived the carnage of the war but came home still spoiling for a fight. Tilson had four boys—Rufus was the youngest—and he raised them to hate everyone and everything, including each other. Rufus’s mom, Eleanor—a quiet, grim-faced woman from Kentucky—disappeared one day when Rufus was still in diapers, and never came back. Hence Rufus grew up thinking the only way to survive in the world was to be a better fighter than anybody else, and this philosophy was supported by the daunting physical size and strength he attained as an adult, which allowed him to dominate and intimidate almost everybody he encountered.