Zero Option

51

It was cool, almost cold up at the top of the notch; Stafford wished now that he had followed Gwen’s advice about a jacket. With no moon yet, there was no view, only the dark mass of the mountains on either side of them, and the deeper darkness below, where the gray path dropped down into the wilderness area. After being briefed about the agreement between Stafford and Carson, the sheriff had recommended that Gwen and Jessamine should get away from the home. Gwen and John Lee Warren were talking quietly over by the drop-off. Stafford stood there with Jessamine, who was wearing a jacket and a backpack.

“Are you frightened?” he asked her.

She turned her hands up and down and shrugged.

“Have you been out there before?” he asked, pointing with his chin toward the wilderness area. A steady cool breeze spilled into the gap from that vast expanse of wilderness north of the notch. It carried the scent of pines and ancient stone.

She nodded emphatically. She pointed to Gwen, then herself, and then made some signing motions Stafford did not understand. Gwen joined them.

“She’s teljing you that we have friends out there. People who will keep us safe. I’m more worried about you than us.”

He smiled at her. Her eyes were almost invisible in the darkness. “I think we’ll be okay. Carson’s not coming here. We’ll have John Lee’s people and the FBI in town when he shows up.

Besides, he’s only one guy.”

“With a lethal cargo.”

“Yes, and no. It’s not like he can use it without killing himself. The only thing that worries me is that he didn’t sound right. I wonder if he was injured in that mess at the DRMO. Burned maybe. He sounded a bit feverish.” “Well, good,” she said. “That should make him less of a threat.”

Stafford glanced over at the sheriff, who was visible only as a small red dot from the cigarette he was smoking. The pungent smell of tobacco infiltrated the forest air. “So you really do have people back there?

People who will give you a place to stay?”

She nodded hi the darkness. He could just see her face, now that his eyes were fully night adapted. “Yes,” she said. “We realfy do.”

“What’s the connection?”

“It’s the school, you see. Most of them back out there will never leave.

But once in a great while, there’s a child …”

“How can we contact you if we have to?”

“There’s a cell phone at a ranger cabin.” She looked out behind him into the darkness. “Ah,” she said. “They’re coming.”

He went with her to the back edge of the notch and peered down into the darkness. The path was barely visible as a serpentine, gray stripe down the back side of the mountain, ending in the deeper darkness of the forest. “Look down there,” she said softly.

He looked, and saw flames. Small flames, just at the edge of the forest below them. No, not flames. Lanterns.

“That’s them?”

“Yes. We should go now. We’ll … visit out there for a day or so, and then send for word to see what has happened.” “What if—” he began, but then he stopped. He had just told her this thing was going to go all right. He plunged ahead. “What if there’s trouble? What if it’s necessary for you to stay hidden for a while?”

“If there’s trouble, we’ll hear about it.” She smiled, a flash of white against the gray oval of her face in the darkness. “Jungle drums and all that. You’d be amazed at how well they keep in touch.”

Dave nodded. There was so much he didn’t know about how things were up in these remote hills, and since he was an outsider, he would probably never know. Just like he had known nothing about Owen’s family, or how Jess had come to live at Willow Grove. There was an arcing shower of red sparks in the direction where John Lee had been standing.

“Time to go,” she said. She stepped forward suddenly and hugged him. “Be careful,” she whispered. Then she took Jessamine’s arm and together they walked off into the darkness.

The sheriff approached, his boots crunching in the gravel and shale that littered the floor of the notch. “They’ll be fine,” he said. “We’d best get back to the house. It’s slower going downhill.” As they walked down, Stafford asked the sheriff about the people waiting for Gwen and Jessamine.

“Mountain folk” was all he said.

They reached the house about forty minutes later, emerging from the willows by the pond to a pool of porch light. The upstairs lights were on hi the bedrooms. Gwen had shown him her father’s room upstairs, but he planned to wait for the children to go to bed before going up there.

He presumed the kids and Mrs. Benning were probably hi the room where the tinted white shadows of a television flickered on the part of the ceiling visible through the curtains. Stafford was almost anxious to get inside; the night air had begun to chill him in earnest halfway down the trail. They let themselves in through the kitchen door, which the sheriff then locked behind them.

“Haven’t had to do that in a long damn while,” he muttered, putting the ancient brass key on the kitchen table. They could hear the sounds of a television laugh track coming from upstairs and the occasional patter of small feet overhead. Stafford looked around for a coffee pot while the sheriff shucked his hat and coat and extracted the big revolver from his holster.

“Looking for coffee makings?” the sheriff asked. “Perk pot’s in there.

Coffee’s in the fridge.”

“You must spend some time here,” Stafford said as he went to prepare a pot of coffee. Then he thought about the question his comment implied.

The sheriff was giving him an amused look when he finally had the percolator set up and bubbling. Stafford was once again struck by the sheriff’s appearance: the tall, rangy body of a lumberjack, with that young-old face, the grayish white hair contrasting with the heavy black eyebrows, and that Wyatt Earp mustache. He wondered how old the sheriff really was.

“We were married when she came back from the university,” the sheriff said, easing his tall frame into a kitchen chair. “I think that was one of the things that screwed it all up in the end. She got out of Graniteville, got an education. I never did.”

“But she came back.”

“Hill country does that to young folk,” the sheriff said. “Either they fly out of the mountains and never come back or they can’t leave for very long. We’d been dating hi high school. I was something of a football star, and Gwen, well … even now she’ll turn your damn head straight around, you just walkin’by.”

Stafford nodded but was careful to say nothing, realizing that the sheriff had decided to get something into the open.

“I went to work for the county force soon’s I graduated and Gwen left for college. By the time she came home to teach, I was senior deputy. A year later, old man Slater— he was the sheriff then — he up and died at his desk, and I took over. Ran for the election the next year, never looked back.”

The percolator stopped making its noises. Stafford found two mugs in the pantry and filled them. He gave one to the sheriff and sat back down to listen.

“We got married the year I was elected. She was living here at the time, but it was a mite awkward, with the docs new wife and all.”

“That was Hope?”

The sheriff eyed him across his coffee mug. “She tell you about all that?”

“Yes.”

“She tell you her momma died? That the old doc remarried a couple years later?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

The sheriff nodded and blew on his coffee. “Not quite how it happened,” he said. “Her momma went crazy. It took while, but by the time she took bad, everyone knew it. Especially old Doc Hand. He had to take her down to Milledgeville in 1974. She died there from some stupid little infection that they never caught. Some flu that got away from ‘em.”

“And then Hope ends up the same way?”

“Yup. After blowing away two of her kids with Doc’s twelve-gauge, and then tearing off her own arm trying to kill herself. Which lovely scene I got to investigate.”

Stafford shook his head hi wonder. “Come visit the nice peaceful north Georgia mountains,” he said. “Relax, take your pack off, listen to the gunfire.”

The sheriff nodded absently but did not reply.

“You lived here?”

“No, sir,” the sheriff said with a touch of pride.

“Don’t much hold with the idea of a man not providing a house and home for his own family. No, we lived across town, near the quarry. She came out here every day, and I usually came here for lunch. Other than what family did to family, it’s not like we had or have a big crime problem up here.”

Stafford nodded. So what led to the affair? he wanted to ask, but he knew better than to do that. The sheriff was staring down into his coffee cup as if looking for the answer to the riddle of the universe.

“See, like I said, I never left Graniteville,” he said again. “I was a local success story.

Everybody knew me from high school days. My classmates in high school, the ones who stayed, were now the citizens. I was the youngest sheriff in the state. Big man on campus, ‘cept’n this wasn’t no campus.” He looked up at Stafford and there was a blaze of pain in his eyes.

“You had an affair,” Stafford said.

The sheriff nodded slowly, the expression on his face a mask of regret “Yes, I did. It didn’t start out to be one, mind you. But Gwen and I were having some problems— over whether or not to have our own kids — and I began to spend time with another woman, a woman I had dated back while Gwen was away at college. For six months or so, it was just that: spending time, getting sympathy. Then one afternoon it became something else, and I became the biggest damn fool on the face of the planet.”

“She found out.” “She found out. Like I said, we’d been having a touch of trouble anyway: I wanted kids. She, for reasons I didn’t understand at the time, said she wanted to wait. It wasn’t what I’d call serious trouble, mind you, but sufficient for me to justify seeking a sympathetic shoulder, or so I thought, anyways. But, yes, she found out.”

“Someone tell her? Small-town grapevine?”

“I don’t think so. Gwen just had a habit of knowing things. Still does.”

Stafford nodded. He didn’t know what to say, so he asked a question about Owen’s reluctance to have kids.

“We’d been married seven years when the trouble with Hope came to a head. Hope didn’t just rise up and do that: For the two, three years before that, Gwen had kinda become mother to Hope’s kids, especially when Hope wandered off the planet. It was real tough on the Doc, tough on everybody. And after that night, Jess, who was the baby, came to live with us.”

“So suddenly, you did have a child.”

“That’s it Course, I didn’t see it that way. Being’ not too damn bright, it took me many years to figure out the real reason.”

“Which was?”

“Old Doc Hand marrying up his new, young, and, eventually, insane wife, Hope.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Hope was related to Carrie, Owen’s mother.”

At first Stafford didn’t see it. And then he did. “Ah,” he said.

“Yeah. Owen’s own mother, then Hope. And, of course, before that, Hope’s older sister, Charity, the one who went flying with her unseen companions at the flooded quarry.”

Stafford sipped his coffee for a few minutes. “And now there’s Jess.”

“That’s right. Now there’s Jess. Who we hope like hell really is a psychic, and not—”

Stafford nodded again. There was no future in it, Owen had said. Because of the madness. Her own mother, her mother’s relatives, and now possibly her half sister. Gwinette Hand Warren had decided never, ever to have children, and when she had decided that a long time ago, her husband had sought the comfort of another woman. No future in that, either. Damn.

“That explains a lot,” Stafford said. “I guess what I find curious is your relationship now. You’re obviously friends; you obviously still care very much for her. See, my wife divorced me this past year. Ran off with some Air Force guy. I could never see myself in the same room with her ever again.” The sheriff nodded. “Owen told me something about that.” He looked up at Stafford, who was surprised to hear this. “Oh, yes, she did. I think-I’m more like her big brother now than her ex-husband. We’ve known each other since we were kids, and then almost eight years as man and wife, and for ten years since.” He sighed. “The plain fact is that I was the one who screwed that one up. She could forgive me for it, but she couldn’t be my wife any more. So what we’ve got now is the best I can make of a poor-ass situation. That I created.

I take what I can get.”

“You never remarried.”

“Nope. After Gwen found out, she went to see the other woman. Told her she was going to leave me. That if we wanted to get married after that, it would be all right with her. Was as nice and sweet as she could be.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah, buddy. When I went to see her after that little session, she told me she couldn’t marry me, because if I couldn’t be faithful to such a good woman as Gwen, I’d never be faithful to her. Always some truth to that notion, I reckon. So that was that. I figured life didn’t have to go hittin’ me between the eyes with an ax handle more’n once to teach me a lesson.”

Stafford smiled ruefully across the table at this complex man. He wondered if he would ever get the chance to reach such an equilibrium in his own tattered personal life. He had hoped, assumed, really, that there was something developing between himself and Gwen Warren, but now he knew better. Gwen was being kind and sympathetic, but that was all.

He was the one who was infatuated with her, but after hearing the full story of her life, he could well imagine that she, like John Lee, had decided not to let life swing any more ax handles at her, either. The sheriff had sensed what was developing, and he had decided to let him down easy.

He concentrated on his coffee. There were sounds of a juvenile altercation upstairs, which ended with a single sharp word from Mrs. Benning. He looked at his watch. Just about an hour to go.