The Steep and Thorny Way (32 page)

“What was that?” a voice shouted in the distance, back where I'd last seen Joe with the noose around his neck.

I ran back with one foot in a boot and the other one bare, and I clutched the pistol in my right hand, contemplating the damage I could do with that last precious bullet. I could kill Sheriff Rink. At the very least, I could shoot him in the kneecap and cause him to moan in pain and distract his cohorts while I released Joe from the
rope. I pushed past trees and the blur of the highway and thought of all the possibilities—all the consequences that would follow. A funeral. A trial. Tears. Heartache. Prison. Eugenics. Pain. Regret.

I reached the oak tree and found the Klansmen unsettled. Two of them held on to Joe by his shoulders. The noose remained around his neck, and the rest of the rope dangled over the branch. The other Klansmen paced about, their wide sleeves flapping.

“I don't want my life to end in tragedy!” I shouted with my gun raised, and I cocked the hammer with my thumb.

“Oh, Christ!” said a voice that sounded like Robbie's. “Put the gun down!”

I swept the barrel in the direction of them all—all eight of the remaining Klansmen, along with their victim, Joe Adder.

“I want to live and love and thrive,” I said, and a solution entered my head—a way to lessen the tragedy. To appease the pain.

I pointed the gun at Joe's head.

His captors dove away from his sides. Joe's eyes expanded above his gag, and he turned as rigid as stone.

“Stay still, Joe!” I shouted, and I closed one eye. “Don't move!”

I squeezed the trigger with the pad of my index finger, and the blast of that shot exploded inside my head. The bullet soared in his direction with a force that rattled my bones.

Joe collapsed into a thick blanket of tall grasses, and the entire world fell silent.

CHAPTER 27

THE REST IS SILENCE

I DROPPED TO MY KNEES IN A CLOUD
of white smoke and watched as all attention shifted toward me. Hoods came off. Voices shouted amid the brain-piercing ringing inside my ears. To my right, Robbie removed his covering and begged me not to kill anyone else, not paying any mind to the fact that the pistol only possessed two barrels, two bullets. Sheriff Rink yanked off his hood and clamored toward me with his hands in the air, demanding, “Drop the gun! Drop the gun!”

I clutched the grip with both my hands and kept the barrels pointed in the direction where Joe had stood. The weight of the little derringer grew too much to bear, as light as it actually was.
My arm muscles weakened and slackened, and the weapon sank toward the ground.

The sheriff lifted the bottom of his robe and fetched a pair of handcuffs from the belt of his dark uniform underneath. “Everyone, leave the scene immediately.” He came over and shoved me down to the ground by my back, pushing me onto my stomach. “None of you were here. Do not leave a trace of yourself behind.”

Cold metal clicked around my wrists. I tasted dirt on my lips and felt the earth digging into my scraped knees.

“Hanalee Denney,” the sheriff barked into my ear in the deepest voice I'd ever heard from him, “you are under arrest for the murder of Joseph Adder.”

Legs swathed in sheets and dark trousers leapt past my head in the mass exodus from the scene. I lifted my face far enough off the ground to see a couple of grown men and several boys my age—the same pack of boys from Laurence's place—fleeing down the dark highway, their robes billowing behind them, hoods tucked under their arms like empty pillowcases. They ran with their torches and lanterns and left the clearing dark and abandoned, save for the sheriff and me, and Joe, lying somewhere in the patch of blackness beneath the oak tree, near the burning cross.

Sheriff Rink lifted me to my feet by the crook of my left arm and dragged me alongside the highway, past Ginger's. I tripped on an uneven patch of dirt and imagined hitting my head on the highway, without my arms to catch me. The sheriff yanked me upright before I smacked against the ground, and he tugged me onward.

“You sure saved me a heap of trouble by killing that boy yourself,” said the sheriff with a squeak. “I don't know why you did
that—maybe you were trying to spare him the pain of the noose—but I'm happy as hell you did.”

“I knew exactly what I was doing when I pointed that gun at Joe's head” was all I said, and I held my chin high.

“Hanalee?” shouted a girl's voice from somewhere behind us.

I swiveled around, which made the sheriff wrench me toward his car all the faster. A strange, chirping sound emerged from the darkness.

Mildred's rickety old bicycle.

“Joe's lying below the branches of the oak tree,” I called out to her, even though I couldn't see her. “The sheriff's taking me to his car to—”

Sheriff Rink smacked his hand over my mouth and opened the back door of his vehicle. The sideways grin of the moon spit an anemic haze over the automobile's black paint, and a jolt of doubt struck my heart. The words I'd shouted to Joe—
Stay still, Joe! Don't move!—
replayed in my head, and I kept feeling my arm and my hand aim the gun just so and seeing Joe fall to the ground in the darkness.

The sheriff grabbed a clump of my hair on the back of my head, shoved me into his backseat, and slammed the car door closed, just grazing my heel.

I lifted my head from the dark leather seat and heard him crank the vehicle to a start down below the grille in front of the car. With an obnoxious sigh and a hiss from the upholstery, he plopped down on the front seat and slammed his own door shut.

“It's time for you to take a little journey outside Elston,” he said with a quick peek over his shoulder.

I scooted myself up to a seated position, despite the hindrance of the handcuffs, and watched Mildred's bicycle careen to a stop up ahead, in the patch of grass leading to the cross and the oak tree. I thanked the Lord for her bizarre premonitions.

“You do realize, Sheriff Rink,” I said, forcing my voice to leave my throat with a deep and confident sound, “my father's spirit roams this highway late at night.”

“Hogwash!” He shifted the vehicle into gear. “There's no such thing as ghosts.”

“Daddy called such spectral apparitions ‘haints,' which always sounded to me like ‘hate.'”

The sheriff laughed with a wheezy whistle and sent the vehicle rumbling forward onto the black road ahead of us, lit only by the twin beams of the headlights. We passed the burning cross and Mildred, bending down over Joe.

“I sure hope you see him out here,” I said, peering out the windshield beyond the sheriff's round head. The glow of the headlights brightened the outstretched tongue of the highway. “I hope you see Hank Denney's face staring straight into your guilty soul.”

The sheriff didn't chuckle at that comment and instead increased our speed, sailing the car past the tree-lined stretch of highway where the Adders and several other Elston residents lived, where Daddy had stumbled into the road. We rode beneath the boughs of trees that arched over the highway like the arms of ancient crones.

“Up ahead,” I continued, “in the crossroads—that's where I've seen him myself.”

“Stop it,” said the sheriff, and he sped us through the junction of the roads. “That's not funny in the slightest.”

“And farther along, through that next patch of trees—I'm sure he's been there.”

“Hank Denney's body and soul left Oregon back in 1921,” said the sheriff with a glance back at me. “We made absolutely certain, when we hoisted him off the ground, that no part of that godforsaken Negro would linger in this state—that's for damn sure.” Only he didn't say
Negro
.

The sheriff turned back around in his seat and gave a start, for just ahead, smack-dab in the middle of the road, stood my father in the light of the patrol car's headlights.

“Holy Mother of—” The sheriff steered us off the road, to the right. Brakes screeched. The car reared and bucked. A fir tree rose up ahead. I opened my mouth to scream, but before any sound left my throat, my body slammed against something hard amid a deafening crack of thunder.

“HANALEE,” SAID A VOICE RICH AND DEEP. OAK AND
honey. Woods and river waters. “We need to get you out of this car before the fire reaches the backseat, darling.”

My eyes refused to open. Pain awakened across my body, from the top of my forehead all the way down to the muscles of my legs—a dull ache at first, then a roar of agony. I coughed on smoke and believed my bones to be blazing with fire inside me.

“Hanalee,” said the voice again, and I knew it was my father, offering comfort.

I lifted my eyelids and found Daddy poking his head into the
open doorway of the backseat of the sheriff's car. His black derby sat far enough back on his head for me to see his big brown eyes, which glistened with concern. My body, wedged between the front seat and the backseat, lay in a tangle of bleeding legs and arms, in a space that seemed too small to be the interior of an automobile. Smoke blackened the nighttime air and stung my eyes, and I heard the sputter of flames.

“Wrap your arms around my shoulders, honey”—Daddy leaned into the vehicle and maneuvered his left arm behind my sore back—“and I'll carry you home.”

“Can't,” I said with a grunt. “Handcuffs.”

Daddy reached his free arm under my legs, and before the fire licked its way across the front seat, he scooped me out of a burning mass of twisted steel that hugged the trunk of a tree that no longer stood upright.

“The sheriff?” I asked, remembering our flight into that trunk. “Sheriff Rink?”

“Don't pay any heed to him.” Daddy steered me away from the wreckage, while the flames snapped and sparked into the air with flashes of unnatural light. “Now
he's
the one wandering the highway, looking for redemption.”

Out by the road, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the movement of a shadow—the stocky figure of a man who carried a white hood beneath his arm. I closed my eyes, and the orange glow of the flames shone against the backs of my lids.

Though I must have been heavy—a grown sixteen-year-old girl with a body weighed down by pain and fatigue—Daddy held me
as though I were still no more than four years old. I pressed my face against the fresh whiskers on his cheeks and the coarse wool of his shoulder, and I fell asleep, thinking of wading in creek water and childhood nights when Daddy told me to love the world, even when it didn't love me back.

CHAPTER 28

REST, PERTURBED SPIRIT

I OPENED MY EYES TO THE SIGHT OF
sunshine streaming through my bedroom window, between the ruffles of my ivory curtains. A robin chirped in one of the trees beyond the panes. A hazy blur of white lingered by my red desk, and I smelled lilacs.

I blinked several times in a row, and the haze brightened and shifted into the shape of a girl with blond hair and a lace dress.

“Hana-Honey?” asked the girl, who sounded an awful lot like Fleur. “Are you awake?”

I blinked some more and lifted my right hand in front of my face, unsure if the appendage would be made of solid flesh.

“Hanalee?” she asked again, and she hurried toward me with
her skirts swooshing, her blue eyes gleaming. “You're awake. You're awake!”

“Am I alive?” I asked with a terrible croak in my voice.

“Yes.” Fleur laughed and kissed my cheek, and her touch eased a dull pain that nibbled at my right leg and my back. “You're badly banged up, you poor thing. Your right leg is broken and stuck in a cast, and your left wrist is sprained and wrapped up in bandages. But”—she sat down beside me and stroked my hair with the tips of soft fingers—“you're alive.”

“Was I . . .” My mind sped back to Daddy, appearing out of nowhere in the middle of the road, and Sheriff Rink, sending us careering off the pavement. “Was I . . . Did the car . . . D-d-did it—?”