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Chapter 12: Last Watch

Death comes on a sunny day
Like the summer rain
When least expected.

April 18, 1988
Afternoon/Evening

Daisy pulled into the yard just after noon, noting the absence of the garish orange Charger, and breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing she wanted was to come home to hear her cousins quarreling over some bleach blonde who gave them 'the eye' over a glass of beer. Uncle Jesse was crouched down beside the barn, tinkering with the old plow. He stood up when she shut the car door, wrench in hand, and picked his way across the yard towards the fence between them.

"Hey, Uncle Jesse!" The excitement of Art Stills' place still fresh on her mind, she ran over and caught herself a instant before hopping up to sit on the narrow wooden crossbeam - she wasn't 60 pounds anymore.

"You seem mighty happy," he laughed. "How'd your interview go?"

"Why, Uncle Jesse, you should see all the things Mr. Sills has behind that house of his!" She took a look behind him. "Something wrong with the plow? Where'd Bo and Luke get off to?"

"Oh, just that dad-burned bolt needing tightened again," he drawled. "Nothin' a little elbow grease can't fix. The boys are down at Cooters gettin a new battery cable for the General." He looked up at the sky and her eyes followed. It's blue was unbroken save for a smudge of gray on the far horizon. "It's supposed to come a storm later, and I'd like to get Maudeen hitched up and finish the last part of the garden before it does."

She grinned back at him as he stuck the wrench in his pocket and adjusted his faded cap, the trials of the past six months momentarily forgotten. The sun was warm, but not overbearing, and she could smell honeysuckle in the breeze that stirred and scattered stray bits of hay across the grass. "Say, Uncle Jesse, are there still blackberries growing on the back forty?"

"They're as thick as ever. I reckon they might still be a little green, though."

"I'm gonna go check anyways. It's too nice a day to stay inside." She leaned across the fence and gave him a peck on the cheek. "Don't work too hard, Uncle Jesse. I love you."

He chuckled. "I love you, too, Daisy."

She debated whether or not to take along a bucket, knowing he was probably right and the blackberries wouldn't be ripe. Then brought one anyway, figuring that it was better to be safe than sorry. At the end of the pasture, she slipped into the woods, startling a deer who bounded away, weaving through the trees with its white plume dancing behind it in the dappled sunlight. Last fall's leaves crunched beneath her feet, their musky scent hanging in the air.

She dawdled and wool-gathered, stretching out the afternoon walk. It wasn't 1:00pm yet, and there would be plenty of time to get supper started when she went back. Right now, it felt good to be alone and simply enjoy the peace and quiet. She skipped the rest of the way, the bucket banging against her shin, until the woods thinned and broke in the small clearing on the other side.

A rusted iron gate, all but invisible beneath a mass of cascading brambles, separated the back forty from Sawmill Road. Half of the brambles stood in the shade of a stand of pin oaks, their berries still small, red, and hard, but the other half in full sun had a smattering of black among the thorns.

There wouldn't be enough for a cobbler, she decided, as she angled her hands carefully through the briars, but there was enough for a snack. Twenty minutes and a host of scratches later, her efforts had gained her only a handful. She shoved them all in her mouth at once before stretching out in the alfalfa grass and throwing her arm across her face to shade her eyes. Imagining herself as a fat, lazy bee droning in the warm sun, she drifted off to sleep.

The sun moved from its zenith, lengthening the shadows of the pin oaks, and a gust of wind - stronger and cooler than the warm breeze from earlier, rolled across the foothills.

Time passed. And Daisy slept on.

A chilling blast of wind shook her awake, and she sat up, disoriented, as the leaves and rustled the grass around her. The bright sun was gone, the blue obscured by a deep bank of low lying clouds.

She rubbed her goose-pimpled arms as another gust of wind hit her face and looked back up at the clouds skating across the sky. Their nearness made her heart stutter and beat hard against her chest - they were barely higher than the tallest trees and seemed to boil as the currents pushed them down from the mountains and towards the south. The sky to the north was an angry blackish-yellowish green.

The color of a bruise.

It was mesmerizing in power and beauty, and she couldn't remember if she'd ever seen such a strange color before in a storm. Then a crack of thunder, so loud she pressed her hands to her ears, shook her from the spell, and a portion on the edge of the cloud bank switched direction.

Her feet took off before she had even thought of running - through the woods, leaping over the fallen trees and through the may apples she had admired scant hours before. Where the forest had been a shady respite from the sun, it was now so dark that she stumbled over roots and rocks in her path. As she glimpsed the red siding of the barn through the trees, there was a CRACK! and then the crash of a tree behind her. She screamed and ran faster, emerging from the woods just beyond the farmhouse as Uncle Jesse, having shut the goats in their pen, turned back towards the field.

"Uncle Jesse!" The wind ripped the sound away. She clambered over the wooded cross-beams of the fence and ran after him. "Uncle Jesse!" Breathless, she caught him by the arm to stop him. "Uncle Jesse! You-"

"I've gotta go get Maudeen in," he shouted. "You go get in the cellar, and I'll be right behind you."

She spared a glace into the field where the mule stomped anxiously at the ground and rolled her eyes at the storm. "I can put her in, you go back!"

"No, she's liable to be stubborn if it ain't me leading her. This storm's gettin wicked, and I don't like the look of them clouds yonder. You go get the lantern lit, and I'll be there in just a minute."

He turned away again, towards Maudeen, putting an end to any argument she might have made. Despite the storm, she would have rather stayed with him, on account of the cellar being the single creepiest place she'd ever been. Once, Luke had tricked her into going down there, then shut the door and leaned a board against it, trapping her inside. She'd banged and screamed until Aunt Lavinia heard the racket and let her out.

Halfway to the house it began to hail, striking the barn's tin roof and scattering like white pebbles across the ground. She turned, hoping to see Uncle Jesse coming, but the distance between them had grown hazy with a fine, misty rain. The wind, now as loud and mighty as a rushing waterfall, threw wetness against her cheek and she pulled her damp hair back where it plastered to her face. Forgetting her fear of the cellar, she ran to it and pulled open the heavy metal door.

On a ledge to her left sat an oil lantern and a box of matches. Her hands shook as she took off the chimney and tucked it under her arm to light the lamp by what daylight remained. The wick flickered and caught, and she set the chimney over it and placed it on the floor at the bottom of the steps before returning to shut the door.

The lamplight danced over shelves of canned fruits and vegetables and the lawn chairs folded neatly against the wall. The floor had changed since she was a child; once packed dirt, it was now concrete and dry instead of muddy. Behind her, the door began to rattle.

"Uncle Jesse?"

She grabbed the door handle and slid it open. In the blink of an eye, it was blown open by the fury of the wind and she clutched the door frame to steady herself. The ground was littered with the ends of broken branches and green oak leaves, and bits of black she recognized as shingles from the roof of the house. Bracing herself, she dragged the door towards her until it thumped shut, then ran back down the stairs to the floor.

Cowering beside the lamp, her back to the cold foundation, she prayed that God would let everyone be okay. Uncle Jesse would be safe in the barn, she told herself. They had lost shingles plenty of times and even trees. Why, he was probably standing beside the tractor watching the storm, while she hid in here like a baby.

The wind, like fingers, probed the foundation, screaming and whistling through the cracks as the lamplight flickered and shadows danced across the bricks. A tremendous "BOOM!" shook the walls and something heavy fell against the door. Squeezing her eyes shut, she drew back as far as she could into the corner beside the stairs. More hail came, banging against the metal like an old hollow mausoleum.

The rains came now; fast and hard and heavy, beating down like a thousand thundering hooves. Trickles of water ran from the corners of the door, dribbling down the wooden steps to collect beside her.

As quickly as it began, the storm was over, and an eerie silence cocooned the cellar. Then the birds began to chirp, and the world came back to life as though nothing had happened.

.******.

It took several tries before the debris blocking the door slid off and she was able to open it. The sun was overly bright after the darkness of the storm, and the yard lay littered with limbs and a myriad of boards and twisted sheet metal. The car Cooter had lent her was upside down in the pasture, and the truck had been pushed across the road into the ditch.

The barn - and Uncle Jesse - were gone.

In the years to come, she would never be sure of the rest of that day. She remembered it in pictures and clips, like a storyboard for a movie too heart-wrenching to be produced. The flashing strobes of Rosco's police car blended with the smell of sawdust from the chainsaws as friends and neighbors came to lend their support and time to searching the area for something too horrible to even think about.

How wrong - how terribly wrong it seemed for the world to go on spinning around her. The birds sang sweetly and the sun shone down upon a perfectly beautiful Georgia spring day. Finally, she could bear it no longer and disappeared into the house - which had stood unscathed through the tornado, to curl up under her covers and pretend that it had all been a dream.

At dusk, the braying echoes of hounds replayed themselves again and again; superimposed on the night like a sheet of vellum.

She wondered what would happen if she simply ran away.

April 20th, 1988

The Chicago streets were clogged with traffic and Enos was thinking of Los Angeles, though at present the City of Angels was on his mind for a different reason than its never ending stream of lights and concrete jungles. The memory of a tattooed hand holding a .357 at his head had wormed its way into his mind on the long trip from upstate Michigan to Chicago.

He had spoken with Ms. Spione, or had attempted speaking with her. Her English was passable enough to order pizza, but lacked something when trying to describe her son's checkered past.

"He is good boy," she had insisted. "Bad friends in...in...in jail, but he is good boy."

Startled, Enos realized that no one had informed her of his death, probably because his name had not been released to the media pending the investigation. Informing families that their loved one would not be coming home was one part of police work that never got easier, even at Central where it was an almost daily occurrence.

He told her as tactfully and as respectfully as he could, minus any details. Maria Spione crossed herself and whispered something with a shine of tears in her eyes, and he got the feeling that the news had not come as any great shock.

Between pictures and gestures and simple broken English, Enos discovered the victim had grown up in a town called Patvarc on the border between Hungary and Russia. He had sent his mother letters from the prison in Balassagyarmat, and although they were written in Hungarian, she had handed them over to Enos without him even asking. She also gave him pictures of Gino at different ages, along with a picture taken aboard the Elcid Barrett with four other crew members, one of whom had recently met his demise by drinking anti-freeze.

It had been forty-five minutes since he had left Ms. Spione's high rise apartment in Roger's Park, and he had traveled all of five miles total. Traffic was being funneled down to one lane on Highway 41 due to construction and he was seriously contemplating flipping on his lights and sirens and riding down the shoulder. A check of his watch reminded him that he had missed breakfast and lunch and at 3:35pm, time was fast encroaching on missing supper as well.

He pulled into the lot at the Illinois State Police Forensic Science Lab with only five minutes to spare before his appointment. Grabbing the manila envelope out of the passenger's seat, he locked the truck and hurried inside. The smell of the building reminded him of the Police Academy in Atlanta. Undertones of gun powder and formaldehyde lingered in the otherwise spotless foyer as he stepped up to the desk where a receptionist smiled at him.

"Hi ma'am, I'm Sheriff Enos Strate from Whitefish County, Michigan. I've got an appointment with Mr. Douglas at 4:00."

"Sheriff! I've been waiting for you," she said, with a hint of worry in her tone. "Your dispatch called earlier and left an urgent message for you to call before you go back."

A sourness settled into his stomach remembering the last urgent phone call he had received on a quiet October evening last year had been about Daisy. If he never had another phone call like that, it would be too soon.

"Possum on a gumbush! Wonder what could be so important?"

He ran through a list of possibles in his head and came up empty. Nothing much riled Joy. If there was a crime, Doc Fletcher was on perpetual standby, and there was nothing that he or Bruce Yergen couldn't handle between the two of them. The Elcid Barrett murders were on a slow track with the ship out of port. There were only three people from his former life who knew how to get in touch with him: Turk, Uncle Jesse, and Rosco, and none of them would be calling to shoot the breeze.

"Sorry, she didn't say more than that," the receptionist told him. "You okay? You look a little pale."

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just hoping it ain't bad news." He took a deep breath and shoved Hazzard out of his mind. "Can I call from here after I meet with Mr. Douglas? I don't wanna keep him waiting on me."

"Absolutely, Sheriff. I'll let him know you're here."