The Ridge: The Whisper of the Leaves - Chap. 42

Barnes was playing a hunch. After talking to Lampkin and Talmadge, they had decided that once Lawrence left to come to town, the girl might have been kept there as insurance. They figured she would either be there alone or with just one of the girls, probably Sally, who they agreed was the more civil of the two.

When it started snowing, though, a whole new set of problems arose. The main one was that it was going to be difficult to approach the house in secret. Before the snow, there was enough in the way of trees and shadows to make stealth possible. With the snow, however, anyone looking could see an approaching person against a white background. He was almost to the house, though, when the snow started.

When he got there, he parked at the bottom of the hill across the gravel road from the Lawrence’s dirt drive. By that time, the ground was covered with a thin layer of white and it was still coming down.

I’ll just have to use the trees, Barnes thought as he pulled a twenty-gauge from the back seat and started moving up through the stand of oak, pine and beech trees. He could not see the house until he had gone about an eighth of a mile and then it came into view, silhouetted by the snow. He couldn’t see any light inside from the front, but he knew that this didn’t necessarily mean anything.

The house was a glorified shotgun shack......long and narrow. Standing where he was, a lamp could be on in a back room of the house and he wouldn’t be able to see it. For that reason, plus because it gave him more sustained tree coverage, Barnes worked his way around to the back of the house. Another reason to stay hidden as long as possible was to keep the livestock from announcing his presence, especially the guineas.

As he had hoped, once he got around far enough, he saw that there was a light visible in a back room. It was in the room to the right of the centered back door. He stood looking at the curtained window for a moment when suddenly a shadow moved across the curtains. Out of reflex, he crouched down slightly as if the shadow could see him. He waited a moment more then slowly began easing his way out of the trees and into the open back yard.

As Barnes did this, a hundred feet away, the hogs routine grunting and snorting began to get louder. The dominecker hens roosting in the chicken house some ten feet to his back, also began to make their presence known. Fortunately, the Lawrences had no dogs, but the guineas made up for it.

Once they sensed a stranger was about, they cut loose in the squawking, cackle that had caused people to nickname them “feathered watchdogs.” A moment after they began, he heard footsteps inside and decided it was time to move.

He ran across the seventy-five feet from the trees to the back door and had his hand on the screen when the inside door opened. All he saw was the outline of a person with long hair and then he saw the barrel of a gun rising up toward him.

“Wait.” He said and started to raise his own shotgun when a blast hit him in the chest and threw him back onto the ground. Barnes noticed that there really wasn’t any pain, but it did feel like the breath had been knocked out of him.

As he lay in the snow, he wondered why he was having such a hard time breathing. He figured it must be the cold…sometimes cold weather made it hard for him to breath. He figured his breath would come back sooner or later, though. His breathing would get back to normal as it always had in situations like this, even as far back as when he was a kid.

He thought about the first time it had happened to him. He was six or seven and he had a pet goat who liked to play “King of the Mountain” on a picnic table his family had. The goat always won, but there was that one time the goat butted Ralph off the table and he hit the ground just right. When this happened, it seemed all his breath suddenly vanished out of him.

He ran in to his mother panicky and trying to talk, but he could not, of course. He remembered that she had smiled, knowing what had happened.

“Just calm down, Ralphy. Just try and take some nice slow breaths,” She said after she sat down and put him on her lap. “Ya just got the breath knocked outta ya. You’ll be okay in a minute.”

And sure enough, she was right and within a minute or, so he was breathing normally again. Then within five minutes, he was back outside challenging his goat to a rematch.

Barnes smiled weakly as he thought back on that goat and his mother. But then he frowned a little, wondering when he would get his breath back. Like his momma had said, it always did come back. He was still waiting, though, when he died on the ground in the snow.

Sally Lawrence stood in the doorway and watched Ralph Barnes die. He was staring at her the whole time, but she knew he did not really see her. In fact she saw him mouth the word “momma” at least three times before his eyes went blank.

She was crying because she had not meant to fire the shotgun and because she had never killed anyone. In fact, she had never even seen anyone die before. Sally had just gone out to see why the guineas were making such a noise. If Barnes had been fifteen minutes later, she and the kid would have been gone. But he hadn’t been later, so now he was dead, and she was a murderer.

She wondered, as she stood there looking at the body lying there at the foot of the steps, surrounded by a halo of red on a field of white. She wondered if he would still be alive if he hadn’t startled her. Probably so, she justified to herself

The tears that were coming from her eyes now became tears of anger. Anger at Barnes, her sister, Marshall Bentwood, her brother. Anger even at herself. But most of all, anger at her father. And it was that suddenly seething anger, rage even, that caused the tears to flow even faster.

It was that rage that at that moment, made her even more determined to do what she had sworn she would do.

Marshall and Conners had run off the road at almost the same instant Ralph Barnes died. Three miles south of Wynne, the snow was already three inches deep on the highway. The rate it was coming down had caused a virtual “white out” and Conners had simply lost control of the car.

Neither of them was hurt as the car slid into the ditch between the road and the railroad track running parallel to it on the west side. The same track, in fact that ran in front of Marshall’s house just a mile down the highway.

“You know where we are?” Conners asked Marshall as he surveyed the predicament.

“Sure,” Marshall answered. “Wynne’s about three miles on, but my house is closer. Maybe a mile.”

“Do you have a phone?”

“Are you kiddin’?” Marshall almost laughed. Something he hadn’t done in quite a few days. “We don’t even have any electricity yet. I’m a farm boy, remember?”

“Well, is there someone there who can give us a ride?”

“Yea, probably. One way or another, we can get a ride.”

“Let’s go then.”

They walked back up to the highway and started heading north. There was no traffic coming in either direction until, when they walked about a half mile, they saw two headlights pull up to the spot where their car had gone off the road.

It was hard to tell, but it looked like maybe someone got out of the car to check and see if anyone was still in the abandoned vehicle. After a moment, they saw the lights move as the car or truck or whatever it was, began to come toward them.

Marshall and Conners continued walking, though, just in case they weren’t going to be offered a ride.

“This is Fortner Crossing.” Marshall said as they came to a gravel crossroad with a church sitting on the right. “Not far from my house now. It’s right over there.”

Marshall pointed toward the north west and Conners could just make out the shape of a house.

“That’s our church,” Marshall said and pointed to the right at a run-down building. It was obviously a church from the steeple pointing skyward. Marshall looked back and could see that the two headlights were still some three hundred yards behind them.

“We’ll be to the house before they get to us at this rate,” Marshall said and turned left onto the gravel road. Conners followed as they crossed over the railroad track then turned north again on the gravel road that ran in front of Marshall’s house.

Conners looked back when they were some hundred yards from the house and saw that the two headlights were coming over the railroad tracks behind them.

“Looks like someone’s determined to give us a ride or see if we’re ok,” Conners said.

Marshall looked back.

“We’re almost to my house,” He said and turned back around.

They could hear the vehicle easily now as the snow made the tires crunch and engine sounds carry farther than usual. Just as Marshall and Conners got to the drive going up his house, the vehicle, a black sedan pulled up beside them. It was 11:59 when the back door swung open.