In The Forest Of Harm Read Online Free PDF Page B

Finally they decided it was just some drifter who needed money for drugs. Nobody could ever explain why he needed to rape and kill my mother, too.” Mary’s eyes flashed. “Most of the money had spilled out of the cash register and was left behind on the floor. The only thing I saw missing was her Saint Andrew’s medal.”
    Joan frowned. “Don’t you mean Saint Christopher?”
    â€œNo. Saint Andrew. It was my father’s. His grandfather had given it to him, and he’d worn it the whole time he was in Vietnam. They sent it back with his body. A knight, fighting a dragon. My mother put it on just before his funeral. She never took it off.”
    â€œJeez, that’s terrible.” Impulsively, Joan wrapped her arms around Mary. “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine living through a hell like that.”
    Mary hugged Joan back. “It was awful,” she agreed quietly. “But it’s history, now.” Over Joan’s shoulder she smiled at Alex, remembering all the nights they’d lain awake in the dorm, Mary going over each detail of the murder scene and the hunt for her mother’s killer a thousand times, Alex listening with unlimited patience and a diminishing pile of PayDay candy bars. Mary knew that without Alex, she wouldn’t have survived the first week at Emory, much less the ensuing twelve years.
    She squeezed Joan, then relaxed her embrace. “Alex pulled me through the worst of it.”
    From the pocket of her jeans she withdrew a plastic bag filled with six smooth, speckled stones. “The old Cherokees honored their ancestors with things of the earth,” she explained. “I picked these stones from the little creek that runs behind my apartment in Atlanta.”
    Mary knelt down and kissed each small stone. Their grainy coolness against her lips brought that long-ago spring day rushing back—Reverend Hunt reading from his Bible, the redbud tree sending tiny magenta stars up against the darkening sky, the mourners huddling in raincoats around the dank hole in the ground that would embrace her mother for eternity. She’d felt like a murderer herself then. If she had just gone straight home that afternoon, this wouldn’t have happened. She would have been there. She would have stopped whoever had done this.
Don’t go, Mama
, she’d cried silently as they’d lowered the simple coffin into the earth.
Please don’t
leave me
.
    Mary made a small pile of the stones just beneath her mother’s marker. “
Sudali
, Mama,” she whispered. “Six. Six stones for six convictions.” For Hance Jordan, who poisoned his young wife to collect her insurance; for Wayne Creech, who fatally stabbed his girlfriend for not wearing a bra; for four more beyond them. One more, and she could place the seventh stone on her mother’s grave. Seven. The number her people regarded as magical and redemptive as any plunge in a Baptist pool. One more stone, and Mary Crow would be at peace.
    She stared at the little pile of six stones for a moment, then she rose and looked at her friends.
    â€œOkay,” she told them. “I’m done.”
    â€œAre you sure?” Alex asked. “We can stay longer if you want—Joan and I can wait for you in the car.”
    â€œNo.” Mary smiled as a shadow passed from her eyes. “I’m done. Let’s go eat an early lunch, ladies. We’ve got a lot of mountains to climb before dark.”

FOUR
    SOMEWHERE IN THE NANTAHALA FOREST,
OCTOBER 2000
    Death has a stink to it. It’s blood and kum and the sea and the sour scent of a man humiliated, pleading for his life. It’s sticky on your hands, and if you cram your fingers in your mouth and suck them like chicken bones, all that sweet death-marrow
goes straight to your brain and makes you feel like God.
    Henry Brank laughed as he pulled the knife from the rabbit’s neck. “This is a real piece