The Devil Walks in Mattingly Read Online Free PDF Page A

even necessary. Tromping through Hollis’s woods was akin to taking your own life into your hands. After all, this wasn’t the Devereauxs’ front porch. This was Jenny’s place.
    I stood there trying to blink away the tired from my eyes and thought, Tomorrow . If I dreamed again tonight, I’d come back tomorrow. Then I thought of the white butterflies and the stones piled upon stones. I thought of Phillip’s words and his dead hand upon me and looked at the bandage on my arm. What kind of dream opens an old scar? Makes you bleed again? I didn’t know, but I knew it was the sort of dream I didn’t want to endure again. I looked back toward the farmhouse to make sure Edith wasn’t hanging clothes or feeding the chickens and slipped through the trees.
    A worn path stood just inside. I followed it deeper into the thick woods and slowed myself, stepping only when a bird sang or a squirrel chirred and only to where the ground was hard and leafless, reaching out with my eyes and ears for anything that might be skulking about.
    Not that it did any good. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, every part of me had dulled by then. That’s what happens when you get two, maybe three hours of sleep every night for a month. I didn’t hear the movement to my right until it was almost on top of me. I crouched close to a dark boulder to my left and took off my hat, clutching it as Zach had his blanketthe night before. Sweat poured from my face and arms. My heart jackhammered.
    “Hollis?” I called. “That you in there?”
    The answer was a shotgun round chambered. I dove behind the boulder as the woods exploded around me in a shower of limbs and leaves. Fear charged forward like a wild animal finally broken free of its cage. I sank into the earth and gritted my teeth, fighting to hold my bladder.
    A voice boomed, “Get off’a my land,” followed by another spray of buckshot that nearly grazed my ear. I reached to the small of my back, felt nothing. Now a deeper panic set in, one in which being shot at played only a small part. Of all the things I could have been thinking then, only one gripped me—I’d left Bessie in the truck, and wouldn’t Daddy have given me an earful for that?
    I screamed, “Hollis, you put that scatter-gun down.”
    The woods stilled. Cautious footsteps from among the trees, then fast, then a pause. And then came what may well have been the sweetest words I’d ever heard:
    “Jake? That you?”
    I raised my hands and then myself from behind the rock, pulling my fingers into my palms and squeezing them still. I much preferred the smell of gunpowder and the taste of earth than Hollis seeing me scared. I spoke deep and even: “I don’t want no trouble, Hollis.”
    It was easy to see how the old man in front of me could have snuck up on me so easy. A morning’s worth of farming had left Hollis’s blue overalls a smudgy brown that blended his potbelly with the woods. A faded black Dale Earnhardt cap was pulled down over his ears. Even the nicotine-stained whiskers around his mouth were a kind of camouflage. The rest of his face turned three shades whiter when he saw me.
    “Lord have mercy,” he said.
    Hollis lowered the shotgun and jogged to me in a herky-jerky old-man way. I dropped my arms and bent for my hat, aware that my legs were about to give way. Thankfully, Hollis picked it up for me. He handed it over as though it were his very life. I breathed easier. Not because of his show of respect, but because Hollis’s own trembling body meant he was not aware of my own.
    “You could’ve kilt me, Jake. Could’ve shorn my head clean off.”
    I spoke the truth: “Bessie’s in the truck.” Then the lie: “Didn’t think I’d need her.”
    Hollis pulled a red bandana from the front pocket of his overalls and wiped his brow. He exhaled a laugh. “Ain’t nobody supposed to be up here for ’nother hour. I thought you was the law.”
    “I am the law, Hollis.”
    “Oh, I know, I know y’are.”