Down in the Holler: The Family

Episode II

This is Down in the Holler, a serial speculative mystery novella featuring Judith Temple, psychic detective.

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← In Episode I: The Dream, Judith received a mysterious dream and agreed to investigate a missing persons cold case in rural Kentucky.

“Drive-through town” was a generous term for the jumble of buildings that made up Salt Fork, Kentucky. The twisting highway, running like a grey river between tumbling green mountains, was the only sign of human habitation Judith had seen for miles. Then she rounded a corner and there, without warning or preamble, was Salt Fork.

Judith crept along Main Street, which seemed to be the only street. It stretched along for a few blocks like a gap-toothed mouth, half its buildings empty and in disrepair.

A tiny library, the mural on its outside wall faded and peeling. Abandoned buildings, out-of-business stores. A greasy diner, its gutters overflowing with rotted leaf corpses. Everywhere, For Lease signs.

Judith checked her rearview mirror to make sure she wasn’t holding anyone up by driving so slowly, but the street behind her was empty. Her hands tingled, a restless sensation creeping into her body, though she couldn’t put her finger on why. Slowing the car to a crawl, she peered at the handful of scruffy people milling about the street.

A scowling teenager stomped toward a dingy grocery store, trailing after a harried-looking woman in sweatpants. A man in a baseball cap lit a cigarette and leaned against a dark red pickup truck. Two men in boots and cowboy hats chatted outside a liquor store.

Nothing to see. And nothing concrete enough to record in her notebook. Judith pushed aside the tingly feeling, double checked her GPS, and kept moving.

Judith liked having answers. And this ability – gift, curse, sense, whatever it was – was not in the habit of giving her clear, precise answers. It was accurate, far more accurate than random chance. But it was layered with her own preconceptions, emotions, worldview, mood – a complex web of filters that snatched away certainty. The engineer in her wanted to quantify, isolate, study these sensations, these visions and premonitions. But this gift of hers, if it was a gift, had other ideas.

The address Anna May had given Judith led her off Main Street, past the whitewashed Salt Fork Church of God, and toward a smattering of tumbledown houses.

The Schneider house was decent enough, a compact, two-story home with a sagging roof and vines creeping up its wooden planks. Judith opened her car door and heard raised voices coming from inside the house.

A man and a woman, though she couldn’t make out their words. And a third, shrill voice shrieking at them to be quiet.

Tugging her peacoat tighter against the chilly air, Judith made her way up the front walkway, its worn cement infested with scraggly, opportunistic weeds. The voices rose, jumbling over each other in a ragged tug-of-war.

“ – so afraid of?”

“Not in my house!”

“It’s been twenty years!” Anna May’s voice roared, her Kentucky drawl swallowed in rage. “You’re not even her father!”

Judith knocked on the front door.

Silence dropped over the house, leaving only the birdsong of early spring and the faint rumble of a car on the distant two-lane highway.

The curtain rustled in the window, and Judith caught a glimpse of a narrow eye before the curtain jerked back into place.

The door creaked open, revealing a gray woman whose skin seemed to hang, deflated, on her angular bones.

Behind the older woman, Judith saw Anna May, just as she had looked on Wednesday, when her image had floated, unbidden, into Judith’s mind: sandy curls, sturdy curves. Probably a nicotine patch under her sleeve. But now Anna May’s arms were crossed, her lips pressed tight.

A weatherworn man with a belly and a scraggly beard glowered in Judith’s direction. Slapping a baseball cap on his head, he stomped out of the room.

The lovely reception she’d been hoping for.

Judith looked back toward the gray-haired woman to introduce herself, but the words died before they had a chance to form.

The woman stared Judith dead in the eyes. Without a smile, without a hello, without a word.

Judith’s mind scrambled for the words she’d been about to spew. Hello? Hi, my name is –What had she been about to say? She needed to say something. It was a rule of conversation, a custom, a guardrail – to say hello in greeting. Judith liked guardrails, the failsafe paths through the minefield of conversing with strangers.

But this woman just stared, and Judith stared back.

Anna May, her face blotchy with the dregs of fury, stepped forward. “Hi, Miss Temple. I’m Anna May. We spoke on the phone. This is Cindy, my mom.”

Cindy dropped her eyes and stepped back to let Judith inside.

Judith held out her hand to Cindy. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Schneider. I’m Judith Temple.”

“Oh, sorry,” Anna May said. “She’s Cindy Mitchell. Schneider’s my married name. My maiden name was Hanson, same as Autumn’s.” She gave an apologetic shrug, an awkward giggle. “Sorry, lots of different names. Confusing, I know.”

“And the man who just left?”

“Rock Mitchell. My stepdad.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Mitchell.” Judith dropped her hand when Cindy didn’t take it. “Well. Might as well get to it. Which room did your sister sleep in when she lived here?”

“Oh, uh –” Anna May faltered, a shrill cheeriness in her voice. “Don’t you wanna hear about Autumn first? What we know about that night, and everything?”

“No,” Judith said. “My data has shown that too much frontloaded information affects the accuracy of my readings. I prefer to do my initial reading with as little bias as possible, and then confirm the validity of my results with the available facts.”

“Oh. That sounds…nice, I guess.” Anna May retreated toward a narrow staircase. “Um, Autumn’s room was up here. My mom and Rock use it for storage now.” She started up the staircase. “You want some sweet tea or water or anything?”

“No, thank you.”

At the top of the stairs, Anna May turned a corner and opened a wooden door pockmarked by nicks and scratches. “Okay. Well, you can, um, make yourself comfortable.”

The room was a maze of boxes. Cardboard boxes, plastic bins. Some lids closed tight, others open and spilling out old clothes and junk. An abandoned, dust-covered standing bike sat in one corner, and an old TV shrouded in a yellowed sheet stood in another.

Everything was haphazard, shoved together without even the semblance of a path between the boxes. Claustrophobic and dark, almost suffocating.

Judith set down her purse by the door, closed her eyes, and waited.

Nothing came.

Or, rather, too many things came, so many that no image, no sound, no memory could break through the chatter. It was a low-level hum – a blank, white radio static.

Judith opened her eyes and picked her way through the jumble of boxes toward the lone, grimy window. Perhaps some natural daylight would clear the room.

In the dull sunlight that pushed past the dirty screen, Judith peeked out the window at the thick-limbed beech tree whose bare branches scratched at the outside wall of the house.

She closed her eyes again.

The static was louder, fracturing her concentration, drowning the words and images straining to make themselves known.

“Is there anything I can get you?” Anna May’s voice broke into Judith’s mind. “Anything that might help?”

Judith opened her eyes and turned, her lips pursed with the effort to contain her frustration. Silence would help. A little solitary space to work would help.

Cindy, with her droopy, haggard face, stood in the doorway behind Anna May.

“I’ll need to try other rooms,” Judith said. “Where did your sister like to go? Which room was her favorite?”

“The backyard.” The hint of a sad smile caught the corner of Anna May’s mouth. “She was an outside girl.”

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The backyard was a mess of muddy holes and patchy grass, with windblown trash scattered against the chain-link fence. But beyond the back gate, the grass sloped up in a short, steep rush – and then forest. Thick trees, the buds on their branches straining toward spring, cast heavy shadows on the earthy forest floor.

“I’d like a few minutes alone,” Judith said over her shoulder. “Please.”

The screen door creaked, then banged shut as Anna May and Cindy retreated inside.

Judith closed her eyes. The static was fainter now, but still there, lingering along the edge of her perception.

Autumn. Autumn, the girl with the tree outside her window, who preferred the backyard to the warm house. That was already more than Judith preferred to know when she was searching for impressions. Just knowing that – Autumn’s free-spirited draw toward the outdoors – could color her perception of what she found, what she received.

Through the static, an image strained. Autumn, opening a window, reaching her foot toward a sturdy branch. It was dark. There was a party across town, a beat-up truck waiting for her down the block.

Eyes still closed, Judith reached into her bag for her notebook, but a creaking sound startled her. She opened her eyes, and the gate that led up the hill into the forest was open, swinging on its hinges.

And there, where before there had been no one, were two little girls.

A jolt, whether from thrill or fright or some mixture of the two, sprang through Judith, and she held her breath, watching.

The smaller one shook her blonde corkscrew curls, crossing stubborn arms over herself as her chin quivered. The dark-haired older one stood outside the swinging gate, a mischievous smile breaking across her face.

“Come on,” she whispered, beckoning. “Come on.”

But the little blonde girl shook her head.

From the corner of her eye, Judith caught movement in the house. She jumped, hand flying to her chest.

Through a crack in the curtains, she could just make out Cindy’s red-rimmed eye before the curtain snapped back into place.

Judith whirled back toward the gate and the little girls.

The gate was closed.

The yard was empty, save for her.

Judith let out a breath. Good to know the strange, staticky interference hadn’t completely blocked her impressions. Not that she’d learned anything she didn’t already know.

Judith opened her notebook and jotted down the place and time.

Two small girls, one blonde, one brunette. Playing on swinging gate –

The hair rose on Judith’s arms and the back of her neck, a faint current of electricity rolling over her body. Her shoulders tightened. Slowly, she lifted her eyes.

A dark-haired young woman stood before her. Her face looked no more than nineteen, but her eyes were grim and worn and weary. Dirt stains smeared her clothes and darkened her cheekbones. And glistening on her shirt, pooling on her abdomen, was a wet, blooming puddle of scarlet.

Judith’s pen hesitated over the paper.

The woman said nothing, did not move, but stared at Judith, shutters closed over whatever meaning lay beneath her eyes. Was she pleading? Or was it a threat, a warning to stay far away from these hills and the secrets they hid?

“Autumn?” Judith murmured.

The woman did not respond, only stared with fixed, unblinking eyes. A chilly breeze rustled the grass, scratching the new twigs of the beech tree against the wooden house. But the woman’s hair did not move with the wind.

“What do you want, Autumn?” Judith said. She glanced back at the window of the house, but Cindy’s peeping eyes were nowhere to be seen. “What can I do for you?”

Autumn stood in the yard, arms at her sides, the fatal wound seeping beneath her shirt. Without a movement, without a word, she watched Judith.

She was simply there. And then, suddenly, she wasn’t. The yard was empty once again. The watchful sensation faded, and Judith’s senses returned to their baseline.

Judith sucked in several deep breaths, heavy with the wet, earthy scent of approaching spring. Turning back to her notebook, she frowned in frustration at her shaking hands.

She would have to parse out the categories for the different impressions before adding them to her spreadsheet. The first, seeing Autumn climbing out the window, had been solely within Judith’s mind – a typical psychic vision of the past.

The two little girls by the gate were surely a haunting – or Judith’s preferred, more neutral term, place memory, which didn’t bring to mind wispy, vengeful ghosts.

But the third – an apparition, most likely. Apparitions were capable of interacting with the viewer in some way, but the only interaction she could attribute to this woman was that hard, unwavering stare, directly into Judith’s eyes.

Autumn wanted something, Judith could feel it.

Feelings were vague, and unverifiable. But with enough data points, she might eventually be able to create an accurate model of how her feelings, her impressions, her limited perception, compared to the facts of a case or situation. But she was only in the very early stages of data collection. All she could do for the moment was to keep scrawling psychic impressions and plugging data points into her spreadsheet.

Judith closed her notebook and slipped it back into her purse. Autumn had reached out four times already. Once with the strange, shared dream on Wednesday, once in a vision, once in the place memory by the gate, and again just now, as an apparition. She had reached out, and she wanted something.

Judith bit her lip. Though it might interfere with the clarity of her impressions, it might be time to collect a bit more data on this Autumn Hanson. Time to combine her psychic impressions with good, old-fashioned investigation.

Standing up, she pushed through the noisy screen door and back into the stale air of the house. Anna May and Cindy, hovering in the kitchen, sprang alert.

Anna May edged closer to Judith, a hesitant anxiety in her eyes. “So…um. Did you…see anything?”

“I’m willing to take the case, if you’re still interested,” Judith said, keeping her tone clipped to cover the last, breathy remnant of fear in her voice.

“You will?”

“But,” Judith said, “I noticed there’s no police station here. I’m assuming, since Salt Fork is unincorporated, that the county sheriff is your law enforcement?”

Anna May nodded. “That’s Sheriff Morrissey, up at the county courthouse in McFerrin. ‘Bout thirty minutes from here.”

Judith tugged out her phone and searched for McFerrin. “All right, then. Well, I’m going to need to speak to him.”

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Thank you for reading!

Keep reading! Episode III: The Sheriff →

← Read Episode I: The Dream

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