Down in the Holler: The Goodbye (Reprise)

Episode XII

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

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← In Episode XI: The Shaft, Judith and Tim made a frantic search through the mountains.

The vines snaking up the walls of the Mitchell house had shed the dull bronze of fading winter for the rich, flowering green of early summer.

In the balmy warmth of late afternoon, Judith hesitated on the sidewalk, crossing her arms over the Welcome to Kentucky! t-shirt she’d bought at the McFerrin gas station to replace her pajama shirt and sweatshirt, stale with sweat and stained by dirt and dead leaves. The few hours heavy sleep she’d gotten in McFerrin’s motel were enough to keep her on her feet, but her body was sapped, depleted in the aftermath of the jagged fear, the midnight chase up the mountains, the echoes of Granger’s screams plummeting into the earth –

Judith stabbed her fingernails into her arm and shook her head, pushing the memories away, holding them at arm’s length.

She had one more thing to do before she left Salt Fork.

As she took a breath to steel herself, she only vaguely noticed the crunch of tires behind her and the click and creak of a car door opening.

“Judith?”

Turning, Judith came face to face with Anna May Schneider, her round eyes wide and sheepish.

Anna May shut the minivan door and fiddled with the hem of her shirt. “Are you going inside?”

“I’d like to do a debrief of the case,” Judith said. “I realize I am no longer working for you, but given recent events –”

“No, it’s fine. You can – I’m –” Anna May trailed off, her eyes searching for words in the house, the sky, the sidewalk. “Why don’t we go in?”

Judith followed Anna May up the path, overgrown by a lawn that was more weeds than grass. When they reached the porch, Anna May stopped and stood rooted to the warped wooden planks, her eyes on the window.

Frowning, Judith leaned over to look.

The window opened onto an alcove in the living room, where Rock and Cindy Mitchell sat, their fingers intertwined and knuckles resting on the faded wood of the table. The television was black and silent.

“Is something wrong?” Judith whispered.

Anna May’s eyes glistened in the golden afternoon sunlight, and her voice was thick. “I don’t remember the last time I saw them do that.”

Judith waited, shifting her weight between her feet, until Anna May finally stepped forward and rang the doorbell. From inside came the scrape of chairs, the shuffling of feet, and Cindy opened the door.

But the Cindy in the doorway was not the gray, deflated woman of months before. Like color returning to a withered flower, her gray curls were not so limp, her skin not so sallow. There was a hint of light in her eyes, a slight pink in her cheeks.

Without a word, she stepped back, making way for them to enter.

When Judith’s eyes met Rock’s in the sun-dappled living room, the softness in his eyes soured. Slapping his baseball cap onto his head, he stood, squeezed Cindy’s hand, and left through the open front door.

Cindy wrapped Anna May in an embrace that lasted long enough to twist Judith’s stomach into awkward knots. Pulling back, Cindy rubbed Anna May’s shoulders. “Why don’t you make some coffee.” Her voice was stronger, deeper than Judith had expected, and she realized with a start that the only times she’d ever heard Cindy’s voice had been in screams. “I wanna talk to Miss Temple here.”

Her body tight with uncertainty, Judith followed Cindy through the house and out the back door to the yard, where just beyond the fence the mountains rose in sun-rich green. Cindy sank onto on a worn patio swing.

Judith hesitated, then reached for a plastic lawn chair. With a shake of her head, Cindy patted the cushion beside her.

Perching on the edge of the swing, Judith wove her fingers together and clutched her knees, waiting.

Cindy pushed the swing back and forth, back and forth, her eyes on the trees and their golden-green leaves.

“News travels fast here,” Cindy said at last.

“I assume you’re referring to Granger.”

“Sheriff came by not too long before you got here, but we’d already heard all about it from the neighbors.” With her toes, Cindy kept moving the swing back and forth, back and forth. “There’re rumors goin’ around that a psychic lady called the sheriff’n told him Granger was about to kill little Melissa Sloan. Judgin’ by the dirt stains on your jeans, I’m guessin’ that’s true. You drove all the way down here last night, didn’tcha?”

“That’s correct.” Judith rubbed at the stubborn brown stains on her jeans and cleared her throat. “I have a theory.”

“A theory? And what is it you got a theory about?”

“About you,” Judith said. “I think you have some very strong psychic functioning, and that’s what prevented me from doing my readings around you.”

A small smile snuck onto Cindy’s face. “When I was a little girl, I’d sometimes see things other people couldn’t see, know things other people didn’t know, things I had no way of knowin’. Ignored it, mostly, when I got older.”

“It seemed that you were blocking me. Like radio interference.”

“Mighta been somethin’ like that. I don’t rightly know.”

Judith studied her ruined shoes. “You saw Autumn, didn’t you?”

The swing kept up its steady rhythm – back and forth, back and forth.

“You ain’t got no idea what it’s like,” Cindy said, her voice as quiet and constant as the back and forth, back and forth of the patio swing, “knowin’ your baby’s dead and gone, and havin’ to see her day after day, standin’ there all bloody, covered in dirt. She never said nothin’, just stood in corners, on the edge of crowds. She was tryin’a tell me somethin’, but I never could figure out what. I couldn’t live with it. Blocked her out, pushed her away – I guess that’s what I did. Whatever it was that I did, it was only to keep me from dyin’ inside.”

The curated words of Judith’s burgeoning theories strained against her – psychic functioning, medium, buffer, interference, Purgatory – but she held them in check. She didn’t need to let them loose, not now. It was a hard, slow-learned lesson for her, that not everything had to be said.

“I got some theories too.” Cindy sighed, a weighty release. “My baby couldn’t get to me, so she got to you, when it mattered. I think she knew; I think she saw what Granger was fixin’ to do. What happened to her, she didn’t want it happenin’ again. And she found a way. My baby always found a way.”

Cindy lapsed into silence, filled only by the creak of the old swing.

As the sun drifted closer to the tops of the trees along the mountain ridge, Judith’s fingertips started to tingle, and she stilled. Cindy gasped, and Judith raised her eyes.

There in the yard, in the golden sunlight and the soft spring breeze, was Autumn.

Her long, dark hair lay in wisps over her shoulders, and a bright sundress fluttered about her. In her arms, resting on her hip, was a dark-haired girl with tight black curls and wide green eyes, her little fingers clutching the fabric of Autumn’s dress.

Autumn smiled and pressed her cheek against the little girl’s forehead.

With a last look that settled over Cindy and Judith with the golden warmth of the afternoon sunshine, Autumn, holding her green-eyed little girl, turned and moved with slow, smooth steps toward the fence.

She opened the gate, closed it behind her, latched it.

Then, following the gentle billows of the wildflowers, Autumn and her daughter traveled up the hill, through the sunshine, and into the deep green of the mountain forest.

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The evenings were long now, with daylight holding tight to the earth even into the nighttime hours. There would still be plenty of sunlight left for the two hours back to Lexington.

Judith checked her phone again as if she somehow could have missed Tim’s call in the past thirty seconds.

She wouldn’t call him a second time. Two calls would be excessive.

But it didn’t seem right, even to her, to leave McFerrin without saying goodbye.

The previous night, sitting for what had felt like hours in the flashes of red and blue that lit the forest, listening to the murmur of Tim’s voice and the gruff bluster of Sheriff Quinn as the sheriffs called and woke people across both their counties – paramedics for Melissa, homicide detectives from the nearest town big enough to host a police force, a recovery team to rappel into the mine shaft – she and Tim hadn’t had a chance to exchange another word.

Judith hated loose ends, unanswered questions.

But, in addition to Tim, there was something else niggling at Judith, itching at her.

She had to try, just once before she left. Just to answer her own questions.

Holding her clasped hands in front of her, Judith closed her eyes.

Autumn, where are you?

She waited, turning slowly, listening.

A gentle tug on her fingertips pointed her north, and Judith started up her car, pulling onto the country road crowded by trees as steep and close as the arches of a summer-green Gothic cathedral.

On the quiet roads, every now and then Judith stopped, closing her eyes, holding out her hands, letting the tug guide her. It led her onto the northern mountain road. The same general direction as Lexington, she reminded herself. Little more than a detour.

In the mountains above Salt Fork, a sign boasted a scenic overlook, and the pull at her fingertips tugged harder.

Judith steered her car off the road onto the wide gravel parking area of the overlook. A black SUV was parked beside the sign as well, its windows too dark to see if it was empty. Climbing out of her car, Judith followed the marked trail away from the street and through the trees.

Surely Granger hadn’t hidden Autumn’s body here, so close to the road.

Judith’s winding thoughts stopped cold when she stepped through a clutch of trees onto a narrow path bounded by a crumbling rock wall, and stood looking directly at Tim Morrissey.

Tim turned as she approached, and his tired smile made the sunlight too warm and gave Judith a sudden urge to flee back to her car.

“What’re you doing all the way up here?” Tim’s hat, the ridiculous hat that made him look even taller than nature made him to be, was nowhere in sight, though his hair still bore its dent.

“I’m not following you,” Judith said. “I called. To say goodbye. But I didn’t know you were here.”

With a gentle chuckle, Tim leaned against the wall and pointed to the holler below, drenched with the lush colors of a lingering golden sunlight. “The view used to be a lot better. But it’s still a sight to see.”

Judith took a few hesitant steps forward and peeked over the edge of the rock wall, which appeared to be the only barrier preventing them from tumbling over a sheer, rocky cliff into the valley.

Down below them, amid the thick green of the trees and the rolling hills that stretched for miles, was a cluster of rectangular gray buildings and circular pools of dark blue water. A water treatment plant.

“I was looking for Autumn,” Judith whispered.

Tim shrugged as though to push away a shiver. “Looking for Autumn?”

“All day, I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. The whole time I was investigating, I was so focused on finding her killer that I didn’t leave myself time to try to find her body. That’s how I ended up here. I was dowsing.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“I generally don’t kid.”

Tim chuckled again and shook his head. “I’ll give you one guess as to what I’m doing here.”

“I don’t like guessing games. I prefer logic puzzles in which I have all the available information in front of me.” Judith leaned back from the wall, away from the cliff and the trees so far below they looked like fluffy green clouds. “Are you looking for Autumn too?”

“Technically I took today off. Needed some beauty sleep. But a thought’s been bugging me all afternoon – there were no other bodies, at least none they could find, in that mine shaft, only Granger’s. If Granger hadn’t dumped Autumn in that shaft, then where was she? And if he already had a body-hiding spot that had evaded law enforcement for two decades, why switch and try to take Melissa someplace new?”

Tim turned around, lounging his back and elbows along the wall. “So I started wondering about all the reasons why he might have gone looking for a new place. What if his old spot was compromised? That made me think about what’s been built in the hollers in the past twenty years. Mind you, not many new things have been built out here aside from a hospital or two. But about five years ago the county stuck this thing, this water treatment plant, up here in the hills where there used to be nothing but trees and the occasional hunting cabin. When they put that place in, there would have been bulldozers and excavators all over the mountain that wouldn’t have noticed, let alone stopped to look at, some mostly-decomposed bones.”

“You got that from thinking about it for an afternoon?”

Tim raised an eyebrow and smiled. “You got here from following a ghost pulling on your fingers?”

“That’s not an accurate representation of how dowsing works.”

Tim, seeming perfectly at ease while leaning against a dubious wall over a rocky cliff, turned toward the valley again and looked down at the concrete, the sharp angles, the ponds in their precise, equidistant circles. “I just wanted to come up here and see it for myself, see if it felt right.”

“You say things just feel right as though the sensation is objective fact,” Judith said. “As evidence, it’s highly suspect.”

A laugh burst from Tim, loud and open and surprising, and despite her best efforts and a surge of defensiveness, Judith caught herself smiling.

“Things don’t feel right or feel wrong to me,” Judith said over Tim’s laughter. “If I physically see something in front of me, then I know it’s there, and if I have a vision of something, then I know there’s at least some truth to it, even if it’s more abstract than I would prefer. But feeling has nothing to do with it, and my spreadsheets can corroborate what I’m saying.”

“Every word out of your mouth is the opposite of every psychic stereotype I’ve ever heard.”

“I should hope so.”

When Tim’s chuckles subsided, he turned to Judith, a more somber note in his voice. “I forgot, I was going to mention – Melissa’s gonna be going up to Lexington once the hospital discharges her.”

“Lexington?”

“For rehab. Really, I think she mostly just needs a quiet place for a while.”

Judith nodded, a sudden torrent of thoughts rushing through her mind.

Lexington. Anywhere in Lexington would put Melissa within half an hour of Judith’s house. Would she be expected to visit Melissa? Bring food? God forbid – make small talk? Rehab and quiet – of course Judith wanted Melissa to have those things. But the thought of directionless chit chat with a relative stranger – particularly a relative stranger who was beholden to her – was enough to raise the tide of Judith’s anxiety like seawater gushing over floodgates.

“–almost no way we’d get a warrant to tear up the plant looking for her body.”

“Hm?” Judith started, suddenly aware that Tim was talking to her.

“I said it’s going to be nigh on impossible to get a warrant that would let us search that plant for Autumn’s body. We’d have to tear up the concrete; it’d be a mess. And we don’t have any solid evidence that she’s even there.”

“I don’t think Autumn cares if we find her.”

“You get that feeling too?”

“It’s not a feeling,” Judith said. “I thought that’s what she wanted, at first. It’s how I perceived the first dream, the one that put me in touch with Anna May. But since then, the communications I’ve had from her dealt with finding and stopping Granger. She didn’t seem to care whether or not I found her body.”

“Still, for her family, for their closure.”

“I think they’re doing all right,” Judith said quietly.

Tim cocked his head at her, then nodded, turning his face back to the valley.

The rustle of the evening breeze through the leaves, the soft bleating of cicadas, the whisper of squirrels wrestling and racing through the tree branches – the rich sunset stillness stretched between them, and a strange, uncomfortable tugging stirred within Judith.

“I’d better get going,” she said, stepping back from the wall. “I don’t want to be driving in the dark.”

Tim pushed himself off the wall as well, moving back toward the narrow path to the road.

“Hey,” Tim said, a step behind her. “I really am glad you came to Salt Fork. It’s been a wild ride.”

“When I accepted this job, I didn’t expect a cold case to involve so much adrenaline.”

“You handled yourself pretty well.”

“As did you.” Judith took a few more steps, then stopped. She turned around in the middle of the path. “But the next time you’re confronting someone who has a gun, please wear your Kevlar.”

“I don’t usually have a civilian with me. That was an extenuating circumstance.”

“Some studies report that law enforcement officers suffer fatal injuries at a rate almost four times higher than that of other occupations.”

“Did you look that up today?” Tim said, and the smile that crept across his face sent a rush of irritation through Judith, along with another sensation that she definitely did not want to be dealing with on her way out of Salt Fork. “Are you concerned?”

“I was curious. About the statistics.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so.” Judith spun back around and hurried the last few steps to the road, where their cars sat undisturbed along the gravel shoulder.

As he emerged from the path, Tim held out his hand. “Let me know the next time you’re in this neck of the woods. And I’ll call you if I ever need a psychic.”

Judith took his hand outstretched hand and shook it. “Southeast Kentucky isn’t on the way to many places. I doubt I’ll be in this neck of the woods unless you need a psychic.”

The handshake stretched several seconds longer than the businesslike handshakes to which Judith was accustomed, and her face was hotter, more flushed than it should be in the gentle June evening. She extricated her hand. “Well. Goodbye, then. Until you need a psychic.”

“Can I let you know the next time I pass through Lexington?”

“You – can. Yes. You can do that.”

“Okay, then.”

Tim’s grin was infectious, but Judith turned away to hide her reddening face and walked to her car.

“Drive safe,” Tim said.

“Wear your Kevlar.”

Judith started her car and pulled away from the scenic overlook, back onto the winding, tree-lined highway. When she glanced in her rearview mirror, there was Tim, leaning against his SUV and waving, a laugh in his eyes and the warm spring sunset slanting through the trees and puddling him in leaf-dappled gold.

Judith waved once, then turned her eyes back to the road ahead.

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Thank you for reading and for sticking through to this final episode! If you enjoyed this installment of Down in the Holler, please let me know with a like, comment, or restack!

← Read Episode XI: The Shaft

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