Down in the Holler: The Interrogation
Episode VII
This is Down in the Holler, a serial speculative mystery novella featuring Judith Temple, psychic detective.
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← In Episode VI: The Poem, Judith discovered a poem that added another layer to the case.
The dagger-sharp tips of the mountain pine trees swallowed the last shimmer of daylight, leaving deep folds of darkness in the valley. Harsh, buzzing streetlights flickered to life, illuminating the Pine Gap Coal Company’s parking lot in puddles of yellow as Judith sat in her car and watched Rock Mitchell step out of the small, squat security building.
He said goodbye to someone inside, and his low, craggy voice was casual and friendly, butting up like an ill-fitting puzzle piece against Judith’s memory of his angry grumblings. Hands in his pockets, he meandered toward the parking lot and sat heavily on a rusty bench, staring out and upward at the mountain and the final orange crescent of light.
Judith closed her eyes.
It was easy now, disconcertingly easy, without the strange interference that hung like static around the Mitchell house. Images and sensations flowed into Judith’s mind with the smooth press of a rising tide.
Regret rolled off Rock Mitchell, an undertow of dark, roiling shame and jagged stones.
Cindy at the sink, her back to him, her shoulders sagging with long-carried grief.
Anna May, her face young and smooth, her cheeks plump as ripe peaches, her eyes red with tears and blame, her skin blotched with futile fury.
Cindy, fading to gray, a leaf shriveled to ash in a dying campfire.
Judith pushed further, searching, reaching for Autumn, who hovered like a specter at the edge of Rock’s memories.
The incoherent clamor of raised voices, fists banged on tables. Slammed doors, boxes of clothes and books and childhood mementos shoved onto the front porch like a cleansing.
Autumn. Judith strained toward the visions as they flickered and dimmed. Where are you? What did he do?
A sharp rap, loud and jarring, on the hood of the car startled Judith from the vision, and she opened her eyes.
Rock Mitchell stood in front of her car, his security uniform rumpled and tight around the abdomen, his face stiff and hard as the gray cliff behind him. “What d’you think you’re doin’ here?”
Judith clutched the steering wheel, her fingers itching to reach down and put the car in reverse, to escape back onto the road. Peeking around Rock, she glimpsed a trickle of dusty, grime-faced miners stomping out of the cavernous mine entrance as their shift ended. If he tried to get violent, at least there would be witnesses.
Judith rolled down her window a few inches. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“I don’t want nothin’ to do with you, lady. You ain’t welcome at my home, and you ain’t welcome at my place of business. Now, you get outta here ‘fore I call the sheriff on ya.”
“Actually, the sheriff offered to come with me to talk to you,” Judith said. “In retrospect, I probably should have taken him up on it.”
“What you tryin’a say?”
“He was under the impression that, because he is a sheriff and a man, you might be more willing to talk to him.”
Rock stepped closer to the cracked window. “I don’t wanna talk to you ‘cause you’re a vulture hangin’ around, leechin’ money outta my family.”
“Anna May is the one paying me, and, as far as I’m aware, she’s not your daughter.”
The only part of Rock that moved were his hands, clenching into fists. “You get outta here,” he hissed, “and don’t you come back.”
Rock turned away, stalking back toward the metal bench.
Frustration surged through her, and Judith yanked the keys from the ignition and opened her door. “I have questions for you.”
Rock kept walking, hands shoved into his pockets.
Judith closed her car door, which beeped as it locked. “Why did you wait a month before you labeled Autumn a missing person?”
Walking faster, Rock did not sit on the bench, but strode around it, keeping it between them like a shield. His bulky shoulders rose and fell with heavy breaths.
Judith followed him, standing on the opposite side of the bench. “Why did you give the case four weeks to go cold before you even tried to look into your own stepdaughter’s disappearance?”
Rock spun around to face her and clutched the back of the bench with white-knuckled hands. “You don’t know nothin’ ‘bout her.” His constricted voice stabbed into the air, too loud in the chill, quiet evening air. “Get back in your fancy car and crawl back to whatever city you came from.”
“First of all,” Judith said, “it’s not a fancy car. It’s lightly used. I find buying cars new to be a waste of money. And secondly, I do know that Autumn periodically disappeared for a few days while she couch-surfed. And I also know that you kicked her out of the house on multiple occasions. But there’s a big difference between someone with Autumn’s history going missing for a few days, and going missing for a month without a word. So what took you so long?”
“I ain’t talkin’ to you. If you’re accusin’ me of somethin’, you go get your sheriff and have him come say it to my face.”
“Everythin’ okay?” said a voice.
Startled, Judith turned her eyes away from Rock to the handful of dirt-covered men in dusty coveralls standing nearby, their eyes shifting between the scene before them and their cars in the parking lot.
“Your ride comin’ soon, Rock?” one of them said.
Judith crossed her arms and turned back to Rock. “I could do that. I could go get the sheriff. Would you talk to him? Would you tell him why you didn’t investigate until it was too late?” A strange, small buzzing pushed at the edge of Judith’s awareness, and her fingertips went numb.
“Get outta here, lady.” Rock’s hands tightened on the back of the bench.
“Were you buying time?” Judith said, pushing past the distracting, fuzzy clamor in her mind. “Were you destroying evidence?”
“I said get outta here.”
“Where did you hide her body, Rock?”
“You shut your mouth!” Suddenly Rock was around the bench, and one of the miners, his thick neck caked with dust and streaked with sweat, was between them, arms out like a wall.
Judith fell back a step, delayed adrenaline flooding her body at the fury in Rock’s voice and the raging speed in his steps. Beside the growing audience of miners and bear-shouldered Rock, she was small, a lone woman with nothing but a set of car keys as a weapon.
The buzzing in Judith’s mind grew, a noisy static pressing into her thoughts. Judith fought back against it, focusing her attention on Rock as, behind her back, she squeezed her key fob and unlocked her car. “You killed Autumn, didn’t you?”
A strangled, gasping sound came from behind Judith, and the static rose to a fever pitch, stabbing at her mind.
She whirled around, and behind her stood Cindy, white-faced and wide-eyed. Clutching her purse to her chest, Cindy backed up, her legs shaking as she rasped with ragged breaths.
Judith gaped at Cindy and her deathly pale face.
The static, the interference, the buzzing that disrupted Judith’s visions –
It wasn’t the house. It wasn’t the house at all.
A heavy arm shoved Judith out of the way, and she stumbled sideways as Rock barreled toward Cindy.
“Don’t touch me!” Cindy shrieked, collapsing to the weed-infested sidewalk, her back against a light post. She breathed in sharp, jagged gasps, her hand at her chest, and a sob wracked her body. “What did you do?”
“Honey –” Rock reached out toward Cindy but stopped as she wailed and shrank away from him.
Heat and the thick scent of burnt earth radiated from behind Judith, and over her shoulder came the menacing rumble of a voice. “Get out.”
Judith turned, backing away as one of the miners advanced on her, pointing at her car.
“Get outta here, and don’t come back.”
Judith’s legs shook as she stumbled to her car and fumbled with the door handle. Cindy’s panicked sobs grew louder, and Rock’s sandpaper voice hollered for an ambulance.
Looking back once more, Judith locked eyes with the largest of the miners, his body squared with hers and his face hard as stone. She scrambled into her car, threw it into drive, and sped out of the parking lot, back onto the dark country road.
Heart pounding, Judith suddenly screeched to a halt as she realized that she couldn’t see anything but the dim gray outline of the trees and the hills. She turned on her car headlights, and the tangled forest lit up in cones of yellowed light. She peeled away again on the deserted road, the deafening static in her mind fading as she put distance between herself and Cindy.
Cindy –
Who was she?
What was she?
Had Judith just killed her, her heart giving out at the realization that she was married to her daughter’s murderer?
Judith’s foot seemed unable to accelerate or slow down smoothly as she stomped on the gas and then the brake, making her stomach churn around the tight turns of the mountain road. Her hands shook, her face hot and flushed as she wound her way toward Salt Fork.
Food. She needed food and rest, and she’d be fine. She just needed to drive through Salt Fork and then back down the road to McFerrin and her motel room. Then she’d eat food and write down her visions, figure out what on earth was going on with Cindy. She’d figure out all of it. She just needed quiet.
Judith bit her lip. She should have taken Tim with her. What had she been thinking? She wasn’t an officer of the law. She was just a software engineer who sometimes saw things she couldn’t explain.
Judith slowed to the speed limit as she entered Salt Fork, dormant and still as a ghost town in the evening twilight. She drove past Fix ‘Em Roy’s car repair shop, past Anna May’s Sunset Holler Boutique.
The trembling in her hands eased, and her breathing calmed, though her thoughts roiled within her. She’d categorize her visions, input them into her spreadsheet - that’s what she’d do. Then she’d reason her way through it all. Everything would be fine. Everything would be clear.
Judith’s fingers tingled and went numb.
Slone’s Service Station loomed ahead of her, its dirty white façade glowing faintly in the first hint of moonlight. A dark red pickup truck was parked in front of it.
A chill crept over Judith’s skin, and she let out a weary sigh, her shoulders sagging. She looked up, and there, by the side of the road, was Autumn, dead-eyed and bloody, her dark hair lank and dirty.
“What?” Judith whispered, a seething fury in her voice. “What do you want from me?”
Slamming on the brakes, Judith pulled the car to the side of the road and parked. “Is this what you want?” Heaving in tight, angry breaths, she stared directly back at Autumn and her ravaged body that shimmered in the car’s headlights. “If you want to tell me something, then just tell me.”
Judith closed her eyes and tried to loosen the knot in her body, tried to quiet the riotous waves of her thoughts and listen.
It came in a flutter at first, a flickering image.
Fire, orange flames licking at the peeling blue paint of a small house.
The vision grew, the colors brightening, the sound sharpening. A little freckled boy with eyes the deep pine green of the mountains, a woman with a swelling secret within her, sleeping as smoke crept under the door.
A man, his face a strange, familiar echo – a horrible, off-kilter brokenness in his eyes. Something tilted, not quite right.
Then the image swirled and shifted, and sound dug into Judith’s ears as she saw through someone else’s eyes.
The night sky, stars poking through the trees, pine needles and dirt knocking hard against her back.
The scrape of metal, the glint of moonlight on a deadly sharp edge –
Screams, disturbing nothing but the trees and the squirrels that dodged back into their homes –
Blood, too much blood, and ragged breaths and dirt catching under her fingernails and a grave-dark hole in the earth.
And eyes, pine green and off-kilter, face swimming in and out of view, until suddenly she was above him, watching his lean body, his oil-covered hands, yank the blood-slick knife out of her.
Judith’s eyes flew open. Gasping, she grasped her stomach.
Still intact. No blood. No needles in her hair, no dirt crusted under her fingernails.
Cold sweat beaded over Judith’s forehead and dripped down her neck.
It couldn’t be. How could she have missed it? She would have known, should have seen –
Judith’s gaze darted toward movement outside her car.
Autumn was gone, the night dark and still. But, just ahead of Judith, the lights of Sloan’s Service Station shone, and the door opened. Granger strode out, his arm slung over Melissa’s shoulder, a cigarette between his fingers.
He paused, his eyes lingering on Judith’s car in the dimness, and he threw up his hand in greeting.
A shiver cascaded down Judith’s spine, and her breath caught in her throat.
She put the car into drive once more and sped toward McFerrin. Her hands were ice cold, her body coiled tight as a mouse trap.
It couldn’t be.
But her mind flew back to Autumn, to her dead-eyed stare, to her bloodied body, to her last moments, when a boy with pine green eyes knelt over her, holding a knife in his hands, his fingernails dirty with engine oil –
The last thing Autumn saw that night, deep in the lonely, claustrophobic woods, was Granger Combs.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this installment of Down in the Holler, please let me know with a like, comment, or restack!
→ Keep reading! Episode VIII: The Turning
Down in the Holler Table of Contents
Recently
was kind enough to invite me to participate in his Author Insights series, and our interview came out this past week. It was a wonderful experience and gave me a lot of food for thought regarding the why behind my writing. Jim was a very gracious interviewer and asked phenomenal questions. Please feel free to take a look, if you haven’t already!
Holy cow! Question is: did Granger put the knife in or just take it out?? Wondering as there’s more to come…
So much tension in this chapter! On tenterhooks to find out what happens next..
By the way, wondering if you've ever seen the Italian murder mystery series "Inspector Ricciardi" (Il Commissario Ricciardi)? It's set in 1930s Naples and the titular Inspector has the gift/curse of seeing the ghosts of the victims in the murders he's called to investigate. Naturally he keeps his special ability to himself. I've been reminded of it in Judith's visions of Autumn.