Down in the Holler: The Witnesses

Episode IV

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

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← In Episode III: The Sheriff, Judith demanded a “test” from the county sheriff.

It was a case of tunnel vision, pure and simple.

Whoever had been sheriff of McFerrin County twenty years ago had hung his investigation on Autumn’s then-boyfriend, Granger Combs, to the exclusion of everyone else in and around Salt Fork.

Statistically the boyfriend was a likely suspect. But there was another candidate who, as far as Judith could tell from Autumn’s case file, had never been investigated by any authorities, local or federal, and, from a statistical standpoint, was just as suspicious.

Rock Mitchell. The stepfather.

Judith raised her hand to knock on the front door of the Mitchell house, where today the only yelling came from the noisy television inside.

“Judith!” came a voice behind her.

Judith whirled around toward the quiet street to see Anna May leaning out the window of a minivan.

“You talking to my mom and stepdad this morning?” Anna May bellowed into the chilly air.

Judith hesitated on the front porch. Yelling across lawns was not her preferred method of communication. She could move closer to Anna May and eliminate the need for hollering loudly enough to alert half the neighborhood. But if she walked to the street to talk to Anna May, Rock and Cindy might open the door. And every moment she spent stumbling back through the muddy yard toward the house was another moment they could slam the door in her face and refuse to speak to her.

Judith kept her feet rooted to the porch. “That was my plan.”

“What?”

“That was my plan,” Judith said again, the loudness of her voice awkward and strained.

“Let me go in with you!” Anna May’s car jerked forward, and she swerved into the driveway. Extricating herself from the van, she stuck her head back in through the window. “Two minutes, Jason. I’m leaving the keys ’cause it’s cold, but don’t you let me catch you climbing up in the front seat or locking the doors while I’m gone.”

The Jason in question, a lanky, dark-haired boy with his head bent over a phone, didn’t even look up in response.

“Now, Judith, you still have that list I gave you, right? Of Autumn’s friends back in the day? Most of ’em still live in town.” Anna May strode past Judith, collected a spare key from beneath a garden gnome, and unlocked the door. “Knock knock!”

As Anna May and Judith stepped inside, Cindy popped her head around the corner. When her haggard eyes caught sight of Judith, she retreated into the kitchen.

“Don’t count as knockin’ if you’ve already opened the door when you say it.” His back to them, Rock Mitchell nursed a cup of coffee in front of the massive, blaring living room TV. When he glanced their way and spotted Judith, his face soured. “I told you, I ain’t gon’ talk to no con woman. You’re wastin’ your money.”

Judith raised her voice over the TV. “Where were you on the night Autumn disappeared, Mr. Mitchell?”

Anna May’s eyes widened. “Oh jeepers.”

Rock turned around in his seat, squaring himself with Judith. “What’d you just say to me?”

Anna May stepped backward toward the door. “I gotta take Jason to school. I’ll – um – call you later today, Judith. Bye, Rock. Love you, Mom.”

The screen door slapped shut behind her.

“I asked you where you were on the night Autumn disappeared,” Judith said.

Rock jabbed at the remote, and the TV went black and silent. “I ain’t gon’ listen to this.” With a grunt, he hauled himself to his feet and started for the kitchen. “I’d throw you outta my house if I wasn’t leavin’ for work anyway.”

He swung his mug into the kitchen sink with a clatter that made Cindy jump, then snatched his baseball cap and coat from a hook.

Turning back to Judith, he glowered at her from under the low rim of his hat. “I better not catch you in my house again, ya hear me? Go bother somebody else’s family.”

He slammed the door, rattling the pictures on the wall. Outside, his beat-up pickup truck rumbled to life.

Judith took another step into the small kitchen, with its faded linoleum floors and yellowish wallpaper. “Mrs. Mitchell, perhaps you remember where Mr. Mitchell was that night. Was he with you?”

“Why’re you here, huh?” Cindy snapped. Judith realized with a jolt that it was the first time she’d heard her speak.

“Anna May hired me,” Judith said.

“To do what? Dredge up the past? It’s been twenty years. You ain’t gon’ bring my baby back, so what’re you tryin’ to do?”

“Based on what I’ve learned from Anna May, my own psychic impressions, and Autumn’s case file, I have two objectives,” Judith said. “I want to figure out what happened to Autumn –”

And locate her body. The dark-haired, stony-eyed apparition of two days before, her abdomen puddled with glistening blood, her face and clothes smeared with dirt, sprang from Judith’s memories. Anything less than blunt honesty tugged and pinched at Judith like too-tight clothes. But even she knew that describing to a victim’s mother the precise state of her child’s ghostly apparition would do more harm than good. She’d eventually have to state the facts as she understood them – that Autumn was dead, buried somewhere up in the endless mountain hollers – but perhaps today wasn’t the day.

“And what?” Her grey hair hanging over her shoulders in limp curls, Cindy crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. “What’s your second objective, miss psychic lady?”

“And –” Judith hesitated. “Just one. I miscounted. I have one objective.”

Cindy scoffed and returned to scrubbing dishes in the sink.

What did Cindy know? Did she suspect her husband, or know where he had been that night? Why was she so averse to Judith’s services? Many families would jump at any possibility of finding their missing loved ones – why not her?

Taking a quiet step back, Judith closed her eyes and focused on Cindy.

Judith waited, listening. Reaching out into the world in a way that she didn’t fully understand and couldn’t quantify – looking for anything, any impressions clinging to Cindy, any echoes of her memories and grief.

But there was nothing. No image reached out toward Judith, no vision of the past, no lingering memories. There was only noise. Static, like a crossed radio signal. She couldn’t pick up anything.

There was something about this house, a noisy interference every time she tried to use her ability. Scowling in frustration, Judith opened her eyes.

Cindy stared at her, soap bubbles dripping from her wrists. “What the Sam Hill you doin’?”

Judith cleared her throat. “My job.”

“Get outta my house. And don’t you even think of comin’ back here.”

---

---

“Salt Fork doesn’t have a single place that makes lattes?” Judith peered into the greasy cup of coffee in front of her.

“We got one street in this town,” Granger Combs said, a half-cocked smile on his face. “Rudy’s Diner’s the closest thing we got to a coffee shop.”

Judith took a sip, frowned, and shook a packet of powdered creamer into the cup. She stirred it clockwise, clinking the spoon against the cup, breaking up every clump of powder until the coffee turned from black to a muddy river brown. She tasted the coffee again, then looked back up at the trio watching her from across the booth. “As I mentioned on the phone, I’d like to take a few minutes to do a psychic reading on each of you before we begin.”

“Little weird, but okay.” Granger grinned and slung his arm around the blonde woman beside him. The narrow-faced man on his other side tucked his hands into his lap and studied the water rings on the cheap laminate tabletop.

Closing her eyes, Judith pushed away the awkwardness of the sudden silence.

She focused first on the blonde woman, Melissa Sloan, an old friend of Autumn’s. Melissa would have been a beautiful woman if she’d been born with a little more money, a little more of a chance in life. But, nearing forty, her skin was sallow and flaky from decades of cigarettes, harsh soap, and poor nutrition. That was what slipped into Judith’s consciousness: stunted growth, claustrophobic horizons. Flower petals withering, floating away on a rough gale of mountain wind.

And a baby.

Judith opened her eyes. Melissa stared back, wide eyed.

Don’t bring up pregnancies unless the woman says something first, Constance’s voice echoed in Judith’s mind. Judith had flouted that rule before, and it never ended well.

Closing her eyes again, she focused on Granger Combs, a lean man with car oil on his hands and the lingering remnants of an athlete’s physique.

“We allowed to talk while you do your thing?” he said.

Judith kept her eyes closed. “I’d prefer if you wait until I finish.”

“Just don’t want nobody to think you’re sleepin’ and we’re all just sittin’ here starin’ at you.”

Judith ignored him.

Cars overhead, tools in a box, just within reach –

Granger’s voice came again. “Mel, you gettin’ the sliders?”

The images stuttered in Judith’s mind. Granger with Melissa, empty beer cans in a pile by the trash can, an argument –

“What ’bout you, Stewart? Myself, I’m gettin’ the bacon burger.”

“Mr. Combs,” Judith snapped. “You’re being very distracting.”

“Sorry.” He smiled his disarming, lopsided grin. “Don’t you wanna get to know us first? Wouldn’t that help with your readings, or whatever you call ’em?”

“No.” Judith closed her eyes and started again.

She waited, reaching out into the ether.

Her concentration broken, the images retreated into nothingness.

Judith pursed her lips and stifled a huff of frustration. She’d have to try Granger again later.

She turned her focus to Stewart, a wiry man with a persistent cough.

For a few moments, it seemed as though the images wouldn’t come, as if they’d all been chased away. But then, like a spark suddenly caught by a gust of wind, they flickered to life.

A tunnel, low and dark, with electric lights running overhead. The whir and crash of machinery scraping rock. Dust, thick and heavy, settling on everything – machines, skin, clothes, faces.

But something else nagged at Judith. Not a vision she could see, but a sensation. A hungry pit of suspicion and shame, a heavy burden.

Stewart had a secret.

---

Though questions itched under the surface of her skin, Judith waited for two minutes after the food arrived, letting Melissa, Granger, and Stewart start into their lunches. Then, when the questions threatened to claw their way out of her, she leaned across the table toward Granger.

You picked up Autumn in your truck the night she disappeared.” Judith eyed Granger as he devoured his bacon burger like a starving man. “Where were you going?”

Granger spoke around a mouthful of food. “Party at Stewart’s house, I think. It was a long time ago.”

“It was the last time you saw your friend alive,” Judith said. “Surely it left some sort of impression.”

“Well, sure. But some of the things we were doin’ that night don’t really help you form memories, if you know what I’m sayin’.”

“I assume you mean drugs.”

“We were in high school, ya know. Not a lot to do up here.”

Granger’s grin never wavered, but Melissa picked at her food while Stewart shifted in his seat.

“The party was at your house?” Judith watched Stewart closely, but he didn’t meet her eyes.

“For a bit,” Stewart said. “Then we headed out to someplace else.”

“Someplace else?”

The clinking coffee cups of the diner’s few other patrons punctuated the silence.

“Where was this someplace else?” Judith said.

“Somebody’s old family hunting cabin, I think.” Melissa dunked a french fry in ketchup, then dragged the fry around her plate, leaving a wet, red ring circling her food. “Not one of our friends. It was somebody from another town. We just followed the directions until we found everybody’s cars parked up in the mountains.”

“Would you be able to find this cabin again?”

Melissa shook her head. “I ain’t been there since.”

“What about the two of you?” Judith turned to Granger and Stewart.

“They were selling hard stuff up there,” Granger said through a mammoth bite of food. “Harder’n you could usually get in town back then.”

“Are you saying you don’t remember?”

“We’re saying it was a long time ago,” Stewart said in his thick, quiet voice.

“What happened to Autumn at the party?”

“Don’t remember much,” Melissa said. “She always kinda did her own thing. A real free spirit. Sometimes she sat and talked to people, but if she wasn’t in the mood, she might go for a walk or go out on the roof or dance on the table, or anything, really.”

“She was there one minute and gone the next?”

“I’m just sayin’ I don’t remember. I came back that night with Stewart and Granger, and she wasn’t with us.”

“What time did you come back?”

“I don’t know,” Melissa said. “Probably ’round four in the morning or something. That was pretty normal for us on a Saturday.”

Granger swallowed his food with a noisy gulp. “We looked for her, though. Looked all around the house and a little bit in the woods before we headed back.”

“You left her with no ride home from a cabin somewhere in the woods.” Judith raised her eyebrows.

“You gotta understand,” Granger said, “Autumn did stuff like this all the time, disappearin’ without tellin’ nobody where she was goin’. This wasn’t nothin’ unusual.”

“So you didn’t think anything of it? Didn’t try to look for her the next day?”

“Not until ’bout a week later, when her mama started callin’ around to people’s houses lookin’ for her. Sheriff treated it like a runaway case for a while, then eventually they started lookin’ for witnesses, askin’ ’bout a body and such. But never found nothin’, far as I know.”

Judith stared hard at Granger’s face, a daub of mustard in the corner of his mouth. “You were Autumn’s boyfriend, weren’t you?”

Granger leaned back in his seat and let out a long, heavy breath. “Off and on.”

“At the time she disappeared, were you off or on?”

“Don’t really remember. Hard to know with Autumn.”

“You were on,” said Melissa.

Granger’s smile returned, and he pulled Melissa closer, his arm around her shoulders. “You remember better’n I do. You were jealous even then.” He winked at Judith.

Judith leaned in and lowered her voice. “What kind of a relationship did Autumn have with her stepfather? Rock Mitchell.”

“They could not stand each other,” Melissa said, her bland voice suddenly animated. “At each other’s throats all the time, lots of shouting matches. He was a hard line kinda guy, and there wasn’t no way you could fence Autumn in for more’n two minutes.”

“Do you think it’s possible that he could have had something to do with her disappearance?”

A silence, thick as the gravy that slopped over Judith’s untouched biscuits, filled the air around the table.

“Stewart, you’ve been awfully quiet,” Judith said.

Stewart shook his head. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Rock Mitchell. Hardly ever said two words to him.”

“Did you see Autumn leave that night?”

“What?” Stewart hesitated. “No. Look, I gotta go.”

Standing, Stewart tossed a ten-dollar bill on the table. “Gotta pick up my wife from the hospital.”

Judith frowned. “The hospital?”

“She works there,” Stewart said, scooting past Granger and Melissa. “Respiratory therapist.”

“Stewart makes his hard-earned money down in the mines so he can pay his wife to treat him when he gets coal lung.” Granger smiled, clapping Stewart on the back.

Without another word, Stewart pushed through the door.

Judith scraped back her chair and darted after him.

Shoving open the heavy front door of the diner, she caught up to him on the sidewalk. “Stewart, just a minute.”

He stiffened and turned back toward her.

Judith lowered her voice to a whisper. “I know you’re keeping a secret of some kind. Is it about Autumn?”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. But if you know something that might help –”

“You’re off your rocker, lady.” He strode to his car, parked along the nearly empty street.

“Just take my card.” Judith pushed the little piece of cardstock at him. “In case you change your mind.”

Scowling, Stewart snatched it from her hand, shoved it in his pocket, and slammed his car door.

---

While the daylight faded to a chilly pink and the sun sank below the dark green mountains outside her window, Judith sat at the cramped desk in her room in McFerrin, the only town within an hour radius that was big enough to host a motel, and scrolled through the few old Salt Fork news articles available online.

Judith had spent the day driving from house to house, talking to Autumn’s old friends and classmates, asking the same questions and getting psychic impressions of the same unrelated small-town dramas – gossip, dysfunctional families, the ever-present specters of Oxy and fentanyl. Nothing that helped Autumn’s case.

Twenty intervening years was enough time to make a case very, very cold. But cases had been solved after longer lapses, and Judith suspected that at least someone in this tiny mountain town knew what had happened to Autumn Hanson.

In a town that seemed too small for secrets, this one unsolved crime gaped, a black hole in the middle of the tiny community.

Judith’s phone rang, making her jump.

An unidentified Kentucky number.

She snatched it on the second ring. “Judith Temple.”

“I changed my mind.” The voice spoke in little more than a whisper, barely audible over the noise of a TV in the background.

“Stewart Mullins, I presume?”

“How’d you know that? You see a vision of me callin’ or somethin’?”

“On occasion I have been known to use basic human reasoning skills. I knew you were lying and wanted to come clean, and I gave you my card,” Judith said, letting the statement linger. “And I also recognized your voice.”

“I ain’t –” he started, his voice rising. Then, with a sigh, he lowered it back to a whisper. “I ain’t lyin’ ’bout Autumn. I didn’t do nothin’ to her, and I don’t know where she is.”

“Then what are you hiding?”

Stewart took a breath, and all Judith could hear on the other line was the television behind him.

“Stewart?” she said.

“I found a note.”

“A note?”

“Autumn left it at the cabin, on one of the beds, that night she disappeared. For Granger, I guess, but I don’t know if he ever saw it. Maybe he did. I don’t know.”

“What did it say?”

Stewart paused again. “You want a picture of it?”

“What do you mean a picture? You kept it?”

“I – yeah, I kept it.”

Then, without even reaching out for it, Judith saw him.

Stewart, skinny and pimply and shy. Always sidelined, always tagging along. Always Melissa’s date, both of them watching with starving eyes as Granger and Autumn did their push-and-pull, dating and breaking up again and again like a broken record.

Then, one night – a note on the bed. A note for the boy who would never care about Autumn like Stewart did.

He snatched the note, tucked it away in his pocket.

The vision cleared, and Judith saw only her dingy motel room and the rosy sunset.

Lovesick, awkward Stewart had stolen the note, hidden it away all those years ago. The small, petty act of a jealous teenage boy.

But then Autumn never came back.

And the note, potential evidence, had festered in Stewart’s mind, burning a hole in his peace, a hot ember hidden in the ash of a long-dead fire.

Judith’s phone dinged.

Jerked from her thoughts, Judith moved her phone away from her ear and clicked on the message.

It was a photo taken from a phone camera. On a kitchen countertop sat a wrinkled, yellowed note on lined notebook paper, faded letters scrawled in an untidy hand:

Follow me if you care.

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Keep reading! Episode V: The Red Herring →

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