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  His view was temporarily blocked when he had to go around the last obstacle, huge box hedges planted around the Odom family plot. Chester Odom owned the local nursery and, even though none of the graves were occupied, he had already landscaped them. He said he did it to make sure he would have a nice resting place, but everyone knew the old coot used it to advertise his business. Why else would he have a little sign stuck in the ground proclaiming, "Odom's Nursery—Let us make your loved one's resting place a garden of Eden"? Hardy kept taking down the signs, but Chester put them right back up.

  Luke stepped around the end of the hedge, blinked against the lights... and cursed to realize he'd been had. Two flashlights had been tied to low-hanging branches from a tree over the grave. It was undisturbed, and the bouquet of artificial pink and white roses he'd put there over a month ago was still in place at the foot of the marker carved with the inscription:

  ORLENA PEARL BALLARD

  1923-1964

  DEVOTED MOTHER

  ASLEEP IN JESUS

  Hands shaking with rage, Luke took out his pocket knife and reached up to cut the ropes. While he was really pissed off to think somebody had dared rile him this way, he was relieved it wasn't worse and told himself he still had time to make it to Emma Jean's. The evening wasn't totally ruined.

  ...until the shots rang out.

  He was a perfect target, framed by the glow of the flashlights, there on the windy hillock in the black of night. The first bullet smashed into his shoulder, and he dropped to his knees with a gasp. The second ripped through his thigh, and he pitched forward to dig his fingers into the gummy red clay to try and propel himself forward in a frantic attempt to escape the ring of light that rendered him a helpless mark. The third shot struck him in the head.

  Across the road in one of the mill shacks, Cecil Curry had awakened at the sound of gunfire. He rushed down the hall and grabbed the big flashlight he kept beside the front door. He didn't like living so close to a graveyard, but the house was the only one the mill had available to rent when he'd gone to work there six months ago. His wife, Nancy, teased him about being scared of the dead, even though he tried to make her see he felt it was just his duty to check out anything unusual.

  "What's wrong?" she called sleepily as she padded down the hall after him. Through the open door she could see him standing at the edge of the front porch, sweeping the cemetery with the big light. It gave her the willies. "Listen, it's just some kids fooling around 'cause it's Halloween. Come on back to bed."

  "I heard gunshots," he said grimly. "And it's not Halloween no more. It's after four o'clock. I'm gonna call the law and report it."

  Nancy frowned. He had called the sheriff's office twice before and both times the noises he'd heard turned out to be tom-cats fighting. Folks were going to start laughing at him behind his back, and she didn't want that. "It was probably a truck backfiring on the Birmingham highway. Come on back to bed."

  Cecil thought about the way Sheriff Ballard and his deputies had looked at each other and snickered the last time he'd called them out. "You're probably right. Just a backfire."

  He let her lead him back inside. They were almost to the bedroom door when they heard the sound of a car roaring out the cemetery gates, squealing tires.

  "Whoever come out of there was up to no good," Cecil said, looking over his shoulder toward the front of the house.

  Nancy gave his arm a tug. "It's none of our business. Now let's get some sleep. First thing Monday, I'm calling the mill office and see when they'll have another house so we can move. You're going to drive us crazy if we stay here."

  Luke also heard the car as he struggled to drag himself by his arms, eyes filling with blood streaming from the wound in his head. It was a long way down the hill to where he'd left the car. Through the dizzy haze overwhelming him, he knew he had to try and reach the car and use the radio to call for help. Clenching his teeth, struggling to breathe, he mustered all his strength for a mighty thrust forward, then felt himself hurtling into the gaping black hole that was Jake Petrie's grave.

  And as he lost consciousness, Luke knew the terror Robbie Kershaw must have known when his mind exploded.

  Chapter 2

  Emma Jean wrapped the ham sandwich she had made for Luke in wax paper and put it in the icebox. She noticed the compartment at the top needed defrosting. It made Rudy awful mad to see it caked with ice, but she was not worrying about chores, him losing his temper, or any of the fretful things that filled most of the waking hours of her life. She was thinking about the one person in the world who made her happy and worrying why it was after four o'clock, and he hadn't shown up.

  He hadn't even called with his signal—one ring and hang up meant he was tied up with sheriffing business and couldn't come; two meant he was on his way. They didn't dare chance talking, not on a six-party line. Myrtle Letchworth, the old busybody down the road, would wake from a sound sleep at any hour if she heard somebody's line ringing just to see what she could hear. Then she could gossip about it the next day at the beauty shop she ran in the trailer behind her house.

  It just wasn't like Luke not to give either signal since he knew she'd stay up waiting till he did. He had told her earlier at the gas station that he was going to try to get to her house early because he knew it was going to be a while till they could see each other again with Rudy changing his shift. And then he had added, smiling mysteriously, that he wanted to talk about something important. So Emma Jean was feeling real anxious, but there was nothing she could do about it, no one she could call. Certainly not the sheriff's office. Somebody besides Luke might answer, and what could she say?

  With a sigh, she took the dish rag from the sink and began to wipe the top of the yellow and white chrome table. The kitchen was small, like the rest of the house. There was hardly enough room for the table and the four chairs with their cracked vinyl seats. The sink was old and chipped and had all kinds of nasty looking stains that put blisters on her hands when she tried to scrub them out. Rudy said his ma said Emma Jean was a sloppy housekeeper. When she had dared to point out the stains had been there when they rented the old tenant house, he had slapped her. She tried not to talk back to him. He couldn't stand that in a woman. He said his pa never put up with it from his ma, and he wasn't going to take it off her either.

  Next she made sure there were pieces of old fried bacon in the mousetraps under the cabinets. The mice came in from the fields, and bacon lured them better than cheese. Rudy said it was cheaper, too, because his pa gave them bacon when he killed hogs, but cheese cost money.

  She went into the sitting room with its worn sofa and chairs that Miss Bertha—that's what she called Rudy's ma—had given them. She didn't care for Miss Bertha because she was always criticizing her to Rudy. That made Rudy meaner than ever, but Emma Jean still tried to do everything she could to get along with Miss Bertha.

  She glanced around the room with loathing. The tacky plastic flowers stuck in Coke bottles that Miss Bertha had given them were nothing but dust collectors. She didn't like all the pictures of Jesus on the wall either, not because she didn't believe in Him, because she did. She just wasn't a fanatic about religion like Miss Bertha and the other members of their kooky church, Thunder Swamp Pentecostal Holiness. Situated way back in the woods about four miles out of town, folks there got a bit crazy sometimes with their hollering and carrying on. It scared her half to death the first time she saw somebody doing what was called talking in tongue. It was an old man. All of a sudden he had jumped up out of his seat and started dancing around and waving his arms and yelling things like, "Praise Jesus," and "Glory, glory." Then he had started making sounds like "ollee-lollee-wallee-ewww-yahhh," and the next thing Emma Jean knew he was down on the floor, thrashing around, with his eyes rolled back up in his head and his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth like a lizard. She had tried to leave, but Miss Bertha wouldn't let her out of the pew, and since Miss Bertha weighed about 300 pounds, folks didn't get by her if she
didn't want them to.

  Emma Jean had come home that day and told Rudy about it and swore she would never go back. He said folks would talk about her if she didn't go to church every Sunday. When she'd asked how come he didn't go, he hit her a time or two and said if she didn't learn to watch her mouth, he'd kick her out on her butt. Secretly she thought that would be a blessing except she didn't have any money and no place to go. She also knew he didn't mean it and would kill her if she ever tried to leave.

  The linoleum floor was cold, and she was barefooted, so she walked into the bedroom with its cheap shag carpet that she had bought at Woolworth's Five and Dime for $19.95 with some of the money she had earned picking tomatoes for Sid Dootree during the summer. She never got a chance to spend what she made working at the laundromat because her boss gave her pay direct to Rudy, who hadn't raised hell about her using some of the tomato-picking money because the bedroom floors were raw wood, and he was always getting a splinter in his foot.

  Actually, she despised the bedroom most of all with its old rusted iron poster bed. It took up almost the whole room.

  Clothes had to be stacked in orange crates in the corners or hung on nails in the wall, but Rudy said all they needed was the bed anyway.

  She sat down and ran her hand across the pillow where Luke would put his head if he showed up. Thanks to him she had a few good memories from the old sagging mattress. Luke hadn't wanted to lay on the bed, saying it was bad enough to have sex with another man's wife without doing it right in his bed. She had begged him though, shyly explaining how she wanted to be able to think about something nice happening there. Then she would be able to just close her eyes and think about him when Rudy was having his way with her. Luke had understood and never said another word about it, but she could tell he liked it better when they did it in the back seat of the patrol car or in a motel.

  Lord, she loved him so much and brushed tears from her eyes to think about it. Still she couldn't believe she'd been blessed to have him love her in return—which she believed with all her heart he did.

  He was handsome but not like a movie star. He was raw-boned and good-looking from his expressive brows to the square lines of his jaw. He had smoky brown eyes and his hair was a straw blond color, neatly trimmed in a crew cut.

  He was tough through and through with a hard, muscular build and big, broad shoulders. He made her feel that, as long as she was with him, nothing in the world could ever hurt her. And he also had a gentle side, holding her after they made love like she was so precious she might break.

  Over and over she wished she could have met Luke instead of Rudy, but Luke had been in the Army, not the Air Force, and he had never been stationed at Patrick Air Force Base on the east coast of Florida. There was no way they could have met at the Sputnik Lounge at Cocoa Beach where she worked as a cocktail waitress. She went there from Tennessee, running away at sixteen, because, after dodging her stepfather's groping hands for years, he had finally crawled in her bed one night and forced her to put her mouth on his thing. When she told her mother, she was accused of lying and got a beating with a belt. Emma Jean realized then things would only get worse and hit the road.

  Broke and desperate, she swiped a purse from an older girl on the bus so she could use her driver's license to get the job at the lounge. All she had to do was keep her thumb over the name while the bookkeeper copied down her birth date.

  The tips were good. She shared the rent on a trailer with two other girls, and life would have been just fine if the customers had kept their hands to themselves. Eddie, her boss, said that if she wanted to keep her job, she'd better grow up and see that's how it was. Things were getting pretty miserable when Rudy came along. Eddie was giving her a hard time, saying he knew she was using a false ID, that she was nowhere near twenty-one, and if she wasn't nice to him, he would turn her in. She was trying to keep him at bay till she could find another job, but then one night, a drunk customer ran his hand up her miniskirt and squeezed her crotch. It made her so mad she smacked him over the head with the tray of cocktails she was carrying. The customer jumped up and grabbed her and started hitting her. That's when Eddie came in yelling she was fired, and right in the middle of it all, Rudy suddenly appeared to come to her rescue and whisk her away.

  Over burgers at an all-night cafe, he told her he'd had an eye on her for the last few nights he'd been coming to the lounge. He said she reminded him of Sandra Dee with her blond hair and blue eyes, but he had held off trying to make a date with her till he could figure out what kind of girl she was. He didn't want somebody cheap, and he won her heart when he confided that his mother had always told him not to date a girl unless she was the kind he might want to marry one day. Emma Jean thought that was sweet. She thought he was sweet, and cute too, even though something about his eyes scared her sometimes.

  His discharge was coming up, so there hadn't been time for much of a courtship, but Emma Jean didn't mind. He said he loved her and wanted her to be his wife and take her home with him to a little Alabama town called Hampton. They got married only two weeks after they met, and Emma Jean still shuddered to think of their wedding night when all the trouble began.

  They had left Florida in Rudy's beat-up Ford pickup truck right after the early morning ceremony at the courthouse in Titusville. Less than an hour up the road Rudy said he couldn't wait any longer to really make her his wife. In the time they had known each other, they hadn't gone beyond tongue-kissing and heavy petting because he said he wanted things to be right. Emma Jean had only felt a teeny bit guilty to let him think she was a virgin, thinking of that time with Johnny Grice back in the ninth grade, a mistake she had tried to put out of her mind.

  When they stopped at a seedy-looking motel, the man at the desk grinned nastily at Rudy for wanting a room in the middle of the day. He made Rudy so mad he yanked the marriage certificate from his pocket and yelled at the man that they were man and wife and, if he didn't wipe that silly smirk off his face, he'd do it for him.

  Emma Jean was so embarrassed. Once they were out of the office, she said that she wished they'd waited till night. Rudy told her to shut up, that she was his wife, and he'd say when they went to bed.

  The room was awful. It smelled like smoke and pee. The sagging bed with its stained spread and a cigarette-burned dresser were the only pieces of furniture. The floor was covered in cracked linoleum, and roaches had scurried to hide when the door was opened. Frayed curtains were nailed to the dingy windows. There was a toilet without a lid in an alcove next to a cheap metal shower stall. Then there was no time to look around because Rudy had already taken off his pants and started tearing at the shirtwaist dress she was wearing. She tried to fend him off by telling him it was her best dress and he was going to ruin it. He said he didn't care, ripped the front, and then yanked off her bra. Emma Jean lost her temper then and tried to push him away, which only made him mad. Then he threw her down and shoved himself into her.

  By then she was crying so hard she couldn't stop. He had turned into a monster, but the worst was yet to come. All of a sudden he was hitting her, yelling how he could tell she wasn't a virgin, and calling her a whore. He accused her of lying to him, and she tried to tell him she hadn't lied. He hadn't asked her if she was a virgin. Besides, it only happened one time with one boy when she was just a kid.

  He had his way with her and then hit her till she was dizzy. He told her if she thought she was going to run around on him, she was crazy because he'd kill her if he ever caught her. Afterward, he went out and bought a bottle of whiskey, then got so drunk he passed out. Emma Jean cried most of the night, wondering what kind of hell she had got herself in and how she could escape.

  The next morning he told her he hated having to hurt her but said it was her fault for having fooled him. He went on to say that, while he never would have married her if he had known she was soiled, she was his wife now and as long as she learned her place he'd take care of her. He warned her again that he'd kill her if he ever
caught her running around. Then he stopped at the first store they came to and bought her a new dress.

  So began her miserable existence as Rudy's wife, but all the while she dreamed of finding a way to get away from him. She tried taking corresponding courses to get her high school diploma, but he found out when he happened to get the mail before she did one day. He whipped her with a belt until she admitted she stole the money from his wallet to pay for the course. He warned her that he'd better not find any more of her "book shit" as he called it.

  Defeated, she went to the post office to mail a letter to the company telling them not to send anything else. There was no one there that day except the clerk, Ruth Pederson. Ruth was a nosy sort, and by the time she got through grilling Emma Jean about her black eye, the whole story just spilled out. Ruth told her not to worry, that she would keep her lessons and all mail from the school right there at the post office for Emma Jean to pick up. If she could keep her things hidden at home, Rudy wouldn't know. So far he hadn't found out, but she hadn't been concentrating on her studies much since Luke came into her life. She no longer worried about the future, just about the here and now and being with him whenever possible.

  Wearily, she turned off the garish bulb hanging from the frayed cord in the ceiling and got in bed. She supposed she should take off the lavender baby doll pajama set she had bought especially for this night and put on one of her old nightgowns. Otherwise, Rudy would want to know where she got the set. Worse, he would wonder how she paid for it now that tomato season was over. He never gave her any money of her own. It was Luke who insisted on giving her a few dollars now and then, and she had saved that money till she had enough to buy the pajamas.

  Suddenly she heard a soft creaking sound as the kitchen door opened. She bolted upright, joy spinning through her body, to realize Luke had made it after all. If he was running late, he hadn't taken time for the phone signal, but that was all right. He knew she'd be waiting.