Wonderland Creek

  I read the next chapter, and I had never felt happier being a librarian than I did in that moment. We were all engrossed in the story when we heard a sound outside. It took me a moment to recognize it as a car engine. Bobby jumped up and peered out the front window. “Holy cow, it’s the sheriff!” Before I could move, all four boys scrambled to their feet and scurried out of the library like rabbits disappearing into the underbrush. Mamaw followed them.

  I looked over at Lillie who was now wide awake. “Don’t you say a word, honey.” We heard boots tromping up the steps, the door squealing open, footsteps in the hallway. A mountain-sized man in a tan uniform halted in the doorway to the non-fiction section, looking all around. He removed his hat to reveal graying black hair and a receding hairline. Lillie acted as wary as a cat with a big dog sniffing around. I could see their mutual distrust and wondered what was behind it. I was quite sure he hadn’t come in to check out a book.

  “Afternoon, Miss Lillie.” He nodded slightly.

  “Afternoon, Sheriff. This here’s Alice from up in Illinois. She come to help out in the library.”

  “So I heard.”

  How in the world had he heard?

  “Also heard you had a little hunting accident down here. Came to see how Mack was doing.”

  I longed to jump up and plead with the sheriff to drive Mack to a hospital where he could get proper medical attention instead of enduring sticky homemade poultices and tansy tea with moonshine, but something about the man made me as uneasy as Lillie.

  “Tell you the truth, I’m thinking he may not pull through,” Lillie said softly.

  That was news to me—and probably to Mack who had been awake a moment ago and now was faking unconsciousness.

  “I’ll know more in a couple of days,” she said.

  “I need to talk to him when he wakes up,” the sheriff said. Lillie didn’t reply. “Anything I can do for him?”

  “You saying your prayers, Sheriff? Prayer never hurts and always helps.”

  He smiled without giving a reply, a smile that went no deeper than the skin on his face. “You ladies need anything?”

  This might be my only chance to get to a telephone or a train station and back to civilization, but I hesitated. I had an instinctive dislike for this man, something deep in my gut that I couldn’t explain. And I knew from reading mystery stories that the heroine always ended up in worse trouble when she didn’t follow her gut instincts. Even so, I might have asked the sheriff for help and fled Acorn for good if it hadn’t been for Mamaw and those boys. But during the past hour when I had been carried away to Treasure Island, something had changed inside me. In spite of the hard work and the uncooperative farm animals, in spite of my misgivings as a sorcerer’s apprentice—or maybe her accomplice—in spite of everything about this crazy, bat-infested library, I decided in that moment to keep quiet. I would stay here and work. And help.

  “Can’t think of anything we need, Sheriff,” Lillie said with a shrug. She shook her head—and so did I.

  “Well, I’ll be on my way then. Afternoon, ladies.” He tipped his hat to us as he placed it back on his head. His heavy boots made the floorboards groan as he left the house.

  Lillie gripped my arm the moment the door closed, clutching it hard enough to hurt. “That man’s a snake,” she whispered to me. “A snake!”

  Her words rattled me. Maybe my gut instinct had been right. But the sheriff was the good guy in most stories, rescuing people from the bad guys. Why was everything in this town turned upside down?

  Three days later, when Lillie was sure that Mack would live, she started planning his funeral. She announced this news at breakfast, and I couldn’t believe my ears. “You mean you’re going to lie to everyone and say that he died?”

  “It’s for the best, honey.” The three of us were eating together in the non-fiction section. It was the first time that Mack had been able to sit up and feed himself since the morning he’d been shot. He wore his arm in a sling made from an old tablecloth, and he had to lean against the bookshelf to stay upright, but evidently his condition had improved so much that Lillie had decided he was ready to die and be buried.

  I put down my plate and stared at Mack, waiting for an explanation. He was eating tiny bites of his pancake as if it really was going to be his last meal. “You make these pancakes all by yourself, Miss Ripley?” he asked.

  “Yes. I decided to cook something different for a change. Why?”

  “They’re . . . interesting. I don’t believe I’ve ever had pancakes that were deep-fried before.”

  I may have used a little too much oil. But that didn’t change the fact that these people owed me an explanation. I knew quite a lot about funerals after dating Gordon Walters for nearly a year, and I didn’t see how in the world you could fake someone’s death.

  “Funerals are long, drawn-out affairs,” I told him, “with a wake and a memorial service and a burial. How are you going to lay here and play dead for two or three days?”

  Lillie waved her twig-like hand as if shooing away my concerns like flies. “We don’t have fancy funeral parlors around here, so the corpse starts stinking to high heaven pretty fast, especially in warm weather. We try and get folks in the ground as quick as we can, before that happens.”

  “But you can’t bury him! He isn’t dead!” Although I had to admit that he could easily play the part of a corpse. Compared to the bear of a man who had answered the door five days ago, he looked pale and sickly. And no wonder, after bleeding the way he had and then lying around on his mattress enduring Lillie’s remedies and Cora’s homemade moonshine.

  “Well, we can thank the Good Lord that he ain’t dead,” Lillie said. “Jesus answered all our prayers. Now, first thing we gotta do is get Lloyd Hayes to build us a casket. I’ll talk to Faye about it when she comes in this morning.”

  I had lived with Lillie long enough to know it was useless to try to reason with her. I turned to plead with Mack. “Is this what you really want her to do?”

  He nodded somberly. “Otherwise, the shooter might come back and finish me off.”

  “But it’s deceitful! We would have to tell a hundred lies and—”

  Lillie laid her hand on my arm to soothe me. “No one’s asking you to lie, honey. Just keep your sweet little mouth shut.”

  I stared at her, then at Mack. He looked up at me with eyes as dark and soulful as a cocker spaniel’s. “Please, Miss Ripley?”

  I exhaled in frustration. “What will you do if I say no?”

  Lillie tightened her grip on my arm. “Don’t say no, honey.” It sounded like a threat. She looked at me for a long moment, smiling her gap-toothed smile, then finally let go. “Second thing we gotta do is mix up a potion to put Mack into a deep sleep. I know just how to do it, too. He’ll be so far gone, folks can poke pins in his toes and he’ll never feel it.”

  I shivered at the thought. “Haven’t you people ever read Romeo and Juliet? Don’t you know what can happen when people try to pretend they’re dead?”

  Mack gave me an irritating grin. “I read it. But I’m not Romeo and there’s no Juliet to die along with me—unless you’re volunteering for the part.”

  I crossed my arms and huffed. “I don’t want any part of this. How far is it to the nearest railroad station?” I made up my mind to pack my suitcase and walk to the next town if I had to, then take the first passenger train back to Chicago.

  “How far?” Mack repeated. “Well, I guess that depends on which horse you’re planning to ride. Belle doesn’t like to go very fast so it would take her a couple of hours—”

  “You people infuriate me! I asked how many miles it was, not how many hours it takes. Doesn’t anyone around here know about miles?”

  “Sure, but it depends on which creek bed you plan to follow and whether or not it’s flood season. It floods a lot this time of year, and sometimes the bridges wash away and—”

  I didn’t wait to hear the rest. I gathered up our dishes and carried the
m out to the kitchen. I would have slammed the kitchen door behind me for dramatic effect, but my hands were full. I could hear their mumbled voices in the other room as they conspired together, planning Mack’s demise. I stayed out of it.

  Later, I was seated behind the library desk, attacking the piles of returned books, when Faye arrived for work. She peeked into the dining room to check on Mack, who was doing a stellar performance of a man hovering at death’s door. Lillie shooed her away.

  “He took a turn for the worse last night,” Lillie said in a stage whisper. “Now he’s running a real high fever.” She hobbled into the foyer and made a big show of closing the dining room door as she pulled Faye aside to ask, “Can you get Lloyd to build us a casket, honey? Tell him he can take wood from my shed, if he needs to.”

  Faye’s hands flew to her mouth. “A casket? Oh, Miss Lillie! Don’t tell me—”

  “I’m afraid so, honey. I done all I can for Mack, but I don’t think he’s gonna make it.”

  “No! He can’t die!”

  “Only a matter of days now,” Lillie said, shaking her head. “Maybe hours. I see the life draining outta him bit by bit, and ain’t nothing I can do to stop it.”

  Faye covered her face and wept. I pictured Mack in the next room faking unconsciousness, and I wanted to kick his carcass off the mattress and onto the floor. Lillie mustered a few tears of her own. “Truth is, honey, I may not be too far behind him.”

  “Lillie, no! I can’t bear to lose either one of you!” Faye threw her arms around Lillie, nearly knocking her over, sobbing as she rocked Lillie in her arms. I couldn’t bear to watch this scene play out three more times when the other librarians arrived, so I grabbed my sweater and left the house to go for a walk.

  I had been slowly exploring the town whenever I needed to get away, first walking up the road to the post office to mail a long letter to my friend Freddy. I had described all of the events that had happened to me so far, and I could imagine Freddy’s reaction as she read about them. My story was so unbelievable that she would wonder if I was writing a novel of my own. Or maybe she’d think I really had lost my mind and had gone to the spa with my aunt to take a water cure. Hadn’t Gordon accused me of living in a dream world? I would have to write to Freddy again and assure her that this town and my trials were all very real.

  The tiny post office also seemed to serve as the gathering place for Acorn’s elderly men. I heard the mumble of voices as I walked up the steps, but the conversation halted abruptly as I opened the door. Half a dozen pairs of eyes glared at me from wrinkled faces as if I had interrupted a conspiracy instead of a poker game. Four of the men seated around a rickety card table clutched their fan of playing cards to their chests, as if worried that I would see how many aces they had.

  “Excuse me, but I would like to buy a stamp please. I need to mail a letter.” Silence. “You do sell stamps here . . . ?”

  One of the men at the card table—the oldest one from the look of him—laid his playing cards facedown and slowly pulled himself to his feet. He grabbed his cane, hobbled over to a chest of drawers that served as the countertop, and pulled out a tattered envelope. His hands trembled as he removed a single stamp and handed it to me. I paid him, licked the stamp, and stuck it on the envelope, then looked around in vain for anything resembling a mail slot.

  “Um . . . where’s your mailbox?” He took the letter from my hand and dropped it into the same drawer where the stamps had been. He nodded slightly as he closed the drawer.

  “Oh . . . well . . . thank you. Good day to you.” I had no confidence at all that my letter would ever reach its destination.

  The houses in Acorn were pitiful and bedraggled, the library a mansion in comparison—and it was run-down and in need of a good coat of paint. I wondered which houses belonged to Faye and the other packhorse ladies. Laundry sagged on clotheslines, goats and chickens scratched around barren yards, skinny hound dogs howled at me as I walked past. There seemed to be a lot of trash and pieces of rusty metal piled everywhere. I saw a gaunt old man tending a weedy garden patch, attacking clods of earth with a hoe as he prepared for spring planting. I waved, but he returned my greeting with a stare. These people were poor. Dirt poor. There were no other words for it. The town had a defeated look as if it had been beaten and left for dead on the side of the road.

  The second time I ventured out I followed the creek behind the library upstream as it wound past boulders and fences and disappeared into the woods. I meant to ask Lillie if the stream had a name, but I kept forgetting. The bank was soggy with spring rain and the mud tugged at my shoes, trying to suck them off my feet. When I grew winded from the steep climb and spooked by all of the vague rustlings in the forest, I turned around and followed the creek back home.

  This morning I decided to walk in the opposite direction from the post office, following the road that my uncle had taken as he’d sped away. I reached the place where he had turned around that first day, but I continued walking, passing a cemetery on my left, perched on the side of a very steep hill. It was the first cemetery I’d ever seen that wasn’t on a flat patch of land. Tombstones climbed all the way up the slope like spectators on bleachers, jockeying for the best view. The corpses must be standing upright in their caskets. I looked away, remembering Mack and Lillie and their dastardly funeral plans.

  Eventually I came to a side road and a sign that said Jupiter Coal Company—Acorn Mine. I decided to walk down the road toward the mine, and I soon reached a clearing on a narrow strip of level ground. The mining camp looked deserted. One end of the camp had been the business end, with railroad tracks, a tall clapboard structure on stilts, and a lot of mysterious scaffolding. A small sign on the side of a squat one-story building said Mine Office. A tangle of wires connected it to the outside world—my world—but whether the wires were for telephones or electricity, I didn’t know. I didn’t see anything that looked like a mine entrance and wondered if it was underground somewhere or dug into the side of the mountain.

  I turned and walked the opposite way toward a row of shacks where the miners must have lived. Each tiny building had two doors and presumably housed two families, even though the huts were scarcely bigger than the shed where Lillie kept her horse. Several of the windows had been smashed, and shards of glass glittered in the sunlight beneath the empty window frames. The drab, barren houses reminded me of photographs I had seen of slaves’ quarters before the emancipation. I halted when I reached a barrier across the road with a No Trespassing sign tacked onto it.

  Sadness hung over this camp like fog. A closed mine meant men without jobs, families going hungry. But it struck me that this may have been a place of misery even when the mine had been operating. I imagined men in miners’ caps plunging into a dangerous, claustrophobic shaft six days a week and emerging, black-faced, twelve hours later. I imagined anxious families scratching out a living in these colorless shacks, worrying about explosions or cave-ins. Sons would have little choice but to follow their fathers into the mines, never getting any further ahead, generation after generation. I finally turned around and walked back to the library, carrying the sadness with me like a hobo with his belongings slung over his shoulder.

  The library was quiet again. The packhorse ladies had all ridden off and the crying over Mack’s approaching death had finally ended. I peeked into the dining room and saw him sitting up again, reading a book. Lillie had curled up in her chair and fallen asleep, exhausted by her performance, no doubt. Mack beckoned to me when he saw me. “Can I talk to you?”

  I shrugged, then folded my arms across my chest as I leaned against the doorframe.

  “Listen, it should be pretty clear that someone wants me dead. If you don’t help us . . . Well, do you really want my blood on your hands?”

  “My hands? It’s not my fault that somebody’s trying to kill you. For all I know, you deserve it.”

  “Maybe I do . . . But Lillie can’t handle this alone. She needs your help.”

  “
How can you play such a mean trick on those women? You must have heard how grief-stricken Faye was. What a cruel lie to tell!”

  Lillie shifted in her chair and stretched as my raised voice awakened her. “Those gals might be sad now,” she said with a yawn, “but just think how happy they’ll all be when we resurrect Mack from the dead. It’ll be just like Easter morning around here.”

  “This is unbelievable!” I recalled Gordon’s angry words to me on the day of Elmer Watson’s memorial service—how funerals were a once-in-a-lifetime event and that poor Mr. Watson would never be buried again. Gordon's family should open a funeral parlor in Acorn, Kentucky. They could make twice as much money.

  “Won’t you at least think about helping us?” Mack pleaded.

  I walked away without giving a reply. If I had read about this plot in a novel, I would have slammed the book shut and declared it highly improbable. It strained credibility to think that two intelligent, God-fearing people would try to fake a man’s death and deceive an entire community. But then everything that had happened here during the past week had seemed preposterous. I might be powerless to stop these events, but I didn’t have to participate in them. I vowed to simply stand by and watch them unfold in angry silence.

  The only bright spot in my day was when Faye’s boys came in with Mamaw for the next installment of their story. By then my temper had cooled and I could greet the little ones with a smile. “Are you here for the next chapter?” I asked. They returned my good cheer with somber faces.

  “Mack’s gonna die, ain’t he?” little Clyde asked.

  “Well . . . that’s what Miss Lillie is saying.” I spoke through clenched teeth.

  “Our pa’s building him a casket.”

  “Hmm. I see.”

  “When Mack’s dead and buried, will you finish the story for us?”

  “Yeah, will you?”

  “We’ve been real good,” Little Lloyd said. His brother elbowed him and he amended it to, “Well, we ain’t been too bad.”