The Ballad of Dinah Caldwell Read online

The folds of the mountain were packed together, wrinkle after wrinkle, pushed up against each other until their tops cracked into knives. Scrubby undergrowth softened the edges, but it was all dangerous.

  She slowed down. Her options weren’t much. Up a tree or hiding in the rocks somewhere.

  They couldn’t sneak up on her if she was in a tree. She jumped to grab a low-hanging branch of a black oak and braced her foot against the furrowed bark. She’d taught Warren to climb trees when he was six, and he’d been falling out of them since. The narrow trunk made it easy to reach around for handholds; she climbed twenty feet up before she heard them coming. If she could get another seven to where that spruce leaned into the branches of the oak, they wouldn’t be able to see through the bushy cover. They were headed her way, but slowing down, searching.

  She grabbed the branch over her head, found leverage with her foot, and hoisted herself up. One more and she’d be behind the leaning cover of the spruce. She tested the branch above and to her left; it would pull her up behind the green cover.

  Almost thirty feet down, three men and a woman strode around the forest floor, poking the clumps of sumac and sapling undergrowth, circling the piles of rock left from landslides. One was definitely Brian Shaw, his face lined and bitter, his bald head a sharp contrast with his heavy red beard.

  The branch she’d have to brace her leg on wasn’t quite sturdy enough. She could do it if she mostly pulled herself up with her arms and kept the weight off her legs.

  The branch groaned but held. She cursed the fact she’d never had the kind of arm strength she wanted and pulled herself up, pushing off the limb below at the last moment to get high enough. A pop-crack sounded but she was already up and behind the cover of the spruce.

  Nothing fell, thank God, so they probably wouldn’t be able to place the sound. They fanned out, the one in flannel heading off west while Brian Shaw and the woman searched the rocks she’d been heading for. The fourth, a stocky white guy in a thermal vest, circled the trees a hundred feet to her right, peering up into the tops.

  Cooler air trickled through the branches. Dinah looked up. The cloud cover had thickened, and the tops of the trees swayed, silhouetted against the sky. The breeze wasn’t making it all the way down to the forest floor, but it was getting windy out there.

  The woman shouted off in the distance, and the paunchy vested man hurried toward the yell. Whatever they’d found, it wasn’t her or Warren. Dinah leaned back against the trunk.

  She drew in a breath and held it, forcing her ragged breathing to stop. Warren needed her to keep it together.

  She and Warren would go to Kara’s. She’d climb down from this tree, go get him, and go to Kara’s house. They’d figure it out.

  Water splashed onto her hand. She looked up. The sky hung low and gray and the tops of the trees were blackened. Lightning crashed across the sky. Splatters struck her face.

  Her gaze froze on the sky in shock.

  Water. Rain.

  The voices below rose. Yelling and crashing. Clearly these people didn’t spend much time in the forest. And then all four of them climbed up the hill to her left, walking quickly and no longer glancing around. They walked right past her tree, barely fifteen feet away.

  Rain in the mountains, after this much drought, that was flash flood territory. A splatter hit a leaf on the branch next to her, a shiver of fall color.

  Shaw’s voice carried. “They’re kids. They’ll die out here if they don’t head to the neighbors. We’ll watch for them there.”

  They strode out of earshot, heading for the ravine and their cars before they got caught in a flash flood or lightning took down a tree.

  Run them off—had that been the assignment? Gates wouldn’t care that Dinah didn’t believe her mother’s broken neck was an accident. He talked long and loud about how close he and the sheriff were. And if the sheriff believed that it was an accident, no one else would investigate.

  Fifteen minutes had to be long enough to wait. If she did something reckless, she’d get them both caught right when they were almost okay.

  Finally, she climbed down the tree. The woods were darker, but she could still see just fine.

  Getting back to Warren took longer than it should have. No sign of Gates’s people as she approached his hiding spot. She checked the treetops and looked into the ravine to make sure. If she had to, she could run again, and Warren would still be safe hidden in the rock.

  Nothing. They’d actually left.

  “Warren!” she whispered. “They’re gone.” She scrambled the dozen yards to the rocky shelf. One of the bags lays to the side. She closed her eyes for a moment and exhaled. He was still here. They hadn’t found him. “Warren. I’m back.”

  The bags had tumbled a few feet away from the entrance to the tiny cave.

  She froze. Warren lay sprawled next to one of the bags, half out of the cave. Asleep. He must be asleep. She ducked down and rock bit into her hands as she crawled into the space. Dinah shook his thin shoulders under his bulky coat; she dragged him out into the dimming light and kept shaking him.

  Blue skin. No, no, no. She placed her palms on the center of his chest and pushed. Again. Again. Endlessly. She couldn’t stop.

  Tears soaked her face and dripped onto his body. His skin couldn’t be blue. His eyes couldn’t be unfocused like that. He couldn’t be lying here like this.

  Dinah couldn’t even scream.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  WATER COLLECTED IN RIVULETS AND HOVERED ON THE DIRT before soaking into the earth. The clay clung to her shovel.

  The cars had left, leaving bruised tracks on the grass.

  For hours, Dinah dug in her backyard. She dug the grave deep, wide, for all of them. Rain, the first in months, soaked the bottom of the hole and the blanket she’d wrapped around his body.

  She’d had no choice but to go home. To take care of them. When she looked at his face, his closed eyes, resurrection seemed so possible. He’d open his eyes. He’d sit up. Human life couldn’t be stopped by something like this. A person couldn’t be there one moment and the next, just gone.

  Please, God, let people be more than bodies and blood.

  She’d pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes for so long they were swollen. Her hands shook on the shovel. The handle had scraped her palms raw, so she wound kitchen towels around them and kept going.

  She couldn’t think about anything beyond this hole in the ground. Couldn’t look at the two figures wrapped in blankets behind her.

  Couldn’t think about what she had to do next.

  It was too deep, now. She jumped down into the grave and stumbled when she landed. It was deep and uneven. She kept digging.

  The whole world reduced to her shovel, her hands, and the gulf she tore in the earth.

  Dinah pulled the figure in the checked blanket in the grass closer. She had to let gravity help her slide her brother’s body into the grave with her. Her arms shook from digging, but she couldn’t put him down. Instead, she let her knees buckle, sat down in the grave, and held his body to her chest.

  She left him wearing their father’s coat—she wanted to tear it off him and she wanted him to have it if he wanted it, so she didn’t know what else to do.

  Her father had failed them, and now so had she.

  She sat with him like that for more than an hour, until her arms had stiffened so much the pain shocked her when she moved.

  So what if Gates came back. There was nothing after this.

  Dinah set Warren down. She brushed a hand through his sandy hair before covering his face with the blanket. And then she pulled her mother down into the grave, too, and laid her body next to Warren’s.

  She’d just stay here. All three of them buried in the earth like this. Her whole family together.

  When she looked up, all she could see were the dirt walls around her and the gray of the raining sky like a blanket over the grave.

  No god was in that sky.

&nb
sp; It would be fine to stay here with them. Because she was dead, too.

  Warren had been afraid to die. She’d seen it every time he had a coughing fit. He’d said the asthma attacks felt like trying to breathe through a tiny straw. Her mother had been afraid, too—afraid all the time.

  Somewhere out there, Gabriel Gates was breathing. He was dry. He was clean. His heart pumped iron and salt through his veins, and his eyes opened and closed when he wanted them to. He would sleep in his bed tonight.

  She was still alive enough to make Gabriel Gates afraid to die.

  Dinah stood up.

  Her shaking arms almost wouldn’t hoist her out of the grave. Slick and wet with mud, she caught a knee on the edge and pulled herself a few feet up the dirt wall. A root scraped her knee bloody, but she barely paused. It had to happen right now, this death of one life and rebirth into another, or it wouldn’t happen at all. Her fingernails digging into the clay, she scrambled up the last few inches, then collapsed on her stomach in the mud. She rolled over to face the sky and closed her eyes against the rain.

  He had bought everything and paid for nothing, but he would pay for her family.

  She’d stop his heart. She’d take his lungs. She’d break his neck for what he’d done.

  Dinah rose to her feet. She pushed the first shovel of dirt down into the grave. The muffled crush of dirt hitting the quilts sounded like summer, like hoeing in the garden and sifting through soil to pull out the rocks. Like planting tomatoes and melons, all four of them sweating in the early spring sun.

  She picked a smooth gray stone out of the dirt and rubbed it between her fingers before shoving it in her pocket.

  The mud cooled her palms. She held them up. Her skin was blistered and raw, bleeding, but all she felt was a distant heat.

  Her clothing dripped rain. She’d left the bags back in the woods. She hadn’t been able to carry them and Warren.

  She couldn’t live here anymore, but she could shower. If Gates came back before she left, that would just make things easier. Before she went inside, Dinah lifted the latch on the plank door to the henhouse. It swung open.

  The chickens would probably be caught by feral dogs. But being hunted was better than dying in the henhouse, trapped and waiting on someone to save them. At least this way they’d have a chance.

  Dinah climbed the steps to the house. The door still hung open. She pulled off her boots and crossed the living room in her wet socks.

  She turned on the five-minute water conservation timer to get the shower to work. Cold water poured from the showerhead and struck her skin, but she’d been wet and numb for hours, so this didn’t make a difference. Shivering, she rinsed the dirt from her hair and fingernails and focused on the mud-stained water swirling down the drain. The five minutes the shower timer allowed wouldn’t cut it, so she had to sit shivering in the tub for another ten until it unlocked and she could reset it.

  They’d stopped buying propane for the water heater when she was six, so she barely remembered hot showers. In the winter, her mother had used the large woodstove to heat pans of water to warm up baths in the tub.

  Dinah sat on her bed to pull on dry socks and then changed into clean pants and a long-sleeved shirt. She lifted her guitar case from behind the couch. She’d come back. After Gabriel Gates was dead, she’d come back home.

  A small thing, flat and white, lay in the driveway. Dinah nudged it with her boot. A yellow strip of split peel showed underneath.

  A pear. Flattened by a tire. After she’d kicked over the bucket yesterday, it must have rolled far enough away that she’d missed it.

  The rain had slowed to a hesitant drizzle. She carried the flat, gray river rock with their handprints from beside the steps over to the grave. It wasn’t much of a headstone, but it was something.

  She walked across her yard and paused in the road. Kara’s house lay just across the ravine. The yellow glow of the windows shone in the dusk. Maisy whinnied loudly, the sound carrying from the hilltop. Kara must be going out to feed her for the night.

  Go to Kara’s, her mother had said. She could curl up on Mrs. Hernández’s couch and stare at the warm sunset walls until she fell asleep. Kara would clean and bandage Dinah’s hands. They’d figure out what to do.

  But then what. He’d sent men to chase them through the woods. Why had he bothered? He’d tell his story to Sheriff Anders and that would be it. So why try to kill them? Because she’d thrown a knife at him, bitten him? Because Warren had shot at him? Because they’d made him angry?

  Left turn to Kara’s, or right turn to town.

  Shaw had said they’d be watching the neighbors. If she went to any of her neighbors’ houses, they would defend her if Gates came looking. And that would mean more bodies.

  She would have to look Kara in the eyes and say my life is gone. And she’d have to say why.

  When her family had needed her most, she’d failed them. She hadn’t filled the gap her father had left, like her mom had said, or righted his wrongs, or done anything but abandoned them, too.

  The guitar fell out of her hands as she bent over and puked.

  Dinah wiped her mouth. Picked up her guitar.

  Right turn. One foot in front of the other, into the woods beside the road to town.

  Dinah reached the bags as the light filtering through the trees began to dim. She pulled out Warren’s boots and his sweaters, repacked everything into one backpack. The bag, her guitar case, and the water.

  The load was almost too heavy to carry, but struggling with it gave her something to focus on. Without the weight to lift, she might sit down and never get back up.

  She left Warren’s boots resting on top of his folded sweaters in the split in the rocks.

  A mile with the backpack was exhausting, but she finally hit the rise of rocks that had framed her backyard for her entire childhood. A depression in the rock wall meant she had cover at her back and over her head. A fire in front of her would keep the animals away.

  Town was fifteen miles to the east. Less than fifteen, now.

  She scraped the ground bare in a wide circle. Found some dry leaves and sticks under the rock ledge. Building a fire was easy. While the sticks crackled, she cleaned the gun. It had sat in the dirt by the grave, in the rain, while she dug. She slid out the bolt and the magazine, cleaned the action and the barrel before oiling and reassembling it. After loading it and checking the safety, she set the gun under the rock ledge where it wouldn’t get wet if it rained again.

  Not until she shook out the tarp on the ground and rolled up in the blanket did Dinah pull out the stone she’d taken from the grave.

  Somewhere today, a hole had torn open in the universe and she’d stepped through it into a void where things like this could happen.

  A dog howled, the baying sound of a hound mix. She touched her knife, making sure it was still right by her hand.

  The fire burned brightly. Orange and gold flames, crackling and popping, trails of smoke. Dinah pulled the blanket tighter and closed her eyes, and the heat warmed her eyelids and cheekbones. Eyes still closed, she watched the light of the fire play against the forest in front of her, and when she fell asleep, she saw gray eyes and blue lips, and tasted blood in her mouth.

  DINAH SAT BOLT UPRIGHT, HER SKIN PRICKLING. NOTHING MOVED, no strange noises nearby.

  The sun was high in the sky, and the fire was down to coals again. She’d have to tease it back to life. She shifted the ash and tossed on a few handfuls of pine needles. They smoked but still burned. Because her legs were falling asleep, she stood up and found the hatchet. Part of her knew getting wood was important, but the rest of her was angry that wood could matter right now or ever again.

  Beyond the giant fallen limb lay two broken branches, crossed over each other in a dead, drying X. A few well-placed strikes, and she’d have her firewood. She climbed over the fallen tree and kicked the logs to make sure snakes weren’t hiding under it. A centipede and a dozen ants scurried away, but nothing
larger.

  The wood gave way under a few strokes. The logs weren’t big enough to last very long, but she didn’t care.

  An armload should be enough. It would have to be.

  Dinah trudged back to her spot. As she stepped over the limb, she froze. Something moved through the trees. From here she couldn’t see what. She waited a moment but didn’t see anything else, so she kept walking.

  A few yards from her bag, she stopped. A feral hound was dragging her backpack away. He dropped it by the fire, which was now dead again, and dug at the top of the heavy bag.

  Shit. Dinah crouched and quietly set down her armload of wood. She pulled the knife from her belt and stood back up.

  He was huge. Powerful tawny shoulders, a long whip tail, saggy-jowled muzzle.

  That backpack had everything she owned in it.

  She stepped closer. His ears pricked up and his dark eyes focused on her. His black lips lifted in a snarl around the fabric of her bag. He’d found food, and he wasn’t going to give it up.

  “Go away!” She grabbed a log from the pile she’d set down and threw it at him. It fell with a thud by the backpack. He jumped but didn’t leave. The second one she threw struck him in the ribs. He barked and dropped the bag. Instead of running away, he lowered his head and growled.

  She gripped her knife. She could throw it and hit him from here, but it might not kill, and then she’d have nothing. Her other knives were still by the fire.

  If she stepped back, he’d chase her. Nowhere to go but forward. Make noise. She waved her arms and yelled. He crouched just a little, and Dinah knew he was going to run for her before he did it.

  She had her knife up when he hit her. His weight knocked her down, but she stabbed him in the shoulder. He yelped and his giant slobbery jaws snapped. Dinah kicked his stomach and rolled over, struggling to get up, but he was on top of her in a fury of paws and teeth.

  Maybe she should let him. At least then she’d be done.

  His teeth pierced her left bicep and dug in. She screamed and pain scorched her whole arm. He wasn’t letting go. His neck was exposed. She gripped her knife and swung.