“Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine…”
I want my mother
“Oh what a foretaste of glory divine…”
my mother is in a box and soon she’ll be in the ground, I want my mother
“Heir of salvation, purchase of God…”
father looks cold and dead, like mother. I want my mother, I want to smell my mother
“Born of his spirit, washed in his blood”
my mother was washed in blood at the end, spots of blood on her pillowcase, blood on her sheets, blood in the handkerchief that she gripped so tightly and tried to conceal on the morning I last saw her alive, she even had blood on her teeth when I hugged her last, when she was no longer my mother but a skeletal beast imposter, like that winter litter of barn cats, born with their innards on the outside that father gathered up in a sack and drowned in a bucket
“This is my story…”
I hate this
“This is my song…”
please stop singing
“Praising my Saviour…”
I want my mother
“all the day long”
I want everyone in this church to be dead and my mother to be alive
“This is my story, this is my song…”
dead
“Praising my Saviour all the day long.”
I want my mother.

The congregation didn’t stop singing. They went on and on with open, gaping mouths and stoic, tearless, blank faces. Caring about and concentrating more on their own voices, striving to be the loudest and most devout in the small, suffocating, nauseous confines of the tidy Methodist church. Occasionally and only for appearances, one of the bland cow faces of one of the old women in the pews, would nod a forlorn, plaintive, pitying glance in Elsie’s direction and only once satisfied that their contrived, compassionate gaze had been witnessed by no less than three of their fellow parishioners, would they then resume their warbling yammer. Fortified with satisfied sanctimony, they would sing even louder. Elsie recognized many of the faces and at one time had even liked some of the people who had gathered here today, but now they were strangers and her hatred for them was increasing by the minute. They could not know; how could they know? And if they couldn’t know, then what were they doing here? Only Elsie knew what it was like to be without her mother. Whether their own mothers were long dead or not didn’t matter. Their dead mothers didn’t matter. The only dead mother that mattered was Elsie’s own. They could never feel the loss that Elsie was feeling, and their orchestrated, soothing mewing only made Elsie feel worse.

Occasionally her father’s grip would tighten on Elsie’s limp, upright and outstretched palm. This usually proceeded a heaving sob that had become so routine in its repetition that by the end of the service Elsie was counting the seconds between the squeeze of his hand and the ensuing convulsion. She found it to be a welcome distraction from the proceedings. Elsie knew that her father loved her mother because anyone who had ever met her mother loved her. Why should he be any different? Of course, he wasn’t deserving of her kind demeanor, pleasant bearing and forgiving soul, but few were. It was a standard near impossible to live up to. Not because her mother was so determinedly upright and righteous but because she was so naturally and disarmingly good in spirit. There was no one like her and because of that Elsie thought, as she sat on the cold hard walnut, maybe God had killed her out of jealousy. It was the first truly dark thought of a deluge of dark thoughts to follow. A bitterness was already taking root deep inside Elsie. A bitterness that would soon grow into a tangled, thorny vine of seething rage, resentment and hatred. A bitterness so fiercely fed and carelessly pruned that it would in years to come spread interweaved tendrils that could allow no sunlight to reach her heart and would choke out every emotion, even her grief.

The sky outside was cobalt and cloudless, and in it, a December air of conclusion. Elsie could see it clearly through the small framed windows that lined the whitewashed walls of the church, each window looking like one in a series of cheery paintings. It was so emphatically clear and blue that Elsie felt certain it was mocking her pain. It brought her no comfort and offered no portent of brighter days ahead, it only suggested to her that the natural world couldn’t care a fig for her loss. Finally, mercifully, the singing stopped, and the room began to shuffle and murmur. Everyone was standing now; coattails and bonnets and noses blowing in kerchiefs blotted the clear blue indifference, long enough for Elsie to acknowledge her father’s gentle tugging and come to her feet. It was time to carry her mother outside. “I want my mother,” said Elsie, out loud this time. With that, her father heaved and made a sound like the coffee pot boiling over and struggled to suppress an outright wail, with what was instead, an injured animal moan.

The churchyard was winter barren. Dead limbs littered the graves and here and there stones leaned precariously, clinging at desperate angles. The few that could no longer resist gravity lied recumbent on the cold, hard ground, mirroring the bones beneath, of those whose name they bore. Amongst the chiseled stones and crosses were a number of hand-hewn markers that betrayed the financial standing of the souls below. The poorest of the county were generally laid to rest in family plots on long held parcels with no more than a simple wooden cross or an upheaved rough stone to mark their memory. This would have most certainly been the case for Carra Sutton Meyer, if not for the benevolence of the congregation. Although Carra and Elise had attended services infrequently and Frank Meyer almost never, the townsfolks felt so strongly unified in their appreciation of this good and enduring woman that they pressed Frank to allow her a Christian burial. Elsie was glad she wasn’t being buried at home on their small farm. She didn’t want a daily reminder of her dead mother rotting in the earth, she wanted her mother alive and rocking her and gently singing as she had always done. Watching now as a line of mourners filed by, tossing earth into the hard-won hole in the ground, she was stricken with the realization that she would never again know that embrace.

Oh God no, and now once more the singing. I want my mother.

A decision had to be made about school. With no mother to watch over her and her father occupied as the sole laborer on their small farm, what few friends Frank Meyer had among the townspeople urged him to allow Elsie to attend the grammar school in town. They even offered to take up collection for a mule that Elsie might employ to help her cover the distance to and from, knowing that their lone plow horse could not be spared from the farm. Elsie’s mother, an inherently smart, if modestly educated young woman, had resisted formal education for her only child. The school in town was several miles away and it was not unusual for those families farthest up in the hills to educate their children from home or just as often, to not offer any formal education outside of simple cyphering and Bible readings. Many of the mountain children received their primary education out in the fields or in the woods. They learned to plow and to pick. To milk and to trap. To forage and to hunt. These were the lessons that would serve them best in their hardscrabble lives to come. But Carra Meyer had done her best to offer more. She envisioned a life away from these hills for her daughter, maybe even in a big city like St. Louis or Little Rock. So time was set aside every morning wherein she would read to Elsie from Longfellow or Tennyson or The Holy Book. They would work together on spelling and simple arithmetic assignments, gathered from donated primers, and Elsie, though she knew it not, was not lagging in any discernible fashion behind the children closer to town who attended school on a regular basis. In fact her mother’s attentiveness and broad ranging interests provided a curriculum quite superior in many ways to the education by rote and rod that was occurring in the valley below.

Carra held close the real reason she didn’t want Elsie attending the school in town. Her husband knew the reason and while less guarded, the subject remained seldom mentioned, though many of the town folk suspected her construction from the beginning. Elsie, a perfectly sweet and otherwise healthy little girl had been born with the unfortunate affliction of a clubfoot. Her left leg swung and dragged most perceptibly but in spite of the malformation she compensated quite admirably and it rarely kept her from accomplishing anything she set her mind to. She learned to hurry but she could not run, though her walking gait was no less rapid than most. Elsie’s parents agreed that it was for the best to treat her no differently than they would any other child. Coddling her was a luxury they could not afford anyway, there was simply too much work to do and so Elsie carried a similar burden of chores as to those of most of her peers.

It wasn’t the difficulty of the journey in and of itself that constituted Carra’s reluctance to send Elsie off to school but also an accompanying measure of guilt. Carra, an otherwise steady and sensible woman, found herself all too often wracked with guilt. Guilt that her darling daughter was imperfect through no fault of her own. Guilt that the difficulty of Elsie’s birth and her own resulting frailty would apparently not allow her to birth any brothers or sisters for Elsie to play with or to share in the chores. Guilt that her husband’s glaring ineptitude as a provider along with his increasing inclination for corn liquor made Carra dream often of clutching up Elsie and escaping this mountain forever. Her guilt increased tenfold on those occasions when she instead imagined escaping the mountain alone.

The feeling was only compounded when Frank Meyer in his drunken worst moments, which seemed to Carra to be occurring with dreadful, mounting frequency, would utter the most hateful, self-pitying tirades, often in earshot of Elsie. “There weren’t never no gimps on my side of the family!” or “Why couldn’t you have provided me healthy boys instead of a peg-leg girl?” Carra was always astounded that the man who had stolen her heart was capable of such ugly behavior and she was astounded further when she caught herself giving weight to his words.

Worse than the guilt was the shame. Oh Lord, how she despised herself for the shame. That insidious shame that would well up without warning when she might find herself in town or outside of church, to be suddenly confronted by a swarm of running, laughing children at play; climbing a tree or skipping a rope. All the while Elsie holding tight, tucked into her skirts and observing. She would catch herself wishing that Elsie was one of them, wishing that Elsie were whole. And then the shame would come crashing down on her. First the shame for her broken and sheltered child, here on display in the presence of the other mothers and their perfectly healthy offspring and secondly the scouring shame she felt for ever having conceived such a thought in the first place.

Frank Meyer had always thought the hours spent on studies was both a waste of Elsie’s and more importantly, Carra’s time. He needed all the help he could get putting crops in the field, slopping hogs, milking the cow, collecting the eggs and an ongoing endless number of other chores required to maintain even this modest farmstead. Carra however was no shirker and more than made up for any time lost on Elsie’s lessons. As her husband was spending more time than ever tending his still back in the woods, she increasingly carried the bulk of the load and rested rarely. An ingrained habit that would play against her when the sickness later came. Up until the time of her illness, their mostly happy home, though fraying, had been manageably maintained. But now she was finding herself increasingly weaker, short of breath and prone to spasmatic fits of coughing. Once finally diagnosed by Doctor Bancroft, Carra was almost immediately resigned to her fate. There had been some offhand mention of vaccine and the doctor alluded to a new sanitorium under construction down south in Booneville but these discussions were mostly ceremonial in nature. They both knew there was neither money nor inclination for serious treatment. If her body had enough strength left in it to fight, she might survive it. If not, she would join the infinite roll of the multitudes the disease had claimed before her.

Having gotten sick only made her feel all the more guilty. The thought of leaving poor Elsie alone on that mountain with her progressively unreliable father was more than she could bear. A meanness was growing in Frank Meyer, borne of the terror of abandonment. Carra had a sister up North and she briefly entertained the thought of sending Elsie away but she knew in her heart that her family was no better off than her own and Elsie would be viewed as a burden, just one more mouth to feed. And then out of the blue, Frank would string together a few good days and she would set the thought aside. She prayed constantly that her husband would rise to the occasion once she was gone but Frank Meyer was not the rise to the occasion type. If everything were going well, he was capable of grace and good humor but even in the best of times he was selfishly disposed to indulgent actions. In the worst of times he leaped in headfirst.

Carra persevered for over two years beyond the day her diagnosis first came, but by the autumn of 1911 her condition had grown steadily worse. By the end of November it had now been more than a week since she had last left her bed and everyone knew her end was near. She spent most of that time in a fever dream of interweaving coughing fits and hallucinatory fears. When she was at rest she would lay quietly in languid melancholy, staring out the single westward facing window, seeing little beyond what pale light and shadow the winter frost would allow. Elsie was often at her side, sitting silent, stoic and scared in the old cane rocker, staring at her mother’s pretty things arranged neatly on the little dressing table near the foot of the bed. She would pat her mother’s forehead and attend to her waning bodily needs. In moments of lucidity Elsie would read passages from The Crucifixion by An Eye-Witness, that resided on Carra’s nightstand, stopping often to exchange tearful, final good-byes, never quite sure which of these would be the last. Doctor Bancroft made one last bland appearance, offering nothing beyond the most obvious advice for providing Carra comfort in her last days. Frank was decidedly gentle and tenuously composed up until the end, allowing Carra some measure of hope and comfort here at her time of dying. Though it was not even a full hour following her last breath, that he retreated to the bottle in utter despair. Through the tears of her own grief, Elsie saw clearly her miserable path ahead.

The subject of schooling had come up often in the weeks since it became clear that there would be no recovery for Carra. While still lucid and spirited, she had implored her husband to find a way for Elsie to attend class in town. That brief apparition of Frank’s better self, had assured her that he would do so and he possessed just enough virtue left of him to follow through with his beloved’s final wish. In the days following Carra’s burial, arrangements were made and the mule was secured by the congregation. He came to Elsie already named and though the moniker was at odds with her pain, she kept it anyhow and grew very fond of Applesauce the mule, in very short order. She reserved for he alone her remaining affections. Affections she could no longer muster for any living two-legged soul.

Frank Meyer found it in himself to hitch the wagon and follow Elsie down the long mountain road all the way into the valley and in sight of the school for her first few journeys. This afforded courtesy, while never intended to be a daily ritual, was promptly disbanded after a week or so when Elise firmly assured her father that she both knew the way into town and felt fully confident in Applesauce’s ability to transport her there. The truth of the matter was that at the end of every school day, her father showed up each day more drunk and demonstrative than the last, to lead her home. The discomfiting embarrassment that his righteous display imposed on Elsie as she struggled to navigate new relationships with teacher and students, rendered her reproach of her father quite tactless. This led to a rambling tirade on the subject of her ungratefulness that she had to endure half-way to home before Frank finally slumped forward to let horse lead wagon, unmolested. Suddenly Elsie felt ninety instead of nine, but she comforted herself in the knowledge that this would be the final time she would have to suffer his damnable escort.

It didn’t take Elsie very long to acclimate to the classroom curriculum. She managed to catch up quickly in most subjects and occasionally found herself far ahead of her classmates in others. Acclimating to her classmates was a different story altogether. She found the bulk of the boys to be loud, not very bright and disruptive. She simply assumed this was the manner of all boys and men, never really having much interaction with any other than her father. Aside from their general rowdiness, she discovered them to be for the most part genial or simply indifferent to her presence. This suited her just fine, for she identified more closely with their manner and motivations anyway. As for the girls, she didn’t understand them at all. A few were sullen and shy, like Elsie, but the others, the most boisterous of them, were to her dismay, preening, nasty, ninnies. The nastiness started almost straight out of the gate with sniggering comments, openly aired on every sensitive subject from her drunken father, to her dead mother to her misshapen foot. Everything about them was crossways or underhanded and ugly;

“Did your mother really die of consumption? My daddy says it is the scourge of the poorer classes.”

“We would invite you to skip rope with us but I don’t believe you are able, still you are most welcome to watch.”

“Do you have to have your shoes made special? I suppose you could never wear a pretty slipper of the style Mother and Father gave me this Christmas.”

“I heard that Mr. Schulz the blacksmith makes her boots for her, when he’s not shoeing horses!”

“My father says your father is the most pifflicated man in the county, whatever that means.”

“My mother is teaching me to sew and we are making the most beautiful dress for my birthday! Do you sew Elsie?”

And so on and so on.

Whenever Miss Platt, the school teacher would overhear these exchanges she would scold the guilty party in an excoriating tone that would ultimately draw more unwanted attention to Elsie and make matters worse. Privately Miss Platt would commend Elsie for her aptitude and even try to mentor her in an unsophisticated attempt to ease her transition but just when Elsie would allow her heart to open to the suggestion of a friend, Miss Platt would behave the mother hen to the cliquish worst of the girls. A mother hen with no room left under her wing for a broken runt. The duplicity of every female she encountered that wasn’t her mother, only served to raise both her guard and her ire to towering new heights.

By the time Spring came around, Elsie had learned how to better disappear into the background. Most of her classmates accepted her in the same way they would have accepted the sudden appearance of an extra desk in the room. As the novelty of Elsie wore off they would torture her less frequently, but she remained a favorite target of the most devilish of them when boredom set in. She was by no means their only target, for they would malign, assault or aggravate any of the weakest among them, even the boys. It was however Elsie’s stone-faced resilience that made her something of a special challenge for Ruth Presseisen, the leader of a particular nest of rattlesnakes. It seemed as if Ruth spent all her waking hours dreaming up new ways to be mean and spiteful and once the knife was in, Ruth would always try to twist it in a new direction to see what fresh pain she could inflict. She was creative in that way with everyone, even her cohorts.

With warmer weather came new and demoralizing outdoors recess games. It seemed to Elsie that every physical activity in the schoolyard had one common theme. Running. She was strong enough for the leapfrog games but on one occasion her heavy boot came down hard on Madeline Schaffe’s foot and for all the ensuing hysterics you would have thought Elsie had dropped an anvil on her. She never played leapfrog again. She could certainly stand and swing a rope without issue if only she were ever asked. Occasionally she would find a quiet spot off to the side and play jacks or make-believe games with her sorority of fellow lessers but invariably one of the snottier girls would find a reason to chase a ball through their circle, upsetting their game. One fine April afternoon during recess, Elsie walked near Ruth and her friends, skipping rope as they were accustomed to do. They abruptly stopped their chanting and began again with a seemingly well-rehearsed new rhyme,

“Elsie Meyer while crossing the sea,
Hit an iceberg at quarter-past three,
Everyone drowned but she was carefree,
She floated on her foot down the Mississippi,
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I…”

With each letter called out the rope whipped faster but the rope couldn’t keep pace with Elsie’s heartbeat. She was fuming and it took biting clean through her lip to stem the tears. She simply would not give them the satisfaction.

Rarely did the boys and girls share the same playground space or the same games. The boys would cycle their play from week to week it seemed, alternating peculiar contests with names like Crackabout or Charley Over The Water or Fire On The Mountains. Each of these games involved their own unique patterns of vigorous running, tagging, tugging and throwing usually precipitated by sing-song rhymes,

“Charley over the water,
Charley over the sea.
Charley catch a blackbird,
Can’t catch me!”

Or

“Fire on the mountain, run, boys, run!
You with the red coat, you with the gun!”

The girls, when not jumping rope in exclusive small groups, mostly contented themselves with less strenuous games such as London Bridge, Mulberry Bush or Frog In The Middle. Elsie would sometimes join these larger, less skillful group games and would occasionally even find herself having fun.

But on most days, when the children were left to their own devices, Elsie found some way to avoid participation. She became Miss Platts most dependable eraser cleaner and when not thus occupied contented herself with a favorite book of poetry. Every now and then the teacher felt compelled to force the entire student body to play some new game she had recently discovered in a book. Games with tantalizingly descriptive titles like Smuggling The Geg, How Many Miles To Babylon or Saddle The Nag. Elsie dreaded these days and was in good company with the rest of her classmates, who resented their hour of freedom being confiscated for one more lesson. Fortunately, orchestrating the action while reading aloud the rules and objectives from her book of games, would result in Miss Pratt almost always spoiling the entire recess, so Elsie never had to get too involved. The children as a unit resisted these disruptive introductions mightily.

Spring turned to summer and with the end of the school year Elsie retreated back up the rocky hillside where she remained, for the most part, in solitude. She would ride Applesauce into town whenever her father gave her a little money for sugar, flour and coffee or the other incidentals that could not be wrung from the farm. She would sometimes run into classmates who might react with anything from a modest wave, to unacknowledged indifference, to outright insult, depending on who the classmate might be. Elsie’s hide was now plenty tough and she took each response in stride. Neither her nor her father ever attended church again since the day they buried her mother, though they would on occasion make it a point, when in town, to lay flowers on her grave in the churchyard. These weren’t her only visitations however. On more than one morning, Minister Crowley had had to rouse Frank Meyer from a shivering, drunken slumber after he had wandered from the woods like an injured animal in the middle of the night, to collapse forlorn at the foot of Carra’s grave.

For the next couple of years, schooldays and summers came and went, all the while Elsie enduring taunts and ridicule, scorn and indignation or the utter dismissiveness of her classmates. Over that time she grew evermore inwardly hostile, evermore outwardly unflappable. She had good days and bad days as do we all but her number of good days unfairly diminished with each passing year, until the horror of her homelife made the misery of her schooldays seem almost welcome by comparison.

At least her father couldn’t get at her while she was in the classroom. Drunkenness was now his waking state and he spent most of his time tending his still, cooking the corn mash, selling off what little he didn’t drink himself. In spite of this he managed to create a minor industry which was necessary to provide the income required to buy seed and feed and essentials for farm and home, though those were never now his motivations. He no longer held such noble aspirations and the lion’s share of the money was frittered away on gambling with other layabouts or tobacco. He had increasingly left Elsie on her own to fend for the farm and in doing so she had gained a healthy handle on the workings of the entire operation. It wasn’t much of a farm but she kept it productive enough to feed them both, with what money she was allowed providing for the balance of their necessities. She had learned to budget well and always made sure she had enough left over for coal oil to keep herself out of the dark. Elsie wasn’t afraid of most anything but she was afraid of the dark.

It was in darkness that her father first came to her bed. It had been some time since any remaining good had finally been gutted from Frank Meyer and now he was left with a sinister pickled brain, preserved in an alcohol brine of bitterness, loneliness and gloom. The deplorable visits had begun without infliction on a frigid winter night when he had simply come to her bed and collapsed. But soon the callings came more often, not only on cold winter nights but hot summer ones too. It now seemed that every incident in poor Elsie’s life was a trial, designed to steel her further against future injury. Her soul was becoming a dark and cagey place where misery and mirth mingled in the foul and brackish sludge of revenge. She grew quick-witted, conniving and masterful at evasion. She now plotted and schemed and daydreamed of a method for killing her father. She had been alone in spirit ever since her mother had died and she now longed to be alone in actuality. She knew she was still too young to be left unattended should something happen to her father at present but in a year or two things would be different. She waited and she endured, knowing full well her day would come and that she would be its author.

Elsie had received her first taste of murder from her father, the experience of which would later serve her well. It was on an Indian summer, October afternoon, with a breezy golden light filtering through the rustling trees. It was the kind of day where even Frank and Elsie Meyer were happy to be alive and in each other’s company. It was the kind of day when death likes to pull the rug out from under the living. Elsie sat idly as her father tended the still, playing with a hand tailored rag doll, the only tangible remaining remnant of her mother’s love. In the scrub brush nearby, a white-eyed vireo repeated its chattering song, “chip-oh-wee-ree-ree, chip-oh-wee-ree-ree, chip-oh…”, and then abruptly took wing. They both had heard the snapping branch at the same instant and Elsie peered up in time to witness a whirlwind of kinetic motion. The Treasury Man came lunging at her father, pistol drawn and in that same swirling second her father blindly swung out with the flaming iron poker, burying the blunted, grabbing tip, deep in the revenuer’s temple. The pistol went off with the shot splintering the bark on the tree Elsie reclined against, not six inches above her head. The Treasury Man slumped to the ground, right foot dancing a solo mountain jig, gurgling and sputtering like the monstrous blue catfishes she watched her father pull from the river to leave gasping on the bank. He was still rasping horribly when Father dragged him to the hastily dug, shallow grave, tossed the pistol in after him, and threw the first shovelful of earth upon him. Elsie stood fascinated, watching until she could no longer see the tips of the man’s boots; until the now muffled groans grew fainter and finally ceased.

Now here it was a few years later with a bedful of nightmares and daydreams behind her and graduation coming soon for her and her fellow Eighth Graders. Back in the schoolroom that had become both refuge and prison, she sat watching, silently stone-faced as her giggling ninny classmates passed their notebooks around for autographs, praising each other with overwrought flattery and preening affectations of camaraderie, as they scribbled trite sentiments on the pages. Elsie clutched her own notebook tight to her chest, never daring to present it, knowing the rejection that would surely follow. She grabbed her shawl and quietly went behind the schoolhouse, with pen and ink and notebook in tow and the thought of decorating the pages with salutations of her own creation. There she sat alone and silently repeated as a memory exercise, the picturesque bromides the other girls had recited aloud. Pen in hand, she began. 

Oh, how she hated that Ruth Presseisen. She hated everything about her from her expensive dresses to her blue eyes and strawberry blond curls. But most of all she hated her silly last name, which Elsie had always struggled to pronounce properly and which Ruth would in turn annunciate for her with exaggerated precision and condescending ridicule. Neatly in her steady hand she wrote, “I hope you’ll lead a happy life, and make some man a cheerful wife!” She read it back and hated it. She didn’t want a man in her life ever again, certainly not a husband. She wished nothing but agony for her father and the same for most all the doltish boys at school. She methodically erased the second line and replaced it with, “And never cut our friendship with a knife.” Better, much better Elsie thought as she envisioned the long sharp blade of the carving knife first removing Ruth’s pretty braids, before finally plunging deep into her milky bosom. With that image dancing playfully in her head she resumed, “When you are grown and chance to look at this book, don’t forget to pronounce my last name. Pre-si-sen. Ha, Ha.” The laughing continued in Elsie’s head long after her pen stopped writing.

“Who wants to sign my book next?” she thought. Hester Mayer was at one time haltingly kind to Elsie, once even pointing out the similarity of their surnames. “We are like sisters,” she said, “separated by just one letter.” Elsie hoping for a confidant allowed herself to believe maybe she had found one in Hester but once the other girls made it clear to her that Elsie was a pariah, Hester’s kindness soon turned cold. Very often after that she would be loudest and most hostile amongst them when berating poor Elsie, as if she had to erase in the other girls’ minds any memory of her ill-conceived civility. For cowardly Hester, Elsie wrote,

“Love many, trust few,
Always paddle your own canoe.”

Lovingly,
Hester Mayer.

Just then she heard the obnoxious hee-haw of that braying fool, Katherine Monteith come pouring forth between frame and sill from the slightly opened schoolhouse window. “She might be the worst of them all, for she is dumber and uglier than I,” thought Elsie, “yet she treats me like I am her inferior, only because her father is a wealthy and respected merchant in town.” Katherine never missed an opportunity to boast to Elsie how pretty, well respected and loving her own mother was, even if each point were roundly debatable. No matter, she would concoct every manner of mother/daughter intimacy to relate to Elsie, for no other purpose than to remind Elsie of that which she was missing. “I despise her!” Elise murmured, simmering as she neatly penned,

“The best luck I ever knew,
Was when I made a friend of you.”

Sincerely yours,
Katherine Monteith.

That left remaining only Madeline Schaffe. Of her primary tormentors Madeline was the most timid, the least venomous. “That shall make her easiest to kill.” thought Elsie as she scrawled one last message in her notebook.

“When you are old and cannot see,
Put on your specks and think of me.”

Your sincere friend,
Madeline Schaffe.

With that she closed her notebook along with her eyes and leaned back against the schoolhouse soaking up what warmth she could from the cold, January sun. What would it be like to make them all just go away? 

Many of Elsie’s classmates would continue their formal educations in High School but nearly as many would not and she was among the latter. Now, at the ages of fifteen and sixteen, they were big enough to help full-time on the family farms or for the boys to take jobs in the mills. An education limited to the 8^th grade was not uncommon in the rural counties of these Ozark hills and an 8^th grade education was all Elsie could or would endure. With the very end of her tortuous schooldays in sight, something inside of Elsie, something that had been straining and slowly unravelling without interval for years, finally snapped. That very next day she got busy. 

After carefully following her movements with no real intent of genuine malice other than to confront and scare her, she took Madeline by surprise down by Terrell Creek. What happened next was the sudden onslaught of a blind urge that theretofore had only been an inkling. All that it took to trigger the urge into action was Madeline’s unkind reaction to Elsie’s appearance. “Oh, it’s just you Elsie. I can’t be bothered now; I’m looking for my dog.” “She went chasing after a rabbit, her name is Biscuit. If you see her call her to you and hold her for me.” “Sure I will,” Elsie replied pointing. “I saw a dog playing along the bank not long ago, just down yonder.” “Show me!” demanded Madeline. And with that they walked toward the water’s edge, Madeline pacing frantically while shouting, “Biscuit! Biscuit!” 

“I’ve got your Biscuit.” Elsie whispered to herself as she came up quietly behind Madeline. Easily overpowering her, Elsie wrapped her scarf tightly around her neck, pushed her down the slippery bank and held her head under the icy water. Madeline thrashed wildly as Elsie knelt on her back but she could get no traction in the cold, wet mud and eventually her obliterated air stopped bubbling to the surface. Still, she held her in place till both Elsie’s hands and Madeline’s face turned purplish blue. Hauling her under the arms she dragged her sodden body a ways down the shoreline, stuffed her into a muddy shelf overhang and gathered driftwood and dead leaves to cover her up. “The ground is too frozen to bury her and anyway I have no shovel,” thought Elsie, “but perhaps she can winter here.” “If the coyotes and coons don’t make a meal of her she will keep until the spring rains carry her remains down to the river.” “Never mind anyhow, the deed is done,” she said aloud. Wet and shivering but burning inside she started the long trek home. Her mind raced as she alternated between hysterical bouts of tears and laughter and her body convulsed involuntarily. The bitter cold coupled with the glorious release of the deed had inflicted a state of shock upon Elsie. She later recalled little of her journey home.

A few weeks later on a frigid February afternoon, the community still shaken with disquietude over the abrupt disappearance of young Madeline Schaffe, it happened again. Elsie was returning from a visit to town, driving their one horse and rickety wagon (Applesauce being blanketed back home in the barn), with a load of meager provisions to sustain Father and her throughout the remaining winter. There, in the road up ahead she spied Katherine Monteith, who was also returning home after a visit to her own father’s mercantile store. Elsie avoided the mercantile whenever possible, not wanting to patronize the Monteith family, preferring to gather her goods from Eckler’s Hardware at the other end of Main Street. Katherine heard Elsie’s wagon in the road and turned to see who was coming. She paused chomping on her peppermint stick a moment, long enough to thrust a bony finger at Elsie’s rig and shouted loudly, “I do declare, I don’t know who is more skinny, sickly and pathetic, you or that Godforsaken beast pulling the wagon!” Elsie slowed the wagon to a halt and sat in the road watching as Katherine threw her head back with a hearty guffaw and resumed working on her candy. She sat there for what seemed like minutes as Katherine continued on her way. Elsie looked over each shoulder to make sure the road was clear behind her and without saying a word whipped the old nag with hideous ferocity, driving the wagon straight toward Katherine, who turning too late, let out one baleful yelp from her twisted, sugar smeared mouth. 

The last thing she saw before being crumpled, broken and torn under shoddy hoof and heavy wheel was Elsie’s determined glare accompanied by an ever so slight, tight-lipped smile. Right to the end Katherine remained loud and obnoxious, wailing loudly in her death throes just as she had in life. Her muddy, bloody petticoat was twisted up around her head and upon slowing and turning the rig, Elsie saw glistening in the cold winter sun, the stark white flash of Katherine’s shin bone, protruding through the laces of her boot. Elsie whipped the horse again and kept whipping, holding tight the reins as the force of the second impact nearly threw her out of the buckboard. Katherine was no longer screaming. She lay face up in the road with a split in her skull like a watermelon that was fumbled and dropped from a height. Her eyes stared blankly up at the sky and a dribble of blood, or was it peppermint?, oozed stickily down her chin. Elsie thought for a moment, “If I drag her into the roadside scrub she is certain to be discovered. For this road is well travelled.” Elsie was small but mighty. Years of doing all of the chores on her own and fighting off her father’s sodden advances had made her so. She chopped wood, she plowed their small plot, she carried stones from the field and water from the well, so lifting the slight, ridiculous child of privilege into the back of the wagon was not so much of a challenge. And beside she wasn’t exactly concerned about the further bumps and bruises applied to Katherine’s silly noggin that were required for completion of the job. Once in the back of the wagon she wrapped Katherine in the soiled old quilt she had brought along on the journey for warmth. 

Upon returning home she knew her father would be blind drunk, either in bed or up in the hills. She was little concerned with him discovering her as she dragged Katherine’s body down into the root cellar, a place her father never ventured. Elsie prepared every meal and her father never seemed to be hungry much anyway. He got most of his meager sustenance from the jug. It was cold in the root cellar and Elsie felt no great sense of urgency in disposing of Katherine more permanently so she propped her in a darkened corner with the bloodied quilt draped over her.

She went about her daily routine for some weeks without any human interaction expect for that of her loathsome father and an occasional visit to Katherine to check on the yawning gap in her skull. She had taken a keen interest in the slightly shifting shape, color and smell of the wound. She was fascinated by the transformation of this once lively, foolish creature that now looked more like one of the trapped possums her father would hang, bleed out and gut. What was once pink was now turning green, what was once crimson had turned black and Katherine’s eyes, still opened in mesmerized horror, had a blue, gray film that gave her an unnatural and directionless gaze. Elsie knew she couldn’t lodge here forever. With the coming of spring she would start to thaw completely and the reek would reveal her residency. She knew enough about the dead things of the woods to know that.

One early Sunday morning, with the slightest hint of Spring in the air, Elsie, knowing that her father would be snoring away last nights drink for hours to come, got busy. She carried the long carving knife, the boning knife and the cleaver and spread them out on an old table in the barn. The saw and the ax were already nearby. She next went to the root cellar and fetched Katherine, who was stiff as a board and somehow heavier than she remembered. At first she tried to pull her up the few short stairs by her hair but it came out in two clumps in her hands when Katherine’s crooked leg caught on the bottom steps. Elsie was pulling hard when the roots gave way and she ended up tumbling backwards from the cellar on her rump. She let out a laugh and scattered the dry, mangy locks to the cool morning breeze. Grabbing her now under both arms she pulled the wretched girl up and out. Katherine’s lips were now drawn back in a ghastly smile and Elsie swore she caught the sunlight glistening on peppermint shards stuck in the teeth and gums where she had bit down hard upon initial impact of the wagon. Real or imagined, she even thought she had caught the scent of that Christmas candy she had only ever enjoyed on one occasion, long ago when Mother was still alive, back when her home was a happy one. 

Little Elsie had cleaned enough fish, skinned enough varmints and even helped dress a deer now and again that her father would somehow manage to stay sober enough to fell with his rifle, so that the blood and the gristle and the sweat of the task bothered her little. Working with her back to the penned animals she ignored their uneasy murmurings, bemused at their instinctual perception that something entirely unnatural was afoot. With routine chore like detachment she kept at it until she had everything neatly arranged in small bundles and bucketsful. She first carried the buckets to the hog pen where the three skinny inhabitants almost lost their swine minds in their frenzied, gluttonous delight. In fact, they disposed of the sticky wet slop of Katherine so quickly that Elsie wanted to see what work they would make of the bigger pieces. She started with an arm that disappeared, bone and all, in a voracious tug of war that lasted no more than five minutes. “This is going to be easier than I thought,” smiled Elsie. 

It was now early March and here and there the happy yellow crocuses began to push through the pungent, matted winter debris. The entire county was now in an uproar over the two missing girls but little homesteads like Elsie’s were scattered all over the hills and valleys and the gossip and hysteria of town seldom reached their isolation. Her father upon hearing tell of the rumors from his corn whisky customers, summoned some remnant of concern for the girl and forced Elsie to start carrying a little pistol in her skirt pocket whenever she ventured out for chores or necessities. He was not so far gone to not realize that his miserable existence was dependent on her constant foraging and resourceful energy. 

Elsie didn’t necessarily consider herself a cold-blooded murderer, not yet anyhow. After all she hadn’t specifically planned the killings of Madeline and Katherine, they had pretty much just occurred. Like a sudden thunderstorm or finding a penny on the road, they had just happened. But now Elsie began to worry about Hester. Sure Hester was gutless and Elsie despised her for not having spine enough to stand against her paltry friends but Hester was also the smartest of the bunch and she was beginning to make her suspicions known. It was only a week ago that Elsie, feeling bold and robust, was returning on the road from town and passed Hester and her little sisters playing in the meadow near the spring. Upon seeing Elsie, Hester bolted upright and started repeating louder and louder, “What have you done with them?” “What have you done with them?” The faintest of smiles passed over Else’s lips as she walked by without ever looking over or acknowledging Hester’s wails. By the time Elsie rounded the bend Hester’s query had reached a hysterical pitch. This gave Elsie a warm feeling of satisfaction but as she traversed out of earshot of Hester’s fanatic moan, worry of further discovery began to creep into her mind. “She has no proof but she knows and she like the rest of them is a blabbermouth. Something must be done.” 

Hester happened to be madly in love with the older brother of another of their classmates, Sally Ann Washburn. Austin Washburn was as dumb as a post in Elsie’s mind but he was industrious and graced with a strapping physique and rugged good looks that served him well in all of his endeavors. Together with his father, Mr. Eli Washburn, they ran a thriving lumber mill on their patch of land near an inlet to the river. 

It was no secret to anyone that Hester was mad for Austin, as she would pine openly and endlessly about his wavy blonde hair and kind blue eyes. She would write poetry flush with longing and tender devotion. Austin himself was aware of her affections but did little or nothing to either encourage or discourage her feelings. He was simply too busy at the mill and too keen to blow off steam in town with the other young men of the community to pay Hester much mind. So it was with a bewildered mind and a hopeful heart that she awoke one pretty spring morning to spy the bright blue ribbon with a note pinned to it, tied to the branch of the blossoming crabapple tree just outside her bedroom window. She threw open the sash and almost fell to the ground while grabbing at the note but it was too far from her reach. She ran out the door, still in her nightclothes and climbed the short distance to where she could untie and unravel the ribbon from the branches and was still in the tree when she tore open the note and read,

“Meet me up at Oden’s Point at 4:00 pm this afternoon. I would like to speak with you of my intentions and my hope of our future together.”

Affectionately yours,
Austin Washburn

Giddy and flush with excitement Hester nearly toppled from the tree before skipping and twirling back to the front door, carefully composing herself and tucking the ribbon and note up the sleeve of her nightdress before entering. Her mother called from the kitchen, “Hester? What on earth are you doing outside in your nightclothes, have you lost your mind?” Hester replied as she passed back through to her bedroom, “Oh Mother, I saw the most beautiful bluebird on the branch outside my window and just had to have a closer look but he flew away.” 

“Never mind that, wake your sisters and get dressed for breakfast, it will be on the table soon,” said Mrs. Mayer. 

That morning and afternoon dragged on endlessly for Hester as she finished her chores and fretted about what dress to wear and how to fix her hair. She rebuked herself for her over eagerness and fretted about her arrival time but finally erred on the side of early. Better to appear anxious than chance missing him with a coy, late appearance. As she climbed the winding footpath to their meeting place her head swiveled fore and aft hoping to catch a glimpse of Austin on the trail. Oden’s Point is a wide limestone plateau reaching 90 feet above a bend in the river with tracks of the Missouri Pacific Railroad running directly below, a popular spot for picnics and courtship but likely to be abandoned on a late afternoon in March, when the high breeze still blew with a chill air and the sunset came early. The sun was in fact dropping on the far horizon, bathing her surroundings in the golden light of late afternoon. She had arrived only slightly early and expected to see Austin coming up the trail and through the greening canopy of trees any minute now. She sat down on the smooth seat of a boulder, overlooking the valley below and waited.

Elsie had herself been lying in wait for more than an hour, indistinguishably tucked behind boulder and brush off to the left of the trailhead with a clear view of the stage like platform of the plateau. She had quietly checked and rechecked the cartridges in the diminutive break-top .32 caliber, Iver Johnson pistol her father had given her to carry. She stoically permitted the intrusion of crawling insects in her hiding place without commotion, but nearly revealed herself when of a group of three boys almost ruined her plans. They came bounding up the trail noisily in a footrace to the top and once reaching the summit set about collecting a pile of stones. Arsenal at hand they laid on their stomachs peering over the edge, waiting for the next passing train. Tossing rocks onto the boxcars below had become one of their favorite diversions with particular honors bestowed if you timed one just right to drop on the engine or caboose. Even greater distinction was rewarded if you managed to rile a conductor from the cabin out on to the end rail platform, looking upward and maybe shaking a fist. After about ten minutes of enthusiastic (inane in Elsie’s view) prattle, without any sign of a train one of the boys finally said, “I think we missed the afternoon train, If I’m not home in time for supper I’m gonna get whipped. Lets come back on Saturday and try for the two o’clock.” The other two boys had grown bored with the waiting and happily complied and just as quickly as they came, went loping down the opposite path that led down to the tracks where they would cross and head for home. Their loud chattering was barely out of earshot at the time Hester arrived up the opposite trail.

After a five-minute wait, during which Hester spent nervously smoothing her hair, pinching her cheeks and generally tittering about on her perch, both girls heard the distant toll, laboriously pealing four bells. As the last chime echoed, rolled and faded through the hills, Elsie emerged from her den revealing herself and startling poor Hester mightily. 

“Ugh, it’s only you,” Hester sneered, “please remove yourself as I am expecting a very important visitor and we do not wish to be disturbed!” 

“I know who you’re expecting,” replied Elsie, “and he’s not coming.”

“What do you mean, he’s not coming?” 

“Did you really think that Austin Washburn would be interested in a mealy-mouthed, little prig like yourself?” “Silly girl, he doesn’t even know you exist.” 

“That’s not true!” bellowed Hester, “He loves me, what have you done with him?”

“Done with him?” I’ve done nothing with him. It’s what I’m going to do with you that you should be worried about.”

Too furious to register that she was also suddenly very frightened, Hester stood up and stalked towards Elsie. Simultaneously Elsie withdrew the pistol from her skirts and pointed it directly and steadily at Hester’s forehead.

Hester recoiled in horror, “I knew it! I knew it all along from the day Madeline didn’t come home that you had murdered her! Her and Katherine both! You wicked, wicked girl, what did we ever do to you to deserve this?”

Elsie had been over it so many times in her head, the speech with which she was going to admonish Hester, the details of her duplicity, her indifference…her utter meanness. But in her eagerness for revenge and her unwillingness to reveal her hurt, she replied simply, “You didn’t do anything to me, or anything for me, or anything with me. Ever. Maybe you should have been nicer to me.”

“Now step backwards.”

“What are you going to do?” wailed Hester, “If you shoot me someone is bound to hear and come running!”

“Well if that isn’t a town girl for you”, Elsie smirked, “Do you have any idea how many gunshots go off in these woods on any given day?” “You see we hill folk don’t go to market for our food, we eat what we raise and we shoot the rest.” “No one round here is going to give the sound of a gunshot any thought at all.”

“Why me Elsie?” “I tried to be your friend, you’re just so… so different.” 

“You didn’t try very hard, now did you?”

“No I suppose I didn’t, Oh Dear God, please don’t shoot me in the face! My mother…”

All the while Elsie had been advancing on Hester, the muzzle of the pistol growing ever nearer Hester’s head. Hester was stepping, backwards now, glancing furtively at the ground beneath her feet, trying to gauge the distance to the edge. Hester’s mention of her mother had sparked a fury in Elsie where before there had only been calculated determination. “You look at ME Hester or so help me I will shoot you in the eye.”

With that Hester let out a barely audible whimper. “I am going to give you a choice that I didn’t give your two cow friends. You may stand there while I shoot at your silly pumpkin head and you may or may not die instantly but your poor mother will surely shriek at the sight of the hole I leave behind, or you may simply throw yourself off the edge and be done with it.” I estimate that you are about five feet away from the precipice right now.” Hester stole a quick glance and still saw the rocky earth between her feet, taking two baby steps backwards as the barrel of the modest black pistol, looking now the size of a cannon, inched ever closer. She could now smell the metal of the thing mingling with the gunpowder residue of its last discharge. Desperately she pleaded, “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me! It was Ruth who hated you so! I don’t know why she did but I tried to be your…”

The word friend never came as Hester suddenly disappeared from Elsie’s gaze. The next sound was instead the horrible clomp of teeth smashing together as Hester’s feet dropped out from under her. She fell straight down like a sack of grain dropped from a barn loft but her retreating steps had been so short that on the way down her chin caught and smacked the outermost rim of the cliff’s edge. After that it was a tumbling summersault and the long free fall to the tracks below. 

“I lied when I told you that you were five feet from the edge Hester, you were much closer than that,” Elsie quietly corrected herself.

Setting the pistol on Hester’s former perch she got down on all fours, eased herself to the rim and peered down the yawning gap into the darkening depths below. She could make out the rumpled clump of yellow that was once Hester in her finest dress lying directly between the two faintly glinting rails of the railroad tracks. Those three boys on their best day couldn’t have dropped their shot any more squarely center than Hester did herself on those tracks, Elsie thought. 

She was about ready to push herself up and dust off when something off to her left, pink and wet, caught her eye in the last rays of afternoon sun. She admired it quizzically wondering if it were a baby bird that had dropped from its nest or some regurgitation of one of the forest creatures but presently it came into focus and registered. She let out a small snort of laughter when she realized that she was looking at about an inch and a half’s worth of Hester’s bloodied tongue that she must have bit off when her chin smashed the edge on her way down. Righting herself Elsie reached out the toe of her boot and gingerly flipped the stray piece of meat over the side. “Your cruel tongue should accompany you to the afterlife Hester. You may find more souls to torture with it in Hell.”

Turning now, Elsie retrieved her gun and tucked it in her pockets along with the discarded note and blue ribbon she found lying next to the boulder. With that she headed down the path and along home to prepare the supper for her despicable father.

At round 7:00 pm that evening Engine No. 267 of The Missouri Pacific line was running fifteen minutes behind on its run from Nassau to Carthage to Crane. The conductor was Stephen Napier, a twenty-two-year veteran of the rails. He was aggravated with the delays taking on water back in Monteith that had put his train behind schedule and he was determined to make up the time. He had managed the bend at Oden’s Point countless times before but even so he always slowed the engine a good 15 to 20 miles per hour to navigate the long blind curve. Tonight he didn’t feel like slowing down and he ordered his fireman to shovel on a little more coal. He was mad at his fireman for missing his mark over and over again at the little brass spittoon in the corner of the cab, he was mad at the incompetence of the tenders back up the line and he was mad at the memory of stones raining down on his engine and cars the last time he came through the pass. He held the throttle open steady at 40 miles per hour, a speed that bordered on careening on the old and sparsely maintained tracks. As the light of the big engine came off the tree line to his left and settled back on the track ahead it fell on a black shape not a hundred and fifty yards down the line. As his eyes made their adjustment it seemed to him that the shape was actually moving and he felt certain there was a wayward cow or wild hog lingering on the track, perhaps stuck or just plain stupid. He let out a prolonged blast on the steam whistle and the shape immediately shifted, with scattering portions peeling away. He could see clearly now it had been a huge flock of Turkey Buzzards feasting on a carcass and he could only hope as he applied the brake that the cattle catcher out front would do its job as advertised. He knew certain that the hurtling two hundred plus tons of iron had no chance of stopping before impact. As the last of the buzzards peeled off, he braced himself as the brakes whined and squealed in protest, and in the commotion he caught a bloody glimpse of yellow up ahead and thought at first deer, but then as the gap quickly closed, “God no! Oh dear God no!” 

As he recalled the incident later the fireman’s scream was even higher pitched than the shrieking brakes. When the roaring beast finally came to a stop they immediately leapt from the cabin, lanterns in hand on either side of the track and traced backwards, all the while peering into the dark underbelly of the train. Along the way they would catch a sickening, glistening smear of red on the rails or a lump of flesh and hair, twisted in stained yellow cotton, until finally alighting on the bulk of the clump that had once been Hester Mayer. Alfred the fireman immediately threw up his coffee and beans and Stephen Napier finished out his working days, clerking in a hardware store back home. He never again climbed into the cockpit of an engine and from that day forward, felt sick and sweaty every time he heard the blast of a train whistle coming through town.

The whole community talked about how Hester had been sorrowful, if not outright hysterical over the disappearance of her friends. How she sought the love of young Austin and how between that unrequited love and her missing classmates she must have just been overwhelmed to a degree where she flung herself off the point. Even her grieving parents settled on this scenario as the most likely. What pieces of Hester could be retrieved and arranged were wrapped in linen and placed in a mostly empty coffin. She was prayed over and placed in the ground up on Sycamore Hill not far from the empty graves of Madeline and Katherine. Not too far from Carra Meyer. And no one ever knew, not Hester, not Elsie and not Stephen Napier, of the massive old barn owl, whose once keen eyesight now greatly diminished, mistook Hester’s detached tongue for a field mouse and made a midnight snack of it.

Most everyone accepted that Hester had either purposely jumped or had stumbled over the edge. As for the other missing girls there were still rumblings of foul play but it was also understood by everyone that this was still rough and dangerous country. Had the girls been swept out by swift currents into the river channel, well, they wouldn’t have been the first. Their bodies could remain lodged under a treefall for months while the catfish and gar slowly picked away at them. The hills too were riddled with caves where an adventurous child might have entered a winding passage never to be seen again. There were even a few panthers and bears still roaming these parts though their numbers were greatly diminished. Either could have pounced and made a meal of Katherine or Madeline. Adding to the speculation, there was an old Cherokee woman down in the valley that swore it was the work of Kecleh-Kudleh, a man-beast of Indian folklore. Other folks told tales of The Ozark Howler, a giant mystical cat, up to his old devilry again. 

What most people could agree on was that no matter the manner of disappearance; they were gone, never to be seen again. Ruth Presseisen however did not concur with the prevailing theories as to the girls’ vanishing. She and Hester had on numerous occasions shared their suspicions of Elsie. They had noted how Elsie was the only one of their classmates to not show herself at the funerals of either Madeline or Katherine and as Ruth alone now noted, Hester’s either. They had both recalled Elsie’s frightful, evil stare whenever their paths had crossed. They had both recognized their horrid treatment of Elsie while in school but whenever Hester might express remorse or regret; Ruth would quickly admonish her and reiterate her own vile, consuming hatred for Elsie. Now all alone, she loathed her all the more. 

Too ornery to acknowledge fear, too superior to admit vulnerability, she was determined to expose Elsie and bring her to justice. One April morning she marched boldly into the office of Sheriff Maddox and revealed all of her collected evidence, most of which was pure speculation and vitriol. The sheriff listened patiently as Ruth, often bordering on hysterics, espoused how Elsie was responsible for all of the recurring carnage and mystery in the community. She even blamed Elsie for the recent mutilation of her neighbor, Old Miss Hennessy’s dog. When in reality that had been the work of nearsighted Elijah Seeger driving his new Model T pickup through town, who innocently enough thought he had hit a sizable rut in the dirt road when it had in fact been Miss Hennessy’s Cocker Spaniel, Duchess. Sheriff Maddox listened intently and without criticism until at long last Ruth had exhausted herself. And then he spoke plainly, without emotion but in a calming tone that further enraged Ruth, “Listen to me very carefully, that poor girl has had an extremely hard life and I don’t want you pestering her in any way. You leave the sheriffing to me.” Maddox had had more than his share of run-ins and dealings with Elsie’s drunken, corruptible father and had learned to tolerate him, not from dereliction of duty necessarily but more from sheer exhaustion of the matter. That and his enduring sympathy for Elsie skewed his thinking. He had once been quite in love with Elsie’s beautiful mother in their younger days and was dismayed when she married Elsie’s father who was at the time a decent enough man on the surface but of somewhat dubious character. It didn’t help matters that Elsie bore a strong resemblance to her mother.

Now Ruth was screaming again, “Leave the sheriffing to you? Leave it to you? Why you haven’t done a thing to solve these murders and that’s what they are you know, murders! And I’m next; I’m next I tell you! You watch and see; only I’m not going to stand around waiting for it to happen! If you won’t do something I will!” 

Maddox took her, gently but forcibly by the shoulders and led her out of the jail. “I’ll say this just once more Ruth, you leave that girl alone. She doesn’t deserve this. Please don’t make me involve your parents in this discussion.”

“She doesn’t deserve this? Well, I don’t deserve to die and you don’t deserve to be sheriff if you won’t do something about it! As for my parents I’ll involve them myself and maybe you’ll listen to them if you won’t listen to me! My father has influence in this town and….”

She was out on the porch and still yammering when he gently closed the door on her. A voice from the back of the jail called out, “Maybe she’s on to something Sheriff, there’s an awful lot of squirrely business goes on up at that Meyer place.” The voice was that of the town drunk, woken from his stupor by the racket and commotion that was Ruth Presseisen. 

“You pipe down Boone or find somewhere else to sleep it off, I don’t want any sheriffing advice from you either.”

The next morning began with a warm spring breeze, very much welcome after what seemed to even the old-timers as the coldest, most bitter winter in memory. Ruth woke early with a productive day in mind. She had never laid eyes on the Meyer place and never dreamed she would have to, but she knew the road that led up the mountain that accessed the smattering of farms of the dirt poor, and hideaways of the ne’er do well that lived up here. It was a frightful and ominous cut that zigzagged its way along steep cliffs with precarious drop-offs, so vertical in climb at times that she couldn’t imagine how car, horse, mule or wagon could ever navigate it. Ruth was on foot however and determined not to be detected as she conducted her investigation. Only once did she have to step off the road when she heard the approaching footsteps of a lumbering mule. She peered from her hiding place deep in the brush as some old mountain coot came down the road, looking half asleep as his tired old beast traversed the long familiar path. Two long cane poles were tied to his pack and they whipped back and forth with every careful step the mule took. Between the whoosh, whoosh of the rods and the whip of the tail they created an effective defense for both weary animal and slumbering man against the horseflies. Ruth thought he were more likely soused than asleep, like so many of the mountain people always seemed be. Probably heading to the river to try and catch what would hopefully become breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

Ruth continued her laborious climb, all the while peering over her shoulder and carefully approaching every bend. She knew if she were to be seen she would stick out like a sore thumb. Very few had business up on the mountain and those that did were well known to its inhabitants. Usually they came to trade goods from the valley below or fill a jug. Certainly a fifteen-year-old girl from a good family in town had no business here. She was counting, somewhat naively, on the industrious nature of the not very industrious hill folk. She figured those not still sleeping off last nights corn liquor would be off in the woods hunting or tending to their sickly, stilted crops in their little clearings of open rocky ground. She was hoping that once she found the Meyer place she would recognize the battered old, jerry-rigged wagon that Elsie often drove to town. The first home she came upon was nothing more than a makeshift shack with a path so narrow it looked as if no wagon could fit through the overgrowth. She inched ever closer to see a brace of squirrel hanging just outside the slightly ajar door. As soon as she noticed the wisp of smoke coming from the chimney and heard a rattle from within, she almost gasped and ran screaming from the spot, but she managed to compose herself and retreat slowly and stealthily. Back on the road she hadn’t walked much more than a hundred yards when an opening yawn in the deep timber revealed itself to her right. She peered up the crudely cultivated, deep-rutted road and saw an open patch at the end with billowing clouds revealing a sizeable clearing. She walked carefully amongst the roots and rocks not wanting to turn an ankle and find herself hobbled here in this horrid place.

As she scrambled up to the end of the lane she was shocked to find a rather tidy, if somewhat overrun little farm. It didn’t look altogether different than the much larger, older family farms along the valley road. There was a well-kept red barn tucked almost into the tree line and other than the need of a new paint job and the one door hanging awkwardly on its hinges, it looked perfectly functional, almost proud. The little home with the stone foundation was a bit more ramshackle with several shutters missing and those that were, either leaning against the frame or lying where they fell. There was a lovely patch of well-weeded coneflower, aster and primrose pushing up outside the front door to the left of the steps, a border of limestone neatly encircling it. Off to the right and behind the house were several acres of harvested field that looked as if they had been tended and still awaiting the spring planting. Ruth looked for any sign of life but saw none other than the pigs in the pen behind the barn, downwind from the house, and a dozen or so chickens pecking around the yard. Near the house she saw a well and pump and thinking there was no possible way this cozy farm could be the Meyer place entertained the thought of quenching her considerable thirst after the long climb up the mountain road. “If someone should come upon me, I’ll just say I got lost in the forest while walking and was desperate for a drink.” Even these universally guarded and fractious residents of the mountain would not deny a wayward, thirsty child a drink from their well. 

She knelt down, manning the pump handle with one hand and holding her pretty blonde hair away from her face with the other, drinking deep and long until satisfied. She had been thirstier than she realized and worked the squeaky pump handle long enough for a lone figure to have time to exit the barn and approach her from behind, unheard. She was wiping her mouth on the apron of her dress but quickly bolted upright as if yanked by strong arms, when she heard the familiar voice almost directly in her ear. “Hello Ruth, how nice of you to visit at long last.”

“Oh Lord have mercy, you startled me so!” Ruth’s brain was racing and she started sputtering words. “It was such a beautiful morning and I went for a walk and I just kept walking and walking until I was lost and I came upon your well and was ever so thirsty! I’m sorry I didn’t ask before drinking but I thought no one to be inside and I had no idea that this was your quaint little home!”

“Do you mean to say then that you didn’t come to visit me Ruth?” Elsie inquired.

“Oh dear no, I would never come calling without an invitation,” Ruth lied.

“Lets not pretend you’d ever come calling at all,” replied Elsie, “unless to snoop on me. You know you despise me as much as I despise you. It is too bad that you have no friends left to accompany you on such a lovely morning walk.”

“You treacherous little beast! If I have no friends left it is only because you‘ve murdered them all!” spat Ruth.

“You’re right Ruth, I did murder them all and now I am going to murder you. The only difference is that I will feel absolutely no remorse when I’ve killed you.”

Elsie had been in the barn working on the wagon, trying to secure the gate with bailing wire when she glimpsed a passing figure through the narrow opening between the barn doors. Not knowing if it were her father or worse still, one of her father’s frequent moonshine customers, she grabbed the first tool that came into view and carried it with her to go see who had entered the yard. When she recognized Ruth’s familiar frame at the pump, her grip on the tool tightened to a white-knuckled grasp. Her heart raced, “She couldn’t possibly be making it this easy on me”, she thought. 

Ruth was so alarmed when she heard Elsie’s voice and turned to see her standing there, that she had never even noticed the fearsome tool Elsie had carried openly in her right hand. If she had noticed it she wouldn’t have know what it was for, having never been asked by anyone to do a hard days labor to earn her keep on God’s green earth. But she was noticing it now, as Elise, gripping the long wooden handle with both hands now, raised the corn sickle high over her head. Aghast, Ruth turned away and let out a deafening wail as Elsie swung downward with maddening strength and buried the long-curved blade deep in Ruth’s left shoulder. Elsie’s arms shuddered fiercely as the blade met the resistance of Ruth’s collarbone, snapping through and digging ever deeper, shattering ribs and slicing lung, all along its invasive, murderous path. 

Elsie would never have believed it possible to shut Ruth Presseisen up but shock, horror and the realization that she was dead at this point no matter what happened next, managed to do what neither her parents, teacher, classmates or the sheriff had ever been able to do. Instead of hateful words Ruth was now reduced to redoubling blabber and incessant moaning. The blow had taken her wind and the gaping injury made it nigh impossible to recover it. Elsie extracted the blade with a careless yank that drove Ruth to her knees and without hesitation took another horizontal swing, striking Ruth just below the right shoulder, breaking her arm and all but removing it completely. Ruth now lay on the ground in shrieking agony. “So help me Ruth, if you wake up my Father I will really hurt you!” “Stand up and walk,” Elsie demanded, “there is nothing wrong with your legs…yet.”

“I can’t, I can’t,” Ruth loudly moaned, “You’ve killed me.”

“Here, let me help you,” said Elsie with abrupt deliberation, grabbing Ruth by her hair and dragging. 

Somehow Ruth managed to gain her feet and was half running, half falling as Elsie pulled her for what seemed like a mile but was only fifty or so yards to the hog pen. Elsie propped her against the fence while she undid the latch. Ruth now looked like a broken porcelain doll, arms detached and askew, that but for a few remaining stitches would have dropped cleanly from her sides. Her indigo cotton dress was now stained black with her own blood. She wanted to collapse in a heap but any movement at all brought the raging pain to full bear. She managed to remain upright against the fence murmuring, “Why, why?” Ignoring her Elsie swung open the gate and swiftly grabbed Ruth by the waist, almost lifting her off the ground as she steered Ruth and heaved her backwards into the slop. The hogs, now accustomed to their newly familiar diet were rabid with anticipation. 

“You should have been nicer to me,” Elise dispassionately replied. 

Ruth didn’t hear Elsie at all. Her senses were a dark, deepening pit of pain and nightmare flashes of fat pink flesh, gnashing white pig grins, black mud and the last torn remnants of beautiful blue sky she would ever lay eyes on. Mercifully even the colors started to fade to a blinding red and finally to black unconsciousness. For a short while after that she remained alive but unfeeling as the pigs made quick work of her.

Elsie walked directly into the house without a backward glance. She was washing herself at the kitchen sink when from the back room she heard her Father stirring and then with a shout, “What you been screeching about and what’s got them pigs all riled up? I swear to Christ if I don’t get some peace there will be hell to pay!” 

“I fell while I was feeding them hogs and one came after me but don’t you worry about me Father, I’m just fine and you’ll have your peace soon enough.”

“I better damn have it right now, you smart, clever whelp!”

“Yes Father.”

Three days later the town was now in complete uproar over the disappearance of yet another young daughter. Fingers were pointed in every direction but ever increasingly at Sheriff Maddox and his deputy George Stone who not only hadn’t been able to solve the last three disappearances but also now seemed incapable of preventing further from occurring. Sheriff Maddox knew that his job was on the line but more than that he knew it was his responsibility to end these tragic mysteries. He had laid awake many nights over these past few months wondering what he might have missed in the search for Madeline and Katherine. The reality of another girl disappearing from under his nose was too much to bear and he wished now that he had not been so dismissive of Ruth that day in his office. Not that he could lend any credence to the thought that Elsie may have had a hand in it but Elsie’s father was certainly worth having another look at. 

He had already paid a visit to Frank Meyer’s still up in the hills after the first two girls went missing. If Elsie’s father had been on site, the sheriff had been prepared to run him in for cooking corn mash shine but mostly he just wanted to rummage the area for any indication of foul play; any clue at all that might connect Frank Meyer with the mystery. He had paid a number of such visits to the haunts and hideaways of every suspicious character and well known troublemaker he could think of. He had scoured the county but the presence of Elsie had always kept him from disturbing the Meyer home and bringing her any more shame than what she was already accustomed to. That was a consideration he could no longer afford her. 

It was about ten in the morning and the steady spring rain that had started the day before showed no sign of letting up. He pulled on his slicker, grabbed his shotgun from the rack and told Deputy Stone to mind the town while he went out for a bit. He deliberately didn’t tell George where he was headed because experience had proved that his deputy had a bad habit of sharing sheriff office business all around town and he didn’t want any more gossip following young Elsie. Besides, he didn’t really expect to find anything. After all, successfully perpetrating the disappearance of three girls would be too much like work for Frank Meyer. He didn’t have the vigor or the smarts to pull it off. 

The rain had caused a number of washouts on the main road and beyond and when he finally reached the winding road that climbed the mountainside he knew better than to try and push the Oakland V8 up those treacherous hills so he parked it off in a cut. It was plenty dangerous enough just walking up the road and he slipped more than once. He had his pistol at his hip but had removed and pocketed the shells from the shotgun, not wanting to have some ridiculous accident on the way up and alert the whole mountainside of his approach. His plan, such as it were, was too have a look around the grounds of the small Meyer farm, before looking through the out buildings and then finally knocking on the door to ask Frank Meyer a few questions. He’d have the shells back in their chamber before he did that. He figured he’d have free reign to do so since Frank was most likely passed out this time of day and neither he nor Elsie should be outdoors in this weather. 

When he reached the top of the Meyer lane he held tight to the tree line walking behind the barn, keeping out of view of the house. Already he was on the lookout for any piece of clothing or disruption that might indicate trouble. Emerging from the back corner of the barn he lingered behind the hog pen, his back to the trees with a torrent of slop running in rivulets between his legs. He was trying not to disturb the pigs but they seemed uneasy, almost eager at the sight of him. They were letting out a ruckus that in turn had the animals inside the barn sharing in their agitation. He was going to move away quickly and come up behind the house to walk the field when something bright in the dark mud caught his eye. 

Elsie meanwhile had been up in the loft of the barn in her cozy spot where she often went to read or sew. She spent much of her time in the barn by choice as it kept her a safe distance from the reach of her father. When she heard the disturbance in the yard she prayed hard that her father had not awoke and was headed to the barn with lascivious intentions. Now that she carried the pistol, that was never going to happen again. She peered from a high window toward the house and saw no movement and next went to the back of the loft and looked out the door. Below and to her left she saw the figure of Sheriff Maddox climbing the fence of the pen, careful not to slip on the wet rails, using his shotgun for balance as he pulled himself up and over. Elsie ran to the ladder and shimmied down just as fast as her bad foot would allow, exited the front of the barn and crept round the other side to see just what the sheriff was up to. Sheriff Maddox walked slowly through the muck, swinging the shotgun at any pig that got too close and bent over the object looking intently. It was a piece of bone and it had teeth. He was trying to reconcile what animal it could have been, dog or deer or what? And then a chill ran the length of his spine and his head filled with fire as he picked it up and the mud slipped away revealing a fully intact, lower human jawbone. “My God, what has happened here?” said the sheriff, now standing erect and letting the rain wash the last remnants of filth from the gleaming white bone that he held aloft in dismay. Elsie who had fed the pigs daily, wondered how she could have missed it. The heavy rains must have unearthed it from deep in the mud. She had believed they had been so thorough in their consumption that she had never even bothered to search the pen for remains. There was nothing else left to do now; her deeds were discovered. She pulled the pistol from her skirt and held it straight out, inching as close as she dared to the fence. She was looking at a three quarter view of the back of the sheriffs head, certain that he could spy her but between his hat, the steady rain and his horror, he never saw her approach. She fired the gun, striking him in his lower right side and he instinctively whirled pointing the shotgun directly at Elsie, flinging the jawbone aside in the process. He was stunned stupid when he saw what appeared to be the pretty face of Carra Meyer staring back at him. Only it wasn’t Carra, it was little Elsie. Confused and frightened he pulled the trigger of the shotgun and nothing happened. He noticed the corner of Elsie’s mouth lift a little and her shoulders shrug a bit. The next shot rang out, hitting nothing. The right hand of Sheriff Maddox felt for the grip of his pistol as his left dropped the shotgun in the mud and then instantly, he felt nothing at all. Elsie’s third shot had struck him dead center in the forehead, knocking his hat clean off his head and dropping him backwards in the filth. The pigs could no longer contain themselves.

Elsie left them to it and went straight to the house, carefully opening the front door, still gripping the pistol and fully expecting her father’s wrath but all she heard was the familiar, sickening snoring she had come to hate so fiercely. She waited for a long, uneasy hour back up in the loft as she listened to the hogs furiously fighting for each new rendered scrap. She sat and thought deeply about what to do next. “I will have to rake through the entire pen and make sure nothing has been left behind. They can’t eat the guns so I will have to retrieve them.” Soon enough the pigs were all piled in a corner under an overhang out of the rain, fat and drowsy from their latest feast. Elsie did indeed rake the muck of the pen after carefully placing the sheriff’s pistol, shotgun, badge and keys on a barrelhead to let the rain wash them clean. It was sloppy, impossible work in the still steady rain but Elsie stuck with it until she was certain she had collected anything that could arouse further suspicion. The pigs had ignored his hat too and the jawbone still lay where the sheriff had tossed it. Elsie had collected a few more random scraps of bone that she threw into the woods and quite a few scraps of the Ruth’s dress that she placed in the hat along with the keys and jawbone. The sheriff’s badge, she placed in her pocket. She carried the hat and its contents to the root cellar where she dislodged a large loose stone from the foundation wall, placed the items inside the considerable empty space behind and then using all of her might, lifted the stone back into place. She carried the sheriff’s guns up to the hayloft, placed his badge alongside and covered them under deep piles of straw. Then she went back to her sewing and waited. 

It rained the entire rest of the day. Her father woke late afternoon, ill tempered as ever, he ate a little and drank a lot. He was passed out again in the parlor shortly before midnight.

The next morning was a bright and cheery one. The clouds had lifted and the sky was clear blue with that intensity that the sky only achieves after a prolonged rain. The birds were chirping and nesting and the chickens were amok in the yard pecking away between the puddles. Elsie’s father was up early, for him, though Elsie had already been awake for three hours having milked the cow and collected the eggs, with many chores still ahead. Frank Meyer was dressed and as clear-headed as he ever got, which was not an occasional occurrence. “I’m off into the hills to see if I might shoot a pheasant or two,” he said approaching something like civility. “Alright Father, I wish you luck. Pheasant would be a welcome dish.” She knew and he knew that she knew, that he was actually headed to check on the still after the long interruption of rain. He would have the fire going and be cooking mash again by noon. 

Elsie watched as he navigated the muddy trail, disappearing into the wet, thick woods. She immediately went to the hayloft and retrieved the sheriff’s guns and badge. She looked long and hard from her high perch in the loft to make sure her Father did not return after forgetting something. When confident he was well on his way, she carried the sheriff’s pistol and shotgun carefully down the ladder and into the house. She entered her Father’s bedroom and sat down on the floor next to the big oak bed that her father had special ordered from back east, as a wedding present for his lovely new bride. Her father had long since taken any interest in maintenance of the home and the housekeeping fell to Elsie along with everything else. She kept a tidy home but rarely entered this room and it showed. The floor under the bed was thick with dust. Elsie took one of her father’s handkerchiefs from his drawer and meticulously wiped down the sheriffs guns. Then she withdrew her own little pistol from her pocket and did the same. Crawling under the bed she placed all three guns fast and center against the wall under the headboard. There too she left her Father’s handkerchief, with the sheriff’s badge wrapped inside. And then she headed into town. 

Walking the full five miles into town she went straight to the Sheriff’s Office without delay. Opening the door she walked up to the desk where the sheriff would have been seated but found Deputy Stone in his place.

“I want to speak to Sheriff Maddox.” Elsie firmly demanded.

“Just who are you and what do you want with the sheriff?” replied George Stone.

“I’m Elsie Meyer and I want to know what the sheriff wants with my Father. He came around our place yesterday looking for him and I told him, you know where to find him and now I haven’t seen either of them since.”

“So your Frank Meyer’s girl? Well you’re not alone child because I haven’t seen hide nor hair of the sheriff since he left here yesterday morning.” “You say he was up at your place, what time was that?”

“ A little before noon I suppose,” Elsie answered.

“My father never came home the night before and I told the sheriff so.”

“You mean to tell me your father spent those rainy days and nights tending his still? Not likely, he ain’t that dedicated to his work,” Deputy Stone quipped.

“I didn’t say that. I only said he never came home. I figured he was out carousing with his no-good acquaintances or maybe passed out in the hills. He keeps a little shelter up there, near the still.” Elsie paused for a moment as if to suggest that she had almost forgotten the following minor detail, “Oh and one more thing, the sheriff’s car is sitting parked at the bottom of the mountain road this morning. At least I think it’s the sheriff’s car.”

“Is that so? And when is the last time you saw the sheriff?”

“The last time I saw him he was entering the woods behind our house headed toward Father’s still. That was yesterday just after we spoke.”

“Well pardon my language young one but this is getting damned curious. If you’ll excuse me I have a few telephone calls to make.”

“What about my father?” 

“I’m going to damn well find your father; the sheriff too! I’m tired of being in the dark and I’m going to get to the bottom of this.” You run along back home and you may be seeing me again real soon.”

It was around three in the afternoon when she did see Deputy Stone again. The roads had dried enough that he drove straight up the mountain road, though twice along the way the three men with him had to get out and push the car out of a puddled ditch. He drove hard and furious up the Meyer lane, whiplashing the Model T through the obstacles and gullies, all the while the two hounds accompanying the men brayed relentlessly. By the time he reached the Meyer place he was in a foul mood and with both dogs and men piling out of the car, the dogs still yapping and pulling on their chains, he walked up to Elsie’s door and rapped hard and fast. Elsie had heard the commotion well before the knock came and was already standing behind the door. She opened it fast leaving George Stone briefly wagging his fist in the air. “Hello again, Deputy Stone.”

“Little girl, I need to know if your father or sheriff Maddox have returned here since we last spoke.”

“No sir, I’ve not seen either of them and I’m getting mighty concerned,” Elsie replied, allowing her voice to quaver a little, even mustering a tear for effect. 

“So am I Elsie, so am I.”

Then Deputy Stone said, “Before I take these men up into them hills, I need to know where your father keeps his guns and if you know how many he has.”

“He has one pistol I know of,” Elsie answered, “and his hunting rifle and a shotgun that is hanging right now above the hearth.” “But I can’t speak for where the pistol and rifle are right now.”

“Does he keep them anywheres special?”

“Well, when he’s at his worst with the drink he gets extra scared and addled. I’ve known him to keep the pistol at his bedside, sometimes even under his pillow or the mattress. I’ve found it there before when I’ve tided his room or cleaned up his sick.”

Deputy Stone didn’t ask, rather he told Elsie, “I’m needing to come into the house and look around for them guns.” 

“Jubal, you come inside with me. You other men stay out here and keep a sharp eye.” “Elsie, I’d like you to point me to that shotgun.” She didn’t protest at all and Elsie and the two men entered the home.

“Have her take you to the bedroom and check under the pillows and mattress like she said.” The shotgun was hanging just where Elsie said it would be. Deputy Stone pulled it from the pegs, opening the break-barrel and saw two shells in the breech. Holding it up to his nose he took a deep whiff. He didn’t get the impression that it had been fired recently. He removed the shells and returned the gun to its cradle. Just then an excited voice came loud from the backroom.

“George get in here! You’re gonna want to see this!”

Jubal Johnson was down on all fours peering under the bed, his right hand still gripping his own rifle when the deputy entered the room. “What is it, what have you found?” Elsie stood stoically in the corner. Did George Stone detect a glint of excitement in her eyes? “You better get down here and have a look for yourself, I ain’t touched none of it.”

Deputy Stone eased down on his belly next to Jubal and had a look; two pistols, a shotgun and a bundle. The deputy didn’t have to look twice to recognize the clunky Colt .45 automatic that Hank Maddox carried at his side. Sheriff Maddox had liked to describe it as less cumbersome than a shotgun but just as effective. He must have been loaded for bear because there was his shotgun too, the one he had pulled from the rack in the office yesterday. He slid them out to his side along with the second pistol and lastly the oily, muddy handkerchief. “Take out your handkerchief Jubal and place them guns on the bed. Don’t touch the trigger or the grips.” Stone sat like a child playing jacks with his back against the bed and slowly unwrapped the dirty handkerchief in his lap. When he saw Hank’s badge he bit his lip, muttered something unintelligible and shook his head from side to side. He knew that Hank Maddox was dead. He would have never let himself had his guns swiped, much less his badge. Finally he stood up, steely determination replacing all consternation on his face. 

“Put them guns in the car and check your own weapons, we’re heading up the hill.” 

”Miss Elsie, your Daddy’s in a mess of trouble. I want you to be right here when we return. If he should arrive home while we’re gone, you don’t let on to nothing.” 

Elsie protested, “But if my father comes home to find your car and those guns missing from under the bed, it’ll be the end of me!” 

“Well you’re right about that. I hadn’t considered.” Deputy Stone thought for a moment. “Well, we can’t take you with us. I want you to start walking back to the Sheriff’s Office and wait for me there. If we should pass you on the road after we finish our business we will pick you up along the way.”

“Yes sir.” And then she added, “Please don’t kill my Father.”

Deputy Stone didn’t answer her. “Come on boys, we’re heading up to that still. Fred you lead with your dogs.” And with that they disappeared into the brush.

The still was not that far from the Meyer home, maybe three quarters of a mile. Frank Meyer was too dumb drunk and too lazy to place it any deeper in the wood. Besides most everybody knew about it anyway. Some of the most respectable town folk were his best customers, receiving his wares through shady third parties, too refined to deal directly with detestable Frank Meyer themselves. At the first sound of unnatural movement coming from down the hill, Frank thought it was maybe Elsie coming along but even so his hand reached out for the rifle. Then the hounds started barking, very near and he grabbed the rifle and stood rigid, aiming at nothing yet. A voice called out from the wood, “Put that gun down Meyer, I’m taking you in.” 

“Like Hell!” came the reply. 

Frank, who had been sampling his product all afternoon fired one shot up in the air and immediately took another two blind shots into the deeply shaded woods. Bleary eyed and angry he shouted out, “Show yourselves goddammit” With that Deputy Stone leveled his rifle and hit Frank plum in the right shoulder, the impact sending Meyer’s rifle flying into the underbrush. George Stone, who had desperately wanted to fight in France but couldn’t hide the limp in his left leg, the result of being thrown from a horse when he was ten years old and breaking it bad, was something of a crack-shot. With Frank disarmed and stunned, the hounds were let loose and they set on him like they would any helpless quarry. The four men closed ranks around him and Deputy Stone announced, “Frank Meyer, I’m arresting you for the murder of Sheriff Maddox and for the disappearance of them three girls.” “Stand up and start walking.”

“”What the Hell you talkin’ about? I ain’t done nothin’ to the sheriff or no damn girls!” “Not another word Meyer or I swear on my Mother I will drop you right here in the woods and leave the buzzards to pick you clean.”

Frank Meyer who never had the sense to shut up for his own good continued to snarl and spit until Deputy Stone popped him clean on the mouth with the butt of his rifle, splitting his lip and setting free a couple of Frank’s rotten teeth. He was silent and sullen for the rest of the walk to the car and finally passed out on the drive to the jail. 

Elsie had only been sitting outside the locked office for about ten minutes or so when the deputy’s car pulled up and parked alongside the brick building. The man with the dogs went the opposite direction down Main Street while the other two dragged Elsie’s father under his arms towards the front door of the jail. Deputy Stone followed directly behind with his rifle leveled at her father’s back. 

Coming to his senses Frank Meyer saw Elsie and said, “What in the hell is she doing here?” Elsie quietly followed the group of men into the Sheriff’s Office and watched them place her father into one of the two small cells in the back. Frank Meyer sputtered and cursed the whole way and as his three captors secured him behind bars, he looked over their shoulders to see Elsie grinning a quizzical, wicked grin until it finally registered, “My God it was her, it’s that evil child that done it all!” Deputy Stone growled, “Shut up or so help me I’ll knock what teeth you have left down your throat!” Frank Meyer’s head was whirling at the thought of what had become of his life as the deputy shut and latched the heavy door between the jail cells and the office. “Jubal, you better go fetch Doc Creighton and ask him to get over here in a hurry.”

“I’m very sorry Elsie but your Father won’t be coming home.”

“I know that Deputy. It’s just as well; I’ll finally be free of his terrors. I just can’t believe he had the need to hurt my poor friends when he had already spent so much of his time hurting me.” 

Deputy Stone, his tone now tender said, “I’ll have one of the boys drive you home and I’ll ask my missus to come calling on you in the week ahead to see if she can help you in anyway.” 

“That’s very kind of you Deputy Stone but I will manage. I run the farm on my own anyhow, now I will be able to do so in peace.”

The neighboring county constables, the state police and Deputy Stone scoured the woods up around the still in the days to come. There they unearthed the shallow grave of the Treasury man and several remnants of the missing girls dresses. That, along with the sheriff’s possessions found under his bed, were more than enough to send Frank Meyers to the gallows and by the time he was hung he had himself believing he had committed all of the terrible acts of which he had been accused. He went to his drop screaming as they placed the hood over his head, “I’m sorry Carra, I’m so very sorry my love! What a monster I have become! What a horror I’ve committed! Now I will never see your pretty face again! I am damned to perdition!” He was still lamenting, muffled under the hood, when his neck snapped and after that he just danced awhile, silently.

Nobody ever knew what became of the bodies of Sheriff Maddox and the three girls but many folks marveled at how transformed and upright Elsie Meyer had grown. She even entered a fat and frisky hog in the County Fair that summer and won a blue ribbon. The events of 1918 were not soon forgotten and the disappearances remained a well-told tale in the region for generations to come. Some spoke warily of the strange woman who lived alone up on the mountain and others championed her for her fortitude and perseverance. Fewer still, including the parents of Ruth Presseisen, went to their graves never giving up the idea that she was somehow involved in the tragedies of that long ago winter and spring. 

As for the quiet, dowdy cripple of Christian County she lived out her days quietly and peaceably. And only now and again would she pull the stone from the root cellar walls and fondle those long ago relics. The Sheriff’s hat was now musty and misshapen and his keys were tarnished and rusting. The scraps of dress she had kept for herself had grown moldy and brittle over the years. Only the jawbone remained the same, still to this day white and rigid. She often wondered which of her classmates it had actually belonged to but every now and again, when she held it up close and examined the teeth, she was quite certain she caught a trace of a whiff of peppermint.