Nowhere People (Nowhere, USA Book 7) by Ninie Hammon

Author:Ninie Hammon [Hammon, Ninie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling & Stone
Published: 2021-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

Cotton Jackson pulled Stuart’s rented Lexus up on the left side, as close as he could get to the behemoth trunk of the massive Carthage Oak in Gideon. The gnarled old tree stretched up more than a hundred feet into the sky, with a circumference Cotton would guess was at least twenty feet. When they had last come to Fearsome Hollow, they’d been in Jolene’s van and she’d backed up next to the tree, facing the street … and a good thing, too, because Cotton had been driving when they left. He’d been so frantic to get away from the storm, the shadows, the shrieking and the gunfire that he’d have plowed smack into anything in his path.

This time he parked so it’d be easy to load up the trunk of the Lexus. If they found anything to load, that is.

Jolene got out of the car and came to stand beside him, looking up at the mammoth tree. She’d refused to wear the sling he’d made for her, just got him to put on a tight bandage, pointing out “I might need this arm.”

She might indeed.

Going around to the car trunk, he retrieved from it the second of the two picks he’d purchased at Home Depot, along with the tire iron and accompanying mallet. He rejoined Jolene, who had gone around to the back side of the tree and was now on her knees in front of the sealed opening of the huge hole, the hole Rose Topple had told him was so large children had once played inside it. The bottom of the opening was a couple of feet off the ground, where roots the size of fire hoses snaked out away from the trunk. The top of the opening was about five feet from the bottom, stretching out in an oval maybe ten feet wide. You could easily have fit a chest freezer through that opening. Depending on the depth of the hole, the contents of two duffle bags of bones certainly wouldn’t fill it.

If the bones were still where the Jabberwock had instructed Lily Topple to put them a century ago.

The little girl had jammed the opening full of creek rocks after she placed the bones inside, filled it completely, top to bottom. Cotton had always assumed — as he was sure everyone else did — that the entire hole was full of rocks, that they’d been used to seal the hole for some purpose related to the health of the tree. He didn’t lay claim to vast knowledge about trees, but his neighbor’d had a big tree with a hole in it and an arborist had instructed him to fill the hole — to keep critters from burrowing farther into the tree, causing more damage. Not with concrete, though. Once it set up, it wouldn’t “give” as the tree moved in growth. The recommenced fill was spray insulation foam. But most people just filled holes in their trees, if they filled them at all, with rocks.

Cotton

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