What Lies Beneath by J. G. Hetherton

Author:J. G. Hetherton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

CHAPTER

23

LAURA’S FATHER ABANDONED her twice: once when she was eight years old, when he vanished for a year, and then again when he came home to die.

The first time, in late August 1996, he woke Laura before dawn, let her take a sip of his coffee, and told her she wouldn’t be going to school. It was the first day of bowhunting season, but Bruce Chambers had never been big on following rules. She watched as he cleaned the .30-30 lever-action carbine that had belonged to his own father. He buffed the walnut stock until it gleamed, his den filling with the musk of gun oil, then showed her how to sling the rifle across her shoulders.

He led her outside, across the back acreage of the Chambers farm, and up onto the gravel hump of the train tracks slashed across the rear property line. She hopped from one railroad tie to the next, and when they came to a trestle across a draw, when the ground between the ties turned to empty air, she reached for him.

“Hold my hand, Daddy,” she said.

It was a mistake. Of all the things her father wanted for her, helplessness was the least of them.

He batted her arm away. “Don’t need me for that anymore.”

They finished crossing, then turned perpendicular to the tracks and marched down the berm, into the longleaf pines. Their path traced a bone-dry creek bed blown full of fallen leaves. Her father’s boots stayed silent even as hers crackled.

“Quiet now,” he said. He was a soft-spoken man ordinarily, and the barnacled whisper of his voice in the trees was the same as ever. He had a voice made for hunting. One gloved finger came to his lips, the supple calfskin grating across his week-old stubble, then pointed toward higher ground.

Two pines rotted on their sides. The thinner, weaker one had been the victim of a summer storm, and when it fell the tree had acted as a massive lever, prizing not only its own roots out of the ground but the roots of its brother. The trees had grown too close to each other, and when one fell, it dragged the other down with it.

They rested behind the tangled, dirt-clumped root ball. Laura offered her father the rifle, and he took it, resting the stock along the top of the tree trunk. They waited while the shadows shortened, and all Laura could hear was the rustle of wind and her own breathing and eventually the grumble of her stomach, and when late morning arrived without any sign, her father flipped the rifle up onto his shoulder and stood.

“Maybe this evening,” he said. “We’ll come out here again, try our luck.”

She followed him to their special hiding place. Her father had told her the story many times, and it went like this: The day after she was born had come a storm to end all storms, a fury of ice and fire. Central North Carolina was famous for its ice storms, when

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