Over several days, the sheriff of Haywood County spoke briefly with two estranged, living relatives and an ex-wife in Duluth, none of whom had been in contact with Donald Kennington in over a year, all of whom said he’d been on a downward spiral since his daughter’s death, that it had ruined him in every way imaginable, that he’d probably gone up into the mountains to die.
A deputy found it in the glove box — a handwritten note folded between the vehicle’s owner’s manual and a laminated map of Minnesota.
He read it aloud to the sheriff, the two of them sitting in the front seat as raindrops splattered on a windshield nearly pasted over with the violent red leaves of an oak tree that overhung the parking lot.
My name is Donald Kennington. Please forward this message to Arthur Holland, detective with the St. Paul Police Department.
The death of my daughter, Tabitha Kennington, brings me to these mountains. I am writing this in my car on August 5th, having followed Roger and Susan Cockrell, of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, to Beech Spring Gap. I have taken their photographs with a digital camera, along with pictures of their green Range Rover and license plate. You will find my camera containing these pictures in the trunk of my car.
At this moment, I do not know if Mr. Cockrell was responsible for killing my daughter in a hit-and-run six years ago. I plan to meet the Cockrells tonight and find out. To be clear, I intend no physical harm to Mr. Cockrell or his wife. If Mr. Cockrell is responsible, however, we will see if I’m so lucky. Does a man who runs down a young woman and leaves the scene contain it within him to murder in cold blood in order to hide his crime and his shame?
I suspect he does.
The Cockrells will be thorough in disposing of my body, tent, backpack, etc., which makes this last bit of business a little tricky.
My camp is in a small glade in the rhododendron thicket on the east slope of Shining Rock Mountain, approximately a hundred vertical feet above the meadows of Beech Spring Gap. The glade is twenty yards across, with a large boulder in the middle. Look for a flat, shiny rock in the grass. My tent now stands over it, and I’ve made a tiny rip in the tent floor and dug a small, shallow hole in the ground under the rock.
Tonight, if Mr. Cockrell admits his guilt, into this hole, sealed and safe in plastic, I will drop a tape recorder, and hopefully rebury it before he murders me.
©2009 by Blake Crouch
667, Evil and Then Some
by Marilyn Todd
A Shamus Award nominee for her 2007 EQMM story “Room for Improvement,” about a female P.I. in 1950s London, Marilyn Todd returns, in this issue, in a much more fanciful mood. Fans of her series of novels set in Ancient Greece won’t want to miss Blood Moon, the follow-up to 2007’s Blind Eye, which is scheduled for April 2009 release from Severn House. In it, High Priestess Iliona is called on by the Spartan secret police to find out why three people were killed during a diplomatic visit.
The devil went down to Georgia. Everybody knows this, because Charlie Daniels wrote a song about how he was looking for a soul to steal and was in a bind, ‘cause he was way behind, and was willin’ to make a deal. Obviously, there’s poetic licence here. Hell, as you’d expect, is not exactly short of applicants, all of whom are processed with commendable speed and efficiency. Nor do we make deals.
What was true, though, was that when the devil came upon that boy playing on a fiddle and playin’ it hot, he did jump up on a hickory stump and say, “Boy let me tell you what: I bet you didn’t know it but I’m a fiddle player too, and if you care to take a dare, I’ll make a bet with you. I’ll bet a fiddle of gold against your soul, ‘cause I think I’m better than you.”
Or words to that effect, the devil not really being one for poetry, whereas Mr. Daniels probably needed it to rhyme. But the point I’m making is that the president does like to get out of the office every once in a while, see how the world of sin is shaping up. Which is pretty nicely, as it happens, but when he’s gone, Hell doesn’t run itself. So while he and this Johnny character were taking bets, souls versus fiddles and all that, it was noses to the grindstone for the rest of us.
Leastways, it should have been.
Was it Georgia, specifically, which always gets as hot as Hell in August? Or pure bad luck that the minute the competition started, the pitchfork sharpeners went on strike? In no time, the brimstone workers had walked out in support, with the stokers of the hellfires downing pokers in sympathy. I felt beads of sweat trickle down my horns. As the president’s right-hand demon, it was my job to relay status via his personal hotline and I wasn’t looking forward to that, I really wasn’t. He tended to have what I suppose you’d call mood swings when it came to bad news. Messengers rarely volunteered for the job. In the end, of course, it was immaterial. The weather forecast showed that it was a rainy night in Georgia. I couldn’t make a connection.
“Don’t worry about the strikers.” The head of Inhuman Resources patted my shoulder reassuringly. “I used to teach kindergarten, so I’m well used to tantrums,” he breezed. “I’m off to start negotiations straightaway.”
“Good, because it would have put the Old Man right off his playing,” I said, remembering how very attached he was to that golden fiddle of his. And quite honestly, I had enough problems to contend with without my boss venting his spleen.
The thing is, you see, before he left, he’d tasked me with conducting a feasibility study into the future of Hell.
“After all, if the universe is expanding,” he’d argued, “we need to know what’s going to happen to us.”
He was big on economic forecasts, was the president, and like any major corporation, tended to invest heavily in research, development, and marketing. Once, he set me writing slogans in his absence and I thought that was a pretty tough assignment.
The devil’s in the details, that was one of mine.
Hell to pay, another.
Damned if I know, probably the best.
But slogans, I quickly discovered, were a piece of cake compared to feasibility studies. I mean, where do you start? After kicking at the edges for a while, I eventually pressed the button in the elevator for three thousand floors down to the Finance Department, where every thumbscrew, prod, and drop of boiling oil has to be accounted for. Exactly. If taxation is hell, then Hell itself is truly taxing. But thankfully, between Accounts and the Admissions Office, I managed to gather enough statistics to fill a football stadium. And having waded through them, began to see a problem.
“Dr. Faust.” The nasal voice of the tannoy echoed through the sulphur. “Dr. Faust to ER immediately. Dr. Faust to ER.”
Another emergency in Eternal Retribution, then? Any other time I’d have been curious to see what was so urgent that it needed to drag the good doctor away from the golf course. Someone else selling their soul to the devil, and starting a fight because they couldn’t get a discount? Or was the Irritating Ringtone Punishment Squad failing to get a signal again? Whatever the crisis, though, I decided it wasn’t my problem. What I’d discovered, on the other hand, was. And it was big...
“Dr. Lecter,” boomed the disembodied tannoy. “Dr. Lecter to the canteen, please.”
Poor old Hannibal. Ever since he’d been appointed Director of Pain and Misery, he kept forgetting lunch, and another time I’d have made some wisecrack as he hopped into the elevator about taking his work home with him. That day, though, I had weightier issues on my mind, and even when I got the spiky bit of my tail caught in the doors, I barely noticed the bruise.