November Mourns by Tom Piccirilli Page A

murdered?”
    Zeke screwed his face into about as much of a pout as he could pull off. His fingers fluttered about like he was in front of a chalkboard trying to map out Sherman’s March. “You’re a damn fool. She was only seventeen. No young girl like that dies for no good reason, up in them foul woods.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Don’t you glare at me like that no more neither. You want to scrap, we’ll have it out right now. But don’t you give me that eye no more. I didn’t have nothin’ to do with what happened to yours. No matter what you and your miscreant daddy’s got to say about it. And you better not be spoutin’ gossip like that ’round town no more!”
    Zeke Hester didn’t have the temperament for any real slyness. Shad felt a small surge of shame even though he’d been attacked. He had known better. Zeke didn’t have anything to do with Mags’s death. He would’ve left marks.
    “Get out of here,” Shad told him.
    “You don’t tell me to move on, boy.”
    “It’s time for you to be quiet now.”
    “You go on and stay the hell away from me, if you have any consideration for what’s good for you. Or I’ll beat you down and leave your ass out on the highway like week-old roadkill.”
    Shad sighed. Pa was right. Zeke didn’t have a good memory. Already he was starting to flex again, weighing his odds, getting ready to push a little harder. You could see how he tongued his rotted tooth and the raw nerve gave him a painful kick that lifted him up onto his toes.
    Whatever Zeke was going to say would be immensely unwise. It would be mean and it would be about Mags. Shad took a step backwards, as if urging the insult toward him.
    Here it comes.
    Zeke Hester smiled through that wild thatch of hair, and muttered, “The way she threw it around, driving guys crazy, I’m surprised it didn’t happen no sooner. Now, you dwell on that some.”
    “Sure,” Shad said, and he went for Zeke’s bad arm, grabbing it at the elbow and wrist and giving it a vicious twist.
    The snap was clean and loud as a gunshot. Zeke instantly went into shock and didn’t even scream. He sat down heavily, twitched a few times, and started to cry.

 
    Chapter Seven
     
    HIS FATHER ’ S PICKUP WASN ’ T IN THE YARD when Shad finally decided to visit Megan’s grave.
    A trace of storm grew heavier in the air as the wind rose and gusted through the pastures. Crimson-tinted clouds swarmed across the sky, darkening it to the hue of trailer-trash bruises.
    The rain let go for a while, stopped briefly, and began again, fitful and hesitant and cold. Stands of pine jerked and swayed, bowing as if determined to groan in your ear and confirm every apprehension. As he drove up the wet dirt road the Mustang hit every rut.
    He parked at the base of the foothill and got out. The hound pup crawled free from beneath the house and trotted up the road to greet Shad. Lament’s collar was old and oversized, but he’d grow into it. The tags were scratched and they jangled together as he began to lope.
    “Come on,” he said.
    The dog followed as Shad worked his way up the knoll toward the graves of his mother and sister.
    The sun had begun to hemorrhage in the west as the late afternoon cooled even faster. The nearest church, four miles away along the bottoms, crooned a despondent tune he’d heard before but could only remember while it played. The breeze in the boles of the oak trees hummed and occasionally drowned it out.
    Standing in the weeds, he noticed again how stricken the land had become. The groves had thinned until they were little more than brushwood and briar patches.
    His cool and calm seemed to come and go lately, and he knew he had to work on that before it got him killed. You played games as a kid that became the discipline of your adult life. He’d never realized it years ago—lying there in the darkness at the back of his closet, covered in sweat with his cheek pressed to the smooth hardwood floor, as the silence