Return to Hawk Creek
an excerpt

Return to Hawk Creek

He went back to the spot over and over. When he knew he shouldn’t. When he knew he might get caught. He still went back. There had been others since that night. But oh, that night, that night. That was when his real glory began.
The hackberry bushes grew thicker each year, blackjack oaks laced their stumpy branches together, and old sycamores toppled in the spring storms. Someone scavenged the wood from the tent platforms, and soon sumac bushes covered the posts left behind.
Folks in Hawk Creek said the camp was haunted by the ghosts of the slain girls. What idiots. Only he knew that the ghost existed within him, in the shadow he cast weaving soundlessly through the abandoned woods.

Chapter One

Aunt Gertie had gotten the funeral director out of bed so she could get inside to see Cody Walker’s body. Mary Jo knew this with one look at her watch that said 7:00 a.m. and one glance at Aunt Gertie’s attire. Though Aunt Gertie had lost her license years ago in an “unfortunate misunderstanding” with several other cars at a stoplight, she still drove—a souped-up golf cart that she kept in pristine condition. She slid off the seat and walked up to Mary Jo, who waited on the porch of the newspaper office.
“You know I don’t like closed casket funerals. Everyone ought to get a chance to say one last goodbye face to face. I’m against closing the casket.”
Mary Jo stepped aside as Aunt Gertie pressed her gold purse into Mary Jo’s stomach and opened the screen door. Mary Jo followed her into the front room. The Hawk Creek Chronicle resided in a bungalow from the 30s. The “office” was the living room. Aunt Gertie took off her second favorite black funeral hat—one worn only for viewings—and laid it carefully on top of Mary’s desk. She patted the pillbox-style hat and smoothed the half veil.
“You wouldn’t believe the job that Nate Tucker did on that boy. He looks like he’s just sleeping in his mother’s arms. Rosy cheeks, you can barely see the scars. Hair combed real pretty. When I go, take me to Nate’s, but don’t let him smooth any wrinkles out. I’m partial to every one of these.”
In the kitchen, Mary Jo bypassed the coffee maker her staff used and opened the refrigerator door, pulling out the second Pepsi of the day. She took a large plastic cup from the dish drainer, filled it with cube ice, and emptied the can into it.
“Okay. Day can get started now,” she murmured after one long drink.
“Down at the diner folks was talkin’ about the anniversary. Wondering what you might be putting in the paper about it.” Gertie blocked the kitchen doorway with her fragile frame.
“I don’t intend to write about it at”—
“Don’t intend? Don’t intend! Now, Mary Jo . . .”
While Aunt Gertie vented, Mary Jo drank her Pepsi and tried not to smile at this woman who had raised her and her younger sister, Jane. She knew they had been responsible for some of Aunt Gertie’s worry lines, but she also knew that the laugh wrinkles were truly earned. Her great-aunt was a busybody but was the first one to help if anyone needed her. She arrived at the home of the recently deceased with the first of the apple pies that would be brought in by friends and neighbors. She weeded Paula Howard’s neglected garden when Paula broke her arm falling over her cat. She disciplined youngsters on the street—“Pull up your britches. Your butts are ugly and you’re not in a gang. There ain’t no gangs in Hawk Creek”—and then gave them dollars for candy bars.
“Mary Jo!”
Mary Jo took another drink of Pepsi and looked at Aunt Gertie.
“You ain’t heard a word I said, have you?”
Mary Jo didn’t answer, but managed to squeeze past her and get to the layout tables in the former dining room. She pushed up her glasses and examined the pages she had worked on the night before. Maybe if she looked extremely busy, Aunt Gertie would go away and forget about the story.
“Come on, now. Make us some coffee and tell me firsthand about the story.”
“Don’t have time right now. I’ve got to get the rest of these pages pasted up and to the printer today, so it can hit the streets tomorrow. Besides, you know I don’t like coffee.”
Mary Jo took another long drink from her glass and almost drained it.
“Okay. Okay. Where’s the story? I’ll just read it myself.”
“Aunt Gertie, I’m not writing a story about the murders.”
“What! What kind of newspaper woman are you? It’s been twenty-five years since those poor girls were murdered, and you’re just going to forget it? I didn’t raise you to be so thoughtless!”
Thoughtless. Mary Jo snickered. It would be nice to be thoughtless. To forget that night, the days after, Jane leaving them. Jane.
Though she knew she would eventually give in to technology, Mary Jo silently thanked her old-fashioned ways at times—her ability to get lost in glues and positioning and double trucks sliding over pieces of type on the paste-up boards. She doubted if she would be able to hide, to become “thoughtless” sitting at a computer screen.
She wasn’t expecting Aunt Gertie’s tone to soften, and when it did, she felt like a child again.
“I know this is a tough thing. Lord knows, I miss Jane as much as you do. I have some guilt, too, about . . . well, you know how horrible it was.” In the pause, Mary Jo didn’t look at her, but she could sense Aunt Gertie rising to her full 5’1 height. “But, by dern, little girl, you’re the editor in this town. You’ve got to keep this story alive.”
“Why? They caught the man who did it. Let it die.”
“Dave Littlebear was found innocent.”
“No one else could have done it. The police never even looked for anyone else. Besides, they had plenty of evidence against him.”
“You know damn good and well the people of this town don’t believe he did it. They know that sheriff was crooked, planted the evidence and”—
“But what will be gained by bringing it up again? It will just prompt the Tulsa Gazette to write another article about the ‘quaint, backward little town of Hawk Creek’ and the screw-up of the investigation by hillbillies who didn’t know how to handle a major case.”
Aunt Gertie puffed up and spit out a string of expletives that made Mary Jo smile. She knew she could get Aunt Gertie off track by bringing up the city folk.
“You’re damn tootin’. I’ll never let that Tulsa reporter off who described us all as rednecks chewin’ on Redman, driving rusty Fords with full gun racks in the back windows.”
Aunt Gertie, who had been known to chew a little tobacco, would still take up for the non-chewing population of Hawk Creek.
“I keep my gun at home, handy by my bed,” she added.
Mary Jo laughed and spilled Pepsi out on her white tennis shoes.
The front door screen slammed against the frame.
“Hellooooo! Any news to be had around here?”
“Hot damn. I’m hiding in the closet.”
Aunt Gertie darted into the broom closet between the dining room and kitchen before Mary Jo could say a word.
“Hey Pete,” Mary Jo said, mouth hanging open.
“You look like you’re surprised to see me,” Hawk Creek’s chief of police said.
Pete Daniels was a lanky man with skinny arms and legs, until he turned profile, and you saw his potbelly, like a kangaroo’s. He was a good man—and smarter than people gave him credit for.
“It’s not like I don’t come in here every other day.”
Mary Jo nodded toward the broom closet, and Pete smiled.
“I’m not surprised at you,” Mary Jo said loudly. “I was just daydreaming and got startled. What can I do for you?”
“Oh, I was just going to let you know that I have Gertie’s golf cart hitched to the car and I’m taking it to the station. I told her that the next time”—
“Hold on one damn minute, buckaroo!” Aunt Gertie screeched as she flung open the broom closet door, got her hair tangled in a mop, and exploded into the paste-up room with a yellow sponge clinging to the front of her shirt.
“Open the wrong door on the way to the bathroom, Gertrude?” Pete asked.
“You got no right confiscating my ride.”
“I told you that if you didn’t get that back tire aired up, I wasn’t going to allow you to drive it in this town anymore. You’re already in violation of city ordinances, and I’m letting you use it on the streets anyway.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. Get out of my way.” Aunt Gertie pushed past Pete and headed for the front door. “I’m unhooking it from your car and taking it down to the station right now.”
“’Fraid I can’t let you do that. I’ll haul it down there, and you can take it from there.”
“Well, of all the nerve. All right then. Quit flirting with my niece, and let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”
Pete shrugged and turned to go.
“Hey, now don’t forget about that story, Mary Jo! You act your age and like you are a bonafide newspaper woman and get that damn thing in the paper.”
Mary Jo had been enjoying this little scene, one enacted many times through the years as Gertrude’s ability to maneuver any type of vehicle and parallel insistence on still riding one throughout the town continued to butt up against the law. Now, her dark mood returned.
Pete stood with a questioning look on his tired face.
“No, I’ll tell you what,” Mary Jo found herself saying, letting go of her censor. “You act your age and quite telling me what to do. Go down to the diner and gossip all you want with the coffee-drinkers about the murders. I’m not going to write about them.”