Mountain Calling |
Summary: | After hearing that Lois McNabb was in town picking up winter supplies, Sheriff Mayfield comes calling to make sure she's set for the winter and follows up on the case of the death of her parents and siblings. Could there be a tie with another case he recently found out about? |
Date: | 07 Dec 1941 |
Related: | Business Call |
Lois lives some distance up one of the steeper and windier mountains, and quite some distance into the back woods. She has a pump well but not running water; lanterns but not electricity. The little sharecropper's cabin she's taken over in lieu of her family home looks like it took a long, deep sigh and then just never straightened up again. There are signs of industry, however; a vegetabale garden and potato patch that are thriving decently enough, if not enough to offer feed for the year; a drying deerskin, smoke in the chimney against the damp, chilly Tennessee air. And, round the back, the sounds of someone chopping wood to ensure more smoke can happen. Someone being Lois, with her sleeves rolled up and a bit of sweat trailing down the side of her neck.
With winter closing in, Everett was made aware of the visit to the general store by Lois, though he's surprised that the girl's planning on spending the winter at the home by herself. As he's concerned about the welfare of most of the locals, the Sheriff bought a few items and loaded up the cruiser to head up towards the farm.
The Holstein pulls up into the woman's yard as Everett steps out. "Miss McNabb? Ya home?!" he calls out as he goes around the back to open the trunk of the Ford. "It's Sheriff Mayfield!"
Lois wipes the sweat off her face with the back of her sleeve, then thunks her axe into the stump, quelling her momentary burst of surprise. She comes ambling out and says, "Afternoon, Sheriff, how do? Is everything alright?" She watches as he opens the trunk of his Ford, looking a trifle confused, but, polite as ever.
Everett grins, taking out a couple of bags. "Everything's fine." he says. "Just heard you were planning on buckling down for the winter, and wanted to pay a visit, make sure everything's alright up here and I wanted to get ya a couple of things." the Sheriff offers as he has a bag of coffee and a smoked ham for her to add to her winter stores. "You going to be alright up here?" he asks her as he sets down the items on the hood of the car for her. "Don't know if you've heard the news yet." The smile he had on his face fades as he takes on a more pensive glance.
Lois' confused gaze turns to one of touched warmth. "Oh, Sheriff, that's so kind of you. I'll be a sight more all right now! Please, come in, and I'll make you some of this coffee right now. That's the least I can do for you." She takes them, and for a moment tears actually brim up in her eyes. She blinks them back quickly enough, but sometimes unexpected kindnesses can have that kind of an impact on a body. After clearing her throat and opening the door to allow them both inside, she asks, "What news?"
The cabin is spartan. Her bed has been made up with quilts her mother probably made for her some time ago. The wood stove proves to be the source of the chimney smoke; it's currently bathing the entire place in a pleasant warmth, tinged with the smell of woodsmoke. There are dishes that need to be done, but evidently she was tackling the exterior chores first. The table and chairs are clean. There's just about enough space for the small food prep area, the wood stove, the table, the chairs, and the bed, along with a chiffarobe, again looking like perhaps one of the few heirloom pieces she managed to save. A journal of some kind has been tossed carelessly on the bed. Lois pauses to light up an oil lamp, then pours water from a metal pitcher into a stovetop coffee pot.
The Sheriff follows the young woman into the smaller home. He's never bothered to question why she didn't return to the family home, he understands why, after all, he was there the day that the whole incident went down. As she takes up the coffee, he takes up the ham, and has one more gift - a newly stitched quilt for her bed that he picked up from the local ladies auxiliary, along with a small basket of preserves from figs and peaches. "Coffee sounds really good right now, I didn't mean to interrupt your work, Miss McNabb." he admits as he comes into her home to set down the items on the table. He's not forward enough to set anything on her bed.
At her question, Everett lets out a sigh. His expression sinks slightly as he draws in a breath. "Came over the telegraph this morning. There was some sort of attack in the Pacific by the Japs. Don't have many more details than that, but the President's supposed to give an address on it some time today, so if you have a radio." He shakes his head as he sets down the items to watch her work for the moment. "Were you able to get everything ya needed from the general store? Ain't going to be wanting for the winter?"
She scoops coffee into the pot, glancing at the other gifts in a way that says she's threatening to tear up again. There is no radio at all; it seems he's her source of news. They'd had one -her old home had electricity, unlike this cabin- but she must have sold that when she sold just about everything else. "Oh no, that's terrible," she says, eyes widening. "Oh gosh. I'm going to have to come down and get a newspaper, at least. Thank you for telling me."
Though even as she reacts, there's a relieved slump of her shoulders; one that said she'd been bracing to hear that someone from the /town/ was dead or hurt. Hearing it's some distant tragedy in the Pacific is actually better than expected, terrible as that may be.
Setting the coffee on the stove to boil, she comes to sit across from him, casting a critical eye over her space. "I've got the potatos and carrots in, and plenty of beans. Got some winter vegetables going out there, and the hunting hasn't been bad. Plenty of feed for Jenny, too." Jenny being her old nag, the one that pulls her cart at the mare's own sweet pace. "As long as we don't get no fierce snows I should be right as rain."
"I'm not gonna lie, Lois," the slip of using her first name perhaps from the fact that she's close to the same age as his own daughter, perhaps the Sheriff's own concerns showing as he considers her. "Don't rightfully like you up here by yourself. Farmer's Almanac says the winter won't be terrible, but it still would make me be at ease to know you were safe." Perhaps a fear of something coming back to finish off what started in on her family.
"But yeah, terrible news from the west. Suppose when I know more, I'll be heading back up here to fill you in, unless you're able to make the trip back into town." He gets a little grin. "I don't know if you knew about it, but back in the day.." when he was her age. "..moonshiners used to run these routes a lot during the prohibition. There's an old still sight or two around here that had some decent caves. Just be careful of bears that may have decided to hibernate within them." he comments as he looks up towards the young woman and offers a sincere smile.
"I do appreciate it, Sheriff," Lois says, taking no offense at all to any of this. "I don't rightly know where else I'd go, though. I couldn't ask someone else to take care of me, it wouldn't be right." One thing she inherited was David McNabb's fiercely independent streak. The man wouldn't have asked for help if he was bleeding in the street. Take it if it was offered, yes- he wasn't a fool -but not ask. And then he'd work fifteen ways from Sunday to try to pay whomever back, because he felt uncomfortable being in anyone's debt for any reason. He'd believed a fellow's first duty was to avoid being a burden on others; he evidently passed that sense straight down to Lois without skipping a beat. "But I reckon I don't have much reason to go spelunking, at least!"
Of course, as soon as she says that she thinks of a few possible reasons. Here and there. But all of /those/ are all part of the plum crazy things she doesn't talk about.
"I know it sounds terrible, but if you ever need it, the jail's pretty warm, and as long as I don't have a reason to lock the door, you'd be welcome to stay the evening and get warm." Everett offers. Yes, he has extra bedrooms in his home, but he's not trying to seem /that/ forward. "Alright. Well, it sounds like you have everything taken care of and set up. I'll make sure to come calling now and again to make sure all's well up here. Does the phone at your parent's house still work?" he asks, trying to make sure to cover all of the bases as the Sheriff considers the young woman again. He's not going to trample all over her hospitality and offer of coffee though. "Is there anything else you need to have checked on while I'm up here?"
Speaking of which, the warm rich smell of the coffee is finally permeating the room. She stands and pours two cups. "How do you take your coffee, Sheriff?" she asks. She says, "I reckon it is, but I sold the farm, all but this little bit of it you're standing on. I couldn't work it by myself, and I didn't want to watch it slide farther and farther into debt while I stubbornly pretended I could. Better to sell it and do what I could then wait for the bank to take it later down the line. I held on to what I could manage."
"Plain's fine." Everett responds as he listens. He knows of the sale most likely - after all, most land deals have to cross his desk at some point after all as he draws in a breath. "I know it's been hard since the mine closed, perhaps the lumber payments from Butler will help." he's hopeful at least as the Sheriff settles his hands over each other as he gives a slow nod of his head. "The garden looked like it was gonna be ready for a good til come spring. You make sure you're careful on who you hire to help you out."
She passes it over black; she takes hers the same. She takes a long sip, relishing the treat, closing her eyes for a moment before settling back across from him. "Oh la, I wasn't planning on hiring anyone at all," she says, and a very real shudder passes over her frame. Cutting her property down to the bone neatly prevented her from even having to contemplate doing any such thing. Her hand closes tightly across the coffee cup, but she makes herself smile as if she hadn't just reacted as strongly as she had to the idea of bringing a hireling up the mountain.
"Didn't mean to offend, Miss McNabb." Everett is a man that does notice things, and the change in her demeanor, the grasp on the coffee mug tightening, he realizes he made an error and takes a sip from his mug. "I have no doubts you can take care of yourself up here, doesn't mean I'm not going to worry as you're one of the residents, even if your just outside of town." he comments as he gives her a smile to try to reassure her.
"Offend? Heavens, no. You've been nothing but kind, Sheriff, truly." Lois says, eyes widening in surprise. The reaction had not been an expression of offense at all, it seems, and now she shakes it off altogether. And she suddenly chuffs. "And you've sure been patient with me, goin' on and on about myself. How is /your/ family? What else is going on in the town?"
"Jennifer's off in Nashville for college now, so I have the house to myself. It probably shows." Everett offers good-naturally. She thinks she has dishes to do? There's a reason that the sheriff eats at the diner most days, he would most likely burn down his house trying to boil water as he takes another drawl from his coffee. "Other than that, the usual. Though I wanted to ask you about something.. from the night you lost your family. If you're amicable to talk about it? I don't want to push if you don't want talk about it."
"Jennifer's always been so good at schooling, I always admired her," Lois says warmly but then…then he brings up that night. She bites her lip and looks down into the dark abyss of her coffee cup. Suddenly it strikes her as…so very appropriate…that she can't see the bottom.
Then she takes a deep breath to clear the maudlin thought, and centers herself. "Of course, Sheriff. If it's anyone's business, it's yours."
His immediate urge is to cover her hand with his own in a way to be comforting, but he quickly withdraws it as Everett considers for a moment. "The thing that attacked your family.. do you remember how it was dressed? Manner of clothing? Shoes, no shoes? Anything like that?" he asks. He knows she was adamant that it had her face - he's asking to see how much else of the young woman it copied as he takes out his old notebook to open it as he flips through it to bring up his original notes from the case that he took when he was just a deputy.
She starts. She had later just started telling everyone it was an itenerant, as that's how she came to be sure something accessed her parent's property anyway. Then she realizes Everett would have been first on the scene, where she was babbling and covered in blood, clutching the wood axe with the body at her feet, on the urge of shrieking her way to insanity. She'd blocked the aftermath out entirely.
A long exhale. "She -it- he? At least by the time I got home it was wearing my other good dress. No shoes, but…the only shoes that would have gone with that dress were on my feet. It was definitely /my/ dress, not just /a/ dress, because I'm down to the one." She suddenly looks at the Sheriff, /really/ looks at him. "You're asking like you believe me," she says in wonder.
Something shows in the good Sheriff's eyes. A recognition, perhaps. As if he's realizing something as he jots down a quick note and moves to close the book in order to put it away. "I have to investigate all sides of the case, Miss McNabb. If I didn't believe you, I'd have to take you down the jailhouse and at the moment, I'm still sorting it all out." he says as he folds his hands over each other. The case was one of the numerous reasons the former Sheriff retired and now he's the man in charge of it all as he considers. "I've seen things in my time that I'll never be able to understand, but I have to accept them cause I saw them myself. Not that anyone else would believe it. But there it is." he shrugs his shoulders around the cup of coffee before the Sheriff takes another draw off the mug.
"There are awful things out there," Lois whispers in agreement. "You saw the…" she had blocked this out too, but she remembers something. She walks to her journal and thumbs it open, where she has sketched what looks like a pile of skin, discarded clothing and sundry yuck. She's made a few poorly spelled notes about it, but…it's not unlike what someone in law enforcement might document in the hopes of understanding the crime. "You saw that? In my room, near my closet? Like a snake skin, only for something person sized, person-skinned? I don't remember if y'all went back to my room. But of course you'd have gone to every room."
Everett has the original notes from the investigation, along with his own. "I do." he says simply as he stands up to come over to her to look over her shoulder - he's one of the few that can do that as he's actually taller than her as he looks over the notes and sketches she made. "Do you remember if it was armed, or if it used it's own hands?" he asks. Yes, he has his notes and he knows the answer. "And did you notice anything around the house before the attack? Anything your parents or family may have said about someone around the home, or looking in on your windows?"
"It went after them with one of our kitchen knives. It moved like - it just /moved/. Faster than I've ever seen anyone move, when it came after me. I think if I'd tried to run instead of grabbing the axe…" She closes the journal, then turns to face him. "No. But my parents were kind, sheriff. If he'd come to the door looking like a hobo they'd have invited him in to feed him. That's the kind of people they were. I don't know why them, I don't know why us, I don't know what it really wanted. Maybe it's just…biblically bad, something that kills because that's what it does. Maybe it had some deeper purpose, but if it did, I sure haven't figured what it was."
Everett draws in a breath. "I never doubted the charity of your parents, Lois. I'm just trying to establish if you or them had noticed any strangers in the days before the attack. In particular, you." he says simply as he makes a few notes as he smiles towards her, not unkindly. "What happened to you might be related to another case I'm working on, but I'm not ready to tie them together in marriage just yet." he says as he studies her eyes and gestures towards the journal. "May I have the sections pertaining to the case? I mean, I don't want to read about yer crushes and boyfriends nd day to day stuff, just what may be persistant to what happened."
"Will you please tell me about the other case?" Lois asks, but she doesn't deny him the notes.
She could reproduce them from memory anyway. And probably will. She doesn't laugh about boyfriends or crushes, but neither does she volunteer a jot of information about what else might be in her journal.
She heads over to her cabinets and roots around until she is able to locate a long metal spoon that will serve as a decent straight edge. Then she opens the journal and scores the pages out for him without hesitation.
There's a lot more there than a skin drawing. There's a rough map of the entire crime scene in there. There are notes that indicate she went through all of her parents letters and papers, looking for some sort of answers. There are also library notes. She /had/ spent a lot of time at the library after, and now it's clear she wasn't just clearing her head with romances, or checking the almanac. Every single last reference the library had, no matter how small, to anything that shapeshifted is copied in her painstaking lettering. Like many farm kids, she never graduated from high school, but she can copy, and she can certainly self-educate. Biblical references. Local Native American legends. Literary references. Whatever she could find. It amounts to about 10 pages of work.
If she was a deputy, his child, or his wife, he'd probably share the information freely, but in this case, Everett is having to play it close to his vest. "Just someone said that they had an unknown person around their house at night. When I went to investigate, I noticed that it wasn't wearing shoes. And it seemed to be male." he says as he starts through her notes. He can't seem to nail down what it is, but in this case, he seems to notice that there is a tie between the two.
Tucking the notes into his own pad, he offers her a little smile. "You have to understand, I'm not trying to spread rumours or misinformation and I still need to protect the privacy of those that ask for my assistance." He doesn't know what the girl's doing in private, and it would just be odd for him to be waiting for this creature to show up and Lois shows up - again. He would hate to use the hand cannon on his hip against her, after all.
He returns to the table to finish off his coffee. "How are you set on firewood for the winter?" he asks, noticing that she was working on it when he pulled up.
A dilemma.
Her instinct is to go into town, get the rumors, and take this thing out before it hurts anyone else, including the sheriff. On the other hand, yeah. She doesn't want to become a suspicious person, and if he believes her…then in this case, just giving him the information may be enough. "I don't think your normal gun will kill it if it's another shifter," she says instead. "I think I got lucky in beheading it. Lots of the stuff in my notes there…says beheading, or silver. I don't know as you can just safely put it in the jail downtown, neither."
She starts. Firewood. Yes. Normal things. Firewood and coffee and figs on the table. She glances to the window and looks out. "I reckon so," she says.
He's not a hunter. At least if he is, Everett hides it really well. He really is a small town Sheriff that's trying to keep it all calm and together with a sinkhole to hell outside of town and his country on the verge of going to war as he makes a few notes. "Silver? Like a werewolf or something?" Yes, he's read the novels, he was a kid after all. He's not going to 'There there, let the adults take care of this' her, but at the moment, he's still keeping a lot of information under wraps. And that's just how he has to do it at the moment. "I'll make sure to keep it in mind. Anyway.. I think I've kept you from your work long enough, Miss McNabb. Wouldn't want to keep you from getting the rest of what you need for the winter in place." he offers as he finishes off the mug and winks at her. "Best coffee I've had this week." he says with a smile as he moves to at least rinse out the mug before he leaves.
She smiles at him, a smile that chases some of the dark shadows from her eyes, even as a kernel of determination forms in her heart.
She's going to have to keep an eye on him. She'll just keep an eye on him; if he handles it fine, she'll leave be, but if not, she'll be there to take this thing out before it can hurt him. That's the only way to handle this. Do that…and make sure he doesn't spot her.
"Best company I've had all week. Thank you again, for everything. I can't even express how much it means to me that you came all the way up here just to check on me and bring me all this and…"
"Don't sweat it, Lois. Just being a good neighbor and Sheriff." Perhaps there could be more there. Anything from seeing a bit of his daughter in the determined girl to the fact that she's a single woman and he's a widower. Everett gives a light touch to her shoulder and an encouraging smile. "You take care. And if anything happens, you make sure to let me know, alright?"
She doesn't shy away from the touch, but puts her hand over his for just a second. "I will," she promises. "You'll be the first one I get in touch with." Then she steps away, smiling at him, but letting him get back about his own day as well. This is going to be tough; she's got to think a bit about how to make it all work.
Taking the stepping away as a sign that the visit's at a close, the Sheriff pulls back on his heavy coat and steps back out into the cold to get back to his car and start it up to make the trip back to town. She's figuring out how to make it work on her end, he's working in his mind on how to keep the town protected from.. whatever this is.