brain.
“Marry you? At twelve?”
“Yeah. He’s an old pervert. Come on in. I got coffee going and food in the slow cooker. Hope you like chicken and dumplings. I missed lunch and I’m starving.”
“I’m always hungry. But
twelve
?” Nell didn’t smile, but she did call off her dogs. That and an offer to feed me was a start.
***
Nell knew stuff. Nell was like a font of knowledge and wisdom, strength and power, innocence and hard-won independence. I liked her instantly, which didn’t happen to me often. I sat at her antique kitchen table, the boards smooth from long use, the finish mostly gone and the grain of the wood satiny beneath my fingertips. She had an old boom box loaded up with CDs: jazz and blues and even some forty-year-old hard rock, which started while we set the table. And her chicken and dumplings smelled so good I wanted to cry. Trusting her for reasons that had everything to do with her magic and her calm self-assuredness, I turned off the video; I had no desire to record Nell Ingram, She was a private woman and I wanted to honor that.
Nell didn’t offer grace, and when I commented on that, considering her ultra-right-wing background, she said, “I believe in God. I just don’t know if I like him much. I sure don’t like the colonel’s God, but then Ernest Jackson’s going to hell someday. If I get lucky, I’ll be the one to send him there.”
She was fierce, for such a tiny little thing. Sharp-faced, delicate, and lean, with long, slender, strong fingers and hair she had never cut, worn parted down the middle and hanging to her hips. She’d have been almost pretty, if she had tried to be. But Nell didn’t put on airs for anyone. Nell was just, purely, Nell. Pale-skinned where she wasn’t tanned, farmer-John-style clothes, work boots. Capable looking. And man, could she cook! The odors were enough to make Beast want to come out and chow down, the music selection was funky enough to make me want to dance, and Nell had cooked enough to feed herself for a week, which meant that there was plenty for me without the guilt of taking someone else’s food.
As I ate my second helping of flaky biscuitlike dumplings in thick chicken gravy, served up in green, hand-thrown pottery bowls big enough to double as horse troughs, Nell sketched what she remembered of the compound. I was able to overlay her sketch with the sat-map photos of the current compound, and quite a few of the buildings were unchanged, which helped a lot in the planning stage of a raid. She knew which building the colonel lived in and where the jail was. And best of all, she knew where the armaments were stored. “They keep ’em here”—she tapped the uneven rectangle that represented a building—“which is right next to the nursery. They know no one’s gonna blow up the weapons and risk killing all the children.”
“Yeah. That’s . . .” I thought through possibilities and discarded
cruel
,
insane
, and
evil
, to choose “not unexpected.”
Nell snorted, and it wasn’t a ladylike snort; it was a hard, ferocious sound. “It’s the way cowards work.”
I didn’t disagree.
“You asked about caves,” she said. “They got several, but they’re used for storage. So far as I ever heard, they weren’t the kind that went anywhere. But there’s a long crevasse here.” She pointed at my sat map to a darker green area. I had thought it was just a different kind of tree growing close together so the leaves overlapped, but according to the topo map, she was right, it was a narrow ravine. “That’s how they get in and out. A crick runs along the bottom, then goes underground for a ways. It comes back out on the Philemons’ property, and the entrance can be seen from their house. There’s no way past. Trust me. The Philemon family are church related and they let the colonel use their vehicles in return for concessions.”
“Money?” I asked.
“Access to the womenfolk.” Her eyes went harder, a flint
“Marry you? At twelve?”
“Yeah. He’s an old pervert. Come on in. I got coffee going and food in the slow cooker. Hope you like chicken and dumplings. I missed lunch and I’m starving.”
“I’m always hungry. But
twelve
?” Nell didn’t smile, but she did call off her dogs. That and an offer to feed me was a start.
***
Nell knew stuff. Nell was like a font of knowledge and wisdom, strength and power, innocence and hard-won independence. I liked her instantly, which didn’t happen to me often. I sat at her antique kitchen table, the boards smooth from long use, the finish mostly gone and the grain of the wood satiny beneath my fingertips. She had an old boom box loaded up with CDs: jazz and blues and even some forty-year-old hard rock, which started while we set the table. And her chicken and dumplings smelled so good I wanted to cry. Trusting her for reasons that had everything to do with her magic and her calm self-assuredness, I turned off the video; I had no desire to record Nell Ingram, She was a private woman and I wanted to honor that.
Nell didn’t offer grace, and when I commented on that, considering her ultra-right-wing background, she said, “I believe in God. I just don’t know if I like him much. I sure don’t like the colonel’s God, but then Ernest Jackson’s going to hell someday. If I get lucky, I’ll be the one to send him there.”
She was fierce, for such a tiny little thing. Sharp-faced, delicate, and lean, with long, slender, strong fingers and hair she had never cut, worn parted down the middle and hanging to her hips. She’d have been almost pretty, if she had tried to be. But Nell didn’t put on airs for anyone. Nell was just, purely, Nell. Pale-skinned where she wasn’t tanned, farmer-John-style clothes, work boots. Capable looking. And man, could she cook! The odors were enough to make Beast want to come out and chow down, the music selection was funky enough to make me want to dance, and Nell had cooked enough to feed herself for a week, which meant that there was plenty for me without the guilt of taking someone else’s food.
As I ate my second helping of flaky biscuitlike dumplings in thick chicken gravy, served up in green, hand-thrown pottery bowls big enough to double as horse troughs, Nell sketched what she remembered of the compound. I was able to overlay her sketch with the sat-map photos of the current compound, and quite a few of the buildings were unchanged, which helped a lot in the planning stage of a raid. She knew which building the colonel lived in and where the jail was. And best of all, she knew where the armaments were stored. “They keep ’em here”—she tapped the uneven rectangle that represented a building—“which is right next to the nursery. They know no one’s gonna blow up the weapons and risk killing all the children.”
“Yeah. That’s . . .” I thought through possibilities and discarded
cruel
,
insane
, and
evil
, to choose “not unexpected.”
Nell snorted, and it wasn’t a ladylike snort; it was a hard, ferocious sound. “It’s the way cowards work.”
I didn’t disagree.
“You asked about caves,” she said. “They got several, but they’re used for storage. So far as I ever heard, they weren’t the kind that went anywhere. But there’s a long crevasse here.” She pointed at my sat map to a darker green area. I had thought it was just a different kind of tree growing close together so the leaves overlapped, but according to the topo map, she was right, it was a narrow ravine. “That’s how they get in and out. A crick runs along the bottom, then goes underground for a ways. It comes back out on the Philemons’ property, and the entrance can be seen from their house. There’s no way past. Trust me. The Philemon family are church related and they let the colonel use their vehicles in return for concessions.”
“Money?” I asked.
“Access to the womenfolk.” Her eyes went harder, a flint
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