Read Online The Skull Ring by Scott Nicholson - Free Book Online

boys living out West. It's nice to have somebody I can fuss over."
    She patted Julia's hand.
    "I only hope this doesn't spoil my appetite for dinner," Julia said, before lifting another forkful.
    "A girl your age ought not worry about what she eats. There's a lot of that going on, I hear, girls throwing up and wasting away because they're scared of getting fat. A real man doesn’t mind a little meat on the bone."
    Julia grinned. She wasn't called a girl very often, not at twenty-seven. "No need to worry. I'm not afraid of a few extra pounds."
    Only other things. Lions and tigers and bears and Satanic cults, oh my.
    "Mrs. Covington—"
    The woman held up a wrinkled hand. "How many times do I got to tell you? Call me 'Mabel.'"
    “Okay, Mabel.”
    “Walter Triplett’s been around a right good bit lately.”
    “He seems like he knows what he’s doing.”
    “A real fix-it man," Mrs. Covington said. "Fixed everything up real nice. Got away with murder, some say.”
    “Murder?”
    "I shouldn't be airing out nobody else's dirty laundry," Mrs. Covington said, as if she didn't get the opportunity as often as she liked. "But a body ought to keep themselves informed. So it ain't gossip, it's more just passing along information."
    Julia gripped her purse tighter. The falling dusk suddenly felt like a suffocating blanket, a funeral shroud for the living. The cat jumped into Mrs. Covington's lap, barely visible except for the green glow of its eyes. The woman stroked it and resumed rocking.
    "Walter lost his wife about eight years back. When I say 'lost,' that's exactly what I mean. They was out camping on Cracker Knob yonder." The woman waved a trembling arm toward unseen mountains. "And Walter came back the next day and said she had disappeared. Just up and walked off in the middle of the night. Of course, they rounded up a big search team, every man what could walk and even a few women, and went over every square inch of that mountain. Never was no sign of her."
    The chair's squeaking was amplified by the silence of the night. Julia noticed for the first time how softly night descended, how it crept up around you, drifted from the trees, rose like smoke while simultaneously descending like dark snow. Insidious, slow, and determined.
    "Walter swears up and down she was right next to him in their little tent, sleeping one minute, gone the next. Didn't take her hiking boots or nothing, just whatever clothes she was wearing at the time. And she was a Stamey, old family. Not the sort to do foolish things, raised to know a little bit about the woods."
    "Poor Walter," Julia found herself saying. So that was the thing she had seen in his eyes, the bit of gray haunting the brown of his irises. A sadness buried deep.
    "Poor Walter, maybe. But poorer for her, I'd say. 'Course, there is all kinds of caves and cliff edges on Cracker Knob where a body could meet the Maker, but a mountain girl would know to watch out for such dangers. And a mountain girl wouldn't wander off in the dead of night no way."
    Mrs. Covington spoke as if looking through the mist of years. "Some say Walter kind of helped her along in her disappearing act. That he helped her over a cliff, if you know what I mean. Or maybe strangled her and tucked her in some of those rock crevices on the north slope."
    “He seems okay to me. He’s polite.”
    “Well, I hate to speculate on things I don’t know for sure, but I hear the Stamey girl was pregnant when she went missing.”
    The pie felt like a lump of wood in her throat as she imagined a scared young woman wandering lost in the wild mountains, with their granite rock shelves and laurel tangles.
    "Of course, that ain’t too surprising, since they hung out with Hartley," Mrs. Covington asked.
    The name clanged a faint but disturbing bell. "What about Hartley?"
    "Deke Hartley lived in that house for five years. A strange old coot. Burned the lights through the night, came and went at all hours, never seemed to settle into a