The Masked Man and the Orphan Girl

By Jeff Shannon

"The Masked Man and the Orphan Girl" is a suspenseful murder story set in a small Mississippi town in the 1980's. Cranberry Farmer, a teenage girl who has lost her parents, flees from her adopted home. Her ordeal, survival instincts, and new life frame the central perspective of the story. Off-setting her world is the "masked man," who is a killer with a bizarre ritualistic pattern. The reader is kept guessing about who he is, and why he behaves as he does. The county police, particularly the enigmatic sheriff, are thoroughly involved. There are a number of strands, seemingly unrelated, which gradually weave together until a rather surprising ending.

As the novel begins, Cranberry Farmer has just endured the ordeal of her young life. Named by her free-spirited, but deceased parents, now she flees from her adopted relatives. She is seen lugging her suitcase down the road to meet an uncertain fate.

Cheerwood Mississippi, a very fine town, is her home. But it is also the source of incipient evil, emerging as a man dressed in white. Madam Torrance, his first victim (or is she?), reveals to him the last fortune she will ever give: a girl in the water.

The police struggle to find the ritualistic killer. The white man stalks the next victim to be sacrificed. And the orphan girl intensely dreams of water.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667808239

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The Masked Man and the Orphan Girl

© 2021 Jeff Shannon

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-66780-822-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66780-823-9

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Masked Man’s Fortune

Chapter Two: The Angry Waters

Chapter Three: Migration

Chapter Four: The Sheriff’s Domain

Chapter Five: At the Bridge

Chapter Six: Cranberry and Paige

Chapter Seven: He was a Different Boy

Chapter Eight: Rooted by Family

Chapter Nine: Tommy Batiste

Chapter Ten: Life with the Primroses

Chapter Eleven: Philippine Fiesta

Chapter Twelve: Cheerwood was a Fine Town

Chapter Thirteen: Mister Bernie’s Store

Chapter Fourteen: Summoned

Chapter Fifteen: Jeremiah Pettyjohn

Chapter Sixteen: The Cheerwood Star

Chapter Seventeen: Rebecca Mooney

Chapter Eighteen: First Baptist Church

Chapter Nineteen: Linda Torrance

Chapter Twenty: Water, Water, Everywhere Water

Chapter Twenty-One: The County Fair

Chapter Twenty-Two: An Ear on the Inside

Chapter Twenty-Three: Moonshine on the Mooney Bottom

Chapter Twenty-Four: Going Home

Chapter Twenty-Five: Hardy Youngman

Chapter Twenty-Six: Trapping the Rats

Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Calm Before

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Night Crawlers

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Out of the Mist

Chapter Thirty: Into the Flood

The Aftermath

Chapter One:

Masked Man’s Fortune

And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it. —Exodus 32:20

—Words carved on a tree near Cheerwood, Mississippi

He was the strangest-looking client who had ever come to see her. From the moment he walked through the door, she could not take her eyes off his appearance: The formal white suit, glossy pearl shoes, and satin gloves were extravagant. The white top hat made him look even taller than he already was. But that his face and neck were completely coated with a white powder or paste of some kind moved him into the world of the bizarre.

Most striking of all was the mask over his face. It was vertically divided in half down the center of the forehead, nose, and mouth. One side was clear plastic. The other half was dark gray, almost black, with just a touch of transparency to the flesh it concealed. The holes for eyes and mouth were flat and expressionless.

All around the edges of the costume mask, from ear to ear, were sculpted curves. On the clear side the locks were either of hair or leaves, as the shapes were obscure. On the dark side the tubular curves tapered to become horns. It was a masked face of good and evil.

Only his black eyes off-set the visage. His eyes probed through the eye holes and followed her movements. They were empty-seeming even behind the mask.

Was he pretending to be a mime or some kind of performer? Was he mocking her by dressing like this? She wondered if she knew him, and perhaps then might realize what was wrong with him.

It was her vocational gift to read people. She felt there was something abysmal and otherworldly behind the white face and hidden eyes. She was almost certain it was not a charade; he was lost in there.

Nonetheless, he was willing to pay and that made him a client. He had cash in his hand when he came in the door. Other than startling at first, she did not outwardly acknowledge the way he looked. Her kind of work would be among the last to judge appearances or avoid the inner turmoil of a person’s life. In a way, such matters were her business.

He said little. He only wanted her to tell his fortune; that was all. It would have been easy for her to wryly smile and say, Oh, white man, whoever you think you are, just look in the mirror. What do you expect to happen?

To call Madam Torrance a charlatan was too simple a judgment. True, not everything she said and prophesized was genuine. But she was very good at delving, discerning angles, teasing out what was there; she walked the fine line of possibilities and hopes.

There were times when what she saw and revealed came to pass. It was uncanny and she felt a power within herself. She believed in her gift and the air of authenticity underscored her less forthright tricks.

Tell me what you see, he told her. Then he added coldly and cryptically, I will tell you what I see.

She heard him and furtively ducked her eyes to the side. It was hard to look at him. The strangeness was penetrating and ever more disconcerting.

They sat across from each other with the table between them. She hurried through the usual staging and build-up to fortune telling. She wanted this session to be short. Madam Torrance placed her fingers and long red nails over the translucent ball. She remained still for a time as she gazed into it.

When the vision emerged, it was striking. It was more distinct and clearer than usual.

Madam Torrance revealed it, There is a girl in a green jacket. She is there. There. Waiting. Waiting for you. She waits at the end of a long road.

"The girl is standing in the water, standing on the water. She commands the water, and it obeys her."

She looked up at him and waited for what he might say to this.

He was stony and unmoved.

In truth, he did not like water; he never had. He feared the water, which would make what he was about to do even more an act of true devotion.

For a time, the tall white man stared intently at the sorceress sitting across from him.

It went on too long….

A feeling of inexplicable fear climbed up the back of her neck.

It was the last fortune she would ever give.

He rose from the chair, towering and looming over her. He reached over and locked his hand onto her wrist—the very wrist he would saw through to sever her hand.

With no feeling at all in his voice, he said to her, No, witch, it is you who will taste the water.

Chapter Two:

The Angry Waters

Lightning struck the Water Oak where the Gimlick boys built a tree house. The superheated flash sizzled down the trunk and set the wooden structure on fire. Flames burned brightly even amid the thunderstorm. It was such an eerie and inexplicable sight to the few who witnessed it that it might even have been called a Sign .

If it was a sign, then its secrets remained hidden until the time was right.

That time was soon at hand….

The rain which fell in April of 1986 in the town of Cheerwood, Mississippi, was the heaviest in recent memory. A few times a year there was enough rain to turn the barely trickling ditch of Bohannon creek into a fast-moving torrent. This April’s steady and intense downpours pushed the creek to a level of a wild river.

The flood was deadly, and no living creature had any place being near it. But two people were taken by the angry waters.

Bobby Drummond was a local farmer. He grew soybeans, cotton, corn and some sorghum on the same land his daddy farmed before him. He knew every foot of the four hundred-plus acres, most of it on fertile bottom land.

On an April day he chugged along on the reliable older model Massey Ferguson tractor. It was still very wet; the fields of his Mississippi farm had plenty of standing water on the prepared fields.

The heavy rain ceased two days before. This day was a mixture of blue sky and scudding clouds blowing off to the east.

The tractor bounced along the dirt road. Bobby was about to round a corner at the edge of Bohannon creek when something caught his eye. He was used to familiar trees and sights in wooded thickets around the creek.

Bobby investigated the creek, which was a twenty-foot-deep gully at this spot. The rain and subsequent flooding left debris everywhere, but Bobby saw what looked like a distinctive black tree standing almost upright in the middle of the creek. It had never been there before. His first thought was the power of water had somehow carried a strange tree down river and jammed it into the soft bottom.

But something did not register. For one, it was too straight without any branches, and for another there was a large object up against it.

Bobby killed the tractor’s engine, climbed down, and sunk into the soft ground. He kept his eyes on the tree and the large baggy thing which seemed to be stuck to it.

Bobby was like anyone else, his perception always interpreting, checking what was abnormal against the inner catalogue of normal. This was out of the ordinary.

He came to the edge of the creek in full view. The stump or tree, as he could now see it, leaned from its anchor in the bottom of the creek, which still flowed around its base. The lumpy shape sagged away from it. Bobby remained quizzical. He had an instant remembrance of the time a few years back when he was out in the east field harvesting beans, and he saw something peculiar. His mind told him the black circle on the ground was a fire ring. Someone made a campfire here. But it turned out to be three dead turkey buzzards; they must have eaten something poisonous.

And maybe that very memory found its mark, as Bobby grasped what he was now seeing—the image of living-then-dead, and bodies lying not where you would ever expect to find one. The realization rose in a dreadful force of truth: For all at once, Bobby Drummond knew the lumpy black sack attached to the pole in the middle of this remote part of Bohannon creek was a human being.

He audibly wailed, Oh, good mercy, it can’t be! It can’t be!

Bobby Drummond physically shook all the way back home. He needed to get on the phone as fast as he could.

On the April day when the downpour was heaviest and the creek near its crest, a sixteen-year-old girl threw herself into the storm. Her name was Cranberry Farmer; it was the name her free-spirited, and now deceased, parents gave her.

Cran, the most typical of her nicknames, reached a breaking point. She refused her uncle Chet’s advances, surprising him with her vigorous resistance. She backed into the corner of her room and sat down with her back against the wall. As he moved toward her, she kicked with her right leg and caught him with a glancing blow on his shin. It was enough for him to stop and back up. She yanked a blanket off the bed and over and around her drawn-up knees.

He was already dead drunk and enraged when he slapped her face with the back of his hand. Uncle Chet’s lascivious manner had taken a new and horrifying turn. She had witnessed his violence before, but never like this and not toward her.

Chet Primrose fumed out of her room slurring, You don’t live here for free anymore, you little tramp! Then he stomped down the stairs of their small white frame house, got in his truck, and drove off in the rain. Cranberry remained slumped in the corner of her room, balled up with her arms still locked over her knees.

He had made several ambiguous advances lately, though this one was both uninhibited and determined. In the years Cranberry had lived with her aunt and uncle nothing like this had ever happened. Though in this dizzying past week, as she thought about it, there were some things he said and did well before; it was uncomfortable then, and now she saw clearly what she did not want to believe.

But this, this was new. It made her sick and confused. Paige Davidson, Cranberry’s best friend, knew a little. No one else did. Not her Aunt May.

The words reverberated in her mind with a resonant clarity: Free? Free…Free….

Something her inside stirred: The light of freedom, desperately needing to escape with all her will.

When she heard the truck chug off into the distance, Cran felt a sense of urgency, of compelling desire to just go: To get out and run. Now.

She realized in a dark brooding way that freedom meant being gone from here, from this suddenly unlivable life. She felt like some force, some presence almost, took over and led her to the very edge of life.

She would say to herself, and later to Paige: I didn’t think. I just ran.

The little white house where she lived with her aunt and uncle was on the outskirts of Cheerwood. It had been raining for several days. For most of this day it was a hard, steady spring rain. There were even some tornadoes in the area.

A couple of times a year when it rained like this the creeks became rivers. It was hard to believe that these ditches could fill up so fast and so high: Twelve, fifteen, twenty feet higher with brown churning water. But they could and they did, and any living creature stayed clear of the deadly water.

Bohannon creek was the main water course through town. It was a deep gully and it had generations worth of debris in it: discarded tires, animal bones, beer and soda cans, a few dumped appliances. When Cranberry was younger, she played in the creek. Kids clambered up and down the sides, but even then she was instinctively repulsed by the oozy greenish water trickling through.

Now Cranberry ran from the house and her life without any clear thought or intention. The rain was unseasonably chilly, and it plastered her brown hair to her head and soaked through her clothes in short order.

The sprint away from the house finally exhausted her and she slowed to a stop. When she bent over, hands on knees, a thought entered her mind: Go to the water.

She did it without thinking. Everything was loud; the rain was pounding all around. The land was a shallow lake, and it was hard to even tell the difference between water in the air and water on the ground. Cranberry’s staggering, blinding path brought her to the edge of the creek. It was filled to the brim and surging fast. She stood by and felt it; the water seemed like a sinuous dragon rippling by on its way to cause havoc.

She walked along the banks of the river, feeling its muscular power and immense force: She edged ever closer to it, so close she could flick a shoe to the side and clip one of the cresting waves.

Her footsteps sunk into the mixture of mud and grass. Just ahead Cran saw, even through the dense water world, part of the bank collapse and disappear into the brown flood.

Cranberry Farmer came to this spot and stood precariously on a sliver of spongy earth between the raging water and the eroded bank. It was insane to be here, for she had just seen the dragon swallow the ground in front of her.

But she was not thinking, hardly feeling, out of herself so entirely that she did not feel like a self at all—and did not want to feel.

It may have been ten seconds or two minutes. She closed her eyes and clenched her hands to her chest. And then she felt her body easing down as if a hand gently lowered her into the sea. The foothold was gone and so was the girl. She wanted the water to take her and take her it did.

Cran thrashed a few times to right herself in the water. She felt the gripping power of the current hurrying her along the surface. For some fifty feet she was carried almost gently. She felt disembodied watching herself move past a stand of trees, then seeing the pitched roof of a house just over the edge. Her body poured along at the same speed of a half-filled Styrofoam cup; it swirled so close she could have scooped it up as if to drink hot chocolate on a cold morning.

There was no real panic. It was so easy, so helpless.

And then, passively suicidal Cranberry Farmer came to herself. Some part of her, deep and heartfelt, roused from a hypnotic state.

Abject terror stung her. The dragon was gone; now it was all water and fear and the thought of imminent drowning. Her arms flailed and she gulped the fetid water. Had she not been a good swimmer, she would already have been lost. Cranberry kicked hard and a shoe disappeared from her foot. Her right arm slammed into a log half in the water and half jammed into the bank. She felt it tear at her skin.

There was almost nothing she could do. The water was deep and taut, and it carried away everything in its grip. She knew she would be taken with it until her already weakening strength gave out completely. It was all she could do to flail and kick and keep her head up.

Her headed bobbed up and she saw the Lembright road bridge looming ahead. It was one of the roads over Bohannon creek. Cranberry knew if she was thrust into that bridge she would go under it and either be smashed or forced below the water and drown.

Just as she spied the bridge ahead, her little corky body swung with the current to the left side of the creek. There in front of it, overhanging the creek, was a copse of trees. In normal times it would have been far above the water line, but now it was just at the edge.

She swept toward it, and with all her strength grabbed an overhanging branch with both arms. Cranberry hung on it while the force of the water pushed her bottom and legs forward. The tree was spindly with spiny barbs all along the branches.

Cranberry Farmer was pierced and cut all along her hands and arms. She cried out in pain, but held on to the precious, precarious hold. Gradually, inch by painful inch, enduring scrapes and punctures, she pulled herself up and rolled onto the bank.

She sprawled in the weedy bushes like a bedraggled cat. The sixteen-year-old lay there exhausted and unmoving. The river surged and the rain continued to pound. Somehow it all felt soothing with unaccountable peace. The throbbing pain was soon to return, but for a few moments she did not feel it.

For several violent minutes Cranberry Farmer’s sad life was forfeit, and then given back to her. She nested in the scraggly wasteland. The voice came again; it was not a voice in any audible way, just a conviction, a clarity of direction if only for the next few moments: Get up and walk.

She followed the command and struggled unsteadily to her feet. Cran walked shoeless with wets socks flapping about. She moved toward the bridge that would have been her death and gazed down at the muddy waters. There was no dragon, no primeval chaos, nor carrier of her fate; it was a flooded creek.

Cran crossed over to the other side, absently putting one foot in front of the other. She was numb from the water; the punctures on her arm were beginning to throb.

With nowhere else to go, Cranberry Farmer returned to the home she fled just a little while ago.

She swung open the flimsy door to the back porch and stripped off all her grimy clothes in a heap. She looked like a wraith from the underworld. As Cranberry shuffled up the stairs to her room, she heard her Aunt May call out, Cran, is that you? Cranberry did not answer her, nor did her aunt follow up the question by checking on her.

Cranberry heard the television on in the other room. The maudlin conversation came from the show Aunt May was watching. May Primrose never knew Cran had left the house in the first place, been baptized like no other, and come back from the dead.

Cranberry crawled in bed right away. It was a single bed in her small room. She pulled the covers all the way up. It felt snug and warm, temporarily safe like a little cocoon. When she came out from under the covers, her uncle would still be around. What then?

But things were different. Something profound had changed. It almost felt like a dream: allowing herself to die, coming so close, and then somehow surviving. All in an hour’s time.

For now, there would be sleep; she was so exhausted. Cranberry Farmer, her suicide attempt failed, slept for at least an hour. When she woke up it was dark outside. If her aunt looked in on her, she was not aware of it. Aunt May continued to occupy her own dreamy reality.

There was no sign of Uncle Chet, though the quiet was surely a false peace. He was probably still out drinking, which darkened the thought about what things might be like when he got home. He was often unpredictable, but when he left this time, he was angry and frustrated and that rarely ended well.

Cranberry shuffled into the upstairs bathroom and closed the door. Like the old fairy tales, the mirror told the truth. What a naked sight she was. She sometimes thought of herself as a bit too hippy, but maybe it was because she had thin legs.

But the let me have a good look at my body in the mirror was not the focus right now. Instead, what she saw was the damage done by the death plunge in the creek. Cranberry Farmer’s shoulder length brown hair was stringy and wild. She had blotches of mud on her torso, and of all things, a leaf plastered to her inner thigh.

Most of all, her arms made her look like a drug addict whose needle punctures had gone into a frenzy. Up and down both arms, with some on her side and one red welt on the side of her left breast, there were scratches, punctures, and wounds. She was aching badly. She took some aspirin to relieve the pain.

As pitiful and damaged as she looked, she had a feeling of wonder of even being here in this moment. A little while ago her life hung in the balance, and she let it happen.

Do you want to live? It was like a second voice, also belonging to her, asking the honest question.

Do I want to live? she whispered softly back to herself.

Do I? The question floated above her, unanswered.

Cranberry Farmer knew that she could not live like this anymore. She was given a second life, which meant there was no way to return to, or face, the old life.

She treated her cuts with some first aid cream and bandages. The aspirin was helping, but not enough to eliminate the pain. She dressed in fresh jeans and a T-shirt promoting deep sea fishing on the Mississippi Gulf Coast; it was a place she had never visited.

Cranberry walked into her surrogate parents’ bedroom, pausing to listen to the sounds from the downstairs. The TV was still on. There was no other sound.

There were only two phones in the house, one downstairs and the one in their upstairs bedroom. She almost never used this one, but now she needed to.

For a full minute she sat on the double bed looking at the phone.

Cran picked up the receiver and dialed. As one, two, three rings sounded, it occurred to her that this moment of decision hung in the balance.

Finally, the call was answered: Hello. It was a female voice. Paige Davidson, Cranberry’s best friend, answered the phone.

Paige, it’s me.

What’s the matter? Paige replied immediately, hearing something in her voice.

I think I need to do it.

Really? You mean it?

I think so. I have to now or I don’t think I will.

What happened? No, tell me later. I’m—we’re ready. I mean, I don’t have a car. How are you going to get here?

I’ll walk, I guess.

Cran, are you all right? Can you do it?

Yes, I have to.

Now? Really now?

I’m packing.

Okay. I’m here.

Wait for me.

I love you.

I love you, too.

Cranberry felt the sense of urgency to leave, as if every moment of delay was a risk. It would take a while, though. She had one suitcase and a backpack. A lot was going to have to be left behind.

She hurriedly gathered clothes, shoes, anything she would need, because the future was open from here on; there was no return ticket. She dug through the drawers of a small desk and saw it right away: a favorite photograph of her as a toddler being held in the air. Mother held one arm, Daddy held the other, and she smiled with glee.

There they were, the Bohemian pair: Austin Farmer with his long beard groomed to a point a few inches below his chin. She could not see it from the photo, but his hair was even longer in the back and undoubtedly braided in a short ponytail.

And mother, oh she was pretty. In another world she could have been a model—which was so far from who she was. She was on the tall side, but long-legged and slender. She had high cheeks, a broad beaming smile, though with the same inverted pouty mouth that Cranberry inherited from her. Mother wore a bandana over her head and a colorful blouse.

The reminiscence had to wait, though. Cranberry grabbed photographs, bracelets, trinkets, and lots of small things to shove in her backpack.

So much had to be abandoned.

As she worked quickly, a background conversation was going on in her mind. It was like the next table over at a restaurant with a group of people talking about something important, and she heard only parts of it—but it was all inside.

The word, though she really did not know it well was serendipity.

Just think now: it is a wonder, isn’t it? Serendipity; that’s it, I think. Paige answered the phone. She might not have. But she did. And only when you were ready. And, oh God, what has happened to you…you’ve barely even allowed yourself to think about it yet.

Clothes flew into the suitcase. Cran’s arms throbbed. The hum of conversation continued under the surface.

You were going to die. Be dead, whatever being dead is. But here you are. Think about that now. Do you know who are you?

She pressed the brown suitcase closed; it had seen better days and the snaps strained from the bulge. There was no room to spare for anything else to fit in.

Do you feel anything, Cran? Who are you?

She stopped gathering. That was all. The rest would have to stay: An old guitar in the closet. She never got far with that. A couple of dresses. A record player.

Cranberry Farmer, sixteen and desperate, on the verge of a life-changing event, was about to be an orphan all over again. It felt like she was seeing herself from a distance: as if she saw herself from a mountaintop, but everything below was shrouded in mist. And now it was time to go down into the midst of it.

Chapter Three:

Migration

It was getting late and, thankfully, dark outside. Cranberry slung the backpack over her shoulders and did her best to heave the suitcase down the stairs without Aunt May hearing anything.

The rain had mostly quit, but the evening skies were still windy. It was going to be a chore lugging a stuffed suitcase a mile down the road, but it was a one-way street now for soon—to-be-homeless Cranberry Farmer.

She headed down Lightsey Avenue. She just wanted to get there as soon as possible, whatever there at the Davidsons held in store for her. There was no way to move fast. Cran lurched the suitcase along, adding fatigued muscles to throbbing wounds.

At one point, Cran stopped and sat down on the suitcase. Feeling sorry for herself, she whimpered a little. The black loneliness of the night asserted itself; there was no one to hear her crying. No one to comfort or rescue her. It was already so much the parcel of her young life. And like other times and circumstances, the reality of Cran’s situation meant she had to do it herself. Either get up and get going or life stops here. It was a profound motivator to have no one to fall back on.

A few cars passed her. A girl lugging a suitcase and wearing a backpack on a rainy night must have raised eyebrows, but no one stopped.

That was until a Dodge Ram truck turned on the street a quarter mile ahead. And it was a case of…if I could imagine the worst that might happen right now, it would be, but it can’t possibly happen, can it?

What about that serendipity?

The truck made a left turn and the headlights probed down the street, dead ahead to where Cranberry Farmer was escaping.

A feeling of dread ballooned in her midsection. The husky throb of the diesel engine told her who it was; the one person she did not want to meet right now in this very place.

She was every bit like the proverbial deer in the headlights. There was no running, no escape, because now Uncle Chet, rogue predator, serial drunk, clearly saw her and was easing his pickup truck to a stop right in front of where she intended to walk, suitcase in hand.

He leaned out the driver’s side window and slurred with unfeigned exasperation, Wha’ the faaa…!? Chet Primrose prided himself on rarely cussing (not much), because he had a delightful little way of substituting a near cuss word of his own making.

She stopped where she was, not even setting the suitcase down. Cran imagined smelling his inebriated breath on her neck and face.

Cranberry Farmer did not think about what to do, which would have resulted in indecision and paralysis. Instead, she just kept walking. The out-of-body voice told her to walk. If nothing else, it meant not surrendering.

She was some thirty steps further down Lightsey street when she heard his pickup truck jam into reverse and start backing up.

She winced as if the truck might strike her from behind, but he kept it on the road next to her. Cranberry kept walking, but as he passed her in reverse she heard him yell out of the now open passenger side window, Where the hell do you think you’re going, you little bitch?

She looked straight ahead and moved past the open window. Adrenaline coursed through her and the burdensome suitcase felt lighter.

Chet screamed at her again, his sudsy voice whining like a wounded