“Maybe just the middle-aged blues.”
She shook her head determinedly. “No.” She glanced about, as if looking for a more private place. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.
“About what?”
“Daddy. I want to know what drove him away from me.”
“Look, Serena, sometimes you just have to …”
She shook her head adamantly. “It’s better to know, don’t you think? Better to know what happened?”
Kinley felt as if he’d been shot back in time, and he was once again in Jefferson’s Drug Store, facing her father as he had the afternoon Ray had asked him the same question in the same determined voice. He thought of all the times since then that he’d actually found out “what happened,” but had felt no better off for all he’d learned.
“I don’t know, Serena, maybe it’s not better,” he said, an answer that he knew would disappoint her.
Lois arrived an hour later. She wore a plain black skirt and blouse, and looked considerably older than he remembered, as if time had suddenly swept down upon her, done its vulture’s dance on her face and eyes.
“Hello, Jack,” she said as she stepped over to him.
“Lois.”
“How long’s it been?”
“Four years, five? I’m not sure.”
“Not exactly,” Lois said. “I was at your grandmother’s funeral.”
“You were?”
“I came over, said hello.”
“I’m sorry, Lois, a lot of that time …”
“A blur, I know,” Lois said briskly. “It doesn’t matter. I was always just ‘Ray’s wife’ to you anyway.”
As she walked away, Kinley wondered if what she’d said was true, if his mind had done its old trick of making people invisible. If so, there was nothing he could have done about it. He had long ago accepted the fact that his mind had its own postures and inclinations. So much so that he sometimes felt it hardly belonged to him at all, that it was something separate, a small gray animal curled up in his skull, peering out from behind his eyes, lurking there, alive and breathing in the dark, airless chamber.
Lois paused at the casket, then, without turning around, walked directly out of the house and into the backyard. From his chair in the living room, Kinley could see her there, her back to him as she stood half concealed by the slender tendrils of the enormous weeping willow that consumed the small backyard. For a moment, she stood very rigidly, her shoulders lifted, her head held slightly upward, as if she were watching the willow’s shredded tent as it trembled around her.
A moment later, Serena joined her there, and even from a distance, Kinley could tell they were arguing, a struggle he assumed to be the last exchanges in an Oedipal war whose outcome no longer mattered.
Still, it was clear that the war went forward anyway, and as the seconds passed, it built steadily, the voices growing louder, until Kinley could almost hear the words themselves. It only ended when Lois suddenly glanced toward the house, caught Kinley’s silent, staring eyes, and lifted her hand to silence Serena. After that, the two of them walked back inside.
“Serena and I were just discussing the house,” Lois said to Kinley as she returned to the living room. “I was trying to give her some advice.”
“Well, you could rent it, I suppose,” Kinley told them, already uncomfortable in the role of family advisor.
“No,” Lois snapped. “I think she should get rid of it. Ray was able to keep it up. But for somebody like Serena, a single woman, living away at college, I think she’d be better off without it.”
Serena stared at Kinley pointedly but said nothing.
“She needs to sell it,” Lois said. “That’s the best thing.” She turned back toward the casket. “With him gone, there’s …” She stopped, let her eyes drift back over to Serena. “There’s nothing else to do.”
Serena’s face grew tense, but she did not speak.
Lois turned to Kinley. “Well, I guess I’ll see you at the funeral tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
She offered him her hand. “Funerals. That’s where we seem to have all our meetings.”
Kinley shook her hand. “Lois, about last time …”
“Don’t worry about it, Jack,” Lois said. “I’ve learned that when people forget you’re around, they also stop bothering you.” She smiled thinly. “Ray told me what you said, you know.”
“Said?”
“Years ago,” Lois explained. “When he told you about my mother’s death.”
Kinley said nothing.
“You were very matter-of-fact, just like always,” Lois went on, her intensity building, set to explode. “Your theory was that I’d loved my mother and hated my father, and so I’d decided to make him a murderer.”
“Yes, I remember that,” Kinley said unemphatically, trying not to prime the powder.
“Well, you were wrong, Jack,” Lois told him flatly. “I loved my father and hated my mother. But I still had the same suspicions. Can you imagine that?”
With that, she spun around, and headed for the door.
Almost as if moved by the hard waves of an aftershock, Kinley and Serena followed her, watching out the front window as she strode to her car, got in and drove away.
“She’s one of those women,” Serena said quietly.
“Those women?”
“The kind who never expect anything but hurt,” Serena said. “Victims.”
Kinley watched as Lois’s car headed down the narrow, tree-lined street. He could see her head in silhouette above the driver’s seat, a small, dark shape whose look reminded him so much of Maria Spinola that he wondered if some backwoods version of Fenton Norwood was already stalking her, perhaps toying with the lock on her back door.
By mid-afternoon the house was crowded with Ray’s neighbors and associates. At first Ray’s sister Millie was the only one he’d recognized. But as the hours of the wake passed, he found himself recognizing others, some of them from high school, a smattering of teachers and students, along with other local personalities whose faces he could recall, town figures of one sort of another, grocers, barbers. He could tell that quite a few of them had recognized him, as well. But that was not surprising, since the local paper had plastered his face on the front page every time a new book had been published.
By early evening the house was empty again, and Kinley and Serena walked out on the front porch and sat down in the swing. It was a cool evening, and Serena wrapped herself loosely in one of Ray’s old sweaters.
“You didn’t really have to stay in the house the whole day,” she said.
“I wanted to,” Kinley told her.
She smiled delicately. “He would have liked that. He believed in loyalty.” She tucked her arm beneath his and let her head drift lazily onto his shoulder. “We used to sit out here when I was a little girl. Just like this. In the night. All snuggled up.” She pulled away from him abruptly. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”
“When it happens suddenly like that,” Kinley told her, “it always takes some time to adjust.”
Serena nodded. She seemed more composed than she’d been earlier in the day.
“When are you going back?” she asked casually.
“The day after tomorrow.”
“You can stay here until then,” Serena told him. “And I’ll go to my mother’s place.”
“No, that’s all right. Like I said, I have a room at the hotel.”
“No, stay here,” Serena insisted. “Daddy would have wanted you to.”
He decided to do as she asked, and later that night he found himself alone in Ray’s living room, his eyes watching the casket as it rested in its deep nest of swirling flowers. For a long time, his mind struck him as uncharacteristically blank, as if a kind of numbness had overtaken it, blocking out whatever pain he might otherwise have felt.
He stood up, walked out onto the porch and took in the cool night air. The night was closest to him, and he’d always felt more at ho
me in dark places, the lightless horse stall in which Colin Bright had stacked the bodies of the murdered Comstocks, the small cramped smokehouse, where Mildred Haskell had performed her last experiment on little Billy Flynn, the damp cavern where her husband Edgar had later deposited those tiny, torn remains. Kinley had been in all those places and felt more at ease in them than any of the bright fields he’d flown over in his travels, or the green pastures he’d wandered in, his eyes roaming the grasses in search of that particular place where the earth had been turned up, the body finally uncovered and pulled up from its hidden vault. There was even something in the phrase “brought to light” that had always made him feel ill at ease, as if it were destined finally to drive back the vampire darkness in which he breathed far more comfortably.
After a time, he walked back into the house, and down the short corridor to the room that had been Ray’s in high school, and which he’d long ago converted into a small, cramped office.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, as if to keep its interior hidden from eyes Ray would not have wanted prying into his private space. There was a small desk, gunmetal gray, with an ancient black typewriter and a single reading lamp. Several cardboard filing drawers had been stacked next to it, their sides bulging with the papers Ray had stuffed inside. Homemade wooden bookshelves took up the walls’ remaining space, rising to the ceiling to make a kind of angular pit in which to house the desk. Books were stacked randomly on the shelves, bloating them out, forcing them to buckle, so packed and overburdened they looked as if they were about to snap beneath their heavy loads.
Ray had been the ultimate autodidact, the unschooled, self-educated dabbler in a hundred disparate fields. There were novels of every sort, collections of stories and literary essays, along with works of history, biography, social science, assorted titles that had struck him at the moment. Only one shelf had the look of careful organization, and that was the one devoted to Kinley’s books, each standing side by side, as if Ray had taken as much pride in them as Kinley had. One by one, Kinley took them down, read the old inscriptions he’d written year by year: To my dear friend and fellow crime buff. To the only man whose nose remains with mine on the bloody path. To Ray, my tenth book for your fortieth year.
When he’d read the last one, Kinley suddenly felt very tired. He walked over to the desk and slumped down in the small swivel chair. From that position, he could see a small rectangle of white paper which Ray had taped to the wall just above his typewriter. It hung in the gray shadow of the bookshelf which hung above the desk, and he had to lean forward and squint slightly in order to make out what it said. It was obviously a line which Ray had read in some kind of essay on mystery writing, an idea that had struck him so powerfully he’d actually taken the time to type it out and tape it to his wall:
In an age of mass death, the mystery remains the final redoubt of romantic individualism in its insistence that one life, unlawfully taken, still matters so much within the human universe that the failure to discover how and by whom that life was taken contains all we still may know of romantic terror.
Kinley studied the quotation for a moment, his mind shooting back to the train station where Ray had brought him after his grandmother’s funeral. There had been something strange in his deep green eyes that day, something Kinley had never quite forgotten. Later he had thought it might be loneliness, or family trouble, or perhaps nothing more than the sort of middle-aged despair he’d seen come and go in scores of his acquaintances. Now he wondered if Ray had been feeling something less ordinary than all that, and that if he’d looked deeper into his old friend’s eyes that day, he might have glimpsed his longing for an answer.
SIX
At Serena’s invitation Kinley rode in the first car behind the hearse, with Lois and Serena opposite him, and Ray’s sister Millie and her husband, Grady, at his side. A long serpentine procession followed along behind them, car after car in a twining line that stretched for nearly two miles up the mountainside to the spacious cemetery, where Ray was finally put to rest.
The service was longer than he’d expected, and while one of the local ministers droned on, Kinley found himself thinking again about the last time he’d seen Ray alive, his memory very vivid.
The rain had been falling in great gray sheets along the asphalt railway siding as he’d hopped aboard the northbound train. Ray had remained on the siding, looking up, his green eyes troubled, his voice tense and urgent as he’d spoken his last words before the train shuddered for an instant, then slowly, laboriously made its way forward, Ray trudging along beside it, as if intent on making a final point.
It’s hard to sleep, Kinley.
You’ve always had trouble with that.
How about you?
I sleep fine.
Ray had smiled at Kinley’s reply, an eerie, discomforting smile, as if his answer had been full of secret ironies. Then the smile had vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and Ray’s face had grown very solemn again.
Except for the eyes. They’d continued to search Kinley’s face, as if looking for some code for an otherwise indecipherable text.
Kinley, are you …?
It was precisely at that moment the train had jerked ahead, moving steadily faster as Ray had stepped up his pace, trotting beside it now, as if half determined to leap aboard.
Kinley, are you …?
The train was advancing rapidly now, so that Ray was almost running to keep up with it, the rain exploding against his heavily moving body like crystal bullets, until at last, when he could no longer keep up, he’d simply stopped and watched silently as Kinley waved to him. “Bye, Ray,” he’d shouted.
But Ray had never returned that last farewell, so that, as Kinley realized now, the preacher’s voice a dull murmur in the background, their long friendship had ended with an unfinished and still unanswered question.
Kinley, are you …?
Once the funeral was over, Kinley and Serena returned to the house on Beaumont Street. Kinley took a seat in the living room, his eyes fixed on the now empty space where Ray’s coffin had rested only a few hours before.
“They’re always moving,” Serena said as she sat opposite him in the small, cramped living room. She nodded toward his hands. “Always moving.”
He pressed them down on the arms of his chair. “It’s an old habit. I’ve had it all my life.”
“It’s a grasping motion,” Serena said, “the way your hands move.” She smiled self-consciously. “I took this pop-psychology course in college. They talked about body language.” She glanced toward his hands. “What you’re always doing with them, it’s called a grasping motion.”
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
She shrugged. “It’s just a nervous response.”
“To what?”
She shook her head. “It was just pop-psychology. They didn’t go very far into anything.”
“I see,” Kinley said, his eyes lingering on the bare area of floor where Ray’s casket had once been.
Serena studied him a moment, as if unsure. “There’s something I have to tell you.” She hesitated. “I wasn’t going to mention it, but I think I should.”
“What is it?”
“Somebody went through Daddy’s office the afternoon he died.”
“How do you know?”
“Because when I came in the next day, it looked sort of different.”
“Messed up?”
“Just the opposite,” Serena said. “Straightened up. Everything neat and orderly, the way Daddy would never have left it.” She stopped, waited for him to respond, then continued when he didn’t. “And something else,” she said pointedly. “You know that file cabinet in his office?”
“Yes.”
“Several files were missing. Whole letters. Three of them: D, O and S. Everything in those files was gone. The folders were there, but there was nothing in them.”
“Maybe there’d never been anything in them,” Kinley told her.
Serena shook her head adamantly. “No, there had to have been.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Daddy only made a file when he had something to put in it. There’s no X or Z because he never had anything to file under those letters.”
Kinley nodded.
“And I looked at the empty folders, too,” Serena added, “the ones for D, O and S. They were stretched and cracked at the seam. I’ve worked in file cabinets long enough to know that that only happens when the files have had things in them. Usually lots of things, not just a few pieces, enough to weight the folders down.”
“D, O, S,” Kinley said softly. “Any idea what was in them?”
“No.”
“Old cases? New ones?”
“It could have been either kind.”
“Did he file things under names or subjects?”
“Both.”
“That makes things a little complicated,” Kinley said.
Serena waved her hand. “But that’s the way he was,” she said. “Complicated. That’s why it bothers me, the missing files. They could have been about anything.”
Later that night, Kinley found it difficult to sleep, so he wandered down the corridor to Ray’s office and checked the files himself. In the yellowish light that came from the desk lamp in Ray’s cramped office, he pulled out the upper file drawer to see if any other files were missing. They were all in place, all of them but the letters Serena had mentioned. He checked the file folders and noticed all the same things Serena had. There was no doubt that a great deal of material had once been in the folders, and that all of it was gone.
For a long time, Kinley remained in Ray’s office, randomly fingering the remaining files, as if trying to soak up something of the spirit that had ruminated there, studying the crimes and misdemeanors of his native ground. They seemed almost trivial, a world of petty larcenies and family squabbles that never soared toward the dark envelope Kinley pressed against continually in his own books. How could Dottie Adair’s occasional forgeries compare with what Mildred Haskell had done to her neighbor’s son, or Old Man Adams’s public drunkenness to Colin Bright’s demonic games?
Evidence of Blood Page 4
