Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  Stephen Phelps

  A hole in the one, as good as a hole in the other. When Daniel Turner, crouching like a sniper at Mom’s bedroom window, shot Johnny Bellefleur in the ribs, I sighed. That was all. Sighed. Like an extra rib that was lodged in my chest melted and I could breathe. I could breathe at midnight when the trellised jasmine blossoms made the night sweet as if the stars would pollinate them, or the moon. I could breathe at noon when heat rippled from the sun and sky.

  I tore a strand of jasmine from the front porch. White sap sticky on my hands. Perfume in the night air. Stinking the inside of the car as I drove to the hospital.

  But Felicity had checked out. No forwarding address.

  I needed none. I drove to Philips Highway, talked to the other girls.

  They said, In the hospital.

  They said, A bastard shot her – eyes like I might be the bastard.

  They said, Felicity who?

  I bought one of them, abused her for an hour, paid her forty bucks, and tucked the jasmine in her hair. Get out, I said.

  She did.

  But with each breath, the pain in my chest grew.

  I found Felicity and put her in the construction trailer where I could get her when I wanted her.

  Not enough.

  I forced Kathryn in the garage while Samantha slept in her car seat.

  Not enough.

  I parked by Johnny Bellefleur’s house and watched his wife’s comings and goings. The way she stood on the driveway and smoothed her blouse over her breasts when she got out of her car. The way she fumbled with the keys every time she unlocked the front door. The way she left the door open as she turned on the inside lights – to escape if someone was hiding inside? To let me shove into the house from outside?

  Not enough.

  I climbed over the fence into the backyard. Screwdriver in my belt. To stop the dog? To jimmy the lock on the sliding glass door? To hold against her throat as I smelled her fear.

  I stepped on to the back porch and watched through the window as she and Johnny Bellefleur struggled in bed. Her fumbling hands on him. His on her. I rested the screwdriver against the windowpane. I pressed the tip against the glass and dragged it across the invisible grit. It left a thin white scar. What couldn’t I do to him with it? What couldn’t I do to her?

  But he rolled off and she sat on the bed. Did she stare at the window? Did she see me watching?

  I drew back from the house, slipped across the dark lawn, and went out over the fence.

  Coward, I called myself as I drove back to Fernandina. And I hated cowards.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Johnny

  ‘Why not believe in fictions? If they make life livable, why not? Yes, we’re all dying. Yes, everything we’ve built will fall down. Yes, in the end, it comes to nothing. But why beat yourself up over it? Why not believe it’s all a gift?’ The Baptist Hospital psychologist drum-rolled his fingers on the table. The putting-green-colored carpet in his office banked against the floor-to-ceiling window. In the distance, beyond the St Johns River, white clouds hung in the sky, as soft as fictions.

  Why not believe in them?

  The previous afternoon, as we’d left the construction site trailer, I’d said to Felicity, ‘You didn’t see us here, OK?’

  She’d answered, ‘They don’t pay me to see during the day. Only at night.’

  Why not blind myself to the daylight? And the darkness too, if that helped?

  I said to the psychologist, ‘I know a woman with a leg wound. It’s infected. It’s so bad you can hardly bear to be in the same room with her. She believes she’s getting better. But she’s dying – you can see it.’

  ‘There’s a difference between stupidity and believing in fictions,’ he said. No drum roll.

  After my appointment, Lillian picked me up in front of the hospital. As we drove up the entrance ramp to the highway, she asked, ‘How are you feeling?’

  I said, ‘I believe I’m doing better.’

  She glanced at me. ‘Are you being sarcastic?’

  I said, ‘I don’t know.’

  She’d arranged for us to meet with a man named Jerry Fernin who taught engineering at her college so we could show him the Phelps blueprints and diagrams. When we got there, we spread the blueprints on a conference table, and Fernin inspected them, spending a long time on the sheet that showed the pipes extending into the marsh. He wore jeans, flip-flops, and a white T-shirt, and, except for the gray in his ponytail, I would’ve thought he was a student. Lillian said he consulted around the country on environmental engineering problems.

  He looked concerned. ‘Where’d you get these?’

  Lillian said, ‘Is there something wrong?’

  He looked again at the pipes. ‘No, it’s nice work. Better than nice.’

  Lillian gave me a look, and I asked him, ‘What do you mean, nice?’

  ‘I was at a convention in Atlanta last month, and a couple of designers introduced something like this. They thought it could actually be built three to five years from now at the earliest.’ He went to the other end of the table, brought back one of the machine diagrams, and laid it over the blueprint. ‘They call this zero-impact filtration. It brings in outside water, which cleans the waste and then goes back out with its natural organisms and bacteria intact. Even the water temperature stays the same.’

  ‘That makes no sense,’ I said.

  He tapped the diagram. ‘This is the future. Clean processing, or very close to clean.’

  I looked at him. He wiped a bead of sweat from his nose with a finger. ‘How much did they pay you?’ I asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘What did they give you to say the plans are good?’

  Lillian shook her head. ‘No, Johnny—’

  The man looked vaguely amused.

  I gathered the blueprints and diagrams from the table, folding them, rolling them, balling them together. ‘Nothing these people touch is good. Nothing. It’s filth, and so is anyone they get their hands on.’

  Lillian said, ‘Johnny!’

  The man smiled. ‘It’s cool,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you in the newspapers and on TV. You’ve got problems. I understand. But your problems aren’t mine. These designs are great, the best I’ve seen. If you don’t like me telling you that, ask someone else. You’ll hear the same thing.’

  As we drove from the college, I said, ‘It makes no sense.’

  Lillian said nothing.

  I said, ‘Your friend is full of shit.’

  ‘You can’t accuse everyone,’ she said.

  ‘Even if everyone’s guilty?’

  She looked hard at me. ‘Everyone? You’re guilty? I am?’

  ‘Us especially.’

  She shook her head like I might be too far gone for saving.

  We ate lunch at a Thai restaurant, and when we came out, the little white clouds that I’d seen from the psychologist’s office had darkened and thickened. A stiff breeze blew the blossoms from the crape myrtle trees planted at the edge of the parking lot. So much for believing in fictions.

  But the lemon-grass chicken seemed to have lifted Lillian’s mood, so I said, ‘It still makes no sense.’

  ‘Or maybe it does,’ she said. ‘The Phelpses build a perfect plant like this, and no one worries about them anymore. No one inspects them very closely. They could get away with a lot. What else are they doing on Little Marsh Island?’

  ‘Other than finding Sheneel Greene’s body? Nothing.’

  ‘And hiring the strangest watchman I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘They know her,’ I said. ‘Edward and Stephen Phelps do, and it sounds like Cecilia also might. They do their business close to the family.’

  ‘It’s easier to keep secrets that way.’

  ‘But Felicity has no loyalty to them.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I know it,’ I said. ‘They’ve abused her since she was a girl.’

  ‘And yet there she is, sleeping on their bed, in their trail
er, on their land.’

  ‘Fine. What would she be guarding? What else are they doing?’

  She looked nervous. ‘Let’s find out.’

  So we drove toward Edward and Cecilia Phelps’s house. As we crossed the river, rain started to fall, pocking and misting the water below the bridge. By the time I turned off the engine in front of the Phelpses’, the sky was slate and rain smeared the windshield. We ran from the car, rang the bell, and Cecilia Phelps opened the door.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said when she saw us in the rain. ‘Two of you.’

  We followed her into the house, and the sound of the pounding rain fell to a hum. She took us to the living room and sat on a long white couch. ‘I would offer you tea, but …’ She let the sentence die.

  A painting behind the couch showed a luxuriant green swamp shadowed by thick oak branches, Spanish moss, and red-flowering vines. The sky above the swamp hung low with storm clouds. The heads of two alligators rose from the brown water. One held a large fish in its jaws. A smoke-like vapor came from the nostrils of the other.

  When Cecilia Phelps saw me staring at it, she said, ‘It’s based on an eighteenth-century drawing by William Bartram. He came from Philadelphia and was ill-equipped for the climate and people here. He expected strawberry fields but found this instead.’

  ‘His mistake,’ I said.

  ‘He persisted,’ she said. ‘He paddled upriver and he never was eaten. He survived. Most men aren’t so lucky.’

  Lillian said, ‘Who is Peter Lisman?’

  Cecilia Phelps turned her one-eyed gaze to her. ‘What a strange question and from such a strange woman.’ Her tone remained polite. ‘I could as easily ask, Who is Tom Corfield?’ Lillian looked stung. ‘I know about your little life and dramas, more than I care to know. Edward finds out about these things. He knows everything. You should understand that.’

  I said, ‘What is Peter Lisman to you?’

  She smiled on the good side of her mouth. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Who was his father?’ Lillian asked.

  She considered me. ‘His name was Aaron Lisman. A bad man, if you must know.’

  ‘And his mother?’ I asked.

  ‘I believe you’ve met her. I’ve heard that you stole Peter’s computer from their apartment.’

  ‘I was thinking about her,’ I said. ‘She looked about fifty years old. And Peter is, what, about forty? So she was ten when he was born? Seems unlikely.’

  ‘It’s time for you to leave,’ she said.

  Lillian said, ‘He looks so much like Sheneel. We noticed that the first time we saw him. Others must have noticed it too.’

  Cecilia Phelps called into the house, ‘Kathryn!’

  I said, ‘If Sheneel was still alive and we stood them side by side, I’ll bet we’d swear—’

  ‘Kathryn!’

  Stephen Phelps’s wife stepped into the room from the hallway. She held her daughter in her arms. She gave me an uncertain smile.

  Cecilia Phelps recovered her calm and said, ‘Kathryn, will you show my guests out?’

  THIRTY-THREE

  Lillian

  The periodicals librarian at the Main Branch brought out two large leather-bound volumes on a metal cart, and Johnny and I lifted them on to the reading table. They included copies of the Times-Union from thirty years ago, when Papa Crowe said the stove exploded in the Phelpses’ house, burning Cecilia Phelps and killing her younger son. A family with the Phelpses’ money and power should have gotten front-page coverage, but I found the story, along with black-and-white photographs of the burning mansion, in the Metro section of the October-sixth paper.

  The paper said that a kitchen fire at the Phelpses’ Ortega house erupted the previous afternoon, causing severe damage, one death, and several injuries. Dead was a one-year-old infant, Darren Phelps. At Wolfson Children’s Hospital, suffering from smoke inhalation, was three-year-old Stephen Phelps. Transported by helicopter to the Shands Hospital Burn Center was their mother, Cecilia Phelps, with life-threatening injuries. Also at Shands, in critical condition with smoke inhalation, was Avis Greene. Treated and released from Baptist Hospital was Jacob Alexander Crowe. Two engine companies fought the blaze. Fire damage was limited to the kitchen and the rooms above it, but smoke and water damage were extensive.

  Edward Phelps had said that the family used to call Papa Crowe Jacob, so his full name must have been Jacob Alexander Crowe.

  But who was Avis Greene?

  The October-eighth paper gave more details and more pictures. Fire department investigators were trying to determine whether a gas-line leak or mechanical failure caused the stove to explode. They had no reason to suspect arson, a spokesman said, but the explosion was enormous, blowing out windows and knocking down part of a side wall, which meant that gas had collected in the kitchen. Why no one smelled it, the investigators couldn’t say. Avis Greene, who was married to Jacob Alexander Crowe, died of her injuries the previous afternoon. Cecilia Phelps had been transferred from Shands to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where investigators were unable to talk to her. Doctors said they would release three-year-old Stephen into the care of his father later in the week.

  When Papa Crowe told Johnny about the fire, he’d said that Cecilia Phelps carried Stephen to safety, then returned for her other son, and that the burning ceiling collapsed on her. The newspaper told a different story. It credited household gardener Jacob Alexander Crowe – Papa Crowe himself – with saving both Cecilia and Stephen, who were unconscious in the kitchen when he found them.

  The story included a picture of Jacob Alexander, a black man in his forties.

  I showed it to Johnny. ‘Recognize him?’

  Johnny smiled. ‘Papa Crowe.’

  ‘He was married,’ I said. ‘His wife was there too. She died after the fire.’

  We paged through the newspapers, looking for follow-up reports. Three articles from the end of October discussed the ongoing fire investigation. The investigators ruled out a gas-line leak or a problem with the stove. They also determined that the windows in the kitchen were shut, though, on the cool, early-October afternoon of the fire, other windows throughout the house had been open. They said the swinging door to the kitchen was latched shut. The concentration of gas in the room would have asphyxiated anyone in it if the gas hadn’t first exploded. Cecilia Phelps and her baby boy were in the kitchen at the time of the explosion. Three-year-old Stephen was in the next room with the Phelpses’ maid, Avis Greene. Jacob Alexander Crowe was out in the side yard.

  The last paper, at the end of October, said that Cecilia Phelps remained in the Johns Hopkins burn unit, and doctors were continuing to turn away investigators and reporters.

  Without ever saying so explicitly, the articles implied that Cecilia had caused the gas explosion, probably in a suicide attempt.

  ‘Damn,’ Johnny said.

  ‘Uh huh.’

  After October, the coverage stopped. Cecilia Phelps was probably still refusing to talk, and the Phelpses’ insurance company probably had decided that paying off the family would be easier than fighting them in court, or else the Phelpses had withdrawn any claim they might have made.

  Johnny said, ‘They bought them off too.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  When we returned the bound volumes, I asked for recent copies of any South Georgia papers the library subscribed to, and the librarian brought a stack of the Kingsland Tribune & Georgian. Johnny found what we were looking for in the Saturday paper – a story that followed up on the information Papa Crowe gave him when he visited him in jail. The story detailed the court settlement between Phelps Paper and the State of Georgia. Phelps Paper had agreed to pay a fine of just over a million dollars and to hire an outside firm to remove and dispose of the topsoil over a thirty-acre site, a job that would cost another two to three million dollars. A spokesman for the Georgia Department of Environmental Protection praised Edward and Stephen Phelps for addressing problems that occurred during an era of laxer environ
mental standards.

  ‘Now they’re cub scouts,’ Johnny said.

  We wanted to know more about Peter Lisman’s past, but the librarian said the collection included no birth records. We could have searched newspapers for stories about him killing his father, but if he was a juvenile at the time, the papers might not have named him and, without more details about the crime, our search would likely come to nothing.

  ‘We could call Daniel and ask,’ Johnny said.

  ‘Hah.’

  ‘Then let’s talk to Papa Crowe.’

  We drove back up the highway, the windows open, the warm, humid breeze buffeting us. A west wind had pushed the storm clouds out over the ocean, and the air smelled of the swamps and salt marshes. Semi-trailer trucks, their cabs closed tight, barreled past, heading north from Miami. Turkey vultures circling over a clearing on the highwayside seemed to know where they were going better than the rest of us. I watched Johnny, a man who had packed the carrion of soldiers into bags and shipped it home from a faraway sea and had returned home half transformed to carrion himself.

  ‘What?’ he said when he saw me watching.

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  He turned his eyes back to the road.

  When we stopped in front of the half-painted wooden house where Papa Crowe lived, Johnny got out, put Papa Crowe’s revolver into his waistband, and stepped on to the porch.

  On the other side of the screen, through a gap between the front door and the jamb, the room was dark. An odor of rotting plants and medicine drifted out.

  Johnny knocked and then knocked harder.

  No answer.

  Johnny knocked again and yelled, ‘Papa Crowe?’

  I said, ‘Let’s go in.’

  ‘I’ve made that mistake before.’ But he went to the other end of the porch, peered through a dirty window, and said, ‘Damn.’

  We went inside.

  The front room was a mess of broken bottles, crushed metal canisters, overturned cabinets, and wooden shelves that had been ripped from the walls. Strange-colored liquids pooled on the floor. Various powders and sprigs of dried plants lay in the pools and among the shards of glass.