Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  “Did I hurt you?” Shirley said, inclining her head toward the second floor to indicate the abrupt start she’d provided to Bell’s day. “Hope not.”

  “I’ll live.”

  “Real sorry, Belfa.”

  “Apology accepted. Okay, then. What’s going on?”

  “Got thrown out of Tommy’s tonight.” Shirley picked at a spot on the tabletop. “No, that ain’t right. Not thrown out. I never got in. Tried to. I was with Bobo and the band. We’re playing there. But they stopped me at the door. Just me. Everybody else, fine. But they said I wasn’t welcome. I told them to go to hell. Then the boss come out. Tommy LeSeur. He said it was your doing. Said you’d told him not to let me in. What the hell are you—?”

  “Shirley,” Bell said, interrupting her, but doing it gently. “Listen to me. Not the kind of place you need to be hanging out.”

  “I didn’t have nothin’ to do with that murder the other night. Told you that.”

  “Yes, you did. That’s not what I mean.”

  “Then what the hell do you mean, Belfa? ’Cause the way it looks to me, it’s just you interfering. Trying to control me.”

  Trying to keep you out of trouble. Watching your back. That was what Bell wanted to reply, but didn’t. Her aim was to settle Shirley down, not rile her up all over again.

  “And you know what?” Shirley said, jumping ahead, taking advantage of Bell’s delay in answering. “Don’t need you to take care of me, you got it?”

  “Look,” Bell said. “Tommy LeSeur is a bad guy. A really bad guy. Coming within ten miles of him or his kind is not a good idea. If you want a fresh start, then you ought to steer clear of that place.”

  “I told you,” Shirley’s voice was calm, but agitation lurked just behind it. “I’m Bobo Bolland’s manager. The band plays there a lot. How the hell can I manage ’em if I ain’t allowed in the place they’re playin’ in? Don’t make no sense.”

  Bell picked up Shirley’s lighter. With her thumb she rubbed its little plastic side, then set it back down on the table again. Buying time.

  “Tell me,” Bell said, “about this ‘manager’ thing.”

  “Nothing to tell. Just like it sounds. Bobo needs somebody to book gigs for the band, make a YouTube video, pass out flyers, and such like. They’re getting real close to a recording contract, Belfa. It’s gonna happen.”

  “Does he pay you?”

  Shirley was beginning to get angry again. Bell could see it in her face: Her jaw was set tight, her chin tilted up. She raked the back of her hand across her red nose.

  “Shit, yeah, he pays me. What do you think? It’s a job, Belfa. For Christ’s sake.”

  “Can’t be much.”

  “No. Not yet. But that’s how it works.” Shirley’s voice was speeding up, bit by bit, as she made her points. “I’m getting in on the ground floor. Later, once he makes it big, I’ll get a percentage. I got it all in writing, Belfa. I ain’t stupid, okay?”

  “I know that.” Bell realized she had said it too quickly. It sounded phony. Falsely reassuring. The truth was, she didn’t think Shirley was stupid. Just naïve. Just rusty when it came to knowing how the world worked. “How’d you meet him?”

  “Mutual friend.”

  Bell didn’t have to say it out loud. Shirley, she knew, could translate her glance: You don’t have any friends.

  Hell, Bell automatically added to her thought. I don’t have many friends either, come to that. Nick Fogelsong didn’t count. He was family.

  “I was in this bar, okay?” Shirley said. Belligerence seemed to drive tiny spikes into her words. “While ago. Way before I came back to Acker’s Gap. I was on the road. Traveling. Just going around. Not heading anyplace special. Ended up there. Bobo was playing that night. Fella I knew said to me, ‘You want to say hi to Bobo?’ Well, I’d already told that fella how much I loved the music I was hearin’. So I said, ‘Hell yeah.’ Next thing I know, I’m shakin’ hands with Mr. Bobo Bolland hisself.” Shirley sighed. A smile shyly edged its way onto her face.

  “Me and Bobo hit it off,” she went on. “Got to talking. His real name’s Harold. Bobo’s a nickname. Had it since he was three years old. His mama tried to put a bow tie on him for church one day and he pulled it off and he threw it down and he said, ‘What? What that?’ So his mama said, ‘It’s a bow tie, honey,’ and he musta liked the sound of it ’cause after that, he went around the house going, ‘Bow tie. Bow tie.’ So naturally they started calling him Bobo.”

  When Bell didn’t comment on the story, Shirley doggedly continued. “Heard they was playing at Tommy’s—it’s a regular gig—and I went out to hear ’em a couple weeks ago, and we made a deal. I’m the manager. So you’ll tell LeSeur to let me in, right? You’ll call him? I mean, like—this is my job.”

  “It’s not a job,” Bell said. She’d decided not to coddle her sister. She’d show her respect by telling her the truth, and telling it in a firm, deliberate way. “It’s nothing. And it’ll lead nowhere. Bolland plays in bars, Shirley. Cheap bars. Filled with bums. I don’t know him, but I don’t have to know him to know this—he’s a loser. And if you hang out with him, you’ll be a loser, too.”

  Shirley flinched as if she’d been smacked. She reached for a smoke. Her hand trembled. It trembled even more as she tried to light it. She gave up, taking the cigarette out of her mouth and holding it in the air in front of her face, like something she’d found on the street. A stick, maybe, or a broken-off piece of something unidentifiable. Something she could grasp at, cling to, while she spoke in a low, heartbroken mumble.

  “You just gotta ruin everything for me, don’t you, Belfa? Every last thing. Every time.”

  Chapter Twenty

  It was the girl from the gas station.

  Bell remembered her. She didn’t know who the young woman was, but she’d seen her recently. Oh, right. That was it: behind the counter of the Lester station. In the middle of the night. After the ceremony at the hospital. She was the clerk.

  “Yeah?” the young woman said.

  She’d opened the door seconds before Bell gave up and walked away. Bell had knocked once, twice, and then, after a long interval, a third time. Waited. And then, just as Bell turned to go, wondering how long Odell Crabtree had lived in this shriveled-up house that looked as if it might be reclaimed any minute by the patchy, weed-thatched woods surrounding it, the front door edged open.

  “Oh,” Bell said. She was startled. Slightly flustered. “Hi. I’m Belfa Elkins. Raythune County prosecutor. I’m looking for Odell Crabtree.”

  “What for?”

  “I have some questions for him. And you are?”

  “His daughter. Lindy Crabtree.” The young woman rose up on tiptoes, peering past Bell and out into the grass-challenged yard and the dusty driveway, vivid now in the headlong sunlight of midafternoon, checking to see if anyone else was there. “He’s not home.”

  “When do you expect him back?”

  “Look,” Lindy said. “He’s sick. Real sick. He doesn’t come out of his room. He can’t see anybody right now, okay?”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t home.”

  The young woman’s small face bunched up into a frown. “Just go away, okay? Leave us alone.”

  It didn’t come out mean, Bell noted. It came out cautious. And weary.

  Lindy started to close the door. Bell put up a hand to stop its progress.

  “I’ll talk to you, then,” Bell said. “Don’t want to bother your father. Won’t take long.”

  Lindy shrugged. She thought about it. Bell could sense her weighing her options, calculating the odds of getting rid of this stranger quickly and easily if she let her in for a brief conversation. Better to capitulate now, perhaps, than to say no and endure a return visit. A longer one, maybe.

  “Okay.”

  The interior of the house was similar to the exterior, like a dirty sock turned inside out despite the fact that both sides are equally filthy. It was ramshackle, compact, and cl
austrophobically cluttered. An ancient gray haze seemed to hover over the stuff, as if select portions had lain undisturbed for slow-turning centuries, like the spoons and combs and vases of Pompeii. Bell had been in a lot of houses in Raythune County that looked just like this, houses that were gradually sinking back down into the dirt they’d emerged from. At one point, someone must have cared for this place, must have kept up with the sweeping and the polishing, but that someone was long gone now, and the ongoing accretion of junk and dust was practically audible; Bell could swear she heard a steady hum, living just below the closely packed silence. She glanced at the thick closed drapes that fell in clotted folds, at the low ceiling printed with sickly yellow streaks from long decades of cigarette smoke. A bark-brown upright piano, mutely entombed in cobwebs, was pushed into a corner.

  The one notable feature was the preponderance of books. They weren’t corralled onto bookshelves—there were no bookshelves—but lived wherever they wanted to: spread out across the cushions on one side of the ragged gray couch and on both end tables; rising in sloppy piles that dotted the hardwood floor; shoved up along the walls like a second baseboard. Bell was able to make out a few titles on the top of the stacks: Warped Passages by Lisa Randall. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Time Reborn by Lee Smolin. Lindy picked her way with ease amid the mini-towers of books on the floor. It wasn’t as if she failed to notice them because they didn’t matter to her, Bell thought; it was, rather, that they were old friends and Lindy was comfortable around them. She took their presence for granted.

  “You work at the Lester station,” Bell said. She sat on the edge of an armchair. The maroon material on each arm was rubbed shiny.

  “Yeah,” the young woman replied.

  She reminded Bell of Carla, but only slightly. Actually, Lindy Crabtree reminded her even more insistently of someone else: herself. Belfa Elkins—then Belfa Dolan—at this age had been just as closed, just as stubborn, just as tightly sealed up with her troubles and secrets.

  “I was there,” Bell said. “The other night. You probably don’t remember.”

  “We get lots of customers.”

  “I bet you do. How long have you worked out there?”

  “A while.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It’s okay.” Lindy frowned. “So is this about my job?”

  “No. It’s not.” Bell paused. She admired the young woman’s directness and decided to emulate it. “A man named Jed Stark was fatally stabbed in a bar the other night. We know who did it—that’s not the reason I’m here—but the victim had a business card in his pocket. A business card for a lawyer named Sampson Voorhees.” She waited to see if any light of recognition flashed in Lindy’s eyes. “And on that business card,” Bell continued, “was another name, too. Your father’s. Odell Crabtree.”

  Still no response.

  “Any idea why,” Bell said, “Jed Stark would be looking for your father?”

  “Never heard of anybody named Jed Stark.”

  “How about Sampson Voorhees?”

  “Nope.”

  The denial had come quickly, but Bell was fairly certain she had spotted a flicker of recognition. She pressed on.

  “May I ask your father the same question? I mean, I understand if he’s ill and doesn’t want visitors—but if I can’t see him, would you ask him for me?”

  “Okay.” Lindy looked away. “That it? I’m pretty busy.”

  “Reading, I bet. Quite the library you’ve got here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A lot of science books, I see.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You like science.”

  Lindy shrugged.

  “So it’s just you and your father living here?” Bell asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Must be hard for you,” Bell said, thinking: No wonder the place is such a mess. Working full-time and taking care of a parent is a lot for a teenager to handle. “Doing everything yourself, I mean.”

  “It’s okay.”

  The young woman’s expression was as inhospitable as her answers. She let her gaze drop and drift, landing at random on one stack of books or another and then moving on—anywhere but back to her visitor’s face.

  Bell didn’t push. She was accustomed to conversations like this one; awkward question-and-answer sessions were a prosecutor’s lot. Most of the people she spoke to in the course of a workday were in some kind of trouble, and for many, she represented the outcome they most dreaded: an encounter with the court system. Bell never took it personally anymore, the way she’d done earlier in her career. She allowed silence to be her cointerrogator. People disliked silence. It made them uncomfortable and so they would often say something—something incriminating—just to get rid of it.

  “Anything else?” Lindy said. She had let the silence go on longer than Bell expected; it might have been a new record.

  “Here’s my card.” Bell stood up. Lindy didn’t. “If your father can think of a reason why Jed Stark was looking for him—or if the name Voorhees rings a bell—I’d appreciate a call.”

  Lindy looked at the card for a few seconds before taking it. Tapped it into the breast pocket of her flannel shirt. Bell surmised that the card would ride around in Lindy’s shirt for a few hours and then wind up as a bookmark. Well, Bell thought, that’s as honorable a fate as any other, and better than most. She’d seen people tear it into pieces right in front of her, or spit on it, or use it as a toothpick—or mail the card back to her office, smeared with dog shit.

  Bell was reaching for the front doorknob when she heard it: a heavy thump, followed by a muffled cry of pain. She couldn’t tell from which direction the noise had come because it was over too fast and there was no echo, just a two-part crack of sound breaking against the banked quiet of the old house. Bell turned. Lindy rose quickly from the couch. Her indifference, the cool blank repose in which her face was set, had vanished, replaced by a ragged agitation.

  “Just—just go, okay?” Lindy said. “Go away.”

  “What’s going on? Did your father fall? If you need some help—”

  “We don’t need your fucking help, lady.” Lindy’s interruption was swift and harsh. She moved across the room, toward what Bell assumed was the kitchen. “Just go. Leave us alone.”

  “But what if your father has—?”

  “Please.” Lindy paused under the arch that separated the rooms—Why is she going in that direction, Bell thought, and not toward the bedroom?—and the look she gave Bell was so intense and pleading, so heartfelt in the raw urgency of her desire to be left alone, that Bell didn’t argue.

  “Please,” Lindy repeated. Her stare was stark with desperation. And then she was gone, rounding the corner.

  Driving away from the Crabtree house, weaving carefully between the potholes until she reached the county road, Bell was bothered by a thought that quickly hardened into conviction: The noise had come from the basement, not the bedroom. And whatever it was, it had terrified Lindy Crabtree.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Two days after the visit from the prosecutor, Lindy found it.

  She had made a mental grid of the house and then traveled from quadrant to quadrant, room to room, trying to be systematic about her search. Scientific. Or if not scientific—she knew what the word really meant, knew from her reading how true scientists worked, and thus scoffed at her own pretentions—at least thorough. Kitchen cupboards, dresser drawers, stacked-up shoe boxes, junk left on tables and chairs. She checked under the couch, under the bed, behind the piano. She pulled stuff out of the closets. She lifted the rugs. She patted the heavy drapes in the living room, shaking the hems, watching the dust bloom and dissipate in the dim sweltering air. She waited until her father was asleep and then she moved gingerly through the basement, too, stepping carefully amid the boxes and branches and old tables. Thank God he was a heavy sleeper. Always had been. His snores were loud, damp-sounding. He slept curled up in a ball, but sometimes he would flo
p over on his back, mouth open, and the snores would quicken and intensify, like something large and strong tangled up in barbed wire, trying to fight its way out.

  She didn’t know what she was looking for—or, more to the point, she didn’t know what else she was looking for. She’d already discovered the things that worried her, that had made suspicions linger in her mind: Missing knife. Boot prints on the kitchen floor.

  She wanted more. Before she did anything—before she could even contemplate telling anyone else about the outlandish idea that had so thoroughly infiltrated her thoughts—she needed more proof.

  And now she had another worry: the visit from that prosecutor. Lindy had lied to her, of course, but the lie seemed justified. Yes, she’d heard the name Sampson Voorhees. And Jed Stark, too—but she wouldn’t tell the prosecutor that. Not right away, anyway. Not until she knew what was going on. In the letter addressed to her father that had come a week or so ago, the one with the New York City postmark, the names had been right there:

  Dear Mr. Crabtree,

  As you know, I have attempted to contact you several times. My letters have not been answered. Yet it is imperative that I speak with you soon about a matter of some urgency. This inquiry could result in a substantial financial opportunity for you. My authorized representative in your area, Mr. Jedidiah Stark, will be contacting you shortly with details. I trust you will treat this correspondence confidentially.

  Very sincerely yours,

  S. J. Voorhees

  After skimming it, Lindy had frowned and fumed. The words “substantial financial opportunity” sounded like just another attempt to persuade senior citizens to invest in silver mines in Bolivia or some other scam. This “Sampson J. Voorhees” had probably dumped a truckload of such letters on the older folks in Raythune County. Swindling bastard, Lindy had thought. Freakin’ con man.