Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  But now it seemed that too much was happening all at once. First her suspicions about her father, and now, a visit from the prosecuting attorney. Lindy was perplexed, apprehensive. And determined to ransack the house to see if there was anything here that might tie her father to the terrible rash of assaults. Anything more than what she’d already discovered. More than the knife and the boot print and the certainty that he’d been going out at night.

  So that she could decide what to do.

  She’d tried to ask him about it. Because if he admitted it, somehow that would be better. That would mean, at least, that he was aware of what he was doing, that he was still in charge of himself. “Daddy, after dark—when you go out—what do you—?” And he’d roared back at her, eyes wild, unfocused, as if he were trying to figure out—and this part devastated her, even though she knew it was part of his illness—just who the hell she was, this young woman in the flannel shirt and jeans, this person who stood before him in the dingy kitchen, looking like somebody he used to know, or maybe not.

  There were other times, too, of course. Times when he wasn’t incensed, wasn’t yelling. Times when he was the way he’d been before. Some mornings, the man who came rising out of the basement, his boots dropping heavily on step after step after step, enabling her to chart his progress, counting his steps while her anxiety ticked up in unison with each individual stair, was—out of the blue—the old Odell Crabtree. And those were the hardest moments by far, because they reminded her of how things might have been.

  She could tell right away. Could tell that it was going to be a good day. The first thing he’d do when he reached the top step and opened the basement door and gazed at the person who sat at the small square table, her book propped up against another stack of books, her face rising from the page to meet his eyes, would be to smile at her. It was a thin smile, barely creasing his face, barely making a dent in the deep-set wrinkles. But it told her everything she needed to know. “Mornin’, my girl,” he would say, a greeting that served as further confirmation that, for an unknown interval—but never for more than a few hours, and never very often—he was back. He’d be flummoxed, of course, and sometimes grumpy, filled with questions, criticisms—he’d never been a saint, nobody would ever claim that—but he wasn’t the angry, cursing stranger who paced back and forth in the basement. He was her dad again. The dad who had gradually come to love her.

  At those times, he might walk around the house for an hour or so. Sometimes he asked for Margaret. “Where’d she go?” he’d ask Lindy, and he’d ask it more in wonderment than in sadness, because he didn’t remember. “She off visiting somebody?” he’d say, adding, “Back soon, I guess. Well.” He had to walk hunched over, and he kept one hand on the small of his back and another on the wall, steadying himself.

  Lindy would reply, “Yeah. Back soon.” Was that the right thing to do? She didn’t know. Should she tell him the truth? Tell him that her mother was dead, dead for six years now, and that it was just the two of them—just her and her father—left in the house? Or should she protect him, lie to him, let him live for these precious few hours in a kind of time-starved twilight, where the past was more real than the present? Hell, she’d rather live there herself. Who wouldn’t?

  So she’d say, “Yeah,” and let him be. He’d nod and keep walking, making a slow satisfied circuit around the house. Waiting for his wife to come home. “Back soon,” he’d murmur, and Lindy, if she was close enough to hear, would echo, “Soon.” Sometimes he would add, “Supposed to go fishing with Ray today, but I’m staying home. Need to be with your mama. Don’t want to miss her when she gets home.” By the next morning, the anger would flood back in. He would spend his days in the basement again, and she could hear him down there, just as she’d heard him when the prosecutor was visiting, falling against the objects that Lindy had dragged and stacked, the dead branches and the rocks and the cinder blocks. Home.

  And then, just when she was ready to give up, she found it.

  * * *

  At first, she didn’t realize what it was. On her hands and knees, leaning over, she had pulled out the last flat box from under the massive oak dresser in what had once been her parents’ bedroom. That box contained nothing unexpected; it was filled with old National Geographic and Life magazines. Her mother hadn’t graduated from high school, but she’d been a passionate reader. Among Lindy’s clearest memories was the sight of her mother at the kitchen table, marveling at something in National Geographic, flicking the pages restlessly, reading paragraphs out loud to eight-year-old Lindy and then looking up from the magazine and addressing her daughter directly: “Big world out there, my girl. You make sure you go see it.”

  Lindy tried to shove the box back under the dresser. It wouldn’t go. She pushed again, and realized that she was pushing it at the wrong angle. She tried again. Its progress was blocked by yet another object, small enough that she had missed it the previous times she looked. Something was jammed against the wall.

  Lindy dropped onto her belly. She squinted into the dark area beneath the dresser, into the space created by the four fat wooden legs holding the dresser several inches off the floor. Reached under. She had to stretch out her arm. Her fingernail scratched metal and she scrabbled at whatever it was, finally getting her hand around the small tin box and pulling it toward her. She was certain she’d never seen it before in her life.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Lindy examined it. It was about the size of an old-fashioned cigar box, light blue with silver trim, badly discolored. On the top and sides was a swirling logo: SILVERMAN’S FAMOUS BISCUITS, with an etching of three sailboats poised on a tree-fringed lake. Lindy was so nervous that her hands trembled. She didn’t know why the moment felt so fraught; over the years, she’d found dozens of little boxes squirreled around the house. Her mother had adored small, pretty boxes, along with elegant glass jars and pastel wrapping paper and curling ribbons, and she kept everything. When Lindy was a little girl, her mother had explained that it was a good idea to surround yourself with bits and slivers of beauty. With shiny scraps and dabs that reminded you of a radiant elsewhere, of something other than dirt roads and pinched-off horizons. Over the years Lindy had found, tucked here and there around the house, the glass figurines and river rocks polished to a beguiling smoothness that her mother carefully, lovingly accumulated and then placed at strategic points throughout the small, worn-down house, perhaps as a sort of counterweight to the ordinary. As a way of telling herself—and telling the world, too, if it ever happened to notice—that she was more than a coal miner’s wife in a shabby town that nobody’d ever heard of.

  So it wasn’t the mere fact of finding the box that made Lindy’s fingers tremble when she touched it. This box felt … different, somehow. Charged with mysterious energy, like a magical object in a fairy tale. Or maybe something darker than a fairy tale.

  She was almost sick with dread, afraid of what she might discover. What if it was something that implicated her father? That proved he was a violent criminal—and that the history of his rampages tunneled back a long way into the past? That they hadn’t just started with his sickness? But Lindy was also aware of a kind of golden anticipation. This was something her mother had touched.

  She opened the hinged lid.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The initials JP stood for Joyce’s Place. The name was a tribute to the late Joyce LeFevre, owner of Ike’s, the diner that formerly had occupied this spot at the intersection of Main and Thornapple in downtown Acker’s Gap. For years Ike’s had provided a consoling supply of greasy biscuits floating in fragrant lakes of sausage gravy, not to mention coffee as strong and ornery as a growl. JP’s didn’t do that. Jackie LeFevre, Joyce’s thirty-five-year-old daughter, was adamant about it: JP’s was not a substitute for Ike’s. JP’s had its own style. Its own rhythm. Its own rituals. The only sentimental touch allowed on the premises was the name.

  Bell had admired Jackie’s independence even as sh
e wondered at the wisdom of it. The population of Acker’s Gap skewed old, and older people, Bell observed, liked things to stay the same as they’d always been. Hell, she corrected herself. Everybody’s pretty much that way. Old folks just don’t mind showing it.

  “Coffee for the both of you?”

  Wanda Moore, one of two waitresses, barely slowed down to sideswipe them with the question as she barreled past. Bell and Sheriff Fogelsong had arrived here at roughly the same moment and grabbed the last available booth. Wanda and her colleague, Patty Harshbarger, were swamped, thanks to the tumult of the lunch rush. The occupants of a large table in the corner had been yelling at Wanda for the past three minutes, as if they faced a desperate emergency—and indeed they did, if a lack of ketchup for crinkle-cut fries constituted a legitimate crisis.

  Unlike Ike’s, which had gotten along with a brief, splinter-ridden wooden bar and wobbly stools that looked as if they were seconds away from becoming kindling, JP’s featured a gleaming stainless steel counter that followed a long wall, serviced by a series of sturdy, red-topped stools. Along another wall was—of all things—a salad bar. The stack of small white plates at one end of the salad bar looked perky and expectant, while a pair of shiny metal tongs waited dutifully next to each ceramic jar and its reservoir of shredded carrots or hard-boiled eggs or sliced-up cucumbers—none of which would have been even remotely conceivable in Ike’s, where customers most likely would have used the tongs to hoist a cucumber coin into the air so that they could peer at it suspiciously, wondering if maybe a quick drag across a plate of gravy would render it edible.

  Each time Bell came in here, she was momentarily assailed by the vivid contrast. JP’s was compact and bright; Ike’s had been large, dark, cavernous. JP’s sported a vegan section on the menu. The hell is that? more than one patron had muttered, staring at the strange word and turning the menu upside down and then right-side up again, trying to trick it into revealing its meaning. At Ike’s, menus had been largely beside the point: You knew what they had, and the daily special—chili mac or fried catfish or ham steak or spaghetti—had been indicated on a chalkboard propped up next to the cash register, along with the price. Bell could still picture Georgette Akers, Joyce’s partner in business and in life, leaning over the blackboard first thing every morning, short stalk of chalk in her chubby hand, adding a smiley-face next to the words and the numbers, and then holding up the board and blowing off the excess chalk dust, admiring her handiwork.

  Sometimes the ghosts could get to Bell. Old towns were thick with them. Sometimes she liked that; she liked the fact that she knew the history of these streets and these people. Among the living faces she saw every day, she knew the life stories of a good percentage of them, and she knew the faces of the dead forebears that stretched out behind them. Not so thoroughly as Rhonda Lovejoy did, of course, but enough to turn the town into a long hall of murmuring echoes.

  In Acker’s Gap the past never left you alone. At night, if your sleep was shallow and restless, the dead would show up in your dreams and say your name over and over again, in a rising tone, like someone calling for a lost dog, and in the daytime they walked around right next to you, pressing you, crowding you. You had to drive out beyond the city limits now and again just to get some distance from them, some peace.

  She looked across the table at Sheriff Fogelsong. “How’s your morning going?”

  “Lousy.” He lifted off his hat. Dashes of sweat flecked his forehead, which was bright pink from the heat. Fogelsong’s tidy buzz cut should’ve kept him slightly cooler than average, but today not even that could provide any relief; his scalp looked as if it had spent some quality time rolling around on the grill that Jackie kept going behind the counter.

  “Donnie Frazey’s driving me crazy,” he added.

  “Questions about the homicides?”

  “You bet. But you know what? I gotta admit—he’s justified. Got a deadline for next week’s paper. And he wants to know what kind of progress we’re making. Dammit, Belfa—I don’t have any answers for him.” Fogelsong lifted a napkin and dabbed his brow. He looked down at the damp napkin, then over at her. “Feeling about as useless these days as tits on a bull.” He wadded up the napkin and flipped it to the far side of the table. Any benefits he enjoyed from a month away, Bell noted, had fled already, judging from his face.

  “How about the hitchhiker that Deputy Harrison interviewed?” she said. “The one who saw somebody in the woods along Godown Road at the relevant hour?”

  “Didn’t pan out. Turns out our witness was pretty drunk.” Disgust burned in the sheriff’s voice. “Yeah, he claims he spotted somebody in a long coat out there. And the timing’s right. But a witness back in Swanville reported that he’d had six PBRs that night and woulda barely been able to wobble in and out of the woods to take a piss. Won’t help us a lick.”

  She waited. She knew better than to offer false consolation.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let me know if you need any help with the investigation.”

  “You’ve got your own job to deal with. Don’t intend to saddle you with mine, too. Especially not with you being shorthanded and all.”

  Bell’s secretary, Lee Ann Frickie, had left for vacation the day before. Lee Ann took two weeks each summer to visit her son, Lance, in Clemson, South Carolina. She had offered to cancel her trip this year—she didn’t feel right about leaving while two unsolved homicides had the town on edge—but Bell insisted: Go. Lee Ann needed a break. Hell, Bell had silently amended that. We all do. Not much chance of getting it, though, while the violent deaths of Freddie Arnett and Charlie Frank were open cases.

  Bell started to say something to Nick, but put it aside for later. Perry Crum had ambled up to their table. He was on his way to the front to pay his bill. Big-faced, droopy-eyed, with hair the color of ginger ale that had lost its fizz, Crum had delivered mail in Raythune County for forty-two years, a fact to which his posture gave painful-looking testimony. Sweat had wrecked the crease in his government-issue pale blue shirt and gray shorts.

  “Hey, Sheriff,” Perry said. He knuckled the dirty-white pith helmet farther back on his head. “Ain’t there some kind of law against this heat?”

  “Oughta be. You tell me how to enforce it, Perry, and I’ll be happy to do so.”

  Perry pumped his eyebrows up and down a few times, by way of agreement. He turned to Bell. “How’re you, Mrs. Elkins?”

  “Doing fine, thanks.” She looked at Perry’s stooped shoulders, wondering what it felt like to hoist a heavy mailbag in and out of his truck in this heat. Not to mention the long, jarring drives into and out of the hollows in his boxlike, butt-ugly government van.

  That vision gave rise to another one: Perry out on the country roads, all by himself. Vulnerable. An easy target.

  “Listen,” she added, trying to keep her voice casual. “You be careful, Perry. I know you’ve heard about the assaults. Just keep your eyes open, okay?”

  Perry tried to sop up some of the sweat on his neck with a handkerchief, first on one side, then the other. “Appreciate the concern, Mrs. Elkins.” He smiled.

  She knew a bit about his personal life—Rhonda Lovejoy had filled her in on the situation a few years ago, and nothing ever changed for people like Perry—and so Bell felt compelled to add a coda: “Your sister, Ellie. She doesn’t go out by herself, does she? Especially not at night?”

  “No, ma’am. Kind of you to ask, though. Ellie never leaves the house. She needs me to take care of her. Always will. Things’ve been that way since she was born. Promised my folks I’d look out for her and I do.” Perry stuffed the handkerchief in his back pocket. That was enough about that. “Don’t suppose you all are making any headway.” He read the answer right off their faces. “Well,” Perry said, “you’ll get to the bottom of it. No doubt. Nice afternoon, you two.”

  He moved along. Bell picked up her water glass and took a long reflective swallow. “I’ve been thinking, Nick. Summer’s a funny season. P
eople relax too much. When it gets dark, it’s still nice and warm out. So people forget. Let their guard down. They leave their windows wide open and their doors unlocked. I’ve done it myself. Stayed up till two, three, four in the morning sometimes, sitting on the front porch. Never give it a second thought. Truth is—a lot of bad things can happen once the sun goes down. Even in the summer.”

  The sheriff’s expression was grim. “That’s for damned sure.” He swiped at a runaway bead of sweat rolling down the right side of his face. “I’ve been getting the serial killer question everywhere I go, just like you predicted. Really wish the folks around here watched a little less TV, you know? You sit yourself down in front of enough of those crime shows—and pretty soon, you think you’re seeing a serial killer every time you push your cart through the produce section of Lymon’s Market.” He wiped his wet finger on a pant leg. “I guess I can understand their concern. I mean, both attacks happened at night. No obvious motive like robbery or revenge.”

  “But there are some pretty significant differences, too.”

  “Two different weapons,” he agreed. “Sledgehammer and a knife.”

  “Yes. But something seems—well, a little off.” Fogelsong looked at her, waiting for her to go on. “The attack on Freddie Arnett was pretty straightforward,” Bell said. “Three blows to the back of the head. All of generally equal—and equally deadly—force.”

  “Okay.”

  “But the stab wounds on Charlie Frank were different. I read Buster’s report and then I called him to ask about it, to make sure I was interpreting his findings correctly. There were five wounds in the shoulder area—two on one side, three on the other—and those were fairly shallow. Didn’t require much force. By themselves, they probably wouldn’t have killed him. The lethal blows came after that. Eight very deep and very powerful thrusts into the chest and abdomen. One severed the aorta. He didn’t have a chance.”