A Living Grave

by Robert E. Dunn

  That was the first time I was proud to be called Hurricane.

  “I’m not so selfish to have asked you to marry me if it was for my sake,” he said. “It’s not for me, it’s for you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You know the difference between you and me?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ve been fighting to live. I think you’ve been fighting . . .” He thought about it. Then he shrugged weakly like he was giving up the search for the words he needed and said simply, “not to.”

  It was like being slapped.

  “You think I want to die?”

  This time it was his turn to shake his head. “Not wanting to die is not the same as wanting to live. Really live.”

  I wanted a reason to strike out at him. I wanted to conjure the anger again and shout, to scream how wrong he was.

  But he wasn’t. The real shame is that, until the last few days, everyone had seen it but me. At least I saw it then. I kissed him and told him that I loved him. Then I told him I would marry him.

  Chapter 20

  I slept in Nelson’s bed for the first time that night. We were naked and close, whispering words that disappeared in the dark. Meaningless sound, endearments, and soft breath that held back, at least for me, the smallest worry. All the world melted away in our lovemaking. Nelson had opened not just the sliding door but most of the windows as well. The night carried clean heat and ripples of chill that washed the atmosphere of the house.

  Everything about the night brought my skin to life. Everything made me smile. At one point, I had a secret thought.

  The wheel spun in my favor.

  I didn’t say it out loud. Nelson would have thought me crazy. I wasn’t so sure myself. Did insanity feel like happiness? Was it simply insane to be happy in this world?

  When we were spent and tangled in stillness, I quietly said, “I’ll never fall asleep.” Then we were both out.

  I didn’t dream. That’s to say, I didn’t dream so I could see. My dreams were only feelings of warmth and safety within the void. I awoke with the creeping sunrise. My mouth was hot and dry. It felt like a monkey had been sleeping within it and smelled like it too.

  It didn’t matter and I couldn’t wait. I woke Nelson. It wasn’t easy but I got him to open his eyes and look at me. I asked him, “Do you still promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Then I kissed him with my monkey mouth.

  Sunday was like a cauldron into which we both dropped words and feelings, memories and expectations creating a spell of good feelings. We never left the house. I helped Nelson crate more of his work and I told him everything about Leech. The open, breezy windows of the house were like a single Cinerama screen on the world around us. Above, the sky was the color of old jeans with tufts of tangled white thread wearing through. Below, the rippled lake was catching sun on one angle and sky on another. Filling everything between sky and water were the trees. From far away there were only greens, but closer . . . reds and oranges mixed with yellow flipped at the tip of a branch that barely broke the frame of the window. A large white oak had begun turning.

  * * *

  From famine to feast, as they say. When I made it into the office Monday, my in-box was stuffed with responses from the previous week’s calls and e-mails. There were notes from Family Services and multiple e-mails with attachments from the City of Branson, county, and state liquor-control agencies. The documents concerning Moonshines I forwarded to the sheriff and to the district attorney. I would go through them for information to connect dots between people but I was not qualified to make judgments about the legalities of the contracts. That would be someone else’s job.

  It was Carrie who I was most interested in. I had an e-mail confirming there was a file on her and the family with the Missouri Department of Social Services. That was basically all it said. That wasn’t news to me. When I called, the social worker assigned to her case wouldn’t talk to me on the phone. I gave my badge number and asked her to call me back at the sheriff’s department number but she said no. She would not talk to me without meeting in person first. Some people are too good at their job. I had to go into Branson to meet her at the county office.

  Marion Combs, of the Missouri Department of Social Services, was a sharp woman of about fifty. Blonde, but the color was fading away. She didn’t dye it and something about that made her seem both tougher and warmer. Her eyes were blue and had a way about them that said little gets past. Immediately I knew she took her job and the kids assigned to her seriously.

  “You look like someone who had a good weekend,” she said as soon as I had introduced myself. Then she laughed at the look on my face. “Don’t mind me. I get used to reading faces because almost everyone I meet in my job is hiding something. Like your job, I guess.”

  “At least in my job if they lie I get to beat it out of them,” I said as I sat beside her piled desk.

  Marion laughed again, then pointed a sharp, pink nail at me. “You have a reputation for such things, Hurricane.”

  “I have a tough time getting away from that.”

  “Don’t try,” she said. “There are much worse things to be known for than being a tough cop. Chuck hasn’t fired you yet, has he?”

  “Sheriff Benson? No ma’am, he hasn’t, but I think at times it crosses his mind.”

  “I can call him Chuck. He was my beau once upon a time.” Her smile was like an old photograph. It told the story of a lost moment. Then it faded and she asked, “You know why he won’t?” I shook my head but Marion wasn’t waiting for me. She went right on answering her own question. “Because you’re the one cop in the county that everyone knows and is afraid of.”

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good thing,” I said.

  “It is,” she stated with complete certitude. Turning to paw through file folders on her desk, Marion shifted to the task at hand. “Now remind me: Which of my kids were you needing to know about?”

  “Carrie Owens,” I said.

  She stopped digging and leaned back in her chair. “I don’t need the file to talk about her. Wouldn’t do much good. Almost nothing in it. Nothing on the lines, that is. Hers is sort of a between-the-lines kind of case, you know what I mean? What’s she done? What do you need to know?”

  “Abuse?”

  “That’s—between the lines. But I believe so. If I could prove it or if she would speak up, I’d have her out of that house.”

  “I actually think she might be counting on someone else to get her out.”

  “Who?”

  Marion’s blue eyes grew wide as I told her what I knew about Leech. When I finished, she went back to the piles on her desk and grabbed a thick file. From that she pulled a sheet of notebook paper with Leech scrawled over it in thick, scratchy letterings all made with different pens. She turned it over and on the back there was the same little verse that Billy had quoted to me. Below that, in a neat, girlish cursive unlike the bold strokes on the other side, were three lines.

  * * *

  I would give you anything,

  I would give you anyone,

  For you to give me a real family.

  * * *

  I liked Marion and meeting her had kept my mood up even after learning what I had about Carrie. Truthfully, though, my joy was buoyed by more than the new friendship. I had fallen for Nelson like a schoolgirl and was enjoying the drop. It was hard to focus on work and the things I needed to do. I wanted to check in on Clare and to make an appearance at Moonshines. I hadn’t done anything on the investigation into the great RV shoot-out. Not that there was a lot of investigation needed. I was pretty certain who had done it; it was bringing them in and finding a witness to speak up that was the trick. That probably wouldn’t happen now that the feds were involved and looking at the Nightriders for their own purposes.

  Dad used to tell me: Line your problems up, largest to smallest. Then he went on to tell me that largest didn’t always mean biggest. Somet
imes the largest problem is a little thing that’s important. So I went to Carrie Owens’s home again wondering if, this time, I would get inside the front door.

  I needn’t have worried. Doors were not the issue. As soon as I pulled onto the street I could see a knot of people on one side watching the three on the other. Carrie, her mother, and a large man who looked like a Neanderthal with a cheap suit and cheaper haircut were in the yard yelling—make that screaming—at each other. The Neanderthal had to be the errant dad come home.

  No one paid any attention to me as I pulled up, then got out of the SUV.

  “I hate you,” Carrie wailed in a cracking voice. “I hate everything about you. I just want to be left alone.”

  Her parents were ignoring her cries, too involved with venting their rage on each other.

  “You make her like this,” the mother shrieked. “You love her too much and coddle her, you make her a baby just like your little pet and you set her against me. How can I live with her when you’re gone? You’re always gone.”

  The father was flailing his arms like the words coming at him from both sides were physical blows that had to be deflected. He didn’t scream, he bellowed. “I earn a living and I love my daughter. I’m a good father. What’s wrong with that?”

  “You love her more than me, that’s what’s wrong with it. You’re wrong. Your love is wrong. Everything is wrong about you.”

  Carrie was still standing but she looked limp and crumpled. Over and over she said, “I hate you,” but her screams had withered into wet sobs.

  I thought the worst was over. They all looked wounded and spent. I should have been able to step in and talk, get them all separated and cooling down. This might have been the perfect time to get some truth, but it didn’t happen that way.

  Mr. Owens heard the shift in his daughter’s voice from anger to despair. He turned to it and reached out to her. At the same time, several things happened and I had no way of telling what started the other or if there was some kind of emotional spontaneous combustion that flared from the smoldering heat.

  Mrs. Owens darted forward with a voice that sounded like she had been gargling glass and snarled, “Don’t touch her.”

  Carrie’s voice exploded into a knife-edged wail as she screamed, “No.”

  The father didn’t yell anymore: He swung out with fists that looked to be as large and hard as frozen turkeys. Carrie fell to the ground, pushed rather than punched, but still hit hard. Mrs. Owens caught the back swing of knobby knuckles against her temple and went down even harder.

  I didn’t talk then. I jumped in and hit the big man in the small of the back with my lowered shoulder. He shrugged me off and kept his feet. I almost fell but managed to keep my feet. It would have been better if I had fallen. Owens caught me by the hair, then pulled me in front of him while pushing my head down at the same time. Then his huge right hand smashed against my ear.

  The blow was glancing but I heard the fireworks bursting in my head. When he struck, he released my hair. Either he thought I was done or he realized I was not his wife. It gave me the moment I needed to bring my weapon out and step back into a two-armed stance. My head was spinning. I needed the footing of the stance just to keep from falling. If I had to pull the trigger there was no telling what I might have hit. Probably nothing I aimed at. Luckily, I didn’t have to find out.

  Mr. Owens froze when the pistol was pointed at his chest. And when I commanded him to get on the ground, he did so. That was when I noticed the silence. Carrie, her mother, and her father on the ground were all looking at me like I was William Shatner beamed down among them.

  I was grateful for the quiet. Once Mr. Owens was cuffed I left him there and called for transport and a deputy to take statements. I wouldn’t be able to write anything until I saw fewer than five of everything. I also asked Darlene to call Marion Combs to tell her that I had arrested Mr. Owens and that Carrie probably needed some help. I didn’t say that what I had heard confirmed our suspicions, but I was feeling pretty sure—with her father in jail—Carrie might feel better about talking to someone.

  I was high on adrenaline and self-congratulation. One from the violence and the other from getting an abusive parent away from a child. The high dulled the grinding pain at my temple and carried me back to the sheriff’s office with a song in my heart. Other people have MP3 players. I had personal playlists of songs locked in my head to fit most any mood I’d ever been in. Songs—like magic bookmarks on my emotions popping into focus like old friends to say: Remember this feeling. For a long, black period it had seemed to fail me. I was noticing more and more that it was cropping up again. As I drove with my windows down and a hand out in the hot wind I realized that the song in my head was “Mr. Blue Sky” by ELO. That had always been my happy, proud, and pleased-with-myself song. I thought I had lost it.

  When I pulled into the parking lot I was still high on myself and the music of Jeff Lynne. If I hadn’t have been so high I might have been paying more attention. Moon was just outside the doors of the jail talking with someone I couldn’t really see and didn’t really want to. There were other things on my mind. The two men were talking and Moon was shaking his head. My assumption was that the other man was also freshly released and asking for either money or a ride. I parked the SUV and sat for a moment with my head tilted back and my eyes closed. It felt good to just feel good for a minute. When I accepted the real world again and opened my eyes Moon was walking away alone. The man he had been talking to was leaving the lot in a hurry. Even through the tinted windows on his car I caught the flash of silver jewelry and a wide-toothed grin. The same man I had seen outside the hospital and at Moonshines.

  Even through my good mood that nagged at me. Perhaps I should have listened.

  Inside the station I sat at my desk and stayed there for only a few minutes. Nothing, not the grinding ache in the side of my head or the good feeling of putting Owens away, could keep my mind off of the previous day. Is it any surprise that phone calls and paperwork couldn’t hold my attention?

  I checked out and went to get some lunch. Since we had eaten the greasy burgers and delivery pizza all weekend I sacrificed and picked up a couple of salads and went to share with Nelson.

  Sometimes sacrifice has its rewards.

  Nelson didn’t want food. When I came into the house he was working at the easel. He and the painting were both bathed in sunlight. The smile that crossed his face when I came in was brighter, though. Then it changed into a smile that had a touch of the night in it.

  After putting down his brushes he wiped his hands off on a stained cloth, then his shirt. The shirt was almost a palette of its own, smeared and blotted with bright reminders of the images he had captured.

  As I set the food on the table he caught me and pulled my shoulders around. It was a gentle demand. But still demanding. His warm hands—still smelling of paint and oil, smelling of him—embraced my face. Then they pulled me into a kiss. The kind of kiss most of us dream of coming home to. At once, as if the moment were choreographed, his tongue slipped into my mouth and his thumb brushed the scar beside my eye. I accepted both completely and it was as if the scar were being erased in the wetness of the kiss.

  His hands, his mouth, his eyes—even his skin—seemed to be hungry for contact as he touched me. Not touched: He enveloped me like a microbe I had learned about in biology class long ago. It fed by engulfing prey and simply making the smaller creature part of it. That was how Nelson was making me feel.

  And I was responding. So help me, I was just as hungry and didn’t know until he had shown me what I needed.

  * * *

  At my desk again, I smiled through my paperwork. Between sexy daydreams I even managed to write out a very long, detailed synopsis of everything I had been working on. Within it I drew both connections and conclusions between the various elements. I gave special attention to Mr. Owens. I suggested further investigation into the murder of Angela Briscoe and gave my opinion that Carrie Owe
ns had put Danny Barnes up to the murder in some kind of weird pact to gain favor from Leech. Responsibility, I ultimately laid at her father’s feet.

  On a separate couple of pages, I recounted my visit to the hospital and subsequent encounter with the man dressed like a square-dance pimp. Then I noted seeing him talking with Moon here at the jail.

  The man had a definite connection to all the different groups that were somehow connected to meth, whiskey, and murder. I had seen him at Moonshines on that first night and the night that the RV was shot up. He had shown up at the hospital where Cotton was being treated, then murdered.

  I made a note to check up on Moon.

  The sheriff was not in the office and Darlene told me there was a planning session with the feds. We were all hitting the Ozarks Nightriders meth lab early Tuesday morning. We being the DEA, the Forestry Service, and the Sheriff’s Department. We except for me.

  I was excluded.

  I felt excluded and angry about it. Honestly, though, it was a confusing kind of anger. Maybe the anger came from the confusion—I didn’t know. What I did know was that I had put myself here. It doesn’t sound like much of a revelation, but it was. After more than ten years of blaming events and other people I could finally say most of the mess in my life was my doing. It only took years, gallons of beer and whiskey, everyone I knew telling me the obvious, and falling in love.

  Who’s counting?

  They say that it’s never too late to start trying to repair your life. I called a florist and sent flowers to Emily Benson, the sheriff’s wife.

  My day was over. I packed it in, putting my notes in my files, turning in my logs, and dropping my legal pads on Sheriff Benson’s desk. There were still some things I wanted to look further into, so I printed some of the material sent to me in response to e-mails. It all dealt with liquor-control regulations and the concessions made by all parties to allow a distillery restaurant under state, county, and city regulations. There was a lot of it. Apparently, there had been many promises made and even more stipulations put on those promises. It was a complex deal that involved taxes and tax incentives, zoning, and sales controls on all liquor produced. I thought I would go over it tonight looking for some reason behind the death of Johnny Middleton.