by Jeff Crook
“No idea.” I folded the paper and set it aside.
“Something’s wrong.”
“Somebody stole my car last night.”
“Oh my God!” Jenny gasped.
“I think maybe it’s time you introduced me to your favorite neighbor.”
* * *
Doris Dye opened her back door and greeted us with a cold, cockeyed stare, her purse dangling from her arm and her keys clutched in one arthritic claw. She was dressed for church in a coarse black dress that looked like she had made it herself, black block-heeled shoes and stark white hose too thin to hide the blue veins mapping her legs. It wasn’t even Sunday and I thought maybe she was going to a funeral. She looked like the kind of woman whose social life primarily consisted of funerals.
I introduced myself by saying I was working for Deacon. “You remember Deacon?” Jenny added.
“Have you come to apologize?” the old lady asked. With her eyes pointing in two directions, I couldn’t tell who she was talking to. “Because if you have, I don’t have time to listen. I was just leaving.”
Jenny apologized for keeping her but I remained where I stood, blocking the path to the brown sedan parked in the detached carriage house. For her part, Doris tried to fill the doorway so I couldn’t see into the kitchen behind her. “Last night,” I said. “I saw you at your front window. I believe you saw me.”
She allowed that she may have noticed when I ran off into the woods and left my car parked in the street with the headlights on and the car door open, and that she had, in fact, been about to call security to have it towed, but by the time she got her phone and returned to the window, somebody was already driving away. “It wasn’t you,” she noted with a smile. “It was dark and my eyes ain’t what they used to be, but I know a black man when I see one. I just assumed he was a friend of yours.” She meant that as an insult.
I thanked her for her time. She closed and locked her door. Maybe she had changed her mind about the funeral.
Back at Jenny’s house, I called the police to report the theft. Officer Lorio arrived about an hour later. I hadn’t seen him since the day of the wake. He looked like he had packed an extra ten pounds into his shirt, most of it muscle, plus an extra pound or two in the bags under his eyes. He seemed to think we had a fair chance of catching the car thief and suggested we head over to the Fayette County sheriff’s office. “The gates are monitored by twenty-four-hour infrared video. We should be able to get an exact time when it was stolen, and hopefully a good picture, maybe match it to somebody using our new facial-recognition software.”
The cops in this county had more toys than the FBI.
* * *
Lorio and I sat in a small monitoring room down the hall from the first-class jail where I’d taken lodgings my last trip through Mayberry. We passed Sheriff Stegall in the hall but he pretended to be reading something important on the back of a box of crackers. Using the department’s computer, Lorio was able to tap into the DVR files of the security company that handled Stirling Estates.
“You know they ruled Sam’s death a suicide?” Lorio asked during a long stretch of no activity. We watched the tape at sixteen-times speed, slowing down any time a car appeared at the gate.
I told him how Stegall had informed me, that day in his office.
“Did you believe it?” he asked.
“Not at first.” After what I saw on the levee that April morning, I assumed the coroner was covering something up. Now I knew he’d killed himself. Maybe out of regret, maybe for reasons no one could understand. The only thing missing was how, and that question no longer kept me up nights. I didn’t care.
“You believe it now?” Lorio asked, to which I shrugged. “But if what you saw is true…”
“What I saw doesn’t matter. You know that.”
“I know the facts of the case,” he said in his best policeman’s deadpan, “but I also knew Sam. I’ve known him since high school. I don’t think he would kill himself, not anymore. He loved Reece, but he loved his other kids, too. He wouldn’t leave them without a father.”
Deacon had said the same thing. These people thought Sam Loftin was a saint. Even after we found that money, Deacon couldn’t bring himself to think Sam killed himself. But he was right about one thing—Sam Loftin may have been a monster, but he was a dead monster. Dragging him out of his grave wouldn’t make anything right. All exposing him would accomplish was more pain, like an unexploded shell left over from a meaningless war, waiting in the ground for some child to step on it.
“Something must have happened to Sam. You said that yourself. I think maybe he had a stroke or a heart attack. The coroner found a deep contusion to the back of the head, but it wasn’t enough to kill him. You saw the rocks on the levee. He says Sam may have slipped and struck his head.” I remembered the limestone boulders, rough and jagged, certainly capable of punching a hole in somebody’s skull, but not very slippery unless wet. It hadn’t rained in almost a week when Sam died. “So if he didn’t kill himself, why rule it a suicide? He didn’t leave a note.”
“Not all suicides leave notes,” I said. God knew I’d photographed enough of them. “Was he depressed?”
Lorio shrugged and paused the tape at a small white car passing through the gate. It wasn’t my car. “Sam had his bad days, just like anybody else, but he was usually a pretty happy guy.”
“What about his finances?” Here I was pretending to be a cop again, asking cop questions as though there was any question about what happened. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I couldn’t help myself.
“Business has been good for the last year. He worked practically all the time. He was working the day he died.”
The time stamp on the video read 8 a.m. My car never passed the gate during the night. “It must still be on the property,” Lorio said as he turned off the computer. The room went dark, but I could still see his round face in the lingering glow of the monitor. The bags under his eyes looked like deflated marshmallows.
“We should check Doris Dye’s garage.”
“You check,” he said. “I like my job. I’d like to keep it.”
19
LORIO DROPPED ME OFF at the end of Jenny’s drive. I found everyone by the pool eating watermelon. Holly sat on the edge of the patio wall in a black bikini a little smaller than a pirate’s eye patch, teaching the kids to spit watermelon seeds. Nathan swanned around, snapping photos of everybody with his camera and reminding us how expensive it was.
I brought Jenny and Deacon up to date about my car. The worst part was, I’d left my camera and computer on the front seat. “I doubt they’ll still be there when they find my car,” I said. “If they find it. The camera was worth more than the car, anyway.”
Jenny scratched her head for a minute, then cut me a slice of watermelon. “I think Sam’s old camera is up in the attic. I gave it to him when we were dating.”
“No thanks,” I said.
“It’s a good camera.”
“Thanks all the same.” I’d had enough trouble out of secondhand cameras that once belonged to dead people.
Without batting an eye, Deacon said, “We’ll buy you a new camera, then.”
As much as I needed to hang on to this job, I shook my head no. “The camera will go to the church when you’re done, of course,” he added. “The thing is, I need those photos to send to the craftsmen I’ve hired to do the wood carvings. They’re in Pennsylvania. So I can’t wait until the police find your car.”
That seemed like a fair deal, one I could live with. “I know where we can pick up a good camera cheap.” I took a bite of watermelon, so cold and so sweet it made my teeth hurt. “I’ll need a ride into Memphis.”
“I’ll take you,” Nathan offered. Before I could say no, Jenny insisted on driving me herself.
* * *
We left Jenny’s kids with Holly. Before he departed, Deacon gave me a signed blank check drawn on his church’s checking account to buy the camera. All he asked
for was a receipt. I’d never met people so oblivious with their money before.
As we drove up Highway 70 toward the city, Jenny questioned me about my adventures beneath the House of Usher. I played the whole affair as a minor inconvenience, with lots of comical French shrugging. I left out the part about the creature chasing the girl because I didn’t want to give her the wrong impression. Jenny didn’t believe I wasn’t scared stiff, especially when I found myself locked in the crypt.
“I would have been terrified.”
I had a feeling I already knew where this conversation was going, even before she asked, “Do you remember how we met?”
I said that I did. “I saw you for like ten minutes at that bar and then you just disappeared. Next thing I know you’re all over the news for a couple of days, then nothing. But I always knew I’d see you again.”
“Well, here I am,” I said.
“Here you are.” She pulled up in front Deiter’s shop and parked. I waited for her to unlock the doors, but she just sat there, thin fingers wrapped around the steering wheel, her eyes staring at something I couldn’t see. She was working herself up to ask the question she’d been waiting three months to ask.
For all her outward poise, it was clear she was barely holding herself together. It was still too soon for her to hear what I had to say, but she was reaching out to me, as if I could bring her some final message from her dead husband. I didn’t have a final message. I didn’t have anything that could help her, and I knew that would tear her apart.
“Officer Lorio told you what I saw.”
She nodded, her eyes welling up with tears. She had the same big brown eyes as her daughter Cassie, only older, softened by smile lines in the corners. She snatched a Kleenex from a box in the center console and pressed it to her face, still nodding, violently, her back heaving.
She wanted to be torn apart.
I described the scene to her as though reading it for the court record. I didn’t embellish it or read anything into it. I didn’t offer any theories as to what might have happened or try to explain how I had seen her husband alive when he’d been dead for several hours at least. I described how I found Sam in the water and how I tried to rescue him. I told her just enough and no more, certainly no more than she probably already heard from Lorio.
She nodded all the way through my story, never once looking at me through the Kleenex pressed against her face.
“What I saw that afternoon wasn’t your husband. I don’t know what it was. It’s like I told Sheriff Stegall. I can’t explain it.” I could be a convincing enough liar when I needed to be. They teach you that in cop school—after hours.
“Thank you,” she snuffled.
“I don’t know if this is any help at all.”
“It is. It helps just to know.” She reached across the center console and took my hand, pulled it close and pressed my knuckles to her lips. I could feel her tears hot on my skin. “You’ve helped me more than you can know.”
She released my hand and unlocked the door.
I left her in the car to finish her cry rather than take her into the shocking rat warren that Deiter called his shop. He answered the door wearing nothing but a pair of plaid boxers and a black army beret. His teeth were still blue from the half-eaten cupcake in his hand. “It’s my birthday,” he said.
I pushed inside and closed the door behind me. “And I didn’t get you anything.”
“What do I need?” he shrugged, a comically helpless look on his face as he glanced around the room. He seemed to have everything his Teutonic heart desired.
We went into his office. It was his office because that’s what he called it. It looked no different than the rest of the shop, which is to say, the dumpster behind a legitimate camera store. After I told him about my stolen car and camera, he dug out his best hand-me-down Nikon, charging me less than half of its retail value because he’d used it a couple times during his sideline paranormal investigations.
Of course, even Deiter’s hand-me-downs made my equipment look like a fossil dug out of a tar pit. His camera did everything short of wiping your nose. The handbook weighed more than the camera. I filled out Deacon’s check and gave it to Deiter. He dropped it on his desk without looking at it. Two seconds later, I couldn’t find it again amid all the clutter.
“I’m including an infrared filter,” he said as he slid a round plastic case into the camera bag. “Use this when you’re shooting that Zuber wallpaper. Speaking of…”
He pushed a pile of dirty laundry and a matching pair of Siamese cats out of the chair behind his desk. I thought at first the cats were dead but they tumbled out of the pile eventually and stalked away, tails twitching. “I didn’t know you had cats, Deiter.”
“Yah, I’m keeping them for somebody who used to be a friend,” he answered. “Look at this.” He pulled up an image on his computer screen of the antique wallpaper I’d photographed that first day in Mrs. Ruth’s house. The images, though still faint, looked as though a couple of decades of dust and cigarette smoke had been stripped away, leaving behind pale blue images of men and women in early nineteenth-century dress, hunters on horses with packs of dogs boiling about their hooves, happy cartoon slaves plowing in the fields, a grinning black Mammy bouncing a little white cherub on her hamlike knee. However, in many places huge brown stains, like the outlines of a topographical map, had nearly erased portions of the scenes, leaving fuzzy images whose shapes could only be guessed at. Deiter said, “This is the best of the bunch, and I could only do so much with what you gave me. The infrared filter should help.”
“What about the other pictures?”
“Useless.” He scrolled through several hazy, overexposed images filled with white bubbles of light that completely obscured whatever it was I had been trying to shoot. “Too much dust in the air. Your flash picks up nothing but blobs. Lots of people in the business call these orbs.”
“What business?”
“Ghost business. Focking amateurs, they tell you these are spirits of the dead, but they’re just little specks of dust reflecting off the flash.”
I left that one hanging in the wind, even though I could tell he was dying to hear my ghost stories about Ruth’s house. “They’re taking the roof apart right now. The air is full of dust.”
“You’re wasting your time until they finish.”
“They can’t finish until I’ve shot my pictures.”
He scratched deeply into his straw-colored beard, loosing a blizzard of crumbs down the alpine slope of his naked belly. “You need to keep the dust out of the area you’re working.”
“That won’t be easy in a construction zone.”
“You could curtain off the room with plastic sheets and duct tape, bring in some fans.”
Always listen to your German engineer, if you have one handy. “I’ll try that,” I said, knowing I never would. The house was already a sauna without sealing myself inside a plastic bubble. They’d find my bloated corpse before the first siesta. “Burn me a copy of the best shots. Deacon will want to see them.”
“Already did.” He dropped a disk into the camera bag and zipped it shut. I followed him to the door, along with the pair of cats. They twined back and forth between his feet as he walked, tripping him every other step. He opened the door and they darted out, vanishing into the drought-stricken shrubbery.
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll get hit by a car?” I asked.
“I should be so lucky.” He glanced past me at Jenny in her SUV. “You look like you’re meeting a better class of people these days.”
I snapped a desiccated branch from the boxwood beside the door. “You ought to water your bushes, Deiter. They’re dying.”
20
EVERY MORNING DEACON PICKED ME up at my motel and dropped me off back home in the evenings. He never asked if he could see my room and I never invited him in, even though sometimes I didn’t particularly want to be alone. Because I was already so far behind on the job, I worked Saturd
ays and Sundays, but there was still so much dust in the air from the roof construction that most of my photos ended up hopelessly obscured with orbs. I had to take a dozen shots just to get one I could use.
Then the Nikon broke and Deiter spent two days repairing it. Deacon seemed to take all these setbacks in stride. He never asked to see my pictures. He expected the Devil to throw up every obstacle he could. “It’s Satan’s job to try to stop me, just like it’s my job to push ahead and continue doing the Lord’s work. I got nothing against a man trying to do his job. I respect that, even in the Devil.”
While I waited for the dust to settle between shots, I explored Ruth’s old mansion, poking into its corners, peering into crannies, opening doors and always finding another door to open, another room I hadn’t seen before. All it meant was more work. I began to suspect the house of growing, and pretty soon I came to understand why Ruth fought so hard to keep it. I was starting to dream about the place at night—those nights that I actually slept. When I couldn’t sleep, I killed cockroaches and counted the needle scars in my arms.
Sunday mornings when he picked me up outside the motel, Deacon always asked me to go to church, and every Sunday morning I declined. “I will get you one day, Jackie Lyons. And then I’ll save you whether you want to be saved or not.” By the third Sunday I wasn’t entirely sure he was talking about my soul.
I came to relish those Sundays, with or without him. Construction shut down and the circus camp emptied out about an hour before church, leaving me utterly alone with the house. It was the best time to work, but I didn’t bother working. I took excursions into the woods, more often than not getting lost for hours at a time. I rediscovered the cemetery in the woods and spent an hour walking among the gravestones. In daylight, the Stirling family vault looked about as threatening as a garden shed, and since they had broken the lock off the rusty gate in rescuing me, I had no fear of being trapped inside a second time. I found Deacon’s friend, the Opossum Paul, scrabbling around in the leaves, searching for converts among the roly-poly gentiles. He poked his apostolic head out and hissed like a radiator.
