by Jeff Crook
“These are serious accusations, preacher,” Eugene said.
“I have made no accusations. I have named no names and pointed no fingers. But if you believe I have just described you, it is not my words that have condemned you, brother. As Jesus said, you have said it, not I.”
“Oh, he’s good,” Jenny whispered. She wasn’t the only person who thought so. Luther hid his grin behind his pudgy hand. People in the audience began to snicker.
Deacon continued, “Regarding Mrs. Lyons, she moved in with Jenny Loftin at my suggestion. I will vouch, upon my honor, that she is not paying rent.”
Luther nodded and said, “And I will second the motion put forward by my mother, that a hardship fund be set aside for the temporary relief of those in our community who find themselves in difficult circumstances. It will be considered by the full committee Thursday next, and if approved will be put to a vote by the entire homeowners’ association at the next annual meeting.” Luther was, if nothing else, a master politician. It was lucky for Senator Mickelson that he didn’t harbor ambitions for national office. No doubt the Republican party would bend over backward to run him for Mickelson’s seat.
“As for the matter of Mrs. Loftin, I think it has been satisfactorily settled, unless you wish to doubt the word of an ordained minister, Eugene. Mrs. Lyons is a guest of Mrs. Loftin and is welcome as long as Jenny wishes her to stay. Does anyone care to dispute this?”
No one did, not even Doris Dye.
“Then this meeting is adjourned.” Luther was the first to stand. He turned and shook Deacon’s hand before Eugene could get his gavel out.
* * *
I followed Jenny to the bar to wait for Deacon. Jenny ordered wine. I went for the Wild Turkey with a lot of ice. “That was interesting,” I said. “Other than poor reflexes, what’s Eugene’s malfunction?”
“He and Sam had issues.” The bartender brought our drinks. Jenny paid with a credit card. “Sam couldn’t talk about it because of the nondisclosure agreements, but I think it had something to do with money. Sam was the HOA treasurer.”
I already knew that, but it bore repeating. Money has a way of making enemies even among the best of friends. People have been known to kill each other over the stuff.
“At least Deacon was able to get the hardship fund started.” I knew he was doing it for her sake.
Jenny snorted and shrugged. “If it ever happens. The next annual meeting isn’t until January.” She knew how these things worked as well as I did. Six months was plenty of time for the motion to be tabled and quietly forgotten, unless Deacon was there to keep pushing it. And if Mrs. Ruth died in the meanwhile?
“Deacon has been suggesting you move in with us for a long time. We just didn’t know how to ask.”
“Why would he do that? He barely knew me. You barely knew me.”
She stared into her wineglass. “He said you could help us.”
“I don’t know how.”
“I thought he meant with money. I’m not sure now what he meant. But I trust him.” She turned and touched my wrist, lightly, just the tips of her fingers. Her eyes had a bit of wildness to them. “Deacon has a gift, Jackie. You must have noticed. He has a way with people. It isn’t just his magnetism, though he has plenty of that.”
Enough to turn a compass needle.
“There’s a power working through him, a Godly power. He’s so wise, sometimes it’s like he can read your mind. He doesn’t really, but it feels like he does. It’s impossible to hide anything from him. He knows things about you that you aren’t even aware of.”
“He sounds like a regular Carnac the Magnificent.”
“But it’s impossible to get a read on him. I’ve known him for almost a year now, yet I hardly know him at all. He takes our burdens and makes them his own, but he doesn’t share his troubles with us. He never talks about himself, about his past or his feelings or anything.” I didn’t tell her that Deacon had told me quite a bit about his past. Maybe all of it was lies. Or maybe not.
We moved from the bar to a table near the windows. The couple who had left the meeting early were outside on the deck. The woman was still crying as she stared out over the lake, her fingers buried up to the knuckles in the deck rail, while her husband made useless gestures of comfort. I asked Jenny, “What happened to their daughter?”
“It was after a softball game in Somerville. Lindsey told her teammates she was riding home with a friend, but nobody saw her leave. Sam wasn’t coaching the team anymore or he would never have let her go off on her own.”
“Did they find her?”
“No. And it’s been three years. Lindsey was fourteen. She and Reece…” she started to say, until Deacon arrived. Jenny wrapped her arms around him. “I’m so glad you showed up when you did.”
“I’m glad you called me,” he said. “I would have been here sooner but I was dealing with a possedé.” He ordered a beer from a waitress. “All that talking. Podna, that’s thirsty work.”
“You were just in time. I don’t like to think what Jackie might have done to Eugene.” She nudged me with her toe. “Would you really have hit him?”
“I doubt I could have caught the little bastard.” I took a sip of the Turkey. The taste always reminded me of my dad—a little bastard of a different stripe. “He was ready to bolt. Speaking of, you lied for me, preacher.”
The waitress brought his beer. He lifted it to his lips without drinking. “Unlike Jesus, I do not have the power to soften a man’s heart.” He tilted the bottle up. I watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall, over and over until the bottle was empty. It took about six seconds. I’d never seen him sock one away like that.
He carefully set the empty bottle on the table and stepped back, brushed his hands down the front of his vest. “God will forgive me because my heart is true. Besides, it’s no sin to lie to the devil.”
30
THE NEXT MORNING I WOKE UP in a puddle of sweat. It was the hottest day of the year so far, so naturally Jenny’s air conditioner broke down. She met me in the hall, fanning herself with a magazine. “I just…” she said, exasperated to the point of tears. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll talk to Deacon,” I said.
I found him rebuilding the porch on Ruth’s house. His shirt was off, the sweat sheeting down his naked back, the blaring sun baking his skin to the color of an old penny. His back and shoulders were laced with old blue tattoos. He sported the usual Army propaganda—eagles, knives through skulls, that sort of thing—plus a couple of prison tats from that stint in the federal hotel for going AWOL. His body was tight as a coiled spring. It was the first time I’d ever seen him without his suit or at least a tie. He sat back and pushed the hair out of his eyes as I climbed the steps.
I told him about Jenny’s air. “It’s Friday. We won’t be able to get anybody out here before Monday.”
“My HVAC guy went home to Texas for the weekend, but I can take a look at it when I’m done here.”
It hadn’t rained since early May. A pall of dust hung low in the sky, turning the sun red as blood as it set. There didn’t seem to be as many people working on the house as before, and other than the grading and leveling in the field, they hadn’t started on the church. Maybe the heat was keeping them away. Or maybe they did the sensible thing and got most of their work done early in the morning while I was still in bed.
After about two hours of sweltering in the closed up house trying to take photos, I packed it in. Another wasted day. Every photo I took was obscured by orbs. If only I could shoot without the flash, but all the windows were still bricked up or boarded over.
I staggered outside and flopped down on the steps. Deacon was hammering on the porch, all alone. “I wish I could have photographed before you tore everything apart,” I said.
“There are always setbacks,” he said through the nails in his mouth. Deacon felt good about his work on the porch, though I could tell he was disappointed with the progress with the rest of the house.
We headed back to Jenny’s. Deacon disappeared around the side of the house while I went inside, hung my camera on the hall tree. The place had heated up considerably, though it was still bearable. Jenny’s house was built in the days before air-conditioning. With the windows open, you could almost live in it in the summer.
I heard Cassie playing with her dolls in the den and talking to somebody in a play voice pitched dog-whistle high. Suddenly she dropped the play voice. “No, you’re not doing it right!”
I edged around the corner and found her, to my surprise, quite alone, sitting with her back to me, cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace, doll clothes tossed about as though a Barbie house had exploded in her lap. She turned to search for something and stopped, staring back at me.
“What’s up?”
“Playing,” she said.
I moved some dolls to sit on the hearth. The bricks were cool against the back of my legs. “Who were you talking to just now?”
She didn’t answer at first. She stared down at the doll clothes heaped in her lap, turning a tiny plastic pink shoe around and around her pinky. Finally, she dropped the shoe and looked up at me. “My friend.”
So she called them her friends, too. I had wondered that night, when I saw the girl in the red swimsuit, whether Cassie was aware of her invisible companion.
“She’s gone now,” she added.
“Where did she go?”
She shrugged.
“Does she live around here?”
Cassie pointed at the fireplace.
“She lives in the chimney?”
“No.”
“What’s her name?”
“Cassie.”
“But that’s your name.”
“She says it was her name first.”
“Is she your pretend friend?”
“No.”
“She’s real?”
“I don’t know.”
“If she’s real, how can she live in the fireplace?”
“She doesn’t live in the fireplace.”
“Where does she live?”
Cassie didn’t answer. I waited and after a while she sighed and started picking up her dolls. She wasn’t going to answer.
“She must be a special friend,” I said. “Is she a nice friend?”
“Sometimes.”
“Is she mean?”
“Sometimes.”
“Does she talk to you?”
“Sometimes.”
None of my special friends talked to me. They were just there, waiting for something I could never understand. The sweat started to drip from the end of my nose.
“Does she ever tell you things?”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” She took the few dolls she had already gathered and ran upstairs, leaving me sitting on the hearth. I looked at the fire-blackened bricks at the back of the fireplace. I could still smell the ashes of an old fire, though the ashes had been swept up months ago. No one appeared. Apparently, Cassie’s friend didn’t want to be my friend.
Jenny came inside from the pool, carrying Eli wrapped in a towel. Deacon was right behind her.
“It’s your compressor,” he said. “You’ll need a new one.”
“Great.” Jenny set the boy on the couch and viciously rubbed his wet hair. “That’s just fantastic.”
31
NATHAN AND HOLLY HUNG around the pool all day Saturday because it was too hot to go inside, even to pee. Nathan wore brown swimming trunks and a turquoise Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to the navel. He had brought his camera and spent the morning impressing me with it. “Don’t you have a home somewhere?” I asked.
“This used to be my house,” he said, oblivious. “I sold it to Sam and Jenny.”
Holly wore a little black thing that looked painted on, or maybe it was black electrical tape. As I didn’t have a swimsuit of my own, I asked Jenny to lend me one. She didn’t think any of hers would fit, so I tried on one of Reece’s—a white two-piece with little red dots like measles. The white blended perfectly with my junkie pallor. “I can’t believe it fits,” Jenny said when she saw me in it. “I should probably hate you.”
I took a quick dip to cool off. When I climbed out, I noticed the suit had turned translucent. “Are you sure this belonged to Reece?” I asked Jenny as I wrapped myself in a towel. Thank God Nathan had gone on a beer run.
“It was in her drawer. Maybe it’s one of Holly’s. She does her laundry here sometimes.” It wasn’t Holly’s. Now that I was wearing it and seeing my areolas and pubes through the sheer fabric, I remembered seeing the same suit in one of the peekaboo photos I’d found in Sam’s suitcase.
I went inside to change and found Reece’s team photo lying on the floor in front of her desktop computer. I picked it up and hung it on its nail, then locked the bedroom door to keep out any surprise visitors while I tossed the entire room. I went through her drawers looking for a compromising photo of her daddy, a diary, maybe a love letter taped to the underside of a dresser drawer. Jenny told me that she’d never had the heart to go through Reece’s clothes, so I was looking at things pretty much as she’d left them the day she died. I dumped her jewelry box on the bed, but didn’t find anything too expensive for a teen girl. I turned the pictures off the walls, including the team photo, felt the paper backs for loose spots, pried off the cardboard, peeled back the posters and magazine clippings that she had taped above the bed, shifted the bed and checked the box springs.
Nothing. I got the feeling somebody had already been over the place. It was too clean, too generic. Nothing personal remained—no ticket stubs, no snaps of her and her friends, no diary tucked away under her bras and panties. This wasn’t a bedroom, it was a museum.
Then I thought, girls these days don’t keep diaries and love letters, and their pictures are on their cell phones, but I hadn’t come across a phone, either. Not the sort of thing a parent would let sit in a drawer, anyway, and she wouldn’t have compromising photos on her phone, in case she lost it. I turned on her computer, but it took a while to boot up. It had probably been five years since anybody had looked at it.
While I waited, I picked out a little turquoise two-piece with a scallop shell over each boob. I looked at myself in the dresser mirror. I’d been clean for a year, clean but still living a junkie lifestyle in many ways—broken sleep, never seeing the sun, garbage for food when I could get food at all. A week of regular eating and semiregular sleeping habits couldn’t erase a decade’s worth of damage. I looked like the star of some sad television special, The Little Mermaid—Where Is She Now?
The computer finally came up and I did a quick search of the hard drive for photo files, found a few family snaps but nothing out of the ordinary. Next I checked for saved emails and documents and mostly found old homework assignments, book reports and science projects. I opened her trash bin, but it was empty; then I checked her temp file folder without turning up anything incriminating. Her internet bookmarks folder didn’t lead me anywhere, either. The last place I checked was her browser history. I found her email account right away, but without a username or password, I couldn’t access it. I scrolled down the list until I saw a social website that had been extremely popular five or six years ago. I clicked the link and brought up the login page. The name Piglet59 was prefilled in the user name box. The website was still in business, but I wasn’t. I tried all the obvious passwords—admin, combinations of names of family members, her name, her birthday, but nothing worked.
This girl had covered her tracks better than most criminals. Either that, or someone had covered them for her.
* * *
Among the ennui-afflicted bourgeoisie of Stirling Estates, any event was an occasion for a party. As soon as people heard that Jenny’s air conditioner had broken, they were lining up in the driveway bringing coolers of ice, cases of beer, boxes of wine and buckets of cheap Mexican booze. Mostly women, friends of Jenny, which suited Nathan just fine as he was too busy chasing expen
sive tail to pay attention to poor little me. I noticed he spent a lot of time courting Annette LaGrance, the HOA secretary, and she did little to dissuade him. By her second margarita she was sitting in his lap. Her daughter, the Elle model, played with Cassie and Eli in the shallow end of the pool.
I spotted an older black man sitting on an upturned bucket at the end of Jenny’s pier. I hadn’t seen him come in, and no one had spoken of him or seemed to notice that he was there. I wasn’t sure whether he was real or not, and I didn’t want to point him out, in case I was the only one who could see him. I asked Jenny to show me the boathouse.
“We don’t have a boat anymore,” she said as she opened the gate. I followed her down the path. “I sold it to Nathan not long after Sam died. There’s nothing much to see.”
The wind was rising on the lake, blowing moist and warm as a sauna. Waves slapped hollowly against the piles beneath our feet. The old man turned around on his bucket and Jenny said, “Hey, Bert.” He lifted his hand in greeting but kept his eye on the fishing pole propped in front of him. His fishing line ran taut as a piano wire down into the water.
Jenny unlocked the door and opened it. Inside, it was little more than a kind of carport for a boat, no floor, just open water, with a pair of skids hooked up to an electric wench for lifting the boat out of the water. A couple of old orange life jackets hung from a nail beside the door, and a thicket of fishing rods stood in one corner, their reels a nest of tangled twines, rusty hooks, and bobbers. A single bulb swung from a wire dangling from the roof beam—the cherry on its teenage-slasher-movie cake. All it needed was a spear gun hanging over the door. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jenny said. “Why did you want to see it?”
I thought up a lie and I thought it up quick. “I was just wondering if I could put a bed in here and get out from underfoot.”
