by Jeff Crook
“Of course,” I said, and headed upstairs. Of course, I didn’t know anyone else who might have had a motive to kill Sam. Jenny was the only good suspect I had, but I was happy to mark her off the list. I’d sleep better, anyway.
I found Cassie in her bedroom, under the bed with her feet sticking out, waiting for somebody to see her. I sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the Disney princess pillow and laid it across my lap. She didn’t move from under the bed.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “What’s up?”
She didn’t answer. I didn’t expect her to. “She’s in the pool right now.” I walked over to the window, which overlooked the pool. The girl in the red one-piece was still there, but she had sunk to the bottom. Jenny sat at the pool’s edge, her feet in the water, watching Eli try to climb into an inflatable lifesaver. “I talked to your mom. She’s sorry she yelled at you.”
Cassie’s little blond head rose up in the space between the bed and the wall. Her eyes were as big as the knobs on her bedposts.
“I didn’t tell her about this, or about us, what we see.” I sat on the bed, and Cassie climbed up beside me, curled up in my lap like a dog and stuck her thumb in her mouth.
“I won’t tell her unless you want me to. But she won’t make you go swimming now.”
She pulled out her thumb and whispered, “Thanks.”
“You don’t have to be scared of them,” I said. I clumsily stroked her head, streaming her fine hair through my fingers.
“Aunt Jackie?”
I cringed. “Just Jackie.”
“Mama said to call you…”
“We don’t always have to do what Mama says.” I cringed again. This is why I disliked children. It wasn’t so much the kids as what I turned into around them.
“Can I tell you something?” I nodded that she could. “Reece made me promise never to tell.”
My heart climbed up my throat and tried to push past my tongue. I swallowed it down before saying, “I think maybe you can tell me. I won’t tell anyone else.”
She thought about that for a bit, nervously gnawing on her thumb, while my shaking fingers continued to brush through her hair. Finally, it came out. “Reece had a boyfriend.”
“Oh?” I pulled a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth, gently, so as not to floss her teeth with it. “Did she tell you his name?”
“No.”
The anchor chain of my heart rattled through its hawse and sank, sixteen fathoms deep.
“She was meeting him,” she continued, “that night. She snuck out through her window. She made me promise not to tell.”
Back went the thumb into her mouth, a plug to stop her sobs, and I wondered how many nights she had lain in this bed, gnawing it raw to keep anyone from hearing her tears. How many times had she blamed herself for keeping Reece’s secret, when doing the wrong thing and being a tattletale might have saved her sister’s life? I had slept in Cassie’s bed more nights, walked more miles in her shoes that she had logged herself, blamed myself a million times for my own little brother’s death. We shared more than a talent for seeing the dead. We carried them on our backs, too.
Grown-ups aren’t allowed to suck their thumbs. All we had were words, but at times like this, words were hollow noises, empty as a junkie’s promises. I couldn’t tell her she did the right thing. She would know I was lying. That’s why she hadn’t told anyone until now. She’d never met another person who could keep her secrets.
42
I FOUND REECE’S SOFTBALL TEAM photo lying on top of the computer. This time, the nail had been ripped out of the wall, the glass shattered in the frame and the photo slipped part of the way out. I stood at the door for a moment, my fingers clamped to the knob, then stepped inside and quietly closed and locked it. In the kitchen below I could hear Jenny banging supper pots on the stove, Holly laughing at something on television. Nathan had taken Cassie for a ride in his boat to cheer her up.
I picked up the broken frame and slid the photo out, careful not to rip it on the shards of glass. On the back Reece had written in round, girlish script her entire team roster by name and number. Next to her own number, 59, she had written, instead of her own name, the word Piglet.
Piglet59 was Reece’s username. I turned on the computer and pulled up her email account. On a hunch, I typed DLGOXOXOX into the password box and waited.
The first dozen pages of emails had never been opened. Most were spam, but about fifty or so were from her father—the emails Jenny said he wrote to Reece after she died. Page after page of the most tedious descriptions of family life mixed with heartrending apologies for failing her, for letting her down, for not being there when she needed him most. How he could have done more, should have done more. How he couldn’t live without her. Promises to kill himself and apologies for failing at that, too.
I knew now why Jenny never wanted to read these. I also knew that if the insurance company ever saw them, Jenny would need a signed confession from Sam’s murderer before she saw the first penny of life insurance money. There was no doubt Sam loved his daughter, loved her beyond the point of obsession, but I detected nothing sexual in any of his epistles.
I kept going, plodding through hundreds of emails from Reece’s friends, dating back years before her death. Reading about the horrors of middle school and the wonders of boys. About eight months before she died, during her goth period, Reece had also got herself mixed up in a cutting clique.
When I was growing up and couldn’t deal with life, I’d smoke a joint or drink a beer. We take that away from kids and now they cut themselves.
She stopped using email not long after she started cutting. I reached the end of the inbox without finding a single email from a boy or man, other than the ones from her father, and there was nothing in any of the other folders, including the sent folders and trash can. That made sense. Whoever had raped her had covered his tracks too well to leave something as traceable as an email lying around where he couldn’t delete it.
Next I tried the social networking site and found that, like most people, Reece used the same password for everything. When it opened, I was met with a black page covered with pictures of corpses and screenshots of B-movie horror flicks, backed by the quiet strains of Rob Zombie’s “Living Dead Girl.” In her profile, Reece listed it as her favorite song. Cute.
This is where she moved when she stopped using email. I was able to pick up the unbroken narrative of her tragic life, but now in her messages she began to mention this mysterious older boyfriend. My young buddy at the guard shack had said that most of the kids in school believed this boyfriend to be a fiction to hide her lesbianism.
The boyfriend was real, only he wasn’t a boy. I found the first photo in her private photo album—a selfie taken in a bathroom mirror. Shot from the neck down, there was nothing in the photo to identify the bastard. The bathroom looked tiny, perhaps a half bath, with blue wallpaper and a fuzzy orange-or-peach-colored cover on the toilet seat, not unlike the half bath under Jenny’s stairs except the colors were all wrong. Still, it looked vaguely familiar, but I could have seen it anywhere. He had shaved his pubes, but still sported plenty of belly hair. It formed a curious curl, like a question mark, around his navel. I didn’t need to see his driver’s license to know he was at least twice Reece’s age, and probably a lot older, maybe old enough to be her daddy. His username was Nastyb01. Hey Piglet, his message said, I can’t wait to be with you again. And neither can my little friend. Look how happy he is.
I went through all the Nastyboy messages, one by one. In some of them, he sent her thumbnails of the photos he’d taken of her, photos I’d found in the suitcase in the attic. I saw the same phrase, over and over, sometimes from him, sometimes from her—What are you thinking about? It was like some passphrase or inside joke, the kind of insipid code that secret lovers use when people are around.
In the later messages, he began asking for her password, saying that if she loved him she would trust him. When she
refused, he demanded it, then said she couldn’t see him again until she learned to trust him. They went through a rough period, maybe a month or two in which they barely wrote, before she finally caved and crawled back to his lordship. Only the password she sent wasn’t DLGOXOXOX.
In one of his last messages before she killed herself, he promised he’d love her forever and sent the picture of her crying in the rain. This is my favorite, he said. I love it so much, I sleep with it every night, if you know what I mean. I’m running out of photo paper! LOL.
Jenny called upstairs that supper was ready. I shouted that I’d be down in a minute, then scrolled back through, reading the messages again, looking for anything that might identify him. The only one that provided a hint said, I’m the luckiest man in the world. No man alive ever had a woman who loved him the way you love me. I recognized these words. I’d seen them or heard them somewhere, maybe a love song or something from a movie. I was sure it was a direct quote, word for word. In my mind I could even hear a man’s voice whispering them, as if he were saying them directly to me.
I wanted to vomit.
The worst part was reading Reece’s responses. She loved this creep with the sort of desperation that only a thirteen-year-old girl can know or understand. When he ignored her, she cut herself. When she was going to meet him, she couldn’t sleep the night before. She hated her mother because she kept getting in the way. She hated summer because Jenny was home all day and her boyfriend had to work all the time. She preferred winter, when they could be together whenever they wanted. Then the school year started and she was going to stay home sick and this time she promised she wouldn’t make him stop, she would go all the way and she loved him forever. Then she did it. Then he acted like he didn’t want to see her anymore. He demanded her password. He was just using her, and she started cutting again and she hated herself and him and the world. Then, finally, she gave him her password and they were going to meet again and he was so sorry he had let her down. He couldn’t live without her anymore. He promised he would make it up to her, if he could just see her one more time.
And that was it. The last message. It was April and Reece Loftin was dead.
* * *
I could imagine him, after she died, going mad as he tried to gain access to her account to delete all his photos and messages, realizing she had changed her password before that last meeting. Living in constant fear, waiting for a knock on the door.
A knock that never came.
Had she changed her password when she was planning to kill herself? Had she planned to kill herself, or was it a sudden reaction, perhaps to some rejection or betrayal on his part? If so, why had she hidden those photos in the attic? And where had she gotten the money she hid with the photos?
I didn’t know. I couldn’t wrap my head around the enormity of it. She hadn’t hated her abuser. If she was afraid of anything, it was getting caught or losing his attention. She loved the guy. She cut herself when she couldn’t be with him.
Absolutely no doubt he was manipulating her, playing with her tender emotions. But there was nothing unusual about that. I’d been through that game myself, a half-dozen times at least, since I turned eighteen. Once with the man I married, another with a man I almost married. Before that, with a boyfriend who killed my own brother and kept dating me until I finally uncovered his crime.
I kidded myself that I couldn’t have been trapped by the same guy, or someone just like him. I kidded myself that I would know him when I saw him because he was a monster, that the enormity of his sin must leave a mark for everyone to see. But the sheer adolescent banality of it appalled me. When I tried to access Reece’s accounts, I had expected to read heartrending stories about how he raped her, abused her, tortured her. Instead, he was just a jerk, a jerk like the million other jerks who ever mind-fucked the girl he pretended to love.
The only difference was this girl died. This one died, out of how many?
I needed to talk to Deacon. He had been right all along. The man who had molested Reece and photographed her hadn’t been her father. If Sam wasn’t a child molester, why kill him? Who had a motive?
Nastyboy.
Maybe Sam figured out who Nastyboy was. Maybe he saw the same messages on his daughter’s computer and recognized the guy.
Deacon knew the people in this community better than almost anyone. If I showed him the pictures of Nastyboy, maybe he’d be able to identify the bastard. He was the only person I knew, other than Jenny, who might, and I couldn’t show her the photos without revealing everything I knew about Reece. Things she didn’t need to know.
Sometimes people aren’t what they seem. Sam and Jenny didn’t know their own daughter. But in this case, it was better that they didn’t.
* * *
My phone rang while I was shutting down the computer. It was Deacon, as though in answer to my prayer. I glanced at the window. It was getting dark outside. I’d been at it for hours.
“Were you just over here?” he asked.
“I stopped by earlier. You weren’t home.”
“I’ve been home all day. I thought I heard someone knocking just now. I looked out the window and saw you leaving.”
“That was hours ago.”
“I could have sworn it was you.” He sounded uneasy, confused and tired. “You can’t see anything through this stained glass. I don’t know what I was thinking, putting these windows in a house. They belong in a church.”
A tremendous bang, like someone dropping a bathtub through the floor, drowned out his next few words. All I heard was “… can you be here?”
“Are you working?” I asked.
“No. I sent everyone away. That’s why I need to see you.”
He hadn’t heard the bang I heard. He had seen me when I wasn’t there, and not seen me when I was. Something was wrong. “Let me put some shoes on.”
“Be careful,” he said before hanging up.
Careful? Of what? He didn’t sound like the Deacon I knew. I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, staring out the window at the empty levee and the dark eaves of the forest in the distance. I saw a flash of white in the underbrush, like a torn piece of cloth blown by the wind. Only there wasn’t any wind.
As I stood, I heard a girlish whisper on the bed behind me. What are you thinking about?
What wasn’t I thinking about?
* * *
I ran into Holly coming out of the bathroom under the stairs. She was dressed to the hilt in a little red sleeveless thing stretched thin as a stocking over her curves. She towered over me in her heels. “Excuse me,” she said, ducking through the doorway. She saw the laptop in my hand and the camera around my neck. “You’re not working this late, are you?”
“No. Are you?” I don’t know why I said it. She was in my way and it just popped out. I tried not to look at her as I slipped by and headed for the door.
Jenny called from the kitchen, “Aren’t you eating supper?”
“I need to see Deacon.”
“Then take him some supper.”
I waited in the kitchen while she made a couple of plates—pork chops, fried rice, steamed asparagus; all of it cold but still edible. I heard the front door slam. I don’t know if Jenny had heard my comment to Holly, but she said, “Going out with one of her gentlemen friends, I suppose.”
I didn’t particularly care. I just wanted to go, but I made the small talk. “Does she have many?”
“A few.” She wrapped both plates in plastic wrap and put them in a picnic basket with a bottle of wine and two plastic cups. “Though one rarely sees any of them,” she grinned. She had an infectious grin, full of mischief. She suppressed it as best she could, which was barely at all.
“One doesn’t, does one?” I snorted.
“We shouldn’t make fun. The poor thing has nothing to do,” she chastised herself. “No job, no life except lying around the pool all day. I don’t think she even graduated high school. She must be bored to tears.”
&nbs
p; She handed me the picnic basket and I headed for the door, remembered my manners and said, “Thanks. I’ll be back before you go to bed.”
She grinned and winked. “No, you won’t.”
43
AS I APPROACHED THE HOUSE, Deacon’s bedroom window was a square of colored light though the trees. The front door stood open and he was waiting in the doorway, a shotgun resting in the crook of his arm. I had never seen him with a gun before. I shouted his name. He turned without acknowledging me and entered the house. I climbed the steps and followed him inside, only to find the front hall empty. I heard him upstairs banging around before he appeared at the top of the stairs. He had no shotgun, and there was no way he could have got upstairs that quick.
I dropped the picnic basket and scanned the room for an intruder, stepped behind the door to my right and peered through the hinge crack into the next room. I watched a frail, emaciated old man lower himself into a rocking chair. His tiny body was nearly swallowed by a Kentucky colonel suit of immaculate seersucker. He rested the butt of the shotgun on the floor between his boots.
“Did you just get here?” Deacon asked as he descended the stairs. I said that I had. He gave me an odd look to match my odd behavior.
“Thought I saw a rat,” I explained, pointing. The old man’s skull-like face drawn into a mask of grief, he turned in his chair and set an ambrotype photo on a table by the wall. Before table and photo disappeared, I saw a woman and three children in the oval brass frame. Grinning furiously with toothless gums, he leaned his nodding chin onto the barrel of the shotgun and pulled the trigger. I jumped as his head dissolved, but there was no sound of the gunshot. He left the chair rocking silent and empty in the corner.
Deacon followed my gaze into the room. “Are you sure it wasn’t the Opposum Paul? Sometimes he wanders the house at night.”
“Pretty sure.” I was surprised by the steadiness of my voice. You never really get used to seeing them. Until this moment, I hadn’t seen a ghost in Ruth’s house. I had felt them, felt sure they were there, but they had kept themselves hidden. Until tonight. I worried what that portended. I knew it couldn’t be good, and I knew it was connected to the strange phone call that had summoned me here.
