“You sure everything’s okay, love?” she asked again.
“Everything’s fine. I’ll see you soon.”
He hung up.
Now, both of them were lying to each other.
13
After spending the night in a seedy South Side motel that rented rooms by the hour, Dexter left the city for the northern suburbs.
It was an overcast morning, the gray clouds shedding snowflakes. In the slippery snow, he was careful to keep the Chevy under the speed limit. He couldn’t afford an accident, or any incident that would attract the attention of law enforcement.
Around ten o’clock, he arrived in the city of Zion. Although he had grown up in Chicago, forty-five minutes south, until he’d met his wife he’d never visited the tiny burb. The downtown strip was a conglomeration of mom-and-pop stores and mainstream establishments. Old split-level homes and ranches dominated the neighborhoods. There was a church on almost every corner, and most of the streets had biblical names: Enoch, Bethel, Ezekiel, Gabriel, and the like, harking back to the town’s founding as a religious community.
His wife had told him that, until a few years ago, they hadn’t even allowed the sale of alcohol within city limits. It was little wonder that she had left for Chi-town, where he’d met her working in his cousin’s hair salon.
His wife’s aunt, her closest surviving relative, lived in Zion. While he was incarcerated, and the letters that he mailed to her at their house came back as undeliverable, and his attempts to call her revealed a disconnected number, he became positive that his wife had moved back to Zion to be near her aunt.
Several times, he’d attempted to collect call her aunt from prison. Predictably, the old bitch had refused to accept the calls.
Her aunt lived on the west side of town, in a neighborhood of brick ranches with large yards, winter-stripped elms, and ice-mantled pines. He slowly crawled past her house.
Like the other homes in the neighborhood, hers was a brick ranch, accessible via a long, snow-covered walkway. A Christmas tree stood in the front window, merry lights twinkling.
He wondered if the old bitch might have moved—perhaps into a nursing home or a grave. Then he saw the wooden plate on the mailbox that stated The Leonards in scrolling script.
She still lived there.
There were no newspapers piled on the porch or driveway. She’d been a stickler for following the daily news. The lack of a paper lying outside meant that she’d already plucked it off the ground, which probably meant that she was home.
He parked a couple of doors down, shut off the engine, and waited. He watched, patiently.
Occasionally, a car grumbled past, tires spitting up snow. A few houses down, a kid came outdoors with a golden re
DON’T EVER TELL 79 triever, and the child and dog tumbled through the snow until a woman yelled at them to come back inside.
Two hours later, no one had emerged from the house. It was another freezing day, however, and old folks tended to stay indoors in such weather, their brittle bones unable to withstand the low temperatures.
He pulled his knit cap low over his head.
He already had the Glock and the switchblade stashed inside his jacket.
He climbed out of the Chevy and crunched through the slush. A white delivery van rumbled down the road, and he waited for it to pass before he crossed the street.
He trudged toward the house. Thick, hard snow carpeted the walkway. She probably paid a neighborhood kid to shovel the walk, and hadn’t gotten around to having it done yet for the most recent snowfall.
A short set of concrete steps, caked with ice, led to the front door. A half-full bag of salt stood nearby, next to an aluminum snow shovel.
He reached inside the bag and got a handful of salt. He tossed the granules across the steps.
Then he picked up the shovel. Returning to the end of the walkway, he began to scrape snow and ice off the pavement, tossing it aside into the yard.
When he had gotten deep into his work and had cleared off half the path, the front door finally creaked open.
Back turned to the house, he continued to shovel, as if he were only a good neighbor concerned about the snow piling up on an elderly lady’s property. Slowly he worked his way backward along the path, drawing closer to the doorway.
“Excuse me,” she said. Her cultured voice retained some of the authority of the elementary school teacher she’d been before her retirement. “Excuse me, sir?”
He kept his back to her, kept shoveling, kept inching backward.
He heard the door creak open wider.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said. “I appreciate your shoveling off my walkway, but do I know you?”
Only a couple of feet from the porch, he spun around.
Betty stood in the doorway, bifocals perched on the edge of her nose. She wore a white sweatshirt and matching pants and held a tea cup.
When she saw his face, the cup slipped out of her fingers and shattered on the porch steps.
“I’m a little offended, Betty,” he said. “How could you ever forget me?”
“Dexter . . . oh, Jesus...”
“Long time no see, bitch,” he said, and slammed the shovel against her head.
14
The office of Rachel’s OB-GYN was located in College Park, just off Old National Highway. Joshua’s parents lived less than ten minutes away, so he decided to visit them before he met Rachel for her appointment.
Old National Highway, the city’s main drag, was a winding, four-lane road of strip malls, fast-food joints, nightclubs, pawn shops, currency exchanges, barber shops, hair salons, and liquor stores. The dome of a mega-church rose in the distance, resembling a pro sports arena.
Farther along the highway, retail gave way to residential development. Builders had recently discovered the area and were busy erecting the same sprawl of cookie-cutter subdivisions that consumed much of metro Atlanta.
His parents lived in an older section of town, in a neighborhood of Craftsman bungalows, ranches, and old Colonials. Oaks, elms, and maples stretched bare branches into the cloudy afternoon sky.
He parked in the driveway of their ranch house. Although it was midday, his parents were retired, and usually home.
The garage door was open, so he went in via that way. His father had his head stuck under the hood of a yellow Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight that looked as if it hadn’t burned gas in a decade.
“Hey, Dad,” Joshua said.
His father slid from under the hood like a man extricating himself from the maw of a whale. With skin the color of aged oak, he was a small, compact man, standing about fivesix; Joshua had inherited his size from his mother’s branch of the family.
A dirty cotton towel peeked from a pocket of his dad’s jumpsuit, and he grabbed it and wiped off his hands. He had worked as a mechanic at the local Ford plant before it closed, and though he had retired, he wore the oil-stained gray jumpsuit almost every day. It was a family joke that he would one day be buried in the uniform.
“What you know good, boy?” Dad asked in his gruff voice. A toothpick dangled from the corner of his mouth, dipping up and down when he spoke.
“I was in the area and wanted to stop by to say hello.”
Dad grunted, used the same soiled towel to blot sweat off his face. He nodded at Joshua’s Ford Explorer, brown eyes shining. “How that truck holdin’ up? ’Bout time for an oil change, ain’t it?”
He visited his parents every couple of weeks, and every time he saw them, his dad suggested that it was time for an oil change. The mechanic in his father couldn’t resist the compulsion to fix every car he encountered; Joshua was certain that the Oldsmobile his father was currently diagnosing belonged to someone in the neighborhood.
“I’ll bring it by soon for you to work on,” Joshua said. Dad grunted, and his eyes dimmed. “Mama’s inside,” he said, turning back to the car.
It was an ordinary exchange with his father. Beyond the subject of automobiles, they neve
r had much to talk about.
He went inside the kitchen. A gigantic pot seethed on the stove, filling the house with the delicious aromas of chicken, broth, dumplings, and vegetables.
Curious, he lifted the lid off the pot—and hissed when the heat stung his fingers. The lid slipped out of his grasp and clanged onto the floor.
“That must be my baby in there,” Mom said, coming around the corner. “Clumsy as ever.”
“Hi, Mom.”
He kissed her on the cheek, which required him to barely bend at all. His mother was a shade less than six feet, her body as thick as a tree trunk. Gray-haired, she wore a shapeless blue house dress, an apron, and threadbare slippers. A pair of bifocals suspended from a lanyard rested on her broad bosom.
Without the glasses, though, her dark eyes were as sharp as ever. They cut into Joshua with the precision of surgical scalpels, and he felt himself weakening under her gaze, swiftly regressing in age from thirty-two to twelve.
“Pick that lid up off the floor, boy,” she said. “And don’t be a dummy—use a mitt this time.”
He grabbed the oven mitt off the counter and used it to pluck the lid off the tile.
“Now wash it off ’fore you put it back on my pot.”
He took the lid to the sink, rinsed it under cold water, and carefully placed it over the pot.
“Come in my kitchen snoopin’ and messin’ up,” Mom said. “Shoot, if you kept in touch with me like a good son should, you’d know I was cookin’ chicken and dumplins. Sit down.”
He sat at the end of the kitchen table. Mom shuffled to the stove, lifted the lid off the pot, and stirred the soup with a big spoon.
“I was in the area and wanted to stop by to say hi,” he said.
“Wanted to stop by to say hi? Like we just acquaintances or somethin’. You ain’t been by here in a month.”
“It hasn’t been that long, Mom. I visited last week.”
“Maybe you did. But I ain’t seen that heifer you married since Thanksgiving. That’s plain disrespectful. You come to see us, but she can’t?”
“She’s been busy with the salon.”
“Wouldn’t trust that heifer as far as I could throw her,” Mom said, hands on her wide hips. “What kinda wife talks her husband into quittin’ a good job so he could go out there and be unemployed and strugglin’?”
His mother had been against him leaving his job to start his business. Although he was earning more money and was happier being his own boss, in his mother’s mind, he was jobless and broke. She blamed Rachel for it, of course.
“She ain’t an honorable woman,” Mom said.
“Why do you say that?”
“She just ain’t. I feels it right here.” Mom touched her breast. “But you ain’t listen to what I think, oh no. Mama done lived sixty-some years but don’t know nothin’!”
He was quiet. Eventually, her tirade would run its course.
She ladled some soup into a bowl and plinked a spoon inside. “Come here and take this.”
He got up, took the bowl, and returned to the table.
“Blow on it, first, boy, that’s hot,” she said.
He blew on a spoonful, and then tasted it. “It’s delicious, Mom.”
Mom nodded, and shuffled to the garage door. She opened it and yelled at his father: “Earl, get from up under that car and come in here and eat!”
He swallowed another spoonful of soup. His mom usually had to yell three or four times before his father gave up the joys of automobiles for the company of his family. Theirs was an odd marriage, seemingly devoid of tenderness, but his parents had been together for thirty-five years, a milestone that few members of Joshua’s generation would ever reach.
Although if he was trapped in a marriage like the one his parents had, who would want to stay?
Mom poured a glass of sweet tea and plopped it on the table. “Drink that.”
He took a sip. “Wow, that’s really sweet.”
“That’s how I always make it, boy. You done forgot? What that heifer been givin’ you to drink—wine?”
If he ever disclosed to his mom that they often drank wine with dinner, she would have branded him an alcoholic and said she was going to pray for him.
“Uh, no, Mom. No wine.”
“Hmph.” Mom sat next to him, the chair squeaking under her weight. She smiled, showing new dentures. “Chaquita came by here yesterday.”
He almost choked on a dumpling. “She did? Why?”
“ ’Cause she respects me. Unlike your wife.”
Chaquita was his ex-girlfriend. She and Joshua had dated for two boisterous years before she dumped him, declaring him too dull and soft for her tastes.
Puzzlingly, Chaquita and his mother stayed in touch. They sometimes went shopping together or out for lunch, like mother and daughter.
“She asked after you,” Mom said. “That girl still loves you, you know.”
“She broke up with me, Mom. Anyway, I’m married now. Whatever feelings she thinks she has for me, she needs to let them go. I’m going to be with Rachel for the rest of my life, hopefully.”
“Hopefully? You sound kinda doubtful to me. Sound like the bloom is off the rose. What kinda problems you havin’ with that heifer?”
“No problems.” He lowered his gaze to the bowl, shoved another spoonful of soup in his mouth.
“What’s done in the dark will come to light,” Mom said, with obvious pleasure.
“Excuse me?”
“You know what I mean! I’m talkin’ ’bout dirt, boy. Skeletons in the closet. Deep, dark sinful secrets. All that mess— it’s gonna come out.”
“Well, everyone has secrets, Mom. You never...you never know everything about anyone.”
“I know everythang ’bout your daddy!” She pointed to the garage, shaking her long finger. “You know everythang ’bout your wife?”
He glanced at his watch. “Mom, I’ve gotta go. I’ve got an appointment at two.”
“What? You just got here!”
“I know, and I’m sorry. I’ll be back soon, promise.”
His mother followed him to the door, muttering.
“Remember what I said, boy. What’s done in the dark . . .”
“Will come to light, I know,” he said.
He gave his mother a kiss, and went to his truck. As he pulled away, she yelled at his father again to come inside and eat. A normal day in the Moore household.
Driving to the doctor’s office, he realized why he had visited his mother. He’d wanted to talk to someone whose doubts about Rachel’s honesty exceeded his own. He’d wanted to talk to someone who would fan the flames of his discontent, someone who would whip his emotions into an uncontainable storm.
Because he’d decided that he was going to confront Rachel, and demand the truth.
15
Whacking Betty upside the head with the shovel had knocked her out cold. She slumped in the doorway, resembling a drunk who hadn’t quite made it through the door after a long night of boozing.
Dexter hooked his hands underneath her armpits and dragged her inside. She was a slender woman, easy to move. He kicked the door shut behind him.
The small foyer opened into the living room. It was furnished with a burgundy sofa and chairs, an oak coffee table, a television broadcasting a soap opera, and the tall Christmas tree he had seen from the street.
Photographs were everywhere. Pictures of Betty and her dead husband. Pictures of his wife. However, none of the shots of his wife were recent; he’d seen all of them before.
But that meant nothing.
He propped Betty against the sofa. Her bosom rose and fell slowly, and her lips were parted, drool spilling over them, but her eyelids didn’t flutter. She would be unconscious for a few moments yet.
He locked the front door and cinched the curtains shut. Shadows sprang from the corners of the room, like old friends.
Brandishing the Glock, he swept the house, boots knocking across the floor. To his knowledge
, Betty was spending her golden years living alone. But securing the scene was an old habit.
He also was seeking signs of his wife. He doubted that she lived with Betty, but she surely would’ve visited the old bitch often, and she might’ve left behind personal effects that would give him proof that she was in the area.
There was no one else in the house. He found nothing of his wife, either. Strange.
In a drawer in the kitchen, he found a thick roll of duct tape. Returning to the living room, he found Betty unconscious, but breathing at a faster rate. About to awaken.
He bound her thin wrists in her lap with a swath of tape, and wrapped up her bony ankles, too. He lifted her off the floor and placed her in a La-Z-Boy recliner.
He slid the coffee table across the carpet and sat on it, so he could look her directly in the face and analyze every nuance of her expressions when he spoke to her.
Her face in repose, Betty was a striking woman for her age. A thick, full head of gray hair. Healthy cinnamon complexion. High, sculpted cheekbones. Full lips. Based on the photos he’d seen of her in her youth, Betty had been quite the fox. She bore a strong, family resemblance to his wife.
“Oh, Betty,” he said, softly. “Wake up, old girl. I want to talk to you.”
Her eyelids fluttered. She was playing possum.
He popped open the switchblade and whisked the tip across the back of her hand, drawing a narrow line of blood.
Betty’s eyes flew open, and she let out a bleat of pain.
Violence had always been the most persuasive tool in a police man’s arsenal. The most effective means to get to the desired result. Betty was going to be dead before he left the house, of course—he owed that to his wife for her blistering betrayal—but the old broad might have some useful information to share with him.
“We need to chat,” he said.
Her honey-brown eyes glistened. She had eyes like his wife, too.
“I read in the paper that you might have escaped from prison,” she said. “You’re a fool to come back here, but then you never were very smart.”
He smiled—and sliced the blade across her other hand, carving a crescent moon-shaped wound. She issued a satisfying wail.
“Where’s my wife?” he asked.
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