No Saints in Kansas

by Amy Brashear

  Copyright © 2017 by Amy Brashear

  This is a work of fiction. While it is based in part on real events and people, all situations and dialogue, and many of the characters, are solely products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons and events is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Soho Teen,

  an imprint of Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brashear, Amy, author.

  No saints in Kansas / Amy Brashear.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-683-7

  eISBN 978-1-61695-684-4

  1. Murder—Fiction. 2. Criminal investigation—Fiction. 3. High

  schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Family life—Kansas—Fiction.

  6. Capote, Truman, 1924–1984—Fiction. 7. Lee, Harper—Fiction.

  8. Kansas—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PZ7.1.B75154 DDC [Fic]—dc23 2017021387

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my mom, my dad, and my brother, Alex

  Author’s note

  Dear Reader,

  On November 15, 1959, a family of four was brutally murdered in the quiet town of Holcomb, Kansas. The Clutters—Herbert, Bonnie, Kenyon, and Nancy—were shot execution-style in their own home. The senseless crime made national news. It quickly attracted the attention of a writer from New York City, Truman Capote, who traveled to Holcomb to investigate. The book he wrote about that experience, In Cold Blood, has since become a classic.

  In 1991, at the age of nine, I moved to Garden City. It’s only six minutes from Holcomb, but a metropolis by comparison. Everyone was eager to talk about the Clutters, pillars of the Holcomb community. The first person we met at church mentioned that her husband was a relative of Bobby Rupp, one of the original suspects. It was a strange introduction to a place I’d call home. I began to wonder how Holcomb might feel to a newcomer, like me, at the time of the murders. When I finally read In Cold Blood, that wonder turned into a consuming interest—and ultimately inspiration.

  The result is teenager Carly Fleming. She’s one of the few fictional characters in a novel otherwise populated by the real people who are forever seared in the nation’s memory—the victims, their friends, the police, the investigators, Truman Capote and his friend Harper Lee . . . even Arthur Fleming, one of the real-life court appointed attorneys for the culprits. In my novel he is Carly’s father.

  I remain grateful to the woman we met at church that day because she also made me fall in love with a phrase that stuck with me when I read In Cold Blood for the first time: “Out there.” It showed me the truth about how lonely home can feel—anyplace where the fence posts are all the same height, where the wind always blows the same way—in the wake of tragedy.

  With thanks,

  Amy Brashear

  CHAPTER ONE

  I can smell the kerosene. The police tape is the only thing that separates me from the men loading a pickup truck with bloodstained blankets, sheets, pillows—even a couch. I grip the bicycle handlebars so tight my knuckles turn white.

  There are a lot of volunteer men here. And there are a lot of people like me, standing behind this barricade, crying. I use the sleeve of my coat to wipe my eyes and my runny nose. All around I hear sniffling and whimpering. Two blood-soaked mattresses are chucked onto the pile. Foreman Taylor puts a teddy bear in the back and digs for his keys in his pocket.

  He starts slowly down the lane. I push my bike across the grass and lean it up against a fence post. He drives right through the police tape, straight across the road, into the wheat field. We lookie-loos turn and watch him unload it all. After everything is stacked into a pyramid, the teddy bear’s placed on top, like a star on a Christmas tree. He lights a match and tosses it. Smoke fills the air as everything that once belonged to my friend and her family burns.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Mr. Stoecklein says, walking up behind me.

  “Then where should I be?”

  “Well, not here,” he says, crossing his arms.

  “But Nancy—”

  “Is dead.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mrs. Walker’s history class doesn’t seem to matter now. I walk in late while she’s lecturing about President Lincoln’s assassination.

  “‘On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and a Confederate sympathizer, fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC.’” Mrs. Walker is reading from a book.

  Nancy was shot, too. Nancy’s dead. I care about that. Lincoln? Not so much. Not even a little bit. I don’t know him. I know, I mean, I knew Nancy.

  Sue Kidwell and Nan Ewalt found them—the entire Clutter family—Sunday morning, on their way to church. Sue was Nancy’s best friend. She’s not even in school today.

  Nancy promised I could borrow her red velvet dress for the Sadie Hawkins dance; she was bringing it to Sunday school. Reverend Cowan told the congregation the god-awful news. “This morning, I was called out to Holcomb to the River Valley Farm. There has been an incident,” he’d said, pausing to rub his eyes. “I’m saddened to report that the Clutter family—Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon—are deceased.”

  I cried when I first heard. I cried again at the crime scene. It feels like some part of me hasn’t stopped crying since. Especially at the headlines.

  clutter family slayings shock, mystify area

  Everyone likes—I mean, everyone liked—the Clutter family. Well, I guess not everyone.

  People in town think that Bobby did it. You know, killed the Clutters. But I know that Bobby didn’t do it. Bobby is, was, Nancy’s boyfriend.

  Mrs. Walker taps me on the shoulder. “Hon, the bell’s rung.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I grab my bag, leaving a tissue behind.

  Mary Claire stands in the hallway with her books to her chest, staring at a photo of Nancy on a wall next to a row of lockers.

  “Carly, can you believe it?” she says. “Things like this don’t happen here.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  My boyfriend, Seth, has to go to Garden to run an errand for his mom, so he puts my bike in the back of his truck. It’s a ten-minute drive, and once we get there, he parks on the square and goes inside a store while I stay fiddling with the chipped knob on the radio, moving it back and forth, trying to find something to listen to on the AM stations. Anything but farm reports and market reports. I don’t care what the going price of cattle and wheat are at the moment. I hear a no-nonsense voice, stern and to the point, and stop moving the knob. The reception is low, static mostly, but a news bulletin breaks through.

  “A local family was found murdered Sunday in their home—”

  Click. That goes off.

  I look out the window and see Bobby’s truck, and he’s sitting inside with the engine turned off. Mrs. Parker, or as everyone in town calls her, Mrs. Nosy Parker, walks by and glares at him before rushing down the sidewalk and into a nearby store. People in town have been giving him that look. A knowing look. A look of I know what you did. Before I know it, I’m walking over there. He’s alone, staring out the windshield. I knock on the window but he doesn’t move; he stays facing forward. I climb inside and slam the door shut.

  Bobby and Seth are considerably different in appearance. Where Bobby is tall and muscular, with dark
curly hair and light green eyes, Seth is short, pudgy, with blond hair and dark brown eyes. Bobby’s cuter than Seth. Yes, I said it. Everyone knows it. Bobby’s out of my league. But it doesn’t matter anyway. He belongs to Nancy—belonged to Nancy. Besides, I’m still the new girl in town. Seth was the first boy to ask me out to go cruising around on this square on a Sunday afternoon. Seth’s popular, and being the new girl, I wanted to be popular. Really, I wanted Holcomb to be like Manhattan, even if everyone around me agreed that my Manhattan is the wrong Manhattan. This, they tell me all the time.

  “You probably don’t want to be seen with me,” he says.

  “Why?”

  He looks over at me. “You know why.”

  “I don’t believe what I hear.”

  “Yesterday, we were supposed to go cruising around town.”

  “Bobby—” I touch his hand, the one that rests on the steering wheel.

  “I was at home when I heard. My pop told me.” He sniffs and rubs his forehead. “My brother and I drove out to the farm. There were emergency vehicles everywhere. They surrounded the house and blocked the entrance. I went home and called Sue.” He squeezes the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles turn white. “That night we went to the funeral home in Garden—”

  “Bobby, you don’t have to talk about it.”

  “Do you think if I don’t talk about it, it’ll just go away, that I’ll forget?”

  “No.”

  The clouds part, sending rays of late-fall sunshine directly into my eyes. I pull down the visor to shield my face.

  “Nancy was lying there in that casket. Not moving. She was wearing the red dress, the one that she made for 4-H—”

  “I was supposed to borrow that dress. She was bringing it to Sunday school.”

  “Carly—”

  “Now she’s going to be buried in it for all eternity.”

  “It’s just a dress,” he says.

  “It’s not. It’s Nancy’s dress.”

  “We wanted to go see the spook show on Saturday night. But her dad said no. What if . . . ? Nancy wouldn’t have been home.” He turns to me.

  I look out the passenger-side window. Seth’s walking out of the store and down the sidewalk toward his truck. Seth nods at Bobby and then nods at me to get out.

  “We’ll talk later,” I say, glancing over my shoulder as I open the door.

  He shakes his head. In the sunlight I notice the dark circles under his eyes. “You say that now.”

  “I say that always.”

  Seth’s waiting with the engine running and the volume to the radio turned up high. “Come on, Carly, you know better than that,” he says, eyeing Bobby’s truck.

  “What?”

  He puts the truck in reverse and takes me home.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The first thing I do is throw my book bag on the kitchen table and grab an oatmeal raisin cookie from the cookie jar. I pour myself a glass of milk and then lean against the counter, right next to the phone on the kitchen wall, waiting for Mary Claire to call. She always calls once she’s done with her chores out on her family farm. I stare at the rotary dial; the ring of white circles is like a clock that’s stopped ticking. When the phone bursts out with a shrill ring, I jump.

  “Hello, Fleming residence.”

  “Darling!”

  It’s not Mary Claire. It’s my mother’s younger sister, Trudy. Unlike Mom, she decided to stay close to her East Coast society roots—wisely, as far as I can tell.

  “Aunt Trudy, we’re fine.”

  “Oh, thank God,” she says. “I read about the murders and just hoped that it wasn’t a spree.”

  I sit my empty glass on the countertop. “How do you know about the murders? Did Mom call? Did Dad?”

  “Oh, no, The New York Times had a clipping. When I read it this morning over coffee, I just knew that I had to call.”

  I almost smile. The real clock, the one on the wall next to the refrigerator, just hit four o’clock.

  “I know. I know,” she adds. “I should have called sooner, but I had a date for tea at the Plaza Hotel with a certain someone special. Time just got away from me, darling.”

  Aunt Trudy calls everyone darling. I think it’s because she can’t remember anyone’s name. She’s always calling me Carol, Cory—or my favorite, Charley—but never Carly. It’s better than what my brother gets: “the boy,” “that boy,” or just “boy.”

  For someone who always gets our names wrong, she makes sure everyone knows hers. She’s also a mirror image of my mom. Thin, blonde, pretty. Always has her makeup on, red lips that match her nails. Her hair is curled and always in place. She carries around a pair of dark sunglasses to hide her late nights that turn into early mornings. She wears too much mascara, which runs when she cries. She always cries. Cries because she is sad or cries because she is happy. My mother says I take after her in that regard. Emotional. Too emotional for our own good. We, as in Aunt Trudy and I, always get worked up over things that are out of our control.

  “I was shocked—I tell you, shocked—to see something about Kansas in The New York Times that didn’t have anything to do with the farming that you people care so much about out there.”

  “Out there” is what she calls anything past the Mississippi.

  She came out here once, a few months after we moved. Mom begged and begged for her to come. Aunt Trudy took the train from New York City to Kansas. She got off in Dodge City, mainly by mistake. Dad drove the fifty miles to pick her up. She couldn’t believe the smell. How the air smelled like cow shit, even if you didn’t see any cows. It’s an acquired smell. I still haven’t gotten used to it. Most people say it’s the smell of money. And the nastier the smell, the more money’s being made.

  She spent a good portion of her time in Holcomb stuck inside our house, venturing out only for food, which she quickly dismissed. She announced, like she was delivering the Gettysburg Address, “I am a vegetarian!” The smell does mess with your sense of taste. At dinner one night, she squeezed her nose shut with her fingers while attempting to eat a salad. She glared at my mother. “Smells like cow poop. The whole town. How is that even possible? How do you live like this?”

  Aunt Trudy stayed exactly three days before she came up with some excuse to get back to New York. Now she calls, writes letters, and sends presents, mainly books. All kinds. She thinks being “out there,” or “hours from civilization,” as she puts it, I don’t get to read anything besides the Bible. I told her we have a library but she doesn’t listen. So she sends me books and leaves notes inside.

  “I’m so glad that you’re safe,” she says. “The article says that they had a girl who was sixteen. She was your age, Coley; did you know her? Was she a friend?”

  I sigh at the name Coley. “Yes. She was.”

  Aunt Trudy draws a sharp breath. “Not a best friend?”

  “Not really, but she could have been.”

  “Well, if there’s anything that I can do for you all, don’t hesitate to ask. I’m just a phone call away.”

  “Wait!”

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  “Aunt Trudy, can you send me that New York Times piece?”

  “Sure thing, darling. It’ll go in the first-class mail tomorrow, along with a book. But hide the book from your mother,” she says. “It’s kind of risqué. It’s about this man named Norman Bates—you’re going to love it.”

  Great. Another thing to hide. Under my bed I’ve got the Ouija board Aunt Trudy sent me last year—she swears that it really works because she “went to a séance, Carrie, and saw a spirit!” (her words)—a camera that miraculously produces instant photographs, and a pair of blue jeans.

  I know the Ouija board will scare the Methodists, but Aunt Trudy specifically instructed me to hide the camera because “it will threaten Arthur Fleming, Esquire.”
Her words again, although I’m not sure how instant photos would threaten Dad. He’s a defense attorney. As I see it, Dad’s job is to prove that people accused of a crime are really innocent—so if anything, instant photos might help. But Aunt Trudy’s logic plays by its own rules.

  The most scandalous Aunt Trudy gift of all, of course, is the jeans. My mom thinks a lady should never wear pants.

  “Thanks, Aunt Trudy.”

  “Stay strong, Carlotta.”

  “Carly,” I say.

  “No, darling, it’s Trudy, Aunt Trudy,” she says. “Well, look at the time.”

  I look at the clock. It has barely moved at all. “Do you have to go?”

  “Sadly, I do. Don’t worry, child. Things will be back to normal, just you wait and see.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Asher comes through the back door and tosses his gym bag on the floor.

  He’s fourteen, a sophomore, but since Sunday he’s seemed so much older. He walks around with his head low, his lanky frame stooped. He doesn’t make eye contact with anyone. When he does talk, he speaks in short phrases. His eyes are red; he claims it’s because he’s not feeling well. His oxford shirt, which is usually tucked in, is sticking halfway out. Asher doesn’t want to show his emotions to anyone. Kenyon was his best friend. Kenyon was the first one to introduce himself to my brother when we moved here. He got Asher to join the 4-H. They had secrets and inside jokes.

  Kenyon was nice to me. When he came over to our house, he always made conversation, asked me how I was. Maybe he was just being polite.

  What I know for certain is that Asher considered Kenyon to be his best friend, and from what I could tell, the feeling was mutual.

  “Basketball tryouts were canceled,” Asher says, opening the refrigerator and taking out a pitcher of cucumber water. He pours himself a glass and gulps it down. “I wasn’t ready anyway.” He pours himself another.