by Ron Rash
“Why did you do it?” he asks.
“Angie Wellbeck was right,” I answer. “The money I gave Ligeia was for drugs but she didn’t me get the drugs.”
“You killed her because she owed you money?”
“Yes.”
“By yourself?” Loudermilk asks. “No one else was there?”
“I was by myself,” I answer. “No one was ever involved except her and me.”
“And you’ll go with me to the courthouse and sign a statement saying that?”
“Yes.”
“What about an attorney? You don’t want one?”
“No,” I answer, and stand. “I’m ready to go, right now.”
“All right,” Loudermilk says, and nods at the bottle. “So killing Ligeia Mosely, is that your excuse for being a drunk, knowing all these years what you’d done, knowing that she was still out in those woods?”
“No,” I answer. “I have no excuse for that.”
“No excuse,” Loudermilk says, then says it aloud again, as if to commit the words to memory.
As he stands he carefully tucks his shirt into his pants and centers his belt buckle, perhaps already preparing for the press conference.
“You got any kind of weapon on you?”
“No.”
“You’d better lock up the house,” Loudermilk says. “You may not be back for a while.”
I get my key and we walk out to the porch. Across the way I see a deputy smoking a cigarette as he leans against the squad car. Loudermilk gestures to him as I close the door. I turn the key and hear the click.
“Are you going to handcuff me?”
“Do I need to?” Loudermilk asks.
“No.”
We go down the steps and the deputy opens the back door and I get in.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I did try to leave that one time,” my mother told me, her words punctuated by the beeps and hisses of the hospital machinery. “It was the summer when you were seven and Bill twelve. I knew it would be hard to support myself and two children but I felt we could get by. I sent out résumés to high schools and actually had an interview scheduled in Raleigh. But your grandfather found out. One afternoon when you and Bill were at the rec center, he came to the house with Sheriff Lunsford and Mr. Ashbrook from the bank. I thought at first something had happened to you or your brother. I was so frightened and kept asking over and over if you both were all right. Sheriff Lunsford had to tell me twice before it sank in that you and Bill were fine.
“They came in and we all sat down. Your grandfather said Show her the check, and the sheriff did. Your grandfather had written it to me for a hundred dollars, but now the one was a nine. The change was crudely obvious. When I asked what this was about, the sheriff replied forgery, and that Mr. Ashbrook was ready to testify that he’d personally taken the altered check from me.
“Only if I decide to press charges, of course, your grandfather said. He told me if I tried to leave Sylva that he would do just that. I knew that he had me, and everyone in the room knew it too. It’s strange what you notice in moments like that, a small something that you later find significant. Your grandfather wore his suit despite the heat, and he noticed a piece of lint and picked it off his pants and flicked it onto the floor. It was as if my finally finding the courage to make a new life for us elsewhere was no more difficult for him to deal with than that piece of lint. There he was, two of the most powerful men in Sylva beside him, and they were doing exactly what he wanted. So I promised your grandfather that I would stay. And never try to leave again, correct? he said, and I answered yes. I could tell Sheriff Lunsford and Mr. Ashbrook were ready to leave, but they didn’t dare get up or even clear their throats. The sheriff handed the check to your grandfather. But instead of tearing it up he looked at me and said But of course I may go ahead and put you in prison anyway, raise those two boys myself. And for a minute no one said a word. The four of us sat there, Sheriff Lunsford, Mr. Ashbrook, and your grandfather just letting that threat linger, like his words were something he could taste and savor.
“Then Mr. Ashbrook spoke for the first time since they’d come. If you try to do that, Dr. Matney, he said, I will not testify. Some people might think his doing that was a small thing, but anybody who knew your grandfather would know otherwise, because Mr. Ashbrook had a family too, and I am sure sometime later he paid dearly for those words. Your grandfather didn’t acknowledge what Mr. Ashbrook said, and I wondered if I’d really heard it, because Mr. Ashbrook had always seemed a milquetoast, more like a teller than a bank manager, the kind of man who’d faint dead away if a robber came in demanding cash. But then your grandfather had smiled, not at Mr. Ashbrook but at me, and said, What would I do with two boys causing a racket around my house. Then your grandfather stood and the three of them left.”
That story is what I remember as I wait in the interrogation room, the Breathalyzer taken and passed, the sheriff and his witnesses, a clerk and a deputy, watching everything that is said and done. All that remains is my signature on the confession being typed and run off. A question enters my mind about the morning Bill tried to withdraw his money. If Mr. Ashbrook had known what it would lead to, would he have defied my grandfather a second time?
Maybe once is enough, I tell myself as I stand in front of the room’s one window. At the end of the long gray hallway is the holding cell. I don’t recall what it looked like inside. What lingers in my memory is the metal door clanging shut like an audible slap in the face. I sit back down and stare at my hands, wishing I’d bargained for one more drink. Or maybe it’s better this way, let the punishment begin. No longer the Eugene Gant who sought escape, but instead Raskolnikov, who embraces his incarceration. But that romantic notion quickly dissipates with the thought of being gang-raped while stone-cold sober. For a moment I waver.
Sheriff Loudermilk comes in with the confession. He sits down but the deputy and clerk stand. The clerk’s face is familiar, perhaps someone I went to high school with, because we look about the same age. Then I know her name and the knowledge is strangely comforting. Phrases come to mind: The theory of a unified field. The love that ended yesterday in Texas. Jungian archetype . . . All portend that this should be the right ending because it coheres.
“You’re Renee Brock, aren’t you?” I ask.
“Now it’s Clark,” she answers tersely.
“I bought a necklace at your father’s jewelry store once. A silver sea horse was on the chain.”
So what? her face says. As she turns to look out the window, hollowness is all I feel.
“This is being recorded,” Loudermilk tells me, and nods at the camera in the upper corner. “One more time, Matney. You’ve been read your rights, and you’ve said you don’t want a lawyer present, correct?”
I nod.
“Answer verbally.”
“That’s correct,” I say.
“And by signing this confession you’re admitting you killed Ligeia Mosely on September 15, 1969.”
“Yes.”
“Say it louder.”
“Yes,” I say.
He sets the paper and pen in front of me and I pick up the pen with my left hand.
Loudermilk reaches across the table and sets a splayed palm on the paper.
“Put the pen down.”
“Why?”
“Where on her body was there a second cut?” he asks.
“What?”
“The second wound, where was it, you son of a bitch?”
I try to read Loudermilk’s face to see if he is trying to trick me, but it’s as if his features—eyes, mouth, forehead—are tightening like an animal preparing for ambush.
“Where was it, Matney?” he says again, loud enough that his deputy starts walking toward us. “Where else was Ligeia Mosely cut?”
“I know what you’re doing,” I answer. “There wasn’t a second wound.”
Loudermilk turns to his deputy.
“Cut off that damn camera,” he barks, and turns to Renee. �
�Go on back to your desk.”
When the deputy returns and confirms the camera’s off, Loudermilk leaves his chair. He comes around the table and stands beside me.
“Get up,” he says.
When I do, Loudermilk grabs my collar. He shoves me against the wall, his forearm pressed under my chin.
“What in the name of God is wrong with you?” he asks.
“There was only one cut,” I gasp, and he presses harder.
“The hell there was, you left-handed son of a bitch,” Loudermilk shouts. “They found a blade mark on her right pubic bone, the inside of the bone.”
The deputy settles his hand on Loudermilk’s shoulder.
“Sheriff,” he says. “The window is open.”
Loudermilk lets me go, takes a step back.
I bend over, heaving for breath.
“I—”
He leans closer. I can smell his hair oil, the mouthwash on his breath.
“Don’t speak until I tell you to, Matney, or I’ll beat you to a bloody pulp even if it costs me my job and whatever lawsuit your brother hits me with.”
Loudermilk waits a moment, then lets go and steps back.
“So he wasn’t even there,” the deputy says, “much less killed her.”
“No,” Loudermilk says. “This sick son of a bitch doesn’t know a damn thing, except how to drain a whiskey bottle.”
“He can’t even give you a name or two?” the deputy asks.
Loudermilk pauses. It’s like he’s seen a twitch on a fishing line.
“I’m going to ask you one more question, Matney, and I want a one-word answer. One word. I’ll know if you’re lying, so don’t even try. Don’t dare try. Do you know who killed Ligeia Mosely? One word, yes or no.”
I meet his eyes.
“No,” I answer.
For a few moments Loudermilk makes no reaction. Then he nods at the deputy.
“Go get his stuff from the cage.”
“Yes, sir,” the deputy says and leaves.
“I hope that the next time I see you,” Loudermilk tells me, “your car is wrapped around a telephone pole, a single-car accident. If you’re broken up bad, I’ll tell the ambulance driver to drive slow, and to Waynesville, not Asheville. I’ll not give your brother another chance to save your worthless ass.”
He opens the door.
“Get out of here,” he says.
As the deputy drives me home, I think of what my mother said about noticing something seemingly trivial at the time and yet, later, it proves important, definitive. What I remember was not at Panther Creek but at school between classes. Ligeia was reaching into her locker and one of the books crooked in her arm slid free and, as she made a fumbling gesture to keep it from falling, her other books spilled onto the floor. She’d kneeled to gather them, her brown eyes looking up, the freckles darkening as her face reddened in embarrassment. It is an unremarkable memory of an unremarkable moment, something that happened to everyone during high school. Just something human.
CHAPTER TWENTY
There was a last, brief newspaper article in which Sheriff Loudermilk stated that though Ligeia Mosely’s death may well have been drug related, no solid leads had turned up. She could have simply walked the mile down to the interstate to hitchhike, her first ride her last. He conceded that the likelihood of finding her murderer was diminishing. Too much time had passed.
Nevertheless, for months I kept expecting someone to come forward and say Ligeia had mentioned meeting Bill and me on Sundays at Panther Creek, or else recalling our truck being parked there. But neither has happened and now it is winter. The earth around Panther Creek is buried beneath a foot of snow, the creek glassed by ice. No leaves remain to give the wind a voice.
Bill and I have not spoken again about her. It is in my brother’s hands now, what good might come from what happened. I have almost finished with this story, and so my days will be emptier, the clock crawling toward five o’clock. Soon I will build a fire and when five o’clock comes I will raise my goblet toward the hearth and see through glass the refracted flames. As the bottle of whiskey empties, I may even see myself as a man who helps save lives, a spectral assistant each time the blade enters.
As for Ligeia, I have given her the exotic name and blue eyes and clear complexion I promised that afternoon on Panther Creek. Now, as the earth turns these mountains west into darkness, a final promise remains before I offer this story to the fire one page at a time. Fire and water. So now I write the ending, which happens this evening, not in this house or at Panther Creek or in my brother’s office, but instead on a beach in Florida. A woman is walking barefoot, the incoming tide swishing over her feet. Her beach house is fifty yards farther down the shore. It is almost dusk and she sees the warm yellow light behind the panes. A man is there, finishing a final paragraph before he comes to join her. She feels a surge of happiness as she thinks how lucky she’s been to survive her wayward years. Their daughter, grown now, will come to visit tomorrow and stay for a week. She will come back here in the morning and she and her daughter will hold hands as they enter the water together. Or perhaps there is no daughter come to visit, no husband finishing a story, or even a story—only herself, smiling as she leaves the sand and enters the ocean. She rises once, glances toward shore, then turns and disappears, a mermaid finally home.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Kathy Brewer, Tom Rash, Bill Koon, Megan Lynch, Phil Moore, Marly Rusoff. Ann, Caroline, and James.
Onward.
About the Author
RON RASH is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to five other novels, including the prizewinning One Foot in Eden, The Cove, and Above the Waterfall; five collections of poetry, including Poems: New and Selected; and six collections of stories, among them Nothing Gold Can Stay and Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
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Also by Ron Rash
FICTION
Above the Waterfall
Something Rich and Strange
The Ron Rash Reader
Nothing Gold Can Stay
The Cove
Burning Bright
Serena
The World Made Straight
Saints at the River
One Foot in Eden
Chemistry and Other Stories
Casualties
The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth
POETRY
Poems: New and Selected
Waking
Raising the Dead
Among the Believers
Eureka Mill
Credits
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph © Kate Vukovich/ImageBrief
Copyright
THE RISEN. Copyright © 2016 by Ron Rash. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-243631-3
EPub Edition September 2016 ISBN 9780062436337
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