Heaven's Crooked Finger

by Hank Early

  “Everybody just stop,” Mary said, her voice still calm, but there was a clear don’t fuck with me edge that you couldn’t miss.

  “We’re all going to work this out. We’re on your side,” she said. The woman started to say something, but Mary shot her a stern look and she fell silent.

  “Now,” she said, “Earl, please explain to them why we are here.”

  Despite everything, I had to keep myself from smiling. It would have been wildly inappropriate considering the situation, but sometimes you meet a certain kind of woman who just hits all your buttons. For me, Mary was that woman.

  “We’re here because we wanted to find out a little bit more about the circumstances surrounding her . . . death. That’s all. We weren’t with the sheriff’s office in the nineties. We don’t know the details. It’s why we’re here.”

  The woman glared at me, but her husband nodded slightly.

  “Maybe,” I said, “if you’ll just talk to us, we might be able to get to the bottom of things.”

  I probably shouldn’t have said that. In my opinion, one of the worst things a detective—private or otherwise—could do was give false hope. It never paid off, but in this case, I decided it was a necessity if we were going to talk to these people at all.

  “All right,” the man said. “We’ll talk to you.”

  His wife looked like she was ready to spit hot lava at him, or at least rip out his hairs one by one, but she kept her mouth shut. Her lips quivered with something like rage, but she managed to not say a word.

  The man held out his hand. It was a begrudging, halfhearted kind of gesture, but it was something. “Wyatt DeWalt,” he said. I looked at his hand, remembering the way, just moments earlier, he’d used it to wipe vomit off his chin.

  Goddamn. I had to shake it. If I didn’t, his wife might try to kill me again.

  I grabbed his hand and pumped once, trying to hide my distaste.

  When he turned to head back inside, I glanced at Mary. She was laughing at me.

  19

  “Just so we’re clear,” Mary said as we sat down at a flimsy card table inside the surprisingly immaculate trailer, “which one of you is actually Allison’s sibling?”

  Wyatt raised his hand and winced slightly. I was betting he had a headache from all that drinking. “That’s me, but Patty and Allison was always close. I reckon Patty is the nearest thing Allison ever had to a mama.”

  Mary nodded, meeting Wyatt’s eyes, and I could tell he was already getting comfortable with her, which was sort of amazing considering, just a few minutes earlier, he’d addressed her with a racial slur.

  “Can you tell us what happened? Her story?”

  Even Patty seemed to brighten a little at this. In my experience, almost everybody liked to tell their story, especially if it involved some injustice, either real or perceived. There were some exceptions. Me, for one. I’d just as soon bury my story and never think about it again, much less share it with someone else.

  Patty was the one who told it, but every now and then, Wyatt would break in with a name or a date or would just grunt to let us know he was in agreement with what Patty was saying.

  “Like we said, she didn’t never really have no mother. A girl like that . . . well, she had some troubles. She went from this boy to the next one, but that ain’t so bad. I had my own mistakes when I was a kid. I tried to warn her out of it, but kids—nearly all the ones I’ve ever known—have to make their own mistakes before they learn. Everything else is just a bunch of wasted breath.”

  “Noise,” Wyatt said. “That’s all it is.”

  Patty nodded at him. “Anyway, any fool could see she was going to get pregnant. And when it finally happened, she didn’t know who the father was. She had some suspicions, but it didn’t matter. Once she started showing, them boys that had been so eager to be with her, they disappeared like cockroaches when the lights come on. Scurried right on back to their holes. I told her me and Wyatt would take care of her. We’d help her out.

  “That bucked her up some, but you could tell she was really sad. At the time, she was working part time over at the Magic Mart, out near 51. You know the little place at the foot of Pointer Mountain. Some fella came in there and invited her to church. She must have thought he was handsome or something because she ain’t never been to church a day in her life, but she come home that afternoon just beaming because this man asked her, and she was going to go.”

  “I didn’t see no harm in it,” Wyatt said.

  Patty shot him a look. “I told her not to go. There’s some churches in these mountains that ain’t about nothing good.”

  “Well, I didn’t know this was going to be one of those,” Wyatt said a little defensively.

  “Which is why I told you—”

  I cleared my throat and asked the question I already knew the answer to. “What was the name of the church?”

  “The Holy Flame,” Patty said, twisting the words in her mouth as if she couldn’t stand to have them touch her tongue.

  “I know the place,” I said.

  Mary glanced at me, then said, “Go on.”

  “So she went. And she changed fast. I mean, I thought that stuff took some time, but not with Allison. She became different, but she did seem happier, so I just told myself it would be a fad, and if it got her through the pregnancy and out the other side of them post–baby blues, I’d just shut my mouth.”

  Something strange happened then. Patty—previously so full of anger—began to cry. It wasn’t an aggressive kind of crying like I would have expected from her, from a person who seemed to only have one speed, and that was full tilt. Instead, I might not have even noticed if one of the tears hadn’t dropped onto the card table with a nearly silent smack.

  She wiped her eyes, but the tears kept coming.

  “She wouldn’t talk about the man other than to say he was a ‘good man.’ Or sometimes she’d say he was a ‘godly man.”

  “‘He’s looking out for me,’” Wyatt said. “That’s what I’ll always remember her saying. ‘He cares about me.’ Jesus Christ. I should have known.”

  “What was the man’s name?” I held my breath, praying it wasn’t my father.

  “She wouldn’t tell us. She could be so damned stubborn sometimes. She said if she told me, she knew I’d try to find him and meet him, and she didn’t want that.” Wyatt shrugged helplessly, and I saw him glance longingly at a half-empty bottle of whiskey sitting on the kitchen counter.

  “Did she ever describe him, talk about what he was like? Anything?”

  Wyatt deferred to his wife. “To hear her tell it, he was the nicest man around. Couldn’t do no wrong. Said he hung the moon. Like I said, I was skeptical but just let it ride. Then she lost the baby. It was a terrible thing. Lost it a week before she was due. That did a number on her.”

  “Changed her,” Wyatt said. “That’s what it did. She weren’t never the same after that.”

  “Did she continue to see the man from the Holy Flame?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. She saw him more. She barely came around after that. Always gone. When we’d ask where she’d been, she just said, ‘At the church.’”

  Mary said, “I’m sorry for being unclear, but was Allison living with you?”

  “Supposedly. She’d been with us for five, six years, but once she took to the church after the miscarriage, she was hardly ever here.”

  I swallowed, still feeling uncomfortable at the thought of this nameless man.

  “Go on,” Mary said.

  “This is getting to the bad part. Eventually, she just kind of disappeared. We didn’t see her. What was it, Wyatt, a month?”

  He shrugged. “At least three weeks.”

  “I’d call it a month, but either way, she came back with these odd marks on her hands and up her arms too.”

  “Marks?” I said.

  “They looked like tattoos,” Wyatt said, “but they didn’t stay. We tried to tell the sheriff’s office about this before.
But they wouldn’t listen.”

  “Can you describe the marks in any more detail?” Mary asked.

  “Hell, at one time, I drew pictures of them, but I threw all of ’em away when I finally realized the sheriff’s office wasn’t going to do anything.” He shrugged. “I remember them being sort of red, and sometimes they could look like a rash, but they weren’t like any rashes I’d ever seen.”

  “They was pretty,” Patty said. “I’d of been proud to wear one as a tattoo, but they weren’t that.”

  I glanced at Mary. From the look on her face, I could tell she was as perplexed as I was by these marks.

  Exasperated, I said, “We can come back to those. Move us forward. What was next?”

  “Well, next was her getting pregnant again.”

  “How long was this from the first?” Mary asked.

  Patty pursed her lips and calculated. “From the miscarriage I’d say it was about a year.”

  “And the father?”

  “That man,” Patty said. “Had to be. ’Course she wouldn’t ever say, but who else would it have been?”

  “It was him,” Wyatt said. “I know it was.”

  Mary and I both waited. The mood in the kitchen had grown heavy, and I could tell the worst was still to come.

  “She had a little girl. Named her Jenny. She loved that little girl.” Patty wiped at her eyes again. “I loved her too.”

  “What happened to Jenny after her mother died?” I said.

  Patty glanced at her husband. “They really don’t know.”

  Wyatt nodded. “You got your order wrong.”

  “How’s that?”

  “What happened to Jenny before Allison died? That should have been your question.”

  “Wait,” Mary said, “is Jenny dead?”

  Wyatt shrugged and looked at Patty again.

  Patty’s face was a mess. She looked stricken with grief. I suddenly felt really sorry for the both of them and was glad I hadn’t retaliated earlier.

  “It’s possible. But the truth is, we don’t know. One day, Allison just came home again. When she did, Jenny wasn’t with her. We asked where she was right off, but it was like she couldn’t hear us. Most I ever got out of her was when she said Jenny was okay.”

  “That’s all,” Wyatt said, nodding. “She wouldn’t say no more. Just that she was okay, and we shouldn’t worry.”

  “But we worried like crazy,” Patty said. “I even went to the church to try to find her, but nobody there knew what I was talking about. Or if they did, they pretended not to.”

  “She raised hell,” Wyatt said. “So much that the police came to us. Said there’d been complaints and we needed to stay away from that church.”

  “I told the police I had some complaints too,” Patty said. “I told them we had a missing child. They wanted to talk to Allison. Wouldn’t let us hear any of it, went in a back room and closed the door. When they came out, they said everything was fine. There wasn’t no missing child.”

  “We felt helpless.” Wyatt looked helpless right now. His eyes were downcast, his cheeks sallow and pale. He was sweating. Probably the drinking, though he sure did look like he could use another.

  “I was the one that found her,” Patty said. “She was up in the woods.” She pointed to the window we were sitting near. “Out that way. No more than a half mile. Hanging from a tree.”

  It was too much for Wyatt. At that, he rose and walked over to the counter to retrieve the bottle. He unscrewed the cap and tossed it aside, as if he had no use for it anymore, and I fully expected that to be the case based on his hangdog expression and the way his eyes were locked on that amber-colored juice. I knew that look, had felt that look on my own face many times.

  “We don’t think it was suicide, though. We think it was that church. And I want to be clear, even if she hung herself, it wasn’t suicide. It was murder. I’m convinced it wouldn’t never have happened if not for that church. We tried and tried after she died to get somebody to investigate, but it wasn’t happening.”

  Wyatt took a long pull from the bottle. “Once,” he said, “Patty was sure she seen Jenny. Was about three years ago.”

  “Was only two years. Saw her walking on the side of the road over near Possible Mountain. I stopped. Told her who I was. Called her by name. I says, ‘Hey, Jenny,’ but she just looked at me like I was crazy. Told me her name was something else. Said she had a mama and a daddy, and she was happy. I had to let her go. But it was her.” She gasped and covered her mouth to hold in a sob. “I swear it was.”

  Wyatt turned the bottle up again.

  Mary looked at me. Her face was calm, but her eyes looked worried.

  “I suspect,” I said, “the lack of cooperation you felt might have been very real. I think it might have something to do with the sheriff being a long-standing member of the Holy Flame.”

  Patty nodded, her lip stuck in a painful-looking snarl. “That’s what I said. But what do they care? Them deputies just do what he says.”

  “We’d love to help you figure out what really happened,” I said, “but first we need some help from you.”

  Patty nodded. She seemed eager. Wyatt was deeply involved with the bottle now, his eyes nearly shut as he slumped in his chair.

  “Either of you ever hear her say anything about a well in the mountains? Anything about lightning?”

  Patty seemed to think. “I can’t say that I do. I wish I could tell you something, but none of that rings a bell.”

  Wyatt opened his eyes. “When she came back after the miscarriage, she was afraid of storms. Didn’t matter if there was lightning or not. Just rain made her afraid.”

  It wasn’t very much, but I felt like it was a small strand I could tuck away for later.

  “Anything else?” Mary asked.

  They were both silent. After a few moments, Patty said, “What happened to Clint?”

  “Excuse me?” Mary said.

  “Clint. He was the only deputy that ever listened to us. He would check in now and again, but then he stopped.”

  “I don’t know him,” she said, glancing over at me. Her expression suggested she knew more than she was letting on.

  “He was a good one,” Wyatt said, slurring his words.

  “I’m sure he was,” Mary said. She smiled at Wyatt kindly.

  “I just wished she’d never met that man at the Magic Mart,” Patty said.

  “Is there anyone else who might know about her situation?” I was thinking of one of the neighbors when I asked the question, but I should have seen the answer coming.

  Patty met my eyes, and it almost looked like she’d divined my connection to the Holy Flame somehow, because she said, “You gonna have to go to that church and ask them. Somebody at the church knows. I guarantee that.”

  20

  That afternoon, I sat in a folding chair under the high eaves of the burned-out church thinking about what Mary had told me as we drove away from the DeWalts’ home.

  “That’s the deputy,” she’d said.

  I’d been lost in thought and didn’t follow. “Say again.”

  “Clint Martin. That was the deputy I replaced.”

  “What did Shaw say had happened to him?”

  “His exact phrasing was that ‘he went AWOL.’”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t know, but it strikes me as a little ominous that the one deputy who tried to help the DeWalts is no longer around.”

  It struck me the same way. I wasn’t ready to go so far as to believe Shaw was running a cover-up of some kind, but there was no denying the facts—at least the way the DeWalts relayed them—didn’t look good.

  I tried to clear my mind and concentrate on the storm moving in from the west. The view from my chair was the kind people would pay good money for, but it occurred to me I was enjoying it for free.

  While in North Carolina, I hadn’t believed home held anything for me except grief. But here I was, sitting outside the old church, an
d I felt something shift to the forefront, something I’d forgotten. I realized it was the hope of my childhood, the foolish kind of hope, uncorrupted by experience.

  I watched as Rufus—led by Goose—crested the ridge just ahead of the storm. Rufus had tied a rope loosely around the puppy’s neck, and the two of them had gone for a walk. Goose didn’t seem to mind about the rope, and in fact, he appeared to have intuited Rufus’s disability rather quickly. I laughed a little as Goose looked over his shoulder patiently as the old man picked his way around a large boulder.

  As they approached, I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent of the oncoming storm. I needed to think. I needed to decide. I had cases waiting for me in North Carolina. Good, paying cases. Three times since Mary dropped me off at the church and made me promise not to leave without letting her and Granny know first, I had dialed the number to the airport to book a flight. And three times I had disconnected the call before anyone answered. The fourth time I tried—just fifteen minutes ago—I’d found my phone dead.

  A sign?

  That was laughable. This whole thing was laughable, really. Why should coming back home change my core beliefs? There were no signs in this world. The dead did not ascend. And whatever had happened to Allison DeWalt and Bryant McCauley was nothing to me.

  But I knew that wasn’t true. Allison especially. Her story reminded me too much of my past, and I had no doubt her fate was tied inextricably to my father’s church. My brother’s church now. Hard as that was to believe.

  Sure, the world would continue to fall into the same holes, over and over again. It seemed the way of things, but invariably, it also seemed as if someone from my family was standing next to those holes, ready and willing to push the next fool in.

  And I couldn’t ignore that anymore.

  I opened my eyes and saw that Rufus and Goose had switched directions and had wandered over past the graveyard and down to the edge of the creek. Goose was drinking from the water, and Rufus was standing straight as an arrow, oblivious to the rain that fell. He looked like a scarecrow weathering a storm, and I liked the analogy because Rufus was the same as me. He’d survived the Holy Flame. A little worse for the wear, but he’d broken free.