by Jay Brandon
She folded her arms suddenly, and her face tightened.
Mrs. Fecklewhite was standing in the doorway of her dead daughter’s room. Jordan was moving slowly, touching objects at random. In the bookcase were a couple of volumes from a popular teenage series, some Nancy Drew, some popular novels, and a host of classics, mostly nineteenth century—Dickens and Twain and Emily Dickinson— and a few books Jordan was sure hadn’t been on the school curriculum, such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. But nothing that looked like a diary, and he didn’t want to pry any more.
“And I couldn’t help her,” Joan Fecklewhite said. “When she asked me what she was going to do, I wanted to tell her, ‘Honey, I never had the problem of scoring 1480 on the SAT. I didn’t have to decide whether I’d rather go to Princeton or Stanford.’ ”
Jordan crossed the braided rug to glance at the items atop the dresser: small vials of makeup, a program from a play, and imbedded in a glass paperweight the head of a white unicorn, its horn raised questioningly. “Could she perhaps have been talking about Kevin?” he asked.
“That’s what I thought next,” Joan Fecklewhite answered, her voice brightening, “and I wanted to tell her— well, I did tell her, I said, ‘Jenny, things will work out between you and Kevin.’ She shook her head, like I didn’t understand, but I did, I said, ‘I don’t mean whatever problems you two’re having, I mean it’ll work out when you leave. You’re gonna have a whole different life. Kevin’ll—well, he’ll have a good life, too, but it won’t be like yours.’ I thought maybe I was saying too much, so then I said, ‘Unless you want to stay with him. If you do, you’ll find some way.’ She smiled at me then, like I’d helped, but it was the saddest smile you’ve ever seen.”
Mrs. Fecklewhite sniffed but otherwise didn’t move, remaining on the threshold of the room. Standing among the dead girl’s belongings wearing his suit, his late-model car waiting outside to take him back to the big city, Jordan could picture Jenny Fecklewhite’s sad smile perfectly. It was as if he made eye contact with the dead girl past her mother’s shoulder. Jordan understood the sadness: Joan Fecklewhite had described for Jenny not only how her relationship with Kevin could shrivel and fade but that the ties to her parents could do the same. Jenny was poised to have a life completely removed from all those in her hometown. It was what everyone expected of her; it had probably been what Jenny had hoped for herself, but the expectations must also have made her very lonely at times.
“Then he showed up,” Mrs. Fecklewhite said.
“Who? Kevin?”
She nodded. “He did that sometimes, like he knew when she was thinking letting-go thoughts about him. We were in here with the college catalogs spread out on Jenny’s bed when I heard this banging on the front door, and when I went to open it, I saw Kevin through the screen door wearing this old hat that must’ve been his dad’s from before Kevin was born, with a piece of cardboard stuck in the hatband that said ‘Press.’ And he tips the hat to me like we’ve never been introduced before and he says, ‘Hello, ma’am, I’m Joe Feeblemeister’—something like that—‘I’m a press photographer for the Weekly Reader, and we heard there was a photo opportunity here.’ ”
She chuckled, shaking her head. Reliving the story, seeing Kevin, Joan Fecklewhite had regained her footing. She walked away, and Jordan followed her down the hall. “Jenny had come out behind me, and when she saw Kevin, she put on this—”
Superior smile, Jordan thought.
“— this look she gave him sometimes, but Kevin just barged right in and says, ‘Hello, miss, you look like you must be the college girl. Could we maybe get a few candid snaps for our readers who can’t read?’ Jenny started laughing, too. Kevin was acting like he was a real pro, he was squinting around here like he wanted to line up the perfect shot. ‘Maybe with your trophies,’ he said. ‘Ain’t you got any trophies? Bowling trophies maybe? Or a beauty crown. Ain’t you ever won a beauty contest?’
“Jenny started getting into the spirit of it. She said, ‘Wait, wait,’ and she ran and cut off a long strip of butcher paper and wrote on it with a black marker ‘Miss Agricultural Byproduct,’ and when she came back with that for a sash, Kevin said, ‘Oh, perfect.’ He snaps her picture and says, ‘Now when you’re at Harvard or Yale and they say you didn’t have no culture where you come from, you can show ’em this.’
“The kids were here, too,” Joan Fecklewhite continued, “Edwina and the boys, and they came running in to see what all the excitement was about—they always gathered around when Kevin was here—and he said, ‘Oh good, little people. Let’s have a picture of you thanking the little people who made it all possible.’ And we all go running around putting together a beauty contest costume for Jenny. She got a paper towel tube for a scepter and— What did we use for a cloak? I don’t remember, but she—” Mrs. Fecklewhite’s laugh stopped abruptly. The picture had become too vivid for her. Jordan stood with his hands in his pockets, watching her face, which had gone from pale to splotched with red, from middle-aged to youthful to suddenly aged.
“Jenny was having as good a time as any of us,” she continued more quietiy. “One time she looked at me and shook her head like ‘What an idiot,’ but before Kevin got here, she’d been blue, and after he came, she was smiling. She was running around, and Kevin snapping pictures every two seconds, and the kids jumping around her like she was about to do something magic.”
Like vanish, Jordan thought. Disappear like the out-of-place creature she’d been.
He followed Joan Fecklewhite out onto the front porch. She wasn’t dismissing him, she was still reliving the past day. “They came out in the yard,” she said, “and see that tree stump? They used that for a throne. Jenny sat there with her chin so high you could barely see her eyes, and they were all bowing and scraping to her. Then she made Edwina the princess and took off all her stuff and put it on Edwina, who just about got lost in the cloak and the—the stuff, but she was grinning so big, she loved it when Jenny included her.
“Jenny starts shouting, ‘Where’s some crops? I want a picture of all of us with some crops. Where’s some cotton? And get the house in the picture. And Mom—’ ” Joan Fecklewhite stopped again, her hand lifted in a wave. The smile that had been starting on her face froze in midformation. Her eyes were distant and deep.
Looking at her daughter, Jordan suddenly wondered, had Joan Fecklewhite also seen her lost sister, Jenny’s mother? Jordan remembered with a shock that the Kevin he’d just heard described as so lively was dead, too. So much death encompassed by this tiny house and yard: the transformer of every memory. Mrs. Fecklewhite would never be able to remember her daughter with unalloyed pleasure. Jordan turned away from the sight of her face to survey the empty yard that sounded so silent. The tree stump looked abandoned.
“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Fecklewhite.” He had to repeat the sentiment to bring her out of her trance. He left her still staring across her front yard. Driving away, Jordan felt a little displaced himself. When he came to a crossroads he sat there for a long minute, trying to remember which way to turn.
“Kevin hit him, too, right, I mean there was some give and take, like any fight?”
“Not that I saw,” the hardware store owner said calmly. “Kevin reached out for Wayne, like to grab him, and they both fell down once, so Wayne might’ve got a little scratched up, but Kevin never took a swing at him. Time I went to help, Wayne just had him down on the ground, punching.” Jordan grimaced but was careful to thank the man. Before he left, he tried another probe. “You know about—Jenny Fecklewhite and the judge?” he asked Hiram Lester, as if Jordan already knew, as if he were just challenging the store owner’s knowledge.
“Know what?” the hardware store owner said. “That he helped her with her homework, maybe lots of times? I know what some old busybody women would say.”
He knew. Jordan hadn’t been able to get anyone to say it, but some people obviously knew what Jordan had figured out: that Jenny
and Judge Waverly had been lovers.
“They were in here. Perfectly friendly, too,” the Pizza Hut owner said of Wayne and Kevin. “Kind of intense, but not mad.”
“Which one left first?”
“Kevin. Wayne just sat over there in the corner booth for a while, talking to himself, but I didn’t get close enough to hear. Then he suddenly jumped up and left, too.”
“Looking mad?” Jordan asked.
This wasn’t the first time the Pizza Hut manager had been questioned. He had his story down pat. Dale Hines was a youngish middle-aged man, with a florid face and a gut that looked as if he enjoyed his own product; he had retired early from something else, probably the military, before buying the pizza franchise. “No, sir, he wasn’t mad. Said goodbye when he left, like always.”
“And this was how long before you heard about the fight and the murder?”
“Oh, an hour maybe, I’m not sure. Late lunch shift, then it was three or later before some kid came in talking about Jenny. I thought of Wayne right away.”
Jordan kept his face neutral He’d had practice by now. Better the witness drop this observation now than by surprise from the witness stand. “Why? I thought you said he didn’t look mad when he left.”
“No, but the way he and Kevin’d been talking, so serious, then when Wayne left he looked—not mad, but like he’d made up his mind.”
The hospital’s file on Jenny included, surprisingly, a color photo, the first time Jordan had seen the girl in living color. It wasn’t a preautopsy photo, it was a candid snap of the girl laughing, just turning toward the camera, a green-eyed blonde so pretty and so young it was heartbreaking to think of her growing old—or dying.
“I put that one in,” the nurse Evelyn Riegert answered Jordan’s surprised expression. “Jenny had volunteered here a few times, and once we got pictures of the staff at a kids’ day we had. After they brought her in, I had a copy made for the file. For contrast.”
Ms. Riegert kept her chin from trembling by closing her mouth firmly. Jordan studied the picture. “I need copies of everything,” he said quietly. “I can get a subpoena if you—”
“No, I know you’re entitled.” She took the file from him, then the photo. “I’ll have that one copied for you, too.” There was no one in Green Hills who was going to let Jenny be reduced to lifelessness.
Dispatch records showed that Officer Harry Briggs had been on solitary patrol, his last recorded call more than an hour before he raced to the scene of Jenny Fecklewhite’s murder. And Deputy Delmore had been coming off a late lunch, which he’d reported eating alone in his car, when he’d received the call that had supposedly led to his discovery of the body. Either of them could have been in Pleasant Grove Park earlier than he’d reported.
As Jordan left the law enforcement annex to the courthouse, he knew that word of what he’d obtained there had spread through the building before he reached the front door.
Dr. Wyntlowski said judiciously—as much as an unshaven man rubbing a hand across his eyes could appear judicious— “There definitely could have been an event in the hospital.”
“An event,” Jordan said. “Like a calf roping, you mean, or a bake sale by the ladies’ auxiliary of the VFW.”
“I love to hear a lawyer tell me I’m being obscure,” the assistant medical examiner grinned. “It’s so entertaining. You know what I mean by an event, or were you not listening all those times I testified for you?”
“Not during the gory parts.” They were in Bob Wyntlowski’s glass-walled office at the morgue, with gory parts on display just behind him if Jordan turned his head, which he resolutely refused to do.
“An event, meaning your boy here— What was his name? Kevin?— didn’t necessarily just go into decline and not recover from the beating. Possibly something else happened in the hospital to contribute to the cause of death.”
“Something criminal?”
“Not necessarily. Bubble in one of his tubes. Choking on food— but he wasn’t eating solid food, was he?”
“No. These other possibilities aren’t mentioned in their autopsy summary or the death certificate?”
The assistant medical examiner hesitated. Dr. Wyntlowski remembered Jordan only as a prosecutor, when they’d been more or less on the same team. Jordan hoped that ever so slight sense of cameraderie—as much as could exist between a doctor and a lawyer— still prevailed. He knew that ordinarily Wyntlowski wouldn’t be nearly as forthcoming with a defense lawyer.
Wyntlowski held up the autopsy report on Kevin. “This summary from their local doctor just reeks of who-gives-a-damn. Or of aw-we-all-know-what-happened. They don’t seem to have explored all the possibilities.”
“And you can’t tell from their findings? Or the hospital records?”
“No. But you know, they were probably right. Beating victim dies, you don’t look real hard for the cause when you can see it all over him.”
Dr. Bob glanced past Jordan’s shoulder and held his head up curiously as if something interesting had happened out there at one of the tables. Jordan stiffened a little more. “What about this other one?”
“Now this one they did a good job on,” the medical examiner said, flipping open the file on Jenny. He brushed past the color photo of the living girl and went straight to the autopsy report. “I don’t have any quarrel with their conclusions, and I don’t see anything they didn’t look for.” “Broken neck,” Jordan said, and the doctor murmured affirmatively. “Does it look like it was intentional?”
“Some day I’m going to have to get one of you real smart lawyers to explain to me how to read somebody’s mind just from looking at the wounds he inflicted.”
“Well, I mean, it was the root that broke her neck, right? Not the blow itself.”
Wyntlowski said, “If you want to try out your defense on me, go ahead. Yeah, he might not’ve meant to kill her. Accidents happen when you start punching people in the head. But the law doesn’t call them accidents, does it, Jordy?”
Jordan stood, thinking of the gauntlet of corpses he had to run to get out of here. He reached for his files, but Dr. Wyntlowski still had the Jenny one open to the preautopsy closeup photo of the girl’s damaged face. Jordan had to narrow his eyes to look at it.
“Interesting mark here,” Wyntlowski said. “This is the blow that cracked her cheekbone, probably knocked her over backward. Look at the impressions it left.”
Jordan did. “Big knuckle?”
“I’d say a ring. Definitely a ring. Either that or he used a club with a small knob on it. But I’d say from the surrounding indications that it…”
By concentrating on the mark, Jordan could put her face almost out of his mind. The impression was deep and pocked with details. It might have been a closeup of a crater on the moon.
“You know what you’re telling me on both these cases,” Jordan said. “You know what I’m going to have to ask for now.”
“Yeah,” Dr. Wyntlowski said, managing to hide any concern he felt for the lawyer’s problems.
Jordan felt like a cigarette ad. In his dark suit and silk tie, standing on the mezzanine level of the old Majestic Theater, he felt so sophisticated that all that was needed to complete the picture was a cigarette or a martini glass. Some vice was definitely called for.
“Hello, Judge,” he greeted a passing county court judge, who smiled back at him so graciously it might have been campaign time. He nodded across the room to an older couple, friends of his parents. He hadn’t been to the Majestic Theater in a long time, almost since it had stopped showing movies and been renovated for stage productions, but he felt at home in his native city. He watched alertly for Laura, hoping she hadn’t had any trouble finding her way.
But he got distracted by familiar faces, by couples looking elegant or goofy, by beautiful women at their most beautiful. He was watching one, wondering if the deep shimmers of her dress were green or black, wondering what sort of underwear she wore to k
eep herself upheld like that, when he realized it was Laura. He had never seen her shoulders before. He hurried down the stairs, watching not to lose her, and reached her side just as she turned.
“Hello.”
She only smiled, but Jordan read a lot into her smile: her pleasure at his thoughtfulness in arriving early, the way his familiarity made him stand out from the background of the entire foreign city, her slight relief that he had not only appeared but looked appropriate to the surroundings and to her.
“You found it.”
Laura kept her smile. “Last year I had season tickets.”
“Oh. Then you show me around.”
She took his arm. Jordan remembered that this was his first date in how many years, but the thought didn’t make him nervous. He no longer had a date mode, that high-octane tense phoniness that had kept a variety of girls from learning anything about him. He felt at ease with Laura as soon as he’d seen her.
“What was the best thing you saw last year?”
“Here?” She thought. “Guys and Dolls, I suppose.”
“But it wasn’t like Chicago, was it?”
She turned her head as if she’d seen someone she knew. “I didn’t get out much in Chicago,” she murmured.
Jordan stopped close to a pillar so that she would turn toward him. He liked everything he saw about her. The way she wore her elegant dress and makeup not as if they were costume and disguise, but as if she were comfortable in them; yet he could still see her daily face as well: the slightly upturned nose that invited a kiss, the bright eyes startling beneath the brown eyebrows, the quizzical look produced by the ever so slightly raised cheekbone. When he looked at her cheek, he was reminded of that other cheekbone, the shattered one in the autopsy photo.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. If I’d realized how beautiful you are, I would have asked you out sooner.”
