The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  “You must have a file or something. I’d like to see that.”

  “I’d like to. I really would. But an open case like this—”

  “I’m family. I thought—”

  “I wish I could.”

  They stared at one another for a moment. Something flickered in the policeman’s eyes.

  “Departmental policy, Mr. Sleep. I’m real sorry.”

  “Would you mind telling me about it?”

  “You sure you want to do that?”

  “I think I have to.”

  The sheriff nodded as if that was about what he had expected. “I was off duty, but they called me in. They do that with anything out of the ordinary. We don’t get many—” He hesitated. “Well, I can count the suspicious deaths I’ve seen in the last twenty years on one hand.”

  “So you’d call this suspicious.”

  “Well, there was a gun, wasn’t there?”

  Henry slipped his hand in his pocket, touched the slip of paper he had wrenched away from the stranger. After calling the sheriff, he had stood in the bright foyer and unfolded it with trembling fingers. A scrap from a yellow legal pad, nothing more. Now he nearly brought it out, but something—

  —those eyes—

  —prevented him from doing so.

  “I wouldn’t call it suspicious, exactly,” Crawford was saying. “Folks said he’d seemed distracted lately—”

  “Who?”

  Crawford glanced at him. “Doc Cade for one. That lady works down the church for another.”

  “Penny Kohler.”

  “You’ve named her exactly.” He tucked his hat under one arm and ran his fingers through dark hair, sprinkled liberally with gray. “He must have been sitting at the desk when he did it. We found him on the floor here, the chair overturned under him.”

  Henry stepped forward, and now he could see it, a faint brownish discoloration on the carpet. God, he thought. He caught another whiff of that faint apple-rotten odor, and now he thought he might be sick.

  “Deep breaths,” Crawford said. “You’ll be all right in a minute.”

  Henry leaned over, his hands on his knees, breathing as Crawford had told him. After a moment, the faintly metallic taste in his mouth retreated a little.

  “This is no good,” Crawford said. “What do you say we grab a cup of coffee and talk in the kitchen?”

  “Doc Cade paid to have the carpet cleaned,” Crawford said. “Didn’t want you to have to come home to it. But the truth is, cleaning won’t ever get it out. What you need to do is, you need to get someone out here and just rip it out, lay new carpet in that room.”

  Henry didn’t answer. He sat at the table, his face cradled in his hands, listening as Crawford busied himself with the coffee.

  “Five minutes, we’ll have a fresh pot,” Crawford said. “You’ll feel better.”

  Henry sensed his weight settling across the table. He looked up and Crawford met his eyes.

  “You all right?”

  “Fine.”

  They sat quietly, listening to the coffee perk. Crawford took a notebook and pencil from his breast pocket. He licked the end of the pencil.

  “You mind if we go over a few things? Just routine.”

  Henry shrugged.

  “Now, the last time you talked to your dad, that was how long ago?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  Crawford said nothing.

  “Almost three years, I guess.”

  “You recall the date?”

  “The day I moved. I guess I could figure it out.”

  “Three years is a long time. You have a falling out?”

  “Not exactly. Things have been tough ever since …”

  “Since when?”

  So this was how it was to be, Henry thought. Everywhere the past looming up to haunt him. Ever since Mom died, he had meant to say, but what came out was, “It was about three years ago.”

  The coffee stopped perking. Henry stood.

  “You live in Ransom, North Carolina, right?”

  Henry poured coffee. “Sugar or cream?”

  “Just black.”

  Henry placed a steaming mug in front of Crawford and leaned against the counter, holding the other mug of coffee, savoring its warmth, its rich aroma. “Yeah. Ransom.”

  “And that’s what, four hours from here?”

  “Five and a half.”

  “Now, the last time you and your dad talked, how would you characterize that conversation?”

  “Your standard stuff. I was leaving, he told me to be careful, something like that.”

  “You argue?”

  “Not then. We had been, I guess.”

  The sheriff nodded. “That happen a lot?”

  “We didn’t talk enough for it to happen a lot.”

  Crawford paused, as if debating whether the point was worth pursuing. Then: “Yesterday, Doc called about—”

  “I don’t see how this is helping.”

  Crawford said nothing.

  “Talking about my relationship with my dad—how does that help us find the person who broke in here?”

  “I have two men working on that right now, Mr. Sleep. I’m just trying to get the lay of the land.”

  “The person who broke in here, you think he had anything to do with my dad’s death?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely.”

  “Why not?”

  Crawford picked up the mug of coffee, put it down, and said, “What is it you teach down there at Ransom College?”

  “English. Composition mainly. A few lit courses.”

  “You have much occasion to run investigations in that line of work, son?”

  “No.”

  “Then why don’t you cooperate and let me do my job?”

  Henry crossed the room and sat down.

  Crawford’s voice was gentle when he spoke again. “I didn’t mean to be abrupt, Mr. Sleep. Let me explain, if I can. Your father had seemed edgy lately, distraught—the people he was close to, they all agree to that—”

  “But—”

  “There’s more. We’re getting some preliminary lab work back now. The angle of …” He paused, searching. “The angle of entry—I’m sorry, there’s just no other way to say it—it was consistent with a self-inflicted wound. Plus, your dad had powder residue on his fingers. That means he fired the weapon that killed him. He bought the gun legally over in Charleston just after the new year. It was licensed and the dealer’s records check out.”

  “But there wasn’t a note.”

  “Sometimes there isn’t.”

  “What about tonight?”

  Crawford shrugged, lifted his hands. “I’d like to know that myself.”

  “Then why do you need to know about my relationship with my father?”

  “Way you go about this, Mr. Sleep, is you ask people questions. Most of them come to nothing, but once in a while you turn something up. And it’s not always the obvious questions that do it. So why don’t you help me out here?”

  Henry sighed.

  “So Dr. Cade, he called you yesterday morning at what time?”

  “It would have been nine or so.”

  “So you left first thing this morning?”

  “I had some things to take care of at the college. Classes haven’t started yet.” Henry hesitated. “I told them I wanted to take the spring off.”

  Crawford sipped his coffee, studying Henry over the rim of his mug. “You planning to stay in the area?”

  “I wanted to keep my options open.”

  “So you left today at what time?”

  “Around noon. I drove straight through. You know the rest.”

  “Which is what I don’t understand, Mr. Sleep.”

  Henry waited.

  “Why didn’t you come directly to the house? Why did you park in the street out there?”

  “I needed a minute to get myself together.”

  “That’s an explanation, but I can’t help having another thought.”<
br />
  “What’s that?”

  “You sure you weren’t suspicious right from the start for some reason?”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  Crawford licked his pencil again, doodled in the margin of his notebook. “You sure you hadn’t talked to your father in the last week or two? Maybe he mentioned something that made you a little uneasy?”

  “Like what, Sheriff?”

  Crawford shrugged. “How about Asa Cade?”

  “He told me what had happened. He said he found him here yesterday morning, that he called you.”

  “Nothing else?” Crawford fixed him with those washed-out eyes of his. Once again, Henry caught a distant flicker of something else in those eyes—as if this was the question the sheriff had been driving at all along. “Did Doc mention anything that might have caused you to be concerned, to take extra precautions?”

  “No. He didn’t say anything else.”

  Crawford made a note, nodding. Just then the deputies appeared in the doorway—the first one, Ricks, a tall man, nearly as tall as Crawford, but spare and hard looking, with a nose that had been broken once or twice; the second one, Mears, slower, running to fat, with sad eyes and a hangdog expression.

  “We’re about finished up here, Sheriff,” Ricks said.

  Crawford stood, flipping the notebook closed. “Fine.”

  Henry followed them to the front door. They paused in the foyer. Mears nodded at one of the elongated windows beside the door. A cardboard square had been affixed in place of the broken pane of glass.

  “You’ll want to get that taken care of.”

  Henry nodded.

  Crawford clapped his hat back on his head. “We’ll be in touch if we turn something up, but something like this—” He shrugged. “You never know.”

  They went out onto the porch. A wind had come up, sharp as a flensing knife, and a few stray flurries of snow whipped through the bright cone beneath the porch light. The three cops, burly in their slick jackets, were halfway down the walk when Crawford turned, his face cast half in shadow.

  “We’ll be in touch,” he said again. “In the meantime, if something comes back to you—something your father might have said, or Asa Cade—you let us know.”

  Crawford and his deputies had been gone more than two hours by the time the phone call came. In the interval, Henry had carried his bags in from the Volaré: two trips up the narrow stairs with the faded runner. Two trips, almost everything he owned, and as he lowered his bags to the floor, he felt time slip around him once again—here in the room where he had slept as a boy, bathed in the spectral radiance of a high thin moon.

  Henry snapped on the light.

  Taken together, the furnishings—a high school pennant, book shelves lined with Marvel comics and spine-broken paperbacks, a Darth Vader bank—suggested a kid of maybe twelve, as if the room had gotten mired in the summer his mother had died, unchanged by the six additional years he had slept here before leaving home for good. Like a time capsule, a monument to the boy he had been.

  The thought shivered him. It reminded him of another room on this hall, another monument, a door he hadn’t opened in seventeen years. Henry shook his head. Too much history, too many ghosts. He wasn’t ready to face them yet.

  Downstairs, he found a six-pack in the refrigerator. He was in the study, looking through his father’s desk and working on his third beer, when the telephone rang.

  After a moment, his father’s calm tenor filled the room, the same rich tones Henry had heard him use to deliver a life’s measure of sermons.

  You’ve reached the home of Quincy Sleep. I can’t take your call right now, but if you’ll leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

  Then the tone.

  Henry stared at the answering machine. A ravaged masculine voice came out of the tinny speaker.

  “I’m trying to reach Mr. Henry Sleep,” the voice said. “My name is Benjamin Strange. I’m calling from the newspaper down here in town, the Observer. You don’t know me and I know you’re busy now—I’m sorry about your dad, Mr. Sleep—but if you get this message I hope you’ll take a minute and call me here at the paper.” He added the number, and said, “I’m not trying to hassle you, Mr. Sleep. Reporters sometimes do that at a time like this, but I think you’ll be glad you called.” He paused, as if he were trying to decide whether to add something else; then he hung up.

  Henry stared at the machine, remembering the long months after his mother had died, the whispers, the constant stares, bright with suspicion. So that was how it was going to be. He should have known it. Already he could feel the eyes of the townspeople boring into him, the weight of the unspoken question in every mind: What happened? What happened to your father’s faith?

  He thought of Harold Crawford—Terrible thing, him being a preacher and all—and his two deputies mooning about the house, their eyes filled with the same question, and he felt a little wave of bitterness crest within him.

  A reporter. A fucking small-town gossip. He stabbed a button with one finger, erasing the message, but it was too late: rusty gears had been set to turning. Memory beckoned.

  Seventeen years, he thought. Seventeen years.

  He should never have come back.

  That long-ago summer was too close here, too real, too palpable beyond the parchment-thin tissue of years. Standing there in the study where his father had died, Henry could smell it, taste it—he could almost touch it: the stench of the sickroom as his mother’s face shrank to fit the death mask underneath; the damp heat of Harold Crawford’s car; most of all, the rain.

  The endless unforgiving rain.

  Chapter 4

  Storms battered Sauls Run the year Henry turned twelve. Blizzards rolled out of the mountains in February, surrendering the high country to battalions of black thunderheads as the season turned. Gully-washers, old-timers called them. Thunder-gushers. Streams swelled toward high-water marks, and Stoney Gap Lake lapped ominously against the pilings of the town dock.

  Upstairs in the house on Widow’s Ridge, Henry and his father mounted a deathwatch.

  At Christmas, Lily Sleep drank eggnog by the fireplace. By May, she was bedridden, her face a wizened mask of morphine and anguish.

  The sky cleared for a week that month. Henry sat in his mother’s sickroom and watched miraculous shafts of spring sunlight lance through high clean windows unchanged by their passage. It was an ideal he could aspire to: transparency, a life unscathed by events passing through it. He rocked in his chair and stared at his mother sleeping her drugged sleep across the room. He thought:

  I am made of glass.

  “No way,” said Perry Holland, “you first.”

  Henry Sleep fixed the other boy with a cool gaze and smiled, a broad, empty smile designed to show Perry that he feared nothing. And indeed, he didn’t. There was nothing inside him, not fear or anger or even sorrow, just bright, glittering emptiness, like glass. Like someone had pried open his mouth and poured gallons of molten glass down his throat and it had clotted there inside him. A blister of perspiration slid out of the hair at his temple.

  Perry turned away.

  Henry glanced at the railroad tracks that wound through the hills below. The tin roofs of Crook’s Hollow glinted among the trees down there, giving way to the broad thoroughfares of the Run at the valley floor. Perry’s house—Holland House itself—brooded over the eastern end of High Street. A tiny car trundled over the Stone Bridge toward the courthouse. Otherwise the July streets lay silent, steaming in the muggy prologue to another storm.

  “Forget it,” Perry said. “Let’s go back. If my dad knew, he’d kill us.”

  “How’s he going to know?”

  Henry rattled the fence and a chain-link harmonic rolled away from them. At his feet, the rusty mesh had buckled, leaving a crawl space in the damp grass.

  That morning over breakfast his father had said, in that strange, toneless way he had of speaking lately: “You need to s
tay close by today, Henry, hear?”

  “Why?”

  His father stared at him. “Your mother,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  “What about her?”

  “Just stick around. That’s the end of it.”

  Henry had dropped the matter, but he couldn’t stand the thought of another day cooped up inside. Rain, rain, go away, he thought. The sun was out. He could feel its lure.

  When his father trudged upstairs to tend to Henry’s mother, Henry stole outside and retrieved his bike. At the top of Widow’s Ridge, he slung his leg across the seat and shot down the shady tunnel of Christian’s Fork toward town. And he didn’t feel a shred of guilt. He didn’t feel anything at all.

  He ran into Perry on High Street. They knocked around aimlessly for a while—playing pinball at the Grand Hotel until they ran out of quarters, skipping stones over Mill Creek—and then, in the manner of boys with nothing much to do, they had somehow decided to mount an expedition to the old Holland mines. The plan required a measure of ingenuity to put into action. It was midafternoon by the time they sneaked back into Henry’s house for a flashlight. Thunderheads were massing over the ridges to the west.

  “I don’t know,” Perry had said. “It looks like rain.”

  And Henry had said, “Are you scared?”

  Now, standing high above the town, their bikes hidden in the brush below, he said it once again: “What’s the matter, Perry, you scared?”

  “No.”

  “Then come on.”

  Just like that he wormed his way under the fence: on the far side, the world he had known all his life, thronged with damp greenery, storm brewing in the air; over here a moonscape of mud and steel, a rolling escarpment littered with husks of discarded machinery. Rutted roads snaked away from a brick machine shop emblazoned with Holland Coal’s fading logo. Slag heaps lay in the shadow of disused coke ovens. Spurs of railroad track wound upward, visible in flashes between the arms of the mountain. The mines lay higher, rusty tipples glimmering among the trees, their mouths blasted into rubble.