by Joe Hill
The light is different. It isn’t morning yet, but the night is in retreat, has already scooped up most of its stars and put them away. Fat, pale, mountainous clouds, the shreds of last night’s thunderstorm, drift vividly against a backdrop of darkness. Terry has a good view of the sky, staring up through one of the side windows. He can smell dawn, a fragrance of rain-saturated grass and warming earth. When he sits up, he sees that Lee has left the driver’s-side door ajar.
He reaches on the floor for his sport coat. It must be down there somewhere; he assumes it slipped off his lap while he was asleep. There’s the toolbox, but no coat. The driver’s-side seat is folded forward, and Terry climbs out.
His spine cracks as he puts his arms out to his sides and stretches his back, and then he goes still—arms reaching out into the night like a man nailed to an invisible cross.
Lee sits smoking on the steps of his mother’s house. His house now, Terry remembers, Lee’s mother six weeks in the ground. Terry can’t see Lee’s face, only the orange coal of his Winston. For no reason Terry can put his finger on, the sight of Lee waiting for him there on the porch steps unsettles him.
“Some night,” Terry says.
“It isn’t over yet.” Lee inhales, and the coal brightens, and for a moment Terry can see part of Lee’s face, the bad part, the part with the dead eye in it. In the morning gloom, that eye is white and blind, a glass sphere filled with smoke. “How’s your head?”
Terry reaches up to touch the scrape on his temple, then drops his hand. “Fine. No big deal.”
“I had an accident, too.”
“What accident? You okay?”
“I am. But Merrin isn’t.”
“What do you mean?” Abruptly, Terry is aware of the clammy-sick hangover sweat on his body, a kind of unpleasant dewy sensation. He looks down at himself and sees black finger smears on his shirt, mud or something, has only a vague memory of wiping his hand on himself. When he looks back at Lee, he is suddenly afraid to hear what he has to say.
“It really was an accident,” Lee said. “I didn’t know how serious it was until it was too late to help her.”
Terry stares, waiting on the punch line. “You’re moving too fast, buddy. What happened?”
“That’s what we have to figure out. You and me. That’s what I want to talk about. We need to have our story straight, before they find her.”
Terry does the reasonable thing and laughs. Lee has a famously dry, flat sense of humor, and if the sun was up and Terry wasn’t so dreadfully sick, he might appreciate it. Terry’s right hand, however, doesn’t think Lee is funny. Terry’s right hand has, all on its own, begun to pat Terry’s pockets, feeling for his cell phone.
Lee says softly, “Terry. I know this is terrible. But I’m not kidding. We’re in a real mess here. Neither of us is to blame—this is no one’s fault—but we’re in about the most awful trouble two people can be in. It was an accident, but they’ll say we killed her.”
Terry wants to laugh again. Instead he says, “Stop it.”
“I can’t. You need to hear this.”
“She is not dead.”
Lee sucks at his cigarette, and the coal brightens, and the eye of pale smoke stares at Terry. “She was drunk, and she came on to me. I guess it was her way of getting even with Ig. She had her clothes off, and she was all over me, and when I pushed her away—I didn’t mean to. She fell over a root or something and landed on a rock. I walked away from her, and when I came back—just awful. I don’t know if you’ll believe this, but I’d rather take out my other eye than have ever caused her pain.”
Terry’s next breath is a lungful not of oxygen but of terror; he inhales a chestful of it, as if it were a gas, an airborne toxin. There is a churning feeling in both stomach and head. There is a feeling of the ground tilting underfoot. He has to call someone. He has to find his phone. He has to get help; this is a situation that calls for calm authorities with experience handling emergencies. He turns to the car, leans into the backseat looking for his sport coat. His cell phone must be in his coat. But the coat isn’t on the floor where he thought it would be. It isn’t in the front seat either.
Lee’s hand on the nape of his neck causes Terry to jump upright, crying out, a soft sobbing shout, and to pull away from him.
“Terry,” Lee says. “We need to figure out what we’re going to say.”
“There’s nothing to figure out. I need my phone.”
“You can use the one in the house if you want.”
Terry stiff-arms Lee, pushing him aside, and marches toward the porch. Lee pitches his cigarette and follows, in no particular hurry.
“You want to call the cops, I won’t stop you. I’ll go with you to meet them at the foundry,” Lee says, “show them where to find her. But you better know what I’m going to tell them before you pick up the phone, Terry.”
Terry takes the steps in two bounding leaps, crosses the porch, jerks open the screen door, and pushes the front door in. He takes a stumbling step into a dark front hall. If there’s a phone here, he can’t see it in all the shadows. The kitchen is through to the left.
“We were all so drunk,” Lee says. “We were drunk, and you were high. She was the worst, though. That’s what I’ll tell them first. She was coming on to the both of us from the moment she got in the car. Ig called her a whore, and she was determined to prove him right.”
Terry is only half listening. He moves swiftly through a small formal dining room, barking his knee on a straight-backed chair, stumbling, then going on, into the kitchen. Lee comes after him, his voice unbearably calm.
“She told us to pull over so she could change out of her wet clothes, and then she put on a show, standing in the headlights. The whole time you didn’t say anything, just watching her, listening to her talk about how Iggy had a few things coming to him for the way he treated her. She made out with me a while, and then she went to work on you. She was so drunk she couldn’t see how angry you were. In the middle of giving you her little lap dance, she started talking about all the money she could get, selling the story of Terry Perrish’s private gang bang to the tabloids. That it would be worth doing to get even with Ig, just to see his face. That was when you hit her. You hit her before I knew what was happening.”
Terry is in the kitchen, at the counter, his hand on the beige phone, but he doesn’t pick it up. For the first time, he turns his head and looks back at tall, wiry Lee with his crown of golden-white hair, and his terrible, mysterious white eye. Terry puts a hand in the center of Lee’s chest and shoves him hard enough to slam him back into the wall. The windows rattle. Lee doesn’t look too upset.
“No one’s going to believe that horseshit.”
“Who knows what they’ll believe?” Lee Tourneau says. “It’s your fingerprints on the rock.”
Terry pulls Lee by the shirt, away from the wall, and smashes him into it again, pins him there with his right hand. A spoon falls from the counter, strikes the floor, rings like a chime. Lee regards him, unperturbed.
“You dropped that big fat joint you were smoking right next to the body. And she’s the one gave you that scrape,” Lee says. “Fighting you. After she was dead, you cleaned yourself off with her underwear. It’s your blood all over her panties.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Terry asks. The word “panties” also seems to ring in the air, just like the spoon.
“The scrape on your temple. I cleaned it with her underwear, while you were passed out. I need you to understand the situation, Terry. You’re in this thing as much as me. Maybe more.”
Terry brings the left hand back, squeezing his fingers into a fist, then catches himself. There is a kind of eagerness in Lee’s face, a bright-eyed anticipation, his breathing shallow and fast. Terry doesn’t hit him.
“What are you waiting for?” Lee asks. “Do it.”
Terry has never hit another man in anger in his life; he is almost thirty years old and has never thrown a punch. He has never even been in a schoo
l-yard brawl. Everyone in school liked him.
“If you hurt me in any way at all, I’ll call the police myself. That’ll make things look even better for me. I can say I tried to defend her.”
Terry takes an unsteady step back from him and lowers his hand. “I’m going. You ought to get yourself a lawyer. I know I’m going to be talking to mine inside of twenty minutes. Where’s my coat?”
“With the stone. And her panties. In a safe place. Not here. I stopped somewhere on the way home. You told me to collect the evidence and get rid of it, but I didn’t get rid of it—”
“Shut the fuck up—”
“—because I thought you might try to put it all on me. Go ahead, Terry. Call them. But I promise if you lay this shit on me, I’ll drag you down with me. Up to you. You just got Hothouse. You’re going back to L.A. in two days to hang with movie stars and underwear models. But go ahead and do the right thing. Satisfy your conscience. Just remember, no one will believe you, not even your own brother, who will hate you forever for killing his best girl when you were drunk and stoned. He might not believe it at first, but give him time. You’ll have twenty years in jail to pat yourself on the back for your upstanding morals. For the love of God, Terry. She’s been dead for four hours already. If you wanted to look clean, you should’ve reported it while the body was still warm. Now it’s bound to look like you at least thought about hiding it.”
“I’ll kill you,” Terry whispered.
“Sure,” Lee said. “Okay. Then you’ve got two bodies to explain. Knock yourself out.”
Terry turns away, stares desperately at the phone on the counter, feeling like if he doesn’t pick it up and call someone in the next few moments, every good thing in his life will be taken away from him. And yet he can’t seem to lift his arm. He is like a castaway on a desert island, watching an airplane glitter in the sky forty thousand feet overhead, with no way to signal it and his last chance at rescue sailing away.
“Or,” Lee says, “the other way it could’ve happened, if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, is she was killed by a random stranger. It happens all the time. It’s like every Dateline ever. No one saw us pick her up. No one saw us turn in to the foundry. As far as the world knows, you and I drove back to my place after the bonfire and played cards and passed out in front of the two A.M. SportsCenter. My house is on the exact opposite side of town from The Pit. There’s no reason we would’ve gone out there.”
Terry’s chest is tight, and his breath is short, and he thinks, randomly, that this must be how Ig feels when he’s in the grip of one of his asthma attacks. Funny how he can’t get his arm up to reach for the phone.
“There. I’ve said my piece. Basically, it comes down to this: You can live life as a cripple or a coward. What happens now is up to you. Trust me, though. Cowards have more fun.”
Terry doesn’t move, doesn’t reply, and can’t look at Lee. His pulse trip-traps in his wrist.
“Tell you what,” Lee says, speaking in a tone of soothing reason. “If you took a drug test right now, you’d fail. You don’t want to go to the cops like this. You’ve had three hours’ sleep, tops, and you aren’t thinking clear. She’s been dead all night, Terry. Why don’t you give yourself the morning to think about this thing? They might not find her for days. Don’t rush into anything you can’t take back. Wait until you’re sure you know what you want to do.”
This is a dreadful thing to hear—they might not find her for days—a statement that brings to mind a vivid image of Merrin lying amid ferns and wet grass, with rainwater in her eyes and a beetle crawling through her hair. This is followed by the memory of Merrin in the passenger seat, shivering in her wet clothes, looking back at him with shy, unhappy eyes. Thanks for picking me up. You just saved my life.
“I want to go home,” Terry says. He means it to sound belligerent, hard-assed, righteous, but instead it comes out in a cracked whisper.
“Sure,” Lee says. “I’ll drive you. But let me get you one of my shirts before we go. You’ve got her blood all over that one.” He gestures toward the filth Terry rubbed off on the front of his shirt, which only now, in the pearly, opalescent light of dawn, can be identified as dried blood.
IG SAW IT ALL IN A TOUCH, just as if he had sat in the car with them, the whole way to the old foundry—saw it all, and more besides. He saw the desperate and pleading conversation Terry had with Lee, thirty hours later, in Lee’s kitchen. It was a day of impossible sunshine and unseasonably cool weather; kids shouted in the street, some teenagers splashed in a swimming pool next door. It was almost too jarring, trying to match the bright normalcy of the morning with the idea that Ig was locked up and Merrin was in a refrigerated cabinet in a morgue somewhere. Lee stood leaning against a kitchen counter, watching impassively, while Terry leaped from thought to thought and emotion to emotion, his voice sometimes strangled with rage, sometimes with misery. Lee waited for him to spend his energy, then said, They’re going to let your brother go. Be cool. The forensic evidence won’t match, and they’ll have to publicly clear him. He was passing a golden pear from hand to hand.
What forensic evidence?
Shoe prints, Lee said. Tire prints. Who knows what else? Blood, I guess. She might’ve scratched me. My blood won’t match with Ig, and there’s no reason they’d ever test me. Or at least you better hope they don’t test me. You wait. They’ll let him go inside of eight hours, and he’ll be clear by the end of the week. You just need to stay quiet a while longer, and you and him will both be out of this thing.
They’re saying she was raped, Terry said. You didn’t tell me you raped her.
I didn’t. It’s only rape if she doesn’t want you to do it, Lee said, and he lifted the pear and took a wet bite.
Worse than that was the glimpse Ig had of what Terry had attempted to do five months later, sitting in his garage, in the driver’s seat of his Viper, the windows down and the garage door shut and the engine running. Terry was on the twitching edge of unconsciousness, exhaust boiling up around him, when the garage door rumbled open behind him. His housekeeper had never once in her life shown up on a Saturday morning, but there she was, gaping at Terry through the driver’s-side window, clutching his dry cleaning to her chest. She was a fifty-year-old Mexican immigrant and understood English well enough, but it was unlikely she could read the part of the folded note sticking out of Terry’s shirt pocket:
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,
Last year my brother, Ignatius Perrish, was taken into custody under suspicion of assaulting and murdering Merrin Williams, his closest friend. HE IS INNOCENT OF ALL CHARGES. Merrin, who was my friend, too, was assaulted and murdered by Lee Tourneau. I know because I was present, and although I did not assist him in the crime, I am complicit in covering it up, and I cannot live with myself another—
But Ig didn’t get any further than that, dropped Terry’s hand, reacting as if he’d been zapped by static electricity. Terry’s eyes opened, his pupils huge in the darkness.
“Mom?” Terry said in a doped, heavy voice. It was dark in the room, dark enough so Ig doubted he could make out anything more than the vague shape of him standing there. Ig held his hand behind his back, squeezing the hilt of the knife.
Ig opened his mouth to say something; he meant to tell Terry to go back to sleep, which was the most absurd thing he could say, except for any other thing. But as he spoke, he felt a throb of blood surge up into the horns, and the voice that came from his mouth was not his own, but his mother’s. Nor was it an imitation, a conscious act of mimicry. It was her. “Go back to sleep, Terry,” she said.
Ig was so surprised at himself he stepped back and thumped a hip into the night table. A glass of water clashed softly against the lamp. Terry shut his eyes again but began to stir feebly, as if in another moment he might sit up.
“Mom,” he said. “What time is it?”
Ig stared down at his brother, not wondering how he’d done it—how he had summoned Lydia’s voice—but only if he could do
it again. He already knew how he’d done it. The devil could, of course, speak in the voice of loved ones, telling them the things they most wanted to hear. The gift of tongues…the devil’s favorite trick.
“Shh,” Ig said, and the horns were filled with pressure, and his voice was the voice of Lydia Perrish. It was easy—he didn’t even have to think about it. “Shh, dear. You don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to get up. Rest. Take care of yourself.”
Terry sighed and rolled away from Ig, turning a shoulder to him.
Ig had been prepared for anything except to feel sympathy for Terry. There was no cheapening what Merrin had been put through, but in a sense—in a sense Ig had lost his brother that night, too.
He crouched in the darkness, looking at Terry lying on his side under the sheets, and thought for a spell, considering this newest manifestation of his powers. Finally he opened his mouth, and Lydia said, “You should go home tomorrow. Get back to your life, dear. You’ve got rehearsals. You’ve got things you need to do. Don’t you worry about Grandma. Grandma is going to be fine.”
“What about Ig?” Terry asked. He spoke in a low murmur, with his back turned. “Shouldn’t I stay until we know where Ig went? I’m worried.”
“Maybe he needs to be alone right now,” Ig said in his mother’s voice. “You know what time of year it is. I’m sure he’s fine and would want you to take care of work. You need to think about yourself—for once. Straight back to L.A. tomorrow, Terry.” Making it an order, pushing the weight of his willpower behind the horns so they tingled with delight.
“Straight back,” Terry said. “Okay.”
Ig retreated, backing for the door, for daylight.
Terry spoke again, before Ig could go.
“Love you,” he said.
Ig held up in the door, his pulse tripping strangely in his throat, his breath short.
“I love you, too, Terry,” he said, and gently shut the door between them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
IN THE AFTERNOON IG DROVE up the highway to a small country grocery. He picked out some cheese and pepperoni, brown mustard, two loaves of bread, two bottles of red table wine, and a corkscrew.
