by Ace Atkins
Behind the house stood the stables, but the horses had already been taken away. She guessed that her cousin Maggie had picked them up. Their dogs Hank and Merle, too. She remembered what the cop had said about Merle finding them. How he stayed at their side. Whimpering.
From the shoulder of the two-lane, she could just make out the crumbling plywood of her old playhouse in the magnolia tree. A knotted rope hung loose below.
She wished she could climb through its twisted branches, through the white, fragrant flowers, and into the safety of a world she’d created for herself. Up there, she never had any worries. True evil never existed. Only the sweet voice of her mother calling her to dinner, making her leave tins full of mud pies and discarded toys.
Her scarred knees and broad grins were all gone now.
She pulled the keys from the old F150’s ignition and took a deep breath. It was about 5:00 A.M… Loose traffic blew past her on the way to Holly Springs and Memphis as she looked at herself in the rearview mirror. A weak, predawn light crept around her.
Dark circles rimmed her brown eyes. Her curly blond hair was limp and dirty and her face flat – washed of any color. Any life. Twenty-two years old and already tired of living.
Maybe it was that she was tired of being on the run. For the past two months, she’d existed in a hazy fog in roadside motels and truck stops. No one knew where she’d disappeared. She only wanted to be left alone and for the pain to stop. The days had passed with bottles of cheap wine and a blur of blacktop and scattered yellow median lines.
Being anonymous could be reassuring.
Abby gritted her teeth and got out of her car, a black duffel bag in her hand. The silence was almost too much. Each step she took on her lawn, as she looped to the back of the huge house, was pain.
She remembered how proud her father had been when he’d bought the place back in the late ‘eighties. Always told people he’d renovated it. But, really, he’d just paid the contractor to make some adjustments. There was a large skylight in the kitchen where he cooked his spicy Cajun food, and a sunken room he’d added that he called his theater where he made her watch John Wayne movies on a big-screen television. Big bowl of popcorn, Cokes in those small green bottles.
Never let her just watch the film, always talked about patriotism and true grit.
Seemed like she always wanted to be out with her friends, cruising the Square, or trying to sneak into frat parties. But now she’d give her life just to watch one of those faded, hokey movies with him. The smell of his cheap aftershave. His silly laugh.
On the side of the house, she took the brick steps onto the creaking porch. Yellow crime-scene tape sealed off the landing but she ducked beneath it. The sky was starting to turn a swirl of yellow and purple like a halo that surrounds a healing wound. A few small clouds were black and thin.
She went to the back door and dropped the bag, pulling out a crowbar and a flashlight. More crime-scene tape sealed the back door. She ignored it and sank the crowbar behind the metal wedge that held a new Master lock in place.
She pulled the wedge until her muscles screamed and the lock broke free. She inserted her own key into the door’s lock and pushed it open with her foot.
This was the first time she’d been inside since it happened. She’d been living just a few miles away at her sorority house on campus when she got a call from her cousin. She remembered speeding along the highway and seeing the ambulance and squad cars lined up outside. All of them parked haphazardly on the lawn.
Today, she felt like she was walking through a mausoleum. The kitchen was hot as an old attic. It smelled of stale bread and rotten oranges. The sun was rising over the barn in the backyard, its rays filtering through an oak tree. Beams shot into an antique stained-glass window mounted over the kitchen sink.
Abby turned on the flashlight and walked through a narrow hallway, passing pictures of her family on horseback and on ski trips, and into the den. More tape blocked her path and she ripped it aside as she felt her face break and her throat crack.
Her legs buckled and she dropped to her knees when she saw his old chair. Brown leather, a history of the Civil War lying in its well-worn seat. She pulled herself up and slid into the chair still smelling his presence.
She imagined her mother cooking now. Maybe shelling peas or chatting with their maid, Lucy.
She closed her eyes and felt the tears bleed down her face.
She clasped her hands over the heat of the flashlight, pushed herself to her feet, and walked back to the study where he died. She rolled back the twin doors and saw the fat, mahogany desk and chair that creaked when he would lean back and study cases.
She placed her hand on the desk, sitting flush next to the far wall, and reached to its corner, pulling as hard as she could. The desk barely budged and she tried harder. Finally, it squeaked on the wooden floor and she could see the square pattern he’d cut into the wall. She pulled back the desk a little more and used the crowbar to pop out the square.
Inside, she saw the face of the safe. The combination was easy, her parents’ anniversary. She wheeled through the numbers and cracked it open. Without even looking at the headings on the dozens of manila folders or the contents of the velvet-covered boxes, she slid them into the duffel bag.
She closed the safe, reinserted the square, and pushed the desk back flush with the wall.
She didn’t need the flashlight anymore. Dawn had arrived. A gray light burned through the curtains. A stale heat pulsed in the room.
She walked to the front hall and looked at the door to her parents’ bedroom. She knew that her mother had been there when the men – the police said it was more than one – had entered and emptied their guns into her father.
She’d almost made it to the door – maybe running to her husband – when a slug ripped into her shoulder and another into her temple. She’d been wearing that goddamned housecoat Abby hated so much. The ratty terry-cloth thing with ripped pockets.
Abby stared at the door and dropped her head. Her fine hair fell into her eyes and matted to her damp face.
The answers were in her bag now. She knew it. The local cops were idiots. They said it was a robbery. But he’d still had a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex on his wrist when they found him.
Abby shook her head at the thought, gripped the black bag tight to her chest, and sprinted to her car. The ghosts were too close.
From a clearing along the back highway, Perfect studied the girl’s face through a pair of small binoculars. She’d followed the girl all the way from Meridian where she’d stayed for the last couple of days in a run-down trucker’s motel. The girl, whose name was Abby, didn’t see Perfect, though.
Perfect had kept close to the shadows watching the girl’s movements, listening in on her phone conversations with her cousin – amazing what the manager of the motel could do – and sifting through the girl’s old truck while she was asleep. She found a photo album, a duffel bag of used clothes, and receipts from the last couple of months.
Abby. Hmm. Liked to spend daddy’s money. Banana Republic T-shirts. J. Crew underwear. A pair of Nike running shoes that probably cost a hundred and fifty bucks. Caswell-Massey lotion mixed in with tiny bottles of motel shampoo.
Perfect would have to straighten her hair, shear it at the jawline, maybe even lose the platinum. Girls like Abby didn’t know how to be sexy. They liked blending in. They liked wearing boys’ jeans and tattered baseball hats.
She watched Abby run to the truck with the same black bag in her hand. Was it weightier now? Sure it was, Perfect thought, reaching into her Navajo-print purse and pulling out a pack of Capris. She lit a match and sucked in some smoke as Abby’s truck disappeared from her rearview mirror.
There was time.
Perfect fussed with her hair, trying to imagine how it would look with a few inches trimmed away and a wash of brown color. She’d have to stop by one of the shops on Oxford Square and buy a roll-neck sweater, preferably gray, and a pair of jeans. Onl
y slightly faded, of course. And was there a sporting goods store that sold really good shoes? She couldn’t remember.
Makeup? Almost none. Maybe a dull gloss on her lips, and, yeah, she’d have to remove the color from her nails and then cut them down a bit.
The sunlight bled over the far grassy hill and stretched its weight across the old farmhouse, a dilapidated barn with a tin roof, making the light shine hard in her eyes, and over the bumping green hills close to the highway.
What else did she have? What else did she know? Oh, yes, the cousin.
She remembered from the phone the way Abby’s cousin had this smoky confident voice that kept on asking her to come back to Oxford. At one point, she almost thought the cousin had her convinced, but Abby would start crying and say she didn’t want to talk to the police again or any of their family. Especially some pussy uncle. What did Abby say? She hated them all, or something like that.
There was something else she spotted in that old photo album about both the cousin and the mother. They had the damned most intense eyes Perfect had seen. Almost like they saw everything. Three hundred and sixty degrees. Kind of grabbed you right through the photo.
Kind of a weight or maybe a heft to what they saw. Sort of sleepy. Sort of intelligent. The eye thing. Yeah, she could do the eye thing.
The thick yellow light stretched its way across the pavement and onto Perfect’s face as she buttoned the top three buttons of her tight red angora sweater and practiced the husky voice.
“You’ve been out too long, Abby,” she said, feeling her eyes grow heavier. “Darlin’, it’s time to bring you on in from the cold.”
Chapter 7
AFTER DRIVING ALL morning and night, a big truck stop was exactly what Abby needed. One of those places that sold mesh hats with redneck sayings and beef jerky by the truckload. She wanted to grab a couple of buttery biscuits, a cup of hot black coffee, and find a clean bathroom to wash herself off. Maybe they had showers, too, she hoped, spotting a billboard made out of neon and chrome near the Tennessee border and pulling off the highway. Besides, her engine light had been on red since Holly Springs and she was pretty damned sure her whole motor was about to blow unless she got to a mechanic.
But sometimes you just had to keep riding things out and see where fate would take you.
She parked underneath a huge portico and listened to fat drops splatter the roof. Her radio blared some bad country while her windshield wipers flapped a steady beat. On the other side of a long plate glass window, hardened truckers shoveled country-fried steak and mashed potatoes with gravy into their mouths. She licked her dry lips, counted out a few crumpled dollar bills and four quarters in her hand and wondered if she could go a little farther without a meal.
She wanted one more day alone, without calling her cousin or without answering questions about her parents. Was she all right? Did she need anything? They were fine people, weren’t they? Goddamn it. She didn’t need another fucking person telling her how fine her parents were. She knew her mother once bought a mess of socks for a deaf boy named Pooky, and that her father once donated the five hundred dollars he won for killing the largest buck in the county to Oxford First Baptist. Everyone was trying to make saints or Mother Teresa out of them now. But all Abby could remember was how her mother bought that good Minute-Maid pink lemonade and hugged the crap out of her when she heard that Abby’s boyfriend had split for a Tri-Delt from McComb. Or that the last time she saw him, her daddy wore his reading glasses upside down to make her laugh like when she was five.
The memory burned away in a truck stop window dripping with water and steam, pink from the neon. The neon read: SHOWERS, ATM, CHECKS CASHED, CHEAP CIGARETTES. After she pumped out five bucks, Abby bolted for the front entrance as the hard gray rain soaked her face and stung her eyes.
Perfect Leigh watched Abby make a run for it, the girl’s feet splashing through the oily puddles. Inside her car, Perfect crushed a thin cigarette into a dirty ashtray and turned down the Best of Nancy Sinatra CD. Perfect looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror and decided she’d done a great job with the makeup. Dull gloss on her lips. A little mascara. These college girls liked their simplicity for some reason.
Hair wasn’t bad either. Only took a handful of brown-tinted mousse and some bobbing shears she kept in a little overnight case. Hell, the whole transformation was done a few hours ago at Lake Puskis when Abby was walking around feeding the squirrels and communing with nature. The clothes were in the car and the rearview worked as her canvas.
Perfect closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and ran her hands down over her shoulders, breasts, and stomach. She kept her hands on her stomach for a few moments, just feeling her breath. She started inhaling a little faster.
She was quick, she was perky, and brimming with energy and kind of a motor mouth.
Abby knew women like this. Never give Abby a second to doubt you or your intentions. You are Ellie. You were born in Houston, Texas. Your father owned a wicker furniture company and your mother was a former Miss Texas runner-up. When you were a child, you moved to Memphis and grew up in the wealthy suburb of Germantown. You like Chinese food but not Italian. You like Pop Tarts and Tootsie Rolls and anything sweet. And, one time, you rescued a puppy from drowning when the levee broke near your aunt’s mink farm in Louisiana.
Perfect smelled her new perfume and she liked it. She liked this body. She liked the way Ellie smelled and spoke with this clarity and cleanness. Ellie. Ellie was special.
The truck stop was loaded with bad food. A Dairy Queen, Subway, Taco Bell, and a big restaurant called Grandma’s Country Cookin’. Grandma’s was a place where a bunch of scruffy guys wearing flannel shirts took their coffee and talked about their latest loads. Auto supplies to her right and Western wear along the back wall. Who needed all this stuff on the road? Abby thought as she shook the water from her head and strolled through the bright, fluorescent coldness.
Felt good to stretch her legs and be among people again. Didn’t matter if they were toothless or a little haggard. She smiled at a little Asian woman who passed her carrying a crate of Yoo-Hoo.
Abby could barely afford one. All she had was two dollars. There had to be something in the cooler for that. She wasn’t thirsty anyway. Maybe one of those horrible egg salad sandwiches or a microwavable roast beef sandwich. She grabbed the egg salad.
“Abby?” someone asked. “Is that you?”
She turned and faced a young woman, who was maybe in her late twenties, with brown hair cut all one length. She wore a gray sweater, dark jeans, and running shoes. Abby studied her face and smiled. She was too old to know from class.
“I’m sorry,” Abby said, shrugging.
“Ellie,” the woman said. “The Grove? Met you and your cousin last year?”
It was a voice she recognized from every bourbon-drinking, cigarette-smoking Southern woman she’d ever known. The woman’s thick lips curved into a welcoming smile. Her big blue eyes dropped into hers with a familiar look Abby knew but couldn’t recognize. The woman’s skin was tanned and her eyebrows thin and arched.
“Sure,” Abby said, lying.
The woman suddenly reached around Abby’s neck and squeezed her close. She smelled like Calvin Klein perfume and Abby felt the woman’s weighty breasts smash against her like two balloons filled with concrete. “God, I’m so sorry about your parents. My God. What you’ve been through. I spoke to Maggie just the other day and she said she was just worried to death. Cain’t believe I just ran into you like this. On my way to Memphis, you know, and stopped off for gas. You look so tired. Are you all right? Abby, I’m so sorry.”
For some reason, she didn’t know why, maybe because she was so tired and maybe she wanted to be held, but Abby hugged this woman back, who she didn’t know shit about. It felt good to be with someone familiar.
“My car. I think the engine is about to burn up,” Abby said.
“Oh, Lord,” Ellie said. “Sit down and let’s have a cup of co
ffee and figure it all out. I know this place is absolutely awful, but would you like lunch? I mean, a hamburger? No one can screw up a hamburger or breakfast, or at least that’s what my daddy always told me.”
Abby opened the freezer and replaced the egg salad sandwich.
“Sure,” she said.
As Perfect rambled, she watched Abby’s eyes follow the water sluicing down the foggy window like it was worms racing. Perfect loved to ramble like Ellie. It was like letting loose and peeing outdoors in the rain. She talked about when her father died from cancer and how she’d lost twenty pounds in two months. She spoke of recently finding comfort in God after a ski trip to Aspen where she saw sun fall across the snow like a halo. And of course, she offered to drive Abby back to Oxford and maybe find Maggie and go out to dinner at City Grocery.
She could tell Abby was barely listening. The girl just sat there at the Grandma’s counter as eighteen-wheelers rolled by outside. Perfect decided to try the human-contact move. Basic shit. She reached over, spread her fingers wide, and covered Abby’s hand noticing overgrown cuticles. No manicure?
The trick was not to grasp the hand, but just to give a warm reassurance. Levi taught her that. Levi had taught her everything.
“How ’bout it?” Perfect asked, keeping her hand in place. “Leave that old truck here and come with me. Let’s just circle back, I don’t need to shop anyway. We’ll find Maggie. She’s so worried about you, Abby. She really is.”
Abby had barely spoken. Strange little bitch. She was petite and loose-limbed and had the same sleepy eyes Perfect had noticed from the family photographs. The girl didn’t wear makeup and kept an Ole Miss hat scrunched down in her eyes. Greasy hair. White T-shirt stained with old coffee.
A little stubble under her arms. Good Lord. The girl needed to be hosed off and shaved.
