Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Your divorced parents live next door to each other?”

  “Welcome to my life.”

  Mickey poked in another number and Faye thought that Carson should probably show him how to use speed dial. She had no doubt that Mickey, Kenny, and Alba talked to each other several times a day.

  Faye could still hear everything coming through Mickey’s phone, and Kenny’s voice was clearer than Alba’s had been because he was yelling. Kenny skipped right over hello and went straight to “Holy shit, there’s a hole in my wall. A bullet came right through my wall and hit my kitchen cabinet.”

  “Hang tight, buddy,” Mickey said. “The police are on their way.”

  ***

  After they were cleared to leave the house, Faye, Mickey, and Carson stood with Roy Cloud in Mickey’s back yard. Cloud was officially telling them nothing about the investigation, but they could plainly see what was going on. Bigbee had elbowed Cloud aside, pointedly taking charge of the effort to find the shooter. Bleck had helped the officers clear out the woods, and they had all moved on to searching the back yards of the only other houses on the road, Alba’s and Kenny’s.

  Kenny stood in the yard to Faye’s right, talking intently with Bigbee. When they finished, he came straight over to talk to Mickey.

  “You okay, man? What in the hell? There’s a bullet hole in the wall of my living room. It was from the second shot. I know that because I was counting shots and I watched it make a crater in my sheetrock. That bullet’s still in my kitchen cabinet. If I’d been sitting in a different chair, it would’ve got me.”

  “Do you think it was a wild shot or was that bullet meant for you?” Mickey said. “I just thought—I mean, it was so obvious that the first shot happened right when I turned on the light that I was sure all those bullets were aimed at me. Cloud’s people found a bullet in my basement wall. I’ve never been so glad somebody was a terrible shot in my entire life.”

  “It was for Alba,” Mickey said. “I bet the third shot was for Alba. What was I thinking? I bet it hit her house, too. She says she’s okay, but she’s gotta be terrified.”

  Mickey went running toward his other next-door neighbor’s house. Cloud, Kenny, and Faye followed close behind.

  Faye would have known which house was Alba’s without being told. The yard was overrun with flowers. Pink roses climbed up a white trellis over the back door, flanked by billowy blue hydrangeas, and there were daisies everywhere.

  “Alba! Are you okay? Open the door right now.”

  Faye looked at Carson, who was doing his best not to watch his father make a spectacle of himself.

  Mickey stood under the flower-laden trellis and fumbled with his keys.

  Cloud muttered, “No, you don’t,” as he sprinted toward the door where Mickey stood. “Get out of there, Mickey! Right now! We’re still searching that yard. Alba is staying put inside her house because that’s what I told her to do. You need to do the same.”

  Alba picked that moment to answer her door and say, “I just told you that I was okay. On the phone, remember? You need to get a grip, Mickey.”

  “There’s a hole in Kenny’s house. A hole clear through the wall. Cloud tells me there’s a bullet lodged in my basement wall. The third shot must have been meant for you. Did it hit your house? Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Alba held out her arms and looked each of them up and down, then she bent over and surveyed the rest of her body. “I don’t see any blood.” She turned around and said, “Do you see any bullet holes in my back. No? I guess I’m fine, Mickey.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Why would any of those bullets be aimed at me? I didn’t know Sophia, but I loathed her. I didn’t have to know her to see her for what she was. Even if I knew anything that would convict her killer, I wouldn’t say anything, so why would I be a target?”

  Roy leaned over and whispered in Faye’s ear. “He’s carrying a torch for his ex-wife after all these years. Not surprised.” He might have been angry enough to fire Faye, but at least he was still speaking to her.

  Mickey turned around and walked away from his ex-wife without another word. He ambled back to his own back yard as casually as if he hadn’t been firmly put in his place by the woman who had left him thirty years before.

  ***

  Faye had fully expected the search to find nothing. This shooting was so similar to the first one she and Carson and Kenny had experienced. The shooter was invisible, hidden in a densely wooded area. There were no injuries. The motive was unclear. It was unclear who the target was. It was even unclear whether anyone was being targeted. Why would she expect that there would be more clues this time, beyond a couple of bullets lodged in walls?

  She hadn’t taken into account Bleck’s legendary nose. This time, he turned up a weapon.

  Roy was coming to the end of his questions and Faye was thinking maybe she’d be able to get Carson home soon so he could sleep off all those beers, when a young officer walked out of the woods and handed Roy his phone. He said nothing but “Hunting rifle.”

  Roy snatched it out of his hand, and said, “You couldn’t text me this? Does Bigbee know?”

  “It’s not far. Didn’t take me a minute to walk it. And, yeah, he knows.”

  Roy leaned his head meaningfully in the direction of Carson, Mickey, and Faye. The look on his face said, “Shut up in front of the witnesses,” so the young man did.

  Cloud used his fingers to enlarge the photo and examine details. Carson leaned over for a glance. Cloud pulled the phone away, saying only, “Evidence,” but Faye could tell that Carson had seen something that surprised him.

  Bigbee hustled across the yard toward them. “Dr. Callahan, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth. You two shouldn’t be here. I’ve already asked you all my questions for now. You should go.” He flapped his hand toward Faye’s rental car and walked away.

  Mickey’s back yard was on a sharp incline, and its surface was uneven. Carson was hours away from being able to walk straight. Within five steps, he had fallen to his knees. It took both Mickey and Roy to get the big man to his feet.

  “I’ll get him home tomorrow,” Mickey said. “He can sleep it off here.”

  Carson began to argue that he wanted to go home right then.

  “The both of you need to sleep this off in your own beds,” Roy said. “Maybe you might think about cutting down on your drinking.”

  Alba announced that she’d take Carson home. Kenny, talking over her, said the same thing.

  This made Faye think to give Alba and Kenny a thorough look. If she had to guess, they were both stone cold sober. They certainly weren’t visibly drunk.

  Roy gave them a cool look, and Faye could almost read his mind. He wasn’t sure if they could be trusted. Faye was beginning to wonder whether anybody in Sylacauga could be trusted. Everything about Roy Cloud said that he, at least, could be trusted, but how well did she know Roy? Not well at all.

  Roy didn’t even acknowledge that Kenny and Alba had offered their help. “If you can wait a little while longer, Doctor Faye, I’ll help you get him home.”

  ***

  By the time they reached Carson’s house, he had passed from being a loud drunk to being a sleepy drunk.

  “Can you walk or do you need help getting to bed?” Roy asked.

  “You think I need help walking, old man?” Carson weaved his way up his own sidewalk and nearly fell three times. “Oh, okay, maybe you’d better help me get in the house.”

  Faye and Roy steadied him as he shuffled along. She wasn’t sure whether they should put him on the couch or help him to bed. Roy saw her indecision and said, “This man’s too big to spend the night on that little couch,” so they walked him into his bedroom and helped him off with his shoes.

  Closing the bedroom door behind them, Faye said, “He invited you in. Here’s your chance to see if the
notebook’s here. You can do what you like with it.”

  “We get search warrants for a reason, Faye.”

  “I didn’t say ‘Why don’t we go through Carson’s desk and kitchen cabinets?’ but I don’t see anything wrong with looking around without touching anything.”

  “I’m too tired to argue ethics with you, but I’ll admit to letting my own ethics slide a bit just now. I looked around that bedroom pretty good while we were pulling off Carson’s boots. If the notebook is in that room, it’s not in plain sight.”

  “I agree.” Faye gave one last look around Carson’s living room, because she knew that Roy Cloud was about to hustle her out the door. “I don’t see it in here, either.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Alba and Kenny don’t have alibis for this afternoon’s shooting.”

  “You think they shot up their own houses?”

  “Maybe. Something’s not right about what happened today. I’d suspect Mickey himself if I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes, lying on the floor listening to somebody else shoot a gun at him. It’s not possible that those shots came from inside his house. You could at least test Kenny and Alba for gunshot residue.”

  “I did.” The disapproving air that had hung around Cloud since he caught her at Sophia’s cabin lifted a little. In fact, there was a smile playing around his wide mouth.

  She punched him on the arm. “You were making fun of me for thinking they shot up their own houses, and the whole time you had the exact same suspicions. You’re a sneaky one, Roy Cloud.”

  “It’s my job, Doctor Faye. I want you to understand that the gunshot residue data will be worthless in court. The residue hangs around forever. It stays on the clothes you wear to the shooting range. It accumulates in your house over time if you shoot a lot. You saw Mickey’s gun collection. Kenny’s may be bigger. A defense attorney will shred any evidence we present, but we still have to take the samples. If we didn’t, the defense attorney would say we must not really have believed the accused had shot a gun.”

  “You really think Alba’s house is a hotbed of gun residue?”

  “A woman living alone for twenty-nine years? Who prides herself on her independence? Who was married to a gun lover? In Oklahoma? Alba has a gun in her house and she keeps in practice. I guarantee it.”

  “Did somebody check on Emily?” She was ashamed that this hadn’t already occurred to her.

  “She cut her hand making a sandwich at lunchtime. Pretty bad. Her knife slipped off a big block of cheese and nearly took the end of her thumb off. She’s been in the ER until just a few minutes ago. So nobody shot at her and she didn’t shoot at anybody. She lives in the back of beyond, just like Alba, Kenny, and Mickey, so I sent somebody out to her house to check things out. Didn’t find anything.”

  She hated to ask the next question, but it hung in the air like a thunderhead. “Sly?”

  “Your husband vouches for him. I wish we had a witness that wasn’t family, but this is better than nothing.”

  “My husband is not a liar.”

  “Yeah,” Roy said. He put his hands in his pockets and stood there as if considering his words but, in the end, he said nothing but, “We should go.”

  Faye looked around Carson’s living room longingly.

  “Don’t you worry, Doctor Faye. I’ll get a warrant and come back here for a proper search. I’ve looked over your photos of the last pages of that notebook, and I know that I need to read the whole thing eventually.”

  “Yes, you do. We both do. We have to find out what Carson did with it.”

  He continued speaking as if he hadn’t heard her. “I also need to understand why Carson wanted that notebook badly enough to interfere with a murder investigation. Which you, by the way are no longer working on. Remember?”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Faye got to Sly’s house in time for supper, but she wished she hadn’t. Joe didn’t have anything to say to her, and she was beginning to wonder if he ever would again. They even washed the dishes together in silence, and she ached for all those evenings when they had used that time to laugh and talk. When her phone rang, she was relieved to have the chance to go outside and take it.

  “I am so sorry. I feel like a fool. You must think I’m a total drunk.”

  Carson’s liver hadn’t finished processing all that alcohol yet, but he’d sobered up enough to enter the remorse phase of a bender.

  “It’s okay, Carson. Sometimes people drink a little too much. You’ll be fine tomorrow.” Thinking of the coming hangover, she said, “Or maybe the next day.”

  “When I heard that gunshot, I thought I’d lost my dad. He’s not perfect, but I love him. I really do love him. I can’t help it.”

  “You’re not supposed to help it. Mickey is your father.”

  He was sobbing now. “I don’t know what to think about my mother. Maybe the asshole was aiming at her, too. Maybe she did the shooting herself, but she favors a revolver, not a rifle. Maybe she took that rifle out of Kenny’s house and opened fire at him and my dad both. It wouldn’t be hard to walk down that ravine behind the house and take an easy shot. There’s trails all through there. I spent whole days out back when I was a kid and I know exactly where I’d stand if I wanted to aim at all three houses.”

  “Could Kenny have done the same thing? Gone down one of those trails, shot the rifle, hid it, then come out of the woods? It would have been pretty safe to shoot a hole through his own wall, since he wasn’t in there. I notice the shots at Mickey’s and Alba’s houses went wild, so they would have been pretty safe, too.”

  Carson snorted. “It’s easier to imagine Mom with murder in her eye than Kenny, but yeah. There’s paths out in those woods that would take you where you needed to go.”

  He started to laugh and seemed to be having trouble stopping.

  “Carson. Carson, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, but I just thought of something. Mom would never put a hole in the side of that house that she likes so much. Besides, what if she accidentally shot a rose bush? It would be just like her to mess up her alibi by shooting wild so none of her flowers came to harm.”

  “Roy is an excellent investigator. I haven’t known him long, but I can tell. He’s going to get to the bottom of this. It’s important to him.” She wasn’t sure she could say the same things of Bigbee, who was, after all, in charge.

  “But what if he’s too late?” His voice was thick with tears. “I can’t lose any of them, Faye. Not my parents and not Kenny. They’re all I have. I can’t let them die and I can’t stand it if any of them goes to jail. Do you think maybe Emily did the shooting?”

  “She has an excellent alibi and a lot of witnesses that say she couldn’t have done it.”

  The sobs stopped and his voice grew quiet, as if he was just too tired to talk any more. “There’s somebody else who could have done it, but you won’t like it.”

  “Sly has an alibi.” She neglected to mention that Sly’s alibi was given to him by his loving son.

  “I don’t really want it to be Sly, either. It’s been years since I was a little kid riding in his truck, but I still care about him. Bottom line, I am completely certain it wasn’t Mom or Kenny. Neither one of them would have ever shot into a house with me in it.”

  “Carson. We were in my car. How would they have known that you were there?”

  This thought brought the sobs back.

  “Listen. We both have loved ones to protect, and we both want to get to the truth. I have an important question and I need for you to get yourself calm so that you can answer it. Can you do that?”

  A deep breath. “I can.”

  “Just now, you said something about your mother going to Kenny’s house to get the rifle. Why did you say that?”

  “I told you. Her gun is a revolver.”

  “But why Kenny’s house? Couldn’
t she have bought it or taken it from your dad’s house? It would take him a while to notice that one gun out of his huge collection was missing.”

  “You’d think that but no. He’d notice. Anyway, it wasn’t one of Dad’s guns, I know that for sure. It was Kenny’s. Faye, I can’t be the one to testify against him. I can’t.”

  “Maybe you won’t have to. The police can look up the registration—”

  Carson’s laugh was explosive. “Kenny inherited that gun from his dad who got it from his dad who probably bought it from a friend during the Great Depression. Do you think one of them got up one day and said, ‘I think I’ll go register all my guns?’”

  “Maybe it’s not his. Are you sure?”

  “Just because I’m drunk, it doesn’t mean I’m not right. Kenny taught me to hunt and that’s the first rifle I ever shot. I’m sure.”

  ***

  When Faye went back into the house, it was with the express intent of getting Sly and Joe to talk to her. There were too many shootings and too much fear, injury, and death. Everyone in Sylacauga must want to see an arrest immediately. Any arrest. Fear made it too easy to look for a scapegoat. Her family needed to pull together.

  She was surprised to realize how much she trusted Roy Cloud to be fair to Sly but, sooner or later, Bigbee was going to decide it was time to pay more attention to the suspect who had already done time in a penitentiary.

  She came in the door and walked straight to Sly’s easy chair, where he was spending yet another night pretending to watch TV.

  “Do you keep your old trucking logs?”

  Sly looked at her. His eyes were so bleary that she almost suspected him of drinking again.

  “Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t budge from the chair.

  “This is important, Sly. How else do you plan to establish an alibi for a murder that happened nearly thirty years ago?”