Fast Falls the Night

by Julia Keller

  Bell never knew. Lee Ann did not discuss it.

  Which was why this moment was so odd. It had never occurred before in the course of their relationship, a union that involved mutual trust and ease but that did not ever quite tilt into friendship.

  Lee Ann mentioned God.

  It happened as Lee Ann was leaving. Her workday was over. She gathered up her purse and her paperback, along with the empty brown paper sack in which she had ferried her lunch. She reused each paper sack multiple times, until the top edge was so crinkled and frayed that it would barely hold a twist, and the bottom was so weakened by the tiny droplets of moisture that sometimes transferred from the sides of the small Tupperware container of fruit cocktail—her favorite dessert—that it was in serious danger of disintegrating.

  “Belfa? A word?”

  Bell looked up from her computer screen. The door between her office and Lee Ann’s domain was open, and she had been generally aware of her secretary’s leave-taking rituals.

  “Sure,” Bell said.

  She had just received another message from Sheriff Harrison and could use a distraction. Three more overdoses. Three kids found unconscious on the riverbank.

  So the total was now twenty-seven. Three of the twenty-seven had died.

  Lee Ann stepped into her office. She stood in front of the desk. “Do you know ‘Abide with Me’?”

  “What?”

  “The hymn. The one that starts, ‘Abide with me.’”

  Bell shook her head. “No.” Her face must have said more than she meant it to, because Lee Ann responded immediately.

  “I know, I know,” the secretary declared. “It’s totally inappropriate to discuss religion in the workplace. Particularly a public building. In fact, it’s probably illegal. I might as well be trying to put up a nativity scene on the courthouse lawn. Or post the Ten Commandments in the ladies room. Right?”

  “We have to walk a careful line. Church and state and all that. Kind of important.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Once again, Bell’s face did her talking for her. It said: Then why are you bringing it up?

  “Look,” Lee Ann went on, “this is just about the worst single day anybody around here can remember. Acker’s Gap is going to be a long time recovering from it. If it ever does recover, that is.”

  “No argument from me.”

  “So this afternoon I started thinking about a certain hymn. With everything going on—well, it just seemed like something you might want to think about, too.”

  “A hymn.”

  “Yes.” Lee Ann ignored the skepticism in her boss’s tone.

  “What’s the relevance?” Bell said.

  “It was written in 1847 by a minister. He was dying. Henry Francis Lyte—that was his name. He was thinking back on his life as if it had been a single day. Thinking about all the sad things that had happened—death and pain and disappointment. Bitterness and doubt. The day was ending and night was coming on. He was afraid. And so he was asking God to help him get through it. Because everybody has troubles and doubts. Mostly, though, they’re spread out across your whole lifetime. It’s hard when they’re all bunched up in a single day, like what’s happening today—but you have to keep going. Keep fighting back. And trust in more than just the darkness that’s coming down all around you.” Lee Ann paused. She looked a little embarrassed, as if she had overstepped. Giving pep talks was not her style. Giving pep talks about God was definitely not her style. “I’m sure somebody trained in theology would have a better way of explaining what Reverend Lyte meant when he wrote it,” she demurred. “But that’s how I’ve always thought of the hymn. It’s based on Luke 24:29. And it’s my favorite. When the choir sings it at Rising Souls on a bright Sunday morning, with the sun coming through the stained glass—it helps, Belfa. That’s all I can tell you. It really does help.”

  “How does it go?”

  Lee Ann’s eyes widened in alarm. “Heavens. You don’t expect me to stand here and sing, do you? Right here in the office?”

  “Just recite the words, then, if that’s easier.”

  Her secretary paused. Bell could see that Lee Ann did not quite know how to proceed. She had not expected Bell to be interested enough to make the request.

  “I’m aware of your feelings about organized religion,” Lee Ann finally said. “I’d never intrude on that. Never try to change your mind. It’s your business, not mine. But today has just been so—so unbelievably awful, with all the overdoses, and the deaths, that I thought it might be good to have some positive thoughts out there, too. But I don’t want to offend you or—”

  “I’d like to hear the hymn.”

  “You would?”

  “I would.”

  Lee Ann nodded. “Well, all right. Just the first verse.” She set her purse and her book and her empty lunch sack on the edge of Bell’s desk. She clasped her hands and held them waist-high. She took a deep breath. In a small, clear voice, using a cadence that made it clear that it was a poem but that did not sound silly or singsong, she recited:

  Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

  the darkness deepens; lord with me abide.

  when other helpers fail and comforts flee,

  help of the helpless, o abide with me.

  She waited a few seconds and then she picked up her purse, her book, and her paper sack. She nodded to Bell and left the office without speaking an additional word. Bell understood. After the austere beauty of the lines Lee Ann had just spoken, anything else she said would be anticlimactic. Even intrusive. The words needed to live in the air all by themselves, untouched by lesser words or more ordinary ideas, for a few precious seconds. And then regular life could resume. The day from hell could continue its relentless march toward nightfall.

  To her surprise, Bell did feel a kind of serenity. She had instantly memorized the lines. She was aware of a frail, delicate sense of peace. She wondered if maybe they had come through the worst of it.

  And then her cell rang.

  Eddie

  6:31 P.M.

  He loved to watch her swing. Dusk was coming on but he could still see her.

  Both of her tiny fists held the linked chain with the sweet earnestness of a kept promise. The swing rose high in the air and the little girl fully extended her legs, almost as if she were gulping air in her lungs instead of catching air with the glorious upward thrust of her legs, and then, as the swing fell back again, she dropped her legs and bent her knees, bringing her heels to the bottom of the seat, readying her legs for the next swoop up and out. Her face was radiant. He could see it clearly, even though his parking spot was across the street from the park, partially shielded by the leafy, low-hanging branch of a silver maple.

  God, he loved his little girl, his Marla Kay. She was named for his grandfather, Marlon, whom he also loved but who had died when he was seven, and for Kay, his great aunt, another loved person who had died a long time ago. Everyone he loved seemed to leave the earth before their time. Maybe he was the problem. He was a curse.

  Raylene had let him name her. “Least I can do,” Raylene said, “’cause you ain’t gonna see much of her, tell you that right now.” He could not fight her on it, because at the time he was in bad shape: the spasms in his legs, the headaches, the mood swings from the brain injury, the blank spots in his memory. He could barely recall the single night he and Raylene had spent together, the night that Marla Kay was conceived.

  She was going really, really high on the swing now. Eddie wondered if she was chilly. The sun was on its way down, dropping behind the mountains fast and clean, like something with no intention of ever coming back, and she was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and shorts. She had to be a little bit cold, small as she was, with her hair cut short like that, to fool people into thinking she was getting chemo. Raylene didn’t take care of her like she should.

  Just look at that little girl go, Eddie thought. Just look at her.

  There was no one else around. The par
k was empty.

  He had not thought much past the moment. That was better. So many things had gone wrong in his life that he could not see the point anymore of advance planning. Why plan when things were just going to go wrong anyway?

  He got out of his truck. One more look around the playground. Making sure.

  Nobody.

  Raylene could be anywhere, doing anything. She frequently left Marla Kay unsupervised. The only time she really paid attention to the girl, Eddie thought with rising anger, was when she was showing her off as a cancer victim, trying to get money, playing on people’s sympathies. It was disgusting. Raylene’s apartment was a block and a half from the playground, which was why she had chosen it; she could send Marla Kay out to play and the little girl wouldn’t get bored. It was the world’s cheapest babysitter. The swings, the slide, the monkey bars—Marla Kay had her pick.

  The swings were her favorite. Eddie knew that because he had watched her here before. Many times. At first he had been nervous, because the church truck was so recognizable, but then he figured it out: Nobody cared. As nosy as the people in this town could be sometimes—when he first returned from the service, total strangers would stop him on the street and ask him why he limped like that—they could also be obtuse, once they had gotten used to you. They were caught up in their own problems. He had watched Marla Kay in the playground dozens of times and nobody ever came up to the truck window and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, spying on a child that way.

  “Hey, sweet pea,” he said.

  She had not seen him approach. She had slacked off on her swinging and was dawdling now, spinning the seat around, tracing circles in the dirt with the toes of her flip-flops. When he spoke, her head quickly turned his way. Her smile was an astonishing thing; it broke across her small face like a mini-sunrise. Her eyes widened in uncomplicated pleasure. She jumped off the swing and ran toward him. He caught her and he picked her up—not too far off the ground, because he was not able—and he swung her around. It hurt his back and his legs, it hurt like hell, but she loved it and so he did it.

  “Daddy!’ she cried in delight. “Daddy!”

  He gritted his teeth and hoisted her up on his shoulders, arranging her legs on either side of his head. That made her giggle. She grabbed onto his thick hair. He crossed the street. He faltered once, his leg suddenly wobbly and unreliable, but he regained his balance and pretended to be joking around, staggering in a comical way.

  When he reached the truck, he opened the passenger door and leaned forward, enabling her to climb off his shoulders and tumble onto the seat. She giggled again.

  “Where’re we going, Daddy?”

  They were almost back to the church by the time she asked. Until that moment, she had talked about neutral things while they drove along: How much she loved to swing, why blue was her favorite color although sometimes it was pink, why she liked shorts better than dresses. And then she asked about their destination. She did not ask anxiously, or suggest that they needed to let her mother know that she had left the playground. She was simply curious. She trusted him.

  Eddie replied that they were going to go to his house. Was that okay with her? Marla Kay nodded as if it made perfect sense, even though she had never been there, and then she said, “Why doesn’t Mommy like you, Daddy?” Kids picked up on things. He knew that. He didn’t mind her asking. He answered her the only way he could: “Don’t know, sweet pea.” It was true. He understood that Raylene considered him a nuisance, and that she wished he was out of her life entirely, but he wasn’t sure why. His very existence seemed to annoy her. Yes, he had argued with her over the cancer scam, and yes, he had a fair idea of the other thing she did for money and he did not approve of it, and when he told her so she said it was his fault because he never gave her enough—but her irritation seemed far in excess of any of that.

  He parked the truck in the alley behind the church, as he always did. He did not want to vary his routine, in case anyone was watching. He reached behind his seat. He had re-wrapped the rifle in the plaid wool blanket. He had wanted to have it with him, just in case. Now he needed it for the next phase. She didn’t ask what he was carrying. That, Eddie had discovered, was the way it worked with a five-year-old; you never knew what she might ask about. She would ignore a big, obvious thing and then her attention would be snared by something small and ordinary.

  There was an entrance to the basement just off the alley. Marla Kay was fascinated by the three steps down and then the door itself, which was round and red and wooden and had a funny latch. It looked like a door in a story, she told him. A fairy tale. That had never occurred to Eddie until he saw it through his daughter’s eyes.

  “Right in here,” he said.

  They walked side by side through the doorway and into the basement. He pushed the little wooden door shut behind them.

  “This is where my daddy lives,” she said, as if she were narrating a TV show.

  He thought she might be scared in the basement, or at least unsettled. It was a big concrete box, with a low ceiling and an old, moldy smell, and it was filled with junk. The glass block windows only ran along one side, and the light they let in was a murky, underwater light, faint and vaguely sinister.

  But she was fine. She ran straight over to the furnace and pounded on the round side, as if she were making friends with a nice giant. It gave off a deep plangent echo.

  “What’s this?” she said. “It’s big.”

  “It’s a furnace, sweet pea. Keeps the church warm.”

  Next she scampered over to his clothes rack along the wall. “These are your shirts, Daddy,” she said, touching the plaid sleeves of his work shirts, one by one. She had recognized them right away.

  “Yep,” he said.

  “And here’s your kitchen.” She touched the utility sink, the small microwave, the mini-fridge.

  “Yeah.”

  “And here’s your bed. Is this where you sleep, Daddy?”

  He set the wrapped-up rifle on the card table that he used as a staging area. “That’s right.”

  “And is this where I’m going to sleep?”

  She had found the small cot on the adjacent wall. He had bought it that afternoon at the mall, on his way back from Lymon’s after his confrontation with Raylene. He had also purchased a set of sheets. They showed a scene from the movie Frozen: two girls with long hair and sparkly gowns. He hadn’t seen the movie himself, but he knew how much Marla Kay loved it because for a period of time that was all she talked about on the few occasions when he was permitted to see her. She knew the songs by heart. One of them had the refrain, “Let it go,” and when Marla Kay saw the sheets, she giggled and said, “Hey, Daddy—you got me some ‘Let it Go’ sheets!”

  Before he could answer she was running back across the room toward him. She hugged him hard. His knees trembled—as small as she was, her headfirst smack into his kneecaps packed a wallop—and he had to reach out a hand to the wall to steady himself. With his other hand, he touched the top of her head. He hated the fact that Raylene had shaved it, to make her look sick, but part of him did like being able to feel her skull, to know for sure how solid it was, how substantial. She was a good, strong girl. His Marla Kay. He loved her so much that it almost made him dizzy.

  I will never forget this moment, he promised himself. No matter what happens tonight, I will remember this moment forever. I will carry it in my heart. No one can take away this feeling. They can take everything else—but not this.

  “Hey, Daddy,” she said, breaking away from his knees so that she could gaze up at him. She grinned. “I’m hungry.”

  Jake

  6:45 P.M.

  Leo looked like hell. No use beating around the bush, Jake thought.

  “You look like hell, Leo,” he said. “Guess all that healthy living isn’t paying off yet, right?” He laughed. He was in a hurry—he was in a desperate hurry, actually, because the clock was ticking and people were dying—but he needed to keep tha
t fact from Leo. He needed to act like the same old smart-ass Deputy Oakes, easygoing, cool. If Leo figured out that Jake was pressed for time, he would take special delight in tormenting him, drawing out their conversation. The balance of power would shift.

  He had found Leo in the back room of a tattoo shop located in a strip mall along a stretch of Route 7 that included a gun and ammo store, a video game store, a tanning place, a pizza place, and two taverns, one at either end.

  The tattoo shop had a rusty awing and a bad lettering job on the grimy front window: SKIN U ALIVE. Mack Cruikshank, the owner, had hired his cousin to do the lettering because the price was right, but as Mack’s wife, Juniper, had put it, with a saucy toss of her long white-blond hair that indicated she thought she had coined the phrase: “You get what you pay for.” The words “SKIN” and “U” were okay, but by the time Randy Rutherford got to the “Alive” he realized he should have measured the space. He had run out of real estate. Thus “Alive” was written with the same giant A and L with which he had rendered the “SKIN” and the “U,” but after that there was a smaller i, a tiny v and finally a virtually nonexistent e. The store’s name looked as if it was being sucked sideways into an unseen vacuum cleaner somewhere off to the right.

  There was always a Harley Softail Slim parked on the patch of gravel in front of the shop. The bike belonged to Mack. At present the lot also sported two other bikes and a Dodge Charger, which meant this was a busy night at Skin U Alive.