Bring Her Home

by David Bell

Winter and Hawkins exchanged a look, but they held whatever objections they might want to make to themselves. Bill understood what they were doing. They were pacifying a difficult customer, indulging a man in the throes of grief.

  Only Paige knew Bill well enough to know it wouldn’t pass, that once he set his mind on a certain course of action, there was no turning back from it.

  “I have some brochures. Or you can come by our office and look in person. We’re operating on your schedule, Mr. Price.”

  “And I want one more thing,” Bill said.

  Winter maintained his practiced customer service façade, but something crossed Hawkins’s face, a sliver of irritation at being held at the table so long while listening to Bill’s expression of his desires.

  But he waited patiently, along with Winter and Paige.

  “I want to see her,” Bill said. “Summer. I want to see her before she gets reburied.”

  “Bill.” Paige’s voice sounded edgy and panicked. For the first time that day, she revealed real concern about the things he was saying. “Why would you want to subject yourself to that? You don’t want to remember her that way, do you? Do any of us?”

  Bill ignored her. “She should still be okay to see, right? It’s only been a day since the burial, and she’s been embalmed.” He turned and looked at Paige. “I’ve been looking at Haley for days. Her injuries. I can’t imagine Summer’s are any worse. And I’d like to really see my daughter one last time. I think it’s the least you can do.”

  No one offered any further argument.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Just after seven that night, Bill grabbed his coat from the front closet and walked into the family room, where Paige was watching an HGTV marathon. A hunky guy with bulging muscles was taking a sledgehammer to the walls of somebody’s kitchen, sending up a spray of dust and debris and laughing the whole time he did it. Bill paused, looking at the screen. They sure made the destruction of a home look joyous on that network.

  “What’s up?” Paige asked. She looked tired, and she yawned, lifting her hand to her mouth. “Excuse me. Long days.”

  “I have an errand to run.”

  Paige tried to mask her curiosity, and when she spoke, she managed to keep her voice cool and detached. “Anything I can help with?”

  “No. No, it’s cool.”

  “Okay,” she said, eyeing him as if he were a dangerous animal.

  “You know, you don’t have to—”

  Paige held up her hand. “Bill, stop. I’m staying. Please stop telling me I can go.”

  “But your family—”

  “They’re doing fine without me.” She laughed. “I bet the kids haven’t had a home-cooked meal all week. Kyle has the local pizza place on speed dial. His sister lives there too. She’s helping. And Kyle and the kids are coming down for the funeral when it’s time. I’m not going anywhere. Okay?”

  “I’ll try to stop asking.”

  “Good.”

  But he didn’t move. He remained in front of her with his coat on. He imagined his face looked pretty lost.

  “Did you want to say something else?” She shifted her body, moving her feet out from under her and placing them on the floor. She muted the TV. “Is this about the funeral?”

  Bill nodded. “I have to decide if I want the church involved.”

  “Oh.” Paige looked surprised by the statement, her eyebrows lifting. “Why wouldn’t you? Did Summer not believe?”

  “I don’t know what she believed. She seemed kind of contemptuous of organized religion. She used to complain about the Bible-thumpers around here. She used to say that being out in nature or connecting with a friend was as good as being at Mass. She wasn’t shy about sharing her opinions with me.” Bill felt a little foolish standing and talking in front of his sister, like he was making a speech to the Rotary Club or something. But he made no move to sit down. “We haven’t been going to church since Julia died. I guess I find it hard to go along with all of that after what happened. And now, I’ve lost my wife and daughter. Who would believe after that? None of it seems right.”

  Paige listened patiently, the glow from the TV reflected in her glasses. “I guess I wasn’t sure,” she said finally. “I didn’t know how much you were going. But maybe this is the time for you to go back. It can be a great comfort.”

  “You still go?” Bill asked. “You hated it when we were kids.”

  “I like taking my children there. I like the community. And the school.” She shrugged. “Have you been seeing someone?”

  It took Bill a moment to understand his sister wasn’t asking him about his romantic life. “You mean a shrink?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. I went with Summer a few times. Why?”

  “It can help. Remember Mom and Dad sent me to one in high school. They said I was partying and drinking too much.”

  “You kind of were.”

  She ignored his comment. “It helped, even if I think they were wrong to send me. It’s nice to talk to an objective party.”

  “I’ll think about it.” He turned to leave but looked back one more time. “You should lock the door behind me. You know, just in case . . .”

  Paige stood up. “I’ve got it. And if there’s trouble, I’ll call your superhot neighbor.”

  Like Julia did the day she died, Bill thought. She had to. . . .

  “God, I get tired of hearing how good-looking he is,” he said, and went out into the cold night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Bill drove toward the cemetery. He knew it closed at seven o’clock, and every night, a Jakesville cop drove dutifully through the grounds, making a circuit to check for lingering mourners, bird-watchers, and teenagers rolling around in the grass, oblivious to the graves beneath them. Then the cop locked the gate, using a chain and padlock.

  Bill saw the lights from the patrol car as he drove closer, its conical beams illuminating the trees and the headstones. Somewhere out there, across the flat expanse of grass, both Julia and Summer lay buried. He hated to think of the mumbo jumbo spoken over Summer’s body, the syrupy praise and hand-raising, the muttered “amens” that accompanied her as she was placed into the cold, unforgiving ground. He remembered Candy Rodgers’s smug certainty, her admonition that Summer could still benefit from having God in her life.

  And Candy had emerged from Summer’s bedside, claiming she had felt something, a statement that made Bill want to roll his eyes to the ceiling.

  And yet, she’d been right. It was her daughter there, not his.

  He pounded his hand against the steering wheel as he drove. He made a series of turns, navigating through the narrow streets of a small subdivision. Porch lights glowed and cars sat in driveways. Long days were ending for the families who lived there, and they gathered together in what, at least from the outside, looked like snug and comfortable certainty.

  Bill found the correct street and eased to a stop across from the house he sought. The lights were on inside the boxy little structure. A blue glow from behind the curtains told him someone was watching TV. He imagined the two of them, mother and daughter, sitting on the no doubt out-of-date furniture. If asked, Bill couldn’t say why he was sitting across the street or what he expected to learn. He knew if Hawkins found out about his presence there, he’d receive more than a lecture. There might be threats of legal action, some warning about the way he might have jeopardized the case.

  But he couldn’t just sit at home and do nothing but think about caskets, so he waited across the street from Teena Everett’s house.

  An hour passed, and the darkness grew deeper. A few stars peeked through the cloud cover. Bill watched the house and grew drowsy. He hadn’t been sleeping enough, and the long days of roller-coaster emotions were catching up to him, making his every thought and gesture drag. He wondered if he’d be sitting across the street from t
he home of people he barely knew—people with at most a tenuous connection to whatever happened to Summer—if he were in full command of his faculties, if sleep deprivation and grief hadn’t robbed his frontal lobe of some ability to decide between a good idea and a bad one.

  Cars passed occasionally, their headlights making him squint in the glare. He wanted to know where people came from and went to, what it was like to be living a normal, settled life. Were they going to the grocery store? Coming home from work?

  Bill thought of the thousands of small decisions he’d made concerning Summer’s life. The times she insisted on riding her bike to soccer practice instead of getting a ride with him. The afternoons and evenings she spent alone after school while he finished working. The nights she said she was spending at a friend’s house . . . and he never followed up. Summer had always been fiercely independent. One of the first words she learned to say was “self,” and she said it whenever he or Julia tried to help her toddler body accomplish any task. Taking a drink, opening a door, putting on clothes. “Self, self,” she’d say, and he and Julia would back off, taking the independence and high spirit as the best of signs.

  Bill remembered meeting Summer’s kindergarten teacher at a conference. The woman told them every time she asked for a volunteer to lead an activity—sports, painting, reading—Summer’s hand went up first. “She might grow up to be president of the United States,” the teacher said with a laugh. “At least a senator.”

  Had he backed off too much? Should he have struck a more favorable balance between losing his cool on Halloween and letting his daughter remain independent?

  A car turned into the Everetts’ driveway and cut its lights. From his vantage point and through the darkness, he saw it was a larger, light-colored car, something like an Impala or a LaCrosse. The vehicle looked too new, too high-end for Teena’s mother to be driving it, and Bill watched a figure—a man—step out into the yard, his coat pulled up high on his neck against the cold, and walk to the front door, where he knocked. One of the porch lights was burned out, leaving the man in half shadow as he waited to be let in.

  It took a moment for Bill to realize his heart was thudding. It seemed strange to have such a reaction. Wasn’t Teena’s mom like anybody else? Wasn’t she likely to have a boyfriend or a friend, maybe a brother or a cousin, someone familiar enough to come by the house at an innocuous time in the evening?

  Bill lifted his hand, reaching for the ignition key, intending to head home to Paige and the collection of awful decisions they faced the next day. But then the door opened, and the man shifted his weight, stepping back as Teena’s mother greeted him with a lukewarm smile. When the man moved that way, the light from the functioning bulb caught the side of his face, and Bill realized it was his neighbor, Adam Fleetwood, walking into the Everetts’ house.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Bill moved across the yard, stepping gingerly.

  As he walked, a series of thoughts tumbled through his brain. He thought of that last phone call Julia made, the one to Adam. The one Adam didn’t answer. It made sense that she’d call their reliable neighbor if she was painting the kitchen. Adam was the guy who watched their house when they left town. He was the guy who came over to fix a leaky pipe under the sink when Bill grew frustrated.

  But then Bill put the call together with the little comments Julia had made over the years, things she’d said about how attractive Adam was. And fresh in his mind were Paige’s words on the same subject.

  On the surface, Adam and Jillian Everett appeared to have nothing in common. In the past, Bill had occasionally met women Adam brought home, and he was always envious when he saw them. By and large they were younger and much prettier than Jillian Everett, earthy girls, comfortable in their own skin and every bit as willing as Adam to drink whiskey and hike in the woods. Bill could imagine all the things they were willing to do. Mousy, nervous Jillian Everett didn’t fit the pattern at all.

  Bill climbed the steps, his feet moving faster the closer he came to the door. He tried to peer through the curtains, but they were closed, obscuring anything going on inside. He knocked. The burned-out light hovered above his head like a dead star.

  “Come on.” He knocked again, longer and louder.

  When the door swung open, Jillian Everett blinked a few times, a look of fearful worry etched on her face. And just behind her, standing, his broad shoulders seeming to fill the entire living room, was Adam.

  “Mr. Price?” Jillian said. “Why are you here?”

  Bill pushed past her, moving toward Adam. He didn’t know what he was going to say. He fumbled for the right words.

  “You can’t just—”

  “What are you doing here?” Bill asked Adam. “How do the two of you know each other?”

  None of his normal, easygoing cool showed on Adam’s face. Hands on hips, he stood, looking down on Bill, his lips slightly parted as though preparing to speak. But it took a long moment for something to come out.

  “You seem upset, Bill,” he said. “Maybe you should—”

  “Just tell me why you’re here,” Bill said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward Jillian. “Teena might know something about Summer’s murder. They’re all tied up in it.”

  “Calm down, Bill,” Adam said, his face sterner. “You can’t come in here like this.”

  “What are you doing here?” Bill shouted. His voice came from someplace inside him, someplace he didn’t realize was taking over. And just as on the night he grabbed Summer by the arm and shook her to the floor, he momentarily stood outside himself, watching another version of his own body scream at Adam Fleetwood. “Tell me. Tell me right now.”

  “Did you follow me?” Adam asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I came to . . .” Bill stopped. “I just . . .”

  “You came to spy on me,” Jillian said. “You think Teena knows something about Summer’s death, so you were out there spying on us.” She looked at Adam and then walked across the room, her shoes scuffing against the carpet. “I’m calling the police.”

  “Wait,” Adam said.

  “No, he can’t just show up and harass us.”

  “Is that why you’re here, Bill? Because you’re checking up on Jillian and Teena?”

  Bill saw nothing to gain by lying. “Yes, I guess so.”

  Something dark showed on Adam’s face, something akin to the clouds passing across the stars outside. Adam’s hands moved, searching for something to do, and for a moment Bill thought he was going to make a grab at him.

  But he lifted his hands to his head and ran them through his thick hair.

  “It’s much more complicated than that, Bill,” Adam said. He looked over at Jillian. “Don’t make the call. I’ll talk to Bill outside.”

  He placed his hand on Bill’s arm, grabbing it as with a claw, and Bill could offer little resistance as Adam manhandled him through the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  When they were out on the lawn, their breath puffing in the cool night air, Adam let go of Bill’s arm. Bill wanted to reach up and rub the spot where he had gripped him, fully expecting a bruise to form there by the next day, but he resisted the urge. It somehow seemed unmanly to rub at the spot where his bigger and stronger friend had grabbed him.

  “Now will you tell me what the hell’s going on?” Bill said.

  Adam placed his hands on his hips and craned his head around, looking back at the house. Jillian came to the door, pressing her face against the screen as she peered out into the night, but then she backed away, closing the inside door behind her.

  Adam turned around to face Bill. High overhead, an airplane slipped by, its engines a soft roar in the quiet night, its lights blinking down on them like tiny red eyes.

  “Are you okay?” Adam asked. “You were pretty wrecked last night. Grief an
d the booze. Do you even remember me coming by?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like my guts have been turned inside out,” Bill said. “Like I’m being roasted over hot coals. I don’t know how I’m doing or how I’m supposed to be doing.”

  Adam nodded, his face eagerly supportive. “I hear you. There’s no right way.”

  “What are you doing here?” Bill asked.

  “Okay. You know how I got that DUI last summer? The time you came and bailed me out?”

  Bill remembered. Adam had called him about ten o’clock on a weeknight, informing Bill he’d been arrested for drunk driving and needed a ride home. Bill gladly did the favor, and the two men never really talked about it after that. Adam seemed embarrassed by the whole thing, admitting on the ride home with Bill that he’d had one too many. It was a simple favor on Bill’s part. A drive to the police station and then back home. He never knew how Adam reclaimed his car from the impound lot.

  “Sure,” Bill said. He tried to find a comfortable position, first crossing and then uncrossing his arms.

  “Well, they send you to alcohol school after that. It’s just a series of weekend classes to keep your ass out of jail. Boring as hell, but everybody does it when it’s their first offense. Well, I met Jillian there. She’d been busted too, right around the time I was. So that’s how we met.”

  “You’re dating?” Bill asked.

  “No, no. Just friends.” Adam switched to a hushed tone, even though the front door was closed and the house shut up tight. “But she has a problem with alcohol. Or she has in the past. She’s been going to AA ever since her arrest, trying to stay on the straight path as her kid gets older. So I’ve just kind of helped her out. I’m a shoulder to cry on, a support system. I’m not in AA or anything, so I can’t sponsor her, but I help however I can. Kind of a buddy system.”

  Adam’s explanation made Bill feel like a world-class jerk. “I see,” he said.