"Slau_0440335574_oeb_c08_r1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Slaughter Karin - [Grant County 05] - Faithless (html))
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lena heard Jeffrey yelling through his closed office door as soon as she walked into the squad room. She lingered near the coffee machine by his office, but couldn’t make anything out.
Frank joined her, holding out his mug for a top-up even though it was already full.
She asked, “What’s going on?”
“Marty Lam,” Frank said, shrugging. “Was he supposed to be sitting on that house last night?”
“For Chip Donner?” Lena asked. Jeffrey had ordered a cruiser to wait outside Donner’s house in case he showed up. “Yeah. Why?”
“Chief drove by on his way in this morning and nobody was there.”
They both paused, trying to make out Jeffrey’s words as his tone rose.
Frank said, “Chief is pretty pissed.”
“You think?” Lena asked, her sarcasm thicker than the coffee.
“Watch it,” Frank said. He had always thought that the almost thirty years he had on her should afford him some kind of deference.
Lena changed the subject. “You get that credit report back on the family?”
“Yeah,” he said. “From what I could tell, the farm’s running in the black.”
“By a lot?”
“Not much,” he said. “I’m trying to get a copy of their tax returns. It’s not gonna be easy. The farm’s privately held.”
Lena stifled a yawn. She had slept about ten seconds last night. “What’d the shelters say about them?”
“That we should all thank God every day there are people like that on the planet,” Frank said, but he didn’t look ready to bow his head.
Jeffrey’s door banged open, and Marty Lam walked out like an inmate doing the death row shuffle. He had his hat in his hands and his eyes on the floor.
“Frank,” Jeffrey said, walking over. She could tell he was still angry, and could only imagine the reaming he had given Marty. The fact that he had a bruise under his eye the color of a ripe pomegranate probably hadn’t done much to improve his disposition.
He asked Frank, “Did you get in touch with that jewelry supply company?”
“Got the list of customers who bought cyanide right here,” Frank said, taking a sheet of paper out of his pocket. “They sold the salts to two stores up in Macon, one down along Seventy-five. There’s a metal plater over in Augusta, too. Took three bottles so far this year.”
“I know it’s a pain in the ass, but I want you to check them out personally. See if there’s any Jesus stuff around that might connect them to the church or to Abby. I’m going to talk to the family later on today and try to find out if she ever left town on her own.” He told Lena, “We didn’t get prints on the bottle of cyanide from Dale Stanley’s.”
“None?” she asked.
“Dale always used gloves when he handled it,” Jeffrey said. “Could be that’s the reason.”
“Could be someone wiped it down.”
He told her, “I want you to go talk to O’Ryan. Buddy Conford called a few minutes ago. He’s representing her.”
She felt her nose wrinkle at the lawyer’s name. “Who hired him?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Lena asked, “He doesn’t mind if we talk to her?”
Jeffrey was obviously not interested in being questioned. “Did I get it backward just then? You’re my boss now?” He didn’t let her answer. “Just get her in the fucking room before he shows up.”
“Yes, sir,” Lena said, knowing better than to push him. Frank raised his eyebrows as Lena left and she shrugged, not knowing what to say. There was no deciphering Jeffrey’s mood over the last few days.
She pushed open the fire door to the back part of the station. Marty Lam was at the water fountain, not drinking, and she nodded at him as she passed by. He looked like a deer caught in the headlights. She knew the feeling.
Lena punched the code into the lockbox outside the holding cells and took out the keys. Patty O’Ryan was curled up on her bunk, her knees almost touching her chin. Even though she was still dressed, or rather half-dressed, in her stripper’s outfit from last night, she looked about twelve when she slept, an innocent tossed around by a cruel world.
“O’Ryan!” Lena yelled, shaking the locked cell door. Metal banged against metal, and the girl was so startled she fell onto the floor.
“Rise and shine,” Lena sang.
“Shut up, you stupid bitch,” O’Ryan barked back, no longer looking twelve or innocent. She put her hands to her ears as Lena shook the door again for good measure. The girl was obviously hungover; the question was from what.
“Get up,” Lena told her. “Turn around, put your hands behind your back.”
She knew the drill, and barely flinched when Lena put the cuffs around her wrists. They were so thin and bony that Lena had to ratchet the locking teeth to the last notch. Girls like O’Ryan rarely ended up murdered. They were survivors. People like Abigail Bennett were the ones who needed to be looking over their shoulders.
Lena opened the cell door, taking the girl by the arm as she led her down the hall. This close to her, Lena could smell the sweat and chemicals pouring out of her body. Her mousy brown hair hadn’t been washed in a while, and it hung in chunks down to her waist. As she moved, the hair shifted, and Lena saw a puncture mark on the inside of the girl’s left elbow.
“You like meth?” Lena guessed. Like most small towns all over America, Grant had seen a thousandfold increase in meth trafficking over the last five years.
“I know my rights,” she hissed. “You don’t have any call to keep me here.”
“Obstructing justice, attacking an officer, resisting arrest,” Lena listed. “You want to pee in a cup for me? I’m sure we can come up with something else.”
“Piss on you,” she said, spitting on the floor.
“You’re a real lady, O’Ryan.”
“And you’re a real cunt, you cocksucking bitch.”
“Whoops,” Lena said, jerking the girl back by the arm so that she stumbled. O’Ryan gave a rewarding screech of pain. “In here,” Lena ordered, pushing the girl into an interrogation room.
“Bitch,” O’Ryan hissed as Lena forced her down into the most uncomfortable chair in the police station.
“Don’t try anything,” Lena warned, unlocking one of the cuffs and looping it through the ring Jeffrey had had welded to the table. The table was bolted to the floor, which had proven to be a good idea on more than one occasion.
“You got no right to keep me here,” O’Ryan said. “Chip didn’t do nothing.”
“Then why’d he run?”
“Because he knows you fuckers were gonna bang him up no matter what.”
“How old are you?” Lena asked, sitting down across from her.
She tilted her chin up in defiance, saying, “Twenty-one,” pretty much assuring Lena she was underage.
Lena told her, “You’re not helping yourself here.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“You’ve got one on the way.”
This took her by surprise. “Who?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Fuck,” she spat, her expression turning into a little girl’s again.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want a lawyer.”
Lena sighed. There was nothing wrong with this girl that a good slapping wouldn’t fix. “Why is that?”
“I just don’t,” she said. “Take me to jail. Charge me. Do whatever you want to do.” She licked her lips coyly, giving Lena a once-over. “There something else you want to do?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
When the sexual offer didn’t work, she turned back into the frightened little girl. Crocodile tears dribbled down her cheeks. “Just process me. I don’t have anything to say.”
“We’ve got some questions.”
“Go fuck yourself with your questions,” she said. “I know my rights. I don’t have to say jack shit to you and you can’t make me.” Minus the expletives, she sounded very much like Albert, the owner of the Pink Kitty, when Jeffrey had asked him to come down to the station last night. Lena hated when people knew their rights. It made her job a hell of a lot harder.
Lena leaned across the table, saying, “Patty, you’re not helping yourself.”
“Fuck you with your helping myself. I can help myself fine just shutting the fuck up.”
Spittle dotted the table, and Lena sat back, wondering what events had brought Patty O’Ryan to this kind of life. At some point, she had been someone’s daughter, someone’s friend. Now she was like a leech, looking out for no one but herself.
Lena said, “Patty, you’re not going anywhere. I can sit here all day.”
“You can sit on a big fat cock up your ass, you cocksucking bitch.”
There was a knock on the door and Jeffrey walked in, Buddy Conford behind him.
O’Ryan did an instant one-eighty, bursting into tears like a lost child, wailing at Buddy, “Daddy, please get me out of here! I swear I didn’t do anything!”
Sitting in Jeffrey’s office, Lena braced her foot against the bottom panel of his desk, leaning back in her chair. Buddy looked at her leg, and she didn’t know if it was with interest or envy. As a teenager, a car accident had taken his right leg from the knee down. Buddy’s left eye had been lost to cancer a few years later and, more recently, an angry client had shot him point-blank range over the matter of a bill. Buddy had lost a kidney from that fiasco, but he still managed to get the charge of attempted murder against his client reduced to simple assault. When he said he was a defendant’s advocate, he wasn’t lying.
Buddy asked, “That boyfriend of yours staying out of trouble?”
“Let’s not talk about it,” Lena said, regretting yet again that she had involved Buddy Conford in Ethan’s troubles. The problem was, when you were on the other side of the table and you needed a lawyer, you wanted the wiliest, most crooked one out there. It was the old proverb of lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas. Lena was still itching from it.
“You taking care of yourself?” Buddy pressed.
Lena turned around, trying to see what was keeping Jeffrey. He was talking to Frank, a sheet of paper in his hand. He patted Frank on the shoulder, then walked toward the office.
“Sorry,” Jeffrey said. He shook his head once at Lena, indicating nothing had broken. He sat behind his desk, turning the paper facedown on the blotter.
“Nice shiner,” Buddy said, indicating Jeffrey’s eye.
Jeffrey obviously wasn’t up for small talk. “Didn’t know you had a daughter, Buddy.”
“Stepdaughter,” he corrected, looking as if he regretted having to admit it. “I married her mama last year. We’d been dating off and on for pretty much the last ten years. She’s just a handful of trouble.”
“The mama or the daughter?” Jeffrey asked, and they shared one of their white-man chuckles.
Buddy sighed, gripping either side of the chair with his hands. He was wearing his prosthetic leg today, but he still had a cane. For some reason, the cane reminded Lena of Greg Mitchell. Despite her best intentions, she had found herself looking out for her old boyfriend this morning as she drove into work, hoping he was out for a walk. Not that she knew what she’d say to him.
“Patty’s got a drug problem,” Buddy told them. “We’ve had her in and out of treatment.”
“Where’s her father?”
Buddy held his hands out in a wide shrug. “Got me.”
Lena asked, “Meth?”
“What else?” he said, dropping his hands. Buddy made a fine living from methamphetamines— not directly, but through representing clients who had been charged with trafficking in it.
He said, “She’s seventeen years old. Her mama thinks she’s been doing it for a while now. This shooting up is recent. I can’t do anything to stop her.”
“It’s a hard drug to quit,” Jeffrey allowed.
“Almost impossible,” Buddy agreed. He should know. More than half of his clients were repeat offenders. “We finally had to kick her out of the house,” he continued. “This was about six months back. She wasn’t doing anything but staying out late, stumbling in high and sleeping till three in the afternoon. When she managed to wake up, it was mostly to curse her mama, curse me, curse the world— you know how it is, everybody’s an asshole but you. She’s got a mouth on her, too, some kind of voluntary Tourette’s. What a mess.” He tapped his leg with his fingers, a hollow, popping sound filling the room. “You do what you can to help people, but there’s only so far you can go.”
“Where’d she go when she moved out?”
“Mostly she crashed with friends— girlfriends, though I imagine she was entertaining some boys for pocket change. When she wore out her welcome, she started working at the Kitty.” He stopped tapping. “Believe it or not, I thought that’d finally be the thing to straighten her out.”
“How’s that?” Lena asked.
“Only time you help yourself is when you hit rock bottom.” He gave her a meaningful look that made her want to slap him. “I can’t think of anything more rock bottom than taking off your clothes for a bunch of seedy-ass rednecks at the Pink Kitty.”
Jeffrey asked, “She didn’t happen to get mixed up with the farm over in Catoogah, did she?”
“Those Jesus freaks?” Buddy laughed. “I don’t think they’d have her.”
“But do you know?”
“You can ask her, but I doubt it. She’s not exactly the religious type. If she goes anywhere, it’s looking to score, seeing how she can work the system. They may be a bunch of Bible-thumping lunatics, but they’re not stupid. They’d see right through her in a New York minute. She knows her audience. She wouldn’t waste her time.”
“You know this guy Chip Donner?”
“Yeah. I represented him a couple of times as a favor to Patty.”
“He’s not on my files,” Jeffrey said, meaning Chip had never been busted by Grant County police.
“No, this was over in Catoogah.” Buddy shifted in his seat. “He’s not a bad guy, I have to say. Local boy, never been more than fifty miles from home. He’s just stupid. Most of ’em are just stupid. Mix that with boredom and—”
“What about Abigail Bennett?” Jeffrey interrupted.
“Never heard of her. She work at the club?”
“She’s the girl we found buried in the woods.”
Buddy shuddered, like someone had walked over his grave. “Jesus, that’s a horrible way to die. My daddy used to scare us when we’d go visit his mama at the cemetery. There was this preacher buried two plots over with a wire coming out of the dirt and going up to a telephone poll. Daddy told us they had a phone inside the coffin so he could call them in case he wasn’t really dead.” He chuckled. “One time, my mama brought a bell, one’a them bicycle bells, and we were all just standing around Granny’s plot, trying to look solemn. She rang that bell and I liked to shit in my pants.”
Jeffrey allowed a smile.
Buddy sighed. “You don’t have me in here to tell old stories. What do you want from Patty?”
“We want to know what her connection is to Chip.”
“I can tell you that,” he said. “She had a crush on him. He wouldn’t give her the time of day, but she was into him something horrible.”
“Chip knows Abigail Bennett.”
“How?”
“That’s what we’d like to know,” Jeffrey said. “We were hoping Patty could tell us.”
Buddy licked his lips. Lena could see where this was going. “I hate to say this, Chief, but I don’t hold any sway with her.”
“We could work a deal,” Jeffrey offered.
“No,” he said, holding up his hand. “I’m not playing you. She hates my guts. Blames me for taking her mama from her, blames me for kicking her out of the house. I’m the bad guy here.”
Lena suggested, “Maybe she doesn’t hate you as much as she hates being in jail.”
“Maybe.” Buddy shrugged.
“So,” Jeffrey said, obviously not pleased, “we let her sweat it out another day?”
“I think that’d be best,” Buddy agreed. “I hate to sound hard about this, but she needs something more than common sense to persuade her.” His lawyer side must have kicked in, because he quickly added, “And of course, we’ll expect the assault and obstruction charges to disappear in exchange for her statement.”
Lena couldn’t help but grunt in disgust. “This is why people hate lawyers.”
“Didn’t seem to bother you when my services were needed,” Buddy pointed out cheerfully. Then, to Jeffrey, “Chief?”
Jeffrey sat back in his chair, his fingers steepled together. “She talks tomorrow morning or all bets are off.”
“Deal,” Buddy said, shooting out his hand so they could shake on it. “Give me a few minutes alone with her now. I’ll try to paint the picture for her nice and pretty.”
Jeffrey picked up the phone. “Brad? I need you to take Buddy back to talk to Patty O’Ryan.” He slipped the receiver back in the cradle. “He’s waiting in lockup.”
“Thank you, sir,” Buddy said, using his cane to stand. He gave Lena a wink before making his exit.
“Asshole,” she said.
“He’s just doing his job,” Jeffrey told her, but she could see he felt the same. Jeffrey dealt with Buddy Conford on pretty much a weekly basis, and it usually worked to his benefit to cut deals, but Lena thought that O’Ryan would eventually talk on her own without any backdoor negotiations to save her ass from two years in prison. Not to mention Lena would’ve liked to have been consulted on whether or not to give the bitch a free pass, considering she was the officer who had been assaulted.
Jeffrey was looking out into the parking lot. He said, “I told Dale Stanley to send his wife here first thing.”
“You think she’ll come?”
“Who the fuck knows.” He sat back, breathing a sigh. “I want to talk to the family again.”
“They’re supposed to come tomorrow.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“You think Lev will let you hook him up to a lie detector?”
“It’d tell us a hell of a lot either way,” he said, looking out the window again. “There she is.”
Lena followed his gaze as he stood, catching a small woman getting out of a classic Dodge. She had one kid in tow and another on her hip. A tall man walked beside her as they headed toward the station.
“She looks familiar.”
“Police picnic,” Jeffrey said, slipping on his jacket. “You mind keeping Dale busy?”
“Uh,” Lena began, caught off guard by his suggestion. They usually did interviews together. “No,” she said. “No problem.”
“She might open up more without him around,” Jeffrey explained. “He likes to talk.”
“No problem,” Lena repeated.
At the front desk, Marla squealed at the sight of the children, and she leapt up as she buzzed open the door, going straight to the baby on the mother’s hip.
“Look at those adorable cheeks!” Marla screeched, her voice shrill enough to shatter glass. She pinched the baby’s cheeks, and instead of crying, the kid laughed. Marla took him in her arms like she was his long-lost grandmother, stepping back out of the way. Lena felt her stomach drop about six inches as she finally saw Terri Stanley.
“Oh,” Terri said, as if the breath had been knocked out of her.
“Thanks for coming in,” Jeffrey told them, shaking Dale’s hand. “This is Lena Adams . . .” His voice trailed off, and Lena forced herself to close her mouth, which had opened a couple of inches at the sight of Terri. Jeffrey looked at Lena, then Terri, saying, “Y’all remember each other from the picnic last year?”
Terri spoke—at least her mouth moved—but Lena could not hear what she said over the rush of blood pounding in her ears. Jeffrey need not have bothered with an introduction. Lena knew exactly who Terri Stanley was. The other woman was shorter than Lena and at least twenty pounds lighter. Her hair was pinned up into an old lady’s bun though she was barely out of her twenties. Her lips were pale, almost blue, and her eyes showed a flash of fear that seemed to mimic Lena’s own. Lena had seen that fear before, a little over a week ago as she had waited for her name to be called so that she could leave the waiting room of the clinic.
Lena actually stuttered. “I-I . . .” She stopped, trying to calm herself.
Jeffrey was watching them both closely. Without warning, he changed his earlier strategy, saying, “Terri, do you mind if Lena asks you some questions?” Dale seemed about to protest, but Jeffrey asked, “Mind if I get another look at that Dart? She sure is sweet.”
Dale didn’t seem to like the suggestion, and Lena could see him trying to work out an excuse. He finally relented, picking up the toddler standing beside him. “All right.”
“We’ll be back in a minute,” Jeffrey told Lena, giving her a meaningful look. He’d want an explanation, but Lena was at a loss for a story that did not incriminate herself.
Marla offered, “I’ll take care of this one,” holding up the baby, making him squeal.
Lena said, “We can talk in Jeffrey’s office.”
Terri only nodded. Lena could see a thin gold chain around her neck, a tiny cross hanging at the center. Terri picked at it, her fingers brushing the cross like a talisman. She looked as terrified as Lena felt.
“This way,” Lena said. She moved first, straining to hear Terri’s shuffling footsteps behind her as she walked toward Jeffrey’s office. The squad room was almost empty, only a few cops in from patrol to fill out paperwork or just get in from the cold. Lena felt sweat pouring down her back by the time she got to Jeffrey’s office. The walk had been one of the longest of her life.
Terri did not speak until Lena closed the door. “You were at the clinic.”
Lena kept her back to the woman, looking out the window at Jeffrey and Dale as they walked around the car.
“I know it was you,” Terri said, her voice tight in her throat.
“Yeah,” Lena admitted, turning around. Terri was sitting in one of the chairs opposite Jeffrey’s desk, her hands gripping the arms as if she could pull them off.
“Terri—”
“Dale will kill me if he finds out.” She said this with such conviction that Lena had no doubt Dale would do it.
“He won’t hear it from me.”
“Who will he hear it from?” She was obviously terrified, and Lena felt her own panic drain away when she realized that they were both bound by their secret. Terri had seen her at the clinic, but Lena had seen Terri, too.
“He’ll kill me,” she repeated, her thin shoulders shaking.
“I won’t tell him,” Lena repeated, thinking she was stating the obvious.
“You damn well better not,” Terri snapped. The words were meant as a threat, but she lacked the conviction to carry it off. She was almost panting for breath. Tears were in her eyes.
Lena sat down in the chair beside her. “What are you afraid of?”
“You did it, too,” she insisted, her voice catching. “You’re just as guilty as me. You murdered . . . you killed your . . . you killed . . .”
Again, Lena found her mouth moving but no words coming out.
Terri spat, “I may be going to hell for what I did, but don’t forget I can take you with me.”
“I know,” Lena said. “Terri, I’m not going to tell anybody.”
“Oh, God,” she said, clutching her fist to her chest. “Please don’t tell him.”
“I promise,” Lena vowed, feeling pity take over. “Terri, it’s okay.”
“He won’t understand.”
“I won’t tell,” she repeated, putting her hand over Terri’s.
“It’s so hard,” she said, grabbing Lena’s hand. “It’s so hard.”
Lena felt tears in her eyes, and she clenched her jaw, fighting the urge to let herself go. “Terri,” she began. “Terri, calm down. You’re safe here. I won’t tell.”
“I felt it . . .” she began, holding her stomach. “I felt it moving inside. I felt it kicking. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have another one. I couldn’t take . . . I can’t . . . I’m not strong enough . . . I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take it . . .”
“Shh,” Lena hushed, smoothing back a wisp of hair that had fallen into Terri’s eyes. The woman looked so young, almost like a teenager. For the first time in years, Lena felt the urge to comfort someone. She had been on the receiving end for so long that she had almost forgotten how to offer help. “Look at me,” she said, steeling herself, fighting her own emotions. “You’re safe, Terri. I won’t tell. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I’m such a bad person,” Terri said. “I’m so bad.”
“You’re not.”
“I can’t get clean,” she confessed. “No matter how much I bathe, I can’t get clean.”
“I know,” Lena said, feeling a weight lifting off her chest as she admitted this. “I know.”
“I smell it on me,” she said. “The anesthesia. The chemicals.”
“I know,” Lena said, fighting the urge to slip back into her grief. “Be strong, Terri. You have to be strong.”
She nodded. Her shoulders were so slumped, she looked as if she might fold in on herself. “He’ll never forgive me for this.”
Lena didn’t know if she meant her husband or some higher power, but she nodded her head in agreement.
“He’ll never forgive me.”
Lena chanced a look outside the window. Dale was standing at the car but Jeffrey was to the side, talking to Sara Linton. He looked back at the station, throwing his hand out into the air as if he was angry. Sara said something, then Jeffrey nodded, taking what looked like an evidence bag from her. He walked back toward the station.
“Terri,” Lena said, feeling the threat of Jeffrey’s arrival breathing down her neck. “Listen,” she began. “Dry your eyes. Look at me.” Terri looked up. “You’re okay,” Lena said, more like an order than a question.
Terri nodded.
“You have to be okay, Terri.” The woman nodded again, understanding Lena’s urgency.
She saw Jeffrey in the squad room. He stopped to say something to Marla. “He’s coming,” she said, and Terri squared her shoulders, straightening up as if she were an actor taking a cue.
Jeffrey knocked on the door as he came into the office. He was obviously disturbed about something, but he held it back. The evidence bag Sara had given him in the parking lot was sticking out of his pocket, but Lena could not tell what it contained. He raised his eyebrows at her, a silent question, and she felt a lurch in her stomach as she realized she hadn’t done the one thing he had told her to do.
Without pausing a beat, Lena lied. “Terri says she’s never seen anyone at the garage but Dale.”
“Yes,” Terri said, nodding as she stood from the chair. She kept her eyes averted, and Lena was grateful Jeffrey seemed too preoccupied to notice the woman had been crying.
He didn’t even thank her for coming in, instead dismissing her with, “Dale’s waiting outside.”
“Thank you,” Terri said, chancing a look at Lena before she left. The young woman practically ran through the squad room, grabbing her kid from Marla as she made for the front door.
Jeffrey gave Lena the evidence bag, saying, “This was sent to Sara at the clinic.”
There was a piece of lined notebook paper inside. Lena turned the bag over, reading the note. The four words were written in purple ink, all caps, taking up half the page. “ABBY WASN’T THE FIRST.”
Lena walked through the forest, her eyes scanning the ground, willing herself to concentrate. Her thoughts kept darting around like a pinball, one minute hitting against the possibility that there might be another girl buried out in these woods, the next colliding into the memory of the fear in Terri Stanley’s voice as she begged Lena not to tell her secret. The woman had been terrified by the prospect of her husband finding out what she had done. Dale seemed harmless, hardly the type of man capable of Ethan’s kind of rage, but she understood Terri’s fear. She was a young woman who had probably never held a real job outside her home. If Dale left her and their two kids, she would be completely abandoned. Lena understood why she felt trapped, just as she understood Terri’s fear of exposure.
All this time, Lena had been concerned about Ethan’s reaction, but now she knew there was more to worry about than the threat of his violence. What if Jeffrey found out? God knew she had been through a lot of shit in the last three years— most of it of her own making—but Lena had no idea what would be the final line she crossed that made Jeffrey turn his back on her. His wife was a pediatrician, and from what she had seen, he loved kids. It wasn’t like they had political discussions all the time. She had no idea where he stood on abortion. She did know, however, that he would be pissed as hell if he found out Lena hadn’t really interviewed Terri. They had been so tied up in their mutual fears, Lena hadn’t asked her about the garage, let alone if there had been any visitors Dale didn’t know about. Lena had to find a way to get back in touch with her, to ask her about the cyanide, but she couldn’t think how to do this without alerting Jeffrey.
Less than two feet away from her, he was muttering something under his breath. He had called in pretty much every cop on the force, ordering them to the woods to check for other gravesites. The search was exhausting, like combing the ocean for a particular grain of sand, and throughout the day, the temperature in the woods had kept going from one extreme to the other, the hot sun pouring through one minute, the cool shadows of the trees turning her sweat into a chill the next. As night was settling, it became even colder, but Lena had known better than to go back and get her jacket. Jeffrey was acting like a man possessed. She knew he was shouldering the blame for this, just like she knew there was nothing she could say that would help him.
“We should’ve done this Sunday,” Jeffrey said, as if he could have miraculously guessed that one coffin in the forest meant there would be at least another. Lena didn’t bother pointing this out; she had tried and failed several times before. Instead, she kept her eyes on the ground, the leaves and pine needles turning into a melted mess as her thoughts went elsewhere and her vision blurred with the threat of tears.
After nearly eight hours of searching and only getting through half of the more than two hundred acres, she doubted she would be able to find a neon sign with a big arrow pointing down, let alone a small metal pipe sticking out of the ground. Not to mention they were losing light fast. The sun was already dipping down low, threatening to disappear behind the horizon at any moment. They had pulled out their flashlights ten minutes ago, but the beams did little to aid the search.
Jeffrey looked up at the trees, rubbing his neck. They had taken one break around lunch, barely pausing to chew the sandwiches Frank had ordered from the local deli.
“Why would someone send that letter to Sara?” Jeffrey asked. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Everyone knows y’all are together,” Lena pointed out, wishing she could sit down somewhere. She wanted just ten minutes to herself, time enough to figure out how to get back in touch with Terri. There was the added problem of Dale. How would she explain why she needed to talk to his wife again?
“I don’t like Sara mixed up in this,” Jeffrey said, and she understood that one of the things driving his anger was the fact that Sara’s involvement might put her in jeopardy. “The postmark was local,” he said. “It’s somebody in the county, in Grant.”
“Could be someone from the farm knew better than to mail it from Catoogah,” she pointed out, thinking anyone could’ve dropped a letter by the Grant post office.
“It was sent Monday,” he said. “So whoever did it knew what was going on and wanted to warn us.” His flashlight beam flickered and he shook it to no avail. “This is fucking ridiculous.”
He held his portable radio to his hand, clicking the mic. “Frank?”
A few seconds passed before Frank asked, “Yeah?”
“We’ll have to get lights out here,” he said. “Call the hardware store and see if we can borrow anything.”
“Will do.”
Lena waited until Frank had signed off before trying to reason with Jeffrey. “There’s no way we’ll be able to cover the whole area tonight.”
“You want to come out here tomorrow morning and realize some girl could have been saved tonight if we hadn’t knocked off early?”
“It’s late,” she told him. “We could walk right past it and not even know.”
“Or we could find it,” he told her. “Whatever happens, we’re back here tomorrow looking again. I don’t care if we have to get bulldozers out here and dig up every fucking square inch. You got me?”
She looked down, continuing to hunt for something she wasn’t even sure was there.
Jeffrey followed suit, but he didn’t give up. “I should’ve done this Sunday. We should’ve been out in full force, gotten volunteers.” Jeffrey stopped. “What was going on with you and Terri Stanley?”
Her attempt at a casual “What do you mean?” sounded pathetic even to Lena.
“Don’t dick me around,” he warned. “Something’s going on.”
Lena licked her lips, feeling like a trapped animal. “She had too much to drink at the picnic last year,” Lena lied. “I found her in the bathroom with her head in the toilet.”
“She’s an alcoholic?” Jeffrey asked, obviously ready to condemn the woman.
Lena knew this was one of his buttons, and not knowing what else to do, she pressed it hard. “Yeah,” she said, thinking Terri Stanley could live with Jeffrey thinking she was a drunk as long as her husband didn’t find out what she was doing in Atlanta last week.
Jeffrey asked, “You think she makes a habit of it?”
“Don’t know.”
“She was sick?” he asked. “Throwing up?”
Lena felt a cold sweat as she forced herself to lie, knowing even as she did it that she was making the best choice given the circumstances. “I told her she’d better straighten out,” she said. “I think she’s got it under control.”
“I’ll talk to Sara,” he said, and her heart sank. “She’ll call Child Services.”
“No,” Lena said, trying not to sound desperate. It was one thing to lie, quite another to get Terri into trouble. “I told you she’s got it under control. She’s going to meetings and everything.” She racked her brain for some of Hank’s AA talk, feeling like a spider caught in its own web. “Got her chip last month.”
He narrowed his eyes, probably trying to decide if she was being honest or not.
“Chief?” his radio crackled. “West corner near the college. We’ve got something.”
Jeffrey took off, and Lena found herself running after him, the beam from her flashlight bobbing as she pumped her arms. Jeffrey had at least ten years on her, but he was a hell of a lot faster than she was. When he made it to the crowd of uniformed patrolmen standing in the clearing, she was still a good twenty feet behind him.
By the time she caught up, Jeffrey was kneeling beside an indentation in the earth. A rusted metal pipe was sticking up about two inches into the air. Whoever had spotted the site must have done so out of sheer luck. Even knowing what to look for, Lena was having trouble keeping her focus on the pipe.
Brad Stephens came running from behind her. He was holding two shovels and a crowbar. Jeffrey grabbed one of the shovels and they both started digging. The night air was cool, but they were both sweating by the time the first shovel thumped against wood. The hollow sound stayed in Lena’s ears as Jeffrey knelt down to brush away the last of the dirt with his hands. He must have done this same thing with Sara on Sunday. She couldn’t imagine what the anticipation had been like for him, the dread when he realized what he was uncovering. Even now, Lena was having a hard time accepting that someone in Grant was capable of doing such a horrible thing.
Brad jammed the crowbar into the edge of the box, and together he and Jeffrey worked to pry away the wood. One slat came up, flashlights shining eagerly into the opening. A foul odor escaped— not of rotting flesh, but of mustiness and decay. Jeffrey put his shoulder into the crowbar as he pried another board, the wood bending back on itself like a folded sheet of paper. The pulp was soaking wet, dirt staining it a dark black. Obviously, the box had been buried in the earth for a long time. In the crime scene photos of the grave by the lake, the grave had looked new, the green pressure-treated wood doing its job of holding back the elements even as it held in the girl.
Using his bare hands, Jeffrey pulled up the sixth board. Flashlights illuminated the interior of the stained box. He sat back on his heels, his shoulders sagging either from relief or disappointment. Lena felt her own mixture of both emotions.
The box was empty.
Lena had stayed around the potential crime scene until the last sample was taken. The box had practically disintegrated over time, the wood soaking into the ground. That the box was older than the first they had found was obvious, just as it was obvious that the box had been used for the same thing. Deep fingernail scratches gouged out the top pieces Jeffrey had pried away. Dark stains riddled the bottom. Someone had bled in there, shit in there, maybe died in there. When and why were just two more questions to add to the growing list. Thankfully, Jeffrey had finally accepted that they couldn’t continue looking for another box in the pitch dark. He had called off the search and told a crew of ten to show up again at daybreak.
Back at the station, Lena had washed her hands, not bothering to change into the spare outfit she kept in her locker, knowing nothing but a long, hot shower could wash away some of the distress she was feeling. Yet, when she came to the road that led into her neighborhood, she found herself downshifting the Celica, making an illegal U-turn to bypass her street. She unlatched her seat belt and drove with her knees while she shrugged off her jacket. The windows slid down with the touch of a button, and she turned off the noise coming from the radio, wondering how long it had been since she had a moment to herself like this. Ethan thought she was still at work. Nan was probably getting ready for bed and Lena was totally alone with nothing but her own thoughts to keep her company.
She drove through downtown again, slowing as she passed the diner, thinking about Sibyl, the last time she had seen her. Lena had screwed up so many things since then. There was a time when no matter what, she didn’t let her personal life interfere with her job. Being a cop was the one thing she was good at, the one thing Lena knew how to do. She had let her connection to Terri Stanley get in the way of her duties. Yet again, her emotions were jeopardizing the only thing in Lena’s life that was a constant. What would Sibyl say about Lena now? How ashamed would her sister be at the kind of person Lena had become?
Main Street dead-ended at the entrance of the college, and Lena took a left into the children’s clinic, turning around and heading back out of town. She rolled up the windows as the chill got to her and found herself fiddling with the dials on the radio, trying to find something soft to keep her company. She glanced up as she passed the Stop-N-Go, and recognized the black Dodge Dart parked beside one of the gas pumps.
Without thinking, Lena did another U-turn, pulling parallel to the Dart. She got out of her car, looking into the market for Terri Stanley. She was inside, paying the guy behind the register, and even from this distance, Lena could almost smell the defeat on her. Shoulders slumped, eyes cast down. Lena suppressed the urge to thank God she’d happened to run into her.
The Celica’s gas tank was almost full, but Lena turned on the pump anyway, taking her time removing the gas cap and putting in the nozzle. By the first click of the pump, Terri had come out of the store. She was wearing a thin blue Members Only jacket, and she pushed the sleeves up to her elbows as she walked across the brightly lit filling station. Terri was obviously preoccupied as she walked to her car, and Lena cleared her throat several times before the woman noticed her.
“Oh,” Terri said, the same word she had uttered the first time she’d seen Lena at the police station.
“Hey.” Lena’s smile felt awkward on her face. “I need to ask you—”
“Are you following me?” Terri looked around as if she was scared someone would see them together.
“I was just getting gas.” Lena took the nozzle out of the Celica, hoping Terri didn’t notice she’d put in less than half a gallon. “I need to talk to you.”
“Dale’s waiting for me,” she said, tugging down the sleeves of her jacket. Lena had seen something, though—something all too familiar. They both stood there for the longest minute of Lena’s life, neither one knowing what to say.
“Terri . . .”
Her only answer was, “I need to go.”
Lena felt words sticking in her throat like molasses. She heard a high-pitched noise in her ear, almost like a siren warning her away. She asked, “Does he hit you?”
Terri looked down at the oil-stained concrete, ashamed. Lena knew that shame, but on Terri it brought out anger in Lena like she hadn’t known in a while.
“He hits you,” Lena said, narrowing the space between them as if she needed to be close to be heard. “Come here,” she said, grabbing Terri’s arm. The woman winced from pain as Lena yanked up the sleeve. A black bruise snaked up her arm.
Terri didn’t move away. “It’s not like that.”
“What’s it like?”
“You don’t understand.”
“The hell I don’t,” she said, tightening her grip. “Is that why you did it?” she demanded, anger sparking like a brush fire. “Is that why you were in Atlanta?”
Terri tried to squirm away. “Please let me go.”
Lena felt her rage becoming uncontrollable. “You’re scared of him,” she said. “That’s why you did it, you coward.”
“Please . . .”
“Please what?” Lena asked. “Please what?” Terri was crying in earnest now, trying so hard to pull away that she was almost on the ground. Lena let go, horrified when she saw a red mark on Terri’s wrist working its way below the bruise Dale had made. “Terri—”
“Leave me alone.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
She headed back to her car. “I’m going.”
“I’m sorry,” Lena said, following her.
“You sound like Dale.”
A knife in her stomach would have been easier. Still, Lena tried, “Please. Let me help you.”
“I don’t need your help,” she spat, yanking open the car door.
“Terri—”
“Leave me alone!” she screamed, slamming the door with a loud bang. She locked the door as if she was afraid Lena might pull her out of the car.
“Terri—” Lena tried again, but Terri had pulled away, tires burning rubber on the pavement, the hose from the gas pump stretching, then popping out of the Dart’s gas tank. Lena stepped back quickly as gas splattered onto the ground.
“Hey!” the attendant called. “What’s going on here?”
“Nothing,” she told him, picking up the nozzle and replacing it on the pump. She dug into her pocket and tossed two dollars at the young man, saying, “Here. Go back inside.” She climbed back into her car before he could yell anything else.
The Celica’s tires caught against the pavement, the car fishtailing as she pulled away. She didn’t realize she was speeding until she blew past a broken-down station wagon that had been parked on the side of the road for the last week. She forced her foot to back off on the accelerator, her heart still pounding in her chest. Terri had been terrified of Lena, looking at her like she was scared she’d be hurt. Maybe Lena would have hurt her. Maybe she would have turned violent, taking her rage out on that poor helpless woman just because she could. What the hell was wrong with her? Standing at the gas station, yelling at Terri, she had felt like she was yelling at herself. She was the coward. She was the one who was scared of what might be done to her if anyone found out.
The car had slowed to almost a crawl. She was on the outskirts of Heartsdale now, a good twenty minutes from home. The cemetery where Sibyl was buried was out this way, on a flat plain behind the Baptist church. After her sister had died, Lena had gone there at least once, sometimes twice a week, to visit her grave. Over time, she had cut down on her visits, then stopped going altogether. With a shock, Lena realized she hadn’t visited Sibyl in at least three months. She had been too busy, too wrapped up in doing her job and dealing with Ethan. Now, at the height of her shame, she could think of nothing more appropriate than going to the graveyard.
She parked at the front of the church, leaving the doors unlocked as she walked toward the front gates of the memorial garden. The area was well lit, overhead lights illuminating the grounds. She knew she had driven here for a reason. She knew what she needed to do.
Someone had planted a handful of pansies by the entrance to the cemetery, and they swayed in the breeze as Lena walked by. Sibyl’s grave was to the side of the grounds that bordered the church, and Lena took her time walking through the grassy lawn, enjoying the solitude. She had spent almost twelve hours straight on her feet today, but something about being here, being close to Sibyl, made the walk less daunting. Sibyl would have approved of being buried here, Lena always thought. She had loved the outdoors.
The cement block Lena had upended and used for a bench was still on the ground beside Sibyl’s marker, and Lena sat down, wrapping her arms around her knees. In the daytime, a huge pecan tree gave shade to the spot, tendrils of sunlight slipping through the leaves. The marble slab marking Sibyl’s final resting place had been cleaned to a shine, and a quick look around at the other gravesites proved that this had been done by a visitor rather than the staff.
There weren’t any flowers. Nan was allergic.
Like a faucet being turned on, Lena felt tears pool in her eyes. She was such a horrible person. As bad as Dale was to Terri, Lena had been worse. She was a cop: she had a duty to protect people, not scare the shit out of them, not grab their wrist so hard that she left a bruise. She was certainly in no position to call Terri Stanley a coward. If anything, Lena was the coward. She was the one who had scurried off to Atlanta under the cover of lies, paying some stranger to slice out her mistakes, hiding from the repercussions like a frightened child.
The altercation with Terri had brought back all the memories Lena had tried to suppress, and she found herself back in Atlanta, reliving the whole ordeal again. She was in the car with Hank, his silence cutting like a knife. She was in the clinic, sitting across from Terri, avoiding her eyes, praying it would be over. She was taken back to the freezing operating room, her feet resting in the icy cold stirrups, her legs splayed for the doctor who spoke so calmly, so quietly, that Lena had felt herself being lulled into a sort of hypnotic state. Everything was going to be fine. Everything will be okay. Just relax. Just breathe. Take it slow. Relax. It’s all over. Sit up. Here are your clothes. Call us if there are complications. You all right, darlin’? Do you have someone waiting for you? Just sit in the chair. We’ll take you outside. Murderer. Baby killer. Butcher. Monster.
The protesters had been waiting outside the clinic, sitting in their lawn chairs, sipping from their thermoses of hot coffee, for all intents and purposes looking like tailgaters waiting for the big game. Lena’s appearance had caused them all to stand in unison, to scream at her, waving signs with all sorts of graphic, bloody pictures. Obscenely, one even held up a jar, the implied contents obvious to anyone standing within ten feet of it. Still, it didn’t look real, and she wondered at the man— of course it was a man— sitting at home, maybe at his kitchen table where his kids sat and had breakfast every morning, preparing the mixture in the jar just to torment frightened women who were making what Lena knew was the most difficult decision of their lives.
Now, sitting in the cemetery, staring at her sister’s grave, Lena let herself wonder for the first time what the clinic did with the flesh and bone they had removed from her own body. Was it lying somewhere in an incinerator, waiting to ignite? Was it buried in the earth, an unmarked grave she would never see? She felt a clenching deep down in her gut, in her womb, as she thought of what she had done— what she had lost.
In her mind, she told Sibyl what had happened; the choices she had made that brought her here. She talked about Ethan, how something inside of her had died when she started seeing him, how she had let everything good about herself ebb away like sand being taken with the tide. She told her about Terri, the fear in her eyes. If only she could take it all back. If only she had never met Ethan, never seen Terri at the clinic. Everything was going from bad to worse. She was telling lies to cover lies, burying herself in deceit. She couldn’t see a way out of it.
What Lena wanted most of all was to have her sister there, if only for a moment, to tell her that everything was going to be okay. That had been the nature of their relationship from the beginning of time: Lena fucked up and Sibyl smoothed things over, talking it through with her, making her see the other side. Without her guiding wisdom, it all seemed like such a lost cause. Lena was falling apart. There was no way she could have given birth to Ethan’s child. She could barely take care of herself.
“Lee?”
She turned around, nearly falling off the narrow block. “Greg?”
He emerged from the darkness, the moon glowing behind him. He was limping toward her, his cane in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other.
She stood quickly, wiping her eyes, trying to hide her shock. “What are you doing here?” she asked, rubbing grit off the back of her pants.
He dropped the bouquet to his side. “I can come back when you’re finished.”
“No,” she told him, hoping the darkness hid the fact that she had been crying. “I just . . . it’s fine.” She glanced back at the grave so that she wouldn’t have to look at him. She had a flash of Abigail Bennett, buried alive, and Lena felt an unreasonable panic fill her. For just a split second she thought of her sister alive, begging for help, trying to claw her way out of the casket.
She wiped her eyes before looking back at him, thinking she must be losing her mind. She wanted to tell him everything that had happened— not just in Atlanta, but before then, back to that day she had returned to the police station after running some samples to Macon, only to have Jeffrey tell her that Sibyl was gone. She wanted to put her head on his shoulder and feel his comfort. More than anything, she wanted his absolution.
“Lee?” Greg asked.
She searched for a response. “I was just wondering why you’re here.”
“I had to get Mama to bring me,” he explained. “She’s back in the car.”
Lena looked over his shoulder as if she could see the parking lot in front of the church. “It’s kind of late.”
“She tricked me,” he said. “Made me go to her knitting circle with her.”
Her tongue felt thick in her mouth, but she wanted nothing more than to keep hearing him talk. She had forgotten how soothing his voice could be, how gentle the sound. “Did she make you hold the yarn?”
He laughed. “Yeah. You’d think I’d quit falling for that.”
Lena felt herself smile, knowing he hadn’t been tricked. Greg would deny it at gunpoint, but he had always been a mama’s boy.
“I brought these for Sibby,” he said, holding up the flowers again. “I came yesterday and there weren’t any, so I figured . . .” He smiled. In the moonlight, she saw he still hadn’t managed to fix the tooth she had accidentally chipped during a game of Frisbee.
He said, “She loved daisies,” handing Lena the flowers. For just a second, their hands brushed, and she felt as if she had touched a live wire.
For his part, Greg seemed unfazed. He started to leave, but Lena said, “Wait.”
Slowly, he turned back around.
“Sit down,” she told him, indicating the block.
“I don’t want to take your seat.”
“It’s okay.” She stepped back to place the flowers in front of Sibyl’s marker. When she looked back up, Greg was leaning on his cane, watching her.
He asked, “You okay?”
Lena tried to think of something to say. She sniffed, wondering if her eyes were as red as they felt. “Allergies,” she told him.
“Yeah.”
Lena crossed her hands behind her back so she wouldn’t wring them again. “How’d you hurt your leg, exactly?”
“Car accident,” he told her, then smiled again. “Totally my fault. I was trying to find a CD and I took my eyes off the road for just a second.”
“That’s all it takes.”
“Yeah,” he said, then, “Mister Jingles died last year.”
His cat. She had hated the thing, but for some reason she was sad to hear that he was gone. “I’m sorry.”
The breeze picked up, the tree overhead shushing in the wind.
Greg squinted at the moon, then looked back at Lena. “When Mom told me about Sibyl . . .” His voice trailed off, and he dug his cane into the ground, pushing up some grass. She thought she saw tears in his eyes and made herself look away so that his sadness did not reignite her own.
He said, “I just couldn’t believe it.”
“I guess she told you about me, too.”
He nodded, and he did something that not many people could do when they talked about rape: he looked her right in the eye. “She was upset.”
Lena didn’t try to hide her sarcasm. “I bet.”
“No, really,” Greg assured her, still looking at her, his clear blue eyes void of any guile. “My aunt Shelby— you remember her?” Lena nodded. “She was raped when they were in high school. It was pretty bad.”
“I didn’t know,” Lena said. She had met Shelby a few times. As with Greg’s mother, they hadn’t exactly bonded. Lena would never have guessed the older woman had something like that in her life. She was very tightly wound, but most of the women in the Mitchell family were. The one thing Lena had been astounded by since her attack was that being raped had put her in what was not exactly an exclusive club.
“If I had known . . .” Greg began, but didn’t finish.
“What?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He reached down and picked up a pecan that had fallen off the tree. “I was really upset to hear it.”
“It was pretty upsetting,” Lena allowed, and surprise registered on his face. She asked, “What?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated, tossing the pecan into the wood. “You used to not say things like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like feelings.”
She forced out a laugh. Her whole life was a struggle with feelings. “What things did I used to say?”
He mulled it over. “‘That’s life’?” he tried, mimicking her one-sided shrug. “‘Tough shit’?”
She knew he was right, but she couldn’t begin to know how to explain it. “People change.”
“Nan says you’re seeing somebody.”
“Yeah, well” was all she could say, but her heart had flipped in her chest at the thought of him bothering to ask. She was going to kill Nan for not telling her.
He said, “Nan looks good.”
“She’s had a hard time.”
“I couldn’t believe y’all were living together.”
“She’s a good person. I didn’t really see that before.” Hell, she didn’t see a lot of things before. Lena had made an art out of fucking up anything remotely positive in her life. Greg was living proof of that.
For lack of something to do, she looked up at the tree. The leaves were ready to fall. Greg made to leave again and she asked, “What CD?”
“Huh?”
“Your accident.” She pointed to his leg. “What CD were you looking for?”
“Heart,” he said, a goofy grin breaking out on his face.
“Bebe Le Strange?” she asked, feeling herself grin back. Saturday had always been chore day when they lived together, and they had listened to that particular Heart album so many times that to this day Lena couldn’t scrub a toilet without hearing “Even It Up” in her head.
“It was the new one,” he told her.
“New one?”
“They came out with a new one about a year ago.”
“That Lovemonger stuff?”
“No,” he said, his excitement palpable. The only thing Greg loved more than listening to music was talking about it. “Kick-ass stuff. Back-to-the-seventies Heart stuff. I can’t believe you don’t know about it. I was knocking on the door the first day it was out.”
She realized then how long it had been since she had listened to music she really enjoyed. Ethan preferred punk rock, the kind of disaffected crap spoiled white boys screeched to. Lena didn’t even know where her old CDs were.
“Lee?”
She had missed something he’d said. “Sorry, what?”
“I need to go,” he told her. “Mama’s waiting.”
Suddenly, she felt like crying again. She forced her feet to stay on the ground and not do something foolish, like run toward him. God, she was turning into a sniveling idiot. She was like one of those stupid women in romance novels.
He said, “Take care of yourself.”
“Yeah,” she said, trying to think of something to keep him from going. “You, too.”
She realized she was still holding the daisies, and she leaned down to put them on Sibyl’s grave. When she looked back up, Greg was limping toward the parking lot. She kept staring, willing him to turn around. He didn’t.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lena heard Jeffrey yelling through his closed office door as soon as she walked into the squad room. She lingered near the coffee machine by his office, but couldn’t make anything out.
Frank joined her, holding out his mug for a top-up even though it was already full.
She asked, “What’s going on?”
“Marty Lam,” Frank said, shrugging. “Was he supposed to be sitting on that house last night?”
“For Chip Donner?” Lena asked. Jeffrey had ordered a cruiser to wait outside Donner’s house in case he showed up. “Yeah. Why?”
“Chief drove by on his way in this morning and nobody was there.”
They both paused, trying to make out Jeffrey’s words as his tone rose.
Frank said, “Chief is pretty pissed.”
“You think?” Lena asked, her sarcasm thicker than the coffee.
“Watch it,” Frank said. He had always thought that the almost thirty years he had on her should afford him some kind of deference.
Lena changed the subject. “You get that credit report back on the family?”
“Yeah,” he said. “From what I could tell, the farm’s running in the black.”
“By a lot?”
“Not much,” he said. “I’m trying to get a copy of their tax returns. It’s not gonna be easy. The farm’s privately held.”
Lena stifled a yawn. She had slept about ten seconds last night. “What’d the shelters say about them?”
“That we should all thank God every day there are people like that on the planet,” Frank said, but he didn’t look ready to bow his head.
Jeffrey’s door banged open, and Marty Lam walked out like an inmate doing the death row shuffle. He had his hat in his hands and his eyes on the floor.
“Frank,” Jeffrey said, walking over. She could tell he was still angry, and could only imagine the reaming he had given Marty. The fact that he had a bruise under his eye the color of a ripe pomegranate probably hadn’t done much to improve his disposition.
He asked Frank, “Did you get in touch with that jewelry supply company?”
“Got the list of customers who bought cyanide right here,” Frank said, taking a sheet of paper out of his pocket. “They sold the salts to two stores up in Macon, one down along Seventy-five. There’s a metal plater over in Augusta, too. Took three bottles so far this year.”
“I know it’s a pain in the ass, but I want you to check them out personally. See if there’s any Jesus stuff around that might connect them to the church or to Abby. I’m going to talk to the family later on today and try to find out if she ever left town on her own.” He told Lena, “We didn’t get prints on the bottle of cyanide from Dale Stanley’s.”
“None?” she asked.
“Dale always used gloves when he handled it,” Jeffrey said. “Could be that’s the reason.”
“Could be someone wiped it down.”
He told her, “I want you to go talk to O’Ryan. Buddy Conford called a few minutes ago. He’s representing her.”
She felt her nose wrinkle at the lawyer’s name. “Who hired him?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Lena asked, “He doesn’t mind if we talk to her?”
Jeffrey was obviously not interested in being questioned. “Did I get it backward just then? You’re my boss now?” He didn’t let her answer. “Just get her in the fucking room before he shows up.”
“Yes, sir,” Lena said, knowing better than to push him. Frank raised his eyebrows as Lena left and she shrugged, not knowing what to say. There was no deciphering Jeffrey’s mood over the last few days.
She pushed open the fire door to the back part of the station. Marty Lam was at the water fountain, not drinking, and she nodded at him as she passed by. He looked like a deer caught in the headlights. She knew the feeling.
Lena punched the code into the lockbox outside the holding cells and took out the keys. Patty O’Ryan was curled up on her bunk, her knees almost touching her chin. Even though she was still dressed, or rather half-dressed, in her stripper’s outfit from last night, she looked about twelve when she slept, an innocent tossed around by a cruel world.
“O’Ryan!” Lena yelled, shaking the locked cell door. Metal banged against metal, and the girl was so startled she fell onto the floor.
“Rise and shine,” Lena sang.
“Shut up, you stupid bitch,” O’Ryan barked back, no longer looking twelve or innocent. She put her hands to her ears as Lena shook the door again for good measure. The girl was obviously hungover; the question was from what.
“Get up,” Lena told her. “Turn around, put your hands behind your back.”
She knew the drill, and barely flinched when Lena put the cuffs around her wrists. They were so thin and bony that Lena had to ratchet the locking teeth to the last notch. Girls like O’Ryan rarely ended up murdered. They were survivors. People like Abigail Bennett were the ones who needed to be looking over their shoulders.
Lena opened the cell door, taking the girl by the arm as she led her down the hall. This close to her, Lena could smell the sweat and chemicals pouring out of her body. Her mousy brown hair hadn’t been washed in a while, and it hung in chunks down to her waist. As she moved, the hair shifted, and Lena saw a puncture mark on the inside of the girl’s left elbow.
“You like meth?” Lena guessed. Like most small towns all over America, Grant had seen a thousandfold increase in meth trafficking over the last five years.
“I know my rights,” she hissed. “You don’t have any call to keep me here.”
“Obstructing justice, attacking an officer, resisting arrest,” Lena listed. “You want to pee in a cup for me? I’m sure we can come up with something else.”
“Piss on you,” she said, spitting on the floor.
“You’re a real lady, O’Ryan.”
“And you’re a real cunt, you cocksucking bitch.”
“Whoops,” Lena said, jerking the girl back by the arm so that she stumbled. O’Ryan gave a rewarding screech of pain. “In here,” Lena ordered, pushing the girl into an interrogation room.
“Bitch,” O’Ryan hissed as Lena forced her down into the most uncomfortable chair in the police station.
“Don’t try anything,” Lena warned, unlocking one of the cuffs and looping it through the ring Jeffrey had had welded to the table. The table was bolted to the floor, which had proven to be a good idea on more than one occasion.
“You got no right to keep me here,” O’Ryan said. “Chip didn’t do nothing.”
“Then why’d he run?”
“Because he knows you fuckers were gonna bang him up no matter what.”
“How old are you?” Lena asked, sitting down across from her.
She tilted her chin up in defiance, saying, “Twenty-one,” pretty much assuring Lena she was underage.
Lena told her, “You’re not helping yourself here.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“You’ve got one on the way.”
This took her by surprise. “Who?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Fuck,” she spat, her expression turning into a little girl’s again.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want a lawyer.”
Lena sighed. There was nothing wrong with this girl that a good slapping wouldn’t fix. “Why is that?”
“I just don’t,” she said. “Take me to jail. Charge me. Do whatever you want to do.” She licked her lips coyly, giving Lena a once-over. “There something else you want to do?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
When the sexual offer didn’t work, she turned back into the frightened little girl. Crocodile tears dribbled down her cheeks. “Just process me. I don’t have anything to say.”
“We’ve got some questions.”
“Go fuck yourself with your questions,” she said. “I know my rights. I don’t have to say jack shit to you and you can’t make me.” Minus the expletives, she sounded very much like Albert, the owner of the Pink Kitty, when Jeffrey had asked him to come down to the station last night. Lena hated when people knew their rights. It made her job a hell of a lot harder.
Lena leaned across the table, saying, “Patty, you’re not helping yourself.”
“Fuck you with your helping myself. I can help myself fine just shutting the fuck up.”
Spittle dotted the table, and Lena sat back, wondering what events had brought Patty O’Ryan to this kind of life. At some point, she had been someone’s daughter, someone’s friend. Now she was like a leech, looking out for no one but herself.
Lena said, “Patty, you’re not going anywhere. I can sit here all day.”
“You can sit on a big fat cock up your ass, you cocksucking bitch.”
There was a knock on the door and Jeffrey walked in, Buddy Conford behind him.
O’Ryan did an instant one-eighty, bursting into tears like a lost child, wailing at Buddy, “Daddy, please get me out of here! I swear I didn’t do anything!”
Sitting in Jeffrey’s office, Lena braced her foot against the bottom panel of his desk, leaning back in her chair. Buddy looked at her leg, and she didn’t know if it was with interest or envy. As a teenager, a car accident had taken his right leg from the knee down. Buddy’s left eye had been lost to cancer a few years later and, more recently, an angry client had shot him point-blank range over the matter of a bill. Buddy had lost a kidney from that fiasco, but he still managed to get the charge of attempted murder against his client reduced to simple assault. When he said he was a defendant’s advocate, he wasn’t lying.
Buddy asked, “That boyfriend of yours staying out of trouble?”
“Let’s not talk about it,” Lena said, regretting yet again that she had involved Buddy Conford in Ethan’s troubles. The problem was, when you were on the other side of the table and you needed a lawyer, you wanted the wiliest, most crooked one out there. It was the old proverb of lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas. Lena was still itching from it.
“You taking care of yourself?” Buddy pressed.
Lena turned around, trying to see what was keeping Jeffrey. He was talking to Frank, a sheet of paper in his hand. He patted Frank on the shoulder, then walked toward the office.
“Sorry,” Jeffrey said. He shook his head once at Lena, indicating nothing had broken. He sat behind his desk, turning the paper facedown on the blotter.
“Nice shiner,” Buddy said, indicating Jeffrey’s eye.
Jeffrey obviously wasn’t up for small talk. “Didn’t know you had a daughter, Buddy.”
“Stepdaughter,” he corrected, looking as if he regretted having to admit it. “I married her mama last year. We’d been dating off and on for pretty much the last ten years. She’s just a handful of trouble.”
“The mama or the daughter?” Jeffrey asked, and they shared one of their white-man chuckles.
Buddy sighed, gripping either side of the chair with his hands. He was wearing his prosthetic leg today, but he still had a cane. For some reason, the cane reminded Lena of Greg Mitchell. Despite her best intentions, she had found herself looking out for her old boyfriend this morning as she drove into work, hoping he was out for a walk. Not that she knew what she’d say to him.
“Patty’s got a drug problem,” Buddy told them. “We’ve had her in and out of treatment.”
“Where’s her father?”
Buddy held his hands out in a wide shrug. “Got me.”
Lena asked, “Meth?”
“What else?” he said, dropping his hands. Buddy made a fine living from methamphetamines— not directly, but through representing clients who had been charged with trafficking in it.
He said, “She’s seventeen years old. Her mama thinks she’s been doing it for a while now. This shooting up is recent. I can’t do anything to stop her.”
“It’s a hard drug to quit,” Jeffrey allowed.
“Almost impossible,” Buddy agreed. He should know. More than half of his clients were repeat offenders. “We finally had to kick her out of the house,” he continued. “This was about six months back. She wasn’t doing anything but staying out late, stumbling in high and sleeping till three in the afternoon. When she managed to wake up, it was mostly to curse her mama, curse me, curse the world— you know how it is, everybody’s an asshole but you. She’s got a mouth on her, too, some kind of voluntary Tourette’s. What a mess.” He tapped his leg with his fingers, a hollow, popping sound filling the room. “You do what you can to help people, but there’s only so far you can go.”
“Where’d she go when she moved out?”
“Mostly she crashed with friends— girlfriends, though I imagine she was entertaining some boys for pocket change. When she wore out her welcome, she started working at the Kitty.” He stopped tapping. “Believe it or not, I thought that’d finally be the thing to straighten her out.”
“How’s that?” Lena asked.
“Only time you help yourself is when you hit rock bottom.” He gave her a meaningful look that made her want to slap him. “I can’t think of anything more rock bottom than taking off your clothes for a bunch of seedy-ass rednecks at the Pink Kitty.”
Jeffrey asked, “She didn’t happen to get mixed up with the farm over in Catoogah, did she?”
“Those Jesus freaks?” Buddy laughed. “I don’t think they’d have her.”
“But do you know?”
“You can ask her, but I doubt it. She’s not exactly the religious type. If she goes anywhere, it’s looking to score, seeing how she can work the system. They may be a bunch of Bible-thumping lunatics, but they’re not stupid. They’d see right through her in a New York minute. She knows her audience. She wouldn’t waste her time.”
“You know this guy Chip Donner?”
“Yeah. I represented him a couple of times as a favor to Patty.”
“He’s not on my files,” Jeffrey said, meaning Chip had never been busted by Grant County police.
“No, this was over in Catoogah.” Buddy shifted in his seat. “He’s not a bad guy, I have to say. Local boy, never been more than fifty miles from home. He’s just stupid. Most of ’em are just stupid. Mix that with boredom and—”
“What about Abigail Bennett?” Jeffrey interrupted.
“Never heard of her. She work at the club?”
“She’s the girl we found buried in the woods.”
Buddy shuddered, like someone had walked over his grave. “Jesus, that’s a horrible way to die. My daddy used to scare us when we’d go visit his mama at the cemetery. There was this preacher buried two plots over with a wire coming out of the dirt and going up to a telephone poll. Daddy told us they had a phone inside the coffin so he could call them in case he wasn’t really dead.” He chuckled. “One time, my mama brought a bell, one’a them bicycle bells, and we were all just standing around Granny’s plot, trying to look solemn. She rang that bell and I liked to shit in my pants.”
Jeffrey allowed a smile.
Buddy sighed. “You don’t have me in here to tell old stories. What do you want from Patty?”
“We want to know what her connection is to Chip.”
“I can tell you that,” he said. “She had a crush on him. He wouldn’t give her the time of day, but she was into him something horrible.”
“Chip knows Abigail Bennett.”
“How?”
“That’s what we’d like to know,” Jeffrey said. “We were hoping Patty could tell us.”
Buddy licked his lips. Lena could see where this was going. “I hate to say this, Chief, but I don’t hold any sway with her.”
“We could work a deal,” Jeffrey offered.
“No,” he said, holding up his hand. “I’m not playing you. She hates my guts. Blames me for taking her mama from her, blames me for kicking her out of the house. I’m the bad guy here.”
Lena suggested, “Maybe she doesn’t hate you as much as she hates being in jail.”
“Maybe.” Buddy shrugged.
“So,” Jeffrey said, obviously not pleased, “we let her sweat it out another day?”
“I think that’d be best,” Buddy agreed. “I hate to sound hard about this, but she needs something more than common sense to persuade her.” His lawyer side must have kicked in, because he quickly added, “And of course, we’ll expect the assault and obstruction charges to disappear in exchange for her statement.”
Lena couldn’t help but grunt in disgust. “This is why people hate lawyers.”
“Didn’t seem to bother you when my services were needed,” Buddy pointed out cheerfully. Then, to Jeffrey, “Chief?”
Jeffrey sat back in his chair, his fingers steepled together. “She talks tomorrow morning or all bets are off.”
“Deal,” Buddy said, shooting out his hand so they could shake on it. “Give me a few minutes alone with her now. I’ll try to paint the picture for her nice and pretty.”
Jeffrey picked up the phone. “Brad? I need you to take Buddy back to talk to Patty O’Ryan.” He slipped the receiver back in the cradle. “He’s waiting in lockup.”
“Thank you, sir,” Buddy said, using his cane to stand. He gave Lena a wink before making his exit.
“Asshole,” she said.
“He’s just doing his job,” Jeffrey told her, but she could see he felt the same. Jeffrey dealt with Buddy Conford on pretty much a weekly basis, and it usually worked to his benefit to cut deals, but Lena thought that O’Ryan would eventually talk on her own without any backdoor negotiations to save her ass from two years in prison. Not to mention Lena would’ve liked to have been consulted on whether or not to give the bitch a free pass, considering she was the officer who had been assaulted.
Jeffrey was looking out into the parking lot. He said, “I told Dale Stanley to send his wife here first thing.”
“You think she’ll come?”
“Who the fuck knows.” He sat back, breathing a sigh. “I want to talk to the family again.”
“They’re supposed to come tomorrow.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“You think Lev will let you hook him up to a lie detector?”
“It’d tell us a hell of a lot either way,” he said, looking out the window again. “There she is.”
Lena followed his gaze as he stood, catching a small woman getting out of a classic Dodge. She had one kid in tow and another on her hip. A tall man walked beside her as they headed toward the station.
“She looks familiar.”
“Police picnic,” Jeffrey said, slipping on his jacket. “You mind keeping Dale busy?”
“Uh,” Lena began, caught off guard by his suggestion. They usually did interviews together. “No,” she said. “No problem.”
“She might open up more without him around,” Jeffrey explained. “He likes to talk.”
“No problem,” Lena repeated.
At the front desk, Marla squealed at the sight of the children, and she leapt up as she buzzed open the door, going straight to the baby on the mother’s hip.
“Look at those adorable cheeks!” Marla screeched, her voice shrill enough to shatter glass. She pinched the baby’s cheeks, and instead of crying, the kid laughed. Marla took him in her arms like she was his long-lost grandmother, stepping back out of the way. Lena felt her stomach drop about six inches as she finally saw Terri Stanley.
“Oh,” Terri said, as if the breath had been knocked out of her.
“Thanks for coming in,” Jeffrey told them, shaking Dale’s hand. “This is Lena Adams . . .” His voice trailed off, and Lena forced herself to close her mouth, which had opened a couple of inches at the sight of Terri. Jeffrey looked at Lena, then Terri, saying, “Y’all remember each other from the picnic last year?”
Terri spoke—at least her mouth moved—but Lena could not hear what she said over the rush of blood pounding in her ears. Jeffrey need not have bothered with an introduction. Lena knew exactly who Terri Stanley was. The other woman was shorter than Lena and at least twenty pounds lighter. Her hair was pinned up into an old lady’s bun though she was barely out of her twenties. Her lips were pale, almost blue, and her eyes showed a flash of fear that seemed to mimic Lena’s own. Lena had seen that fear before, a little over a week ago as she had waited for her name to be called so that she could leave the waiting room of the clinic.
Lena actually stuttered. “I-I . . .” She stopped, trying to calm herself.
Jeffrey was watching them both closely. Without warning, he changed his earlier strategy, saying, “Terri, do you mind if Lena asks you some questions?” Dale seemed about to protest, but Jeffrey asked, “Mind if I get another look at that Dart? She sure is sweet.”
Dale didn’t seem to like the suggestion, and Lena could see him trying to work out an excuse. He finally relented, picking up the toddler standing beside him. “All right.”
“We’ll be back in a minute,” Jeffrey told Lena, giving her a meaningful look. He’d want an explanation, but Lena was at a loss for a story that did not incriminate herself.
Marla offered, “I’ll take care of this one,” holding up the baby, making him squeal.
Lena said, “We can talk in Jeffrey’s office.”
Terri only nodded. Lena could see a thin gold chain around her neck, a tiny cross hanging at the center. Terri picked at it, her fingers brushing the cross like a talisman. She looked as terrified as Lena felt.
“This way,” Lena said. She moved first, straining to hear Terri’s shuffling footsteps behind her as she walked toward Jeffrey’s office. The squad room was almost empty, only a few cops in from patrol to fill out paperwork or just get in from the cold. Lena felt sweat pouring down her back by the time she got to Jeffrey’s office. The walk had been one of the longest of her life.
Terri did not speak until Lena closed the door. “You were at the clinic.”
Lena kept her back to the woman, looking out the window at Jeffrey and Dale as they walked around the car.
“I know it was you,” Terri said, her voice tight in her throat.
“Yeah,” Lena admitted, turning around. Terri was sitting in one of the chairs opposite Jeffrey’s desk, her hands gripping the arms as if she could pull them off.
“Terri—”
“Dale will kill me if he finds out.” She said this with such conviction that Lena had no doubt Dale would do it.
“He won’t hear it from me.”
“Who will he hear it from?” She was obviously terrified, and Lena felt her own panic drain away when she realized that they were both bound by their secret. Terri had seen her at the clinic, but Lena had seen Terri, too.
“He’ll kill me,” she repeated, her thin shoulders shaking.
“I won’t tell him,” Lena repeated, thinking she was stating the obvious.
“You damn well better not,” Terri snapped. The words were meant as a threat, but she lacked the conviction to carry it off. She was almost panting for breath. Tears were in her eyes.
Lena sat down in the chair beside her. “What are you afraid of?”
“You did it, too,” she insisted, her voice catching. “You’re just as guilty as me. You murdered . . . you killed your . . . you killed . . .”
Again, Lena found her mouth moving but no words coming out.
Terri spat, “I may be going to hell for what I did, but don’t forget I can take you with me.”
“I know,” Lena said. “Terri, I’m not going to tell anybody.”
“Oh, God,” she said, clutching her fist to her chest. “Please don’t tell him.”
“I promise,” Lena vowed, feeling pity take over. “Terri, it’s okay.”
“He won’t understand.”
“I won’t tell,” she repeated, putting her hand over Terri’s.
“It’s so hard,” she said, grabbing Lena’s hand. “It’s so hard.”
Lena felt tears in her eyes, and she clenched her jaw, fighting the urge to let herself go. “Terri,” she began. “Terri, calm down. You’re safe here. I won’t tell.”
“I felt it . . .” she began, holding her stomach. “I felt it moving inside. I felt it kicking. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have another one. I couldn’t take . . . I can’t . . . I’m not strong enough . . . I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take it . . .”
“Shh,” Lena hushed, smoothing back a wisp of hair that had fallen into Terri’s eyes. The woman looked so young, almost like a teenager. For the first time in years, Lena felt the urge to comfort someone. She had been on the receiving end for so long that she had almost forgotten how to offer help. “Look at me,” she said, steeling herself, fighting her own emotions. “You’re safe, Terri. I won’t tell. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I’m such a bad person,” Terri said. “I’m so bad.”
“You’re not.”
“I can’t get clean,” she confessed. “No matter how much I bathe, I can’t get clean.”
“I know,” Lena said, feeling a weight lifting off her chest as she admitted this. “I know.”
“I smell it on me,” she said. “The anesthesia. The chemicals.”
“I know,” Lena said, fighting the urge to slip back into her grief. “Be strong, Terri. You have to be strong.”
She nodded. Her shoulders were so slumped, she looked as if she might fold in on herself. “He’ll never forgive me for this.”
Lena didn’t know if she meant her husband or some higher power, but she nodded her head in agreement.
“He’ll never forgive me.”
Lena chanced a look outside the window. Dale was standing at the car but Jeffrey was to the side, talking to Sara Linton. He looked back at the station, throwing his hand out into the air as if he was angry. Sara said something, then Jeffrey nodded, taking what looked like an evidence bag from her. He walked back toward the station.
“Terri,” Lena said, feeling the threat of Jeffrey’s arrival breathing down her neck. “Listen,” she began. “Dry your eyes. Look at me.” Terri looked up. “You’re okay,” Lena said, more like an order than a question.
Terri nodded.
“You have to be okay, Terri.” The woman nodded again, understanding Lena’s urgency.
She saw Jeffrey in the squad room. He stopped to say something to Marla. “He’s coming,” she said, and Terri squared her shoulders, straightening up as if she were an actor taking a cue.
Jeffrey knocked on the door as he came into the office. He was obviously disturbed about something, but he held it back. The evidence bag Sara had given him in the parking lot was sticking out of his pocket, but Lena could not tell what it contained. He raised his eyebrows at her, a silent question, and she felt a lurch in her stomach as she realized she hadn’t done the one thing he had told her to do.
Without pausing a beat, Lena lied. “Terri says she’s never seen anyone at the garage but Dale.”
“Yes,” Terri said, nodding as she stood from the chair. She kept her eyes averted, and Lena was grateful Jeffrey seemed too preoccupied to notice the woman had been crying.
He didn’t even thank her for coming in, instead dismissing her with, “Dale’s waiting outside.”
“Thank you,” Terri said, chancing a look at Lena before she left. The young woman practically ran through the squad room, grabbing her kid from Marla as she made for the front door.
Jeffrey gave Lena the evidence bag, saying, “This was sent to Sara at the clinic.”
There was a piece of lined notebook paper inside. Lena turned the bag over, reading the note. The four words were written in purple ink, all caps, taking up half the page. “ABBY WASN’T THE FIRST.”
Lena walked through the forest, her eyes scanning the ground, willing herself to concentrate. Her thoughts kept darting around like a pinball, one minute hitting against the possibility that there might be another girl buried out in these woods, the next colliding into the memory of the fear in Terri Stanley’s voice as she begged Lena not to tell her secret. The woman had been terrified by the prospect of her husband finding out what she had done. Dale seemed harmless, hardly the type of man capable of Ethan’s kind of rage, but she understood Terri’s fear. She was a young woman who had probably never held a real job outside her home. If Dale left her and their two kids, she would be completely abandoned. Lena understood why she felt trapped, just as she understood Terri’s fear of exposure.
All this time, Lena had been concerned about Ethan’s reaction, but now she knew there was more to worry about than the threat of his violence. What if Jeffrey found out? God knew she had been through a lot of shit in the last three years— most of it of her own making—but Lena had no idea what would be the final line she crossed that made Jeffrey turn his back on her. His wife was a pediatrician, and from what she had seen, he loved kids. It wasn’t like they had political discussions all the time. She had no idea where he stood on abortion. She did know, however, that he would be pissed as hell if he found out Lena hadn’t really interviewed Terri. They had been so tied up in their mutual fears, Lena hadn’t asked her about the garage, let alone if there had been any visitors Dale didn’t know about. Lena had to find a way to get back in touch with her, to ask her about the cyanide, but she couldn’t think how to do this without alerting Jeffrey.
Less than two feet away from her, he was muttering something under his breath. He had called in pretty much every cop on the force, ordering them to the woods to check for other gravesites. The search was exhausting, like combing the ocean for a particular grain of sand, and throughout the day, the temperature in the woods had kept going from one extreme to the other, the hot sun pouring through one minute, the cool shadows of the trees turning her sweat into a chill the next. As night was settling, it became even colder, but Lena had known better than to go back and get her jacket. Jeffrey was acting like a man possessed. She knew he was shouldering the blame for this, just like she knew there was nothing she could say that would help him.
“We should’ve done this Sunday,” Jeffrey said, as if he could have miraculously guessed that one coffin in the forest meant there would be at least another. Lena didn’t bother pointing this out; she had tried and failed several times before. Instead, she kept her eyes on the ground, the leaves and pine needles turning into a melted mess as her thoughts went elsewhere and her vision blurred with the threat of tears.
After nearly eight hours of searching and only getting through half of the more than two hundred acres, she doubted she would be able to find a neon sign with a big arrow pointing down, let alone a small metal pipe sticking out of the ground. Not to mention they were losing light fast. The sun was already dipping down low, threatening to disappear behind the horizon at any moment. They had pulled out their flashlights ten minutes ago, but the beams did little to aid the search.
Jeffrey looked up at the trees, rubbing his neck. They had taken one break around lunch, barely pausing to chew the sandwiches Frank had ordered from the local deli.
“Why would someone send that letter to Sara?” Jeffrey asked. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Everyone knows y’all are together,” Lena pointed out, wishing she could sit down somewhere. She wanted just ten minutes to herself, time enough to figure out how to get back in touch with Terri. There was the added problem of Dale. How would she explain why she needed to talk to his wife again?
“I don’t like Sara mixed up in this,” Jeffrey said, and she understood that one of the things driving his anger was the fact that Sara’s involvement might put her in jeopardy. “The postmark was local,” he said. “It’s somebody in the county, in Grant.”
“Could be someone from the farm knew better than to mail it from Catoogah,” she pointed out, thinking anyone could’ve dropped a letter by the Grant post office.
“It was sent Monday,” he said. “So whoever did it knew what was going on and wanted to warn us.” His flashlight beam flickered and he shook it to no avail. “This is fucking ridiculous.”
He held his portable radio to his hand, clicking the mic. “Frank?”
A few seconds passed before Frank asked, “Yeah?”
“We’ll have to get lights out here,” he said. “Call the hardware store and see if we can borrow anything.”
“Will do.”
Lena waited until Frank had signed off before trying to reason with Jeffrey. “There’s no way we’ll be able to cover the whole area tonight.”
“You want to come out here tomorrow morning and realize some girl could have been saved tonight if we hadn’t knocked off early?”
“It’s late,” she told him. “We could walk right past it and not even know.”
“Or we could find it,” he told her. “Whatever happens, we’re back here tomorrow looking again. I don’t care if we have to get bulldozers out here and dig up every fucking square inch. You got me?”
She looked down, continuing to hunt for something she wasn’t even sure was there.
Jeffrey followed suit, but he didn’t give up. “I should’ve done this Sunday. We should’ve been out in full force, gotten volunteers.” Jeffrey stopped. “What was going on with you and Terri Stanley?”
Her attempt at a casual “What do you mean?” sounded pathetic even to Lena.
“Don’t dick me around,” he warned. “Something’s going on.”
Lena licked her lips, feeling like a trapped animal. “She had too much to drink at the picnic last year,” Lena lied. “I found her in the bathroom with her head in the toilet.”
“She’s an alcoholic?” Jeffrey asked, obviously ready to condemn the woman.
Lena knew this was one of his buttons, and not knowing what else to do, she pressed it hard. “Yeah,” she said, thinking Terri Stanley could live with Jeffrey thinking she was a drunk as long as her husband didn’t find out what she was doing in Atlanta last week.
Jeffrey asked, “You think she makes a habit of it?”
“Don’t know.”
“She was sick?” he asked. “Throwing up?”
Lena felt a cold sweat as she forced herself to lie, knowing even as she did it that she was making the best choice given the circumstances. “I told her she’d better straighten out,” she said. “I think she’s got it under control.”
“I’ll talk to Sara,” he said, and her heart sank. “She’ll call Child Services.”
“No,” Lena said, trying not to sound desperate. It was one thing to lie, quite another to get Terri into trouble. “I told you she’s got it under control. She’s going to meetings and everything.” She racked her brain for some of Hank’s AA talk, feeling like a spider caught in its own web. “Got her chip last month.”
He narrowed his eyes, probably trying to decide if she was being honest or not.
“Chief?” his radio crackled. “West corner near the college. We’ve got something.”
Jeffrey took off, and Lena found herself running after him, the beam from her flashlight bobbing as she pumped her arms. Jeffrey had at least ten years on her, but he was a hell of a lot faster than she was. When he made it to the crowd of uniformed patrolmen standing in the clearing, she was still a good twenty feet behind him.
By the time she caught up, Jeffrey was kneeling beside an indentation in the earth. A rusted metal pipe was sticking up about two inches into the air. Whoever had spotted the site must have done so out of sheer luck. Even knowing what to look for, Lena was having trouble keeping her focus on the pipe.
Brad Stephens came running from behind her. He was holding two shovels and a crowbar. Jeffrey grabbed one of the shovels and they both started digging. The night air was cool, but they were both sweating by the time the first shovel thumped against wood. The hollow sound stayed in Lena’s ears as Jeffrey knelt down to brush away the last of the dirt with his hands. He must have done this same thing with Sara on Sunday. She couldn’t imagine what the anticipation had been like for him, the dread when he realized what he was uncovering. Even now, Lena was having a hard time accepting that someone in Grant was capable of doing such a horrible thing.
Brad jammed the crowbar into the edge of the box, and together he and Jeffrey worked to pry away the wood. One slat came up, flashlights shining eagerly into the opening. A foul odor escaped— not of rotting flesh, but of mustiness and decay. Jeffrey put his shoulder into the crowbar as he pried another board, the wood bending back on itself like a folded sheet of paper. The pulp was soaking wet, dirt staining it a dark black. Obviously, the box had been buried in the earth for a long time. In the crime scene photos of the grave by the lake, the grave had looked new, the green pressure-treated wood doing its job of holding back the elements even as it held in the girl.
Using his bare hands, Jeffrey pulled up the sixth board. Flashlights illuminated the interior of the stained box. He sat back on his heels, his shoulders sagging either from relief or disappointment. Lena felt her own mixture of both emotions.
The box was empty.
Lena had stayed around the potential crime scene until the last sample was taken. The box had practically disintegrated over time, the wood soaking into the ground. That the box was older than the first they had found was obvious, just as it was obvious that the box had been used for the same thing. Deep fingernail scratches gouged out the top pieces Jeffrey had pried away. Dark stains riddled the bottom. Someone had bled in there, shit in there, maybe died in there. When and why were just two more questions to add to the growing list. Thankfully, Jeffrey had finally accepted that they couldn’t continue looking for another box in the pitch dark. He had called off the search and told a crew of ten to show up again at daybreak.
Back at the station, Lena had washed her hands, not bothering to change into the spare outfit she kept in her locker, knowing nothing but a long, hot shower could wash away some of the distress she was feeling. Yet, when she came to the road that led into her neighborhood, she found herself downshifting the Celica, making an illegal U-turn to bypass her street. She unlatched her seat belt and drove with her knees while she shrugged off her jacket. The windows slid down with the touch of a button, and she turned off the noise coming from the radio, wondering how long it had been since she had a moment to herself like this. Ethan thought she was still at work. Nan was probably getting ready for bed and Lena was totally alone with nothing but her own thoughts to keep her company.
She drove through downtown again, slowing as she passed the diner, thinking about Sibyl, the last time she had seen her. Lena had screwed up so many things since then. There was a time when no matter what, she didn’t let her personal life interfere with her job. Being a cop was the one thing she was good at, the one thing Lena knew how to do. She had let her connection to Terri Stanley get in the way of her duties. Yet again, her emotions were jeopardizing the only thing in Lena’s life that was a constant. What would Sibyl say about Lena now? How ashamed would her sister be at the kind of person Lena had become?
Main Street dead-ended at the entrance of the college, and Lena took a left into the children’s clinic, turning around and heading back out of town. She rolled up the windows as the chill got to her and found herself fiddling with the dials on the radio, trying to find something soft to keep her company. She glanced up as she passed the Stop-N-Go, and recognized the black Dodge Dart parked beside one of the gas pumps.
Without thinking, Lena did another U-turn, pulling parallel to the Dart. She got out of her car, looking into the market for Terri Stanley. She was inside, paying the guy behind the register, and even from this distance, Lena could almost smell the defeat on her. Shoulders slumped, eyes cast down. Lena suppressed the urge to thank God she’d happened to run into her.
The Celica’s gas tank was almost full, but Lena turned on the pump anyway, taking her time removing the gas cap and putting in the nozzle. By the first click of the pump, Terri had come out of the store. She was wearing a thin blue Members Only jacket, and she pushed the sleeves up to her elbows as she walked across the brightly lit filling station. Terri was obviously preoccupied as she walked to her car, and Lena cleared her throat several times before the woman noticed her.
“Oh,” Terri said, the same word she had uttered the first time she’d seen Lena at the police station.
“Hey.” Lena’s smile felt awkward on her face. “I need to ask you—”
“Are you following me?” Terri looked around as if she was scared someone would see them together.
“I was just getting gas.” Lena took the nozzle out of the Celica, hoping Terri didn’t notice she’d put in less than half a gallon. “I need to talk to you.”
“Dale’s waiting for me,” she said, tugging down the sleeves of her jacket. Lena had seen something, though—something all too familiar. They both stood there for the longest minute of Lena’s life, neither one knowing what to say.
“Terri . . .”
Her only answer was, “I need to go.”
Lena felt words sticking in her throat like molasses. She heard a high-pitched noise in her ear, almost like a siren warning her away. She asked, “Does he hit you?”
Terri looked down at the oil-stained concrete, ashamed. Lena knew that shame, but on Terri it brought out anger in Lena like she hadn’t known in a while.
“He hits you,” Lena said, narrowing the space between them as if she needed to be close to be heard. “Come here,” she said, grabbing Terri’s arm. The woman winced from pain as Lena yanked up the sleeve. A black bruise snaked up her arm.
Terri didn’t move away. “It’s not like that.”
“What’s it like?”
“You don’t understand.”
“The hell I don’t,” she said, tightening her grip. “Is that why you did it?” she demanded, anger sparking like a brush fire. “Is that why you were in Atlanta?”
Terri tried to squirm away. “Please let me go.”
Lena felt her rage becoming uncontrollable. “You’re scared of him,” she said. “That’s why you did it, you coward.”
“Please . . .”
“Please what?” Lena asked. “Please what?” Terri was crying in earnest now, trying so hard to pull away that she was almost on the ground. Lena let go, horrified when she saw a red mark on Terri’s wrist working its way below the bruise Dale had made. “Terri—”
“Leave me alone.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
She headed back to her car. “I’m going.”
“I’m sorry,” Lena said, following her.
“You sound like Dale.”
A knife in her stomach would have been easier. Still, Lena tried, “Please. Let me help you.”
“I don’t need your help,” she spat, yanking open the car door.
“Terri—”
“Leave me alone!” she screamed, slamming the door with a loud bang. She locked the door as if she was afraid Lena might pull her out of the car.
“Terri—” Lena tried again, but Terri had pulled away, tires burning rubber on the pavement, the hose from the gas pump stretching, then popping out of the Dart’s gas tank. Lena stepped back quickly as gas splattered onto the ground.
“Hey!” the attendant called. “What’s going on here?”
“Nothing,” she told him, picking up the nozzle and replacing it on the pump. She dug into her pocket and tossed two dollars at the young man, saying, “Here. Go back inside.” She climbed back into her car before he could yell anything else.
The Celica’s tires caught against the pavement, the car fishtailing as she pulled away. She didn’t realize she was speeding until she blew past a broken-down station wagon that had been parked on the side of the road for the last week. She forced her foot to back off on the accelerator, her heart still pounding in her chest. Terri had been terrified of Lena, looking at her like she was scared she’d be hurt. Maybe Lena would have hurt her. Maybe she would have turned violent, taking her rage out on that poor helpless woman just because she could. What the hell was wrong with her? Standing at the gas station, yelling at Terri, she had felt like she was yelling at herself. She was the coward. She was the one who was scared of what might be done to her if anyone found out.
The car had slowed to almost a crawl. She was on the outskirts of Heartsdale now, a good twenty minutes from home. The cemetery where Sibyl was buried was out this way, on a flat plain behind the Baptist church. After her sister had died, Lena had gone there at least once, sometimes twice a week, to visit her grave. Over time, she had cut down on her visits, then stopped going altogether. With a shock, Lena realized she hadn’t visited Sibyl in at least three months. She had been too busy, too wrapped up in doing her job and dealing with Ethan. Now, at the height of her shame, she could think of nothing more appropriate than going to the graveyard.
She parked at the front of the church, leaving the doors unlocked as she walked toward the front gates of the memorial garden. The area was well lit, overhead lights illuminating the grounds. She knew she had driven here for a reason. She knew what she needed to do.
Someone had planted a handful of pansies by the entrance to the cemetery, and they swayed in the breeze as Lena walked by. Sibyl’s grave was to the side of the grounds that bordered the church, and Lena took her time walking through the grassy lawn, enjoying the solitude. She had spent almost twelve hours straight on her feet today, but something about being here, being close to Sibyl, made the walk less daunting. Sibyl would have approved of being buried here, Lena always thought. She had loved the outdoors.
The cement block Lena had upended and used for a bench was still on the ground beside Sibyl’s marker, and Lena sat down, wrapping her arms around her knees. In the daytime, a huge pecan tree gave shade to the spot, tendrils of sunlight slipping through the leaves. The marble slab marking Sibyl’s final resting place had been cleaned to a shine, and a quick look around at the other gravesites proved that this had been done by a visitor rather than the staff.
There weren’t any flowers. Nan was allergic.
Like a faucet being turned on, Lena felt tears pool in her eyes. She was such a horrible person. As bad as Dale was to Terri, Lena had been worse. She was a cop: she had a duty to protect people, not scare the shit out of them, not grab their wrist so hard that she left a bruise. She was certainly in no position to call Terri Stanley a coward. If anything, Lena was the coward. She was the one who had scurried off to Atlanta under the cover of lies, paying some stranger to slice out her mistakes, hiding from the repercussions like a frightened child.
The altercation with Terri had brought back all the memories Lena had tried to suppress, and she found herself back in Atlanta, reliving the whole ordeal again. She was in the car with Hank, his silence cutting like a knife. She was in the clinic, sitting across from Terri, avoiding her eyes, praying it would be over. She was taken back to the freezing operating room, her feet resting in the icy cold stirrups, her legs splayed for the doctor who spoke so calmly, so quietly, that Lena had felt herself being lulled into a sort of hypnotic state. Everything was going to be fine. Everything will be okay. Just relax. Just breathe. Take it slow. Relax. It’s all over. Sit up. Here are your clothes. Call us if there are complications. You all right, darlin’? Do you have someone waiting for you? Just sit in the chair. We’ll take you outside. Murderer. Baby killer. Butcher. Monster.
The protesters had been waiting outside the clinic, sitting in their lawn chairs, sipping from their thermoses of hot coffee, for all intents and purposes looking like tailgaters waiting for the big game. Lena’s appearance had caused them all to stand in unison, to scream at her, waving signs with all sorts of graphic, bloody pictures. Obscenely, one even held up a jar, the implied contents obvious to anyone standing within ten feet of it. Still, it didn’t look real, and she wondered at the man— of course it was a man— sitting at home, maybe at his kitchen table where his kids sat and had breakfast every morning, preparing the mixture in the jar just to torment frightened women who were making what Lena knew was the most difficult decision of their lives.
Now, sitting in the cemetery, staring at her sister’s grave, Lena let herself wonder for the first time what the clinic did with the flesh and bone they had removed from her own body. Was it lying somewhere in an incinerator, waiting to ignite? Was it buried in the earth, an unmarked grave she would never see? She felt a clenching deep down in her gut, in her womb, as she thought of what she had done— what she had lost.
In her mind, she told Sibyl what had happened; the choices she had made that brought her here. She talked about Ethan, how something inside of her had died when she started seeing him, how she had let everything good about herself ebb away like sand being taken with the tide. She told her about Terri, the fear in her eyes. If only she could take it all back. If only she had never met Ethan, never seen Terri at the clinic. Everything was going from bad to worse. She was telling lies to cover lies, burying herself in deceit. She couldn’t see a way out of it.
What Lena wanted most of all was to have her sister there, if only for a moment, to tell her that everything was going to be okay. That had been the nature of their relationship from the beginning of time: Lena fucked up and Sibyl smoothed things over, talking it through with her, making her see the other side. Without her guiding wisdom, it all seemed like such a lost cause. Lena was falling apart. There was no way she could have given birth to Ethan’s child. She could barely take care of herself.
“Lee?”
She turned around, nearly falling off the narrow block. “Greg?”
He emerged from the darkness, the moon glowing behind him. He was limping toward her, his cane in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other.
She stood quickly, wiping her eyes, trying to hide her shock. “What are you doing here?” she asked, rubbing grit off the back of her pants.
He dropped the bouquet to his side. “I can come back when you’re finished.”
“No,” she told him, hoping the darkness hid the fact that she had been crying. “I just . . . it’s fine.” She glanced back at the grave so that she wouldn’t have to look at him. She had a flash of Abigail Bennett, buried alive, and Lena felt an unreasonable panic fill her. For just a split second she thought of her sister alive, begging for help, trying to claw her way out of the casket.
She wiped her eyes before looking back at him, thinking she must be losing her mind. She wanted to tell him everything that had happened— not just in Atlanta, but before then, back to that day she had returned to the police station after running some samples to Macon, only to have Jeffrey tell her that Sibyl was gone. She wanted to put her head on his shoulder and feel his comfort. More than anything, she wanted his absolution.
“Lee?” Greg asked.
She searched for a response. “I was just wondering why you’re here.”
“I had to get Mama to bring me,” he explained. “She’s back in the car.”
Lena looked over his shoulder as if she could see the parking lot in front of the church. “It’s kind of late.”
“She tricked me,” he said. “Made me go to her knitting circle with her.”
Her tongue felt thick in her mouth, but she wanted nothing more than to keep hearing him talk. She had forgotten how soothing his voice could be, how gentle the sound. “Did she make you hold the yarn?”
He laughed. “Yeah. You’d think I’d quit falling for that.”
Lena felt herself smile, knowing he hadn’t been tricked. Greg would deny it at gunpoint, but he had always been a mama’s boy.
“I brought these for Sibby,” he said, holding up the flowers again. “I came yesterday and there weren’t any, so I figured . . .” He smiled. In the moonlight, she saw he still hadn’t managed to fix the tooth she had accidentally chipped during a game of Frisbee.
He said, “She loved daisies,” handing Lena the flowers. For just a second, their hands brushed, and she felt as if she had touched a live wire.
For his part, Greg seemed unfazed. He started to leave, but Lena said, “Wait.”
Slowly, he turned back around.
“Sit down,” she told him, indicating the block.
“I don’t want to take your seat.”
“It’s okay.” She stepped back to place the flowers in front of Sibyl’s marker. When she looked back up, Greg was leaning on his cane, watching her.
He asked, “You okay?”
Lena tried to think of something to say. She sniffed, wondering if her eyes were as red as they felt. “Allergies,” she told him.
“Yeah.”
Lena crossed her hands behind her back so she wouldn’t wring them again. “How’d you hurt your leg, exactly?”
“Car accident,” he told her, then smiled again. “Totally my fault. I was trying to find a CD and I took my eyes off the road for just a second.”
“That’s all it takes.”
“Yeah,” he said, then, “Mister Jingles died last year.”
His cat. She had hated the thing, but for some reason she was sad to hear that he was gone. “I’m sorry.”
The breeze picked up, the tree overhead shushing in the wind.
Greg squinted at the moon, then looked back at Lena. “When Mom told me about Sibyl . . .” His voice trailed off, and he dug his cane into the ground, pushing up some grass. She thought she saw tears in his eyes and made herself look away so that his sadness did not reignite her own.
He said, “I just couldn’t believe it.”
“I guess she told you about me, too.”
He nodded, and he did something that not many people could do when they talked about rape: he looked her right in the eye. “She was upset.”
Lena didn’t try to hide her sarcasm. “I bet.”
“No, really,” Greg assured her, still looking at her, his clear blue eyes void of any guile. “My aunt Shelby— you remember her?” Lena nodded. “She was raped when they were in high school. It was pretty bad.”
“I didn’t know,” Lena said. She had met Shelby a few times. As with Greg’s mother, they hadn’t exactly bonded. Lena would never have guessed the older woman had something like that in her life. She was very tightly wound, but most of the women in the Mitchell family were. The one thing Lena had been astounded by since her attack was that being raped had put her in what was not exactly an exclusive club.
“If I had known . . .” Greg began, but didn’t finish.
“What?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He reached down and picked up a pecan that had fallen off the tree. “I was really upset to hear it.”
“It was pretty upsetting,” Lena allowed, and surprise registered on his face. She asked, “What?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated, tossing the pecan into the wood. “You used to not say things like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like feelings.”
She forced out a laugh. Her whole life was a struggle with feelings. “What things did I used to say?”
He mulled it over. “‘That’s life’?” he tried, mimicking her one-sided shrug. “‘Tough shit’?”
She knew he was right, but she couldn’t begin to know how to explain it. “People change.”
“Nan says you’re seeing somebody.”
“Yeah, well” was all she could say, but her heart had flipped in her chest at the thought of him bothering to ask. She was going to kill Nan for not telling her.
He said, “Nan looks good.”
“She’s had a hard time.”
“I couldn’t believe y’all were living together.”
“She’s a good person. I didn’t really see that before.” Hell, she didn’t see a lot of things before. Lena had made an art out of fucking up anything remotely positive in her life. Greg was living proof of that.
For lack of something to do, she looked up at the tree. The leaves were ready to fall. Greg made to leave again and she asked, “What CD?”
“Huh?”
“Your accident.” She pointed to his leg. “What CD were you looking for?”
“Heart,” he said, a goofy grin breaking out on his face.
“Bebe Le Strange?” she asked, feeling herself grin back. Saturday had always been chore day when they lived together, and they had listened to that particular Heart album so many times that to this day Lena couldn’t scrub a toilet without hearing “Even It Up” in her head.
“It was the new one,” he told her.
“New one?”
“They came out with a new one about a year ago.”
“That Lovemonger stuff?”
“No,” he said, his excitement palpable. The only thing Greg loved more than listening to music was talking about it. “Kick-ass stuff. Back-to-the-seventies Heart stuff. I can’t believe you don’t know about it. I was knocking on the door the first day it was out.”
She realized then how long it had been since she had listened to music she really enjoyed. Ethan preferred punk rock, the kind of disaffected crap spoiled white boys screeched to. Lena didn’t even know where her old CDs were.
“Lee?”
She had missed something he’d said. “Sorry, what?”
“I need to go,” he told her. “Mama’s waiting.”
Suddenly, she felt like crying again. She forced her feet to stay on the ground and not do something foolish, like run toward him. God, she was turning into a sniveling idiot. She was like one of those stupid women in romance novels.
He said, “Take care of yourself.”
“Yeah,” she said, trying to think of something to keep him from going. “You, too.”
She realized she was still holding the daisies, and she leaned down to put them on Sibyl’s grave. When she looked back up, Greg was limping toward the parking lot. She kept staring, willing him to turn around. He didn’t.
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |