A Grant County Collection (91 page)

Sara wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, eyes watering from the overwhelming stench of bleach in the tiny bathroom. She wished that Jeffrey was there to keep her mind from going to such dark places. Since filing the adoption papers, they'd started playing what-if games. 'What if we get a boy who hates football?' 'What if we have a girl who loves pink and wants her hair braided?'

Sara imagined games were the last thing on her husband's mind at the moment. A dead person had been in that SUV and Lena was somehow entangled in that death. After meeting Jake Valentine, Jeffrey did not trust the local force to solve this crime without leaping to the easiest conclusion and pinning it all on Lena. He had left early this morning to plot strategy with Nick Shelton, a friend of his who worked for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Sara had not been invited to tag along.

She leaned back over the tub, rinsing the Comet, then sprinkling more powder to start the process again. The sponge was just about to give up the ghost, but Sara would not stop until the job was done. She folded the sponge in two and used the edge to attack the black ring around the periphery that probably dated back to the seventies.

Sara muttered a curse under her breath, wishing again that she was back home. At least in Grant County, she could stay out of Jeffrey's way and let him do his job. Here, all she could do was make sure he had a clean place to put his toothbrush. Overnight, she had turned into a glorified housewife, and for what? So that Lena could laugh her way out of town?

Sara knew that Jeffrey bent the rules sometimes. If he had been by himself last night, Jeffrey would have taken the empty nurses' station as an invitation to find Lena on his own. If he had walked into that hospital room alone, Lena might have opened up to him. She might have told him why she needed to get out of there instead of breaking out. She sure as hell wouldn't have tried to use Jeffrey in order to make her escape; she respected him too much.

Unlike Sara.

Cathy had said that women were their own worst enemies. Was Sara Lena's enemy? She didn't think so. It was true that Sara had never understood the bond between her husband and the thirty-five-year-old detective, but Sara wasn't stupid enough to be jealous. Barring the fact that Lena was as far from Jeffrey's type as you could get without going outside the species, their relationship was too much like that of an older brother and errant young sister to cause Sara concern.

Maybe the dislike came from Lena making such bad choices for herself. After her sister, Sibyl, had died, Lena had fallen into a deep depression. She even managed to get herself temporarily suspended from the force. That was when she'd started seeing Ethan Green. That was when Lena had lost all of Sara's sympathy.

As a doctor, Sara should have understood the process. Grief can lead to depression, depression can lead to chemical changes in the body that make it impossible to crawl out of the spiral without some help, be it pharmacological or therapeutic or both. God knew that over the last few months, Sara was more than intimate with the dangers of depression. Still, her personal experience did not help her understand why Lena had turned to Ethan.

Sara had read the women's journals, knew the statistics, studied the causal relationships. Depression can lead to vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities attract predators. It was like a shark sensing blood in the water. Just because a woman gave the outward appearance of being strong, that did not preclude her from becoming a victim of domestic violence. In some cases, it made her more likely to fall victim; you could only keep up that tough act for so many hours before it all fell apart.

Sara knew this in her brain. She accepted that some women – smart women – got mixed up with the wrong person, ended up making compromise after compromise until there was nothing left but to sit there and take it. But, still, the fact that Lena's twenty-four-year-old boyfriend had abused her – not just abused her, but beaten her to a bloody pulp – was something that Sara could not get past.

It was as if Lena had been obsessed with the man, like she could not get him out of her system. Maybe if Ethan had been a drug, Sara would have better understood the addiction. Heroin, meth, opium . . . that would explain Lena's devotion, her inability to get through the day without a hit. The brainwashing would have made more sense if she had been in a cult, but there was nothing for Lena to fall back on but her own damaged personality. She had a good job, her own money, her own support structure. She had a gun and a badge, for chrissakes. Ethan was a paroled violent offender. Lena could have arrested him at any time. As a police officer, she was bound by law to report any case of domestic violence, even if she herself was the victim.

And yet she had left it up to Jeffrey. Lena was the one who had tipped him off that Ethan was carrying a gun in his backpack. Jeffrey refused to discuss it with Sara anymore, but she was certain that Lena had planted the gun, that the only way she had been able to get rid of her abuser was this coward's way. Ethan had ten years' hard time hanging over his head. Lena had hidden the gun, then called in Jeffrey to do her dirty work.

And of course, Jeffrey had come running.

But wasn't that why Sara loved Jeffrey? Because he refused to give up on people, no matter how beyond reach they seemed? Sara was hardly one to talk about women making stupid mistakes with men. She had married Jeffrey twice, leaving him the first time after coming home to find him in bed with another woman. Jeffrey had changed in the years since their divorce, though. He had grown up. He had worked to get Sara back, to regain her trust and mend their relationship. She loved this new Jeffrey with such passion that it scared her sometimes.

Was that what had driven Lena to stand by Ethan no matter how many times he beat her? Had she felt the same lovesickness as Sara, the same lurch in her stomach when they were apart? Had she made such a fool of herself over him that she could not let go?

Sara dropped the scraps of the sponge into the wastebasket and rinsed the tub again. Jeffrey would be shocked when he got back from his meeting. She could not remember the last time she had cleaned her own bathroom so thoroughly. Sara hated most domestic chores and did them only because in a town as small as Heartsdale, her mother would find out if she hired a maid. Cathy's belief was that chores built character, and paying other people, especially women, to do them showed what sort of character you really were. Sara's belief was that her mother's Puritan work ethic had gone round the bend. There was a reason Sara had graduated from high school a year ahead of her class. When she was growing up, her mother thought that homework was the only valid excuse for getting out of cleaning duty.

She washed the cleaner off her hands, her mind going back to Lena and wishing that Ethan Green could be washed out of all their lives just as easily. Sara had seen Ethan only once – seen his body. The tattoos must have taken hours to ink onto his skin. There were at least ten that Sara had counted, but the one she could never put out of her mind was the large black swastika over his heart. What made a man embrace such hatred? What did it say about Lena that she could be with such a man, want him, make love to him, and not be repulsed by the hateful symbol on his body?

Last night, sitting in the car outside the hospital, Sara had seen the way the skinhead in the white sedan had looked at Jeffrey, the recognition that Jeffrey was a cop, his callous disregard for what that means. She had also seen the red swastika on the man's arm and felt a sudden sickening fear when Jeffrey made it obvious that he was not intimidated, would not back down. Now, she felt sick just thinking about it.

The phone rang and Sara's heart jumped. She ran into the other room and picked up the receiver. 'Hello?' She waited, listening to static on the line, the sound of someone breathing. 'Hello?' she repeated, then, for no reason, 'Lena?'

There was a soft click, then the quiet of a dead line.

Sara returned the phone to its cradle, shivering. She looked at her watch, then checked it against the alarm clock on the bedside table. Jeffrey had left almost two hours ago to meet with Nick Shelton. He had told her he'd call on his way back, but there was no telling when that would be.

She saw a takeout menu on the table, the notes she had scrawled on the back. Sara picked up the menu, tried to decipher her own handwriting.

Jeffrey had left Sara an assignment. She loved him for trying to make her feel useful, but the fact was a monkey could've performed the task. After her coffee run to the convenience store, she had called Frank Wallace, Jeffrey's second in command, and asked him to track down the license plate from the white sedan they had seen at the hospital last night. Even Frank had sounded puzzled when he'd heard Sara's request. He had played along, though, typing the plate into the computer, humming under his breath. Sara had known Frank for as long as she'd been alive – he was a poker buddy of her father's – but she had felt uncomfortable talking to him on the phone, mostly because they both knew that she had no business doing policework.

Frank had the registration in under a minute. Sara had scrambled for something to write on and found the takeout menu in one of the bedside drawers. A corporation named Whitey's Feed & Seed owned the Chevy Malibu.

So, the Nazi in the white sedan had a sense of humor.

Sara had rung off with Frank and decided to take some initiative – something a monkey surely could not do – and run down the articles of incorporation for Whitey's Feed & Seed. After spending almost twenty minutes on hold with the secretary of state's office, she knew a man named Joseph Smith was listed as CEO and president of Whitey's Feed & Seed. Going on the assumption that this was a valid name and not some allusion to the founder of the Mormon Church, Sara called directory services. There were over three hundred listings for the name of Joseph Smith in the state of Georgia. Oddly enough, none of them lived in or around the Elawah area.

Frank's computer search had yielded a post office box as the address for the vehicle's registration, but the woman at the secretary of state's office had given Sara a local address, 339 Third Avenue. If Reece was like every other small town in the world, it was laid out on a grid pattern. The Elawah County Medical Center was on Fifth Avenue. Sara knew that the hospital was less than a ten-minute drive from the motel, which meant that Third Avenue had to be within a few miles.

Sara stared at the menu, her scribbled letters crisscrossing the dessert selections. She'd talked to her mother, cleaned the bathroom, refolded all the clothes in their suitcase and left three messages on her sister's cell phone to please call before boredom atrophied her mind. Short of sweeping the motel parking lot, there really was nothing else left for her to do.

A motorcycle revved outside, the pipes so loud that the plate glass window rattled. Sara looked out the slit in the curtains, but she could only see the back of the bike as it pulled onto the main road. Overhead, the sky was turning dark, but she guessed that any rain was at least a few hours away.

Sara tore off the address she'd written on the menu and wrote Jeffrey a note on the entree section. She had seen some local maps at the convenience store when she'd walked over earlier that morning. Third Avenue had to be close by.

She snatched the motel key off the table and left the room before she could stop herself.

'Tell us about our mother,' Lena and Sibyl begged Hank, almost as soon as they could talk. They were desperate for information about the woman who had died giving birth to them. Hank would always protest – he had a bar to run or a meeting to attend – but eventually he would settle down and recall a summer picnic or a trip to see long-lost relatives. There was always something that happened – a stranger on the side of the road that their mother helped, a relative she nursed back to good health. Angela the Angel always put others ahead of herself. Angela happily gave her life so that her twin daughters would live. Angela was looking down on Sibyl and Lena from heaven.

Even to a child's ears, the stories were unbelievable fairy tales full of goodness and light, but Lena and Sibyl had never tired of hearing about their mother's generosity, her open, loving heart. Sibyl had tried to emulate their mother, to be the sort of person who only saw good in others. For Lena's part, Angela Adams had been the invisible yardstick, the woman she would never meet and never measure up to.

And now Hank was telling Lena that her mother had not died in childbirth but had been killed by a drug dealer. Not just any drug dealer – Hank's drug dealer.

One of the first things Lena could remember Hank telling them about their mother was that Angela had been unequivocal on the subject of drugs and alcohol. After years of watching her older brother slowly dig his own grave, she had finally cut him out of her life and vowed never to let him back in. Hank had not cared at the time. He was twenty-six years old. He didn't want family or sex or money or cars. All he was interested in was finding his next high.

According to Hank, the first promise that Angela extracted from her husband, Calvin Adams, was that he would never go out drinking with his fellow officers. Calvin adhered to this – they were very much in love – and seldom touched a drop; certainly, he never drank in front of his young wife. Of course, no one would ever know how long that would have lasted. The couple shared only three months of wedded bliss before Cal pulled over his last speeding violation. The driver shot him twice in the face and drove off, never to be seen again. Lena's father was dead before his body hit the ground.

Angela's first sign that she was pregnant came at her husband's funeral. Not normally one to be weak-kneed or emotional, she passed out at Calvin's gravesite. Seven months later, she went into the hospital to give birth to twin girls and never came out. Septicemia is rare, but deadly. It took two weeks for the infection to overtake the new mother's systems, shutting down her vital organs one by one until, finally, a decision had to be made to take her off life support. Hank Norton, Angela's closest living relative, had made the decision.

It was, Hank often said, the most difficult thing he had ever done in his life.

It was, evidently, all a lie.

Angela Norton had been a petite woman, very plain looking until she smiled, then there was no way you could not notice her. She had the dark coloring of her Mexican-American mother, unlike her brother, who was pasty as a jar of buttermilk. Another quality Hank did not share with his sister was her extreme devoutness, courtesy of their mother's Catholicism. Angela was passionate about helping people while Hank was passionate about helping himself.

As an adult, Lena knew that every good story has its darkness and light, and now she could see that Hank had always painted himself in the blackest of hues.

Angela Norton had met Calvin Adams at a church fair. He'd been working the raffle for the sheriff's department and despite the fact that gambling was a sin, she wanted her chance to win the basket of baked goods being offered as prize. Angela was a shy girl, just a teenager when she met the dashing young deputy. She was bright and funny, and just about the kindest, most caring person to walk the face of the earth.

Angela and Hank's mother had died at a young age. Car accident. She had no other relatives, and her husband, career military, had been killed in Vietnam when the children were little. Cal was an only child. Both parents had died when he was in his early twenties. He had no other relations in town, no cousins or aunts or uncles that anyone knew of. No family for Lena or Sibyl to visit.

Calvin Adams cut a dashing figure. A bit of a nerd in high school, people had been surprised when he signed up with the sheriff's department. He had turned into a good cop, though – firm, but fair. Always willing to listen to both sides of an argument. He wore the gun and badge with pride but never lorded it over anybody. Angela and Calvin were in love, very much in love, and what happened to them was tragic.

After watching his sister take her last breath, Hank had taken the newborn Lena and Sibyl from the hospital because he would not leave his own flesh and blood to be raised by the state. Woefully unprepared that first night, he had improvised cribs by lining two dresser drawers with sheets and pillows, nestling his young charges in for the night as he went around his house and systematically destroyed any traces of alcohol.

He often claimed that night was his 'turning point,' that looking down and seeing those two helpless baby girls tucked into his sock drawers, knowing that he was the only thing standing between them and the hairy-chinned woman from children's social services, had given him the strength to turn his back on an old friend.

This was the history Lena had been told. These were the lies she had been spoon-fed all of her life. She could remember rainy afternoons with Sibyl, playing games with Hank's stories. They acted out the tragedy of their parents' short lives, always taking turns being Angela, the best, the kindest, one. Oh, how their parents loved each other. Oh, how they would have loved to hold their twin daughters in their arms. Things would have been different, so very, very different, had they lived.

Or would they?

Hank often claimed that he gave up his addictions the night that he brought his nieces home from the hospital, but Lena had lived through it. She knew the truth. Eight years passed before he really gave it all up. Eight years of weeklong benders and parties that lasted for days and the police sniffing around, and lies . . . nothing but lies.

She had lived in this house, seen it with her own eyes: all those years and yet she had never suspected that a drug addict would tell her anything but the truth about her own mother and father. Why would he lie about what had happened? What did he have to gain by all those lies?

Lena dried her hair with a towel as she sat on the edge of her bed. She had changed into one of Hank's old dress shirts so that she could get in the shower with him and scrape off some of his filth. He was so thin that she could feel his bones through the rubber kitchen gloves she wore to clean him. What looked like rope burns circled his wrists and ankles, but she knew he had probably caused the damage himself, picking the skin with his fingernails, peeling it away like an orange.

Meth mites. Speed bumps. Crank bugs. There were all kinds of names for the phenomenon that caused meth users to pick, scrape, and dig at their own skin. As part of the police outreach program, Jeffrey taught a drug course at the high school twice a year. Lena could clearly remember the first time she'd been forced to tag along. She'd felt her heart race as she'd heard Jeffrey talk about the chemistry behind the sickness, give an explanation for the self-mutilation she'd seen.

Meth causes the body temperature to rise, which in turn causes the skin to sweat. When the sweat evaporates, it removes the protective oil coating the dermis. This process irritates the nerve endings and makes the addict feel as if something is crawling under his skin. He will do anything to stop the sensation, use any instrument he can find to relieve his suffering.

Lena had once watched Hank take an ice pick to his arm, scratching it repeatedly back and forth until the skin split open like a sack of sugar. Just now, she had seen the scar in the bathroom, the thick rope of flesh that had been sewn back together. There were so many marks on his body, so many painful reminders of what he had been willing to do to himself just to get high.

And still, in all those years, Hank had never, ever been this bad.

Why? Why had he gone back to that life after fighting so hard to leave it? What had made Hank embrace the very thing he despised? There had to be a reason. There had to be a trigger that made him take that first shot.

Was it the drug dealer? Was Hank buying drugs from the man who had killed Lena's mother?

Lena finished drying her hair. She sat up, looking at herself in the mirror over the dresser. Dark curls sprung around her head, water still dripping at the nape. How could she be back in this place again? How could she be back in this room, on this bed, drying her hair after yet again hosing off caked shit from her uncle's emaciated body?

She was an adult now. She had a job, her own home. She wasn't under Hank's thumb anymore, dependent upon him for anything.

So, why was she still here?

'Lee?' Hank stood in the doorway, tattered robe wrapped around his body.

Her voice was trapped somewhere in her throat, but she managed, 'I can't talk to you right now.'

He obviously didn't care. 'I want you to go home. Just forget what I said. Just go home and get on with your life.'

'Did that man shoot my father?'

Hank looked over her shoulder. Lena knew there was a Rick Springfield poster behind her, a remnant from her teenage years.

'Tell me the truth,' she insisted. 'Tell me how they really died.'

'Your father was shot. You know that, Lee. I showed you the newspaper article. You and your sister both.'

She remembered this, but how could she trust him? How could she even trust her own memory after all this time?

She asked, 'What about my mother? You said he killed my mother.'

His throat worked as he swallowed. 'Losing your daddy killed her, is what I meant.' He scratched his neck, his chin. 'It wasn't the man you saw what shot him, but people like him. Bad people you need to stay away from.'

'You're lying,' she said, never more sure of anything in her life.

He started picking at a sore by his ear. She knew he would start twitching soon, needing the drug.

'When did it start?' she asked. 'When did you get hooked again?'

'It don't matter.'

'Then tell me why,' she said, aware that she was almost begging. 'Why would you go back to this, Hank? You worked so hard to—'

'It don't matter.'

'You're an old man,' she told him. 'You won't be able to fight it this time. You might as well go ahead and pick out a coffin.'

'Just put me in a hole,' he said. 'That's where I belong.'

'Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?'

'You're supposed to leave,' he shot back, sounding for a moment like the old Hank again, the one who laid down the rules, said my way or the highway.

'I'm not going until you tell me the truth,' Lena told him. 'I won't leave until you tell me why you're doing this to yourself.'

'Go back to Grant. Go back to your job and your friends and just forget me.'

She stood from the bed, gripping the towel in her hand. 'I mean it, Hank. I won't leave here until you tell me the truth.'

He couldn't look at her. Finally, he said, 'There ain't no truth to tell. Your mama and daddy died. There's nothing you can do to change that.'

'I deserve to know what happened.'

He pressed his lips together, shaking his head as he turned to leave. Lena grabbed his arm to stop him. 'Tell me what happened to my mother. Tell me who killed her.'

'I killed her!' he yelled, trying to pull away. 'You wanna know who killed your mama? Me. It was
me
! Now go on home and let the dead stay buried.'

She felt his skin slide under her fingers, knew that she was pressing a broken needle deeper into his flesh. She tried to let go but he clamped his hand over hers, held her in place.

Tears wet his eyes and his expression softened, as if for just a moment he could see past his need. 'You and your sister were the light of my life. Don't ever forget that.'

Lena jerked her hand away. There was a tiny sliver of dried blood just below his jugular where he must have taken a hit while she was drying her hair.

She cleared her throat, tried to speak past the lump that had formed there. 'If you puncture an artery—'

'Yeah.' He seemed resigned.

'Your neck will swell up,' she continued. 'You'll suffocate.'

'Go home, Lee.'

'Hank—'

'I know what will happen,' he told her. 'I don't want you to be here when it does.'

In the twenty years since Lena had last set foot in the Elawah County Library, the only thing that had changed was the addition of a lone computer desk crammed up against the back wall between romance and general fiction. Even the lame Halloween decorations looked the same: the purple papier-mâché skeletons with their orange top hats, the black cats with glittery tails, the cauldrons of witches' brew. The only thing missing was the plastic pumpkin filled with candy corn that usually sat on the information desk. Lena guessed from the current clientele that the librarian didn't feel they were worth treating. The woman seemed to spend most of her time riding up and down in the freight elevator with her rolling cart and a sour expression that was scarier than any Halloween costume.

Sibyl had spent hours in the library when they were kids. She had been the good student, the one who whiled away her time catching up on homework or reading the latest science magazines Miss Nancy, the former librarian, ordered in Braille especially for her. Lena was the one who moped around, complaining under her breath, until Hank finally picked them up to go home. He used the library as a babysitting facility, making the girls stay there until he could get away from the bar and take them home.

Now, Lena regretted her youthful insolence, her lack of interest in how the library worked. Even blind, Sibyl would have been able to figure out the microfiche machine. Lena couldn't manage to thread the damn thing. She'd scrolled out two rolls of filmed newspaper archives like a kitten with toilet paper by the time the librarian came up from the basement again. Her look of perpetual disapproval went up a notch when she spotted Lena.