A Time of Torment (34 page)

‘Maybe he skipped. Isn’t that what they call it: “skipping”? I think I heard it mentioned on TV once.’

‘It’s hard to skip without money. Your husband left what little he had in the bank, and he doesn’t have a debit or credit card.’

She folded her arms. Her very white teeth nibbled at her lower lip as though, in the absence of anything else to consume, she might feed upon herself. Jerome Burnel’s disappearance seemed to have come as news to her, but her attitude wasn’t entirely one of surprise. She didn’t know about it, Parker guessed, but it wasn’t unexpected.

‘And what has any of this to do with me?’

‘You were born in Plassey County, West Virginia.’

There it was: a kind of shiver.

‘So?’

‘Did you know a man named Harpur Griffin?’ A breath. He heard it being released.

‘No.’

And a lie.

All that stuff about people looking to the right when constructing untruths – or it might have been the left; Parker could never remember, not that it mattered anyway – was so much mumbo jumbo: smoke from the pseudoscience of neuro-linguistic programming. It was the pauses, or absence of them, that gave a liar away: either taking too much time to think, or not enough time at all. He could see Norah Meddows weighing her options, and deciding that deception represented her best hope.

‘You’re sure?’ he prompted her.

‘Don’t be rude, Mr Parker. It’s a sign of poor breeding.’

‘Deceit, on the other hand, is universal.’

‘Get out of my store, or I’ll call the police.’

‘Oh, I don’t much care if you call the police or not,’ said Parker. ‘I’ll be talking to them myself pretty soon anyway. I just thought I’d give you the chance to tell the truth before all this got out of hand. Harpur Griffin did time with your ex-husband. Griffin was burned alive in his car in Portland a couple of days ago. It made the papers – some of them, anyway. He also came from Plassey County. That makes two people from one small region in West Virginia with ties to Jerome Burnel. I find that odd.’

‘Just leave. Please.’

‘I think I will.’ He sniffed the air. ‘You know, the smell of old clothes always reminds me of mortality.’

She couldn’t help but bridle at the implied insult to her business, even at the risk of further time in his company.

‘This isn’t a thrift store.’

‘Right, it’s “vintage”. I forgot, like most antiques are just junk until somebody wants them badly enough. You have my card, in case you need to call me and prepare.’

‘Prepare for what?’

‘The questions that the police will ask you, eventually: Did you set up your husband to be robbed back in Maine? Did you know that he carried a gun? How did you recruit the men who ended up dying at your husband’s hand? Did you help to plant the child pornography that convicted him? Why did you have Harpur Griffin killed?’

‘I didn’t have—’

The words tumbled out before she could stop herself. Parker turned toward the door.

‘It sounds like you do need to practice your answers,’ he said.

‘Go fuck yourself.’

He raised the index finger of his right hand.

‘Remember: it’s a sign of poor breeding.’

And he closed the door gently behind him.

N
orah Meddows waited until Parker had driven off in his car – a rental, she thought, noting the make, color, and license number – then locked the door and turned the sign to
CLOSED
. She killed the lights in the store and returned to the back room, where she dashed the new stock from the table and scattered it on the floor. She looked at the phone. She’d have to call them. They might – no, they would – hurt her if they found out that the detective had been here and she’d kept it from them. He’d made the connection with Plassey County, although that was their fault, not hers. They were the ones who’d recruited Harpur Griffin to do their dirty work.

She couldn’t understand why they hadn’t just killed her husband, either before he went to prison or while he was behind bars. Instead, they’d opted to inflict years of misery upon him, and even she hadn’t hated him that much. She’d just found him dull and weak, although she had been surprised by his actions at the gas station. But whatever his previously unsuspected depths, it still turned out that not everyone in the jewelry trade made enough money to shower a good wife in wealth and diamonds. Who knew?

They’d kill the detective, of course. If they were smart, they’d just make him disappear. But she was seriously starting to wonder how clever they really were, after botching a simple robbery that she’d gifted to them – why the hell couldn’t they have taken her husband on a quiet stretch of road instead of in a gas station? – and then burning a man alive and allowing his remains to be found – because they must have been the ones who murdered Griffin, although she had no idea why.

And then there were the two bodies discovered in the county, the ones that had been all over the papers at the weekend. If the Cut had also put them in the ground, they were definitely losing their touch. Maybe she should just keep her mouth shut after all. It wasn’t like Parker was going to advertise that he’d spoken with her, or was it? Damn. No, she’d have to tell them. They were her occasional suppliers as well, after all. Their ‘ranges’, as they called them, often produced some nice items of clothing for her store. More to the point, they were her silent partners, and their monthly share wasn’t linked to gross or net: it was a set fee, and it hurt every time.

She had watched enough crime shows to know that she shouldn’t use any of her own phones to make the call. She picked up the clothes from the floor and spent an hour sorting and pricing most of them before driving all the way to the Mall at Tuttle Crossing, keeping an eye in the rearview mirror for the detective’s car, but finding no sign of it. She watched out for him inside, too, even taking a detour to Panera Bread just to grab a coffee and sit by the window, all the time trying to catch sight of him or his vehicle. When she was as certain as she could be that he had not followed her, she went to Sears, got a cart, bought some towels, stockings, and a handful of other stuff that she barely needed, before adding a cheap cell phone to the pile. She then headed to an Internet café and activated the phone on one of its computers.

When all that was done, she made the call.

P
erry Lutter liked walking. He liked being outdoors. When he was in his little bedroom in his parents’ house – the same bedroom that he’d occupied for as long as he could remember, complete with some of the childish things that he’d never put away, and the adult things that were now also part of his twin lives, for he was both young and old – he would feel the walls closing in around him, and hear voices speaking to him in the night. The voices, the Bad Speakers, used dirty words, sometimes about women and girls, and Perry didn’t think he liked to hear those words, although among his adult things were some magazines that he had found on his travels, and hidden as best he could behind the dusty childhood books on his shelves.

But when he was outside, the voices usually went away, or were lost in the sounds of birds and animals, wind and water. In the summer, Perry would often sleep outdoors, either on the porch or, if the air didn’t smell like rain, in his sleeping bag in the woods behind his father’s toolshed. His parents didn’t try to stop him, just as long as he stayed within sight of the house at night.

There were times, though, when the voices persisted, the babble of them so loud that they made Perry wail. When that happened, Perry would pray, and if he prayed hard enough the other voices would come, the soft ones, and they would shoo the Bad Speakers away, and eventually Perry would fall asleep to the sound of them, which was like the hushing of the sea.

Perry stayed away from the Cut. He kept to roads and forests that did not abut it, maintaining a buffer between himself and whatever dwelt in that place. He would hear it if he accidentally drew too close, as he sometimes did if he grew disoriented and confused, but that only happened when he was tired or hungry, so he’d learned always to keep some candy and fruit in his pack when he went wandering.

The thing in the Cut sounded like the rattle he’d had as a child, and which his mother still kept in a drawer in the living room, along with one of Perry’s earliest pairs of shoes, a picture of her that he’d drawn on his first day at the special school, and old photographs of him as a baby and a little boy. Perry loved it when she took them from the drawer and told him the stories connected with each item, even though he’d heard them hundreds of times before. The sound of his mother speaking was one of the few voices that could drown out the Bad Speakers.

Another was the voice of the thing in the Cut, because even the Bad Speakers were afraid of it.

Rattle-rattle, chatter-chatter, hiss-hiss
: not separately, but all at once, a communication in a language that could only be heard and never understood, yet the baseness of it was clear to any who were exposed to it, and to Perry Lutter in particular because he had no filters to protect himself from it. So he avoided the Cut, and also the people who lived in it, because they brought with them the taint of the thing that dwelt among them, and behind every word they spoke was its echo.

Perry was almost six feet tall, but had never shed the baby fat of childhood. Regardless of the weather, he always wore a long-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck, either brown or blue chinos, depending on the day of the week, and a windbreaker. His hair was black, and he wore it brushed straight back from his forehead and held in place by a generous dab from his supply of Reuzel’s water-based pomade. His father used Murray’s pomade, which was cheaper, but Murray’s was oil-based and gave Perry acne along his hairline, so his mother insisted that he use Reuzel’s instead, although his father bitched about the extra cost every time he saw Perry with the tin in his hand. Perry’s eyes were slightly too small for his face, but he had a kind smile, and neither meant nor did any harm. He worked three afternoons each week, and all day Saturday, washing dishes for Miss Queenie at the diner, for which she paid him three dollars an hour, which he stored in a vintage Nabisco cookie tin and counted every Sunday afternoon, carefully writing the new total on a sheet of paper that he kept with the money.

Perry’s mind was mostly a happy blank when he rambled through the woods and fields, because he was at peace with himself when he wandered. Lately, though, that peace had been taken from him, ever since he had witnessed the two men from the Cut digging the hole. He’d tried to pretend that he hadn’t seen what they were doing, but he wasn’t sure he’d fooled them. Then he’d made the mistake of going back early the next morning to see what they’d put in the hole, digging with a little shovel that he’d borrowed from his dad’s toolshed. He thought that the men might have buried treasure in the hole.

But it wasn’t treasure.

He’d thrown up all over his shirt and pants when he saw what lay under the dirt. He didn’t know what else to do, so he covered the bodies as best he could before returning home to clean himself up and put on a new shirt and pants. That was how his mother had found him, crying in his underwear and pulling on a pair of chinos backward, crying because his clothes had gotten dirty, and the chinos were the wrong color for the day, and his hands smelled of dead boys.

Perry Lutter was incapable of lying; such a level of outright deception was beyond him. The closest he could come to it was in a withholding of the truth, or a refusal to speak at all. It took his mother half an hour to calm him to the point where he would even begin to talk to her about what had happened, and another half hour later the police were at the scene. Afterward, Sheriff Henkel came to speak to Perry, with his father and mother present, but Henkel could get little out of him because Perry had a profound fear of men and women in uniform, a consequence of an incident in his twenties when one of Russ Dugar’s idiot deputies had come across Perry just off Mortonsville’s main street, tearing apart the contents of a garbage can. The deputy, who was new on the job and unfamiliar with Perry, although he could clearly see that he was mentally challenged in some way, ordered him to stop, but Perry persisted in redistributing the trash, whereupon the deputy pushed him to the ground, cuffed him, and drove him to the sheriff’s department where he was put in a cell to cool off.

It was a perfect storm of misfortune, because the incident occurred on a Sunday afternoon, when the only other deputy in the department was just as wet behind the ears as his comrade, if marginally more sensitive to Perry’s condition. When Perry wouldn’t stop crying, and began banging his head against the bars, the deputy took it upon himself to call Russ Dugar at home for advice.

Dugar, despite all his flaws, was not an unkind man, and knew the Lutters well. He drove to the sheriff’s department, still dressed in his Sunday shirt and tie, stopping off only to pick up Perry’s mother along the way. Together they managed to calm her son down, and discovered that Perry, who had been buying candy, had accidentally dropped his mom’s change in the garbage can, and was afraid of getting in trouble for not being able to produce it when he returned home. A doctor had to be called to put some stitches in Perry’s forehead, and he had remained understandably fearful of uniforms, and particularly the attire and patrol vehicles of the Plassey County Sheriff’s Department, ever since. As for the unfortunate deputy who had arrested Perry in the first place, Dugar ground his face so hard against the bloodied cell bars that he bore the mark of them on his skin for days.

It wouldn’t have done Henkel any good even if he’d arrived out of uniform, because Perry knew that he was the sheriff, which brought with it the same set of traumatic associations. The best Henkel could get out of Perry was that he had been curious about the disturbed earth and started digging. And if Perry knew more than he was saying, as Henkel quietly suspected, in part because of the way Perry’s mother had tightened her grip on her boy’s hand when the questions got too near the truth, then he wasn’t going to share it with Henkel anyway. Later, on his porch, Charlie Lutter again asked if the police could gloss over the fact that Perry had found the bodies, and Henkel had consented, seeing no benefit to anyone involved in publicizing Perry’s involvement, especially not if this was Cut work. They’d find out in the end, though, no matter what Henkel did or did not say. Charlie Lutter knew it, too. He was just doing his best to shield his son.