Break the Skin (31 page)

I don’t know that I was capable then of giving any sort of logical thought at all to what I should do. Lester had told me to get rid of the .38, but I still had it under my shirt. When Mr. Hambrick told me he’d left the door to his house open, I walked down there, still with no notion of
what I was going to do with that gun. Maybe I was trying to keep from thinking about what had happened to Rose and Tweet and—good Lord, the thought hit me so hard I almost went to my knees—the baby. Later, I’d hear that if only someone had found Rose sooner, even though she was dead, the baby was so close to being born, the doctors might have been able to save her. It was a girl. That was one of the last things Rose shared with me. A little girl. I would have taken her as my own. At least that’s the thing I dream about now. Lester and me and that baby, and all our lives ahead of us.

I walked into Mr. Hambrick’s house, and it was so quiet. I stood in the entryway, listening to the grandfather clock’s ticking in its alcove alongside the staircase. I called out for Poke, thinking he might be there, but no answer came back to me.

Here, the slope-shouldered officer said to Poke, “Where were you, son?”

“I was up at Rose and Tweet’s.”

He’d gone there, he said, because he’d heard the shots, because he’d seen Lester and me on the porch. He’d seen us go back into the house, and he’d seen me come out and get into Mother’s car and drive away. Soon, he said, Lester came out with Delilah. He had his arm around her shoulders, and she was all crumpled up against him, as if she could barely walk. He got her into his truck, and he turned it around and headed back toward the highway.

“And you never said a word about any of this?” the big-bellied officer said.

Poke shook his head. “It was too big to tell.”

It would be Mr. Hambrick who would find the bodies when he finally went to Rose and Tweet’s to look for Poke. The police would talk to him and to Poke. Officers would come to Mother’s house and ask her if she’d heard anything. “Nothing,” she’d say. And me? Had I noticed anything unusual when I’d come by Rose and Tweet’s on my way home from work? “No, sir,” I’d told the officer who’d asked. “Nothing out of the ordinary at all.”

It was too big, Poke said again, and that’s what I thought, too. It was too big for any of us to tell—so big that Lester and Delilah and I would keep it quiet, so big that Lester would finally try to forget it by slipping into one of his fugues and going away. Now I had to go ahead and say how I climbed the stairs at Mr. Hambrick’s house, where I found myself going into Poke’s room. His bed was unmade, the covers tossed in a tangle at the foot, but I didn’t touch them. I still had that .38.

The closet door was open, and I saw the pile of clothes on the floor and at the back, a hole someone had punched or kicked in the drywall.

I was standing there when I heard footsteps falling hard and fast on the stairs. I knew they belonged to Poke.

He froze when he came through the doorway and saw me in his room.

“Laney, don’t tell me how it happened. I don’t want to know.”

He went to his bed and started straightening out the covers, pulling up the top sheet and the white chenille bedspread, smoothing out the wrinkles, as if finally he’d come to a point where he’d seen too much, and now he thought if he only kept his mind on making that bed, he’d forget what he’d just come upon at Rose and Tweet’s.

I had to grab him by the arm and swing him around. “You see what you get? You see what you’ve got now from nosing around?”

That’s when the .38 fell from my shirt. It banged against the floor, and Poke and I stood there, looking at it.

Then he glanced at me, hoping, I think now, that I’d pick it up, but once it was gone from me, I couldn’t bear to hold it again.

“I’m supposed to get rid of it,” I said. “Poke, I’m so scared.”

He nodded. His glasses slipped down his nose a little, and he pushed them back up. Then, without a word, he bent down and picked up that .38. He held it by the barrel.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

And like that, he gave me one less thing to worry about. He took that .38, and sometime later, when I was going about my business cleaning
Mr. Hambrick’s house like nothing was out of the ordinary, Poke stuffed the gun into the hole in the drywall in his closet.

If I’d been a better person, I wouldn’t have let him do that, wouldn’t have left him open to suspicion. I came clean with the officers. I said, “It was Delilah’s .38. Poke didn’t have anything to do with what went on at Rose and Tweet’s.” My voice got small then, ashamed as I was to admit this next thing. “I never deserved Poke as a friend. I was never good enough back to him.”

He took off his glasses and slung them down on the table. He covered his eyes with his hands and kept rocking back and forth.

I started to touch him, just to pat his arm, just to let him know I was there, but I didn’t think I had the right.

“Girl, you’re in a world of trouble,” the big-bellied officer said. Then he nodded to the slope-shouldered one. “Get the boy’s grandpa. Tell him he can take him home.”

MISS BABY

I
went to Illinois the same night Lester did. I borrowed Emma’s car, and I took off after him. A 1985 Chrysler Le Baron with a plastic Madonna stuck to the dash. A big old boat of a car, and I wheeled it on faith into Arkansas, up through Missouri, and on into Mt. Gilead, Illinois. An itty-bitty town where it was easy as pie to find the police station.

“I’m here about Lester Stipp,” I said to the lady officer behind the glass at the counter.

The woman was peeling an orange. She pressed her fingernail into the rind and tore away a strip. She studied me. “You know Lester Stipp?”

“He lived with me in Texas.”

She put the orange down on a white paper towel. “You’re Betty Ruiz. You’re Miss Baby.”

“That’s right.”

“Sugar, we’ve been looking for you.”

While I was on the road those fifteen hours, the police there in Mt. Gilead had been talking to Lester. He’d come to say the truth. He and Laney didn’t pull that trigger. It was that other woman, that Delilah Dade. Maybe that was true, but it wasn’t the whole story, was it? Lester said no, no it wasn’t, and he owned up to it then, the story that would floor me once I heard it all, a story of witchcraft and sore hearts and the belief that one woman, that poor Rose MacAdow, could cast a spell. A story of conspiracy to commit murder, and even if Lester or Laney didn’t
pull the trigger, they still had plenty to answer to. They knew enough, the lady with the orange told me, to keep them locked up. The police had run a check on my car and found out my name and address. They’d seen the fresh tat on his wrist. They’d put it all together. They knew about Pablo. They knew about Slam Dent. They knew I’d given Lester a place to hide out all those months, and what they wanted to know was how it all came to be. Did I have knowledge of these murders in New Hope? Did I knowingly harbor a criminal?

“He told me he didn’t have anything to do with that business here.”

“Oh, he had something to do with it all right. More than he let on with you.”

I was worn out from the road. I felt my head spinning and my knees about to buckle. Lester had promised me he was innocent. I held to the edge of the counter to keep from fainting.

“He told me he didn’t have anything to hide.”

The woman laughed. “Sugar, a man who says he doesn’t have anything to hide most certainly does have something to hide.”

I wanted to laugh at how silly that sounded, but I couldn’t. I understood that Lester was in trouble. I understood that I’d have to answer questions. I’d stepped up to him that evening on the corner of Oak and Fry, and I’d said, “Hey, good-lookin’.” I had no idea where I was going then, but I knew where I was now. Deep in his real life, the one I tried my best to cover with a lie. Here I was, playing a part in this tale of witchcraft and murder. All along, I thought I was the one inventing a story when really it was already written, cast like a spell, just waiting for me to appear.

LANEY

June 2010
MT. GILEAD, ILLINOIS

I
went on trial first. It was summer again, a little over a year since that May morning when Lester came out onto the porch and told me Rose and Tweet were dead.

He told the story again on the witness stand. He answered all the State’s Attorney’s questions. He spoke in a soft voice, and said, “Yes, sir,” and, “No, sir,” when need be. I don’t harbor any bad feelings toward him on account of he testified against me. Nothing he said was a lie. I closed my eyes and listened to that voice, and it tore me up inside to think of the trouble we were in. We could have gone on being sweethearts. We could have gotten married, had kids, lived a regular life. None of that was possible now.

Was it true, the State’s Attorney asked Lester, that he and Elaine Volk had been involved in a romantic relationship?

“Yes, sir.”

Was it true that there’d been a plot to murder Rose MacAdow?

I sat at the defense table, my head bowed, my hands folded in my lap, but when I heard that question, I couldn’t keep myself from raising my head to look at Lester. My eyes, folks would say later, looked so big. You could hardly believe I’d been involved in such a story. Laney Volk. Always a slip of a thing, I’d nearly wasted away in jail, losing so much weight my face was all eyes. I wore a blue dress with white cuffs on the
sleeves and a white Peter Pan collar. A dress Mother had brought for me. “Oh, Laney,” she’d said. “What in the world have you done?”

Lester cleared his throat. “I want to tell the truth here. I want to explain how it all happened.”

The State’s Attorney was a squat man in a gray three-piece suit, the vest of which stretched across his ample stomach. He had neatly combed silver hair, and a friendly face. “That’s what we want, too, son. You go ahead when you’re ready.”

Lester said that, yes, at one time there’d been a plot. “Then Laney changed her mind. We both changed our minds. Even Delilah. She didn’t come to Rose and Tweet’s that morning meaning to kill them. Things just happened.”

That was true, I said, when, despite the resistance of my attorney, I insisted on taking the stand and telling my side of the story. I thought I had to because the girl—the goth girl with the thick black coils painted from the corners of her eyes onto her cheekbones, the girl who kissed me outside the South End on the night Delilah fell for Tweet—had come forward to tell the story of how I’d given the horns-of-the-devil sign that night, and she knew I worshipped Satan.

“I was just singing,” I said from the stand. “All I did was give the sign for rock ’n’ roll.” I held my fingers up to demonstrate. “I can sing,” I said in a small voice. My mother was crying, and I knew she was thinking about that talent I had and how she’d encouraged me and I’d never done a thing with the voice God gave me. “You might not think it to look at me,” I said, “but, really, I have this gift. I can sing.”

The State’s Attorney said, “Didn’t you already tell the police that you burned a black candle with Rose MacAdow’s name scratched into it? Didn’t you try to summon the devil?”

I admitted that I’d begun to believe that Rose had put a hex on me. “I started having horrible migraine headaches,” I said, “and I knew she had a doll that was supposed to be me, and she stuck pins into its head. Delilah said there was a hex on all of us, a death hex.”

“A death hex?” the State’s Attorney said.

I nodded. “Yes, sir. A hex to last as long as Rose was alive. The only way to stop it was to kill her. That’s what Delilah said.”

“We’re not talking about Delilah Dade now.” The State’s Attorney raised his voice. “We’re talking about you and what you did in connection with these murders.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “and what I mean to tell you is this: I let Delilah believe what she wanted to believe. I lit that candle, and when she said that about the death hex and what we had to do, I didn’t say anything to stop her.”

Was I present when Lester Stipp test-fired that .38? After the murders, did I let Gerald Hambrick take it from me to get rid of? Before the murders, did I help set a fire at the home that would eventually become the murder scene? Did I own a book of spells? Did I try to practice them from time to time?

I admitted that all of those things were true.

“Are you a witch, Ms. Volk?”

I picked at the buttons on one of my cuffs. I looked down at my bony, jittery fingers, and I swore they belonged to someone else. For a good while, I didn’t say a word, and I got to thinking that I could just shut up now and let the rest of my life play out with no help from me at all. I could give in to the future I’d made. Then the judge leaned toward me, and his chair creaked, and I knew I’d have to go on and do what I’d meant to do when I took the stand, which was to take responsibility for everything, to admit what I knew to be the truth: There were all these lives going on in people and they didn’t even know it, all these lives festering just beneath the skin. It didn’t take much to call them up to light and air. The prick of a needle here or there, and everything you thought you weren’t could get out and stain you forever, could ripple out to other people—you could even swear you loved them—and hurt them in ways you never could have imagined. You could be that person you saw sometimes on the news, that person who’d done something unforgivable and could barely face it.
Trust me
, I wanted to say.
It can happen
.

I’d see Delilah only one more time—at her trial, where I’d tell my story again, and my heart would break from the ugly look she’d give me, like I was no one she’d ever cared about at all.

At my own trial, I answered the State’s Attorney’s question. “A witch? No. I wasn’t really anyone at all. I was just a girl, but I knew that the way we were thinking was wrong.”

“You could have gone to the police, couldn’t you, Miss Volk? All along the line there were multiple chances to tell the police what you knew.”

I couldn’t deny that.