Cementville (34 page)

Willis was drawing a blank as to whose kid the deputy was. Big ears; could be Pekkar's kid. That would be a strange turn—half the customers here at the jail probably got picked up wandering away from Pekkar's Alley three-quarters lit. Maybe the deputy was one of Hap Spalding's kids, there being seven or eight of them. If so, he'd lost a brother at Blacksnake. Willis wished he knew for sure, because he ought to say something, offer condolence. Lem might know who the kid was, but they were sitting too close to the desk, and even if Willis asked in a whisper, the deputy would hear. Willis glanced at Lem.

Lem was getting agitated, which was not a state one often saw him in. “Reckon they'd mind if we went in?” he asked. He hadn't taken his eyes off the closed door that Willis knew led to the kitchen. A kitchen that also served as the interrogation room.

The deputy looked up from his paperwork and gave a slow,
apologetic shake of his head. “Sorry, Mr. O'Brien. I'm sure they'll be out directly,” he said.

Willis paged through a yellowed leaflet.
The Sunday Visitor
. June 1961. He threw it down. The door to the kitchen opened, and Alden Wilder came out. Lem stood up, the prospect of every possible outcome writ large across his face.

“He's—” Alden started to say. “Lem, Harlan is confused. I cut Sheriff O'Donahue off in his interview.”

“Confused . . . how? What are you saying?”

“O'D thinks he ought to stay the night. I don't disagree with him, Lem. We'll call the VA and see if we can schedule an evaluation.”

“You aren't saying you think he's dangerous?”

“Not to anybody else. But nobody wants to risk Harley hurting himself.” Alden Wilder was solicitous and calm. He'd spent a lifetime being solicitous and calm. “They're going to let him rest, nobody's going to bother him tonight, no more questions. Why don't you go on home now.”

“But what am I supposed to tell Lila?” Willis's neighbor, as sturdy a man as he'd ever known, stood there before the lawyer with his arms hanging limp at his sides. Lem swallowed hard and cleared his throat, but still his lips trembled. His eyes searched Alden Wilder's face.

“We'll let you know in the morning as soon as we hear from the VA. I'll give you a call myself, Lem, I promise.”

Willis did not attempt conversation on the way home, which seemed to take much longer than the drive down. They found the women in the front room, much as they'd left them. When Lila saw that Harlan wasn't with them, she started in with renewed hysterics. Katherine looked questioningly at Willis. He raised his empty hands in a hopeless gesture.

“Oh, not to worry now, Mother!” Lem said with a cheer so hollow even a child wouldn't have been fooled. “Our boy is sleeping soundly. Ate a slice of cake and nodded off. You know how a full belly has always made him sleepy.”

Lila frowned at her husband over a handful of Kleenex. “Cake?” she said.

“I think the Holy Ghost Sisters take a big cake over there to the jail once a week or so. Isn't that what they said, Willis?”

Willis pressed his lips together and nodded.

Katherine patted Lila's knee and stood to go. “You rest, too,” she ordered.

Walking home, Katherine clutched her sweater around her, and Willis drew her near to share his heat.

“Cake?” she said. “Seriously?”

Willis chuckled. “I think Lem was more worried about Lila than he was about Harlan.”

“Understandably. She's a rare bird, our Lila. I won't be surprised if this lands her back at Our Lady of Peace.” Their neighbor had spent extended periods at the mental hospital in Louisville every few years for what she called her “spells.”

It was midnight and Carl and Maureen were still up when Katherine and Willis reached home.

“To bed, you!” Katherine said to her daughter.

“What happened though? I've been waiting all this time!” Maureen wailed.

“Nothing happened. The sheriff needed to ask Harley some questions. That's all,” Willis said, and when Maureen started again, “Sh-sh-shh! Everything's going to be okay. Don't worry, Maureen, you won't miss anything. Bed. Now.”

And she did trundle off, complaining softly, tiredly, of the unfairness of every aspect of her life. She turned at the bottom of the stairs. “Oh, yeah. Billy came home.”

“He's home now? He's upstairs?”

Willis detected a note of hope in Katherine's voice.

“No,” Maureen said. “He went out again when we told him about Harlan getting arrested.”

“Not arrested—” Katherine started. Maureen trudged up the steps.

“Did he say where he was going?” Willis asked Carl. He realized he was holding his breath.

“What happened though?” Carl said, his repetition of Maureen's words almost comically lacking inflection. Willis still hadn't gotten used to his brother's flat voice. He was ashamed of the uneasy feeling he got whenever he was around Carl. It occurred to him that, next to Maureen, probably nobody had spent more time with Carl than Harlan O'Brien. His brother deserved a better answer than the one they'd given their thirteen-year-old daughter.

“He was taken in for questioning, same as half a dozen other people. They need to find out who killed Jimmy Smith's wife. And the Ferguson girl,” Willis said. “Alden Wilder was there to make sure the interview went okay. You know, see to it that Harlan was treated fairly, that his rights were respected, and so forth.” Willis really wasn't very good at this, and he wished Katherine would step in. He looked at her to signal as much, but she was puttering at the stove, putting away the pans from dinner and getting out the skillet and coffee pot for tomorrow morning's breakfast.

“What are they going to do to him?” Carl said.

“Do to him?”

“Will they shock him?”

“No, Carl! God no. What—” Willis stopped. The only experience his brother had with someone being
taken in
was when he himself was taken to Eastern State Hospital, where his family proceeded to leave him for half of his life. Willis rubbed his face with both hands, suddenly overcome with exhaustion. Katherine was behind him then, running a cool hand across the back of his neck. She sat between the two men.

“Harlan is in good hands. He's safe. The sheriff is with him. Alden Wilder will make sure it all goes smoothly. We're all going to be okay,” she said again.

How did she do it? How did she say such things with no apparent shortage of faith that this was true?

* * *

A
LDEN
W
ILDER AVAILED HIMSELF OF
the wobbly toilet at the jail, washed his hands at the porcelain sink hanging from the wall. The call summoning him to the jail had come as he and Jane were sitting down to dinner. He had polished off the last ounce in the bottle of whiskey left from his retirement celebration. The Judge's clerk started in with an apology for calling him at home. And then the Honorable Freeman Hume himself came on the line.

A favor
, he said. Last one, he promised. The sheriff was insisting they had no choice but to bring Harlan O'Brien in for questioning, and could Alden please be there, as a precaution. Alden braced himself for Freeman's bombast, listening for the gist of his old friend's request. The bottom line was that if word got out that Cementville was the kind of place that would prosecute a decorated war hero, their prospects of landing another factory in the county would be shot. This was no time to be in the national spotlight again, Freeman Hume said, not after the scourge of the war losses and the pall of mourning and so forth. These murders would be ignored in the larger world, if they weren't so bizarre and non-normative for our town.
Non-normative
. Had the Judge actually used that word? Apparently the Fergusons had gone up to Frankfort about the death of the girl, even got an audience with the governor.
The governor!
Hume huffed with indignation. Who would have thought they could get themselves organized enough to file a complaint to the Commonwealth's Attorney? The judge rambled from one topic to another, clearly discommoded. That Vietnamese woman was some kind of geisha or something . . . Levon Ferguson was claiming Harley pulled a Bowie knife out from under the seat of his father's truck and came after him at Pekkar's Alley last week . . . oh, the suffering . . . oh, the sure-fire reaction of outsiders . . . temporary insanity, the Judge was thinking.

Alden wasn't listening anymore. This had to be all kinds of unethical, a sitting judge calling an attorney at home. But:
That's the ending I want to see for this story
, Hume was saying, and then he hung up.

Waiting in the jail's cramped kitchen for O'Donahue to arrive with Harlan, Alden rooted around the pockets of his coat for a cigarette, found his lighter, then remembered the pack of Camels lying on his nightstand at home. Holding the lighter up to the buzzing fluorescent light overhead, he read the inscription:
To AW, Worthy Adversary, Trusted Friend
—
FH
. Alden lifted his leather satchel from the floor and took out a yellow legal pad and three sharpened No. 2 pencils. He lined the pencils up then chose one to twiddle between his fingers, flipping and twisting it over his knuckles, a tiny baton.

When O'Donahue lead the lieutenant into the kitchen, Alden rose and shook the hand of each man. The deputy pulled out a chair for Harlan, greeted him familiarly—they were probably in the same class at Holy Ghost—then went out to the waiting room to meet Lem O'Brien when he arrived.

Harlan O'Brien sat, rigid as a man condemned, not by laws but by the jury crowding his tormented mind, a sentiment Alden conjured as he looked into the hooded eyes, the uncanted head rod straight. A line floated through Alden's mind, something from a half-remembered poem about the dead in war being more alive than the living.

Alden Wilder had never gone to war. In his years before the bar, he had never defended a murder suspect.

O'Donahue fetched a glass of water from the sink and placed it before Harlan. He engaged in one-sided small talk for five, ten minutes, and Alden realized the sheriff was the most uncomfortable person in the room.

“Mr. Wilder has come here to be on hand while we talk. He is willing to act as your attorney, Harlan, should it be decided you need one.” The sheriff paused, waiting for Harlan to speak. “Do you understand why we've asked you to come in this evening?”

Harlan let out a deep exhalation, long and slow. “I don't mind. It's okay. We had to kill them all. That's how it works.” He raised a hand to his chin, wiped it across his mouth, then pondered his hand as if it belonged to someone else.

“Are you talking about Augrey Ferguson?”

“Sheriff,” Alden said. “Harlan, you don't need to answer that right now.”

Harlan looked at O'Donahue as if just noticing his presence. “Who?”

“The Ferguson girl. She was found dead. Up near Judge Hume's barn. Do you remember that?”

“Augrey?”

“Yes. Augrey Ferguson is dead.”

“I suppose we killed her too. We had to, you see.”

“Giang Smith, too?” O'Donahue began, but Alden cut him off. “Well, Alden, for God's sake, what
can
I ask him?”

“Sheriff, all due respect, it doesn't seem as if Harlan is in a condition to talk this evening.” Alden stood. “May I speak to you in your office?”

O'Donahue followed him out, signaling to the deputy to come sit with Harlan in the kitchen. And together the two men made a plan.

They went out to the waiting room. Lemuel O'Brien rose from the hard wooden bench. Willis Juell was there too, probably as moral support for his neighbor. Alden looked into Lemuel's face and assured this father of a lost man that his son was going to be safe.

“I promise you, Lem,” O'Donahue said as he saw them out the door. “I'll stay up with him all night if I have to.”

Alden Wilder left the jail through the back door and was walking up the alley to where his car was parked when a figure moved in the shadows. Billy Juell leaned against the old stone wall of the jailhouse, the lit end of a cigarette causing his face to glow for a split second.

“Billy? That you?”

The boy stepped forward.

“What are you doing out here, son?”

“Nothing,” Billy said. “Watching. Waiting.”

“For?”

Billy mashed the cigarette with his toe. In the dark, Alden heard him let out the last smoke.

“How about I give you a lift home, Billy.”

“Nah, I'm all right. I'll be heading on home directly.”

Alden Wilder eased his Lincoln out of the gravel lot behind his building, stopped, and rolled down the window to try and convince the boy one last time to get in the car.

Billy bent down and said, “You don't need to worry about me.” His breath was a cloud of booze. “Everything's going to be okay.”

* * *

C
ARL IS FIRST TO WAKE
. He shoots from his cot on the sleeping porch like a man on fire. In the same instant Katherine, recognizing the voice of her son, rises, tells Willis not to get up, that she will tend to Billy. She is relieved when he does, though, and he follows her down the stairwell to the kitchen below. Billy is sitting at the table, Carl already beside him, patting him the way you might a strange little boy you found lost and wandering. From Billy's mouth come the indecipherable whimpers, the drunken repetitions to which each of them have listened over the summer as the spaces between his binges decreased. Carl fetches a glass of water. They wait for Billy to breathe in the air of home, the only thing that works to calm him.