Dead Right (15 page)

“Do you think she wanted more children?”

“I don’t know. She had difficulty carrying me. Bonnie Ray, the neighbor across the street, told me my mother tripped and fel when she was seven months pregnant and nearly miscarried. The accident threw her into an early labor. They nearly lost me on the delivery table.”

“You were two months premature?”

She nodded. “After that my parents were hesitant to try again. Which is why…” It felt almost sacrilegious to reveal what she was about to say next, but she’d avoided the subject of her mother for so long, she suddenly wanted to talk, to make sense of al the contradictions. The fact that Hunter was from out of town actual y helped. He had no previous knowledge of Eliza, no prejudicial opinion one way or another.

“What?” he prompted.

“They slept in separate bedrooms.”

“Every night?”

“I can’t say. I only had my mother for the first ten years of my life. At the time, there didn’t seem anything wrong with their not sharing a room. My mother said he snored, and that made it difficult to sleep, so they slept apart.”

“And your father didn’t mind?”

There was an undercurrent to this question that led Madeline to believe he had strong feelings on the matter.

“Not real y,” she said. “What made him angry was that she let me sleep with her. He thought she was coddling me too much.”

“Or maybe he wanted to visit her room occasional y, and knew he wouldn’t be able to if you were there.”

knew he wouldn’t be able to if you were there.”

“She took care of him before we went to bed.”

He raised his eyebrows. “
Took care of him?
God, you make it sound like she was doing chores.”

“I’m just saying it wasn’t like they never had sex, okay?”

“How do you know?” He leaned back on his hands.

“I know,” she said, unwil ing to expound on it.

“It looks to me like she preferred you to him. That might’ve rankled.”

Madeline didn’t argue. Like most children, she’d been so egocentric, she’d never questioned her mother’s devotion. It was just there, like the sun and the wind and the rain. But, in retrospect, she had to agree with Hunter. She’d definitely held the number one spot in her mother’s heart.
I
love you more than anything,
Eliza would whisper as she pul ed Madeline into the cradle of her body every night.

It’d been a long time since Madeline had thought of those words. Probably because, after her mother’s suicide, they’d felt like such a lie.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Her mother’s loss hurt almost as badly today as it had then….

He turned to yet another page. Her mother was holding her birthday cake, with nine candles on top. “I see a lot of pictures of you, a few of her, but not many of your father,”

Hunter commented.

“I told you, Dad worked too much. He was real y dedicated to the church.”

“He wasn’t present at your birthday party?” Except for the one that included her mother with the cake, the pictures on the page depicted Madeline and a few playmates.

“To be honest, I don’t remember. I know a friend’s mother took that picture, so probably not.”

“You didn’t miss him?”

“No. I loved him, but…it was after my mother died that we grew close. She sort of—” Madeline struggled to put fragments of memory into words “—acted as a go-between, I guess.”

“It doesn’t sound as if your parents were al that happy together,” he said.

Sophie sauntered in from the kitchen to investigate.

Madeline stroked her soft fur as she answered. “Every marriage is unique. There was some tension at times, but that’s normal, isn’t it?”

“Do you think they’d be married today if your mother was stil alive and whatever happened to your father hadn’t happened?”

“Of course. Dad didn’t believe in divorce.”

“Under
any
circumstances?”

Sophie jumped into her lap and began to purr. “He thought it was a sin.”

“Like most everything else.”

“I’ve told you before, he was a very religious man. He felt that Mom’s depression was his cross to bear, too. He even spoke of it in his sermons, many of which are in this box right here.” She gently pushed the cat aside, then rummaged through the scrapbooks and photo albums until she’d located the files.

Hunter accepted the folders she handed him, but he seemed more interested in something he’d spotted in the other box. As he drew it out, Madeline realized it was one of her mother’s journals—one that stil had at least half the entries in it.

“Did this belong to your mother?”

She nodded. She had a few of Eliza’s journals, mostly from the early years. As Madeline grew older and her mother’s depression worsened, Eliza destroyed more and more of what she wrote. The notebook she’d been using at the end had barely twenty pages left in it, most of them taken up with anecdotes about “Little Maddy,” and poems that were increasingly desperate-sounding and difficult to understand.

Hunter flipped slowly through the pages, perusing the contents. Madeline had separated this journal from the others several months ago because she’d been planning to read it. She thought it might bring her some peace to see the world as Eliza must’ve viewed it. But she’d never been able to overcome the resentment she felt over her mother’s final act. Or the irrational fear that she’d somehow “catch”

her mother’s disorder.

It wasn’t easy to see Hunter sifting through the pages of that binder. Madeline bit her cuticles as he read, fidgeting until he looked up. “It’s okay,” he assured her.

“What’s in there?” she asked.

“Some pretty bleak poetry.”

“I told you she was depressed.”

He pursed his lips and didn’t comment. “Mind if I cart a few of her journals to the guesthouse, along with your father’s sermons? I’d like to take my time reading them.”

“Why?” she asked impatiently. “My mother had nothing to do with my father’s disappearance. She’d been dead for six years by then.”

“People are complex beings,” he said. “Sometimes the roots of an event run very deep.”

“No one else has looked
this
deep.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.” He held up the notebook, a questioning expression on his face.

“Fine. Take it,” she said.

“Where are the others?”

She sorted through what was left and pul ed out several more as he searched his own box. “Don’t tel me this was hers, too,” he said, holding up a soft plastic Disney journal with a picture of Cinderel a on the front.

“Oh.” Madeline’s hand automatical y came up to cover her mouth.

“What?” he said.

She took a shaky breath. “That was my journal. My mother bought it for me. So I could write when she did.”

His voice softened. “Okay if I read it?”

“How could something I wrote as a ten-year-old possibly help you?”

“It probably won’t,” he admitted. “But there’s always that smal chance. You might’ve recorded something significant without knowing it.”

Madeline couldn’t imagine that she’d written anything too private at such a young age. She had yet to discover boys, so there’d be no childish fantasies or girlish longing. She couldn’t even remember what she might’ve considered important enough to warrant a few words. Miscel aneous scribblings about her parents? School? Her friends? The animals on the farm? The farm itself?

“I guess,” she said. “I’m afraid you won’t find it very interesting, though.”

“I’m not sure about that. Meeting you as a little girl might be more interesting than you think.” He tried to open the journal, but it was locked. “You got a key for this?”

“No. I can’t believe I even have the book. I haven’t seen it for years.” She hadn’t become fanatical about saving things until later, after her father had disappeared. “Go ahead and break the lock.”

“You don’t mind?”

She shook her head—but regretted that decision the moment the journal fel open.

Ray sat alone in his mobile home. The TV squawked in front of him, but he wasn’t real y watching it. There was too much going on in his mind, too many memories floating around. Memories of the keenest excitement he’d ever known—and memories of the deepest fear.

He got up and began to pace the wel -worn carpet, stopping to peer through the curtains when he heard a car pul into the trailer park.

It was a beat-up truck that stopped at Ronnie Oates’s place down the way.

Dropping the curtain, Ray went into his smal kitchen, intending to distract himself by fixing something to eat. But there wasn’t anything in his cupboards. He needed to go shopping, but he didn’t dare leave his house.

They’d found the reverend’s dildo! He stil couldn’t believe it.

Had they found the pictures, as wel ?

“Must not’ve,” he mumbled for probably the mil ionth time. If they’d discovered the pictures, the police would’ve been knocking on his door long before now. Katie and Rose Lee were in a lot of them. Ray had burned the ones the reverend had given him—years ago. After it was over, he didn’t like seeing what he’d done. And he wasn’t stupid enough to keep any proof of his actions. But the preacher was never satisfied. His excitement fed off those pictures.

Ray had sometimes wondered if he had one stuck in his Bible when he was preaching on Sundays, so he could look down and see it.

There were certainly plenty to choose from. Hel , Ray had even taken a few of them. One he’d snapped right there in the reverend’s study at the church, with Katie tied spread-eagled on the floor and the reverend pretending to be some kind of porn star.

The reverend liked it when Ray made a show of it, too.

So they’d watch each other, trade off, get even more creative with what they’d do to the girls. One time, Barker put a col ar on Rose Lee and dragged her to the pulpit. He loved that because it showed how powerful he was. The reverend believed he could get away with anything. And Ray had started to buy into that belief. He remembered taking a picture of Barker making Katie bend over one of the pews while he rode her doggie-style, yanking back on that col ar if she so much as whimpered.

That was the day Barker had demanded Ray use the dildo on his own daughter. The reverend’s eyes had gleamed feverishly as he coaxed, bribed and encouraged Ray, who’d gotten so caught up in it al that he’d final y crossed the line the preacher had been begging him to cross for months and had sex with his own daughter.

Rubbing his hands nervously over his pants, Ray cursed.

How was it that those memories made him hard even while they made him sick?

Because he’d do it again if he could. He’d just never had the opportunity. Without the money and cover provided by the preacher, he wouldn’t have done it in the first place. He would’ve been too scared. Since then, he’d paid a few underage prostitutes in Jackson. And he liked the kiddie porn he viewed on the Internet so much, he knew he’d go hungry if he had to choose between his ISP and the grocery bil . He’d already stolen his mother’s diamond ring and her real silver and hocked them to buy the computer equipment he wanted. But the pornography, along with his fantasies and his toys, were enough for him these days. With his surrogate devices, there was little fear of punishment. Just play; just pleasure.

It had been the damned reverend who couldn’t get enough of the real thing.

And now they’d discovered the dildo and the panties….

Ray kicked over a chair, then closed his eyes and shook his head. Even if they found his semen on those panties, they wouldn’t be able to trace it to him. They didn’t have his DNA on record; they’d never had any reason to get a sample.

He just had to lie low and wait for it to blow over. Look at Clay Montgomery, he thought. From al indications, he’d committed murder and gotten away with it. The Stil water Police didn’t know their heads from their asses. He’d be fine.

Grabbing his truck keys, he stalked out of the trailer and headed over to the Piggly Wiggly to buy some groceries.

10

T
he folded piece of paper that fel out of Madeline’s childhood journal made her stomach lurch. She knew instantly what it was. She’d taken that paper out of the garbage after her father had wadded it up and thrown it away. She hadn’t seen it in twenty-seven years, but every word, every line, was indelibly imprinted on her memory.

When Hunter picked it up, she didn’t stop him. She probably would have, except that she couldn’t breathe. She watched his long fingers open the sheet, watched his light blue eyes scan the contents.

After several interminable seconds, he raised his eyes.

“Your mother was going to leave your father?”

Madeline’s throat burned with the difficulty of holding back her tears. She reached for the paper he held instead of trying to speak, and he relinquished it to her hands.

Dear Mom:

I can’t go on this way. Each day is darker than the last. I have to leave Lee, as soon as possible. I can’t explain, and I can’t come to you. Not yet. I need money, though. As much as you can spare. Please.

Anything…

Tears blurred Madeline’s vision so she could no longer read. Blinking quickly, she pushed the note away before her emotions could completely overwhelm her. She didn’t want to see her mother’s beautiful script, to feel the poignant loss that settled so heavily on her shoulders. Would her mother have been any happier had she left Stil water?

The jagged edge of guilt seemed to cut Madeline like a saw—destructive, powerful, tearing. She’d first found that note when she’d discovered a false bottom in her mother’s jewelry box and had been so frightened by what she’d read that she’d started to cry. Her parents, who’d been watching TV, hurried into the bedroom. Then her mother stared with wide, desperate eyes as her father took the note and read it aloud.

He’d assured Madeline that it was just more of her mother’s unbalanced writing, a side effect of her “il ness,”

but Madeline would never forget the abject despair on her mother’s face.

Hunter recovered the note and set it to one side as he moved closer. Then he held her hand. She thought he might prod her for answers she couldn’t give, not right now, but he didn’t. They sat in silence, their fingers interlaced.