Last Ragged Breath (39 page)

“Mrs. Stegner,” Bell said quietly. “I'd like a word with you, please.”

Confusion bloomed in Brenda's pale blue eyes. She didn't respond.

“You know Royce Dillard,” Bell went on. “Like Opal said, you were friends a very long time ago, weren't you? And you didn't like the way Ed Hackel was treating him.” Still no response. “You're a good woman, Mrs. Stegner. You want to protect Royce. He needs somebody to protect him, doesn't he? He can't do it for himself. He doesn't know about the world. He doesn't know what it can do to you if you're not strong.” Bell kept her hand on Brenda's arm. The woman had begun to nod, slowly and tentatively. “I think you want to tell me what happened, Mrs. Stegner. I think you do.”

Now the nodding stopped. Brenda blinked. “Tell you what happened when?”

“When you killed Ed Hackel.”

Brenda jerked her arm away. “What are you—
No
. No, no. You've got it wrong, you hear? I didn't kill anybody. Jesus—
me?
You can't think—you don't really believe—”

“Then where were you on the Thursday afternoon when Hackel was murdered?”

Brenda took in a torturously slow breath. She was a long time letting it back out again.

“I can't tell you that.”

“I need to know, Mrs. Stegner.”

“I said I can't tell you.”

“All right, then. I'll have to call the sheriff. We'll go into one of the interrogation rooms and we'll talk about it there. Your husband can either wait for you or pick you up later. Your choice.” She quickly recited the woman's Miranda rights.

The fear in Brenda's eyes had gone through several transformations. Now it reached a crescendo. Her hands began to shake.

“You've got to under—I can't—I won't—” Brenda's sentences kept stopping and starting. The trembling in her hands had expanded into the rest of her body. “I'm not—I didn't—Please—”

“What happens next is up to you, Mrs. Stegner.”

The woman raised her head. The expression on her face was a blend of resignation and heartbreak, with a tincture of something else, too, something small and dark and lost.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, fine. You want to know where I was on that Thursday—I'll tell you. My husband doesn't know. If you tell him, you'll destroy just about everything that matters to me—but I can't stop you. You'll do as you see fit.” She swallowed and then winced, as if she'd just had a taste of her own lies. “I'm a drunk. A lowdown, stinking, shit-faced drunk. Okay? That's how I deal with things. With the fact that there's never enough money. And nothing in my life except work and mud and crap. So two or three days a week—more, if I need it—I drive over to Swinton Falls and I go to meetings run by the Reverend Stony McHale. He'll vouch for me.

“Andy doesn't know. He thinks I go visit my mother. Because he thinks I'm
happy
. He knows I used to drink, but he thinks it was easy for me to quit. See, I'm a lot younger than he is, Mrs. Elkins. More'n twenty years younger. You can't tell it now, but I had big dreams. I had plans for my life. You shoulda seen me. Back when I knew Royce, back in those days—I had the boys chasing after me, let me tell you. And then things just—they just happened. That's all. The world just got away from me. I love Andy. I do. I love my husband—but I fucking
hate
my life.”

Brenda didn't kill Hackel. Her alibi was easy to check—so easy that she couldn't be lying. Bell knew Stony McHale and his work. She admired him. He wouldn't lie, either.

I was wrong,
Bell thought, regret washing over her.
And I put this poor woman through hell. I made her say out loud what she's spent years trying to push down and forget. But as Opal Lymon said: I'm the prosecutor. I'm doing my job.

“You go ask him, Mrs. Elkins,” Brenda continued, in a voice that was now so low and so hopeless that it sounded like the rasp of a rusty saw drawn across scarred wood. “You do that. You go ask the Reverend McHale about that Thursday. And all the other Thursdays. And the Tuesdays, too. All the days I have to go talk to somebody so I don't jump clean out of my skin. So I don't grab for that bottle. He'll tell you.”

Brenda lurched away without looking back, head down, thick boots hitting the hardwood floor with the flailing stamp of wild sorrow. She was returning to the husband who waited for her in the lobby, and who loved her without knowing her at all. Her secrets were simple ones, ordinary ones, but they were hers, and they would follow her forever, like the echoes of her heavy steps through the emptied-out courthouse.

 

Chapter Thirty-seven

“Royce,” Bell said. “It's time. Cards on the table, okay? I know what Hackel threatened you with.”

He wanted to look up at her, but he couldn't, and so he moved his head sideways instead of up. She could feel the stubbornness in his stare, even though she couldn't see his eyes.

Dillard sat on the edge of his cot in the narrow jail cell. His legs vibrated. The motion seemed to be outside of his control, a force that had overtaken him long ago and would keep on running until somebody somewhere—not him—was finally able to pull the plug.

In front of him stood three women: Bell, Serena, and Rhonda. Just outside the cell, slouching against the cinder block wall, was Chess Rader, night supervisor of the jail. It was dinnertime, and the other prisoners were busy with their pudding cups. Chess had delivered the last plastic tray to the last cell in line and then returned here.

“He was going to pay Vera to change her story,” Bell said. “Isn't that right? That's what Hackel held over your head. We know what he told you—that if you didn't sell the land, he'd give the signal. Set it all into motion.” She made her voice a tick gentler. “Your whole life would look like a lie. A fraud. Everything people have always believed about your family—twisted, torn up, destroyed. It's no wonder you attacked him. Lots of people would've done the same. He'd hit you with something a lot worse than a shovel.” She held up a manila folder. “I've got the paperwork ready. You change your plea to guilty. We explain it all to Judge Barbour. It'll work out a lot better for you, Royce, if you just admit what you did, and we can go from there.”

Serena reached down and touched the top of his shoulder. Dillard didn't pull away this time. He seemed unaware that her hand was even there.

“Royce,” Serena said. She spoke quickly. “It's your decision. If you'd like to think about this, I can ask Judge Barbour for a delay—and then we'll talk about it, just you and me, and—”

“Wait,” Dillard said. He pointed at Bell, without looking at her. “Yeah. What you're sayin'. That's it. That's what happened.”

Bell felt a flutter in her stomach. Hearing it confirmed, hearing him say it out loud, made this a moment she had both sought and dreaded. She'd thought she was prepared for his confession, but now that he was making it, she realized that she wasn't. Yes, she had wanted to win this case. She wanted it badly. But some small part of her—the human part, not the prosecutor part—had secretly held out a fragment of hope that maybe they were wrong. Sheriff Harrison was wrong. The town was wrong. All of them were wrong—except for Rhonda Lovejoy.

And now, this.

“Okay, then,” Bell said. All business. The jail cell had gone quiet. Bone quiet, Nick used to call this kind of intense stillness, by which he meant the quiet of bones in a coffin, locked into position for eternity. “Here's how it's going to work. When we go back into court tomorrow,” she said, snapping off the words, “you'll notify Judge Barbour that you want to change your plea to guilty. Then we'll ask for a recess and meet back here to start working on a plea deal once we've looked at—”

“No. No. Wait. Whoa, there,” Dillard said. His voice was jittery with alarm. “I never did it. I never killed him.”

Serena spoke before Bell could. “But you just said—”

“
NO
.” It sounded more like a punch of thunder than a simple word. Seconds after he had spoken, Dillard's body seemed to recoil from the press of their accumulated stares. “When I said, ‘Yeah,' I meant you had it right about that asshole,” he added, talking so fast that it verged on a kind of gravelly babble. “It was blackmail, plain and simple. He was gonna call me a liar. Me and my family. Said he'd gotten hold of Vera. Made a deal with her.” His head whipped around, his eyes landing on and then sweeping past the individual cinder blocks in the wall. “But I didn't kill him. I didn't do it. No way.”

Bell's sympathy was quickly turning into annoyance. She'd done what she could. She'd explored alternative scenarios, she'd considered other culprits, but everything ended up in the same place: the small dirt clearing in front of Royce Dillard's barn, with a shovel being thrust over and over again at the back of a man's neck.

“Best thing you can do for yourself now,” she declared, “is to change your plea to guilty. Let your lawyer here work out a deal. Now that we have a motive, we can look at possible mitigating—”

“I never did it,”
Dillard cried out. Spit bubbled up in the corners of his mouth, and when he wrenched his head from side to side, some of the spit flew out and landed on his shirt. He looked like a man in intense, searing pain, the kind of pain that was far worse than a physical wound. “I
hated
him—I hated his miserable stinking guts—but I never hit him with no shovel and I never killed him,” Dillard said. His next words came out as a sort of primitive incantation: “Never, never, never, never, never.”

This was not some swaggering defendant, trying to con them with lies and evasions. This was a man turning himself inside out, exposing his soul. He was vulnerable now, Bell thought. If she could push him just a little more, she could get him to admit his guilt. Then she could agree to a more lenient sentence—lenient only in comparison to spending the rest of his days in prison.

“Royce,” Bell said. “I'm going to ask you one more time. On the lives of your dogs—on the life of Goldie and the rest, and please don't ask me to name them all, because frankly, I don't think I can—do you swear to me, right here and right now, that you did not kill Edward Hackel? On your mother's memory—do you swear you didn't do it?”

He was breathing hard. The breaths were husky and slow, swimming in phlegm. He shook his head back and forth. His face was somber and filled with pain, but his eyes were bright. Bell had been so certain that he was about to confess—she had named the things most sacred to him, his mother and his dogs—that when he didn't confess, she felt as if someone had yanked out a chair just before she sat down in it.

“On my mother's memory,” he intoned, “and on the lives of my dogs, I swear I didn't kill that sonofabitch.”

A moment passed. The only sounds came from prisoners in the other cells up and down the line. One man hummed, then stopped. Another bounced a single time on his cot, making it squeak.

She had tried, and failed. He wouldn't budge.

“Okay, Royce,” Bell said. She was weary, and resigned to what would happen next. She'd given him his chance. “That's it. I'll leave you be. Big day tomorrow. Get yourself a good night's sleep. Don't imagine you'll be having any more company.”

He lowered his sleeve, with which he'd wiped the spittle from his lip. He was settling himself down. “Nope. Not unless that lady comes by again.”

“What lady?”

“Owner of that company that's puttin' in the resort.”

“Carolyn Runyon.”

“Yeah,” Royce said. “She's come by here a coupla times to see me.”

Bell looked at Chess. “I've never seen her name in the log.”

Chess shrugged. “Can't say. She hasn't been here when I was on duty. But some of the other guys aren't exactly vigilant about logging in visitors' names. Especially if you wave a ten-dollar bill under their nose.”

Bell's eyes consulted Serena, who shook her head. “News to me, too.”

She turned back to Dillard. “So Runyon came to see you.”

“Yeah. Doesn't stay long. Just long enough to say that if things don't go my way in the trial, she knows some real good lawyers for the appeal. Said everybody deserves a fair shot.”

All at once it was clear to Bell. It had not been clear to her earlier because there was too much in the way—too much history, too much fog, too many mountains.

Bell finally understood what had happened in the last few minutes of Ed Hackel's life as he stood in the gray twilight by Royce Dillard's barn. She knew who had killed him, and she knew why. All she had to do now was figure out how to prove it—and do it before the case went to the jury tomorrow.

 

Chapter Thirty-eight

Sometimes Nick Fogelsong thought about Carlene's two little girls—not so little anymore, but he remembered them that way, and so no matter how old they grew, he would always see in them the three-year-old and seven-year-old they once had been, running around the backyard when they visited him and Mary Sue, hair streaming behind them, moving in and out of the shadow of Smithson's Rock—and he wondered what it would have been like.

Having his own children. His and Mary Sue's.

He'd been thinking about it tonight. He only let himself go there when he was alone. The night sounds of the hospital wound themselves around his thoughts until everything dissolved into one thing: the sounds and his thoughts, neither conscious of the other.

It was a natural thing to wonder about—would they have been boys or girls, dark or fair? But it carried a hurtfulness inside it, too, that kind of speculation, like something shiny and pretty you see on the sidewalk and so you reach down and pick it up, and then discover that it's a piece of glass. Before you know it, you're bleeding.