Revenant (20 page)

A
fter the commotion in the parking lot settled down, I sat at my desk and listened halfheartedly to Clive, the Saturday editor, persuade Brandon that the newspaper had to cover the story of Jack's burning car. Brandon was showing a loyalty to Jack that left me flabbergasted. I called Jack and left a message on his answering machine telling him to take his phone off the hook, in case other media had hold of the story. In his state, he'd only make matters worse for himself.

As I hung up the phone, a police officer tapped on my door and handed me a manila envelope. I tore into it. The drawing Mitch had sent over of the possible suspect was strangely familiar, yet it could have been almost any handsome man with regular features. His nose was perhaps a little too thin, the skin around his brown eyes feathered with lines that didn't come from laughing. Aside from the strange tension the artist had captured, there was nothing extraordinary about the face. I gave the composite drawing to Clive.

The entire front page of Sunday's paper would be devoted to coverage of the murders. We had a shot of the cemetery where the unidentified girl had died. The body had been removed before Joey took the shot, but the ground was soaked with her blood. I hoped it wouldn't reproduce so graphically in the paper. We'd run the composite drawing beside that, along with my story detailing the latest murder and recapping the other murders. The Sunday edition was going to pack a hard punch, but it wasn't irresponsible. There was no speculation in my story. No mention of mother complexes or attempts to explain the motivations of a serial killer. I quoted Mitch and Avery liberally in their efforts to calm coastal residents.

When Clive signaled me that my story was okay, I put in a call to the Biloxi PD. Jimmy Riley didn't work on Saturday. I called his home and got an answering machine. Instead of leaving a message, I decided to drive by.

Riley's home was impressive for a police officer. It was nestled in a private neighborhood on a lake, a split-level house with a pool and a boat dock, which was empty. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. Chances were Riley was out at Chandelier Island running the red fish. I'd heard he was an avid sports fisherman.

There were no other leads to follow, so I drove home. The cats greeted me at the door, and I petted my way into the house. I'd come to rely on the felines. They needed me, and it gave me pleasure to meet their demands. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the blinking red light of my answering machine. While the cats ate a can of high-end food, I checked my messages. Kev Graves was first, and he sounded tense. There was also a call from Dorry, telling me that Mother had bought a pork roast because she knew it was my favorite. They wanted to go to Foley, Alabama, to the outlet stores Saturday afternoon. Tommy was on call all weekend at the hospital, and the kids were busy so she was free to shop if I had time.

The very idea was terrifying. I'd been with Dorry on a shopping spree. There was a certain point where plastic could actually produce enough friction to combust.

I called Kev back first.

“You were right,” he said. “The good doctor is playing doctor with that nurse.”

“Can we get photos?”

“Are you sure, Carson?”

“Yes. Never go into a fight with an unloaded gun.”

“Okay. I should have photos and video by Monday morning.”

“Yeah, Tommy's on call all weekend, or so he told Dorry.” I hesitated, then asked anyway. “Why do you think he'd be with this woman? I mean over Dorry? Is she prettier?”

“She's not as pretty as Dorry. She's younger.” He sighed. “It's not a choice of either-or,” Kev said. “He has Dorry. I don't think he has any intention of divorcing his wife. This is just a piece on the side. You know, he'll buy this girl a car or a pool or some big-ticket item that she couldn't really afford on her own. He'll fuck her silly for about five months, and then he'll ease out of the relationship and wait for the next pretty nurse who makes him feel
muy macho.
”

“Why do men do this?” I didn't understand this behavior. Loss, not adultery, had killed my marriage.

“The honest truth?” Kev asked, not bothering to hide his anger. “That little nurse comes without baggage. She can pretend that Tommy Prichard is the most wonderful man in the world. She makes him feel special and virile. He meets all of her expectations and then some. A real relationship doesn't work that way.”

There were men in all professions who lived that life, but medicine created a stratified society—the gods and the minions. Gods, as everyone knew, took what they wanted. Minions supplied it. Dorry was just another minion, and one without even the courtesy of a professional title. Mother and wife didn't carry a lot of respect in a world where doctors had the power of life and death.

“Nail him, Kev. If Dorry does decide to divorce him, I want to clean him out.”

“You got it.”

I hung up and called Dorry. My intention was to beg off the weekend, but when she answered, I could hear in her voice that she was pushing hard to be her perky self. Pity made me concede to a trip home.

“I want to talk to Daddy,” she said. “About going back to school.”

“To college?”

“Yes.” She was instantly defensive, a tip as to how low her self-esteem had sunk. “Daddy was saying the other day that he'd pay your bills if you wanted to go to pharmacy school. It's not too late for me.”

“Of course it's not too late,” I said. “I was just surprised. I think college would be a good choice for you.” Dorry wasn't blind. She was positioning herself for change.

“The kids are old enough, and Tommy is working a lot.”

“What would you study?”

“Maybe midwifery.”

That was a shock. Dorry had once been squeamish around blood, but fingers in car doors, falls, broken bones and knocked-out teeth of four children had toughened her. “I think you'd be wonderful as a midwife.”

“You always support me. That means a lot.”

I heard the emotion in her voice. “See you for dinner. No shopping, but I'll come for dinner.” I hung up.

My last call was to Michael. Acting on impulse, I thought I'd invite him to dinner in Leakesville. The clinic was closed, but an answering service patched me through to his cell phone.

“Batson Veterinary,” a female voice answered.

“Polly?” I was shocked, and it showed.

“Who is this?”

“Carson Lynch. I was calling for Michael.”

“Mike is busy. The clinic is closed on Saturday afternoon except for emergencies. He needs some time with his family, don't you think?”

“This isn't an emergency,” I said quickly. “But please ask him to call me Monday when he reopens.”

“I'm not his secretary. You can call back then.”

I started to say something else, but the line was buzzing. She'd hung up.

 

If I had to drive to Leakesville, I had the perfect day. I left the windows down and played a station of country oldies. I took a lot of back roads, meandering through stands of pines, ugly subdivisions on clear-cut acreage and bottoms where the smell of a free-running stream reminded me of my childhood.

I stopped at Brushy Creek and took off my shoes. The water was icy, and I remembered the days when Mother brought us to the creek with a watermelon to chill in the shallows and have a picnic lunch. Dorry and I had hunted Indian relics in the sandy clay bluffs of the creek. We'd found arrowheads and shards of pottery. I'd taken a lot of them to Miss Lizzie, an elderly black woman who was said to be a conjurer. She'd told me stories of a time and people left behind in the past.

The water was bitingly cold, and I waded for only a few minutes before numbness made me slosh out to the bank. I drank a Diet Coke while my feet dried in the sun. Then I put on my shoes and continued to Leakesville.

Dad was still at the store, and I was left alone with Mother in the kitchen. The smell of the pork roast made my mouth water. The thought of spending an hour or two alone with her made me think of the pint of bourbon tucked in my truck.

“You look better,” Mama said, her pale gray eyes examining me. I'd seen them warm when she looked at Dorry, or pictures of Billy. But never for me.

“I'm sleeping a little better.”

“You never were a good sleeper. Not like Dorry. She'd go to bed and be in the same position until I woke her the next morning. I was as likely to find you out walking in the moonlight as tucked up in bed.”

“I must have worried you a lot.” It was actually a revelation. I'd never considered that my nocturnal searches for fairies would worry anyone. There had never been a time when I'd felt unsafe in the woods around my house.

“I was always concerned that you'd make it to the river and fall in and drown.”

“You should have gotten one of those child harnesses and hooked me up.”

She laughed at the idea. “You were a wanderer.”

“I loved the woods. I was thinking of Miss Lizzie today when I was driving over.”

“She asks whenever I see her. You were her favorite. I always wondered what it was you two talked about. I felt like you'd rather be with her than with me.”

Again I felt a pang of revelation. “That was never true. It was just that Miss Lizzie…” How far could I take this? I decided to try. “Accepted me.”

“And I didn't. I was critical.” The sharp edge of disapproval that I knew so well had crept into my mother's voice.

“You were only trying to protect me,” I said, hoping to mollify her. I didn't want my father to come home to tension. I didn't want to spend an evening sitting poker stiff around a table of food I couldn't swallow.

“You'd take off after school and I wouldn't see or hear from you until it was time for bed. I'd be frantic when you finally came dragging home.”

“I'm sorry, Mother. I never realized how much I worried you.”

She turned her back on me and began chopping the celery for potato salad.

“Can I help?” I asked.

“You never liked to cook.”

“I'd like to help now.” There was such bitterness between us. It felt hopeless, but somehow I had to make it through dinner. How was it that my mother and Dorry could laugh and carry on and enjoy being with one another? I brought up only bad memories and bitter emotion.

She put a chopping board in front of me with an onion, pickles and hard-boiled eggs. She continued to work on the celery as I chopped the other ingredients. She liked things chopped fine, and I tried to make them uniform, the way she liked them. I'd never been able to perform the simplest task to her specifications.

When everything was diced, she took the ingredients without comment and mixed the potato salad. When she turned with a spoonful for me to taste, I was surprised.

“Delicious,” I said, “as always. Dorry is right. There are some things that never taste as good as the way you make it.”

“That's imagination,” she said, but she was pleased.

“I guess it's association with a time and place where everything seemed good.”

She put her hand on my shoulder and gave a light squeeze. When I didn't stiffen or pull away, she gave a tentative smile. I'd done my share of damage to her. That was something I hadn't understood until recently.

“Hannah, honey, I'm home.”

My father's voice brought a full smile to our faces. We both moved to give him a hug, and then Dorry arrived. The shadow of Billy entered the room. Maybe I was the only one who saw him; maybe the others had simply learned to live with the absence of my dead brother more easily than I had.

“Do I have time for a ride before dinner? Dorry, want to come?” I asked.

Mom looked at her Bulova wristwatch with the thin, double-stranded, black, silk band. It had been her mother's and Mama had worn it every day since I could remember. “For an hour. Dorry, are you going to ride?”

“Are you kidding? I wouldn't be able to walk for a week. I'll stay here. I want to make some cream puffs for Emily's party tomorrow. The tearoom provides everything, but Emily really wanted homemade cream puffs.”

“You're a bad influence,” I said, teasing her. But I was halfway out the door.

 

There is no finer time in the Mississippi pine barrens than the spring. Wild dogwoods scatter the woods with delicate white blossoms. Clumps of black-eyed Susans bloom in the most unlikely places. Where the soil is sandy and damp, pitcher plants and buttercups lure insects to their deaths, and the mayhaw trees are laden with berries that make the best jelly in the world.

Mariah was too old to gallop through the woods as I'd done as a young adult, but then so was I. Even so, her muscle tone was good. Emily was doing a great job keeping her in shape. We headed down the river trail at an eager walk.

My offer had been sincere, but I was glad Dorry had decided not to come. I needed the solitude of the ride. I didn't want to be distracted from the beauty of the woods by chatter or the need to focus on another person. I wanted to be with Mariah. We'd been friends for a long time.