Summer of the Dead (11 page)

So she took her chances. She repeatedly questioned herself about it, going back and forth with the pros and cons, over and over again, but she wouldn't lock him in. Nor could she afford to hire someone to watch him in her absence—even if she could have persuaded her father to put up with a stranger in the house. Which he didn't want. And neither, come to that, did she.

Sometimes her apprehension seemed misplaced, her worry unwarranted. There were mornings when she arrived here and it was clear that he hadn't come out of the basement at all, not once, much less left the house. But something was changing. He was getting angrier, more restless. Unpredictable. These days, when she got home and waited a minute or so in the kitchen, letting the house settle in around her, listening, then climbed down the rickety basement stairs, moving slowly, keeping a cautious hand on the rough-feeling rail, and called his name, doing it softly so as not to startle him—
Daddy, hey, Daddy, it's Lindy, it's just me
—she would hear him scuttling away from her like a frightened animal, thrashing, kicking, banging, tripping over boxes and tables, snarling at her. If she tried to approach him, he would lurch away to another corner, cringing at the doorway-sized punch of daylight at the top of the stairs, flinging up a meaty hand in front of his face to block it, then dipping his grizzled gray head.
Damned double shift,
he would sometimes mutter.
Gotta work a double shift. Ray, you got your end? Ray-boy. You hold on there, Ray
.
I'm coming on through.
Ray Purcell was her father's best friend. They'd started out in the mines together in the 1960s. Lindy had heard a lot of stories about Ray, although she never met him; he died of lung cancer in 1973.

Her father's agitation was definitely escalating. She didn't know why. She knew only that he was suffering even more these days, tormented by some frantic inner vision that chased him around the basement and—to her growing concern—sometimes out of the basement, too, and out of the house. These days, when Lindy came home in the morning after her shift and moved through the house into the kitchen, passing window after window, each window freshly anointed by the light of the rising sun, she would often find the back door ajar from where he'd come back home. Boot prints on the kitchen floor. And in her heart, a clutch of fear.

Like this morning.

Her knees felt wobbly, so she sat down at the kitchen table. She took several deep breaths, fighting off a wave of dizziness that emanated, she knew, from her apprehension. If she'd had anything in her stomach, she would've thrown it up; her guts felt kinked and clawed-at. At times Lindy was overwhelmed by everything, by the responsibility and the fear and the confusion. Was she doing right by her father, after all? Hiding him this way? Enabling him to stay where he was, the way he was? She thought she was protecting him, but was that what she was really doing?

There weren't many family members left. No one who lived nearby. And no one, certainly, whom Lindy trusted enough to confide in. She had some distant cousins on her mother's side in eastern Kentucky and another set on her father's side who lived up near Morgantown, but that was all; they never visited, and they picked up on partial truths and made their judgments from that. They knew Odell was big and mean and “touched in the head” now, as her second cousin Jeannie Stump liked to put it, but they had no idea about the true extent of his rages, or his night prowls, or about the fact that he lived mostly in the basement, in a space tricked up and fitted out to look like an old coal mine.

A week after Lindy's high school graduation, Jeannie Stump had made an unannounced visit. For a graduation gift, she brought Lindy a flowered tote bag and a makeup kit. Jeannie was a tall, broad, slump-shouldered woman in her late fifties with wiry gray hair and gray eyes. She lived by herself and worked at a nursing home, where her job was to push the chest-high rolling cart up and down the corridor each morning and each evening, dispensing pills to the old folks in tiny room after tiny room, a task that required her to speak loud and slow and to maintain, at all times, a sunny optimism blatantly at odds with the accelerating decay she witnessed daily.

Jeannie had taken one look at the way Lindy and Odell lived—the crumbling house, the isolation, the mess in the cellar—and declared, “Honey, listen to me—we've got to get you some help with your poor daddy. Gotta call somebody, okay? A government agency, maybe.” Jeannie meant well. Lindy was sure of it. But her failure to mind her own business caused problems.

Two days after Jeannie had gone back to Morgantown, there was another knock at the door—Jeannie's knock had been enough of an irritating surprise, now here was another—and Lindy found herself in the bustling, meddlesome presence of someone who identified herself as Gladys Davies, a caseworker with Raythune County Family Services. It turned out that Jeannie, suspecting Lindy might not make the call, had made it herself.

“We have a real good adult day care program,” Davies had informed Lindy. She blinked behind a large pair of rectangular eyeglasses that dominated her face. “I can sign you up right here and now.”

“No thanks,” Lindy said.

Davies frowned. She had dull red hair, and her fleshy body was corralled into a chocolate brown pantsuit. Lindy hadn't invited her to come in and sit down, but the woman had done so anyway, pulling a clipboard out of her gigantic black vinyl purse and placing it across her lap like a TV tray. There was a practiced snap and prim efficiency to her movements, as if the world were one big to-do list and she was on the lookout for boxes she could tick.

“We're fine,” Lindy added. She'd remained standing. Hand still on the inside doorknob, to facilitate—she hoped—a swift exit by this interloper.

“We've got lots of craft activities,” Davies said. “And a county bus can pick him up here every day.”

“No thanks.”

Davies seemed perturbed as well as puzzled. Then she sensed the real issue—or so she thought—and offered Lindy a brightly commiserating smile. “It's free, honey. Won't cost you nor your daddy one red cent.”

“Don't need it.”

A tiny sigh. So maybe that wasn't it, after all. The woman's voice was flat now, all the enthusiasm ironed out of it by Lindy's truculence: “Well, I can't force you, Miss Crabtree, but I hope you'll give me a call soon to set something up. You can't take care of him forever. Not all by yourself.”

“Yeah. I can.”

“Don't you have things you want to do?”

Davies's tone had dropped lower, and the effect was to produce an instant, insinuating try at intimacy. She went on, “Friends you want to hang out with? A boyfriend, maybe? Maybe check into courses at a community college? As long as you're looking after your daddy, your life is pretty restricted, honey. It doesn't have to be this way.”

“Yeah,” Lindy said. “It does.”

*   *   *

She was still sitting at the kitchen table, where she'd slung herself when the dizziness commenced, her bowed forehead pushed into clasped hands. A headache smashed repeatedly behind her eyes, like waves striking a high black rock. The recollection of the people who had recently tried to help—Jeannie Stump, the lady from the county agency with the big glasses—only made things worse. Made her feel even more alone.

They didn't get it. Nobody did. Lindy couldn't abandon her father. Couldn't let anybody see him this way. Couldn't let anybody know just how bad he was. She loved him, but it was more than that, too. More than love. It was something that didn't have a word to go along with it.
Not everything in the world has its own damned word,
Lindy told herself, the anger and the sorrow and the uncertainty building up inside her whenever she thought about her father, a shifting combination of emotions for which she had no vocabulary.
Some things just are what they are—and there's nothing to call them. No way to describe them. They just are what they are.
So she'd made him a place in the basement, in the darkness he craved. She wasn't trying to shut him away, out of her sight; she only wanted to make things the way he liked them. And she promised herself that as long as he lived, she'd take care of him. By herself.

Lindy lifted her face. The kitchen was bright now; another summer Sunday was under way. Each object in the small room—table, book, chair, floor, sink, counter, coffee cup, knife block—was clear and blunt and particular.

Knife block.

Black handles protruded from the wooden block, the heavy blades resting in their designated slots. She knew there were six slots—which meant there ought to be six knife handles.

Lindy counted the handles silently:
One. Two. Three. Four. Five
.

She counted them again. Faster this time, agitated, needing to know, afraid to know:

OneTwoThreeFourFive
.

There was a knife missing. The last one in the line. The biggest one. The one that, when Lindy was a child, used to frighten her. Each time she would see her mother pulling it out of the block by its handle, Lindy—knowing full well that the knife was intended for ordinary household chores, for harmless things, for chopping and slicing food—would be fixated on that blade, because it was as gray and dangerous as a shark's fin, and she would feel the fear growing inside her, as if its ascending gradations were precisely synchronized with the rising of the knife as her mother drew it slowly from the wooden block.

The last knife wasn't there.

Lindy's gaze scoured the floor, the countertop, but she already knew. It wasn't there. And she hadn't used the knife. She wasn't the one who had removed it.

Her eyes dropped once more to the floor, to the boot print, a terrible and unambiguous stamp verifying that—at the bottom of it all—she had no control over anything, not her father, not her world, and that no matter how much she tried, no matter how much she pretended otherwise, now she knew the truth.

It was coming.

 

Chapter Thirteen

“Buster.”

“Hey there, darlin'.”

Bell winced, glad that the conversation was occurring on the phone and not in person. If Buster Crutchfield, Raythune County's infuriatingly misogynist coroner, had been standing in front of her, she might have been tempted to pop him a good one, right in the mouth. She had had to endure his inane iterations of “darlin'” and “sweetie pie” and—most egregious of all—“cupcake” for many years now, but his mellifluous name-calling never seemed to get any easier for her. She made a fist with the hand that wasn't holding the phone and set that fist on top of the file folder in the middle of her desk. Then she closed her eyes, and kept going.

Back when she was new to the prosecutor's job, Sheriff Fogelsong had advised Bell to overlook Buster and his sexist lexicon, arguing that the coroner was an old man, set in his ways, and she'd be better served by outlasting him than by making a fuss. Well, the joke was on her: Five years later, Buster was still going strong. She'd missed her chance to demand that he address her as a fellow professional and not as a cocktail waitress.

It was Thursday, two days after Sheriff Fogelsong's return and one day before Governor Riley Jessup's visit to Raythune County, and Bell and the sheriff were still no closer to finding out who had murdered Freddie Arnett and Charlie Frank. The heat had continued to build—the heat from the summer sun, certainly, but another kind of heat, too, the kind that falls on sheriffs and prosecutors when the people who elect them are scared and angry. And have every right to be.

“I've been reading your notes on the Arnett and Frank autopsies,” Bell told him, “and there are a few things I'd like to go over. Do you have a minute?”

Buster indulged in a robust, prolonged sigh. She could imagine his round red cheeks puffing up, like those cartoon versions of the west wind, and his rubbery lips vibrating. “Oh, my, my, my,” he said. “Sorry to say, sweetness, but I've got a visitor here right now from the WVU medical school. This afternoon suit you?”

No, this afternoon most definitely did
not
suit her, Bell fumed. But she appreciated—grudgingly—the fact that Buster consulted regularly with physicians from the medical school to keep his lab procedures up to date. Hard to argue with that kind of initiative.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “Make it after four. I'll be in court till then.”

“Will do. Looking forward to it, hon.” Buster's concluding chuckle had a lascivious twist at the end, like a coiled dollop of soft-serve ice cream at the top of the cone.

Bell was disappointed. And yet it wasn't as if she lacked for diversions. An important trial was starting up that afternoon, one that Bell had decided to handle herself. If she were a mature person, a reasonable person, a levelheaded and rational person, she'd take a break now. Go for a walk. Get a cup of coffee, maybe.

Hell with that
.

She popped open her laptop. She was still curious about the man killed in Tommy's last weekend. How did the business card of a New York City lawyer get itself in his pocket? She clearly remembered the names on the card: Sampson J. Voorhees and Odell Crabtree.

She did a quick Google search for the first. Even with the refinements “attorney” and “New York,” the results were disappointing. There was a property transfer record from the early 1990s for an “SJ Voorhees & Associates” and little else. No news stories. No company Web site. Bell scrolled up and down the page, and the next several pages, just to make sure. Nothing.

The other name on the card, Crabtree, was a common moniker in Raythune County—which meant that getting to the bottom of it would require an altogether different search engine. For inquires of a local nature, she'd go to a woman whose knowledge base—and the speed of her retrieval of same—would leave Google gasping for breath while she thundered past, panting and sweaty but triumphant: Rhonda Lovejoy, lifelong resident of Acker's Gap and close relation to 98 percent of the residents of said county.