The Covenant (23 page)

“It was in her drawer. Maybe it's one of Holly's. She does her laundry here sometimes.” It wasn't Holly's. Now that I was wearing it and seeing my areolas and pubes through the sheer fabric, I remembered seeing the same suit in one of the peekaboo photos I'd found in Sam's suitcase.

I went inside to change and found Reece's team photo lying on the floor in front of her desktop computer. I picked it up and hung it on its nail, then locked the bedroom door to keep out any surprise visitors while I tossed the entire room. I went through her drawers looking for a compromising photo of her daddy, a diary, maybe a love letter taped to the underside of a dresser drawer. Jenny told me that she'd never had the heart to go through Reece's clothes, so I was looking at things pretty much as she'd left them the day she died. I dumped her jewelry box on the bed, but didn't find anything too expensive for a teen girl. I turned the pictures off the walls, including the team photo, felt the paper backs for loose spots, pried off the cardboard, peeled back the posters and magazine clippings that she had taped above the bed, shifted the bed and checked the box springs.

Nothing. I got the feeling somebody had already been over the place. It was too clean, too generic. Nothing personal remained—no ticket stubs, no snaps of her and her friends, no diary tucked away under her bras and panties. This wasn't a bedroom, it was a museum.

Then I thought, girls these days don't keep diaries and love letters, and their pictures are on their cell phones, but I hadn't come across a phone, either. Not the sort of thing a parent would let sit in a drawer, anyway, and she wouldn't have compromising photos on her phone, in case she lost it. I turned on her computer, but it took a while to boot up. It had probably been five years since anybody had looked at it.

While I waited, I picked out a little turquoise two-piece with a scallop shell over each boob. I looked at myself in the dresser mirror. I'd been clean for a year, clean but still living a junkie lifestyle in many ways—broken sleep, never seeing the sun, garbage for food when I could get food at all. A week of regular eating and semiregular sleeping habits couldn't erase a decade's worth of damage. I looked like the star of some sad television special,
The Little Mermaid—Where Is She Now?

The computer finally came up and I did a quick search of the hard drive for photo files, found a few family snaps but nothing out of the ordinary. Next I checked for saved emails and documents and mostly found old homework assignments, book reports and science projects. I opened her trash bin, but it was empty; then I checked her temp file folder without turning up anything incriminating. Her internet bookmarks folder didn't lead me anywhere, either. The last place I checked was her browser history. I found her email account right away, but without a username or password, I couldn't access it. I scrolled down the list until I saw a social website that had been extremely popular five or six years ago. I clicked the link and brought up the login page. The name Piglet59 was prefilled in the user name box. The website was still in business, but I wasn't. I tried all the obvious passwords—admin, combinations of names of family members, her name, her birthday, but nothing worked.

This girl had covered her tracks better than most criminals. Either that, or someone had covered them for her.

*   *   *

Among the ennui-afflicted bourgeoisie of Stirling Estates, any event was an occasion for a party. As soon as people heard that Jenny's air conditioner had broken, they were lining up in the driveway bringing coolers of ice, cases of beer, boxes of wine and buckets of cheap Mexican booze. Mostly women, friends of Jenny, which suited Nathan just fine as he was too busy chasing expensive tail to pay attention to poor little me. I noticed he spent a lot of time courting Annette LaGrance, the HOA secretary, and she did little to dissuade him. By her second margarita she was sitting in his lap. Her daughter, the
Elle
model, played with Cassie and Eli in the shallow end of the pool.

I spotted an older black man sitting on an upturned bucket at the end of Jenny's pier. I hadn't seen him come in, and no one had spoken of him or seemed to notice that he was there. I wasn't sure whether he was real or not, and I didn't want to point him out, in case I was the only one who could see him. I asked Jenny to show me the boathouse.

“We don't have a boat anymore,” she said as she opened the gate. I followed her down the path. “I sold it to Nathan not long after Sam died. There's nothing much to see.”

The wind was rising on the lake, blowing moist and warm as a sauna. Waves slapped hollowly against the piles beneath our feet. The old man turned around on his bucket and Jenny said, “Hey, Bert.” He lifted his hand in greeting but kept his eye on the fishing pole propped in front of him. His fishing line ran taut as a piano wire down into the water.

Jenny unlocked the door and opened it. Inside, it was little more than a kind of carport for a boat, no floor, just open water, with a pair of skids hooked up to an electric wench for lifting the boat out of the water. A couple of old orange life jackets hung from a nail beside the door, and a thicket of fishing rods stood in one corner, their reels a nest of tangled twines, rusty hooks, and bobbers. A single bulb swung from a wire dangling from the roof beam—the cherry on its teenage-slasher-movie cake. All it needed was a spear gun hanging over the door. “Beautiful, isn't it?” Jenny said. “Why did you want to see it?”

I thought up a lie and I thought it up quick. “I was just wondering if I could put a bed in here and get out from underfoot.”

“Don't be ridiculous!” She closed the door and locked it. “You're not underfoot.”

The old man reeled in his line. He pulled up a bare hook and set the pole aside, clucking his tongue. “Little babies keep stealing my bait.”

“You and Sam used to catch some big ones here,” Jenny said. She introduced me to Bert Quinn.

“Catfish as long as my arm,” he said as he baited his hook. His knuckles were as big as walnuts and the veins stood out like worms across the backs of his hands.

“Bert was Sam's shop foreman at the plant before it closed. When Sam started the landscape business, he brought in Bert as his partner.”

“I wasn't much of a partner,” he said. “Sam did all the work. All I did was make sure we had people to work.”

“You see that the job gets done, too. Sam would have been lost without you,” Jenny said. “
I'd
be lost without you, Bert.”

“Truth is, I ain't so sure I can do it without Sam.” He stared at the bare planks between his feet. “I can't run the business by myself, Jenny. Sam always handled that end. I don't know what I'm doing and I'm too old to start over. I'm near seventy years old this October. I need to retire, but all I got is Social Security and my stake in the company.”

“But you're doing fine. There's more business than ever, Bert,” Jenny said.

“There's plenty of business, but there ain't no money in it. I haven't paid you the first check, nor me neither. I don't know how Sam did it. I guess I ain't got his head for figures.”

Jenny rested her hand on his shoulder. “Neither do I, but we'll get through this. It will all balance out in the end.”

“It pains me to say, Jenny, but I was hoping you might buy me out, so I can retire.”

She stepped back as though he'd hit her. “I don't know, Bert. You and Sam built this business. I can't run it all by myself.”

Bert cleared his throat and stood up. He looked at me, then back at Jenny with a pained expression, his old fingers working themselves into knots. “I'm just gonna … I need to use your facilities.” Jenny nodded and Bert passed me, headed toward the house.

Jenny walked to the end of the pier and stood, gripping the rail and staring out across the lake. I'd been there before. Not at this particular rail, but one just like it, staring into a whole lot of empty while your life slowly fell apart behind you. Husband, job, everything gone. “I take it you don't have the money to buy him out,” I said.

She shook her head and tried to tuck a strand of loose hair behind one ear. “I don't understand how Sam did it. He must have had some kind of magic with numbers because I can't get it to add up. The company is doing more work than ever. Bert has secured several new contracts since Sam died, but the money isn't there, so I haven't been drawing Sam's salary. The weird thing is, Sam didn't pay himself enough to cover our expenses. I haven't paid the mortgage in two months, Jackie. The bank is threatening to foreclose. I don't have the money to get the air-conditioning fixed. We've been living off the HELOC and the credit cards since Sam died, but the cards are maxed out. If it weren't for Eli and Cassie's survivor benefit checks from Social Security, I couldn't put food on the table at all.”

Back in the day I would have suspected Sam of dealing, but that suitcase full of cash, combined with the photos of his daughter, made me think he was into something far worse than selling blow to his neighbors. It was too bad I couldn't just drop that suitcase full of money on Jenny's doorstep and disappear, but I knew she'd only turn it over to the cops and never see a dollar of it. The only thing I was sure about was that somebody had killed Sam Loftin.

Somebody might have had a damn good reason.

I looked back up at the house and the pool party. Three more neighbors had just arrived. Some of these people brought food and drinks, but most of them were mooching off Jenny, drinking her liquor and cleaning out her fridge. She had hidden all this from me, just like she hid it from the people at the party.

“Why don't you sell this place, move somewhere you can afford?”

“You've seen the For Sale signs on our street. In this market, I'll never be able to pay off what we still owe on the house. We're under water. Jesus, I don't know what I'm gonna do.”

“What about Deacon? He could probably get the money from Mrs. Ruth. Enough to get you through, anyway.”

“He has offered a hundred times. I won't take charity.”

I knew how she felt. I'd lived off people's good will for the last seven years, doing everything short of hooking just to keep body and soul together. I'd sold myself in other ways, some of them worse than turning a trick.

And here I was still on the dole, living with Jenny. The rent I paid barely covered the food I ate. I didn't like it, but sometimes people don't have choices. Jenny didn't have many choices left. She just didn't realize it yet.

 

32

J
ENNY PUT BOTH KIDS IN HER
bed with the fan blowing across them to keep them cool, then joined me outside. We sat in a pair of teak deck chairs watching the light in the pool play over the brick chimney. I wore a fleece pullover, my hair wrapped in a big towel. Jenny borrowed one of my cigarettes and tried to smoke it and coughed a lot. The night was as warm as bathwater, buzzing with cicadas, the single light bulb above the back door swirling with bugs, but it felt better outside than in the house.

“I think I'd rather sleep out here,” I said.

“The mosquitoes would eat you alive.”

Jenny had gone to the grocery store that morning but now the fridge was empty. Her friends and neighbors had cleaned her out. I only had a couple of dollars in my pocket, but I offered to go to the store in the morning if she would lend me her van. She didn't say no, but she didn't say yes, either. Instead, she started talking about Sam again.

“We went through a rough patch about a decade ago, back during the recession. Sam was a plant manager, he made good money, enough to buy this house. I didn't have to work. I stayed home and took care of Reece and worked on my art.”

She had never mentioned her art before. I never saw her working on anything. There were a few paintings around the house that weren't the usual hobby-shop or furniture-store stock pictures, but I hadn't paid enough attention to them to look at the signature. I supposed she had given it up.

“Then the plant closed. Nobody was hiring. Sam couldn't find a job, so I got a job as a teacher's assistant. Sam started cutting yards here in the neighborhood and before you know it he had built a landscaping company literally out of nothing at all. It was amazing. He got his first big contract doing the landscaping here in Stirling Estates. After that he always said we were doing OK and I never worried about money. He took care of everything.”

So, Sam's first big contract was through the HOA where he was the treasurer. Jenny didn't seem to see anything unusual in that, and I guess there wasn't. That's just the way the world turns—for the wealthy. I didn't resent her for it. She had never known any other world. But if I didn't find a way to get Sam's life insurance money for her, she was going to find out. Soon.

It was getting late, but not too late for Deacon to pop by. We hadn't seen him all day. Jenny excused herself and went to bed. Deacon grabbed the last barely cool beer floating in a tub of melted ice. “Shouldn't you be practicing your sermon?” I asked. “Tomorrow is Sunday.”

“I never prepare beforehand.”

He had slipped off his usual black coat and undone his tie. “I just let the spirit move me.” He sat on the edge of the deck chair Jenny had recently vacated, kicked out of his shoes, peeled the black socks off his enormous feet, rolled his pants up to his knees and walked down the steps into the water. “By God,” he sighed.

“Busy day?”

“You could say that.” He took a long swig of his beer. “I'm run off my feet. I had to make three trips into Memphis to pick up lumber just this afternoon, then Ruth asked me to stop by.”

Malvern had a perfectly good building supply store of its own, but Deacon's people stopped shopping there after the third time they were accused of shoplifting. “How is Mrs. Ruth?”