The Covenant (33 page)

I hated to disappoint his thirty years of experience. “We were firebombed.”

Stegall stepped from the kitchen, half a chocolate cake falling out of his mouth. Fred did his famous double take. Jenny gripped my hand.

“Molotov cocktail through the bedroom window.” I made a sound like breaking glass. “Another one in the hall. Woosh. Downstairs, too. Front porch. Back door.” Thinking about the fire seemed to rekindle it in my flesh. My skin felt tight and dry, like an old glove left out in the sun.

Sheriff and marshal exchanged a worried glance. Malvern was a small town and its officers liked nice easy investigations where they didn't have to wait for the ruins or the bodies to get cold. They liked going home to supper at six o'clock Monday through Friday. They liked suicides and people smoking in bed and events that could be explained from a nice safe distance.

Fred took his notepad from his shirt pocket and licked a pencil. “What time was that?”

I didn't know the time. I wasn't wearing a watch. It was late. He put his notebook in his shirt pocket and leaned back in the chair, creaking the wood with his weight. “Renovating these old houses,” he said, thumbing his bracers, “I've seen it a hundred times. All kinds of accelerants laying around, paint thinner, mineral oil, piles of rags. Add some old wiring and a little carelessness…” He shrugged.

“There wasn't any electricity in the house.”

“A house will go up so fast, it's easy to think it's been firebombed.”

I sighed and pressed my fists between the cushions of the couch. “I saw the bottle come through the window and break on the floor.”

“Fire gets so hot, it blows out the windows,” Stegall added helpfully.

“I've heard houses groan and scream, just like somebody was dying inside it,” the fat old man said. “It's downright creepy. It's just hot gases escaping, but it makes you wonder sometimes. You never really know until you find the bones.”

I wondered if they would ever find Deacon's bones. There was nothing left of the house, nothing but a smoking white moonscape between two crooked, blackened brick chimneys rising impossibly slender from the ash. It had burned up even the largest beams.

“There's just one more thing,” Fred said, leaning forward and putting his fat, sooty hand on my knee. “Why didn't Mr. Falgoust escape with you?”

*   *   *

The next night, Jenny and the kids were all safely ensconced in their beds, already able to sleep again, already getting on with their lives. I returned to the scene of my resurrection, walked between the headstones white in the moonlight, and the shaggy cedar trees blacker than the night itself, my feet shuffling through drifts of brown needles dry as the still-smoking ash of Deacon's pyre. All the normal human superstitions had been burned out of me over the years, like an overexposed photograph. I had seen too much human meat, photographed too many murders and accidents and suicides, gone home too many times with the smell of them lingering in my clothes and woke up too many mornings with their blood dried to the soles of my Buster Brown shoes. A person can grow accustomed to anything. I found it far too easy to imagine Deacon's disarticulated bones sprawled six feet below my toes, too easy to visualize the ultimate ruination of a man. I tried not to think about it. I tried not to think about him coughing out the last breath of life as the black smoke lowered and the flames crept up his legs, nobody there to hear and remember his last words, nobody to deliver a last message to his flock of saints or even the woman or women he loved.

None of it mattered. Look at John Vardry, dead these seventy years in his dead wife's crypt. Lying among his bones the bits of shrapnel and German lead that put a swift end to his life. John Vardry, one of seventy-two million people killed in that war. Seventy-two million—a number too enormous to comprehend. Think of that many bodies stacked up. It beggars belief. Their bones would fill a hundred Superdomes. But was the world diminished one jot, one tittle by their loss? John Vardry had sired Luther Vardry and by extension this whole land and this whole situation, even me, standing here in a graveyard with nothing and no one to mourn.

That's all that mattered. The world would go on, but for me, it had stopped when I looked between the bars of the crypt gate and watched the burning house collapse upon itself and the fire go up like a whirlwind from hell. The world had not turned for me since that moment. I was frozen in that instant, like a phantasm endlessly repeating. A hundred years from now I'll still be sitting in that crypt, staring through the bars, and maybe the people living here might feel a cold spot in the air where my heart once hung, or maybe they would hear the hollow keening of my voice and tell themselves
It's the wind, only the wind, my dear, go back to sleep
.

Grief itself must leave a ghost. I was already that ghost, blind to the world's continuing revolutions. Two solid days of bone-deep grief had done that to me, worn me down like an old tooth. I hardly felt alive. My heart was an empty sack, still beating.

I didn't know what else to do. I looked up at the weak, hazy stars.
If only it would rain,
I thought.
Everything is dying. If only it would rain and wash it all away
.

*   *   *

I crawled back to Jenny's house in the dark and out to the end of the boat dock beneath the bug-swirled lamp. I stood there for I don't know how long, standing until I could stand no more, until I sank to the deck and sat with my feet dangling over the water, rubbing the crusty edges of hunger and exhaustion against the file of my grief until the file was dull and smooth, and I fell asleep and slept nearly six hours and woke with the sun baking my already baked face red as a beret.

I entered the kitchen and found Jenny standing at the stove watching a pot boil. Her hair was pulled up in a banana clip with a few wet strands of blond hair dangling in her face. “Have you eaten?” she asked over her shoulder.

“No.”

“Sit down and let me fix you something.”

“I'm not hungry,” I said. “What are you doing?”

She turned back to the stove and adjusted the flame under the pot. “Parboiling peas so I can freeze them.” She had been to the farmers' market.

“That's not what I meant,” I said.

“I know what you mean, Jackie.” She moved things around on the counter—a ladle, the lid of the pot, a shaker of salt, nervously rearranging them. “I'm doing the only thing I know how to do. I've been through this twice already. The only thing to do is to keep going. Try to keep busy.” She seemed to have grown smaller somehow, older. She looked frail, with her face sweaty from the steam. She wasn't wearing any makeup, and I couldn't recall a time when Jenny wasn't wearing her face after nine in the morning.

She rested her elbows on the edge of the sink and stared out the window at the sunburned grass of the back lawn. “Go upstairs, take a shower and get some sleep. We're going to church tonight.”

“Church!” I said, incredulous. “Why tonight?” She knew what I was thinking. More and more, she seemed to always know.

“We can't have a funeral, so Luther is doing a memorial service for Deacon.”

*   *   *

I dragged myself upstairs, but I knew I'd never be able to sleep. I sat in a chair by the window and watched Sam do his familiar old dance on the levee, over and over.
What the hell are you trying to tell me?

He wasn't trying to tell me anything. He really was just a broken record, worse than useless because all it did was remind me of what I could no longer hear. Like the photos full of orbs, reflections of light off dust motes. All destroyed in the fire.

Downstairs Jenny was making lunch for her kids. Holly was swimming laps in the pool, Nathan sitting on the edge of the pool with a stopwatch. Sometimes I knew what it felt like to be a ghost, to sit on the edge of other people's lives, unheard and unseen, often unsuspected, watching people come and go, unable to participate in the simplest human interaction—a touch, a kind word—never again belonging anywhere or with anyone. I still didn't believe in Deacon's idea of Jesus or redemption, heaven or hell, but if there was a hell, this was it. It must grieve the dead most to know how swiftly we forget them.

I couldn't stay with Jenny any longer. My reason for being there had burned to the ground. I couldn't go with them to Deacon's memorial and listen to that old man tell his lies. I had attended too many funerals already.

I slipped out of the house while they were eating lunch by the pool. The grass in the yard was brittle beneath my naked soles, the cedar boughs turning brown as though sprayed with herbicide by a leaky crop duster. The heat off the street was swollen and vampiric, baking the last life from the weeds growing along the verge and from anything that dared cross. I crossed, oblivious to the heat, worn out to my bones, aching in body and soul.

I went back to take a last look at the ruin in the light of day. The chimneys had fallen, one across the other. Crime scene tape was strung through the silent woods like confetti after a New Year's Eve party. Deacon's saints were gone, their camp as empty as if it had never been.

I went home to pack. They had gone to church, the house was empty, supper sitting on the stove. Even though I wasn't hungry, I picked up the plate and took it into the den, turned on the television and sat down with the plate in my lap—baked chicken in some kind of cold white sauce, cold steamed broccoli, glutinous beans with onions and peppers. I tasted nothing while I clicked through the channels, finding nothing, until there was nothing, just darkness and silence and at long last sleep.

 

46

I
WOKE WITH THE FEELING THAT
someone had touched my face. I sat up in the dark. My supper plate had been put away and a blanket spread over me while I lay unconscious on the couch. The grandfather clock in the hall chimed twice.

It was agony to move, a trial of will just to lift an arm, every breath a deliberate act. Yet somehow I managed to stand and stagger to the kitchen, where I found the keys to Jenny's van. I had just one thought, one desire—somewhere out there on the streets of Memphis was a score to end all scores. I knew how I would do it. Not by drowning or hanging and certainly not by way of a bullet. My old friend, Mr. Brownstone. We'd been apart too long and that was no way to treat such a dear friend.

I dragged myself up the stairs, hand over hand, to gather what little money I had from pockets and drawers, enough to buy enough smack to stop my heart one last time. At the top I stumbled over Jenny sitting on the top step in her lavender housecoat, silent and still as a cat, her arms wrapped around her knees, long blond hair spread over her shoulders and back.

“I know you hurt,” she said. “Trust me, I know. But when the people we love die, we don't have the luxury of falling apart. Not when others are depending on us.”

“I can't, Jenny.”

“You have to.”

“
You
have to. I don't have to.”

“Dammit Jackie, you were a detective.”

The strangeness of her declaration was like a dash of cold water down my back. It made me stand up straight, asshole puckered. “So?”

“So … go detect something. Investigate. Find out who did this.” She meant Deacon. She didn't know I'd spent the last two months trying to prove her husband had been molesting her daughter. I was glad I never shared my suspicions with her, because I'd been as wrong as a person could be. I'd been wrong about everything.

I said, “I don't know anything about fire investigations.”

“All you need to know is who wanted Deacon dead.” She got up and walked down the hall, stopped at her bedroom door and turned on the light. “That's why you're here, Jackie. That's why you have to go on. You owe it to Deacon.”

Let the dead bury the dead,
I thought, but I mustered enough genuine sincerity to say, “Good night.”

“I'll see you in the morning.” She entered her bedroom and closed the door. I heard the click of the light switch as the light under her door winked out.

*   *   *

Sleep had left me again, maybe never to return. I stood at Reece's door, paused in the act of opening it because just as I touched the knob I heard a thump on the other side. I stood at the door with my hand on the knob, afraid to open it, afraid for the first time in my life of what I might find looking back at me from the other side. Not Reece. I was afraid I'd open the door and find Deacon waiting there. He'd want to know what I was waiting for.
I owed it to him,
Jenny said.

I walked back downstairs and sat on the couch until dawn slid up the sky, my mind crawling through every fact I knew, every guess, every theory, trying to find something that tied it all together. Two men were dead—Sam and Deacon. How were their murders connected?

Sam's murder seemed obvious enough. He had found out something he wasn't supposed to know. Maybe he was killed by the guy who molested his daughter and drove her to suicide. But if that were true, why kill Deacon? If Sam had told Deacon before he died, Deacon would have settled that bill long before I arrived on the scene.

Maybe it had something to do with the finances for the homeowners' association. I remembered the question Deacon had asked that night at the meeting.
How did they spend all those HOA fees? A little landscaping? The senator
'
s Coon Supper?
What if Sam found out the money was going somewhere else?

Then there were Sam's finances. Spending cash that had no source. Was Sam the one skimming HOA fees? Or was he part of a team of grifters? Did he grow a conscience and threaten to expose his accomplices?

What did Deacon know? Far more than he ever told me. I'd never know what Sam told Deacon before he died, whether he confessed to stealing or exposed those who were. What I did know was this—with Deacon dead, there was no one to contest Ruth's will. All her money and all her land would go to Luther Vardry.