The Covenant (37 page)

The June bugs were already up and whirring in the trees, their noise the very voice of August itself, as though August were a living thing composed of biscuit-colored dust and rainless moist heat and the mirage shimmering above the road. It was not yet eight in the morning. She helped me to the door even though I didn't need help, ducking under a rosebush gone wild and running up the porch trellis almost to the second-story windows.

She made me breakfast and I told her about Sam and Reece and Nathan, how Sam had hidden what Nathan had done to Reece, how he had taken Luther's money. I told her how Sam broke it off when he found out Nathan was sniffing around Cassie. I told her how I'd discovered the whole thing, from the photos in the suitcase to the website where Nathan sold pattycake pictures of her daughters. I told her how Luther had tried to buy me off, and how I had refused, and what Luther had promised to do her, to us both.

Nathan's lawyer was already denying the whole thing. He claimed he'd shot Lorio by accident. Lorio had just got off work when he met me on the levee and he was still wearing his vest. It saved his life, and Nathan's, too, because if he had killed a cop, the State of Tennessee would have strapped him to a gurney no matter how many senators his daddy owned. I was happy Lorio survived. He held my hand in the emergency room, even though he looked like a mummy with his head wrapped in a couple hundred feet of bandages. He was a good Joe. Having him survive was the first really lucky thing that had happened to me in a long time. He'd woke up on the levee with his scalp hanging over his face like a bad wig, heard the shots in the woods, and radioed it in.

Nathan claimed that after he'd accidentally shot Lorio, I'd gone berserk and attacked him, and he'd only shot me in self-defense. If you ignored the fact that all my wounds were in my backside, it made perfect sense. A guy like Luther could probably find a lawyer and a judge who would rule my injuries inadmissible while using Nathan's to prove the savagery of my attack. Stegall hadn't arrested me yet, but I knew it was only a matter of time before I was staring down the barrel of an attempted murder charge.

I honestly didn't give a flying fuck-all what they did to me. I was glad to be alive. Nathan was still lying in a hospital bed with his shoulder in a cast and eating his breakfast through a straw, while I was sitting by a pool dining on poached eggs and margaritas at nine o'clock in the morning. Best of all, Nathan's days of seducing teenage girls were over. I'd dropped his male-model looks into a wood chipper. His face was a bowl of moldy prunes. Maybe one day the doctors would be able to put it back together well enough to recognize him by his driver's license picture. If only that gun hadn't fouled, I could have solved both our troubles. Like they used to say in the old days, I'd have swung for it, and gladly.

Jenny listened to my tale to its unsatisfactory conclusion without saying a word. Then she got up and went inside and I didn't see her until three in the afternoon. I found her in the den, pulling on her stockings. A warm, moist wind billowed the curtains in the open window. Her white dress was borderline conservative—just a little high at the thigh, just a bit low and open at the breast, trimmed in black, with a fat double strand of pearls hanging around her neck.

“Where are you headed?” I asked. I was just going to make another pitcher of margaritas.

“I'm going to see Luther,” she said.

I knew she was doing the right thing, but I still felt a little let down. She still had two kids to provide for. She knew that in this town, our chances of obtaining justice were in the house's favor. Nobody had died yet, and Luther's grasp upon the strings of power were as strong as ever.

I didn't want her to think I disapproved of her choice. “Do you want me to go with you?” I asked.

She smoothed the stocking on her leg. She had better legs than me, and she was going to need every inch of them. “I was hoping you would.”

*   *   *

We found Luther propped up in bed, dressed in pale blue pajamas with half-dollar buttons, his foot wound in a huge white bandage, like a gout patient. Adonis the Butler let us in the room. Luther shooed his nurse out and invited us to sit. His bed had four posts wide enough to kick a football through, and a headboard like a library wall, shelves piled six deep with books, a couple of neat drawers in which to hide liquor bottles and porno magazines and whatever else an old retired preacher needed to keep him warm and safe on winter nights.

Jenny chose the love seat by the window, picked up a throw pillow and rested it in her lap, crossed her legs. I sat in a high-backed chair that was still warm from the nurse's ass.

“Nathan shot me,” Luther explained, pointing at his bandaged foot, “when I tried to stop him from taking the gun. I'm so very sorry, Mrs. Lyons.”

“Miss,” I corrected habitually. “I'll survive. That's not why we're here.”

“I see.” He glanced at Jenny then back at me, his eyebrows a question mark. I nodded. “I see,” he repeated.

“Jenny had a right to know,” I said.

“Of course she does.” He turned his patronizing smile upon her and repeated himself again. “Of course she does. She must make her own decisions regarding her family. As do we all.”

“I just want to know one thing,” Jenny said, forcing the words through the catch in her voice.

“Yes?”

She came up off the couch and flung the pillow at Luther. “How could you?” The pillow bounced off his foot, eliciting a choked sob of pain.

“Nathan is my son. I had to protect him.”

“Reece was my daughter!” Jenny shrieked.

The nurse opened the door a crack and stuck her head through. “Everything OK, Brother Vardry?”

“I'm fine.”

She closed the door. He mopped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his blue pajamas. “Sam and I tried to take care of this delicate matter within our two families rather than draw in outsiders, people who wouldn't understand.”

“
I
don't understand, Luther.”

I picked up the pillow where it had fallen to the floor, in case Jenny got the crazy idea to murder him with it.

He eyed me nervously. “If there is a dispute between church members, the Bible tells us to settle it within the church. In his first letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul says, ‘If any of you has a dispute with another, dare he take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the saints?'”

That was his stock answer. I tossed the pillow in the air and caught it, but not before Luther had crawled halfway up the headboard. I pitched it to Jenny, then picked up his cell phone from where he'd left it on the covers. I'd noticed he was texting somebody when we came in the room. I thought maybe he'd been calling the police, but I noticed his last text was to Holly, telling her to stay in her room.

Jenny shouted, “This wasn't some theological dispute, Luther. Or a fight over parking spaces or loud parties or how often somebody mows their lawn. Nathan is a predator. He abuses little girls, my little girls!”

“If he were your son, wouldn't you try to protect him?”

“Not from this!”

“You can't understand,” he said. “You're not one of us. You were never one of us, Jenny.”

“Looks like you've raised yourself quite a pair of monsters, Mr. Vardry,” I said. I'd heard the clatter of heels on the parquet outside his door. It opened. It wasn't the nurse this time.

“Daddy?”

“Holly!” Luther snapped. “I thought I told you…”

“Change of plans.” I set his phone on the nightstand. “Come on in, Holly.”

She slunk into the room and cringed up to his bed. I wondered if there were a time of day that she didn't wear heels. She probably even wore them to bed, but only for the right sort of people.

“Pair of monsters?” Jenny asked. She never missed a thing.

“Ask Luther,” I said. He stared at me blankly, little dots of perspiration lined up like birds on the wire of his mustache. “If he won't tell you, ask Eugene Kitchen. Ask him who killed Sam.”

“I thought…” She paused, looking from me to Luther to Holly. “Nathan?”

“Nathan's no killer.” I turned so that only Holly could see my face, shot her a wink that made her ankles give under her. She wobbled on her heels and sank to Luther's bed, hugged one of the posts. “I shouldn't be standing here right now. As much as Nathan wanted me dead, he didn't have what it took to finish me off. I saw him, not five feet away, close his eyes when he pulled the trigger. He also shot low at Officer Lorio. And he hit you in the foot, Luther.”

Luther began to laugh to hide his nerves. “You're not seriously suggesting that Eugene Kitchen killed Sam.”

“Not at all. Just that he knows who did.”

The man had no choice now but to brass it out. “And who, pray tell, is that?”

I walked to the window and looked out over the lake, at the roof of Jenny's house and the window of Reece's room, and the figure moving slowly across the levee, his hands in his jacket pockets, his head sunk to his chest. “The medical examiner in Memphis concluded that Sam was killed by two blows to the head from a blunt, rounded object.”

“A rock.” Luther reached across the bed and grabbed his phone from the nightstand. “That's exactly what our coroner ruled. I'm calling the police.”

“Actually, two rocks,” I said as he dialed. “And your local boy said Sam drowned. Memphis disagrees.” The figure on the levee stopped and turned, waved to someone behind him and waited a moment.

“Two rocks, thrown from close range, by someone who knew how to throw them.” Luther stopped dialing, while the figure on the levee turned suddenly as though to run, but instead staggered forward. “Someone Sam knew closely and never suspected, someone he would wave to when she shouted his name, let her get close enough to kill him.”

Jenny whispered, “Holly.”

“What was it, Holly? What did you use? Maybe a couple of the river pebbles from Luther's Roman garden?” I watched Sam go headfirst into the lake and wondered if maybe he'd tried to escape to the safety of the water, like a man running from a swarm of bees.

Luther straightened the lapels of his pajamas and brushed the sweat from his lip. I was amazed by his effortless shift to a new strategy when his previous position became unviable. He was a man alone, an island unto himself, clinging to no one and nothing, not even his pride. He laid his phone on the bedspread.

“I'm glad you didn't call the police on my daughter. I'm sure you're aware that Holly is a bit unbalanced.”

Holly groaned and bit the bedpost, scraped off twin gouges in the varnish with her teeth. She spit it out savagely. “If I am, it's because of you and Nathan and Gus and Meemaw. Y'all did this to me. Even Mama, because she never said anything. She just let Nathan do whatever he wanted. She wouldn't believe me when I told her, not after the fire.”

“I think I can rely upon your discretion when I tell you that Holly set the fire that burned down my house and killed my two children.” Luther spoke as though she wasn't even in the room. “It was an accident. She was burning herself with matches.”

Holly slid off the bed to the floor and lay there, moaning and mewling.

“We'll have her committed, of course. Nathan will spend the rest of his life in prison, and the DA has decided not to charge Mrs. Lyons with attempted murder.”

That was nice of him. I guess the DA was just waiting for Luther to make the call.

He continued coldly, “I can't make up for what my children have done, but I would like to try.”

Jenny wasn't talking, wasn't moving. I couldn't even see her breathing. “How?” I asked.

He hid his smile behind a yawn, already writing the check in his mind. “The same deal as before, only better. I'll buy Sam's company for a substantial sum. Jenny will never have to work. I shouldn't have tried to cover for Nathan, but he was my son. What would you have done, Jenny, if it were your son?”

I answered for her. “That's just the thing, Luther. Nathan isn't your son. Holly isn't your daughter. They're adopted. Ruth told Deacon everything.”

“I doubt she told him
everything,
” Luther laughed. “Besides, they are my children even if they aren't my blood.”

“They are your blood, Luther. You're Ruth's children, all three of you.”

He slipped that punch with a shrug. “Son or brother, it doesn't matter. I had to protect Nathan.”

“You've no idea the things they've done to me,” Holly said from the floor. She had dragged something out from under the bed—a long cardboard box. “And not just me. There are others. Dozens, hundreds. Gus and his girls. That hill is full of bones.”

“Holly, be quiet. You're in enough trouble.” Luther grabbed a pillow and rested it in his lap. “Don't make it worse.”

“Worse! You son of a bitch. How could it possibly be worse?” She opened the box and pulled out another God-damn Benelli shotgun. This family had more money tied up in guns under the bed than I had in the world. I made a jump for her but she twisted aside and left me lying on my back at her feet. I glanced under the bed but I guess she'd taken the last ace.

“Sometimes I think I'm going crazy. Sometimes I have this corkscrew in my brain, turning around and around, getting tighter and tighter, so tight I can feel it pulling my hair, and I just want to take a gun and dig it out.” She wedged the barrel under her chin.

“Holly no!” Jenny screamed. She was a better person than me. I'd just as soon Holly painted the ceiling as the floor.

“Don't worry, Jenny, I'm not going to do anything until I've made her pay for what she's done.”

“What have I done, Holly?” I asked. There was nowhere to hide. I couldn't slide under the bed before she unloaded on me. She wouldn't pull her shot, like her brother.