The Scamp (10 page)

No, he says. I don't.

Couper asks me if I want to see the crime-scene photos. He has his hand in the envelope, ready to pull them out, before I say yes.

Her face was already bloated, the cut in her throat empty and dry. It looks unreal to me, her hair, in the leaves. The grain of the marble headstone behind her.

The unusual thing? Couper says. No signs of struggle. No fiber. No sexual assault. No semen.

Weird, I say. Are they always sexual assaults, though?

When you find a naked seventeen-year-old? he says. Most likely.

Was she killed elsewhere? I say.

No, he says. The ground was saturated with blood. Whatever she was doing there, he says, she wasn't struggling.

They brought in the mother's boyfriend for questioning, but had nothing to keep him. He'd been six hours away, at work, and said he hadn't spoken with Alyssa since she moved back in with her dad. Her phone records didn't indicate calls outside of town. She never went to visit her mother in jail.

What's your theory? I say to Couper on the road in the morning. We have four hours before we get to Summersville, had a hot night of light sleep in the Scamp. The pavement, already wavy from the sun beating down.

I don't have one yet, he says. And to my surprise, he gets on the interstate, cruising in the right lane till the next exit, where he pulls into a truck stop. The parking lot is filled with eighteen-wheelers, diesel pumps, guys
in jeans and boots. There's a truck wash, a diner, and a drive-thru hut that sits high enough for a rig to pull up and order coffee and cigarettes.

Couper parks alongside the main building, near an air tank, and I can see the windows of the gift shop inside, where T-shirts and mugs are on display. He wags my knee. Let's take showers, he says.

eight

KHAKI

In Summersville, I went with a man called Carter. I told him my name was Jordan. Like the river. We met in the Summersville Baptist Church. Carter, a twenty-nine-year-old never-married carpenter and landscaper. Me, new to town. Henderson used to say there's only two stories in the world, someone new comes to town or somebody leaves. I had cut my hair myself, and darkened it to a light ash-brown and wore it just to my shoulders with trimmed bangs. I bought dresses. And a purse.

I needed a place to breathe. A place to sit down on a porch and think, simmering. In the heat of the little town, I was cold at the core. Henderson was two towns behind me. Florida was in the ocean. When her daddy turned up dead behind a Dollar General, no one knew to look for me. But it was better to be out of there.

I rented the back quarter of an old Victorian on a side street. It had a white-paneled kitchen, a back porch, a parlor with an old-fashioned chandelier and a small bedroom with a brass bed. I met Carter at a Wednesday-evening meeting. I had a paperback Bible I'd picked up at a thrift store. A pocketbook with a South Carolina license that read
Jordan McCollough
and a MasterCard I kept active in my mother's name.

On the back porch, on our second date, Carter asked me what my secret was.

To the sweet tea? I said, coy. Superfine sugar.

He held my hand over the table between us. I was barefoot, and goddamn it was hot, a hundred, a hundred and five. He rubbed his thumbs over my fingernails. No, he said. Your secret. What brought you here.

I told him a truth. I needed a fresh start, I said. I wanted to live quietly on my own. To clear my head. To think. To relearn what was important.

He nodded like what I'd said was a prayer.

I was burning up with anger and resentment and shame. I wanted time alone to cull that into something manageable. Something I could use. Hurl at someone.

I wanted to see what I could get away with. In a town like Summersville, where a woman like me gets noticed in the best ways. I made a quiet splash. Went to church. Dated the right man. Made the right acquaintances, but kept to myself.

By the time I left there, afraid of what was happening in a town so small and godly, and needing to care for
my sick mother in Virginia, Summersville didn't know what hit it.

Nevada arrived as I was closing. I had shut down the machines, counted out the register. She was there on the sidewalk when I came out the front door with my key, locking up. It was a little coffee shop on the corner. Espressos and cookies and sweet tea. The owner was a fiftyish woman with daughters. I told her I had a mean ex, and needed to work for cash to stay under the radar.

You need to play on people's compassion.

She asked me if he knew where I was and I said no. I'm laying real low, I said. She rubbed my shoulder, said it was fine. That she would keep an eye out for me. I worked there for eight months.

Cash in my pocket, I was closing, and there she was. Nevada. With near-black hair and eyes that were green like a cat's. She wore white shorts and Vans sneakers. A T-shirt that said
As I Lay Dying
. She had a blue streak in her hair that came from under her ear and hung over her collarbone.

Oh, you're closed, she said to me.

What were you looking for? I said.

She looked at me a long time before she answered.

What she wanted was chai. I gave her my address and told her to meet me on the back porch in twenty minutes. I'd make her some tea. I wanted to change. I wanted to go home alone, and not be seen on the street with her.
I wanted to forget which direction she'd come from and see her manifested only on my porch, under the yellow light, a small patch of grass and a clothesline behind her.

For the record, when it happened, it was she who kissed me.

She was the only one I left like that. Where they could find her. Where everyone could wonder
Why?
And who.

It made the casual kissing, the minor petting that I did with Carter, more bearable. He was chaste. He made it clear that he desired me, but he kept it in check. It was unlike anything I'd seen.

I played with the buttons on his shirt. I said, I'm not a virgin.

And he laughed. I'm not either, he said.

I meant it as an apology to him. A warning. I said, In college, and he nodded.

When he fixed my kitchen sink, he found a small bottle of bourbon and the pack of cigarettes I kept in a junk drawer.

Jordan, he said.

I covered my mouth with my hand. Old habits, I mumbled.

He stopped the faucet from running a steady thin stream. I rubbed my hands down the length of his arms and laid my cheek on his shoulder blade.

Jessa, I met at church. She was shy, literally beat down by a second husband. She'd married at seventeen, had
a baby, and then remarried at twenty-five and had another. We talked in the parking lot one Wednesday night, a long time. After ten o'clock. Standing under the streetlamp by her car. She told me about the new baby, about the older girl. She talked about books and about TV shows and nail polish. Her words had a warp speed to them, like she was thirsty, and I was water.

I touched her elbow. What's bothering you? I said.

We had done a study on Ephesians.
Be kind.
I carried my Bible tucked under my arm. Wore a rayon dress with a small flower print. Flat sandals.

Oh, she said. Sometimes I don't want to go home.

You want some tea? I said.

I would love some.

I took her home. And then I talked to her every day. Every day, until the end.

They'll never find Jessa.

I never met Nevada at my own house again. We met everywhere else. The cemetery. The quarry. The mill yard. Behind the fire station. On the baseball field.

I gave her the name Nevada that first night. She had an Indian look to me. She looked like a desert flower. One that blooms, full open and purple, at night.

I love it, she said. Is Jordan your real name? she asked me.

No.

Is it close to your real name?

Nope.

Her mouth was on fire. Her hands, small and square and strong. She had a tattoo on her hip, a blackbird, perched and watching me when I pressed my mouth on her. While I held her hips in my hands. Her spine, arched. Her mouth, open and singing.

With Jessa, I prayed. We sat at my kitchen table, which had come with the house, round and shell pink from the 1960s with pink vinyl chairs. We had coffee and a lemon cake she'd brought me. I held both her hands and she lowered her head, her eyes squeezed.

Lord, I said, deliver this woman from the evil that overpowers her life. Guide her with Your loving hand. Protect her and make her whole again.

Henderson used to talk about paradox. In his philosophy years. About how sometimes you couldn't be clean until you were dirtied. Couldn't be free until you were enslaved. Couldn't be whole until you'd been broken to pieces.

I kept that in mind.

Jessa's husband was mean in terribly usual, predictable ways. He called her stupid in public. He talked over her. He hushed her when she tried to assert an opinion. When no one looked, he pulled her hair and pinched the backs of her arms. He'd hit her on top of her head, which left her dazed, her brain ringing like a bell. She'd lost hearing in her right ear from him boxing it. It buzzed and if she plugged her left ear, everything was muffled, stuffed.

Why? I asked her. There was no reason why. But I wanted her to try to answer it. Why does he do this?

If I refuse, she said. She looked up at the ceiling, ashamed. Her body was soft and white. Her hair, reddish and long. She had freckles on her shoulders, on her eyelids. If I disagree. If I spend too much. She chewed the side of a thumbnail.

I wanted to yell at her. I'd seen my own mother, weakened from radiation, fall down the stairs to the basement when my father pushed her. She dislocated her shoulder, the blade sticking out at a frightening angle, my mother howling in pain, crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.

Oh, you got enough fat on you still to cushion a fall, Doe had said.

I pushed it back in for her, with a loud snap. I did it quick, afraid, acting without thinking. It was in the wrong spot; I put it back.

We sat there after, the two of us on the cellar floor. My mother, wiping at her face. Me, stunned. Thank you, she said to me.

It was the least I could do.

Carter wanted daughters. He never outright talked to me about marriage, but he'd hint sometimes. He wanted to know about my sisters, about my mother.

My mother lives in Virginia, I told him. In a little town, like this one, I said.

How come you didn't go there, he said, instead of here?

Well, you know how it is, I said. Everybody knows you.

You know all that's behind you, he said. Carter was a dedicated believer in forgiveness, ongoing. A clean slate. A state of grace.

About my sisters, I told him I had two: one in Texas, with four boys, and one in California, who was married but didn't have a baby yet.

And that's it? he said.

That's it.

Where's your daddy?

Oh, I said. I felt my throat tighten. My daddy passed, I said. When I went to college.

Carter nodded.

Broke my mama's heart, I said.

And yours too, Carter said.

Mine too.

I made sense to him. The way I talked about back home. My sisters, my mother. He knew that I spoke with Jessa, and thought I was doing right by her, to counsel her, to be a good friend to her. Nobody knew about Nevada. And I was the only one who ever called her that.

What I knew about Nevada was that she lived now with her daddy, who worked at the mill. That before, she'd lived with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, and that now, her mother was in jail. That her father was trying to undo some of the damage her mother had done, or let be done. I knew she was unsatisfied, living in this little town, that she had wanderlust in her soul.
That she liked to save kittens from the shelter, or baby rabbits when the mother died. She painted her toenails electric blue, and her fingernails green. She wouldn't go to church, and ate her meals fast and greedy, like a kid who had grown up the youngest in a house of men.

I left her in the old part of the cemetery. There was a front part, newer, close to the road, and another gathering of stones farther back in the trees. It was deep and wet back there, the grass long and moldy. The stones, hardly legible. The oldest graves were hidden by thick sumac and wild raspberries around the perimeter. If you were just driving by, you wouldn't know there was another part.

I made one clean hard cut to her throat, and only after took the blindfold from her eyes. It was loose around her temples, around the back of her hair. Not meant to bind. Meant only to cover her eyes. To shield her from the look on my face when rage took over. I took her clothes, and I burned them.

She was missing, and Jessa was gone. They found Nevada within two days. But over Jessa, there was just whispering.

Do you know, Carter asked me, where she went?

I shook my head.

There's a baby, he said.

I know.

And by then, my fictional mother was ill. My sisters were coming home, from Texas and California, to spend time with her in Virginia. I had never stayed so close to what was going on.

The officer who came to my back porch asked me when I'd talked to Jessa last.

We had coffee last Friday, I told him. And we prayed, I said. She was often distressed, I said.

They had found Nevada, naked, with her throat cut, he said, clear into the spinal cord. Her head was nearly detached. Dear God, the cop said to me, hesitant to suggest a connection, but it was there. People were talking. Who would do such a thing? he said.

I went to a prayer vigil, but couldn't stay. Carter put his coat around my shoulders and took me home. What was happening? How could it be so dangerous just to be a young woman?

I'm scared, I told him.

You should be, he said.

He walked me to my door and said he'd wait on the porch until I'd turned the deadbolt. A shame, he said. We don't lock our doors here.

And after that, I left. I called him once, to tell him I'd arrived safely, relieved to be away from what was going on in Summersville, and that I was in the company of my sisters, and my mother, that my California sister was expecting her first baby after all, that there was joy to be had, there among us, a family of women.