What Dies in Summer (29 page)

Under the heading of odd news, Don said some homeless guy told the cops he saw an old woman with ragged clothes and a funny hat standing on the opposite side of the road watching as Cam crashed.
He said there was a blue jay or something flying around her head, and swore the lady disappeared into thin air a second or two after the crash. But according to Don he was so full of gin that for
all the good he did them as a witness he might as well have seen pink elephants.

Aunt Rachel laid low after the wreck, so nobody knew how Cam’s death had affected her, but when Mom heard about it she gave me a big smile and a thumbs-up.

The gist of the reactions I heard generally came down to some variation of,
What goes around, comes around
, but all Hubert said as he bit into his chili dog was, “Well
boo-fuckin’-hoo.”

Gram’s take was biblical. She said, “ ‘He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.’ ”

As for me, I had my usual confused morass of thoughts and feelings. Somewhere in the process of trying to work them out, I watched a news clip of Amanda Peyser’s mother on Channel 5.

“I pray to God no other parent will have to go through what we did,” she said, dabbing at her eye with a tissue. “I’m thankful the monster who took Amanda is g-gone, and
other girls like her ca-can be safe.”

I stared at the screen, hardly believing what I was hearing. I stood up and turned off the TV. “How can she say that?” I asked L.A. “How can she think there’s any such
thing as safe?”

After thinking it over for a minute L.A. said, “She’s just mad at everybody who didn’t lose their kids.”

I sat back down, and neither of us spoke for a while. Finally I said, “The only thing we know for sure is Cam’s never gonna hurt anybody else.”

“So give yourself a gold star,” L.A. said. “For once in your life take credit for something good.”

Take credit for Cam’s death? It sounded ridiculous to me, but then if you looked at it from her standpoint the idea did make a certain kind of sense. One of the truest things Gram and Dr.
Kepler had taught me was that knowledge is a two-edged sword, though I sometimes privately suspected it had a lot more edges, not to mention sharp points, than that. Either way, nothing could have
made the basic truth of the concept plainer to me than my state of mind right now. Because at this moment, regardless of what it might say about me, I now knew for a certainty that I would have
personally killed Cam a thousand times over to save L.A. from a hangnail, and done it with a song in my heart.

I don’t really know why we even went to the funeral. I doubt Gram would have insisted on it, but maybe the force field created by her sense of the fitness of things compelled us. Or maybe
it was guilt over feeling no guilt that Cam was dead.

Brother Wells preached over the casket just like he would anybody else’s, except for not saying much about Cam being among God’s children or walking with Jesus now or any bullshit
like that.

“We are gathered here today to bid earthly farewell to Camden Lee Rowe . . .” he said.

And there they were, all three names.

“His life’s journey is done and he walks among us no more. As we are all imperfect vessels, unworthy of the limitless love of our Heavenly Father, we can make no claim to understand
all that God has wrought . . .”

But I didn’t catch the rest. Being in church brought back words and phrases I’d heard here over the years, like “the blood of the lamb” and “washed in the
blood,” and even though I knew I didn’t truly get the meaning of this any better now than I ever had, it was enough to catapult me backward in time, back to L.A. and me washing the
bedspread and the knife in the hottest water we could stand, mopping the hardwood floor of her room and the hallway with pine cleaner and hosing away the splatters of blood on the porch and walk
and driveway, praying to finish before Gram came home. The blood was everywhere, no visible difference between Cam’s and mine, and for a crazy few seconds it seemed to me there wasn’t
enough water and soap in the world to wash it all away. And in a way I was right. It was still no trick at all for me to half close my eyes when I looked at, or even imagined, the floor or the
sidewalk at Gram’s and see it all again, bright and evil and in its own way absolutely unerasable.

After the service, as we walked out the double doors of the church into the white blast of afternoon heat and down the steps onto the blazing sidewalk where the long death cars waited at the
curb, Gram, L.A. and I got separated. Gram and L.A. ended up with Mom in one car, and I rode with Diana in another.

The sun had overheated her in her black funeral dress, bringing out a little shine of sweat on her upper lip. A glow, I guess it was. Looking at it, I remembered the way her bare skin had
sparkled with water on the island that day in Minnesota, and suddenly, in the middle of all this seriousness, I wanted to lick the sweat off her lip. But having that completely insane and
undoubtedly sinful thought right here in front of the church, with Cam’s dead and mutilated body so close by, caused a chilly shadow of guilt to pass over me. I tried to keep from thinking
what I was thinking, which of course only made it worse.

What finally distracted me from that was the unwanted memory of Don telling us about the other stuff they’d found in Cam’s toolboxes and duffel bags in the van after the wreck. The
camera and the uniform shirt hadn’t been the end of it, not by a long shot. There were cords and ropes and blindfolds, surgical scissors and clamps, knives, rolls of duct tape, pulleys and
other equipment he used, and a lot more stuff like that in the men’s restroom inside the old Conoco station, which was where he had kept the girls locked up. Before he killed them. In the
freezer of the little refrigerator he used for his beer they found the girls’ nipples, wrapped in foil with several snips of dark hair. I could hardly believe I’d been as close as I had
to all of it, even within touching distance of what was in the van, without feeling it.

And then it got even worse. When Don had to go take a phone call I managed to sneak a look at the pictures Cam had taken, and what he had written on them. In several of the pictures I recognized
Tricia Venables, and you could see at least part of Cam in some of them too. In one picture, Tricia was tied in a chair naked and blindfolded, and a hand was holding a box knife against her left
breast. At the bottom was written in black grease pencil,
SHE WAS READY!
In some of the photos, the girls were standing naked on a box with blood on their breasts and thin ropes around their
necks, the way I’d dreamed of them. On one of these, Cam had written,
SHE COMES AND SHE GOES!
and on another,
MAKING HER WAIT IS THE BEST PART.

The long black cars rolled silently away from the curb.

“What’d L.A. tell you?” I asked Diana.

“He did stuff to her, Bis, for a long time, like he did with those girls, except he didn’t kill her and he only cut her a little.”

“
A little
?” I stared at her.

“She’s still all there,” said Diana.

“Why did she wait so long to tell anybody?”

“He said he’d kill you and Gram if she did.”

My head was thumping and I felt the sting of tears in my eyes. L.A. had kept her mouth shut to save us. I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to hold that inside herself every day.

“So what changed?” I asked. “Why’d she let on when she did?”

Diana looked hard at me for a minute, then said, “You really don’t know?”

I shook my head and wiped at my eyes.

Diana said, “She started believing in you more than him.”

And the weight of complete inadequacy settled on my shoulders like sacks of cement.

We arrived at the cemetery and bumped our way back to the Rowe plot. There were a few black locusts and some crape myrtles back here but not much else to keep the sun off. The grave, along with
a big gray pile of rocky dirt covered with a phony green rug that I assumed was meant to look like grass, was shaded by a blue-striped awning. Four rows of folding chairs had been arranged under
the awning facing the casket, which was supported on a kind of frame draped with the same green material that had been thrown over the dirt. Sunlight reflected off the marble headstones all around
us. From one of them a blue jay watched the movements of the people with a glittering black eye. In the distance, I saw Colossians Odell standing near the edge of the trees with his panama in his
hand. He looked calm and focused, and I hoped the terrible storms that sometimes raged through his mind had let up at least for a while. There was no sign of Caruso, but I somehow felt sure he was
sleeping safely in Colossians’ pocket.

“I don’t think we should make her talk about it too much until she’s ready, Bis,” said Diana into my ear.

I nodded, taking a last swipe at my eyes and trying to straighten my tie, hoping nobody would get the idea I was shedding tears over Cam. I wondered how much talking was too much and how you
were supposed to tell and why there wasn’t a damn rulebook you could look things like this up in. For some reason I remembered what Dr. Kepler had said to me about true enemies, and thought
of Jack in a coffin like Cam’s. I wondered if an enemy was still an enemy after he was dead. Or had his teeth knocked out.

As everyone stood around waiting to be told where to sit, I saw L.A. standing stiffly next to Gram in her darkest blue dress and shiny black shoes, her hair tied with a black ribbon. I noticed a
couple of the men from the church looking her up and down, their eyes full of hungry curiosity. I walked over and stood by her side for a second, wanting to offer her some kind of support but
unable to think of anything to say or do that seemed the least bit helpful. I could smell the perfume she’d borrowed from Diana and the wine she’d been drinking. She stared at the
casket with eyes like black diamonds. The power she was radiating was almost visible, but I didn’t know what was in her mind. Maybe it was hate. Maybe satisfaction. Or something else
entirely. All I knew for sure was that I wasn’t going to ask her.

Diana took my hand as we sat in the third row of chairs, behind Gram and L.A. Mom, Rachel and Jack were in the second row, Jack looking like a sore thumb in his neck brace. For a few seconds I
was lost in thoughts about right and wrong, justice and paybacks.

“. . . and in bringing Camden Lee Rowe here to this place of final farewell,” said Brother Wells, “we humbly acknowledge our inability to fathom our Creator’s will, or to
truly know any man’s heart. Camden walked in God’s sunshine even as you and I do; he drank of the water God gave us and ate of the bread of the fields our Father prepared for us. We
cannot know what separate country of the spirit he may have passed through while he was among us. That is between him and the Maker before Whom he now stands. As ever, we trust not only in the
mercy but in the wisdom of that Maker, our Lord, the Ruler of heaven and earth.”

I visualized Cam, not free to just lie down and be dead but cobbled and stitched back together like a chewed-up doll, standing in front of the great desk in God’s office. But this time He
looked bigger and more dangerous. This was the Maker of universes and Judge of judges, with world-breaking thunder in His face. Everything His eyes touched glowed and snapped with blue voltage.

Outside the windows behind Him strange violet lightning veined across a blue-black sky and I saw tall muscular figures armed with heavy swords gathering out there—dark angels empty of
mercy. They began materializing one by one beside and behind Cam, their lion breath filling the air, their eyes as unbearable as the flames of arc welders.

I felt my hopes of getting a word in for Dad and Gramp and Dr. Kepler, not to mention the dead girls, slipping away, my tongue and my words locked down by the monstrous gravity in this place of
ultimate judgment.

“Amen,” said Brother Wells from somewhere far away. I felt the blood returning to my face, and I breathed again.

And the last thing I heard as I came back to the moment was the long, despairing scream that ripped its way out of Cam’s ruined throat as the irresistible blood-crusted hands of the dread
angels closed on him and, as the old woman had promised L.A., he vanished into eternal night as the darkness took back its own.

A COUPLE OF DAYS
later I threw the knife off the Cadiz Viaduct into the Trinity as the sun was going down behind the city. L.A. and I hadn’t
spoken about what had happened that day but what we knew about Cam’s death naturally made for an extra weight between us, another thing we carried together in the world, the way Mr. Campion
and I would always carry Dee’s death.

But for L.A. the weight pulled a different way and seemed to reposition something in her heart. She didn’t pay attention to every little sound and movement around her like she had before.
I don’t think she ever covered herself with pillows anymore, and she never hit me or got that wild look on her face again. She taped school pictures of the three murdered girls to her mirror.
There was a changed light in her eyes now and she was somehow more beautiful, but older, and in a way you knew wasn’t entirely good.

Something had changed in me too. Somehow the strange hungers I had never been able to satisfy left me. I almost never drank with L.A. anymore, and when I’d lit a Chesterfield in
Gram’s back yard the other day I hadn’t liked the taste at all, crushing it out unsmoked.

Then on a Sunday afternoon Don, dressed in loafers, khakis and a yellow pullover and not looking the least bit like a cop or a boss, visited Gram and me at home. Gram fixed him a big glass of
iced tea, then poured cold buttermilk into a tumbler for herself. She got her pepper mill from the freezer, ground a little black pepper onto the buttermilk and sat down at the kitchen table. Then
Don sat down across from her, and they talked about the heat and the government for a while, Don saying, “Yes ma’am” and “No ma’am” to her, exactly as I did.

After a few minutes he excused himself, stood up and said, “Come on, Jimbo, give me a hand.”