Under a Dark Summer Sky

by Vanessa Lafaye

  “That may be, but it’s not what happened.” He leaned toward Dwayne so their noses were almost touching. “And anyway, I hear that you came to the camp this morning to look for a boot to match a print?” He raised his eyebrow. “Mine don’t match, and neither did anyone else’s in the camp, did they? So now you’re trying this”—he cast a disdainful glance at the T-shirt—“to make it stick to me.”

  Dwayne felt his temper start to rise. I’m in control here. I ask the questions. He had been so intent on finding the owner of the boot, and when that didn’t happen, the shirt had been like a gift. But there was no way to prove that the blood on the shirt was Hilda’s, and with Henry refusing to explain, it was completely circumstantial. His alibi might be false, but it would be hard to break, with the men on his side. Any judge in the county would throw it out of court. Yet Henry was hiding something, he was sure of it. Maybe protecting someone. But who?

  “Here’s what I think happened.” Dwayne leaned back and laid down his pen, arms crossed over his paunch. “After the way Missus Kincaid flung herself at you at the barbecue, you figured you’d have some of that. So you followed her when she left. But she didn’t want you, and she fought back. This made you mad, because men like you are used to having any white woman you want, aren’t you, Henry? You had them in France and…other places.” An image of Henry on top of Noreen, her laughing, urging him on, doing all the things she’d never do with her own husband. Dwayne stumbled, tried to recapture his train of thought. “She was drunk. You’re a big, strong guy, easy for you to pull her off the road and beat her to a pulp.”

  Henry said nothing for a moment, just regarded Dwayne levelly. “This lady been…interfered with?”

  “No, but—”

  “So tell me why,” he asked, “if I’m crazed with lust for this woman, why don’t I rape her? Ain’t that what men like me”—he let the phrase hang in the air—“always do? And why don’t I kill her? Why do I let her live, when she can finger me? Why, Deputy Campbell? It don’t make no sense. None of it does.”

  “Everyone in town saw how you danced with her, laid hands on her,” said Dwayne. He felt blood rush to his face. Where did those words come from? He had started to sound like Ronald. The stained T-shirt had seemed to confirm that his gut instinct about Roberts was right, but now his certainty started to unravel. He needed something solid to stand on, something that would not just turn to sand beneath his feet.

  “They saw what they wanted to see,” said Henry with a dismissive shrug. He paused, eyes narrowed. “Why you lookin’ at me like that?”

  While Roberts was talking, Dwayne’s mind was searching for evidence of a different kind. He regressed the man’s features to those of a baby. He took his face apart in his mind and tried to reassemble it into Roy’s. The nose was different, and so was the chin. There was maybe something in the shape of the eyes, possibly a similar tilt to the cheekbones… He could not be sure, of any of it. Who could say how Henry’s and Noreen’s looks would combine? It felt like the entire foundation of his life had crumbled away, eroded by doubt. He wanted it to be true. He needed it to be true.

  And still Roberts sat there, calm, unafraid, even relaxed. He should have pissed his pants by now, but instead he looked arrogant beyond belief.

  Anger and frustration boiled together inside Dwayne like acid, threatened to burn a hole right through him. He could be sure of nothing. His muscles trembled with the effort of control. His fists itched to pound that cool smugness from Roberts’s face. Dwayne said nothing, just continued to stare. The answers were there, he knew it, but he could not bring them to the surface.

  “Sorry, Deputy,” said Henry, “but you taken a wrong turn somewhere. Missus Kincaid a nice lady. She been good to me. I got no reason to harm her.” He stood up. “And you got nothin’ to hold me, so—” He turned to leave.

  Dwayne was out of his seat so fast his chair went over with a crash. One of his hands grabbed Henry’s collar, and the other pulled back to strike with all his considerable strength. The truth was inside Roberts. I will thrash it out of you, so help me God.

  “Uncle Dwayne!”

  He felt Jimmy tugging on his arm. For a split second, he almost tossed him aside, but the boy’s expression of openmouthed shock stopped his hand.

  Dwayne still gripped Henry’s collar tight, breathing hard. In Henry’s eyes, he saw alarm but also sadness, like Dwayne had failed some test he didn’t know he was taking.

  Dwayne swallowed hard, released his hold. How did this get so out of control? Just a few minutes before, he had been conducting a normal interrogation, as he had hundreds of times before. He tried to regain his composure. Roberts had tricked him somehow; that was the only explanation. He struggled to focus. Pictures of Henry and Noreen together filled his head. The urge to punch Henry in the mouth—the mouth he had kissed her with—was undiminished. If anything, it was stronger. He could take no more. He had to escape from Henry’s steady, direct gaze.

  “Jimmy!” he barked. “Put him back in the cell.”

  He pushed past the startled Jimmy, desperate for air.

  • • •

  Jenson Mitchell had woken from a troubled sleep with a profound feeling of wrongness. There was a metallic taste in his mouth and gooseflesh on his arms although the night had been oppressively hot.

  He got up from his narrow bed at the back of Trudy’s house, his old bedroom. No sense in keeping the house he had built once his wife was gone. He didn’t want to spend every day avoiding reminders of her. The same flu that took his father had taken her too, strong and young as she was. And Trudy’s house, big and empty without Eldridge, was closer to the store. He pulled on some clothes and sat on the edge of the bed. The barometer was still dancing around. While it had ceased to plummet, which was cause for some relief, the behavior was not normal. He decided it was time to check with Fred again.

  Once at the store, he felt no better. The air glued the shirt to his skin. His nerves felt jangly and itchy, as if a mild electric current were passing through him. His ears tingled, and his eyes were sore, yet the sky was clear. The only sound was the faint sigh of the waves slowly breaking and the cries of a few sea birds. And then came another sound, of the telephone in his office. He got there on the last ring.

  “Jenson,” said Fred, and just from the way he said his name, Jenson knew something had happened. “Seems that our friend is on the move. Heading northeast. I’ve ordered the lanterns to be put out tonight.”

  The warning lanterns, placed along the coastal lighthouses and weather stations, signaled the approach of a damaging storm. There would be two red lights, one above the other, to indicate a northeasterly heading. Although this would bring it in the direction of Heron Key, Jenson knew that storms often lost their power once they made this turn. “What’s your best bet for landfall?”

  “Now, Jenson, you know I’m not a gambling man,” said Fred, which was belied by Fred’s many weekends spent in Nassau’s casinos. “But if I had any money, I’d put it on Coquina Bay.”

  This was a wealthy enclave between Miami and Fort Pierce, a favorite of golfers from up north. It was close enough that Heron Key would feel the sting of the beast’s tail as it passed by—if it made it that far.

  “That is,” added Fred, “if it doesn’t blow itself out, of course, which is more than likely.”

  “Every chance of that,” agreed Jenson. There were still too many uncertainties for his liking. “What’s your advice?”

  “It’s moving real slow from what we can tell. We’ll get plenty of warning if it does head for land. Stay by the phone.”

  Jenson hung up, his mind already calculating what needed to be done. Fred had never lived through a big storm. Jenson was just a child when the one came that took his grandmother, but he had a very clear memory of that day. A giant hand had picked up their house and pushed it a hundred yards down the street. He heard the terribl
e grinding of the house against the road, even over the noise of the wind. Glimpses of the town flashed past through the empty holes where the windows used to be. Then it tore the roof off and sucked his grandmother into the sky. The last he saw of her was the soles of her shoes.

  He knew the next twenty-four hours would be critical. It was time to make a list of people to call.

  Chapter 15

  Dwayne sat in the cab of his truck, head in his hands, and waited for his heart to stop pounding. He kept seeing a grotesquely deformed creature made from Henry’s face stuck onto Roy’s little body. The inspection at the camp had been an embarrassing waste of time. He could not claim to be any closer to identifying Hilda’s attacker. Ronald and the others would not wait much longer. He heard there was a meeting planned at the clubhouse for the next evening. At a total loss for what to do next, he cast around the cab for a cigarette. His scrabbling dislodged the piece of paper with the boot print. It fluttered onto his lap.

  He crumpled it into a ball to throw out the window, but some memory stopped his hand. He smoothed the paper out again. Earlier that morning, while inspecting the boots at the camp, something had bothered him. It was not simply that the drawing found no match among the men’s boots; it was that, as the inspection had continued, he had begun to doubt whether the pattern belonged to any boot at all. Although the men wore different makes and sizes, there should have been some basic similarity, just variations on a template. Yet the drawing he held in his hand, he now realized, was of a completely different character.

  There was still the option of checking the footwear of all the men in town, but he was coming to realize that this would just compound the time wasted so far. In the excitement of finding Roberts’s bloody shirt, he had let emotions cloud his judgment.

  I have been looking in completely the wrong place.

  He started the engine and headed for Doc’s office.

  • • •

  Henry leaned back against the rough concrete of the cell. Water dripped slowly from the ceiling, making a muted plink in the bucket on the floor. Ike snored extravagantly in the next cell. The man had only woken twice, to piss on the floor and demand a lawyer. He still stank of the vomit encrusting his shirt.

  Henry caught Jimmy’s eye. The boy had been observing him from behind the pages of yesterday’s paper for some time.

  A cold draft of suspicion made him shiver in the sweltering jail. The deputy had stared at him like he wanted to see through to Henry’s very bones. The rage in him went beyond Hilda’s attack. There was something personal in that stare, more than just a professional lawman’s desire to obtain a confession. Henry had seen plenty of them in his travels, been threatened many times, even beaten by a fair few. And yet some part of him still wanted to believe that Dwayne Campbell was different, that justice was still possible, even here, even now. Despite all the evidence of his senses, he wanted to believe. He a decent man. Doc said so. He tried to focus on that thought, but the image of Dwayne’s staring eyes would not leave his mind.

  He got up and began to pace the dimensions of his cell. Eight steps, turn.

  Missy would have heard of his arrest by now. He remembered her face, as it had looked the previous night in the yellow lamplight. He felt calm. That’s what thinking of her did to him. He should have been frantic, given his situation, but he was not.

  Eight steps, turn.

  I trust in American justice. Now why had he said that? Just to show Dwayne that he wasn’t dealing with an ignorant hick?

  Eight steps, turn.

  Did he even believe it? Since returning from France, he’d seen every kind of abuse of power, from the small-town cops like Dwayne to the federal government. He had seen his fellow soldiers trampled by their former comrades on orders from Washington. He had seen the smoldering bodies of sharecroppers whose only crime was wanting a fair price for their goods. He had seen the newspaper reports that a mob held a man to be lynched. The reporters had time to get the story, but still all the authorities did was cut down the corpse when it was over.

  Eight steps, turn.

  Despite all the evidence of men’s brutality, it was Missy, and her basic goodness, that made him believe again. It was hope, he realized, so long absent from his life. She restored that in him, made him want to believe the best in everyone. It felt like a dead, gangrenous limb had been healed, with fresh blood in the veins, new skin on the bones. Deputy Campbell a decent man. Doc said so.

  Eight steps, turn.

  But then he thought back to the night of the barbecue, the way Dwayne had stared, even before Missus Kincaid was attacked. Something was very, very wrong.

  Eight steps, turn.

  • • •

  Doc woke to the sound of voices raised in argument. There was a high-pitched woman’s voice, which sounded stubbornly irate and clearly belonged to Mama. The other voice was lower, with a note of urgency that cut through his grogginess. Dwayne.

  “You got to leave the man be,” said Mama, blocking the doorway with her substantial bulk. “He needs rest, or he won’t be no good to no one.”

  “Let me by, woman,” said Dwayne. “This cain’t wait.”

  “It’s okay, Mama,” said Doc, slowly getting off the cot. He felt like he had slept for days, but the sun’s angle told him it was maybe a couple of hours. A plate of Mama’s fried chicken had restored him somewhat. He wiped the lenses of his glasses and squinted at Dwayne’s silhouette in the doorway.

  Mama withdrew, with a scowl at Dwayne. She gathered up her hat, her pocketbook, and the plate and left. The slam of the screen door signaled her disapproval.

  “Doc,” said Dwayne, “I got to take a look at Hilda.”

  A frown creased Doc’s forehead. “What’s going on, Dwayne?” The man was clearly agitated. In his hand, he clutched a dirty, creased scrap of paper. “What happened at the camp this morning? Did you find a match?”

  Dwayne shook his head. “No, not to any of the boots. I did find a bloody shirt belonging to Henry Roberts, so I arrested him on suspicion.”

  “You arrested Henry?” Doc was now extremely glad that Mama had gone home.

  “Had to, Doc.” Dwayne spread his hands. “The man refuses to explain it. Arrogant son of a bitch.” He paced the small space. “Cool as a cucumber, he was, and his shirt absolutely covered in blood. Says it’s not hers, like that’s enough. What possible, innocent explanation could there be for that much blood?”

  “An animal, maybe?” But Dwayne was not listening. “Then why are you here, if you think he did it?”

  “He knows more than he’s saying. I can feel it, Doc.” Dwayne flopped onto a wooden stool. “But something ain’t right.” He held up the scrap of paper. “None of the boots matched, and I think I know why. I’m starting to think…to think it ain’t a boot print at all.”

  “That does change things,” agreed Doc. “What else could it be?”

  “Dunno,” said Dwayne. “That’s why I got to take another look.”

  “Is there another reason, Dwayne, why you arrested him?” Doc had heard the rumors, just like everyone else, that Henry might be Roy’s father. He didn’t believe them, but Dwayne was desperate for an answer. Doc hoped he would resist the urge to abuse his position of authority but imagined that the temptation would be overwhelming. He wondered how long his principles would stand up to such strain.

  Dwayne’s eyes slipped to the floor. His shoulders slumped. He said nothing for a long moment, then looked up. “I cain’t deny that I wanted to get him alone. Not to hurt him, you understand, just to ask him. But when it came to it, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.” He searched Doc’s face for an answer to his pain. “I’m a pathetic excuse for a man.”

  Doc laid his hand on Dwayne’s shoulder. “No, you’re not. Maybe it’s just…it’s different when the man is sitting there with you. Maybe you just realized that knowing won’t help after all.
”

  “Maybe…I thought it would make it easier to bear somehow, if I knew, but now…” He shook his head. “One thing I do know is that we got to think again about what made this mark.” He held up the crumpled piece of paper. “It’s the only thing we got to go on.”

  The way to deal with any of life’s traumas, Doc knew from experience, was to focus on the work, just the work. As for the rest…well, that could wait. “We’d better hurry,” he said. “The wounds are healing fast.”

  They stood on either side of Hilda’s bed, the only sounds her slow breathing and the soft whoosh of the fan in the corner. Although Dwayne had a clear memory of how she looked on the night of the attack, he was shocked anew at the extent of damage to her face. He realized the healing would make it look worse, but even so. Between the swelling, the stitches, and the bruises, she resembled something found on a slaughterhouse floor. She had been a very pretty woman; some even thought her beautiful. No more.

  Doc gently pushed a lock of hair from Hilda’s forehead. Dwayne noted the way his face softened when he looked at her. Doc had been alone a long time now. It was clear that Leann and Cora were never coming back. It was common knowledge that Nelson had neglected Hilda before, and this pattern had continued. He seemed to spend all his time holed up with Ronald LeJeune. Maybe something good will come out of this after all. If she lives.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Doc, “about the force of the blows needed to do this kind of damage. If someone used their fists, their hands would be lacerated. They might even have broken fingers. I’m pretty sure they’d need treatment, and I’d hear about it. So it must have been—”

  “An object,” interrupted Dwayne. “They hit her with something…something that made that mark.” He pointed to the fading crosshatch pattern of red lines on her nose. “The object, whatever it was, could have got smashed from the force of that blow.”