Phelps, a tall man, with the lankiness of a college basketball player, stood at a desk. In his mid-thirties, he had long hands, a face that looked as if it once had acne, and curly black hair. ‘Thanks, Bobby,’ he said to the guard. ‘I’ve got it from here.’
As the door closed, he extended one of his long hands, and said, ‘I’m Stephen.’
Instead of shaking, I flashed my hand with the Band-Aids, and said, ‘Johnny Bellefleur.’
‘I know who you are, Mr Bellefleur,’ he said. ‘You’re the man who’s been poking around Alex Greene’s house.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Small town. Everyone talks. If I’m not mistaken, you also served three tours in the Navy, last time on a hospital ship called The Mercy.’
A framed eight-by-ten on his desk showed him with a woman and two children – a young boy and a younger girl – all dressed in white pants and white button-up shirts. The woman and the children had blond hair and very white teeth.
I said, ‘My background isn’t the kind of thing people talk about in a small town.’
He gestured toward the door as if Bob Peterson still stood there. ‘It’s the kind of thing my security guy finds out when I ask him to.’
‘You’ve taken a lot of interest in me. I didn’t even know your name until about ten minutes ago.’
‘I take interest in anything involving my family.’
‘And that’s what Alex and Sheneel Greene are? Family?’
‘Relations would be a better way of putting it. Their mother, Laura, is my cousin on my father’s side, but we’ve got a big extended family here. Three years ago, at a reunion, we counted sixty-five members living on Amelia Island and more than a hundred in the region. What’s your interest in Sheneel?’
‘My wife taught English to her.’
‘I know that too. What I have a hard time understanding is why the two of you are getting involved in something you’re not part of. This is a family tragedy. It’s not for you.’
‘What have the police told you about Sheneel’s death?’
He forced a smile. ‘I’ve had Bobby checking with them each day. I know as much as anyone. The best guess is she intentionally overdosed, though the toxicology report won’t come back for a week or two.’
‘Someone killed her,’ I said. ‘She didn’t do it herself.’
The skin on his neck flushed. ‘That’s nonsense.’
‘Someone cut her up.’
‘What do you mean, cut her up?’
‘What’s not clear? Someone used a blade on her. It went through the skin, the muscle, and the bone. The police have evidence of it. Have Bobby check in again.’
He seemed to melt back into his chair. ‘Damn.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Christ.’ His eyes were far away.
I asked, ‘Who would have done this to her?’
He blinked and refocused. ‘I still don’t understand why you’re getting involved in this. What does it have to do with you?’
‘That’s complicated.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘When I was in the Navy, I saw things.’
‘Things?’
I took a deep breath. ‘The job I did – I saw men a couple of days after they died. As much as a week. I could piece together their stories from their wounds – gunshot, shrapnel, IED, petroleum and chemical burns – but after a while the faces and legs and arms seemed to join into one … I don’t know what to call it. That was the problem. It was made of individual human lives, but it was no longer human, and it had no name. It’s complicated.’
‘But you weren’t in combat?’
I felt an accusation in those words, and I said nothing.
He nodded, seeming to process what I’d told him. ‘So this is what – a way of redeeming yourself?’
‘There’s no redeeming this. I just want some answers.’
He seemed to think about that. ‘You know, there might not be answers either.’
‘Yeah, I suspect there might not be.’
‘I wish I could help you. I didn’t know Sheneel well. When she was sixteen, she and Alex came to the reunion. Since then, I’ve only heard the gossip and rumors.’
‘What rumors?’
‘Sheneel’s troubles mostly. The suicide attempts, getting arrested last summer. Rumors had her and Alex taking and selling just about every drug you can name.’ He steadied his gaze on me. ‘Whatever happened to Sheneel, she was who she was. If you think that finding the answers you’re looking for will save you from whatever you need to get free of, there’s nothing I can do to stop you from looking for them, as long as you treat my family right. But that won’t change who or what Sheneel was. She was troubled. Her mother is troubled. Her brother too. So, let me know if you have more questions,’ he said, ‘and I’ll answer them if I can. But do you mind if I tell you something?’
‘What?’
‘You look bad – real bad. Don’t let this thing make it worse.’
I said, ‘I’m sure that’s good advice.’
He nodded at the bandages on my left hand. ‘You get in a fight?’
‘A dumb accident.’
He made a sympathetic face.
I turned to go, then stopped. ‘Why did your cousin Laura change her name back to Greene from Phelps?’
His face became pained. ‘Long story. Let’s just say, she’s been messed up for a long time.’
When I stepped out of the office, Bob Peterson was waiting. He escorted me through the hallways and to my car, then pointed toward the security booth and said, ‘Straight down the road and through the gate.’ As I climbed in, he added, ‘I hope you found what you were looking for.’
What was I looking for? Answers, I’d told Stephen Phelps, not redemption. I wanted to know who had killed Sheneel Greene.
But that was only part of the truth. For eighteen months, I’d stood, swaying at a stainless steel table that was bolted to an iron floor far below the ocean surface, and processed bodies that were beyond saving. But they had done something when they were alive. They had driven into firefights. They had slept shoulder to shoulder in their cots in tents and barracks. They had put their hands on the bloody but still-living limbs of the men they had fought alongside. They had felt, on their wounded and bloody skin, the sting of other men’s tears as their breathing slowed.
I had not.
I was a factory man in a meatpacking plant.
Did I want redemption? I wanted more than that. I wanted to keep the blurring faces of all the dead men I’d seen from spinning in front of my mind’s eye like the cars on a carnival ride. I wanted to pull those men from the ride or fling myself into the mechanism that powered it and jam its gears.
What was to keep Sheneel Greene’s face from joining the others on that ride? What was to keep me from packing her and disposing of her as I’d packed and disposed of the bodies that had passed through the hold of the ship on the Arabian Sea?
I thought I knew that answer. Stephen Phelps had said that she wasn’t for me. But maybe I could be for her. Maybe I could sponge away the dirty circumstances of her death, and, as she lay in her casket, she would be clean.
No, I realized, she would never be clean. She was troubled, Phelps had said. The dirt might run through skin and muscle and into the bone. If that was true, I would be unable to cut it away, even with a blade.
When I passed the guard booth, I turned and drove toward Alex Greene’s house. I would confront him with the drug rumors about him and Sheneel and see what happened. It was none of my business, but I would stick my fingers into the dirt and measure its depth. If it swallowed my fingers and hand – if it swallowed my whole arm – I would reach in deeper, because I hadn’t done so with the dead men whose nameless spinning faces had merged into a monster.
I parked at the curb by the yellow house and crossed the ragged lawn. The newspapers were gone from the front windows. I stepped into the screen porch. The front door stood open a crack, wide enough t
o jam a shoe in. A new set of wind chimes made of white seashells – silent in the still, hot air – hung from the porch ceiling.
I knocked on the door.
No one answered.
I knocked again and pushed the door with my forefinger until it swung wider. I called into the house, ‘Alex!’
Nothing.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside. ‘Alex?’
I went to the couch. The blanket and pillow lay on the cushions. The room smelled of sweat and a terrible salt and metallic odor that I knew from six thousand miles away. The skin on my back tightened, and for a moment, in the hot air of the house, I felt the vented breeze that sometimes piped into the hold on the ship, and I felt the slow sway of the floor. I spun, half expecting to find someone else in the room, but I was alone. I went to the kitchen door. A white Formica table, chipped on one corner, was pushed against a wall. A refrigerator hummed in a corner. A mix of plastic and china dishes stood on a counter by the sink. Over the sink, a screenless casement window was cranked open.
That left the bedroom. I went to it, thinking, I’ve been gone only an hour, asking, What possibly could happen in an hour? And answering, Everything. In a flash, in a fragment of a moment – on a roadside or in a car or in the lonely bedroom of a little yellow house. I looked through the bedroom door. My head spun. Next to a queen-sized box spring and mattress, Alex Greene lay on a green oval rug, his head bloody. He wore no shirt and his chest and belly glistened with sweat. His right arm looked as if it had been torqued until it had broken sideways and backward. His shorts were yanked half-down on one side, exposing a skinny hip.
I opened my mouth to swear, but no sound came out.
I went to him, telling myself, You can do this. You’ve done this before. You’ve seen worse.
A fly landed on one of his eyes, and I waved it away. Then I saw the tattoo on his exposed hip. It was no bigger than a dime, the faded ink almost invisible in the dim light – a snake wrapping against itself, swallowing its own tail. I bent low, wanting to touch it, fearing that if I did, the little snake head would lash at me with an electric bite. But I never got a chance to choose between the irrational impulses – to touch or not to touch – because a sound behind me made me turn again, and now I glimpsed another man, large and white-skinned – bright white, almost blue-white, it seemed to me in the dim light – holding a baseball bat above his head and closing the distance between us. He grunted and swung the bat. I raised my hand to protect my head – my left hand, bandaged from fingertips to wrist – and the bat cracked through it.
The bat hit me above the ear and a ripping and roaring tore through my head. I knew even as I fell to the floor that, if I lived, a bright pain would come.
TWELVE
Lillian
I heard a Fly buzz when I died.
Daniel called at three in the afternoon. He said that when Johnny left the Phelps Paper Company, a security guard followed his car. When Johnny went into Sheneel and Alex Greene’s house and stayed for nearly an hour, the security guard decided to check what was happening. When the security guard saw Johnny on the floor with Alex Greene’s body, he called the police and then called his boss, or maybe the other way around. Now, Daniel was calling from the highway halfway to Fernandina. I should come too, he said.
My own voice sounded faraway when I asked, ‘Did Johnny kill him?’
‘The man I talked to told me Alex Greene was cut up and Johnny was there. No one seems to know the details.’
I ran from my office to my car. Would Johnny kill Alex Greene? I saw no reason why, and I hated myself for thinking it. But I also had seen no reason why he would cut up his own hands.
When I got to Fernandina, eight police cars, two ambulances, and a fire truck were parked outside the yellow house. Crime-scene tape stretched across the front yard, and a uniformed cop guarded the front door. Neighborhood kids stood barefoot or straddled bicycles on the street.
I cut across the lawn and asked the officer to tell Detective Turner that I was outside. ‘This a family party?’ he said, but he radioed into the house.
Daniel came out, looking grim.
I asked, ‘Is he—’
‘He’s going to be all right.’
The little house was crowded and hot, though a window air conditioner blew full. A cop talked with two men in suits. Through the bedroom doorway, two women and a man worked under a bright light. Daniel nodded at one of the businessmen, a thick-chested man, and said, ‘His name is Bob Peterson. He found Johnny.’ He nodded at the other man – tall, in a pink Oxford-cloth shirt, holding a gray suit coat in his hand – and said, ‘Stephen Phelps. He showed up before EMS and the squads.’ When I glanced at the bedroom, he said, ‘Body’s already gone.’
In the kitchen, Johnny was sitting at the table with a detective. The bandage on his left hand was bloody, the arm above it swollen past the elbow. A trickle of blood had dried on his cheek.
The detective said to him, ‘He had bright white skin? “Blue-white”?’
‘That’s what it looked like. I saw him for only a second.’
‘Why didn’t Peterson see this man?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he went out the kitchen window.’
‘He was big, you say?’
‘Huge.’
The detective looked at the wall above the sink. ‘Small window.’
I went to the table and said, ‘My husband is hurt.’
The detective looked at me, annoyed. ‘Who let her in?’
‘He’s bleeding—’
His eyes icy, Johnny raised his good hand. ‘I’m fine.’
I asked, ‘What happened?’
Johnny turned back to the detective. ‘I don’t know how the guy left. I just know what I saw.’
I said, ‘What happened to your hand?’
He looked at me as if I had injured him. ‘A baseball bat hit it.’
‘I’m taking you to the hospital.’
Johnny said, ‘Cut it out.’
‘What?’
‘Cut it out. I’m talking with this man. I’ll go when I’m done.’
‘Your hand,’ I said.
‘It’s fine.’
‘It’s not fine. It’s—’
‘Stop it!’ he yelled. Then he lowered his voice. ‘Just stop it.’
I walked into the living room. Tears stung my eyes. The hot air smelled like copper and sweat, and I felt nauseous. I went to the couch and sat, and when the man Daniel had identified as Stephen Phelps saw me, he came and sat on the other end. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.
‘You’re Lillian Turner?’ he said.
I nodded.
‘Sheneel’s teacher.’
‘Small town,’ I said.
‘Very.’
‘My husband didn’t do this.’
‘Who says he did?’
The muscles relaxed in my chest. ‘Thank you.’
He wiped his forehead again. ‘I talked with him a little while ago in my office. I warned him he might hurt himself in this. In Sheneel’s part of the family, someone’s always getting hurt.’
‘Do you know what happened here?’
He hesitated, touched my shoulder, and said, ‘I tend to hear almost everything that interests me, but when your husband came to my office, he told me things about Sheneel’s death that I hadn’t heard before. To tell the truth, I didn’t know whether to believe him. Your husband didn’t look entirely … together. So I sent my security man after him when he left. Bob followed him here, and when your husband didn’t come back out, Bob went in after him. He found your husband on top of my cousin’s boy.’
‘On top?’
‘That’s what Bob says. Your husband was bleeding from the head, and he was lying on Alex. Bob pulled him off. Alex was dead. Bob called me, and I called the police.’
‘Christ.’
‘Your husband told Bob that someone else was in the house. He said a man attacked him.’
I nodded at the kitchen. ‘
That detective doesn’t seem to believe him.’
He glanced through the door at Johnny. ‘How else could he have gotten knocked on the head? But Bob was outside and saw no one leave.’
Shouting erupted in the kitchen – Johnny and Daniel yelling at each other, Johnny saying something about Daniel covering up Sheneel’s murder, Daniel calling Johnny crazy.
Johnny burst into the living room and looked around wildly until he found me on the couch. He said, ‘Let’s go!’
Daniel followed him from the kitchen and said, ‘Here’s the secret, Johnny – there’s no secret!’
Johnny headed for the front door. ‘Let’s go!’
The cop at the door blocked him and Johnny looked ready to hit him, but Daniel said, ‘Let the man out,’ and the cop moved aside.
As Johnny disappeared from the front porch, I turned to Daniel. ‘Can you get my car back to my house?’
He nodded, and I tossed him my keys and ran after Johnny. He had parked at the curb in front of the house. He glared at me. ‘Get in.’
‘Give me the keys,’ I said.
‘Not on your life.’
‘If you don’t give them to me, I’m not going with you.’
His eyes burned with anger. ‘I’m sick of this,’ he said. He dropped the keys on the pavement and got in on the passenger side.
He leaned against the door as I drove to the hospital. When I stopped at the entrance to the ER, he got out without a word. By the time I parked the car and went inside, the nurses had him in an exam room, and an hour later – after the X-rays, the pupil dilation check, and the concentration and coordination test – the doctor, a small, round Asian woman, told us that Johnny had a fractured wrist and a mild concussion. ‘We can keep him here overnight, or we can put him in a cast and send him home,’ she said.
‘I’m going home,’ Johnny said.
‘That’s fine. We’ll get you into a cast.’ The doctor turned back to me. ‘Check on him every few hours and make sure he’s alert.’
‘Let’s go,’ Johnny said.
The doctor asked, ‘Is he always this way?’
That evening, a layer of clouds covered the sky, and, when we got in bed, a light rain fell against the windows. Johnny lay on his back, the lamp on, staring at the ceiling.
Second Skin Page 9