Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  Screw that, Bell thought, picturing the crime-scene photos from Freddie Arnett’s driveway. The shattered skull. The wet bits of brain matter. Freddie’s stringy, old-man’s body, facedown, arms and legs askew. His trousers had hiked up in his sudden awkward fall, and a strip of bare skin showed just above his thin white socks; the strip on each leg was pale and hairless. Somehow that bothered Bell almost as much as did the sight of the smashed brain: that inch of skin above his socks. It was so tender, so intimate. Men like Freddie Arnett never wore shorts. So this was a part of him that only his wife, more than likely, had seen for a long, long time, maybe since he was a little boy, when he took baths on Saturday nights with his brothers, and now here it was for strangers to gawk at. Law enforcement personnel, crime-scene techs—anybody on official business could look at him without his permission. Murder was the ultimate violation, yes, but there were other violations, too, that came in its wake. Smaller, heartbreaking indignities. Such as a strip of skin between a rucked-up trouser cuff and the folded-over top of a ribbed white sock.

  Fogelsong was talking again. “I’m meeting with Deputy Harrison in half an hour to coordinate the investigations. See where we stand. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Bell nodded.

  “By the way,” he said, shifting his position on the couch, signaling a shift in topic, “I heard about your own little adventure. That stabbing you stumbled across in Collier County on Saturday night. Shirley’s okay, I take it.”

  “Yeah. But she’s out of control, Nick. Won’t listen to me. Goes her own way.”

  “She’ll settle down.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do.”

  “Anyway,” Bell said, “the homicide in Tommy’s appears to be unrelated to Freddie Arnett’s murder. Killer confessed to Deputy Sturm at the scene. We’re checking on his whereabouts Thursday night—but this one seems tied up nice and neat. No loose ends. Not about who did it, that is. There are a few questions about the victim and a business card he had in his pocket, and I might be looking into that just as soon as I—”

  “Sturm?” Nick asked, interrupting her. “Mandy Sturm?”

  “Yeah. Do you know her?”

  “Not her,” he said. “Not well, anyway. It’s her husband I know. Virgil Sturm. Good man. Works for the CSX railroad. Or did, before all the layoffs.” Fogelsong dusted off his knee, as if he could somehow get rid of bad news the same quick way. “He’s related to Mary Sue’s family.”

  Bell let a short but decisive length of time go by. “Speaking of Mary Sue—how’d things go in Chicago?”

  The sheriff discovered the cuff button on his right sleeve. He pressed it with his thumb, then twisted it, as if checking to make sure it wouldn’t fall off at an inopportune moment.

  “Fine,” he said. Voice flat, neutral.

  Bell was disappointed but didn’t show it. His business.

  “One thing.” Nick was speaking again, which surprised her. Usually she was the one forced to break the occasional silences. “I went by to see Clayton Meckling,” he said. “The hospital he’s at—the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago—is right downtown. Real close to the hotel where Mary Sue and I stayed. Spent a couple of afternoons with him.”

  Now Bell was the one who looked around for a bit of busywork in which to indulge. She picked up a yellow pencil, one of several she kept at the ready alongside a short stack of paper on her desktop, and nervously worked the pointy end against the sheet on top. In a few seconds, the paper wasn’t blank anymore.

  “How’s he doing?” Bell asked. She kept her voice casual.

  “Pretty well. He’s a fighter. Not a surprise, but still good to see. They’re working him hard and he’s eating it up. Just about ready to come back, he told me.” Fogelsong rolled his shoulders, then leaned forward so that he could arch his back. Couch-sitting was not a natural condition for him. “I don’t know how you two left things, Belfa. Don’t know if you’re in regular contact anymore. But he’s not the man he was four months ago. No more self-pity. None of that left in him. He’s got plans again.”

  She was glad to hear it—thrilled, actually—but hesitated to show any portion of her joy to the sheriff. She was closer to Nick Fogelsong than to anyone else on the planet, but there were still areas of Bell’s life that she didn’t discuss with anyone—including Nick. Bell and Clay Meckling had been romantically involved until Clay was maimed in an accident in the spring. He withdrew from her, from everyone, and she and Clay hadn’t spoken in over two and a half months. It was Rhonda Lovejoy who’d told her about Clay’s trip to the Chicago rehab hospital, one of the best in the world.

  “Appreciate it,” Bell said. For all the emotion in her voice, she might have been thanking him for opening the courthouse door for her.

  The sheriff waited, just in case she wanted to say something else, ask any more questions about Clay. She knew why he was waiting, and she also knew how impossible it was for her to reveal how deep her feelings ran for Clay Meckling—as impossible, come to that, as it was for Fogelsong to discuss his wife’s illness. Put Nick and me in a contest to see who’s more stubborn, Bell thought, and it’d be a tie, no question. He won’t talk about Mary Sue and I won’t talk about Clay. Won’t—or can’t. Same thing. Both of us were taught to keep it all inside. Sometimes it felt as if they’d both been sentenced to prison—not the kind that had held Shirley, but the kind whose invisible walls were even taller, even stronger—on account of how and where they were raised, the hard and constant lessons they’d learned.

  “Well,” Nick said, “better get back to it.” He stood up, having first leaned to his right so that he could use his palm to push off against the arm of the couch. It bothered the hell out of him, Bell knew, that he needed help these days, even inanimate help, to assist his rise. Nick hated dependency in all its forms. But he was fifty-five years old. Gravity pushed back harder these days. “After I meet with Deputy Harrison, I’ve got to get ready for tonight’s meeting with the county commissioners,” he said. “Soon as word gets around about Charlie Frank, they’re going to have a lot of questions about the murders. And they’re right to be asking.” Another complication occurred to him. “I’m going to request funds to hire private security for the ceremony on Friday. It’ll bust the budget wide open—but it’s worth it. Everybody’s jumpy as hell. And no wonder.” He put his hat on his head, leveled it up.

  “Extra security sounds like a good idea.”

  “Thing we really need,” he said, “is another deputy. I’ll make my pitch again, but it won’t work. Can tell you that right now. Commissioners might go for a temporary fix, but a new hire? Forget it.”

  “A couple of unsolved murders might change their minds.”

  “Hell of a way to get their attention,” he shot back. “Anyhow, way I hear it, there’ll be a record crowd on Friday. Maybe close to a thousand people. Maybe more. Can you beat that? A thousand people—all in one place—in Raythune County. Riley Jessup spends his days in a big house over in Charleston now, but he’s still a popular man in these parts.

  “You know what?” Fogelsong went on. He was switching gears again. Bell could hear it in his voice. That voice had toughened up, the anger threading blackly through it. “No way in hell I ever thought we’d have two homicides in a row like this. Not again. Not after last fall. You just don’t expect it.” He ruminated for a quick run of seconds. “Don’t imagine Freddie Arnett or Charlie Frank were expecting it, either, until events proved otherwise.” He started to go, then turned his head in her direction one more time. “Deputy Harrison did a good job while I was away,” he said. It was both a question and a statement. “Considering.”

  “She did her best. Baptism of fire, I’d say.”

  “Coffee later at JP’s?”

  “Sure.” Even in the midst of the slow-motion crisis of two murder investigations, they needed to keep their rituals. They’d agreed on that five years ago, when they first began working together. “Bet you missed that bottomless
cup at JP’s,” she added. “Coffee’s kind of hit-and-miss in big cities, as I recall.”

  Bell saw something come into Fogelsong’s eyes before he answered. She and the sheriff had a fierce and steady mutual affection. They rarely alluded to it, even in passing. And that, she believed, was a large part of what had enabled its survival all these years: They didn’t wear it out or distort it by analyzing it or even naming it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the main thing I missed, all right. The coffee.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Lindy could not bring herself to lock her father in the basement when she left at night for her shift at the station. She could have done just that; there was a dead bolt on the kitchen side of the basement door, and she kept the key. It would be easy. But if anything happened—a fire, say—she would be trapping him, dooming him, and she couldn’t do that. The basement had no outside entrance. No windows, either.

  So she took her chances. She repeatedly questioned herself about it, going back and forth with the pros and cons, over and over again, but she wouldn’t lock him in. Nor could she afford to hire someone to watch him in her absence—even if she could have persuaded her father to put up with a stranger in the house. Which he didn’t want. And neither, come to that, did she.

  Sometimes her apprehension seemed misplaced, her worry unwarranted. There were mornings when she arrived here and it was clear that he hadn’t come out of the basement at all, not once, much less left the house. But something was changing. He was getting angrier, more restless. Unpredictable. These days, when she got home and waited a minute or so in the kitchen, letting the house settle in around her, listening, then climbed down the rickety basement stairs, moving slowly, keeping a cautious hand on the rough-feeling rail, and called his name, doing it softly so as not to startle him—Daddy, hey, Daddy, it’s Lindy, it’s just me—she would hear him scuttling away from her like a frightened animal, thrashing, kicking, banging, tripping over boxes and tables, snarling at her. If she tried to approach him, he would lurch away to another corner, cringing at the doorway-sized punch of daylight at the top of the stairs, flinging up a meaty hand in front of his face to block it, then dipping his grizzled gray head. Damned double shift, he would sometimes mutter. Gotta work a double shift. Ray, you got your end? Ray-boy. You hold on there, Ray. I’m coming on through. Ray Purcell was her father’s best friend. They’d started out in the mines together in the 1960s. Lindy had heard a lot of stories about Ray, although she never met him; he died of lung cancer in 1973.

  Her father’s agitation was definitely escalating. She didn’t know why. She knew only that he was suffering even more these days, tormented by some frantic inner vision that chased him around the basement and—to her growing concern—sometimes out of the basement, too, and out of the house. These days, when Lindy came home in the morning after her shift and moved through the house into the kitchen, passing window after window, each window freshly anointed by the light of the rising sun, she would often find the back door ajar from where he’d come back home. Boot prints on the kitchen floor. And in her heart, a clutch of fear.

  Like this morning.

  Her knees felt wobbly, so she sat down at the kitchen table. She took several deep breaths, fighting off a wave of dizziness that emanated, she knew, from her apprehension. If she’d had anything in her stomach, she would’ve thrown it up; her guts felt kinked and clawed-at. At times Lindy was overwhelmed by everything, by the responsibility and the fear and the confusion. Was she doing right by her father, after all? Hiding him this way? Enabling him to stay where he was, the way he was? She thought she was protecting him, but was that what she was really doing?

  There weren’t many family members left. No one who lived nearby. And no one, certainly, whom Lindy trusted enough to confide in. She had some distant cousins on her mother’s side in eastern Kentucky and another set on her father’s side who lived up near Morgantown, but that was all; they never visited, and they picked up on partial truths and made their judgments from that. They knew Odell was big and mean and “touched in the head” now, as her second cousin Jeannie Stump liked to put it, but they had no idea about the true extent of his rages, or his night prowls, or about the fact that he lived mostly in the basement, in a space tricked up and fitted out to look like an old coal mine.

  A week after Lindy’s high school graduation, Jeannie Stump had made an unannounced visit. For a graduation gift, she brought Lindy a flowered tote bag and a makeup kit. Jeannie was a tall, broad, slump-shouldered woman in her late fifties with wiry gray hair and gray eyes. She lived by herself and worked at a nursing home, where her job was to push the chest-high rolling cart up and down the corridor each morning and each evening, dispensing pills to the old folks in tiny room after tiny room, a task that required her to speak loud and slow and to maintain, at all times, a sunny optimism blatantly at odds with the accelerating decay she witnessed daily.

  Jeannie had taken one look at the way Lindy and Odell lived—the crumbling house, the isolation, the mess in the cellar—and declared, “Honey, listen to me—we’ve got to get you some help with your poor daddy. Gotta call somebody, okay? A government agency, maybe.” Jeannie meant well. Lindy was sure of it. But her failure to mind her own business caused problems.

  Two days after Jeannie had gone back to Morgantown, there was another knock at the door—Jeannie’s knock had been enough of an irritating surprise, now here was another—and Lindy found herself in the bustling, meddlesome presence of someone who identified herself as Gladys Davies, a caseworker with Raythune County Family Services. It turned out that Jeannie, suspecting Lindy might not make the call, had made it herself.

  “We have a real good adult day care program,” Davies had informed Lindy. She blinked behind a large pair of rectangular eyeglasses that dominated her face. “I can sign you up right here and now.”

  “No thanks,” Lindy said.

  Davies frowned. She had dull red hair, and her fleshy body was corralled into a chocolate brown pantsuit. Lindy hadn’t invited her to come in and sit down, but the woman had done so anyway, pulling a clipboard out of her gigantic black vinyl purse and placing it across her lap like a TV tray. There was a practiced snap and prim efficiency to her movements, as if the world were one big to-do list and she was on the lookout for boxes she could tick.

  “We’re fine,” Lindy added. She’d remained standing. Hand still on the inside doorknob, to facilitate—she hoped—a swift exit by this interloper.

  “We’ve got lots of craft activities,” Davies said. “And a county bus can pick him up here every day.”

  “No thanks.”

  Davies seemed perturbed as well as puzzled. Then she sensed the real issue—or so she thought—and offered Lindy a brightly commiserating smile. “It’s free, honey. Won’t cost you nor your daddy one red cent.”

  “Don’t need it.”

  A tiny sigh. So maybe that wasn’t it, after all. The woman’s voice was flat now, all the enthusiasm ironed out of it by Lindy’s truculence: “Well, I can’t force you, Miss Crabtree, but I hope you’ll give me a call soon to set something up. You can’t take care of him forever. Not all by yourself.”

  “Yeah. I can.”

  “Don’t you have things you want to do?”

  Davies’s tone had dropped lower, and the effect was to produce an instant, insinuating try at intimacy. She went on, “Friends you want to hang out with? A boyfriend, maybe? Maybe check into courses at a community college? As long as you’re looking after your daddy, your life is pretty restricted, honey. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

  “Yeah,” Lindy said. “It does.”

  * * *

  She was still sitting at the kitchen table, where she’d slung herself when the dizziness commenced, her bowed forehead pushed into clasped hands. A headache smashed repeatedly behind her eyes, like waves striking a high black rock. The recollection of the people who had recently tried to help—Jeannie Stump, the lady from the county agency with the
big glasses—only made things worse. Made her feel even more alone.

  They didn’t get it. Nobody did. Lindy couldn’t abandon her father. Couldn’t let anybody see him this way. Couldn’t let anybody know just how bad he was. She loved him, but it was more than that, too. More than love. It was something that didn’t have a word to go along with it. Not everything in the world has its own damned word, Lindy told herself, the anger and the sorrow and the uncertainty building up inside her whenever she thought about her father, a shifting combination of emotions for which she had no vocabulary. Some things just are what they are—and there’s nothing to call them. No way to describe them. They just are what they are. So she’d made him a place in the basement, in the darkness he craved. She wasn’t trying to shut him away, out of her sight; she only wanted to make things the way he liked them. And she promised herself that as long as he lived, she’d take care of him. By herself.

  Lindy lifted her face. The kitchen was bright now; another summer Sunday was under way. Each object in the small room—table, book, chair, floor, sink, counter, coffee cup, knife block—was clear and blunt and particular.

  Knife block.

  Black handles protruded from the wooden block, the heavy blades resting in their designated slots. She knew there were six slots—which meant there ought to be six knife handles.

  Lindy counted the handles silently: One. Two. Three. Four. Five.