Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  Two people—an old lady and a toddler—had already succumbed to the temperature and, limp and glassy-eyed, been hauled off by the paramedics. At least we’re right here at the ER, Bell thought. Can’t get much handier.

  She tried to come up with a rough head count. Were there a thousand people here today, as Sheriff Fogelsong had predicted? Close to it, maybe. In any case, it was one of the largest gatherings she’d ever seen in Raythune County. Maybe the free hot dogs and RC Cola served up on long tables at the back were the principal lure—even though some visitors had obviously smuggled in their own refreshments, the kind classified under the “adult beverages” rubric. No wonder: This was a special day. And these people were plenty excited to see Jessup, former governor of West Virginia, on one of his rare trips back to his homeplace.

  So far they hadn’t seen a thing, because the show was running late. Jessup and his entourage had arrived a while ago in a lumbering, big-hipped, white motor home with a license plate that read WV GOV and were hustled forthwith into the building. All the crowd could do now was wait and sweat.

  Watching them, Bell did what she always did when in the presence of a large group, her eyes brushing quickly across each face like a feather duster moving down a row of balusters: tick, tick, tick, tick. She suspected that she probably kept up that careful vigilance in her sleep, too; behind the closed lids, her eyeballs were moving, shifting back and forth, because she was generally certain there was trouble brewing somewhere, and only her to stop it. Or only her and Nick and his deputies.

  Which sins lurked in this heart or the other one, what guilty memories or bad intentions haunted which souls? That was what she wondered, peering at these people. She couldn’t help herself. The cost of being a prosecutor, Bell had discovered only a few months into the job, was this ongoing appraisal: Statistics insisted that a certain number of people in any gathering had either committed a crime or were going to, in the near future; a certain number had gotten by with something or hoped to. A certain number hid terrible secrets.

  Hell. Whoever was responsible for two violent homicides could be here right now. Whoever had smashed an old man’s head and then stabbed another man—both of the victims were helpless, both of them were beloved to someone—might be within the shifting orbit of her gaze. He could be out there in the crowd at this very moment, mopping at the sweat on the back of his neck just like anybody else, muttering about the heat, grinning at somebody’s joke, while in the locked basement of his mind, he dreamed of the darkness to come, of what he would do and how he would do it.

  * * *

  “Hot nuff fur ya?”

  The crowd roared back various versions of “Yeah!” and “Hell, yeah!” and “Uh-huh!” followed by raucous spurts of hooting and whistling. Small children begged to be hoisted up on the hairy shoulders of fathers in tank tops, and the fathers obliged. Old people rose painfully from their lawn chairs and squinted toward the flag-festooned truck bed, flattening out one hand for use as an eyeshade, bunching up the other into a fist to place against a fleshy hip for stability.

  Riley Jessup stood on the makeshift stage as if it were the most natural thing in the world for an eighty-nine-year-old man to be right here, clutching a cordless microphone as lovingly as an ice cream cone, blinking in the all-over sunshine. His head was a white hairless lump stuck on the wide plank of his shoulders. He was short and grievously overweight, but the seersucker suit had been tailored with such discreet and non-binding generosity that his true dimensions were obscured.

  “Hot nuff fur ya?” he repeated. The echoes of his amplified voice bounced around the parking lot in tattered bits and scraggly patches. The crowd cheered and laughed and stomped and whooped and whistled, and Jessup, Bell saw, drank it all in, the voluminous love and the honest admiration. He inhaled it, he absorbed it, and she would have sworn that she could actually see the crowd’s rowdy energy filling him up like an elixir, causing him to blossom and swell, restoring him, rejuvenating him, and as the magic stuff branched through his body, he seemed to shed a few brittle flakes of his old age and decrepitude; the crowd’s energy straightened his spine by a tick or two and enabled him to lift his arms just that much higher as he gestured toward it, his sweaty red bulb of a chin raised up, his eyes aimed at a spot slightly above their heads, positively popelike in his all-encompassing, beatific gaze. He hadn’t held elective office in almost three decades, but he still had the gift. He still knew how to handle a crowd, how to rile it up and smooth it out and rile it up again.

  “My, oh my—it’s so-o-o-o-o good to be back home!” Jessup hollered. “Right here in Raythune County!”

  More cheers, whistles. Then the crowd sank back down like a half-baked soufflé, rising and now cratering, the brief stir of activity having reminded everyone of just how wickedly enervating this heat really was.

  “My friends,” Jessup said. Voice calm now. Softer. It caused the people to lean in, straining to hear. They were hungry for what he had to say. They needed him. Just as these people filled and energized Riley Jessup, he had the same effect on them. Bell had attended a few political rallies now and again, but never had she witnessed such raw and obvious synchronicity, such a mass symbiotic exchange. Jessup had moved beyond the confines of Raythune County in so many ways, but the place still energized him; it still moved in his blood and fed his dreams. It was still a part of him. And he of it.

  “My friends,” he repeated, the public address system popping and crackling with every third word or so, “when I was a little boy growing up in Briney Hollow, it was a terrible thing when somebody got sick. Nearest doctor was three counties away.” Jessup shook his head, initiating an answering ripple in the folds of flesh on his neck. “If somebody did get sick—well, all you could do was pray. Pray and pray and pray. Sometimes the good Lord saw fit to bless your loved one with a little more time. And sometimes He didn’t.”

  Jessup paused. He frowned. He looked down at the pointy tips of his shoes. Every old person in the crowd, Bell guessed, was recollecting right along with him, remembering a parent or great uncle or favorite aunt who’d died a slow and misery-filled death a half a hundred years ago back in some inaccessible niche, a death impossible to contemplate in a modern era of painkillers and antibiotics. And paved roads.

  “No more!” Jessup thundered. He’d raised his head abruptly, as if he’d suddenly heard his long-dead but eternally beloved mother calling his name from the back porch, fetching him home for supper. “No more! ’Cause we got ourselves this fine medical center right here in Raythune County. And now it’s even gonna have its very own MRI machine!”

  Jessup sucked in a long, deep breath. He let it out with a wheeze, like a note held too long inside an accordion, so long that it managed to wander off-key. “Now, as y’all might’ve heard,” he said, voice turning coy, “I’ve done pretty well for myself.” A rolling tide of chuckles spread across the crowd. Everybody knew that Jessup was a millionaire who lived in sumptuous comfort and luxury, a universe removed from the poverty of his upbringing in Raythune County, and that fact seemed to enhance rather than detract from his credibility. “Got my pick of hospitals. Wellsir, my grandson, Montgomery, is real, real sick. And next time the doctors want to have a crack at him, we’re bringing him back. Back to the Raythune County Medical Center. ’Cause there ain’t no better place nowheres!”

  As the crowd stomped and hollered its communal approval, Bell spotted Sheriff Fogelsong’s brown hat across the crammed-full lot; he moved steadily along the perimeter, coordinating his actions with Deputy Harrison. Bell waved, but he didn’t see her. He was too focused on his surveillance. He had a funny feeling about the event, he’d told her the day before. It wasn’t a premonition, exactly, just an odd unsettledness in his belly. Too many bad things had happened already. He couldn’t relax. No matter how much additional security was present, this was Nick Fogelsong’s lookout. His county. His responsibility. And there were too many people, too much confusion, too many ways for things to go w
rong.

  The audience was at it again, interspersing the whoops and the cheers with two-fingered whistles. Jessup raised a hand to halt the hullabaloo; the people happily obeyed, their shrieks dying down and then winking out one by one like stars at sunrise. “And so,” he went on, “that’s what I come to say to you today. That’s it, plain and simple. But I dearly hope that some of you’ll find a minute to come by and say hello before we head back to Charleston. I’ll be in the lobby over there. And after that,” he said, a husky swagger in his old-man voice, “I think you oughta find yourself a creek somewheres—so you can jump in and get outa this gol-durned heat, whadda say? Whaddaya say, folks, whaddaya say?” The crowd exploded as Jessup goaded them on: “Huh? Huh? Can’t hear ya! Louder, now—can’t rightly hear ya!”

  * * *

  The speech had concluded an hour and a half ago, and still the people came, threading through the lobby and past the governor one by one, the very old and the very young and those in the vague indeterminate swath of ages in between, an earnest and anxious chain of well-wishers. The crowd was crushed and funneled through one side of the entrance doors and then the long line looped across the carpeted lobby, and after that it curved back out the other side of the double doors; from above, the squiggly line gyrating through the front section of the building surely looked like a toddler’s clumsy scribble. There was a vast murmuring sound, the kind of anticipatory excitement that resists expression in mere words. No matter how long these people had to wait to see Riley Jessup, they would gladly have waited even longer.

  It had required the best efforts of five security guards, two on each side and one at the rear, to help the old man totter down from the flatbed truck, courtesy of an overmatched stepstool, and then to guide him into the lobby and lower him into a custom-made chair, whereupon his body relaxed into its default pudding shape. Even though Jessup was now out of the sun and into the air-conditioning, shiny buttons of sweat still popped spontaneously across the top of his head. His shirt collar was limp and sopping.

  Bell watched from a corner of the lobby. These people seemed to crave physical contact with the man, even if just for a few precious seconds. A handshake. A fleeting brush of their fingertips against his. Certain politicians, she thought with bemusement, were wildly beloved in West Virginia, despite the record of corruption and incompetence and unabashed laziness that clung to them like pieces of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of their shiny shoes. Politics here was ruled by a curiously inverted ratio: The worse the people were treated by some scalawag of an elected representative, the more they seemed to revere him, especially in retrospect. Bell sometimes wondered if it came from the same impulse that made mothers defend their prodigal sons—the bad boys, the bums, the users, the troublemakers—and love them all the more for their rascally defects.

  And there might be another reason, too, she surmised, why West Virginians rarely held a grudge against even the most grotesquely rapacious politician. They wanted to believe. Needed to. They were compelled to believe that, no matter how bad people—or conditions in general—had been in the past, they could be different tomorrow. It was a kind of shy, primitive optimism that sometimes irritated her, but she knew that it was also a survival technique. If you didn’t have hope around here, what the hell else did you have?

  “Hey, there.”

  Bell turned. Rhonda Lovejoy was at her side, grinning despite a face so red that it resembled a freshly picked cherry tomato. Her sky blue dress with the big white bow at the neck was damp and bedraggled; overall, she looked as if she’d walked fully clothed into a shower and then changed her mind about it before soaping up.

  “How’re you doing in this heat?” Bell asked her.

  “Tolerable. Ran into my cousin Evie outside. She’s here with all six of her kids. Asked if I could use my influence to move ’em up a little bit.” Rhonda shook her head nobly. “Don’t worry, boss. I set her straight. No favors. Not how the prosecutor’s office operates.”

  The line was moving faster now as the security staff began to hustle people along. Jessup’s handshakes were briefer, the small talk brusquer. His smile came and went like a DVD on fast-forward. Bell noticed a woman standing to the left of the governor’s chair, hunched over a cell phone, ignoring the endless river of worshippers. She was middle-aged, excruciatingly thin, draped in a white linen pantsuit with dainty gold buttons, her small feet angled into lipstick-red heels. If you looked closely, you could see the faint imprint of Riley Jessup’s heavy features on her much smaller face. She had a dimpled chin and tiny eyes and cinnamon-colored hair that cupped her cheeks like two hands. Bell recognized her from the picture that had accompanied Donnie Frazey’s preview story in the Acker’s Gap Gazette: She was Sharon Jessup Henner, the governor’s daughter.

  Bell couldn’t hear what she was saying into the cell, but clearly it wasn’t a cordial exchange. The woman’s face was owned by a scowl. The skin on that face looked hard; it was thickened by age, and by the sneaky inroads carved by worry or debauchery or both. It told the story of her life. Skin always did.

  “That’s his daughter, right?” Bell asked Rhonda. The room was so noisy that she didn’t need to whisper.

  “You got it. Pretty notorious, back in the day.”

  “How so?”

  Rhonda licked her lips. She seemed to cool down all at once. Now she was in her element. She knew the backstory of a great many residents of Raythune County, along with their uncles and cousins and great-aunts and step-grandparents; she could even recite the lineage of the better-known hunting dogs in the region. And she enjoyed deploying the information, as long as she could do so at her own pace, letting the story unfurl bit by delicious bit, like a wide red ribbon coaxed slowly and dramatically off its spool.

  But this time, there was a complication. Rhonda knew the Jessups’ saga only thirdhand, from listening to other people’s stories. She hated to acknowledge that there were families in Raythune County about which she had little inside information; it was like finding a bad spot on a shiny apple. So she first had to justify herself.

  “Well,” Rhonda said, tucking in gamely, “you gotta remember, boss, that nobody ever heard of the Jessups until Riley went into politics. Before that, they were just another dirt-poor family from Briney Hollow. Now, you grew up around here, too, so I don’t need to tell you about Briney Hollow,” she said, and then proceeded to do just that: “Too many folks out there to keep track of. Too many kids running around with no shoes. No warm coats in the winter. No breakfast in their bellies when they head out to school. It’s a shame, but it was true then and it’s true now. Briney Hollow is one of those places you’d swear the good Lord forgot all about—and by the time He remembers, He’ll be too embarrassed at His lapse to do much of anything about it. Anyhow, Riley Jessup was an ambitious fella, early on. Had a real knack with the crowds—guess you just got a look at that yourself—and kept on going. Up and up and up.”

  Rhonda paused. She and Bell were both distracted by the sight of an elderly woman in a sweat-mauled blue blouse who had tottered up to Jessup’s chair and offered her hand; when he took it and shook it and then tried to withdraw, she held on, as if his hand were the last rock sticking out of the cliff face and she was sliding down, down, down. Jessup’s face quivered with the opening stages of panic. At last a security guard intervened, breaking the old woman’s grip and leading her away, while she mumbled her outrage.

  “Same time Jessup was rising up,” Rhonda went on, resuming her story with even more relish, “Sharon over there was running wild. Gave Jessup and his wife, Tammy Lynn—Tammy Lynn, God rest her soul, died of breast cancer a few years back—no end of trouble, on account of her drinking and her sleeping around. Loved to embarrass her daddy, seems like. Ran away time after time when she was a teenager. Disappeared completely in her twenties and thirties. Straightened up, though, in the end. Came home to her folks after finding Jesus—or so she said, there being no way to independently verify that story with the other party.�
��

  Rhonda paused once again. There was a kink in the line parading past Jessup’s chair; like an ominous clog in a drain, the backed-up crowd was thickening into a confused lump. A chubby toddler with strawberry-blond pigtails—apparently mistaking the rotund governor for a shopping-mall Santa—had attempted to climb into his polyester prairie of a lap. A security guard snatched up the girl in a pincer-like grip and, with astonishing speed, deposited her back on the floor. She waited five seconds and then exploded into shriek-heavy sobs.

  “Then Sharon married Whit Henner,” Rhonda said, now that the show was over and the line had begun to move again. “Aide to the governor. Their son, Montgomery, was born sixteen years ago. Sickly child, right from the get-go, and he’s only gotten worse. Bet you anything that Sharon’s on the phone right now with one of his doctors back in Charleston.” Rhonda and Bell looked at Sharon; she had moved a few steps away from Jessup’s chair and from the long motley string of his admirers, and was aiming another barrage of verbal abuse into her cell.

  “Riley Jessup is just nuts about the kid,” Rhonda said. She had lowered her voice ever so slightly; this part of the story was sad rather than juicy. “Do anything in the world for him. Now, mind you—Jessup was never much interested in family before, except when the cameras were rolling. But everybody says he’s a changed man. The boy’s health problems just bother him something awful. Tear him up inside.” Rhonda crossed her arms, a signal that she was winding things up. “The governor tells anybody who’ll listen that Montgomery is the only reason he’s still on this earth—I mean, the old man’s got a pacemaker and diabetes and enough arthritis to make every step a misery. But God granted him a few more years, he says, so’s he can see Montgomery grow up.”

  “Where’s the kid?” Bell said, looking around.

  “Oh, he’s way too sick to travel. Some kind of heart thing. Real bad, I hear.” Rhonda scratched the side of her neck, a neck wet from copious sweating.