Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  She punched the key in the lock. Opened the door. Stepped inside.

  Nothing happened. Of course there’s nobody here. Jesus. Grow up, already. Bell felt like a damned fool. She shoved the door shut behind her. And realized that her hand was shaking.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  At noon the next day, Bell caught Nick Fogelsong in the act. His first impulse was to fumble for a desk drawer in which to hide the evidence, but to no avail; she’d seen what he was up to. So the sheriff, scowling, miffed at himself for letting her find him this way, gave up. He grunted and flung the object across the top of his desk. It knocked over a chipped red coffee cup filled with pencils and pens. He made no move to pick up the cup or its scattered contents.

  “I do believe,” Bell said gravely, “that this may constitute an impeachable offense. Been nice serving with you.” Then she grinned, unable to keep the joke going. Picked up the book he’d discarded, studied the armor-cocooned knight on the cover. Read the title and the author’s name aloud: “Agincourt. Bernard Cornwell. Good one?”

  He nodded. He was still embarrassed. Reading—especially military history—was Nick Fogelsong’s passion, but this was the middle of a workday. No excuse for such lollygagging.

  “Well,” she went on, setting the book back down, “I’ll let you slide this once. And I need a favor, anyway, so think of it as quid pro quo.”

  He waved her toward the wooden chair that faced his desk. “Long as you don’t spill the beans about my secret vice, you can have whatever you want.” He pulled out the bottom drawer on the left-hand side of his desk and perched a booted foot there. “Actually, come to think of it, this is my lunch hour, so I’ve got nothing to apologize for. Free on a technicality.”

  “Hey. Who’s the lawyer around here, anyway?”

  The office was exceptionally hot. Fogelsong didn’t believe in air-conditioning. He’d allow other employees who worked in the courthouse annex to install window units if they so chose, but he also let it be known that he considered it a ridiculous frill. The mountains kept Acker’s Gap reasonably cool, he pointed out. The good Lord surely meant for us to sweat hard, he’d add. Little reminder of the effects of hellfire. So we can alter our behavior accordingly. He was teasing, but with Nick Fogelsong, sometimes it was hard to tell.

  Bell rolled up the sleeves of her white blouse. A nod to the humidity, as well as to the fact that she had a serious matter to discuss with him.

  Leaning forward in her chair, her earlier levity having vanished, she rapidly filled him in on what Rhonda Lovejoy had discovered about Rhododendron Associates and Riley Jessup. The information had been simmering in Bell’s mind since the day before, when only a full slate of afternoon appointments and an evening’s worth of paperwork kept her from acting on it right away.

  She didn’t tell Nick about the absurd little drama she’d enacted on her front porch last night, and never would. He’d worry about her. Think she was slipping. Going soft. There was enough real danger already; threats were common in a small-town prosecutor’s office, because a prosecutor had to live alongside the very people whose lives she interrupted with little inconveniences such as jail terms. No sense dwelling on the made-up kind.

  “So I’m headed to Charleston in about an hour,” Bell said. “Want to have a little chat with Riley Jessup.”

  The sheriff looked mildly surprised. “Really.”

  “Well, I had a bail hearing scheduled this afternoon on the Fletcher case, but it’s been postponed. So I have the time. And it’s a nice day for a drive.” She shrugged impatiently. “Why would a public figure like Jessup be in business with a low-life scumbag like Jed Stark? I figure there’s no harm in trying to find out what the connection is.”

  Fogelsong gave himself a minute to think before he nodded. “Okay. So your intention is to go grill our illustrious former governor and see if he’s willing to come clean about his private financial dealings.” The sheriff’s voice gradually became more serious, shedding its jocular tone. “You do realize, I hope, that to a man like Riley Jessup—to any politician, for that matter—public image means more than anything else. More, even, than their fortune. They spend years and years building up a picture of themselves in the public eye. Polishing it. Keeping it just the way they want it. No matter what the reality is—and no matter how long it’s been since their name was on a ballot—they’ll hang on to that pretty picture at all costs. They’ll fight like hell to keep themselves looking good for the home folks. Their legacy is everything. Older a politician gets, the more passionate he is to come across like a Lincoln in the history books.” He rubbed the back of his neck. He didn’t like sarcasm and tried to keep it out of his tone, but lost the fight. “And you think Riley Jessup will take a chance on losing all that and answer your questions because—why? Oh, yes. Because you’re so all-fired persuasive.”

  Bell was stung by his skepticism, but saw his point. Her desire to visit Jessup did sound as if it might be a waste of time. “I don’t think he’ll divulge anything in particular, no. Or put his precious public image in any jeopardy. But remember what you taught me? Letting somebody know that you’re curious—even if that’s all you do—can work wonders sometimes. Can initiate some unforeseen consequences.” It was a twist on the classic Nick Fogelsong truism: You can do as much to put the brakes on bad behavior with a long, slow, level stare—a stare that declares I’m watching you, mister—as you can with a cocked gun and an arrest warrant.

  He shrugged, reluctant to dwell on the compliment. “Okay. But you don’t need my permission to drive to Charleston. So what’s the favor?”

  “You know the budget situation around here. Meaning there’s nobody to cover the phones in the prosecutor’s office while Lee Ann’s on vacation. Meaning that if I’m on the road this afternoon, it’s a problem.”

  “I thought Tina Sheets was helping out.”

  “She is.” Tina Sheets worked in the country treasurer’s office. “But only in the mornings,” Bell explained. “That’s the only time they can spare her.”

  “Still not following.”

  “I was thinking—” She hesitated. Looked down at her lap. This was harder than she’d anticipated. “Was thinking that maybe I’d ask Mary Sue to come over to my office this afternoon and answer the phone. Just for a few hours.”

  She still didn’t look at Nick. She couldn’t. She didn’t know if the idea would make him angry, if he would lecture her about interfering in his personal life, employing that clipped, cold, exquisitely well-controlled voice he used when his ire was on the rise. Mary Sue Fogelsong hadn’t worked since her diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. She was effectively medicated now, her symptoms were under control, but she spent too much time sitting at home—or so Bell believed. Mary Sue Fogelsong had once been a third-grade teacher at Acker’s Gap Elementary. A good one. She was happiest when she was busy. Now, though, no one asked anything of her—least of all Nick Fogelsong. He thought the best way to protect her was to shield her from the world, and from the world’s expectations.

  Yet Bell knew what Mary Sue was capable of. She’d seen it. Bell bet her life on it last spring, and she had been proved right.

  “Up to you,” Nick said. His voice was neutral. “Your call.”

  * * *

  Bell stood in front of the square oak desk in the small outer room that connected to her office. This was the desk from which Lee Ann Frickie had run the prosecutor’s office for the past forty-seven years, through six different prosecutors. It featured a clean, polished surface with a divided soul: half high-tech, half old-fashioned. A computer monitor and keyboard shared the space with a big black rotary-dial phone.

  Bell tapped the top of the clunky-looking receiver.

  “It’s just like the one that Hick and Rhonda share downstairs. Both of ’em belong in the Smithsonian,” Bell said. “The phones, I mean, not the assistant prosecutors.” Mary Sue was too focused to react to her joke, so Bell went on: “I don’t think they’ve updated the phon
e system in the courthouse since about 1947. And yet we’ve got Wi-Fi. Go figure.”

  Bell needed to be on the road in ten minutes in order to make it to Charleston by 4 P.M., but she was apprehensive about putting any pressure on Mary Sue. So she was trying to sound casual, lighthearted, as if they had all the time in the world. She didn’t want to intimidate Mary Sue or fluster her. Didn’t want to make her nervous.

  To each instruction, Mary Sue nodded grimly, as if Bell were relaying last-minute details about the D-Day landing. She sat behind the desk, back straight, hands clasped on the blotter, watching Bell with unblinking intensity. Mary Sue was a lean woman with short brown hair, hazel eyes, and a wary smile; she had once been pretty, but her illness aged her, putting lines in her face and an unnatural solemnity in her personality. She was trying very, very hard.

  When Bell had called her, Mary Sue’s response was startled and heartfelt: “Oh, yes! Yes, I’d love to help. I’ll be right there. Oh, my, yes.” And in a way, Bell was glad there wasn’t much time to go over things; Mary Sue couldn’t fuss or obsess or second-guess herself. Her duty was simple and clear: answer the phone, take messages.

  “Because,” Bell explained as she gathered up her purse and her briefcase, “when people call the prosecutor’s office, they don’t want a machine. They want a real, live human being at the other end of that line. Even just to leave a message.”

  Mary Sue nodded. She had nodded at everything Bell said. At one point she’d even begun to take notes, but Bell put a hand on top of Mary Sue’s hand to stop her, murmuring, “You’ve got this. You’re fine.”

  Outside, the heat was fierce. The air felt extra-heavy, clinging to Bell’s skin like a layer of Saran Wrap. She looked forward to lowering all four windows once she hit the interstate, letting the breeze cool her down.

  She’d just reached the Explorer when she saw him.

  Lanny Waller.

  Or as she immediately corrected herself: Lanny Fucking Waller. The sonofabitch who’d so far beaten the rap for sexual molestation of three minors because the girls’ mother was too chickenshit to let them testify against him—or to testify against him herself. He was ambling down the sidewalk in a dirty red T-shirt printed with a Confederate flag, and baggy plaid canvas shorts, chewing on something sticky, opening his mouth improbably wide with every revolution of his stubble-crusted jaws.

  He spotted Bell at roughly the same moment she saw him. Instantly, the chewing stopped. He spread out his mouth to make the biggest, widest, grossest, and most insinuating grin that Bell thought she’d ever witnessed, a grin that showcased a broken row of black and yellow teeth.

  Then he gave her a slow-motion, lascivious wink.

  Bell felt a tsunami surge of primitive emotion, an emotion that slammed her, overwhelmed her, pushing everything else out of her head. All the fine and enlightening words she knew, all the music and poetry, all the intricate and lovely bits of civilization, were swept away.

  I want him dead.

  No: It was more than that. Much worse.

  Not just dead. I want to kill the bastard myself.

  She’d felt this kind of rage before. Walking along Main Street a few weeks after her high school graduation—it was a punishingly hot summer, just like this one—she’d spotted Herb McCluskey. He was first in a long dismal line of foster parents who’d taken her in after her father was killed and her sister sent to prison. Herb McCluskey was a bum. A dirty, conniving bum with whom—along with his equally loathsome wife, Lois—Bell lived for a few months. Finally the social worker was able to get her out of there, and once the paperwork was ready, it happened so fast that the McCluskeys didn’t have time to squeal about the loss of the monthly check.

  Bell rarely ran into the foster families she’d lived with. Mostly they were the kind of people who didn’t stay long in one place, the kind whose lives were as flimsy and fly-by-night as their trailers. But there was Herb McCluskey, big as life, just as ugly as she remembered him. McCluskey didn’t say a word to her. Didn’t even look at her. Chances were, he’d forgotten all about her. Bell remembered enough for the both of them.

  And now, here was Lanny Fucking Waller.

  She wanted to lunge at him, she wanted to make a tight fist and take aim at that big fat miserable face, she wanted to—

  No.

  No, no, no.

  Bell recoiled from her own impulse, shocked at the intensity of her desire. She was a prosecutor, for God’s sake. An officer of the court. She wasn’t an enraged and emotionally disturbed teenager anymore. She believed in the justice system—at least she thought she did. Yet a dirtbag like Waller had set her off so easily, provoking something raw and wild in her. Something vicious and livid and foul, something that seethed in the lowest spot in her soul. Something she worked like hell to keep under wraps.

  And the worst part of it was, Waller had seen it. He knew. He’d tricked her into revealing herself. Standing there on the bright sidewalk, goading her with his very presence, he’d figured her out. He’d read her mind from the expression on her face, and what he now knew of her was devastating. She saw the gloating message in his eyes: Deep down, lady, you and me’s exactly the same. Got the same twitch and jump and urge. Being what we are, hating like we do, we’re doomed. We’re dead already.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Lindy distributed the letters across the kitchen table in two rows. With mounting excitement she had moved the stacks of books out of the way, and now she focused on the precious contents of the small tin box. The paper was thin and old and she had to be careful when she handled it, because the letters had been folded over multiple times. When she unfolded each one, the creases designating the folding points were like perforations eager to tear.

  She had the night off from the Lester station. But even if she hadn’t, she would have stayed right here. Called in sick. Reached her district manager and referred to a stomachache and a headache—a few different kinds of aches, vague and iffy, thrown in there together for good measure, because when a female employee called in sick, they didn’t ask any questions, afraid it might involve menstruation, the thing that no man Lindy had ever met wanted to discuss or even to acknowledge—and her district manager would’ve been fine about it, anyway. Lindy was reliable. She’d called in sick only once, when her father hurt himself. Year and a half ago, it was. Threw himself against the basement wall too hard. Lindy was afraid he’d suffered a concussion and so she stayed with him all night, not letting him fall asleep, waking him up every time his head sank. Daddy, she’d said. Daddy, come on.

  She counted the letters. There were fourteen. Except for the last several, all were handwritten on lined paper with a raggedy edge on the left side, the kind of pages hurriedly torn out of a spiral notebook.

  She had hoped they might be love letters. Hoped they’d been written in the time when her parents were courting, when Margaret Schoolcraft and Odell Crabtree were getting to know each other, the shy young woman and the burly coal miner.

  But no. She scanned the first few lines of the first few letters and realized they were addressed to her mother from a friend. Lindy had never heard of her, but that wasn’t surprising; her mother was not the kind of person who dragged the past into every conversation, like some crusty old fart going on and on about how things were so much better when Truman was in the White House.

  Lindy arranged the letters across the table from oldest to newest, left to right. The oldest one was dated July 9, 1972:

  Hi, Maggs!!!

  This camp is STUPID STUPID STUPID. I mean it. Total crap. Can’t believe they made me come here. What’s going on there? Can’t wait to get home. It’s hot as HELL and they make you do this stupid craft stuff. Plus go out in a canoe. Whole place smells like dead fish. God it stinks. I hate my counselor. Some fat-ass bitch named Cynthia. I tried to call her Cindie and she said, My name is CYNTHIA and she said it like she’s a queen or something. Bitch. Hey, gotta go. They’re turning out the cabin lig
ht.

  The letter was signed Maybelle in swirling, curving letters that bounced across the page and then linked up below the line, the looping bottom of the M attached to the trailing end of the final e.

  As an adult, Lindy knew, her mother had never been called Maggs or even Maggie; it was always Margaret. But on the rare occasions when her mother told her stories about her childhood, Lindy remembered, the other people in the stories—her sister, her parents, her friends—sometimes called her Maggs.

  The name Maybelle made Lindy want to snicker. Sounded like a cow. Or like some little old grandma in a long dress and work boots in a rocking chair up on the front porch, taking potshots at the crows, sneaking slugs out of the moonshine jar. Maybelle. Jesus.

  Lindy moved on to the next letter. It was dated August 24, 1975:

  Maggs,

  Gotta go. They’re coming real soon and I’m not even packed. I just wanted to say I’m going to miss you and miss this place. I am SO SO mad. I don’t WANT to go away to that stupid school. I don’t care how great it’s supposed to be. You’re my best friend and I DO NOT want to leave. They say I can come back at Christmas vacation but I don’t trust them. I know what’s going on. They want me gone. Last night my father called me a “g-d troublemaker.” Can you believe that? He acts all holy all the time, but when the front door’s closed and nobody’s listening, it’s all different.

  Okay, I really DO have to go now. I wish I was dead. Dead, dead, dead.

  Once again the letter was signed Maybelle, only this time, the signature was ordinary. No swirls. No curves.

  Lindy tried to picture her mother back in the time she’d have received this note. In 1975, her mother would have been … right, fourteen years old. Based on pictures of her mother as a teenager, Lindy could imagine her hunched over these letters, sitting cross-legged on the porch swing or stretched out flat on her belly on the floor of the bedroom she shared with her sisters, serious, intent, frowning as she read about her best friend’s troubles.