Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  “Which was…?” His sentence trailed off.

  Bell swallowed hard before she spoke. “Spare parts.”

  * * *

  “Daddy,” Lindy said.

  The time had come for Bell and the sheriff to join her in the cell. Lindy knelt on the gray concrete floor next to her father’s bed. She was still groggy from sedation—during the drive from the hospital to the courthouse she’d frantically rolled down the window and thrown up twice—but she was fighting to keep her mind clear. She knew there was very little time.

  Lindy leaned forward. She put her arms around her father’s thick torso, or as far around as her arms would go. Odell took one of his puffy gnarled hands and he placed it on top of her head, and he said, in a voice honeycombed with phlegm, “My girl. My girl.”

  Deputy Mathers had called in a doctor earlier that day, and the verdict was swift, definitive: No need to take him anywhere. Nothing anybody can do. Odell Crabtree’s lungs were long-pummeled and severely scarred and his heart was drowning in its own fluids. His body was beaten down and used up. There wasn’t one thing that was killing him; there were many, many things. The shock of finding Lindy unconscious on the living room floor, the confusion of the last few days, seemed to have consumed the final ragged bits of his strength. Yet somehow he had hung on, almost as if he hoped—with whatever reasoning power was left to him—to see Lindy again. And here she was.

  Minutes passed with no sound, except for Odell’s ponderous, clotted breathing. The intervals between each breath—the spaces between the slow rise and automatic fall of his strapping chest—grew wider. Then wider still. He was running out of breath, which meant he was running out of life.

  “Daddy,” Lindy said.

  If there was to be any final mercy, Bell thought, let it be this: Let Odell recognize her. Realize she is here. Let the fog in his mind lift for these last few moments.

  “Daddy,” Lindy said again, and now she was weeping, her small shoulders bobbing up and down as she embraced the ragged heap that represented what had become of Odell Crabtree, his mortal shape and material being. “Daddy, you can’t die. I don’t have anybody else.”

  His crusty brown lips moved. His tongue was briefly visible as it touched those lips. He was fighting to speak.

  The words were gravelly and slurred with fatigue, but in the exquisite silence of the darkest part of the night, they were comprehensible, if barely so: “Lied to you, my girl,” Odell said. “Couldn’t tell you that you weren’t really our child. You were Maybelle’s. Maybelle come to us and said, ‘I can’t keep this baby. I can’t. It’ll ruin my family. Ruin our name. Be bad for politics. And my daddy’ll never give me another dime.’ And your mama said, ‘Never you mind. We’ll take her. And nobody’ll ever know.’ See, thing is—your mama wanted a child. But I didn’t. All I wanted was the money. They paid us to take you, my girl. I’m ashamed to say it, but I took the money.” He had to stop. He was breathing hard, even harder than before. He coughed a terrible wrenching cough that seemed to lift him and shake him and then fling him down again. “She’s not Maybelle these days. Calls herself something different. Her daddy was governor. He’s a rich man. Lives in a big house. But you know what? You don’t belong to Maybelle no more. You never did. You’re my girl. I love you like you were my own child. You are my child now. Oh, Lindy, girl.” The coughing fit this time made him gasp and twist.

  Another few minutes passed and then he was gone—not dead yet but gone to another place, an in-between place, churning and flailing through the thought-swamp where his memories had sunk once again, stranded like lost ships on the ocean floor—and he blew out a chestful of air and he bellowed, “Who’re you? Who the hell are you?” and he pushed Lindy’s head off his chest, angry and confused, and he tried to rise from the narrow bed but fell back again, choking, grasping at the sheets. And then, a few minutes later, he died—for real this time.

  In the profound silence that followed, Bell looked around the small cell. Shoved back in a shadowy corner was something she hadn’t noticed when they first arrived, something not usually present in a Raythune County jail cell. It was a battered table, big enough for an old man with a wrecked spine to crawl beneath, making a place where he could feel comfortable—or as close to comfortable as he was likely to get, as his mind drifted back to the past: Ray-boy, you hear me? Hey, Ray. You there? It’s Odell. On my way, Ray-boy. I’m coming. Gonna help with that load. On my way. Bell didn’t know for sure, and wouldn’t have a chance to ask until later, but she guessed that the person who’d brought in that table, the person who’d heard the story about what Lindy had rigged up in the basement and who then tried to duplicate it here as best she could, was Mary Sue Fogelsong. Who knew a thing or two about suffering.

  * * *

  The coroner’s van came for Odell Crabtree’s body. Fetching him was a slow and laborious process; he was a very large man, and there was no easy way for the paramedics to load him into a body bag and swing it onto the gurney and bump the gurney down the courthouse steps in the darkness, a step at a time, and then kick at the collapsible wheels and slide it into the vehicle. Lindy, arms crossed, the tears dried on her face, watched it all; she watched until the coroner’s van, the red lights across its backside glittering wetly in the streaming rain, disappeared around the corner.

  Now there was nothing more for anyone to do. “Long night,” Fogelsong muttered to Bell, and she muttered back, “Longest night in the history of the freakin’ world.” The sheriff nodded.

  It was just after 4 A.M. when Bell and Lindy left the courthouse to walk to the Explorer. Lindy had agreed to spend some time—at least a week, although Bell was hoping that it might stretch into more—with her second cousin in Morgantown. Jeannie Stump was going to meet them in Charleston, roughly the halfway point, in the morning. Bell would drive Lindy there. Tonight, Lindy would spend the night with Bell. The bed in Carla’s room was already made up, Bell told her. She’d been expecting her daughter to come to Acker’s Gap for the summer. That wasn’t going to happen. But the bedroom was still ready.

  The rain had tapered off to a fine mist. That mist gave the world a gauzy, fretful, half-formed look, as if it were deciding moment by moment which side to embrace—either the dream-spun past, where ghosts walked in their sleep, or the present, a place of clarity and edges, a place where the living staked their claim. Nights like these, with a wet veil cast over everything, Bell felt strangely close to the dead. They had a right to be here, too, murmuring, numinous. That was one of the reasons she stayed in Acker’s Gap, perhaps—a reason she would never disclose to anyone, not even Nick. These dead—the ones who had been, in life, bad or good, savage or kind—were her dead. She knew their names. She knew their faces.

  After the two of them had climbed in the Explorer and cinched their seat belts, Lindy spoke. “Thought I might try to get in touch with Montgomery Henner one of these days. I mean—he’s my half brother. And that’s family, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I know he doesn’t have much time. Unless he gets a donor heart. But no matter how long that turns out to be—” Lindy didn’t finish. Instead, she said, “You know what it’s like. Being pretty much alone. Heard your father died when you were just a kid. And your sister—” Once again, she didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Yeah.”

  “Must’ve been tough.”

  Bell let the wipers slap off the wavy accumulation of rain before she pulled away from the curb. Lindy probably knew a few scattered truths about Bell’s childhood, the way a lot of people in Acker’s Gap did—or thought they did.

  “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. On our way to Charleston,” Bell said. “Got lots of time.”

  “Complicated, huh?”

  “You could say that.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  Bell wasn’t accustomed to watching sunsets. Usually she was too busy, and sometimes too restless and agitated, to sit and let the live theater of the day’s end—the languid wash
of orange that spread across the western horizon—play out in front of her. But tonight, that’s all she had to do.

  A week had passed since the death of Odell Crabtree. Bell sat on a chair on the back stoop of the garage apartment that was now Shirley’s home. The ramshackle one-story place with dented aluminum siding was located just outside Blythesburg, on a tan stretch of dirt road that stopped abruptly at the railroad tracks, the way a sentence is brought up short by a period. The road didn’t continue on the other side; it simply ended.

  Now that things had settled down in the prosecutor’s office—Perry Crum had pleaded guilty to homicide and was awaiting sentencing, and the FBI was handling the case against the conspirators—Bell had decided to bring over the last of Shirley’s things: two flannel shirts, one red and one blue, that had been in the dryer the day Shirley moved out. And a battery-powered clock radio.

  On the drive over to Blythesburg, Bell’s cell had sounded. It was Sheriff Fogelsong. “Finally had a chance to talk to Jason Brinkerman,” he said. “Get his account of what happened in that basement.” Bell didn’t answer, so he continued. “Kid told me you were pretty rough on Perry Crum. And paramedics said he looked like he’d been run through a table saw and then finished off in a chipper-shredder. Bastard deserved it—but still. Jason said you were out of control. That you were yelling something. Something that sounded like ‘Daddy.’ I told the kid he must’ve heard you wrong.” He waited. “Belfa?”

  “Nothing to say, Nick.”

  “Figured that. Just want to make sure you were still listening.” When she didn’t answer, he grunted and went on. “Look. Your business. Not trying to interfere, Lord knows. But it’s a funny thing. Anger’s okay in small doses—it keeps people like you and me on the job, it’s the reason we push back against all the crap—but it can turn against you, too. Real quick. If you’re not careful. If you don’t keep an eye out. Manage it properly. You don’t want to end up there, Belfa. You don’t want to be like some of the people on the other side of the law. Dead inside. Burned up from the inside out—on account of all the anger.”

  No reply.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll leave you be. You don’t have to talk about it. Seems like that’s how you want it.” Still no response, and so he changed the subject. “Got some other news. Lanny Waller’s dead.”

  “What happened?”

  “Regina Wills shot him this afternoon. Turned herself in. Used his own shotgun on the bastard. Two slugs—one in the chest, one in the gut. Took him a good hour and a half to bleed out, during which time she sat there and watched.”

  Bell remembered the little speech that Riley Jessup had made her listen to that day at his mansion. The speech about rising up. Different ways to rise up, Bell thought. Regina had found her own way.

  “From what I hear,” the sheriff continued, “Waller kept on going at those girls, night after night, even while the judge was investigating Missy Wills and her mighty mysterious change of heart. Regina finally snapped.”

  “What’s the charge?”

  “First-degree murder. Lanny’d had the trailer hauled over to Collier County just a week or so ago, so at least it’s not our lookout. Amanda Sturm made the arrest.”

  “Well, I’ll have a chat with Mason Dittmer,” Bell said. She had a good working relationship with the Collier County prosecutor. “If the evidence supports the facts as you’ve described them, I think first-degree murder’s the wrong charge. Maybe Mason’ll be inclined to listen.” Bell tried to find some sliver of regret for Lanny Waller’s passing, to be even the tiniest bit sorry that he’d suffered what was surely an agonizingly prolonged death. Nope, she realized. Let him rot in hell.

  And later on there’d be, she hoped, plenty of room in hell left over for Perry Crum and Riley Jessup and Bradley Portis and Sharon Henner. Any pity she might briefly have entertained for Sharon—a woman forced to watch her son fade away before her eyes—had vanished. Any lingering sympathy she felt toward Perry—his long sacrifice for his sister had changed him, and done it so profoundly that he probably didn’t even recognize himself anymore—was already gone.

  By the time she arrived at Shirley’s new home, Bell was ready to talk about something other than the law and its layers. Only two chairs could fit on the stoop; both were the fold-out kind that looked as if a heavy sigh could reduce them to a pile of short aluminum poles and frayed plastic. Bolland had automatically offered the chairs to the women. He settled onto the single concrete step, guitar on his knee.

  At first they sat in silence. An amiable silence, not an awkward one. From her vantage point in the chair, Bell could peer down at the top of Bolland’s head. His hair looked as if it was thinning by the minute. In no time at all, he’d be totally bald on top. The gray ponytail meandered down his back; it was attached to a few loose strands that looped around his ears. He was an old man. An old man with a young man’s dreams. So this is what you want, Bell ached to say to Shirley. This. This life. With this man. But she didn’t say it.

  Just before Bolland started his song, a whistle hooted in the distance. Last message from a departing train, a long one that had begun its journey past this spot a while ago, shortly after Bell arrived, its rusty cars packed high and tight with coal. The whistle was a way of saying good-bye. And it worked on Bell like another kind of signal, too, telling her it was time to acknowledge what she knew but had not declared outright to herself. Until now.

  Carla wouldn’t be coming back to Acker’s Gap. Oh, she’d visit for a day or so, now and again. Maybe even stay a week. But she would never live here again. Bell was sure of it. Carla had moved past this place—the first, no doubt, of many such moves she’d be making, as the landscape of her life expanded, keeping pace with her dreams. Bell had raised her daughter to be independent and headstrong and fearless. There was a price to pay for that. And Bell was paying it.

  Bell had once had a good friend who loved the poetry of John Donne, loved the way its grave sagacity and stiff ecclesiastical rhythms were sometimes broken wide open by unruly passion, and Bell recalled a verse that her friend had loved. She could still see it on the page, ancient spellings intact:

  Our two soules threrefore, which are one,

  Though I must goe, endure not yet

  A breach, but an expansion.…

  If they be two, they are two so

  As stiffe twin compasses are two,

  Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show

  To move, but doth, if the’other doe.

  For Carla henceforth, Acker’s Gap would be the fixed foot of the compass; she would spin and expand in ever-widening circles, in a profusion of possibilities. Acker’s Gap was her past. Not her future.

  So I’m listening to Bobo Bolland and thinking about John Donne, Bell thought, chastising herself. Bit of a stature gap. Truth was, though, Bolland’s music wasn’t all that bad. His voice had a kind of wire-brushed melancholy to it, a toughness undermined by the tender recollection of lost loves and old woes. Bell liked his voice. And she sort of liked Bolland himself, another realization that surprised her. He’d had his problems in life, his challenges, and always would; he’d made mistakes. Big ones. Hell, Bell thought. So have I. So has everybody. And he’d make more mistakes, going forward. No doubt. Maybe even bigger ones.

  Point was, he treated Shirley well. That was all that mattered. Or all that ought to.

  When she’d arrived a while ago with Shirley’s things, Bolland came rushing out of the flung-open screen door and grabbed the bag from her, polite and welcoming. He was nervous around Bell, and he stammered, too obsequious by half, but she could understand that. Assumed it would pass. She knew she could be intimidating. Nobody relaxed around a prosecutor. Foolish, frankly, ever to do so. The whole point of the job was to pass judgment on people.

  Now they sat on the little stoop as the day’s light died all around them. They didn’t turn on the porch light, because they knew it would summon vigorous platoons of flying bugs. The darker the sky turned,
the less visible Bolland was, and the more he seemed to morph into pure voice.

  He was finishing up an original song. The melody was filled with the lilting misery of minor chords; the lyrics were grim and pessimistic, but pessimistic in that poetic way that could sound almost optimistic because—as Shirley had told Bell just the other day, musing aloud as she wedged her meager supply of clothes in a paper grocery sack—if you can sing about it, you can live through it. “Bobo taught me that. He’s a wise man, Belfa. Really. He is. Give him a chance and you’ll see.”

  Bell looked over at Shirley. Her sister’s eyes were closed and she nodded in time with the music. She wasn’t smiling, but she seemed content, satisfied. Not wrought up, at least. Not churned or whirling.

  As Bolland moved toward the end of the song, his voice glided upward in an unexpectedly exquisite arc, like a palm sander following the grain of quarter-sawn oak, a wood whose secret is locked away until it is stained and polished and its heart is coaxed out, brought forward for the world to see. Bolland held the final note for a long time. And in that moment, for reasons unfathomable to her, Bell felt the essence of Shirley’s life as never before. She felt the yearning and the fear and the frustration—and the beauty, too, the sere and wounded grace—and she felt everything that might have been but wasn’t, everything that her sister should have had but now never would: Just one clear day of pure happiness, unstreaked by pain. A single memory that wasn’t marbled with loss. Shirley didn’t say a word, but Bell felt as if she could hear her speaking, hear her voice falling into harmony with Bolland’s last limpid note: I’m okay now, Belfa. You don’t need to look out for me anymore. You can let go.