by Ace Atkins
Wesley Ruth and Judge Blanton stopped by but didn’t eat. Luther Varner got loose from the Quick Mart for a few minutes. Mr. Jim stayed, taking an empty seat by Quinn and not saying a word but giving a polite nod before settling into a large piece of fried chicken. Boom excused himself and left with his plate empty, and that chair was empty all of ten seconds when Anna Lee sat down, wearing a bright red coat buttoned high, blond hair loose over her shoulders, giving a crooked smile and a roll of the eyes to Quinn. “We missed you in church,” she said. “They called for you all of two times. Your mother said you were working. I thought you might have headed back to camp.”
“I went for a drive.”
“With who?”
“Myself.”
Anna Lee cut her brown eyes over at him, her long fingers picking at her chicken, pulling the skin off, taking little bites. Quinn smiled at her and she looked away, another old woman coming over to him, a friend of his dead grandmother, handing him a greeting card she wanted him to open when he returned back home. Quinn wasn’t quite sure where she meant.
He laid his hands on her old hand and thanked her, his eyes lifting up and seeing Lillie Virgil holding Jason upside down and swinging him from side to side like a pendulum. She was dressed up, long black pants, a nice silk top. Quinn noticed Anna Lee watching her and then looking down when she saw Quinn was staring.
“People have seen you around with Lillie,” she said, smiling. “What’s going on there?”
“Nothing.”
“Heard y’all have barely been apart.”
What do you say to that?
Quinn messed around with the last few mouthfuls and put down his fork, looking for some sweet tea to clear his mouth. He took a deep breath, catching Lillie’s eye and smiling. Lillie smiled back.
“She never dresses like that.”
“Stop,” Quinn said.
“What?”
“Needling me.”
“Congratulations,” Anna Lee said. “They sure missed you at church.”
She cleared her plate and was gone. Quinn turned to the right, where Mr. Jim was working on a chicken leg and then wiping his mouth. He looked at Quinn and shrugged.
“What do you make of that?” Quinn said.
“I wouldn’t have kept my barbershop open for forty years if I didn’t know when to shut my mouth.”
“I will never understand her,” he said.
“Hell, men and women, we don’t speak the same language,” he said.
Quinn winked at the old man, gathered his plate and took it back to the kitchen. His mother, never one to have a good time, was already elbow-deep in the sink, suds spilling over the counter onto the floor. Jason was running wild, with Lillie running after him, running right into Quinn and then pushing him back with the flat of her hand.
“Y’all have a nice talk?” she asked.
Quinn reached for the coffeepot and poured a cup.
He rolled up his sleeves and started to help with the dishes, his mother trying to push him away. “Go talk to everyone,” she said. “I can’t be in there.”
“Let me ask you a question,” Quinn said, reaching for a wet plate to dry. “Was Uncle Hamp really friends with Johnny Stagg?”
“I know they did business,” his mother said. “I don’t know if they were friends.”
“Stagg wants our land pretty bad.”
“He won’t get it.”
“You’re goddamn right.”
“Quinn?”
“What?”
“Watch that mouth.”
Quinn reached for a glass and dried it, setting it on the rack, Lillie wrangling Jason long enough to sit him at the little breakfast nook, trying to get him interested in a coloring book. Over his mother’s shoulder, he saw Anna Lee in the foyer throwing a purse over her shoulder and reaching into her coat pocket for her keys. She looked at Quinn and then turned for the door, Quinn knowing the move, knowing she wanted him to follow her outside so they could argue a bit more.
Quinn reached for another dish.
“Judge Blanton is going to keep his eye on things after I’m gone,” Quinn said. “I don’t want that land ever coming to that son of a bitch.”
His mother shook her head.
“Okay?” Quinn said, Lillie lifting her head from the table and looking at him.
His mother nodded.
“Do you now see how he wasn’t in his right mind?” Jean Colson asked. “It would’ve been just his mind-set to sell that property to someone without telling me.”
“He didn’t sell it,” Quinn said, “just signed some stupid agreement on a scrap of paper.”
“I hadn’t spoken to him since last Easter Sunday, and here he comes in maybe three weeks ago, knocking on my door and wanting to know if I could store some of his boxes. This is a man with two barns and three sheds. He had so much junk he needed me to watch his possessions.”
Lillie stood up from the table. She looked to Quinn.
“What did he leave, Mrs. Colson?” Lillie asked, placing her hands in her pockets and standing on the balls of her feet.
His mother had turned his bedroom into a sewing/storage room but kept the walls as they’d been ten years ago. There were posters for the U.S. Army BE ALL YOU CAN BE, Rangers LEADING THE WAY, and a black-and-white of Tishiro Mifune from Yojimbo over a small bookshelf filled with all five of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories, Walden, A Book of Five Rings, Huck Finn, and a volume on Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do. He’d nailed up ninja throwing stars and a bowstave, and all of the belts he’d earned as a kid taking tae kwon do. Everything hung on the wall leading him on the path to becoming a modern warrior. He’d wanted to be a Ranger since first seeing the film Darby’s Rangers on late-night television during one of his father’s rare long appearances. He became obsessed when he found some Ranger literature at the recruiter’s office. The idea of a Ranger having to volunteer four times for service seemed ideal. He was prepared to volunteer for whatever was thrown at him, his teenage self traveling about a million miles an hour, fearless, but not really understanding what fear meant.
“I’d forgotten how intense you used to be,” Lillie said, lifting one of the five boxes his uncle had left on a bed with a thin bedspread. She used a pocketknife to slit the tape, finding rows of manila files crammed inside, snapping the knife closed and back into the pocket of her wide-legged pants. The light was white and harsh through the curtains, and Quinn closed them, standing over Lillie’s shoulder, his mother still in the kitchen cleaning up with some other women, Jason down for a nap.
Boom had disappeared an hour ago. No one saw him leave.
A prom picture of him and Anna Lee in a gilded frame stood on the bookshelf. Quinn looked stiff and posed in a rented tux, red flower on his chest, hands around Anna Lee’s waist. While flipping through the files, Lillie said, “Damn, y’all look like kids.”
“What do we have?”
“These are just tax records,” she said. “Looks like he saved every damn receipt for the last five years. I don’t know. You can look if you want. We probably need a CPA to go through all this. Maybe something he wanted you to see.”
Quinn hefted up another box, this one containing fistfuls of family photographs going back maybe a hundred years, people from his family at the turn of the damn century, standing grim-faced in front of churches and sitting in rocking chairs holding rifles. “Yep, that’s your people all right,” Lillie said. “Look at that guy, he looks just like you. Same serious scowl, the way he’s holding that weapon. Run for the hills.”
Quinn flipped through a few pictures, photos of his mom and dad. Several of Quinn with his uncle, fishing, hunting. Quinn with the first big buck he’d killed, the one that won his second prize in the state for young hunters. The damn thing’s head still hung over the mantel in the family room. He placed the photos back in the box, Lillie losing faith that any of this crap meant anything, lying back on the old bed in the room clogged with
two sewing machines and unused exercise equipment. She flipped through a big wad of photos, Quinn noticing the way the silk top had hitched up on her stomach a bit, the tautness of her stomach as she shifted.
He turned away and reached for a fourth box.
“Y’all okay in there?” his mother yelled.
“Yep,” Quinn said, slicing into the fourth, finding more rows and rows of tightly stacked manila files, expecting to see more stuff for the tax man but pulling out the first file and clearly seeing typed-up copies of crime reports. Each folder label noted the case. “Lillie?”
Lillie moved off the bed, leaving the old photos spread out.
She got near him, everything in the room so cluttered that it was hard to breathe. She was about his same height, and Quinn felt her pressed against his shoulder, breathing hard, and then setting down on one knee to shuffle through the piles. She split the files in two stacks and told him to start reading. She sat down Indian-style, flipping through the first file, and within seconds it was on the floor and she was on to the next.
Jean brought them fresh coffee, not saying a word while they read, and closed the door with a light click.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“I imagine you’ll know when you see it,” Lillie said.
“This is a file on a vehicular homicide,” he said. “Some drunk ran over a fella out on County Road 389.”
“Keep going.”
“Why would he keep these here?”
“He’d have no reason to take these from the office, unless it was something active he wanted to work personal.”
“He do many investigations himself?”
“When you got eight folks looking out for one county, everybody pitches in.”
“And no police department.”
“Jericho still can’t afford to put anyone on the payroll. Let alone any of those hamlets.”
“Here he’s got five files all for some fire out in Carthage. Does that make any sense? I thought that’d be the fire marshal’s business?”
“When was it?”
Quinn scanned the top sheet. “Looks like back in June.”
“I know that fire,” Lillie said, reaching for the file. “Two men were killed. A couple kids, too.”
She stood up and moved to the edge of the bed, spreading the file out beside her. Quinn sat next to her, reading over her shoulder, Lillie pulling back her curly hair and tying it up with a band from her purse. She read for a long while, flipping through pages like crazy, reaching for the next file and tearing into it.
Quinn stood.
He picked up the photo he’d set aside of him and his uncle with that prized deer. That had been the year after he’d been lost, about the time his dad had gone back to California and Uncle Hamp had taken him out every weekend during deer season, even letting him be late to school once or twice, walking up deep into his hundred acres of land and sitting in silence in the tree stand. Quinn holding that bow line taut, right over that buck without that buck getting wind of him, knowing that even some dirt off his boots should scare him away.
He’d taken a perfect shot, hitting that buck right through his heart. An instant kill—the animal running for a hundred yards without pain or even knowing it was already dead—the way you want all kills to be. Something he’d learned from his uncle.
They’d dragged it back to the house, hoisted it up, and gutted it.
“Here it is,” Lillie said.
“What?”
“You got two folks who made it out of that hot box alive. A man and a woman.”
Quinn waited.
“This one fella was airlifted to the burn unit in Jackson,” Lillie said, still staring at the pages on Quinn’s old bed, the springs and slats creaking under her. “I recall that, meeting the helicopter and the ambulance out there. I don’t know what happened to him.”
“And the woman?”
She looked up and said: “The woman was Jill Bullard, the preacher’s daughter.”
12
Quinn and Lillie found the cutoff and cleared land through a thicket of pine trees and headed down the muddy road on foot, fearing getting her Jeep stuck. The thicket opened up onto the burn site just as it started to sleet, nothing left but a footprint of gravel and concrete blocks, the charred remains of the trailer heaped into three piles of dirt and shorn metal. The whole site had been scraped clean and neat, no power or telephone lines ever reaching this far off the main roads of Tibbehah County. Quinn squatted to the ground and sifted through some dirt, finding some blackened and twisted PVC pipe and a rusted screwdriver with a melted handle. Lillie kicked around the site, toeing at piles with her boots and walking toward the edge of the land, looking south toward where the gentle, deadened slope gave way to the highway leading back to Jericho.
She kept her hands in her pockets, a sharp cold wind kicking her hair up off the collar of her jacket.
Quinn threw down the pieces and joined her at the edge.
“Not much left,” he said.
“I’ll check the property records in the morning.”
“You don’t think they owned the land?”
“They could’ve been squatting,” Lillie said. “Lots of trailers just set down where people won’t bother them. Don’t expect much.”
“Is the fire marshal still Chuck Tuttle? He signed off on this deal.”
“Yeah, he’s still around.”
“You don’t like him?”
“I like him fine. He just is too friendly when he should be doing work.”
“Maybe he talked to the Bullard girl. Or heard something.”
Lillie shrugged, pulling the hair back from her eyes only to find them covered again. Everything down in the valley was gray and lifeless, mud up to their ankles. Wind cut through the pines, making sounds like an approaching train.
“Hamp’s coat suits you,” she said, smiling, sort of absent and loose, looking down into the valley. “He’d be proud you have it.”
They spotted Tuttle loading wood into an old pickup just as they turned off the main road to town and toward his ranch house. He tossed a couple more sticks into the back of the truck and walked toward Lillie’s Jeep, a teenage boy behind him continuing the work, Quinn figuring the boy was his son. Tuttle was in his mid-forties, stick thin but with an enormous belly that pulled at his flannel shirt’s buttons. He walked slow, waving to Lillie, wiping his hands with a bandanna and greeting Quinn with a nice handshake, talking for a good bit about how sorry he was to hear about his uncle. Quinn thanked him, with Lillie following: “Chuck, we got a few questions for you about that fire that killed that family in June.”
Tuttle’s boy continued to throw the wood onto the back of the truck, the steady rhythm of it sounding like a drumbeat. Tuttle reached for his thick glasses, breathed on them, and cleaned them a bit with the bandanna and then blew his nose with it. “I can pull that report for you,” he said, smiling at Lillie. “Can it wait till the morning?”
“We’ve seen it,” Lillie said. Quinn stood beside her, watching Tuttle, Tuttle smiling back. The wind came down through the hills and across his back, rattling their jackets and pant legs.
There was slow traffic passing the house, so close to town.
“My mother-in-law used up all her wood last week,” Tuttle said. “Waited till tonight to call me and say she was cold. Now, how come it took her so long to let me know? I’d just settled down to watch the ball game and now I’m gonna be loading wood.”
“Just a couple things,” Lillie said. “Did you talk to the girl, Jill Bullard?”
“Don’t recall,” Tuttle said. “She the girl that got free of it?”
Lillie nodded. “There was a man who lived, too.”
“Got burned up real good. Think he died down in Jackson.”
“I saw the Bullard girl mentioned in your report, but the address showed the same trailer. Did you take her statement?”
“There wasn’t much to this thing, Lillie,” Tuttle said. “
One of them left a skillet on the stove and started a grease fire. One of the men who died come in about one in the morning to fix some eggs. That’s all I know.”
Lillie nodded and looked to Quinn.
“I saw you at the memorial service,” Tuttle said. “How’s your momma?”
“Fine.” Quinn nodded.
“Didn’t see her there.”
“She didn’t go,” Quinn said. “Mr. Tuttle, you think there could’ve been more to this fire?”
“No,” Tuttle said. “There wasn’t evidence of arson, if that’s what you mean. Like I said, it was pretty clear to me.”
“Reason we’re asking,” Lillie said, “it seemed pretty important to Sheriff Beckett. He’d kept the files separate from his office work. I think he’d really been studying on it.”
Tuttle nodded and yelled for his son, who’d sat down on the rear bumper of the truck. “Be there in a minute.”
Quinn shifted his weight.
“Your uncle took this one pretty hard,” Tuttle said. “Two children got burned up. He talked with me a lot about it. He blamed the parents for squatting up there in the hills like that, no electricity, cooking on an open flame. I think he just had a hard time not being able to make a bit of sense of it.”
Tuttle’s truck started, his boy behind the wheel, slowly turning and heading down the short drive. The truck idled by them, Tuttle offering his hand to Quinn. “You think this could’ve been what was worrying him so?”
Quinn nodded. “Looks like it.”
“But you don’t recall anything more about Jill Bullard?” Lillie asked.
“Only met her once and that was the day of the fire. I made some notes, and she left. I never saw her before or since. She was a pretty gal. Not in a good state. I recall that.”