by Ace Atkins
“Sheriff Beckett had been talking to her,” Lillie said. “Was he assisting you in any way?”
Tuttle shook his head, reaching for the door handle of the truck, the black exhaust wreathing his legs and face. “That must’ve been a whole other matter.”
The sheriff’s office didn’t get the call till late that Sunday, but it didn’t take long before the whole town heard the story of the twin boys on that first weekend of deer season, riding four-wheelers and raising hell through the eroded hills and woods of their daddy’s five hundred acres. Both of them had on matching camo Mossy Oak gear and brand-new pairs of Cabela boots. They’d packed rifles and plenty of ammo, bottles of Mountain Dew, and beef jerky in case they got hungry, and a fresh can of Skoal that the older brother, older by a whole five minutes, kept in his own back pocket ’cause he’d paid for it.
This was their second time out that day, heading out to hunt with their daddy at dawn and then out again after church, barely able to contain themselves as they kicked off their loafers and ties and slid into their boots and camouflage, not really giving a damn if they killed a deer or not, because there was plenty of time for that. This was just being able to run the woods like crazy without having to answer to anyone. Because, as the younger brother had said, “When a boy is fourteen, he’s got to be turned a little loose. We ain’t kids.”
They found the clearing and tree stand where they’d been earlier, seeing those young does and a fawn, practicing that silence with their daddy, waiting for a buck to enter that clearing, step inside that ring and sacrifice himself. But instead, a doe had sniffed something, heard a creak of the wood in that slapped-together lookout, and darted off down the trail. The older brother knowing the deer would come back, bringing the buck with them.
They both plugged in some snuff and sat on their haunches, looking into the wind. The younger brother crashing together a pair of horns that they kept on the dusty floor. He crashed them together again and again, knowing that a buck couldn’t resist the sound of a fight, and, goddamn, neither saying that word out loud but both of them thinking it, here walks up the prettiest twelve-pointer they ever saw, thick-necked and proud. The younger brother let the older get the shot, moving up the barrel and finding a line in the scope. But he could only pull that trigger with shaking hands, the bullet leaving with a mule kick, scaring that big boy away, knowing there wasn’t no fight, only a couple kids up a tree house.
“He’ll be back.”
“No he won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“He hadn’t gotten big by bein’ no retard.”
They dug into their sacks, a couple pieces of jerky washed down with the Mountain Dew, turning their bottles into spit cups and not talking at all, because there wasn’t a hell of a lot that either boy could say that would surprise the other. They waited for the buck to return for a good couple hours, trying the horns again, crashing them together like bone cymbals and sitting back on their haunches, waiting for a tick of sound. By then the night had started to fall, maybe a good thirty minutes past when they’d said they’d head home. And so they packed up their gear, laying their hunting rifles back into their padded cases, and wandered back down to the four-wheelers with their heads lowered.
“You see that?”
“What?”
The other craned his neck and veered off to the right, just off the side of the wide, cleared field, making his way to an old dead pond that someone had tried to start way before they were born but gave up on, the water not having a source or a place to go. Cypress had taken root in the shallow water, and not a living thing thrived there except for some turtles and snakes. During the summer the whole thing would just dry up, and they’d find footprints of deer and raccoons that padded across the open space.
The twins both walked closer, both of them pulling their rifles from their cases and walking slow and steady to the big oak tree, circling it twice. With the canopy of dead branches laced above them and in the failing light, mud sucking at the soles of their new boots, they somehow didn’t really grasp what they were seeing, stopping to look at it and then looking at each other as if they needed confirmation.
A body lay facedown at the edge of the dead pond, a girl, with bare legs and no shoes, the wind catching up under her skirt and showing off her panties. The boys more embarrassed than scared. One of them got close and toed at the girl’s shoulder, her head covered in a bloody pillowcase, showing right clear where the bullet had gone.
Her skin as white and puckered as the belly of a fish.
“Why’d they put that sack on her head?”
“’Cause they didn’t want her to see what was coming. What do you think?”
13
“How many times had she been shot?” Quinn asked.
“Just once,” Lillie said.
“Was she beat up?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Lillie said. “Luke Stevens hasn’t looked at the body yet.”
“How long she been there?”
“Maybe a week,” she said. “Hard to tell. Some animals got to her.”
Quinn was in the back field of the farmhouse, the burn pile still smoldering. He’d thrown in some dry branches and fallen logs to get it all going again before he’d heard Lillie’s Jeep. And now she stood over him as he sat on his haunches poking at the fire, getting some warmth in the early night. The sleet had stopped, but it had grown colder, the wind kicking up the flames and carrying off the smoke and sparks into the dark. Two big pecan trees near the house looked like old sentries.
“Not much we can do now,” he said. “You call the preacher?”
“Wesley drove up there,” she said. “He delivered the news personally.”
“That’s pretty stand-up.”
“That’s his job.” Lillie shrugged. “Wesley said they had to put the preacher’s wife on suicide watch.”
“Had to be expecting this.”
Quinn found a cut log and sat down, Lillie sitting beside him, placing her hands under her arms, leaning forward toward the fire. Quinn poked at its edge with a stick, stamped out some loose sparks that had caught on the dry grass. “You want a drink?” he asked. “Boom actually left a half bottle.”
“I’m on duty,” she said.
“So what?”
“Wouldn’t sit too well with the public.”
“It’s good stuff.”
“You drink on recon?”
Lillie felt warm next to him, her knee and leg bumping into his, reaching her hands out and warming them and then placing them back under her arms. Quinn straightened his knees, the soles of his old boots toward the heat. They didn’t talk for a long while, Lillie walking up to the Cherokee, checking in with the dispatch, and then coming back to sit beside Quinn.
Lillie seemed smaller and younger with her curly hair pinned up and no makeup. She wore jeans and a county sheriff’s jacket zipped to the neck, a holstered gun, mace, and a set of handcuffs at her slender waist.
“I feel sorry for her folks,” she said. “I don’t care what path that girl took. Delivering that kind of news is the very worst part of this job.”
“Any good parts?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
“Anything we can do tonight?”
“Both witnesses to that fire are dead.”
“Plenty of folks left who might know something.”
“I got some names,” she said. “I’m going to kick over some logs tonight.”
“You mind if I come along?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll be your muscle.”
“I don’t need muscle.”
“What makes you so damn tough?” Quinn asked, smiling.
“It’s not what you think.”
“What do I think?”
“I hear people talk about me,” she said. “People been talking about me forever. A girl tries to play with the boys, and they think there’s something wrong with her.”
She knocked his knees with her l
eg and smiled back, looking down at her hands.
“You aren’t the same, Quinn. Not like when I knew you.”
Quinn watched as she put a hand to her lean face as it moved from shadow into the firelight.
“You sure used to be angry,” she said.
“I’m not angry.”
“See what I mean?”
Lena wandered down to Hell Creek at dusk, getting down on her knees and praying for a while, feeling the big weight behind her before she even heard his voice.
“You ain’t hungry?” Gowrie asked.
She didn’t answer. The brown water moved slow and sluggish over rocks and sand, thin slivers of ice collected by the muddy banks.
“We gonna get your boy out,” he said.
“When?”
“I ain’t payin’ no bail. But we got him a lawyer from Memphis. The lawyer says they ain’t got a case. The case on him is on account of me.”
She turned and looked at Gowrie, standing on the banks of the creek, some light snow scattering all about him, him wearing no shirt, only a military jacket open over his big chest, showing the tats and rib bones. His face shrunken and drawn, as if his features had been cut from stone.
“They think he’d turn, but that ain’t how we do things. No, sir.”
“Who are you?”
“I told you. We’re a family.”
She nodded, reaching for a tree branch and standing, feeling cold enough now that she’d go back with him, follow that muddy trail back to the ragged trailers in the gulch. Gowrie reached for her elbow, soft and gentle, and steered her back up the well-worn path, talking and talking, barely able to take a breath between his thoughts, saying that the law in this county was nothing but a dirty joke and that he’d bust old Charley Booth out of jail himself if they even tried to keep him tied in legal knots.
“They just want to fuck me.”
“Where are you from?”
“What’s that matter?”
“Just askin’, is all.”
“Ohio. Near West Virginia.”
“Why are you down here?”
“Come on,” Gowrie said, trudging up through the gulley, all the wash of gravel and trash and beer cans swept down into a fanned-out pattern of mud, steeped in boot prints and hooves, the earth smelling of sulfur. It was getting dark, and most of Gowrie’s people were in their trailers, yellow light coming from crooked windows lined with tinfoil and cardboard beer cases pressed flat against the glass. Somewhere, someone was playing a guitar and beating on some drums.
“I got you a bed,” Gowrie said.
She looked into the open mouth of the old barn, searching for Ditto.
“I got you some candy bars, too. Can you drink beer?”
“I don’t drink.”
“And you don’t fuck, neither.”
He laughed while he led her up some crooked steps and opened the door to his beaten trailer, two women and an old man sitting together on an old sofa watching Family Guy, smoking weed and drinking. The old man stared at Lena, offering her a taste of his Jack Daniel’s bottle, the girls too baked to turn from the cartoon. Gowrie tugged at his Army jacket and tossed it on a pile of dirty clothes, now only wearing a tight pair of blue jeans and combat boots, his back a road map of tattoos of dragons and ancient symbols. He cracked open a beer and pulled the joint from one girl’s fingers.
“Daddy, don’t you got somethin’ to do?”
The old man stood up, stoop-shouldered, and loped out of the room. The girls shifted, one wearing pink sweatpants and a tank top. She was skinny, and her face had small sores across it, as if she suffered some kind of pox.
Gowrie moved back through the kitchen, piled high with dirty paper plates and crushed beer cans, cigarette and roach butts in jelly jars. In the middle of all the junk, Lena spotted dozens of guns, pistols and shotguns and those guns with the big fat clips that could hold a million bullets. Boxes and boxes of shells and bullets.
Gowrie flipped on the lights in a room with a mattress on the floor, filled ankle-deep in clothes. “There’s a blanket in that corner. If you get cold, let me know.”
There didn’t seem to be any heat in the trailer besides a little radiator by the television.
Gowrie smiled at Lena, her noticing the blackening edges of his teeth, the parched lines around his rheumy eyes. He just nodded and walked away, leaving the door wide open, the canned laughter and sound effects from the cartoons filling the trailer.
He was gone for a long while. And Lena was grateful for the food Ditto had found for her earlier, knowing she wouldn’t have to leave the room till morning.
She found a bathroom, no toilet, only a hole cut in the floor, where she squatted and peed, and returned back to the room, trying to lock the door but finding it didn’t even have a knob. The window above the bed was covered in more tinfoil, and empty beer cans and cigarette butts littered the bed. She lay for a long time in the darkness, twice feeling the child kicking inside her as she stayed wide awake listening to the noise of the television, the pinging of sleet on the roof. Men were talking out by the window and then were gone.
She dozed off.
Jett Price’s mother was a big woman, so big she could barely fit through the door of her small ranch house out toward Drivers Flat. She wore an enormous housecoat, and fuzzy pink slippers caked with mud, and didn’t seem a bit impressed when Lillie introduced herself as a deputy sheriff and asked if she might come in to talk. Connie Price just turned, not shrugging or changing expression, but just headed back into the darkened house, switching on an overhead light that shined on a table filled with several framed photos of a boy and a girl mixed in with statues of angels and Jesus, the same children that Quinn had seen in the file on the fire.
The school pictures had been paper-clipped to details on their death.
Cakes and cookies and pies, neatly wrapped in cellophane, covered a dining-room table. Big Connie Price pulled out a cigarette from a little cove by the kitchen and lit up, taking a seat by her bounty of food, explaining—talking now for the first time—that she had an event at the church and was running late. “Will this take long?”
“No, ma’am,” Lillie said.
She nodded.
“Very sorry to hear about your family.”
“They were supposed to be with me. Their mother, that’s the one who left ’em with Jett. Jett had no business taking on those children.”
Quinn didn’t know what to say, offering only another “Sorry.”
“Everybody’s sorry,” Connie Price said. “I’d prefer not to discuss this, if it’s all the same. Why are y’all here anyway?”
Lillie said, “There’s some questions about the fire.”
“You mean about how my son could have been so damn almighty stupid to leave a skillet on his cookstove?”
“No, ma’am,” Lillie said. “We were wondering about the relationship your son had with Jill Bullard.”
“He was seeing her.”
“And Keith Shackelford?”
“He was from somewhere abouts in Memphis. They were in the Army together, drinkin’ buddies. My son killed his own children’cause he was drunk. That’s what you want to know?”
“My uncle was Sheriff Beckett,” Quinn said. “He’d taken a personal interest in what happened to your family.”
“How’s that?”
“Did you ever speak to my uncle?”
“He was at the service for the children,” she said, nodding. “He came by twice after that. He was a fine man. I was sorry to hear of his passing.”
“Did he ask you questions about the fire?” Quinn asked.
“No,” Connie Price said, stubbing out her cigarette and checking her watch. “Why would he?”
“I don’t think he was convinced it was an accident.”
“They did an investigation,” Connie Price said. “The fire marshal said things like this happen all the time and not to blame my son. But who else would you blame? He killed his own children.”
/> “Ma’am,” Lillie said. “Did you know anyone who’d want to do Jett harm?”
“Not like this. Who’d want to kill children?”
“Did my uncle ever give you reason to think he doubted what happened?”
She shook her head.
“Jill Bullard was found dead today,” Lillie said. “She’d been shot.”
Price put one hand to her mouth and placed the other on a chair to steady herself. She reached for the gold cross on her neck and kept her fingers there. She shook her head over and over.
“Could Jett have owed anyone money?” Quinn asked.
“Jett always owed people money. When you get yourself into drinking and drugs, that’s what happens.”
“You recall any names?”
“I really got to be going. I was supposed to be at church twenty minutes ago to help them set up.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Quinn said.
“Do you know anyone we might speak to?” Lillie asked. “Folks who knew Jett or Keith Shackelford or Jill?”
“You can talk to Jett’s ex. She’d be glad to heap some blame on my son. Not that I disagree.”
Quinn helped carry the pies and cookies to Connie Price’s Chevrolet sedan in the drive. She closed them all up in her trunk, keys in hand.
“Where’d your son serve?” Quinn asked.
“He was in the invasion of Iraq,” she said. “He carried a Rebel flag on his tank when it rolled into Baghdad. I have pictures.”
“Was Shackelford part of his unit?”
“You’d have to ask him,” Connie Price said. “I don’t exactly know when they met in the service.”
“I’m afraid he’s dead, too,” Lillie said.
“When?”
“Right after the fire.”
“That’s a lie,” Connie Price said. “He may not be much to look at, with those burn marks across half his face. But I just saw him last week.”
14
Lillie got an address on Shackelford from a previous arrest, and they found it strange that it was down in Sugar Ditch, the black district of the county. She called back to dispatch to verify, and apparently he’d been living with a black female who’d been arrested at the same time for possession of crack. The house wasn’t more than a shed painted a putrid green with a failing roof and asbestos siding. A few hard knocks on the door brought out a scared old black woman who found the law on her poorly screened-in porch. The house smelled of clean laundry, and the floorboards hummed with an unbalanced load. The old woman said she didn’t know the white man, had never met the white man, and didn’t want to meet him in the middle of the night. Lillie asked about his girlfriend, and she shook her head more, saying she’d only rented the house six months ago. The arrests had taken place two years ago.