Kelvin’s feet slipped across the carpet. I heard him fiddling with the pills in the kitchenette.
How did I feel? I’d fought to discover the truth. I’d even risked danger and injury. Bud was flawed. He’d made terrible mistakes out of self-interest and greed, but I loved him. Why had everyone doubted me? Even Bud himself didn’t believe I could handle this. I couldn’t wait to find Rod and tell him how wrong he’d been, how seriously he’d underestimated me.
But in the background of my pride, a part of me knew something wasn’t right.
I followed Kelvin into the kitchenette. “How did Carter King die? Warner said Bud beat him to death.”
“Don’t mind that,” he said after too long of a pause. “Warner exaggerated, is all.”
I watched as Kelvin picked up one of the pill bottles, looked at the label, then set it down.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Warner looked genuinely disgusted. I think it fundamentally changed the way Warner thought of Bud, to know he was capable of something so violent.”
“Nah. Erabelle is what ended that friendship.” Kelvin picked up another pill bottle. “One bad punch killed Carter. Bud didn’t mean it to happen.”
“I saw the body. The entire skull was smashed in.”
Kelvin tried to open one of the pill bottles. “I told them not to give me the childproof ones. Do I look like I got kids?”
I reached out and stopped Kelvin’s hand on the bottle. “You already have your pills set up in that plastic container in the living room.”
He tried to laugh. “You’re right. I plain forgot. I guess that’s what you call a senior moment.”
He was lying, of course. Kelvin hadn’t needed or wanted pills. He came into the kitchen to avoid me. He left now for the same reason.
“I’m sure you’ve got more questions about Bud and Mida,” he said on his way back to the recliner. “But I’m real tired. Let me get some of my strength back and we’ll talk again in a few days.”
Kelvin’s voice rang hollow in my ears, and not because of his fatigue or illness. The tone was that of a parent telling an anxious child that nothing bad would ever happen. It was an obvious lie, but so much better than admitting that cancer, housing bubbles, and terrorist attacks probably waited in the future.
I followed and stood in front of Kelvin as he sat down. “Was I wrong about Bud and Mida?”
“No. You got it.” He pulled a blanket over his legs. “But maybe we can talk about it in a few days. I’m running a temperature.”
“Bud wouldn’t beat someone to death.” But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. “He’d have to be so incredibly angry. There’s nothing that could make him that angry.”
Except there was something.
The idea tore its way through me. Even then, I couldn’t summon the strength to say it out loud.
THIRTY
Christmas Day, 1:17 p.m.
Kelvin took a sip of 7UP. “Let this rest. You figured it out. Time to let it go.”
I tried to ask the question, but gravity increased tenfold. My legs gave out and I sat straight down on the ottoman.
Kelvin’s eyes widened in alarm.
I struggled and finally said it. “Did Carter King hurt my father?”
Kelvin flinched.
Tears came to my eyes. I tried to speak, but it was so hard. “How bad?”
After a long pause Kelvin looked up. “Bad.”
“Was it just physical or . . .” My throat closed and I couldn’t get the words out. I let a sob escape to clear the way, then said, “Was it sexual abuse too?”
“Folks didn’t talk about it back then. Nobody knew what pedophile meant, but we had them around, all the same.”
“How did Bud know?”
“Mida told him. She caught her brother at it, but didn’t know what to do. She felt responsible. That’s why she helped us hide the body, not cause there was anything romantic between her and Bud.”
“My dad didn’t . . .” The rest of the sentence got lost in my tears.
Kelvin ripped two tissues from the end table and forced them into my hand. “I’m sorry, dear. I couldn’t make that out.”
“My dad didn’t talk until he was nine. Bud had to tell the school he was mute.”
Kelvin sat back. “Abuse at that age, it’s hard to overcome, but your dad did better than a lot I’ve seen. He never hurt nobody else. Didn’t get into drugs like a lot of survivors do. He worked hard and had a family of his own.”
“He killed himself, didn’t he?”
Kelvin didn’t answer.
“Didn’t he?” I yelled.
He recoiled, startled by my suddenly raised voice, but then said, “Bud always figured he did. I guess he tried once before when you were real little. Bud blamed himself, of course.”
Rage gushed inside me. It was like a previously untapped deposit that had always been there. It flowed now because I was forced to admit that my father’s pain—his depression, sorrow, and own rage—had all been stronger than his love for me. He’d left me without his protection. He’d made a choice to leave.
And my father had, in his turn, been abandoned by Bud. Dumped, after the recent trauma of losing his mother and father, to live with a pedophile because Bud couldn’t be bothered with his own brother. Bud had chased excitement and adventure. He’d run from Erabelle, responsibility, and obligation.
I raised my hand to my face and jabbed at the open wound. It didn’t work. The real hurt did almost nothing to dull the one inside me.
Kelvin jerked to attention. “What are you doing? Your face is bleeding.” He ripped more tissues from the end table. “Here, put pressure on that.”
I ignored the offered tissues. “I hate him.”
He struggled to stand. “I know. I hate Carter King too.” He held my chin and pressed the tissues to my face himself. “But there’s nothing to do now. He’s been buried for fifty years.”
“No.” I paused to sob. “I hate Bud.”
Kelvin lowered his hand. His eyes glassed over, but he managed to hold in the tears. “That’s what Bud was afraid of.”
I had to move. I couldn’t bear to be trapped in the little apartment. At the door, I stopped and turned around. I still held the pawnshop binder to my chest as though it were a shield. “Thank you for your help. You’ve been very good.”
I left the building and got in the news van. I drove, but not to any place in particular. At one point I had to pull over. Rage swelled in my limbs. I pounded the steering wheel and kicked blindly. I didn’t even know why. I just did it.
I passed Westside Hospital—a different facility from the one Bud was in—and stopped. Because, apparently, there was no limit to what I could be wrong about, I decided to see if I needed stitches. My pride was salved only slightly by their use of glue instead of needle and thread.
The physician’s assistant said I’d have a scar, but a relatively minor cosmetic procedure might remove it in the future. I walked back to the car with a prescription for a light painkiller and an antibiotic. It reminded me of Kincaid.
I drove to Rosedale. It wasn’t rational, but when I saw Bouncer through the window of his mother’s store, I felt better.
I parked and he opened the front door for me. “What happened to your face?”
“Can I come in?”
He stepped back so I could enter, then locked the door behind me. He’d been alone in the store, unpacking boxes and restocking the shelves, but said he had coffee made in the back.
We sat at the same table his mother had been using to cut pages from the Bibles the night before. I wrapped my cold hands around the warm ceramic mug, but didn’t drink its contents.
I told him about Bud—how he’d killed Carter King and why, how he’d assumed Carter’s name, and how Bud had been the one selling Bibles with Bouncer’s mother in ’84.
When I finished, he crossed his arms. “Why are you here telling me this?”
“I thought you’d want to know about Bud
, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I don’t know.” I pushed the coffee away. My rising annoyance absolved me of having to pretend I liked it. “Maybe I didn’t want to be alone.”
“You’ve got people. You’ve got a guy who obviously loves you and friends.”
I stood. “I wish I could push a button and make them all go away.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate being tangled up in their lives. I don’t want to feel hurt or angry when they let me down, and I don’t want to be terrified that something bad might happen to them.”
Instead of being judgmental, as I expected, Bouncer nodded. “I feel that way about my mom sometimes. She won’t go straight. I don’t think it’s even about the money. When I tell her how hard it is for me to know she could get that third strike, she tells me not to worry, like it’s a choice or a switch I can flip.”
He stood up and started back out to the storefront. “There’s no way for me to stop worrying about her. That’s part of being in a family, even if it’s a family of two.”
I followed him to where he’d been unpacking boxes. “I don’t want to be in a family.”
“But you don’t want to be alone either.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because being alone is an easy dream to realize.” He grinned. “And instead of doing it, you came here to tell me that we might, in fact, be family.”
He reached down and picked up several Bibles, then placed the stolen merchandise on an empty shelf.
“If I’m so desperate to connect with you, then why don’t I know your name?”
“Because until this moment you haven’t cared enough to learn that my name is Jake.”
“Exactly. Because caring is the worst.”
“You’ll get no argument from me.” He shelved more Bibles. “And short of the person you love dying or magically ceasing to exist, there’s no way out. You’re trapped.”
A fantasy of running away dazzled me for a moment. Erabelle had escaped the ties that bind by moving to Indonesia. It felt so seductive—severing every claim on me, every relationship that required something I wasn’t able to give. No more feeling guilty because I’d hurt someone. No more feeling angry because people had hurt me.
It came just as suddenly as the truth about my father and Carter King. I sucked in a breath and rocked back.
“Are you okay?” Bouncer said. “Is something wrong?”
“I know who shot Bud.” My mind whipped through scenarios. I reached a particularly awful one and jumped up. “And I think they’re going to do it again.”
I raced back to the van. I flipped through the pawnshop binder trying to see what Bud must have seen. I didn’t look for the brooch, but rather I focused on the transactions from the previous weeks. I saw enough to confirm I was right and called Lucero.
I also started driving. After several failed attempts to reach him, I left a long message on his voice mail. I even called Handsome, who also didn’t pick up, and left a similar message. As a last resort, I called 911.
Despite all that effort, I was alone when I reached the Kings’ land. I followed the road along the refinery’s electric fence. The van shook as the speedometer climbed to ninety. After what felt like an eternity, I slowed at the asphalt driveway and turned in. I approached the mobile homes with dread. When I didn’t see the Escalade, my dread turned to fear.
I stopped and got out without turning the engine off. The overcast day cast a depressing tint over the unkempt flower beds and crooked shutters. Even the Christmas lights looked cheap and sad.
No one answered at Sally and Brandon’s house. I ran across the drive and pounded on Mida’s door. If she’d been there, I would have thrown her in the van. Saving at least her would have been enough of an excuse to run away and let the police handle the rest.
But she wasn’t there.
I listened for sirens in the distance, but no cavalry was charging in. The only sound on the lonely property came from the wind beating through the dead grasses. I had no choice. I was going to have to drive to the farmhouse.
I returned to the van and drove forward past the mobile homes. The asphalt ended and spit me out onto the dirt road. A trail of dust and earth blossomed behind me as I sped farther and farther into the property.
I honestly didn’t know what I’d do when I did eventually reach the farmhouse. Should I park some distance away and try to sneak up on it? Should I charge in? I might be wrong. I didn’t have proof, just some circumstantial evidence and an understanding of what might be driving Bud’s shooter.
A formation of odd black streaks and sharp angles appeared on the horizon. I’d never visited from this direction, and it took me a few moments to identify the collapsed barn.
Time to decide. The farmhouse appeared and I decided on a direct approach. If it turned out the worst was true, I’d stall until the police arrived. It might not be too late.
I slowed. Four vehicles were parked in the dirt clearing at the rear of the house: three pickups and Sally’s Escalade. I parked a short distance back and shut off my engine. Through the windshield I eyed the trucks.
The duct tape on the front bumper identified one of them as belonging to Kincaid. The second was much older and looked like the one Brandon had been driving the previous day. The third was easily the biggest and most expensive. I recognized it as part of Warner’s fleet of vehicles. Erabelle had given me a ride in a similar one the previous day.
Not all of the trucks were empty. Someone’s head cast a shadow on the back window of his or her vehicle. The head didn’t turn at the sound of my van. It didn’t glance down to read or examine something. The shadow didn’t move at all.
I had a bad feeling, but took the bat and got out of the van. Outside, the air reeked of diesel fuel from the rumbling generator.
I walked slowly, partly from caution and partly from dread. I stopped one last time at the rear of the pickup. I tapped the CHEVY lettering with the baseball bat. The wood hit the metal with a loud thud, but the figure didn’t move.
This dead stillness implied that the individual was past being a danger to me or anyone else, but I still approached with care. The driver’s-side window was rolled down. I didn’t want to look, but forced myself.
My stomach lurched and I had to fight my gag reflex.
Frank had been shot. There wasn’t much blood where the bullet had entered just above his ear. His skin was still warm and I didn’t think he’d been dead for long. The money, the second half of Warner’s lump-sum payment to the Kings, wasn’t in the truck with him. Neither was the diamond brooch he was supposed to obtain in the trade.
I pictured Frank arriving in the souped-up pickup. Doing yet another dirty errand for the family he’d spent decades serving. He probably hadn’t even got out of the truck. The killer could have stood in the same spot as me, smiling and making conversation. Frank probably hadn’t known what hit him.
I’d got here too late to save Frank’s life, but I might not be too late to save the others.
I stepped up and crept through the kitchen. The plastic sheeting had been lowered over the doorway into Brandon’s lab. I cautiously looked inside. With all the windows boarded, the work light on the stand still provided the only illumination. The leftover tools of meth production were still in place, but the room was empty.
My relief proved short-lived. A faint noise beckoned from farther inside the house. The long, low sounds reminded me of water sloshing in a bucket.
I stepped softly on the plastic covering the floor. I reached a large archway on the opposite side of the room and pulled back the sheeting.
A chemical odor filled the dark room. Faint light, as well as the sloshing sounds, came from a hallway. As I crossed what used to be the living room, I recognized the dim outlines of the front door. It was good to know I could get out without running all the way back through the house.
That’s when I tripped. I found the Mini Maglite in my coat pocket and s
hone it down.
This time my stomach didn’t lurch. It was as though my overwhelmed brain had shut off certain reflexes.
Kincaid lay splayed on the floor. His open eyes stared straight up at the ceiling. He’d been dead longer than Frank, and it appeared his death had been much more painful.
THIRTY-ONE
Christmas Day, 2:54 p.m.
Kincaid had been shot in the stomach and bled out. The swell of dark liquid had reached a particularly wide space between the wood planks and fallen straight down under the house.
I swallowed, despite my mouth’s feeling like a dry sponge, and reached down to check for a pulse. I didn’t doubt that Kincaid was dead, but it seemed the proper thing to do. Touching him, I realized that he’d been covered in some kind of liquid. The wood floor glistened with it too, without actually feeling wet.
Judging from the smell, some kind of flammable chemical or accelerant had been poured on the body and around the room. I stifled my panic by reasoning that the killer was unlikely to ignite the house while still inside.
A lot of people would have walked back to their car and waited for the police. Even more people wouldn’t have ventured past the public road in the first place. That I’d driven all the way here, continued past Frank’s body, and now found myself inside a firebox standing over yet another body placed me in a select group.
Despite the danger, I continued toward the hallway and the odd sloshing sounds. If I ran away now and more people died, I’d always have that weight on me. I’d know I’d been selfish and left others in danger with disastrous consequences. Isn’t that the weight Bud had lived with for fifty years? I had no desire to emulate him.
I killed the flashlight and entered the dark hallway. The chemical smell increased the closer I got to the sounds. Its sharp odor burned my nostrils and I had to cover my face. My foot slipped, which was unusual in my boots, and I guessed the accelerant had been poured here only moments earlier.
I had an odd realization that this was the place where my father had been hurt. Within these walls he’d been unable to defend himself against a predator. I wanted it to burn. I wanted the match to be struck. That the wood still stood and that I could stand inside this place all these years later was an abomination.
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