Fortunes of the Dead

by Lynn Hightower

  Janis scoots her chair just a little bit closer, and rests her bare feet in his lap. A little half smile tugs his lips, and she bets he’s a good kisser. Kissing is important to Janis, and a man who won’t kiss her and do it properly gets thrown out with no second chances.

  Dennis traces a finger along the creases of her toes. “I never knew a bullfighter who painted their toenails red.”

  “That’s because you never knew me.” Some of the toes are black and blue—night before last a bull was camping on a cowboy and she had to get closer than she liked.

  Dennis lifts the ankle bracelet up from her skin, and runs a finger in a circle under the chain. Janis leans back to see what he will do next. To see if she will have to kick him out for being in a hurry.

  But this one’s got nowhere else he wants to go, and nothing else he wants to do, and she is the focus of his entire attention. Which is how Janis likes things to be.

  He presses the soles of her feet with his thumbs, his skin rough from heavy labor. He is careful of the hurt parts, and she relaxes finally and closes her eyes. He takes one foot between both hands, stroking the toes lightly with one, and grasping and massaging with the other. She smiles because it is a very good feeling.

  “I’d do anything to make you smile like that.”

  Janis opens her eyes. Dennis has such dark brown eyes, and he is halfway to falling in love. Janis can’t be accused of breaking hearts. She always stays put; it’s the cowboys who drift away.

  His hands go up under the hem of her jeans, and he is warm, and she is drawn to that. She asks him if he’d like to see the bedroom.

  The “bedroom” is behind a curtain on rings, but it might as well be a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria for the way Janis pushes away the curtain and motions him in. She curls up on the bed, then stretches, lying sideways, and smiles up at him. “Take your clothes off, real slow, will you do that?”

  He hides it if he’s feeling embarrassed. He doesn’t go really slow, but he doesn’t go fast, and he is matter-of-fact about everything he takes off. He folds everything neatly and puts it on a chair at the foot of the bed.

  Janis chuckles at his neatness, no doubt his mother would be proud. Dennis covers himself with his hands, and pretends to be insulted.

  “Hell, don’t laugh at it, will you?”

  He is so very lovely in the light that shines through the bedroom window. So muscular and taut, young and ready. And she isn’t as old as she feels like she is, which is something that Janis forgets. She is drifting, and thinking how it would be if Hal could be here, and she looks up and sees Dennis has stretched out beside her on the bed and is watching the way her eyes go dreamy.

  She sees him now, she is aware, and he takes her face between his hands, and starts a kiss slowly, drawing it out, not letting her go. And she doesn’t want to be let go. She strains toward him and he pulls the shirt over her head, and undresses her slowly, admiring each item of clothing she wears. The jeans—they show off the swell of her hips. The sweater—that clings so tight to the most beautifully shaped breasts he has ever seen. The bra, so sweet, so sexy; the panties, so delicate and feminine that he would like to take them home in his pocket. He folds each piece of clothing, and lays it on top of his things in the chair, and ever after they begin this way.

  Dennis takes a minute to study her, really study her, and seems sincerely pleased with every inch of her body. Janis thinks that the world would be a happier place if every woman had a man like this one.

  He pushes her down to the pillow; he is not through looking. He traces the scars up and down her body, some of them still red and inflamed, others white and silvery, faded. He is intrigued, as if they are beauty marks. She has one leg bent, and he takes a hand and strokes the skin of her inner thigh.

  “You talk like you’re a hundred and two, but I don’t think you’re all that much older than I am.”

  “It isn’t just age that makes you old.”

  He kisses her knee. “Are you too old for this?”

  She shakes her head.

  He runs his fingers down between her legs. “And this?”

  The kid holds her afterward, and she buries her face in his neck, and tries to think of nothing but how pleasant it feels, the way he is stroking her hair. They lay together, legs entwined. “Can I ask you a question, Janis? I can call you Janis, can’t I?”

  “What else would you call me?”

  “Oh, Mary or Cleopatra or Veronica Lake. You call me Hal. I didn’t know if I was supposed to make up a name for you.”

  She says nothing.

  “I don’t mind if you call me Hal.”

  Janis traces his left ear with her fingertips.

  “I was wondering about all that stuff you got on the wall—the newspaper articles, the building burning … and the guy with the devil horns and the target on his shirt?”

  “That’s the enemy.”

  “What enemy? Is he bothering you? I can take care of him if you want me to.”

  Janis does not laugh because Hal is in earnest, and she respects it when a man seriously offers her his protection. “That’s David Koresh, Hal, and he’s already dead and in hell. Don’t you recognize any of those pictures? That’s Waco. Waco, Texas.”

  Dennis lies back, head on the pillow next to hers. “Waco. Yeah, I remember something about that, but hell, Janis, that was a long time ago.”

  “Not for me it wasn’t.”

  “Are you writing about it or something?”

  She gives him a half smile. “Why do you think that?”

  “All those stacks of legal pads. I mean, you almost got a whole book there, looks like to me.”

  “It’s just my thoughts, Hal. And some of my memories so I don’t forget. Sometimes I forget.”

  “We all do, Janis.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s a secret here somewhere.”

  “Want a bedtime story, do you? It’s not going to help you sleep.”

  “I want to know. It looks important.”

  Janis rolls over on her stomach and props herself up on her elbows, and Dennis strokes her back while she talks.

  She starts with the horse, with Dandy, and how she was still looking for him then. And Hal, bless him, finds her quest completely natural. Someone steals your favorite horse, of course you go after him. It’s what he’d do in her shoes.

  It was early days then, and she was tracking a paint that had been sold and moved quickly, and the farmer thought there might be something funny about it. Janis doesn’t have a lot of money, and she is wondering what best to do. So of course, she calls Emma.

  “Emma?” Dennis asks. He is paying close attention to all the names, wondering if a Hal is going to come up.

  Janis nods. “Emma was my sister. We were as close as two sisters can be. And she had a little boy named Joe, only she called him Crumpet.”

  “Why do you say ‘was’?”

  “They’re dead now. Went up in flames.”

  “At Waco?”

  “Yeah,” Janis says. “At Waco. It’s hard to explain about my sister. She was soft.”

  Dennis gives her shoulder a kiss. “You’re soft.”

  “I mean in personality. How tough a person she is.”

  “As in you’re not going to find her bullfighting in clown makeup?”

  Janis squeezes his hand and nods. “Emma’s husband died in a car wreck the year after Crumpet was born, and she just never got over it. I didn’t realize how bad off she was till I started living with her. Mark left her a house and a lot of insurance. She should have been set for life. But by the time I got there, she had ‘donated’ all her investments and money to Koresh’s people, and she was ready to sign over the house.”

  “To Koresh?”

  “David Koresh. The cult leader at Waco.”

  “The Branch Davidians, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And he knew your sister? It sure is a small world.”

  “Don’t talk like he was some k
ind of celebrity. He was evil, a predator. He made it a point to know vulnerable people with money. He would take people like my sister—smart people, Hal, everybody in this world is vulnerable at some time in their life—and he would make them think he could give them whatever it was they needed. Love, family, Jesus. He’d use it to get some kind of hold over them. Then they’d give him all their money and everything they had, and go live in that hell compound he called Mount Carmel. Mount Hell is what it was. Emma was determined to go there. I never could figure out why, except that maybe because she thought if she gave them everything she had, they would take care of her. She wouldn’t have to think or make decisions or be alone all the time. And they surely did take care of her.”

  “I don’t get how people are sucked up in all of this.”

  “Oh, Hal.” Janis runs her hand through his hair. “It’s shocking how well this stuff works. They start out slow, telling you that what you believe is all wrong, or how come you’re not happy? Then they just get to where you come and listen. And first they tell you where to sit, and when you can go pee, and when and what you can eat, and it happens so fast, suddenly you’re stuck. It’s mind control, and the scariest thing is how well it works. That’s how it happened to Emma. She took Crumpet one day, and I could not get her back home. I would go to the compound, and at first they let me come all I wanted, because they wanted to recruit me, too.

  “A lot of those people in there were just scared—scared to face what was going on, scared to rock the boat. The Enemy made them scared of the world, of going to hell; they didn’t know which end was up. The men lived with the other men, and the women with the women, and Koresh … he had sex with anybody he felt like. Even the little girls.”

  Dennis says nothing, but Janis sees revulsion in his eyes.

  “Emma was thin when she got there, but she kept on losing more weight. I know they weren’t getting anything to eat, anyone except the Enemy, and he was a pig. That’s what he was like, an evil pig who just wanted to eat, sleep and fornicate, and they just treated him like a prize pet that can’t be crossed and did whatever he said to keep him happy. It was the universe of Koresh.

  “I went everywhere for help. The police, the FBI, everybody. And no one could or would help me. Those people had guns in underground rooms. They stockpiled ammunition and water and food, they lived like the end of the world was around the corner, and nobody cared.

  “I got told to just abandon Emma and let her live her life. But she was my sister. So I went to live in the compound with her. And I just started working on her a little bit every day, pointing stuff out. Like how come the Enemy does this and does that and he’s supposed to be divine. And she started to come out of it a little. Started to see things with a better judgment. Particularly when they took Crumpet and made him live with the men. And she knew he wasn’t getting fed. She knew about their ‘discipline’—how they would beat him with a spoon if he cried, or did the things all little babies do. And Emma … at least what she couldn’t see for her, she could see for her child.

  “We made plans to leave, but we didn’t want to just walk out, because I knew, and Emma did, too—we knew she wouldn’t be strong enough to leave if the Enemy came out and talked to her. She was scared of him. I think she would rather have died, literally died, than make him mad.

  “But finally we got a chance for all three of us to go. We were leaving at dusk, but we got delayed, and it was dark, and Emma … she just couldn’t quite do it. She couldn’t go.

  “So I said, Emma, if I go get Chris and Dale—those are our brothers. If I go get Chris and Dale, will you leave with them? And she said she would. And she said get Mama to come, too. And I knew that would work. She promised me. So I left her behind, because it was the only way we could both get out of there, and I was going back for her.

  “The last time I saw my sister, she was just standing there on that flat plain, waving at me; and she looked so hopeless and worn out, just holding on to little Crumpet.”

  “And then what? Waco?”

  Janis closes her eyes and snuggles down beside Dennis.

  “Well, hell, Janis. I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Having ready cash in my wallet and more in my bank account had gone to my head. A wiser woman would hoard that money, keeping finances on an equal footing from week to week. But I had gotten used to the periods of boom and bust, and while I was content enough either way, there is no question that I know exactly how to enjoy the good times.

  I was having lunch at Ed and Fred’s Desert Moon, and after eating half of the Thai pizza and drinking most of a glass of red wine, I had ordered the chocolate fudge cake and coffee with cream.

  I flipped through the pages I had printed up from Internet downloads—Cheryl Dunkirk’s name had brought up a lot of entries on the google search engine, but most of them were post-disappearance.

  Earlier hits brought me the following information: Cheryl was a member of the Pep Club, the Spanish Club, and president and founder of the Pizza Appreciation Club at Danville High School. She sang in the senior chorus.

  She had been an avid member of online chat boards, and I read through dozens of her latest chat board posts.

  “Listen up, Porcelain Dog Mike. It is not the right of any human being, in any circumstance, to take the life of another human being except in self-defense. Anything else is playing God. I don’t know about you, but I have enough to do running my own life. I can’t be responsible for deciding to extinguish another.

  “… Why? Because I’m in law enforcement? I won’t change my mind. I don’t let people tell me what to think and peer pressure doesn’t bother me—I don’t care if I please people. And by the way, you sure are jaded and bitter for a shoe salesman.

  “You can’t get around it, Kiss and Run. It takes time to get over that kind of a relationship, and if you think you can save it you should. Forget who calls first—that kind of connection doesn’t come along every day. Don’t let it go without a fight.”

  Cheryl seemed to have been an outgoing, opinionated, and idealistic young woman who was passionate about law enforcement, Mayan ruins, and pizza. Added to the expensive clothes in her closet, the sum did not equal the awkward loner Miranda described. Maybe Miranda was describing herself.

  I wondered why she would lie in a life-or-death situation.

  The fudge cake arrived, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream melting beneath a pool of thick hot fudge. I took a bite—the cake alone was so rich and heavy I could be sated with that one taste, not that I’d let it go at that. I stirred cream into my coffee, thinking back on my conversations with Miranda.

  The first thing she’d told me was that Cheryl had not been having an affair with Cory Edgers and that her sister’s disappearance had nothing to do with a love triangle. She said she’d know if Cheryl had been having an affair with Edgers. She’d even defended Edgers, saying he was a departmental outsider, and that a friendship between Edgers and Cheryl had been perfectly natural.

  Miranda might lie to convince me to look elsewhere for Cheryl’s murderer. If she really believed that Edgers had nothing to do with Cheryl’s disappearance, she wouldn’t want me going over the same ground the police were covering. I could see Miranda telling me what she wanted me to know, in an effort to control the investigation. Particularly if she thought doing so was in Cheryl’s best interests.

  I took a sip of coffee and wiped a dot of cream off the table with my napkin. Was I kidding myself? Making excuses for Miranda? People rarely tell the truth. They tell you what they want you to know.

  The waitress eased my bill onto the table. I took another bite of cake, paid in cash, and left a generous tip. The only difference between me and other people with money was that mine wasn’t going to last. Which also meant that I enjoyed it more.

  Today there were two cars in the narrow driveway beside Robbie Little’s house on Rosemont Garden—a mildly crumpled Toyota Celica that was blocked
in by a beige Ford Ranger, almost new, a rental. I parked the Miata at the curb one house down, and walked up the sidewalk.

  A white trellis covered the right side of the little house, and in the spring the brown growth snarling through the slats would no doubt erupt in dozens of roses.

  Very quaint for a single male grad student.

  My knock on the door was answered in due time by a small woman, comfortably padded, who could not be an inch over five feet. She was slightly bent, as if her back hurt. Her hair was sparse, soft looking and white. Her glasses were silver, and she wore a nubby white sweater and an apron over red sweatpants. Her tiny elfin feet were tucked into a pair of hideous Dearfoam house shoes that clueless relations give for gifts at Christmas.

  “Hello, my dear, are you one of Robbie’s friends?”

  “My name is Lena Padget, I’m a detective, working on the disappearance of Cheryl Dunkirk. If Robert’s home, I’d like to talk to him. Robert and Cheryl were close friends, weren’t they?”

  “Oh, yes, honey, they used to be ‘together.’ In fact, for a long time, Cheryl lived right here with me and Robbie. I’m June Holden, by the way, Robbie’s grandmother, on his mama’s side. Come in now, honey, it’s too cold to stand outside.”

  The living room was overheated to the point that it was more comfortable outside. I shed my jacket in self-defense. The unseasonably warm February had segued into a warmer than usual early March. Winter was over.

  “Sit down, sit down, I’ll be right back, just let me go tell Robbie you’re here.”

  I settled on an ugly but comfortable couch that was covered in a gold-and-blue floral-print fabric. It had a gathered ruffle across the bottom and there seemed to be at least nine pillows lined up across the seats, two that matched the fabric on the couch, the rest a mix of satin, crocheted knit, velvet, and cotton. The living room was tiny, and crowded with an amazing conglomeration of furniture. A highly polished piano took up an entire corner, and a television perched on a metal rack covered up a window, which could not let much light in anyway, sealed as it was in heavy drapes of gold brocade. A walnut veneered bookcase sat next to the TV, shelves heavy with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and stacks of heavy yellow issues of National Geographic. There were two chairs, a recliner and a rocking chair, and a rectangular coffee table whose surface was covered with porcelain dogs of all sizes and shapes.