Legacy of Masks

by Sallie Bissell

  “Buenos días, Ruben,” Mary said as the little man beat a hasty retreat. “Como está?”

  “Buenos días, Señorita,” he replied, his voice a horrified whisper.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Sylvia,” said Mary, walking up to the counter.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it, Ms. Crow,” Sylvia said airily, as if pleased to be caught necking. “Ruben’s Mexican. The men are prudish that way. How’s it going? You get any more bear masks?”

  “Not so far.” Mary smiled at the rotund girl who had, over the past two months, sold her everything from lightbulbs to picture hangers. Though the heavy jowls of flesh on her face made her look thirty, she probably wasn’t out of her teens. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay. Can I help you find something?”

  “I need an answering machine for my office phone. Do you carry those?”

  “Right back here.” Sylvia started waddling down one aisle, her wide hips swaying from side to side. “You working on Ridge’s case?”

  “Sort of.” Mary followed Sylvia through the bird seed display and on into sporting goods. They were headed toward school supplies when she noticed an array of photographs hanging on the wall. Several years’ worth of Keener Kats softball teams beamed down at her. In every one Deke Keener stood behind two rows of little girls, all dressed in pink-and-black uniforms. Glenn Daws also grinned from the photos, a big, beefy blond who looked as if he might have once played football.

  “Oh,” said Mary, surprised. “The Keener Kats. There’s Deke, and there’s Glenn Daws.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Sylvia said somberly. “That’s both of ’em.”

  Mary frowned at the photos. “Which one is Bethany?”

  Sylvia pointed a chubby finger at a beautiful little heart-shaped face smiling from a photo in the top left corner. “That’s her.” She moved her finger down a row, to a slightly chubbier face. “And that’s me.”

  “You two played on the same team?”

  Sylvia nodded. “We were in the same grade in school, till I quit.” She looked down at her protruding stomach and gave an embarrassed laugh. “Though I don’t guess anybody could tell that now.”

  “Sure they could,” Mary lied, wanting to lift the girl’s sub-basement opinion of herself. “You’ve got the same terrific hair and that killer smile.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.” Sylvia blushed at Mary’s compliment. “But that’s us. Bethany was left-handed, so she played first base. I played center field.”

  “What did you think of her?” asked Mary.

  “She was okay back then.”

  “Back then?”

  “She changed, later on.” Sylvia shrugged, as if not wanting to speak ill of the dead. “But a lot of us did.”

  “Changed like how?”

  “Well, everybody liked her and everything, but she did some really crazy stuff.”

  “What do you mean?”

  A sour look crossed Sylvia’s face. “Bethany slept with everybody in town. Most girls would get into big trouble, doing what she did, but not Bethany. She gets a scholarship to college and a handsome Indian boyfriend.”

  “Don’t forget Bethany’s dead, Sylvia,” Mary reminded her. “And Ridge is in jail for her murder.”

  The girl shrugged. “There are more people than Ridge Standingdeer with good reason to kill Bethany Daws.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “And most of ’em have ‘Mrs.’ in front of their names. Bethany used to trade old Maynard Locust blow jobs for vodka, back behind the liquor store when his wife was working the counter. I saw her do that with my own two eyes!”

  Mary feigned shock. “You don’t mean it! She seemed like such a nice girl.”

  “She was nice,” Sylvia said with finality. “But she was crazy, too.”

  Mary checked out Sutton’s modest selection of answering machines, chose the least expensive one, and headed toward the checkout counter. After Sylvia rang up her purchase, Mary wrote out a check. “Thanks, Sylvia. It’s always interesting to hear another side of the story.”

  “It’s God’s own truth!” Sylvia said defiantly, closing her cash drawer. “If you want my opinion, I don’t think Ridge Standingdeer killed her at all. I think Bethany Daws just pissed off the wrong wife!”

  Mary walked back to her office, mulling over what Sylvia had just told her. It echoed what Deke had revealed last night, although he had not hinted at the extent of Bethany’s sexual exploits. If that was indeed the case, maybe some aggrieved wife had killed the girl. It would take no huge amount of strength to crack her skull open with a four-dollar tomahawk. But how would someone sneak into her room at night? Mary shook her head. Unless some angry wife was running around Pisgah County with the skills of a cat burglar, Bethany’s killer was someone the girl had known well.

  She reached her office door and paused, trying to decide whether to go over and confer with Ravenel. Though tempted to fill him in on all the things his man McGruder had apparently overlooked, at the last minute she changed her mind. She wanted to pay a visit to the one man Sylvia had mentioned by name, liquor clerk Maynard Locust.

  She got in her car and made a U-turn on Main Street, driving over to the local ABC store. Like every other state-run liquor outlet, it was puritanical in its approach to vending hooch—no flashing signs, no giant plastic Tennessee Walking Horses in the parking lot, just a nondescript brick building with a sign that warned you’d damn well better be twenty-one years old before you set foot inside the door.

  Mary went inside, jingling a small bell over the transom. She hadn’t planned on buying anything, but when she remembered that she was going to be spending her foreseeable future all alone, she walked over and picked up a bottle of Sapphire gin. She took her purchase to the checkout counter, where an oily-skinned man wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt sat reading the sports page of the paper. Mary charged her gin to her Visa card, then asked, “Is Maynard here today?”

  “Nah, him and his wife went to Myrtle Beach.” The man smirked, flirting. “Why? You a friend of his?”

  “Actually, I work for the paper,” Mary lied, officially kicking off her career as a private detective. She fished a newspaper photo of Bethany from her purse. “Someone told me Maynard knew this girl.”

  The man took the clipping. Though he tried to seem uninterested, the look on his face confirmed what Sylvia Goins had just told her. Bethany Daws had apparently been generous with her charms at the ABC store.

  The man shook his head. “I’ve never seen her.”

  “Really? I heard she came in a lot, but I guess you get a lot of minors in here.”

  He shrugged. “We sell liquor. Kids want to get drunk. We get our share of fake IDs.”

  “But you never sold this girl any?”

  “Not me,” the man assured her. “The new sheriff’s a real nutcase about that. He’d bust my ass in a heartbeat.”

  Yeah, right, thought Mary. Provided your ass wasn’t in the back room, getting serviced by Bethany Daws. She put the clipping back in her purse and smiled. “Well, thanks. Maybe I’ll come back later and talk to Maynard.”

  “He’ll be back next week,” the man said, his interest fast returning to the sports page. “But I can tell you right now that he never sold her any whiskey, either.”

  Mary picked up her gin and headed for the door. She had no doubt that the man was telling the truth. Why sell a pretty girl whiskey when you could just barter for it, off the books?

  As she waited at a traffic light, she considered everything she’d learned about Bethany Daws. Outwardly, the girl led an enviable existence—popular at school, high-performing academically. Secretly though, she’d led a shadow life, filled with alcoholism and promiscuous sex—the classic behaviors of a victim of sexual abuse. Usually that meant the father, and Deke had admitted last night that Glenn Daws and his older daughter had a difficult relationship. Mary wondered—could Daws have killed her? He had access, maybe motive. No, she thought, discarding the idea. Jerry Cochran was a bright guy. H
e would have put Glenn Daws at the top of his suspect list. But what about the mother? And didn’t Bethany also have a little sister?

  “Something was making that girl see Ridge as her savior,” Mary said aloud. “He was an outsider, with no knowledge of her past. Nobody here knew him, so no one could tell him her dirty little secrets.” Before, Mary hadn’t understood why a girl with a full ride to Chapel Hill would want to run off with a boy of primitive upbringing in backcountry Appalachia, but now she saw it clearly. Bethany could mold Ridge into anything she wanted. Bethany could use Ridge as a wedge against her family. And finally, running away with a boy with no family nearby meant you never had to come home again.

  “Wow,” Mary whispered, pulling up across the street from her office. Trying to figure out Bethany Daws was like peeling an onion—lots of layers had to be discarded before you got to the core of everything.

  She got out of the car and hurried up the stairs. Just as she was about to unlock her office door, she saw Dana coming out of the small rest room all the tenants shared.

  “Mary! Is it true you’re not moving?”

  “Well, not anytime in the immediate future.”

  “All right!” Dana lifted her fist in triumph. “I’m so happy to hear that!”

  Mary gave an embarrassed shrug at her own indecision, but then she grew serious. “Dana, do you have a professional moment? I’d like to run something by you.”

  Dana glanced at her watch. “I’ve got a client coming at noon. But I can give you my undivided attention for the next ten minutes.”

  “Thanks.” Mary followed her into her office. “How would you diagnose this? A bright, attractive teenage girl is everyone’s sweetheart in public, but is wildly abusive and promiscuous on the sly.”

  Dana sat down behind her desk. “Abusive of what?”

  “Alcohol for sure. Maybe street drugs as well.”

  “Any friends?”

  Mary remembered Sylvia Goins’ sullen disapproval of Bethany. “Popular at school, but I’m guessing nobody really close.”

  “Two-parent family?”

  Mary nodded.

  “Daddy’s word law?”

  “Possibly. Certainly there’s a troubled relationship with the father.”

  “Sexual abuse,” Dana said perfunctorily.

  “That’s what I guessed.” Mary sighed. For some reason, she’d clung to the naÏve hope that she’d left all that behind in Atlanta.

  Dana gave a grim nod. “Statistically, we lead the region.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope. I live with a woman named Genevieve Lyles. She’s a psychologist with the state board of education. She thinks we have a serial child rapist.”

  Mary was taken aback. “Excuse me?”

  Dana’s eyes flashed with anger. “Jen’s convinced that someone out there is fucking Pisgah County kids. She says she can prove it. She just can’t get anybody to believe her, except me.”

  “Try me,” said Mary.

  “Are you serious?”

  “As a heart attack.”

  “Then come over for dinner tonight,” said Dana. “I’ll have Jen prove it to you.”

  30

  Dana had invited her for dinner at seven, so at six-thirty Mary drove over to a street that wound up the hill behind the bookstore. It was an older residential neighborhood, shaded with tall oaks and sycamores, where people sat on their front porches and children played outside after dark, squeezing out every drop of summer before school and homework and the sorrows of growing up started over again. A multivoiced choir of katydids chirped a contrapuntal rhythm and though the breeze was still warm, it carried the first bittersweet notes of fall. With the exception of the late-model cars parked in the driveways and a dish antenna that sprouted from one house, the neighborhood seemed timeless; it could have been August in the 1940s as easily as August in the new millennium.

  Mary pulled up in front of a small redbrick bungalow that sat amid carefully tended flower beds. White impatiens and colorful snapdragons spread out in profusion, guarded by a scruffy black-and-white dog that wagged his tail at the sight of her.

  “Hey, fella.” Mary smiled, approaching the little beast cautiously.

  He gave a halfhearted woof, as if fulfilling his watchdog duties, then trotted down the steps and started licking her hand.

  The screen door opened with a squeak as a woman came out on the porch. She wore jeans and had brown hair, cut like a cap on her head.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the woman called. “Bobby will lick to you death long before he’ll bite.”

  “So I see,” Mary replied, rubbing the dog’s soft fur.

  “Are you Mary?” The woman came down the steps. Up close, Mary could see that she was around forty, with deep blue eyes and a sprinkling of freckles over her nose.

  Nodding, Mary extended her hand. “Are you Dana’s partner?”

  The woman laughed. “I’m Genevieve Lyles. Jen for short. Come on in. Dana’s fixing the salad.”

  Mary gave the dog a final pat and followed Jen into a living room where overstuffed bookshelves surrounded a small stone hearth. Candles of varying heights glowed from the fireplace as bouncy Latin jazz played softly from a CD player. Dana had stashed her tennis racquets behind the front door, and Bobby had littered a bright red rug with an array of well-chewed dog toys. Mary smiled. It looked very much like the home of any other American couple. Nothing about it would indicate that both partners wore bras and likely kept the toilet seat down.

  “Come on back,” said Jen, leading Mary through a small dining room, into a much larger kitchen. “Like I said, Dana’s doing the salad. May I pour you a glass of wine?”

  “Sure,” said Mary. “Sounds wonderful.”

  “Hi, Mary!” Dana looked up from the sink, where she was rinsing mushrooms in a cascade of running water. “I see you met my two running buddies.”

  “Yes, I did.” Mary looked enviously at Dana’s plumbing, then took the glass of wine Jen offered. “A formidable pair. Who’s the gardener in the family?”

  The two women looked at each other in the way of longtime couples, as if trying to remember who exactly did what. “Jen plants the annuals every spring. I do bulbs in the fall.” Dana laughed. “I guess I want more long-term bang for my buck.”

  “Actually, she’d rather just be on the tennis court,” Jen teased with a wink. “Plus she’s afraid of breaking a nail.”

  Dana shook her head. “Such a fibber! I’ll have you know I almost broke two nails uncorking that wine!”

  Laughing, Mary touched her glass to Jen’s. “Well, whatever you broke was worth it. This wine is wonderful.”

  Dana turned to join in the toast. “We pulled out all the stops tonight, Mary. We intend to keep you from ever leaving Hartsville!”

  They ate on a deck that opened off the back of the house. Dana grilled shish kebabs while Jen picked fresh corn and tomatoes from their garden. Dinner was just as delicious as the wine, and Mary learned that the two women had met in graduate school, at Duke. Both were psychologists; while Dana had a private practice, Jen taught at nearby Western Carolina and collected statistics for the state board of education.

  “Statistics on what?” Mary asked as Dana plopped a scoop of vanilla ice cream on some warm peach cobbler.

  “Pretty much anything the state dreams up,” said Jen. “Plus, I do some contract work for the BIA, and the Department of Human Services.”

  Mary didn’t quite know how to broach the subject that had, in fact, precipitated her coming. Jen, however, was not as shy.

  “Dana tells me you suspect some of the same things I do about Pisgah County.”

  A moment of silence arose as Mary struggled to voice her wild suspicions. Finally she simply said, “I think someone was molesting Bethany Daws. And I think someone killed her to shut her up.”

  Jen glanced at Dana, then drained her glass of wine. “You have all but one thing right, Mary.”

  “What’s that?”

&
nbsp; “Someone has been molesting a lot more than just one child.”

  Dana reached over and squeezed her partner’s arm. “Why don’t you show Mary your files? I’ll clean up out here and make us some coffee.”

  Reluctantly leaving the dinner dishes to Dana, Mary followed Jen back into a small bedroom that doubled as a home office. She sat down on a futon while Jen rummaged through a file cabinet in the closet, finally emerging with two thick manila folders.

  “Okay,” she said, glancing quickly through all the pages, then dividing them into four piles. “This is a statistical study I’ve kept current for the past ten years. It covers all the kids enrolled in the school systems of Graham, Haywood, Jackson, Pisgah, and Swain Counties.”

  “What exactly are you studying?” Mary asked.

  “Originally, Raleigh wanted to know why Pisgah County dropout numbers were so high. I interviewed everybody who would talk to me. The boys gave pretty typical reasons, but almost all the girls had stonewalling honed to a fine art. It niggled at me, so I started gathering data on behavioral reactions to sexual abuse. That’s when things got interesting.”

  She handed Mary a stack of bar graphs printed on old-fashioned sheet-fed computer paper. “The five counties are on the left. Each page represents a different year and a different behavior. I’ve measured suicides, attempted suicides, illegal drug arrests, dropout rates, illegitimate pregnancies, and treatment for STDs. As you can see, Pisgah County, which is the lowest in population, nonetheless leads the pack, and leads by a significant margin.”

  Mary flipped through the pages, noting the strange little marks that meant so much to statisticians. “Couldn’t the Cherokees be skewing the numbers?” She felt disloyal, asking the question, but she knew that Indian kids fell victim to self-destructive behaviors far more readily than their white peers. That, she’d seen up close.

  “I thought that, too, at first.” Jen pulled another sheet from her folder. “So I did a separate subgroup study. The Cherokee numbers held steady until the late nineties, then they actually began to improve. The money that the casino is generating for them is really pumping up their self-esteem.”