“Look, I don’t know about you, but the way I see it, I got two choices: I can either back your ass or burn it. You do what I say, you'll come out fine, but if you’ve got some beef with that--?” Jimmy shrugged. “Your call.”
Jason shoved his hands over his head and said he’d go along with Jimmy. What else? If he wanted to recoup anything out of this deal, he had to play it Jimmy's way. And right then, he even thought it might work.
Chapter Twenty-Four
They wouldn’t give him his phone call; they wouldn’t tell him where Beth and Chrissy were. Charlie waited with his face pressed against the bars of the jail cell and asked again when Devers came with a breakfast tray. “Tell me where they are?”
The deputy shoved the tray through the slot.
Charlie said, “I know my rights. You have to give me a phone call.”
“Who you going to call in this town, Cunningham, that don’t think you’re a killer?”
“It wasn’t me. It was Tinker. He’s got Beth and Chrissy. Come on, please! Goddamnit, you’ve got to find them before he does something to them, if he hasn’t already.”
“Save your begging for the judge. Everybody knows you’re a liar. We searched the property, asked around town, ain't nobody seen Beth. But how could they? When she ain't been here?”
Charlie said, “That's the dumbest--” but he broke off when he saw that Devers was that dumb. “This isn’t happening,” he muttered, and he turned in a frustrated circle, hands clapped to his head.
“Oh, it’s happening all right.” Devers sounded like he was enjoying himself.
Charlie went up to the cell bars. “Chrissy is only three; she’s a baby. You can’t stop looking for her. Please. You've got to keep looking for my family.”
“Oh, we’re lookin’, trust me.” Devers shifted the toothpick in his mouth corner to corner. “But why don't you make it easy on all of us, and tell us where you hid the bodies?”
“Fuck you!” Charlie shouted and thrusting his hand through the bars, he got a wad of the deputy’s shirt.
“C’mon, now.” Lance broke Charlie’s hold, grinned and backed away. “You ain’t racking up too many Brownie points with that attitude.” He leaned against the wall.
“Look, asshole, you can tell that bastard, Tinker, he can stick me with this; he can frame me, but even if you lock me up for life, I'll get out, and I'll come back. I'll come up from hell if I have to.”
“Woo, I'm so scared.” Lance rolled the toothpick over his lip and walked away.
“What about Maizie? Have you talked to her?”
Devers turned. “Don’t act like you don’t know.”
“Know what?”
“She’s dead, killer.”
“Dead?”
“Of a heart attack caused by you when you stole her car. Knowin’ her, she tried to stop you, and her heart gave out.”
Charlie groped his way to the cot and sat down. He shouldn’t have left her the way he did. She’d been so weak and chalk-white under her dark skin, whiter than pale, and sweating. Now she was gone.
Panic washed through him. No one was coming to help him; there was no one to speak for him, to vouch for him. He didn't have a chance in hell, not one prayer.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Lance and some other deputies showed up at Lucy’s house at noon on the day after her murder. Jason let them in, and then taking the cordless phone from the library out onto the small dark patio, he called Jimmy. “What the hell is going on? They're all over the house, going through everything, taking pictures. They bagged the slippers Lucy was wearing, for Christ’s sake.”
“They have to conduct an investigation,” Jimmy answered. “It's routine.”
Jason saw nothing routine about it.
“What about Beth’s luggage? Did you get rid of it the way I told you?” jimmy asked.
“Yeah. It's ash now. They didn't have much.” Jason had gone through what little there was before he’d burned it in a trash barrel out behind the barn, and when he’d come across Chrissy's birth certificate in a folder of personal papers, he’d sat down to study it. Beth was listed as the mother, Cunningham the father. But blurring his vision just right, Jason had seen his own name linked with Beth's as the father, and a curious softness had come over him, something like affection, like love, and his throat had knotted with longing. Chrissy could have been his, should have been his child, but Beth had never understood him, never understood what he wanted. None of the bitches ever did.
He kept the birth certificate, and the stuffed lamb, and Beth’s wedding ring that he’d found in the bathroom, putting them into a box that he shoved into a closet. He wasn’t sure why he kept those things and burned up the rest, but he was glad that he had preserved them. The thought comforted him. Nights he would take them out and touch them. He wore the ring; he stroked the lamb. He thought how his life might have been. He waited to be arrested.
But it didn’t happen. Within a week of the cops searching Lucy’s house,
the search for Beth and her kid was called off. Jimmy got up in front of the news cameras and said no proof could be found that either of them had been in the area much less at the farm. That started folks talking, saying Cunningham had probably murdered them too, but without bodies, it was just talk and went nowhere. Jimmy wanted gratitude from Jason; he wanted Jason to get his mind in gear, get it back on the business of managing the Japs and Jimmy’s campaign.
But Jason’s head was full of noise. He knew Beth was out there, somewhere, waiting for him. Maybe even watching him from the woods, biding her time. He hired a detective, Sam Bradenton in Houston, to hunt for her telling him and anyone who asked that he had an obligation to get word to Lucy’s daughter about her mother’s death. Folks were in awe; they were impressed. Jason was grieving, distraught, anyone could see it, the man looked awful, positively ill, and yet he put Beth’s feelings first just the way he had put Lucy first when her own daughter couldn’t be bothered. Among themselves, they hoped Beth would never be found. They didn’t want her here; they were rooting for Jason to inherit. Hadn't he devoted himself to caring for Lucy? While Beth--that ungrateful girl--had run off and never looked back?
Jason heard it all from Jimmy; even Lance came to Lucy’s house to report the talk around town. Jimmy said Jason ought to get on his knees and praise the good Lord Almighty for the prevailing wind of local ignorance. Jimmy said, “Relax.” But Jason couldn’t, not even when, after days of searching, Bradenton uncovered no trace of Beth or the kid. Anywhere. He said it was as if they had never existed.
Jason thanked the detective; he paid him his fee like the business was done. Only it wasn’t. Beth was everywhere he went. He carried her in his brain; she lived inside him, the lone witness to what he’d done. She was part of the constant hum, the resonation, the buzz that plagued him, that more and more often now separated into words: “You're going to die, killer ...”
... Diekillerdiekillerdie....
Chapter Twenty-Six
She opened her eyes and objects swam at her from pre-dawn drifts of light-shot gray: the dresser against the opposite wall, the closet door, the edge of a nightstand that separated her bed from the one beside it. On her right, a new day pressed a dim rectangle against the window shade. And now, when she could no longer fight it, thought came, and she prayed that among the fragments she'd find her real name.
But it didn't happen this morning. The way it hadn't happened any morning for more than two weeks now. There was nothing much in the dresser drawers either. Two changes of panties, size six, and two bras, size thirty-four C, that Sharon had bought her from Wal-Mart. The rest of her clothes were from the stockpile of goods donated to the women's shelter that was her home, at least for now.
A pair of jeans and two shirts hung in the closet. Navy tennis shoes sat on the floor. They looked like Keds, but they were some no-name brand. That's what she was, some no-name brand. The long blue T-shirt she wore to sleep in was a loan from Glenda Metzger. She ow
ned the house and ran the shelter.
Glenda and Sharon Hillier, the Child Protective Services caseworker, called her Jane as in Doe for lack of anything better. It gave her visions of herself on a slab in the morgue with a tag dangling from her toe.
“I might be better off dead,” she had told Sharon in the early days after her rescue. Sharon had visited Jane in the hospital at the request of Kate Mullins, the woman who had rescued Jane from the side of the road. Since then Jane had learned Kate's daughter had been abused and abandoned in circumstances that were similar to Jane’s with the exception of the loss of memory. Kate's obvious concern and her compassion had convinced Jane to trust her, and Sharon Hillier too.
A petite brunette with bright brown eyes, Sharon had a sparkle that drew Jane from their first meeting. She wasted no time pulling a chair to Jane’s bedside, and as if they had been friends for years, she teasingly said she wouldn’t tolerate Jane’s “blue look”.
“I just talked with Doctor Keplar,” she said. “He told me head injuries like yours take time to heal, the same as your ankle will.” Sharon gestured toward the crutches leaning against the wall. “You won't be using those forever.”
“I hope not. I feel so clumsy with them. Can't do anything for myself. I don't like being dependent.”
Sharon grinned. “Oh, good, you’re whining. You must be mending.” She fixed Jane with a quizzical look. “Still nothing before Kate found you?”
“Nothing clear. I remember coming here and meeting Doctor Keplar, all the tests. The rest is--” Jane spun her hand beside her head. “Everyone’s been so kind. I don't know how I'll ever be able to make it up.” She looked away, blinking.
“Hey, take it easy. You're supposed to relax.”
“I asked Dr. Keplar why he couldn't just hypnotize me to help me remember.”
“And?”
“He said in his opinion it wasn't a reliable method of recovering memory. What I might come up with under hypnosis wouldn't necessarily be real. It could be something I saw on television or a scene from a movie, or something I read in a book.” Jane touched the back of her head. “He said maybe when the swelling goes down.” She shrugged. “It might help if I could see the place where Kate found me.”
Sharon had agreed to drive Jane out to the area where she’d been found a few days after Jane was released from the hospital, but if anything, the trip left her feeling more hollow and frightened than before. She stood at the side of the road waiting for something concrete, and instead she filled with dread. Shadows scurried like rats across her mind. She returned to the shelter more disheartened than ever.
“Maybe I just don't want to remember,” she had told Dr. Keplar later that same week. “If I think too long about it, try to force it, I get scared.” Jane put a hand to her throat. “I lose my breath.”
“Try putting your focus somewhere else,” he advised.
“For how long?” Jane jumped up to pace unable to sit still. “I'm living in a shelter on charity with no job and no money.” She paused mid-stride before his desk. “How is it that I know so many things about myself, I take my coffee with cream only, no sugar, I prefer a shower to a bath, I don't care for spinach; how is it I know all of that, but I can't remember my name or where I live?”
Dr. Keplar leaned his elbows on his desk. “I think you suffered some type of emotional trauma, something has frightened you, or angered you so badly, your brain has blanked it out. It’s running in self-protective mode.” He spread his hands. “Not common but not so rare either. Certainly, you're not the first person I've seen with episodic memory loss.”
“I feel it, right here.” Jane resumed her seat and tapped her forehead with both hands. “Everything, as if I'm just on the verge of remembering. Sometimes I have dreams. There's a woman; I could swear she's my mother.”
Dr. Keplar nodded. “Dreams are often the way back. Something triggers the subconscious during your waking hours, you take it to bed with you, and bingo, back it all comes.”
But two weeks had passed since that visit with Doctor Keplar, and she was no closer to learning her identity. She was no longer seeing Dr. Keplar either; she hadn't the money to pay him. And as a result of a court hearing yesterday, the judge had ordered the little girl who called herself Stinkerbelle into foster care. Sharon had done everything she could to delay what after fourteen days was standard procedure for abandoned children.
The judge had been sympathetic, but short of producing a birth certificate or even a relative who could testify to Jane's identity, there was no way to prevent Belle from being sucked into the system. The state had laws in place to protect children like her; the laws were there for the child's safety and well-being. Jane understood about the laws. She understood how Belle could be looked on as abandoned. Jane had no legal claim to the child, no way to care for her, and no memory of any relationship between them. So why had it felt so awful watching Belle go? Why did she feel this deep sense of despair?
Jane clamped her jaw against what had become a habitual and infuriating urge to cry. Tears would not keep her from seeing that child’s heartbreak. Belle's stare--those green, green eyes so dull with loss--so frighteningly dry of tears--seemed to accuse Jane from within her own mind. Belle had uttered not one sound in protest when Sharon packed her meager belongings and led her out. But then the little girl had been mostly mute from the start.
“What's your name, honey?” Sharon had asked over and over. “Can you tell me who your daddy is?”
“Daddy calls me Stinkerbelle,” the child answered. It was all she had to say on the subject of her name or anything.
Glenda brought her a doll from the cache of in-house donations and found her some clothes, size four T, but Sharon, and the pediatrician who examined Belle as they came to call her, had concluded she was not much over three. It was the pediatrician who pointed out the bruising beneath Belle's arm.
“Someone yanked her pretty hard.” The doctor pinned Jane with an accusing glare. “I'm surprised her shoulder's not dislocated.”
“I didn't do it.” Jane stated what to her was irrefutable fact. She didn't know her own name, couldn't tell anyone her phone number or address, but she knew without doubt that she hadn't inflicted the child's injury.
The doctor made no comment, but it was clear he thought her guilty. To him, her memory loss must look like an awfully convenient cover.
Mommy. Jane brought the word into her mouth now, tasting it, as if the flavor might awaken something familiar. Was she Belle's mother? She put a hand to her belly. Did her body hold the memory of a child growing inside? Had her womb become a fluid-filled nest, a host for new life? Belle's first cradle? There had been nights when Jane had sat on Belle's bed watching her sleep, or she’d stretched out carefully alongside her and taken deep, quiet breaths, filling herself with Belle's scent, as if smell alone could awaken her dead memory. But it didn't happen, and yesterday, acting on the judge's order, they had taken Belle away.
“To a good foster home,” Sharon said. “A couple I know. They're kind. They'll take good care of her.”
Sharon didn't say what Jane knew, that Belle needed a real home, not a shelter. Belle needed parents, even if they weren't her own. Belle needed stability, a place to recover, and Jane couldn't provide it. Who knew when or if that day would ever come? Who knew if she even had a legal right? Not Jane. She couldn't even remember her own name.
Later that morning, sitting at the kitchen table, Jane stirred cream into a second cup of coffee. The breakfast she had helped Glenda cook was over; the dishes were washed, and most of the other residents were gone to work or attending counseling sessions. All of them were survivors of spousal abuse. They made Jane wonder, What was she the survivor of? Was she married? Did her husband beat her?
“You aren't feeling sorry for yourself, are you?” Sharon came into the kitchen and Jane smiled at her.
She came nearly every day to check on Jane, excusing her frequent visits by saying they were part of her job, bu
t Jane sensed the caseworker’s interest was more personal, and she was grateful. Jane thought in her lifetime she had not had many friends. She knew this somehow.
Sharon helped herself to coffee and brought it to the table. “Where's Glenda?”
“Helping Tim.” Jane had yet to meet Glenda’s big brother, who was older by four years, but she claimed with great affection that Tim was bossy and an incorrigible slave driver.
“He must be behind on his paperwork again.”
“They seem close.”
“They've been through a lot. They grew up here, did you know?”
“In this house?”
“Uh-huh. I lived a couple doors down. Tim and I are the same age. Went through school together.” Sharon sipped her coffee.
“So all of you are close. Is that why you’re in the same line of work?”
“Well, not exactly. Glenda ended up in a shelter like this once.”
Jane’s eyes widened. “What happened? Or maybe it’s none of my business.”
“It’s all right. She doesn’t mind us telling her story. She was married to a guy who beat her up regularly. The last time he did it, he put her in a coma. That was five years ago. Tim was graduating law school, Rutgers in New Jersey. He’s always felt guilty that he wasn't here. When Glenda recovered, she was determined to help other women like herself.”
“My God.” Jane set her back against the ladder of her chair.
“When Glenda and Tim inherited this house, they decided it was perfect for a shelter. Tim provides legal counsel pro bono for the residents who need it as part of his law practice.”
“How wonderful that they could take something so horrifying and make something good from it.”
“They’re good people.”
“Is Tim married?”
“Divorced. Just recently, actually. No children. He’s a workaholic, takes on a lot. I call him the champion of lost causes. But oh, his heart. It’s bigger than the world.” Sharon ducked her chin, looking meaningfully into Jane’s eyes.
The Last Innocent Hour Page 11