by Jeff Crook
I considered asking him for a ride, but his truck was at the circus camp and he appeared to be settling in for the night on Jenny’s couch. Neither could I ask her to take me home—her kids were asleep upstairs. Jenny grinned at my look of helpless resignation and said to Deacon, “You can sleep in the downstairs guest bedroom…”
“I’ll be fine here on the sofa.” He waved at the preacher on the television. “This old Bible-thumper is about to put me to sleep.”
“Suit yourself, but the kids wake up at six to watch cartoons.”
He rolled off the couch without spilling his wine. “Good night, ladies.” He went to his appointed chamber and closed the door.
Jenny led me upstairs, to a room at the far end of the hall. “Here’s the bathroom, if you want to take a shower.”
“I could use one.”
She opened the opposite door. “And this was Reece’s room.” The pink comforter fringed with lace looked like it had been ironed on the bed. I didn’t ask Jenny why she wanted me to sleep here. I didn’t have to ask. Her eyes wandered the room, desperately searching for ghosts.
She opened a dresser drawer still filled with carefully folded panties and bras and little polka-dot pajama tops. “I don’t think any of these will fit you, but I can lend you a pair of mine,” she said.
“I usually sleep commando,” I said.
“My son, Eli…”
“I’ll lock the door.”
“I’ll just get you a towel, then.” She disappeared down the hall. I walked to the window and pulled back the pink curtains. The lake was visible beyond the tops of some trees, with the levee angling off to the right. From this height, I could see the lights from one of the larger houses across the lake shining off the wet rocks and rippling on the surface of the water where Reece Loftin had drowned herself, and where Sam Loftin’s ghostly body floated facedown for a few slow heartbeats, then vanished into the black depths.
* * *
It was nice to take a shower where you didn’t have to put a quarter in the meter to get hot water, even if I did have to step around toy boats and plastic army men to turn on the tap. I shampooed the brick dust and grave soil from my hair, the water red as blood running down the drain, then sat on the toilet to dry off. A small plaque hung on the wall above the toilet—a Dolphin Award for Best Swimmer in Class, awarded to Reece Loftin by the Stirling Baptist Church Summer Day Camp.
I brushed my teeth with a new toothbrush I found still in its box in a drawer, and while I was brushing, Jenny absconded with my dirty clothes, leaving me with nothing but a towel to wrap around my bare bodkin. At least the kids were asleep.
When I returned to Reece’s bedroom, I found a framed photograph lying on the floor by her desk. It was a picture of a girls’ softball team. I assumed she was one of the girls, though I couldn’t tell which was her. “Fayette County Champions” was written on the photo, along with the date and a long string of letters, DLGOXOXOX. In the Coast Guard, we had DILLIGAF—does it look like I give a fuck?
This one meant, Daddy’s Little Girl. Hugs and Kisses.
While I was looking at it, Cassie said behind me, “What are you thinking about?”
“I was just…” I started to say, but the doorway was empty. The hall outside was empty, too. I walked down to Cassie’s room. She was asleep in her bed, one arm thrown over her face. I returned to the bedroom and closed the door behind me.
There was a bare nail in the wall above the computer, so I hung the picture from it, locked the door, dropped my towel and climbed into bed.
Two hours later, I was still lying there. I always had trouble sleeping in a new bed. The last person who had slept in this bed had been dead five years, and yet her room looked the same as the day she died, a museum of grief. Her clothes were still in the closets and drawers, her pictures cut out of teen magazines still pinned to the walls.
I slid out of bed and looked through one of her closets until I found a white terry cloth bathrobe. To my surprise, it fit. As I snuck downstairs, the house was silent and dark, except for the kitchen, where the refrigerator hummed and the light over the stove threw out its lonely yellow circle on the tile floor. I filled a glass with water from the dispenser in the fridge door and drank it standing at the sink, looking out the window at the pool. I refilled my glass and strolled out to the edge of the pool, lit a cigarette and stood looking down at the water glowing from the light at the bottom. I wondered how much it cost to run that light all night long.
The wind blowing across the lake seemed to clear out the last of the cobwebs from the crypt. I finally felt sleepy enough to try bed again. As I walked along the edge of the pool, the green glow shining up through the water threw wavering lines across the back of the house. I saw my own wraithlike reflection in the glass door, cut off at the hips and floating legless toward me. As I opened the door, a shadow fluttered across the surface of the pool, momentarily darkening the patio. I turned, but there was no one there, no one in the pool, no one anywhere.
17
I WOKE WITH THE IMPRESSION that somebody was whispering my name. It was still dark outside. I rolled over and looked at the clock radio on the dresser—3:32 in the morning and I felt like I hadn’t slept at all.
I lay in that strange bed in the dark with the frilly edges of the sheets tucked under my chin, smelling the unfamiliar, vaguely mildewy smell of a bed that hadn’t been slept in for ages. I looked at the dark rectangles of the Teen Beat posters above my head without actually being able to see what they portrayed. I tried to remember who was in the photos, their faces if not their names. The only one I could identify was the softball team photo over the computer, the one that had fallen earlier and was missing from its nail once again. I sat up.
Someone knocked softly three times on the door.
I waited to see if they were real. They knocked again, softly. Maybe it was the knocking that had woke me. I rolled out of bed and wrapped myself in a robe, opened the door and was surprised to find Deacon standing there. I recognized him by his size and his whispered voice. “Did I wake you?”
“Isn’t that why you were knocking on my door?”
“I thought I would find you already awake.” He scuffed the carpet with his shoe and shrugged. He was fully dressed in his black suit and tie, sunglasses resting on the top of his wavy black hair.
I stepped back to allow him into the room. He reluctantly entered. “Why’s that?” I asked.
“I had a dream.”
I closed the door behind him and flicked on the light. He turned around and stood in the middle of the room, hands clasped behind his back, feet spread in a military at-ease posture, but his eyes were frozen to the ceiling. I sat on the bed and pulled the pillows into my lap.
“I was walking naked in a splendid garden, so beautiful,” he began in his preacher voice, drawing out each word as though tasting it. For once, he didn’t have his Bible in his hand, and he looked naked without it. “It pained my heart to know that such beauty could not last. I was happy, but I was also alone. As I walked along the bank of a river, an angel appeared before me clothed in flame. The angel said, follow me, and he led me out of the garden to the edge of a burning desert.”
Deacon dropped his eyes and looked at me and I felt his gaze go right through me, like a pin through a bug. I knew then the true power of the magnetism that drew people to him. I felt the full extent of that strange attraction, yet at the same time I was repelled by it, because I knew it for the illusion that it was. I’d seen too many magic tricks to be fooled, but even as I rejected it, I felt it buzzing inside me, like stepping on an exposed wire.
“I saw you, Jackie, wandering in the desert, also naked and alone.”
“I’ve never heard that one before,” I said. Men were all the same, and preachers were the worst of the breed. He’d done nothing more original than trying to put the make on me in a dead girl’s bedroom. He wasn’t done yet, either.
“The angel said to me, go unto this woman, for the Spirit
of the Lord is with her.”
“So you came up here to see how I compared to your dream?”
“You were dying, Jackie Lyons,” he said, ignoring my gibe. “I saw you fall and went to you. There was a demon inside you, eating you from the inside out.” He knelt beside the bed, took my hand and turned my arm over to expose the old needle scars lacing my skin.
“You noticed those earlier,” I said as I pulled my hand from his grasp. “It’s a good trick. No doubt any other junkie would already have lain back and opened her legs to Christ, but you can’t guilt me with your Come-to-Jesus, preacher. I’ve been guilted by the best in the business—my mother.” Somehow it felt blasphemous to mention her in such context, but at the same time, deeply satisfying. Maybe I was getting my demon on.
Deacon seemed to like it, too, because he smiled.
“I woke up from the dream knowing that the Lord had commanded me to see you,” he said. “So I should be asking you why I’m here.”
“It was your dream, not mine.” I stood up and walked to the window, feeling his eyes follow my every step. I looked down at the levee, but there was no sign of Sam’s ghost. Even the dead must sleep, especially at this time of night.
The clock radio caught my eye again, but this time I saw its reflection in the mirror on the closet door. It read 5E:E.
When they’re that obvious, you just have to go along or they never let you rest. I slid back the closet door. Reece’s shoes were neatly lined up along the left wall, her clothes, jackets and coats still hanging from the rod, though they were all pushed to the right. The missing softball team photo leaned against the back wall beside a large pink pig that somebody had won knocking over milk bottles at the county fair. Maybe with her pitching arm.
As I leaned into the closet and picked up the photo, my arm brushed the pig. It toppled over, revealing the outline of a small door in the back of the closet. It was about two feet tall and made to blend into the wall in such a way that you had to know it was there to see it.
Deacon touched my shoulder. “What is it?” I shifted to the side so he could see. He dropped to one knee and pushed the door with the palm of his brown hand. It opened without a sound and let out a warm, dusty breath of air.
“It’s just an attic crawl space. Probably gives access to the furnace.” He nodded at the photo in my hand. “What’s that?”
“It’s a photo of Reece’s softball team.”
He took it and pointed her out to me. “She was such a beautiful child,” he said. Reece had long, straight blond hair that framed a narrow, handsome face, the kind of wholesome, thirteen-year-old American doll loved by major cable television networks that catered inane sitcoms to voracious teen audiences. “More lovely even than her mother, though she has her father’s nose.” Sam Loftin was her coach, smiling in the back row with his hand on Reece’s shoulder. I hadn’t recognized him because he wasn’t dead yet.
I didn’t tell Deacon that this was the second time tonight I’d found this photo off its nail. Nor did I try to explain how it fell across a room and into a closed closet. He didn’t need that kind of encouragement. Next thing he’d be telling me Reece was trying to speak to me from beyond the veil and I didn’t need him or anybody else telling me my business. I grabbed his phone, shone its lighted face into the attic crawl space and onto the dark, bulky object tucked between two joists, partially hidden beneath a fold of insulation.
I pulled out a small, dusty hardshell suitcase covered with tweedy gray fabric and brown leather straps. It still had a bag-check tag attached to it with a destination of MEM. Deacon stood behind me as I set it on the bed and opened it. It was full of loose cash, mostly twenties and hundreds.
Any other situation and I would have assumed this was drug money, but I couldn’t see Jenny dealing. “That’s a lot of money,” Deacon whispered, a worried look on his face. Just my luck. The first time in my life I stumble across unguarded riches and I’ve got a preacher attached to my hip.
There was a heavy brown envelope tucked into the suitcase lid pocket. I opened it and dumped its contents on top of the money—a cache of photos of Reece, printed on regular copier paper. In the photos, she looked to be anywhere from ten to fourteen years old, the photos shot at different times in different places, some of which I recognized—the log bridge in the woods, Jenny’s pool and boathouse, the levee, the bed of a truck parked in front of Jenny’s house. Other places I didn’t know—a log cabin, a lake with crystal-clear water, and the front of a ski boat.
The photos themselves were disturbing. The youngest ones seemed innocent enough, but as she got older, her clothes got skimpier and her poses more suggestive. Nothing pornographic or obscene in the youngest photos, nothing you wouldn’t see in teen-clothing advertising, but still wrong in this context—swimsuits and bikinis, short skirts, Catholic schoolgirl uniform, pajamas, panties. Somewhere around thirteen, she went goth, dyed her hair black, pierced her nose and her eyebrow, heavy black eyeliner and black or blue lipstick. She posed seductively, partially dressed, showing off her bottom, wet T-shirts, bare back, a translucent white bikini that might as well have not been there when it was wet. In one picture she sat in a booth at some restaurant, a strand of her long black hair hooked behind one triple-pierced ear. She wore a tight Rob Zombie T-shirt, no shoes, rings on almost every finger, some of them homemade from pieces of wire and zippers, one bare foot propped on the ratty tablecoth and her toenails painted black. A dictionary picture of teen insolence.
In another photo, she was partially submerged in the clear water of a lake, her naked torso suggesting complete nudity. Deacon whispered, “That was taken at Spring Lake in the woods.” I don’t know why he was whispering.
The last photo in the stack was of Reece sitting in the rain by Jenny’s pool. She looked about fourteen and was completely nude, squatting with her arms wrapped around her knees. Her goth hair was growing out blond at the roots, and she had lost the makeup and piercings. Her wrists and legs bore the scars of a habitual cutter, some fresh and red, others almost too faded to see. She looked cold and her smile was forced. She was crying, but her tears could have been the rain on her face.
“Put them away,” Deacon said. “That poor child. Put them away.”
He was thinking what I was thinking. Reece had drowned herself because she couldn’t stand the abuse any longer. “We can never tell her mother,” he said.
“Jenny has a right to know.”
“To know what?”
“That her husband was abusing her daughter, that she killed herself, and that five years later he killed himself. Out of grief, or guilt, or something.”
“You don’t know that. And if you told Jenny, it would kill her.”
“What about the truth, preacher?”
“Jenny doesn’t know, so it’s not a lie to keep this secret. Far worse to reveal it. As Jesus said in one of his most misunderstood passages, let the dead bury their dead.”
“Don’t talk to me about the dead,” I barked, then immediately regretted it.
But he was too preoccupied to notice. “I just can’t believe Sam did this to his own daughter. I knew Sam. He loved Reece and grieved for her every day of his life. There must be another explanation.”
He actually believed that, but I knew better. I knew you could never really know anybody, not your best friend, not your parents, not even the person who shared your bed every night. When Dennis Rader was sitting in the church office composing letters on the church computer, did the congregation know their deacon was describing for the edification of newspaper editors the way he bound, tortured and killed his victims? Did John Wayne Gacy’s wife really know the man who stacked boys under her living room floor?
Sometimes a person with everything to live for bites the barrel of a gun because the pain they’ve bottled up inside hurts more than the bullet they eat. The grieving widower doesn’t confess how, when the doors were closed and the lights were low, he mind-fucked his wife until she washed down a handful of bar
bs with a bottle of Chardonnay. No, he’ll be properly mystified for the benefit of onlookers, just like everybody else, and when the funeral service is over and everybody has gone back to their beautiful lives, he’ll quietly burn her suicide note in the fireplace.
I’d seen brother stab brother in front of their own mother. I’d seen children left to rot in a cage by their grandparents, grandparents left to rot in a nursing home by their children. Sometimes there just aren’t rational explanations for the horrors people commit. Sometimes people really are monsters, even the people we think we know best.
18
THIS NEXT MORNING I FOUND my clothes freshly laundered and lying across the desk chair in front of the computer. It was like being back home. I dressed and checked Deacon’s room, but he was already gone. I hadn’t heard him leave the house and wondered if he slept. He had left my room around five that morning. We stayed up counting the money in the suitcase—$38,235. It was more cash than I had seen in one place at one time, and even Deacon, flush as his bank account was with Mrs. Ruth’s largesse, seemed awed by those neat stacks of green arrayed across the bed.
On my way down to the kitchen, I looked into Jenny’s bedroom. She was dressed but asleep, napping with her children tucked into the curves of her body. I poured myself a glass of milk, went to get the paper from the end of the driveway. The morning sun felt hot on my face. I sat by the pool and read the paper but there was nothing in it except the usual greed, corruption, rape and murder. After a while I noticed Jenny in the kitchen making breakfast. She waved at me through the window.
I decided to phone the guard shack to find out where they towed my car. The guard checked their log and said there hadn’t been any tow-aways the previous night. Jenny brought me a piece of toast with fig jam and a cup of coffee and sat cross-legged in the chair next to me. “I see Deacon’s gone already,” she said. “He’s always working.”
I nodded without saying anything. She leaned over and lifted a plastic cover from the side of the pool to check the skimmer trap. “How long do you think it will take you to photograph Mrs. Ruth’s house?”