by Jeff Crook
“How old were you in this picture?” I asked.
“Twelve or thirteen.” She looked like a grown woman. And now I recognized where I’d seen the man before—in Nathan, only about thirty pounds lighter.
“These photographs are almost as valuable as anything else in that safe-deposit box,” Ruth said. She opened the box and showed me her pictures. “These are all of me, my whole career. When I was younger, I dated all the best leading men in Hollywood, several politicians, a couple of generals, three colonels, an admiral, and a spy from the KGB. When I was your age, I was offered quite a shocking amount of money to pose in my altogether for a certain magazine; I think you know which one I mean—this would have been back in the sixties. Later I had the pleasure of entertaining a senator with a well-known preference for young Southern ladies.”
I sat on the floor for hours going through the photos and listening to the stories of her many loves and affairs, none of whom she named outright. She dropped enough hints to fill a dump truck. The pictures on top were the most recent, taken when she was in her sixties. Some were glamour shots, some were nudes and some were candids, vacation photos and photos from events, weddings and cotillions and Coon Suppers past. I lifted out a photo of her naked and very pregnant, lying on a tiger-skin rug in front of a stark white backdrop. She leaned forward to look at the picture. “Oh, dear. How did that get in there?”
Even though there was nothing in the image to date it (and ageless as Ruth was, it was notoriously difficult to guess her age from any photograph without contextual clues), I guessed from the order of the photos in the box that she must have been in her late forties or early fifties. “And how old were you in this picture?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t remember.” Smiling at me from under the oxygen hose, she took the photo and put it in the desk drawer. I didn’t ask her what happened to the baby. The picture wasn’t old enough for it to be Luther.
Digging deeper into the box was like going back in time. Down through the Hollywood years of the fifties and forties, through the Weegee years and the Irving Klaw period, then a stretch through the thirties when most of the photos bore Malvern and Memphis photo studio logos. The next group was of Ruth as a teen and preteen, some of them seminude or entirely unclothed, others in full flapper regalia or dressed for the cotillion at Twelve Oaks. “Little girl Alice age six,” Ruth said, smiling. “I was locally famous, even then. A doctor from Germantown offered to buy me from my father after an all-night game of pinochle. I thought for a moment Gus was going to agree. He might have, had the doctor not already lost most of his money.”
Beneath these were older photos of other little girls, going all the way back to Victorian times. “I found these among Gus’s things when he died,” she said. “I think some of them are his sisters, and his mother when she was a girl.”
With a curator’s delicate touch, I lifted out crumbling sepia daguerreotypes of more women and children. And beneath those lay charcoal sketches of naked slaves. “These were drawn by Josiah Overton Stirling, my great-grandfather.”
What I had in front of me was two centuries’ worth of erotica, much of it questionable and possibly illegal. Back when I was a vice cop for the Memphis Police Department, I had arrested men for less than this. I had to assume Ruth knew this much about my past, and possibly quite a bit more. “Why are you showing this to me?”
“I’m not showing it to you, dear. I’m giving it to you,” she said. “I want you to keep these photos so Luther doesn’t get his paws on them. My son is waiting for me to die so he can sell these to a bunch of dirty old billionaires. To be sure, he will hold out the best ones for himself.”
They reminded me too much of the photos of Reece I’d found in Sam’s suitcase. Why hadn’t I destroyed them? Because they were evidence. Evidence of a crime I had plotted with a preacher to conceal.
“These are a historical record. I know you will take care of them.” I almost laughed. For the last five years I’d been ten bucks away from homelessness more times than I could count. I never owned more than I could carry in a shopping basket. When this job for Deacon was finished, if it ever would be finished, I didn’t see my situation changing that drastically. I couldn’t take care of her pictures of naked children any more than I could take care of actual children.
Ruth took my hand. Hers felt cold and dry and nearly lifeless, as though the length of her arm was too great a distance from her heart to warm it. “You gave me something the other day that I can never repay. You gave me my memories,” she said. “Memories of my life before all this, when I was still a simple farm girl who loved a simple farmer.”
Deacon had said Ruth could lie well enough to fool the Devil, but she wasn’t fooling me. At twelve or thirteen she was helling around the country robbing banks with her movie star father, but at fifteen she was just an innocent farm girl? Not that it mattered. Maybe she believed the lies. Maybe the lies were all she had. Lies and a box of dirty pictures.
“The money and the photos and the land isn’t all there is to my legacy, Jackie. Some of it I can never give away, no matter how much I try. Me and my daddy Gus, we robbed and stole, to be sure, sometimes just for the fun of it. But I have done far more terrible things than robbing banks.”
“I’m no saint myself, Mrs. Ruth.”
“That’s why I know I can trust you. And Deacon has told me about your gift.”
Had he betrayed me? I wondered as I asked, “What gift is that?”
“For finding out the truth,” she said.
34
I STOPPED AT THE GUARD SHACK on my way home to file a claim on the HOA insurance for the theft of my car. Where it said to list witnesses who had seen my car on the property, I put Doris Dye. I also noted that the guard company’s surveillance video showed my car enter the property but never leave it.
The guard was a young kid. He looked about fifteen, but he told me this was just his summer job. He was a tight end at the University of Tennessee and even though he was a sophomore this year, he was already talking to pro scouts. His dad was a UT alum and he lived in Stirling Estates, next door to a lineman for the NFL team in Nashville. “I can get you tickets to any game,” he said.
“So why are you working the guard shack?” I asked as I handed him my insurance claim.
He muttered something about community service for a DUI and tossed my papers in an outbox on his desk. He was a cute kid, though. He filled out his rent-a-cop uniform in all the right places. I called him a kid, but he was six foot eight and every bit a man except the space between his ears.
“So you’re, what, about nineteen?”
“Yeah,” he grunted.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “When I was nineteen, I could drink a lake of beer.”
A little understanding helped mollify his pride. “I know, right?” he said. “Everybody makes such a big deal out of it. I wasn’t even that drunk. And it was on campus.”
“Cops are assholes.”
He grinned and flexed, his pecs fluttering like small trapped birds under his shirt. “Especially campus cops.”
I leaned across the top of the desk to drop my pen in his cup. “So you probably went to school with my friend’s daughter, Reece Loftin.”
“Yeah,” he said, shifting back in his seat and shooting me the old side-eye. “I didn’t really know her. Just saw her around school.”
“It’s a shame what happened.”
“I guess. I didn’t really know her. I heard she was into cutting, listening to Slipknot and Rob Zombie, Nine Inch Nails, all that stupid goth shit.”
“But I thought she played softball and was on the swim team.”
“That was before. She went totally goth in like eighth grade.”
“What about her boyfriend. Did you know him?” I asked.
He laughed once, explosively, derisively. “She didn’t have a boyfriend. Not that anybody knew, anyway.”
“But I thought she liked that boy … what’s his name…?” I w
as fishing with the only bait I had—the universal banality of teenage relationships. I’d been a teenager myself, once upon a time. Also, nothing stays a secret in middle school. Somebody always knows what really happened. Secrets are the currency of the eighth grade hall.
He bit hard. “Look,” he said, leaning toward me. “She told everybody her boyfriend was this older guy who was supposed to be this total badass. Anytime a guy asked her out, she’d say my boyfriend would kill me.”
“You asked her out?”
“Everybody did. She was really cute in seventh grade, but she wouldn’t go out with anybody because she was ‘in a relationship,’” he said, with quote fingers and a roll of his eyes. “But nobody believed her. Nobody ever saw this guy.”
“How much older? Like in high school?” I asked.
“Way older. An adult. Had his own business and everything.”
“That’s weird.”
“Seriously. But it was bullshit. I think she was just into girls and didn’t want anybody to know.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Josh.”
“If you think of anything else, you know, like a name for this mysterious boyfriend, or somebody who might know something, will you call me, Josh?” I wrote my name and number with a Sharpie on his hand.
“What are you, a cop?”
“Why, did somebody commit a crime?”
His face went red all the way up to his buzz cut.
“Because if they did, I’d advise them to call the police and tell them everything they know. I’m just a friend of the family. And if you just want to call me, that’s OK, too.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
I knew he wouldn’t actually call, but I wanted to give him a way to explain the cougar scars I’d left on his hand.
* * *
Before I went home, I took a driving tour around Stirling Estates. I hoped I’d spot the old jalopy parked behind somebody’s house, but most of the houses were sprawling, towering piles of Federalist and mock Tudor, crouched like cats at the end of drives long enough to land a private jet. Everything I passed was beautifully manicured, expensively watered, meticulously groomed, hollow, empty, bereft of soul and meaning beyond the merely decorative, like sofa paintings in which people actually lived. I saw no one outside, not even the ghost of a gardener.
That might have had something to do with the heat. The man on the radio said it was a hundred and two and still rising. The Memphis city council was talking about restricting water usage for lawns and swimming pools. Shelby and surrounding counties had passed a No Burn ordinance. The weatherman had a special graphic counting the days since the last rain. Farmers were predicting disaster.
Jenny’s house was a welcome respite, even though Jenny wasn’t there. I found the kids in the pool with Holly and Nathan. Nathan left soon after I arrived. I got the feeling he was starting not to like me, which broke my heart in the worst way. I took the box of pictures up to Reece’s room and found the softball team photo lying on the floor again. I set it on the computer desk and changed into her bathing suit.
Jenny still wasn’t around when I got down to the pool. Holly was smearing sunscreen on Eli’s back. “She had a doctor appointment,” Holly explained. Jenny hadn’t mentioned a doctor’s appointment that morning.
I sat on the edge of the pool and shoved off, sank until my toes touched bottom. The water was so warm, it was like not being submerged at all. Turn off the lights and a person could almost go to sleep in this. I kicked off the bottom and broke the surface, shook wet hair out of my eyes. Holly said, “Deacon’s man stopped by. Definitely need a new compressor.” Even if Deacon could get the work done at cost, there was no way Jenny could afford it.
I floated on my back for a while, wishing I had worn sunglasses, until the sun had dried my face and was starting to burn out the backs of my eyeballs. I rolled over and looked at my shadow wavering on the bottom of the pool. A second shadow floated just to the right of mine. It reached out and touched my shadow’s hand and I was out of the pool, scalding the soles of my feet on the hot concrete and shivering to my bones.
Still busy with Eli’s sunscreen, Holly hadn’t noticed my hasty exodus from the water, but Cassie was backed into one corner of the pool, owl-eyed, her fingers white-knuckled to the sides. I lifted her out by the arms and walked her to a chair, wrapped a towel around both of us and took her inside the house. I sat her on the hearth. Her eyes were still frozen into that thousand-yard stare.
“Cassie.” She didn’t respond. I turned her face to mine but I couldn’t move her eyes. “I know why you won’t go in the deep end.”
Her voice wasn’t even a whisper, just a movement of the lips. “No you don’t.”
“There’s a dead girl down there.”
Her eyes slowly focused on me, as though waking from a dream.
“I don’t believe you.”
“But I believe you,” I said. Suddenly she was in my arms, squeezing so tight I thought I was going to pass out. “You’re not crazy. If you are, then I’m crazy, too.”
“You can really see them?”
“When I was a girl, sometimes I’d wake up in the night and hear my grandfather standing beside my bed.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“Sometimes they’re scary, but most of the time they don’t even notice us. I think my grandfather just wanted to be with me.” She pulled back, wiping away the tears with the back of her wrist. “The girl in the pool—is she your sister?” I asked.
She shook her head no. I felt strangely relieved. They are bad enough when they are strangers. To think she had to look at her drowned sister was just too much.
“Who is she?”
“Somebody bad,” she said. “Very bad.”
“Do you ever see Reece?”
She shook her head no. “I wish I could.”
“Me, too. My brother died when I was in high school. I wanted to see him again so bad, but he never appeared. What about your dad? Do you ever see him?”
Fresh tears started down her face. “Why can’t he see me?”
It broke my heart to think what she’d been going through, probably all her life, without anyone to talk to. At least I’d had my brother Sean. He couldn’t see them the way I could, but he’d heard my grandfather’s footsteps in the attic and his pocket watch ticking in the night. “I’ve seen your daddy, too. Somehow, it’s like a movie recorded on the environment. It plays over and over, but it’s not really him. I don’t know why it happens, or how.”
“Maybe God puts it there, so we won’t forget him.”
“Maybe so. The preacher told me that what I see is a gift from God. What do you think?”
“I just wish I could be like everybody else.”
“So do I. But we can’t help the way we are, can we? We just have to learn how to live with it. It’s scary and strange, but you get used to them. It took me a long time.”
She crawled into my lap. I wrapped the towel around her. Despite the heat of the house, we were both still shivering. My body started to rock of its own accord—I don’t know how long I was doing it before I noticed. I’d never held a child to comfort it, never even been this close to one, not since I was a kid myself.
She fell asleep in my arms and I was halfway there myself when Holly brought Eli inside to get his bath. She passed us, a curiously annoyed look on her face. She and Cassie were besties. I got the feeling Holly didn’t like me holding her, like she was jealous.
“Cassie shouldn’t be sleeping. If she takes a nap now, she’ll never go to sleep tonight.” I watched her legs disappear up the stairs. She had the kind of legs that took a long time to do that. Maybe I was a little jealous, too.
35
CASSIE WAS IN THE SHOWER when Jenny got home. The baths and showers were a mere formality, an act of habit or tradition that in these circumstances did nothing to alleviate our stank.
We ate our supper of peanut butter sandwiches
by the pool. It was just my luck to find a rich friend just when she’d run out of money. Jenny took the kids inside to change into their pajamas. Holly waited around until dark for Deacon to appear, but he never did. “Tell him to call me,” she said as she stalked away.
“She’s so strange,” Jenny said after Holly had gone. “She’s nothing like Luther and Virginia. They are good, solid, dependable people. Nathan, and especially Holly are…” Her voice trailed off.
“Adopted,” Deacon finished for her. It was like he’d been waiting for Holly to leave. He sank into a chair. He’d spent the whole day installing the stained-glass windows from New Orleans. Even his sunburn had a sunburn.
“But they look like Ruth,” I said. “Both of them.”
“Luther used to operate an orphanage, back when he was more interested in doing the Lord’s work than counting tithes,” Deacon said. “At some point he turned the orphanage into a nursing home.”
“Ruth’s nursing home?” I asked.
He confirmed this with a nod. “Luther and Virginia adopted four children—Nathan, Holly and Korean twin sisters whose names Ruth couldn’t remember.”
“Luther and Virginia don’t have twins,” Jenny said. “If they had grown twin daughters, why haven’t we ever heard about them?”
Deacon picked a bit of old paint from his lip. “Ever noticed how Luther’s house is newer than the other houses on his street?”
“Yes,” she said.
“They used to live in Winchester House—the place Overton Stirling built for his second wife and abandoned after she died. Luther restored it and moved in with his family. Holly was maybe eleven or twelve at the time. One night, Luther and Virginia were at a party. Nathan and Holly were supposed to be babysitting the twins, who were not even a year old at the time. Nathan ran off with his friends and left Holly alone with the babies. Somehow a fire got started, they never said how, and the old house went up like a match. By the time the fire department arrived, it was completely gone. They thought they had lost all three kids, but the next morning here comes Holly up out of the woods half dead, without a stitch of clothes and most of her hair burnt off. She was in shock and to this day can’t remember what happened or pretty much anything about her life before that moment. They don’t know how she got out of the house or how she made it to the woods without anybody seeing her. By the state of her clothes and her hair, she must have been on fire at the time. She hasn’t been right in the head since.”