by Jeff Crook
“You wanted to see me about something?” A normal man would have feigned outrage and revulsion, demanding I explain myself. He knew what those photos meant. All that remained was to determine how much I knew. I already knew how much he knew. He was up to his stiff neck in it.
I took a deep puff and blew the smoke his way. “You saw those pictures?”
He coughed slightly and turned his head to one side. “What have they to do with me?”
“Your son was the photographer.”
“You can’t prove that.” He waved the envelope at the smoke. “Just a bunch of cheap printouts. Anybody could have taken them. Sam…”
“Ah, yes, Sam,” I interrupted. “Well, I thought of that already. Then, I thought to myself, people would pay a lot of money for pictures like this.” I knocked back another swallow of his whiskey. I’d tasted its kind once before, out of Mrs. Ruth’s flask.
“Dirty old men, for instance. And dirty young men. This afternoon I did a little digging around. Google’s a wonderful thing, you know. It didn’t take me long to find those same photographs for sale on a website. A dirty little website that charges twenty bucks a month to join and obtain access to all the photographs of the underage models.”
“I fail to see what any of this has to do with me,” he said. He opened the top drawer of a Louis XVI semainier and dropped the envelope inside, closed the drawer and crossed to the window. It was mostly dark outside by now, just the lights at the end of Luther’s pier shining on the lake.
“This website sells photographs of nubile young models like Reece Loftin, Mercedes LaGrance and her sisters, even your own daughter Holly. Plus a lot of other girls whose names I don’t know. But I bet you know their names.”
Still staring out the window, fingers laced behind his back. “Baptists don’t gamble.”
“You don’t drink either,” I said as I topped off my glass from his bottle. “The owner of this website is one Nathan Vardry. I believe you are familiar with him?”
“What do you want?” Luther asked.
“Your son seduced one or more of these girls. I know because I’ve seen his messages to Reece Loftin. I’ve seen how he played her. He abused her at some point. Eventually she killed herself.”
“You have not explained yet how Nathan broke any laws. You say he abused this girl…” This girl, daughter of his neighbor and supposed friend, whose name he now would not pronounce. This nameless girl, an object to be ridden and thrown away like an old broom.
“… but you have no proof, no photographs or videos of the act, just messages on a computer.”
And the only witness conveniently dead these five years. I was beginning to wonder if her death had been a suicide after all.
“Nor have you explained, despite my repeated requests, how any of this concerns me.” Luther turned and leaned against the windowsill. “This is your last opportunity to do so before I have you thrown out.”
“Even if none of the pictures are technically pornographic, these are underaged girls we’re talking about. Nathan can’t sell their photos without the signed consent of their parents.”
He pulled out his desk chair and sat, leaned back into the fat, creaking leather, steepled his fingers across his belly, smiled. “Oh dear. Publishing photos without the consent of their parents. With such a Sword of Damocles hanging over his head, how will Nathan go on? Why, if it were brought to trial, and I can assure you he’ll never see the inside of a courtroom concerning this, he might get ninety days playing tennis in a minimum-security prison. Are you prepared to risk everything in a futile effort to accomplish his doom?”
“Accomplish his doom?” I said, more in shock than wonder. Who talked like that?
He chuckled and shook his head in bemusement. “Surely you know what I mean.”
I did, only too well. But I wanted him to spell it out.
“You do this and I’ll destroy both of you. Jenny will lose her house and everything she owns. Sam was swindling the HOA, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I can prove it. I offered him the opportunity to pay it back. He chose to kill himself instead. The HOA will sue Jenny to recover those funds. She’ll lose everything.”
Tiny beads of sweat lined themselves up along the top of his pencil-thin mustache. It was hot outside, but the library was deliciously cool. I swallowed a gulp of his whiskey and asked, “And how will you accomplish my doom, Luther?”
“If the police were to search your belongings, might they not find illegal drugs?”
“No doubt Stegall could plant something incriminating. Proving it would be another matter. I used to be a cop, you know.”
“Used to be,” he reminded me. “Your past is against you, my dear. So you see, calling the police in this matter would be detrimental to us all. I’d much rather we settled it personally, so that we may part as friends.”
“Friends?” I didn’t know we were friends. Maybe he wanted to make friends, but I didn’t think his door swung that direction.
“The Bible tells us in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, ‘If any of you has a dispute with another, dare he take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the saints?’ I said that I could destroy you. I could also make you.”
He opened a desk drawer and took out a large checkbook and a bejeweled silver pen in the shape of a large cross. “This discussion doesn’t have to go beyond my door. Do you understand?” He began to write.
“I think I do.” I finished off the glass of whiskey and dropped my cigarette into the dregs. “What about Jenny?”
He spoke slowly as he carefully spelled out my name on the check. “Jenny Loftin will be taken care of. She will find a new business partner, a competent partner who will make the business prosper. They will never want for customers, customers who will pay premium prices. Her children will go to the best schools and colleges. Senator Mickelson is a friend of mine and a Harvard man. If Eli or Cass want to go to Harvard, West Point, Annapolis, we can make that happen.” He signed his name and carefully tore the check out of the book, folded it once and slid it with his fingertips across the desk.
Annapolis. I wondered if that’s how Roy Stegall got his commission. All these bastards were attached at the hip. I picked up the check. “What about Nathan?”
“I’ll see he gets the treatment he needs. He’ll spend a long time in the hospital. You can be sure of that.”
“Is that what you promised Sam?”
He cleared his throat and tapped his fingers on the desk two or three times. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“When Sam discovered Nathan had known his daughter.” The check was blank. I could fill in any amount I wanted. I pulled out my pack of smokes, shook the last one out and stuck it in my mouth. “Known her in the Biblical sense. Did you promise him Nathan would go to a hospital?”
He coughed in anticipation. “I wish you wouldn’t smoke in here.”
I patted my pockets, looking for a lighter.
“Yes, to answer your question, Nathan did go to the hospital and he did receive treatment. Sam was wise enough to accept my gifts and the business I sent his way. Perhaps you’ve noticed that Sam’s company does all the groundskeeping and landscaping here at Stirling? That’s no accident.”
So Sam must have figured the damage to his daughter was already done. Maybe he wanted to save her from the further humiliation of a trial. Or maybe he wanted to cash in. Jenny told me Sam had been out of work for a year when he started his landscaping business. Luther made sure the business was successful, probably gave him the capital to get it off the ground. Sam might even have been blackmailing him.
Even so, Reece had to know her father had found out about Nathan, and that he’d made a deal with the devil in exchange for their silence. Reece had to know because Sam had to make sure she never told anyone. Once word got out, that would violate the terms of their covenant.
I lit the cigarette dangling from my lip, then touched Luther’s check to the lighter’s flame. I
dropped it into the empty jelly glass. The residual alcohol ignited and the check vanished in a hot blue incandescence.
49
LIGHTNING BLOOMED AND DIED all along the western horizon, dimly flickering orange and pink mushrooms feathered by broken veins of brighter light, as though I had landed on some alien planet. If it didn’t rain, there’d be fires for sure.
As I crossed the levee, I thought about the lives I’d ruined. I couldn’t even go home and tell Jenny why she was about to lose everything, not without revealing the truth about Sam and Reece. Not the horrible truth I’d previously suspected, but horrible all the same.
Her house had become a home to me, a refuge I had not known since the day I left my mother’s house. Maybe even before that. I’d never had a haven in my marriage—my house, even then, had been nothing more than a space I occupied during my off hours. Seeing Jenny’s house rising at the far end of the levee with its windows aglow with warm yellow light, the steep angles of its dark roof rising against the storm-flecked sky, I wanted to run to it, embrace it, crawl inside it and never leave again. I wanted to make its children my children, its life my life, its ghosts my ghosts; to leave behind the endless scraping and scrabbling uncertainty of a drug-addicted part-time photographer of the dead and dying and become something approaching a normal human being, with a life and a reason to wake up in the morning. But just when I’d found this life and started to learn to love it, I had lost it. I had lost Deacon. I was about to lose the only real home I’d ever known. I could have had it all, just by taking Luther’s check.
Instead, I’d burned it, and with it my future and Jenny’s future and the future of her kids. Burning bridges was my speciality. Too bad I wasn’t born fifty years earlier; I might have had a promising career as a saboteur in some leftist uprising. I hadn’t even stopped to ask Jenny what she wanted. She might have taken Luther’s check. She couldn’t feed her children with moral outrage. Sam had made his choice, and I was beginning to wonder if maybe he hadn’t made the right choice after all. He couldn’t turn back the clock, but he could take compensation. And protection.
My footsteps slowed as I reached the place where Sam died. How many times had he stood here, looking down into the dark water that took his daughter, grief eating away at him, rotting him from the inside, like mold behind the wainscoting? How many times had he walked this path, coming home with Luther’s filthy money padding his pockets? No wonder he hid it in the attic. He probably couldn’t bear to look at it. Maybe Sam stashed Luther’s money with the pictures of his daughter so that every time he made a withdrawal, he had to look at what it bought. Probably he blamed himself for her suicide.
He should have.
The day I found him in the water, his pockets hadn’t been weighed down with thirty pieces of silver. He’d been coming home across the levee. From where? I looked back at Luther’s house, and if I squinted hard enough I could almost see the old murderer standing at his library window. What happened that morning? Had Luther shut off the spigot? Did Sam threaten to expose their embezzlement of the HOA fees?
Or had he discovered something new? Had he discovered Nastyboy’s young-models website and seen that Nathan was now posting and selling photos of his youngest daughter, Cassie?
A gust of wind came up and blew hard and strong for almost a minute, pinning my slacks against my legs. As it died down, a voice behind me said, “Looks like it’s about to blow up a salcoon.”
“Heard from Wiley?” I asked Lorio.
“Yeah.”
Another gust ripped across the lake, bringing a smell of fishy rot.
“Give me your flashlight,” I said. He handed it over and I climbed down the rocks to the water’s edge.
“Sam was struck on the head by a smooth, blunt instrument,” he said. “Care to take a guess what it was?”
“I’d say a rock.”
“He fell on some rocks before he went in the water.”
I shined the flashlight at the rough limestone boulders. “These aren’t smooth. They’re jagged.” I turned the beam on a smooth round river pebble, about the size of a grapefruit or softball, still lying where Lorio had pitched it several days ago. The lake level had dropped another six inches, exposing a second cobble that was the twin of the first.
I dug both out of the mud and climbed the bank. Lorio took one in his hand and turned it over, then looked at me and shrugged his eyebrows. “I’ve seen rocks like this before.” I hefted its weight and guessed about three pounds. “The murderer must have brought it with him.”
“It doesn’t make sense. A rock is a weapon of opportunity. Heat of the moment.”
“Not if it’s your weapon of choice. The one weapon you know you can kill somebody with.”
“But there’s two rocks,” Lorio said. “Why take two rocks to bash somebody over the head?”
“In case the first one misses.”
He didn’t get it, and I never got a chance to explain it to him.
Neither one of us spotted Nathan coming across the levee. Lorio’s back was to him and I was too busy congratulating myself on the brilliance of my deduction. By the time I saw Nathan, he was already lifting the shotgun to his shoulder. I tried to shove Lorio to the side, but he was a heavy guy, mostly muscle, and I just bounced off him. He took most of the charge in his back while I tumbled helplessly down the levee, like a doll thrown out of a car window.
I ended up on my feet at the bottom just as Nathan was swinging the gun toward me. A flash of lightning lit me up bright as day as he let loose. The elevation, or the darkness, or the sudden light, or maybe Divine Providence threw him off, because all I received was a single pellet in my left cheek.
One was more than enough. I lit out for the trees. Nathan chambered another round and blasted at me. I felt a swarm of wasps sting my backside but none of them broke skin—I was already too far away, running serpentine through the tall grass.
I had lost a shoe by the time I entered the woods, but I kept running. Sticks and stumps murdered my bare foot and wild rose vines snatched and jerked at my skin and hair and ripped my legs like whiplashes, but I kept running. I heard Nathan crashing through the woods behind me. He knew this place better than I did. He’d grown up here. I was blind in the dark. I couldn’t even see the trees I was blundering into, but I kept running.
Then I remembered Lorio’s flashlight. By some miracle, it was still in my hand. I clicked it on and found myself standing in a gully in the woods with trees arching completely overhead, like the roof of a church. Part of the roof had been broken through and my car hung through the hole, its tires wrapped in vines, headlights smashed, windows empty with broken glass, like small piles of diamonds, lying beneath the wheels.
My face felt swollen to twice its normal size. I touched my cheek and held my bloody fingers up to the light. The collar of my shirt was dark with blood. I heard a crunch of gravel and dove to the side but the blast hit me in the legs and spun me in the air, flinging the flashlight spinning, its beam slicing through the woods until it hit a tree and the bulb shattered into darkness. I lay on the ground beneath my car amid the broken window glass and saw a violent orange flower erupt from the barrel of the gun and light up Nathan’s face.
Then I was running again, through the pain and the darkness, without even a moon to steer by, just the occasional whip of buckshot to guide and goad, until I tripped and fetched up headfirst against the trunk of a bald cypress as black and hard as the gates of hell. I rolled over and the woods were no longer dark. They were flashing with lights that illuminated nothing, ghost lights moving in and out of the ghosts of trees. I lay in a shallow muddy pool at the bottom of a crown of cypress knees, while Nathan roamed the witch fields behind me, bellowing like a castrated bull, the blast of his shotgun cutting through the underbrush like a million angry bees.
I closed my eyes and lay rabbit-still, hoping he would miss me in the dark, maybe give up, go home, wash the blood off his hands and pretend it never happened. I knew better bu
t in my pain I preferred the safe fantasy this notch afforded, this moment of rest with the muddy cold against the blistering stings of buckshot peppering my legs. I knew Nathan couldn’t give me up now. If he couldn’t find me here, he’d look for me at Jenny’s. I couldn’t call her because my phone had burned up in the fire. Before long I realized something was sharing my mud pool. It felt like a snake trying to crawl up my leg, but I didn’t move. If I moved, he’d find me. He was still out there, somewhere close by, stuffing fresh shells into his shotgun.
I wondered how I was still alive. He’d hit me twice, once from close range, but I knew from the intensity of the pain that he hadn’t done much damage. I tried to brush the snake off my leg and felt a hard lump of buckshot with my fingers, just below the skin behind my knee. I was lucky he didn’t blow my leg clean off.
Then I wondered if I was still alive. I opened my eyes and couldn’t tell if my eyes were open at all. The ghost lights were gone, the woods dark again, dark and lovely deep and miles to go before I sleep. I reached out my hand and groped blindly for the tree under which I lay and instead my fingers closed around a cool, strong hand.
“Get up, Jackie,” a familiar voice whispered. His fingers tightened around mine and he pulled me to my feet. He guided me past trees I couldn’t see but could feel with my outstretched hand, then past trees I thought I could see, dark vertical stripes against the greater darkness, and then there was the moon shining down through the branches well enough to see by, and at last the silver of the lake in the woods spreading out before me. He turned at the shore.
I stepped into the circle of his arms and nestled my cheek against his chest. I thought about Holly and how as a child she had run from the fire and hidden in these woods, maybe even by this same lake. “How did you escape the fire?” I said into his chest. “I waited for you. Where have you been?”
I felt him stiffen. “I didn’t escape…” But it wasn’t Deacon’s voice that spoke. It was deeper voice, with a drawl slow and thick as cold molasses, uneducated but not ignorant. He felt thinner and taller, the muscles of his arms leaner, harder, strong enough to lift an eight-pound maul with just one hand and split a stick of green sweetgum with a single stroke.