by Jeff Crook
“What was it, Holly? What did you use? Maybe a couple of the river pebbles from Luther’s Roman garden?” I watched Sam go headfirst into the lake and wondered if maybe he’d tried to escape to the safety of the water, like a man running from a swarm of bees.
Luther straightened the lapels of his pajamas and brushed the sweat from his lip. I was amazed by his effortless shift to a new strategy when his previous position became unviable. He was a man alone, an island unto himself, clinging to no one and nothing, not even his pride. He laid his phone on the bedspread.
“I’m glad you didn’t call the police on my daughter. I’m sure you’re aware that Holly is a bit unbalanced.”
Holly groaned and bit the bedpost, scraped off twin gouges in the varnish with her teeth. She spit it out savagely. “If I am, it’s because of you and Nathan and Gus and Meemaw. Y’all did this to me. Even Mama, because she never said anything. She just let Nathan do whatever he wanted. She wouldn’t believe me when I told her, not after the fire.”
“I think I can rely upon your discretion when I tell you that Holly set the fire that burned down my house and killed my two children.” Luther spoke as though she wasn’t even in the room. “It was an accident. She was burning herself with matches.”
Holly slid off the bed to the floor and lay there, moaning and mewling.
“We’ll have her committed, of course. Nathan will spend the rest of his life in prison, and the DA has decided not to charge Mrs. Lyons with attempted murder.”
That was nice of him. I guess the DA was just waiting for Luther to make the call.
He continued coldly, “I can’t make up for what my children have done, but I would like to try.”
Jenny wasn’t talking, wasn’t moving. I couldn’t even see her breathing. “How?” I asked.
He hid his smile behind a yawn, already writing the check in his mind. “The same deal as before, only better. I’ll buy Sam’s company for a substantial sum. Jenny will never have to work. I shouldn’t have tried to cover for Nathan, but he was my son. What would you have done, Jenny, if it were your son?”
I answered for her. “That’s just the thing, Luther. Nathan isn’t your son. Holly isn’t your daughter. They’re adopted. Ruth told Deacon everything.”
“I doubt she told him everything,” Luther laughed. “Besides, they are my children even if they aren’t my blood.”
“They are your blood, Luther. You’re Ruth’s children, all three of you.”
He slipped that punch with a shrug. “Son or brother, it doesn’t matter. I had to protect Nathan.”
“You’ve no idea the things they’ve done to me,” Holly said from the floor. She had dragged something out from under the bed—a long cardboard box. “And not just me. There are others. Dozens, hundreds. Gus and his girls. That hill is full of bones.”
“Holly, be quiet. You’re in enough trouble.” Luther grabbed a pillow and rested it in his lap. “Don’t make it worse.”
“Worse! You son of a bitch. How could it possibly be worse?” She opened the box and pulled out another God-damn Benelli shotgun. This family had more money tied up in guns under the bed than I had in the world. I made a jump for her but she twisted aside and left me lying on my back at her feet. I glanced under the bed but I guess she’d taken the last ace.
“Sometimes I think I’m going crazy. Sometimes I have this corkscrew in my brain, turning around and around, getting tighter and tighter, so tight I can feel it pulling my hair, and I just want to take a gun and dig it out.” She wedged the barrel under her chin.
“Holly no!” Jenny screamed. She was a better person than me. I’d just as soon Holly painted the ceiling as the floor.
“Don’t worry, Jenny, I’m not going to do anything until I’ve made her pay for what she’s done.”
“What have I done, Holly?” I asked. There was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t slide under the bed before she unloaded on me. She wouldn’t pull her shot, like her brother.
“Nathan is in the hospital because of you, and he’ll go to prison because of you, and Deacon is dead because of you.” She noticed me gathering my feet and stepped back into a shooting stance, her cheek nestled against the stock, the bead nestled on my forehead. “I loved him, and he loved me, not you. Why did he want you? He wasn’t supposed to die.”
“Go on,” I said. “You killed them all, didn’t you? Every girl who got between you and Nathan. What about that one in the red one-piece, the girl in Jenny’s pool? She stole him from you, didn’t she, when Nathan owned that house? How old were you then? And that girl on the softball team, the one who disappeared.”
“No,” she whimpered.
“And Reece. What about her? Did you drown her in the pool, or was it in the lake?”
She lowered the shotgun a hair and glanced at Jenny, her lips trembling. “I’m so sorry.” Sorry, again. This family.
“What did you do to Reece, Holly?” Jenny asked.
“Reece was my best friend in the whole world!” Holly burst out hysterically. “She used to sneak out at night and we’d go swimming in the lake. But that night, she was already in the water, her and Nathan, and they were naked and he said he loved her. I don’t know what happened. It’s like it wasn’t even me doing it. But it was my hands on her ankles, pulling her down.”
“Oh Holly.”
“By the time I knew what I was doing, it was too late.”
“Oh God.” Jenny staggered as though hit by one of Holly’s rocks. Holly dropped the gun and ran to catch her. An explosion close by my head stunned me. I thought the shotgun had gone off when she dropped it. Jenny was screaming and something heavy tumbled to the floor. The door burst open and I heard a noise like somebody stepping on a cat.
I stood up, ready for almost anything.
Almost.
Holly lay on the floor at the end of the bed, Luther’s nurse stooped over her trying to hold in the blood and brains leaking from a grapefruit-sized hole in the side of her pretty head. Luther sat with a long-barreled .44 revolver smoking between his fat fists. He’d taken it from one of the drawers in his headboard. His eyes were as dark and empty as the end of that barrel. He laid it on the bedspread as casually as if it were a book he’d tired of reading.
“I thought she was going to kill Jenny,” he said.
I scooped up the shotgun and gave Luther the old John Wayne treatment, right across the kisser. He snapped back into the pillows with a surprised look, then folded forward on the bed.
Like father, like son.
Or brother.
52
There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about.
— NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, THE SCARLET LETTER
THE NEXT WEEK I BOUGHT A LITTLE place on the South Bluff in Memphis, barely enough room for me, my ghosts and nine or ten guests, but it was home. All that country air was starting to choke me, and I was getting a bad habit of busting men named Vardry across the face. I worried I might run out of them just when I was starting to enjoy it.
There wasn’t much left to do but dig up the bodies. I pieced most of the story together by talking to Virginia Vardry. Freed of her shrubbery, she was a remarkable conversationalist. She was neither dull nor stupid, just deathly afraid of the monster she’d married and the monstrous children he’d forced upon her.
Nathan’s first conquest had been his sister Holly, age eleven. He’d gotten her pregnant when she was thirteen. “Jesus,” Virginia said of my apparent shock at this news. “Don’t look so surprised. Incest runs in the family.” We met over Cosmos at Blue Fin and she had just ordered her third.
“I didn’t think Ruth was Gus’s true daughter.”
She popped a maraschino cherry in her mouth and rolled it around her tongue. “No doubt Ruth told you she had no memory of her mother. That was one of her pretty little lies. She told me once about the day she first met Luther’s grandfather. I use that term loosely. They don’t have names for the kind of relationships they had in that fami
ly.”
The waiter brought our drinks. Virginia ordered another before she’d taken the first sip of the new one. I suppose she was trying to make up for all those years she’d wasted being a good Baptist. “Ruth was maybe four years old—she would change the story every time she told it. Four or five or six or seven. The thing is, she was the prettiest little thing Grandpappy Gus—he hated it when Luther called him Grandpappy—had ever clapped eyes on. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of her?”
I didn’t answer and she didn’t wait for my response. “Her mama was one of Gus’s working women, though I also use the term ‘woman’ loosely—she was just a child herself. She hoped that by convincing Gus that Ruth was his daughter, he would marry her. Instead, he took Ruth and left her mama to her work. Ruth saw her mother quite often—the old woman was still living around here somewhere when Luther and I got married. Ruth preferred living with Gus to sleeping on cases of whiskey in the back rooms of his joints, watching her mother service the poor tenant farmers and railroad workers and small-town hoodlums who blew through the door and emptied their pockets into the Stirling bank account.”
She lifted her glass in toast. “To the Stirling bank account.” I joined her. We were each in our own way still profiting off the nameless child whore who traded her daughter for a handful of magic beans. Virginia had served Luther with divorce papers in his hospital bed, right after a letter arrived from the Baptist leadership requesting that His Reverence take an extended sabbatical from his semiretirement. I found a key—the key to Ruth’s safe-deposit box at the bank—while I was going through my stuff back at Jenny’s house, getting ready to move out. I had forgotten to return it, and she hadn’t asked for it back. She also said Luther didn’t know about the safe-deposit box. And that I should take whatever I wanted. That’s how I remembered it, anyway.
Virginia sucked her drink to the bottom and spit the lemon twist into the empty glass. “Gus Stirling raised Ruth up to be his lover, which she remained to the end of his days. Holly and Nathan are his children.”
“What about Luther?”
“What do you know about John Vardry?”
“Nothing, really. Ruth barely mentioned him.”
“Did you know that Augustus Stirling once lynched a black man named Lonnie Jackson? Hung him from a tree up on that hill in the woods.”
Up on yonder gallows hill. That was a line from Holly’s jump-rope song. Where my father’s bones do dwell.
“Ruth’s Lonnie?” I asked.
“That’s him.”
“Ruth said he was a sharecropper. She never mentioned he was black.”
“It was a terrible scandal. Not the lynching, nor even the affair. Gus was, by that time, a respectable planter, even though he still had his hand in any number of illicit activities. But he was a Stirling, which meant he was respectable and could be forgiven for taking the law into his own hands, so long as he was discreet. This hanging was not discreet. It was downright appalling, even to people used to seeing men lynched. They strung him up by his hands and lit a fire under his feet.”
“Jesus!”
“Even so, no white man had ever been arrested for lynching a black man in Fayette County, or to my knowledge anywhere. But there was a hot shot new sheriff in Fayette County, a man elected to clean out the juke joints and whorehouses and gambling halls. With this lynching, he saw an opportunity to bring down Boss Stirling, even if no jury in the state would convict him of murder. Gus was arrested, and that was the scandal.”
“That sheriff,” I said. “His name wouldn’t be John Vardry, would it?”
She patted my hand and winked. “The Vardrys were a cadet branch of the Stirlings, descended from one of old Albert Stirling’s daughters. To settle the case, Gus married, or more likely sold Ruth to Sheriff Vardry. There are some who believe she was carrying the black man’s child on the day of her nuptials, but you’ve seen Luther, so you can decide for yourself whether that’s true. I don’t believe it is. Whatever the truth is, barely eight months later she gave birth to Luther. John Vardry turned in his badge and joined the army. He was killed in North Africa fighting Rommel.”
Virginia was enjoying this, and not just the vodka. Like Holly, she was setting fire to the source of her pain and dancing around the flames. “Gus, he loved girls, the younger the better. You know what he used to say to me, when he’d sit there with Holly on his bony lap? He’d say, ‘Seven is heaven, eight is great, nine is fine, ten ain’t no sin, but eleven is heaven all over again.’ But Ruth was his girl, the one he could never quit. And she couldn’t quit him, not even after he was dead. Does that shock you?”
“Nothing about this family shocks me anymore,” I said.
“Why do you suppose Luther forced her to move into the nursing home? It wasn’t for her health. Ruth couldn’t quit Gus. She went down to that crypt and I don’t know how she did it but she pried the lid off and carried his bones back up to the house. Sam Loftin found her lying on the floor with them and called Luther.”
I had liked Ruth. I couldn’t imagine her doing anything of the sort. Maybe Virginia was inventing stories out of spite, but I didn’t credit her with that much imagination. I changed the subject back to Nathan and Holly. She warmed to that, especially after the waiter brought her fourth Cosmo. “I think I’ve had enough of these,” she said. “Bring me something different.”
I had already found Nathan’s website where he posted the photos of the girls. A monthly subscription cost $19.99, with over a thousand subscribers, giving him almost $20,000 a month in income, of which he paid out less than a tithe in maintenance and web hosting. No wonder he never had to drive one of his popsicle trucks. His internet operation had never been large enough to attract the attention of the feds, and even if it had, nothing on his site was illegal.
It was just vile. Monstrous, like everything else about this family, even Virginia Vardry, in her way. She was Luther’s third cousin and fifteen years his junior (though she didn’t look it), fiercely devout, and completely in awe of him when they first met. They’d agreed before the marriage to live a chaste life together, priest and nun, and to raise a family of adopted children. Back then she couldn’t imagine a better life, in service of the Lord.
Nathan’s private collection was another matter altogether. It didn’t take Sheriff Stegall’s techs long to crack Nastyboy’s hard drives.
Like his sister Holly, Nathan was nothing if not damned good-looking. With his money and his connections—he was a youth pastor at Luther’s church—it was easy for him to get close to these girls and their families. Pretty soon, he would convince their parents to let him meet up for private photo shoots, or failing that, take them on rides on his boat or in his truck, where he’d slowly talk them out of their clothes. A few girls, like Reece, had fallen hard for him, hard enough to give him everything he wanted.
But he’d perfected his techniques on his sister before setting his sights on fresh game. After Holly got pregnant, Nathan brought her to Memphis and paid a bankrupt dry cleaner of an abortionist fifteen dollars to pump her full of naphtha and fish the fetus out of her womb with a coat hanger and a pair of salad tongs. He couldn’t take her to a real doctor, not at her age. She’d have blabbed everything.
“After that, Nathan wouldn’t have anything to do with Holly,” Virginia said.
“Then the fire…” I offered.
She played with the lemon twist in her glass for a moment. “Nathan was supposed to be home that night, but he’d gone out with his new girlfriend. Holly was jealous, burned herself with matches and accidentally set the fire. But instead of saving those babies, she watched the fire burn until it set her clothes on fire. Then she ran down to the woods and hid until she got hungry.”
The day after Luther murdered his daughter to keep her from talking, Jenny brought in a brickmason to take the fireplace apart. In a compartment behind the firebox he found a red one-piece bathing suit, a skull and an old popsicle box full of small bones. They had cut off her hands and he
ad, so that if her body ever surfaced, she couldn’t be identified. Her body never did surface, but they were able to make an ID based on dental records. Turns out she was just one of a half-dozen neighborhood girls, ages eleven to fifteen, who had disappeared or died over the years. After he helped his sister cut up the body and bury the best parts in the fireplace, Nathan sold the house to Sam and Jenny and moved to a bigger estate across the lake.
As I bought Virginia Vardry her fifth martini, I thought how even six dead girls couldn’t account for all the children haunting Ruth’s woods.
… And One More Thing
I WAS BEGINNING TO WONDER if any of this really happened. I was beginning to wonder if Deacon had been a real man and not some revenant or avenging angel sent down to Shitkicker, Tennessee, to end the line of Stirling and Vardry both. They never found his remains, and not even Fire Marshal Mertz believed the house had burned hot enough to destroy bones, much less teeth. Sometimes at night I imagined him escaping, leaping through a door as the house came crashing down, running through the woods with his hair on fire, diving into Spring Lake to be rejuvenated by its healing waters. He might be lying there still, his body clad in glistening samite, waiting for some king to come and take his Lost Gospel and spread it at the point of a sword.
Nights were hardest for me.
Nights were when I thought about how Stegall never charged Luther in the death of his daughter. How Nathan pled out for the attempted murder of Officer Lorio and got a sentence of fifteen years in a minimum-security prison. He’d be out in five. There was no investigation into Sam’s death, or Reece’s, or the deaths or disappearances of any of the other girls. They were all stamped Closed, Holly Vardry listed as the perp, and the files placed in storage for eventual loss or accidental destruction.
With Sam’s death finally ruled a murder, Jenny was awarded his life insurance settlement. She sold the house and moved to Arlington. Eugene Kitchen bought her house at her asking price, which was twice what it was worth. I suspected, as did she, that the money came from Luther. He had paid her off anyway.