For the Trees

by Brett Baker

  “We understand that,” I said. “Do you have any idea what happened? Suspects?”

  “We’re still investigating,” Officer Rueth said. “That’s why I said you shouldn’t worry about it. When we’ve got something to tell, you’ll be the first to know. Right now it’s too early to jump to any conclusions.”

  “How long are you planning on being in there?” Johnny asked.

  “As long as it takes. You can’t rush these things. People start rushing and they get sloppy and that’s how mistakes are made. We’ve only got one chance to get this right, so we’ve got to take our time.”

  “When I talked to the officer last night on the phone he mentioned that you might want to talk to us sometime.”

  “That’s right,” Officer Rueth said. “I’m not certain right now is the best time for that. Will you be around later tonight?”

  “We’re staying at the Econo Lodge,” Johnny said. “We can talk anytime. I presume you know how to get in touch with me, since you found my cell phone number last night.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” Officer Rueth said. “Again, I’m sorry for your loss, and I want you to know that we’ve got a very good crew working on this. We’ll be on the trail of these killers real soon.”

  “I hope so,” Johnny said. “Thank you.”

  Officer Rueth nodded and said, “We’ll be in touch.”

  She turned and we watched her walk back up the driveway, and back inside the house. It seemed odd to me that they wouldn’t want to talk to us right away. Interviewing friends and family seemed like a basic first step of any investigation, and despite Officer Rueth’s assurances, their delay in talking to us made me question the integrity of the investigation.

  As a lawyer, I expected Johnny to share my concerns regarding the delay in talking to us, but he didn’t mention it. Instead he grabbed Justine’s hand and pulled her into an embrace. I saw a tear running down his cheek as he motioned for me to join their hug. I’d taken a step toward them when a deep, booming voice startled me.

  “Johnny and Mia come home. Probably not how you wanted your little reunion to happen, is it? Just the same, I’m sure Frank and Maggie would be tickled to see the two of you together. They loved the dickens out of you guys.” I looked toward the street and saw Whittaker Watson walking toward us. He held the ever-present cane in his hand, and it looked as if his limp had become worse since the last time I’d seen him, which had been at least a couple of years.

  “It’s been a long time, Whit,” Johnny said, letting go of Justine’s hand and reaching out to shake Whit’s hand. “How are you?”

  “I’m devastated,” Whit said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without them. My bingo buddies, my drinking buddies, my best friends. I miss them already. That’s why I’m dressed in all black. I’m mourning, damnit. I’ll be mourning the rest of my life.”

  I stepped toward Whit and saw his eyes glistening. I wrapped my arms around his waist and rested my head on his chest. “Thanks for taking care of them. I know how much they meant to you. Especially mom. I know she was probably glad that you were there at the end.”

  “Horseshit,” Whit said. “I wasn’t there for them at all. If I was there for them I would have been sitting on that porch with a 12 gauge when those motherfuckers showed up and blasted them to Kingdom Come. I didn’t do that though. I let them get butchered. Sat in that goddamn recliner in my living room while your mom and dad endured an unimaginable hell. I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. I looked up at him and wiped away a tear. “You can’t blame yourself for this. You’re not their protector. You did nothing wrong. If it weren’t for you my mom would have died alone on the floor, far away from my dad, instead of next to a dear friend. You comforted her.”

  “She never regained consciousness, Mia. She didn’t even know I was there. I made no difference at all. By the time I found them the chance to make a difference had already passed. I let them down. I should have been there.”

  I pulled Whit toward me and hugged him tight. I felt Johnny wrap his arms around both of us, and then heard him say, “You’re the best, Whit. They both loved you, and they know you tried to help them. Don’t be so hard on yourself. You couldn’t do anything more than you did.”

  Whit began sobbing, a thunderous wave of emotion that sounded like an angry seal. He’d moved into a house across the street from ours when I was a kid. He was a widower whose wife had died in a car accident two months prior, and left him with three kids to take care of. He’d been a shitty father up to that point, and admitted as much to my mom on the day he moved into his house and came across the street to introduce himself and request parenting advice from my mother after he saw her playing with Johnny and me in the front yard. His kids were older than us, and with help from mom and dad, he raised them as a single father.

  When Johnny and I left the house, he and my mom became close. So close, in fact, that many of the neighbors assumed that they were having an affair, and that it was only a matter of time until my mom left my dad and moved across the street to be with Whit. Fifteen years ago Johnny and I spent a long afternoon talking to my mom about her relationship with Whit, and she assured us that it never progressed beyond a friendship. I had subsequent conversations with mom and always believed her claims of innocence. Dad never worried about their relationship. He considered Whit a close friend, and a good man, two qualities that my dad knew would prevent him from doing anything inappropriate with my mom, even if he wanted to.

  So it made sense that Whit would feel my parents’ death so acutely. I can’t imagine the trauma of finding two close friends murdered in such a grisly scene. Most people would turn around and run out the door after encountering my dad’s body inside the porch. But Whit immediately thought of my mom and went to find her, called for help, and comforted her. It made me sad to see him blame himself for not doing more.

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Whit. Mom wouldn’t like that. She’d say, ‘Chin up, you did good.’ There’s nothing you could have done to stop this.”

  “Me and a 12 gauge would have stopped it.”

  “Yeah, maybe at that moment. But what if they came back? You’re just going to spend the rest of your life sitting on a porch, waiting for bad guys? They wouldn’t want that. It’s not your fault.”

  My words didn’t seem to impact Whit. He shook his head in disagreement and continued crying. I wanted to console him, but had no idea how. Losing a friend is hard enough, but feeling responsible for their death threatened to destroy him. I looked at Johnny, who could only shake his head and look down at the ground.

  I felt a hand on my back and lifted my head to see Justine standing next to me. “Have you talked to the police yet, Whit?” she asked. With that Whit stopped crying, took a few deep breaths, and stepped back away from me. Justine looked back at me and nodded her head.

  “I talked to them last night and this morning. Told them everything I saw, but I don’t know how much help it was. It’s not like I saw anyone going in or coming out. The killer didn’t just strut past my house with blood dripping from his hands. He was a little more subtle than that.”

  “Did they seem to have any theories on what happened?” Johnny asked. “Leads or anything?”

  “Doesn’t seem like it,” Whit said. “They’re looking for a needle in a haystack, I’m afraid. Somebody killed them, but I don’t think the police have the first damn clue who it was. When they first started questioning me I thought they considered me a suspect. Asked me where I was last night, was I mad at them, did we have any disagreements? They seemed satisfied with everything I had to say. But then they came knocking on my door again this morning. Evidently someone stirred up that nonsense about me and your mom.”

  “Good lord,” Johnny said. “That bullshit again? It’s just never gone away, has it?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Whit said. “It never bothered me much, but I know it bugged the hell out of your mom. She hated for
anyone to think that she’d be unfaithful to your dad.”

  “So what’d they say this morning?” I asked.

  “Same old shit. Were we having an affair? How long had it gone on? Did your dad know about it? All these questions trying to get me to admit something that wasn’t true. I think I finally convinced them though. I owe everything to your mom and dad. If it weren’t for them I wouldn’t have had any idea how to be a parent after my wife died. They saved my life. Or my kids’ lives, at least. Ain’t no way I’d ever do anything to mess up their relationship.”

  “We know, Whit,” I said.

  Whit nodded as if our reassurance was exactly what he needed. “Anyway, we talked for about thirty minutes this morning and I think they knew that they were no closer to solving the case when they left my place than they were when they arrived. I don’t know who else they’ve talked to. I’ve kept to myself since I got back from the hospital. I’m too upset. Don’t think I could talk to any of the neighbors about it. What if they’re the ones that did it?”

  “You think a neighbor did it?” asked Justine.

  “Nah, not really. We ain’t murderous folks down here. Not in this neighborhood. Some of them might drive you crazy, or we might say ‘I’m gonna kill that guy’ but we don’t really mean it. At least I don’t mean it. I can’t speak for everyone else.”

  “So what’d you see when you found them?” I asked.

  Justine let out an audible gasp, and looked toward Johnny. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” he asked.

  “I think we need to,” I said. “The sooner we hear it, the sooner we can deal with it.”

  “I’m not sure there’s anything we need to deal with. Obviously we have to deal with their death and everything that’s to come in these next few days, but I don’t think we need to know every little detail. Some of this stuff is probably just better left unknown.”

  “I think your brother’s right, Mia,” Whit said. “It’s all rather heinous. And once you know it, you can’t un-know it, no matter how much you might want to. It’s one thing to know they died, even that they were murdered, but it’s an entirely different thing to really know what happened. Jesus, I wish I didn’t really know what happened. It’s going to haunt me for quite a while, I think.”

  “Well I think we owe it to them to hear about it,” I said. “Of course it’s horrific, but at least we only have to hear about it. They had to live it. They had to die from it. I can’t imagine what those minutes in the house were like for them. The rest of the world is just going about its business, living their lives, and our parents are facing astonishing horror. I think hearing the details, trying to empathize with what they went through, is the least that we can do.”

  Whit looked at Johnny, who just stared back at him. I waited for him to say something, but he remained silent. After thirty seconds, Justine spoke. “Will it help you, Whit, if you get to tell the story? Sort of share the pain?”

  “It makes no difference to me,” Whit said. “I don’t need to share it. It’s not going to make me feel better. My friends are dead whether I keep it to myself or not. I think they’d want me to spare their children the pain of hearing about it though. They loved the two of you more than anything. You too, Justine. Maggie used to talk about you all the time. She was so damn impressed with what you’ve done at that avocado grove.”

  Justine smiled. “That’s so nice to hear.”

  “She was a hell of a woman,” Whit said. “The world’s worse off without her here.”

  “I think we ought to hear it,” Johnny said. “Mia’s right. We need to know what they went through.”

  “Well we don’t really know,” Whit said. “All we know is the aftermath.” Johnny nodded, but said nothing.

  “Just tell us what you saw then,” I said. “Don’t hold back.”

  Whit took a deep breath and looked toward the house. He swallowed hard, gave a quick, cursory smile, and then said, “We were supposed to go to bingo. The Methodists have bingo every Saturday night. Church teachings say they’re not supposed to, but the pastor decided it’s more important to raise money so the church can help the community than it is to obey the rules created by some men they don’t even know and who don’t know the problems of Greene County. Anyway, we’ve been going to bingo for years. I always pick them up and drive us there so your dad can have a couple of drinks. I never was much of a drinker.”

  “I pulled into the driveway and it only took about thirty seconds before I knew something had to be up. They’re usually out the door as soon as I pull up. You know how your mom is, always on time, always on top of things. Never kept me waiting. So when I sat in the car and no one came out, I figured that maybe she wasn’t feeling good and Frank couldn’t get himself out of the house on time. I waited a few minutes, and decided to knock on the door. Three, four times I knocked and no answer. I called their names, and then went around to check the other door, and knocked there, but no luck.

  “So I went back to the porch, knocked again, then opened the screen and just sort of called out their names into the house. I don’t like going in places unless I’m invited, even your mom and dad’s. Of course I was always welcome there, but still, it’s nice to be invited inside. But when I opened the door I smelled something burning. You know your mom, she’s always baking. I don’t think a week’s gone by in all the years that I’ve known her that she hasn’t baked something delicious. And I thought it unlike her to burn anything, so I decided to let myself in.”

  Whit looked down at the ground and ran his fingers through his thick white hair. He coughed twice, cleared his throat, and took a deep breath. He looked at Johnny when he began speaking again.

  “Your dad was right there on the ground as soon as I opened the door. He was on his side, with his knees up a little, sort of like a baby, but not really. All I could see was his back and his side, and if it weren’t for all of the blood you’d think he’d just fallen, or he was taking a nap or something. Didn’t look too bad.”

  Whit paused and looked at me, and then at Justine. It seemed as if he wanted to be sure we could handle what he’d said thus far, and whatever he was about to say.

  “I’d never seen so much blood. It pooled in a circle around his whole body. I screamed, went over to him and started calling his name. I turned him on his back, and that’s when I saw all the holes. Seemed like dozens of them. I don’t know how many there actually were. He wasn’t breathing, and I knew he was gone. It was just too much. I crossed his hands over each other on his stomach and put a blanket over him. I’m not sure why, I did that. It just seemed right. That’s the worst part. When I fixed his hands I noticed they were cut, too. His right pinky had been almost completely severed, and he had two or three really deep cuts on each hand. He’d obviously been trying to defend himself, but it was just too much. Nothing he could do. But Jesus H. Christ, I don’t think they needed to stab him so many times. Most of those wounds came after the job was done. Seemed like it was fury at that point. Just out and out anger and rage that they took out on that man. Sick.”

  Whit shook his head. Johnny looked at me and raised his eyebrows, with an implied, “Are you happy you asked?” I broke his gaze and looked at Whit who was wiping his eyes, but didn’t seem to be crying. Justine stared into the distance, her arms folded in front of her body, her pointed toe tapping the ground.

  “And then I thought of Maggie,” Whit said, so loud that I thought he might break down. “The cookies were burning, but I’d forgotten about them after seeing Frank. But when I covered him, I immediately thought of Maggie and those cookies. I went into the kitchen and it was smoky. Smelled like burning chocolate. I called for her, and then went to turn off the oven. Saw her on the other side of the kitchen table, on the floor, face down. I turned her over and she had a cut on her cheek. The left cheek from here to here.” Whit made a line from his ear lobe to his nostril. I didn’t know she’d been cut in the face. For some reason that seemed especially barbaric. Justine must have ag
reed as her mouth gaped open and she covered it with her hand. “Her face was bloody, and she had a few wounds in her chest, one in her stomach. She didn’t have near as much blood though. Not sure why. I guess fewer wounds. Small wounds. I don’t know. Fucking horrible to think about though. Anyway, I had my hands on her shoulders and I was sort of shaking her, trying to get her to wake up, talk to me, blink, anything. But nothing happened. So I let her go, and I just sort of sat there on my knees, looking at her, crying. And then I saw her chest move a little, and put my face by her nose, and felt her breath. Not much, but a little. Enough. More than nothing. So I called 911 real quick and told them to send an ambulance. Took forever for those assholes to get here. I don’t know how long, but it seemed like hours. Cops showed up at the same time, but they had to hold their fucking horses so the paramedics could try to save your mom. They took her out and I told them that I was riding in the ambulance with her. The cops tried to get me to stay, but I told them to go fuck themselves, I wasn’t letting Maggie die alone. I knew she was going to die. She was breathing, but I didn’t really have any hope. They were working on her all the way to the hospital, and I was just rubbing her feet. We went inside and they worked on her in the ER, but almost as soon as they got her hooked up she passed away. I swear I could feel it the exact moment she died. Felt like something just left the room. Like when you hold your breath for a few seconds and then exhale and it makes a sudden whoosh sound as it leaves your lungs. There was a whoosh sound in that room when life left your mom.”

  I felt a tear run down my cheek. My years working for The Summit had provided immunization against death. Not against dying, but against how I reacted to death. I’d become disconnected about it. At times my lack of feeling toward the death of others had worried me. I feared The Summit had robbed me of my heart or my soul or whatever part of us makes us mourn the loss of other people. I’d begun to see death as either an obstacle removed—if the person dying was an enemy—or as a resource lost—if the person dying was a friend. But that immunization failed when faced with the death of my parents. I’d listened to Whit’s description intently, and my preoccupation with gleaning details outweighed the heartbreak as he spoke. But when he came to the end I felt the horror and the anguish wash over me. I began to sob.