by J. D. Horn
A few feet down the hall, she turned left and stepped into the kitchen. Ava stood there at the sink. All the dishes Corinne had washed had been returned to soapy water, and her future mother-in-law had started the process all over again. She yanked one of the plates out of the suds, rubbing it as if she were out to wipe away original sin. “I fear you are woefully lacking in the domestic arts,” Ava said without turning, her voice cold. The sheriff cleared his throat, and she spun around, nearly dropping the plate to the floor. Her disposition turned to reconstituted sunshine in an instant. “Sheriff,” she said, a smile pulling her lips taut. Rather than backing that smile up, her eyes darted to Corinne.
“The manners of these young people,” she said, shaking her head, keeping those lips pulled up at the corners all the while. “You shouldn’t have bothered coming, Sheriff. My son is planning on calling your office this afternoon, like you asked.”
“Yes, so the young lady here has informed me. I’m afraid it can no longer wait.”
“The sheriff would like some water,” Corinne said, readying herself to duck if Ava sent the plate she held hurtling toward her. “And I told him about your excellent pie as well.”
Ava dropped the plate into a large metal bucket filled with clear water, then went to the cupboard and removed a glass, filling it with water from the pitcher she kept in the refrigerator. She handed it to the sheriff, who downed it in a single draught. Ava held the pitcher up and raised her eyebrows, silently asking their visitor if he cared for more. He waved his right hand, shaking his head. Why are they so afraid of using words? Corinne wondered as the sheriff handed the glass back to Ava and took a seat at the kitchen table.
“I’ll go find Elijah,” Corinne said.
“After you do, perhaps you can help me hang the wash on the line?” Ava’s tone left no room for doubt that her words were not a request. She was clearly determined to keep Corinne from learning whatever news the sheriff had to convey.
“Of course,” Corinne replied. “As soon as my fiancé and I have finished hearing what the sheriff needs with us.” As she turned her back, she heard the sheriff snort out a laugh.
SEVENTEEN
“Yankee?” Bell asked, as he watched Ava’s face slowly regain its color.
“As good as. From California.”
“Elijah will have his work cut out for him with that one.” Bell couldn’t help but compare the mousey-looking Corinne to the sultry Ruby. Even though the women came in very different packages, they seemed to possess the same type of fire, the same steel backbone. “Your son has a taste for headstrong women.”
Ava nodded her head, her eyes narrowing and the corners of her mouth turning down. “That he does. When I learned of Corinne, I had hoped . . . well, I’d hoped for a very different type of daughter-in-law. The girl thinks she knows it all and has the right to stick her nose where it doesn’t belong.”
“Just remember she’s Elijah’s job to handle, not yours.”
“That may be, but the sooner he takes a belt to her bare hide and puts her in her place . . .”
“Well, that ain’t likely to happen until after the honeymoon,” Bell said, giving Ava a knowing smile. “Once the heat’s out of him, he’ll soon decide he’s had enough of her stubborn ways. I’ve seen it a dozen times. There he is now.” The sheriff pointed out the door that opened to the sleeping porch. Elijah’s face had appeared through the screen of the outer door. He hesitated a moment before coming onto the porch; the way his head and shoulders bobbed on the other side of the screen implied he was scraping earth off his boots.
“Afternoon, Sheriff,” Elijah said as he entered the kitchen, Corinne dogging him a few paces behind.
“Afternoon,” Bell replied, looking at the boy from head to toe, appraising him not as a young man he’d watched grow, but as a possible suspect. There was a trace of worry in the boy’s blue eyes—they were focused intently on him, the right one squinting a bit more than the left—but Bell could detect no guilt, no guile. The boy’s broad square shoulders were tense, pulled back enough to show that he suspected he might be in trouble, but his overall manner spoke of innocence.
“What can I do for you, Sheriff?” Elijah asked. Bell motioned to the chair across the table from his own, and the young man pulled it out and sat.
Corinne hovered behind Elijah for a few moments before deciding to take the seat next to him. In spite of the grim nature of his visit, Bell had to smile at the look on Ava’s face. But he had no interest in drawing the woman’s ire. “Miss . . .” he began, but couldn’t put his finger on the girl’s family name.
“Ford,” Corinne filled in the blank for him.
Bell ran his hand over his moustache, noticing that the hairs felt somehow wirier than they used to. “Miss Ford, I am afraid I’ve come to discuss some rather unpleasant occurrences with your fiancé.”
Corinne looked Bell dead in the eye. “I’ve just returned from spending over two years in a war zone. I doubt if anything you’re planning to relate could be worse than what I’ve already experienced. I’m soon to be Elijah’s wife. That means whether good, bad, or unpleasant, I’m here to support him.” The girl was mighty full of herself, but Bell couldn’t help but like her.
At first Ava blanched, but she had turned nearly purple by the time she managed to form words. “Corinne, the sheriff is telling you that this is the business of men. You need to come with me.”
“No,” Elijah said, reaching out and taking Corinne’s hand. “I want her to stay.”
Ava’s eyes widened in surprise, but she said nothing. She just tilted her head to the side and tossed one final dark glance at her future daughter-in-law. When Corinne held her ground, Ava untied her apron and folded it neatly before leaving it on the counter. “I’ll be out back if you men need anything,” she said and exited the kitchen, passing through the sleeping porch and out the back door.
Bell had wasted enough time on Dunne family squabbles. He dove straight in. “When was the last time you saw your buddy Dowd or either of the Sleiger boys?”
Elijah slumped in his chair and ran his hand back through his hair first, then down his beard. “Last weekend, as I reckon. Why? They in trouble?”
Bell thought about how best to answer that question. He considered the likelihood that this meek young fellow could have ripped the entrails out of a man he’d been friends with since practically birth. Not at all, he decided. “I’m afraid I got some real bad news for you, son.” Elijah lowered his head, but kept his eyes locked on Bell’s. The boy was bracing himself. Bell decided to deliver the news without the graphic details. “I’m afraid we found Dowd Johnson and Bob McKee’s bodies this morning. Sorry, son. Your friends are dead. We ain’t got a fix yet on Wayne and Walter’s whereabouts, but they both seem to be missing.”
“Dowd and Bob are dead?” Elijah asked, obviously trying to reconcile the word with his friends’ names. Everyone in these parts knew the Dunne boy had served in Korea, but dealing with death at home, where it wasn’t expected, was a different matter. Corinne tightened her grip on Elijah’s hand.
Bell nodded his response. “I do have to tell you that the killings were particularly brutal. Given the shape Bob and Dowd were in, things don’t look good for the Sleigers either. I wish I could spare you from this truth, but I have to ask you if you know who might have wanted to kill your buddies, and do it in an ugly way.” Elijah said nothing. He lowered his eyes to the table and shook his head. “Maybe they crossed some moonshiners or interfered with the wrong man’s girl?”
“Gangsters, perhaps?” Corinne wondered aloud. She seemed surprised by the sound of her own voice. “I’ve heard,” she addressed Bell, “that they can be extremely brutal. They do it to make a point to others.”
“Ma’am, this is Conroy, not Chicago. Or even Savannah, for that matter.” It was more of a knee-jerk reaction, though—the woman had a point. Whoever had killed the men had left their bodies as a warning, a way of marking their territory. Bell knew damned well
there were plenty of gangsters in Conroy, but up till now they’d all been held tight under the Judge’s thumb. He believed Frank and Bayard hadn’t been involved, but he found himself wondering if some upstart thugs were flexing their muscles. Taking advantage of the Judge’s bereavement to try and wrest away the reins of his operations. Bell was long overdue to pay the Judge a visit.
The phone rang in the hallway. Elijah didn’t move. His face was frozen, his eyes burning into his own clenched fingers. Bell and Corinne exchanged a look, both uncertain as to whether Corinne had earned the right to answer. Corinne paused a moment, but then patted Elijah’s shoulder and followed the ringing out of the room.
Bell watched the boy as his face cracked and his lips began to tremble. “I ain’t the same man I was before I went to Korea, sir,” he said looking up at Bell. “I see things different now. Corinne, she don’t know about the things I used to get up to with Dowd. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Sheriff?” Corinne’s voice interrupted before he could respond to Elijah. “The phone is for you.”
Bell acknowledged the young man’s request with a nod. He passed Corinne in the hall on his way to the telephone table. He lifted the receiver from the table and answered, “Bell here.”
“Sheriff, this is Reverend Dean Miller from Five Point Methodist. Your office said I might find you there.” There was a pause on the line.
“And found me you have, Reverend Miller. What can I do for you?”
There were a few more moments of silence. “Well, sir,” Miller finally said. “I got something here at the church I need you to take a look at.”
“I’m rather busy at the moment; can you be more specific about what this something is?”
A pause on the line, then, “It’s a body, Sheriff. I don’t know whose. There ain’t no head. And it’s . . .”
“Yes?” Bell prompted, losing patience.
“It’s tied to the steeple.”
EIGHTEEN
Last night, it had proven slippery work using Bob’s own intestines to lash his body to the Methodist steeple, but Ruby felt she owed it to the bride and groom to help decorate for the wedding. Now as she stood in the dim green light of the Cooper kitchen, using the hand pump to flush water over her fingers in an attempt to clean the rest of Bob from beneath her nails, she wondered if her efforts had yet been appreciated.
The couple would probably feel she’d already done too much for them, but still, this show of affection was merely the beginning. Ruby had been making plans from the second she’d learned Elijah was to wed.
Corinne had no friends here, so Ruby herself would serve as the maid of honor. It seemed the least she could do.
Ruby loved tradition, at least when it came to weddings. For the bride, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Between Corinne and herself, they had all four tokens covered. Corinne, she was new, at least new to Conroy. Ruby herself was Elijah’s old fiancée, the one he was now pretending had never existed. She looked down at her cornflower-tinged hand; she had the blue part covered as well. And Corinne, well, the bride was living on borrowed time.
But what about the groom? Ruby couldn’t bear the thought of overlooking Elijah. The finest tradition for the groom was the shivaree. Such a pretty-sounding word, for such a raucous affair. Stealing the groom away, to the accompaniment of the clanging of pots and pans, shrieks and bells, horns and whistles. Without a doubt, Elijah’s buddies had made plans to kidnap him after the wedding, and drop him at least a half night’s walk away from where his bride’s tender and quivering womanhood awaited.
Since she’d shredded Elijah’s two best friends, Ruby would also need to stand in as best man. Elijah needn’t worry; if he married this new woman, Ruby would see to it that he had his shivaree, and it would be a much grander event than anything poor old Dowd or Bobby could have ever dreamed of pulling off.
Ruby would wait. Give Elijah a chance to walk away from this wedding. If he called it off, if he showed that he belonged to her, she would take him to live with her forever. Let him reign beside her in the new world she was going to build right here in Conroy. But if he pledged his troth to Corinne, Ruby would still take him; she would take him apart, and take her own sweet time doing so.
Ruby felt overcome by a burning desire to meet this Corinne, to see up close the woman who could have so easily erased her memory from Elijah’s heart. She decided that tonight, right after stopping in to see her daddy, she’d pay Corinne a visit, maybe even give the woman a chance to save herself by leaving Conroy and heading back where she belonged. But it wasn’t mere curiosity or some deep-seated sense of fair play that prompted Ruby’s decision. It was a realization that when it comes right down to it, killing strangers isn’t nearly as much fun as killing the people you know. Their acquaintance would be brief, but Ruby wanted to get to know Elijah’s ladylove, at least a little, before Ruby ripped out her throat.
NINETEEN
Elijah nodded when Sheriff Bell popped his head back into the kitchen and told them he had to leave; then he focused on his own hands, wishing to God Almighty he could think of a way to make all this go away. A cold sweat broke out over him, and the room around him seemed to darken. He felt sick to his stomach, and he stood quickly and pushed past Corinne, out of the kitchen, out through the sleeping porch, falling to the earth on his hands and knees and dry heaving until his chest hurt.
Corinne followed on his heels, lowering herself so that she could drape her arm over his shoulders. Elijah reached back and pushed her arm away, standing and stumbling off to where his dad’s truck sat. He ignored Corinne’s calls as he flung the truck door open and hopped in.
A part of his brain protested. He knew what he was doing to her was wrong, but he also knew she would want him to talk, and talk and talk and talk. Like somehow yammering about any of this would fix it. He caught a glimpse of her standing in the yard and looking all helpless as he peeled away.
He shot down the drive and onto the road, no other destination in mind than away. He drove around, most likely in expanding circles, his hands cramping on the wheel. Somehow he lost track of direction in this area where he’d lived the better part of his life, and ended up a bit south of town, where the train tracks swung in sharply away from the river and crossed over the road before turning back north. When the bumpy and rutted lane leading to the Cooper house showed up on his right, bringing with it memories of happier days, he pulled off the paved road without thinking twice.
The old Cooper place sat two miles down a deserted red dirt road, and he sped up enough for his tires to kick up some of that copper clay onto his fenders. The house, which had been empty for longer than Elijah had been alive, sagged on its foundation. Once it had sheltered a family, but now it only played host to cottonmouth snakes and Saturday-night teenagers looking for a place to do the things they’d deny ever having done, come Sunday morning. Outside of the well-trampled front porch and the poorly hung door, kudzu had nearly swallowed the old house now, one of its few remaining bubble-glass windowpanes winking at the dying sun from behind the vine’s heavy lashes.
He killed the engine and sat for some time, might’ve been a minute, might have been an hour, his eyes tracing the weave of the twining vine. Finally he swung open the door and slid his boots to the dry ground. He slammed the truck door shut, and strode up the rickety steps to the porch, trying to remember the good times he’d had here and shut the rest of it out.
Elijah, Dowd, the Sleiger brothers, and Bobby—hell, even old Rigby before he got his badge—used to come out here to drink. They’d swing by Delmar Blount’s place for a jar of his corn liquor, then find their way to this house’s slanting porch. They’d bring girls out here, too, then scare them with ghost stories to get them to cuddle closer. One well-timed owl hoot could be credited for Elijah losing his cherry, stretched out with Kay Grimes on an army surplus sleeping bag in the back of his dad’s truck.
The plank steps bowed with too much play to be
safe, but he climbed them anyway, each one groaning then sighing as they bore and then were relieved of his weight. He approached the door and tugged on the knob. It was, of course, unlocked, but it had shifted in the frame so that it stuck. He concentrated his anger, and gave the knob a hard shove. The door vibrated as it came open. He stepped inside.
The room, in spite of the sweltering heat and humidity outside, was surprisingly cool, no doubt thanks to the vines that might one day rip the house apart. He couldn’t imagine why, but someone had gone to the trouble to board up the front room’s window. The light that pierced the open door seemed to be swallowed by shadow, somehow not managing to make it more than a foot or two beyond the threshold. The light that did make it into the room did so through the filter of the kudzu leaves, leaving it dim and tinted an eerie green. He drew in a breath of the dry, dusty air. It smelled different than he remembered. There was a resinous odor, not quite like pine sap, not quite like the scent that would waft from his mother’s cedar chest. It was like both, but neither. Like the two crossed with the smell of a warm vinyl record.
He walked over to the abandoned potbellied stove that stood in the far corner. When they used to come out here, sometimes they’d hide a jar of shine or a bottle of whiskey inside. He knelt and opened the door, staring in at the empty grate. No luck. Least not today. He ran his hand over his face and stood, coming to attention as a thudding sound resounded on the floor upstairs. For the briefest of moments, he wondered whether the derelict place might be haunted after all.