by Jack Todd
“Poe, you remember me. Lambert Cain. You’ve done some work around my house a few times, cleaned up some tree limbs after a storm, things like that.”
“Mister Cain, yessir. I knows you. Ma says you were always a fine fella.”
“Well, that’s good to hear, Poe. Rose is an old friend of mine. She’s asked me to be your lawyer, do you understand?”
“How come I needs a lawyer?”
“Because of Miranda, Poe. They think maybe you hurt Miranda. Is that true?”
Poe shakes his head frantically. “No, no, no, no. I doesn’t hurt Miranda. I never hurts Miranda. Sonofabitch fellow.”
“You mean there was someone else out there, is that right?”
“Sonofabitch fellow.”
“But if someone else attacked her, Poe, what happened to him? Why didn’t the sheriff see him? The sheriff didn’t see anyone else out there.”
“I throws him away.”
“I’m sorry? What did you say?”
“I throws him away. I think his head crashed up on a car.”
“So he had a car out there?”
“Yep. Big black car. I throws him away and he hits the car, bang! Then he don’t move. Sonofabitch fellow.”
Cain spends another ten minutes with Poe, tracking the same circle around and back to the man in the black car, without learning anything more. He leaves Rose to keep Poe calm while he strolls down the hall to locate Jim Dunn, and pokes his head into the sheriff’s office long enough to say that they’re as ready as they will ever be.
“I don’t know that you’ll get any more than I can get, Jim,” Lambert says, “but you’re welcome to try.”
According to Jim Dunn’s log, his initial interview with Poe Didelot lasts fifty-two minutes, with the suspect’s attorney, Mr. Lambert Cain, and his mother, Rose Didelot, in attendance, although what Poe has to say could have been said in a minute or less. After that, it’s all repetition. “That sonofabitch fellow. I throws him away. I throws him away. Sonofabitch fellow.”
“What did he look like, Poe? What did this man look like?”
“Sonofabitch. Like a sonofabitch fellow.”
~
How dead feels
Poe wonders if this is how it feels to be dead, and he wonders if he’s not already, like one of the dead things he’s seen: a cat crushed by a cement truck, the old nanny goat Molly B., or Wild Bill’s wife Darlene, who died of the cancer. He remembers Darlene at the funeral home, lying there in her open coffin like a thing made of yellow wax, while Bill stood nearby with his head down, shaking all over and sobbing because the sorrow had him in its grip and would not let go. Did Darlene in her coffin feel the way Poe feels now? Looking out at the world, able to see but unable to touch or feel or taste? He watches it all going by, but it does not feel like his world anymore.
Things lose their odor in jail. He can barely smell himself. He can’t hear much over the hum of the ventilator and the heating system. The food all tastes the same, and he has no appetite even when Rose brings food from home. Inside his cell, there is a constant trickle of water from somewhere, tracking along the outer walls, dripping onto the floor. Poe figures that the people who built the jail probably didn’t take much care. When he builds a thing, he builds it to last. If something is put up the right way, water won’t seep through. Whoever built this jail took care to see that no human can escape, but less attention was paid to what might get in.
Spiders share his cell, as many as there are in the outhouse at home. He tries to figure out where they come from and what they eat. He’s seen no flies or mosquitoes inside the jail. He can pass an entire morning watching a spider going back and forth on the ceiling or weaving a web in a corner. He doesn’t fret. His only worry is that the door won’t open. It’s a foreign thing to him, a locked door. He and Rose never lock anything, not the door to their house, the door to the cheese shed, or the door to the barn where the goats and geese shelter in winter. When the door to his cell slides shut, there isn’t even a crack where Poe can get purchase with his fingers to open it. He tries putting a shoulder against it and giving it a mighty heave, but there isn’t a hint of give. He lies awake, worrying that the door will never open again, that when they press the button nothing will happen and he will be trapped in his cell until he starves to death.
He misses Miranda. He misses Wild Bill and Joey Ballew. He misses the goats. The jailers let him keep his fob watch, so when it’s milking time, he closes his eyes and lets his six-fingered hands move and flutter as he milks them all in turn: Jenny-Girl and Ostrich, the twins Bertha and Betty, Roxie, Little Dipper, Maude, Lula May, Olive, Susie Q, Thelma Pearl, Aunt Nell, and Princess Sally last.
~
Vanished
Because of the storm and its aftermath, four days go by before Sheriff Jim Dunn is able to get out to the crime scene. He takes his own battered old Jeep with the four-wheel drive rather than the department’s cruiser because the track to the gravel pit is sure to be pitted with muddy ruts after the storm and because he enjoys driving the old Jeep in rough country.
Belle Coeur County has survived the storms without a single fatality, although a great deal of property has been lost or damaged, enough to keep the insurance companies busy for months. The forecast for the next week is for sunny skies and mild temperatures, so the county will have time to dry out. Crews are out already, and he can hear chainsaws everywhere, cutting up all the downed trees for firewood. There are roofs to be mended, fences to be rebuilt, and a few rickety bridges that are gone forever, but the thing about a place like this is that people will pull together and help out.
Late-summer sunshine drifts through the trees, and it feels good to be out by his lonesome rather than shuffling paper in an airless office. He’s listening to Hank Snow on the radio, enjoying himself a little too much, driving too fast on a road that hasn’t been maintained since the old gravel pit shut down. He rounds a corner near a thick stand of beech and maple trees and has to jam the brakes through the floorboards to avoid sailing off into the water. The Jeep skids sideways right up to the edge of a lake that is a couple of hundred feet beyond where it ought to be. He eases it into reverse and backs away as gingerly as he can to where the ground feels reasonably solid.
Sheriff Dunn parks the Jeep between a couple of tall poplars on higher ground and climbs out, his knees feeling a little watery. He walks back toward the lake in mud up to his ankles, feeling his way along from tree to tree, wanting something to hold on to in case the ground gives away. When he reaches the point where the gravel pit should have been, he sees that the old gravel tower is gone. So is the pump shack and the turnaround where the heavy dump trucks used to back in for their loads. At least a dozen tall poplar trees have vanished into the water, along with a stand of weeping willows that fringed the bank. Everything is gone, including that pretty picnic spot up on a little rise overlooking the river trail. Washed away, as though it had never existed.
This puts a whole new slant on things. He had planned to spend the better part of the day out here, measuring, marking, observing, bagging evidence. He even thought he might get lucky and be able to identify the tire prints of the car that Poe claims was parked here, but everything is gone. He walks the last hundred feet with care, probing with one boot and then the other, holding on to branches when he can, half expecting the ground to slide out from underneath him at every step. Only the roof of the old tower is visible, far out in the lake. It isn’t hard to figure out what happened: all those years of pumping gravel hollowed out the ground underneath and the deluge did the rest. The artificial lake is now a few hundred feet wider than it had been, and everything that was here before the storm is gone. The crime scene is nothing but water.
Dunn moves cautiously around the fringes of the lake until he finds an abandoned skiff with an oar hidden in the weeds. He tests it to make sure it won’t sink, then paddles out to the tower and circles
it carefully. There’s little to see, but a dozen feet from the tower, he finds a waterlogged old comic book, with crudely drawn obscene cartoons. He lifts it from the water with a stick and bags it as evidence.
On the way back to the highway, he notes how rough the track is and clocks the mileage on the odometer. It’s better than a mile and a half from the highway to the gravel pit. That’s a long way to carry an injured woman, even if you’re as big and strong as Poe. That doesn’t tell him a whole lot, except that Poe was determined to get to the highway. If he attacked the girl, you’d think he would have left her there and tried to save himself, but that’s what another man would do. A man like Poe? He’s heard Rose say it a dozen times: Poe has his addlements and particularities. There’s no telling how he might behave if he was alone with Miranda in an isolated spot like the gravel pit.
~
“I took the brownies out to Poe and then . . .”
On the morning of her seventh day in the hospital, Miranda flickers in and out of consciousness, like a lightbulb in a faulty socket. Her father sits in his chair by the window, watching the traffic go by. It’s a glorious, sunny day, late summer slipping into early autumn. He can see leaves turning in the distance, and the sky is the deep blue you get after the summer heat has faded. The warmth streaming through the glass makes him sleepy, and he must have nodded off, because he thinks that he is dreaming when he hears her speak. Daddy? Daddy, my throat hurts.
Thorne struggles to focus on the sound. Daddy? Daddy? Where am I? How did I get here? He leaps to his feet, frantic and a little dazed. By the time he gets to Miranda’s side, she is unconscious again and he is left to wonder if it was all a dream. He rings for a nurse, and the nurse checks her vital signs. Her pulse is strong, her blood pressure is normal. An impossibly young doctor looks in long enough to say they can start weaning her off the sedatives. He warns Thorne not to upset her. Thorne guesses that someone must have heard him ranting about the brutal things Poe has done to his daughter. He returns to his chair by the window like a child who has been chastised and resumes his vigil. If Miranda woke once, she will wake again. He is certain of that now.
An hour later she is briefly awake, says a few words, and drifts off. Thorne keeps talking to her, about the weather, about her mother, about her girlhood, anything that comes to mind except Poe. It’s late in the evening before she is fully conscious.
“My throat hurts,” she says.
“Yes. The doctors say it will heal. You just have to be very careful.”
“How did I get here?” Miranda asks.
Thorne is startled by the question. “You don’t remember? You must remember. You don’t remember what happened to you?”
“I don’t remember. What should I remember? Was I in an accident?”
“It appears that Poe attacked you, honey. Out by the gravel pit. I guess he tried to do things to you, but they say he didn’t quite succeed. He beat you half to death, though.”
“Poe? No. No no no no. It can’t be. Poe wouldn’t hurt me.”
“The sheriff caught him red-handed, honey. Poe was carrying you out of the woods. Out by the old gravel pit, where he used to take you fishing. I’m sure you’ll remember if you think about it.”
“Think about what?”
“The day you were attacked. It will come back to you.”
“When was it?”
“A week ago today.”
“I’ve been here a week? That’s not possible.”
“I’m afraid it is, Miranda. They didn’t know if you were going to make it or not. I didn’t know if you would ever be conscious again.”
Thorne is weeping. Miranda reaches up and traces his tears with her fingertips. “Don’t cry, Daddy. I’m okay now, I think. I can’t believe it’s been a week.” She tries to shift her position on the bed and grimaces. “I hurt all over.”
“Yes. It was worse. You’re looking a bit better.”
“I need water.”
He holds the water glass in his right hand, his left behind her head, lifting her up. “The nurse said you can only have a bit at a time, otherwise you’ll bring it back up.”
Miranda nods. “I don’t remember any attack. I don’t remember anything. The last thing I can remember is taking brownies out to Poe.”
“That was three or four weeks ago, before the first flood.”
“What flood?”
He strokes her forehead. “The doctor said you might have some short-term memory loss. We don’t have to talk about it now. It will come back to you.”
She closes her eyes and drifts away again. Thorne stands holding her wrist, feeling her pulse, tears rolling down his cheeks.
When Miranda wakes again, it’s night. Her father isn’t in the room. She assumes he went home to sleep. She helps herself to a sip of water and lies staring at the ceiling, trying to remember. Her mind keeps traveling the same circuit, up to the same point. She remembers clearly the time school ended for the summer, driving her VW Beetle home, listening to the radio. She remembers things that have happened since, like looking for stones for the wall, driving out in the pickup to load them. The day Poe hoisted Bill’s pickup out of the mud. She can reconstruct it all, up to the point where she made brownies before she went out for her morning run. She remembers taking the brownies out to Poe.
I took the brownies out to Poe and then . . .
I took the brownies out to Poe and then . . .
I took the brownies out to Poe and then . . .
The next thing she can recall is the pale halo of light over her hospital bed, then her father at her bedside. I took the brownies out to Poe and then . . .
And then nothing. A gaping void. How is it possible not to remember three weeks of your own life? She is a blank, nothing left of those weeks but the hole in her soul.
Sheriff Jim Dunn finds Miranda asleep in the afternoon. Wild dark hair spread over the startling white of the pillow, her face and neck covered with fading greenish bruises. Thorne sits at her bedside, ready to snarl at any who would disturb her.
“What do you want?”
Dunn lifts his hat. “Good afternoon, Mr. Thorne. I heard that your daughter is conscious and thought that she might be up to a question or two.”
“Well, she isn’t. Get the hell out of here.”
Dunn stands his ground. “Well now, I could do that. I could go. But I’d think you’d want to get to the bottom of this so’s we can find out who attacked your girl.”
“We know the guilty party, Sheriff. Poe the giant. I want him hanged by the neck until dead. Now go do your job.”
“That’s precisely what I’m doing. You’re a lawyer, Mr. Thorne, and a top-notch legal eagle defense lawyer at that. You of all people know how it works. It’s one step at a time, and the lawman who tries to skip a few steps ends up with a case that won’t stand up in court. I’ll swing by in an hour or two and see if it’s possible to have a word with your daughter.”
“It’s alright, Daddy.” Miranda is awake, her dark eyes wide. “I don’t mind a few questions, but I’m not sure I can help much, Sheriff. I don’t remember a thing.”
Dunn nods and drags over a chair. Thorne folds his arms over his chest and glares at him. With his tangled hair and beard, he looks thoroughly unkempt and half mad. Dunn can’t blame the man. His own daughter is only two or three years younger than Miranda. If such a thing had happened to her, he would be in such a state or worse, but he has a job to do.
“Mr. Thorne, I have some notion how difficult this might be for you. Perhaps you might want to stroll down to the cafeteria and get yourself a cup of coffee while I chat with your daughter. It won’t take long.”
“How dare you? You can’t force me to leave, Sheriff.”
“No, I can’t. You’re absolutely right, Mr. Thorne. I can’t force you to go. I’m not forcing you, I’m asking. It’s been my experience that th
e victim in a case like this feels a little freer to talk without the presence of a parent in the room. Just step out for a bit and let us talk.”
“I will not.”
Miranda touches her father’s arm. “Daddy, it’s okay. Really. Get yourself a coffee and get me one of those raisin oatmeal cookies. It’s still two hours until supper and I’m hungry. Please.”
The effect she has on her father is magical. Thorne leans back, obedient to her touch. “Alright, I’ll go. But don’t let him bully you, now. If he starts leaning on you, you clam right up and wait until I get back.”
“He’s not going to lean on me, Daddy. I’m not a criminal.”
Thorne nods reluctantly and struggles to his feet, keeping a wary eye on the sheriff. “Alright. One cookie, coming up. Anything else?”
“An apple juice. Please.”
“Sheriff? I suppose you’ll be wanting a coffee?”
“No thank you, sir. I’ll be fine.”
Miranda waits until she can hear her father’s footsteps echoing down the hall, then turns to the sheriff. “Is it true? Poe is in jail for this?”
“I’m afraid so. I found him carrying you alongside the highway out by the old gravel pit. He had you slung over his shoulders and you were in a bad way. Just dumb luck I happened by when I did. Now, we don’t know what happened, I’ve got to stress that. Poe kept saying ‘get help,’ over and over, so it’s possible he was just trying to help you. But in the meantime, we’ve got to keep him in jail, for his own protection if nothing else. Folks are pretty wrought up about this and since Poe is large and odd, they’re inclined to blame him.”
Miranda sinks back into her pillow and bites her lip. “This is so wrong. It’s got to be wrong. Poe would never hurt me. Never.”
“You’ve known Poe a long time?”
“Since forever. When I was a little girl, he used to take me fishing out at that old gravel pit. The last few years, I’ve been helping him build a stone wall along my father’s property. I hired him, to tell you the truth. Daddy didn’t want to. But it’s a good job for Poe and we’re going to have a beautiful wall.”