by Maureen Tan
As I opened the wrought-iron gate and walked up the flagstone path to the first house, it occurred to me that the front porches of 1231 and 1233 accurately reflected the homes’ owners. The porch I was stepping onto was glossy white and furnished with wicker furniture, cushy floral pillows and hanging baskets of cascading petunias. Next door, the other porch was pony-spotted with multicolor layers of peeling paint, had rusted milk cans and cracked ceramic crocks overflowing with bright flowers decorating its sagging steps, and supported an old sofa. Also floral. No car in front of Marta Moye’s impeccably kept house—she no longer drove. A vintage yellow Cadillac was the only thing that was impeccably kept on the property next door.
Marta, who had recently celebrated her sixty-eighth birthday, was sitting on the wicker sofa, obviously waiting for me. Today, she was the one who had called 911, so hers was the story I needed to hear first.
Despite the flowing woven cotton jumper she wore, her usually pale, round face was flushed bright red beneath a halo of pink-toned gray hair. As much with agitation as with heat, I thought. She sputtered as she stood, still clutching her tiny Yorkie, Peanut, against her ample breasts.
“That…that…man…urinated on my hedge!” she shrilled the moment I set my foot on her porch.
That man was Larry Hayes, the proprietor of the Antique Attic and Marta’s senior by at least a decade. I glanced at my watch knowing that, these days, Larry opened the Attic closer to noon than ten. That was, when he bothered opening it at all. I shook my head slowly, thinking that his retirement hours were leaving him plenty of time for his feud with Marta.
Rumor had it that there was a good reason that the break in the fence between their backyards had remained unrepaired for decades. Scandalous, the usual local gossips maintained. Such carrying on—especially at their age! And they wondered if the affair had been going on before Marta’s husband had died and Larry’s young wife had deserted him.
But a month earlier, on my first official visit to the two frame houses, I’d noticed that the passageway had been crudely repaired—on both sides of the fence. A neat square of latticework on Marta’s side. Mismatched scraps of lumber on Larry’s. And the same ladies who had been happily outraged now happily discussed the inevitable consequences of “that kind of behavior.”
The feud between the two seemed to be escalating. In the past week, their calls to 911 had almost become a daily event. Most of them in the morning, when the two seemed to take particular pleasure in annoying each other. Usually, I tried to be patient. I liked Larry. I liked Marta. But today, with the memory of a root-ensnared skeleton fresh in my mind, their complaints were particularly irrelevant.
Twenty minutes later, after taking enough notes to keep Marta happy, I climbed the steps onto Larry’s front porch. He looked utterly relaxed as he sat on his battered floral sofa, sipping extra-sweet iced tea. He was dressed in slim jeans, aged and bleached to a soft blue, and a short-sleeved shirt in a shade of pearl-pink. The V of the shirt revealed a turkey neck and a curl of white chest hair. Given the proximity of their yards and Marta’s volume as she’d spoken with me—and assuming that Larry had turned his hearing aid on—there was no doubt in my mind that Larry had heard every word of her complaint.
Difficult to know if it was friendship or anticipation that brightened Larry’s face when he saw me, but it prompted him to offer me tea from a nearby pitcher. When Katie and I were younger, Larry’s tea had ranked as one of our favorite beverages, though I’d probably had gallons to her quarts. I drank it to wash down the peanut-butter-and-cheese sandwiches that Larry and I ate while we sat in his battered, flat-bottomed boat and fished for anything that’d bite.
Katie had hated fishing. Hated, she’d said, to see defenseless things die. Not just the fish we caught, but even the worms that baited our hooks. At the time, I’d thought that odd. I still did, but for a different reason.
Today, as usual, the aluminum pitcher was stacked with ice and sparkled with beads of condensation. I was hot, sweaty and sorely tempted. But I’d turned down Marta’s lemonade just minutes earlier, so I couldn’t accept a cup of tea from Larry. There’d be no end of trouble if I appeared to be taking sides.
“Thanks, but no,” I said.
I perched on the porch railing just across from the tanned, skinny old man. I spoke in a normal voice and judged from his posture and expression that he was having no problem hearing this morning. A change from the visit I’d had to make a few days earlier, when I was sure he’d deliberately turned his hearing aid off. And he’d made a point of keeping his bad ear turned toward me.
“So, tell me, what’s going on?”
It took a few minutes for him to gather enough enthusiasm to tell his side of the story, but he eventually endorsed Marta’s account. With a single addendum.
“I peed on my property, on my side of the hedge.”
Which explained it all, I supposed.
The day before, Larry had called 911 and, when I’d arrived, had complained about Marta encouraging her dog to relieve itself in the vicinity of the very same hedge. I had pointed out—quite moderately, I’d thought at the time—that there was no law against Peanut doing his duty on his side of the hedge as long as Marta didn’t allow the waste to pile up. Which she didn’t.
I allowed my exasperation to color my voice.
“Goddamn it, Larry.”
He raised an eyebrow at me, not because I’d called him by his first name—he’d given me permission to do that when I was ten—but because I’d taken the Lord’s name in vain. Larry was proud of being a God-fearing man. Marta, he’d assured me on several previous occasions, was the Almighty’s way of testing him. Just like the sores He’d inflicted on poor old Job.
I considered the possibility that Larry and Marta were God’s way of testing me, briefly rolled my eyes in His direction—toward a hazy blue sky that promised no relief from the already oppressive heat of the day—and prayed for patience. Then I tried again.
“I’ll throw you in jail if you pee on the hedge again.”
I figured that for a sufficiently unpleasant threat. The town’s solitary cell was a windowless room that had formerly served as records storage in the brick city building. At about the time I’d been hired, rows of filing cabinets had been replaced by two cots, a utilitarian sink and toilet and a locking steel door with a barred viewing window. The cell opened into my small office, was a dozen steps removed from the larger offices of the mayor and the city clerk, and was at the far end of the building from an auditorium that was used for city meetings during the week and social gatherings on the weekends.
After a year’s worth of occasional overnight occupants and despite air-conditioning and regular scrubbing, Maryville’s lockup now smelled like most every other lockup. Summer humidity seemed to encourage the oily, persistent aroma of perspiration, urine, vomit and beer. Not that I served alcohol to the inmates, but beer was usually what landed them there. Lately, the smell had been bad enough that the mayor complained about it to anyone who would listen.
Larry was on the city council, so certainly he had heard the mayor complaining. He’d probably smelled the odor himself. So the possibility of ending up as one of the cell’s few sober visitors was, in my opinion, a deterrent. But Larry wasn’t looking deterred. Rather, the expression on his wizened face rivaled that of a Friday-night drunk-and-disorderly. His beetle brows pulled together into a wiry V-shaped gray caterpillar above pale blue eyes, and his lips twisted into a pettish scowl.
“What could you possibly charge me with?”
I thought about it for a heartbeat.
“Public indecency.”
I was serious.
He was outraged.
“I made sure she couldn’t see my privates.”
Based on Marta’s account, he wasn’t lying.
“He waited until I was out on the steps, watering my petunias,” she’d told me. “Then he shouted to get my attention. I could only see his head and shoulders above the hedge, bu
t I could tell he was…you know…unzipping. And I could hear exactly what he was doing. Afterwards, he sighed, then waved at me!”
I looked down at Larry, who was still scowling, and resisted the urge to throttle him. Instead, I briefly rubbed my thumb across a couple buttons of my uniform shirt in a futile attempt to blot the itchy trickle of sweat between my breasts. The trickle was protected—in fact, encouraged—by a pair of 32Bs encased beneath too many layers for a hot summer day. Bra, T-shirt, vest, uniform. The vest was also layered—sixteen ultra-thin layers of Kevlar rated IIA and guaranteed to stop a.40 caliber Smith & Wesson bullet.
Sadly, the vest offered no protection against the likes of Larry and Marta. But living most of my life in Maryville did. I knew, for instance, that Larry and Marta attended the same Methodist church and that the minister’s wife was a reporter for Maryville’s gossipy weekly newspaper. The very paper that Ed Statler had been reading.
I took a deep breath, then deliberately slowed my speech and softened my vowels so my drawl was unmistakably southern Illinois. But I kept my tone unyielding. Important that Larry understand: I might be his friend and a hometown girl, but I would do whatever it took to keep the peace.
“This problem between you and Marta, I want you to resolve it, Larry. Resolve it or forget it. Leave each other alone. If I have to come out here again, I will tell Reverend and Mrs. Cox about the little war you two have going on. The Spirit might compel the reverend to bring it up during Sunday services, in the context of loving thy neighbor. But even if he doesn’t, his wife will certainly publish the details I’ll provide in the Police Blotter.”
Minutes later, I made a return trip to Marta’s house, delivered a similar message and left her sputtering on her front porch.
Then I crawled gratefully back into the SUV, cranked up the air-conditioning and thought about gossip. And scandal. And how I now exploited almost daily and virtually guiltlessly the very thing that had victimized Katie and me throughout our childhoods.
No doubt having Katie and me arriving in town too skinny and never having set foot in a school, much less a church, set tongues wagging throughout Maryville. Only Aunt Lucy and Gran knew the actual circumstances that landed us in Maryville. Knew that—most likely scared off by the cops who swarmed our apartment building—our mother had never returned to claim us. No one in Maryville ever knew what had happened to Katie on the day our mother abandoned us. Or what, except for Katie’s brave intervention, would have happened to me.
But lack of information had never been a problem where Maryville gossip was concerned. Folks had pretty much always expected the worst from Lucy Tyler’s sister, Lydia. You could see it coming, I heard them say. That Lydia Tyler always thought she was better than everyone else. Her, with her Marilyn Monroe looks and too-tight clothing! But with a father not long dead from cancer and a mother who was too busy mourning and putting food on the table to notice much of anything, it was easy enough to understand how a teenager like Lydia might spin out of control.
To hear people talk, it was no surprise to anyone—besides, maybe, Gran and Aunt Lucy—when Lydia ran away with money and jewelry stolen from the Cherokee Rose and its guests. To Hollywood. And every once in a while Katie or I would hear folks snicker about my mother ending up doing those kinds of movies. And worse. They wondered aloud if our mother was still alive or if, by now, drugs or alcohol or one of those diseases had killed her.
As we got older, the inevitable comparisons between us and our mother began. Mostly because it was apparent to anyone with eyes that Katie was growing up to look just like our mother. Five foot five, blond, beautiful and voluptuous. Fortunately, folks whispered just loudly enough for us to hear, Katie was also quiet and shy and well-behaved. It was her spindly limbed, headstrong sister who had Lydia’s personality, who hadn’t learned proper respect for almost anyone, who used her fists in the school yard the way no proper young lady ever would. And because I looked nothing like my sister and because gossip always assumes the worst, folks speculated about whether Katie and I shared the same father. A woman like Lydia Tyler wouldn’t much care who she slept with if it got her what she wanted, they said. No doubt both girls were bastards.
Who my father might be plagued me, inspired a years-long search for my birth certificate in every nook and cranny of the Cherokee Rose. I stopped looking when I was twelve. That’s when I found a bundle of letters tucked beneath a floorboard. They were all addressed to Aunt Lucy at a post-office box address on the other side of the river. From the postmarks, I could tell that my mother had been writing to her sister ever since she’d run away. The series of letters, which ended about a year before Katie and I came to live at the Cherokee Rose, detailed my mother’s big career plans and her new clothes, described parties with movie stars and boyfriends who were talent scouts.
Never once did she mention having two little girls.
Not too long after I found those letters, a registered letter was delivered to the Cherokee Rose with a Las Vegas postmark. I never read that letter. Never even saw it. But I didn’t have to. Maryville gossip provided me with all the information that I needed.
I was in the library, sitting on the floor between shelves, reading the first pages of The Blue Sword. It was an adventure, which was the kind of book I liked. That’s when I overheard the librarian talking to the chief of Maryville’s volunteer fire department. And I heard my mother’s name. The librarian said that a friend at the post office had told her that Lucy Tyler had received a letter from her sister a couple of days earlier. Between that letter and the one that was mailed back—to a bail bond company—Lucy had pulled five hundred dollars from her savings account and bought a money order.
I didn’t understand, back then, the significance of that transaction. But I did know that my mother hadn’t ever bothered writing to me. Or to Katie. Certainly, she’d never phoned us. Or sent us gifts on our birthdays or at Christmastime.
My mother didn’t care about us.
That’s what I decided that day in the library. And that’s when I tried to stop caring about her. Tried to stop even thinking about her. Because I knew the truth. Though Aunt Lucy was always telling us that our mother loved us, I’d overheard Gran say more than once that Lydia Tyler cared only about herself.
I believed Gran.
Of course, I never told Katie about the letters or my decision. I didn’t want to risk her having an asthma attack and ending up in the emergency room or maybe dying. And I didn’t want her crying all the time the way she had when Aunt Lucy had first brought us home to Maryville. So I kept quiet as Katie created soap-opera fantasies about our mother’s amnesia or her undercover work in some foreign country or her long imprisonment on false charges. Someday, Katie assured me, our mother would come and find us. Gran would forgive her. Aunt Lucy would hug her. And finally reunited, we would all live happily at the Cherokee Rose.
When, I wondered idly as I lifted the microphone from its mount on the dashboard, had Katie finally stopped believing that our mother would return? I thought about it for a minute, realized that we’d been in high school before her hope had turned to bitterness. Bitterness that had festered and spread like poison through her mind. And had finally ended in murder.
My bleak turn of thought made it easy to keep my voice serious when I checked back in with dispatch and reported that the 911 on Honeysuckle Drive had been resolved. At least for the time being. In turn, I was told that Chad had just radioed. He and the state crime-scene techs were headed to Camp Cadiz and would meet me in the parking lot.
My trip back through the forest took me along the same route that Chad’s father had traveled with his terrified family a decade earlier. Past the narrow, rutted mud road that had once led to a rotted-out single-wide trailer. A few years earlier, a gang from out of the area had set up a meth lab on the property. They’d discovered too late that—unlike many of the rarely traveled roads that crisscrossed the forest and rural southern Illinois—this particular dead-end road was regularl
y traveled by a big, redheaded county cop.
For a while, I watched the dense green woods flash past on both sides of the gravel road. Then I crossed the narrow bridge over Big Creek. For about a mile, the creek paralleled the road’s right shoulder, occasionally visible through the tangle of green foliage. This morning, it sparkled unthreateningly in the early-morning sun. But on the night Chad’s mother had died, the rushing current had been strong enough to carry the bleeding boy almost a mile downstream.
It was a miracle that he hadn’t drowned, I thought. But he’d managed to grab onto a branch and pull himself from the water. A county cop had found him walking down the road in the dark, headed for town, looking for help to save his mother.
Chad’s father had been arrested just after sunrise the morning after he’d killed his wife. He’d been found at home, sleeping soundly in the bed he’d shared with his wife for fourteen years. The Lord, he’d told the cops when they’d questioned him, had commanded him to punish his unfaithful wife and purge her living sin from the face of the earth. He was certain that he’d done just that. Shot her with the critter gun he’d always kept in his truck, then thrown the gun away. Down into a ravine.
“It wasn’t the Godly way to do it,” he’d explained, “but I lost my knife in the floodwater. Shortly after usin’ it on the boy.”
He’d seemed distressed by the news that his son had lived.
Chapter 8
There was a stop sign at the next intersection.
In a masterpiece of coincidental timing, Chad pulled onto the gravel road in front of me. But instead of taking my turn and immediately following him, I waited for a second vehicle to pull out onto the road behind him. The unadorned minivan was white and its blue-on-white license plate read Illinois and Official Vehicle.