The Weight of Blood

by Laura McHugh

  “So all I had to do was give him a little peck. Creepy. And kind of sad that he’s so starved for affection. But I don’t guess anybody would kiss him for free.” I sat on my hands to hide their shaking.

  Daniel looked about to boil over, like Birdie’s old coffee percolator. “Did you even stop and think what he might’ve done to you? For all we know, he’s the one who killed Cheri.”

  No need to tell Daniel about my moments of doubt on the riverbank, from which I hadn’t quite recovered. One of Birdie’s sayings came to mind: If the wolf wants in, he’ll find a way. “If he wanted to hurt me, he’d do it whether I kissed him or not. And he didn’t kill Cheri. Whatever else he might be capable of, I don’t see him killing her.”

  Daniel rubbed his hands over his face, as though trying to wipe away his annoyance. “Okay,” he said. “I’m not as sure about that as you are, but let’s just say Jamie’s not involved. So we’re thinking if this Emory guy sells girls, he might’ve taken Cheri and sold her. We still don’t know who he sold her to or who killed her. And I doubt that guy’s gonna tell us. How the hell does somebody live on Caney Mountain, anyway? It’s all conservation land up there.”

  Caney Mountain rose out of the earth just north of Henbane. The park encompassed eight thousand acres of springs, caves, woods, and cliffs. Tourist maps proclaimed it to have the best views in the Ozarks. Bess and I had gone there on our fifth-grade field trip, made the pilgrimage to see Missouri’s champion black gum tree, the biggest in the state.

  I shrugged. “It’d be a good place to hide.”

  “Did you ever think it was something like that? With Cheri, I mean? People had all kinds of ideas, everything from satanic sacrifice to voodoo to an affair with the art teacher. But I never heard anybody mention her being sold.”

  “No,” I said. “I kept a list. That wasn’t on it.”

  “It’s just hard to believe, in a place like this where everybody knows everybody else’s business, there’re still secrets.”

  I might have thought so, too, but I was uncovering more secrets every day. “Do you know how to pick locks?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re at a dead end here. I have to get into Crete’s office, look through his files. We need to know who rented that trailer.”

  Daniel sighed. “You know my brothers are serving time for robbery?”

  I looked away, feeling guilty for having asked.

  “We’re good at picking locks,” he said. “Not so good at getting away with it.”

  “You don’t have to help,” I said. “Just teach me how to do it.”

  He paced a slow circle in the dirt, hands in his pockets. “I can do better,” he said, sending up a plume of dust with his shoe. “I know where to find the keys.”

  A half-moon silvered the parking lot as we crept toward Dane’s. A dark night would have been better, but it had to be done before Dad got back to town, and once I knew Daniel had access to the keys, I couldn’t get in quick enough.

  Daniel ticked off the reasons he’d held back on telling me about the keys: He didn’t want me getting into trouble, didn’t want to lose his job, didn’t want his mom to have to visit all of her kids in jail. Still, he’d insisted on coming along. He used his key to get into the boathouse, where a ring of spare keys was hidden under a floorboard in the supply closet. He didn’t know which keys went to what, but he’d once walked in to find Judd returning them to their hiding place after locking the cash drawer in the office for the night.

  I waited on the dark side of the building, listening to the scratch and clink of failed keys until Daniel called softly that he’d found the right one. When I scurried over to join him, he stopped me before I could slip inside. “Wait out here,” he said, holding on to the bell at the top of the door so it wouldn’t make noise. “You can be my lookout.” I started to argue, but he pulled the door shut behind him and locked it. He had broken in to Dane’s without me.

  I sat down to wait. It was still hot enough outside to make me sweat. The river beckoned from across the road, gleaming under the moon, and I wondered if I could convince Daniel to take a swim with me when we were done. Cheri’s tree hung over the water like it was bending to take a drink. Had her killer admired this same nighttime view when he disposed of her body? No, it had been cold that night, freezing, the air laced with fog. Surely he hadn’t taken the view into account.

  The beam of a flashlight swept across the gas pumps and startled me to attention. I gave the front door two quick taps and sneaked around the corner to the patio, where a side door led out from the restaurant. We had planned to escape this way if anything went wrong. I hoped Daniel had heard my warning, though I wasn’t too worried about it. Most likely the light belonged to a camper wandering around in search of a soda machine. I waited for the flashlight or footsteps to move past me, but they didn’t. Then I heard the bell jangle on the front door.

  Adrenaline surged through me, making my muscles twitch. I didn’t want to risk going back around to the front, so I pressed my face to the little window in the patio door, trying to distinguish shapes among shadows in the dimly lit store. One of the shapes darted toward me, and I stepped aside as Daniel burst out the door and hurriedly shut it behind him. The keys rattled in his hands as he sought the right one and relocked it.

  “Let’s go!” I hissed. He pulled a folder from under his arm and reached around me, one hand lifting the back of my shirt and the other sliding the folder beneath it, pressing it against my sweating skin.

  The door creaked, and there was no time to move. “Hey, now.” The unmistakable gruffness of Judd’s voice. “What the hell’s going on out here?”

  Daniel turned around, holding out his arm to keep me behind him.

  “Well, well,” Judd said. “Past your bedtime, ain’t it, Miss Lucy?”

  “I was just—”

  “I ain’t blind,” he said, spitting on the ground.

  “I’ll take Lucy home,” Daniel said.

  Judd frowned. “Maybe I ought to be the one doing that.”

  “It’s okay, Judd,” I said. “I’ll get home on my own.”

  “You supposed to be out in the woods after dark?”

  “Straight home. Like a flash.” I backed into the darkness, tucking in my shirt to hold the folder in place, hoping Daniel would be able to smooth things over with Judd.

  I headed upstairs when I got home, and even though I was alone in the house, I closed my door before opening up the folder. I sat cross-legged on my bed and scanned the first document. It was a lease agreement, but not for the trailer in Henbane, the trailer where Cheri had been. The lease was for an apartment in Springfield. So was the next, then the next. It wasn’t surprising to see that my uncle had so many rental properties, because he had his hands in lots of different jars and didn’t make a point of telling me about all of them. But when I reached the end of the folder, I hadn’t found what I was looking for. The whole point of breaking in to Crete’s files for the rental records was to find out who’d rented the trailer, because that person might know what had happened to Cheri. Crete kept records on everything. If he didn’t have a rental contract for the trailer, that was telling in itself. I sifted through the pages again, making sure none were stuck together.

  There was a knock downstairs, and I knew it was Daniel. I hurried down to let him in. “It’s not in there,” I said. “Was that the only folder with leases in it?”

  He looked distracted. “I don’t know. I didn’t see another one, but I was in a hurry. So there’s nothing on the trailer?”

  “No. What’s wrong? Did Judd chew you out?”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “I’m not worried about Judd. I … I don’t think I locked the desk. I remember locking the cabinet, replacing the key, locking the door behind me, but I don’t remember the desk.”

  “Maybe Crete won’t notice.”
<
br />   Daniel frowned. “You know him better than me, what do you think?”

  “We could go back now and lock it. I need to put this worthless folder back anyway.”

  “No. Judd might be hanging around. I couldn’t put the keys away because he was there, but I need to get them back before someone realizes they’re gone. We can’t risk using them in the morning to get back into Crete’s office and check everything.”

  I reached out to take his hands. “I’m sorry,” I said. We stood there for a minute, not looking at each other. “Do you want to stay?”

  He gave me a halfhearted smile, squeezed my hands, and released them. “Nah, Lucy,” he said. “Get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I was skittish going in to work the next day and terrified that someone would notice. I’d been up much of the night trying to prepare coherent responses to any questions that might come up. I repeated them until they felt true. Any trace of confidence evaporated when I saw Crete sitting on the bench outside Dane’s, watching my approach.

  “Sit down a minute,” he said. “I need to talk to you.” I sat. “Judd called me last night, said he caught you fooling around up here with Daniel.”

  I had an answer ready. “It’s nothing serious,” I said. “We’re just friends.”

  “We can get into that later,” he said. “What I wanna know is why you were here.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We didn’t plan it. I couldn’t sleep, I came out for a night swim. He was here.”

  He stared me down. “So he didn’t ask you to meet him. You showed up and here he was?”

  I nodded.

  “You mighta kept him from robbing the place.”

  No. No. No. Something had tipped him off. It had to be the drawer, left unlocked, like Daniel had thought.

  “The spare keys are missing, and only somebody working the boathouse’d know where I keep ’em. Looks like he got into the office but didn’t make it into the safe.”

  I shook my head, my brain scrambling to catch up and figure out how to fix this.

  “That can’t be it,” I said. “He’d never steal from you. He didn’t say anything about it.”

  “He lied and said he came up here with you. That whole family’s full of liars and thieves. I only hired him as a favor to his old man. We grew up together, you know, before he got busted. He thought his youngest was gonna be different, make something of himself.”

  “He probably just meant we came up here together from the river. We were on the patio. I was with him the whole time.”

  “I had to fire him, Lucy. And I don’t want you around him anymore. You don’t need to be messed up with trash like that.”

  I’d gotten Daniel fired. My stomach churned all day, and when I finally got hold of Daniel on the phone that night, he sounded a thousand miles away.

  “I’m not mad,” he said for the tenth time, though he sounded mad when he said it. “I’m glad you’re okay, and I’m glad Crete thinks you had nothing to do with it. It could’ve turned out a lot worse for me, too. He could’ve pressed charges.”

  “But you’re still leaving.”

  He groaned. “Like I said, I need a job to help pay for school, and I won’t find anything else around here. Especially if Crete tells everybody I stole from him.” He lowered his voice, making it harder for me to hear him. “The last thing I want to do is leave you here alone, with everything that’s going on. Once I find a place in Springfield and get some money coming in, I’ll be back to visit. I can help you figure things out. But I don’t want you stirring up anything while I’m gone, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I wouldn’t be able to tell him what I was doing, because it would only make him worry and nag me. It was easier to let him think I’d wait for him before making another move. Though if he believed that, he didn’t know me at all.

  “I would’ve been leaving in another month anyhow,” he said. “Even if this hadn’t happened.”

  “I know.” It hadn’t seemed real, though. His departure had been far away, with infinite possibilities existing in the time between. Any number of things could have changed his course, kept him with me. That was wishful thinking. How could I expect him to give up his plans and stay in Henbane when I couldn’t wait to leave myself? And he wouldn’t have stayed, even if I’d asked. He would have gone to school, like he was going now. Better, maybe, to get it over with. Better for him to move forward with his life. And for me to move forward with mine. Rule number four, don’t let a boy get in the way of rules one through three.

  Chapter 20

  Lila

  I’d been staying at Carl’s house for three weeks, and he had finally admitted that he wasn’t going back to his job in Arkansas. He was looking for something local but hadn’t had any luck yet. Now that I was more comfortable moving around the house, we had started eating supper together every night at the dining room table. Tonight he’d heated up some biscuits and deer-sausage gravy that Birdie had brought over at breakfast. I hadn’t wanted to eat it the first time I’d seen it puddled on my plate. But like everything else Birdie made, it tasted better than it looked. And I was hungry. Each time nausea swelled in my throat, I thought about the thing in my belly and ate to quiet it. When I ate, the nausea went away, and I could pretend everything was fine.

  After dinner, I took the dishes to the sink to wash them, but Carl told me he would do it later. Now that I was no longer an invalid, I felt uncomfortable with him waiting on me. I wondered, as I did every day, how much longer I could stay here. I couldn’t stay forever. We stared at each other, not sure what to do with this moment when I was not quite a houseguest and not quite something more.

  “Wanna listen to some music?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. He led me to the living room, and I sat on the sofa while he fiddled with the stereo. All the windows were open, and a box fan pulled in the evening air. Carl sat down next to me and took my hand in his as we listened. The recording was scratchy, the song haunting, a duet with some kind of guitar in the background.

  “That was my parents,” Carl said when it was over. “They met singing at church. They used to sit out on the porch and sing. Just old mountain songs and such. Dad played banjo.”

  “It was beautiful,” I said. “Are all Ozark songs so fucking tragic?”

  He chuckled. “I guess I never thought about it, but yeah. Most of ’em. Love songs, especially.”

  He put on another album and I felt myself relaxing, almost to the point of falling asleep. I wondered if the tiny creature inside me was already stealing away my energy, strengthening itself against my will.

  “Do you like it here?” Carl asked, squeezing my hand.

  “Henbane?” He’d asked me that before, and I remembered not wanting to insult his hometown.

  “Here,” he said. “This house. With me.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I want you to stay here.”

  “You do?”

  He nodded. I smiled but didn’t answer. If Ransome had been telling the truth, Crete would leave me alone as long as I kept quiet. Maybe he’d find someone else to exploit, someone who’d consent. I wondered what I’d do if he brought in another ignorant girl like me. Would I be able to stomach knowing what was happening to her and not say a word?

  I slept alone in Carl’s mother’s room—the room I was dangerously close to thinking of as mine. He hadn’t made any move to sleep in the room with me, not counting the first night, when I awoke to find him dozing in the chair. Probably he still thought of me as a convalescent, which was just as well because I was in no condition to be intimate with him. I laid my hand below my navel to see if I could feel anything different, but there was no shape, no movement, nothing except my own familiar skin. Maybe it was all in my head, a crazy notion borne from Gabby’s suggestion. I didn’t know for sure that I was pregnant, and there was no sense sa
ying anything to Carl until I knew.

  That night my dreams were dark and clouded, full of dead ends and treacherous paths that led me right back where I’d started. I startled awake to a flurry of shadows across the walls and floor. Outside the window, between me and the moon, I saw a torrent of bats. The thought of them spilling from a crack in the earth filled me with unexplained dread.

  Chapter 21

  Lucy

  “So he came into Wash-n-Tan a few weeks back with all his collared shirts,” Bess said. “You know how he’d been going around all wrinkly since his wife left. You’d think somebody like him could figure out something as simple as an iron. I guess he was just too lazy.” She was trying to explain how it was that she came to be fooling around with Vice Principal Sorrel from the junior high, whom I remembered mostly for his sweatiness and fake smile. I was trying to hold my judgment, but it was really, really hard. I kept picturing the yellow stains on the armpits of all his shirts.

  “Can we please skip to the part where you discover his redeeming qualities?”

  Bess looked embarrassed, and I regretted opening my mouth. “It didn’t happen all at once,” she said. “Like I was saying, he came in with his shirts and offered extra if I could get ’em done while he waited. Said he needed ’em for some job interviews he had coming up. Normally, my cousin makes me leave all the ironing for him to do, ’cause I fuck it up every time. But I wanted the extra cash, so I told Sorrel I’d do it. He just sat there watching me at first while I loaded up the washer. I mean, he had a magazine, but he wasn’t looking at it. He started making small talk, like, he couldn’t believe how much I’d grown up since junior high, how were things going for me in high school, what did I think of the teachers, on and on. I got sick of it after a while, so I said, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and get a tan while you’re waiting? So you can look real sharp for your interviews?’ Boy, did he think that was a grand idea. I got him all set up in the back room, and he asked me if he had to get naked to get in the thing, and I said, ‘Well, you don’t have to, but people do, and I wipe down the bed with antiseptic after, so it’s safe if you want to do it.’ ”