“A man. A big man. He had red hair and a mark on his cheek. Like a birthmark.”
My father said, “His name is Deaton. He’s a company goon. What did he want?”
“Just to say hello,” she said. “And that he knew us. He wanted us to know that he knew us. He said the girls’ names.”
My father nodded slowly and then turned and walked further into the house with the gun, and that was the last that was said of any of it, at least in front of us. We were in the midst of a strike that year, a monster that had stretched on since early in the winter, and my father was leading the local UMWA. His friends had been beaten. His truck had been set on fire. But no one had ever come to the house before. No one had ever said my sisters’ names. In another few weeks, the strike had ended—quietly, the way those things always seemed to end—but it wasn’t until late summer that I happened to hear a news report on the radio, the discovery of a body in the waters of the Hog Thief, shot full of bullets. The man had been missing since sometime in the spring, and his name was Deaton.
Until further notice, I had been reassigned to my current task: finder of missing photographers. I’ll be honest: as career changes go, it was jarring. I left the Knight Hawk around twelve-thirty and headed south and east along the IL-13/127 corridor. The thinking was, I should at least talk to Luster’s daughter and get some sense of this Guy Beckett and what he might have been working on and where he might have gone. Way I saw it, the most likely explanation for Mays’s murder and Beckett’s sudden disappearance was that Beckett’s committing the former—for whatever motive—had necessitated the latter. I had a feeling that the cops were probably thinking the same thing. I had a second feeling that Luster and Jonathan were maybe thinking the same thing, too, but neither had said so. We can get as advanced as we want as a species, but something in us will never let go of the idea that giving voice to an unpleasant possibility will somehow make it real.
I rolled the bike past Grubbs, Vergennes, and Grange Hall. Like a lot of rural places, southern Illinois is basically a bunch of small towns knit together, a Babel’s Tower mix of rednecks, rubes, freaks, tweakers, gun nuts, and aging hippies––real hippies, not the newfangled crunchy kids they’re turning out these days––who’d fled into the dark-licked hills sometime during the bloodiest days of a war that wouldn’t stop shaping their lives and had never come out. The land they occupy is low farmland, or river basin, or rock-clotted hill country, evidence of the Illinois glacial advance of some two hundred thousand years ago.
It’s a pretty place, too, at least it is when it’s not turning itself into a mudhole. By the time I reached Spillway Road, the clouds had rolled over to show their dark bellies, and the rain was coming down in sideways sheets, sucking little plumes of white smoke from the asphalt. The wind picked up and snakes of gray water slithered across the paved ribbon of highway. I tell you, at this point, I started seriously regretting my decision to ride to work. I soaked down to the skivvies in seconds, and the rain buffeted the bike across the lane and nearly off into the woodsy roadside. Somehow I held on, but there were moments in there when I felt like a spider clinging to her web during a typhoon.
The address Jonathan gave me was inside something called the Crab Orchard Estates. I wasn’t sure what that was—it sounded like some kind of nineties real estate agent’s wet dream—but I had a sense of where it must be. I aimed the bike toward the Crab Orchard wildlife preserve and took the shoreline road until I spied a gated community spreading its way west and north along the edge of the water. There was a check-in box with a black man sitting inside. When I pulled up, he leaned closer to the window and slid back the glass.
He said, “Little damp today.”
“I don’t know, I’m thinking of building an ark.”
“Probably more practical than, say, a motorcycle.”
“Probably,” I said. Everybody was a comedian. “Let me ask you, you know where I can find Temple Beckett’s place?”
“She know you’re coming?”
“What I’m told.”
This was getting down to business. He produced a clipboard and looked holes in it. He flipped some pages and put the clipboard back on its hook. He picked up a phone and dialed, but I guess no one answered because after a moment he set it down again, too.
“She ain’t called down about anyone, and I can’t raise the house. What’d you say your name is?”
“She’d probably have called me Slim.”
“That a coal mine thing?”
“How’d you guess?”
“You got a bucket tied to your scooter there,” he said. He sighed. “I let you go up and something happens—something ain’t supposed to happen, I mean—I’m the one’s gotta answer for it.”
“Well, maybe I could leave something here with you. You know, some kind of collateral.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
“Leave something? Like what?”
“My union card, maybe.”
“You even got a union card?”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t think so. These days, I don’t know anyone’s got one. They’re like unicorns.”
“Getting to be.”
He waved his hand at me.
“Go on up. Just don’t do anything come back on me,” he said, and gave me some sense of the direction I should go. Then he said, “You know, I used to be in the mines my own self. Worked a scratchback mine up at Olney years ago. My father worked it, and his brother, and some cousins of mine, and I swore I never would but damned if I didn’t. I’ll tell you, that was something like a hell on earth.”
“Five-foot seam?”
He leaned forward in the window a little. The rain beaded on his short, silver hair and eyebrows.
“Lemme tell you, we’d have strangled our mothers for five-foot coal. You ever heard of Kelvin’s Scratch-Ass Mine?”
“Can’t say.”
“Well, that was us. The Scratch-Ass Boys. Four feet in most places. Couple three-and-a-half foot spots. Like that old song, ‘Thirty Inch Coal.’ You know that one?”
“I heard it once or twice.”
“Ridin’ on a lizard in thirty-inch coal,” he sang. His voice was soft but deep, and it sounded like history. “It was like that. You raised your eyebrows, you’d hit the ceiling. You got so you had scabs all up and down your back and spine and on your knees and hands. My wife ain’t like those scabs on my hands. Calluses, neither. Bought me this cream to use. Smelled like some kind of flower, lilacs, and wouldn’t you know that’s what those other Scratch-Ass sonsofbitches ended up nicknaming me. Lilac. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, and after twenty years I finally did, and it’s nice not being Lilac anymore, but look where I ended up. Sitting in a damn box all day.”
“Least it’s got a high ceiling,” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s dull. Go on up, Slim. But behave.”
I promised to behave. I thanked him and started to roar away. He started to push shut his window. I stopped and said, “Hey, one more thing. I grew up around here, but I’ve never been to this development before. You happen to remember what used to be here?”
“Sure. Once upon a time, this was the old Grendel Mine company town.”
“I thought I knew it. That was a Roy Galligan mine, memory serves.”
He nodded.
“Still is, technically. The mine’s up the hill there apiece, across from that King Coal outfit. You can kinda make out what’s left of the tipple. It’s dead, but Galligan still owns the land lease.”
“Galligan and Luster. I guess they own most of them around here these days.”
“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t know Luster. Heard his name, of course, but that’s the extent of it. Roy Galligan, though, him I know.”
“I can tell from your tone you don’t like him,” I said.
He chuckled. “He ain’t on my holiday shopping list, no. You might think you’ve met a sonofabitch in your time, but let me tell you, you ain’t. That old man is so bad, they’ll have to
come up with a new definition of the term just so ordinary bad men won’t get all full of false piety.”
“That’s pretty good,” I said.
“Thanks. You sit in this box all day, you have time to think about stuff like that and how to say it. Good old Roy,” he said, but he didn’t mean it. Nobody who said “Good old Roy” ever meant it.
I thanked him again and waved and puttered through the gate, which opened for me on its mechanical arm. Even with his directions in mind, it took a bit of getting lost on the shiny loops of paved road before I found my bearings. Sure enough, this was the old Grendel Mine company town. Way back when, it’d been the largest and most modern of its kind in the area, basically a self-sufficient community. There’d been company housing and a company store and company script stamped with the name of the company president and streets named after the important coal men of the time. The town had a mayor—who reported directly to the mine owner—and its own police force. The only thing it didn’t have was a bill of rights for the residents. That’s what the union was for, and the rifles. Anyway, it was gone now. The streets were renamed things like Candy Cane Lane and Golf Club Way, and the old lake shanties and company shacks had been torn down and replaced with starter mansions. South was the Duck Neck, and the marina with white boats resting uneasily in their slips, and more of the preserve. Up the piney slopes to the southeast was another mine, the old Grendel colliery, closed now these twenty years or more.
After a while, I managed to find Temple’s address. It was at the far end of the development, abutting a wall of shingle oaks and, closer to the lake, bald cypress and tupelo and piles of duckweed. The house was an imposing gray foursquare with a lot of big, rectangular windows and a triangular projection like a silver toque near the back of the house. A mahogany-hulled Chris-Craft runabout bobbed near the quay, and a little red sports car with an eggshell ragtop and beaming chrome side pipes crouched in the bricked driveway. There didn’t seem to be any airplanes or rocket ships around, but maybe they were in the back. I went up and knocked. After a moment, the door opened and a woman appeared.
She didn’t look happy. That was the first thing that struck you. She was a small woman with white hair and wrinkled eyes, though she didn’t look old enough for either, and her mouth was clenched like a fist. She was dressed in jeans and a blouse with a light pattern, and there was a wooden disk on a twine cord around her neck. She put a hand on her hip and frowned and said, “You the man from the mine?”
I told her I was the man from the mine. I said, “You’re Temple Beckett?”
“Don’t be an idiot.” She closed the door, leaving me in the downpour. Bad guess, then. I stood there, getting as wet as a fish’s teeth. A long time later, the hard-bitten woman opened the door again.
“All right, come in.”
I came in. The hallway was dark wood and blue tile painted with little flowers, and it was what you’d call a good-size space. I’ve been on smaller runways. A life-size painting of a redheaded woman on horseback took up one wall. The other was partially covered by some kind of woven wall hanging, African or maybe Honduran. On either side of the doorway, widemouthed vases coughed dried ornamental grass, and the ceiling was fitted with a segmented skylight that ran the length of the space and let in the day’s stormy light.
“I didn’t know any of this was back here,” I said to the woman.
She handed me a towel and said, “That’s what the gate is for.”
The sitting room was pretty big, too. You could have parked a bus in it and not missed the space. The ceilings couldn’t have been higher than twenty feet. The furniture was farmhouse, but expensive-looking farmhouse, and tasteful, as were the knickknacks and framed pictures. There were photos of an older woman—Temple Beckett’s mother, maybe—but none of the old man. At least none that I could see. The floors were polished walnut, stained very dark, and the walls were lined with bookshelves so tall you’d need a man from the circus to bring down the high volumes. Like in the hallway, the ceiling was pitted with skylights, these as deep as wells, and the floors were draped with worn Oriental rugs. As I often was, I was again struck by the sheer amount of money in the world and how much trouble the world went through to make sure none of it ended up in my pockets.
I stood there, dripping on a rug. The wrinkle-eyed woman frowned at me, then told me to wait and went out again. I missed her immediately and consoled myself drying my hair with the towel. There was a picture of Guy Beckett on the coffee table, and I picked it up for a better look. He looked the same. The doughboy was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it was missing, too. I was still thinking about it when the door opened again and a second woman came into the room.
“Put that picture down, please.”
She was about my age, early forties, though I had to look at her hands to tell it. She was good-looking, too. Good-looking is putting it mildly, maybe. I looked around vaguely for a priest to strangle. She was tall and lean, with the kind of green eyes a lazy novelist would describe as “piercing.” Her copper hair was pulled back from her face with a strip of brown cloth. I imagined that its more honest self was touched here and there with gray, but that was just a guess. The rest of her was dressed like a pioneer fashion model in a deerskin jacket with turquoise beads sewn on the pockets, a powder blue roll-neck sweater, faded jeans, and buskins made of the same stuff as the jacket.
I put down the picture. She looked at me and it and frowned the kind of desperate, exhausted frown that turns the room upside down and shakes the sympathy from its pockets.
“You’re Slim?”
It was Luster’s daughter, all right. You could see him in her, the way she moved and spoke. She held herself like the native she was—rock-shouldered, fighting shyness, full of Midwestern grit—but she held herself like a native who’d spent time and sweat and money to unlearn it all. Mostly money, probably. She didn’t want to shake hands.
“You found us,” she said. She didn’t sound any too thrilled about it. “I guess I should offer you a drink. You people like to drink, don’t you?”
“Ma’am?”
“Coal miners.”
I’m a big boy who knows when he’s being picked on, so I didn’t take offense. I said, “I’ll take coffee if you have it and it’s not too much trouble.”
She frowned some more in that beautiful way of hers, but nodded. She summoned someone named Susan, and the wrinkle-eyed woman came back. Temple asked her to put on a pot. Susan looked at me like something she wanted to sweep into the street and walked quickly out.
I said, “I’m just going to say it. I don’t think she likes me.”
“She doesn’t. But don’t take it personally. She doesn’t like anyone.”
“Even you?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I’m not sure. Frankly, she’s had a hard life. In some ways, terrible. But she’s been a great help to me, and I’m willing to put up with her moods, even when she goes a little sour on me.”
“So she takes care of you, you take care of her?”
Temple sat down on the sofa. It was one of these things swallows you like a biblical whale. She crossed her legs at the knee and pointed one of the buskins into space. She gestured for me to sit, and I spread my towel on a leather chair across from her and settled into it. The white leather on the armrests smelled like wealth and comfort.
Temple said, “A bit crude, but that’s basically it. Isn’t there anyone you take care of?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“A kid?”
“Daughter. She just turned twelve yesterday. Or thirty. It’s hard to tell sometimes.”
I glanced around the big room. Rather subtly, I thought.
She shook her head and grinned meanly at me and flipped her hair. She had a sexy, toothy look about her that reminded me a little of Gene Tierney. I wanted to put on my finest JCPenney’s suit and comb my hair and solve her mystery for her.
She said, “You can just ask me, you know?”
I felt myself blushing. I
looked at her and smiled and shrugged.
“No young ones of your own, I guess?”
“No.”
“Sorry. This really isn’t my thing. Private-detecting, I mean.”
“I guess not.”
“I tried to convince your dad.”
Temple said, “That’s not always so easy. Believe me, I know. My father tends to get what he wants.”
“Well, I think what he wanted was a detective of some kind. Instead, he got me.”
She waved her hand at me. She wore a ring fixed with a chunk of black stone big enough to choke an elephant. “I think what he probably wanted was you,” she said. “And here you sit. Big as life and wet as the lake. At least he seems to like you.”
“More than he likes your husband?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“I don’t know. The way you said it, I guess. Your voice. It didn’t sound like you were talking about yourself. Top of that, your husband’s a reporter, and I have a sense that Mr. Luster has a fairly low opinion of the fourth estate. I think maybe he thinks Guy is out to get him.”
“He said that to you?”
“Not in so many words, but yeah. This story he and Dwayne Mays were working on, for example.”
“I don’t think . . .”
The coffee must have already been on because just then Susan came back in with a tray of it. In front of Temple she set a cup made of paper-thin bone china. Me, she gave a thick porcelain mug that might have lived in a garage for a few years, or maybe the crawlspace under the house. Susan dipped her head facetiously at Temple and went out again.
Temple watched her go. She looked at the door for a while after it shut, then turned back to me with hard eyes and said slowly, “I want be honest with you.”
“Okay.”
“It’s no offense, okay, but I don’t need you here. I don’t need you and I don’t want you. Let’s be up front about that.”
“Seems reasonable, really.”
She ignored that. “You’re my father’s idiotic idea. Not mine. I tried talking him out of this, but he wouldn’t listen. He never listens. And here you are, without the faintest idea what you’re doing or where you’re going or what to do, and none of the experience even to know that you don’t know it. You don’t, do you?”
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