Ivy made a show of staring at her watch. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Look at the time.’
She was usually a pretty good liar – she’d always thought that this was one of the hallmarks of a good cop, another arrow in the quiver – but this time the line sounded as phony as a drug suspect saying he didn’t know how the crack got into the front pocket of his jeans.
Ivy stood. She hugged Carl. Francesca Lindor seemed to sense an opportunity slipping away, and did her best little-dog act to get in between them.
‘Great to see you, Carl.’
‘Let’s not make it so long next time.’
Francesca Lindor nuzzled Ivy’s leg.
‘I won’t.’
‘Give my best to your mother.’
‘I will.’
‘And if you get me those pictures I’ll put a mind to it,’ he said. ‘When you get old the memories take a little more excavating.’
‘I appreciate it, Chief.’
Before the dog could start singing spirituals Ivy made her way quickly across the porch, out the door, and all the way to her SUV.
She opened the driver door, looked back at the house. The dog was now sitting in the front window.
Ivy looked at the silhouette of those perfectly peaked ears, and thought about this dog at a shelter, knowing full well that a big skittish dog was never going to find a forever home. An eighty-pound former police dog, at that.
Damn it.
Why did you look into those eyes, Ivy Lee?
It was over. She closed the door, walked back to the house.
Francesca Lindor was officially her dog.
They were still a quarter mile from the house when Francesca Lindor began to pace in the back of the SUV.
When Ivy pulled into the drive and opened the hatch the dog bolted from the vehicle and began to conduct a perimeter search, sensing and sense-logging all the animals on the property, including the half-dozen dogs who had once lived there, marking the property as her own every few minutes.
Estate fully claimed, Ivy opened the back door to her house. Francesca Lindor hesitated until Ivy entered. The dog soon followed.
As always, the sight of Amos’s empty water bowl caught Ivy’s eye. Francesca Lindor was on it in a flash.
‘You know what?’
Francesca Lindor barked once.
‘Exactly,’ Ivy said. ‘We’re going to need a bigger bowl.’
She sat at her computer late into the night, working on the photo of Delia. She knew she would have to stop one day but she wasn’t quite ready. She still felt that the answer to what happened to her sister could be found in the photograph.
Before shutting it all down for the night she glanced again at the autopsy report of the latest victim.
Dr William Hardy, she thought.
Forensic psychologist.
She would make the call.
37
The girl sat on the settee near the window, a book in her lap. She looked small and frail.
‘Good morning,’ Jakob said. He crossed the room, put down the tray with the tea and the fresh rolls. ‘Did you sleep well?’
She shook her head.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t want to be here anymore.’
Jakob sat down next to her.
‘May I ask why?’
She shrugged, said nothing.
‘You can leave at any time, my dear.’
‘I can?’
‘Of course.’
She glanced across the room, at the door that led to the hallway. ‘But the door is always locked.’
‘I’m afraid you are mistaken.’
The girl got up from the settee, crossed the room, tried the door. It pulled open with ease.
She stood in the doorway, perhaps unsure what to do now that the path was available to her. She closed the door, returned to her seat by the window.
Jakob pointed across the field.
‘Do you see that square of land? The one with the young saplings?’
‘Yes.’
‘That is yours. And it will be for all eternity.’
Jakob could see a sheen come to her eyes. She was an emotional sort. He’d known this since seeing her for the first time at the food bank where she had given her time. It was one of the reasons she was who she was, and did the things she was compelled, by her heart, to do. It was why he had chosen her. It was why, ultimately, she had come to him.
‘Nothing has changed,’ he said.
Jakob stood, crossed the room. Near the door was a table and a brocade satchel. He returned with the bag, undid the clasps.
Inside were neatly banded stacks of currency. He watched the girl as she peered into the bag, saw her eyes widen. He heard a slight catch in her breath. Considering her heritage, her life as it had been lived to this moment, he understood.
‘The bag has always been in your room, and the door has always been open. You can leave whenever you want, and you can take this with you.’
‘This is a promise?’
‘On my honor.’
She took a deep breath, slowly exhaled. ‘I’m afraid.’
‘There is no need to be afraid.’
‘Can I see it again?’
She was not talking about the money. She was talking about her grove. ‘Of course.’
They rose, crossed the room to the large windows overlooking the property behind Veldhoeve.
‘Tell me about her.’
Jakob knew what she meant. He asked anyway. ‘Who, my dear?’
‘The first girl,’ she said softly. ‘Tell me her story.’
‘Of course,’ Jakob said. He sat down next to her on the settee, extended his arms. She nestled against his chest.
‘Her name was Eva,’ he began.
Jakob told her the tale, as it had been told since the beginning. He told her about Eva’s journey, about her family, about the first time she fell in love.
‘Would you like to see the drawings again?’
The girl nodded.
They took the back stairs up to the gallery. As always, the girl sat in front of the Virtues, rapt, her eyes glistening.
Sometime later, Jakob walked her back down to her room, and held her until she fell asleep.
When he left, he locked the door.
38
Will had most of his hardware store purchases arranged on the dining room floor. If he had the energy, he would get started on the refinishing later in the day. He just needed a few more things before he could do that.
The closest big box stores – Target, Wal-Mart, Home Depot – were in neighboring Geauga County.
He locked the doors at Godwin Hall, walked back to Red Oak, up to the second floor.
Even though he knew the answer, by rote, he would ask Detta if she wanted to accompany him. He left his room, walked down the hall, knocked. The door was ajar.
‘Detta?’
Silence.
He pushed open the door. Detta was on the bed, her ever-present earbuds in place. She acknowledged him, but did not take out her headphones.
‘I need to get a few things,’ Will said, louder than he had to. ‘There’s a Wal-Mart not too far away. Do you want to go?’
Maybe it was just cabin fever, maybe it was out of boredom, but for whatever reason, Detta grabbed her shoulder bag, slid off the bed, and marched out of the room.
Will followed.
As Will walked the aisles at Wal-Mart, picking up some inexpensive sheets to use as drop cloths, among other things, he found that he couldn’t get his mind off Eli. He wondered what the man’s life had been like, what he had been like as a young soldier, what he had done for a living after the service.
He wondered if the man had been at the bottom of those steps a long time, if he had suffered at all.
‘Miss?’
The word brought Will back to the moment. There was some sort of commotion in the next aisle. As Will walked around the end cap he saw two older people, a man and a woman, looking down the ais
le. Their expressions seemed to hover between interest and fear.
Will looked.
Detta was at the far end of the aisle, standing next to a shopping cart. In the cart were five or six bottles of wine, potato chips, a few packages of Oreos. As Will took a few steps closer he noticed that one of the wine bottles in the cart was on its side, and had no cap. It looked to be empty.
When Will looked at his daughter’s right hand he understood. Detta had another bottle in hand, and it, too, was well on its way to being empty. He could smell the alcohol from ten feet away.
‘Detta?’
She glanced over, her eyes unfocused. She brought the bottle to her lips, took a long drink.
One of the Wal-Mart employees, a rather stout young woman in a blue smock, was rapidly approaching Detta from the other end of the aisle. Will could see by the employee’s body language that this was not going to go well.
Will managed to get between the young woman and his daughter just in time. He put a hand on the employee’s shoulder.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m her father.’
The young woman backed off a little, but did not leave. She brought her walkie-talkie to her lips and said something in retail employee code. You did not have to be in the business to know that she was calling security.
Will stepped closer to Detta. As he approached, Detta took yet another long drink from the bottle. A quick glance at the shopping cart showed that one of the bottles was indeed empty. It meant she had consumed an entire bottle of wine, and then some, in less than fifteen minutes.
‘Honey.’
His daughter pulled away from him.
‘Don’t you touch me.’
‘Detta, we can talk about this. You don’t have to—’
‘Leave me alone.’ Detta wiped at the tears that were gathering in her eyes. ‘I fucking hate this place, this town, these people with their pancake breakfasts.’
Will glanced over his daughter’s shoulder. There was a small crowd collecting at the end of the aisle.
‘Detta, we don’t have to do this. It’s not your fault. None of it.’
‘My fault? Of course it’s not my fault. How could any of it be my fault?’
At this, his daughter began to knock items off the shelf. Luckily, they were mostly plastic dishes and other picnic items. Her face began to redden even more deeply. As she waved her arms, wine came flying out of the bottle.
Behind her was now a large young man. Will was sure he was security for the store.
‘Are you her father?’ the man asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Sir, you’re going to have to get control of her, or I will.’
Will took out his wallet, handed his Visa to the stout female employee. She looked at her boss, who nodded, then took the card. She backed up to the end of the aisle.
‘It’s your fault,’ Detta said. ‘All of it. It’s your fault for meeting that boy, that psycho boy. It’s your fault that you let him know where we lived. It’s your fault that he came to our house and started that fire. You killed Mom. You killed my mother.’
‘Let me help, Detta.’
‘What, like you helped that boy? With your behavioral therapy? Do you want me to do some yoga breathing?’
Will opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.
There were no words to say.
They spent less than an hour in the store’s loss prevention office.
The damage came to only forty-six dollars. The officer declined to call the local police, even though Detta’s consumption of alcohol was a violation of the law.
When they returned to Red Oak Detta walked to her room and slammed the door.
39
He was a big man.
His dead father spoke to him from the shadows, latticed by the soft gray moonlight streaming in the mobile home’s front windows. In his lap was a package, wrapped in brown butcher’s paper. It was closed with strong twine.
He came home from the war in June of that year. Had a dishonorable discharge.
‘What did he do to merit the discharge?’ Jakob asked. His voice sounded small, like a child’s.
As I understand it, he was a thief. He was caught trying to steal from a commissary. He continued to ply that dark trade around Holland County.
‘Did he steal from us?’
He never got the chance. He came looking for employment, but we knew of his past, his misdeeds. When he was denied, he took to threats.
He came to his end in September of that year. When they found him in two pieces on the railroad tracks he had near him the spiked oaken barrel and silver coins.
‘Avarice.’
Yes.
Avarice was one of Jakob’s favorite drawings.
‘What came of his passing?’
It was wartime, and the man was seen by many to be a traitor. He was quickly forgotten. To the good people of Abbeville his passing was considered to be the harvest of black seed.
‘Where is the man now?’
Do you know the path from the main barn to the river’s edge?
Jakob had walked it many times. Just that morning in fact. The path was laid with huge flagstones. In between the stones there was never a problem with weeds and grass.
Jakob understood. He’d heard this story many times as a boy, but never tired of it.
He sat in silence, and readied the pistol.
When the man awakened in the chair he glanced around, disoriented, then looked down to see two open bottles of whiskey at his feet. He tried to focus on the man sitting across from him. When he saw Jakob in the dim light he perhaps thought of standing to confront this intruder. Then he saw the firearm.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
Jakob lifted the pistol. ‘Drink.’
With a trembling hand the man reached down, picked up one of the bottles. He brought it to his lips, tilted it upwards.
‘More.’
The man tried to drink more. He spit much of it back. He was moments from passing out again.
‘You can no longer live with yourself.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You and the girl,’ Jakob said.
The man’s small eyes darted back and forth between Jakob and the two items on the table in front of him. He weaved in the chair.
‘You’re fucking crazy.’
‘A very fine line,’ Jakob said.
Jakob pointed again at the bottle, this time with the barrel of the pistol.
The man once more tilted the bottle to his lips. Half the whiskey poured down his chin.
Jakob stood, walked behind the man.
In front of him, on the coffee table, was the classified section of the day’s newspaper and a magic marker. Jakob put the magic marker in the man’s hand. When the man dropped it Jakob put the pistol to the side of the man’s head. The man picked up the marker.
‘You will write her name.’
‘Whose name?’
Jakob told him. With great effort, the man repeated the name on the newsprint until he could no longer write.
Jakob folded the paper, sat down. It was time.
‘You and Mr Combs.’
‘Who?’
‘Soort zoekt sort,’ Jakob said.
The man tried to focus his eyes, to make sense of something he could not understand. Jakob translated.
‘Kind seeks kind.’
Jakob continued. He felt the presence of his fathers behind him, smelled the sweat of their labors. It was important that this man knew what was happening to him. It had always been important.
‘You have lived a useless life. You have grown nothing, and you will leave nothing behind. There are some people who say – many people, to be fair, and I would not presume to judge them regarding this – that God makes no mistakes. Would you agree with this assessment?’
Silence.
‘I do not agree. I believe God has made many mistakes, but has done so on purpose. They are puzzles for us to figure out. Comple
x equations.
‘Think of the many who have not had the opportunities you’ve had. Your general health and luck of the draw to be born in such a place as this.’
The man began to cry.
‘No. You’ve chosen to live a life of larceny and degradation. A life of vice.’
Jakob was moved by the symmetry and beauty of it. He did not need the flesh, just the blood. He uncapped the flacon, set it on the table.
With his gloved hand he placed the fearsome device in the man’s left hand.
Moments later, the razor-sharp steel began to whir.
40
What had she done?
She didn’t even remember what she’d said. All she could recall was that she was shouting, and that people were staring at her.
And she remembered the devastated look on her father’s face. She’d hurt him badly.
They hadn’t said a word when they got home.
She hadn’t slept at all.
The morning after the Wal-Mart incident Detta got dressed before 8 a.m. and left Red Oak. She walked idly past the small stores – a gun store, an old hardware store, a coffee shop, a Realtor – and wondered if this little town was going to be the rest of her life. She wanted to talk to her mother. She wanted to crawl into a hole.
She wanted to die.
Uncle Joe’s Sweet Shoppe was a small cedar-shingled storefront, second last of the stores on the north side of the square.
The window display at Uncle Joe’s boasted leftover decorations from Easter, with baskets full of green hay and a three-foot stuffed bunny who had seen better days. Its left eye was missing.
As Detta entered the store she heard a bell tinkle overhead, and was greeted by the aromas of chocolate and spun sugar. Beneath it were the sharp fragrances of cherry and raspberry and orange and mint.
Standing at the back of the shop, next to the four-stool fountain, were five teenagers; three girls and two boys. Two of the girls looked like identical twins, pale and faux-Goth. They both had smudgy eyes, like extras in The Walking Dead.
The third girl was short and stocky, her head shaved on one side, the other side swept up into a purple Mohawk. She wore mauve lipstick and a magenta midriff T-shirt, at least two sizes too small. It exposed a cantilevered roll of pasty white flesh over her spangled belt.
Murder Scene Page 18