Indelible

by Karin Slaughter

  Sara waited until the woman was in the car, but Nell held up a hand to keep her from speaking. “Put an ad in the paper,” she said. “No sense letting those dogs waste away out back when there’s people who know how to care for them.”

  “What are you going to tell your neighbor when he gets home from work?”

  “I guess they broke their chains,” Nell shrugged. “I’d better go check on Jared.”

  “Nell—”

  “Don’t ask me questions, Sara. I know I talk too much, but there’s some things you need to hear from Jeffrey.”

  “He doesn’t seem interested in telling me much of anything.”

  “He’s over at his mama’s,” Nell said. “Don’t worry, she won’t be home for another few hours. She grabs lunch at the hospital on Tuesdays.”

  “Nell—”

  Nell held up her hand, walking away.

  After walking up and down the street twice, Sara realized she could always look at the mailboxes instead of trying to remember what Jeffrey’s mother’s house looked like. She found the one marked “Tolliver” five houses down from Nell’s and hoped to God no one had been watching her make a fool of herself. She felt especially stupid when she recognized Robert’s truck parked in the driveway.

  In the daylight, the house looked more run-down than Sara had thought the first time she had seen it. Several coats of paint had been added over the years, giving the siding a rippled effect. The lawn was a depressing brown and the spindly tree in the front yard looked like it was about to fall over.

  The front door was wide open, the screen door unlocked, but still she knocked, saying, “Jeffrey?”

  There was no response, and Sara walked into the house just as she heard a door slam in the back.

  She repeated, “Jeffrey?”

  “Sara?” he asked, coming into the family room. He had a hand-held propane torch in one hand and an adjustable wrench in the other.

  “Nell said you were here.”

  “Yeah,” he said, not exactly looking at her. He held up the torch. “The pipe in the kitchen burst about two years ago. She’s been washing dishes in the bathroom ever since.” She did not respond, and he motioned her back to the kitchen. “I’m gonna finish up with this, then go over to the jail and check on Robert. I just don’t buy what he said yesterday. I know there’s something he’s not telling me.”

  “Lot of that going around,” Sara mumbled.

  “What?”

  She shrugged, looking at the mess on the floor. He had taken apart the entire faucet just to replace the pipe. She asked, “Did you turn off the water?”

  “That’s what I was doing outside,” he told her, sitting on the floor. He took some sand cloth and sanded an end piece of copper pipe with the methodic precision of an amateur.

  Sara sat across from him, trying not to be critical of the work he had already performed. Had her father been here, he would have called Jeffrey a girl.

  There was a note of pride in Jeffrey’s voice when he said, “I went ahead and replaced everything.”

  “Hm,” she mumbled. “Need help?”

  He cut his eyes at her, and she gathered this was something like driving in that only men did it. Considering her father had taught both Sara and Tessa safety procedures for using propane and acetylene torches before they could comfortably say the words, this was more than slightly insulting.

  Still, she let it pass, saying, “I didn’t tell you last night—”

  “About that,” he interrupted. “I’m really sorry. I promise you, I don’t usually drink like that.”

  “I didn’t think you did.”

  “As for the other…” His voice trailed off, and Sara picked up the can of flux, needing to do something with her hands.

  She said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hold you to it.”

  “Hold me to what?”

  She shrugged. “What you said.”

  “What did I say?” he asked, his tone of voice wary.

  “Nothing,” she told him, trying to open the can.

  “I was talking about what we did,” he said, then corrected, “I mean, what I did.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not,” he said, taking the flux and opening it for her. “I’m not…” He paused, as if searching for a word. “I’m not usually that selfish.”

  “Forget about it,” she told him, but somehow his half-ass apology made her feel better. She dipped the brush into the flux and daubed it onto one of the elbows he had already sanded. “I want to talk to you about the skeleton.”

  His attitude changed completely, and she could see his defenses go up. “What about it?”

  “It’s a woman. A young woman.”

  He gave her a careful look. “Are you sure?”

  “The shape of the head is obvious. Men usually have larger skulls.” She took the measuring tape and measured the distance from the sink to the cutoff valve at the floor. “Men’s skulls are heavier, too. Usually with a bony ridge above the eyes.” She measured a length of pipe and clamped the cutter at the correct spot. “Men have longer canine teeth and wider vertebrae,” she continued, spinning the cutter until the pipe broke. “Then there’s the pelvis. Women’s are wider for child-bearing.” She lightly sanded the pipe. “Plus, there’s the sub-pubic angle. If it measures less than ninety degrees, then it’s male, more than ninety, it’s female.”

  He put flux on the pipe as Sara slipped on a pair of safety glasses. His face remained blank as he shoved the elbow onto the pipe, and he waited until Sara had used the flint striker to light the torch before asking, “How do you know she was young?”

  Sara adjusted the torch before waving the flame over the pipe, heating it enough to make the flux boil. “The pelvis tells the story. The public bones meet in the front of the pelvis. If the bone surface has bumps or ridges, that means it belongs to a young person. Older people have smoother bones.”

  She turned off the torch and threaded out the solder, watching it melt into the joint. She continued, “There’s also a depression area in the public bone. If a woman has given birth, there’s a notch where the bones separated in order to allow room for the baby’s head.”

  Jeffrey seemed to be holding his breath. When Sara did not continue, he asked, “Did she have a baby?”

  “Yes,” she told him. “She did.”

  Jeffrey put the pipe down in front of him.

  “Who’s Julia?”

  He exhaled slowly. “Didn’t Nell tell you?”

  “She said to ask you.”

  Jeffrey sat back against the cabinet, leaning his hands on his knees. He would not look at her. “It was a long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “Ten years, I guess. Maybe more.”

  “And?”

  “And she was…I don’t know, it sounds bad now, but she was kind of like the town slut.” He wiped his mouth. “She did things. You know, touched you.” He glanced at her, then looked away. “Rumor was she’d give a blow job if you bought her something. Clothes or lunch or whatever. She didn’t have much, so…”

  “How old was she?”

  “Our age,” he said. “She was in the same class as me and Robert.”

  Sara saw where he was going with this. “Did you ever buy her anything?”

  He looked offended. “No,” he said. “I didn’t have to pay for that kind of stuff.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  “I want you to tell me what happened.”

  “She just left one day,” he said with a forced shrug. “She was there one day and gone the next.”

  “There’s more to it than that.”

  “I can’t…” He let his voice trail off. “I found this yesterday in the cave,” he said, taking something out of his pocket. Sara saw a necklace with a charm on it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me then?”

  He opened the locket and looked inside. “I don’t know. I just—” He stopped.
“I just didn’t want you to know one more bad thing about me.”

  “What bad thing?”

  “Talk,” he said, meeting her eyes. “It’s just talk, Sara. The same old bullshit that’s been following me around since I got here. You get to a point where you’re guilty of one thing and people think you’re guilty of another.”

  “What do they think you’re guilty of?”

  Jeffrey held out the chain. “I showed it to Hoss. He didn’t want anything to do with it.”

  Sara looked at the cheap gold heart and the pictures inside. The children were still infants, probably only a few weeks out of the hospital.

  Jeffrey said, “She wore it all the time. Everybody saw her with it, not just me.” He gave a harsh laugh. “The thing was, nobody knew what she had done to get it. No one would cop to it, you know? She’d show up in a new dress at school one day and we’d start talking shit about who bought it for her, what she did to get it. This”—he indicated the necklace—“she showed it to everybody. She didn’t know any better. She thought it was expensive. It’s not even solid gold, it’s plate.” His shoulders dropped. “There’s no telling what she did for it.”

  “It looks old to me,” Sara told him. “Not an antique, but old.”

  He shrugged.

  “What about the photographs?”

  He took back the locket and looked at the pictures inside. “I’ve got no idea.”

  “So, yesterday in the cave, you knew it was her?” Sara asked, wondering why he had not said anything at the time.

  “I didn’t want to think it was her,” Jeffrey said. “I’ve been feeling guilty all my life for things I didn’t do. Things I had no control over.” He gave a long, sad sigh. “My parents, the house I lived in, the clothes I wore. I always felt so ashamed of everything, wanted to show people a better part of me than my circumstances.” He looked around the kitchen. “That’s why I left here, why I was so anxious to get away and never come back. I was sick of being Jimmy Tolliver’s son. I was sick of walking down the street and feeling everybody’s eyes on me, waiting for me to mess up.”

  Sara waited.

  “You see the better part of me.”

  She nodded, because she could not deny this, despite what reason would dictate.

  “Why?” he asked, and he seemed like he really wanted to know.

  “I don’t…” She let her voice trail off, giving a shrug. “I wish I could say. My brain keeps telling me all these things….” She did not elaborate. “I just feel it in here,” she said, tapping her fingers to her chest. “The way you make me feel when you make love to me and the way you double-knot my shoes so they won’t come untied and the way you listen—you’re doing it now, really listening to what I have to say because you honestly want to know what I’m thinking.” She thought of the soldier’s letter he had read to her what seemed like a lifetime ago, and couldn’t explain it any better than, “I guess that you see me, too.”

  He put his hand over hers. “This thing with the bones. It’s going to blow wide open.”

  “How?”

  “Julia,” he told her, and it seemed to take great effort for him to say her name. “I need you here, Sara. I need you seeing me the way I really am.”

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “I can’t,” he told her. She thought she saw tears in his eyes, but he looked away. “It’s a mess,” he said. “I thought maybe Robert had…”

  “Robert had what?”

  She saw his throat work as he swallowed. “Robert says he killed her.”

  Sara put her hand to her chest. “What?”

  “He told me yesterday.”

  “Morning?”

  “No, after we found the bones.” Sara started to tell him that the sequence did not make sense, but Jeffrey continued, “I showed him the necklace and he said he bashed her head in with a rock.”

  Sara sat back, trying to absorb what he was saying. “Did you tell him that her skull was broken?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did he know?”

  “He might have gotten it from Hoss. Why?”

  “Because that’s not how she died,” Sara said. “The skull fracture came at least three weeks before she died.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” Sara told him. “Bone is living tissue. The fracture was already healing when she was killed.”

  “It looked like she’d been hit in the head.”

  “That was from something else. Maybe a rock fell in the cave or an animal…” She did not want to tell him what the animals could have done. “Absent scalp and tissue, I can’t tell you whether or not she was hit in the head immediately before she died, but even with that, her hyoid bone was broken.”

  “Her what?”

  “The hyoid,” she said, putting her fingers to her throat. “It’s here, a U-shaped bone in the center. It doesn’t just break on its own. There has to be significant pressure there, some sort of blunt force or manual strangulation.” She watched Jeffrey, trying to gauge his reaction. “It wasn’t just fractured, it was broken in two.”

  He sat up. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ll show you the bone if you want.”

  “No,” he said, tucking the necklace back into his pocket. “Why would he say he killed her when he didn’t?”

  “That was my next question.”

  “Maybe if he’s lying about that, he’s lying about the other night.”

  “Why?” Sara asked. “Why would he lie about either?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeffrey told her. “But I’ve got to find out.” He indicated the sink. “Can you finish this?”

  Sara looked at the mess. “I guess.”

  He started to leave, then turned around. “I meant it, Sara.”

  She looked up. “Meant what?”

  “What I said last night,” he told her. “I do love you.”

  Despite the horrors of the last few days, she felt a smile on her face. “Go talk to Robert,” she told him. “I’ll finish this and meet you back at Nell’s.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tuesday

  Jeffrey pulled down the visor of Robert’s truck, trying to get the sun out of his eyes. He was not exactly hungover, but a small headache was sitting right behind his nose like a hot dime. Like her husband, May Tolliver had passed on one thing to her son for which Jeffrey was grateful: unless he got rip-roaring drunk, he never got hungover. It was a gift as well as a curse. In college, while Jeffrey had been able to drink anyone under the table and still be able to perform at football practice the next day, most of the guys had stopped their heavy drinking by the end of the first quarter for fear of getting kicked off the team. Jeffrey had taken a few years more. After waking up in a hospital outside of Tuscaloosa with his hand in a cast and no memory of how he had gotten there, Jeffrey had decided to bring his drinking days to an end.

  Reggie Ray was sitting at the front desk when Jeffrey walked into the sheriff’s station. He said, “What are you doing here?”

  Jeffrey did not have time for pleasantries. “Fuck off, you little pissant.”

  Reggie stood so fast his chair fell over. “You wanna say that to my face?”

  Jeffrey had walked past the desk, but he turned around. “I thought I already had.”

  They both waited in that stupid game of chicken that men were supposed to outgrow by this age. Even knowing this, Jeffrey stood his ground. He was sick of being treated this way. No, it went further than that. He was sick of letting people treat him this way. Talking to Sara, Jeffrey had finally realized after all these years that the guilt and shame he had experienced had been his own damn doing. Sara did not see him as his father’s son. Even now, hearing the worst she could from all kinds of people, she stood by her original view of him. She had known him the least amount of time, yet she seemed to know him better than all of them rolled together, even Nell.

  Jeffrey crossed his arms, asking Reggie, “Well?”

  “Why is i
t every time you’re in town something bad happens?”

  “Luck, I guess.”

  “I don’t like you,” Reggie said.

  “Is that all you can come up with?” Jeffrey asked. “Well, guess what, you little shit, I don’t like you, either. I haven’t liked you since you walked in on your sister giving me a blow job in your father’s garage.”

  Reggie took a swing, but Jeffrey caught his fist in the palm of his hand. The impact sounded harder than it was, making a loud smack in the empty room. Jeffrey squeezed Reggie’s hand until the other man’s knees bent.

  “Asshole,” Reggie hissed, trying to get his hand back.

  Jeffrey jerked the other man forward, banging him against the desk before he let him go. The front door opened and Possum walked in, glancing at Reggie, who was doubled over, before giving Jeffrey a friendly smile as if nothing had happened the day before.

  “Possum,” Jeffrey began, feeling like a total bastard when he noticed the bruise running along the bottom of Possum’s chin.

  Possum held his friendly smile, just like always. “No big thing, Slick,” he said, patting Jeffrey on the back. “I got your change from yesterday. Don’t let me forget to give it to you.”

  “No,” Jeffrey said, thinking he had never felt so bad in his life.

  Possum moved on. “You talk to Robert?”

  “I was just going to try.”

  “Bail was set this morning,” Possum said, taking a thick envelope out of his pocket.

  Jeffrey saw a wad of cash in the envelope and took Possum a few feet down the hall. Not that Reggie Ray wasn’t listening, but he felt better having some distance from the other man.

  He said, “Possum, where’d you get that money?”

  “Borrowed it against the store,” Possum said. “Nell about had a heart attack, but we can’t leave Robert locked up like that.”

  Jeffrey felt his shame return. He had not even considered the possibility of Robert making bail, let alone helping out. “Jessie’s family’s got plenty of money,” he said. “You should let them do this.”