Nell shrugged. “She did things with boys. I don’t know, it sounds like no big deal today, but back then, you just didn’t put out.” She amended, “Well, you did it, but you sure as shit didn’t let everybody know about it.”
“I remember,” Sara said. Fear had kept her from giving in to Steve Mann, and shame had kept her from really enjoying it when she finally did.
“Julia wasn’t pretty,” Nell said. “She wasn’t plain, either, but there’s a quality girls like that have that makes them ugly. I guess it’s some sort of desperation, where they grab onto anybody they think can make them feel better about themselves.” She stared at the pictures of her family that lined the wall. “I look at Jen and it just makes me cringe sometimes because I see this need in her. She’s not even a teenager yet and she’s got this unquenchable thirst for approval.”
“Most girls are like that.”
“Are they?”
“Yes,” Sara said. “Some are better at hiding it.”
“I try to tell her she’s pretty. Possum’s just crazy about her. Went to the father-daughter dance with her at the end of school last year. My God, but that man can carry off a baby-blue tux like nobody you’ve ever seen.”
Sara laughed, imagining Possum in the tuxedo.
“She’s doing sports now,” Nell said. “Basketball, softball. It’s making a difference.”
Sara nodded. Girls who participated in sports had more self-confidence; it was a proven fact. She said, “I look back and thank God I had my mother.” Sara laughed at herself. “Not that I ever believed a word she said, but she was always telling me I could do anything I wanted to do.”
“Obviously, part of you was listening,” Nell pointed out. “You don’t get to be a doctor just because you’re pretty.”
Sara felt a tinge of a blush at the compliment.
“Anyway,” Nell said, folding and unfolding the tissue. “Julia was kind of loose. She didn’t make a secret of it, either. She thought it meant something that the boys would go with her, like they thought she was special or they loved her. Like blowing them behind the gym after school made her some kind of special. She actually bragged about it.”
“Did she ever go with Jeffrey?”
“The truth?” Nell asked.
Sara could only nod.
“The truth is, I can’t tell you. I don’t see why he would. I was giving it to him pretty regular then.” She laughed at herself. “You never know with boys that age, though. A sixteen-year-old boy is gonna pass up on getting laid? Hell, most grown men wouldn’t pass that up. Sex is sex, and they’ll do just about anything to get it.”
“Did you ever ask him about what happened?”
“I didn’t have the guts,” Nell said. “I wouldn’t have a problem now, but you know how it is when you’re young. You’re scared to say something that might piss him off and make him leave you for the next hot thing.”
“Who was the next hot thing?”
“Jessie, I thought, but in retrospect I know that he never would have done that to Robert.” Nell tucked her feet under her legs. “I don’t think he did, if you want my gut reaction. Even then, Jeffrey had this thing about him, this sort of guide that let him know the difference between right and wrong.”
“I thought he was in trouble all the time.”
“Oh, he was,” Nell said. “But he knew he was wrong. That’s what I kept after him about. He just knew better than to do the crap he did. He had to get to that point where he made the decision to listen to his gut.” She added, “Your gut’s a lot smarter than you think.”
Sara thought of her conversation with her mother yesterday. “My gut tells me to trust him.”
“Mine, too,” Nell said. “I remember when Julia came to school the next day after she said she was raped. It was horrible. She told anybody who would listen. The details just filtered through so that by lunchtime we were all thinking she was bruised and battered.” She paused. “Then I saw her in the hall, and she didn’t look that upset to me. She seemed to be enjoying the attention.” Nell gave another shrug. “The thing was, she lied all the time. Lied for attention, lied for pity. No one believed her. She probably didn’t even believe herself.”
“What did she say exactly?”
“That Robert took her to the cave, gave her some beer, loosened her up.”
“Where does Jeffrey come in?”
“Later,” Nell answered. “The story took on a life of its own, just like these things always do. He swore up and down he was with Robert when it happened, and she said sweet as you please that, by the way, Jeffrey was there, too. Said they both took turns on her.”
“She changed her story?”
“From what I heard, but gossip goes both ways. She could have been saying they were both involved from the beginning and I just heard it wrong. It was a mess. By the end of the day there were rumors she’d been gang-raped by a group of boys from Comer. Some of the football team was talking about going after them. People just go crazy with that kind of thing.”
“Were the police—” Sara stopped. “Hoss.”
“Oh, yeah. Hoss was called. Some teacher at the school overheard Julia crying about it and they called in Hoss.”
“What did he do?”
“He interviewed her, I guess. God knows he knew where she lived. Right before her father died, Hoss was there every weekend breaking up a fight between him and Lane.”
“Did he interview Jeffrey and Robert?”
“Probably,” Nell said, not sounding certain. “Julia backed off the story real quick after Hoss was called in. Stopped talking about it at school, stopped acting like the injured party. People tried to get her to say something—not because they were concerned but because it was a good scandal—but she wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t say a thing. She was gone a month or so later.”
“Gone where?”
“To have that baby, I’d guess,” Nell said. “Fat as Lane is, no one made a connection when she told everybody she was pregnant again. Her husband had just died and we all felt sorry for her.” Nell paused.
“Now, there was a blessing, that old man dying. He was a terror, worse than Lane ever thought to be. Worse than Jeffrey’s dad, I’d say. Just a mean, nasty piece of work.”
“How many children did she have?”
“Last count, six.”
“Is the one I saw today—Sonny—her youngest one?”
“He’s a cousin. I don’t know why she took him on. Probably for the extra money the state gives her.”
“That’s unbelievable,” Sara said, wondering how anyone could allow that woman to raise a child, let alone two.
“Julia came back nine or ten months later and there was Eric, her new brother.”
“No one said anything about the timing?”
“What were they going to say?” Nell asked. “And then a few more weeks later, she was gone again. It was just easier to say that Lane was the mother and Julia had run off somewhere. Dan Phillips, one of the boys who’d been on the football team, ran off around that time. There were all kinds of rumors, but they died off pretty quick. It made it easier for everybody, I guess.”
Nell sat up on the couch and took a photo album out from under the coffee table. She thumbed through some of the pages until she found what she was looking for. “That’s her, there in back.”
Sara saw a photograph of Possum, Robert, and Jeffrey standing in the bleachers of a football stadium. They were all wearing their letterman jackets with their last names stitched on the front above their football jersey numbers. Jeffrey had his arm around Nell, and she leaned into him like a love-struck young girl. Inexplicably, Sara felt a stab of jealousy.
“Bastard never would give me his jacket,” Nell said, and Sara laughed, but felt secretly relieved for some reason. In high school, wearing a boy’s letterman jacket was right up there with wearing his class ring. It was not so much a symbol of the boy’s love, but a way for the girl to make the rest of her friends jealous.
As if reading her mind, Nell asked, “Whose ring did you wear?”
Sara felt herself blush, but more from shame than anything else. Steve Mann’s class ring had been a hulking chunk of gold with a hideous chess knight on the side—nothing like the football and basketball rings the athletes wore. Sara had hated wearing it and took it off as soon as she moved to Atlanta. Three months passed before she got up the nerve to mail it back to him along with a note explaining that she wanted to break up. To her credit, she had apologized to him years later, but Sara wondered if she would have given it a second thought had she not been forced to move back to Grant after what happened in Atlanta.
Nell took her silence for something else, probably assuming someone like Sara had not dated much in high school. She said, “Well, it’s stupid anyway. Jeffrey didn’t have a class ring—couldn’t afford it—but all the other girls wore theirs like a damn wedding ring.” She laughed. “The only way they could get them to fit was by wrapping half a roll of tape around the band.”
Sara allowed a smile. She had done the same thing.
Nell returned to the photo album, saying “There” as she put her finger beside a blurry image of a young girl standing behind a picture of Possum and Robert. “That’s Julia.”
Sara had been expecting something horrible from Nell’s description, but Julia looked like any other teenage girl from that time period. Her hair was straight to her waist and she was wearing a simple dress with a floral pattern. She looked sad more than anything else, and as sudden as her previous stab of jealousy, Sara felt a sharp sense of sympathy for the teenager.
Nell leaned over to look. “Now that I’m seeing her again, she wasn’t that bad. You really can’t judge personality in a picture, can you?”
“No,” Sara agreed, thinking the girl was fairly attractive. Yet, that had not been enough to help her transcend the circumstances of her family life. She asked, “Was her father abusive?”
“He beat the crap out of them.”
“No,” Sara said. “The other way.”
“Oh, you mean…” Nell seemed to think about it. “I have no idea, but it’d make sense.”
“Do you know who the father of her child might have been?”
“No telling,” Nell said. “If you wanted a list of everybody she’d been with, it’d end up being half the town.” She gave Sara a pointed look. “Reggie Ray included.”
“He was younger than her.”
“So?”
Sara conceded the point, then said, “From what Lane said, it sounds like Eric has to go to the hospital a lot to get treatments. So he has to have some sort of clotting problem with his blood.” She tried to think of other possibilities. “There has to be an autosomal recessive or dominant transmission.” She saw Nell’s perplexed expression and said, “Sorry, it means that the disorder is genetic. It has to do with one of the two proteins that make up clotting factors.”
“Is that supposed to make sense?”
“Bleeding disorders are passed from parent to child.”
“Ah.”
“Do you know if Julia had anything like that?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Nell said. “I remember one time during home ec, she sliced her finger open pretty bad with a pair of scissors. Whether or not it was an accident, I don’t know, but she didn’t seem to bleed any longer than a normal person would.”
“If she had something like von Willebrand’s disease, then having a child without proper medical supervision would have been life-threatening,” Sara said. “There would also be other people in her family who were affected, and Lane pretty much said that wasn’t the case.”
“So you’re saying it had to come from the father?” Nell asked. “I can’t think of anyone in town with that kind of problem.” She added, “Not Robert, especially. He got pretty banged up on the football field and never seemed the worse for it.”
“Jeffrey, too,” Sara said. She remembered drawing his blood sample. The puncture had bled no longer than usual. Even as she considered this, Sara felt ashamed. She had never genuinely thought Jeffrey could be guilty of either crime, but some part of her was glad that there was irrefutable proof.
“I could ask around,” Nell offered.
“It comes in degrees,” Sara said. “Some people have it and don’t even know it. It’s not as easy for women because of their menstrual cycles. Generally, they know there’s a problem. My bet would be it came from the father.”
“A needle in a haystack,” Nell pointed out. “Who knows, maybe Dan Phillips has it.” She reminded Sara, “The one who ran off about the same time Julia did.” She reached over and paged through the album. “Here,” she said, indicating a young man standing in the back row of the football team photo.
“He doesn’t look like a football player,” Sara said. Phillips was on the thin side and his dark hair was combed straight back off his head. He looked healthy enough, though one photo could not give the full story.
“He mostly played tackle dummy,” Nell said. “Just being on the team and wearing the letterman jacket was all most of these guys wanted. Go down to the hardware store on game day and you can still hear them talking about it like they were in the damn Super Bowl.”
“Glory days,” Sara said. It was the same in Grant. She turned the page, looking at the other pictures. There was a black-and-white snapshot of Jared from a few years back, and she said, “He’s growing up to be a handsome boy.”
“You’re not going to tell Jeffrey, are you?” Nell tried to smile. “Don’t answer that.” She put the album back under the table. “You still leaving town?”
“I don’t know.”
“Stick around.” Nell patted her leg. “I’m making cornbread tonight.”
“Where’s Robert?”
“Possum took him to the store to buy him some clothes,” she said. “Robert didn’t want to go back to the house and God only knows what Jessie did with the stuff at her mama’s.”
“What about Robert?”
“He’ll be okay.”
“No,” Sara said. “Robert. We’ve only been talking about Jeffrey. Did you ever think he was involved in what happened to Julia?”
Nell took her time answering. “He was always secretive.”
“About what?”
“Maybe ‘secretive’ is the wrong word. Makes him sound shifty. He’s just private. Doesn’t talk about his feelings much.”
“Jeffrey doesn’t, either.”
“No, not like that. Like he doesn’t want anyone to get too close to him.” She sat back on the couch, her back slumped into a C. “Everybody thought it was Possum who was on the outside, but I think it was Robert. He never seemed to fit in. Not that Jeffrey treated him that way, but it’s that same thing we were talking about earlier. He always waited to see what Jeffrey did before he acted.”
“That’s not uncommon for teenagers.”
“It was more than that,” Nell said. “If Jeffrey got into trouble, Robert would take the blame. He was like Jeffrey’s safety net and Jeffrey let him do it.” She looked at Sara. “The minute Jeffrey left, Robert did the same thing with Hoss. He’d take a bullet for either one of them, and I’m not exaggerating.”
Sara debated before telling her, “Robert is saying that he killed Julia.”
Something in Nell’s face shifted, though Sara could not pin down what. Her voice had changed, too. “I don’t know about that.”
“No,” Sara said. “Me neither.”
Chapter Twenty
Jeffrey found his mother’s Impala parked in her usual space in front of the hospital. She could have easily walked to work and back, but May Tolliver would never add more minutes to the time it took for her to get that first drink after her shift in the hospital cafeteria ended.
As usual, she had left the windows down to keep the car from turning into an oven. Jeffrey smelled stale cigarette smoke wafting through the air as he opened the door. She always kept a spare key in the glove compartment, and he found it underneath a
bunch of religious tracts and brightly colored pamphlets that must have been stuck under the windshield wiper of the car at some point. She might have been a chain-smoking drunk, but May never littered.
The engine turned over after he pumped the gas several times, and Jeffrey brushed cigarette ash off the gear console as he shifted the car into drive. The windows were foggy from nicotine, and he took out his handkerchief, wiping the windshield as he drove out of the parking lot. If his mother left the hospital before he got back with the car, she would easily put two and two together and realize that with Jeffrey in town he had probably borrowed her car. He had “borrowed” it often enough as a teenager, and May had never mentioned it to a soul. The two times Jeffrey had been pulled over by sheriff’s deputies, May had insisted she had loaned the car to her son.
Jeffrey drove aimlessly through downtown, not heading in any particular direction. He felt sick in his gut, like someone had died. Maybe someone had. He was sinking back into that old feeling that his life was totally out of control. He was the eye of a storm that caused nothing but destruction.
He could not get over the fact that all these years Robert had even for a minute entertained the thought that Jeffrey had killed Julia Kendall. Back in Hoss’s office, when Robert had asked the question, Jeffrey had been too shocked to show anything but anger. Even when he denied it, tried to tell Robert what had really happened, the other man had simply shaken his head, like he did not want to hear whatever yarn Jeffrey had concocted to explain his actions.
“It doesn’t matter,” Robert had kept saying. “I’ll take the rap.”
Jeffrey realized he was close to the funeral home, and he took a last-minute turn across the highway, pulling into the lot. He parked in the back, hoping Deacon White would not have the car towed. Jeffrey was sick of borrowing people’s cars and shoes and whatever else he’d taken these last few days. He wanted to be in his own home in his own bed. He wanted to be alone. The cave was the closest thing he could think of that might bring him some peace.
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