by Julia Keller
“Larry?” Jackie said. “For Christ’s sake. Is that you?”
A large man was mounting the porch steps. He held his rifle over his head with two hands as if he were fording a stream, to indicate that he meant them no harm.
Jackie spoke quickly to Bell, who by now was standing beside her. “It’s Larry Pratt. My ex.” She turned her attention back to him. “So you’re not in the car? That’s not you out there?”
“Hell, Jackie. You think I’d shoot at you?” Larry said. “I love you. I’ve been telling you that for ten years. I got here this afternoon and been hanging out there in your backyard. Watching you. Making my plans. Saw that car go by over and over again—and on that last trip, I saw the gun. Knew you needed me.”
With all the commotion, lights had sparked on inside the houses and on the front porches up and down the street, as if a master switch had been flipped. By this time the sheriff’s Chevy Blazer had arrived, blocking the vehicle that had started all the trouble. Flashlight in one hand, Fogelsong used his other hand to rip open the car door.
Shirlene McAboy stumbled out of the car. In the glare of the sheriff’s jumbo flashlight, her haggard face was a soggy, livid mess. She was sobbing, wailing, begging forgiveness. Fogelsong reached roughly past her to grab the shotgun on the passenger seat. Then he shoved Shirlene up against the side of the car. Quickly frisked her to make sure she had no other weapons, and secured her thin wrists with handcuffs.
“Bell,” Fogelsong said. She’d hurried down the porch steps to join him.
She knew what he was asking her to do. She quickly recited her constitutional rights to Shirlene McAboy. The young woman with stringy blond hair and a ferret-like face stammered her consent and then began crying again. She alternated her sobs and yowls with a hiccough-ridden explanation. “The bitch fired me,” Shirlene sputtered. “I needed that job. You hear? Needed it more than those other two bitches did. Said she couldn’t afford to keep me on, but I know the real reason—it’s because she don’t like me. So I had to show her. Show her she can’t push me around. Anyway, I didn’t fire at her or nothin.’ Ain’t even loaded. Just wanted to scare the piss outta her.”
The sheriff had finished checking the rifle by now. He secured it in the back of the Blazer. Then he took control of Shirlene; with one hand on the top of her greasy head, the other clamped on the upper part of her arm, he made sure that she was securely stowed in the backseat of the Blazer. He nodded to Bell. Time to go. His next stop, Bell knew, would be the jail in the courthouse annex.
From the top step, where she’d been watching the arrest, Jackie yelled, “You were a lousy waitress, anyway, Shirlene McAboy!”
Bell returned to the porch. Deputy Harrison would be arriving shortly to take witness statements. In the meantime, Bell needed to keep an eye on Larry Pratt. He’d be facing charges himself for reckless endangerment and for the unlawful discharge of a weapon in the city limits.
Larry and Jackie eyeballed each other across the porch floor. They were three or four feet apart, but to Bell, the distance seemed even greater. She had gotten her first good look at the man who had once been married to Jackie. He was short and broad, with flat brown hair and a pointy nose. An unfortunate smell rose from him, a combination of sweat and desperation and too many hours on the road. He blinked fiercely and repeatedly.
“Dammit, Larry, I told you to leave me alone,” Jackie muttered.
These two people, Bell thought, had once loved each other. Planned a life together. What happened? No telling. But the point was, she reminded herself, you were allowed to change your mind. Everybody had the right to choose what kind of life they wanted, and with whom they wanted to share it. And nobody else had a say in that—not your family, not your friends, not your preacher, not your boss. Not even the person whom you’d once loved. If Jackie LeFevre didn’t want to reconcile with her ex-husband, if she wanted to be with somebody else—or to be with nobody else, to be alone—then that was how it would be. Her business.
“You’re making a big mistake,” Larry said. His voice was hoarse, but still retained its hectoring bravado. “You hear me? Big, big mistake. You gotta listen, Jackie. Okay? You belong to me. Look, I saved your life. That counts for something, right?”
“It counts for shit,” she said. “You know what, Larry? You’re lucky I didn’t blow your fool head off. When you came up those steps just now, I wanted to do it. I did. Just to get rid of you, once and for all.”
Her words had clearly rattled him.
“Jackie, I—”
“Go away,” she said. She didn’t say it with rancor this time; she said it with weariness. With finality. “Go away and don’t come back. Ever. Nobody wants you here.”
It was a raw, wrenching, deeply personal moment for the two of them, perhaps the most intense one they’d ever had or ever would, and Bell fervently wished she were elsewhere. But she couldn’t give them their privacy; she had to make sure Larry Pratt didn’t flee. And truth be told, both of them seemed oblivious to her presence, anyway.
Something seemed to change in Larry’s demeanor. There was a subtle shift in him; the bullying insistence gave way to a sort of strained, earnest yearning. “You did love me, though—right? You really did?”
“Yeah. I did.”
“So what happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s nobody else?”
“None of your damned business—but no,” Jackie said. “I’m not in love with anybody else. I’m just not in love with you.”
Larry stood there quietly, head down, studying the porch floor. Nothing more to say.
A few minutes later Deputy Harrison arrived. She read him his rights and took him into custody for violating weapons statutes and for aggravated menacing.
Bell had the sense that he’d put everything he had into this night, every last shred of emotional energy. It was a last-ditch effort to have the life he wanted. Would tonight mark the end of Larry Pratt’s quest? No telling. Bell couldn’t predict if he would give up or if he’d continue his campaign to win Jackie back. Bell hoped it was over. She hoped that, once he’d dealt with the charges against him, he would leave Acker’s Gap and never return. Work his way toward a new life. She hoped, for his sake as well as for Jackie’s, that he would learn to let the past stay right where it was—buried under layers of time, accessible only by memory.
* * *
The Sunnydell Nursing Home was located in a rural area in Combers County, about 125 miles from Acker’s Gap. It was one of dozens of such establishments that had popped up in recent years, as the number of old people without the financial means to move into new, purpose-built facilities continued to increase. Once a private home, Sunnydell had been outfitted with ramps and rails, ringed by a chipped brick walk with weeds nosing up through the seams, transformed into a place where the indigent elderly could come to die. It was an altogether depressing place, Bell thought as she turned into the gravel parking lot. The last stop on the night train.
She’d made the drive in an hour and a half. After the events at Jackie LeFevre’s house the night before, Bell had been grateful to be on the road, glad to put some temporary distance between herself and the scene of such chaos and heartbreak. She had set off within minutes of receiving a phone call from Rhonda Lovejoy, announcing the results of her explorations.
“Combers County,” were Rhonda’s first words to Bell that morning, even before a more standard greeting. “That’s where you oughta be heading if you want to talk to Evelyn Hickok—who, by the way, hasn’t been ‘Evelyn Hickok’ since about 1978. More on that later. For now, just get on the road, boss, and then put me on speakerphone so I can fill you in on the way.”
As Bell drove, she’d listened to Rhonda’s story, breaking in from time to time to urge her assistant to stay on topic. Trying the name “Evelyn Hickok” in phone books and tax records had gotten her exactly nowhere, Rhonda explained; the tradition of women changing their names with each marriage made things a
lot more difficult for a researcher. “But I remembered that you said she was an ornery old cuss, a real nasty piece of work,” Rhonda went on. “And people like that are apt to be in and out of civil court all the time with their nuisance suits. Sooner or later, they sue everybody—their car mechanic, their dry cleaner, their house painter. So I started checking court filings for a six-county radius, going all the way back to the early 1970s. Thank God this isn’t New York City or Chicago! Pretty mind-numbing stuff at first, but it got easier after the early ‘90s, when all those court databases were put online. I did a keyword search with ‘Evelyn.’ Figured the last name had probably changed.”
“And?” Bell said. She was attentive to her driving, but if pressed, she’d also have to admit that she barely noticed the mountainside as it swept past her, a long steep wall in the midst of its vivid change from the reddish-yellow of late fall to the grayish-brown of early winter.
“Sure enough,” Rhonda went on, “there was a suit filed in 2003 by an Evelyn Prather against a discount store in Drummond where she’d allegedly taken a fall in their parking lot. She claimed they’d not cleaned up the lot properly and she tripped on a twig. A twig, Bell, can you beat that? She was asking for $650,000 for pain and suffering. Oh, and to cover the doctor bills for a mildly sprained ankle. A sprained ankle! No wonder our courts have such a backlog that they can’t even— ”
“Rhonda.”
“Right. Okay, so in the filing, the plaintiff was required to list her full name—Evelyn Conyers Hickok Wallace Prather. Formerly known as Evelyn Hickok.”
“You found her.” Bell didn’t bother keeping the admiration out of her voice.
“Not yet. The address for her on the filing was way out of date. She’d moved on from there awhile ago. But she’d also neglected to pay her attorney. They’d won the case for her—they squeezed a settlement out of the discount store’s home office down in Chattanooga—and so they kept tabs on Evelyn Prather over the years. Or their collection agency did, anyway. Turns out that I went to high school with the brother of a woman who now works as a paralegal at that law firm. And the last known address for Evelyn Prather—formerly Evelyn Hickok—is Sunnydell Nursing Home in Combers County.”
“Nursing home.” Bell’s tone was as abruptly deflated as her mood.
“She’s ninety-seven, boss. Hardly a surprise. Where did you think we’d find her? Olympic Village?”
“Yeah, but how much is she even going to remember?”
“Don’t know,” said the doggedly cheerful Rhonda. “And you don’t, either. Not until you talk to her.”
Bell had thanked her for her efforts and ended the call. Forty-five minutes later she crossed the Combers County line. Sunnydell showed up a few minutes after that; its tired-looking taupe vinyl siding appeared to be fading into the dusky brown of the distant foothills, as if the entire structure were, inch by inch, being reabsorbed by the landscape.
The inside smelled precisely as Bell had expected it to. She was led into a small room on the first floor.
“Evelyn,” Bell said. The old woman, still as death, sat in an armchair by the dresser.
The aide who had served as Bell’s guide uttered a bitter blurt of a laugh.
“You gotta do better than that, lady,” she said to Bell. She leaned over and screamed into the old woman’s ear. “YOU GOT COMPANY!”
Evelyn, roused from her stupor, flinched and cringed. That was the signal for the aide to leave. “All yours,” she said to Bell. “Good luck.” Another laugh.
Bell moved closer. The old woman was dressed in a bedraggled pink robe. Only a few strands of white hair were left on her blindingly white skull, and her face was a melting cradle of wrinkles. When she opened her mouth to speak, Bell smelled the foul odor of a backed-up intestinal system. She counted three teeth.
“Git the hell away from me,” the old woman said. It came out as a low mumble. “Now. Or I’ll sue your ass.”
“Mrs. Prather, my name is Belfa Elkins, and I’m here to talk to you about— ”
“Git the hell out. Right now. I’ll sue. Swear I will.”
“It’ll just take a minute.” Bell talked fast. “Your son’s remains have been found. Your son, Dave. And I have some ques—”
“Don’t got no goddamned son. Goddamned queer weren’t no son of mine. Now, you git outta here. I said git. Git!” The mumble had risen to a high-pitched squawk.
“Please, Mrs. Prather. He was your child. And you’re the only one who can tell us about— ”
“Git! Git! Git out!”
She raised her tiny white fists over her head and shook them, which in turn made her frail body quiver with a self-inflicted palsy. Bell was afraid that the old woman might wind up doing harm to herself, so she backed off.
“Okay, okay,” Bell said. “Fine. I’m leaving.”
This was the end of the line. Evelyn Prather was the last person on earth who might have been able to tell her about her mother’s fate. And the old woman was too wrapped up in hate, too mired in her precious bigotry, to talk to her.
Bell rounded the corner of the hall, heading for the front door. It was going to be a long drive home.
Behind the front desk, the aide was doodling on a blotter. An idea occurred to Bell. People like Evelyn Prather, she knew, go through friends the way other people go through sticks of Juicy Fruit. The Evelyn Prathers of this world don’t have permanent relationships—just temporary alliances. Temporary sounding boards for their frustrations and their bitterness and their paranoia. Then they move on to some other “friend,” some other hapless person upon whom they can dump their vileness. They need an audience. A mirror to reflect back their darkness to themselves. Bullies always have sidekicks.
“Hey,” Bell said to the aide. “Has Mrs. Prather ever had any friends in here? People she talked to until they pissed her off or she pissed them off—and now they barely acknowledge each other’s existence?”
“Oh, yeah,” the aide said. She grinned and rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah.”
Six minutes later, Bell was sitting down in the second-floor corner room occupied by Marge Hastings, an eighty-seven-year-old widow from Beecher County who had bright blue eyes and a good memory.
The story she told could never be independently verified or proven in a court of law, but it was good enough for Bell. Because there was no reason for Marge Hastings to lie— and no reason, come to that, for Evelyn Prather to have told Marge Hastings anything other than the truth, as bleak, as repugnant, as that truth might be.
* * *
“Evelyn acted all sweet to me at first,” Marge said, “but that wasn’t really her way. Oh, my, no. I think she just needed somebody to talk to. And I was new here, and lonely, and so I listened. I listened even though it shocked me. She wanted to do that. That’s what she likes to do—shock people. Knock ’em off balance. She told me—I wasn’t used to such language, especially not from a woman—that she was a badass. Never wanted to be anything else. Proud of herself, she was. Pleased and proud.
“Oh, she talked about her son, Dave, all right. About the day he came to her and told her that he was in love with his best friend in high school. She slapped his face. Called him a queer. Got out her Bible and started reading it out loud, getting louder and louder, and when he tried to talk, she just talked louder. Drowned him out. He turned to leave the room and she kicked him. He fell down and she kicked him again, calling him a queer-boy and telling him what a disgrace he was.
“He left the house that night, Evelyn said. Joined the Army. Once he got back, she’d hear stories about him. People’d see him drinking himself sick, night after night. He did odd jobs now and again, but mostly he stayed drunk. Nobody knew about him—he kept his life a secret and Evelyn was mighty glad about that—but the secret just ate away at him. Like acid. That’s how Evelyn put it. Smiled when she said it, too.” Marge shook her head.
“Then he finally seemed to pull himself together,” she went on. “Got a good job, working for a lady who
owned a roofing company. One night, Evelyn told me, she drove out to where Dave was working—he was finishing up a roof on a vacant house, way off by itself, and he wanted to get it done and so even though it was late he was still there—and there was a woman with him. Talking to him, handing him tools. Nice-looking, a little older than Dave. Wearing a blue scarf with some clouds on it. The three of them all just stood there, next to where Evelyn parked her car, and Dave introduced the woman as Teresa.”
Bell nodded. She hoped she’d be able to speak in a normal voice. “That was my mother.”
Marge put a frail-looking hand on Bell’s knee. She waited, and when Bell’s eyes told her it was all right, she continued. “So Evelyn said, ‘Well, glad to finally see you with a girlfriend, Dave. Glad to see you’re not still fornicating with men. Glad you won’t burn in hell.’ And Teresa said, ‘I’m not his girlfriend, Mrs. Hickock. And there’s no such thing as hell—unless you count having to be around you.’ Well, that made Evelyn so mad that she couldn’t think. Couldn’t see straight. She was as mad as she’d ever been before in her life, she told me. Surely didn’t deserve that kind of disrespect. She jumped back in her car and—she said this part real slow, Mrs. Elkins, pretending like it was hard for her, but you could tell she was showing off, she was proud of herself—she ran him down. She killed her own son. That’s what she told me. Mowed him over with her car like he was a stray dog in the road. The woman named Teresa just stood there. She was in shock. Not crying, not screaming—just staring. Paralyzed by the horror of it. Then Evelyn realized what she’d done. She’d committed murder. And there was a witness. That meant prison time— lots and lots. And so Evelyn did what she had to do. That’s how she put it—‘I had to do it. No choice in the matter.’ She got out of her car and she grabbed for the hammer that Dave’d been using on his roofing job and she charged at Teresa. Hit her in the head, over and over. It was dark by now. She left the bodies until later that night, when she came back with the man she’d just married—Enoch Wallace—and he helped her get rid of them. They put ’em in the trunk and then drove around until they found a spot. Then another spot. Enoch Wallace dug the holes. He was a big man, Evelyn said. Big and strong. Not like her boy Dave. Dave was a small man, she said. Small and weak.”