Angels Burning

by Tawni O'Dell

  I’m the first to look up and away from the dead girl and this dead town to the lush green waves of rolling hills on the blue horizon, and I feel the familiar ache that always comes over me whenever I’m faced with ruined beauty.

  One by one, the men turn away, too, consumed for a final moment by their private tortured thoughts before returning to the practiced numbness that enables them to do their job but unfortunately can’t shield them from their dreams.

  Our sleep will be haunted tonight by those legs that even in death look like they could get up and run away from here.

  chapter two

  SINGER AND BLONSKI arrive back at the tan brick municipal building that houses our department well before me. I had to stay and talk to the coroner and strategize with Nolan. Campbell’s Run is a no-man’s-land when it comes to police jurisdiction since it doesn’t exist as a town anymore according to the state of Pennsylvania. The road going through it doesn’t exist either. Buchanan is the nearest community with its own police force, and I’ve been the chief here for the past ten years.

  Nolan has all the resources of the state police at his disposal, including their forensic lab. I have six officers (two on vacation), four vehicles, and a frequently broken vending machine. The investigation is his, but we’ll assist. The arrangement would be the same if the girl had been found on my doorstep. The crime is too heinous to risk failure due to our inexperience with homicides and a budget that can barely put gas in our cruisers and ink in our printer.

  It doesn’t hit me until I pull into my parking space and realize I’m still in my bare feet because I wouldn’t put my new shoes back on, that I forgot to go home and shower and change. I think about turning around and leaving, but we have a single shower in our locker room and I have a pair of sweats in my office. I have a lot to tackle this morning. I’ll go home and get some real clothes on my lunch hour.

  Singer and Blonski are deep in conversation with Karla, our dispatcher, and Everhart and Dewey, my two other available officers. This was their day off, but I need all hands on deck. Dewey has four kids out of school for the summer and seemed happy to be called into work. Everhart’s wife is pregnant with their first child, just past her due date, and is driving him crazy; he seemed even happier. All talking ceases when I enter the building.

  “I realize I’m a little dirty,” I say, and walk past quickly without allowing any commentary.

  I motion at Singer and Blonski.

  “You two. A word, please.”

  They follow me into my office. This ten-by-twenty-foot enclosure painted the color of khaki pants with one window overlooking a parking lot and no central air is the closest I come to having a nest, and the vigilant fondness that comes over me once my officers enter here is the closest I come to feeling maternal.

  “How much do you weigh?” I ask Singer as I open my window and perch on the sill, hoping for a breeze.

  “One sixty,” he says.

  “No way,” Blonski cries out, plopping down in a chair the same way he might land on a buddy’s chest during a backyard tussle. “And you’re six-two? You’re a freak. You need to bulk up.”

  “It doesn’t matter how much I eat. I don’t bulk,” Singer replies, lowering himself into the other chair.

  “I didn’t appreciate your comments in front of Corporal Greely,” I tell them.

  “We were trying to protect you,” Singer replies.

  “You’re an idiot,” Blonski informs him, shaking his head.

  “If I were a man would you have felt the need to protect me?”

  “If you were a man you wouldn’t have been wearing a skirt and a—”

  “Do you know why I’m dressed like this?” I interrupt Singer.

  “I like your blouse,” he says.

  “Because I was on my way to eat tasteless scrambled eggs and soggy bacon with town officials and concerned citizens and discuss the potholes on Jenner Pike and the new dog-barking citation. Next time you want to protect me, protect me from that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Blonski grins. The chastisement was meant for both of them, but Singer has taken on all the blame and this means Blonski won.

  The first time I saw BROCK BLONSKI written across the top of a job application, I pictured a linebacker from Fred Flintstone’s favorite football team, and when I met him, aside from the fact that he wasn’t a cartoon character wearing a loincloth, he fit the bill: square-jawed, broad-shouldered, competitive, with a deceptively lumbering large-primate gait. He spoke in grunts and monosyllables and ate entire rotisserie chickens for lunch. I was beginning to think the fact that his first name was only one swapped vowel away from the word “brick” completely summed up his personality until I overheard him explaining the latest developments in neuroscience nanotechnology to the mother of a boy who had just suffered a head wound after wrecking his dirt bike. He only pretends to be dumb.

  “I wanted to thank you for volunteering,” Singer says to me. “I was afraid the detective was going to ask me to do it.”

  “I wanted to do it,” Blonski says.

  I look at them sitting side by side: one with thick dark hair parted fastidiously on one side, long limbs folded into his seated body umbrella-style, a live-wire jumpiness about him; the other a human ATV, head shaved, leaning back in his chair with eyes half-closed like he’s about to nod off. They’re two seemingly very different young men, physically and mentally, but to someone my age all that matters is they’re both twenty-three, which means they’re exactly the same.

  “Were any missing-persons reports filed recently for a teenaged girl?”

  “Nothing in our county,” Blonski responds.

  “Too bad it’s summer and school is out. An absentee list from the high school would be a good place to start looking.”

  “Won’t the state police be doing all that stuff?” Singer asks.

  “I’m sorry, Officer, would you like the day off?”

  His face reddens.

  “No, it’s just that . . . ” he begins.

  “We’re going to conduct our own investigation. We know the area and the people living in it better than they do. Corporal Greely welcomes our help.”

  “Welcomes?” Blonski wonders skeptically.

  “Feels obligated to accept our assistance,” I correct myself. “I’m going to take a shower. When I’m done, we’re going to brainstorm.”

  Singer gets up from his chair and heads for the door. Blonski lingers.

  “She might not be from around here,” he says.

  “Only someone from around here would think to dump a body out at the Run,” Singer counters.

  “Maybe the killer is from around here but the girl is from somewhere else?”

  Singer disagrees.

  “How would he have found her? Have you ever run into anyone around here who isn’t from around here?”

  Blonski gets up and leaves. I stop Singer as he’s heading out my office door and hand him one of my new pumps.

  “Can you get out that scuff?” I whisper to him.

  “Sure thing, Chief,” he says.

  I NEVER USE the locker room. I’m surprised to find that it’s neat and clean. I realize immediately that I don’t have a towel, soap, or a comb. There’s a faded blue beach towel with a picture of a shark on it, fangs bared, folded and sitting on the end of the bench. I pick it up and inspect it. It’s dry and it doesn’t smell. Wrapped inside is some kind of bodywash.

  As I walk past the mirror, I stop and stare dumbly at my reflection. I can’t believe I just had a conversation with two of my men in this condition and they were able to keep straight faces. I look like a chimney sweep.

  I can’t help thinking about my mom and what her reaction would have been to my appearance. She was obsessive about personal cleanliness to the point where she named her first child after her favorite soap. She took at least two showers a day and set aside a full hour every evening for her religiously observed bubble bath complete with lit candles, soft music on
the radio, fizzy pink Mateus wine in a plastic gold chalice from a Renaissance Faire, and an altar set with shiny glass bottles, tubes and ceramic pots with metallic lids, and sparkly silver lipstick cases.

  Her desire to be immaculate didn’t extend past her body, however. I can’t ever recall seeing my mother run a vacuum or wash a dish. Our grandmother used to stop by sometimes and tidy up until I got old enough to do it, but her visits weren’t often enough to combat the filth, piles of clutter, and soiled clothes that accumulated everywhere.

  I always wished Grandma would get mad at Mom and tell her she needed to be a better mother and a better housekeeper, but she thought her daughter’s refusal to attend to such mundane domestic tasks was perfectly acceptable because she was beautiful.

  “Your mother shouldn’t have to worry about things like this. It would be a crime for a girl that pretty to do dirty work,” she’d say as she attacked our sticky kitchen linoleum, her hair covered with a knotted bandana, wearing a colorless housedress and clunky rubber-soled shoes.

  Anyone seeing Grandma would’ve never known she had produced an offspring too lovely for mopping.

  The ever-practical Neely finally piped up one day and asked, “If being pretty is such a big deal, why doesn’t Mom use it to make money? She could be a movie star, or Miss America.”

  Grandma looked like she was about to scold Neely, then her face softened like she was going to say something kind. She ended up not saying anything.

  What we didn’t realize was that Mom was using her looks to make money. Various boyfriends bought her clothes, paid our rent, gave her spending money. When times got desperate, she’d work for a little while as a waitress or secretary in town, but each job would quickly lead to finding a new sugar daddy.

  I step into the shower and turn on the water, making it as hot as I can stand. I watch it turn black as it hits my muddy skin and streams off my body before swirling down the floor drain. No matter how much I scrub and dig, I can’t get the grit out from under my fingernails.

  I wonder if the dead girl was pretty. Probably. Most teenage girls are some kind of pretty simply by virtue of their youth, even though almost all of them think they’re ugly.

  I make the water hotter until I can’t stand it anymore, knowing it’s still not anywhere near as hot as the flames that had begun to consume the girl’s face.

  I’ve managed to keep the details of her at bay, but standing here naked and exposed on a concrete floor, I lose my resolve. The image washes over me along with the steaming water: patches of burned skin the amber brown of pipe tobacco crisped tautly over her face and bare arms; her skull, caved in on one side, scattered with straggly shocks of singed hair; her hands clutching at nothing, the fingers like strips of jerky. It suddenly strikes me that her hands were burned worse than any other part of her body. I file this away in my head as possibly important.

  I know this is the moment when I should finally cry for her, for the life she didn’t get to live and the horror of her final moments, for her family and the anguish they will never be able to escape for the rest of their days, but the tears don’t come until I abandon my thoughts of the murdered girl and begin to concentrate on the monster who could do something like this. It’s familiar territory for me, and the rage and righteousness I find there warms and comforts me. They’re not tears of grief but of relief.

  Back in my office, still in bare feet, with my unruly dark hair pinned to the top of my head, wearing gray YMCA sweatpants and a pink sweatshirt from a breast cancer fund-raising fun run, I sit at my desk and reach for my reading glasses with a sigh.

  I started wearing them last year. At first I kind of liked them. I convinced myself I was rocking the sexy librarian look. That delusion ended fairly quickly.

  I just turned fifty a couple of weeks ago. The number on its own doesn’t bother me. I didn’t even get upset when Singer unthinkingly proclaimed with sincere admiration, “Wow, fifty! That’s half a century.”

  I’m in good health. Aside from a little bit of gray in my hair that I cover, a few lines on my face, and the beginning sag of certain body parts, I still look good. I’m okay with my age, but nobody else is. Especially men.

  I bristle at the thought of Nolan hurling me over that fallen barbed wire back at Campbell’s Run this morning like I was a sack of road salt. He would’ve never done that when I was younger, because the same act would have had the sensual connotations of a romance novel lover swinging his sweetheart over a babbling brook.

  He also would have never asked me about my weight with the dispassionate scrutiny of a farmer passing by a penned hog at the county fair.

  Maybe this is my comeuppance for spending so much energy during my life trying to make men in my profession ignore my face and figure and take me seriously as an equal. I didn’t want them to treat me like a girl; now I do, and all they see is a sexless blob.

  Singer knocks on my door even though it’s open. He pauses and sniffs the air.

  “I smell Axe bodywash,” he says.

  “Never mind.”

  “There’s a guy out here who insists on seeing you.”

  “Something to do with our girl?”

  “No. He won’t give his name, but he says he killed your mother.”

  He let’s the weight of this statement sink in. I’m sure he expects a reaction from me, but I have none to give.

  “Are you okay, Chief ? Do you think this joker is serious? Should we check on your mom?”

  “My mom was murdered when I was fifteen.”

  He drops his eyes to the floor.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay. Show him in.”

  I’m perfectly calm. I don’t have to force it. I really feel nothing, and I wonder fleetingly if that means there’s something wrong with me.

  I assumed I’d never see him again, but I never ruled out the possibility. He’s an old man now but still vain about his looks. He hasn’t lost his hair. It’s completely gray but thick. He’s put an oily gel in it and slicked it back from his forehead. He’s wearing a faded but clean short-sleeved checked shirt with fake pearl buttons and an enameled American flag belt buckle as big as his fist. His bare arms are covered with tattoos in heavy black ink. He didn’t have any when he went in, so they must be the work of a prison artist who seems to have randomly scribbled on and slashed at him. I can’t make out a single image or word.

  “Hi there, Dove.”

  He smiles at me. His teeth haven’t fared as well as his hair. They’re stained, and he’s missing a few.

  “You’re all grown up. Well, you’re past grown up. You’re way on the other side of grown up.”

  “I get it. You’ve made your point,” I say.

  “Though you weren’t exactly a little kid when I went away. You already had a good-size rack on you. Nice ass.”

  “Still the charmer, I see.”

  I fold my hands on my desk.

  “What do you want, Lucky? Or did your nickname change to something more accurate in prison? Is it Pathetic Loser now?”

  “No need to make personal attacks,” he replies, taking an unoffered seat. “It’s still Lucky. Compared to a lot of guys where I just come from, I am lucky. And I got a few years shaved off my sentence for good behavior. What could be luckier than that?”

  “I was notified you were being released.”

  He sizes me up in the covetous way he used to look at Mom and me and Neely but also cases of beer, our neighbor’s Trans Am, and our TV before he turned it on and sat down to watch a ball game. He had two expressions: a sullen bored pout for things he didn’t care about or didn’t understand, and a greedy groping gaze for everything else.

  “How’s that little sister of yours? I hear she’s a lesbian.”

  “She’s not a lesbian.”

  “That’s not what I heard. I heard she’s a real man-hater.”

  “Lots of heterosexual women hate men. Thanks to men like you.”

  “Too-shay,” he ex
claims, flashing me another hay-colored smile. “I hear she’s a dog trainer now. Some kind of dog whisperer or, in her case, more like a dog shouter.”

  He laughs, highly amused by the sputtering spark of his own dim wit.

  “You’ve heard a lot for a guy who’s spent the past thirty-five years behind bars,” I say.

  I’m as amazed as I was in my youth that my mother had anything to do with him, but this was common musing for me back then. As far as I could tell, my mother’s only standard for men was that they could afford her. Young, old, handsome, homely, muscly, portly, blue-collar, white-collar, married, single, educated, and dumb as dirt: we watched all kinds come and go.

  Very few appealed to Neely and me, and those who did initially always proved to be jerks in the long run. Lucky had been a jerk from the start, although we both agreed he was good-looking. He worked in a factory that made parts for mining equipment and drove a black Harley with a dazzling electric blue stripe. He drank too much, but so did our mom, and he treated my siblings and me like we were the hired help or naughty pets depending on his mood, but so did our mom.

  “Maybe I’ll go see her.”

  “Stay away from Neely.”

  “Hit a sore spot,” he cries, grinning. “Come on. You aren’t still mad over that pop I gave her that one time for talking back to your mom? If you’d had a dad, he would’ve done the same thing.”

  “What do you want?” I repeat.

  “I think you know.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “How about your little brother? What was his name? Spot? Fido? Bandit?”

  “Champ.”

  “Yeah, right, Champ.”

  “He left the state when he graduated from high school.”

  “Running away from his sisters, huh?”

  He was running away from something. Definitely not his sisters. At least Neely and I have always prayed this wasn’t the case.

  I’m not about to allow this conversation to turn to Champ.

  I look at Lucky over the tops of my glasses.

  “I’ve got a lot to do today. I need you to leave.”

  “So you’re not going to be nice about any of this? Even after all these years?”