Angels Burning

by Tawni O'Dell

  A whistle rings out and the dogs look at Neely, who tells them, “Stop.” Owen and Kris do what they’re told, but Kross—her problem child—continues doing what he wants.

  She walks over to Kross with Smoke at her heels, slips off the leash she wears draped around her neck the way a doctor wears a stethoscope, clips it onto his collar, and gives it a sharp yank.

  “Stop,” she says again.

  Kross sits back on his haunches and looks pathetic.

  “I’m Neely Carnahan. This is my place, and these are my dogs,” she tells Derk. “Who are you?”

  Derk crosses his arms over his chest.

  “Derk Truly.”

  She looks down at him from beneath the brim of her ball cap, sizing him up like she might a potential new member of one of her obedience classes.

  “Are you Tug’s brother?”

  He nods.

  “Tug’s on a walk with Maybe. He should be back soon.”

  She turns her back on Derk and returns to us. The dogs follow her. Derk watches them go, then decides he should do the same.

  He stops a short distance from Mason. The two of them eye each other suspiciously. They look to be about the same age. Mason might be a little older.

  “Your socks are stupid,” Derk blurts out.

  We three adults turn our heads in unison toward Mason to see how well he’ll return Derk’s serve. He seems smart and capable but also a little awkward. He could choose not to participate in a volley of insults and take refuge behind his dad or start to cry.

  “You’re stupid,” Mason fires back. “You’re covered in frosting and blueberry pie. Don’t you know how to eat?”

  Derk isn’t prepared for Mason’s smash. He sends back a wild shot that veers out of bounds.

  “The chief ’s a cocksucker!” he shouts, and takes off running.

  Neely motions for the dogs to follow him, then she and Champ look at me with varying amounts of curiosity and condemnation in their eyes. I’m flooded with déjà vu. When we were kids they were always looking at me this way, always wondering what I was up to and assuming I wasn’t going to tell them the whole story. I have no idea how many times I said to them, “It’s better if you don’t know.”

  “He doesn’t know what the word means,” I tell them.

  “And that makes it okay for him to use it?” Champ asks.

  “He wanted to meet the dogs,” I explain to Neely. “I guess Tug talks about them all the time. But I was only planning on dropping by for a minute. I have a meeting with Nolan and his team.”

  “The dogs will stay with him until he realizes he’s lost, and then they’ll lead him back here. I can take him home when I take Tug,” she volunteers.

  “Are you sure?”

  “In return, you can make dinner for all of us tonight at your place.” To Champ she says, “Dove’s a great cook.”

  “She always was,” he says. “Just no Chef Boyardee, please.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  We drop into a clumsy silence, the unexpectedness and enormity of our reunion sinking in for all of us. I never said it out loud to Neely or Grandma, and I rarely said it to myself, but I never expected to see my brother again.

  “Okay. Great. I don’t know what else to say. I’m overwhelmed.”

  Champ gives me another hug. I was too shocked by the first one to notice details, but this time I’m only too aware of how thin and frail his body feels beneath his shirt.

  His color isn’t good. His eyes are sunk deep into bruised sockets. I guiltily glance at the insides of his arms as he pulls them away looking for track marks. He didn’t do drugs in high school, but his demons could have driven him to anything during the years since then.

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry I stayed away so long. I just couldn’t—”

  “Enough,” Neely cuts him off. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk about serious stuff later if we want to.”

  “I don’t want to,” Mason pipes up.

  “Me neither,” Neely agrees.

  She hasn’t stopped grinning the entire time I’ve been here. I’m starting to be concerned. Like any activity a person has avoided for great lengths of time, I wonder if too much of it all at once can harm her. I think of the disclaimers at the beginning of workout videos: anyone considering taking part in vigorous physical exercise should consult a doctor first.

  Has anyone ever stroked out from smiling?

  “I’ll call you later,” I tell my sister.

  I start heading to my car and realize Mason is trotting along beside me, holding his binder against his chest again.

  “What kind of chief are you?” he asks.

  “A police chief.”

  “That’s cool, but it would be way cooler if you were an Indian chief like Crazy Horse.”

  “I agree, but I couldn’t pass the physical.”

  “Are you really a good cook?”

  “Yes.”

  “No fungus please.”

  We reach my car and I’m suddenly consumed by a need to get away from here. It takes everything I have not to push Mason to the ground, throw open my door, and tear out of here with squealing tires spitting out gravel behind me. I don’t want to revisit my past. I don’t want to be crippled with rage and regret again. I don’t want to hate. Neither does Neely. She wasn’t smiling; her face was contorted with pain. She’s wearing a mask.

  “Anything else you don’t like?” I ask Champ’s little boy.

  The binder flips open with a small ripping noise and I’m transported back in time to Champ’s first day of high school and his excitement over his first Trapper Keeper. We had been living with Grandma for four years by then. I was a commuting sophomore at a nearby college and Neely was starting her senior year of high school, something she did to fill the hours when she wasn’t volunteering at the local animal shelter or working at the Greenview Kennels. I had taken Champ out a few days earlier to get school supplies, at which time he informed me that everyone had one of the cool, relatively new binders filled with folders and if he didn’t have one, he would be a social outcast. The original design with a snap had been updated to Velcro. By the time he graduated, it would be changed back to a snap again after numerous teachers complained to the manufacturer about the noise. That morning he sat at Grandma’s kitchen table ripping it open and closing it again until I shouted at him to stop and tried to pull it out of his hands. We got into a spirited tug-of-war. I let him win.

  The Velcro means Mason’s Trapper is vintage, but it’s not one of Champ’s. He covered his with doodles and stickers. This one is bare except for the carefully lettered name across the top: Mason James Carnahan.

  Mason glances inside and reads from a list, “Onions, dippy eggs, mayonnaise, olives with the red slimy things in the middle, coffee, fish unless it’s in a stick, Go-Gurt, pork chops, coconut, and fake cereal.”

  “Fake cereal?”

  “They say it’s the same as the real cereal and you buy it ’cause it’s cheaper and it’s not the same.”

  He rustles through some papers in one of the folders and pulls out a small, colorful square of paper. I can’t tell what it is from a distance. I don’t have on my glasses.

  “Got it,” I say. “Anything else?”

  He looks at the ground while considering my question. The back of his exposed neck glows pink and is dusty with tattered skin from a sunburn peel. Champ always had the same burn. His came from spending hours on end sitting in our tiny patch of a backyard hunched over his toy cars and trucks, or his plastic soldiers, or his farm animal set.

  I’m suddenly awash in memories of my brother at that age. They end with a thud outside a closed bedroom door where I hear Gil’s husky promise and Champ’s whimper, then I find myself standing in my mother’s bathroom looking at her lifeless hand at the end of a slim bare arm hanging limply from the tub and her big diamond solitaire engagement ring sparkling prettily in the candlelight. I almost took it. I had a moment born of reading too many novels as a kid tha
t romanticized running away where I thought I could sell it and Neely, Champ, and I could take the money and head west. Runaways always headed west. But I was too responsible even back then. We were going to have a roof over our heads, dinner on the table every night, and go to school like normal people did. It was very important to me that we seemed normal.

  Eventually Champ would run away, but he waited until after he was eighteen so it wouldn’t seem like running away; it would simply be leaving.

  Why has he come back? Why do runaways return? To settle a score? To get answers? To borrow money? Not to visit two sisters he hasn’t needed for more than two decades and definitely not to try and start over.

  Mason raises his head and our eyes meet. His are filled with too much worry for someone his age; I’m afraid mine are filled with too much recklessness for someone my age.

  He hands me a coupon for Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal.

  “No cupcakes,” he says gravely. “They make my dad cry.”

  chapter ten

  THERE’S NOTHING like standing in the middle of a large conference room bathed in unforgiving fluorescent lighting with a bunch of men, decades younger than you, staring at your backside while you study photos of a burned, bludgeoned dead girl tacked onto a dry-erase board to make you forget about your own problems.

  In the span of forty-eight hours Nolan has already covered a lot of ground. I’m not surprised. He’s a tenacious investigator. Once a case falls into his lap, it’s as if he puts on a pair of blinders and becomes one of those Central Park horses pulling tourists around, his head down, no distractions, only able to see the strip of pavement in front of him, which in his case is the trail leading to a killer.

  Unfortunately for his wife and children, they became part of the noisy traffic he found it necessary to ignore in order to do his job, and he continually plodded right by them, never giving them a second thought but expecting them to be waiting for him in the stable afterward ready with praise, affection, and a trough full of food.

  His wife has stayed with him all these years, but I can’t imagine she’s been happy. They spend most of their time apart. I guess they both decided it would be easier to have separate lives than go through a divorce. It’s none of my business. I’m not the other woman and never have been. During the twenty-seven years I’ve known Nolan we’ve probably had sex maybe thirty times, our hookups never planned and never talked about afterward. Like our latest, they’ve come out of nowhere, the surprise adding almost as much excitement to the act as the lusty comingling of body parts.

  I was sexually active throughout my forties but not necessarily sexually satisfied. The other night with Nolan was the first non-self-inflicted orgasm I’ve had in five years.

  I was so pleased that while I was online looking up the Jessica Simpson bedding collection to identify the comforter that had been wrapped around Camio Truly, I Googled traditional anniversary gifts, found out five years is wood, and ordered myself a coffee table.

  Nolan dismisses his team. They grab up the remaining doughnuts along with their notes and cups of coffee and give me nods and growling mutters of gratitude.

  Nolan invited me to this briefing as a courtesy, but I know he also values my input. The same can’t be said for the men working for him who are either young, ambitious go-getters hoping to be a detective of his rank someday, or experienced cops confident in their abilities and possessive of their testosterone-fueled, by-the-book world. They may have a bit of respect for my title and a few might even think I earned it through merit and not because of some type of political feminist maneuverings, but none of them have the slightest regard for my domain. They consider small-town cops to be glorified babysitters. I don’t take offense at this. In a way I am the day-care equivalent of law enforcement. I’ve spent my twenty odd years as a cop cleaning up after the residents of Buchanan, teaching them basic manners and social skills, putting them in grown-up time-out when their behavior becomes destructive or distracting.

  What I do is just as important as what they do. If I do my job right, people might not end up getting to a point in their lives where they commit the offenses that make them the problems of these troopers.

  Standing this close to the murder board with everything written in big block letters, I don’t need my glasses, but I get tired of taking them on and off. I’ve learned to slide them down my nose and look over the tops of them.

  Nolan obviously doesn’t wear his shades when he gives a briefing to his fellow officers. Without them, it’s immediately obvious why he does wear them during every other aspect of his job. He’s built a career on being a hard-ass but he has gentle eyes, a comforting shade of baby-blanket blue couched in a crinkly web of kindly old-uncle creases.

  He’s looking at me.

  “Your glasses aren’t terrible,” he says. “I thought they’d make you look old, but you don’t look any older than you are.”

  “Here you go with the sweet talk again.” I sigh.

  He’s moved the family members out of the suspect category. I notice with a heavy heart that Zane Massey is still there.

  “The immediate family members all have alibis,” he tells me while jabbing a finger at each blown-up DMV photo in turn. Camio’s incarcerated brother, Shane, is represented by his mug shot.

  “Father was out of town on a job. Sister was at a friend’s house. Older brother has two hundred inmates and a dozen guards who can account for his whereabouts.”

  “And Shawna?” I wonder. “You seemed to think she was a possibility the other day. What happened?”

  “This crime required effort. I can’t imagine her getting off the couch.”

  I shake my head at this.

  “Why is it brass won’t let you talk to the press?”

  “You think the same thing,” he grunts at me.

  He’s right. Whoever killed Camio swung a heavy object at her head, rolled her up in a blanket, drove her to Campbell’s Run, lit her on fire, and stuck her down a sinkhole. Even so, I don’t have as much trouble imagining Shawna doing any of that as I do picturing her cleaning up afterward.

  “We’ve been through the house and their vehicles. There’s no sign of blood anywhere, and a head wound like that would’ve bled like crazy. Would’ve been a helluva mess to clean up. Nearly impossible to erase all traces,” Nolan goes on. “You’re positive the comforter didn’t belong to them?”

  “I can’t be a hundred percent sure,” I answer, “but like I told you, it’s definitely not their style and it’s also pricey. I can’t see Shawna blowing a hundred twenty dollars on a comforter, plus then you feel obligated to get the shams and bed skirt, maybe a few throw pillows—”

  “I get it,” he cuts me off, moving away from me and puckering up his face like the mere mention of a bed skirt might make him start lactating.

  He throws himself back into discussing the case.

  “You’ve got a drunk for a father, a mother who checked out a long time ago, a son in prison, and a dropout daughter who got herself knocked up in high school. On paper it looks like the ideal family environment where something like this could happen.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” I join in his analysis, “but I think they’re too messed up to do something this messed up.”

  “Come again?”

  “They all seem more concerned with self-destruction than anyone else’s destruction. Even Shane’s knife fight. Witnesses say the other guy started it and it might not have happened at all if they both hadn’t been three sheets to the wind. Accidents do happen, but otherwise, where’s the motive? This is one tight-knit clan, and even though Camio might be a little different, she was still one of them, and I think they all loved her in their own highly dysfunctional ways. Zane told me when she was around her family she became just like them. I don’t know exactly what that means but I have a pretty good idea. Her number one loyalty seems to have been to her family even if she wanted to get away from them.”

  I walk over to Zane’s most recent
school photo, enlarged and posted at the top of the suspects list. He’s not stone-faced or staring belligerently trying to prove he’s too tough or too cool for this yearly ritual. He’s smiling for the camera, probably thinking about all the relatives who are going to end up with a copy of the picture compliments of his mother.

  She flashes through my mind. I see Brie Massey running around riffling through drawers and pulling open photo albums looking for a photo to give to the police believing if they just had the right one, they’d see the same wonderful, innocent, clean-cut boy she saw instead of seeing someone capable of murder.

  Nolan comes up behind me.

  “He admits he went out to meet her right around the time of her death but claims she didn’t show up.”

  I turn to him with my hands on my hips and look at him in exasperation over the tops of my glasses, then quickly take them off altogether when it occurs to me I might very well look like some reviled teacher from his youth.

  “Why would he admit that if he did it?” I ask.

  “To throw us off.”

  “Did that kid strike you as the kind of kid who’d try to throw off the police? And he wasn’t gone from the house long enough.”

  “We don’t know that. We still don’t have a straight answer from the parents about how long he was gone. Dad says he thinks he was gone for about an hour. Mom originally said he wasn’t gone at all. Once we told her Zane admitted he went to meet Camio, she changed her tune and said he may have been gone. Either one of them would lie to save him.”

  “What about his car?” I challenge him. “Came up clean didn’t it?”

  “All the Massey vehicles are clean,” he admits.

  “And what about his motive?”

  “It’s possible they were breaking up. Last time they were at the house together, Miranda Truly said she overheard them fighting. Camio told Zane she wanted to break up and he got very angry.”

  I think about this revelation for a moment and my chat with Zane about Camio’s family and his two visits to their home. If they needed to have that particular fight, I can’t imagine he’d let it happen in a house full of Trulys. Camio wouldn’t want that either. Maybe Miranda heard what she wanted to hear.