Angels Burning

by Tawni O'Dell

  “But every time you do you could end up with a kid.”

  “How is that any different from being a girl?”

  He glares at me. I move on to something more relevant.

  “You say you and Jessy don’t have any kind of relationship, but last time she saw you, she wanted to hook up with you. What do you think that was about?”

  “She didn’t want to hook up with me. She wanted me to babysit.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “She had somewhere to go and she didn’t want to bring the baby along. She said it was going to be emotional or something like that. She said it could get messy.”

  “ ‘It could get messy’? Those were her exact words?”

  “She was upset about something. She even started crying. Then the baby started crying. Then they left.”

  “Upset about what?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “So she wasn’t with you this past Friday between the hours of five and eight?”

  “I saw her for fifteen minutes, maybe.”

  I lean back on my stool, take a long swig from my beer, and give him my best disapproving stare. It doesn’t take long for him to wilt under it.

  “I had good intentions,” he feels the need to explain. “She’s not bad-looking but she’s got some extra poundage going on. I was kind of doing her a favor.”

  “A favor?”

  “I’m not a loser. I’m going to school. I got student loans to pay. I’m working. My whole life should be flushed down the can because I had pity sex one night?”

  I’ve lost all patience with this jerk.

  “Maybe you could try looking at having a child as a good thing instead of a bad one. Lots of people do. It’s not all about bills and responsibilities. There are rewards.

  “And if you were able to get it up, pity isn’t what you were feeling, jackass.”

  I stare him down again.

  “Now get me my lime.”

  I should leave. There’s no reason for me to stay, but I do it anyway just to cramp the style of Mr. Pity Sex.

  I’d like to tell him if what I’ve heard is correct, he shouldn’t feel any pity for Jessy. She got exactly what she wanted. Her only interest in him was as a sperm donor. He did do her a favor but not the way he thinks.

  Jessy shouldn’t have even been in this bar or any bar. She was eighteen when she got pregnant. Even now she’s still shy of twenty-one.

  They’re serving minors in here. I make a mental note to have one of my men look into this, then I make another note to stop being a cop and enjoy the rest of my beer.

  I only last for one more beer before the noise gets to me. I’m ready to leave when a woman sits down beside me. I almost faint.

  “What are you doing here? You hate bars,” I say.

  “You’ve been weird lately. Stressed out. I thought you might want some company.”

  Neely looks all around her, gets her bearings, then motions at Kirk who pretends not to see her.

  “You mean you were worried I was going to get shitfaced and do something stupid,” I correct her. “Those days are long past. I get drunk on two shots now and I’m so sick the next day I want to die. Where’s Mason?”

  “At your house, a couple blocks away, with Smoke, watching TV.”

  “I guess he’s safe. The only guard I’d feel safer with would be Nolan, and that’s only because he has opposable thumbs.”

  “Screw his thumbs. People are more afraid of a snarling German shepherd than they are of an old cop. Besides, why does Mason need a guard? What do you think is going to happen while you’re gone? Aren’t you the chief of police of this town? Don’t you pride yourself on how safe it is?”

  “It didn’t turn out to be very safe for Camio,” I say dejectedly, my three beers starting to make me feel sorry for myself. “And I don’t like Lucky skulking around.”

  Neely makes a sour face and waves away the thought of Lucky with her extended middle finger.

  “So how’d it go?” she asks. “I can tell you talked to the bartender by the way he’s avoiding us.”

  “Helpful. I think. Camio’s sister might’ve been with her when she died or right before. Same for her uncle. Same for her grandmother. They’re all lying. I don’t know why. I don’t know how much they’re lying. I still don’t see any reason for any of them to kill her.”

  “Family members kill other family members all the time,” she says.

  “But not simply because they’re family. There’s always a specific motive. Something that the killer needed or wanted or set him off. Let’s change the subject.”

  “Hey, kid,” Neely says to Kirk in her best instructor voice. “Bring me a Jack and Coke. Now.”

  He looks her way and obeys, no differently than Sammy the golden doodle.

  “The last guy I slept with I met at this bar,” I announce as it occurs to me.

  I’m not counting Nolan. I never count him.

  “The guy who owns the sporting goods store in Hellersburg?”

  I nod.

  “How was it?”

  “Eh.”

  “Why do you do it then?”

  “Because I want to have sex.”

  “Don’t you want to have good sex?”

  “Of course. But good sex isn’t always available.”

  “And eh sex is an acceptable substitute?”

  “No.” I sigh.

  Kirk brings Neely her drink, asks me if I want another beer, then asks someone behind me what he’s having. Neely and I turn around and find Lucky standing behind us.

  “Speak of the devil,” I say.

  Neely hasn’t seen him for more than thirty years. It takes her a minute to place his face. He knows her instantly.

  “The high-and-mighty one,” he coos, his voice sounding as oily as his hair looks. “Princess Neely. Too good to give me the time of day except for her bitchy little comments when her mama wasn’t listening.”

  Neely turns around on her stool.

  “Don’t you talk about my mother.”

  “I’ll talk about your mother all I want. She was the love of my life and somebody killed her and you’re going to tell me who.”

  Neely gets off her stool and gets in his face. He’s wearing a lot of cologne, and she blinks her eyes against the smell.

  “We’re not going to tell you anything,” she says in a low, calm voice. “Dove says you’ve been running around threatening us and saying you’re going to sue us. You even went and harassed Grandma. No one’s impressed. You don’t scare us. You can’t prove anything, and you don’t have the balls to try and hurt us.

  “Come on, Dove,” she says to me.

  I’m pretty sure he’s wearing the same shirt as when he came to see me five days ago but it’s been laundered. Mingled with his noxious cologne is the cloying flowery scent of some kind of fabric softener.

  I don’t know where he’s staying or how he’s getting by. Life isn’t easy for an ex-con and definitely not for one pushing seventy. I picture him living in a single rented room, empty except for a lumpy mattress on an old iron bed frame and a dresser topped with an amateurish flea market painting of a basket of kittens on black velvet, with one belt buckle and one going-out shirt to his name.

  I start to get off my stool and he grabs me roughly by the arm.

  “You stole my life. You think I’m just going to let it go?”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  I meant for the words to come out sounding fierce and final, but they sound defeated and full of regret.

  Neely pulls his hand off me and gets between us.

  “I’m going to tell you this one time and one time only. You leave Dove out of this. I’m the one who convinced her to lie. I’m the one who came up with the whole idea.”

  He gives her a leering smile full of graveyard gaps and stained teeth like old headstones.

  “Then you’re the one who should buy me a drink.”

  “Let’s go,” Neely commands.


  I reach into my purse for my wallet.

  “Don’t you dare,” she warns me.

  “I’m paying for ours.”

  She leaves first. I throw three twenties on the bar and hurry after her, not waiting to see Lucky’s reaction.

  I join my sister outside the bar.

  “It had to be done,” she says.

  I’m not sure which crime she’s talking about. I agree the first was necessary, but maybe we didn’t need to falsely accuse Lucky. I tell her as much.

  “We had to lay it on someone,” she reasons, “and he was the best candidate. If the police had kept looking they might have found out the truth.”

  Neely is not a physically demonstrative person with people. I could probably count on one hand the amount of times we’ve embraced during our lives. Even now she doesn’t hug me. She reaches out and cups my face with her two hands the way a mother does with a young child who she’s trying to soothe.

  “I know you think it was selfish but it wasn’t,” she says. “You didn’t do it for yourself; you did it for me. There was no way I would’ve survived if they caught you.”

  I look into her eyes, our mother’s eyes, and marvel at how I can’t live without someone who so resembles someone I killed.

  chapter twenty-three

  I MANAGE to keep my emotions in check until we get back to my house and I’m alone in my bedroom. When I start crying it’s because I’m overwhelmed once again by my sister’s loyalty. I’ve never been able to cry over what I did to my mother. I’ve felt sorrow, rage, shame, and disgust since that night but I’ve never shed a tear or experienced a moment of regret. I don’t know what this says about me. I do know what it says about her.

  I found out about Gil and Champ innocently enough and have often looked back on that day and thought how easy it would have been for me to have not discovered what was going on and also how I had failed my little brother by not discovering it sooner. I don’t know which feeling has been worse: the guilt over my dereliction of duty or the twinges of self-preservation that make me wish I’d never known.

  I came home unexpectedly from school. After a dentist appointment downtown, I walked home instead of going back for my last few classes. My plan was to grab a bite, then convince Mom to let me borrow her car to drive back later for basketball practice. It turned out she had gone shopping. I saw Gil’s big cranberry Buick in the driveway but thought nothing of it. He came and went from his places of business whenever he felt like it. He was the boss.

  Champ should’ve been in school. Gil had taken him out for what he called a family emergency.

  He hadn’t bothered to shut his door completely because he thought they were alone.

  We all like to think we know how we’d react in a crisis. We’ve all watched plenty of tragedies covered on the news and thought, I’d handle it differently. I would’ve gone to the authorities, or I would’ve taken that boy and run away, or I would’ve killed that son of a bitch right then and there and no matter what I did, I’d be on the side of the angels and when it was all over, I’d be able to put it behind me.

  The problem with this armchair supposing is that it’s fiction even though it may spring from true outrage. Nothing shatters the reality of our good intentions like reality.

  I was in a situation I could have never imagined in my wildest, most perverted dreams. It was inconceivable. I would have been less shocked if Gil had turned out to be a werewolf or an alien from another planet than a human doing what I witnessed when I walked by that door.

  I didn’t panic. I didn’t scream. I didn’t threaten. I didn’t vomit or run.

  I turned my head away and stood back from the door.

  “Champ!” I called out, trying to sound strong and whole instead of the shivering, frantic bits I’d become. “Come here.”

  I never spoke to Gil. I would never speak to him again. He left. Later that night the police would find him at Rankin’s with a half dozen of his employees going through inventory and able to give him an impeachable alibi.

  I called Grandma and told her she needed to take Champ to her house and watch him for a while. I explained in a demented twist of irony that I had a surprise planned for Mom that just involved Neely and me and wanted Champ to be absent.

  Grandma never questioned my story, and I never told her what happened to Champ. I didn’t think she could handle it or that she could help. I’ve often thought since then, after a lifetime of knowing her, that I was wrong on both counts.

  I waited until Mom was taking her bath. I knew I’d have her undivided attention that way.

  She was settled deep in a cloud of bubbles, her golden hair piled on top of her head and drinking a glass of wine, when I walked into the bathroom to tell her.

  I had no idea how to begin the conversation. I wanted it over. I truly believed once I told her, she’d fix everything. My heart swelled with love as I stood before her knowing she would be our savior. She would finally be our mom.

  I took a deep breath and blurted out, “Gil’s been messing with Champ.”

  I think I expected her to be in denial at first. Or thought she might even laugh. Or maybe she’d always sensed something was wrong. Maybe she’d be subconsciously prepared. Maybe she’d go directly to fury. Or collapse even deeper into her bubbles sobbing. Or jump for her robe and head for the phone to call the police.

  She sighed and looked annoyed at me.

  “It’s not a big deal, Dove.”

  I was sure I hadn’t heard her right or she hadn’t heard me right. Before I could repeat myself, she went on with an explanation she seemed to feel was perfectly fine.

  “He lives in a big, beautiful house. He has all the toys he could ever want. Food on the table. And he finally has a father. Gil has even talked about adopting you kids.”

  She knows, a voice screamed inside my head. She’s known all along and doesn’t care.

  “He’ll get over it,” she assured me. “He’s a boy.”

  Was it a swap? the voice continued screaming. Did you discuss it calmly like a business deal over a nice dinner? Did he hold out the velvet box with the diamond ring sparkling inside it and tell you it was all yours if you gave him your son?

  I’d never find out the answers.

  Once again I didn’t fall apart. I didn’t hang around to further discuss the situation. I didn’t snap. I didn’t lose my temper. I remained calm and sane. I knew exactly what I was doing as I walked to my little brother’s bedroom and returned with his baseball bat choked up firmly in my hands. I was so in control and considerate that I remembered not to damage her face for Grandma’s sake.

  Neely is the only other person who knows the truth and even she doesn’t know all of it. I told her about Champ and I told her what I did but I never told her what Mom said to me in the bathroom before she died. I knew it wasn’t necessary.

  Neely wouldn’t care about the details and the depths of our mother’s depravity. All she needed to know was the bitch failed to protect her pups.

  THERE’S A TAP on my door.

  Neely and Smoke have gone home. I left Mason downstairs in front of the TV. I tell myself he’s watching too much TV. I need to find him some kind of day camp.

  “Just a minute,” I tell him, and head for a box of Kleenex.

  I blow my nose, dab at my eyes, and check my reflection in a mirror. Along with MOF, I’m now also a victim of SOF, Sad Old Face. My eyelids are puffy, my face sags like Deputy Dawg’s, my skin’s sickly pale with patches of red. In my youth, crying made me look deliciously vulnerable and dewy.

  “Come in,” I call.

  Mason enters clutching his Trapper Keeper.

  “You look sad, Aunt Dove,” he immediately confirms.

  “I’m a little sad.”

  “Is it because of me?”

  “No, definitely not.”

  I plop down on the edge of my bed and pat the space beside me.

  “Come here. Let’s have a talk.”

  He moves t
oward me, then has second thoughts.

  “Wait a minute,” he says.

  He lays down his binder and rushes from the room.

  He returns with a smartphone in a rosy glitter-frosted case and hands it to me.

  “I was going to save this and give it to you as a thank-you present when Dad comes back but maybe you’d like it now. It might make you feel better.”

  “Where did you get this?” I ask.

  “Derk. He traded it for these goofy paper umbrellas and toothpicks shaped like swords Dad and I collected on our road trip. And some other toothpicks from Manny’s that have little Mexican flags on them.”

  I turn on the phone and slide my finger across the screen to access it. Up pops a photo of Camio and Zane.

  Mason crawls up on the bed beside me and looks over my shoulder.

  “I asked him why he had a pink sparkly phone.”

  He pauses while he grabs his binder and starts leafing through its pages. He seems to find what he’s looking for.

  “Derk said it belongs to an angel who dropped it from heaven,” he reads from the page, then smiles up at me.

  “I wrote that one down. Pure gold.”

  chapter twenty-four

  I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT of regret and guilt as salt and pepper siblings: the first a clean, straightforward, righteous emotion aroused by circumstances beyond our control or power to repair; the second a murky, confusing, selfish muck fueled by culpability, real or imagined, and kept bubbling by a sense of inadequacy.

  Regret is spontaneous, but I believe we choose to feel guilt. This is the only way I can explain good people like Neely and Nolan who, while capable of admitting mistakes and taking responsibility for their failures, move past them and never seem to let them impact their lives.

  I don’t think I’m a selfish person and I try not to feel guilt, but sometimes I fail. Today is going to be one of those days.

  It was a different time, I remind myself as I stand in front of my closet searching for an outfit. Pedophilia wasn’t openly discussed the way it is now. Teachers, doctors, guidance counselors, even the police weren’t trained to notice it. No one was ready to acknowledge it existed, especially in white-picket-fenced little towns. And if it did exist, the men committing this vile act had to be the unwashed, unsavory, unnoticed dregs of society.