by Julia Keller
“Try not to get upset like that,” he said. “Don’t be the kind of person who gets upset. Won’t serve you.”
He started to tell her what his temper had done to him—how it got him in all kinds of trouble when he couldn’t control his anger. He held back. She would ask him more questions about it. He didn’t want to lie to her. But he did not want her to know that he had hit a man in the head with a bowling ball because the man had pissed him off, annoyed him, and the man was now blind in one eye, and had a dented-in place on the side of his skull. Eddie did not serve much time for that. He was just back from Afghanistan and his thinking was totally messed up. The judge, thank God, was a veteran, too.
She was instantly contrite. “I won’t, Daddy. I promise I won’t get upset.”
“Good. If you do, though—just count to ten. That helps.”
“I can count way past ten,” she said, scoffing at the idea that ten was her limit. “I can go to twenty-five.”
“I know, sweet pea. But that’s not what I mean. I mean that if somebody makes you mad, you can count to settle yourself down. One, two, three, four, five—you get a rhythm and it takes your mind off it. So you’re not focusing anymore on being hurt or upset.”
“Does it work for you, Daddy?”
“Yeah.” He reached over and nudged her paper plate, rattling the rest of her Tater Tots. “Can you finish these?”
“Yeah,” she said. He had the impression that she had said “Yeah” just now because he had said “Yeah” before, and she wanted to be like him.
That was an astonishing thought. Never before had anyone wanted to be like him. He was always the negative example, the person you did not want to be like. But Marla Kay wanted to be like him.
It occurred to him that this night could be his whole life. He could live it all right here, right now. Live it right down to the stub, like a candle that burns all the way out. Morning, noon, and night: He could live it all in the next few hours. With his little girl. After that, he didn’t care what happened to him. He had read about certain insects that did that: They lived a lifetime in a single day.
He looked at his watch. It was all going by so fast. It was almost 9 P.M.
Part of him wanted to tell her what was going to happen, so that she would appreciate it, too. So that she would understand. They had to pack everything in together, the two of them. They had to pack a lifetime of nights into a single night.
This night.
“Am I going to spend the night here, Daddy?”
He was tempted to say, Yeah, sweet pea. He really wanted to say that. The idea would please her; she was comfortable here, at ease, and she would look forward to sleeping on the Frozen sheets. That had been his original plan. Then he had changed his mind; this was one of the first places they’d look for her.
But he had promised himself he would not lie to her. Ever.
So he said, “No, not tonight. In fact it’s just about time to go.”
“Go where, Daddy?” Excitement in her voice. Anticipation.
“It’s a surprise.”
She nodded. She trusted him. He was her daddy and he would take care of her. She kicked out her legs, her body bouncy and free. She turned her head. She noticed the long thin object on the bed, the one wrapped in the plaid blanket.
“What’s that, Daddy?”
Paul
9:07 P.M.
The meeting with the church elders had run long. It always ran long but usually not this long. They had gotten a late start; Paul had an errand to run before joining the seven old men in the church rec hall. He had met Dot Burdette at the morgue. She had wanted to see her niece’s body.
By the time Paul said good night to the last old man and walked into the rectory’s small kitchen, Jenny had just about finished preparing their dinner. Mondays were his night to cook.
“Hey,” he said. “Smells terrific. But it was my turn.”
“If I’d waited for you to extricate yourself from your adoring flock,” Jenny said archly, “we wouldn’t eat until midnight. Those old guys really love the sound of their own voices, don’t they?”
“Yep.” He kissed her cheek, which was flushed from the heat of the stove. She shooed him away. She was busy. “But as somebody who’s notorious for giving long sermons,” he added, “I’ve got no room to criticize.”
She laughed. “Too true.” She dished up two bowls of beef stew and they sat. The table was a long wooden one with bench seats. Jenny had discovered it in an antiques shop in Virginia and thought it looked vaguely churchy.
“Too hot for stew,” she conceded, “but I felt like making it.”
“I thought you were leaning toward hamburgers. That’s what I told Eddie.”
“Changed my mind. And he never came up, anyway. Guess he’s not hungry.”
“Well, the stew’s good.” He had yet to take a bite.
“You haven’t even tasted it.” Annoyance creased her voice. “That’s so you, Paul. You praise something just to be praising it. It’s got nothing to do with what you actually believe.”
He took a long sip. “Okay, but it really is good.”
She had complained about that before, about his need to make everybody feel better. He took responsibility for all the emotions in the room. He always had. Even as a kid, he had felt a serious need to ensure the happiness of everyone he came across. He was the kind of boy who would deliberately miss a jump shot if his team had a big lead, in order to give the other side a chance to catch up. When his older sister admired his bike, he tried to make her take it. She wouldn’t. Instead she had looked at him and said, “What? No. You’re crazy. I don’t want your stupid bike. I want one of my own that’s just as good as yours. Or better.” In college he never told his dorm roommate how much he hated Pearl Jam. Cliff loved their music, and so Paul said he loved it, too, and it was fine if Cliff wanted to play it loud.
And that was why he became a pastor. He could do professionally what he’d always done—which was to soothe the world, to keep it smoothed-out and safe. Round the edges. He was handsome in a square, middle-of the-road way—medium build, straight brown hair, straight teeth, regular features—and that helped, too, with the minister thing. People liked to confide in a good-looking young man. His mentor, a preacher at his home church named Elbert Trammel, explained that to him. It sounded simplistic, but it ended up being true. Paul saw it all the time: Women and men who came to him because they were troubled would visibly relax in his presence. Paul was, as the Reverend Trammel put it, “easy on the eyes.” Trammel was not; he had rubbery lips, frizzy gray hair, bad skin, a melting-candle physique. People were made anxious by ugliness, he told Paul, especially in a man of God. If you’re such a good and faithful servant of the Lord, then why do you look like ten miles of bad road? That, the old man insisted, was exactly what they were thinking when they sat in their pews on those Sunday mornings and listened to Elbert Trammel preach at them. At the very least, wouldn’t a just and loving God have taken care of that face of yours? I mean, really.
Paul met Jenny at his first church assignment: assistant pastor at Stone Ridge Baptist in Poplar Springs, Tennessee. She was twenty-nine and still lived with her parents. She worked at the Gap, and on one of their first dates, she explained to him—at his request—the proper way to fold a T-shirt. I do this all day long, she told him. You wouldn’t believe how often people come into the store and mess up the stacks of T-shirts, just for the heck of it. Jenny was short and heavy and wore glasses. She was not what anyone would call attractive, but there was an energy about her, an earnestness, that many people, including the new assistant minister, found appealing. She was volunteer coordinator at Stone Ridge and her greatest desire, she told Paul on that same first date—after she had demonstrated the proper folding of a T-shirt—was to change the world. Make it a better place.
“So what were the guys grousing about tonight?” Jenny asked. Before he could answer, she added, “Do you want some crackers with that?”
&nbs
p; “No, I’m good.” He wasn’t really hungry but he knew better than to tell her so. It would be rude, being as how she had worked so hard to make dinner. He had already decided: He’d finish his bowl and ask for seconds. “They’re upset about all the overdoses today. Had a bunch of them. All over town.”
“I heard.” She nodded solemnly. “What does it say about this place that dozens of people overdose on heroin and you and I don’t even discuss it until”—she checked the clock on the kitchen wall—“after nine o’clock at night? It’s like a regular thing around here now. God help us all.”
“Yeah. Pretty shocking.”
“What did the elders say?”
“The usual. Everybody’s wondering what the church ought to do.” He braced himself. He knew what was coming next.
“So what should we do?”
There was challenge in her tone. The “we” was on purpose. He knew his wife’s view: A church should be an active force for good in a community. Life was a battle, it was always good versus evil, and they couldn’t—they shouldn’t—let down for an instant. Work. Strive. Sacrifice. Work some more. It was the same drive she’d brought to the folding of T-shirts at the Gap: Don’t stop. Don’t even slow down. He admired her. He really did. Except that sometimes he got a little tired of it.
Sometimes he wanted to just eat his dinner. Or not eat it. Whatever. He just wanted to relax without having somebody preach at him about his duty. He knew his duty. He knew it better than anybody else.
He owed her. The bargain they’d struck six years ago was unspoken, but unspoken bargains often were the most binding of all. He had learned that. The bargain was: If he agreed to take the job as head pastor of the Rising Souls Church in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, she would give him another chance. Because that was why he needed to leave Stone Ridge. He had had an affair with a parishioner. Wendy Pang was a forty-four-year-old divorcée who came to him for spiritual counseling. Paul, to his great surprise, fell in love with her. Their lovemaking—passionate, intense, uninhibited—was like nothing he’d ever experienced with Jenny, back when they were still having intimate relations. He was selfish with Wendy. He didn’t worry about her pleasure, as he did when he and Jenny made love. It was enormously liberating. Wendy liked his selfishness. She said it turned her on.
They talked of a life together, he and Wendy Pang. He would have to leave the church, of course, in addition to divorcing Jenny. Before any plans could go forward, Wendy announced that she had changed her mind. It was a fling, she said, a short burst of madness, but she had come to her senses. And he needed to do that, too. I thought it would last forever, she wrote in her final text to him. But it didn’t. He confessed to Jenny. The job in Acker’s Gap—a place neither of them had ever heard of—seemed like fitting penance.
But his affair had turned Jenny into what she had never been before: A Jealous Person. She was always watching him now, alert for signs and hints. He knew why she had come to his office that morning, ostensibly to deliver the message from Dot Burdette. It wasn’t to deliver a message from Dot Burdette, even though, as it happened, Dot Burdette really had needed comfort from him, in the wake of her niece’s sudden, grubby death.
She had come to get another look at the woman he was meeting with in his office. To gauge the vibe. Was there anything going on? Was there anything that meant something conceivably might go on at some point in the future?
No. And: no. That’s what Jenny had decided. He could tell. She had sensed no sexual threat from Shirley Dolan.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But we’ve got to do something. This town is really shaken up—parts of it are, anyway. The rest doesn’t even know what’s happening.” He leaned back, then forward. He missed a regular chair with a back to it. “I’ve never seen Dot Burdette the way she was tonight, over at the morgue. I’m not sure why she wanted to go.”
“Somebody had to positively ID the body, I guess.”
“Sammy had already done that. I don’t suppose it much matters if it’s an aunt or an uncle.” He fetched a deep, discouraged-sounding breath. “What a night. First the morgue and then the elders’ meeting. Walter Bee and his buddies, telling me the world’s going to hell—and just what do I propose to do about it?”
“Well, that’s kind of in your job description, isn’t it? Helping people make sense of their sorrows?” She was pushing him, like always. Needling him. “When things go wrong—people turn to their pastors. That’s good. Not bad. Right?”
He shrugged. She would never forgive him. Or worse: She would always forgive him. She would make forgiving him her personal hobby.
He had realized that the second they landed in Acker’s Gap. It didn’t matter what he did or didn’t do, it didn’t matter if he was the world’s best husband or a philandering cad—she would never, ever, ever not forgive him.
So to hell with her.
He didn’t mean that. He was tired, and he was sad about the overdoses and all the pain he had seen in the eyes of the church elders tonight, several of whom, he knew, had children and grandchildren with drug problems, and who were probably thinking, There but for the grace of God …
He was glum and he was frustrated. And he didn’t want any more damned stew.
“Some of the elders want to start a halfway house,” he said. “Someplace for addicts to come.”
“That’s a really good idea,” Jenny said. “There’s not enough room here at the church, but I bet we could find a good empty building downtown that we could—”
“Whoa,” he said. “Nothing’s been decided yet. We’d have to do a lot of fund-raising first. And get permits and such. It’s just an idea right now.” And it’s their idea, he wanted to say to her. You don’t have to be in charge of every damned thing. You don’t have to swoop in like some angel and start organizing all the good deeds in the world.
But he did not say that, because it would be cruel. And Paul Wolford was not cruel. He was a good guy. He was the guy everybody liked. When he screwed up, he asked for a second chance, and he usually got it. Our God is a God of second chances, he liked to say in his sermons. People liked hearing it.
“What was that?” Jenny said.
He started to give the classic retort to that question—“What was what?”—when the sound came again and this time, he heard it, too: A knock, as if someone had dropped something on the floor of an adjacent room.
“Might be somebody at the back door,” he said. “I’ll check.”
“I’m coming, too.”
He understood. She didn’t want him to go alone. By now it was dark outside. The church’s neighborhood at the east end of town had once been considered safe but there was no such thing anymore as a safe neighborhood. Not in Acker’s Gap.
They reached the back door. Another knock. Paul flipped on the outside light. When he opened the door, he said, “Raylene” in a startled voice. He wasn’t sure if he was saying it to her or to Jenny or to himself.
Raylene was bent almost double, one arm stuck straight out to claw at the door, the other clutching her stomach, heaving with sobs.
“My baby!” she cried. “He got her. You have to help me—please! Please! No telling what that pervert might—”
“Is this about Marla Kay?” Jenny said, using her elbow to help her move in front of Paul. “What’s going on? What happened?”
“I told you,” Raylene screamed back at her. She seemed to be offended by Jenny’s relatively calm demeanor. “Eddie took my baby girl. His truck’s out back so I figure he’s got her down there. He grabbed her from the playground. I went to get her and this lady who lives across the street said she saw a man take her—a man in an orange truck with a church sign on it. You gotta help me—please.” Her voice dropped to a snarl. “By God, if he so much as touches my little girl, I swear I’ll kill that goddamned bastard with my bare hands, just as sure as I’m standing here.”
“Settle down,” Paul said, in his best can’t-we-all-just-get-along purr. “Eddie’s a good man. And
he loves her. He’s not going to—”
“He’s got a gun down there,” Raylene broke in. “He told me once. Did you know that? The man you’re protecting has got a deadly weapon. How’re you gonna feel if he hurts my girl?”
Before Paul had a chance to answer, the air was riven by the sound of a gunshot from the church basement.
Bell
9:32 P.M.
She had been sitting with Dot Burdette for over an hour. Their business was concluded but they were still here, sitting side by side in the bucket seats in the waiting room of the Raythune County Coroner’s Office. Everyone else had gone home: Dot’s brother, Sammy; her pastor, Paul Wolford; the coroner, Buster Crutchfield.
Only Dot remained. And as long as Dot was here, Bell would be here, too, because that was what she had promised Dot: You stay, I stay.
The chairs were the cheap plastic kind, the whole row bolted to a long metal strip. They were purposefully uncomfortable—that was Bell’s theory, anyway—to discourage long visits. Grief sometimes left people frozen. She could well imagine someone showing up here to ID a body and then just never mustering the will or the energy to leave.
Dot might be that someone.
In the hours since she had learned about Sally Ann’s death Dot had shifted from one region of sorrow to another, making the change like the swift, clean stroke of an engine. She had gone from active shock and clawing agony to a kind of blank, wide-eyed calm. Dot had not washed her face or changed her clothes. This woman who was always so prideful about her appearance, who rarely left her house without full makeup and heels that matched her purse, wore old pants, tennis shoes, and an oversized shirt with a raggedy collar. These were exactly the clothes she had pulled on, Bell surmised, when she received that middle-of-the-night visit from Sheriff Harrison. She had spent the subsequent hours sitting in her living room, the room in which Bell had found her earlier that day. Dark room, dark thoughts. Her hair had not been combed. It was flat in some places; in others, it stuck up in strange-looking tufts.