Carnal Innocence (30 page)

“I’ve got some thinking to do.” He ran a hand through his hair. It was dry now, but he caught a whiff of her shampoo. Even so small a thing had his gut tightening. “Will you be all right? Want me to call Josie, or Susie, or someone?”

“No, no, I’ll be fine.” But she wondered if he would. “Matthew’s a rigid sort of man, Tucker. That kind always sees the logic of placing blame.”

“There’s blame enough. Listen, I need to get back. I don’t want Cy having to talk to him on his own.” His hands dug into his pockets again. “He’s just a kid.”

“Go ahead.” It would be better, she thought, to be alone. To put off talking about what had happened between them that morning. “I’ll be fine, really.” She lifted their plates, thinking Useless was going to breakfast like a king.

He put a hand on her shoulder as she turned to the sink. “I’m coming back.”

“I know.” She waited until he was at the doorway before speaking again. “Tucker. Thanks for telling
Matthew I wasn’t helpless. When you’re used to people seeing you that way, it means a lot.”

Her back was to him, her shoulders straight. He knew she was looking out to where the blood had dried on the grass.

“We’re going to have to talk, you and me. About a lot of things.”

When she didn’t answer, he left her alone.

H
is daddy was dead. Miss Della had told him. His daddy was dead. There would be no more snapping belts or merciless fists. No more shouts to a fever-eyed God to punish the sinners for their transgressions, their laziness, their filthy thoughts.

Miss Della had sat him down in the bright kitchen and told him, and there had been kindness in her eyes.

He was afraid, so afraid that there would be no end for him but hell. The fiery, screaming black pool of hell his father had often gleefully described. How could he expect forgiveness or a place at the Lord’s table when he harbored such an evil secret in his soul? The secret whispered through his brain with the devil’s rusty chuckle.

His daddy was dead. And he was glad.

When his tears had come, the tears Miss Della patiently waited out then wiped away, they weren’t tears of sorrow or grief. They were tears of relief. A river of joy and gratitude and hope.

And it was that, Cy thought as he watered the kitchen garden, that which would consign him to hell for all eternity.

He had been responsible for the death of his father. And he wasn’t sorry.

Miss Della had told him he could stay at Sweetwater just as long as he wanted—Mr. Tucker had said so. He didn’t have to go home, he didn’t have to go back to that house of fear and hopelessness. He didn’t have to face Vernon, see his father in his brother’s eyes, feel his father’s wrath in his brother’s fists.

By a single act of cowardice he had wiped out four years of waiting.

His father was dead, and he was free.

Cy hunkered down, the hose soaking grass until it gurgled in a puddle. Rubbing his knuckles in to his eyes, he wept in joy for his life, and in terror for his soul.

“Cy.”

The sound of his name had the boy jerking to his feet. It was only quick reflexes that had Burns nipping out of range of the garden hose. They stood facing each other a moment, the water squirting between them, a young boy with a puffy face and frightened eyes and a man who wanted to prove that Cy’s father had carved up women in his spare time.

Burns tried his most ingratiating smile, which put Cy immediately on edge.

“I’d like to talk with you for a few minutes.”

“I’ve got to water these plants.”

Burns glanced at the soaked greens. “You seem to have done that already.”

“I’ve got other work.”

Burns reached down to turn off the water himself. Authority was something he wore as habitually as his tie. “This won’t take long. Perhaps we could go inside.” Out of the blistering heat.

“No, sir, I can’t track all over Miss Della’s clean floor.”

Burns glanced down. Any trace of white on Cy’s sneakers had been obliterated with grass and dirt stains. “No, I suppose not. The terrace then, around the side.” Before Cy could protest, Burns took him by the arm and led him around the flower beds. “You enjoy working at Sweetwater?”

“Yes sir. I wouldn’t want to lose my job ’cause I got caught sitting around talking.”

Burns stepped onto the slate terrace and gestured toward one of the padded chairs under a striped umbrella. “Is Mr. Longstreet that hard a taskmaster?”

“Oh, no, sir.” Reluctantly, Cy sat. “He never has enough for me to do, to my way of thinking. And he’s always telling me to slow it down and take it easy, real considerate like. Sometimes if he’s around late in the afternoon at quitting time, he brings me out a Coca Cola himself.”

“A liberal employer.” Burns took out his pad and recorder. “Then I’m sure he wouldn’t mind you taking a short break to answer some questions.”

“You can ask him yourself,” Tucker suggested. He strolled out of the kitchen door with a chilled bottle of Coke. “Here you go, Cy.” He set the bottle down in front of the boy. “Wet your whistle.”

“Mr. Burns—he said how I had to come on out here and talk,” Cy began. His eyes were as panicked as a rabbit’s caught in the white stream of headlights.

“That’s all right.” Tucker touched a hand to his shoulder briefly before scraping back a chair for himself. “Nobody expected you to work today, Cy.”

With his lips pressed tight together, Cy stared down at the white table. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Well, for the next few days you do what suits you.” Tucker pulled out his cigarettes. He figured he was down to a half pack a day by his current method and ruthlessly tore off half the tobacco. “Now, Agent Burns here’s having himself a busy morning.” His eyes stayed on Burns’s over the flare of his match. There was a warning there, as clear as the message Hatinger had written in blood. “So, why don’t you tell him what you can. Then maybe you’d like to drop a line with me for an hour or two.”

Burns curled his lip at the idea of taking the boy fishing the day after his father had been killed. “I’ll let you know when we’re finished, if you’d like to go tie some flies.”

Tucker helped himself to a swig of Cy’s Coke. “No.
As I figure it, since the boy’s working here and staying here for the time being, I’m a kind of guardian. I’ll stay, unless Cy wants me to go.”

Cy lifted those panic-dazed eyes to Tucker’s. “I’d be obliged if you’d stay, Mr. Tucker. I might get something wrong.”

“All you have to do is tell the truth. Isn’t that right, Agent Burns?”

“That’s exactly right. Now—” he broke off as Josie walked out wearing a paper-thin pink robe.

“Well now, it’s not often a woman strolls out of her kitchen and finds three men waiting for her.” She moved closer to ruffle Cy’s hair, but her eyes were all for Burns. “Special Agent, I was beginning to think you’d taken a dislike to me. Why, you haven’t been around to talk but one time.” She eased a hip onto the arm of Tucker’s chair. When she reached over to pluck up one of Tucker’s cigarettes, she afforded Burns the best view in the house. “I was about to make something up just so you could investigate me.”

He was stuffy, but he wasn’t dead. Burns found his throat clogged and his tie too tight. “I’m afraid I have little time for socializing while on a case, Miss Long-street.”

“Now, that surely is a shame.” Her voice was as rich and heady as the scent of magnolias. With a flutter of her lashes, she handed Burns the pack of matches, then steadied his hand with her own when he touched the flame to the tip. “And here I’ve been pining away, hoping you’d find time to tell me all about your adventures. I bet you’ve had scads of them.”

“Actually, I’ve had a few interesting moments.”

“I’m going to have to hear all about them or I’ll just explode from curiosity.” She trailed a finger down her throat to where her robe met loosely over her breasts. If his eyes had been tied by a string to her hand, Burns couldn’t have followed the movement more closely. “Teddy told me you were the very best.”

He managed to swallow. “Teddy?”

“Dr. Rubenstein.” She sent him a sultry look under heavy lashes. “He was telling me you were the absolute
expert on serial killings. I just love talking to brainy men with dangerous jobs.”

“Josie.” Tucker sent her an arch look. “Weren’t you going to get your nails done or something this morning?”

“Why, yes, honey, I was.” She shifted to hold out her hands. Her robe crept up another inch. “I don’t think a woman can be really attractive if she lets her hands go.” She rose then, satisfied that she’d broken Burns’s concentration. “Maybe I’ll see you in town later, Special Agent. I’m fond of stopping for a cold drink at the Chat ’N Chew after my manicure.”

She left him with the distracting image of her hips swaying beneath that thin pink robe.

Tucker tossed his cigarette into a brass bucket filled with sand. “You going to turn that recorder on?”

Burns gave him a blank look, then shot to attention. “I’ll be asking Cy questions,” he began, but his gaze drifted to the kitchen door. “I have no objection to you being present, but I’ll tolerate no prompting.”

Tucker gestured with his open hands and sat back.

Burns switched on the recorder, entered the appropriate data, then turned to Cy with a solemn smile. “I know this is a difficult time for you, Cy, and I’m sorry for your recent loss.”

Cy started to thank him, then realized he wasn’t talking about Edda Lou, but his father. He took refuge in staring at the table again.

“I realize you spoke with Sheriff Truesdale last night, and your information was very helpful. We’ll have to talk about that again, but I think we’ll start with a few other things. Did your father ever mention Miss Caroline Waverly to you?”

“He didn’t hardly know her.”

“So he never spoke of her to you, or in your hearing?”

Cy darted a look at Tucker. “He mighta said something on one of the days I brought him breakfast. Some days he said lots of things, like when his mood came on him.”

“Mood?” Burns prompted.

“Those hard moods he had, when he said God was talking to him.”

“And did he have these moods regularly?”

“Pretty much.” Cy chugged down Coke to ease his dry throat. “A.J. used to say that he just liked to beat up on people and used God as an excuse.”

“He was often violent with you and other members of your family?”

“He …” Cy remembered Tucker’s phrase. “He had a heavy hand.” That didn’t sound so bad somehow. It was almost like saying he had a head cold. “He didn’t tolerate no sass. The Bible says how you’re to honor your father.”

Tucker said nothing, but he noted that Cy hadn’t said father and mother. He didn’t imagine Austin had drilled that part of the scripture into his son’s brain.

“And he used this heavy hand when he had his moods.”

Cy shrugged his thin shoulders. “He used his hands most all the time. It was just worse during the moods.”

“I see.” Even Burns wasn’t unaffected by the casual way the boy described brutality. “And when you were bringing him food and supplies in the culvert, he had these moods.”

“I had to do it.” Cy’s knuckles whitened on the glass bottle. “He’d’ve killed me if I’d gone against him. I had to do it.”

“Agent Burns isn’t blaming you, Cy.” Again Tucker laid a hand, that soothing, comforting hand on his shoulder. “Nobody is. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No, I’m not blaming you.” Burns’s voice roughened, and he coughed to clear it. The stark fear on the boy’s face appalled him. “No one would. I only want you to tell me if your father spoke of Miss Waverly.”

“He said some things.” Cy blinked his eyes fast to close off tears. “He said how she was full of sin. How all women were. Like Lot’s wife. She got turned into a pillar of salt.”

“Yes.” Burns folded his hands. “I know. Did he tell you why Miss Waverly was full of sin?”

“He said how …” He shot Tucker a miserable look. “Do I have to say?”

“It’d be best,” Tucker told him. “You take your time.”

Cy took it by gulping down Coke, wiping his hand across his mouth, squirming in his chair. “He said how she was spreading her legs for Mr. Tucker.” His face went beet-red. “And how she was no better’na whore for it. It was time to cast the first stone. I’m sorry, Mr. Tucker.”

“It’s not your fault, Cy.”

“I didn’t know he meant he was going to hurt her. I swear I didn’t. He said stuff all the time. It got so you didn’t pay much mind to it, as long as he wasn’t hitting you. I didn’t know he was going after her, Mr. Burns. I swear I didn’t.”

“No, I’m sure you didn’t. Your father hit your mother, didn’t he?”

The frantic color in Cy’s cheeks ebbed away. “We couldn’t do nothing about it. She wouldn’t do nothing. She wouldn’t let the sheriff help, ’cause a woman’s supposed to cleave to her husband. The sheriff’d come by sometimes and she’d just tell him how she’d fallen off the porch or something.” His head dropped. Shame weighed almost as heavy as fear. “Ruthanne says how she likes it. She likes getting beat on. But that don’t seem right.”

Burns decided there was no use trying to explain the psychology and the cycle of abuse. That was a job for social workers and shrinks. “No, it doesn’t. Did he hit Ruthanne, too?”

He smirked, the way brothers do over their sisters. “She’s pretty good at getting out of the way.”

“How about Vernon?”

“They’d whip up on each other sometimes.” Cy made a quick, dismissive move of the shoulders. “Mostly they hung together. Vernon was Daddy’s favorite. He took the most after Daddy. Inside and out, my ma said. They were alike inside and out.”

“How about Edda Lou? Did your father hit her?”

“She was always butting him, daring him, like. She hit back at him. Once she split his head with a bottle when he used the belt on her. That’s when she moved out. She moved into town and never came around the house anymore.”

“Did he say things about Edda Lou, too? The way he did about Miss Waverly?”

A wasp circled down to investigate Cy’s Coke and was batted away. “We weren’t supposed to say her name. Sometimes he got worked up and said how she was a whore of Babylon. Vernon would try to get Daddy riled up about her. He wanted to go fetch her from town and bring her home so they could punish her. Vernon would say how it was their duty as her family and as Christians, but I don’t think he believed in that like Daddy did. Vernon just likes to hit people.” He said it simply, as if he’d just commented that Vernon liked ice cream sundaes. “Then Daddy found out she was seeing Mr. Tucker and he said how she’d be better off dead. And he beat Ma.”

Tucker pressed his fingers against his eyes and wondered if the guilt would ever pass.

“Cy, do you remember when your father and Mr. Longstreet argued?”

Tucker dropped his hands. He nearly laughed. The euphemistic “argument” still showed in fading bruises on his ribs.

“I guess I do. Daddy came home with his face ail busted up.”

“And what about two nights before that.” The night Edda Lou was murdered. “Do you recall if he had one of his moods?”

It was the first question Cy had to think about. His eyes lost some of their glassy fear as he considered. Absently, he took another swipe at the persistent wasp. “I can’t recollect for sure. When he got wind that Edda Lou was supposed to be pregnant, he was real fired up. But I don’t know which night that was.”

Burns prodded for a few minutes, trying to jog the boy’s memory without tipping him off to the reason. In
the end. He backed off. He still had Ruthanne and Mavis Hatinger. Their memories might be keener.