Lie Still (43 page)

A few nights ago, Mike and I watched some old football film of Dickie in a state high school playoff game. The film canister arrived at the front door by UPS, in an anonymous brown cardboard box addressed to Mike, the number
88
drawn in Sharpie where the return address should have been.

No soundtrack. We watched every grainy moment.

In the final seconds of the game, the ball was soaring across the field, a Hail Mary pass. No. 88 leapt in the air, his hands reaching up for the impossible ball like a prayer to the gods.

It is hard to square that magnificent moment of grace with the man who, in some odd ritual that made sense only to him, washed his ex-wife in homemade bath salts before he murdered her. Liza Beth Tucker sold eight varieties of bath salts at her gas station in Hazard. She told police that Dickie bought a six-month supply of the lemon salts at a time. He told her his wife liked them, even though Liza Beth knew that his wife had left him years ago.

When serial killer fanatics found out about the bath salts—the kind of loonies who collect famous murderers’ cards the way kids collect baseball cards—they ordered so much of the stuff by phone that Liza Beth set up an Internet site. The home page claims her products “are original recipes loaded with healing properties from the salt dug out of a genuine Kentucky mine.”

If you order the lemon bath salts and pay an extra $5.95, she’ll send you a small bag of dirt from Dickie’s property and an overhead helicopter shot of his place, with hand-drawn X’s where the bodies were discovered. I’d bet the salt is Morton’s and the earth is from Liza Beth’s own backyard.

What can I say? People are sick.

I
didn’t think she’d show.

She held the strings of three dancing white balloons. Her filmy pale blue dress melted into a big sky of skittering clouds. She stood in a carpet of red leaves, about a hundred yards apart from the group of mourners. Her head was slightly turned, fighting the wind. Impressionistic. A Monet. A picture of Misty that almost wasn’t painted.

Misty had tracked her way to Dickie’s hill months ago, looking for her sister, twenty years after she disappeared. Dickie recognized her, and kicked her off. He didn’t kill her then, but Misty had set her fate in motion. Her fate, Caroline’s fate,
my
fate.

Those weren’t roof rats over my head in Dickie’s bathroom. It was Misty, hoping I’d hear, a fact I can’t think about too much. After months of stalking, Dickie had grabbed Misty on the last night in the glass house. The day after she shut the door in my
face. He trucked her back to the hill and planned to kill and bury her there, until Mike and I drove up. We apparently inspired him to a more apocalyptic fury.

Dickie spent a good deal of time on the road in the last month, tracking back and forth between his house in Kentucky and a motel in Fort Worth where he paid a monthly rate. A search of his room turned up prepaid cell phones and a scratch pad scribbled with the name and number of one of the security clones who worked on our house. It still isn’t clear where Caroline died, or whether Dickie ever brought her back to the house where they began their story.

Misty had promised to come back and say goodbye, I just didn’t expect her to do it today, at Caroline’s second memorial. I stared past her, across the open ranchland, a beautiful piece of property owned by the Lee family trust. Letty had deemed it the appropriate place to scatter Caroline’s ashes. It was turning out to be a simple, beautiful service, in part because Letty’s Baptist reverend had gently encouraged her not to speak or sing. About two hundred people, a little prayer, a harp, a good strong wind that would carry the ashes, and not a word about how Caroline died.

I could see Lucinda’s floppy black funeral hat in the back of the crowd. She’d lost the baby and left her bad-tempered husband three weeks ago. She stood near Holly and Tiffany, who had tied their balloons to their Gucci bags and linked their arms. I realized Caroline’s club would go on without her, a crippled, handicapped centipede. My mother had liked centipedes. She said they were misunderstood.

When it was time, I let the string slip out of my fingers and turned to watch Misty. I didn’t have to ask why there were three.

Alice. Wyatt. Caroline
.

Rising together. Misty’s head craned up until they mingled with the hundreds of other balloons sailing into the clouds.
Then her eyes settled on me. Eight months pregnant, I was not too easy to miss.

“Give me a minute, OK?” I asked Mike.

He nodded, as people headed back to their cars, lined up on the dirt road behind us.

I hadn’t seen Misty for six weeks. We’d exchanged a couple of brief emails and one stilted phone call about her sister Alice’s burial. Misty had been recuperating in Kansas City, at a wonderful place that seeks to heal both the wounds of the body and the mind. When a serial killer’s siege on my house exploded on the Internet, Renata was one of the first people to call my hospital room. She hooked Misty up with the clinic and the renowned psychiatrist who had treated her years ago after her rape and suicide attempt.

Misty and I met halfway across the grass. She held the picture of Alice in her hand, out of the prison of its frame. This time, I saw details: the plastic jewels on both fingers, the grape Kool-Aid around her lips, the crooked middle tooth.

Misty gave me a quick hug, a relief. I wasn’t sure how she really felt about us. A friendship forged out of deception and guilt and redemption. She was still bony, still recovering. A tiny silver cross hung where the encrusted dollar sign used to. No makeup. Her eyes, brown, like the first time.

“Everyone in my group therapy thinks I need to lock this picture away forever,” she told me.
For-evah
. I could hear the twang now, just the tiniest echo. “They all agreed that it is holding me back. But I decided to give Alice one more outing. We buried her a week ago today. By my mother and father. I wish you could have been there.”

“Me, too.” Mike and Gretchen had laid down the law. No traveling.

She glanced at the photo. “About a year ago, my aunt found this and mailed it to me. Out of the blue. I was sure it was Alice
begging me to find her. A fever took over me, although truthfully, I can’t remember ever
not
being angry. But what’s the saying? ‘While seeking revenge, dig two graves, one for yourself.’ ”

“Douglas Horton,” I replied. “The guy who also famously taught thousands of teenage girls the fallacy that if you love something set it free.” Trying to sound light, not quite succeeding. “I’m really surprised you’re here, Misty. Mourning Caroline.”

“Not mourning exactly. Trying to forgive, maybe. After Dickie wouldn’t help, I tried Caroline. It was almost like she’d been waiting for me. Like it was a
relief
to see me when I landed at her door. Begged me to stay so that we could work on finding Alice together. Put me up in that fortress of a house, paid for private investigators, said she’d make Dickie tell us where Wyatt was. Said not to say who I was or why I was there, of course, and told me to invent something about my past. Asked me to join her stupid club so people wouldn’t ask questions if they saw us together. All of this, ostensibly to protect me from Wyatt. But Wyatt was nowhere. By the time I realized how off-balance Caroline was, it was too late to back out. Of course, I’m not one to talk about being off-balance.” She laughed softly. “I hated lying to you, Emily.”

I nodded. “Do you think she knew what happened to her son?”

“I like to think she didn’t. That she was sincere about that, at least. I heard her make one of the calls to Dickie, telling him about the private investigator she hired. I do believe Caroline kept horrible secrets about him. Maybe she finally let Dickie know she couldn’t keep them anymore. I try to look back and see all the things I must have missed when I was a kid. Wyatt’s crappy life seemed so much better than my crappy life.” Her mouth twisted. “This town. I stepped into it and went crazier than I already was. If it’s any consolation, I’m on a new path.
Renata’s psychiatrist …
my
psychiatrist … says I have all the tools to become a highly functioning dysfunctional. And your gallery friend called. Wants to set up a show of my photographs. She says people will come because of my ugly past, but that I’ll be successful because I’m good.”

“You
are
good,” I told her. “And your photographs are stunning.”

“Not good like you. Not good like Wyatt. Emily, you
fought
that bastard. You came to my house that day, risked your life, to make sure I was OK. You’re
still
helping me, after I went nuts and very nearly got your baby killed. Then there’s Wyatt—he used his allowance to buy Alice and me food. Still, I didn’t believe him when he told me he fixed Alice’s bike tire, and she rode off. Wyatt looked guilty. Probably because he knew who was.”

I had to ask, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer. “Why did Dickie obsess on me?”

“He saw you at the party, that first night. He was making plans to take Caroline.” Misty hesitated. “He told me that you reminded him of her. When she was young. In the beginning.”

I was right. I didn’t want to hear.

“You brought a friend.” I pointed to a tall, lanky figure in conversation with Mike by the car.

“Joe. He’s a Kansas City cop. His wife died two years ago of cancer. We met on the plane on my way to the clinic. A lucky coincidence that they reassigned his seat.”

Fate is a compass.

M
ike called him The Candy Man.

He was young and fresh-faced in blue scrubs, still cute and macho even with the medical shower cap, and when he slipped the epidural needle into my back after twelve hours of labor, I wanted to give him everything I had except my newborn child.

Two weeks late, I was ready to pop, although our baby seemed perfectly happy to settle inside me for life. Reasonable really, considering what was out here. Every ultrasound, every test declared that he was still perfect.

My eyes roved over a six-foot-tall giraffe created, entirely by Letty’s hand, out of diapers. Letty herself was camped in the waiting room, explaining some kind of vending-machine diet to a hostage crowd that included Holly and Lucinda. They had packed our refrigerator with food last night. Go figure.

Our baby had a name now. Adam. Middle name Lee, in Letty’s honor. We made this decision with full knowledge that this fixed Letty to our lives forever, no matter how far we eventually traveled from Clairmont, Texas.

“I have something that might take your mind off the pain.” Mike held a plain brown manila envelope. I flinched. I knew the ugliness contained in innocent-looking envelopes.

“What is it?” My heart beeped faster, triggering an annoying sound effect from the heart monitor.

“I tracked down your little girl. I called in a favor from an FBI buddy. He faxed it today. I was going to give it to you tonight. I just didn’t count on you going into labor. Honestly, I didn’t think Adam was ever coming out.” He just said it, flat-out, like it was no big deal. I stared at him in disbelief, thinking he shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t have involved the FBI. I fought this emotion with the one that wanted to tear the envelope out of his hand. I watched a contraction start its rise on the monitor, feeling nothing. The Candy Man had done his job.

“Just tell me.” I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them. “No, wait. Is this really the right time?”

“I’ve thought about that for the last twelve hours. I think it’s the perfect time. Her name is Natalia.”

It was out. I couldn’t make him put it back in.

Natalia
.

“Pretty.” My eyes blurred with tears. “They picked a pretty name.”

“She was adopted at five weeks. Lives in Rome with her parents and two older brothers. Her father is a professor. Her mother, a journalist.”

Safe
.

“She appears to have a very happy life,” he said. “Her parents are well respected.”

“I don’t want to mess that up.” I meant it. All these years, fearing she was dead or homeless, hungry or abused. Wanting to fling my arms around her and say
sorry, sorry, sorry
.

My eyes found the cross at the end of the bed, formed by the railing.

I watched my belly tighten under the soft blue gown, swelling again like a thing apart from me. Adam, working harder. I imagined him swimming, pushing his way through an underwater cave.

No other choice but to brave the surface.