‘A few week ago. I got over myself and asked a friend in Carterson to tell Hank I said hi and she told me she hadn’t seen him in forever.’
‘Did you ever see a white SUV outside his house?’
‘No.’ She added, ‘Larry and I go for walks after supper. We pass by Hank’s almost every night. I’ve never seen anyone there. As a matter of fact, I wondered if you had come to get him. His car was in the driveway, but there were never any lights on except the usual one in the kitchen.’
Hank always left the kitchen light on as a deterrent to thieves; not a good strategy if the entire neighborhood knew the trick.
Lena asked, ‘When did you last see him?’
‘Four days ago – that’s why I called you. He was outside trying to fix his mailbox. Somebody put a cherry bomb in it, probably one of those kids from a couple of streets over getting a head start on Halloween. Larry offered to help but Hank cursed at him, told us both to go away, so we did.’
Lena mulled this over. ‘He’s been holed up in his house for how many months and the only thing that got him outside was a broken mailbox?’
‘He was so high, Lee. I’m surprised he could stand up on his own, let alone walk the twenty feet to his mailbox. His skin was awful. He obviously hadn’t bathed in a while. A fool could see what he’s doing.’
‘Which is?’
‘Trying to end it.’
Lena felt her voice catch. ‘End his life?’
Charlotte shrugged. ‘End his misery, maybe.’
‘What’s changed? What happened that set him off?’
‘I have no idea. That’s the truth. My focus every day when I get up is not taking another drink. I’m an alcoholic. We’re not known for our altruism.’
Lena doubted that was the case with Charlotte.
She pressed, ‘But you saw he was having problems two, maybe three months ago?’
‘I don’t know,’ Charlotte admitted. ‘Maybe I saw that he was depressed or preoccupied or acting differently, but all I cared about was me. School had started back and I was in this hellhole with kids snickering behind my back and teachers snickering in front of it. I was struggling to stay sober. My focus was on what would keep me on the right path.’ She held out her hands as if she were helpless. ‘By the time I realized something was wrong with him, it was too late. He wouldn’t talk to me, he wouldn’t return my phone calls, he wouldn’t answer the door. He just kept telling me to leave him alone and let him do what he wanted to do.’
Lena was familiar with the refrain. ‘That’s when you started writing him the letters?’
‘Yes.’ She paused, lost in her own thoughts. ‘It was awkward at first, but then when he didn’t write back it was almost freeing. I just wrote whatever I wanted. I’ve never done that before, just said what was on my mind.’
‘You talk a lot about Sibyl, what it was like when you were together.’ Some of the passages had been so hard to read that Lena had found herself staring out the window, lost in another time. Charlotte had managed to capture the essence of Sibyl: her good nature, her loving kindness. Even after Lena had finished reading the letters, the feelings had stuck with her, so that it was almost like Sibyl was alive again.
Charlotte said, ‘Hank is the only one who knew about her. Us. What we felt for each other, that it was love and not something grotesque.’ She leaned her back against the window, arms crossed low over her waist. ‘But you know what? A long time ago, he asked me what would’ve happened if Sibyl and I had made it work. I could have transferred to Georgia Tech, you know. They wouldn’t have offered me a full ride like they did with Sibby but I was already in college, doing pretty well, making the honor roll. I was miserable living with my folks and having to drive back and forth to Milledgeville. I could’ve transferred and gotten a job in Atlanta or got student loans or something to make it happen, but I didn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I guess it scared me. Everything scared me back then. Atlanta ‘s so big, so anonymous. I felt safe here. And it would’ve killed my parents.’
‘It was easier for us to leave home than it was for you,’ Lena tried. ‘Your folks were-‘
‘My folks would’ve never talked to me again if I’d followed her to Atlanta. They caught us together once. Did you know that?’ Lena shook her head, shocked that Sibyl had never told her. ‘It was fall break of my sophomore year and Sibby was about to go off to Tech. My parents were supposed to be visiting my aunt Jeannie for the day but they got into a fight. They were always fighting back then. This was around the time mother found out he’d been screwing Mrs. Ford from the church for about the last five years.’ She laughed at the irony. ‘So, they came back early and found us… Well, you can imagine how they found us. They called Hank at the bar and made him come over right then to confront us. He was furious – but at them, not Sibyl. He said we were both adults and that it was none of their damn business.’
‘ “Let he who is without sin…” ‘ Lena quoted.
It was one of Hank’s favorite verses. He was always throwing it out right before he told you that what you were doing was wrong.
Charlotte said, ‘Y’all were so lucky to have him.’
Lena laughed. ‘Are you kidding me? I would’ve killed for your parents when I was growing up.’
‘You can have them.’
‘Okay,’ Lena allowed. ‘What they did then was bad, but they never accidentally locked you out of the house all night or forgot to feed you or left you alone with strangers and they sure as hell never got so drunk they ran over you with their car and-‘
‘What?’
‘You know what Hank did.’
Charlotte looked confused. ‘What did he do?’
‘He blinded her. He took away Sibyl’s sight. How can you-‘
‘ Lena, that wasn’t Hank.’
Lena felt her heart stop mid-beat. ‘What are you talking about?’
Charlotte stood in front of her, still confused by Lena ‘s reaction. ‘I was there that day.’
‘No, you weren’t.’
‘You and me and Sibby were playing in the front yard with an old tennis ball I’d stolen from my brother. You threw the ball over Sibyl’s head and she ran into the driveway and-‘
‘No,’ Lena insisted. ‘You weren’t there.’ Even as she said the words, she could picture the day: throwing the ball over Sibyl’s head, making her chase after it. And there was Charlotte Warren on the other side of the driveway, scooping up the ball and tossing it back to Lena. ‘No.’ Lena shook her head as if she could clear the memory. ‘You weren’t there.’
‘I was, Lee. I saw the car backing up. I yelled, but she didn’t stop. The bumper hit Sibyl’s head. I saw her collapse in the driveway.’ As she spoke, Lena saw it happening again. Sibyl running into the driveway, Charlotte screaming. ‘There was just this thin line of blood.’ Charlotte traced her finger along her own temple, down her jaw, exactly where the blood had been on Sibyl. ‘You started sobbing, you were hysterical, and Hank came running out of the house and your mother just-‘
‘My mother?’ Lena felt light-headed. She leaned back against the desk. ‘What are you talking about? My mother was there? She was there when Sibyl…?’
‘Lee,’ Charlotte began, putting her hand on Lena ‘s shoulder. ‘It wasn’t Hank. Your mother was driving the car. She’s the one who blinded Sibyl.’
WEDNESDAY EVENING
ELEVEN
Sara lay in bed, trying not to think about what was living in the mattress underneath, her body. The autopsy had taken ten brutal hours, and when they had finally gotten back to the motel, she had nearly cried at the sight of the filthy room. Sara knew there was a maid around here somewhere. Earlier this morning, she had seen the woman pushing around a large cart with all sorts of cleaners and a vacuum. Except for the bed being made, nothing else in the room had been touched. Sara hadn’t exactly been expecting a thank-you note for scrubbing the bathroom, but the woman could have at least vacuumed the rug. The green M amp;M she had seen under the table yesterday morning was still nestled in the shag carpet.
Sara closed her eyes and listened to Jeffrey humming in the shower, the water slapping against the plastic tub. She had cleaned the cut on his hand using some disinfectant they’d found in the morgue, but he would have to bandage it on his own when he got out of the shower. She was too tired to do it herself, and frankly, part of her could not let go of her anger from yesterday afternoon. They had spent the entire day together, yet neither one of them had been willing to break the ice and talk about what had happened.
Jeffrey seemed fine with this, which only served to annoy Sara more. The situation made her feel like the prototypical bitchy sit-com wife who was always harping on her poor, misunderstood husband. She had always supported Jeffrey, even when she’d thought he was wrong, and it was unfair of him to let her be cast in the role of shrew.
On top of that, Sara still had a bad feeling about Elawah and whatever Lena had drawn them into. The autopsy she had performed that day only served to heighten that sense of dread. Over the years, Grant County had seen its share of violent deaths but Sara was hard-pressed to think of a more awful way to die than being burned alive. She was usually adept at separating the victim from the crime. If you were going to cut into a dead body, you couldn’t think of it as a person anymore. You had to look at it as parts of a whole: circulatory, respiratory, tissue, organs, skeleton.
Still, as Sara worked on the woman, she’d found herself wondering about her life, the method of her death, the family she was leaving behind. Then, she began to wonder about the perpetrator. What kind of person could do this to another human being? Certainly not the kind of person she wanted Jeffrey talking to.
They had not waited for Fred Bart to come before starting the autopsy, which was a good thing considering the dentist had never showed. Removing the remains from the car had proven to be the easy part. Once the corpse was on the table, Sara found that the woman’s body had been so ravaged by fire that the usual procedures could not be followed. There was no need for the Stryker saw since the back of the skull had fractured off in Sara’s hand, allowing the brain to slip out like the pit of a ripe peach. There was no need for a Y-incision to open the torso when there was hardly any skin left to cut.
All but two of the ribs were fractured by the heat. The larynx and trachea were seared, the tongue cooked into the neck organs. The pleural surfaces of both lungs were charred, the air spaces consolidated with soot. Most of the skeletal musculature had a well-done appearance. The bone marrow was black.
The soot in the lungs proved the woman had lived long enough to inhale the smoke. Sara was certainly not an arson specialist, but she assumed that the gas tank explosion had been the result of a fire that started inside the car. The blast from the tank had gone up and out, mostly damaging the very rear of the SUV. The woman, even sitting in the backseat, would have been able to remove her seat belt, get out of the car, before the real damage started.
From all appearances, she had not been raped. Sara wondered why this came as a relief. Sara herself had been raped – brutally so, as a certain lawyer liked to point out. As awful as that experience had been, she imagined it was much more painful to be burned alive.
The thing that terrified Sara most was that the woman surely knew what was coming. There had been no obvious damage to the skull; no one had knocked her out before the fire was set. She had watched and waited as flames devoured her body.
The shower cut off, and Sara rolled over onto her stomach, wishing she’d thought to bring their pillows from home. She was wearing socks, sweatpants, and a long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the collar, even though the room was stuffy from the heat and smelled of wet fried chicken. The remnants of a pizza they’d had delivered were on the plastic table, and she thought about getting another slice, but her body would not move. She would have asked Jeffrey, but earlier he had taken one look at the well-done ground beef topping and dry-heaved.
The bed shifted as he got in. She waited for him to turn off the light, to bunch up his pillow and arrange the blankets like he usually did before he settled down. He did none of this, asking instead, ‘You asleep?’
‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘Did you put something on your hand?’
He didn’t answer her question. I shouldn’t have slowed the car.’ He added, ‘Yesterday,’ as if she needed some clarification, then repeated, ‘I shouldn’t have slowed the car.’
Sara closed her eyes. ‘I shouldn’t have slapped you,’ she answered, though as much as she tried, as shamed as she felt for resorting to violence, Sara couldn’t bring herself to truly regret it.
Still, she rolled over, put her head on his chest. He gave a deep sigh, and she felt the last of her anger dissipate.
She said, ‘You smell like hotel soap.’
‘It could be worse,’ he pointed out, though thankfully didn’t tell her how. ‘Did you call your mother?’
‘She was taking a nap with Daddy.’ Sara added, ‘At six in the evening.’
Jeffrey laughed, but Sara had never told him that she was twenty-two years old before she found out that her parents’ ubiquitous Sunday afternoon ‘nap’ excuse had been a cover for something far more illicit than sleeping. Nor did she tell him that her nineteen-year-old sister had been the one to inform her.
Jeffrey laced his hand through hers, suggesting, ‘Maybe soon we’ll be taking naps.’
A baby. Their baby.
He told her, I checked the machine while you were doing your autopsy notes. The adoption agency didn’t call.’
‘I checked it while you were in the shower.’
‘They’ll call,’ he said. ‘I can feel it.’
‘Let’s not talk about it,’ she told him. ‘I don’t want to jinx it.’ The truth was that it could take years before a baby was available, though the fact that they had agreed to take a child up to the age of two and hadn’t asked for a specific race or sex had definitely moved them up the list. The woman at the agency had said that it could be next year or it could be any day now. All they could do was wait – something neither Jeffrey nor Sara was very good at.
Jeffrey stroked her arm, then her side. His thumb slipped just under the waist of her pants, and he suggested, ‘Maybe we could take a nap right now.’