Authors: Jefferson Bass
“Just for kicks,” she said, snapping the crank into the case of the reel, “why don’t we probe one of these, see if these crosses really do seem to be marking graves, or if they’re just decorative accents.”
“We have probes in the Suburban? Why didn’t you say so sooner?”
“What, and miss that great seminar on the forensic coat hanger?”
She retrieved two probes and a fistful of survey flags from the back of the vehicle and handed one of the probes to me. It was a stainless-steel rod, four feet long and about the thickness of my index finger, with a one-foot handle across the top that formed a tall, skinny T. “Pick a grave, any grave,” she said. I pointed to the cross closest to us, which was at one corner of the cluster of markers. “Which side of the cross do you suppose the grave would be on?” I shrugged; without a plaque or marker—and with such dense ferns underfoot—it was impossible to tell.
“How about we probe both directions? That way, no matter which way the grave is dug, we’ll find it. If it’s there to find.”
Starting a foot above and below the cross, we pushed the probes into the ground. Mine went in easily, halfway up to the handle, before hitting tightly packed soil; Angie’s, on the other hand, hit hard clay half a foot down. Working our way farther from the cross—and to either side of our starting points—we probed repeatedly. Again and again mine passed through loose, disturbed earth, and I marked each of these holes with a survey flag; again and again Angie’s probe hit hardpan just below the topsoil. Finally, after I’d lengthened and widened my grid considerably, I began hitting hard dirt, too, which told me that I’d reached the margins of the disturbed area, and was now encountering undisturbed soil. I stepped back so Angie could photograph what I’d flagged. The ten flags defined an oval-shaped area of loose, disturbed soil, about two feet wide by six feet long: just about the size hole you’d dig to bury a teenage boy.
Angie was adding notes to her sketch when Vickery returned at a jog. He was sweating and breathing hard. He took in the flags, and his eyebrows shot up. “Looks like you two have been busy.”
“You were gone awhile, so we found something to do,” said Angie. “Quacks like a grave to me, even if it isn’t where the dog’s been digging. What’s up?”
“This cemetery is gonna stir up a shit storm,” he said. “Even if the skulls didn’t come from here. The commissioner—the big boss, the head of FDLE,” he explained for my benefit, “has a call in to the governor. I’m afraid we’re about to have a lot more people looking over our shoulders.”
“Maybe that’s the best thing that could happen,” I offered. “Seems like the boys at this school fell through the cracks all those years ago. Maybe now people will finally pay some attention.”
“Maybe,” conceded Vickery. “But I wouldn’t bet my pension on it.”
T
he Twilight Motor Court was well named; I suspected the sun had set on its glory days—if indeed there had ever
been
glory days—decades ago. The motel consisted of seven cinder-block bungalows, which might have been new and clean in the 1950s, but which now ranged from seedy to crumbling. The two that sat farthest from the road were roofless and windowless. Mine, number three, seemed intact, but the ridgeline of the roof sagged, the paint on the trim was peeling, and the bottom of the door sported a wooden fringe where the outer layer of veneer was peeling and splintering. An ancient air conditioner in the side wall rasped and clattered, its wobbly fan grazing the cooling vanes at random intervals.
Given the complexity created by the revelation of the cemetery—given the shit storm that was brewing, as Vickery put it—he and Angie had decided we should stay nearby, eliminating the two-hour round-trip to and from Tallahassee. The nearest place to stay—the only place to stay that was within a half hour of the school site—was the Twilight.
As I wriggled the reluctant key into the lock, the knob rattled in my hand. I twisted gingerly, half expecting it to come off. It didn’t, but once the door scraped open, I almost wished it had. The room was dank and musty, a few degrees cooler than the outdoors but even more humid, and my eyes and nose began to itch at once from the onslaught of mold spores. The floor was upholstered with shag carpet—an unfortunate “update” from the 1970s, I guessed—that was pea green with reddish-brown stains . . . or maybe reddish-brown with pea-green stains. The sagging double bed was topped with a polyester bedspread of similar vintage, color, and contamination, and I shuddered to think what biological stains might fluoresce under the glow of an alternate light source. Suddenly I felt nostalgic for the Hotel Duval, with its peaceful neutrals, its glowing ceiling bubbles, and its luminous waitresses.
A seething, spattering sound emanated from the bathroom. I found the light switch and flipped it; a dim, bare bulb in the ceiling revealed a hissing faucet in the porcelain sink and a dribbling shower in a cracked fiberglass bathtub, another “update” added twenty or thirty years before. Both fixtures were streaked and stained with rust, as was the toilet. I leaned down and twisted the knobs on the bathtub. The shower’s dribble doubled in volume, but lacked the pressure required to form an actual spray.
My cell phone rang, causing me to jump. The number was Angie’s.
“Hey there,” I answered. “Welcome to the Bates Motel. Watch out for the guy with the butcher knife.”
“One difference between this and
Psycho
,” she said. “The bathroom in
Psycho
actually had a shower curtain.”
“You can have my shower curtain. I sure don’t need it. Have you checked the water pressure?”
There was a pause, and I heard gurgling in the background. “I see what you mean. This’ll make it hard to rinse off the soap.”
“You’ve got soap? You must have the deluxe suite,” I joked, peering at my soap dish, which was empty except for the layer of mildew. “You FDLE fat cats sure know how to travel in style.”
“Hey,” she squawked, “the way the BP spill screwed our tourism revenues, we’re lucky we’re not sleeping under a bridge. FDLE’s budget had already been cut to the bone in 2008 and 2009. Now we’re amputating whole sections. Won’t be long before we start selling brownies to buy rape kits. Or sending out e-mails to all our friends and relatives: ‘Please sponsor my next crime-scene search! I need to raise five thousand dollars in pledges before the corpse gets cold!’ ” I laughed, but her point was serious.
“It’s worrisome,” I agreed. “Forensic technology—just like medical technology—gets more sophisticated all the time, but that means it gets more expensive, too. Which homicides get the VIP treatment, and which ones do we cut corners on?”
“Black men don’t generally get the VIP treatment.” She paused. “Neither do battered women,” she added softly.
“I’m sorry, Angie,” I said. “I wish there were more we could do.”
“Me, too.” She sighed. “Anyhow. So, astonishingly, there’s not a four-star restaurant here at the lavish Twilight Motor Court. Shall we go back to the Waffle Iron?”
“Fine with me; I like the Waffle Iron. But let me get cleaned up first.”
“Yeah, good luck with
that
,” she said. “Just come knock on my door whenever you’re ready. I’m in number four, the palatial place next door. You’ll recognize it by the duct tape holding the window together. I just talked to Stu, and he’s ready, so once you’re clean and shiny, we’ll saddle up and go.”
I headed for the shower, but the combination of anemic water pressure, rust stains, mildew, dirt, and dead bugs was too much for me. I did find an ancient bar of soap in the rusted medicine cabinet, so I managed to get tolerably clean taking a sink bath.
Ten minutes after we’d talked, I knocked on Angie’s door. The brass number was missing, but beneath the outermost layer of peeling green paint was a four-shaped remnant of peeling red paint. Angie hadn’t been kidding about the duct tape: a missing windowpane had been replaced with cardboard, which was held in place with brittle, curling duct tape.
“Come in,” she called. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed—the same scary-looking bedspread I had, though her stain pattern appeared slightly different, like variations in a modern artist’s series of paintings on a theme of scuzzy bedspreads. Lying open on the bed in front of her was a wallet-sized album of photos. The dozen or so pictures were snapshots of a life: Kate as a baby, swaddled in the arms of a nervous and proud four-year-old sister; Kate riding a pony at her sixth birthday party, a cone-shaped party hat rubber-banded to her head; Kate pitching for her high school softball team; Kate graduating from nursing school; Kate in a wedding gown, flanked on one side by Angie, her matron of honor, and on the other by a groom who’d been scissored from the photo; Kate and Angie standing with a wizened old woman with dyed red hair, too much rouge on her cheeks, and eyes that looked like an ancient version of Angie’s.
The most poignant images in the set were four black-and-white photos of the two sisters, as grown-ups, playing dress-up in antique clothing. They wore high-collared Victorian gowns, sequined flapper dresses, fitted hobble skirts, silly poodle skirts. In each picture, their hairdos harmonized with the clothes; so did their expressions, which ranged from prim to saucy to sophisticated. “These are great,” I said. “Tell me about them.”
Angie smiled. “Ah. That was a great weekend. Kate and I took a road trip to see my grandmother, up in Akron, Ohio, on her ninety-fifth birthday. Her mind was still sharp, but her health was starting to fail, and we figured it might be our last chance to celebrate her birthday with her. Anyhow, at some point Saturday morning, Kate said something about needing a new pair of jeans, and Grandma made one of those typical geezer comments about how much better clothes used to be, back in the day. So we were humoring her, but also teasing her—‘Right, Grandma, these kids today don’t know beans about how to dress’—and she said, ‘You girls should look through those trunks of clothes up in the attic.’ So we did, and it was amazing. She was right—the clothes
were
a lot cooler back in the day. She had stuff she’d worn in the twenties and thirties and forties; she had stuff
her
mother had worn back at the turn of the century, and stuff
our
mother had worn in the fifties. We spent all afternoon Saturday trying on clothes and fixing our hair, while my cousin took pictures and Grandma told us stories about the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression and World War Two.” She shook her head with a wistful smile. “Funny thing about your grandparents. They’re already old, or at least you
think
they’re old, by the time you know them. So you never picture them as little kids, or wild teenagers, or scared young parents, or anything except old folks.” She took back the photos and looked at the picture of the old woman. “Grandma became a real, three-dimensional
person
to me that day, you know?”
I nodded. “Is your grandmother still alive?”
“No. She had a stroke two months later. I’m so glad we took that trip.” She flipped through the series of dress-up photos. “That was the last trip Kate and I took together. Two months later, she met Don Nicely. And now she’s fading into monochrome memories of the good old days.”
There was a knock on the door. “Let’s eat,” growled Vickery. “I’m starving.”
Angie folded the picture wallet closed and tucked it in her purse. After she did, I noticed, her thumb rubbed circles around the hatchet scar on her index finger—a way of hanging on to a more tangible memory, I guessed—and I doubted that she even realized she was doing it. I remembered a line from a Shakespeare play, spoken to Hamlet by the ghost of his murdered father—“Remember me. Remember me. Remember me.” I felt certain Angie would remember Kate always; I prayed that she would not be haunted by her sister’s ghost forever.
O
ur second meal at the Waffle Iron was more somber than our first. Angie seemed to have turned inward. Then Vickery handed us more pages from the diary Flo was deconstructing, which didn’t seem likely to lift our spirits.
I’d thought I was hungry, but as I began to read, I lost all appetite.
Jared is dead, and Buck might be dying.
We were in the dining hall last night. Dinner was pinto beans and cornbread. I was sitting across from Buck. Jared McWhorter was sitting on one side of him. While Cockroach was saying grace, Jared reached over and grabbed Bucks piece of cornbread off of his plate. Hes taken food from me before, and from lots of other boys. Hes one of the biggest, roughest boys so he always gets away with it.
But last night Buck got mad and grabbed ahold of Jareds wrist with both hands and started trying to get his cornbread back. Jareds stronger than Buck, but Buck wouldnt let go. Give it back, give it back, he was saying. His teeth were clenched tight together, so he sounded like an animal growling Give it back you bastard. I tried to shush him up, but he was to mad to listen. Give it back, give it back. He was growling louder. Cockroach said a quick Amen and started looking around to see who was making noise during the blessing.
Jared had reached under the table with his other hand and started pinching Buck to make him let go. He must have pinched him real hard because Bucks eyes closed and he made a kind of a squealing yell through his teeth, but he never let go. Then he bent down and bit Jareds hand.
Jared let out a big yell and jumped up. Buck was still holding on to him with his hands and his teeth, so when Jared jumped up he pulled Buck with him. The bench caught the back of their legs and made them both fall over backwards onto the floor. Cockroach blew his whistle one short time then three long times, loud, to call the other guards, but Buck and Jared just kept on fighting. Jared was yelling and punching Buck in the face, or trying to, but he was having trouble getting any good licks in because Bucks face was mostly covered by his own arms and Jareds arm. So then Jared put his other hand on Bucks throat and started to choke him.
Thats when Cockroach got there and started trying to pull them apart. He wasnt having much luck with his one hand, so he started kicking. He kicked Buck in the back and the ribs three or four times, and that was enough to make Buck let go and curl up into a ball. Buck hollered at the first kick, then grunted at the second kick and then he just whimpered like a dog thats been hit by a car and is dying. Cockroach kicked Jared three or four times too, in the belly and in the nuts. The last two kicks were hard enough to lift him mostly up off the floor and send him skidding. Jared puked out some bloody looking vomit and just lay there on his side making a gurgling sound.
Four other guards came busting into the dining hall then. They looked at Cockroach, who was standing over Jared, looking down with his face all twisted up and purple and his nostrils open wide like a horses. One of the guards, Mr. Delaney, squatted down and looked at Jared, then looked up at Cockroach. Hes in bad shape, said Mr. Delaney. I don’t think he’s breathing right. We best get him to the infirmary. Goddammit said Cockroach. Alright get him out of here. Mr. Delaney and Mr. Whitlock reached under Jareds arms and raised him up off the floor, face down, and dragged him out the door. His knees and feet were dragging the floor, and I heard his shoes thump down the wooden steps and scrape across the dirt and roots in the yard. The third guard, Mr. Tillman, was squatted down looking at Buck, who was groaning and whimpering. I reckon we should take him to the infirmary too, said Mr. Tillman, but Cockroach said no. He aint hurt, said Cockroach, hes just pretending. Come on and help me bring him down to the shed. Mr. Tillman looked at Cockroach and said are you sure about that? and Cockroach said goddam right Im sure. Come on. So he and Mr. Tillman grabbed Buck under the armpits and hauled him up and started carrying him toward the door. Buck started crying and saying please dont, please dont. Shut up, boy, said Cockroach. Buck got his feet halfway under him. I dont think he was trying to walk, I think he was trying to stand up and plant his feet and stay in the dining room. but he was to weak. They ended up dragging him out the same way theyd dragged out Jared, except Buck was crying and pleading and trying to get his legs under him.
The fourth guard, Mr. Ewbanks, stayed behind with us while we ate. Nobody talked or even looked at anybody else, we just kept our heads down low over our plates. I ate about three bites and then I felt I was about to get sick, so I quit eating and just stirred my food around with my spoon. After a few minutes Mr. Ewbanks had us clear the table and march back to our dormitory.
It took me a long time to go to sleep. I dreamed Cockroach was making Buck bite his own arm and chew it and swallow it.
The next morning Bucks bed and Jareds bed were both empty still. At assembly Cockroach told us that because of the fight in the dining hall, we were confined to the dorm for the morning. He said Jared had been taken to the doctor in Quincy to get stitches for the bite in his arm and Buck was in the infirmary.