The Sleeping and the Dead (19 page)

But clearly Ashley had met her murderer, sought him or her out.

“Wait a second,” Jenny said before I hung up. “You mean to tell me you just met Jimmy last week, and then a couple days later you find my cell phone in a garbage can?”

Smart girl, that Jenny. For somebody who still believed in fairy tales, nothing got past her.

 

24

I
LOADED UP THE CAR
, then went back to the house to lock up. My parents kept a spare key in a fake rock in the azaleas. I locked the door and returned the key to its rock. That's the first place an experienced burglar looks before he goes through the trouble of kicking down your door. You might as well hang the key on a hook by the mailbox. My parents wouldn't survive in a place like Memphis. I backed my car out of the drive and drove away. But not back to Memphis, not yet.

I turned off Pyburn into the Masonic Cemetery and drove around the loop until I reached Pastor Corner. I parked and tossed my cell phone on the seat, because there were certain times and places where you don't want to be connected to the world.

My brother's grave was one of them.

It was a simple upright square of polished granite, set next to the unfinished stones that marked my parents' plots. I stood on my own empty grave, looking down at my brother's occupied one—Sean Wallace Pastor, Beloved Son. Dead at fifteen. Murdered.

The last time I saw him alive was the Saturday night after Thanksgiving. He'd gone over to a friend's house to watch movies. I woke up in bed that night with him standing at the door. I said,
You finally made it home
and he said,
Yeah.
I said,
Did you get in trouble?
and he said,
No
.
Night,
I said, and he said
Good night, Jack.
He always called me Jack. I rolled over and glanced at the clock and went back to sleep. I woke up a little after six the next morning with my father shaking me. He told me to get dressed and come downstairs. When I told him to leave me alone, he yelled at me to just fucking get up, which is the only time in my life he ever swore. It scared the shit out of me. I thought it was nuclear war. We used to worry about the end of the world back in the day. I thought we were going to make a run to the Ozarks, where Dad had a cabin in the mountains. While I was getting dressed, I noticed the police car in the driveway.

I went downstairs and there were two Pocahontas cops sitting on the couch looking miserable. I heard my mother in the kitchen rattling coffee cups, making up a tray. My father was still in his pajamas. He had a glass of straight bourbon in his hand. “Your brother's been killed,” he said without preamble.

“Here?” I shrieked, terrified, thinking someone had come in the house while we were sleeping.

“Not here,” my father said.

“Last night. Sometime before midnight. That's when we found his body,” one of the cops explained without looking at me.

“But that's not possible.”

“He was in an accident,” the other cop said.

“No he wasn't!” I was screaming, I know, because my mother ran into the room and crushed me to her breasts.

“He's not dead!” I jerked away and shoved her. She fell on the couch with her long legs up in the air. My father tried to grab my arms to keep me from hitting her. I kept screaming, over and over, “He can't be dead. He can't be. He can't.” One of the cops got me in a bear hug and lifted me off the ground. Mom was screaming and running around the room punching herself in the head. I nailed the cop in the nuts three times before he crumpled to the floor. It was a small town and my dad was rich, so they didn't arrest me.

I was having a common reaction to grief. That's what they said when I told them my brother wasn't dead, that he couldn't be dead, because I had seen him and talked to him at 2:45 in the morning, three hours after the police found his body. Nobody believed me, of course. I was being hysterical. Just like a girl.

My parents didn't believe me either, but then they'd never believed me or Sean when we told them our grandfather's ghost lived in the attic, or about the old man who stayed out by the elm tree in the front yard, or the Indians in the woods, or the dead kid on the playground at school. By the time I was twelve I stopped telling anyone what I saw. The only person who ever believed me was Sean, because he saw them, too.

When Sean was killed, his ghost didn't stay in the attic with Grandpa. After saying good night to me for the last time, he moved on, and I hated him for that. I wanted him to hang around and haunt me. I used to go up to the attic and beg him to let me see him just one more time. There really was no justice in the world.

His grave was immaculate. My mother came every week for twenty-four years to place new flowers over him. The groundskeepers kept the leaves raked and the grass mowed, trimmed and edged. There was nothing to do but stand and stare at the stone and the grave that wasn't even a mound anymore. There wouldn't be any new Pastors born in Pocahontas, nor any old ones planted in Pastor Corner after my parents died. Sean was the last male of the old family line. There probably wouldn't have been any more Pastors even if he had lived, but that was no consolation.

I took a rainbow bumper sticker and tube of superglue out of my pocket. For twenty-four years, on the anniversary of Sean's death, I came here and put a rainbow sticker on his gravestone. And then someone would come along behind me and peel it off. For a long time I thought it was my mother. We never talked about it. It might not be her. It might be anybody in that town. But it was probably her.

At first the police said Sean had been hit by a car, run over while crossing the highway. Hit-and-run—that's what they told us. That's what we said at the funeral. No one could say what he was doing out there, crossing the highway in the dark, miles from anything. They were investigating but they had no leads. At school, people were saying differently. They said somebody had killed Sean on purpose. Somebody I knew. Nobody would talk to me about it. Certain people began to avoid me, including my old boyfriend. So I hung around, acting normal, acting like nothing in the world was wrong, and all the while I listened to them, every word I could eavesdrop and overhear. Eventually, I learned that a girl I knew was dating a senior named Zack who knew something.

One day in April, I cornered her in the bathroom and shoved her head down the toilet until she told me what I wanted to know. She was a little pug-nosed cheerleader thing. She found out she liked breathing better than keeping secrets and being popular.

My father had Sean's body exhumed and examined by a coroner in Little Rock. Turns out he had been beaten to death and his body dragged behind a car to disguise his injuries. The local county coroner had missed these pertinent details because his son, Zack Taylor, had been the driver of the car.

During pretrial, Zack's father said it had been a normal, everyday fight between two teenage boys that ended tragically when one of them fell and struck his head on a rock. This was the delta, endless fields of mud and damned few rocks bigger than a marble. The Little Rock autopsy said Sean had been beaten with blunt objects while his hands were bound above his head. The coroner saw evidence of left- and right-handed blows from at least three different objects. Under interrogation, Zack named his accomplices. With his friends Wayne English and Dakota DeSpain, Zack strung Sean up and beat him to death, then tied him to the back of his truck, dragged him down County Road 405, and left his body in a ditch beside Highway 67.

At the trial, the defense tried to justify what the boys had done. They put a sophomore named Dan English on the stand. Dan was Sean's best friend and the younger brother of Wayne. Sean had gone to Dan's house that Saturday night to watch movies and play pool in their basement. Dan English was a big kid and a burgeoning golden god on the Pocahontas High School swim team, but on the stand he looked small, pale and frightened, like he hadn't slept in a month.

The defense attorney asked Dan if Sean Pastor drugged him and performed “various disgusting homosexual acts” against his will. The killers claimed they had come home to find my brother raping Dan, and in their rage, they had beaten Sean to death with pool sticks.

Dan English fell apart on the stand and denied the drugging story. Obviously this wasn't what he had been coached to say. The defense attorney tried to end the questioning, but Dan kept going, hysterical and furious, pounding the rail with his fist. “Wayne and them took us out to the farm and they hung Sean from a tree. They beat him with fence posts and baseball bats and made me watch. I loved Sean. I died that day! I died!”

He wasn't the only one.

The only reason they hadn't killed Dan was because his older brother was there. They beat the hell out of Dan for being a fag, but they didn't go so far as to kill him. If I had been there, they wouldn't have killed Sean, either. The thing was, I should have been with those boys that night. I was going steady with Dakota DeSpain, but that weekend I was having my period, so I stayed home. I didn't want to hang out with Wayne and Zack and that crowd, but that's what Dakota always wanted to do if he couldn't screw me.

If I had been there, I could have stopped it. They'd have had to kill me, too. Sean died because I was on my menses. My brother would still be alive today if I hadn't stayed home, and maybe I would still be alive, too.

The judge ordered the jury to disregard Dan English's emotional testimony. Strangely enough, they disregarded the judge's instructions. Wayne English got twenty-five years, reduced to five on appeal, but Zack and Dakota were only sentenced to two years apiece. Zack's father, the county coroner, didn't even lose his job for trying to cover up my brother's murder. County coroner was an elected official, after all, just like the sheriff, and there were still a lot of people in that town who thought Sean Pastor got what he deserved. Dan English went on to Southern Cal on a swim scholarship, and in his third year hung himself from a diving board.

That's why I come home every Thanksgiving weekend, with the hope of seeing his ghost just one more time, so I could tell him I'm sorry, so I could tell him goodbye. I stood by his grave, waiting, probably not more than ten minutes. It had become a ritual, as pointless as any other, but I kept it religiously. I didn't cry anymore and Sean never showed, not even a prickle of cold on the back of my neck. I superglued the rainbow sticker to Sean's headstone, got in my car, and drove the fuck back to Memphis. Let Mom try to peel that one off.

 

Monday

 

25

A
DAM WAS THE FIRST TO
call me, about nine o'clock, leaving a message on my voice mail. He didn't have anything new on the killer, just an interesting detail. Cole Ritter's first publicly produced play had debuted at the Overton Park Shell in June 1966. About two minutes later, he called back and left another message. He said, “Ashley St. Michael was a professional photographer. You're buying a camera from her husband. I don't believe in coincidences, Jackie.” And he hung up again.

About eleven o'clock, James called and left a message. He wanted to meet tonight. He didn't say why, but he didn't need to say why. It had become painfully obvious that he had sold his wife's camera because he needed money. And now he needed that last five hundred a lot worse than I did, which meant he was probably still in deep to the same guys as when Ashley was murdered. Maybe they'd killed her to send him a message. But that was too easy, and I didn't believe in easy any more than Adam believed in coincidences.

I woke up to the rain again, a good steady soaking rain sheeting down the bay window in the bedroom. I rolled off the couch, crawled into bed, and slept until twelve, woke up, crawled back to the couch, and ate cold pizza out of the box. Deiter called and left a message. He sounded excited. He said
fock
a lot. He said to come over right away. So I dressed, grabbed the Leica, and drove over.

I followed him inside and to the back of his shop, where he had my pictures printed out and thumbtacked to the walls. He had cleaned up the place enough to get close to the photos on the wall without standing on a pile of dirty underwear. While I examined the prints, he opened a beer and a package of Twinkies. He offered me a Twinkie, but I took his beer.

“Is this all?”

“Is this all? What the fock do you mean is this all. There's your Playhouse Killer,” Deiter said as he pointed at the photos on the wall.

In three out of the dozen a person could be seen hiding behind a piece of scenery. But that's all it was—a person. Deiter had pulled out enough detail to show that our backstage slinker had short dark hair and thick eyebrows. But that could be anybody. Hell, you could even mistake it for me on a bad day, and I didn't have very many good ones.

“I'm not a miracle worker.” Deiter was hurt and angry. “I did what I could. I got you a face out of this shit. Maybe the killer looks like Gumby, I don't know.”

I was sorry. This really was the first solid piece of evidence we had. I told Deiter this and made him jolly again. I liked him jolly. But I knew if I showed these pictures to Adam, he'd say the same thing. It was pretty much useless as evidence, except as a sort of balm of Gilead. But Deiter had done his best. I couldn't ask for more. Actually, I could. I had hundreds of pictures taken of the Playhouse Killer's victims and their murder scenes. I didn't want to bring them all to Deiter, so I asked him to show me how to manipulate the photos to bring out more detail. If the killer was in the habit of watching the police process his murder scenes, I might find his face in one of those older pictures, maybe one good enough to show Adam.

Deiter plugged the Leica into his computer. He scrolled down until he found the pictures of Cole Ritter's murder scene and opened one I had taken of the construction. “Here's a good trick,” he said and inverted the colors, basically changing the photo into its own negative on the screen. The effect was surreal. The construction site turned into an alien moonscape in which each block of shattered white concrete became a patch of nearly featureless black, while darker areas leapt out in strange, disturbing brilliance.