Angels Burning (33 page)

Champ should've been in school. Gil had taken him out for what he called a family emergency.

He hadn't bothered to shut his door completely because he thought they were alone.

We all like to think we know how we'd react in a crisis. We've all watched plenty of tragedies covered on the news and thought,
I'd handle it differently. I would've gone to the authorities,
or
I would've taken that boy and run away,
or
I would've killed that son of a bitch right then and there and no matter what I did, I'd be
on the side of the angels and when it was all over, I'd be able to put it behind me.

The problem with this armchair supposing is that it's fiction even though it may spring from true outrage. Nothing shatters the reality of our good intentions like reality.

I was in a situation I could have never imagined in my wildest, most perverted dreams. It was inconceivable. I would have been less shocked if Gil had turned out to be a werewolf or an alien from another planet than a human doing what I witnessed when I walked by that door.

I didn't panic. I didn't scream. I didn't threaten. I didn't vomit or run.

I turned my head away and stood back from the door.

“Champ!” I called out, trying to sound strong and whole instead of the shivering, frantic bits I'd become. “Come here.”

I never spoke to Gil. I would never speak to him again. He left. Later that night the police would find him at Rankin's with a half dozen of his employees going through inventory and able to give him an impeachable alibi.

I called Grandma and told her she needed to take Champ to her house and watch him for a while. I explained in a demented twist of irony that I had a surprise planned for Mom that just involved Neely and me and wanted Champ to be absent.

Grandma never questioned my story, and I never told her what happened to Champ. I didn't think she could handle it or that she could help. I've often thought since then, after a lifetime of knowing her, that I was wrong on both counts.

I waited until Mom was taking her bath. I knew I'd have her undivided attention that way.

She was settled deep in a cloud of bubbles, her golden hair piled on top of her head and drinking a glass of wine, when I walked into the bathroom to tell her.

I had no idea how to begin the conversation. I wanted it over. I truly believed once I told her, she'd fix everything. My heart swelled with love as I stood before her knowing she would be our savior. She would finally be our mom.

I took a deep breath and blurted out, “Gil's been messing with Champ.”

I think I expected her to be in denial at first. Or thought she might even laugh. Or maybe she'd always sensed something was wrong. Maybe she'd be subconsciously prepared. Maybe she'd go directly to fury. Or collapse even deeper into her bubbles sobbing. Or jump for her robe and head for the phone to call the police.

She sighed and looked annoyed at me.

“It's not a big deal, Dove.”

I was sure I hadn't heard her right or she hadn't heard me right. Before I could repeat myself, she went on with an explanation she seemed to feel was perfectly fine.

“He lives in a big, beautiful house. He has all the toys he could ever want. Food on the table. And he finally has a father. Gil has even talked about adopting you kids.”

She knows
, a voice screamed inside my head.
She's known all along and doesn't care.

“He'll get over it,” she assured me. “He's a boy.”

Was it a swap?
the voice continued screaming.
Did you discuss it calmly like a business deal over a nice dinner? Did he hold out the velvet box with the diamond ring sparkling inside it and tell you it was all yours if you gave him your son?

I'd never find out the answers.

Once again I didn't fall apart. I didn't hang around to further discuss the situation. I didn't snap. I didn't lose my temper. I remained calm and sane. I knew exactly what I was doing as I walked to my little brother's bedroom and returned with his baseball bat choked up firmly in my
hands. I was so in control and considerate that I remembered not to damage her face for Grandma's sake.

Neely is the only other person who knows the truth and even she doesn't know all of it. I told her about Champ and I told her what I did but I never told her what Mom said to me in the bathroom before she died. I knew it wasn't necessary.

Neely wouldn't care about the details and the depths of our mother's depravity. All she needed to know was the bitch failed to protect her pups.

THERE'S A TAP
on my door.

Neely and Smoke have gone home. I left Mason downstairs in front of the TV. I tell myself he's watching too much TV. I need to find him some kind of day camp.

“Just a minute,” I tell him, and head for a box of Kleenex.

I blow my nose, dab at my eyes, and check my reflection in a mirror. Along with MOF, I'm now also a victim of SOF, Sad Old Face. My eyelids are puffy, my face sags like Deputy Dawg's, my skin's sickly pale with patches of red. In my youth, crying made me look deliciously vulnerable and dewy.

“Come in,” I call.

Mason enters clutching his Trapper Keeper.

“You look sad, Aunt Dove,” he immediately confirms.

“I'm a little sad.”

“Is it because of me?”

“No, definitely not.”

I plop down on the edge of my bed and pat the space beside me.

“Come here. Let's have a talk.”

He moves toward me, then has second thoughts.

“Wait a minute,” he says.

He lays down his binder and rushes from the room.

He returns with a smartphone in a rosy glitter-frosted case and hands it to me.

“I was going to save this and give it to you as a thank-you present when Dad comes back but maybe you'd like it now. It might make you feel better.”

“Where did you get this?” I ask.

“Derk. He traded it for these goofy paper umbrellas and toothpicks shaped like swords Dad and I collected on our road trip. And some other toothpicks from Manny's that have little Mexican flags on them.”

I turn on the phone and slide my finger across the screen to access it. Up pops a photo of Camio and Zane.

Mason crawls up on the bed beside me and looks over my shoulder.

“I asked him why he had a pink sparkly phone.”

He pauses while he grabs his binder and starts leafing through its pages. He seems to find what he's looking for.

“Derk said it belongs to an angel who dropped it from heaven,” he reads from the page, then smiles up at me.

“I wrote that one down. Pure gold.”

I'VE ALWAYS THOUGHT
of regret and guilt as salt and pepper siblings: the first a clean, straightforward, righteous emotion aroused by circumstances beyond our control or power to repair; the second a murky, confusing, selfish muck fueled by culpability, real or imagined, and kept bubbling by a sense of inadequacy.

Regret is spontaneous, but I believe we choose to feel guilt. This is the only way I can explain good people like Neely and Nolan who, while capable of admitting mistakes and taking responsibility for their failures, move past them and never seem to let them impact their lives.

I don't think I'm a selfish person and I try not to feel guilt, but sometimes I fail. Today is going to be one of those days.

It was a different time, I remind myself as I stand in front of my closet searching for an outfit. Pedophilia wasn't openly discussed the way it is now. Teachers, doctors, guidance counselors, even the police weren't trained to notice it. No one was ready to acknowledge it existed, especially in white-picket-fenced little towns. And if it did exist, the men committing this vile act had to be the unwashed, unsavory, unnoticed dregs of society.

Gil was rich, highly visible, from a good family, a pillar of the community. Our mother was a loose woman with three illegitimate children who married him for his money and was murdered by an ex-lover.

We knew we could never get anyone to believe what Gil had done
to Champ. We also didn't want Champ to have to talk about it. He wasn't even able to talk to us about it. We naïvely thought he could forget about it and we could, too, if we pretended it never happened.

None of these suppositions help me to climb out of the guilt swamp I've found myself wallowing in this morning.

I realize I've lost a skirt and blouse, a sundress, and a shoe to this investigation, ruined by coal, dirt, blood, and chewing tobacco. All that's left is for me to get spattered by motor oil or the grease from a serving of hot wings and I'll really feel like one of the boys.

I know I'm bucking the odds, but I put on one of my favorite summer ensembles: a fitted robin's egg blue sleeveless dress, nipped fetchingly at the waist, with a matching jacket, and the taupe pumps I was wearing the day we found Camio.

Her phone is long gone, scooped up by a state trooper who was in the area almost instantly after I called Nolan last night and told him about my gift from Mason.

I also told him Jessy no longer has an alibi.

I've been invited to the state police barracks this morning purely as a spectator and once I arrive, I do feel like one. What unfolds before me is even better than attending a sporting event or a Broadway musical. Watching Nolan try to interrogate Derk is an unparalleled form of entertainment all its own, and my mood begins to lighten.

Shawna sits with me watching the proceedings on a computer screen. She didn't want to be present in the room while Nolan talked to her son, but she did agree to observe rather than bring in a representative from child services.

I watch her watching him looking for any signs of distress or anger. She reveals nothing, and I wonder if she's retreated again into her titanic detachment.

According to the troopers who escorted them here, Mrs. Truly cooperated fully with them when they showed up at her house, although it did take close to a half hour of her repeatedly going to the back and front porches and shouting for Derk before he finally appeared, but once he did, he surrendered peacefully after informing both officers that cops
are a bunch of cocksuckers and showing them how he could throw his pocketknife hard enough to make it stick in a tree trunk. Their suggestion that maybe she wanted to give her son a bath and have him change his clothes was met by expressions of utter disbelief on both their faces.

“Has he always been this energetic?” I ask Shawna.

Derk is on top of the table jumping up and down, his fists clenched, his now bare feet hitting the surface in loud slaps, his head tilted back, howling, “Not telling! Not telling! Not telling!” in response to Nolan's latest attempt to find out where he found the phone.

“Even as a baby,” Shawna says, her eyes never leaving the screen. “He was hard to control.

“But he's a good boy,” she thinks to add.

“Of course.”

Derk has been reacting to all of Nolan's questions in a similar fashion. He's hidden under the table. He's done a headstand in the corner. He's done a cartwheel-type maneuver by grabbing the back of his chair and throwing his legs up and over it. He took his sneakers off and chewed away big chunks of the soles and spit out the pieces at the wall before putting them on his hands and crawling around the room on all fours. He ran in place at an impressive speed while shouting “Dick!” at the top of his lungs.

There were no usable prints found on the phone. Derk is our only lead.

Nolan gets up from his chair without bothering to give Derk an explanation and heads for the door. Even after he leaves, the boy continues to jump up and down and yell.

The door to the small empty office where we sit with nothing but a laptop opens and Nolan steps inside.

“Mrs. Truly,” he begins, and runs a hand over his crew cut, “is your son retarded?”

“You'll have to forgive Corporal Greely's political incorrectness,” I intervene on his behalf. “What he meant to say is, is he special?”

Shawna doesn't respond to either question.

“He doesn't like to be confined,” she states. “Makes him antsy.”

“Maybe I should talk to him on a mountaintop somewhere,” Nolan says gruffly.

“Or the surface of the moon?” I suggest.

He gives me an exhausted, frustrated look I'm not expecting.

He wasn't able to break Eddie, and I know this is weighing heavily on him.

Even though Eddie's fingerprints were on the steering wheel of Adelaide's car and on a few surfaces inside her house, and it's been confirmed that the blood in the trunk of the car, in the kitchen, and on the bottom of the cast-iron skillet belongs to Camio, he claims he visited his aunt recently and that she loaned him his car. Nothing more. He says he doesn't know anything about Camio's murder or his aunt's disappearance. He's sticking with this story for now.

“Do you want to try?” he asks me.

I don't want to steal Nolan's thunder, especially here in his own barracks. I also don't think I'll have any better luck.

“I think we should let his mother try,” I reply.

“He don't listen to me,” Shawna says automatically before Nolan can comment one way or the other. “I can't make him tell me anything.”

“Don't make him,” I say. “Ask him nicely. Tell him it will help Camio. He thinks she's an angel now.”

Nolan and I wait.

“Just speak from your heart,” I urge her.

She looks back at the screen where Derk's antics continue. I wonder how long he could do this.

A heavy sigh fills the room and she rises, seemingly pulled up by the release of air from her lungs.

Nolan nods at me. I accompany her, and he stays behind to watch.

Derk doesn't even look at us when we enter the room.

We each take a seat on either side of the table where he hops up and down like a frog still shouting, “Not telling!”