Carnal Innocence (6 page)

Annoyed, she shook off the sympathy. The moment he’d strolled out—limping slightly—the women had begun to buzz about him and someone named Edda Lou. Caroline took a deep breath of the verdant smell of heat and green, and smiled to herself.

It looked like our slippery-smooth Mr. Longstreet had gotten himself into a nasty little mess. His girlfriend was pregnant and screaming for marriage. And, according to the local gossip, her father was the type who’d be more than willing to load up the shotgun.

Trailing a finger over a branch, she began to scent the water. Lord, she was a long way from Philadelphia. How could she have known it would be so peaceful and so entertaining to listen to the chatter about the town lothario?

She’d enjoyed her half-hour visit to town, the ladies’ talk about children, recipes, men. Sex. She laughed a little. Apparently, North or South, when women got together, sex was a favored topic. But down
here they were so frank about it. Who was sleeping with whom, and who wasn’t.

Must be the heat, she thought, and sat down on the log to watch the water and listen to the music of early evening.

She was glad she’d come to Innocence. Every day she could feel herself healing. The quiet, the vicious sun that baked all of the energy out of you, the simple beauty of water shaded by moss-hung trees. She was even getting used to the night noises, and that blacker-than-night country darkness.

The previous night she had slept for eight hours straight, the first time in weeks. And she’d awakened without that plaguing headache. It was working, the solitude, the serenity of small-town and rural rituals.

The roots she’d never been allowed to plant, the roots her mother would have furiously denied existed, had begun to take hold. Nothing and no one was going to pull them free again.

She might even try her hand at fishing. The idea made her laugh and wonder if she still had a taste for catfish. She shifted and picked up a pebble to toss in the water. It made such a satisfying plop that she picked up another, and another, watching the ripples spread. Spotting a flat-sided stone by the verge of the water, she rose to pry it up. It would be fun to try to skip it. That, too, was an old, almost forgotten image. Her grandfather standing here, just here, and trying to teach her how to skip the rock over the water.

Pleased with the memory, she bent, curled her fingers around it. Odd, she had the most ridiculous sensation of being watched. Stared at. Even as the first shiver worked down her spine, she caught something white out of the corner of her eye.

She turned, looked. And froze. Even the scream turned to ice in her throat.

She was being stared at, though the eyes that watched saw nothing. There was only a face, bobbing above the rippling surface of dark water, with a hideous mop of long blond hair that had tangled and caught in the roots of an old tree.

Her breath hitched, coming through her lips in small, terrified whimpers as she stumbled back. But she couldn’t take her eyes off that face, the way the water lapped at the chin, the way a shaft of sunlight beamed off those flat, lifeless eyes.

It wasn’t until she managed to throw her hands over her face, blocking the image, that she was able to draw the air to scream. The sound echoed through the bayou, bouncing off the dark water and sending birds streaking from the trees.

M
ost of the sickness had passed. Sour waves of nausea still rose in her stomach, but if she forced herself to breathe slowly, Caroline could manage to hold down a little tepid water. She sipped again, breathed deeply, and waited for Burke Truesdale to come back out of the trees.

He hadn’t asked her to go in with him. She supposed he’d taken one look at her face and known she wouldn’t have made it ten feet. Even now, as she sat on the top step of the porch, her hands almost steady again, she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten from the pond back to the house.

She’d lost one of her shoes, she noted absently. One of those pretty navy and white flats she’d bought in Paris a few months before. With glazed eyes she stared down at her bare foot streaked with dirt and grass. Frowning with concentration, she toed the other shoe off. It seemed important somehow that she have both feet bare. After all, someone might think she was crazy, sitting there on the porch with one shoe on. And with a body floating in the pond.

When her stomach pitched, rolled, and threatened
to expel even the tap water, she dropped her head between her knees. Oh, she hated to be sick, hated it with a passion only someone who had recently recovered from long illness could feel. The weakness of it, the shaky loss of control.

Clenching her fists, she used all her concentration to pull herself back from the edge. What right did she have to be sick and scared and dizzy? She was alive, wasn’t she? Alive and whole and safe. Not like that poor woman.

But she kept her head down until her stomach settled, and the dull buzzing faded from her ears.

She lifted it again when she heard the sound of a car bumping down her lane. Caroline brought a weary hand up to her face as she watched the dusty station wagon squeeze through the overgrowth.

She’d have to cut those vines back, she thought. She could hear them brushing against the already scarred paint of the car. Must be some clippers in the shed. Best to do it in the morning, before the day heated up.

Dully, she watched the station wagon stop beside the sheriff’s cruiser. A wiry man with a red tie knotted around a turkey neck climbed out. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, and a white hat atop a full head of hair he’d dyed as densely black as coal and slicked into a modified pompadour. Pouches of loose flesh dipped below his jaw and his eyes, as if the skin had once been full of fat or fluid and had stretched under the weight.

His black slacks were hauled up with sassy red suspenders, and he wore the heavy, shiny black tie shoes Caroline associated with the military. But the cracked leather bag he carried announced his profession.

“You must be Miz Caroline.” His high-pitched voice would have made her smile at any other time or place. He sounded eerily like a used-car salesman she’d seen on the old RCA console only the night before. “I’m Doc Shays,” he told her as he propped one foot on the bottom step. “I tended to your grandfolks near to twenty-five years.”

Caroline gave him a careful nod. “How do you do?”

“Fine and dandy.” His sharp physician’s eyes
scanned her face and recognized shock. “Burke gave me a call. Said he was headed on down here.” Shays took out a huge white handkerchief to mop his neck and face. Though he could move fast when he had to, his slow and easy pace was more than bedside manner. It was the way he preferred to do things. “Hell of a hot one, ain’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t we go on inside, where it’s cooler?”

“No, I think …” She looked helplessly back toward the shielding trees. “I should wait. He went in there to see … I was throwing stones in the water. I could see only her face.”

He sat beside her, took her hand in his. Fingers still nimble after forty years of medicine monitored her pulse. “Whose face, darlin’?”

“I don’t know.” When he reached down to open his bag, she stiffened. Months of vigilant doctors with their slim, shiny needles had her system jittering. “I don’t need anything. I don’t want anything.” She jolted to her feet, and though she tried, she couldn’t keep her voice from shrilling. “I’m all right. You should try to help her. There must be something you could do to help her.”

“One thing at a time, darlin’.” To show good faith, he shut his bag again. “Why don’t you sit on down here and tell me all about it? Nice and slow. Then we can figure out what’s what.”

She didn’t sit, but she did gain enough control to take several long breaths. She didn’t want to end up in the hospital again. Couldn’t. “I’m sorry. I don’t suppose I’m making much sense.”

“Well, now, that don’t worry me none. Most people I know spend about half their lives making sense and the other half exercising their jaw. You just tell me how it occurs to you.”

“I think she must have drowned,” Caroline said in a calm and careful voice. “In the pond. I could see only her face …” She trailed off, forcing back the image before it nudged her toward hysteria again. “I’m afraid she was dead.”

Before Shays could question further, Deputy Carl Johnson came out of the trees and started across the
sun-bleached lawn. His usually spotless uniform showed traces of dirt and streaks of wet. Still, he walked with military precision, a commanding figure, six foot six of taut muscle. His glossy skin was the color of chestnuts.

He was a man who enjoyed his authority and prized his control. Just now he was fighting to maintain his professional aura when what he wanted to do was find a secluded spot to lose his lunch.

“Doc.”

“Carl.”

It needed only that for the two men to exchange information. Muttering an oath, Shays mopped his face again.

“Miss Waverly, I’d be obliged to use your phone.”

“Of course. Can you tell me what …” Again, her gaze was drawn toward the trees, her mind to what was beyond them. “Is she dead?”

Carl hesitated only a moment, pulling off his cap to reveal tight black curls cut as close and neat as a newly mowed lawn. “Yes, ma’am. The sheriff’ll talk to you as soon as he can. Doc?”

With a weary nod, Shays rose.

“There’s a phone right here in the hall,” Caroline began as she started up the steps. “Deputy …”

“Johnson, ma’am. Carl Johnson.”

“Deputy Johnson, did she drown?”

He shot Caroline a quick look as he held open the screen door for her. “No, ma’am. She didn’t.”

Burke was sitting on the log, turned away from the body. A Polaroid camera sat beside him. He needed a minute before he slipped back into his law-and-order suit. A minute for his head to clear, for his stomach to settle.

He’d seen death before—had known the look and the smell of it from boyhood, hunting with his father. First they’d gone out for the sheer pleasure of it. Then, when crops and investments had failed, they’d hunted to put meat on the table.

He’d seen the death of his own kind as well.
Starting with his father’s suicide when the farm had been lost. And wasn’t it that death that had led him to this one? Without the farm, with a wife and two young children to support, he’d signed on as town deputy, then as sheriff. The rich man’s son who had detested the futility of his father’s death, and the cruelty of the land that had caused it, had chosen to channel his talents, such as they were, toward law and order.

But even finding his father hanging in the barn, hearing the quiet creak of the rope rubbing over the thick beam, hadn’t prepared him for what he’d found in McNair Pond.

He still had much too clear a picture of what it had been like to wrestle that body from the water, to drag it out onto the ground.

It was funny, he thought, drawing hard on a cigarette, he’d never liked Edda Lou. There had been a coarseness about her, a sly look in her eyes that had milked away any sympathy he might have felt for her being unfortunate enough to be kin to Austin Hatinger.

But just now he was remembering the way she’d looked one long-ago Christmas when he and Susie had come across her in town. She’d have been no more than ten, mousy hair stringing down her back, patched dress hiking up too far at the side hem and drooping at the front. And her nose pressed up to Larsson’s window as she stared at a doll with a blue cape and rhinestone tiara.

She’d just been a little girl then, wishing there was a Santa. Already knowing there wasn’t.

He turned his head when he heard the rustle of brush. “Doc.” He blew out a stream of smoke on the word. “Christ.”

Shays laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, squeezed once, then moved to the body. Death wasn’t a stranger to him, and he had come to know that death wasn’t only for the old, either. He could accept that the young were taken, through illness, through accident. But this mutilation, this wild destruction of a human being was beyond acceptance.

Gently, he picked up one of the limp hands and studied the raw wrist. The same telltale signs braceleted
the ankles. It hurt him more somehow, this ring of broken skin and the hopelessness it represented, than the vicious slices on her torso.

“She was one of the first babies I delivered when I came back to Innocence.” With a sigh he did what Burke had not been able to do. He reached down and shut Edda Lou’s eyes. “It’s hard for parents to bury their children. By Jesus, it’s hard for doctors, too.”

“He messed her up pretty good,” Burke managed to say. “Just like the others.”

He picked up the camera. They would need more pictures, and God knew he had to do something before the coroner came. He swallowed a hard knot of anger.

“She was tied to that tree there. There’s blood dried on it. You can see from the scrapes on her back where she rubbed against it. Used clothesline. Pieces of it are still there.” He lowered the camera again, and his eyes were bright with fury. “What the hell was she doing here? Her car’s back in town.”

“Can’t tell you that, Burke. Can’t tell you a hell of a lot. She was hit on the back of the head.” Shays’s hands were as soothing as they would have been had his patient been alive to feel them. “Maybe he hauled her out here. Maybe she came on her own and riled him up.”

Struggling to hold on to his nerves, Burke nodded. He knew, just as everyone in town knew, who it was Edda Lou had riled up.

Caroline paced the porch. If she could have worked up the courage, she’d have marched into the bayou and demanded information. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could stand this waiting. But she knew she’d never make it past the first stand of trees, not when she knew what was beyond them.

She saw the dark sedan creep down the drive, followed by a white van. Coroner, she thought. When the men got out of the van with a stretcher and a thick black bag, she turned away. That bag, that long black bag not so different in shape and size from the kind people used to haul off things they no longer wanted,
that bag reminded her much too forcibly that it wasn’t a person in the pond, it wasn’t a woman, it was only a body that wouldn’t suffer from the indignity of being taken away in a big piece of plastic.

It was the living who suffered, and Caroline wondered who the woman had left behind to grieve and mourn and question.

Her heart ached to make music, to make music so passionate it would drive away everything else. She could still do that, thank God she could still do that. Escape there when there was nowhere else to run.

Leaning against the post, she closed her eyes and played it in her head, filled her mind with melody so rich she didn’t hear the next car jolt down the lane.

“Hey there.” Josie slammed her car door, and finishing off the last of a cherry Popsicle, started toward the porch. “Hey,” she said again, and offered a friendly, curious smile when Caroline raised her head. “Y’all got a commotion here.” She licked the stick clean with a savoring tongue. “Saw all these cars turn in while I was heading home and thought I’d see what was doing.”

Caroline gave her a blank look. It was odd, almost obscene, to see someone so vivid and pulsing with life when death was still hovering. “I beg your pardon?”

“No need for that, honey.” Still smiling, Josie walked up the steps. “I’m just nosy, that’s all. Can’t stand for something to be going on and not know about it. Josie Longstreet.” She held out a hand still a bit sticky from the melted ice.

“Caroline. Caroline Waverly.” After she’d shaken hands, Caroline thought how innate manners were, how absurdly automatic.

“You got trouble here, Caroline?” Josie set the sticks on the porch rail. “I see Burke’s car. Gorgeous, isn’t he? Hasn’t cheated on his wife, not even once in better than seventeen years. Never seen anyone take marriage so damn serious. But there you go. Doc Shays, too.” She glanced back at the crowded lane. “Now,
he’s
a character. That shoe-black hair all puffed up and slicked back like a fifties rock and roll singer? Sounds a little like Mickey Mouse, don’t you think?”

Caroline nearly smiled. “Yes. I’m sorry, would you like to sit down?”

“Don’t worry about me.” Josie took a cigarette out of her purse. She lighted it with a gold butane. “You got all these visitors, but I don’t see a soul.”

“They’re …” She looked toward the trees. She swallowed hard. “The sheriff’s coming now.”

Josie shifted position subtly, turning her body slightly, lifting her shoulders. The sassy smile she offered Burke faded when she saw his eyes. Still, her voice was bright. “Why, Burke, I’m jealous. You hardly ever come to pay calls on us at Sweetwater, and here you are.”

“Official business, Josie.”

“Well, well.”

“Miss Waverly, I need to speak to you. Could we go inside?”

“Of course.”

As he started by, Josie took his arm. The teasing had gone out of her face. “Burke?”

“I can’t talk to you now.” He knew he should tell her to leave, but he thought Caroline might want another female around when he’d finished with her. “Can you wait? Maybe stay with her awhile?”

The hand on his arm trembled. “How bad is it?”

“As bad as it gets. Why don’t you go in the kitchen, fix us something cold? I’d be obliged if you’d stay in there until I call you.”

Caroline settled him in the front parlor, on the striped divan. The little cuckoo clock that she had wound faithfully since her arrival tick-tocked cheerfully. She could smell the polish she’d used on the coffee table just that morning, and her own sweat.