Citrus County (14 page)

All this had happened in the course of a single day—the body being found in the wee hours by an old-timer training his terriers, and the parents, at about two in the afternoon, making a statement to the press. When Shelby had arrived home from school, she’d known nothing about it. She’d found her father in the kitchen, mumbling in front of the sink, leaning on the counter in a way that made him look crippled. He refused to sit. He gave Shelby a summary, his voice stiffening on the phrases he quoted from the news. He told Shelby that he considered this little girl’s family lucky. He was facing Shelby now, leaning on the counter with his forearm.

“Stand straight,” Shelby commanded.

He did so, sort of propped himself. Shelby noticed a garbage bag on the floor, full of pamphlets. She nodded toward it and her father said he’d made an error joining all those, whatever they were—clubs. They couldn’t help him. They were support groups, that’s all.

“Is that so bad?” Shelby asked. She didn’t know what to do about this other little girl, what to say or think about it. It had nothing to do with her and her father. That wasn’t true, though. It was an insult. Shelby felt disrespected.

“I think it is bad,” Shelby’s father said. “I think being in all those groups will keep me from—” He didn’t finish.

“Maybe you’re right,” Shelby said.

“You don’t keep getting mail about it, do you?”

“You’re leaning again,” said Shelby.

“Why did I bring us here?”

The simple answer was that a job had been waiting for him. There was a guy high up in mosquito control that he knew from his boxing days. Shelby knew what her father meant, though. In any other county, none of this would’ve happened. Kaley would still be with them.

Shelby bent so she could catch her father’s eyes and he aligned himself. He did something with his jaw and drew an enormous, wheezing breath. “Are you going somewhere?” he asked. “You’re always going somewhere.”

“I am, aren’t I?”

“Toby? Is that where you’re headed?”

“Not today. He’s always busy.”

“What’s his deal?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure I know,” said Shelby’s father. “I don’t know what questions to ask anymore.”

“I don’t think Toby has a deal. I don’t think he wants one.”

“Is he okay, though? Is he okay for you to hang around with?”

“I’m not sure,” Shelby said. “I think that’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“You will then,” said Shelby’s father. “You’ll find it all out.”

Shelby held her arms out, but did not move any closer to her father. She made him stand free of the counter, made him lead in the hug, provide the firmness. Her and her father’s lives were a series of injuries and insults to those injuries. Shelby wanted to see that little girl’s bones. She wanted to know every single thing that had happened to her.

“Was that some kind of prayer you were saying?” she asked. Her father’s arms were clamped around her, pressing on her ribs. “That mumbling when I walked in—was that a prayer?”

Her father squeezed tighter, almost stopping her breath.

Shelby dumped the contents of her book bag and replaced them with the handjob flag, a pack of snack cakes, and a staple gun she’d dug out of the utility room. Since her sister’s disappearance, no one—with the exception of Mr. Hibma, from whom she’d drawn a couple detentions—would dare discipline her. She’d been given a free pass on skipping school. She’d been caught stealing a cookie in the cafeteria and nothing had happened. She’d thrown her PE coach’s whistle in the toilet.

She followed the path she and Toby had taken to the library, then cut to the right at the fire road and shuffled through a corridor of spaced myrtles. She neared Central Citrus Baptist and took a moment at the edge of the woods. A painting crew was packing gear into a van, three guys all wearing denim shorts. Shelby watched as they slid a ladder into an apparatus on the roof of the van, dug bottles of sports drink out of a cooler, then crept out of the lot.

Shelby advanced to the front steps of the church, which were cordoned off with tape. The painters had done the steps, the front porch, the shutters. Shelby ducked under the tape and stepped up to the door, the soles of her boots sticking with each step to the newly painted wood, leaving imprints of her treads. It felt to Shelby like she was taking sides. She wasn’t sitting on the fence. She was doing something Toby would appreciate, no matter how he’d acted when Shelby first mentioned it. Shelby was doing something her Aunt Dale would approve of. She was doing something, she believed, that she
herself
could get behind.

She hung the flag, three staples across the top and three across the bottom, then dug a marker out of one of her pockets. On an open space on the flag, she wrote:

I, Shelby Register, hung this flag. I did it in the early evening, April 4. The prints in the paint will match my boots. I purchased the flag at the shop in the Sunray Shopping Plaza. I do not have a receipt, but the owner liked me and will remember me.

The opening game of the season was a breeze. After the final buzzer, the other coach approached Mr. Hibma affably. He was encouraged by how good Mr. Hibma’s team was, optimistic that they could beat his rival, the coach at Springstead Middle.

“Hell,” Mr. Hibma said. “We’re going to whip Pasco.”

“I can’t beat him myself,” said the other coach. “I’m writing this year off. I’m starting a lawn service.”

“How does one go about starting a lawn service?”

“You need a big truck and an open trailer. Then you need the mowers and shit. You need a couple guys to work in the sun.”

“And this will enable you to quit teaching?”

“That’s the fantasy. Yesterday I picked up the magnet for the truck door: Sunrise Lawn Management.”

Mr. Hibma stepped over to his team’s cooler and filled two cups with iced tea. He handed one to the other coach. Mr. Hibma knew there were ways out of teaching, but he’d never pursue any of them. That was part of what he had to admit to himself, that he wasn’t the kind of person who started his own business or went to night school. He didn’t hustle.

“Let me ask you something,” Mr. Hibma said. “You don’t seem interested enough in girls’ middle school basketball to have a rival.”

The guy swished some tea around in his mouth. “Has nothing to do with basketball,” he said. “The coach at Springstead is an old friend of my wife’s, and he told her about some of us going to a strip club on teacher planning day.”

“What a dick,” Mr. Hibma said.

The guy nodded, downing the rest of his tea, getting slightly worked up. “He’s the one who invited me. You know?
He
invited
me
.”

“We’ll shut them out,” Mr. Hibma assured him. “We won’t let them score a point.”

He held his cup aloft, though it was empty, and the other coach matched the gesture.

Mr. Hibma went to the locker room to address his team. Not much needed to be said. He told them not to get tendonitis patting themselves on the back, that their fitness still wasn’t up to snuff. He explained to them, because something had to be said about Rosa and Sherrie’s disregard for his rules concerning personal appearance, that he was instituting a double-standard: Rosa and Sherrie could look however they chose. Life was full of double standards, he told the girls. They should get used to it.

On the way home, Mr. Hibma stopped at the video store. He wanted a porn movie. He’d been unable, lately, to masturbate, and he’d decided to leave all subtlety by the wayside, to stare at slick bodies as they slapped together, to listen to heavily eye-shadowed women shriek. He’d crank the volume on his TV until the shrieking drowned out the barking of any dogs.

Mr. Hibma proceeded to the back of the video store. He nudged through a pair of saloon doors and into the adult room. He’d never been in it before. There was no one else in the room, so Mr. Hibma took his time, skimming synopsis after synopsis. The saloon doors weren’t tall, so people that walked by could look in and see Mr. Hibma. He didn’t believe he should be ashamed, didn’t believe anyone had the right to judge him, but still, he was a teacher. He was in a strip mall with a toy store and an arts-and-crafts shop in it. It was about a hundred degrees in the adult room. Despite its rattling, the fan built into the wall did nothing. Mr. Hibma could feel the blood in his cheeks. An older man came through the saloon doors, whistling to himself. He didn’t acknowledge Mr. Hibma, simply went to the movie he wanted, plucked it off the shelf, and was gone. A lady with a gaggle of kids tottered by outside. She paused and gave Mr. Hibma a look. He had to get out of there. He picked a movie, one about a women’s football league. He steeled himself and emerged into the main room, breathing the fresh air, walking with his movie pressed against his leg. He turned up an aisle and stopped in his tracks. A girl from his first period—Karen was her name—was behind the register. What was she, fourteen? Maybe her parents owned the place. Mr. Hibma ducked into the war section and stalled for a minute, wondering if he should wait for Karen to go to the restroom or take a break, but he knew he couldn’t get his porn movie. He rested it on the shelf behind a Vietnam documentary and slipped outside.

He drove two miles up the road, to a restaurant with a separate bar that was usually empty. He would salvage the night. He would drink a series of gin drinks and eat something fried and go home and collapse. In the morning, if he still desired straightforward porn, he’d drive to another town. This bar made strong drinks. It had a jukebox full of forgotten music. It smelled like smoke, but nobody was ever there to smoke in it.

When Mr. Hibma pulled into the lot, he saw a fleet of cars adorned with Citrus Middle School parking stickers. He stepped around a bush and peeked in a window. Librarians. They’d bunched the tables together. Assistants. Even volunteers. There were maybe nine of them, sipping determinedly at pink wine. Mr. Hibma knew when he was beat. He leaned against his car, face upturned toward to the sky, racking his brain for something else to do, some other way to salvage the night.

He had to change himself. The world wasn’t going to change to suit him. He tried to see himself as he would be after he murdered Mrs. Conner, but all he saw were faint, unclustered stars. He could see the act, the smothering, Mrs. Conner’s flailing limbs, but he couldn’t be sure what it would mean for him. He didn’t
want
to kill anyone. He didn’t hope for it to come to that. And neither did anyone else. Dale wasn’t going to answer his letter. No one was going to help Mr. Hibma. He was flying uncharted skies.

Shelby had her father’s checkbook out and a book of stamps and a pile of statements and envelopes. She had electric bills, water bills, trash pickup, cable, phone. Half of them were late. Shelby went through and stamped all the envelopes. You didn’t have to lick stamps anymore. She remembered always wanting to lick stamps for her parents when she was little. Now they were stickers. She picked up a pen to date one of the checks and it wouldn’t write. It scratched against the soft surface of the checkbook. Shelby shook the pen and licked the point and still it wouldn’t perform its function. She didn’t have another one handy. It felt like a colossal chore to get up and find another pen. She ran her fingers against the fine grain of the table.

Shelby imagined walking around in the summertime and seeing her breath, the billboards in an unimaginable language she would never try to learn, every meal centered on fresh fish, every cabinet full of vodka. The sun setting at eleven at night. She imagined flying in a jet, and acting like she did it all the time. Shelby would point at menus. She would have the best guide. She would stay in the best part of the city, in an apartment whose balcony probably looked out over the morning bustling of shopkeepers.

Aunt Dale had finally answered Shelby’s e-mail, and in a sincere tone that wasn’t stiff in the least. Shelby and her aunt already had a rapport, as much as was possible over a computer. They weren’t estranged relatives, they were Shelby and Aunt Dale. Shelby wasn’t going to come out and write what she wanted, but it ought to be obvious. She wanted to be invited for a visit. She wanted to go to Iceland for the summer, or for a week, a long weekend—a chance to be far from the shadows of her real life. Breathing foreign air for even an hour, she knew, would help her. She was going to hint and hint. She was going to win Aunt Dale over. Aunt Dale knew what she was doing in the world and she would share that with Shelby. Shelby would return from her trip tough and levelheaded. Shelby had already e-mailed back and forth four or five times with her aunt. Now it wasn’t taking longer than a day to get Aunt Dale’s responses. Aunt Dale had already quit asking Shelby how she was doing, had already dispensed with pleasantries. And for Shelby’s part, she posed question after question about Iceland, about the people and the TV shows and the government. It wouldn’t be long before Shelby would see it all herself.

Toby made the walk to Wal-Mart. He found the Home & Garden section and within that, past stacks of hoses and fertilizers, found the pest control aisle, the ant killer. Every time he went to the bunker, Kaley had more bites. She had no concept of using the trash bucket and keeping the lid on it. She did as she pleased and hummed in Toby’s face and got skinny. And ever since that girl had been found out by Buccaneer Bay, Toby felt he had no chance of getting caught. The cops and the FBI thought it might be the same assailant. There was no end to this in sight. The authorities had made nothing but wrong assumptions the whole way through, and they were only getting wronger.

Toby got the attention of an employee, a guy with lots of stuff on his forearms—spiked leather bracelets, a watch, a key on a rubber coil, wristbands.

“Which is the strongest ant killer?” Toby asked.

“They’re for different situations.”

“What about for, like, a cabin way out in the woods?”

“A cabin?”

“Well, say a barn.”

“A barn with what in it?” The guy’s hair all laid one way. It went the same direction from one ear to the other.