Daddy's Little Girl (21 page)

He spent a lot of his time talking to Bruce Lee, Bobby Coughlin did.

Directly to Bruce Lee.

It was like he had Bruce’s phone number or something.

How it worked was this.

Above Bobby’s bed at home was this huge picture of Bruce, looking fiercer than he ever had in his brief time on the planet.

And each morning, after rolling out of bed, Bobby Coughlin stood in his ragged underwear and aped his man.

Struck the same pose.

Put the same ferocious expression on his face. And served the same kind of warning on the world that Bruce Lee had.

Only now Bobby Coughlin was doing it in the evening—striking the pose, serving the warning.

Specifically, he was sending out dire emanations to Dave Evans, warning him that after today’s embarrassment—Angle shrieking at Bobby in the hall, Dave not defending Bobby—that things were going to get very bad for Dave.

Very bad.

Just now, Bobby heard Bruce Lee’s voice in his head.

“Do not be afraid, little one. You are becoming a master of yourself and thus a master of other men, as well.”

Bobby, wearing the same gym shorts he’d worn back at the health spa, smiled.

Then did a quick karate kick (actually he didn’t know if it was karate or judo or what; never having studied either one of them, all he knew was that the kick was, whatever its origins, a pisser) and knocked himself off his feet.

He landed on the bed.

But instead of pretending he’d screwed up, he’d told himself that, in a real fight, he would have killed the other guy (whose name could very well be Dave Evans) before falling down.

No doubt about it.

With Bruce Lee’s help (just yesterday, Bruce had said, “Bobby, someday you won’t need acne cream and your biceps will be full and girls will offer to give you endless hours of pleasure”) Bobby was going to stake a claim on manhood the way the U.S. Marines had staked a claim in Grenada.

He turned and looked at the Bruce Lee picture the way he used to look at the Stations of the Cross in church.

With reverence.

Awe.

Communion.

He was just setting himself in the proper position again—the Killer Position as he thought of it—when he heard the door creak open behind him.

Before he could break the position—because he knew who had just walked in, who was about to embarrass him—he heard a girl’s voice say, “You’re such a nerd it’s incredible.”

There he was, skinny Bobby Coughlin, one hundred and twenty-six pounds in his gym shorts, a face full of pimples, a heart full of fear, and there stood his twelve-year-old sister Annie, making fun of him.

“You’re really scary, Bobby.”

“I thought Mom told you to knock.”

“No, she told you to knock, remember, you’re the one who’s walking in the bathroom when I’m in there. You just want to see my boobs.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“That’s just because you can’t get any girls your own age.”

Annie was mad at him because instead of MTV, he’d insisted they watch a Kung-Fu movie on cable. She could be merciless when you crossed her. Like now.

“You pretending you’re Bruce Lee?” she asked, raising her eyes to the poster. She was four-feet-ten, weighed maybe eighty pounds, and was pretty in the snub-nosed way of all the Coughlin women. She was also about as compassionate as a hungry shark.

“If you want to know,” Bobby said, deciding to really bait her, “I talk to Bruce Lee.”

“Isn’t he dead?”

“Not really.”

“Boy, that’s a good one. ‘Not really’.” She put her hands on her hips, spoiling for this argument as much as Bobby was. “He’s either dead or he’s not.”

“He speaks to me.”

She smirked. ‘“From beyond the veil’, like Leonard Nimoy says on
In Search Of.”

“That’s not on anymore.”

“A lot you know. It’s on cable now.”

“Oh.”

“And you definitely do not talk to Bruce Lee.”

“Yeah, well I do, and he told me some very confidential things about you.”

“Like what?”

“Like what you do when you’re watching MTV alone. ”

His sister’s pretty face crimsoned instantly. Boy, had he struck some kind of nerve.

“Oh, yeah, like what?” Annie protested. But her voice was gone. She was embarrassed.

“Like—smoke dope.”

“Bull.” But her face had gotten even redder.

“You do, don’t you?” Bobby said, buoyed by his own cleverness.

Here at last was a weapon he could use against his mean sister.

“Bull. I do not.”

“Bull, you do, too.”

“You’re such a fruit,” she said, sniggering again at the Bruce Lee poster.

With that, guilt still giving her eyes a pained expression, she left the room.

“You call me a fruit again, I’ll tell Mom about the grass,” Bobby said.

But she was gone.

Slamming the door.

Bobby smiled up at Bruce Lee.

Thanking the man.

His friend.

And mystic mentor.

Bruce often did things like that.

Helped Bobby when he was in a jam.

Tonight—much to the regret of Dave Evans and Angie—Bruce Lee was going to help Bobby very much.

There was only one thing worse for Deputy Shanks than being tied up.

That was being set free.

Adam Carnes and Beth Daye had done Shanks an odd kind of favor by strapping his wrists and legs tight with rope and stashing him in a dark city park where nobody was going to find him.

Shanks made an effort to get out of the ropes, but not too much of an effort.

Once he got free he would have to find Sheriff Wayman and tell him what had happened.

And that was a fate Shanks was not looking forward to.

For sure, he would lose his job.

Worse, he would lose face.

In a small town like Burton, that was the worst thing of all.

Forever, after tonight, he would be looked on as a kind of clown, an image that many people in town already had of him.

He would have to move.

Getting law work was not easy for a man like Shanks.

He’d only gotten the job anyway because he was Sheriff Wayman’s nephew.

And the sheriff had always looked after Shanks’s mom, who was one of those luckless ladies (three husbands, two of them dead, one run off) who seem to plague every family like an inherited disease.

And now look what Shanks had done.

And now look at what Sheriff Wayman was going to do to him.

The rope fell away from his hand as if by magic.

Shanks had been working the rope for the better part of an hour now, and he’d just gotten lucky, thanks to his thin wrists, that it had loosened up enough to pull his hands free.

He sat there, tempted to put the damn thing back on.

Maybe he would feel better about things if he knew what was going on.

Like he’d told the Carnes guy, he was strictly following orders.

The sheriff never took Shanks into his confidence.

About anything.

Shanks reached down and pulled the ropes free of his legs.

In all, undoing the knots took five minutes.

He was not a master at things like this.

Then he stood up, rubbing his wrists from where the rope had bit in, and kicking his feet out to get the circulation moving again.

Then he walked down to his car. Might as well get it over with. Drive over to the sheriff’s and tell him what had happened and take his punishment.

Carnes and Beth Daye had let the air out of his tires.

Great, he thought, that’s just what I need.

Walking back to the sheriff’s office without my car, the guy I was supposed to follow around having let the air out of my tires.

Just great.

“Mrs. Foster?”

“Who is this?” the woman snapped.

“My name is Adam Carnes.”

“How did you get my number?”

“That doesn’t matter, Mrs. Foster.”

“It matters to me,” the woman said, “it matters a great deal.”

“Mrs. Foster, my daughter was abducted last night.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, “but I’m sure there’s no way I could help you.”

“That isn’t true, Mrs. Foster.”

“I’m going to hang up now.”

“I need to know what happened to Kenny.”

The mere mention of her son’s name froze the air.

“Mrs. Foster.”

In a much weakened voice, she said, “As I said, I’m going to hang up now.”

“Something is going on in this town. Somehow your dead son has something to do with it.”

Bitterly, the woman said, “I suppose you’ve been talking to that deranged Dora Jean Williams. Those are lies she tells about Kenny.”

“She isn’t the only one who says he was wild.”

“Wild is one thing, Mr. Carnes. Criminal is another.”

“Mrs. Foster, I just need twenty minutes of your time.”

“To prove what, Mr. Carnes?”

For a moment he was silent. He debated whether or not he should hint at the theory that he and Beth had evolved, the theory that Beth was back at her office checking out.

“I need to know why your son died and who killed him.”

“I can save you a trip,” the woman said imperiously. “He was killed because he wandered too near the edge of the highway where he happened to be walking. That’s why he was killed. As for who, it’s very simple. A truck driver named Harcourt. He wasn’t even drunk. Isn’t that amusing, Mr. Carnes? The least he could have done was be drunk so there’d be a good excuse for what he’d done.”

The woman was choking back tears.

“Now, Mr. Carnes, if you don’t mind,” Mrs. Foster said.

Carnes couldn’t help himself. Knowing that the woman was about to hang up, he played his best card.

“I think Kenny was in the park the night Dora Jean was accosted,” Carnes said. “But I don’t think he did it—I just believe he saw who did it. I also believe he was killed for that reason.”

Apparently the theory interested the woman enough to respond. Sarcastically, she said, “So somebody hired Harcourt the truck driver to run Kenny over?”

“Maybe Kenny saw Harcourt in the park. Maybe Harcourt stalked him for several days.”

“Why wouldn’t Kenny tell somebody what he’d seen?”

“Maybe he was scared.”

“That’s a lot of maybes. Anyway, there was very little Kenny was afraid of. Many times I’d wished he’d been more fearful as a boy. That way there wouldn’t have been so much—”

She stopped herself before saying anything incriminating.

“I need to talk to you,” Carnes said.

“I’m going to bed, Mr. Carnes. I’m an old woman. Old women retire very early, even in these liberated days.”

“Mrs. Foster, don’t you want to know the truth about Kenny?”

“I do know the truth about him.” This time her tears were obvious. “He was my son. A good boy. He died very young. Run down by accident.” The tears shook in her throat. “There’s nothing else I need to know, thank you.”

With that, she hung up.

Immediately Carnes set off for the newspaper office three blocks away, where Beth was going after stopping back at her apartment for some head cold medicine she felt she was going to need.

Soon after the phone call with the man named Carnes, Ruth Foster had wearily climbed the stairs, clutching the rifle she’d smashed the downstairs case to get. The casing had been old, and, in her frenzy and impatience, Ruth had crashed her elbow into the pane, shattering it.

She could never recall doing anything like this in her life, a measure of her present condition.

As she passed Minerva’s room, she heard her friend tugging on the locked door.

Tugging uselessly.

For now, until Ruth decided what to do, Minerva was best left locked in.

Ruth passed down the hall, her arm tired from the weapon she hugged to her.

Finally she came to an ornate oak door that seemed closed in some final way. The door stood a good seven feet tall and made Ruth feel like a child.

She leaned forward, put a small hand on the knob, and turned the metal handle to the right.

Dust floated at her like invisible birds. She coughed, choking, as dead air filled her senses.

For some reason—this was hardly a time to be humorous—she thought of those hokey monster movies on late-night TV, the ones where the Egyptologists were always opening cursed tombs.

She stood looking at a room that had sat unused for many, many years now.

With the large picture window, kept from view now by heavy, funereal drapes, there had once been enough sunlight in the room to make it golden.

The light had touched the divan and the grand piano and the elegant statuary, including the swan-lady of mythology whose delicate hand angled up to the heavens.

Ruth could hear the laughter of long ago.

Her husband.

Kenny.

Herself.

How they had loved this room, how they had kept it almost like a sanctuary. It was a room where guests, no matter how important, were never permitted.

Never.

Not even a senator.

Not even a famous actor.

She came in reluctantly, as if being guided by ghosts.

In the very dust itself were the molecules of other days—as if time were nothing more than elusive pieces of light and shadow tumbling randomly through the universe.

She could hear songs played so proudly on the Steinway.

The slightly off-key tone of “Happy Birthday.”

The sigh that falls between deep and tender kisses.

She saw her husband again just now, a large man with the jaw of an English lord (at least as depicted by Mr. Errol Flynn) and the presence of a great politician.

Then she saw Kenny.

He was six years old.

Sitting on the edge of the divan.

Watching them dance.

The tune floated from the radio—a sweet, sentimental song filled with saxophones—

Once or twice she caught the way he looked at her, her own son, sitting there—

The memory faded.

She was now an old woman standing in the lung-wrenching dustiness of a room that honored the dead.

She touched the rifle for some inexplicable kind of reassurance.

She came further into the room.

On the mantel of the fireplace was a photograph of her and her husband. She picked it up. Reverently.

They’d been a good-looking couple.

She had not been especially vain, but she had not been unduly modest, either.

She’d been a fetching lass, all laughter and gentle promise to her suitors, but at heart an old-fashioned woman who’d kept herself pure for her husband and dutiful to her son....

Her son.

The image of him again.

At six, sitting on the divan watching them—

At ten—

At fourteen—

The lies Dora Jean told about him—

She sighed, thinking back to the many long nights she’d spent with Kenny after the death of her husband—the conversations, the advice, the warnings—

All he’d been was a “hell raiser.” That was the term for him. A hell raiser. Others might see something more serious there, but she’d known better, and for years she’d argued against the notion that Kenny was—

Feeling flushed and exhausted, she dragged herself across the room and seated herself on the divan, collecting cobwebs on her face and hands as she did.

She thought back the long years—

Kenny’s smile—

Kenny’s laughter—

Then the mysterious changes that came over him—

The lies Dora Jean told
—

She was still caught in her reverie when the sounds came up from the basement.

Infusing the very walls with their physical presence.

The animal sounds.

She glanced up at the open door, half-expecting a shadow to fill it.

The sounds died.

She sat back, letting the rifle fall to the floor. She felt so tired....

... Oh, she had been a fetching one ... she thought of the Cotillion Balls in the spring where her husband in his dark suit and white shirt and red tie used to glide her so handsomely around the floor....

... of Chinese lanterns ...

... of that heartbreaking first sense of spring ...

The animal sound again.

This time when Ruth looked up, something changed in her face. The melancholy was gone. As was the frenzy.

She had put it off for so long.

So many years.

She thought of her dead husband. Wondered what he would do.
Knew
what he would do.

Knew what
she
should do.

She stood up unsteadily, wanting to be free suddenly from this tomb of memories. Of fetid flowers and grinning skeletons. Of times and fashions and feelings long past.

She could forgive herself no longer
—

The time to act was now.

She left the room of her dead husband and her dead son, trapped in a state that was neither life nor death, a shambling woman with a rifle.

With, at last, a purpose.