Damaged Goods (23 page)

Peeling off Cornell, he took Main Street into downtown and looked at his map. Hershel wished he’d driven down to the migrant camp to see if Carl needed a ride to work instead of heading off on this pointless excursion. There were no set hours for previewing a sale, but Carl typically opened the doors around ten. At least that’s what the yellow note in his office said. It was nine o’clock when Hershel looked up Albert Darling’s last known address.

He took Third Street into a neighborhood of small homes from
the 1940s and ’50s. Most looked like rentals, the yards littered with toys and weeds. He searched the numbers, his head hurting in its familiar way, barely noticeable now. At last he found the one he sought and pulled up along the curb. Gray paint peeled off the house in long strips, revealing the aqua-green of a more optimistic era. One shutter was missing, and the other looked about ready to go. Someone peered through the dirty front window at him. Now seen, he slid out of his truck, which looked conspicuously extravagant here. He wandered up the front walk, stepping over a child’s bicycle, past the boy who likely owned it, and knocked on the hollow door. As he waited, Hershel turned and looked at the kid. He stood in a mud puddle, his shoes black, the bottoms of his pants wet and ragged. The boy watched him, mouth slack, rain falling on his already soaked head. So this is what people mean when they say “not enough sense to come in out of the rain,” Hershel thought.

A woman opened the front door a crack and peered out with one eye. “Can I help you?” She sounded defiant, and Hershel had a flash of Darling’s in-your-face bluster.

“I’m looking for Albert Darling.”

She opened the door about ten inches and looked Hershel up and down. Her hair was unwashed and hung in greasy dark strands almost to her waist. “Who are you?”

Hershel wondered if he should say. What did he have to hide? If only he knew. “Hershel Swift.”

“Swift? You’re that asshole that sold his stuff, aren’t you?”

“He was delinquent on his payments. It was legal.”

“Wasn’t neither.”

Hershel was already growing weary of her. “Is he around?”

She squinted at him. “No, he’s not.”

“You know when he’ll be back?” Hershel basked in the relief that at least the man was still alive.

“I’ve got no idea. We ain’t seen him since summer.”

Hershel looked back at his fancy new truck. The boy was now standing inches from it, staring up at the grille.

“Git away from that, Caleb!” the woman shouted so shrilly that Hershel suffered a sharp pain through his left eye. “Look, mister, I don’t know where Al is. I filed a missing-person report ‘cuz he disappeared after trying to get his gun back from you.”

Hershel experienced a strange melting sensation in his limbs.

“We figured you killed him.”

“Why would I kill him?”

“I know how he can be.” Her voice carried a hint of apology.

“I don’t need to kill people. What I did was legal.”

“Wasn’t neither. You can’t just sell a person’s stuff like that. How was he supposed to get down there and pay you? He was in jail.”

Hershel shook his head and stepped onto the sidewalk, heading for his truck.

“If you didn’t kill him, I will when I get my hands on him. He’s got three kids want to see their dad. And he owes me money.…”

As Hershel climbed into his truck he glanced back at the woman, now on the step in her bathrobe and bare feet; then he pulled away from the curb. He felt nauseated. Where was Albert Darling if he’d been missing since summer? He’d gone only a few hundred yards when he hit the brakes hard and backed up until he was in front of the house again. The woman walked toward the truck.

“When, exactly, was the last time you saw him?”

She put her hands on her hips. “Middle of August.”

“You have an exact date?”

She shot him a dark look. “Hang on.” She disappeared inside the house.

After waiting several minutes, Hershel killed the engine. The boy was still admiring the truck, and Hershel smiled down at him, trying to put his mind on something less damning. The boy didn’t smile, but stared at him as if he were growing a horn from the center of his forehead.

Finally she returned carrying a creased sheet of paper covered
thickly with small-type print. She held it up. “August sixteenth. That was the last time.”

Hershel felt struck by lightning. The sixteenth was the night of his accident. He started the engine and pulled away from the curb. “Thanks,” he said. He rolled the window up and drove numbly toward the edge of town.

Silvie explored the outer perimeter of Hershel’s farmhouse, examining the last remnants of autumn. He had border plants along the foundation, mere stalks now, some still clinging to seedpods like reluctant parents. Whatever they were, coralbells or columbine, they were unrecognizable without their leaves. It was cool and damp under the branchy canopy of the oak trees, and she wondered what it was like here in June or July, when the sun beat down and the shade of these giants was at a premium. She imagined the generations of children who might have grown up here, playing in the sprinkler and sucking on Popsicles. Was this Grandma’s house? A place of happy memories and scrumptious food? She couldn’t imagine that terrible things had ever happened here. It wasn’t the sort of place where broken families lived. It could never have been a fatherless household. Not with the straightness of the eaves and the condition of its sturdy roof.

At the rear of the house next to the mudroom she found stone steps leading down to a storm cellar. Cautiously, she descended them, careful not to slip on the moss and the rotting leaves, and peered through the dusty window. It smelled of mushrooms and cedar, sweet organic decay. The door was locked, and she was relieved. Not because she wasn’t curious about the things that might be left to languish in there but because someone might also use it as the perfect hiding place until Hershel was gone and she was alone.

The rain, which had momentarily dissipated, began to fall again, and she walked out to the tiny garage, past the little orange
car that Hershel hadn’t yet got running, in search of anything to explore. If this would be her home for the time being, even if it was just a possibility, she wanted to know every inch of it. Her eyes roamed the cobweb-covered shelves, skimming the common items collected over more than one person’s lifetime: badminton rackets, camping gear, a single wooden oar without its boat. Three gasoline cans sat neatly in a row, the same size and color, but decades apart in design. There was nothing here to give her clues to who Hershel was; these things could have belonged to anyone and probably came with the house.

At the back of the garage, Silvie found another door. She tried the knob and with some effort pulled it open, revealing a walkway and another shed. It looked older than the garage, with a lean-to structure on one side, filled with disintegrating firewood, now so covered with wet moss that it would never light.

The shed door creaked, as if it hadn’t been opened in a half century. She kept a constant inventory of the spiders, watching the direction in which they moved like an air-traffic controller alert for trouble. The building was shallow, and as her vision adjusted she found old cans and bottles with strange names she couldn’t pronounce. She moved along a shelf row. They were forgotten chemicals used for agriculture. There was something charming about these relics of daily farming, untouched from the 1940s or ’50s. She suspected that these chemicals had been long banned from modern production. But here they were, for anyone to discover.

An open sack of lime sat in the corner, used for sweetening acidic soil, she knew from her eighth-grade Western States history class. Most of the West had been built on cattle and farming, and her teacher had spent hours boring them senseless with small details like the importance of lime. She was surprised she remembered it. Silvie stepped close to examine a large metal drum, blowing the dust off the label, which was crowned with the silhouette of a tree.

“A-c-tylcho-lin-es-ter-ase,” she enunciated. Her eyes traveled
down to the small print. Active ingredient: organophosphates. “Hmm, organophosphates. That’ll poison your dog.” The same ingredient had been in the pesticide her mother had used to kill the aphids on her flowers, which by accident had also killed Silvie’s pet.

Returning to the house, Silvie washed her hands, letting the water run over her skin, cleansing away the dust for long, long minutes.

She opened a kitchen drawer filled with odds and ends, then another. She found Hershel’s opened mail and reviewed the electric bill, the phone bill, his Visa statement. She began an unfocused search of information about him as she considered how she got here.

She hadn’t planned to leave Wyoming this way. She’d dreamed of escaping to new places, but that’s just what it was—dreaming. The existence of the photos wasn’t a surprise, but the revelation that she was not his only victim carried a frightening edge that had sent her into a blind panic. Those faces—those scared little faces. So much like her own. She hadn’t thought her plan through—there was no plan.

It made her wary of everyone around her. Was anyone who he seemed to be? Was Hershel keeping secrets, too, despite his declaration?

The old English roses were Kyrellis’s favorites, even though the nursery he had purchased had built its reputation on sturdy floribundas. He held a newly opened blossom to his nose and inhaled the spicy-sweet aroma. Its petals were the soft pink of the inside of a seashell, and they rippled back in delicate layers like folds of luxurious silk. He held the flower in the crook of his thumb and forefinger, gently resting it on his wide palm. He studied it a long
while, unable to tear his eyes away from the subtle color, so rich in the center, so mild at the edges. Perfection. It
was
perfection, though he knew that in six months he’d be standing in a rare spring light, bestowing the same honor on a floribunda. He could be so easily swayed between the two seasons. Floribundas were summer to him: large, bold, deliberate.

He released the stem and examined the tiny buds on the plant, looking for aphids. They were clean. This very rosebush had been plagued by a fungus that started at the trunk and marched upward, painting the undersides of the leaves with velvety orange as it went. He thought he’d have to toss the plant and fumigate the greenhouse. Once he’d switched to a systemic pesticide, however, the fungus disappeared and there wasn’t an aphid in sight. Kyrellis knelt beside the plant to get a closer look at its underside, just to be sure.

Satisfied, he groaned to a stand once again. He’d cut these roses on short stems and float them in a crystal bowl of water on the kitchen table before going to bed. The kitchen needed brightening after the grim events of the previous day. He hadn’t slept. He’d been afraid to sleep, walking over the scene a thousand more times upon his return. He’d stopped at the do-it-yourself car wash in Sherwood on his way home and sprayed out the bed of his truck, washing the last of Carl Abernathy down the city sewer. Still … Kyrellis wondered what he had missed. He worried that he was becoming careless; he needed sleep. Whatever he’d missed in his scrutiny was sure to come to him in his dreams.