Dead Right (17 page)

The next week’s sermon was on tithes and offerings, but Hunter saw no mention of her. It was in Eliza’s journals that her name appeared again and again. Madeline’s mother couldn’t seem to get over the tragedy of the girl’s death.

She also referred to another loss—the suicide of a sixteen-year-old girl.

Had I spoken, I could’ve saved her. I tried to warn them, but they wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t see. They thought I was crazy. That’s what
he
tel s everyone.

Was Barker the “he”? And how could Eliza have helped?

Because she could identify with the girl’s mental anguish?

According to what Hunter could piece together—there was no obituary or article that he could find—Rose Lee Harper had overdosed on sleeping pil s.

“Wait…” he muttered, skimming a different section in which he spotted the girl’s name. She’d been found naked on the floor of her bedroom.

Naked? That struck Hunter as odd. He didn’t know of one other suicide in which the person had first stripped down. Especial y not someone only sixteen years old.

The way Eliza had written the word
naked
was unusual, too. She general y wrote with a pretty, flowing script, as neat as he imagined her house would be. But
NAKED

stood out because it was printed and traced again and again until it made such a deep impression in the paper he could’ve read the word from the other side of the page.

He ran his finger over the engraved letters.

How wel had Eliza known this girl?

He searched through the other journals but, unlike Katie, he could find no previous mention of Rose Lee.

It was possible she’d been on the pages that were missing. There were quite a few.

A knock at the door interrupted him. “You haven’t showered yet?” Madeline asked when he answered.

“I got involved in reading these journals.”

“What about the farm?”

“I’l go as I am, and shower when my clothes come.” He glanced over his shoulder at the materials spread out on the desk. “What do you know about Rose Lee Harper?”

“Rose?” she asked. “Where did you read that name?”

“Your mother mentions her quite often.”

“Oh.” She straightened the strap of her purse. “I guess that doesn’t surprise me. My mother was real y empathetic.

And what happened to Rose was so sad.”

He stepped out and shut the door behind him. “It said she committed suicide.”

“She did. But it was her whole life that was sad, you know?” They rounded the truck Hunter had seen the night before, the one Madeline’s brother had dropped off for her to use, and approached the car. When they reached it, she tossed him the keys.

“I’m driving?” he asked.

“It’l help you learn your way around town.”

“How was Rose’s life sad?” he asked as he climbed behind the wheel.

Madeline got in on the passenger side. “Her mother left her to be raised by her father when she was little and went to live in some other state with another man. And Ray Harper didn’t start out as the best dad.” She pul ed an elastic tie from her purse as he backed out of the drive.

“What’d he do wrong?”

“He didn’t have much money and—” she adjusted the rearview mirror so she could bunch her hair into a ponytail

“—at first he spent what he did have on booze.”

Booze…Just the word made Hunter crave a drink, but he quickly put it out of his mind. He was doing so much better since he’d left California. “Did that change?” he asked, dodging the potholes in the narrow lane that led from Madeline’s house.

“He became devoutly religious. He used to bring his daughter over to the church to work for my father. She even helped out at the farm occasional y.”

“Doing chores?”

Madeline put the mirror back in place and motioned for him to turn left at the stop sign. “She’d do filing and tidy up my father’s office.”

“It was messy?” Hunter asked. “He strikes me as the type who’d be very organized.”

“He was, for the most part. He neglected the repairs and painting at the farm, but he stayed right on top of his church work. I think it was more a matter of finding something he could pay her for. They real y needed the money. If it wasn’t for my father, I don’t know how they would’ve survived.”

“Her own father didn’t work?”

“Ray’s a handyman. He was then, too. Sometimes he could get work, other times nothing.”

Hunter loosened his seat belt a little. “If your father was trying to help them out, why not hire Ray to do some of the repairs around the farm?”

“He did. I remember seeing Ray once in a while. But it was mostly Rose Lee, working over at the church.” She shook her head. “Emotional y, she was real y messed up, a very strange girl. My father used to counsel her for hours.”

“What about Katie Swanson?”

“Don’t tel me my mother wrote about Katie, as wel ?”

Madeline had put on a little makeup, which enhanced the already vivid green of her eyes.

Hunter returned his attention to the road. “You’ve never read your mother’s journals?”

“No. I…I couldn’t. Just seeing the covers brings it al back.”

He knew what “it” was—the pain. And she was lost in it now, remembering. But Hunter had to look at the whole picture, to know what had gone on before the reverend disappeared. That was necessary if he was going to figure out the possible motives of the people around him.

“Madeline?”

“Katie was another of my father’s ‘projects,’” she said with a sigh. “She had a mother who’d sleep with anyone.

No one knew who her father was. She was lonely and uncared for, and the man her mother was with at the time beat her. So my father stepped in before the state could get involved and arranged for her to live with Ray and Rose Lee.”

“Why wouldn’t he want the state to get involved?”

“He liked to take care of his own congregation.”

They reached Stil water, passed a Victorian that had been turned into a store, the police station, Walt Eastman’s Tire Service. “Where to?” he asked.

“Keep going. The farm’s on the other side of town, off the highway.”

He stopped at Stil water’s only light. “Ray and Rose didn’t mind having Katie with them?” he asked, resuming their discussion. “I thought they had financial problems, too.”

“Having Katie there was a good thing for them. They had an extra room in their trailer, and my father paid them to let her stay.”

“Where did your father get the money?”

“He col ected alms for the poor every Sunday. There were specific members of the church for whom we were al praying, so it was real y a joint effort. I think that’s what endeared my father to so many people. He took a real interest in the less fortunate.”

Hunter gave the car more gas as they cleared the busier streets and entered an open area. “Why do you think she ran away?”

“Word has it she was pregnant.”

He shook his head. “At fifteen?”

“You have to remember what her mother was like. Katie probably lost her virginity at twelve or even younger. And according to the rumors, she’d been sneaking out at night, seeing Tommy Meyers, who was three years older.”

“It was his baby?”

“Tommy’s always denied it, but my father was sure it was. No one real y knows. She died before she had the baby, so there was no paternity test.”

“That
is
sad,” he said.

“It real y upset my father. He and Ray, who blamed himself for not watching her more closely, spent hours out in his office, trying to come to grips with it.”

“By doing what?”

“Talking, of course. I could hear their voices coming through the door when I went to the barn to feed the chickens. Sometimes I’d see Ray’s truck in the drive late at night. They’d tried so hard to help her, you know?”

“Did your father have any other ‘projects?’” Hunter asked. Considering the luck he’d experienced with Rose Lee and Katie, Hunter hoped not.

“Not real y. He continued to help Ray until my own mother…” She cleared her throat. “Wel , after that, we had a couple of bad years with the farm, he had me to take care of, and people around here were struggling so he wasn’t making as much at the church. It was al we could do to get by. Then he married Irene and had his hands ful raising three more kids.”

“Did anyone ever say anything about the fact that Rose Lee was found naked?” he asked.

Madeline’s forehead creased. “She was naked?”

“That’s what it said in your mother’s journal.”

“I don’t remember that. But I was only eight or nine at the time of her funeral. It wasn’t something folks talked about in front of me.”

“I can’t picture a young woman peeling off her clothes and then taking a bunch of sleeping pil s,” he said.

“Maybe she’d just been involved in a romantic encounter.”

“Do you recal her having a boyfriend?”

“No. I can’t real y imagine her being with anyone. She was extremely shy. After Katie died, she quit working for my father, and I rarely saw her in town. When I did run into her, she wouldn’t even look me in the eye. She’d stare at the ground.”

“So would you say Rose Lee took Katie’s death hard?”

“Harder than anyone. I doubt she ever recovered from the grief.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Before Katie died, there were times she seemed almost normal. Afterward—” she shrugged “—afterward, she would barely speak.”

11

T
he farm was bigger than Hunter had expected. “Clay runs this by himself?” he asked as they parked to one side of the long gravel drive and got out of Madeline’s car.

“Yes. Can you believe it?”

He whistled under his breath. It wouldn’t be an easy job to manage such a large piece of property—and yet it appeared that Clay had the place wel in hand. Madeline’s stepbrother obviously wasn’t afraid of hard work. Hunter had to respect that. But he wondered about some of the comments Madeline had made concerning Clay. He sounded driven, protective, determined. Madeline had also implied that Clay had a very short fuse, which was an important thing to note in a possible murder investigation.

The impressions of the players involved often proved more valuable than the facts. Facts could be interpreted in several ways; it was the perspective of those who’d known Reverend Barker that would final y reveal the information Hunter was after.

“So this is where you grew up?”

Madeline deposited her keys in her purse as she nodded.

It was a white two-story A-frame that sat back from the road. It wasn’t particularly large, but it wasn’t smal , either.

Hunter guessed it to be about 2400 square feet. Behind the house, he could see a rather imposing barn. The wind carried the scent of animals and he heard some distant clucking, so there was probably a chicken coop next to the barn. A rooster strutted around the corner to confirm it.

Hunter couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a rooster. They weren’t exactly a common sight on the beaches of L.A.

Madeline paused when she noticed that he’d begun walking more slowly. “Be glad that’s a different bird than the rooster we had here when we were little,” she said.

“Why?”

“The old one would’ve tried to gouge your eyes out. We were terrified of it. Especial y Grace. He was very territorial.”

Hunter imagined the humid days of a summer spent on the outskirts of this smal Mississippi town, imagined children with denim overal s and dusty bare feet gathering at the local grocery market to slake their thirst at the Coke machine. It was a completely different world than the one he’d known growing up in Mission Viejo, one of the nicer suburbs of Los Angeles. But it held a certain appeal.

“What?” she said, and he realized he was smiling.

“I was thinking of Tom Sawyer.”

“Don’t be giving me any more of that west coast attitude,” she said, deepening her accent.

He thought about the differences between her home and his, then decided California wasn’t
better
than Mississippi, but it was different. “Just don’t try to feed me any col ard greens, and we’l be okay,” he teased.

“Have you ever tried col ard greens?”

“No, but I hate spinach.”

Wind chimes tinkled as they stepped onto the wraparound porch, which creaked slightly beneath their weight.

“Your stepbrother takes good care of the place.”

“He does. It actual y looks better than when my father was…er…here.”

She often acted as if she didn’t know whether to say

“alive,” and general y veered away from it. Hunter suspected that, even after twenty years and the discovery of her father’s car in the nearby quarry, she couldn’t believe he was real y dead. That uncertainty had to be difficult for her.

“How’s it changed?” he asked.

She shrugged. “The house used to be an ugly, dingy green. The yard had a lot of weeds and bare spots, where our dog had dug various holes and buried this or that, usual y one of our shoes.”

“Your father didn’t mind how it looked?”

“I don’t think he paid much attention. He was a bit of a mad scientist, so interested in his work that he didn’t real y see anything else.”

“Didn’t you tel me that your father cared about setting a good example?”

“In some ways, he did. He was most severe in his punishments when we said or did something that reflected poorly on him. He felt the children of a devout preacher should be hardworking, sober-minded and wel -versed in scripture.”

The people in Madeline’s life were beginning to seem familiar to Hunter. He’d seen a few pictures of her father, knew he’d been tal and imposing with hol owed-out cheeks, piercing black eyes and a determined jaw. Her mother had been the opposite—smal , soft and gentle-looking. Madeline had obviously inherited her height and slenderness from her father’s side, but her bottle-green eyes resembled her mother’s. So did her smooth pale skin.

Hunter wondered where the auburn-colored hair had come from—maybe a grandmother or an aunt. He had yet to see any pictures of extended family members but knew he’d probably run across them later, when he searched through the rest of her scrapbooks.

“Was there one child he singled out more than the others?” he asked.

“He was hardest on Clay. But a lot of men are tougher on their sons than their daughters.”