Evidence of Blood (5 page)

Kinley was not surprised to see Ray’s picture on the front page. In a town like Sequoyah, any man who’d been County Sheriff as long as Ray would have become a locally prominent figure.

In the photograph, he looked younger than Kinley remembered him. The deep lines that had begun to gather around his eyes and cut through the sides of his face were hardly visible, and his red hair had managed to conceal the gray that was sprinkled throughout it, but which could only be seen when the light was exactly right. It was hard to imagine him dead, even harder to think of him at the moment of death, stumbling through the brush, his hands clutching at his chest, his eyes popped in terror, the birds watching all of this from the bare limbs that streaked above him.

A short article accompanied the photograph. It was written matter-of-factly, and for anyone who might not have known, it detailed Ray’s tenure as a Deputy Sheriff under Floyd Maddox, his later election as Sheriff after Maddox’s death in 1974, and his decision not to seek reelection in 1990.

According to the article, Ray had died late on the afternoon of September 1. His body had been found by a resident of the canyon area. District Attorney William Warfield had subsequently ordered an autopsy.

Kinley folded the paper, returned it to the table in front of him and eased himself back in his chair. Outside, the town’s one main street remained sleepy, perhaps comatose, compared to the noise and movement of New York, and he marvelled that Ray could have endured it for so long.

“That’ll be fifty cents,” the waitress said as she stepped up to the booth. “Do you want a receipt?”

Kinley thought of his tax records and decided that his trip home could not be counted as a business expense. “No,” he said.

He arrived at Ray’s house at exactly eleven. He’d beer there many times since they’d first met, the two of them sitting through the night in the wooden swing on the from porch and talking about everything under the sun. He’d spent so much time in and around the house during his last four years in Sequoyah that he’d finally come to think of it nearly as fondly as his grandmother’s place on the mountain.

As a house, it wasn’t much—small, wood-framed, with two tiny bedrooms and a living room not much larger But it was as close as the Tindalls had ever gotten to an ancestral home, and because of that, Ray had given Lois just about everything else he had, all his savings, am much of the farmland he’d accumulated over the past fifteen years, in order to keep it in his family’s name. Since the divorce, he’d lived there alone, wandering down it short, dimly lit corridors, or burrowing into the small of fice he’d fixed up for himself in what had once been Se rena’s bedroom.

Serena, herself, opened the door. She was now twenty with Ray’s red hair and penetrating green eyes. Even from behind the rusty screen, her skin gave off a soft whit light.

“It’s good to see you,” she said quietly, as she swung open the screen door, stepped back and let him walk inside. “I’m glad you could come. You were the closest thing Daddy had to a brother.”

Kinley drew her into his arms. She stood silently within them, her posture determinedly erect, unbending, a woman who’d fully inherited her father’s rock-ribbed sense of dignity and self-containment.

He released her, and she stepped from his arms. “He’s in here,” she said as she directed him out of the small square foyer and into the living room. Sprays of flowers stood on green metal legs throughout the room, their sweet aroma almost suffocating in the enclosed space. The casket rested in front of the tiny brick fireplace, a massive metal vault which seemed to shrink the room around it.

“I decided to keep it closed,” Serena said. “I think Daddy would have wanted it that way.”

“Yes, I think so, too.”

“Around here, people open them, but …”

“No, you’re right,” Kinley told her. “I did the same thing with my grandmother,” He fixed his eyes on the casket. It was hard to imagine Ray inside, alone in the dark.

“I was here only a month ago,” Kinley said. “We had a nice talk.”

“When your grandmother died.”

“Yes.”

Serena kept her eyes fixed on the casket, but with a look that appeared slightly puzzled, as if she were trying to figure out exactly what lay inside.

Kinley looked at her solemnly. “You were the daughter he wanted, Serena,” he told her softly. “He always felt that way about you. You know, that you were independent, ready to go it alone, the daughter he wanted.”

Serena turned toward him. “We were always close. Very close. Except for the last few weeks. Something changed between us.” She shook her head. “No, something changed in
him.”

Kinley shrugged lightly. “Well, a divorce, something like that, it always …”

“It wasn’t just the divorce,” Serena insisted. “It was Daddy. Something about him.”

“He was always a little unusual, Serena.”

“Something happened to him,” Serena said firmly. “He didn’t talk about it. But something definitely happened.”

“Maybe just the middle-aged blues.”

She shook her head determinedly. “No.” She glanced about, as if looking for a more private place. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“About what?”

“Daddy. I want to know what drove him away from me.”

“Look, Serena, sometimes you just have to …”

She shook her head adamantly. “It’s better to know, don’t you think? Better to know what happened?”

Kinley felt as if he’d been shot back in time, and he was once again in Jefferson’s Drug Store, facing her father as he had the afternoon Ray had asked him the same question in the same determined voice. He thought of all the times since then that he’d actually found out “what happened,” but had felt no better off for all he’d learned.

“I don’t know, Serena, maybe it’s not better,” he said, an answer that he knew would disappoint her.

Lois arrived an hour later. She wore a plain black skirt and blouse, and looked considerably older than he remembered, as if time had suddenly swept down upon her, done its vulture’s dance on her face and eyes.

“Hello, Jack,” she said as she stepped over to him.

“Lois.”

“How long’s it been?”

“Four years, five? I’m not sure.”

“Not exactly,” Lois said. “I was at your grandmother’s funeral.”

“You were?”

“I came over, said hello.”

“I’m sorry, Lois, a lot of that time …”

“A blur, I know,” Lois said briskly. “It doesn’t matter. I was always just ‘Ray’s wife’ to you anyway.”

As she walked away, Kinley wondered if what she’d said was true, if his mind had done its old trick of making people invisible. If so, there was nothing he could have done about it. He had long ago accepted the fact that his mind had its own postures and inclinations. So much so that he sometimes felt it hardly belonged to him at all, that it was something separate, a small gray animal curled up in his skull, peering out from behind his eyes, lurking there, alive and breathing in the dark, airless chamber.

Lois paused at the casket, then, without turning around, walked directly out of the house and into the backyard. From his chair in the living room, Kinley could see her there, her back to him as she stood half concealed by the slender tendrils of the enormous weeping willow that consumed the small backyard. For a moment, she stood very rigidly, her shoulders lifted, her head held slightly upward, as if she were watching the willow’s shredded tent as it trembled around her.

A moment later, Serena joined her there, and even from a distance, Kinley could tell they were arguing, a struggle he assumed to be the last exchanges in an Oedipal war whose outcome no longer mattered.

Still, it was clear that the war went forward anyway, and as the seconds passed, it built steadily, the voices growing louder, until Kinley could almost hear the words themselves. It only ended when Lois suddenly glanced toward the house, caught Kinley’s silent, staring eyes, and lifted her hand to silence Serena. After that, the two of them walked back inside.

“Serena and I were just discussing the house,” Lois said to Kinley as she returned to the living room. “I was trying to give her some advice.”

“Well, you could rent it, I suppose,” Kinley told them, already uncomfortable in the role of family advisor.

“No,” Lois snapped. “I think she should get rid of it. Ray was able to keep it up. But for somebody like Serena, a single woman, living away at college, I think she’d be better off without it.”

Serena stared at Kinley pointedly but said nothing.

“She needs to sell it,” Lois said. “That’s the best thing.” She turned back toward the casket. “With him gone, there’s …” She stopped, let her eyes drift back over to Serena. “There’s nothing else to do.”

Serena’s face grew tense, but she did not speak.

Lois turned to Kinley. “Well, I guess I’ll see you at the funeral tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

She offered him her hand. “Funerals. That’s where we seem to have all our meetings.”

Kinley shook her hand. “Lois, about last time …”

“Don’t worry about it, Jack,” Lois said. “I’ve learned that when people forget you’re around, they also stop bothering you.” She smiled thinly. “Ray told me what you said, you know.”

“Said?”

“Years ago,” Lois explained. “When he told you about my mother’s death.”

Kinley said nothing.

“You were very matter-of-fact, just like always,” Lois went on, her intensity building, set to explode. “Your theory was that I’d loved my mother and hated my father, and so I’d decided to make him a murderer.”

“Yes, I remember that,” Kinley said unemphatically, trying not to prime the powder.

“Well, you were wrong, Jack,” Lois told him flatly. “I loved my father and hated my mother. But I still had the same suspicions. Can you imagine that?”

With that, she spun around, and headed for the door.

Almost as if moved by the hard waves of an aftershock, Kinley and Serena followed her, watching out the front window as she strode to her car, got in and drove away.

“She’s one of those women,” Serena said quietly.

“Those women?”

“The kind who never expect anything but hurt,” Serena said. “Victims.”

Kinley watched as Lois’s car headed down the narrow, tree-lined street. He could see her head in silhouette above the driver’s seat, a small, dark shape whose look reminded him so much of Maria Spinola that he wondered if some backwoods version of Fenton Norwood was already stalking her, perhaps toying with the lock on her back door.

By mid-afternoon the house was crowded with Ray’s neighbors and associates. At first Ray’s sister Millie was the only one he’d recognized. But as the hours of the wake passed, he found himself recognizing others, some of them from high school, a smattering of teachers and students, along with other local personalities whose faces he could recall, town figures of one sort of another, grocers, barbers. He could tell that quite a few of them had recognized him, as well. But that was not surprising, since the local paper had plastered his face on the front page every time a new book had been published.

By early evening the house was empty again, and Kinley and Serena walked out on the front porch and sat down in the swing. It was a cool evening, and Serena wrapped herself loosely in one of Ray’s old sweaters.

“You didn’t really have to stay in the house the whole day,” she said.

“I wanted to,” Kinley told her.

She smiled delicately. “He would have liked that. He believed in loyalty.” She tucked her arm beneath his and let her head drift lazily onto his shoulder. “We used to sit out here when I was a little girl. Just like this. In the night. All snuggled up.” She pulled away from him abruptly. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”

“When it happens suddenly like that,” Kinley told her, “it always takes some time to adjust.”

Serena nodded. She seemed more composed than she’d been earlier in the day.

“When are you going back?” she asked casually.

“The day after tomorrow.”

“You can stay here until then,” Serena told him. “And I’ll go to my mother’s place.”

“No, that’s all right. Like I said, I have a room at the hotel.”

“No, stay here,” Serena insisted. “Daddy would have wanted you to.”

He decided to do as she asked, and later that night he found himself alone in Ray’s living room, his eyes watching the casket as it rested in its deep nest of swirling flowers. For a long time, his mind struck him as uncharacteristically blank, as if a kind of numbness had overtaken it, blocking out whatever pain he might otherwise have felt.

He stood up, walked out onto the porch and took in the cool night air. The night was closest to him, and he’d always felt more at home in dark places, the lightless horse stall in which Colin Bright had stacked the bodies of the murdered Comstocks, the small cramped smokehouse, where Mildred Haskell had performed her last experiment on little Billy Flynn, the damp cavern where her husband Edgar had later deposited those tiny, torn remains. Kinley had been in all those places and felt more at ease in them than any of the bright fields he’d flown over in his travels, or the green pastures he’d wandered in, his eyes roaming the grasses in search of that particular place where the earth had been turned up, the body finally uncovered and pulled up from its hidden vault. There was even something in the phrase “brought to light” that had always made him feel ill at ease, as if it were destined finally to drive back the vampire darkness in which he breathed far more comfortably.