Locked Doors (13 page)

She sought out reason in his eyes and found it.
 
They were not wild or impassioned but black and serene.
 
And if they burned, it was a smoldering like embers.
 

Now only clutching her with one hand, he brushed his black hair from his eyes.
 

Karen felt gravity pining for her, a waterless undertow.
 

She upchucked on his windbreaker but he did not let go.

“Karen,” he said.
 
“Now do you believe?”
 

He released the belt of her robe, watched her fall.
 

She screamed for two seconds, then the rope silenced her.
 

Back and forth she swung, still fifty feet above the lawn, a pendulum for the lighthouse.

19

AT two in the morning the Impala streaks south on
Ocracoke
Island, a ribbon of land less than a half mile wide.
 
To the west the Pamlico Sound yawns out into darkness.
 
Oceanside the Atlantic shines like black blood under the jaundiced October moon.

In the trunk, Elizabeth Lancing sleeps and she does not dream.

Behind the wheel the smiling driver is tired and happy, the window down, his hair whipping across his pale face.
 
He inhales deeply, the tepid air redolent of kelp and saltwater and driftwood and the carcasses of fish on
tidesmoothed
sand.

At last he sees it beyond the dunes that now hide the sea—his hometown, a faint incandescence on the black horizon.
 

And he wonders,
Old Andrew, since I’ve shown you the way, will you come?

V I O L E T

20

THE last Wednesday of each month is unfailingly baked spaghetti night at Lighthouse Baptist Church.
 
It is tradition, a comforting inevitability for this Christian community.
 

The congregation slowly progressed from the kitchen into the fellowship hall much as it had done every Wednesday evening for the past twenty-two years.
 
Each churchgoer carried a paper plate laden with baked spaghetti, a yeast roll, a salad of wet lettuce and shredded carrots, and a Styrofoam cup of sweet tea.
 

They dined with their brothers and sisters in Christ at the circular foldaway tables, happily consuming the insipid meals, the fellowship hall resounding with myriad conversations and rampant children, while praise music flowed from speakers on the stage, an auditory warmth.
 
Through tall windows the dying sun funneled weaker and weaker, now only a suggestion of purple in the late October sky.
 

Violet King sat at a table with her parents, Ebert and Evelyn, and a friend of her parents named Charles.
 
Charles was thirty, single, and on fire for Jesus.
 
Violet disliked the way he looked at and spoke to her, as though he were privy to some secret she had not disclosed, as though he were something more than a shallow acquaintance.

Charles had been monopolizing the conversation for the last five minutes, narrating his attempt to witness to a “troubled black youth.”
 

But Violet wasn’t listening.
 
She just stared at the cube of baked spaghetti on her plate.

“…and I told him, ‘Jesus died for
you
, little
fella
.’”
 
Charles’s bottom lip had begun to quiver, his voice gone soft and earnest with emotion.
 
“And you know what he said to me?
 
It’ll break your heart, Ebert.
 
He said ‘How come God loves me?’
 
And I told him, I said… You with me, Violet?”

Violet looked up into those small lonely eyes across the table.

“Yes, I’m with you, Charles.”

“I told him, ‘God loves little black boys just as much as He loves little white boys.’”

A four-year-old boy ran over and stopped in front of Violet, a chocolate icing ring around his smiling little mouth.

“You’re pretty,” he said, then ran away shouting, “I did it, guys!
 
I did it!”

The young woman laughed.

“Where’s Max, Violet?” Charles asked.

“Same place he was when you asked me a week ago,” Violet responded but she did not say it bitterly.
 
“He’s coaching cross-country this fall.
 
They had another meet today.”
 

Is that all right with you
you
freaking weirdo?

“Just don’t want to see him backsliding on us.
 
You start skipping Wednesday nights, what’s next?”

“My son-in-law
ain’t
no backslider, Charles,” Ebert said.
 
“You know I wouldn’t tolerate that.
 
Ain’t
that right, baby?”

“Yes, Daddy.”
 

Violet smiled at her father, a big brawny man,
whitebearded
and baldheaded.
 
He’d
earned
that shiny red dome working his dairy farm.
 
Their table smelled faintly of manure.
 

As Violet sipped her tea she felt Charles eyeing her.
 
She often caught him staring, especially during Sunday sermons.
 
He was always chiding her about her “boy haircut,” said women were supposed to have long and flowing hair, encouraged Violet to let her blond locks grow out.
  

Her pager buzzed against her hip and she glanced down at her lavender skirt.
 

When she saw the number she stood up.

“Mom, if Max comes, tell him I’ll be right back.”

“Everything all right, Vi?”
 

Evelyn stared up at Violet through
cloudyblue
eyes that picked up the gray in her hair.
 

How can you sit here with this whacko?
 
“Yes ma’am.”

Violet walked out of the fellowship hall into the corridor of classrooms.
 
At the end of the hallway, the double doors had been thrown open and she could see into the new sanctuary where the music director was furiously arranging chairs in the choir loft in preparation of the practice that would immediately follow the fellowship dinner.
 
She didn’t feel up to singing tonight.
 
She wanted to go home, crawl into bed with a pint of Cherry Garcia, and watch television, preferably a Ken Burns documentary on PBS.

With the commotion of the feasting congregation now a whisper, Violet stepped into a dark classroom and closed the door behind her.
 

The pager vibrated again.
 

She rummaged her purse for the cell phone.

21

VIOLET turned around in the cul-de-sac and parked her Jeep Cherokee on the curb.
 
The dashboard clock read 7:15.
 
There was no tinge of luminosity in the sky excepting the blurry pinpoints of starlight that obscured when you looked straight at them.
 
Turning off the engine, she stared at the chaos in the distance, filtering out the dazzle of flashing lights so she could imagine this hysterical street as it must’ve seemed that night.
 

Tranquil.
 

Ordinary.
 

Safe.
   

She absorbed her surroundings—the young pine forest across the street from the lakefront houses, the cul-de-sacs at each end, the road that dead-ended into Shortleaf Drive, the number of houses between cul-de-sacs (eleven) and that serene black lake.

Violet did not speculate or theorize.
 
With the investigation only in its infancy it wasn’t useful to do so.
 
All she knew was that a family of four had been slain in that brick ranch forty yards down the street.
 
Coupled with the other murders—the clerk knifed to death in a Rocky Mount Wal-Mart and the woman hanged from the
Bodie
Island Lighthouse—this had been one of the bloodiest weeks in North Carolina since the Civil War.
    

As she opened the door and stepped out into the autumn evening she couldn’t help thinking,
Most investigators never encounter anything like this
.
 
And then:
You are not equipped to handle it
.
 

Her legs gave out and she leaned against the Jeep.
 

Closing her eyes, she took a long calming breath, whispered a prayer, and started walking toward the flashing blue lights.

The perimeter of the
Worthingtons
’ half-acre lot had already been roped off with crime scene tape.
 
Violet counted three police cruisers, an ambulance, a van, and two unmarked cars parked along the curb across the street.
 

A uniformed patrolman stood at the foot of the driveway, guarding the perimeter.

“Hi, Reuben,” she said.

“Viking?
 
You
were on-call for this one?”

“Yep.”

“Lucky you.
 
That house next door is where we had the kidnapping on Monday.
 
These are the neighbors we could never get to answer the door or the phone.”

“You’re kidding me.
 
You were first car?”

“No, Bruce was.
 
He’s over talking to Barry.”

Violet stepped under the tape and walked down the driveway toward her sergeant, a wide massive man with the girth of an oak tree and a voice as deep as her daddy’s.
 
He was talking to a patrolman when she walked up between them.

“Hey, guys.”
 

Her sergeant looked down at her and shook his head.

“You sure caught it this time, Viking,” he said as though it were her fault.
 
“I’m
gonna
go talk with Chip and the boys.
 
Bruce can tell you what you got.”

“You been in yet, Barry?” she asked.

“No.
 
We just got the search warrant.
 
Bobby’s executing it right now.”

“CSI ready to start videotaping?”

“I think so.”

“Would you ask them to hold off a sec?
 
After I talk with Bruce, I’d like to do a quick walkthrough.”
 

Sgt. Mullins gazed down at her for a moment.
 
He rarely smiled.
 
Standing under his undecipherable scowl always made her feel eight years old again.
 
She knew exactly what he was thinking because she’d thought it too: she was incapable of handling this.