Natchez Burning (79 page)

Katy whipped her face forward.

“What the hell’s wrong with you this week?” He bent to dry his hairy legs. “You walk around like you’re in a fog, which ain’t far from normal, but this week it’s like a damned Alzheimer’s ward. You don’t even
wash
yourself. You stink. Why don’t you take a bath?”

How could she answer that? If she told the truth, Randall or her father would have her committed again—or worse. Neither man had any qualms about killing, and as depressed as Katy was, she didn’t want to die yet. She glanced over at the
Examiner
. The side that lay facedown displayed two portraits of Henry Sexton. One showed the reporter as a college intern, questioning an elderly black preacher in Gilbert, Louisiana. The other showed paramedics loading Sexton into an ambulance in front of the
Concordia Beacon,
which had been gutted by fire last night.

Ever since Henry visited this house last week, sparks had been firing through the blank spaces in Katy’s brain. Images flashed out of nowhere, like the visions she’d had after alcoholic blackouts, pictures she wasn’t sure had ever been real. Henry had asked her about a colored boy, one he’d claimed she once loved.
Pooky Wilson.
The name had scarcely moved her when he’d first said it, like a stone dropped into a deep lake that sank endlessly into darkness. But later that night, as she drifted into uneasy sleep, that stone had finally hit bottom. And when it hit, it jarred something loose.

Over the next few days, painful memories began bubbling to the surface, and each bubble contained its own discrete nightmare. In one of the first, she saw herself as a young girl, peering into her mother’s bathroom. Her father sat on the edge of the bathtub, talking to his wife. All Katy could see was her father’s broad back. He had never sat in there like that—in fact, Brody Royal hardly spoke to his wife at all. But on
that
day, he’d spoken steadily, and in such a low, cruel voice that Katy had quickly retreated. An hour later, her father called an ambulance and told them his drunken wife had drowned in the bathtub. Ever since remembering this, Katy been unable to get into the bathtub.

“You want to kill me,” she said to her husband, voicing her terror for the first time. “Don’t you?”

Randall stopped drying himself and looked at her mirror, his actor’s mask almost making him appear human. But he must have sensed her state of mind, because suddenly his mask fell away. Forty years of unalloyed hatred blazed out of his eyes like deadly radiation.

“Go on,” she goaded, knowing she would pay for her defiance. “Admit it. You want to kill me.”

“I ought to,” he said. “I’ve been chained to your pathetic ass for forty years, and you’ve been trying to kill yourself the whole time. You nearly drank yourself to death in the seventies. You all but blew your heart out with coke in the eighties, and you’ve been eating tranqs and happy pills ever since. You were hardly alive that whole time. What was the point?”

“You tell me,” Katy said quietly. “Why didn’t you just put me out of my misery?”
Like Daddy did Mama,
she thought.

Randall shook his head with exasperation, but he didn’t answer.

“I know you’ve wanted to,” Katy went on, trying to push him to—to what? “I can see it in your eyes. Right now. You’d like to choke the life out of me, watch my face turn blue. You almost did it a couple of times. That night at Gulf Shores. And the time in Las Vegas, after the dog show.”

Randall’s face darkened. “Don’t even mention your little rat dogs. Brody should have left you in the nuthouse over in Texas.”

She shuddered, a physical echo of her year locked inside the Borgen Institute.

“Tell me, Randall,” she said in a voice she barely recognized. “Please. Why
am
I still here?”

He stepped closer, staring down like a hunter about to finish a wounded animal. Her brain told her to run, but she remained on her stool. If he killed her … what did it matter?

“You really want to know?” he asked, and she shivered at the coldness in his voice. “I’ll tell you. You know that river land you own?”

“What about it?”

Randall smiled. “Eleven miles of pristine riverfront farmland. Eleven
miles
. That came down to you from your mother’s family, and it’s legally encumbered so that it can never leave her blood family. Well … since you can’t have kids, that means once you die, it goes to your cousin up in Savannah.”

Katy shook her head, lost in confusion. “I don’t understand. If you can’t get that land, or sell it, what good is it to you?”

Her husband laughed with such harshness that she felt sick. “It ain’t me, honey. It’s your daddy. Brody might never be able to get
hold
of that land, but as long as you’re alive, he can lease it to farmers, cut timber off it, and suck the oil out from under it. And that’s what he’s been doing since the day I married you.” Randall tapped the side of his head and laughed. “You get it now? You’re worth more to him alive than you are dead. It’s really that simple. Jesus. I thought for sure you’d have figured that out by now. I guess your brain is more scrambled than I thought.”

He turned to his closet and pulled a shirt over his still-wet back. “So here I stand, your babysitter. Highest paid babysitter in the world, probably. But it still ain’t enough.”

She sat in stunned silence, staring at her shattered reflection, finally understanding the riddle of her existence. In her mind, she watched a blurry movie of herself signing various papers in an alcoholic haze.

“I’ve got a busy day,” Randall said. “Brody’s in New Orleans, but he’ll be back this afternoon. Go play with your dogs, or whatever you’re going to do. But do me one favor, please. Take a fucking bath.”

He walked out of the room.

Katy sat motionless until she heard the carport door slam. Then she picked up the newspaper, walked to the bathtub, and turned the hot tap wide open. Opening a drawer beside her husband’s lavatory, she took out a pair of sharp scissors, which she laid in the edge of the tub.
You get it now?
Randall had said, as though talking to a moron.
You’re worth more to him alive than you are dead.
Katy’s leg muscles quivered as though barely able to support her weight. How was that possible, since she felt as though she might float away from the earth’s surface at any moment? While she waited for the tub to fill, she looked down at the newspaper and read the name beneath the top story.

Caitlin Masters
.

DESPITE BREAKING THE
speed limit most of the way to Mercy Hospital, I find Caitlin already talking to Drew Elliott in the north wing. She hardly glances over as I approach, since she’s giving her full attention to Drew, who looks up and waves at me but keeps talking. At forty-two, Drew remains the television ideal of a doctor: handsome, athletic, super-competent. But like all mortals, he’s had his share of personal troubles, and I’ve done my part to help him out of them.

“We probably should have flown him to Baton Rouge,” Drew says, nodding down the hall to where a parish deputy sits glumly on guard in a high school desk. “But between the orthopedist, the surgeon, and myself, we managed to patch Henry back together. Reduced the fractures, took care of the abdomen. Besides, he didn’t want to leave. He insisted that we keep him in this hospital. Something to do with Albert Norris being treated here, apparently.”

A single-story structure on Highway 15, Mercy Hospital serves the citizens of three surrounding parishes, but it’s no level-one trauma center.

“I appreciate you driving back over to check on him,” I say. “Has Henry gotten clearheaded enough to say anything more about his attackers?”

Drew nods. “Last night he dreamed that one of his assailants was the son of a guy he played church softball with about ten years ago. Casey Whelan was the kid’s name. I don’t know how seriously Sheriff Dennis will take that, but Henry sounded sure.”

“The FBI will take it seriously. They’re in town now.” I cut my eyes at Caitlin. “Special Agent Kaiser is supervising an FBI team down at the Jericho Hole. My guess is they’re planning to dive on the car Kirk Boisseau found yesterday.”

“Has Henry really been asking for me this morning?” Caitlin asks Drew.

“He’s spoken both your names, but I think it’s you he really wants to see.”

“I’d better get in there then. How lucid is he?”

“In and out. He looks bad, but I’m confident his head injury’s not life-threatening.”

“So he’s out of danger?” I ask.

“I’m not sure that’s a medical question.” Drew nods down the hall at the armed deputy.

I shake Drew’s hand. After he gives Caitlin a farewell hug and departs, she and I walk toward the deputy’s desk. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” I ask her.

“I’m fine.”

Sure you are.

We identify ourselves to the deputy, but he asks to see our driver’s licenses anyway, which gives me some measure of confidence in Sheriff Dennis’s precautions.

As soon as we pass through the door, I see a woman who must be Henry’s girlfriend sitting near the foot of his hospital bed in one of those ugly chairs that fold out into a torturous bed.
She’s a nurse,
I remember now.
Sherry something
. Sherry wears pink scrubs and looks to be a few years older than Henry. Dark bags hang beneath her bloodshot eyes. She doesn’t get up when she sees us, nor does she offer any welcome.

As I pass the corner of Henry’s bathroom, I see him at last, and the sight takes my breath away. His neck and face are a swollen collection of contusions, ecchymosis, and hematomas, with only the occasional patch of undamaged flesh showing. A plaster cast encases his left forearm, and his right wrist is purplish-black. Henry’s eyes are only half open, yet he acknowledges our arrival by slightly lifting his right hand from the coverlet.

“Sherry?” I venture.

The woman on the chair nods as though against her will.

“Is it all right if we come in?”

“Come on. He been waiting for you long enough.”

Her eyes stay mostly on Caitlin, giving an examination worthy of a romantic rival. This might be irrational, but I see it all the time during initial meetings between women.

When I’m far enough into the room, I see a catheter bag and another bag for fluids strapped to Henry’s bed. There’s probably a drain tube sewn into the stab wound in his belly. A wave of nausea goes through me.

“How’s he feeling?” I ask.

Sherry rolls her eyes at the absurdity of this question. “How do you think? You know, I knew this would happen. Sooner or later, it had to, with all those stories he was writing.”

Caitlin starts to speak, then wisely thinks better of it.

“I’ve tried to get him to tone them down,” Sherry goes on. “The articles. Things have changed around here, but not that much. Most people have moved on, and the races get along pretty good. But some folks can’t let go of the past. And that’s who put him in here.”

“I’m afraid you’re right.” I move closer to Henry and touch his foot under the covers. “Hey, buddy. It’s Penn. Can you hear me?”

Henry’s eyes blink open and stare at the ceiling, then track slowly over to me. When he tries to speak, what emerges is a sort of guttural ululation, and I wonder if pain meds are contributing to his difficulty.

“What have they got him on, Sherry?”

“Zosyn for infection. Dilaudid for the pain.”

“
Wiss I could nalk benner,
” Henry groans suddenly.
“Lossa ell you. But … I not gon be able work … on stery foh while
.
”
A strained laugh comes through his clenched teeth.

“Is his jaw wired shut?” I whisper to Sherry.

“No. But he bit his tongue during the beating, and some teeth are smashed. They had to stitch the tongue up.”

“Christ.”

Henry moves his eyes until they settle on Caitlin, who has moved up beside me.
“You gon haf pick up where I lef off
.
”

This statement probably sent a blast of endorphins through Caitlin’s body, but she hides her excitement well. Demurring with a shake of her head, she says, “Henry, I’m sure you’ll be able to dictate stories from here. I’ll put one of my reporters at your disposal.”

He closes his eyes, squeezing tears from their inside corners.

“Has anybody read you this morning’s
Examiner
?” I ask. “Caitlin did a big story on you. You’re a hero, man. The online edition has racked up praise from all over the world. You’ve got comments from India to South Africa.”

Sherry steps up to the bed and wipes Henry’s tears with a tissue.

“This is still your story,” Caitlin says firmly.

His lips move again, but his jaw barely moves.
“No. Uppa you now. But thass not why I call you here. I got … sumpin for you.”
He motions weakly to Sherry with his right hand.
“Give it her
.
”

“Are you sure?” Sherry asks, her resentment clear.

Henry nods with obvious difficulty.

Reaching into the pocket of her scrub pants, Sherry produces two small keys, which she hands to Caitlin. Caitlin looks at Henry and raises her eyebrows.

“
They shole my case files,
” he says.
“Or bun ’em. Everysing. ’Ose my keys … safe apposit box … woy—urr-ROY-al Cotton Bank.”

Excitement is crackling off Caitlin like static electricity.
These
are the keys Henry mentioned to Lou Ann Whittington while he lay bleeding on the pavement. “What’s in the safe-deposit boxes?” Caitlin asks.

“
Copies
,” Henry croaks. “
Sranscrip. FBI files … disk. Insern did mos of ih foh me … lass summuh. Took mohhr … moh suff yes’day.
”

“My God,” Caitlin breathes. “Henry, are you saying I can use your files?”

The reporter nods again, his forehead covered in sweat. He probably couldn’t verbalize the trauma of giving away the fruits of a decade’s work, even if he wanted to. “
You haff oo,
” he says at length.

Sherry leans over and wipes his purple skin with a washcloth.

“
Be cah-ful,
” Henry warns.
“Nah lige me. Don bee supid lige me.”