Redemption (2 page)

He swatted at an occasional fly as he took to the narrow stairs in the middle of the house, careful not to touch the worn banister rails. By the time he reached the top of the stairs, he was drenched in sweat.
It hit a hundred and five Saturday,
he thought.
Why didn’t Darcy open a window? Unless someone closed them all afterwards. Or she closed them. Why the hell would Darcy do that unless ... she planned to die?

He felt a chill despite the heat and followed the stench into a tiny kitchen, a Formica table and two chairs commanding most of the floor space. He found a dozen frozen entrees and a frozen-solid twelve pack of Pepsi in the freezer, fresh milk, salad fixings, and an uneaten casserole in the fridge.
Darcy was expecting company
, he thought.
No one makes a casserole for just one person. But do you make a casserole for a gentleman caller? A friend, maybe? Her crazy mama? Her mama’s brains are a runny, uncooked casserole already.

He checked out the tidy sitting room. A single couch with a pink throw blanket folded neatly on top. A pockmarked coffee table. A single tall lamp. A little Philco black-and-white TV on a stand.
Looks like my place
, Overton thought,
only bigger and cleaner
.

He passed a bookcase in the hall crammed with romances, each thumbed to death, and entered the bathroom. A piece of paper taped to the mirror over the sink announced, simply, “GOODBYE.”
Good-bye, as if there’s something good about a suicide. Ain’t nothing good about a dead body, no matter the cause.
He rubbed his eyes, counted a few more crow’s feet around his eyes, and pulled on the mirror. Several marbles fell out of the medicine cabinet and rattled round and round in the sink before resting at the stopper. Overton smiled. “You got me, Darcy.” He shook his head at the rows of pill bottles, most nearly empty, that filled the cabinet from top to bottom. He closed the cabinet. “To each his own poison,” he said, and he felt the towel on the towel bar.
Still a little damp. She had time to take a shower, so the time of death may be later than six. But why take a shower and then kill yourself?
He shook his head.
Guess she had to be clean for her heavy date with God.

He left the bathroom and faced a door, took a deep breath, and opened it. More flies buzzed past him announcing the acrid smell of death. Darcy lay snuggled up in a twin bed, an empty pill bottle and an empty glass next to a telephone on a nightstand.

“
Hello, Darcy,” he said.

He checked the closet and found a few uniforms, “Darcy Lynn” stitched in blue on the pockets, and several dozen white shoes, the comfortable kind with thick soles. A red-checked blouse lay draped over the room’s only chair, a pair of faded blue jeans neatly folded below.
Maybe Darcy had a honest-to-God real date get cancelled and—

“
You thinkin’ suicide, Sheriff?”

Overton jumped. “Ramsey, you’re supposed to be with Mrs. Stump on the porch!”

Ramsey held a handkerchief tightly to his face. “Mrs. Stump went home.”

To call everyone in town,
Overton thought
. Least Calhoun will be spared the sight of her today.
“Well, don’t touch anything, okay?”

Ramsey nodded. “I ain’t touchin’ nothin’.”

“
And it only looks like suicide right now.”
So much like suicide that it seems rigged somehow. Note. Empty bottles. But what’s in the fridge is a mystery.
“But we have to be sure. It might could be, and it might not could be.”

“
You mean it might be somethin’ more?”

Overton growled. “That ain’t our job yet, right?” Ramsey nodded. “So go back to the station and call the forensic lab in Calhoun.”

Overton heard hurried footsteps coming up the stairs.

“
They finally done killed her, didn’t they?
The bastards!
”

Overton closed his eyes.
Annie Mitchem, and at a time like this.
“Ramsey, keep Darcy’s mama from coming up here, okay?”

Ramsey froze. “Come on, Sheriff, you know we don’t get along.”

Annie had been claiming for years that she had been receiving strange phone calls even though her phone had been cut off in 1984.

“
Just keep her out!”

But it was too late. Annie Mitchem, Snow’s resident crazy who claimed clairvoyant power from passing UFO’s, pushed past Ramsey and entered the bedroom, her face a collage of emotions. Overton blocked her view of the bed. “Ms. Mitchem, I’m sorry, but it looks like suicide.”

Annie pushed Overton aside and threw back the covers, releasing a few more flies. “Suicide my ass! Why’s she got her dang uniform on?”

But she—or someone—took a shower.
Overton took the edge of the covers from Annie’s trembling hands and smoothed it over Darcy’s shoulders. “I don’t know, Ms. Mitchem, but I’m real sorry for your loss. And we have to leave the scene intact for forensics, so if you don’t mind—”

“
And why ain’t the window open? She’d have cooked in here! Girl couldn’t sleep, even in winter, without a window open.”

Overton walked Annie to the doorway. “Maybe she didn’t want folks to find her for a while. Maybe she—”

Annie spun away from Overton and ran to the nightstand, ripping open the drawer. “It’s not here,” she said in a small voice. “It’s not ... here.”

“
What isn’t?” Overton asked.

Annie clutched her chest. “I gotta go.”

Overton tried to grab Annie’s arm. “What’s missing, Ms. Mitchem?”

“
I gotta go!” she sobbed, and she pushed past Ramsey down the hall and the stairs in a flash.

“
Shouldn’t we hold her for questionin’, Sheriff? She ain’t all that broken up, right? I mean, Darcy’s her only child, and she did say someone killed Darcy, right?”

“
We’ll catch up to her later.”

“
And how’d she find out so soon?”

Overton shrugged. “Maybe she got a phone call from space.”

“
But Sheriff—”

“
Get back to the station and call Calhoun, okay? And don’t talk to anyone, not even Lester, okay?”

“
Okay.”

After Ramsey left, Overton stood over Darcy, her flaming red hair staining the pillow like blood.
She looks so peaceful,
he thought. “Your pain may be over, Miss Darcy, but mine’s just beginning.”

2

The bastards!

Crazy Annie ran, walked, and stumbled around Snow while the heat and humidity reduced her to one hundred pounds of sweat. She stopped dead still in front of the Sellers Home Place at 15 Poplar Street, raising a fist and spitting on the stone and wrought-iron fence. “You’ll get yours, you bastard! Least your daddy had the good sense to die and go to hell!”

She weaved around the yellow lines on State Route 115. “Just followin’ the yellow zipper road!” she cackled, staring hard at the fresh carcass of an opossum on the shoulder. “Did you see it comin’, Mr. ‘Possum? Or did you run to the light? I always run to the light. There’s safety in the light.”

She dropped and sat in the middle of the road, the sun high overhead.

They didn’t believe me when I saw the lights that night, didn’t believe me when that phone kept ringin’ and ringin’ in my house for years and years. “It’s all in your head, Ms. Mitchem,” he says. I mean, where else would it be but in my head? That fat deputy couldn’t find his ass with a telescope, not even the Hubbell. “You don’t have a phone, Ms. Mitchem,” he says. Boy has a plumber’s butt crack the size of the Grand Canyon. Probably hides his brain down there.

“
Screw him!” she shouted to the wind. “Screw ‘em all!”

She looked directly at the sun.

Heard the ringin’ again today, heard it loud and clear as a bell. Heard a voice tellin’ me to go see Darcy, tellin’ me Darcy had a present for me, tellin’ me Darcy had somethin’ important to tell me. Just like on that night, dear Jesus, that night! Only she couldn’t tell me what happened cuz of Jimmy Lee.

She stood, swaying slightly.

And now Darcy’s dead, oh my lands! My baby’s dead!

She looked around at the fields of browning corn.

Hell has come to Snow to sit for a spell. I know that’s where I’ll end up, that thing I done. Even though I did it out of love, I deserve to burn forever.

She looked in the direction of Snow. “God damn you all to hell, you
bastards!
”

A flash of pink coming through the waves of heat rising off the road caught her eye. She squinted. “Who in the world, and in a pink Cadillac?”

The pink blur stopped a thousand feet away, its engine roaring.

“
Is that? No, it couldn’t be!” She smiled. “Well, it’s about damn time you came home!”

Crazy Annie ran down the yellow zipper road as the pink blur squealed tires and picked up speed.

3

One down, six to go ...

Crazy Annie, just a-stumblin’ and gigglin’ at the skies. She won’t know what hit her. She won’t feel a thing. Press accelerator, squeal tires, center the Cadillac symbol on her chest.

Annie stops, turns, squints—and now she’s smilin’? This bus ain’t stoppin’, lady. Now I know you’re crazier than crazy.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Watch the speedometer lean past eighty-five. Line her up. Easy to aim with a Caddy. And Annie’s still smilin’, stretchin’ out her arms, laughin’.

Contact. The body floats through the air, disappearin’ for a moment, then falls through the rearview mirror.

Take foot off the gas pedal. Pull onto shoulder. Get out.

Daa-em, what a mess. “Humpty-Dumpty” got nothin’ on this little scene.

Time to make a little business transaction. Good thing Annie’s got one good hand left. Just sign … right ... there.

Jump in the car. Turn up the music. Laugh.

“
Some people just shouldn’t be let out the house, huh?”

Two down, five to go ...

4

Overton sat on the porch swing at Darcy’s waiting for Madison Powell of the Central Forensic Lab in Calhoun.

I’m up the creek waiting on a geek,
he thought wearily.

Ramsey had done a poor job of hanging police tape in front of the door, the tape snaking and flapping in the stale wind. The temperature had sneaked past 100 again, Lester had yet to fix the cruiser’s air-conditioning, and it was only 10 A.M. Add to this a gathering crowd of people and one very persistent reporter, Snow’s only member of the press who ran the
Snow Beacon
, and Overton realized he was having the second worst day in his life.

He rarely thought about the first, sixteen years prior when he was a deputy, though his dreams wouldn’t release the image of that boy, posed on that statue of rearing horse and heroic rider, his arms draped over the bronzed shoulders of Confederate hero Nathaniel Baker Snow, the poor boy’s back mutilated with that word.

“
So it’s a suicide, right?” Autumn Harper asked for the fifth time.

Where is Ramsey with that lemonade?
Overton thought. “Listen, Miss Harper, I’ve already told you. I can’t say a thing at this time, okay?” He looked up at Autumn, all five freckled feet of her, one of the few graduates of Pine County High School to return to Snow after college. “And you can quote me on that.”

“
But Mrs. Stump
said
—”

“
Mrs. Stump never went in the house, Miss Harper. All she got was one whiff and she was gone. Besides, if it
is
a suicide, you ain’t gonna run it in the paper that way, are you? Ain’t that your policy?”

Autumn shrugged. “Everybody’s gonna know anyway, right?”