Summer of the Dead (36 page)

“Get some rest, willya?”

She eyed him. “You first.”

*   *   *

By late afternoon a line of lumpy clouds the color of coal dust had barged into the sky over Acker's Gap. Within minutes the rain started up, a heavy, drubbing rain that fell on the dry-packed roads and heat-baked sidewalks with a frantic sizzle, releasing a thick, sour-smelling steam that instantly fogged windows and made the backs of people's necks feel clammy and unpleasant. The rain brought no relief from the heat. It made for a different kind of heat; that was all.

Bell picked up Jason Brinkerman. They drove through the rain toward the Crabtree house. In the dusk of a wet day, the beleaguered old place looked just as bad as it had in full sunlight. Even more sinister, if that was possible. The crooked trees seemed to be crumpling from the weight of their waterlogged foliage. Rain slid off the leaves and the trunks like ointment being hosed off the skin of a prehistoric animal. Bell parked in the driveway behind Lindy's car and turned to Jason.

“We'll just go in for a minute,” she said. “Lindy wants a few things from the bedroom.” She squinted at the front windshield; it was streaked and grayed by the steady headlong rain. “Sorry I don't have an umbrella. Hot as it's been lately, I clean forgot that such a thing as rain even existed.”

Jason nodded. He had said very little on the drive over, grunting or nodding in response to Bell's sporadic attempts at conversation. He'd asked her for an update on Lindy's condition and Bell wondered:
Is he asking because he cares about her—or because he fears she might have recovered enough to identify him as her attacker?

Bell opened the front door of the house. The air inside was muggy and malodorous. She took a step forward, and the bloodstain on the pitted wood seemed to jump right up, a grim tattoo that was much larger than she had remembered. She watched Jason. He glanced at the stain. Quickly turned away. Did his expression indicate anguish or guilt or—as was sometimes the case—a bit of both? Perpetrators could sometimes wail louder than anybody else when in the midst of unmistakable evidence of what they'd done.

“Gather up some of Lindy's books, will you?” Bell said. “We'll take them to the hospital. I have to get something else. Back in a sec.”

Jason nodded. He moved amid the piles of books on the living room floor in a sort of daze, picking up one after another, then setting each book back on the stack without really looking at it. The rain was audible on the roof, a dismal irregular rhythm. It sounded as if it might break through the flimsy ceiling any second.

In the crowded bedroom, Bell spotted the dresser that Lindy had told her about. She kneeled down. Reached under. Felt around. The small tin box was exactly where the young woman had said it would be. Bell secured it and stood up. Before rejoining Jason, she opened the lid and scanned a few of the letters, feeling their fragility against her fingertips and marveling at the look of the handwriting, the fierce loops and quick slashes rendered in blue ink that had faded over the years to brown—just as the emotions, too, had surely faded, the way emotions do. Some of them, anyway.

The living room was unoccupied. Had Jason gone into the kitchen?

“Hey,” she called out, moving in that direction, “let's hit the road, okay? Want to get these things to Lindy as soon as possible.”

He wasn't in the kitchen, either. Bell was baffled. She hadn't heard the back door open. She looked around, her gaze taking in the gray sink jammed with soiled dishes and the one-step-from-the-rag-bag curtains and the spindly dinette whose surface was overwhelmed by books. She recalled the last time she'd stood in this kitchen—with Odell Crabtree staring at her—and she shivered.

The thump sounded like a dropped sack of laundry. It came from the basement. Bell was sure of it.
Definitely. The basement
. But why would Jason have gone down there? What was he trying to pull?

She felt a flicker of fear. Just a small, quick spike of panic. She pushed it back down again, refusing to let it get a foothold in her thoughts, but it had made its point. What if he jumped her? She didn't know this kid. Knew nothing about him—except that his brother was a drug addict who might have murdered two people, his father was a convicted felon, and he himself might very well have attacked Lindy Crabtree.

Why the hell am I here? What made me think I'd be able to shock Jason Brinkerman into telling me the truth? Jesus.
She didn't have a weapon. This house was a good mile and a half from any other human habitation. Tucked back behind thick woods. Screened off from the main road.
Why did I ever—?

Another thump. Louder this time.

“Jason?” she said.

No answer.

Could it be Odell Crabtree? Maybe he'd been released and had blundered his way back home. Legally, they were on shaky ground every minute they held the old man; soon they'd have to either charge him or release him, even though his detention was actually a matter of kindness, not jurisprudence. Maybe the sheriff had let him go.

No. Nick would've contacted me. Asked my advice.

But who else would be down there? If it was Jason, then why wasn't he answering her call?

She'd have to check out the basement. No choice. She put the tin box on the table, nudging aside a short stack of books to make a space for it. Then she reached for the battered old two-paneled door, so warped and twisted that she had to yank phenomenally hard on the metal knob to get it to budge.
Sonofabitch,
Bell thought, using all her strength to wrench at the thing, knowing her arm would be sore in the morning—
If I live that long,
she thought ruefully, teasing herself, or maybe not—and then she stepped into darkness.

 

Chapter Thirty-seven

“Jason?” Bell said. She repeated his name on every other tread. “Jason. You down there?”

Even with the door ajar at the top of the stairs, the basement was frustratingly dim. She fingered the wall for a light switch as she descended, but didn't find one. The cellars in a lot of these old country houses, Bell knew, weren't wired for electricity; the owners sometimes would rig up a light, but usually it was controlled by a string hanging from a bare bulb in the basement itself. Nothing so up-to-date as a wall switch.

“Jason?”

She reached the bottom.

The smell was horrifically foul. Her first instinct was to identify the constituent elements—feces, urine, mold, rancid food—but she stopped, wondering why the hell she would bother to do so. Naming the odors within the dank pervasive stink just made it worse. Better not to know. She felt herself growing dizzy from the rapid head-slaps of the smell.
Don't think about it. Don't think about what you're breathing in.

Her eyes adjusted partially to the darkness and she could make out the mounds ranged across the floor, mysterious lumps of different sizes. She could also discern what seemed to be a gigantic tree branch lying on its side, spanning the width of the room; myriad smaller branches forked off from the trunk, reaching in all directions like skinny twisted fingers. Peering closer, she saw that some of the black shapes on the floor were boulders, while others were square; they were piled-up boxes and tables.

“Jason?”

She took a step. Her foot skidded briefly on what felt like a thick scattering of gravel. Pushing her foot forward another inch or so, she realized that the cellar floor was coated with small rocks and dirt. The air on her skin felt cool, no more than fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The constant temperature of an underground space—a cavern or a coal mine.

“Mrs. Elkins! Look out—he's right behind—!”

The blow came at the same moment she heard Jason's warning, and Bell felt a ferociously sharp pain on the side of her head. She staggered. She'd been hit with a large rock. It knocked her sideways. Swaying and groping for something to grasp, she fought not to pass out. Her right ear felt as if it had been half-severed by the chopping blow. She turned around. She realized that her assailant was getting ready to try again; the breeze rushing past her cheek came from the air displaced by the rock as he raised it once more. Higher this time. She managed to sway to one side, forcing him to recalibrate, and in that quarter-second of reprieve, as the blood from her wound moved down the side of her neck, hot against her clammy skin, she felt a wild surge of strength from an unknown source, and then instantly its origin was clear to her: rage. Rage as pure as flame.
You fucking sonofabitch
.
You goddamned fucking sonofabitch
. The anger that defined her, that had been a part of her life for as far back as she could remember, hidden behind a polite daily façade of please-and-thank-yous, simmering beneath the pressed clothes and the law degree but always there, reviving itself over and over again in the darkness at each day's end, the ultimate renewable fuel source—flew through her body.

Tucking her chin, she head-butted him in the chest. She had to guess at his approximate whereabouts but rammed him anyway, and she knew she'd guessed right from the resistance she met and from the
Uhhhh
of his expelled breath. She'd knocked the wind out of him. He didn't drop the rock but he was disoriented for another precious second. She heard Jason yelling from a corner of the room—
“Watch out, Mrs. Elkins, he's about to—!”
—and she wished like hell that she had a light, any kind of light, to guide her fighting and to enable her to get a glimpse of the man's miserable fucking face, whoever he was, whatever he—

I do
.

The tiny flashlight on her key chain.

Shielding her face with an upraised arm, Bell sent her hand plunging into her pocket. She swung the small dot of illumination up, up, up—straight up at the large black rock clutched overhead by a man draped in a long garment, a man determined to crush her skull, and as the light shifted from the rock to his face she saw, to her shock and confusion, a nimbus of frizzy white hair and the twisted-up, livid, hate-filled features of Perry Crum. The postman.

*   *   *

She aimed the light directly in his eyes. That gave her a puncher's chance. He scowled, and in that impossibly short interval she dropped the key chain to free up her hands. She slid to the right and came at him sideways, low and hard, head-butting him again, using her windmilling arms to gouge at his face. His long coat wasn't a coat at all but some kind of poncho—a rain poncho, slick and thin and plastic—and there flashed across her mind a picture of Perry Crum making his rounds on rainy days, friendly and smiling despite the weather, pale blue poncho sprouting from his wrinkled neck.

He fought her off with the big rock, pummeling her, slamming it repeatedly against her arms and her hands. She ducked and bobbed, protecting her head. She managed to get a fist past the thicket of his blows and without a second's hesitation she slammed it into his nose, sharp and hard, and then she hooked her thumbs into his eyes, jabbing and pulling, and his screams bounced around the small cellar like something being tossed from corner to corner.

Suddenly he was on the ground. Flat on his back, flailing. He'd flung away the rock in order to grab at his eyes and his nose, still screaming, and Bell immediately tackled him. Knees grinding into his chest, she groped in the dark until she found a rock, one she could get her fist around, and then another rock that she could get her other fist around, and then she smashed them down on his face, one after the other, alternating her fists in a rhythmic assault. She could see very little in the blacked-out cellar but in her mind's eye she saw him clearly—yes, clear as day—only it wasn't Perry Crum anymore. The face she saw was Donnie Dolan, her father, the man who had ruined her sister's life and ruined her life, too, the bastard who destroyed them, destroyed any chance they had for happiness, for a normal life, even, and so she would erase him, she would grind his face into ugly pulp and then she would—

“Mrs. Elkins. You'll kill him. Please Please stop—”

She stopped. Panting, breathing so hard and so fast that her body rocked and heaved with every raspy inhalation and exhalation, her arms were frozen in mid-arc, the arms that had been descending systematically on the torn face like the urgent swipes of a scythe, back and forth, back and forth. Whose voice? Who had called to her, breaking the spell, restoring her to herself?

It was the kid. Jason Brinkerman.

Her knees slid off the man's chest. Didn't matter anymore. She'd knocked the fight clean out of her opponent. Crum's nose had been relocated to the wrong part of his face and the skin on his cheeks hung in bloody shreds; his whimpers sounded disgustingly weak.

“Mrs. Elkins,” Jason said. “I'm here. Over here.”

*   *   *

She stood up and staggered to the other end of the basement. She retrieved the key chain with its miniature flashlight and used it to find Jason. As she untied him, he told her how he'd gotten there. Perry Crum had been hiding in the kitchen; Crum must have scurried out of the living room when he heard them enter the house. “Put a hand over my mouth,” Jason said, rubbing his wrists, hoarse and shaky from the adrenaline spikes still pelting his body, “and dragged me down here. Said he'd kill us both if I tried to holler and warn you.”

She moved back to Crum. Stood over him as he writhed on the cellar floor, squealing and groaning. “Why?” she said. “Why, Perry?”

At first he ignored her, cupping his smashed nose in one hand, using the other to scrabble at the loose folds of his poncho. Then he coughed, sputtered, and blurted, “Only wanted the best. For the girl.” His words were blunted and fogged by snot and tears. “That's why I done it.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Lindy.” Crum turned his head, spit out a gob. “Shit—you broke my damned nose.”