The Covenant (14 page)

He was thinking what I was thinking. Reece had drowned herself because she couldn't stand the abuse any longer. “We can never tell her mother,” he said.

“Jenny has a right to know.”

“To know what?”

“That her husband was abusing her daughter, that she killed herself, and that five years later he killed himself. Out of grief, or guilt, or something.”

“You don't know that. And if you told Jenny, it would kill her.”

“What about the truth, preacher?”

“Jenny doesn't know, so it's not a lie to keep this secret. Far worse to reveal it. As Jesus said in one of his most misunderstood passages, let the dead bury their dead.”

“Don't talk to me about the dead,” I barked, then immediately regretted it.

But he was too preoccupied to notice. “I just can't believe Sam did this to his own daughter. I knew Sam. He loved Reece and grieved for her every day of his life. There must be another explanation.”

He actually believed that, but I knew better. I knew you could never really know anybody, not your best friend, not your parents, not even the person who shared your bed every night. When Dennis Rader was sitting in the church office composing letters on the church computer, did the congregation know their deacon was describing for the edification of newspaper editors the way he bound, tortured and killed his victims? Did John Wayne Gacy's wife really know the man who stacked boys under her living room floor?

Sometimes a person with everything to live for bites the barrel of a gun because the pain they've bottled up inside hurts more than the bullet they eat. The grieving widower doesn't confess how, when the doors were closed and the lights were low, he mind-fucked his wife until she washed down a handful of barbs with a bottle of Chardonnay. No, he'll be properly mystified for the benefit of onlookers, just like everybody else, and when the funeral service is over and everybody has gone back to their beautiful lives, he'll quietly burn her suicide note in the fireplace.

I'd seen brother stab brother in front of their own mother. I'd seen children left to rot in a cage by their grandparents, grandparents left to rot in a nursing home by their children. Sometimes there just aren't rational explanations for the horrors people commit. Sometimes people really are monsters, even the people we think we know best.

 

18

T
HIS NEXT MORNING I FOUND
my clothes freshly laundered and lying across the desk chair in front of the computer. It was like being back home. I dressed and checked Deacon's room, but he was already gone. I hadn't heard him leave the house and wondered if he slept. He had left my room around five that morning. We stayed up counting the money in the suitcase—$38,235. It was more cash than I had seen in one place at one time, and even Deacon, flush as his bank account was with Mrs. Ruth's largesse, seemed awed by those neat stacks of green arrayed across the bed.

On my way down to the kitchen, I looked into Jenny's bedroom. She was dressed but asleep, napping with her children tucked into the curves of her body. I poured myself a glass of milk, went to get the paper from the end of the driveway. The morning sun felt hot on my face. I sat by the pool and read the paper but there was nothing in it except the usual greed, corruption, rape and murder. After a while I noticed Jenny in the kitchen making breakfast. She waved at me through the window.

I decided to phone the guard shack to find out where they towed my car. The guard checked their log and said there hadn't been any tow-aways the previous night. Jenny brought me a piece of toast with fig jam and a cup of coffee and sat cross-legged in the chair next to me. “I see Deacon's gone already,” she said. “He's always working.”

I nodded without saying anything. She leaned over and lifted a plastic cover from the side of the pool to check the skimmer trap. “How long do you think it will take you to photograph Mrs. Ruth's house?”

“No idea.” I folded the paper and set it aside.

“Something's wrong.”

“Somebody stole my car last night.”

“Oh my God!” Jenny gasped.

“I think maybe it's time you introduced me to your favorite neighbor.”

*   *   *

Doris Dye opened her back door and greeted us with a cold, cockeyed stare, her purse dangling from her arm and her keys clutched in one arthritic claw. She was dressed for church in a coarse black dress that looked like she had made it herself, black block-heeled shoes and stark white hose too thin to hide the blue veins mapping her legs. It wasn't even Sunday and I thought maybe she was going to a funeral. She looked like the kind of woman whose social life primarily consisted of funerals.

I introduced myself by saying I was working for Deacon. “You remember Deacon?” Jenny added.

“Have you come to apologize?” the old lady asked. With her eyes pointing in two directions, I couldn't tell who she was talking to. “Because if you have, I don't have time to listen. I was just leaving.”

Jenny apologized for keeping her but I remained where I stood, blocking the path to the brown sedan parked in the detached carriage house. For her part, Doris tried to fill the doorway so I couldn't see into the kitchen behind her. “Last night,” I said. “I saw you at your front window. I believe you saw me.”

She allowed that she may have noticed when I ran off into the woods and left my car parked in the street with the headlights on and the car door open, and that she had, in fact, been about to call security to have it towed, but by the time she got her phone and returned to the window, somebody was already driving away. “It wasn't you,” she noted with a smile. “It was dark and my eyes ain't what they used to be, but I know a black man when I see one. I just assumed he was a friend of yours.” She meant that as an insult.

I thanked her for her time. She closed and locked her door. Maybe she had changed her mind about the funeral.

Back at Jenny's house, I called the police to report the theft. Officer Lorio arrived about an hour later. I hadn't seen him since the day of the wake. He looked like he had packed an extra ten pounds into his shirt, most of it muscle, plus an extra pound or two in the bags under his eyes. He seemed to think we had a fair chance of catching the car thief and suggested we head over to the Fayette County sheriff's office. “The gates are monitored by twenty-four-hour infrared video. We should be able to get an exact time when it was stolen, and hopefully a good picture, maybe match it to somebody using our new facial-recognition software.”

The cops in this county had more toys than the FBI.

*   *   *

Lorio and I sat in a small monitoring room down the hall from the first-class jail where I'd taken lodgings my last trip through Mayberry. We passed Sheriff Stegall in the hall but he pretended to be reading something important on the back of a box of crackers. Using the department's computer, Lorio was able to tap into the DVR files of the security company that handled Stirling Estates.

“You know they ruled Sam's death a suicide?” Lorio asked during a long stretch of no activity. We watched the tape at sixteen-times speed, slowing down any time a car appeared at the gate.

I told him how Stegall had informed me, that day in his office.

“Did you believe it?” he asked.

“Not at first.” After what I saw on the levee that April morning, I assumed the coroner was covering something up. Now I knew he'd killed himself. Maybe out of regret, maybe for reasons no one could understand. The only thing missing was how, and that question no longer kept me up nights. I didn't care.

“You believe it now?” Lorio asked, to which I shrugged. “But if what you saw is true…”

“What I saw doesn't matter. You know that.”

“I know the facts of the case,” he said in his best policeman's deadpan, “but I also knew Sam. I've known him since high school. I don't think he would kill himself, not anymore. He loved Reece, but he loved his other kids, too. He wouldn't leave them without a father.”

Deacon had said the same thing. These people thought Sam Loftin was a saint. Even after we found that money, Deacon couldn't bring himself to think Sam killed himself. But he was right about one thing—Sam Loftin may have been a monster, but he was a dead monster. Dragging him out of his grave wouldn't make anything right. All exposing him would accomplish was more pain, like an unexploded shell left over from a meaningless war, waiting in the ground for some child to step on it.

“Something must have happened to Sam. You said that yourself. I think maybe he had a stroke or a heart attack. The coroner found a deep contusion to the back of the head, but it wasn't enough to kill him. You saw the rocks on the levee. He says Sam may have slipped and struck his head.” I remembered the limestone boulders, rough and jagged, certainly capable of punching a hole in somebody's skull, but not very slippery unless wet. It hadn't rained in almost a week when Sam died. “So if he didn't kill himself, why rule it a suicide? He didn't leave a note.”

“Not all suicides leave notes,” I said. God knew I'd photographed enough of them. “Was he depressed?”

Lorio shrugged and paused the tape at a small white car passing through the gate. It wasn't my car. “Sam had his bad days, just like anybody else, but he was usually a pretty happy guy.”

“What about his finances?” Here I was pretending to be a cop again, asking cop questions as though there was any question about what happened. I don't know why I did it. Maybe I couldn't help myself.

“Business has been good for the last year. He worked practically all the time. He was working the day he died.”

The time stamp on the video read 8 a.m. My car never passed the gate during the night. “It must still be on the property,” Lorio said as he turned off the computer. The room went dark, but I could still see his round face in the lingering glow of the monitor. The bags under his eyes looked like deflated marshmallows.

“We should check Doris Dye's garage.”

“You check,” he said. “I like my job. I'd like to keep it.”

 

19

L
ORIO DROPPED ME OFF
at the end of Jenny's drive. I found everyone by the pool eating watermelon. Holly sat on the edge of the patio wall in a black bikini a little smaller than a pirate's eye patch, teaching the kids to spit watermelon seeds. Nathan swanned around, snapping photos of everybody with his camera and reminding us how expensive it was.

I brought Jenny and Deacon up to date about my car. The worst part was, I'd left my camera and computer on the front seat. “I doubt they'll still be there when they find my car,” I said. “If they find it. The camera was worth more than the car, anyway.”

Jenny scratched her head for a minute, then cut me a slice of watermelon. “I think Sam's old camera is up in the attic. I gave it to him when we were dating.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“It's a good camera.”

“Thanks all the same.” I'd had enough trouble out of secondhand cameras that once belonged to dead people.

Without batting an eye, Deacon said, “We'll buy you a new camera, then.”

As much as I needed to hang on to this job, I shook my head no. “The camera will go to the church when you're done, of course,” he added. “The thing is, I need those photos to send to the craftsmen I've hired to do the wood carvings. They're in Pennsylvania. So I can't wait until the police find your car.”

That seemed like a fair deal, one I could live with. “I know where we can pick up a good camera cheap.” I took a bite of watermelon, so cold and so sweet it made my teeth hurt. “I'll need a ride into Memphis.”

“I'll take you,” Nathan offered. Before I could say no, Jenny insisted on driving me herself.

*   *   *

We left Jenny's kids with Holly. Before he departed, Deacon gave me a signed blank check drawn on his church's checking account to buy the camera. All he asked for was a receipt. I'd never met people so oblivious with their money before.

As we drove up Highway 70 toward the city, Jenny questioned me about my adventures beneath the House of Usher. I played the whole affair as a minor inconvenience, with lots of comical French shrugging. I left out the part about the creature chasing the girl because I didn't want to give her the wrong impression. Jenny didn't believe I wasn't scared stiff, especially when I found myself locked in the crypt.

“I would have been terrified.”

I had a feeling I already knew where this conversation was going, even before she asked, “Do you remember how we met?”

I said that I did. “I saw you for like ten minutes at that bar and then you just disappeared. Next thing I know you're all over the news for a couple of days, then nothing. But I always knew I'd see you again.”

“Well, here I am,” I said.

“Here you are.” She pulled up in front Deiter's shop and parked. I waited for her to unlock the doors, but she just sat there, thin fingers wrapped around the steering wheel, her eyes staring at something I couldn't see. She was working herself up to ask the question she'd been waiting three months to ask.

For all her outward poise, it was clear she was barely holding herself together. It was still too soon for her to hear what I had to say, but she was reaching out to me, as if I could bring her some final message from her dead husband. I didn't have a final message. I didn't have anything that could help her, and I knew that would tear her apart.

“Officer Lorio told you what I saw.”

She nodded, her eyes welling up with tears. She had the same big brown eyes as her daughter Cassie, only older, softened by smile lines in the corners. She snatched a Kleenex from a box in the center console and pressed it to her face, still nodding, violently, her back heaving.

She wanted to be torn apart.