The Covenant (28 page)

But my father hadn't played this song, her song, at her own funeral. It had escaped his memory as easily as it did mine.

*   *   *

While we waited outside for them to put the coffin in the hearse, Deacon took me aside and pulled me close, his fingers laced behind my back, his chin resting on top of my head. His hair was still damp from his exertions on stage, but he had recovered nicely enough from his tears. My eyes were still swollen, my nose dripping into the tissue I held to it. He kissed my hair and whispered, “Jackie, do you long for death?”

The way he said it almost sounded like an invitation. I pulled back, momentarily alarmed, all my original Jim Jones suspicions reawakened. One of the religious charlatan's most powerful tools was his ability to seduce women and make them his staunchest defenders. “Not particularly. Why do you ask?”

“‘
Peace in the Valley
' is about laying down your burdens and going to your reward. Are you tired of this life?”

“Are you offering me your Kool-Aid?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. He slid his sunglasses onto his nose and stepped out into the sun, away from me. I tried to apologize, but his thoughts were already elsewhere. He had already shaken my dust from his feet. I wondered if I had lost him, reminded myself that I had never had him.

Eugene approached, a smirk on his face below his still-swollen nose. Most of the bruising had faded to a dull yellow, like an old mustard stain around his eyes. I longed to crease his smug face with the knuckles of my right hand. “Is this the kind of church you're planning to build, preacher?” he asked.

Deacon folded a stick of gum into his mouth and balled up the foil wrapper before answering. “No, I plan to build a much louder one.”

“I've never heard anybody preach a sermon at a funeral.”

Deacon smacked his gum and smiled. “That's what Mrs. Ruth wanted. She says to me, preacher, I want you to preach the bastards a sermon. What about, Mrs. Ruth? I says. I don't want to hear any that resurrection shit, she says. I want some God-damn fire and brimstone. Preach them the story of Lot, she says. She picked it out in particular. Lot, all the way through, from the angels in the city to Lot's daughters fucking their drunk daddy in the cave. Let it be a lesson to them all, she says to me.” He laughed derisively and stuck his hands in his pockets, and I wondered if some of his words hadn't been meant for me.

Scowling, Eugene pulled a folded piece of paper from his jacket and handed it to Deacon. “Here's a little something to remember her by,” he said, then strolled away.

*   *   *

I rode with Deacon in his pickup. He listened to the country music radio station. The concrete highway under the wheels went
ku-chuk ku-chuk ku-chuk
in time with the music. The wind whistled through the side window, which I had lowered to let out the smoke from my cigarette.

Luther had originally planned to bury Ruth at Memorial Park in Memphis, but at Deacon's urging, he agreed to put her in the cemetery in the woods. We turned off the highway into the church construction area, drove over the gravel track past the half-empty camp of Deacon's saints and parked under the trees between two bulldozers.

We walked in single file across a meadow at the edge of the woods where the bulldozers and graders hadn't gone. The sun was really up now and the heat was like a breath of hell. Grasshoppers as big as your finger sailed out ahead of us as we pushed through the tall sunburned grass, the coffin held aloft on the shoulders of six strong men. Deacon led us to an old wooden bridge over the creek that ran out of the lake. It was as dry as the creek in the woods.

Deacon's workers had used cutting torches to remove the old rusted gate from the crypt and replaced it with a new one. They carried her inside. Luther stood at the entrance and read the funeral service like he was reading a menu, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, cuppa joe ninety-nine cents for seniors on Sundays. He closed the gate, locked it, dropped the key into his inside jacket pocket and patted it like a man whose ship had finally come in.

 

39

J
ENNY AND I WALKED HOME
through the woods well before dark, well before the children began to play their reindeer games. She opened a bottle of wine and we sat on the couch. There was nothing to watch on television. Eli sat on the floor in front of the fireplace and banged toys together. Cassie was upstairs reading a book.

Jenny crossed her legs into a lotus posture, her glass of wine resting on her knee. “Sam used to send Reece emails,” she said out of the blue.

“What kind of emails?”

“After she was gone, you know? He'd send her emails. He said he could almost pretend she was away at camp and too busy to respond. But he sent them anyway.”

“What did they say?”

“I don't know.”

“You never read them?”

She took a sip of wine and held it in her mouth for a while. “I couldn't. He loved her that much.”

Eli toddled over and showed her one of his toys, ran it up and down her leg making
brumm!
noises, and she smiled and said
Wow!
until he was satisfied that she was thoroughly entertained. I stared at the fireplace, waiting for a girl to appear. She never did, but Jenny followed my gaze and seemed to read my mind.

“One winter night—this was a few years after Reece died and I think I had just found out I was pregnant with Eli. Sam and I were sitting here reading. We had a fire going because it was the coldest night of the year. For some reason, we both looked up at the same time. A black butterfly suddenly appeared from the flames and clung to the fire screen, fluttering, and we looked at each other, like, to make sure we weren't crazy. I was like,
Am I seeing this?
Sam got up and opened the screen. The butterfly flew across and landed on this lampshade.” She indicated the lamp on the table beside her. “Sam said, look, it's Reece. She's come home.”

People are very good at lying to themselves. I was living proof of that.

“Reece always loved butterflies. And pigs. Sam took it outside and let it go, but it was so cold I doubt it survived.” She finished off her wine and stood up, took my empty glass. “I don't think it was real, anyway.”

While she was refilling our glasses in the kitchen, I asked, “Did Sam have a camera?”

“Sure. It's upstairs. Do you need to borrow it?”

“No. Is that the only one?”

“He had another one at the office that he used for his landscaping business.” She returned, handed me a full glass, folded her legs up like a fawn and settled on the couch. “I'll see if Bert can bring it by.”

*   *   *

Jenny went to bed. With the house mostly asleep, I took my glass of wine and sat outside by the pool. Bats dipped in and out of the light over the boat dock, feeding in the halo of bugs. I needed a quiet moment to cogitate, try to put everything together. What I knew wouldn't fill an empty wineglass. Somebody had killed Sam. That person had then cleaned up after themselves quite nicely, probably burning every diary and journal, deleting every photo and email that might have pointed to a motive in his murder. The only thing they missed was that suitcase in the attic.

I didn't like where this line of thought was taking me. My cigarette burned down almost to the filter. I thumped it straight up into the air, as high and hard as I could. The glowing red cherry hung for a moment at the top of its flight, then sailed off across the lake as if by magic, scribbling a dizzy red trail across the stars. The bat finally dropped the butt and it vanished into the water.

Jenny wasn't the only person who had access to the house. That day when her air conditioner broke, dozens of people were in and out of the place, upstairs and down. Her doors were open to practically anybody who happened to wander by. She had invited me to live with her even though she barely knew me. Her social circle was enormous. For all I knew, it could have been Officer Lorio, Doris Dye, or Sheriff Stegall. For that matter, it could have been Deacon.

I watched a boat slowly drifting across the flat surface of the lake. The children in the woods had turned up and were having a regular pep rally. I walked out on the levee, hoping for another look at Sam, hoping he would appear, like the ghost of the king of Tyre or Denmark, to tell his astonished audience of his murder by a brother's hand.

And if Virgil and Shakespeare offered no clues, why not seek the services of Marlowe and Holmes, private consulting detectives? Maybe I would see something I hadn't seen before, some bloody thumbprint or claim check from a camera shop.

The levee was empty, but I spotted a dark shape crouched where Sam had fallen into the water. For a moment I thought it was the same doglike shadow that had led me to the graveyard in the woods. Then Officer Lorio stood up and shined his flashlight in my face.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Just going over things, one more time,” he said as he climbed the limestone boulders. Apparently, I wasn't the only one entertaining fanciful thoughts.

I noticed he had something in his hand. “What's that? A potato?”

“Just a rock.” He showed me a smooth cobble of river stone about the size of a grapefruit. “Found it down there.” He tossed it and shone his flashlight where it splashed at the water's edge. “The lake is at least five feet low. I was just thinking, there's probably some good noodling along this levee.”

“Noodling?”

“Hand fishing for catfish. You swim along the bank and feel for holes. When you find one, you stick your hand in and wait for a catfish to bite.”

“Bite what?”

“Your hand.”

I could think of more entertaining ways of catching dinner. “Then what?”

“You pull it out.”

The kids in the woods began to call to one another like coyotes. They were all over the woods, crying
Ollie Ollie oxen free
. There had to be fifty of them, and knowing that they were all ghosts made me wonder if they all died here. The history of the Stirling family went back almost two hundred years. This land had once been a plantation with dozens of slaves, and before that Chickasaw tribes lived and hunted here. But it had been my experience that the spirits of the dead rarely lingered more than a few decades, otherwise the world would be full of them. I'd often wondered what happened to the ancient dead—did they move on, in the Christian sense, to a better place? Maybe they just faded, like old Zuber wallpaper? If so, what had held these kids in this place for such a long time?

Lorio brought me back to the land of the living. “Sam and I used to noodle along here when the water was low. I've seen him pull forty-pound catfish out of the water with his bare hands. He was the best swimmer I knew. Sam and Jenny met in college at a swim meet. Sam coached Reece's swim and softball team. Reece was captain of her school's swim team, too. I watched that girl grow up. I loved her like she was my own daughter.” His voice broke at the end. Did he love her enough to kill his best friend?

But if he killed Sam, he wouldn't be out here in the dark for the twentieth time looking for evidence. Unless he was looking for evidence of his own crime.

“What was Sam like after Reece died?”

“You can imagine. It nearly destroyed him.”

Lorio told me how he and Sam grew up together. Their daddies had been best friends, used to hunt deer and quail and go noodling for catfish all the time. When they grew up, he and Sam followed in their father's footsteps. “Sam's the only real friend I ever had,” he said as his eyes strayed once more to the noisy woods below. “I got friends, you know, but nobody was ever like Sam.”

Lorio shined his flashlight on his watch. “It's kinda late for these kids to be out, don't you think?”

I shrugged.

“I wonder who their parents are.”

“I don't think they have parents.”

He laughed. “I know what you mean.”

But he didn't.

“Sam stopped fishing after Reece drowned. When they found her clothes on the levee here, he searched and searched the bank for hours, but a body will do strange things underwater, drift away from where it went in. They found her the next day on the other side of the lake. Me and Sam went noodling one time after that, but he couldn't do it anymore. He said he couldn't put his hand in the hole. He was afraid of what he might find.”

The kids were really getting rowdy. I'd never heard them this noisy before. Lorio looked at his watch again and continued, “But he wasn't suicidal. I'd bet you a hundred dollars he didn't kill himself. And I know Sam couldn't have fallen in and drowned. He was like Tarzan in the water.”

“I have my own reasons for believing you,” I said. “But a hundred bucks and your hunch won't buy us lunch. We need more to go on if we're going to question the local coroner.”

“Jenny can request an independent investigation by an outside party. She can authorize an exhumation.”

“If you can get her to agree to that, I have a friend who might do the exam.” I was thinking of Wiley, who wasn't my friend at all. “But I'll need your help.”

Out of the woods came a jerking, rusty-edged scream, as though some child were being torn apart in a hay baler. Lorio drew his piece and started down the hill. I caught his arm and said, “Don't.”

“That kid is in trouble.”

“You won't find anything.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they're not real.”

He didn't say anything for a long time, just stood with the beam of his light shining into the woods, too weak and too far away to illuminate anything. Finally he said, “Seriously?”

“They're not there. I know. I've tried to find them. They're just voices, left over from another time.”

Hilarious laughter erupted all along the edge of the woods, then gradually receded into silence. After a while, the crickets and frogs started up. Until that moment, I hadn't noticed their absence.