The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (17 page)

Joe LeDonne had stayed an extra hour on patrol because it was Friday night, prime time for wrecks on back country roads. The Hamelin High basketball team had played an away game in Erwin, and LeDonne was afraid that hot-rodding teenagers would turn the two-lane blacktop into a drag strip on the way home. Tonight, though, they had been lucky: The switchback curves on the old Erwin road had claimed no young sacrifices, and now, after hours of cold riding past dark houses and frosted fields, LeDonne could call it quits.

He went back to the courthouse to pick up his old Volkswagen, and then headed for the one place in town that was open past midnight, the Mockingbird Inn. Most of the regulars would still be nursing beers, trying to drag out Friday night as long as it would go, but LeDonne took no interest in that. He wanted black coffee and a hamburger with tomato and mayonnaise before he went home to his own dark house. He'd see Martha on Saturday night, when Godwin pulled the night patrol.

As he walked into the noisy roadhouse, a sudden hush fell over a room filled with people who had been laughing and dancing a moment before. The sight of LeDonne's brown uniform had dampened spirits. He gave them a perfunctory nod to indicate that he wasn't there on business, and slid into an empty booth, feeling like the Angel of Death. From force of habit, though, he scanned the room. Some of the county hell-253

raisers were there, but they didn't look drunk enough to cause trouble. He saw mostly truckers on coffee break and Wake County's singles, shopping around between divorces. At the bar, though, sat Vernon Woolwine, dressed for an evening out in a black cape lined in red satin, worn over a threadbare dark suit. His black hair, slicked back across the crown of his head, gleamed like—and perhaps was—shoe polish. He was alone. LeDonne was thinking of going up and offering him a ride home when someone slid into the booth across from him, and said, "Long time no see."

It was Justin Warren, beer in hand, wearing a leather bomber jacket and a Stetson. None of his weekend warriors had accompanied him to the Mockingbird Inn. With an ironic grin, he lifted his mug in a toast to the scowling deputy.

"Long time no see," LeDonne agreed. "Lucky you. When I can get a warrant, I'll drop in on your little imitation boot camp."

Justin Warren shook his head. "I don't know why you want to take that attitude, Deputy. I'm a law-abiding citizen who pays property taxes."

"I don't think we need somebody importing trigger-happy toy soldiers into the county. Sooner or later, one of them will get shot, or you'll get careless with the drugs or the illegal weapons, and we'll be there waiting to shut you down." LeDonne looked around for the waitress. Where the hell was his coffee?

"Things must be pretty slow in Dogpatch if you have to worry so much about one law-abiding stranger. What do you do for fun? 254

Round up stray dogs?" Warren laughed. "You poor guys can't even get a good murder case to chew on. The last one you had was the Underhill family, wasn't it? I read about them. And that crime solved itself before you got there."

LeDonne looked up quickly. "Maybe. Did you know the Underhills?"

"I knew the major. Met him in here about this time of night, once. He seemed all right. Too bad his kid went berserk. I figured it for drugs."

LeDonne searched the man's face for a sign of strain. "Did you get along with Paul Underbill? Like him?"

"Didn't care one way or the other." Justin Warren smiled. "You really are afraid of me, aren't you?" he said. "You're hoping you can arrest me for something so that I won't haunt you anymore."

"Why should you haunt me?"

"Because you miss your old life. Your old buddies. Combat is a hard-on like nothing else. You still dream about it. You close your eyes and you're back in the jungle, and it's so real you can smell it. You're a cop because you're still chasing that rush. You want to come out to the camp in the night, and lose yourself in the woods with us. We can take you back to when you were alive, LeDonne. Join the hunt, why don't you? Where's the harm?"

Where was the harm? LeDonne was picturing himself in camos, crawling through the wet woods, reactivating senses he hadn't needed for twenty years: the smell of fear, the electric feel of someone hidden close by. Maybe he could go 255

up one night and join in; it would be a good way to check the place out and see if they were up to anything. Make sure there were no drugs around. He could feel his muscles tighten at the thought of the hunt, and he almost smiled.

LeDonne's coffee arrived, but when he looked up to thank Crystal, he saw that she was not the one who brought it. Instead, LeDonne found himself staring into the solemn, pudgy face of a satanic Vernon Woolwine. In his present incarnation, Vernon had reddened his mouth to a gash, and ringed his mournful eyes with black eyeliner, in his best imitation of Bela Lugosi. The hillbilly vampire pointed to the coffee on the scarred pine table and ruffled his cloak with a flourish by way of greeting. "Going my way?"

"Just about," said the deputy, getting to his feet. He took a long swallow of coffee. "I reckon I can run you home, Vernon. I'm about through here." Suddenly, he wanted to go home. Not to his empty house. He wondered if Martha would still be awake.

In her iron bedstead with the hollow pipes at the head and foot of it, Nora Bonesteel was dreaming, her eyelids flickering in the darkness. Her hands were curled into fists as she struggled with the senses flooding her brain, but it was a blind dream. She saw nothing. She felt. The mattress beneath her turned hard as a board, and she could not turn over. The space seemed hardly larger than her own body. She felt the itch of mold growing on her cheek and in the hollow of her throat, but she could not 256

raise her hand to scratch away the patches of green. She knew, without seeing them, that the patches of mold were green. The color of wet and decay. The bed felt wet with a heavy cold fluid that was not water, but she could not sit up. When she tried to cry out for release, she found that her lips would not open. Copper threads tied her lips together, blocking her tongue. She could feel the wires attached to triangular points stuck into her inner lips, but there was no sensation of pain, only the bitter taste of copper against her shriveled tongue. Beyond that there was only immobility, and cold.

When she felt the cold blade of the hatchet cut through the skin of her neck, Nora Bonesteel sat bolt upright, tears streaming down her face, groping for the bedside lamp. She felt her face and her neck, and stretched her lips to reacquaint herself with the form of the sleeping woman that she was. She could see and move; the sensation of confinement faded as she returned to full wakefulness.

With shaking fingers she switched on every light in her house and then lit two candles on the parlor mantelpiece. She fiddled with the radio dial, usually set for classical music, until she found an all-night bluegrass station blasting out lively, familiar country songs, and there she sat till sunup in her blue Queen Anne chair, enveloped in noise and light to wall out the roaring darkness.

The . . . house

Went up in a roar of flame,

As I danced in the yard with waving arms,

While he wept like a freezing steer.

- EDGAR LEE MASTERS,

Spoon River Anthology

They were on the sidewalk in Johnson City. Maggie Underhill kept trying to dodge the gusts of wind, pulling her short cloth coat tighter around her, but Mark seemed oblivious to the cold. He was wearing his blue blazer and a burgundy tie emblazoned with shields. He might have passed for a law student except that his hair was too long, and there was a glazed quality to his stare. He was clutching a white pillowcase wrapped around something angular. It jutted out through the folds of cloth, giving off fumes like rotten eggs mixed in kerosene. Mark didn't seem to notice the smell. He held the bundle to his chest as if it were a kitten.

"Let me do the talking," he murmured to his sister. "You just stand there and look sincere. Can you handle that?"

Maggie looked away. That's what Josh had been telling her, too. He had called that night when they got back from Oakdale, half-frozen and sick with the smell of formalin. After Mark parked the car under the oak tree, he had gone to the woodshed to hide the object of their quest. Maggie let herself in by the back door, 261

and put the kettle on to make tea. She was warming her hands over the heat of the stove burner when the kitchen telephone rang. With a smile of relief, Maggie walked over and picked it up.

"It's going to be all right," she heard Josh say in his gentlest voice. "You just hold on, Maggie. I'm here. I'm with you."

"Did you see what we did?" Maggie asked. "Are you mad at us?"

She thought she heard him sigh, which struck her as odd, since ghosts didn't draw breath. "No, Maggie. I'm not mad at you. I'm just sorry it had to be this way. I want you to hold on, Maggie. Can you do that? Just keep on keeping on until spring, and then everything will be all right."

A new thought made her shudder. "Are you with Daddy, Josh? Is he mad at us?"

"He's not here. I have to go now. Just remember I care about you. And I'm with you. No matter how bad it gets."

"I couldn't run away. And I can't tell on Mark. We never told on each other. I wouldn't even get down the paddle for anyone else's whipping."

"I know, Maggie. Just hold on."

"Can I call you?"

"You don't have to."

After that she'd made herself some tea, and

took a long, hot shower. When she came out,

she heard Mark in the front room, pacing and

talking loudly, as if he were arguing with some-

one, but she didn't go down to see. She was suddenly very sleepy.

That had been two weeks before. Now it was Valentine's Day. Maggie had passed the days watching television, a pastel blur of game shows, looking out the window, and waiting for Josh to call again, but he never did. She never went out into the woodshed to see by daylight their terrible acquisition. Nor did she speak of it to Mark. The days went by, and she thought perhaps he had forgotten about it, now that the urgency of retrieving it was past. At first she had been afraid that their vandalism would be discovered by a cemetery groundskeeper, but apparently his vigilance in winter was not great. They had reburied the coffin, and covered the earth with leaves. No one seemed to have noticed the disturbance. As each day passed, Maggie spent less time looking out the window at the gravel drive and the low-water bridge that led up to the highway. She stopped going cold at every loud noise. Gradually, television became more real to her than life, and she snuggled down in its bland warmth, safe again, as Josh had promised.

Mark let two weeks pass before he mentioned the money again. He came downstairs at eleven, hours earlier than his usual time of awakening, and announced that they were going to Johnson City after lunch. He was clean-shaven, and his hair was combed. Dress up, he'd told her. This was business. Without a word of protest, Maggie put on her navy blue wool and some makeup 263

and followed her brother to the car without asking the purpose of the journey.

They drove the two-lane mountain road to Johnson City in silence. The pillowcase on the backseat reeked in the closed car until Maggie was ready to gag. She opened her window a crack, but the cold air was too bitter against her face. She hoped they'd be leaving the thing in Johnson City; she didn't want to know what it was. Mark pulled into a parking space on a quiet side street, and headed for a glass-fronted store, the pillowcase under his arm. Maggie fumbled in her purse for coins for the parking meter, but found that she hadn't any money. In the end, she trailed after her brother, wondering what "business" had brought them to town.

The sign on the window said Jewelry Store in flecked gold leaf. Maggie paused to look at a display of garnet rings—her birthstone—but Mark grabbed her elbow and ushered her into the store. "Good afternoon," he said to the shop's only inhabitant, an elderly man in a dark suit. Mark could sound quite affable when he cared to, which wasn't often. It was his public face, same as their father's.

"What can I do for you good people?" the old man asked. His soft Southern voice invited their confidence.

Maggie looked around her, at the silver tea sets, the trays of diamond engagement rings, and the case filled with gold watches. She wished that they were shopping. She would have liked a birthstone ring or tiny gold earrings studded with garnets. But Mark seldom 264

went into a store except to grocery shop when they ran low on powdered milk or bread, and on those trips he went alone. Dad had been like that, too, treating the house as if it were a fortress.

Mark had strolled up to the counter and placed his reeking pillowcase on the glass counter. The old man stepped back as the smell reached his nostrils. Mark smiled reassuringly. "We need some help," he said pleasantly. "There is a number carved in very tiny print, and we need someone with a strong magnifier to read it."

"What is it?" asked the old man, dabbing at his face with a linen handkerchief. Beads of sweat had appeared at his temples.

"It's a number carved on a tooth," said Mark. "Belonged to a spy. This is classified, you understand." He reached into the pillowcase and drew out the yellowed jawbone, now devoid of skin but still smelling of preservative. Maggie looked away.

"Where'd you get this?" asked the jeweler, making no move to take it from Mark's outstretched hand.

"Please. Read out the number for us. It's that tooth there." Mark pointed to a molar, shiny with a gold-tone filling.

The man looked at Mark, and started to say something, but thought better of it. With a shrug he took the jawbone, and carried it back into the office where he did jewelry repair.

Maggie touched Mark's elbow. "Suppose he reports this?"

Mark smiled. "He doesn't know who we are. Besides, it's our family fortune we're trying to recover. Surely people can understand that. If not, we can buy them off."

Maggie let her thoughts drift away from the conversation as she stared at the trays of rings in the glass-fronted counters. Perhaps Mark would let her buy one when he recovered the money from Switzerland. Mark was humming tunelessly. Every now and then he would lean forward to peer at the jeweler through the glass partition.

Several minutes later, the old man came out, holding the jawbone in his handkerchief, his arm outstretched to distance himself from the stench. "I don't understand," he said, blinking up at Mark. "I've examined every one of these teeth. There's no number on any of them."

"That's impossible," said Mark with a stubborn smile. "Did you use a strong magnifier when you looked at them?"

"I'm telling you: there's nothing there." The jeweler glanced at the telephone. "May I have your names, please?"

"No," said Mark. "We'll take our business elsewhere." He grasped Maggie by the elbow and hurried her out of the shop. When they reached the car, he sped away without even waiting to take the parking ticket off the windshield.

It was going to be a long winter. The solstice was six weeks past, but Laura Bruce still couldn't see any appreciable lengthening of the

days. Cloudy days seemed dark even at noon. She looked out the kitchen window at the gathering twilight that blurred the shapes in the yard until they became gray shadows ebbing into the dark. Surely time was passing, she thought, touching her swollen belly.

She turned on the kitchen light to shut out the evening gloom. Time for a cup of tea, and perhaps a sandwich, not that she felt much like eating. She had been to the doctor in Johnson City again today. No change, he told her. He had measured for signs of dilation, listened for the heartbeat that wasn't there, and finally sent her away, counseling more patience. It wasn't time yet. He didn't look at her much during the appointment. She had become an embarrassment to him: the specter of failure and death among the happy mothers awaiting his care. He didn't ask how she was feeling, and she volunteered no information. All that mattered was when, and that he was unable to tell her. So she drove home in the pale winter sunlight, and thought a dozen times of aiming her car for the nearest tree. She didn't, though. Despair was a sin. She'd read that somewhere.

Laura opened the refrigerator, and looked without favor at its contents: plastic cartons of cottage cheese, a package of hot dogs, and a bowl of homemade applesauce. She shut the door. Just a cup of tea, then. She didn't feel like going to the bother of cooking. After all, she wasn't eating for two. And not getting any exercise, either, she thought, forcing her mind away from the pain of recollection. As soon as 267

some mild weather set in, she would go for walks, or perhaps do a bit of gardening, setting out early annuals for April color. Jane Arrowood could tell her what plants would thrive in early March. She must remember to ask.

Meanwhile, there was television, and books from the limited supply of the Bookmobile. By default, because the library van contained little other than westerns and romances, she had discovered C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed. She read it over and over, even renewing it, because she could not bear to part with it. Reading Lewis was like talking to someone who understood what she was feeling now. He spoke of the laziness of grief. Yes, that was true. She felt as if she had been moving in slow motion over the past few weeks. The slightest task required great effort, and the many small chores of living seemed altogether pointless. She fingered a limp strand of hair that fell across her forehead; she hadn't shampooed it for several nights, always telling herself that another day's postponement would make no difference.

She followed his chronicle of the stages of bereavement, willing herself to move on to the next one, for she had to. Because no one could live where she was now, in such a spiritual twilight. So she reread Lewis, and took him at his word that there was an end to even the greatest pain. But it was hard to be brave in private.

She still hadn't told Will. But that didn't count as being brave. It was just a confrontation that she was avoiding. She wrote to him every other day, as something to do, and she 268

missed him so much. If Will had been home, she would have confided in him, and let him comfort her. But trusting her sorrow to pieces of paper would mean reliving it, and putting aside her own sorrow for Will's sake. She wasn't ready to do that. Grief is a form of selfishness. Had Lewis said that, or did she work it out for herself? Laura had become quite adept at penning cheerful, newsy letters that betrayed nothing of her own despair. Will has enough to trouble him, she told herself. He needn't be burdened with this, too, when there's nothing to be done for it. She had managed to outlive the first shock of the tragedy, first as a sleepwalker, and then with mindless activity. The bustle in the house the morning after death. She had scoured the house, tidied the closets, and finally, in the momentum of housecleaning, she had set about turning the nursery back into a guest room, taking down the dinosaur curtains, and packing away the baby things. All reminders were gone now, save just the one that she saw each time she looked in the mirror.

The rumble of the kettle subsided, and a ribbon of steam sailed upward from the spout. Laura got a bag out of the canister, and put it into an earthenware mug. She glanced at the library book lying on the counter, and thought again about fixing a sandwich. She mustn't give in to the laziness of grief. Perhaps she ought to try to do some visiting.

She had avoided the Ladies' Circle, with their relentless chatter about pregnancy. And Nora Bonesteel. Laura had not been back to the house 269

on Ashe Mountain since she had learned of the baby's death. She had to work through her bitterness before she could face the old woman again. Did Nora Bonesteel know that the baby would die, and if so, why didn't she give Laura warning? Sometimes when Laura thought of Nora Bonesteel, she would become angry that this knowledge had been kept from her, and at other times, she would recall something else Nora had said. "I hardly ever get anything I'd set a store on knowing." So perhaps she hadn't known at all. And if she had received a premonition, what good would it have done to talk about it? It could only have given Laura added weeks of suffering. Laura had come to accept that, but the resentment lingered. She wouldn't go back to see Nora Bonesteel until she could work through her grief. And until she could deal with the well-meaning inanities of people who didn't understand about bereavement.

That thought brought an image of Mark and Maggie Underhill into her mind. When Laura had been called to comfort them on the night of the murders, she hadn't understood about grief, either. She hadn't known what to say to them, or how to act in the presence of their tragedy. She had felt embarrassed and tongue-tied in the face of so much loss. She had thought they might not want strangers around, but perhaps they needed people, whether they knew it or not. Will would have sensed that. He would have tried to befriend them. She hadn't done a good job of ministering to them, she thought, and personal sorrow was no excuse. Laura 270

hadn't seen the Underhills since Christmas. She had not telephoned them or driven out to see how they were. Mark and Maggie had not tried to contact her, either. Grief is lazy; grief makes us shy. We want people around, she thought, but we don't want to make the effort to talk to them. I have been selfish, Laura told herself. I lost one person; they lost four. Now I can tell them that I truly do understand their loss. In a few days she would go and see about them. When she felt stronger. Perhaps she would take them the book.