The Risen (5 page)

“That's right,” she said. “We don't want to scare the fish.”

When they got to the downstream pool, Ligeia refilled her cup and, drink in hand, she waded into the water. I freshened the bait on the second rod and made another sloppy cast. Soon the rod tip dipped. I reeled in a nice rainbow and raised it for Bill to see. But he wasn't looking my way. He and Ligeia were closer now, not an arm's length apart. I placed the trout on the stringer
and dropped it back in the water. When I looked downstream again, the plastic cup was drifting into the tailrace. Bill and Ligeia were up to their waists in water, face-to-face as Ligeia reached behind her and the green bikini top fell free.

C
ases like this can be difficult to solve, but we've received more forensic information, and some input from the community. We've also been reviewing the original missing person's report from 1969. Unfortunately, the uncle and aunt who filed the report are deceased, as are the victim's parents. The burial site's proximity to the interstate is being considered. We know of at least one serial killer in the region at that time. Of course, we ask anyone with information to contact the sheriff's department.”

These are Robbie Loudermilk's words in the next morning's paper. The story has been relegated to page two, but near the article's end the reporter
asks if Loudermilk knows of other cases in Jackson County where human remains had been found. One, he answers, almost certainly a suicide, had been identified in 1962. Then Loudermilk mentions a case in 1921 that I already know about. “Not a whole skeleton but a femur,” the sheriff notes, “found by a dog on the banks of the Tuckaseegee.” A cloud covering the sun on an otherwise clear day—something of that same darkening chill passes over me as I link what was found in 1921 to Ligeia.

I can no longer simply sit and wait, so get in my car and drive out of Sylva and then north on I-40 until I come to the second Asheville exit. The medical center rises into view. I haven't been here in fifteen years, and then not to Bill's office but to the hospital recovery room where my daughter lay.

Three events, each decades apart, merge. Coincidence, or something more—blood connected by blood.

I'm early so expect to be flipping through magazines until Bill arrives, but the receptionist takes me straight to his office.

“Dr. Matney said he'd be here within the hour.”

I sit in the leather armchair opposite Bill's desk. Despite the personal touches, the office has an anti
septic feel, as if minutes earlier each item was lifted and sterilized, then reset exactly where it had been. A laptop's on the huge oak desk, as well as photographs of Leslie and my nephews, Lee and Jesse, and a photograph of Sarah at her college graduation. Bill's AOA certificate and Bowman Gray degree hang on the wall beside the desk. Below are two photographs of Bill. One is of him in his high school baseball uniform. In the other my brother is outside a tent in Haiti with two Red Cross workers. He's in a stained blue smock and clearly exhausted but smiling, as are the Red Cross workers.

Behind me, though, and much less cheerful, is the print of Rembrandt's
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp,
which once hung in our grandfather's examination room. Considering their antipathy, I'd been surprised when Bill accepted this inheritance. It's hung where most patients won't notice it and that seems wise. To see a man performing an autopsy would be unsettling for someone anticipating surgery. The weighty mahogany frame makes the scene darker, more ominous. “That painting is a reminder,” Bill had answered when I'd asked why it hung in his office, “of why I can never be complacent.”

On the bookshelf, thick tomes of the trade. No novels or biographies, but on the row beside Menezes and Sonntag's
Principles of Spinal Surgery
and Kaye and Black's
Operative Neurosurgery
is the copy of my M.A. thesis on Thomas Wolfe, which I gave Bill thirty-six years ago.
It's a wonderful piece of scholarship, Eugene,
Bill said after he'd read it.
You perceive so much, things I wouldn't have noticed.
I'd had the disorienting sense that my brother was truly proud of me, even a bit envious. My thesis appears thin and insubstantial amid the medical books, but it is still here, as is, I now notice on the shelf, our mother's Bible.

My thesis, our mother's Bible, the painting—all bespeak a humility so unlike the brother I'd grown up with who was so certain of what was best for him and me. It was easy for Bill to see himself as above the rest of us. In school the smartest student, on the field the best athlete, handsome and popular, and, all the while, Grandfather assuring him and everyone else in Sylva that Bill would become a great surgeon. Who would dare argue against our grandfather's decree? How could Bill even imagine himself as anything but the golden boy?

When Bill married Leslie, I was skeptical that this
new version of my brother would last. So many people, seemingly transformed by spouses, revert to their old ways. Your mate believes you're better than you are, and for a while you actually believe it too. But a day comes when you don't believe it anymore and soon your spouse doesn't either, and you might remind her of where she'd met you in the first place, and the tumbler of whiskey that lay on the bar between her and you, and she'll say, Yes, I met you in a bar. I just didn't know you'd live your life as though you'd never left it.

But by all appearances Bill remained transformed. A good man, compassionate, generous, helping with all manner of good causes. I'd seen articles noting such in the Asheville newspaper, seen my brother interviewed on WLOS for some charity or cause. Bill was disappointed when I'd left the Ph.D. program and settled for teaching at a community college, disappointed once more when I'd stopped writing fiction. But he had kept encouraging me, urging me to use my “gift.”

After the drinking got out of control, he came to see me, brandishing the thesis.
You have a rare abiltiy for writing and understanding literature, Eugene,
he told me.
If you get your head right, you can turn things around. You can teach at a university; you can write books.
I'd responded with a
drunken tirade. He finally left, but not before nodding at the bedroom's shut door where Kay had taken Sarah.
Life's a gift, Eugene,
he'd said.
Don't squander it
.

After the wreck, Bill hired the best trial lawyer in western North Carolina to defend me, but the anger once directed at Grandfather now was directed at me.
You have no idea what you've been given and now thrown away, but damn it, I'll not let you waste another person's life.
Two days later Kay and Sarah left to stay with Bill's family. They remained there until Bill found them an apartment in Asheville.
Your brother's as fine a man as I know.
How many times had I heard that over the years, and with it the sometimes subtle, sometimes more direct, indictment of me? Always the better brother. But now everything seemed helter-skelter.

I waited for a man who'd lied to me for forty-six years. Something terrible had happened to Ligeia at Panther Creek and my brother had done it, but how to believe Bill capable of such a thing, toward anyone.
Murder.
An ambulance wails in the distance but is coming closer, as if bringing that word toward me, increasingly louder, shriller. The ambulance turns into the hospital entrance and red light washes over Bill's
window. The siren dies and a memory of a high school baseball game fills the silence. Bill had hit a deep ball to right field and decided to stretch a triple into a home run. The catcher took the throw at the plate, too late for a tag, but as Bill slid, he stabbed his metal cleats into Bill's knee, a cheap shot that could have ended my brother's baseball career. Bill got to his feet and picked up the bat, gripping it like a club. The catcher stepped back, and kept backing up as my brother limped after him until teammates wrestled Bill into the dugout. Would Bill have swung that bat? And if so, at a knee or a rib cage or the catcher's head? All I know is that the rage made anything seem possible.

I hear my brother speaking to his receptionist. In a few moments he comes in, closes the door, and sits down in his desk chair. His hair is thinning and a few more crow's-feet crease his eyes, but his regimen of exercise, eating well, and moderate drinking makes him appear a decade younger. He looks at me as he might a patient about to receive an unwelcome diagnosis.

“Believe me, Eugene,” he says softly. “You're better off not knowing about this, better off in a lot of ways.”

“And why is that?”

“It didn't involve you then,” Bill says, “and it doesn't now.”

“It did, and it does.”

“Just let me—”

“Tell me what happened, damn it.”

“Listen to me,” he says, less gently. “Think about the decisions you've made in your life and how they've turned out. Let me make this one for you. Trust me enough to do that.”

“Trust?” I answer. “You told me you took Ligeia to the bus station. You told me you
saw her leave.”

“I lied for your own good.”

“Tell me what happened. I'm not leaving until you do.”

Bill raises a hand to his brow, holds it there briefly as if confirming a fever. He sets the hand on the armrest.

“Okay,” he says.

“When I went to meet her that morning, I didn't see her, not at first. But then I started looking around and saw a red suitcase in the creek. Ligeia was lying on a sandbar downstream. I didn't get a pulse but I did CPR. I did it a long time. There was blood and a bump on the back of her head. She probably slipped and hit her head on a rock. Carrying that suitcase could have caused her
to lose her balance, but she might have been drugged up too. That could have caused her to slip.”

“She lost consciousness and drowned?”

“Yes.”

I try to hold enough thoughts together to comprehend what I'm hearing, but it's like passing a hand through cobwebs. It sounds impossible, but what would be more possible, that Bill had killed her?

“Why didn't you take her to the hospital, or go to a house and call the rescue squad?”

“It wouldn't have done any good.”

“It wouldn't have done any good?”

“My doing CPR was her only chance,” Bill says. “Maybe if I'd seen the suitcase sooner, or gotten to the creek earlier . . .”

“I'm not talking about that. You know what I mean.”

“I panicked, Eugene. If I called, even from a pay phone, they'd figure out who called it in. You probably won't remember but it rained the night before. Tire prints and footprints would be there.”

“But if it was just an accident?”

“But I was there,” Bill says, “and she had a suitcase with her.”

“So?”

“Damn it,” Bill says, annoyance in his voice now. “She had a suitcase. Someone was clearly going to meet her, and I was the one who showed up. There would have been questions, and with her getting in all that trouble in Florida, questions about drugs, questions about a lot of things.” Bill pauses. “There would have been an autopsy, and even though it was an accident, it would still look suspicious . . .”

“So you buried her?”

“Yes.”

Then I understood.

“You were afraid it would keep you out of med school?”

Bill is silent.

“That's it, isn't it?” I ask, a long-absent self-righteousness in my tone. “Med school was more important than Ligeia's family knowing what had happened, more important than her being buried out there like a damn dog?”

“Judge me if you want,” Bill says, “but if you had been in the same situation . . .”

“I've fucked up my life, I admit that. I've done some bad things, but I have never done anything close to this.”

“Haven't you?” Bill says, looking at me meaningfully.

“If you mean the car accident,” I answer, “that's what it was, an
accident
.”

“And this was an accident too, and when you had yours, you acted no differently. You could have turned down the attorney I got you and gone to jail.”

“You covered her up with dirt and left her. Except for someone being out there right after a hard rain, no one may have ever known.”

I meet my brother's eyes. They are gray but with a yellow tinge, like butternut. Our mother's eyes were the same color, another small detail our grandfather could not control.

“No one knew, that is, except you.”

“And if I hadn't done what I did,” Bill says, and gestures toward the door, “I wouldn't be here helping people, and Ligeia would be just as dead, whether in the woods or a cemetery.”

“So it all turned out for the best?”

“I'm not saying that,” Bill replies. “All I'm saying is that some—no, a lot of good has happened because I did leave her out there.”

Bill's landline flashes but he checks the number and doesn't pick up.

“You should have told me the truth when you came
home that night,” I tell him. “I asked you if everything was okay. You said it was.”

“You couldn't have changed anything, it was already done,” Bill answers. “I made a decision and it was for the best, then and now.”

“Best for you, Bill, not me.”

“How would your life have been better? For forty-six years you'd have known she was out there dead.”

“Ligeia wouldn't have been out there forty-six years,” I answer. “She wouldn't have been out there a day.”

“You can't know that, Eugene. If you had been there . . .”

“All these years and you've never told anyone?”

Bill shakes his head.

“Not even Leslie?”

“What don't you understand about this?” my brother says, opening his palms in exasperation. “What good would come of that for Leslie, in any possible way?”

“So it's just something to know and then forget about?” I ask. “You never lie awake, thinking about her being out there? You've never wanted to tell someone, get it off your chest?”

“That's not your concern,” he answers tersely.

“But it's not your secret anymore, and with her
being buried, they'll believe she was murdered. Ligeia knew people. She could have told them about us.”

“None of her friends said anything about us when she disappeared.”

“Everyone thought she'd run off to Miami. Now they'll know different.”

“No one ever saw us out there with her,” Bill answers, “not once.”