Summitt

Chapter Twelve

A ringing phone waked Selby. His bedroom was in shadows, but the first sunlight was filtering dully through the frosted windows.

His dreams had been of hounds on leads, black and brown shapes with lolling tongues, and cemetery markers and objects in patterns he couldn’t identify or make sense of...

The hounds had struck at the entrance to a small estate called Vinegar Hill. A lane from Dade Road led back through a hedge of locusts to a house and garage. After flashing his light through the windows, and seeing what he had both expected and dreaded, Selby had told Gideen to pack in the hounds and head back for Little Tenn.

No gas stations were open; Selby had driven home and called the sheriff’s station on Route One. That had been two a.m.

He snapped on his bedside lamp and answered the phone.

“Sergeant Ritter here, Mr. Selby. Figured you’d better know this. Battalion Chief Quill and his unit at Coatesville got a brush-fire alarm a couple hours ago. Had to bring in the pumper from Odena to get it under control.”

In some strange way, Selby knew with certainty what Sergeant Ritter was about to tell him. Last night, as Gideen had been loading the hounds into the truck, Selby had seen a red light like the dome of a police car flare briefly on a hill beyond White Clay Creek.

Sergeant Ritter was saying, “I logged your call around two-thirty and patched it straight through to Sergeant Wilger in East Chester. He said he’d get someone on it, check the county recorder, find out who’s living there.”

Selby let out his breath slowly. “Where did you say that fire was?”

“They tell me you could see the flames clear over to Quarryville. Kids probably, Chief Quill says, let a campfire get away from ’em, got scared and ran for it. No sign of ’em though. Fire took the old Vinegar Hill place except for the garage and some of the back trees around it.”

A white Toyota Celica was parked on the shoulder of Dade Road at the entrance to Vinegar Hill. Behind it was a maroon sedan with East Chester police insignia on the door panels.

“This is obviously a waste of time.” Shana stepped from the station wagon and stared at the blackened trees. The lane into the house had been churned into a glistening gridwork of mud by the fire apparatus. Water thick with soot and charred splinters foamed in the ruts.

“You can stay in the car if you want,” Selby said.

“What difference does it make anyway?” Shana asked. “Sergeant Ritter told you the whole place was gone.”

Her hair was in a loose ponytail and she wore Normie Bride’s freshman letter jacket, compensating for the long sleeves by doubling the cuffs back over her wrists.

Burt Wilger came up the lane from the house, his boots and poncho wet and muddy, and his glasses smudged with soot.

Nodding to them, he said, “It’s a tough break,” and glanced behind at the layers of smoke drifting from the blackened house. “If you were right, Mr. Selby, we might have had something to go on.”

“I was right,” Selby told him. “Four hours ago, there was evidence here. Now we’ve got a fire sale.”

“You’re positive about that? Evidence, I mean?” Wilger looked at Shana and cleared his throat. “The DA’s here, she’ll want to talk to you. I’ve got to check the fence line, see if I can find out where those kids broke through it.”

A patch of lawn had been trampled down by the firemen, and churned into haphazard patterns by their hoses. Beyond the muddied grass stood what was left of the house, the beams and supports standing like a crooked black skeleton against the sky. The roof had burned completely away, and the bedroom and living room floors had collapsed into the basement. Only the fieldstone fireplace and chimney were undamaged; that and the garage, which had been protected from the flames by the thick crown of a maple tree which had toppled down around it.

Shana stopped on the sodden lawn and looked at the garage door, a tense frown shadowing her eyes. The whole place had a chilling look to Selby, a charnel house with black, twisted trees forming an arch above it.

Shana walked closer to the garage, but stopped, her arms, spindly looking in Normie’s big, loose jacket, crossed across her slight breasts.

A woman came around the side of the house. As she lifted a dripping branch to duck under it, Dorcas Brett seemed taller than he remembered her, slim in a dark leather coat and copper-colored boots. The boots, flecked with water and mud now, were probably what made her seem taller, he thought; either that or the precise way she chose her footing, which gave a taut, controlled line to her body. In the morning light, drops of water glinted in her hair. Without gloves, her hands looked white as popcorn against the backdrop of charred trees.

She introduced herself and Selby said, “Yes, we’ve met, this is my daughter, Shana.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d remember, Mr. Selby.” Dorcas Brett glanced at Shana, who was staring again at the garage doors. “Perhaps you’d rather talk somewhere else, Mr. Selby.”

“What is there to talk about?”

“This place can’t be very pleasant for your daughter.”

“Then let’s get it over with. This is where it happened. What else do you need to know?”

She hesitated and said, “Well, for one thing, Mr. Selby, the county recorder’s office hasn’t got back to us yet. We don’t know who owns Vinegar Hill. We can’t search the house or what’s left of it until we have their permission or the evidentiary basis for a search warrant.”

“I don’t see any problem. Last night I saw what my daughter described to the police, specific things she saw inside this house the night she was raped. Doesn’t my word count as evidence?”

“It’s a sticky legal business, but I’ll try to put it as clearly as I can. To satisfy the probable cause requirements, to prove to a magistrate that we have good and sufficient reasons for a search warrant, our evidence has to satisfy the same standards of admissibility that would be applied by a trial judge. The evidence has to be obtained legally, without violating anyone’s civil rights. It can’t be tainted. So it’s not just a question of what you saw last night, but how and where you saw it.”

“Because I was trespassing you mean?”

“Yes, and if you forced a door open and went inside you could be arrested for committing a felony. I can understand your frustration, but I didn’t write the amendments to the Constitution that—”

He interrupted her. “Then let’s try it this way. Supposing you claim you overheard me telling a bartender what I saw last night. You could act on that, couldn’t you? Wouldn’t that provide, what’s the phrase — an ‘evidentiary basis’?”

“Yes, but if we agreed to do something like that we’d both have to perjure ourselves.”

“Let’s go to a real bar then,” Selby suggested. “I’ll tell a real bartender all about it. You can listen if you want to. Wouldn’t that soothe your legal conscience and protect your flanks from your bosses in East Chester?”

“No, listen. I don’t have a particularly sensitive legal conscience, and I don’t have any need to protect my flanks, as you put it. My only consideration was—”

She pushed her dark hair from her forehead. “Jesus, I’m sorry,” she said unexpectedly. She was pale except for points of color on her high cheekbones. “I’m sorry about what happened to your daughter. I should have told you that first. It was rotten and vile and sickening and if any words of mine can help, if my sympathy and outrage means anything to you, you have them in full measure.”

Selby said, “Yes, that means something, Miss Brett. Thank you.”

From the lane, Wilger called, “Kelly, County Records just patched a message through to me. A caretaker checks this place out every week or so, but it’s owned by an army officer stationed down south somewhere, a General Taggart. He owns the property to the fence lines, sold off the rest to a developer.”

“Have they notified the insurance carrier?”

“County’s taking care of that. I’ve finished up here. I’ll check the caretaker now.”

Selby said, “It’s a shame we can’t make the next logical step, Miss Brett. I was trespassing, but I didn’t kick in any doors. I looked through the windows with a flashlight. I saw the stone fireplace Shana told me about, and the deer’s head hanging over it, and even the cot with ropes still hanging from the ends of it.”

Wilger’s car started up, the tires churning in the slick mud, losing traction with the crescendoing roar of the motor. As the sound whined in metallic blasts through the dripping trees, Shana screamed and stumbled toward them, her boots slipping on the muddy grass.

“No!” she shouted, “no!” and ran into Dorcas Brett’s arms. The noise of the motor was all around them as the car bucked and rocked on the slick road.

“Dammit, Shana,” Selby shouted. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

Dorcas Brett pulled the crying girl close to her and stared at Selby. “Will you stop yelling at her, for God’s sake! Why did you bring her here? Can’t you imagine how she’s feeling?” Her voice was rising, and her gray eyes looked nearly black. “Is this some exercise in dumb amateur therapy?”

An abrupt silence settled through the black woods; Wilger’s car was moving, the sound of the motor fading.

“God,” Dorcas Brett said, her arms falling to her sides. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—” she began, but stopped suddenly and moistened her lips. A faint line of blue, like a surreal touch of lipstick, was forming a fine, dark edge about her mouth.

“Take it easy,” Selby said to her.

With an arm around Shana, he walked with her out the muddy lane to their car.

“I’m all right, daddy.”

“What was that all about?”

“I don’t know. Give me a handkerchief, okay?”

“What frightened you back there?”

“It was the car, the noise. I wasn’t expecting anything, it startled me.”

“But you were staring at those garage doors. Why, Shana?”

“I told you, I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was daydreaming.”

“Did he take you into the garage that night?”

“No... just the house.”

Selby opened the door of the station wagon, and closed it when she slipped inside. “Turn on the radio,” he suggested. “Get some music.”

“What’s the matter with that lady, daddy? She looked like she was going to faint.”

“I’ll check. You okay now?”

“Sure, but you better see what’s wrong with her.”

“Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

The deputy DA was standing with her back to him. She turned and said, “That was very unprofessional. I had no right to come on that way—”

“You’d better stop talking for a while.”

“The book says not to verbalize your feelings.” She was speaking rapidly. “Remember the stats, not the people, don’t get involved on a personal—”

“That’s probably good advice,” Selby said, “but you’d better get your breath back now. Don’t say anything for a while.”

“I wanted you to understand—”

“Dammit, shut up!” Selby held her shoulders and studied her face. Her eyes were distended with stress. An edge of blue had widened about her mouth. Her hands were clenched across her chest.

“Put your hands down,” he told her. “Let them hang loose. Breathe deep and slow. Can you do that? Don’t say anything. Just nod.”

Lowering her hands, she swallowed with an effort and nodded. “I think I ought to—”

He tightened his grip on her shoulders. “Don’t talk, you’re overventilating, burning up oxygen faster than you’re replacing it. Keep it up and you’ll be out cold.”

Holding her wrists, he elevated them until her arms were fully extended and level with the ground. “Breathe as deeply as possible, until you can feel it down to your stomach.”

“I think I’m all right now.”

“No, you’re not. Something triggered a cyanosis jag. It’s like a muscular or emotional overdraft, tapping resources you don’t have. I’ve seen it happen to athletes twice your size. Is it Dorcas or Kelly or what?” he added to distract her.

“Dorcas is a family name.”

“And you’re called Kelly? Just nod.”

“Or Brett, it doesn’t matter.”

“Bodies have breaking points.” He studied the line of blue about her lips. “Like machines. We’re a complex of muscles and endocrines and feelings.”

“I had a year of pre-med before—”

“Never mind that. Listen to me.”

“It’s good of you but—”

“Yes, I’m trying to distract you, but I’m obviously doing a lousy job of it. Keep quiet. Everything runs in harmony until there’s an unexpected pressure against a vulnerable area. Then something breaks and we fall apart. You feeling better?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“You feel up to driving?”

“I told you. I understand what — happened to me.”

“How will that help you drive?”

“That isn’t what I meant.” She was still speaking rapidly, but color had returned to her face. “It’s called hydroxia, a carbon dioxide depletion. It happened to me once in college. I didn’t have breakfast this morning, only coffee, I was—” She paused and swallowed. “No, it was your daughter, her fear hit me in some way I wasn’t prepared for.” She glanced at her extended arms. “I’m all right now, thanks.”

He released her wrists and she drew a deep breath as if experimenting with its effects. The blue line had faded from around her lips. She adjusted her scarf, and said, “Did you ask your daughter what upset her?”

“She told me she was frightened by the sound of the car.”

As they walked out the lane he said, “If you don’t feel like driving I’ll stop in Buck Run and call a cab.”

“Thanks, but that’s not necessary.” She glanced at him. “If there’s anything else you think we should know, I’d like you to call us.”

She took a business card from her handbag, and offered it to him. “My extension is on it,” she said. “And my home phone.”

“All right,” he said.

“But you won’t call, will you?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’m not sure. If you were put off by my attack I’m sorry. It’s not part of my usual legal repertoire, but it’s something else, isn’t it?”

“Of course, Miss Brett.”

He pointed back to the charred and smouldering house. “That’s where some psychopath tortured and raped my daughter, but we can’t even sift the ashes now because nobody at your shop seems to give a goddamn about finding him.”

“You heard Sergeant Wilger, Mr. Selby, he’s on his way to talk to the caretaker right now.”

“I know. He’ll log another hundred hours, and then sit around waiting for a tip from somebody in a bar. Meantime, he can listen to the captain talk about buying ballet clothes for his cute little kid. You better get yourself some breakfast, Miss Brett.”

Hardly aware of what he was doing, Selby tore her card into pieces and scattered them over the muddy ground. “Sorry,” he said, and walked away from her to join his daughter.

When they pulled into the driveway at their farm, Shana had her door open almost before Selby turned off the motor.

“Barby’s got the homework assignments,” she said, “and I told her I’d call her this morning.”

“Can’t that wait a minute?”

“What is it, daddy?”

Silence had settled, a quiltlike country silence, broken only by the stir of leaves and faint cries of birds. The sunlight drifted down through the tops of brilliant red and yellow buttonwoods and maples.

“Are you sure you didn’t remember something back there that panicked you?”

“I told you it was the sound of that car. It scared her, too... the lady, didn’t it?”

“I guess you’re right, it did.”

Shana pushed open the door and put a foot on the graveled drive.

“But there’s another thing.”

“Daddy, I told Barby I’d call her. Can’t we talk about it some other time?”

“No, let’s get it over with. Davey told me you were upset about something that happened a long time ago, something about a jukebox.”

Shana settled back and crossed her arms. Staring through the windshield, she said, “I told him because I thought he deserved to know what was worrying me, what I was feeling. I didn’t want him growing up with lots of mysterious things around him he couldn’t understand, that he’d feel anxious and guilty about.”

She looked skeptically at him. “It wasn’t just the jukebox. Don’t you remember anything about it?”

“We were in a booth having Cokes or something, I remember that much,” Selby said. “Tell me the rest of it.”

“I was wearing a white blouse and sweater, and a blue velvet skirt that Tishie made for me. Some men started laughing. They were having fun. I thought I was, too. When I started dancing, one of them said something and you told him to stop. It was a joke, I thought at first, but your face was mad, as if you were being threatened, not me. Outside I started crying, I couldn’t help it.”

“I told them to watch their language. You were pretty young, and I asked them to stop. That’s all there was to it.”

“But when you came out of the bar, there was blood on the back of your hands and you were laughing and that’s what I always remembered, how you were laughing, and that’s when I got sick all over Tishie’s skirt. You were laughing because you were strong and because everyone else was so weak—”

“Shana, you’ve got the whole thing twisted—”

“Because you say so?”

“No, because maybe you’re not seeing it exactly right... isn’t that possible, honey—?”

“I don’t care. Like this time... it was something happening to me, not to you, but before I could even try to understand it you took it away from me and turned it into something I could never be sure about. Daddy, you took over, but you left me out. That’s not going to happen again... I know what happened that night in that house. Nobody can ever tell me I’m wrong about that or didn’t understand it or that there are always two sides to things. What happened, happened to me, daddy. Not you. If you find out who did it and knock him around in a parking lot or something, then it’s yours... that might prove something to you, but it won’t prove what I need to prove, what I’ve got to prove to myself before I can understand and feel all right with myself again.”

“Shana, Shana,” he said wearily. “What is there to understand? What is there to prove?”

She climbed quickly from the car and stared back at him through the open door. “Well, you never even knew what happened in your own life, you told us that a thousand times... about spending Christmas and holidays at college because there wasn’t any home to go to after Davenport, and never knowing your father... We grew up with your feelings, they got to be part of our lives. We were never sure what was you and what was us, or where the truth of anything was for us. Do you understand now what I’m trying to say? I mean, I don’t want any doubts about what happened. I was raped. I was raped, and the man, whoever he is, has got to admit he did that to me. Not to you, daddy. Me. I didn’t want it, or look for it, or like it and nobody is going to twist that around and say it was anything else, not now and not ever. I mean... I belong to me, the truth belongs to me...”

She slammed the car door and ran to the house, running from him, Selby knew, her hair streaming behind her under a drift of leaves.

Selby sat behind the wheel looking after her. “I belong to me, the truth belongs to me...” It wasn’t a reasonable statement, it wasn’t a logical or sensible one. Only the passion and the touching, high candor of someone very young could have found such words to frame them.

In the study, he called Gideen, who had heard a report of the fire on the radio and had already driven out to Vinegar Hill.

“Saw your car there, and the police, so I went on by, Harry. But I picked up a tail coming back through Buck Run. Them fellas in the black Connie again. New York plates, but I didn’t get the numbers. Talk around here now is that Ollie Jessup might move his Tabernacle church over to Atlantic City, or somewhere on the shore. Except for them things, Harry, I’d got to say we wasted them buck hounds last night.”

Selby changed into a sweat suit and jogged from the top of the meadow down a trail to their pond, which was like a flat, oval slate in the clear sunlight. When he was worried, as he was now, a workout sometimes burned away his restlessness.

Shana’s bicycle, he thought, start there. Red paint on it, according to Davey. Not so, according to the police. Or start with Jarrell at Summitt City. And the girl who hadn’t known where the coffee was. And the sergeant with a chiseled Indian profile. Someone tailing Gideen.

The grass was slick and brittle with the morning’s frost, snapping like glass under his feet.

The ducks swam urgently from the sound of his running footsteps. Selby shook beads of perspiration from his eyelashes, and everything around him was refracted crazily by those tiny drops of water, the pond shot through with shards of light and the trees distorted and shimmering in surreal patterns.

Vinegar Hill. Bloodstains, ropes, fingerprints, any other physical evidence, burned to ashes, flooded under tons of water...

On the trail he and Davey had cut parallel to the logging road, Selby thought of the man in a car watching their house the night he had been at Summitt City. A man in a red sports car...

At last he rested under a shattered oak tree, a relic of an electrical storm that had struck the county during the summer Sarah’s mother had lived with them.

“Pay the two dollars,” had always been Tishie’s advice about anything in life you couldn’t budge or change — accept, don’t argue, don’t aggravate yourself, pay the fine, who can fight City Hall? Who wins? Don’t break your head over what can’t be helped, the will or whim of authority, the hem that couldn’t be lowered because “there was nothing to work with,” rain on wedding days, the undertaker, the tax collector, live with it. Pay...

Selby looked up at the dead tree, limbs gray and leafless, and remembered that she hadn’t been so philosophical about thunder and lightning; they scared her out of her wits and she would invent any excuse to stay with Shana during electric storms, reading to her and Davey, or mending things that didn’t need mending, anything so she wouldn’t be alone in her room when thunder sent Blazer with his tail between his legs into the basement and lightning cracked like a big, bright whip over the meadows.

Tishie’s husband had been Joseph, Sager, “assistant to the concertmaster” of the Manhattan Symphony Orchestra, a man of shy dignity and manners — few faults and fewer words, Tishie had always said of him. Starting at the Manhattan as a janitor, a refugee from Germany, he had been eager for anything to turn his hand to. Mopping floors, sweeping out dressing rooms, loading instruments into cabs or vans when the orchestra traveled. Over the years he became the concertmaster’s valet and personal chauffeur; in Tishie’s view this had only confirmed the title she had bestowed on him from the start — “assistant to the concert-master.” With strangers and an extra glass of sherry, she might slur a word or two and smilingly elevate her husband to the post of “assistant concertmaster.”

It was harmless conceit, in Selby’s view. It fooled no one and wasn’t meant to. But it was a private source of strength for Tishie, an affirmation of what might or could have been, if her parents had sold their shop and left Germany in time.

She had been afraid of much in life, and with good reason; you couldn’t call all her fears groundless. But she hadn’t been afraid of dying. At that kind of thunder and lightning she had shrugged and paid the two dollars.

Selby wondered why he had been thinking of Tishie so often lately, and now he knew why. Sarah’s mother had been certain there was something dark and terrifying on the very edge of life, just beyond her straining, frightened eyes, a creature, a Leviathan, swimming soundlessly through the depths to destroy her. And Selby felt that same fear now. Something complex and dangerous, but completely silent and invisible, was threatening him and everything and everyone important and precious to him.

Tishie had at least known at last the name and shape of her fears.

As Selby started back toward the house, Davey came running down the meadow to join him, tossing a football in the air and occasionally fumbling it, and stopping to pick it up. He threw the ball in a wobbly pass to his father, but it fell short and bounced end over end on the slick grass.

“A man called, dad,” Davey shouted. “A photographer, Mr. Parks, J. D. Parks, he said. He wants you to call him back — not today, but tomorrow. He’s in Philadelphia shooting some pictures of a circus, he told me.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“He thinks he’s got something you want, dad, what you talked about. That’s all he told me.”

Davey scooped up the football and tossed it to his father. “Throw me a pass, will you? A real long one, okay?”

“All right, Davey,” Selby said and waited while his son ran down the meadow, looking over his shoulder, waving his hands over his head. There was a touching urgency in the look of his stout, churning legs...

Cocking his arm, Selby let the ball fly in a high arcing spiral, and watched his son running to get under it, remembering with the sweat drying on his face another moment like this, a football in flight at dusk near a lake and youngsters racing after it, laughing with buoyant energy and exhilaration. A troubled memory, worrisome and disturbing. Boys, two little black boys... who hadn’t remembered where they lived...