An Unquiet Grave

CHAPTER 34

Louis was still asleep when Dee Dalum came into the guest room, gently shook him awake, and handed him the phone. He struggled to sit up as he took it.

“Yeah?” he managed.

“Louis, it’s Phil.” A pause. “Are you coming home today?”

Louis could see a gray morning light seeping out from behind the drapes and he could smell coffee brewing.

“I don’t know, Phil,” he said. “There’s a lot going on here now and-”

“You aren’t even staying here anymore, Louis.”

Louis swung his feet over the bed to the floor. “I know. I was going to drive back last night but the roads were bad.”

There was a long pause on Phillip’s end. “I need you home. I need to talk to you.”

“All right, Phil. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

It took Louis three hours to make it back to Plymouth. The freeway was plowed, but all other roads were iced over, and twice he had almost lost the car into a ditch. He pulled up in the driveway tense and tired, flexing his hands, cramped from gripping the wheel.

The front door was locked. He dug back in his jacket pocket for his keys. The wind was bitter and his fingers were so cold he was struggling to separate the keys when the door swung open. Phillip stood there, dressed in a blue sweater and old slacks. He stepped back to let Louis inside.

As Louis wiggled out of his jacket, he thought about asking if Frances had come back, but he knew she probably hadn’t. It was a little after 10:00 A.M. and the house was empty of any of her usual scents.

“How was the drive?” Phillip asked, taking his coat.

“Dangerous,” Louis said.

Phillip said nothing and Louis headed to the kitchen to look for something to eat. It hit him how sharp his comment about the drive probably sounded, and he knew he was just tired. He hadn’t slept well at Dalum’s last night. Thinking about Delp and having to ask him for help. Thinking about what Dr. Seraphin had said. But none of that was any reason to snap at Phillip.

Louis turned to apologize, but Phillip interrupted him. “So, what’s going on out there?”

Louis opened a cupboard and pulled down a box of Cheerios and some sugar. “We had another murder. A security guard.”

“Yes, I saw something in the Free Press. That’s terrible.”

Louis grabbed the milk and was pouring it on the Cheerios when Phillip spoke again.

“Have you found any connection to Claudia?”

“Not to the killer, no,” Louis said.

“To what then?”

“What do you mean, to what? I don’t have any more information on Claudia than I had two days ago,” Louis said. “And it’s kind of hard to deal with her with everything else that’s going on there.”

“Hard to deal with her?”

Louis was pushing the Cheerios around with a spoon and he stopped. There was a tinge of annoyance in Phillip’s question, and Louis bit back his first response, letting his irritation fade before he spoke.

“There aren’t many leads for her, Phillip,” Louis said evenly. “Right now, we have to catch this guy and maybe when we do, he’ll tell us more. I don’t know.”

“But isn’t there someone else you can talk to?” Phillip asked. “Aren’t there more people out there like that Millie woman? More patients who knew her?”

Louis faced him. “Yeah. I can do that. I can go get all kinds of stories about Claudia. How she looked. What drugs she was given. All the horrible things she went through.”

Phillip stared at him and Louis could see the anguish in his face, and he knew he shouldn’t say one more word because he could hear the edge to his voice and one more word might be one too many. But they poured out anyway.

“Is that what you want, Phillip?” Louis asked. “More guilt?”

“No,” Phillip said. “I have plenty of that.”

Louis turned back to his cereal, but he just stared at it, working his way toward an apology he didn’t want to give. Maybe Phillip needed to hear that remark. Maybe he needed to know just how pathetic he had become, hanging on to some kind of romantic dream that he could never get back, throwing his life away for a ghost.

“But that is why I asked you to come here,” Phillip said. “I didn’t expect you to get involved in another case.”

Louis closed his eyes, his chest so tight he couldn’t breathe. He didn’t want to fight with Phillip. He didn’t want to fight with anyone.

“If you want to quit all this, I understand,” Phillip said.

“I don’t want to quit.”

“You sound like it.”

Louis started stirring the cereal in slow circles.

“If you want to talk, Louis,” Phillip said, “we can go down to the basement. Grab a beer, eat some nuts. You know. We can talk, like we used to do.”

And the words were on his lips before he thought about them, and he heard them come out, but he couldn’t believe they were his.

“We never talked, Phillip,” Louis said.

“That’s not true,” he said. “I remember. .”

Louis faced him. “I got lots of fatherly advice. I got nice clothes. And a damn good education. But we never talked.”

Phillip’s shoulders drew stiff, hurt coloring his face. It was a look Louis had never seen before. But it didn’t stop the rush of emotion, and before he could stop himself, he was talking again.

“Did it ever occur to you why that coach in high school wanted me on the basketball team?” Louis asked.

“Well, I-”

“Or why I didn’t go to the prom?”

Phillip was just staring.

“Or why I ran away so many times? Or what I might have wanted to eat at Christmas?”

“Louis-”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might want something like greens or hot skillet corn bread or smoked turkey legs or anything that might be southern?” Louis stopped for a moment, trying to even his voice. “Or black?”

Now Phillip knew what he was talking about and his expression changed from confusion to indignation. Louis saw something else there-pity.

“I thought it was best for you to forget what happened to you before you came here,” Phillip said.

“Forget?” Louis asked.

“Yes.”

“Forget what happened to me, Phil, or forget what I was?”

“You talk like I tried to make you white,” Phillip said.

“Maybe you did.”

Phillip took a step back, and Louis thought he was going to leave the kitchen, but he didn’t.

“When they brought you here, Louis, you were eight years old,” Phillip said. “You had marks and bruises. And I didn’t care what color of skin those marks were on. I only wanted to make them go away.”

Louis could feel the pounding of his heart. But he had no words now. His throat was too tight and the emotions suddenly too strong. He knew none of this was meant for Phillip. It was something else. And it was about someone else. A different white man in a straw hat, and a face that no matter how hard Louis tried to bring into focus, remained a blur.

Suddenly Phillip was gone and Louis was alone in the kitchen. And for almost a full minute, he didn’t move. Then he sank into a chair at the table and put his head in his hands. He needed to apologize and he would. In a minute. But right now he didn’t want to move. Right now, it was all he could do to control the waterfall of images and memories. Keep them inside and steady. And God, he needed to be steady right now.

Phillip came back into the kitchen and Louis forced himself to look up. Phillip was holding something out to him. Photographs.

“These were taken the night before you arrived here. Do you want to see them?” Phillip asked. “Do you want to see what I saw?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Phillip set them on the table. They were Polaroids. Three of them. Probably taken by Children’s Service.

The first. His scrawny light brown back, splotched with the kind of bruises that came from being smacked.

The second. His butt. The skin colored a deep, bronzy red, some of the welts so big they looked like giant, bloody blisters. And on his upper thighs, ragged lacerations from where the buckle of the belt had sliced into his skin.

He sifted to the third picture. His face. Small, dirty, the lip split, his black hair uncombed and speckled with dirt.

But it was the eyes that pulled at his heart. A strange shade of smoky gray, wide with a beseeching stare. Desperate eyes in a tiny face, like something, someone, trapped behind a mask fighting to get out.

Louis stared at the writing on the wide white border. Louis W. Kincaid. Age 8. December 1967. Detroit, Michigan.

He remembered that December. And that house he had been in before coming here. He remembered Moe. And the man before Moe. But what he couldn’t remember anymore was his first seven years in Mississippi. He used to be able to grab a few images. His mother in a blue dress. His older sister and her bright red lipstick. His brother. . doing something near a river. And they were the good images.

But even those were fading.

His eyes drifted back to the photographs. God, he didn’t want these to be the only things left.

“I’m losing it,” he whispered. He looked up at Phillip.

“The good part of my past. I’m losing it and I don’t know how to stop it.”

Phillip lowered himself into a chair. He reached over and put a hand around the back of Louis’s neck and pulled him closer.