Fatal Flaw

29

I HAD never imagined, before driving into it, how amazingly beautiful was West Virginia. The steep mountain faces, the slender valleys carved by winding rivers, the roads twisting like snakes, the lovely white churches sitting beyond every bend. When Skink and I dropped south out of the long left arm of Maryland into West Virginia, it was like dropping into the landscape of a purer age. Even the sound track was purer – all we could get on the car radio was gospel stations. There were houses all along the route, some fine, some trailers beautifully maintained, some out-and-out hovels, but all seemed to flow naturally from the contours of the landscape. We followed the main road as it crossed a green metal bridge and twisted low through a fertile valley dotted with livestock and then turned off onto a smaller route that started a slow, inexorable climb into the mountains.

The car struggled until it reached the top of Point Mountain, with its inevitable white church just off the peak, and then fell as the road switched back and forth down, down. After a few minutes, to our left, we could catch glimpses through the leaves of something green and narrow and far beneath us, something that seemed, from that distance, more legendary than real. A valley, busy with farms and houses and lumber mills, isolated and lovely in its crevice in the western reaches of the Appalachians. We shared the road with pickups and beat old logging trucks as we continued down into the heart of that valley. Here and there, where the map showed a town, were mere scatterings of houses, a church, a lumber mill, clouds of sheep, another lumber mill, a collection of commercial buildings, a food mart, a Laundromat, a Chrysler-Dodge dealership. This was not a wealthy county, and there was the occasional shack, the rusted-out frame of a swing set, the boarded-up store, but still it was undeniably beautiful.

And then the valley widened and the road rose from the tumbling river and we saw a wooden frame, studded with the signs of the Lions Club, of the Kiwanis Club, of the Chamber of Commerce and the VFW and the various and sundry churches. On the frame, beneath the signs, the following words were affixed:

WELCOME TO PIERCE, POPULATION 649.

H.

I don’t want you to be thinking to all the crap that Tina she spits out. She’s just that way, always stirring up the pot once it stops a boiling. I like you, sure, like I like a lot of others, but I don’t think you’re like special or nothing, not like she says. Everyone knows that you’re with Grady and he’s with you and I don’t want you thinking nothing like what Tina says. I like hanging out with you, is all. It’s bad enough with Grady always on my ass. I don’t be needing you to get all weirded out too or anything. You looked at me yesterday like I was some alien from Mars or something and that’s why I’m writing this.

I maybe have a hard time talking about things. I find it easier sometimes to say what I feel when I’m alone with my mom’s old L. C. Smith. Face to face it’s harder, it’s like my tongue twists in on itself and I get all stupid. I’m not the sharpest spade, I know, as Mr. Perrine makes sure to tell me in front of everyone, but I’m not as dumb as I sound when I talk which is why I’m writing this instead of talking to you at school or on the phone or something.

That time in the quarry I wasn’t leaving cause I was sad or anything. I was just tired, I don’t know. And I feel weird when everyone starts lighting up. I know you say it’s cool that I don’t and no one says they mind but I feel weird. It’s like suddenly everyone’s at a party that I’m not invited to. And when everyone starts to laughing I don’t like that I don’t see nothing funny. I feel less alone sometimes when I’m alone, if you know what I mean. That’s why I up and left. And Grady saying all them things and making jokes about my leaving, that’s all right. I know Grady, he’s just like that, but I only wanted to be alone. Which is why when I first saw that you were following me maybe I wasn’t so nice and all. But I was glad finally that you did.

I didn’t know someone else felt as different and out of place as I do, though I have a hard time thinking you really do. I mean you’re so pretty and you’re with Grady and it’s like you fit in more than anyone. But I guess that goes to show. Some people think because I play ball I’m all this way or that way but I’m not any way like that, I’m my own way, which is, I guess, the problem.

Anyway, thanks for walking and for asking about Leon. I didn’t say much, I guess there’s not much to say, but it still was nice. It’s like now that he’s dead and with what happened and all it seems now no one wants to talk nothing about him. Maybe they’re trying to make it easier on me, I don’t know, but in a way it just makes it worse. Like he’s some huge secret when all he was was a kid. I miss him every day, but if I mention him now my dad just yells at me to put it behind me and move on. Move on to where, I want to ask. Where the hell am I going? He was my best friend, more I guess, and I feel real lost still without him even though it’s been already two years.

So that’s all I wanted to say. I don’t want you acting all weird around me. I’m hoping we can just be friends and hang out a little and maybe you’ll watch me play. That would be something nice.

J.

From the moment of Hailey’s murder I had assumed that Guy, somehow, was at the heart of the story leading to her death. He was my contact in, my secret rival, the third point of our triangle of betrayal, and so I couldn’t conceive of his somehow not being to blame for her murder. But after hearing Guy’s story I suddenly had a different sense of it all. Guy was a pawn, so was I, and the master strategist was Hailey herself.

So my focus now was where it should have been from the start, on Hailey. The answer to her death lay somewhere in her life, and she had given me a map to its most significant moments. In her safe-deposit box she herself had chosen what I would see. The photographs and documents that she had left for me would be my lever to pry open her past. And included among them were the letters, mash notes typed or scribbled by a boy long dead, words that bristled still with raw emotion.

H.

I know you’re mad at me and you got good reason and so I got nothing to say but I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. I don’t know what got into me. It was for a time like the only place I felt free was with you or on the ball field and now, after the fight and the suspension, there ain’t no place left. My dad he blames you for everything and tells me I’m not to see you no more and I tell him to go to hell and that also is on the razor’s edge of blows. So it all keeps getting worse and worse and I don’t know why. We’re just friends, just friends, why can’t everyone see that? What’s going on between you and Grady got nothing to do with me and what happened between Grady and me got nothing to do with you neither. We’ve been cruising toward this for years, Grady and me, only so many times you can hear yourself being called mountain trash without doing something about it. This has been coming since our boyhoods, you was just his excuse.

But I’m not here writing to apologize about Grady. It’s the other thing, the thing that got you pissed at me in the first place. I can’t be like you want me to be, I can’t be all chatty and confessional, it’s not in me. I know plenty of folk who go around telling their life’s story to anyone who happens by but I’ve got no urge to puke my guts out on anybody’s front porch.

We all got a secret. I know you got yours, I can feel it, large and dark, but I got mine too. When I think about what I keep hidden it’s so large it dwarfs me. Whatever you see on the outside is just some sort of a lie, it’s the insides that matter and that’s got to stay inside. Sometimes the secret is so heavy I feel about to be crushed, but it’s never hard keeping it. I might as easily just rip out my insides and let you take a look as to start blatting about like a sheep. It’s me, it’s what I am, I wouldn’t want to survive without it but like a kidney it ain’t nothing I want to be showing around neither. I don’t want you getting pissed at me but it won’t do me no good talking about it, that won’t change a thing. It’s there and I live with it every day, and there’s nothing to be done. So when you say I’m not communicating well there it is. I ain’t. And if that’s gonna keep you mad at me, so be it.

I don’t know when I’ll be back in school. Coach wants me back out there soon as he can the way Delmore’s been booting the ball around short but it’s not up to him. Grady’s due out of the hospital in a few days and Chief Edmonds says I have to wait until he’s out to see if they are pressing charges. They won’t let me back in school until then so if I’m gonna see you before I’m going to have to sneak out but I’m willing if you are.

Just take a little pity on me and don’t ask too many questions cause right now things are such a mess I don’t know what I’m going to do and I don’t know how I’m going to do what I need to do if you stay mad at me.

J.

Along with the letters in the box were the photographs, heartrending because I knew how it all turned out, how but not why. There was a picture of two girls, young girls, just kids, arm in arm, blond in their shifts, frowning both. I could see her face in the picture, Hailey’s face, the cheekbones not yet pronounced, the eyebrows not yet arched, the lips not the full buds they would become, but there it was, her sad face – twice. I knew she had a sister, I never knew she had a twin. Roylynn and Hailey.

I didn’t glimpse the pictures once and quickly, like moving through a friend’s photo album. Instead I thumbed through them often, obsessively, time and time again. It was a strange sensation, this examining of the photographs, unseemly in a way, like pawing through the dresser drawers of some other family’s memories. But they were a part of my route into her past. Roylynn had stayed in West Virgina and Hailey had left, Roylynn was still alive and Hailey was dead. How had that happened? They had shared each other’s features, but what else, what history? I wondered if the pictures would provide a clue. I stacked them and restacked them, I shuffled them randomly and went through them again, trying to find, in the differing orders, a sense behind them, trying to divine the story.

Here was one, the nuclear family, twin girls, still just babies with their mother and their father, their poor doomed father, short, swarthy, his forearms thick and meaty. What little girl wouldn’t feel safe in those forearms? They were smiling, the parents, in that picture, and the babies had that satisfied contempt on their shapeless faces that marked them as happy. This was the “before” picture. Another, burned into my memory, Hailey dead and bloody on the mattress thirty years later, was the”after.”

A photograph of the father, alone now, in a uniform of some sort with a peaked cap, his truck driver’s uniform. Smiling, cocky, gladiator of the road, master of his destiny, hero of country-and-western song, off to haul his cargo of lumber until a load shifted and a brace failed to hold and he was gone.

Where was the sense in the order?

I shifted them around, and now the father was replaced by another. It was a picture of one of the girls holding the hand of a man, not the father, a tall, rawboned man with a grizzled beard. Oh, I recognized him, yes I did. Lawrence Cutlip, younger and harder, not a man to be messed with for certain, but there, holding on to that girl when she needed him most. Who was the girl, Roylynn or Hailey? I couldn’t tell, but there she stood, the girl in the picture, her father gone, squeezing, as if for dear life, the hand of the man who now was her sole protection against an oblivious world.

H.

I am flying, I am floating through the air and I don’t never want to come down. Never. I always thought when it came it would be heavy, leaden, that it would clutch me at the throat like it did before, but this is like drinking freedom pure. I am soaring, held high by something so magical it has no name. The moment we left apart I ran home, to my room, to my desk, so I could write all the things I found it impossible to say in the moment.

I know I’m still in a world of trouble but that don’t have grip on me no more. When you hit a ball solid on the meat of the bat there is an instant when the whole force flows though you like an easy wave. It’s why I love the game so, the feel of that easy wave that flows through you for the instant it takes to finish the swing and send the ball a flying. But now I feel like I am riding that wave, surfing it like a Beach Boy’s song all sweet and sure. All I can think about is you, your smile, your soft hands, the red of your lips, the silver tang of electricity I tasted in your mouth. How did this happen, I keep asking myself, how? One moment we’re in the quarry, talking about something that happened in the past, huddling on the rock, talking as friends, leaning close, our knees butting up one against the other like friends, talking in near whispers, and the next moment I am overcome with something so powerful that it starts me to shaking and has me shaking still. There was a switch and I don’t know how it turned or why but suddenly everything changed and the world was lit with a light I didn’t know existed and I am flying. I don’t know how it happened, I only know I have never been happy before, never, not like this, no, never.

I was wrong when I said there was no use talking. I can’t find the words to say what it felt like to finally trust someone enough to tell it all to, to tell it all and to see a reaction so different than ever I expected. There was no disgust or hate or even pity, you was just listening and nodding like, yeah, okay, and then what. You weren’t sitting there like a judge, you were there like a friend and that meant so much even before the wave hit. And I was wrong when I said I was nothing but the secret because this is so strong, what I’m feeling now, and so outside what I had ever felt before that it makes me doubt whether it was so dark a secret in the first place. Maybe it was like you said, maybe we was young and feeling things we didn’t understand and ended up doing things that meant nothing except that we loved each other in the best way. Maybe like you said it’s common, it happens, and then you move on. And maybe we would have if Leon hadn’t gotten so scared like he did and then played that game with the train that he knew he’d lose. Or maybe it wasn’t just the talking that cured me, maybe you chased it out too, chased it with your kiss, like an angel chasing out something evil in my soul.

Whatever it is I am ready to face what comes next. I know Grady’s been talking about me, talking out of that wired jaw, and so he’ll try something. I know that I even so much as cough in class I’ll be out on my ear. I know that the only reason I’m back on the team is because I was hitting.467 and that if my average drops or I start fumbling at short coach will bench my ass and smile when he does it. I know all that, but I’m not afraid, I’m excited. I can’t wait. I can’t wait to go to sleep tonight so I can wake up tomorrow and see your face and then after school and after practice run to the quarry so I can cover you in kisses till it’s dark and we have to go home and then do it all again the day after and then again and then again.

J.

Another photograph. The two girls again, older now, young, good-looking girls, high school girls.

Is there is something primordial in the attraction of high school girls for the male of the species? When we are younger, say, in junior high, they are the unavailable avatars of desire. What would Juliet have been in the Verona High School, a sophomore? We can barely wait to grow older, to gain confidence, to take our turn with them. But when we ourselves are in high school, most of us find, to our shock, that the years did not bring the confidence or skills we expected to have come as our due. They are there, waiting for us, the high school girls, and yet we fumble our way into disaster after disaster and leave them unsatisfied and confused and looking for college boys. And then later, when we are old enough so that our skills and confidence have caught up with our desires, the high school girls are once again unavailable. We give them their own slang, jailbait, and prudently cross them off the list of possibilities. But does the desire ever die? Do we ever see a pretty high school girl walk by with her pleated skirt and young high breasts and not sigh in disappointment?

And now here, in the photograph, we have the orgasmic fantasy of every red-blooded heterosexual male on the planet earth: two great-looking high school girls who happen to be twins. But instead of desire, this picture provoked curiosity in me. One was dressed prim and proper, books held in front of her body like a shield, smiling shyly. The other stared straight at the camera, arms on hips, hip cocked, leaning slightly forward, defiantly, but without a smile. It was a sad defiance. Look at what I am, it said, look at what I have become. Oh, yes, two girls, twins, but now I could tell them apart. I knew nothing about Roylynn, but this girl, this girl staring with sad defiance at the camera, this girl was my Hailey. And so the question: Why the difference? What had come into their lives and pressed them in so very different ways?

One other picture grips at me. A boy in a uniform, a baseball uniform. He’s on one knee, arms leaning on his bat, posing like a major leaguer. Solid, handsome, either serious or sad, it’s hard to tell in the old black-and-white. Jesse Sterrett, I presume.

In the letters it was clear what had developed between Jesse Sterrett and Hailey Prouix, something strong and indelible, passionate enough to have its great joys and great troubles. On a fragment of paper, a ripped portion of envelope, written in a hand overcome with some long-vanished remorse, he pleaded with her from the bottom of his soul.

It’s killing me ever day, ever damn day that we’re not together. My heart weeps in the wanting. I’m less than a man without you, a carcass already near dead, dying of lost love. You done this to me, you stole my world like a thief. Don’t listen to what they are saying, it’s nothing but lies, lies and damn lies. I’m sorry for what I done but I never had no choice, I only done what I had to. Never a love been so fierce or fearsome, never has it cost so high or been worth the entire world. It’ll kill me, it will, and damn soon. I’m dying for damn sure without you. Yes, I surely am.

The love was fierce and fearsome, seemingly worth every sacrifice, and I hoped so, because I knew how it ended, knew where Jesse Sterrett breathed his last breath and where he died. But why? What secrets had torn them apart? Jesse had a secret, something between him and Leon, his friend, something that dragged at Jesse’s soul and drove Leon possibly to his death. It wasn’t too hard to figure it out, two boys, two best friends, down by the tracks, the changes happening to their bodies, to their thoughts, waking up with strange sensations, two boys experimenting. Oh, it wasn’t too hard to figure it out, Jesse’s dark secret that wasn’t so dark, his strange encounter that was less strange than he could ever have imagined. But Jesse also mentioned Hailey’s own secret, large and dark. What was that, and how did that turn her in the direction of her life? Were the two deaths two decades apart linked in any way? Could learning the truths behind that death shed any light upon Hailey’s? And why had Hailey, with a ragged line of pencil, slashed a brutal zig-zag-zig through the last of of Jesse Sterrett’s letters, as if she were a deranged Zorro trying to deface the words?

H.

I am so angry I could strangle a porcupine, and scared too, so scared, impossibly scared. I love you so much, want you so much, but now I have learned that secret you’ve been hiding, my anger burns least as bright as the love.

I don’t know what to do, but I got to do something and there is only two answers that I can see. One is to stay and fight. Take my word on this, if I do stay there is no way it won’t turn to blood. My rage is so murderous now I couldn’t stop with one blow here or there. Remember how I was with Grady on the ground that time, how I couldn’t stop myself from slamming his grinning face, how the only reason I didn’t kill his ass was that you stopped me? The way I feel now is ten times worse, twenty times, a hundred, and nothing, no power, not even what I feel for you will stop me. I’ll kill him, I will, and they’ll lock up my ass even though the bastard had it coming, and that would be fine by me because I would have done right by you which is all I care about.

But there is another answer, to run, to leave, to up and get the hell out of this town, this state. I know we got nothing, you and me, nothing but the burden of our pasts, but we can make a go of it. What we feel one for the other will get us through. The scouts have been sniffing. I’ll be up in the next draft and till then I can play semipro somewhere or in some unaffiliated pro league where they’ll sign anyone, no questions asked. I’ll talk my way into a tryout and smack the apple all over the yard and they’ll sign me, I know they’ll sign me. And if they find us and come after us we’ll go down to Mexico and change our names and I’ll play down there. They got leagues down there that play all year. And when I’m seasoned enough I’ll make the bigs, I know it, and we’ll be so rich we’ll have a swimming pool the size of this entire county.

All I’m asking is that you trust me. All I’m asking is that you put your faith in my feelings for you. I got a truck from my cousin Ned, a beat-up old thing but it runs, and I’ve packed what I need and I’m ready to go. But I ain’t going without you.

I’ll be at the quarry tonight, I’ll be waiting for you. If you trust me enough to come I’ll dedicate my every waking hour of the rest of my life to making you happy, I will. I swear. But if you don’t come, if you won’t run away with me, then I’ll do it the other way. I’ll do what I need to do to protect you and whatever consequences that come my way I’ll bear gladly because I’ll be bearing them for you. Tonight, I’ll be waiting. Tonight.

J.

30

PIERCE, WEST VIRGINIA, was a county seat, and to prove it, on a hill smack in the center, they had set the county courthouse, a blocky brown building with a single turret, built of sandstone quarried out of a ledge of rock at the far end of the town. To one side of the courthouse the city climbed the slope of the mountain, to the other it fell gently toward the river and then reached across to the far bank, where scattered houses sat in the shadow of another steep rise. The main street, imaginatively named Main Street, jogged around the courthouse. It was built up with brick buildings, squat and aged black, all pressed together along the narrow street as if real estate had once been a prized commodity in the county. The buildings had signs from the middle of the last century, stylized neon banners advertising gifts and flowers and the Courthouse Hotel, signs that hearkened back to a prosperous past. But Pierce didn’t look prosperous now. It looked as if nothing had been built in fifty years, except for the modern and unpleasant Rite Aid that sat just before the turnoff. Something had slipped away from Pierce, some vitality. In its buildings and slumped posture you could sense the vaguely disturbing notion that Pierce was at the heart of an American dream that had suddenly shifted.

We drove around a bit to get our bearings and then took the Hailey Prouix tour of the city. Our first stop was the high school, stretching out on the banks of the river, home of the Fighting Wildcats. It was big for the town, too big, and the buses in the lot told us that children from all over the valley attended. This was where the likes of Hailey Prouix could mix with the wealthy Grady Pritchett as well as mountain trash like Jesse Sterrett.

Our second stop was up the hill from Main Street, a lovely little house painted white with a porch that wrapped around the front like a generous ribbon. The lawn was neatly trimmed, the flowers in the beds were blooming brightly, a swing set could be seen in the side yard. It was the all-American home, it even had a picket fence. The sign said THE LIPTONS, and it seemed as if the Liptons had lived there for generations, but that was an illusion. This was Hailey Prouix’s girlhood home. I wondered how it smelled when she was young, whether the paint then was peeling, the lawn untrimmed, the beds brown and weed-ridden. I wondered what I could have seen through those windows had I been here twenty years before. But time had bleached that house clean of whatever then went on inside. Nothing to be learned here.

And, finally, nothing to be learned either at the quarry on the far edge of the town. I was directed to it by a kid at the Sunoco who eyed me suspiciously when I asked, as if it were a sacred place that I was intending to desecrate. I took a road that twisted up into the mountain and stopped at a turnoff the boy had described. There was a fence, and there were signs warning of dangers and signs prohibiting trespassing, and there was a gate wrapped with chains and fastened by a lock. But the lock was rusted, the signs defaced, the fence torn apart at certain edges. It didn’t take a thing to slip through.

It was getting dark now, but we could see the contours of what had been left after the stone had been ripped from the earth. The walls formed a shoehorn-shaped canyon browned by age, with bushes and scrub trees growing in the cracks, weakening the stone as the plants fought for purchase. There was a wide ledge below us and a path that seemed to travel down to the ledge, a path that required grabbing hold of certain bushes and the roots of certain trees as you made your way down. The ledge was uneven, rough, and littered with beer cans and cigarette packs and graffiti. JK &FS. CATS RULE.JOHN G.LOVES TINA R. I wondered if there was a GRADY LOVES HAILEY or maybe a HP &JS, but I couldn’t spot such from where we stood. And then, beneath the ledge, at the bottom part of the quarry, was a road that rolled out to the river, to take the mined stone to the trains. Between the great stone walls and the road was a reservoir of sorts that seemed to be filled deep with water. I could imagine it all, hanging on the ledge and swimming in the reservoir, a few beers, a little laughter, high dives and skinny-dipping, shrieks of abandon, a little tonguing under the cover of the night, or maybe something a little more than a little tonguing. It was almost enough to make me wish I were seventeen again. Almost. This was the lake, I supposed, that drew the local kids on hot summer nights. And this was the lake from where they dragged the body of Jesse Sterrett.

“So what’s the agenda, mate?” said Skink as we stood over the edge and looked into the dark water.

“Go in town, ask some questions, find the truth about that boy’s death.”

“Sounds simple, it does. So simple, you’d have thought someone would have done it by now.”

“You’d have thought.”

“We just stop anyone on the street, or do you have a plan?”

“I have a plan.”

“That’s encouraging.”

Pause.

“Don’t you want to know what it is?” I asked.

“Not particularly.”

“Not even curious.”

“Only thing I’m curious about is why you brought me along.”

“A lawyer always brings an investigator when he questions witnesses.”

“That he does. But my guess, Vic, is you don’t want me nowhere near that courtroom.”

He was right, I didn’t. As far as I knew, only Skink could connect me to Hailey Prouix, and that I couldn’t allow. “Maybe not. Maybe I just like your company.”

“I am charming, I am. But if I was a hundred and fifty dollars a day charming, I’d be in another line of work. You don’t know what the hell you’re getting into, do you?”

“Nope.”

“And you wanted to bring some muscle.”

“Something like that.”

“All right, then.”

“Don’t you want to know my plan?”

“Nah,” he said, turning from the edge and heading back for the path up the hill. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re chasing here after your own tail. I don’t need no plan. I’ll just sit back and watch the show.”

31

“COURSE I remember,” said Chief Edmonds as he wrapped his meaty hands around a coffee cup. “How could I forget? A sight like that’s not something slips away so easy. When they pulled him out of the water, he was bloated and white like a German Wasserwurst and the back of his head was cracked open like a walnut.”

I tried to ignore the unpleasant food imagery as I finished my breakfast.

We were in Kim’s Luncheonette on Main Street, a large, barren café that, with its high ceiling and uncomfortable spaciousness, seemed to have taken over for a failed hardware store in one of the city’s squat brick buildings. The plain Formica tables were sparsely filled with grizzled patrons, who slumped over their meals and drank their coffees in silence.

“How was everything, Harvey?” said the woman behind the counter when a man stepped over to pay for his eggs.

“Just fine.”

“That’ll be a dollar eighty-six.”

“Uh-oh, I ain’t got it.”

“Then it will be four-fifty.”

They both shared a laugh as he handed over his money. Behind the counter at Kim’s was a large stainless steel milk refrigerator with one serving spigot, the red sign above the spigot holding a single word: WHOLE.

Edmonds and I finished up our breakfasts: eggs, ham, grits, and biscuits with white milk gravy. Skink pawed with his spoon at his milkless oatmeal. The dress code required blue jeans and baseball caps advertising various farm implements, and so Skink and I stood out more than a bit, Skink in his brown suit, me in my shirtsleeves. The chief sat stolidly in his flannel shirt and green John Deere baseball cap. Edmonds’s name had been in Jesse’s letters to Hailey. It hadn’t taken much to look him up in the Pierce telephone directory, and it hadn’t taken much more to get him out to Kim’s. Edmonds, now retired, seemed to welcome the company and was willing enough to talk about Hailey. Trying to get people to speak to me was pretty much the extent of the wondrous plan I had wrought: I would take my cue from the letters, talk to the principals involved, try to shake something loose.

I said I had a plan; I didn’t say it was brilliant.

In the middle of breakfast I had dropped the picture of the boy in his baseball uniform onto the center of our table. I figured that might start things shaking, and maybe it did. When Edmonds saw it, he closed his eyes for a moment and exhaled the name. “Jesse Sterrett.”

“What happened?” I asked after he had described the corpse.

“Who the hell knows?” said Edmonds. “That damn quarry. In Jesse’s time they necked and did their drugs there. In my time we necked and drank our beer there. Now they neck and do who knows what there. We’ve got a fence all around and signs warning everyone to stay away, warning that the rock faces have grown unsteady over time, but I suppose there never was a danger sign that teenagers didn’t ignore. We were forever patrolling, shining in our spotlights, but it didn’t do any good. It was only a matter of time before something happened. Best as we could tell, he fell down, cracked his head, and then tumbled into the water.”

“An accident?” said Skink.

“Yep.”

“Everyone thought so?” I pressed.

“All that mattered, me and the coroner.”

“Doc Robinson.”

“That’s right.”

“How about the boy’s father?”

“You know parents. If a kid crashes the car, it must be a dangerous turn that should have been fixed years ago. If the kid busts a knee in football, it’s the coach’s fault. Always looking for someone to blame. How else could you lawyers stay in business? Jesse’s dad didn’t want to believe that his son was out at the quarry smoking that marihuana and just got careless.”

“Jesse Sterrett didn’t smoke marihuana,” I said.

Edmonds was taken up short. “How do you know that?”

“And didn’t you find it peculiar that a week after Jesse is in a brutal fight that puts a boy in the hospital, he’s found dead?”

Chief Edmonds squinted his hard blue eyes at me. “Come again with what you’re doing here?”

“We’re just trying to understand what happened to Hailey. We have the idea…” I glanced at Skink. “I have the idea that there might be some connection between what happened to Hailey and what happened to Jesse Sterrett.”

“I’m sorry as hell about Hailey. I knew her father, played cards with her uncle, and what’s happened with her sister is just plain sad. I’m sorry as hell, but I’m not surprised. She had a wild streak no one could tame.”

“What is it that happened with her sister?”

Edmonds looked at me and pursed his lips. “I’m willing to tell you what I know about Hailey, but that’s as far as I go. Though I’ll tell you this for free: There’s nothing between what happened to her and what happened to that boy.”

“Weren’t Hailey and Jesse going together when he died?”

“Not as I recall. I seem to recall that Jesse had other interests.”

“Like baseball.”

“Just other interests. And as I remember it, Hailey was seeing someone else at the time. That fight, it was just something between two boys. It’s not unusual ’round here. This one just got a little out of hand. From what I learned, they had been at each other’s throats for years.”

“Jesse and Grady,” I said.

“That’s right. Grady Pritchett. He was like a spur in Jesse’s side, never gave it a moment’s rest. Two guys hate each other like that, you don’t need a reason to fight. From what I could tell, the fight was Grady’s doing. That’s why we let Jesse go back to school and play ball after just a few days.”

“And you never thought there might be a link between the fight and the death?”

“Like I said, it looked like an accident to us. But we did our jobs. Police work’s the same out here as anywhere else. We brought in Grady for questioning. Said he knew nothing about it, said it convincingly, too. He’d been in trouble before, and he had lied to us before, and this time looked to me he wasn’t lying. But still we checked him out. Oh, we did ourselves a full investigation. Doc Robinson insisted, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. On the night of the accident Grady said he was with someone at the time. We went out and proved up his alibi. Witness we talked to was as definite as could be. So that was that.”

I leaned forward. “Who was the witness?”

Edmonds took a sip of his coffee. “Hailey,” he said. “And she didn’t have no doubt about it.”

32

“SO EXPLAIN this to me,” I said to Skink as we drove out of Pierce, following the path of the river. “Jesse is crazy in love with Hailey, he promises to protect Hailey from Grady Pritchett.”

“This all from the letters?”

“From what I could tell; Jesse wasn’t exactly a Hemingway when it came to clarity. So he puts Grady in the hospital, and it sounds like the next thing he’s going to do is put Grady in the morgue. And then, boom, Jesse is found dead and Grady’s alibi is Hailey.”

“Dames,” said Skink.

“Dames? Dames? Who uses the word ‘dames’ anymore?”

“I do.”

“What were you, a sailor?”

“My daddy was. Anyways, you never can tell with a dame. First they blow hot, then they blow cold. It’s all the same to me, just so long as they’re blowing.”

“Your level of enlightenment is dazzling.”

“Thank you.”

We took a right at the Foodmart and drove over a one-lane bridge, as per our instructions. There were three roads leading off to the right, we took the one with the steepest climb up a ravine jutting into the side of the mountain. The road switchbacked once and then again as it climbed the ravine. With a sudden jolt the asphalt gave out, and we were riding now on dirt, soaked with grease and hardened with pebbles. I checked the directions once again as the car shimmied and shook in its climb.

“It should be just up ahead,” I said, and then there it was, a ragged metal mailbox with the the address on the side, two ruts shooting off sharply to the right creating their own switchback as they rose deeper into the yaw of the ravine. A sign was posted on a tree by the drive, the words painted roughly in red:

NO TURNAROUND

I checked the address and then looked over to Skink. “Guess it’s all right to go in, since we have no intention of turning around.”

I steered the car into the drive and slowly rumbled up the pitted ruts. At a sharp turn in the climb there was another sign, this one nailed onto a post:

NO SALESMEN

“You selling anything?” I asked Skink.

“Not me, mate.”

“Me neither.”

I continued up, moving now out of the ravine toward the river, only much higher. The road was getting steeper, my ears popped, and I didn’t like that there was no barrier on the far edge of the drive, that one bad bounce could send us tumbling. On the hill above us I spied a rusted old truck, wheels missing, suspended in a mad pursuit down the side of the mountain. God knows what was stopping it from skidding off the hill and crushing us. In its windshield was another sign, this one, too, painted in red, a blood red I now noticed:

NO HUNTING

“It’s a good thing we left the shotguns and coon dogs at home,” I said.

Farther up the road there was a scraggly grove of weed trees with a sign nailed onto a thin trunk:

NO TRESPASSING

“We don’t seem to be welcome,” said Skink. “What again is the purpose of our visit?”

“To trespass.”

“I feel so much better now. Look up there.”

Another sign:

GO THE HELL AWAY

“That’s to the point, at least,” I said. “Can’t say he’s not being clear.”

I slowed down now, made two final turns up the slope, the car dipping into the ruts, its undercarriage savaged by thick weeds and loose rock. The drive rose through the trees until it ended at a turnaround. An old brown truck was parked there, facing us. Ragged wooden stairs led up to the left, and at the front of the path was one final sign:

BEWARE OF DOGS

I didn’t have time to come up with another weak witticism before something hard slammed into my side of the car and suddenly, at my window, a giant snarling face was baring its teeth and yelping like a maniac.

I turned to look at Skink. His head was thrown back, his mouth a rictus of fear. On the other side of his window a savage face grimaced, saliva falling in streams from yellow teeth.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

“You don’t like dogs?”

“Not ones that are trying to bite my noggin off.”

“Oh, these little pooches don’t mean any harm,” I said as the black dog on my side continued its yelping and the brown dog on Skink’s side snarled and snapped in frustration at the glass between his teeth and Skink’s neck. “They just want us to rub them on their bellies.”

“Turn around, mate, and get us out of here,” said Skink, a real panic in his voice.

“Not yet.” I banged the horn and waited. The black dog danced at the side of the car and kept up its yelping. The brown dog smashed its muzzle against the glass and snapped its jaws. The car rocked.

“Please, please,” said Skink. “Turn around.”

“What is it with you and dogs?” I said.

“Let’s just say I had an unpleasant encounter with a bulldog in my youth.”

“I hear once they chomp their teeth around something, you have to kill them to get them off.”

“Get us the hell out of here.”

Just then a shot rang out.

Skink and I ducked down and stayed down.

“Maybe you should pull out your gun to be safe,” I said.

“I didn’t bring no gun.”

“I thought you were bringing a gun.”

“Across state lines on a fool’s errand? I don’t think so, mate.”

“What good are you without a gun?”

“Plenty damn good. I’ve got fists of iron and nerves of steel.”

“Except when it comes to dogs.”

I cautiously raised my head and peeked out my window. On the staircase leading up the hill a man now stood, cradling a shotgun, the dogs sitting calmly on the step beneath him. He was an old man, thick and unshaved, sparse clumps of hair standing out from his huge head. I sat up slowly, my hands raised to show I held nothing in them. I whispered for Skink to do the same.

I leaned over to open the window. The gun jerked in the man’s arms. I sat up straight again, gesturing my intentions. The gun settled, and the man nodded.

“Are you Mr. Sterrett?” I said, sticking my head carefully out the now open window, my hands still in sight.

“Who’s looking for him?” said the man.

“My name is Victor Carl. I’m a lawyer from Philadlephia, and I haven’t come to help him or to sue him. I simply have some questions.”

“Didn’t you see them signs?”

“Yes I did, I surely did. But I’m not a salesman or a hunter. I didn’t see a sign saying no lawyers.”

“Guess I’ll be putting one up tomorrow.”

“But until then I’d like to ask Mr. Sterrett some questions about his son.”

“Which one?”

“How many does he have?”

“Five boys, three girls.”

I whistled. “And Mrs. Sterrett?”

“Gone now going on five years.”

“I guess the eight kids wore her out.”

“Not the ones still around, they didn’t. It was worrying about the ones that warn’t.”

“I’ve come to talk about Jesse.”

“He’s one of the ones that warn’t.”

“I know he is, Mr. Sterrett. I’m trying to find out why.”

“Hell, I can tell you why.”

“I was hoping you could.”

“You a connoisseur of fine wine, boy?”

“Not really,” I said.

“That’s handy, ’cause I ain’t got none. But I got some corn liquor that I save for special occasions and, you being a lawyer and my dogs being hungry, I’m guessing this qualifies.”

“Is it any good?”

“Course it ain’t no good, but it works.”

“It will pin our ears back, is that it?”

“Like six-inch nails.”

“That would be just wonderful. Especially for my friend here,” I gestured at Skink, “who could use a little cosmetic surgery. But I was wondering if you might help him out a bit. My friend is afraid of dogs.”

“Afraid of these old hounds? Tell your friend Fire and Brimstone here wouldn’t hurt a soul. All you need do is rub they bellies and they’ll be your slaves for life.”

THE HOUSE was just a ways up the path, perched on the hill as if it was getting ready to jump off and fly. Or maybe jump off and not fly. Its walls listed, its paint peeled, its porch sagged low in the middle. Weeds sprouted tall around it, and to the side sat a pile of old metal, twisted fencing, rusted buckets, a refrigerator with its door still dangerously on. We sat out on the wreck of a porch, avoiding the patches where the wood had collapsed through. We each held a glass jar of the corn liquor, a clear, toxic brew that burned all the way down the throat and then set fire to the stomach. I liked it, actually, and was afraid of it all at the same time. Sterrett sat on a big old setting chair, the jug resting by his side, I sat on a crate, Skink sat stiffly on a rocking chair, the dogs curled at his feet, as if Skink’s discomfort was for them like an old familiar blanket. And the view from the porch, well, the view from the porch was astounding.

It flew down into the valley, capturing a swath of green pasture and the tiny sway of cattle before it picked up the flow of the river, with its white froth pouring around jutting rocks. A hawk soared beneath us on patrol, gliding between the sheer cliff faces of the mountains rising on either side. We sat and sipped and listened to the silence, which wasn’t actually a silence at all but a riot of insectile rattles and bird twitters, the scurrying footfalls of rodents, the strange, forbidding rustle of the undergrowth.

“You could sell this view,” I said.

“Yep,” said Mr. Sterrett, “but why would I?”

“The dogs seem to like you, Phil,” I said.

“My luck,” he said.

“What was it that bulldog did to you anyway?” I said.

He scowled and didn’t answer.

Sterrett said, “I heard tell once they get a bite on you-”

“I hear that one more time,” interrupted Skink, “I’m going to burst a vessel.”

“Skink apparently had himself some sort of childhood calamity,” I said.

Sterrett looked at me, then at Skink, then back at me. “I know some about them childhood calamities.” He raised his jar slightly. “You want more?”

I took a sip from my jar, felt the liquor roil down my throat and ignite the eggs and grits and grease of my breakfast, and shook my head no. Skink glanced at the dogs, drained his jar, and held it out for more. Sterrett hoisted the jug and poured.

“I understand that Jesse was a ballplayer,” I said.

“Yep.”

“Any good?”

“Damn good.”

“Did you ever play?”

“Some, but not as good as him.”

“It must have been hard, when he died.”

“He didn’t die.”

I glanced at Skink.”No?”

“He was kilt. Simple as that.”

“The police chief and the coroner ruled it an accident.”

“Yes they did.”

“But you don’t believe them.”

“No I don’t.”

“Why’s that, Mr. Sterrett? What makes you think they were mistaken?”

“Warn’t no mistake.”

Sterrett took a sip from his jar and then rose without speaking and walked slowly off the porch and to the rear of the shack. I stood to follow, but one of the dogs, Fire or Brimstone, I didn’t know which was which, raised his neck and growled, and I sat right down again. We waited a few moments and a few moments more. Skink looked down at the dogs and reached a hand slowly to touch the fur on the black dog’s back. The dog picked up his head, Skink jerked his hand away. Sterrett came back around the side of the house, made his slow way up the steps and into his chair.

“So you think it was a conspiracy, is that it?” I said, starting right again where we had left off.

“Let’s just say they was all in the game.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The card game. High-stakes poker, every other Thursday at the Chevy dealership. Chief Edmonds, Doc Robinson, Gus Pritchett, Larry Cutlip, and whatever other fool they could get to join ’em. Word was sometimes even Reverend Henson sat in, throwing away his paycheck.”

“Pritchett?”

“That’s right. He owned the dealership, the five and dime, the Quick Mart, and most of the rest of the county, not excluding the judge.”

“Let me guess. He’s Grady Pritchett’s father.”

“Was. Dead now.”

“So was he a winner or a loser in the game?”

“He was rich enough it didn’t much matter. What mattered was that Doc Robinson was a drunk and Edmonds never saw a straight he wouldn’t draw inside to, and the two of them was in so damn deep they couldn’t see the stars ’cause they pants was pulled too high.”

“They owed money to Cutlip, the gambler?”

“That’s right. And the thing about old Larry was, he was a hard man.”

“A man you didn’t want to stiff.”

Sterrett shook his head. “And right after my boy’s death, Cutlip falls into money and busts out to them bright lights in Vegas, and them boys, they rule it all an accident.”

Skink’s hand was now halted in the air just above the black dog’s back. He took another sip and then reached down, tentatively scratching the fur. “Who were they protecting?” he asked.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“You said you knew who killed your son,” I said.

“Never said such a thing. Don’t know for sure.”

“But you have suspicions.”

“I might, yes.”

“You think it was Grady Pritchett?”

“Ain’t right to start spouting off without knowing for sure.”

“But you think it was Grady and that his father bought off the chief and the coroner by paying their debts to Cutlip.”

“Never said such a thing. Don’t know nothing for sure. This man you’re representing, did he really kill Hailey?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“What do you think about it?” said Sterrett, talking now to Skink.

“Oh, I think he did it, all right,” said Skink, bending over to scratch the underside of the black dog’s neck. “I think he killed her dead, and now his lawyer is trying to wiggle his arse free.”

I stared hard for a moment at Skink, hurt, as if betrayed.

“Well, he asked,” said Skink.

“See there,” said Sterrett, turning back to me. “A man never does know for sure. If I knew for sure, I’d a done something about it by now. But I can tell you this, it warn’t no accident.”

I didn’t say anything, hoping he would interject himself into the uncomfortable silence, but he didn’t. He stayed quiet, as if the silence wasn’t uncomfortable to him, and we listened to nature settle into the afternoon as the corn liquor settled into our blood. We sat there for a long time in the quiet. The brown dog scooted around Skink’s legs and whined quietly until Skink scratched his neck, too.

“You know where Grady Pritchett is now?” I asked finally.

“He owns a car lot out in Lewis County. Left to him by his daddy in the will.”

“How’s it doing?”

“Not so good, I hear,” he said with a slight smile.

“You know what kind of car he drives?”

“Black Chevy pickup, front right wheel well all beat to hell.”

“I bet, Mr. Sterrett, you know the license plate, too?”

“I won’t deny it. No telling what things you might learn through the years that turn doubts into certainties.”

“You know, maybe I’m crazed, but I could have sworn you told me you knew who did it?”

“No, I did not,” he said, sitting back.

The black dog raised his head, let out a contented moan, and turned over to let Skink scratch his belly. The brown dog followed suit and Skink subdued them both with soft rubs. “He didn’t say he knew who killed his son,” said Skink. “He said he knew why.”

I turned from Skink’s seduction of the dogs to look back at the old man. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

Sterrett rubbed his thumb along the edge of the jar.

“So tell me, Mr. Sterrett, why did your son die?”

He waited a moment, took a drink, let the alcohol settle. Maybe he had taken too much of the liquor, because as he sat there and thought, his jaw began to quiver.

“I loved my boy,” he said. “But it’s not always an easy thing to show. And when you’re working too damn hard and fighting to feed and clothe a family, sometimes you figure the showing can wait. When he was young, Jesse had a friend he could go to, but then they got confused about things and the friend died, and Jesse, I think Jesse was never the same. I tried, I did. But I knew things then maybe I shouldn’t have known and wasn’t under as much control as I might have been. How do you show a boy that you love him still when every look out of his eyes is full of sorrow and every word out of your mouth comes out in anger? I didn’t know the answer, and I live with it every day of my life. It weighs me down like it weighed down my Sarah until she just let go. I thought I was showing what I felt by arguing with him. I thought he could tell from the volume how much I cared. But volume ain’t enough. Listening maybe might have been better. That’s why he died. ’Cause I didn’t know how to show him that I loved him.”

“You blame yourself,” I said.

“What you don’t find at home, you look elsewhere for. And generally you find it in the worst places possible. And that’s what he done. He found hisself a girl that had nothing in her but pain and hurt and the seeds of destruction. You could almost tell it just by looking at her, that might have been the attraction, for all I know. But that’s where he went looking for what he wasn’t finding at home.”

“You’re talking about Hailey Prouix,” I said. “You think she killed him?”

“Don’t know who it was, I told you. But I know she was at the heart of what happened to him, know it in my bones. I won’t say I’m not sorry she’s dead, but I know where she’s going. And I’ll tell you this: Even the devil he best stay clear of her. Yes, sir. Even the devil.”

33

I DROVE unsteadily down the rutted drive that fell from the Sterrett house, weaving more than I meant to and skirting the sheer edge of the ravine as we bounced around the ruts. The two dogs kept us company, running alongside, yelping their good-byes to Skink.

“You made yourself a couple of friends,” I said.

“Steeling my nerves to cozy up to a pair of bloodthirsty hounds, I was. Best advice I ever got from my daddy: Muster your courage and face your fears.”

“Looked to me what you were mustering was that corn liquor?”

“Nah, I was just being polite. But truth to tell, I could use myself a nap right about now.”

“We’ve got someone else to see. You know, I can’t get that image out of my mind, Lucifer sliding respectfully out of the way as Hailey exits the elevator at the bottom floor.”

“That was the liquor talking.”

“I don’t think so. He truly thinks she was evil.”

“He’s entitled.”

“What do you think?”

“Girl I knew,” said Skink, “was hard as dog’s teeth and twice as sharp, but she wasn’t evil. There was a softness in the middle, is all. There was too much need to her. When something’s soft and needy like that, it ain’t much of a trick to twist it around.”

“You think she was manipulated?”

“Don’t know.”

“By Grady Pritchett and his rich father?”

“Money has a way, don’t it?”

“So what do you think of our little murder case now?”

“You mean the boy in the quarry? The cop says it was an accident. The father says it was murder. Hard to tell, though what you told me of them letters makes it seem the father might be more on the right. Still, I don’t see what this one has to do with the other.”

“Neither do I. That’s why I think it’s time to go to church.”

“You reduced to looking for a sign from the Almighty Himself?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

THE BUILDING was solid and white with narrow arched windows and a steeple high enough for you to know it was a church but not so high as to look unduly prideful. Beside the door was the symbol of a cross with a red sail attached. PIERCE UNITED METHODIST CHURCH, read the sign out front. REV.THEODORE H.HENSON.SUNDAY SCHOOL 10:00 A.M.WORSHIP SERVICES 11:00A.M. 1 AND 3SUNDAY.WE BLESS HIS NAME, HALLELUJAH.

The Reverend Henson, as one would expect, was on his knees, but not in supplication. We found him outside in the rear of the church, tending to the flowers in the beds alongside the path that led from the church to its well-shaded cemetery farther up the hill. His hands were moving like creatures in the loam, weeding, smoothing, pulling out withered stalks to make room for those still thriving.

When he heard us coming, he looked up and his face registered dismay for just a moment, as if the harbingers of a doom he had long been expecting had just arrived, before his features lit up in an inviting smile. He was a short, thin man, with nervous hands and pointy features that had aged sourly. He stood up when he heard his name, brushed the dirt from his palms, reached out to shake.

“You’d be the gentlemen from Philadelphia,” he said in a sharp, high voice.

“Yes, we are,” I said.

“Good. I’ve been expecting you. Why don’t you wait inside the church, give me a chance to clean myself a bit before we talk.”

“Don’t be changing for our benefit, Padre,” said Skink.

“I was pretty much done here, but if you’d like instead, we could take a walk.”

“That would be perfect,” I said. We followed him through the path defined by the beds he had just been working in, and I made the introductions.

“I hope you don’t mind if we take our walk here,” he said as he led us into the quiet of the church’s graveyard.

The headstones were a mixture of weathered limestone markers, narrow and thin, and newer, thicker memorials, the smoothed granite still shiny. The grass was long and uneven, oaks were scattered among the plots like sentinels standing ramrod straight.

“When I first joined this congregation a few decades ago, I was intimidated by this place. It wasn’t the fact of death that it so starkly represented as much as the history. I didn’t know these people, didn’t know these families. My parishioners came to me as blank slates that left me feeling inadequate to their needs, and I felt that sense of inadequacy most strongly here, in this place, where the pasts of which I knew nothing were represented by these stones.”

As he walked, he gestured to the stones and the names upon them: Carpenter, Bright, Skidmore, McKinnon, Perrine. The older had the dates of birth and death carved on them, though the printing on some was so weathered as to be unreadable. ROY CUDDY, said one I could just make out. BORN JULY 1907,DIED MARCH 1908. It was impossible not to feel the same history the reverend talked about as we walked alongside him.

“But now that I have a surer sense of the past, now that I recognize the names and the people buried beneath the earth, I find this to be a place of great comfort. As many as I’ve buried in this dirt, I’ve baptized more, boys and girls with the same surnames as on these stones. You want to learn of the circle of life, Mr. Carl, you don’t need see a Disney movie. Just come and take a walk within any church graveyard in any small town.”

It was a nice little talk from Reverend Henson, touching and real, but it was clear he had choreographed it for our benefit. Having learned from his poker buddy, Chief Edmonds, that we were in town, he decided to spend the day gardening so that we would find him out back and we could take this very walk and hear this very speech. Because the subtext of what he was saying was as clear as his words themselves. There is history in this town, Mr. Carl, centuries of history that you neither know nor could possibly understand. Be careful what you conclude, be careful how you judge, for in the scheme of all things you know nothing.

“I was so very sorry to hear about Hailey,” said Reverend Henson. “She had such promise and had overcome so much.”

“Overcome what?” I asked.

“The death of her father. He’s buried over there, along with his wife.” He pointed to a headstone in the corner of the yard. “The death of Hailey’s friend Jesse, which I understand you’ve been asking questions about. That’s his stone over there. He’s buried next to his mother, brother, and sister Amy, who was born with serious problems and didn’t make it past the third week, bless her tiny soul. Jesse’s death had a profound effect on Hailey, I can attest, and sent her into a spiritual crisis I’m not sure she ever came out of. And then of course there was the general level of the poverty into which she fell after her father died, which drags down so many of our best and brightest.”

“Were you close to Hailey?”

“I don’t think anyone was ever truly close to Hailey. She was very tight within herself, but we talked on occasion, and I tried to help her as much as I could.”

“Getting through his death.”

“And other things, yes.”

“I heard she won a church scholarship for her education.”

“That’s right,” said Henson, beaming. “She was a very smart girl, and I was glad to get it for her. She deserved it.”

“You mentioned a spiritual crisis.”

“I did, didn’t I, but I can’t really talk about it now, can I? That was between Hailey and her God.”

“You know I’ve been asking not only about Hailey but about the death of Jesse Sterrett.”

“You believe there may be some connection?”

“I think there must be, yes. What do you think happened to Jesse in that quarry, Reverend?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Carl. The police said it was an accident. Jesse’s father has other ideas. All I know is that it was a terrible tragedy. I don’t think it’s my place to go around assigning blame.”

“Do you think Grady Pritchett was involved?”

“No,” he said quickly, with a sureness I hadn’t expected. “No, he was not involved. And if there is anything you bring back from our conversation, I want you to know that.”

“How are you so sure?”

There was a pause while Reverend Henson reached down and pulled out a weed that was sprouting next to one of the headstones. “He had an alibi.”

“Hailey was his alibi.”

“That’s right,” said the reverend. “And she wouldn’t have lied to protect Grady if he had been involved.”

“No, maybe not. I’ve been looking for Hailey’s sister, what was her name?”

“Is. Roylynn. A very sweet girl, smart as a whip, smarter than anyone, maybe even than Hailey, but she was never as strong as her sister. I’ve tried to help her, too, but her problems proved to be beyond my talents.”

“Do you know where I could find her?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you mind telling us?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why is that?”

“Because, Mr. Carl, you are bringing trouble that she doesn’t need. We’re a strong town, we handled the deaths and we can handle your questions, but Roylynn has always been a fragile girl. We watch out for our own, even the weakest, and we tried to take care of her as best we could, but she was always very tender, too tender. She had pretty much slipped out of the world anyway when word came about Hailey. I fear its effect upon her.”

“You don’t know? You haven’t spoken with her?”

“I have, yes, but the answers are not always clear. She is being well taken care of, that I know. She is in a place that’s more home to her than here.”

“Where?”

“Mr. Carl, I know you have your job to do, and I respect that. I have no opinion about who did what up there in Philadelphia, whether the man you represent really killed Hailey. I have faith in the workings of our legal system, and I’ll leave it to that. And I don’t mind you coming here and stirring pots, acting all self-righteous as if you’re the only one interested in pursuing justice in a case fifteen years old, chasing after ghosts. We all do what we need to do. But I’m not going to send you on to that poor girl. I’m not. You’ll break her in two without even knowing what you’re doing, and then you’ll leave and go back to Philadelphia, and who would be left to pick up the pieces? Leave her alone and let her heal.”

I was about to tell Reverend Henson that I understood his concern, I was about to apologize for our intrusion and rudeness. He was right, I had been going on my little hunt without concern for whom it might have affected. And the news about Hailey’s sister had thrown me. Why hadn’t I been concerned for her? Why hadn’t it ever crossed my mind how hard it must have been for a twin to lose her sister? He had succinctly put me in my place, shamed me, actually, and I was about to slink away like the worm under the rock I felt myself just then to be when Skink spoke up.

“You play cards, Padre?” asked Skink from the center of the graveyard. He had wandered away during my questioning, sauntered from grave to grave as if totally uninterested in what I was doing, but now here came his question, so simple and yet so sharply pointed: Do you play cards?

“I know how.”

“I’m not talking crazy eights here,” said Skink. “I’m talking poker. Seven stud, Texas hold ’em, Maltese cross. You ever play poker for money?”

“Not anymore.”

“But you used to, didn’t you, Padre? You played in that game, didn’t you, with that fellow Edmonds, and old Doc Robinson, and Larry Cutlip, and this Pritchett, the rich one we been hearing so much about?”

“I sat in once or twice, yes.”

“How’d you do?”

Henson laughed. “Not so well, I’m afraid.”

“How about the others?”

“Gus Pritchett knew how to handle himself, and Larry, well, he took it seriously.”

“It sounds like a tough game, it does. Sounds like one I’m glad I missed. But here’s the thing, Padre, did all you chums, you poker buddies, ever get together over a nice friendly hand of five-card draw, jacks to open, trips to win, ever get together and talk about Jesse Sterrett being murdered and Grady Pritchett being a murderer and what you all was going to do about it?”

“No, of course not. I told you that Grady did nothing.”

“You sure? Because something here, it seems funny to me. You got Edmonds and Robinson deep in poker debt to Cutlip, a man who likes to get paid. And then this Jesse Sterrett gets his head smashed and he falls into the lake at the quarry. Edmonds said he looked like some pale German banger when they pulled him out. And it’s after they pull him out that all the strange happenings, they happen. Like first Cutlip falls into money and leaves. And Edmonds and Robinson, their foul-tempered creditor suddenly gone from town, call the whole thing an accident. And then you tell us you know it’s not Grady, like you know it for sure, and I begin to wonder how you could know it for sure, and then I begin to wonder how high was your gambling debts from that friendly little game. And to get me even more curious, I learn that Hailey stands up and alibis this Grady Pritchett. Grady Pritchett, who had just been put into the hospital by our friend Jesse, probably because of Hailey in the first place. See, I knew her, too, and she had that effect on men. Grady Pritchett, whose dad is the richest man in town. Grady Pritchett. Now, why would Hailey make up an alibi for Grady Pritchett if he killed her friend Jesse? She wouldn’t, would she? Of course not, except after she alibis Grady, she ends up winning a church scholarship. How does that happen? How does a bare-arsed small-town congregation like this one happen to get its hands on enough money to give a girl like Hailey a scholarship? You don’t even gots enough money to mow the lawn of your damn graveyard, and yet there you are stuffing enough cash in her pockets to put her through college and law school. How does that happen, Padre? Tell us that.”

Henson stared at him for a long time. “You’ve gotten it wrong.”

“Maybe,” said Skink, smiling broadly with his pearly teeth, a look of triumph on his scarred face. “But not all wrong, did I?”

Reverend Henson stood there for a moment more, rubbing his hands, and then said, “Well, now. This was a fine little chat, but I must be off. Pressing obligations. ’Twas nice to have met you both. Come again.” And then, before we could respond, he turned and hurried out of the graveyard.

I walked over to Skink and looked down at the gravestone. In big letters carved into the marble was the name Sterrett.

“Quite a performance,” I said.

“It’s not the lying that gets to me – lying I can take, who lies better than myself? But I hate to be played for the fool.”

“So what do you think?”

“I don’t know. Who the hell knows? But I’d sure as hell like to learn who the padre is ringing up on the parish phone right about now.”

34

THE LOG Cabin was a rough-looking roadhouse on the way to Clarksburg, just a gray shack off the side of an empty two-lane highway. The windows were dark, so you couldn’t see whether or not there was anyone inside, but the sign advertising LEGAL BEVERAGES was lit, as was the neon MAC’S LIGHT sign. A few scattered vehicles were parked willy-nilly on the gravel parking lot that spilled out to the side of the building. I walked from my car, across the gravel, and patted the dented front wheel well of a black Chevy pickup. Then I loosened my tie, rubbed my eyes, mussed my hair, and headed inside.

The place smelled of sawdust and old smoke, of spilt beer and too many long nights that should have ended early. When I entered into the smoky red darkness, heads swiveled to get a look and then swiveled away with a distinct lack of interest. There was a couple drinking quietly in the corner, there was an old man at the bar hunched over an empty shot glass, there were two kids in a booth in the back, baseball caps drawn low, long legs stretched out arrogantly on the wooden seats. And then there was the man I had come looking for, sitting in the middle of the bar, sinking softly into middle age, a cloud of despair about his head. I had dismissed him as a possibility the first time I glanced his way, thought maybe my man was one of the kids in the corner, but then I realized those kids were not long out of high school. In my mind that’s what Grady Pritchett still looked like, young and arrogant in jeans and baseball cap, full of piss and vinegar, even if with his family’s money the vinegar was balsamic, but time works its black magic on us all. I eliminated one by one the other possibilities and was left with my man at the bar. I hitched up my pants and sauntered over to a stool one away from him.

“What’ll it be?” said the bartender, a stocky gray man with a dented nose, who looked like he had seen trouble in his life and pounded it into submission.

“A draft,” I said, pulling out a twenty from my wallet, “and keep ’em coming.”

The barkeep nodded, and a moment later a coaster was spun in front of me, a full glass set atop the coaster, and the twenty changed into a pile of lesser bills and coins.

“Tough day?” said the bartender.

“They’re all tough.” I took a long draught and kept draining until the glass was emptied. I dropped it down upon the coaster. It wasn’t a moment before the glass was filled again.

The bartender drifted to the end of the bar with the television turned to some lurid local news. The kids in the booth laughed out loud. I turned to the man next to me and said, “You know any good places to eat around here?”

“Where you headed?” said Grady Pritchett.

“Clarksburg.”

“The Rib-Eye up the road a ways. They make a steak almost worth eating.”

“Thanks,” I said and took a long drink of my beer.

When the bartender came over to refill the beer, I gestured him to give the man next to me whatever he was drinking.

Grady Pritchett had a paunch and his hair was going. You could see he had once maybe been good-looking, but his face was now all bloated and shiny. He wore gray dress pants and a short-sleeved shirt with a tie, and there was a ring on his finger, but he was in no hurry to get home to the wifey-poo. Life had happened to Grady Pritchett in the worst way.

“Thanks, man,” he said to me when a fresh Scotch and soda was placed before him. “Where you from?”

“Chicago.”

“You come down this ways much?”

“First time.”

Grady Pritchett raised his glass. “Welcome to paradise.”

I was an investigator, working for a Chicago law firm that specialized in trusts and estates, seeking out missing heirs. That was the story. Generally we could do what we needed over the phone or on the Internet, but sometimes you just had get out there yourself and check the records that needed to be checked or, more important, meet up with the heirs and review with them their options. I dreaded these trips, the long roads and cheap hotels, the dust in the old county record rooms, the local lawyers who started sticking their noses in something that was none of their business. I didn’t tell him all this in one swoop of words, that’s not the way it’s done. But it was there, the whole story, there in the sighs, the silences, the weary slump of my back. In Charleston I found the death certificate I was looking for. In a few small towns along the way I had talked to some people who needed talking to. In Clarksburg there was a lady who refused to tell me over the phone the whereabouts of another lady who was up for a pretty nifty sum. In Gettysburg I needed to check on a old man who’d disappeared from his nursing home six months ago. And then in Philadelphia I had the lovely task of trying to sift through three generations of Olaffsons to find the one that really mattered. I had been putting it off, this trip, letting the work pile up until I could put it off no longer. There were deadlines looming and commissions due, if certain parties that I found signed certain documents. So here I was on Route 19, making my way from Charleston to Clarksburg and thinking for the thousandth time I should find myself a more congenial line of work, like slaughtering pigs.

“You know any places to eat in Clarksburg?” I asked.

“The Holiday Inn ain’t all bad.”

“How about Gettysburg.”

“Never been. They got that Civil War battlefield there.”

“Yes they do. I’ll be taking pictures for the kiddies. What about Philadelphia, you ever been in Philadelphia?”

“Sure. Lots of times.”

“Business?”

“Sort of.”

“That’s the best kind, isn’t it? I used to have a girl from Philadelphia with a mouth like wet velvet. I never been there, but it got so every time I heard the name Philadelphia I popped a woody.”

“What happened to her?”

“Who, the girl from Philadelphia?”

“Yeah.”

“Dead.”

Grady Pritchett’s face paled for an instant, and his mouth quivered.

“Cancer,” I said. “It just ate through her insides like it had teeth, but she was married to someone else, so I was glad to let him hold her hand through it to the end. Still, when I hear Philadephia…”

There was a long silence, where Grady and I just sat and drank. Maybe he was thinking about an old girlfriend in Philly who now was dead. Maybe he was thinking about how it was that he had caused it. See, I had come up with a theory about Grady Pritchett. What if Hailey Prouix, in her youth, had concocted an alibi for Grady Pritchett in exchange for a college and graduate school education from his wealthy father? And what if, later, when pressed by Guy Forrest for some missing cash, Hailey Prouix had gone back to the source that had worked so well before, the Pritchetts, to fill her empty accounts? And what if Hailey Prouix had told Grady she needed the money and would recant the alibi if he refused, and what if Grady had decided that enough was enough, and what if he had gone to Philadelphia himself to finish the job? They say after the first killing it gets easier, and it seemed to me that maybe Jesse Sterrett was the first for Grady Pritchett, and so killing Hailey Prouix might not have been so hard after that. It was just a theory, sure, but I had to contain my anger as I sat beside the man who might have murdered Hailey Prouix.

“You from around here?” I said.

“You won’t find too many tourists in this place. I live in Weston.”

“Born there?”

“No.”

“Where?”

“Pierce.”

“Pierce? Pierce, West Viriginia? Now, how did I hear about Pierce?”

“You didn’t.”

“No, I did, I did.”

“No one ever has.”

“Let me see. Pierce. I think I heard about some family there up for a small inheritance. Is that possible? Nothing much, but it turned out one of the kids I was looking for died in a quarry.”

Grady didn’t say anything, he just stared straight ahead.

“He got his head smashed in and fell into the water there. You ever hear anything like that?”

“I think you’re asking too many questions.”

“Just trying to be friendly,” I said, showing him my palms. “No need to come at me like a block of stone.”

Grady gripped his drink and narrowed his eyes.

“I suppose that was an unfortunate term to use,” I said, “considering the circumstances.”

“I had heard there were two of you asking questions.”

“Yeah, well, tonight I’m solo. So tell me something, Grady, which of your pals was worried enough to give you the warning?”

“Leave me the hell alone, okay? That’s all I’m asking.”

Just then the bartender leaned in between us, staring at me with his gray eyes even as he spoke to Grady. “Is there a problem here, Mr. Pritchett?”

“No, Jimmy, I was just leaving, thanks,” said Grady, sliding off his stool and dumping some cash on the bar before turning to me. “This is what I’ll tell you, same thing I told them fifteen years ago. I had nothing to do with what happened to Jesse Sterrett. Not a thing. There was bad blood, yeah, but still, I didn’t have nothing to do with what happened. What happened to him destroyed me as bad as it did him, worse, because I had to keep living with all the doubts, but I had nothing to do with it. Believe me or not, I don’t give a damn, but leave me the hell alone.”

He wasn’t halfway to the door before I jumped off my stool and started after him. He glanced back, saw me coming after him, spun around and punched me in the face.

The blow sent me reeling to the floor. The pain exploded from a dot beneath my eye to cover the whole of my face. I turned over onto my back, sprawled backward, and watched as the door slammed shut.

“Damn it,” I said out loud. As fast as I could scramble to my feet, I followed him out the door. It had grown dark while I was inside, and the artificial light in the lot was feeble, but I could still see the front door slamming on the black pickup truck and Grady Pritchett’s silhouette in the front seat.

I ran straight at it.

Grady was leaning forward, fighting to jab his key into the slot beneath the steering wheel.

I dashed at the truck, grabbed the handle, pulled. The door flew open and threw me off balance.

The engine turned over and shook to life.

I lunged at the open door, grabbed Grady Pritchett’s collar, pulled him right out of the front seat until his face slammed into the gravel.

“That’ll teach you to use your damn seat belt, you bastard,” I yelled as I stood over him like Ali over Liston.

He rolled over slowly and looked up at me, fear smeared across his soft features like a stain, arms raised in defense. “Don’t,” he said softly.”Don’t.”

Don’t what? What was I going to do to him? Hit him, kick him, beat him bloody until he confessed? What the hell had I just done, rushing out at him like that? I’d been pushing him inside the roadhouse, hoping for something to come loose, and instead he had acted perfectly reasonably. But still I had chased after him like a deranged avenger. What had come over me? I had lost my head, absolutely, and not for the first time since I found Hailey Prouix dead. Who was I so damn angry at? Him, for what he might have done to Hailey, or Hailey herself, for dragging me into this whole rotten story? I had lost myself in the anger of the moment and had no idea of what was supposed to come next.

I stepped back.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean… I didn’t… All I wanted was to ask some questions.”

He looked so helpless, so pathetic, his arms raised defensively like a battered child’s, that I backed off some more. But this time I backed into a wall where there shouldn’t have been a wall. I twisted my head around to see what I had backed into. It wasn’t a wall, it was Jimmy, the bartender with the boxer’s nose.

He grabbed my arms and pulled them back so that he could hold them both with one of his thick arms, jerking my shoulders until they screamed with pain. The other arm he now wrapped around my neck and squeezed, only lightly, I could tell, but I grew suddenly woozy.

Grady Pritchett was still on the ground, but sitting now, hand to his forehead, legs outstretched like a young boy in a sandbox.

“I didn’t mean to-” was all I could get out in a raspy gasp before Jimmy choked me into silence.

Grady pushed himself to standing and staggered at me, slowly, as if drunk, but he wasn’t drunk, and maybe his stagger was an attempt at a swagger, because the next thing he did was rear back and slam his fist into my stomach.

The air flew out of my lungs so fast I could hear the whoosh. My body tried to bend over from the blow, but the granite grip of the bartender kept me standing straight even as my knees buckled from the shot of pain. Nausea flooded through me as Grady Pritchett gripped my hair with his left hand and cocked his right hand to finish the job he had started on my face.

I closed my eyes and heard the smack of something hard against something not so hard and felt my arms wrench and my body hurtle to the ground. I must have been unconscious already, I figured, because I couldn’t feel the pain I knew had to be writhing through my face, the pain of ripping flesh and tearing muscle and collapsing bone. I thought I was unconscious until I opened my eyes and saw Grady Pritchett flying backward toward his black pickup truck as if propelled by some strange magnetic force.

Seeing him fly like that was right out of a comic book. I looked around dazedly for my comic-book hero. And there he was, brown jacket still buttoned, brown fedora still in place, white teeth glowing in the dim parking lot as if lit by black light, standing insouciantly with a large wooden oar in his hands.

Skink.

“How you doing there, mate?” he said, looking down at me.

I spun my head around to take in the scene. Grady was sitting on the ground, dazed. Jimmy the bartender was out cold on the ground, his arms still loose around me.

I squirmed from his grip and to my feet. “Am I bleeding? Did he hit me?”

“Nah, I nailed the bastard holding you afore our friend Pritchett had himself a chance to improve your face.”

“You took your time.”

“Well, I didn’t know I’d be dealing with two, did I? I needed to find something to even up them odds.” As he spoke, he tossed the oar onto the gravel. “But maybe we ought to make our getaway afore someone else charges out of that front door. Can you drive?”

I pressed my stomach, felt my ribs, my face. My eye was swelling from the first blow, my ribs were tender, my stomach was filled with an unpleasant cocktail of pain and nausea, but I could drive.

“I’ll take Pritchett in his truck,” said Skink. “You follow me.”

“What are we doing?”

Skink walked to Grady Pritchett, on the ground by the black truck with its engine still running, and lifted Grady gently by the arm. Grady gave no fight. Skink helped him onto the bench seat of the truck and scooted him over so that Skink himself could get into the driver’s seat. He leaned over solicitously and hitched up Grady’s seat belt before quietly closing the truck’s door.

“This is kidnapping,” I said.

“Nah, that would be a federal crime,” said Skink through the open window of the truck’s front door. “Do we look like the type to commit a federal crime?”

I scanned his gangster outfit and battered features.

“We’re just taking a ride through the countryside,” he said. “We’re going to find someplace nice and private where you and me and our good friend Grady Pritchett can have ourselves a friendly little talk.”

35

“YOU KNOW that guy at every high school,” said Grady Pritchett, “the guy with the rich father and fast car and best-looking girlfriend, the guy with the pack of followers that hang on his every last word and laugh at his every last joke? The guy that seems to have the whole school beat to hell?” Pritchett took a pull from his can of Coors. “That was me. Leastways, that was me before I got all messed up with Hailey Prouix.”

We were surrounded by trees, not far from a stream whose gurgling we could just hear above the cacophonous calls of the insects all around us searching for love. Skink had stopped at a bar farther down the road and gestured me in to buy a couple six-packs, and now we were in the flatbed of Grady’s truck, drinking. Grady had pulled a small electric lantern from the toolbox and we set that down between us like a campfire. We sprawled around its ghostly light and we talked. Or I should say it was Grady who talked. And the funny thing was, it didn’t take much yanking to get the story out. Any hard feelings about the fight at the Log Cabin took wing as he started talking. It was as if the story had been festering inside him for all those long years, like the rotting core of a rotten tooth, and he was glad now, finally, to let it tumble out.

“I knew her and her sister before anything happened between us,” he said. “Pierce ain’t no New York City – everyone in Pierce knows everybody’s damn business – and everyone knew them Prouix sisters. Their father died when they was just girls and the uncle moved in to take care of them all. It was a touching story, and we all were a little sorry for them. But as they got older, they got cuter, and the sorry turned to something else, if you know what I mean. Now, Roylynn, she wasn’t much interesting, she was like this porcelain thing you were so afraid was gonna break if you as much as breathed on it, but Hailey, well, Hailey grew up nice, with a flash of fire in her eyes. She was a couple years younger than us, but she had something, oh, yes. And when this girl Cheryl I was having some fun with decided she wanted to get all serious, talking about getting married and having kids, well, that was the end of Cheryl. So I was looking around for someone new, because when you’re that guy at the high school you need to always have someone, and something about Hailey lit my fancy.”

“She had that fire,” I said, and the ghostly lit face of Skink stared hard at me as I said it.

“And remember now, she was only fifteen. But still. And so I asked her out, because when you’re that guy, it ain’t no big thing to ask some sophomore out, and damn if she didn’t say no. Surprised the hell out of me, and it wasn’t like a shy no, it was like a get-lost-you-asshole no. The guys, they got a laugh out of that one, but I wasn’t laughing. You know how sometimes you see a girl every day of your life and it’s just like nothing and then, when you decide you might like her, well, then every time you see her after that your heart just goes a little crazy? That’s the way it was with Hailey when she said no to me. And after that, all I wanted in this world was her.”

“She was playing you,” said Skink.

“Maybe, but, you know, it was more like she really just wasn’t interested, like there was nothing I could give her that she had any use for. So then I did like the full-court press, you know, being extra nice and getting her invited to all the parties and looking out for her all the time, like in the cafeteria and such. But none of it seemed to work. Until the reefer. I never expected her for that. Me, I started early, smoking with my mom.”

“Your mum?” said Skink.

“My stepmom. My real mother, she left when I was young and took a chunk of my daddy’s money, and then he got married again to someone not much older than me. And she was the one turned me on when I was just fourteen. My dad was out on business, and she came in wearing one a her outfits, which was not much at all, and looking damn good, and she up and asked me if I wanted to try something. Sure, I said. So we lit up in the backyard just like that, lying side by side in the chaises next to the pool, blowing smoke into the air, and ever since, that was how I had my fun outside of school, blowing reefer. It was why I eventually quit the ball team and started cutting school, because it was all getting in the way of my drugs. I mean, my future was set, I was going to work in my daddy’s car lots and become as rich as him and spend my nights banging models and smoking the best weed money could buy. My future was laid out smooth as ice, and I was all for it. Well, asking Hailey out to the movies or some dance wasn’t working, so one day, out of desperation, I sidled up to her in school and asked if she wanted to blow some dope down at the quarry, and what she did surprised the hell out of me. She looked up, smiled that wicked smile of hers, and said, ‘Now you’re talking.’

“So that’s how we started together, hanging at the quarry with the rest, smoking dope. She pulled it in with this intensity I always remembered. The rest of us was just having some fun, but for her it was serious stuff, like the joint, it was a lifeline she was sucking at, like there was something dark she was trying to forget. I figured it was her father’s death that was bumming her and I brought it up once and she told me to shut up in front of everyone, and that was the last time I did that.

“Now, it was clear that she was my girl, and at the quarry, with the others, she was all full of affection. I’d sit there with my arm around her and we’d act like a couple, and sometimes she would exhale the smoke right into my mouth and that got me harder than anything. But, you know, it never moved beyond that. When we were alone, she was cold, man. I’d sit there and try to kiss her and she wouldn’t kiss back, her lips were like smooth slivers of marble. She’d let me grope her breasts, which was pretty nice, but when I tried to reach lower, she’d slap my hand away. I tried to force it once, and she kicked me so hard in the nuts I couldn’t stand up for a week, and that was the last time I tried that, too.

“But I didn’t sense like she wasn’t that kind of girl. It was more she wasn’t gonna be that kind of girl with me. Now, I’d been going all the way since I was fifteen, and Cheryl like couldn’t get enough of it, but Hailey wouldn’t give me a thing. Just to keep me happy she would jerk me off now and then, but she’d do it only ’cause I was begging and it wasn’t so much better than me doing it myself, worse actually, because she was always acting like she was in a hurry for me to finish, which kind of ruined it. Anyone else, I’d a sent her packing, but her refusals just drove me more crazy. I even once said we could get married, and all she did was laugh at me like I was some zero asshole. It was humiliating enough to be a turn-on. So that’s the way it was when Jesse Sterrett all of a sudden started hanging out at the quarry.

“Jesse and I used to be best friends. We played ball together all the time, basketball, baseball, everything. He was quiet and I wasn’t, he was poor and I wasn’t, he was humble and I wasn’t. We was a perfect pair. But he turned against me when he started hanging with that Leon Dibble. I never liked that kid, thought he was strange in the brain and told Jesse so, and it was like Jesse near took my head off. Next thing you know Jesse’s always off with his new best friend and I’m like nothing to him. It wasn’t no surprise to anyone that Leon was as queer as a three-legged goat, and I figured that made Jesse the same. And he proved it to us all when Leon, he killed himself, it was like Jesse went into mourning. It was no use trying to talk to him after that, he wouldn’t talk back. Got so the only way I could get a reaction from him was to needle, needle, and so I did, and he just took it and glowered, and at least that was something. But then he started hanging out at the quarry.

“I thought maybe it was me he was interested in, like as a friend, like he wanted us to be pals again. He wasn’t there to toke, ’cause he didn’t toke, and he wasn’t there to joke around, because he didn’t joke either. He was just there. And then I got an inkling he wasn’t there for me, he was there for Hailey.

“Why is it that everything we most dread in this life we end up forcing on ourselves? I started making fun of him, needling him like I did, laughing at him for not reefing up with us, for being so quiet, for not liking no girls. Laughing at his back when he stormed off. And then one night, when he stormed off, Hailey, she gave me a look that froze my heart before she went off after him.

“It wasn’t long before I realized something was going on, and it drove me insane. The thought of her doing all the things with him that she wouldn’t do with me. I couldn’t sleep. I started hanging outside her house at night, waiting to catch her with him. I never did but that meant nothing. Sometimes, in desperation, I called out her name and that uncle of hers, a brutal piece of man if ever there was one, would rush outside with his shotgun and tell me to get the hell away or he’d spatter me sure all over the county. I knew he would, too, it was in him, but it didn’t mean a thing to me. I was insane. And then one day I just went after Jesse.

“I always was taller than him, stronger than him, and when as boys we wrestled, I always ended up on top forcing him to yell uncle. But he had kept playing ball and working out and the only thing I was exercising was my lungs, and this time it wasn’t even close to a fair fight. I started it, he finished it, and I ended up in the hospital.

“My cheek was shattered, my jaw broken, my knee was busted up, I had bruises up and down my side. When I came in, the doctors said I looked like I’d been hit by a truck, but that wasn’t the worst. Everyone knew what had happened, I had lost my girl to some closet queer, I went after him and he put me in the hospital. You know how in every high school there’s that guy? Well, I wasn’t him anymore.

“No one came visiting, not even my daddy, who was ashamed both that I had fought and that I had lost. Only my stepmom would keep me some company, staying by my side, wiping my brow when I hurt too much to move. And when I got out, it was like I had turned into something else, some ungainly cripple creature no one wanted to have a thing to do with. You can guess how I felt, like everyone had turned on me, and they had. And then there was my former girl and former best friend off together in their little blissful world, leaving me hobbling in the gutter. I wanted to kill them, I did. I wanted to kill them both, and I said so to anyone who would listen.”

“And so when you knew he was planning to meet Hailey at the quarry,” I said, “you were there waiting for him.”

“No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t, that was it, what no one would believe. I wasn’t there. I swear.”

“Then where were you?”

“Someplace else.”

“Where? With Hailey?”

He stopped talking, just shut down like a radio turned off for a long moment. He stopped talking and sat, and you could see the muscles in his face flinch as he considered which of his answers to tell.

“Yes,” he said finally.

“Hell you was,” said Skink. “Makes no sense that you would be, what with all the stuff happening between you and Jesse and her. You’re just saying it because you think that’s the surest way to keep your arse out of trouble. You’re still worried about it, aren’t you, mate? Even though it happened fifteen years ago and Hailey is dead, you’re still worried they’re going to think you done it.”

“Yes,” he said.

“But you didn’t, did you?”

“No.”

“And I believes you,” said Skink.

He looked up at Skink with a strange hope in his face. “Do you?”

“Yes I do,” said Skink, “but no one else did, did they?”

Grady shook his head.

“Your daddykins wouldn’t believe a word from your face. He was sure you done it, wasn’t he? He thought he had no choice but to bail out your arse. So he paid off his pals, the priest, the police chief, and the doctor, and worked a deal with Hailey. He worked a deal wheres he would pay for her college, pay for her to get the hell out of Pierce, so long as she made sure his boy didn’t rot in jail for the rest of his life.”

Grady Pritchett’s eyes widened. “How do you know?”

“Because you’re still in love with her, mate,” said Skink.

“No I’m not.”

“Don’t even try. I can recognize the signs.” Skink glanced at me. “It’s a frigging epidemic, being still in love with Hailey Prouix. But you wouldn’t still love her if she got you off for something you really done. That’s not the way it works. If she had done that, well, you’d be blaming her now for every wrong thing in your life.”

“She’s the only one I can’t blame.”

“There you go.”

“It was her idea,” said Grady. “She came to me while I was still in jail for questioning. She came to me, and when I told her I didn’t do it, like I told everyone I didn’t do it, she was the sole one who believed me. It was she who came up with the idea of her being my alibi. She said she would work it out, so long as I agreed to parrot her story. And I did. Because I swear to God I thought they were going to fry my ass. I didn’t know yet my dad had the fix in. Both for the charges, and for my life.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“It was never the warmest between us. And when I stopped playing ball, which was so important to him, it turned hard. But after this, after him thinking I had killed Jesse, where the hell could it go after that?” He stopped for a moment and wiped at his eyes, and his cheeks glistened in the pale light of the lantern. “He made me stay until the coroner ruled it an accident and the investigation was closed, made me stay in the house without a word passing between us. Then late one night he came into my room, just the shadow of him with the light coming in from behind. He was holding a drink, I remember, the ice clinked against the glass. And he told me to go the next day, to just up and go and to never come back. And so I did, the very next day.” He wiped at his eyes once more. “I never did see him again.”

He lifted his beer and drained it. Skink rescued another from the death ring of plastic and tossed it to him. Grady popped it right open and swallowed all the foam that spurted out and then drank half of that one, too.

“After he died, well, he left most everything to my stepmom, who went down to live in Florida with some guy named Lenny, and he left me nothing except for one stinking used-car lot here in Weston. I thought it was him giving me another chance, thought I could turn it into something like he would have wanted me to, maybe a whole chain of dealerships like he had built. But inventory sucked, and sales, they’ve never been what they should have been, and with the kids vacuuming up the money there’s nothing left for expanding, and every day I go into that place it squeezes more life right out of me. I thought he was giving me a final chance, and now I know it was his final punishment for doing what I never did do.

“But I didn’t begrudge Hailey what she got out of it, and I still don’t. It wasn’t her fault the way she was, and she never fooled me about nothing. In fact, in the whole mess, what she did for me in the jail was the one decent thing anyone did for me. In fact, we was still friends, even after she moved east. I sometimes would drive up to see her in Philadelphia. So maybe you’re right, maybe I still had a crush. Hell, more than maybe. But she never encouraged it or let me do nothing about it. She was just always kind to me, and seeing her even for a little sometimes made me feel the way I felt before, when we was at the quarry at the start and I was still that guy and she was my girl and everything coming was going to be just so smooth.”

WE SAT in that truck most of the night, finishing the beers. Just like it was Grady who did most of the talking, it was Grady who did most of the drinking, and I figured he had cause. I asked him if he knew who it was who really killed Jesse Sterrett, and he said he always assumed it was an accident after all. I asked him about Hailey’s sister, Roylynn, and he told me he had heard she was in a place just south of Wheeling. And after I asked him that, we sat in that flatbed and drank up the beer and didn’t say much of anything, listening instead to the rustle of the night. We stayed quiet and listened until the electric lantern dimmed and died and the stars overhead turned bright and cold and hard.

I drove him home. He wasn’t in any condition to drive and I was, so Skink followed as I drove the black truck into the little town of Weston, to an old Victorian house that was nicely painted and well kept, hedges trimmed flat. When we pulled into the drive, a light went on in the upstairs window.

“Nice house,” I said as I shut off the engine and handed him the keys.

“My wife takes good care of it.”

“It doesn’t look like it turned out all bad.”

“She is sweeter than I deserve. And my kids, well, you know, they’re my kids.”

“Then why spend your nights at a dive like the Log Cabin?”

“All this ain’t what I had in mind.”

“Maybe it’s time to grow up, Grady.”

“Funny, that’s what Hailey used to tell me, too.”

“Where were you the night Jesse Sterrett died?”

“Nowheres.”

“There’s no such place.”

“Sure there is. You just haven’t spent enough time in West Virginia.”

“Where were you?”

Pause. “You don’t believe it wasn’t me.”

“I feel more comfortable with all the details nailed down.”

He took a deep breath. The lights in one of the downstairs rooms turned on.

“She’d wanted it from the start,” said Grady Pritchett, “I knew that, but I’d been good. Despite the temptations, I’d been a good boy. He was my daddy. But when things turned bad, she was the only one who came. And I grew so angry, so damn angry, that I couldn’t even think no more except about hurting someone, especially him, so I stopped being good. She left word she was meeting friends at the club, but that’s not where she was. She was with me, in a motel in a town down the highway, smoking reefer, getting down and nasty. I was still so banged up, it hurt so much, and that was the best damn thing about it.”

I took that in. “You preferred your father to think you were a murderer than to know you were screwing his wife?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

I didn’t have an answer.

The front door of his house opened, and a slim figure clutching closed her robe stood leaning in the doorway.

“Anything else?” he said.

“That about does it. If I need you to testify…”

“Forget it.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll forget it.”

He turned to me and smiled weakly and then opened the door and hopped out of the truck. He walked slowly down the driveway to the house, stopped to kiss the figure, and, without looking back, shut the door behind them.

36

THERE WAS one last place to visit in West Virginia.

The man in white led me through a well-lit hallway. He had broad shoulders, and his head was shaved, and his name was Titus. Titus didn’t check behind him that I was following, but then he didn’t need to. I was spooked, yes I was. It was not my normal venue, behind the walls of an asylum.

It hadn’t taken much to find the place. I had simply called the West Virginia number on the singed records from my cellular phone and they had kindly given me directions. It certainly didn’t look like what I had pictured a mental hospital to look like. From the outside, in fact, in its attitude at least, it suspiciously resembled the Desert Winds retirement home where we had met with Lawrence Cutlip in Henderson, Nevada. It was neat, well trimmed, seemingly deserted. A new, gabled structure with vinyl siding in a pleasing pastel, its grass freshly mowed, its bushes pruned into cute round balls. It appeared to be as much a spa as anything else, a place to restore the frazzled nerves of society wives. I could imagine that Hailey Prouix chose it personally, just as she personally chose Desert Winds for her uncle. She seemed have a thing for tidy places in which to store her various relatives.

The patients I passed as I followed Titus through the hallway were dressed in normal clothes, and they seemed pleasant enough, but I could tell they were patients. Some were impossibly thin and their jaws jutted with a strange prominence, still others wore long sleeves even in the uncomfortable warmth of the building, still others moved with an unnatural sluggishness. I tried to guess what they each were in for, anorexia, self-mutilation, schizophrenia. Look there, that older woman in the corner of that room, she was staring into the sky as if hearing the voice of God. Or was there maybe a television bolted into the upper corner of the room? And that woman there, wearing the long-sleeved blouse, look at her hands marked with cigarette burns. Or were they just birthmarks? And that woman sitting quietly in another corner, staring at her lap, was she a paranoiac ax murderess drugged into a stupor? Or was that a paperback book hidden in her lap?

Well, anyway, I could tell they were patients, absolutely I could. There was just something about them. And the something about them, I realized, was that they were here. But, of course, so was I.

Titus led me into a large common room and stopped at the entrance, waiting for me to step up beside him. “You can’t take her from this room without prior approval,” he said, his voice deep and commanding. “You can’t give her anything without prior approval. You can’t take anything from her without prior approval. There is to be no physical contact without prior approval. Do you have any prior approvals?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“That settles that, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What happened to your eye?”

“An accident.”

“It accidentally got in the way of someone’s fist?”

“Something like that.”

“It doesn’t make me happy, you coming in with an eye like that. Miss Prouix is a favorite of mine. Whenever I see her, it brightens my day. We all need a little bit of sunshine. I’d hate for anything to disturb her equilibrium.”

“That’s not what I’m here for.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, does it? The supervisor said you had some questions for her.”

“That’s right.”

“And I’m sure you’ll be careful in digging for your answers.”

“Yes, I will.”

“Does she know you?”

“No. But I knew her sister.”

“Well, then, go on and introduce yourself, Mr. Carl. She’s over there, by the far wall.”

A bright golden beam fell through the window, illuminating the slim woman on the coach in a halo of sunshine. She was leaning toward the glass, one leg curled under the other, one arm resting on the sofa’s back. She was holding a book, thin and black, but the book was closed, and her face pointed toward the light. I remember quite clearly the bright golden light, but I’m wondering whether the magical beam exists now in my recollection much more vividly than it did that day. Maybe it was overcast, I seem to remember that it was. Maybe the light is an inventive trick of my memory, but I am not inventing that the woman on the couch was the very image of Hailey Prouix. And I am not inventing the emotion that clutched at my chest when I saw her there, across the room, gazing out the window, bathed as she was in gold.

What is love? It is a question that runs like a silver thread through this whole sorry tale, an elemental question that at each point seems to provide a very different answer. But if you had asked just then, as I stood beside Titus and saw Roylynn Prouix within that golden glow, I would have told you that love is a Pavlovian response to certain very specific stimuli. Because if I was feeling something for Hailey Prouix’s sister, and I was, and I believe that what I was feeling was a shimmer of love, then it was based nothing on her, because I had never met her, and it was not a communal emotion flowing back and forth between us, because as of yet she didn’t even know of my existence. It was instead an unavoidable remembrance of how I had felt before when I had seen that same face.

I glanced nervously at Titus, who smiled reassuringly and urged me on. Slowly, I made my way across the room to Roylynn Prouix.

She turned her face to me and smiled as I approached. It was a lovely smile, but different from her sister’s. Where Hailey’s had always been filled with a sad, calculating irony, this smile was guileless and genuine. I had adored Hailey’s calculating smile, which evidenced so many strange depths, but after the multitude of ways I had been twisted and turned since first I saw it, I found Roylynn’s all the more radiant.

“Miss Prouix?” I said.

She continued to smile without saying anything, and I began to worry.

“My name is Victor Carl.”

No response, just that smile. Was there anything behind it? Was the guilelessness I had so admired just an instant before nothing but a lobotomized emptiness? I stared for a moment, overcome with a brief horror at what I imagined might be lacking in the woman before me.

“You, I suppose, are the visitor I’ve been told to expect,” she said finally, in a voice curved by the same accent as affected Hailey’s voice in her unguarded moments.

I breathed a great sigh of relief that someone was at home in the mansion. “Yes, that’s right. I am so sorry about what happened to your sister.”

The smile faded, she looked away to stare again out the window. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

“I knew her in Philadelphia.”

She turned quickly to peer at me. “Really. Tell me, was she happy in Philadelphia?”

It was a setup for a joke, but I resisted. “It’s hard to say, she was a complicated woman, but I think there were moments of happiness.”

She smiled again. “Well, I’m glad to hear that at least.”

“Did she keep in touch with you?”

“Oh, yes. We talked frequently. She often called to see how I was doing, to ask about my day. She was always a very concerned sister.”

“So you knew about Guy Forrest.”

“Pardon?”

“Guy Forrest. Guy and your sister were living together. They were engaged to be married.”

“No, she never mentioned him. I’m sure she would have, if she was really planning to marry him. But generally when we talked, she was more interested in how I was doing.”

“Mr. Forrest was indeed engaged to your sister. There was a proposal, an acceptance, a ring. But now the state has accused him of killing her.”

“Really? I hadn’t heard. That is truly shocking. But I’m sure this Mr. Forrest did no such thing. Men didn’t kill Hailey, they killed for Hailey.”

I was taken aback by that comment, and the cheeriness with which it was dispensed.

“Sit down, Mr. Carl,” she said, gesturing me to a spot at the other end of the couch. “No need to stand over me like that.”

“You should know, Miss Prouix, I’m a lawyer representing Guy Forrest in the murder case. I’ve come to ask you some questions.”

“It’s not contagious, is it, being a lawyer?”

“Excuse me?”

“I won’t start babbling in Latin or start charging for phone calls if you get too close, will I?”

“I can’t guarantee it, but no, I don’t think so.”

“Well, then, I think maybe we can risk it.” She gestured again to the other end of the couch, and I sat.

She shifted to face me, still holding her thin black book, dog-eared and dirty, still smiling, kindly now, with a deep assurance, and I thought suddenly that her being here had to be a mistake. Had to be. She was smart and charming and funny and full of kindness. It was quite a shift from my thinking her lobotomized only a few moment ago, but my whole experience in that place had proved disorienting, and the emotions I was feeling, the Pavlovian love that still clutched at me, made me certain. I didn’t want at that moment to talk about Hailey or Guy or even poor dead Jesse Sterrett. My basest instincts kicked in and I wanted to talk about her. I wanted to chat her up like I would chat up a cutie in a bar.

“What’s that you’re reading?” I asked.

She took tighter hold of the black volume in her lap. “It’s my favorite book. I read it over and over.”

“It must be something fun,” I said, twisting my head to read the battered spine. “Well, maybe not. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.”

“Do you know of him?”

“Hawking. Isn’t he that guy in the wheelchair?”

“Yes. He’s marvelous. I think I’m a little bit in love with him, though I hear he’s terrible to his wives. He has Lou Gehrig’s disease, and he was supposed to have been dead years ago, but instead he sits in that chair and lets his mind wander out to the far edges of the universe. And the strange thing is that in writing about what he sees there, it is as if he is writing the story of my life.”

“Your life?”

“Do you care much for physics, Mr. Carl?”

“E equals MC squared and all that?”

“Yes, and all that.”

“No, I don’t, actually. I don’t understand it. But how is that the story of your life?”

“You know that the universe is expanding at tremendous speed. Of course you do. Can’t you feel it? I can, every moment of every day I feel everything rushing away from me.”

I thought suddenly of the way the points of darkness had rushed away from me during my sleepless nights and the terror that engendered. What must it be like to feel that every moment of every day?

“All this… disintegration,” she said, “is an aftereffect of the big bang.”

“The big bang?”

She leaned forward now, as if she had something urgent to relate to me, as if she were proselytizing about some great new religion that would save my soul. “The big bang. The very beginning of time, when the universe was formed out of a single great explosion. Before that, nothing happened that mattered, because it had no effect on what happened after. And after, nothing was ever the same again, because the explosion just kept hurtling everything far, far away.”

“And that happened to you?”

“Yes. Of course. I thought you said you knew my sister. It happened to her, too. But at some point all this hurtling away is going to stop. It’s slowing down already and the force of gravity is at work every moment and someday, someday soon, the universe is going to stop expanding and slowly, slowly begin to contract. And then the contraction will speed up, speed up, speed up, until boom.” She smashed her palms together. “The big crunch.”

“The big crunch?”

“Yes. And that will be the end of everything. The end of all time, because nothing that happens afterward will be affected by anything that happened before.”

“And that’s coming soon?”

“We can only hope,” she said with a bright smile and a twinkle in her eye.

I wondered just then if she was putting me on. She must have been, and I smiled back at her even as I was feeling a confusing sadness.

“Is that what happened to Jesse Sterrett?” I said. “The big crunch?”

She seemed taken aback at the name. She turned her head and stared for a moment out the window.

“Is he in your book, too?” I said.

Without looking at me, she nodded and then looked down, opening the battered book in her lap. The pages were badly smudged, as if each had been fingered hundreds of times. She paged through the volume, stopping now and then, her attention caught by certain passages, in the way that some page through the Bible. She stopped finally and lifted the book to show it to me.

Chapter 6: “Black Holes.”

“I think maybe,” I said, slowly, as if to a child, “we should put away the book and just talk.”

“Do you know what a black hole is? It is something so massive, something with a gravity so dense, that nothing can escape it, not even light. That’s why they say it is black. Generally it is a star that collapses in on itself. It has to be just the right size, and then, when it is done burning, it just contracts into the tiniest ball of matter. Anything that comes too close falls in and gets ripped apart before disappearing forever.”

“And you say that’s what happened to Jesse Sterrett?”

“Yes, of course. He fell into a black hole.”

“Jesse Sterrett died in the quarry in Pierce. You think there was a collapsed star in that quarry?”

“No, of course not. Just because I’m in here doesn’t make me crazy. But a black hole doesn’t have to be formed only by a star. Anything with sufficient density can be a black hole. There are things called primordial black holes, formed in the very first moments after the big bang, formed of the very first pieces of the universe. It’s right here in the book. Little bits of matter that have compressed into the tiniest shapes and float around the universe wreaking havoc. Think of something the mass of a mountain compressed into something no wider or longer than a million millionth of an inch. Think of that. A dark force from the very dawning of our universe. And they could be anywhere, anywhere, deep in outer space or just behind the moon or around the next bend in the road. They could be anywhere, floating here, floating there, leaving nothing but destruction. Anything that comes too close falls in and gets ripped apart before disappearing forever. The mass of a mountain in a million millionth of an inch.”

I stared at her pretty face as she spoke, I gaped sad and incredulous, but at the same time, for some reason, I remembered the strange force that roared through Hailey and me in the middle of sex. It had seemed then, that force, something powerful, insatiable, devastating, ancient.

“And that’s what killed Jesse Sterrett,” I said, “a primordial black hole?”

“Yes. And Hailey, too.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s in the book.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Of course it doesn’t. Not yet, at least. No one’s been smart enough to come up with a unified theory that explains everything. It is what Einstein spent his life searching for. It is what Stephen Hawking is traveling to the edges of the universe to figure out. One elegant equation that answers all the questions. Stephen Hawking is so close to figuring it out, they are all so close. And I am close, too. I know it. Each day I read over what he says here in this book and I feel myself growing closer and closer to an answer, closer and closer to figuring it out. And when I do, everything will become clear. Everything. Do you want to help me? Won’t you help me?”

“I don’t know anything about physics.”

She reached out and grabbed at my shirt. “You said you knew her. You said you knew Hailey.”

“Yes, I did.”

“And you were asking questions about Jesse Sterrett. So you know more than you think you know. You are closer than you ever imagined. Will you work with me? Will you help me?”

She was shaking the fistful of cloth still in her grip. I took hold of her wrist and gently pulled her hand off of me. “That’s what I’m trying to do. If you could only answer some questions…”

“All your answers are here.” She waved the book with her other hand. “Whatever it is you want to know.”

Just then a shadow appeared to my right. “Is everything all right?” said Titus, his deep voice filled with a solicitous concern.

I noticed then that I was still gripping Roylynn’s wrist. I let go. She turned and smiled at Titus with the same bright smile she had given me only moments ago.

“Mr. Carl is going to work with us to find the unified theory,” she said.

“That’s good,” said Titus. “That’s very good.”

“Titus has helped me so much already,” she said. “We’re getting so close, aren’t we?”

“Yes, we are, we surely are.”

“The world will be stunned when we figure it out.”

“Yes, it will,” said Titus. “You’ll be getting yourself a Nobel Prize.”

“We,” said Roylynn. “You and everyone else who helped.”

“Thank you, Ms. Prouix. That is so kind.”

“All right, Mr. Carl?” she said. “Are you ready?”

“Do you miss her?” I said. “Do you miss your sister?”

There was a pause, where she seemed to carefully, willfully, compose her face into a smile. “How could I?” she said finally. “I never had the chance. She’s in me, she always has been. She makes me strong. I’ve never been lonely a day in my life, because she is in me. I can feel her breath in my breath, her touch in my touch. When I look into a mirror, I see two faces. When I speak, I hear two voices. If it is all right, Mr. Carl, I like to start at the introduction. There are many clues there, I think.” She opened the book. “Here we are. Are you ready?”

I glanced at Titus and then nodded into her kind, smiling face.

She began to read.

I nodded again and kept nodding as she read on and on.

There is something about a Southern accent that sends a comforting signal of assurance. The certainty in Roylynn Prouix’s voice itself told me how important this all was to her, how surely she held to the belief that the answers to everything that had plagued her soul, and her sister’s, were somewhere contained in that battered black book. So I nodded and stopped fighting it and let the syrup of her voice slip over me. I followed her through the words and the pages, I followed her through the simple equations and complex concepts, I followed her until we both were released from the bindings of gravity and flew free from this earth, this solar system, flew side by side past planets spinning and stars forming and stars collapsing and galaxies spiraling around great massive centers, past black holes glowing white-hot against all expectation, past all the strange, gorgeous phenomena, of which man can only as yet dream, toward the far far edges of the universe.

“ANYTHING?” SAID Skink when I met him in the lobby after Titus had come to take Roylynn away.

“No.”

“What was she, Looney Tunes?”

“You could say that.”

“What the hell you think you was going to get in a place like this?”

“I don’t know. Something else. It’s time to go home.”

“Giving up, are we?”

“I’ve got a trial to prepare for.”

“You still going to defend him after finding nothing?”

“Yes. He didn’t do it, I’m sure of it now.”

“You ain’t convinced me yet.”

“I don’t have to convince you. There are only twelve that I care about.”

“You’re disappointing me, Vic. I thought if we found nothing, you’d go back to your original plan.”

“It was a bad plan, flawed from the start. There’s only one way to handle something like this. Straight up to the end. That’s how I mean to play it.”

“I didn’t think you’d find a frigging thing down here, but I’ll admit I’m a little disappointed it turns out I was right. It would have been nice to see things tidied all neat and clean, would have been nice to dig into the past to find our villain. But that ain’t the way of it, is it, Vic? Things never do tidy up all neat and clean.”

“I suppose not,” I said. But even as I was saying it, I didn’t believe it to be the truth. Even as I was saying it, I was remembering the strange interstellar journey I had just taken with Roylynn Prouix only a few moments before. And I couldn’t help thinking that somewhere, out there, in the far reaches of the universe, somewhere in the great black space that I had traversed with Roylynn, somewhere lay the unified theory I was looking for, the theory that tied two victims, two murders, two mysteries together into one brutal solution.