Leather Maiden

44

Belinda and I had landed on the platform where Caroline had died. It had been a pretty good fall, and it was the only platform in line with us. Had we been one platform higher when I cut the rope, we would have landed in the same spot, but a whole lot harder.

Belinda had a gag around her mouth, and when I took that off there was a blue rubber ball clenched between her teeth. I pulled that out and she coughed and gasped for air. I held her head up and she began to gulp the air and pull it in more naturally. Her throat was red with rope burn.

She grabbed me and hugged me, but she was as weak as a minute-old kitten.

I looked at Booger. “Is Stitch dead?”

“Only way he’ll move again is if a ventriloquist sticks his arm up his ass. Got him right in the eye. His left.”

I continued to hold Belinda, letting her get her strength back.

“You know how I made that shot?” Booger asked.

I didn’t care, but I let him talk. He was as proud as if he had just discovered the cure for cancer.

“Used the rifle stock nub to crimp the glass at the corner of one of the windows. You hit it there it’ll crack, but the whole glass won’t come out. Doesn’t make a lot of noise. I used my knife to pick the cracked glass out till there was a space for the rifle barrel. I’ll tell you something cool. I put that rifle through the hole, maybe an inch of it sticking out, and I saw him at the window across the way, and it was one of those windows you can crank up, an old-style window—”

“I know,” I said.

“And I put the bead on him. He was looking down at the crowd, picking out his target, you know, and then just as I was about to squeeze, he had that doe-in-the-forest moment, when he senses something. He turned his head slightly and looked at me. I could see the look on his face through the scope. Everything he ever was or thought he was drained out of his face like shit running out of a sick dog’s ass. I pulled the trigger. It was choice.”

“I heard the silencer cough.”

“Well, no one else did. No one will know that sonofabitch is dead in that office until someone comes in to take out the trash. I see you put the bitch down.”

I looked over at Caroline. Her arms were outstretched and her head was hanging off the platform and the knife was sticking up from her throat. There was a lot of blood.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Damn,” Booger said. “She’s a looker. What a waste of good ass. Well, I’m going to get your knife, there’s fingerprints all over that.”

“My blood is all over the place too. Not to mention hers.”

Belinda finally had it together enough that I could help her walk. She tried to talk, but nothing came out but a kind of squeak. I got her downstairs and set her on the floor with her back against the wall by the exit.

Booger and I got some cleaning stuff off the side of the janitorial buggy Caroline had used to bring Belinda in, spruced me up, stuffed some paper towels into my wounds. None of them were bad, but they hurt.

We found some rags in a closet, and some more janitorial supplies there, a mop and bucket, and Booger carried all of it up to the platform and went to work. I used the rags and helped him clean. Booger pulled the knife out of Caroline’s neck and we wrapped her head and neck in rags and carried her downstairs and put her in the janitorial buggy, her knees under her chin. Then we cleaned the blood that had leaked down from the platform onto the floor below. Even though there was a lot of blood, altogether this only took us about thirty minutes.

The rope had wadded up in the gears, but the gears were strong and they had broken the rope and dropped pieces of it on the floor. I gathered those up and Booger climbed up the stairs and got the rope that had tied Belinda’s feet, the hood, the rest of the stuff, and brought it down. We dumped it all in the trash buggy on top of Caroline’s body. We dumped the rags in there and stuck the mop down beside her. We tore up some paper towels and wadded them and put those on top of the rags so the blood couldn’t be seen. We rolled the buggy into the closet and closed the door.

By this time Belinda could stand, but she couldn’t talk, and she seemed confused and not altogether with it. Booger took his rifle apart and put it in the toolbox, toted the box out the door, went out to the parking lot and got our car. He called on the cell phone when he was near.

We went out the door toward the circle drive, which was close by. The shrubs near the clock tower door gave a little protection, but we finally had to walk out from behind them. Belinda was in a dirty white bathrobe, and she walked as if she were drunk. All it took was one inquisitive eye and we could be done for. I wasn’t up to shooting a student or a campus cop to make sure we got away. They caught us, they caught us. But fate worked for us. The crowd was involved in Judence’s talk. I looked over my shoulder to check it out. The speech was still going on, and I heard some clapping, and a roar of agreement from some of the crowd. All I could see were the backs of listeners. I couldn’t see Judence, but I could hear him over the microphone. He was talking about equal rights and how the school the white community wanted to build was a way to bring back segregation. Some people were saying “Amen” and “Right on, brother,” and stuff like that.

I put my arm around Belinda and we reached the drive as Booger pulled the car around. We got in and he drove us out of there.

We were back at my place and Belinda was on the couch. She had gone right out, but I could hear her breathing, smooth and normal. Booger and I were sitting in chairs. He had a beer and I had nothing.

“Tonight, when things are settled down,” Booger said, “I’ll go back and get the buggy with Caroline in it and dump the body.”

“What if someone finds her first?” I said.

“We’ll hope they don’t,” Booger said. “She’s been missing, so we’ll keep her missing if we can. The other building, not so easy to move around in. We’ll have to leave Stitch. I kind of like that. I think it’s funny.”

“And they get to see what a great shot you made,” I said.

“That too.”

Booger looked at Belinda, said, “You know, she gets that metal shit out of her mouth, she’ll be one hell of a looker.”

“She’s one hell of a looker now,” I said.

“What say I go get us something to eat, some burgers or something?”

“Sure, but bring some yogurt, or ice cream. Belinda may not be up to chewing.”

“Got you, bro,” and Booger was gone.

I went in the bathroom and took off my cut-up shirt and looked at my wounds. A couple of them were pretty bad rips, but nothing had caught too deep except for the back wound, and I had a lot of muscle across my shoulders, so I was going to be all right there. I did need some stitches, and I had the stuff to do that and Booger knew how. It would hurt like hell, but we could make it without seeing a doctor. Main thing was to keep out infection. I took a quick hot shower, and when I got out there was blood running down the drain.

I patted myself dry, threw the bloody towel away and did some awkward work with peroxide, alcohol and bandages. The one in the small of my back was hell. I couldn’t get it just right. I finally managed to get a square bandage to stick back there. It quickly soaked up blood.

I took it off and started over, and this time there was less blood. I got an old dark shirt out of the closet and put it on. That way blood wouldn’t show so bad, and in a way, it would help serve as a second bandage.

When I was dressed, I went back into the living room. All of a sudden Belinda sat up on the couch. She looked at me. Her eyes were big as headlights.

She said something that didn’t sound like any word I knew.

I sat by her on the couch. I took her hand, said, “Take it easy. It’s over with.”

Belinda shook her head. She tapped her left hand with her right, her fingers set like they were holding a pen. I got her a pen and some paper.

She wrote: “Caroline had a little girl. I think she did something to her.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “I know she had a child. We both know that.”

Belinda shook her head, wrote furiously: “A little girl. She was at the house with us. Caroline said to me you had to know how to destroy the things you love if you want to be strong.”

“The child was with her?”

Belinda nodded. She tore a page off the pad and wrote anew: “They drugged the little girl. They drugged me. I woke up in the clock tower, the rope around my neck.”

“Where is the little girl?”

She wrote in very large letters: “IT’S JAZZY, CASON.”

Belinda pulled on one of my T-shirts and a baggy pair of my pants, wore some of my house shoes. I made sure I had the .38, and we took the motorcycle, Belinda clinging tightly to me as I rode as fast as common sense and a fear of arrest for speeding allowed. As we rode it came together for me. Caroline had moved in right next to my parents. Probably saw the listing in the paper, and as everyone thought she was dead, she decided, wouldn’t it be funny to rent a place next to Jimmy’s parents. Hell, maybe it was just coincidence, but thinking about Caroline and Stitch, and their love for games, I doubted it.

Gregore, he was Daddy Greg. The one my dad had knocked the shit out of. And Stitch. He was the new daddy. Somehow, perhaps for no other reason than to bond with Jazzy for a while, before making that ultimate sacrifice Caroline thought made her strong, she took the little girl in, like fattening a calf for the slaughter.

When we got to Jazzy’s house, we pulled into my parents’ drive. I parked the bike in the carport. Belinda was getting along better now, and her voice, though metallic-sounding, was coming back. I climbed up in the tree first, but the platform was empty except for a cloth doll that had been faded by rain and sun.

Next we went to Jazzy’s house and I touched the front door with my shoulder and it moved; it hadn’t been locked or completely closed. I pulled the .38 and went inside, Belinda behind me.

The living room was void of furniture except for a couch, a foldout chair, and a television, a DVD player and a stack of DVDs. There were all manner of pizza cartons and papers lying about. There were stacks of books.

We went into the kitchen. The stove was six inches deep in grease and there were flies in the grease, some of them dead and stuck there. The sink was full of dishes and the place smelled. The trash can was overrun with paper plates and paper cups and boiling with roaches.

On the table was a manila envelope. I picked it up and looked inside. A DVD.

I didn’t look at the note or touch the DVD. I was certain without looking and putting my fingerprints all over everything what it was. Caroline and Dinkins. Caroline figured after Belinda was done in, she’d come back here with Stitch and forge my brother’s name to a note and mail it off to whoever she thought was a good idea, make sure my brother would be discovered as the source. That would give Dinkins his pig sticking and Jimmy his too.

I went out of there carrying the envelope.

The bathroom was a nightmare.

The place was empty. I was looking in a bedroom that had nothing but a mattress on the floor and a pile of sour-smelling clothes nearby when I heard Belinda try to yell to me. It was more of a squeak.

She was in another bedroom, a smaller one, and when I went in there I saw that there was a little blow-up mattress and a blanket on the floor, and there were a few toys, mostly junk from fast-food places. On the floor under a curtained window was a square line of dust where something like a trunk had sat.

“Oh, shit,” Belinda said, her voice still a rasp. “Caroline kept me in here with Jazzy.”

I had to lean close to understand her. She held her throat with her hand as she talked.

“They kept pills in me and Jazzy,” she said. “Sometimes Caroline came in to talk. Gloating.”

Belinda cleared her throat, strained out some more information. “She told me about all their plans. It was horrible, Cason. Just a game to them. She said it took courage to do things that hurt people you love. But she didn’t love anyone, Cason, not really. Maybe Stitch.”

Belinda swallowed, took a deep breath. “She said she had the strength to destroy anyone, even blood of her blood, bone of her bone…So, where is Jazzy?”

I shook my head. Belinda’s little speech had almost taken her voice away again.

“When did you see her last?” I said.

“This morning. They came in and gave me pills, and they gave Jazzy something to drink. By the time they had me tied up and we left, Jazzy was asleep, here on the air mattress. A minute later and I was nearly out of it. I didn’t come awake until we got to the clock tower and I was tied up. They wanted me awake. They knew their drugs.”

I glanced at the square of dust, pointed at it. “Was something here?”

“A toy box,” Belinda said. “But there was hardly anything in it. I think it came with the house. That little girl, they wouldn’t let her leave the room after they grabbed me. Made her stay in here. She comforted me, Cason. She didn’t know what was going on, not really, but she tried to make me feel better. Shit, my throat hurts.”

“We have to go next door, right now. Get a shovel from the carport.”

“What?” Belinda said.

“Come on,” I said. “No time to explain.”

From my parents’ house we walked swiftly to the graveyard amongst the trees, by the creek. I was carrying a shovel, and Belinda had my mother’s trowel. I had put the envelope in the car.

I said, “Poe’s ‘Premature Burial.’ Caroline’s favorite story. The box missing. Jazzy gone. And Jazzy told me she and her mom used to come here and lie down on the graves.”

“Oh, no, Cason,” Belinda said.

We came to a line of thick oaks and hickories, and just below them were the graves. Some of them had old markers, some markers had recently been replaced. A few graves were nothing more than rough spots on the ground. Along the creek there were some willow trees growing, and there were more graves closer to the creek. An explosion of thrushes broke from the willows and fluttered against the leaves of the nearby oaks and hickories and took to the sky.

I walked amongst the graves quickly.

“That would have been hours ago,” Belinda said. “She couldn’t last that long.”

“Don’t say that,” I said.

“She wouldn’t have air to breathe.”

“Was the toy box deep?”

“Pretty deep.”

“I know it was big from the dust lines,” I said. “Half the size of a coffin. She’s drugged, buried in that big box, she wouldn’t be awake, frightened, sucking up air. She’d be breathing shallow, and—look there!”

It was a mound of fresh dirt, red clay heaped up between two old graves.

I stuck the shovel in the dirt and went to work quickly. Belinda tried to dig with the trowel, but I was going too fast and nearly took her head off with the edge of the shovel. She finally sat back and I dug.

The ground was soft and easy to dig and hadn’t been packed down. It looked to have been a job done quickly, and as I dug, I couldn’t help but wonder what would be going through Caroline’s mind; a woman burying a child, her own child, for some kind of game that made her feel strong. I couldn’t find any way to get inside the framework of that kind of thinking.

The shovel hit something. I got down on my hands and knees and started pushing dirt. It was an old gray wooden box. The toy box. I pushed the dirt aside with my hands until I had the lid completely uncovered, and then I took the trowel from Belinda and stuck the point of it under the lid and grunted and pushed and felt all my wounds start to gush, but I kept at it.

The lid creaked up part of the way, and then it hung, and I had to really get my shoulder behind it. That made the wound in my back tear. I could feel blood running down my spine and down the back of my pants.

I tore the lid off.

Lying in the bottom of the box, very still, covered in sweat, wearing only a T-shirt and shorts, was Jazzy. I lifted her out of the box and laid her out on the ground, and called her name up close to her face a couple of times.

“She’s breathing,” Belinda said.

And she was. Her little chest was rising and falling. I peeled back an eyelid, and when I did she stirred ever so slightly, and then she didn’t move again. But she was breathing. She was just out from whatever Caroline had given her, probably in the drink she made her take.

I bent over Jazzy, and then it came out of me, gushed up like an oil reserve, and I started crying, bellowing. I lifted my head and yelled, and when I did I saw the sky had gone gray with storm clouds blowing across the heavens like tumbleweeds.

Jazzy opened her eyes, not wide, but enough she could see me. She almost smiled. Her hand came up and touched me. Her eyes closed again and she grew limp in my arms.

Belinda touched my arm. “She’s going to be all right, Cason. She’s going to be okay. Come on, baby. It’s okay. She’s breathing…She’s just gone back to sleep. But you…you’re bleeding all over the place.”

I suddenly felt a lot better. I smiled at Belinda. I laughed. I said, “You sound like a frog.”

We called Booger and he drove the car over, and I used my house key and we took Jazzy into Mom and Dad’s place, put her on the couch. Booger had brought the fast food with him, and we ate it. I had to eat it, and so did Belinda. I was about to faint.

Finished, we put Jazzy back in Caroline’s house, on the little mattress in her room. She was still sleeping. She looked so innocent.

We drove to a pay phone and I called the cops and gave them an anonymous tip. I told them there was a little girl staying by herself in a home where the adults had left, and I was just a concerned citizen, and then I hung up.

Back at my place we cleaned my wounds again, and Booger sewed me up with a needle and some strong thread. He did this while I bit down on a paperback book to keep from screaming. Booger talked and joked all the while he was sewing. He sewed deep and stitched tight. Belinda got so sick watching, she had to leave the room.

That night I took some pills I had left over from when I had a bad case of the flu, and I slept like the dead.

There’s not much to tell now.

Booger stuck around a couple of days and Belinda moved in with me during that time, just to make sure my wounds were healing all right. We got Booger a big bag of malted eggs and took him to the rent-a-car place, and he rented one and drove it back to Hootie Hoot with his duffel bag in tow, back to his gun range and his bar and his friend Runt, and probably Conchita, to whom Booger could show his new tattoo.

He had been nice to have around, all things considered, and when he left I felt both lonely and damn glad. At the bottom of it all, I feared someday soon I’d hear from Booger again.

Next day I called Timpson and told her I was sick, and wanted her to know I wasn’t chasing a story, not today. She said, “You sure get sick a lot.”

Belinda went to work for a while. When she came home for lunch we got a new envelope, and wearing gloves, Belinda and I cut out an address using letters from magazines. It was addressed to Oswald at the newspaper. The idea was, when Belinda went back to work, she would deliver it to Oswald and say she found it leaning against the door when she came in. That way anyone could have put it there. We also wrote out a note and put it in the envelope with the DVD, and the note was about Dinkins hiring an assassin to kill Judence. In that note we told where the two leather maidens could be found. It said all of this was connected to the body found in the history office killed with a rifle. The office turned out to be Jimmy’s office, but no one tried to make any connection there. Not then or later. The mysterious provider of the information was never detected.

Good thing.

As for Caroline, right before Booger left, he and I went over to the campus at night, got the janitorial buggy with Caroline’s body in it. We were careful when we emptied her and the rags and the paper towels into the trunk of my car, lifting the bag off the buggy rack and dropping it in the trunk. I drove the car off campus and around the block while Booger pushed the buggy cart back and put it inside the clock tower and wiped it down and walked back to the drive just in time for me to come back and pick him up.

We were careful and we were smooth and we were very natural about everything. We drove out to the Siegel house, took Caroline out of the trunk and out of the bag and rolled her down the hill and into the kudzu, which wrapped around her like green ocean waves.

Maybe someone would smell her. Maybe not. If a year from now her remains were found, the police might think they had overlooked her the first time around. That she had been dead since the night she went missing.

I destroyed the rest of the DVDs.

Mom and Dad are trying to be foster parents to Jazzy, and maybe they have a shot. For the time being, she’s with them.

Child Protective Services is having a hard time finding the mother who lived in the house with Jazzy. Her name turned out to be a fraud. I could help them on that matter, but I won’t.

Jazzy didn’t seem to remember me out at the grave. She got quizzed by cops and Child Protective Services workers and a psychiatrist. But that never came out. She either really didn’t remember, or she’s even smarter for her age than I thought.

Jimmy is back at the university teaching. He even has a story to tell about the time a would-be assassin was found dead in his office. The cops figured someone shot the would-be assassin from the tower. An accurate assessment, but they thought it was a Judence supporter; no one has any real ideas who did it or how to go about finding out.

Jimmy never asked me another question. He may have suspicions about what had gone on, but all he knows is what I told him. “It’s safe. Everything is as it should be. Now go home.”

Oswald wrote a really good piece based on what he knew about the leather maidens found in the church and at the back of the field. He wrote about Dinkins, the note and the DVD. Dinkins looks to be prison-bound. A month later, Oswald wrote an article about a rotting body found on the scenic overlook. Another anonymous tip led him to that. Oswald thinks he has fans amongst the underworld. It makes him feel important.

They ran a picture of Gregore’s somewhat weathered shoe stuck in the fork of the old oak tree. Oswald took the picture.

Oswald and I talk now. I think it’s because he feels more content. He didn’t get nominated for a Pulitzer, but he did get a lot of attention, and Timpson doesn’t call him “boy” anymore. But she does refer to him as colored.

The school in the black section of town didn’t get built. I see Judence on TV from time to time, always looking to be the nation’s moral barometer. The black racists and white racists have turned relatively silent for the time being.

The world still sucks.

I drove by Gabby’s work the other day, just out of the blue. I saw her car there, and through the window I got a glimpse of her. I didn’t feel a thing. I drove by her house to see how that felt. It was just a house. After that, I drove home to meet up with Belinda. We like to have dinner together when our jobs permit. She got a job as a reporter in the town next door. She’s real happy about that. I’m not writing hard news anymore, just the columns, and a lot of them have turned to fluff, but I like it that way.

Now and again I drive by the old Siegel house on my way out of town, or on some errand for the paper, and I wonder how Caroline’s body is doing up there. She had once been just a kid who maybe had some possibilities. A smart kid who thought she might be a princess or some such thing, the way little girls do. She became a woman whose soul and heart had been turned to leather, just as surely as the bodies of those poor dead women she and that psycho Stitch had tortured and killed.

Caroline was the true leather maiden. She had been that way a long time. And, to this date, as far as anyone else knows, she’s still missing.