Lie Still

33

It was ninety minutes from Richard Deacon’s place to the home of Caroline’s sister. The tail end of the drive played out like a dreamy film reel of red and gold leaves, graceful horses, and white fences that stretched over rolling land into foggy infinity.

I knew it had been a stupid move to walk into Dickie’s house on my own. I should have risked the chiggers and spiders and poison ivy and the possibility of mooning two strangers. Those troopers probably examined bare asses every night in the local strip joint and wouldn’t think mine was anything special.

But Mike’s mind was apparently not on me as we swept down the mountain curves. At the bottom, where the two-lane highway began, Mike pulled in at the Kitty Cat Quik Mart for gas. We had already checked out of The Mountain Motel, a place I never needed to see again.

The proprietor, a heavyset man who kept hiking up his pants, cheerfully pointed me to a bathroom that seemed like Shangri-La. There was plenty of light and soap. So what if the water was like ice and I had to shake my hands dry? At the counter, at my request, the owner obligingly gave me a few plastic bags and a large rubber band to package up the grimy photo album destined for the overhead compartment on the plane.

Mike had thoroughly brushed it off, and my fingers itched to explore the pages. Both of us had recognized the spider. A brown recluse, the kind that prefers to live in the dark, like vampires. His bite didn’t hurt much at all. You died later, when the poison ate through your skin and ran around in your blood. Long after the eight-legged killer had retreated to dust and shadows.

The album, though, was stubbornly clinging to its mysteries. Prying open its pages was going to be a delicate, painstaking process. Definitely not a job for the car. The photographs were sandwiched between cheap, plastic sticky sheets popular before scrapbooking became a designer sport, the ones that yellowed and then melted the pictures to them. All the pages were stuck together. It was as if the book had been dunked in water, then broiled in the oven to a fine crisp.

Back on the road again, after prying off my shoes and tossing back my virgin swig of chocolate Yoo-hoo, I asked: “Are you going to make me beg for details?” I tipped the drink again. Not bad. And fifteen percent calcium.

“No. You just seemed happy for a while there, so I didn’t bug you. What do you want to know?” Mike’s voice was easy.

“Your cop instinct about Dickie.”

“Depressed. Accommodating. Edgy.”

I wasn’t in the mood to play. “You didn’t say murderer.”

“No, I didn’t. As for the missing little girl, his story doesn’t veer far from what Billie and the local cops told me. She disappeared from her poor mountain family. Not unusual in an area with so much poverty and desperation. But Wyatt was seen with her before she vanished.” So, Mike had known about the little girl before we got here. From Billie, the relentless digger.

The air was getting chillier, inside and out. I punched the heater button obsessively until the digital numbers read 80.

“Dickie said that Caroline paid off the family and local police to let it go. He assured me that whatever happened to the little girl was likely an accident. Claims the details are fuzzy because he was drunk all the time back then. That Caroline took off and didn’t contact him-or Wyatt, as far as he knew-for almost twenty years. She did agree in the divorce decree to pay for their son’s boarding school. After juvie.”

“All that would encourage a little resentment in a kid, even if he wasn’t evil,” I pointed out. “And especially if he was. I’d draw ugly pictures, too.”

“We’ll see,” Mike said noncommittally. “There are only two official incident reports on Wyatt before the little girl disappeared. Swiping some cigarettes from the Shell station. And an illegal road race ten miles out of town.”

“So you think Dickie is telling the truth?”

Mike shrugged. “I don’t know. He admits to drinking whiskey from his own still since puberty. That would fry a few brain cells. He credits his refrigerator full of Tab, grape Nehi, and blue Gatorade for his alcoholic recovery.”

I used a comb to slowly rip through my hair, tangled by the wind into stubborn knots on the ride down the mountain. “They never found the little girl? The one who went missing?”

“No.” Mike eased on the brakes as a car whipped in front of us.

“I’ve been wondering whether Billie learned anything else about Misty.”

Just throwing it out there. We were both connecting a few crazy dots. Mike glanced over, unsure, like he didn’t want to tell me something.

“I sent a couple of cops there for a drive-by yesterday. Misty’s not answering her phone or door. A neighbor saw her dragging a few boxes to her car. We’re working on getting a search warrant.

One judge is on vacation, the other likes to see blood dripping out the windows before authorizing a search.” He tapped the heat back down to 73. “I didn’t tell you I was planning on a search because you seem attached to Misty. I didn’t want you to warn her.” He glanced at me sharply. “I still don’t.”

He had every reason to worry about this.

He seemed relieved that I had nothing to say. I simply nodded.

I wanted him to search.

We learned within the first five minutes of meeting Caroline’s sister why they looked absolutely nothing alike.

The woman who motioned us to sit down in her royally purple and blue brocaded living room was red-haired, bone thin, and bitterly confident that her rank in life was several notches above us.

“Caroline was adopted,” Sophia Browning told us. They were the first words out of her mouth after Come on in. She waved away a uniformed maid who set down a pitcher of raspberry iced tea that belonged on the cover of Southern Living. At least that part ran in the family.

“I’m not that surprised she ended up this way. Caroline had psychological problems.” She smiled at Mike, bringing to life ugly creases around her eyes and mouth. An enormous square-cut emerald hung loosely on a skeletal finger, poised to fall down a kitchen drain if Sophia Browning ever deigned to stand over one. Maroon fingernail polish startled translucent white skin, making me think of Dracula’s bride.

“I heard from some woman in your town yesterday. Was it Libby? No, maybe she said she was Patty. Her last name escapes me. Anyway, she wants to handle the funeral arrangements. Claims to be a descendant of General Lee. She seemed to think that qualified her to be the one in charge of Caroline’s burial. I told her to go right ahead. You know what, I think I’m going to need a real drink. Would you like one?”

Mike shook his head. Did Letty trace Caroline to Sophia on her own? Or had she known all along?

“The tea is delicious,” I ventured. Tarted up with lemon mint, sweet but not too sweet, three plump raspberries resting at the bottom of the glass.

“Taluhlah! Bring me my afternoon delight!” Sophia yelled it out, uncrossing toothpick legs, swallowed up in gray linen slacks. “Gin and tonic,” she informed us. “I thought I could wait, but I didn’t realize this was going to be quite so hard on me.”

As far as I could tell, the conversation wasn’t the slightest bit hard on her. Sophia seemed to be thoroughly enjoying herself. Her eyes wandered over Mike, predatory. “I suppose you want to hear all about Caroline.”

“Anything you can tell me could be useful in finding her killer,” Mike said.

“I doubt that. I haven’t seen her since the reading of Daddy’s will. A fifty-fifty split.” Venom laced her voice. “My parents died young. Daddy passed from a spell with cancer. Mama fell off a horse the year after and got pneumonia recuperating in bed.”

“I’m sorry,” Mike murmured. “How old was Caroline when they adopted her?”

“Four, almost five. She was already set in concrete, everybody warned them. Daddy toured an orphanage in Lexington as part of a church elder event. He complained about going but when he spotted Caroline, he had to have her, just like one of his horses. Daddy was a compulsive collector. Caroline wasn’t by any means a purebred, but she was a pretty little thing with a tragic story.”

The maid slipped back into the room with the “afternoon delight,” and she offered me a half smile, which I returned.

“Thank you, Taluhlah.” Sophia removed a thick crystal tumbler off a tray weighed down by a decanter of gin, a half-empty bottle of tonic, a china plate of lime wedges, and a fresh pack of Marlboro Lights, the brand of choice for supermodels and, apparently, rich Kentucky anorexics. “Just leave the tray, Lula. I hope you’ve got the chicken on for supper. Mister wants to eat at five.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I felt like I’d fallen back in time. Sophia eagerly resumed her story. “Caroline came from the mountains. Her family’s little lean-to burned up, killing her baby sister and her mother. Caroline’s real daddy had fallen asleep with a Lucky Strike in his mouth-but, of course, he lived to tell, like all drunks do. He dumped Caroline in an orphanage with second-degree burns on her feet that hadn’t been treated. My daddy spent a pretty penny on her plastic surgery at Duke.”

Sophia pulled the first cigarette out of the pack on the tray, removed an engraved silver lighter from her pocket, and lit up.

“Mama wasn’t too happy about the idea of adopting, but once she realized it wouldn’t be any more work for her, that our maid Aida could just raise Caroline, too, she bought in. As long as she could go right back to her drinking and socializing, Mama was OK with it. My parents liked to show off what fine people they were, and Caroline was their long-shot Kentucky Derby horse. The little Appalachian girl they turned into a winner. They even set up a painting of her in the front hall and threw a cocktail party under it every year to raise money for orphans. Obscene really. Daddy told me while they hung it that she looked more blueblood than I did.”

I used the armrest to push myself out of the deep-feather couch cushions and wandered over to the window. I was struggling to fit these pieces of Caroline with the others, while staring out at a back veranda supported by white colonial-style columns as big around as my current waistline, Gone with the Wind-style. The fields spread out before me, lush and green, perfectly groomed by cattle and horses better fed than most of the children in this county.

Mike glanced at his watch. Sophia jangled the ice in her empty glass, then poured herself another. Our plane left in three hours and an hour’s drive stretched ahead of us. Mike had thought my feminine presence might loosen up Sophia, but he’d guessed wrong. She barely acknowledged I was in the room and seemed plenty loose already.

“Am I going too slow for you, Chief Page?” she drawled. Her tongue might as well have been in his ear.

“Not at all,” he said. “We have plenty of time. You were saying that Caroline had problems.”

“Yes. Caroline was a little off. At night in bed, she used to whisper to her dead sister, the one who burned up. And she always wrote like a fiend in those stupid diaries of hers. I stole one once and she near about went insane. My parents didn’t pay attention, but Aida worried about her. Told her to stop living in her head or people would think she wasn’t right and she’d get sent back.”

Sophia took a measured puff on the cigarette, exhaling coolly. I sat back down beside Mike, and she stared at my pregnant belly, annoyed, as if I might give birth all over her Persian rug.

“She straightened up a little.” Sophia blew another smoke stream at the ceiling. “We had a good couple of years around fifteen, sixteen. We were only a year apart. Both of us made high school cheerleader. Then she met Dickie, got pregnant, and her little life went up in flames again.”

“Why Dickie?” I couldn’t hold back any longer. “Wasn’t it clear the kind of boy he was?”

“Oh, honey. It was perfectly clear.” She tossed her head back so the wrinkles melted into her skin. Sophia had never been beautiful, I was sure, but she had been coy, and that is enough for horny teenage males. “Every girl in school wanted to taste that fire. Didn’t you ever want a dangerous boy?”

She glanced slyly at Mike, then back at me. “It didn’t hurt that Dickie knew how to catch a football and run all the way to Tennessee. He had a real shot at getting out. An Ohio State football scholarship. But he was set on getting into Caroline’s pants. Told her they were alike deep down. Called her Sweet Caroline. Swore he was the only one who truly loved her. That might have been true, although, like I said, Aida had kind of a fondness for her. Caroline followed Dickie like a lost dog. And if you’re wondering, I know most of this because I read it in her diaries.”

“So she married him and moved out at what… sixteen?”

I admired Mike’s single-minded focus. I tried not to let my loathing for Sophia show.

“Yes, sixteen, almost seventeen. My parents built them that house near Hazard. They didn’t disown Caroline, but they had an unspoken agreement she wasn’t to come back. Reputation was everything to Mama. And, after all, Caroline wasn’t blood. I think they saw the little bastard once, on his first birthday. Mama and Daddy mailed them a monthly check, and Christmas presents in a big box, all of ’em bought and wrapped by Aida.” Her eyes narrowed. “I will say, the fifty-fifty split on the estate was a bit of a shock to me. Daddy’s guilt money, I suppose. After the reading of the will, I didn’t hear anything about Caroline for two years, until that little bastard of hers was connected to that missing girl. I’ve tried to stay as far away from that mess as possible. I heard she divorced Dickie and moved to Texas. Now you guys show up after she’s butchered to death. Not a fairy tale, is it?”

“I appreciate your time and straightforwardness.” Mike placed his hand on my knee, my clue that we were done here. Almost. “Is there anything else you think I should know before taking off?”

Sophia leaned in closer. She’d been waiting for this. Her face was ugly with pleasure.

“I did see Daddy sneaking out of Caroline’s bedroom late at night more than a few times.” She stubbed her cigarette in the flesh of a lime and, smirking, met Mike’s eyes. “I guess we’ll never know, will we? I mean, whether her baby was Dickie’s or Daddy’s.”

It was the shocker she intended, even for Mike, whose shoulders tightened.

A trapped princess. A jealous sister. An ogre. No locks on the bedroom door. Who said this wasn’t a fairy tale?

I tried not to picture Caroline as a child, with a sweet face and scarred feet, lying in bed every night, waiting to be raped.

One true thing rose up in my mind.

Caroline hadn’t lied to me.

Her sister, her real sister, was dead. She died in a fire.

Mike snored and the baby tossed fitfully, leaving me to stare at the cracks in Mrs. Drury’s ceiling that reminded me of Sophia Browning’s blueblood veins. I was home again, in the time it would take to watch a TV movie of the week.

I wondered how Mike could possibly sleep. In the morning, as soon as he left, I threw on some stretchy workout clothes, backed the station wagon out of the garage, waved to Jesse parked out front, and drove the ten minutes to Misty’s house. As Jesse had pulled out behind me, I realized there was something unspoken between us, that he wasn’t reporting my every movement.

I knew in my heart that she was gone, but I had to see for myself. I rolled to a stop at the curb. All the clues were there. Tall windows now black and shiny and uninviting. Three newspapers abandoned in the driveway. A yellow flyer already wedged in the door handle. The grass a hair too long.

Less than a week. How little time it took for a house to lose its spirit.

Where did you run, Misty? What is your story?

After several seconds, I shifted the car into gear. My mind was already jumping ahead to Caroline’s photo album, still tightly wrapped up in white plastic bags and rubber bands. Lying on the kitchen table, waiting for me.