Sacrificial Ground

5

When Frank got back to headquarters, he found Caleb already waiting for him, his huge frame slumped in a padded metal chair beside his desk.

“Two things for you,” Caleb said.

“What?”

“Message from your wife.”

“Ex-wife.”

“In my opinion there’s no such thing,” Caleb said. He shrugged. “Anyway, from Sheila.”

“What’s the message?”

“She just wants you to drop by after work.”

“Okay, what else?”

“This,” Caleb said. He took a thin manila folder from his lap and dropped it on Frank’s desk. “Lab work on Angelica Devereaux.”

“Have you read it?”

“Just finished.”

“Any surprises?”

“Well, she wasn’t raped, if that’s what you mean.”

“Does that surprise you?”

Caleb shook his head. “Not much. In my experience, you don’t have to be a looker to get raped. Fat or thin, old or young, it don’t matter.” He smiled sadly. “Like the saying goes, Frank, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” He slid the folder across the desk. “Take a look.”

Frank picked it up. “I met her sister,” he said. He looked at Caleb. “The two of them had lived together since the plane crash.” He shook his head. “Now she has nobody, as far as I can tell.”

Caleb stared at him, unmoved. “When you get down to the wire on it, not many people do. That’s a true fact, unrecorded.” He nodded toward the still-unopened manila folder. “Anyway, we’ve got a cause of death now.” His eyes seemed to withdraw into their large round sockets. “Drano.”

“What?”

“Drano, or something like it,” Caleb repeated. “A lye-based poison. That’s what the lab boys call it.” He took the report from Frank’s hand and opened it. “Here it is,” he said. Then he read directly from the report. “A lye-based poison administered by multiple injection within the pubic region.” He closed the folder. “What do you think?”

Frank eased the report from Caleb’s hands and began to read it. Very little was out of the ordinary. There was no rape, just as Caleb had said, and neither were there any drugs present in her bloodstream.

“Didn’t have so much as a drink for the road,” Caleb said.

Frank continued to read while Caleb stood over him, staring down.

“I can save you some time, Frank,” he said at last.

“What do you mean?”

“She was pregnant,” Caleb said bluntly.

Frank lowered the folder to his desk.

“Meaning it could be something simple,” Caleb added.

“Like what?”

“The law calls it ‘wrongful death.’”

“Meaning what?”

“Maybe she was trying to give herself an abortion.”

“With lye?” Frank asked unbelievingly.

“Anything,” Caleb added. “Some friend at school could have said something, just a line about how lye’ll get rid of a baby.”

Frank continued to watch him doubtfully.

“Remember that Johnson kid, remember him?”

“The kid who hanged himself.”

“That’s right. Everybody but his parents thought it was a suicide.”

“Well, that’s what you think, Caleb, when you’ve got a kid swinging from the rafters with a knocked-over stool right under him.”

“But it wasn’t suicide, Frank,” Caleb said. “His mother kept telling me that, and I believed her.”

“I thought it was the fact that he was naked that bothered you.”

“That, too,” Caleb said. “So, anyway, I checked around and found out that a few kids on the basketball team had told him how great it was to jerk off while you’re just at the edge of consciousness. That’s what he was trying to do.”

“And so now you figure the Devereaux girl for a botched abortion?”

“Maybe,” Caleb said. “She could have done it herself, given herself those injections.”

Frank looked at him pointedly. Caleb smiled. “Yeah, I know. She couldn’t have dragged her own dead body across that field, could she?”

“No.”

“I bet I know who did.”

Frank waited.

“The daddy,” Caleb said. He nodded sagely. “Mark my words, you find the daddy of that baby, and you’ll find the poor lost soul who killed that girl. Or helped her kill herself. Whatever. You get the daddy, you get the story.”

“Maybe,” Frank said. But even as he said it, he found that he did not feel certain of it. He had seen too many cases where the general rules did not apply, where nothing ever reduced to its most common elements. For an instant, as he glanced back down at the folder, he thought he heard a voice rise from it. He knew it was only a trick of the mind, but he could not refuse to hear it. It was wordless, almost inaudible, and yet he could hear it, a low, withdrawing moan.

Caleb placed his hand on Frank’s shoulder. “Find the father, you’ll find everything.”

Frank nodded and opened the folder once again.

“You doubt it?” Caleb asked.

“I don’t know.”

Caleb looked at him scoldingly. “You make things too complex, Frank.” He laughed slightly. “You don’t ever see the simple things.”

“Maybe I just don’t like them,” Frank said, as his eyes once again scanned the first page of the report.

Caleb released his shoulder. “Well, I got to go home. Big Hilda’s waiting.” He leaned forward and tapped on the report. “Raise a joyful noise, Frank. The fact that the girl was pregnant is the best thing that could have happened on this case.” He stood up straight. “And while I’m full of advice, stay away from the Bottom Rail.”

“I never liked it that much,” Frank said casually.

“And places a whole lot like it, stay away from them, too.”

Frank looked up at him. “You’re beginning to sound like my brother.”

“Oh, shit,” Caleb said with a shiver. “Blessed Jesus, save me from that.” He laughed loudly and walked out of the room.

Frank turned his eyes back toward the report, but his mind remained for a time on Alvin, and for a brief moment he allowed his thought to settle almost tenderly on his brother. He thought of all the things that were clean and clear in Alvin’s life, the unwavering line he walked from work to home, then back to work again. He could see Alvin mowing the grass in the summer, trimming the hedge, tossing a bowling ball on the one night a week he took for himself, and as he considered these things, he realized with sadness that only the crude coincidence of blood connected him to his brother. They had grown as distant from one another as two bits of debris floating in separate galaxies, and now Sheila floated in one more separate still, and his father in yet another, and Sarah had gone even beyond those, beyond recall, forever.

After a while, he found himself staring at the lab report again. He opened it slowly and read it once more, this time more closely, his notebook open beside it, his pencil poised over the small blank page. It was always possible that something lay hidden in the clean, scientific language. He read the first page, then the second, and behind the crisp, matter-of-fact sentences, he could hear the blade of the scalpel as it sliced into Angelica’s stomach and then the slosh of its contents as they spilled out into the stainless steel pan. She had eaten a ham sandwich not long before her death and had drunk some milk. There were no drugs, no alcohol. She had died cold sober. Cold sober she had felt the needle as it pierced her skin, felt the lye flow into her blood. The report surmised that she could have administered the poison herself. It would have been painful, but not impossible. There were no signs of her having been in any way restrained, no rope burns or marks of violence. But the vision which rose from these facts was odd, a beautiful young girl sitting in a chair, filling a hypodermic needle with poison again and again, injecting it into her pubic region again and again. “Seven hypodermic injections,” the report concluded, and then added in a final statement as flat as the sound of a hammer nailing shut Angelica’s coffin: “Death by misadventure.”

The last word continued to sound in Frank’s mind: misadventure. But if she had accidentally killed herself, then someone had helped her do it, then dragged her body into that vacant lot and dumped it.

And there was something else. Dirt had been found in her mouth. As Frank recalled the position of her body, the way it lay face-up on its back, he could not see how any dirt had gotten there. Had Angelica been dragged by the feet and on her stomach, then it was possible that her mouth might have picked up some of the loose earth of the lot. But her face would have been scarred, and it had not been. The front of her blouse was not soiled.

The more Frank thought about these things, the more he felt himself drawn back to the vacant lot. For a few minutes, he fought the impulse to return to it. It had already been thoroughly searched. His eyes were no better than anyone else’s. And yet, the field seemed to urge him toward it, call to him as if its very silence was a strange, imploring voice.

It was dark by the time he pulled the car up to the curb, and he could almost feel the moment when, the night before, someone else had done the same thing, had pulled up to the curb, quickly snapped off the headlights, and then stepped out into the shadowless darkness.

Frank stepped out of the car and looked around. The yellowish light of the few surrounding houses died away before it reached the edge of the lot, and it was as if this vacant field rested in a darkness which it had itself conceived and which no mere human light could penetrate. He could feel that darkness like a heavy robe across his shoulders. It hung all around him, more dense than air, a thick black shroud.

He walked slowly to the very edge of the lot. Brown weedy grasses inched their way over the edge of the cement walkway. Frank reached down, pulled a single drought-stricken blade from the ground and put it into his mouth.

As he looked out over the lot, he could sense the route the man had taken as he straggled through the bramble with Angelica’s body in his arms or over his shoulder. The same briar that had scraped her ankles now grabbed at his trousers as he moved out toward the center of the field. In his mind, he could hear the heavy breath of the man who carried her, hear the whisper of his body as it plunged through the bramble, the thud of Angelica’s shoe as it dropped from her foot to the ground.

He stopped and looked down at the ground. Her shoe had been found exactly where he stood, and for a moment he stared at the ground beneath him, as if trying to absorb some vibration from its depths. But the hard, littered earth gave nothing back, and after a moment he moved on through the thickening brush until he stood once again over the shallow ditch where Angelica’s body had been found. He stood very still and looked all around him. The lot was so bleak and abandoned that it gave everything around it a deeper, more intractable bleakness. To the left a squat, rust-colored warehouse stood in the faded light of a single streetlamp. It was built of plain, yellowish brick and half its black-painted windows had been broken. It seemed to lean to the left, as if it were sinking slowly into the ground. At the rear of the lot, a group of unpainted wooden tenements, half of them boarded up and abandoned, groaned in the summer breeze. One of them drooped forward, as if ready to collapse, and the single light that shone from its second-story window seemed to stare at Frank with a half-closed eye. The other surrounding blocks were almost entirely leveled. On one, nothing but a cinderblock church remained, and on the other was nothing but a dilapidated auto parts store.

He glanced back down to the place where Angelica’s body had been found. He could still see it lying before him, the legs bent slightly at the knees, one arm slung outward from her body, the other tucked neatly at her side. It was as if the imprint of her body still remained like a stain on the ground, and as he looked at it, he could imagine that whoever had brought her here had not picked this spot by accident. It seemed to have been chosen for its ugliness, for the ways its ugliness further humiliated and offended Angelica.

For a while, Frank remained in place, hoping that something would come to him, some idea that the physical evidence alone could not provide, an intimation, however faint, which could nonetheless serve as a kind of guide. But in the end, he felt nothing but the cold reality of Angelica’s death, and he turned around and walked slowly back to the car.

All the lights were blazing in the house when Frank got there, but that did not surprise him. Sheila had kept them on more or less continually since Sarah’s death, as if tragedy were some sort of marauding jungle beast which a campfire could keep away.

“I expected you a little earlier,” she said crisply as she opened the door.

“I have a new case,” Frank told her.

“So Alvin said. A young girl.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how it happened yet?”

“A little. Not much.”

She nodded quickly, then stepped out of the door. “Well, come in,” she said.

Frank walked directly into the living room, but he did not sit down. It did not feel like his house anymore.

Sheila walked to the fireplace and pressed her back up against it. She wore a plain blue dress, slightly wrinkled, and her hair hung in a disheveled tangle at her shoulders. She looked drawn, as if she’d been sleeping badly.

“I’ve decided to leave Atlanta,” she said.

“All right.”

“I’m going to sell the house.”

Frank said nothing.

“I thought I’d give you the first chance to buy it.”

“I don’t want it.”

Sheila’s eyes darted away, as if in rejecting the house they shared together, he was once again rejecting her. “All right, then,” she said stiffly, “I’ll sell the house and give you half the money.”

“I don’t want the money,” Frank said.

Sheila looked at him disapprovingly. “You look like you could use a new suit.”

“I don’t want the money, Sheila,” Frank repeated.

“You could buy yourself a new place,” Sheila said.

“I like where I am.”

“Renting that place on Waldo? You like that? Frank, it’s a slum.”

“You’ve never been there.”

“Alvin’s described it.”

“Alvin has his own way of looking at things,” Frank said. “It may not always be the best one.”

“Well, he told me about it,” Sheila said. “And when I think that we could still be living …”

“No,” Frank said flatly, and watched as she turned away to face the hearth.

“I didn’t mean to get into that again,” she said softly. “I always promise myself that I won’t get into that, and then I do.”

Frank struggled to smile.; “So, where are you moving to, Sheila?”

She eased herself around to face him. “Back home.”

“Fort Payne?”

“You seem surprised.”

“I am … a little.”

“I don’t see why,” Sheila said. “I never liked Atlanta, Frank. I never wanted to come here.” There was a fatal accusation in her voice. He had taken her where she didn’t want to go, and after that, one disaster had led to another, until there was nothing left between them but the memory of disaster.

“You going to buy a place of your own?” Frank asked.

“Not right away,” Sheila said. “At first, I’m going to stay with Papa. He needs looking after, you know.”

He tried to smile again. “I wish you luck, Sheila. I really do.”

She glared at him with a sudden fierceness. “You son of a bitch,” she hissed.

Frank walked to the door. “I’ll spread the word about the house. Somebody in the department might want it.”

Sheila marched to the sofa and slumped down on it. “Save yourself the trouble,” she said bitterly.

Frank opened the door and glanced back at her. For a moment he wanted to find some way to ease the bitterness between them, to draw her softly back—not as a wife, for that was gone forever—but as someone he had loved more deeply and for a longer time than he would ever love again. But it was useless, and he knew it. In the end, there was nothing left but to close the door.

It was after midnight before he got back to the house. Hours of driving through the streets had not helped much. He slumped down on the sofa and turned on the light beside it. He could see his unmade bed in the adjoining room, and its disarray echoed the accusation he’d heard all his life, that he couldn’t finish things, that he drifted along with the flood, with no direction of his own.

The accusation didn’t always seem fair. After all, he’d moved to Atlanta at Alvin’s urging, and for years they’d walked a beat together, two brothers in blue on the gritty, noisy streets. He remembered the pride he’d once had in his uniform, the shining buttons and brilliant silver badge. It had taken him many years to exchange it for the gold shield of a detective, and although Alvin was older, and had been with the department longer, they’d done it the same year. The two brothers in uniform became the two brothers in Homicide, and for several years after that, they’d even worked a few cases together. Then Sarah had died at sixteen, and two years later, Sheila had dropped away. More and more since then, Alvin had worked his own beat, both at work and in his life, and now, as he thought of it, Frank found that he couldn’t blame him in the least.

He stood up and walked out onto the small porch. It was barely large enough to hold a single wrought-iron chair, but it sometimes felt like the only place in the city he still enjoyed. From its high perch, he felt that he could look down and take it all in with just enough distance and perspective to see it with more clarity. He’d spent hours in the little chair, thinking of his father, his daughter, his wife. The old man was always there, preaching to high Heaven about goodness and salvation. But where had the old man’s wife gone to? Why had she left him with two boys and a clapboard church with a congregation so poor they often put bags of peas or berries in the collection box? At times, as Frank thought about it, he felt that he could grasp it. He could remember his mother’s drawn, dark, infinitely unhappy face, stripped by his father’s rigid saintliness, withered away so completely by it, that she’d sometimes seemed little more than a naked carcass, something the birds had picked to death. “Well away, Mother,” he thought now. “Well away from him.”

But he and Alvin had had to stay, and he remembered how, after his mother’s departure, the old man had grown more and more intemperate in his sermons, more and more frantic, desperate, frenzied. Sunday after Sunday, he’d whipped the dusty congregation into a rage for glory. Even Alvin had taken up the trumpet by then. And so it was only himself, shifting on the bench, silent among the howling host of believers who swayed and wept and cried out for redemption.

Sheila had been his redemption, and he could remember the touch of her long brown legs as if they were still wrapped around him. Her warm breath had redeemed him, and the feel of her fingers as they pulled at his hair. During those long, twining nights, he had not been able to imagine that he would ever lie down next to her without desire. And yet, as the years had passed, so had their passion, until, in the end, it was only the house they shared, little square rooms with pictures of seascapes hanging from the walls. Only their house, and their daughter.

She’d been born only a few years after their marriage, and he had named her Sarah as a last concession to his father: Sarah, after Abraham’s faithful and long-suffering wife. Her birth had transformed him, or had at least made him feel transformed. He’d discovered something hidden in himself, an immense and primitive capacity for love. It was as if she possessed a density which nothing else possessed, not his wife or his work, or anything else imaginable. He came to realize how small women lifted huge trucks off the shattered legs of their children. There was something primordial in the bond between a father and his daughter, and he had felt it more powerfully than he had ever felt anything before, and when, year by year, it began to slip away, he felt as if he were slowly being drained of some essential force.

And yet, it had, in fact, slipped away. Slowly, her moodiness had overwhelmed her, and he could not change it. By the time she was nine, she played almost entirely alone. By eleven her eyes had taken on a strange, unfathomable vacancy. By thirteen he had lost her. And three years later she was dead.

He did not know why. The school psychologist had called it “congenital loneliness,” as if, by giving it a name, he had solved the mystery. But it remained a mystery to Frank, one that sank into him like water into the open veins of broken wood. For two years he’d thought of almost nothing else, thought about it as his cases lay unsolved on his desk, as his esteem in the department shrank to nothingness.

Now, it seemed to him, he had only the city and its unending streets. From his position on the small porch, he could see the skyline as it rose like a wall of stars against the night. There was still a kind of magic in its life which appealed to him. There was something wondrous in the concentration of so much humanity in such constricted space, and it was this amazing compression which created the wild, insatiable energy of the streets, an energy which spilled into them each summer night and held there, hour after hour, as if certain that the life which generated it could go on this way forever. At times, as he stood alone on the porch, gazing out at the glittering city, Frank thought that he could actually comprehend its people, as if the diverse and hidden forces which drove them forward were the product of a single, central longing that, by some tragic and mysterious code, urged one man to save his brother, and another to destroy him.