Serial

49

Hogart, 2005

As the days passed, the weight of Beth’s guilt became heavier. Wayne Westerley had told her where Salas was living, in a rundown trailer park fifty miles up the highway, near Lorenton. He wasn’t working, as far as Westerley knew.

So what was Salas doing? That’s what Beth wondered. Was he simply lying around hating her, blaming her, having good reason to think she’d ruined his life?

That was what Beth couldn’t stand, not knowing what Salas thought of this entire tragedy. Of the mistake-if he thought it was a mistake-that had cost him his reputation and some of his best years.

As she sat on her porch, in a wooden rocking chair Westerley had bought for her at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, Beth’s mind would dart like a trapped insect in a bottle with a cork, where there was no way out, but there was nothing to do but keep trying.

As she sat rocking, gripping the chair’s armrests so tightly her fingers whitened, she heard Sheriff Westerley’s big SUV turn into the drive. She recognized the sound of its powerful engine and the underlying whine when it switched gears to negotiate the rutted drive beyond the copse of maple trees.

It was sundown, and she was expecting him this evening. She sat quietly, rocking gently back and forth in her chair.

Westerley flashed her a smile from behind the steering wheel and then parked the big vehicle where he usually did, near the back of the house where it wasn’t visible from the road.

She heard the SUV’s door slam shut, then Westerley’s boots crunching on gravel.

Beth smiled as he stepped up onto the porch. He came over and leaned down, and she scrunched up her toes to stop the rocker momentarily while he leaned down and kissed her forehead.

“What were you thinking?” he asked, as she let up with her feet and the rocker resumed its slow rhythm.

“You don’t wanna know, Wayne.”

“Guess not,” he said, looking more closely at her.

She looked toward the orange ball of the sun dropping ever so gradually toward a distant line of pines.

“Eddie around?” Westerley asked.

“I thought I told you the other day, he’s visiting his great aunt in St. Louis.”

“You did tell me,” Westerley said.

He entered the house and came out a few minutes later with a beer can in his hand, letting the screen door slam behind him. “Sip?”

“No, thanks.” She rocked. The chair’s runners made a soft creaking sound on the porch planks.

“You don’t have to worry about Salas,” Westerley said. “I got that straight with him the day after he was released. He won’t harm you, Beth.”

“Did he say he forgave me?”

“I can’t tell you that. He wouldn’t discuss his feelings toward you. I think he’s so busy hating the state of Missouri, he’s got no room to hate anything else. He thinks they owe him.”

“I think so, too.”

“Well, that’s not for us to decide, except maybe on election days.”

She rocked silently for a while.

“Still and all,” Westerley said, “with Eddie away and you alone here, I get uneasy.”

“I’m fine here,” Beth said. Why tell him about the nightmares she lived in as an alternate world, and the guilt that lay on her like one of those lead aprons that dentists use to x-ray?

“Sun’s almost down,” Westerley said. “We should drive up the highway and get us something to eat.”

“Then come back here?”

“That was my thinking.” He smiled at her. “Yours, too?”

“No need to drive anyplace. I thawed out some steaks,” she said. “I can make a salad while you’re cooking them on the grill out back.”

“Yours is the best plan,” Westerley said.

He moved close to her again, leaned over her, and kissed her once more in the dying light.

When Beth woke the next morning to a jay raising a ruckus outside her bedroom window, Westerley was already gone. The edges of the shades were illuminated by the brightness of the day. She couldn’t remember dreaming, but she must have. Her palms were red and sore where she’d dug her fingernails into them.

What she did remember vividly was last night before she’d slept. She absently reached over to where Westerley had lain and her fingertips explored cool linen.

If only her life had begun last night, instead of-

Just like that, her memories of Westerley’s touch, his warm breath in her ear, everything… dissipated. Her mood immediately darkened.

Salas. She seemed unable to go fifteen consecutive minutes without thinking about Vincent Salas, and what she had done to him. Nothing-not even Westerley-could change that. She wore the past like chains, and she couldn’t find a way to break free.

She felt her face stiffen and begin to contort. Unexpected and uncontrollable weeping threatened. It never lasted more than a minute or two, but it was becoming more frequent. She drew and held a deep breath, keeping it inside her until she felt her sanity return. The impulse to weep receded. She knew she had to do something about this. It might occur in public. She couldn’t let that happen.

Face your fears.

That’s what she’d been told by the state-assigned psychologist who’d been so much help to her after Salas had-after the rape.

That’s what Beth decided to do this morning, face her fears and her regrets, in the person of Vincent Salas. She and Salas both knew that nothing could heal the damage done because of Beth’s mistaken allegation; the only course left was for Beth to let him know how terrible she felt about what had happened-no, what she’d done. It hadn’t simply happened like a brief summer shower. She would apologize to him. It was the least she could do for him. Even if he refused to accept her apology, maybe she’d feel less of a weight on her during her days, and during her nights when sleep wouldn’t come.

So am I doing this for me?

Maybe. Or maybe for both of us. It might help to put what happened behind us.

She took a quick shower, dressed hurriedly, and brushed her hair. It seemed that more individual hairs than usual were caught in the brush’s bristles. Were fear and remorse causing her to lose her hair? She’d seen that happen before, to an abused woman who used to own the beauty salon in Hogart.

Though she wasn’t hungry, she forced down a hasty breakfast of toast and coffee. Before leaving the house, she took a long look at herself in the mirror. The woman staring back at her appeared haggard and older than Beth remembered, as if she were being consumed from the inside. In a way that was happening. Guilt like acid was eating her alive.

Well, it was time to act. To do something.

She locked the front door behind her and then left the porch and walked around to the garage. Its wide wooden doors opened to the side, and as she swung the second one on its rusty hinges something buzzed past close to her ear, making her flinch. Hornets had built a nest in the garage, just as guilt had claimed a home in her mind.

When Roy had left he’d taken their late-model Ford pickup truck. Beth was left with the old Plymouth. She still drove it, even though there were over two hundred thousand miles on the odometer. The old car had some rattles, but it still looked okay, and except for a persistent squealing sound coming from inside the dashboard-Westerley had told her not to worry, it was probably a fan motor with a loose bearing-it ran well.

Beth pulled the garage door all the way open, got in the car, and was relieved but not surprised when it started right up. She let it idle motionless for a few minutes and then backed it out of the garage. Though the morning was clear, you never knew about the weather this time of year. Clouds and rain could develop quickly. She got out of the car and closed the garage doors so water wouldn’t run in if a sudden shower did blow through while she was gone.

On the road she felt better. It wasn’t going to rain. The morning was going to remain glorious. And she and Vincent Salas would have a civilized conversation and come to an understanding.

Once she turned onto the Interstate, she reached Lorenton in less than an hour. It was already almost ten o’clock, so Salas should be awake. Westerley had mentioned where Salas lived in the trailer court-third trailer on the left after you go though the entrance, gray with blue trim. Pile of crap, Westerley had called the trailer. Which was about what you could afford, Beth thought, if you recently got out of prison. She wondered if Salas had a job. If not, maybe she could help. She could offer her help, anyway.

There was a lot of making up to do. A lot to talk about.

As the Honda sailed smoothly over the blacktop highway, Beth’s thoughts wandered. She created a conversation in her mind, thinking on ways to steer their talk in the right directions.

In a sad kind of way, she and Salas needed each other. He could use her help to find a way up in the world, and she could use his forgiveness.

He shouldn’t mind that kind of trade.

After she made the turnoff to Lorenton, Beth had no trouble finding the trailer court. Oak Tree Estates, it was called. Which sounded pretty ritzy.

But it wasn’t ritzy. And Beth saw only a few big pin oaks. Most of the other trees were scraggly-looking maples. The gate Beth drove through wasn’t an actual gate but a rusty iron archway with broken curlicues and some weedy-looking vines growing halfway up each leg.

There was the trailer, dirty gray with faded blue trim. It had wooden latticework concealing the wheels and tires. The same kind of vine that was growing up the entrance arch was laced into the lattice. Two wooden steps led up to a screen door. The trailer’s windows were all tinted, or blocked with shades or drapes. It looked deserted.

Beth got out of the car and walked over hard dusty earth to the steps. There was a clutter of cigarette butts on the ground near the bottom step, as if someone habitually sat there and smoked. She felt the lump of guilt in her gut suddenly turn to fear. Was she out of her mind coming here? This man had every reason to hate her, to harm her.

She might have turned around and gotten back in the car, but a woman’s voice said, “He’s in there.”

Beth turned and saw a heavyset woman with scraggly gray hair walking toward her. She was moving slowly, as if her feet hurt, carrying an ovular blue metal roaster without a lid out in front of her with both hands.

The woman stopped about twenty feet away and stood as if balancing the roaster so liquid inside wouldn’t spill out. Behind her was the trailer she must have emerged from. Its screen door was hanging open. It had a tattered green awning over the door, and smaller, newer-looking awnings over two of its windows. A rusty tricycle lay on its side near the steps.

“Go ahead an’ knock,” the woman urged Beth. “He’s in there. I heard him come home last night. Couldn’t help but hear.” She shuffled carefully to the side about ten feet and tossed a grayish liquid from the roaster into the weeds. “He’s in there,” she said again, over her shoulder, giving Beth a show of yellowed, jagged teeth. She looked Beth up and down. “He could prob’ly use some company.” The woman headed back toward her trailer, holding the metal roaster in one hand now, letting it dangle at her side.

Determined not to let herself be scared away, Beth climbed up on the first step leading to Salas’s trailer door and pushed a buzzer that almost certainly didn’t work. She knocked three times on the metal frame of the screen door.

There was a faint noise from inside the trailer. Then the door on the other side of the screen door opened inward, and there Salas stood, staring down at her.

He was only a vague shape behind the dark screen, not as big a man as she remembered, but still large. He seemed to have put on weight in the right places while in prison. If he hadn’t been wearing a sleeveless white undershirt, he would have been almost invisible in the dimness behind the screen.

“So what do you want?” he asked, in a hoarse voice that suggested Beth had awakened him.

She fought to find words for the ominous dark form towering over her, gazing down at her with a stillness that suggested great calm and a kind of superiority. She was the one who had lied. She was the one who had caused all the damage. Even her husband Roy had told her that before leaving her.

Salas made no move to open the door and invite her inside, or to step outside and talk with her. This wasn’t going at all as Beth had planned.

“I’m…” she managed to say.

“I know who you are.”

“I thought we should talk.”

He was silent for several seconds, then: “So talk.”

“I came here to assure you-” Beth said. God! Did that even make sense?

The shadowy form behind the screen said nothing.

Beth forged ahead. It was why she’d come all this way. “When I identified you in that police lineup, and in court, I would have sworn I was pointing at the right man.”

“You did swear.”

“I don’t know how I could have made such a mistake. And…” She gulped air. “… I sincerely apologize.”

He said nothing. Didn’t move.

“I-I’m genuinely sorry,” Beth said. “I know it can’t mean much to you now, considering what happened, but I just wanted you to know-”

He closed the trailer door and she was standing alone on his bottom step, staring up at the screen with a blank surface behind it.

She stood that way for more than a minute, arms at her sides, head inclined, as if gazing up in search of a god that had forsaken her.

When she backed down off the step, she stumbled and almost fell on the hard baked earth.

Beth barely remembered the drive back to Hogart and home. It seemed that suddenly there she was, in front of her garage with the car’s engine idling.

She realized she was crying.

She knew that nothing had changed, but that everything must.

After parking in the garage and slamming the car’s door behind her, she had to run from the hornets.