South Of Hell

Chapter Thirty-eight

Louis sat down on the wooden bench and let out a long sigh through gritted teeth. He had never thought breathing could be this painful. The muscles across his chest felt cauterized, and the tiny stitches itched like hell. Thirty-six of them.

“You look like you’re going to pass out,” Joe said.

He looked up. Joe and Amy stood nearby. Amy was glancing nervously around the courthouse lobby, as if she expected Brandt to come bursting through the front doors. Joe was holding her hand.

“What do you think the judge will do?” he asked.

Joe glanced at Amy, then whispered something to her. Amy nodded and moved away, taking a seat on the next bench. She wore jeans and the pale pink parka Louis had bought for her at Kmart. Her hair was pulled back and clipped with a barrette. Louis realized she was starting to look like a young woman, as if being told she was sixteen had forced her to grow three years overnight.

Joe sat down next to him. “I’m going to ask for permanent guardianship,” she said, keeping her voice low.

“Permanent? Like adoption?”

Joe gave a half-smile. “I don’t know,” she said. “But for now, just something longer-term.”

“Have you told her?” Louis asked.

“Not yet.”

Louis looked back at Amy. She was fondling her locket. He tried to imagine Joe, his Joe — a thirty-six-year-old woman who wanted no chains and, as far as he knew, no children — taking on a strange girl like this one.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” he asked.

“She has no one else.”

“She has Shockey.”

“For how long?” Joe asked. “It’s a miracle he’s lived two days.”

“And every hour brings more hope.”

“Amy says he’s going to die,” she said.

“And you believe her?”

Joe’s eyes moved away from him, to Amy first, then to nowhere. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just trying to put a Plan B in place. I want her to know, if he does die, that she still has someone.”

Louis started to say something, but he stopped himself. His eyes caught a glimmer of white outside the glass doors. He watched as an Ann Arbor cruiser pulled to a stop. He checked his watch. It was ten to one. He hoped Margi was arriving.

They had learned yesterday that she had not only pulled through, but she wasn’t as seriously injured as Bloom first thought. Apparently, her skull was pretty thick, and it wasn’t the first broken arm she had ever endured.

When Margi heard Brandt was on the run and Shockey was clinging to life, she demanded to be brought to Ann Arbor to help. As part of that help, she wanted to make sure the family court judge knew exactly what kind of man Brandt was.

Louis knew they didn’t need her testimony, but he also knew she needed to give it.

Margi let the cop open the door for her and limped through it. She wore a pair of black leggings that outlined her skinny thighs and bulged where the bandages wrapped her knees. She had her leather jacket over her shoulders, with one arm in a cast. On her head was a goofy-looking velvet hat that spiked her brittle yellow hair out over her ears. He knew it covered a massive bandage on her partially shaved head.

She saw him and came awkwardly across the lobby in heeled sandals. As she neared, her face sharpened in the brighter light. One eye was pooled with blood.

He rose to his feet.

“Am I here in time?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“I’m still alive,” Margi said.

She shrugged as she said it, but there was something in her voice that told Louis she didn’t quite believe it.

“Have you been to see Shockey?” Louis asked.

“No, but I’m going right over when I’m done here,” she said. “How long do you think this is going to take?” She glanced at Amy and lowered her voice. “They said he might not make it, and I want to talk to him.”

“He won’t be able to talk to you,” Joe said. “He’s not conscious.”

Margi’s eyes welled. “I caused this. It’s all my fault.”

Louis was quiet. He knew from the police statement that Margi had told Brandt the address only when he tried to push her from the car. He couldn’t imagine her terror, yet there was a part of him that wished she’d been a little smarter in trying to get away in the first place. Why had she stopped in Hell to make that call? Why not drive fifty miles farther?

“Does he know?” Margi said softly.

“Know what?” Louis said.

“Does he know that I didn’t go back? Does he know that I tried to get away? Does he know that?”

“What does that matter?” Louis asked.

Margi glanced at Joe before answering. “He told me he was proud of me. I’d hate him dying and not knowing that.”

There wasn’t anything to do but lie. Not for Shockey’s sake but for Margi’s.

“Yes,” Louis said. “He knows.”

Margi ran a hand under her nose. Louis didn’t have a handkerchief, and he looked to Joe. She found a Kleenex in her purse and gave it to Margi. When she wiped her eyes, he noticed most of the bright orange fingernails were broken.

The door to the courtroom opened, and someone called Amy’s name. Joe moved away to take her inside. Margi watched them go, sniffed again.

“I’m a little scared. I never been in court before, at least not for testifyin’.”

“I’m not sure they’ll need your testimony,” Louis said. “Don’t be too disappointed if they don’t, okay?”

“I won’t,” Margi said. She reached under her velvet hat to scratch her head, winced slightly as she touched the bandage, then with a sigh just dropped her hand. “I mostly wanted to be here just in case that judge decided to give that girl back to Owen.”

“Not a chance. He’s wanted for the attempted murder of a police officer.”

She looked down at the wadded Kleenex. “He’s going to go back to jail, ain’t he?”

“Yes.”

She sighed.

It was the strangest thing Louis had ever seen. This sad woman feeling sorry for a loser like Brandt.

“I suppose he’d be going back to jail, anyway, so I guess I oughta tell you this part,” Margi said.

“Tell me what?”

“Owen told me he killed his wife,” she said.

“He confessed to you?” Louis asked.

Margi hesitated, then gave a tight little nod. “He said he cut her up and stabbed her like a hundred times, right there in that kitchen. But he broke the knife, and when he left to go get an axe, she like just crawled away and disappeared.”

Louis was stunned. But it did match Amy’s strange account of what she’d seen. She saw her mother attacked and closed her eyes. When she opened them, Jean was gone.

“Did you tell this to Detective Bloom?” he asked.

“No, I… I guess I still wanted to protect him,” she said. “But I’m done doing that. I just can’t anymore.”

“Well, if you still want to testify,” Louis said, “they’ll want to hear this. Will you do it?’

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s the least I can do for Mr. Shockey.”

“He’d be proud of you for that, too.”

Margi’s eyes held his for a moment. Then she wiped her nose with the back of her hand and looked to the courtroom. He knew that even if they caught Brandt today, his trial was months away.

“What are you going to do now?” Louis asked. “You going back to Ohio?”

She tried a smile that came out a quiver. “Well, once you know the gypsy woman is wrong, you can do almost anything, can’t ya?” she said softly.

She limped off toward the courtroom. He started to follow but stopped when he saw another familiar figure come through the glass doors. It was Sergeant Channing.

Channing walked straight to him. Before he spoke, he took a second to study the lacerations that crisscrossed Louis’s face and hands.

“I heard about everything that happened. How you feeling, Kincaid?” he asked.

“I’m fine. Is everything okay with Lily? I’m sorry I haven’t called or-”

Channing cut him off with a raised palm. “Don’t worry about it, man, please.”

He pulled a blue envelope from his shirt pocket, louis printed across the front in block letters.

“Lily wanted me to give this to you,” Channing said.

Louis opened the envelope and pulled out a card. It showed a cartoon of a bandaged teddy bear and the text, PUT YOUR RIGHT HAND ON YOUR LEFT SHOULDER AND YOUR LEFT HAND ON YOUR RIGHT SHOULDER.

Louis opened the card.

AND GIVE YOURSELF A HEALTHY HUG!

She had signed it, in purple pen, in big letters: LOVE LILY.

“You told her I was injured?” Louis asked.

“Yeah,” Channing said. “Kyla and I talked about it and decided she might find out. She reads the papers, believe it or not. Plus, she’s going to see you again, and your face looks like you crawled through barbed wire. Kyla and me… we made a decision a long time ago that we had to be honest with her about this stuff.”

“Because of your job?”

Channing nodded. “A few years back, I ended up in the hospital for a week with a gunshot wound. We didn’t want Lily to worry or be scared for me all the time, so Kyla told her I went out of town.” He smiled. “Well, one morning, Lily didn’t show up for school and set the whole damn city in a panic. Turned out she overheard someone talking and walked three miles to the hospital to find me.”

“Three miles?”

“Yup,” he said. “Afterward, we had a long talk with her about my job and what could happen to me. It’s amazing what kids can digest sometimes.”

Louis looked down at the card. “Yeah, it is,” he said.

Channing was quiet for a moment. “You look beat, man.”

“I’m all right,” Louis said.

“We’re going to catch this fucker,” Channing said. “I know you’d like to be a part of it, but you need to get some rest.”

Louis looked away and nodded.

“When things calm down, give me a call at the station, and let me know your plans,” Channing said.

Louis nodded again. “I will, thanks.”

Channing started to leave, then turned back. “I almost forgot. I got a message for you from Kyla. She says don’t you dare go getting yourself killed now.”

Channing walked away. Louis folded the card and slipped it into his back pocket.

By the time he slid into a back-row seat inside the courtroom, Joe was standing in front of the judge, asking him to allow her to take Amy home with her to Echo Bay.

He looked over at Amy. She was staring at Joe, her eyes filled with love. And he thought it was amazing that with everything Amy had been through, not only was she still able to feel love, but she was also willing to give it to a woman she barely knew.

He pulled Lily’s card from his pocket and stared at the bandaged bear. He opened the card, read the two words printed in the loopy purple letters three times, then carefully tucked it away.

Later that afternoon, they changed hotels again, because Shockey hadn’t regained consciousness, and there was no way to know that he hadn’t told Brandt where they were. Louis checked them into the only place that had two available adjoining rooms, an outdated Red Roof Inn out near the freeway. The first thing Joe did was call her boss, Mike. He told her the trial for a hit-and-run case she had been working on for months had been moved up to next week. She was the investigating officer and the one who obtained a confession from the driver. The case would be dismissed without her testimony.

She told him she would be home in forty-eight hours.

The three of them spent the evening eating pizza and playing Yahtzee until Amy finally went to bed.

Joe and Louis shared a bottle of wine, but they had barely talked. Then, finally, Louis took her hand and led her to the bed. They made love, for the first time since taking custody of Amy. It was quiet and quick, both of them afraid Amy might knock on the door at any time.

Joe knew Louis’s body was still struggling for strength and that he felt guilty for what had happened to Shockey. But even with all that, she sensed that something was missing from his touch.

It was near four when she slipped quietly from the bed and pulled a robe over her goose-bumped skin. Through the darkness, she felt her way toward the bottle of wine she’d left on the small table. Her toe hit the edge of a suitcase.

“Damn,” she hissed.

Louis stirred and rolled over, pulling the blanket up over his shoulder.

Joe shook the sting from her foot and fumbled for the remote to turn on the TV. She muted the sound as the room’s white walls took on the glow of the television.

The bottle of wine was there on the table. As she poured herself some in a plastic cup, she noticed two things on the table.

One was the card Lily had sent Louis. The other was a map of Michigan that Joe had bought Amy after they left the courthouse.

So many questions. Where do you live? What kind of house do you have? Is Lake Michigan big? Do they have bears up there?

On the map, Amy had traced the route from Ann Arbor to Echo Bay in red marker. Printed across the outline of the Leelanau Peninsula were the words: MY NEW HOME.

Joe took a sip of wine and stared at the flickering lights of the television.

God, was she ready for this? Just the idea that someone else was going to be dependent on her was unsettling. Protection… she could manage that. That was her job, after all. But what about the rest? The nurturing and soul shaping and all those other things mothers were put on the earth for.

Her eyes went to the phone, and she thought for a moment about calling her mother. Florence Frye was often awake this early. But Joe was almost afraid of what her mother would say. She had a sudden memory of when she was seven, coming into the kitchen cradling yet another bedraggled stray cat. And her mother’s words: You can’t save them all, Joe.

She would call her mother when she and Amy got back to Echo Bay. She’d find a way to explain. Maybe her mother would come for a visit. Maybe when she met Amy…

Joe shut her eyes. Maybe this was a mistake. But it was one she was willing to make.

She opened her eyes, set her glass down, and went quietly to the door between the two rooms, opening it softly. The lights were off, and Joe slipped in. As she moved deeper into the room and her eyes adjusted, she slowed.

Amy’s bed was empty.

Joe hurried to the far side of the bed to see if Amy was sleeping on the floor. When she didn’t see her, she pushed open the bathroom door and flicked on the light. Nothing.

She hurried back to the bedroom and hit the light switch. The blanket was crumpled, but there was no sign of a struggle. She spun to the outside door. The chain was off.

In two steps, she was there. It was unlocked, and she threw it open. The narrow hall was deserted and quiet. In desperation, she rushed to the window at the end and frantically scanned the parking lot below. Nothing was moving.

She ran back through Amy’s room into her own and hit the light switch. When Louis didn’t move, she shook him.

“Louis! Wake up!”

He bolted upright, almost hitting her in the face with his elbow.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, squinting.

“She’s gone!” Joe said.

“What? Who?”

“Amy! She’s gone. He took her, Louis. That bastard took her!”

Louis bolted from the bed and ran to the adjoining room. Joe followed him.

“He couldn’t get in here without her unlocking the door, and she wouldn’t do that, Joe. She’s probably hiding.” He searched the closet, then got onto his knees to look under the bed.

“No, she wouldn’t do that! I know-”

Joe froze as her eyes found the piece of paper wedged under the lamp on the desk. She snatched it up.

Dear Miss Joe,

I want to go to Echo Bay with you. But I am worried that when Mr. Shockey dies there will be no one left here to look for Momma. So I have to try one more time. I didn’t ask you to help me because you need to stay here and take care of Mr. Kincaid. Please don’t worry about me. I know where I am going and I am not afraid. I will be back sometime tomorrow.

Amy

Joe pushed her hair from her face, the flood of relief that Amy wasn’t in Brandt’s hands quickly giving way to dread. Her eyes went to the empty chair in the corner. Amy had taken her backpack.

Louis noticed Joe’s pale face and the paper in her hand. “What is it?” he asked.

“She’s gone to the farm,” Joe said.