The King Of Lies

CHAPTER 30

Rhonda Temple pretty much shut down after her outburst. She wouldn’t talk much at all, not about Virginia and not about why she’d done what she did. But she did tell me how Alex, her youngest daughter, had come to die. The story stayed with me on the drive back to Salisbury, and I knew that the time had come to confront Jean. I had to ask the question. I had to know.

I parked Dr. Stokes’s car and walked to the entrance of the emergency room. I nodded at a doctor who stood smoking outside, then entered the brightly lit hospital. It was quiet, and for a moment it felt more like a mausoleum than a hospital. The triage nurse’s desk was empty. No one sat on the long benches or chairs in the waiting room. I could hear the hum of fluorescent lighting and the pneumatic hiss of the door as it slid shut behind me. I saw movement behind a glass partition, a flash of white coat, but that was it. The place was dead. So, feeling more like a ghost than ever, I passed through the reception area and into the long hall. It led me past vending machines, telephones, and the closed doors of the small hutchlike offices where low-grade administrators worked from nine to five. I found the bank of elevators and stepped inside. I pushed the button for the third floor.

The nurses’ station on Jean’s wing was empty and I walked quickly past it. As I reached my sister’s room, a nurse turned the corner, moving toward me, but her head was down. She didn’t see me, so I went inside and closed the door. The room was dark after the hallway, but not entirely without light. Some filtered in from outside, and the monitors cast their eerie glow. I half-expected to find Alex there, and honestly didn’t know what I’d do if I did. Fortunately, she wasn’t there. I needed Jean’s attention, not another pissing contest.

When I took Jean’s hand, it felt desiccated, as if she had bled out after all; but it was warm, and I looked down at her as I held it. Her eyes moved beneath her lids, and I wondered what she was dreaming about. Something bad. Her life was a nightmare. There would be no reprieve behind closed eyes. I wanted to wake her but did not. I sat in the chair by her side and held her fevered hand. Eventually, I put my head on the narrow margin of bed, and leaning forward, perched on that unyielding chair, I finally fell asleep.

At some point, I, too, must have dreamed. I felt her hand on my head and heard her voice. How could you, Work? How could you do it? Her hand fell away, along with her words, but in the clairvoyance of dreams, I knew that she was weeping.

When I woke, it was with a start. Jean’s skin was washed charcoal, her eyes twin slits of darkness, but then she blinked, and I knew that she was awake and had been watching me.

“When did you get here?” Her voice was as arid as her hands. I rubbed my eyes.

“Do you want some water?” I asked her.

“Yes, please.”

I poured some into the plastic cup on her bedside table. “There’s no ice.”

“It doesn’t matter.” She drank the water and I refilled her cup.

I looked at the saline bag suspended above her, followed the tube to where its needle entered her arm beneath a white X of tape. It was easy to recall the red sea of her blood on the floor of our parents’ house. She’d probably be dehydrated for a week.

I looked at her face, saw the slackness around her mouth, and wondered what she was on. Antidepressants, maybe? Sedatives? She saw me looking and turned away.

I did not want to ask her the things that had to be asked. She was transparent, and I knew that I had never seen a more fragile person.

“How are you, Jean? Are you holding up okay?”

She blinked at me, and for an instant I thought she wouldn’t answer. She drew up her knees, puddled into herself, and I thought she was going to turn away from me, as she’d done the last time.

“They say you saved my life.” The statement was utterly devoid of emotional context.

They say your car is blue. Like that.

I almost lied. I didn’t want her to hate me for doing what I’d done. “I might have,” I said.

“Even Alex says it. She says you found me and put tourniquets on my arms. She says one minute later and I would have died.”

I looked at my fingers, remembering the slipperiness of her blood; how hard I’d jammed those fingers into her neck, looking for a pulse. “You called me,” I said. “I came.”

“That’s the third time,” she continued. I felt her movement and looked up in time to see her turn her face away. “You must hate me,” she said.

“No.” I put my hand on her arm, turned her back so that I could see her face. “Never, Jean. Don’t you ever think that. I could never hate you.” I squeezed her shoulder and said the words that should have come easily but never had. “You’re my sister. And I love you.”

It was her turn to nod. She did so in fitful jerks as folds closed over her eyes like curtains and tears pooled on the shelf of her wasted cheeks before spilling down her face in two long, hot arcs. She swiped at the tears with one arm, scrubbing them away with the heavy bandage that covered her wrist. She opened her mouth to speak but then closed it, the words unsaid. Instead, she continued to nod. But I understood. The words were hard. That’s how we were raised.

Do you need anything? I wanted to ask. More water? Another pillow? I meant to ask these things, but that’s not what I said. There was a larger question, a dangerous one. But it couldn’t wait any longer. I needed to know. I couldn’t go to Mills until I heard it from Jean herself.

“Did you do it?” I asked.

Jean looked horrified.

“What?” Almost a moan, and the tears came faster, but I couldn’t stop. Every action of the past week had been based around my assumptions that Jean had pulled the trigger. I’d gone to jail for those assumptions. I now faced life in prison for them.

“Did you kill him?” I asked again. “Did you kill Ezra?”

Jean’s mouth gaped and then collapsed. “I thought you did it,” she said. It was her child’s voice, so vulnerable that I saw the truth of her words. She really believed that I’d done it.

“Is that what Alex told you, Jean? Is that why you think I did it? Because she told you I did it?”

Jean shook her head, hair moving over her eyes, coming to rest on her forehead. I saw that she’d pulled the sheet to her throat. Her eyes spilled confusion.

“You did it, Work. You had to have done it.”

“I thought you did it,” I said, and Jean rocked as if my words were bullets. Her eyes widened and she pushed deeper into the pillows that mounded behind her.

“No.” She shook her head again. “It had to be you. It had to be.”

“Why?” I asked, leaning closer. “Why me?”

“Because…” Her voice trailed off. She tried again. “Because…”

I finished her thought. “Because if you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it, then Alex did. Is that what you were going to say?”

This time, she did roll away; she curled into a fetal ball, as if I might kick her, and for that moment I was at a loss. Jean hadn’t done it. Had I not known the truth about Alex, I would not have accepted that fact.

I’d been so damned sure.

“There are some things about Alex, Jean. Some things you might not know.” I had to jolt her out of her complacency, force her to accept the truth.

She spoke from across the chasm I’d opened between us. “I know everything there is to know about Alex, Work. There’s nothing you can tell me.”

“Do you know that’s not her real name?”

“Don’t do this, Work. Don’t try to come between me and Alex.”

“Did you know it?” I asked again.

Jean sighed. “Virginia Temple. That’s her real name. She changed it when she was released.”

“Do you know she killed her father?” I asked.

“I know,” she said.

“You know about that?” I couldn’t believe it. “Do you know how she killed him?” Jean was nodding, but I couldn’t stop. The horror of it was still too fresh in my mind. Cooked meat. Charred lungs. Alex watching and her mother sliced to ribbons. “She handcuffed him to the bed and set it on fire. She burned him alive, Jean. For Christ’s sake, she burned him alive!”

Suddenly, I was on my feet. Beneath me, Jean contracted even further. She was hugging her knees to her chest, cringing, and I saw that the line from her saline bag had a kink in it. The sight calmed me down, forced me to get a grip on my raging emotions. I knew that I was losing it. It was all too much. I took a deep breath, then leaned over to straighten the kink, but when my hand brushed against her arm, she flinched.

“I’m sorry, Jean. I’m really sorry.” She declined to respond, and her body rose up as she sucked in a mighty breath. I found the chair again and fell into it. I buried my face in my palms, pressed against my eyes until I saw sparks. But for her wet breath, the room was silent. I took my hands away and looked at her. She was still clenched in a ball.

“It scares me, Jean. It scares me that she killed her father, and it scares me that she has this power over you.” I paused, looking for better words. “It just scares me.”

Jean did not respond, and for a long time I watched her in silence. After a few minutes of this, I felt the need to move, to do something. I got up and went to the window. I pulled back the curtain and stared across at the parking deck. A car pulled in and turned on its headlights.

When Jean spoke, I could barely hear her.

“She had a pool. Growing up, she had a pool.”

I walked back to the bed. When she rolled her face off the pillow, I could see the wet spot of her tears. “A pool,” I said, letting her know I was there and that I was ready to listen. I sat down. Her eyes were huge and raw; she showed them to me briefly, then turned back to the wall. I looked at her back and waited for her to go on. Finally, she did.

“It was one of those aboveground pools, like we used to make fun of when we were kids. A poor kid’s pool. She didn’t care that it was cheap or flimsy. She didn’t care that it sat behind a single-wide or that it was visible from the road. She was a kid, you know. And it was a pool.” Jean paused. “The best thing that ever happened to her.”

I could see it as if I were there; yet I already sensed the truth of it. It was the way she said it. The pool was not the best thing that ever happened to her. Not by a long shot.

Jean continued. “When she turned seven, her father implemented the new policy. That’s exactly how he said it. ‘We’re implementing a new pool policy.’ He tried to make a joke out of it. She didn’t care one way or another. But if she wanted to hang out around the pool, she had to be wearing high heels and makeup. That was the policy.” She paused, and I heard her sharp intake of breath. “That’s how it started.”

I knew where this was going, and I felt my insides clench in disgust. Hank had been right.

“The policy didn’t include her mother. Just her. She told me once that her mother stopped hanging out at the pool after that. She didn’t do anything about it. She just didn’t want to see it. Her father was out of work that year, so that’s what they did. They hung out at the pool. In the summer, I guess, that was enough. Watching, I mean. But two weeks after they closed up the pool for the winter, it started.”

I did not want to hear this. I wanted her to stop. But I had to hear it and she had to say it. We were trying to find the road.

“He didn’t just fondle her, Work. He raped her. He sodomized her. When she fought back, he beat her. After that summer, she wasn’t allowed to have pajamas. For God’s sake, she had to sleep naked. Another policy. It didn’t start slow and build up. It exploded into her life. One day she was seven. The next day she was getting it regular. His term. But in spite of that, it somehow got worse over time, like he got bored with her and had to find new ways to make it fun. She can’t talk about some of the things he did, not even now. And she’s the strongest person I know.

“It went on for years. He never did go back to work. He drank more and he gambled more. On three occasions, he loaned her out to cover his gambling debts. A hundred dollars here, two hundred there. She was eleven the first time. The guy was a shift foreman at the rubber plant in Winston-Salem. He weighed three hundred pounds. Alex weighed a little over seventy.”

“Her mother…” I began.

“She tried to tell her mother once, but she didn’t want to hear it. She accused her of lying and slapped her. But she knew.”

Jean fell silent.

“She could have gone to the authorities,” I said.

“She was a child! She didn’t know any different. By the time she turned thirteen, it started to get a little better. He molested her less and beat her more.” Jean rolled her eyes to me. “She was getting too old for him. She hit puberty and he started to lose interest.”

“She was fourteen when she killed him,” I said. “Well past puberty.”

A sound escaped Jean’s throat, part laugh and part strangled cry. She turned her entire body over, raised herself up on one elbow as if to meet me eye-to-eye. “You don’t get it, Work.”

“If he’d stopped abusing her-”

“She had a sister!” This time, she yelled. “That’s why she did what she did. A seven-year-old sister named Alexandria.”

Suddenly, I understood. I understood everything.

“On the day that Alex killed her father, her sister had just turned seven years old. Her party was the day before. Guess what her daddy gave her.”

I knew the answer.

“High heels, Work. Her own high heels and a tube of lipstick. For daddy’s little girl. And she loved it. She didn’t know what it meant; she just wanted to dress up like her big sister. That’s why Alex killed him.”

I didn’t want to speak. I didn’t want to hurt my sister further, but knew that I probably would. Hank had told me that Jean loved Alex like a preacher loves his God. So be it. But this was no divine being, no benevolent soul. She was damaged, a killer, and Jean had to understand the truth of this. For her own good.

“What happened to her sister?” I asked. “Did Alex ever tell you that?”

Jean sniffed loudly, but her voice was calmer. “She doesn’t talk about her sister. I guess they lost touch after Alex was locked up. Her sister probably didn’t understand, not at that age.”

I had to do it fast, before I froze. She had to know.

“Her sister died, Jean. She ran back into the house and she burned to death along with her father.”

Jean’s mouth formed into another silent, seemingly toothless black circle.

“Accident or not, she killed her sister. And for some reason, she took her name. Alexandria, Alex. It can’t be a coincidence. She killed her father, she killed her sister, and, as far as I’m concerned, she killed Ezra, too.”

Jean’s body trembled. “She would have told me,” she said, then looked suddenly suspicious. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded.

“I’m sorry, Jean. I know it hurts, but I had to tell you. You deserve the truth.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I swear it, Jean. On our mother’s name, I swear it’s the truth.”

“Get out of here, Work. Get out and leave me alone.”

“Jean…”

“You always took Dad’s side. You’ve always hated her.”

“She killed our father, and she wants me to fry for it.”

Jean rose from the mattress, a gray and quaking shadow of herself; her sheets fell away and she swayed on the narrow bed. I feared she would tumble off and crack her skull on the hard floor. Her finger stabbed at me, and I saw the denial in her. I’d pushed it too hard, too fast.

I’d lost her.

“Get out!” she screamed, and burst into tears. “Get out! Get out of here, you fucking liar!”