Carnal Innocence (19 page)

“Agent Burns. Yes. About your scar.”

“I’ve had it going on twenty years, from when Austin Hatinger come down on me for being a thief.” Toby bent to lift an unopened bucket of paint and turned it back and forth in his broad hands.

“He accused you of stealing.”

“He said I took some rope from his place. But I never took nothing wasn’t mine in my life.”

“And there’ve been hard feelings between you since.”

Toby continued to shift the can. Caroline could hear the paint slop gently inside. “We ain’t been what you’d call neighborly.”

Burns took a pad out of his pocket. “Sheriff Truesdale has a report of a cross-burning on your lawn some six months ago. According to your statement, you believed
Austin Hatinger and his son, Vernon, were responsible.”

Something cold and hard flashed into Toby’s eyes. “I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t prove it when I came out of Larsson’s one evening and found the tires on my truck slashed, either. And Vernon Hatinger was standing across the street paring his fingernails with his pocket knife and grinning. Even when Vernon says to me I should be glad it was my tires this time and not my face, I couldn’t prove anything. So I just said what I thought. Hatinger didn’t like his boy being seen with mine.”

“There was an altercation between you and Austin Hatinger a few weeks later, in the hardware store, where he threatened to harm your son if you didn’t keep him away from Cy. Is that true?”

“He come in while I was buying some three-penny nails. He said some things.”

“Do you recall what things?”

Toby’s jaw set. “He said, ‘Nigger, keep your little black bastard away from what’s mine or I’ll peel the skin off him.’ I said if he touched my boy, I’d kill him.”

The quiet, dispassionate way Toby said it sent a chill racing up Caroline’s spine.

“He said some more things, quoting scripture and talking trash about how us ‘coons’ forgot where was our place. Then he picked up a hammer. We got to fighting there in the store, and somebody took off for the sheriff, I guess, cause he come hauling ass and broke it up.”

“And did you say to Hatinger something along the lines of …” He consulted his pad again. “‘You’d be better off worrying about how often that girl of yours is spreading her legs than about Cy fishing with my Jim’?”

“I mighta.”

“And the girl you were referring to was the now-deceased Edda Lou Hatinger?”

Slowly, Toby set down the paint can. “He was saying things about my family. Shouting filth about my Jim and my little Lucy and my wife. Not a week before that Vernon stopped my wife on the street and told her she’d best keep a closer eye on her boy before he got himself a broken arm or leg. A man don’t have to take that from nobody.”

“And so you brought up Miss Hatinger’s sexual habits.”

Toby’s skin heated with anger. “I was mad. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve brought in his kin since it was him that riled me.”

“But I’m curious how you happen to be acquainted with the deceased’s sexual habits.”

“Everybody knows it didn’t take much to get her on her back.” He looked at Caroline with mute apology.

“And do you have personal knowledge of that?”

Now the fury flashed, bright as a sword in his eyes. Frightened by it, Caroline stepped forward to lay a warning hand on his arm.

“I took vows to a woman fifteen years ago,” Toby said, clenching his fists. “I’ve been faithful to her.”

“Well, Mr. March, I have a witness who claims you visited Edda Lou Hatinger three or four times in her room at the Innocence Boarding House.”

“That’s a shit-faced lie. I never been in her room— not when she was there.”

“But you were in her room?”

Toby began to feel something very much like a noose tighten around his throat. “Mrs. Koons hired me on to do some work there. I retrimmed the windows in all the rooms. Did some painting, too.”

“And when you did your work in Edda Lou’s room, you were alone?”

“That’s right.”

“You were never in the room with her?”

Toby stared at Burns for a slow five seconds. “When she came in, I went out,” he said simply. “Now I gotta get my work done and see to my boy.”

When Toby stepped off the porch and around the side, Caroline realized she was trembling. “That was horrible.”

“I’m sorry, Caroline.” Burns put his pad away. “Questioning suspects can be difficult.”

“You don’t believe he killed that girl because of the hateful things her father did.” Though she wanted to shout it, she forced herself to speak quietly. “He’s a
family man. You only have to see him with his son to understand what kind of person he is.”

“Believe me, Caroline, a murderer does not often look like a murderer. Particularly a serial killer. I could give you statistics and psychological patterns that would astonish you.”

“Please don’t,” she said coolly.

“I’m sorry you seem to be dragged into this affair again and again.” He smiled. “I’d hoped to come by and spend a quiet hour continuing our conversation of the other day. And of course, I’d hoped to persuade you to play for me.”

She took three careful breaths. Perhaps, she thought, he couldn’t help being an insensitive, arrogant clod. “I’m sorry, Matthew, I’m taking a rest from performing.”

“Oh.” His face crumpled in disappointment. “Well, perhaps sometime soon. I’m hoping to have some time at the end of the week. From the little research I’ve done, I’m told there’s an adequate seafood restaurant in Greenville. I’d love to take you.”

“Thank you, Matthew, but I’m sticking very close to home for now.”

He stiffened a bit at the brush-off. “Pity. Well, the work won’t wait, I suppose. I’d best get back.” He walked to the car, annoyed but not defeated. “I’ll take a raincheck on the iced tea if I may.”

“Yes. Good-bye.”

The moment his dust had cleared, she went inside. For the first time in days, she picked up her violin and played.

O
vernight, a slow, dreary rain had moved in, soaking the thirsty ground. By mid-morning it had moved on sluggishly to Arkansas, having done little more than turn the dirt to a slick mud that would bake dry by afternoon.

Beside the open grave a huddle of people stood, ankle-deep in the tattered fog that was already burning off in the yellow glare of the sun. Some yards away a narrow line of oaks dripped with rain, a distracting monotone that reminded Cy of the rusty faucet in the bathroom that leaked day and night.

Sometimes he would lie in bed at night thinking that steady drip, drip, drip would drive him crazy. Just like that Chinese water torture he had read about. He was Cy Hatinger, Secret Agent, and the water would drip, drip, drip on the center of his forehead, but he would never break, not even if the water wore right through the skin and bone and down to the brain.

No, they would never break him. He was Bond— James Bond. He was Rambo. He was Indiana Jones.

Then he would just be Cy, stuck in his musty-smelling room, and he would get up, stuff a ragged
washcloth under the leak so that the drip would muffle to a bearable plop.

This time he didn’t try to block out the sound, but concentrated on it instead, using it to turn his mind away from where he was and what he was doing.

The Reverend Slater seemed ancient to Cy, though in truth the good man was not yet sixty. But Cy’s young eyes saw only the thin puffs of white hair on a sunburned scalp, the roadmap lines that scored the wind-roughened face, and the loose skin of his throat that hung stringily from bony chin to concave chest.

To Cy’s mind the reverend was too old to know much about life. Then again, today was for death, and there he was bound to be an expert.

Reverend Slater’s voice rose and ebbed, flowing melodiously over phrases about salvation and eternal life, and that old standard—God’s will.

Cy wondered what would happen if he stepped forward and snatched the Bible out of Reverend Slater’s hand.

Excuse me,
he could say,
but that’s a big pile of horseshit. God didn’t have anything to do with Edda Lou getting all sliced up. How come we have to put it on Him that she’s going into the ground today? How come we just shuck it aside as the will of the Lord when we all know it was a man’s hand who held the knife?

He was sick of having everything bad put off that way. If the hail came and sliced the young cotton plants to ribbons, it was God’s will.

He knew where hail came from, and it all had to do with hot air hitting cold and turning rain into hard little balls of ice. Cy couldn’t picture God sitting up there on His golden throne and deciding it was time to pitch hail at Austin Hatinger’s pitiful cotton crop.

Just as he couldn’t picture God willing that Edda Lou be hacked to pieces and tossed in the pond.

He wanted to say so. The words almost burned on his tongue in their need to be spoken. He knew his mother would only cry harder and groan and sway. Ruthanne would hush him, mortally embarrassed. Vernon would cuff him hard enough to make his ears ring.
Others might just stare at him. They were mostly ladies who had come, wrapped in their black dresses.

Mrs. Fuller and Mrs. Shays, grouped together with Mrs. Larsson and Mrs. Koons. Darleen was there, too, bawling up a storm so that her mama finally stepped forward and took the baby she was clutching.

There were other women, some who had been friends with Edda Lou, most who’d come out of Christian duty. But men were scarce. Sheriff Truesdale was there, holding his wife’s hand. The FBI man stood off to the side, his face solemn and his head bent. But Cy knew that his eyes were watching, watching, watching.

“I am the way, the truth, and the light,” Slater intoned, and Mavis swayed so violently into her eldest son that Vernon tipped into his wife and sent a domino reaction around the circle of mourners. Everyone jigged and jogged for a moment while the reverend went on, heedless.

“Whosoever believest in Me will enter the Kingdom.”

Cy wanted to shout, to shout at all of them that Edda Lou hadn’t believed in anything but Edda Lou. That all this praying and carrying on was only making a bad thing worse. But he kept his silence, and he kept his head down because there was one man attending the graveyard service whom he feared more than he feared the reverend’s God.

That was his father.

Austin Hatinger stood straight in his shiny Sunday suit, his ankles and wrists shackled, and a glum-faced deputy flanking him at each side.

He listened to the holy word. He watched as the coffin was lowered into its dark, moist home. And he planned.

He heard his wife’s long, ululant cry of grief. His eyes flicked up to her face, saw the ravage done by ceaseless tears. And he plotted.

As the last fingers of fog began to burn off the damp grass, he lowered his head. God had provided, he
thought. Concentrating, he stared unblinking into the hole dug for his daughter. In reaction his eyes began to tear. Let them think he was weak with grief, he thought. Let them see a weak, helpless man.

He waited, waited through the end of the service, waited, waited while the women moved to his wife to murmur useless words of condolence.

As they began to walk off toward their cars, one of the deputies nudged him. “Hatinger.”

“Please.” He focused on that hole in the ground and made his voice tremble. “I need to—pray. To pray with my wife.”

He could see by the way the deputies shuffled their feet that they had been moved by the service and the women’s tears. Masking everything that was in his heart, he lifted his head. All they could see was the shiny-eyed hopelessness of a father with a dead child.

“Please,” he repeated. “She was my daughter. My only daughter. It isn’t natural for a man to bury his child, is it? You know what he did to her, don’t you?” He looked down so they wouldn’t see the hate. “I need to comfort my wife. She ain’t strong and this is like to kill her. Just let me hold my wife.” He held out his hands. “A man’s got a right to hold his wife over his daughter’s grave, ain’t he?”

“Look, I’m sorry—”

“Come on, Lou.” The second deputy had a daughter of his own. “Where the hell can he go with his legs shackled? It’s only decent to give him a minute with his wife.”

Austin stood, his head bowed and glee in his heart as the key turned on the cuffs. “But we’re going to have to stand with you,” the deputy who was called Lou said grudgingly. “And you only got five minutes.”

“God bless you.” Out of the corner of his eye Austin saw that Burke was already in his car and pulling away. A few of the other women had scattered off to older graves to pay respects to family that was gone. Austin took a step forward, opening his arms. Blindly, limply, his wife fell into them.

He held her a moment, waiting, watching as the
deputies averted their eyes out of embarrassed respect for the grieving. It was human nature to offer privacy to the mourning. The smattering of people still in the cemetery turned away.

Then he moved fast, so fast that Cy, who had never once seen his parents embrace, stumbled back into the wet grass.

Austin shoved his wife hard against the first deputy, tumbling both him and the screaming Mavis into the open grave. As the other deputy reached for his weapon, Austin rammed him hard in the chest, going in headfirst like a battering ram. The grappling for the gun was brief while Lou, down in the grave, fought to free himself of a flailing, hysterical woman.

Austin rapped the side of the gun across the deputy’s head, knocking him unconscious, then snatched a wide-eyed Birdie Shays around the throat.

“I’ll kill her,” Austin shouted, full of the wrath of God. “I’ll kill her dead as my girl, you hear me? You throw out your gun and the keys, or I’ll blow a hole in her head fit to drive a truck through.”

Birdie made piping sounds and pawed ineffectually at his arm. A few feet away, Ruthanne began to cry, certain she would never live down this newest humiliation.

“Where you gonna go?” Lou demanded, hating the fact that he was crouched on a coffin with a sobbing woman clawing up his back. The guys back in the station were going to ride him about this like a conventioneer rides a twenty-dollar whore. “Think it through, Hatinger. Where you gonna go?”

“Where the Lord leads me.” And yes, he could feel the strength and heat of that fierce God pumping through him. His eyes shone with it. “‘Master, I will follow Thee!’” he shouted, cutting off Birdie’s air. “Ten seconds, then I do her. After that, I’ll just fill that hole you’re in with lead, and that’ll be that.”

Swearing and furious, Lou tossed out the keys.

“Your sidearm, too.”

“Goddammit—”

“Five
seconds.” With a jerk of his head, Austin signaled Vernon to unchain him.

“You oughta just kill them, Daddy,” Vernon said between his teeth as he turned the key. The idea had blood surging to his face. “Just shoot the Christless bastards and we’ll go to Mexico.”

“I ain’t going nowhere till this is finished.”

Lou popped up, hoping to get off one shot, then ducked down again as a piece of sod two inches away was sheared off by a .38 slug.

“Fucking crazy if he thinks I’m going to end up with a hole in my head.” Lou tossed the gun out.

Austin shoved the babbling Birdie toward the grave, where she teetered on the edge for a moment, her eyes wide with dreadful concentration, her arms stretched like a diver preparing for a double gainer. She landed spread-eagle on Lou.

By the time everyone had sorted themselves out, Austin Hatinger was gone, driving off in Birdie Shays’s Buick. He was carrying two Police Specials and a gutful of hate.

Jim March stood patiently in the hallway, whistling tunelessly through his teeth and waiting for Caroline to come back down so he could ask her if she wanted the braces on her back porch fixed when the painting was done.

His daddy had run into town for a few supplies, and Jim had opted to stay behind. He was supposed to be painting, but he’d noticed the sag and give in the old porch, and thought his daddy would be pleased if the inquiry led to more work.

Caroline had called down to him to come on in when he’d knocked. He’d been careful to wipe his feet. His mama was a fiend about foot wiping and hand washing. Every few whistles he’d edge his paint-splattered Keds a little farther down the hall. He knew the violin was in the parlor, because he’d seen it through the window. Jim wanted a closer look, the same way he
might have wanted one if he’d spotted a brand new Wilson ball glove through Larsson’s display window.

He reached the parlor doorway, casual like, he thought. And there it was. He shot a quick glance over his shoulder toward the stairs, then made his dash. He was just going to take one little look, was all, he told himself. One peek, then he’d be back in the hallway lickity-split.

He’d been thinking about that violin ever since Caroline had played it the day before. Jim had never heard music like it, not in all his born days. It made him wonder if there was something special about this violin, something different from the old fiddle Rupert Johnson would sometimes saw on summer nights.

Jim fumbled with the catches on the side, then lifted the top. When he saw it, nestled there against coal-black velvet, it
was
different. Oh, it seemed to be the same shape and size as old Rupert’s, but it was shiny as a new penny. And when Jim worked up the nerve to touch it, its glossy surface was smooth as silk. Or what he imagined silk would be.

Forgetting his vow to take one quick peek, he gently brushed a thumb over the strings.

Caroline heard the telltale open chord when she reached the bottom of the steps. Her first reaction was of irritation. No one touched her instrument. No one. She tuned and polished it herself, often to the amusement of whatever orchestra she was playing with.

Luis had complained more than once that she spent more time stroking the violin than stroking him. That had made her feel guilty—until she’d discovered he’d been doing quite a bit of extracurricular stroking himself.

She strode toward the parlor, the lecture already heating her tongue. Then she stopped. Jim was kneeling beside the violin case, and his thumb brushed carefully across the strings, as gently as if he were stroking the cheek of an infant. But it was his face that stopped Caroline from speaking the sharp words. He looked as though he’d just discovered some marvelous secret. His smile stretched across his face, not in glee but in profound joy. His eyes shone with it.

“Jim,” she said quietly, and he jerked to his feet like a puppet on a string. His eyes widened until Caroline was all but sure they were going to swallow the rest of his face.

“I—I—I was just looking. I beg pardon, Miz Caroline, I know I wasn’t supposed to. Don’t fire my daddy.”

“It’s all right,” she said, and it was. Wouldn’t Luis be surprised, she thought, that it was all right with her if a young black boy handled her violin? She’d never allowed Luis to do more than breathe on it.

“You don’t have to pay me for the work or nothing,” he barreled on. “I know I shouldn’ta done it.”

“I said it’s all right, Jim.” When she touched a hand to his shoulder, the calm amusement in her voice finally reached his rattled brain.

“You ain’t mad?”

“No, but it would have been better if you’d asked to see it.”

Of course, if he had, she would have said no. Then she would have missed that glimpse of sheer pleasure. The same pleasure she remembered feeling herself, once upon a time.

“Yes, ma’am, I apologize. I sure do. Had no right coming into your parlor like this.” Hardly able to believe his good luck, he started backing out. “I was coming in to ask if you wanted that back porch braced, then I just …” It occurred to him he’d be smarter to leave well enough alone.

“What made you want to see it?”

Shoot, he thought, she was going to tell his daddy for sure. Then the shit would be in the fire. “It was just … hearing you play it yesterday. I ain’t never heard nothing like the way you made that fiddle sing. So I thought … well, I wondered if it was something special.”