June Bug (6 page)

5

Mae Edwards stood at the edge of the Dogwood reservoir in the shade, where the dew of the misty morning still left wet stains on her shoes. Clouds circled overhead, threatening rain. A swirl of lights illuminated trees and shrubs with an eerie glow as they waited for the sun to rise higher. The ascent of confused lightning bugs from the damp earth gave her little comfort, though that scene at evening had always brought with it a measure of familiarity and peace. As long as she could watch the fireflies rise, there was equilibrium with the world, a rightness to an earth gone mad in a hurry. People let old women die in hospital emergency rooms without moving a finger. Men kidnapped children and held them hostage in basements before killing them. There were sick people out there and some were close.

“I never thought this day would come,” she muttered.

Leason shifted from one foot to the other like his back was giving out on him again, pacing along the freshly mown grass near a small sandy patch where the sheriff had told them to stay. There was already yellow tape on the battered dock where kids fished or watched fireworks on July Fourth. A handful of fishermen were in place on an inlet where the trees leaned out over the lake.

“There’s nothing that says she’s down there,” Leason said.

“That’s not what the sheriff thinks,” Mae said.

Leason’s jaw was set with an uncharacteristic hardness. “Sheriff doesn’t know everything.”

“He wouldn’t have told us if he didn’t think there was something to this.”

A young man wearing a tie emerged from the woods, carrying a small notebook and a pen stuck in his shirt pocket. He had the look of innocence combined with an inner tenacity of an attack dog, and Mae guessed where he was from the minute she saw him. It took Leason a while longer to even notice his approach.

“Morning, folks,” the man said just loud enough to be heard. There were burrs on the bottom of his pants, showing the length he had traveled to avoid the authorities. “You’re Leason and Mae Edwards, right?”

“What’s that got to do with you?” Leason said. He was usually genial, a man of few words, and allowed his wife to not only make their social calendar but also take the lead in each conversation. The tension of the scene was eating at him, though. His right eye twitched with what looked to Mae like the beginnings of pinkeye.

“You’re from the
Herald-Disgrace,
aren’t you?” she said.

The man smiled, familiar with the pejorative. “Yes, ma’am. Todd Bentley.” He reached out a hand, but both of them stared at him until he took it back. “I was hoping I could ask a couple of questions.”

“I read your story about the anniversary of Buffalo Creek,” Mae said.

“Thank you.”

“There’s no thank-you to it. Looked to me like you were jockeying for some book deal. Some of those stories make you relive all the pain. Yours just made me feel sorry for the people you tracked down.”

Bentley smiled. “I can assure you, ma’am, I’m not shooting for any book or movie deal. You don’t get too many of those around these parts. Just trying to do my job as well as I can.”

An emergency worker gave a yell and a diesel engine fired. Black smoke rose through the trees like some evil prayer and drifted toward the valley.

“How’d you hear about this?” Mae said.

Bentley moved closer. “I’ve got a friend at the sheriff’s office. We’ve been waiting for a break in this case for a long time.”

Mae could see the headline: “Seven-Year Mystery Solved.” “This is going to sell you a bunch of papers tomorrow, isn’t it?”

“With all the cutbacks, we need something. They’ve laid off half the newsroom since I’ve been working there. If you don’t generate some stories of your own, you don’t have a desk.” Bentley took another step closer to Mae. “But really, Mrs. Edwards, there’s a lot of people who have been interested in this story since day one. You’ve seen all the churches that have kept their vigils, their prayer chains. People have held out hope that this day would come and that we’d at least find out what happened to Natalie.”

Mae recoiled when he spoke her name. As if he knew the girl himself. As if he were on a first-name basis. As if he cared. He had no idea. That girl was full of life with sparkling eyes. Mae still kept the DVD someone had made of the video clips of her birthday and her first pony ride and the trip to Camden Park with Natalie covered in cotton candy—she even had it in her hair. Mae had bathed the child herself that night and marveled at the sticky sweetness of life, and a few days later, at the senseless meaninglessness of the whole thing.

He was right about the prayer chains. Every church in the tristate had Natalie on its list, but as time went on, she dropped off each list one by one. Either God was powerless to do something about the situation or he just didn’t care. And the people were just as powerless as he was.

“I want to be as accurate as I can so our readers get the truth,” Bentley said. “That’s my goal.”

“The truth,” Mae said, laughing through the pain. “You wouldn’t know the truth if it snuck up on you and bit you on the butt.”

A photographer snapped a few shots of emergency personnel at the edge of the lake. Then an officer waved his arms and made the guy move back behind the yellow tape. Obediently the man did, snapping more pictures.

Bentley nervously fiddled with his tie, smiling. “I’ll give you that one. But if the truth held on long enough, we’d probably get a good picture of it.”

Leason, still staring at the scene, shook his head. “Vultures is what you are. Preying on people’s bad news. Just a bunch of vultures looking for carrion. Ought to be ashamed of making people’s loss your stock and trade.”

“Did the sheriff come and get you?” Bentley said.

“He sent one of his deputies. Said there was a scuba diving class early yesterday morning that spotted a car at the bottom. It didn’t hit him until later that it fit the description, and they hustled out here this morning.”

“He wanted you to be here?”

“Discouraged it, in fact,” Mae said. “Didn’t want us as part of a circus, but there are some things you just have to know.”

Todd was scribbling as she talked, looking straight at her. “You’ve always maintained that your granddaughter was alive. Why have you thought that?”

There it was. The fishing had begun on this side of the lake. Looking for a money quote before they even pulled the car out of the water. Natalie was probably just a skeleton now. The fish and crawdads and whatever else lived down there had probably been at her. Water could make a body disintegrate over time. Mae had been at the Ohio when they pulled her uncle’s body out after being in the water for only three days, and he was bloated and almost unrecognizable. Too much to drink and the water too swift and a man who never could swim. What would Natalie look like after seven years?

“I still believe she’s alive,” Mae said. “Some people call it blind hope. I know how much life that little girl had in her. But my resolve is being sorely tested; I can tell you that.”

“Where’s the mother? Where’s Dana?”

Leason turned on the young man like a bull whose territory had been violated, but Mae held up a hand and he stopped, his face contorted.

“Just leave it,” Mae said as if talking to an old dog that had dug through a double-ply trash bag for a chicken bone.

Leason hobbled down the uneven slope to the water and walked precariously along the bank to the staging area for the recovery.

“I’m not talking to you about her,” Mae said. “None of your business. Or anybody else’s.”

“It just seems strange that the mother of the child wouldn’t be here. Has the sheriff contacted her? Or maybe she’s moved from the area?”

“You can’t contact what you can’t find,” Mae said, her jaw set on the false teeth she’d had since she was in her twenties. “Can you imagine losing your only daughter like this? not knowing where she is? wondering every day if you’re going to get a call that says they found a body? people believing the worst about you? I don’t blame her for trying to move on with her life.”

Bentley scribbled and nodded.

Mae waved a hand at him like she was done and took a few steps.

“Mrs. Edwards, is there anything you want to say to the community? the people who have stood with you?”

Mae turned and looked hard at Bentley. “I’ve already thanked those people myself. The ones who prayed and brought us meals and such, they know how much we appreciate their reaching out.” She wasn’t through. “But to the ones who called talk radio and whispered behind our backs like we did something wrong, well, as a Christian woman I don’t have much to say that you could print.”

“Mae!” Leason shouted from the bank. “They’re pulling it up.”

Sheriff Hadley Preston had seen more than his share of gruesome things in his law enforcement career and in the military before that. The past few years most of his days had been spent answering calls about stolen property or domestic disputes and the occasional drug bust. He’d written his share of speeding tickets, knowing well the best wooded lots to park where unsuspecting motorists never saw him until he pulled behind them. That always gave him a sense of pleasure, seeing surprised faces in the rearview.

However, in the midst of regular days of patrols and the routine desk work of a Mayberry existence, he’d stumbled onto the horrific. Before his post in Dogwood County, he’d spent time in smaller communities. He’d been the first on scene at the 7-Eleven in Red House when a robbery gone bad had turned worse. The gunman had fled after spraying the scene with bullets from a semiautomatic. The eighteen-year-old girl behind the counter had died before she hit the floor. Two kids toward the back of the store were lying in a pool of their own blood and red Slurpees. An older teen was hunkered down behind the hot dog warmer, shaking and unable to speak. That day wasn’t much fun.

Of course the strongest memory, the one that had defined his waking moments—and many of his dreams—was the night of November 14, 1970. Preston was seventeen and one of the youngest volunteers with the Wayne County Civil Defense. That evening was cold and rainy, had been all day. The quintessential West Virginia mid-November day. Not a night fit for anything but staying inside and watching TV. Wet leaves on the ground. Soggy earth that smelled fertile and just waiting for winter to lock in and turn everything hard.

His parents had gone to dinner at a friend’s home in Barboursville. He figured they would drink some Hudepohl and play Rook until late. Preston had said he didn’t want to go. In the intervening years, he’d often considered what might have happened if he had taken their invitation and wasn’t one of the first people at the scene.

That night he’d left his cigarettes in the truck, and he ran outside without a coat to retrieve them from the dash. In the eerie mix of dark and fog and rain and moisture that hung in the air, he heard a plane’s engine overhead.

Whoa, that thing is too low,
he thought.

He got out of the truck, listening more than anything, looking toward the airport, hoping what was about to happen wouldn’t. Then a horrible sound wafted over the ridge, unearthly, unforgettable. The last moments of life for some people. The sound was quickly followed by a ball of fire that cut through the haze and fog and descending darkness.

Preston didn’t wait for the phone call. He stuffed his cigarette pack in his shirt pocket and headed up Route 75 until he neared the road to the airport. There, along the ridge, he saw the scattered, burning debris. He parked the truck in a ditch and jumped out, heart pounding, an unlit Pall Mall hanging from his lips, and ran through the underbrush, then slogged through mud that pulled him in and rose to his ankles. Then halfway to his knees.

By the sound of the engine, this was not a small plane, and the wreckage confirmed it. The burning rubble was scattered for several football fields.

He made it to the upward slope of the hill, out of the marshy area, and stopped to listen. The air was still. A crow flew over, cawing. Tires on wet pavement. A VW Beetle with a flashing light on top pulled to the side of the road. Fire trucks in the distance, sirens blaring, getting closer.

For a moment, Preston concentrated on the
tick-tick
of rain on wet leaves. Fire licking the edges of burning engines and the hiss of cold rain on hot metal. In all of that he never heard a voice crying for help. Didn’t hear one person calling out.

Then the sirens overtook the closer noise of the evening.

The pungent smell of jet fuel was all around, and he wondered if he weren’t in some kind of rescuers’ no-man’s-land and if the hillside would be engulfed in flames like some napalm run in Vietnam. But there was something more driving him—the heart of a young man who believed he could find a survivor. On a plane that big, somebody had to have made it. It looked like it had clipped trees at the top of the ridge, and if that was true, perhaps the bottom of the plane had been taken out and seats could have been scattered . . .

Others were coming up the hill, shouting. Preston’d had the presence of mind to grab his long gray flashlight before getting out of the truck. It was on now, scanning the hillside like a beacon of hope. His foot hit a stone, and he cursed as it rolled through the wet leaves. He flashed the light in that direction and was stunned to see a face staring back at him. An older woman. A pearl earring in one ear. He had thought her head was a rock.