Niceville (39 page)

Morgan Littlebasket glared at Twyla.

“Who are these men? Why are they in my house?”

“My name is Coker,” said Coker, “and this here is Charlie. Twyla’s a good friend of ours, and she asked us to come along and help her ask you a few simple questions.”

The man’s tone was calm, casual, and packed with latent menace. Littlebasket felt his left knee begin to quiver. To cover it, he went over to a bar and cracked open a bottle of vintage Cuervo, making a ceremony of pouring four fingers into a crystal glass with the logo of the Cherokee Nation Trust on the side.

Everyone let him fumble around for a while, but once he got settled into a big leather chair and opened his mouth to start in on one of his prepared speeches, the man called Coker lifted up a remote and aimed it at the big flat-screen Samsung above the fireplace.

It bloomed into light and everybody was looking at a picture of Twyla and her sister, Bluebell, both girls obviously in their very early teens, together at the entrance to a large tiled shower area, arms folded across their breasts, naked, engaged in what looked like some serious girl chat. No one said anything.

Morgan Littlebasket swallowed hard a few times, worked out what he was going to say, opened his mouth to say it, but Twyla cut him short.

“Don’t, Dad. Just … don’t.”

Littlebasket looked over at her, composed his features into a semblance of outrage.

“Twyla, why are you showing me these nasty—”

Twyla held up a hand, nodded to Coker, who pressed the
FORWARD
button, rapidly flicking through a series of images taken over a period of years, shots obviously copied from a larger digital file, but clear enough, color shots of the girls—alone, together, occasionally with their dead mother, Lucy—in their bathroom, doing all manner of things that all people do in their bathrooms, and in each shot the girls
were growing older, filling out, blooming, as if the shots were taken from a time-lapse film of two naked young girls turning into grown-up women.

No one spoke.

Coker never looked away from the screen, Charlie never looked at it, instead fixing his hard flat stare on Morgan.

Twyla had never taken her eyes off her father, and her father, after a few frames, was staring into his tequila glass, his shoulders slumping, his hands shaking, his breathing labored and heavy.

After a while Twyla held up a hand and Coker shut the flat screen down.

Twyla walked over and looked down at the top of her father’s head.

“Look at me, Dad.”

Littlebasket slowly raised his old bull buffalo head, his glazy eyes wet, his large mouth sagging.

“Say that you did this.”

He shook his head, mouth working, but only a small squeaky whisper came out.

“I didn’t hear that,” said Twyla, in a low whisper, her head cocked to one side, her expression as white and hard as quartz, her eyes burning.

Littlebasket tried again.

“Your mother … Lucy … she asked me to. It was only for … your safety … in case you fell down—”

Crack
.

No one saw the move. Just a blur, but the sound of the slap filled the room like a whip crack. She followed through, Morgan reeling, and brought it back fast and mean at the end of the arc, raking him across the left cheek with the back of her hand, a well-aimed strike from a very strong, very angry young woman. Blood came out of her father’s open mouth, his teeth showing red with it as he stared up at her.

“Don’t even
try
to blame Mom for this, you shit-heel fucking coward.
Say
that you did this.”

A silence, while the old man moved his lips, his eyes darting around the room, as if rescue was at hand.

No one moved a muscle.

Outside, the shafts of sparkling bright sunlight faded into pale
golden beams, filling the earthy, comfortable room with a gentle amber glow.

“I … did this,” he said, after a long time.

He lifted his hands to his face, started to sob. Twyla stepped in and ripped his hands away, leaning down to speak directly into his center.

“You’re dead to me. You understand me?”

“But … Twyla …”

“No tears, no tears from
you
. You’re only crying because you got caught. All those years, you made Bluebell and me feel like whores, just because we were growing up into women. You treated us like lepers, never hugged us, never said we were pretty, never made us feel …”

Her voice choked into silence.

She pulled herself together, stood up straight again.

“And all the time, you were doing … that,” she said, her hand sweeping out towards the television, the sudden motion making Littlebasket flinch as if she was about to hit him again.

“Listen to me now, Dad. Listen and remember. You will never know what this has done to me. You will never know what you took away from me—”

Littlebasket whispered something barely audible. Twyla cocked her head, her mouth tightening.

“
Bluebell?
Have I told Bluebell? No, I have not told Bluebell. I am not going to tell Bluebell, now or ever. She’s the reason why I’m not going to tell
anyone
about this. I don’t want her to know. You’ll have to find some way to explain why you’re dead to me. I don’t care what it is.”

She stopped, seemed to center herself.

“But one thing
will
happen. Bluebell must never have to know what I know. That’s one thing you can do. One good thing.”

Littlebasket’s mouth was working, trying to form some kind of an apology.

Twyla brushed it aside.

“You will find a way for her not to
ever
know. If you decide to shoot yourself, don’t leave a note explaining it all. If you decide to crash your plane, just go do it and let everybody go on thinking what a great guy you are. I don’t care about any of that. You’re dead to me from the moment I leave this house. Tell Bluebell anything you want. Just make
sure that Bluebell never knows about those pictures. Say that you understand me … say it … Daddy.”

The word rocked him and his tears suddenly became much more convincing.

He nodded and covered his eyes again.

She stepped back, looked over at Coker and Danziger, both of whom were really wishing they had had a lot more to drink than a couple of glasses of Jim Beam and a bucket of Valiums.

Coker and Danziger exchanged looks, and Danziger came over to the old man, stood in front of him. “Listen up, old-timer. Listen up. Shit. Coker, he’s turning into a puddle of warm piss here. Pour the old man some more tequila.”

Coker poured them all some tequila, handed a glass of it to Morgan Littlebasket, for whom he had no feelings of any kind at all. This
thing
here, this deer tick—squashing him wasn’t worth the stain on the sole of his boot.

He walked away, stood beside Twyla, and she eased herself under his arm, spent and shaking now that it was done.

Danziger took his glass, sipped at it, took a knee in front of the old man.

“These shots are small-file jpegs taken from a digital hard drive, or a mainframe, right?”

No word, just the head moving up and down.
Yes
.

“But when you started doing this, years back, there were no digital recorders, so at some point you took the earlier images and had them scanned into digital shots, right?”

Yes
.

“And then you switched to a digital recorder so you didn’t have to use film, right?”

Yes
.

“How did you get the pictures scanned? Nobody at a camera shop would have done that. They’d have called the cops. So you did it all yourself?”

Yes
.

“Okay. Big question here. Lie and we find out, Twyla’s not the only one you’re going to have to worry about. Did you ever take any of the
shots and sell them? Put them on the Internet to trade with other kiddy-porn freaks or sell them to a porn mag?”

The man looked up, a spark there, and then gone again. “No. Never.”

“Twyla got an e-mail today, with about fifty shots taken from that camera you got rigged in her bathroom. Looks like it’s been there for years. How many years?”

Lips dry and working, eyes down.

“Since Bluebell was fifteen.”

Danziger glanced at Twyla.

“Ten years ago,” she said, a harsh whisper.

“Ten years? That right?”

“Yes.”

“Is the camera still there?”

“No. I took it all out when Twyla moved away.”

“When was that?”

“Two … two and a half years ago.”

“Did you throw the recorder away?”

“No. I wanted to, but then … I didn’t.”

“Is the camera still in the house?”

“Yes. In a trunk. In the attic.”

Danziger looked at Coker, who looked at Twyla, and they both left the room.

“These shots here, they look like they stopped a while back. Like when the girls were younger. The shot where Twyla is helping Bluebell shampoo her hair, in the shower together—did you see that?”

“Yes. I … I remember it.”

“It looks like the last shot in the series that Twyla got. I want you to place it in time.”

“Why?”

“Because if you never let those shots out, then somebody else did. If we can figure out who that was, then Coker and Twyla and I are going to go see him and make sure he stops doing shit like this. So can you place that shot in time?”

Silence, but he was thinking.

“I think … it was Bluebell’s birthday. She was going to have her hair done special. Twyla was helping her in the bathroom.”

“Which birthday?”

“Her twentieth. She was going to be a full-grown woman. In our clan, twenty is the age—”

“Her twentieth. What date?”

“Bluebell’s birthday is the seventeenth of July.”

“So after that date, you were still taking shots of the girls, but none of those shots are in the e-mail Twyla got. So maybe that’s just because he never sent them, or maybe that was all he got when he got into your camera. It’s all we got to go on right now. Bluebell is twenty-five, right?”

“Yes.”

Coker and Twyla came back into the room, Coker carrying a large digital recorder. Twyla was carrying a box of mini-disks and looking sickly.

“So can you remember anybody coming into the house around that time five years ago? Was there a party, where maybe somebody could have gotten upstairs and found the camera?”

“No. The party was at the Pavilion.”

“How about cleaning staff? Do you have a cleaning lady?”

“No. Lucy did it all.”

“Did you have any kind of repairs done to the place around then? Any construction workers in?”

“I can’t … I don’t think so.”

“Coker, any dates on those disks?”

Coker took the box, opened it, flicked through the plastic cases. “Yeah. Most of them have labels.”

“Jesus,” said Twyla in a whisper, and then she walked away down the hall and went into a bathroom in the hall, closing the door behind her.

“See if there’s anything for August five years back.”

Silence from Littlebasket while Coker flicked through the cases. He pulled out one.

“Here’s one labeled for August and September, same year.”

“The recorder still work?”

Coker checked it.

“Battery’s flat.”

“Does it have an AC converter?”

More digging.

“Yep. Hold on, I’ll see what we got.”

He plugged in the converter, inserted the disk, stared down at the flip-out LED screen. Twyla came back into the great room, wiping her lips with a towel, her forehead damp, her hair brushed back.

Littlebasket stared at her until he realized that she was never going to look at him again in this life or the next and then he lowered his head.

“Here’s something,” said Coker, handing the box to Danziger. In the screen a man was bending over the shower drain, on his hands and knees, only his back visible, a dark-haired white male with a thick neck and a puffy waistline, the usual plumber’s hairy-assed butt crack, wearing some sort of uniform jacket with a logo.

The logo was blurred, the man moving energetically, prying up a shower drain for some unknown reason.

“Go to the next frame,” said Danziger.

Coker hit the tab, and the images jumped a bit, and now the logo was more visible, a white oval with black lettering.

“That’s Niceville Utility Commission,” said Danziger, turning to the old man. “Looks like you had a service call that August from the NUC. You remember that?”

“No. I don’t.”

“It might be on his computer,” said Twyla. “He keeps a record of all his financial transactions on a Quicken program. Archives it every year. Let me go see.”

Twyla left, went down the hall, apparently to some sort of home office at the rear of the house. She was back in less than a minute.

“He paid $367.83 for an energy audit from the NUC on Friday, August 9.”

“Energy audit? So the guy’s no plumber. Why was the guy in the shower stall?” asked Coker.

“Any name on the bill?”

Twyla shook her head.

“Just the bank transaction. The actual receipt might be in the box of tax receipts for that year. He always took care to save everything, if the IRS ever wanted to jack him up.”