Skin Privilege (14 page)

‘I’m married now. Did you know?’ Lena shook her head and Charlotte supplied, ‘I’ve got three kids and Larry, my husband, he’s such a great dad. He takes extra shifts at the factory so the kids can have everything they need. He goes to all the ball games and the school plays and the band concerts. He’s a really good man, Lee. I lucked out.’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘You seeing anybody?’

‘No.’ Lena had answered too harshly. She felt a warm rush of heat come into her cheeks.

Charlotte glanced over Lena ‘s shoulder as if she was afraid someone would overhear them. ‘I’ve got to get my girl home, and…’ She laughed, but it sounded more like a sob. ‘Gosh, you just look so much like her.’ She put her hand to Lena ‘s cheek, let it linger for just a moment too long. Tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled as she fought back her emotions.

‘ Charlotte -‘

Charlotte took Lena ‘s hand, squeezed it hard. ‘Take care of Hank, Lee. Sibby would’ve wanted you to look after him.’

Lena watched her walk over to one of the kids sitting at the table. Though Charlotte was a couple of years older than Lena and Sibyl, she had been Sibyl’s closest friend. From early childhood until high school, the two were inseparable. They had spent hours together in Sibyl’s room, gone to the movies together, even driven down to Florida together every spring break. They had lost touch when Sibyl moved away to go to college, but friendships like that never really went away.

Charlotte was right about one thing. Sibyl would have wanted Lena to take care of Hank. She had loved him like a father. It would have killed her all over again to know he was living like this. But what if she had found out that Hank had lied to them all those years? How would Sibyl have felt about him then?

‘It’s set up,’ the librarian barked from across the room. She tossed a wave at the microfiche machine like she was finished with it.

‘Thank you,’ Lena returned, though the woman was already jamming her key into the lock to open the elevator and make her escape.

Lena walked back over to the machine. There were other, better ways to go about this. She could call Jeffrey. She could ask him to search the police database for her mother’s name. She could go down to the sheriff’s office and ask for her father’s murder book. She could track down Hank’s dealer and put a gun to his head, tell him if he ever so much as talks to her uncle again, she’ll splatter his brains all over his shiny, white car.

The dealer was the problem. Jeffrey would want to know why Lena was running her mother’s name. Worse, he would probably want to help out. She couldn’t very well tell him that her uncle was back on meth and had said some crazy things she wanted to check out. Jeffrey would be on his way to Reece before she could hang up the phone.

Talking to the Elawah sheriff might bring some unwelcome attention as well. Hank was using pretty heavily; he might even be under surveillance. Even without that, over thirty years had passed since Calvin Adams had been murdered. All his case files had probably been lost or destroyed by now.

She had to use the tools that were available to her, and the library was the best place to start. Hank had lied to her about so many things that Lena didn’t trust anything anymore. She had to start from the beginning and work her way toward the truth. Maybe when she got a little more information, knew better where she stood, she could go to Jeffrey and elicit his help. She had worked with him long enough to know the questions he would ask. What she had to do now was try to find some of the answers.

Lena took a seat at the machine and scanned the front page of the
Elawah Herald.

LOCAL DEPUTY SLAIN

Lena sat on the edge of her chair as she read the story word for word. She couldn’t recall the article Hank had shown her when she was a child, but this seemed to be it. All the details were there: Speeding stop. Dead at the scene. No suspects.

So, at least Hank hadn’t lied about that.

Lena adjusted the knobs on the machine and scrolled down, overshooting the next edition, then slowly winding her way back. The
Herald
was a weekly paper, not more than fifteen or twenty pages long, and her father’s shooting was the biggest news in town. Each subsequent front page for the next month carried the story, basically regurgitating the same details over and over again. Shot twice in the head. No suspects found.

She pressed the fast-forward button, hoping that she wouldn’t have to change the film to find the week of her mother’s death. She scrolled into 1971, slowing around the first week of March. She scanned the obituaries for her mother’s name, then skipped to the next week’s paper, then the next. She was about to give up when she saw a photograph on the front page of the September 19 edition.

Hank had only one photograph of their mother. It was a Polaroid, the colors unnaturally bright. Angela Norton was seventeen or eighteen. She stood on an anonymous beach somewhere in Florida, wearing a modest one-piece white-and-blue checkered bathing suit with a large bow around the waist. Her hair was piled on her head and she stood with her hands at her side, palms down, striking a pose. This had been a time when teenagers wanted to look older, more mature, and Lena had always liked the expression on her mother’s face: the pursed lips and serious eyes, the streak of blue eye shadow and the dark, Cleopatralike eyeliner placing the young woman firmly on the precipice of the sexual revolution.

For Lena and Sibyl’s sixth birthday, Hank had hired an artist from out of town to do a likeness of

Angela’s face. The oil painting hung in the living room over the couch. It had been such a staple of Lena ‘s life that she barely even looked at it anymore.

She looked at the photograph of her mother in the paper, though. Angela Adams, nee Norton, sat in an old rocking chair Lena recognized from Hank’s house. A baby was in either arm, their bodies swaddled in blankets.

Above her, the headline read, the grieving

WIDOW AND HER TWINS.

TUESDAY MORNING

SIX

Jeffrey sat in a back booth at the City Diner listening to the messages on his cell phone. The coffee here was the hi-test kind, and when the waitress came over to fill his cup again, he smiled and waved her away, thinking if he drank any more of the black tar his head would vibrate off his neck. He was already hearing a buzzing in his ears and this, combined with the pouring rain outside, was making him feel like he had stuck his head in a hornet’s nest.

He pressed the three button on his cell phone, fast-forwarding through the Heartsdale mayor’s message asking him to get to the bottom of a group of vandals who were kicking over trashcans on his street, an act that to the mayor’s thinking was one of the first signs of lawless thugs taking over the city.

Jeffrey closed the phone after the last message, which was from a vinyl-siding salesman wanting to talk to him about exciting distribution opportunities. There was nothing from Sara and she wasn’t answering the phone at the motel. He hoped that she was taking a long bath, then thought about the grime he had seen at the bottom of the tub last night and hoped instead that she’d stepped outside to get some air. He was worried about her. She had been much too quiet, even before Lena had run rings around her. The many times he’d woken up in the middle of the night, he’d found her wide awake, curled into a ball, her back to him.

He hated leaving her alone this morning, especially in that disgusting room. Frankly, he hated exposing her to the seedy underbelly that, until last night, she hadn’t known existed. The place was what Jeffrey thought of as a jerk-stop motel, the sort of establishment that catered to truck drivers, whores, and the more than occasional cheating spouse. Jeffrey had spent more than a few evenings in such motels with more than a few women, so he recognized the signs. Even a fool would figure something was going on as soon as he checked in. The clerk behind the front desk had asked Jeffrey how many hours he needed the room.

Jeffrey had parked the BMW in full view of the street in case Lena was looking for him. Though, for all he knew, Lena was halfway to Mexico by now. Part of him hoped she stayed there. He was angry at Lena for not trusting him, even angrier with her for duping Sara, and furious with himself for letting it all happen in the first place.

Sara was right about one thing – Lena had been terrified last night. She’d obviously felt that short of getting Jeffrey to leave, her best option was escape. The question remained: why did she want to get rid of Jeffrey? What could be so bad that she’d refuse his help? The person in the Escalade had been killed. Still, in the cold light of day, Jeffrey couldn’t think of anything – not even murder – that would make him turn completely against her. There had to be an explanation, a reason for her involvement in this death. Lena always played it close to the bone, but she had never willfully jeopardized anyone but herself.

And, still, he could not help but wonder if it was Hank Norton’s body in the back of the burned Escalade. On the way to the diner this morning, Jeffrey had called the station back in Grant County and gotten Hank’s address off Lena ‘s personnel file. He had tried the phone number she’d given, but no one picked up. Surprisingly, the satellite navigation in Sara’s car had actually recognized the address. Jeffrey had taken this as a sign that he should drive by and see if Hank Norton was home. The place looked abandoned, but Jeffrey assumed that was because it hadn’t been painted or repaired in the last thirty years. He would’ve gotten out of his car and checked for himself, but there had been an Elawah County Sheriff’s Department cruiser parked right across the street. The man had given him a wave as Jeffrey drove by.

If Hank was in the back of the Escalade, that might explain why Lena had run. No matter the bad blood between them, if someone had killed her uncle, she would hunt him down like an animal. If she had killed him herself… Jeffrey had stopped there, not letting his thoughts take him down that dark road. After almost two decades of knowing Lena, he should have a better idea right now about whether or not she was one of the good guys.

Last night at the hospital, she’d had her chance to ask for his help and voted with her feet. Obviously, she wanted to go it alone. Obviously, Jeffrey wasn’t going to let her do it. There was still the matter of her being a detective on his force who was involved in a violent crime. She had left that hospital because she was running from something -something she desperately did not want Jeffrey to know about. Whether she was involved in the explosion or had set it herself, Jeffrey was going to figure out what had happened. Jake Valentine couldn’t find his ass in an ass-storm. If Lena was going to be extricated from this mess, it was all down to Jeffrey.

Of course, this would have been a lot easier if he had any idea what the hell was going on.

After he drove past Hank’s house, Jeffrey had called the Georgia Department of Corrections to make sure Ethan Green was still locked up. They had assured Jeffrey that Ethan was still behind bars, but as nice as the woman on the phone had sounded, Jeffrey didn’t quite trust the information she had pulled up on her computer. He had called Coastal State Prison himself and spoken directly to the warden. It was a relief to hear from the man that Ethan was still a resident of the state penal system, but Jeffrey was not stupid enough to dismiss the con from his list of possibilities.

Though he claimed to be reformed, Ethan Green had been a skinhead since childhood. He was raised in a skinhead family and had been arrested along with his skinhead friends. Jeffrey had seen the black swastikas and disgusting images the young man had etched into his skin. There was no way Ethan hadn’t realigned himself with his boys the minute he’d walked back into prison. The only way for animals like that to survive was to live in packs. The only question was how far was Ethan’s reach outside the prison walls? The man at the hospital last night had sported a red swastika on his arm. Was he somehow connected to Ethan? Had the imprisoned skinhead sent one of his boys to get to Lena? That might explain her fear. But, would it explain why she would refuse Jeffrey’s help?

He looked at his watch, wondering why Nick Shelton was late. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s southeastern field rep was a busy man. They had chosen the diner as a halfway point for both of them – far enough from Reece to avoid prying eyes and close enough to Macon so that Nick wasn’t out of the office too long. Jeffrey had been cryptic on the phone last night as he arranged to meet the man, but he was hoping Nick could fill in some blanks on Jake Valentine and what was going on under the new sheriff’s watch. Nick worked on cases that crossed county lines, and Elawah was in his district. If anyone could tell Jeffrey whether or not skinheads were operating in town, Nick Shelton could. The GBI agent took pride in bringing down the bad guys, and despite his tendency toward the flamboyant, he was a damn good cop.

He was also late by almost an hour.

Jeffrey picked up his cell phone and thumbed to the number for the motel. Before he’d left, Jeffrey had asked Sara to get in touch with Frank Wallace back in Grant County, but they both knew that this was just an excuse for Jeffrey to call in later and check up on her. Jeffrey very seriously doubted knowing who the white sedan was registered to would open any earth-shattering leads. It was the kind of base-covering work that Jeffrey usually assigned to junior officers.

Jeffrey was listening to the phone ring, his chest feeling tight as each one passed unanswered, when Sara finally picked up.

‘Jeff?’

‘You sound out of breath,’ he told her, relieved to hear her voice.

‘I went for a walk,’ she told him, then started to explain why. When she got to the part about buying a map, he found himself squeezing the phone so hard that it nearly popped out of his hand.

‘So,’ she continued, obviously excited by her little stroll. ‘It was just a vacant lot, but still, I thought I could go to the county courthouse and see whose name is on the property deed. What do you think?’