Summer of the Dead (26 page)

Okay, I really DO have to go now. I wish I was dead. Dead, dead, dead.

Once again the letter was signed
Maybelle,
only this time, the signature was ordinary. No swirls. No curves.

Lindy tried to picture her mother back in the time she'd have received this note. In 1975, her mother would have been … right, fourteen years old. Based on pictures of her mother as a teenager, Lindy could imagine her hunched over these letters, sitting cross-legged on the porch swing or stretched out flat on her belly on the floor of the bedroom she shared with her sisters, serious, intent, frowning as she read about her best friend's troubles.

“Daddy?”

Lindy stood up abruptly from the kitchen chair. She'd heard a sound, a faint scuffling. Couldn't tell what it was. Then she heard another sound, and this time it was a familiar one: the stomp of her father's boots on the basement stairs. He was coming up.

She waited, counting the steps in her head. Watched the basement door slowly open.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said to the grizzled gray head that poked out sideways from behind the wood slab. Bloodshot eyes blinked at her, bleary and unresponsive. “Got the night off tonight,” she added. “You want something to eat? I can make you some food. No trouble.”

He grunted. Pulled his head behind the door again, like a turtle going back in its shell. The door closed. She counted the steps as the boots clomped back down, the sounds growing marginally fainter. The counting was a habit now.
One … two … three … four … five …
When she got to fifteen, the steps stopped. He was back home again.

Why had he come up? Did he think she'd left for work—and so now he could go out? Out to do whatever it was he did in the dark? She didn't know, and she found the possibility so troubling that she pushed it out of her thoughts.

Time to return to the letters.

*   *   *

The next batch had been sent at intervals of several months and, at one stretch, more than two years. They were all about this Maybelle person's school days. She hated the new school. Hated the teachers. Hated the other kids. She missed Raythune County, missed her friends, missed her best friend Maggie. She'd thought about killing herself but couldn't figure out how to do it efficiently; she was afraid of messing up.
I don't want to be some kind of vegetable,
Maybelle wrote.
That would be totally TOTALLY gross
.

The eleventh letter was dated February 6, 1992. The handwriting was different now. Little more than a scribble. It wiggled across the page, as if the writer was being called from another room and had to finish up quickly. Or maybe she was just distracted:

Margaret,

Okay, I hear what you're saying. And no, I'm not mad. Okay? Really. You have a right to your opinion. But you know what? It's my life, okay? My life. Maybe you could remember that, next time you feel like lecturing me. Okay?

The letter was signed
M.
Just
M.
Lindy turned it over and then back again, to see if there was any more to it, but no.

There were two more letters in the same vein—
Don't tell me what to do, it's MY life
—along with a few lines congratulating Margaret on her upcoming marriage. Maybelle made fun of the fiancé's name, asking Margaret if she was going to mind having the nickname “Crabby,” because that was surely in the cards. Maybelle also made fun of how much Margaret read:
You and that Anne What's-her-face Lindbergh. Jesus. That's all you talk about these days. Her and her books. All that shit about seashells and listening and gifts. BOR-R-R-RING! Who the hell cares about HER, anyway? HE'S the one who's famous!!

The final note, dated March 19, 1994, apparently was a response to something important that Margaret had written, an offer of some kind:

You're the best friend anybody ever had. I mean it. I'll never, ever forget this. Not as long as I live. I'm in a real bad spot and there's nobody else I can turn to. I know you'll keep my secret. I know it. I also know that I don't deserve a friend like you. I really don't. And I'll make it worth your while. You know I will, right? You can trust me, Maggs, just like I trust you.

Look there. I called you Maggs, just like when we were kids. I miss those days. Everything was simple then. Nothing's simple now. Everything is so goddamned complicated. I don't know what I'd do without your help. I'd be lost. I'd be—well, I can't even think about it.

M.

And that was it. The last letter.

Lindy sat back in her chair. She'd had to strain to read the pages, especially the later ones, the ones with the minuscule, hurried-looking handwriting, and she rubbed her eyes. She couldn't remember when she'd last gotten a personal letter. Everybody used e-mail to communicate now. Or texting. But there was something so warm and extraordinary about handwritten letters. They were
actual,
not virtual. They had shape. Took up space. All e-mails looked the same; they showed up on a computer screen and they left that way, too. Even if you printed them out, they still looked all the same. But each of these letters was distinctive. Lindy wished she had the other side of the correspondence—the notes her mother had written to this Maybelle person—but these were better than nothing. Her mother had touched each one, page by page. And that was enough.

Margaret Crabtree had never mentioned a friend named Maybelle. But it was clear that these letters had meant a great deal to her. She'd put them away in a private place. They were not part of the surge and drift and heave of accumulated stuff with which the house had been blocked and swamped all these years. And maybe her mother, on those rare occasions when she was alone in the house, had reached toward that special spot under the dresser, the one that only she knew about, and drew out the blue and silver box and read and reread these letters, just as Lindy was doing now. And maybe they made her happy. Lindy hoped so.

She envisioned her mother at nineteen. Her own age. Lindy imagined her mother holding each letter at exactly the same spot Lindy held it, thumb on the margin, sometimes using an index finger to follow a squiggly, hard-to-decipher line as it kinked its way across the fragile page. Lindy wondered if her mother at that age had been filled with the same kind of directionless longing that burned in her, filled with a restlessness that was like a fine powder riding atop every thought and gesture and ambition, like dust from a dandelion gone to seed, the kind of flower that you blow upon with your eyes closed, fist tight around the stem, fiercely dreaming.

 

Chapter Twenty-six

“They give you any trouble out at the gate?”

They had, but Bell hated to admit it, and so she didn't. She shrugged. “Not too much,” she replied to Sharon's question.

Truth was, the two bastards in their tight black T-shirts and black jeans had accosted her the moment she rolled up to the front entrance of Riley Jessup's estate, yelling
Freeze!
—clearly, Bell thought, they'd watched too many reruns of
Charlie's Angels
on TV Land—while commanding her to exit her vehicle. She complied. Then they'd advised her to turn around and put her hands on the hood of the Explorer while they patted her down. Aggressively. One of the security men, the larger and younger and uglier one, had deliberately taken his time, grunting and letting his oversized hands linger when they followed the inside seam of her slacks, lingering even longer when they grazed her butt and roved across the front of her blouse. Bell could have protested, could have whirled around and snarled,
You sonofabitch, copping a feel, I'm going to kick you in the balls and see how you like it, you stinking—

He wasn't worth the aggravation. If she'd made a fuss, she might not get to see Riley Jessup; if she'd complained, then this visit would become a referendum on how his security staff comported itself—not a fact-finding expedition about Jessup and his investments. So she'd waited for them to finish, then waited again while the older guard called up to the house and checked to make sure they were authorized to let her in. Receiving permission, they stepped back. “Gwan,” the younger man said. He'd punched in a code and then used his palm to slap a metal pad on the side of the big stone pillar. The pillar was the intimidating twin to the one on the other side of the entryway. “Gwan. Git.” The gate swung open. Bell drove forward, and it closed behind her. Through her open window she could hear the mechanism locking automatically, with a soft
whirrrrr
and then the prolonged and ponderous-sounding
thwwwwunk
of a massive bolt settling heavily in its iron stirrup.

She parked in front of the main house, an overgrown, white-brick edifice with six pillars spaced out evenly across the front, black shutters repeated at each of the myriad windows, and a perky profusion of dormers and turrets. There were five other vehicles parked up and down the wide curving drive, the requisite assortment of beefy-looking black SUVs and a small red sports car as round and shiny as a cinnamon drop. Sharon's car, Bell guessed.

During her approach to the massive double-sided front door and its ostentatious hardware, Bell tried her best to ignore the luscious acreage that sloped gently away from the big house, the grass as smooth and emerald green as a PGA fairway, the treetops swaying in the breeze with a synchronous fluidity that could have been choreographed. Bell had never been here but knew the particulars anyway, thanks to Rhonda Lovejoy. Rhonda had dropped by Bell's office the previous day to deliver a magazine piece on the place; published a few years ago, the article was a fawning spread filled with exclamation points and copious photographs and quotes that dripped with the pretend-humility of Jessup and his daughter. The estate included the main house and two guest cottages, a tennis court, a horse barn and riding trails, and a swimming pool trimmed in a blue-green ceramic tile that artfully echoed the color of the sky.

Bell had leafed quickly through the slick pages, then sidearmed the thing back toward a marginally startled Rhonda. “Thanks,” Bell said, sarcasm making something blunt and stubby and notably ungrateful-sounding out of the word. “Nice to know that Riley Jessup's precious butt is nestled in a soft spot every night.” It wasn't his wealth that Bell resented; it was the fact that his wealth had come on the backs of struggling West Virginians. Hypocrisy was hardwired into his life story. He was, after all, a politician.

Hell,
she'd reminded herself.
So am I, come to that.

Sharon had met Bell at the front door and inquired about her reception at the gate. The governor's daughter was wearing a white blouse, tan capri pants, and white sandals, and as soon as Bell lied to her about the guards' decorum, Sharon smiled. “Oh, good,” she said. Her shivery little voice was as musical as a wind chime nudged ever so slightly by a minor breeze. This was probably not the same voice, Bell thought, that she'd been using back in Raythune County when the cell phone almost melted from the heat of her tirade. She escorted Bell through a succession of three vast rooms—the walls and essential furnishings of each served as a garish and overbearing celebration of, respectively, the colors green, gold, and scarlet—and into what seemed to have been designated as a sitting room. Sharon asked if she'd like a beverage. Bell declined. Her no overlapped with the unmistakable voice of Riley Jessup, booming across the acreage of the plush beige carpet, followed by the man himself. His walk was a sort of swaying waddle, reminiscent of a child's pull toy that moves as much sideways as it does forward. He situated himself at one end of a gigantic couch, propped up against the padded armrest.

“Your call was mighty welcome,” Jessup declared. “Not every day I get to entertain a pretty young prosecuting attorney anymore. Not since I left the statehouse. These days, I just rattle around this big old place, making more trouble for Sharon here.” He chuckled at his own little joke. He was wearing a lemon yellow suit with a bright white shirt and flowered tie, and white shoes. His hands looked enormous, like bristly gray chunks of a mystery meat that somehow had eluded FDA inspection.

Sharon remained standing. She ignored her father and spoke directly to Bell. “I'm afraid I have to go now. My son's very ill. He's having an especially bad day.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Bell replied.

Sharon nodded. It was a martyr's nod, serene and self-effacing. As Bell watched, she ascended the wide staircase that dominated the other end of the room, barely touching the twisting cherry handrail as she rose, as lithe and nimble as her father was doughy and tottering. The handrail was polished to a glorious sheen, its rich grain drawn out by the light of the large multifaceted chandelier presiding grandly over the area. Opposite the staircase was a marble fireplace. In the center of the room, four plush white couches had been arranged to form a square. In the middle was a table that featured, along its chamfered edges, a marquetry inlay of leaf-tasseled vines. This was the kind of place, Bell thought, that really should have included a price tag dangling coyly from each item, so that the owners could be absolutely certain that visitors would get the message:
We're rich. And you're not.

“Don't know what business brings you here today, Mrs. Elkins,” Jessup continued, wiggling his backside until it was comfortably situated amid the couch cushions, “but afore we start, I gotta ask you this: If you got any extra prayers you ain't using, I dearly hope you might fire up one or two for Montgomery. Boy's ailing. Ailing something awful.”

Bell sat down on the couch across from him. She underestimated the softness and pliancy of the cushions, and instantly felt as if she were falling backwards. Had she not caught herself in time, she was fairly certain that she'd have slid into the crease between the bottom and back cushions, arms and legs churning helplessly in the air like a capsized beetle.