Summer of the Dead (40 page)

If the transplant authorities wouldn't take a bribe, maybe Odell Crabtree would. He'd taken one before, when Sharon wanted to dump the newborn; maybe he'd take it again now. He didn't care about the girl. He hadn't cared for about nineteen years ago, when he'd demanded and received a folded-over wad of cash for his trouble. Odell was a coal miner. A brute. A savage. A symbol of everything that Sharon and her family had left behind when they moved away from Raythune County. Surely he'd like to be rid of the girl—and end up with a nice big payoff for his trouble.

It was Riley Jessup's idea to bring in Sampson J. Voorhees. “Big-city lawyer,” Sharon said with a sneer, although there was a gleam of admiration in her eyes, too. “Elephant balls—and able to keep a secret, if the price is right.” From his office in New York, Voorhees tried for months to put the offer before Odell Crabtree, to get the old man on board. But they received no response from Crabtree. The next step: Forget the negotiation. Hire a local to do the dirty work. Get Jed Stark to stir up trouble in Raythune County, attacking a series of random victims. Drive home the point that a killer's on the loose. That way, Stark could murder Lindy—and get the body to the medical center—with little fuss. Nobody would ask questions. She had, after all, no real family. No friends. With her mother gone, there was nobody left to care about Lindy. Nobody to harangue the overworked local authorities to stay focused on the case.

The transplant would be done in Raythune County. Riley Jessup's connections would ensure it. If anybody asked questions later, it wouldn't matter; Montgomery would be alive. They wouldn't take his new heart away from him.

“But that fucking sonofabitch Stark got himself killed in a stupid bar fight,” Sharon said, practically spitting her disgust, “right after he killed some old coot. Didn't finish the job. Barely started it.” Voorhees arranged for the payoff to Tiffany Stark to keep her quiet about the plan.

At that point, before Bell could go on with her recapitulation of Sharon's confession, Fogelsong spoke. “So the attack on Charlie Frank was Perry Crum's doing.” The sheriff had propped his backside against the cinder block wall, grateful for the chance to take the pressure off his spine. He looked, Bell thought, about 110 years old. And she figured she looked at least a dozen years older than that. “It had nothing to do with Riley Jessup,” he added, “or his daughter or their plot to save the boy.”

“That's right.”

The sheriff frowned. “So they were chosen at random,” he said. “Freddie Arnett. Charlie Frank. Murdered by different people for different reasons—but victims of the same bad luck.”

“Yeah,” Bell said. “Jed Stark came across a defenseless old man working in his driveway in the middle of the night. Perry Crum saw a guy walking along the side of a deserted road.” She let the fact of the unfathomable brutality of coincidence sink in. No way to pretty it up. Or have it make sense. “For Freddie Arnett and Charlie Frank,” she added, “it was the wrong place to be. At the wrong time. We were looking for logic. For a pattern. We could've looked forever and never found it—because there isn't one.”

Fogelsong thought about her words. Bell, he knew, was doing the same thing that he was: pondering the malicious miracle of chance in lives that were already twisted into unnatural shapes, by virtue of where those lives were being lived, the burnt and battered ground that constituted the arena for this long pageant of sorrow.

A phone call might have drawn Freddie Arnett back inside his house that night, just before Jed Stark came along, and Stark would've picked somebody else to bludgeon to death. A request from Martha Frank—a glass of water, a readjustment of her pillow—could have delayed Charlie's walk, so that when Perry Crum found himself on Godown Road, Charlie would still have been at home, stroking his mother's head, telling her she was safe, telling her everything was fine, telling her that he would always be right there by her side. And Perry would've moved on. Found somebody else to make his point with.

“Voorhees is untouchable, I guess,” the sheriff said.

“Well, he's been in business a long, long time. Which means he's very good at covering his tracks. I'll try—but I bet we can't lay a glove on him.”

Fogelsong shook his head. Something still troubled him. “A heart donor's different from a bone marrow donor,” he said. “People get donor hearts from strangers all the time. Doesn't have to be a family member.” His voice was growing raspy; he'd had quite a night himself, picking up Perry Crum out at the Crabtree house and reviving him and then stuffing the howling, squirming, cursing old man in the Blazer and booking him at the courthouse.

“No,” Bell replied. “It doesn't.”

“So couldn't Stark have just murdered any young person? Anybody who was roughly the same age and size as Montgomery? Given Jessup's connections around here, they'd get that heart to the boy, anyway.”

“Yes. But Lindy was perfect. Nobody looking out for her. Nobody to ask hard questions about her death. Truth is—Jessup and his daughter really couldn't have done this with anyone else. It was only possible for them if they used Lindy. And not just because of the logistics.” The sheriff looked perplexed, and so Bell groped for a way to explain it. “You have to understand how Jessup and his daughter justified their plan. How they reconciled it in their own desperate minds.” She paused. “Everybody's got a story they tell themselves so that they can sleep at night, Nick. So that they're not torn up with guilt and regret every second. And it all comes down to how they looked at Lindy Crabtree. What they saw her as.”

“Which was…?” His sentence trailed off.

Bell swallowed hard before she spoke. “Spare parts.”

*   *   *

“Daddy,” Lindy said.

The time had come for Bell and the sheriff to join her in the cell. Lindy knelt on the gray concrete floor next to her father's bed. She was still groggy from sedation—during the drive from the hospital to the courthouse she'd frantically rolled down the window and thrown up twice—but she was fighting to keep her mind clear. She knew there was very little time.

Lindy leaned forward. She put her arms around her father's thick torso, or as far around as her arms would go. Odell took one of his puffy gnarled hands and he placed it on top of her head, and he said, in a voice honeycombed with phlegm, “My girl. My girl.”

Deputy Mathers had called in a doctor earlier that day, and the verdict was swift, definitive:
No need to take him anywhere. Nothing anybody can do
. Odell Crabtree's lungs were long-pummeled and severely scarred and his heart was drowning in its own fluids. His body was beaten down and used up. There wasn't one thing that was killing him; there were many, many things. The shock of finding Lindy unconscious on the living room floor, the confusion of the last few days, seemed to have consumed the final ragged bits of his strength. Yet somehow he had hung on, almost as if he hoped—with whatever reasoning power was left to him—to see Lindy again. And here she was.

Minutes passed with no sound, except for Odell's ponderous, clotted breathing. The intervals between each breath—the spaces between the slow rise and automatic fall of his strapping chest—grew wider. Then wider still. He was running out of breath, which meant he was running out of life.

“Daddy,” Lindy said.

If there was to be any final mercy, Bell thought, let it be this: Let Odell recognize her. Realize she is here. Let the fog in his mind lift for these last few moments.

“Daddy,” Lindy said again, and now she was weeping, her small shoulders bobbing up and down as she embraced the ragged heap that represented what had become of Odell Crabtree, his mortal shape and material being. “Daddy, you can't die. I don't have anybody else.”

His crusty brown lips moved. His tongue was briefly visible as it touched those lips. He was fighting to speak.

The words were gravelly and slurred with fatigue, but in the exquisite silence of the darkest part of the night, they were comprehensible, if barely so: “Lied to you, my girl,” Odell said. “Couldn't tell you that you weren't really our child. You were Maybelle's. Maybelle come to us and said, ‘I can't keep this baby. I can't. It'll ruin my family. Ruin our name. Be bad for politics. And my daddy'll never give me another dime.' And your mama said, ‘Never you mind. We'll take her. And nobody'll ever know.' See, thing is—your mama wanted a child. But I didn't. All I wanted was the money. They paid us to take you, my girl. I'm ashamed to say it, but I took the money.” He had to stop. He was breathing hard, even harder than before. He coughed a terrible wrenching cough that seemed to lift him and shake him and then fling him down again. “She's not Maybelle these days. Calls herself something different. Her daddy was governor. He's a rich man. Lives in a big house. But you know what? You don't belong to Maybelle no more. You never did. You're my girl. I love you like you were my own child. You
are
my child now. Oh, Lindy, girl.” The coughing fit this time made him gasp and twist.

Another few minutes passed and then he was gone—not dead yet but gone to another place, an in-between place, churning and flailing through the thought-swamp where his memories had sunk once again, stranded like lost ships on the ocean floor—and he blew out a chestful of air and he bellowed, “Who're you
?
Who the hell are you?” and he pushed Lindy's head off his chest, angry and confused, and he tried to rise from the narrow bed but fell back again, choking, grasping at the sheets. And then, a few minutes later, he died—for real this time.

In the profound silence that followed, Bell looked around the small cell. Shoved back in a shadowy corner was something she hadn't noticed when they first arrived, something not usually present in a Raythune County jail cell. It was a battered table, big enough for an old man with a wrecked spine to crawl beneath, making a place where he could feel comfortable—or as close to comfortable as he was likely to get, as his mind drifted back to the past:
Ray-boy, you hear me? Hey, Ray. You there? It's Odell. On my way, Ray-boy. I'm coming. Gonna help with that load. On my way.
Bell didn't know for sure, and wouldn't have a chance to ask until later, but she guessed that the person who'd brought in that table, the person who'd heard the story about what Lindy had rigged up in the basement and who then tried to duplicate it here as best she could, was Mary Sue Fogelsong. Who knew a thing or two about suffering.

*   *   *

The coroner's van came for Odell Crabtree's body. Fetching him was a slow and laborious process; he was a very large man, and there was no easy way for the paramedics to load him into a body bag and swing it onto the gurney and bump the gurney down the courthouse steps in the darkness, a step at a time, and then kick at the collapsible wheels and slide it into the vehicle. Lindy, arms crossed, the tears dried on her face, watched it all; she watched until the coroner's van, the red lights across its backside glittering wetly in the streaming rain, disappeared around the corner.

Now there was nothing more for anyone to do. “Long night,” Fogelsong muttered to Bell, and she muttered back, “Longest night in the history of the freakin' world.” The sheriff nodded.

It was just after 4
A.M.
when Bell and Lindy left the courthouse to walk to the Explorer. Lindy had agreed to spend some time—at least a week, although Bell was hoping that it might stretch into more—with her second cousin in Morgantown. Jeannie Stump was going to meet them in Charleston, roughly the halfway point, in the morning. Bell would drive Lindy there. Tonight, Lindy would spend the night with Bell. The bed in Carla's room was already made up, Bell told her. She'd been expecting her daughter to come to Acker's Gap for the summer. That wasn't going to happen. But the bedroom was still ready.

The rain had tapered off to a fine mist. That mist gave the world a gauzy, fretful, half-formed look, as if it were deciding moment by moment which side to embrace—either the dream-spun past, where ghosts walked in their sleep, or the present, a place of clarity and edges, a place where the living staked their claim. Nights like these, with a wet veil cast over everything, Bell felt strangely close to the dead. They had a right to be here, too, murmuring, numinous. That was one of the reasons she stayed in Acker's Gap, perhaps—a reason she would never disclose to anyone, not even Nick. These dead—the ones who had been, in life, bad or good, savage or kind—were her dead. She knew their names. She knew their faces.

After the two of them had climbed in the Explorer and cinched their seat belts, Lindy spoke. “Thought I might try to get in touch with Montgomery Henner one of these days. I mean—he's my half brother. And that's family, right?”

“Right.”

“I know he doesn't have much time. Unless he gets a donor heart. But no matter how long that turns out to be—” Lindy didn't finish. Instead, she said, “You know what it's like. Being pretty much alone. Heard your father died when you were just a kid. And your sister—” Once again, she didn't finish the sentence.

“Yeah.”

“Must've been tough.”

Bell let the wipers slap off the wavy accumulation of rain before she pulled away from the curb. Lindy probably knew a few scattered truths about Bell's childhood, the way a lot of people in Acker's Gap did—or thought they did.

“We'll talk about it tomorrow. On our way to Charleston,” Bell said. “Got lots of time.”

“Complicated, huh?”

“You could say that.”

 

Chapter Forty-one

Bell wasn't accustomed to watching sunsets. Usually she was too busy, and sometimes too restless and agitated, to sit and let the live theater of the day's end—the languid wash of orange that spread across the western horizon—play out in front of her. But tonight, that's all she had to do.