Summer of the Dead (7 page)

“Yes?” she said in a shaky voice. She seemed more befuddled than distraught. After she spoke, her eyes returned to a resting position on the frayed brown carpet. In multiple spots, the carpet had worn almost all the way through to the hardwood beneath.

Bell introduced herself for the second time. She was sitting on the blue plaid couch across from Annie Arnett, notebook on her lap. Even though it was still early in the morning, Bell could feel the sweat starting up in the crooks of her elbows and behind her knees. Few of the older homes in Acker's Gap were air-conditioned. They relied on screen doors and open windows and the casual mercy of a cross breeze.

“I see.” Annie Arnett nodded. She folded and then refolded her hands. The plump blue veins on the tops of them looked like centipedes inserted under the skin. “Well.”

Bell wondered if the old woman had forgotten the question, the one Bell had asked right after identifying herself when Annie opened the front door: “How much money did you and your husband routinely keep in the house?” If the answer was anything over ten dollars, Bell's next question would be:
And how many people knew about it?

But Annie was still stuck. She continued to gaze at Bell. “Who did you say you were, dearie?”

It had to come down to money. Most crimes eventually did—at least if they didn't come down to sex or jealousy, which seemed unlikely in the case of Freddie and Annie Arnett, both of whom had passed eighty a good while back. And in Acker's Gap, “money” didn't have to mean millions. It didn't even have to mean hundreds. For the desperate people in these parts, twenty dollars was incentive enough to kill.

There were serious problems with Bell's theory. For one thing, Rhonda Lovejoy had already come by and asked the old woman the same question. Moreover, the perpetrator hadn't taken Freddie Arnett's wallet or tried to enter the house after murdering him, so the robbery motive was implausible. Still, Bell had felt an irresistible impulse—an itch that packed the same kind of fierce drawing power, she speculated, as the promise of a couple of bucks did to an addict—to visit Annie Arnett and ask again. To make sure they weren't missing something. Or someone.

“Your grandson,” Bell said. “The one Freddie was fixing the car for. Maybe you told him that you keep money in the house. Just mentioned it in passing a few times. Or maybe just one time. And maybe he told a friend.”

Annie blinked. “No, I don't think so, dearie,” she said. “We don't talk much to Tommy anymore. Not since they all left town. We don't like to bother him. And we know he's too busy to call.”

Bell remembered that from Rhonda's notes. The rest of the family—Annie's and Freddie's son, Luke, and Luke's sons, Tommy and Mike—had moved away. Better jobs, bigger cities. Different skies. It was just Annie and Freddie, still here in Acker's Gap.

Now, it was just Annie.

“Is your son staying with you?” Bell said. “Luke's his name, right?”

Surely someone was helping Annie Arnett get through this. The old woman shouldn't be alone. Her husband had been savagely attacked just a few days ago, and grisly reminders of his death were everywhere: The crime-scene techs from Charleston had finished their work but the driveway still was cordoned off with plastic yellow tape. An evocative dark stain remained on the concrete, baked into the gray by the fierce unrelenting sunlight. That sun, Bell recalled from Rhonda's report, was the reason Freddie Arnett had been working on the Thunderbird so late at night; it was too hot during the day. The chrome on a car could raise a blister if you touched it at the wrong time.

“Oh, Luke was here Friday,” Annie said. “All day, or thereabouts. But he had to go back to Louisville. Couldn't take any more time off work. He'll be back next week, he said. To pick up the car for Tommy.”

Bell looked around. “But somebody's staying with you, right?”

“Oh, my, yes.” Before Bell could ask, Annie added, “Rhonda Lovejoy. I've known her family for ages. She's been spending the night. Ain't that sweet? She came by here to ask me some questions the other day, same as you are now, and when I told her how scared I get at night, with Freddie gone, she said she'd be pleased to keep me company. I'm so happy to have her. Till Freddie gets back.”

Bell thought about her assistant, whose roots in Raythune County ran deep and true, and who had an everlasting compassion for the people who walked these roads. As an employee, Rhonda could be infuriatingly scatterbrained, and her flamboyant wardrobe carried more than a hint of the bordello with its frills and its flounces, but Bell had come to have a significant appreciation for Rhonda Lovejoy, sequins and all.

She wouldn't tell Rhonda that she knew. That wasn't how things were done around here. A kind gesture wasn't undertaken to get a pat on the back. Charity that brought you compliments wasn't charity; it was public relations.

A thought occurred to Bell. “Excuse me, Mrs. Arnett. Did you say, ‘Till Freddie gets back'?”

Annie nodded. “Don't know what's keeping him. Never been gone this long before.” She sighed, but it was a sigh of affection. “Keeps me guessing, that man of mine. He's a handful. Gonna give him a good talking-to when he walks through that door, tell you that for sure.”

*   *   *

Bell paused at the end of the driveway. A ribbon of tape had worked itself loose from one of the green metal stakes and fallen across the concrete. Now it lay there, looking as flat and sad and useless as the tail of a grounded kite. There was no breeze to rouse it. There was only heat, the kind of dense, hard-packed heat that presses on the skin everywhere all at once.

The neighborhood was quiet. Strange for a blue-skied summer Sunday, Bell thought. Where were the kids, the dogs, the bikes, the shouts and the clatter? Maybe it was still too early in the day. Or maybe—and this was a thought that pained her—a lot of people were staying indoors, pinned there by the shock of their neighbor's fate. Up and down the tattered little street her gaze made its fitful way, seeing closed doors and silent yards and windows across which the curtains had been yanked shut. It was temporary, Bell told herself. Had to be. The street would come to life again.

She looked back at the driveway. This was where Freddie Arnett had died—here on a strip of concrete next to his small brown stick-frame house. This was the house in which Freddie and Annie Arnett had lived for sixty-two years. Freddie had left here every morning, long before the sun came up, for his shift at the Milltown Mine No. 12. He would return long after that sun had gone down. And he worked underground, so as far as Freddie was concerned, there might as well not have been a sun at all. Until he retired, the single prevailing truth of his world was darkness.

Freddie's long white Silverado truck was still parked in front of the house. He always parked it there, leaving the driveway free as a workspace for his loving labors on the Thunderbird, which he kept at the upper end of the concrete slab, next to the house. The high polish on the Thunderbird's tubular flanks gave it a sleek, missile-like look. You could tell how much Freddie Arnett loved this car, how much he'd fussed over it, gushed over it, pampered it; it had been unconditionally adored. Same was true for his grandson, Bell guessed. She knew how tempting it was to give everything to a beloved child, to make any sacrifice. It wasn't always the right thing to do—it was almost never the right thing to do—but you did it, anyway. Couldn't help yourself.

“Okay, old man,” Bell murmured. Even if someone had been standing right next to her, they couldn't have made out the words; her voice was soft and filled with grim wonder. “What happened here? Who the hell did this to you—and why?”

It took her a moment to realize that she was talking to the dead. And another moment to realize that it didn't bother her one bit.

 

Chapter Eight

Shirley shuffled into the living room. She parked her backside on the couch, the bony knees of her faded Wranglers jutting out in front of her. She'd been up in her room when Bell called her name. Quickly, she lit a cigarette and took a series of vicious nips at it, as if she'd been warned that somebody might grab it away from her at any minute and so she had to get what she could, while she could.

“You been gone a long time,” Shirley said.

Bell shrugged. “Work to do.” She felt an unpleasant twinge of remembrance; Carla had said the very same thing to her, back when her daughter still lived here. On more than a few occasions. Pointed out that, no matter what was going on with her family, Bell's job came first. And it was usually true.

She was certain that her sister hadn't slept since she dropped her off. Shirley was wearing the same clothes she'd been wearing when she left the house three days before: same jeans, same flannel shirt. She hadn't opened the curtains or raised the blinds. In the dim half-light of the dark-walled room, the skin on Shirley's face and neck and hands was a gray-yellow shade; it was coarse, too, stretched taut in some places, loose-hanging in others.

“Did you get something to eat?” Bell said. The anger that she'd felt at Tommy's six hours ago when she first spotted Shirley—anger that consumed her, like fire racing across paper, turning it to ash in an instant—had faded. It happened over and over again, just like that: Time passed, and her fury at her sister's behavior surged, crested, and then retreated again into a quiet lake of sadness. Bell was slammed back and forth between rage and forgiveness a thousand times a day.

A thousand and one.

She sat down across from Shirley in the battered old chair. It was her favorite piece of furniture; its comfort was uncomplicated, utterly reliable. She'd be needing that comfort for this conversation. She could tell from Shirley's sour face that her sister was still brooding.
Like she has any right to be mad at
me, Bell thought.
Like
she's
the injured party here. Go figure.

“Yeah,” Shirley said. “I'm good.”

She was lying, and Bell knew it. Her sister ate very little these days. And when she did eat, the meals generally came from McDonald's, Pizza Hut, KFC. Or consisted of shiny-packaged snacks from convenience stores: Doritos, mini-doughnuts, Little Debbies. Bell was a reluctant cook, but she tried to bring Shirley decent dinners from JP's: chicken, fish, green beans, steamed broccoli. The next morning, Bell would find the white Styrofoam shell wedged in the kitchen trash, the food inside looking just the way it looked when Jackie LeFevre, owner and operator of JP's, had put it there with a spatula and two fingers. Shirley had tossed the meal without tasting it. Hell, she probably hadn't even opened the container.

“How do you feel?” Bell asked. Trying to get along. Setting a cordial tone so that they might have a decent conversation. For once. “If you want to rest a little, we can talk later.”

“Don't matter.”

Bell let some silence build up in the room. She hoped her sister might say something—anything—that would give Bell a clue about what she was feeling these days. And why she seemed determined to sabotage any attempts to make smooth her reentry into life outside of prison.

“He confessed,” Bell finally said. “The guy from last night. He's in jail. It was a fight over a woman. Just like you said.”

“Figures.” Shirley's hand twitched. She looked around suspiciously, having noticed that the objects on top of the coffee table had been rearranged. “Where's the ashtray? Forget it. I'll just go outside.”

“No, hold on.” Bell didn't want her sister to get up. Didn't want another conversation between them to end prematurely, cut off by some dumb excuse. So she rose, retrieved it from the kitchen, returned. “Just put it in the dishwasher yesterday. Tidying up.” She set down the square glass ashtray, reuniting it with the pack of Pall Malls and the green plastic Bic lighter that seemed to have taken up permanent residence here, at least when they weren't shoved in the breast pocket of Shirley's flannel shirt.

“So,” Bell said. “We need to get a few things straight, okay? I mean, I've tried to be patient. Tried to give you your space. But after last night—well, there've got to be some changes. Some give and take.”

No response, so Bell went on. “I'm not asking for a lot here, Shirley. Just some regular hours. And a better attitude. Carla's coming, okay? And like it or not, you'll be setting an example. I need to know where you are at night. And the job search—how's it going?”

Shirley scowled. “How do you think it's going? World's just dying to hire somebody with a record.”

“You're getting help, though, right? From your parole officer? With résumé writing, job-placement assistance, things like that?”

“Yeah. Things like that.” Shirley, restless, shifted her feet. “You know what, Belfa? After they found that old fart in his driveway, I got a call from my PO. Asking where I was. Asking if I could account for my whereabouts that night. Asking if I had witnesses. Thank God I did.”

“It wasn't personal.” Bell had known that call was coming. She hadn't interfered, realizing that it was better for Shirley in the long run if she didn't. “Standard procedure. With your felony conviction, he's required to—”

“Yeah. Standard procedure to make me feel like a friggin' criminal.”

“I know it's hard.”

The scowl intensified. Shirley triple-tapped her cigarette in the vicinity of the ashtray. “Anyway,” she said, “I got a job.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. You're surprised, right? Nice. Real nice. Appreciate that.”

Bell ignored the sarcasm. Kept moving forward. “When do you start?”

“Already started.”

“Then where—?”

“It's not some lame-ass thing at a fast food place, okay? It's not flipping burgers.” A cold, knowing stare. “Which is what you were thinking, right? 'Cause that's about all you expect from me. That's, like, the upper limit of my abilities, right?”