The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (49 page)

The woman enrolled the girl in Rosewater Elementary and Middle School, the only one in the county.

“She was never a problem,” said one of the teachers.

“Smart as a whip,” said another.

The woman had even invited the visitation ladies inside the first Thursday night they came to call, fixing coffee, chatting civilly, promising to attend Sunday school, which she did the following weekend. The women gave
Jesus and His Disciples
coloring books and a box of crayons to the girl before they left, holding a brief prayer meeting at the opened door.

 

Around dusk on the day Dewey had picked the girl up, he drove back from the factory alone, both arms itching from weed rash and insect bites. His hands trembled. He passed through town, honking and waving at the sheriff, who sat outside the office, elbows draped over the back of a wooden bench. Dewey drove north on SR 92 toward the water, the lights in his rearview mirror having vanished, and turned off onto a grassy path matted down by truck tires that few people knew about, and those who did held their tongues. Sumac and low, broad-leafed trees obscured the entrance. Despite idling the truck in gear, it still bottomed a couple of times, limbs clawing the windshield and scraping the sides, cottontails scampering out of the beams. An old bootlegger named Mel lived at the end in a two-room log cabin with hubcaps nailed along the front wall. Several rusted cars sat on concrete blocks, hoods yawning open, an engine dangling by chain from a thick sycamore limb. A reflection of the moon rippled in the lake behind his cabin.

Dewey took a quick step back when a German shepherd, snarling and baring its teeth, lunged at him as Mel cracked the door.

“I'm tapped out,” the old man growled in a smoker's voice, holding the dog's collar with both hands. “Come back in a day or two.”

“I need something now,” Dewey said, opening his hands submissively.

The old man kicked the door shut.

Dewey drove back to town. A dually pulling a carrier full of bawling cattle passed in the opposite direction, the radio blaring music. He stopped across from the courthouse, under a streetlight, and counted his money. He had enough for the 30-mile trip down SR 92 to an all-night liquor store just across the state line.

 

Searchers found no trace of the girl at the dump or around the abandoned factory. Fishermen launched jon boats into the murky lake, probing shadowed marshes along the shore, but soon abandoned the effort. Some in hip boots waded the drainage ditches surrounding a large field banded by barbed wire and choked with oats ready for harvest, looking for evidence of damaged and broken stalks, suspicious trails, all the obvious places where someone might have thoughtlessly discarded a child. No such evidence was found.

Vultures were a common sight, floating in imprecise circles on thermal pillows, constantly trolling, so few people paid them any mind, but when they began drifting above the field in greater numbers, the implication became clear.

Since the field was so large, over a square mile, and the crop so dense, the sheriff asked the prison for help. Ramsey and other inmates, all with records free of disciplinary infractions, were caged in the Bluebird and driven to the field. Flanked by guards armed with shotguns, they stepped unshackled from the bus.

Determined to complete the search before dark, the sheriff assembled two lines at opposite ends of the field, each to proceed methodically toward the center. Due to the size of the field and the waist-high crop, one line could not see the other. Except for the vultures and strings of manmade clouds dispersing as soon as they formed, nothing occluded the sun, inclined toward afternoon and punishing without quarter, shirts sweat-plastered to itching backs, the air thick with heat that Ramsey felt through the soles of his brogans. A shuffle of birdcalls, along with the croaking of frogs and the ratcheting sound of summer insects, formed an unscripted, ubiquitous chorus. Dragonflies rested their twin sets of veined, translucent wings by lighting atop the swaying pods for a moment, their bodies swathed in twisted rainbows. Mosquitoes began swarming and feasting upon exposed skin. No-see-'ems clogged nostrils and ears.

They waited for what seemed an unnecessarily long time as a deputy communicated with someone on the other end by portable radio. Finally he blew a whistle for them to proceed. That the crop would be damaged could not be helped. Men and women stretched across the field, each a few yards from another, moving deliberately, arms extended, hands brushing the ripened pods aside, scanning the ground. Even the owner, his wife and sons, and their migrant workers, chattering in their own private language, joined the search. As Ramsey pushed ahead, his pants brushing the stalks aside made a sibilant sound with each step, like breath being expelled, as if he were treading upon a living being.

Although it would last less than a day, Ramsey relished the freedom, not freedom with the sense of being unfettered, but the quiet and the vast prospect above, which seemed unlike the one visible from the compound.

At first he wasn't sure. The shimmering horizon distorted what appeared to be figures spread across the field, but then heads and torsos began to form, as if rising out of the earth.

As the two lines came within sight of each other, those with Ramsey glanced at one another, expressions bemused, catching the faintest odor carried by shifting breezes, at first dismissing it as an aberration of the heat, until it grew stronger and could no longer be ignored. His line tightened and closed on itself, approaching the fence, hands covering noses and mouths as the stench became nauseous. They stomped the oats flat, trying to find the source. The one who found her, an older man wearing overalls and a straw hat, shouted and raised his hand. He tied a red bandanna across his face. Dozens crowded around the body. For a careless moment, guards, their weapons lowered, forgot about the inmates. The girl lay naked, her arms and legs splayed, as if she had been tossed over the barbed wire from the access road just a few yards away. Decomposition and the feeding of scavengers led to speculation that she had been killed soon after she went missing. Beetles and maggots swarmed the frail body, a haze of green-backed flies hovering with a low, malevolent hum. Her face was unrecognizable, the skin covering her body drawn tight to the point of splitting and darkened as if sheathed in teal. The time elapsed since she'd disappeared had allowed the oats to right and repair themselves, concealing the body. A thickset woman, in a long, flowered dress with puffed sleeves and wearing a denim bonnet, dropped to her knees, and with hands clasped under her chin began to pray aloud, but no one else made a sound. A female cardinal, its color robbed by gender, squatted on the top strand of the nearby fence, bobbing its tail for balance.

Neither Ramsey nor anyone else had noticed the black named Webster back away until he was several yards from the group and someone shouted. It was as if they all had been awakened from a trance, requiring a moment to orient themselves. That's when he began running, his arms and legs flailing like a string puppet, as if he were frolicking rather than trying to escape, which, with the thickness of oats, would have been impossible. Without being ordered to, he stopped and turned, facing his captors. He ripped his prison-blue shirt free and tossed it aside. Bathed by the sun, his sweat-drenched body seemed to glow. He held his arms straight to the sides, smiled, and dropped his head back. For a moment, with only an unblemished sky behind and his upper body seeming to emerge from a blur of gold, he appeared suspended. Then a shotgun exploded. Webster dropped from sight, the moment embedded in Ramsey's memory. He thought of the Zapruder film, as Kennedy clutched his throat, a crimson spray blooming behind, marking the moment of his death, and of his uncle, who raised him and thankfully had passed on before Ramsey was disgraced, setting a watermelon on a stump for target practice, the pulp and seeds scattering like brain tissue and bits of skull. Everyone rushed to where Webster lay, everyone except Ramsey. He remained beside the girl's body. It didn't sicken him to stare at her remains; neither did it fill him with sorrow nor a sense of outrage. Could he remember a time when it might? Or had he evolved antithetically? After so many years, he couldn't be sure.

While the others huddled, staring at Webster with train-wreck fascination, Ramsey could have dropped to his knees and crawled away, obscured by the oats. In the confusion he might not have been missed for at least half an hour; by that time he could have been well on his way, and with night coming on, an effective search could not have been launched before morning, but then what? He had nowhere to go, no plan, a short-lived escape for which the consequences would have been severe.

 

After leaving the liquor store, Dewey felt like celebrating, one hand resting atop the steering wheel, the other wrapped around the neck of a bottle of low-grade alcohol. He sang along tunelessly to a cassette playing “You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma,” his voice switching from normal to an annoying falsetto as Shelly West alternated verses with David Frizzell. But then, another sound. He flicked the volume down. A rod knocking, like a morning-after headache. He pumped the brakes up and pulled into a 7-Eleven. He got out and lifted the hood. He uncapped a gallon jug of recycled forty-weight and filled a dented tin can that he then carried to the front. Acrid smoke spewed into his face when he spilled some on the exhaust manifold. He lowered the hood but then raised it again when it failed to latch and slammed it shut with both hands. A jagged chunk of Bondo fell off.

After crossing back into the state, a colonnade of grain elevators, which had stood empty for years, flashed momentarily in the sweep of passing light, but then no other structures, no lights ahead, behind, or to the sides, nothing but 30 miles of untamed forests between him and Carson Springs. A foraging possum waddling across the road turned to face the truck, its eyes glowing red when caught in the beams.

“Roadkill!” Dewey laughed and swerved to crush it beneath the left front tire, but as he did, the right side dropped onto the shoulder. He jerked the wheel to the left, tipping the truck. It rolled down an embankment, jettisoning metal and glass, until it came to rest on its roof in a muddy swale, steam hissing from under the hood. Dewey lay broken and bloodied on the shoulder where he died, but not quickly. Sometime later, after the lights of the crumpled truck had gone dead and the radiator expelled itself, an eighteen-wheeler, its cab glowing yellow, sped past. The driver glanced at the road, not realizing he was lost, and then at a swindle sheet spread across the steering wheel. The book bag had tumbled from the bed of Dewey's truck and come to rest beside the road's segmented center. The tractor's front tandems ripped it apart, shredded paper swirling upward in their wake like confused butterflies.

 

Robert Earl had seen it in others, tradition dictating their lives, growing old in family albums that would someday be put aside and forgotten; at times, when alone, their gaze fixed at some middle distance, wondering if there might have been more. And he had tried it himself, a marriage that led to divorce, his wife married to another. Two boys he'd never wanted, calling another man father. But he thought of it, the way destiny had wound its way through his life, as just the way things were, random, one event following another capriciously, without pattern. The secret, he concluded, was to expect nothing and accept the inevitable. He paid what the court had deemed fair, and for that he got to spend two weekends a month with his boys. He'd rather have not seen them at all, just in passing, maybe, but it would have been unseemly and injurious to his image. Although they were grown and gone, for years he tolerated the four days by watching them fight and buying whatever they wanted. He thought of it as penance.

By the time the cruiser, its lights off, pulled in between the willow and the disabled Oldsmobile, it was almost dark; the trailer windows glowed. He had been elected to eight two-year terms as sheriff, so it was something he'd done many times: telling parents that their son or daughter had been crushed beyond recognition in a grinding head-on collision, or a wife that her husband had dropped dead of a coronary while counting his change at Fred's, or apportioning anguish and relief in an emergency room, reading from a list following a fatal school bus crash. It had nothing to do with him, and he ordered his life so it wouldn't.

Two deputies accompanied him, one driving, the other in the back seat, not for support for what some might consider a trying moment of responsibility, but more a demonstration of authority. Once, after leaving the washroom at Sonic and zipping his pants as he walked along the hallway leading to the serving line, he heard someone yell, “All your fuckin' cash, man.” He stopped and pulled his .357 Magnum from its holster to shoulder level, the barrel pointed at the ceiling. He could see the robber's back reflected in the front window. He then stepped clear of the dividing wall and leveled the pistol, which was only inches from the temple of the robber, who held a Glock on the frightened cashier.

“Drop it,” Robert Earl said, but pulled the trigger before the man had time to respond.

They closed the restaurant for half a day to clean shards of skull and bloody tissue from the fry baskets, the condiment bins, and the walls.

He and two deputies attended the funeral, standing to the side, shoulder to shoulder, hats in place, as the dead man's brothers comforted their mother. He and his men were not there as a matter of respect, or to express regret for having done what had to be done, or to solicit some expression of forgiveness or at least understanding, but as a warning, much as he and his men in the 1st Cavalry had done in Vietnam by tucking death cards in the mouths of fallen Vietcong.

The door to the trailer opened as they climbed from the cruiser and placed ten-gallon hats atop their heads, leveling the brims. The woman stood, hands on hips, as a silhouette, the light behind seeming to bend away and around her so that she appeared as a stick figure, slight in stature but intimidating and anonymous.