The Closing: A Whippoorwill Hollow novel (The Whippoorwill Hollow novels) (21 page)

Nate stood.

Franklin put his hand on the butt of his gun. “We won’t have no trouble, Mister Abbitt.”

“Christine,” Nate said, “please don’t leave me. I love you, Christine. I have no right to love you, but I do.” She stopped at the door, standing between Howard and Judge Greene, her back to Nate. “I love you,” he said, “more than anything in the world, and I want you back. I want you back so much. Please forgive me, Christine. Please take me back. I’ll do anything you ask. Anything. Please, Christine. Please take me back.”

For a precious instant Nate thought there was a chance. Then she walked out the door and she was gone.

Howard stood at the door, looking at Nate. Tears ran down Howard’s cheeks. He followed Christine. Judge Greene stood with his back turned to Nate. Franklin put his hand on Nate’s shoulder and eased him back into his chair. Then Franklin and Judge Greene left the room.

Nate cried, deep wracking sobs. Memories flooded over him, a panorama of scenes of his life with Christine. They rolled by like a movie reel on high speed. He wanted to slow down the images and drink them in, but they were compressed into a short stream of fleeting moments—ephemeral, transitory. Too soon the images ended with her last words to him. “You and you alone destroyed our lives and you can never make up for it! Never!”

Thirty minutes later, Judge Greene read the terms of the settlement into the record and entered a decree ending the marriage of Nathan Allen Abbitt and Christine Smith Abbitt.

In the days that followed the media frenzy, prospective clients came to Nate’s door in droves, and he turned no one away. He worked sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. When he came home to his apartment each night, he hoped exhaustion would speed him to sleep, and when it did not, he got out of bed and worked at his kitchen table all night long. Memories of Christine always lurked in the shadows of his mind. In idle moments they tormented him and drove him toward whiskey, but each time he resisted by turning to the only thing he had left—his work.

The Deatherage case plodded through the court system that summer. The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals refused to dispose of the case based on George’s informal letter attempting to concede the appeal. Nate promptly filed his appellate brief, and George filed a statement of non-opposition in reply and waived oral argument. The court then reversed Deatherage’s conviction and remanded the case to the Buck County Circuit Court for a new trial. While Nate and George waited for the Virginia General Assembly to elect a new judge to the Buck County Circuit Court, they prepared the case for trial. Sheriff Feedlow was true to his word and turned the warehouse mattresses over to Shirley West and the Virginia medical examiner’s lab in Roanoke. With the passage of time and all the movement of the mattresses, the chance that any evidence of the murder had survived was slight. As Shirley had warned Nate, hair and fibers don’t normally cling to fabric, but she had a stroke of luck when she looked under the buttons that held the mattresses together. Clamped to a mattress by a button she found fibers that matched Darlene Updike’s blouse. The fibers gave Nate a powerful argument that Darlene was raped on the mattress, instead of on the warehouse floor.

The fibers, coupled with Odoms’ testimony that Crawford was in the warehouse during the attack on Updike and that Crawford normally slept on the mattresses, weakened the commonwealth’s case, but Nate thought the other forensic evidence against Deatherage was so powerful there was still a good chance a Buck County jury would convict him unless Nate could offer them a viable suspect and an alternate theory of the murder. He decided to approach Frank Gentry, Larry Lamb, and Herman Doyle, the men Drinkard had said had one-night stands with Updike, to see what he could shake loose.

While Nate was preparing questions for these men, Daryl Garth called him. Garth’s wife was a nurse at the Buck County Medical Clinic. Garth said she had treated Kenneth Deatherage’s father-in-law for an asthma attack the previous day. He told her George Maupin came to his house to question Deatherage’s wife, Claire, about the murder. She’d refused to talk and he threatened to subpoena her to testify at trial. Claire’s father wanted Garth to help them by trying to keep her off the witness stand.

“I can’t do anything for her,” Garth said. “She can’t pay my fee, but I thought you’d be interested to know the commonwealth’s attorney may subpoena her.”

“Thanks for letting me know,” Nate said.

“Maybe you can pay me back by giving me some help with the Washington case.”

“I’ll do what I can. I’ll give you a call when the Deatherage trial is over.”

George’s attempt to question Claire Deatherage implied she must know something that might bolster his case. Evidence of the corruption of the judge and Deputy Jones had developed so rapidly that Nate had never gotten around to questioning her about the case, but he definitely needed to now.

On a sultry afternoon in late July, Nate turned off the state road east of Bloxton onto a narrow paved road bordered by farmland on both sides. A few miles in, the pavement ran out and the road carried on over a rutted dirt surface. Just past an End State Maintenance sign, Nate came to a clapboard house sitting among hardwood trees. The house was in bad shape. Felt roof tiles had worn away exposing patches of black tarpaper subroofing. Several upstairs windows were broken. The yard was a dust bowl pocked with clumps of weeds.

Nate parked in front of the house and climbed rickety steps to stand on a creaking wooden porch. A hole had rotted through the porch planks just to the left of the front door. The rheumy eyes of an emaciated old dog panting feebly on its side gazed up at Nate indifferently from the shadows under the porch.

The front door stood wide open. Nate stepped into an entry hall. “Anyone home?” No one answered. The entry hall was barren of furniture. There were doors to other rooms to his right and left. A stairway with a broken banister climbed along the back wall to a second floor. A pool of liquid stained the floor beside the front door. Flies swarmed over it and fed on its crusty edges. A sour smell filled the air.

A woman’s voice from inside the house called out. “Put the damn melon rind down. I’m not gonna tell you again.” A red-faced toddler stumbled through the door to Nate’s left. The child wore nothing but a rag diaper that was wet and brown in the seat and sagged between his legs. The little boy stopped and looked up at Nate. He was filthy. Tear tracks streaked through the dirt on his cheeks. His round face and red hair resembled Kenneth Deatherage, but his owlish brown eyes belonged to someone else. The child bent his knees, balled his fists, and urinated through his diaper. A puddle pooled on the floor between his feet. He tippled past Nate to the porch and worked his way down the steps on his hands and knees.

The woman’s voice called out again. “Harmon!” There was a pause. “Goddamn it.” A short young woman in a plain brown dress that hung loosely on her slight frame padded on bare feet into the hallway. She looked at the puddle of urine and cursed. When she saw Nate she put her hand to her breast and let out a little cry.

“I’m sorry I startled you, ma’am,” Nate said. “The door was open. I called out but no one answered.”

The young woman had damp auburn hair that was pressed to her forehead in front and frizzy and sticking up like a bird’s tail-feathers in back. A clear slick substance, likely cooking lard or vegetable oil, was smeared on her chin. She was small and thin. She had the body of a teenager, but her face belonged to a woman older than her years. Her round brown eyes had a wounded look in them. “We can’t pay. I told the other bill collectors the same. We don’t have no money. We’re livin on the dole.”

“I’m not here about money, ma’am. Are you Claire Deatherage?”

The young woman stared at Nate’s scar. Her tense face softened. “What happened to your face, mister?”

“I was in a car accident.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, ma’am. It’s just a scar. Are you Mrs. Deatherage?”

“What do you want with her?”

“I’m an attorney. I represent Kenneth Deatherage.”

“I heard about you. You’re the one wants to get Kenny out.”

“I take it you’re Mrs. Deatherage?”

“I used to be, but I went back to Moses when they put Kenny away. I’m Claire Moses now.”

“Moses is your maiden name?”

“Yes, sir. My daddy’s Tinker Moses. He’s not here. He’s got the empy-sema. The rescue squad came and got him last night cause he couldn’t breathe without them tubes they put in his nose. They took him back to the hospital, but they won’t keep him long. He can’t pay.” Claire craned her neck. “You see Harmon come through here?”

“The little boy? He went outside.”

Claire walked out on the porch and Nate followed. “Drop that handful a dirt right now or I’ll come down there and smack you good!” Harmon squatted in the yard with a fist full of dirt. His face was scrunched up in a stubborn frown.

“Drop it!”

Harmon flinched and opened his fist. He began to cry.

“Shut up, goddamn it! Shut the hell up right now or I’ll smack you good!”

Harmon swallowed a sob and stuck his dirty thumb in his mouth. He waddled around the porch to a side yard. A chicken ran from under the porch, clucking and squawking. He squealed and laughed.

Claire pushed a strand of hair back from her face. “Sumbitch eats dirt like it’s candy. Drives me plum crazy.”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions about your husband, ma’am.”

“I told the law all I know about Kenny back when he killed that girl. You’re not gonna get him out, are you?”

“Who did you talk to?”

“Darby Jones.”

“What did you tell him?”

“They say you’re the one who caused Darby to get killed. They say you killed the judge, too.”

“I didn’t kill them.”

“They say you came here to get Kenny out and you don’t care what happens to the rest of us. Why do you want to set him free, mister?”

“I’m his attorney. That’s my job.”

“Don’t you care what happens to us? People say you don’t care, but you don’t look like a hard man.”

“I owe your husband the best defense I can provide. That’s the law.”

“Then the law’s wrong, mister. Maybe you don’t know what’ll happen. If Kenny gets out, he’ll come here first and he’ll do to me what he did to that girl. He told me so before they took him off to the state jail.”

“He threatened you?”

“He said if I know what’s good for me I’ll keep my mouth shut, but I know him. He don’t trust me to keep quiet. If he gets out, he’ll shut my mouth for good.”

“Shut your mouth about what?”

Claire walked to the far side of the porch. Nate followed her. She gazed at Harmon. He stumbled into a patch of weeds, pulled a handful of dry stalks out of the ground, and waved them in the air, laughing. “I won’t say what Kenny told me.”

Nate decided to come at the subject indirectly. “Deatherage said you and he had a fight the night of the murder.”

“It wasn’t a fight. It was a beatin.”

“Why did he beat you?”

“He don’t need a reason. He beats me for the fun of it.”

“Did you have an argument that night?”

“Same one we always had.”

“What was the argument about?”

“Kenny was gone more’n a week. Then he came here all liquored up and acted like he’d never left. He wanted it, like always. I was worn out from wrestlin with Harmon all day. I wouldn’t give it to Kenny. He knocked me down and got on top of me on the kitchen floor right in front of Harmon.” Claire’s eyes teared up. “Choked me while he did it. If Daddy hadn’t pulled him off me, he woulda killed me.”

“He choked you?”

“Kenny choked off my air and made me pass out when he took my favors. That’s how he liked it. He didn’t do it to me when we first met. He was nice to me in the beginnin. Then he did it to me once just after Harmon was born when I didn’t want to give it to him. He did it more and more after that. It gave him pleasure to choke me when he took it from me.” Claire scowled at Harmon. “Drop it! I told you a hunnerd times. I’ll smack you up side your head you eat one more mouthful a dirt!”

Harmon dropped the dirt, waddled to a rusty tractor, and sat in the weeds under the rear axle.

“What happened after your father pulled Deatherage off you?”

“Daddy put the twelve-gauge on Kenny, and he ran off.” Claire’s eyes clouded. “Don’t you see what happened, mister? He came here first. I wouldn’t give it to him, so he found that girl. She wouldn’t give it to him either, so he took it from her and he choked her, just like he did me, and he killed her. The girl died instead of me.”

“Did you tell Deputy Jones that he choked you?”

“I won’t tell you what I told Darby.”

“I understand George Maupin questioned you about the murder?”

“He came here last week. He wanted me to talk in court. I told him I wouldn’t do it.” Claire looked at Nate’s scar. “He’s not like you, mister. He’s a hard one. He wouldn’t leave me alone. Daddy had to run him off. I didn’t tell that hard man nothin.”

“He can subpoena you.”

“Yeah, he said that, too, but I don’t care. I won’t go to court. I told him so.”

“You won’t have a choice. If you don’t comply with the subpoena, the law will find you and take you to the courthouse, and you’ll be forced to answer George Maupin’s questions at your husband’s trial.”

Claire’s eyes widened. She grabbed Nate’s sleeve. “But I can’t. Kenny’ll kill me. I swear to God. Don’t nobody care that he’ll kill me?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but the county can force you to testify. I need to know what you’ll say on the witness stand.”

“How did that hard man find out what I know? I didn’t tell him nothin.”

“If you tell me what you know, maybe I can do something to help you.”

“You got to keep me out of that trial, mister. Please.”

“I’ll try.”

“I knew you weren’t the bad man everybody said you were. That ugly scar’s not who you are. You don’t have the look of a bad man.”

“What do you know about the murder?”

Claire paused. “I know Kenny killed the girl.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me. He said he killed her because of me.”

Anger flashed through Nate. He had tried to convince himself that Deatherage was innocent. The forensic evidence coupled with Eva Deatherage’s stories about Deatherage’s strangulation fetish made Nate skeptical, but the corruption in Buck County gave him hope that someone else killed Darlene Updike. Now that hope was dashed and he knew Deatherage had played him for a fool. Deatherage was a sadistic rapist, a murderer, and a very good liar, as Nate had suspected all along.

“Are you all right, mister?”

Nate reined in his anger and pulled himself together. “Exactly what did Deatherage say about the murder?”

“Kenny said he never woulda choked the girl if I had given it to him like a wife’s supposed to do. He said it was my fault he killed her and my fault he went to jail.”

“When did he tell you this?”

“The day after he killed the girl. Darby Jones caught him and locked him up. Kenny used his phone call to yell at me to get my sorry ass down to the jail. I went down there and talked to him through the bars. I was glad he was locked up cause he was mighty hot with me. He said I got him in a world of trouble and me and Daddy better come up with the money to get him a crooked lawyer to spring him outta jail or he’d come lookin for me when it was all over. Course, me and Daddy don’t have no money and we don’t have no way to get no money.”

“George Maupin knows Deatherage confessed to you. That’s why he wants to call you as a witness.”