Close to the Broken Hearted (9 page)

And technically, Leah outclassed Chris, although it was only a formality. Ethan Montgomery had made her detective as a favor to her pa before he died, so that the station would be able to pay Leah more money in order to help raise her family. Then it became doubly important when she lost Billy.

Leah was just happy none of this mattered, as Chris seemed to come around now that he had arrived on the scene.

He searched the cat's body more closely than Leah had by using the various tools in the CSI kit and eventually gave up establishing a cause of death. It definitely wasn't anything external. It seemed like the cat had just simply dropped dead. “Maybe it had a heart attack?” he speculated.

“The cat was barely a year old,” Leah said. “Seems a bit farfetched to me.”

“Well, somethin' might of scared it to death,” Chris said. “But then, it's s'posed to have nine lives.” He smiled at Leah, who didn't smile back. Chris's smile disappeared immediately. “Sorry, that was just a little joke to lighten the mood.”

“We can use a little less lightenin', thanks,” Leah replied.

Pulling the camera from the CSI kit, Chris took pictures of the body from all the different angles, exactly as he would a real human body at a real crime scene.
Good,
thought Leah.
Now he at least
looks
like he's taking this seriously.

When he was finished taking pictures, he put the camera back in the case. “Well,” he asked, “what do you want me to do with the cat now? I've pretty much done all I can.”

“Bag it, I guess,” Leah said. “Give it to Norm in the morning. He can probably tell us how it died and give us a rough time of death.”

Chris looked up at her. “Seriously? You want me to get the coroner to give your dead cat an autopsy?”

Leah came in close and lowered her voice so Sylvie wouldn't hear. “I want to set this girl's mind at ease, Chris, and if that takes pulling some strings and getting Norman Crabtree to take a few minutes out of his day to examine this here body? Then, yes. That's exactly what I'm sayin'.”

Chris just shook his head. “I think you're almost as crazy as she is.”

“Chris, what if someone
did
do somethin' to this cat? I mean it didn't die of old age. There's no indication a coon or a coyote got it.
Somethin'
killed it, and we can't tell what after an hour of examinin' it? And
you
don't find that odd?”

“I reckon you've been readin' too many detective novels.”

“I reckon you've been spendin' too much time behind your desk doin' too many crosswords.”

With a huge sigh, Chris reached his gloved hand into the CSI kit and pulled out a bag big enough for the cat's body to go into. “Bagging the cat,” he announced. “But I'm gonna have one problem.”

“What's that?” Leah asked.

“I'm not really sure how I'm gonna attach the toe tag.”

M
ost nights when Sylvie suffered “incidents” she had trouble sleeping.

Tonight, she lay in bed with thoughts circling like a kaleidoscope inside her head. This happened often. Usually, it was always the same thoughts; she'd go through different parts of the past, trying to make sense of them. But making sense of some things was impossible. Sylvie knew that, but she couldn't do anything to stop the endless spinning. Sleep would come eventually, but before it did, she would have to succumb to the pain of reliving the memories of her childhood.

For a long while, she'd known she wasn't completely normal. When she saw her baby brother murdered that day something broke inside of her. Sylvie remembered it all so clearly: like a photograph, only one that went forward and backward in time with different pictures developing on it.

She'd known something inside her wasn't right back then, but she managed to hide a lot of it. After the initial shock wore off, and everyone grieved for Caleb, her folks appeared to somehow move on with their lives. It seemed they thought Sylvie had, too. The first indication her pa got that something was truly wrong with his daughter didn't actually happen until she was twelve. Until then, she'd done a good job of hiding her depression and her paranoia from the world. Sylvie would hear her folks refer to her as “a kid who likes to spend a lot of time in her room” and “someone who likes to go on long walks, alone.”

That was back when she would still leave the house by herself. Now she couldn't imagine going on even a short walk alone.

But in her childhood, Sylvie helped around the house the way she was expected to, lending Mother a hand with cleaning, and making supper while her pa worked out on the farm.

“Can you wipe the dishes, hon?” Mother asked one particular night when Sylvie had been brooding. She brooded a lot, although much of the time she had no idea what she brooded over.

“Yes, Mother,” Sylvie said.

With each wipe of a dish, she felt the thoughts of Caleb grow slightly more distant. Doing anything had a way of pushing the bad thoughts a little farther back.

“Is there anything else for me to do?” Sylvie asked when she was finished, hoping the answer would be yes.

“No, that's fine. Thank you. You really are a good little girl,” Mother had said.

But Sylvie's motives weren't as selfless as Mother believed. She would have done anything to take even a tiny bit of those bad feelings away.

After the initial incident, it had taken Sylvie's pa a lot longer than her ma to get over Caleb's death. Sylvie would hear him crying some nights after everyone had gone to bed. She knew he was in his own bed being rocked gently by Mother, who was telling him that everything was going to be all right, and that Caleb was with the angels now.

“God called him early,” she heard her tell him once. “He had plans for our little boy. We just don't understand them.”

Sylvie would never understand plans from God that involved a three-year-old being shot all over her kitchen during supper. Especially such a happy three-year-old like her baby brother.

And that was how Sylvie remembered Caleb: happy. Maybe time had painted her memories, but Sylvie could not remember a time when little Caleb wasn't the perfect little brother.

Then Preacher Eli killed him.

Time is peculiar. It does change things.

Sylvie had come to understand this.

But she had hated Preacher Eli since that day. That thing hadn't changed. Time had left that one all alone.

And Sylvie had never been happy since that day. That was another thing that hadn't changed.

Not even when the baby was born. She
should've
been happy. It was
her
baby. But, somehow, Preacher Eli stole that, too.

Yet, before she was twelve, nobody really knew how much of a mess the inside of Sylvie Carson's head truly was.

Then came the day she saw her pa butcher the hog.

It was just before Easter, and Sylvie was coming back from one of her walks. She'd been out through their fields, past the horses and cattle, and well into the woods, which were full of mostly oak and birch. She remembered it like it was yesterday, but then she remembered every day of any importance in her life like it happened yesterday. It was that damn time-traveling photograph capable of developing a picture of anything in her past. The pictures were almost always ones she didn't want to see. But she couldn't control them. They just popped into her mind.

The morning had been wet and the grass full of dew. She had left for her walk around ten o'clock, just as the sky was beginning to clear. As usual, she walked to get away from everything. Mainly the farmhouse. Because getting away from the farmhouse was like getting away from the source of all the badness. It was like walking away from the tangled mess of nerves that her mind had become.

As she walked, she tried desperately to keep her thoughts clear—to just be in the moment with nature. She had found
that
was the key to feeling normal: to have no thoughts. Because without thoughts, you could have no feelings. Some days were less successful than others. Some days she got completely lost in her walks, and ended up deep in the forest when she realized the sun was falling and she'd better head for home.

This particular day, her thoughts refused to stop circling like sharks around a rowboat and, after an hour or so of plodding through the wet spring woods, she decided to head back and see if Mother might have some work for her to do that might take her mind to other places. Lately, Sylvie had started to realize just how much Caleb's death had and continued to affect her, and she was beginning to see how much different it made her from other kids.

Sometimes the difference scared her. Sometimes it made her think thoughts that scared her even more. Thoughts of joining Caleb and his angels.

Looking back now, she wondered how she ever managed to make it through all that time without something like that ever happening. Especially given the years she would soon face alone. With absolutely nobody.

The sun was out when she made it clear of the tree line and she slipped through the fence into the cattle field. The day had grown warm, and the dew no longer clung to the grass. She climbed over the horse fences, giving Willow, her favorite of the six horses they kept, a quick pat down before continuing to the other side of the field to the barn where her pa was.

That's when she stumbled on him slaughtering the hog.

She saw the whole thing. And although she didn't want to see it, she couldn't look away.

First, her pa shot it in the head. And the moment that shot rang out, all Sylvie could see in her brain was Preacher Eli's handgun raised, and the trigger being pulled, and her little brother, Caleb, being blown apart.

Then, taking a knife, her pa cut the hog's throat. Blood gushed.

The kitchen full of Caleb's blood gushed into Sylvie's mind.

She stood there, ten feet away, staring. But what Sylvie didn't know was that she was also screaming. Screaming exactly like she was that day Caleb was shot. Only, on that day, she had just screamed in her mind. Today, she was screaming out loud.

Her pa raced over and tried desperately to calm her down. But Sylvie kept shouting, “Caleb! Caleb!” Pointing frantically, her arm trembled.

Picking her up, Tom Carson took her inside the house. Mother raced from the bedroom. Pa gestured for her to keep quiet.

They lay Sylvie down in her bed and put a damp cloth on her head. The screaming stopped, but she kept shaking uncontrollably. Visions of her baby brother, as fresh as the dead hog outside, continued playing around and around her mind.

She got very little sleep that night. The next day, Sylvie's parents called for the doctor, who gave them a prescription for sleeping pills. If her folks had known how close Sylvie came to swallowing that entire bottle, they wouldn't have left it on her bed stand. But for some reason, she resisted.

But she never was the same again after that.

No longer did she leave the house to go for walks by herself. Her folks never again referred to her as “a kid who likes to spend a lot of time in her room,” even though she rarely left it.

Now it wasn't just Sylvie who knew she was broken, but her whole family. At first Sylvie thought it might make things easier, but it didn't. It only seemed to affect Sylvie's pa, who relapsed into his nightly sobbing about his dead son. Sylvie would hear Mother telling him everything was going to be okay while she waited for the sleeping pills to kick in and take her to that one place where nothing ever hurt. That place she always hated waking up from.

Then, two years later, they lost Mother.

Her pa found the body, but Sylvie heard when he told the police how he came upon it. They must've made him tell the story at least three different times.

“I was walkin' into the barn and there were a bunch of flies buzzin' behind one of the horse stalls,” he said. It had been less than an hour since he found her, and he could barely speak through his tears. He was seated on the chair in the living room. Three policemen were at the house. Well, two policemen and one woman. One of the men was taking his report. The woman wasn't wearing a uniform. She was out in the barn looking over the scene. The other man seemed to be interested in the inside of the house. Sylvie couldn't figure out why the house would be interesting to anybody when everything had happened in the barn.

Sylvie was sitting in the parlor just around the corner from the living room with her back to the wall so she could hear. She was crying, but not as much as she reckoned she should be, and it made her feel ashamed. Mainly, she just felt numb.

“I ain't never seen so many flies,” her pa continued, “ 'cept when somethin' like a dead coon or somethin' shows up on the property, so I looked round the stall expectin' to see somethin' like that.” Sylvie heard her pa break down then and start sobbing.

“It's okay, sir. Take your time,” one of the officers (probably the one taking the notes) said.

When her pa spoke again, it was hard to understand him. His nose was stuffed and his voice was full of tears. “And she was lyin' there. Covered in flies. I don't know how long she'd been there. I've been in town most of the day.”

“What were you doin' in town?”

Sylvie's pa sniffled. “Buyin' feed and tack.”

“You have receipts? People can verify you were there?”

There was a hesitation. Then, “What? Yeah, o' course. I was at Arnold's. And I talked to Pete for musta been twenty minutes. That's Pete at the tack shop.”

“Where was the last place you was 'fore coming home?”

Another pause before Sylvie's pa answered. “Jim's,” he said. “You know. The feed store. Why? You don't think I—”

“We just need to ask these questions. Standard procedure.”

Then the other police officer asked, “Was anyone else home?”

“Yeah,” Sylvie's pa answered. “My daughter. She was probably in her room.”
Because she ain't been right since her brother died, and so that's the only place she ever is,
Sylvie thought, finishing his sentence in her head.

“We'll need to talk to her, too.”

They asked Sylvie a bunch of questions she really didn't have very good answers to. She started feeling very accused, like they thought she killed her own mother. The fact was, there was no obvious cause of death, so a case file was opened and an autopsy was performed.

Turned out Mother had somehow ingested rat poison. After an investigation, the police arrested James Richard Cobbler, a radical member of Eli Brown's congregation. There was no evidence linking Eli Brown to the murder. Cobbler had acted alone and was, in his own words, “Acting in God's and Preacher Eli's best interest.” He wound up being given the death penalty and died by electrocution.

Sylvie's pa never did get over it.

Now, no longer did Tom Carson have anyone to console him at night as he cried for the death of his three-year-old son. And he sobbed for the loss of his wife, too. The weight of having lost them both turned out to be too much for him. Ironically, in the end, he wasn't as strong as his daughter. Luckily, Sylvie hadn't been the one to find him. While she was at school one day, he'd gone out past the cattle fields, strung a rope over the bough of one of the oaks close to the outer edge of the woods, and hanged himself.

Once again, there was a police investigation and an autopsy. Tom Carson's death was determined to be a suicide.

Mother would've said, “God called them all early. He has plans for every one of us. You just don't understand them.”

Sylvie would never understand plans from God that involved taking everyone in her family away from her before she even turned fifteen years old.

Besides, Sylvie had always wondered about the deaths of her folks. It had always nagged at her the way they both went: so close together, and so strangely. Why would her pa leave Sylvie all alone? Especially knowing she was the way she was? If Preacher Eli hadn't been in prison, her suspicions would have gone directly to him over her pa's “suicide.”

Then part of her thought maybe
she
was the reason her pa did it. Because he couldn't deal with her without anybody else helping him. Part of her thought maybe it was her fault.

Sylvie not only suffered from what the doctors refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder (something Sylvie didn't really understand), but she had been extraordinarily lonely pretty near her whole life. Foster care didn't do anything but make her lonelier than ever. Even after meeting Orwin Thomas, she'd still felt lonely most of the time.

She wondered if this was how most other people felt.

All of these thoughts continued bouncing through Sylvie's head as she lay in bed staring at her ceiling until, finally, sleep took mercy on her. She either didn't dream or, thankfully, didn't remember what she dreamed after she awoke the next morning.