Leather Maiden (30 page)

I walked amongst the graves quickly.

“That would have been hours ago,” Belinda said. “She couldn't last that long.”

“Don't say that,” I said.

“She wouldn't have air to breathe.”

“Was the toy box deep?”

“Pretty deep.”

“I know it was big from the dust lines,” I said. “Half the size of a coffin. She's drugged, buried in that big box, she wouldn't be awake, frightened, sucking up air. She'd be breathing shallow, and—look there!”

It was a mound of fresh dirt, red clay heaped up between two old graves.

I stuck the shovel in the dirt and went to work quickly. Belinda tried to dig with the trowel, but I was going too fast and nearly took her head off with the edge of the shovel. She finally sat back and I dug.

The ground was soft and easy to dig and hadn't been packed down. It looked to have been a job done quickly, and as I dug, I couldn't help but wonder what would be going through Caroline's mind; a woman burying a child, her own child, for some kind of game that made her feel strong. I couldn't find any way to get inside the framework of that kind of thinking.

The shovel hit something. I got down on my hands and knees and started pushing dirt. It was an old gray wooden box. The toy box. I pushed the dirt aside with my hands until I had the lid completely uncovered, and then I took the trowel from Belinda and stuck the point of it under the lid and grunted and pushed and felt all my wounds start to gush, but I kept at it.

The lid creaked up part of the way, and then it hung, and I had to really get my shoulder behind it. That made the wound in my back tear. I could feel blood running down my spine and down the back of my pants.

I tore the lid off.

Lying in the bottom of the box, very still, covered in sweat, wearing only a T-shirt and shorts, was Jazzy. I lifted her out of the box and laid her out on the ground, and called her name up close to her face a couple of times.

“She's breathing,” Belinda said.

And she was. Her little chest was rising and falling. I peeled back an eyelid, and when I did she stirred ever so slightly, and then she didn't move again. But she was breathing. She was just out from whatever Caroline had given her, probably in the drink she made her take.

I bent over Jazzy, and then it came out of me, gushed up like an oil reserve, and I started crying, bellowing. I lifted my head and yelled, and when I did I saw the sky had gone gray with storm clouds blowing across the heavens like tumbleweeds.

Jazzy opened her eyes, not wide, but enough she could see me. She almost smiled. Her hand came up and touched me. Her eyes closed again and she grew limp in my arms.

Belinda touched my arm. “She's going to be all right, Cason. She's going to be okay. Come on, baby. It's okay. She's breathing…She's just gone back to sleep. But you…you're bleeding all over the place.”

I suddenly felt a lot better. I smiled at Belinda. I laughed. I said, “You sound like a frog.”

         

We called Booger and he drove the car over, and I used my house key and we took Jazzy into Mom and Dad's place, put her on the couch. Booger had brought the fast food with him, and we ate it. I had to eat it, and so did Belinda. I was about to faint.

Finished, we put Jazzy back in Caroline's house, on the little mattress in her room. She was still sleeping. She looked so innocent.

We drove to a pay phone and I called the cops and gave them an anonymous tip. I told them there was a little girl staying by herself in a home where the adults had left, and I was just a concerned citizen, and then I hung up.

Back at my place we cleaned my wounds again, and Booger sewed me up with a needle and some strong thread. He did this while I bit down on a paperback book to keep from screaming. Booger talked and joked all the while he was sewing. He sewed deep and stitched tight. Belinda got so sick watching, she had to leave the room.

That night I took some pills I had left over from when I had a bad case of the flu, and I slept like the dead.

         

There's not much to tell now.

Booger stuck around a couple of days and Belinda moved in with me during that time, just to make sure my wounds were healing all right. We got Booger a big bag of malted eggs and took him to the rent-a-car place, and he rented one and drove it back to Hootie Hoot with his duffel bag in tow, back to his gun range and his bar and his friend Runt, and probably Conchita, to whom Booger could show his new tattoo.

He had been nice to have around, all things considered, and when he left I felt both lonely and damn glad. At the bottom of it all, I feared someday soon I'd hear from Booger again.

Next day I called Timpson and told her I was sick, and wanted her to know I wasn't chasing a story, not today. She said, “You sure get sick a lot.”

Belinda went to work for a while. When she came home for lunch we got a new envelope, and wearing gloves, Belinda and I cut out an address using letters from magazines. It was addressed to Oswald at the newspaper. The idea was, when Belinda went back to work, she would deliver it to Oswald and say she found it leaning against the door when she came in. That way anyone could have put it there. We also wrote out a note and put it in the envelope with the DVD, and the note was about Dinkins hiring an assassin to kill Judence. In that note we told where the two leather maidens could be found. It said all of this was connected to the body found in the history office killed with a rifle. The office turned out to be Jimmy's office, but no one tried to make any connection there. Not then or later. The mysterious provider of the information was never detected.

Good thing.

As for Caroline, right before Booger left, he and I went over to the campus at night, got the janitorial buggy with Caroline's body in it. We were careful when we emptied her and the rags and the paper towels into the trunk of my car, lifting the bag off the buggy rack and dropping it in the trunk. I drove the car off campus and around the block while Booger pushed the buggy cart back and put it inside the clock tower and wiped it down and walked back to the drive just in time for me to come back and pick him up.

We were careful and we were smooth and we were very natural about everything. We drove out to the Siegel house, took Caroline out of the trunk and out of the bag and rolled her down the hill and into the kudzu, which wrapped around her like green ocean waves.

Maybe someone would smell her. Maybe not. If a year from now her remains were found, the police might think they had overlooked her the first time around. That she had been dead since the night she went missing.

I destroyed the rest of the DVDs.

Mom and Dad are trying to be foster parents to Jazzy, and maybe they have a shot. For the time being, she's with them.

Child Protective Services is having a hard time finding the mother who lived in the house with Jazzy. Her name turned out to be a fraud. I could help them on that matter, but I won't.

Jazzy didn't seem to remember me out at the grave. She got quizzed by cops and Child Protective Services workers and a psychiatrist. But that never came out. She either really didn't remember, or she's even smarter for her age than I thought.

Jimmy is back at the university teaching. He even has a story to tell about the time a would-be assassin was found dead in his office. The cops figured someone shot the would-be assassin from the tower. An accurate assessment, but they thought it was a Judence supporter; no one has any real ideas who did it or how to go about finding out.

Jimmy never asked me another question. He may have suspicions about what had gone on, but all he knows is what I told him. “It's safe. Everything is as it should be. Now go home.”

Oswald wrote a really good piece based on what he knew about the leather maidens found in the church and at the back of the field. He wrote about Dinkins, the note and the DVD. Dinkins looks to be prison-bound. A month later, Oswald wrote an article about a rotting body found on the scenic overlook. Another anonymous tip led him to that. Oswald thinks he has fans amongst the underworld. It makes him feel important.

They ran a picture of Gregore's somewhat weathered shoe stuck in the fork of the old oak tree. Oswald took the picture.

Oswald and I talk now. I think it's because he feels more content. He didn't get nominated for a Pulitzer, but he did get a lot of attention, and Timpson doesn't call him “boy” anymore. But she does refer to him as colored.

The school in the black section of town didn't get built. I see Judence on TV from time to time, always looking to be the nation's moral barometer. The black racists and white racists have turned relatively silent for the time being.

The world still sucks.

         

I drove by Gabby's work the other day, just out of the blue. I saw her car there, and through the window I got a glimpse of her. I didn't feel a thing. I drove by her house to see how that felt. It was just a house. After that, I drove home to meet up with Belinda. We like to have dinner together when our jobs permit. She got a job as a reporter in the town next door. She's real happy about that. I'm not writing hard news anymore, just the columns, and a lot of them have turned to fluff, but I like it that way.

Now and again I drive by the old Siegel house on my way out of town, or on some errand for the paper, and I wonder how Caroline's body is doing up there. She had once been just a kid who maybe had some possibilities. A smart kid who thought she might be a princess or some such thing, the way little girls do. She became a woman whose soul and heart had been turned to leather, just as surely as the bodies of those poor dead women she and that psycho Stitch had tortured and killed.

Caroline was the true leather maiden. She had been that way a long time. And, to this date, as far as anyone else knows, she's still missing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joe R. Lansdale has written more than a dozen novels in the suspense, horror and Western genres. He has also edited several anthologies. He has received the British Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, seven Bram Stoker Awards and the 2001 Edgar Award for best novel from the Mystery Writers of America. In 2007 he won the Grand Master Award at the World Horror Convention. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his family.

ALSO BY JOE R. LANSDALE

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A Fine Dark Line

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Freezer Burn

Rumble Tumble

Bad Chili

Mucho Mojo

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2008 by Joe R. Lansdale

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lansdale, Joe R., [date]

Leather maiden / by Joe R. Lansdale.—1st American ed.

p.                   cm.

1. Journalists—Fiction. 2. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)—Fiction. 3. Texas, East—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS
3562.
A
557
L
43 2008

813'.54—dc22                                                                2007051854

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN: 978-0-307-27041-2

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