Playing Dead (38 page)

“That’s interesting,” I said.
Just go
, I screamed silently.

“I asked her once, if she was so intent on being secret about it, why she just didn’t give the money away privately before her death so you girls wouldn’t have to know,” W.A. continued. “She thought that would be deceptive. She said you girls wouldn’t care about the money.”

I laughed at this, an artificial sound in the room that once echoed with Mama’s music.

You were right about one thing, Mama. It’s not about money
.

Hours ago, as they lowered her body into the red sandy earth, I’d been in the process of forgiving her.

That was my mistake.

W
hile W.A. roared his old white Cadillac to life outside, Sadie blew out the kerosene lamp and we headed into the kitchen with the dirty wineglasses. It was better in here. The low light over the sink was on, casting friendly light. The room had been whipped into perfect order, with damp dishtowels hanging neatly on Mama’s wooden towel rack, and foil-wrapped cookies and half-eaten cakes lining the long table.

“Whoa,” Sadie said, peering inside the refrigerator, crammed with Tupperware, Cool Whip fruit salads, and King Ranch casseroles. “Take me home and let’s deal with this tomorrow. Or never.”

Ten minutes later, I dropped Sadie in front of the trailer, armed with a slab of Marjory Adams’s double fudge cake and a generous serving of Waynette Sanders’s homemade macaroni and cheese, very specific requests from a text sent by Maddie.

Hudson appeared under her porch light as I started to pull out, tie loose and hanging around his neck, dress shirt wrinkled and untucked, a relaxed smile on his face. So this is where he’d disappeared to. To keep an eye on Maddie.

I waited with the engine running while he walked over.

“Scoot,” he said, opening my door and throwing his jacket across the bench seat. “I’m driving. I left my truck at the barn.”

I thought about protesting, my conditioned response to Hudson. I thought about asking why his truck was at the barn. Instead, I scooted.

“Are you going to forgive me?” I asked, my eyes straight ahead, following the headlights as they illuminated the deep tire treads in the dirt road.

“Probably,” he said.

I hadn’t really cried all day. Not like this. Embarrassing, hiccupy gasps. Hudson yanked the truck over to the side of the road and held on to me while I let out grief and fear and an unfortunate amount of snot.

“She’s gone, and I don’t even know who I am,” I said, sobbing.

Hudson pulled back, tilting up my chin.

“I know who you are. You’re this scar.” He touched my wrist. “And this one.” He stroked the hair at my temple. “You’re kind. Beautiful. Brave. You save children.”

The hug rolled into something carnal and primitive, nothing but sensation, hands and mouths roving, neither of us able to get enough fast enough.

“Wait,” he said thickly. He pulled off the brake and hit the gas but I couldn’t stop touching him and he couldn’t stop kissing me and it was a bumpy, chaotic ride until he turned off on one of the flattened grass four-wheeler paths to the pond.

If predators of any kind waited for us in the dark, so be it.

Dying right now in Hudson’s arms, without the answers, in the fields where I grew up, would be OK.

This is what always happened when I surrendered my body to Hudson. Every brain cell was suddenly drunk. I stood blithely on the edge of a cliff, hoping it wouldn’t hurt too much when I fell but 100 percent sure that it would.

We only made it about a third of the way to the pond before Hudson turned the truck crookedly into the field, jamming on
the brake. He pushed me flat against the back of the seat, and I knew from experience that he had the bad end of this deal.

“Ow,” he said, backing into the steering wheel. “I’m a little out of practice. In a pickup.”

“You had to add that last part.” For a second I wondered about all the women he made love to after I let him go, if it was like this, fierce and fast, all-consuming, so intimate it hurt.

My black nylon funeral dress was somewhere up around my waist, his hands busy, warm, stripping off my underwear, losing them on the floor. I’d done my part on the drive over, unzipping his pants, pulling at his new shirt until buttons clicked off the dashboard. This was only going to end one way.

Hudson paused to kick open his door, letting in the dense, hot perfume of our land and the ghosts of my past summers. I adjusted my body underneath him. “Is that better?”

“Much better.” Hudson leaned in and pushed back my hair, damp with sweat and tears.

“I’ve heard about you McCloud girls. Isn’t now when I’m supposed to ask if you want me to stop?”

“Shut up,” I answered, and for a little while everything bad disappeared.

“Who’s still here?” Hudson asked, stopping short of the drive.

I lifted my head from his shoulder, groggy, sated, ready to collapse in my bed.

Through the windows of the darkened living room, shadow and light played a spooky game. A steady pulse, a single, timed beat between each movement like a blinking traffic light.

Light, dark.

Light, dark.

“No one,” I said. “Everybody should be gone.”

“Stay here,” he said brusquely, and I nodded, my heart knocking.

Hudson, already halfway up the walk, had entered another zone and I wasn’t invited.

I pulled the keys out of the ignition and threw open the pickup door, careful not to slam it behind me.

“Wait!” I whispered loudly, running up the walk in my bare feet.

“This one,” I said, one key poking out from the jumble on a tarnished key ring that declared me “World’s Best Aunt.”

Hudson motioned me to back up and in one smooth gesture slipped in the key, pushed open the door. He took three cautious steps inside the entryway.

“What the hell?” he muttered. I slipped beside him.

Hudson’s gun pointed at a motionless form slumped in my father’s chair. Two framed landscapes were lying on the floor. We had stepped into the path of an eerie slide show projected on the wall behind us. Oversized, out-of-focus images stained our clothes and our faces with flickering light.

I’d seen these pictures of Fred Bennett and his murdered family enough for twenty lifetimes.

A gray blur hovered on my black dress and up my arm. Part of the image on the wall.

The dead little girl’s face or a doll or the pattern in a couch. I slapped at it like a terrible insect I had to get off. My eyes frantically scanned for a projector and settled on a laptop computer propped up on a stack of books.

I moved farther into the room, away from the wall. The man in the chair dangled an empty bottle from one hand. I didn’t think a dead person could dangle. He lifted his other arm and pointed to the photograph on the wall. A bloody kitchen countertop.

“Get back, Tommie,” Hudson said. “Now.”

“It’s Jack,” I said softly, moving toward the chair.

No visible weapon. I knelt beside him. Something was horribly wrong.

“Jack, this is my friend Hudson. He isn’t going to hurt you. Let’s turn this off and we can talk.” No response. I shook Jack by the shoulder, and Hudson took three steps closer, his weapon aimed at Jack’s head.

Jack had deteriorated. He smelled rancid. Stubble grew out of his chin. His hair, usually so perfect, was oily, wild.

“How many glasses do you count up there?” Jack asked. He didn’t appear to care whether Hudson shot him or not.

I glanced up against my will.

“Three,” I said.

“Good girl,” Jack mumbled. “Smart girl.”

The bottle in his hand was one of those overpriced fancy designer waters. Not whiskey.

Not drunk.

Jack pressed the remote, sweeping us into the tornado after a child’s bath. Wet towels on the floor, the cap off the toothpaste, a pile of dirty clothes in the corner.

He fast-forwarded. Images, melting into each other. “Here it is,” he said.

It was like someone had dumped a can of red paint in the open dishwasher. Fred Bennett’s blood. His body, slumped on the floor.

Jack wasn’t interested in the blood or the body. He zeroed in, blowing up the focus on the refrigerator and a two-door cabinet above it.

One of the cabinet doors hung open.

Jack stumbled over to the wall, Hudson’s gun tracking him. Jack’s shadow loomed across the image, the dates from a calendar on the refrigerator reflected on his forehead like a tattoo.

“See that little white thing right there inside the cabinet? That’s my foot.”

I didn’t process it right away. All of the Bennett children
had died
. Hadn’t they?

I moved toward Jack and he staggered toward me, grabbing my hair, his whiskey breath heating my face.

“Shhhhhhh,” he said, his eyes empty, one finger in front of his lips, the other hand gripping my hair and pulling me close. The stubble on his chin scratched my cheek.

“Play dead. Do you hear me?”

He twisted my hair harder when I didn’t reply.

“My brother told me to do that. He told me to play dead when the Hobbit came to our window. He saved me.” He scrunched up his face.

“It’s OK, Hudson,” I said. “Put the gun down. I’ve got this.”

“Please don’t be mad,” Jack pleaded. “He shot us. My bubby wouldn’t wake up. I had to find Daddy. As soon as Daddy saw me, he stuck me in the cabinet. ‘Shhhh,’ he said. ‘Keep the door closed.’ But I couldn’t. I was afraid of the dark. I saw the Giant come out of the living room with a big stick. I thought Daddy would win. Good guys
win
.”

Three children. Two died. One lived. A cabinet door cracked open three inches, not one, not two, meant a lifetime of Jack playing and replaying the murder of his father like a bloody video game in his head.

A part of me was enraged by this man in front of me. But this wasn’t a man. This was a bewildered child.

“The Hobbit is at the window.” Jack stared frantically at the shut blinds across the room, his mouth an open circle, an expression of pure terror on his face. Maddie’s face as a toddler, before a shot needle punctured her skin.

The silent scream, I called it.

The silence before a terrible wail.

When it came, I wondered whether Jack or the house would implode first.

Wait
, I urged myself.
Let it go. He needs to let it go
.

In less than a minute, he was crying quietly.

I took a breath. “Jack, you’re in my living room. You’re safe. The bad things happened a long time ago. The Hobbit can’t hurt you anymore.”

His eyes flicked back to the window, suspicious. “He’s out there somewhere. You’re lying.”

“He’s not coming in here. Hudson won’t let him. You will be OK. You did the right thing. Hiding.”

“Fuck that!” He pushed me roughly, throwing the remote hard against the stone of the fireplace, cracking it into pieces.

“PTSD,” Hudson mumbled to me. “I’ve seen it enough.”

“I have an idea,” I said. “Not textbook exactly. I have to go upstairs. Please talk to him.”

I ran to my bedroom, flipping on lights as I went. I spilled everything out of my backpack until I found what I wanted. Downstairs, I could hear Hudson speaking quietly.

Then I was back on my knees in front of Jack, forcing the piece of paper from Idabel, Oklahoma, into his hands.

“Are these the men, Jack? This picture has been sitting in Jennifer Coogan’s police file in Idabel. Jack, do you remember Jennifer?”

Do you remember where you really are? Come on, Jack, snap back
.

Something in his eyes flickered.

“These two men were strangers in the area at the time of her death. No one ever tracked them down.”

“I drew that heart tattoo,” he said softly, pointing to the giant’s shoulder. “I went through boxes of crayons. They took all my crayons away.”

I felt a rush of anger that he’d been forced to leave those pictures inside his head.

That adults—
caretakers
—felt the need for such destructive control.

I placed my hand on his knee.

“Jack, your family’s murders, Jennifer’s murder … were six years apart. A thousand miles away from each other. But they’re connected. Can you help me, Jack?”