Summer of the Dead (16 page)

Jessup sucked in a long, deep breath. He let it out with a wheeze, like a note held too long inside an accordion, so long that it managed to wander off-key. “Now, as y'all might've heard,” he said, voice turning coy, “I've done pretty well for myself.” A rolling tide of chuckles spread across the crowd. Everybody knew that Jessup was a millionaire who lived in sumptuous comfort and luxury, a universe removed from the poverty of his upbringing in Raythune County, and that fact seemed to enhance rather than detract from his credibility. “Got my pick of hospitals. Wellsir, my grandson, Montgomery, is real,
real
sick. And next time the doctors want to have a crack at him, we're bringing him back. Back to the Raythune County Medical Center. 'Cause there ain't no better place nowheres!”

As the crowd stomped and hollered its communal approval, Bell spotted Sheriff Fogelsong's brown hat across the crammed-full lot; he moved steadily along the perimeter, coordinating his actions with Deputy Harrison. Bell waved, but he didn't see her. He was too focused on his surveillance. He had a funny feeling about the event, he'd told her the day before. It wasn't a premonition, exactly, just an odd unsettledness in his belly. Too many bad things had happened already. He couldn't relax. No matter how much additional security was present, this was Nick Fogelsong's lookout. His county. His responsibility. And there were too many people, too much confusion, too many ways for things to go wrong.

The audience was at it again, interspersing the whoops and the cheers with two-fingered whistles. Jessup raised a hand to halt the hullabaloo; the people happily obeyed, their shrieks dying down and then winking out one by one like stars at sunrise. “And so,” he went on, “that's what I come to say to you today. That's it, plain and simple. But I dearly hope that some of you'll find a minute to come by and say hello before we head back to Charleston. I'll be in the lobby over there. And after that,” he said, a husky swagger in his old-man voice, “I think you oughta find yourself a creek somewheres—so you can jump in and get outa this gol-durned heat, whadda say? Whaddaya say, folks, whaddaya say?” The crowd exploded as Jessup goaded them on: “Huh? Huh? Can't hear ya! Louder, now—can't rightly hear ya!”

*   *   *

The speech had concluded an hour and a half ago, and still the people came, threading through the lobby and past the governor one by one, the very old and the very young and those in the vague indeterminate swath of ages in between, an earnest and anxious chain of well-wishers. The crowd was crushed and funneled through one side of the entrance doors and then the long line looped across the carpeted lobby, and after that it curved back out the other side of the double doors; from above, the squiggly line gyrating through the front section of the building surely looked like a toddler's clumsy scribble. There was a vast murmuring sound, the kind of anticipatory excitement that resists expression in mere words. No matter how long these people had to wait to see Riley Jessup, they would gladly have waited even longer.

It had required the best efforts of five security guards, two on each side and one at the rear, to help the old man totter down from the flatbed truck, courtesy of an overmatched stepstool, and then to guide him into the lobby and lower him into a custom-made chair, whereupon his body relaxed into its default pudding shape. Even though Jessup was now out of the sun and into the air-conditioning, shiny buttons of sweat still popped spontaneously across the top of his head. His shirt collar was limp and sopping.

Bell watched from a corner of the lobby. These people seemed to crave physical contact with the man, even if just for a few precious seconds. A handshake. A fleeting brush of their fingertips against his. Certain politicians, she thought with bemusement, were wildly beloved in West Virginia, despite the record of corruption and incompetence and unabashed laziness that clung to them like pieces of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of their shiny shoes. Politics here was ruled by a curiously inverted ratio: The worse the people were treated by some scalawag of an elected representative, the more they seemed to revere him, especially in retrospect. Bell sometimes wondered if it came from the same impulse that made mothers defend their prodigal sons—the bad boys, the bums, the users, the troublemakers—and love them all the more for their rascally defects.

And there might be another reason, too, she surmised, why West Virginians rarely held a grudge against even the most grotesquely rapacious politician. They wanted to believe. Needed to. They were compelled to believe that, no matter how bad people—or conditions in general—had been in the past, they could be different tomorrow. It was a kind of shy, primitive optimism that sometimes irritated her, but she knew that it was also a survival technique. If you didn't have hope around here, what the hell else
did
you have?

“Hey, there.”

Bell turned. Rhonda Lovejoy was at her side, grinning despite a face so red that it resembled a freshly picked cherry tomato. Her sky blue dress with the big white bow at the neck was damp and bedraggled; overall, she looked as if she'd walked fully clothed into a shower and then changed her mind about it before soaping up.

“How're you doing in this heat?” Bell asked her.

“Tolerable. Ran into my cousin Evie outside. She's here with all six of her kids. Asked if I could use my influence to move 'em up a little bit.” Rhonda shook her head nobly. “Don't worry, boss. I set her straight. No favors. Not how the prosecutor's office operates.”

The line was moving faster now as the security staff began to hustle people along. Jessup's handshakes were briefer, the small talk brusquer. His smile came and went like a DVD on fast-forward. Bell noticed a woman standing to the left of the governor's chair, hunched over a cell phone, ignoring the endless river of worshippers. She was middle-aged, excruciatingly thin, draped in a white linen pantsuit with dainty gold buttons, her small feet angled into lipstick-red heels. If you looked closely, you could see the faint imprint of Riley Jessup's heavy features on her much smaller face. She had a dimpled chin and tiny eyes and cinnamon-colored hair that cupped her cheeks like two hands. Bell recognized her from the picture that had accompanied Donnie Frazey's preview story in the
Acker's Gap Gazette
: She was Sharon Jessup Henner, the governor's daughter.

Bell couldn't hear what she was saying into the cell, but clearly it wasn't a cordial exchange. The woman's face was owned by a scowl. The skin on that face looked hard; it was thickened by age, and by the sneaky inroads carved by worry or debauchery or both. It told the story of her life. Skin always did.

“That's his daughter, right?” Bell asked Rhonda. The room was so noisy that she didn't need to whisper.

“You got it. Pretty notorious, back in the day.”

“How so?”

Rhonda licked her lips. She seemed to cool down all at once. Now she was in her element. She knew the backstory of a great many residents of Raythune County, along with their uncles and cousins and great-aunts and step-grandparents; she could even recite the lineage of the better-known hunting dogs in the region. And she enjoyed deploying the information, as long as she could do so at her own pace, letting the story unfurl bit by delicious bit, like a wide red ribbon coaxed slowly and dramatically off its spool.

But this time, there was a complication. Rhonda knew the Jessups' saga only thirdhand, from listening to other people's stories. She hated to acknowledge that there were families in Raythune County about which she had little inside information; it was like finding a bad spot on a shiny apple. So she first had to justify herself.

“Well,” Rhonda said, tucking in gamely, “you gotta remember, boss, that nobody ever heard of the Jessups until Riley went into politics. Before that, they were just another dirt-poor family from Briney Hollow. Now, you grew up around here, too, so I don't need to tell you about Briney Hollow,” she said, and then proceeded to do just that: “Too many folks out there to keep track of. Too many kids running around with no shoes. No warm coats in the winter. No breakfast in their bellies when they head out to school. It's a shame, but it was true then and it's true now. Briney Hollow is one of those places you'd swear the good Lord forgot all about—and by the time He remembers, He'll be too embarrassed at His lapse to do much of anything about it. Anyhow, Riley Jessup was an ambitious fella, early on. Had a real knack with the crowds—guess you just got a look at that yourself—and kept on going. Up and up and up.”

Rhonda paused. She and Bell were both distracted by the sight of an elderly woman in a sweat-mauled blue blouse who had tottered up to Jessup's chair and offered her hand; when he took it and shook it and then tried to withdraw, she held on, as if his hand were the last rock sticking out of the cliff face and she was sliding down, down, down. Jessup's face quivered with the opening stages of panic. At last a security guard intervened, breaking the old woman's grip and leading her away, while she mumbled her outrage.

“Same time Jessup was rising up,” Rhonda went on, resuming her story with even more relish, “Sharon over there was running wild. Gave Jessup and his wife, Tammy Lynn—Tammy Lynn, God rest her soul, died of breast cancer a few years back—no end of trouble, on account of her drinking and her sleeping around. Loved to embarrass her daddy, seems like. Ran away time after time when she was a teenager. Disappeared completely in her twenties and thirties. Straightened up, though, in the end. Came home to her folks after finding Jesus—or so she said, there being no way to independently verify that story with the other party.”

Rhonda paused once again. There was a kink in the line parading past Jessup's chair; like an ominous clog in a drain, the backed-up crowd was thickening into a confused lump. A chubby toddler with strawberry-blond pigtails—apparently mistaking the rotund governor for a shopping-mall Santa—had attempted to climb into his polyester prairie of a lap. A security guard snatched up the girl in a pincer-like grip and, with astonishing speed, deposited her back on the floor. She waited five seconds and then exploded into shriek-heavy sobs.

“Then Sharon married Whit Henner,” Rhonda said, now that the show was over and the line had begun to move again. “Aide to the governor. Their son, Montgomery, was born sixteen years ago. Sickly child, right from the get-go, and he's only gotten worse. Bet you anything that Sharon's on the phone right now with one of his doctors back in Charleston.” Rhonda and Bell looked at Sharon; she had moved a few steps away from Jessup's chair and from the long motley string of his admirers, and was aiming another barrage of verbal abuse into her cell.

“Riley Jessup is just nuts about the kid,” Rhonda said. She had lowered her voice ever so slightly; this part of the story was sad rather than juicy. “Do anything in the world for him. Now, mind you—Jessup was never much interested in family before, except when the cameras were rolling. But everybody says he's a changed man. The boy's health problems just bother him something awful. Tear him up inside.” Rhonda crossed her arms, a signal that she was winding things up. “The governor tells anybody who'll listen that Montgomery is the only reason he's still on this earth—I mean, the old man's got a pacemaker and diabetes and enough arthritis to make every step a misery. But God granted him a few more years, he says, so's he can see Montgomery grow up.”

“Where's the kid?” Bell said, looking around.

“Oh, he's way too sick to travel. Some kind of heart thing. Real bad, I hear.” Rhonda scratched the side of her neck, a neck wet from copious sweating.

“How about Sharon's husband—Whit Henner?”

Rhonda shrugged. “Been out of the picture for years. Comes around occasionally for photo shoots. Sharon and her son live with Riley Jessup. Ever seen that place? Believe me, he's got the room.” Her expression changed. She looked troubled; something else was on her mind. “You know what?”

Bell waited.

“Don't get me wrong,” Rhonda said. “I feel for the family's troubles. I do. But if you ask me, Riley Jessup's a first-class, ring-tailed hypocrite. Lives in a palace. He's got more money than God. When he was in office, though, and had the chance, he didn't do a damned thing about the falling-down schools. Or about the roads that're so bad, you can't even find 'em again after a hard rain. Lined his pockets with corporate money and then let those thieving bastards run the state as they saw fit, year after year, dumping poison in the rivers, taking shortcuts with safety regulations and cutting off mountaintops like a bored kid with a stick in a field of dandelions. You've seen that bumper sticker—‘Almost level, West Virginia.' Not even funny anymore, thanks to the Riley Jessups of this world.”

Bell was surprised. Rhonda didn't usually talk politics with such vehemence; her passion was generally restricted to new clothes and fresh gossip.

“Anyway,” Rhonda concluded, “Jessup is trying to make amends, I suppose, with the MRI thingy. First we've ever had. Kind of amazing, really, that we even have an X-ray machine. Surprised they don't just rely on somebody poking you in the gut to see if you yell. And way over there,” she said, inclining her head toward the lobby entrance, and toward a tall, slender man in an artfully tailored gray suit, “is the fella who persuaded Jessup to pay for the MRI—although I hate to have to give him the credit.”

Bell turned. It was Bradley Portis, a man to whom she had taken an instant dislike when she met him a few months ago. The CEO of the Raythune County Medical Center was the only person present who seemed unfazed by the heat. His thick chestnut hair had lost none of its luster. His eyes were unreadable, as glazed-over and generic as his smile. Hands clasped behind his back, he looked mildly bored as he surveyed the crooked trail of people inching feverishly toward Riley Jessup. In his posture, which Bell would've sworn had been perfected with the help of a laser level, and in the slight but perceptible lift of a black eyebrow, she sensed a massive distaste for these people and their second-rate clothes. Their second-rate lives.