Summer of the Dead (31 page)

What a long, slow night it had been, without Jason to talk to. Or even to ignore, which was another form of communication. Jason had taken the night off; he and his brother had driven their father to Charleston the day before for an appointment with a cardiologist. Jason hadn't been sure he would make it back in time, so he took a personal day. Or night, in this case. The replacement was a woman named Bonnie Skinner. Lindy had no opinion about Bonnie Skinner. There wasn't anything, really, upon which to hang an opinion: Bonnie was medium-sized, with medium brown hair and medium brown eyes and cautious, middle-of-the-road opinions about everything. She usually worked in Drummond, at the Lester station over there.

“How do you guys do the coffee for the morning rush?” Bonnie asked.

“Huh?”

“The coffee.” Bonnie stood by the
FILL 'ER UP
sign, holding aloft an empty carafe to help make her point, its glass sides stained with the distastefully brown residue of Dark Colombian Roast. “Like, do you all do 'em all at the same time or one at a time? Brewing new pots, I mean. We do 'em all at once, over in Drummond. Dump out what's in there and start fresh.”

Lindy was rearranging the items on the front counter: the cardboard container with the tiny red 5-hour Energy bottles; the tall four-sided plastic stand with sunglasses stacked up in it, their dark lenses smudged with the fingerprints of people who just couldn't keep their hands off them, who had to try on every single freakin' pair while waiting for Lindy to give them their change.

“One at a time,” Lindy replied, but the tone of her voice said something else:
Whatever.

She missed Jason. The realization surprised her, but it was true. They were a good team. They worked well together, with the natural synchronicity that comes from an accumulation of hours in each other's company. But it wasn't just a work thing, Lindy thought; she was used to Jason, period. Used to his moods and his gestures. She knew by now that when he preened and he bragged, it was to cover up a secret inferiority, and when he acted like he didn't care about anybody else but himself, it was to deflect attention from the fact that he was deeply and habitually empathetic.

In the wide-open prairie of the hours between midnight and 6
A.M.
, hours that Bonnie Skinner mostly spent sitting on a stool by the cooler, pencil diving at intervals toward a ratty paperback filled with page after page of jumbled-word puzzles, Lindy thought about Jason and the noises he'd make, trying to sound like a rapper. The way he'd move casually toward the front counter whenever a customer came in to pay. Backing her up. Sending a silent message:
There's two of us here. I'm watching you
. Just in case.

“Okay,” Bonnie said.

Lindy looked up. She hadn't realized that her temporary assistant was waiting for her to say something else about the protocol for brewing the morning coffee supply, and that when she didn't, Bonnie just decided to tie off the conversation with the all-purpose “Okay.”

Finally the day shift personnel arrived. Time for Lindy and Bonnie to go home. They barely said good-bye to each other in the parking lot; it wasn't hostility, just indifference and fatigue. Lindy nodded and Bonnie gave her a weak smile as they split off, each heading to her own vehicle. The sky was already gray and hazy, which meant that the heat, as it intensified throughout the day, would probably hang stubbornly in the mountain valley like a wool blanket tossed over a clothesline.

As she drove home, Lindy thought about how she'd answer Jason when he asked her—and she knew he'd ask right away, eager for a compliment—about how she'd fared without him. Lindy planned to tease him as long as she could, stringing him along:
Oh, man, she was terrific. Pitched right in. Better watch it, Jace. Might ask 'em to trade you for her. Permanent, I mean.

Naturally, she would set his mind at ease after a while. Wouldn't keep him in suspense. It was too easy, for one thing. Way too easy. Despite his pretense of sophistication, Jason was pretty gullible. Easy prey for jokes.

Lindy climbed the front porch steps into the house, still thinking about Jason and his face, still amused by the idea of how he'd look when she teased him—the worried frown that would scrunch up his features like a wadded-up paper towel, the perplexity in his eyes while he tried to figure out if she was serious or just yanking his chain.

She was, therefore, preoccupied. And that was why she didn't notice the slight movement of the curtain just before her hand cupped the knob and shoved open the front door. That was why, furthermore, when the vicious blow roared forth from the shadow lurking behind that door, striking the side of her head, she was caught so totally by surprise.

 

Chapter Thirty-one

“Let me see if I've got it all straight,” Sheriff Fogelsong said. He settled his broad back against the high padded booth, big hands flat on the stainless steel table, musing amid the quiet of JP's in the middle of a weekday afternoon. There was always a lull between the lunch and dinner rush. That made it his and Bell's favorite time to come in and reconnoiter.

“This Jed Stark,” Nick went on, “was more than just a low-down troublemaker. He must've been some kind of hillbilly hit man. Voorhees—at the request of Riley Jessup, or so you're theorizing—hired him to do something or other. Stark, being a stupid sack of shit, gets himself killed before he can do a damned thing. And the nature of his employment is so sensitive, so potentially explosive, that his widow gets a nice big windfall to guarantee that she keeps her mouth shut about it.”

“Right.” Bell used her french fry, now heavily ketchup-laden, to point at Fogelsong, the way a teacher might use a piece of chalk to indicate a student who's come up with the correct answer. “Jed Stark's assignment had to be extremely serious. Only way to explain the money paid to Tiffany Stark. You don't spend that kind of cash to cover up anything less than murder.”

With her first swallow of coffee Bell had realized she hadn't eaten all day, and so quickly ordered fries. Jackie, who'd sent her waitresses home due to a lack of business and now dealt with the occasional customer herself, tried to steer Bell toward the Fruit Medley. No dice. Not even when Jackie used putatively enticing phrases such as “refreshingly cool” and “nutritionally advantageous.”

“Jackie,” Bell had patiently responded, “it may be ninety-five degrees outside, but I've still got a craving for something deep-fried—and really, really bad for me.”

Jackie had let a raised eyebrow serve as her reply. She returned a few minutes later, placing the order of fries in front of Bell with a resigned politeness. “Salted 'em extra,” Jackie murmured. “Long as you're indulging, might as well make it count.”

Once they were alone again, Fogelsong returned to his summation of what Bell knew and didn't know. The latter, unfortunately, was well in the lead. “Okay,” he said. “So who the hell was Stark supposed to knock off—or whatever it was he was supposed to do? And why?”

“Don't know,” Bell admitted. “Odell Crabtree's name was on the card in Stark's pocket, but there's no good reason why anybody would want Crabtree dead. He's a sick old man.”

“Agreed,” Fogelsong said. “All you have to do is wait a little while—and nature'll take care of it for you.”

Bell had procured another fry, but abruptly dropped it back on the plate. “What did you say?”

“Don't get mad. I was agreeing with you.”

“Not mad. Want you to repeat what you said.”

“Just meant,” he said obligingly, “that if you really want Odell Crabtree out of the picture, you don't have to go to all the trouble and risk and expense of hiring some skunk like Jed Stark to do it. You can just sit back and wait a spell. Odell's an old man. Had a hell of a hard life. Rumor is, he's half out of his head, anyway. Death'll be a relief. And it's definitely not far off.”

“So what if Odell Crabtree wasn't the target?”

“It was his name on the card.”

“Well, it's his house. The name might've meant the location, not the target. Because he doesn't live there alone.”

“His daughter, Lindy, you mean. Haven't seen her in a long time. Doesn't get out much anymore, except to go to work. Takes care of her father, I hear. Won't accept any help.” Fogelsong frowned. “Why would somebody go after a nineteen-year-old girl?”

Bell was digging through her wallet for the money to settle her lunch tab.

“Nick,” she declared, “We've had two homicides already this summer. I'm not real interested right now in the why. I'm interested in telling Lindy to be careful. To keep an eye out.”

*   *   *

Caught in the ardent spotlight of the late-afternoon sun, the house looked just as it had during Bell's previous visit: broken-down, slovenly, engaged in a sort of time-lapse unraveling toward utter ruin. She parked in the driveway behind Lindy's car and waited a moment, taking in the full range and particularity of the dilapidation; it came not solely from neglect, she theorized, but also from natural entropy and from some very daunting odds. Lindy Crabtree surely did the best she could, but the old house and its half-acre lot were more than she could handle on her own.

Bell climbed the crooked front steps. There was no doorbell, so she knocked on the warped and weather-battered door. No response. She knocked again. She was determined to have another conversation with Lindy—and this time, to be more insistent. Bell was fairly certain that the young woman hadn't been entirely forthcoming with her in their earlier conversation; she didn't blame her for that, because Bell would have reacted the same way herself at that age, in response to a meddlesome stranger who claimed to have her best interests at heart. But the stakes were higher now. Lindy and her father—one or both of them—might very well be in danger. Until her talk with Voorhees, such as it was, Bell was unsure; now, the peril seemed more plausible. Voorhees wasn't the kind of man who wasted his time on trifles.

Bell knocked three more times, waiting a long time between each attempt. Maybe Lindy was asleep. Or reading in the kitchen. There had to be a back door, right? She left the porch and rounded the house, parting the high weeds with both hands and stepping carefully over sharp piles of broken bricks and flung-down lumber.

To her surprise, the back door hung three-quarters-of-the-way open on its rusted red-orange hinges. She hesitated. Before she did anything else, Bell called out, “Hello?” She'd lived a lot of her life in this region and well understood that—open door or not—you didn't just wander into someone's house without announcing yourself, unless you had a hankering for a bellyful of buckshot.

“Hello?” she said again.

She pushed at the door with two fingers. The resulting creak was the kind that might be produced by a sound effects specialist for a horror movie; it was a stretched-out yelp that rose and fell and rose again, tapering off just as Bell slipped through the slightly widened opening.

Later, she would not be able to recall what the kitchen looked like. The smell would stay with her forever—a knock-you-back combination of spoiled food and galloping mildew and an accumulation of human wastes—but she would not remember the appearance of the sink or the stove, or what color the floor was. She had no recollection of the walls or the curtains in the dingy little room.

Her attention was instantly commandeered by the gigantic old man who sat, hunched and muttering, over the dinette, his clothes little more than rags, a filthy blanket thrown over his shoulders, hands the size of cinder blocks dangling at his sides. His shaggy white head was bent so far forward that his forehead nearly bumped the tabletop. His massive bulk spilled over the edges of the chair; the span of his shoulders had the rough dimensions of a fireplace mantel.

This,
she thought,
has to be Odell Crabtree.

So startled was she by his size—and his very presence—that it took Bell a second or so to note that his thick fingers were webbed with a sticky-looking substance, as if he'd just fought his way through a series of spiderwebs. His voice was a guttural chant. When he paused before taking another rattling, phlegmy breath, she heard moans from another source—
It's coming from the living room,
Bell thought with alarm,
someone's hurt in there, hurt badly
—and then her focus was pulled back to the old man. He was moving now, turning in the chair, his body shaking heavily, still chanting a rhythmic nonsensical chant.

He lifted his huge head and swiveled it slowly, slowly, in Bell's direction, and the blanket slid off his mammoth shoulders. He raised his hands, too, and held them out to her, palms up, and at that moment Bell realized what the substance was that covered them:. Blood. The old man's hands were smeared with blood. Suddenly Bell was able to understand the chant, could translate his mutterings.
Lindy-hurt-Lindy-Lindy-hurt
, he said as he rocked back and forth in the narrow chair, nearly capsizing it with every clumsy lurch, holding up his hands as if he were asking forgiveness from someone, anyone.

 

Chapter Thirty-two

Bell had told the story to Nick Fogelsong again and again. Three times now, and they hadn't even finished their initial cups of coffee in the hospital cafeteria. It wasn't that the sheriff doubted her; she told it multiple times for her own benefit, because by repeating exactly what she'd seen, precisely what she'd done, from the moment she found Lindy Crabtree until she arrived at the ER in her own car, having followed the ambulance and nearly matching its headlong speed, Bell hoped to recover more details. To nail down the narrative and make sure she had reported everything. Shock, she knew, could work like a soft clinging fog, obscuring things.

“—and so I finally got hold of myself,” she said, “and left Odell Crabtree in the kitchen and ran into the living room.” She paused. This part was difficult. “Lindy was lying behind the front door. Clearly a significant head trauma.” Bell tried to drink from the cardboard coffee cup. She put the cup back down again without accomplishing that. “Nick, it was a terrible. There was a big bloody rock on the floor right next to her. I have to wonder if—”