Summer of the Dead (33 page)

“He's fine. We took him into custody.” Bell cut off Lindy's protest. “Protocol. It's a temporary hold. He's safe, though. From the look of him, he can't take care of himself. He'll get hot meals and a place to sleep. Until you're out of here, it makes sense. Don't you think?”

Lindy wouldn't look at her. A tacit acknowledgment that Bell was right.

“So,” Bell said. “How long? How long has your father been like this?”

Lindy's gaze remained stapled to the blanket on her lap. A minute passed. She lifted her face. “Long enough.”

She coughed. Bell picked up the cup from the bedside table and handed it to her, making sure the straw was angled in the right direction.

“Tell me,” Bell said as soon as Lindy had had her fill and handed the cup back to her, “what it was like before.”

In the faint glow of the monitors, Lindy's face looked even younger than her years, her skin infinitely malleable, like sculptor's clay minutes before the touch of the artist's thumb sets the features into place permanently. Lindy's voice was low and lilting, stripped of the belligerence that had inhabited it during the earlier part of their conversation.

“My mother was wonderful,” Lindy said. She'd waited, deciding whether to trust Bell, and then went forward. “And Daddy—well, he always had a lot on his mind. He grew up rough.” She coughed again. Bell reached for the cup, but Lindy shook her head. The problem with her throat right now wouldn't be alleviated by a drink of water. It wouldn't be alleviated by a thousand drinks of water. “And then my mother died. Daddy lost his job in the mine and—and it was all too much for him. He'd already been having some problems—he was forgetting things, and there was one day when he got lost while he was driving home, the same drive he'd been making for fifty years. He called me in a panic from a stranger's house out on Coon Path Road. He was scared. Real scared. He was—he was slipping away. Not just from me. He was slipping away from everything. From his own memories. From the world. And he started to get real mad about it. Frustrated.”

“Violent?”

Lindy waited. “Yeah,” she said, after the kind of pause that made her affirmative reply redundant. “Sometimes he gets violent.” She reached out and put a hand on Bell's arm. “But you have to understand. It's not his fault, okay? Things are just so different from when Mom was alive. She had a way of calming him. She used to tell me about how they met and they fell in love. I didn't know much about that until right before she died. Daddy, she said, never thought he'd marry. Didn't expect to find anybody to care about him that way. But a friend took him to Mom's church one day, and it was like—like she'd been waiting her whole life to meet somebody like Daddy, and he'd been waiting his whole life, too, to meet her, even though he was a lot older. Never thought they'd have kids, but then I came along.” A smile, brief but prideful. “My mother named me. She loved Anne Morrow Lindbergh—she was always reading and she loved those essays about nature and the seashore and such—but she didn't like the name Anne. Said it was too ordinary. Too common for the likes of me. Because I was going to be special. And so she named me Lindy.”

Tears were spilling out of Lindy's eyes. She had continued talking while the tears came, her voice unaffected by them, as if tears were just something you had to put up with, pass through, like a light rain on the way to your car. Bell didn't rush to comfort her. There was still more Bell needed to know, and comfort could be a muzzle: It closed off revelations.

After a pause to let the sorrow crawl back in its box, Lindy went on. “But there's still so much I don't know about my parents. And it eats at me. It does. Because that's the only way I can hang on to my mother now—by finding out more about her life.” Lindy's voice acquired a frantic edge. “It's all I've got. You see that, right? I don't have anything else to remember her by. I found some letters the other day, from an old friend of hers, somebody she'd never talked about—but that's it. And if something happens to my father—if I lose him too—”

Lindy stopped. It was unthinkable, being left with just bits and pieces of her parents' lives. A haphazard, half-finished jigsaw puzzle. A random jumble. She would have no way back to the past, no route she could follow. She'd be marooned in the present. Stranded with no frame for her life, no facts to fill in the picture.

Bell understood. She understood it better than Lindy could ever appreciate; like Lindy, she lost her mother early and had virtually no extended family. There were differences, of course: Bell had hated her father, while Lindy loved Odell Crabtree. And Bell had a sister. But the broad outlines—the quietly terrifying sense of having no context for yourself, of having few close family members left who could tell you where you'd come from or who you really were—matched up.

Another time, another place, Bell might have discussed this with Lindy. Consoled her. Right now, however, there was a crime to investigate.

“I need you to think hard about something,” Bell said. “I know you don't want to believe your father attacked you. So help me out here. Let's figure it out. If not to rob you—and nothing seemed to be missing, including your billfold and your computer—then why else would somebody assault you?”

“Told you. I don't know.”

“I think maybe you do.”

Seeing Lindy's look of confusion, Bell elaborated. “I mean that sometimes we know things we don't realize we know. Any friends or coworkers pissed off at you? For something that happened on the job, maybe? Anybody threatening you?”

Lindy snorted. “More like the opposite.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I've got a ton of people—too damned many—trying to protect me. Giving me advice. Telling me it's not a good idea to work at night. Or to live alone with my dad. Taking care of him. Telling me I should leave Acker's Gap.”

Maybe they're right,
Bell wanted to reply, but didn't. No sense in provoking the young woman. Not yet, anyway. “Okay,” Bell said. “Let's go over your actions yesterday—up until the moment you were attacked. You work until 7
A.M.
, right? With an assistant? Same guy every night?”

“Yeah. Not last night, though.”

“Why not?”

“Jason took a personal day. Didn't come in to work. He and his brother had to drive their dad to Charleston.”

“Jason have a last name?”

“Brinkerman.”

“Right.” Bell would find out if Jason Brinkerman really had driven to Charleston—or if that was just a made-up excuse and his absence had been strategic, enabling him to get out to the Crabtree house and lie in wait. He would know what time Lindy returned home from her shift. “Who covered for him?”

“Bonnie Somebody. Can't remember her last—Wait. It's Skinner.” Lindy made a sound in the back of her throat that indicated how perturbed she was with herself. “How come I could remember
that
but I can't remember the attack?”

“Just the nature of concussions,” Bell said. “Mind's a funny thing. Okay, go on. So you drive home. You park. House look odd in any way?”

Lindy gave her a sharp glare. Bell realized that the question could have been intended as a wisecrack, a cheap joke; the Crabtree house was a godforsaken mess. Had been for years. The only oddity would have been if it suddenly appeared presentable: paved driveway, picked-up yard, shiny new roof, gutters that didn't dangle like random severed limbs.

“I mean,” Bell added, “did you see any evidence that anyone had been there overnight? Tire tracks, cigarette butts, a porch rug moved a little bit, that sort of thing?”

“Nope.”

“Okay.” Bell nodded. “Listen, you need your sleep. Guess I'd better get out of here before they throw me out.” Lindy's fatigue wasn't her only reason for leaving. She was eager to check on Jason Brinkerman. If the culprit wasn't Odell Crabtree, then Lindy's assistant looked good for the attack.

“I'll come by again later,” Bell said. “You're doing great. Nurse told me they'll probably be moving you out of ICU in a few hours. Put you in a regular patient room. You take care, okay? And can I bring you anything when I come back? Something to read, maybe?”

A light came into Lindy's eyes. “You'd have to go to my house,” she said.

“That's okay. Which book? Lots to choose from, as I remember.”

“Not a book. Like I told you, I found some letters the other day that belonged to my mom. I'd like to have them here. Truth is, with nobody in the house—well, I'm kind of worried. If there was a fire—” She looked concerned. “They can't be replaced.”

“I'll pick them up. Bring them here. Soon as I can.”

Lindy's features were instantly smoothed out by relief. “Great,” she said. “They're under the dresser in the bedroom. In a little box. You'll have to move some things around, but you can find it.”

“Okay.”

“One more thing.”

“Hey, don't push your luck,” Bell said, aiming for a jocular tone. “If you're going to ask for a cheeseburger or something, I'll have to check with the nurses first.”

Lindy's face was serious. “What do you do if—? How do you—?” She faltered.

Bell waited.

“Look,” Lindy said, “I don't believe Daddy did this to me. But what if—” Still struggling to find the right words, she plucked nervously at the sheet that covered her. “What if you find out something about somebody you know—something terrible?” She looked beseechingly at Bell. “What if you find out something you wish you didn't know? How do you—How do you
live
with it? It's so hard to think that somebody you care about might be capable of—something really, really bad. You know?”

“People are capable of anything, Lindy,” Bell said. She said it solemnly, with no cynicism in her voice. This wasn't a matter of cynicism; it was the deepest, saddest truth she knew.

“Even somebody you love?” Lindy said.

“Especially somebody you love.”

*   *   *

Bell sat in her Explorer in the hospital parking lot. Nick Fogelsong was an early riser. But maybe not
this
early, she told herself, pausing before she touched the digit on her speed-dial that was assigned to his home number. She canceled the call and dropped the cell onto the car seat beside her. In five minutes it would be 6
A.M.
; she'd call him at one minute past the hour, and if he sounded sleepy and vaguely pissed off, she'd say,
Hell, Nick. It's after six.

She'd left Lindy's bedside in the ICU a while ago. Sunrise was imminent, its mix of red-gold colors simmering behind the mountain. She fired off a text to Rhonda Lovejoy, asking her to dig up some background information on Jason Brinkerman and his family.

Then she unilaterally canceled her earlier plan. She'd call Nick later and check on Odell Crabtree. Right now, she decided, she needed to be on the road. To be in motion. First she'd stop somewhere and get herself a cup of coffee, and then she'd head over to Jason Brinkerman's house to question him. She wanted to do that right away, before he found out from anyone else that Lindy had been attacked. Jason's initial reaction might tell her a great deal.

Thirty seconds later Bell was turning out of the hospital parking lot when a phalanx of black Cadillac Escalades nearly scraped the paint off the driver's-side door of the Explorer. The sleek swarm came up swiftly and silently, like phantom cars spiraling out of the gray morning mist. They were three separate vehicles, but they followed each other so closely, one virtually connected to the next, that they seemed like a single creature, linked and segmented, turning off Rathmell Road and into the large square lot like a continuous string of flexible chrome and stretched-out black.

Bell pulled to the side of the road to watch. There was a military precision to the way the Escalades operated, a vehicular rigor that reminded her of news footage of presidential motorcades. The muscular machines seemed slightly dreamlike, unreal.

She leaned forward in her seat for a better look. The cars didn't pause in the lot but made a smooth synchronous arc directly to the front entrance. The parade stopped with pinpoint abruptness; the second car was lined up perfectly with the wide walk leading to the glass double doors.

Bell squinted. The just-risen sun was in her eyes, its reflection skittering off the massive black flanks of the Escalades.
What the hell—?

She blinked. Squirmed in her seat, searching for a better angle.

The ID wouldn't have held up in a courtroom, because Bell was too far away and because she saw only the back of a well-coiffed head of cinnamon-colored hair, but she was fairly certain that the woman who emerged from the second Escalade—and who glided into the facility without so much as a glance at her surroundings—was Sharon Henner. And the presence of the extra vehicles surely meant that whatever her mission here might be, the governor's daughter hadn't come alone.

 

Chapter Thirty-four

Bell sometimes called them the In-Between People. It wasn't an original thought; she'd heard Nick Fogelsong talk about it, about how some families in Acker's Gap resisted easy categorization by economic status. They weren't rich, God knows, but neither were they poor—at least not the kind of poor that spread across the area like a leaf blight, infecting houses instead of plants, and human destinies instead of root systems, and that left a constant swath of parts-scavenged cars, mangy animals, scrawny children with stares as deep as graves and twice as final, and elderly relatives who sat all day long on the front porch until they, too, were subsumed by the ravening misfortune.

The Brinkermans weren't that kind of poor. Not yet, anyway. Bell realized it as soon as she pulled up in front of the house on Bonecutter Road just north of Acker's Gap. Rhonda had called her back with the address. After waiting until 8
A.M.
—and finishing off three criminally weak cups of coffee at the Hardee's out on the interstate while she did so—Bell opened her car door and took a long look at the place Jason Brinkerman called home. It was one of a half-dozen houses thrown up along this stretch of road a century or so ago, rote one-story structures with tiny front yards and dirt driveways. The sidewalk stopped after the last house on either end. The Brinkerman place had the small touches that meant somebody at this address still tried, at least a little bit: The mailbox was firmly attached to the creosote-black fence post that served as its pedestal. Hosta had been planted here and there, and measures had been taken to keep kids from trampling the drowsy, big-faced leaves during violent and prolonged chases across the small yard. The grass itself wasn't so lucky.