Cypress Grove Part 3

"Sonny says I don't give you a bill. You know that."

"And you know-"

"He's my boss, Lonnie. I got to do what he tells me. That's how most of us live. What, this job isn't hard enough already?"

"Okay, okay. Anyway, your shift's almost over now."

"Life's just chockful of almosts, ain't it."

Waiting till she was gone, Bates pulled out his wallet, extracted a twenty and a five, and tucked them under the sugar bowl. Easily twice what the bill came to.

"She's dying to know who you are," he told Val.

"I got that."

"You want to come on back with me to the station, pick up that kit?"

"Would you mind if I waited and came by on my way in to work tomorrow, Sheriff? I'd dearly love to go on home now, get some rest."

"Wouldn't we all." He nodded. "What time you figure to be swinging by?"

"Seven, seven-thirty?"

"Good enough. I'm not still there, Don Lee will be."

We stood and made our way to the door.

"Goodnight, then," Val told us outside. Her eyes met each of ours in turn. She shook hands with Bates.

"Lisa's gonna hang me out to dry," Don Lee said.

"Reckon she will. Not to mention having fed your dinner to the pigs." Bates turned to me: "You'll be needing a ride back."

"You don't live in town?" Val said.

I shook my head. "Cabin up by the lake."

"Nice up there."

"It is that."

"Awfully late, though. He's one of yours, Sheriff, right?"

"Well . . ."

"Look, the lake's a long way. I have a spare room. Not much in there yet, an old bunk bed with a futon thrown across it, some plastic cubes, a table lamp without a table. But all that could be yours for the night."

"A kingdom."

We drove out of town in the opposite direction from the lake, past Pappa Totzske's sprawling apple orchard and spread of seventy-five-foot chicken houses. The back seat of Val's six-year-old yellow Volvo was piled with boxes, portable files, clothing, a stack of newspapers. When she hit the key, old-time music started up at full blast. Gid Tanner, maybe. She punched the reject b.u.t.ton on the ca.s.sette player.

"Sorry, I usually have this world to myself."

"Trying to a.s.similate?"

She laughed. "Hardly. I grew up with this, been listening to it, playing it, since I was ten years old."

"Right after you began your carpentry career."

"Exactly. Hammer, screwdriver, mandolin. Lot better with the hammer, though."

The old Ames place was six or seven miles outside town, at the end of a dirt road so deeply pitted that it could have been pa.s.sed off as a child's projection map of the Grand Canyon. Papersh.e.l.l pecan trees and a huge, utterly wild and unkempt weeping willow stood by the house. Whole tribes could be living in the thing unbeknownst.

Val pulled up under one of the pecan trees and we climbed out. I had to hit the car door hard with the heel of my hand to get it open. She'd warned me it stuck some times. From the trunk she took a canvas book bag that looked to serve as a briefcase. A squirrel sat on a limb just above, fussily chattering at us.

"I've only got two of the rooms really habitable so far," Val said as we entered, through the entryway into a small living room that, when the house was built, would have been used only on holidays and formal occasions. Now it sported a narrow bed, a rocking chair, a table doing triple work as desk, eating s.p.a.ce and storage area. An antique wardrobe sat in one corner, drawers on the left in use even as the right side went on being stripped of multiple layers of varnish and paint, down to fine wood beneath. Sandpaper, a shallow dish and rags lay atop it.

On the wall by the table hung a gourd banjo. I ran my thumb across the strings, surprised to find they weren't steel but soft, like a cla.s.sical guitar's.

"You really are into this."

"I guess I am."

She lifted down the banjo and, sitting, balanced it on her lap. Plucked a string or two, twisted pegs. Then started playing, back of the nail on her second finger striking a melody note then brushing other strings as the thumb popped on and off that short fifth string. "Soldier's Joy." Abruptly she stopped, putting the instrument back in place.

"Would you like tea?"

"Love it."

We went through a double doorway without doors into the kitchen.

"Here's my real bona fide as a southerner," she said.

While even the living room had about it an element of improvisation, camping out or making do, the kitchen was fully equipped, pots and provisions set out on shelves, towels on drying racks, dishes stacked in cupboards, knife block on the counter by the stove. We sat at a battered wooden table waiting for water to boil.

"Funny thing is," Val said, "I wasn't into this, not at all, not for a long time. As a kid I couldn't wait to get away."

"You grow up around here?"

"Kentucky. Not a spit's worth of difference. When I left for college, I swore that was it, I'd never look back. And I'd absolutely never ever go back. Took the two JCPenney dresses I'd worked as a waitress to buy, and some books I'd kind of forgotten to return to the library, and settled into a dorm room at Tulane. It was 1975. My Texas roommate's debut had been attended by hundreds of people. She used most of my closet s.p.a.ce in addition to her own-I didn't need it. And those dresses looked as out of place, as anachronistic, as a gardenia in my hair."

Val poured water into a round teapot.

"I was smart. That was one of two or three ways out of there. Tulane was full of rich East Coast kids who couldn't get into Ivy League schools and poor southerners on scholarship. I lost the dresses first, the accent not long after. Most any social situation, I discovered, all you had to do was keep quiet and watch those around you. Sugar? Lemon or milk?"

I shook my head.

"By the second year you couldn't pick me out of the crowd. 'Wearing camo,' as a friend of mine put it. I finished near the top of my cla.s.s, went to Baltimore as a junior partner, very junior, in a group practice."

She set a mug before me, thoughtfully turned so the chip on its lip faced away.

"I don't usually prattle on like this."

"Not a problem."

"Good." Settling back at the table, she sipped her tea. "I was up there for four years-dancing with the one who brung me, as my father would say. I liked Baltimore, the firm, liked the work. And I was good at it."

"What changed?"

"Nothing. Something. Me?" She smiled. "I wanted to, anyway. Do we ever, really?"

"Change?"

Nodding.

"If we don't-if we can't-nothing else makes much sense, does it?"

She half-stood to pour us more tea. Close by, just past the window, an owl hooted.

"You're not a cop, are you?"

"Not for a long time. I was."

She waited, and after a moment I told her the basics.

"Another Cliff Notes life."

"What?"

"Those pamphlets on great books that students read instead of the books themselves. A lot of us experience our lives that way. Sum up who we are and what we're about as a few broad strokes, then do our best to cleave to it. All the good stuff, the small things and distinctions that make the rest worthwhile-Sunday mornings sitting over coffee and the paper, taste of bread fresh from the oven, the feel of wind on your skin, sensing the one you love there beside you-all these get pushed aside. Unnoticed, lost."

"If we let them."

"If we let them, right. And as much as anything else, that's why I'm here."

Dark had become absolute. Far off, frogs called. Their cries bounced across the pond behind the house, amplified by the water as though it were in fact the metal dish that moonlight made it appear. Moths beat at the window beside us, and at the kitchen's screen door.

"I drew my weapon three times," I said. G.o.d knows why I told her this. "And each time someone died. The second time, it was raining, I remember. His blood was running down the street. I was in the street too, with his head in my lap. And all the time I kept thinking: My kids are home waiting for me."

"Kids?"

"A boy and a girl. They grew up without me, have their own lives now. Probably for the best. . . . Thing is, there in the street, in some strange way I was closer to that stranger as he died, this man I'd shot, than I've ever been to anyone else my whole life."

For some time she was silent. We both were.

"I don't know what to say.''

"You don't have to say anything."

"Suddenly everything in my life seems so small."

"Our lives are small."

She nodded. "They are, aren't they?"

I followed her outside, onto the porch.

"Don't suppose you're hungry?"

"Not really."

"Seems I always am. Buy popcorn by the case, eat carrot sticks till I start turning orange myself and have to stop, chew celery till my teeth hurt."

We stood looking up at the sky.

"What about the third time?" she said.

"That I drew my weapon."

"Yes."

"That time, it was my own partner."

"Oh."

"There's a lot more to it," I said.

"There would be." She looked off into the trees. "Listen."

I did, and for this one perfect moment silence enveloped us, absolute silence, silence of a kind most of the world and its people have forgotten. Then the frogs started up again and from miles away the hum of cars and trucks on an interstate reached us.

Chapter Eight.

A YEAR OR so into playing detective, I pulled the chit on a missing-persons case. Rightfully it should have gone to Banks, who was senior and next up. But Banks was actively pursuing leads, the Lieutenant told me, on a series of abductions and rapes at local private schools. Would I mind.

A patient had disappeared from an extended-care facility. Patricia Pope, nineteen years old. Shed been out with friends celebrating her birthday with slabs of pizza and pitchers of Co'Cola. As they ferried home around eight in the evening, a drunk driver smashed head-on into their car. He'd been drinking since he got off work at five and somehow had entered the new interstate by an exit ramp. The other four in the car were killed. Patricia, riding in the front pa.s.senger seat, went through the windshield and onto the hood of the drunk's F-1 50. She'd received acute care in Baptist Hospital's ER, from there had been moved up to neuro ICU for several days where a shunt in her head dripped fluid into a graduated cylinder, then onto a general ward, finally to a separate, step-down facility. She made no acknowledgment when spoken to, reacted but slightly to pain. (In ER they pinched nipples and twisted. Upstairs, kinder and gentler, they poked pins about feet, ankles, forearms, torso.) Her hands had begun curling in upon themselves, first in a series of contractures pitching muscle against bone. Eyes rolled left to right continually. She was incontinent, provided nutrients through a tube that had to be reintroduced with each feeding. Caretakers threaded these tubes down her nose, blew in air through a syringe and listened with a stethoscope to be certain the tube was in her stomach.

The incident occurred on April 3. Patricia had been relocated to the EC facility on April 20. When oncoming nurses went in to check patients early in their shift on the morning of June 17, Patricia was absent from her bed. That was the way the administrator put it when he called. Absent from her bed. Like it was summer camp. The call came in at 7:06. Half an hour later, 7:38 by the bra.s.s-and-walnut clock on the wall, I was sitting in the administrator's office with a cup of venomous coffee in hand watching said administrator, Daniel Covici, MBA, CEO, rub a thumb against the burnished surface of his desk. It was the facility's desk, of course, but I had no doubt he thought of it as his own.

Most investigations are little more than paint by the numbers. You ask a string of questions in the proper order, when they don't get answered you ask them again, sooner or later you find your way to the husband or wife, spurned boy- or girlfriend, business partner, parent, younger brother, gardener, eccentric uncle, jealous neighbor. This was no different. Within the hour, down in the Human Resources bas.e.m.e.nt office looking over a list of recent terminations, I came across the name of an orderly who had quit without prior notice at the end of his shift on June 16, saying simply that he was going on to another, better job. He'd been with the hospital sixteen years. Douglas Lynds. Address out by what was at that time Southwestern, a tiny freestanding wooden house.