A Grant County Collection (59 page)

She parked at the front of the church, leaving her windows down and the doors unlocked as she walked toward the front gates of the memorial garden. The area was well lit, overhead lights illuminating the grounds. She knew she had driven here for a reason. She knew what she needed to do.

Someone had planted a handful of pansies by the entrance to the cemetery, and they swayed in the breeze as Lena walked by. Sibyl's grave was to the side of the grounds that bordered the church, and Lena took her time walking through the grassy lawn, enjoying the solitude. She had spent almost twelve hours straight on her feet today, but something about being here, being close to Sibyl, made the walk less daunting. Sibyl would have approved of being buried here, Lena always thought. She had loved the outdoors.

The cement block Lena had upended and used for a bench was still on the ground beside Sibyl's marker, and Lena sat down, wrapping her arms around her knees. In the daytime, a huge pecan tree gave shade to the spot, tendrils of sunlight slipping through the leaves. The marble slab marking Sibyl's final resting place had been cleaned to a shine, and a quick look around at the other gravesites proved that this had been done by a visitor rather than the staff.

There weren't any flowers. Nan was allergic.

Like a faucet being turned on, Lena felt tears pool into her eyes. She was such a horrible person. As bad as Dale was to Terri, Lena had been worse. She was a cop, she had a duty to protect people, not scare the shit out of them, not grab their wrist so hard that she left a bruise. She was certainly in no position to call Terri Stanley a coward. If anything, Lena was the coward. She was the one who had scurried off to Atlanta under the cover of lies, paying some stranger to slice out her mistakes, hiding from the repercussions like a frightened child.

The altercation with Terri had brought back all the memories Lena had tried to suppress, and she found herself back in Atlanta, reliving the whole ordeal again. She was in the car with Hank, his silence cutting like a knife. She was in the clinic, sitting across from Terri, avoiding her eyes, praying it would be over. She was taken back to the freezing operating room, her feet resting in the icy cold stirrups, her legs splayed for the doctor who spoke so calmly, so quietly, that Lena had felt herself being lulled into a sort of hypnotic state. Everything was going to be fine. Everything will be okay. Just relax. Just breathe. Take it slow. Relax. It's all over. Sit up. Here are your clothes. Call us if there are complications. You all right, darlin'? Do you have someone waiting for you? Just sit in the chair. We'll take you outside. Murderer. Baby killer. Butcher. Monster.

The protesters had been waiting outside the clinic, sitting in their lawn chairs, sipping from their thermoses of hot coffee, for all intents and purposes looking like tailgaters waiting for the big game. Lena's appearance had caused them all to stand in unison, to scream at her, waving signs with all sorts of graphic, bloody pictures. Obscenely, one even held up a jar, the implied contents obvious to anyone standing within ten feet of it. Still, it didn't look real, and she wondered at the man – of course it was a man – sitting at home, maybe at his kitchen table where his kids sat and had breakfast every morning, preparing the mixture in the jar just to torment frightened women who were making what Lena knew was the most difficult decision of their lives.

Now, sitting in the cemetery, staring at her sister's grave, Lena let herself wonder for the first time what the clinic did with the flesh and bone they had removed from her own body. Was it lying somewhere in an incinerator, waiting to ignite? Was it buried in the earth, an unmarked grave she would never see? She felt a clenching deep down in her gut, in her womb, as she thought of what she had done – what she had lost.

In her mind, she told Sibyl what had happened, the choices she had made that brought her here. She talked about Ethan, how something inside of her had died when she started seeing him, how she had let everything good about herself ebb away like sand being taken with the tide. She told her about Terri, the fear in her eyes. If only she could take it all back. If only she had never met Ethan, never seen Terri at the clinic. Everything was going from bad to worse. She was telling lies to cover lies, burying herself in deceit. She couldn't see a way out of it.

What Lena wanted most of all was to have her sister there, if only for a moment, to tell her that everything was going to be okay. That had been the nature of their relationship from the beginning of time: Lena fucked up and Sibyl smoothed things over, talking it through with her, making her see the other side. Without her guiding wisdom, it all seemed like such a lost cause. Lena was falling apart. There was no way she could have given birth to Ethan's child. She could barely take care of herself.

'Lee?'

She turned around, nearly falling off the narrow block. 'Greg?'

He emerged from the darkness, the moon glowing behind him. He was limping toward her, his cane in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other.

She stood quickly, wiping her eyes, trying to hide her shock. 'What are you doing here?' she asked, rubbing grit off the back of her pants.

He dropped the bouquet to his side. 'I can come back when you're finished.'

'No,' she told him, hoping the darkness hid the fact that she had been crying. 'I just . . . it's fine.' She glanced back at the grave so that she wouldn't have to look at him. She had a flash of Abigail Bennett, buried alive, and Lena felt an unreasonable panic fill her. For just a split second she thought of her sister alive, begging for help, trying to claw her way out of the casket.

She wiped her eyes before looking back at him, thinking she must be losing her mind. She wanted to tell him everything that had happened – not just in Atlanta, but before then, back to that day she had returned to the police station after running some samples to Macon, only to have Jeffrey tell her that Sibyl was gone. She wanted to put her head on his shoulder and feel his comfort. More than anything, she wanted his absolution.

'Lee?' Greg asked.

She searched for a response. 'I was just wondering why you're here.'

'I had to get Mama to bring me,' he explained. 'She's back in the car.'

Lena looked over his shoulder as if she could see the parking lot in front of the church. 'It's kind of late.'

'She tricked me,' he said. 'Made me go to her knitting circle with her.'

Her tongue felt thick in her mouth, but she wanted nothing more than to keep hearing him talk. She had forgotten how soothing his voice could be, how gentle the sound. 'Did she make you hold the yarn?'

He laughed. 'Yeah. You'd think I'd quit falling for that.'

Lena felt herself smile, knowing he hadn't been tricked. Greg would deny it at gunpoint, but he had always been a mama's boy.

'I brought these for Sibby,' he said, holding up the flowers again. 'I came yesterday and there weren't any, so I figured . . .' He smiled. In the moonlight, she saw he still hadn't managed to fix the tooth she had accidentally chipped during a game of Frisbee.

He said, 'She loved daisies,' handing Lena the flowers. For just a second, their hands brushed, and she felt as if she had touched a live wire.

For his part, Greg seemed unfazed. He started to leave, but Lena said, 'Wait.'

Slowly, he turned back around.

'Sit down,' she told him, indicating the block.

'I don't want to take your seat.'

'It's okay.' She stepped back to place the flowers in front of Sibyl's marker. When she looked back up, Greg was leaning on his cane, watching her.

He asked, 'You okay?'

Lena tried to think of something to say. She sniffed, wondering if her eyes were as red as they felt. 'Allergies,' she told him.

'Yeah.'

Lena crossed her hands behind her back so she wouldn't wring them again. 'How'd you hurt your leg, exactly?'

'Car accident,' he told her, then smiled again. 'Totally my fault. I was trying to find a CD and I took my eyes off the road for just a second.'

'That's all it takes.'

'Yeah,' he said, then, 'Mister Jingles died last year.'

His cat. She had hated the thing, but for some reason she was sad to hear that he was gone. 'I'm sorry.'

The breeze picked up, the tree overhead shushing in the wind.

Greg squinted at the moon, then looked back at Lena. 'When Mom told me about Sibyl . . .' His voice trailed off, and he dug his cane into the ground, pushing up some grass. She thought she saw tears in his eyes and made herself look away so that his sadness did not reignite her own.

He said, 'I just couldn't believe it.'

'I guess she told you about me, too.'

He nodded, and he did something that not many people could do when they talked about rape: he looked her right in the eye. 'She was upset.'

Lena didn't try to hide her sarcasm. 'I bet.'

'No, really,' Greg assured her, still looking at her, his clear blue eyes void of any guile. 'My aunt Shelby – you remember her?' Lena nodded. 'She was raped when they were in high school. It was pretty bad.'

'I didn't know,' Lena said. She had met Shelby a few times. As with Greg's mother, they hadn't exactly bonded. Lena would never have guessed the older woman had something like that in her life. She was very tightly wound, but most of the women in the Mitchell family were. The one thing Lena had been astounded by since her attack was that being raped had put her in what was not exactly an exclusive club.

'If I had known . . .' Greg began, but didn't finish.

'What?' she asked.

'I don't know.' He reached down and picked up a pecan that had fallen off the tree. 'I was really upset to hear it.'

'It was pretty upsetting,' Lena allowed, and surprise registered on his face. She asked, 'What?'

'I don't know,' he repeated, tossing the pecan into the wood. 'You used to not say things like that.'

'Like what?'

'Like feelings.'

She forced out a laugh. Her whole life was a struggle with feelings. 'What things did I used to say?'

He mulled it over. '"That's life"?' he tried, mimicking her one-sided shrug. '"Tough shit"?'

She knew he was right, but she couldn't begin to know how to explain it. 'People change.'

'Nan says you're seeing somebody.'

'Yeah, well,' was all she could say, but her heart had flipped in her chest at the thought of him bothering to ask. She was going to kill Nan for not telling her.

He said, 'Nan looks good.'

'She's had a hard time.'

'I couldn't believe y'all were living together.'

'She's a good person. I didn't really see that before.' Hell, she didn't see a lot of things before. Lena had made an art out of fucking up anything remotely positive in her life. Greg was living proof of that.

For lack of something to do, she looked up at the tree. The leaves were ready to fall. Greg made to leave again and she asked, 'What CD?'

'Huh?'

'Your accident,' she pointed to his leg. 'What CD were you looking for?'

'Heart,' he said, a goofy grin breaking out on his face.

'Bebe Le Strange?'
she asked, feeling herself grin back. Saturday had always been chore day when they lived together, and they had listened to that particular Heart album so many times that to this day Lena couldn't scrub a toilet without hearing 'Even It Up' in her head.

'It was the new one,' he told her.

'New one?'

'They came out with a new one about a year ago.'

'That Lovemonger stuff?'

'No,' he said, his excitement palpable. The only thing Greg loved more than listening to music was talking about it. 'Kick-ass stuff. Back to the seventies Heart stuff. I can't believe you don't know about it. I was knocking on the door the first day it was out.'

She realized then how long it had been since she had listened to music she really enjoyed. Ethan preferred punk rock, the kind of disaffected crap spoiled white boys screeched to. Lena didn't even know where her old CDs were.

'Lee?'

She had missed something he'd said. 'Sorry, what?'

'I need to go,' he told her. 'Mama's waiting.'

Suddenly, she felt like crying again. She forced her feet to stay on the ground and not do something foolish, like run toward him. God, she was turning into a sniveling idiot. She was like one of those stupid women in romance novels.

He said, 'Take care of yourself.'

'Yeah,' she said, trying to think of something to keep him from going. 'You, too.'

She realized she was still holding the daisies, and she leaned down to put them on Sibyl's grave. When she looked back up, Greg was limping toward the parking lot. She kept staring, willing him to turn around. He didn't.

Jeffrey leaned against the tile, letting the hot water from the shower blast his skin. He had bathed last night, but nothing could get rid of the feeling that he was covered in dirt. Not just dirt, but dirt from a grave. Opening that second box, smelling the musty scent of decay, had been almost as bad as finding Abby. The second box changed everything. One more girl was out there, one more family, one more death. At least he hoped it was just one girl. The lab wouldn't be able to come back with DNA until the end of the week. Between that and analyzing the letter Sara had been sent, the tests were costing him half his budget for the rest of the year, but Jeffrey didn't care. He would get another job down at the Texaco pumping gas if he had to. Meanwhile, some Georgia state representative was in Washington right now enjoying a two-hundred-dollar breakfast.

He forced himself to get out of the shower, still feeling like he needed another hour under the hot water. Sara had obviously come in at some point and put a cup of coffee on the shelf over the sink, but he hadn't heard her. Last night, he had called her from the scene, giving her the bare details of the find. After that, Jeffrey had driven what little evidence they found in the box to Macon himself, then gone back to the station and reviewed every note he had on the case. He made lists ten pages long of who he should talk to, what leads they should follow. By then, it was midnight, and he had found himself trying to decide whether or not to go to Sara's or his own home. He even drove by his house, too late remembering that the girls had already moved in. Around one in the morning, the lights were still on and he could hear music from the street as a party raged inside. He had been too tired to go in and tell them to turn it off.

Jeffrey slipped on a pair of jeans and walked into the kitchen, carrying his cup of coffee. Sara was at the couch, folding the blanket he had used last night.

He said, 'I didn't want to wake you,' and she nodded. He knew she didn't believe him, just like he knew that he was telling the truth. Like it or not, his nights had been spent alone for most of the last few years, and he hadn't known how to bring what he had found out there in the woods home to Sara. Even after what had happened in the kitchen two nights ago, getting in bed with her, climbing in between the fresh sheets, would have felt like a violation.

He saw her empty mug on the counter and asked, 'You want some more coffee?'

She shook her head, smoothing down the blanket as she put it on the foot of the couch.

He poured the coffee anyway. When he turned around, Sara was sitting at the kitchen island, sorting through some mail.

'I'm sorry,' he said.

'For what?'

'I feel like . . .' His voice trailed off. He didn't know what he felt like.

She flipped through a magazine, not touching the coffee he'd poured. When he didn't finish his thought, she looked up. 'You don't have to explain it to me,' she said, and he felt as if a great weight had been lifted.

Still, he tried, 'It was a hard night.'

She smiled at him, concern keeping the expression from reaching her eyes. 'You know I understand.'

Jeffrey still felt tension in the air, but he didn't know if it was from Sara or his own imagination. He reached out to touch her and she said, 'You should wrap your hand.'

He had taken off the bandage after digging in the forest. Jeffrey looked at the cut, which was bright red. As he thought about it, he felt the wound throb. 'I think it's infected.'

'Have you been taking the pills I gave you?'

'Yes.'

She looked up from the magazine, calling him on the lie.

'Some,' he said, wondering where he had put the damn things. 'I took some. Two.'

'That's even better,' she said, returning to the magazine. 'You can build up your resistance to antibiotics.' She flipped through a few more pages.

He tried for humor. 'The hepatitis will kill me anyway.'

She looked up, and he saw tears well into her eyes at the suggestion. 'That's not funny.'

'No,' he admitted. 'I just . . . I needed to be alone. Last night.'

She wiped her eyes. 'I know.'

Still, he had to ask, 'You're not mad at me?'

'Of course not,' she insisted, reaching out to take his uninjured hand. She squeezed it, then let go, returning to her magazine. He saw it was the
Lancet,
an overseas medical journal.

'I wouldn't have been much company anyway,' he told her, remembering his sleepless night. 'I kept thinking about it,' he said. 'It's worse finding it empty, not knowing what happened.'

She finally closed the magazine and gave him her full attention. 'Before, you'd said maybe someone came back for the bodies after they died.'

'I know,' he told her, and that was one of the things that had kept him from sleep. He had seen some pretty horrible things in his line of work, but someone who was sick enough to kill a girl, then remove her body for whatever reason, was a perpetrator he was unprepared to deal with. 'What kind of person would do that?' he asked.

'A mentally ill person,' she answered. Sara was a scientist at heart, and she thought there were concrete reasons that explained why people did things. She had never believed in evil, but then she had never knowingly sat across from someone who had murdered in cold blood or raped a child. Like most people, she had the luxury of philosophizing about it from behind her textbooks. Out in the field, he saw things very differently, and Jeffrey had to think that anyone capable of this crime had to have something fundamentally wrong with his soul.

Sara slid off the stool. 'They should be able to do the blood types today,' she told him, opening the cabinet beside the sink. She took out the sample packets of antibiotics and opened one, then another. 'I called Ron Beard at the state lab while you were in the shower. He's going to run the tests first thing this morning. At least we'll have some idea how many victims there might have been.'

Jeffrey took the pills and washed them down with some coffee.

She handed him two other sample packs. 'Will you please take these after lunch?'

He would probably skip lunch, but he agreed anyway. 'What do you think of Terri Stanley?'

She shrugged. 'She seems nice. Overwhelmed, but who wouldn't be?'

'Do you think she drinks?'

'Alcohol?' Sara asked, surprised. 'I've never smelled it on her. Why?'

'Lena said she saw her getting sick at the picnic last year.'

'The police picnic?' she questioned. 'I don't think Lena was there. Wasn't she on her hiatus then?'

Jeffrey let that settle in, ignoring the tone she gave 'hiatus.' He told her, 'Lena said she saw her at the picnic.'

'You can check your calendar,' she said. 'Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think she was there.'

Sara was never wrong about dates. Jeffrey felt a niggling question working its way through his brain. Why had Lena lied? What was she trying to hide this time?

'Maybe she meant the one before last?' Sara suggested. 'I recall a lot of people drinking too much at that one.' She chuckled. 'Remember Frank kept singing the national anthem like he was Ethel Merman?'

'Yeah,' he agreed, but Jeffrey knew that Lena had lied. He just couldn't figure out why. As far as he knew, she wasn't particularly close to Terri Stanley. Hell, as far as he knew, Lena wasn't close to anybody. She didn't even have a dog.

Sara asked, 'What are you going to do today?'

He tried to get his mind back on track. 'If Lev was telling the truth, I should have some people from the farm first thing. We'll see if he goes through with the polygraph. We're going to talk to them, see if anyone knows what happened to Abby.' He added, 'Don't worry, I'm not expecting a full confession.'

'What about Chip Donner?'

'We've got an APB on him,' Jeffrey said. 'I don't know, Sara, I don't like him for this. He's just a stupid punk. I don't see him having the discipline to plan it out. And that second box was old. Maybe four, five years. Chip was in jail then. That's pretty much the only fact we know.'

'Who do you think did it, then?'

'There's the foreman, Cole,' Jeffrey began. 'The brothers. The sisters. Abby's mother and father. Dale Stanley.' He sighed. 'Basically, everybody I've talked to since this whole damn thing started.'

'But no one stands out?'

'Cole,' he said.

'But only because he was yelling to those people about God?'

'Yes,' he admitted, and coming from Sara it did sound like a weak connection. He had made an effort to back Lena off the religious angle, but he felt maybe he had picked up some of her prejudices. 'I want to talk to the family again, maybe get them alone.'

'Get the women alone,' she suggested. 'They might be more talkative without their brothers around.'

'Good idea.' He tried again, 'I really don't want you mixed up with these people, Sara. I don't much like Tessa being involved, either.'

'Why?'

'Because I've got a hunch,' he said. 'And my hunch tells me that they're up to something. I just don't know what.'

'Being devout is hardly a crime,' she said. 'You'd have to arrest my mother if that were the case.' Then added, 'Actually, you'd have to arrest most of my family.'

'I'm not saying it has anything to do with religion,' Jeffrey said. 'It's how they act.'

'How do they act?'

'Like they've got something to hide.'

Sara leaned against the counter. He could tell she wasn't going to give in. 'Tessa asked me to do this for her.'

'And I'm asking you not to.'

She seemed surprised. 'You want me to choose between you and my family?'

That was exactly what he had been asking, but Jeffrey knew better than to say it. He had lost that contest once before, but this time he was more familiar with the rules. 'I just want you to be careful,' he told her.

Sara opened her mouth to respond, but the phone rang. She spent a few seconds looking for the cordless receiver before finding it on the coffee table. 'Hello?'

She listened a moment, then handed the phone to Jeffrey.

'Tolliver,' he said, surprised to hear a woman's voice answer him.

'It's Esther Bennett,' she said in a hoarse whisper. 'Your card. The one you gave me. It had this number on it. I'm sorry, I –' Her voice broke into a sob.

Sara gave him a puzzled look and Jeffrey shook his head. 'Esther,' he said into the phone. 'What's wrong?'

'It's Becca,' she said, her voice shaking with grief. 'She's missing.'

Jeffrey pulled his car into the parking lot of Dipsy's Diner, thinking he hadn't been to the joint since Joe Smith, Catoogah's previous sheriff, had been in office. When Jeffrey first started working in Grant County, the two men had met every couple of months for stale coffee and rubber pancakes. As time passed and meth started to be more of a problem for their small towns, their meetings became more serious and more regular. When Ed Pelham had taken over, Jeffrey hadn't even suggested a courtesy call, let alone a meal with the man. As far as he was concerned, Two-Bit couldn't fill a three-year-old girl's shoes, let alone the boots of a man like Joe Smith.

Jeffrey scanned the vacant parking lot, wondering how Esther Bennett knew about this place. He couldn't imagine the woman eating anything that didn't come from her own oven, picked from her own garden. If Dipsy's was her idea of a restaurant, she'd be better off eating cardboard at home.

May-Lynn Bledsoe was behind the counter when he walked into the diner, and she shot him a caustic look. 'I's beginning to think you didn't love me no more.'

'Couldn't be possible,' he said, wondering why she was making an attempt at banter. He'd been in this diner maybe fifty times and she had never given him the time of day. He glanced around the room, noting it was empty.

'You beat the rush,' she said, though he doubted people would be banging down the door anytime soon. Between May-Lynn's sour attitude and the tepid coffee, there wasn't much to recommend the place. Joe Smith had been a fan of their cheese and onion home fries and always asked for a triple order with his coffee. Jeffrey imagined Joe's sudden heart attack at the age of fifty-six had put some people off.

He saw a late-model Toyota pull into the parking lot and waited for the driver to get out. The early morning wind was whipping up dirt and sand in the gravel parking lot, and when Esther Bennett got out of the car, the door caught back on her. Jeffrey went to help her, but May-Lynn was in front of the door like she was afraid he'd change his mind and leave. She was picking something out of her back teeth that caused her to put her pinky finger into her mouth up to the third knuckle as she asked, 'You want the usual?'

'Just coffee, please,' he said, watching Esther quickly take the steps to the entrance, clutching her coat closed with both hands. The bell over the door clanged as she walked in, and he stood to greet her.

'Chief Tolliver,' Esther said, breathless. 'I'm sorry I'm late.'

'You're fine,' he told her, indicating she should sit down. He tried to take her coat, but she wouldn't let him.

'I'm sorry,' she repeated, sliding into the booth, her sense of urgency as palpable as the smell of grilled onions in the air.

He sat across from her. 'Tell me what's going on.'

A long shadow was cast over the table, and he looked up to find May-Lynn standing beside him, pad in her hand. Esther looked at her, confused for a second before asking, 'May I have some water, please?'

The waitress twisted her lips to the side as if she'd just calculated her tip. 'Water.'

Jeffrey waited for her to saunter back behind the counter before asking Esther, 'How long has she been missing?'

'Just since last night,' Esther said, her lower lip trembling. 'Lev and Paul said I should wait a day to see if she comes back, but I can't . . .'

'It's okay,' he said, wondering how anybody could look at this panicked woman and tell her to wait. 'When did you notice she was gone?'

'I got up to check on her. With Abby –' she stopped, her throat working. 'I wanted to check on Becca, to make sure she was sleeping.' She put her hand to her mouth. 'I went into her room, and –'