Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (24 page)

He wasn’t hungry so he didn’t make his normal visit to The Hub. He drove to Larry’s house, caught between two log trucks much of the way, and slung a bowlful of feed in the chicken wire and watched the first ladies peck it up. He added water through the fence and looked in the door at the boxes where they roosted in pine straw and wondered how long it took eggs to go bad, how long before the sitting hens began to suspect that nothing good would come from all their work, just rotting shells.

He had no idea how long he’d been standing there when his radio squawked.

“Thanks for the coffee,” Voncille said.

He keyed it. “You’re welcome.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Shannon called again.”

“Yeah. I’ll talk to her.”

“Well, stop by and visit awhile,” she said. “If you got a minute.”

He hung up. Larry’s grass had grown high and weedy and Silas remembered how his fists had vibrated on the lawn mower’s handle, the shower of green grass out the side, Larry watching from his porch. He longed to cut it now, mow his way back to the boy he’d been and do it differently with Larry, go to the police and say, “She was with me.”

What’s missing out of you, Silas?

Courage, he thought.

No wonder he felt at ease among these damn chickens.

His cell buzzed and he dug it out of his pocket, walking back toward where he’d parked in the same spot each day, over his oil stain.

“Constable?”

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s Jon Davidson, at the hospital?”

“Hey, Jon with no
h.
”

“Thought you’d want to know,” he said. “Judging from the fact that the sheriff and Roy French just arrived and seemed like they was in a hurry, I’ll volunteer a guess that your Mr. Ott’s woke up.”

eleven

H
E’D BEEN DREAMING
about him and Silas, perched in high branches. Then it was him and Wallace.

When he opened his eyes the world was too vivid and he shut them again and dreamed of wearing his monster mask, pulling at screaming girls in his barn. Later he saw the high television, first thinking he’d fallen asleep in his mother’s bed at River Acres. Had she died?

He closed his eyes again and opened them in darkness. Silas had floated into the room and was telling him something, not to confess, hear? He didn’t know what was a dream and what wasn’t. When he woke next he seemed in a hospital now, the bed next to him empty, not even sheets. It hurt to turn his head, he felt confined, his throat so dry he couldn’t speak. The window so bright he couldn’t look outside. His chest ached. That seemed real. His nose hurt. His mouth felt tight. His moving toes seemed real. His curling fingers.

He closed his eyes, dreamed of an ambulance, hearing its siren, belted on a flat bed. The black girl (
Monkey Lips
) over him yelling, “Stay with us, Larry, stay with us.” Overhead the high television again, the window. Fluorescent lights. Hospital.

It hurt to breathe but he was breathing faster, he felt tears tracking down the side of his face.

HE WOKE AGAIN.
He moved and a wave of dizziness flooded his head. He heard an announcement asking for doctor somebody to call extension 202. He lowered his chin and saw his bandaged chest and the tubes going into his arms. Something stuck up his nose, something hooked in his lip. He’d never been so thirsty and thought he might gag. He thought how, when Johnny Smith from
The Dead Zone
opened his eyes from his coma, the nurse wasn’t surprised and Johnny thought he must’ve had his eyes opened before.

He faded back to sleep.

WHEN HE OPENED
his eyes again a nurse saw him watching her and jumped. “Oh,” she said.

Then a man in a blue uniform was standing in the door. Talking on a radio.

A moment later a doctor came in snapping on latex gloves and asked him his name and he tried to say it, the doctor working on the tube in his mouth.

“Get him some water,” the doctor told somebody and a moment later a straw touched his lips.

“Sip it slowly,” the doctor said. A suit with a stethoscope around his neck. Short gray hair. Glasses hanging on a string. Shining a light in his eyes, taking his pulse.

“How do you feel?”

Bad, he wanted to say.

“What’s your name?”

“Larry,” he rasped. “Ott.”

“Good. How old are you?”

“Forty-one?”

“Who’s the president?”

Larry coughed. “Did they find that girl?”

The doctor looked behind him. Cop in the door.

“Yes,” he said.

HE WAS FEELING BETTER,
a little. The tubes in his mouth and nose were gone but his face felt hot and chapped from the tape.

More sleep, dreams, waking to find three men watching him. The doctor, leaning against the wall. Roy French in a camouflage T-shirt, holding a paper, a cigarette behind his ear. And another, older, balding man he didn’t recognize. The men made the room smaller, plus the nurse now coming in, hair tied back, gloves, scrubs. She pressed a button, raising Larry’s bed so he was in more of a sitting position. She held a straw to his lips and he sipped.

“Now yall don’t take too long,” the doctor said. “He’s still weak.” To Larry he said, “It’s amazing you’re still with us, I can tell you that. If Officer Jones hadn’t sent an ambulance, if the EMTs had gotten there half an hour later, if they hadn’t done everything exactly right…” He shrugged. “And our ER man, Dr. Israel. Just a genius.”

“He was in Baghdad,” French said. “Two tours over there.”

“You’d been shot near the heart,” the doctor said, “had a very leaky hole. Bleeding like stink.”

“Officer Jones?” Larry whispered.

“32 Jones,” French said. “He saved your life, Larry.”

Silas.

“Least you got the place to yourself,” French said, tapping the other bed. “I was in here last year for gallstones and they bunked me with this old geezer kept farting. He was deaf as a post and couldn’t tell how loud they were.”

“Wasn’t that me?” the other man said. He was white, stocky, a tight belly in his button-down shirt and a string tie. Short hair. Pistol high on his belt, star pinned to his chest.

“There was a gentleman in here when they first brought him in,” the nurse said, “but he asked to be moved.”

“That’s enough,” the doctor said.

“If you need me,” she said.

“I’ll call.”

She walked out of the room, leaving the door cracked. French went and closed it, nodding to the deputy outside, and came back and stood looking down.

“You know me,” he said to Larry, “but you might not know this fellow here. Sheriff Jack Lolly?”

“Morning,” he said, nodding to Larry.

French set the envelope and a tape recorder on the empty bed.

“We got to talk,” he said.

Larry adjusted his left arm, stiff and sore, and felt something holding his wrist. He tried to look but couldn’t see what it was.

His right wrist, too. Then he knew.

French picked up the recorder and clicked a button and set it down. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to record this conversation. You get to be as old as me and the sheriff here, you forget things. That okay with you?”

“Yes, sir.” Larry’s voice hoarse.

“Now if you need a break, just say so. We got plenty of time. Doc here tells me you’re gone pull through. Said the bullet just missed your heart. Hit a rib and bounced around your gut awhile. Had yourself a heart attack and then your organs shut down and they took your spleen, but here you are.”

“Miracle,” the sheriff said. “Did you shoot yourself?”

He couldn’t remember. He thought of Wallace giving him the gun. He wanted to ask why he was manacled to the bed. He tried to think and knew things were there to be remembered but where, what, were they? His mother staring off but not at anything he could see. Was that what she was looking for? All those missing things?

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well,” French said, glancing at Lolly. “Let’s come back to that in a minute. Now, Doc here, he says the first thing you asked when you come to this morning was if we’d found Tina Rutherford.”

He didn’t remember that. Then he did. He remembered his old zombie mask, his father looking at it, shaking his head. His mother saying, “Oh, my Lord, Larry.”

“Some memory loss is common, Mr. Ott,” the doctor said. “Delirium. Just relax. Take your time.”

“Can you tell me,” French asked, “when was the last time you seen her?”

Larry moved his eyes—even that hurt—from French to the sheriff. To the doctor.

“Is she okay?”

“No, Larry, she ain’t. She was found buried in that hunting cabin over on the west end of your land. Nine days in the ground, by our estimation. Raped—”

“What?” Larry said, coming off the bed, held back by the restraints on his wrists.

“Beaten.”

“No—”

“Strangled.”

Larry shaking his head despite the hurt, moving his arms, pulling at the leather belts, the sheet over his feet kicking up.

“Stay calm, Mr. Ott.” The doctor there, frowning. “I told yall, it’s too soon.”

Larry had begun to convulse and the men blurred as they tried to hold him down.

“Nurse!” the doctor called, then, to French, “Yall have to go!” his voice spiraling away and Larry falling back into his own face, the ceiling receding, bright then distorted then…

When he woke he lay alone in his bandages and restraints, he thought of his mother and her ladies. Were they unfed, dead in their pen? A nurse came in and he said in his cracked voice, “Will you help me, please?”

Not looking at him. “What you need?”

“Somebody,” he said, “to please feed my chickens.”

THEY WERE BACK
next time he woke. French and Lolly. Watching him.

“We’ve sedated you,” Dr. Milton said. “If you want to do this later, I’ll send these gentlemen off. It’s up to you.”

He shook his head. Thought it was later the same day, the men in the same clothes.

“You want them to stay?”

A weak nod.

French came to his side. “Doctor,” not looking at him, “can you give us a minute?”

“Well—”

“Preciate it.”

The doctor rose off the wall where he’d been leaning and opened the door. “I’ll be right out here.”

French clicked his recorder on again and cleared his throat, said who was present and the date, time, and place.

“How you feeling, Larry?”

He gave a weak shrug.

“We’ll try not to take too long, put you out too much. The nurse in yonder said you asked about your chickens. Well, I can tell you they’re all fine. It’s your old schoolmate 32, he’s been seeing to em. He went out to see your momma, too. She’s bout the same.”

“Why,” Larry asked, “would he do all that?”

“Well, I don’t try to understand people’s motives until
after
they commit a crime.” He smiled and half turned. “Now Sheriff Lolly here, he was a deputy way back when that other girl, the Walker girl, disappeared.” French stepped aside and the sheriff came and sat on the bed opposite Larry.

“First thing,” he said, “I’m sorry bout the restraints.” He unfastened the left one, then leaned over Larry to undo the other. “That was the hospital’s request,” he said as Larry brought his heavy arms up to his chest and rubbed one wrist, then the other, both sweaty from the lambs wool lining.

“Not something we normally do,” the sheriff said. “Specially for a man’s been shot in the chest and had a heart attack in the same day. I speck you’re too weak to pull them IVs out, much less get up and escape.”

Larry nodded, still massaging his wrists.

“Anyway, Chief Inspector French yonder, he told you I was a deputy sheriff back in 1982, when Cindy Walker disappeared. Been on the force bout two years at that time, out riding around serving warrants, picking up drunk drivers, things like that. Rookie stuff. But I remember those events real good, Larry, cause it was the biggest thing to come along in my career, at the time.

“Reason we never arrested you back then’s cause we never did find a body, and you never confessed. Without no body or confession there wasn’t any way to prove you killed her. Just what we call circumstantial evidence. You had, if memory serves, bout three and a half hours when you was unaccounted for, which would’ve give you plenty of time to have took her somewhere else. But your story was you let her off and left her and went to the drive-in, was supposed to pick her up at her road. Only she never showed up. Just, poof, gone.”

Larry opened his lips.

“You want to say something?”

“Can I talk…” He swallowed. “To Silas?”

“Who?” The sheriff looked back.

French said, “He means 32.” The chief came forward. “He’s not part of this investigation, Larry. This is what we call out of his jurisdiction. Why you want to talk to him?”

“Cause we used to be friends.”

French nodded. “He mentioned something about that, but didn’t sound like yall was friends. More like you just went to the same school.”

“We
were
friends,” Larry said.

“Okay. We all remember things different, I guess.” He stepped past the sheriff, who eased back and lowered himself into the chair by the window. French glanced at his tape recorder. “Now I’ve rode you pretty hard over the years, Larry, I know. But we ain’t never found nothing to let us convict you for that Walker girl or any other girls. Till now.” He was shaking his head. “I reckon it ain’t but a handful of people in the world knew about that cabin out in your woods—”

“I’d clear forgot it,” said the sheriff.

“Cabin out in the last part of them woods you ain’t been willing to sell. And then one of our men stumbles onto her, out there where, odds are, she ought to never been found. It gets me to thinking, Larry.” French scratching his head as he talked. “I’m thinking, fellow with your history might’ve just got fed up with the world. World’s a awful small place, specially here in southeast Mississippi. Maybe you just got tired of ever body thinking what they been thinking about you. Hell, maybe we all partly to blame, whole county ostracizing you. Maybe you just wanted some company, she may of even seemed like she come on to you, way these young girls dress, belly button rings, all that. Tattoos. You with your own kind of, well, local celebrity, I guess. Maybe she was messing with you, all I know. Your biggest fan. There she is, you see her at one place or another, the dairy bar, post office, Wal-Mart, young girl, pretty, long hair, and maybe you resist awhile, maybe a long while.

“But then a man can only resist so long, right, once his rut gets up, and maybe you drank a passel of them Pabst Blue Ribbons we seen in your fridge, or smoked a little dope, got out of your head, and next thing you know you’ve taken her. Just to talk, for all I know. Little companionship. Man gets lonely. But then, you know, way girls can get, all hysterical, maybe you got scared. Maybe she hit you. Threatened you. Tries to run and you didn’t mean for things to happen like they did. Maybe it was all a accident, her winding up dead. You might not even remember exactly what happened or how it happened. It’s one fellow I knew, started drinking with his air force buddy and when he woke up in the morning it was a butcher knife sticking out of his buddy’s chest.

“Maybe that’s why you shot yourself, Larry. All that guilt, adding up. Nothing you meant to do but suddenly it’d done got out of your hands. And you can bury the past but it always seems to come back, one way or another. There’s her face, on the news. In the paper. Whole damn world out looking for her and you alone know the truth.”

French talking on in his calm voice, making rape, murder, logical, Larry listening with his veins full of airy drugs and his head afloat, how reasonable if he had done it, strangled the girl and buried her, how these men understood his life so thoroughly and knew how people were in the world, in their hearts, brains, what they were capable of doing when they drank a passel of Pabst Blue Ribbon beers and smoked a heap of dope, how you could stick your best buddy with a knife, how sometimes women wanted to be raped, they were asking for it, you put on the mask so it wasn’t you doing it, it was somebody else doing what the women wanted anyway, French was saying that, maybe she was asking for it and he was trying as French talked to see into that space where his mother looked, where the truth of memory hid. He could feel the truth waiting for him, floating like a ghost in the room, but his brain the doctor said had been deprived of blood so there might be lapses or delirium and he remembered the mask and remembered the gun, he seemed himself the man in the mask waiting by his door for the other him to come home, watching as Larry got out of his truck and crossed the yard and came up the steps and over the porch and let himself in with his keys and then coming in the house and turning, Mask Larry marching up to Face Larry, pushing the gun against his heart and the two Larrys merging to one with one heart and it’s him holding the gun to his own chest, thinking how good it would feel to confess, to please these reasonable men doing their reasonable, necessary work.