Skin Privilege (28 page)

The fluorescent light over the kitchen sink bathed the room in a blue cast as the sun started to go down. Hank’s AA pamphlets were still scattered on the table, strewn across the floor, stacked hundreds deep on the gas stove. The clock kept ticking, marking away the minutes, then another hour.

After the accident, Sibyl hadn’t been able to remember running into the driveway, or even the fact that she’d been playing ball with Lena in the first place. At the time, the doctor said this was fairly normal with severe head trauma, that sometimes the memories never came back. The sisters had never really talked about it afterward. Maybe they had as children, but as time passed, Sibyl’s blindness and the cause of it had just become an accepted thing between them. Talking about the accident would have been like talking about the sun rising every morning: a foregone conclusion.

Meanwhile, Lena had blamed Hank and Hank sure as hell hadn’t done anything to disabuse her of the notion. Whenever she threw it in his face, he’d just tighten his jaw, stare somewhere over her shoulder, and wait for her to finish.

Charlotte Warren had to know more about this than she was letting on; she was three years older than Lena and Sibyl. Her memory was better, her shock less traumatic. Still, all the woman had revealed were the bare facts: the car had hit Sibyl, Hank had come running, and Angela had bolted, not stopping to see if Sibyl was okay, not bothering to explain what had happened. The police had arrived within minutes, then the ambulance. Charlotte ‘s mother had taken her daughter home and told her to forget what had happened, that no good would come from talking about it.

According to Charlotte, she had taken her mother’s words to heart. Even as her relationship with Sibyl developed into something more serious, Charlotte had assumed that there were some things that were just too awful, too painful, to talk about.

Had it been that simple, though? Had Charlotte and Sibyl really never talked about that day? Lena supposed it was feasible that if Sibyl wouldn’t discuss the subject with her own sister, she wouldn’t bring it up with Charlotte Warren, either. Sibyl had bristled at the thought of having anyone’s pity. She had devoted her life to being as self-sufficient as a seeing person. She’d never given in to her disability or used it for personal gain. Maybe she hadn’t talked about the accident because she hadn’t wanted anyone to feel sorry for her.

So many secrets, so many people protecting Angela Adams, and no one willing to explain why.

Lena reached back over her head to the phone on the wall. The receiver was sticky in her hand, the buttons stuck with grime. She dialed Nan Thomas’s number, thinking she’d ask Sibyl’s lover exactly what her sister had known about that horrible day. Her heart was pounding by the time Nan ‘s phone started to ring. Lena waited, counting off the rings until voice mail picked up.

She hung up, not leaving a message.

What if Sibyl had known it was their mother? No. She would have said something to Lena. There was no way she could have gone all those years without telling Lena that their mother had been alive years after Hank had told them she’d died, that they had been lied to.

Unless Sibyl was trying to protect Lena, too.

‘Shit,’ Lena cursed, rubbing her eyes. She was tired, and sitting in Hank’s house was somehow worse than being in her crappy motel room. It was certainly dirtier.

She stood up and walked toward the back door. Lena put her hand on the knob but didn’t turn it. Instead, she dropped her hand and walked back toward the hall. She stopped in front of the bathroom, then turned back around and went into the kitchen. The chair’s legs scraped across the wood floor but she was hardly worried about the finish.

Many years ago, Hank had run out of room to put all his shit. He’d gotten precut strips of plywood from the hardware store and made Lena hand them up through the attic opening one by one so he could nail them in place. Of course he’d had the wisdom to tackle this project in the middle of August, the hottest month of the year. When he’d come down out of the attic, the last piece of wood nailed in place, he’d passed out in the hallway from heatstroke.

The next day, he was back up in the attic, stacking boxes, moving stuff around. Lena was ten, maybe twelve at the time. Just a few years after Angela Adams had blinded Sibyl. What had Hank put up there? What papers had been hidden above her head all this time? He left so much shit lying around that the extra stuff in the attic hadn’t even occurred to her until now.

Lena climbed onto the chair and pressed her hands against the access panel. It felt stuck, though not with paint. Something was on top, a box maybe, and Lena had to use her fist to punch up the panel and knock off the box. By the time she managed to slide the panel aside, her hand was throbbing, blood trickling from her knuckles. The stagnant air from the attic wafted down, but Lena didn’t give herself time to think it through before reaching up into the open space, grabbing the beams on either side of the opening and pulling herself up.

The roof was pitched, but not enough to stand. She kept at a low crouch as she moved toward the light switch, knowing that long rusty nails from the shingles were jutting down, waiting to rip her scalp open. Even with the sun down, the attic was hot as hell. A bead of sweat rolled down her back. Knowing she was wasting her time, she flicked the light switch. Much to her amazement, the bulb came on, illuminating a small area of the cramped attic. A blown bulb and an empty pack were on the floor so she had to think Hank had been up here recently. There was no telling what he had been doing. Boxes were stacked everywhere, papers spilling out all over the place. Rat droppings dotted the plywood floor. She heard a squeaking sound as some kind of animal protested her invasion.

The smell hit her with sudden intensity, the overwhelming stench of death.

As a rookie cop, Lena had handled her share of calls from out-of-town sons and daughters who were wondering why Mom or Dad or Grandma wasn’t picking up the phone. Generally, there was a very good reason, and the more senior officers considered it on-the-job training to send the rookies out to discover the bodies.

Once, Lena had found an old woman sitting in her recliner, dead as a doornail. An unfinished afghan and some knitting needles were in her lap, the TV chattering in the background. The woman smelled like urine and rotting meat. Lena had puked her guts out on the back porch before she’d radioed back to the station to tell them what she’d found.

Now, in the attic, she felt like puking again – not from stress, but from fear. She knew what a dead person smelled like, the way their body fluids seeped out, the gases escaped, as they decomposed. She knew the way their skin sank into the bones, that more likely than not they’d baked in their own shit as they’d waited for someone to find them.

A thought flashed into her head, one that wouldn’t go away: had she found her mother? Had Angela Adams been up here all those years, her body rotting into the floorboards as Lena and Sibyl lived down below?

No. It wasn’t possible. Too much time had passed. The odor would be gone. Hank would’ve moved it by now.

Lena felt her heart beating in her throat. Hank. She always thought of him last, even now. Tears sprang into her eyes. She reached up, steadying herself against a rafter. There was another noise in the attic, the sound of her own cries, like a siren winding down.

She saw it now on the opposite end of the attic: a pale foot sticking out from behind the boxes; a man’s foot, the sparse spattering of hair around the ankle, the waxy sheen of death on the skin.

‘No,’ Lena whispered, because that was all she could manage.

He had finally done it. He had climbed up here with his kit, taken that last needle, burned that last bag of powder, and killed himself. Just as he had told Lena he would do. Just as she had secretly hoped that he would do all those years ago.

She could leave right now. She could go back to Grant County. She could go to work on Monday, do her job, come home, have some dinner, maybe watch a movie on TV. She could call Nan and maybe go visit. They would drink beer and sit in the backyard and talk about Sibyl and maybe Lena would ask her sister’s lover exactly what Sibyl had known. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe they would talk about the weather or some book Nan was reading that Lena couldn’t begin to understand. Nan would ask about Hank and Lena would tell her that she hadn’t heard from him in a while, didn’t know what he was up to.

Lena crawled to him on her hands and knees. Her arms were trembling so badly that she had to stop halfway, steady herself, before she could go on. She was hearing things again, words in a small voice, like a little girl was saying them. ‘I’m sorry,’ she heard. ‘It’s my fault… I should’ve never left you… I should’ve called an ambulance… I should’ve taken you to the hospital… I should’ve stopped you.’

Lena realized that the voice she heard was her own. She sobbed, gasping for air in the closed attic.

Lena reached up, shoved away the boxes so that they toppled to the side. She saw the naked man lying dead in front of her.

It wasn’t Hank.

THURSDAY MORNING

THIRTEEN

Jeffrey had never liked sleeping in strange places. In his wilder days, he’d been loath to spend the entire evening with a woman, and not just because her husband might come home. He liked being able to get up in the middle of the night and know where the bathroom was. He liked knowing where the light switches were and which cabinet the glasses were in.

What he didn’t like was waking up in Jake Valentine’s house.

He had easily found the sheriff in the parking lot of Hank’s bar next door, though there wasn’t much the sheriff could do but watch the building burn. Jeffrey had found him standing beside one of his deputies, thumbs hooked into the waist of his blue jeans as he watched the last of the fire burn itself out. Valentine was still wearing his ankle holster and smelled a lot like the beer he’d been drinking with Jeffrey the night before. When Jeffrey had asked the man to follow him back to the motel, he hadn’t asked questions.

‘That’s Boyd Gibson,’ Valentine had said when Jeffrey showed him the dead man lying on the floor of his and Sara’s motel room. ‘I went to school with him.’

Not, ‘How the hell did this dead guy get in your room?’ or ‘Who stabbed him in the back?’ Just, ‘Damn, his daddy’s gonna be heartbroken.’

Jeffrey supposed he should be thankful that Valentine had offered them his spare room for the night. Grant County was a long drive and Sara had turned quiet again – too quiet for Jeffrey’s liking. When he asked if she minded sleeping at the sheriff’s house, she’d merely nodded, silently tucking her clothes into the suitcase she’d brought from home. She hadn’t spoken during the quick drive to Valentine’s house, either. When Jeffrey climbed into bed beside her, she’d put her head on his chest, wrapped her arm around him.

Jeffrey found himself listening to see if Sara was crying again. Sara very seldom cried, and when she did, he felt as if his heart was being squeezed in a vise. She wasn’t crying, though. She was thinking. That much was obvious when she leaned up on her elbow, her tone telling him she’d made up her mind when she said, ‘I’m not leaving this place until you do.’

He’d opened his mouth to argue the point, but she put her fingers to his lips, shushed him. ‘When I married you’ – she allowed a smile – ‘at least this last time, I knew you were the kind of man who runs toward trouble instead of running away from it.’ She paused, her tone soft but firm. ‘I can’t stop you from trying to save the world, but I won’t abandon you while you’re doing it.’

He had felt like an absolute shit then – not because he still wanted her to go home, not because he’d put her in the line of fire, but because he had been lying to her face from the minute that dead body had been thrown into their room.

Jeffrey had seen the tattooed man on the floor, saw the dark, black blood flowering out from the pearl-handled folding knife in his back, and said nothing.

‘I’m not leaving until you do,’ Sara had told him.

There wasn’t anything else to say after that. He closed his eyes but sleep wouldn’t come so he found himself listening to Sara’s breathing. She was obviously restless, and after a while she turned on her side, then laid flat on her stomach. At least a full hour passed before her breathing finally slowed and she fell asleep.

Jeffrey got out of bed and dressed, even though there was nowhere for him to go. He desperately wanted to take a shower, but there was only one bathroom in the house and he didn’t want to wake anyone up. He didn’t want to prowl around Valentine’s home, either, so he pulled up a metal folding chair and sat by the window looking out at the street. He adjusted the blinds just enough to see outside. Like the guest bedroom, the living room was on the street side of the house, and Jeffrey imagined the sheriff had been looking at much the same view as Jeffrey was now when he noticed the fire coming from the football field. It would’ve taken him less than five minutes to jog over to see what happened. At least that part of the sheriff’s story checked out.

Despite the modest house, Valentine, or maybe his wife, seemed to be quite the gardener. Tiny landscaping lights lining the front yard illuminated their handiwork: fall plantings and grass that was mowed neat like a green blanket. There were so many things a man did to make a house a home, whether it was replacing a rotted soffit or painting the walls or hanging some ugly floral wallpaper in the bathroom that your wife had picked out. Not that Sara was partial to large floral patterns, but judging from the Laura-Ashley-gone-wild scheme throughout the house, Jeffrey was guessing Mrs. Valentine was.

He tried to think of all the changes he and Sara had made to their home over the years. The only ones that came to mind were more recent. Before the woman from the adoption agency came for a home visit, Sara had convinced Jeffrey to get on his hands and knees with her and look at the house the way a baby might. He’d played along, laughing until they’d found a nail sticking out from the kitchen cabinet under the sink. By the time he spotted a finger-sized gap between an electrical socket and the Sheetrock in the laundry room, he was ready to tear down the house and start again from scratch.