So Close the Hand of Death (14 page)

T
he outer reaches of Forest City had succumbed to the homogenization of America. The highway bypass into town was littered with chain restaurants and hardware supercenters, the concrete strip malls colonized by the everystore mentality that permeated all other mid-to large-size towns off just about every highway. The ultimate in impersonal convenience.

Once they got into the heart of the city, things changed dramatically. For the better, in Taylor’s opinion. She was surprised to see a traditional Main Street replete with mom-and-pop shops, an old movie theater, the drugstore Buddy Morgan had mentioned, with what looked to be a full restaurant lunch counter, and a variety of specialty stores, including a promising-looking bookstore nestled next to the drugstore, Fireside Books and Gifts.

Baldwin drove slowly, and Taylor stared up the treelined median, a small smile playing on her lips.

“What are you looking at?” Baldwin asked.

“I’m waiting for George Bailey to come running down the street.”

Baldwin did a double take, then laughed. “God,
Taylor, you’ve nailed it. This looks exactly like Bedford Falls.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“Too bad that whole movie set was just a creation. The idyllic town square… I always thought it would be fun to live in a small town. Have a routine, eat at the diner every morning, walk everywhere, wave hello to the people who’ve known you your whole life.”

She shook her head.

“Oh, no, not me. I’d go mad with that level of accountability. Nashville is plenty small. Besides, everyone already knows my business.”

They got out of the car, and she looked up and down the street. “This is ridiculously charming. I can’t imagine Ewan Copeland here. It’s just too normal. Too sweet.”

Baldwin saw a man in uniform standing in the window of the drugstore, gesturing for them to come in.

“Look, the chief’s waiting for us. He’s waving from the window over there. Let’s go.”

They walked past the diagonally parked cars in the median and entered the drugstore. They were met with red vinyl, shiny chrome and the overwhelmingly delicious scent of frying burgers.

“You must be the folks from Nashville,” the chief said, shaking their hands in turn, then pointing them toward a booth in the window. He was trim, about five foot nine, with gray hair. His face was lined and weathered, someone who spent a lot of time out of doors. Taylor guessed he was in his mid-fifties.

“What gave it away?” she asked with a smile.

“I know all the folks round here who have guns, that’s what. Plus, your faces were all over the news,
that brouhaha down in Nags Head. North Carolina law enforcement’s had a rough couple of days. Sakes alive. Hopefully the worst is past us now. Unless you brought the mayhem with you?”

“I hope to God not,” she said.

“Good. I’m not in the mood to chase bad guys.” He smiled wide. He was missing a molar on the right side of his mouth. His eyes crinkled with good humor. Taylor liked him immediately.

They settled into the booth, and a young woman came to take their order. She had a small silver ring in her over-plucked left eyebrow. Her hair was tinted red. Henna, maybe, or cheap drugstore dye. It suited her creamy pale skin and brown eyes.

“The biscuits are good here, if you’re wanting breakfast. Burgers are, too,” Chief Morgan said.

Taylor’s stomach grumbled in anticipatory protest, they hadn’t taken the time to refuel on the way down. “I think I’ll have the burger, then. Well done, American cheese, please. With fries. And a Diet Coke.”

“Pepsi okay?” the girl asked.

“Ugh. Yes, if I have to.”

“All we got down here. What about you, sir?”

“I’ll have the same,” Baldwin said, refolding the small paper menu and sticking it upright beside the napkin holder.

“Make that three then, Amy. Throw some of that thick-slab pepper bacon on mine.”

The girl nodded and whisked away. Morgan watched her go. “Amy’s family has owned this drugstore since the early 1900s. If you walk along that back wall toward the bathroom, you can see a mural of what Main Street used to look like. All the old storefronts. It’s changed now, but a few places are originals. At the very least,
the preservation society has stepped in and declared a few landmarks, so there’s funding from the county and state to help with the upkeep. The bookstore next door is a perfect example. They did a great job renovating that place. Tallest building in town, don’tcha know.”

He folded his arms across his chest. “But that’s not why you’re here. You need to talk about the Copelands.”

Taylor could hear the note in his voice, the mixture of revulsion and sadness. She steeled herself. The story to come wouldn’t be antiseptic, printed on the page, open for interpretation. They were about to get the meat of the tale, find the answers to the terror that had haunted her for months. She swallowed involuntarily, mouth suddenly dry. Amy appeared with their sodas. Taylor slipped her straw into the Styrofoam cup and took a long sip, ignoring the chemical taste she abhorred in favor of a caffeine rush.

Morgan ran his finger along his nose, composing his thoughts, then began.

“Elizabeth Biggs Copeland always had problems, from the time she was a little girl. She was the kind of girl folks called delicate, meaning she was totally crazy and full of piss and vinegar to boot. There wasn’t a soul in this town who wasn’t afraid of her, especially those of us in her class at school. Betty Biggs, you can only imagine the names she was called. She got teased quite a bit.

“She wasn’t overtly bad, just…things happened around her. Cats went missing, only to show up days later dead in their owners’ yards, bad things done to them. She was suspected of starting a couple of fires. They started off small, dustbins and the like, but as she got older…” He shook his head. “Two of her friends’
houses burned to the ground in the middle of the night. The first time, she was about eight, and no one was home. The second, Betty was twelve. A little girl named Tabitha was killed, along with the family dog. Betty’d been fighting with Tabitha at school that day. I can’t say that I remember exactly what about. Some boy, probably. Betty had a hard time with the opposite sex in her younger years.”

Baldwin leaned forward in his seat. “You say suspected. No one ever prosecuted her for the fires?”

“Nothing to prosecute. There was no proof she had anything to do with any of it. My dad was chief before me, and his dad before him. They were good cops. They didn’t have the tools we have now. They had to rely on actual grunt work, investigations that hinged on eyewitnesses, unreliable eyewitnesses at that because, first off, we were children who were scared to death of getting in trouble, and second, we were even more scared of Betty skinning us alive if we ratted her out. We don’t have the kind of violence y’all do up in the city. All ours now is drug related—the kids around here have nothing better to do than get high, and they do that well. But back then crime was infrequent, and minor. To have a child accused of murdering her friend, well, that just wasn’t going to happen.”

“It got swept under the rug, then?” Taylor asked.

“Not exactly. Most folks steered clear of Betty after that. Tabitha’s family moved away, the story was only whispered about. It put the fear of God in Betty though, she calmed down, and the strange happenings slowed. She managed to get through high school without any major mishaps. Started dating Roger Copeland her senior year. He was a couple of years older than us, and a god around these parts. A talented minor leaguer
with an eye to moving up. He was being groomed, was a damn good ballplayer. No one knew what he saw in Betty outside of the fact that she was putting out. I mean, she was pretty enough, but vacant. Distant. Something in her eyes always gave me the chills.

“Anyway, Betty got pregnant right after graduation. They married, had Edward, then Ewan and Errol. Things seemed okay on the surface. Both her parents were dead by then, the restaurant gave a decent income. Betty settled into motherhood all right, though all three of the boys were always sickly. Strange stuff, not the usual kid sicknesses like chicken pox. No, the boys were always in the hospital, getting some sort of exploratory surgery, or undergoing expensive tests for diseases no one had ever heard of. We’d never seen the likes of it, to tell you the truth. But she wasn’t doing anything wrong that anyone knew of. Not obviously, anyway.”

Chief Morgan grew quiet. With perfect timing, the food arrived, steaming hot. They all settled into the business of eating. Morgan was right, the burgers were good. Hot and juicy, seasoned perfectly, the thin shoestring fries crispy, just the way she liked them.

Baldwin wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Good choice, Chief.”

“I’m glad you like it.” He settled his burger back in its greasy wrapping paper. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. So Betty’s kids were always sickly. Roger’s career wasn’t going the way he wanted, he’d been told again and again that his time was coming, but you know how it is. Promises made, promises broken. He was drinking some, quiet-like, on the sly, and took up with a barmaid. Stephanie Sugarman. Got her pregnant, of course. Betty found out. She went absolutely around-the-bend nuts. Threatened the girl, threatened Roger. Made a big stink
out of it. Publicly. Roger slunk away for the season, left the girl and Betty and his boys behind. He got called up to be a third baseman for the Braves just a month into the season. It was his big chance, going to the show. The whole town was proud.”

He took a bite of his burger, then wiped his mouth carefully before he continued.

“Well, Betty wasn’t about to let a little thing like Roger’s career keep her from getting her way. She harassed the living hell out of that man. Letters, phone calls. Driving up to his games in Atlanta, pitching a fit when she couldn’t get near him. He finally had to file a restraining order against her, and had his lawyer draw up divorce papers. Word was he planned to marry the Sugarman girl. Of course, he never got the chance.

“Betty wasn’t going to give up that easily. The restraining orders, the time she spent in jail when she was caught breaking them, none of that stopped her. She fell back on one of her old tricks. Burned the Sugarman girl’s house down. Steph was working at the time, over at the Point and Shoot. It was sheer luck that she wasn’t killed, too, she was supposed to be at home. The other bartender had gotten sick and Steph came in at the last second to cover her shift.”

“What was happening with the boys during all this time?” Baldwin asked.

“They were sicker than ever. I remember my mama went over and took care of Edward and Ewan one time, right before Edward passed. They’d gotten pneumonia, and Betty was locked up. The school called my pops. We didn’t have much in the way of social services back then, it was all church oriented, the kindness of neighbors and the like. They didn’t have any more money for the hospital, so Betty sold the barbecue place and ran
through that money like water on all the medical expenses. My mama took care of them, was able to nurse Ewan back to health. Edward died about a week into it, the docs said his body was just too damaged to handle the bug. He’d gone too long without proper treatment. Tore my mama up. I remember her crying her head off the night he died.”

“Is there any chance Ewan could be responsible for his brother’s death?”

“Edward? No, not unless he infected him with the bug in the first place. He had fluid in his lungs at autopsy like he’d drowned.”

Baldwin raised an eyebrow, and the chief shook his head.

“I really don’t think that was the case. My mama was there for the whole thing, she’d have noticed something wrong. They were both too weak to move.”

“Okay then. Please, carry on.”

“Mama told me that all three of the boys were just covered in healing scars from all the surgeries. Crisscrossed all over their stomachs like fishing net. When Edward died, the youngest boy, Errol, he was real thin, like anorexic thin. Weighed no more than eighty pounds, the doc said. They stashed him in a psychiatric hospital for a spell while he recovered. Probably the only thing that saved him, at least for the time being.

“Anyway, Betty went crazy when she heard about Edward. They let her go to the funeral, but she still had a couple of months left on her sentence. She was in shackles, and poor Roger, he just looked all embarrassed. He blamed her, of course, they got into a huge shouting match, had to be separated. It was a big mess.

“When Betty finally got out of jail, she didn’t hesitate. She headed up to Atlanta in a fine rage and found Roger leaving the stadium after batting practice. This was right before the end of the season. Shot him pointblank. Man didn’t have a chance. Betty ran, and no one could identify her at first. Took some fine police work from the Atlanta cops. They found a videotape that had her on it two minutes after the shooting, running away from the stadium. Found her in some fleabag motel on the outskirts of town. She still had the gun, so they hauled her ass to jail. It was for good this time. The trial lasted only a couple of days, it was a cut-and-dried case. They thought about seeking the death penalty, but the district attorney up there in Atlanta, he settled for life in prison. I think he knew that it could be overturned if there was a second trial, she was obviously such a disturbed woman. The judge agreed, and she got sentenced to something like one hundred years. They sent her to the Metro State Prison in Atlanta—that’s where they handle the long-term psychiatric cases—and that’s the last we all heard of Miss Betty.”

Morgan dipped a handful of fries in ketchup and devoured them. Taylor patiently waited for him to finish chewing. After a few moments, she asked, “What happened to Ewan and Errol?”

Morgan didn’t answer right away. He bent his head hard to the right, then the left. He grunted softly, seeming to enjoy the loud pops that accompanied the violent motion. His chiropractic feat accomplished, he took a toothpick out of his front pocket and wedged it between his lips.

“Well, the boys were stuck back here in Forest City. Ewan was fourteen when his mama went away. Errol
had been released by the hospital, his weight was back in a safe range, but he was still so little. Without Edward to watch out for them, they were deemed too young to be left alone. He and Errol became wards of the state. Errol was always a delicate kid, he didn’t last more than a year. Killed himself. The group home they were living in was a sad place, full of unwanted or unwilling children. The home’s administrator found Errol hanging from a rod in his closet, he’d been dead for over a day and no one had missed him.”