Summer of the Redeemers (27 page)

“What?” I was stricken by the sight of so much blood.

Jamey’s face tightened, but she didn’t cry. “There’s nothing you can do,” she said. “Nadine told me to keep you out.”

“What is it? Is she hurt?” I felt the hammer of my earlier headache strike home. My knees quivered. “Is someone dead in there?”

Jamey Louise grabbed my arm and walked me back to Nadine’s house. There was a water hose at the corner, and she turned it on her face and then her body, washing the blood away in pink rivulets that ran down her legs and into her sneakers.

With the blood gone, her face was pale and her eyes sharp, like a doll’s glassy gaze. She washed her legs over and over again.

“What happened?” I thought about running home, just leaving without asking any questions. I could go to Alice’s house and help her with Maebelle V. and the other children. We could ask her older sisters about the seventh grade. Alice loved to think about it, to plan what it was going to be like to be with the juniors and seniors in the halls.

“Cammie is dead.”

I looked at Jamey Louise. I’d never thought she could be so mean. I really looked at her. Fine golden hairs curled at her forehead in wisps, like baby hair. Her skin was clear tan, translucent now that the dried blood was washed away and the color had returned. In her clear brown eyes was … pity?

“Somebody snuck in the barn early this morning and hurt her,” Jamey Louise said. “When Nadine got up, she found her and tried to save her. But she died. Just when you walked up.”

Jamey’s hand grabbed my arm and her fingers bit into my skin. I wanted to slap her away, to slap her in the face as hard as I could, but I couldn’t lift my hand. In fact, I was falling backward. Only Jamey Louise’s tight grip on my arm kept me from slamming backward. As it was, I sat down on the ground, right in the puddle of water Jamey had made while washing away the blood. Her sundress was soaked and stained beyond repair.

“There’s nothing to be done,” Jamey said, sitting down beside me.

I was breathing through my mouth, and I thought of the Fairleys on Wilson Ferry Road. But when I tried to close my mouth I couldn’t breathe. Something was clawing at my throat, working up toward the base of my head.

“I’ve got to go get Daddy to bring the backhoe,” Jamey said. “Want to walk with me?”

I looked at her. I heard what she said, but I didn’t understand it. She got up and tugged me up with her.

“Walk with me,” she said. “Daddy will give us a ride back.”

“Backhoe?”

Jamey looked past me. “Yeah. Nadine couldn’t get her out of the stall. We’re going to have to drag her out to the field and bury her.”

I rejected that information too.

“The other horses are okay,” Jamey offered. She patted my arm. “Nadine said it was strange that they didn’t make a sound, or she would have heard it. Whoever did it just slipped in and …” She stopped. “Libby and Cora are home this morning. You know Libby has a job at the Kettle, waiting on tables. She made twelve dollars in tips last night. That’s the most any waitress has ever made on a Thursday night.”

We were walking down the driveway. Picket had taken up with us, and she was sniffing the trunks of the chinaberry trees.

“Who did this?” I asked Jamey. “Who?”

“Nadine doesn’t know. She can’t figure it out. Whoever did it was strong. Cammie was, uh, stabbed a lot. We couldn’t find the knife.”

“Trapped in that stall, she didn’t have a chance.” I said the words before I thought. “Mama Betts said those horses shouldn’t be penned up all the time. She said it wasn’t natural.”

“If she’d been in the pasture, they could have shot her,” Jamey said. She laced her fingers around my wrist and pulled me along with her. I didn’t resist. I didn’t want to go to the barn, and I didn’t want to go home. At least Jamey knew where she wanted to go.

We’d left Picket several trees behind, and I looked back for her. The barn door was still open only a little, and Jamey had left the gate to the pasture unlatched. It had swung wide open, hanging slightly askew.

“The gate.” I stopped. “I’d better close it.”

Jamey waited while I walked back. Picket was half buried in some undergrowth beneath the big chinaberry tree where Alice and I had once hidden our Coca-Colas. I called to her, but she only wagged her tail, refusing to give up her quest.

I didn’t want to leave her at the barn. “Picket!” I clapped my hands and the noise was too loud. Still, Picket burrowed away.

“Come on,” Jamey urged. “Nadine needs me to get back.”

I went to grab Picket by the collar. Once I got her attention, she’d follow me. I reached deep into the undergrowth, remembering the Cokes and how Greg had found them and drank them. My fingers touched something sleek and polished. It was wood, but it wasn’t a stick. Instead of grabbing Picket, I tugged at the wood. It was heavier than I imagined, and I couldn’t lift it with one hand.

Picket had inched over to give me room and still dig at whatever had caught her fancy. I pushed the tangle of bushes and weeds back, and my breath caught. Picket had thrown a good bit of dirt on the crucified Jesus from the Redeemer church, but I had no doubt that was what I’d found. Except someone had painted the face black. It looked like spray paint of some kind. Whoever had done it hadn’t taken a lot of pains to be neat either. The spray covered Jesus’s face, part of the crown and some of his neck and chest.

“Bekkah, get that dog and come on if you’re coming!” Jamey said.

I grabbed Picket’s collar and pulled her out of the shrubs. “We’re coming.” Once I had her back in the driveway, she gave up and decided to mind me, just like I knew she would.

“What’d she have, a rabbit?” Jamey asked.

“Must have been.” I felt like my feet weren’t completely touching the ground.

“Well, she can chase the chickens at our house. She hasn’t been around this summer, and they’ve all gotten fat and lazy.”

Jamey was trying harder to be nice to me than she’d ever been. I walked along with nothing to say.

“Libby said she’d show us all how to use makeup before school started, if you’d like to learn. Just a little mascara and maybe some rouge and lipstick.”

“Yeah.”

“Even though we’re seventh graders, it’s going to be high school for all practical purposes. Libby started wearing makeup in the seventh grade, I mean to school. She wore it before that when she could get away with it.”

“Libby’s always been beautiful.” I felt like someone else was talking. Someone else had taken over my body and was walking it down the road with Jamey Louise babbling about crazy things. And that person was babbling back.

“Jamey, are you certain it was Cammie?”

“It was her stall. Blood was everywhere, all over the walls and the horse.” She shrugged. “The ones that are the same color look the same to me. There was so much blood …”

We were halfway to the Welfords. “Who would do such a thing?” I remembered Mr. Tom and the horror of his death. Someone sick had done it. Someone so sick that they needed to be locked away from society, Mama Betts had said. She had said that if it was someone on Kali Oka Road, they’d do something evil again. She’d warned me that such sickness didn’t go away, that it just boiled and simmered and fermented until it spewed out again in another mean and cruel act.

Mama Betts thought it was someone from the Redeemers who’d killed Mr. Tom. I’d even thought it was Greg until he’d said he didn’t do it. Was he lying? I didn’t know. I couldn’t seem to think it through.

“Nadine said she was going to catch whoever had done this, and she was personally going to make them suffer,” Jamey said. “I’d hate to be at Nadine’s mercy. You know there’s the old storage area under the end of the barn. They said old Ratheson McInnis used to chain his slaves down there to punish them. That was so no one else could hear them scream when he tortured them.”

“Jamey!” I’d never heard any such thing. “That’s crazy.”

“No, it isn’t. Mama said it was true.”

“Have you seen the room? Have you been in it?”

“No. Who has time to explore when Nadine’s cracking the whip? Anyway, all I was saying was that if she could find out who’d done this, she could chain them down in the little room and torture them for days before she finally finished them off. I’ll bet no one would ever find the body.”

Jamey Louise was only trying to take my mind off what had happened to Cammie, and for a moment it had worked. I wished there was a room beneath the barn, and I wished I could find whoever had hurt Cammie so much. I’d do to them what they had done to her.

Two tears slipped down my cheek. Jamey saw them and started walking faster. She gave up talking and settled on motion. By the time we turned down the drive to the Welfords’ house, I was crying good, but without making a sound.

I sat on the steps, and Emily Welford brought me a glass of lemonade while they sent Libby in the truck to find Gus out in the field. He was turning the ground for some fall turnips.

Condensation dripped off my lemonade glass and hit my shoes at just about the same pace the tears dripped off my chin. Emily and Jamey and Cora stood over me, but no one said anything. They all thought us Riches were silly about our animals. Horses died, cows went to butcher, and unlucky dogs and cats met death in numerous tragic ways. The Welfords had lost livestock to lightning, stray dogs, poachers, colic, birth, infection, and theft. The death of an animal was insignificant to them. But they were too kind to say anything to me about my unstoppable tears. They just stood over me and waited for Gus to drive up on the tractor.

He came in a cloud of dust and diesel, hot and sweat-streaked and weathered beyond his years. “Sorry about that horse, Bekkah,” he said as he climbed the steps and took the glass of lemonade Emily held for him. He drank it all in one swallow, the ice clanking back into the bottom of the glass, hardly melted. Emily took it for a refill and they went inside.

The window was open, and I listened to Jamey tell what had happened. Nadine had gone out to feed and found Cammie down in her stall, hamstrung and with at least thirty knife wounds. She’d bled to death slowly, unable even to struggle to her feet.

Jamey described the stalls and the barn.

“Better get after it. In this heat she won’t last long,” Gus said. He came back out the door, patting my head as he went down the steps.

“He’s gonna go get the chains, so it’ll take him a little while,” Jamey explained. “You want to ride on the tractor with him? I’ll walk.”

“No. You ride. I have Picket.” I wanted to be alone.

“Why don’t you go home?” Emily suggested. She’d come out on the porch again, sliding out of the screen so silently I hadn’t even heard her. “Go home and see if Effie won’t take you to the river for a swim. It’s the last week before school. You might not get another chance.”

“Maybe I will.” The tears were still dripping slowly off my face, but it wasn’t like I was really crying.

“Bekkah, honey, she still has eight other horses. It isn’t the end of the world,” Emily said. “Maybe next summer, if you ride as good as Jamey says you do, maybe Effie and Walt will get you your very own horse.”

“Maybe.” There would be no replacement for Cammie. “I’d better be going.”

Picket hadn’t even bothered to hunt for the chickens. She came out from under the porch as soon as I stepped down. Together we walked down the drive.

I thought about going home. I thought about going to Alice’s. My feet took me back to the chinaberry drive, back to the barn. There was still no sound, or sight, of Gus getting the tractor ready to drag Cammie out of her stall and to a grave. I wanted to see her for myself. To say goodbye. Then I would go home.

The barn was as still as when I’d left it. I walked past the tree with the vandalized crucifix beneath it. I remembered it was there, it just didn’t have anything to do with what was happening to me. Not yet. Once I had dealt with Cammie, I would think about the crucifix and what it might mean.

The barn door was still cracked and I went to it, slipping inside into the dim coolness.

There was nothing except the shuffle and snort of the horses as they ate hay and shifted their weight in the stalls. Cammie’s door was open, and I knew it would be horrible, but I walked there and looked in.

Jamey had not exaggerated. Blood was everywhere. It covered the walls and the hay and the bedding. And the dead horse that lay on its side, one eye open and glazed.

Color was impossible to tell because of the blood, but I knew the slope of the muzzle, the shape of the ear.

It wasn’t Cammie.

I knew it instantly. The dead horse was Caesar, the big gelding that lived two stalls down. His entire head was soaked in blood, covering the blaze that stopped three inches above his nostrils. He was the same dark bay as Cammie, but he was slightly bigger, and a gelding. After the weeks of grooming Cammie daily, of going over her inch by inch, I knew her. My fingers knew the feel of her. The poor dead horse lying in the stall was not my Cammie.

I staggered backward into the center aisle. Caesar’s stall was two doors down, and I ran to it, not daring to breathe. Cammie stood with her head in a far corner, munching her hay. When I whispered her name, she swung around to look at me, calling a soft greeting. Several straws stuck from her mouth, and she pulled them in as she walked over to me for a head rub.

“Cammie.” I whispered her name, unable to believe that she was
alive, uninjured. I opened the door and slipped inside, running my hands down her sleek neck and chest, tangling my fingers in her mane and pressing my face against her so that my tears were soaked into her shining coat.

“I thought it was Cammie, too, at first.”

Greg’s voice startled me. Not that he was there, but the quality of his tone. I turned to him. The barn light wasn’t good, but his eyes were swollen, his face splotched and ugly. Blood covered his long-sleeved white shirt.

“Stay away from her.” I hissed the warning.

Greg backed up two steps as if I’d slapped him.

Shock passed over his face, and I moved forward to confront him. “What was Caesar doing in her stall? Who changed the horses, Greg?”