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  “For what?”

  “Suspicious behavior.”

  “That’s not a charge, and you know it.”

  “It’d stick long enough for me to find a better one if I needed to.” He winked. “I’d just tell Judge Crowe I think it’s pretty damn suspicious. This fellow found dead in the woods. A man that lived on her land.”

  “And only that,” I said. “A tenant. With no other connection.”

  “Anyway, him dead in the woods and she won’t have anything to do with me. A duly constituted authority. Hell, all I got to do is tell the judge she’s not cooperating.”

  There was no point in arguing about it. Nothing had really changed in Kingdom County. Lonnie ran things in the same way his father had run them before him, with a cavalier certainty that he’d be protected by the old chain of command that flowed from the courthouse to the governor’s mansion in one long, unbroken line of cronyism.

  “Is Lila expecting me?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Lonnie answered. “You’ll be a big surprise.”

  But from the expression on Lila’s face, my sudden appearance was far more than a surprise. She looked astonished, as if she’d long ago dismissed me from her mind.

  “Roy,” she said quietly.

  “Hello, Lila.”

  She sat on a metal cot covered by a thin striped mattress, her hands in her lap. Her hair had darkened but still threw off fiery tints. There were lines now at the corners of her eyes, and fainter ones crisscrossed her brow, but otherwise she appeared remarkably unchanged, no more than a blink away from the Highland beauty she’d been.

  The cell door was open. I stepped inside.

  “This is ridiculous,” I told her. “Lonnie having you sit back here. Probably illegal too.”

  She gave a quick laugh. “He’s trying to scare me. But it won’t work.” She smiled softly. “Lonnie told me you’d come back home,” she said. Her gaze was steady, yet oddly probing. “He said you were a friend of his.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” I told her. “I just happened to be over at his house when we heard about Clayton Spivey.”

  She nodded. “I identified him this morning.”

  “I know,” I told her. “And Lonnie should have let you go after that. There’s no reason you should be—”

  “He can’t hold me, I know that,” Lila said firmly. “Why are you here, Roy? Back in Kingdom County?”

  “My father’s dying,” I answered. “I’ve come back to take care of him until it’s over.”

  “Did you bring your family with you?”

  “I don’t have a family.”

  Shadows flitted behind her eyes. “I’ve thought of you a lot over the years.”

  I smiled. “We had some good times, didn’t we?”

  A vision formed in my mind. It was not just of myself and Lila, but of Archie too, and Gloria, all of us sitting at one of the little concrete picnic tables along the edge of the old rock quarry, Archie so moonstruck, so happy to be loved, he’d seemed almost to float in the warm spring air. Then it was only Archie I saw, sitting in his cell, reaching for my hand, I ain’t told the sheriff nothing, Roy, and I ain’t going to.

  Her gaze darkened mysteriously, a storm cloud in her mind. “You knew what you wanted.”

  And what I’d wanted more than anything was Lila. Watching her now, I could see my own younger self in her eyes, the valley boy who’d spotted her at a dance, summoned the courage to approach her.

  She drew in a long breath, and the dark cloud disappeared. “So, you finished college and stayed in California.”

  “A little town in the northern part of the state,” I told her. “I teach at a school there.”

  “Good for you,” Lila said. Her eyes lowered to her hands, then rose again. “Well, thanks for dropping by, Roy.”

  I knew that I was being dismissed, but I held my place at the entrance to the cell. “Lonnie tells me you’re not saying much, Lila. About Clayton, I mean.”

  Her voice chilled. “I say as much as I want to say.”

  “Lonnie’s just doing his job, you know. Just trying to find out a few things so that—”

  “He’s pretending he thinks Clayton Spivey was murdered,” Lila interrupted sharply. “But I know better than that. Clayton had been sick for years. And lately he’d gotten a lot worse.”

  “Well, there was a gun near the body,” I said, trying to put the best light on my detective-story understanding of Lonnie’s tactics. “And so until Doc Poole can take a look, he has to assume that—”

  “I came down to identify the body,” Lila said, the fire of her youth suddenly returning. “I did it out of respect for Clayton. And it’s all I’m going to do. I’m not at the beck and call of Lonnie Porterfield, and I never will be.” She gazed at me in the way she had as a girl, eyes that peeled me back layer by layer. “I’m not going to play by Lonnie Porterfield’s rules.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Good,” she said. “Because I don’t want to talk to Lonnie or about Lonnie.”

  With that, it was clear she’d closed the subject, and I half expected her to rise, stride out of the cell and through Lonnie’s office, but she remained in place, her face brightening somewhat, as if hit by a ray of light.

  “Remember that day at Taylor’s Gorge?” she asked.

  I saw her leap up from the blanket we’d spread across the ground.

  You don’t believe me, Roy? You don’t believe I’ll do it?

  “Remember what we did?”

  She was racing now, at full speed, toward the overhanging cliff, a gray wall that rose above the sparkling water.

  “Yes, I remember.”

  I’d run after her, watching, amazed, as she hurtled forward, sleek as a deer over the forest floor, then out into the bright light that hung in a blinding curtain over the cliff’s rocky ledge.

  “Do you know what the best part was?” Lila asked.

  oShe’d never slowed, never for an instant, but had dove out into the glittering air, her white feet like two small birds taking flight from the stony edge.

  She stared at me now with the same willful gaze she’d had that afternoon. “The way you came running and leaped off that cliff right behind me.”

  I felt the earth fall away, its heavy pull release its grip, saw the dark water below.

  She looked at me pointedly. “You wouldn’t do that now, would you?”

  “No.”

  She shrugged. “I guess I wouldn’t either,” she said.

  Lonnie was sitting in his office when I left her a few minutes later. He plucked a thin cigar from his mouth, its white plastic tip well chewed. “Well, what’d she tell you?”

  “Nothing. At least, nothing about Clayton.”

  “But she did talk to you, right?”

  “Only about the old days. You know, when we were in high school together. I told her you needed to clear a few things up. That there was a gun near the body. She said she came down to identify the body, and that’s all she’s going to do.”

  Lonnie crushed the cigar against the sole of his shoe. “I just can’t figure out why she won’t answer a few questions and be done with it, Roy.”

  I knew the answer, saw Lila at my side, holding my hand, the two of us moving slowly down the road as the pickup closed upon us, then rattled past, a load of drunken boys slouched inside it, waving whiskey bottles in the dark air.

  “I can’t figure it out,” Lonnie repeated.

  “She doesn’t have anything to hide,” I told him.

  He considered this a moment, then said, “Maybe you could help me out a little more on this, Roy.” He nodded toward the overhanging hills. “Go back up to Waylord. Ask around. About Clayton. You know, among the neighbors. They’d talk to you, those people up there. You got roots up there.”

  “In Waylord? What roots? I’ve always lived in the valley.”

  “But your father’s from up there. All they’d need to know is that you’re Jesse Slater’s son. They all remember hi
m up there.”

  “Why would they remember my father?” I asked. “He left Waylord when he was sixteen. And as far as I know, he’s never been back.”

  “Believe me, that won’t matter,” Lonnie insisted.

  I shrugged. “I’m a schoolteacher, Lonnie, not a policeman. I don’t know how to go about this sort of thing.”

  “It’s just a little snooping around, that’s all,” Lonnie replied dismissively. “But I can make it official if you want me to.” He pulled out the top drawer of his desk and plucked something from among a scattering of pads, pencils, and paper clips.

  “Here you go,” he said as he handed a badge to me.

  I didn’t take it. “I haven’t agreed to this,” I said.

  “Look, Roy, you’d be doing a favor for Lila. Because if you go up there and ask a few questions, then I won’t need to keep her down here with me anymore.”

  Lila’s voice sounded in my ear, reminding me of the plunge I’d once been willing to take for her, along with her certainty that I would never do such a thing again.

  I glanced at the badge. “You’d let her go now?”

  “I sure would,” Lonnie said. He smiled. “Now raise your right hand.”

  When I’d finished, he shook my hand. “Congratulations, Deputy Slater,” he said with a laugh. “And welcome to the exciting world of law enforcement.”

  Chapter Seven

  One thing was certain: I had no idea how to investigate anything. But I’d read a few detective stories over the years, and so I merely imitated what I thought a fictional sleuth would do, and went back to the place where Clayton Spivey’s body had been found, in the hope that I might stumble upon something Lonnie had failed to notice.

  The deeply shaded ground still bore the imprint of the body’s dead weight, but nothing else. Lonnie had already collected whatever evidence he could find-the rifle, the shells, the rectangular cardboard box that had contained them.

  Glancing here and there, I noticed nothing at all, until suddenly I glimpsed a second body.

  It lay near the bank of the creek, and as I moved closer, I saw that it was a dove, its head shot off, the decaying body swarming with black ants.

  Not far above, in a fork among the limbs, its nest rested, fully exposed, in dappled light.

  The nest was empty now, but for a moment I imagined the dove curled inside its frail circle of twigs, peering down at Clayton Spivey, watching as he opened the ammunition box, drew out a single shell. I could see where one bullet had grazed the nest’s supporting limb. Another had left a neat round hole in a gently swaying leaf. A third had actually penetrated the left side of the nest, through barely, merely grazing it enough to blow away a few twigs.

  Through it all the dove had sat, strapped down by instinct, motionless, unable to take flight as is always the case with nesting doves, and waited for Spivey finally to steady his aim enough to put a bullet through its head.

  “Afternoon, mister.”

  I turned and saw an old man a few feet away. He was clothed in overalls and a flannel shirt, both coated with the region’s red dust. He’d tugged his hat from his head before speaking to me, and now held it with both hands, a gesture common to the people of Waylord.

  “Name’s Crenshaw,” the man said. “Nate Crenshaw. I live up the creek a ways.”

  He was not threatening in any way and yet a threat seemed to rest between us like a pistol on a gaming table.

  “You the law?” he asked.

  It struck me with some relief that in fact I was. I took out the badge. “Roy Slater.” I nodded toward where the body had lain. “It was Clayton Spivey we found here. I guess you heard about that.”

  Crenshaw continued to watch me warily. “Yeah, I heard about it.”

  “Did you know him?”

  The old man shook his head. “Not much, no. He sure run into a patch of bad luck, didn’t he?”

  Bad luck.

  It was the same phrase my father had always used to gather into one pile a vast array of disasters. Children drowned because of bad luck. Babies died of whooping cough and meningitis for the same reason. When men went to prison or were crushed in collapsing mines, bad luck was the culprit. Women dead in childbirth, or ground down by labor. Bad luck. Once, when I’d asked my father why he’d left Waylord, he’d simply shrugged and said, “Too much bad luck up there.”

  “I seen Clayton sometimes,” Crenshaw added. “Not too often though. He wasn’t too sociable. Lived out in the woods. By hisself.”

  “How’d he make a living?”

  Crenshaw shrugged. “He swapped things. He wasn’t in good enough shape to work regular.” “Did he have any friends?”

  “He visited Lila Cutler from time to time. She let him stay in that little shack on her land. Felt sorry for him, I guess.”

  “Was that their only connection?” I asked. “That he lived on her property?”

  Crenshaw nodded. “Far as I know. Never heard Lila say there was anything else to it. ’course, Lila’s quiet.”

  But the girl I remembered sang along with the band when we danced, hummed continually, called loudly to me from her seat in a darkened theater or the crowded assembly hall at school or one of the wooden bleachers that lined the football field, her arm in the air, waving energetically. Over here, Roy.

  “She was lively when I knew her,” I said. “In high school.”

  “Maybe so,” Crenshaw said. He eyed the stream briefly, turning something over in his mind. “Clayton was out hunting, I guess,” he said, nodding toward the dove’s body.

  “I suppose he was.”

  Crenshaw walked to the edge of the creek, picked up a stick, and dipped it gently into the water. “Hunting like a feller that’s hungry.”

  He drew the stick from the water, considered its wet tip, then lowered it back into the stream, moving its tip in ever-tightening circles over the surface of the water.

  “Like a feller that ain’t got time to wait for a deer or a rabbit. Because he’s hungry. Needs whatever he can get.”

  “Was Clayton Spivey that poor?” I asked.

  Crenshaw tossed the stick into the creek. “Must have been, or he wouldn’t have been shooting at no dove.” His eyes drifted up toward the shattered nest. “A dove won’t fly, you know. Just sets there till you shoot it.” He continued to peer at the nest, looking more and more puzzled as the seconds passed. Finally he shook his head slowly, as if giving in to the mystery of things. “Maybe that’s why Clayton was after it. ’Cause he was too weak to go after nothing else.”

  I looked at the dove, her bloodied feathers alive with ants. “Lila told me that he was sick. Was he dying?”

  “Heard he was, yes, sir.”

  “What of?”

  “Black lung.”

  Then I knew exactly what had happened to Clayton Spivey, the sudden seizure that had overtaken him, driving him first to his knees, then forward, pressing his face against the ground, blood rising like a geyser in his throat.

  “Ain’t no cure once you got it,” Crenshaw added.

  No cure, and nothing to do but wait until the moment comes for you to drown in your own blood.

  And, I thought, case closed.

  I was almost halfway down the mountain when I saw another house sweep into view, one Lila had taken me to many years before and which I associated with her so powerfully, she seemed almost to appear in my car as I neared the building once again, a red-haired girl sitting at my side as she had that day. “Pull in there, Roy,” she’d said, pointing to a rutted driveway, “I want you to meet my second mother.”

  Her name was Juanita Her-Many-Horses, and I’d thought her ancient, though she’d certainly been no more than forty-five at that time, her skin still smooth and brown, with deep-set eyes that shone darkly, like her hair, her features as Indian as her last name.

  “You’re a good-looking boy,” she’d said when I came to a halt before her. “You and Lila going steady now?”

  “Yes, ma’am, we are.”
<
br />   More than twenty years had passed since that day, and I suppose I could easily have continued on past the old house. I’d done it only the day before, when Lonnie and I had made our way up to Lila’s home. But now the past was a rope stretched out to me, tugging me back toward those long-forgotten days.

  “Don’t want no Bibles,” she called as I got out of my car. “Got all the Bibles I need already.”

  “I’m not selling Bibles,” I called back.

  “Don’t want no medicines neither.”

  “I’m not selling anything,” I assured her, then made my way toward where she sat beneath the shade of a large elm, cooling herself with a paper fan that bore a figure of Jesus in flowing robes.

  She dug in her lap for a pair of glasses. “You come from down around, I bet.”

  Down around. The name she’d always given to the valley that lay below her.

  “You don’t remember me, Juanita? I’m Roy Slater.”

  Her eyes flashed in recognition. “You the one from down around. Went with Lila way back when.”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled widely, revealing gaps in her teeth. “You come plenty of times that summer.”

  A bright hot summer, the cool streams our only relief, Lila in her cutoff jeans and a white blouse knotted at the waist. I’d come so often, Lila such a fire in my mind, that Archie had teased me about it. Speeding the way you do, that girl will be the death of you, Roy. By then he’d been hardly less smitten than I was, his passionate attention so firmly settled upon Gloria Kellogg, he’d seemed unable to think of anything else.

  Juanita Her-Many-Horses nodded thoughtfully. “You the one that went off to school. And never come back for Lila.”

  “She told me not to,” I said softly.

  Juanita glanced over to where a pigsty rested in a dense cloud of stink a hundred yards away. Near its center, an enormous sow lay in the steamy mud, swarms of greenflies rising each time it shifted or twitched its flanks, then descending again, to feed on the muck that surrounded it.

  “Call him Amos and Andy,” Juanita said with a laugh when she noticed me looking at the pig. “ ’Cause he done already big enough for two. Call him Amos for short.”

  I nodded toward a stack of cinder blocks opposite her. “Mind if I sit with you a few minutes?”