entrance into the house.
SHE WAS DEAD when he found her, and it wasn’t hard to discern why.
A large shred of her dress had caught on a rock sticking out of the formation she had apparently tried to climb. Meryl realized she must have gotten a long way up for a fall to have killed her, or else she just happened to hit at a fatal angle. He also realized this was going to make his life much, much easier. All he needed to do now was get rid of her body, Billy’s truck, and the damned bed linens in time to walk back to Rose and climb into his own bed to await the moment when someone called to tell him the terrible news.
Her body, shed of its clothing, went into an abandoned feedlot waste pit in the next county. Billy’s truck-with her yellow sundress tied into a plastic bag Meryl found in the truck-got sent into the floodwaters over the highway. In desperation, out of ideas and running out of time before sunrise, Meryl picked up the plastic bag with the bed linens and carried them back to Rose with him. He felt ridiculous doing it. He could get rid of a body and a two-ton vehicle, but he couldn’t figure out how to do the same with some sheets? He’d been afraid to throw them into the feedlot waste pit, for fear they wouldn’t sink fast enough, and he didn’t want to leave them in the truck to be found there. As he walked home, daring the lightning to get him, Meryl nearly started laughing hysterically at this last dilemma. It seemed so stupid compared to everything else he’d had to take care of this night.
When he woke up to the phone ringing in the morning, he knew what to do about the bedclothes that were his remaining problem. He was afraid to wash them for fear Belle or someone else would see him doing it; he was also afraid to take them to the dump, or put them out with the trash. He knew he was being paranoid about something that probably should be easy, but it felt as if all of his fears had centered now on the damned sheets and pillowcases. So after emptying out a cardboard file box, Meryl folded the sheets, put them inside it, and closed the lid on top of them. He found threaded mailing tape in his desk and wrapped the box in it so tightly and completely all around that even scissors would have a hard time finding a place to cut. Then he put it aside to give to Belle to store unknowingly in her basement for him, “because it’s full of a client’s personal records and your bank is more fireproof than my office.” Later, much later when nobody would be paying any attention related to Hugh-Jay or Laurie, he could go back and get the box and finally destroy it. And if he didn’t, maybe the wet fabric would mildew so completely in the box that it would eventually disintegrate and be no threat to him. It wasn’t as if they were much of a threat anyway-hair fiber analysis was an inexact science; a good defense lawyer would cast doubt on it.
Having thought his way out of his last problem, Meryl hurried off to help his future wife and her family in their sad time of great need. He absolved himself with the sentence that became the source of his confidence and his reassurance: It wasn’t a crime, it was a tragedy.
43
January 10, 2010
IN BETWEEN the first and second semesters at Henderson County Consolidated High School, Jody decided to clean out her collection of backpacks. Her idea was that if she destroyed her collection, then maybe that would end her nearly lifelong obsession with it.
It took her two days of going through each pack individually, examining each item and deciding if there was anything worth keeping or giving away. In the end she dumped almost all of it into black plastic trash bags, which she took to the county dump. The packs themselves ate up additional trash bags. She thought about trying to clean them up so they could be donated-to the school where she taught, for instance-but there wasn’t one of them that any self-respecting kid would have wanted to use. They were beaten up, torn up, filthy, out of fashion. But there were a few interesting objects inside of them, a dozen or so, that she wanted to show her aunt Belle, in case Belle might see any value in them for her museum.
HUGH SENIOR had been forced to eat crow about the Rose Historical Museum.
“I thought it was just a little hobby for her,” he admitted freely to people, more freely than his daughter liked, given that he also said, “I thought I was throwing money away, just to let Belle pretend she had a job.”
But he’d been wrong, as he was happy to say now.
Jody thought it was remarkable that during years when Rose was failing in almost every other way, her aunt’s museum-in-a-bank thrived. Belle had turned out to be a great curator with a superb eye for historical artifacts and a talent for displaying them. Plus, she was a public relations fool, as her brother Chase liked to say with admiration in his voice. Belle didn’t like that praise, either, given that he followed it with, “Who would have guessed?”
As for Belle’s writing, what Annabelle used to call “Belle’s little articles” turned out to be good enough to attract assignments from major publications. She became what Meryl called “the go-to girl” for historians and archaeologists, geologists and paleontologists, writers, photographers, and artists, even for the occasional television documentary about ancient seas and rivers, not to mention the busloads of schoolchildren who journeyed to Rose to run around the famous Rocks and giggle their way through her museum. The scientists who arrived in Rose contributed to the local economy: they ate at Bailey’s and the truck stop, and they bought bottled water and suntan lotion at George’s. Some of them got invited out to High Rock Ranch for supper and horseback riding for them and stimulating conversation for the Linders. Jody’s grandfather was especially proud of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist from China who had loved Annabelle’s homemade barbecue sauce.
Jody was proud of her aunt’s “little hobby.”
BELLE’S CHARM still didn’t extend very generously toward the family, and sometimes especially not toward Jody. Sometimes Jody worried that she was the reason Belle and Meryl never had children, because they’d had to spend too much time helping take care of her.
“You got these where, and how?” Belle challenged her niece.
“Out at the Rocks. It’s just stuff I happened to see and pick up.”
“Just happened to,” she said, casting a skeptical eye from the objects to Jody. Her aunt had always been a large woman, patterned on Hugh Senior’s family rather than on Annabelle’s; over the years her good cooking had broadened her as well, so that she cut a formidable figure. “Like you did when you were a little girl?”
“Maybe.”
“I didn’t know you kept doing that.”
“Well, I did. No harm done.”
“Hmm,” Belle said, sounding skeptical.
“Mostly junk,” she declared after a few silent moments of close examination of the first batch that Jody spilled out onto the glass countertop.
“Which ones aren’t junk?”
“This one.” Belle held up a bit of old wood that had a groove in it like old school desks did. “And this one”-a locket without a chain, but with an old-fashioned photo of a girl in it-“and this one”-a metal hinge that might also have come from a desk. “There used to be a one-room schoolhouse near the Rocks. It was ripped apart by a tornado in l882. Killed the teacher and all six children. I suspect these could be remnants of it.”
“I found them together.”
They had worked themselves up to the surface, as things did at the Rocks.
“You did? I’m glad to hear it. That makes it even more likely.”
The locket tugged at Jody’s heartstrings, given that it might have been worn by the schoolteacher or one of the children.
“Will you display them, Aunt Belle?”
But her aunt didn’t answer. She was staring at the second batch of items that Jody was rolling out onto the glass. When Belle finally spoke, her voice sounded choked and she didn’t look at Jody.
“Where did you find this?” she demanded.
Belle held a tarnished little sculpture in the palm of her hand.
“At the Rocks, like everything else. Remember one time I asked you if Mom wore a charm bracelet? I thought
