about Merle finding them. How he stayed at their side. Whimpering.
From the shoulder of the two-lane, she could just make out the crumbling plywood of her old playhouse in the magnolia tree. A knotted rope hung loose below.
She wished she could climb through its twisted branches, through the white, fragrant flowers, and into the safety of a world she’d created for herself. Up there, she never had any worries. True evil never existed. Only the sweet voice of her mother calling her to dinner, making her leave tins full of mud pies and discarded toys.
Her scarred knees and broad grins were all gone now.
She pulled the keys from the old F150’s ignition and took a deep breath. It was about 5:00 A.M.. Loose traffic blew past her on the way to Holly Springs and Memphis as she looked at herself in the rearview mirror. A weak, predawn light crept around her.
Dark circles rimmed her brown eyes. Her curly blond hair was limp and dirty and her face flat – washed of any color. Any life. Twenty-two years old and already tired of living.
Maybe it was that she was tired of being on the run. For the past two months, she’d existed in a hazy fog in roadside motels and truck stops. No one knew where she’d disappeared. She only wanted to be left alone and for the pain to stop. The days had passed with bottles of cheap wine and a blur of blacktop and scattered yellow median lines.
Being anonymous could be reassuring.
Abby gritted her teeth and got out of her car, a black duffel bag in her hand. The silence was almost too much. Each step she took on her lawn, as she looped to the back of the huge house, was pain.
She remembered how proud her father had been when he’d bought the place back in the late ‘eighties. Always told people he’d renovated it. But, really, he’d just paid the contractor to make some adjustments. There was a large skylight in the kitchen where he cooked his spicy Cajun food, and a sunken room he’d added that he called his theater where he made her watch John Wayne movies on a big-screen television. Big bowl of popcorn, Cokes in those small green bottles.
Never let her just watch the film, always talked about patriotism and true grit.
Seemed like she always wanted to be out with her friends, cruising the Square, or trying to sneak into frat parties. But now she’d give her life just to watch one of those faded, hokey movies with him. The smell of his cheap aftershave. His silly laugh.
On the side of the house, she took the brick steps onto the creaking porch. Yellow crime-scene tape sealed off the landing but she ducked beneath it. The sky was starting to turn a swirl of yellow and purple like a halo that surrounds a healing wound. A few small clouds were black and thin.
She went to the back door and dropped the bag, pulling out a crowbar and a flashlight. More crime-scene tape sealed the back door. She ignored it and sank the crowbar behind the metal wedge that held a new Master lock in place.
She pulled the wedge until her muscles screamed and the lock broke free. She inserted her own key into the door’s lock and pushed it open with her foot.
This was the first time she’d been inside since it happened. She’d been living just a few miles away at her sorority house on campus when she got a call from her cousin. She remembered speeding along the highway and seeing the ambulance and squad cars lined up outside. All of them parked haphazardly on the lawn.
Today, she felt like she was walking through a mausoleum. The kitchen was hot as an old attic. It smelled of stale bread and rotten oranges. The sun was rising over the barn in the backyard, its rays filtering through an oak tree. Beams shot into an antique stained-glass window mounted over the kitchen sink.
Abby turned on the flashlight and walked through a narrow hallway, passing pictures of her family on horseback and on ski trips, and into the den. More tape blocked her path and she ripped it aside as she felt her face break and her throat crack.
Her legs buckled and she dropped to her knees when she saw his old chair. Brown leather, a history of the Civil War lying in its well-worn seat. She pulled herself up and slid into the chair still smelling his presence.
She imagined her mother cooking now. Maybe shelling peas or chatting with their maid, Lucy.
She closed her eyes and felt the tears bleed down her face.
She clasped her hands over the heat of the flashlight, pushed herself to her feet, and walked back to the study where he died. She rolled back the twin doors and saw the fat, mahogany desk and chair that creaked when he would lean back and study cases.
She placed her hand on the desk, sitting flush next to the far wall, and reached to its corner, pulling as hard as she could. The desk barely budged and she tried harder. Finally, it squeaked on the wooden floor and she could see the square pattern he’d cut into the wall. She pulled back the desk a little more and used the crowbar to pop out the square.
Inside, she saw the face of the safe. The combination was easy, her parents’ anniversary. She wheeled through the numbers and cracked it open. Without even looking at the headings on the dozens of manila folders or the contents of the velvet-covered boxes, she slid them into the duffel bag.
She closed the safe, reinserted the square, and pushed the desk back flush with the wall.
She didn’t need the flashlight anymore. Dawn had arrived. A gray light burned through the curtains. A stale heat pulsed in the room.
She walked to the front hall and looked at the door to her parents’ bedroom. She knew that her mother had been there when the men – the police said it was more than one – had entered and emptied their guns into her father.
She’d almost made it to the door – maybe running to her husband – when a slug ripped into her shoulder and another into her temple. She’d been wearing that goddamned housecoat Abby hated so much. The ratty terry-cloth thing with ripped pockets.
Abby stared at the door and dropped her head. Her fine hair fell into her eyes and matted to her damp face.
The answers were in her bag now. She knew it. The local cops were idiots. They said it was a robbery. But he’d still had a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex on his wrist when they found him.
Abby shook her head at the thought, gripped the black bag tight to her chest, and sprinted to her car. The ghosts were too close.
F rom a clearing along the back highway, Perfect studied the girl’s face through a pair of small binoculars. She’d followed the girl all the way from Meridian where she’d stayed for the last couple of days in a run-down trucker’s motel. The girl, whose name was Abby, didn’t see Perfect, though.
Perfect had kept close to the shadows watching the girl’s movements, listening in on her phone conversations with her cousin – amazing what the manager of the motel could do – and sifting through the girl’s old truck while she was asleep. She found a photo album, a duffel bag of used clothes, and receipts from the last couple of months.
Abby. Hmm. Liked to spend daddy’s money. Banana Republic T-shirts. J. Crew underwear. A pair of Nike running shoes that probably cost a hundred and fifty bucks. Caswell-Massey lotion mixed in with tiny bottles of motel shampoo.
Perfect would have to straighten her hair, shear it at the jawline, maybe even lose the platinum. Girls like Abby didn’t know how to be sexy. They liked blending in. They liked wearing boys’ jeans and tattered baseball hats.
She watched Abby run to the truck with the same black bag in her hand. Was it weightier now? Sure it was, Perfect thought, reaching into her Navajo-print purse and pulling out a pack of Capris. She lit a match and sucked in some smoke as Abby’s truck disappeared from her rearview mirror.
There was time.
Perfect fussed with her hair, trying to imagine how it would look with a few inches trimmed away and a wash of brown color. She’d have to stop by one of the shops on Oxford Square and buy a roll-neck sweater, preferably gray, and a pair of jeans. Only slightly faded, of course. And was there a sporting goods store that sold really good shoes? She couldn’t remember.
Makeup? Almost none. Maybe a dull gloss on her lips, and, yeah, she’d have to remove the color from her nails and then cut them down a bit.
The sunlight bled over the far grassy hill and stretched its weight across the old farmhouse, a dilapidated barn with a tin roof, making the light shine hard in her eyes, and over the bumping green hills close to the
