years.'
Caroline gave him a careful nod. 'How do you do?'
'Fine and dandy.' His sharp physician's eyes scanned her face and recognized shock. 'Burke gave me a call. Said he was headed on down here.' Shays took out a huge white handkerchief to mop his neck and face. Though he could move fast when he had to, his slow and easy pace was more than bedside manner. It was the way he preferred to do things. 'Hell of a hot one, ain't it?'
'Yes.'
'Why don't we go on inside, where it's cooler?'
'No, I think…' She looked helplessly back toward the shielding trees. 'I should wait. He went in there to see… I was throwing stones in the water. I could see only her face.'
He sat beside her, took her hand in his. Fingers still nimble after forty years of medicine monitored her pulse. 'Whose face, darlin'?'
'I don't know.' When he reached down to open his bag, she stiffened. Months of vigilant doctors with their slim, shiny needles had her system jittering. 'I don't need anything. I don't want anything.' She jolted to her feet, and though she tried, she couldn't keep her voice from shrilling. 'I'm all right. You should try to help her. There must be something you could do to help her.'
'One thing at a time, darlin'.' To show good faith, he shut his bag again. 'Why don't you sit on down here and tell me all about it? Nice and slow. Then we can figure out what's what.'
She didn't sit, but she did gain enough control to take several long breaths. She didn't want to end up in the hospital again. Couldn't. 'I'm sorry. I don't suppose I'm making much sense.'
'Well, now, that don't worry me none. Most people I know spend about half their lives making sense and the other half exercising their jaw. You just tell me how it occurs to you.'
'I think she must have drowned,' Caroline said in a calm and careful voice. 'In the pond. I could see only her face…' She trailed off, forcing back the image before it nudged her toward hysteria again. 'I'm afraid she was dead.'
Before Shays could question further, Deputy Carl Johnson came out of the trees and started across the sun- bleached lawn. His usually spotless uniform showed traces of dirt and streaks of wet. Still, he walked with military precision, a commanding figure, six foot six of taut muscle. His glossy skin was the color of chestnuts.
He was a man who enjoyed his authority and prized his control. Just now he was fighting to maintain his professional aura when what he wanted to do was find a secluded spot to lose his lunch.
'Doc.'
'Carl.'
It needed only that for the two men to exchange information. Muttering an oath, Shays mopped his face again.
'Miss Waverly, I'd be obliged to use your phone.'
'Of course. Can you tell me what…' Again, her gaze was drawn toward the trees, her mind to what was beyond them. 'Is she dead?'
Carl hesitated only a moment, pulling off his cap to reveal tight black curls cut as close and neat as a newly mowed lawn. 'Yes, ma'am. The sheriff'll talk to you as soon as he can. Doc?'
With a weary nod, Shays rose.
'There's a phone right here in the hall,' Caroline began as she started up the steps. 'Deputy…'
'Johnson, ma'am. Carl Johnson.'
'Deputy Johnson, did she drown?'
He shot Caroline a quick look as he held open the screen door for her. 'No, ma'am. She didn't.'
Burke was sitting on the log, turned away from the body. A Polaroid camera sat beside him. He needed a minute before he slipped back into his law-and-order suit. A minute for his head to clear, for his stomach to settle.
He'd seen death before-had known the look and the smell of it from boyhood, hunting with his father. First they'd gone out for the sheer pleasure of it. Then, when crops and investments had failed, they'd hunted to put meat on the table.
He'd seen the death of his own kind as well.
Starting with his father's suicide when the farm had been lost. And wasn't it that death that had led him to this one? Without the farm, with a wife and two young children to support, he'd signed on as town deputy, then as sheriff. The rich man's son who had detested the futility of his father's death, and the cruelty of the land that had caused it, had chosen to channel his talents, such as they were, toward law and order.
But even finding his father hanging in the barn, hearing the quiet creak of the rope rubbing over the thick beam, hadn't prepared him for what he'd found in McNair Pond.
He still had much too clear a picture of what it had been like to wrestle that body from the water, to drag it out onto the ground.
It was funny, he thought, drawing hard on a cigarette, he'd never liked Edda Lou. There had been a coarseness about her, a sly look in her eyes that had milked away any sympathy he might have felt for her being unfortunate enough to be kin to Austin Hatinger.
But just now he was remembering the way she'd looked one long-ago Christmas when he and Susie had come across her in town. She'd have been no more than ten, mousy hair stringing down her back, patched dress hiking up too far at the side hem and drooping at the front. And her nose pressed up to Larsson's window as she stared at a doll with a blue cape and rhinestone tiara.
She'd just been a little girl then, wishing there was a Santa. Already knowing there wasn't.
He turned his head when he heard the rustle of brush. 'Doc.' He blew out a stream of smoke on the word. 'Christ.'
Shays laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, squeezed once, then moved to the body. Death wasn't a stranger to him, and he had come to know that death wasn't only for the old, either. He could accept that the young were taken, through illness, through accident. But this mutilation, this wild destruction of a human being was beyond acceptance.
Gently, he picked up one of the limp hands and studied the raw wrist. The same telltale signs braceleted the ankles. It hurt him more somehow, this ring of broken skin and the hopelessness it represented, than the vicious slices on her torso.
'She was one of the first babies I delivered when I came back to Innocence.' With a sigh he did what Burke had not been able to do. He reached down and shut Edda Lou's eyes. 'It's hard for parents to bury their children. By Jesus, it's hard for doctors, too.'
'He messed her up pretty good,' Burke managed to say. 'Just like the others.'
He picked up the camera. They would need more pictures, and God knew he had to do something before the coroner came. He swallowed a hard knot of anger.
'She was tied to that tree there. There's blood dried on it. You can see from the scrapes on her back where she rubbed against it. Used clothesline. Pieces of it are still there.' He lowered the camera again, and his eyes were bright with fury. 'What the hell was she doing here? Her car's back in town.'
'Can't tell you that, Burke. Can't tell you a hell of a lot. She was hit on the back of the head.' Shays's hands were as soothing as they would have been had his patient been alive to feel them. 'Maybe he hauled her out here. Maybe she came on her own and riled him up.'
Struggling to hold on to his nerves, Burke nodded. He knew, just as everyone in town knew, who it was Edda Lou had riled up.
Caroline paced the porch. If she could have worked up the courage, she'd have marched into the bayou and demanded information. She wasn't sure how much longer she could stand this waiting. But she knew she'd never make it past the first stand of trees, not when she knew what was beyond them.
She saw the dark sedan creep down the drive, followed by a white van. Coroner, she thought. When the men got out of the van with a stretcher and a thick black bag, she turned away. That bag, that long black bag not so different in shape and size from the kind people used to haul off things they no longer wanted, that bag reminded her much too forcibly that it wasn't a person in the pond, it wasn't a woman, it was only a body that wouldn't suffer from the indignity of being taken away in a big piece of plastic.
