Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“You what?” French had asked, on the radio.

Panting, “I think it’s her, Roy.”

“Don’t touch a thing,” French ordered, “and don’t tell a soul. Just set up your perimeter and wait.”

He and the sheriff arrived sharing a four-wheeler not long after, search warrant in hand, prying the lock off the cabin door and moving the bed aside, French saying he’d walked this land himself, twice, both times missing the cabin, camouflaged as it was by kudzu. How in the world had Silas found it?

“Just lucky,” he’d lied.

The cabin was illuminated that night by harsh floodlights on tripods, heavy orange extension cords leading outside to where portable generators had been trailered in by four-wheelers. French filmed the two forensics experts from the C.I.B., wearing Tyvek suits and respirators, as they dug into the floor using entrenching tools to move the soft dirt. Half an hour later one raised his head and gave French a thumbs-up.

Standing in the corner by the stove, Silas had no way to catalog his emotions as what he’d been smelling for a while bubbled up out of his throat and he fled the house, out the door through the vines and ivy spot-lit and drawn back like curtains. The coroner and two deputies and the sheriff stood outside smoking and talking quietly. Silas gave them a weak nod as he lurched into the night, past where the lights could find him, and retched until his eyes burned and his gut hurt.

Later he went back in. Hand over his nose and mouth, he forced himself to look down at what they were discussing, photographing. She’d been thrown in naked on her stomach, he could tell, he could see part of her spine but not, thank God, what would have been her face. What he saw was not even a girl anymore, instead something from one of Larry’s horror books, black and melted-looking and dissolved. What drove Silas back out of the house the second time was not her spine with dirt in its intricate lines or her shoulder blades bound in strands of flesh or the matted green hair where skin from her skull had loosened, but the wrist one of the C.I.B. agents lifted in his heavy rubber glove, her small bony hand with its fingers cupped, showing French’s camera the nails that still bore chipped red polish, and, loose on one of the fingers, her class ring.

Now, his arms up to halt the trucks, Silas’s cell phone began to ring. It always did during traffic duty. Anything official came over his radio, phone calls were personal.

Fuck it, he thought. He dug out his cell.

“Officer Jones?”

“You got him.”

“This Brenda.”

“Who?”

“Up at River Acres? Nursing home?”

It was hard to hear for the traffic and he stuck a finger in his opposite ear.

“Hey,” he said. “I can’t talk now.”

“You wanted to know when Mrs. Ott was having a good day?”

“Yeah?”

“She having one now.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll get over there soon as I can.”

“You best hurry,” she was saying as he hung up.

THE MILL HAD shut down for Tina Rutherford’s funeral. Hell, Chabot had. Black ribbons on the office and store doors, a long line of cars from the Baptist church following the hearse over the highway, Silas directing traffic for that, too, his post at the crossroads of 102 and 11, the four-way stop in his jurisdiction where the procession might get broken up by log trucks, shadows of birds flickering over the road, his uniform pressed and his hat over his heart as cars trolled by with their lights on, him standing, as he had not in years, at navy attention. The windows of the Rutherford limousine were tinted and he couldn’t see the girl’s parents, just a pair of white hands on the steering wheel. And after what must’ve been a hundred vehicles had rolled by, he’d driven to the church and sat in his Jeep, unable to go inside. Later he caboosed the procession to a graveyard miles out in the country, whites only buried there, lovely landscaped grounds shaded by live oaks with Spanish moss slanted in the wind like beards of dead generals. Nothing like the wooded cemetery where Alice Jones lay under her little rock on the side of a hill eaten up with kudzu, the plastic flowers blown over and strewn by the wind. During the Rutherford girl’s burial, a high bright sun and two tiny airplanes crossing the sky, he’d stood at the edge of trees, away from the grief-French had been the one to tell Rutherford his daughter was dead, and for that Silas had been grateful-while the white people near the open grave and the black ones surrounding them at a distance sang “Amazing Grace” accompanied by bagpipes and while Larry Ott lay in his coma, belted to his hospital bed, a deputy posted by the door.

Silas had asked that French let him have the midnight-to-six shift there. He wasn’t a deputy but it was in French’s power to use him. “Fine by me,” the CI had said. “Long as you can stay awake. Nobody else wants it, and we short-handed as it is. But I’m curious.”

“I need the money,” Silas said. Just one damn lie after another.

“Yeah right.”

Silas figured French thought he just craved more limelight, didn’t want to give up the case, wanted to stay in the loop. Which was partially true, and which also helped explain why Silas had gone by Larry’s house every day since he’d found the girl. The first day the deputy stationed there was sitting on the porch in Larry’s rocking chair with his feet crossed reading one of Larry’s books. Silas parked behind his cruiser and got out and nodded.

“What you up to, 32?”

“Feed the man’s chickens.”

The deputy followed him back and into the barn and watched Silas sling corn into the pen, the chickens pecking it up, Silas wondering if they’d think he’d gone over the edge if he fired up Larry’s tractor and pulled the cage to a fresh square of grass.

“I could do that,” the deputy said. “Save you running all the way out here.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You ought to collect the eggs, too. With no rooster in there they just gone rot.”

“You want em?”

“God almighty no. I bring home eggs from Scary Larry? My wife’d thow em at me.”

“You could probably sell em on eBay,” Silas said. “Or one of them serial killer Web sites.”

The deputy toed the lawn mower wheels. “What’s these here for?”

Silas explained as he filled the water tire and shooed the setting hens aside and collected half a dozen dry, brown, shit-speckled eggs, and carried them back to his Jeep. He began taking them to Marla at The Hub, who said she was glad to have them, eggs was eggs.

Nights he sat in a folding chair outside Larry’s door, a tall thermos of coffee and one of Marla’s greasy sacks by his feet, the overhead lights dim, Silas squeaking around on the chair and trying to convince himself of why he was here. He’d brought Night Shift from his office, and because his ass hurt walked the hospital hall reading the stories he never had as a kid.

They’d put Larry in a room at the end of a hall to keep gawkers away, Silas having to stand up a few times each shift to warn off shufflers, old men in robes clinging to their portable IV racks, or nurses from other floors and, once, a hugely pregnant woman in a robe and hospital flip-flops who told him she was in labor.

Silas said, “You a long way from the delivery room.”

Trying to look past him, Larry’s door cracked. “They said walk around.” She pushed her hands into the small of her back. “Try to get this little bastard kick-started.”

Larry was now a suspect-the suspect-in Tina Rutherford’s murder, and Silas had given French his tire molds and the evidence bags with the broken glass and roach in them. Larry’s keys, too. The newspapers and television stations following the story had dug up the scant facts on the Cindy Walker case, as well, how a quarter of a century earlier Larry had picked her up for a date and, hours later, come home without her. A new road had been slashed into Larry’s land and the cabin dismantled, the earth beneath it excavated, French hoping that the Walker girl’s bones might be recovered as well, closing that case. But despite the fact that no more bones had been found, reporters and newscasters were speculating that Larry Ott had attempted suicide because of what he’d done to Tina Rutherford and possibly Cindy Walker and, who knew, maybe other girls. There’d been one from Mobile missing for eleven years. Another from Memphis. Maybe these two-and, who knew, others-were buried somewhere on the last acres Larry Ott had refused to sell to the lumber mill.

Under orders not to talk to reporters, Silas didn’t tell Voncille about moonlighting as Larry’s guard, knowing