neighbors or the guys from work, drinking beers and playing pool made John more livid than anything else he had found.
John went through the drawers of the workbench, careful not to move anything out of place. He found a stack of porn mags under the tray in the toolbox, all the headlines promising “barely legal action” and “cum shots galore.” He flipped through the pages one by one, looking for clues, trying not to stare at the young girls-children, some of them-spread out for the world to see. Maybe something inside of John had been turned off in prison, but all he could think about when he saw their soulless gazes was Joyce, and how insecure and vulnerable she had been at that age. He put the magazines back under the tray, wishing he hadn’t seen them.
Woody’s bedroom was next, a huge master suite with a king-sized bed where the fucker probably made love to his wife every night. The bathroom was enormous, bigger than John’s room back at the hovel. Even the kid’s room was large, a racecar for a bed, toys spilling out of the chest under the window. John felt odd being in the kid’s room. The little bed would be changed for a big one soon. The kid would start growing up, wanting his privacy more. He’d go to school, meet a girl, take her to the prom. It was just too depressing to be in there, so John backed into the hall again.
He returned to the master bedroom, certain he had missed something. He tried to think like his parole officer, Ms. Lam, looking for contraband. He checked under the mattress, felt the pillows for hard lumps. He went through the shoes in the closet and the shirts in the drawer.
Shirts. All designer labels. Soft cottons, some silk. Woody’s underwear was Calvin Klein, his pajamas Nautica.
“Christ,” John whispered, so caught up in hating Woody that he couldn’t breathe. “Think,” he said, like that would make it happen. “Think.”
Two bottles of men’s cologne were on the dresser. John wasn’t interested in the brands, but what had been placed in front of them. A large folding knife. Woody had carried this same knife when they were teenagers. He said it was because he dealt with some badass motherfuckers in his drug dealings, and John had believed him, imagining tense standoffs and risky drug deals as his cousin brandished the sharp, serrated blade.
Woody carried a knife. How had he forgotten that?
“Who are you?”
John spun around, shocked to see the next-door neighbor standing in the doorway to the bedroom. She was wearing a silky white nightgown with a robe. The outfit hung from her child’s body like a wet sack on a pitchfork. Her voice was a little girl’s, high-pitched, almost squeaky.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, but he could tell she was scared.
“I might ask you the same thing,” he said, palming the knife, trying to call up the authoritative tone adults used when they spoke to kids.
“This isn’t your house.”
“It’s not yours, either,” John pointed out. “You live next door.”
“How do you know that?”
“Woody told me.”
She glanced down at his hands, the latex gloves, the knife. “Who’s Woody?”
The question tripped him up, and she must have sensed his hesitation, because she bolted down the hall.
“Hey!” John called, chasing after her through the living room, the kitchen. “Hold up,” he yelled, but she had already flown through the open door and into the yard.
She chanced a look over her shoulder as she made for the fence. He remembered that he still had Woody’s knife in his hand, realized how that must look to her, and stopped. She hesitated again, but her body was still moving. Moving forward.
He watched her fall in slow motion, her bare foot catching on the broken fence, her head slamming into the ground. John waited. She didn’t get up. He waited some more. She still did not move.
Slowly, he stepped into the backyard, the grass soft under his feet. He remembered how it had felt when he got out of Coastal to walk on grass for the first time in twenty years. His feet were used to solid concrete or red Georgia clay packed hard as brick from thousands of men pacing it every day. The grass in the cemetery had felt so soft, like he was stepping on clouds as he followed his mother’s coffin toward her grave.
Twenty years and he had forgotten what grass felt like. Twenty years of loneliness, of isolation. Twenty years of Emily suffering the bimonthly degradation of visiting her son. Twenty years of Joyce being eaten up inside by the knowledge of what kind of monster her brother was.
Twenty years of “Woody living on the outside, getting a good job, marrying, having a kid, making a life.
John stepped carefully over the fence. He realized he still had Woody’s folding knife in his hand, and he put it on the ground beside him as he knelt by the girl. He had learned how to check a pulse at the prison hospital. She didn’t have one. Even without that evidence, he could see from the way her skull was broken that she had probably died the minute her head had slammed against a large rock on the other side of the fence. Her blood was smeared across the quartz, pieces of long blonde hair sticking into the wet.
He sat back on his heels, his mind going over the last time he had seen Mary Alice. Her eyes. He would never forget her eyes, the way she had stared into nowhere. Her body told the real story, though. She had endured horrible things, unspeakable things. In his mind, he could still recall the blown-up pictures from his trial, the photographs showing Mary Alice Finney’s violated body splayed out for the world to see. He remembered his aunt pacing back and forth in front of the jury, and how he’d thought at the time that Lydia’s pacing was bad because all it did was draw their attention to the pictures that were right behind her.
“It’s okay,” John had told Lydia when she’d come to Coastal and explained that their appeals were exhausted, that he would more than likely die in prison. “I know you did everything you could.”
Lydia had told him not to talk about drugs with the police, not to mention “Woody because bringing her son into it would open up John’s past drug abuse and they didn’t want that, did they? If ”Woody was put on the stand, he’d tell the truth.
They didn’t want Woody telling the truth, did they?
That night at the party, Woody had said, “No hard feelings,” tossing him the baggie. Was that when he had decided to hurt Mary Alice?
No hard feelings. John didn’t have any feelings left-just rage that burned like he’d swallowed gasoline and lit a match.
He looked down at the girl. She was a child, but she was also a messenger.
John’s stomach clenched as he slid his gloved fingers into her mouth, pinched her tongue between his thumb and forefinger.
Woody had brought all of this to John’s door. John would put it right back on his. The most important thing he learned in prison was that you never touched another man’s property unless you were willing to die for it.
“Woody,” he had called him, but that was a boy’s name and Woody wasn’t a boy anymore. Like John, he was a man. He should be called by a man’s name.
Michael Ormewood.
John picked up the knife.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“You need to walk it off,” John told Mary Alice. “You can’t go home like this.”
“Have you ever kissed a girl?”
He blushed and she laughed.
“Mark Reed,” she told him. “He thinks he’s my boyfriend because he kissed me after the game.”
John kept quiet, saying a silent prayer of death for Mark Reed, quarterback of the football team, driver of a red Corvette, and proud owner of much body hair, which the fucker liked to show off around the locker room like he was working at freaking Chippendale’s.
“You didn’t answer me,” Mary Alice said, and John thought about Woody’s bag of white powder in his
