looked around the yard some. I’m not sure what he might’ve been hunting for. Drugs, I suppose. But she never touched none of that. There was nothing suspicious. So he told me, anyways. But if there was nothing peculiar, why was he lookin’?”
“Good point.”
So Dave didn’t consider her death to be from natural causes. Shad checked for something he could use to help him hold his course. “Letters? A diary?” He unmade the bed and, despite himself, tore away the blankets, and pulled up the mattress, the box spring Pa had made himself. He stared blankly at the clean slats of the floor beneath.
“Nothing like that. You knew your sister.”
Of course he had-but no, of course he hadn’t. Not anymore. He’d strayed off for two of the most important years in her life. When he’d gone into the can she’d just begun the transition from girl to young woman. It made him ache to think of what he’d missed.
“Don’t go up there,” his father said again, the man talking the way he did when Shad was a kid. “Stay away from them woods.”
“Pa, did you ever think that maybe someone just left her there? A boyfriend?”
“She didn’t have none.”
“Maybe you just didn’t know.”
“I knew everything about my baby girl.”
Except why she was dead. “They probably went up there to make out. Had a fight. She-”
“There wasn’t no boy, son.”
He’d been priming himself for weeks to avenge a killing. There had been cruelty in his father’s voice, whether the old man admitted to it now or not. He’d been calling down the rage, hoping to set it in motion.
Shad walked out but couldn’t help staring over at the chessboard. Both sides had mate in three moves. Pa always played a losing game.
Most of them did. Shad knew he had to fight, all the time, without hope of finishing, to keep from doing the same. The blood dreams had violent, beautiful needs that were entirely human.
Chapter Three
WHEN HE GOT BACK TO MRS. RHYERSON’S boardinghouse he called Dave Fox from the phone in the hallway, and said, “It’s Shad Jenkins. I want you to show me where Megan’s body was found.”
Even a call at midnight didn’t surprise Dave. When you stood six-foot-four, went 250 of brawn and assurance, and could shoot the asshole out of a junkyard rat with an S &W.32 at two hundred yards, there wasn’t much that could shake you. He’d never been rattled in his life, over anything, but there was a trace of concern in his firm voice. “Maybe that’s not such a smart decision. The hell are you doing? You shouldn’t even be here.”
“It’s about time people stopped informing me of their opinions on where I should be.”
“You nearly gained yourself a college degree in the can. That puts you on the highway out of this county. You got a start on something new.”
It surprised Shad. He hadn’t known Dave Fox or the sheriff’s office would be so plugged in on him. He leaned against the wall, trying to ignore the pink wallpaper and a framed paint-by-numbers portrait of Conway Twitty shaking hands with Jesus.
“Is that how you’d play it?” Shad asked.
He was almost grinning and wasn’t sure why, until he reached up and felt his lips and realized it wasn’t a grin at all, he was baring his teeth. You could lose control for an instant and not even know it.
Never show what’s inside. If you didn’t hide it, they’d use it against you. He touched his mouth again and his expression was tranquil.
Dave still hadn’t responded and wouldn’t put it into words, but they both understood that hollow folks always paid their debts, and went after whatever was owed. “Will you take me up there?”
“Yes. I’ll pick you up at seven.”
“Thanks.”
It made sense. Dave had been keeping tabs on him and already knew Shad was staying at the boardinghouse.
He could hear it in the deputy’s voice, and sense his fortitude even over the phone. Dave Fox remained imperturbable, solid as mahogany, a tower of finely carved muscle, unwavering but purposeful. They’d never been particularly close but Shad guessed that was about to change now.
He hung up and thought of Mags’s beautiful face, dead at seventeen, laid out in the middle of a road no one ever traveled.
When he got back to the room his mother and the white bishop were waiting for him, standing there together smiling, breathing heavily as if they’d just been dancing. Shad looked down and saw himself sleeping on the bed with his eyes open.
It hadn’t happened like this for a while.
With her hand against the white bishop’s chin, drawing him to her, the robes flowed around them both as they whispered to one another and giggled. Shad noticed the inside of the window was steamed, and a word was written on the glass.
Pharisee
Someone had spelled it out using an index finger.
Shad stepped toward his mother but she wasn’t aware of him yet. It would take time, he knew, and he tried not to let the dread build within him. The bishop moved away from her and leaned over Shad’s body on the bed, put a hand on his shoulder as if trying to wake him. Failing that, the bishop slid away and came to rest beside Shad where he stood in the center of the room, and spoke to him from the corner of his mouth. As if they were conspirators in a grand royal treachery.
The white bishop’s voice was the voice of his father. “So there you are.”
“Yes,” Shad said.
The three roles of the bishop were illustrated in his vestments. His role as ruler was denoted by the crown. As a guardian, by the shepherd’s staff. As a guide, by the bells on the
The
Shad had no idea how he knew such things. His cellmate, Jeffie O’Rourke, was probably the only Catholic he had ever met.
The staff stood midchest high and had a small crossbar as a handle. The white bishop tapped it on the floor to get Shad’s attention. “She forgets more every year.”
“I know,” Shad said. “It’s better that way.”
“She wants to give you advice, though.”
He tried to imagine what it might be, the form it would take, and if there was any chance that it might prove useful. Usually his mother’s guidance-if this was his mother-came in tangled meanings and bewildering prophecies that never came to pass. He kept waiting, hoping she’d help him out along the way, but so far she wasn’t proving to be much of an oracle.
Mama’s ghost slowly became cognizant of him standing there and glanced over, searching, but without seeing him yet. She stared off into the distance, and said, “Son?”
“I’m here, Mama.”
“Son?”
