Frank picked it up. “I met her sister,” he said. He looked at Caleb. “The two of them had lived together since the plane crash.” He shook his head. “Now she has nobody, as far as I can tell.”
Caleb stared at him, unmoved. “When you get down to the wire on it, not many people do. That’s a true fact, unrecorded.” He nodded toward the still-unopened manila folder. “Anyway, we’ve got a cause of death now.” His eyes seemed to withdraw into their large round sockets. “Drano.”
“What?”
“Drano, or something like it,” Caleb repeated. “A lye-based poison. That’s what the lab boys call it.” He took the report from Frank’s hand and opened it. “Here it is,” he said. Then he read directly from the report. “A lye-based poison administered by multiple injection within the pubic region.” He closed the folder. “What do you think?”
Frank eased the report from Caleb’s hands and began to read it. Very little was out of the ordinary. There was no rape, just as Caleb had said, and neither were there any drugs present in her bloodstream.
“Didn’t have so much as a drink for the road,” Caleb said.
Frank continued to read while Caleb stood over him, staring down.
“I can save you some time, Frank,” he said at last.
“What do you mean?”
“She was pregnant,” Caleb said bluntly.
Frank lowered the folder to his desk.
“Meaning it could be something simple,” Caleb added.
“Like what?”
“The law calls it ‘wrongful death.’”
“Meaning what?”
“Maybe she was trying to give herself an abortion.”
“With lye?” Frank asked unbelievingly.
“Anything,” Caleb added. “Some friend at school could have said something, just a line about how lye’ll get rid of a baby.”
Frank continued to watch him doubtfully.
“Remember that Johnson kid, remember him?”
“The kid who hanged himself.”
“That’s right. Everybody but his parents thought it was a suicide.”
“Well, that’s what you think, Caleb, when you’ve got a kid swinging from the rafters with a knocked-over stool right under him.”
“But it wasn’t suicide, Frank,” Caleb said. “His mother kept telling me that, and I believed her.”
“I thought it was the fact that he was naked that bothered you.”
“That, too,” Caleb said. “So, anyway, I checked around and found out that a few kids on the basketball team had told him how great it was to jerk off while you’re just at the edge of consciousness. That’s what he was trying to do.”
“And so now you figure the Devereaux girl for a botched abortion?”
“Maybe,” Caleb said. “She could have done it herself, given herself those injections.”
Frank looked at him pointedly. Caleb smiled. “Yeah, I know. She couldn’t have dragged her own dead body across that field, could she?”
“No.”
“I bet I know who did.”
Frank waited.
“The daddy,” Caleb said. He nodded sagely. “Mark my words, you find the daddy of that baby, and you’ll find the poor lost soul who killed that girl. Or helped her kill herself. Whatever. You get the daddy, you get the story.”
“Maybe,” Frank said. But even as he said it, he found that he did not feel certain of it. He had seen too many cases where the general rules did not apply, where nothing ever reduced to its most common elements. For an instant, as he glanced back down at the folder, he thought he heard a voice rise from it. He knew it was only a trick of the mind, but he could not refuse to hear it. It was wordless, almost inaudible, and yet he could hear it, a low, withdrawing moan.
Caleb placed his hand on Frank’s shoulder. “Find the father, you’ll find everything.”
Frank nodded and opened the folder once again.
“You doubt it?” Caleb asked.
“I don’t know.”
Caleb looked at him scoldingly. “You make things too complex, Frank.” He laughed slightly. “You don’t ever see the simple things.”
“Maybe I just don’t like them,” Frank said, as his eyes once again scanned the first page of the report.
Caleb released his shoulder. “Well, I got to go home. Big Hilda’s waiting.” He leaned forward and tapped on the report. “Raise a joyful noise, Frank. The fact that the girl was pregnant is the best thing that could have happened on this case.” He stood up straight. “And while I’m full of advice, stay away from the Bottom Rail.”
“I never liked it that much,” Frank said casually.
“And places a whole lot like it, stay away from them, too.”
Frank looked up at him. “You’re beginning to sound like my brother.”
“Oh, shit,” Caleb said with a shiver. “Blessed Jesus, save me from that.” He laughed loudly and walked out of the room.
Frank turned his eyes back toward the report, but his mind remained for a time on Alvin, and for a brief moment he allowed his thought to settle almost tenderly on his brother. He thought of all the things that were clean and clear in Alvin’s life, the unwavering line he walked from work to home, then back to work again. He could see Alvin mowing the grass in the summer, trimming the hedge, tossing a bowling ball on the one night a week he took for himself, and as he considered these things, he realized with sadness that only the crude coincidence of blood connected him to his brother. They had grown as distant from one another as two bits of debris floating in separate galaxies, and now Sheila floated in one more separate still, and his father in yet another, and Sarah had gone even beyond those, beyond recall, forever.
After a while, he found himself staring at the lab report again. He opened it slowly and read it once more, this time more closely, his notebook open beside it, his pencil poised over the small blank page. It was always possible that something lay hidden in the clean, scientific language. He read the first page, then the second, and behind the crisp, matter-of-fact sentences, he could hear the blade of the scalpel as it sliced into Angelica’s stomach and then the slosh of its contents as they spilled out into the stainless steel pan. She had eaten a ham sandwich not long before her death and had drunk some milk. There were no drugs, no alcohol. She had died cold sober. Cold sober she had felt the needle as it pierced her skin, felt the lye flow into her blood. The report surmised that she could have administered the poison herself. It would have been painful, but not impossible. There were no signs of her having been in any way restrained, no rope burns or marks of violence. But the vision which rose from these facts was odd, a beautiful young girl sitting in a chair, filling a hypodermic needle with poison again and again, injecting it into her pubic region again and again. “Seven hypodermic injections,” the report concluded, and then added in a final statement as flat as the sound of a hammer nailing shut Angelica’s coffin: “Death by misadventure.”
The last word continued to sound in Frank’s mind: misadventure. But if she had accidentally killed herself, then someone had helped her do it, then dragged her body into that vacant lot and dumped it.
And there was something else. Dirt had been found in her mouth. As Frank recalled the position of her body, the way it lay face-up on its back, he could not see how any dirt had gotten there. Had Angelica been dragged by the feet and on her stomach, then it was possible that her mouth might have picked up some of the loose earth of the lot. But her face would have been scarred, and it had not been. The front of her blouse was not soiled.
The more Frank thought about these things, the more he felt himself drawn back to the vacant lot. For a few minutes, he fought the impulse to return to it. It had already been thoroughly searched. His eyes were no better than anyone else’s. And yet, the field seemed to urge him toward it, call to him as if its very silence was a strange, imploring voice.
It was dark by the time he pulled the car up to the curb, and he could almost feel the moment when, the night before, someone else had done the same thing, had pulled up to the curb, quickly snapped off the headlights, and then stepped out into the shadowless darkness.
