Karin Slaughter - Indelible

Jeffrey seemed to be holding his breath. When Sara did not continue, he asked, "Did she have a baby?"

"Yes," she told him. "She did."

Jeffrey put the pipe down in front of him.

"Who's Julia?"

He exhaled slowly. "Didn't Nell tell you?"

"She said to ask you."

Jeffrey sat back against the cabinet, leaning his hands on his knees. He would not look at her. "It was a long time ago."

"How long?"

"Ten years, I guess. Maybe more."

"And?"

"And she was…I don't know, it sounds bad now, but she was kind of like the town slut." He wiped his mouth. "She did things. You know, touched you." He glanced at her, then looked away. "Rumor was she'd give a blow job if you bought her something. Clothes or lunch or whatever. She didn't have much, so…"

"How old was she?"

"Our age," he said. "She was in the same class as me and Robert."

Sara saw where he was going with this. "Did you ever buy her anything?"

He looked offended. "No," he said. "I didn't have to pay for that kind of stuff."

"Of course not."

"Do you want to hear this or not?"

"I want you to tell me what happened."

"She just left one day," he said with a forced shrug. "She was there one day and gone the next."

"There's more to it than that."

"I can't…" He let his voice trail off. "I found this yesterday in the cave," he said, taking something out of his pocket. Sara saw a necklace with a charm on it.

"Why didn't you tell me then?"

He opened the locket and looked inside. "I don't know. I just -" He stopped. "I just didn't want you to know one more bad thing about me."

"What bad thing?"

"Talk," he said, meeting her eyes. "It's just talk, Sara. The same old bullshit that's been following me around since I got here. You get to a point where you're guilty of one thing and people think you're guilty of another."

"What do they think you're guilty of?"

Jeffrey held out the chain. "I showed it to Hoss. He didn't want anything to do with it."

Sara looked at the cheap gold heart and the pictures inside. The children were still infants, probably only a few weeks out of the hospital.

Jeffrey said, "She wore it all the time. Everybody saw her with it, not just me." He gave a harsh laugh. "The thing was, nobody knew what she had done to get it. No one would cop to it, you know? She'd show up in a new dress at school one day and we'd start talking shit about who bought it for her, what she did to get it. This" – he indicated the necklace – "she showed it to everybody. She didn't know any better. She thought it was expensive. It's not even solid gold, it's plate." His shoulders dropped. "There's no telling what she did for it."

"It looks old to me," Sara told him. "Not an antique, but old."

He shrugged.

"What about the photographs?"

He took back the locket and looked at the pictures inside. "I've got no idea."

"So, yesterday in the cave, you knew it was her?" Sara asked, wondering why he had not said anything at the time.

"I didn't want to think it was her," Jeffrey said. "I've been feeling guilty all my life for things I didn't do. Things I had no control over." He gave a long, sad sigh. "My parents, the house I lived in, the clothes I wore. I always felt so ashamed of everything, wanted to show people a better part of me than my circumstances." He looked around the kitchen. "That's why I left here, why I was so anxious to get away and never come back. I was sick of being Jimmy Tolliver's son. I was sick of walking down the street and feeling everybody's eyes on me, waiting for me to mess up."

Sara waited.

"You see the better part of me."

She nodded, because she could not deny this, despite what reason would dictate.

"Why?" he asked, and he seemed like he really wanted to know.

"I don't…" She let her voice trail off, giving a shrug. "I wish I could say. My brain keeps telling me all these things…" She did not elaborate. "I just feel it in here," she said, tapping her fingers to her chest. "The way you make me feel when you make love to me and the way you double-knot my shoes so they won't come untied and the way you listen – you're doing it now, really listening to what I have to say because you honestly want to know what I'm thinking." She thought of the soldier's letter he had read to her what seemed like a lifetime ago, and couldn't explain it any better than, "I guess that you see me, too."

He put his hand over hers. "This thing with the bones. It's going to blow wide open."

"How?"

"Julia," he told her, and it seemed to take great effort for him to say her name. "I need you here, Sara. I need you seeing me the way I really am."

"Tell me what's going on."

"I can't," he told her. She thought she saw tears in his eyes, but he looked away. "It's a mess," he said. "I thought maybe Robert had…"

"Robert had what?"

She saw his throat work as he swallowed. "Robert says he killed her."

Sara put her hand to her chest. "What?"

"He told me yesterday."

"Morning?"

"No, after we found the bones." Sara started to tell him that the sequence did not make sense, but Jeffrey continued, "I showed him the necklace and he said he bashed her head in with a rock."

Sara sat back, trying to absorb what he was saying. "Did you tell him that her skull was broken?"

"No."

"Then how did he know?"

"He might have gotten it from Hoss. Why?"

"Because that's not how she died," Sara said. "The skull fracture came at least three weeks before she died."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure," Sara told him. "Bone is living tissue. The fracture was already healing when she was killed."

"It looked like she'd been hit in the head."

"That was from something else. Maybe a rock fell in the cave or an animal…" She did not want to tell him what the animals could have done. "Absent scalp and tissue, I can't tell you whether or not she was hit in the head immediately before she died, but even with that, her hyoid bone was broken."

"Her what?"

"The hyoid," she said, putting her fingers to her throat. "It's here, a U-shaped bone in the center. It doesn't just break on its own. There has to be significant pressure there, some sort of blunt force or manual strangulation." She watched Jeffrey, trying to gauge his reaction. "It wasn't just fractured, it was broken in two."

He sat up. "Are you sure?"

"I'll show you the bone if you want."

"No," he said, tucking the necklace back into his pocket. "Why would he say he killed her when he didn't?"

"That was my next question."

"Maybe if he's lying about that, he's lying about the other night."

"Why?" Sara asked. "Why would he lie about either?"

"I don't know," Jeffrey told her. "But I've got to find out." He indicated the sink. "Can you finish this?"

Sara looked at the mess. "I guess."

He started to leave, then turned around. "I meant it, Sara."

She looked up. "Meant what?"

"What I said last night," he told her. "I do love you."

Despite the horrors of the last few days, she felt a smile on her face. "Go talk to Robert," she told him. "I'll finish this and meet you back at Nell's."

Tuesday

Jeffrey pulled down the visor of Robert's truck, trying to get the sun out of his eyes. He was not exactly hungover, but a small headache was sitting right behind his nose like a hot dime. Like her husband, May Tolliver had passed on one thing to her son for which Jeffrey was grateful: unless he got rip-roaring drunk, he never got hungover. It was a gift as well as a curse. In college, while Jeffrey had been able to drink anyone under the table and still be able to perform at football practice the next day, most of the guys had stopped their heavy drinking by the end of the first quarter for fear of getting kicked off the team. Jeffrey had taken a few years more. After waking up in a hospital outside of Tuscaloosa with his hand in a cast and no memory of how he had gotten there, Jeffrey had decided to bring his drinking days to an end.