Karin Slaughter - Indelible

Sara allowed a smile. She had done the same thing.

Nell returned to the photo album, saying "There" as she put her finger beside a blurry image of a young girl standing behind a picture of Possum and Robert. "That's Julia."

Sara had been expecting something horrible from Nell's description, but Julia looked like any other teenage girl from that time period. Her hair was straight to her waist and she was wearing a simple dress with a floral pattern. She looked sad more than anything else, and as sudden as her previous stab of jealousy, Sara felt a sharp sense of sympathy for the teenager.

Nell leaned over to look. "Now that I'm seeing her again, she wasn't that bad. You really can't judge personality in a picture, can you?"

"No," Sara agreed, thinking the girl was fairly attractive. Yet, that had not been enough to help her transcend the circumstances of her family life. She asked, "Was her father abusive?"

"He beat the crap out of them."

"No," Sara said. "The other way."

"Oh, you mean…" Nell seemed to think about it. "I have no idea, but it'd make sense."

"Do you know who the father of her child might have been?"

"No telling," Nell said. "If you wanted a list of everybody she'd been with, it'd end up being half the town." She gave Sara a pointed look. "Reggie Ray included."

"He was younger than her."

"So?"

Sara conceded the point, then said, "From what Lane said, it sounds like Eric has to go to the hospital a lot to get treatments. So he has to have some sort of clotting problem with his blood." She tried to think of other possibilities. "There has to be an autosomal recessive or dominant transmission." She saw Nell's perplexed expression and said, "Sorry, it means that the disorder is genetic. It has to do with one of the two proteins that make up clotting factors."

"Is that supposed to make sense?"

"Bleeding disorders are passed from parent to child."

"Ah."

"Do you know if Julia had anything like that?"

"I wouldn't think so," Nell said. "I remember one time during home ec, she sliced her finger open pretty bad with a pair of scissors. Whether or not it was an accident, I don't know, but she didn't seem to bleed any longer than a normal person would."

"If she had something like von Willebrand's disease, then having a child without proper medical supervision would have been life-threatening," Sara said. "There would also be other people in her family who were affected, and Lane pretty much said that wasn't the case."

"So you're saying it had to come from the father?" Nell asked. "I can't think of anyone in town with that kind of problem." She added, "Not Robert, especially. He got pretty banged up on the football field and never seemed the worse for it."

"Jeffrey, too," Sara said. She remembered drawing his blood sample. The puncture had bled no longer than usual. Even as she considered this, Sara felt ashamed. She had never genuinely thought Jeffrey could be guilty of either crime, but some part of her was glad that there was irrefutable proof.

"I could ask around," Nell offered.

"It comes in degrees," Sara said. "Some people have it and don't even know it. It's not as easy for women because of their menstrual cycles. Generally, they know there's a problem. My bet would be it came from the father."

"A needle in a haystack," Nell pointed out. "Who knows, maybe Dan Phillips has it." She reminded Sara, "The one who ran off about the same time Julia did." She reached over and paged through the album. "Here," she said, indicating a young man standing in the back row of the football team photo.

"He doesn't look like a football player," Sara said. Phillips was on the thin side and his dark hair was combed straight back off his head. He looked healthy enough, though one photo could not give the full story.

"He mostly played tackle dummy," Nell said. "Just being on the team and wearing the letterman jacket was all most of these guys wanted. Go down to the hardware store on game day and you can still hear them talking about it like they were in the damn Super Bowl."

"Glory days," Sara said. It was the same in Grant. She turned the page, looking at the other pictures. There was a black-and-white snapshot of Jared from a few years back, and she said, "He's growing up to be a handsome boy."

"You're not going to tell Jeffrey, are you?" Nell tried to smile. "Don't answer that." She put the album back under the table. "You still leaving town?"

"I don't know."

"Stick around." Nell patted her leg. "I'm making cornbread tonight."

"Where's Robert?"

"Possum took him to the store to buy him some clothes," she said. "Robert didn't want to go back to the house and God only knows what Jessie did with the stuff at her mama's."

"What about Robert?"

"He'll be okay."

"No," Sara said. "Robert. We've only been talking about Jeffrey. Did you ever think he was involved in what happened to Julia?"

Nell took her time answering. "He was always secretive."

"About what?"

"Maybe 'secretive' is the wrong word. Makes him sound shifty. He's just private. Doesn't talk about his feelings much."

"Jeffrey doesn't, either."

"No, not like that. Like he doesn't want anyone to get too close to him." She sat back on the couch, her back slumped into a C. "Everybody thought it was Possum who was on the outside, but I think it was Robert. He never seemed to fit in. Not that Jeffrey treated him that way, but it's that same thing we were talking about earlier. He always waited to see what Jeffrey did before he acted."

"That's not uncommon for teenagers."

"It was more than that," Nell said. "If Jeffrey got into trouble, Robert would take the blame. He was like Jeffrey's safety net and Jeffrey let him do it." She looked at Sara. "The minute Jeffrey left, Robert did the same thing with Hoss. He'd take a bullet for either one of them, and I'm not exaggerating."

Sara debated before telling her, "Robert is saying that he killed Julia."

Something in Nell's face shifted, though Sara could not pin down what. Her voice had changed, too. "I don't know about that."

"No," Sara said. "Me neither."

Jeffrey found his mother's Impala parked in her usual space in front of the hospital. She could have easily walked to work and back, but May Tolliver would never add more minutes to the time it took for her to get that first drink after her shift in the hospital cafeteria ended.

As usual, she had left the windows down to keep the car from turning into an oven. Jeffrey smelled stale cigarette smoke wafting through the air as he opened the door. She always kept a spare key in the glove compartment, and he found it underneath a bunch of religious tracts and brightly colored pamphlets that must have been stuck under the windshield wiper of the car at some point. She might have been a chain-smoking drunk, but May never littered.

The engine turned over after he pumped the gas several times, and Jeffrey brushed cigarette ash off the gear console as he shifted the car into drive. The windows were foggy from nicotine, and he took out his handkerchief, wiping the windshield as he drove out of the parking lot. If his mother left the hospital before he got back with the car, she would easily put two and two together and realize that with Jeffrey in town he had probably borrowed her car. He had "borrowed" it often enough as a teenager, and May had never mentioned it to a soul. The two times Jeffrey had been pulled over by sheriff's deputies, May had insisted she had loaned the car to her son.

Jeffrey drove aimlessly through downtown, not heading in any particular direction. He felt sick in his gut, like someone had died. Maybe someone had. He was sinking back into that old feeling that his life was totally out of control. He was the eye of a storm that caused nothing but destruction.