Джон Коннолли - The Dirty South

i saw through you, though

i always could

‘I was happy for you to do it.’

so why are you looking, if not for us?

He heard the distant crash of surf breaking, or it might have been truck wheels passing on the wet road. He could no longer be sure, and he did not care. For the moment, those he had lost were here with him.

‘For me,’ he said. ‘For my own sake.’

yes

Susan, both absent and present, stroked Jennifer’s hair.

but why stop?

‘To eat.’

but you’re not hungry

‘For gas.’

but your tank was almost full

‘To rest.’

but you are not tired

He pictured a woman being crowned with thorns, the garland digging into her scalp, the barbs tearing at hair, skin, and flesh. He watched a man kneel over Patricia Hartley and Donna Lee Kernigan to defile them with sticks.

The seat across from him was empty, as it had always been, as it would always be. He stared at his hands, and the scars upon them.

Unknown dead voices called his name.

28

Reverend Nathan Pettle entered his home through the back door. He slipped off his shoes and placed them on the mat bought by his wife for that purpose, printed with the words SHOE INN, which Delores had found funny. The house was quiet. Delores would be down at the small community center next to their church, where she hosted a social group for seniors every second day from noon. Her car was still outside, because Delores preferred to walk whenever the opportunity arose. She had started to put on weight and was embarrassed by it. He assured her that he had not noticed, but she did not believe him because he had given her no cause to. She no longer believed anything he told her.

Pettle took a seat at the kitchen table, facing the image of Christ the Redeemer brought back from a business trip to Kenya by one of his parishioners. Pettle liked it because this Christ was noticeably dark-skinned, and had the build of a laborer, someone who could cut and carry wood and worked with his hands. This was Pettle’s Christ, not some fragile Caucasian figure marked as a victim from birth, doomed to die an emaciated death on a cross.

Pettle closed his eyes, clasped his hands before him, and tried to pray. When he opened his eyes again, Delores was standing by the kitchen sink. She was barefoot, but so lost had he been in his own thoughts that he doubted he would have noticed her approach even had she chosen to alert him to it. His wife was a plain woman, and he had first been attracted to her by the strength of her character as much as the depth of her faith. It was she who had been the true rock in the early days of his ministry – no, their ministry – when he preached to his flock beneath spreading trees or in the living rooms of their homes, accepting payment in the form of food offerings: bread, eggs, once even a whole deer, which had sustained him and his family through a long winter and spring at the start of the decade, until at last Delores became so sick of the taste of venison that she vowed never to eat it again.

Hers was a practical, implacable Christianity, one wanting in warmth. She helped where and when she could, and made a positive difference to the lives of others, but her husband’s congregation looked elsewhere for words of comfort in times of distress. That was not her way, and none judged her for it.

She stared at her husband, her expression unreadable.

‘Is it true?’ she said.

‘Is what true?’

‘That it was Sallie Kernigan’s girl they found out in those woods.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s true.’

Delores Pettle took a single long step toward her husband, drew back her right hand, and slapped him hard across the face.

The rain was likely to keep falling for the rest of the day. The patch of woodland on which Donna Lee Kernigan’s body had been discovered remained taped off, with signs posted advising that this was a crime scene, and any attempt to trespass upon it would be met with the full force of the law.

Griffin had wanted to conduct a massive fingertip search of the surrounding area, with Tucker McKenzie supervising, but he didn’t have the manpower to do it properly, not without the assistance of the sheriff’s office, and that was unlikely to be forthcoming until after the meeting with Jurel Cade – and possibly not even then, depending on the outcome. Instead, McKenzie had done what he could with his own people, making the best of not very much at all. Already Griffin was starting to feel the investigation slipping away from him, and it had barely commenced. He was out of his depth. The only lead was the truck that had picked up Donna Lee. He had already set his officers to interviewing those living and working in the vicinity of the school, just in case someone might have noticed the truck or the driver, and could remember the license number, or the color of the driver’s hair, anything.

Jurel Cade had left a message to say he’d been delayed, and their meeting would now have to take place later in the afternoon. Griffin guessed that Cade was working out his next move, trying to find a way to limit the damage should the Cargill PD prove unwilling to back down or reach an acceptable compromise. Evan Griffin knew he wasn’t very popular with the Cade family. Soon, he wouldn’t be popular with most of the population of Burdon County.

He took his coat from the stand in his office and picked up his car keys. He wouldn’t do anyone any good sitting behind his desk. He told Billie he was going to join Kel and the others over at the school, but only once he’d run by the Kernigan house to take a look at it for himself. He might swing by the crime scene as well, just to check that everything was copacetic.

As he was about to leave, a man appeared in the doorway of the station house. The rain dripped from his head and clothing, and the light in his eyes made Griffin suddenly fearful, as though he had erred gravely by invoking this presence, by adjuring it to remain in this town, this world.

‘You forget something?’ said Griffin.

And Charlie Parker replied: ‘Perhaps.’

II

A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else’s business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don’t know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out … In a world like this, news is not welcome …

Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View : How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960

29

The people on this earth can be divided into two groups for the most part: those that want to leave a place, and those that want to stay in it. The rest simply haven’t made up their minds yet. The smaller a place, the greater the pressure to pick a side, although one doesn’t necessarily have to stick with one’s choice. Circumstances may alter; life gets better, life gets worse.

Generally, though, life tends to stay the same.

For much of the twentieth century, Cargill was the kind of town in which people resided because they didn’t have the resources – financial, familial, or psychological – to go anywhere else. Even if curiosity about other lives, or existential unease at their own situation, caused some citizens to look farther afield, the majority elected to extend their gaze no farther than the boundaries of their own state – or perhaps, in exceptional circumstances, those of contiguous states – in which case they discovered little that struck them as an improvement on their present condition; it was another series of crossroads, except with a heavier dusting of strangers. After a time, the larger part just stopped looking, and tempered accordingly their expectations and those of their offspring.