Джон Коннолли - The Dirty South

‘I heard what happened,’ he said, ‘about how it was you that found the Kernigan girl.’

Tilon looked Denny in the eye, but could perceive no intimation of duplicity. Denny didn’t know about Tilon’s relationship with Donna Lee.

‘Yeah, it was.’

‘That’s bad,’ said Denny. ‘I always liked Sallie.’

Tilon resisted the urge to break the bottle against Denny’s nose, if only because he’d have damaged his own hand. If you liked her so much , he wanted to ask, why couldn’t you have kept your fucking hands to yourself? Instead he said, ‘Any of her friends been in?’

The Rhine Heart might have been many things, filthy not least among them, but it welcomed anyone with money to spend, regardless of creed or color, and Denny had no tolerance for racist talk. Even after she’d quit her job behind the bar, Sallie Kernigan had continued to drink at the Rhine Heart once or twice a week.

‘No,’ said Denny, ‘but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of them later.’ He wiped the bar with the same cloth he’d used on the glasses, the same cloth he probably used for everything, and had for days. ‘But Kel Knight was in here asking after her.’

‘When?’

‘An hour ago. Seems Sallie doesn’t know about her daughter yet. Cops are trying to track her down.’ He squinted at Tilon. ‘You wouldn’t be able to help them, would you? I mean …’

Denny trailed off. Even in the comparatively sympathetic surroundings of the bar, some subjects were better off not discussed aloud. Denny might not have been aware of Tilon’s relationship with Donna Lee Kernigan, but he’d noticed that Tilon was tight with Sallie, and it wouldn’t have been beyond him to speculate on meth being the source of their bond, Sallie Kernigan having a fondness for a good time.

‘If I knew, don’t you think I’d have told them?’ said Tilon.

‘Yeah, sure. Sorry.’ Denny poured himself a glass of water, more as an attempt to distract from whatever offense he might have caused Tilon than anything else. ‘That’s two young women, though. Three if you count the Jackson girl, although who’s to say that killing has anything to do with what’s been happening lately.’

‘The present is history’s child,’ said Tilon.

‘You read that somewhere?’

‘No, I just made it up.’

‘You believe it?’

‘Only a fool wouldn’t.’

Denny, who might have been about to argue, decided against it, not wishing to appear a fool before Tilon Ward.

‘What’s going to happen?’ said Denny.

‘They’re going to investigate.’

‘Who is?’

‘Evan Griffin. The Cargill PD.’

‘You really believe that?’

‘You asked me. I told you.’

Denny twisted his glass on the bar, creating hollow circles of moisture on the old wood.

‘But what if the Kovas people hear about it?’

‘You think Jurel Cade can keep this one quiet?’

‘He managed it with Patricia Hartley, no matter what Loyd Holt might have to say about her death being an accident.’

‘That was before they had another body,’ said Tilon. ‘And Griffin is different.’

Griffin was different. He was a straight arrow, and because he came from outside the county he wasn’t as beholden to old ties of friendship or family. He didn’t accept favors, and didn’t do many either, although he had always cut Tilon a lot of slack. But any obligation Griffin might have felt toward Tilon was about used up by now, and whatever remained of it had probably drained away following this afternoon’s exchange.

Once again, Tilon told himself that he hadn’t done anything wrong in the eyes of the law. Donna Lee Kernigan was seventeen – okay, sixteen when he’d started sleeping with her – which made it legal under the Arkansas Code. True, some people in town might have frowned on a relationship between a teenage girl and a thirty-six-year-old man, but last time Tilon checked, he hadn’t signed any morals clause. His only error lay in not admitting to knowing Donna Lee when he notified the police about her body.

And what good would that admission do him now? None at all was the answer. He didn’t know anything that might help the investigation, so he’d just end up drawing heat, and Randall Butcher wouldn’t like that. Worse, Tilon might find himself in a prison cell if he couldn’t provide an alibi for his movements over the weekend, because one surefire way of putting an end to any concerns about Kovas and its future in Cargill would be to identify a suspect and keep him locked up until all the paperwork was signed. The case could take years to come to trial, and in the meantime the real killer might suffer a heart attack and die, thereby providing further circumstantial evidence of the patsy’s guilt. No, to hell with it: Tilon could do more good roaming free than warming a cot in a cell, and who knows what he might learn if he kept his eyes and ears open, and his mouth shut?

He took a last swig of beer, leaving the bottle half-full. He didn’t even know why he’d ordered it. Force of habit.

‘You hear anything, you let me know,’ he told Denny.

‘Always.’

And Tilon departed.

35

Reverend Nathan Pettle sat alone on the couch in his living room. Delores had finally departed to tend to her seniors, although the reverend’s cheek still bore the red mark of her wrath. It was just like a woman, Pettle thought, to ambush a man unsuspecting – and in his own home, while he was still reeling from the trauma of being forced to gaze on the ruined body of a young girl; a girl he knew, a girl he’d watched grow up, a girl that, in another life, he might even have been permitted to raise as his own.

All men had moments of weakness, and all women, too. It was part of the human condition, but what mattered was that one sought the Lord’s forgiveness for one’s trespasses and endeavored not to sin again. And he’d done that: he’d gone down on his knees before God after sleeping with Sallie Kernigan for the first time. He had prayed for absolution, and promised not to transgress in a similar fashion in the future. He’d wept for himself and his sinful state.

Admittedly, he’d also decided against sharing with his wife the fact of his unfaithfulness, both in order to spare her any pain and to ensure the continuation of their marriage. After all, he reasoned, he’d seen the error of his ways, and whatever his failings – and they were, he felt, relatively few, and mostly minor – once Nathan Pettle made a decision, he stuck with it. He had never intended to stray. Sallie had been struggling, both financially and psychologically, with raising a daughter alone, and had turned to him for advice and compassion. She had broken down in his arms, and he’d held her and—

Well, you see how it was, and how easily a man might waver. Let he who is without sin …

Mind you, he might have struggled to justify the subsequent encounters, and the intensity and variety of them, but he’d been blinded by lust and had fallen prey to the schemes of the Father of Lies, because there was nothing Satan enjoyed more than bringing low a man of God. In a way, the fact that Pettle had persevered in his calling, even after so many stumbles, might have been regarded as testament to his inner strength.

Finally, though, he had vowed never to sleep with Sallie Kernigan again, and meant it. He was helped in this regard by his wife’s discovery of the affair – if it could even be dignified with such a description, given its brevity – and the domestic humiliation and uproar that followed, but he liked to believe he’d have resisted any further temptation, even without Delores’s intervention. Not that his wife had chosen to perceive it that way. God might forgive, but woman did not. Three years had passed since then, and Delores still showed no signs of extending absolution to her husband.