Karin Slaughter - Fallen

“It was always in the morning?”

“Usually from around eleven to about two in the afternoon.”

Three hours seemed like a long enough time for an assignation. “Did Faith know about him?”

Mrs. Levy shook her head. “I’m certain Ev didn’t want the kids to find out. They loved their father so much. As did she, mind you, but it’s been ten years, at least. That’s a long time to go without companionship.”

Will guessed she was speaking from experience. “You said your husband’s been dead for twenty years.”

“Yes, but I didn’t like Mr. Levy very much and he didn’t care for me at all.” She used her thumb to stroke Emma’s cheek. “Evelyn loved Bill. They had some bumps along the way, but it’s different when you love them. They’re gone and your life splinters in two. It takes an awful long time to put it back together.”

Will let himself think about Sara for just a second. The truth was that he never stopped thinking about her. She was like the news crawl that ran at the bottom of the television while his life, the main story, played on the screen. “Do you know the gentleman’s name?”

“Oh, no, dear. I never asked. But he drove a very nice Cadillac CTS-V. That’s the sedan, not the coupe. Black on black and the stainless steel grill on the front. A very throaty V8. You could hear it blocks away.”

Will was momentarily too surprised to respond. “Are you a car person?”

“Oh, not at all, but I looked it up on the Internet because I wanted to know how much he paid for it.”

Will waited her out.

“I’m guessing around seventy-five thousand dollars,” the old woman confided. “Mr. Levy and I bought this house for less than half that.”

“Did Evelyn ever tell you his name?”

“She never acknowledged it. Despite what you men want to think, we ladies don’t sit around talking about y’all all the time.”

Will allowed a smile. “What did he look like?”

“Well, bald,” she said, as if this was to be expected. “A bit paunchy around the middle. He wore jeans most of the time. His shirts were often wrinkled and he kept the sleeves rolled up, which I found rather perplexing because Evelyn always liked a sharply dressed man.”

“What age do you think he is?”

“Without the hair, it’s hard to tell. I’d put him around Evelyn’s age.”

“Early sixties.”

“Oh.” She seemed surprised. “I thought Evelyn was in her forties, but I suppose that doesn’t make sense with Faith being in her thirties. And the baby’s not a baby anymore, is he?” She lowered her voice as if she was afraid someone would hear. “I guess it’s coming up on twenty years now, but that’s not the kind of pregnancy you forget. There was that bit of a scandal when she started to show. Such a pity how folks behaved. We’ve all had our bit of fun now and then, but as I told Evelyn at the time, a woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down.”

Will hadn’t considered Faith’s teenage predicament beyond thinking it unusual she had kept the child, but it had probably rocked the neighborhood to have a pregnant fourteen-year-old in their refined midst. It was almost commonplace now, but back then, a girl in Faith’s predicament was generally suddenly called away to tend a never-before-mentioned frail aunt or given what was euphemistically called an appendectomy. A handful of less fortunate ones ended up in the children’s home with kids like Will.

He asked, “So, the man in the expensive car is in his early sixties?” She nodded. “Did you ever see them being affectionate?”

“No, but Evelyn wasn’t the showy type. She would get in the car with him and he would drive off.”

“No kiss on the cheek?”

“Not that I ever saw. Mind you, I never even met him. Evelyn would drop Emma off here, then go back to her house and wait.”

Will let that sink in. “Did he ever go into her house?”

“Not that I could tell. I guess people do things differently now. In my day, a man would knock on your door and escort you to his car. There was none of this pulling up and beeping the horn.”

“Is that what he did—beep the horn?”

“No, son, that was just a figure of speech. I suppose Ev must’ve been looking out the window, because she always came out as soon as he pulled up.”

“Do you know where they went?”

“No, but like I said, they were usually gone for a couple’a–three hours, so I assumed they were seeing a movie or having lunch.”

That was a lot of movies. “Did the man show up today?”

“No, and I didn’t see anyone in the street, either. No cars, no nothing. The first I heard there was trouble was when the sirens came. Then I heard the gunshots, of course, one and then about a minute later one more. I know what gunfire sounds like. Mr. Levy was a hunter. Back then, all the policemen were. He used to make me go so I could cook for them.” She rolled her eyes. “What a boring gasbag he was. Rest his soul.”

“Lucky man to have you.”

“Lucky for me he’s not around anymore.” She stood with difficulty from the rocker, keeping the baby steady in her arms. The bottle was empty. She put it on the table and offered Emma to Will. “Take her for a second, will you?”

He put Emma on his shoulder and patted her back. She gave an unusually rewarding burp.

Mrs. Levy narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been around babies before.”

Will wasn’t about to get into his life story. “They’re easy to talk to.”

She rested her hand on his arm before going to the closet. Will had been right. There was a darkroom set up in the small space. He stood in the doorway, careful not to block her light as she thumbed through a stack of five-by-seven photographs. Her hands had a slight tremor, but she seemed steady on her feet.

She explained, “Mr. Levy never set much store by my hobbies, but he was called onto a crime scene one day and they asked if anyone knew a photographer. Twenty-five dollars they paid—just for taking pictures! The old bastard wasn’t going to say no to that. So he called me and told me to bring my camera. When I didn’t faint over the mess—this was a shotgun incident—they said I could do it again.” She nodded toward the bed. “That Brownie Six-16 helped keep this roof over our heads.”

He knew she meant the box camera. It looked worn but well loved.

“I moved into surveillance work later on. Mr. Levy had drunk himself off the job by then, and of course I’m a woman, so it took some time for them to understand I wasn’t there for flirting and screwing.”

Will felt his face start to redden. “Was this with the Atlanta Police Department?”

“Fifty-eight years!” She seemed as surprised as Will that she’d lasted that long. “I may be a bag of bones now, but there was a time Geary and his ass-kissers would’ve snapped to instead of brushing me off like a speck of lint on their shiny trousers.” She picked through another pile of five-by-sevens. Will saw black-and-white shots of birds and various household pets, all taken from a vantage point that implied they were being spied upon rather than admired. “This little so-and-so’s been digging in my flower bed.” She showed Will a picture of a gray and white cat with dirt on its nose. The lighting was harsh in the black-and-white print. The only thing missing was a board over his chest with his name and inmate number.

“Here.” Finally, she found what she was looking for. “This is him. Evelyn’s gentleman friend.”

Will looked over her hunched shoulder. The photo was grainy, obviously taken from behind the blinds covering the front window. The lens pressed open thin, plastic slats. A tall, older man leaned against a black Cadillac. His palms rested on the hood, forearms twisted out. The car was parked in the street, its front tires turned against the curb. Will parked his car the same way. Atlanta was a city of hills, resting on the piedmont of the Appalachian Mountains. If you drove a car with a manual transmission, you always banked the wheels against the curb to keep the car from rolling.