Authors: William Lashner
Fatal Flaw (24 page)
Another photograph. The two girls again, older now, young, good-looking girls, high school girls.
Is there is something primordial in the attraction of high school girls for the male of the species? When we are younger, say, in junior high, they are the unavailable avatars of desire. What would Juliet have been in the Verona High School, a sophomore? We can barely wait to grow older, to gain confidence, to take our turn with them. But when we ourselves are in high school, most of us find, to our shock, that the years did not bring the confidence or skills we expected to have come as our due. They are there, waiting for us, the high school girls, and yet we fumble our way into disaster after disaster and leave them unsatisfied and confused and looking for college boys. And then later, when we are old enough so that our skills and confidence have caught up with our desires, the high school girls are once again unavailable. We give them their own slang, jailbait, and prudently cross them off the list of possibilities. But does the desire ever die? Do we ever see a pretty high school girl walk by with her pleated skirt and young high breasts and not sigh in disappointment?
And now here, in the photograph, we have the orgasmic fantasy of every red-blooded heterosexual male on the planet earth: two great-looking high school girls who happen to be twins. But instead of desire, this picture provoked curiosity in me. One was dressed prim and proper, books held in front of her body like a shield, smiling shyly. The other stared straight at the camera, arms on hips, hip cocked, leaning slightly forward, defiantly, but without a smile. It was a sad defiance. Look at what I am, it said, look at what I have become. Oh, yes, two girls, twins, but now I could tell them apart. I knew nothing about Roylynn, but this girl, this girl staring with sad defiance at the camera, this girl was my Hailey. And so the question: Why the difference? What had come into their lives and pressed them in so very different ways?
One other picture grips at me. A boy in a uniform, a baseball uniform. He’s on one knee, arms leaning on his bat, posing like a major leaguer. Solid, handsome, either serious or sad, it’s hard to tell in the old black-and-white. Jesse Sterrett, I presume.
In the letters it was clear what had developed between Jesse Sterrett and Hailey Prouix, something strong and indelible, passionate enough to have its great joys and great troubles. On a fragment of paper, a ripped portion of envelope, written in a hand overcome with some long-vanished remorse, he pleaded with her from the bottom of his soul.
It’s killing me ever day, ever damn day that we’re not together. My heart weeps in the wanting. I’m less than a man without you, a carcass already near dead, dying of lost love. You done this to me, you stole my world like a thief. Don’t listen to what they are saying, it’s nothing but lies, lies and damn lies. I’m sorry for what I done but I never had no choice, I only done what I had to. Never a love been so fierce or fearsome, never has it cost so high or been worth the entire world. It’ll kill me, it will, and damn soon. I’m dying for damn sure without you. Yes, I surely am.
The love was fierce and fearsome, seemingly worth every sacrifice, and I hoped so, because I knew how it ended, knew where Jesse Sterrett breathed his last breath and where he died. But why?
What secrets had torn them apart? Jesse had a secret, something between him and Leon, his friend, something that dragged at Jesse’s soul and drove Leon possibly to his death. It wasn’t too hard to figure it out, two boys, two best friends, down by the tracks, the changes happening to their bodies, to their thoughts, waking up with strange sensations, two boys experimenting. Oh, it wasn’t too hard to figure it out, Jesse’s dark secret that wasn’t so dark, his strange encounter that was less strange than he could ever have imagined. But Jesse also mentioned Hailey’s own secret, large and dark. What was that, and how did that turn her in the direction of her life? Were the two deaths two decades apart linked in any way? Could learning the truths behind that death shed any light upon Hailey’s? And why had Hailey, with a ragged line of pencil, slashed a brutal zig-zag-zig through the last of of Jesse Sterrett’s letters, as if she were a deranged Zorro trying to deface the words?
H.
I am so angry I could strangle a porcupine, and scared too, so scared, impossibly scared. I love you so much, want you so much, but now I have learned that secret you’ve been hiding, my anger burns least as bright as the love.
I don’t know what to do, but I got to do something and there is only two answers that I can see. One is to stay and fight. Take my word on this, if I do stay there is no way it won’t turn to blood. My rage is so murderous now I couldn’t stop with one blow here or there. Remember how I was with Grady on the ground that time, how I couldn’t stop myself from slamming his grinning face, how the only reason I didn’t kill his ass was that you stopped me? The way I feel now is ten times worse, twenty times, a hundred, and nothing, no power, not even what I feel for you will stop me. I’ll kill him, I will, and they’ll lock up my ass even though the bastard had it coming, and that would be fine by me because I would have done right by you which is all I care about.
But there is another answer, to run, to leave, to up and get the hell out of this town, this state. I know we got nothing, you and me, nothing but the burden of our pasts, but we can make a go of it. What we feel one for the other will get us through. The scouts
have been sniffing. I’ll be up in the next draft and till then I can play semipro somewhere or in some unaffiliated pro league where they’ll sign anyone, no questions asked. I’ll talk my way into a tryout and smack the apple all over the yard and they’ll sign me, I know they’ll sign me. And if they find us and come after us we’ll go down to Mexico and change our names and I’ll play down there. They got leagues down there that play all year. And when I’m seasoned enough I’ll make the bigs, I know it, and we’ll be so rich we’ll have a swimming pool the size of this entire county.
All I’m asking is that you trust me. All I’m asking is that you put your faith in my feelings for you. I got a truck from my cousin Ned, a beat-up old thing but it runs, and I’ve packed what I need and I’m ready to go. But I ain’t going without you.
I’ll be at the quarry tonight, I’ll be waiting for you. If you trust me enough to come I’ll dedicate my every waking hour of the rest of my life to making you happy, I will. I swear. But if you don’t come, if you won’t run away with me, then I’ll do it the other way. I’ll do what I need to do to protect you and whatever consequences that come my way I’ll bear gladly because I’ll be bearing them for you. Tonight, I’ll be waiting. Tonight.
J.
PIERCE, WEST VIRGINIA,
was a county seat, and to prove it, on a hill smack in the center, they had set the county courthouse, a blocky brown building with a single turret, built of sandstone quarried out of a ledge of rock at the far end of the town. To one side of the courthouse the city climbed the slope of the mountain, to the other it fell gently toward the river and then reached across to the far bank, where scattered houses sat in the shadow of another steep rise. The main street, imaginatively named Main Street, jogged around the courthouse. It was built up with brick buildings, squat and aged black, all pressed together along the narrow street as if real estate had once been a prized commodity in the county. The buildings had signs from the middle of the last century, stylized neon banners advertising gifts and flowers and the Courthouse Hotel, signs that hearkened back to a prosperous past. But Pierce didn’t look prosperous now. It looked as if nothing had been built in fifty years, except for the modern and unpleasant Rite Aid that sat just before the turnoff. Something had slipped away from Pierce, some vitality. In its buildings and slumped posture you could sense the vaguely disturbing notion that Pierce was at the heart of an American dream that had suddenly shifted.
We drove around a bit to get our bearings and then took the Hailey
Prouix tour of the city. Our first stop was the high school, stretching out on the banks of the river, home of the Fighting Wildcats. It was big for the town, too big, and the buses in the lot told us that children from all over the valley attended. This was where the likes of Hailey Prouix could mix with the wealthy Grady Pritchett as well as mountain trash like Jesse Sterrett.
Our second stop was up the hill from Main Street, a lovely little house painted white with a porch that wrapped around the front like a generous ribbon. The lawn was neatly trimmed, the flowers in the beds were blooming brightly, a swing set could be seen in the side yard. It was the all-American home, it even had a picket fence. The sign said
THE LIPTONS
, and it seemed as if the Liptons had lived there for generations, but that was an illusion. This was Hailey Prouix’s girlhood home. I wondered how it smelled when she was young, whether the paint then was peeling, the lawn untrimmed, the beds brown and weed-ridden. I wondered what I could have seen through those windows had I been here twenty years before. But time had bleached that house clean of whatever then went on inside. Nothing to be learned here.
And, finally, nothing to be learned either at the quarry on the far edge of the town. I was directed to it by a kid at the Sunoco who eyed me suspiciously when I asked, as if it were a sacred place that I was intending to desecrate. I took a road that twisted up into the mountain and stopped at a turnoff the boy had described. There was a fence, and there were signs warning of dangers and signs prohibiting trespassing, and there was a gate wrapped with chains and fastened by a lock. But the lock was rusted, the signs defaced, the fence torn apart at certain edges. It didn’t take a thing to slip through.
It was getting dark now, but we could see the contours of what had been left after the stone had been ripped from the earth. The walls formed a shoehorn-shaped canyon browned by age, with bushes and scrub trees growing in the cracks, weakening the stone as the plants fought for purchase. There was a wide ledge below us and a path that seemed to travel down to the ledge, a path that required grabbing hold of certain bushes and the roots of certain trees as you made your way down. The ledge was uneven, rough, and littered with beer cans and cigarette packs and graffiti.
JK
&
FS
.
CATS
RULE
.
JOHN G
.
LOVES TINA R
. I wondered if there was a
GRADY LOVES HAILEY
or maybe a
HP
&
JS
, but I couldn’t spot such from where we stood. And then, beneath the ledge, at the bottom part of the quarry, was a road that rolled out to the river, to take the mined stone to the trains. Between the great stone walls and the road was a reservoir of sorts that seemed to be filled deep with water. I could imagine it all, hanging on the ledge and swimming in the reservoir, a few beers, a little laughter, high dives and skinny-dipping, shrieks of abandon, a little tonguing under the cover of the night, or maybe something a little more than a little tonguing. It was almost enough to make me wish I were seventeen again. Almost. This was the lake, I supposed, that drew the local kids on hot summer nights. And this was the lake from where they dragged the body of Jesse Sterrett.
“So what’s the agenda, mate?” said Skink as we stood over the edge and looked into the dark water.
“Go in town, ask some questions, find the truth about that boy’s death.”
“Sounds simple, it does. So simple, you’d have thought someone would have done it by now.”
“You’d have thought.”
“We just stop anyone on the street, or do you have a plan?”
“I have a plan.”
“That’s encouraging.”
Pause.
“Don’t you want to know what it is?” I asked.
“Not particularly.”
“Not even curious.”
“Only thing I’m curious about is why you brought me along.”
“A lawyer always brings an investigator when he questions witnesses.”
“That he does. But my guess, Vic, is you don’t want me nowhere near that courtroom.”
He was right, I didn’t. As far as I knew, only Skink could connect me to Hailey Prouix, and that I couldn’t allow. “Maybe not. Maybe I just like your company.”
“I am charming, I am. But if I was a hundred and fifty dollars a
day charming, I’d be in another line of work. You don’t know what the hell you’re getting into, do you?”
“Nope.”
“And you wanted to bring some muscle.”
“Something like that.”
“All right, then.”
“Don’t you want to know my plan?”
“Nah,” he said, turning from the edge and heading back for the path up the hill. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re chasing here after your own tail. I don’t need no plan. I’ll just sit back and watch the show.”
“COURSE I
remember,” said Chief Edmonds as he wrapped his meaty hands around a coffee cup. “How could I forget? A sight like that’s not something slips away so easy. When they pulled him out of the water, he was bloated and white like a German Wasserwurst and the back of his head was cracked open like a walnut.”
I tried to ignore the unpleasant food imagery as I finished my breakfast.
We were in Kim’s Luncheonette on Main Street, a large, barren café that, with its high ceiling and uncomfortable spaciousness, seemed to have taken over for a failed hardware store in one of the city’s squat brick buildings. The plain Formica tables were sparsely filled with grizzled patrons, who slumped over their meals and drank their coffees in silence.
“How was everything, Harvey?” said the woman behind the counter when a man stepped over to pay for his eggs.
“Just fine.”
“That’ll be a dollar eighty-six.”
“Uh-oh, I ain’t got it.”
“Then it will be four-fifty.”
They both shared a laugh as he handed over his money. Behind the counter at Kim’s was a large stainless steel milk refrigerator
with one serving spigot, the red sign above the spigot holding a single word:
WHOLE
.
Edmonds and I finished up our breakfasts: eggs, ham, grits, and biscuits with white milk gravy. Skink pawed with his spoon at his milkless oatmeal. The dress code required blue jeans and baseball caps advertising various farm implements, and so Skink and I stood out more than a bit, Skink in his brown suit, me in my shirtsleeves. The chief sat stolidly in his flannel shirt and green John Deere baseball cap. Edmonds’s name had been in Jesse’s letters to Hailey. It hadn’t taken much to look him up in the Pierce telephone directory, and it hadn’t taken much more to get him out to Kim’s. Edmonds, now retired, seemed to welcome the company and was willing enough to talk about Hailey. Trying to get people to speak to me was pretty much the extent of the wondrous plan I had wrought: I would take my cue from the letters, talk to the principals involved, try to shake something loose.
I said I had a plan; I didn’t say it was brilliant.
In the middle of breakfast I had dropped the picture of the boy in his baseball uniform onto the center of our table. I figured that might start things shaking, and maybe it did. When Edmonds saw it, he closed his eyes for a moment and exhaled the name. “Jesse Sterrett.”
“What happened?” I asked after he had described the corpse.
“Who the hell knows?” said Edmonds. “That damn quarry. In Jesse’s time they necked and did their drugs there. In my time we necked and drank our beer there. Now they neck and do who knows what there. We’ve got a fence all around and signs warning everyone to stay away, warning that the rock faces have grown unsteady over time, but I suppose there never was a danger sign that teenagers didn’t ignore. We were forever patrolling, shining in our spotlights, but it didn’t do any good. It was only a matter of time before something happened. Best as we could tell, he fell down, cracked his head, and then tumbled into the water.”
“An accident?” said Skink.
“Yep.”
“Everyone thought so?” I pressed.
“All that mattered, me and the coroner.”
“Doc Robinson.”
“That’s right.”
“How about the boy’s father?”
“You know parents. If a kid crashes the car, it must be a dangerous turn that should have been fixed years ago. If the kid busts a knee in football, it’s the coach’s fault. Always looking for someone to blame. How else could you lawyers stay in business? Jesse’s dad didn’t want to believe that his son was out at the quarry smoking that marihuana and just got careless.”
“Jesse Sterrett didn’t smoke marihuana,” I said.
Edmonds was taken up short. “How do you know that?”
“And didn’t you find it peculiar that a week after Jesse is in a brutal fight that puts a boy in the hospital, he’s found dead?”
Chief Edmonds squinted his hard blue eyes at me. “Come again with what you’re doing here?”
“We’re just trying to understand what happened to Hailey. We have the idea…” I glanced at Skink. “I have the idea that there might be some connection between what happened to Hailey and what happened to Jesse Sterrett.”
“I’m sorry as hell about Hailey. I knew her father, played cards with her uncle, and what’s happened with her sister is just plain sad. I’m sorry as hell, but I’m not surprised. She had a wild streak no one could tame.”
“What is it that happened with her sister?”
Edmonds looked at me and pursed his lips. “I’m willing to tell you what I know about Hailey, but that’s as far as I go. Though I’ll tell you this for free: There’s nothing between what happened to her and what happened to that boy.”
“Weren’t Hailey and Jesse going together when he died?”
“Not as I recall. I seem to recall that Jesse had other interests.”
“Like baseball.”
“Just other interests. And as I remember it, Hailey was seeing someone else at the time. That fight, it was just something between two boys. It’s not unusual ’round here. This one just got a little out of hand. From what I learned, they had been at each other’s throats for years.”
“Jesse and Grady,” I said.
“That’s right. Grady Pritchett. He was like a spur in Jesse’s side, never gave it a moment’s rest. Two guys hate each other like that, you don’t need a reason to fight. From what I could tell, the fight was Grady’s doing. That’s why we let Jesse go back to school and play ball after just a few days.”
“And you never thought there might be a link between the fight and the death?”
“Like I said, it looked like an accident to us. But we did our jobs. Police work’s the same out here as anywhere else. We brought in Grady for questioning. Said he knew nothing about it, said it convincingly, too. He’d been in trouble before, and he had lied to us before, and this time looked to me he wasn’t lying. But still we checked him out. Oh, we did ourselves a full investigation. Doc Robinson insisted, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. On the night of the accident Grady said he was with someone at the time. We went out and proved up his alibi. Witness we talked to was as definite as could be. So that was that.”
I leaned forward. “Who was the witness?”
Edmonds took a sip of his coffee. “Hailey,” he said. “And she didn’t have no doubt about it.”