I nodded. “Was there any identification on the girl?”
“Nothing. Just that damn bridal veil.”
“Do you think it’s the same killer?”
“I can’t draw a solid conclusion and I’m not willing to speculate. Talk to Avery later on, when he isn’t so busy. He’s a smart man, and he’ll be as honest with you as you let him.”
“Okay.” It was tenuous footing for establishing a relationship with the detective. I was working in the shadow of Brandon Prescott and I understood that.
“Now leave,” he said. “We’ve got to bag the body and take her some place where we can help her.”
He spoke with such tenderness that I blinked back the sting of tears. The help he offered was in capturing the person who’d killed her. Cold comfort, I knew from personal experience.
I walked down the pier, thinking it was so much longer than when I’d first walked up it. When my feet touched sand, I turned and looked back. There was a halo of bright light and the movement of bodies. Had I not known better, I might have thought it was a party.
The population of Leakesville hadn’t changed in the past fifty years. Folks died, children were born, some moved away and others moved back. The county itself had fewer than twenty thousand residents, the city about three thousand. The courthouse centered the town, a common enough configuration, except in Leakesville there was the sense that time had stopped.
I drove around the square, looking for evidence that it was 2005, not 1970. Two old men whittled beneath a magnolia tree. They wore bib overalls and spit tobacco on the grass. Crows, brazen in the warm sun, walked over the courthouse lawn, acting as if they owned it. Across the street, Bexley Mercantile was doing a good business. A man with an excited young boy was picking out a bicycle. Birthday, probably. I remembered the thrill of examining the bicycles at Christmas, telling Dad which one I wanted Santa Claus to bring. I’d loved the Bexley and Mr. Clancy, the owner. Everything a girl ever needed could be found in that store.
My dad’s pharmacy was on Main Street, a corner store that sold hairspray, deodorant, makeup, fire-ant poison, dog collars, a few Parker Brothers games for the occasional birthday present, greeting cards, Russell Stover candies, rubbers and prescriptions. There was also a soda fountain and a spinning bookrack that held everything from Harlequins to John Irving. I’d grown up working the soda fountain. When business was slow, I’d sit at the counter, drink a cherry Coke and read. I’d developed broad literary tastes and a voracious appetite for fiction.
When I pushed open the door, a bell jangled and Gertrude Mason let out a happy bark of laughter. “Look what the dogs dragged up,” she said, coming out from behind the counter to give me a hug. “What about a Coke float?”
I’d found another source of sugar in my vodka, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “Sure. That sounds great.”
“Carson’s here!” she sang out to my dad. He was in the back of the store, typing away on an old computer. Gertrude was the only alarm system Dad had when the store was open, and it worried me. Folks would kill over a handful of Xanax or Oxycotin. I walked to the back and took the step up to where the pharmacist worked on an elevated platform. He could survey the whole store from his perch.
“Carson, I’m glad you’re here. You’re not sick, are you?”
I shook my head. “Just came to say hi.” That was a lie. Mitch Rayburn and the deal I’d made were troubling me.
Gertrude brought my drink. “Here you are,” she said, handing me the concoction in a real glass with a long-handled spoon.
I took a bite of the ice cream and sipped the Coke through a straw. “Just as good as I remember,” I said, and it was.
My father poured yellow capsules into a blue pill counter and counted them out, five at a time. I watched his hands work with speed and efficiency. “Dad, have you ever made a deal that seemed good but might not be?”
“We’re not talking about marriage, are we?” He arched his eyebrows, and I was caught by a gut punch of pain as I realized how white his black eyebrows had become.
“Nothing like that.” I studied his face. The firm cheeks that I’d once loved to touch before he shaved were sagging. There were dark pouches under his eyes. My father was seventy-two, and for the first time since I could remember, he looked his age.
“I’ve made some bad deals. I swallowed the losses. But that’s not what you’re talking about, is it? This isn’t financial.” He frowned.
“No, it isn’t financial.” I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. My father was a man of pure ethics. He didn’t make deals. He would tell me what I already knew—that I’d compromised my professionalism. “Never mind,” I said.
“What are you up to, Carson?” Dad asked.
“I’ll bet you’ve never asked Dorry that question once in her life,” I said, aware too late of the bitterness in my voice.
“I never needed to,” my father answered, and instead of bitter, he was sad.
Mariah had given up her favorite pastime of jerking the reins out of my hand and jumping fallen trees, ditches, pieces of farm machinery or anything that happened to be in her path. In her golden years, she was a more sedate—and safer—mount. In her youth, she’d been a firebrand of action. Though Dorry was the better rider, Mariah was the bolder horse. She loved to jump. Once, she’d jumped out of the arena in a flat class and gone through the warm-up field taking the jumps. I probably could have stopped her if I’d tried harder, but she loved it so.
It was a warm afternoon, perfect for a ride, and I let her amble through the woods that went down to the Leaf River. The trail was overgrown now, the sun dappling through the leaves of water oaks and red oaks, the white blossoms of the dogwood giving it all a magical feel. Wildflowers bloomed in purple and yellow abundance along the sandy path, and it was too early for the deer flies that made life a torment for man and beast during the hot summer months.
For a brief time, I was sixteen again, a child of sunshine and lazy afternoons. Mariah and I made our way to the river, a brown ribbon that had once been the main thoroughfare through virgin forests. Mariah stood on a sandbar, the slow current lapping at her fetlocks. When I went back, I would be Carson the adult again, the childless mother, the alcoholic, the failed wife. It was with great reluctance that I set Mariah on the trail home.
7
“Pass the corn bread, please, Mother,” Dorry said. “No matter how I follow your recipe, mine isn’t the same. Tommy says so, too.”
“Dorry, your corn bread is perfectly fine, and stop trying to flatter me,” Hannah Lynch, my mother, said, but a tiny pink blossom of pleasure crept into her cheeks.
“It is the best,” I said, drawing three pairs of eyes my way. It was just the four of us for a five-thirty dinner at my mother’s antique cherry table. Even though my father was an upper-middle-class pharmacist, my family had always kept the same hours as the community. We ate dinner on farm time, as if the family had worked hard in the fields all afternoon and needed sustenance.
“Mine is nothing like that flat corn bread your husband liked,” Mama said to me. “I think it was made with water instead of milk.”
I looked down at my plate. I’d been divorced from Daniel for a year. My parents had never liked him, had never allowed themselves to know him. He was too different. They’d never been able to see beyond his Latin appearance and different mannerisms to who he was, I think because he’d taken me away. Had we stayed in Mississippi, they might have grown to love him. Instead, he would always be an interloper and the guy who stole their daughter, the man who’d kept them from really knowing their granddaughter, a man