“What do you mean?”
“You tried to tell me. I didn’t want to hear it.”
He’d come on to her. Told her he’d been keeping things of hers ever since she was a little girl, underclothes. Watching her in the tub. He wasn’t waiting any longer. To have sex with her, he meant. Because now he could make her do it.
“What the hell kind of sick madness is that?” I felt like puking. My ears were ringing.
“Blackmail.” She got weirdly quiet. I watched her walking herself back from frantic to that place where she could go. Like this was happening to some other Angus. U-Haul had told her he could go to the school board and get Coach fired for drunkenness and worse. Embezzlement of school and booster funds. That would happen, unless she had sex with him.
He’d stopped banging on the car. We didn’t see him, and it was too quiet. My brain was having trouble turning over, like the fluids were cold. “Shit. He’s gone to get another key.”
“There’s no other key. He’s been pissed over that, he lost the other set.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yeah. But the tire iron is still in the running.”
“This is all bark and no bite,” I said. “He’s just making shit up. Jesus. Stealing from the boosters? That’s like taking out of the church collection plate, Coach would never.”
Wouldn’t, she said, but did. Without knowing it. U-Haul kept all the books. He’d been moving football funds into his mother’s bank account, for years evidently. I said if that was true, they’d have burned down their damn rat trap in Heeltown and gotten a life.
He was just waiting for the iron to strike, is what he’d told her. She’d been calling me for an hour, Jesus. How long was he chasing her around that table? She said not that long, it took a while to get to that point. She’d gone in Coach’s office that afternoon and found out he’d forged Coach’s signature all over a ton of things, power of attorney and such. Stealing from Miss Betsy also, altering her checks. U-Haul came into the office then, she shoved this stuff in his face and one thing led to another, the blackmail and such, before it blew up into him trying to back her into the bedroom.
It was a lot to follow. Why would she go poking in Coach’s office? Craziest thing. Some man had called the house saying U-Haul was putting a lot of Coach’s money in his so-called enterprise, and he needed to check this out with Coach himself. Angus had taken the call. And that’s how it came down. Damn. Mr. McCobb blows open another guy’s con.
We sat in the car forever, waiting for the next moves of a crazed mind. Tire iron to the Impala being among my concerns. The coward must have walked home. Around midnight we called the coast clear. Checked on Coach, who’d slept through the show. I offered to take Angus someplace, but she was pulling it together. We went in the office and unlocked the drawer where Coach kept his Smith & Wesson 40 to take to bed with her. I made sure it was loaded and showed her the safety, which is a little tricky, a grip safety that has to be palmed. She knew.
I sat with her a while in her room, even though I’d have hell to pay later on many fronts. I asked if Coach might have known this stealing was going on. She said no. He’d trusted U-Haul, then stayed too drunk for too long. “That part’s killing me,” she said. “U-Haul says I asked for this. I knew about Dad and didn’t speak up. That’s true, Demon. We knew.”
“You asked for nothing,” I said. “Jesus. You can’t think that.”
“I know.”
“This was done to you. To you and Coach both.” Words I’d been hearing.
“I know.”
She got a little wobbly, and I thought she might fall apart but she didn’t. She sat on the bed talking through what she’d have to do, starting tomorrow. Money to repay, shit to sort out. Lawyers. She looked like a kid, curled against the headboard in her white stretch pj’s, twirling a strand of her hair around one finger, talking like the head of the house. All I could think of was little Angus bearing those Hellboy eyes on her, all her life. Growing her skin of leather.
I told her to push the heavy chest of drawers against the door after I left. And waited to be sure she did.
56
It was April, not quite a year after Vester, and it happened the way I knew it would. I came home and found her. Early evening, not yet dark. Damn April to hell, I could be done with that one. November also. Birthdays, Christmas, dogwoods and redbuds, even football season. Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
I almost didn’t feel anything at first, cleaning her up like I’d done so many times, getting her decent. And then the house, cleaning up her mess and her kit. Hiding stuff, before I made any calls. There were few to make. Thelma had run out of reasons to know her. Like everybody else. I had no wish to see the aunt again, but the EMTs said they had to get hold of next of kin, so I turned over Dori’s phone. Aunt Fred was in the contacts. I’d erased some other numbers first, but nobody cared to track down any mysteries. Another OD in Lee County. There’d been hundreds.
And just like that, I was “the boy that went in there and found her.” People were saying I’d broken into the house, various things. Stories grow on the backs of others. Regardless my clothes and everything being all over the house. Aunt Fred didn’t remember me at all. I watched her pick up a pair of my jeans off the floor like she’s scrubbing a toilet, saying something to the mini-me daughter about Dori having a lot of men friends. I should have screamed the bitch to hell, but my throat had closed up. My baby girl. No words of mine were called for, because just like before, the aunt chose everything. Church, music, one funeral fits all. They buried her beside Vester and her mother. The only thing they got right.
I just felt like a rock through the service, or a hunk of ice. Not cold-hearted against the handful that came out to show respects, it wasn’t their fault. Mostly they were the care nurses that had helped with Vester. Also Donnamarie and them, from the store, and a few girls that might have been friends with Dori in school before they got bored of her. Guilty, curious, who knows what brings people out to view the dead. The funeral was so wrong, I couldn’t see how it mattered. I’d already done everything in the world I could for Dori, and it added up to nothing.
Seeing Angus, that was a surprise. She came up behind me as I was going into the church, and pretty much steered me like a blind man through the day.
At the graveside, we all stood around waiting for over an hour, because Aunt Fred and Tonto got lost. Four or five miles, church to cemetery, and they’re lost. They’d been up there the year before for Vester, but I drove. This time they were on their own, and couldn’t be bothered with the directions I gave them, saying they had the navigator thing in their phones. But you get on these back roads, and that business goes off the rails.