A: Made a b-line and got in front of me and would not let me go up the stairs. He told me I could not go up the stairs. He didn’t want me up the stairs. And he got mad. When Ricky got mad, you knew when he got mad. I’ve made him mad before. He would turn beet red and daggers would come out his eyes.
Stop the moment there. Ricky’s on the staircase, his eyes blazing, the vein in his forehead sticking out and his face a crimson flare. He spreads his arms to block her, holding the broom straight across, one hand curled around the end like a fist. Lanelle’s on the step below him, still in her green Fuel Stop polo, her makeup end-of-the-day tired and her hair smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and diesel fumes.
It’s been a long day. She’s worked a long shift. She should be at home right now, her feet up, not here at poor Pearl’s.
This is when, Lanelle will later say, she knew. Something was off about Ricky. Something had been off this whole time. Even if no one would say it.
Lanelle turned around and went to tell Pearl that Ricky wouldn’t let her up.
“Aw, that’s just Ricky,” Pearl said. “He already searched upstairs. He don’t mean nothing. Just Ricky being Ricky.”
Lanelle knew what she meant. A lifetime of being thought strange could make a man strange. But something didn’t sit right.
So Lanelle walked out to the street and tapped on the window of the first patrol car she saw. No command post yet; the cops were doing everything out of the front seats of their cruisers. “Did y’all search Pearl’s house?” she said.
“Ma’am?” the officer said.
“This white house,” she said. “Right here. Did y’all search it?”
The officer checked his clipboard. “Lady of the house said a Ricky searched it.”
“And y’all are satisfied with that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Later she’d never be able to explain it quite right to herself, why she hadn’t just turned around and shoved her way past Ricky and marched upstairs and looked. Sure, later they’d say it would have been too late by then, anyway, that the boy had died immediately, and all there was in that closet—all that Ricky was keeping her from finding—was a body.
But she’d still think about it. For years she’d think about it.
Instead, she told the cops she was there to help and she’d do anything they wanted. They sent her into the woods with the LeBleu fire department, where she stayed late into the night, shining a flashlight on mud-brown leaves that turned reflective in the damp, watching the gleam that came back at her, looking for a color that didn’t belong. She walked the edges of the ravine, leaning to peer into it, not really expecting to find a boy, but looking, still looking.
Come morning she was back at the Fuel Stop, cleaning out the Thermoses she’d borrowed. And Ricky was there. All day long, as she passed change back to the truckers and nodded at them, she kept catching herself looking up through the plate-glass windows at the front of the truck stop, watching Ricky as he crossed the lot. It was his face she was looking at. That squinted-up face like a small dog. Did he look normal? Normal, that is, for Ricky? Or did he look like a man with something to hide? And those hands of his—did they look like hands that could hurt a child? It wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell anyone about, what she was feeling, but something just didn’t sit right.
TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, 2003
A: I, myself, when I have company that I don’t quite trust, I keep my jewelry in my room. I will lock my door to my room so they don’t go into it.
Q: So you’re suspicious?
A: Right. Because I don’t want them going in there, you know, for some reason. I’m hiding my jewelry.
Q: Okay.
A: So that set me suspicious to Ricky, him not letting me go upstairs.
She knew what it meant. Ricky had something to hide.
There is no way to know, now, as Lanelle passes back the bills to the truckers, and Pearl wipes down the counters at the Fuel Stop, and Ricky hoists his laundry bag over his shoulder to carry to his folks’, that in three months, after Jeremy’s body has been found in the closet, after Ricky has been handcuffed and locked up in the parish jail, after the front pages of newspapers all over the state have run the same black-and-white photograph of the bogeyman sex offender who’s murdered a little boy, and after the Lawson home has become command central for the police, who have taped the closet and Ricky’s bedroom in yellow tape, and, after all of Ricky’s belongings from the room have been placed in sealed plastic bags marked EVIDENCE and Jeremy’s body has been sealed up and carried off to the morgue, that Terry Lawson—Pearl’s husband, Joey and June’s father—will take his son, Joey, out for an afternoon motorcycle ride.
No record exists of what Terry Lawson says that afternoon. Maybe he says, “Let’s go out to the lake, Son.” Maybe “Why don’t you come to the store with me, come for a ride?” Maybe “You feeling like ice cream?” He gives the boy his hand and helps him climb up, gets his little legs situated around the bike’s body.
Then that motorcycle flies right into the second car of an Amtrak train, killing them both.
The second car.
Terry Lawson was steering. His son behind him, hanging on to his waist. Witnesses say that the area was clear—that the train could be seen “for a mile”—and that it blew a loud whistle just before impact. How do you hit the second car of a train? Maybe the first car you don’t see coming, and it hits you. But how do you hit the second car?
*
There is so much the people in this story cannot know yet, so much that hovers in the court records still to come. Through the pages of the transcript I watch as Lanelle flips on the pump for another truck and stares at Ricky through the window. I watch as Pearl moves on to refilling the creamers. I watch as Ricky tries to flag down a ride in a passing car.
For three days more, Jeremy’s body will stay wedged in the closet as Joey and June play in the hallway across from it. For three days more, Pearl and Terry Lawson will tuck the children into their beds at night and wake them up in the morning and ready them for school, and all the while, Jeremy’s body will be there across the hall, standing wrapped in the blue blanket printed with Dick Tracy, his boots and his BB gun placed neatly at his feet.
The grown-ups drink their coffee, the children their morning milk at the table, and in three months’ time the father, Terry, will be dead. The boy, Joey, too.
Later, there will be allegations that Terry was molesting June. Nothing ever proved.
I try to study the past, try to read between the lines of its text—to see Terry as he pours himself more coffee and sits down beside the bowls Ricky set out for the children’s cereal. Where were his hands last night? He and Pearl gave up their bedroom.
And Pearl, look at her there now, as she opens the refrigerator door and reminds Joey to finish his breakfast. What does she see? What does she see, or what is she able to see? What does she look away from? Did she not know Jeremy’s body was there? Three days.
Then Terry and Joey die. And Pearl takes June, and disappears.
Eight