Lap-legged drunk, Hollis spied them and took a tire iron to the boy, sending him to the city hospital. Hollis roughed up Jane too. And when Jane’s daddy found out, he whipped Hollis’s butt and demanded the dean kick Hollis out of school.
Soon after, Hollis had slipped into a howling despair and spent the next year freeloading off college pals, boozing it up, and fighting in bars tucked off gravel lanes, gambling in seedy juke joints out on country crossroads until his daddy put his foot down and snapped him back home.
A short time later in another county, Hollis met a girl at the Truth of God’s Point Pentecostal tent revival that an old chum dragged him to. Hollis married her within four months, then had himself three babies before you could sweep the snow off as many springs.
“Louise is a’growing meaner by the minute.” Hollis laughed, answering Flannery. “Ready to drop our fourth any day now. How’s the teaching job?”
One of Mama’s old canasta-playing friends, Alice Locke, interrupted and gave Hollis and Flannery each a plate lunch from her home. Two more townswomen pushed beyond the troopers and offered Hollis freshly baked cookies. “Sheriff Henry,” one said, “you must be exhausted. Here you worked so hard feeding the town yesterday, now having to suffer this.” She flicked an arm to the water. “Poor dear.” She passed him the plate.
Hollis took a cookie, hiding a grateful smile behind a bite. “Mm. Thank you, Mrs. Winter and Mrs. Knightly. It’s delicious, and you do mighty wonders for the sad soul.”
Flannery declined the sweets.
The women disappeared back into the growing crowd.
Flannery’s stomach had been lit from the nerves, her insides so twisted she could barely keep the coffee down. Still she did her best to take a tiny nibble of the meatloaf, gravy-covered potatoes, and butter beans before tossing it all into a bush. She stole away to the onlookers long enough to return the plate and thank Mrs. Locke again for her generosity and the tasty meal.
Gilly’s Tow Truck Service worked hours on the car, trading their squeegees for brooms to clear off the thick coating. A spiderweb of cracks blanketed the windshield.
The state police and the sheriff’s department and the coroner loitered around the old 1950 vehicle, watching it all, sneaking glances Flannery’s way.
From a distance, an official-looking person, maybe a man from the local newspaper, Flannery guessed, took pictures of the Mercury, of Hollis, of her, and a lot of the folks behind them.
Then a lawman stepped forward and tried the partly caved-in door on the driver’s side.
Flannery held her breath. The door wouldn’t budge. The man jerked on the big metal handle again, then circled around to the other side and tried that door’s handle without any luck.
The tow truck worker called out for a crowbar, and someone fetched one. Together those two worked on freeing the door, prying it loose until at last the Mercury creaked open, splashing out more river water and spilling muck and foul-smelling, slurry sediments onto the grass.
Flannery saw it on top of the grass, sticking out of a pile of mud. A scream cartwheeled in her throat, whisked off her tongue into a scratchy cry she didn’t recognize.
Hollis must’ve seen it too. When she took a step toward it, he latched on to her arm and snatched her back.
Flannery slipped free and darted over to the Mercury. A state trooper caught her arm, and she broke his grip and dropped to the muddy ground, screaming wildly.
She plucked up one of her sister’s leather Mary Janes and swiped away the gunk. The pretty organza bow Mama had made and fastened to Patsy’s prom shoe was clumped in dirt, the inside packed full of more mud.
Flannery pulled herself up to her knees, slowly stood, and peered into the opened door.
The Mercury was cramped with mud, stacked thick and almost up past the steering wheel. Two necks of broken whiskey bottles poked up from the muck like headstones. Patsy’s other shoe lay on the dash beside a billfold and a long, human bone.
Slowly Flannery looked to the rear. Someone from behind grabbed her and tried to pull her back. Flannery clung to the door frame, her eyes locked to the backseat.
A man yelled, “Get this woman outta here!”
Someone else hollered, “Secure this vehicle.”
And another screamed, “Don’t touch anything! Dammit, don’t—”
But it was too late. Flannery’s eyes touched everything, burning the memory into her, cutting through the stitches of sanity, branding her with a grief that balled up in her hot-white fists. A scream turned sideways and tightened in her windpipe.
Her wet eyes soaked it all up, every drop of mud, every speck of dirt, every inch of grime and what it tentacled—old bottles, Danny’s leather belt, one of his black dress shoes with the odd penny plastered to its sole, Hollis’s metal flask, and the parcel of two cracked and muddy skulls, resting in the back dash, wedged against the sloping window, locked eternally in a grotesque lover’s kiss.
CHAPTER 20
Flannery clung to Patsy’s mud-filled prom shoe, its heel snapped and missing, as the men surrounded the car and carefully extracted the remains held within. Hollis tried to take it from Flannery, but she held on tight, and growled like a mean dog.
Around her the coroner’s people sealed bone, bottles, and belts. Everything they could find and even things that couldn’t be named were carefully wrapped in plastic and tucked into boxes labeled Evidence.
Flannery knew she looked like a crazy woman standing there gaping. For a short while the men didn’t bother her and left her to soak in that madness, so full of the brokenness, they weren’t sure how to approach. They moved around her, a mixture of fear, curiosity, and pity in their stolen glances.
Flannery thought about the bones scattered in the car. Patsy’s painful death. It’s okay, Patsy. Don’t cry, don’t cry, sister; I’ll do it for both of us now. Flannery did, feeling like someone was tearing at her flesh, plucking the very bones off her body, snapping them in twos and threes.
After a while Flannery had spent her tears. Touching her swollen face, she swiped the mud off. Her clothes were filthy from the grime and the scattered mud around the car.
For years she had thought of, fought against, the nagging possibility that her sister, her one and the same might be dead, each time sweeping away those thoughts with more hopeful ones, imagining a happy family for Patsy somewhere else. Somewhere far away with the man she loved and who loved her back. But always the anger perked. The pent-up fury surfaced for Patsy leaving them like this, leaving Flannery here to fix Mama’s broken heart and her own, leaving them all this time wondering.
Those angry thoughts would come and go over the years, leaving Flannery spent, weighted down for weeks, where she wouldn’t talk to anyone unless she had to, answer her door or phone, or so much as stop to chat with her coworkers at school.
She looked around for Hollis.
A man came over and tried to pry the shoe from her, and she doubled over, clutching it firmly to her chest. “No, you can’t have it. You can’t have this one last piece of her.”
The exasperated young man went off to get Mr. Flagg, the old coroner. Hurrying over to the gentleman wearing a dark suit, he pointed back to Flannery.
Another coroner’s assistant hollered for Mr. Flagg to come quick. The assistant whistled and passed a large bone to the coroner, flicking muck and dirt off his vinyl gloves. “May have us a murder instead of a drowning, Roy.”
Roy Flagg flexed his gloved hands and took it from the assistant, turning it over carefully and inspecting.
“See the bullet hole and bone shatter? Right there on the upper part of the humerus,” the young assistant eagerly pointed out, announced excitedly.
“We’re going to have to rake inside there, comb this whole area.” The coroner frowned, looking around. “Secure this area. Only my two assistants, no one else.”