“Giving me a head start, that’s all.”
Jay shoves his hands into his pants pockets, his fists pressing against the seams, trying to understand what could have possibly passed between Sam and A.G. to taint A.G.’s relationship with his one and only son. Jay, who didn’t have a father, didn’t have a choice in the matter, says, “You’re making a mistake.”
A.G. slides the ball cap off his head.
He lifts the bottom of his T-shirt to wipe sweat from his forehead. “I never did much for my son. Some of that’s on me, but a lot of it ain’t,” he says, glancing around the one-room juke joint. “Best I could give him now is a little bit of advice. You want to know what we talked about, Mr. Porter? I’ll tell you the same thing I told him. ‘Get the hell away from Sam while you still can.’”
CHAPTER 15
Lonnie meets him at the house after dark. Jay leaves a plate of baked chicken, peas, and cabbage for her on the table. The kids ate early, with him, and went to their own rooms, Ben to his comic books and his PlayStation and Ellie to whatever her breakup with Lori King has freed her to do. Homework, he hopes. Maybe Lori’s indiscretion might actually land Ellie on the honor roll this semester. Belle Blue is playing on the hi-fi when Lonnie walks in, lugging the same beat-up cardboard box full of her old notes, this time with a six-pack of Shiner Bock resting on top. “A. G. Hats,” she says when she hears the music, the black-and-blue keystrokes. She sets the box on one of the kitchen chairs.
“You a fan?”
Lonnie shakes her head. “Amy is.”
The thought of it, any little thing about the woman she’s both in love and enraged with, makes her smile, despite herself. “She plays it once a week, I bet.”
“You know anything about him, why he quit playing?”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“No,” Jay says, leaving it at that.
Lon takes off her jacket, a red quilted vest with cotton sleeves, draping it on the back of a kitchen chair. She thanks him for the food, inquires if there’s any pepper sauce or chowchow for the cabbage, tearing into half the plate while standing up. Jay cracks open one of the beers and hands it to her.
“You get it?” he asks.
“I got it.”
Then, swallowing, she tells him he’s not to quote a word of it. “You never saw this, okay? If even a period or comma is different from whatever you get from the state in discovery, I don’t want to hear it. You never saw a thing from me, understand? Resner did it as a favor. He’s pissed as hell about all of it, being pushed off the case, the way they’re playing this whole thing, not bothering to link this girl to the others.” She reaches beneath the flaps of the cardboard box. Sitting right on top is a thin manila envelope. She picks it up and hands it across the table with a piece of advice. “Take a deep breath first.”
Jay opens the envelope. Inside, he finds a copy of the autopsy report following the death of Alicia Nowell, age eighteen. The first thing he sees is a color picture of her pulpy, bruised face, swollen around the eyes. The flesh at one corner of her mouth has been torn, the flap of skin pulled back like a bloody curtain to show her chipped right incisor, covered with dirt and tiny bits of dried grass. Her eyes are open, staring out at him, the mud-coated skin above her eyebrows knitted into a tiny, woeful w. Jay stumbles back at the sight, dropping the handful of papers onto the floor. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters.
“I know,” Lonnie says.
“The other girls, they weren’t beaten, were they?”
Lonnie shakes her head, picking up the pages.
“What is all this?”
Jay turns at the sound of his daughter’s voice.
She’s standing in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen, still in her school clothes. “You can’t be in here right now,” he says. “Go back to your room.” She stands on her tiptoes, glancing over his shoulder at the pictures.
“Is that her?”
“Go,” Jay says, gruffer than he meant to be. She backs out of the room, Lonnie watching her leave. Jay puts two hands on the back of the nearest chair to steady himself. He feels the chicken, cabbage, and peas turn to raw sewage in his insides. Jesus Christ. What in the world did he do, bringing this shit into his life, this monstrous, bruising death into a house that has already seen its fair share? What was he thinking? “Hey,” Lonnie says. “You okay?”
He nods. But it’s a lie.
Lonnie lays her drawings from the first two cases faceup next to this recent autopsy report. She moves the pieces around so that the photographs of Alicia Nowell and the images of the first two girls are all side by side.
“Check the time of death,” she says.
Alicia Nowell, according to this report, was far enough along in the stages of decomposition to prevent the medical examiner from making more than an educated guess as to how long her body was hidden in the weeds: five days.
“She was already gone,” Jay says.
“The whole time they were searching.”
“She was already dead.”
He looks at the images, the three girls lined up in a row.
“Why is this one different?” he wonders.
Lon doesn’t know. “For whatever reason, Alicia was the only one who was beaten. She was killed almost right away and found in a different place.”
“The railroad tracks behind Demaree Lane.”
Jay pulls out a sheet of paper from her cardboard box, flipping it over to draw a quick, crude map of Pleasantville. The railroad tracks are an L-shaped ten-block stretch from the open field where the other girls were found.
“Who called it in? Sunday morning?”
“It was a transient who found her, guy pushing a shopping cart,” Lon says. “When he saw the girl, he ran to the Methodist church nearby and knocked on the back door. It was one of the pastors who called the cops.”