CHAPTER 33
LUCY
The morning after Uncle Crete had caught me breaking in to his house, I woke up exhausted, like I’d been hauling rocks in my sleep. I wanted to stay in bed, but I had to get up and face my new reality. I was grounded, and Dad wouldn’t let me out of his sight. I wasn’t supposed to use the phone. Dad was hungover and threatening to send me to a Christian boarding school in Arkansas. It seemed a bit extreme for breaking curfew, if that was really all he thought I’d done. He dragged me into town with him to get some groceries, and I begged him to let me go to the little library in the courthouse.
“I thought you said they never have anything worth reading,” he grumbled. “Isn’t that why I’m always stopping at the Trade-A-Book?”
“Please. I finished all the books you brought me. Can’t I at least have something to read if I’m gonna be stuck at home?”
“Fine,” he said. “But I don’t know how much time you’ll have for reading, with all the chores you’ll be doing.”
I climbed the steps to the courthouse, and instead of heading down to the basement library, I went straight to Ray’s office. He wasn’t in, so I borrowed a piece of paper and an envelope and scribbled a note to him. Need to talk to you ASAP. I sealed the envelope and left it with the receptionist, then hurried down to the library and grabbed a book at random before heading back to the truck.
Dad was sitting in the cab with the newspaper spread across his lap. “Junior high vice principal hanged himself,” he said.
I tried to sound surprised. “What does the article say? Did he leave a note or anything?”
“Don’t say much at all,” he said. “Happened sometime yesterday.” He glanced over at me. “What’d you get?”
I inspected the book cover along with him. It was an old Harlequin romance novel with a picture of a bare-chested man and a corseted woman groping each other. Dad looked at me like he had no idea who I was, and I gritted my teeth to keep from defending myself.
On the drive home, he lectured me about staying on the right path. He laid out the next few days, which would consist of woodchopping and brush clearing, soul-saving tasks for a wayward youth. We had plenty of firewood for the winter, but we needed to get next year’s supply cut so it could cure. He repeated his favorite and most annoying adage, that wood warms you three times—when you cut it, when you haul it, and when you burn it—and I didn’t bother pointing out that it was August and I didn’t want to be any warmer. I had mostly tuned him out until he brought up his return to work, which would be the following Monday. He didn’t want me home alone anymore. I would be staying with Birdie.
Dad didn’t waste time. He sent me to my room to get ready as soon as we got home. I dressed in jeans and a thin flannel shirt, laced up my work boots, and pulled back my hair. We doused ourselves in bug spray, and I packed a small cooler with sandwiches and apples while Dad loaded up the truck with his saws, ax, and shotgun. I grabbed two frozen water jugs from the deep freeze, and we headed into the woods on the narrow road we’d cleared through the timber.
Dad felled three oaks and set to work slicing off the limbs and cutting the branches into manageable pieces. I dragged all the useless parts to the brush pile while he sectioned up the tree. When I was done with the brush, I would start loading wood into the truck to haul it home, following this pattern over and over until we were too worn out to continue.
The humidity was in full bloom, my entire body sticky with sweat. I sat down on a log and took off my thick leather gloves, hating the musty smell they left on my hands. I wiped sawdust off my face and drank meltwater from the jug. The buzz of the chain saw lulled me into a drowsy state, and I wanted to curl up in the cab of the truck and fall asleep, forgetting everything that was going on. The chain saw stopped abruptly, and the sudden silence was unsettling. Dad set the saw down on the tailgate and got out his sharpening kit. “I could use a hand,” he said. When he worked on the chain saw at home, he clamped the bar to his workbench with a vise, but out in the woods, he needed me to hold it steady. He drew a file through the chain’s teeth until the edges shone sharp. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something,” he said. “I thought about it last year when you … you know, with the pastor’s boy. But when I saw that boyfriend of yours the other day—”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Well, Daniel, whatever he is, he cares about you, and he’s older, and … You know I’ve taught you to keep your pants on, and I haven’t changed my mind about that. I hope you realize he’s over eighteen and you’re not, and if I found out anything happened, I could have him prosecuted.”
“Dad! We’re not even— He’s …” I didn’t know how to explain my relationship with Daniel, and it wouldn’t do any good anyway.
He kept filing. The grating of metal on metal vibrated through my bones. “What I’m saying is I tried to raise you right. But I don’t know how good a job I did. People make mistakes. I don’t want you fooling around with that boy, but more than that, I don’t want you getting pregnant and ruining your life. You need to go to college, get yourself some fancy degree, and make a decent living. I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”
I thought carefully about what I wanted to say to him. “Did it ruin Mom’s life when she had me?”
Heat reddened his ears, stained his throat. “She was coming from a completely different place. She wanted you more than anything.”
I’d heard that before. “Didn’t she want to go to school?”
Dad slid the file back into its plastic sheath. “If her life had gone differently, if it hadn’t got thrown off the tracks, she’d have been in school somewhere. She never would’ve met me or had you. But things happened. And she told me she wouldn’t have changed any of it; she wouldn’t have given you up for anything. All the good parts missing from her life, she wanted those for you. She said there was plenty of time for her to go back to school when you were older.”
Except there hadn’t been time. “So she had plans. She wanted to raise me and go back to school.… What happened? What changed all that?”
“I wish I knew,” he said. “She was depressed about something, but she wouldn’t talk about it. And then she was gone.” He gassed up the saw and pulled his gloves on. “Back to work,” he said.
“Speaking of work,” I said, “I’m scheduled to go in tomorrow. Will I still be under house arrest?”
“I seem to remember, when you took that job, you promised to follow some basic rules. Which you broke. From here on out, you work for me.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. I was late one time! You can’t take away everything just for breaking curfew.”
He yanked the cord, and the saw grumbled fitfully. Dad’s expression dared me to keep arguing, and when I didn’t, he turned his back and resumed deconstructing the tree.
After three days of hauling wood and splitting last year’s logs, I was worn out and getting cabin fever. I hadn’t been able to talk to Bess, and I hadn’t heard anything from Ray. I’d practically given up hope of Daniel calling. I didn’t know if Dad had given him the sex talk, too, but whatever he’d said surely hadn’t helped. I was still angry about my overblown punishment, though secretly, I was relieved not to have to go to work. Just thinking about Crete made my stomach hurt.
It was Dad’s last night before heading back to work in Springfield, and he was drinking, like he usually did after talking about Mom. It wasn’t the best time to ask him a question, but I couldn’t wait any longer for the answer.
“Hey,” I said, poking my head into the living room, where he was listening to an old bluegrass album. “I need to ask you something.” He looked up, his expression blank. “You know how I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Cheri. Would you tell me something if you knew? I can keep quiet just like you. You know I can. It’s important to me to know the truth. You might not realize how important.”
He got up and crossed the room to the stereo, where he flipped clumsily through a stack of records. “Sure, I know something. She was killed and chopped to bits. End of story.”
“Dad.” I waited until he turned to look at me. “Somebody thinks you had something to do with it. I don’t believe it.… I know you didn’t kill anybody … but she was my friend, and I—”
He dropped the record he was holding and moved toward me, unsteady on his feet. I had pricked a nerve. “Somebody? I can guess who that might be. What else did somebody tell you about me? Huh?”
I took a step back. He’d scared me a few times when he was drinking, and I’d seen him plenty angry, but rarely had he ever directed such anger at me.
“He tell you I killed somebody?” His whiskey breath soured the air.
“I didn’t believe him,” I said quietly.
“You’re wrong,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I killed a man once.” He clamped his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back against the doorframe. “It was an accident that haunts me every day of my life. Somebody convinced me to keep it quiet, took care of things for me. So I owed him a favor. When he needed my help, I came running.” I squirmed, but he didn’t seem to realize how tight he was gripping me. “He’s my brother, and he needed my help, so I helped him. I’m the gravedigger in the family, and it was just another job. Except when I got there and saw … it was her.”
“Cheri? Crete killed her?” I felt a rush of anticipation. I was so close to the answer.
Dad shook his head. “He didn’t kill her, and he didn’t tell me who did. He just called me to clean up the mess. He said the whole thing started out as an accident, but it happened on his property, and he didn’t want to get messed up in it. She was already dead, no point calling the law.”
He let go, and my shoulders ached where he’d clutched me. “But you didn’t bury her.”
“No. I tried, but I couldn’t. She didn’t deserve to disappear like that.”
“You … you put her in the tree?”
“Right across from Dane’s,” he said. “Crete is family, and I’d never turn him in, but I wanted him to know it wasn’t okay. I won’t go around burying murdered little girls, no matter what he has on me.”
“How do you know he didn’t kill her?”
“He’s never been afraid to tell me the truth. He don’t hide who he is, not from me.”
That didn’t mean Crete wouldn’t mislead him. He had known the truth about Cheri all along, yet he’d tried to make me think Dad was the guilty one. He’d twisted the truth about my mother, about how she came to be here. He wouldn’t have shown Dad the papers I’d seen in her folder. Wouldn’t have admitted that he’d handpicked Lila as his own. And I didn’t believe that Crete would tell my dad if he’d had something to do with her disappearance.
“What are we going to do?”
“Nothing,” he said. “We’re gonna keep quiet. There’s no bringing Cheri back. Crete got my message loud and clear, I’m not doing him any more favors. School’s about to start. Your job is to stay out of trouble and graduate, and you don’t need to worry about anything else. You can let Crete think you believe him … hell, he didn’t really even lie to you. No doubt I’d get thrown in jail right along with him if any of this came out.”
“Do you think he did something to Mom?”
“In all the years she’s been gone, I’ve thought through every imaginable possibility. So I thought about it, yeah. I even asked him once, straight up, did he have anything to do with her leaving. I asked everybody the same thing. I don’t believe he did. I know him better than anybody. His idea of right and wrong might not be the same as yours or mine, but he stands by his family. I took a risk when I laid Cheri out like that. He was pissed. He could’ve taken away everything we have in a heartbeat, but he didn’t. He won’t. He was disappointed when I told him you wouldn’t be working for him anymore, but he didn’t argue.” Dad sank into his recliner. “Everything’s gonna be fine now. You can focus on school, and you’ll be safe and sound at Birdie’s while I’m gone.”
“I thought I was safe and sound here,” I said. He unscrewed the lid on the Southern Comfort and took a swig straight from the bottle. “How long’s this punishment going to last?”
He looked tired, dazed. The lamplight sallowed his skin, aged him with unflattering shadows. “Everything’s gonna be fine,” he repeated. Fine got swallowed up in the bottle as he took another drink.
He was worried. My missed curfew might have scared him, but it wasn’t the only reason I was headed to Birdie’s. He wanted to protect me, to lock me back in a box I no longer fit inside, though he knew as well as anyone that it wasn’t possible to move in reverse; no matter how hard we fought against it, time flowed in only one direction.