Read the book: «Turning Angel»
GREG ILES
Turning Angel
Copyright
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Greg Iles 2005
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2013 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Greg Iles asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007546541
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007546657
Version 2018-07-30
Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature’s power.
Camille Paglia
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Greg Iles
About the Publisher
Prologue
The rain kept falling, swelling the creek until it lifted the girl into its muddy flood. She swept down through the town, unseen by anyone as she passed the grassy mounds where three hundred years ago Indians worshipped the sun. She bobbed in the current beneath the Highway 61 bridge, naked and unbloodied, not yet gray, limp as a sleeping child. She rolled with the creek, which wound through the woods toward the paper mill and crashed into the Mississippi River in a maelstrom of brown waves. The girl made this journey alone and unknowing, but soon she would whip the town into another kind of maelstrom, one that would make the river seem placid by comparison.
She never meant to cause trouble. She was a quiet girl, brilliant and full of life. When she laughed, others laughed with her. When she cried, she hid her tears. She was blessed with many gifts and took none for granted. At seventeen, she had already brought honor to the town. No one would have predicted this end.
But then no one really knew her.
Only me.
ONE
Some stories must wait to be told.
Any writer worth his salt knows this. Sometimes you wait for events to percolate in your subconscious until a deeper truth emerges; other times you’re simply waiting for the principals to die. Sometimes it’s both.
This story is like that.
A man walks the straight and narrow all his life; he follows the rules, stays within the lines; then one day he makes a misstep. He crosses a line and sets in motion a chain of events that will take from him everything he has and damn him forever in the eyes of those he loves.
We all sense that invisible line of demarcation, like an unspoken challenge hanging in the air. And there is some wild thing in our natures that makes us want to cross it, that compels us with the silent insistence of evolutionary imperative to risk all for a glinting shadow. Most of us suppress that urge. Fear stops us more often than wisdom, as in most things. But some of us take that step. And in the taking, we start down a path from which it is difficult and sometimes impossible to return.
Dr. Andrew Elliott is such a man.
I have known Drew since he was three years old, long before he was a Rhodes scholar, before he went to medical school, before he returned to our hometown of twenty thousand souls to practice internal medicine. And our bond runs deeper than that of most childhood friends. When I was fourteen, eleven-year-old Drew Elliott saved my life and almost lost his own in the process. We remained close friends until he graduated from medical school, and then for a long time—fifteen years, I guess—I saw him hardly at all. Much of that time I spent convicting murderers as an assistant district attorney in Houston, Texas. The rest I spent writing novels based on extraordinary cases from my career, which gave me a second life and time to spend with my family.
Drew and I renewed our friendship five years ago, after my wife died and I returned to Natchez with my young daughter to try to piece my life back together. The early weeks of my return were swallowed by a whirlwind of a murder case, but as the notoriety faded, Drew was the first old friend to seek me out and make an effort to bring me into the community. He put me on the school board of our alma mater, got me into the country club, talked me into sponsoring a hot air balloon and a Metropolitan opera singer during Natchez’s annual festivals. He worked hard at bringing this widower back to life, and with much help from Caitlin Masters, my lover for the past few years, he succeeded.
All that seems a distant memory now.
Yesterday Drew Elliott was a respected pillar of the community, revered by many, held up as a role model by all; today he is scorned by those who venerated him, and his life hangs in the balance. Drew was our golden boy, a paragon of everything small-town America holds to be noble, and by unwritten law the town will crucify him with a hatred equal to their betrayed love.
How did Drew transform himself from hero into monster? He reached out for love, and in the reaching pulled a whole town down on top of him. Last night his legend was intact. He was sitting beside me at a table in the boardroom of St. Stephen’s Preparatory School, still handsome at forty, dark-haired, and athletic—he played football for Vanderbilt—a little gray at the temples but radiating the commanding presence of a doctor in his prime. I see this moment as clearly as any in my life, because it’s the instant before revelation, that frozen moment in which the old world sits balanced on the edge of destruction, like a china cup teetering on the edge of a table. In a moment it will shatter into irrecoverable fragments, but for an instant it remains intact, and salvation seems possible.
The boardroom windows are dark, and the silver rain that’s fallen all day is blowing horizontally now, slapping the windows with an icy rattle. We’ve crowded eleven people around the Brazilian rosewood table—six men, five women—and the air is close in the room. Drew’s clear eyes are intent on Holden Smith, the overdressed president of the St. Stephen’s school board, as we discuss the purchase of new computers for the junior high school. Like Holden and several other board members, Drew and I graduated from St. Stephen’s roughly two decades ago, and our children attend it today. We’re part of a wave of alumni who stepped in during the city’s recent economic decline to try to rebuild the school that gave us our remarkable educations. Unlike most Mississippi private schools, which sprang up in response to forced integration in 1968, St. Stephen’s was founded as a parochial school in 1946. It did not admit its first African-American student until 1982, but the willingness was there years before that. High tuition and anxiety about being the only black child in an all-white school probably held off that landmark event for a few years. Now twenty-one black kids attend the secular St. Stephen’s, and there would be more but for the cost. Not many black families in Natchez can afford to pay five thousand dollars a year per child for education when the public school is free. Few white families can either, when you get down to it, and fewer as the years pass. Therein lies the board’s eternal challenge: funding.
At this moment Holden Smith is evangelizing for Apple computers, though the rest of the school’s network runs comfortably on cheaper IBM clones. If he ever pauses for breath, I plan to tell Holden that while I use an Apple Powerbook myself, we have to be practical on matters of cost. But before I can, the school’s secretary opens the door and raises her hand in a limp sort of wave. Her face is so pale that I fear she might be having a heart attack.
Holden gives her an annoyed look. “What do you need, Theresa? We’ve got another half hour, at least.”
Like most employees of St. Stephen’s, Theresa Cook is also a school parent. “I just heard something terrible,” she says, her voice cracking. “Kate Townsend is in the emergency room at St. Catherine’s Hospital. They said … she’s dead. Drowned. Kate Townsend. Can that be right?”
Holden Smith’s thin lips twist in a grimace of a smile as he tries to convince himself that this is some sort of sick prank. Kate Townsend is the star of the senior class: valedictorian, state champion in both tennis and swimming, full scholarship to Harvard next fall. She’s literally a poster child for St. Stephen’s. We even used her in a TV commercial for the school.
“No,” Holden says finally. “No way. I saw Kate on the tennis court at two this afternoon.”
I look at my watch. It’s nearly eight now.
Holden opens his mouth again but no sound emerges. As I glance at the faces around the table, I realize that a strange yet familiar numbness has gripped us all, the numbness that comes when you hear that a neighbor’s child has been shot in a predawn hunting accident, or died in a car crash on homecoming night. It occurs to me that it’s early April, and though the first breath of spring has touched the air, it’s still too cold to swim, even in Mississippi. If a high school senior drowned today, a freak accident seems the only explanation. An indoor pool, maybe? Only I can’t think of anyone who owns one.
“Exactly what did you hear and when, Theresa?” Holden asks. As if details might mitigate the horror of what is upon us.
“Ann Geter called my house from the hospital.” Ann Geter is an ER nurse at St. Catherine’s Hospital, and another St. Stephen’s parent. Because the school has only five hundred students, everyone literally knows everyone else. “My husband told Ann I was still up here for the meeting. She called and told me that some fishermen found Kate wedged in the fork of a tree near where St. Catherine’s Creek washes into the Mississippi River. They thought she might be alive, so they put her in their boat and carried her to the hospital. She was naked from the waist down, Ann said.”
Theresa says “nekkid,” but her word has the intended effect. Shock blanks the faces around the table as everyone begins to absorb the idea that this may not be a conventional accident. “Kate was bruised up pretty bad, Ann said. Like she’d been hit with something.”
“Jesus Lord,” whispers Clara Jenkins, from my left. “This can’t be true. It must be somebody else.”
Theresa’s bottom lip begins to quiver. The secretary has always been close to the older students, especially the girls. “Ann said Kate had a tattoo on her thigh. I didn’t know about that, but I guess her mama did. Jenny Townsend identified her body just a couple of minutes ago.”
Down the table a woman sobs, and a shiver of empathy goes through me, like liquid nitrogen in my blood. Even though my daughter is only nine, I’ve nearly lost her twice, and I’ve had my share of nightmares about what Jenny Townsend just endured.
“God in heaven.” Holden Smith gets to his feet, looking braced for physical combat. “I’d better get over to the hospital. Is Jenny still over there?”
“I imagine so,” Theresa murmurs. “I just can’t believe it. Anybody in the world you could have said, and I’d have believed it before Kate.”
“Goddamn it,” snaps Bill Sims, a local geologist. “It’s just not fair.”
“I know,” Theresa agrees, as if fairness has anything to do with who is taken young and who survives to ninety-five. But then I realize she has a point. The Townsends lost a child to leukemia several years ago, before I moved back to town. I heard that was what broke up their marriage.
Holden takes a cell phone from his coat pocket and dials a number. He’s probably calling his wife. The other board members sit quietly, their thoughts on their own children, no doubt. How many of them have silently thanked God for the good fortune of not being Jenny Townsend tonight?
A cell phone chirps under the table. Drew Elliott lifts his and says, “Dr. Elliott.” He listens for a while, all eyes on him. Then he tenses like a man absorbing news of a family tragedy. “That’s right,” he says. “I’m the family doctor, but this is a coroner’s case now. I’ll come down and speak to the family. Their home? All right. Thanks.”
Drew hangs up and looks at the ring of expectant faces, his own white with shock. “It’s not a mistake. Kate’s dead. She was dead before she reached the ER. Jenny Townsend is on her way home.” Drew glances at me. “Your father’s driving her, Penn. Tom was seeing a patient when they brought Kate in. Some family and friends are going over there. The father’s in England, of course, but he’s being notified.”
Kate’s father, a British citizen, has lived in England for the past five years.
A woman sobs at the end of the table.
“I’m adjourning this meeting,” Holden says, gathering up the promotional literature from Apple Computer. “This can wait until next month’s meeting.”
As he walks toward the door, Jan Chancellor, the school’s headmistress, calls after him, “Just a minute, Holden. This is a terrible tragedy, but one thing can’t wait until next month.”
Holden doesn’t bother to hide his annoyance as he turns back. “What’s that, Jan?”
“The Marko Bakic incident.”
“Oh, hell,” says Bill Sims. “What’s that kid done now?”
Marko Bakic is a Croatian exchange student who has been nothing but trouble since he arrived last September. How he made it into the exchange program is beyond any of us. Marko’s records show that he scored off the charts on an IQ test, but all his intelligence seems to be used only in support of his anarchic aspirations. The charitable view is that this unfortunate child of the Balkan wars has brought confusion and disruption to St. Stephen’s, sadly besmirching an exchange program that’s only won us glory in the past. The harsher view is that Marko Bakic uses the mask of prankster to hide more sinister activities like selling ecstasy to the student body and anabolic steroids to the football team. The board has already sought my advice as a former prosecutor on how to deal with the drug issue; I told them that unless we catch Marko red-handed or someone volunteers firsthand information about illegal activities, there’s nothing we can do. Bill Sims suggested a random drug-testing program, but this idea was tabled when the board realized that positive tests would probably become public, sabotaging our public relations effort and delighting the board of Immaculate Heart, the Catholic school across town. The local law enforcement organs have set their sights on Marko, as well, but they, too, have come up empty-handed. If Marko Bakic is dealing drugs, no one is talking about it. Not on the record, anyway.
“Marko got into a scuffle with Ben Ritchie in the hall yesterday,” Jan says carefully. “He called Ben’s girlfriend a slut.”
“Not smart,” Bill Sims murmurs.
Marko Bakic is six-foot-two and lean as a sapling; Ben Ritchie is five-foot-six and built like a cast-iron stove, just like his father, who played football with Drew and me more than twenty years ago.
Jan says, “Ben shoved Marko into the wall and told him to apologize. Marko told Ben to kiss his ass.”
“So what happened?” asks Sims, his eyes shining. This is a lot more interesting than routine school board business.
Clearly put off by the juvenile relish in Bill’s face, Jan says, “Ben put Marko in a choke hold and mashed his head against the floor until he apologized. Ben embarrassed Marko in front of a lot of people.”
“Sounds like our Croatian hippie got what he deserved.”
“Be that as it may,” Jan says icily, “after Ben let Marko up, Marko told Ben he was going to kill him. Two other students heard it.”
“Macho bullshit,” says Sims. “Bakic trying to save face.”
“Was it?” asks Jan. “When Ben asked Marko how he was going to do that, Marko said he had a gun in his car.”
Sims sighs heavily. “Did he? Have a gun, I mean.”
“No one knows. I didn’t hear about this until after school. Frankly, I think the students were too afraid to tell me about it.”
“Afraid of what you’d do?”
“No. Afraid of Marko. Several students say he does carry a gun sometimes. But no one would admit to seeing it on school property.”
“Did you talk to the Wilsons?” Holden Smith asks from the doorway.
Bill Sims snorts in contempt. “What for?”
The Wilsons are the family that agreed to feed and house Marko for two semesters. Jack Wilson is a retired academic, and Marko seems to have him completely snowed.
Jan Chancellor watches Holden expectantly. She’s a good headmistress, although she dislikes direct confrontations, which can’t be avoided in a job like hers. Her face looks pale beneath her sleek, black bob, and her nerves seem stretched to the breaking point. They must be, to bring her to this point of insistence.
“I move that we enter executive session,” she says, meaning that no minutes will be taken from this point forward.
“Second,” I agree.
Jan gives me a quick look of gratitude. “As you all know, this is merely the latest in a long line of disruptive incidents. There’s a clear pattern here, and I’m worried that something irreparable is going to happen. If it does—and if it can be demonstrated that we were aware of this pattern—then St. Stephen’s and every member of the board will be exposed to massive lawsuits.”
Holden sighs wearily from the door. “Jan, this was a serious incident, no doubt. And sorting it out is going to be a pain in the ass. But Kate Townsend’s death is going to be a major shock to every student and family at this school. I can call a special meeting later in the week to deal with Marko, but Kate is the priority right now.”
“Will you call that meeting?” Jan presses. “Because this problem’s not going to go away.”
“I will. Now I’m going to see Jenny Townsend. Theresa, will you lock up when everyone’s gone?”
The secretary nods, glad for being given something to do. While the remainder of the board members continue to express disbelief, my cell phone rings. The caller ID shows my home as the origin of the call, which makes me unsure whether to answer. My daughter, Annie, is quite capable of pestering me to death with the phone when the mood strikes her. But with Kate’s death fresh in my mind, I step into the secretary’s office and answer.
“Annie?”
“No,” says an older female voice. “It’s Mia.”
Mia Burke is my daughter’s babysitter, a classmate of Kate Townsend’s.
“I’m sorry to interrupt the board meeting, but I’m kind of freaked out.”
“It’s all right, Mia. What’s the matter?”
“I’m not sure. But three people have called and told me something happened to Kate Townsend. They’re saying she drowned.”
I hesitate before confirming the rumor, but if the truth hasn’t already spread across town, it will in a matter of minutes. Our secretary learning the truth from an ER nurse was part of the first wave of rumor, one of many that will sweep across town tonight, turning back upon themselves and swelling until the facts are lost in a tide of hyperbole. “You heard right, Mia. Kate was found dead in St. Catherine’s Creek.”
“Oh God.”
“I know it’s upsetting, and I’m sure you want to be with your friends right now, but I need you to stay with Annie until I get there. I’ll be home in ten minutes.”
“Oh, I’d never leave Annie alone. I mean, I don’t even know what I should do. If Kate’s dead, I can’t really help her. And everyone is going to be acting so retarded about it. Take whatever time you need. I’d rather stay here with Annie than drive right now.”
I silently thank Jan Chancellor for recommending one of the few levelheaded girls in the school to me as a babysitter. “Thanks, Mia. How’s Annie doing?”
“She fell asleep watching a documentary about bird migration on the Discovery Channel.”
“Good.”
“Hey,” Mia says in an awkward voice. “Thanks for telling me the truth about Kate.”
“Thanks for not flipping out and leaving the house. I’ll see you in a few minutes, okay?”
“Okay. Bye.”
I hang up and look through the door at the boardroom. Drew Elliott is talking on his cell phone at the table, but the rest of the board members are filing out the main door. As I watch them go, an image from our promotional TV commercial featuring Kate rises into my mind. She’s walking onto the tennis court in classic whites, and her cool blue eyes burn right through the camera. She’s tall, probably five-ten, with Nordic blond hair that hangs halfway to her waist. More striking than beautiful, Kate looked like a college student rather than a high school kid, and that’s why we chose her for the promo spot. She was the perfect recruiting symbol for a college-prep school.
As I reach for the office doorknob, I freeze. Drew is staring at the table with tears pouring down his face. I hesitate, giving him time to collect himself. What does it take to make an M.D. cry? My father has watched his patients die for forty years, and now they’re dropping like cornstalks to a scythe. I know he grieves, but I can’t remember him crying. The one exception was my wife, but that’s another story. Maybe Drew thinks he’s alone here, that I slipped out with all the others. Since he shows no sign of stopping, I walk out and lay my hand on his thickly muscled shoulder.
“You okay, man?”
He doesn’t reply, but I feel him shudder.
“Drew? Hey.”
He dries his eyes with a swipe of his sleeve, then stands. “Guess we’d better let Theresa lock up.”
“Yeah. I’ll walk out with you.”
Side by side, we walk through the front atrium of St. Stephen’s, just as we did thousands of times when we attended this school in the sixties and seventies. A large trophy cabinet stands against the wall to my left. Inside it, behind a wooden Louisville Slugger with thirteen names signed on it in Magic Marker, hangs a large photograph of Drew Elliott during the defining moment of this institution. Just fourteen years old, he is standing at the plate under the lights of Smith-Wills Stadium in Jackson, hitting what would be the winning home run of the 1977 AAAA state baseball championship. No matter how remarkable our academic accomplishments—and they were many—it was this prize that put our tiny “single A” school on the map. In Mississippi, as in the rest of the South, sport overshadows everything else.
“Long time ago,” he says. “Eternity.”
I’m standing on second base in the photo, waiting to sprint for the tying run. “Not so long.”
He gives me a lost look, and then we pass through the entrance and pause under the overhang, prepping for a quick dash through the rain to our cars.
“Kate babysat for you guys, didn’t she?” I comment, trying to get him to focus on the mundane.
“Yeah. The past two summers. Not anymore, though. She graduates—was supposed to graduate—in six weeks. She was too busy for babysitting.”
“She seemed like a great kid.”
Drew nods. “She was. Even these days, when so many students are overachievers, she stood out from the crowd.”
I could point out that it’s often the best and brightest who are taken while the rest of us are left to carry on, but Drew knows that. He’s watched more people die than I ever will.
His Volvo is parked about thirty yards away, behind my Saab. I pat him on the back as I did in high school, then assume a tight end’s stance. “Run for it?”
Instead of playing along with me, he looks me full in the face and speaks in a voice I haven’t heard from him in years. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
The emotion in his eyes is palpable. “Of course.”
“Let’s get in one of the cars.”
“Sure.”
He presses a button on his key chain, and his Volvo’s lights blink. As if triggered by a silent starter pistol, we race through the chilly rain and scramble onto the leather seats of the S80. He slams his door and cranks the engine, then shakes his head with a strange violence.
“I can’t fucking believe it, Penn. It’s literally beyond belief. Did you know her? Did you know Kate at all?”
“We spoke a few times. She asked about my books. But we never got beyond the surface. Mia talked about her a lot.”
His eyes search out mine in the shadows. “You and I haven’t got beneath the surface much either these past five years. It’s more my fault than yours, I know. I keep a lot inside.”
“We all do,” I say awkwardly, wondering where this is going.
“Who really knows anybody, right? Twelve years of school together, best friends when we were kids. You know a lot about me, but on the other hand you know nothing. The front, like everybody else.”
“I hope I see past that, Drew.”
“I don’t mean to insult you. If anyone sees beneath the surface, it’s you. That’s why I’m talking to you now.”
“Well, I’m here. Let’s talk.”
He nods as if confirming a private judgment. “I want to hire you.”
“Hire me?”
“As a lawyer.”
This is the last thing I expected to hear. “You know I don’t practice anymore.”
“You took the Payton case, that old civil rights bombing.”
“That was different. And that was five years ago.”
Drew stares at me in the glow of the dashboard lights. “This is different, too.”
It always is to the client. “I’m sure it is. The thing is, I’m not really a lawyer anymore. I’m a writer. If you need a lawyer, I can recommend several good ones. Is it malpractice?”
Drew blinks in astonishment. “Malpractice? You think I’d waste your time with bullshit like that?”
“Drew … I don’t know what this is about. Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”
“I want to, but—Penn, what if you were sick? You had HIV, say. And you came to me and said, ‘Drew, please help me. As a friend. I want you to treat me and not tell a soul.’ And what if I said, ‘Penn, I’d like to, but that’s not my specialty. You need to go to a specialist.’”
“Drew, come on—”
“Hear me out. If you said, ‘Drew, as a friend, please do me this favor. Please help me.’ You know what? I wouldn’t think twice. I’d do whatever you wanted. Treat you without records, whatever.”
He would. I can’t deny it. But there’s more than this beneath his words. Drew has left much unsaid. The truth is that without Drew Elliott, I wouldn’t be alive today. When I was fourteen years old, Drew and I hiked away from the Buffalo River in Arkansas and got lost in the Ozark Mountains. Near dark, I fell into a gorge and broke my femur. Drew was only eleven, but he crawled down into that gorge, splinted my leg with a tree limb, then built a makeshift litter and started dragging me through the night. Before he was done, he dragged me four miles through the mountains, breaking his wrist in the process and twice almost breaking his neck. Just after dawn, he managed to get me to a cluster of tents where someone had a CB radio. But has he mentioned any of that? No. It’s my job to remember.
“Why do you want to hire me, Drew?”
“To consult. With the protection of confidentiality.”
“Shit. You don’t have to hire me for that.”
He pulls his wallet from his pants and takes out a twenty-dollar bill, which he pushes at me. “I know that. But if you were questioned on the stand later—as a friend—you’d have to lie to protect me. If you’re my lawyer, our discourse will be shielded by attorney-client privilege.” He’s still pushing the bill at me. “Take it, Penn.”
“This is crazy—”
“Please, man.”
I wad up the note and shove it into my pocket. “Okay, damn it. What’s going on?”
He sags back in his seat and rubs his temples like a man getting a migraine. “I knew Kate a lot better than anyone knows.”
Kate Townsend again? The sense of dislocation I felt in the boardroom was nothing compared to what I feel now. Again I see Drew sitting at the table, weeping as though for a family member. Even as I ask the next question, I pray that I’m wrong.
“Are you telling me you were intimate with the girl?”
Drew doesn’t blink. “I was in love with her.”
TWO
My heart is pounding the way it does on the all-too-rare occasions when I run for exercise. I’m sitting in front of the St. Stephen’s Preparatory School with one of the most distinguished alumni who ever attended it, and he’s telling me he was screwing a high school student. A student who is now dead. This man is my lifelong friend, yet the first words that pass my lips are not those of a friend but of a lawyer. “Tell me she was eighteen, Drew.”
“Her birthday was in two weeks.”
I suck in my breath and close my eyes. “It might as well have been two years. That’s statutory rape in Mississippi. Especially with the age difference between you. It’s what, twenty years?”
“Almost twenty-three.”
I shake my head in disbelief.
He takes my arm and pulls it toward him, forcing me to look into his eyes. “I’m not crazy, Penn. I know you think I’ve lost my mind, but I loved that girl like no one I’ve known in my life.”
I look away, focusing on the playground of the middle school, where water has pooled on the merry-go-round. What to say? This isn’t a case of some horny assistant coach who got too chummy with a cheerleader in the locker room. This is an educated and successful man in the grip of a full-blown delusion.
“Drew, I prosecuted a lot of child molesters in Houston. I remember one who had regularly molested an eleven-year-old girl. Can you guess what his defense was?”
“What?”
“They were in love.”
He snorts with disdain. “You know this isn’t like that.”
“Do I? Jesus Christ, man.”
“Penn … until you’re in a situation like this, you simply can’t understand it. I was the first to condemn that coach who got involved with that senior over at the public school. I couldn’t fathom it then. But now … I see it from the inside.”
“Drew, you’ve thrown your life away. Do you realize that? You could go to jail for twenty years. I can’t even …” My voice fails, because it suddenly strikes me that I may not have heard the worst of what will be revealed in this car tonight. “You didn’t kill her, did you?”
The blood drains from his face. “Are you out of your mind?”
“What did you expect me to ask?”
“Not that. And there’s something pretty damned cold in your tone.”
“If you don’t like my tone, wait till you hear the district attorney. You and Kate Townsend? Holy shit.”
“I didn’t kill her, Penn.”
I take another deep breath and let it out slowly. “No, of course not. Do you think she committed suicide?”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because we were planning to leave together. Kate was excited about it. Not depressed at all.”
“You were planning to run away together?”
“Not run away. But to be together, yes.”
“She was a kid, Drew.”
“In some ways. Not many. Kate had a different kind of upbringing. She went through a lot, and she learned a lot from it. She was very mature for her age, both psychologically and emotionally. And that’s saying something these days. These kids aren’t like we were, Penn. You have no idea. By fifteen they’ve gone through things you and I didn’t experience until our twenties. Some of them are jaded by eighteen.”
“That doesn’t mean they understand what they’re doing. But I’ll be sure and run that argument past the jury.”
Drew’s eyes flicker. “Are you saying you’ll represent me?”
“I was joking. Who else knows about this relationship?”
“No one.”
“Don’t be stupid. Someone always knows.”
He sets his jaw and shakes his head with confidence. “You didn’t know Kate. Nobody knows about us.”
The naïveté of human beings is truly breathtaking. “Whatever you say.”
Drew puts his big hands on the wheel and squeezes it like a man doing isometric exercises. In the small space of the car, his size is intimidating. I’m six-foot-one, two hundred pounds; Drew has two inches and twenty pounds of muscle on me, and he hasn’t let himself slip much from the days he played tight end for Vanderbilt. It’s not hard to imagine Kate Townsend being attracted to him.
“It comes down to this,” Drew says in a steady voice. “The police are going to start probing Kate’s life. And if they probe deeply enough, they might find something that connects me to her.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A diary? Pictures?”
“You took pictures?” Why am I asking? Of course they did. Everyone does now. “Did you videotape yourselves too?”
“Kate did. But she destroyed the tape.”
I’m not sure I believe this, but right now that’s not the point. “What about Ellen?” I ask, meaning his wife.
His eyes don’t waver. “Our marriage has been dead for ten years.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“I did. You and the rest of the town. Ellen and I mount a major theatrical production every day, all for the sake of Tim.”
Tim is Drew’s nine-year-old son, already something of a golden boy himself in the elementary school. Annie has a serious crush on him, though she would never admit it. “What about Tim, then? Were you going to leave him behind?”
“Of course not. But I had to make the break from Ellen first. I’ll die if I stay in that marriage.”
They always sound like this before the divorce. Any rationalization to get out of the marriage.
“I don’t want to say anything negative about Ellen,” Drew says softly. “But the situation has been difficult for a long time. Ellen’s addicted to hydrocodone. She has been for six years.”
Ellen Elliott is a lawyer who turned to real estate in her midthirties, a dynamo who focuses on the upscale antebellum mansions in town. Originally from Savannah, Georgia, she seems to have pulled off the rare trick of breaking into the inner cliques of Natchez society, something outsiders almost never accomplish. I’ve never known Ellen well, but the idea of her as a drug addict is hard to swallow. My mental snapshot is a sleek and well-tended blonde who runs marathons for fun.
“That’s kind of hard for me to believe, Drew.”
“You can’t imagine Ellen popping Lorcet Plus like M&Ms? That’s the reality, man. I’ve tried for years to help her. Taken her to addiction specialists, paid for rehab four times in the last three years. Nothing has worked.”
“Is she clinically depressed?”
“I don’t think so. You’ve seen her. She’s wide open all the time. But there’s something dark underneath that energy. Everything she does is in pursuit of money or social status. Two years ago she slept with a guy from Jackson during a tennis tournament. I literally can’t believe she’s the woman I married.”
“Was she different when you married her? About the money and status, I mean?”
“I guess the seeds of that were there, but back then it just looked like healthy ambition. I should have seen it in her mother, though.”
I can’t help wanting to defend Ellen. “We all start turning into our parents, Drew. I’m sure you have been, too.”
He nods. “Guilty as charged. But I try to stay self-aware, you know? I try to be the best person I can be.”
And that led you to a seventeen-year-old girl? I have more questions, but the truth is, I don’t want to know the gory details of Drew’s personal life. I’ve heard too many drunk friends pour out the stories of how their lives fell short of their dreams, and it’s always a maudlin monologue. The odd thing is that by almost anyone’s estimation, Drew Elliott has led a dream life. But as my mother always said: You never know what’s cooking in someone else’s pot. And one thing is sure: whatever happens as a result of Kate Townsend’s death, Drew Elliot’s touchdown run through life has come to an end.
“I need to get home to Annie, Drew. Mia needs to leave.”
He nods with understanding. “So, what about it? Will you help me?”
“I’ll do what I can, but I’m not sure that’s much. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”
He nods and looks into his lap, clearly disappointed. “I guess that’s the best I can hope for.”
I’m about to get out of the car when Drew’s cell phone rings. He looks at the LED screen and winces. “Jenny Townsend.”
My chest tightens.
“She’s going to want me to come by the house.”
“Will you go?”
“Of course. I have to.”
I shake my head in amazement. “How can you do it? How can you look Jenny in the eye tonight?”
Drew watches the phone until it stops ringing, then meets my eyes with the sincerity of a monk. “I’ve got a clear conscience, Penn. I loved Kate more than anyone on earth, except maybe her mother. And anyone who loved Kate is welcome in that house tonight.”
Drew is both right and wrong. He will be welcome in the Townsend home tonight; in fact, of all the visitors, he will probably be the greatest comfort to Jenny. But what if Jenny Townsend knew that her personal physician had been having sex with her teenage daughter? That he was about to abandon his family and blow Kate’s perfectly planned future to smithereens?
“I’ll give you a call tomorrow,” I say softly.
Drew catches hold of my forearm as I climb out, once more forcing me to look into his eyes. “I’m not out of my mind. It wasn’t a midlife crisis that led me to Kate. I’d been starving for love for a long time. I’ve turned down more women in this town than you can imagine, both married and single. When I hurt my knee in that car accident last summer, I was home for six weeks. Kate was there every day, watching Tim. We started talking. I couldn’t believe the things she talked about, the things she read. We e-mailed and IM-ed a lot at night, and it was like talking to a thirty-five-year-old woman. When I could walk again, I organized a medical mission trip to Honduras. Kate volunteered to come along. It was actually Ellen who suggested it. Anyway, that’s where it happened. Before we returned to the States, I knew I wanted a life with her.”
“She was seventeen, man. What kind of life could you have had with her?”
“An authentic life. She was only two weeks shy of eighteen, Penn, and she was going to Harvard in the fall. I’ve already taken the Massachusetts state medical boards. I scored in the top five percent. I’ve already put a deposit on a house in Cambridge.”
I’m speechless.
“And now none of that will ever happen,” Drew says, his face tight with anger and confusion. “Now someone has murdered her.”
“You don’t know it was murder.”
His eyes narrow. “Yes, I do. It had to be.”
I gently disengage my arm. “I’m sorry for your pain, man. I really am. But if it gets out that you were involved with Kate, you’re going to be crucified. You’d better start—”
“I don’t care about myself! It’s Tim I’m worried about. What’s the best thing I can do for him?”
I shake my head and open the door to the rain. “Pray for a miracle.”
Mia Burke is sitting on the porch of my town house on Washington Street, a bulging green backpack beside her. I park by the curb, looking for Annie’s smaller form, but then I see that the front door is open slightly, which tells me Annie is still sleeping and Mia is listening for her. Mia stands as I lock the car, and in the light of the streetlamp I see that, like Drew, she’s been crying.
“You all right?” I ask, crossing the sidewalk.
She nods and wipes her cheeks. “I don’t know why I’m crying so much. Kate and I weren’t really close. It just seems like such a waste.”
Mia Burke is the physical opposite of Kate Townsend. Dark-haired and olive-skinned, she stands about five-feet-two, with the muscular frame of a born sprinter. She has large dark eyes, an upturned nose, and full lips that have probably sent a hundred adolescent boys into paroxysms of fantasy. She’s wearing jeans and a LIFEHOUSE T-shirt, and she’s holding a book in her hand: The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Mia has surprisingly eclectic taste, and this has probably confused the same boys who dream about her other attributes.
“You’re right,” I murmur, thinking of Drew with very little charity. “It is a waste.”
“Did she commit suicide, Penn?”
It occurs to me that Mia’s use of my first name might seem inappropriate to some people. It’s always seemed a natural informality between us, but in light of what I now know about Drew and Kate, nothing seems innocent. “I don’t know. Was Kate the type to kill herself?”
Mia hugs herself against the chill and takes some time with the question. “No. She always kept to herself a lot, especially this year. But I don’t think she was depressed. Her boyfriend was giving her a lot of trouble, though.”
“Kate had a boyfriend?”
“Well, an ex, really. Steve Sayers.”
Steve Sayers, predictably, was the quarterback of the football team.
“I don’t really know what the deal was. They dated for almost two years, then at the end of last summer Kate seemed to forget Steve existed.”
Thanks to Drew Elliott, M.D …
“The weird thing is, she didn’t break up with Steve. She’d still go out with him, even when she obviously didn’t care about him anymore. But she stopped having sex with him, I know that. And he was going crazy from it.”
Mia’s frankness about sex doesn’t come out of the blue. We’ve had many frank conversations about what goes on beneath the surface at St. Stephen’s. If it weren’t for Mia’s candor, I would have as little idea of the reality of a modern high school as the rest of the parents, and would be of as little use on the school board.
“Did Kate tell you she stopped having sex with him?” I ask.
“No. But Steve told a couple of his friends, and it got around. He thought she might be doing stuff with someone else. Someone from another school, maybe.”
“What did you think?”
Mia bites her bottom lip. “Like I said, Kate was very private. She had this charming persona she could turn on, and most people bought into it. But that was just the mask she used to get through life. Deep down, she was somebody else.”
“Who was she?”
“I’m not sure. All I know is that she was way too sophisticated for Steve. Maybe for any guy our age.”
I look hard into Mia’s eyes, but I see no hidden meaning there. “What made her so sophisticated?”
“Her time in England. After her parents got divorced, she went over to London and lived with her dad for a while. She went to an exclusive school over there for three years during junior high. In the end it didn’t work out for her to stay, but when she got back here, she was way ahead of the rest of us. She was pretty intimidating with that English accent.”
“I can’t imagine you being intimidated.”
“Oh, I was. But last year I started catching up with her. And this year I passed her in every subject. I feel guilty saying it now, but I felt pretty good about that.”
Some of Drew’s words are coming back to me. “You play tennis, don’t you?”
“I’m on the team. I’m not as good as Kate. She was a machine. She won state in singles last year, and she was on her way to doing it again this year.”
“Didn’t Kate play competitive tennis with Ellen Elliott?”
“Hell, yes. They won the state open in city league tennis.”
“What do you think about Ellen?”
Mia’s eyes flicker with interest. “Are you asking for the official line, or what I really think?”
“What you really think.”
“She’s a cast-iron bitch.”
“Really?”
“Definitely. Very cold, very manipulative. How she treats you depends totally on who your parents are.”
“How did she treat Kate?”
“Are you kidding? Like her personal protégée. Ellen was number one in Georgia when she played in high school. I think she’s reliving her youth through Kate.”
“How did Kate treat Ellen?”
Mia shrugs. “Okay, I guess. She was nice to her, but …”
“What?”
“I don’t think Kate respected her. I heard her say things behind Ellen’s back. But then everybody does that.”
“What do you mean?”
“The women Ellen trains with for her marathons talk all kinds of shit about her when she’s not around. They say she’ll stab you in the back without thinking twice.”
“So why do they hang around with her?”
“Fear. Envy. Ellen Elliott is hot, rich, and married to Dr. Perfect. She’s the social arbiter of this place, in the under-forty crowd anyway. She has the life all the rest of them want.”
“That’s what they think.”
Mia looks expectantly at me, but I don’t elaborate.
“I think I know what you mean,” she says. “I don’t know what Dr. Elliott is doing married to her. No one does. He’s so nice—not to mention hot—and she’s so … I don’t know. Maybe she fooled him, too.”
“Maybe.” Mia is too bright for me to question like this for long. “You probably need to get going, huh?”
She nods without enthusiasm. “I guess. I feel sort of weird, you know?”
“Because of Kate?”
“Yeah. But not the way you’d think. Her dying changes a lot of things for me. I’ll be making the valedictory speech now, for one thing. And I wanted to do that. I have some things I want to say to our class, and to the parents. I didn’t want to take any spotlight off of Kate by saying them in my salutatorian speech. Now I can say them, I guess. But I didn’t want it like this.”
“Well, you certainly earned it. Kate only beat you out by … what?”
“A sixteenth of a point on the cumulative.” Mia smiles wryly. “She wasn’t as smart as people think. She acted like she never studied, but she did. Big-time. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I guess I have some anger toward her. I’m not even sure why.”
“Try to tell me.”
Mia sighs and looks at the sidewalk. “Kate knew how to make you feel like shit when she wanted to. She would tear out your heart with a few words, then act like it was an innocent comment. She got Star Student because she outscored me by one point on the ACT, and she always made sure people knew that. But I outscored her by forty points on the SAT. You think she ever said one word about that?”
“What did you make?”
“Fifteen-forty.”
“Wow. So you two were basically rivals, not friends.”
Mia nods thoughtfully. “I’m more competitive than I should be, but for Kate, winning was an obsession. We were always the top contenders for everything. She was homecoming queen, I’m head cheerleader.” A strange look crosses Mia’s face. “I guess some people might say I had a motive for killing her, like that cheerleader-mom thing in Texas.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that. I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about you.”
An ironic laugh escapes her lips. “Oh, plenty gets said about me. But that’s another story. And don’t get me wrong about Kate. She had a tough family life. Her dad was a real asshole. When she showed her vulnerable side, it was hard not to feel for her. Especially for me. But I had to deal with the same shit, and I don’t use my intelligence to hurt people.”
Mia gazes down Washington Street, one of the most beautiful in the city, and shakes her head as though dismissing some useless thought. Mia’s father left her mother when Mia was two, and he’s hardly seen his daughter since. Economic support was the bare minimum dictated by the courts, and even that came on a sporadic basis.
“As far as Kate dying,” Mia says, “I guess I can’t really believe it yet. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s so random.”
“High school kids die in accidents like everyone else.”
“I know, but this is different.”
“Why?”
“After I called you, I got a few more calls. People are saying it wasn’t an accident at all. They’re saying somebody killed Kate. Did you know that?”
Could Drew be right? “Why are they saying that?”
“Some of the nurses at the hospital said it looked like Kate was strangled and hit on the head.”
Despite my friendship with Drew, an image of him choking Kate fills my mind, and I shudder. “You know Natchez and gossip, Mia. Anything could have happened to Kate’s body while she was floating down that creek.”
“But why was she half naked? And why from the waist down? I suppose she could have been skinny-dipping, but with who? She wasn’t with Steve—or at least he claims she wasn’t. It makes me wonder if maybe Steve was right.”
At this point Kate’s classmates probably know twice as much about her death as the police department. “Right about what?”
“About Kate having another boyfriend. Someone none of us knew about. Someone who might get mad enough or crazy enough to kill her.”
“Can you see Kate making someone that angry?”
“Oh, yeah. When Kate got on her high horse, she could piss you off beyond belief. And as far as making someone crazy—a guy, I mean—she was a very sexual person. We talked a few times about it. She really thought she might be a nymphomaniac.”
“That term isn’t even used anymore, Mia. A lot of girls first experimenting with sex probably feel that way.”
She gives me a knowing look. “I’m not talking about experimentation. I’m no saint, okay? But Kate knew about things I’d never even heard of. She was as intense as any person I ever met, and she believed in giving herself pleasure. She, uh, this is kind of embarrassing, but she showed me a couple of toys once, and it shocked me. I know she freaked Steve out with some of the things she asked him to do, and that was over a year ago.”
Sex toys? Drew’s words come back to me with fresh impact: These kids aren’t like we were, Penn. You have no idea …
“I know you want to look in on Annie,” Mia says, picking up her backpack and slinging it over her shoulder. “I’ll get out of your hair. Sorry if I was too frank about that stuff.”
I step to my left and give her plenty of room to pass. “Don’t worry. I’ve seen just about everything in my day.”
She gives me a sly look that belies her age. “Have you? I figured you for a straight arrow. I asked my mom about you, but she won’t tell me anything. She obviously likes you, but she gets all cryptic when I bring you up.”
I feel myself flush. “Be careful driving. Your mind’s not going to be on the road.”
Mia takes her cell phone from her purse and holds it to her ear. It must have been set to vibrate. “She did? … No way … That’s just weird … I will. Later.” She puts the phone back in her purse and stares blankly up the street again.
“What is it?” I ask.
Mia’s eyes betray a puzzlement I’ve never seen in them before. “That was Laura Andrews. Her mom’s one of the nurses who tended to Kate. She just told Laura that Kate was raped.”
“What?”
“She said Kate had a lot of trauma—down there, you know?”
My thoughts return to Drew. If Kate was raped, I hope he never has to know it. But of course he will, like everyone else in town. It suddenly occurs to me that by hoping to protect Drew from this knowledge, I’m assuming he is innocent of the crime. That’s a dangerous assumption for any lawyer to make, but I’ve already made it. I simply cannot imagine Drew Elliott raping any woman, much less a high school girl.
“Let’s hope that’s not true,” I murmur, recalling the shattered rape victims I tried to avenge as a prosecutor in Houston.
“Yeah,” Mia echoes. “That’s too horrible even to think about.”
“So don’t. Think about driving.”
Mia forces a smile. “No worries. Do you need me tomorrow?”
“I may, if you can spare the time.” I’m thinking of Drew and his request for help.
“Just call my cell.”
She walks to her car, a blue Honda Accord, and climbs in. I watch to make sure she gets safely away, then walk up the steps into my house. As I close the door, my study phone rings. I trot to my desk and look at the caller ID: ANDREW ELLIOTT, M.D.
“Drew?” I answer.
“Can you talk?” he asks, his voice crackling with anxiety.
“Sure. What is it?”
“I’m at Kate’s house. I just got a call on my cell phone.”
“From who?”
“I don’t know. But he told me to leave a gym bag with twenty thousand dollars in it on the fifty-yard line of the St. Stephen’s football field. He said if I don’t, he’ll tell the police I was screwing Kate Townsend.”
Shit. “You told me nobody knew about the affair.”
“Nobody did. I have no idea who this could be.”
My mind is whirling with memories of similar situations when I worked for the D.A. in Houston. “When does he want the money?”
“One hour from now.”
THREE
“Penn?” Drew says, breathing shallowly. “Are you there?”
My old friend’s words have paralyzed me in the study of my house. “Twenty thousand dollars cash in an hour? At nine o’clock at night? That’s crazy. That’s impossible.”
“No, it’s not. I have the cash. We have a safe here in the house. Three, actually. One for documents, one for guns, one for cash and jewelry.”
I should have guessed. Drew Elliott lives in a stunning Victorian palace sited on five acres in one of the affluent subdivisions near St. Stephen’s, a mansion that contains every technological gadget known to man. “Do you think the blackmailer knows that?”
“He said he knew I had the money.”
“Did you recognize the voice?”
“No. But it sounded like a black kid.”
“A black kid? Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. He asked for drugs, too.”
“Drugs?”
“Prescription drugs. Painkillers. Anything I have. He said I should consider this drop as a down payment. His words. A sign of good faith.”
“I hear something in your voice I don’t like, Drew.”
“I know what you’re going to say, but—”
“You’re not delivering that money, brother. You have two choices. Ignore the call, or phone the police and tell them everything right now.”
Drew is silent for too long. “There’s a third choice,” he says.
“Drew, listen to me. There is no upside to paying this money. Just by showing up, you’d be admitting some guilt. You could also be taking your life into your hands.”
“Because the caller could be Kate’s killer? That’s what you were thinking, right?”
He has me. “I guess so.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, too.”
“Then you should call the cops. At this point, an act of God couldn’t keep your affair with Kate from becoming public. You have to think damage control now. It’s a hundred times better if the police learn the story from you than from someone else. Better for your family, too. Think of Tim.”
“I have until tomorrow morning to make that decision.”
“Don’t assume that.”
“Penn, the guy who called me probably murdered Kate. I want to see his face. I want to—”
“I know what you want to do. Forget it. Go home, mix yourself a stiff drink, and start thinking about what’s best for your son. That ought to be a change.”
Drew sucks in air as though I’ve knocked the wind out of him. “I know Tim needs me, okay?”
“You haven’t been acting like you do. Tim would be lost without you. And if you really think Ellen isn’t a good person, that’s twice the reason to keep yourself out of jail.”
More silence. “You’re right. Goddamn it, I just need to do something about Kate.”
“There’s nothing you can do. It’s time to suck it up and be a man. Kate’s beyond help. She’s gone. All you can do now is pick up the pieces of your own family.”
“Daddy?” comes a small voice.
Glancing toward the hall, I see my daughter poke her head around the kitchen door frame. Annie is a physical echo of her mother, a tawny-haired beauty with eyes that miss nothing. This is both a blessing and a curse, as I am continually confronted by what is essentially the ghost of my dead wife.
“Annie’s calling me, Drew. I need to go. You go home and calm down. I’ll call you in a bit and we’ll decide what you’re going to do.”
Silence.
“Drew?”
“I will.”
“How’s Jenny handling it?”
“It’s destroyed her. I had to sedate her. She ought to be asleep soon.”
“Jesus … okay. I’ll talk to you later.”
By the time I hang up, Annie is standing in front of me, her cheek pressing into my stomach. The one eye that I can see is full of sleep. She yawns, then says, “Where’s Mia?”
“Mia had to go home, Boo.”
“Aww. Mia’s fun.”
“I know. She’ll probably be back tomorrow. She said you fell asleep during the movie.”
“I guess I did. I already knew what was going to happen. Are you going to call Caitlin tonight?”
“Probably.”
“Will you do it now?”
“Let’s get you in the bed first. Then she can tell you good night.”
Annie smiles, then tugs me toward the stairs. I follow, but she stops at the base of the staircase. “Will you carry me, Daddy?”
“Nine years old? You’re pretty big to get carried these days.”
“You can do it.”
Yes, I can, I say silently, for some reason thinking of Annie’s mother. Sarah will never carry her child up the stairs again. An ache passes through my chest, like the pain from an old wound, and then I sweep Annie up into my arms and march up the steep staircase to the second-floor bedrooms. The old Victorians in Natchez have stairs seemingly designed to keep pro athletes in peak condition. I turn into Annie’s room, bend my creaking knees enough to pull back the covers, then slide her underneath them. She laughs and yanks the blanket up to her neck.
“Now call Caitlin!” she squeals.
I take my cell phone from my pocket and speed-dial Caitlin’s cell phone. She’s working a special assignment in Boston, as an investigative reporter for the Herald. I met Caitlin when her father, a newspaper magnate who owns the Natchez Examiner and ten other papers in a Southern chain, sent her down here to whip the Examiner into shape. We got close during my efforts to solve a decades-old civil rights murder and during the trial that followed. Caitlin grew to love Natchez—and me—but after the excitement of that trial faded, along with the glow of the Pulitzer she won for her stories covering it, she realized that Natchez might not be the most exciting place to spend your days, especially when you’re under thirty and hungry for challenges.
After a year of living next door to Annie and me, Caitlin began taking assignments in other cities, mostly working on investigative stories for other papers in her father’s chain. We’ve remained committed to each other, and to our plan of marrying one day. But following through with that plan would mean changes that Caitlin isn’t ready to handle yet. Annie would begin to see Caitlin more as a mother, and would expect her to be around much more consistently. Caitlin has asked me about moving to a city—after all, I lived in Houston for fifteen years—but to my surprise, I find myself reluctant to leave the town where I grew to adulthood.
Caitlin’s phone kicks me to voice mail. “This is Penn and Annie,” I say. “We’re trying to get a long-distance good-night kiss. Call us when you can.”
“Voice mail,” I tell Annie, trying to sound unconcerned. “She must be working.”
“You should hurry up and marry her,” Annie says. “Then she can be my real mom. Then she can live here.”
I can’t help but feel some resentment. When the Herald offered Caitlin a plum assignment investigating further sexual abuse in the archdiocese of Boston, she almost turned it down. The job meant at least two months away from Natchez, and though we talked about flying to see each other on weekends, we knew that probably wouldn’t work out. But the offer came from a renowned editor for whom Caitlin had worked as an intern while at Radcliffe, and I sensed that if she said no, she would eventually resent it. I’m glad she took the assignment, but our fears about visiting have proved true. The sum of our recent contact? I’ve flown to Boston once, and she flew down to Baton Rouge for a weekend with Annie and me.
“She works this late?” Annie asks.
Lately it’s become more and more difficult to reach Caitlin at night. “It’s not that late for grown-ups. Maybe she’s working undercover.”
“Yeah, she does that sometimes,” Annie says thoughtfully. “Like a spy.”
“Yep. Now, shut those eyes.”
Annie opens her eyes as wide as possible, then giggles like a two-year-old.
I poke her in the side. “You’re a pain in the you-know-what.”
More giggles. I give her a kiss, then walk into the hall and descend the long staircase. “See you in the morning!” I call.
“Not if I see you first!” she yells back.
In the kitchen, I raid the refrigerator and construct a colossal turkey po’boy. I only had a salad before the school board meeting, and I’m starving. To keep my mind off Drew and his problems I click on CNN, but there’s no escaping. CNN makes me think of Caitlin, and thoughts of Caitlin bring me back to Drew.
The essential problem that has kept Caitlin and me from marrying is our age difference. At thirty-three, she is very much in the midst of proving herself in her chosen profession, which requires her to leave Natchez often. At forty-three, I’ve already succeeded in two different careers, and the only thing I have left to prove is that I can raise my daughter well. Having endured the problems that come with a ten-year age difference, I can’t help but view Drew’s dream of a real life with Kate as absurd. Did he plan to divorce Ellen and commute by air between Natchez and Boston in order to see Tim? He couldn’t have continued practicing medicine in Natchez. The local society women would have risen as one to boycott his practice and ostracize the former darling of St. Stephen’s Prep. How would Drew have introduced Kate to fellow doctors in Boston? This is my wife. She just graduated—from high school. Of course, Drew wasn’t concerned about such mundane matters. He loved Kate, and the rest of the world could go to hell.
But now the world may have its way with him. As the CNN anchor reads a litany of global crises, I make a list of the threats Drew faces. First, statutory rape. Given the age difference between him and Kate, he could get twenty years in Parchman prison. And since Kate was his patient, he could lose his medical license. Even if he doesn’t, the mere rumor of such an affair in Natchez could kill his practice. If Kate was raped, and physical evidence links Drew to her corpse, he could be charged with capital murder for homicide during the commission of another felony. In Mississippi, conviction for capital murder brings with it the very real possibility of death by lethal injection.
If Kate was in fact murdered, the police have a tough job ahead of them. By carrying her body to the emergency room rather than leaving it where they found it, the fishermen who found Kate deprived investigators of any chance to examine her body in situ. They might have lost or destroyed critical evidence. And since Kate was found wedged in the fork of a tree during high water, the actual crime scene is probably upstream somewhere along St. Catherine’s Creek. With today’s heavy rain, the police may never find out where she actually died.
Right now, detectives are probably focusing on the “helpful” fishermen, since these Samaritans may well have raped and killed Kate before taking her to the hospital. St. Catherine’s Creek has never been noted for its fishing, and it’s quite dangerous for boats during heavy rains. After interrogating the fishermen, the police will move on to Kate’s mother, her boyfriend, and any close friends who might have information about her last hours. That could take much of the night, and will probably continue through tomorrow. If the blackmailer didn’t exist—and if Drew is right about Kate not confiding their affair to anyone—Drew might just be safe.
But the blackmailer does exist, and my experience as a prosecutor tells me it’s unlikely that Drew will escape entanglement in this case. If he had sex with Kate in the last seventy-two hours, she may have traces of his semen inside her. A phone call from the blackmailer to the police would focus their attention on Drew. Any confirming piece of evidence linking Drew to Kate in an inappropriate way would prompt police to request a DNA sample from him. That would bring disaster in three to four weeks—the time it usually takes to get the DNA results in a rush situation. And when the police start searching upstream in St. Catherine’s Creek for the murder scene, they will eventually come to the bend where the two most exclusive subdivisions in Natchez come together. One of those subdivisions—Pinehaven—is where Kate Townsend lived. The other—just across the creek and through the woods—is Sherwood Estates, where Drew Elliot’s Victorian mansion stands. In the absence of other evidence, this juxtaposition might not suggest anything, but if the blackmailer gets the rumor mill churning …
The microwave clock tells me forty minutes have passed since I last spoke to Drew. Feeling a little anxious, I pick up the kitchen phone and call his cell phone. He doesn’t answer. I wait about a minute, then try again. Nothing. I hate to call his wife, given all that I’ve learned about their marriage, but I need to know that Drew is safely drunk somewhere, and not on his way to the St. Stephen’s football field with a bag of cash.
“Hello?” says a groggy female voice.
“Ellen? It’s Penn Cage.”
“Penn? What’s going on? Is Drew with you?”
I knew it. “No, I was actually calling for him.”
“Well”—loud snuffling, rustling of cloth—“I thought I heard him pull up outside a while ago, but then he didn’t come in. Maybe he’s out in his workshop. He goes out there sometimes when he’s feeling moody.”
“Is there any way to check without you having to get up?”
“Intercom. Just a sec.” There’s a burst of static. “Drew? Drew, are you out there?”
More static. “He’s not answering. He called a while ago and told me he was leaving the Townsends’ house. Maybe he got called to the hospital on his way home. I think he’s covering tonight.”
“That’s probably it. You get back to sleep, Ellen.”
“Sleep. God … I had to take a pill to even have a chance at sleep. I was really close to Kate, you know.”
“I knew you played tennis with her.”
“That girl was gifted, Penn. I think she would have made the team at Harvard. God, wouldn’t that have been something?”
“Yes, it would. I’m sorry, Ellen.”
I hear a sound I can’t identify. “We raise these children,” she murmurs, “we pour everything into them, all our hopes and dreams, and then something like this happens. If I were Jenny Townsend, I’m not sure I could handle it. I might do something crazy. I really might.”
“Well, I hope she finds the strength to deal with it.”
“It’s good to talk to you, Penn. We don’t see you enough. You should come by for a drink. I really liked your last book. I want to talk to you about some of the characters. I think I recognized a few.”
I give Ellen an obligatory laugh and ring off. Where the hell is Drew? I’m afraid I already know the answer. I start to dial my parents’ house, but it’s too late to ask my mother to come over. Instead, I dial Mia’s cell. She answer after two rings.
“Penn?”
“Afraid so. Is there any chance you could come back for about an hour? Annie’s asleep, but I need to go out.”
“Um, I guess so. Is it important? Of course it is. You wouldn’t call if it weren’t.”
“Are you with your friends now?”
“Such as they are. Everybody’s pretty freaked out. But I’m not far away from you, actually. I can be there in five minutes.”
“Thanks. I’ll pay you double your usual rate.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’m on my way.”
I hang up and walk back to my bedroom, the only one on the ground floor of the house. In the top of my closet is a nine-millimeter Springfield XD-9 with a fifteen-round clip. I carried a .38-caliber revolver in Houston, but recent experience taught me the wisdom of having a large magazine. I keep the weapon close, albeit with a trigger lock to protect Annie. Unlocking the guard mechanism, I slip the pistol barrel into the pocket of my jeans and grab a waterproof windbreaker from the closet.
Waiting on the front steps for Mia, I call Drew’s cell phone again. When he fails to answer, I consider calling the police for help—but only for a moment. The risks to Drew are too great. When Mia pulls up to the curb, I give her a wave and walk to my Saab, hoping to avoid any explanations.
“Everything okay?” she calls.
I turn back to her. “Fine. Annie’s still in bed. I just need to run an errand.”
Mia nods, but I see suspicion in her eyes. I’ve never called her on such short notice before.
“What else have the kids been saying?” I ask.
“All kinds of things. But it’s mostly bullshit. You know how people are. Like you said … Natchez.”
“I should be back in less than an hour, but if I’m not, you can stay, right?”
“I’ll be here when you get back.”
I move toward my car. “I really appreciate it, Mia.”
“Is that a gun in your pants?”
I look down. The butt of the Springfield is sticking up in front of my windbreaker.
Mia isn’t looking at the pistol but at me, her eyes questioning. I start to give her an explanation, but nothing would really make sense. As casually as possible, I pull the tail of the windbreaker over the gun.
“Penn, are you okay?”
“Yes. Mia, you—”
“I didn’t see anything,” she says, her face radiating assurance. “I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”
If only that were true. “Keep a close eye on Annie.”
“I will. Bye.” She turns and hurries into the house.
I climb into my Saab and start the engine, wondering what kind of insanity I’ll find when I reach St. Stephen’s.
FOUR
Buck Stadium was called simply “the bowl” when I was a student at St. Stephen’s, and the reason was plain. Back then, the stadium was only an oval hole in the ground surrounded by pine and hardwood trees. Spectators sat on its grassy sides to cheer during Bucks games, until enough money was raised to build rudimentary bleachers. Tonight three new school buildings stand on the south side of the bowl, and wide concrete steps march all the way down to the field. The bleachers are massive prefab units like those at college football stadiums, and huge banks of overhead lights can turn night into day at the flick of a switch. Fancy dressing rooms and a workout center stand on a terraced shelf halfway down the hill, and a blue rubberized track surrounds the football field. The year we fought our way to the state football championship, Drew and I practiced in a cow pasture filled with holes and played under dim “security lights” like the ones in supermarket parking lots.
Despite all the improvements, there’s still only one narrow access road to the bottom of the bowl, which is probably why the blackmailer chose the football field to pick up his payoff. He can easily detect the approach of any police vehicles, and the surrounding woods offer infinite avenues of escape, once he crosses the Cyclone fence that surrounds the track.
I cut my headlights as I climb the main driveway of the campus, then park on the south side of the elementary school to remain hidden from the eyes of anyone in the bowl. With the Springfield weighting my right front pocket, I walk quietly along the side of the building toward the bowl.
Standing in the shadows beside the building is a Honda ATV, commonly called a four-wheeler in this area. The camouflage paint scheme, Vanderbilt bumper sticker, and gun boot mounted on the handlebars mark this four-wheeler as Drew Elliot’s. Like most men in and around Natchez, Drew is an avid hunter. The only good news is that the gun boot contains a Remington deer rifle, which means Drew probably didn’t go armed to deliver his payoff to the fifty-yard line below.
Twenty yards from the elementary school, the ground drops precipitously into the bowl. Transecting that space is the asphalt road that curves down to the track. Staying in the shadows by Drew’s four-wheeler, I try his cell phone one last time.
There’s no answer, but for a moment I think I hear the chirp of a ringing cell phone. Crouching low, I scuttle to the edge of the bowl and look down. It’s like staring at a bottomless black lake. The light from the security lamps mounted on the stadium’s press box dies after only a few yards. Whatever is happening on the floor of the bowl, I can’t see it.
As I stare into the blackness, the whine of a small engine rises out of the hole. The whine seems to be coming toward me. Then a single headlight flicks on, cutting a bright swath down the length of the football field. Sitting at midfield is a small gym bag.
Where the hell is Drew?
What sounds like hoofbeats suddenly rises out of the bowl, followed by the sound of panting. I’m reaching for my Springfield when Drew’s face appears out of the dark. He pulls up short, his eyes filled with shock.
“Penn? Come on!”
He races past me to the four-wheeler. Far below, the motorcycle stops beside the gym bag.
“What are you doing here?” Drew calls over his shoulder.
“Trying to keep your ass out of trouble!” I answer, dividing my attention between the distant motorcycle and Drew.
He cranks the ATV with a rumble, kicks it into gear, and lurches up beside me. “You can help me or you can stand here with your thumb up your ass,” he says. “You’ve got three seconds to decide.”
A high-pitched revving echoes out of the bowl, and then suddenly the headlight is tearing away from us again, back in the direction from which it came. Certain that nothing will dissuade Drew from pursuit, I hike my leg over the seat and clamp my arms around his waist. He hits the throttle, and the Honda flies over the lip of the bowl, descending as though in free fall.
“This is nuts!” I yell in his ear. “You know that!”
He grabs something from his pocket and holds it over his shoulder until I take it. It looks like a small kaleidoscope.
“What’s this?”
“Night-vision scope! If he kills his headlight, keep that scope on him!”
Night vision? Why am I surprised? This is exactly the kind of useless toy that your affluent Mississippi hunter possesses. “Did you recognize the guy on the motorcycle?”
“He’s wearing a helmet with a black visor. Gloves, too, so I don’t know if he’s black or white.”
We hit the floor of the bowl with a bone-jarring impact, then zoom across the track onto the football field. A hundred yards ahead, the motorcycle slows to a near stop. He must be negotiating an opening in the Cyclone fence. Drew guns the ATV, and we hurtle up the football field at fifty miles an hour.
“What are you going to do if you catch him?”
“Ask some questions!” Drew shouts, pushing the Honda still harder. “Find out what he knows!”
The rest of Drew’s words are lost in the roar of wind past my ears as we race toward the end of the bowl.
“Look!” he shouts, pointing at the almost stationary headlight. “We’ve got him!”
The smaller engine whines like a chainsaw, and then the headlight begins moving jerkily uphill.
“Fuck!” bellows Drew.
Suddenly the entire bowl is blasted by white light, as though God ripped back the night sky to expose a hidden sun. In the blinding light I see a narrow gap cut in the Cyclone fence. Drew steers toward it.
“You can’t make it!” I scream, realizing the hole was cut for a motorcycle to pass through. “Don’t do it!”
Drew jolts across the track with abandon, then—realizing he can’t break the laws of physics—hits the brakes, throwing the Honda into a skid. The ass end of the four-wheeler spins forward, and suddenly it’s me who’s most likely to slam into the fence. But the grass is slick from rain. We spin once more, and then the front bumper of the ATV just kisses the loose wire of the Cyclone fence.
“Come on, baby,” Drew pleads, trying to restart the engine, which died during the skid.
“Give it up, man. Let him go.”
As the rattle of the motorcycle grows fainter, the steel fence post beside me sings as though struck by a hammer. Almost instantly that sound merges into a deafening boom that echoes around the bowl like cannon fire. Only then do I realize that the supersonic crack of the rifle bullet escaped me altogether. For a moment I wonder whether, despite the evidence of my eyes, Drew has drawn and fired his deer rifle at the fleeing motorcyclist. But he hasn’t.
“Somebody’s shooting at us!” I yell, clapping him on the shoulder.
“No shit!” he grunts, finally cranking the Honda to life. “Get off and hold the fence back!”
As I dismount the ATV, a second rifle shot blasts across the bowl. Drew yanks his own rifle from the boot and shoves it into my hands. “You know where the switch is? For the stadium lights?”
I nod blankly.
“Shoot back! Sooner or later, that asshole’s going to hit one of us.”
I scramble through the gap in the fence, move to the side of the opening, then lay the rifle barrel through one of the diamond-shaped holes in the fence and sight in on the staircase at the base of the press box. The switch box is mounted on the wall just above it. I see no one there, and I’m glad for it.
As Drew tries to bull the Honda through the gap in the fence, I draw a bead on the metal circuit box that contains the light switches. The Remington bucks against my shoulder three times before the blazing lights go dark.
“Get on!” Drew yells, the four-wheeler suddenly beside me in the darkness.
I shove his rifle back into the gun boot and climb onto the seat behind him, shocked by my exhilaration at having neutralized the threat from above. But the greatest threat to my safety probably wasn’t the shooter in the stadium; it’s the man whose waist I’m clinging to in the dark.
There’s no path through the trees, but this doesn’t deter Drew. He accelerates up the incline like a whiskey-crazed redneck in a mud-riding contest, dodging pines and briar thickets with inches to spare. As we crest the first hill, I feel the front wheels rise off the ground, and for a second I’m sure the Honda is about to flip backward and crush us, a manner of death all too common in Mississippi. But Drew stands erect and leans over the handlebars, restoring enough equilibrium for us to ramp over the hill and land in one piece on the other side.
To my surprise, he brakes to a stop and switches off the headlight. Now we face a darkness so deep, it makes the bowl seem hospitable by comparison. This is the darkness of the primeval forest.
“You’ll never catch him,” I say softly.
“Shhh,” says Drew, killing the motor. “Listen.”
Sure enough, somewhere below us and to our left I hear the faint protest of a small engine being pushed hard.
“He’s running the creek bed,” whispers Drew.
Drew is probably right, but that’s no great help. “He could come up out of that creek in a dozen different neighborhoods,” I point out. “We’ll never get him now.”
“Watch,” says Drew, cranking the Honda again.
I hug him tight and clench my thighs around the seat as he flicks on the headlight and plunges down the hillside. He must have hunted these woods before. There’s no other explanation for the speed with which he navigates the forest in the dark. We fly along one ridge as though pursued by the devil, then plunge down an almost perpendicular drop and splash into swiftly running water.
After struggling through the stream for a dozen yards, we climb onto a gravel-covered sandbar and race along the creek bed. All I can do at this point is hang on and pray that Drew knows where he’s going.
Twice more I’m doused by creek water, but then I hear a whoop of triumph as he sights a solitary taillight ahead. Somehow—I can only assume it’s because of superior knowledge of the terrain—Drew is closing the gap between us and the motorcycle. The note of the Honda’s engine climbs in pitch as he pushes the ATV to its limit.
“Easy!” I shout. “You’ve got him now!”
“He’s seen us! He’s speeding up. If I push him, he might wreck.”
“We might wreck!”
In thirty frantic seconds, Drew closes the gap to twenty-five yards. The taillight disappears as the motorcycle whips around a bend, but three seconds later we round it, too, and I sight the light again.
Suddenly the darkness gives way to a plain of white sand shining in the moonlight. The creek is a black snake slithering over it, and somehow the motorcyclist has reached the opposite side of that snake. Drew aims the Honda at the narrowest part of the stream. Instinct tells me this is a mistake, since shallows tend to be broad while narrows indicate deep-cut channels. But this is Drew’s home ground, not mine. As the motorcycle escapes over the sand, Drew punches the gas, and we hit the narrows at thirty miles an hour.
It’s like plowing into a guardrail. The rear end of the Honda flies over my shoulders, and the next thing I know, I’m sucking water and clawing mud. Knowing that the sinking four-wheeler could pin me to the creek bottom, I scrabble over the slime and burst up into the air.
I see no sign of Drew or the four-wheeler, only a cloud of steam rising from the water behind me. Diving back beneath the surface, I feel my way to the overturned vehicle and burn my forearm on the exhaust pipe. Then my hand closes on a bulging calf. Drew is pinned beneath the ATV.
Struggling around to the upstream side of the Honda, I plant both feet firmly on the creek bottom, then squat and grab the handlebars. Hoping the current will function like a second person, I heave upward and lunge downstream with all my strength.
The ATV rises about a foot, then stops.
I redouble my efforts, but the weight of the engine is just too much. As my back starts to give way, the main current of the creek suddenly lifts the ATV out of my hands and carries it several yards downstream. I fall and float behind it for a couple of seconds. Then I get my feet under me and turn, expecting Drew to break the surface.
He doesn’t.
“Drew!”
Nothing but the sound of water.
I know a guy who snapped both femurs in a four-wheeler accident exactly like this one. And Drew took the brunt of the impact when we hit the creek. The water’s not much more than four feet deep here, but the current is strong. If Drew was knocked unconscious, he could be thirty yards downstream already.
I take a deep breath and go to the bottom, then let the current carry me along. In less than ten seconds I collide with the ATV again. It’s being dragged sluggishly down the creek. I’m feeling my way around it when a strong hand grabs my shirt and pulls me to the surface.
The free sample has ended.
