Chapter Eleven

Speaking of not telling Billy Ray everything, Raven didn’t tell him that she was proceeding with her cleanup of Oral’s house. She didn’t want the argument. Except with Billy Ray, there wouldn’t have been an argument so anyone would notice – no shouting or slammed doors. Instead, there would be her stating her position, his look of dark disapproval, and then, the most annoying of all, a dismissive grunt. She couldn’t let his or Imogene’s condemnation make her forgo her promise to Oral’s memory. She’d erase the damage Lovelle had done while chasing Oral through its bright rooms with a scythe. Laughter would fill his house again.

The last time she was at the house was during a crime scene walk-through. Bloodstains jutted up the interior sun-yellow walls. Bits of brain clung to kitchen cabinets where Oral had taken his last breath. Lamont Lovelle had succeeded in not only ushering Oral’s soul from this earth with his blasted scythe, but he left a picture so grotesque that it was all she saw when she thought of the man who had mentored her. That needed to change.

That was why about two weeks after Noe’s birthday party, she found herself parking her red Mustang in an uneven dirt yard choked with weeds and pockmarked with pecan shells from the grove next door. Oral never was a fan of manicured front lawns. He preferred to let the wisteria and the wide wraparound porch speak for him. Now, this late in the year, the wisteria branches were thick, bare, twisted. They clung to the pergola in a snarling, determined grip of ownership.

At the front door she lifted the heavy combination lock and held it against her palm for a few seconds. She reached into her back pocket for the napkin she had scribbled the combination on after a call to the lawyer who handled Oral’s last will and testament. She thumbed the combination into the lock, and was heartened when it popped open with one hard click.

The heavy door creaked unevenly in warning as she pushed it open. When she stepped into the house a smell with the force of a shrieking wraith almost knocked her backward. The house had been locked up for over a year. With no one to pay the bills, the electricity and water had been cut off long ago. She recognized in the odor, the smell of rot, old blood and, oddly enough, the hot, corrupted scent of burning feces.

Oral Justice was killed in the summer. The house was shut up in the summer. For one wild moment Raven thought that the entire hell of that July and August was escaping through the door to terrorize her anew. Her eyes watered. She didn’t realize she had stopped breathing until she gulped and coughed low and hard in her throat in an effort to let in new air.

Holy demons of all things sinful, she thought. She only hesitated for a fraction of a second. She owed it to Oral. She took two steps inside with her knuckles pressed against her nose. All of the furniture was in the same position that it had been in on the day that Oral died – the overturned glass coffee table, the broken shards now covered in a thick layer of grime. The hardwood floor held none of the shine she remembered. Oral’s blood telegraphed in dark patches in various places. Her eyes followed the blood splatter on the wall and the cast-off on the ceiling. She remembered it being a bright arterial red. Now it was oily, black.

Without realizing that she did so, she walked the house the same way she did when it was a crime scene. She finished in the kitchen, where most of the damage to Oral’s big body had been inflicted.

She told herself not to do it, but she had to. She didn’t know why but something beckoned her. Maybe it was her father’s voice surfing the wave of frenzied whispers in her head. She opened the refrigerator door as if in a trance. Something caught up top and before she knew it, the freezer door came along for the ride. This time she did stagger backwards, and almost fell. Floyd’s cackling laughter grew louder and louder in her head.

Roaches poured from the freezer, their black legs making scurrying sounds as they hurried out of the refrigerator and pattered in streams down to the tile floor. What would usually be wrapped cubes of frozen meat were now black squares of putrefaction.

Reminds you, don’t it, Birdy Girl, Floyd’s voice, the voice she thought was dead, said, that animal flesh we be eating. Meat. Things alive at first and things that can decompose just like us humans when the good Lord puts us down.

“Shut up,” she gasped. “Shut up. You’re dead.”

The bottles in the refrigerator door jangled against each other as she slung it closed. The door bounced back, refusing to shut. She looked down at her sneaker-clad feet to see the roaches attempting to clamor up the legs of her jeans. She shook them off with a screaming sob.

She had seen horrific crime scenes, some in which the body lay for months. But she never gave much thought to cleaning up such a sight. Someone else scoured the blood from the walls, pried up the floor, removed the broken furniture, and, yes, even cleaned out the refrigerator.

Her entire body went rigid before it released again with a command to run.

As she ran, she imagined that the smell was not only clinging to her, but piercing through her flesh to settle in her bones so completely that she feared it would still be there when they dug her up a hundred years later.