Chapter Forty-Four

Breaker wanted her to take the evidence to the chief. He told both Imogene and Raven that Chief Sawyer would have no choice but to follow up. But Raven wasn’t so sure about that, and neither was Imogene. They talked Breaker down, but Raven didn’t know how long he would keep quiet. He wanted to be a normal dad again, maybe even go back to the BLPD to pick up his old job in major crimes. His girls could go to school, and the town could get back to the business of pretending as if it cared for its children, that is, until the next walking disaster decided they had an axe to grind.

Raven needed her old partner, Billy Ray, to help her pull the threads that would untie the knot of this crime. But he was nowhere she looked. It was as if the sour Byrd’s Landing wind had whispered to him that he was about to be pulled down into a nightmare, urged him to run. She found him in the last place she expected.

The shotgun where Billy Ray battled Lovelle didn’t look like it did last year, no bottle tree fighting off evil spirits. Someone had long ago stolen away the twinkle lights that Billy Ray draped around the windows and front door. The door itself had been ripped off its hinges, carried away. Beyond the threshold stood a maw of darkness.

With a flashlight she walked through the front door, half expecting the overturned furniture and a blue flame still burning on Billy Ray’s Viking stove. The memories of that night followed her through the house and out the back door. But there was one thing that made her proud. She didn’t run. She walked.

From the high porch she could see Billy Ray in the barren yard looking up at the frosted moon. His hands were knotted into fists at his sides. No oh-shucks pork pie hat pushed back on his head this time, no friendly bowling shirt to put people, especially white people, at their ease. Without these affectations of amiability, she could see the pain and frustration that he had been trying to hide since she had returned to Byrd’s Landing. He stood next to a scarred stump that used to be a fully grown weeping willow before Lovelle tried to burn him alive beneath it.

He didn’t turn toward her, though he had to know that she was standing there. She wasn’t making any attempt at stealth.

“What in all things holy are you doing here, Billy Ray?” she asked him. “How in the hell did you get down there?”

The porch was at least six feet off the ground, bolstered by two-by-fours. After the first landing the only thing left were the supports, the porch so rickety that it was no small thing that it hadn’t already collapsed. She figured he must have jumped, so in spite of the pain in her own body, that’s what she did, swearing she heard bells jangling in approval as she stuck the landing.

He turned to her then, his eyes glittering with moonlight. His smile was amused. “I didn’t come that way. But leave it to you to show off.”

“What are you doing here?” Raven repeated. “I’ve been looking all over for you. This isn’t healthy.”

“I don’t come here because it’s healthy. I come here to remember, to remind myself that it was real, not a bad dream. The question is how did you find me?”

“After I eliminated all of the places you could be, I thought I’d find you at the only place you shouldn’t,” Raven said. “You’d think the scars and the medical bills would be enough to let you know that it was real.”

Billy Ray laughed softly. “That’s why I love you, Raven. You can always be counted on to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. So, why you so hot on finding me?”

“We’ve got to talk about Edmée.”

“No.”

“Not your relationship with her. I’m talking about the Sleeping Boy killer.”

“I know what you want to talk about. Imogene called me. All you’ve got is a wish and an obsession, and that’ll make it a dangerous conversation.”

“Well, that ought to match your blind spot.”

“Why? Because you think I’m sleeping with her?”

“Are you?” she challenged.

“Is that any of your business?”

“Are we really going to fight about the least important thing right now?”

“You appear to be willing.”

“Okay,” she breathed. “It’s my business when it comes to finding Noe, which you don’t seem to give a hollering hoot of a wet dream about.”

“I care about that boy more than you know.”

“Then why don’t you listen to me?”

“Because you’re talking out of your ass. Edmée wouldn’t hurt a fly if it was shitting in her gumbo.”

He turned, walked up the hill and through the alley leading out of the backyard.

“She grew up on a farm. Did you know that?” she called to him.

He shook his head without turning around.

“They had pigs and goats. Chickens. She told me stories when we were in school together about having to kill them. How bad she felt about it. I didn’t think too much about it until she was handling that snake in my rooms at Mama Anna’s like a pro, talking about how she used to be a country girl.”

He stopped at the mouth of the alley and turned to her. “So?”

“These boys are being slaughtered out of revenge. The killer feels bad about doing it. That explains the method, the blankets, washing the body after. Don’t you get it? They’re sacrifices paying for the sins of their families.”

“I hear you. But why Edmée?”

It took everything she had to maintain eye contact with him. For some reason, she saw Edmée in her mind’s eye, all soft, asking that she not reveal her past to Billy Ray. When she finally decided to speak, it was too late. He had lost patience.

“Oh, I see,” he said. “You haven’t gotten around to making that part up yet.”

“Come on, Billy Ray.”

“You ever think it could be your boyfriend?”

“Stevenson? What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Stevenson. Did you check him out as possibly being a part of this?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Well, he used the same road that the killer took Noe and Clyde on,” he said. “For his fake location for his fake movie.”

“Lots of people use that road out of town. You want to arrest half of Byrd’s Landing?”

“Rogue cop. Obsessed with putting you away. Lied to you about everything he is. How do you know he didn’t take Clyde and Noe to get back at you? And here you are having no problem partnering with him.”

“I have plenty of problems partnering with him. I don’t have a choice. Besides, Stevenson being good for this is stupid.”

“Man shows up out of nowhere and all of a sudden Noe and Clyde are gone,” he said. “Why is that stupid?”

“Is this how we’re going to be toward each other now that you have a girlfriend? A married girlfriend, I might add? Suspicious? Cruel?”

“You forgot jealous.”

“You’re jealous of Stevenson?” she asked.

He laughed. “Not even as a joke. But you sure are jealous of Edmée.”

“You think I want to take the place of Edmée in your bed?”

“Of course not,” he said. “But you do everything you can just to tear her down. She told me how competitive the two of you were in high school.”

“So, what are we competing for now? Your attention? I’m jealous because you can’t spit or take a piss without that perfumed succubus at your side?”

He looked at her for a long time. She didn’t like that look. He said, “I rest my case.”

“Don’t you walk away from me, you fool,” she yelled to his retreating back, his T-shirt now a square of white in the darkness. “I have a lot to tell you.”

“Stevenson, Raven,” he said over his shoulder.

She chased him up the hill leading to the alley, but was no match for his quick, long strides even with his limp. She shouted every invective she knew for what she thought was just short of the jugular, but he rewarded her efforts with not one of his Billy Ray comebacks. She got only an accusing silence. The fear that she was about to lose him made her want to cry, but of course she wouldn’t. It wasn’t out of pride, but the fear that he wouldn’t care.

She was standing on the run-down sidewalk as she watched him get into his Skylark parked on the opposite side of Peabody. He veered the little car across the street straight toward where she stood. Anybody other than Billy Ray, Raven would have been sure the Skylark was trying to mow her down.

On the wrong side of the street now, he stopped the car next to her, rolled down the window. He stared at her for so long that Raven thought he was going to say something profound. What he did say was, “You ain’t going to want to stand out here too long. It’s late, dark. No telling what this neighborhood is crawling with now that nobody lives down here anymore.”

With that he rolled the window back up and drove away, the wheels rustling along the road in the dark. Raven stood there stunned. But then rage galvanized her. She scooped up a handful of dirt and threw it at his car, satisfied to see the dirt clod bounce off his trunk, not caring that the flashlight dropped and rolled as she did so.

She called him a demented pussy-whipped son-of-a-robber. She called him an adulterer, a hypocrite and ended with, “Your mother wasn’t married to your father, you dumb piece of butt filth.” That last bit made her a bit ashamed. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t heard her, had long since turned the corner out of sight. But, she asked herself, was he really sleeping with Edmée? Did he not care if she were killing kids? Did she really not know him?

Better question, Lovey, Floyd’s voice broke in. Did he really just leave you here in the dark?

“Yes, he did,” she answered back bitterly. “And you’re right, Daddy. No telling what a man will do when there’s tail involved.”

She picked up the flashlight. The casing was cracked, the light flickering, but it still worked. She was ready to get the hell out of there. She reached in her pocket for her keys and froze. Her pocket was empty. Maybe in the car, she thought.

But no.

For Raven, there was a place for everything. Besides, she distinctly remembered getting the big flashlight because it was so dark out, and dropping the keys in her jacket pocket. And she remembered jumping from the porch steps to the ground in what might have been a more graceful somersault if her body wasn’t in so much pain. She thought she heard something jangle, and then the argument. She forgot all about the keys.

The flashlight flickered and buzzed. Raven pointed it back at the house, then through the alley leading to the backyard. Father of all things holy, please don’t make me have to go back through that alley.

But she knew she had no choice.

She pointed the struggling light in front of her and began walking, making as much noise as she could as she went. She knew that wasn’t the smartest thing in the world given that she was probably alerting every crackhead in a five-mile radius holed up in these abandoned houses, but Raven knew that she could at least talk to a junkie. If they wouldn’t listen to reason, she could very well defend herself. But a snake? Maybe a cottonmouth this time?

That would drive her over the edge.

She walked on, stepping carefully over the uneven ground in the alley. She talked to God as she kept walking, asked him to not carry out Floyd’s wish for punishment for little girls who told on their daddies. She removed the Glock from its holster. If she saw one snake in the light of the flashlight, she didn’t care if it was harmless or not, she was going to blow it to bits before it had a chance to play dead.

She walked a few more steps, stopped when a possum froze in the beam of the flashlight. When she finally made it to the backyard, the light sputtered completely out. She really did want to cry then, big gut-wrenching sobs like she did when she was a little girl. She started the flashlight app on her cell phone. It didn’t provide much light but there was enough to guide her to the hulk of the damaged back porch.

It turned out that the drama wasn’t necessary. Her keys were lying on the edge of the weed patch as if they were patiently waiting for her to come back. Can’t go anywhere without me, they taunted. She bent to scoop them up. In that instant light flooded the yard, and then her name, as clear as crystal.

“Raven.”

* * *

Raven whipped toward the light source. There at the edge of the fenceless yard was a small man with yellow hair dressed in black. Odd shadows made his eyes appear as black holes in his pale face.

The fact that she believed that this man was from her own imagination made it worse for Raven. She was dancing on the cliff of sanity and madness and was horrified at how close she was coming to falling over the edge.

With putting distance between the man and herself the only thing on her mind, she caught the porch’s lip and pulled herself up. It crashed into a pile of broken sticks the minute she made it through the back door. She sprinted through the house, imagining the Floyd thing on the other side of the wall, running both unreal and unseen alongside her.

She exited the shotgun, pressed the button to open her car door, fumbled the key into the ignition – oh what she wouldn’t give for a start button now – and drove out of there like a soul escaping hell. He was there in her rearview, a hand reaching out to her, one long finger pointing.

She knew he wasn’t real. She knew that she was only running away from her own madness. But the light. It was hard to believe that the light came from her twisted imagination.