Nautilus checked a county map. He had another stop on his snapshot tour of Jim Day’s life, a former foster home where a teenaged Day had lived for several months. Day had been at several foster homes, but Nautilus only found one former foster who hadn’t died or moved.
Marlene Cullers lived just south of Carrollton. She looked younger than mid-sixties, a tall and heavy-boned woman with waist-length gray hair, half-round glasses, and a smile as wide and bright as a truck grille. She wore a Neil Young tee-shirt, patched blue jeans, and backless plastic shoes like helmets for your feet. If she’d been a lady wrestler, Nautilus figured, her name would have been Big Hippie Mama. She took him from front porch to coffee at the kitchen table in twenty seconds flat.
“Jimmy was a foster kid with us when his mama got arrested for dealing, went to prison. We were one of three families he stayed with. We talk, fosters, and all of us had the same experience.”
“What kind of experience was that?”
She shook back the free-falling shock of gray hair. “Jimmy didn’t do anything. He sat and looked at you, like trying to figure something out. Or making up a movie in his head where you had a part to play, but only he could see how it came out. He never seemed angry, never acted out. But that’s because he never really seemed to be there.”
“Was he dull? I mean …”
“Mentally? No, quite the opposite. He did very well in school. But when we’d talk to his teachers, they’d all ask the same questions: Is he always this quiet? Does he have these mannerisms at home?”
“Mannerisms, ma’am?”
Cullers frowned, trying to find words. “Sometimes he’d say things that didn’t fit. You’d say, ‘The Smith’s new kittens got stole from their back porch last night,’ and Jimmy’d laugh and say, ‘At school today we ate hot dogs for lunch.’ Stuff like that. No connection, not one anyone could figure, anyway. And he’d watch television all the time, war movies, police shows. And old cowboy movies. He dearly loved old John Wayne movies. Especially one about, about …” She spun her fingers, trying to gather the memory. “Rio something or other.”
“Rio Grande?”
“That’s it. He’d read the TV Guide cover to cover to see if it was on that week, get up at three a.m. to see it. We didn’t stop him because television seemed to keep his attention, one of the few things that did.”
“How long did he stay with you?”
“Eleven months. He wasn’t a problem. He was barely here. But my husband tore up his back in a fall, couldn’t work. I had to take a job clerking at the co-op until he got better.”
Nautilus pushed the empty coffee cup to the center of the table and sat back in the chair, almost ready to leave. “So, outside of the occasional inappropriate mannerism, there were no behavioral hassles for Jim Day?”
“No, not really …” A hesitation.
“What, Miz Cullers?”
“Jimmy wet the bed a bit. Actually more than a bit. It was almost a nightly occurrence. No big deal. I put a plastic pad beneath the sheet, kept fresh sheets in his room so he could fix things, and we all played like no one noticed.”
Nautilus felt a stirring in his gut. That’s one. One of three. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table.
“Tell me, Miz Cullers, were there any suspicious fires around your house, or in the neighborhood during the time Jimmy was here?”
Puzzlement filled the woman’s eyes. “How did you know about that? The fires?”
“Tell me about them.”
“There were two that I remember. One was a grass fire out by the highway. Usually they’re started by cigarettes tossed from cars, but this one started in the woods and burned out to the highway. Someone had built a fire in an old shed and it got out of control. It was no big deal. But there was another fire a couple months later.”
“Bigger, I take it?”
“Burnt down an abandoned house a half-mile away. The fire department said it was set deliberate, gasoline. It was just part of the strangeness that day.”
“Strangeness, Miz Cullers?”
The woman’s voice dropped low. “The fire-fighters found the bodies of three dogs. The poor things had been tore up while alive and hid away in the house. One had gone missing from down the street, the Lovells’ place.”
“Do you remember where Jim was during those times?”
“I don’t remember with the grass fire. I was calling for him when the house burnt, scared by all the smoke. He showed up mumbling that he’d been playing by the creek, the other direction. Oh Lord, I just remembered something else. Something I forgot completely about …”
“What?”
“He smelled like smoke. I thought it was from the air, the smoke in the air. There was a lot of smoke from the house fire. But it smelled so thick on him.”
Two and three, Nautilus thought.
He thanked Marlene Cullers and left. Next, he had a phone call to make, area code 325, somewhere around Abilene, Texas. It could be a very interesting call and he pulled off by the Tombigbee River to let his eyes wander over water as he read his notes again. He slipped a photo from his pocket, the picture made from a courthouse microfiche of old copies of the local newspaper. He set the photo on his lap, took another look at the sweeping river, then dialed the number.