9
Bruce was about thirty minutes out of Jericho in the northern part of Calhoun County. A lumber mill dwarfed the small downtown—a road sign reading WELCOME TO BRUCE WHERE MONEY GROWS IN TREES—and even at dawn the metal buildings were lit up, with mountains of logs waiting in piles to be cut down into planks, plumes of steam rising up into the cold air. Lillie pulled into a service station and grabbed a couple more coffees; they’d arrived in town thirty minutes early and were supposed to see the minister at his church at seven. Quinn and Lillie sat in her Cherokee for several minutes, watching the logging trucks bumping their way down a gravel road and leaving the mill’s chain-link gates. The light turned from slate gray to a brilliant purple while Lillie, making a face at the weak coffee, confessed to not stepping foot in a church for ten years.
“The only people who are brave enough to pay me a visit are the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she said.
Quinn blotted a napkin at the busted skin on his knuckles.
“You should wrap that up,” she said.
“I will when we get back,” he said. “Do those men sound familiar?”
“We’ll look at some photo packs back in Jericho,” Lillie said.
“Wesley said he knew ’em but won’t tell me.”
“Wesley is often full of shit.”
“You think Stagg sent ’em?”
“What do you think?” Lillie started the cruiser, and they made their way through the old downtown, not all that different from Jericho, and along a small street to a Baptist church with a parking lot that was empty except for a Buick parked in a space reserved for the minister. After Lillie had left Quinn at his mother’s last night, she’d made some calls to people on the Calhoun County school board, finding two girls named Beccalynn younger than ten. She’d spoken to the first girl’s mother, finding the woman at home with three other children. The second call yielded the Bullard family, and a long pause when Lillie asked questions about young Beccalynn’s mother, whose real name, it turned out, was Jill. The man, a pastor, asked if they could meet in person.
“How long has it been since her family saw her?” Quinn asked.
“Three months,” Lillie said.
“How long has their granddaughter been living with them?” Quinn asked.
“More than a year.”
They found Reverend Bullard in his office with an open door, the church offices smelling of musty old Bibles and cleaning supplies, that familiar church scent. He had them sit in a little grouping of four chairs, where Quinn assumed he did counseling. Lots of brochures on alcoholism and domestic violence on a table between them. He offered them coffee and they took it, pretty weak, but they couldn’t complain, waiting for him to come to the point as he made polite conversation, talking about losing his sermon and having to retype the whole piece last night.
He was in his early forties, slight and graying. He had a soft, gentle voice and wore a basic blue suit and red tie. A piece of toilet paper had been stuck on a cut on his chin. “Did you find her?” he asked.
Lillie shook her head. “Your daughter, Jill, was in Tibbehah County last month. We want to talk to her in regards to an ongoing investigation.”
Quinn could tell Bullard assumed he was a deputy, too, and Lillie did nothing to try to set him straight.
“What’s she done now?”
Lillie shook her head. “Nothing. But a man she was seen with was killed. We just want to know more about him.”
“I figured she was dead,” the pastor said. “We’ve been expecting that call for four years. I pray for her every day, but she has to make decisions on her own.”
Lillie nodded. Quinn felt himself start to sweat.
“Beccalynn was Jill’s second child,” he said. “She aborted the first. We didn’t know until later. There has been nothing but drugs and men ever since. We only have one child now and that’s Beccalynn, and we pray that her mother never again enters her life.”
“Do you have any idea where she could have gone?” Lillie asked, her hands held tight in her lap. Quinn shuffled in his seat and put down the coffee, feeling hot in the small room with all its plaques and religious posters, a purple robe hanging on a hook by the door with two umbrellas and a baseball cap.
Bullard shook his head and looked at his hands.
There’d been a time when Caddy had gone down to Panama City with some friends and had disappeared for about eight days. Quinn’s mother about lost her mind, and Quinn had to get a special pass to leave Fort Benning. He and another Ranger who wanted to come along had searched in and out of every shithole along the Miracle Mile until they found her passed out in a daiquiri bar, two boys from the Navy base trying to ease her back to their car.
He and his buddy nearly ended up in jail for whipping the shit out of those sailors. Four months later, Caddy disappeared again.
“She used to call and ask for money,” the preacher said. “I didn’t even know that she’d been in Tibbehah County. I figured she was still in New Orleans.”
“Does your wife know we called?” Lillie asked.
“No.”
“You think she might know something?” Quinn asked.
“She knows less than me,” he said. “The last time I saw her was in New Orleans. I had wired Jill money at a grocery store on Royal Street. I waited till she came and picked it up, and followed her out. She looked just wild, with her clothes and hair. She didn’t seem to know me at first. When she did, she made wild accusations and said very hurtful things. She’s not my daughter. I don’t know who she’s become and would never want my wife to feel what I had felt.”
Quinn stood, feeling like he could not breathe.
“Now we have a name,” Lillie said, still sitting looking up at him. “We’ll try and run her through the system.”
“You understand if I don’t want to be notified,” the preacher said.
Lillie laid down her card and wrote her cell phone number on the back. “If you hear from her, please let us know.”
Quinn shook his hand with speed and left the building, finding some comfort out in the chilled early morning air. He wanted to punch the shit out of something but tried to calm his thoughts with breathing.
They always said that shit worked, and sometimes it did.
Lena had spent the last three days at a women’s shelter in Jericho, where they fed her three meals a day and gave her a bunk in the basement of the Baptist church among rows of folding chairs, golden choir robes, and two Ping-Pong tables. The fat wife of the preacher had taken particular interest in her, coming down the steps late at night with cake or pudding, high on the glory of the Christmas season, reading tracts of Bible stories from old Guidepost magazines and comparing Lena’s plight to that of the Virgin Mother. She told the fat lady she hadn’t been a virgin since she was thirteen, thank you very much, but she did appreciate the pudding. The woman would smile at her and pat her on the head, and for most of the day Lena was free to help out with dishes in the kitchen after prayer breakfasts and fold laundry of the other gals who were there, including a woman in her forties with a busted lip and a black girl about her age who was just about as knocked up and said she wasn’t no virgin, either. On that Sunday afternoon, after a supper of baked chicken and peas and sweet tea, Lena took a walk, promising the local counselor that she only needed some air and would not smoke, drink, or do intentional harm to herself or the baby.
She found herself in downtown Jericho, the sun headed down not long past four. The bare trees and old rusted tower looming over the squat buildings were dark and shadowed, as if they’d been sketched in pencil. With the four dollars left in the quilted coat she’d been given, sewn by the good sisters of the church, she ordered a hamburger and small milk shake at the Sonic Drive-In, sitting at a table up by the kitchen window, while the slots were filled with white boys’ muddy trucks and black boys’ sporty sedans jacked up on high silver rims.
The milk shake was what she needed, and, with less than a dollar left, she asked the waitress for an order of fried pickles. The woman set them down and didn’t even ask to be paid, Lena left somehow thinking that she’d been in a similar spot at one time or another.
Visiting hour was tomorrow, and if Jody, or Charley Booth or whoever he really was, didn’t want to see her again, she guessed she’d hand-crawl her way back to Alabama and ask for some forgiveness from her father, although her daddy had made it pretty damn clear she was not much use to their family as a common whore. She figured maybe she could stay at the church and work, but the ladies had already tried to place her with a program in Jackson that sounded like a place that a girl left without her child.
If she could just have the kid and get back on her feet, she could take care of it. She had a sister in Birmingham who could watch the baby if she could find work. Her momma could help if she could find where she was living, the last place being Tampa, where she’d been working as a dancer. She figured she just needed to settle this thing with the boy since it was him who’d told her that he’d loved her and that she sure made him whole, and all of that had sounded pretty solid over some cold beer and weed, but sober, rattling around her head at the Sonic, it sounded pretty much like horseshit off a greeting card.
She tried to keep the last few pickles, them cooling off fast in the wind, when she saw the black Camaro, the one from the jail the other day, whip into the parking lot and slide right into a slot by an old Ford.
That muscled guy with the shaved head and the stubble mustache and goatee leaned out the window and pressed the red button, calling out what he wanted just as if they didn’t have an intercom and kind of laughing about it to some girl that sat next to him, shadowed in the front seat. The man said he wanted a country-fried steak sandwich, some tater tots, and a large cherry limeade.
“Oh, and a sundae with that cherry toppin’,” he said.
Lena watched him, noticing his large, veiny arm, lined with tattoos, and the way he turned out the window again and dug a lump of dip from his lower lip, flinging it down onto the pavement and turning his black eyes right on her.
She sucked on her milk shake, not backing down for one damn minute. She’d paid for her food and would enjoy it, even longer than she’d expected. She turned away and watched a man in white working the grill, flipping over patties and checking some fries in a grease trap.
Lena placed her hands in her little knitted coat, feeling the wind kicking up over her back.
“I love the look of a woman with child,” a man said. “Y’all got that glow.”
She craned her head.
He smiled at her, wearing a black T-shirt with no sleeves like it wasn’t about forty degrees out, and reached out and grabbed her last two fried pickles and put them on his fat tongue, sliding into the seat in front of her.
“Don’t look at me like that, girl,” he said, scratching the stubble on his chin, his teeth yellowed. “You can forget that Charley Booth. Right now, I may be the best friend you ever had.”