(30)

As I was about to ascend the stairs, my trusty ax handle in hand, Mrs. Chandler came out of the kitchen and started across the living room. She said, “Come sit with me awhile.”

“I thought that area was off limits.”

“You’ve been in here already.”

I thought about my dog-on-the-couch analogy. Bark, bark.

“You can come in when invited,” she said. “You’re invited. And you won’t need the ax handle. I won’t hurt you.”

She had taken a seat on the couch by this time and she patted a spot next to her. I saw on the coffee table in front of her there was a large book. I recognized it. Natural Wilson’s volume on Long Lincoln.

I put the ax handle on the floor and sat by her. “Not going to ask about the ax handle?” I said.

“I know what it’s for,” she said, and she touched the book on the coffee table. “Read your article. It was good, but it’s only got a part of the truth.”

“It’s one article. A series of them will follow.”

“I know. It says so at the bottom of it. I read all the way through and even understand what I read. This book you mentioned. I know it well.”

“Okay,” I said.

To emphasize, she patted the book again. “I know what’s not in the book that the author would have liked to be there but was too frightened to write. I know it’s not very well written, and I know most copies were bought up when the book first came out, and I know the one in the library is one I donated.”

“I have that one upstairs.”

“Yes, and it’s been gathering dust in the library for a long time, but my guess is after you turn it back in, it will never be on the shelves again. It will cease to exist. They were foolish letting it stay there.”

“They?”

“You know who I mean.” She pursed her lips. “Now that I’m old, and I have cancer—”

“Hell, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

“I don’t talk about it usually. It’s what it is. It’s a bad cancer too. Eating me from the inside out. Wish it would go away, but as the old saying goes, wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first. Prayer has been suggested, but you could modify that saying to pray in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first. You would have the same results.”

“Isn’t there something you can do to treat it?”

“It’s a done deal. I have a bit of time, the doctor thinks, and I feel okay. He says it’ll come on fast, and suddenly, I don’t want to do a damn thing. He says by that point they’ll have me so full of morphine or some such, I won’t know if I’m flying to the moon or trying to slice it up for a wheel of cheese. I’ve come to terms with it, and I’ve decided it’s about time I let loose the badger in the angel cake. I don’t really want to discuss my cancer. I want to tell you what I know before I can’t. I want to give you some things. I think a lot of dead bodies are surfacing, just like when someone drowns in the lake. They go down, but in time they come up. And recently in car trunks.”

Technically, they hadn’t come up, but I let that go. I got the symbolism of it. “I’m intrigued,” I said.

“Of course you are. Listen to me. I want to give you some information that might help you, or it might make you go upstairs and pack and move on. And I wouldn’t blame you. Let’s start with this. Once upon a time I had a husband, and I found out too late he was a malicious, unprincipled asshole who would screw a knothole in a tree in case a squirrel was bent over inside picking up an acorn. I married young, as that’s what girls did back then. My plan was to have a family and go to football games and ice cream socials with my husband and children, do the wife thing, the local-citizen thing, maybe bake a cake or pie for some county fair, die old and happy surrounded by my children and not too bad-looking for a hundred and ten. But that part of my plan didn’t turn out so good.

“Bert, he was nasty as the scum on pond water. His inability to run with a football was etched into his past like a thorn. He was smart and well built, kind of pretty, but physically he was slow. He ran like cold molasses on a winter morn, had all the blocking ability of a fog on the road. So his football ambitions were just that, ambitions.

“Our bedroom used to be the one you’re in at the top of the stairs. My husband, Bert Chandler, was a hitter, and he liked to correct me, as he put it. Meaning I wasn’t supposed to disagree with him even if he said sewage was the food of the gods. Some years ago, he was standing there on the stairs. He had just corrected me and raped me, which he called ‘having fun,’ and he was expecting me to go downstairs like a good little girl and make his breakfast. I came out of the bedroom, having adjusted myself to a bit of normalcy, having dried my tears and combed my hair, and there he was at the top of the stairs, all showered and dressed. He was straightening his tie. Blue with gray stripes. I remember it perfectly. He was a fine-looking man, standing there, though I noted he had missed a spot while shaving and some hairs stood out from his chin like little spikes. Odd thing to remember, huh?

“For him, what he had done to me was nothing important. It was how he thought things should be, a slap and hump when he felt like it. He was going to eat the breakfast he expected me to fix for him, go off to his lawyer job, working for Jack Manley Sr. At that time, Manley’s boy, Jack Jr., didn’t work there in either law or insurance. That was to come.

“Quiet as a dream, I came up beside Bert and shoved him with both palms, knocked him down the stairs. I can’t say I planned it, and I barely remember doing it, the actual pushing, I mean. He landed on his head on a middle step, and there was a popping sound like someone stepping on a crusty bug, and then that great big body of his tumbled the rest of the way down and lay on the floor at the base of the stairs, one shoe having come off his foot. His hair had slipped and there was a lock of it on his forehead, like an old bopper might wear. His head was set funny on his neck, and he was looking up at me. If he had been able to see, he would have seen me doing a little happy dance at the top of the stairs. Just came out of me, dancing like that. Like I was leaping up and down on burning coals, but I was ecstatic.

“Near everyone in town suspected I pushed his ass, but no one could prove anything, and the only person I’ve ever admitted it to is you. I did collect a good amount of money, though. He had a lot tucked away. And since Jack Manley Sr. also sold insurance, Bert had put together a comfortable life insurance policy from him for the both of us. I always suspected, just a feeling, that Bert had a policy on us both to remove suspicion that would be there if he decided I might could have an accident. One policy was just too obvious. Surprised that bastard. Got him first.

“I got the insurance money and the money that he had tucked in places around the house that he didn’t think I knew about, and I got this house and a car. Jackpot.

“Jack Manley Sr. came around shortly after Bert was in the ground, buried in a cheap particleboard coffin in the suit he died in, same tie, same stickpin, not embalmed, as I wanted the worms to get to him as fast as possible.

“Jack Sr., who was tighter than Dick’s hatband, offered me a regular monthly check, quite generous, as a way of honoring my husband’s memory, as he put it.

“Reason for those checks wasn’t about Bert’s memory or my widowhood. It was just in case I might know something Bert told me that could be harmful to Jack Sr. or, for that matter, the city council, this town’s own little Gestapo.

“Bert worked for Jack a long time, had grown up with him, Parker, Kate, all of them, knew their kids and so on. When all of them were little, they had a secret society. They still do. Back then they made up their own little god and had a wooden statue of it and everything. Carved out of a piece of an old creosote post. They called it Creosote Johnny. Kid stuff, but you know what Bert told me they used to do? They had a monthly meeting and a ceremony in the woods somewhere, sacrificed a little animal to a successful future each time. Squirrels. Cats. Dogs. Strangled them with a garrote. And you know what else? They have had successful futures. Money. Power. Sex. They know what’s going on with everyone in this town, and they have their thumbs on the scales. They own New Long Lincoln, heart and soul. They owned the old town for the most part, engineered the flood for a new and better place they could control as the city council. When some people wouldn’t move, they took it on themselves to eliminate the problem.”

“You’re not suggesting these ceremonies worked? That they were some kind of black magic?”

“No, but maybe they thought so, and maybe it doesn’t matter now. They are what they have become. Dedication. Hard work. Ruthless acts. That’s what got them there. The main three, anyway. The others were just assistants, really. Now it’s Judea Parker, Jack Sr., and Kate Conroy. Some, like Jack Jr., well, he’s important, but he’s still just a worker bee waiting for Jack Sr. to go tits-up so he can slip into his place. I think they are now not too unlike how they were as kids, but with more power and money.

“People you would never suspect owe them allegiance. That’s why I would be careful with Dudley. He’s all right, I guess, but they have things on him.”

“What sort of things?”

“Come on. Think about it. He’s been living with a man who brings him lunch and goes to restaurants and travels on trips with him. He and Duncan aren’t just good friends. They’re butthole buddies. I don’t give a shit, but members of this town would if it got out. You can’t exactly call a place like this broadminded.”

I understood then.

“It’s insidious,” Mrs. Chandler said. “Someone with money or power has a kid who gets in trouble with the law, runs over someone while drunk, rapes a girl at the junior college. Well, for the right faithfulness to the council, the right donations, the problem might go away. A slap on the wrist, or maybe nothing at all. Someone well positioned in town needs help with something or other, like maybe you think colored people moving into your neighborhood brings down the property value, the council can be there if they decide to be, and like a miracle, the folks who don’t fit will be loading their goods in a pickup truck and leaving town. City council may have photos of someone, like, say, a fat chief of police and his boyfriend doing the midnight backstroke. Those photos could go away. For certain concessions, of course. Favors to be given in the future when needed.

“There are people and businesses all over town that are indebted to the council in one way or another, big and small. Like the insurance company Bert worked for and is still run by Jack Sr. and Jack Jr. It’s the only one in town and it’s financed by the bank here, and if for some reason the city council, who might as well be the company and the bank, don’t want to pay out, they don’t, and they know how to get away with it.”

“One tongue licks the other,” I said.

“Exactly. Being married to Bert, the city council suspected I knew all this. Bert, you see, for all his faults, was a talker. And a good one. He could be entertaining that way, but he was a blabbermouth. They knew that, and when he had his unfortunate fall down the stairs, they wanted to make sure I was beholden to them. I think Bert at some point, for his own protection, let them know he had records he had kept, and they feared those records might come to light. Not long after Bert was in the ground, I had the feeling, more than once, that someone had been in the house searching, trying to find out if there were records.”

“If they’re as dangerous as you say,” I said, “couldn’t they have just…well, taken you out?”

“Believe me, I thought of that. But for all they knew, those records were squirreled away someplace where they could be accessed by people outside the jurisdiction of this town, maybe upon my death. They don’t fear New Long Lincoln, but outsiders could make it tough on them if they dug deep enough.”

“That would be me,” I said.

“It would. Thing is, Danny, there are records, and they never found them. I know that, because if they had found them, the records would be gone. They are extensive, and they are well hidden. This house used to belong to a man who sold bootleg whiskey and had what you might call a speakeasy and what some used to call Moonshine Castle. When Bert bought the house, he redesigned it so that the hidden drinking room became a depository for all the damaging records and—get this—reel-to-reel tapes he had dealing with the city council. He secretly recorded a lot of business that went on. Even Bert knew he was walking on eggshells, so at some point, he must have told them what he had for his insurance policy, and they had to assume he had it stashed away someplace safe, which in a way he did, but not the way they might think. But those records? Now I’m giving what he had to you.”