Faithless

  She swallowed as a lump came into her throat. That he had realized his mistake meant almost as much to her as if he hadn’t made it in the first place.

  He soothed, “I know it was hard, baby. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I don’t like you going through something like that on your own.”

  “Carlos was with me.”

  “That’s not the same.” He kept rubbing her back, making small circles with his palm. His voice was barely a whisper when he asked, “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Tessa wants me to go to this church with her tomorrow night.”

  His hand stopped. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  She looked at him over her shoulder. “Why?”

  “These people,” he began, “I don’t trust them. I can’t tell you why, but something’s going on.”

  “Do you really think they killed Abigail?”

  “I don’t know what they did,” he told her. “All I know is that I don’t want you mixed up in this.”

  “What’s to get mixed up in?”

  He did not answer. Instead, he tugged her sleeve, saying, “Turn over.”

  Sara rolled over onto her back, and a smile played on his lips as he ran his finger along the half-open zipper of her skirt. “What did you have for dinner?”

  She was too embarrassed to say so she just shook her head.

  Jeffrey slid up her shirt and started to rub her stomach. “Better?”

  She nodded.

  “Your skin is so soft,” he whispered, using the tips of his fingers. “Sometimes I think about it and I get this feeling in my heart like I’m flying.” He smiled, as if a private memory was playing out in his head.

  Several minutes passed before he said, “I heard Jimmy Powell’s back in the hospital.”

  Sara closed her eyes, concentrating on his hand. She had been on the verge of crying most of the day, and his words made it harder to resist. Everything she had been through in the last forty-eight hours had tightened her up like a ball of string, but somehow his soft touch managed to unravel her.

  She said, “This will be the last time,” her throat tightening as she thought of the sick nine-year-old. Sara had known Jimmy all of his life, watched him grow from infant to child. His diagnosis had hit her almost as hard as it had his parents.

  Jeffrey asked, “You want me to go to the hospital with you?”

  “Please.”

  He lightened his touch. “And how about later?”

  “Later?” she asked, feeling the urge to purr like a cat.

  “Where am I sleeping?”

  Sara took her time answering, wishing she could just snap her fingers and it was tomorrow and the decision had been made. What she finally did was gesture toward the boxes he had brought over from his house. “All of your stuff is here.”

  The smile he flashed didn’t do a very good job of hiding his disappointment. “I guess that’s as good a reason as any.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jeffrey kept the radio down low as he drove out of Heartsdale. He realized he had been gritting his teeth when a sharp pain shot up the side of his jaw. Jeffrey heard an old man’s sigh come from his chest, and felt like opening a vein. His shoulder hurt, and his right knee was acting up, not to mention his cut hand was still throbbing. Years of football had taught him to ignore aches and pains, but he had found as he got older that this was a harder trick to pull off. He felt really old today— not just old, but ancient. Getting shot in the shoulder a few months ago had been some kind of wake-up call that he wasn’t going to live forever. There had been a time when he could trot out onto the football field and practically break every bone in his body, only to wake up feeling fine the next day. Now his shoulder ached if he brushed his teeth too vigorously.

  And now this hepatitis shit. Last week, when Jo had called to tell him, he had known it was her on the phone even before she said a word. She had a way of pausing before she spoke, hesitant, as if she was waiting for the other person to take the lead. That was one of the things he had liked about her, the fact that she let Jeffrey take charge. Jo refused to argue, and she had made an art out of being agreeable. There was something to be said for being with a woman who didn’t have to think through every damn thing that came out of her mouth.

  At least he wasn’t going to be sleeping on the floor again tonight. He doubted Sara would welcome him into bed with open arms, but she appeared to be getting over some of her anger. Things had been going so well between them before Jo had called, and it was easy to blame someone else for his recent problems. The truth was that it was starting to seem like every day with Sara was one step forward and two steps back. The fact that he had asked her to marry him at least four times and each time been basically slapped in the face was beginning to grate as well. There was only so much he could take.

  Jeffrey turned onto a gravel drive, thinking that between the farm and Dale Stanley’s place, his Town Car was going to look like it had been through a war zone.

  Jeffrey parked behind what looked like a fully restored Dodge Dart. “Damn,” he whispered as he got out of his own car, unable to conceal his appreciation. The Dodge was cherry, dark blue with tinted windows, jacked up in the back. The bumper was seamless, bright chrome sparkling from the security light mounted to the garage.

  “Hey, Chief.” An extremely tall, skinny man wearing work coveralls came out of the garage. He was rubbing his hands on a dirty towel. “I think I met you at the picnic last year.”

  “Good to see you again, Dale.” There weren’t many men Jeffrey had to look up at, but Dale Stanley was practically a beanstalk. He looked a lot like his younger brother, if someone had grabbed Pat by the head and feet and stretched the young policeman a good twelve inches either way. Despite Dale’s towering height, there was an easygoing air about the man, as if nothing in the world bothered him. Jeffrey put his age at around thirty.

  “Sorry I had to ask you to come so late,” Dale told him. “I didn’t want to upset the kids. They get nervous when a cop pulls up.” He glanced nervously back at the house. “I guess you know why.”

  “I understand,” Jeffrey said, and Dale seemed to relax a bit. Patrolman Pat Stanley, Dale’s little brother, had been involved in a pretty intense hostage situation a few months ago, barely escaping with his life. Jeffrey couldn’t imagine what it was like to hear about something like that on the news, then wait for a police car to pull up to tell you that your brother was dead.

  “They don’t even like the sirens on TV,” he said, and Jeffrey got the feeling Dale was the kind of guy who scooped up spiders and took them out of the house instead of just killing them.

  Dale asked, “You got a brother?”

  “Not that I know of,” Jeffrey told him, and Dale threw back his head and laughed like a braying horse.

  Jeffrey waited for him to finish before asking, “We’re right on the county line, aren’t we?”

  “Yep,” Dale agreed. “Catoogah’s that way, Avondale’s here. My kids’ll go to the school up on Mason Mill.”

  Jeffrey looked around, trying to get his bearings. “Looks like you’ve got a nice place here.”

  “Thanks.” He motioned toward the garage. “You wanna beer?”

  “Sure.” Jeffrey was unable to hide his admiration as they walked into the shop. Dale ran a tight ship. The floor was painted a light gray, not a drop of oil in sight. Tools were suspended on a Pegboard, black outlines showing where everything belonged. Baby food jars containing bolts and screws hung from under the top cabinets like wineglasses in a bar. The whole place was lit up bright as day.

  Jeffrey asked, “What exactly do you do here?”

  “I’m restoring cars mostly,” he said, indicating the Dart. “I’ve got a paint shed out back. The mechanicals are done in here. My wife does the upholstery.”

  “Terri?”

  He tossed Jeffrey a look over his shoulder, probably impressed that Jef
frey remembered her name. “That’s right.”

  “Sounds like a pretty good setup.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said, opening a small refrigerator and taking out a Bud Light. “We’d be doing okay except for my oldest one. Tim sees your ex-wife more than he sees me. And now my sister is sick, had to quit her job over at the factory. Lot of stress on the family. Lot of stress on a man, trying to look after them.”

  “Sara mentioned Tim has asthma.”

  “Yeah, pretty bad.” He twisted the top off the bottle and handed it to Jeffrey. “We’ve got to be real careful around him. I gave up smoking cold turkey the day the wife took him back from the doctor’s. Tell you what, that liked to killed me. But we do what we have to do for our kids. You don’t have any, do you?” He laughed, adding, “I mean, not that you know of.”

  Jeffrey made himself laugh, though considering his circumstances it wasn’t very funny. After an appropriate interval, he asked, “I thought you did metal plating.”

  “Still do,” he said, picking up a piece of metal from his worktop. Jeffrey saw it was an old Porsche medallion, plated in shiny yellow gold. The set of fine-tipped paintbrushes beside it indicated Dale had been working on filling in the colors. “This is for the wife’s brother. Sweet ride.”

  “Can you run me through the process?”

  “Plating?” His eyes widened in surprise. “You came all the way out here for a chemistry lesson?”

  “Can you humor me?”

  Dale didn’t stop to think it over. “Sure,” he agreed, leading Jeffrey to a bench in the back of the shop. He seemed almost relieved to be in familiar territory as he explained, “It’s called a three-step process, but there’s more to it than that. Basically, you’re just charging the metal with this.” He pointed to a machine that looked like a battery charger. Attached were two metal electrodes, one with a black handle, the other with a red one. Beside the machine was another electrode with a yellow and red handle.

  “Electricity runs positive from the red, negative from the black.” Dale indicated a shallow pan. “First, you take what you want to plate and put it in here. Fill it with solution. You use the positive, clean it with the chrome stripper. Make it negative, activate the nickel.”

  “I thought it was gold.”

  “Nickel’s underneath. Gold needs something to stick to. Activate the nickel with an acid solution, banana clip the negative to one side. Use a synthetic wrap on the end of the plating electrode, dip it into the gold solution, then bond the gold to the nickel. I’m leaving out all the sexy parts, but that’s pretty much it.”

  “What’s the solution?”

  “Basic stuff I get from the supplier,” he said, putting his hand on top of the metal cabinet above the plating area. He felt around and pulled out a key to unlock the door.

  “Have you always kept that key up there?”

  “Yep.” He opened up the cabinet and took down the bottles one by one. “Kids can’t reach it.”

  “Anybody ever come into the shop without your knowing it?”

  “Not ever. This is my livelihood,” he said, indicating the thousands of dollars’ worth of tools and equipment in the space. “Somebody gets in here and takes this stuff, I’m finished.”

  “You don’t ever leave the door open?” Jeffrey asked, meaning the garage door. There were no windows or other openings in the garage. The only way in or out was through the metal roll-door. It looked strong enough to keep out a Mack truck.

  “I only leave it open when I’m here,” Dale assured him. “I close it up when I go into the house to take a piss.”

  Jeffrey bent down to read the labels on the bottles. “These look pretty toxic.”

  “I wear a mask and gloves when I use them,” Dale told him. “There’s worse stuff out there, but I stopped using it when Tim got sick.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Arsenic or cyanide, mostly. You pour it in with the acid. It’s pretty volatile and, being honest here, it scares the shit out of me. They’ve got some new stuff on the market that’s still pretty nasty, but it can’t kill you if you breathe it wrong.” He pointed to one of the plastic bottles. “That’s the solution.”

  Jeffrey read the label. “Cyanide free?”

  “Yeah.” He chuckled again. “Honest to God, I was looking for an excuse to change over. I’m just a big ol’ pussy when it comes to dying.”

  Jeffrey looked at each bottle, not touching them as he read the labels. Any one of them looked like they could kill a horse.

  Dale was rocking back on his heels, waiting. His expression seemed to say he was expecting some reciprocation for his patience so far.

  Jeffrey asked, “You know that farm over in Catoogah?”

  “Soy place?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Sure. Keep going that way”—he indicated the road heading southeast—“and you run right into it.”

  “You ever have anybody come over here from there?”

  Dale started to put away the bottles. “Used to be they’d cut through the woods sometimes on their way to town. I got kind of nervous, though. Some’a them folks ain’t exactly your upstanding types.”

  “Which folks?”

  “The workers,” he said, closing the cabinet. He locked it back and returned the key to its hiding place. “Hell, that family is a bunch of fucking idiots if you ask me, letting those people live with them and all.”

  Jeffrey prompted, “How’s that?”

  “Some of these folks they bring down from Atlanta are pretty bad off. Drugs, alcohol, whatever. It leads you to do certain things, desperate things. You lose your religion.”

  He asked, “Does that bother you?”

  “Not really. I mean, I guess you could say it’s a good thing. I just didn’t like them coming on my property.”

  “You worried about being robbed?”

  “They’d need a plasma torch to get into this place,” he pointed out. “Either that or have to come through me.”

  “You keep a gun?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Can I see it?”

  Dale walked across the room and reached up on top of another cabinet. He pulled down a Smith & Wesson revolver and offered it to Jeffrey.

  “Nice gun,” Jeffrey told him, checking the cylinder. He kept the weapon as meticulously clean as his shop, and fully loaded. “Looks ready for action,” Jeffrey told him, handing back the gun.

  “Careful now,” Dale warned, almost jokingly. “She’s got a hair trigger.”

  “That a fact?” Jeffrey asked, thinking the man was probably pleased with himself for setting up such a good alibi should he ever “accidentally” shoot an intruder.

  “I’m not really worried about them robbing me,” Dale explained, returning the weapon to its hiding place. “Like I told you, I’m real careful. It’s just, they’d come through here and the dogs would go crazy, the wife would freak out, the kids would start crying, got me all het up, and you know that ain’t good.” He paused, looking out at the driveway. “I hate to be this way, but we’re not living in Mayberry. There are all kinds of bad people out there and I don’t want my kids around them.” He shook his head. “Hell, Chief, I don’t have to tell you about that.”

  Jeffrey wondered if Abigail Bennett had used the cut-through. “Any of the people from the farm ever come to the house?”

  “Never,” he said. “I’m here all day. I would’ve seen them.”

  “You ever talk to any of them?”

  “Just to tell them to get the fuck off my land,” he said. “I’m not worried about the house. The dogs would tear them apart if they so much as knocked on the door.”

  “What’d you do?” Jeffrey asked. “I mean, to stop them from cutting through?”

  “Put in a call to Two-Bit. Sheriff Pelham, I mean.”

  Jeffrey let Dale’s comment slide. “Where’d that get you?”

  “Same place as when I started out,” Dale said, kicking his toe into the ground. “I didn?
??t wanna bother Pat with it, so I just called up there myself. Talked to old Tom’s son Lev. He’s not bad for a Jesus freak. You met him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I explained the situation, said I didn’t want his people on my property. He said okay.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, about three, maybe four months ago,” Dale answered. “He even came out here and we walked along the back property line. Said he’d put up a fence to stop them.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You take him into the shop?”

  “Sure.” Dale looked almost bashful, a kid bragging about his toys. “Had a sixty-nine Mustang I was working on. Damn thing looked like it was breaking the law just sitting in the driveway.”

  “Lev’s into cars?” Jeffrey asked, surprised by this detail.

  “I don’t know a man alive wouldn’t be impressed by that car. Stripped it from the ground up— new engine, new suspension and exhaust— about the only thing original on that baby was the frame, and I chopped the pillars and dropped the top three inches.”

  Jeffrey was tempted to let him get sidetracked but knew he couldn’t. He asked, “One more question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Do you have any cyanide around?”

  Dale shook his head. “Not since I quit smoking. Too tempted to end it all.” He laughed, then, seeing Jeffrey wasn’t joining in, stopped. “Sure, I keep it back here,” he said, returning to the cabinet over the metal-plating area. Again, he found the key and unlocked the cabinet. He reached far into the back, his hand disappearing for a few moments into the recesses of the uppermost shelf. He pulled out a thick plastic bag that held a small glass bottle. The skull and crossbones on the front sent a shiver through Jeffrey’s spine as he thought about what Abigail Bennett had been through.

  Dale placed the bag on the counter, the glass bottle making a clink. “I don’t even like touching this shit,” he said. “I know it’s stable, but it freaks me the fuck out.”

  “Do you ever leave the cabinet unlocked?”

  “Not unless I’m using what’s in there.”