Evan said, “I agree with you. Train is looking for a spotlight. Or maybe DeRade ordered him to find the spotlight. But he can’t find it. Or doesn’t have the guts.”
“Really?” said Michael. “I think Train has guts. And I also think he’s crazy. He’s ready to burst. He’ll bring guns or hand grenades to school.”
Pierce was shocked. “Do you mean that?”
“He’s frantic,” said Michael. “Pulsing. Like a warning light.”
“He’s ready,” agreed Evan. “But for what, exactly? I don’t agree that he’d bring guns or grenades to school.”
“I like Train,” protested Doria. “He’s perfectly nice whenever we chat.”
“Train chats?” said Rebecca. “ ‘Chat’ is the last word I would choose when that creepy guy stares with those dead eyes.”
Pierce was on his cell phone. “Dad? There’s sort of a feeling here that Train Greene might be ready to bring guns to school.”
“Hey! Don’t use my name!” said Michael.
“Why’s he calling his father?” asked Jenny.
“His daddy’s a homicide cop,” said Michael. “Like we need Train to know we’re talking about him. Last time somebody ratted on a Greene brother, he lost an eye.”
“I’m not naming names,” Pierce told them. “No, Dad,” he said into the phone, “just kids in Youth Group.”
Jenny’s mother butted in. “Doria, I understand that you took advantage of the opportunity offered last Sunday to volunteer in our community. Would you tell us whether the charity involving meal delivery in Chalk seems worth our money and time?”
“It was worth my time. A hundredfold. But on the other hand, a visiting professor was not impressed.”
“Tell us,” said Rebecca. “I’ve never even been in Chalk. It’s supposed to be so dangerous.”
Doria told them about her afternoon. She talked for so long that when she looked at the time, she blushed.
“So it isn’t dangerous,” said Rebecca.
“Miss Kendra was careful. She kept her eye on me and twice said to stay next to the Explorer. But everybody was nice and smiling. Train even found my car keys that I dropped and brought them to me.”
“Train hasn’t done a thoughtful thing since he stopped being Cliff,” said Pierce. “And this isn’t the first time there’s been interest in your keys. What exactly happened, Doria?”
“Are you going to tell your father about that, too?”
“Doria, it’s better to prevent murders than solve them.”
“Who’s talking about murder?” demanded Rebecca.
“I am,” said Pierce. “Train and DeRade blinded a kid. If Train is ready to take a step up, it would be murder.”
“They didn’t completely blind Nate,” Jenny pointed out. “He lost one eye, not both.”
“Just an oversight,” said Pierce. “Train won’t get it wrong next time. So are we going to play volleyball or just hang around talking about psychopaths?”
Monday
Lutie skips school.
Train corners Kelvin.
Death comes.
14
Monday morning Lutie woke up feeling separated from the Lutie she had been the previous sixteen years. That Lutie was innocent and stupid.
This Lutie was afraid of being among the other kids. The threads that knit her to her friends and classmates had unraveled. She was separate; she would always be separate. Her family secret was the worst secret there could ever be.
Doria was separate from most people most of the time. How did she get up and face the world every morning with that burden?
“You have to go to school,” said Aunt Tamika. “I’ll drive you. The minute you get there, this feeling will diminish. You’ll be busy, school will be full of demands and you’ll start forgetting.”
Forget that her mother had murdered her grandmother?
Lutie couldn’t find anything to wear. Usually getting dressed was a highlight of her day. She often went to sleep wrestling with the delightful decision of choosing tomorrow’s outfit.
Today Aunt Tamika picked out her clothes. Lutie didn’t even argue. Then Aunt Tamika drove her up the long curved drop-off lane at Court Hill High and Lutie just could not get that car door open.
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” said Aunt Tamika. “Nothing has changed. It’s just that you know more. Now, you text me all day long. At lunch, Grace and I are taking a few hours off and we’ll try to find Saravette.”
What for? Why had they ever tried to find Saravette? Why on earth did they want to find her now? Lutie wanted to throw up just thinking of her.
“I can’t tell from her message if she was drunk, or sick, cornered by something else she’s done, or mixed up with some deal gone bad,” said her aunt. “Or if she just felt weepy and threw her sins at you instead of us. So we’ll see if we can find her. That’s our job, not yours. You be a scholar and make us proud.”
When Aunt Tamika’s car was out of sight, Lutie skipped school for the second time in her life and walked home.
Train was summoned to the principal’s office.
There was a cop car parked out in front of the high school, but that was often the case.
Didn’t have to be for him.
Train thought about Saturday night, as he had edged closer to the organ. He thought about Doria, flinging herself out a door he had not seen. He thought about getting himself safely out of the church. Hadn’t been easy. Two men and a woman were circling outside and kept coming back to circle some more.
Doria must have heard him, although he was sure he had not made a sound. But she couldn’t have seen him. Couldn’t have named him. If the police were here for him, it could not be over using a stolen church key and stalking Doria.
Court Hill High was a very easy building to leave, with all its outside doors. Train thought about walking away, shrugging about a stupid summons to the office, but he knew what DeRade would do. DeRade would swagger right in and laugh at the cops.
So Train took his time but eventually sauntered into the office.
Two cops.
He knew them both.
One was Pierce’s daddy.
Train refused to cooperate. No, he wouldn’t sit, he wouldn’t take a soda, he wouldn’t talk.
But the cops were not accusing him of anything. They were trying to be all fatherly and understanding. What was he planning, they wanted to know. How could they help?
Train had so many plans he couldn’t decide where to start. The set-a-kid-on-fire plan; the slice-someone’s-palms-open plan; the join-the-army-and-let-them-make-the-decisions plan.
“See,” said Pierce’s daddy, “you got a real special nickname. Train. I think it fits. A train is big and powerful. But it has to stay on its track. DeRade now, he followed a track went only one way. He never wanted a ticket out. He wanted a ticket straight to prison. But here’s the deal. It’s your train. You can choose where to get off.”
Train didn’t listen to sermons. Not his mother’s, not Miss Veola’s, and certainly not the police’s. He thought of a piece Doria had played the other night. It was like arithmetic: notes as neat as long division, lined up in tidy columns. It got bigger and more complex, like going from arithmetic to algebra to calculus. He used to love arithmetic. He was failing it now, like he was failing everything, because he refused to study.
There was one thing he refused to fail.
Following DeRade’s orders.
Train’s cell phone rang.
The detectives got all alert.
Train looked down at his phone.
Stop, Miss Veola had texted.
The only person besides the police who calls me, he thought. Religion and the law, they want me. Nobody else.
Anxiety and eagerness to know more infected the school. Teachers fluttered, students stomped.
The police had come for Train.
Nobody at Court Hill High knew what he had done.
Nobody doubted that he had done it.
In the cafeteria, Kelvin was sitting alone. He liked lunch and frequently took two rather than hustle back to class. His next class was Business Skills, none of which Kelvin wanted anyway.
Somebody would join him soon, and he’d chat with them, or he wouldn’t, but either way he’d be content.
Kelvin dozed in a patch of sun, protected by his nice even temperature.
Train yanked out a chair and sat down at Kelvin’s table. “You turn me in?”
“No.”
“Then it was Pierce.”
“Pierce?” Kelvin was amazed. “Lives down by Azure Lee?”
“The one.”
Pierce was a swimmer, a group singularly isolated from everybody else, proudly removed from the usual sports like football, basketball and baseball. What did Pierce know about anything? Azure Lee, now—he could see Azure Lee turning in Train in a heartbeat. Azure Lee was tougher than all of them put together.
Kelvin said, “So what’d you do?”
“What makes you think I did anything?”
Kelvin raised his eyebrows. That was not DeRade talking. DeRade would have bragged about ten evil acts even if he hadn’t committed one.
Train glittered, and Kelvin felt as if he could see future evil acts lining up, ready to come onstage, ready to spill blood. Train gave him a savage grin, as if he had won a contest Kelvin had not known they were competing in.
Kelvin was suddenly afraid.
Aunt Tamika called Lutie’s cell.
Lutie muted the TV she was watching from Aunt Tamika’s big sofa.
“We didn’t find Saravette, Lutie. She’s not answering her phone. Nobody at the building where she was last month has seen her. Grace went into shelters. I tried a soup kitchen.”
Good, thought Lutie. Lost is the best place for her.
At four o’clock that afternoon, Doria was in yet another church. Mr. Bates’s, where he was the organist and directed the choir and gave lessons.
It was a megachurch, complete with escalators to the upper tiers of seating, huge screens on which the minister could be seen from a distance, a symphonic band to supplement the organ and a professional choir. It had its own coffee shop and bookstore. It held services in Spanish and Korean, and had dedicated ministers for both those languages. It seated five thousand.
Doria told Mr. Bates about the Laundry List.
He was fascinated. “Sing the songs for me,” he said.
Doria slid off the organ bench. “I think I have to stand. Lutie stands.”
“Is Lutie our new measure of perfection?”
“At Court Hill High, she is.” Doria stood on the edge of the massive stage, facing all those seats. Good thing they were empty. She liked an audience, but an audience that big would definitely be a test.
She sang the two songs she knew.
When she finished, Mr. Bates said, “Doria, I had no idea. Your voice is like liquid silver.”
“Oh, thanks, but the songs need Lutie. She just has so much power.”
“You mean volume or that her delivery is powerful?”
“Both,” she said, sliding back onto the bench.
“I haven’t met Professor Durham,” said Mr. Bates, “but he’s well known in his field. I think you should coax Lutie to work with him. The worst thing would be for the songs to get lost after all, and that could so easily happen. Lutie seems to be the only caretaker, as it were. Suppose she goes to college and gets into other stuff. She becomes a doctor or a lawyer and doesn’t have time for music and loses interest in church and goes bigtime into some splashy career on the West Coast and Court Hill is just a memory. Then the songs evaporate.”
Doria was tired of the Laundry List. She said, “Mr. Bates, I don’t want to have my church job anymore.”
“No! Doria! You need it for a thousand reasons. You get to perform every week. Very few musicians have that privilege. You always have something to work for, because you always need more music. You give up your church job, then you’re learning music just for your own sake, and the pressure of the world can make that too hard.”
“But it’s so dorky. And everybody’s on my case not to practice alone in the church in the dark.”
“And do you?”
“Of course I do. So do you. So does every organist. And the other thing I’m thinking of is, I’m thinking of graduating a year early.”
“Don’t. College is enough of a shock. You don’t want to be younger than everybody else.”
“You’re the one who says I’m too mature for my age.”
“Yeah, well, that’s high school. In college, when everyone’s drinking and partying and sleeping around, you have to be strong to steer clear. You need that extra year, Doria. Now, about last Sunday at St. Bartholomew’s. They applauded when you did the Vierne?”
“Yes.”
“Did they stand up? Was it a real ovation?”
“They’re Presbyterians. They don’t get that excited.”
“But it’s a goal,” said Mr. Bates. “Get them on their feet. Now play that Vierne for me, and I want it more powerful than Lutie. I want to be forced to stand because I’m so excited.”
“Dad!” said Pierce, choking on his dinner. “You talked to Train yourself?”
“Train was intimidated. If he had any plans, he won’t try them now. Pass the hot sauce.”
“Dad! If you intimidated him, it’s even worse! Now he’s got to prove that cops can’t shove him around. I’m the person he’ll prove it to.”
Pierce’s mother was beside herself. She wanted Pierce in private school, or out of state, or maybe she should leave the whole marriage and this stupid person who thought he was a law enforcement officer, but in fact was putting his own son’s life and eyesight at risk!
Pierce’s parents rarely argued in his presence and he liked to believe they rarely argued at all. He went into the backyard rather than be proven wrong.
Around him stretched big brick houses with their big green yards. He saw Fountain Ridge suddenly as a sort of classy prison: you could hide out here, safe in your matching sets of bushes and trees, safe among three-car garages and the weed-whacked edges of lawns. Nothing could touch you here. They didn’t even have insects in Fountain Ridge, because everything was sprayed and treated.
He thought of Train, the least sprayed and treated person in Court Hill High.
Aunt Tamika got home early.
Aunt Grace got home with her.
Uncle Dean drove up at the same time.
They walked into the house together, an out-of-step trio at the wrong time of day.
“What?” said Lutie. She didn’t care if they knew she’d skipped school today. They should get used to it.
Aunt Grace shook her head.
“What?” said Lutie again.
Aunt Tamika was crying.
“What?” shouted Lutie.
“Saravette,” said Uncle Dean. “She’s dead.”
15
“The police found her,” said Aunt Tamika. “She went on a binge. Drinking, drugs, pills, everything she could find. Police got her to the ER and called me. Dean and I drove as fast as we could. She had already passed.”
Lutie thought of MeeMaw on the porch in the dark, singing “Be You Still Alive?”
No. Not anymore.
“She’s been heading that way for a long while,” said Tamika. “I don’t think she minded going offstage forever. It was a terrible death in a terrible place, but one good thing.” Aunt Tamika smiled shakily at Lutie. “She told the person she loved good-bye and I’m sorry.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“But if she loved me …”
“Saravette was desperate all her life, Lutie. Desperate for what, I never knew. She couldn’t be satisfied with anything. She couldn’t stick to anything. She couldn’t work hard for anything. She could only thrash around.”
“But when she was sober and straight, Lutie,” said Uncle Dean, “she was a precious gem.”
“How often w
as she sober and straight?” asked Lutie.
There was a pause. “Actually, I never saw her like that,” said her uncle. “I just want to believe that every human is a precious gem if the circumstances are right. But Saravette made her own circumstances. We tried to fix things, time after time. Time after time she wouldn’t let us.”
Death had come. They needed their pastor.
They got in Uncle Dean’s car and drove to Chalk, where Miss Veola was waiting for them in the little yard under the big trees. They held each other and wept.
“I want the funeral to be private,” said Lutie.
Miss Veola gave her a strange look.
“Nobody knows Saravette anymore,” said Lutie.
“They know you, honey. Funeral’s for you, too. You need to pray and sing and rejoice in the presence of the Lord and your friends.”
“I still want it private,” said Lutie.
“You just don’t want them to know what kind of life Saravette led,” said Miss Veola. “I don’t want to know what life she led. I don’t want to face the facts. I don’t want proof that I failed one of my babies. Or that she failed me. You and I, we don’t know which one it was. Only the Lord knows. But funerals—they’re not about protecting our reputation. They’re about sending the soul of somebody we loved to Jesus.”
Aunt Tamika and Aunt Grace wept.
But I didn’t love her, thought Lutie. I hardly knew her.
Lutie believed in heaven. She had never been able to close in on hell. But there had to be opposites. If the good people had eternal life in the presence of the Lord, then what about the bad people? Where did they go? Or were they all God’s children in the end, folded in the arms of the Lord? Did he say, “It’s okay. You’re here now. Let’s not worry about what happened then.”
Lutie hoped not. Lutie hoped Saravette had to worry.
“I hurt too,” said Miss Veola finally. “I hurt for my dear friend Eunice, who tried to be the best mama she knew how. Two out of three daughters turned out beautifully, and one was lost. But we have wept over that enough. Now is our time to give Saravette Painter food for her journey.”