A Grant County Collection: Indelible, Faithless and Skin Privilege

  'You feel so good,' she whispered putting her lips to his ear, letting him feel her breath. 'So good ...' She kept talking, coaxing him along with the words she knew would push him over the edge.

  He gasped, the muscles along his back tensing like wire. Sara squeezed her eyes closed, focusing everything on the warm flowering at her center as his body shook with release. He slowed his pace and this time she let him, relishing each stroke, wishing she could hold him in forever.

  He shuddered again as he finished, falling against her, his hands gripping the counter as if he needed help standing. She traced her fingernails lightly up and down his back. His skin was hot and sticky but still she wanted to feel every part of it. Sara kissed his shoulder, his neck, his face.

  'Jesus,' he panted. 'I'm sorry I couldn't ...' He shook his head. 'Jesus.'

  Sara put her mouth to his, gave him a soft kiss. She could count on one hand the number of times Jeffrey had let himself finish before she did. She could also honestly say she had never felt closer to him in her life.

  He was smiling again, that half-smile that could infuriate her and make her love him at the same time. 'I bet you Nick couldn't do that.'

  She leaned her head back against the mirror, still not ready to make a game of this.

  'You know what they say about short guys overcompensating.'

  She looked at him, saw that he needed her to play along. 'Give me a little credit,' she relented. 'I think I can do better than Nick.'

  He smoothed back her hair. 'Do you know that I have loved you pretty much since the first time I laid eyes on you?'

  She laughed. 'You had a hot date lined up the very same night.'

  'I did not.'

  She poked him in the ribs. 'You had to call her to tell her you'd be late.'

  He brushed his lips across hers. 'I love you, Sara.'

  She felt her throat tighten. She gave him her usual answer, her joking answer that had driven him crazy the first year they were together because she would never say the words back to him. 'I know.'

  'You know what else?' he asked, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. 'You are a dirty, dirty girl.' Sara felt herself blush crimson and he laughed out loud. 'That, too, but I meant literally. Look in the mirror.'

  She turned and checked her reflection. He'd managed to wipe off most of the dirt from her face but she still looked as if she'd been hit by a truck.

  He said, 'I have to be honest. I don't like what you've done with your hair.'

  She turned back around. 'You're not exactly the prize pig at the fair.'

  'Then why don't we finish this in the shower?' He glanced down, ran his hands up her thighs. 'Or did you want to give me a chance to redeem myself right now?'

  'You think you remember how?'

  They both jumped as a loud banging shook the door.

  Sara slid off the counter, pulling up her sweatpants and closing her shirt in one swift motion. Her heart was pounding like she was eighteen years old again, caught in the back of a Buick with a boy instead of an old married woman who had every right to be in a cheap motel with her husband.

  There was more pounding on the door, almost like a hammer. Light streamed in at the top where the flimsy plywood bent from the impact. The plate glass window overlooking the parking lot made an ominous creaking sound.

  Sara buttoned her shirt as Jeffrey tucked himself back into his jeans. 'If that's Jake Valentine,' he began, but didn't have time to finish his sentence. The window shattered, glass flying into the room, curtains billowing as a large object smashed onto the plastic table then fell to the floor.

  Jeffrey had dropped to his knees, his arms covering his head. 'What the—'

  Wheels screeched on asphalt outside.

  Sara's mouth opened in surprise. The object was a man. Someone had just thrown a man through their window.

  Instinctively, she ran toward him but Jeffrey caught her hand, yanking her to the ground.

  'Go into the bathroom,' he ordered, reaching under the mattress and pulling out his gun. 'Now.'

  Sara ran in a crouch as Jeffrey moved toward the door. He put his hand on the knob, tried the door, but it wouldn't budge.

  He pressed his back to the door, then the wall, making his way to the window. Quickly, he looked out the window, scanning the parking lot, then kneeling back down under the ledge. He did this twice, and Sara held her breath each time, waiting for his head to be blown off.

  Jeffrey glanced back at Sara. 'Stay here,' he told her, then jumped through the broken window.

  Sara held her breath, ears straining for the sound of gunshot. She crawled on her knees toward the man, trying to see if he was alive. Glass was everywhere, and she picked around it, trying not to cut herself. She kept her head down as she pressed her fingers to his neck, but wasn't sure if what she felt was a pulse or her own shaking hands.

  'Sara.'

  She screamed, ducking down at the same moment that she realized it was only Jeffrey.

  'Whoever it was is gone.' He used the butt of his gun to knock away some glass before climbing back through the window. 'Is he dead?'

  She finally looked at the man. He was on his left side facing the window. The white pearl handle of an expensive-looking folding knife stuck out of his back. A large shard of glass was fixed in his neck but there was only a trickle of blood, not the expected spurt generated from a beating heart. Still, she pressed her fingers to his carotid just to make sure.

  She told Jeffrey, 'Nothing.'

  He seemed almost relieved. 'The door's been nailed shut.'

  Sara sat back on her knees, said a silent prayer of thanks that it was just a man thrown through the window and not a flaming ball of fire.

  Jeffrey tilted the man's head, looked at his face. 'I think it's the guy from the bar.'

  'It has to be,' she told him. The man had obviously recently been in a fire. His eyes were open but the lashes were singed off. His close-cropped hair was covered in soot. His shirt was burned away in large patches, the flesh underneath showing first- and second-degree burns.

  Jeffrey started to tear open the man's shirtsleeve.

  'Don't,' Sara told him, thinking there might be evidence on the shirt, but she saw Jeffrey's reason soon enough.

  Tattooed onto the dead man's arm was a large red swastika.

  LENA

  TWELVE

  Lena sat at Hank's kitchen table, her back against the wall, waiting for him to come home. The clock over the stove ticked loudly, and Lena had to force herself not to match her breathing to the noise. The Mercedes was in the driveway, so he must have come home at some point, but he was nowhere to be found now. The house was empty, the shed and beat-up old pickup in the backyard were both vacant. She'd driven by the bar, called the hospital, even talked to some old coot at the sheriff's office who gave her the standard line about waiting twenty-four hours, but Hank had pretty much disappeared. His cell phone was on the kitchen table, the battery dead. The answering machine showed no messages. The blue metal box, his drug kit, was gone. There was no way Hank would go anywhere without his kit. He must have taken it with him, which meant he'd left the house of his own accord – but that didn't tell her where he had gone.

  Lena didn't even know what she would do if and when he turned up. What would she say if he walked through the door right now? What could she possibly ask him? Four hours had passed since she'd talked to Charlotte at the school, but the passage of time had done nothing to give Lena any clarity.

  Hank had not been driving the car.

  Angela Adams had blinded her own daughter, then – what? Driven away? Left Hank to deal with the fallout, to shoulder the blame?

  The one thing Lena had sworn she'd never forgive him for and the bastard hadn't even done it. All that anger she'd held against him for most of her life was still boiling up inside her, only now she had nowhere to direct it. Should she be mad at her mother, a woman she couldn't even remember meeting? What was so bad about Angela Adams that Hank would let people assume
he blinded his own niece rather than let the girls know that she was alive? What had she done to all of them?

  The fluorescent light over the kitchen sink bathed the room in a blue cast as the sun started to go down. Hank's AA pamphlets were still scattered on the table, strewn across the floor, stacked hundreds deep on the gas stove. The clock kept ticking, marking away the minutes, then another hour.

  After the accident, Sibyl hadn't been able to remember running into the driveway, or even the fact that she'd been playing ball with Lena in the first place. At the time, the doctor said this was fairly normal with severe head trauma, that sometimes the memories never came back. The sisters had never really talked about it afterward. Maybe they had as children, but as time passed, Sibyl's blindness and the cause of it had just become an accepted thing between them. Talking about the accident would have been like talking about the sun rising every morning: a foregone conclusion.

  Meanwhile, Lena had blamed Hank and Hank sure as hell hadn't done anything to disabuse her of the notion. Whenever she threw it in his face, he'd just tighten his jaw, stare somewhere over her shoulder, and wait for her to finish.

  Charlotte Warren had to know more about this than she was letting on; she was three years older than Lena and Sibyl. Her memory was better, her shock less traumatic. Still, all the woman had revealed were the bare facts: the car had hit Sibyl, Hank had come running, and Angela had bolted, not stopping to see if Sibyl was okay, not bothering to explain what had happened. The police had arrived within minutes, then the ambulance. Charlotte's mother had taken her daughter home and told her to forget what had happened, that no good would come from talking about it.

  According to Charlotte, she had taken her mother's words to heart. Even as her relationship with Sibyl developed into something more serious, Charlotte had assumed that there were some things that were just too awful, too painful, to talk about.

  Had it been that simple, though? Had Charlotte and Sibyl really never talked about that day? Lena supposed it was feasible that if Sibyl wouldn't discuss the subject with her own sister, she wouldn't bring it up with Charlotte Warren, either. Sibyl had bristled at the thought of having anyone's pity. She had devoted her life to being as self-sufficient as a seeing person. She'd never given in to her disability or used it for personal gain. Maybe she hadn't talked about the accident because she hadn't wanted anyone to feel sorry for her.

  So many secrets, so many people protecting Angela Adams, and no one willing to explain why.

  Lena reached back over her head to the phone on the wall. The receiver was sticky in her hand, the buttons stuck with grime. She dialed Nan Thomas's number, thinking she'd ask Sibyl's lover exactly what her sister had known about that horrible day. Her heart was pounding by the time Nan's phone started to ring. Lena waited, counting off the rings until voice mail picked up.

  She hung up, not leaving a message.

  What if Sibyl had known it was their mother? No. She would have said something to Lena. There was no way she could have gone all those years without telling Lena that their mother had been alive years after Hank had told them she'd died, that they had been lied to.

  Unless Sibyl was trying to protect Lena, too.

  'Shit,' Lena cursed, rubbing her eyes. She was tired, and sitting in Hank's house was somehow worse than being in her crappy motel room. It was certainly dirtier.

  She stood up and walked toward the back door. Lena put her hand on the knob but didn't turn it. Instead, she dropped her hand and walked back toward the hall. She stopped in front of the bathroom, then turned back around and went into the kitchen. The chair's legs scraped across the wood floor but she was hardly worried about the finish.

  Many years ago, Hank had run out of room to put all his shit. He'd gotten precut strips of plywood from the hardware store and made Lena hand them up through the attic opening one by one so he could nail them in place. Of course he'd had the wisdom to tackle this project in the middle of August, the hottest month of the year. When he'd come down out of the attic, the last piece of wood nailed in place, he'd passed out in the hallway from heatstroke.

  The next day, he was back up in the attic, stacking boxes, moving stuff around. Lena was ten, maybe twelve at the time. Just a few years after Angela Adams had blinded Sibyl. What had Hank put up there? What papers had been hidden above her head all this time? He left so much shit lying around that the extra stuff in the attic hadn't even occurred to her until now.

  Lena climbed onto the chair and pressed her hands against the access panel. It felt stuck, though not with paint. Something was on top, a box maybe, and Lena had to use her fist to punch up the panel and knock off the box. By the time she managed to slide the panel aside, her hand was throbbing, blood trickling from her knuckles. The stagnant air from the attic wafted down, but Lena didn't give herself time to think it through before reaching up into the open space, grabbing the beams on either side of the opening and pulling herself up.

  The roof was pitched, but not enough to stand. She kept at a low crouch as she moved toward the light switch, knowing that long rusty nails from the shingles were jutting down, waiting to rip her scalp open. Even with the sun down, the attic was hot as hell. A bead of sweat rolled down her back. Knowing she was wasting her time, she flicked the light switch. Much to her amazement, the bulb came on, illuminating a small area of the cramped attic. A blown bulb and an empty pack were on the floor so she had to think Hank had been up here recently. There was no telling what he had been doing. Boxes were stacked everywhere, papers spilling out all over the place. Rat droppings dotted the plywood floor. She heard a squeaking sound as some kind of animal protested her invasion.

  The smell hit her with sudden intensity, the overwhelming stench of death.

  As a rookie cop, Lena had handled her share of calls from out-of-town sons and daughters who were wondering why Mom or Dad or Grandma wasn't picking up the phone. Generally, there was a very good reason, and the more senior officers considered it on-the-job training to send the rookies out to discover the bodies.

  Once, Lena had found an old woman sitting in her recliner, dead as a doornail. An unfinished afghan and some knitting needles were in her lap, the TV chattering in the background. The woman smelled like urine and rotting meat. Lena had puked her guts out on the back porch before she'd radioed back to the station to tell them what she'd found.

  Now, in the attic, she felt like puking again – not from stress, but from fear. She knew what a dead person smelled like, the way their body fluids seeped out, the gases escaped, as they decomposed. She knew the way their skin sank into the bones, that more likely than not they'd baked in their own shit as they'd waited for someone to find them.

  A thought flashed into her head, one that wouldn't go away: had she found her mother? Had Angela Adams been up here all those years, her body rotting into the floorboards as Lena and Sibyl lived down below?

  No. It wasn't possible. Too much time had passed. The odor would be gone. Hank would've moved it by now.

  Lena felt her heart beating in her throat. Hank. She always thought of him last, even now. Tears sprang into her eyes. She reached up, steadying herself against a rafter. There was another noise in the attic, the sound of her own cries, like a siren winding down.

  She saw it now on the opposite end of the attic: a pale foot sticking out from behind the boxes; a man's foot, the sparse spattering of hair around the ankle, the waxy sheen of death on the skin.

  'No,' Lena whispered, because that was all she could manage.

  He had finally done it. He had climbed up here with his kit, taken that last needle, burned that last bag of powder, and killed himself. Just as he had told Lena he would do. Just as she had secretly hoped that he would do all those years ago.

  She could leave right now. She could go back to Grant County. She could go to work on Monday, do her job, come home, have some dinner, maybe watch a movie on TV. She could call Nan and maybe go visit. They would drink beer and sit in the backyard and talk abou
t Sibyl and maybe Lena would ask her sister's lover exactly what Sibyl had known. Or maybe she wouldn't. Maybe they would talk about the weather or some book Nan was reading that Lena couldn't begin to understand. Nan would ask about Hank and Lena would tell her that she hadn't heard from him in a while, didn't know what he was up to.

  Lena crawled to him on her hands and knees. Her arms were trembling so badly that she had to stop halfway, steady herself, before she could go on. She was hearing things again, words in a small voice, like a little girl was saying them. 'I'm sorry,' she heard. 'It's my fault ... I should've never left you ... I should've called an ambulance ... I should've taken you to the hospital ... I should've stopped you.' Lena realized that the voice she heard was her own. She sobbed, gasping for air in the closed attic.

  Lena reached up, shoved away the boxes so that they toppled to the side. She saw the naked man lying dead in front of her.

  It wasn't Hank.

  THURSDAY MORNING

  THIRTEEN

  Jeffrey had never liked sleeping in strange places. In his wilder days, he'd been loath to spend the entire evening with a woman, and not just because her husband might come home. He liked being able to get up in the middle of the night and know where the bathroom was. He liked knowing where the light switches were and which cabinet the glasses were in.

  What he didn't like was waking up in Jake Valentine's house.

  He had easily found the sheriff in the parking lot of Hank's bar next door, though there wasn't much the sheriff could do but watch the building burn. Jeffrey had found him standing beside one of his deputies, thumbs hooked into the waist of his blue jeans as he watched the last of the fire burn itself out. Valentine was still wearing his ankle holster and smelled a lot like the beer he'd been drinking with Jeffrey the night before. When Jeffrey had asked the man to follow him back to the motel, he hadn't asked questions.