“Maddox,” someone in the crowd growled. “He'd probably have shot somebody by now.”
God bless him, whoever said it. I recalled many an encounter with
Sheriff Maddox when he was alive, not a single one of them pleasant. I was glad to know that others felt the way I did about him. He had died quite suddenlyâdressed only in a red raincoat and saddle oxfords, in the arms of another man's wife. It seemed a fitting epitaphic image. Maddox died, leaving the post of county sheriff open for Skidmore to fill.
But the specter of the departed Maddox hovered over the crowd for a moment and produced an ashen calm.
“Now,” I said to Skid, “exactly what's in the document that you're crumpling in your right hand?”
“I got the coroner's toxicology report an hour ago,” he said, calming slightly. “The Dyson family was in such a hurry to get the girls ready for this service that they rushed the Deveroe boys over at the funeral parlor, which, in turn, truncated the coroner's work. But when I saw the initial finding, I rushed over to Judge Hayes to get this cease and desist. I mean, it's better to do it now than to exhume the bodies tomorrow, right?”
“Why?” was all Robert Dyson wanted to know.
“Do you really want me to tell you in front of all these people?” Skid's voice was distant and cold.
“What is it?” Sara Dyson chimed in, letting go of her rosary beads.
“All right,” Skid sighed, still emotionless. “The initial toxicology report indicates that the girls might have been under the influence of hallucinogens.”
The statement could have caused the room to erupt again, but instead it shut everything down. The fellowship hall fell silent as a tomb.
Only then did I finally see Judy. She was standing close to the hallway door, nodding, a grim look of determination on her face.
“But you don't believe,” I pressed, trying to keep my voice down, “that the girls were taking illegal drugs.”
I could still read Skid like a book. He had a wild look of determination in his eyes.
“Of course not,” he answered me, his voice betraying a shaky underpinning.
“I believe that they were poisoned with them, given drugs without their knowledge.”
“What?” Mrs. Dyson whispered.
“And if that's true,” Skid barreled forward, “then these drugs would most likely be the cause of the girls not getting off the railroad tracks.”
“And that would change the coroner's report,” I supplied, “to murder.”
Â
I followed Lucinda home shortly after that. No one wanted to stand around and watch as the bodies were loaded into hearses that should have carried them to their burial sites.
I pulled my truck up next to her car and got out, saw her to her front door.
“Listen,” I said as gently as I could, “do you have some photos of the girls in your wallet? You know, school pictures or something?”
“What?” She glared at me.
“I have a few things to do.” I locked eyes with her.
She nodded.
“You want to show the pictures to someone who might have seen them that night.” She sighed.
“I'll give them back today.”
She opened her purse, fiddled with her wallet, produced two yearbook-style portraits.
“You get enough to eat at the church?” she mumbled absently.
“Anyway,” I said quickly, “I'll be back in a couple of hours. Will you be all right until then?”
“Uh-huh,” she told me unsteadily, fishing in her purse for her house key. “Where are you going?”
“Over to the Palace in Pine City. I want to show these photos to someone. I might be able to discover if the girls had dates.”
She stopped all motion for an instant.
“They might have,” I said before she could form a sentence.
“I see.” She opened her front door.
“Two hours.”
She nodded and headed into her house.
I turned my truck around and headed for Pine City, trying to remember the name of the young man at the movie theater with whom I'd spoken, the usher-filmmaker. He'd said it wasn't a good name for a director.
What was it?
I asked myself.
I spent the entire drive over the hill to Pine City failing to recall the boy's name and trying to ignore my stomach. As I pulled up to the Palace, I realized it was the middle of the afternoon and there probably wouldn't be anyone there.
I parked directly in front of the entrance. There were no lights inside.
The facade of the place was like its interior, a romantic amalgam of Moorish temples, Hollywood fantasy, and art deco glamour. The fired tiles had been cleaned to their former gold, and the marquee dazzled the entire town square with several thousand moving lights. The day's feature was
A Guy Named Joe,
a heartbreaking bit of World War II mysticism: a fighter pilot's ghost, Spencer Tracy, teaches the girl he loved in life to fall in love with another man, a man who was alive, his replacement, in fact. She fell in love with a younger pilot about to leave on a bombing mission, never knowing that the ghost of her dead lover had whispered in her ear. I stared up at the title feeling surrounded by ghosts.
I got out of the truck, stood on the sidewalk awhile trying to decide what to do. After a moment I thought I heard noise inside and stood at the glass doors peering in.
There seemed to be someone behind the popcorn machine.
I tapped on the glass and popcorn sprayed everywhere.
“What the hell!” A boy's face popped up from behind the counter.
“Hello,” I called through the crack in the door. “It's Dr. Devilin here. I think I spoke to you on the phone.”
“Christ.” He leaned on the counter a moment. “You near scared the life out of me.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Can you talk for a second?”
“I'm not supposed to.”
“It's about the girls I was telling you about.” I rummaged in my coat pocket and found the snapshots I'd just gotten from Lucinda.
“Yeah,” he said, heading my way. “People are talking about it now. I called around. Terrible.”
I held up the photos even before he got to the door. He was a sandy-haired teenager, a touch on the hefty side even for our mountain community. He wore a button-down, white cotton shirt, thin, fifties-style maroon tie, black dress slacks, and white tennis shoes. The name badge said
Andy
.
He came to the door and opened it before he saw the pictures.
“Oh, yeah,” he said quickly. “Damn. You don't forget those girls.”
“Right.” I stepped inside. “I was hoping.”
“They came to the later show,” he said, “last show of the night, you know? And they were all cute and stuff, but their boyfriends were kind of a pain in the ass.”
“How so?” I asked, hoping I didn't look surprised that they
had
boyfriends.
“I know them from school,” he sighed. “Jocks.”
“Sports aficionados.”
“They play football,” he confirmed.
“I suppose it's not like when I was in school,” I said, putting the photos away. “In those days, the sporting crowd lived in one universe and I seemed to live in another.
Smart
was exactly the last thing I wanted to be. When I was your age.”
“The more things change,” he sighed, “the more they stay the same, you know?”
“I know,” I commiserated.
“Were you as big in high school as you are now?” he asked.
“About.”
“Lucky,” he said haplessly.
“Didn't help. I was often referred to as
Goliath
and several times as
Tiny,
an attempt at something of an ironic appellation.”
“You were bigger though. You could have done something.”
“Ever read
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?”
“Saw the movie,” he piped up. “Great stuff.”
“What's the Chief's problem? Remember that character?”
“Ohhhh.” He rolled out the sound. “He was a giant guy, but he thought he was too small to do anything about his problems.”
“There you go.”
“So you were, like, nuts?”
“What?” I scowled.
“The Chief was nuts. Wasn't everybody in an asylum in that movie?”
“Well, yes,” I said quickly, “but I was making a point about being in high school.”
“Look,” he interrupted impatiently. “I really have to get the snack bar ready. And now I also have to clean up because you scared me and I decorated the place with popcorn.”
“My fault. I'll help. So about these boys, the dates. Do you know their names?”
“Yeah.” He headed back to the old glass counter. “One was Tony Riddick and the other one was Nickel Mathews.”
I followed him in.
“Hang on,” I said. “Is the Mathews boy related to Melissa Mathews of the sheriff's department, do you know?”
“Nickel is Melissa's cousin,” he said wearily. “He's always going on about how he can get away with stuff because his cousin will fix it. But as far as I know, he never did anything, he just talked about it.”
I'd followed him to the counter and begun to pick up popcorn kernels.
“Where do you want these?” I asked.
“Oh.”
He went behind the counter and pulled out a large black plastic garbage bag.
“I'll get the vacuum,” he said, “you don't really have to help. But thanks.”
“Look, here's an uncomfortable question,” I said, straightening up. “How much do you know about the drug culture in your high school?”
“Drug culture?”
He laughed. “This isn't Atlanta. We don't have a
drug culture. If we want to destroy ourselves, we get drunk, as God intended.”
“You're saying there are no drugs in your high school?” I asked him sternly.
He stopped what he was doing and looked me in the eye.
“If there were,” he said soberly, “would I tell you?”
“You would if the two girls died from taking drugs,” I told him, locked on his eyes.
“Oh.” He looked down. “Damn. Those girls? I don't believe it.”
“There are drugs in your high school,” I pressed. I was sincerely hoping his answer would still be no.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Pretty much everything.”
“So, what's popular?”
“Weed, of course,” he said quickly. “I hate it. Makes me stupid. Meth is good. Good for work or studying. You know, like No-Doz.”
“No hallucinogenics?”
“What year is this?” he chided. “Hendrix is dead, manâalong with the acid culture.”
“Nothing else? I read in
Time
magazine that ecstasy was making a comeback. As a party thing.”
“I guess,” he said softly, busying himself behind the popcorn machine. “That's
sort of
like a hallucinogen.”
“Sometimes boys slip that into a Coke or something. Dose an unsuspecting person.”
“No,” he corrected. “You're thinking about the date-rape thing. X is just good clean fun.”
“You actually seem to know a good bit about the subject,” I said casually.
“Look,” he exploded unexpectedly. “I'm trying to help you. And I know about the subject because I'm a worldly sort of person. I'm a filmmaker. See? An artist.”
“And it's an artist's responsibility to know the world,” I agreed, thinking it best to change the subject. “Who was your favorite? You were telling me on the phone. Lelouch?”
“Favorite, I don't know,” he hedged, “but I like him. I like all the French new wave.”
“I prefer Truffaut. He's got more of a humanist sensibility and a greater body of work. He often constructs a dynamic to make you think something terrible is going to happen, and then it turns out to be something wonderful instead.”
No sense talking down to the boy.
“The opposite of real life,” he sniped, “in other words.”
“Well, you've been very helpful,” I said, stepping back from the counter, “and I expect to be standing in line for one of your movies within the decade.”