Page 79 of Shame the Devil

Smothering her.

He asked, “Was she dead before he buried her? Tell me. I need to know.” And tried to breathe.

Please. Please don’t let her have died like that. Please don’t make us have to imagine that.

The detective said, “Yes.” And he had to drop his head and take a minute.

When he raised his head again, he said, “OK. What else do you need to know? I’ll help every way that I can.”

“Who told you she’d left?” Johnson said.

“My older sister. Vanessa. She called me at school and said that Mom hadn’t come home on Friday night after work. That her car was gone, too. That Dad had found a bunch of her clothes missing, and her suitcase. She said that they were going to call the police, but then Dad looked in her closet, and figured out that she’d …” He swallowed. “Left.”

It hadn’t been true. None of it had been true.

“When was that? What day of the week?”

He didn’t have to close his eyes to answer that. “Saturday.”

Close to noon, but he’d still been asleep. In a girl’s bedroom, in some sorority. He couldn’t remember her name. Mandy? Candy? She’d been blonde, because he remembered how she’d looked sitting up, startled by the phone, her hair falling around her face. He remembered the feel of her naked hip next to his, the warmth of it, and the betrayed look in her blue eyes when he’d told her, “I have to go.” Then the scramble to find his clothes. He’d never found his briefs at all, had just pulled his jeans on and left.

He’d known she’d thought it was another girl calling. He hadn’t been able to help that. He’d had to get home.

“She called, because you were …”

“In Nebraska. Lincoln.”

“At the university?”

“Yeah. Playing for the Huskers. Well, not playing much. Freshman.”

“What date was that?”

He passed a hand over his hair. “I don’t know. October sometime. We’d played Ohio State the night before. It was Homecoming the next week. I remember that. I’d thought my folks would come. But my mom was gone, and my dad didn’t come, either. You could look it up, I guess.”

“Did you play in that game? The one on that Friday night, the day before you heard?”

He raised his head again and stared. “What, me?”

“Yes. We’re trying to establish everybody’s whereabouts, that’s all.”

“You’re kidding.Me?I killed my mom? I buried her in her car? Why?”

“We’re establishing everybody’s whereabouts,” the detective repeated.

Harlan had never felt murderous in his life. He was murderous now. The red rage was rising into his head, behind his eyes. “I didn’t play,” he said. “I was on the bench. You could look it up. There’s a roster. Somebody might still have it. Afterwards, I went out and partied with the team, because we won, even though I was no part of it. And then I went home with a girl. I don’t remember her name. It takes almost ten hours to drive from Lincoln to Bismarck, and ten hours to drive back again. It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t one of my sisters. I knew how to operate an earthmover. I’d have known how to get it off the lot, how to break into the office for the keys, and I’d have had the guts to do it. How to get her car out there. How to do the … logistics. They couldn’t have done any of that, and they sure as hell wouldn’t have helped our dad do it. We loved our mom. Our mom was great.”

Except that he hadn’t believed it. As the months had gone by, as the postcards had come and she hadn’t, and especially after the postcards had stopped, his belief in her had trickled away. Why had he accepted that? How could he have done that? All the time, she’d been right there, and their dad had gone on like nothing had happened. Driven onto that Deane Road land, probably. Driven right over her, like he hadn’t dumped that dirt on top of her and smoothed it over with the big teeth of some machine, deep in the night. Taken it back to the lot, parked it, and hung up the keys.

And gone home to tell their kids she’d left, because she didn’t love them enough.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he managed to go on, “because you know exactly who it was. It was the guy who’s sitting in jail right now. The guy who thought my mom and I wrecked his life and told us so, over and over again. The guy who finally killed her for it and covered her with dirt, when she always wanted things clean. When she worked so hard to make them beautiful. To plant flowers. To show me …” He could barely go on through the tightness in his chest, his throat. “Owls. She was anurse.She felt sorry for him. Don’t you get it? She felt sorry for him, and she died for it.”

33

Visiting Hours

It wasafter dark by the time they left. Both Annabelle and Jennifer looked beyond exhausted when Harlan finally locked the door behind them. He put the house key into his pocket and wished he could throw it into the field instead. As far as he could, and that was a long way. Just let it be harvested with the sunflowers or plowed into the ground. Just let it disappear.