Page 12

W ith her parents still sleeping, Livia snuck out of the house at six a.m. By noon, she entered Georgia.

Bald cypress trees stretched into the afternoon sky, and river birch shadowed the road.

The last two hours of the drive were easy, and Livia allowed the GPS to guide her through the town of Burlington.

Casey Delevan’s mother lived in a dilapidated house with peeling paint and dirty windows.

There was no garage, but a rusted-out Toyota Corolla was parked in the gravel driveway.

It was the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday.

Three hours earlier Mrs. Delevan had answered the phone when Livia called and asked if she were interested in purchasing a magazine subscription.

Now Livia parked in the street and walked to the house.

The doorbell made no audible sound and after the second try Livia knocked instead.

A moment later, a middle-aged woman answered the door.

“Barbara Delevan?”

“Yes?”

“Hi, ma’am. My name is Dr. Livia Cutty. I’m here to talk to you about your son. ”

The woman regarded Livia through the screen door, then pushed it open and held it for Livia to enter. “C’mon in.”

Livia walked through the door, which led directly to the living room.

On a sunny autumn day, Mrs. Delevan’s home was dark and drab.

A forced blackness brought by drawn shades that allowed only an outline of boxed light to enter.

No lamps helped Livia’s vision, and the result was a dingy brown glow her eyes needed time adjusting to.

“Can I get you something? Water or soda?”

“No, thank you.”

“Beer, or something?”

“I’m fine.”

“C’mon in and have a seat.”

Livia walked into the living room and took a seat in the recliner.

The couch, Livia could tell, was Mrs. Delevan’s domain.

It was split into three sections, and the middle cushion was well worn, trampled down and stained with various colors—food and coffee.

Mrs. Delevan fell into the spot and brought her feet up onto the coffee table.

There, too, was evidence of a sedentary life.

The finish on the table was absent from where the woman’s feet constantly rested as she watched television—a giant monstrosity that stood in the corner and predated flat panels, it was the very definition of a “large screen” television.

It was blaring an episode of Housewives from somewhere, and in the same movement that Mrs. Delevan sat down, she muted the television.

The cushion to her right was stacked with papers— Livia guessed they were bills or financials of some sort, organized roughly in piles and by a slider where envelopes rested upright.

Covering the cushion to her left was food and beverages.

Cartons of takeout and plastic bottles of Coke, the current one wedged between the cushions.

A bottle of vodka stood in the corner of the couch and a white Styrofoam coffee cup, the rim bitten and marred, rested on the table.

Mrs. Delevan slopped some vodka into the coffee cup and topped it with Coke, then looked at Livia.

“If you’re here to talk about Casey, I’m gonna need one of these. Sure you don’t want nothin’?”

“Yes, thank you.” Livia looked around the small home. “You live here alone, Mrs. Delevan?”

“Call me Barb. Yeah, it’s just me. Alan down at the store thinks he lives here sometimes, till I set him straight.” She smiled to reveal a set of rickety teeth and necrotic gums.

Livia noticed a pack of Marlboros on the end table and had smelled the stale odor of nicotine as soon as she walked in the door.

The last years of Livia’s life had been spent analyzing the lifeless human body, its tissue and cells, and witnessing the destructive nature of the world—the things the human race does to one another and to themselves, the substances that are ingested, the air that is breathed, and the manner in which our organs malfunction as a result of it all.

The consequence of this education and the postmortems she’d conducted was that Dr. Livia Cutty saw death before it arrived.

She watched Barb take a gulp of vodka and Coke and imagined the fatty liver that sat inside the woman’s body.

Livia knew exactly what that organ would feel like in her hands, bloated and greasy with hardening vessels snaking along its surface, abused for so long by the toxins that washed through it.

When Barb reached for the Marlboros and put one between her lips, pinching her lips together as she ignited the tobacco, Livia watched in her mind’s eye as the smoke traveled through the trachea and into the lungs.

She imagined the epithelial cells and goblet cells lining the airway, streaked now with yellow soot and slowly dying.

She saw the small bronchioles of Mrs. Delevan’s lungs already stenosed from years of abuse, and the tiny clusters of alveoli tight from necrosis and unable to expand and transfer oxygen into the bloodstream.

Put this woman on a treadmill and Livia could see her heart working in overdrive to push oxygen into those dying lungs.

“You have one of those?” Barb asked. “A guy who thinks he can come and go as he pleases?”

“Can’t say I do, ma’am.”

Barb waved her hand to dismiss the thought. “You with the police?”

“No, not exactly. I’m with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina. I was the one who performed the autopsy on your son.”

“Oh yeah? Cops said I could call you if I had any questions.” Mrs. Delevan turned and paged through the papers to her right, gave up after a minute. “They gave me a card, it’s in here somewhere.”

“Here,” Livia said, handing her a new one. “I’m always available.”

“You come all the way down from Raleigh?” Barb said, reading the card .

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Long way.”

“It was a pretty drive. Trees are starting to change,” Livia said. “And I don’t like talking to family over the phone about something so delicate.”

“Well, I appreciate it. Police tell me my Casey didn’t drown, that maybe somebody killed him.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s what my examination revealed.”

“Somebody stabbed him, they said?”

Livia nodded. “That’s what it looks like, yes.”

Homicide detectives, Livia was learning, were notorious for leaving out “unimportant” details when talking to victim’s families.

Livia could imagine the two Raleigh detectives setting foot in this home and knowing two things immediately.

First, Barb Delevan had nothing to do with her son’s death.

And second, she wasn’t going to be useful to their investigation.

To streamline their visit, the detectives had left quiet the details about the suspected manner in which Casey Delevan had died.

“Stabbed” carried the connotation of a sharp object to the gut.

As awful as that image may be, unidentified holes to her son’s skull were worse.

Barb Delevan shook her head, took a sip of vodka and a long drag from her cigarette. “You sure he didn’t drown like the newspeople say? He wasn’t really stable. Mentally, I mean. I could see him jumping from that bridge before I could see him . . . well, before I could imagine someone hurting him.”

“I’m sure, ma’am. Your son did not drown.”

“But on the news, they say he might have.”

“I understand, but the newspeople have it wrong.”

“How can you tell? ”

“Lots of ways. But the strongest evidence we have is that your son had no water in his lungs. This tells us without question that he did not drown. And he had no injuries consistent with a long fall from a bridge.”

“So it’s true? Someone stabbed him?”

Livia nodded and Casey’s mother wiped her eyes before taking another hit from her cigarette.

“He suffer?”

Livia had no way of knowing this. But based on Maggie Larson’s report that whatever was used to penetrate Casey Delevan’s head had breached the brain tissue as deep as an inch and a half in four different locations of the temporal lobe—responsible for hearing and cognitive ability—there was a very good possibility that Casey Delevan suffered a long, slow death while bleeding out and completely conscious.

The only good news was that he might have been deaf and unable to comprehend what was happening.

Then again, he might have lost consciousness, making his death truly painless.

This long afterward it was simply impossible to know for certain. Still, Livia’s answer was immediate.

“He died instantly.”

Barb nodded. Knowing that her son had not suffered relieved some of her burden.

“I’d like to ask a few questions about Casey, if that’s all right,” Livia said.

Barb shrugged. “Sure.”

“Police said you two were estranged.”

“We didn’t talk, if that’s what you mean.”

“May I ask why?”

Another sip of vodka. “Long story. ”

“I drove a long way.”

“Why’s it important?”

Livia thought for a moment. “About a year ago, summer before last, a couple of girls went missing from up where I live in Emerson Bay.”

Barb pointed two fingers at Livia, cigarette between them and smoke twisting behind. She nodded her head. “I ’member that. That one girl is still all over the news. One that got away.”

“Correct. The other girl? She was my sister.”

“Other girl who was taken?”

“Yes.”

“That was your sister?”

Livia nodded.

“Well, shit on that. Sorry to hear, Doc.”

“Thank you.” Livia shifted in the recliner.

“The reason I mention it is because Casey and my sister, Nicole, were dating when she disappeared. My examination of the—” Livia stopped herself.

She almost said body, something Dr. Colt had lectured them about.

Relatives didn’t want to hear about bodies.

The deceased were still very much alive in their memories.

“—of your son indicates that he likely died around the same time that my sister went missing. End of the summer of 2016. Maybe fall. So for my own selfish reasons, Barb, I wanted to find out a little about Casey. About the person my sister was dating.”

“You’re not sayin’ Casey had something to do with those missing girls, are you?”

Having built a good rapport to this point, Livia didn’t dare reveal her suspicions. And the truth was that she had no idea what to think about Nicole and Casey. “Of course not. I’m just looking for anything I can find about that summer. Anything I can learn about my sister before she went missing.”

“You know,” Barb said, pouring more vodka into the white Styrofoam cup, “we’re a lot alike, you and me.”

“Oh yeah? How’s that?”

“My older boy, Joshua, he went missing. He was nine. Out with Casey and their daddy at the fair. Their father was such a piece of shit, excuse me. Worthless as a husband and no good as a father. Knowing this about him, I still let him take my boys to the fair that day. He came home with Casey. Never saw Joshua again.”

Livia paused at the revelation. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“Me too. So I know how you feel. About your sister. Casey would’ve known, too.”

“When did that happen? Your other son?”

“July twelfth, 2000. He’d be twenty-seven now, but I only know him as that nine-year-old boy stuck in my mind.” Mrs. Delevan looked off into the corner of the room.

“Joshua was never found?”

Barb shook her head. “My Joshua is gone. Police questioned my husband for a long time, but they finally gave up on that angle. There was a predator at that fair, and he waited until Joshua drifted far enough away from his daddy. That’s all it was.

The police checked in with me for a year to tell me about their leads and about the case.

But they stopped calling eventually. After a while, I gave up hope.

Me and their daddy were never the same. I still blame him.

He didn’t have nothin’ to do with Joshua’s disappearance, but he was the one supposed to be watchin’ my boy that day.

He knows it, too. So he took off about a year after we lost Joshua.

Casey and me never seen him again. Casey hung around until he was eighteen, then he took off like his daddy.

Ain’t talked with him for three, four years.

Then I get a call from the police. Now both my boys are gone. ”

Livia listened to the sad life of Barb Delevan.

The self-destruction and drawn shades and dark house and reclusive lifestyle made a great deal more sense.

And so, too, did Nicole’s attraction to Barb’s son.

Their cousin Julie’s disappearance—a turning point in Nicole’s childhood—was something Casey Delevan would have related to.

Livia imagined Nicole finding comfort in that connection, something she hadn’t found from her family.

Livia had been off at college when Julie disappeared and didn’t see the ramifications until the following summer when Nicole was withdrawn and confused.

A nineteen-year-old kid herself, Livia wasn’t equipped with the tools to comfort her younger sister about something so tragic.

Her parents tried to shield the horror of it by moving on and hiding the details from her.

“I’m really sorry for your loss,” Livia said. “I won’t take up any more of your time. If you need anything, or have any questions, please call me.”

“Thanks for coming all the way down, Doc. And for setting my mind to rest that my boy didn’t suffer.”

“Of course.”

“And it does get easier,” Barb said, sitting up and pouring more vodka. “Day by day, I miss him less and less. ”

Livia stood. She knew Barb Delevan was talking about her missing son whom she hadn’t seen for nearly twenty years, not Casey. That Barb and Casey had lost touch, Livia was sure, had to do with the nine-year-old boy trapped in Mrs. Delevan’s mind.

“Thank you,” Livia said as she headed for the door and the fresh air outside.