WE SAT in that truck most of the night, finishing the beers. Just like it was Grady who did most of the talking, it was Grady who did most of the drinking, and I figured he had cause. I asked him if he knew who it was who really killed Jesse Sterrett, and he said he always assumed it was an accident after all. I asked him about Hailey’s sister, Roylynn, and he told me he had heard she was in a place just south of Wheeling. And after I asked him that, we sat in that flatbed and drank up the beer and didn’t say much of anything, listening instead to the rustle of the night. We stayed quiet and listened until the electric lantern dimmed and died and the stars overhead turned bright and cold and hard.
I drove him home. He wasn’t in any condition to drive and I was, so Skink followed as I drove the black truck into the little town of Weston, to an old Victorian house that was nicely painted and well kept, hedges trimmed flat. When we pulled into the drive, a light went on in the upstairs window.
“Nice house,” I said as I shut off the engine and handed him the keys.
“My wife takes good care of it.”
“It doesn’t look like it turned out all bad.”
“She is sweeter than I deserve. And my kids, well, you know, they’re my kids.”
“Then why spend your nights at a dive like the Log Cabin?”
“All this ain’t what I had in mind.”
“Maybe it’s time to grow up, Grady.”
“Funny, that’s what Hailey used to tell me, too.”
“Where were you the night Jesse Sterrett died?”
“Nowheres.”
“There’s no such place.”
“Sure there is. You just haven’t spent enough time in West Virginia.”
“Where were you?”
Pause. “You don’t believe it wasn’t me.”
“I feel more comfortable with all the details nailed down.”
He took a deep breath. The lights in one of the downstairs rooms turned on.
“She’d wanted it from the start,” said Grady Pritchett, “I knew that, but I’d been good. Despite the temptations, I’d been a good boy. He was my daddy. But when things turned bad, she was the only one who came. And I grew so angry, so damn angry, that I couldn’t even think no more except about hurting someone, especially him, so I stopped being good. She left word she was meeting friends at the club, but that’s not where she was. She was with me, in a motel in a town down the highway, smoking reefer, getting down and nasty. I was still so banged up, it hurt so much, and that was the best damn thing about it.”
I took that in. “You preferred your father to think you were a murderer than to know you were screwing his wife?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
I didn’t have an answer.
The front door of his house opened, and a slim figure clutching closed her robe stood leaning in the doorway.
“Anything else?” he said.
“That about does it. If I need you to testify…”
“Forget it.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll forget it.”
He turned to me and smiled weakly and then opened the door and hopped out of the truck. He walked slowly down the driveway to the house, stopped to kiss the figure, and, without looking back, shut the door behind them.
36
THERE WAS one last place to visit in West Virginia.
The man in white led me through a well-lit hallway. He had broad shoulders, and his head was shaved, and his name was Titus. Titus didn’t check behind him that I was following, but then he didn’t need to. I was spooked, yes I was. It was not my normal venue, behind the walls of an asylum.
It hadn’t taken much to find the place. I had simply called the West Virginia number on the singed records from my cellular phone and they had kindly given me directions. It certainly didn’t look like what I had pictured a mental hospital to look like. From the outside, in fact, in its attitude at least, it suspiciously resembled the Desert Winds retirement home where we had met with Lawrence Cutlip in Henderson, Nevada. It was neat, well trimmed, seemingly deserted. A new, gabled structure with vinyl siding in a pleasing pastel, its grass freshly mowed, its bushes pruned into cute round balls. It appeared to be as much a spa as anything else, a place to restore the frazzled nerves of society wives. I could imagine that Hailey Prouix chose it personally, just as she personally chose Desert Winds for her uncle. She seemed have a thing for tidy places in which to store her various relatives.
The patients I passed as I followed Titus through the hallway were dressed in normal clothes, and they seemed pleasant enough, but I could tell they were patients. Some were impossibly thin and their jaws jutted with a strange prominence, still others wore long sleeves even in the uncomfortable warmth of the building, still others moved with an unnatural sluggishness. I tried to guess what they each were in for, anorexia, self-mutilation, schizophrenia. Look there, that older woman in the corner of that room, she was staring into the sky as if hearing the voice of God. Or was there maybe a television bolted into the upper corner of the room? And that woman there, wearing the long-sleeved blouse, look at her hands marked with cigarette burns. Or were they just birthmarks? And that woman sitting quietly in another corner, staring at her lap, was she a paranoiac ax murderess drugged into a stupor? Or was that a paperback book hidden in her lap?
Well, anyway, I could tell they were patients, absolutely I could. There was just something about them. And the something about them, I realized, was that they were here. But, of course, so was I.
Titus led me into a large common room and stopped at the entrance, waiting for me to step up beside him. “You can’t take her from this room without prior approval,” he said, his voice deep and commanding. “You can’t give her anything without prior approval. You can’t take anything from her without prior approval. There is to be no physical contact without prior approval. Do you have any prior approvals?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“That settles that, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What happened to your eye?”
“An accident.”
“It accidentally got in the way of someone’s fist?”
“Something like that.”
“It doesn’t make me happy, you coming in with an eye like that. Miss Prouix is a favorite of mine. Whenever I see her, it brightens my day. We all need a little bit of sunshine. I’d hate for anything to disturb her equilibrium.”
“That’s not what I’m here for.”
“That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, does it? The supervisor said you had some questions for her.”
“That’s right.”
“And I’m sure you’ll be careful in digging for your answers.”
“Yes, I will.”
“Does she know you?”
“No. But I knew her sister.”
“Well, then, go on and introduce yourself, Mr. Carl. She’s over there, by the far wall.”
A bright golden beam fell through the window, illuminating the slim woman on the coach in a halo of sunshine. She was leaning toward the glass, one leg curled under the other, one arm resting on the sofa’s back. She was holding a book, thin and black, but the book was closed, and her face pointed toward the light. I remember quite clearly the bright golden light, but I’m wondering whether the magical beam exists now in my recollection much more vividly than it did that day. Maybe it was overcast, I seem to remember that it was. Maybe the light is an inventive trick of my memory, but I am not inventing that the woman on the couch was the very image of Hailey Prouix. And I am not inventing the emotion that clutched at my chest when I saw her there, across the room, gazing out the window, bathed as she was in gold.
What is love? It is a question that runs like a silver thread through this whole sorry tale, an elemental question that at each point seems to provide a very different answer. But if you had asked just then, as I stood beside Titus and saw Roylynn Prouix within that golden glow, I would have told you that love is a Pavlovian response to certain very specific stimuli. Because if I was feeling something for Hailey Prouix’s sister, and I was, and I believe that what I was feeling was a shimmer of love, then it was based nothing on her, because I had never met her, and it was not a communal emotion flowing back and forth between us, because as of yet she didn’t even know of my existence. It was instead an unavoidable remembrance of how I had felt before when I had seen that same face.