Noreen stared at me evenly. “Then why didn’t she ask me for a ride?”
I had no answer for her, and admitted it.
Noreen paused a moment, and in that brief interval I knew that there was more.
“When she called me, she sounded like she’d been crying,” she said.
Instantly, I saw Kelli’s face, saw her eyes, the dread that must have been in them, a black net descending.
“Why would she have been upset like that, Ben?” Noreen asked.
For the first time in my life, I felt truth not as something valuable, to be sought after, a shining light, but as a knife at my throat. And so I lied.
“I don’t know, Noreen,” I said.
She gazed at me closely, like a doctor examining a body, looking for the source of its malignancy. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She watched me silently, as if making a decision for all time, a choice she would have to live with forever. “Okay,” she said at last. Then she touched my hand with a single outstretched finger. “Sheriff Stone talked to me. You know, like he’s talked to everybody at school.”
I nodded.
“But I didn’t tell him about Kelli’s call,” she said. “Or that she was looking for you that day, or anything like that.”
I said nothing.
She looked at me significantly, as if swearing a grave oath. “And I never will,” she said.
For a moment we stood facing each other silently. Then her arms lifted toward me, gathered me into a firm embrace. When she spoke, her voice was low, its tone unmistakably collusive. “What do we do now?”
I felt her arms tighten around me, and I knew that I would never be loved more powerfully than this by anyone. And it struck me that over time I might offer loyalty in return, devotion through the years, perhaps even come to feel it as a kind of passion.
CHAPTER 20
MORE THAN EVER OVER THE LAST FEW DAYS, IT HAS RETURNED to me in the sound of an ax blade whirring in the air, and of Luke’s voice directly after that. Did you hear what happened to Lyle Gates?
Even as he said it, so matter-of-factly, I heard all the other questions he has asked through the years, all his unspoken doubts like a chorus in my mind. Luke believes that there is something missing in the case the prosecution brought against Lyle Gates, something missing in the motive Mr. Bailey offered the jury to explain what happened on Breakheart Hill.
And so he has not forgotten Lyle, nor his own testimony at the trial, nor mine, nor even the dramatic way Edith Sparks pointed Lyle out as the man she’d seen coming out of the woods that day, her finger trembling in the charged atmosphere of Judge Thompson’s courtroom, her voice barely carrying as far as the jury box, so that she’d had to repeat her answer, saying it harshly the second time, and in a voice that carried outrage as well as testimony: Him.
But more than anything, Luke has not forgotten the look on my face as he struggled to tell me what he’d seen on Breakheart Hill. He has not forgotten the dead eyes that greeted him, the tightly closed mouth, the utter stillness that enveloped me, and that even as he tried to tell me, suggested I already knew. And I know that it is a face that has surfaced many times in his mind over the years, like a corpse suddenly given up by the river.
And so there was something darkly suggestive in the way he posed the question that afternoon, the words coming slowly, heavily, as if hung with weights. Did you hear what happened to Lyle Gates?
I shook my head almost casually, revealing no hint of the pang I suddenly felt at the mention of his name. “No, I haven’t heard anything about Lyle,” I answered.
It was late on a fall afternoon, and Luke had dropped by my office as he often did, though on this occasion he had no doubt been urged there by what he’d just learned. “Well, you knew he’d been brought to the prison farm, didn’t you?” he asked.
Two years before, the local paper had noted that after twenty years in the state penitentiary, Lyle had been moved to a prison farm near Choctaw to serve the rest of his sentence. His mother was ailing, the article said, and she had petitioned the Board of Prisons to have Lyle moved closer to her so that she could continue to visit him without having to endure the hardship of a long journey. The board had granted Mrs. Gates’s petition, and Lyle had subsequently been transferred to a prison farm in the northern part of the county. I had neither heard nor read anything about him since that time. So that Luke’s question, when it came, struck me with the suddenness of a gust of wind.
“Yes, I knew he was at the prison farm. But that’s the last I’ve heard about him.”
“Well, they killed him yesterday, Ben,” Luke said.
I felt my lips part in a stunned whisper, but no sound emerged.
Luke sat in the chair in front of my desk, his eyes trained on mine. “Killed him,” he repeated. “Shot him down.”
“Who?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, from the way it sounds, he sort of killed himself.”
I stood up, walked to the window and looked out. To the right, I could see the old courthouse standing in its grave severity atop a flight of cement stairs. I remembered how I’d stood on those stairs years before, stood in the driving rain with my father next to me, the two of us watching as Lyle passed by, so very small, as he had seemed, against the enormous gray monolith of Sheriff Stone.
“Suicide, that’s what I’d call it,” Luke went on. “I mean, he didn’t give the guards much choice.” He drew the newspaper from beneath his arm and dropped it on my desk. “It’s all in there,” he said. “You can read it when you get a chance.”
I nodded, my eyes still locked on the old courthouse, the sternly accusing look of its high stone walls.
“You know, Ben,” Luke said, “I never could figure out why Lyle would do something like that.”
I heard Mr. Bailey’s voice echoing through the years: Only hate can do a thing like this.
“I know what they said it was,” Luke said. “That Lyle wanted to get back at Kelli for treating him the way she had that day at Cuffy’s. But that was weeks before, Ben. That was old business as far as Lyle was concerned.”
I offered nothing, said nothing.
“Of course it could have been that he was all fired up by that stuff Kelli wrote in the Wildcat,” Luke said. He fell silent, and I knew that he was reconsidering it all again, going through the old details, chewing on the questions that still plagued him. “But to attack a young girl the way he did? I don’t know, Ben. Lyle never seemed mean enough for something like that. I mean, the way Kelli treated him at Cuffy’s, that would have made him mad, but not that mad.”
I kept my eyes on the far mountain, its shadowy ridges growing darker as night fell. In my mind I saw Lyle stalking through the dense green undergrowth, his eyes searching for the girl he’d seen in Luke’s truck, the one who’d insulted him in full view of the men he worked with on the road, an affront whose depth, as I believed at the time, even he could not have imagined as he’d stood, thunderstruck, in Cuffy’s Grill that day.
“I guess there’ll always be a few things in life we’ll never know,” Luke said.
I returned to my chair and eased myself into it. “I guess so,” I told him softly, wearily, as if all the years had fallen upon me, depositing in one great load their full, enormous weight.
He looked at me tenderly. “You’ve never gotten over it, have you, Ben?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Me neither, in a way,” Luke said. “Probably a few others, too.”