The question was, did Robert really kill her? God knew he hated the girl for spreading that rumor that they had raped her. Unlike Jeffrey, who just chalked it up to Julia trying to get attention, Robert had seethed with the kind of hatred that burns you from the inside. Maybe it was because Jeffrey knew that he would be going away to Auburn in the fall, or maybe it was because he knew how baseless the allegations were, but he had not taken Julia's charges to heart the way Robert had. In retrospect, Robert could have been angry because he felt guilty. Someone had made that baby.
Jeffrey took a deep breath and slowly let it go. Robert could not have killed her. He did not even know how she had died. Someone out there did, though. Someone had been in this cave with Julia. An argument had sparked or maybe whoever did it had just had enough of her. Jeffrey had seen this kind of thing all the time when he was a cop in Birmingham. It was depressing when you heard firsthand the stupid excuses people could come up with to try to justify the fact that they took another life. Was there a man out there right now, going to church on Sundays, playing ball in the yard with his kids after work, telling himself he was still a good guy because Julia Kendall had asked for it? The thought made him sick.
He rested his foot on the coffee table and looked around the dank cave. The first time they had found this spot, he had thought it was the best place in the world. Now it just looked like a damp hole in the ground. More than that, it was a tomb.
He stood as best he could and walked out into the sunlight. Slowly, he made his way back toward the funeral home, trying to think about what to do next. He wanted answers to all of this, wanted it solved once and for all. Robert was not going to help him with anything, but being a cop, Jeffrey was used to noncooperation from the chief suspect. Maybe that's what Jeffrey needed to do now, think about this case like a cop instead of as Robert's friend. Looking at it that way, he had forgotten an important step: talking to the victim's family.
A few years before he moved to Grant County, Jeffrey had spent two weeks driving around the South, looking at all the historic homes he could only read about when he was growing up. The trip was born of impulse and the need to get out of Birmingham while a certain assistant district attorney he had been dating cooled her heels over Jeffrey telling her there was no way in hell they were going to get married. Looking back, it had been one of the best times of his life.
Among other sights on the trip, he saw the Biltmore House, Belle Monte, and Jefferson's Monticello. He toured battleships and historic battlefields and walked the same path Grant took to Atlanta. Wandering through downtown after viewing The Dump, an old apartment building that really was a dump yet held the distinction of being where Margaret Mitchell had written most of Gone with the Wind, he happened upon a classically designed mansion called the Swan House.
Like everyone else of any rank in Georgia, the Inman family had got its money from cotton and decided to build a house that celebrated their wealth. They had hired a local architect named Philip Trammell Shutze to design their mansion, and he had come up with nothing short of a masterpiece. The Swan House had some of the most beautiful rooms Jeffrey had ever seen, including a bathroom with floor-to-ceiling pink marble that had been painted over to look like white marble; the lady of the house had not liked the original color. Long after the tour had ended, he had managed to sneak into the opulent library and just stare at the old books on the shelves. Jeffrey had never stood in such a room in his life, and he felt at once in awe and humbled.
In great contrast, Luke Swan's house was the kind of shack even Jeffrey had looked down on when he was a kid. As a matter of fact, the house was so bad that somewhere along the way the Swan family had simply abandoned it and moved into a trailer home parked in the driveway. Stacks of newspapers and magazines stood on the porch, just waiting for a stray cigarette or match to bring the whole place down. It stank of poverty and hopelessness, and Jeffrey thought not for the first time that there were still large chunks of the rural South that had not yet fully recovered from Reconstruction.
As Jeffrey parked on the dirt road in front of the house, six or seven dogs ran out to the car – the standard redneck house alarm. A majestic-looking mailbox stood at least four feet high in front of the driveway, fancy script giving the street numbers. Just to be certain, Jeffrey checked the numbers against the page he had ripped out of the phone book he had found dangling from a wire by the pay phones outside Yonders Blossom. The book was at least ten years old, but people in Sylacauga did not tend to move around much. There were only two Swans listed in town, and Jeffrey had taken the wild guess that Luke was not associated with the ones who lived near the country club.
"Git back!" a woman yelled at the dogs as Jeffrey got out of the car. The animals scattered and the old woman stood on the cinder block porch outside the trailer, leaning heavily on a wooden cane. Her cheeks were sunken in, and Jeffrey guessed she had left her teeth in a glass somewhere inside the trailer.
She asked, "You come about the cable?"
"Uh…" He looked back at his mother's car, wondering what she must have been thinking. "No, ma'am. I came to talk to you about Luke."
She clasped her housedress together with a gnarled old hand. He walked closer and he could see her rheumy eyes were having trouble focusing.
As if she knew what he was thinking, she said, "I got the cataracts."
Her accent was so heavy that he had trouble understanding her. "I'm sorry."
"Not your fault, is it?" she asked, no menace in her tone. "Come on in," she said. "Mind that first step. My grandson was gonna fix it for me, but then, well, I guess you know what happened."
"Yes, ma'am," Jeffrey said, testing the bottom step. The cinder block shifted, and he could see where rain runoff from the trailer had eroded the soil underneath. He kicked some dirt and stones under it, making it a bit more level, before following her into the trailer.
"Not much," the old woman said, the understatement of the century. The place was a pigsty, the narrow design making it seem like the walls were closing in. More newspapers and magazines were piled around the room, and Jeffrey wondered what she was doing holding on to all this stuff.
"My late husband was quite the reader." She indicated the piles of magazines. "Couldn't bear to part with his things when he passed." She added, "The emphysema got him. Don't smoke, do you?"
"No, ma'am," he said, trying to follow her into the main room, a combination kitchen/dining room/living room that was little more than ten feet square. The trailer smelled of chicken fat and sweat, with a slightly medicinal undertone that older people got when they stopped taking care of themselves.
"That's good," she said, putting her hands out in front of her to feel her way toward her chair. "Smoking's horrible. Kills you something bad in the end."
Beside him, Jeffrey saw a stack of Guns amp; Ammo along with magazines of a considerably more adult nature. He glanced at the old woman, wondering if she was aware that a copy of the 1978 Christmas edition of Penthouse sat less than three feet from where she stood.
She said, "Go on and sit if you can find a place. Just move that stuff aside. My Luke used to sit there and read to me." She put her hand behind her, feeling for the chair. Jeffrey took her elbow and helped her sit. "I like the National Geographic, but the Reader's Digest is getting a little too liberal for my liking."
He asked, "Do you have someone who comes in to take care of you?"
"It was just Luke," she told him. "His mama done run off with a door-to-door salesman. His daddy, that was my youngest boy, Ernest, well, he never amounted to much. Died in the penitentiary."