“I need new lawn chairs.”
“Lucky I dropped by. I decided it was as good a time as any to stick a personal reminder invitation to Caroline’s memorial service in your mailbox since you hadn’t been polite enough to RSVP. I go up to the mailbox, put my ear to the door, and ask myself, Why is Emily using power tools at midnight? My spidey sense was tingling. I got my Ruger out of my trunk, and here we are.”
Letty’s patter was constant, ludicrous, breathtakingly soothing.
I don’t remember passing out, only coming to in Mike’s arms.
Mike and Jesse unrigged an explosive on the back door and carried Misty and me to the waiting ambulance long before a bomb squad helicopter landed on our little suburban street. I’m pretty sure it scared off all of Mrs. Drury’s ghosts for good.
38
Ten days later, the FBI exhumed the bodies of four girls from the wooded hill behind Dickie Deacon’s place. One of the first bodies was almost certainly that of Alice, age eight, buried in a clearing near the top, four feet off a ragged path.
Misty identified the ring with an orange plastic gem that they dug out with the third set of bones. Her sister had won two rings in a gumball machine that final summer and never took them off. Alice had insisted they were lucky.
On the third story of Dickie’s house, the FBI found these things: a nicely appointed bedroom with a satellite flat-screen TV, a master bathroom with twenty jars of lemon bath salts, an industrial washer and dryer, a closet of high-tech hunting gear and surveillance equipment, unopened Amazon boxes packed with stuffed animals, a portfolio of horrible, amateurish drawings of Caroline, and a museum-like room dedicated to Dickie’s trophies and fading football jerseys. I know there was more in that house on the hill, but Mike refused to tell me about it. Search teams had settled in at the Best Western, planning on wrestling the kudzu and mud on that hill for months.
The worst day for me was when they found Wyatt. Dug from a shallow grave in a horse stall in the crumbling barn behind Dickie’s house. Forensic investigators estimated his age at death to be between eighteen and nineteen. His preliminary DNA test did not match Richard Deacon’s. He’d been strangled to death, like all the little girls.
It left us to wonder: Did Dickie know that Wyatt wasn’t his son? Sophia Browning has said through her fortress of lawyers that she won’t in a million years offer her DNA for comparison. She’s fighting an exhumation of her father.
Mike reminds me that in every terrible case, there would always be questions. The absolute truth dies with the victim. Mike says he just imagines the scenario that makes him happiest. I imagine that Wyatt found out about Alice and died trying to avenge her.
Dickie had told everyone that his no-good son had taken off, and everyone believed him. The official theory is that he wired money to himself around the country, picking it up in Wyatt’s name, in case anyone ever got wise to his lifestyle or too curious about what happened to his missing son. A dead man on the run is easy to blame.
A few nights ago, Mike and I watched some old football film of Dickie in a state high school playoff game. The film canister arrived at the front door by UPS, in an anonymous brown cardboard box addressed to Mike, the number 88 drawn in Sharpie where the return address should have been.
No soundtrack. We watched every grainy moment.
In the final seconds of the game, the ball was soaring across the field, a Hail Mary pass. No. 88 leapt in the air, his hands reaching up for the impossible ball like a prayer to the gods.
It is hard to square that magnificent moment of grace with the man who, in some odd ritual that made sense only to him, washed his ex-wife in homemade bath salts before he murdered her. Liza Beth Tucker sold eight varieties of bath salts at her gas station in Hazard. She told police that Dickie bought a six-month supply of the lemon salts at a time. He told her his wife liked them, even though Liza Beth knew that his wife had left him years ago.
When serial killer fanatics found out about the bath salts-the kind of loonies who collect famous murderers’ cards the way kids collect baseball cards-they ordered so much of the stuff by phone that Liza Beth set up an Internet site. The home page claims her products “are original recipes loaded with healing properties from the salt dug out of a genuine Kentucky mine.”
If you order the lemon bath salts and pay an extra $5.95, she’ll send you a small bag of dirt from Dickie’s property and an overhead helicopter shot of his place, with hand-drawn X’s where the bodies were discovered. I’d bet the salt is Morton’s and the earth is from Liza Beth’s own backyard.
What can I say? People are sick.
39
I didn’t think she’d show.
She held the strings of three dancing white balloons. Her filmy pale blue dress melted into a big sky of skittering clouds. She stood in a carpet of red leaves, about a hundred yards apart from the group of mourners. Her head was slightly turned, fighting the wind. Impressionistic. A Monet. A picture of Misty that almost wasn’t painted.
Misty had tracked her way to Dickie’s hill months ago, looking for her sister, twenty years after she disappeared. Dickie recognized her, and kicked her off. He didn’t kill her then, but Misty had set her fate in motion. Her fate, Caroline’s fate, my fate.
Those weren’t roof rats over my head in Dickie’s bathroom. It was Misty, hoping I’d hear, a fact I can’t think about too much. After months of stalking, Dickie had grabbed Misty on the last night in the glass house. The day after she shut the door in my face. He trucked her back to the hill and planned to kill and bury her there, until Mike and I drove up. We apparently inspired him to a more apocalyptic fury.
Dickie spent a good deal of time on the road in the last month, tracking back and forth between his house in Kentucky and a motel in Fort Worth where he paid a monthly rate. A search of his room turned up prepaid cell phones and a scratch pad scribbled with the name and number of one of the security clones who worked on our house. It still isn’t clear where Caroline died, or whether Dickie ever brought her back to the house where they began their story.
Misty had promised to come back and say goodbye, I just didn’t expect her to do it today, at Caroline’s second memorial. I stared past her, across the open ranchland, a beautiful piece of property owned by the Lee family trust. Letty had deemed it the appropriate place to scatter Caroline’s ashes. It was turning out to be a simple, beautiful service, in part because Letty’s Baptist reverend had gently encouraged her not to speak or sing. About two hundred people, a little prayer, a harp, a good strong wind that would carry the ashes, and not a word about how Caroline died.
I could see Lucinda’s floppy black funeral hat in the back of the crowd. She’d lost the baby and left her bad-tempered husband three weeks ago. She stood near Holly and Tiffany, who had tied their balloons to their Gucci bags and linked their arms. I realized Caroline’s club would go on without her, a crippled, handicapped centipede. My mother had liked centipedes. She said they were misunderstood.
When it was time, I let the string slip out of my fingers and turned to watch Misty. I didn’t have to ask why there were three.
Alice. Wyatt. Caroline.
Rising together. Misty’s head craned up until they mingled with the hundreds of other balloons sailing into the clouds. Then her eyes settled on me. Eight months pregnant, I was not too easy to miss.
“Give me a minute, OK?” I asked Mike.
He nodded, as people headed back to their cars, lined up on the dirt road behind us.