Vi walked into the dining room. She hadn’t breathed yet and her eyes made slow progress adjusting to the darkness. At the dining room table she stopped, letting form and detail vivify in the shadows.
Then she took an unflinching breath.
Sweet. Rich. Rot.
Some putrid aberration of macaroni and cheese.
So keen she could taste it.
She sniffed again, letting the scent of decay engulf her. During her second month in Criminal Investigations Division she’d caught her first suicide-two summers ago on a sweltering July afternoon, a seventy-four-year-old man suffering with Alzheimer’s had put a twelve gauge under his chin. He was found a week later in a small trailer without air-conditioning. Though his smell was horrific, she discovered surprisingly that she couldn’t shun it, that she would accept, possibly embrace that awful stench out of reverence and compassion for her dead. The visceral intimacy of it inexplicably bound her first to the victim, then to the decoding of their murder.
A bright waning moon was rising over Lake Norman, its light spilling across the linoleum floor of the Worthingtons’ kitchen.
When Vi saw the little boy under the breakfast table something twitched inside of her. She walked into the moonlit kitchen, knelt down by the table, and brushed her bangs out of her eyes. Turning on the flashlight, she shined it in the boy’s face, then down the length of his small body. There were no visible ligature marks or bruises but his head rested awkwardly on the floor.
Broken neck.
The flashlight beam passed slowly down his right arm and stopped at his hand, the fingers drawn into a tight fist. She shined the beam onto his other hand. Those fingers were loose, clutching what looked like a battery.
Vi walked to the backdoor and peered through glass panes into the moony backyard, taking in the oak, its tree house, the rope swing, the pier, the lake. Cutting off the flashlight, she walked back through the dining room into the den, her eyes now where she wanted them, accustomed to the shadows. She could’ve turned on the lights but she needed to encounter the house as he had encountered it.
The smell sharpened in the den. She stopped and looked down at a bowl of popcorn on the floor. A videotape case sat empty on top of the television. Movie night. She walked over, glanced at the title: Where the Red Fern Grows.
When the telephone rang, Vi drew a sudden breath.
The answering machine picked up after two rings: “This is Theresa.”
“Zack, too.”
“Hank!”
“And Ben!”
Familial laughter.
A boy’s voice continued: “We aren’t here. Leave a message if you want.”
After the beep: “Hey ya’ll. It’s Janet. Hadn’t heard from you yet about next weekend, so I’m just calling to bug ya. Really hope you can make it. Jack and Susie send their love. Talk to you soon.”
The silence resumed.
Stepping into the hallway, Vi glanced in the bathroom, then continued to the doorway of the older boy’s room. She saw Hank Worthington in bed under the covers. He only looked asleep and she thought, This house would feel so normal if you couldn’t smell the death.
At the end of the hall, the door to Zach and Theresa’s bedroom stood wide open. Vi approached carefully, as though she might wake them, pulse racing, a pounding in the side of her neck.
She did not deny or curse the fear. Squatting down, she prayed, I don’t feel You in this house. Go with me into that bedroom. She rose, felt just as alone, but walked on until she stood in the threshold of the master bedroom, eyes watering from the smell.
Vi had no tricks for steeling herself up to see innocence eviscerated. It punched the wind out of you and then you carried on or you quit. Sgt. Mullins had told her that early on. He’d been right.
With the tip of her pencil, she flicked the light switch.
The room shrieked at her and she let slip a bated whimper. Her stomach fluttered as she took three steps forward and looked straight into the worst of it.
Mr. and Mrs. Worthington stared back at her, despoiled of any scintilla of dignity.
Vi jotted on her notepad, relieved to look away.
When she finished she walked back down the hall into the foyer and opened the front door.
It felt so good to breathe fresh air again. She wanted to wash her hands for an hour.
As she stepped onto the front porch and pulled the door closed after her, she felt Sgt. Mullins and the CSI techs studying her, reading the abhorrence on her face, reflecting it in their own.
“The parents are torn up,” she said to everyone. “May be a ritual-type thing. And the boy under the table is holding something in his right hand.”
One of the techs said, “You know Andrew Thomas used to live just across the lake. Bet you ten beers this was him. He’s come back out of hiding. Wanted to do it with a flourish.”
As Vi stepped across the sidewalk into the grass, she saw a local news van parking in the cul-de-sac.
The patrolman stood in the street with his arm around Brenda Moorefield and as Vi walked toward them, cold again, she called her husband and told him not to wait up.
23
ON the day he planned to interview Andrew Thomas, Horace Boone woke to the frozen pitiless darkness of his singlewide shithole on the outskirts of Haines Junction. The kerosene heater had gone out again during the night and despite five layers of quilts and blankets he lay on the mattress on the floor, shivering uncontrollably. Having woken cold for the last two weeks he was beginning to realize that he would not survive a Yukon winter in this rundown shelter, when the temperature fell to minus forty and the wind howled through the thin walls.
He threw off the covers and came to his feet, already fully clothed in a camouflage bib and down hunting jacket he’d purchased last week at The Woodsman, one of the local outfitters. Moving out of the tiny bedroom, he crossed the “living room” in three steps and entered the kitchen. The refrigerator was the hotspot of the trailer this morning and he pulled open the door and grabbed a carton of orange juice. Shaking it up, he took a long sip of the acidic slush and then began foraging the kitchen cabinets for his breakfast.
While he consumed a stale Poptart he leaned against the sink and glanced through the living room at the wretchedness he’d called home for the last month. The mattress, the television, and that disgusting couch comprised the furnishings of his trailer. You could only sit on the left end of the couch where the springs still held weight. And if you smacked the brown cushions on a clear day, you could watch them emit a mushrooming cloud of dust into the sunbeams from their inexhaustible store.
He’d been doing most of his writing in the village at Bill’s diner, sitting in a booth near the window, drinking obscene amounts of coffee. In the last two weeks he’d written the first three chapters of his book on lined college rule notebook paper. They chronicled his first encounter with Andrew Thomas at the bookstore in Anchorage, his journey to the Yukon, and his sneaking into Andrew’s cabin. He kept the purple notebook with him at all times during the day and stored it in the freezer while he slept so that if the trailer caught fire his manuscript might have a chance.
On October 30, the seventh anniversary of my mother’s death, I discovered that my life in Haines Junction, a life I loved madly, was over.
Just before noon I was sitting in the computer lab of the public library reading an emotional Live Journal entry from an internet friend I knew only as Tammy M. Midway through a hefty paragraph in which she analyzed her incapacity for shallow social interaction, the Champagne woman sitting at the computer beside me turned to her husband and said, “Look at that, Ralph. Andrew Thomas is back.”
Adrenaline shot through me, I felt the bloodheat color my face, but when I glanced over at the couple I saw the woman pointing to a news headline on her monitor. Feeling my gaze, she looked at me.