She stood up and walked toward the back door. Lena put her hand on the knob but didn't turn it. Instead, she dropped her hand and walked back toward the hall. She stopped in front of the bathroom, then turned back around and went into the kitchen. The chair's legs scraped across the wood floor but she was hardly worried about the finish.
Many years ago, Hank had run out of room to put all his shit. He'd gotten precut strips of plywood from the hardware store and made Lena hand them up through the attic opening one by one so he could nail them in place. Of course he'd had the wisdom to tackle this project in the middle of August, the hottest month of the year. When he'd come down out of the attic, the last piece of wood nailed in place, he'd passed out in the hallway from heatstroke.
The next day, he was back up in the attic, stacking boxes, moving stuff around. Lena was ten, maybe twelve at the time. Just a few years after Angela Adams had blinded Sibyl. What had Hank put up there? What papers had been hidden above her head all this time? He left so much shit lying around that the extra stuff in the attic hadn't even occurred to her until now.
Lena climbed onto the chair and pressed her hands against the access panel. It felt stuck, though not with paint. Something was on top, a box maybe, and Lena had to use her fist to punch up the panel and knock off the box. By the time she managed to slide the panel aside, her hand was throbbing, blood trickling from her knuckles. The stagnant air from the attic wafted down, but Lena didn't give herself time to think it through before reaching up into the open space, grabbing the beams on either side of the opening and pulling herself up.
The roof was pitched, but not enough to stand. She kept at a low crouch as she moved toward the light switch, knowing that long rusty nails from the shingles were jutting down, waiting to rip her scalp open. Even with the sun down, the attic was hot as hell. A bead of sweat rolled down her back. Knowing she was wasting her time, she flicked the light switch. Much to her amazement, the bulb came on, illuminating a small area of the cramped attic. A blown bulb and an empty pack were on the floor so she had to think Hank had been up here recently. There was no telling what he had been doing. Boxes were stacked everywhere, papers spilling out all over the place. Rat droppings dotted the plywood floor. She heard a squeaking sound as some kind of animal protested her invasion.
The smell hit her with sudden intensity, the overwhelming stench of death.
As a rookie cop, Lena had handled her share of calls from out-of-town sons and daughters who were wondering why Mom or Dad or Grandma wasn't picking up the phone. Generally, there was a very good reason, and the more senior officers considered it on-the-job training to send the rookies out to discover the bodies.
Once, Lena had found an old woman sitting in her recliner, dead as a doornail. An unfinished afghan and some knitting needles were in her lap, the TV chattering in the background. The woman smelled like urine and rotting meat. Lena had puked her guts out on the back porch before she'd radioed back to the station to tell them what she'd found.
Now, in the attic, she felt like puking again – not from stress, but from fear. She knew what a dead person smelled like, the way their body fluids seeped out, the gases escaped, as they decomposed. She knew the way their skin sank into the bones, that more likely than not they'd baked in their own shit as they'd waited for someone to find them.
A thought flashed into her head, one that wouldn't go away: had she found her mother? Had Angela Adams been up here all those years, her body rotting into the floorboards as Lena and Sibyl lived down below?
No. It wasn't possible. Too much time had passed. The odor would be gone. Hank would've moved it by now.
Lena felt her heart beating in her throat. Hank. She always thought of him last, even now. Tears sprang into her eyes. She reached up, steadying herself against a rafter. There was another noise in the attic, the sound of her own cries, like a siren winding down.
She saw it now on the opposite end of the attic: a pale foot sticking out from behind the boxes; a man's foot, the sparse spattering of hair around the ankle, the waxy sheen of death on the skin.
'No,' Lena whispered, because that was all she could manage.
He had finally done it. He had climbed up here with his kit, taken that last needle, burned that last bag of powder, and killed himself. Just as he had told Lena he would do. Just as she had secretly hoped that he would do all those years ago.
She could leave right now. She could go back to Grant County. She could go to work on Monday, do her job, come home, have some dinner, maybe watch a movie on TV. She could call Nan and maybe go visit. They would drink beer and sit in the backyard and talk about Sibyl and maybe Lena would ask her sister's lover exactly what Sibyl had known. Or maybe she wouldn't. Maybe they would talk about the weather or some book Nan was reading that Lena couldn't begin to understand. Nan would ask about Hank and Lena would tell her that she hadn't heard from him in a while, didn't know what he was up to.
Lena crawled to him on her hands and knees. Her arms were trembling so badly that she had to stop halfway, steady herself, before she could go on. She was hearing things again, words in a small voice, like a little girl was saying them. 'I'm sorry,' she heard. 'It's my fault… I should've never left you… I should've called an ambulance… I should've taken you to the hospital… I should've stopped you.'
Lena realized that the voice she heard was her own. She sobbed, gasping for air in the closed attic.
Lena reached up, shoved away the boxes so that they toppled to the side. She saw the naked man lying dead in front of her.
It wasn't Hank.
THURSDAY MORNING
THIRTEEN
Jeffrey had never liked sleeping in strange places. In his wilder days, he'd been loath to spend the entire evening with a woman, and not just because her husband might come home. He liked being able to get up in the middle of the night and know where the bathroom was. He liked knowing where the light switches were and which cabinet the glasses were in.
What he didn't like was waking up in Jake Valentine's house.
He had easily found the sheriff in the parking lot of Hank's bar next door, though there wasn't much the sheriff could do but watch the building burn. Jeffrey had found him standing beside one of his deputies, thumbs hooked into the waist of his blue jeans as he watched the last of the fire burn itself out. Valentine was still wearing his ankle holster and smelled a lot like the beer he'd been drinking with Jeffrey the night before. When Jeffrey had asked the man to follow him back to the motel, he hadn't asked questions.
'That's Boyd Gibson,' Valentine had said when Jeffrey showed him the dead man lying on the floor of his and Sara's motel room. 'I went to school with him.'
Not, 'How the hell did this dead guy get in your room?' or 'Who stabbed him in the back?' Just, 'Damn, his daddy's gonna be heartbroken.'
Jeffrey supposed he should be thankful that Valentine had offered them his spare room for the night. Grant County was a long drive and Sara had turned quiet again – too quiet for Jeffrey's liking. When he asked if she minded sleeping at the sheriff's house, she'd merely nodded, silently tucking her clothes into the suitcase she'd brought from home. She hadn't spoken during the quick drive to Valentine's house, either. When Jeffrey climbed into bed beside her, she'd put her head on his chest, wrapped her arm around him.
Jeffrey found himself listening to see if Sara was crying again. Sara very seldom cried, and when she did, he felt as if his heart was being squeezed in a vise. She wasn't crying, though. She was thinking. That much was obvious when she leaned up on her elbow, her tone telling him she'd made up her mind when she said, 'I'm not leaving this place until you do.'