SAFELY BURIED Chapter 3: Call It Fate

“Great,” she muttered. “I can see I won’t be getting much sleep tonight.”

“You’re not the only one,” I said. I had a lot of work ahead of me. This was going to be a big story for the Gleaner, and I had to write it. We didn’t have many murders in Meridian County. The last one, which had occurred nearly a year ago, was connected with a meth lab in Nazareth, a small town at the western end of the county. That event was no match for a home invasion and a double murder.

We clanked over the cattle guard and scraped bottom in the gully. A few drops of water spotted the windshield. Moments later a heavy downpour drummed the roof and sheets of rain swirled in front of us.

Paula said, “I guess maybe you should drop me off at a motel after all.”

“I will do that—as soon as we talk to the police.”

A long breath pinched her nostrils. Her words came out as she exhaled: “Drop me off first then. I don’t like talking to cops. They treat you like dirt.”

I laughed. “You’re not wanted by the police, are you?”

“No,” she snapped as if insulted. “But why can’t it wait till morning? I’m tired.”

“So am I. But you seem to be forgetting the two bodies you found.”

“I’m not forgetting. But what difference would it make? Wayne and Cheryl looked like they were laying there, I don’t know, for weeks maybe. We just happened to find them tonight.” She puffed out her cheeks and blew. “God, I could use a beer.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but we have to call the cops now, not tomorrow. And then I have to write a story for the paper I work for.”

She glowered at me. “You’re a reporter? Shit. Now I get written up in the paper.”

“Call it fate,” I said.

I had to get at least a few paragraphs in the morning paper, which meant I’d also have to call the press room and tell them to hold off on printing the first section. They would not be happy about it.

It made no sense to drive all the way to Campbellsville. The county police would come flying back here, and I’d be right behind them. The sensible thing was to stay put. I just had to get to a phone before the presses started rolling. I felt like kicking myself for leaving my cell phone at home.

I swerved onto the county road and headed back the way we had come. The nearby log house was completely dark. My next chance was the brick ranch. I stepped on the gas but hit the brakes almost immediately because the house appeared sooner than I expected and its lights were on.

I pulled into the concrete driveway. A picture window with open drapes provided a wide-angle view of the living room.

I asked Paula if she wanted to go in with me.

“Jeez no, I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“All right. I won’t be long.”

I jumped out and made a dash for the house. The porch light came on and the front door opened before I got there. A heavy-set man in a striped polo shirt poked his head out. He doesn’t realize what a risk he’s taking, I said to myself. He’s lucky I’m not the guy who murdered his neighbors.

I took one last running step onto the narrow porch and said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to call the police. May I use your phone?”

“What happened?” he said.

“Your next-door neighbors have been murdered.”

“Murdered?” He sounded skeptical and shocked at the same time. “When? Tonight?”

“Please, may I use the phone?”

He yanked the door inward, and I stepped onto a slate floor with a round oriental rug that looked too expensive to wipe my feet on. The living room was as big as my whole apartment.

He pointed. “It’s over there.”

I crossed the room and punched in the number of the sheriff’s department, which I knew by heart. While the phone rang, I introduced myself.

He said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Larrison. I’m Don Grapevine.”

He was slightly taller than I was, which made him about six-feet-one. He had a wide chest and square shoulders. Barely a hint of a paunch bulged against his shirt, whose wide blue and green stripes somehow went with the salmon-pink collar. I guessed he was pushing sixty and trying not to show it. He sported a dark tan that seemed to glaze over the pale blotches on his skin. He had a golden-blond flattop that was perfectly flat and probably dyed.

The phone went on ringing. Where was the dispatcher? What was he doing, playing cards? I hung up and asked Grapevine for a phone book. He went to the kitchen, which was behind the living room, and returned with the directory. I looked up Sheriff Eggemann’s home number. I could have called the state police, but the sheriff wouldn’t have liked that.

I heard a door open at the other end of the house, and a woman called, “Don, who’s there?”

Grapevine didn’t reply. I figured he wanted to hear what I was going to say.

The sheriff’s slow smooth drawl tickled my ear. After exchanging a few pleasantries—Sheriff Eggemann was never in a hurry—I gave him a capsule account of the night’s events.

“Were they shot?” he asked me.

“I couldn’t tell,” I said. “The bodies are too decomposed. My guess is they’ve been dead around two or three weeks.”

While the sheriff and I were talking, the woman from the other end of the house arrived in a summery cotton robe. She seemed surprised to find a stranger standing in the living room, and as soon as she saw me she pinched the lapels of her robe together. She was decades younger than Grapevine, maybe twenty-seven, twenty-eight, a couple years younger than me. She couldn’t be his wife, could she? His daughter? No, she wouldn’t have called him Don. His mistress? Let’s hope not. Framed in the entrance to the hallway, she stood barefooted, rosy pink from the bathtub or shower, drying her hair with an oversized towel. “What’s going on?” she asked Grapevine.

I listened to them with one ear, the sheriff with the other.

“Our neighbors—the Garths—have been murdered,” Grapevine said.

Her mouth fell open, She took a few slow steps into the room and stopped beside a grand piano, where she struck a girlish pose, one leg bent, her knee jutting out to the side with her foot perched on its toes.

When I stopped talking for a moment, she silently mouthed the words “Is that true?”

I nodded.

She wandered toward the front window and plopped down on one of two matching sofas that faced each other across a square cocktail table. Her auburn hair glistened next to a lamp. She crossed her arms below her breasts and hugged herself as if she were cold. I realized it was cold in the house. The air conditioner must have been running full blast.

“God, I didn’t know them that well, but I did know them,” she said to Grapevine. “Cheryl’s nice—I mean she was. Why would anybody murder them?”

The sheriff said, “You’ve had a busy night, Phil. I’d like you and your hitchhiker to stay right where you are till I get there. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“We’ll be here,” I told him.

As soon as I hung up, Grapevine said, “Phil, I’d like you to meet my stepdaughter, Jodie. Jodie, this is Phil Larrison. He’s the editor of the Gleaner.”

“Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry I barged in on you like this.”

She flicked her wrist. “No problem.”

“The sheriff’s on his way,” I told them. “He wants me to wait here, but I’ll get out of your hair. I’ll wait in my car.”

Jodie said, “I heard you tell the sheriff there’s a woman with a broken leg with you. Why don’t you bring her in. The two of you can wait here.”

“She’ll get soaked,” I replied. “It takes a while for her to get out of the car in her cast.”

“I’ve got a big umbrella,” Grapevine said. “Don’t leave her sitting outside by herself. We’ll fix you some coffee or tea.”

It sounded too good to pass up. “I’ll see if she wants to come in,” I said, but first I called the press room.

It was still raining when I went outside, but the deluge had been downgraded to a misty drizzle. Frogs peeped in the fields. I expected Paula to cuss me out for making her wait so long. I must have been in there all of ten minutes, fifteen at most. The car windows were fogged up. I saw a runny watery circle where she must have wiped the glass with her hand. I opened the door and began to apologize.

My stomach sank.

She was not there.

Through grinding teeth I mumbled, “Don’t do this to me.”

I stretched my neck to see if I could spot her somewhere. Come on, God, give me a break, just one break. But it wasn’t God’s fault she had disappeared. I shouldn’t have let her out of my sight. “Paula,” I yelled, “come on now.”

She could not have gone far. She might be only fifty feet away, taking a pee in the field. Or she she could be hobbling down the road, trying to bum another ride. But the most likely explanation was that she was on her way back to the Garth place. She’d hide in the corn for the rest of the night if she had to, till the police were finished. I had found her looking for something in the kitchen—money maybe. She’d go back inside and search the whole house.

I called to her through the rain.

Grapevine came out carrying a red and white beach umbrella, which he opened and held over our heads. “What’s going on?” he said.

“She’s gone,” I said. “She probably went back to the Garths’ house. That’s where she expected to stay. I’m going to go back and see if I can find her.” I felt deflated, limp. “Listen, when the police get here, tell them I’m over there, would you. Thanks. Thanks for your help.”

I got in the car and turned on the air conditioner to clear the windows. The sheriff had told me to stay put, but it was more important to find Paula. I knew he didn’t want us contaminating the murder scene any more than we already had, but that was the point—we already had. I backed out to the road. Grapevine and Jodie stared at me from the porch. I felt like an idiot for leaving Paula alone in the car.

I probed the edge of the fields with my headlights, weaving from side to side. By now she had to be drenched. How could she get through these fields with her leg in a cast? She might fall and break her other leg. Her cast could get stuck in a groundhog hole.

Darker possibilities took shape. There were packs of coyotes in these hills—they could eat her alive. What if the murderer lived in the log cabin up ahead? Maybe he had followed us to Grapevine’s and snatched Paula while I was inside the house. What if he was watching me right now, taking aim as I inched along the road?

Was I still awake? I felt as if I were having one of those early-morning anxiety dreams where I gradually realize I’m dreaming. But how could I have fallen asleep so quickly? I shook myself. My eyes felt stiff, like dried-out meringue. I thought I felt the first faint tickle of a sore throat. My skin seemed coated with greasy dirt. I gripped the steering wheel hard and made a conscious effort to stay on the road, just in case I was still dreaming.

I parked in front of the Garths’ house, got out of the car, and looked around. For a split second the scene in the bathroom reappeared. I knew that image would pop into my head for the next twenty years. I had a feeling that Paula was watching me. I called her a couple of times, but she did not answer.

The misty drizzle was now just mist. A thick shelf of mist hung over the corn.

It wasn’t long before the flashing lights of two police cars appeared on the ridges of the knobs. They were running silent—no need to wake up the citizenry at this hour. A few minutes later they were in the hollow. They stopped at Grapevine’s house for a minute, and then they were on their way over here. Sheriff Eggemann came down the lane in a brown-and-tan SUV, followed by one of his deputies in a brown-and-tan cruiser. Their red and white flashers seemed to bounce back and forth as they lit up the hollow.

The sheriff stepped out of his car and said, “Dangnabbit, Phil, I thought you told me she had a broken leg. How’d you lose her?” He was tall and thin, but not lanky. A decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, he was a popular Democrat who played musical chairs at election time. He was a polite, affable man who looked less like a county sheriff than the county auditor he had been for two terms and the county clerk he had been for two terms before that. He was expected to win his second term as sheriff later this year.

“I left her in the car while I went inside to call you. I came back here to try to find her.”

Deputy Jesse Holsapple spat on the ground not far from my feet. “That was real smart,” he said.

I had known Holsapple a long time. I had liked him better before he joined the county police, back when he was a full-time carpet installer. He had installed all the carpeting in the house where my ex and I had lived. He had done a nice job, but once he got his deputy’s badge he turned into a cocky, no-nonsense kind of guy. He had also become a part-time minister, otherwise known as a half-assed preacher. He served a small church in Shale Creek, where he brought the message to a few folks every Sunday, unless he was on duty.

The sheriff stared at the misty fields. “Well, I reckon she’ll turn up sooner or later,” he said. “Jesse, get on the horn to the state police and tell them to watch for a female hitchhiker wearing a cast on her leg—that should be enough of a description—just in case she gets back on I-65.” Next, he activated the spotlight on the side of his SUV and scanned the surrounding landscape, to no avail.

“Let’s take a look inside,” he said. “Normally, I’d wait for the state police to get here before going in. That way they can’t say we disturbed any evidence, but I’d say it’s been pretty well disturbed already, right, Phil?”

“We didn’t go in the bathroom,” I said.

Holsapple grunted. “At least you done something right.”

I shot back, “We found the bodies, didn’t we?”

I led the way to the house and showed them the broken glass in the front door. The door had locked itself when we’d left, so the sheriff donned a glove, slipped his hand inside the crumpled-up barrier that Paula and I had made, and unfastened the lock.

“Don’t touch anything,” he said. He flicked on a small flashlight, and Holsapple did the same.

I followed the sheriff inside with the deputy right behind me.

“It’s a little ripe in here,” the sheriff said, covering his nose with his sleeve.

The flashlights sent crazy shadows across the walls and ceilings until the sheriff used a gloved knuckle to turn on the living-room lights.

“The motive couldn’t have been robbery,” Holsapple said. “That TV and stereo wouldn’t still be here.”

“The bathroom’s upstairs,” I told them.

As we went up, I had a weird premonition that the bodies would not be there.

I need not have worried.

When he saw them, Holsapple let out a long whistle. “Holy Christ almighty God.”

The sheriff stooped down and began scrutinizing the bodies. “I suppose we’d better call the coroner,” he said.

“You want me to call him, Sheriff?” Holsapple asked.

“Go ahead, Jesse. He’ll want to see what we’ve got here. He’ll hand the case over to the state police, of course. He’d be in way over his head on this one.”

The sheriff poked his light under the clawfoot tub. He inspected the two tall windows, both of which were open a couple inches from the top and bottom. The windows were screened, but the insects had found other ways into the bathroom. He looked for shell casings on the floor but did not locate any. When he was finished in the bathroom, we went downstairs, where he stood in the middle of the kitchen and simply looked around.

I told him I had to get back to the office to write my story. I tried to get a few comments out of him—his take on the situation, could he say if they’d been shot?—but he wouldn’t commit to anything. “You just sprung this on us,” he said. “Give us some time to investigate.” In the bright light from the ceiling his face appeared slack and drained. He turned and said, “Phil, you look as tired as I feel. Why don’t you go write your story and go to bed. We can talk again tomorrow.”

That was exactly what I wanted to do.

As I headed for town, the freshly washed air fanned me through the open windows, the locusts throbbed in the trees, and the red lights on the radio towers watched me like a pair of eyes.