Indelible

He sat on the bench, his mind again going back to Sara. She thought he was guilty, and why not? The things people had been telling her were horrible – and some of it was true. God only knew what Nell was putting into her head right now. Back when Julia disappeared, Nell had started acting differently around him. She had started to pull away, like she did not quite trust him anymore. Three weeks before graduation, she had broken up with him in the gymnasium, yelling at him like he was a dog. God, she had hated him that day, and Jeffrey still did not know what he had done.

He had left the gym and run into Julia. She was back from wherever she had run off to, come home to help her mother with the new baby. Lane Kendall's husband was dead and she needed all the help she could get. Even with the false charges Julia had made against Jeffrey and Robert, when he ran into her – and he had literally run into her, she had been standing right outside the gym doors – and she asked if he wanted her to do him a favor, he had said, "Sure."

The rape allegations had died down when Julia left town the first time. No one really believed her, anyway. She had slept around too much for people to think she was not a willing participant, and why the hell would a man rape her when she was giving it up easily enough?

"I'm sorry about what I said," Julia had told him, following him through the woods, the back way to the cave. "I didn't mean to get y'all in trouble."

"You didn't get us in trouble."

She laughed. "I bet not," she said. "That old Hoss can't abide anybody doing you wrong."

Jeffrey had not responded. They had reached the cave, and he held back the vines.

"It's dark in there."

"You go

"You still mad at me?" she asked, a curious smile at her lips as she glanced down at his crotch. "Maybe I shouldn't go in there."

"Suit yourself," he said, going into the cave ahead of her, his erection so painful he was surprised he could speak.

Jeffrey looked around the cave now, trying to remember what it felt like to have Sara in here. Certainly, better than when Julia was there. She had finally followed him inside and within minutes she had started crying, telling him she had made a mess of her life, apologizing for what she had said about Robert and Jeffrey. He had gotten angry because all he wanted was a blow job, not her fucking life story.

Julia had wanted him to kiss her, but Jeffrey had refused. There was something ugly about the shape of her mouth, and all he could think about was how many other guys had been there. In the end, he had told her to go away. When she would not go, he left the cave. The next time he saw Julia Kendall, Sara was there and Julia was nothing but a skeleton, laid out on the rocks as if she had gone to sleep that day, waiting for Jeffrey to come back.

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.