Страница 40 из 41
This time I was ready, and as he lunged toward me, I stepped to one side, stuck out one foot, and as he stumbled over it, I brought the candy cane down again on the back of his neck.
If the children hadn't been there I would have kicked him or broken one of his arms, to make sure I wouldn't have to deal with him again. But the children were there, Luke screaming and wailing with all the abandon of a two-year-old, and A
Would hitting him again be any more traumatic for them? I thought not and raised my foot.
But Chandler McAdoo said, "No."
All the fight went out of me in a gust. I let the red-and-white-striped plastic fall from my fingers to the carpet, told myself I should comfort the children. But I realized in a dim way that I was not at all comforting right now.
"Eve and Jane are behind the chair in the bedroom across the hall," I said. I sounded exhausted, even to myself.
"I know," Chandler said. "Eve called nine-one-one."
"Miss Lily?" called a tiny, shaky voice.
I made myself plod into the master bedroom. Eve's head popped up from behind the chair. I sat on the end of the bed.
"You can bring Jane out now," I said. "Thank you for calling the police. That was so smart, so brave." Eve pushed the chair out and picked up the infant seat, though now it was almost too heavy for her thin arms.
Chandler shut the door.
It promptly came open again and Jack came in.
He paused and looked me over. "Anything broken?" he asked.
"No." I shook my head and wondered for a second if I would be able to stop. It felt like pendulum set in motion. I rubbed my throat absently.
"Bruise," said Jack. I watched him try to decide how to approach me and Eve.
With great effort, I lifted my hand and patted Eve on the head. Then I folded her in my arms as she began to cry.
I sat with Eve in my lap that night as she told the police what had been happening in the yellow house on Fulbright Street. Chandler was there, and Jack—and Lou O'Shea, since Jess had passionately wanted to be there as Eve's pastor, but Eve had shown a definite preference for Lou.
Daddy, it seemed, had started getting fu
"He always liked me to wear lipstick and makeup," Eve said. "He liked me to play dress up all the time."
"What did your mom have to say about that, Eve?" Chandler asked in a neutral voice.
"She thought it was fu
"When did things change?"
"About Thanksgiving, I guess."
It was just after Thanksgiving that the article about unsolved crimes had appeared in the Little Rock paper. With the picture of the baby in the giraffe sleeper. The same baby sleeper that Meredith had kept all these years in a box on the closet shelf, as a memento of her baby's first days.
"Mama wasn't happy. She'd walk around the house and cry. She had a hard time taking care of Jane. She ..." Eve's voice dropped almost to a whisper. "She asked me fu
"About... ?" Chandler again.
"About did Daddy touch me fu
"Oh. What did you tell her?" Chandler sounded quiet and respectful of Eve, as if this was a very ordinary conversation. I had not known my old friend could be this way.
"No, he never touched me ... there. But he liked to play Come Here Little Girl."
My stomach heaved.
I won't go through it all, but the gist of it was that Emory liked to deck Eve in lipstick and rouge and call her over to him as if they were strangers and induce her to touch him through his pants.
"So what else happened?" Chandler asked after a moment.
"He and Mama had a fight. Mama said they had to talk about when I was born, and Daddy said he wouldn't, and Mama said ... oh, I don't remember."
Had Meredith asked him if Eve was their baby? Had she asked him if he was molesting the child?
"Then Mama or Daddy got my memory book and took a page out of it. I didn't see them do it, but when I got home one day, the page was missing, my favorite picture of me and A
Jack and I met each other's eyes.
"Then Mama said I needed a blood test. So I went to Dr. LeMay, and he and Miss Bi
"Mama told me not to tell anyone, but Daddy saw the needle mark when he bathed me that night! But I didn't tell, I didn't!" Big tears rolled down Eve's cheeks.
"No one thinks you did anything wrong," I said.
I hadn't realized how tense she was until she relaxed.
"So Daddy found out. I think he went looking and found the paper Mama got from the doctor."
The lab results? A receipt for whatever Meredith had paid for the blood test?
"So the next night he said Mama needed a break and he was going to take us out."
"And you got in the car, right?" Chandler asked.
"Yep, me and Jane. I was buckling her car seat when Daddy said he'd left his gloves. He opened the trunk and got something out and put it on, and he went in the house. After a few minutes he came back out with something under his arm, and he put it in the trunk and we went out to eat. When we got home ..." Eve began to cry in earnest then.
Chandler slipped out with Emory's keys to open Emory's trunk. He came back in five minutes.
"I got some people looking and taking pictures," he said quietly. "Come on, sweetie, let's put you on a bed for a little while, so you can lie still."
Lou, who had tears ru
"What was in the trunk?" Jack asked.
"A clear plastic raincoat with lots of stains and a single-edge kitchen knife."
I shuddered.
Jack and Chandler began to have a very important talk.
Chandler called over to the men searching the house on Fulbright Street. In about thirty minutes, thin Detective Brainerd brought a familiar shoe box into the bedroom at the manse.
Jack put on gloves, opened the box, and began to smile.
Dill and Varena had taken A
Jack dropped me at his motel room while he went to the jail to have a conversation with Emory Osborn.
When he returned, I was still lying on the bed staring at the ceiling. I still had my coat on. My throat hurt.
Without speaking, Jack consulted an address book he fished out of his briefcase. Then he picked up the phone, took a deep breath, and began dialing.
"Roy? How you doing? Yeah, I know what time it is. But I thought you should be the one to call Teresa and Simon. Tell them we got the little girl ... of course I wouldn't kid about something like that. No, I don't want to call them, it's your case." Jack held the phone away from his ear, and I could hear Roy Costimiglia shouting on the other end. When the sound had abated a little, Jack started talking, telling Roy as much as he could in a few sentences.
"No, I don't know... they better call their lawyer, have her come down before they come down. I think there's a lot of steps to go through, but Osborn actually admitted it. Yeah." Jack eased back on the bed until he was lying beside me, his body snug against mine. "He delivered his own baby at home, and the baby died. I think there's something kinda hinky about that, it was a baby boy... and he definitely likes little girls. Anyway, he felt guilty and he couldn't tell his wife. He gave her a strong painkiller he'd been taking for a back injury, she conked out, he began riding around trying to think of how to tell her the baby didn't make it. He lived right close to Conway, and he found himself just cruising through Conway at random, he says. Yeah, I don't know whether to buy that, either, especially in view ... wait, let me finish." Jack pulled off his shoes. "He says he rode through the Macklesbys' neighborhood, recognized the house because he'd delivered a couch there about four months before. He liked Teresa, thought she was pretty. Suddenly he remembered that Teresa had been pregnant, wondered if she'd had the baby ... he watched the house for a while, says he was too distraught to go home and face his wife. Suddenly, he got his chance to make everything better. He saw Teresa come out onto the porch with the baby in her carrier, stop, put her down, and go back in the house. She was such a bad mother she didn't deserve a baby, he decided, and she already had two, anyway. His wife didn't have one. He took Summer Dawn home with him."