I scanned his gangster outfit and battered features.

"We're just taking a ride through the countryside," he said. "We're going to find someplace nice and private where you and me and our good friend Grady Pritchett can have ourselves a friendly little talk."

35.

"YOU KNOW that guy at every high school," said Grady Pritchett, "the guy with the rich father and fast car and best-looking girlfriend, the guy with the pack of followers that hang on his every last word and laugh at his every last joke? The guy that seems to have the whole school beat to h.e.l.l?" Pritchett took a pull from his can of Coors. "That was me. Leastways, that was me before I got all messed up with Hailey Prouix." that guy at every high school," said Grady Pritchett, "the guy with the rich father and fast car and best-looking girlfriend, the guy with the pack of followers that hang on his every last word and laugh at his every last joke? The guy that seems to have the whole school beat to h.e.l.l?" Pritchett took a pull from his can of Coors. "That was me. Leastways, that was me before I got all messed up with Hailey Prouix."

We were surrounded by trees, not far from a stream whose gurgling we could just hear above the cacophonous calls of the insects all around us searching for love. Skink had stopped at a bar farther down the road and gestured me in to buy a couple six-packs, and now we were in the flatbed of Grady's truck, drinking. Grady had pulled a small electric lantern from the toolbox and we set that down between us like a campfire. We sprawled around its ghostly light and we talked. Or I should say it was Grady who talked. And the funny thing was, it didn't take much yanking to get the story out. Any hard feelings about the fight at the Log Cabin took wing as he started talking. It was as if the story had been festering inside him for all those long years, like the rotting core of a rotten tooth, and he was glad now, finally, to let it tumble out.

"I knew her and her sister before anything happened between us," he said. "Pierce ain't no New York City-everyone in Pierce knows everybody's d.a.m.n business-and everyone knew them Prouix sisters. Their father died when they was just girls and the uncle moved in to take care of them all. It was a touching story, and we all were a little sorry for them. But as they got older, they got cuter, and the sorry turned to something else, if you know what I mean. Now, Roylynn, she wasn't much interesting, she was like this porcelain thing you were so afraid was gonna break if you as much as breathed on it, but Hailey, well, Hailey grew up nice, with a flash of fire in her eyes. She was a couple years younger than us, but she had something, oh, yes. And when this girl Cheryl I was having some fun with decided she wanted to get all serious, talking about getting married and having kids, well, that was the end of Cheryl. So I was looking around for someone new, because when you're that guy at the high school you need to always have someone, and something about Hailey lit my fancy."

"She had that fire," I said, and the ghostly lit face of Skink stared hard at me as I said it.

"And remember now, she was only fifteen. But still. And so I asked her out, because when you're that guy, it ain't no big thing to ask some soph.o.m.ore out, and d.a.m.n if she didn't say no. Surprised the h.e.l.l out of me, and it wasn't like a shy no, it was like a get-lost-you-a.s.shole no. The guys, they got a laugh out of that one, but I wasn't laughing. You know how sometimes you see a girl every day of your life and it's just like nothing and then, when you decide you might like her, well, then every time you see her after that your heart just goes a little crazy? That's the way it was with Hailey when she said no to me. And after that, all I wanted in this world was her."

"She was playing you," said Skink.

"Maybe, but, you know, it was more like she really just wasn't interested, like there was nothing I could give her that she had any use for. So then I did like the full-court press, you know, being extra nice and getting her invited to all the parties and looking out for her all the time, like in the cafeteria and such. But none of it seemed to work. Until the reefer. I never expected her for that. Me, I started early, smoking with my mom."

"Your mum?" said Skink.

"My stepmom. My real mother, she left when I was young and took a chunk of my daddy's money, and then he got married again to someone not much older than me. And she was the one turned me on when I was just fourteen. My dad was out on business, and she came in wearing one a her outfits, which was not much at all, and looking d.a.m.n good, and she up and asked me if I wanted to try something. Sure, I said. So we lit up in the backyard just like that, lying side by side in the chaises next to the pool, blowing smoke into the air, and ever since, that was how I had my fun outside of school, blowing reefer. It was why I eventually quit the ball team and started cutting school, because it was all getting in the way of my drugs. I mean, my future was set, I was going to work in my daddy's car lots and become as rich as him and spend my nights banging models and smoking the best weed money could buy. My future was laid out smooth as ice, and I was all for it. Well, asking Hailey out to the movies or some dance wasn't working, so one day, out of desperation, I sidled up to her in school and asked if she wanted to blow some dope down at the quarry, and what she did surprised the h.e.l.l out of me. She looked up, smiled that wicked smile of hers, and said, 'Now you're talking.'

"So that's how we started together, hanging at the quarry with the rest, smoking dope. She pulled it in with this intensity I always remembered. The rest of us was just having some fun, but for her it was serious stuff, like the joint, it was a lifeline she was sucking at, like there was something dark she was trying to forget. I figured it was her father's death that was b.u.mming her and I brought it up once and she told me to shut up in front of everyone, and that was the last time I did that.

"Now, it was clear that she was my girl, and at the quarry, with the others, she was all full of affection. I'd sit there with my arm around her and we'd act like a couple, and sometimes she would exhale the smoke right into my mouth and that got me harder than anything. But, you know, it never moved beyond that. When we were alone, she was cold, man. I'd sit there and try to kiss her and she wouldn't kiss back, her lips were like smooth slivers of marble. She'd let me grope her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, which was pretty nice, but when I tried to reach lower, she'd slap my hand away. I tried to force it once, and she kicked me so hard in the nuts I couldn't stand up for a week, and that was the last time I tried that, too.

"But I didn't sense like she wasn't that kind of girl. It was more she wasn't gonna be that kind of girl with me. Now, I'd been going all the way since I was fifteen, and Cheryl like couldn't get enough of it, but Hailey wouldn't give me a thing. Just to keep me happy she would jerk me off now and then, but she'd do it only 'cause I was begging and it wasn't so much better than me doing it myself, worse actually, because she was always acting like she was in a hurry for me to finish, which kind of ruined it. Anyone else, I'd a sent her packing, but her refusals just drove me more crazy. I even once said we could get married, and all she did was laugh at me like I was some zero a.s.shole. It was humiliating enough to be a turn-on. So that's the way it was when Jesse Sterrett all of a sudden started hanging out at the quarry.

"Jesse and I used to be best friends. We played ball together all the time, basketball, baseball, everything. He was quiet and I wasn't, he was poor and I wasn't, he was humble and I wasn't. We was a perfect pair. But he turned against me when he started hanging with that Leon Dibble. I never liked that kid, thought he was strange in the brain and told Jesse so, and it was like Jesse near took my head off. Next thing you know Jesse's always off with his new best friend and I'm like nothing to him. It wasn't no surprise to anyone that Leon was as queer as a three-legged goat, and I figured that made Jesse the same. And he proved it to us all when Leon, he killed himself, it was like Jesse went into mourning. It was no use trying to talk to him after that, he wouldn't talk back. Got so the only way I could get a reaction from him was to needle, needle, and so I did, and he just took it and glowered, and at least that was something. But then he started hanging out at the quarry.

"I thought maybe it was me he was interested in, like as a friend, like he wanted us to be pals again. He wasn't there to toke, 'cause he didn't toke, and he wasn't there to joke around, because he didn't joke either. He was just there. And then I got an inkling he wasn't there for me, he was there for Hailey.

"Why is it that everything we most dread in this life we end up forcing on ourselves? I started making fun of him, needling him like I did, laughing at him for not reefing up with us, for being so quiet, for not liking no girls. Laughing at his back when he stormed off. And then one night, when he stormed off, Hailey, she gave me a look that froze my heart before she went off after him.

"It wasn't long before I realized something was going on, and it drove me insane. The thought of her doing all the things with him that she wouldn't do with me. I couldn't sleep. I started hanging outside her house at night, waiting to catch her with him. I never did but that meant nothing. Sometimes, in desperation, I called out her name and that uncle of hers, a brutal piece of man if ever there was one, would rush outside with his shotgun and tell me to get the h.e.l.l away or he'd spatter me sure all over the county. I knew he would, too, it was in him, but it didn't mean a thing to me. I was insane. And then one day I just went after Jesse.

"I always was taller than him, stronger than him, and when as boys we wrestled, I always ended up on top forcing him to yell uncle. But he had kept playing ball and working out and the only thing I was exercising was my lungs, and this time it wasn't even close to a fair fight. I started it, he finished it, and I ended up in the hospital.

"My cheek was shattered, my jaw broken, my knee was busted up, I had bruises up and down my side. When I came in, the doctors said I looked like I'd been hit by a truck, but that wasn't the worst. Everyone knew what had happened, I had lost my girl to some closet queer, I went after him and he put me in the hospital. You know how in every high school there's that guy? Well, I wasn't him anymore.

"No one came visiting, not even my daddy, who was ashamed both that I had fought and that I had lost. Only my stepmom would keep me some company, staying by my side, wiping my brow when I hurt too much to move. And when I got out, it was like I had turned into something else, some ungainly cripple creature no one wanted to have a thing to do with. You can guess how I felt, like everyone had turned on me, and they had. And then there was my former girl and former best friend off together in their little blissful world, leaving me hobbling in the gutter. I wanted to kill them, I did. I wanted to kill them both, and I said so to anyone who would listen."

"And so when you knew he was planning to meet Hailey at the quarry," I said, "you were there waiting for him."

"No, I wasn't. I wasn't, that was it, what no one would believe. I wasn't there. I swear."

"Then where were you?"

"Someplace else."

"Where? With Hailey?"

He stopped talking, just shut down like a radio turned off for a long moment. He stopped talking and sat, and you could see the muscles in his face flinch as he considered which of his answers to tell.

"Yes," he said finally.

"h.e.l.l you was," said Skink. "Makes no sense that you would be, what with all the stuff happening between you and Jesse and her. You're just saying it because you think that's the surest way to keep your a.r.s.e out of trouble. You're still worried about it, aren't you, mate? Even though it happened fifteen years ago and Hailey is dead, you're still worried they're going to think you done it."

"Yes," he said.

"But you didn't, did you?"

"No."

"And I believes you," said Skink.

He looked up at Skink with a strange hope in his face. "Do you?"

"Yes I do," said Skink, "but no one else did, did they?"

Grady shook his head.

"Your daddykins wouldn't believe a word from your face. He was sure you done it, wasn't he? He thought he had no choice but to bail out your a.r.s.e. So he paid off his pals, the priest, the police chief, and the doctor, and worked a deal with Hailey. He worked a deal wheres he would pay for her college, pay for her to get the h.e.l.l out of Pierce, so long as she made sure his boy didn't rot in jail for the rest of his life."

Grady Pritchett's eyes widened. "How do you know?"

"Because you're still in love with her, mate," said Skink.

"No I'm not."

"Don't even try. I can recognize the signs." Skink glanced at me. "It's a frigging epidemic, being still in love with Hailey Prouix. But you wouldn't still love her if she got you off for something you really done. That's not the way it works. If she had done that, well, you'd be blaming her now for every wrong thing in your life."

"She's the only one I can't blame."

"There you go."

"It was her idea," said Grady. "She came to me while I was still in jail for questioning. She came to me, and when I told her I didn't do it, like I told everyone I didn't do it, she was the sole one who believed me. It was she who came up with the idea of her being my alibi. She said she would work it out, so long as I agreed to parrot her story. And I did. Because I swear to G.o.d I thought they were going to fry my a.s.s. I didn't know yet my dad had the fix in. Both for the charges, and for my life."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"It was never the warmest between us. And when I stopped playing ball, which was so important to him, it turned hard. But after this, after him thinking I had killed Jesse, where the h.e.l.l could it go after that?" He stopped for a moment and wiped at his eyes, and his cheeks glistened in the pale light of the lantern. "He made me stay until the coroner ruled it an accident and the investigation was closed, made me stay in the house without a word pa.s.sing between us. Then late one night he came into my room, just the shadow of him with the light coming in from behind. He was holding a drink, I remember, the ice clinked against the gla.s.s. And he told me to go the next day, to just up and go and to never come back. And so I did, the very next day." He wiped at his eyes once more. "I never did see him again."

He lifted his beer and drained it. Skink rescued another from the death ring of plastic and tossed it to him. Grady popped it right open and swallowed all the foam that spurted out and then drank half of that one, too.

"After he died, well, he left most everything to my stepmom, who went down to live in Florida with some guy named Lenny, and he left me nothing except for one stinking used-car lot here in Weston. I thought it was him giving me another chance, thought I could turn it into something like he would have wanted me to, maybe a whole chain of dealerships like he had built. But inventory sucked, and sales, they've never been what they should have been, and with the kids vacuuming up the money there's nothing left for expanding, and every day I go into that place it squeezes more life right out of me. I thought he was giving me a final chance, and now I know it was his final punishment for doing what I never did do.

"But I didn't begrudge Hailey what she got out of it, and I still don't. It wasn't her fault the way she was, and she never fooled me about nothing. In fact, in the whole mess, what she did for me in the jail was the one decent thing anyone did for me. In fact, we was still friends, even after she moved east. I sometimes would drive up to see her in Philadelphia. So maybe you're right, maybe I still had a crush. h.e.l.l, more than maybe. But she never encouraged it or let me do nothing about it. She was just always kind to me, and seeing her even for a little sometimes made me feel the way I felt before, when we was at the quarry at the start and I was still that guy and she was my girl and everything coming was going to be just so smooth."

WE SAT in that truck most of the night, finishing the beers. Just like it was Grady who did most of the talking, it was Grady who did most of the drinking, and I figured he had cause. I asked him if he knew who it was who really killed Jesse Sterrett, and he said he always a.s.sumed it was an accident after all. I asked him about Hailey's sister, Roylynn, and he told me he had heard she was in a place just south of Wheeling. And after I asked him that, we sat in that flatbed and drank up the beer and didn't say much of anything, listening instead to the rustle of the night. We stayed quiet and listened until the electric lantern dimmed and died and the stars overhead turned bright and cold and hard. in that truck most of the night, finishing the beers. Just like it was Grady who did most of the talking, it was Grady who did most of the drinking, and I figured he had cause. I asked him if he knew who it was who really killed Jesse Sterrett, and he said he always a.s.sumed it was an accident after all. I asked him about Hailey's sister, Roylynn, and he told me he had heard she was in a place just south of Wheeling. And after I asked him that, we sat in that flatbed and drank up the beer and didn't say much of anything, listening instead to the rustle of the night. We stayed quiet and listened until the electric lantern dimmed and died and the stars overhead turned bright and cold and hard.

I drove him home. He wasn't in any condition to drive and I was, so Skink followed as I drove the black truck into the little town of Weston, to an old Victorian house that was nicely painted and well kept, hedges trimmed flat. When we pulled into the drive, a light went on in the upstairs window.

"Nice house," I said as I shut off the engine and handed him the keys.

"My wife takes good care of it."

"It doesn't look like it turned out all bad."

"She is sweeter than I deserve. And my kids, well, you know, they're my kids."

"Then why spend your nights at a dive like the Log Cabin?"

"All this ain't what I had in mind."

"Maybe it's time to grow up, Grady."

"Funny, that's what Hailey used to tell me, too."

"Where were you the night Jesse Sterrett died?"

"Nowheres."

"There's no such place."

"Sure there is. You just haven't spent enough time in West Virginia."

"Where were you?"

Pause. "You don't believe it wasn't me."

"I feel more comfortable with all the details nailed down."

He took a deep breath. The lights in one of the downstairs rooms turned on.

"She'd wanted it from the start," said Grady Pritchett, "I knew that, but I'd been good. Despite the temptations, I'd been a good boy. He was my daddy. But when things turned bad, she was the only one who came. And I grew so angry, so d.a.m.n angry, that I couldn't even think no more except about hurting someone, especially him, so I stopped being good. She left word she was meeting friends at the club, but that's not where she was. She was with me, in a motel in a town down the highway, smoking reefer, getting down and nasty. I was still so banged up, it hurt so much, and that was the best d.a.m.n thing about it."

I took that in. "You preferred your father to think you were a murderer than to know you were s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his wife?"

"Wouldn't you?"

I didn't have an answer.

The front door of his house opened, and a slim figure clutching closed her robe stood leaning in the doorway.

"Anything else?" he said.

"That about does it. If I need you to testify..."

"Forget it."

"All right," I said. "I'll forget it."

He turned to me and smiled weakly and then opened the door and hopped out of the truck. He walked slowly down the driveway to the house, stopped to kiss the figure, and, without looking back, shut the door behind them.

36.

THERE WAS one last place to visit in West Virginia. one last place to visit in West Virginia.

The man in white led me through a well-lit hallway. He had broad shoulders, and his head was shaved, and his name was t.i.tus. t.i.tus didn't check behind him that I was following, but then he didn't need to. I was spooked, yes I was. It was not my normal venue, behind the walls of an asylum.

It hadn't taken much to find the place. I had simply called the West Virginia number on the singed records from my cellular phone and they had kindly given me directions. It certainly didn't look like what I had pictured a mental hospital to look like. From the outside, in fact, in its att.i.tude at least, it suspiciously resembled the Desert Winds retirement home where we had met with Lawrence Cutlip in Henderson, Nevada. It was neat, well trimmed, seemingly deserted. A new, gabled structure with vinyl siding in a pleasing pastel, its gra.s.s freshly mowed, its bushes pruned into cute round b.a.l.l.s. It appeared to be as much a spa as anything else, a place to restore the frazzled nerves of society wives. I could imagine that Hailey Prouix chose it personally, just as she personally chose Desert Winds for her uncle. She seemed have a thing for tidy places in which to store her various relatives.

The patients I pa.s.sed as I followed t.i.tus through the hallway were dressed in normal clothes, and they seemed pleasant enough, but I could tell they were patients. Some were impossibly thin and their jaws jutted with a strange prominence, still others wore long sleeves even in the uncomfortable warmth of the building, still others moved with an unnatural sluggishness. I tried to guess what they each were in for, anorexia, self-mutilation, schizophrenia. Look there, that older woman in the corner of that room, she was staring into the sky as if hearing the voice of G.o.d. Or was there maybe a television bolted into the upper corner of the room? And that woman there, wearing the long-sleeved blouse, look at her hands marked with cigarette burns. Or were they just birthmarks? And that woman sitting quietly in another corner, staring at her lap, was she a paranoiac ax murderess drugged into a stupor? Or was that a paperback book hidden in her lap?

Well, anyway, I could tell they were patients, absolutely I could. There was just something about them. And the something about them, I realized, was that they were here. But, of course, so was I.

t.i.tus led me into a large common room and stopped at the entrance, waiting for me to step up beside him. "You can't take her from this room without prior approval," he said, his voice deep and commanding. "You can't give her anything without prior approval. You can't take anything from her without prior approval. There is to be no physical contact without prior approval. Do you have any prior approvals?"

"No, sir," I said.

"That settles that, doesn't it?"

"Yes, sir."

"What happened to your eye?"

"An accident."

"It accidentally got in the way of someone's fist?"

"Something like that."