The Covenant Read online

  Enough sunlight slanted through the cracks in the roof to read the bronze plaques fixed above the niches in the walls. The oldest vault belonged to Josiah Overton Stirling, born in 1833, died 1930. His beloved wife Beatrice and four darling children—Murray, Phillip, Mary and Claire—all died within days of each other in 1873, the same year that yellow fever nearly turned Memphis into a graveyard. Beside him lay a second beloved wife, Estella Ruth, who had no birth date but died September 1, 1898, the same day that Caesar Augustus Stirling was born. Caesar died in 2002 at the age of 104 and was interred in the imperial Roman sarcophagus in the center of the crypt, with winged Victories reposed above his bones and naked prepubescent caryatids holding up his marble deathbed.

  One name seemed out of place: John Allen Vardry (1918–1942). A bronze plaque, Ruth Stirling Vardry, hung beside his, minus the date of death. When they finally laid her bones here, no more Stirlings would pass that rusty iron grate, as hers was the last and only unoccupied niche in the tomb.

  In all my explorations, I never did find Spring Lake. The dry creek that Deacon said would bring me to it led instead to a shallow gully overcome with wild rose and blackberry vines. Most nights around dusk, the neighborhood children would come out and I could hear them playing in the woods until after dark. I tried to find them once or twice but never did. I didn’t really expect to.

  Late in the third week of my work, I could tell something was going on over in the estates—that’s what Deacon’s people called the area beyond the forest where the rich people lived. One Friday evening I couldn’t find Deacon when it came time for my ride back to the motel. One of his parishioners said he’d gone to see Mrs. Loftin. I borrowed a flashlight and set off through the woods along the now-familiar trail. But this time I must have taken a wrong turn, because it led me out at the base of the levee near the spillway. The neighborhood children were starting up early tonight—I caught snatches of Holly’s wire-briar-limber-lock song drifting through the trees.

  I climbed to the top of the levee, stopped to light a cigarette and blow the cobwebs from my lungs. There were some big houses over there across the lake, big enough to fit two or three of Mrs. Ruth’s crumbling white mansion inside and still have enough room to park a private jet. The nearest had a long wooden pier jutting halfway out into the lake. It was lit up with spotlights, and someone had built a stage at the far end and decorated the rails with enough patriotic bunting to float a barge.

  Jenny’s house sat dark and silent at the other end of the levee. Though it wasn’t late, only one light shone in a downstairs window. I noticed then that I was near the spot where Sam Loftin had killed himself. I clicked on my flashlight and walked along the shore, shining the beam down into the water, not really looking looking for anything in particular but looking all the same. All I saw were the same limestone boulders, and the trapped and dwindling pools where a few tadpoles struggled in the mud, and one condom floated like a dead jellyfish beside a smooth, oblong cobblestone.

  I got close enough to the house to see that Deacon’s truck wasn’t parked in Jenny’s driveway. There was nothing left to do but head back, so I turned around and walked right through Sam.

  I came out the other side of his ghost with an icicle banging around my ribs. He was facing back the way he had just come, from across the levee, and he wasn’t waving so much as waving something away. He turned around and walked toward me and I backpedaled, not wanting to experience that level of spiritual intimacy again. He took a few steps, then his head jerked forward and he staggered, then lurched, too quick to avoid, and I felt him enter me again, and again the icy cold and now the additional blind, paralyzing, rush of terror.

  He passed through me and was gone, trying to escape the death already inside him, his hands over his head like a man on fire. He dove, but there was no splash, just a profound stillness, the lake below me as black and empty as a well. The flashlight in my shaking hand was dead, its batteries as drained as the woman holding it.

  I sat down and began to shake, just like that day when I dove in the lake. It was a cold that went down to my bones, a cold no blanket could warm, a cold worse that the coldest, illest heroin withdrawal on a bare steel bunk in a piss-stained jail.

  Sam Loftin hadn’t drowned himself and he hadn’t died of a heart attack. Someone had attacked him, someone I couldn’t see. I’d stood beside him and inside him, been baptized in his fear and shared the moment of his death like a conjoined twin. Never mind the record of hideous crimes I found in his suitcase in the attic, never mind that he died the same day as the daughter he was abusing, never mind how much it looked like suicide, someone had attacked Sam Loftin. I didn’t know who, not yet anyway, not unless he decided to show me.

  But I would find out. Somehow.

  21

  There are few things … hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery.

  — NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, THE SCARLET LETTER

  THE FOLLOWING DAY WAS a Monday. I woke up anyway, showered, brushed the hair on my teeth, and was waiting outside watching the heat rise off the asphalt when Deacon called. I noticed by the clock on my phone that he was late.

  “You’re late,” I said.

  “You don’t remember last night.”

  “Sure I do.” I barely spoke to him on the ride home, didn’t tell him about my encounter with Sam. I’d seen plenty of ghosts, but I’d never been one of them, never shared its terror at the moment of its death. Deacon had talked the entire way home, as he usually did, but I hadn’t listened. “Tell me again, just for kicks.”

  He sighed and said, “We’re not working today.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s the Fourth of July.”

  “Is it really?” That would explain the big fireworks tent parked across the street from my motel.

  “I’m at the nursing home picking up Mrs. Ruth. Luther Vardry is hosting the annual Independence Day Coon Supper for Senator Mickelson. Mrs. Ruth wants to be there, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Luther is actually letting her, probably because she won’t make a donation to the senator unless she can put the check in his hands.”

  “Naturally.” I knew he’d get to the point eventually.

  “Anyway, Mrs. Ruth wants to know why you’re not here.”

  “Tell her I wasn’t invited.”

  “Well, you are now. We’ll be at your place in about twenty minutes.”

  I said I was looking forward to it, even though I wasn’t. Normally I would have declined such an invitation, but after last night on the levee, I was fully prepared not to be surprised by anything I found. I just hoped I’d find something.

  I heard the siren of an ambulance pulling into the motel parking lot and stepped outside to see who died. The back doors of the ambulance opened and out stepped Deacon, dressed in his usual funereal black, but he had added a splash of festive color in the form of a star-spangled tie that flapped in the diesel exhaust. It took me a second to realize this was my ride to the picnic. I climbed in the back.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you, Jackie,” Deacon said as he shut the doors. I had put on my best secondhand Liz Claiborne blouse and a pair of designer shorts I’d dug out of a donation box one night. He wasn’t the first man to notice how well I cleaned up.

  By her smile, Mrs. Ruth approved as well. I rode beside her gurney. She was dressed for her big scene—slinky black dress, diamond earrings, pearl necklace wrapped half a dozen times around her impossibly long neck. She had an IV drip sticking out of one well-veined hand and a tinkling glass of bourbon gripped in the other. Even with an oxygen hose nestled under nose, she still made me look like the personality girl in the middle school clique. She held my hand while we punched red lights all the way to Malvern, the ambulance weaving into oncoming traffic, bucketing over the potholes until I felt the fillings shaking out of my teeth. “Are you growing out your hair?” Ruth asked.

  “I thought I m
ight try something different,” I lied. I didn’t have the money to get it cut.

  The driver didn’t turn off the siren until we passed the guard shack at Stirling Estates. Little American flags were stuck in the ground every ten feet along the road and flags were attached to every fence post, every mailbox was wrapped in flag tape, flagpoles fifty feet high flew flags big enough to blanket a tractor-trailer down to the treads of the tires. Every yard had at least one sign supporting the reelection of Senator Mickelson, every tree a yellow ribbon wrapped around its trunk, every minivan and Mercedes parked along the road leading to the park sported a magnet that read, “Support Our Troops.”

  We pulled up in front of Luther Vardry’s house to find a Malvern policeman directing traffic. Roy Stegall’s urban assault RV idled in the driveway. Both sides of the road were lined with people heading to the park next to Luther’s house. A sign by the gate into the park read, “Stirling Estates 23rd Annual Coon Supper.” Way back under the shade trees that lined the shore of the lake, a catering truck from Hungry Bob’s Country Bar-B-Q and a band’s trailer were parked next to Nathan’s popsicle van. The long pier that I had spotted from across the lake last night ran out from a promontory, ending in a sort of gazebo where the band was setting up its instruments.

  “So what’s this shindig all about?” I asked.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of a coon supper,” Mrs. Ruth said.

  The ambulance stopped and the driver got out, leaving the engine idling. “Sure, but I think I may be a little underdressed for the occasion. I left my best bedsheets at home.”

  “It’s for the benefit of Senator Mickelson.” Deacon opened the back doors. “Everybody will be here, every politician and political smoothie within a hundred miles. Of course, we’re also invited to Luther Vardry’s private picnic.”

  I hopped down. “So glad we don’t have to mingle with the ordinary millionaires.”

  He and the driver lifted Mrs. Ruth’s gurney out and set it on the ground. Nathan Vardry appeared, pushing a wheelchair as though driving a race car, making vroom noises with his lips. He winked at me as Deacon and the paramedic helped Mrs. Ruth into her chair. Nathan pushed her up the driveway, making tire-squealing noises all the way up to the house.

  “Nice kid,” I said to Deacon. “How long has he been twelve years old?”

  Luther’s house was built like a temple, designed to awe the supplicant upon her approach. The house was a modest affair of eight or nine bedrooms, with ten antebellum-style columns across its Federalist front and twenty-foot doors topped by a Palladian window. It only took a moment to realize this was Mrs. Ruth’s house in the woods, only built to a grander scale, a monument to the Vardrys’ infinite wealth.

  Deacon led me around to the back by way of a brick path bordered with bright yellow rosebushes on one side, and river cobbles as big as softballs on the other. It brought us to an iron gate guarded by one of Sheriff Stegall’s goons. Though it pained him to do so, he let us through without a body-cavity search. Only another half-mile hike and we entered the deer park that was Luther Vardry’s backyard. A police helicopter passed low over the house, sounding like a war flashback, while a mob of overdressed children chased its shadow across the lawn and waved as it banked out over the lake.

  The path cast us up on the shores of Caligula’s summer palace, with its Roman fountain of naked cherubs frolicking with dolphins and emperors, a marble obelisk carved with the Ten Commandments (even the one about coveting), a pergola not much larger than airship hangar, and concentric rings of raised rose beds surrounding a koi pond paved with polished brown river cobbles. A concrete path ran straight as a ruler down to a boathouse on the lake, where a smallish yacht bobbed in the wakes of passing jet skis. A pair of Irish wolfhounds the size of small horses came bounding around the corner of the house, nearly knocking us down in their frantic joy, then circled back and beat me to death with their tails.

  22

  FIRST, THERE WAS THAT BRIEF, awkward period where you enter a party and wait to be noticed. With Deacon at my side, it was briefer than usual. Luther Vardry’s wife, Virginia, appeared long enough to stick a beer in my hand, then vanished smoothly into the shrubbery. Next came Holly, dressed in her high school softball uniform, slinking up behind Deacon with her tongue between her teeth. Finally, Luther appeared, gliding along on tiny, polished loafers that glinted in the sun.

  Luther had a bright round face like a Russian doll and a mustache that looked like it had been drawn with eyeliner and a ruler. His mouth was very thin and shut up tight beneath his nose, even when he smiled. His slicked-back black hair showed nary a trace of gray, but it was starting to wear a little thin above the temples. I could see the family resemblance to Holly and Nathan, but they favored their grandmother more than their father, and their mother barely at all—a woman so nondescript I couldn’t pick her out of the bushes, where she lurked, nibbling a Communion cracker.

  “Jackie is a photographer,” Deacon said as Luther took my hand.

  He perked up and gave my fingers a weak squeeze. “Perhaps I should hire you to photograph my daughter’s wedding.”

  “I ain’t getting married, Daddy,” Holly protested.

  Luther smiled in polite embarrassment. “Justin is a fine young man. He has asked for your hand in marriage and I have given it.”

  “But I don’t love him!” The fine young man that Holly didn’t love was at that moment sitting in a chair not ten feet away, scraping dog shit off the soles of his four-hundred-dollar loafers. “You can’t make me marry him,” Holly said.

  “Your mother and I can’t take care of you forever.”

  “Then I’ll move in with Nathan.”

  “Like hell, you will!” Nathan had just exited the back door, pushing his grandmother’s wheelchair ahead of him. Mrs. Ruth had to fend off the door with her oxygen bottle. She looked angry enough to wrap her air hose around his neck.

  Holly said to Nathan, “Why not? You got a million bedrooms in that house all by yourself.”

  “You know why not.” He rolled his eyes at me. “Like I want my sister moving in with me.”

  Ruth raised her voice above the familial din. “How long do I have to wait before somebody fetches me a God-damn drink?”

  “You want some punch, Mama?” Luther offered.

  “Hell no I don’t want any of that Baptist piss. Get me a real drink, and when you’re done, take this boy and drown him in the lake.”

  “Now Meemaw, you know you’re not supposed to drink hard liquor,” Virginia rustled from the shrubs.

  “Well, for God’s sake, woman, give me a beer before I perish!” For a woman strapped to an oxygen tank and confined to a wheelchair, she could still shout the squirrels out of the trees.

  Deacon took me around and introduced me to several other guests, who politely ignored me. My secondhand clothes didn’t have the charm of their secondhand clothes, because they’d overpaid for theirs to be ironic, while mine were stolen out of necessity. How Deacon knew them all, first and last name and all their relations down to their dogs and cats, remained a mystery. He seemed to have a politician’s gift for faces and facts, a font of information I hoped I could tap in the future, double entendre and all. I wasn’t ready yet to tell him my new idea about Sam Loftin’s death, not until I had more information and maybe a suspect or two.

  Sheriff Stegall arrived to announce that Senator Mickelson would be arriving soon to deliver his Coon Supper speech. Luther took control of his mother’s wheelchair and led the way. For a retired Baptist minister, he seemed pretty spry. Someone had found Ruth a floppy beach hat to keep the sun off her face.

  Out of the shade of Luther’s trees, the sun was murderous. It hadn’t rained in weeks, but the park’s grass was kept lush by frequent and expensive irrigation. As we crossed the baseball diamond, the wheels of Ruth’s wheelchair roused clouds of rust-colored dust that blew toward the lake.

  Holly dropped in between Deacon and me and whispered, “Isn’t i
t amazing how Meemaw doesn’t burn up in the daylight?” Deacon pushed his sunglasses onto his face, waved with the tips of his fingers and slanted away into the throng, leaving me with her.

  “She never seems to get any older,” Holly said, dragging the metaphor out for one more bow.

  “She’s a remarkable woman,” I said.

  “When I was little, I thought Meemaw was a vampire.”

  The police helicopter settled in the soccer field. Sheriff Stegall hurried over to open the door for Senator Mickelson—a tall, white-haired, smiling old nodder who had recently been considered a possible vice presidential candidate. He made a beeline for Luther and Ruth, stepping briskly in front of his security escort and waving to the corral of local reporters. After he had kissed Ruth’s hand, we continued on our way. A stage had been erected near the pier.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you,” Stegall said as he sidled up beside me. “How did you get invited to this bash?”

  “Do you want to see my invitation?”

  He patronized me with a smile. “What do you think of the show so far?”

  “You’ve put on a marvelously vulgar display of power,” I said.

  “Senator Mickelson likes to see how we’re spending his money.”

  “You’re doing as thorough a job as any I’ve seen.” I didn’t seem to bother Stegall in the least. He rattled on, preciously proud, as though the whole affair had been created for his amusement and benefit. “The senator has a house here in Stirling Estates. He’s chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and president pro tem, fourth in line of succession. My department is so flush with Homeland Security money, I got a guy on the payroll does nothing but think of new ways to spend it.”

  “We all have our problems,” I said.

  “Speaking of problems, I made a few phone calls, did a little checking around. Seems you used to be a cop.”