All I’m asking is that you trust me. All I’m asking is that you put your faith in my feelings for you. I got a truck from my cousin Ned, a beat-up old thing but it runs, and I’ve packed what I need and I’m ready to go. But I ain’t going without you.
I’ll be at the quarry tonight, I’ll be waiting for you. If you trust me enough to come I’ll dedicate my every waking hour of the rest of my life to making you happy, I will. I swear. But if you don’t come, if you won’t run away with me, then I’ll do it the other way. I’ll do what I need to do to protect you and whatever consequences that come my way I’ll bear gladly because I’ll be bearing them for you. Tonight, I’ll be waiting. Tonight.
J.
30
PIERCE, WEST VIRGINIA, was a county seat, and to prove it, on a hill smack in the center, they had set the county courthouse, a blocky brown building with a single turret, built of sandstone quarried out of a ledge of rock at the far end of the town. To one side of the courthouse the city climbed the slope of the mountain, to the other it fell gently toward the river and then reached across to the far bank, where scattered houses sat in the shadow of another steep rise. The main street, imaginatively named Main Street, jogged around the courthouse. It was built up with brick buildings, squat and aged black, all pressed together along the narrow street as if real estate had once been a prized commodity in the county. The buildings had signs from the middle of the last century, stylized neon banners advertising gifts and flowers and the Courthouse Hotel, signs that hearkened back to a prosperous past. But Pierce didn’t look prosperous now. It looked as if nothing had been built in fifty years, except for the modern and unpleasant Rite Aid that sat just before the turnoff. Something had slipped away from Pierce, some vitality. In its buildings and slumped posture you could sense the vaguely disturbing notion that Pierce was at the heart of an American dream that had suddenly shifted.
We drove around a bit to get our bearings and then took the Hailey Prouix tour of the city. Our first stop was the high school, stretching out on the banks of the river, home of the Fighting Wildcats. It was big for the town, too big, and the buses in the lot told us that children from all over the valley attended. This was where the likes of Hailey Prouix could mix with the wealthy Grady Pritchett as well as mountain trash like Jesse Sterrett.
Our second stop was up the hill from Main Street, a lovely little house painted white with a porch that wrapped around the front like a generous ribbon. The lawn was neatly trimmed, the flowers in the beds were blooming brightly, a swing set could be seen in the side yard. It was the all-American home, it even had a picket fence. The sign said THE LIPTONS, and it seemed as if the Liptons had lived there for generations, but that was an illusion. This was Hailey Prouix’s girlhood home. I wondered how it smelled when she was young, whether the paint then was peeling, the lawn untrimmed, the beds brown and weed-ridden. I wondered what I could have seen through those windows had I been here twenty years before. But time had bleached that house clean of whatever then went on inside. Nothing to be learned here.
And, finally, nothing to be learned either at the quarry on the far edge of the town. I was directed to it by a kid at the Sunoco who eyed me suspiciously when I asked, as if it were a sacred place that I was intending to desecrate. I took a road that twisted up into the mountain and stopped at a turnoff the boy had described. There was a fence, and there were signs warning of dangers and signs prohibiting trespassing, and there was a gate wrapped with chains and fastened by a lock. But the lock was rusted, the signs defaced, the fence torn apart at certain edges. It didn’t take a thing to slip through.
It was getting dark now, but we could see the contours of what had been left after the stone had been ripped from the earth. The walls formed a shoehorn-shaped canyon browned by age, with bushes and scrub trees growing in the cracks, weakening the stone as the plants fought for purchase. There was a wide ledge below us and a path that seemed to travel down to the ledge, a path that required grabbing hold of certain bushes and the roots of certain trees as you made your way down. The ledge was uneven, rough, and littered with beer cans and cigarette packs and graffiti. JK &FS. CATS RULE.JOHN G.LOVES TINA R. I wondered if there was a GRADY LOVES HAILEY or maybe a HP &JS, but I couldn’t spot such from where we stood. And then, beneath the ledge, at the bottom part of the quarry, was a road that rolled out to the river, to take the mined stone to the trains. Between the great stone walls and the road was a reservoir of sorts that seemed to be filled deep with water. I could imagine it all, hanging on the ledge and swimming in the reservoir, a few beers, a little laughter, high dives and skinny-dipping, shrieks of abandon, a little tonguing under the cover of the night, or maybe something a little more than a little tonguing. It was almost enough to make me wish I were seventeen again. Almost. This was the lake, I supposed, that drew the local kids on hot summer nights. And this was the lake from where they dragged the body of Jesse Sterrett.
“So what’s the agenda, mate?” said Skink as we stood over the edge and looked into the dark water.
“Go in town, ask some questions, find the truth about that boy’s death.”
“Sounds simple, it does. So simple, you’d have thought someone would have done it by now.”
“You’d have thought.”
“We just stop anyone on the street, or do you have a plan?”
“I have a plan.”
“That’s encouraging.”
Pause.
“Don’t you want to know what it is?” I asked.
“Not particularly.”
“Not even curious.”
“Only thing I’m curious about is why you brought me along.”
“A lawyer always brings an investigator when he questions witnesses.”
“That he does. But my guess, Vic, is you don’t want me nowhere near that courtroom.”
He was right, I didn’t. As far as I knew, only Skink could connect me to Hailey Prouix, and that I couldn’t allow. “Maybe not. Maybe I just like your company.”
“I am charming, I am. But if I was a hundred and fifty dollars a day charming, I’d be in another line of work. You don’t know what the hell you’re getting into, do you?”
“Nope.”
“And you wanted to bring some muscle.”
“Something like that.”
“All right, then.”
“Don’t you want to know my plan?”
“Nah,” he said, turning from the edge and heading back for the path up the hill. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re chasing here after your own tail. I don’t need no plan. I’ll just sit back and watch the show.”
31
“COURSE I remember,” said Chief Edmonds as he wrapped his meaty hands around a coffee cup. “How could I forget? A sight like that’s not something slips away so easy. When they pulled him out of the water, he was bloated and white like a German Wasserwurst and the back of his head was cracked open like a walnut.”
I tried to ignore the unpleasant food imagery as I finished my breakfast.
We were in Kim’s Luncheonette on Main Street, a large, barren café that, with its high ceiling and uncomfortable spaciousness, seemed to have taken over for a failed hardware store in one of the city’s squat brick buildings. The plain Formica tables were sparsely filled with grizzled patrons, who slumped over their meals and drank their coffees in silence.