Page 131 of Long Way Down

“Yeah. And that was why, I think, when I got to the shack, and when I went inside, and found her lying there, dead, with her clothes all twisted up, I didn’t really understand what I was looking at. I didn’t realize what had happened to her.”

She took a deep breath, and kept going, stumbling over the words a little in her rush to get them out, to get them off her chest, finally. “He was there. He put his hand over my mouth, and he squeezed my throat” – a throat that, now, bore the shadow of a forming bruise where Doug Waxman had gripped her tight so he could press the edge of a knife to her face – “and told me that if I told anyone, he’d kill my whole family. That God wanted him to. God loved him, and not me, and so nobody would believe me if I said I’m seen him out there with Ivy, so why bother tattling at all?

“Flashlight beams came through the windows: Mark Wallace’s boys, out gigging frogs, a whole burlap sack full of them, caught in the storm and seeking shelter. Pastor Keith told me to keep my mouth shut, and slipped out before they came in. They found me standing there, dripping all over the dirt floor, Ivy dead behind me.”

She wiped her eyes again, though they were dry, now. Too dehydrated to cry anymore, he thought. “And I didn’t tell. The police came, and they asked me so many questions, and they took Ivy away in a body bag. Mama screamed at me, and then my aunt screamed at me, and slapped me in the face over and over until Daddy pulled her off of me, but I didn’t tell any of them. Not for a long time, anyway.”

He touched her face; smoothed his hands up her forearms, under her sleeves, where her skin was too cool and clammy. “You weresix, Dixie. And he’d threatened your family. No one would have blamed you for not saying anything.”

“Oh, no, they weren’t mad ‘cause I kept it secret. They were mad when I finallytattled.” A flare of old anger, as she spat the word, and then exhaustion dragged her back to flat determination. “Pastor Keith was a ‘pillar of the community.’ Beloved by every mother, and old lady, and favorite uncle in all of Danville. He’d just baptized the sheriff’s new baby, and all the deputies got married in his church. He led the Danville High football team in prayer each Friday night before the game. And here was I, little nothing-special Missy Dixon, saying he’d murdered my cousin, who’d been dead for twelve years.

“Mama hated me.” She’d lapsed into this sad, yet somehow serene tone, voice blooming with the essence of that small town; her speech settled into this lyrical sort of rhythm. Maybe the cliché about Southern storytellers was true: she’d tugged the role on like a second skin, suitable and comfortable. “I could see it in her face. She didn’t yell, but her eyes got this look, and her jaw got really tight. She wished I was as dead as Ivy.”

He continued to stroke her arms. “That can’t be true,” he said, but she shook her head.

“Oh no, she did. Daddy didn’t care. He drank too much at that point; plop him down in front of the TV, and it didn’t matter what went on around him.

“It was bad at school, too. Parents didn’t want their kids talking to me. Pastor Keith got taken in for questioning, and I was the villain, the one who’d dared to accuse him of something awful. Danville’s such a tiny place…those sorts of crimes don’t happen there, they just don’t. Rape, murder: that’s for big cities and TV dramas. It was so unthinkable, so heinous, that it was easier and better for all of them to call me a liar than to examine what they’d all observed about Keith Blevins.

“The FCA put dog shit in my locker.” She snorted. “The ‘Fellowship of Christian Athletes.’ Apparently, Jesus wants you to write DIE, BITCH in dog shit on somebody’s locker front.”

Pongo wanted badly to say something comforting, but couldn’t come up with anything appropriate. So he laid there, stroking the baby-fine hairs on her forearms, and watched a hint of firmness return to her gaze.

“Granddad believed me, though. He knew I wasn’t a liar.”

“Did he talk to the cops?”

“He tried to. But the sheriff told him he’d best get back to working on his cars and let them handle the police business.

“Pastor Keith had a nice, takeout dinner at the station, fried shrimp and hush puppies from Bertha’s Café, homemade sweet tea from a jug the sheriff’s wife brought. Two deputies drove him home and walked him inside, turned on his lamps and poked in his closets. Made sure he was safe and sound before they left for the night.

“They didn’t check the car port, though. And that was the door my granddad came through, after the deputies were gone. He said Pastor Keith was in his recliner, in front of the TV, with his pants undone. Dirty magazine in one hand and his dick in the other.

“Granddad put two slugs of buckshot through his heart.”

“Holy shit,” Pongo breathed, a jolt of something like delight shooting through him. “He killed him?”

She cocked her head, gaze narrowing a fraction. “You ever heard of anyone taking buckshot to the chest point-blank andliving?”

“Son of a bitch. Granddad’s a real one, huh?”

“Yeah.” A wistful smile graced her lips a moment, a flash of true, deep satisfaction. And then faded. “I don’t go home for holidays, but I try to get down to Parchman Farm at least once a year to visit him. He’s adjusted shockingly well to prison.” She shook her head, wondering. “So many people stew over it. Being locked up. The routine and the risk and all that. But he says, ‘Ain’t a big deal. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.’”

Pongo whistled, quietly. “Damn. I think he’s my new hero.”

Another smile, this one even quicker. She blinked hard, lashes fluttering. She’d cried all her mascara off, and they were a pale, amber brown. “I knew there was something wrong with Pastor Keith, but nobody else saw it. And then, now, with this case, Doug Waxman didn’t even register as a threat. I don’t…” She tipped her head down, hair sliding forward to shield her face. “Not one of my instincts is any good.”

“Hey, now, that’s not true.”

She didn’t seem to hear him, fiddling with the edges of his cut, tracing the threads of his patches with her nails. “I asked myself so many times if I imagined what happened in that shack. Did he really threaten me? Had I imagined it? Did I go in there, find Ivy OD’d on homemade bourbon, have a tipple myself and pass out? Dream it all? Was I one of those kids who hallucinated and then stuck to my guns when I was wrong?”

“Dixie.”

“And then, when I finally confessed, because I couldn’t sit in that pew one more Sunday with him looking at me, couldn’t stomach the thought that he was going to run for mayor, the bastard – all the parents said I was paid political opposition. That I wanted drama. That I was a little slut who’d made advances onhim. I don’t–”

He pushed her hair back so he could cradle her face in both his hands. Her eyes snapped to his, too-bright, feverish in their remembered pain, still terribly fresh beneath the shiny, cold veneer she’d shaped for herself.

“Sweetheart, you have to know none of that was your fault. You do know it, right?” A tear winked on her lower lashes, and he caught it with his thumb.

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