The Home Place: A Novel Read online

  Alma reaches out and puts her hand on Pete’s as he continues. His hand, grasping hers, is sweaty.

  “It was a Sunday night. We were both home for once. Shep was working on lesson plans and I was doing market research on this idea I have for a coffee brand. Man, that’s all gone to hell the last few months. We heard a knock and Vicky stumbled in, looking like hellhounds were after her, blouse torn, shaky on her feet. We sat her down and gave her water and tried to get her to talk.” Pete’s eyes meet Alma’s for a moment, insisting on his next words. “She was stone sober, but half incoherent. She kept saying over and over ‘He did it again,’ but that’s all she’d tell us. ‘I can’t believe he did it again. I thought it was over.’ She showed us a big horizontal bruise on her shoulder, but she wouldn’t say who did it. Just stared at us with those crazy eyes.”

  Alma wants to put her hand to Pete’s face to stop the words, but something in the truth he is telling acts like a force field. She can’t move. She feels sure that if she shifts at all, they’ll both break into a million pieces.

  “I don’t know what she expected us to do. For some reason she could never actually say it was rape, but I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life, Alma. I didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want us to call the police, wouldn’t go to the hospital. I thought about calling you, getting legal advice, and then I thought, what if she doesn’t want the police involved because she’s lying again? What if this is a setup like all the stories she used to tell me about needing money, and she smoked it all?” Pete looks for a second as if he might drop his head into his hands and weep. Instead he steps back off the bar stool and takes a few deep breaths while staring at the ceiling. When he looks back down, his face is blank. “I feel like such a jerk. I just didn’t know what to do, and if I had, she might still be alive.”

  Alma’s limbs begin to work again as soon as Pete moves. She reaches out to grab his arm and pull him close. She wants to find something soothing to say. She wants to have been there and known and done something, anything, to make it all different for Vicky and Brittany. At the same time, an awful, subversive, cynical voice in her head is recounting the many lies and petty manipulations Vicky has used on them all over the years. Could this be one last master stroke from the grave? The lie that will reach out to lash them all, even after the liar is gone?

  Pete holds Alma, rubbing her back. “We told her we’d be there for her if she wanted to press charges or get counseling or anything, but she would never even admit who it was.” Pete’s sigh is long and gravelly. “She was pissed. She said the law wouldn’t do anything for her.” Pete cuts himself off, biting back more words, and steps away from Alma. “It was more like she was hinting that if we were real men, we’d kill him, whoever ‘he’ was. Make it look like a hunting accident or something.”

  Suddenly, something in Pete’s face makes Alma lean toward him. “So did you?” Her voice is a whisper, but Pete can’t mistake her meaning. He recoils in surprise.

  “Did I what?” It’s a false protest. Alma makes an emphatic eyebrow gesture. He knows what she means. He looks away.

  “Christ, Alma, no.”

  CHAPTER 14

  TUESDAY, 2 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  The rented Mitsubishi has no way of knowing how to get to the house on Lewis, but still, it takes her there. Alma is in front of her parents’ old house without any intent, idling under the streetlight, her mind empty. She hasn’t been here in more than a decade, when she threw most of their possessions into trash bags to take to the rescue mission and the consignment shop. Except for the few things she, Pete, and Vicky chose as mementos, some camping gear, kitchenware, and a few useful dorm-room items, they loaded nearly everything into the back of Walt’s pickup and watched it roll away.

  Most of it wasn’t worth saving—stained rugs, worn towels, secondhand furniture—but Alma remembers the weight and taste of the tears as she bagged up her family’s possessions. She remembers the petroleum smell of trash bags filling the living room. It felt horribly cruel to dispose of her parents’ personal things: if they came back now from the dead, there would be nothing to come home to—no shoes, no face cream, no electric razor. Walt—along with the IRS—insisted that there was nothing to do but sell the house for the little equity in it and dispose of everything inside.

  “Sell everything,” Walt told Helen as he strode out the front door, leaving the work for his wife, the Saints, and his orphaned nephew and nieces. “Clear it out and keep the receipts.”

  Alma was sleepwalking in her grief, unable to protest, but Pete fought Walt with all his youthful ferocity. “It’s ours,” Pete cried, standing on the threshold of their house in his military-issue long underwear, snow swirling around his feet. “We have a right to it!” It has never occurred to Alma until this minute how strange it was that Pete should follow Walt into the military. But of course, that was before the accident.

  “You don’t understand anything.” Walt was angry and unwilling to give explanations. “Your parents’ assets are forfeit. There’s nothing left. The sooner you get used to that the better, ’cause it’s all going.” He stalked back to his pickup in the darkness.

  Still, they remained family, locked together in a macabre dance over Mike and Anne’s worldly leavings. The house was already on the market. By the end of his leave, Pete could turn to Alma and joke that at least they’d never have to look at that god-awful carpet again. Alma sits in the warm Mitsubishi now and finds herself longing for the good old days when all she’d lost was all she thought she owned.

  The house is well kept. A young family lives here. There’s a child’s sled in the front yard and a car seat in the little Toyota in the driveway. They’ve planted shrubs that have grown large enough to hold snow. There’s new siding, yellow instead of white. The walk is shoveled. Alma is strangely comforted. It’s good to see the house cared for, when so much of their former life has grown weeds.

  Alma last slept here the night before she left for Bryn Mawr, nearly six months after the crash. At that time, there was a real estate sign in the yard, only a few odds and ends left inside. Mercifully the market was terrible that year and the house took months to sell. The young IRS agent, who couldn’t meet their eyes and scratched himself incessantly while talking to them, managed to forget that the young Terrebonnes still had the keys. All the government cared about, after all, was the money.

  Helen stayed with Alma and Vicky until the mission sent a truck for the furniture, then went back to her house. Alma refused to leave, even after the beds were gone and she and Vicky were in sleeping bags side by side in the living room for a good five months. Helen didn’t resist. As long as Alma was in town, there was an unspoken compact that Vicky belonged with her. Helen had suffered some early miscarriages, then became completely unable to conceive, the years accumulating dust in a home that could have functioned only with the distraction of children. Helen’s mild alarm at becoming a parent after all those empty years didn’t register with Alma until long afterward, when out of nowhere she remembered whispered stories of the unwelcoming home that drove Helen into Walt’s arms at such a young age.

  All that was only gathering clouds that last summer. Alma would finish her long shifts at Albertsons and walk home with a backpack full of groceries, then stroll the neighborhood with Vicky as she learned to use her prosthetic. Chance was working all hours on a friend’s ranch to save money for college, but he’d still come in many nights. There was no television and they were half afraid that turning on the lights would bring down an IRS eviction notice, so in the evenings the three of them sat on the back stoop or walked to the playground or laid on a blanket in the backyard until the stars rose, Vicky fell asleep, and Alma and Chance rolled together like gravity had realigned. The girls drifted toward childhood haunts, places their parents used to take them: the park, the library, the soft-serve ice cream stand. They had a million things to talk about and only a few days left together, so naturally, they never spoke. They were
together, that was the thing.

  And then they were two. Alma remembers Chance calling over and over in those last days after she abruptly cut off all contact between them, leaving notes after the phone was disconnected, even showing up looking frantic during her shift at the grocery store, following her through the aisles while she mutely stocked shelves until the manager made him leave. There’s nothing left to say, she told Chance as he pleaded with her, and she meant it. For the last few days she and Vicky sat for hours at the park, Alma feeling so disconnected to the ground, trees, streets, that she thought she might well float away. Alma pictured them that way in her head, floating through the streets almost invisible, the wraiths of Billings, half dead themselves.

  Lying on the floor those late August nights with cicadas and crickets crying on the other side of the screens, Alma played with the zipper on her sleeping bag and felt sure that once she left, she would never be able to come back. Everything that made Billings her home had taken wing in the silent flight of rubber on ice. The last night before she left she lay awake in the evening cool, letting tears roll for Chance and waiting for the flight to Philadelphia like it was an evangelical resurrection. Vicky fell asleep quickly on the hard floor and didn’t turn over all night, exhausted from struggling to master the prosthesis.

  In the intervening years, Alma’s regrets about those last weeks have become a sort of rosary, thumbed over in her mind until the worried beads are worn and familiar. I should have found another place for you to live. Click. I should have taken you with me—impossible, impractical, but I should have found a way. Click. And last but most awful: I should have stayed, delivered you from evil. There were only the hasty, inadequate words at the airport, as Helen hung back and Vicky clung to Alma: “It’ll be okay, bug. You can call me anytime.”

  Alma reassured herself at the time that she was leaving Vicky in the best available hands. She wouldn’t even have to change schools. Walt and Helen were family who would welcome Vicky into their home like the child they’d never been able to have.

  “He’s never rubbed my nose in it that I’m barren,” Alma heard Helen say to her mother once when they thought Alma had stepped outside. “He deserves my loyalty for sticking with me.” Helen had an autoimmune disorder that made conception and pregnancy difficult. Later this vague illness developed into full-blown multiple sclerosis. The specter of disease and disappointment walked with Helen at the best of times, and Walt drew further away as she grew worse. It was no secret that they’d never had anything to talk about. The day they got married, Walt shipped out for Vietnam. He never wrote his young, fearful bride, not once. She had to find out from other soldiers’ families that Walt had been spotted alive, where he’d been stationed. Helen never reproached him for it in all the quiet years to come.

  Maybe it’s hindsight, but Alma still feels as if she should have known that there was never much hope for Vicky in that emotional vacuum, only a long descent toward the morgue, under a big sky full of a million stars, none of them lucky for her.

  Really, Alma asks herself still, what alternative had she had but to leave Vicky with Walt and Helen? She and Pete were both so young, just starting to live their lives. To take care of Vicky would have meant sacrificing everything. And yet here in front of the old house, looking at the steps where she and Vicky played with sparklers on some long-ago perfect summer night, Alma condemns herself again. Whatever she could have done to save her sister, she didn’t do it. There is no “working through” that. No amount of talking or Zoloft will make it right. It’s an old-fashioned cross to bear. She’d better fit it to her shoulder and start down the road, beginning with finding Vicky’s killer.

  A half hour later Alma pulls into Maddie’s carport. She wants to give Maddie a quick report on the home place before stopping by the grocery store and heading out to pick up Brittany. Before she’s gotten around the car, a thin man steps out of the afternoon shadow of Maddie’s small garden shed to stand in front of her.

  In a stocking cap he looks different, but after a second she recognizes Murray. Alma rears back and lurches away from him, cracking her hip painfully on the side mirror. “What do you want?” she demands. She spots Murray’s car parked out on the cross street, where he could see anybody pulling up to Maddie’s.

  “I want to talk to you,” Murray says, stepping forward to close the distance between them. His hands are in his jacket pockets and there’s sweat on his face in spite of the cold. He’s not really bigger than Alma, but the way his eyes fail to focus properly makes her lace her fingers through her keys.

  “I thought you were in jail,” Alma says, taking a careful step backward.

  “Made bail.” Murray’s smile reveals decayed meth teeth. “Girlfriend of mine helped me out.”

  Alma shivers. “So why are you jumping out at me like that? You couldn’t just ring the bell?”

  “I wanted to talk to you alone. I’ve been thinking about Vicky.”

  Alma wants to take another big step away from him, but holds herself firm beside the car.

  “What about Vicky?”

  Murray puts a hand to his head, as if he’s in pain. “I don’t want to get involved in what’s going on. I don’t know nothin’. I was passed out in the house the whole time. When I woke up in the morning I saw police lights, so I scooted out the back. I hardly knew her.”

  “That’s not true. You must have known her pretty well. She let you use the house.”

  “All right, I know, but the cops don’t know about all that. I can beat this possession charge, but I can’t do hard time. I’m a businessman. It’ll fuck things up.”

  Alma sniffs. The cops arrested him at the home place. They know all about his connection to Vicky. Murray’s not making sense. “You’re dealing meth, that’s what it’ll fuck up. Why should I care? Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you know I knew Vicky. I want you to keep quiet about it. Just let things play out. I didn’t kill her.”

  “I’ve already told the cops everything I know about you. There’s nothing to keep quiet about.” She glances up at Maddie’s windows and catches the hum of a laugh track. Maddie won’t hear anything coming from outside.

  Murray’s face loses its slack expression. “I’d say that was a mistake.” He steps forward and brings his face a little closer to hers. Alma can’t help but recoil. “I’m already out time and money because of you. My whole operation’s got to relocate. You drag me into a murder investigation and I might start to get pissed off.”

  “Are you threatening me? Because if anything happens to me, you’re going to be suspect number one.” Alma’s mind jumps to Vicky’s last moments, bleeding in the cold and dark, with nothing but her keys as a weapon, and someone leaning over her, covering her face. She’s frightened and furious all at once, and she wants to smack that smartass look off Murray’s face. The nerve of this little prick. She’s bested his professional kin, the toady corporate negotiator who thinks he can intimidate women with threats and never expects to eat his lopsided contract for lunch.

  But Murray isn’t finished. “I know your brother. The faggot. And the little girl too.” He smiles a creepy little smile with only the edges of his mouth. His skin, so close, is rough and colored an unhealthy gray. “Brittany Terrebonne, right? Goes to Broadwater?”

  Alma’s anger overwhelms her fear. “If you go near that little girl, you’ll have a lot worse than police to worry about,” she hisses.

  Murray takes a step back but the smirk doesn’t change. “All I’m saying is, let the dead rest. No reason to get me involved, right?”

  Emboldened by his slight retreat and the wobble in his gait, Alma takes a threatening step to look him straight in the eye. “I want you off this property and away from the home place for good. I want you nowhere near my niece or any member of my family. You want to be left alone, you leave us the hell alone.”

  Murray has turned and taken a few more uneven steps away, but at this he stops and glares back at her in th
e already fading light. The muscles in his neck flex and he shows his hideous teeth. “It’s a deal, lady.”

  Inside the house, Alma checks all the locks and gives what sounds to her own ears like bland, unconvincing reassurance that she’ll take care of things at the home place, that Murray has left there for good. Maddie is satisfied. Now that she’s calmed down a little, Alma considers Murray’s words further. If he’s ceding the home place to her, that means he understands that Vicky’s death has extinguished his claim. With Vicky gone, he has nobody to hide behind. That alone is a reason for him to want her alive. It’s almost a shame. Alma frowns. Murray would make an ideal suspect. But he could have motives she knows nothing about. Back in the car, she calls Ray with the news about Murray’s visit.

  “Well that punk.” Ray is indignant. “I’ll send out a uniform to bring him in. We’ll find some excuse, keep you out of it, don’t worry. Sorry about that.”

  By the time she’s filled the backseat with groceries and hit the interstate, Alma feels as if she’s running down a street in London during the blitz, trying to get to the bomb shelter in time, frantic to reach the place of safety. The home place is the only refuge left.

  When Alma gets to the Little m, Brittany is waiting at the front windows of the ranch house in a white sweater, a fetch to Alma’s eyes in the gathering country night. She runs out and hops in the car. Jayne is at the door with Mae on her hip, waving a warm goodbye. Alma steps out to say a few quick words of thanks, but she is weary, desperate to regain the quiet of the home place. She settles back into the driver’s seat with relief, throws the car into gear, moves them forward toward the road.

  “Hi,” Brittany says. “Did you know the Murphys have chickens?” Her tone is casual, as if Alma comes to pick her up every day and this is a conversation resumed.

  Alma hesitates. “I know it’s nice spending some time here, honey, but don’t get too used to it. We haven’t decided anything permanent yet.”