The Home Place: A Novel Page 4

  Alma uses her left hand to wrench her right away from Vicky’s face. When she speaks, her voice is far louder than she intends and echoes off the cinder blocks. “This is my sister.”

  “Thank you,” Larry says. He moves a hand to close the shroud, then pauses. “The tattoos are beautiful,” he adds with some reluctance, as if he knows he’s crossing a line but needs to reach out to her somehow.

  “What tattoos?”

  “Hadn’t you seen them? She has a tattoo of a wing on the back of each shoulder—like angel’s wings. It was . . . oddly appropriate. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Can you—are you allowed to show me?”

  Larry glances down at Vicky’s body, judging the easiest way to roll the corpse. Without hesitating, he unzips the shroud a little and reaches across to put one hand on Vicky’s right arm and the other on top of her right shoulder, rolling her toward him enough to expose her upper right back to Alma. “She fell face-first, you see,” Larry mentions in a tone of professional appreciation, “and they didn’t find her until morning, so there’s no lividity on the back. The tattoo is remarkably clear.”

  He’s right; the tattoo is beautiful and detailed. It must have taken a long time, by someone with talent. “And the other side is the same?” Alma asks. She wonders when Vicky had them done, how she paid for them.

  Larry nods. “Perfect matching set. The only ones she had. It’s unusual, because they’re so big. Usually a person who goes in for that kind of body art will have it all over, but she’s completely clean except for that.”

  “I never knew about it,” Alma says. She reaches out to touch the fairy pattern on Vicky’s back, but the cold of her sister’s skin is too much this time.

  Larry clears his throat, as if suddenly aware that he’s said too much, and offers a form verifying the identification, then another authorizing the release of the body to the funeral home. As soon as she’s scrawled her signature next to the Xs, he steers her back into the hall as quickly as possible.

  It is only when the steel door latches behind her that Alma slumps against the slippery wall and braces her hands against her knees. She takes a few deep breaths. Vicky’s wings seemed inexplicably familiar—and suddenly she knows why.

  She and Vicky are back in the hall outside the sanctuary at First Church, getting ready for some long-ago Christmas pageant. Alma is the angel of the Lord who appears to Mary with glad tidings, and little Vicky—Victoria Rose, as the choir director liked to intone to get her attention—has been relegated to some shepherd role in a towel and headband. Vicky is distraught. She wants with all her fierce little heart to be an angel, and Alma wears the biggest and most beautiful pair of wings.

  “Please,” Vicky begs, lower lip beginning to tremble in a way she knows affects Alma, “let me try them on?”

  Alma’s entrance is coming up in just a few minutes, but she’s afraid that at any moment the congregation will hear Vicky’s wail louder than the angel chorus if she’s denied. “Just for a minute,” she concedes. “And be very careful.” She shrugs the wings off her own shoulders and helps Vicky pull on the straps. Vicky spins in delight, brown curls bobbing, then on impulse runs up to the first landing of the stairs to the old offices. Light shines through the wings from above, backlighting Vicky in a pose of divine exaltation as she stands on tiptoe at the top of the stairs, raising her arms.

  “Hold on to the rail!” Alma hisses, trying not to raise her voice. It’s too late. Vicky is tumbling from her precarious pose, sliding hard down the steps on one side, shredding the left wing, while Alma watches, unable to stop the bruising descent. Alma gasps at the destruction of the precious wings that she herself has longed to wear for several years. At the bottom, Vicky raises herself on one hand and twists to look at the wings. Her movements show that she isn’t badly hurt, but at the sight of the wings, she begins to sob, a discordant, broken lament audible all the way to the choir loft. Alma sets aside her own stabbing disappointment and kneels to put her arms around Vicky and shush her. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she murmurs. “We can fix them.”

  Vicky only cries harder. The choir director, Mrs. Thompson, runs up, heavy bosom bouncing, to tell Alma that it’s time to make her entrance. Her face falls at the sight of the wings. “Oh dear,” she says. “Well, they’ll know you’re the angel even without the wings. Just get in there, Mary’s waiting!”

  Alma rises to take her cue, leaving Vicky alone and weeping on the floor. By the time she comes back, the wings are abandoned in a pile, trampled by the other characters coming and going from the sanctuary, and Vicky is playing some sort of hand game with a girl in a pair of donkey ears.

  Alma thought the moment had passed without any real damage to Vicky, but now the tattoos have revived the little girl poised at the top of the steps, glowing like a cherub, just before the fall. Grown-up Alma, alone in the corridor outside the morgue, wraps her arms around herself and fights for control. She pulls her mind into the present, but the effort leaves her trembling. Her breath comes in gasps. She shuts her eyes, but vertigo nearly takes her, so she opens them wide and slams her hands against the wall. Slowly, the world rights and stills. Her breath slows and deepens.

  In a moment, Alma begins to move her feet, bolstered by the steady click of her high-heeled boots along the corridor, growing faster, seeking the sunlit world above. She finds a side door and plunges back into the bracing cold.

  CHAPTER 4

  SUNDAY, 2 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  Without thinking much about where she’s going, Alma steers the car the few blocks to the Itching Post, Pete’s place. As on any afternoon during term, its sofas and big upholstered couches are full of students nursing coffee and trying to study. The pool tables in back are hidden by the usual crowd of ringers and procrastinators, playing for what each desires most: money or the passage of time. It’s a commuter campus mostly, so Pete’s endeavor wasn’t an instant success, but he’s been in business for several years now and the place has developed a loyal and jittery following. Volume, Pete told her once over the phone, is the secret. Get the hospital workers coming in every day, get the standing orders going, give them what they need faster and better than the competition. Encourage the regulars, the coffee groups and book groups, give them a few specials to keep them happy, learn their names. Until this coffeehouse thing, she’d never realized her older brother had such a head for business. In high school, she would have picked him for Most Likely to Move Back Into the Family Basement.

  She remembers a late-night call at the office, nearly seven years ago now, Pete’s bright voice on the line. “I wanted you to know,” he said as she scrolled through a document she was editing, “I got a job. I start on the morning shift tomorrow. There’s a little training, then I’ll be managing a coffeehouse downtown.” Pete had tried going to college on his GI benefits and wound up spending more than he could spare of every check at the nearest bar. After he flunked out, he ran through a series of minimum-wage jobs. This was the first time in many months that his words didn’t seem a little slurred on the phone, regardless of the time of day.

  “That’s great, Petey,” she enthused, wondering how long this job would last.

  “Alma, listen. This time is different. I’m sober. I’ve been sober nearly a month. My new sponsor helped me get this job.” There was a light in Pete’s voice that she hadn’t heard since before their parents’ accident. It came down the line with a warmth resembling hope.

  “Aw, Pete, I’m so glad to hear that,” she answered. And she was, but the preceding years had been teaching her not to trust Pete’s recoveries. They were shorter and less frequent each time. “Who’s your sponsor?”

  “His name is Shep. He’s a vet too. We can . . . talk about things.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. Glad he could talk to someone. Pete was resolute in refusing to tell Alma about the things rotting in his soul, a big-brotherly gesture of protection that had cut him off from the person most likely to
hear and understand. Maybe talking things through with Shep would make Pete somehow, someday, better able to talk to her again.

  Now Pete is behind the coffee bar, looking very much at home in a bartender’s apron and an Edmonton Oilers cap over his balding head. “Little sister,” he calls, waving with a rag in hand. “Good to see you. You look like hell.” He comes around the bar and Alma steps into a bear hug that picks her up off her feet, as always.

  “I’m glad everyone in town is in agreement on that.” She laughs into his flannel shoulder. Pete is several inches taller than Alma and broad, a man who looks more like he should be cutting trees than pushing espresso. He got his size so early that he worked summers during high school doing ranch work, which he always says taught him that castrating bulls and mending fences is no way to make a living. His fine hair is half gone, but his eyes are the same soft brown that skipped a generation from their grandpa Al, against all laws of genetics.

  “Can you believe it?” Pete says into her ear. His voice has a deep growl that’s a little Johnny Cash and a little Elvis. Alma smiles at the beloved sound. “I keep thinking I’ll wake up and it won’t be real. Grandma said you were going over to identify the body. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t do it. You okay?”

  Alma nods and explains to him sotto voce about the coroner and the police, the way Vicky was found, the planned autopsy. Pete shakes his head.

  “No surprise there. She was messed up with some bad folks.”

  “Do you know any of them?” Alma holds Pete’s eyes, feeling the irresistible draw of suspects to pursue. She wants something to offer Detective Curtis. Whatever happened, she wants it resolved—and quickly, before anything in Seattle goes off the rails.

  Pete thinks a minute, then pulls a few stools behind the bar so they can sit away from the customers. “A few. Nobody I consider dangerous, except maybe this one guy, Murray something. Bad news. I’m not sure about now, but Dennis used to have these friends who went back and forth to Salt Lake, running drugs. Hard stuff. It all comes through here. If I were the cops, I’d look into that scene.”

  Alma skates a hand across the slick surface of the counter. “I knew about that. She let a few things drop about Dennis, back when she was still talking to me.”

  “She got to know them through him. She comes in here now and then.” Alma notices Pete’s use of present tense. How odd that he hasn’t digested Vicky’s being dead, while Alma has begun to feel as if Vicky’s been gone a very, very long time. On the other hand, Pete didn’t see her body on that gurney.

  “Yeah,” Pete goes on, “there was a while when I felt like I was her best friend. She’d come in here strung out or working double shifts and I’d give her mugs of coffee to bring her around, listen to her problems, that sort of thing. Tried to get her into the program, but she didn’t want anything to do with it. I never asked where Brittany was or if she should be at work. I wanted her to come back.”

  “And she talked about this Murray? You know him?” Explain this to me, she wants to demand. Tell me how this could happen, who could do this to our sister.

  Pete raises an eyebrow at her eagerness. “I could pick him out of a lineup, if that’s what we’re talking about. We aren’t exactly buddies but, yeah, I met him.” Pete keeps moving as he talks, arranging pastry trays, stowing supplies, straightening tea boxes, coming back to rest lightly on his stool until he notices another task to be done. Somewhere, he’s recovered the sort of hummingbird energy he had as a small boy. “Came up here from Vegas a few years ago, I guess. He used to be mostly a small-time meth dealer, but she owed him money, and I got the feeling he was expanding the operation. She let him use the home place a few times to get him off her back, and then of course he wouldn’t leave.”

  “She let him use the home place?” Alma hears how her voice sounds, just like Grandma’s when one of the neighbor kids gets a new tattoo, but she doesn’t care. This is shocking.

  “It’s so far from anything, and those big barns. It’s perfect. I tried to get rid of him a few times, but I didn’t want to involve the police for fear it would lead back to Vicky and she’d lose Brittany. She did once, you know. They put her in foster care for a few months a couple years back, before Vicky pulled it together again.”

  “You never told me.” Alma knows that Pete has been a source of support for Vicky and Brittany in ways she couldn’t be, but this—this angers her. How could he see Brittany almost lost to the family and not tell her? How could he let the home place—their common heritage—become part of Vicky’s games? And why the secrecy about such important things? No matter how often she calls or e-mails, as long as she’s in Seattle, she’s an outsider. She fingers the edge of the counter, exploring its hard edge and rough underside, pressing the texture against her fingertips until it hurts.

  Pete blows his breath out and stands again, like he’s on a spring. “Nothing you could have done. Anyway, finally Murray pointed a gun at me and I just said okay, cowboy, have it your way.” Pete stretches out his arms in a gesture of capitulation. “God grant me the serenity, you know? So I just walked away.”

  Alma keeps her eyes down, following her fingers. He’ll read her if she looks up, and she doesn’t want to fight. Walking away is certainly an improvement on Pete’s natural tendency to respond to any slight with a full-on bar brawl, but she finds herself wishing that he’d made an exception for Murray. “So tell me what happened when Brittany called.”

  “Ah, she told you.” He shakes his head. “And now you expect me to come up with an explanation too.”

  At this, Alma looks up. Damn straight she expects an explanation, although she can hear Pete’s side of the argument in her head: she has no right, wasn’t here, hasn’t been here for anything that mattered in years. Who is she to come back and demand explanations? She looks down again, retreats, becomes smaller on her stool.

  “Maybe I don’t have one.” Pete leans back on the counter and folds his arms. “Maybe I just didn’t go this time, and it turned out to be the one time that really mattered.” He finishes a coffee the barista started, takes money, makes change, turns back to her. “Look, for what it’s worth, I was going to go. I was in the car and then I thought I saw Walt’s GMC go by out on Twenty-Seventh, so I thought he was taking care of it. I guess I was wrong. But do you have any idea how often someone or other in this family calls me expecting me to rescue them? Just because you got out doesn’t mean they’ve stopped being needy as hell, and I’m Johnny on the spot. Sometimes I just say no, and sometimes I make the wrong call.” He starts attacking the counter with a rag.

  Alma sits beside him, trying to form the words to ask how this can possibly apply to Brittany, how he could ignore a child’s call for help. But it will only start a fight, and she can’t afford to fight with Pete right now. It would cost her too much, from an account drawn way, way down.

  Pete takes up his monologue again, leaning over her, speaking into her ear, every muscle tense. “Look, Vicky’s been relapsing for as long as I can remember. Nothing’s ever made a difference. How many times has she been in rehab, court-ordered or otherwise? I lost count. It got to the point where she knew I wasn’t going to come running for her anymore, so she started having Brittany call. Do you have any idea what it’s like getting frantic calls from a little girl saying there’s no food in the house? Of course you go. There’s nothing else you can do. And you get there and Vicky’s sitting on the couch watching Days of Our Lives, laughing at you like you’re the fucking Sucker Delivery Service. I still came most of the time. And the one night I decide I’ll just let Walt take care of it, since he seems to be doing something for once, she goes and gets herself killed. And Brittany blames me. You blame me, and you were in Seattle! It’s not like anyone’s called you for help in the last ten years, is it?” Pete’s voice has been gaining volume, but with that last sentence he stops, leans on the bar, and sighs. “I’m sorry, that was a cheap shot.”

  Alma slumps onto the bar next to him. “No, it’s true.
But what would you have had me do, Pete? I was in no shape to take care of anybody when I left.”

  They’re silent together like that for a few minutes. It is good to be quiet together. Her parents had that between them too, Alma reflects, that calm that was a refuge. After their deaths, the calm got lost for many years. To feel it settle between them again is a rare benediction. After a few minutes, Alma rouses herself to ask a question she’s been pondering for some time. “What ever happened with you and Walt?”

  Pete startles. “What?”

  “I know Walt said something, or did something, when he found out about you and Shep. Something bad. No one ever told me what.”

  Pete looks down. He begins to nod, slowly at first, then more vigorously. “Yeah,” he answers, his head coming up. “Yeah, you’re right. Why do you want to know?”

  Alma stares at the ceiling for a moment, but the answers are nowhere on the stamped tin.

  “Maybe I want another chance to be there for you,” she says. “Can I have another chance?”

  Pete settles his arms more comfortably on the counter and laughs. “All right. Fine. Jesus, what a story. I’ve tried to forget.” He lowers his voice and Alma settles in. “I guess it happened because I’d borrowed some tools from him—this is three, four years ago now—and he came by to get them. We were in the garage working on Shep’s pickup with the big door closed, but the side door was open. Walt came in that way and we didn’t hear him. I was fitting some new plugs and Shep was handing me the spacer. I still have no idea what he did—something about the way he touched me, I guess—but Walt knew right there.”