“…and I told him, ‘Jesus died for you, little fella.’” Charles’s bottom lip had begun to quiver, his voice gone soft and earnest with emotion. “And you know what he said to me? It’ll break your heart, Ebert. He said ‘How come God loves me?’ And I told him, I said… You with me, Violet?”
Violet looked up into those small lonely eyes across the table.
“Yes, I’m with you, Charles.”
“I told him, ‘God loves little black boys just as much as He loves little white boys.’”
A four-year-old boy ran over and stopped in front of Violet, a chocolate icing ring around his smiling little mouth.
“You’re pretty,” he said, then ran away shouting, “I did it, guys! I did it!”
The young woman laughed.
“Where’s Max, Violet?” Charles asked.
“Same place he was when you asked me a week ago,” Violet responded but she did not say it bitterly. “He’s coaching cross-country this fall. They had another meet today.”
Is that all right with you you freaking weirdo?
“Just don’t want to see him backsliding on us. You start skipping Wednesday nights, what’s next?”
“My son-in-law ain’t no backslider, Charles,” Ebert said. “You know I wouldn’t tolerate that. Ain’t that right, baby?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
Violet smiled at her father, a big brawny man, whitebearded and baldheaded. He’d earned that shiny red dome working his dairy farm. Their table smelled faintly of manure.
As Violet sipped her tea she felt Charles eyeing her. She often caught him staring, especially during Sunday sermons. He was always chiding her about her “boy haircut,” said women were supposed to have long and flowing hair, encouraged Violet to let her blond locks grow out.
Her pager buzzed against her hip and she glanced down at her lavender skirt.
When she saw the number she stood up.
“Mom, if Max comes, tell him I’ll be right back.”
“Everything all right, Vi?”
Evelyn stared up at Violet through cloudyblue eyes that picked up the gray in her hair.
How can you sit here with this whacko? “Yes ma’am.”
Violet walked out of the fellowship hall into the corridor of classrooms. At the end of the hallway, the double doors had been thrown open and she could see into the new sanctuary where the music director was furiously arranging chairs in the choir loft in preparation of the practice that would immediately follow the fellowship dinner. She didn’t feel up to singing tonight. She wanted to go home, crawl into bed with a pint of Cherry Garcia, and watch television, preferably a Ken Burns documentary on PBS.
With the commotion of the feasting congregation now a whisper, Violet stepped into a dark classroom and closed the door behind her.
The pager vibrated again.
She rummaged her purse for the cell phone.
21
VIOLET turned around in the cul-de-sac and parked her Jeep Cherokee on the curb. The dashboard clock read 7:15. There was no tinge of luminosity in the sky excepting the blurry pinpoints of starlight that obscured when you looked straight at them. Turning off the engine, she stared at the chaos in the distance, filtering out the dazzle of flashing lights so she could imagine this hysterical street as it must’ve seemed that night.
Tranquil.
Ordinary.
Safe.
She absorbed her surroundings—the young pine forest across the street from the lakefront houses, the cul-de-sacs at each end, the road that dead-ended into Shortleaf Drive, the number of houses between cul-de-sacs (eleven) and that serene black lake.
Violet did not speculate or theorize. With the investigation only in its infancy it wasn’t useful to do so. All she knew was that a family of four had been slain in that brick ranch forty yards down the street. Coupled with the other murders—the clerk knifed to death in a Rocky Mount Wal-Mart and the woman hanged from the Bodie Island Lighthouse—this had been one of the bloodiest weeks in North Carolina since the Civil War.
As she opened the door and stepped out into the autumn evening she couldn’t help thinking, Most investigators never encounter anything like this. And then: You are not equipped to handle it.
Her legs gave out and she leaned against the Jeep.
Closing her eyes, she took a long calming breath, whispered a prayer, and started walking toward the flashing blue lights.
The perimeter of the Worthingtons’ half-acre lot had already been roped off with crime scene tape. Violet counted three police cruisers, an ambulance, a van, and two unmarked cars parked along the curb across the street.
A uniformed patrolman stood at the foot of the driveway, guarding the perimeter.
“Hi, Reuben,” she said.
“Viking? You were on-call for this one?”
“Yep.”
“Lucky you. That house next door is where we had the kidnapping on Monday. These are the neighbors we could never get to answer the door or the phone.”
“You’re kidding me. You were first car?”
“No, Bruce was. He’s over talking to Barry.”
Violet stepped under the tape and walked down the driveway toward her sergeant, a wide massive man with the girth of an oak tree and a voice as deep as her daddy’s. He was talking to a patrolman when she walked up between them.
“Hey, guys.”
Her sergeant looked down at her and shook his head.
“You sure caught it this time, Viking,” he said as though it were her fault. “I’m gonna go talk with Chip and the boys. Bruce can tell you what you got.”
“You been in yet, Barry?” she asked.
“No. We just got the search warrant. Bobby’s executing it right now.”
“CSI ready to start videotaping?”
“I think so.”
“Would you ask them to hold off a sec? After I talk with Bruce, I’d like to do a quick walkthrough.”
Sgt. Mullins gazed down at her for a moment. He rarely smiled. Standing under his undecipherable scowl always made her feel eight years old again. She knew exactly what he was thinking because she’d thought it too: she was incapable of handling this.
As Sgt. Mullins lumbered off toward the white-jacketed CSI techs, Violet glanced over her shoulder at a woman who stood weeping in the street at the edge of the Worthingtons’ lawn.
She turned back to Bruce.
He was a year younger than Violet, just a year out of the academy on uniformed patrol. They’d attended the same high school though they hadn’t known each other then. But Violet remembered him. He looked much the same—tall, slender, slightly bugeyed, with a fearful nervous mien.