Dead of Night 5

The echo of gunfire vibrated against his chest. His heart jumped once, twice, three times before settling back to its normal beat.

Jesus, get a grip. Just somebody out hunting rabbits.

He’d been stateside for, what? Nearly two years and still the sound of gunfire—or a revving car engine—could propel him straight back to the war.

An army psychiatrist had assured him that it wasn’t uncommon for the effects of PTSD to linger or even worsen over time, but Lukas had finally figured out for himself how he needed to deal with the aftermath. He’d have to find a way to compartmentalize his time in Iraq, the same way he had everything else in his life. It was just like cleaning house. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

Some of those memory boxes—like his childhood—were to be opened rarely and with great caution, although he supposed he hadn’t had it any rougher than a lot of kids. Southern boys were raised with certain expectations. Once you accepted your place, once you mastered the pursuits deemed manly enough by a culture still mired in the past, you were rewarded for your trouble with jealousy and bitterness because your old man suddenly saw in you the passing of his own youth. Your triumphs became his failings, and he would do anything to prove he was still the better man even if it meant breaking you in ways you could never have imagined.

Sometimes the rivalry lasted well beyond the grave. How else could he explain his decision to come back here? Lukas wondered. Or even his career choice. Why follow in his father’s footsteps if the idea of besting the old man’s accomplishments didn’t still hold some twisted appeal?

Not that it was going to be easy to live up to—let alone surpass—his father’s reputation. William Clay had been a legend in Union County for as long as Lukas could remember. He’d served as county sheriff for the better part of twenty-five years, and in all that time, only one major case had gone unsolved.

Lukas glanced over his shoulder, a momentary spurt of adrenaline nudging away his fatigue. Fifty yards behind him, the DeLaune house rose like a stately specter, its pale walls and gleaming windows a constant reminder of the town’s darkest secret.

Sixteen-year-old Rachel DeLaune hadn’t just been murdered. Her body had been mutilated, the crime scene desecrated with satanic symbols. And in spite of his father’s best efforts, the killer had never been caught.

Not yet, at least.

A thrill of excitement slid up Lukas’s backbone even as he shuddered in dread. Something about that house always gave him the creeps. He couldn’t explain it. It was a fine old place, beautiful in the spring and summer when the roses and crepe myrtle were in bloom. But in the dead of winter, surrounded by an army of skeletal trees with their limbs quivering in the wind, the house looked cold and bleak and abandoned.

Some said it was haunted. Some even claimed they’d seen Rachel’s ghost at an upstairs window staring down at them as they passed by on the street.

But Lukas didn’t believe in ghosts. Not the kind that came back from the grave anyway. The only thing that had ever haunted him was his past.

Which was why he’d locked it away.

Turning back to the cottage, he stepped up on the concrete porch and knocked on the door. As he waited for someone to answer, he watched the buzzard’s spiral tighten over a spot in the woods where the quarry lay dead or dying.

After a moment, Esme Floyd drew back the wooden door and peered at him through the storm door. She was tall and thin with posture as straight as a yardstick and eyes that snapped with intelligence. The cotton dress she wore was crisp and spotless, her hair an improbable shade of silvery blue.

“Miss Esme, I’m Lukas Clay. I hear you reported some kind of disturbance at the DeLaune place last night.”

“Lukas Clay? Well, Lord have mercy. I liked to not recognized you.” She slipped on her glasses as she examined him through the door. “You used to take after your daddy, but I swear, you the spittin’ image of your mama nowadays. Except for them eyes. Dark as muscadines. You got your daddy’s eyes, all right.”

She fumbled with the latch, then pushed open the door for him to enter. Stepping into her little house was like crawling into a blast furnace. The warmth was a welcome respite from the wind and cold at first, but after a few minutes, Lukas felt as if someone had cocooned him in a thick layer of wool. The cloying heat took his breath away, and he quickly peeled off his gloves and unzipped his jacket.

“Better take off that coat,” Esme warned. “Else you freeze to death when you go back outside.”

Lukas shrugged out of his jacket and she hung it on a hook near the front door.

“So you knew my mother?”

“I was acquainted with her,” Esme said. “She was a real fine woman.”

His mother had died when Lukas was eight, and he’d always been fascinated to hear about her through others. The box that held his memories of her had been put away for so long, he couldn’t seem to find them anymore.

“Your daddy and Mr. James used to be big fishing buddies,” Esme reminisced. “They’d go off on trips, sometimes stay gone for a week or more at a hitch. Your mama’d come by the house to pick him up when they got in. You’d always stay in the car, but I’d see you out there now and then, peeking out the back glass.”

Lukas smiled. “I can barely remember those days.”

“You were just a little thing, real quiet and shy. After your mama died, God rest her soul, your daddy quit coming around so much. I guess he had his hands full raising you.”

Or maybe he’d found other pastimes besides fishing, Lukas thought. Because being a widower, much less being a father, had never changed the old man’s behavior one whit. He’d always done as he damn well pleased.

Lukas followed Esme into the tiny living room where she’d set up her ironing board in front of the television. A soap opera was on, and she watched the story for a moment before she reached down and switched off the set.

“Tell me what happened last night,” he said.

“It’s like I told that lady on the phone. I saw something out my bedroom window.” Esme picked up the hot iron and plowed it into a shirt. A cloud of steam rose as the iron hissed against the freshly starched fabric.

The smell of ironed cotton brought back an unexpected memory. Lukas suddenly had a vision of his mother standing behind an ironing board pressing one of his father’s khaki uniforms as tears rolled down her cheeks. Lukas had been maybe four or five at the time.

“What’s wrong, Mama?”

“Nothing, son. I’m just tired, that’s all. You run along and play. I have to get these shirts done so I can get supper on the table by the time your daddy gets home.”

Strange to be remembering that now, Lukas thought, as he sat down in a chair near the ironing board. “What did you see, Miss Esme?”

She glanced up, her eyes flickering with something Lukas couldn’t define. “Somebody on top of Mr. James’s house, that’s what.”

He stared at her in surprise. “On top of the house? In the middle of an ice storm?”

“The sleet had stopped by then. And the moon was out. I could see him up there plain as day.”

“You could tell it was a man?”

She guided the point of the iron across the shirt collar. “Only thing I could tell for sure was that he was up to no good. Why else would somebody be up there that time of night?”

“What time was this?”

“After midnight. More like one o’clock.”

“Are you always up that late?”

“My old arthritis bothers me at night. Sometimes it helps to get up and walk around.”

“So you looked out the window and you saw someone on the roof of the DeLaune house. Why didn’t you call the station?”

“I didn’t want nobody out on those slick roads because of me. Somebody get killed driving over here, I got that on my conscience.”

“Yeah, but we might have been able to catch him last night. It was probably just someone trying to find a way in out of the cold, but if it happens again, you call us. Hear?”

She went back to her ironing. Lukas watched her for a moment, mesmerized by her strong strokes.

“Have you seen anything like that before? Anyone coming around the house acting suspicious? Any strange cars parked out on the street?”

“Not lately, I ain’t.”

“But you have seen something?”

The iron faltered and another cloud of steam rose up from the shirt. “It was a long time ago. Before they sent him to the pen.”

“Who?”

“That ol’ Fears boy.” Her tone was pure contempt.

“Are you talking about Derrick Fears?”

She nodded, her eyes gleaming with scorn. “I’d see him out on the sidewalk sometimes, watching the house. I’d try to run him off before Mr. James catch him, but he wouldn’t budge. Just stand there and mock me. Sometimes he’d cup his hands to his mouth and squeal like he was real bad hurt. You ask me, there’s something bad wrong with a body who’d do something like that after what this family went through. Something done took that boy’s soul a long time ago.”

“Did you ever call the police when you saw him out there?”

“Nothing the police could do about it. Ain’t no law against standing on the sidewalk actin’ a fool, is they?”

“Do you think it could have been Derrick Fears you saw on the roof last night?”

“They still got him locked up, last I heard.”

“No, he’s out.”

“Out?” She said the word as if she couldn’t quite comprehend its meaning.

Lukas nodded. “He paid his debt to society and they set him free.”

She slammed the iron down so hard on the board, the rickety legs threatened to fold. “Now, don’t that just beat all? He slices somebody up in a knife fight and don’t get as much time as my boy, Robert, did for stealing some blamed old car. That don’t seem right to me.”

“It doesn’t seem right to me, either, but I’m not here to argue the shortcomings of our judicial system,” Lukas said. “I’m trying to figure out who was up on that roof last night and why.” He walked over to the window and glanced out.

The path from the cottage led straight up to the DeLaune house, but trees blocked the view. How well could she have seen the roof in the middle of the night, even if the moon had been out?

As Lukas studied the back of the house, a slight movement in one of the upstairs windows caught his attention. He kept his gaze on the same spot, but when he didn’t see anything else, he wondered if he’d glimpsed the reflection of a bird or the play of sunlight in the glass.

He glanced over his shoulder where Esme was noisily putting away the ironing board. “No one’s living in the house right now?”

“No one left but Mr. James. And he won’t be coming back home, bless his heart.”

“What about the daughter? Sarah.”

“She lives in New Orleans. Her and Mr. James don’t get along, but since he took sick, she’s been coming around more than she used to.” In spite of the overheated house, Esme plucked a sweater off a hook and draped it over her scrawny shoulders.

“Miss Esme, were you here the night Rachel DeLaune was murdered?”

Her gnarled hand clutched the sweater to her bony chest. “Why you asking me about that? It don’t have nothing to do with somebody being up on that roof, does it? Besides, I don’t like thinking about that night.”

“But you do think about it, don’t you? Everyone in this town thinks about it. Because no one ever paid for that girl’s murder.”

“Your daddy did everything he could to find out who did it. He went to his grave still looking for her killer.”

“But he never found him, did he?”

Esme trained her penetrating gaze on Lukas. “And you think you can find him, I guess. You think you can do what your daddy couldn’t?”

Lukas was surprised and a little unnerved by how easily she’d read him. “I just want to do my duty by this town.”

“Humph.”

He ignored her dismissive response. “Tell me about the night they found her body,” he said. “Where were you?”

“I was right here at home, that’s where.”

“How did you hear about it?” When she didn’t answer, Lukas said softly, “Look, I know this is hard for you. You’ve worked for the family for years. You helped raise those girls. It was a terrible thing that happened, and a dark cloud has been hanging over this town ever since. I’ve read all the police reports, been over them I can’t tell you how many times. But right now, I’d really like to hear about that night from you.”