“She wasn’t happy to see me. She said I was disgustingly fat, a bloated pig, a walking pile of blubber. She laughed when I asked her to stop hurting the boy and pray with me, find salvation like I have in the bosom of Jesus. She called me more names, filthy names through her candy smile. My sister, my flesh and blood. Evil.”
The last of the Butterfinger disappeared. Gwen Whalen did some more rummaging in her purse, came out with another Toblerone. “I can’t stop eating,” she said.
Runyon looked away.
“I couldn’t stop that day, either. The awful things Francine was saying to me, I wanted to put my hands over my ears, I wanted to run away, but all I did was reach for one of the cookies she’d been baking. Warm cookies on a plate, I could smell them, why should she care if I took one? But she did. She said, ‘Don’t touch those cookies, you fat cow’ and slapped my hand. She hit the plate too and it fell and broke on the floor, but she said it was my fault. She called me a cow again, an effing cow, and slapped my face, hard.”
Fat cow, effing cow. The “weird stuff about cows” Bobby had heard.
“Then she punched me in the stomach with her fist like she did when we were growing up. It hurt, it hurt, and Satan reared up and seized control and put the knife in my hand and I … She screamed and I slew her, I slew my sister. Thou shalt not kill. Her blood was on my hand, I couldn’t stand to see it, I hid it inside a dish towel. Then I ran away and drove home, I don’t know how but I did, and begged Jesus to cast out the Devil. He did, he forgave me, but I kept seeing Francine’s face, her blood like the blood of Christ. I prayed and prayed, but they wouldn’t go away. Candy smile, chocolate smile. I’m so hungry.…”
The second Toblerone went in two gulping bites. She pawed frantically inside the purse once more, came up with a handful of Hershey’s Kisses. That was as much as Runyon could stand; he’d heard enough, seen enough, added enough to her suffering. Crabtree, Farley, Halim, somebody else, anybody else, could take over and be the next to listen to Gwen Whalen’s confession.
He left her sitting there with her eyes squeezed shut again, her chocolate-smeared mouth moving silently, her fingers unwrapping more of the Hershey’s Kisses—still trying to pray away, eat away, her guilt.
26
The climb down the hill was a lot easier than the ascent had been; I wasn’t winded when Chavez and I reached flat ground. Still, the muscles in my legs and thighs were tight and quivery as we hurried along the rutted track. Kerry was right: I needed to get more exercise. She was always after me to go for long walks, join a gym, take up jogging again. No way on the jogging; I’d tried that a few years back and gave it up quick, mainly because I felt like an attention-drawing idiot pounding along public streets in my sweat suit. I’d feel the same way in a gym, huffing and puffing on treadmills and the other machines they have in those places. The long walks, though, were a good idea, and I’d been promising myself I would start taking them on a regular basis. Now maybe I had the impetus to follow through.
The sky was mostly clear now, the day warming up. I could feel sweat dripping under my arms, down the back of my neck into my shirt collar, as we moved ahead. The road ruts were deep and the earth between them and on either side rumpled and broken in places, so that you had to watch where you put your feet. The last thing either of us needed now was to sprain an ankle.
Once we were through the narrow passage between the hill folds, we angled ahead to where the track made its long loop to the north and stopped there. The buildings were visible from that point, with very little ground cover between. I unsheathed the Zeiss glasses for another sweeping scan. Still a frozen tableau, no sign of life anywhere. But when I had the binoculars cased again, I put my hand back on the butt of the .38 in my pocket. Never take anything for granted when you’re in unfamiliar territory.
Moving again, Chavez letting me have the lead now. The hush seemed deeper here behind the hill; even the birds had quit cawing and chirping. We put a little distance between us as we came into the cluttered yard, walking on either side of the track. The ground was softer here, the ruts deeper and showing the tire indentations we’d seen from the hilltop. Fresh, all right.
The track petered out in gravel and clumps of grass, but the tire marks made a new trail straight to the barn. Check there first. The weather-beaten structure looked as if a stiff wind would knock it down into rubble: listing a little off-center, the roof caving in the middle, the entrance doors hanging crooked. When I got in close enough I saw a rusted hasp on one door half, with a padlock hanging from it by the open staple. There was a narrow gap between the two unlocked halves.