Flowering Judas(12)

Althy inched down the hall and looked inside. Mike must have been here first. The room had been completely destroyed. There were clothes everywhere. There were books everywhere. That was something else about Haydee. She was neat. She kept all her things in special places. Maybe Mike had found the money.

There was noise down the hall. It could be a burglar, but Althy didn’t think so. She went back out into the hall and down it toward the “living room,” which was full of dirty clothes, too. Dirty clothes traveled. They were everywhere.

Mike was sitting on the recliner. The recliner was broken. It showed raw wood at the joints. Mike had his head back and his eyes closed.

“Did you find the money?” Althy said.

“Of course I didn’t find the goddamned money,” Mike said. “Why would I find the fucking money? She’s a bitch, that girl is. I’m going to beat the fucking crap out of her when she gets home.”

Althy sat down on the metal folding chair. She couldn’t remember where the chair had come from. It was just there in the trailer one morning, and it still was.

“Listen,” she said. “You don’t want to touch Haydee. She’s not like other people.”

“Beat the fucking crap out of her,” Mike said.

“She’ll call the police,” Althy said, feeling anxious now. “She did last time. She’ll get you locked up.”

“You ought to learn to control the fucking bitch,” Mike said. “She’s your daughter.”

“We don’t want the police around here,” Althy said. “Not again. It’s one thing we find the money and we take it. We have a right to take it. She’s living here. She’s supposed to be contributing to the household. I read that in the papers. But you can’t touch her. She’ll call nine-one-one.”

Mike was so still on the recliner, he looked dead. “I looked everywhere,” he said after a while. “I took a knife to her fucking mattress. I couldn’t find it. How much do you think she has?”

“Eight or nine hundred dollars,” Althy said.

“What’s the bitch want a car for anyway? Where does she think she’s going? To work? Right. Some work. Quik-Go, for Christ’s sake. And that school. What the fuck does she think she’s doing going to school?”

Althy looked at her hands. “Did you dig up the ground? You know, out there? Haydee thinks you did. She thinks you were looking for the money.”

“Of course I didn’t dig anything the fuck up,” Mike said. “Jesus. If she’d dug that thing down in the ground that way, somebody would have seen her. It would have been gone in a day. And she likes to look at it. I know she does. She hoards the fucking stuff. Like a miser. She hoards the fucking stuff.”

“Somebody dug it all up,” Althy said. She was pushing words past the haze in her brain. They were having a hard time coming out. “Somebody’s going to come out from the company and have a fit. She thinks you dug it all up looking for the money.”

“I didn’t dig it all up.”

“Don’t you wonder who did dig it up? Don’t you wonder? Under the circumstances.”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean? ‘Under the’ fucking ‘circumstances’?”

Althy looked down at her hands again. It was hard to keep the times straight, sometimes. That had all happened so long ago. Haydee was only six. That was all. Haydee was sitting right here in this living room while Chester Ray Morton paced up and down and that girlfriend of his … that girlfriend of his …

It was hard to remember. There was nothing left of it but the trailer next door, and it was empty.

And haunted.

Maybe Haydee had put the money over there.

Althy closed her eyes and put her head in her hands and waited for the headache spasm to pass. Then she opened up again and looked around the room.

If Haydee was hiding the money in Chester Ray Morton’s empty trailer it was safe enough from Althy Michaelman.

She wouldn’t go back into that place on a bet.

8

Kyle Holborn could have told Darvelle Haymes where he was going, and why he was going there, and what the dispatcher said the man on the phone said he’d thought he’d found out there at the building site—but it would have taken too long to explain, and much longer to handle. Kyle didn’t know if he was handling it now. He wished he’d been the one to drive. It was always Jack who drove when they went out together. Kyle didn’t know why.

Jack parked the cruiser as close as he could to where everybody was standing. That wasn’t very close. Kyle could see them all through the darkening evening, a little clutch of men around some construction equipment, swaying back and forth, their hands in their pockets. One of them looked up and saw the patrol car. He broke away from the crowd and headed toward them.