Page 95 of The River We Remember

“Lying again?” Graff asked.

“Maybe. That’s what I’d like to find out.”

“And if you prove this pattern,” Kyoko said, “how will it help my husband?”

“It’s a building block in the defense. Let me get it set in place, and then I’ll tell you the rest.”

Which was obfuscation. What Charlie really wanted was to be able to suggest to a jury that someone had killed James Patrick Quinn because of an assault. She believed this someone was either Kyoko or Noah Bluestone and believed that they were holding back the truth because they didn’t think a jury in Black Earth County would buy their story. She thought if she could prove that Jimmy Quinn was the kind of man who’d attack a defenseless woman, the Bluestones might come around and deliver the details of what really happened the night the big Irishman died.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

THE LUNCH CROWD at the Wagon Wheel was large and hungry and boisterous. Angie and Ida scurried like crazy. In the kitchen, in the heat from the griddle and oven, Wendell’s face ran with beads of sweat. Scott hustled to bus the tables so that he could load the dishwasher, but he was often held back by folks who wanted to talk to him about his heroics on the Alabaster.

In the middle of the rush, Garnet Dern entered the café. She spoke to Scott’s mother briefly, and Angie called her son over.

“Scott, I need you to go up to my bedroom. There’s a box near my desk full of books. Bring the box down and give it to Mrs. Dern, will you?”

“Sure,” Scott said.

“If you’ll excuse me, Garnet,” Scott’s mother said, “I need to get back to my customers.”

“Of course, Angie.”

As she hustled away, Scott saw that Mrs. Dern watched his mother go with a look that seemed to him hard and that he didn’t understand.

He said, “I’ll be right back.”

“Meet me outside, Scott,” Mrs. Dern replied. “I’ll open the back of my station wagon and wait for you there.”

Scott knew his absence, however brief, would be tough for his mother and grandmother and Wendell, so he ran. To the house, up the stairs, and into his mother’s bedroom. He found the box next to her desk, as she’d told him. On top lay two books with no titles. One was new-looking, the other old and worn. He unflapped the box, slipped the volumes inside with the other books, closed up the box again, carted it down the stairs and out of the house, where he loaded it in the back of Mrs. Dern’s station wagon, which was already full of other boxes.

She thanked him and said, “I have to tell you, I’m so proud of you. We all are.”

He was almost to the point where such praise no longer embarrassed him. In fact, he was beginning to like it.

Then Mrs. Dern did something unexpected. She leaned to him and kissed his cheek. The fragrance she wore poured over him in a heady, invisible haze. And as the woman drew back, Scott Madison caught a glimpse down the top of her loose blouse at the fleshy mounds barely contained by the white lace of her bra.

She got into her station wagon, waved through the window at him, and drove away.

Scott Madison stood in the gravel of the lot, in the heat of the early afternoon sun, and stared after her as if he’d been smacked in the head with a frying pan.

AN HOUR LATER, as the rush abated, his mother said, “Are you all right? You seem a little unfocused.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“I think maybe you should just go lie down for a while. We can take care of things here.”

“I’d rather go to the library.”

She smiled as if this pleased her immensely. “Of course.”

“I’ll be back to help with supper,” he promised and left.

He almost never lied to his mother, but he wasn’t inclined to tell her that he was really going to the gravel pit to shoot a gun with Del Wolfe. And, anyway, it was the second lie he’d told her in their conversation. The first was that he was all right. He wasn’t. He couldn’t get the image of Mrs. Dern’s lace-cupped breasts out of his mind. They’d been so near to him, inches really. And he’d begun to imagine, even as he’d moved zombielike between tables, what those breasts might look like loosed from her bra. And that imagining was suffused with the memory of her scent and the wet plant of her red lips against his cheek. And Scott Madison, who’d only that morning been in love with Holly Coleridge, found himself—just like that—totally intoxicated with carnal thoughts of a woman old enough to be his mother.

He walked out to Creasy’s Hollow. In the year that he and Del Wolfe had been best friends, he’d never visited Del’s place. Del had never invited him. The trailer in which Del lived with his mother and Tyler Creasy was mounted on cinder blocks in a stand of old trees behind the gas station–garage that was the source of most Creasy income. There were also several small houses among the trees, accessed by fingers of unpaved, rutted lanes. The hollow was dark and smelled of mud and stagnant water. Scott heard the sound of men’s voices coming from the open doors of the garage, and then the sound of a pneumatic machine of some kind. He skirted the building and headed to the trailer, where he climbed a set of warped wooden stairs and knocked on the door. Del opened up, a book in his hand and a surprised look on his face.

“Madman?”