What Lies Beneath Page 2

  The execution will be carried out by lethal injection at Raleigh’s Central Prison. An exact date has not yet been announced.

  CHAPTER

  1

  ADDICTION RAN THROUGH the Chambers family tree like an invasive species, a creeping vine that choked off the individual branches as surely as hands around a throat.

  For her father it had been booze—liquor, brown, straight, room temperature, anytime, all the time, the sword and shield he made sure never to be without. If alcohol could be considered a weapon, then her father had been well armed. His own childhood had been less than idyllic, but more than that she could not say. Only after his death had she learned her paternal grandparents were called Agnes and Rupert; in all her life, he never spoke their names.

  Her mother’s poison was twofold: food, and attention at any cost, the kind of desperate need to be seen that makes people want to look away. Diane Chambers lived on a diet of empty calories washed down with gossip. She thrived on news of others’ misfortune, always certain she’d just moved up one notch in a zero-sum game.

  Diane said, “Your article this morning nearly gave Fran McInery a coronary.”

  “I don’t know her,” Laura replied.

  Diane laughed, but her cackle quickly became a cough. She held up a finger, pressed the clear plastic oxygen mask to her face, and sucked down a breath before continuing.

  “Didn’t think you would. She barely goes outside these days, just to church. And to the Food Lion when she thinks no one will be around to see her load up on snack cakes. Did you know she was best friends with Linda Merritt growing up? The two of them always together, co-captains of the cheerleading squad. Beautiful. Popular. Of course, back then she had a metabolism like a hummingbird. Hard to picture her getting tossed in the air these days, isn’t it?”

  “Were you a cheerleader too?” Laura asked.

  Diane gave a heavy-lidded blink. “Don’t change the subject. You almost sent her over the edge, I heard. I bet her heart looks like a goddamn head cheese.”

  Laura’s mother was clinically obese, somewhere north of three hundred pounds, but Laura was careful to avoid pointing out the hypocrisy. “I’m sorry to hear she’s not well.”

  “Don’t be. She never wanted to be seen with me back when she was queen of Orange County High. Why should I treat her any different now? Still, I’ll never understand why Bass Herman prints this tripe.”

  “He’s the one who asked me to write it.”

  “Better to leave the past in the past, I always say.”

  “If something’s newsworthy, I write about it.”

  “People like to hear about nice things too, you know,” her mother said.

  “Not many folks would consider an old friend’s heart attack nice, but you seem to be enjoying yourself just the same.”

  Her mother sniffed. “She’s the one who quit returning my calls.”

  Thunder crackled in the distance. The farmhouse where Laura had grown up stood in the center of a hundred acres cleared of any trees, a roughly square area about four-tenths of a mile on each side. Sight lines in every direction were long, so Laura just pulled open the woolen curtains on the nearest window.

  Row after row of field corn marched all the way to the tree line. Each stalk stood nearly eight feet high in the late-summer heat. Above them, clouds clawed their way over the horizon, one piling on top of another, rising and thickening into an anvil shape ten thousand feet high. Purple thunderheads, pulsing with internal lightning, roiled at the base.

  Severe weather is common in central North Carolina, especially thunderstorms during the summer months. Humid air hunkers near ground level while cool wind pours over the top of the Appalachians in the west. The hot air wants to rise, and rise it does, enormous swords of cloud thrust upward through the atmosphere. The distant trees hissed in anticipation, leaves rubbing like sandpaper, presaging what was possible during a storm like this: barrages of lightning strikes, hail, downbursts powerful enough to rip away the roof of an exposed house.

  A faint whiff of ozone clung in Laura’s nostrils. She knew that smell.

  “I have to close the windows.”

  Her mother frowned. “For this little drizzle? I thought I raised you to have a few ounces of guts.”

  Laura ignored the jab and climbed the narrow stairs two at a time. The farmhouse was almost 150 years old, built in the era before air conditioning or central heating, and no real improvements had been made since Laura was a child. Her father, drunk, had tottered his way up a ladder to the roof and installed a new television antenna. She’d been in kindergarten then, excited for improved reception on her cartoons, appalled that she might have to watch her father break his neck in order to get it.

  For cooling, they had always relied on the house’s original design. The deep, shadowy front porch had been built as a refuge from the hottest hours of the day, and for the interior they depended on cross-breezes threading between opposite windows. For as long as she could remember, all the windows had been left open between May and October each year.

  The door to her old room squealed on its hinges.

  Inside she found her scarred wooden bed, its bare mattress still covered with the same Minnie Mouse bedspread of her youth. Shoes with cracked soles, pairs she’d last worn in high school, waited in a neat row on the floor of her closet. The corner of the room featured a fireplace bricked up sometime around the turn of the century. A rough wooden mantel ran above it, home to pictures and trinkets she had collected from elementary school onward.

  Laura scanned the items, her eyes landing on the only photograph that featured her mother. She wiped dust away from the frame.

  Her mother had always been a stout woman, but twenty years ago she had possessed a kind of raw athleticism. In the picture she had the same dark, beady eyes, but muscular legs poked out of her olive hiking shorts and her skin had the high, windburned color of someone who lived their life outside.

  It was a person Laura couldn’t remember.

  She’d left her hometown immediately after high school and only come back two years ago when she had no place else to go. She’d found her room looking exactly like it did now, a time capsule filled with memories she’d never wanted to preserve. For almost a year she’d lived back at home, but the relationship between her and her mother had eventually bubbled over, just like it always did. She’d found herself a cheap apartment, and her mother, it seemed, had put things back the way she liked them.

  She ran a finger across the top of the dresser. Dust clung to the surfaces. Spiderwebs hung like cotton off the window screens and in the corners.

  “How long since you’ve been up here?” she called down the stairs.

  Her mother said something she couldn’t hear, then dissolved into a fit of coughs.

  The window seemed welded to its jamb, but on the third pull it rattled down to the sill. She twisted the brass latch shut and made her way through the other upstairs rooms, closing the house up tight. In her mother’s room, the master bedroom, she found the same thin layer of grime on everything. The room smelled dank, stale, as if the air had been undisturbed for some time.

  Back downstairs, Diane Chambers was fiddling with the valve on her oxygen tank. “Damn thing won’t come open.”

  Laura pushed her mother’s hand aside and twisted it experimentally. “It’s all the way open already.”

  “Then it’s spent.”

  “How many have you used so far?”

  Diane glowered up at her, not answering.

  “I’ll just check the closet. I know how to subtract.”

  Her mother paused. “Seven,” she said finally.

  Laura let herself sink down into a musty armchair in a corner of the living room. “That’s almost all of them. You don’t get your delivery until, what? Tuesday?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You must be using it more often than not. The doctor said if—”

  Her mother reached up and, with a savage yank, ripped the plastic tubing out of her nose. “I’m fine, damn you. And I’m not going to sit here under my own roof and listen to my daughter give a lecture.”

  “Seems like sitting is just about the only thing you do. You’re sleeping downstairs now?”

  “My easy chair is just more comfortable.”

  “But you could climb the stairs if you wanted?”

  “If I wanted,” her mother agreed.

  Laura was about to tell her to prove it when the lamp next to Diane began to glow more brightly. A high-pitched electric whine filled the air, the lightbulb popped, and the room plunged into darkness.

  CHAPTER

  2

  LAURA SHUFFLED TO the wall and felt for the light switch, working it back and forth a few times with no result.

  “Power’s out.”

  “You don’t say,” her mother drawled.

  She checked her phone. “No bars either. Must have knocked out the cell tower too.”

  “Remember where we keep the light?”

  In the pantry Laura found a cheap plastic flashlight hanging from a nail. It threw a weak beam, the batteries nearly dead, but it was better than nothing. She put a finger on the nail. It had been her father who hammered it into the wood. For as long as she could remember, this nail had been the location of the emergency light. Power outages had always been frequent on the Chambers farm, and they’d needed a light where it could be scooped up quick. Back when her father was around, the emergency flashlight had been substantial, the heavy metal kind that swallowed D-cells one after another. This current dollar-store iteration had her mother’s name all over it, Laura thought. But she’d never once seen Diane swing a hammer. The nail was her father’s handiwork. She hadn’t watched him put it there, but she knew it just the same.
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  She lifted the plastic light in one hand and cast the beam around. It landed on dirty dishes in the sink and on the roaches skittering back under the garbage can.

  She made her way back to the living room, and the two of them sat across from each other without speaking for a while, with only the patter of rain on the roof and the whistle of wind under the eaves to break the silence. Laura wondered for the thousandth time why she even bothered with these weekly visits. Because one day soon, she’ll be gone, her inner voice reminded her. Moments like these would become, if not exactly good memories, then at least valuable by virtue of their scarcity. A time was fast approaching when the phone line connecting them would go dead permanently and any chance to fix things would be lost forever.

  Her hand rested on the arm of the chair, and the flashlight shone on the previous Friday’s edition of the Hillsborough Gazette resting on the coffee table. Her article about Simon Barrow’s pending execution was above the fold, laid in next to an awkward picture of Sheriff Fuller and Lieutenant Whitley she had taken herself.

  Neither Fuller nor Whitley had been enthusiastic about talking to her for the piece, which hadn’t surprised her—her relationship with local law enforcement could charitably be described as frosty. But the Merritt murders had a special place in local legend. Simon Barrow had never spoken a word to the police or anyone else, as far as Laura knew, and the mystery surrounding his motives was fertile ground for speculation. She’d heard variously that the killings were the work of drug addicts, Satanists, and Democrats who’d committed the crime as part of a plot to dismantle the Second Amendment. Even after twenty years, Hillsborough was a place where “Shotgun Slayer” was a popular choice of Halloween costume.

  The execution of Simon Barrow was sure to make waves in such a small town, and both Fuller and Whitley were seasoned enough to understand the importance of public relations. A simple “no comment” would only fuel the rumor mill.

  That hadn’t meant Laura rated a real meeting, however. She’d had to corner them on the courthouse steps with a camera in hand. They’d allowed her to snap the photo, but then Whitley had turned and walked into the courthouse without another word. Fuller had spoken with her less than five minutes before making an excuse to leave.

  From the coffee table, she pulled the paper into her lap and shined the sickly beam of light down on the front page.

  The two men stared up at her. Fuller made her think of a politician in his dark-colored chalk-stripe suit, a red tie knotted across his throat in a thick double Windsor. Whitley looked like he’d rolled out of bed in yesterday’s clothes: a rumpled dress shirt, wrinkled slacks, unkempt hair clinging to the side of his head. Neither man had bothered to smile for the camera.

  “Still the same old Laura.”

  She glanced up at her mother, now just a murky shadow on the other side of the room. “Excuse me?”

  “Even as a child you used to spend hours looking at yourself in the mirror.”

  “It’s a newspaper, Diane, not a mirror.”

  “A paper with your name up there at the top, and you with that just-same slobbering look on your face. Pride’s a sin, no matter how you commit it.”

  Laura remembered the cheap plastic mirror she’d pasted to the wall, the glass baby-food jar of hair ties and barrettes, the broken-handled brush fished out of the trash. “I was just a kid. I think Jesus would have wanted me to look nice.”

  “Or maybe it was envy,” her mother said. “You were copying Emily Merritt, as I recall. The two of you were thick as thieves back then.”

  Laura glanced down to the article and then back to her mother. “Is that what this is about?”

  “She was the leader, and you were the sidekick. You’d have drunk up her backwash if she asked.”

  “She was my best friend.”

  “Oh, it was more than that, I suspect.”

  Laura felt the words slip out before she could stop them. “I wanted to be her, do you understand? She liked herself. Her daddy wasn’t a drunk. Her momma used to take her to the beauty parlor to get her hair done.”

  Diane scoffed. “Everyone thought they were the perfect little family, even you—that’s the thing I could never stand. The Chambers farm and the Merritt farm have almost the same acreage. They’re backed right up against each other, separated by nothing but the railroad tracks and a bit of woods. On paper we should have had the same station in life. But everyone loved the Merritts. And us? We were no-good trash. Couldn’t you at least have the decency to hate them for the unfairness of it?”

  “Hate them,” Laura repeated, turning the words over in her mouth. “I never did. Maybe in time I’d have grown into it. Maybe when I got to be your age.”

  “Yes, I suppose you never had the chance.” Diane leaned forward and tapped the newspaper in her daughter’s lap with one bloated, sausage finger. “Because the world went ahead and evened itself out, didn’t it?”

  Laura didn’t answer. They sat in silence again, and together waited out the worst of the storm. After an hour the wind faded and the rain slowed. The lights flickered once before coming back strong, and the phone in Laura’s pocket buzzed with a series of notifications.

  “I always figured you must have hated her but kept it to yourself,” Diane said.

  “Who? Emily?”

  “Thought that’s why you wrote the story, taking your opportunity to smear them the way they deserve to be smeared.”

  “I barely mentioned her.”

  “Not in this one. More to come, I’m sure, between now and when they slip him the needle.”

  Laura stood and headed for the door. Through the window she could see her car parked at the bottom of the porch stairs, waiting to carry her away. All she had to do was climb inside, turn the key, and go. Just leave, she told herself, and don’t look back.

  Her mother reached up and turned off the lamp, its light too bright after so long an absence.

  “The Merritts were never perfect,” she said. “Remember that.”

  * * *

  The car was a 1969 Dodge Dart GT convertible, the 273 V-8 model with a three-speed manual transmission. It had come off the manufacturing line in B5 blue, a silvery metallic azure, but decades of exposure to the elements had diluted its paint toward gray. It had a hard brake pedal and a stiff clutch, and the rear-wheel drive setup meant it tended to skid around corners in wet conditions or at high speeds. The tires would slip their way across asphalt and set a person’s heart to hammering in their chest.

  The Dart was more than a few years past its prime, in other words.

  But Laura loved it just the same. The key turned smoothly; the exhaust burbled to life. Rain still rustled against the Dart’s canvas soft-top as she fiddled with the mirror until it displayed a view of the backyard. The sound reminded her of wet nights spent in a military-surplus pup tent erected behind the house. She would set it up on Friday afternoons and stay outside until Sunday, coming inside only to use the bathroom. Her mother never bothered to check on her, and that had been fine by Laura—avoiding Diane was exactly the point—but from time to time her father would poke his head in the flaps.

  “Rain coming,” he would say.

  Her father had been a man of few words, and usually that would be the end of their conversation. Sometimes he would stay with her, though, and she would sit cross-legged in the light of the lantern and listen to his stories.

  That was one of her good memories.

  Laura shifted the mirror back into position, fished her phone out of her hip pocket, and hit the unlock button.

  The screen populated with a series of missed calls, all from the same number. It had a 252 area code, which covered the northeast quadrant of the state and ran all the way to the Outer Banks, far from Hillsborough’s location in the central Piedmont. Whoever was on the other end, they had called her four times in quick succession, one call right after the other.

  Whenever she’d had reason to call someone back to back, Laura thought, it had always been out of desperation. Calls that close together were a message in and of themselves. If she looked hard enough at the screen, Laura could almost read it.