The felons ball, p.8
The Felons' Ball, page 8
She felt flattered that he’d jumped right into the difficulties of the investigation, as if she had something to offer in that regard. “Maybe it was a crime of passion,” she said. “Isn’t that what people say about stabbing? People get angry, and then they turn around and there’s a knife in the block by the cutting board.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wished she could take them back. If Ben’s murder originated in passion, it must have been committed by someone who knew him well, and who knew him better than her family? Who knew him better than her, the woman he’d been sleeping with for most of the past year? “But don’t listen to me,” she added hastily. “I guess your mind just wants to come up with a story to explain a situation like this.”
The sheriff said nothing. He didn’t even nod. He was one of those men who knew how to use silence to make people nervous, and it was clearly working, Natalie chattering on without even thinking about what was about to come out of her mouth. “I really don’t know how much more I can tell you about Ben,” she said. “It wasn’t like other relationships, where you sit down and tell each other all about your families and your hobbies. We kind of skipped over that stage.”
“That makes sense,” Underwood said. “I assume you’d known him your whole life, right? How did you get together?”
Natalie hesitated. “I wasn’t a teenager or anything, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “I didn’t say you were.”
“That’s one reason we kept it a secret,” she said. “Older men and younger women get together all the time. There’s nothing unusual about it. But if it turns out that they’ve known each other for a long time, people think it’s grooming or something.”
“Like Elvis and Priscilla,” Hardy offered.
She paused. It was a reference her father would have made. “Ben loaned me some money,” she said. “When I was first starting out. I could have gone to my dad, but he’d already financed the construction, and if he’d given me a loan, it would have come with all kinds of conditions. Ben didn’t even want me to sign anything.”
“Did you pay him back?”
“Not yet,” Natalie said. “I was going to, but he never acted like there was any hurry.”
The sheriff nodded. Everything about his body language indicated that he was open, receptive, not judging or criticizing her, and Natalie wasn’t sure why she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it. “You asked me about Lanny Marsh yesterday,” he said. “We’re still trying to track him down. Did you know him well?”
“Of course I knew Lanny,” she said. “We were friends.”
He was watching her closely. “Friends?” he repeated. “Or more than friends?”
Natalie crossed her legs and then uncrossed them, pressing her hands to her thighs. “We never dated or anything like that,” she said. “I was only fourteen, and he was eighteen. He talked a lot about wanting to get out of Ewald, and I used to fantasize that maybe he’d take me with him. But then he ran away.”
Hardy pushed himself back from the desk and threaded his hands behind his head. “I heard something about that,” he said. “I’m not sure if I’ve got all the details, though.”
Again, she considered how much she really wanted to tell him. Her family never talked about Lanny Marsh—not where he had gone when he left Ewald County, and certainly not what he’d done right before he left. If she was going to tell Sheriff Underwood the truth about the boat crash, it might as well be now. She took a deep breath and jumped.
“You know how I said that Croaker blamed us when he went to prison? It wasn’t just that my dad and Ben had an in with the judge. I always thought that maybe Lanny, not Croaker, was the one driving.”
“But you were on the boat, weren’t you?” Underwood asked. “How could you not know who was driving?”
“I was passed out,” she admitted. “I was only fourteen, and I’d gotten into my dad’s liquor that night. In the hospital, everybody told me that Croaker had been driving, so of course I believed it. But later, when I thought about it, I was sure that Lanny had been at the wheel when I blacked out.”
His face was expressionless now, and she had no idea whether or not he believed what she was saying. “So you’re assuming that your dad and Ben lied.”
Natalie grimaced. “I think Daddy was just trying to help,” she said. “Lanny didn’t have a great childhood. His mother died of cancer when he was only three or four, and Ben was a heavy drinker back then. Daddy said that Lanny was like a son to him. We always went to his football games, and I think Mama might have gone to his parent-teacher conferences when Ben couldn’t make it. That was what made it so awful, when Lanny—”
She stopped, hoping that the sheriff would assume that she was referring to the boat crash. But she could tell from the slight lift of his eyebrow that he’d caught her hesitation. “Lanny left home not long after that, didn’t he? Did he talk to you about it before he left?”
Natalie shook her head. “I was still in the hospital then. Lanny had been talking about joining the merchant marines for years, so no one was really surprised. He always said he was going to drive out to LA and jump on a ship as soon as he got a chance, and when Ben went to rehab, I guess that seemed like the perfect time. But he took some things of Daddy’s when he left—this Brooks & Dunn NASCAR die-cast, and a Curtis Turner that was Daddy’s favorite. That was what really broke Daddy’s heart.”
The sheriff nodded, as if this was more or less what he’d expected. “I saw your dad’s collection, but I don’t know a thing about NASCAR,” the sheriff said. “What’s a die-cast, and what kind of money are we talking about?”
“A die-cast is like a model car,” Natalie explained. “Like a Matchbox car, but bigger. I think it’s made in a mold or something. The Brooks & Dunn was really rare, so it was worth a few thousand dollars, but the Curtis Turner wasn’t worth anything. He grew up not far from here, and he was Daddy’s favorite driver. He thought Lanny took it just to be spiteful.”
“Did your father report them missing?”
“I’m not sure,” Natalie said. “I know they spent a lot of time trying to get the police to look for Lanny, but he was eighteen, and they said they couldn’t do anything. Obviously that was more important than the collectibles, but I did catch Daddy searching for the Curtis Turner die-cast on his phone one time. I think he was hoping that Lanny might have posted it for sale.”
Underwood unlaced his hands, his eyes trained on the empty wall behind Natalie’s head. “And nobody ever talked to Lanny again? Not even his dad?”
“Ben got postcards from him,” she said. “He used to flip through them once in a while, but I never read them or anything. I really hope y’all can find him. I can’t imagine finding out that my dad had died and nobody had even told me about it.”
The sheriff paused, laying his hands flat on the desk. “Let’s go back a little bit,” he said. “Now you know I’m not telling tales out of school when I say that your family used to be involved with some nefarious activities. That’s just a statement of fact; you know it, I know it, everybody knows it.” He spread his palms as if to indicate that awareness of the Macreadys’ criminality extended to the edges of the known universe. “What I can’t figure out is when they quit. I’ve read all the interviews and the transcripts from your uncle’s trial, but there’s nothing in the reports that indicates that those stills up in the national forest were ever destroyed.”
“You should ask my dad,” she said, feeling even more nervous now. “I don’t know anything about that stuff. I was just a kid back then.”
“And you and Ben never talked about it?” he pressed. “He never told you stories about their glory days?”
“No,” she said. “I swear.”
Underwood held her gaze for a long moment, but something in his expression had changed, as if he’d believed her denials and concluded that she had nothing useful to offer him. She couldn’t tell yet if she felt offended or relieved.
“When I first came in, you said I should protect myself,” she said. “What did you mean exactly? If you don’t believe Croaker had anything to do with what happened to Ben, what do I need to protect myself from?”
He scratched at his sideburn, pursing his lips as if he wasn’t sure how to answer. It was so quiet, she could hear the fan blades spin and the plastic blinds tick against the glass. “You’d probably know more about that than I would,” he said. “Do you have any enemies? Anybody who might mean you harm? When you’re close to somebody who’s murdered, you have to ask yourself if there might be a message in there for you.”
She felt a buzzing in her ears, like the beginning of a headache. “If we’re done, I should get back and meet my sister.”
But now that their interview was officially over, he didn’t seem in any hurry to see her leave. “Do you know I’ve never taken a yoga class?” He kicked back in his chair. “I’ve been thinking I should try it out. I have some sports injuries from way back, and I think it might help to stretch everything out.”
“You should come by the studio.” She reached into her purse for one of the free-class cards she kept in the inside pocket. “Increased flexibility can help with long-term discomfort like you’re describing, but it also has a lot of other benefits. You’d be surprised at how much better you’d feel.”
Halfway through her spiel, she began to worry that he might see this as another kind of invitation, but he simply tapped the card against his palm and slipped it into his pocket.
Though she would have preferred to make her own way, he walked her down the hall again, past the window of an office that seemed to be for paying bills or submitting forms. Beverly Peck was standing in line and called out, “Morning, Sheriff,” her beady eyes sweeping over Natalie, who cringed inwardly. Beverly worked at the bait and tackle store out by the marina, and by noon every fisherman between here and Marlborough Springs would know that Natalie Macready had been seen at the courthouse that morning.
At least the sheriff didn’t walk her all the way out to the parking lot, instead opening the door for her and looking out, shading his eyes with his hands. “That’s a nice little Chevette you’re driving,” he said. “That’s not what the insurance gave you, is it?”
“It’s my dad’s car,” Natalie said. “I’d rather just get a rental, but he says it’s safer to drive a car that everyone can recognize as mine.”
“Well, it’s sure as hell conspicuous,” Underwood said as he turned back toward his office. “Everybody’s going to see you coming.”
13.
It wasn’t that she’d lied to Hardy Underwood, or not exactly. It was true that she knew virtually nothing about her family’s moonshining business, which had ceased to be a viable commercial enterprise around the time she was born. From what she’d heard, production in Ewald had all but stopped after the big federal raids in the late nineties. Her grandfather Macready’s farm supply store, which had once sold seven million pounds of sugar and half a million one-gallon containers in a single year, had been forced to close its doors, and he’d died soon after. Her father had left behind the lucrative days of delivering the county product to the back doors of bars in the cities of the Southeast and concentrated on their legitimate business, and after Uncle Leo served his time, he’d joined his brother at Macready Contracting. That was the official story—the one that her father himself had surely shared with the sheriff before he’d written a sizable check to his campaign.
But it wasn’t the whole truth. Natalie could remember the mini fridge in the den that throughout her childhood had been stocked with mason jars, some clear as sunshine, others tinged deep blue, yellow, or purple with muddled fruit. She’d assumed these were gifts from friends, as Hardy had suggested, but she didn’t know that for sure. When they were very little, their mother had told the girls that it was medicine that was dangerous to children, and none of them had gone further than opening the door and running their fingertips along the long line of colored glass. Until they were teenagers, of course. Until the night of the boat crash.
No one ever asked Natalie what she remembered from that night. She’d answered the police’s questions at the hospital, but once they found out that she’d passed out after the boat left the dock and didn’t wake up until Luke pulled her onto the bank, they’d seemed to lose interest, and that was fine with her. They had so many other accounts to chase, ones that must have seemed more interesting and more relevant. In the years since, Natalie had heard her sisters’ stories of that night so many times that they’d become as real to her as her own memories. She could see the tall, shirtless boy palming the wheel—could see, as if in a movie, the boat turning at a too-sharp angle as it approached the bridge that ran over the top of the TVA dam. She could see the pictures that had been printed in the newspaper the next day: the police headlights illuminating the lakeshore; Croaker with his head in his hands.
She’d had a new outfit for the Felons’ Ball that year, a skintight red minidress that she’d bought with her allowance and sneaked past her mom. Cassie said it looked slutty, but once Natalie put it on, she knew that the real reason Cassie didn’t want her to wear the dress was because she’d known Natalie would look prettier than her. The dress clung to Natalie in all the right places, showing off her new cleavage and the roundness of her ass. In a concession to the weather, she paired it with shearling boots and a long white cable-knit cardigan. Kaitlyn did her makeup, giving her a smoky eye and lipstick that matched the dress exactly. “Just keep your face out of the light when you see Mama,” Kaitlyn warned. “She’ll say you look like a streetwalker.”
Natalie had rolled her eyes. The last thing she wanted to do that night was be around their parents. Lanny had been flirting with her for months now, putting a hand on her waist or lower back anytime he passed her in the hallway, leaning too close to whisper funny or outrageous comments in her ear. This was her chance to show him that she was ready to learn whatever it was he had to teach her.
Lanny was like the other guys she knew, but also different, and that was what she liked about him. He’d refused to apply to college in the fall, saying that he could make a good salary by hitchhiking out west and jumping on the first boat he saw, and he’d get to see the world at the same time. He was the one who’d explained to her that the merchant marines weren’t like the regular marines; the correct term was actually merchant mariner, which referred to any worker on a cargo ship with a US flag. “I don’t know where the fuck he even got this idea,” she’d heard Ben say to her mother in their kitchen late one night. “It’s like he wants to get as far away as possible.” Ben Marsh never would have asked her opinion, but Natalie could have told him that that was exactly the point.
But finding time with Lanny at the Felons’ Ball was harder than she’d expected. He was with Croaker and Luke, the three of them making the rounds of the adults, saying yes ma’am and no sir, answering questions about the football season and accepting hearty pats on the back. Luke was the one who usually bought the beer for the group, since he was over six feet and could grow a real mustache, as opposed to Croaker’s scraggly peach fuzz. He lifted weights even in the offseason, and sometimes Natalie saw him running along the side of the highway in basketball shorts and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. Luke had been after Cassie since middle school, and though Cassie acted like she was too good for him, Natalie had always expected her to give in eventually. As far as Ewald County boys went, she could do a lot worse than Luke Caldwell.
Natalie liked both Croaker and Luke well enough, but she found it hard to pay attention to them when Lanny was around. It wasn’t just his looks that attracted her. He was passably cute, with a tall, rangy body and the kind of pointed, mobile face that made him look interesting rather than handsome, but there was more to him than that. She loved the way his eyes moved over her, with a gaze that warmed her body from the top of her head to her curling toes. Most of the boys she knew were bashful about sex, stealing glances at Natalie and her friends and then turning away, as if embarrassed by their own lust, but Lanny was the opposite. He made Natalie aware of her own desire—made her feel the force that was inside her, like a seam of lava running to her core.
While Lanny and his friends made the rounds, Kaitlyn stayed behind the buffet table serving puff pastry appetizers, and Natalie lounged in a beach chair behind her, fending off the cold with an insulated cup of white lightning and orange juice. She was on strict orders from Cassie to limit herself to one drink—“I’m not sneaking you in the house if you get sloppy,” her sister had insisted—but Natalie found the limit insulting. She wasn’t a child, for God’s sake. She’d been sneaking the occasional beer at parties for the last year at least, and she could handle far more than one sip of her father’s moonshine. It was in her blood, after all.
The bocce tournament had ended, her father and Ben Marsh crowned champions again, when Lanny appeared at the arm of her chair. Natalie hadn’t seen him coming, and she sat up suddenly, wishing she could check her makeup. “It’s on,” Lanny whispered, his eyes scanning the crowd rather than her face. “I got the keys to your dad’s boat.”
Natalie gave him her widest smile. “I’ll go anywhere with you,” she said, and now Lanny did stop and look at her, his eyes traveling down from her face to her body. She shifted slightly to let her cardigan fall open, and his grin widened. “Well, damn, girl,” he said, his accent getting stronger, the way it always did when he was drinking. “Let’s get the hell out of here then.”
They left the party and made it across the lake without incident, but the bonfire was disappointing—mostly college students from out of state who had no interest in sharing their weed with a bunch of locals—and it wasn’t long before Luke decided they should relocate to the party boat. “Come on,” she heard him whisper to Lanny, who was standing by the fire. “The plan was to get some alone time.” Luke looked meaningfully at Cassie, and Lanny grinned.
