Chapter 2
Old Mill Road
Harlan Peavey had driven the milk route out of Calloway for nineteen years, and in all that time the only thing he had ever found on Old Mill Road at ten past five in the morning was deer.
It was the fifteenth of June, a Sunday. The sky over the soybean fields had gone the colour of dishwater and was beginning to take on pink at the edges. The truck's heater was off. He had the window down and his elbow out and the radio tuned low to the gospel station out of Macon, and he was thinking, in the loose, unhurried way of a man who has been awake since three, about whether his wife would let him have eggs.
He saw her a long way off.
She was walking in the middle of the road, on the yellow line, not fast and not slow, barefoot. For a moment he took her for a mailbox, for the flat grey shape of something left out. Then she lifted one hand and pushed her hair behind her ear, and he took his foot off the gas.
"Lord," he said aloud.
He stopped the truck about fifty feet short. He turned off the radio. He sat with his hands on the wheel for a count of three, as a man does when he suspects he is about to be asked to be somebody, and then he got down.
She did not seem to see him.
She was a girl, a young woman, in a blue sundress with one strap torn and mud drying on the hem. Her left knee had been scraped and had bled and had stopped. She had her shoes in her right hand, a pair of white canvas sneakers with the laces tied together, and she was holding them by the knot, the way you carry a thing you've been told to carry and not to drop.
"Miss?" he said. "Miss, are you all right?"
She stopped. She looked at him, and it took her a while. He would say afterward, to a police officer and then to a lawyer and then to a courtroom in which he sat for four hours with his Sunday hat in his lap, that her eyes were not the eyes of somebody who had been crying. They were the eyes of somebody doing arithmetic.
"What road is this?" she said.
"Old Mill, miss. About four miles north of the county line."
"What time is it?"
"A little past five."
"Sunday?"
"Yes, ma'am."
She nodded slowly. She seemed to be checking each answer against something. Then she said, in a clear, polite, careful voice, as if she were giving it to a stranger on a bus: "I need a pen."
What happened at the lake house between 10:52 on Saturday night and about half past four on Sunday morning is not going to be told here.
It will be told later, in pieces, by a number of people, under oath and otherwise. It will be told by a nurse with a clipboard, and by a lawyer with a laser pointer, and by a man in a gray suit who will say that it did not happen at all. It will be told in transcripts and depositions and motions in limine. It will be told by her, in a voice that will be described in the newspapers as flat, and which she will hear described that way, again and again, for years, as if flatness were a flaw in the testimony, and not the sound of a person standing very still in order to get through it.
But it will not be told here, in this chapter, in this way. It belongs to her. And what the reader needs to understand, for now, is only this:
There were five of them.
In the cab of the milk truck, with the engine idling and the first light coming up pale over the soybeans, Harlan Peavey found a ballpoint pen in the pocket of his work shirt. It was a blue Bic, chewed at the end. He held it out and she took it, and for a moment he thought she was going to write on her hand.
She did. She pushed up the sleeve of her left arm and began to write on the inside of her forearm, just below the elbow, in small block capitals, with the careful flat pressure of someone who has been taught that you press hard enough to be read and not so hard that you tear the paper.
He did not look. He had been brought up not to. But the cab was small, and the light was coming in through the windshield, and he was a man who read for a living, in the sense that he read every label on every crate, and so he could not help but see it.
G. PRUITT.
She stopped. Her tongue touched her top lip. Then she wrote, under it:
D. SUTTER.
O. MADDOX.
T. BOYLE.
He realized that he was holding his breath.
She sat for a long time with the pen against her arm. The truck ticked. A mockingbird started up somewhere in the fence line, running through its whole repertoire: a car alarm, a phone, a robin, a squeak. She was looking at the empty space under the fourth name. Her lips were moving. He thought, afterward, that she was counting.
"Miss," he said, finally. "Do you want me to call somebody? There's a hospital in town. I can take you right now. I can call your mama."
She did not answer. She set the pen against her skin again, and the point held there, a small blue dot spreading in the fine hairs of her forearm, and Harlan Peavey saw that her hand was not shaking at all.
It was the stillest hand he had ever seen.
"There's a fifth," she said.
"A what, miss?"
"There's a fifth one. I know his name." She said it as if she were reading from a very long way off. "I just haven't decided if I'm allowed to write it."
"Allowed by who?"
She didn't answer that, either.
Instead, with the same flat, careful pressure, she wrote the initials C. M. on her arm. And then, very slowly, she drew a line through them. And then she looked up at Harlan Peavey, who had a grandchild her age, and whose Sunday hat was lying on the seat between them, and said, in a voice that was almost kind:
"I'm sorry. I'm going to need you to drive."
He drove.
He went the whole eleven miles to Pruitt County Memorial in the milk truck, with the crates rattling in the back and the sun coming up over the fields on his right, and he did not speak, because he understood that she did not want him to. He drove at forty-five. He did not take the shortcut by the quarry. At every stop sign, he came to a full and honest stop.
She sat with her shoes in her lap and her forearm turned up on her knee, like a page.
When they reached the emergency entrance, a man in blue scrubs was standing at the curb with a cigarette, and a woman in a green cardigan was coming out of the sliding doors with a cup of coffee in each hand, laughing at something over her shoulder. It was a quarter to six on a Sunday morning, at the end of a twelve-hour shift, and the woman in the cardigan looked tired and ordinary and pleased to be going home.
She looked up, and saw the truck, and saw who was in it.
Harlan Peavey would say, in the courtroom, under oath, that it was the first time in his life he had heard a person make a sound like that. He would say that it was not a scream. It was lower than a scream. It was the noise a house makes when something in the foundation gives.
The two cups of coffee hit the pavement.
In the passenger seat, without turning her head, Corinne Bellamy said, very quietly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:
"Mom. Don't. I've got it written down."