One of Us Read online

  “He was just like me,” he repeated.

  “What did you do?”

  “I killed him.”

  In the silence that followed I struggled to find the lesson I was supposed to take away.

  Tommy was a talker; Rafe wasn’t, but they both only opened their mouths when they had something meaningful to say. Most people did the opposite.

  “You got rid of the hate, but wouldn’t it have been easier to kill someone you hate?” I eventually asked.

  I knew I had asked the right question because the answer explained everything.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Let’s go, boys,” I hear Rafe say beside me.

  He and Billy and Troy start walking toward the gallows.

  Rafe’s sixty-one now. The years have put their stamp on him but somehow haven’t aged him. Maybe that’s because he was never young to begin with. He’s always just been.

  Parker’s eyes dart in all directions, searching for his best avenue of escape, but he thinks better of it and falls backward onto the time-blackened wood in surrender, where he lies motionless, trapped by his snowsuit as surely as any toppled baby.

  eight

  SCARLET

  THE FIRST TIME I saw a dead person I was nine years old. Actually, I didn’t see an entire person; I saw parts.

  Twenty-eight men were killed in an explosion in one of my dad’s mines. I was playing in his study when he got the call. He stood beside his desk, a slim figure in silhouette against the daylight outside the window. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he wouldn’t look sad or even upset. Nothing ever bothered my dad unless he wanted it to.

  “Twenty-eight,” he said into the phone.

  His fingers began to tap on the lovingly polished surface of the mahogany desk that once belonged to his great-grandfather, the original Walker Dawes.

  He noticed a mark on it, frowned briefly, and rubbed it away with his fingertip.

  “Well, double digits are never good, but it could’ve been worse. Let me change and I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  He turned around, intending to head out the door, but spotted me on the floor with my collection of Strawberry Shortcake dolls spread out before me. He bent down and gave me one of his best boardroom smiles.

  “Hey, there, Button.”

  “Is something wrong, Daddy? Where are you going?”

  “There’s been an accident,” he replied, tousling my hair. “It’s nothing that concerns you.”

  My mom agreed with him. Not only did the mine explosion not concern me, it really didn’t concern her. She departed the next day to go stay with her parents in New York and avoid the “unpleasantness,” as she called it. My little brother and I were left in the care of Anna, our nanny, which wasn’t anything new.

  Anna strongly disagreed with my parents. She thought the accident did concern me very much and to prove it, she packed me up in her pea-green Pontiac two days after Mom fled and the bodies had been recovered and drove me to Lost Creek. She left Wes at home with the kitchen staff.

  The nearest hospital and morgue were dozens of miles away from the mine and there were too many bodies to fit in the funeral home, so they laid out the pieces of men in the elementary school gym.

  When we arrived, the building was surrounded with vehicles: cars, pickup trucks, ambulances, fire trucks, police cars. People stood around in murmuring knots or stared numbly into white Styrofoam cups. Some cried quietly while others held them. Men were crying as much as the women. Big men. Tough men. Men who looked like they could break my dad’s arm as easily as they snapped kindling across their knees.

  I had expected hysteria. I had heard my dad tell my mom that “all hell was breaking loose” in Lost Creek. I expected women collapsing on the ground sobbing and tearing their hair out. I expected angry men shaking fists and brandishing shotguns while claiming someone was going to pay for this. I expected other men in uniform rushing around authoritatively calming everyone; instead it turned out the men in uniform cried just as much as everyone else.

  I had believed in Hollywood’s version of tragedy, but this was real life, and in real life hell wasn’t something that broke loose; hell was something people kept quietly hidden in the shadows of their everyday lives, but every now and then they couldn’t stop it from stepping out into the light.

  Anna grabbed my hand and maneuvered me through the cars and trucks and people.

  Everyone stared at us, but I didn’t mind. I was used to people knowing who I was, but this was a different kind of acknowledgment. There was no awe or respect in their glances. No humility in their silence. They stared at me frightened and full of animal distrust, as if they were a pack of woodland creatures watching me walk through the smoldering ashes of a forest I had just burned down.

  We walked into the gym. It also served as the cafeteria and auditorium. School had been canceled for three days, but the smell of pizza burgers still lingered. There was a stage at one end with old snagged blue curtains and a counter at the other end where the kids lined up to get their school lunches slopped onto their orange plastic trays. Both ends had scuffed backboards hanging from the ceiling with basketball hoops and torn nets mounted on them. There weren’t nearly as many people in the gym as outside, and the ones who were there didn’t notice us at all.

  The bodies and pieces of bodies were covered in sheets and spread across the gym floor. The sheets must have been torn off beds and donated by townspeople because they weren’t a uniform institutional color. I noticed a pink one and a lavender one. One was yellow with tiny orange flowers, one striped in shades of blue and green, and one decorated with cowboy hats and boots. It was smaller than the others and obviously belonged on a child’s bed. The lump beneath it was smaller, too, and for a moment I wondered if a dog had died in the explosion.

  A policeman stood beside a table near the other doors talking to a doctor with a clipboard under his arm. The table was covered with a white sheet and had a couple of small lumps. Two tear-stained women—one older than the other with her arm around her shoulders—stood together over one of the sheets while a priest talked quietly to them. A pastor in a polyester suit holding a Bible and wearing a white tie with a large gold cross pinned in the middle of it talked quietly to an elderly couple standing away from the sheets.

  I looked up at Anna and thought she was about to say something to me when a young woman came through the doors behind us, walked past us, and headed toward the policeman, her high heels click-clacking over the polished wood floorboards.

  She was attractive in a skittish sort of way and had the most amazing shade of hair I’d ever seen. It was almost the color of a yellow marshmallow Peep. But it wasn’t her hair or youth or slavish use of blue eye shadow that made her stand out compared to the others. It was what she wore: a slinky black party dress and a pair of strappy red stiletto heels.

  I didn’t understand. I was enthralled. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  She talked to the policeman and the doctor and from out of nowhere, two other men appeared. I could tell they were miners by their steel-toed work boots, their dirty hands, and the exhaustion carved into their faces. They had been digging for bodies for two days and nights.

  They greeted her and it was obvious they all knew each other. The four men talked earnestly to her. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to talk her into something or out of something. Finally the two miners stepped away and she lifted her chin and squared her shoulders, and I suddenly understood everything about her.

  She had dressed up for the occasion the same way people dressed up for church and funerals. Out of respect for the worst thing she would ever have to do in her life she had put on the prettiest thing she owned. Her husband had probably bought her those shoes and that dress with the money he earned at the job that had killed him. He probably loved to see her in them so she had put them on to come
down to the school gym and identify what was left of him.

  The doctor pulled back a section of the sheet on the table. The policeman looked away.

  I stared at her shoes. I wanted those shoes.

  She suddenly lunged for whatever was under that sheet. It turned out to be part of an arm, from the elbow down, charred black, with a hand attached to it.

  The doctor tried to intervene but she pushed him away. She began fiddling with the dead fingers. She was trying to pull off a ring. She yanked and the finger came off instead.

  A strange noise came gurgling out of her mouth. I thought she was finally going to cry, but it was laughter: high-pitched, screeching, hysterical laughter. She laughed and laughed and laughed.

  Everyone in the gym watched, but no one made a move to stop her.

  I suppose I should’ve been scared or grossed out or sad, but I wasn’t any of those things. As I looked around at all the bewildered pain on all the helpless faces, I wondered if life and death was different for poor people. Maybe being alive was the bad part for them. Surely it was better to be ribbons of flesh seared into a coal seam than to be that crazy, ruined girl.

  The doctor was able to get the finger away from her and put it back under the sheet. She kept laughing. The priest went over to talk to her, and she laughed harder.

  “This is your father’s fault,” Anna whispered icily to me. “He’s a murderer. All of the Dawes men are murderers.”

  “I’m going to tell my dad you said that.”

  “Go ahead. It wouldn’t be the first time he heard it. Besides, he doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him.”

  “He cares what I think.”

  She squeezed my hand tighter and shook it.

  “Look closer,” she urged me. “Doesn’t it bother you? What do you see?”

  What I saw bothered me but I didn’t feel bad. It was their own faults, after all. Everyone knew coal mining was a dangerous job. I didn’t feel regret. I didn’t feel in any way responsible for what I was seeing or that my father was responsible either. I sensed something wasn’t fair, but injustice without a defined villain is only bad luck. I sensed waste, but I wasn’t sure what was being wasted unless it was the red shoes because they might not ever be worn again.

  “Parts,” I told her.

  She glared down at me and I dug my fingernails into her palm. She stood it for as long as she could before whipping her hand away, hissing at me. It was a game we played: which one of us could inflict more pain.

  She wasn’t allowed to inflict physical pain on me, because I was a child, so she settled for the emotional and psychological kind that didn’t leave marks on the outside. I, on the other hand, could do whatever I wanted, and even though I enjoy a good mind fuck just as much as the next gal, I preferred real, honest hurt.

  I like red shoes to this day. I have at least a dozen pairs of them. I like red in general but not because of my name.

  People always think I must be named after the color or the plucky heroine from Gone With the Wind, but I’m not. My father’s great-grandfather died of scarlet fever, and my father idolized him to the point of obsession. The Dawes men never sire daughters and always name their firstborn sons after themselves, so when I was born, my parents were completely caught off guard and had no idea what to call me. My dad insisted that despite my gender deficiency, they still had to find a way to pay tribute to his revered ancestor. And that’s what they did. They named me after the disease that killed him.

  I haven’t been back here for almost twenty years, and when I say here I mean the mansion the Original Walker built back in the 1800s. It sits on an expanse of private land about five times the size of Lost Creek. We have our own zip code.

  My father loves attention but he also tires of it quickly and needs to retreat into isolation, while my mother must be constantly admired by people who mean nothing to her. They resolved the problem by buying four other homes in more exciting locales where my mother spends most of her time. Dad joins her now and then when he wants to be reminded why he spends most of his time alone.

  He’s a man of extremes in everything. He once told me that it’s okay to be very poor or very rich because the lack or excess of money frees your mind to dwell on loftier subjects, while the people in between spend their lives obsessed with the pathetic mundane trappings of mediocrity. It’s why we have a country infested with shopping malls, tractor mowers, aluminum siding, and sweatpants.

  The people in between would all be better off dead, according to Dad. At least he practices what he preaches. He works tirelessly to keep himself very rich and his workers very poor. He’ll have none of that middle-class blandness associated with his name.

  I’ve never spent any time in the town except for my visit to the school with Anna. I’ve never even seen the infamous gallows, although I’ve heard enough about them and seen enough pictures, including the painting in my father’s study. Last night while relaxing in my hotel room after my flight from Paris to Philadelphia, I watched a repeat of a reality TV show where a group of paranormal investigators skulked around the gallows and jail looking for the ghosts of Prosperity McNab and his fellow Nellies. They didn’t find them, although they insisted they felt them. I wasn’t convinced.

  I’m on my way to Barclay, the only town around here large enough to have a motel. I have no idea how this meeting with Anna’s cousin is going to unfold, but even if it turns out to be nothing, I want the option of not sleeping under the same roof as Walker and Gwen Dawes.

  Maybe I’m a little crazy for doing this, but my curiosity has been piqued to the point where I can’t think about anything else. Anna’s been dead for a long time now, and I didn’t even know she had a cousin in Lost Creek who described herself in her letter to me as Anna’s best friend. I was immediately pissed off. I was Anna’s best friend. She also said she was the only person Anna would trust to keep this kind of secret and I’m a huge sucker for secrets.

  The rest of the letter was vague in content, a bizarre conflicting mix of angry half-formed threats against me and desperate pleas to let her help me while hinting that there was some horrible skeleton in the Dawes family closet Anna had told her about and only I could stop her from revealing it to the world.

  I tried calling her but she wouldn’t speak to me. When I told her my name, I heard a panicked gasp on the other end before she hung up.

  I make a trip back to the States every couple of years. I usually don’t venture farther than my apartment in New York City, but I decided this time to visit the old homestead and to pay a visit to dear cousin Marcella Greger to discuss this terrible secret and her misguided belief that she was Anna’s best friend.

  After checking into the Barclay Holiday Inn with a marquee advertising karaoke night and the upcoming nuptials of Tyler and Brytnee (I asked at the front desk and her name wasn’t misspelled), I take a seat in the chlorine-saturated air at a table in the bar with a view of the atrium and the indoor pool.

  I’m about to go back to the front desk and complain about a lack of service when a waitress finally appears. She rushes over to me, apologizing profusely, and explaining that they don’t get many customers in the middle of a weekday and that she’s all alone.

  She’s young and cute despite her awful brassy blond dye job and too much foundation and metallic shadow that completely overpowers her pretty blue eyes. It would be very cool if she was a descendant of the yellow-haired girl with the red stilettos.

  “My name’s Heather,” she tells me. “What can I get you?”

  “Jack Daniel’s and Coke and please put more Jack in it than Coke.”

  “Okay,” she says, biting her lower lip, “but I’ll have to charge you for a double or I could lose my job.”

  I smile at her.

  “And you wouldn’t want to lose a great job like this one.”

  We both look around us at the Holiday Inn atri
um, at the empty poolside tables with their drooping, lopsided umbrellas faded not by sun but by age, the fake palm trees, the stacks of chairs against a wall waiting to be set out again for the next retirement banquet or wedding reception.

  In the distance, an ice machine clunks and growls. In the pool, three pudgy children shriek, splash, and smack each other.

  “It’s a good job for here,” Heather asserts.

  “There’s a whole big world out there.”

  “I know, but I like it here.”

  “Why? Don’t tell me it’s because of a boyfriend.”

  “No.”

  She blushes. I love girls who blush.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend right now. I don’t know why I stay here. I guess ’cause my family’s here. I got lots of friends, too.”

  She gives me a quick once-over, appreciating what she’s seeing even though I know she doesn’t realize what she’s seeing: the five-inch heels of my Louboutin boots, my Moroccan print Albert Elbaz tunic over black skinny jeans, my distressed leather Versace motorcycle jacket, my lips glistening with Guerlain Folie de Grenat, and the six-carat ruby on my right ring finger.

  “Are you here on vacation?” she asks me. “You look like you’re on vacation.”

  “Why would someone come here on a vacation?”

  She laughs.

  “I admit there’s not much going on. It’s sure not Disney World.”

  “It’s not even Carpet World.”

  She laughs again.

  “But it’s a nice place,” she insists.

  “If you like rust and fat people.”

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe you said that.”

  As if to prove my point, an obese woman in a cherry-red one-piece looking for all the world like a gigantic jacks ball, carrying a People magazine and a Big Gulp, comes walking toward the pool, her flip-flops slapping in time with the rhythmic rumble of the ice machine.