Carnal Innocence

She didn’t want to end up in the hospital again. Couldn’t. “I’m sorry. I don’t suppose I’m making much sense.”
    “Well, now, that don’t worry me none. Most people I know spend about half their lives making sense and the other half exercising their jaw. You just tell me how it occurs to you.”
    “I think she must have drowned,” Caroline said in a calm and careful voice. “In the pond. I could see only her face …” She trailed off, forcing back the image before it nudged her toward hysteria again. “I’m afraid she was dead.”
    Before Shays could question further, Deputy Carl Johnson came out of the trees and started across thesun-bleached lawn. His usually spotless uniform showed traces of dirt and streaks of wet. Still, he walked with military precision, a commanding figure, six foot six of taut muscle. His glossy skin was the color of chestnuts.
    He was a man who enjoyed his authority and prized his control. Just now he was fighting to maintain his professional aura when what he wanted to do was find a secluded spot to lose his lunch.
    “Doc.”
    “Carl.”
    It needed only that for the two men to exchange information. Muttering an oath, Shays mopped his face again.
    “Miss Waverly, I’d be obliged to use your phone.”
    “Of course. Can you tell me what …” Again, her gaze was drawn toward the trees, her mind to what was beyond them. “Is she dead?”
    Carl hesitated only a moment, pulling off his cap to reveal tight black curls cut as close and neat as a newly mowed lawn. “Yes, ma’am. The sheriff’ll talk to you as soon as he can. Doc?”
    With a weary nod, Shays rose.
    “There’s a phone right here in the hall,” Caroline began as she started up the steps. “Deputy …”
    “Johnson, ma’am. Carl Johnson.”
    “Deputy Johnson, did she drown?”
    He shot Caroline a quick look as he held open the screen door for her. “No, ma’am. She didn’t.”
    Burke was sitting on the log, turned away from the body. A Polaroid camera sat beside him. He needed a minute before he slipped back into his law-and-order suit. A minute for his head to clear, for his stomach to settle.
    He’d seen death before—had known the look and the smell of it from boyhood, hunting with his father. First they’d gone out for the sheer pleasure of it. Then, when crops and investments had failed, they’d hunted to put meat on the table.
    He’d seen the death of his own kind as well.Starting with his father’s suicide when the farm had been lost. And wasn’t it that death that had led him to this one? Without the farm, with a wife and two young children to support, he’d signed on as town deputy, then as sheriff. The rich man’s son who had detested the futility of his father’s death, and the cruelty of the land that had caused it, had chosen to channel his talents, such as they were, toward law and order.
    But even finding his father hanging in the barn, hearing the quiet creak of the rope rubbing over the thick beam, hadn’t prepared him for what he’d found in McNair Pond.
    He still had much too clear a picture of what it had been like to wrestle that body from the water, to drag it out onto the ground.
    It was funny, he thought, drawing hard on a cigarette, he’d never liked Edda Lou. There had been a coarseness about her, a sly look in her eyes that had milked away any sympathy he might have felt for her being unfortunate enough to be kin to Austin Hatinger.
    But just now he was remembering the way she’d looked one long-ago Christmas when he and Susie had come across her in town. She’d have been no more than ten, mousy hair stringing down her back, patched dress hiking up too far at the side hem and drooping at the front. And her nose pressed up to Larsson’s window as she stared at a doll with a blue cape and rhinestone tiara.
    She’d just been a little girl then, wishing there was a Santa. Already knowing there wasn’t.
    He turned his head when he heard the rustle of brush. “Doc.” He blew out a stream of smoke on the word. “Christ.”
    Shays laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, squeezed once, then moved to the body. Death wasn’t a stranger to him, and he had come to know that death wasn’t only for the old, either. He could accept that the young were taken, through illness, through accident. But this mutilation, this wild destruction of a human being was beyond acceptance.
    Gently, he picked up one of the limp hands and studied the raw wrist. The same telltale signs