At the End of the Road Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  THE RETICULATED WOMAN

  THE PASSAGE OF SLOW-MOVING TRACTORS

  EDEN ROAD SNAKED WITH SHARP CURVES

  HE WAS PEDALING THE BIKE STANDING UP,

  THE GRAVEL DRIVEWAY FROM THE ROAD

  SHE WAS STILL COMING AT HIM, ARMS OUT-

  BEFORE CHURCH THE NEXT DAY, AND BEING

  WITH THE PERSPECTIVE OF ADULTHOOD,

  AND ACROSS THE ROAD, WATCHING THEM

  TO KYLE AND GRACE, HE BECAME LESS A

  GRACE AND KYLE WERE PLAYING HIDE-

  IT’S RIDICULOUSLY EASY TO HIDE IN A

  HE WOULD RATHER HAVE BEEN PLAYING

  THE SLEEPING ARRANGEMENT WAS THE

  JASON WAS SMART. HE WAS THE MASTER-

  DARL GRAYBEAL’S SHATTERED SPINAL

  AND SO KYLE TRACKED HIS BROTHERS TO

  HE FOLLOWED THEM TO A SMALL CLEAR-

  KYLE FIGURED TO SCRAMBLE RIGHT PAST

  AFTER INSPECTING THE ROAD AND FIND-

  AFTER CHURCH, THE EDWARDS FAMILY

  NOW SHE TRULY WAS THE RETICULATED

  THE PARALYZED MAN

  KENNY AHEARN SAT ON HIS PORCH AND

  A FALLOW FIELD CHOKED WITH WEEDS,

  THEY TOOK THEIR TIME ADDING TO IT,

  HE WAS NOT ABLE TO BRING HIMSELF TO

  LOUISE EDWARDS LOOKED AT HER BONY

  THEY WERE ALL STANDING IN THE FALLOW

  WEARING THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE WON-

  KYLE WAS WATCHING TV, CHIN CRADLED

  KYLE TREKKED TOWARD THE CORNFIELD

  THEIR ENCOUNTER WITH THE PARALYZED

  “KYYYYYYYYLE!”

  COUNTY WATER WAS COMING TO EDEN

  KYLE WAS IN A FRENZY. HE WAS COM-

  HE WAS GETTING TO BE PRETTY GOOD AT

  JUST ABOUT A MONTH BEFORE KYLE ED-

  FALLS RIVER DRIVE INTERSECTED WITH

  EDEN ROAD ENDED AT MT. VERNON ROAD,

  DANA SAT ON A CONCRETE BENCH OUT-

  ONCE SHE MADE IT PAST THE HORSE PAD-

  THE SUMMER DRAGGED ON, AND MELODIE

  HE DIDN’T HAVE ANY IDEA IF IT WAS MID-

  KYLE WAS SCARED OUT THERE BECAUSE

  THE SPACES IN THE WEB WERE FILLING

  IT WAS JUST STARTING TO GET LIGHT OUT-

  THE THROBBING IN HIS GOOD WRIST

  LATER, KENNY SAT ON HIS PORCH. HE WAS

  THEY SAT THERE AT HIS KITCHEN TABLE. IT

  AND THEN SHE COULD TELL DAY FROM

  KYLE OPENED THE DOOR AT THE TOP OF

  MAMA WANTED TO K NOW WHAT HAD HAP-

  DANA TURPIN FOUND THE BOY BACK AT

  KENNY SMILED UP AT THE COLORED PO-

  IT WAS MIDNIGHT. THERE WAS NO MOON

  HE GAVE KYLE THE ORANGE TOAST CHEE

  DOWNSTAIRS, THERE WAS A LONG-

  KYLE COULD SMELL THE BODIES EVEN

  KYLE WAS DRIVING MELODIE GODWIN’S

  IT WAS LIKE A MONOCHROME KALEIDO-

  EDEN ROAD DEAD-ENDS AT MOUNT VER-

  “THUM-THUM-THUM-THUM-THUM-THUM

  IT USED TO BE, SHE COULDN’T HAVE EVER

  ALTHOUGH GRACE CERTAINLY HAD A WARY

  HE HAD HIT HER. AFTER ALL THESE MONTHS

  WITH THE DOOR AJAR, SHE COULD SEE

  “IT’S OKAY, SWEET-GIRL,” THE PARALYZED

  “ALRIGHT, NOW, I’M READY. YOU JUST GO

  KYLE HAD BROUGHT HER AN APPLE AND

  KYLE GOT TO THE BOTTOM AND IT WAS

  KYLE WOULD NE VER COME TO KNOW WHAT

  THE SERVANT OF THE ASH

  HER SERGEANT CALLED HER AT HOME

  SHE WAS DISAPPOINTED.

  THE SHERIFF WRESTED THE DRIVER SIDE

  THEY WERE AT THE FREE CLINIC IN AT-

  BOYD HAD TO LEAVE THE HOUSE AT 5:45

  IF LOUISE HAD BEEN ABLE TO THINK

  IN THE CAR, TEARS STREAKED LOUISE’S

  THE TICKING OF THE CLOCKS IN THE EMPTY

  DANA DROVE STRAIGHT FROM THE CRIME

  KYLE’S FATHER ANSWERED THE DOOR,

  SHE SWUNG HER VEHICLE INTO AHEARN’S

  OUT FRONT, MR. AHEARN ASKED, “DID YOU

  THE BOYS HAD FORCED KYLE TO A COR-

  THE FIRST BOY FELL IN BEHIND HIM WHILE

  IT HAD TAKEN DANA A LOT LONGER TO

  MRS. EDWARDS REMEMBERED DANA FROM

  SHE COULD NOT SEE THE CHAIN ANY LON-

  BUT WHAT TO DO NOW? SHE HAD GIVEN IT

  MELODIE STOOD MOTIONLESS IN THE SI-

  KENNY DIDN’T NEED HIS KEY TO ENTER

  THE BUS HAD DROPPED HIM OFF TWO

  HEADING TO DOUGLAS COUNTY, DANA

  THE BOY HAD BEEN WRONG. IT WASN’T A

  DANA KILLED THE SIREN AS SHE EXITED

  NEARLY BLIND, GUNSHOT, HER MIND SHAT-

  KYLE SLIPPED QUIETLY INTO THE PARA-

  “IT’S ABOUT TIME YOU GOT HERE, BOY.”

  DANA KILLED THE ENGINE AND LIGHTS

  “I’M STILL DIZZY. MY SUGAR’S NOT COM-

  DANA FIRED THE SHOT OVER THE WRAITH’S

  LATER THAT YEAR, THE COUNTRY-ROCK

  BY THE TIME DEPUTY TURPIN TOOK THE

  IN THE FEW MINUTES THEY HAD BEFORE

  MERCUROCHROME

  Acknowledgements

  PRAISE FOR

  A VERY SIMPLE CRIME

  “A Very Simple Crime is the product of A Very Talented Writer. Grant Jerkins’s stylish prose and rich characters set him apart. As a reader, you will enjoy every page. It’s impossible this is a first novel. Don’t miss it.”

  —Ridley Pearson,

  New York Times bestselling author of In Harm’s Way

  “There’s not a soul you can trust in the story . . . [A] well-fashioned but extremely nasty study in abnormal psychology, which dares us to solve a mystery in which none of the normal character cues can be taken at face value.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “No one in this novel is as [he or she] appear[s] to be, and the twists and turns never let up until the very last page. This dark, chilling debut . . . is a real page-turner and should especially appeal to legal thriller fans.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “You have to admire the purity of Jerkins’s writing: He’s determined to peer into the darkness and tell us exactly what he sees.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Beautifully plotted, aware of its genre roots yet wholly original, funny, scary, haunting . . . and oddly arresting from the very first sentence.”

  —Nicholas Kazan,

  playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Reversal of Fortune

  “Jerkins juggles his plot twists like a top circus acrobat in this nasty legal noir.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Grant Jerkins

  A VERY SIMPLE CRIME

  AT THE END OF THE ROAD

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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d

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2011 by Grant Jerkins.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jerkins, Grant.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54562-1

  1. Life change events—Fiction. 2. Secrets—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.E69A94 2011

  813’.6—dc23

  2011028158

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my sister, Amanda Grace Beam

  GOD IS

  He was just a boy.

  In her mind, the woman could conjure only a faint static image of the boy, like a photograph faded with time and constant handling.

  The woman’s room in the Clermont Hotel overlooked Ponce de Leon Avenue. The Clermont, a fading redbrick monolith, wasn’t the worst the city of Atlanta had to offer, but it was close. The hotel was noted for its late-night lounge, located in the basement, its main attraction being Blondie, a stripper who crushed beer cans with her breasts.

  The woman knew what she had come here to do. Not consciously. She never consciously acknowledged to herself that she had come here to end her life. But that knowledge was there inside her, hidden away. Just as whatever it was that had gotten her to this point existed somewhere deep within her—but she was not allowed (or did not allow herself) to see it. Still, it was there inside her, hard and ugly and shameful.

  The woman looked at her reflection in the spotted mirror. Why did men still want her? Why would they pay to have sex with her? What was wrong with men that they would pay to have intercourse with a thirty-seven-year-old meth addict who looked a haggard fifty? And she realized that she had never understood the sex act, what drove men and women to seek it out—in one form or another—over and over throughout their lives.

  She finished the last of the tranquilizers, washing them down with water from the bathroom sink. Already she could feel the soothing warm fingers invading her, holding her. This was the only penetrating embrace she had ever cared for. She wished she hadn’t finished the vodka beforehand, because now she needed to hurry. Now her conscious mind knew what her other mind had done. Now her two halves were working together, and for the briefest moment the point in her life when she had first been divided flashed in her mind and she saw the hard shameful thing and it didn’t hurt because the hard thing was dying now.

  She found a soiled Rite Aid receipt stuck to the bottom of the trash can and wrote five words on the back of it. She folded the paper and wrote the boy’s name across the front. She tucked the note inside the Xanax bottle, capped it, and put it in her pocket.

  And she thought of the boy, and she thought about the hard, ugly, shameful thing deep within her, and she was happy because she realized that she was winning. She was going to kill that thing inside her.

  THE RETICULATED WOMAN

  THE PASSAGE OF SLOW-MOVING TRACTORS

  had ground the red clay surface of Eden Road into a fine, rust-like powder. And the stern eye of the Georgia sun baked the powder drier than crematory ash. Speeding cars that sometimes used the lonely road as a shortcut to the reservoir left massive, lingering red plumes in their wake.

  When the woman’s car flipped over, it sent up rolling, choking clouds of the stuff. And now the woman stood in front of the boy, both of them covered in the rust-colored dust. The blood that seeped from the woman’s scalp wound etched thin lines down her soiled face. And as the blood spidered through the dirt, it left an obscene red reticulation, a web of gore.

  The boy stood, unmoving. His mind could not yet fully process how his environment—an environment that seemed to never change—was, in a matter of seconds, changed with a ferocity that defied comprehension.

  The woman stumbled toward the boy, her hands held out stiffly before her like a zombie, like Frankenstein’s monster, and the boy could see that blood also dripped from her fingertips, and he could see through the dirt and the blood that her fingernails had been torn away in the accident, ripped out from their beds, leaving an exposed jangle of nerves and meat.

  EDEN ROAD SNAKED WITH SHARP CURVES

  more appropriate to a mountain pass than this flat stretch of North Georgia houses and small farm plots. But it was the boy’s road. Kyle Edwards rode his bicycle on it daily. It was only about two miles long. On one end was the Sweetwater Reservoir where Kyle bought fifteen-cent candy at the dank bait shop that smelled of earthworms, crickets, and minnows; the other end intersected Lee Road, the two-lane blacktop.

  It was a safe world—more or less. There were only three things in Kyle’s world that he considered dangerous and that he feared. One was the territorial bull that roamed the cow pasture that bordered the cornfield. The pasture held the green pond where Kyle liked to spend a great deal of his time, so whenever he went there, he had to be vigilant of the bull that had already crippled one boy from the area.

  His other fear was of Patrick Sewell and his little brother Joel and their friend Scotty Clonts. They were teenagers. Long hair and dirty Levis. Scotty Clonts seemed to wear the same shirt every day—a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves that had the words Judas Priest—Sad Wings of Destiny printed on it in gothic script. Kyle didn’t know what a Judas Priest was, but it struck him as menacing—as did Scotty himself. Patrick Sewell was the oldest son of Nathan Sewell, the chairman of the Douglas County Board of Commissioners. Nathan Sewell somehow managed to get himself reelected every four years despite the fact that his son Patrick was an unemployed high school dropout (hell, they kicked him out, most folks would say) who sported frizzy red hippie hair, seldom bathed, and was suspected to be involved with drugs.

  Patrick had once thrown a brick at Kyle, unprovoked, while he was riding his bike. The brick had hit him in the chest and knocked him off his bicycle into a ditch. The blow had knocked the breath out of Kyle’s lungs, and he had lain in the ditch, momentarily unable to breathe and certain he was going to die, Patrick standing over him, laughing.

  Patrick’s younger brother, Joel, was the same age as Kyle, but he was scared of Joel most of all. Joel was disfigured. The lower half of his face was a twisted raw mess. Kyle’s oldest brother, Jason, said that Joel Sewell had drunk a bottle of Drano, and the acid had eaten away his lower jaw and throat. Supposedly, Joel thought it was Coca-Cola he was drinking, but that didn’t make any sense to Kyle. How could you confuse Drano with Coca-Cola?

  Kyle rode his bike (a hand-me-down Schwinn Stingray complete with gold glitter banana seat and ape hanger handlebars) as fast and as hard as he could up and down Eden Road, delighting in the plumes of red dust he kicked up behind him. He rode straight down the center, never giving the remotest thought to his safety. He was just a boy.

  He was scared of only one other thing in his environment—and that was blasting caps. Public safety commercials about blasting caps seemed to interrupt every cartoon he ever watched, typically depicting a boy about Kyle’s age, walking through
dirt and debris—as he himself often did—and spying a benign and compact bundle of wires half obscured on the ground. The boy in the commercial always did exactly what Kyle would have done lucking up on such a fascinating treasure: He picked it up and began fidgeting with it. The commercial ended with a look of surprised horror in the commercial boy’s eyes, the screen going to white, and the echoing thunder of an explosion fading out.

  The commercials worked on Kyle’s mother as well, creeping into her mind, so that she regularly admonished him that if he ever came across anything that looked like a blasting cap, he should not touch it, but come straight home and tell her.

  So Kyle was haunted by the remote chance of being blown to bits, but he exercised zero caution playing in the road. No one had ever warned him. Certainly not his parents. There’d been no commercials.

  HE WAS PEDALING THE BIKE STANDING UP,

  going for maximum speed, maximum dust trails, heading straight into a blind curve, when the blue car materialized in front of him. There was time for him to note that the car was kicking up its own massive trail of dust, denoting high speed. There was also time for Kyle to note that he was dead. Even in his limited understanding of the world, he could see that the coming collision was neither avoidable nor survivable. The car was going to hit him—that seemed a given. And it would kill him. Another given. At ten years old, he understood that tons of hurtling metal versus a boy on a bicycle equaled death.

  He watched, as though a bystander, the scene of his own demise.

  The last thing he saw before he hit the dirt was the woman behind the wheel of the powder blue Chevelle Super Sport, her face dumb, not yet comprehending. Kyle laid down his bike, skidding toward the car’s bumper. And the woman must have done something, because when Kyle finally opened his eyes, he was completely unharmed. Fresh skid marks ended two feet away from where he sat in the road. He inspected his body, making sure that it was true, that he was unhurt; then he picked up his bike, which was a little dusty but also unharmed. When he tried to mount the bicycle, he fell over it, his legs refusing to work properly. When he was able to get back up, he started pushing his bicycle back toward his driveway.