from speaking the truth to Chick, just like she couldn’t stop herself from telling him the story of her life in the hallway of the All-You-Can-Eat back when she had first realized that she loved him.
“I married Lester because you took off and I had to make a life for myself and your child. I married him because it was that or die because I couldn’t be with you. Maybe I was wrong to marry him. Maybe I was cruel to you. Maybe this is my punishment for spending nine years waiting for you to knock on my door and come take me and Adam away, even though Lester loved our son as much as any father could and loves me more than I deserve. Maybe this is God’s judgment for every bad thing I ever did.”
He stepped toward her then and wrapped his arms around her. He pulled her into his body and she inhaled the scent of him, familiar and strange, perfect and wrong. She wanted to embrace him and squeeze him to her, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. She stood stiff and straight with her arms crossed over her chest like a corpse inside a coffin.
He asked in a voice ragged with sorrow, “What can I do, Barbara Jean? What can I do to make it better?”
It just came out, the simple truth of what she wanted at that moment. “Kill him. If you want to do something for me, if you want to do something for our son, you’ll kill Desmond.” Barbara Jean twisted out of his arms and stepped away from him. Brushing off the stray gray, red, and white feathers that had transferred from his body to her black sweater, she said, “I’ve got to get back to my husband. He’s not well.” She left him standing with his arms reaching out for her.
The police were back at Barbara Jean’s house the next day. They were Plainview police officers this time instead of the Indiana State Police. They talked to Lester for a while in the foyer and told him they wanted him to come with them. Barbara Jean refused to let him leave the house without her. She made such a fuss that they put her in the squad car along with her husband. The police drove them out of downtown Plainview and onto Wall Road. She closed her eyes as they passed the place where Adam had been found.
The Plainview chief of police stood in the side yard of Desmond Carlson’s house, one of a dozen cops milling around—the entire Plainview police department back then. Three of the policemen were loading Desmond’s body onto a stretcher when the car carrying Barbara Jean and Lester drove up. At least Barbara Jean thought it was Desmond. She hadn’t seen him up close in nine years. And he was barely recognizable now, with half of his face gone.
They separated Lester and Barbara Jean then. The chief of police talked to Lester ten yards away from her while a patrolman asked Barbara Jean where her husband had been the previous night and early that morning.
That was when James drove up along with the white state trooper who’d come to the house with him to tell Barbara Jean and Lester about Adam. They moved fast, their police cruiser skidding in the mud. The questioning ended as soon as James approached. Lester came over and stood next to Barbara Jean while James spoke with the police chief for several minutes. Then James walked over to his friends and said he would drive them home.
On the way back to the house, James apologized for the trouble and explained that he didn’t hear about it right away because Desmond’s neighborhood was part of the Plainview cops’ jurisdiction, while Wall Road, owned by the university, was the territory of the state police. He assured them that, after the investigation, it would be concluded that Desmond, overcome with guilt, had killed himself with a shot to the head. James said, “That’ll turn out to be the best thing for everybody.”
When the car pulled up in Barbara Jean and Lester’s driveway, the white trooper shook Lester’s hand and whispered, “I would’ve done the same thing if it’d been my boy.”
It began that day, the rumor that Lester had killed or engineered the death of Desmond Carlson. Eventually, Lester seemed to believe it himself. But Barbara Jean knew the truth. Out at Desmond Carlson’s place, while the policeman questioned her about her husband’s whereabouts,