Lee Martin - The Bright Forever

Contents

the bright forever

a novel

LEE MARTIN

Shaye Areheart Books

NEW YORK

To Deb

Thank you for asking the right questions

Acknowledgments

M ANY THANKS to those who offered advice and encouragement along the way: Phyllis Wender, Sonia Pabley, Susie Cohen, Amy Bloom, Steve Yarbrough, Ladette Randolph, Hilda Raz, Karen Shoemaker, Gerald Shapiro and Judith Slater, Paul and Ellen Eggers, Bart and Melanie Adams, Harry and Mildred Read, Jim and Maria Duncan, Ron Read, Lynda Clemmons, Brenda Boganwright, Amanda Dean, Christine Bonasso, Kathleen Finneran, Doug Johnstone, and Amos Magliocco. The Ohio State University has been generous with its support, as have my colleagues in the English Department and the creative writing program. The fates have blessed me with Sally Kim, an editor of great courage and grace. My eternal gratitude to her and to everyone at Shaye Areheart Books who believed in this novel.

About the Author

L EE MARTIN is the award-winning author of the novel Quakertown; the memoirs From Our House, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection in 2000, and Turning Bones; and the short-story collection The Least You Need to Know. He has won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, a Lawrence Foundation Award, and the Glenna Luschei Prize. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he teaches in the creative writing program at The Ohio State University.

Also by Lee Martin

~~~

Turning Bones

Quakertown

From Our House

The Least You Need to Know

On the banks beyond the river

We shall meet, no more to sever;

In the bright, the bright forever,

In the summer land of song.

Fanny J. Crosby, The Bright Forever

Copyright 2005 by Lee Martin

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Shaye Areheart Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Martin, Lee, 1955

The bright forever : a novel / Lee Martin.

1. GirlsCrimes againstFiction. 2. Loss (Psychology)Fiction. 3. Missing childrenFiction. 4. KidnappingFiction. 5. IllinoisFiction 6. RevengeFiction. I. Title.

PS3563.A724927B75 2005

813'.54dc22 2004023758

eISBN: 978-0-307-23816-0

v3.0

Raymond R.

I M NOT saying I didnt do it. I dont know.

Mr. Dees

O N THE NIGHT it happenedJuly 5the sun didnt set until 8:33. I went back later and checked the weather cartoon on the Evening Registers front page: a smiling face on a fiercely bright sun. I checked because it was the heart of summer, and I couldnt stop thinking about that long light and all the people who were out in it; Id seen them sitting on porches, drinking Pepsis and listening to WTHOs Top Fifty Countdown on transistor radios. I knew they were getting a laugh out of Peanuts or Hi and Lois in the newspaper, thrilling to the adventures of Steve Canyon. Cars were driving along High StreetTrans-Ams and GTOs, Mustangs and Road Runners, Chargers and Barracudas. Some of them were on their way to the drive-in theater east of towna twin bill, Summer of 42 and Bless the Beasts and Children. Others went downtown. Teenage boys were ducking into the Rexall or the new Super Foodliner to pick up a pack of Marlboros or Kools. Couples were strolling around the courthouse square, lollygagging after supper at the Coach House or a steak and a cold beer at the Top Hat Inn. They were window-shopping, the ladies admiring the new knee-high boots at Bogans Shoe Store, high school girls looking at the first wire-rim glasses at Blanks Optical, the flared-leg pantsuits at Helenes Dress Shop, the friendship bracelets and engagement sets at Letts Jewelry.

Enough time and opportunity, and yet no one could stop what was going to happen.

We were just an itty-bitty town in Indiana, on the flat plain beyond the rolling hills of the Hoosier National Foresta glassworks town near the White River, which twisted and turned to the southwest before emptying into the Wabash and running down to the Ohio. That day, a Wednesday, the temperature had gotten up to ninety-three and the humidity had settled in and left everyone limp with trying. The air held in the smell of heat from the furnaces at the glassworks, the dead fish stink from the river, the sounds of peoples living: ice cubes clinking in glasses, car mufflers rattling, screen doors creaking, mothers calling children to come in.

In the evening, when the breeze picked up enough to stir the leaves on the courthouse lawns giant oaks and dusk started to fall, the air cooled just enough to make us forget how hot and unforgiving the day had been. After the hours spent working at the glassworks or the stone quarry or the gravel pit, people were glad to be moving about at their own pace, taking their time, letting the coming dark and the rustle of air convince them that soon there might be rain and then the heat would break. I was content to sit at the kitchen table, noodling around with the story problems I planned to use the next day with my summer students, one of whom was Katie Mackey.

Later, there would be a few folks who would step up and say they had something maybe the police ought to know. Their names would be in the newspaperspapers as far away as St. Louis and Chicagoand on the Terre Haute and Indianapolis television stations, people who would be in the notebooks of all the magazine writers whod comeslick-talking out-of-towners with questions. Newshounds from Inside Detective, Police Gazette. Theyd want to know how to find so-and-so.

Ive never been able to tell this story and my part in it until now, but listen, Ill say it true: a man can live with something like this only so long before he has to make it known. My name is Henry Dees, and I was a teacher thena teacher of mathematics and a summer tutor for the children like Katie who needed such a thing. Im an old man now, and even though more than thirty years have gone by, I still remember that summer and its secrets, and the way the heat was and how the light stretched on into evening like it would never leave. If you want to listen, youll have to trust me. Or close the book; go back to your lives. I warn you: this is a story as hard to hear as it is for me to tell.

Gilley

W E WERE EATING supper. Thats what I remember, the four of us sitting at the table: Mom and Dad and me and Katie. It was just a night like that, a summer night, and pretty soon Katie would finish her lemon sherbet and ask to be excused and then run up the street to find her friend Rene Cherry. Thats what would have happened. Ive known it all these years. Rene and Katie would have made up, said they were sorry about the quarrel theyd had that morning, and played until dark, when Mom would have called my sister in.

But before any of that could happen, I said, Katie didnt take back her library books.

I was still mad at her because sometime that afternoon she had gone into my room and listened to my Carole King album,