The Truth That Lies Between Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used factitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  THE TRUTH THAT LIES BETWEEN.

  Copyright © 2019 by W. D. McComb.

  wdmccomb.com

  All rights reserved. Published by TreaShore Press.

  ISBN: 978-1-7340904-0-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-1-7340904-1-3 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-7340904-2-0 (ebook)

  First edition.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Part Two

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Part Three

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  About the Author

  DEDICATION

  To...

  The mothers:

  The one who took me fishing, called me her little buddy, and cooked the best biscuits.

  The one who stocked my bookshelves with Hardy Boys mysteries, insisted on proper manners, and clapped her hands when I showed up at her door during college.

  The one who made sure Santa always brought me literature, taught me the worth of love and sentimentality, always had faith in my potential when I doubted whether anyone else did, and lest I forget, read more drafts of this book than she cares to remember.

  And most importantly, the one who propped me up through exhausting years of engineering school, medical training, and building a practice, who told me to go for it when I first shared my idea of a crazy new pastime, patiently supported my long nights at our kitchen table, and lovingly endured all my quiet periods of preoccupation, and who believes in me and our children the way only a wife and mother can.

  The fathers:

  The two who happened to be both neighbors and friends, who wowed me with the war stories they would rather someone else tell, drove me countless times “to town for a Coke and a pack of Nabs,” and let me shoot their shotguns and tangle their fishing reels.

  The one who taught me — from wherever he happened to be: school, home, church, or even behind the wheel of whatever old Ford truck he got by with because money was tight — the value of hard work, the sanctity of integrity, and the importance of being tough enough to finish what I start.

  The children:

  The three who inspire me to strive for clean storytelling without sacrificing authenticity, to create something I can leave behind for them and their children long after I leave this world, and most importantly, to be a better person. And yes, without question all the “Dad, it’s really good, when are you gonna publish that thing?” comments were helpful, too.

  ...This is for you. Thank you all.

  PART ONE

  “The highest compact we can make with our fellow, is, —

  ‘Let there be truth between us two forevermore.’”

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  ONE

  “HEY Bud, why don’t you share the joke? Sure could use one.”

  I immediately recognize the voice, but I would have known it was Jack Masterson even if he communicated in Morse code. No one calls me “Bud” like he does. Most everyone else just calls me Case. I sneak a sideways frown at him. “Say what?”

  “You’re just staring off and smiling.”

  I glance back across the marble headstone-studded landscape and the last few lingerers from the meager assembly, but their somber looks, dark suits, and darker sunglasses under an ashen sky suggest nothing to smile about. Then I hear the popping sounds, probably some kid’s firecrackers going off in the distance, and I realize Jack is right. I had been smiling. I shake my head. “Nah, don’t know any good jokes. Just thinking.”

  “You always were a dreamer. Working on that book?” Jack knows I’m an English major. What he doesn’t know is the novel I dreamed of writing as a kid now seems as likely to happen as a genie popping out of my coat pocket.

  “Me — a dreamer? You were always the dreamer. And schemer.”

  Jack cuts his eyes at me. “Schemer? I’m just an optimist.”

  My grin returns. He’s right about the optimist part. Such was always his nature — so long as life didn’t force it out of him.

  “Those firecrackers.” I nod toward the sound. “Made me think about that time with the cap pistols. Your optimism could’ve gotten us killed.”

  His wink tells me he knows immediately what I’m talking about. When we were nine or ten, his sister Michelle told us a rumor about a homeless man lurking around town, maybe just sneaking in houses to steal food, maybe with other things on his mind. Jack convinced me we should sleep in the living room and scare him off with cap pistols if he showed up. Neither of us actually believed it would ever happen, but when the back door creaked open in the midst of a thunderstorm, our bravado proved as fleeting as the flash of lightning illuminating the figure looming in the doorway.

  “I scared him off,” Jack says. “Just like we planned.”

  “Like you planned. Except you shot on accident, peed your pants and ran to wake up Dad.”

  Jack shakes his head and finally shows a glimmer of a smile. “That was you with the wet crotch. But I’ll give you credit. You did find the bullet he left.”

  “Not exactly what Michelle had us expecting from the Vagabond, huh?”

  His expression darkens, and his eyes lock on mine, like he’s searching. “Little did we know.”

  Little did we know we’d find that body later, and everything would go to crap. I want to say it, but I don’t. I just nod and look away instead.

  Havenrest Cemetery now appears devoid of people except two workers, dutifully shoveling earth into a hole six feet deep. One is a middle-aged black man and the other a scrawny white teenager, two or three years younger than us. Jack steps over and picks up a rose boutonniere lying on the grass adjacent to the mound of dirt, absently smells it, and tosses it underhand atop the partially covered casket. He stands up, opens his mouth to speak, then bites his lower lip and shakes his head. We both pretend to study an enormous flock of blackbirds, a sea of specks against the gray winter horizon. Their staccato calls, softened by the distance, pepper the awkward silence until I interrupt them.

/>   “I’m sorry about Michelle. She’ll be missed.” I immediately hate the cliché but don’t regret the effort.

  Jack sighs heavily. “Wouldn’t wish ovarian cancer on my worst enemy.”

  I pat him on the shoulder but still can’t think of anything helpful to add, so I wait as he rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet. I can tell he wants to talk now.

  “Sad thing is, she had really gotten her life back together.” He stops abruptly and throws a glance my way without turning his head. “But after everything ... she started getting better. Kicked her habits, went back to school, to church. Got married. Said Ron was the first guy she’d ever been with who treated her right.”

  I can’t help but wonder how Jack is really holding up. Physically, he seems fine. The wavy, brown hair, with a tinge of auburn when the light hits it just right, and his ruddy complexion haven’t changed. And his muscular frame — up to six foot one and maintaining its two-inch advantage over mine — looks as robust as ever. But his usual disposition seems further away than the place smiles disappear with the death of a sister. I know it just by looking at him, the same way a flicker of facial expression conveys an emotional shift no painter could capture, but even a baby could identify.

  We stand in silence, idly toeing blades of grass at our feet, hands in our suit pant pockets, shoulders hunched slightly against the icy breeze. “She’s at peace now at least,” I say.

  “A hard thing to come by sometimes.” Jack stands motionless for a time, then shrugs and bumps me gently with his elbow.

  “What?”

  He chuckles. “We sure had some good times, didn’t we, Bud?”

  “Are you … talking about before? Or after?”

  Before and after — the two divisions in time by which all moments of our friendship are inevitably now distinguished. Jack knows this even better than I do. He stares at me hard before he answers, and I could kick myself for taking the conversation back there again. “Do you ever think about it anymore? You know, what happened?”

  What happened. It suddenly occurs to me that within the tragedy of Michelle’s death might lie an opportunity to extract something good, perhaps a new beginning. A dispatch of the after. Only Jack can decide.

  “Do you?” Of course, I already know his answer.

  TWO

  Five years earlier — 1985

  “SUCKERS! Y’all can’t beat me!” Jet laughed as his three-wheeler skidded to a halt in Jack’s driveway.

  “Let Mr. Sissy ride with you next time,” Jack shot back, “yap yap yapping in your ear to slow down the whole way through Papa Mac’s farm, and see if you don’t eat my dust.”

  I tried to trip Jack as he dismounted the Honda Big Red in front of me. “I’m not afraid of going fast. You just can’t drive.”

  “Wusses and bad drivers got no hope keeping up with me,” Jet said. “Speed is the name of my game.”

  Jack snorted. “The only thing you’re fast at is getting to the refrigerator.” He pinched Jet playfully where his belly protruded over his waistline just enough to make an easy target.

  “Ow!” Jet yelped, swinging and missing Jack’s back with his fist. “Punk.”

  Jack’s eighteen-year-old sister Michelle leaned against her Toyota Celica, sucking on a cigarette. “Gonna get yourself killed riding like that,” she drawled. “Y’all are all stupid.”

  I laughed to myself. While I supposed it possible that our reckless driving could get us hurt, and some might question the intelligence of Jack or me, the word “stupid” didn’t belong in the same county, much less the same sentence, with a reference to John Edward Townsend. Jet’s acronymic nickname might not be an apt description for his fleetness afoot — or lack thereof — but it just so happened to be a perfect fit for his brain. My other best friend was incontrovertibly smart — freaky smart, we always said, his mind a whirlwind of facts, figures, theories, and words we had never heard of. He made straight As without a hint of effort, scarcely cracked a textbook because he was always reading something else, and completed school assignments absently while his mind sped off in myriad directions.

  “Shut up, Michelle,” Jack retorted. “Go smoke a doobie or something.”

  She glared at Jack and finished off her cigarette in one deep drag before putting it out against the car door and tossing it at his feet. Her pink halter top hung off her bony shoulders and chest in a revealing way that made me wonder whether the look was intentional or an unintended consequence of too many skipped meals. Either way, I suspected weed might not be the worst thing on her agenda.

  “Hello, Michelle Masterson.” I dragged the ‘hello’ out and emphasized each syllable in a mocking, yet playful, way. Troubled or not, she and I had always gotten along okay.

  Her mouth curled at the corners ever-so-slightly. “Hello, Casey Reynolds,” she drawled, mimicking my cadence. “Or should I say, Shaggy-Doo?”

  Michelle was the only one who ever called me that, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t heard it a hundred times over the years. As a little kid, whenever American Top 40 with Casey Kasem came on the radio, I loved to remind people that my name was Casey, too. And most everyone ignored me — except Michelle, who pointed out that Kasem provided the voice for Shaggy, the inept, cowardly, dog biscuit-eating comic relief in the Scooby-Doo cartoons. An entertaining character to be sure, but not the image I was going for. Which is exactly why she called me Shaggy-Doo. I hated it, which made her love it even more.

  The truth is, I was named after a knife. A knife brand, to be precise. My father and his before him both accumulated a collection of Case knives and believed a man should always have one in his pocket. At first, my mother wouldn’t hear of her son being named after a pocketknife, but she eventually relented — with a compromise. So, the name on my birth certificate is Casey.

  “Call me what you want,” I said, “but you know you still love me.”

  She frowned. “I’d like you better if you hung out with someone besides my idiot brother.”

  Jack pretended to pick a booger and flick it on her as he walked by, darting beneath her attempt at a right hook. “Come inside, guys.” He reached for the door. “I’ve got something serious to ask y’all.”

  Jet and I widened our eyes and together mouthed the word ‘serious’, mocking a look of worry about another scheme and its consequences. Jack rolled his eyes. “Oh, shut up and come on.”

  The blast of cool, conditioned air was a welcome change from the lingering smolder of a typical Mississippi September, almost as refreshing as the large glasses of sweet tea we poured. A note on the kitchen counter from Jack’s mom said she was working late at the diner tonight, hot dogs were in the fridge.

  Jet stretched his ample frame out on a brown plaid couch, and I plopped down in my favorite chair, a faded red leather piece that enveloped my body perfectly as the particles within it shifted to accommodate my shape. Jack’s mom said it was called a Sacco, that Jack’s father had ordered it years ago, before Jack was born, to bring some “Italian style” to their décor. She never particularly liked it, and now it was so worn it looked like it might fall apart, but she said she couldn’t get rid of it. I figured it was because of the memories it carried but liked to think it was partly because it was my favorite.

  Jack was, as usual, a nervous bundle of energy, pacing the linoleum floor that spread from the kitchen through the living room. “Okay, here’s my idea. Let’s build a cabin.”

  Jet leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees. “A cabin? Where?”

  “Where ya think? Duh. On Papa Mac’s.”

  Hey, can we go to Papa Mac’s?

  The indelible echoes of that question from Jack or Jet were ever-present, a simple inquiry that had led to innumerable excursions onto what was a veritable paradise as far as we were concerned — a farm tucked precisely between my neighborhood and theirs, comprising everything we considered important. Fields and sloughs, hardwood bottoms and pine ridges, honeysuckle vines and blackberry thickets. Plen
ty of game to hunt, and a prime fishing hole we nicknamed Snake Lake, where the fish were big but our fear of the snakes was bigger. Best of all, though, was our campsite. A small clearing nestled within a copse of oaks, guarded by briars and hedge and hidden out of view from the field road, unless you knew where to look. Our three-wheelers could deliver every essential for an overnight stay, from firewood to boom boxes. It was our very own oasis, and we availed ourselves of its amenities almost as much as we fished and hunted the place.

  I took a gulp of sweet tea and shot Jet a look while Jack anxiously tapped the linoleum kitchen countertop. “You’re serious?” I asked Jack. “Build it on Papa Mac’s?”

  “Absolutely. Maybe not a cabin, but we can put something together. We’ll call it the Hideaway.”

  Jet looked at me. “The Hideaway?”

  Jack pressed on. “It’s perfect. C’mon, maybe your dad could help us?”

  Jet’s father was a local contractor, but he had been having difficulty finding enough work. So he most likely had some time on his hands, not to mention plenty of tools.

  Jet didn’t appear to take offense. “Dad might, but dude, it’s not even our land.”

  Jack turned to me. “Whadda you think?” He began to pace, watching me, awaiting my opinion — my verdict. Papa Mac, the best friend of my late grandfather, had asked my father to keep an eye on the property. So it wouldn’t happen without me, whether Jet was on board or not.

  I smiled. “Let’s do it.”

  Jack smiled back and pounded his fist in his hand. He continued pacing a moment, then spun toward us, speaking as he turned. “We have to keep it a secre —”

  A low voice growled, “What secret? You know I don’t like secrets.”

  THREE

  STONE Perkins had somehow walked in without making a sound. He glared hard at Jack as if no one else was in the room, bloodshot eyes aflame and flickering. Jack had once told me he disliked his stepfather when he was sober but hated him when he was drunk. I had a feeling which version we were about to see.