Free Volt: Stories by Alan Heathcock Page A

large white oak still held its autumn leaves, its branches gently waving. Through a gap in its canopy she glimpsed a flash of pale skin. Her breath drew away, and then she was shuffling down the bench and she slipped and fell hard on her back, sliding in the new snow to the base of the slope.
    The oak towered above her. She shone her light up into it, over the girl’s exposed ribs, her dangling arms, and between her buds of breasts curved a rivulet of dried blood, dripped from where the rope had torn the skin of her neck. Helen turned on her side and retched. Vomit steamed in the dirt. She took clean snow into her mouth and caught her breath. She stood and unsnapped the latch over her pistol, and approached the darkness beneath the boughs.
    The girl’s toes dangled inches from the ground. She wore only shoes. Clunky black shoes with square heels. Her naked skin glowed white against the dusk. Her mouth hung open and what little light came through the saffron boughs gleamed in her braces. Helen took off her own coat. She tried throwing the jacket up over the girl’s shoulders, but it slid off and fell in a lump on the ground.
    It was the girl. Jocelyn Dempsy, whom everyone called Jocey. She raced motorbikes on a dirt track by the old mill, played JV basketball as an eighth grader. She loved Moon Pies. Loved cherry cola. She’d come to the grocery and buy them, and Helen would watch her eat alone by the road and return the bottle for a nickel before riding off.
    Brisk wind whistled through the limbs. Helen stumbled to sit against the trunk of the oak, her legs stretched out before her, pistol drawn in her lap. Dusk had settled. The prairie was tinted blue, shocks of blue sedge stiffly swaying.
    Spring 2008: All day Helen had searched the flooded area, delivered the stranded to higher ground. Now she was alone. The current took the boat and she shone the spotlight across the black water and onto the large house, the flood up to its second-floor sills. She hooked the dock rope around a window box and the prow knocked against the siding. She pressed her forehead to the window’s cool glass. The room’s red fabric wallpaper had silver stripes that flashed in the spotlight. A twin bed lay diagonally in the middle of the room. A cardboard box made a crater in the mattress, a new-looking ball glove atop the box. Alone on a wall above a dresser hung a poster of three busty women in yellow swimsuits, each suit with two letters that when pressed tightly together spelled YAMAHA.
    Helen forced open the window. Careful not to sway the boat, she held her holster and stepped down into the room. It was the first time in hours she’d been out of the boat, and her legs shook. The carpet glistened in the spotlight, a dark line three feet up the wall marking the flood’s highest point.
    The room had not been disturbed, was kept like a museum; Helen had been in the room that winter, putting on a play of sorts, searching the girl’s drawers and beneath her bed and taking notes on what she passed off as evidence—report cards, a menu from the Tahiti Connection restaurant in Turberville, a ticket stub from a motocross event in Bowling Green—she knew would lead nowhere. She wrote it all up in a report for the staties.
    The bedroom door was locked from the inside. Helen opened the lock and door, wiped the knob clean, then walked down the hall. Water splashed with each step. The walls were tiled with Dempsy family photos: Jocey, very young, sporting a boy’s shag haircut and straddling a small motorbike; the family in matching cream sweaters with David on a hay bale, the baby on his lap, Jocey and Connie each behind one of his shoulders; Jocey’s school portrait, a ponytail tied with red ribbon, braces, a blemish on her nose.
    At the back of the house, Helen entered the master bedroom. A canopy bed with mahogany posts filled most of the room. Helen gazed out the bedside window at the flooded world, the dark roofs of houses spread like barges