The clerk swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
Fritz nodded, knowing he’d made himself implicitly understood. “If anybody asks, I’ll be back in an hour.”
It took only five minutes for Fritz to get home. He lived only a few blocks from Palmetto’s downtown district, where the tallest skyscraper, the Citizens First National Bank, was only six stories high. The town proper had a population of ten thousand, although ten times that many lived in the rural areas of the county.
The Jollys’ neighborhood was old and comfortable. Fritz and Dora had bought the house as newlyweds in preparation for all the kids they planned to put in the many bedrooms. Unfortunately, Dora had developed an ovarian tumor shortly after Hutch was born and had to undergo a complete hysterectomy. She’d made a sewing room out of one of the spare bedrooms; Fritz and Hutch stored fishing and hunting gear in another.
Dora was in the kitchen washing dishes when Fritz came in through the back door and removed his vest. “Hi. Is the coffee still on?”
Dora Jolly was a tall, slender woman whose cheerful personality had given way to grim resignation over her untimely sterilization. She was an efficient homemaker, but no longer the loving, cheerful girl Fritz had married.
She wiped her wet hands on a dish towel. “What’s going on, Fritz? How come you were called to the courthouse in the middle of the night? Why’d you have me keep Hutch home from school?”
Fritz poured his own coffee. “Where is he?”
“Upstairs in his bedroom. He’s behaving as peculiar as you. I cooked his breakfast, but he ate next to nothing. There’s something the matter with both of you. I want to know what it is.”
“No, you don’t, Dora. Believe me—you don’t. Leave it at that.”
Setting his unfinished coffee on the porcelain drainboard, he left the kitchen. The door to Hutch’s second-story bedroom was closed. Fritz knocked once sharply, then opened it and went in.
Hutch was dressed but shoeless. He was sitting up in his unmade bed, propped against the headboard, staring sullenly into space. Beneath his freckles, his skin appeared more pale than usual. Last night he had said he got the long scratch on his cheek from a backlashing tree limb. Now that Fritz knew better, the sight of it turned his stomach.
Hutch regarded him warily as he approached the bed and sat down on the edge of it. “Your mother said you didn’t eat breakfast.”
“No, sir.”
“Are you sick?”
He fidgeted with the fringe on the chenille bedspread and shrugged laconically. Fritz had questioned too many suspects not to recognize guilt when he saw it. His stomach churned harder.
“Well, boy, what’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Why don’t we stop dancing around the mulberry bush?” Fritz said tightly. “Tell me about it.”
“Tell you about what?”
Fritz lost his patience. “I’m trying my damnedest to keep from knocking the hell out of you. Wise up and start talking. Spare yourself the beating that I’m scared shitless you deserve.”
Hutch’s own tenuous control snapped. He began swallowing convulsively. His torso heaved. His wide shoulders started to shake. He looked ready either to burst into tears or to vomit. Finally he was able to say, “You know about Jade, I guess.”
“I know that she got to the hospital about eleven-thirty last night.”
“Eleven-thirty!” Hutch exclaimed.
“She says an unidentified black man picked her up out of a ditch on the coastal highway and drove her there. She claims that you, Neal, and Lamar gang-raped her.”
Raising his knees, Hutch planted his elbows on them while gouging his eyesockets with the heels of his hands. “I don’t know what happened to me, Daddy. Swear to God, I didn’t realize what I’d done till it was all over.”
Fritz’s chest suddenly felt as heavy as a sack of concrete mix. The last, vain glimmer of hope that the girl might be lying flickered out and died. Wearily, he rubbed his face. “You raped that girl?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Hutch sobbed. “Something came over me, over all of us. It was like I stood back and watched myself doing it. I couldn’t believe I was doing it, but I couldn’t stop myself either.”
Fritz listened to his son’s blubbering account of the incident. Each incriminating word was like a spike being driven into his head. Almost verbatim, Hutch’s story matched Jade’s.
“So you just left her there?” Fritz asked when Hutch finally stopped talking.