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    The Last Talk with Lola Faye: A Novel
    The Last Talk with Lola Faye: A Novel
    The Last Talk with Lola Faye: A Novel
    Ebook310 pages5 hours

    The Last Talk with Lola Faye: A Novel

    By Thomas H. Cook

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    About this ebook

    A “marvelously tense” novel of psychological suspense centered on a long-ago crime of passion, from an Edgar Award–winning author (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

    With dreams of academic greatness, Lucas Paige rose from humble and sordid beginnings to attend Harvard. But his achievements since then have been meager. In St. Louis to give yet another sparsely attended reading, he discovers a face from the past he’s tried to forget: Lola Faye Gilroy, the “other woman” he long blamed for his father’s murder.
     
    Reluctantly, Luke joins Lola Faye for a drink. As one drink turns into several, these two battered souls relive, from their different perspectives, the most searing experience of their lives. They are transported back to the tiny southern town of Glenville, Alabama, where a violent crime of passion is turned in the light once more. As it turns out, there is much Luke doesn’t know. And what he doesn’t know can hurt him.
     
    Trapped in an increasingly intense exchange, Luke struggles to gain control and determine what Lola Faye is truly after—before it is too late.
     
    This “darkly powerful” (Kirkus Reviews) literary thriller, rich with Southern atmosphere, is “a knockout” (People).
     
    “Cook continues his work as one of the best fiction writers in America.” —The Plain Dealer
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateAug 6, 2010
    ISBN9780547541273
    The Last Talk with Lola Faye: A Novel
    Author

    Thomas H. Cook

    THOMAS H. COOK was born in Fort Payne, Alabama. He has been nominated for Edgar Awards seven times in five different categories. He received the Best Novel Edgar, the Barry for Best Novel, and has been nominated for numerous other awards.

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      The Last Talk with Lola Faye - Thomas H. Cook

      title page

      Contents

      Title Page

      Contents

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      Three Months Earlier

      PART I

      One

      Two

      Three

      Four

      Five

      PART II

      Six

      Seven

      Eight

      Nine

      Ten

      Eleven

      Twelve

      Thirteen

      PART III

      Fourteen

      Fifteen

      Sixteen

      Seventeen

      Eighteen

      Nineteen

      Twenty

      Twenty-one

      Twenty-two

      PART IV

      Twenty-three

      Twenty-four

      Twenty-five

      Twenty-six

      Twenty-seven

      Twenty-eight

      Three Months Later

      About the Author

      Connect with HMH

      Copyright © 2010 by Thomas H. Cook

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

      For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

      www.hmhco.com

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

      Cook, Thomas H.

      The last talk with Lola Faye / Thomas H. Cook.

      p. cm.

      ISBN 978-0-15-101407-1

      1. Murder victims’ families—Fiction. 2. Crimes of passion—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

      PS3553.055465L37 2010

      813'.54—dc22 2009027927

      eISBN 978-0-547-54127-3

      v2.1116

      For my mother,

      Mickie Cook,

      with love and devotion

      When what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.

      —MARIANNE MOORE

      Three Months Earlier

      So, Luke, what’s the last best hope of life?

      The memory surfaced as it often did, out of the blue, for no apparent reason: Julia, my lost wife, glances up from something she’s been reading, takes off her glasses, and, knowing that nothing will ever open inside me until I answer it, she bluntly poses her question.

      I was standing before a glass display case filled with old frontier blankets when this memory last came to me. The blankets were thick and rough, and I imagined those first westward settlers curled up beneath them, whole families pressed together as they waited out the night. How fiercely the prairie winds must have lashed their little wagons, shaking the spindly frames and billowing out the canvas. Later they’d no doubt used these same blankets to ward off the frigid cold that had so ruthlessly whipped the plains, spreading them over the dirt floors of their dugouts, or layering them over their own shivering bodies, where they’d huddled with their dogs as the wind howled outside. How much warmth these blankets must have provided, I thought. How often they must have seemed the only warmth.

      It was this sense of physical suffering in the service of some great hope that had once formed the basis for all my human sympathy, the one deep feeling that was truly mine, and that had once fired my dream—boyishly, perhaps, but yet more powerfully for that—of writing my own great books.

      In those books, I’d hoped to portray the physical feel of American history, its tactile core: the searing bite of a minié ball, the sting of a lash, the muscular ache of hard labor and the squint of small chores—what it had actually felt like to pick cotton, hew a tree, fire a locomotive, thread a needle made of whalebone, shape a candle by another candle’s light. Mine would be histories with a heartbeat—palpable, alive, histories that pulsed with true feeling.

      I’d done none of that, I knew, as I turned from that glass case, those neatly stacked frontier blankets. I’d written a few books, the most recent to be published just three months from now, but I’d never created anything that approached the works it had been my youthful ambition to write.

      It’s one thing to bury an old dead dream, however, and quite another to attempt, again and again, to resurrect a dream you can’t let die, which is what I’d done, always beginning with a passionate concept, then watching as it shrank to a bloodless monograph. I’d repeated this process many times, and later that same afternoon, only a few minutes after I’d stood before those frontier blankets, I prepared my desk for yet another run at my old best hope, but stopped and found myself thinking about where it had all begun.

      Then, rather suddenly, it came to me, a memory of my mother’s wedding ring. Just before leaving Glenville, I’d picked it up and looked at it closely, like a jeweler, recalling all the times I’d seen her delicately remove it before washing dishes because she feared it might slip off and disappear down the drain. At the heart of those memories, I should have felt some gritty aspect of her life: the weight of an iron as she pushed it across a shirt, the oily touch of dishwater, the gooey damp of batter, and if not these, then at least I should have been able to infuse the ring she’d cherished with that power of time and remembrance we trivialize with the phrase sentimental value.

      Surely, I should have felt something at such a moment, but tellingly, I hadn’t. Unless one could call numbness a feeling, for that was the only sensation I’d actually had, a numbness at the core, everything dry, brittle, dead, all of which should have told me that no matter how many times I tried, I would never write the deeply sentient books it had been my dream to write, that I was, and always would be, as Julia had once said, a strangely shriveled thing.

      Standing at my desk, recalling the unfeeling way with which I’d stared at my mother’s ring, I heard again her earlier question: So, Luke, what’s the last best hope of life?

      I glanced out the window, into the chill September rain, and thought again of how life’s darkest acts pool and swirl, but never go under the bridge.

      So, Luke, what’s the last best hope of life?

      I’d had no answer then.

      Now I do.

      PART I

      One

      SHE HAD ONE of those hayseed names, Lola Faye Gilroy, and that night I would more easily have expected an apparition of my father sitting down to his last meal of corn bread and buttermilk or my mother reading Anna Karenina in her bed than Lola Faye herself, particularly given the darkly inquisitive look in her eyes, the same look she’d had at my father’s funeral, as if she were still trying to sort it out, determine if she alone had caused so much blood to be spilled.

      Even on that day, eyeing her from across the black hole of his still-open grave, I’d thought her the last person in the world to be the other woman in my father’s life, though by the time he sat down for that final, profoundly unromantic meal, I’d known about their relationship for several months, a terrible truth I’d kept from my innocent and unsuspecting mother.

      I’d not seen her again until some months later, when my bus had pulled out of town. On that occasion, I’d noticed her sitting alone on the same concrete step my mother and I had often shared. She’d looked up as my bus went by, and there it was, that same vague look of quizzical dissatisfaction I’d first noticed at my father’s funeral, as if she’d been going over it all yet again, the stark facts of his murder, gnawing at them in that little rodent way of hers, which had made me only more anxious to rid myself of Lola Faye Gilroy, my father, my mother, Glenville, and anything else that might stop my heart and chill my soul, make me ask the dreadful question Lola Faye would later pose near the end of our talk: Oh, Luke, can life really be like that?

      I’d flown to Saint Louis at my own expense, the purpose being to hawk my new book, Fatal Choices. I’d done a yeoman’s job of discussing certain disastrous tactical decisions—the failure of the Confederate high command to storm Washington after First Manassas; the shooting-gallery layout of our fleet at Pearl Harbor—and in that way had illustrated the larger but hardly unfamiliar point that otherwise intelligent men can go monstrously wrong.

      The Museum of the West had provided a room for my talk, and the museum gift shop had agreed to order a few copies of my book and set up a table where I could sign them at the end of it. The museum’s events planner had balked, however, at supplying wine and cheese.

      I arrived at the museum early that evening, checked to make sure my books were actually in the gift shop, then, with time on my hands, toured the modest Charles Lindbergh exhibit. The great aviator’s empty flight suit hung in a glass display case, oddly deflated, like his reputation. For years he’d lived in the ill favor his prewar flirtation with Hitler had created, less a maker of history, in the end, than the diminished product of its unforgiving judgment. Staring at that suit, its ghostly folds, I had an idea for another book: History’s Outcasts.

      I snatched the little notebook I carried with me for such purposes, scribbled a reminder, then walked to the lecture room where I was to give my talk. Inside the room, I found a young man putting out folding chairs. A museum identification badge hung from a black cord in a pouch of rectangular clear plastic. The front of the badge bore the likenesses of the great explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, both looking eager to map the far reaches of the West, to penetrate its unknown vastness, their courage so indomitable, their adventure so thrilling, their achievement so stupendous that beside such towering figures the rest of us seem but sidelined players in a small-town game.

      Proceeded on, I said softly.

      Excuse me?

      Oh, I said, faintly embarrassed by the abrupt wandering of my own mind. It’s a phrase Meriwether Lewis often wrote in his journal. ‘Proceeded on.’ It means, I suppose, not giving up, proceeding on . . . toward something great.

      The young man peered at me like one in the presence of a space creature. I have to finish up, he said.

      I realized that I blocked the row of chairs the young man was attempting to complete.

      Oh, sorry, I said, and immediately stepped out of his path. I’m Dr. Paige, the speaker here this evening.

      For a moment we stared at each other, the young man working to decide what he should do next, I awaiting his decision.

      Finally he said, We have a little garden.

      By this he meant that I should go there to cool my heels until it was time for me to speak.

      Yes, of course, I said. I’ll wait there.

      In the garden I found a few aluminum tables with round white tops and matching chairs. A little fountain spurted arcs of water from the mouths of four leaping fish, and over them a loosely draped girl with flowing hair poured another, larger stream of water from a wide-mouthed pitcher. The sculpted fish seemed happy enough to receive this offering, but the girl’s face remained oddly grim, as if she were aware, as the fish were not, that the water she offered them was poisoned.

      The tables were all empty save for one at which a young man kept glancing about expectantly. It struck me that I’d once had that inner tapping of the foot as well, especially at those moments when escape had seemed impossible and I was forced to consider that I might live my whole life in Glenville, the moribund little Alabama town in which I’d been born and had grown up, and which my vast ambition had demanded that I leave. In quick succession these thoughts of Glenville brought back my mother and father, brought back Miss McDowell’s jangling need and Debbie’s dread; brought back Sheriff Tomlinson in his thoroughness, Mr. Ward with his disturbing news, Mr. Klein’s grim revelation; brought back that whole departed world, and yet, for all this parade of figures from my distant past, no thought came to me of Lola Faye.

      She was very near, however.

      In fact, she had to have been cruising down Lindell Avenue at that very moment. But had I thought of her as I sat in the chill shade of the garden, watching that vaguely malicious girl pour vaguely sinister water into a pool of happily oblivious fish, I doubtless would have recalled her not as she was now, bent upon her mission, but as she’d been during the relatively brief time I’d known her: twenty-seven years old, dressed in solid-color skirts, usually pastels; her blouses often adorned with small designs, mostly flowers, though sometimes snowflakes or little furry animals, like the wallpaper one sees in the rooms of young children. There’d been a sunny quality in her style of dress that seemed forced, and even a little silly, like believing a fairy tale one should have outgrown. She dresses against the facts, my father explained when I mentioned it once, and by which I assumed him to mean that Lola Faye dressed against the brutal facts of Woody Wayne Gilroy, the distraught husband whose sobbing phone messages she never answered; the rented wood-frame house, with its water-stained ceiling and creaking floor; and perhaps even against the dead-end job she’d taken at Variety Store, the eternally struggling little five-and-dime my father owned and in whose back storeroom he had enjoyed the fruits of their tawdry love affair.

      Or had it been lust alone that had driven him to betray my mother?

      I had never been able to say, since desire and love are often so impossibly mingled that to ascertain where the one begins and the other ends is simply more than we can do.

      This much was obvious, however: Lola Faye Gilroy, at the time she met my father, was nearly twenty years younger than my mother and had what any Victorian would have called a comely shape. That said, she was by no means beautiful, and certainly not dazzling. Among ladies of the court, she would not have caught the king’s eye, nor even that of a lowly minister.

      In terms of personal habits, she smoked like a young woman who had no expectation of ever impressing anyone with either her style or her grace, and her desk, as I noticed many times, was covered with coffee-cup rings, the ashtray boiling over with butts and charred matches.

      As to education, Lola Faye had graduated from high school but had gone no further, and I never saw her with a book. She spoke in the accent of our region, and in every way appeared to be exactly what a life lived in Glenville had made her. Nothing about her suggested worldliness or sophistication. Her smile was warm and open, but any attempt at a sultry pout would have made her look clownish. She would not have known how to turn away, then look back fetchingly; how to flip her hair seductively or languidly close her eyes. The art of coquetry would have been as beyond her comprehension as anything in French.

      Was she sensitive? Was she knowing?

      I never thought so, but in some people, these qualities emerge only at intimate moments when, in the soft quiet of a darkened room, one suddenly betrays a depth of understanding wholly unseen before, some piercing bit of painful wisdom that peeps out like a scar from beneath a cuff, and often with an implied sense of secret sharing that is powerful in itself: This is for only you to see.

      I could never imagine such a moment passing between Lola Faye and my father when I thought of them together, but perhaps this was because it was at this moment in any recollection of that sour time that my mind inevitably, and as if in flight from far darker thoughts, returned me to my fondest memory of my mother.

      She’d been working in her garden long into that afternoon, a woman in her late thirties. I was a boy of ten, with nothing to do but watch her. After a while, she straightened herself, then unpinned her hair so that it fell in a thick dark wave down her back and over her nearly bare shoulders. Caught in the sun, she had suddenly looked beautiful to me.

      I think Mr. Klein must have seen this same beauty at that moment too, because when I noticed him standing on the other side of the fence, his face conveyed a look almost of awe.

      Good afternoon, Miss Ellie, he said.

      My mother turned toward the voice and saw Mr. Klein, the man in whose jewelry store she had worked before I was born, a tall, dark, and thoroughly foreign man, our town’s only Jew.

      Good afternoon, Mr. Klein, my mother said.

      Mr. Klein handed my mother a book. I thought you might enjoy this.

      My mother took the book. "Middlemarch. Thank you, Mr. Klein. I’ll be sure to return it."

      There’s no hurry at all, of course, Mr. Klein told her.

      He was a man in his midfifties, and he spoke with a slight accent. Everything about him struck me as graceful and refined, so that he seemed perpetually to stroll some beautiful Old World square. He had lost everything in the war, according to my mother, his parents and his two brothers. It was the kind of loss, she said, that could increase a person, because some people get larger, Luke, as things are taken away.

      "I read Silas Marner again only last week, my mother told Mr. Klein. She smiled. Allow me to give you something in return. She drew her basket from the ground. It was filled with lush red tomatoes. She took the largest and most fully ripened one from the basket and offered it to him. Please."

      Mr. Klein reached out and took the tomato, but from the bottom, so that for just the slightest moment, the back of his hand rested against my mother’s palm, an instant during which their eyes locked, and in that locking, sent and returned a tiny but palpable charge.

      Ellie!

      It was my father’s voice, but when I turned, I didn’t see him. This was not unusual, since it had long been his habit to announce himself from a distance, as if he felt his wife and son should be alerted to his approach.

      He came steaming around the corner of the house only seconds later, dressed, as he always was, in baggy trousers and a flannel shirt with a perpetually frayed collar. He was carrying a large brown bag and for a moment seemed to use it almost as a shield as he approached where my mother, Mr. Klein, and I stood at the old wooden fence.

      Good evening, Mr. Klein said to my father.

      My father nodded, then glanced about. Pretty evening, he said.

      Mr. Klein’s eyes returned to my mother. Yes, quite lovely, he said.

      Mr. Klein brought me a book, Doug, my mother said. She lifted it into the air with a flourish. "Middlemarch."

      My father stared at the book as if it were a serpent, something that twined and hissed.

      That’s nice, he said. He looked at Mr. Klein. So, you getting much trade these days? he asked.

      Mr. Klein shrugged. About the same as always.

      My father appeared at a loss to continue this conversation, and in lieu of talk, roughly shook the brown bag. Ham, he said. He looked at my mother. I thought you might bake it with apples. He turned to Mr. Klein. You like ham?

      Mr. Klein shook his head softly.

      People of the Jewish faith don’t eat ham, Doug, my mother informed him gently.

      It was the first I’d heard of this, but it served only to elevate Mr. Klein in my esteem; all things remote were beginning to draw me, images of castles and rivers and ancient battlefields now playing continually in my child’s mind.

      Is that right? my father said. He looked genuinely amazed. You don’t know what you’re missing, Abe.

      I suppose not, Mr. Klein said. He looked at my mother again, now with a slight smile playing on his lips, one she returned as if in soft conspiracy.

      Well, I should be going, he said to her.

      Thank you so much for the book, my mother said. I’ll return it to you when I’m through.

      Mr. Klein touched the brim of his hat. Good evening, then.

      Good evening, my mother replied.

      Mr. Klein turned and headed back toward his car, a figure moving smoothly through the twilight.

      Nice fellow, my father said. Smart too. Good head for business.

      My mother took the bag from my father and tucked her one free hand beneath his arm. Come, Doug, she said as one might gently coax a child to follow.

      I turned away from them and watched Mr. Klein go, something lonely and isolated about him, like a deer cut from the herd, so that as he drifted across the green lawn, I felt the nature of his foreignness, how he would always be the other in other people’s eyes.

      Within seconds he’d disappeared around the corner of our house. I turned toward the back door that led into our kitchen. A light went on inside, and from my place on the lawn, I watched as my mother busily removed the ham from the brown bag, placed it in a metal pan, then began peeling apples, all of this done with what struck me as unearthly grace while my father sat at the kitchen table, oblivious to her service, his body kicked back in his chair, his boots pressed against the side of the table, his dusty old . . .

      Your life is oedipal as hell.

      Julia’s voice sounded so vividly in my mind at that moment that I had to keep myself from turning around in my chair to look for her. Then, just as suddenly, the world returned to me in its actual detail: the chairs, the fountain, the stone maiden whose expression now seemed quite cleverly malicious as she fed the unsuspecting fish their final draft.

      I looked at my watch and realized that the young man must have long ago placed the last chair in a neat row and that no doubt a few people had already taken their seats and were awaiting my arrival.

      What I didn’t know as I rose and made my way toward the room that had been prepared for my talk was that Lola Faye Gilroy, for very different reasons than the rest of the audience, was waiting for me too.

      Two

      A FEW PEOPLE TURNED as I came into the lecture room, but others continued to read whatever books they’d brought with them or to chat with those nearby. With one exception, all of them were women, most seated alone, their damp raincoats neatly folded and placed in the empty chairs next to them. The single man in the audience looked to be in his midsixties. He wore a Vietnam veteran’s cap, the name of his unit emblazoned on the bill, the sure sign of a military history buff.

      They were all museum regulars, or so it seemed to me, and I had no doubt that

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