by john | Mar 13, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Serialized Fiction, Writing
Chapter 5
Sheriff Dunleavy leaned back in his chair and looked at me, one of those long, steady looks that men do when they think they’re being all serious, but really all they’re doing is trying to figure out what box to put you in now that you have done escaped the one they thought you were supposed to fit into all nice and neat. I’ve known men like him all my life, and it’s better to just let them sit and “process things” and figure out what they’re going to say, then go on about your business and do things the way you intended to do them in the first place, rather than getting your blood pressure up fighting them over it.
“Ms. Carter, I don’t know what help you can be, but I don’t have a whole lot to go on with this case, and I don’t know anybody in this town, and Jeff, bless his heart, just ain’t as much help as I’d like for him to be. So while I’m not sure I believe you can do everything you say you can do, I think it’s gonna be a whole lot better for me to have you working with me instead of out on your own getting in my way.”
“Well, Sheriff, that’s certainly one way of looking at it, and since it gets me right to where I want to be, which is working on this case, I don’t expect I’m going to argue with you about it. Now what can you tell me that the child hasn’t been able to tell me herself?”
“I don’t know what the victim has told you—“
“Jenny,” I interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“Her name is Jenny, and she is a girl. She is not ‘the victim’ or ‘the girl’ or ‘the body.’ She is Jenny, and I will remind you that she is still sitting right here and can hear every word. She is dead, and she is a ghost, but she is also still a little girl who is scared at what is going to happen next, and angry that she won’t go to the prom, or graduate high school, or get married, or have a baby, or grandbabies, or any of the things that she was supposed to do. So she will be treated with respect, and not referred to as ‘the victim.’ Do we have an understanding?” I might have slipped into my Sunday School Teacher voice, the one I used on Kacey Swicegood all those years when he was trying to be distracting while I was teaching the story of the loaves and fishes.
Sheriff Dunleavy looked appropriately chastened, although I don’t know if it was because of what I said, or if I just made him remember his own mama reading him out for talking ugly when he was a child. He nodded, then went on. “Like I was saying, I don’t know what Jenny has told you, but we know very little about this case. The…she came home from the football game, apparently went to basement for some reason, and apparently fell down the stairs.”
“You say ‘for some reason,’” I said. “Does that mean the power was on when y’all found her?”
“Well, yes ma’am, when we got the call Saturday morning the power was on and there were no blackouts the night before that got called in, so we didn’t have any reason to think the power was ever out. But that would explain her going down to the basement when there was no one else in the house.”
“What about her flashlight? Did she have a flashlight with her?” I asked. Jenny nodded for me to go on, but stayed silent.
Dunleavy looked at me, then picked up a folder from his desk and took some glossy pictures out of it. He spread the crime scene photos out on his desk and started looking through them. “I don’t see a flashlight in these pictures. The basement’s not the cleanest place I’ve ever seen, but there’s not much clutter,” he said.
“There it is,” Jenny said, pointing to one of the pictures. “On that shelf by the freezer. That’s my flashlight. But how did it get all the way over there?”
“What do you mean, sweetie,” I asked, then I saw where she was pointing. On the shelf over their big freezer, the one her daddy probably put a deer in every winter, sat a bright shiny flashlight, without a speck of dust on it. I could see in the photo how much it stood out on the shelf.
“Sheriff,” I said. “Jenny said that’s the flashlight she was carrying when she went down the steps,” I said. “We need to find out who moved it.”
“Yep, because if she had it in her hand when she was pushed, somehow I doubt it flew ten feet across the basement and just happened to land perfectly on that shelf,” Dunleavy agreed. “I’ll get Jeff to go over there and bag it, then we can bring it back over here and dust it for prints.”
“You might want to have him dust the fuse box while he’s over there,” I suggested.
“That makes sense. If Jenny’s telling you the power was out…”
“What’s the matter, Sheriff?” I asked.
“I’m talking like I believe this is all really happening, which I reckon I do, since I’m sending a deputy over to re-open a crime scene based on either the say-so of a ghost, or the say-so of a crazy woman. It’s just going to take me a minute or two to adjust to my new reality, I think.”
“Welcome to my world, Sheriff. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of room on the crazy train.”
“Lila Grace, did you just make an Ozzy Osbourne reference?” Sheriff Dunleavy asked me.
“I’m hardcore, Sheriff,” I replied. “Didn’t they tell you I worship the devil and bite the heads off live bats?”
“Oh, people tried to warn me, alright, but believe me, their warnings could not hold a candle to the reality,” he said.
“I’m so glad I could help,” I said with a smile, then returned my attention to the crime scene photos. Sheriff Dunleavy called Jeff on the radio while I perused the photos and sent him over to the Miller house to collect the flashlight and dust the fuse box. He also instructed the young officer to take pictures of the stairs, regardless of the fact that a dozen people had trooped through their in the days since Jenny’s death.
The scene in the photos was pretty normal for a basement, even as peculiar as a house with a basement was for Lockhart, South Carolina. The only reason I could think they would have it is the slope the house sat on made for a whole lot of usable space along the back of the house, so somebody put walls around it and called it a basement. There were some shelves with the kind of junk people usually put on their garage or crawlspace – old sports equipment, lawn furniture that’s out of season or too worn out for use except when the in-laws come over and every single chair that can come out into the yard already has a behind in it, some old cans of paint, a seed spreader, a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, and a dead teenage girl.
Jenny stood looking over my shoulder, silent after telling us about the flashlight. I didn’t say anything to the child, just let her look. Sometimes the dead need to see themselves lying there to really understand their new place in the world, or lack thereof. I looked up at the girl, and her face was sad, but determined.
“Are you alright, sweetie?” I asked after a minute.
“I’m fine. It just took me a minute to get my head wrapped around the fact that was me laying there. Did my mama or my daddy find me?”
I looked at Sheriff Dunleavy, then when he didn’t answer I remembered that he couldn’t hear the girl. “Who found her, Sheriff? Was it her mother or her father?”
The sheriff opened another manila folder on his desk and pulled out a pink sheet of a multi-part form. “It says here that the father discovered the…found her.” He caught himself before he called her “the body,” and I appreciated it.
“That’s good,” Jenny said. “Mama wouldn’t have been able to handle that. I mean, I’m sure it was bad for Daddy, too. But Mama would have just been tore all to pieces.”
“I’m sure she was that anyhow, darling,” I said. “A parent ain’t supposed to have to bury their child. It’s about the worst thing I can imagine.”
“You never had any kids, did you Ms. Carter?” Jenny asked, all of the melancholy of death forgotten in the irrepressible curiosity of the teenager.
“No, honey, I never married. I guess children just weren’t in the cards for me,” I said. I pushed all thoughts of a young man with glasses and a trim beard driving out of town in a fast car to the back of my head. This was not the time to dwell on old hurts or regrets. This was the time to find out who pushed that child down a flight of stairs.
“I can’t see anything out of place or unusual, Jenny,” I said, motioning to the pictures. “Can you?”
She leaned in closer, her body passing through my shoulder. I felt all the hair on my right arm stand up in goosebumps at her touch, like a goose didn’t just walk over my grave, but stopped and decided to tap dance on it for a little while. After several long seconds, she straightened up, and I rubbed some warmth back into my arm.
“No ma’am, I don’t see anything different. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the basement, though, so I might not know it if I saw it.” She looked disappointed, like she had been hoping the killer wrote his name in the dust at her feet or something.
“She didn’t see anything else out of place, Sheriff,” I reported. “What else do you have that we can look at?”
“I don’t have any more photos, unless you want to look at the autopsy?” He looked from my face to over my right shoulder, where Jenny stood. I thought for a moment that the good Sheriff could see her, then I remembered that I looked up at her whenever I talked to her, so he could easily figure out where she was from watching me.
“I don’t think will be necessary,” I said. I had no interest in seeing pictures of this sweet child all cut up, and wouldn’t be able to get any information that way anyway. I was no kind of doctor. All I’d get from seeing pictures of an autopsy would be nauseated.
“Good,” Sheriff Dunleavy said. “The findings were consistent with a fall down the steps, but the coroner was surprised to see that there were no bruises on the knees or hands. That made him think that she might have been pushed, because a person falling would naturally put their hands out to break their fall.”
“And most people who fall down the steps don’t land on their head,” I said.
“That’s right,” the sheriff agreed. “If it had been a normal fall, her legs and the rest of her would have been all bruised up. She wasn’t, just her head and a broken neck. Then when I saw you at the scene, I knew life was about to get a whole lot more complicated.”
“I am sorry about that, Sheriff. I would very much like for your life to be as simple as possible. Because when your life is simple, it means that my life is boring. And I like a boring life. I like to go to church on Sunday and on Wednesday nights. I like to go to the farmer’s market on Saturday and buy my vegetables. I like to read the newspaper every morning while I eat my oatmeal with strawberries cut up in it and just a little bit of brown sugar to make me feel decadent. I like boring, Sheriff. So I truly am sorry that I am complicating your life, but this poor child showed up on my doorstep crying her poor dead eyes out, and I couldn’t very well turn her away.”
“No, I reckon you couldn’t, at that. Well, right now I’ve got Jeff going out to pick up the flashlight, so do you have any supernatural advice as to our next step?”
I didn’t get the chance to answer, because as soon as I opened my mouth to speak, the woman who was painting her nails at the reception desk when we walked by rushed in, her mouth open wide. “Sheriff, you got to come quick,” she panted.
“What’s wrong, Ethel?” the sheriff asked.
“We just got a 911 call come in. There’s another dead girl.”
by john | Mar 6, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
4
It ain’t easy knocking on the door of a house that’s grieving, especially when you know it’s a child that’s passed. The Miller house looked like about any other house in one of them new planned neighborhoods, called Evergreen Acres, with all the streets named after trees. Of course, not a one of the trees they named a street after is an evergreen, so the Millers lived on Maple Lane. I shook my head at how dumb some developers can be as I pulled up on the street outside their house.
There were a few cars in the driveway and on the side of the road, but not too many. It was the day after the funeral, and most of the family from out of town had already gone, leaving the poor child’s mama and daddy to start trying to put their lives back together. And here I was to tear it apart again.
Reverend Aaron Turner answered the door, a scowl making his face look even more sour than usual. The Baptist preacher always looked like somebody shoved a lemon in his mouth and clamped his jaw shut, or maybe stuck that lemon someplace a little further south. But whenever he saw me, his face scrunched up like he just took a bite of something rotten and didn’t have nowhere to spit it out. I was not going to be able to talk to the parents with him in the house. I’d be surprised if I got into the house at all, given the good reverend’s dim view of me and my gifts. The kindest thing he’d ever called me was a fraud, and it went decidedly downhill from there.
“Reverend,” I said, so polite that butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. I held out the white Pyrex dish with blue flowers on it. “I brought a chicken pot pie. Figured these folks might be tired of broccoli and green bean casseroles by now.”
“That’s mighty kind of you, Ms. Carter. I’ll be sure to pass it along, with your condolences of course.” He stepped back and made to close to the door on me, but he had to hold the dish with both hands on account of the bottom being too hot for him to manage it one-handed. That made him slow getting the door closed in my face, and I pushed my way just across the threshold and held the door open with my foot.
“I don’t mind coming in for a minute to pay my respects. My circle wanted me to say something to Mrs. Miller on our behalf.” I wondered if it was a worse sin lying to a preacher than just lying in general, because the women in my church circle group didn’t have a damn thing to do with me being there, and had no idea I was using their names in vain. They wouldn’t have cared about that, but the lying to a preacher thing would have given Tot Good a little pause, at least.
“That won’t be necessary,” Reverend Turner insisted through gritted teeth. The man did not want me in that house, particularly right then. I started to wonder if there was more to his insistence than just his general dislike for me and his completely unfounded opinion that I sold my soul to the devil.
“Who’s at the door, Aaron?” The voice coming from within the house was familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to it. That was odd, since I’d known most everybody in town for years.
The little bit of light coming from within the house was blotted out by the big frame of Sheriff Dunleavy stepping into the doorway between the parlor and the foyer. “Ms. Carter? How are you doing?” the sheriff asked, walking over to me, a grin splitting his face. I trusted his intentions about like I trusted a crying crocodile. A smiling lawman is never honest about his intentions. I liked my police like I liked my undertakers – solemn and grim.
“I’m fine, Sheriff. I just brought this chicken pot pie and my respects to the Millers. I heard about Jenny and just felt awful about it.” I pushed past Reverend Turner and shook the sheriff’s hand. “Are you here officially, or just being a sympathetic ear?”
“I’m here in an official capacity, I hate to say,” Dunleavy said. “There were a couple of strange things that came up in the autopsy that I need to go over with Mr. And Mrs. Miller.”
“What kind of strange things, Sheriff?” I asked. I knew it wasn’t my business, and a big-city cop would never tell me squat, but I had a little hope that my hokey charm would soften Dunleavy up a touch.
No such luck. “I’m sorry, Ms. Carter. I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation. I’ve said too much already. If you’ll excuse me,” he stepped past me toward the door and nodded to Turner. “Reverend.”
“Sheriff,” the preacher nodded back in that silent acknowledgment men do. Sheriff Dunleavy continued out the door and down the steps. I didn’t see what car he got into, but it must have been his personal one. I would have noticed a police cruiser in the driveway, even if I missed Reverend Turner’s big old black Lincoln Town Car with the Clergy sticker on his bumper. The man was just a little ostentatious for my tastes, with his perfectly creased pants and his big shiny car. I could tolerate fancy or judgmental, but I didn’t do good when one package wrapped up both irritating traits. And Turner was fit to bursting at the seams with both.
“You need to leave, Ms. Carter. This family has been through enough without your interference and crazy stories,” the preacher said in a low voice. He practically hissed at me, the bald-headed little snot. I thought, not for the first time, that Reverend Turner probably got beat up a lot in school. Not because the other children were terribly cruel, which they could be, but because he was such a little bastard.
“You’re right, Reverend.” I said, sugar practically dripping off my tongue. “These fine folks have lost everything that matters to them right now. I should leave them alone to their grief. My name is on the bottom of the Pyrex, so they can return it whenever they’re done. But don’t you go putting that dish in the refrigerator while it’s still hot. It’ll cool down too fast and explode.”
“I know that, Lila Grace. What do you take me for, a moron?”
I didn’t answer that, I just turned and left the house. After all, my mama always said if you can’t say something nice about somebody, don’t say nothing at all.
“What are you doing?” Jenny asked as I walked down the steps on the front porch. “Why are you leaving? Talk to me, dammit!”
I tried very hard to keep my voice low and not move my lips much as I walked to the car. There was a steady trickle of people walking up to the front door, most of them carrying Pyrex, but a few with KFC buckets and one or two even carrying grocery bags with paper plates and the like.
“I am leaving because it will not do us any good to get in a fight with a preacher on your front porch. I can come back this evening when he is leading his choir practice, and have a much better chance of talking to your mama and daddy without causing a scene.”
“Well, where are we going now?” She asked, fading through the passenger door of my truck and settling into the seat. She turned half around, reaching for the seatbelt, then laughed a little. “I guess I don’t have to worry about seatlbelts now, do I?”
“No, honey, I think you’re beyond those problems. And since the only lawman in town who can see you is Sheriff Johnny, you’re probably safe from getting a ticket, too. Speaking of lawmen, we’re going to see Sheriff Dunleavy to ask him what was squirelly in your autopsy. Could be he has some information that might be useful to us, and we certainly have some that he should find interesting.”
I pulled the pickup out onto the street and drove around the block, then headed toward the sheriff’s office. There was a familiar white Prius sitting in the Sheriff’s parking lot, and now I knew what Dunleavy’s car looked like. I could count the number of hybrids in Unionville on one hand and have a thumb to spare, so it wouldn’t be any trouble seeing the Sheriff coming from a mile away, even if he wasn’t in his official vehicle.
I walked through the front door, wincing at the loud electronic beeeeeep that accompanied me. Sheriff Johnny had a bell on a metal arm over the door, like in an old hardware store, and it was still unnerving to me the new technological sound that came with the new high-tech lawman.
“Come on in, Ms. Carter,” Sheriff Dunleavy called from his office. “I didn’t expect it would take you very long to get here.”
“Well, then you might just be sheriff enough to take care of this county,” I said. I walked into his office and paused at the door. The “lawyer chair” had been replaced, and a new chair with arms sat in its place. I sat down in the new chair, testing the soft leather. There was no wobble, and it sat just a little high, putting the occupant almost at eye level with the person sitting behind a desk. Obviously this new sheriff didn’t think he needed any help intimidating people. That in itself was a little bit intimidating.
“The old chair had one leg shorter than the other. Imagine that,” the sheriff said, sitting down behind his desk. He motioned to a Styrofoam cup on the front edge of his desk. “I fixed you an ice water.”
I picked up the cup and took a sip. It was very cold. “Thank you, Sheriff. You have been expecting me.”
“You seem like somebody who takes an interest in things that aren’t quite ordinary,” he said with a mild smile.
“That sounds an awful lot like a polite way of calling me a busybody, Sheriff,” I replied, fixing my own smile firmly on my face. It seemed like we were going to sit here and play the “bless your heart” game for a little while, where we made snide little comments hidden in well-mannered sentences before finally abandoning our pretenses and getting down to business.
But the Sheriff had a surprise in store for me. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his desk, and stared right at me. “I’ve asked around about you. Seems like most everybody here believes you can do what you say you can do. Even Reverend Turner, who thinks you’re in league with the devil, believes you can talk to the dead. Your own pastor, Dr. Reese, speaks very highly of your gifts and your willingness to help people. So either you’ve managed to fool an entire town, or you really do have some power to talk to dead folks.”
“Like I said when we first met, Sheriff, everybody around here talks to dead people. The only difference with me is that they talk back.” I leaned forward in my chair and looked him in the eye as I spoke.
“Well, exactly what are the dead telling you today?” he asked.
“They’re telling me that Jenny Miller didn’t fall down those stairs,” I replied.
“Do they know who killed her?”
“No, they don’t.”
“Then what good are they?”
“They’re dead, Sheriff, they aren’t Batman.”
He let out a deep echoing laugh and leaned back. “I like you, Lila Grace. Can I call you Lila Grace?”
“I wish you would, Sheriff.”
“You know why I like you?”
“Because I can help you solve murders?”
“No, because you ain’t scared of nothing! You have got bigger juevos than any man I’ve ever met. I respect that.”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Sheriff,” I said. “There’s plenty of things I’m scared of. I’m scared of spiders, they give me the willies. I’m scared that the life I lead isn’t good enough to get me to Heaven, and when I walk up to the pearly gates, Saint Peter is going to laugh in my face and send me down to the other place. I’m scared that I really am crazy and just hallucinating all these dead people, and you, and driving around town, and I’m really down in Columbia on Bull Street tied to bed in a pair of Depends that ain’t been changed in two days with everybody ignoring my screaming because they’re tired of listening to this old woman’s mouth. I’m scared of sunspots, because I watch too much PBS. I’m scared of the government, because I watch too much C-Span. I’m scared of getting cancer from watching too much TV, and I’m scared that I won’t be smart enough, or strong enough, or good enough to find who murdered the beautiful little girl that’s sitting in your other chair right now unable to be seen or heard by anybody in the world but me, and that she will wander this earth forever instead of going to Heaven to see her Granny again like she deserves.”
I leaned back and took a drink of water. “So there are plenty of things that scare me, Sheriff. Just none of them scare me as much as letting this little girl down.”
by john | Feb 27, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
The reception to this reading at Mysticon last weekend was great, so I guess I’ll keep on scribbling on it. Y’all know we love comments, right? And remember, this is strictly first-draft stuff, so there will probably be spelling errors and plenty of proof that I don’t really know where the commas go.
Chapter 3
I wasn’t too surprised to see Sheriff Johnny sitting in my living room when I walked in with Jenny in tow. The girl stopped, though, and when I sat down in my favorite chair, I noticed that she was still standing in the open french door frame between my dining room and den.
“Well, come on in, sweetie. He ain’t gonna arrest you. Not now, anyhow.” I smiled at her to let her know I was only joking, and waved her into the room.
She came into the room and sat on the couch. I’ve never understood how ghosts can sit on furniture, but they can’t turn a doorknob or handle other objects. Most of ‘em can’t, anyway. But for some reason, they can all sit on a chair or couch just like they still walked around breathing.
“Now, honey, let’s start with what Sheriff Johnny here likes to call the real police work.” I nodded to Johnny, and he smiled at me. He looked like he was only half paying attention to what we were talking about, but I knew he was listening a lot more to what me and that child said than he was listening to another In the Heat of the Night rerun. I mean, I like Carroll O’Conner as much as the next woman, but back to back episodes five days a week is a little much. But Sheriff Johnny has got hooked on it since he showed up at my door the morning after his funeral, all mute and confused and lost.
Some ghosts can talk, some can’t. I’ve never known what makes one of them able to communicate over another one, and it ain’t like I’ve been dead to ask anybody. But Sheriff Johnny was one of them that couldn’t speak, so he had to resort to bad sign language and gestures to get his point across. The two of us spent many an afternoon in recent months watching YouTube videos on sign language, and we got to a place where we could communicate with one another pretty good.
I reached over to the antique chest of drawers I got out of Miss Ellen Ferguson’s house when she passed, and I dug around in the top drawer until I found an ink pen and a little yellow notepad. I leaned forward to Jenny and asked, “Now who do you think would want to hurt you, sweetheart?”
“I can’t think of nobody, ma’am. And I mean it, too. Carla Combs was mad at me for getting Homecoming Queen, but she got over it when she beat me for class President. Matt Ridinger was mad at me for being named Salutatorian, but then his scholarship to Duke came through and he stopped caring about stuff around here. So I can’t think of anybody that would want to kill me.”
I looked over at Johnny, who wiggled his fingers in the air for a few seconds. I nodded, and turned back to Jenny. “What about any of the other girls on the cheerleading squad? I asked. “Did any of the girls on the bottom of the pyramid want to be on the top? Or vice versa, or whatever girls get made at each other about nowadays.”
She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No, nothing like that. I was captain of the squad, but I didn’t make up any of the routines or decide anything about who got featured or anything like that. And I was on the bottom of the pyramid, because I had strong enough legs to hold up some of those little heifers.” The corner of one lip turned up a little sneer, and that was the thing I’d been waiting for – the hint of mean girl to come out.
It took me back, and not to somewhere I liked going. I went right back to seventh grade gym class and playing dodge ball. All the teams were picked except me and little Mikey Miller, who had braces on both legs and a lisp. Karen Taylor and Laura Anne Mays were arguing over who got “the gimp,” and who got stuck with “Crazy Gracie,” as I was called until my junior year of high school.
But Jenny’s sneer was gone as soon as it came over her, and she looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hate to call them names, that’s what Miss Hope called us all. We were her little heifers, and she was our Mama Moo-Cow. I think she got picked on in school because she was a big girl.” Well, I’ll be. Maybe this child really was as nice as she was acting. That was going to make it even harder to figure out who wanted to kill her.
Sheriff Johnny caught my eye, and I turned to see him wiggling his fingers to beat the band. “Slow down, Johnny. You know I ain’t watched them videos as many times as you have.” It was true, too. Sometimes I left the sign language videos running on a loop so Johnny could practice while I went to church, or the grocery store, or just out to piddle around in my garden. He’d gotten downright good at that stuff, and when he got excited, like he was now, sometimes he was too much for me to keep up with.
He stopped, then started again. I watched his wispy hands closely, glad he wasn’t too pale today for me to see all the details. Sometimes Johnny would get wispy in the middle of the day, only to grow sharper and more distinct as night fell.
I turned back to Jenny. “Sheriff Johnny was wondering if there was anybody that had a disagreement with your parents? Anybody that they argued with a bunch?”
“No, ma’am,” the girl said. “I mean, they got in little squabbles with Todd Ferguson about stuff at the church, and Mama didn’t shop at the Farmer’s Market no more since she caught that Riley girl putting her thumb on the scale when she was weighing her cucumbers, but nothing to come to no fights, or nothing like that. Daddy didn’t even owe nobody money, except the bank. And they ain’t usually the ones to go around pushing people down steps, are they?”
‘No, honey, I reckon they ain’t. Bankers are usually more sneaky than that.” Johnny was wiggling his fingers at me again, but I turned my head and ignored him. He hates that. Makes him madder than a frog on a frying pan to be ignored, but sometimes I had to use it like a mute button. Johnny had a bad habit of forgetting that he wasn’t Sheriff mo more. On account of being dead and all.
I stood up and walked to the kitchen. “You want something to drink, honey? I got sweet tea, and ice water. Oh, shoot, I’m sorry.” Sometimes I forget they ain’t ever gonna drink nothing again, especially the ones that can talk. I fixed myself some sweet tea in an old Tupperware tumbler and walked back into the den.
“I’m sorry about that, honey,” I said.
“It’s okay,” the girl said. “I ain’t quite used to it myself, yet. Being dead, I mean.” She got a pensive look on her face. “Do you know…why I’m still here? Does this mean I can’t go to Heaven?” She looked like she was going to cry, the poor thing. I knew better, cause ghosts can’t cry, but it’s still a good idea to keep the supernatural visitors on as even a keel as you can manage, emotionally speaking. When a ghost loses control of their emotions, things have a bad habit of flying around the room, and I had some nice Depression Glass piece in my china cabinet that I didn’t want to see get broken.
“I don’t know why you’re here, honey, but I’ve got an idea,” I said. “It seems like the people who don’t move on are either scared of what they’re going to find when they pass from this world, or there’s something unfinished keeping them here. Sheriff Johnny hangs around this old town because he ain’t convinced that the new Sheriff can take care of his people, so he tries to keep an eye on things. Miss Leila Dover doesn’t think her husband JR can take care of himself without her, not realizing that he took care of himself and her the last five years when her Alzheimer’s got so bad. And you got murdered, only nobody knows it, so ain’t nobody looking for your killer. So you want justice. I reckon when y’all get your outstanding issues resolved, so to speak, y’all will all move on to the land of harp music and fluffy clouds.”
“Are you sure?” The child looked scared to death, which I reckon was not a real good turn of phrase for her anymore.
“I ain’t sure of much, sweetie. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my fifty-seven years on this earth, it’s that we don’t know half of what we think we know, and we understand less than half of that. But I know this – if you were a good person, then you’ll end up Heaven. It don’t matter if you toilet papered an old lady’s house on Halloween, or skipped Sunday School more times than you went. It matters how you acted towards others, and whether or not you are really sorry for any harm you might have caused. I am not your preacher, and I am not here to cast judgement. But if I had to guess, I would think that once we figure out who pushed you down them stairs, you can move on to the next world and see anybody that’s waiting for you on the other side.”
“Like my Granny?” She said, smiling.
I remembered that child’s grandmother the second she said it. Vera Prustley was a foot-washing Baptist, as we called them. She was as devout a woman as any I’d ever known. Didn’t truck with playing cards or music on Sunday, but wasn’t rude about her religion, either. I didn’t know her too well, but she always had a friendly nod for me when we would pass in the grocery store, even when I was on the outs with my own church family. She had passed about six years ago, right about the time this child would have been in middle school. That’s about the time when children really start to understand death and grieving, so her Granny’s death was something she would have carried with her.
“Yes, darling,” I replied. “I think your Granny is almost certainly waiting to see you again. So let’s try to figure out where to go from here so you can go see Miss Vera again, and your killer can go straight to jail.”
Sheriff Johnny waved his arms so wildly I turned back to him. “Yes, Johnny?”
He wiggled his fingers at me, and I gave him a little smile. “I agree, Sheriff,” I said.
I turned back to Jenny. “Sheriff Johnny says your killer don’t need to go to jail, we need to send his sorry behind right to Hell.”
by john | Feb 20, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Serialized Fiction, Writing
It’s Monday, so here’s another Chapter of Amazing Grace. That’s at least what I’m tentatively calling it. Hope y’all enjoy it.
Chapter 2
It took a week and a half, but I soon found out just how right Sheriff Dunleavy was. I was bringing in tomatoes when I first saw the poor dear, sitting on the steps to my back porch with her head in her hands. Not literally, of course. Even the dead have some sense of propriety.
I walked past her at first, giving her a glance to make sure she was really dead and not just some misguided cheerleader from the high school selling candy for the prom, or magazine subscriptions for the winter formal, or seed packets for the study abroad program. I’ve disappointed so many of those children for so many years, it’s almost like a game now. They come up with new and even more interesting ways to get me to part with my money, and I come up with different ways to say “no.” But no, this wasn’t a living child here to be disappointed by an old woman on a fixed income. This child was dead, all her disappointments were now behind her.
I laid out the tomatoes on top of the washing machine on a dishtowel I’d put down that morning just for that reason, and went into the kitchen. I washed my hands and face, put my gardening gloves on the windowsill over the sink, and went back out to the porch. I sat down in the rocker my nephew Jason and his second wife gave me for Christmas one year and looked at the child sitting on my steps.
“Well, come on,sweetie. Let’s have it. What’s got you coming to see the crazy old woman that talks to dead people? Except you being dead, that is?”
The girl spun around on the step and stared at me, her mouth hanging open. I laughed so hard I almost spilled tea all over myself, but managed to get myself together before I really made a mess. “Oh my good Lord,” I said, “If you could see the look on your face, child! If you was still alive, I’d tell you to close that thing before flies got in it, but I reckon that ain’t much of a problem now, is it?”
“Y-you can see me?” the child asked. “You can hear me?”
“Of course I can see and hear you, sweetheart, ain’t that the whole reason you and your little girlfriends toilet papered my front yard two Halloweens ago?” It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a ghost blush, but it was still a rare enough occurrence to make me grin.
“I’m sorry about that. We didn’t think about…”
“About how hard it would be for an old woman to get all that toilet paper out of the trees and the grass? Of course you didn’t, that’s what being a teenager is all about. And don’t think you invented anything new, honey, I’ve been getting TP’d on Halloween since your mama was a young’un. It’s a lot easier to take care of than you think. You just take a lighter to it, it burns right out before any part of the tree catches, Easy-peasy. Now, what brings you to my front porch looking all distraught? And who are you, firstly? Ever since I quit teaching Sunday School at the A.R.P. Church, I don’t know as many of you young people as I used to.
“We’re Baptists anyway,” the girl said.
“Well, I forgive you,” I replied. The poor child looked terribly confused, which just made me laugh again, which just made her look even more confused. “Anyway, honey, you were going to tell me who you were?” I prodded.
“My name’s Jenny Miller, and I reckon you can see I’m dead.”
“I noticed that first thing. How did you die and how long ago?”
“About three days ago, I guess. Time is strange now, and I don’t have to sleep, so it’s a little odd. But they had my funeral today, and I think it was a Friday when I died, so it feels like about three days.”
“Well, let me go get the paper and we can see if you’re in the obituaries. That can tell us quite a bit.” I went into the house and pulled out the last three days’ worth of The Herald and carried them out to the porch.
I opened the first newspaper, Saturday’s edition with high school football on the front page, and a big picture of a smiling blonde girl on the back page of Section A. I compared the photo with the ghost on my steps, and sure enough, it was a match. “Yes, honey, you died on Friday night after cheering our Bulldogs to a victory over Dorman in overtime. It says here that you fell down the stairs in your house and broke your neck. But I suppose that isn’t what happened, was it?
The pretty blonde ghost looked up at me, her eyes brimming. “No, ma’am. I didn’t fall. I was pushed. Somebody pushed me down the stairs and broke my neck, now I’m stuck here until I get justice!” Her words built and built on each other until she was almost shouting. I felt the power roll off of her, full of anger and pain. I knew if I didn’t find a away to send her to her rest, that she could turn into a powerful poltergeist. This child needed to move on, and fast.
“Okay, sweetie, just calm down,” I said, putting my tea down and using the same tones I used to use to calm spooked horses when I was little. “Now tell me what you remember, and we’ll work from there.”
“I don’t remember anything,” she said, her voice shaky and thready. “That’s the problem. I remember leaving the game with Shelly, and then nothing.”
“How did you get home?” I asked. I knew if I could get her to realize that the memories were there, that it would all would all work out.
“Shelly drove us. She got her license last month, and this was the first game her mom had let her drive to.”
“Alright. Did Shelly come in with you, or did she drop you off in the driveway?”
“Neither one. She just stopped on the street in front of my house, and I got out. I walked up the steps to the front porch, unlocked the front door, turned around to wave goodnight to Shelly, and went inside.”
“Then what?” I kept my voice low, not wanting to break her out of the almost-trance she had slipped into as she walked back through the night in her memory.
“I reached over to turn on the lights, but nothing happened. I remember thinking that was strange, because the porch light was working fine, but then I remembered Daddy had installed one of them fancy battery backups on the porch light so we’d have some kind of light when the power went out. It was dark as could be, but there was a little bit of light coming in the door from the porch light, and that streetlight the power company put up in the front yard shines in through the living room window something fierce, so I could see plenty.”
“What did you see, honey?” I asked.
“Nothing. I mean, nothing unusual. It just looked like my house, you know? Only dark. I went to the kitchen and got a flashlight out of the drawer beside the sink where Mama keeps all the hurricane stuff, and I went to the basement to look at the fuse box.”
“Only you never made it down to the basement,” I added.
“That’s right,” the pretty little ghost agreed. “On account of some sumbitch shoving me down the stairs as soon as I got the door open good. I remember feeling two hands in my back, then I went forward, and I remember a big flash when I hit my head…then…I’m sorry, I don’t remember anything else. I woke up the next morning to the sound of my mama screaming, and I was looking down at my own body, lying there at the bottom of the stairs…” her words trailed off into sobs, and I wanted to put my arm around her and try to give the poor child some comfort, but I knew my arm would just pass right through her. I’d done it before with other spirits, and it never went well. It just made the ghost more upset and left me feeling a little bit embarrassed.
“Okay, sweetheart, it’s okay,” I said in a soothing tone. “Let’s go inside and have a seat while you try to think of anything else you remember from that night. You’re doing real good, better than anybody would expect.” I stood up and she followed me into the house.
She stopped by the washing machine and looked at the tomatoes all spread out waiting to be washed and canned. “Did you just pick these?” she asked. “I love fresh tomatoes!” She reached out for one, but couldn’t touch them. Her tomato days were over, unfortunately. She looked up at me, stricken.
“I’m sorry, honey. You can’t touch things anymore.”
“I know. I just forget sometimes, you know?”
I did know. I’d seen it for years with other ghosts I had known. Sometimes a very powerful spirit can move things around them, but that kind of poltergeist energy is real hard to sustain, and it makes a ghost become thin and wispy, and before long it fades away entirely. I don’t know if the spirit moves on, or just…fades.
That was something I didn’t dwell on too much. It was more for the ladies in my Sunday School class, and I tried not to ask too many heavy theological questions around that bunch. They just let me start coming back to Sunday School about six months ago, so I didn’t want to push my luck. I led the teenager’s ghost into the house to see if we could come up with any other clues about her untimely demise.
by john | Feb 12, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Serialized Fiction, Writing
That’s my new working title for this. I dunno if I’m going to keep it or not. This is something I’m messing around with and thinking of serializing here. If you like it, go buy one of my other books, or join my Patreon.
Chapter 1
“So you’re a medium?” The large man asked me in the tone of voice usually reserved for the mentally ill or the tragically stupid. I wasn’t sure which one he thought I was, but I had a pretty good guess. “That means you talk to dead people?”
“Sheriff Dunleavy,” I replied, working very hard to keep a civil tongue in my mouth and remember that my mama raised me to be a lady. “I’m Southern. We all talk to dead people down here. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe I can truly trust anybody that doesn’t speak to at least two or three dead relations on a daily basis. The difference is, they talk back to me.”
Jeff Mitchum, one of the deputies, piped up. “She’s right, Sheriff. Miss Lila Grace can find things you thought was lost forever, and tell you if your wife is fooling around on you, and all sorts of things she ought not to know.”
I sighed a little bit. I knew Jeff was trying to help, but he never was the sharpest knife in the drawer and I could tell from the look on Sheriff Dunleavy’s mustached face that Jeff’s endorsement had most of the opposite effect the poor deputy was hoping for.
“Thank you, Jeff, I said, setting my purse down in the one chair in the waiting area of the Union County Sheriff’s Department. I stepped up to the counter, resting my elbows on the chipped and stained formica surface. “Jeffrey, darling, it is powerful hot out there today. Would you be a dear and get me a glass of ice water?” I pulled a Kleenex out from the sleeve where I had it tucked away and dabbed at my forehead.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jeff said, hopping up from his ancient rolling chair and walking back behind the four desks that made up the “bullpen” of the Sheriff’s office.
Sheriff Dunleavy remained exactly where he had been since I stepped into the building, leaning on the frame of his office door, one eyebrow climbing to where his hairline probably used to be. “I can’t get Mitchum to move that fast when a call comes in, much less to run fetch me stuff. Maybe you do have super-powers.” He gave me one of those little half-smiles men get when they think they’re being clever.
“Maybe I taught that child Sunday School every week for six years and brought him up to respect his elders,” I replied with an arched eyebrow of my own. We stood there for a minute staring, neither one of us saying a word, ’til finally Dunleavy cracked.
“Well, what is it?” He asked.
“What is what, Sheriff?”
“What do you want, Ms. Carter? I have a department to run, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Oh, I noticed, all right, Sheriff. I notice all the people clamoring for attention for their complaints.” I gestured at the empty waiting room. “I notice all those cars in the parking lot.” I pointed out the glass door where three police cruisers and my well-loved 1986 GMC Sierra pickup sat alone in a parking lot built for thirty or more. “And I certainly notice the preponderance of victims you are consoling right there in your very office.”
I never blinked. I just looked at him. After a minute or so, Jeffrey returned with my ice water. “Thank you, Jeffrey. I appreciate that. Now, may I come in, Sheriff, or are you going to stand there and be stubborn while my talent and news go to waste?”
Dunleavy sighed a huge sigh. But I suspected everything this man did was huge. He stood about six and a half feet tall, and was a fit man, rare in law enforcement down here. Too much rich food and front porch sitting for a man to keep himself trim much past twenty years old.
“Please come in, Mrs. Carter,” he said, walking ahead of me into his office. I followed him into his office, which was almost completely unchanged from how it looked when Dunleavy’s predecessor, Sheriff Johnny Thomas held court in the room. The pictures on the wall were different, shots of Dunleavy in a tailored suit shaking hands with various smiling important-looking people from his last job, Chicago if I recalled correctly. A light dusting of Sheriff Johnny’s cigar smoke still coated everything else, especially the padded high-back rolling chair behind the desk and the surface of the desk itself. The computer was new, one of those big all-in-one jobs, and looked out of place in the cramped room, like a spaceship in a Sam Spade novel. I ran my fingers across the top of the monitor and took my seat in the wooden visitor’s chair nearest the desk.
Like most people who had been in the office more than once, I knew that the chair on the left was for normal people, and the chair on the right was the “lawyer chair.” Sheriff Johnny had his brother Red take the other visitor chair out one afternoon and shave a quarter-inch off one of the front legs so it never would sit quite right. Sheriff Johnny never had much tolerance for lawyers. But the Sheriff was gone now, succumbed to a heart attack in the middle of umpiring a softball game between the Baptists and the Methodists back in the spring. “Gone” of course is a relative term for me, since I saw Johnny clear as day standing in the corner of the office staring down at the newest occupant of his desk.
“Now, Mrs. Carter—“ Sheriff Dunleavy began, but I cut him off.
“Ms.” I corrected.
“Excuse me?”
“Ms.,” I repeated. “I am not, nor have I ever been, married. And while I appreciate the flattery inherent in the idea, it has been some number of years since I felt reasonable answering to ‘miss.’ Therefore, please call me ‘ms.’ Or Lila Grace, if you tend toward the informal. I assure you I do not find the use of my given name offensive.”
“Okay, then Lila Grace, what can I do for you today?”
“I mostly wanted to call on you to introduce myself and determine to what degree we can work together.”
“Work together?” There went that eyebrow racing skyward again.
“Jeffrey explained to you that I was of some assistance to your predecessor on more than one occasion. I would hope to be able to continue that relationship with you.”
“You want to work with the police department?”
“Not work with, per se. I would simply like to be able to bring you information from time to time and know that it will be treated with respect, and not dismissed out of hand because of where it came from.”
“And where does your information come from, Ms. Carter?”
“From the dead, Sheriff. I thought we had covered that. I am a medium. I converse with the spirits of those who have passed on. They tell me things. Sometimes I need to pass those things along to you. I need to know whether or not you will believe what I tell you, or if I will need to pursue other avenues to satisfy the spirits.”
Sheriff Dunleavy’s eyes went cold and he leaned forward in his chair, putting his elbows on the desk. I thought for a moment I saw a hint of an old tattoo poking out from under his short sleeve dress shirt, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe the tip of an anchor? Was our new sheriff a Navy man? Rural South Carolina typically produced more Army men and Marines. Not many of our boys on boats.
His stern voice brought me out of my reverie. “Ms. Carter, I don’t know what kind of relationship you had with Sheriff Thomas, but this is my office now, and we will run things by the book. I will take any information you bring to me seriously, and I will investigate every lead in every case, but I will not have a civilian going around town on her own sticking her nose into police business. Are we clear?”
I looked up into the corner where Sheriff Johnny stood with his arms across his chest. He was grinning fit to beat the band, and I chuckled a little. I tried to hold it in, but I couldn’t.
Sheriff Dunleavy’s face and forehead flashed red, and I saw a little bead of sweat pop out at his temple. “Is something funny, Ms. Carter?”
“I’m sorry, Sheriff. It’s just that Sheriff Johnny is standing over in the corner behind you laughing his dead fool butt off.”
“What?” Dunleavy’s head whirled around, then he turned back to me, scowling.
“I’m sorry, but he’s there. He’s amused because this is very much like the first time I sat in this office and talked to him about a murder. He yelled at me, called me a crazy person and told me if I ever stuck my nose back in police business that he would have me arrested and shipped off to Bull Street for a psych evaluation.” I pointed at the corner where Sheriff Johnny was standing.
“So he’s in the corner of my office, just hanging out? What does he want?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t asked him yet. I figured since it’s your office now, I should deal with the current occupant before trying to communicate with any prior tenants that might be lingering past their expiration date, if you will.”
“Well, ask him,” Sheriff Dunleavy said, leaning back in his chair and folding his muscular arms across his broad chest. He did cut a fine figure of a man, if a little thin on top. If I were twenty years younger, I might have set my cap for him. As it was, I wondered if he might make a good match for Jane down at the Children’s Desk in the library.
I turned to Sheriff Johnny and said, “What do you want, Johnny? Why aren’t you back where you belong, watching soaps with Linda or doing whatever y’all do in the Great Beyond?” I’m sure Sheriff Dunleavy was disappointed that my conversing with the dead didn’t seem much different than me conversing with the living, but that’s how my life has always been.
Sheriff Johnny opened his mouth once or twice, but no sound came out. This happens with spirits after they’ve crossed over and come back, sometimes they forget how to talk. I had faith in the Sheriff, though. He hadn’t been dead more than four or five months. He should still be able to converse relatively easily.
“Go on, Johnny, spit it out. We ain’t got all day, now.”
“Trouble’s coming, Lila. I can’t see more than that, but something bad’s coming to Lockhart, and it’s gonna take both of y’all to deal with it.” Sheriff Johnny said, his voice hoarse with grave rust and thin like the wind.
I relayed his message to Sheriff Dunleavy, then looked back up at Johnny. “Now you know he’s just gonna say that’s what I would make up to have you say, so you gonna have to do something to prove that I’m not a fraud now, Johnny Thomas, or this man ain’t never gonna believe me.”
“Tell him the key is taped to the bottom of the middle drawer.” The shade said, then turned and walked through the wall out into the sunlight.
“Wait, Johnny, I don’t know what key you’re talking about!” I stood up and hollered as the ghost vanished. “Dammit. Excuse me,” I said as I sat back down.
“What key?” the sheriff asked.
“Exactly my point,” I grumbled. I reached down to the floor and picked up my purse. I stood up and extended my hand. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time, Sheriff Dunleavy. It’s obvious that you don’t believe in my gift, so I will take my leave.”
The sheriff stayed seated. “What key, Ms. Carter?”
“I don’t know, Sheriff. That’s what’s so damn frustrating about dealing with dead people. They tell you half what you need to know, then wander off and go back to being dead. It’s worse than dating, I swear to God.”
“What did he say about the key?” Sheriff Dunleavy’s voice was calm, but he was working to keep it that way. I could tell by the way his knuckles went white around the arm of his chair.
“He said it was underneath the middle desk drawer, whatever that means.” I replied.
“Sonofabitch!” Dunleavy sat up straight, then dropped out of his chair onto one knee and yanked out the center drawer of his desk. I sat back down in my chair as he felt around the bottom of the drawer, then got down on his hands and knees and vanished behind his desk. He emerged a moment later with a brown envelope clutched in his fist. “Got it!”
He sat back in his chair and ripped open the top of the envelope. A small brass key fell out onto his calendar desk blotter, and he pounced on it like a kitten playing with a junebug.
“What’s that, Sheriff?”
“This is the key to Sheriff Thomas’s file cabinet, Ms. Carter. He had one copy on him when he…”
“Died is the word you’re looking for, Sheriff. Remember, I still get to talk to people after they die, so it’s not quite the hardship for me that it is for most people.”
“Yes, well, he had one copy on him when he died, but those keys were lost after the autopsy. And I’ve had no access to any old case files, or even his current case files, since I got here last week.”
“Until now,” I said.
“Until now,” he agreed.
“When the sheriff’s ghost told me where to find it.”
“When you used some resources unavailable to most people to assist me in finding it,” the sheriff agreed, nodding in unison with me.
“So we have an understanding?” I asked, standing and holding out my hand.
Sheriff Dunleavy stood up and shook my hand. “Ms. Carter, I’m not sure what we’ve got, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never understand a minute of it.”
by john | Feb 6, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Serialized Fiction, Writing
I don’t like that working title, so it’ll change at some point. This is something I’m messing around with and thinking of serializing here. If you like it, go buy one of my other books, or join my Patreon.
Prologue
When I was a little girl, my best friend was named Tina. I met her the summer after my fourth grade year, and we played together all summer long in the woods behind my house. I didn’t have many friends, so when I started telling my mother about Tina, she was thrilled. I’d finally found a girl my own age to be friends with. I suppose she thought this would make school easier in the fall. I didn’t believe that, I just thought it might give me a nice summer before I had to go back to school, where the girls teased me about my clothes and asked me why I always wore boys’ shoes and why my clothes were old and frayed at the hems.
Tina never asked questions, just played Star Wars on our swing set Millennium Falcon and always let me be Princess Leia and never made me be Chewbacca because I was “dirty” and “smelled like a Wookie.” Tina was always there that summer, just hanging around outside whenever I got done with breakfast in the morning, ready to play. She never came into my house, not even for afternoon snack, and I never went to hers. We just played together, exploring the woods and the creek and the red clay banks and getting the mud between our toes and making mudpies and taking off our blue jeans and sitting on the wet rocks in the creek in our underwear, pretending we had on bikinis like the older girls we saw on TV.
Until one morning Tina wasn’t there. I hopped down the cinderblock steps at the back door of our trailer and looked around, but she wasn’t nowhere to be seen. I wandered around my back yard for a little while, swung on the swing for a bit, but she didn’t show up. So I went to look for her. She wasn’t down by the creek, not even in the deep pool where we liked to catch crawdaddies. She wasn’t in Old Man Perkin’s field seeing how far she could fling cowpies before they broke. She wasn’t in the old barn across the road at Aunt Hazel’s place, with all its smells of hay and old horses.
Finally I found her all the way down at the old Martin place, sitting all by herself on the steps. There weren’t no house there no more, it having burned up a long time before I was born, so there was just a concrete slab foundation poured with three brick steps leading up to it, and a chimney sticking up like a red brick finger pointing at the sky.
“What you doing sitting out here all alone?” I hollered as soon as I saw her. She was still tiny off in the distance, and when she didn’t say nothing I figured she didn’t hear me. I ran down the overgrown gravel driveway, thistles and grass seeds catching all up in my white tube socks I had to wear on account of the handmedown boots Mama got me from the church was still a little big. She allowed as how I’d grow into them by the time school started.
I was out of breath from running up that whole long driveway, so I leaned over and put my hands on my knees like I seen people do on TV when they were tired. It didn’t make me feel no better, so I just sat down on the top step next to Tina.
“What you doing all the way out here?” I asked again, panting a little. Tina never got out of breath, no matter how far we ran or roamed. She could run for days if she needed to. Me, I had a little belly from watching too much TV, so Mama liked that I spent all day running around outside with Tina. She said all the fresh air was good for me. I thought she liked it that I was out of the house for her to watch her stories.
Tina didn’t answer me for a long time, then she finally said “I’m waiting for my mama.” I hadn’t never met Tina’s mama, not in all the time we’d been playing together. I hadn’t never been to her house, neither. She’d always just showed up outside in my back yard, ready to play.
“Okay, I’ll sit with you. Is she gonna bring you lunch?” Tina shook her head and didn’t say nothing. I just sat there with her, quiet. Sometimes she was like that, quiet and still. Other times she was just like a normal girl, least as much as I could tell, not really having any other friends to speak of.
We waited for a long time, but nobody came. After a while, I got bored and started to look around the old burnt down house. I’d been there before, a couple of times, but I always got scared and left before I could see anything. Kids on the school bus would point at this place, nothing visible from the road but the chimney, and say somebody died in the fire and that it was haunted. I wasn’t scared of ghosts, not as long as Tina was with me, and it was daylight.
I found a nickel, and a Bible that you could still read some of the pages in, then I was rooting around in a back room and found a golden locket. The chain was melted away, but the locket itself looked like it had been under something when the fire happened, so it wasn’t hurt too bad. I couldn’t get it open, not even with my pocketknife. I messed with it for a long time, then turned to Tina to see if she could open it.
Tina was standing at the top of the steps with a pretty woman with long dark hair and eyes that hadn’t smiled in a month of Sundays. I don’t know how I knew, but I could tell that I’d never seen anyone so sad. She wasn’t dressed to be outside, wearing slippers and a housecoat over her pale green nightgown, but she didn’t seem to care, and I wasn’t going to tell a grown-up how they should or shouldn’t dress.
I walked over to them and stuck my hand out. “Hey there,” I said. “You must be Tina’s mama. I’m Lila Grace Carter and I appreciate you letting Tina come play with me. She has been a good friend to me this summer.”
She knelt down in front of me, putting herself eye-to-eye with me, and smiled. It was a winsome thing, a little flutter of a smile that might run away if you looked at it too hard, so I tried to pretend like I couldn’t tell she didn’t have many smiles in her life. “Why, thank you, Lila Grace, I appreciate you keeping my baby company these past months ’til I could come be with her again. I expect we’ve got to move along now, but know that wherever you go, Tina will always be your friend.”
Then she stood up, motioned Tina over to her side, took her hand, and they were gone. That’s all it was; one second they were standing in front of me, the next they were gone. I turned around in circles and ran around that burnt-up homestead looking and hollering for Tina, but she was gone. After what felt like hours of looking, I decided she was gone for good and trudged on home.
Mama was standing at the sink peeling potatoes for supper when she saw me walk up the driveway. “Lila Grace you leave them nasty boots on the back porch and wash up before you come in this house!” She hollered through the screen window. I took off my boots and turned on the spigot by the back door, then let the water run through the hose for a minute ’til it got cold, and washed the dirt and soot off my hands and feet and face. I dried off with an old towel hanging by the back door that Daddy used to clean up with before he came in from the sawmill at night, and I carried my boots in and set them on the porch before I hopped up to the kitchen table for some lunch. We never ate in the dining room except on special occasions.
Mama brought me a glass of sweet tea and a tomato sandwich, and I could see on her face she’d been crying. “What’s wrong, Mama?” I asked as she sat down, washing down a big bite of home-grown tomato and mayonnaise with tea sweeter than lemonade.
“A woman from our church passed this morning, honey, and the whole thing made me a little sad. I was glad when you came home for lunch instead of going off all day playing today.”
“Who was it?” I asked, taking another too-big bite of sandwich. Mama smiled at me as the tomato juice ran down my chin. She picked up a paper napkin off the table and wiped my face for me. I grimaced a little, I wasn’t a little kid anymore, but she was upset, so I let her do it without fussing.
“I don’t think you knew her, but it was Clara Good. Her family lived down the road a piece before you were born. Her husband and daughter were killed in a house fire years ago, and poor Clara never was right after that. She couldn’t keep a job, and finally they had to put her in a home up in Rock Hill. Well, she died today, and it all reminded me of how sad the whole story was.”
“She lived in that old burnt-out house on the other side of Mr. Sam Junior’s place?” I asked, slipping the locket deep into the front pocket of my jeans.
“Yes, that was the place. You know it?”
“Only that some kids on the school bus say it’s haunted.” I had never lied to my mother before, but something told me that no good would come of telling her where I had spent my morning.
“She had a daughter about your age, I can’t remember her name…” I watched my mother’s eyes go wide, then she looked at me. I looked back at her, ready to tell her everything if she asked, or to tell her nothing. It was the first time I remember us talking like that, having a whole conversation without speaking a word, but it certainly wasn’t the last time it happened.
“Finish your sandwich, sweetie. Then I need you to help me hang up the laundry this afternoon.” She got up from the table and went back over to the sink and went back to washing and peeling potatoes. I finished my sandwich and carried my paper plate to the trash can on the back porch. While I stood there, out of Mama’s sight for the time being, I pulled the locket out and looked at Tina’s face staring into her mama’s, both of them smiling like there was no tomorrow.
I closed the little golden oval and slipped it back into my pants pocket. I looked out the back door and thought for a minute that I could see a woman walking away from my house holding hands with a little girl, but in a blink they were gone.
“Bye Tina,” I whispered, and went inside to help Mama with chores. That was the day I realized how different I really was.
