by john | Apr 10, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
This is the 9th chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE. Wednesday I’ll have a post about some changes to the book that I’ve found need to happen through this process, and the evolution of a novel, so if you’re enjoying these posts, come back
9
Walking amongst the dead always brings me peace somehow. I know it’s the opposite for a lot of people, but I find the company of the resting dead awful relaxing. As much time as I spend with the restless dead, it’s exceedingly peaceful to walk among those that have gone on from here.
So that’s what I did. I walked along the front row of the cemetery, right there on Front Street, with my truck parked all cattywumpus like I’d been drunk as Cooter Brown when I pulled into the parking lot. I lingered for a second in front of the three-sided monument that Cousin Bowman had collected money from everybody in the family to put up back in the 1964. My daddy gave him twenty dollars and bought three four copies of the book he wrote about our family’s travels across the ocean from England to the South Carolina upstate, and told Bowman to get the hell out of his face and not to never ask him for another dollar while he was trying to eat.
In defense of Daddy’s manners, he said he was trying to eat some of Aunt Eller’s coconut cake, and her coconut cake always was everybody’s favorite. She’d make this three-layer white cake so moist if you squeezed it you could get water for days. Ellen always made Cool-Whip icing with a bunch of shaved coconut all through it, so you got some coconut in the icing between the layers of the cake, too. It wasn’t like some of them store-bought coconut cakes, which is basically a white sheer cake with some coconut sprinkled on top. I tried for years to learn how to make cake like Aunt Eller, but I never could figure it out. Then she passed, and then Daddy passed, and I never married, so I didn’t have anybody to teach me, nor anybody to eat it, so I just quite trying. It’s probably been a month of Sundays since that old Tupperware cake carrier has seen any use.
I looked at that monument, tracing the Carters, and the Thomases and the Feemsters all the way back to whatever little piece of English soil they sprang up from. The original Johnny Thomas in this part of the world was from Wales. He was about old Sheriff Johnny’s grandpappy with about a dozen greats in front of it. Me and Johnny always knew we were some kind of kin, but being Southern, we just called it “cousins” and let it go at that. My mama always could rattle off what number cousin you were to somebody and how many times removed, but I never got the hang of it.
I walked a little further, and took a seat on a headstone in front of my Granny’s stone. I was sitting on Mr. Bo Mickle’s stone, and I usually made it a point to apologize to Mr. Bo for disrespecting him that way, but I’ve been doing it so long by this point that I reckon Mr. Bo would have found some way to let me know if it bothered him.
“Hey, Granny,” I said. She wasn’t there, of course. Granny died when I was about thirteen, and she didn’t linger but a couple of days. I met her right here the morning after her funeral and watched her walk into the light. It wasn’t like she walked up into the clouds like the end of Highway to Heaven episode, but there was a bright white light, and she told me she loved me, and told me to be good, and then she turned around and went away. So I knew she wasn’t listening in, but somehow that made it easier to talk.
“Granny, I’m having a terrible time with this one. The poor little girl wants my help so bad, but her mama and daddy won’t have any of it. Her mama won’t, anyhow. That preacher Turner has got his hooks into her so deep you’d think she was going to make a big donation or something. I’m sorry, that wasn’t very Christian of me. But he just makes me so mad sometimes. It’s like he knows I want to help people, and he keeps trying to get in my way anyhow.”
I got down off the top of Mr. Bo’s rock and moved over to sit cross-legged on the grass right in front of Granny’s stone. I’d done this forever, but the older I got, the harder it was to get up off the grass when I was done. I reckoned it wouldn’t be too many more years before I was going to have to have a cane or some kind of walking stick if I was going to go traipsing around in cemeteries. This one wasn’t too bad, but some weren’t maintained as good, like the one where Pap was buried.
Yeah, Granny and Pap didn’t lay to rest together. They weren’t even in the same town. Granny was right here in Lockhart, but Pap was way over in Chester. He remarried after Granny went, and that was about the last we saw of him. It was like he wanted nothing more than to forget our family and go be with a new one. I didn’t like it, and I could tell it hurt Mama something awful, but we respected the old man’s wishes and left him alone. He lived a long time after Granny passed, ’til he was well into his nineties. I only heard about it when he died because I read the obituary. There was no mention of our family in the listing of relatives. Since I wasn’t family anymore, I didn’t go to the visitation.
I did go to the funeral, though. I stood back away from everybody and watched them lay the old man to rest. When all the rest of the mourners got back in their cars, I walked up to the graveside and stood there for a minute watching the men lower the casket into the dirt. I was just about to walk back to my truck when he stepped up beside me.
“You still see ghosts, Lila Grace?” my dead grandfather asked me.
I nodded. I didn’t really want to talk to him. I didn’t know what to say. This was the man who had made me a rocking horse for Christmas when I was three years old. A rocking horse I had until I was a grown woman and gave it to a young couple at the church who had a little boy who loved to play cowboy. This was also the man who abandoned my mother when she needed a parent most, when she was burying her own mother in that ugliest cycle of life. The man that turned his back on my family for over two decades, and now stood next to me while I watched his body being lowered into the ground and tried to decipher my feelings.
“I expect you got some questions. If you’d see fit to come with me for a minute, I’d like to answer ‘em.”
Well, the old man knew he had me then. I was so curious when I was little that he used to call me “Cat.” “Get on out of here, Little Cat,” he’d say when he caught me snooping in his or Granny’s closets, trying to find Christmas presents or birthday presents, or just old pictures of him from the War or of Granny when she was young woman.
None of that curiosity faded as I grew up, and getting older did nothing to tame that curious Little Cat, so I followed the old man. He walked around to the back of my truck and motioned at the tailgate. I opened the tailgate and sat down on it. He sat next to me, and this let us sit together without being forced to look at one another. I liked that arrangement.
“Best thing about driving a truck, Little Cat,” he said. “You carry your car, and a table, and a seat with you all in one.”
“Don’t call me that,” I said, my voice suddenly that of a seven-year-old girl again.
“Why not? It’s what I’ve called you for years.”
“No,” I corrected. “It’s what you used to call me. You ain’t called me nothing in years.”
“Well,” he said, looking at the laces on his boots. He was dressed like I always used to see him, in a checked flannel shirt, blue jean overalls, and brown work boots. Most ghosts present wearing what they died in, but some wear what they’re most comfortable in. Sometimes they’ll get a look at their funeral, and all of a sudden it will switch to what they were buried in. Dickey Newton showed up one day wearing nothing at all, dead as a doornail and naked as the day he was born. I sent Dickey away and told him not to show his face, or any other part of himself, around me until he learned to manifest himself at least a pair of britches.
“What are you still doing here, Pap?”
“I stayed to see you. I’m glad you came to the funeral.”
“I felt like it was the right thing to do.”
“For me or for you?”
“For me. What you thought hasn’t been on my mind much since you wrote us out of your new life.” I could hear the bitterness in my voice, but I didn’t care. He hurt my feelings when he just up and abandoned us like that, and I reckoned he could know it.
“I am sorry about that, Lila Grace.”
“If you hadn’t done it, I reckon you wouldn’t have nothing to be sorry for.”
“Well, you’re right about that. It was wrong, and it was selfish.”
“So why’d you do it?”
He didn’t say anything for a long time, and when he finally spoke, his words were slow, like he was picking them carefully. “After your Granny died, I was a mess. We had twenty-seven good years together. I guess that ain’t really true. We had twenty-four good years, with enough bad days throughout to make up a year or two, and the last year was pretty rough. When your Granny got sick, I didn’t do nothing but take care of her for a year. It was hard on me, but that’s what a husband is supposed to do.”
“Well, when she was gone, I didn’t have that purpose any more. I couldn’t remember what it was like to be anything more than the man with the sick wife, and every time I saw your Daddy, or any of my family, all I saw was her face. It didn’t take long until I couldn’t stand that anymore, so I left.”
“You always told me that a man faces up to what’s hard.”
“That’s true. I just wasn’t much of a man right then. So I went away, and I made myself a new family, and I loved them. I know you probably don’t want to hear that, but I did. It was a different love than what I had for y’all, but it was a true thing just the same. But I never forgot you. I never forgot any of you.”
“I never forgot you, neither, Pap. I tried real hard, but I didn’t.”
“Thank you for that.” I saw a bright light start to form out of the corner of my eye, and Pap turned to see it. “Looks like my train’s ‘bout to pull out of the station,” he said.
“You stayed here just to tell me all that? What if I hadn’t come?”
“You would eventually.” He smiled at me, got off the back of my truck, and walked into the light. It flashed brighter than the sun, then popped out, leaving me blinking and rubbing my eyes. I was alone in the cemetery, and I went back over to where the men had been running the backhoe and I shed a tear over my Pap’s grave. Not for his death, but for the life we never shared.
I sat there for about an hour, just talking to Granny about Jenny, and Shelly, and the idiot Baptist preacher, and her soaps that I still watched every day so I could keep track of who’s alive and dead for her. After a while, though, my knees started really giving me fits, and my spine started to knot up down in my lower back, so I got up and moseyed on back to the truck. I ran my fingers across the stones as I walked, liking the feeling of the different granites used. Some were buffed to a high polish, but plenty were either too old for that, or just never cared to pay for it.
I got to my truck and looked at myself in the mirror. I was born lucky – I have a complexion that lets me cry without turning into a red, blotchy mess. I fixed my makeup and put the truck in gear, pointing the old girl down the street toward the sheriff’s office.
by john | Apr 3, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Serialized Fiction, Writing
This is the latest chapter of a new novel that I’m serializing here. I release a new chapter every Monday. If you need to catch up, you can CLICK HERE.
Chapter 8
Thirty minutes later I was back on the porch of the Miller house. Jenny stood next to me, and I wasn’t real sure who was more nervous, her or me. I raised my hand to knock on the screen door, then put it down. I repeated the process two more times before I decided to just bite the bullet and knock.
A man in his mid-forties came to the door, well-dressed despite looking like he hadn’t slept in several days. He stood on the other side of the screen in a polo shirt and khakis, the uniform of the Southern middle class father. I heard a choked sob from Jenny, but when I glanced in her direction, she was gone. Looked like I was on my own for this one.
“Mr. Miller?”
“Yes, I’m David Miller. Can I help you?”
“Mr. Miller, I’m Lila Grace Carter. I live over on Spring Street. I…I’m working with Sheriff Dunleavy investigating you daughter’s death, and I have a few questions, if you have a few minutes.”
“Can this wait, Ms. Carter? This isn’t a good time. My wife just learned that my daughter’s best friend Shelly…” his face crumpled for an instant, but he pulled himself back together. “I’m sorry. We just got some sudden news and my wife is very upset.”
“I understand, Mr. Miller. I was just with the Sheriff,” I said, wondering a little how the word got out this fast. Sheriff Dunleavy would have barely had time to go talk to Shelly’s family, and the Millers already knew. Word spreads fast in small Southern towns, and never faster than when the news if awful. “But we would really like to get any information you have as soon as possible. If there’s any way…”
“Okay, fine,” he sighed. “But out here. My wife is…resting right now. I don’t want her disturbed.” He motioned to a pair of white wooden rocking chairs on the porch, an accessory that should almost come with the porch in the rural South. I took a seat, and he put his hand on the other one before stopping himself.
“I’m sorry, I’m being rude,” he said. “Can I get you anything to drink? Sweet tea? Pepsi? Ice water? I think there’s even some Cheerwine in there. I don’t know what all people have brought, but there’s at least half a dozen two-liters on the kitchen counter.”
“I’m fine, Mr. Miller. Please, sit down for a minute.” He sat, and we rocked for a minute while I tried to figure out where to begin.
“I know some of these questions will probably be repetitive, but with Shelly’s disappearance, there might be a connection—“
“Do you think whoever hurt my Jenny took Shelly, too?” he asked. There was a flicker of hope in his eyes that I had to temper, or he wouldn’t be able to focus enough to be any use to me.
“I don’t know, sir. I just know that we’re a small town, and a pretty safe one, usually. But here we are with two best friends falling victim to something, I don’t know if it’s bad luck or what, within just a few days of each other.”
“It’s not bad luck,” Mr. Miller said. “Somebody came into this house and killed my Jenny. If that’s the same person that hurt Shelley, then I reckon I’ll have help when I gut the bastard. If it wasn’t, then I’ll get him all to myself.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. I wasn’t really working for the police, just working with them. A little. Begrudgingly. Plus, I pretty much agreed with him. I decided to just let it lie, rather than trying to give him some line of righteous crap about what his daughter would have wanted.
“Mr. Miller, can you think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt your daughter?” I asked, keeping my tone as gentle as I could. I’d helped Sheriff Johnny with a few cases, but I’d never talked to a grieving parent while I tried to find out who killed his child before, and I felt like I was walking on eggshells.
“No, nobody. She was a cheerleader, in the FCA, ran track, was Vice-President of her class, all that stuff. She was a sweet child, everybody loved her.”
“Was there anyone with a grudge, anyone that may have imagined some reason to dislike her? A classmate, and ex-boyfriend, anything like that?”
“Nothing,” he insisted. “Jenny didn’t date. It wasn’t allowed. We let her go out in groups and some double dates with Shelly, but nothing serious.”
I heard a snort from my left and turned to see Jenny sitting on the porch rail, her immaterial feet somehow twined around the supports. “Little does he know,” the ghost girl said with a saucy grin.
I tried a different angle. “What about Shelly? Was she as…well-liked as Jenny?” I knew the answer I expected, and Mr. Miller didn’t disappoint.
“No,: he said quickly. “Shelly was a little wild. She was something of a mean girl, and I know she put down some of the less popular girls in school. Jenny was always telling us about something Shelly had pulled on an underclassman, or a girl in their gym class, or some poor child that tried out for the cheerleading squad.”
“Did Jenny mention anyone specifically that Shelly was particularly rough on?” I knew that anyone with a grudge against Shelly probably didn’t care much for her best friend, either. I’d also spent enough time with teenaged girls, having been one once upon a time, to know that whatever Shelly did, it was unlikely that Jenny was blameless in the affair.
“I can’t think of…wait, there were a couple,” the distraught father held up a finger as ideas came to him. “There was Ian Vernon, the photographer for the yearbook. Shelly hacked his phone and sent texts to all the girls in school with dirty pictures, making it look like it came from Ian.”
“That’s more than a little mean girl stunt, Mr. Miller. That could cause serious problems for Ian in the future.” I was expecting some teasing, but not hearing that Shelly committed a felony to harass a classmate.
“I know, but you know how kids are, right?” I decided not to get into that discussion with him just days after the death of his daughter. “Was there anybody else that might hold a grudge against Shelly?”
“I guess any girl that didn’t make the cheerleading squad probably hated both of the girls,” he said. “Jenny and Shelly were the ones who decided on the team, with some help from Mrs. Hope, their advisor. Last year there were a few girls who got upset, but from what I understand they put some new systems in place this year to make it more transparent. Score sheets and things like that, and they had individual meetings with all the girls after tryouts to tell them why they didn’t make the squad and what they could work on for next year. From what Jenny said, it worked real well.” I knew Debbie Hope, and that sounded like something she would do. She was a heavy girl in school, and now that she had started teaching she was the kind of teacher that wanted everybody to feel like they were being treated fairly.
“What about boyfriends?” I asked again. “I know you said Jenny didn’t date, but what about Shelly?” I found it hard to believe that two high school cheerleaders wouldn’t at least go on dates.
“She had a few boys that she went out with from time to time, but nobody serious. Jenny and Shelly would go to the movies with Derek and Edward sometimes, and I think Shelly when to the prom with Tony Neefe last year.”
“Who did Jenny go with?”
“She didn’t go. She was supposed to go with Aaron Tolliver, but he started dating a girl, and he wanted to take her instead. So Jenny didn’t go. She was just a sophomore, so she still had two proms, so she wasn’t upset.”
“Really? Had she bought a dress?” I remembered back in the Dark Ages when I went to prom, buying the perfect dress was more of an ordeal than trying to keep your knees together all night after the prom.
“Oh, no,” her father replied. “If I’d laid out that kind of money, there would have been a whole different conversation. No, she never…” He choked up, probably thinking of all the pretty dresses he was never going to get to buy his little girl. My heart broke for the poor man, but I felt like I had to keep pressing. With two dead girls within day of each other, there had to be some connection, if we could just see it.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Miller. But could you just—“
“What are you doing here?” I turned looked up at a pretty blonde woman in her early forties standing on the other side of the screen door. She was obviously Jenny’s mother, the hair, eyes, and nose were almost identical. But I’d not seen Jenny’s mouth twist up into that kind of scowl, and I’d certainly not heard her speak with such venom.
“I’m sorry,” I stood up and held out my hand. “I’m—“
“I know who you are, charlatan. Pastor NAME has told me all about you.” Mrs. Miller spun around and disappeared into the house. I heard her footsteps stomp through the house, then I heard the sound of a refrigerator opening and closing with a thud.
The angry woman walked out onto the porch holding a blue and white pyrex dish with flowers that I recognized as my own. “We didn’t wash the dish, because I wouldn’t touch any food that came from your house. When Reverend NAME told me you came here, I couldn’t believe him. I couldn’t understand for a second why a heathen like you would want to set foot in the home of a god-fearing family in their time of grief. And now I come out onto my front porch and see you flirting with my husband? You need to leave, right now, and take your witchery with you.”
I was stunned. Speechless. I’d been called a lot of things in my life; heathen, godless, witch, liar, fake, you name it, I’ve heard it. But I’ve never in my life had someone speak to me with the abject loathing that Karen Miller unleashed on me in her den.
I looked down, working hard to keep my temper under control. It was not an inconsiderable struggle, but I somehow managed to speak with a civil tongue. When I felt like I could speak without screaming at her, I said “Mrs. Miller, I am so sorry for your loss, and the last thing I want to do right now is upset you or your husband further. I will go, but please understand that the police have reason to believe that Jenny may not have fallen, and now they have found Shelly NAME’s car in John D. Long Lake, so they have asked me to help with the investigation. I am not trying to do anything other than ask your husband a few questions—“ I snapped my mouth shut as she held up a hand.
“Out,” she ordered. “Get out and do not ever set foot in this house again. Take your dish, and your casserole, and your lies, and your devil worship and get out of my house.”
I nodded. I couldn’t see any way to do anything else, so I just nodded my head and turned to go. I stopped on the sidewalk and turned around, looking at the grief-stricken man sitting in the rocking chair and the fuming woman just inside the threshold. “I hope y’all can find peace. I hope that the police can find who did this terrible thing and bring them to justice. I am truly sorry for your loss.”
Then I turned and walked down the sidewalk, got into my truck, and nestled the casserole dish onto the passenger side of the bench seat amongst a jacket and some other junk to keep it from sliding around. I put then old girl in gear and pulled onto the street, making a right turn, then a left, then another right until I sat in the parking lot of the big Presbyterian church where I grew up.
I unfastened my seatbelt, leaned my head on the steering wheel, and let the tears of pain and shame and anger pour down my face. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I shouted in the privacy of my truck’s cab. “Lord, I know I don’t talk to you as often as I should, but I have to ask—why can’t they just let me try to help them? Why do these people have to be so damn mean?”
I sat there for a couple more minutes, then pulled a pack of Kleenex out of the glove box and blew my nose. I tossed the tissue into the passenger seat floorboard and got out to walk the cemetery and talk to my people a little while.
by john | Mar 27, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
This is the latest chapter of a new novel that I’m serializing here. I release a new chapter every Monday. If you need to catch up, you can CLICK HERE.
Chapter 7
I walked over to the ghost and tried to speak to her without it being obvious to the dozen people standing behind the police cordon a dozen yards away that I was talking to empty air. It’s not an easy task, but it’s one that I have somewhat mastered over the years.
“What’s wrong, sweetie? You look like somebody just ran over your dog.” I realized as soon as the words crossed my lips that it wasn’t the most polite way of talking to a dead child who just found out that her best friend is dead, too. But there aren’t any instruction manuals for my kind of life, and I couldn’t take it back, so I just had to roll with it.
“Where’s Shelly?” Jenny asked, glowing tears rolling down her face. This was a new one on me. I’d seen ghosts angry, and sad, and even seen a couple of them scared of what was coming next, but I’d never seen one cry before. But here she was, sobbing just like you’d expect a girl whose best friend’s car just got pulled out of a lake to do. Her tears weren’t solid, of course, but they were part of her, a little tiny piece of Jenny’s soul cascading down her cheeks, cutting little trails of faintly glowing light across her shimmering visage.
“What do you mean, where’s Shelly?” I asked. I didn’t want to come off as crass and say that she was on the stretcher being loaded into the back of the ambulance, where do you think she is, you idiot, but that’s kinda what I was thinking.
“I don’t see her. I could see Sheriff Johnny, and I’ve seen a couple of other ghosts as I’ve been walking through town since I…since we first met. But I don’t see Shelly. Where is she?”
I looked around. The child had a good point. I didn’t see Shelly, either. Far as I could tell, Jenny was the only ghost at John D. Long Lake, and I was powerful glad of that. I didn’t relish the idea of telling Shelly that she was dead, especially if it had happened as recently as I expected it had. And worse than that, I sure didn’t want to run into the poor Smith children if they happened to be lingering all these years. I didn’t expect them to, not after all this time, but you never know. Some people have powerful attachments to places, and some people have powerful reasons for wanting to see justice done. None of that is normal for little kids, but there’s no hard and fast rules about the afterlife.
“I don’t see her, sweetie. Maybe she’s not here.”
“Why wouldn’t she be here? Where would she be?” Jenny was starting to get more upset, and her sadness was turning to anger, which was starting to stir up the rocks and dust around her feet. I stepped back and took a look around. We hadn’t drawn much attention yet, everybody was still focused on the macabre ceremony of loading poor Sherry’s body into the ambulance, but that ritual was almost complete, and we would be the most interesting thing by far in a minute or so.
“Jenny, I need you to calm down,” I said in my reassuring teacher voice. It’s different from the steely tone I used on Cracker earlier, but it still got through to the distraught child. A couple of pebbles dropped to the ground as she stopped rocking back and forth and focused on me.
“That’s good,” I said, keeping my voice low and calm. “Not everybody stays around after their bodies die, not even people who are killed or have a good reason to stay. It may be that Shelly didn’t have any great desire to see justice done for herself, or maybe she was just okay with moving on.”
“But…then why am I still here?” She looked up at me, more tears flowing down her face. She was calmer now, but the pain in her voice was heartbreaking.
“I don’t know, darlin’,” I said. “I have no idea what makes one person linger and one person pass on to the other side. If I did, I’d be able to help people move on a lot faster, I think.”
“Is that what you’re trying to do with me? Help me move on?”
“That’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it?” I asked. “You don’t want to stick around Lockhart dead forever, do you? I want to find out who killed you, so he or she doesn’t hurt anybody else, but I also want you to be able to go to your rest.”
“You mean Heaven,” the girl said with the firm conviction of a Protestant teenager that’s never questioned her faith for even one second.
I had no such convictions anymore, unfortunately. “I mean whatever you think I mean, honey. I think it’s probably a little different for everybody, and I’m pretty sure there’s not a lot of harps involved, but I know that whatever’s on the other side waiting for you, it’s a damn sight better than walking around talking to an old woman who’s going to get locked up in a room with padded walls if she keeps standing on the boat landing talking to thin air.”
Jenny smiled and sniffed. She was a cute little thing, even dead and weepy. “Thank you, Ms. Lila. I still don’t know why Shelly wouldn’t want to stick around and find her killer, but I reckon we can take care of that for her.”
“I expect we can,” I agreed. “Now let’s go see if the sheriff has any ideas on how we can do that.”
I walked back over to the car, where Sheriff Dunleavy had just raised the hood. I stuck my head under there beside him and said, “I think that’s the engine, Sheriff.”
“Thank you, Lila Grace. I’m no mechanic, but I think you’re right.”
“Is there anything in the engine that will tell us who killed this child?” I asked.
“Not that I can see,” he replied.
“Has anything been tampered with, like on the TV shows? Brake line cut, anything like that?”
He pointed to a square thing sitting on top of another thing. “That’s the master cylinder. It looks fine. I can’t see where anything was tampered with there.”
“Does that have anything to do with the brake lines?” I asked.
“You don’t know anything about cars, do you, Lila Grace?”
“I know where the gas goes in, I know to change the oil in my truck every five thousand miles, and I know to change my tires every three years. Anything past that, I ask Clyde. His nephew Brownie runs a service station and takes care of all my automotive needs.”
“Then why do you keep asking me about the brake lines?” the sheriff asked.
“On the TV shows, whenever two people poke their heads under the hood of a car that somebody died in, they always come out and say that the brake lines were cut. I just wanted to see if that happens in real life, too.”
“You watch too much NCIS, Lila Grace.”
“That may be, Sheriff, but I can’t help it. That Mark Harmon is just adorable. I like the New Orleans one, too. The LA show is okay, but I don’t like those actors as much. They’re too pretty.”
“Well, nobody cut any brake lines on this car,” the sheriff said, straightening up. I followed suit, and he slammed the hood down, motioning for Clyde to load the car onto his wrecker. “In fact, as far as I can see here, the car was in perfect working order before it went into the lake.”
“So why did it go into the lake?” I asked.
“Well, somebody wanted it to go into the lake. That’s why they drove it in there.”
“I reckon what we have to do next is find out who.”
“Yeah, that’s not the worst thing we have to do next.” I looked at the sheriff, and his face was grim.
“Oh,” I said, my voice soft. “Do you want me to go with you?”
“Do you have any particular connection with the family?”
“No,” I said. “I know them, but only to speak in the grocery store. We don’t go to church together, so I never had Shelly in any of my Sunday School or Vacation Bible School classes.”
“Then you’d better leave this to me. I don’t suppose she’s…” he waved a hand around in the air.
“No, she’s nowhere to be seen, Sheriff. I think she has already moved on.”
“Pity,” he said. “Maybe she could tell us something about the bastard that did this. Pardon my French.”
“Bastard isn’t French, Sheriff. Merde is French, and I won’t bruise if you cuss around me.”
“Just the same, I’ll try to keep it clean. Feels like cussing in front of my mama. Just ain’t natural.”
“I’m pretty sure your mama knows those words, too, Sheriff.”
“Oh, I can guarantee you she does. My daddy was a Marine. She’s heard them all.”
“Was a Marine? It was my understanding that you’re always a Marine.”
“He passed two years ago. That’s the only way you stop being a Marine, Ms. Carter. You stop being.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Sheriff. The loss of a parent is a hard thing to get over, no matter when it comes.”
“I reckon the loss of a child is, too,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make this the worst day of a couple parents’ life.”
“I’ll meet you at the station in the morning and we can talk about the fingerprints on that flashlight in Jenny’s basement and look for connections between these girls’ deaths.” I watched him walk to his car and throw his hat on passenger seat. I did not envy the big man his duties this afternoon.
“Do you think the same person that killed me killed Shelly?” Jenny asked. I didn’t hear her come up, but she only made noise if she tried to, or spoke.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two best friends in a town of less than ten thousand people wound up dead within five days of each other. Do you?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Then let’s go back to your house. I need to talk to your mama and daddy. Without that son of a bitch preacher of yours looming over us.”
by john | Mar 20, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
This is chapter 6 of a serialized novel that I’m working on. I post a new chapter each Monday. To catch up on previous chapters, you can click HERE.
Chapter 6
I followed the sheriff in my truck, but the closer we got to the scene, the more my heart just sank further down toward my toes. I wasn’t sure when we turned off onto Highway 9 out of town exactly where we were going, but the second we turned left onto Black Bottom Road, I felt sick to my stomach.
“This is where she did it, ain’t it?” Jenny asked.
“Yes, honey, this is where she did it.” I replied, thinking back to that summer when Union County got famous for the ugliest of reasons. A few minutes later, we pulled up to the boat landing at John D. Long Lake, where Susan Smith rolled her car into the lake with her two children strapped in, drowning them both. I hadn’t been to the lake since the day they pulled the car out, for fear of what I would see when I did, but here I was now.
“That’s just awful,” Jenny said.
“Yes, it is.”
“Are the little boys here?” she asked.
“I hope not,” I said. “I hope they went to Heaven to play and be little boys forever and have all the ice cream they want and never get skinned knees or stung by yellowjackets.”
“That would be nice,” Jenny said. “I hope that too.” I could feel her look at me. “You ain’t been out here, have you?”
“No, I haven’t. I don’t know if I can do anything for those boys if they are here, and I don’t know if I can stand it if I can’t.”
“You want me to look around and see if they’re here?”
“You’re sweet,” I said, putting the truck in park and unfastening my seatbelt. “But I’ll be fine. If there’s a couple little boys out there, I reckon I’ll try to help them move on. If not, then that’ll be better, I think. But they aren’t why we’re here.”
“I wonder who it is?” She asked, passing through the door to walk beside me.
There was a wrecker and an ambulance parked at the landing, and Sheriff Dunleavy was talking to Clyde, the county wrecker driver. A pontoon boat floated out in the lake, and I saw bubbles popping up to the surface around the boat. My best guess was they had Allan West down there looking around, since he was the only person in this part of the world with SCUBA gear that used it more than once a year.
I walked up to the sheriff’s side. Clyde tipped his hat to me. “Lila Grace,” he said.
“How are you, Clyde?”
“Oh, I been better, I been worse. Ain’t looking forward to this mess.”
“Why’s that?”
“Cars get heavier than hell when you fill ‘em up with water,” Clyde said. “I ain’t got but a five-ton winch on this old girl. Too much water in whatever’s under there, I might not be able to pull it out. I can handle most cars, but we get something like one of them big stupid SUVs and we better be sure to break out all the windows before it comes up. That’ll let the water run out easier and give me less problem winching it up onto the landing.”
“What happened here, Sheriff?” I asked.
“You need to go on back outside the yellow tape, Ms. Carter,” Jeff came up to me and took hold of my arm. I shook him off and gave Dunleavy a look.
“It’s okay, Jeff. She’s helping us on the Miller case. She can stay.”
“But she’s not a deputy. It’s only supposed to be emergency personnel behind the tape, Sheriff,” Jeff protested.
“Jeff, I get to let anybody on this side of that yellow piece of string that I want to,” the sheriff said. “If it’ll make you feel better, when we get back to the stations, I’ll deputize Ms. Carter. But for now, leave her alone and go make sure that Cracker fellow stays the hell back.”
The “Cracker” in question was Gene “Cracker” Graham, the owner of the local newspaper, lead reporter, and chief photographer. Life in a small town meant he wore a lot of hats. I recognized his car pulling up to park next to my truck, and Jeff hurried off to intercept him.
“You were telling me what happened?” I asked.
“Shorty Horton was fishing out here when he hooked his line on something. Snapped it clean, so of course he decided that he’d finally found the one big catfish in Long Lake, and starts circling.”
“Don’t know why,” I said. “Catfish that old and big wouldn’t be fit to eat.”
“Anyway,” the sheriff continued. “He hit something with his outboard motor, and when he dove under to see what it was, he saw the car, with long blonde hair floating out the driver’s side window. He called it in, and you know the rest. Jeff was already on the scene when I got here, and he’d called Clyde. I got Allan out here, and once he gets the winch hooked up, we’re going to pull it up out of there and see who the poor woman was.”
“I thought Ethel said it was a girl?” I asked.
“Lila Grace, have you seen Ethel lately? Anybody who ain’t drawing Social Security is a boy or a girl, including you and me.”
I laughed. “Well, I think I’m a fair bit closer to getting my government check than you are, but it’s still a ways off. I can’t even get free sweet tea at Hardee’s yet.”
“I got it!” Allan shouted from across the lake.
“Get your boat out of the way and we’ll pull her up,” Clyde hollered back. Allan heaved himself out of the water, looking like the Michelin Man in his wetsuit. He waddled to the captain’s chair, leaving a trail of fins, tanks and mask as he went. Seconds later, the pontoon boat putt-putted off to the far side of the lake and Clyde put the winch in gear.
It whined with the load, but the old rollback wrecker had more than enough power to pull the black Honda Civic up out of the water. As soon as the back bumper crested the lake’s surface, I heard Jenny gasp.
I turned to her, my eyebrows up. “What is it, sweetie?” I asked, trying not to let on to Clyde that I was talking to a ghost. He didn’t believe in what I did, and didn’t look too fondly on my talking to dead people around him.
“That’s Shelly’s car. Oh my god, it’s Shelly!” The dead girl collapsed weeping to the ground, more upset about her friend’s death than I’d seen her about her own.
“Sheriff,” I said quietly. “We have a problem.”
“What’s wrong, Ms. Carter?”
“That car belongs to Jenny Miller’s best friend Shelly. She was the last person to see Jenny alive, and now she’s probably drowned child in the driver’s seat of that car.
“Son of a bitch,” the sheriff said under his breath. “Pardon my language, Ms. Carter.”
“Hell, I was just thinking the same thing myself, Sheriff.” I said, splitting my focus between the car slowly rolling backwards up the boat landing and the sobbing teenage ghost at my feet.
Sheriff Dunleavy motioned his deputies to push the lookie-loos further back, and went over himself to break up an argument between Deputy Jeff and the newspaperman Gene Graham, who had indeed shown up with a big old Nikon camera slung around his neck like a hillbilly Jimmy Olsen. Cracker was waving his arms and starting to wind himself up into a whole tirade about the First Amendment and freedom of the press when I walked up.
“Gene,” I said, my voice cracking through the muggy air like a whip. Gene’s head whipped around like he was back in my Sunday School class and I caught him trying to get a reflection up Renee Hardin’s skirt in his patent leather dress shoes again. That boy never would believe me when I told him patent leather didn’t reflect, no matter how much you polished it. He was a little scamp, but it did mean he always had polished shoes for church, so I let it go.
“Ms. Lila, what are you doing here, and on the other side of the tape, too?” Gene asked.
“The sheriff has done told you he can’t answer no questions, Gene. Now you need to put that camera back in your car and go interview Arthur Black about how his peaches are coming in after the cold snap we had in April. As soon as the sheriff has something he can tell you, he’ll call you and give you an exclusive.” I didn’t bother to point out that since he owned the only newspaper in town, he always had an exclusive. Ever since that mess with the Smith woman happened, Cracker liked to think he was a big-time newspaperman. He had one story picked up by the Associated Press and it went straight to his head, I swear.
“Now, Ms. Lila, I can’t do that. This is the biggest news to happen in Lockhart this week, and I have to cover it. I need to report on it, and I can’t do that without taking some pictures.”
“That is not going to happen, Mr. Graham, and if you point that camera anywhere near that vehicle without my permission, I swear on my mother’s grave you’ll find it at the bottom of the lake,” Sheriff Dunleavy growled.
Gene bowed up again, and I could just about see these too men getting ready to whip things out and start measuring, so I leaned into Gene and whispered, “We think it’s Shelly Thomas’ car, but we can’t have nothing getting out about it until we see if she’s in there and then notify the next of kin. You wouldn’t want that child’s mama reading about it in the newspaper before we get a chance to break the news to her, would you?”
Gene’s face went ghost-white and he took a step back from the yellow police tape. He stood there for a minute, then took a deep breath and wiped his eyes. “No, Ms. Lila, that would be awful. I see what you mean. I can go…cover some other stories and wait for word from the sheriff that he has information. Y’all know where to find me.” He turned and waddled off back to his truck and peeled out of the parking lot. I started walking back to the car, and Sheriff Dunleavy followed close behind.
“What was that all about, Ms. Carter?” he asked.
“Gene played baseball with Shelly’s daddy in high school. They fell out when Shelly’s daddy stole Gene’s girlfriend.”
“Why would that make Graham back off the story?”
“Gene’s girlfriend married Shelly’s daddy and had three little girls. The oldest one is about sixteen and I’m afraid we’re about to find her in the driver’s seat of that car.”
“So Gene doesn’t want to upset his old girlfriend, I get it.”
“Gene doesn’t want to break the heart of the only girl he ever fell in love with, Sheriff. He never got married, never had kids. He and the Thomas’ became real close after they got married, and Gene is godfather to all three girls. He would no more hurt that family than he would sell his newspaper.”
The car was all the way up on dry land now, and Clyde was lowering the end of the rollback to pull the car up onto the wrecker. Sheriff Dunleavy waved him to a stop, and walked around the car. I followed close behind, looking where he looked, but I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
“What do you see, Sheriff?” I asked.
“Not much,” he said, his eyes scanning the car as we did a slow lap around the outside. “There’s nothing to indicate that she wasn’t driving or operating the car under her own power when it went into the lake. We won’t know more until we get it back to the garage, but all the window are intact, and I can’t see any scratch marks around the keyholes to indicate forced entry.”
He paused at the driver’s door, peering inside. “Is that Shelly?”
I looked in the window and nodded. Shelly Thomas was sitting up behind the wheel, pretty as you please in a cute pink top and blue jeans. Her seatbelt held her upright, and there was no air bag deployed, so it didn’t look like she’d been in a wreck. I couldn’t see too much through the windows, all streaked with silt and lake muck, but I couldn’t see any injuries on her. She just looked like a pretty teenaged girl out for a drive.
The sheriff motioned the EMTs over to the car, and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. I stepped back out of the way as they rolled a stretcher over to the side of the car and opened the door. Water poured out onto the ground, and everybody stepped back.
Clyde walked up to me with a sheet in his hands. “Take a corner, Lila Grace,” he said, holding out the white fabric to me.
“What are we doing, Clyde,” I asked, then a lightbulb went off as I watched him walk away from me as far as he could while we each had one corner of the sheet, and he lifted his hand above his head. I did the same, and we held that old ragged sheet up like a curtain as the EMTs and Sheriff Dunleavy got the girl out of the car and onto the stretcher. They zipped her up in a body bag and covered her with another sheet before one of them nodded to Clyde and we let the makeshift privacy screen down.
I walked over to Clyde and helped him fold the sheet. “That was sweet of you, Clyde,” I said.
“People deserve not to have everybody in the world gawking at them when they’re laying there dead, Lila Grace,” he said. “I started carrying this in my car some fifteen years ago, when that kid ran his car into the bridge railing down on Old Pinkney Road.”
“I remember that wreck,” I said. I didn’t bother telling Clyde that I had talked with that poor boy several times before he got satisfied enough that his mama would be fine without him and he was able to move on.
“There was a bunch of people at that one, like there is today, and that boy was all tore up. His head was about split plum in two, and I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair to him that all them people that didn’t even know him were looking at him like that. So now I try to give people a little dignity in death. It’s the least I can do.”
“It matters more than you think, Clyde,” I said.
“I reckon if anybody would know, it’d be you,” he said, then turned and put the sheet in the cab of his truck. I stood there flabbergasted. I’d had a lot of people say a lot of things about my gifts before, but never had anybody just accepted them for what they were like Clyde. I swear, that little old man was a true onion. He had more layers than anybody would ever suspect.
I looked to Sheriff Dunleavy to ask him what our next move was, but caught sight of Jenny as I turned my head, and the look on her face stopped me in my tracks.
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.”
