Them Bones Page 23

“Sure.” Cooley left us and James waved me into a chair beside his.

  “I knew your daddy,” he said. “We did some business. And I knew your mama.” He chuckled softly, and the seams in his face shifted into new trenches. “They were somethin’.” He laughed even deeper. “Your mama was a pretty thing, and she had fire in her eyes. She’d look at folks and say, ‘Give a damn.’ It made some people real mad.”

  “I’ve heard a few stories,” I answered.

  “Times were troubled back then.”

  I wondered where this was going, but I could smell the coffee brewing and the warmth of the fire was turning my cold bones to gel. James had a soothing voice, rich and worn.

  “When your mama got pregnant with you, that was when your daddy decided to put his law degree to work. He came by here and told me he’d never meant to practice law. He loved that land and wanted to work it. But it was a hard time for big landowners. The weather and the economy had turned against him. He was worried, too, about your mama. She stirred people up. She never believed anyone would hurt her for what she believed. Your daddy knew better, so he practiced a little law, mostly free, and then got elected as a judge.”

  “Did you know them well?”

  He nodded. “I’d say pretty well.” He shifted in his chair so he could face me more directly. “I gave your daddy some advice, on occasion, and I’m gonna give you some, too. Stay out of Delo’s house. Stay away, Sarah Booth. It’s not finished, and you don’t want to be in on the end of it.”

  He wasn’t trying to frighten me. “What’s going on?”

  He shook his head. “Delo Wiley never hurt anybody in his life. He let those rich men hunt his fields when the corn was in, and he took their money. I told him not to let that Maxwell woman use his cabin. But it was easy money, and it tickled him that such high-and-mighty folks acted no better than what they called poor white trash.”

  Kincaid’s reasons for meeting Isaac Carter were too complex to explain. More revenge and power than lust and sex. Perhaps the same was true for most people who cheated on their husbands or wives. I shook my head. “Kincaid didn’t kill Delo.”

  James nodded. “Delo was killed so secrets wouldn’t be told.”

  My heart began to beat faster. “What secrets?”

  “You want to come back here tomorrow and find a dead old Negro sitting in his chair?”

  “Isaac Carter and his toady Deputy Walters have already been out here to talk to James about the good ol’ days,” Cooley threw in from the kitchen. “A blind man could read that message.”

  James ignored the younger man’s outburst. “Delo didn’t really know anything. He suspected, but he didn’t know. When I saw that dead man’s grown son over there, I knew it was trouble. And that sister out in the cornfield, digging like a madwoman. She nearly scared Cooley half to death with that long silvery hair and that nightgown blowing in the wind. It’s a wonder she didn’t freeze to death.”

  “You saw Sylvia in the cornfield?” I asked.

  “She got out of a car about midnight. Then it drove away and she started digging.”

  I remembered Hamilton’s question about his sister’s means of conveyance. “What kind of car?” I questioned.

  “Big car. Dark color.” James looked past me as he thought. “An older-model Lincoln,” he said. “It had a big, smooth engine, because when I heard the dogs barking and I got up to check I remember thinking that the car was fine-tuned, in perfect condition. The woman got out of the car, and before she had time to close the door, the car was pulling away.”

  “They just let her out?” Sylvia had obviously arranged a pickup point, because she made it back to Glen Oaks. Crazy she might be, but she was also smart. Very smart.

  “There was a cold wind, and she was walking across that cornfield with her nightgown billowing out behind her. The sight of her made me afraid. After a while, I sent Cooley out to bring her in here before she froze. She saw him coming and ran into the woods. I figured that’s why the brother showed up just at dawn. He was looking for his sister.”

  “How long did Hamilton stay?”

  James looked at me long and hard. “I saw him and Delo walk out in the cornfield. Then I went on to church with Cooley. I was gone awhile, visiting, but when I got back he was gone and Delo, I suppose, was dead.”

  The pictures his words created were as sharp and painful as nails in my flesh. Cooley came into the room bearing a tray with three mugs, three spoons, sugar, and cream. I took mine black and sat back in the chair. “Did you tell the sheriff about this?”

  Cooley gave that soft snort of contempt I’d heard before. “We don’t tell the law anything. If you were black, you wouldn’t talk to anybody in a uniform. For the last twenty years those fools have been comin’ out here in the dead of night, diggin’ up the corn and the fields. It’s gotten worse lately. They’re ruinin’ Delo’s crop, and ours, too. Like we might have buried it. We called the law plenty of times, but you know what was done. Nothing. They’re out there looking for that—”

  “That’s enough, Cooley,” James said gently but with a hint of iron. “Miss Delaney doesn’t want to hear about such foolishness. I’m sure she’d rather hear about the time her father and I caught that big tabby cat in the river. It almost took the boat down.”

  I wanted to hear a tale about my father, but I wanted to find out who was digging in the cornfield more. One look at James’s face and I knew he wasn’t going to tell me anything else. I sat back and drank my coffee and listened.

  Jitty hovered around the kitchen table, her normally serene face a knot of concern. I’d been gone all day and most of the night, and the house was freezing. The oven was on broil and the door open, but it seemed as if the liquid in my body had turned to slush. I sighed and shuddered, wrapping my hands around the bowl of soup I’d heated and then decided I didn’t want.

  “You knew all along he was a suspect.” Jitty had a bossy tone in her voice, as if I were a naughty child who’d hurt herself doing something against the rules.

  I pushed the soup bowl away, untouched, and sat back in my chair. What she was saying was true. Hamilton the Fifth had always been the prime suspect in his mother’s murder. Now, he’d been placed at Delo’s murder only hours before the body was found.

  “It’s just ’cause you dropped your drawers for him,” Jitty said, nodding knowingly. “Look at it like this, Sarah Booth, you’ve slept with worse. And he didn’t hurt you. Fact is, you had a good time and you needed it.”

  “Stop it,” I hissed at her. I hated it when she tried to reduce sex to some kind of physical therapy for the lonely. I huddled deeper into the jacket I was too cold to take off.

  Jitty leaned stiff-armed on the table in front of me. “Fact is, you don’t use it, God’ll take it away from you. A woman needs to pop her cork at least twice a month, or all her juices will dry up.” At my shocked expression she leaned down closer. “I read about it in one of those magazines. You know it wouldn’t hurt you to read some women’s magazines. Might remind you about what a body needs.”

  I sighed. It was pointless to argue with Jitty. In a month she’d be throwing my night of sexual liberation in my face, but at this moment she was determined to take the “modern” approach to the fact that I’d slept with a man who might have killed a slew of people.

  Even as I thought it, I got a flash of the night we’d spent together. A man like that couldn’t be a killer.

  But of course he could, my brain argued. Killers weren’t always rot-toothed, hollow-eyed desperados who slapped their kids and kicked their dogs. Parchman Prison was filled with all sorts of men who’d committed crimes of every description. Some of them were bound to be good-looking, charming, and smart.

  Like Hamilton.

  I felt Jitty staring at me and I turned to find her, arms akimbo, glaring.

  “You sink any deeper, I might as well shovel dirt on top of you,” she said.

  “I don’t want him to be a killer,” I finally admitted, shocked a
t how pitiful I sounded.

  “Well, quit wallowing in self-pity and go find who did it.”

  It was great advice. I’d even thought of it. But how was the question.

  “Maybe you should get some help,” Jitty suggested.

  Coleman Peters came to mind. He was the sheriff, and he’d always seemed like a decent sort. Maybe if I explained my suspicions to him, he would help me out. Even as I thought about it, I knew it was stupid. Coleman didn’t need to agitate Isaac Carter and the Buddy Clubbers by reopening a murder twenty years old that cast doubt on their business ethics, not to mention multiple murders and massive cover-ups.

  “Everyone who might help me is a suspect,” I whined.

  “Your mama never raised a hand to you, but if she was standin’ here she’d slap you right across the face.”

  Jitty’s angry words had the intended effect. I sat up and lifted my chin. She was right. Mother was kind and compassionate and patient—but she couldn’t abide whining.

  “Use your brain, Sarah Booth. There’s someone who was in the Garrett house the summer before Mr. Garrett was killed. Someone who saw things.”

  “Tammy,” I said, half rising. I hadn’t forgotten her. I just hadn’t considered that she might have vital information. But she had been there every day. And her grandmother had fought against the zoning change.

  “Thanks, Jitty,” I said, this time not even caring that she’d gloat and torment me with this for months.

  “Get goin’,” she said.

  I jumped up, pulled my gloves from my pocket, and started the search for my keys. As I shook out the gloves, a piece of paper dropped to the floor. It was a neatly folded square that I picked up and opened. The check was made out to Delo and signed by Kincaid.

  I held it a moment in my hands, stunned. Then I realized that Cooley must have tucked it there as he walked me down the rows of dead corn when he’d escorted me to my car. I’d felt his hand on my elbow, fumbling.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said softly. When I looked around for Jitty, she was gone, replaced by a tapping at the kitchen door.

  For a split second of foolishness, I thought it might be Hamilton and I sprang to my feet. Sneaking to the window, I peered out. Harold stood on the back steps.

  My thumb gave a feeble protest, just before the big monkey of guilt jumped on my back. Little monkey paws all over me. I had not played fair with Harold.

  I confronted a hard fact. Though my thumb throbbed for Harold, it was Hamilton who controlled the rest of my body. Murderer he might be, but I’d fallen for him. I didn’t intend to pursue the Dark Lord of Knob Hill, but I could no longer even consider Harold as a mate.

  And coward that I was, I couldn’t face him.

  Clutching my keys, I crept out of the kitchen to the front door. Then I ran across the porch, jumped in the car, and drove away.

  25

  I considered driving around until Harold was gone, and then going up to my room and flinging myself on the bed where I could kick and scream and cry in a fit of fury. When I was four and five, that behavior seemed to make things better. But then I’d had my parents, who waited until the storm passed and then came in to soothe me with touches and a voice of reason. Often that voice was describing punishments and restrictions for my tantrum, but it didn’t matter. After the excess of emotion, I needed the reason.

  But there would be no one to reason with me once I pitched my fit. The only man who had cared enough to try had just been jettisoned out of my life because I lusted for another.

  Before I could sink into the depths of self-hatred and shame, I focused on the clouds building in the night sky. They were huge and gray-black and rumbling with thunder, which added to the excitement and pleasure of driving the Roadster. The car was all mine, for the moment. I had to concentrate on that. Not on being decent or nice or loved or noble—but being solvent. It was the way of the world for bottom-feeders like myself.

  I drove to Tammy’s house.

  Unlike the afternoon when there had been people on the front porches, her neighborhood was now shuttered against the storm. The street seemed eerily abandoned, and I drove slowly, avoiding a trashcan that rolled into the road and a stray dog that scampered, teats almost dragging the ground, through my high beams. I passed a big Town Car bumping out of the Grove in the opposite direction, and caught a glimpse of pale blond hair at the steering wheel. More than likely it was someone who’d been to see Tammy.

  Tammy’s house looked closed and uninviting, but I could see a light on in the back. I wondered what she was doing. Claire was back in Mound Bayou, living the life of motherhood with her infant daughter. Tammy, like me, was alone.

  Instead of knocking at the front, I walked around the house toward the light. It did occur to me that it was foolish behavior. She might mistake me for a robber. The strains of a scratchy Billie Holiday record seeped out of the house. “Lover Man.” It wasn’t exactly upbeat music. I knocked at the back door.

  The kitchen light came on, the door opened a crack, and Tammy’s face appeared. She was well schooled in guarding her reactions. She showed nothing as she pushed open the door to let me in.

  “Cold night for creeping around houses,” she commented as she led the way through a porch and into the kitchen. The smell of fried chicken lingered near the stove, and in another room, Billie Holiday sang good morning to a heartache.

  “Are you busy?” I asked. It seemed that we had lost the way of our friendship. There had been a time, a brief time, when we’d been able to smile at each other and reveal our deepest secrets. My life had pulled me in a different direction, as had hers. But it struck me that I hadn’t had a friend like her since. Not in college or New York. There had been girls and women I liked and admired, but none like Tammy.

  “I was making some clothes for Dahlia,” she said, motioning me to follow her into the next room. A sewing machine was set up on a table, and beside it were dainty pieces of material, a bright summer pattern of red and yellow and blue. “Sundresses,” she said. “It’ll be summer before you know it.”

  “Tammy, who is Claire’s father?” I hadn’t meant to ask so bluntly. I hadn’t meant to ask at all.

  “You can’t leave it alone, can you?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I’ve discovered some things about myself I’d rather not have known. Now I want to know everything.”

  She walked to the record player, an old turntable of a type I hadn’t seen in years, and turned it off. In the silence her voice sounded tired. “We all learn things about ourselves we don’t like to accept.”

  “Please tell me.”

  “If you’d really wanted to know a long time ago, it might have made a difference. If anybody except my granny had thought to ask, it might have changed my life. She died believing that my pregnancy was her punishment for trying to hold on to her home, for fighting against the land development. I was too afraid to speak the truth.”

  She went to the table and picked up Dahlia’s little dress. “Your daddy gave Granny advice. He helped, and Mr. Garrett was helping, but that was a long time ago.” She looked up at me. “I wanted things to be different for Claire, and they are. She fell in love with a boy, and together they made a baby. At least it was joyful. It didn’t happen that way for me.”

  “How did it happen?” I was afraid to hear, and I realized that perhaps, all along, it was fear that squelched my curiosity.

  “Remember I told you I worked at Knob Hill that summer, before Mr. Guy was killed?”

  I nodded.

  “I worked in the house with Lolly and Missy, and I worked in the gardens with Mr. Henry. Late at night when everyone was asleep, Hamilton would get me in the pool and teach me to swim. I was terrified of that beautiful aqua water. During the day when I was carrying laundry or cleaning vegetables at the kitchen sink, I’d watch Mrs. Garrett swim, all sleek and wet like some animal with a special talent. I wanted to feel the water sliding over my body. I wanted to wear a bikini and climb out of that pool
with the water running down me and puddling at my painted toes. But I was afraid of it, like it would grab hold of me and pull me down to the drain.”

  She put the dress down and her hand idly stroked the material.

  “Hamilton taught me how to swim, and late at night I’d get in the pool in my underwear and swim for a long time, practicing all the strokes he taught me. I got where I could swim real good, without breaking the water or making a sound. Clean, just the way he showed me.”

  I held still. To move would have stopped her.

  “That was the summer I started dreaming. At first it was small things. I’d dream of fresh strawberries with sugar and cream, and that’s what Missy would fix for dessert. Or I’d see a pattern, and suddenly Mrs. Garrett would be putting up new wallpaper that looked exactly like I dreamed. It was fun. I told Missy and Lolly, and they laughed, but I could tell it also bothered them. Then I started dreaming about the doves.”

  She realized she was still stroking Dahlia’s dress and she stopped. She tucked her hand in the pocket of her slacks and sighed. “Remember, you asked to hear this, Sarah Booth.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. She walked past me and into the kitchen. As she started a pot of coffee, she picked up her story.

  “The dreams got worse and worse, until I would go to the kitchen all tense and hollow-eyed because I couldn’t sleep. That’s when I started swimming more. It seemed to relax me and help me sleep. I was out there swimming one night when I heard voices. Mr. Guy was gone, and Mrs. Garrett had been in Memphis shopping for a few days. The house had been quiet, and I didn’t even know she’d come home. But she was home, and she was in her bedroom over the pool. A man was up there with her, and they were talking about—”

  She broke off and turned to face me.

  “They were talking about killing Mr. Garrett, weren’t they?”

  She nodded. “They planned it just the way it happened.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I can’t say,” she whispered, and as she reached for the sugar bowl her hand trembled so that I got up and took it from her.