Oh, yeah, I knew what they wanted. I was sure Noble wanted a grubstake and the second I gave him money enough to open some business somewhere, he’d be off. And he’d leave the old man with me.
So what would I do with a geriatric gnome?
I didn’t get any further in my thoughts because Jackie knocked on the door, and when I told her to come in, right away, I saw that she wanted something from me. Let’s see. What could it be?
When she started to speak, I wanted to tell her to spare me the lecture, that I’d just get out my checkbook. I’d buy Noble some business far away from the angry relatives (if I knew them, only the younger generation was angry; Uncle Clyde’s generation was probably laughing their heads off) and I’d send the old man to a nursing home.
But as soon as I saw Jackie’s face, I decided to use her guilt to get her to tell me why she’d been so weird lately. First, though, I had to listen to what she was saying about family. She was saying how everyone needed one and how as a person got older, family meant more to him, and someday I’d regret not getting to know my father, and I should let bygones be bygones and—
I’d seen my father sitting upright, eyes wide open, but sound asleep. After he’d unnecessarily told me who he was and before Jackie made her dramatic wet-dog entrance, Tessa had asked him how he could do that. He said that where he’d been he’d learned that he had to look as though he were alert at all times. He said that a man with his fine physical looks couldn’t let down his guard ever. Tessa had giggled because she thought he was joking about his “fine physical looks,” but I could see that he was serious.
While Jackie was going on at me about family, I tried to see if I’d inherited this ability to sleep with my eyes open while sitting up. When I’d about decided I was going to be able to do it, Jackie stopped talking and looked down at her hands. Uh oh, I thought. She’d gone off family and was on to something else, but I hadn’t been listening. I searched my mind to remember what she’d been saying. Oh, yes. Camera. Something about a camera. Her new digital maybe? Or that fantastic little printer she’d bought?
“Where’d you get it?” I asked. That seemed a safe question.
“I…” she began. “I met this man and he lent me—”
She couldn’t have woken me up more completely if she’d shot at me. “A man?” I asked.
“You…” She looked hard at me. “He doesn’t want me to tell you about him because he said you’d tell Dessie. But I think you’re a better person than that. You are a better person than that, aren’t you?”
“Much better,” I said. I saw no need to tell Jackie that Dessie’s mad passion for me had only been an attempt to make her jug-eared lawn boy jealous.
Instantly, Jackie gave me so much information that I had trouble understanding it all. Of course my hearing may have been clogged by the fact that my temperature had risen approximately twelve and a half degrees. What kind of town was this? I’m a rich bachelor. Where were the women who were dying to have me? Women who would do anything to get me? Dessie wanted some kid who only knew how to push a lawn mower, and now Jackie had—my temperature went up two degrees more—“met a man.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, “let’s backtrack. His name is—?”
“Russell Dunne.”
“And he is—?”
“An associate professor of art history at the University of North Carolina.”
“Right. And he gave you—?”
“Lent me the digital camera and the printer. They’re his, not mine. At the picnic he took a photo, printed it out, and I thought it was—”
“The printer isn’t battery-operated so how’d he use it out in the woods?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he had a battery pack. He had so much stuff in his bag it was almost magic.”
I think she was trying to make me laugh, but laughter was the furthest thing from my mind. “Magic,” I said.
“If you’re going to be nasty, I’m not going to tell you anything.”
I apologized, but I was dying to ask her to spell the guy’s name. When I searched out his credentials on the Internet I wanted to be sure I had the name right.
I listened politely as she told me how “nice” he was, but my mind was racing. She had to have met him on Sunday. While I was at Dessie’s, solving her love life and being a great friend to a woman I hardly knew, Jackie had been picking up men…Where?
“Where did you meet him?” I asked. “Exactly where?” I added, in case she’d already told me.
She waved her hand. “That doesn’t matter. I’d been taking photos of flowers and—”
“You picked up a man on a trail somewhere?” I asked, truly shocked. “I didn’t think you were that kind of woman. But then, you’re not from my generation, are you?”
Jackie didn’t take my bait. “He grew up in Cole Creek, but he—” She looked down at her hands. “He asked me not to tell you about him because of your relationship with Dessie.”
Again with Dessie. Was I tied forever to her because I’d had dinner with her? First Rebecca and now Dessie. “What’s Dessie got to do with this?” I asked more sharply than I’d intended to.
“Russell wrote a bad review of her work and since then the town has considered him a pariah.”
That took me so aback I couldn’t prevent a smile. What an old-fashioned word. “A pariah, huh?” I stopped smiling. This thing needed some logic applied to it. “Why would the town care whether or not Dessie Mason gets good reviews?”
“She’s the town celebrity so they don’t want her hurt.”
“Really? It’s my opinion that this town pays no attention to celebrities. Take me, for example. In that town where I met you, they were all over me, but here, we’ve had one invitation to an afternoon in the park and since then, zilch.”
“What does that mean?” Jackie asked, frowning.
“Just that something isn’t ringing true.” I could see she was getting angry, so I smiled to soften what I wanted to say. “Are you sure this guy didn’t ask you not to tell me about him because I might stop him from getting what he wants?”
Jackie narrowed her eyes at me. “And just what is it that you think he wants?”
“You. In bed.”
“Is that supposed to shock me? You just said that I’m from a different generation than you are. Women today aren’t eternally-virgin Doris Days. I hope he wants me in bed. I really, really, hope he does. But, so far, no luck.”
I didn’t want Jackie to see my shock. Or was it shock? Was it, maybe, red-hot jealousy?
“Let’s not fight, okay?” she said softly. “I really came up here to talk to you about your relatives. They don’t have any place to stay.”
Sorry, but I couldn’t move my mind around that quickly. Some man had written a bad review of Dessie Mason’s work and now an entire town hated him for it? Did that include Miss Essie Lee? She was as dried-up as Dessie was luscious, and human nature told me that the Miss Essie Lees of the world did not defend the Dessies.
I wanted to ask Jackie more questions about this man. Top of my list was to ask for his social security number so I could run a major search on him. But when I looked at Jackie, I could tell that she’d just asked me a question. Ah, yes. Toodles. My dear old dad.
“You didn’t put it in your book,” Jackie said.
That startled me. Had I ever had a thought that I hadn’t put in one of my books? She spoke again. Oh, yes, why had my dad been in prison? True, that particular story had not been put into any book. I had, of course, written the story, but that manuscript had been a thousand pages long, so Pat had done some cutting. She said it was better to leave out the reason the hero’s father was in prison because the missing story lent some mystery to the book. She didn’t say that I was revealing too much, but then Pat could sometimes be as polite as her mother.
“When he was a baby,” I said, “my father was dropped on his head and afterward, he was always slow. Not retarded, but…” I thought. “Simple. Childlike. My mother to
ld me he took everything literally.”
I settled back in my chair. I’d told this story only once before, and that was to Pat. Right now, part of me didn’t want to accord Jackie the honor of being the second person to hear it. After all, while I’d been patching up someone’s broken romance, Jackie had been picking up a strange man in a forest, believing every word he said, and lusting over him. I couldn’t make myself think about what she’d said, that she wanted to go to bed with this stranger. Had I misjudged her character? Was she after all men? Would Noble have to fend her off? My funny-looking father?
I made a vow to never again eat black olives that had been sliced into little rings.
“My uncles,” I said, “decided to rob a bank. They were all young and full of themselves and they saw it as a way to make themselves rich. Of course they didn’t think how they were later going to explain the fact that even though half of them were unemployed, they could suddenly afford houses and cars. But anyway, they came up with what they thought was a foolproof plan:They’d use Toodles as a decoy. He—”
“Why’s he called ‘Toodles’?”
I looked at her. “I’ll tell you the details if you want to hear them, but it might be better just to say that one of the results of my father’s injury was a very long delay in toilet training.”
“Oh,” Jackie said. “So how were your uncles going to use a poor, innocent man like your father to help them commit a crime?”
“Tootles was to sit outside the bank with the motor running in the getaway car, thinking he was going to drive away when they came running out. But my uncles double-crossed him. They planned to rob the bank, then go out the backdoor where another car was waiting. They figured that by the time the police came, they’d be long gone. When the police stopped to arrest Toodles, that would give them time to escape.”
“They wanted your father to be arrested?”
“Yes. As a diversion. They knew Toodles hadn’t done anything wrong, so what could the police charge him with? Sitting outside the bank in a car with the engine running? My uncles figured the police would let him go after a few hours, then the lot of them would share the money and live happily ever after.”
“And the police wouldn’t search for the bank robbers? Wouldn’t they suspect your uncles?” Jackie asked, eyes wide.
“The police could find them for all they cared, because my uncles believed they had ironclad alibis: each other. Who could fight eleven men swearing that they’d all been together?”
“Okay, so what went wrong?”
“My uncles didn’t know that Toodles had been seeing a girl.”
“Your mother.”
“Yes. She’d been raised in an orphanage and she was pretty much alone in the world. And she had such a bad temper that she didn’t have a lot of dates, plus she was past thirty, so maybe when little Toodles came along, she was ready to try anything.” I shrugged. Who knew what went on in my mother’s head? The woman had certainly never shared any of her inner feelings with me.
“Anyway, my uncles didn’t know that the night before the robbery, my parents had crossed the state line and been married by a justice of the peace. Three days before, my mother had told Toodles she was going to have me. I believe her exact words were, ‘Look what you did to me, you little cretin.’ But, as I said, my father doesn’t seem to see things as other people do, so he was very happy that his girlfriend was going to have his baby, and he asked her to marry him. One of my aunts told me that my mother said she’d rather let a train run over her feet than marry him, but then my father told her he was going to buy her a house and a car and that she’d never again have to milk a cow.”
“He was under a bit of pressure, wasn’t he?” Jackie said. “He had a wife, a child on the way, and no way to provide for his new family. So there he was, sitting in the car waiting for his brothers to show up with the loot, but, instead, the police arrived. He must have been frantic.”
“Yeah. By the time the police arrived, my uncles had already run out the backdoor, but my father didn’t know that. And what my brothers didn’t know is that Toodles had a gun. They never did find out where he got it, but between you and me, I think my mother gave it to him. She told the police she didn’t know anything, but I think my dad had told her about the bank job. My mother wasn’t one for taking someone’s word for anything, so if Toodles told her he was going to buy her a house and a car, she’d want to know where he was going to get the money. I think Toodles told her what he and his brothers were going to do, and I think my mother had some suspicions about his brothers, so she gave him an old revolver she’d got from somewhere. She was going to see that she got what she wanted.”
Jackie gave me one of “those” looks. “And what she wanted was a home for her child.” When I didn’t say anything to that, she said, “Did your father shoot someone?”
“Three people, two of them policemen. When the police went charging into the bank, guns drawn, Toodles thought his beloved brothers were still inside, so he went in shooting.”
“In other words, your father risked his life to save his no-good, lying, double-crossing, rat fink brothers.”
“That’s the way my mother saw it, too. Toodles didn’t kill anyone, but he wounded the two policemen and grazed a hysterical bank teller. Took off her left earlobe.”
Jackie leaned back in the chair. “So your father went to jail, and after you were born, your mother gave you to your uncles to raise.” Her head came up. “What happened to the money from the bank job?”
I smiled. “They didn’t get a dime. One of the tellers, not the one who got shot, but another one, recognized my uncle Cal’s voice and called out his name. They all panicked and ran out the backdoor.”
Jackie got up and walked over to one of the bookcases along the wall. I knew she wasn’t looking at the books, but was thinking about my family. They did that to people. Hadn’t that been proven when people bought the books I’d written about them?
I decided to change the subject. “Had any visions lately?” My intention was purely malicious. I wanted her to remember the fun she and I’d had when I’d been around to save the lives of the people she saw. Would this Russell Dunne have done that? Or would he have hesitated and told her that she’d just had a dream? Or would he have taken her to a doctor to be examined?
Jackie took a long time before she answered. “What would happen if I started seeing evil inside a person’s head?”
Wow! Where had that come from? And what an intriguing question. It was one of those questions that could inspire an entire novel.
I started to answer, but then I sat upright. Was this question from the guy she’d picked up in the forest? If it was, then that meant Jackie had told him about her visions. Having sex with someone else was one thing, but this…this sharing of what was private between her and me was betrayal. When I didn’t—couldn’t—say a word, she kept on talking. It was a good thing her back was to me because if she’d seen my face, she would have run from the room.
“What if we were having dinner with two couples and I had a vision that one man and one woman, not married to each other, were having an affair and were going to kill her husband and his wife? How would you—or I—stop it?”
I liked the way that question made my mind work so I put aside Jackie’s betrayal and thought about it. “Warn the victims,” I said.
She turned to look at me. “Oh, yeah, sure, and people believe that their spouse is going to kill them. Don’t you think that if a man was plotting to kill his wife that he’d be really nice to her? And he’d make sure that others saw how much he loved her, and that she was the most important person in his life? If you told her this darling man was going to kill her, she’d never believe you.”
“You’ve done some thinking about this, haven’t you?”
“Yeah,” she said, plopping down onto the chair across from my desk. She hit the seat so hard that if it hadn’t been padded, she would have broken her tailbone. “I, uh…I think I know why Amar
isa was killed.”
If someone had held a gun to my head, I wouldn’t have let her know that I’d never heard the name “Amarisa” before, although it took only about a second to figure out who she was.
“Why was she killed?” I asked in a whisper and couldn’t help a glance at the door. Please don’t let anyone knock and disturb us.
“She had visions. At first they were like mine, but, gradually, they got stronger until she began to see what was inside people’s heads. And she started to…to prevent the evil from happening.”
Prevent, I thought. Was she hinting that this woman, Amarisa, murdered people before they did what they were just thinking about doing? But how could she be sure they were going to carry through? Didn’t everyone at some time think of killing someone else? “This Russell Dunne tell you about her?” I asked, and hated the jealousy that was in my voice.
“Yes. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but—”
“Why shouldn’t you tell me?” I snapped. When had I become the enemy? The outsider?
Jackie shrugged. “I don’t know. Russell was telling me these things in confidence, but maybe if this story were brought out in the open, people would tell what they know. Maybe then this evil wouldn’t hang over Cole Creek.”
“I can’t think of anything it would solve if this story were made public,” I said firmly, my jaw rigid.
Jackie looked at me. “Do you think the people who killed that woman are still alive?”
“No.”
“What makes you say that?”
It was my turn to reveal secrets. “I looked up some of the people from this town on the Internet. Several people died in freak accidents the year after the woman was crushed.”
“How freaky?” she asked.
“You ready for this? Crushed. In one way or another, they were all crushed.”
“So who did it?”
“That’s just what I wondered. Think Russell would know?” I was being facetious, so I expected Jackie to rein me in as she usually did, but, instead, she got up and walked back to the bookcase.
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