by Webb, Debra
His head snaps up and despite the tears on his face the fiery glare is back. “Mark my word, her daddy did this. I only wish he was still alive so I could drag him down into that goddamned hole and bury him the way he did my baby.”
Delbert Yarbrough executes an about face and storms off to his truck.
I lean against the doorframe and watch him roar away. I watch until I can no longer see his old white truck and the sound of the engine fades into nothingness. He is hurting. I understand his pain. In his shoes I might feel the same way. If I had not known James Cotton the way I did, if our families had not been close, I would likely feel as Yarbrough does.
For the first time in all these years I ask myself if it’s possible…could Letty’s father have harmed Natalie and Stacy? He was a soldier who watched his fellow soldiers die, who fought his enemy as necessary. An enemy he didn’t truly understand. An enemy who could be a child as easily as a grown man. Was it possible that he suddenly, inexplicably saw Natalie and Stacy as enemies?
Yes, of course. There is no logical way to deny the possibility and yet every cell in my body resists the idea.
Letty’s Jeep rolls into the driveway and my heart aches at the sight of her. As much as this hurts me, quite possibly it hurts her more. No one is saying terrible things about my dead sister. She, on the other hand, not only has to deal with reliving her father’s suicide, she also has to face the viciousness of the resurrected accusations regarding his involvement with Natalie’s and Stacy’s deaths.
I straighten from the doorway. “So what did our esteemed mayor have to say?”
No need to mention the strange visit from Delbert Yarbrough. Judging by the agitation in her step the meeting with the mayor was trouble enough.
Letty waits until she’s inside to respond. She closes the door and sags against it. “We just received our first official warning.”
“Well damn. And I missed it.” I gesture toward the dining room. “Shall we have coffee while you fill me in?”
“I’m on caffeine overload.”
We migrate toward our mini conference room. I make a stop at the fridge and grab a bottle of water, then set it on the table. “Sit.”
She watches as I place an apple next to the bottle before giving me one of those pure Letty looks that states loudly and clearly “Really?”
With a fresh cup of coffee, my fourth, I join her at the table. “So what did Heather have to say?”
She bites into the apple and chews for a moment. It’s obvious she is attempting to get her frustration under control.
“First, she demanded to know what it is that we think we’re doing.”
“I take it you told her.” I occupy my hands by cradling the warm mug. The urge to march down to the mayor’s office and shake the hell out of the woman who wouldn’t even hold the position if not for her mother throttles through me.
“You’re a private citizen and I’m on personal leave. It’s a free country. We have the right to review and theorize in any way we choose about the case as long as we don’t infringe on anyone else’s rights or in any way obstruct the official investigation.”
She tears off another chunk of the apple.
“She didn’t care for your response,” I offer.
Letty fakes a smile. “She didn’t like my attitude. Said I was disrespectful of her position.”
Funny but not a good thing.
“I’m sure you weren’t disrespectful.” I say this in hopes that I’m right. Letty’s nerves are raw right now, as are mine. This is not a good place to be when attempting to carry on a reasonable conversation. Or perhaps reasonable is the wrong word. Heather wants her universe to operate a certain way and those within that universe to act just so.
“She doesn’t want the truth.” Letty finishes off the apple and plops the core onto the table.
“Because it will make the previous investigation look bad?” I propose since I can see no other reason she would be so concerned.
She nods. “Chief of Police Barker Claiborne—one of her mother’s cronies—was lead on the investigation. If he looks bad, she looks bad and Mommy can’t look bad because she just got engaged to Senator Ned Baxter who’s in the middle of a reelection campaign.”
“I saw the billboards the night I arrived—I thought the woman standing beside the senator was Lorraine Jackson Beaumont—but I was too focused on my own problems to care. So this is a really bad time for Mommy dearest to have any past issues arise.”
A logical conclusion given the current mayor’s mother was the mayor at the time and is now moving into Alabama state politics—even if only by marriage. Jacksons have held the position of mayor in Jackson Falls for four generations, nearly a century. Of course Lorraine married a Beaumont but she was still a Jackson just as her daughter is no matter that her father was a Beaumont and her husband is a Turner. Scandals related to the family name have been as scarce as hen’s teeth. I have my doubts as to whether it’s because the Jacksons were and are above reproach. I suspect it has more to do with not getting caught. But then I am biased. I despise Heather Beaumont Turner more than a case of bedbugs—something I’ve unfortunately dealt with twice in my life after staying in ratty motels in third world countries.
“She warned me that she would be watching,” Letty admits. “Which means she’ll have someone watching us. Maybe a friend, but more likely a member of her personal security team.”
“She has a personal security team?” I don’t know why this surprises me. She is the mayor. More and more public figures are targets. I suppose being from one of the wealthiest families in the state and marrying into another of those wealthy families adds to the worry of kidnapping and the like.
“Oh yeah,” Letty goes on. “She has the one the city pays for and then she has the one her momma pays for.”
“Speaking of the Beaumonts.” My conversation with Mallory bobs to the surface of the river of thoughts rushing through my brain. “So Mallory’s younger daughter married Heather’s baby brother because she was pregnant.” This still amazes me on some level. “It’s different these days than it was when we were kids. I’m surprised there was a forced marriage. Why not just pay her off?”
Letty smiles. No doubt her first of the day. “Apparently little Marshall was in love with the girl and refused to break it off. And the girl was spilling the beans about the baby all over town. I’ve never seen a high profile wedding thrown together so fast.”
“I’ll bet Lorraine was fit to be tied.” I laugh at my use of one of my mother’s favorite adages. Lorraine Jackson Beaumont was her rich daddy’s only child and she has proven every inch the conceited bitch he raised her to be—another of my mother’s favorite sayings. Helen and Lorraine have disliked each other for as long as I can remember. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe I’ll ask Helen one day.
“Don’t you know it.” Clearly this gives Letty great pleasure. “Of course she never let on. You would’ve thought the two had been promised since before they were born.” Her brow folds with thought. “Come to think of it, Mallory’s older daughter is a city councilwoman. She was elected not long after the wedding.” Letty shakes her head. “The woman is nice and she really seems to care about the community, but she has zero personality. In fact, she was the long shot in the race, behind in all the polls, then our lovely mayor and her mother began to support her and she was suddenly a shoo-in.”
Some things never change. “Just goes to show how far some people will go to take care of their kids. Lorraine couldn’t very well have her youngest offspring married into a family of what she considers nobodies.”
Letty opens the bottle of water and downs a long swallow. As she absently replaces the top back onto the bottle she mutters, “Sometimes I hate this place.”
Of all the people in this town, I can understand this sentiment better than anyone. But it pains me deeply to hear Letty say those words. She has built a life and a career here. Something else has happened…something bigger than the mayor’s re
primand.
“What else happened this morning?”
Her attention intent on the bottle, she turns it around and around with her fingers. “Someone spray-painted awful things on my father’s headstone.”
“Oh God.” I go around the table and crouch at her side. “I’m so sorry. When did this happen?”
“Late last night or early this morning I guess.” She plucks at the label on the bottle. “I ask myself how the hell could someone do that, but I know. I know. People believe he’s a killer, a monster. Doesn’t matter that he was dead and could no longer defend himself before they officially labeled him a suspect. Doesn’t matter that he served his country and his life was devastated because of it. It doesn’t even matter that he was innocent.”
I take her hand in mine. “I’ll go to the hardware store and get something to clean it up. Don’t—”
“Our mothers have already cleaned it up the best they can. It wasn’t easy to get the spray paint off, especially the red, but somehow they managed.”
I think of the red stain on Yarbrough’s hand. But I can’t be sure it was actually paint or that it had anything to do with defacing James Cotton’s headstone. The last thing I want to do is make accusations without proof and cause even more pain for another innocent man. Though he has a different way of showing it, Yarbrough is hurting just like the rest of us.
“Tell me what we should do now.” We have those long lists of names. “Should we start interviewing the next people on our lists?”
Letty surveys the table, then nods. “Yeah. To hell with the mayor. We’re going to do this whether she likes it or not.”
“I agree.” I stand as Letty pushes her chair back. “But we need to proceed with a bit more caution. This is your home, Letty. Your career. We can’t jeopardize what you and your mother have built here.”
“This is your home, too,” she reminds me, “and your mother’s. We all deserve the truth. Natalie and Stacy deserve justice. My dad deserves peace. I intend to find that peace and that justice no matter the cost.”
What more can I say? Letty is right. We all need the truth no matter how many people we have to rub the wrong way to find it.
After a few minutes more of planning, we proceed with the same strategy as yesterday: I go one way with my list, she goes the other with her own.
Except I have a stop to make first.
If Delbert Yarbrough can show up at my house unannounced, I can do the same. Maybe I’ll get lucky and he won’t be home. Maybe he’s busy organizing another of his pointless protests and I can have a look around.
We all have secrets.
We all tell lies.
It won’t hurt to learn what secrets Mr. Yarbrough keeps.
20
HELEN
My fingers tighten around the steering wheel as Ginny and I sit in silence. We cleaned the ugly graffiti from James’s headstone as best we could but there is more work to be done. At least the worst of the vile painted words are no longer visible.
Monster. Killer. Evil.
I called a professional cleaning service but they won’t be able to get to the job until later in the week. What we accomplished will have to do until then. Ginny’s cell phone rings and I jump. We both do. She answers and I sit quietly listening to her end of the conversation. The voice on the other end sounds like Letty. I can barely hear so I can’t be certain. I hope nothing else has happened.
I think of Emma and her out at the farm and I worry. I worry that this new nightmare will scar them both more than they already are. God Almighty, I want this to be over. My sweet Natalie is gone. She is never coming back. Why can’t we just leave it and have some peace? I should be glad her remains were found. I should be thankful for the opportunity to lay her to rest...
I am not. The timing could not be worse.
I know my Emma. I know Letty. They will not stop until they know the whole truth and I am terrified.
“Please be careful,” Ginny says. “Love you.”
She puts her phone away and exhales a heavy breath, outrage making her face twitch. “Mayor Heather called Letty on the carpet about this unofficial investigation she and Emma are conducting. She warned Letty to watch her step. You know her Momma put her up to that shit.”
I grit my teeth a moment to prevent screaming. That bitch Lorraine Jackson Beaumont has been running this town for most of her worthless life, through her daddy before she was mayor herself and now through her daughter. I wish I could tell her just how pathetic she really is, but I cannot. I can only keep my mouth shut and hope her fiancé wins this damned election and takes her off to Montgomery. It will be such a blessing to know she is gone. She dragged out the grieving widow image for nearly two decades after the lowdown piece of shit she’d married right out of college died. I almost smile at the thought that he is rotting in hell while his precious wife chases after her happily ever after with another man. I force away thoughts of her dead husband and think of how when the image of widow no longer suited Lorraine’s purposes, she found wealthy, handsome international businessman turned politician Kurt Carlton.
Though Lorraine may soon be gone, her daughter is proving equally ruthless and utterly self-centered but I doubt she will ever be as good at either as her momma.
“I’m worried about them.” I say this because it needs to be said. Emma is all in the world I have left, just as Letty is all Ginny has. We cannot allow them to make the same mistakes we made. “We have to do something.”
“Those dog tags were in my car,” Ginny says, her voice seething and so very quiet as if the rage is sinking deeper inside her, curling its way through her and meshing with the pain and agony she has had to carry all these years.
We spent hours on our knees scrubbing her husband’s headstone. James Cotton was a good man. A broken man, but a good one. He was a veteran who came back damaged in ways that twenty-five years ago there was no good way to fix. He was guilty of nothing more than being misunderstood.
“Think, Ginny.” I turn to her. “Think very hard. Are you sure they were in your car after James died?”
Renewed fury flashes hot and swift in her eyes. “I took them off his cold, dead body myself. That old bastard Glenn Wallace saw me do it. He knows I did. I cleaned them off with the hem of the dress I was wearing and the next day when I found them in the bottom of my purse I hung them on the rearview mirror in my car.”
“Why would Glenn lie and say he doesn’t remember seeing them?”
Glenn Wallace, the coroner for the past thirty years, apparently signed a statement in the past twenty-four hours asserting that the only jewelry worn by the deceased James Cotton was a wedding band. When the chief and that new ABI fella questioned Ginny this morning they told her what he said and she told them the coroner was wrong. If Ginny says those dog tags were hanging around her husband’s neck when he died, then by God they were. I guess it’s possible the cancer and the treatments have scrambled Glenn’s memory.
I tell myself it was an honest mistake except I cannot see how.
It pains me to know that Glenn would do such a thing. I would never have believed he was that kind of man. But then, I know Lorraine. She probably blackmailed him with some knowledge she has kept all this time for just this moment. That’s the danger in lies and secrets. Once they happen they take on a life all their own. They invade our existence, burrow in deep, winding around the truth and then it becomes impossible to separate them, to pick them apart. Slowly but surely it becomes a part of your memory, your past and your future…until someone or something unearths that place where it all started. And then you can’t take it back. Can’t make it go away or pretend it never happened.
It seethes and grows and you cannot stop the momentum.
“I want to know what purpose it serves for him to lie!” Ginny glares at me.
I take a breath, banish the disturbing thoughts and shake my head though I know her words were not a question.
“I asked him right there in the shed where Ja
mes shot himself if I could keep his dog tags. I knew how much they meant to him and I wanted Letty to have them when she was older. He said, ‘why course you can, Gin’ and that’s what I did.”
My soul aches at the idea that someone would want to hurt Ginny and Letty like this. I feel outraged at Glenn’s betrayal. I keep that to myself for another time.
“There’s only one answer then,” I say and our gazes lock. “Someone took them out of your car. The someone who helped cover up the truth about my Natalie’s murder.”
The hurt swells and undulates. My eyes burn and my chest aches with the effort to hold it inside. It’s been twenty-five years but the pain of losing a child will go with me to my grave. It cannot be assuaged.
Ginny nods. “That’s the only explanation and we both know it. Glenn, the chief, all of them are part of the cover-up.”
I don’t have to ask if she locked her car, no one in Jackson Falls did back then, most of us don’t now. Back then folks didn’t even bother locking their houses if all they were doing was running errands in town or picking up kids from school.
Who would have imagined a killer was lurking in our midst?
The worst kind of murderer—one who preys on children.
The agony presses against my breastbone and I lose my breath. I fight the hurt and struggle to pull myself together. Now is not the time to fall apart. Whatever else I do, I must protect Emma.
“What if…?” I struggle to draw in a breath, the air squeezes past the misery and goes grudgingly into my lungs. “What if James didn’t kill himself? What if he was chosen as the scapegoat?”
He was the perfect option. Mentally ill. Prone to outbursts. Every day he walked the very road where the girls disappeared. Twenty-five years ago we believed that the strain of being a potential suspect in the investigation pushed him over the edge, but more than once since then I have dared to wonder if someone had set him up. Ginny would never talk about it. But the time for ignoring possibilities is over.
Ginny shakes her head. “He killed himself, Helen. He’d been telling me for days he couldn’t take no more. I did all I could to help him, but there was no way to stop his mind from dragging him to that awful place. When Letty first became sheriff she looked at the case file. She said there was nothing to suggest anything other than what it was.”