Killer Nashville Noir

by Clay Stafford

  The baby had come quickly, and Cassie’s father insisted on taking them back home to Gideon that same afternoon. Cassie fell in love with her armful of sweetness and just knew that everything was going to be different now that she had someone all her own.

  The New Madrid fault shook a little when Cassie introduced her mother to baby Sybil. The crystal drops hanging from the candelabra on the mantle in the den tinkled as her mama’s yellowed fingers tugged at the blanket to expose the tiny face.

  “Oh, Cassie, she’s something special,” Mama had whispered.

  For a month Cassie had held her baby, bathed her and changed her diapers, rocked her to sleep, breathed in the smell of her newness. She battled what her mama labeled “the colic” with James Taylor and Carole King; Cassie didn’t know any normal lullabies. Her voice grew hoarse with trying to soothe Sybil.

  When the fever spiked, Cassie had sung to the bundled basket in the passenger floorboard for the whole hour-long drive to town. But a few miles outside Hayti, the baby got so suddenly still that fear choked Cassie. At the hospital, she got a last kiss on the hot forehead.

  Cassie had an album up in the attic somewhere with all the clippings she’d gathered in those early years—an odd kind of baby book full of pages curled with age and heat, pictures of Sybil in incubators surrounded by doctors, and then finally, the last one, a snapshot in front of the house as people in white coats carried long rolls of plastic past a crowd of gawkers under a headline: Gideon Gets Its Own Bubble Baby.

  In the picture, Cassie held the door.

  • • •

  The sun threw shadows onto the front porch as Cassie handed the old man Sybil’s note. He squinted as he read her scribbles. He mouthed the words like a child just learning to read: “Reach for something, hanging, hand empty.”

  Cassie expected the confusion in his pursed lips, but the horrible awareness that dawned so suddenly in his eyes shocked her. He had looked at her then, his mouth slack with regret, but she had nothing for him. He slipped the note into his shirt pocket, quietly nodding to himself, and then he disappeared into the gap of yew trees at the edge of the yard.

  “What’d you tell that old man?” Cassie asked her daughter, but Sybil ignored her. “You tell me what that meant.”

  Sybil just kicked her feet against the plastic that pressed against the walls of her bedroom. She lived in a bubble inflated by the air they forced in; her world swelled and dipped like a jellyfish played upon by the water. Sybil dragged her feet down the plastic wall until the flesh on her soles rolled and squealed with friction like the rocks buried deeply in the Reelfoot Rift.

  That night, Bess Sanderson shot her husband dead as he was coming out of the Sherman Hotel with his secretary.

  A letter came weeks later from the old man’s daughter.

  Cassie sat on the front porch steps to read it. A saw-whet owl was calling to its mate in the dusk, its voice growing higher and higher with fear. Cassie didn’t sleep that night. She sat in the hall and watched Sybil through the cloudy plastic.

  Cassie took the letter to Reverend Dakin when the nurse from Hayti came for her bi-weekly visit. She told the Reverend about the church ladies and Bess Sanderson, about how they had asked secret things and Sybil, who had never spoken, not to the doctors nor the nurses, not to Cassie, Sybil had whispered to each woman a Delphic answer.

  “Gideon was a prophet, you know. In the Old Testament,” the Reverend said as he pulled his thumb against the corner of his leather Bible, drumming the pages like a flipbook and fanning the ashes of his cigarette.

  “What?” Cassie asked.

  “You know, our town Gideon and Gideon the prophet.”

  “I don’t understand.” Cassie tried to make the Reverend’s words explain how Sybil knew that the old man’s son had strung himself up in a tree half a mile from his deer stand in the backwoods. The old man’s daughter had written to thank Sybil for giving her father peace of mind before his passing and a chance to bury his son.

  Reverend Dakin spit his phlegm out the church window. “Folks believed in such things back then. That God told us what we needed to know. His mouth to our ears. Thought he used those what we’d consider afflicted now. Maybe that’s the connection.” He squinted at the letter again.

  “You’re saying that because we live in Gideon, God is using my Sybil to talk to us? With Carole King lyrics?”

  “You just got to have faith, Cassie.”

  The Sunday after Cassie showed him the letter, Reverend Dakin preached about modern-day miracles.

  “God is alive and among us!” he hollered to his indolent flock. “I ain’t an educated man. I don’t know nothing about absent clockmakers and the like. I’m just here to spread the word. God’s word. And He come to Gideon to tell us to listen up!”

  Folks from all over New Madrid County came to see Sybil then. Some wanted revelation; others came, like medieval pilgrims, to whisper confessions and seek absolution.

  Sybil didn’t write her cryptic answers anymore. She mumbled them and only once.

  “Winter or Fall.”

  “Trouble lose me.”

  “Been this way, nevermore.”

  Cassie sat cross-legged on the floor beside her daughter’s door, gloved hand opening the plastic flap just wide enough for the string of words to slip past the high whistle of the machines. She studied Sybil’s body language, waiting for a sign that she was about to speak, and watched her mouth so she could shape the words as her daughter shaped them.

  Beyond those moments, Sybil never spoke.

  Cassie never asked a question.

  • • •

  When Sybil turned thirteen, reporters and camera crews rutted the front yard. They hadn’t come to ask Sybil questions; they just wanted her picture because she had lived so long. The bubble boy in Texas had just died.

  “You can’t expect more than sixteen,” the doctors had told Cassie then. “And you should prepare yourself for it happening any time. Every day from now on is like winning the lottery.”

  Cassie had buried her parents that year. But not Sybil.

  Students started coming from the state university at Columbia to study her. They sat for hours in the farmhouse chairs Cassie had dragged in from the kitchen. Year after year, they watched Sybil, their eyes oscillating from her to notebook.

  Scratches in the hardwood floor recorded Cassie’s passage from Sybil’s room to elsewhere. “Excuse me,” she’d say as she slid behind them, her hands full of dirty clothes or sterilized food.

  They nodded as they scooted their chairs forward.

  Then one day Cassie couldn’t take it anymore. “I’ll be out in the yard if you need me,” she muttered under her breath.

  They nodded, but they never took their eyes off Sybil.

  Sybil lay on the floor rolling her head against the plastic until her hair arced with static electricity. She never looked at the researchers or her mother; she watched the stars on her ceiling. The Junior Astrology Club from Jefferson City had donated a kit. They’d heard about Sybil and wanted to do something for her. Cassie spent a week stenciling and pasting a glow-in-the dark galaxy while Sybil huddled in the corner of the room, her bubble world shrunk to give Cassie room to work.

  The constellations warbled beyond the rise and fall of the plastic as it breathed. The stars of Berenice’s shimmering strands fluttered behind the distortion. Sybil’s own hair, a shiny black gift from her father, stretched out around her; it had been chewed at the ends and crackled with energy that had nowhere to go.

  The researchers scribbled in their pads.

  Outside, Cassie stabbed her trowel in the dirt beneath Sybil’s window. And then she heard the tires climbing the gravel of the steep drive. She turned to watch as the van veered onto the grass and stopped. A woman rolled down the window of the passenger side.

  “Is this where the bubble girl lives?” she hollered across Cassie’s yard.

  Cassie nodded and turned back to planting the sunflowers that would
grow tall enough for Sybil to see.

  “Why this don’t look no different from the houses back home,” the woman muttered as she got out of the van. “Paul Delfoy, I thought you said there’s a bubble. There ain’t no bubble here.”

  “Woman, I told you just what it said on the computer. ‘Come See Gideon’s Own Bubble Girl and Eat at the Ajax Café.’” The man pushed himself through the driver’s side door. Cassie couldn’t imagine how he had managed to get himself behind the wheel in the first place. The man was huge.

  “Ma’am, you sure this where the Bubble Girl lives?” he asked.

  “Bought a shotgun, Jack,” Cassie said to the dirt. “Smackwater.” Then she nodded again and crossed the yard to the water hose. Mrs. Delfoy followed Cassie.

  “We done been over to the river at New Madrid to see the Fault. They say the river run backwards and made a waterfall that sunk a bunch of boats and killed some folks, but there ain’t nothing to see of it now.” The woman stood over Cassie as she knelt to rinse the dirt from her hands. “We’re on our way back down to Amos, you know, in Arkansas? We done went to St. Louis and now we’re stopping to see the sites on the way home.”

  Cassie stood and watched Mr. Delfoy move up against the house to peer in Sybil’s window.

  “So that poor girl done lived in a bubble all her life. My, my. That’s tragic now, ain’t it? Bless her heart. You her mama?” Mrs. Delfoy asked.

  Cassie opened her mouth to speak at the same time that Mr. Delfoy spun away from the house like he’d been popped.

  “Mona, get in the car.” He looked sickly and, as he passed the women, Cassie could see he was shaking; she felt the ground move under his weight.

  Cassie knew Sybil must have said something to Mr. Delfoy, shouted it to him through the window. She went in the house, drying her hands on her pants, and asked a research student what Sybil had said, but the woman muttered something about subject confidentiality. Cassie pressed her lips in a hard line and went to make herself a pot of coffee and ponder Paul Delfoy’s fate.

  That night the lightning storm came. Sybil had been pacing in her room since the Delfoys left. Around noon, she started mumbling to herself, “Things to come. Pieces on the ground.”

  Cassie knew something was coming, just like the day before the Thanksgiving earthquake back in ’96.

  “Lose control. Hot. Cold. Over, all over.”

  Cassie had tried to watch the Macy’s parade with her daughter on the tiny TV she pulled into the hall, but Sybil wouldn’t sit still. By the afternoon she was pounding her feet on the wall and screaming. “All over! All over! All over!”

  Cassie ran outside. She stood beside the yew in the front yard where she knew Sybil could still see her. Breathing the cool air slowly as she tried to calm herself, Cassie felt everything change. The earth pulsed electricity in an effort to release the tension—but too late. She stumbled across the heaving ground on her way back to the house. Her hands streaked red down the white hall as she worked to balance herself; she had been squeezing the yew berries and her fingers were coated with juice. She thrust them into the plastic gloves and reached for her daughter. But Sybil sat on the edge of her bed, now calm and silent.

  The quake passed; they always did.

  The lightning storm would pass, too. And tomorrow would come as it always did. And Cassie would turn forty in the spring. Sybil would be twenty-two next month.

  “Lonely times. Find a friend.”

  Thunder pealed through the foothills.

  Earlier that afternoon as the storm front rolled in, Cassie had checked the generator like she always did when there was a chance the power would go out. Some people could live in the dark, but not Sybil.

  The lightning struck somewhere on the hill out back of the house. And the lights died. The blackness suffocated Cassie as she waited for the generator to kick on. It never did. She felt her way to the hall closet to get the flashlight.

  Sybil was by the door; the plastic sheathing deflated like an amniotic sack over her. Her breath came fast and shallow, lifting the plastic with quick pulses like a heartbeat. Cassie laid the flashlight on the floor and slid her hands into the gloves. She held her daughter, hummed, and waited.

  The plastic rested on Sybil’s face like a shroud. With the last of her air, Sybil whispered an answer for her mother though Cassie never asked a question.

  “Wasted days, wasted nights,” Sybil had muttered before the plastic sheathing dipped into the hollow of her mouth and silenced her.

  Cassie didn’t know if Sybil meant it as judgment or prophecy. Freddy Fender was just too damn cryptic, like Nostradamus. You could make it mean anything or nothing at all.

  THE KEEPSAKE

  by Mary Burton

  Murder is not a one-size-fits-all crime. People kill for many reasons. Revenge. Jealously. Hate. Even love.

  Officer Georgia Morgan with the Nashville Police Department Forensics Unit didn’t generally care about motivation behind a killing. That was big picture. She cared about the micro picture: hair fibers, fingerprints, DNA, and all the other minute details that proved guilt or innocence.

  Homicide Detective Jake Bishop was her opposite. He saw the forest, not the trees. Sure, he’d use Georgia’s forensic work in the courtroom to sway a jury, but when it came to day-to-day investigations, it took a back seat. With the clock ticking to catch a killer, Bishop didn’t wait for backed-up state labs or fingerprint analysis. He focused on witnesses, family, friends—anyone that could help paint the broad strokes on the murder canvas.

  Bishop closed the faded file folder. The sharply creased white shirt and bold red tie set off the olive hue of his skin. In a clipped Boston accent he asked, “You sure about these test results?”

  Georgia shoved back a curled lock of red hair. “You bet. I don’t make mistakes. And mind telling me why we are here at Rudy’s?”

  “Setting the mood.”

  Morning sun cut through the front window of Rudy’s honky-tonk centered in the city’s heart on Lower Broadway. At night, with only the dim overhead lights casting a dewy glow, the bar appeared timeless as if five decades of patrons drinking and dancing to the music of wannabe country western stars hadn’t taken its toll. In the sharp light of day, it looked worn-out and reeked of spilled beer and stories—some good, some not.

  Bishop tapped an impatient finger on the closed file containing one of the half-dozen cold cases Georgia decided could be solved with modern lab testing or new evidence. Time was a double-edged sword when it came to cold cases. Evidence could be lost, but it could also be unlocked with modern science. Memories faded with time, but fears and inhibitions also eased, freeing witnesses with a conscience to finally speak the truth.

  “And why did you choose this case?” The South Boston accent sharpened the words.

  “Because Grace Duvall’s daughter called me a few weeks ago. She wanted me to look again into her mother’s murder.”

  “Doesn’t her father visit the police every year and ask if we’re any closer to finding his late wife’s killer?”

  “Yes, however, he’s recently been sick with cancer.”

  Twenty-eight years ago, Grace Duvall had been a twenty-six-year-old waitress working at Rudy’s. She was a long-legged beauty with jet-black hair and an hourglass figure that made men look. Most folks interviewed after her death wondered why she’d married Lance Duvall. He was handsome enough and reasonably charming, but most agreed that he loved the idea of stardom more than creating music. Grace’s parents were distraught by the marriage, but the birth of their baby granddaughter, Emily, appeared to soothe some of the tension.

  On the night Grace was murdered, it was her turn to close the bar. She clocked out minutes after her 3 A.M. shift ended and exited out the back alley door where her red ’68 Mustang was parked.

  Bishop, never one to mince words, asked, “Does your interest in this case have anything to do with Annie?”

  Irritated, Georgia held his gaze, while behind her a stage looked want
ing and alone without a musician straddling its five-by-five plywood surface. “No.”

  He folded his arms over his chest, a raised brow challenging her.

  Annie was her birth mother, and she’d also worked at Rudy’s as a singer until she was murdered in her home when Georgia was five days old. Georgia was adopted by the homicide cop working the case and folded neatly into the Morgan brood, which already consisted of three high-energy boys. A fair complexion and a rock-star singing voice were her two legacies from a birth mother she’d daydreamed about since she was a small child. “This is about Grace Duvall. She’s been denied justice too long, and this might be her last chance to get it.”

  “Did Grace know Annie?”

  The thought crossed her mind. “They could have. I’ll never know for certain.”

  “Fair enough.” Bishop opened the manila folder resting on the round cocktail table coated in a half inch of shellac over Nashville postcards. Glaring up from the file was the face of Grace Duvall as she lay dead in the back parking lot. Bruises ringed her long white neck and her right eye and cheek were battered. “Grace clocks out after closing and then what?”

  “The killer punched her hard. She hits the ground. Loses an earring that was never found. Most likely dazed, but alive. Then her attacker straddled her and strangled her to death before vanishing. Her husband, Lance Duvall, sounded the first alarm bell at 5 A.M. when he awoke and discovered his wife had not come home. He called the cops.”

  “Lance Duvall.” He scanned the notes. “He worked in a warehouse on the east side of the Cumberland River?”