by Erica Waters
“Jim’s not capable of literary language.” Jesse rubs his jaw, which boasts only a light dusting of fair hair, nothing like Cedar’s dark stubble.
“I think he was trying to protect someone. Kenneth maybe.”
Jesse starts. “Kenneth? What do you mean?”
“I know Kenneth was there that morning. He told me. Why didn’t you tell the police that?”
Jesse puts his head in his hands and groans. “Damn it, just forget about Kenneth, okay?”
I lean forward. “Frank called me this morning and threatened me, saying I need to leave Kenneth alone. Does that sound innocent to you?”
Jesse looks up and his face turns pale as oatmeal. When he speaks, desperation laces his words. “Kenneth doesn’t matter. He didn’t do anything. Leave him out of it. Leave everybody out of it.”
I change tactics. “Jim didn’t say you killed him, but he said you’re the reason he’s dead. He said you deserve this.” When Jesse doesn’t respond, I finally squeak out, “Well, do you?”
Jesse brings his eyes up slowly to meet mine. “I do.”
The world tilts and sways. “Why?”
Jesse looks away, rubbing the back of his neck. He lets out his breath in a sigh of exasperation, or maybe regret, I don’t know.
“Is this about drugs?” What else could it be? What other thing could Jesse be mixed up in?
“It’s not about drugs, but that’s all I can tell you. Anything else would—” Jesse makes a sound like there’s something stuck in his throat. He sniffs a few times, looking down at the table. I realize he’s trying not to cry. I put my hand on his forearm, and he looks up at me, eyes rimmed red. “I didn’t mean for him to get killed, I swear. It’s not what I wanted.” His expression is earnest, sincere.
“But you know what happened to him?” Relief makes my voice hoarse. Jesse did something, but he didn’t give Jim the blow that took his life. He’s not a killer. I’ve been doubting him all along, but I believe him now. Looking in his eyes, I know for sure Jesse didn’t kill Jim. And knowing that changes everything.
Jesse nods. “I didn’t kill him, but I may as well have.”
“You know who did this,” I say. “You’re sitting in here while Jim’s murderer’s out there.”
Jesse looks down at his hands, fear and shame and exhaustion playing over his features.
“Then why aren’t you fighting this? Why are you letting yourself get sent to prison?” I can’t keep the impatience from my voice.
Jesse puts his face in his hands again, and I can barely make out his next words. “No one would believe me. Why should they, with my record, with everything I’ve done?”
“I’m going to figure it out,” I say. “I’m not going to let you stay in here.”
Jesse looks up, his eyes pleading. He’s afraid. “Shady, I’ve caused enough trouble and pain for one lifetime. I don’t want to cause any more. If I go to prison, at least you’ll be safe and everything will be all right, and no one else has to suffer. Please.”
I start to ask him who he’s so afraid of, but then something else Jim said hits me. “Jim said sometimes you get punished for a crime you didn’t commit, but you were owed punishment for something else, so it’s the same thing.”
“So?” Jesse says.
“Is that what this is about? You think it’s your chance to pay for something else you did?” I ask, my face burning. I didn’t come here to accuse Jesse, but ever since Jim said I should talk to Jesse about him wanting Daddy to die, I’ve been hearing Miss Patty’s voice in the back of my head, saying they ought to reopen Daddy’s case. Saying maybe Jesse killed him. I hate myself for thinking it, but I guess her words climbed into my brain like ticks in a dog’s fur, and they’ve dug their suckers in.
“What’s this really about, Jesse? Because I don’t think it’s just about Jim.”
My brother looks like he’s struggling between nausea and anger, like some deeply buried thing is trying to burn its way out of his belly.
“Just tell me,” I say.
I don’t want him to tell me. I finally know he’s not Jim’s killer. The relief of that certainty—having my faith in him back again . . . I can’t have it snatched out from under me.
“You’ll never forgive me if I do,” Jesse says, and I can already feel the ground starting to fall away beneath my feet.
My stomach twists. It’s all too much. I don’t want to find out if it’s something I could never forgive him for. I don’t want to dig up these secrets. I’ve already lost too much. I want to keep what little I still have. Jesse didn’t kill Jim. I should’ve left it at that.
“Aunt Ena’s been gone a long time,” I say, pushing away from the table. “I’m going to go check on her, make sure she hasn’t passed out somewhere. Finish your candy.”
Jesse nods, relief spreading across his face.
I stride across the room, trying to ignore how the eyes of the inmates follow me. Some of them give me the leer that usually accompanies a catcall, but most of them just look like they envy my freedom to get up and leave.
I find Aunt Ena sitting on the bathroom sinks, her head bowed, hands gripping the edge of the counter. “You all right?” I ask.
She looks up. “Yeah. You get what you need?” I nod, so she hops down and we go back to our table in the visitor’s room.
But when we get there, Jesse’s gone.
Twenty-Three
It’s raining when we make it outside, coming down so hard and fast it’s bouncing back up from the pavement. Aunt Ena and I race to the car but are soaked by the time we get in, water dripping from our hair and clothes.
As I drive back down the highway, I stare straight ahead at the road, chewing the inside of my cheek. The road’s half flooded, but my mind is like a barn on fire, all panic and flames.
“Did he kill Jim?” Ena asks quietly, barely loud enough to be heard over the rain.
“No,” I say, my voice firm and certain for the first time in weeks. “He didn’t, but he knows who it was. He knows what happened.”
“Then why the hell’s he sitting in jail? Stupid boy.”
“I think Jesse’s trying to protect me and Mama and Honey. He said if he stayed in jail, we’d be safe, that no one else would have to suffer.” I don’t tell her about the rest of that conversation. In fact, I decide I’m going to let it burn to ashes, to be forgotten and dispersed on the wind. What matters is that Jesse didn’t kill Jim, that he’s being punished for a crime he didn’t commit.
Aunt Ena doesn’t say anything, so I keep talking. “Jesse said that no one would believe him because of his record. I wonder if that means the person who really did kill Jim is someone people trust, or at least someone whose word would be believed. I thought it might be Kenneth, but Jesse was so sure it wasn’t him. And honestly I find it pretty hard to imagine too.”
Aunt Ena makes a sound of agreement.
We drive in silence for a while, my brain spinning through possibilities. But the pieces won’t come together, won’t make a whole—at least not one that makes sense. “Damn it,” I yell, slapping the steering wheel. “If Jim would’ve just told me, instead of talking in riddles, this would be so much easier.”
Aunt Ena lays a hand on my shoulder, her touch calming. “Tell me again what Jim’s ghost said,” she prompts.
I sigh, but I walk her through Jim’s ghost raising step by step, trying to get every word right. “. . . And then he said he’d been putting the knots in his hanging rope a long time, or maybe he tied his own noose, something like . . .”
Where else have I heard that before? It sounds so familiar. “Is that a thing people say, tying their own hanging rope? Like, an expression lots of people use?” A memory hovers just out of my reach.
“I haven’t heard it before, I don’t think,” Aunt Ena says.
There’s something here, but I can’t grasp it. I think and think until I feel a migraine starting at the back of my skull.
Then it hits me. “Oh, oh my God.
”
Aunt Ena’s head snaps toward me. “What is it?”
“Frank.” In my mind, I hear his voice, rumbling at me as he left the trailer that day. “I remember when Jim said that about the noose, it sounded familiar, like I’d heard it before. Frank had said almost the same thing when he came to the house to apologize to Mama. He said that some people were determined to tie their own noose.”
Frank’s drunken words, screamed into the darkness on the night I raised Jim’s ghost, come back to me, too—“It’s him—he’s the one. That lying, conniving worm.” He was talking about Jesse, but I didn’t realize there might be any truth to his words. What exactly did Jesse do, and what does it have to do with Frank?
That last puzzle piece clicks into place. Frank’s insistence that it was Jesse, how strange he acted at the construction site, the voice mail he left me.
“I’m not saying he hit Jim with the hammer, but he’s involved somehow. He has to be.” I think I knew it all along but couldn’t quite believe it.
“I don’t know, Shady,” Aunt Ena says. “It’s possible.”
I take a steadying breath. “I want to go see him. I want to find out why he’s so sure Jesse did it. Why he didn’t suspect anyone else. Lots of people had access to that house, and I’m sure plenty of those guys hated Jim. It could have been someone else on their crew. Frank would know that. But he went straight for Jesse without a second thought. He’s hiding something, and I want to find out what it is.”
Aunt Ena pauses before she answers. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Shady. You shouldn’t be confronting Frank. You’re a sixteen-year-old girl and he’s a grown man. And he’s not the saint people around here think he is. I knew him when we were young.”
Kenneth believes Frank is Jesus Christ in Levi’s, and I’ve never heard anyone except Jim and Mama say a word against him. But I know he’s no saint. I’ve had two glimpses of his darkness—that night he was drunk at the construction site and the hateful message he left on my phone. But just how unsaintly is he?
“What do you know, Aunt Ena?”
She only sighs in answer.
“Mama told me about that night Daddy beat him up,” I prompt.
“She told you that?” Aunt Ena’s voice is a mingling of surprise and embarrassment.
“Only that he made a pass at you and you weren’t interested, and Daddy got mad and hit him.”
She pauses and I think she won’t say anything, but then she murmurs, “Frank Cooper isn’t a man who likes to hear the word no.”
“So he—he tried to . . . ?” I can’t finish the question. The idea makes me feel sick.
Aunt Ena clears her throat, and when she speaks, her voice is shaky. “Yes, but he didn’t get very far. Your daddy took care of it, and I never—well, I never had the guts to report it. The town loves him. I figured they’d never believe me.” From the corner of my eye I see her pass a hand over her eyes, the way she does when she feels overwhelmed. “I’ve always been ashamed of that—that I haven’t been braver.”
The thought of Aunt Ena feeling guilty about something that wasn’t her fault makes my heart ache. I put my hand over hers and squeeze.
Frank and Jim, light and dark, good and bad. But what if all this time, we were wrong about which of them was the good brother and which one the bad? What if Jim was right all along, and Frank’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing Jim always said he was? Jesse and I could never quite believe Mama would marry someone so awful—maybe she didn’t.
“Aren’t you tired of it, Aunt Ena?” I say.
“Tired of what, darlin’?”
“Tired of letting the Franks of the world make us scared?” I glance at her and see her shudder, wrapping her arms around herself.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
There’s a roar going through me, made up of rage and fear and hope. I’m close now. Close to the truth. I just have to find a way to make Frank talk.
“Jim knew about Daddy’s fiddle. Did Frank?”
“Shady, you can’t play your daddy’s fiddle again. Not after what happened.”
“Did he know?”
Ena sighs. “Not completely. But I think he guessed. He called William unnatural, warped—that night of the fight.”
Then maybe I already have a way to make him talk. That makes up my mind. “I’m driving over to see Frank now. Should I take you home first, Aunt Ena?”
She’s quiet a long time. “No, don’t take me home.”
I pull into the parking lot of Frank’s office, a low-slung brick building with scraggly bushes out front. His truck is there, like I knew it would be. Jim always said Frank’s too greedy to take a day off. I figured he was just jealous of his older brother because Frank was more successful, more respected. I don’t know what to think anymore.
I don’t know who Frank really is, but I guess I’m about to find out.
Daddy’s fiddle’s on the back seat, where I stowed it this morning, afraid to even leave it in the house with Honey. I turn and stare at it for a moment, considering. Aunt Ena turns too, and her eyes go wide when she sees it. “Shady,” she says, her voice low and warning.
How many more times can I play it before the shadow man kills me? I don’t know, but I have to take the risk. I’m too close to Jesse’s freedom to let my fear win.
I take a deep breath and grab Daddy’s fiddle.
I put my hand on the door handle. “You can stay out here,” I say, but Aunt Ena shakes her head. We run through the pouring rain to the front door. It’s not locked, and a bell dings as we enter. The reception desk sits empty.
The moment I step into the building, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. Aunt Ena shivers and then puts her arm out in front of me, like she’s stopping me from stepping out into traffic.
“You feel that?” she asks.
I nod, fear creeping up my spine. But before I can speak, Frank pops his head out of his office. His beard is longer and thicker than usual, his eyes bloodshot. “Can I help you, ladies?” he says before realizing who we are. He strides to the front desk, a look of annoyance on his face. “Shady, what are you doing here? I told you to stop bothering my family.”
“We went to see Jesse today,” I say, squaring my shoulders, meeting his eyes. I’m not a roach to be squished.
A breeze from nowhere drifts across my face, making me shiver.
Frank lumbers around the counter and looms over us like a grizzly bear. “And?”
My knees tremble, but I hold his gaze. “I know Jesse didn’t kill Jim. And I suspect you know it too. Why have you been lying?”
He takes a step back and licks his lips. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What I do know is that you need to get on home now, leave this matter to the police and the grown-ups.” He’s trying to act commanding, but he’s off-center, agitated. And that chilly breeze on my face tells me why. He’s being haunted.
If Jim’s already moved on from haunting the site of his murder to haunting his brother, what does that mean? Nothing good—that’s for sure. Daddy always said the only ghosts with power like that had made roots in the world from their fear and rage. Those are the kinds of ghosts you have to worry about.
I lay my fiddle on the counter. “Do you remember this?”
“It’s a violin,” he says dismissively.
I throw open the clasps and lift the lid. “It was my daddy’s. You remember how he used to play it?”
“So?” Frank says, stepping back again.
“Well, I play it now,” I say, letting his answering silence deepen for a moment. “Do you want to know what happened when I raised your brother’s ghost?” I gaze at him, waiting. “Do you want to know what he said?”
Frank tugs at his beard, glancing sharply to his right. “You ain’t never . . .”
I pull the fiddle from the case and raise the bow above the strings. “Should I call him back now? Don’t you want to say goodbye? Don’t you want a chance to tell him you love him?”
<
br /> I gently touch the bow to the strings, and the fiddle emits a high, shivery note. Frank takes another step away from me.
The fading note pulls at me, urging me to call it back. But I have to stay focused.
“Jim’s haunting you, isn’t he?” I say. “You know, ghosts never stop haunting once they get started. They’re like a stuck record, playing the same note over and over again. They can’t help it. They’ll haunt you until you join them.”
My heart races, and goose bumps prick my entire body, but I keep talking. “I feel him here now. I can let you see him if you’d like.” I was planning to bluff my way through this, but now I don’t need to. Jim is here, and his ties to this world are even stronger than they were the night I called his ghost.
I raise the bow again, and Frank strikes, slapping it out of my hand. “You little bitch,” he screams, all of his calm bravado gone. “You little bitch.” I’m so shocked I don’t move for a few seconds. Even after the voice mail he left me and the story Aunt Ena just told me, it’s still hard to believe this is the person Frank’s been hiding all these years. This must be the Frank Aunt Ena knew back when she and Daddy were young. The Frank Jim knew.
Ena steps in front of me, cringing away from Frank’s raised hand. She’s been silent all this time, but now she speaks to Frank. “Why don’t you go to the police? Maybe if you tell them what you know about his murder, Jim will give you some peace.”
“I’m not to blame for this,” Frank says, but not to us. He’s looking over our heads, as if out the window, though the draft on my neck tells me what he’s actually seeing. Who he’s actually seeing.
“We didn’t say you are, but there’s a reason your brother’s ghost is in this room. He’s been haunting you for weeks, hasn’t he?” I ask. I realize now that Frank wasn’t just raving that night at the construction site, he was arguing—with Jim.
Frank snatches a heavy glass bowl full of mints off the receptionist’s desk, scattering the candy across the floor. He grips the bowl in one hand, lurching toward me. “Did your brother tell you I did it? He’s a liar, you know. He tells all kinds of lies.”