‘He talked until all I could think about was sinking a kitchen knife into his chest. So I left. I packed a suitcase and got on a bus for New Mexico. I spoke with Alex from time to time on the phone. For a while, everything seemed fine. But, last spring, Stephen started coming around Alex and Sheneel’s house. Alex wouldn’t tell me exactly what was going on between Sheneel and her father. I knew I should come back, but I couldn’t get myself to do it.
‘Then, last June, Sheneel stabbed Stephen.’ She smiled, and her mouth was crooked. ‘My girl. That’s what Stephen needed, I thought. But maybe it’s what I needed. Stephen refused to testify against her, the charges were dropped, and I hoped it was over.
‘But Stephen kept coming around, and then Alex told me on the phone that Sheneel had threatened to report what the mills were doing. That’s when I decided to come home. I knew the Phelpses wouldn’t allow it.’
She looked hard at me, as if her story had been a kind of challenge. I glanced down at Papa Crowe, who’d closed his eyes at the bottom of the pool.
I said, ‘So Stephen killed Sheneel because she was threatening him.’
‘Because she was threatening him and because he wanted her but couldn’t have her. I know it.’
‘Do you have any evidence?’ I asked.
‘What evidence do I need?’
‘The police won’t arrest a man on what you’ve told me.’
She nodded down at the pool. ‘Papa Crowe said you would help.’
‘Not me.’
She screwed her lips. ‘You don’t want to be a coward. That’s what Papa Crowe says. He says you want to be a hero.’
I shook my head. ‘All I want is a good night’s sleep.’
‘Is that any different?’
‘Alex didn’t tell you that Stephen Phelps killed Sheneel?’ I asked.
‘He didn’t need to. When he told me she was dead, I asked where she was. He told me and I went.’
‘And he didn’t tell you who told him she was there?’
‘I knew and he knew that I knew.’
‘Why would Stephen have shown him her body?’
‘So Alex would know what Stephen would do to him if he didn’t behave. It’s always been this way. You do what the Phelpses say or they burn you or rape you or take what you value most in the world.’
I glanced again at Papa Crowe, lying with his eyes closed. ‘I don’t see what I can do that the two of you can’t.’
‘No one listens to us. I’m the girl who got pregnant when I was seventeen and again at twenty and whose own family won’t talk to her. Papa Crowe is a crazy old Gullah who they keep arresting for trespassing on land he says he owns but he’s got no title to, and who crams the shelves in his house with bottles of weeds and animal blood. You’re from outside. They’ll listen.’
I laughed at that. ‘I just got out of the hospital where they shot me full of drugs every time I tried to talk. No one listens to me either.’
For the first time, her intense eyes dimmed. ‘That’s what I told Papa Crowe.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You won’t help?’
‘Nothing I can do that you can’t.’
She shook her head, picked up one of the wooden folding chairs, carried it to the edge of the pool, and dropped it to the pool bottom. The chair shattered by Papa Crowe’s head. He opened his eyes. Laura Greene said, ‘He says he can’t help.’
Papa Crowe pushed himself to sitting and then stood stiffly. ‘I ain’t deaf.’ He climbed the ladder, brushed the dust off his pants on the poolside, and stepped close to Laura Greene. ‘But you,’ he said to her, ‘you got to listen better.’
As we motored back across the water toward the harbor, the morning sun hung in a cloudless sky and glared off the rippling surf. Two gulls soared above the skiff.
I yelled above the sound, ‘Why did you tell her I could help?’
‘’Cause you need this. ’Cause you been helping already and I reckon you will.’
‘You reckon wrong.’
We rounded an island that was mostly submerged under the rising tide. One of the gulls banked to the left and disappeared, the other lowering over the skiff as if it expected to be fed scrap fish or bait. Papa Crowe opened the throttle.
‘Where to now?’ he said. I said nothing. We crossed an area of flat water and I looked into its depths for fish but saw only ribbed sand. ‘You a useless man now?’ Papa Crowe said. ‘You go home and lie on the floor with your dog?’ As we approached shore, the water turned gold and brown, stained with tannin from the same pine trees that the Phelpses pulped, bleached, and pressed into paper. ‘You sit on the branch of a tree and sing of nothing like the bird?’ he said.
‘You’re a bastard,’ I said.
‘You sleep in a hole in the ground like the tortoise?’
When we entered the Fernandina harbor, he cut back on the throttle, and as we approached the dock he let the engine die and we glided alongside the weather-beaten wood until he threw a line around a cleat.
‘Get out,’ he said, and there was a mean edge to his voice that I hadn’t heard before.
I said, ‘Do you know where Stephen Phelps lives?’
‘Sure. Everybody do. He live in the big house built by his grandfather.’
‘You expect he would still be there, or would he be at the mill?’
‘He a boy with a lot of money and don’t like to get out of bed over early.’
‘OK, then,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
He smiled. ‘It the right choice, son.’
‘You’re coming in with me, though.’
‘You think?’
‘I do.’
‘Then how can I say no?’
Stephen Phelps lived with his wife and two children near downtown Fernandina in a large yellow Victorian house with a walled-in front garden. The front path, made of crushed and raked coquina, circled around a central fountain and led up three broad steps on to a veranda.
When we knocked, a small girl with blond hair answered. I’d seen her in a photograph on Stephen Phelps’s desk when I’d visited his office. She wore white cotton pajamas and gazed up at Papa Crowe and me with what looked like astonishment.
A voice spoke from behind her. ‘Sammie! Get away from there.’ The child disappeared, and a black woman, about fifty years old and wearing the kind of black-and-white maid’s uniform that I’d thought was only used in old movies, opened the door wider. She gazed at me, then Papa Crowe, and then me again, seeming to appraise our wet pant legs and dirty, night-worn faces.
‘Hello, Toya,’ Papa Crowe said.
But she spoke only to me, through sour lips. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘We’re here to talk with Mr Phelps,’ I said.
‘He’s expecting you?’
‘No, but he should be,’ I said.
‘Your name?’ she asked, as if she imagined it would be something unpleasant.
But footsteps approached from behind her, and Stephen Phelps, dressed in khakis and a blue Oxford shirt, holding his daughter in one arm, said, ‘It’s all right, Toya. I know these gentlemen.’
‘They—’ she started.
He repeated himself. ‘It’s all right.’ He put a patronizing hand on her shoulder, and I imagined him putting that hand up Laura Greene’s dress and on Sheneel Greene’s leg. ‘Will you please help Kathryn with breakfast?’
The maid gave Papa Crowe a distrustful glance and disappeared down the front hall.
Phelps looked at Papa Crowe and then at me. ‘How does that saying go? A man is judged by the company he keeps.’
I said, ‘You two know each other?’
Phelps said, ‘I’ve had many encounters with Mr Crowe. They often have involved trespassing and sometimes destruction of machinery or other property.’
‘Those were accidents, sir,’ Papa Crowe said.
Phelps asked me, ‘What can I do for you?’
‘When we talked last time, you said I should
let you know if I had more questions.’
‘I meant at my office,’ he said.
‘But you weren’t at your office this morning.’
‘I haven’t even eaten breakfast.’ He looked at his watch.
We stared at him.
He said, ‘Fine. Come in, then.’
Inside, the house smelled of scented cleansers and furniture polish the way a closely kept old hotel does. Wooden stairs, covered with a paisley carpet runner, led to the second floor from the front hall. The furniture in the living room looked as old as the house, but newly upholstered and clean.
As Phelps walked to the breakfast room, his daughter watched us over his shoulder. His wife stood at the table, spooning scrambled eggs on to three plates. She wore her blond hair in a ponytail and had the kind of face that thins rather than widens with age. She wore a tennis skirt and a white V-neck T-shirt with a pink heart logo.
Phelps asked the maid to get coffee for Papa Crowe and me, introduced his smiling wife as Kathryn and his daughter as Samantha, and said, ‘You just missed my boy. He’s left for school.’
I said, ‘Do you teach him what your father taught you?’
He smiled. ‘What was that?’
‘You know, the world is your oyster? Take the pearls where you find them?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
I hadn’t expected Phelps’s wife and child at the table. But I said, ‘Laura Greene says you raped her.’
The surprise on his face turned hard to anger. His wife looked stunned and confused, his daughter only confused. Papa Crowe grinned.
Phelps said, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Sorry,’ I said, and sipped the coffee. ‘She also says you killed Sheneel and Alex.’
Kathryn Phelps stared at her husband.
He said, ‘I’ve invited you into my house, and you’ve insulted me. You’ve told terrible lies in front of my—’
‘I said I was sorry.’
The Phelps family watched me drink from the coffee cup.
Phelps took a deep breath and let it out. ‘It’s time for the two of you to leave.’
I said, ‘She told me you were only fifteen when you raped her, long before you and your wife got together, I’m guessing.’
Phelps said to his wife, ‘Honey, will you take Sammie—’ And he pointed a thumb up the front hall.
She forced a smile, took her daughter’s hand, and pulled her from the table.
Phelps lowered his voice to a whisper, but the force and threat were clear. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ He pulled a phone from his pocket and fumbled trying to dial it. I figured he was calling either the police or Phelps security.
I said, ‘Is it true that Sheneel was your daughter?’
He slammed the phone to the table. ‘Get out!’
‘I hear that you were bothering her last June and she had to cut you.’ I reached for a basket of muffins, but he knocked the basket from the table. ‘Pathetic,’ I said.
He lunged at me. But I rose and met him halfway. He was a tall man and strong, but he was used to a life of soft comforts, and I didn’t care whose skin split, his or mine, or whose bones broke. My hand found a knife on the table, and I brought it to his chest.
He whispered, ‘A bad, bad mistake.’
Hands pulled me away – Papa Crowe’s hands. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Nothing good come from killing a man in his own house.’
I dropped the knife on the floor and let Papa Crowe draw me back.
‘We get what we come for,’ he said.
Phelps stood at the table, panting, his eyes full of fury and humiliation.
‘Goodbye, Stephen,’ Papa Crowe said, and he stepped toward the front hall.
Kathryn Phelps must have put her daughter in her room or left her with the maid, because she’d returned and stood in the doorway.
‘Thank you for the coffee,’ Papa Crowe said. ‘We about dying with thirst,’ and he brushed past her into the hall.
She said nothing, but watched her husband with strange curiosity, and I said nothing either, but followed Papa Crowe out of the house.
Papa Crowe drove me home, grinning as if he was demented.
‘What?’ I said.
He said, ‘You make him worry like a snake in a fire.’
When he dropped me off, Lillian was in the backyard with Percy. Papa Crowe gave me the redfish he’d caught, and I took it outside to show her how I’d spent the night and early morning. I felt good. The saltwater spray had stung me out of myself. Confronting Stephen Phelps had given me a charge of adrenaline. Maybe the meds that the hospital had prescribed for me were giving me a boost too.
Percy wanted the fish, but Lillian seemed unimpressed. She said, ‘You have a counseling appointment in forty-five minutes.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’ My easy acquiescence softened her. She looked at the redfish again. ‘I didn’t think you liked fishing.’
‘I didn’t used to.’
‘I’ll cook it for lunch,’ she said. ‘But I won’t clean it.’
We went inside to the kitchen, and she gave me a knife, sharper than the one I’d held to Stephen Phelps’s chest. I flipped the redfish on to its back and drew a deep slit from the base of its gills to its anus. I ran my finger through the slit, scraping against the inside of the ribs, pulling the slop of organs and guts on to the counter. Percy danced hungrily at my feet, and my memory flashed to the underbelly of the ship on the Arabian Sea and the slop of bodies, bones, and blood. I forced the picture from my head.
The outpatient psychologist they assigned me at Baptist Hospital had a performer’s shtick, complete with finger-on-the-tabletop drum rolls. We sat in his office, with putting-green-colored carpet, a polished wood table between us, and a floor-to-ceiling window facing over the St Johns River.
He said, ‘What is it you want? What do you really want?’
I thought about the question. ‘A lot of the life we live is about ignoring the obvious truths. I don’t want to live like that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I want the truth.’
‘Even if it’s unbearable? Unlivable? What good is a truth like that?’
‘It’s better to lie to ourselves?’ I said.
‘Absolutely.’ Drum roll.
TWENTY
Lillian
A half-hour after Johnny left for his appointment, I put Percy in the backyard and got into my car. Johnny’s story about Laura Greene had spooked me. Sheneel’s pale face, blue with veins on her forehead and temples and her paper-white hair, hung again in my imagination.
Desire. Like an empty casket. A need in my head, between my legs, in my heart.
I drove out Heckscher Drive to Little Marsh Island. The day had warmed and I kept the windows up and the air conditioner on, though the cool air on my skin made me think of hearses and the futility of resisting bodily corruption. I drove over a narrow bridge, where three black men stood fishing with bamboo poles, and on to Little Marsh Island, past clean stucco houses with neat lawns and gardens, and along a stretch of road with more houses on one side and trees and scrubland on the other. I drove by a newly cut service road, which was blocked with a single chain, and, after the road, a new chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
I realized only when I reached the end of the fence that it closed access to an area just beyond the spot where, according to the first news reports, a man named Peter Lisman had found Sheneel’s body while looking at a fifteen-acre plot of real estate.
I turned the car around and drove back along the fence to the chained-off service road, pulled on to the grassy shoulder, and got out. The road cut around the back of the fenced property, and, as I walked, the sounds of Heckscher Drive fell into a silence broken only by the hum and whine of insects. The road bent and led to an open gate in the fence. Large signs on either side said, No Hunting – No Trespassing. Another large sign said, Douglas Commercial and Industrial D
evelopment Corp. A smaller sign, under the developer sign, said, Phelps Paper Company.
I stared at the Phelps Paper sign, yanked out my phone, and called Daniel. The news reports had said only that Peter Lisman found Sheneel’s body while looking at real estate. When Daniel picked up his phone, I said, ‘Does Peter Lisman work for Phelps Paper?’
‘Who?’
‘I mean it.’
He said nothing, and then, ‘You don’t want this, Lillian.’
‘What have you done?’
‘Nothing. I’ve done nothing.’
‘The Phelpses bought the land where Sheneel’s body was found?’
‘I’ve let things take their course.’
‘That’s doing something too, though, isn’t it?’
‘Leave this alone,’ he said.
‘Christ, Daniel, if you’re mixed up in this—’
‘I’m trying to stay as far from it as I can.’
I had to think about that. ‘That’s a problem.’
‘I’m doing the best I can.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘The best I can.’
‘What have the Phelpses given you?’
‘I didn’t like Johnny saying that. I hate it from you.’
‘What have they given you?’
‘Goodbye, Lillian.’
‘It’s not too late,’ I said, but he had already hung up.
I looked at my watch. Almost four p.m. Johnny would be done with his counseling session and wondering where I was. I looked at the sky – the thin clouds overhead, the sun tipping toward the west. A locust keened high in a pine tree. I walked to the gate. A car had left fresh tracks in the sand. Had it driven in or out? The gate was open. In. The No Hunting – No Trespassing signs said offenders would be fined up to five hundred dollars or sentenced to sixty days in jail. Daniel’s voice sounded in my memory: You don’t want this.
I went through the gate, following the tracks.
The road cut over a small rise and dipped again on to a wide sandy plot that ended in a grass marsh. Overhead, three turkey vultures, tilting their wings side to side, glided in lazy circles. The road bent around a stand of pine trees and opened on to a construction site. The land was scarred – cleared, filled, flattened. Trees that once grew in the center of the site lay broken and splintered on the periphery, their yellow-white insides exposed like shattered bone. Two white construction trailers stood at the far end. An idle bulldozer stood nearby against a bank of live oaks. Pink landscaping cord, stretching between stakes in the ground, laid out the shape of a large building. A green Land Rover, the driver’s door open, stood where the gravel road ended.
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