A Death in Live Oak

by James Grippando

  “Any follow-up on Percy Donovan?” asked Andie.

  “Agents are monitoring both the Ichetucknee and the Santa Fe rivers,” said Ferguson.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Headquarters agrees that the Alliance could have him. But no one believes that they’d hold him anywhere near the site of Jamal Cousin’s lynching. It’s just too stupid.”

  “There are some seriously dumb fucks in this group,” said Andie, thinking of Colt. “It’s worth checking out.”

  “Agreed. But there’s a lot of ground to cover, and the plan is to keep it low-key. The last thing we need is a local SWAT unit going door-to-door, trying to find a needle in a haystack. That’s a recipe for a dead hostage.”

  A splash in the pond startled Andie. A huge bullfrog had narrowly escaped, and a hungry gator slithered through the reeds to find breakfast elsewhere.

  “What about the Croc that the black fraternity found on the riverbank?”

  “What about it?” asked Ferguson.

  “Is it being sent to our lab to see if it matches the Croc found near Jamal Cousin’s body?”

  “That’s between the state attorney and the regional crime lab,” said Ferguson. “The forensic team is on it. Not our turf.”

  “I can confirm that the Alliance was in that general area right before the Croc was found. They could have planted it.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “To muddy the waters and make it impossible to prosecute anyone for the murder of Jamal Cousin.”

  “That’s not really our focus,” said Ferguson.

  “Maybe it should be,” said Andie. “Manufacturing evidence to disrupt the prosecution of a racially motivated hate crime would be one more piece of evidence that the Aryan National Alliance is nothing but a criminal enterprise. Don’t you think?”

  His gaze turned toward the lake. The first sign of morning light was just a glimmer on the flat water. “You really want to know what I think?” asked Ferguson.

  “I do,” said Andie.

  “If I were you, I’d take a step back and remind myself what we’re really here for. More and more, the way you see things, the way you hear things, is being colored by how it affects your husband’s case. That’s what I think.”

  Andie couldn’t have disagreed more, but it wasn’t the time or the place to have that battle. “Thanks for being honest,” she said.

  He rose and started back toward the tent. Andie didn’t follow.

  “You’re welcome,” said Ferguson.

  CHAPTER 62

  Cynthia rode in the passenger seat as Virginia drove down the highway at a steady twenty-miles-per-hour below the posted speed limit. Virginia was a careful driver, but it was Cynthia who refused to believe the engineers in Detroit who insisted that it was safe to drive any faster.

  Cynthia’s mind was a photo album. She could easily recall a time when this part of Live Oak, beyond the old railroad junction that dated back to the Civil War, was the outskirts of town. Much had changed since she was a girl. Where the only sign of civilization had been a clunky old mailbox at the end of a white-sand road there now stood a gas station or a fast-food restaurant. Mobile homes dotted the pastures that had once been covered in slash pines and palmettos. Ranch-style homes—the kind that Cynthia called “concrete shoe boxes”—had replaced horse farms. Live Oak hadn’t seen the uncontrolled suburban sprawl of coastal areas, but the life was being choked out of old Florida nonetheless.

  Not everything about old Florida, however, was better.

  “Turn here,” said Cynthia, pointing.

  The road didn’t have a name, but Cynthia was almost certain that they were going in the right direction. The area had changed a lot, she supposed. She couldn’t really say for sure. It was the first time in her life that she’d visited the place where Willie James Howard had grown up—the actual road where his house had stood.

  “Stop here,” said Cynthia.

  Virginia pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road and stopped. “My granddaddy grew up not far from here,” she said.

  Cynthia wasn’t surprised. This entire area had been “colored” during Jim Crow. “Can you help me get out, please?”

  Virginia climbed out from behind the wheel, walked around to the passenger side, and helped Cynthia out of the car. Sunrise was just moments away, and the dew-covered greenery glistened in the predawn glow. A cool breeze greeted them as they walked to the edge of the lot and stopped. Before them was a broken gate. It was in terrible disrepair and looked ready to fall over. The walkway beyond the gate was overgrown with weeds. It led to nowhere. The house that had once stood was gone.

  “Did you know the folks who lived here?” asked Virginia.

  Cynthia held her gaze, trying to imagine what the house might have been like. “Just the boy,” she said.

  Virginia had no follow-up, as if she knew better than to ask a ninety-year-old white woman how she had known a black boy from this part of town.

  Cynthia lowered her eyes and then looked at Virginia. “We can go now,” she said.

  “Home?”

  “No. Take me to the Bond-Howell Lumber Company, please.”

  Virginia flashed confusion, then concern, as if the old woman’s mind were going. “Oh, Miz Cynthia, that old sawmill has been gone for years.”

  Cynthia’s expression turned very serious. “Then take me to where it used to be.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She helped Cynthia back into the car, then climbed behind the wheel and closed the door. The ignition fired, their car pulled away, and a trail of dust sparkled in the first burst of sunshine on the horizon.

  Percy guessed it was his fifth day of captivity. He couldn’t be sure. The passage of time was an elusive concept when living in darkness, chained to a wall. Percy’s initial benchmark had been meals, but feeding time seemed random, and it was the same bologna sandwich whether it was breakfast, lunch, or dinner. He wasn’t even sure that he was eating more than once or twice a day. Perhaps the confusion was intentional, his captors’ effort to throw off his internal clock. His most reliable indicator of a new day had become a bowel movement in the disgusting bucket that was constantly within reach. At least they’d taken away the dead rat.

  The door opened, and the light switched on. Percy shielded his eyes from the assault. The longer he remained in the windowless shed, the longer it took his pupils to adjust to the sudden brightness that signaled the return of his captor.

  “Bath time,” the man said.

  Percy was suddenly hit with a blast of ice-cold water from a hose, which was a complete break from the routine. It wasn’t exactly a water cannon, but Percy instinctively recoiled against the wall, his mind flashing with the image of civil rights marchers knocked off their feet by firefighters.

  “Hold still!” the man shouted, and the streaming water kept coming. It soaked Percy from head to foot and swept away the mess on the floor and around the metal bucket. Then it stopped.

  “Better?” the man asked.

  Percy looked up, dripping wet. It actually was better, relatively speaking, at least temporarily. But it was hard to think of being hosed down like a dog as an improvement. Percy didn’t answer.

  His captor stepped toward him. It was a new guy. He’d replaced the man who’d rushed into the shed without his ski mask and shot the rat. Maybe these idiots hoped that if Percy heard another man’s voice, studied another man’s frame, he would forget the face of his first captor. Percy would never forget that lightning bolt tattoo.

  He threw Percy a blanket. “Don’t want you to catch cold,” he said, and the sarcasm came through.

  Percy fumbled with the chains but managed to wrap the blanket around his shoulders.

  “Got some good news,” the man said. “The FBI is out searching for you.”

  Percy wasn’t sure if he was being messed with. “That is good news.”

  “Oh, you bet it is.” He bent down, getting right in Percy’s face, two pierc
ing blue pools staring out through the eyeholes of the ski mask. “It changes everything. With the FBI crawling around, we may need you as a hostage. So we’re keeping you alive. For now. How’s that sound, Emmett?”

  “My name’s not Emmett.”

  “Might as well be.” He tossed a wrapped sandwich into Percy’s lap, still staring. Then he rose slowly, towering over his hostage. Percy watched as he turned and walked to the door.

  “Very, very lucky, Emmett.”

  The light switched off and his captor left the shed, leaving Percy in the darkness.

  CHAPTER 63

  The sun was a bright yellow ball between the clouds and treetops as Cynthia and Virginia reached the Suwannee River, just a few miles northeast of Live Oak. Virginia parked the car at Suwannee Springs and helped Cynthia out.

  Cynthia hadn’t been to the springs since childhood. It was a popular spot for picnicking and swimming on a hot summer day. The main spring—there were at least six in all, by Cynthia’s recollection—was within the rock walls of a nineteenth-century bathhouse. Clear, yellow-greenish water pooled behind the wall and spilled out through an opening at the base over limestone boulders into the tannic Suwannee River. Folks used to claim that the spring waters could cure just about any ailment.

  Cynthia felt in need of a little healing, but of a different sort.

  “This way,” said Cynthia.

  They followed the path around the wall. The exposed limestone underfoot was smooth where thousands of visitors had walked for more than a century. The path led to a cluster of boulders where spring water flowed from the bathhouse. The rocks formed a ledge, and it was the closest thing in the area to a waterside cliff. Cynthia couldn’t count the number of times she and her friends had jumped from these boulders at the river’s edge and disappeared into the dark depths of the great Suwannee.

  Cynthia gazed out toward the river. The long southwesterly journey to the Gulf of Mexico was a slow one. Sometimes, especially if Cynthia looked way downriver, the water almost seemed motionless. But it was always moving, ebbing and flowing. There was no way to stop it. Definitely no way for Cynthia to stop it—any more than she could erase the horror of what had happened at that very place, nearly a lifetime ago, east of Suwannee Springs.

  Cindy was in the living room helping her mother remove the decorations from a dried-out Christmas tree. “Let’s Start the New Year Right”—the flip side of Bing Crosby and the Ken Darby Singers’ “White Christmas”—was spinning at 78 rpm on the Victrola. The afternoon had seen only one casualty, a glass angel that slipped from Cindy’s hand and shattered on the floor.

  “Careful, honey,” her mother said, as Cindy reached for an ornament on one of the higher branches. “Get the step stool.”

  Cindy went to the kitchen. Her father entered suddenly through the back door, startling her. Sunday afternoons were usually his time for reading the newspaper in the recliner.

  “Where were you, Daddy?”

  “Just went over to visit with the Judge.”

  The Judge had hung up his black robe to enter private practice sometime before the war, but years on the bench made him the most prominent lawyer in Suwannee County, and out of respect everyone still called him “Judge.” His daughter was a year behind Cindy at the high school.

  “Mama and I are taking down the tree.”

  He glanced toward the living room. Cindy thought the expression on his face was a bit strange. Before she could ask what was wrong, her mother entered the kitchen.

  “Young lady, where’s that step stool I asked you to get?”

  “Mary, I need a minute with Cindy.”

  Her mother backed away, and Cindy had the unsettling notion that she was the only person in the room who didn’t know what this was about.

  “I’ll be upstairs,” her mother said.

  Cindy’s father led her to the kitchen table and sat her down. He stood, resting his hands atop the back of his chair, leaning forward just slightly as he spoke.

  “I have some sad news,” he said.

  Cindy braced herself. “Sad?”

  “Something terrible happened, honey. We picked up Willie James from his house this morning and drove over to the sawmill, where his father works. Mr. Howard is a decent man. I explained to him what happened—what his son wrote to you.”

  “Daddy, why?”

  “Just listen to me. Mr. Howard fully agreed that Willie James deserved a good whippin’.”

  Cindy lowered her head, speaking into the table. “You whipped Willie James?”

  “No, of course not. I wouldn’t lay a hand on another man’s child. His daddy and I agreed that he would give his boy some proper discipline.”

  She looked up at her father. “Did he do it?”

  “Well, what we did was drive to the river, where his daddy could find a switch.”

  “He couldn’t find a stick at a sawmill?”

  “Don’t sass me,” her father said in a stern voice. “I wasn’t going to make the man whip his own son in front of everybody he worked with.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “So his daddy whipped him down by the river?”

  “That was the idea. But see, Willie James got all defiant. He started jumping around and pushing back, sayin’ no one could whip him, not even his own father. So we tied his ankles and his hands, just to keep him under control.”

  Cindy said nothing, but she was starting to shake inside.

  “Well, wouldn’t you know?” he said. “That boy just got even more defiant. Started cussin’ like the devil himself had taken over him. And then . . .”

  “What happened?”

  “Willie James jumped in the river.”

  “Is he—”

  “He drowned.”

  “No!” she shrieked.

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “What? How?”

  “I told you how. I know it might be hard for you to understand, but this is really all for the good.”

  “Good?” she asked, louder than intended. “How is it good that a boy drowned?”

  Her father came around from behind his chair and took a seat at the table, looking Cindy straight in the eye. “You’re young, honey. You don’t know those people the way I do.”

  “What are you talking about? You don’t know them.”

  “Yes, I do. I will tell you something, and I swear it is God’s honest truth. When that boy jumped in the river, his father just stood there. Just stood there. The man didn’t even try to help his own son.”

  Cindy could barely comprehend. “That’s . . . terrible.”

  Her father shook his head. “That’s coloreds, honey. They just ain’t like us.”

  Spring water splashed on the limestone boulders at Cynthia’s feet. She wiped away a tear from her cheek.

  “Are you crying, Miz Cynthia?” Virginia asked.

  She dabbed away another tear with her hanky. “I’m all right.”

  “Let’s sit down and rest,” said Virginia, gesturing toward the bench near the old bathhouse.

  “I’m fine right here,” Cynthia said firmly. “I just need another minute.”

  Virginia took hold at the crook of Cynthia’s elbow. “All right, Missy. I got you. But be careful, now. You know I can’t swim.”

  Neither could Willie James.

  Cynthia gazed out across the river. “There’s no shame in dying. Is there, Virginia?”

  “We all have our homegoing sometime,” she said.

  “It’s so unfair, the way some people go out so young. But for others, life goes on. And on. And on. It can be a horrible thing, living long after someone else dies. When you know it was your fault.”

  “Oh, don’t talk like that,” said Virginia. “Mr. Porter was a stubborn fool. No sixty-five-year-old man with a heart condition should be out mowing the lawn when it’s ninety-eight degrees in the shade. You warned him. It’s not your fault he died.”

  Cynthia sighed. She could have explained, but she didn’t have the energy. She had str
ength enough to do just one more thing.

  “Virginia, could you bring me my pocketbook, please? It’s on the bench over there.”

  A check over the shoulder diverted Virginia’s attention for a split second. “I think you left it in—”

  Cynthia jerked her arm away from Virginia’s grasp and threw herself forward—not far, but far enough. Her shins scraped the limestone as she went over the ledge headfirst.

  “Miz Cynthia!”

  The river was like ice water, but it felt strangely refreshing, cleansing, and exhilarating—the way it had so many years earlier when Cynthia and her childhood friends would swing from a rope, enter with a splash, and buoy back up with screams of delight. This time, Cynthia didn’t even try to surface—but she must have for a moment, because she heard Virginia’s voice one last time.

  “Miz Cynthia, my God!”

  The current carried Cynthia along the steep, rocky ledge and around the bend. The last thing she saw was the blur of sunshine in the morning, as she peered up through the clear, black water of the Suwannee River and its secrets.

  CHAPTER 64

  Jack took Righley to breakfast at the Dixie Grill. Theo had been thinking about the biscuits since their last visit, so he and Shelly joined them. It was almost nine thirty before a table opened and the hostess seated them. By then the restaurant, like all of Live Oak, was abuzz with the news about “poor ol’ Mrs. Porter.”

  It amazed Jack what a child could pick up in the clamor of a crowded restaurant.