Running From Mercy

by Terra Little

  Jasper saw the frown on her face and cackled knowingly. “Viceroy’s too good for you now? I ‘spose you used to smoking rich folks’ cigarettes, way out in Caleefornia and all.” He took his time lighting another cigarette, staring at her through the smoke. “How you holding up?”

  “Not too good. I still can’t believe it, you know?”

  He nodded slowly. “Ya’ll was like two sides of a coin, you and Paris. Couldn’t see one without the other, ‘less you was up to no good. Then you did your dirt by yourself.”

  “I did do some dirt, didn’t I?” It was hardly a question. More like the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. “The town was probably glad to see me go.”

  “Not everybody.” He picked up an ashtray from an end table and held it out to her. “Put that thang out, gal. You ain’t smoking it no way.”

  “I want to see her, Jasper,” Pam blurted out. She put the cigarette out and turned begging eyes on him.

  “Thought you might,” Jasper said and went in search of his keys.

  Alone in the front room of his apartment, Pam took her time looking around. He lived in three rooms over his funeral home, and all these years later, his apartment still looked the same. There was an old floral print sofa and chair, scarred tables, and outdated accessories. The only new additions appeared to be a plush recliner in one corner and a large-screen television. The smell of Old Spice and cigarette smoke clung to the air, strong as ever.

  Her eyes fell on the couch and skidded away just as quickly. When she started working for Jasper he’d given her a key that unlocked the funeral home’s main door, in case she needed to get in and he wasn’t around. Months later, on a fluke, she discovered that the key also opened the back door to his apartment, just off the kitchen. She wondered if he had ever figured out that she’d been inside his apartment more times than she let on. Aside from being uncomfortable to the ninth degree, that couch knew more than a few of her secrets.

  “Here we go,” he said, coming back into the room. He motioned for her to follow him through the kitchen and down the back stairs.

  Pam held her breath as she waited for Jasper to unlock the door to the room where Paris was being kept. Inside, it was nearly freezing cold and the odor of embalming fluid was heavy in the air. She was relieved to see that Paris was alone, already in the casket

  Chad had dressed her in a soft pink dress, one Pam had ordered and shipped only hours after Nikki’s frantic call the day before. It was amazing how fast money could make things happen.

  She approached the casket slowly, starting violently when Jasper turned on a table lamp behind her. The light allowed her to gaze fully into Paris’s slack face, and when she did, a tortured moan rose from her throat. She wasn’t aware of Jasper setting the keys on a nearby table and backing out of the room. He mumbled something about her taking all the time she needed and then locking up when she was done, and then he was gone.

  She pulled a chair up next to Paris and sat down wearily. How can she be gone? Pam wondered for the hundredth time.

  TWO

  Chad Greene stood over his wife’s casket and wondered if he had taken leave of his senses during the period of time between that very moment and the day before. Paris looked the same, still peaceful and serene, despite the jarring circumstances of her death, but something was different.

  Beside him, his daughter was staggering and gripping at him for balance, and his arm shot out reflexively to steady her and bring her closer to his side. She burrowed in, slipping her arms inside his suit jacket and pressing her face into his shirt, and he continued to stare at the woman he had married fifteen years ago and was about to bury today.

  Her hair was different, that much was obvious. Just yesterday he’d instructed Glena, the funeral home’s cosmetologist, to arrange Paris’s hair in a neat bun at the crown of her head. Other than at bedtime, when she’d combed her hair out and pulled it into one thick braid that hung down her back, Paris never fussed with her hair. The bun was simple and low maintenance, she said. So he had given explicit instructions for his wife’s hair to be arranged in a bun, and he’d seen it for himself just yesterday. Glena had even gone so far as to arrange little sprigs of baby’s breath around the base of the bun, and the overall effect had been lovely.

  The baby’s breath was gone now, and in its own way, so was the bun. It was looser and slightly tilted to one side. Livelier. Strands of hair framed his wife’s face and rested against her forehead, giving her a gently tousled appearance, as if she had been running around all day and was just now stopping to rest.

  Then there was Paris’s makeup to consider. She hadn’t bothered with it since before she’d graduated from college, but lipstick was smoothed onto her lips now and blush was visible along her cheekbones. In his mind’s eye, he saw her as she had looked when he’d first decided to marry her.

  A lump formed in Chad’s throat as he studied his wife. They’d shared fifteen years of life together—fifteen good years—and even if he was never able to give her all of his heart, she had possessed part of it. He’d never known anyone as selfless and loving, hadn’t believed anyone so genuinely good existed until Paris. Her generosity and unflagging optimism was what had initially drawn him to her, and then he’d grown to love her for her strength and drive to overcome the obstacles in her life. Theirs was never a passionate love, but it was strong enough that he sincerely mourned the loss of her.

  “She looks so pretty,” Nikki whispered for her father’s ears only. Now that the service was over she and her father were the only ones standing at her mother’s casket, and she was glad for the solitude. She hadn’t been able to linger the way she wanted to during the viewing portion of the service. “I can’t believe how pretty she looks. Did you tell them to put the makeup on?”

  “No,” Chad shook his head. He studied the lipstick again and felt himself go cold all over. Suddenly he remembered the name of the vivid shade, he heard himself commenting on it a long time ago and then he heard a voice telling him it was called Glazed Raspberry. He saw it in motion as familiar lips moved in one watery memory after another. He should’ve noticed it right away, because God knew he’d seen it enough, though not on Paris’s lips.

  He closed his eyes and then opened them back up on Paris’s hands. Two seconds later, his breath was locking up in his throat and Nikki was patting him on his back like she thought he might be choking. The concerned expression on her face was so like her mother’s he had to look away from her until he got himself under control. He didn’t know what he’d do if he looked around the sanctuary and saw her, couldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t lose his mind if he called her name and she answered. So, he kept his eyes lowered and let himself be led back to the front pew, where he sat like a statue while the casket was readied for transport. Doing anything else was liable to result in there being two funerals instead of just the one, and he figured the town had had enough excitement for one day.

  She’s here, Chad thought numbly. Pam is here.

  It occurred to him to share his discovery with Nikki. He was sure she would be relieved to know her aunt was near. She’d been crying over Pam’s lack of presence almost as much as her mother’s, and she would want to know. But, he couldn’t bring himself to push the words past his lips just yet.

  Chad scrubbed his hands across his face and admitted to himself that he wanted to sit with the knowledge a little while longer. As soon as his racing heart calmed down, he would share.

  Nikki saw her first. She spied her aunt standing at the side of the road talking to Gillian and broke away from her father’s embrace to go to her. A few minutes ago, Chad had mentioned that Pam was at the church, and Nikki had been keeping her eyes open for her ever since.

  Nikki raced across the cemetery, unmindful of the graves she trampled over, and stopped less than a foot away from her aunt. With her back to the gravesite, Pam was unaware she and Gillian had company until the other woman’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. She barely had time
to pivot and then her arms were full of heaving teenage flesh. Over her niece’s head, her eyes met Gillian’s.

  “I’ll call you,” Gillian said and squeezed Pam’s shoulder one last time before climbing into her rental car and slowly driving off.

  Pam watched the car until it disappeared around a curve, then she pushed her face into Nikki’s soft curls. The girl was holding on for dear life, stealing her breath, but she returned the embrace because she needed it just as much.

  “There must be a boy in the picture if you’re curling your hair.” Pam set Nikki away from her gently and pushed her fingers into her hair, careful not to rearrange the style. “Three months ago you were vowing to stick with a ponytail until you were eighty years old.”

  “You had your hair like this on the BET Awards,” Nikki said. “I wanted it like yours.” Before she knew what was happening, Nikki reached out and nipped the dark sunglasses from their perch on Pam’s nose.

  “If you knew how badly I need those, you’d give them back to me right now.” The indulgent smile on her face took some of the sting out of her voice. She felt naked without the oversized, round, black glasses on because they allowed her to see out and no one to see in. Without them, she was laid bare for the world to stare at, and it was unnerving.

  Right now the world consisted of Mercy, Georgia and its residents. It seemed that everyone who was anyone had turned out for Paris Greene’s funeral. Not that that was unusual, Pam reminded herself. Paris was well loved and highly regarded, starting way back when, when she was a quiet and perfectly polite girl. Never a moment’s trouble, Paris was. She had cemented her standing in Mercy when, after college, she returned to put her social work degree to use in the children’s home where they’d grown up. She and Chad had made a good home here and raised a good kid.

  “They’re all here,” she said.

  “A lot of people loved Mom.”

  Pam brought her eyes away from the crowd at the gravesite and looked at Nikki solemnly. At seventeen, she was taller than Pam by at least three inches and shockingly thin. She had claimed her father’s cocoa-brown complexion and his height, but everything else was her mother’s, right down to her long, slender fingers. Her hair was long, silky with natural waves, and inky black. She had eyes a make-up artist would fawn over, deep-set and wide beneath thick, naturally arched brows. And they were green, just like her mother’s and Pam’s were.

  A black child with green eyes, a nurse had exclaimed minutes after Nikki was born. She was a beautiful baby. Smooth and pecan-brown with perfectly symmetrical features, big-eyed and nosy right from the start. The nurse had speculated that her eyes would change in time, and then she’d noticed that both the child’s mother and aunt were green-eyed, so change was not likely. If anything, Nikki’s eyes were a more intense shade of green than her predecessors’ were.

  “Not nearly as much as we did, though. I wanted to stop breathing when your dad called me. I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner, Nikki. I should’ve been here for you, but I couldn’t . . .” Her voice trailed off as tears filled her eyes.

  “You and Mom were best friends,” Nikki said. “I figured you were spazzing out, Aunt Pam. It’s okay. They say it’s different with twins.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Dad, for one. He said you and Mom were like two halves of a whole when you were kids. He knew you’d come, said we just had to wait until you could handle it. I’m glad you sent the dress, though.”

  “Now do you see why I need the glasses?” Pam wiped at tears and grinned. She glanced back into the crowd and found Chad deep in the thick of it, talking with an elderly white woman who was dressed in black from head to toe. She instantly recognized the woman as Moira Tobias and smiled fondly.

  Nikki noted the direction of her aunt’s gaze and touched her arm softly. “Are you ready to go over there, Aunt Pam?”

  “I have to be, don’t I?” She slid an arm around Nikki’s waist and leaned in. “Will you stay close?”

  “I promise,” Nikki said and began leading her aunt across the grass.

  Pam slipped the dark glasses back over her eyes and allowed herself to be led.

  Miles Dixon wore dark glasses of his own, and behind them his eyes widened as he caught sight of Pamela Mayes coming across the grass. He’d been in Mercy, Georgia since he learned of Paris Greene’s tragic death last Tuesday, hoping for the chance to orchestrate a meeting with Pam. Maybe he’d casually run into her in the local grocery store or just happen to be walking down the street when she came outdoors. But apparently her propensity toward reclusiveness extended over into her personal life as much as it did her professional life, because this was his first time setting eyes on her.

  On occasion over the years, he’d looked up and found himself in the same room with her, at an industry function where she’d shown her face and then slipped away quietly and quickly. He was as familiar with the force of her presence and the sultriness of her voice as her legions of fans, but that’s where his association ended. Many times he had wanted to simply walk up to her and introduce himself, but she seemed to always be in the company of towering, heinous-looking bodyguards, and he’d had no desire to try his hand at crashing the gates. He was nothing if not patient.

  Miles had bided his time, waited her out, and now here she was. The prodigal daughter returns, he thought as he watched awareness of her presence ripple through the crowd. These were people she’d grown up with and around, and yet they appeared to be star struck. Even as they genuinely mourned the loss of one of their own, they stared at Pam as if they didn’t know who she was. He saw teenagers being tapped out of their trances by scowling parents, elderly ladies bending their heads together to gossip, and old men checking their drooling expressions and straightening their ties.

  And he saw that she was aware of it all. It was there in the stiffness of her spine, the subtle flaring of her nostrils as she bowed her head to pray, the way she gripped the teenager’s hand. Resentment seeped from her pores the same way an expensive fragrance might. Pam, who was comfortable onstage with thousands of fans cheering and chanting to her, who always stopped to sign autographs, even if it meant pushing her food away in a restaurant or cutting her leisure time in half, was uncomfortable.

  Miles had started his career as a journalist almost twenty years ago, when he’d taken a part-time job as a second-string metro news reporter. His duties had mainly consisted of picking up the slack where the lead reporter left off and fetching coffee, but periodically, he was thrown a bone and allowed to cover a story with some substance to it. It was during one of those times that he’d aspired to make a name for himself. His chance finally came when the lead journalist was stranded out of the country on the same day as a horrific bombing. A headline-grabbing story emerged, and with the lead journalist out of his way, he grabbed a young, similarly aspiring photographer by the collar and set off to write a kick-ass story.

  Barely a year later, Miles was writing his own feature stories and soaking up as much of the business as he could. Then somewhere along the way he developed a fascination with ghostwriting books, mostly biographies and autobiographies, and discovered he had a knack for the undertaking. No one was especially surprised when he scraped up the capital to purchase a small, low circulation newspaper and proceeded to increase the paper’s circulation three-fold. By the time he’d purchased a fledgling publishing company and breathed new life into it, his reputation for being tenacious, shrewd, and sometimes ruthless had preceded him, and he couldn’t have described himself better.

  He was at a point in his life where he was used to doing just about anything he damn well pleased, and he was imminently pleased with the prospect of writing Pamela Mayes’s autobiography. Given her considerable fame as a songstress, Miles was certain that he’d have a bestseller on his hands. She was mysterious and withdrawn; she never granted interviews, and had a hard and fast rule of never addressing the personal questions that were frequently thrown her way. To Miles, all that added up
to a woman with secrets.

  As he strolled around town his first few days in Mercy, he’d heard many of the old-timers talking about Paris Greene and what a good, upstanding person she was. He didn’t doubt that the woman would be truly missed. Pam, on the other hand—and here the voices lowered and turned sly—was another matter altogether. Some wondered if she would come, while others turned toward the horizon, eagerly awaiting her arrival as if she would suddenly materialize from thin air like a flying superhero. Where Pamela Mayes was concerned, the climate was decidedly cooler. He’d heard the word scandal more than a few times. Whore, too, which had raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  His loosely knit plan to print the story of a struggling artist-turned-celebrated-vocalist was rapidly transforming itself into a quest to uncover the truth about a woman the world only thought it knew. There’s a story here, Miles told himself. He would bet the whole of his media conglomerate on it. He only needed to figure out a way to get Pamela Mayes to open up and tell him all about it.

  As Miles watched Pam from behind his dark glasses, he wished he could read minds. His job would be so much easier if he could.

  THREE

  Chad closed the door on the last of the mourners and sent the deadbolt sliding home gratefully. They were all well meaning, and he could see that they were sincere when they offered to help with whatever needed to be done, but he was glad to finally be able to breathe in peace. Whatever tasks lay ahead, he’d deal with them when the time came. But that was the future and this was now, and right now he needed to be alone with his thoughts.

  Apparently, Nikki had felt the same way, because she pled exhaustion after barely an hour of having her hand pressed and her back patted and fled to the safety of her room. He was left alone to wade through clouds of high-spirited perfume and to stand in obligatory silence on the back patio while the men smoked cigars and thought they were offering words of comfort. He’d never quite understood the ritual of returning to the grieving family’s home after a funeral. At a time when people would most want to rest and recuperate, they were forced to make smalltalk and to keep up a façade of emotional well-being. That in itself was exhausting; never mind the clean up after everyone left.