by Lori Roy
“Indeed,” Tillie said, his heart pumping hard and fast in his chest. “God rest.”
Tillie was flanked by Robert on one side and Timmy on the other. Maybe they both knew those watches were laid out in Tillie’s shop, or maybe neither of them did. Maybe Natalie Sharon was fooling the both of them. And just as Tillie thought Natalie’s name, she grabbed on to Tim and whisked him away. As she led him across the aisle, she looked back at Tillie and ever so slightly shook her head.
“Ain’t she a lovely girl, Tillie?” Robert said.
“Pardon?” Tillie said, trying to figure why Natalie shook her head at him.
“The Coulter girl,” Robert said. “I think she and Tim would get on good together.”
Tillie shook his head, slow at first and then faster. “Imogene ain’t a real Coulter.”
He didn’t say it with any mind toward disrespecting the dead. Everyone knew Edison Coulter wasn’t Imogene’s real daddy, though folks mostly didn’t talk about it. Tillie said it because he knew Robert was really after the Simmons bloodline, which came from Imogene’s mama, and that he was tempted by the idea of Tim being father to the next generation. Not only was the Simmons name the last remaining tie to the rebirth of something that was sacred to men like Tim and Robert Robithan, but their very town was named for a Simmons.
“Besides,” Tillie said, “Timmy is too old for Imogene, don’t you think? And he goes with Natalie Sharon, don’t he?”
Robert made a face as if Natalie’s name tasted sour to him. “I know Imogene ain’t a Coulter, but Coulter ain’t the name that counts. Lottie Rose, she’s Imogene’s real mama, yes? That’s the Simmons side of the family, and the Simmons name is what matters. Thought you might like the idea, knowing a good man was looking after her.”
Tillie spent the rest of the funeral trying to figure why Natalie had shaken her head at him and how in God’s name he was going to convince Robert Robithan that Imogene was no good for his son. Dang it all, nothing had gone right since Tillie let those watches into his store, likely because letting those watches in was like letting the Klan back in. The fear Tillie felt when he first left the Knights of the Southern Georgia Order had faded over the years, just as the Klan had faded. But recent days were feeling more and more like days from long ago, and Tillie’s fear had returned. First thing tomorrow, he would get rid of them watches one way or another, but for tonight, he’d make sure they were locked up tight.
Taking one last look to make sure no one has followed him from his car to the shop’s back door, Tillie makes his way inside. In the dark showroom, he takes long, slow steps so he won’t bump a shin or knock Mrs. Tillie’s favorite milk glass from the shelves. He could take the watches home with him or put them in the safe right here in the shop. At the cabinet, he feels for the small lock, squints, and leans close so he can see. The lock pops open. He lifts the glass top, and as he leans in again so he can get a good look, he drops his key. The velvet-lined display case is empty.
Chapter 6
BETH
Before
My eyes are closed. If I can’t see him, he isn’t real. But I can’t stop the sound of him or the smell of him. One big boot hits the floor and then another, and each time one lands, it’s louder than the last. He’s getting closer. He is real. The floor shakes, and I close my eyes tighter, pinch them hard until silver specks swim in the darkness behind my lids. The smell of him grows stronger too. Spicy and thick and greasy because he was carrying pizza, and that smell presses down on me. I curl myself up, make myself as small as I can, so small I’ll disappear into nothing, maybe float out into the dark solar system we’re learning about in school.
The footsteps stop. No more heavy boots rattling the floors. It’s quiet like before he came. Only the sound of the TV. A commercial is playing. I hold my breath so my ears will work better, but I still hear air rushing in and out. It’s his air, not mine, but I won’t take another breath, not until the sound stops. There is the smell of him too. It’s still here, hanging right over me. Something wraps around my arms and I suck in a breath and I scream. My arms and legs take off on their own. I’m kicking and hitting and squirming, but then his arms wrap all the way around me. His smell burns my throat and nose. He squeezes so I can’t kick. I can’t move at all. And he carries me out the door.
Chapter 7
IMOGENE
Today
After first pushing open the iron cattle gate that Eddie and Daddy had kept up with even though they hadn’t had cattle in years, Imogene drives a quarter mile over a gutted dirt road that leads from Mama’s place to the old caretaker’s house. Mama’s favorite strategy for dealing with Imogene these past few years has been to keep her busy with chores or favors, and this is another one of those times. Imogene’s latest career was partly Mama’s idea too. After her favorite necklace, a family heirloom, was stolen a few years back and never recovered, Mama suggested Imogene take up insurance investigation. It was a little like being a lawyer, Mama said, the thing Imogene had hoped to be before her world collapsed.
As Imogene nears the old house, she has to guess where the drive is because the weeds have run it over. She rolls to a stop, the car lurching when she brakes too hard, throws it into park, and stares up at the front door where Grandpa Simmons lived after Mama married Edison Coulter. Like the main house, the old caretaker’s house has clapboard siding, but its slats bow and buckle from lack of care. The narrow porch that runs the length of the house is sinking, along with the pitched roof above it, and while all the lower windows have been boarded over, the second-story windows have not and the glass in them looks almost black.
It’s just dark enough that the headlights throw a soft glow on the oaks that have taken over since she was last down here. She’d been in high school, nearly ten years ago, and had come here with Russell, sat on those steps, and talked about becoming a lawyer one day and moving off to Atlanta. Russell, a few years older, had already graduated and was rehabbing houses. There were plenty of old homes to be saved in Atlanta, so they could go together, he said, but that wasn’t really what he wanted. He loved the old homes only found in small towns like Simmonsville, homes that hadn’t been touched in fifty years, that still had original tile, and doors that hung from rusty hardware. Despite the dreams they shared on those steps, they’d both always known they’d say good-bye as soon as Imogene graduated from college. While Russell’s life was in Simmonsville, the history that hung over Imogene’s house and family and even the town was too heavy for her.
But one year into college, long before Imogene could graduate and go off to law school, she turned up pregnant. Edison Coulter would have gladly let her move away, but he wouldn’t have her giving birth to a bastard child under the name of Coulter. She wasn’t happy about it in the beginning, being pregnant, but then Russell proposed, swore he wanted to. He said there wasn’t another person on earth he could love like he loved Imogene, and whoever was growing inside of her, well, Russell loved him or her too. He had a house already picked out for them. Original woodwork. Hard pine floors. He’d fix it up, he said. Spend his nights and weekends doing it. Imogene had always loved Russell, in truth since she was just a girl, yet she’d feared and hated her family’s history and its present more. But Russell’s passion and excitement proved contagious, and they gave Imogene faith. They gave her room enough to breathe and to love Russell in a way he deserved. She began to believe she could build a life in Simmonsville out from under Ed Coulter and the Knights of the Southern Georgia Order. She said yes to Russell, and they were married.
Mama says Imogene has to forgive herself for not being happy like Russell was in the beginning. She was, after all, happy soon enough, well before Vaughn was born. When she wasn’t in class or studying, she helped with renovating their home—a hundred-year-old three-bedroom craftsman with a fenced backyard. After the accident that killed Russell and Vaughn, Jo Lynne moved Imogene out of the house she shared with them and into an apartment she’d had freshly painted and fully
furnished. Imogene has never been back to the house she lived in with Russell and Vaughn, has never even driven past, and she never will. Another young family moved in, which is as much as Imogene ever wanted to know about the new owners. Mama says if Imogene can’t forgive herself for how she felt in the beginning, she’ll never be right again.
Shaking her head in hopes of knocking loose the memories, Imogene throws open the car door and grabs her flashlight from the glove box, something she finds handy when running down her disability cases, leaves on the headlights, and steps outside. Giant reeds, thick clumps of them, grow like wheat along the front of the house and around the west side as far as the headlights reach. They rattle like the wooden chimes hanging on Mama’s front porch.
If Daddy did run that wire down here, it’ll likely come up out of the ground west of the house. Not quite needing the flashlight yet, though the orange sky is slowly melting into gray and she’ll need it soon, she tucks it in her back pocket. Then, holding her arms crossed over her chest like a cattle guard, she shoulders a path through the hollow reeds that tower over her. Kicking and stomping, mostly to scare off whatever might be slithering underfoot, she cuts a path all the way to the far end of the house, and on her way back, she stumbles, falls forward onto her knees and then onto her bare hands.
Digging through the broken, mushy reeds that drip slime, she feels around until she finds the wire and then follows it to the house. Standing, she tugs back on the stocking cap one of the broken reeds snatched from her head, switches on her flashlight, and runs it along the stacked-stone foundation. The white stones are edged at their grout lines in mold and moss. Every few feet, the wire is anchored to the stones by a metal bracket. Running her fingers over them, one after another, she can feel that some are old and rusted and others are smooth still, newer. Imogene’s hopes that Edison Coulter’s indiscretions were solidly in the distant past dwindle. Whatever he’d been up to down here, he’d been keeping up on the maintenance of it.
Her daddy, the only daddy she’s ever known, likely hadn’t considered who would clean up his mess after he died. He’d have had to consider his own mortality to do that, and men like Edison Coulter, men who are worshipped, idolized, revered even, don’t bother with thoughts of mortality.
After clearing away a few feet of reeds from the foundation, Imogene reaches the first of the narrow basement windows. She’d been looking for the wire to snake its way up the house and disappear into a first-story window. But instead, it disappears into the basement. Bracing herself with one hand to the side of the house, the loose paint flaking as she leans there, Imogene squats to the window. It sits just above ground level and has been boarded over with a sheet of plywood. She runs her flashlight along its edges, trailing the yellow spot of light with one hand. Feeling for any sort of give, she tries to work her fingers under the plywood, but it won’t budge. Next she pulls her jacket sleeve down over her thumb and scrubs at a few of the screws that have been driven into the wood.
They had a problem in the early 2000s with folks trying to settle in the old places around town. The hospital over near Milledgeville started letting folks go, and some of the newly released patients started to wander. Some wandered north, and still to this day, a few of those fellows regularly sleep on the benches along Simmonsville’s Main Street. That’s when Daddy and Eddie first boarded up the old house. Seventeen years ago or so. Grandpa had just died, and no one was living there anymore. But the screws in this window, they still have a smooth finish.
She’s about to lose the last of daylight and soon it’ll be too dark to do anything else, and much as she knows it’s only childish fears that have come back to haunt her, she’d just as soon get home. And she’d just as soon spend no more time remembering Russell and her sitting on those steps, or remembering the way he trailed his fingers along the insides of her arms or talked about dovetail joints and hard hickory or how the first time they slept together, he used his arms to hold himself above her so he could look straight into her eyes, not letting her turn away because she was shy about it. She’d rather not remember dreaming of a future they both knew they’d never have, and then that very thing coming true.
Tomorrow, she’ll call someone to come out and cut the wire on this end and up at the house so no one will ever know Daddy had been up to anything. Tucking the flashlight away, she starts back to the car, when something inside the old house kicks on. Pressing an ear against the siding, she listens. It’s definitely coming from the house. A motor perhaps or a fan.
She was down to this old place dozens of times as a child, especially before Grandpa Simmons died. She was too young during those years to understand his doings with the Knights. He was Mama’s father and Imogene’s protector; that’s all she knew. When Imogene’s own daddy would flick her hair, call her unholy, say she wasn’t a real Coulter, Grandpa Simmons would stop him. Sometimes, it only took Grandpa standing from a chair or maybe dipping his chin in Daddy’s direction to stop Daddy saying those things. Other times, a few times, Grandpa Simmons grabbed Daddy by his shirt collar and dragged him from the room, saying nobody talked that way about his daughter and grandchild. Nobody. Once Grandpa died, there was no one left to silence Daddy when he took to saying those things.
If Imogene was brave enough to walk into the old house back then, she should be brave enough now. First checking that her flashlight is still burning strong, she pushes her way through the rest of the reeds until she reaches the back of the house. Imogene won’t do this to spare Jo Lynne or Eddie like Mama wanted. Already, Imogene’s anger at Daddy has bled all over those two. So many years, they’ve told Imogene not to stir up trouble about Daddy and his other women. Boys will be boys, they’d said. A seventy-year-old boy? Imogene had said. When do boys finally become men?
And Eddie, like Daddy, is one of the Klan, and so is Garland, Jo Lynne’s husband, though nobody is meant to know that. He never attends the rallies or spreads flyers. He can go to the lightings down at the lake because under a hood and robe, no one would know it’s him. Garland holds deed to all the Knights’ property and manages all the membership money, and as long as he has no ties to the organization, no matter what damage the Knights might inflict, the courts can’t seize their assets. Or so Daddy and the other Knights hope. No, Imogene won’t tend to this wire and whatever she finds inside for her sister and brother or to cover up whatever it might imply. This one time, at least, she’ll sidestep being a disappointment and do it for Mama.
When Imogene was a kid, before the hospital started letting patients go, the door off the kitchen was always unlocked. Coming around the back corner of the old house, she sees that same door hasn’t been boarded over, and when she turns the knob, it opens. Stepping inside, she sweeps her flashlight around the kitchen and tugs on the small chain hanging from an overhead light, but nothing happens. Crossing into the entryway, she pauses and listens but hears no more of the humming sound.
“Hello,” she hollers, and coughs because the air is stale and dusty.
Calling out a second time and still hearing nothing, she takes a few more steps and reaches the staircase that leads to the second story. Underfoot, the pine floors are soft, and fearing her weight might be too much for them, she slides her feet, testing the next step before she takes it. Beyond the staircase that leads up to two bedrooms, she crosses into the small dining room. Daylight is mostly gone now, and because the windows are boarded up, the house would be totally dark without her flashlight. She tries another light switch. Still nothing, but things are exactly as she remembers them. No Confederate flags hang from the wall, no gun racks in the living room, no flyers stacked on the kitchen counter. She can report back to Mama that Daddy wasn’t up to anything after all.
She walks around the large dining room table, trailing a finger over its dusty top, and as she passes the door that leads down to the basement, the hum she heard from outside grows louder again. Something down in the basement is running. No mistaking that, but there’s also no mistaking th
at she isn’t going down there tonight, another fear left over from her childhood. She never went into the basement, not even on a dare. Besides, whatever she’s hearing, it’ll have been running for days, weeks maybe, so one more night won’t matter. It’s another thing she’ll see to tomorrow. For now, she’ll go home and tell Mama it’s all taken care of. She turns to leave, thinking she can almost feel the hum of whatever is running down there in the basement, and the sound disappears. The house falls silent.
She takes another step toward the basement door, the floorboards creaking with each movement, but instead of reaching for the doorknob, she only stares down at it. Her flashlight is beginning to lose its power, and the light has faded from bright yellow to a cloudy orange. There is just enough left to let Imogene make out two bolt latches that have been installed—one at about eye level and one near the bottom of the door. A keyed padlock has been installed just above the doorknob.
With one finger, Imogene touches the top bolt latch. What was once smooth metal is now pitted with rough patches, most certainly rust, though she can’t make it out. The lock will be stiff with age and lack of use, but when she pushes, it slides easily to the left. She does the same with the bolt near the floor. Lastly, she runs her fingers over the lock that has been installed just above the doorknob. It is a keyed lock, and while the lock has been snapped closed, the key dangles from it. She slips the lock free and opens the latch.
As a child, when Grandpa Simmons was still alive and living in the house, Imogene sometimes stood at the top of those stairs and stared down. Eddie would give her a little shove as if to push her down, and Jo Lynne would holler at him to leave well enough alone. Even before rumors began of the patients from Milledgeville taking up in the old house and even before Grandpa died, leaving the house empty, Eddie would tell stories of anchors drilled into the basement’s stone walls where people were once chained by the caretaker and kept for days until they learned their lessons. Learn your lessons, Imogene, Eddie would say, less you be chained in Grandpa’s basement too. Imogene reaches into the stairwell and pats the wall to her right until she feels it. A switch. With one finger, she flips it.