James tossed the letter aside and picked up the phone.
Malachi answered on the first ring.
“I’m sending you another sample,” James told him, sealing the evidence bag with the sweatshirt from the grave tucked inside, along with samples of the coffin. “I need an ID on an unidentified vic.” He was going to find out who it was.
On the other end of the line, Malachi exhaled. “You sure about this, Doc? Somebody gets wind of this, and—”
“You get any crap about it, you tell them it was my call.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“Good.”
“It’s just—I just want to know, what is it about this case, Doc? What’s so important? It’s the first time—the only time—you’ve called in a favor like this. What is it about the Atchison case?”
James turned from the phone to the doorway where Raylene Atchison had stood all those years ago, brimming with light. To his right was the office where he had kept Aurora safe after her mother’s murder. How could it be that so many years had passed since then? It seemed impossible.
“It’s somebody I knew a long time ago,” James said. “Just make sure you take your time with it, Malachi. The first time around, the file was a mess because Gentry was careless. I don’t want any more mistakes.”
“Sure thing, Doc.”
“And, Malachi?”
“Yes?”
“Have you heard anything about those unidentified remains from a few weeks ago?”
“You mean Bayou John Doe?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing yet.”
“Thanks.”
He wondered what news Josh was hoping for. Having his brother’s remains would mean an end to the search, but it was an ending that seemed hollow. James remembered the sight of his father in his coffin, the way the pain and disbelief collided in his chest before splintering into a thousand pieces. How did that compare to the pain of surviving what Josh had?
There was a serious undertone in Ruby’s voice on the intercom, something rare for her.
“Josh Hudson here to see you.”
James stepped out of the autopsy suite. He wished he had news for Josh. “Send him on back, Ruby.”
Josh Hudson had never been what James would call clean-cut, but he looked even more disheveled than usual. He wore the same torn gray hooded sweatshirt from the other night, and appeared to have been on the losing end of a fight, a cut swelling beneath a bandage above his left eye.
James tried to hide the alarm in his voice. “How are you, Josh?”
“Been better.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any news for you about Jesse. They work at a glacial pace over at the state lab. The minute I know something, I—”
“I’m not here about Jesse,” Josh said. “I’m here about Aurora’s case.”
“Oh, of course!” James opened the door to his office. “Here, let’s sit in here.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
“So, what did you find out?”
Josh ignored the question. “Do you remember that morning? The morning Aurora was brought here?”
The events were scorched into his memory, the mundane and the profound.
“Absolutely. It had been a busy week. I was under a lot of stress.”
“Were you in the office that whole shift?”
“No. There was a bad wreck on the causeway that night. Teenagers out joyriding flipped their pickup. Four fatalities. It took them almost two hours to cut them out. I was on scene that night up until three.”
There was something like relief on Josh’s face.
“Why are you asking me this, Detective Hudson?” James said, puzzled.
“I’m sorry,” Josh said. “It’s just—take a look at this, Doc.” He unfolded a piece of paper, a printout of a phone bill. “This is from the mini-mart, from when Aurora was found.” He pointed to a line just above one highlighted in neon marker.
James recognized the morgue’s phone number.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Doc, someone called here at three that morning. Before the police were called.” He slid his finger across the page. “Four times, ten seconds each. Calling and hanging up.”
“That doesn’t make sense. I wasn’t here. There was nobody here.” There were no techs here that night. Just James.
“Well, was there anybody who had a key?”
James remembered his assistant from the pre-Ruby days, a fortyish woman named Dorothy who wore gray jumpsuits and subsisted exclusively on Tab and Wheat Thins. Dorothy, whose aggressive brand of cheerfulness irritated him to no end, Dorothy who lifted pink weights on her lunch break and had a Sandy Duncan haircut—could such a person really be involved in a murder? It seemed impossible.
“Maybe a past employee or something,” Josh prompted.
And then James thought of it. Of course. It made perfect sense now. The careless autopsy report, the way he’d been shut out of the case. Malachi’s voice on the phone. Somebody gets wind of this, and …
“Davis Gentry,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Aurora returned from Royce Beaumont’s closed office to find a woman waiting on her front porch, fussing with the bark of the flowering pink tree in the front yard. People in Cooper’s Bayou didn’t seem shy about showing up at the alligator man’s house unbidden. Aurora was getting used to it.
“Hello?”
“Aurora,” the woman breathed. She was in her forties, blond bangs framing a sweet face. “I’m Bobbie Sharpless. I was a friend of your mom’s.” She sucked in a breath and reached a long-fingered hand to cup Aurora’s face. “Oh, honey. I thought about you so many times. God never blessed me with a daughter. I called your grandpapa and nana, and they thought it was best for you not to have any contact with this place. But I wanted you to visit, Aurora, to stay with me.”
Aurora curled her hand around Bobbie’s. “I appreciate that,” she said, and she did.
“She loved these trees,” Bobbie continued, releasing her grip on Aurora to wipe a tear making its way down her tanned cheek. “Crape myrtles. I always loved them too. You know, they come all the way from China? But when they brought them to England, they didn’t grow. It wasn’t until the British brought them to the South that they bloomed for the first time, like they’d finally found their place.” She plucked one of the audacious pink spikes.
“I never knew that. Bobbie, can you come in for a sec?” Aurora led her up the steps and into the house.
Bobbie paused in the doorway. “Your grandpapa, he kept this place up real nice. Beautiful.” Bobbie set the bag that was tucked under her arm on the table. “Fresh donuts.”
“Thank you.” Aurora poured them both glasses of lemonade from the batch cooling in the fridge, and they sat on the porch with the sweating glasses, watching the bayou through the delicate lace of the trees.
“How did you know I was here?”
Bobbie laughed. “It’s a small town. It’s funny, Raylene and I used to talk about how we were going to get out of here as soon as we turned eighteen. We were so sure of ourselves back then, and look at us now. We’ll both be here for all eternity, I expect.”
“You were her best friend.”
“She was the sister I never had,” Bobbie said, something fierce in her voice. “You know, when you were little, you called me Auntie. There was something about your mother, honey. When I was with her, it was like—anything was possible. She could make you believe that you could do anything.” There was such unfettered pain in her voice that Aurora reached across the table between them and touched her arm. “I’m just so sorry, Aurora. For your loss. I’m so, so sorry.”
Aurora felt the familiar tightness in her throat, the grief fast becoming eclipsed by a new emotion: anger. It should be her mother sitting with her on this porch, watching the last slice of sunlight slip beneath the bayou’s surface. Aurora had spent her entire life longing for a person she could barely remember, a pers
on who had affected so many people in Cooper’s Bayou. Doc, Jefferson Gibbs, Royce Beaumont, and now here was another person before her, weeping at the memory of someone who had been dead for twenty years, while Aurora, her flesh and blood, clung to a few scraps of memories that were becoming more shapeless with each passing day. It wasn’t fair.
Aurora’s eyes drifted to the embankment, heavy with pink blossoms. How long had her mother been there alone on that shore before someone found her?
“I’m going to find out what happened to her, Bobbie. I finished up all of Papa’s affairs, but I’m not going to leave. Not until I find out who took her away from us.” She was surprised at the timbre of her own voice, the nurse’s voice, the one that told people who was in charge.
“I know you are, sugar,” Bobbie drawled, patting her cheeks with a wadded-up tissue. “Josh won’t give up on y’all, neither. I know he won’t.”
Josh. Aurora remembered the expression on his face when they’d watched the video of her interview, his warm hand on her back. We don’t have to do this now. As much as he wanted answers, he wanted to protect her at the same time.
“Josh is a good man,” Bobbie continued. “Easy on the eyes, too. You got a boyfriend up in New York?”
“No.” She thought about the date with Mike, the softball game, the meeting with Luna Riley. All of it seemed like another lifetime ago. “Josh is sweet.”
“He’s been through enough, Lord knows. He’d have the right to be an asshole.” Bobbie shook her head.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know about the Fun World thing?”
Fun World. Aurora remembered the sign on the way into town, a peeling monstrosity with a clown’s head dangling from the top edge, lips pulled back in a leering grin.
“I saw the sign on the interstate. Some kind of amusement park?”
“It was. We all went there when we were kids. Rides, games, that kind of thing. There was always a bad element there though, older guys hanging around. When I heard what happened to Josh, I can’t say I was surprised. Horrified, sure. But not surprised.”
“Is that where his brother was abducted?”
“Yep. He saw the whole thing.”
She remembered Josh that night on the bayou, his head tilted up to the sky, the way he’d turned suddenly to look at her. I was there. So Josh had his own dark place as well. A dark place he remembered.
“Did they ever find the brother?”
“The guy never told the cops where he put the body.”
All the pieces were sliding into place. Josh’s absences from the evidence room, the long silences between them.
“The bones, the ones they found by Baboon Jack’s,” Aurora said quietly.
Bobbie nodded. “They think those bones might be Jesse. They ain’t sure, though.”
“He never told me.”
“Oh, sugar.” Bobbie scooted her chair closer to Aurora’s. “You know how men are. They never want to show you the weak parts. I know he cares about you, I could tell the way he talked when he came to see me. They’re not complicated creatures.”
“You’re right, they’re not.” Aurora felt something loosening inside her, at ease in a way that she had not been in a long time.
“I know what I wanted to show you. Wait right here, sweetheart.”
Bobbie disappeared into the house, leaving Aurora to watch the bayou. The water was thickening, the trees shuddering and retreating from its edges as though the water itself was gathering strength, the night building towards some grand crescendo.
Bobbie reappeared with a clay jar. Aurora recognized it from the top of the secretary desk in the living room. A delicate design, a sunburst of tiny iridescent lines was scored into the sides, a cherub that had shed much of its golden skin reclining on the stopper.
“What is it?”
Bobbie set it on the table between them. “Your grandpapa didn’t like to talk about voodoo,” she said, “but he went to see Charlsie, way back when.”
“He thought the Crumplers had put a curse on him.”
“Yes,” Bobbie said. “Your grandpapa was a strong man. He didn’t back down from nobody, not even the Crumplers. He told them to go to hell, and they put a curse on him, right before your mama died.”
“Do you think they killed her?”
Bobbie shrugged. “They’re behind most of the evil in this town. It wouldn’t surprise me. Nobody in this town ever stood up to them, until your grandpapa did.”
She twisted the vase around so that the cherub faced Aurora. “When we die,” she said, “in voudon, we believe that it’s just a change, from one condition to another. There’s two parts to the soul, the gros bon ange and the petit bon ange. When you die, the gros bon ange goes back up to the sky, to the cosmos.”
“And the petit bon ange?”
“That’s the part of the soul that makes you who you are: your personality, your hopes and dreams. After death, it hangs around the body for a few days, and you can capture it in a jar, like this one. Your mama’s ti bon ange, it’s in here, sweetheart. Your grandpapa and I captured it.”
“Then what happens?”
“You’re supposed to burn the jar, to release the soul into the land of the dead.”
Aurora touched the top of the jar. “But you didn’t.”
“We couldn’t, sweetheart. We just couldn’t do it.”
Aurora held the jar in her hands, the clay firm between her fingers. Her own mother, trapped in death in this vessel. Why would her grandfather leave this behind? Why was Bobbie telling her this? The questions rose and then died in her throat, the answer imprinted on Bobbie’s tearful face.
She would be the one to solve her mother’s murder, and she would be the one to let her go.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“Do you think he’ll show?”
Samba and Josh sat in the Corvair in front of the Craw Lake detention facility, a concrete structure painted a soulless shade of brown that overlooked a marsh choked with kudzu so thick you could barely tell there was water somewhere underneath.
“If there’s something in it for him, Doyle will show,” Josh said, opening the door. “I told you, though, I think this is a waste of our time.”
“How’d he end up back in jail so fast?”
Josh chuckled. “Doyle was always reliable that way. He didn’t waste any time getting picked up again.”
Josh’s vote had been to go to Davis Gentry’s office in Tampa straightaway, but Doc Mason had talked him out of it. They needed more information first, something solid to connect all the pieces. The Crumplers were the ones harassing Aurora at the house; they could have been involved in the murder too.
Back in the evidence room, this had seemed like a good idea. You wanted intel on local crime, Doyle Hudson was a good source. But now Josh wondered if it all had been some terrible mistake.
“When’s the last time you saw your father?”
There had not been a trial. On the advice of his attorney, who was probably a bigger huckster than he was, Doyle had pled guilty to all of the charges against him. Assault with a deadly weapon; extortion; fraud. Liana had been long gone by then, and his mother was in treatment for the cancer that would eventually take her life, so only Josh, aged fifteen, had been present in the courtroom for the sentencing. They had given Doyle an opportunity to speak, to apologize to the people he had conned, to say a few words to his own family.
He had said nothing.
“Fifteen years,” Josh said. “I’m only here for Aurora.” It was a one-in-a-million chance, but those were the ones you had to take, weren’t they? No matter what the cost.
“Well, that sounds like a good reason to me. I hear there’s a place with the world’s greatest banana pudding about a mile down the road,” Samba said. “Call me when you’re ready to go.”
Josh nodded. One of Samba’s best qualities was his ability to know when to leave things alone.
Inside, a woman with curly red hair pulled into a b
un slouched next to the metal detector and gave Josh the once-over.
“I’m here to see Doyle Hudson,” Josh told her, depositing his keys in the tiny plastic bin.
She raised an eyebrow. “Huh. Well, Doyle’s just Mr. Popular this week, ain’t he? Inmate of the month or some shit.”
“Is that right? Who else has been to see him?”
“Some pretty little blond girl with legs up to here. Poor thang. I see it all the time, girls with a man in prison. These men in here act real sweet, but as soon as they cut them loose, they’re out there screwing everything that moves.”
Pea. It had to be.
“Not all guys are like that,” he told her.
“I ain’t never met one inside who wasn’t.”
“Well, you’re working in the wrong place.”
She beamed at him and held open the door to the visiting room, where Doyle Hudson waited behind a pane of filthy glass. Josh sat in the cracked plastic chair, and the two Hudsons regarded each other. His father had lost weight in prison, his skin tight against the curve of his cheekbones, but there was something else. He no longer held his chin and shoulders in an arrogant tilt, but slouched back against the chair. His hand curled around the telephone receiver, and Josh mirrored the movement.
“Good morning, son.”
Josh steeled himself against the tide of anger, but it never came, just the same suffocating inertia that he’d been mired in since the day his father went away.
“Hello, Doyle.”
His father bristled at the use of his first name. “You’re looking well.”
“I need some information from you.”
His father nodded, expecting this reaction. “I have some things I’d like to say to you first.”
“I’m not here to help you make amends.”
“Jesus has forgiven me.”
“Well, he’s a better man than me.”
Doyle leaned forward. “You’re a good man, Josh. I know my opinion ain’t worth shit to you. I know that. But here you are.”
The Evidence Room: A Mystery Page 18