by Fay Robinson
“I’m sure,” Matt said. “He’d been stalking her.”
“She helped him with his paintings.”
“He’s mentally retarded,” Matt told Jack. “And dangerous.”
“No, he’s autistic,” Leigh corrected this time. “He’s actually got above-average intelligence. But I agree he’s dangerous.”
The story sparked Jack’s memory. Patrol officers had standing orders to pick up Wade whenever he was seen on the street and return him to Horizon House, a facility on Wilcox Avenue.
A US Supreme Court ruling had paved the way for the man to return to the town of his alleged crime. The justices said states could be required under the Americans with Disabilities Act to provide community-based services rather than institutional placements for people with disabilities.
“Shannon, calm the kids down,” Jack ordered, “and go reassure your grandmother that everything’s all right. She has to be worried. Bill, my police radio is lying on the front seat of my car. Go get it. Ruth, see what you can find to clean this cut, please.”
Ruth took off ahead of him while Jack picked up Lucky and carried her against her protests into the cabin. He set her in a chair by the kitchen table and pulled up a second chair for himself. Ruth had found alcohol and cotton and she handed them to him.
“Now,” he said, gently dabbing the wound, “tell me what happened.”
Everyone crowded around, anxious to hear. She had a captive audience as she related her story.
“…and I screamed bloody murder because he was right there, not a foot from me, and the stupid motor wouldn’t crank and I’d lost the paddle when I fell.”
“Wait a minute, you fell?” Jack asked with concern. “How hard?”
“Only a little stumble onto my knees. I’m perfectly fine. Where was I? Oh…I thought about hitting him with my camera or going over the side and taking my chances in the water, but then I noticed what he had in his hand.”
“What?” Leigh asked. “A knife? A gun?”
“No, it wasn’t a weapon.” A strange look came over her face. “He did the weirdest thing. I expected him to hit me or choke me or something, but instead, he…he… God, I still can’t believe it.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, tell us!” Leigh snapped in frustration. “What did he do?”
Lucky pulled a piece of white cloth from the pocket of her shorts and held it up for them to see. “He offered me his handkerchief.”
CHAPTER FIVE
ONCE SHE’D CHANGED out of her bloody shirt and washed off, Lucky felt better. Jack had used his radio to tell the dispatcher to contact the sheriff’s department, since the area where she’d seen Terrell was beyond police jurisdiction. A deputy spotted him shortly after, picked him up and returned him to the group home.
“I still think he should be in jail,” Shannon said across the picnic table.
Jack and Cal had grilled the hamburgers, and everyone was finished eating except Lucky. Feeling a touch nauseated and fighting a headache, she picked at what was left on the paper plate. “What do you suggest they charge him with?” she asked Shannon. “Being too polite?”
“With escape or something.”
“He’s not a prisoner,” Jack explained, pulling up a metal folding chair. He put it at the end of the table, near her parents and grandmother. Beyond him, the three children played, trying to coax a reluctant Beanie to fetch a stick. “He’s under supervision for his protection, not the town’s. And since Lucky caused her own injury, there’s nothing I can have him charged with.”
“But he could’ve murdered her!”
“I don’t think he would’ve hurt me,” Lucky said, surprised to discover she believed those words. “He had the perfect opportunity, but he didn’t use it. That end of the slough is so isolated he could have killed me and scuttled the boat. None of you would ever have known what happened.”
“Just like Eileen Olenick,” Leigh said.
“I guess, but…he was so incredibly gentle, almost like a little boy offering me a gift.” That brought a scoff from her father. “No, Dad, listen. When I wouldn’t take the handkerchief from him, do you know what he did? He put it down on the seat and backed away, like he understood how afraid I was.”
“Don’t be fooled, baby,” her father warned. “He’s very cunning. You shouldn’t go out in that boat alone.”
“She won’t,” Jack said pointedly.
Lucky frowned, but didn’t respond. This wasn’t the time to discuss it.
“Wonder what he was doing out this far in the first place,” Cal said, and they all echoed similar curiosity.
Lucky shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess…he wanted to play in the river.” She told them about his strange behavior, how he’d delighted in slapping the water.
Cal shivered, as if suddenly hit by a blast of cold wind. “Yow! This story gets creepier by the second.”
Jack, always the cop, wanted to know details about the murder and the victim. “Who was this woman?”
“Miss Eileen was the art teacher where Cal and I went to elementary school,” Lucky said. “She was in her late thirties. A bit eccentric, but really, really nice. Extremely pretty.” Everyone voiced agreement. “I always wondered why she hadn’t married.”
“Because she had a lover and he was already married,” Lucky’s mother told her. “You were too young to hear the gossip, but that’s what we all believed.”
“I was definitely in love with her,” Cal said.
“You were twelve,” Lucky pointed out.
“So? I was still in love with her.”
Lucky elbowed him in the ribs for being silly, then continued, “This was the spring of 1980, right before my tenth birthday. Shannon was…fourteen or fifteen?”
“Fifteen,” Shannon supplied.
“…and was at the high school with Leigh and Terrell, who were both seventeen. Terrell took special classes in the morning. I guess that must’ve been before they started putting kids with mental or physical disabilities in regular classes. I don’t remember. Anyway, Miss Eileen heard he had talent and she took it upon herself to work with him privately. Mostly she gave him lessons at the school, but sometimes, on weekends or in the afternoon, she went to his house. She was the only person outside of his family who ever spent any time with him. Nobody else wanted to.”
“Too weird,” inserted Cal.
“He couldn’t talk, and all the kids learned pretty quickly that he did strange things, so we stayed clear.”
“What kind of things?” Jack asked.
Leigh fielded this question. “Like spinning, or crawling into closets or cabinets. In Sunday school he’d bang his head against the wall and upset the teacher. After he got to be six or seven, he was so difficult to control his mother stopped bringing him to church altogether.”
“Did he seem dangerous?” Jack asked her.
“Not then. At least not dangerous to anyone other than himself.”
Lucky took up the thread. “Looking back, I don’t think any of us gave Terrell much thought, period. He was a ghost. A nonentity. He was in our neighborhood and our school, and at one time he’d been in our church, but he wasn’t really a part of our world. We didn’t see him.”
Until a certain Sunday morning. Then everything changed….
First Baptist Church of Potock, May, 1980
LUCKY DECIDED she must have a touch of the supernatural. Her body had this weird way of twitchin’ and slidin’ about when she was bored, even when she told it not to.
It was twitchin’ now. Her legs swung back and forth and her butt wriggled to find a more comfortable spot on the pew.
Under the stiff white collar of her best Sunday dress, her neck also itched something fierce from the heat. She took off her gloves and clawed at the prickly skin, wishing she could also get rid of her tights and the stupid shoes with bows on top, passed down to her by her sister Shannon.
For the third time that summer, the power was off. The church was old and t
he nearby river was about to take it after years and years of trying. The lines on the walls marked each flood: the bad one back in ’38, which the old people still talked about, when the water reached all the way to the cemetery on the hill and brought up the coffins; the one in ’45 that got the kitchen; the one in ’69 that took the new piano and left the sanctuary full of mud and dead water moccasins.
Last year the pews had drifted away, most ending up a mile downstream in a hay field. For weeks afterward you couldn’t walk down the road without finding hymnals in the trees.
Each time the water rose, another little piece of the building floated off down the river. Soon, Lucky predicted, they’d have to give up the church and all become Methodists.
She pulled at her neckline and made a noise of frustration. The temperature inside felt near two hundred degrees, and she was trussed up worse than a turkey at Christmas dinner.
Leaning down, her mama whispered, “Be still.”
That was easier said than done. If a body could get ’lectrified, Lucky was sure that was what had happened to her. Like lightning had struck her and sent her skin to crawlin’. Like her skin maybe even wanted to jump right off her bones.
Accidentally her swinging foot touched the seat in front of her.
“Erin Renee, don’t make me tell you again.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
On the other side of her, Lucky’s daddy patted her leg, then winked. Beyond him, Cal sat with Leigh, Mema and Papa Sam. Cal leaned forward and snickered because she’d gotten in trouble. She gave him a look that said she’d get him later.
Most Sundays she liked church. Preacher Sutton had a nice face, a soft voice, and he didn’t go on and on with the sermon or holler the way Preacher Hardesty had. And unlike Preacher Hardesty, he didn’t think Lucky was going to hell, although he did say the Almighty might be a bit unhappy with her for slipping those catfish in the baptismal tank last Sunday. God, it seemed, did not have a sense of humor.
“…But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” the preacher said, quotin’ scripture. “And God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.”
No, Lucky couldn’t blame the preacher or the sermon for her restlessness. She couldn’t really even blame the heat. Miss Eileen Olenick was totally at fault, and Lucky planned to tell her so the very next minute she set eyes on her. For the first time Lucky could remember, Miss Eileen hadn’t come to services. Without her, without her funny straw hat, a kid didn’t have anything worthwhile to look at in church and so shouldn’t be blamed if she got a little antsy.
Every Sunday until now, Miss Eileen and her hat could be counted on to make the sermon go down a whole lot easier. She always came in at the last minute, breezin’ in the back door and down the center aisle to the front row, where she wasn’t supposed to sit. Everybody knew the front pews were for rich people and those kin to rich people.
Lucky didn’t think Miss Eileen was rich or kin to anybody important, but probably nobody had ever told her the rules about where to sit at church. Or maybe she just forgot them because she wanted to sit in the front row. Miss Eileen liked to be different.
Take that hat, for instance. It was an ordinary straw hat, like lots of ladies wore to church, but Miss Eileen dressed it up each week with some interestin’ bit of decoration: a turtle shell found down by the river, a door hinge painted to look like a butterfly, magnolia leaves from that big tree in her front yard. Last week she’d stuck on some Indian symbols and feathers and had made some earrings out of pretty blue rocks.
Miss Eileen was a strange bird, all right, the most fun person in Potock. “A bit peculiar, but nice,” Lucky’s mama said. Goin’ to her house was a treat. She had a bunch of paint and clay and other neat stuff that Lucky was allowed to play with just about whenever she wanted. That was worth looking past Miss Eileen’s strangeness.
Color was Miss Eileen’s big problem. She liked it more than a body should. Red, green, purple—it didn’t matter to her if the colors shouldn’t go together. She wore green shoes with red dresses, bright pink scarves with purple blouses, even wild stripes with checks and plaids. She was so bright that staring at her sometimes made you swimmy-headed. Even her car was two colors, a funny-shaped yellow-and-white Metropolitan.
Lucky had looked up the word metropolitan once in the dictionary and found it meant “the major city.” That didn’t fit Miss Eileen at all. Like Lucky, she didn’t know beans about big cities. She’d never been out of Alabama in her whole life.
And she never, ever missed church on Sunday morning.
A scream and a commotion at the back of the church made the preacher stop and everybody turn. More ladies started screaming. People jumped to their feet and pushed toward the aisle, blocking the way. Lucky tried to see what was happening, but she was too short. She only caught a quick glimpse of the boy who’d come through the open door, then somebody got in her way again.
Hurriedly she scrambled up on the seat, Cal doing the same. The boy who’d caused the screaming had fallen to his knees, and red dirt and big splotches of something covered his clothes. He crushed some object to his chest, but Lucky couldn’t make out what it was.
Terrell Wade. She knew the boy. Truth be told, she didn’t really know him. Nobody knew Terrell, except his poor family. She knew who he was, just like all the kids did who’d been warned by their mamas to stay away from him. At seventeen he was as big as any man in town. He was also dumber than dirt.
The screaming in the church had stopped, but unnatural noises were coming out of Terrell that robbed Lucky of breath. He rocked and rocked, holding that thing to his chest like a baby.
Preacher Sutton came forward. “Son, are you hurt? Do you need help?” Only then did Lucky recognize the dark stuff on his clothes.
Terrell wailed and stretched out his arm to the preacher, a crushed and blood-soaked hat in his fingers. The hat was straw. White ribbon and small tinkling bells decorated it. The whole church seemed to gasp in one big breath, but nobody moved. Even Lucky felt glued in place. She wanted to move, or scream, or…something, but couldn’t.
In that awful moment she knew why Terrell Wade had blood all over him. And even worse, she knew what had happened to Miss Eileen Olenick. Finding her voice, she blurted out what was surely on the mind of everybody in that place, although nobody wanted to be the one to say it. “Gawd help us all! Terrell’s done gone and murdered Miss Eileen!”
“THE AUTHORITIES SEARCHED for weeks, but they never found her body or even a crime scene,” Lucky said. “This area is dotted with old mine shafts, caves, sinkholes and abandoned quarries, any one of which could’ve been used to dispose of her body and her car. And there’s the river, of course. Drop something in the right place and you’ll never see it again.”
“Could he drive?” Jack asked.
“No one was ever sure, but he certainly had the physical strength to at least push her car a short distance. It was a tiny two-seater.”
“Disposing of her body and car and then implicating himself by turning up bloody, clutching with her hat, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“No, but like Leigh said, he did weird things. His brain circuits were all screwy. We figured he killed Miss Eileen in a frenzy of lust, panicked and hid the car somewhere. Maybe he got confused about the hat. Who knows what went on in his mind that day?”
“Did they prosecute?”
“The district attorney felt that, without a body and no witness, it wouldn’t do much good, but Dad wrote editorials urging the town council to petition the state to have him put away.”
“Wade holds your father responsible for his commitment?”
Lucky cleared the lump in her throat. “No, not exactly. There was a hearing—the mental-health people, the DA, Terrell’s widowed mother, a handful of witnesses. At first the judge seemed to lean toward no action. He said he saw nothing to suggest Terrell was a danger to the community, even though the caseworke
r testified that he’d been extremely agitated and unmanageable since the morning he showed up at church. He’d gotten so out of control his mother had been forced to remove him from school.”
“Does she still live here?”
“His mother? No, she died several years ago. Her sister, Leona Harrison, is his only remaining relative.”
“Was he present at the hearing?”
“Yes, but he wouldn’t—or I guess, couldn’t—communicate and never tried to explain or defend himself. The judge said he deserved the benefit of the doubt about Miss Eileen’s disappearance, though. He pointed out that even if it came to pass that Miss Eileen was the victim of foul play, Terrell could simply have found her hat.”
“That’s possible, isn’t it?”
Her chest tightened. She’d asked herself the same question a million times.
“I suppose it is.” She swallowed hard. “But then a witness testified that she’d seen Terrell following Miss Eileen a few days before her death and that he peeped in her windows.”
“You,” Jack guessed.
She nodded. “What I told the judge that day changed his mind. Terrell went to a state hospital for an evaluation and ended up staying twenty-one years.”
THAT NIGHT after everyone had gone home, Jack cleaned the kitchen and washed the few dishes they had used.
“I can get those,” Lucky called from the couch.
“No, take it easy. I can handle it. Read your newspaper.”
When he finished, he came and sat with her. Beanie, who’d been at his feet by the sink, followed like a shadow, plopping down with an audible thud on the hard floor between his legs. She laid her head across his foot. It seemed she wasn’t happy unless she was touching him. He understood completely. That was how he felt about Lucky.
He took his wife’s hand in his lap, nesting his fingers between hers, thankful to have her to himself. My wife. He’d always liked the way that sounded. Pretty soon he’d also be able to say my son or my daughter. Nothing could be better than that. He inadvertently let out a sigh, but Lucky misinterpreted his noise of contentment.