Kerry and Val passed Delgado’s abandoned car on the side of the road a mile from Leaf’s cabin. It looked odd, sitting out there in the dirt on a road that was populated only by sky-high Georgia trees and signs warning of deer. Kerry noticed the Fulton County, Atlanta tag on the car, but had no true purpose in considering how that clean Pontiac had come to be left in the dirt. Not wanting to alert Leaf of his presence, Delgado had left it there and cut through the woods to get to the cabin.
The Jaguar’s GPS led Val to the driveway with the thrice-painted and chipping metal mailbox. She turned into the property and all the chatter in the car stopped as she and Kerry surveyed the winding path through a small grouping of trees that led to an open area, which featured in its center a little cabin that had obviously passed its days of beauty and glory twenty or so years ago. This and that was broken and tacked back into place. The flower beds were overrun and only made apparent by slanted bricks that had been pushed into the ground to create enclosures. The face of the cabin had either never been painted or every inch of color had faded. The front door was wide open.
“You think this is it?” Kerry asked Val, who looked just as worried by the sight as she felt.
“GPS says so,” Val said and then she pointed to Leaf’s car that was parked right in the grass on the side of the house. “There’s his car.”
“Why is the front door open?” Kerry pointed to the front door.
“I don’t know. We’re in the country. You know people do things like that. Maybe he left it open because he’s expecting us.”
Val had driven as close to the cabin as she could and then turned off the car. Neither she nor Kerry moved, though. They just looked out at the cabin like it was a haunted house.
“Guess we need to get out,” Val said soon, as if it had just occurred to her.
“Maybe we could just blow the horn or text him—let him know we’re out here,” Kerry suggested.
“Oh, Lord, let’s just get this over with.” Val reached behind her seat and grabbed her purse.
Outside the car, Val and Kerry climbed the steps, fully expecting Leaf to pop out at any minute, or hoping he would. Something just didn’t feel right about the situation.
“Leaf?” Val said, leading Kerry into the house. “You in here? It’s Val and Kerry.”
Kerry looked on the wall just inside the front door, found the light switch, and flipped it up.
Startled by the new light in the shadowy room that somehow seemed extra-spooky at that point, even with its backwoods location and dank interior design, Val turned to Kerry and quipped, “Why’d you turn on the light? You don’t know if he wants his lights on.”
Kerry shrugged and went to turn the switch down.
“Just leave it,” Val said, looking around the room at cobwebbed paintings of hunting scenes on every inch of wall space and antique hunting weaponry.
“Where’s Leaf?” Kerry asked to avoid saying something about how eerie the room felt. She’d never been a particularly intuitive person, but there was a sound radiating through the middle of her brain telling her to get out of that little woodsy cabin. “You think he’s here?”
Val stepped further into the house. She looked down a dark hallway that seemed to lead to bedrooms. “Leaf?” she called again before turning back to Kerry after there was no response. “He said he’d be here,” she said to her.
“Well, it’s not like him to say he’d be somewhere and then not be there,” Kerry replied.
“I know.”
The women instinctively moved in toward one another.
“Leaf!” Val called again, but only echoes of the sound of her voice returned.
Kerry pointed to the open door leading down to the basement that was at the top of the hallway. “Looks like there are steps in that doorway. Maybe he’s downstairs.”
“Okay,” Val agreed, nodding. “Go on and check it out.”
“What? Why me?”
“You found the doorway.”
“But you’re closer to it.” Kerry pointed to Val and then the doorway.
“Come on and stop being a pussy,” Val said, avoiding the pangs of flight in her brain. “He’s probably just down there doing some high-level FBI-type shit, like sharpening swords or something and that’s why he can’t hear us.”
Kerry frowned at Val. “Fine. Look, let’s just go down there together.”
Val rolled her eyes dramatically. “I don’t think so. The way I see it, we’re two black girls visiting a white man’s cabin in the middle of the woods and he’s not answering us.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Since when do black women go search for clues for missing white men in dark basements?” Val put her hand on her hip and awaited Kerry’s answer.
“You can’t be serious with that superstitious black stuff.” Kerry pointed out. “We drove all the way up here and you want to leave because going downstairs wouldn’t be the ‘black thing’ to do?”
“Yup.”
Kerry grabbed Val’s hand. “Come on.” She started pulling her toward the basement and spoke the whole time to cut the haunting silence around them. “Like you said, he’s probably down here working.” She pulled Val down the top two steps. “Probably has on headphones.” Two more steps. “And is listening to something like Pink Floyd or R.E.M.” Two more steps.
“I hate R.E.M.,” Val said.
Kerry looked back and up at her at the bottom of the staircase. “What? I loved them! Are you kidding me?”
“Your music taste just sucks.”
The women were hand in hand when they peeked around the corner and saw a light on in a room toward the back of the basement. There were couches and cots, and some old machinery of some kind filling up the space leading to the room.
“What is all this crap?” Kerry whispered. “And who builds a basement in a cabin—in Georgia?”
“Rich white folks,” Val answered as they stepped through the maze toward the room. “Probably been planning to live down here when the black revolution comes.”
Even with fear surging through her, Kerry laughed at the joke.
“You’re a mess,” she said.
Neither Kerry nor Val would ever remember who stepped into the little back room first. But they’d recall that Kerry was the first to see the bodies. The men with open eyes and mouths on the floor. One with blood pouring out of the back of his head. The other with his stiff hands still clutching his throat. They’d remember it was Kerry who first put this horror-flick scene together in her mind because it was she who’d gripped Val’s hand from behind and said softly, yet urgently, and almost as if she’d been accustomed to such images, “Back up! Back up!”
Val was the one who screamed when she took it all in. It was Leaf who was bleeding and some man she didn’t recognize who was beside him. She’d remember the gun on the floor.
As if a bomb detonator was ticking over a loudspeaker sounding throughout the cabin, Val and Kerry backed up from the visual like one of the men would wake up and come crawling toward them at any minute and then turned and bolted up the stairs, through the hallway, across the living out the front door.
Hard as she was, Val called out for Jesus and every orisha she could think of the entire way. And though her feet led her to the driver’s-side door, every muscle in her body was in shock and she had no idea what to do when she was inside.
Kerry said, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
But Val was nearly in a catatonic state with her incantations, so Kerry hopped out of the car and pulled Val out of the driver’s seat. “I’ll drive,” she said, leading Val to the passenger’s seat.
Rocks and pebbles popped out from the back of the car after Kerry pressed her foot onto the gas pedal to hustle out of there. Both hands on the steering wheel, she made a big circle in the front yard and sped out the driveway to the road.
“What the hell! What the hell? What the hell!?” Val repeated in different tones of urgency as she came to during
the escape. “Was that Leaf? Leaf’s dead?”
“Yes. It was him,” Kerry said, swerving as she tried to handle the car’s speed on the road in their escape from whatever. “Who was the other guy?”
“I have no idea!” Val looked out the back window like someone could be following them. Suddenly, she remembered her clandestine meeting with Leaf that day at the jail and then his last words to her about mentioning the meeting to no one and making sure not a soul followed her to the cabin. “I’ve never seen him before. And Leaf didn’t say anyone would be there.”
They passed Delgado’s car on the side of the road, but had no reason to really notice it.
Kerry looked over at Val quickly. “You think that man—he killed Leaf?”
“I don’t know. I saw a gun on the floor. I don’t know. That’s what it looked like,” Val answered.
“Well, what happened to him?”
Just then, Mama Fee was awakened from a restless nap where she’d seen Delgado fall to his knees and die in a dark room.
“I don’t know. And I don’t want to know,” Val said, not knowing of her mother’s work. She looked out the back window again. “All I know is that we’re out of here. Right? We’re fine. We’re cool,” she said. “No one knows we were here. We can get back to Atlanta and just forget about this. Right?” She nervously looked out the window again. “Did you tell anyone you were coming here?”
“No. You told me not to.”
Val rubbed her hands along her lap. “Good. Good. And the door was already wide open, so we didn’t touch anything in the house. And if there’s a—”
“Wait!” Kerry stopped Val. “I touched the light switch. Remember? I turned it on.”
Val closed her eyes and told Kerry to stop the car.
“Why?”
“We have to turn around. We have to go back.”
“For what?”
Val reached for the steering wheel. “We need to clean the switch.”
“What? Are you crazy? I’m not going back to that creepy house. What if the police are on the way? What if—I’m just not going back. No way. What do you think this is? We’re not crime-scene cleaners.”
Val popped her leg over into the driver’s side and pressed the brake, forcing the car to a hard stop.
“If we don’t and the place becomes a crime scene, they’ll find your prints and then come looking for you,” Val explained.
“And I’ll explain what happened. We didn’t do anything,” Kerry said.
“Are you fucking out of your mind?” Val pleaded. “You just got out of jail for murdering your husband and this is the GBI agent who was assigned to his case. They’ll put you right back in jail so fast. You want to go back to jail?”
Kerry thought for a second on the quiet road where no other cars had passed and then started turning the car around. “You’re right,” she agreed finally. “We have to go back.”
In an excruciatingly nerve-racking repeat appearance at the crime scene, Val and Kerry stood at the back of Val’s car arguing about why Val didn’t have any bleach in her trunk. There was body spray in a suitcase with overnight clothes, rim shiner, and Windex.
“The Windex will work fine,” Val said, rushing. “It probably has bleach in it. Just go in there and use it to wipe the light switch.”
“With what?” Kerry looked at the overnight bag and jumper cables in the trunk.
“Take these,” Val said, handing Kerry a brand-new pair of lime-green lace panties from the overnight bag.
Kerry took the lacey panties and Windex and looked up the driveway to be sure no one was coming.
“Come with me,” she said to Val.
“I need to stay out here and keep watch,” Val said.
“I am not going in there alone!” Kerry protested. “Just come with me.”
“The light switch is right inside the door! Just go in there and spray the Windex on the wall and wipe with the panties. I’ll be waiting for you out here.”
Kerry accepted her fate to clean up her own mess and tiptoed to the cabin like she was afraid to wake the dead. The entire time she kept looking back at Val, who reassured her by pointing toward the cabin and smiling, though she’d already decided there was no way she’d go into the house again herself.
Inside the house, Kerry sprayed the Windex on the light switch and wiped with one eye on the door and the other toward the hallways leading to the doorway to the basement. Her little bit of intuition visualized a man in all black creeping up from behind and choking her: Something dramatic like that. Her heart raced as she sprayed and sprayed to make something invisible like a fingerprint disappear.
“Come on!” Val rushed Kerry from outside. She heard what sounded like a helicopter in the distance.
Kerry looked at the switch again like she could see anything and stuffed the wet panties into her pocket. “Okay!” She looked in the path that led to the dead bodies and repeated, “Okay!” before running out.
“I’ll drive,” Val said, back to her wits.
Kerry was the one who was nearly out of it then, so she agreed without a word and walked toward the passenger’s seat. She wasn’t in shock with fear as Val had been the first time they left. Kerry was thinking of something, thinking of what could’ve led to what she was seeing. All of this. This death. What was going on? Her head was spinning with inquiry.
The ticking from the sky was closer. Val heard it more prominently and she looked up at the clouds, expecting to see something before she got into the car.
Val got in and turned the car out of the drive again. She kept looking up toward the sky to find the source of the noise.
“You hear that?” she asked quiet Kerry, who didn’t reply. “I think it’s coming from the sky. Sounds like a helicopter.”
She pulled out of the driveway.
“You okay?” She looked at Kerry.
Kerry blinked. “I’m not sure. Someone killed Leaf.”
“I know. I was there,” Val said, searching for the source of the sound that was closer still.
“Somebody killed him.” Kerry looked at Val. “He was trying to help us and someone killed him.” She looked ahead, but not at the road or anything, just ahead. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” she said as she added things up. “It’s true. It’s all true. They killed him. They killed him because he was helping me. It’s all true. They tried to kill Jamison. They killed Ras. Charles Brown. They killed Leaf.” She paused and said eerily, “And they’re probably going to try to kill me too.”
“Please don’t start with that shit again,” Val said, distracted from her helicopter watch.
“It’s not shit. It’s true,” Kerry defended herself. She’d actually been exchanging e-mails with Baba Seti from the Fihankra Center. He’d assured her that Jamison was indeed alive and if she wanted to see him again, all she had to do was come to the center. He, and only he, could connect her to him. “How else can you explain this? How else? Who else could have known that we were coming to meet with Leaf today?”
“You don’t know if that’s why he was killed. It could’ve been anything,” Val said. “Like maybe that dude in there was his lover or something and something popped off. Who knows.”
Kerry waited a second and said, “He had a wedding band on.” She could see the gold band on his finger as it was clenching his neck.
“It’s not true, anyway. There is no they. Just stop that shit! Stop it!” All the anger Val felt toward Kerry for connecting her sudden release from jail to some conspiracy theory she’d read online and not the dark deed Val had done to make it happen, was smashed into her harsh tone. Right then she didn’t care if—as Lebowski had pointed out—Kerry was still mourning and most likely just suffering the pain of losing the love of her life.
“There is a they and you know it. Just pay attention; you’ll see. Stop trying to ignore it,” Kerry said. “That’s what they want you to do. To pretend they’re not there, controlling all of this, and we’re just down here killing each other
for no reason. How else do you explain it?” Kerry turned back to Val with tears in her eyes. “How else do you explain why anyone would want to kill Jamison?”
Val pulled over and stopped the car.
“Plenty of people wanted Jamison dead, Kerry. Plenty,” she opined with no care or regard for Kerry’s feelings. She was done with that. She was done. “People like your mother.”
“What?”
“You want to know why your mother has been acting so odd? Because she tried to have Jamison murdered.”
“No.” Kerry kind of snickered. “Stop it. What are you talking about?”
“She did. She hired a hit man to kill Jamison and the GBI was tracking her. Leaf told me.”
“No.” Kerry smiled faintly. “Not true.”
“It is. That’s why she wasn’t involved when you were in jail. Why she didn’t want to be front and center. Why she’s been acting so secretive since you’ve been out. She even admitted it to me. That day I was at the house. She admitted it to me.”
“No.” Kerry shook her head. “Not true. You don’t understand. My mother is crazy for sure, but she’s not that crazy.” Kerry laughed again. “She didn’t come to the jail so much or get involved with my case because it isn’t proper. She didn’t want to be connected with it in the eyes of her little friends and people she thinks are important. It sucks, but that’s her way.”
“Wake up, Kerry! Stop protecting that evil woman! There was no excuse in the world for her not to be there for her daughter. Not unless what Leaf told me was true.”
Kerry let that new information set in.
“No,” she said as new tears found their way to her cheeks. “She wouldn’t do that. She knows. She knows how much I love him. She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t have Jamison killed.”
“She didn’t have him killed. She tried, though,” Val clarified with more caution this time. “Leaf told me all about it. You can let her tell you about it.”
Kerry wrapped her arms around her waist like she felt pain coming from her navel area, the clearest connection she had to Thirjane Jackson. Suddenly she could smell Jamison. Hear him laughing. Hear Tyrian laughing. “If she didn’t do it—if the person she hired didn’t do it—what happened, then?”
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