by Attica Locke
He wanted to talk to Geneva first.
He gave Randie a pleading look as he told Wozniak that it was Rangers protocol to give the deceased’s family a chance to speak with the press before the department made an official statement. The lie made no sense. But he was over six feet tall and wearing a badge and gun, which made for a convincing package. Wozniak didn’t question it. Randie would stay behind with the reporter, talking about Michael and what she knew—or, frankly, didn’t know—about his trip to Texas. Darren put no restrictions on it. It was her story to tell. And it would buy him time. She asked when he would be back and looked, for a moment, undone by the idea of being without him. He didn’t mention the Keith Dale interview in front of the reporter, but he looked at her and made a promise. He’d be back soon.
Wendy was out front of the cafe when he pulled the Chevy into the parking lot, which was still full. Geneva’s was as busy as it had been when he left with Randie this morning, if not more so, and he wasn’t sure how easy it would be to get Geneva alone. The topic was delicate and private. Unless it ain’t, he thought. Lark was a tiny little dot of a town. Everyone at Geneva’s seemed to know about Lil’ Joe hanging out at the icehouse, and Lynn, the bartender, had hinted at a predilection for black men on Missy’s part. Maybe Missy and Lil’ Joe’s relationship was common knowledge, even if it was rarely spoken of.
“You still putt-putting around here?” Wendy said.
She had a can of beer in her lap along with the rusty .22, keeping watch over the day’s wares: jelly jars and cast-iron pots, a wooden wig stand, and a yellow-and-red Coca-Cola crate probably thirty years old. It was clearly stuff she’d found lying around her house, items that, placed on a quilt by a colorful old lady, took on enough historical significance to earn a little pocket change. Darren admired the swindle. “You know they ain’t gon’ let you arrest nobody over that killing, neither one of ’em,” she said. The rain had stopped for now, and two clouds broke away from each other, clearing the way for a snatch of sun.
Wendy shielded her eyes.
Darren smiled and said, “All the more reason you ought to feel free to tell me the truth.” Then with no preamble, he said, “So that child is Lil’ Joe’s, right?”
“Well, lookie who woke up sharp this morning.”
“And Geneva knows?”
Wendy looked at him as if he were slow.
“Keith, too?” he asked.
“He gave that boy his name, but that ain’t fooling nobody.”
“Why the hell is Van Horn asking for lists of Geneva’s customers, folks passing through town, when the dead woman’s husband was raising another man’s child?” Darren asked. A child Keith and his family seemed to have fobbed off on Wally and Laura Jefferson, a retroactive renouncing of a boy who wasn’t blood? Wendy waved him to her right so she wouldn’t have to stare into the sun behind him. He stood under the roof’s overhang, and in the little bit of shade it provided, he saw that Wendy’s eyes were a paler brown than he’d thought, a rich honey color. She said, “You a Texas boy, you know how this story goes.”
It was Wally who started telling tales, she told him.
“He holds a mean grudge.”
Wendy was certain he’d steered the sheriff in a direction that served him.
“See, Wallace Jefferson’s people built this town,” she said.
Lark had begun as a plantation more than a hundred and seventy years ago. That’s the old house there, she said, nodding toward Wally’s place across the highway and the dome of Monticello. Wally’s people fancied themselves some distant relation of the nation’s third president, saw themselves as direct heirs to American history. And like ol’ Thomas, they prospered as slave owners, clear of conscience and flush with cash. Juneteenth switched things around for them, but not that much; there was always a new way to make a dollar. Most black folks living in Lark came from sharecropping families, trading their physical enslavement for the crushing debt that came with tenant farming, a leap from the frying pan into the fire, from the certainty of hell to the slow, hot torture of hope.
The Jefferson family made a good piece of money when the state paved a brand-new highway right through the center of town. Wendy supposed it was just good business sense that kept Wally in fancy trucks and diamond rings a generation later. That and the fact that Wally still owned almost 90 percent of the land in this little corner of the county—all except Geneva’s place. Darren wondered how a young single black woman was able to buy property off the highway in the 1960s. “That,” Wendy said, “is the story I’m trying to tell you.”
Geneva Marie Meeks never made it past eleventh grade, which was the year her daddy got sick and could no longer tend his ten little acres of cotton. Her mother and brothers pitched in, but still the family fell behind, far enough for them to decide that even the youngest, Geneva, would have to work. She could always cook, had been feeding her family of six since she was barely tall enough to reach the top shelf in the cupboard, so she took a job in the Jeffersons’ kitchen—making breakfast, lunch, and dinner six days a week as well as bag lunches for young Wallace Jefferson III, who was in high school up to Timpson and had a little Ford Fairlane his daddy bought him so he could breeze up and down the highway in style twice a day. Wally had always been a little too fussed over, made to think he was more special than he was. But he idolized his father and everything about him, from the way he cinched his britches tight at the waist, held up by a sterling silver buckle, to the gentlemanly way he carried himself around town, holding open doors for ladies and never saying the word nigger in mixed company. Wallace Jefferson II, whom folks called Jeff, was on his second wife by then. After his first wife, Wally’s mother, had passed suddenly, he’d taken to frequenting church socials as far away as Marshall and Dallas looking for a decent girl to marry, to make his house a home again. But the second Mrs. Wallace Jefferson II, Phyllis Slatterly of Longview, didn’t last, having greatly overestimated the joys of plantation living in the twentieth century. She quickly grew bored in a town of only a couple hundred people, many of whom were too black and poor to admire her station in life to the degree she felt her title as Mrs. Wallace Jefferson II deserved. Besides, she had to drive nearly two hundred miles to Dallas to spend Jeff’s money in any way that was satisfying. She didn’t last but eighteen months before fleeing and having the marriage annulled in the courthouse in her hometown. Jeff let her go and raised his boys—Wally and his younger brother, Trent, who died in a car accident during his freshman year at Texas A&M—on his own. He made peace with his life as a bachelor, and he gave up on love. Which was why he was in no way prepared for having Geneva in his house.
She was too young for him, he knew that.
In fact it was not lost on him the looks his son Wally gave Geneva when she passed through any room in the house he was in or the way Wally would bring her a cold Coke all the way from Timpson and ask her to take a break and sit on the back steps with him. They were close in age, Wally and Geneva, if not in temperament. Even at eighteen he was a blowhard, a boy who didn’t quite fill out his shoes, who loved to brag about money he hadn’t earned. Geneva was a quiet girl, smart and funny, if you caught her in the right mood, and she knew about hard work. Two or three nights a week she’d stay late prepping food so she could come in a little later the next day—which meant extra time she could spend cooking for her own family.
They got to talking that way, the elder Jefferson and Geneva. Late at night, Jeff, a whiskey on the kitchen table, would watch Geneva knead dough for dumplings or wash collards leaf by leaf to make sure she got all the cabbage worms. He offered to help a few times, but she told him to sit down, and he did.
They talked about school. Did she miss it? Yes.
They talked about her daddy. Was he getting any better? No.
They talked about Jeff’s first wife and how he still cried sometimes.
Some nights they traded stories and family lore, his ancestors versus hers.
He’d have left it
alone, but goddamn, she was pretty.
“And she’ll tell you,” Wendy said. “She’ll tell you she fell for him, too.”
Jeff took to driving Geneva home on the nights she stayed late. She didn’t live more than a mile away, but he started to feel strange letting her walk out the door after midnight. And he started to feel strange in other ways, too. A lick of heat up and down his neck when she looked at him. A terrible ache below the waist if she was standing too close. And a yearning to touch her everywhere, to know what those curls would feel like wrapped around his fingers.
One night she told her mama the Jeffersons wanted her to work through the night, and when Jeff climbed into his pickup truck to drive her home as usual, she told him to park somewhere instead. He looked at her across the cab and felt a rush of blood through his whole body. Knowing what was about to happen, he chewed on his fingernails as he drove them out to the very edge of the land on which his mansion sat. He had never been with a colored girl, so when he tasted her for the first time, a kiss that lasted near about an hour, he was too ignorant to know if it was black or Geneva that tasted so sweet.
It was her first time, and he told himself to take it slow.
But he couldn’t help what happened. Soon the truck was shaking in the middle of that field, Jeff with one hand pressed against the damp passenger-side window and the other cupping her left hip. They rocked each other, and Geneva screamed and bit his earlobe and prayed in gratitude. It was over in less than ten minutes, and they lay together in the front of the truck till the sun came up.
It’s possible Wally didn’t know what had happened when he came down for breakfast the next day and Geneva “arrived” for work wearing the same clothes as she’d been wearing the day before. But what he did know is that shortly after that fateful night, his father, without explaining a word about it, starting building a small shack right across the highway from their home. He built it by hand, paying Isaac, who used to do yard work for the Jefferson family, five extra dollars a week to saw lumber. Isaac wasn’t but around twelve at the time, as thickheaded as he is now, Wendy said. Wally first thought it was a house for Geneva, which was bad enough, but a cafe on his family’s land galled the boy much worse. His daddy had built a business for the girl he loved. Jeff hand-painted the sign with her name on it, and it was Geneva’s idea to string up some lights on the building, make her place colorful and inviting. It was the only colored place for miles back then, and she and Jeff made a good profit, enough for her family to finally give up tenant farming. When her daddy finally passed from the cancer, she laid him to rest in a satin-lined coffin, had money enough for a marble headstone and a sea of flowers—lilies, her mother’s favorite. They were an odd family of sorts, Jeff staying for meals at the restaurant, eating at the same table as the colored family who used to work for him, and Wally refusing to join him.
Anybody who looked at it would say they were happy, Geneva and Jeff.
And then came Joe.
The night she told Jeff about the music man, Joe had already been staying in the back room of the cafe for two days. Those two had fallen hard and pledged true to each other from the very first they met. And Joe was through hiding.
She sat Jeff at the nicest table and brought him a slice of lemon meringue pie and a glass of whiskey, neither of which he touched. He saw her with the much younger and much blacker man and asked one question. “This what you want, ’Neva?” And when she said it was, he pushed back from the table.
“Fine, then.”
Those were the last words he ever said to her.
Joe bought out the place with his music money, and Jeff, God bless him, was dead within a year. And yet here Geneva was, still making good money off Wally’s land, least that’s the way he saw it. She had stolen it from him, and for decades he’d been on her to sell it to him, not that he would do anything except tear it down. “It’s just the principle of the thing with him, you understand.”
“And how soon after Joe arrived was Lil’ Joe born?”
It was as delicately as Darren could think to put it.
“Child, I don’t know nothing about all them dates,” Wendy said. “But if you asking if Lil’ Joe is kin to Joe, then the answer is no. Didn’t matter much. Joe loved that boy just like he was his own. They don’t make ’em like Joe no more.”
“So Wally and Lil’ Joe were brothers?”
“You pretty quick,” she said with a wink.
“That baby—my God, Missy’s kid is Wally’s nephew. Does Wally know?” He’d had Keith Jr. staying in his house since the murder.
“I don’t know what that man know.”
A heavyset black woman walked out of Geneva’s picking at her teeth with a red toothpick. She glanced at Wendy’s wares laid out next to the door, leaned in for a closer look, then thought better of it and waddled to her burgundy Honda Civic. The car tilted heavily to the left when she got behind the driver’s seat, and Wendy said, “I have a girdle in my car. Bet she’d have bought that.”
As the Honda backed up and pulled out of the parking lot, Darren saw a curious sight. A Shelby County squad car pulling off the highway with its lights on, flashing blue and white. The siren was off, and Darren felt a disconnect between sound and speed that made it seem like the world around him was moving in slow motion. A second squad car pulled in behind the first, and they both parked at the edge of Geneva’s lot. When Van Horn stepped out of the first car, Wendy whistled a low note. Darren felt a sinking feeling in his chest, a stone of hope lost down a well, gravity playing out its game of inevitability. It was always going to lead to this, wasn’t it? Somebody in Geneva’s going down for Missy’s murder? He put out a hand before Van Horn could get to the door. “What’s going on?” he asked, watching as two deputies climbed out of the second vehicle. What could possibly require this much manpower? Van Horn told Darren to stand back, that this didn’t have a thing to do with him, then he walked into Geneva’s followed by the two deputies, who leaned against the wall near the jukebox. The sheriff’s men stood, armed and at the ready, as Darren entered. Behind the counter, Geneva looked up and saw Darren and the county men at the same time, and she looked confused, as if they’d arrived together, as if there had been a coordinated effort.
“Geneva,” Van Horn said. “Let’s do this nice and easy, hear?”
He asked her to come from behind the counter with her hands out in front of her. Then he nodded to one of his men, a fellow younger and fatter than Van Horn. He lifted the cuffs off his belt and waited patiently for Geneva to come forward. She stared at the scene before her as if it had materialized for her entertainment, as if the men were bad actors working with a less-than-stellar script.
“Parker, what in the hell is this shit?”
“Geneva, don’t talk,” Darren said. “Don’t say anything.”
“We taking you in for Missy’s murder,” the sheriff said.
Huxley swung around in his seat, and Tim got to his feet. “Are y’all crazy?” Tim said. “What cause y’all got to believe Geneva killed Missy?”
“We have evidence to suggest Mrs. Sweet was the last to see her alive.”
“What—did I rape her, too?” Geneva said.
The deputy holding the cuffs said, “We no longer believe she was raped.”
“That’s enough.” Van Horn snapped at his deputy for speaking out of turn and ordered him to cuff the woman immediately. Both Huxley and Tim tried to block the deputy’s advance on Geneva. “I can fit three in them cars,” the sheriff said, and Huxley and Tim backed off. The deputy went behind the counter and—rather gently, Darren thought—placed Geneva’s thin wrists in metal handcuffs. The kitchen door opened, and Faith walked out and screamed.
“What are y’all doing to my grandmama?”
Darren looked from her to Huxley and Tim and finally to Geneva as she passed him, her wrists shackled behind her back. The deputy kept a firm hand on her shoulder. Darren followed them outside, watching as the cop ducked Geneva’s head so sh
e wouldn’t hit the car’s door frame. She stopped and threw a glance back at her business, at the place around which her entire life revolved.
“Huxley,” she said. He’d come out with Tim and a few of her other customers to watch what was happening. “Close up the shop and call that lawyer up in Timpson, the one who come around when Joe got shot.” Then she looked at Darren. Her bottom lip quivered, and it was the first crack he’d seen in her steely facade, the first he knew she was terrified. “Don’t talk, no matter what,” he told her, calling on his legal training. Then he made a promise he wasn’t sure he could keep. “I’m going to get you out of this.” She nodded as she slid into the caged backseat.
Part Four
17.
THE MISSY DALE autopsy was a point of pride now that Sheriff Van Horn had his arrest. Oh, he was all too happy to share the findings with Darren now, might have gift-wrapped them if he could, so smug was he about this turn of events, proud to have closed at least one murder case, even if it meant arresting a woman in her late sixties for reasons that made not a lick of sense to Darren.
The sheriff’s station was wood-paneled and ice cold, or at least the room where Van Horn put him was. The carpeting was flat and gray and torn up by boot heels in places. There were junior football league pictures on the walls—a team sponsored by the Shelby County sheriff’s department, the boys growing from tots to teens in the photos—as well as a wall calendar featuring state wildflowers, October’s picture a grove of red-and-yellow Indian blankets. Darren sat below the calendar at a table on top of which a secretary had laid a doily next to the Mr. Coffee machine as a place setting for Styrofoam cups and sugar cubes. Darren pushed it all aside and opened the file in front of him.