Mississippi Noir

by Tom Franklin

  Anna felt her head spinning. Car trouble?

  “He stopped and was eating with us here at McDonald’s when you called him,” Mary said. A silence dragged out. “Anna? You still there?”

  Anna’s brain seemed to have gone numb. Her head was roaring.

  She had told Jack she thought Mary had been killed—and yet Jack had been there with Mary at the time, while they were talking? He was sitting right there with her? Why didn’t he tell me that?

  There could be only one reason. Dazed, she peered up at Woody, who was still wolfing down sandwiches, and then looked past him, focusing as if for the first time on the roofline of the house just above the trees behind him. The house owned by someone Woody said he knew, someone who wouldn’t mind their trespassing . . .

  Oh my God.

  Anna felt her stomach turn over. She lowered the phone and said to Woody, “That’s Jack’s house, isn’t it?”

  Woody had turned away and was digging around in the picnic basket. “What?”

  But she knew it was true. Jack Speerman lived there—about a hundred yards off the road, Woody had said. He lived there—here—and the well was on his land. The well with the wheelbarrow ruts running toward it from the direction of the house. Anna’s thoughts were flying now, zinging around in her head.

  And then she heard something behind her. She whirled around—

  And stared straight into Jack’s face. Anna yelped and clapped a hand over her mouth.

  Woody heard her and turned. “Jack?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  She just kept staring. This wasn’t the mild, friendly Jack Speerman they’d seen at Wendy’s. This face was drawn and flushed with anger—but also with something else. Frustration? Guilt? Regret?

  Anna was breathing in ragged gasps, trying to think. Had Jack heard enough of the phone conversation just now to know she was talking to Mary? “Jack,” she said, panting. “Thank God you’re here.” She leaned closer and whispered, “I haven’t said anything to Woody about all this. In fact, I think I might’ve been wrong. I was just about to call you back and—”

  Vaguely, as if from a distance, she could hear Mary’s voice in the phone she held in her hand: “Anna? Are you there?” Anna looked dumbly down at it, knowing that Jack had heard it too, but before she could say or do anything more, the phone was suddenly gone, slapped out of her hand and onto the ground six feet away. Her fingers were stinging.

  Jack Speerman looked as if he wanted to hit her again, and not in the hand this time.

  “So you know Mary’s alive,” he said softly, “and you probably know by now that I was with her when you called. And if you know that . . .” Jack paused and shook his head. In a voice heavy with sadness he continued, “What have you done, Anna?” He glanced past her at Woody, who was standing now, the picnic forgotten. “What in God’s name are you two doing here anyway, snooping around?”

  “You invited me,” Woody said, sounding hurt. “You said to stop by sometime and take pictures—”

  “A year ago. Things have changed since then.” Jack’s gaze moved to the gray rooftop beyond the trees and then back again, and Anna saw the heartache in his eyes. “What are the odds?” he murmured. “Couldn’t you have left well enough alone?”

  Woody, Anna could tell, was beginning to understand. He had backed up several paces, his eyes narrowed and alert. He looked at the house too, then at the well behind him, and at the wheelbarrow tracks between the two. Putting it all together. Last of all, he turned again to stare at the pain and guilt on his old friend’s face.

  Except for the regular screech and creak of the windmill, the scene had gone dead silent. Anna could feel her heart thundering in her chest.

  “It’s you,” Woody said, with something like awe in his voice. “You’re the Night Stalker. He looked like someone impersonating a policeman because he was a policeman.”

  Jack ran a beefy hand over his face. He had perspired all the way through his uniform shirt. “No,” he replied miserably. “It wasn’t me.”

  “It was me,” a voice said, from off to the side. All three swiveled to look.

  Standing there on the rutted path to the house was a carbon copy of Jack Speerman. The eyes, mouth, even the build was the same. The only differences were hair color and height: this brother was darker, and shorter. That, and the fact that there was something odd in his eyes.

  And a gun in his hand.

  “Stuart?” Woody said.

  “Hello, Woody. Lotta water under the bridge.” Stuart Speerman turned to Anna, his face grave. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “But I know who you are,” Anna said. She felt strange, and disconnected. It was as if she were watching all this from someplace else. At this point she was beyond surprise.

  At last everything made sense. The violent, unbalanced brother, living here with Jack, staying out of sight except for an occasional drive down the road behind the house to intersect with Highway 25 and the unsuspecting motorists traveling there. The perfect hideout, for both himself and the bodies of his victims. The perfect opportunity to strike and take cover and strike again.

  “Why?” Anna managed to ask.

  Stuart’s face grew even more solemn. “Voices,” he said. “They told me to do it. I had no choice.”

  She shook her head. “Three innocent people. You’re insane.”

  He shrugged as if that might indeed be a possibility.

  Anna turned to Jack. “And you helped him.”

  “I protected him. There’s a difference.”

  “Was it your car that stopped those women?”

  “No,” Stuart said. “But it was his light bar. It fits pretty well on the top of his other car. The one the voices told me to drive.” He grinned then, and for a moment Anna could clearly see the gleam of madness in his eyes. “It’s amazing—nobody worries if there’s no uniform, or markings on the car. That flashing light’s all it takes. Besides, I work at night.”

  “Worked,” Jack corrected. “You promised me it was over.” He turned to Anna and Woody and said wearily, “It’s over now.”

  “Well, it will be.” Stuart’s smile was back again. “After we do a little cleanup.”

  Woody was staring at his old friend. “How could you do it, Jack? I mean, you’re a peace officer.”

  The muscles in Jack’s face seemed to slacken. “He’s my brother.” As if that explained everything.

  “So you’re going to shoot us both? Is that it?”

  “He won’t,” Stuart said. “Somebody from the gas station might hear it.” Slowly, casually, he took a noise suppressor from his pocket and screwed it onto the end of his pistol. “Besides, there’s no real need for that. That well’s ninety feet deep.” Stuart grinned again. “Minus maybe ten feet of dirt and bodies. Still a long way to the bottom.”

  “Wait a minute,” Anna blurted. “You’re forgetting about our other friend. Mary. I told her what I suspected—she’ll call the police. The real police, I mean.” Even in her terror she gave Jack a withering glare. “And she knows where we are.”

  Jack shook his head. “No, she doesn’t. I never mentioned your location when I spoke to you on the phone, and I heard most of what you said to her just now. All she knows is what I told her—you and Woody had car trouble somewhere.” Jack still had a haunted, sorrowful look, but there was no fear of discovery there. He was in control, and he knew it.

  But Anna and Woody were about to die, and Anna knew it.

  As if to confirm this, Stuart raised the silenced automatic and pointed it at Woody. “Gentlemen first,” he said.

  And Anna did the only thing she could think of to do. Moments earlier she had unbuttoned the cuff of her left sleeve so the collapsed steel bar resting against her forearm could be easily removed. Now she snatched it out with her right hand, flicked it to its full length even as she spun around, and hit Jack Speerman with it, square in his left temple. As he went down, she turned again and threw the heavy bar as hard as she could, en
d over end, at Stuart.

  “Run, Woody!” she shouted. “RUN!”

  But Woody didn’t run. He didn’t run and he didn’t attack. He didn’t do anything but stand there, frozen and wide-eyed. Stuart Speerman, who had frantically ducked the bar Anna had thrown at him, stood straight up again, aimed the pistol, and shot Woody once in the chest.

  Anna screamed, a primitive, blood-chilling scream that made Stuart turn and point his gun at her this time. The problem was, this target wasn’t stationary. Anna was sprinting toward him, face contorted and teeth bared in fear and rage, and in his surprise both his shots missed her. She crashed into him at full speed, biting and clawing, and both of them fell to the ground. But as short as Stuart Speerman was, he was not weak. He pulled his right arm free and clubbed her viciously in the forehead with the heavy automatic, and then hit her once more, on the left side of the head. Anna rolled off him and onto her stomach two feet from Woody’s sprawled body and four feet from the edge of the well. She was still conscious but was so stunned her world was spinning and full of stars. She tried to move but found she couldn’t.

  At the edge of her fading eyesight she saw Stuart’s shoes take a step toward her, heard him say, “Good try.” And knew, although she couldn’t see his hands, that his gun was now aimed at her.

  In those final seconds, a dozen thoughts ricocheted through her brain. Memories, loves, thrills, regrets. One was the realization that she should’ve gone for Jack’s gun after hitting him, should’ve tried to grab it off the ground or out of its holster or wherever it was, and shot Stuart with it. But she suspected that wouldn’t have worked either. The only difference was, she’d have died already, and twenty feet farther west.

  It was all over now anyway.

  Just as she was wondering whether to close her eyes or leave them open, another pair of shoes, these black and gleaming, stepped into her field of vision. She heard a grunt of great effort, and saw Stuart’s brown loafers rise an inch or two off the ground. With a huge push she managed to force herself onto her side so she could see, and when she looked up she saw Jack Speerman, bright blood oozing from his ear and nose, lifting and squeezing his brother from behind. Stuart’s arms were pinned to his sides, his gun useless. Grunting, the two men struggled there for several long seconds.

  Then something happened that Anna would never forget. Jack looked down at her, looked down past his shorter brother’s shoulder, and Anna saw a strange peace deep in those eyes. A moment later, Jack moved slowly past her, still holding Stuart in a bear hug, and stepped into the well.

  Neither of the brothers screamed, or said a word. They just vanished into the pit. After what seemed an extremely long time, she heard a muffled thud as they hit bottom.

  She turned her head to look at Woody, lying beside her in a spreading pool of crimson, and thought, Help him. I have to help him. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t even help herself. A moment later her eyes clouded, the incredible pain in her head washed over her—

  * * *

  “—and she passed out.”

  Little Charlie was still asleep in his car seat, but Deborah sat and stared at her mother with eyes as big as quarters.

  “You passed out?” she said. “What about Woody?”

  “She—I—didn’t know, for a long time. I woke up two days later, in a bed at Baptist Hospital in Jackson. I barely pulled through, they said. Woody was in a room down the hall. It took five months for him to heal, but the bullet had missed his heart, and he made it. Both of us made it, physically speaking. But . . .”

  “You didn’t stay together.”

  “No.” Anna McDowell looked at her daughter, then back at the road ahead. “Thinking back on it now, I realize that I could never in a thousand years have suspected your father of having done what I—incorrectly—suspected that Woody Prestridge had done. If you truly know and love someone, those doubts just wouldn’t be there, no matter what. I think Woody and I were never able to get past that.”

  “And then you met Daddy.”

  Anna nodded. “Six months later. We got married right away, and a year after that, a precious little girl named Deborah came along.”

  The girl thought about all that for several minutes. “I still don’t understand. Who rescued you? Did someone hear you scream?”

  “No. No one from the station, or the nearby area, heard or saw anything at all. We survived only because of a quirk of fate. The phone Jack Speerman slapped out of my hand stayed on, and the connection stayed open. Mary didn’t hear everything, but she heard enough. She called 911 and the cops and ambulances were there within fifteen minutes. Mary saved our lives.”

  “A lady you’d just met earlier that day.”

  “Yep. An angel, according to your dad.”

  “But—like Speerman said—how did she know exactly where you were?”

  Anna grinned. “The windmill. That rusty old windmill, squawking away in the background. She heard it through the phone.”

  Deborah was frowning again. “But to have heard the windmill noise earlier—to know where it was—Mary must’ve been in the woods after all.”

  “She was. Just like the cashier at the station said. She told me later that she’d crossed the street and the field all the way to the woods after coming out of the restroom—but then turned around and went right back to talk to the folks who wound up letting her ride with them. Woody never saw her until she called out to him a few minutes later.”

  “So you were wrong. He wasn’t lying.”

  “I was wrong about a lot of things,” Anna said. “Turned out Woody’s odd behavior was because of his new position. He later transferred from sales to desk work.” She took in a long breath and blew it out. “Nobody was lying that day except Jack, and nobody had killed anyone except Stuart.”

  “But Jack was guilty too, right?”

  “Yes, he was. And he knew it.”

  Deborah blinked twice, her eyes still wide. “Whoa.” She looked a little overwhelmed. “Has Daddy ever heard this story?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What about Aunt Penny?”

  Anna smiled again. “There’s something you probably don’t know about Penny. She used to be a nun. Or at least she trained for it. Then she changed careers and moved to Tennessee.”

  Deborah gaped at her mother. “What?! You said you were telling me the truth!”

  “I was.”

  “But you said your friend that day . . . you said she was named Mary Patrick.”

  “That was the name the church gave her—they do that. Her real name was Penny McDowell.”

  Deborah turned and stayed silent for several moments, watching the countryside glide past the windows. “So Aunt Penny didn’t just save your life; she wound up introducing you to her brother.”

  “And by doing so, made sure she would have a niece and nephew to come visit her once a year.”

  Deborah giggled. It was a good sound, Anna thought, after what they’d been talking about for the past hour.

  She thought about what Officer Keller had told her, after the incident with the would-be carjacker this morning. Was it true? Had what happened to her that day long ago really made her tough?

  Maybe it had. But right now she didn’t want to be tough. She wanted to be a regular mother, the kind her kids could love and trust and play with before the world around them tried to make them tough. That would come soon enough.

  “Mom?” Deborah said.

  “What, honey?”

  “The story you told me. Do you think about it much?”

  Anna waited a long time before answering. Because the truth wasn’t the answer she wanted to give, or the one Deborah wanted to hear. Of course Anna thought about it, those things that had happened there in the piney woods beside the highway. She would always think about it. Sometimes, late at night, she could even hear the windmill again, the sound of those ancient, rusted blades turning around and around and around. But maybe now, now that the story had been told, she would think about
it less. Who knew?

  “Yes,” she said. “Sometimes I do.”

  Deborah nodded, as if to acknowledge that the truth was always the best approach, honestly the best policy. They exchanged a knowing smile, Anna popped open another Coke, and little Charlie woke up in the backseat and rubbed both eyes with his chubby fists. Outside, State Highway 25 became 82 and then 45 and then pointed them north toward Tupelo and Corinth, straight as an arrow. Just south of the Tennessee line the sun broke through the clouds, waving them on.

  It was a good day for traveling.

  ANGLERS OF THE KEEP

  by Robert Busby

  Olive Branch

  Hunched over my ex-father-in-law’s front yard, molding a layer of pine straw around the purple lilac hedges and crawl-space grates wrapped around Lafayette’s sprawl of a brick one-story rancher, I heard the tires of Erin’s rental car massaging the gravel drive leading up to the carport. Erin had found a new breath of life after our divorce, quit her job as first-grade teacher at Bodock Elementary to pursue her PhD in American folklore at Oklahoma State University. Except for the semester she took off after Betty, her mom, was murdered a year and a half earlier, she’d been in Stillwater for four years of the five we’d been divorced. I was between gigs. Holding out for a management position, as they say.

  Erin eased the car to a stop just short of the carport even though her father’s El Camino had not been parked there when I pulled in this morning. I’d assumed Lafayette was at the Feed Mill on Main Street, slugging coffee and shooting the shit with the other old-timers. Lafayette’s lungs were bad sick, figured he’d want to get in all the breakfasts he could. But it wasn’t like him not to welcome Erin home. The car door slammed. I stabbed the shears through the pallet of pine straw into the red clay underneath, made my way around the house along the stone path embroidered with monkey grass I’d planted for Lafayette last spring.

  “Thought you might be over here,” she said.

  She pushed herself off the hood of the blue Saturn. She wore a black wool turtleneck and when she uncrossed her arms her tits became ambitious. Her teeth gripped a peppermint candy. I folded my work gloves into the back pocket of my jeans and gave her a hug.