She stopped her car in front of the house and got out, admiring the gray paint job with the white trim, green plants, and white wicker lawn furniture on the front porch. It looked like something out of a magazine. Marlena complained all the time about keeping the plants alive. She said they drank more water than a thirsty field hand. The plants made the porch, Dotty could see that. As she walked across the wooden floor she touched the frond of a fern. The plant needed water. She’d be sure to bring some out. With Marlena in the hospital for God knew how long, Dotty decided on the spot that she’d come over and water the plants so they wouldn’t die. It was bad enough that Lucas had to worry about his wife hurt so bad and his little girl taken. He shouldn’t have to worry about plants, too.
Her knock was answered by Lucas himself. For all his grief and worry, he was impeccably dressed. “I brought you some breakfast, Lucas,” she said, inching the hot pan she held with a baking mitt toward him.
“Dotty,” he said, his voice not even surprised, “what a kind thing to do. Come in.” He stepped back so she could enter.
Dotty took the hot food to the kitchen, talking over her shoulder as she walked. “Any word on Suzanna?”
“None.”
She didn’t have to see his face to know that he didn’t want to talk about his missing daughter. “Let me fix you a plate. Just take a seat at the table, and I’ll serve you. Is there coffee made?” She looked at the untouched percolator. “I’ll put some on.” She loved working in Marlena’s kitchen. Everything was spotless, and there were all the latest appliances to work with. Cooking meals in such a kitchen would be a pleasure, not a chore like Marlena made it sound.
She put water and coffee in the pot and plugged it in. While it was perking she got a china plate and loaded it with a heaping serving of her casserole. She got the fresh butter that Joe Mergenschoer’s wife churned every other day and put chunks in two still-hot biscuits. She picked up silverware and a clean linen napkin from the drawer and took it all to the table where Lucas waited.
She put the food in front of him and allowed her hand to flutter over his shoulder, barely registering the feel of the worsted wool suit jacket. “I know this isn’t as good as Marlena can make, but I tried.”
Lucas laughed. “Marlena does good to scramble an egg without burning it. I didn’t marry her for her talent in the kitchen.”
Dotty stepped back. Marlena had never discussed her sex life with Lucas. Not because Dotty hadn’t tried to lead her that way. In fact, Dotty had often fantasized what it would be like to climb between the sheets with Lucas Bramlett. There was just something about him that made her imagination gallop. He had an air of command, like he’d do whatever he felt like doing. That excited her. She wanted to feel helpless and ravished, forced to climax by a ruthless man. Lucas played a large role in her fantasies as she lay alone in her bed each night. She realized he was talking to her.
“Jade stayed with Marlena last night. Could you manage to sit with her today? I have work at the real estate office.”
“Sure,” Dotty said. “I’ll do whatever I can to help you. I mean, Marlena’s my best friend.”
Lucas assessed her as if she’d suddenly spouted the formula for a successful stock buy. After a moment, he said, “I can see you want to be helpful.”
She felt the area below her bellybutton tighten, as if the muscles had suddenly bunched into a fist. Under the common words he spoke was another message. “Yes,” she answered, her voice breathless. “I want to help.”
She could tell that he knew how he was affecting her. His smile was nothing more than the lift of one corner of his mouth.
“Do you really want to help me?” he asked, putting his napkin on his barely touched food.
“Yes.” The word was hardly a whisper. She pressed her thighs together beneath the full skirt of her navy dress. She had the strangest idea that he could see up her skirt, see that she’d worn her fanciest panties with the white lace panel that covered the entire front. Her pubic hairs were a triangle of darkness beneath the lace, looking mysterious and feminine.
“Dotty, I know you’re Marlena’s best friend,” he said, scooting his chair back so he could face her, hands relaxed on the arms of the chair. His expression was mildly curious. “And you want to help me, is that right?”
He was playing with her. She knew that, and she liked it. “Yes,” she said, her thighs pressing against the sensation that crept through her lower body. She stood only two feet away from him, unable to move closer or away.
“Take off your clothes,” he said. “Lean over the table.”
The trees caught Frank’s attention first. He stood in the spot where Marlena had been found. He knew it was the exact spot because he found darkened earth where her blood had pooled. Had he not had the mental picture of her bloody body, he would have found the place beautiful. Old oak trees, limbs draping to the ground, created a circle. The morning sun slanted through the mossy limbs and gave it the look of a place where an ancient ritual might have been held, some Druid rite, he thought.
There was no sign of the Cadillac, but there was evidence that Marlena had stumbled through the underbrush until she’d fallen, unable to go farther. As he began to examine the ground more closely, he found traces of the story he sought. Her footprints led back to the river. Marlena had come up from the water, her right foot dragging slightly as she stumbled along.
He read the trail in the pine needles and thought about Totem Joe, a wind talker in the 101st Airborne, a unit that took heavy casualties during the war. Joe had been only a kid, a boy of eighteen whose real name was Joseph Longfeather. Totem Joe had been a nickname, one given in spite and accepted in friendship. Joe had taught Frank the art of tracking. Frank could still hear his soft voice with the rustle of Cottonwood trees in it. “The earth tells many stories, if a man is patient enough and observant enough to read them.” Frank had decided that he would be such a man. Even though he was five years older, Frank had become a student of Joseph Longfeather. The two of them had done a good bit of tracking in the war. Joe had used his strange pecks and taps to send information he’d observed back to army headquarters. Totem Joe had saved a lot of lives, but not his own. Joe had been hit by shrapnel. Frank looked up and saw Joe partially hidden by one of the old oaks. He stepped forward, his hands holding his stomach where the shrapnel had cut him wide open. Blood and pink tissue peeked from beneath his fingers.
Leaving Joe behind, Frank followed Marlena’s trail to the sandy bank of the river. Her footsteps had left hollow indentions in the sand and finally disappeared in the brown current of the Chickasawhay. She’d come from up river, he could tell that by the angle of her footsteps as she came out of the water. She was trying to make her way east, toward Drexel, maybe. Or maybe toward the Chevy car, which he’d learned was registered to one John Hubbard. That was a long leap, but so far, no one had come forward to claim the car, and in Frank’s experience, folks didn’t just up and lose a mostly new Chevy on the side of a little-used dirt road. Marlena’s attack, the abduction of the girl, and the car were all tied together.
Thinking about the Chevy sent his thoughts to the Cadillac convertible. Lucas hadn’t said a word about the missing car. Of course, Lucas hadn’t been around to make statements of any kind, and the sheriff had ordered Frank not to go to the Bramlett house. On the two trips that Frank had made to the hospital yesterday evening and early this morning, he’d seen only Jade in the room. One time Jade had been sleeping while she sat in a chair, her head tipped back against the wall. The last time she’d been wiping Marlena’s face with a cool cloth. Even from the doorway Frank could tell that Marlena was not awake. He’d left without talking to either woman. He thought about that, about how he felt in the presence of Jade Dupree and her half-sister Marlena Bramlett.
The resemblance shared by the two women was uncanny, more a type of glow than a physical trait. One was lemon sherbet and the other burnished like pale wood. He couldn’t say which one was the more beautiful.
That would be like trying to say what tasted better, steak or fried chicken. Jade was the older by two years, but it seemed to make no difference. They both had large eyes, one had a blue set and the other that impenetrable green. They were both slender, with graceful arms and hands and pretty legs. Marlena was blond, a pale ash shade that said money. Jade’s short hair was a cluster of brunette curls. He thought of the story Black Beauty when he looked at the two of them. It didn’t make much sense, but he always thought of Beauty and the other horse, Ginger. Inseparable, and when they were parted, one died. The women were like elegant horses of two different colors, but both thoroughbreds who could go the distance.
They lived within four miles of each other, yet Marlena had never been allowed to acknowledge her half-sister. Jade had been in the Bramlett house, but as a servant. She’d baby-sat the girl, Suzanna, and cooked for special events, and done Marlena’s hair. Almost like real sisters, but Jade had been paid for these services. That fact was well known in town. Lucille had made sure of it.
The unacknowledged kinship between the women was another indication of the power that Lucas, and through him Lucille, held over the town. Lucille Sellers Longier had slept with a black man, had borne him a child, yet folks pretended it never happened. With Jade standing right in front of them looking like a dark shadow of Marlena, they pretended she belonged to Jonah and Ruth. It was downright amazing.
Frank stepped into the deliciously cold water of the river, moving slowly so he could examine the bank. Once he found Marlena’s entry point, he’d be close to finding the scene of the abduction and attack.
As he moved upriver, his thoughts remained on Jade. He still had to wonder how Lucille had pulled off having the baby of a Negro and not been run out of town on a rail. The only thing he could figure was that folks were busy trying to survive the Depression. He moved steadily against the current, his gaze on the riverbank, his mind on the past. The 1920s had been hard for everyone, especially those who made their living from timber. Bad storms had leveled vast tracts of pines, wrecking the timber industry. Lucille’s family had not suffered, though. They’d hosted big parties with music and liquor. The way he heard it was that Lucille had taken to carrying on with a café au lait trumpet player from New Orleans. She got pregnant, and when she began to show, her folks sent her away, saying she’d gone to the Meridian School for Young Ladies. Before she came back, though, an infant girl appeared in the home of Jonah and Ruth Dupree, a childless black couple who worked for the Sellerses, and then later the Longiers.
Most folks had put two and two together, but nothing was ever said in public. Lucille, properly subdued by her experience, married Jacques Longier, a newly arrived Frenchman who hadn’t had time to hear the seamier rumors of the town, or maybe heard them and didn’t care because the Sellerses were wealthy and Lucille their only child. In truth, Jacques had been a poor businessman and a worse gambler. But Marlena was born during the second year of the marriage, thereby sealing the bargain.
Frank had traveled several miles upstream when he noticed several ferns had been uprooted on the bank. He waded over to make a closer inspection. Something had been dragged over the lip of the small bank. He moved a few leaves with a pencil. There was a dark stain in the sand. Blood. Using a tree limb he pulled himself up the bank, stopping when he found a cane pole thrown into the shrubs beside the river. He didn’t touch it, hoping he could lift some prints. His heart rate increased. He was closing in on the place where everything had gone wrong for Marlena and Suzanna. He was glad he was alone.
6
For a long time the hospital room had been quiet. Dawn had crept through the blinds on a window that gave a view of a patch of brown grass and two old water oaks, leaves hanging listlessly in the heat. Jade had watched the sunrise, finally turning to stare at the woman so still in the hospital bed. Marlena’s profile seemed to drink the morning light, glowing softly in the semidarkness of the room. The drip had given out after midnight, and a nurse had come to replace the bottle, the tiny bubbles chasing up like silver beads at a rate of thirty-seven a minute. Jade had counted the bubbles, periodically making sure that the pace was steady. She imagined that each tiny drop sent more strength into Marlena, more will to fight. Her imagination, though, wasn’t quite strong enough to banish the comparison of the drip to the gravity bottles that pushed embalming fluid into the dead, preserving them against decay.
When the nurse came into the room, Jade had asked what was in the drip, but the nurse hadn’t answered her. She’d lifted her nose only half an inch, but enough to tell Jade she was beneath an answer. She might look white, but she was just a pale nigger.
After the nurse left, Frank visited. Jade had pretended not to see him as she wiped Marlena’s face, but she’d seen him. She’d caught his outline in the doorway and knew exactly who it was just by the way he stood. He’d assessed the scene and then left. He had questions and Jade had no answers. Marlena hadn’t told her anything. She’d slept all night, moaning on occasion, but never uttering a single comprehensible word.
Jade turned to adjust the blinds, and in the window’s reflection she saw Marlena shift. A frown moved across Marlena’s face. She said something so softly that Jade leaned forward, her head cocked so that her ear was only inches from Marlena’s lips.
“Help me,” Marlena said.
Jade felt a sweep of relief. She’d watched Marlena throughout the night and wondered if she’d be able to talk, or even if she’d live. She’d imagined that Marlena’s blond beauty had begun to cool and decay, so that in a few days she would be at Rideout Funeral Home and Jade would put the last lipstick on her rubbery lips.
“I’m here,” Jade said. She watched the eyelids flutter and then open. Marlena looked at her without recognition. “It’s me, Jade,” she whispered.
“Suzanna.” Marlena said the word as if she wasn’t certain what it meant. “Suzanna.” She said it again, this time with more emphasis.
“It’s okay,” Jade said, pulling the call bell from beneath the pillow and pressing it hard. Marlena had the look of someone waking from a nightmare yet still caught in fear.
Marlena looked around the room, now lit by the morning sun. She started to sit up but cried out in pain and sank back against the pillows. “Su-zan-na!” She shouted the word, each syllable with equal emphasis.
Jade put her hands on Marlena’s arms. “It’s okay,” she said again, pressing hard to hold Marlena still. “You have to be careful. You’ve been hurt.”
Marlena stared at her without recognition. “Susanna,” she said, and Jade began to fear that she didn’t really know that Suzanna was her daughter, that the name had simply become the only word Marlena could utter.
“Suzanna,” Jade said back to her.
“Taken,” Marlena sighed, and then she began to cry.
The black Cadillac was hidden behind a thick wall of huckleberry bushes. Frank found it without difficulty. He’d followed signs of a struggle on the riverbank until he came upon a pair of brand-new Keds. They were sized for a child, not an adult. He studied the ground, the knocked-over can of worms, the fishing pole cast into the bushes by the side of the river, the pine straw and scrub oak leaves scuffled in places. The marks in the ground told a distinct story. Suzanna had been fishing when someone came up behind her and grabbed her.
About fifty feet from the scene of the abduction he found a place where something had crushed the delicate wild ferns that grew in sandy soil. The area was about the size of a child. He could assume that Suzanna had been subdued in some manner and left on that spot, perhaps while the attacker went after Marlena, or went to join his cohort, if there were two. But what was Marlena doing that a man, or two men, could sneak up on her? The last anyone heard from Marlena, she’d told Lucas she was going to the church to help sort clothes for the poor. She’d never put in an appearance. There was something wrong with the story.
He began to walk a circle around the area. He moved slowly, taking his time, thinking once again
how glad he was that he was alone. Huey would bring tracking dogs in another hour and destroy any chance of finding clues. Huey was a man of action. He wasn’t smart, but he was smart enough to know that to the voters, action looked like he was doing something. Long ago, Frank had learned that small actions often counted most.
Briars gripped the laces of his shoes, and he stepped carefully out of their clinging embrace. He moved around the Cadillac until he came to the picnic cloth. He surveyed the scene from a distance of fifteen feet. Ants had taken over the food, but he could see the ruin of chicken salad sandwiches, a jug of tea, dark at the bottom and clear at the top with lemon slices floating. A swarm of yellow jackets made a bowl of potato salad look alive. Beside the sandwiches was a wicker basket. Moving carefully, he walked to it and nudged it open with his toe. Three plates and forks were inside. The number was troubling.
The picnic cloth was crumpled, and when he knelt down to look more closely he saw the blood. It sprayed in tiny drops across the lower corner of the cloth. There were other stains, too. Sex and blood. The story he read from the picnic scene didn’t jive with anything he’d been able to put together.
He broadened his circle, looking for anything. About twenty feet from the picnic cloth he found six bags of Big Sun potato chips. He picked up a stick and moved three of the bags, thinking of the Chevy abandoned on the road. Forrest County had reported back. John Hubbard, the registered owner of the Chevy, was a traveling salesman for Big Sun, a company that stocked small rural stores in Mississippi with chips and candy bars, beef jerky and pork rinds. Frank pulled a paper sack from his back pocket and scooped up the chips, setting them aside on the picnic cloth. He began his search again, this time faster because he was looking for something larger. A body.
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