by Jackie Lynn
This part brought more questions from the group.
“How did the dead man’s nephew find you on the highway?” Rhonda asked.
Rose shrugged. “Just a weird coincidence, I think,” she replied. “He had been called about his relative and was on his way here to take care of things. He saw the patrol car with West Memphis written on it when we had stopped for something to eat in Russellville. He followed us and tried to get Sheriff Montgomery’s attention.”
“So he ran you off the road?” Thomas asked. “That seems a little over the top.”
“He didn’t mean to run us off the road,” Rose replied. “It was an accident.”
“What about the kidnappers?” Lucas asked.
Everyone leaned in for the answer.
Rose just shook her head. “We don’t know,” she said with more than a hint of disappointment in her voice. “They were gone by the time the police got there.”
“In Henryetta?” asked Lucas.
Rose nodded. “At a motel.”
“You never saw them?” Rhonda asked.
“No,” Rose replied. “I hid inside a storage bin. I don’t even think they knew I was in there.”
The group was silent, thinking over everything she had reported.
Finally, Rhonda spoke the words everyone was thinking. “We’re just all glad you’re home and okay.”
“Me, too,” Rose replied, grateful for the love of her friends.
Thomas squeezed her on the leg and there were a few moments of silence as everyone stared at Rose.
“So, why all the food?” Rose asked again.
Ms. Lou Ellen swept her hair behind her ear as everyone looked in her direction.
“When we heard the ghastly report from Sheriff Montgomery, I was beside myself with worry. We were all sure there would be more bad news.”
“Okay,” Rose said, waiting for the rest of the story. The fact that she had been given up for dead had already been established.
“And everybody knows a person loses her appetite upon hearing the devastating confirmation of the death of a loved one.”
She sounded perfectly reasonable, and Rose was touched by being referred to as “a loved one.” She smiled.
“So, when Mary here”—she nodded at her friend, who once again rolled her eyes at the older woman—“told me about the sheriff’s call and your late-night mishap, I thought it was best to make sure we all ate before we were struck anorexic with the later report of your violent death.”
Rose crossed her brows in her confusion, suddenly feeling the ache of her wound. The story had suddenly gone in a direction she was no longer following.
“Mama’s been cooking since dawn,” Rhonda reported. “She wasn’t going to stop until we heard what had happened to you.”
“That’s right, little sister,” Lucas added.
“So, let me get this straight. You’ve just been eating all day so that when you got bad news and you couldn’t eat, you’d already be full?” Rose asked, trying to make sure she understood what her friends were saying.
“I’ve been to the grocery store four times,” Rhonda said.
“She asked me to go only an hour ago,” Thomas reported.
“I never know her to eat so much,” Mary said. “She and that dog eat all day.”
“I do believe there were more than just two plates to be washed at dinnertime,” Ms. Lou Ellen said, implicating the others in the room.
They all turned away.
“And you just kept cooking?” Rose asked, still surprised by the way her friend responded to bad news.
“When the hours passed, Rose,” Ms. Lou Ellen explained as she sat down at the table next to her daughter, “I began to think about the funeral event and how there would be the necessity for a large gathering of friends and family.” She winked at Tom when she said the word family.
He smiled in return.
“And I knew there would be a need for vast variety,” she continued.
“Even though the grief would have taken away everyone’s appetite?” Rose asked.
The older woman seemed indignant at the question. “Rose, you above all people understand that you cannot die in the South without proper dietary arrangements,” Ms. Lou Ellen responded. “Whether the bereaved eats or chooses not to eat, someone is responsible for providing the opportunity for selection. There must be casseroles present.”
To hear the explanation, Rose thought, it sounded perfectly rational. “So, you’ve been cooking funeral food all day?”
“Anticipatory grief food,” Ms. Lou Ellen replied, “until about noon; then it was funeral food.” She folded her hands in her lap.
“Little sister, we have been worried sick,” Lucas said. “Whereas I go to praying, my mother-in-law finds baking eases the tension of a long wait.”
Rose looked at all the dishes spread across the table and the countertops, along the top of the refrigerator, and across the stove. She saw how much Ms. Lou Ellen had cooked and she suddenly understood that every dish represented an hour of impatient and anxious waiting. She was moved by her friend’s concern.
“Well, since there will be no funeral anytime soon, not for me anyway,” Rose said, trying to show her gratitude, “I think we should eat something now.”
The sighs of everyone gathered around her surprised Rose. Obviously, they had already partaken of the funeral nourishment provided by Ms. Lou Ellen, or maybe it was the anticipatory grief food—Rose wasn’t sure.
“We’d love to sit with you while you have a plate,” Thomas said, speaking for everyone there. “But we’re really full,” he added.
“We have enough food now that we can grieve for everybody who will one day be dead,” Mary said, standing up and heading into the kitchen.
“And that,” Ms. Lou Ellen said as she stood up to get Rose a plate, appearing relieved, “is a very respectable thing.”
Rose laughed and relaxed in her seat, waiting to be served.
TWENTY-ONE
Thomas walked Rose to her camper after she had sampled everything Ms. Lou Ellen had cooked and after everyone was convinced that she was really okay. It was late, and Rose was glad to be finding her way to her own bed once again. She was exhausted from all of the day’s events. She held Thomas’s hand as they strolled toward the river.
“Did you find a tractor?” she asked, remembering the reason for his trip to Fort Smith. They had not talked about his trip.
He nodded. “Found one first thing this morning,” he told her.
They stopped at the picnic table closest to her campsite. She eased down and he sat next to her.
“I got back here about ten,” he said. “I stopped at the office first, to see you, and that was when Mary told me what had happened.”
Rose listened as he explained.
“I’ve been crazy worried,” he said. “We all have.”
She leaned against him.
“I know,” she said.
They sat in the silence of the late night.
“Lou Ellen was the most upset,” he said. “She thought she was responsible for what happened because she was the one who told you to return the bracelet to the crime scene.”
“You know about that?”
Thomas nodded. “In between cooking the entrées and the desserts, she confessed. She said that it had been her idea for you to be out there last night. She was so angry with herself for advising you to do that. She was more upset than I’ve ever seen her.”
“So, it was more than just expecting bad news and preparing for a funeral that caused her to do all that cooking,” Rose said.
“Yeah, I’d say guilt had as much to do with her Martha Stewart tendencies as concern or sadness.”
Rose suddenly felt terrible for her friend. She then understood the unsettled look she had noticed on Ms. Lou Ellen when she first returned.
“It wasn’t her fault,” she said to Thomas, realizing that she would need to tell that to Ms. Lou Ellen, too.
“I kn
ow, and I told her the same thing. But she took it hard, the news of what happened to you. She even swore off sharing her ideas.” Thomas smiled.
Rose was surprised. “She really was upset!” Then she thought about it. “Of course, that won’t last.”
“I know. By the end of the afternoon, she was already telling me about her idea of going into the catering business. She wanted me to be her partner. She drew up plans, figured out where she would advertise. She even came up with a company logo.” Thomas shifted in his seat at the table. “She had several choices, but it turned out she was partial to the name Funeral Foodery.”
“Foodery?” Rose asked. “Where did she get that?”
Thomas shook his head. “Who knows where our dear friend gets anything.” He slid his arm around Rose.
“But she was upset that you had done what she had suggested and then gotten into such danger.”
Rose nodded.
A late-night breeze blew across the river. They huddled closer together.
“I gave the bracelet to the sheriff,” she told him. “I guess he’ll give it to the nephew.” She certainly hoped that he would.
“Lou Ellen said that you went to the library and that you were trying to figure out the symbols on it,” Thomas said.
Rose nodded. “Yeah, and I didn’t know it at the time, but the sheriff knew a lot of them.” She remembered how quickly he’d identified the ones she hadn’t been able to find.
“It was apparently something like a story bracelet. There were a lot of symbols engraved on it.” She recalled what she had learned.
“There was one for death, one for evil, one for speaking to spirits, a river, and a ladder,” she reported. And then she paused. “And actually, I think the murder has something to do with that one,” she said. “The ladder, I mean.”
Thomas turned to face her. “What makes you think that?” he asked.
“I found a ladder in the camper—in a little hidden compartment. Then a man showed up before the Highway Patrol, a man who claimed to be a patrolman and who actually turned out later not to be one, and he was really interested in it once I told him what I had found.”
“There was a man pretending to be a police officer?” Thomas asked, not having heard this part of the story.
Rose nodded. “He came up just after I had called Sheriff Montgomery. He certainly dressed the part of patrolman, had me fooled. But then he drove away when the real Highway Patrol showed up.”
Thomas thought about the new information and then he considered her theory. “What did the ladder look like?” he asked.
Rose shook her head. “I don’t know. I never saw it because it was so dark inside. All I know is that it felt like wood and that there were studs along it, like stones or something.”
She sat thinking about the things that had happened. “What I don’t understand is why somebody would murder a person for a ladder.”
“Must be a ladder worth some money,” Thomas responded. “Greed is always a motive for homicide,” he added.
They both remembered the murder that had occurred earlier that year, the one prompted by a report of gold coins and the misinformation that Thomas’s friend Lawrence Franklin had them in his possession.
Rose tried to imagine what kind of ladder might be of value. Then she thought of the dead man’s name. She mentioned it to Thomas.
“It’s Jacob’s ladder,” she said.
“What?” He did not know the name of the deceased.
“The old man who was murdered. His name was Jacob. It was Jacob’s ladder,” she said again.
They both paused, thinking about her observation.
“Let me see,” he replied. “If I remember my Bible stories…”
He paused, recalling the Old Testament history he had studied and read. “Jacob, the son of Isaac, the grandson of Abraham, had a dream after he stole his brother’s birthright. It was a dream about a ladder stretching from earth to heaven, a ladder with angels going up and down it.”
Rose remembered the story she had been told when she was a little girl and attended the Lutheran church down the road from where she lived. She went there to Vacation Bible School every summer. She learned all of the stories then.
“Esau,” she said. “Esau was his twin brother, the older of the two.”
“And Esau was the one who was supposed to get the blessing, but Jacob tricked both his brother and his father and got the blessing,” Thomas added.
“But I never understood the dream,” Rose said. “Why did he have a dream of angels ascending and descending near him when he had done something so reprehensible?” she asked. “Why would he receive this wonderful vision, a promise that he would have many children and would be able to return to his homeland? Why, when he had done something so horrible to his own family, would God promise Jacob that He would always be with him?”
Thomas considered the question. “Mercy, I guess.” Then he explained what he meant. “It was a dream for which we are all desperate, the dream that promises restoration, the dream that says we will one day return to that joyful Garden of Eden, to completeness. And that even though we are exiled at the hand of someone we have wronged or if we wander far away on our own accord, we will always have the vehicle to get us home again, the ladder filled with angels bringing us back to the fold.”
Rose pondered this. She suddenly remembered her own dream as she’d lain upon the mystery ladder, the colors and the faraway cries, a place that harbored no such commodity. She recalled the way the dream had come to her, as if it had been the dream of someone else, as if it had been passed to her. She thought about the way she fell through darkness.
“Jacob’s ladder,” she said softly, still thinking about the connection between the Bible story and the one at hand. “But this story didn’t turn out so good,” she added. “This Jacob got murdered; he received no mercy.”
“Well, maybe that’s the purpose of an afterlife,” Thomas replied. “Maybe the mercy we don’t find here, we’ll find there.”
A barge moved along the river. They both glanced up to watch the vessel as it passed. It was long and empty except for a few old tires and large spools of rope. Lights danced along the sides. One man stood inside the small captain’s cabin. They waited until it was all the way to the bridge before speaking again.
“Rip came by yesterday,” Rose finally said, glad to be able to tell him about everything that had happened.
He nodded.
She saw that he had already heard. “Mary?” she guessed, remembering that her friend had also told the sheriff.
“Lou Ellen again,” he replied. “She was in quite the confessional mode. She told me practically everything, about you, about her. Some of it was more than I really wanted to know.” He smiled. “Anyway, she said that you were upset that he was here, that he brought his new wife with him.”
Rose didn’t reply.
“She said she didn’t know what you talked about,” Thomas said. “That you didn’t tell her that.”
Rose nodded. She remembered how she had felt after her ex-husband drove away, how she hadn’t mentioned to her friends his reason for coming. She wondered if Thomas was waiting for her to tell him, whether he was curious about what had been exchanged between her and her ex-husband. But she understood that being nosy was not a trait of this man she had come to love. Thomas was content to wait to hear from her only when she was ready to tell. That was one of things that drew her to him, the ease with which he let her unfold her stories.
“It’s my father,” she said, not really having a reason to keep the news to herself any longer. Besides, she realized, she had already told Sheriff Montgomery. She might as well tell the person who mattered most to her, she decided. “Rip said that his condition has worsened and that I should go back to Rocky Mount to let him say his good-byes.”
Thomas waited awhile before making a reply. Rose could tell by the way he hesitated that he was being very careful with the words he chose, that he understood the w
eight of the situation.
“And what do you think?” he finally asked, knowing some of the history between Rose and her only surviving parent.
“I think I don’t owe my father anything else. I think it was out of line for Rip to come here with his new bride and tell me this. I don’t want to be told that I have to go back there. If I go home, I’ll expect him to apologize for all that he put me through, and I’m afraid that once again I’ll be gravely disappointed and that I’ll be the one to come away feeling guilty.” She drew in a breath. “I’m tired of thinking about him and having to sort through more emotions than a person should have to deal with in one lifetime.” She looked away.
“Why didn’t he tell my brother, who, by the way, lives less than ten miles from the nursing home? Why is it that I’m always the one who has to attend to him?”
Thomas didn’t respond. He knew Rose’s questions weren’t really meant to be answered.
“When do you have to make your decision?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “If he’s as bad as Rip says, then I guess sometime soon.”
Thomas nodded; then he cupped her chin in his hand and gently turned her head so that she was facing him.
“It doesn’t matter to any of us what you choose,” he said softly. “We all love you, Rose; Lou Ellen, Mary, Rhonda, Lucas, and I, and we always will.”
He reached up and slid a piece of hair away from the wound on her forehead.
Rose thought he was going to say something more, but he didn’t. She expected that he would tell her what he thought she should do, or say he’d go with her, or give her other alternatives to think about. But he only held her. He didn’t say another thing until they walked to her camper and he kissed her good night, and then it was only the promise that he would see her in the morning. She watched him walk up the driveway and down the lane toward his place.
Later, however, when she slid into her bed, stretched, and then curled under the cover of a light blanket, she thought about his comment, and she understood completely. What Thomas had said and what he had not said were exactly right. And in spite of the harrowing events of her day, Rose fell fully and calmly into sleep.