by Ninie Hammon
He continued in an urgent voice, the words coming fast, “The pictures was as detailed as some fancy portrait — lightyears beyond the little line sketches she done before. They was all paintings with people in ‘em, but nothing like a portrait of the queen of England sitting on a throne. The people in Mama’s paintings was all dead. Not died-in-their-sleep dead, neither. Messy dead. And the paintings all had windows in them. In the beginning, when she first started painting ‘em, the windows was blank, didn’t show nothing at all, but then one day there was a little girl in one of them. She’d been strangled.”
He paused, looked at her with such a direct stare she had to avert her own eyes.
“Except that particular little girl was very much alive. Becky Adams, that was her name. She wasn’t dead … yet.”
He let the word hang out there in the air between them like a dead fish on a stick, and Jessie tried to reach out and grab hold of the concept, but her mind backed up from it, refused to engage.
Suddenly, the lights in the room came back on. The sudden bright blinded them and they both blinked like moles let out on a sunny day.
The picture leaned up against the chair was even more horrifying in the light from lamps and the ceiling fixture than it had been shrouded in shadow, dreamlike, illuminated only by candles and the lantern.
It snapped then — the insanity of the whole scene slammed into Jessie with the force of a wrecking ball. That was it. Jessie was done. The last thing she needed, on the last day she intended to occupy space on the planet, was a crazy old man in her living room prattling on about a picture his mother had painted … or he’d painted … or Bozo the Clown had painted…
She stood, drew herself up as tall as she could and was surprised and impressed that her voice didn’t shake when she spoke.
“You need to leave now.”
“No ma’am, I ain’t going nowhere long’s…”
She took two steps to the fireplace and picked up her cellphone off the mantle. With her fingers poised over the keyboard, she said, “I don’t even have to dial all three numbers: nine one one. It’s a one-stroke key on my phone. Unless you leave — right now — I’m punching that key.”
“You don’t want to do—”
“You don’t have any idea what I want or don’t want!” she shouted, not meaning to but when she saw the effect it had on him, she was glad she had. “You don’t know anything about me. I didn’t invite you into my life, you barged in like you owned the place.” Her mind flittered to the raincoat hook behind the door. “Well, you better barge right out again before the police show up and drag you out.”
The old man didn’t look angry. He looked sad. Without a word he stood and the little sound-asleep dog beside him sprang instantly to life.
“And put the gun back down on the table.” He might not even have realized he’d picked it up again while he was talking. No, he knew he had it. He meant to keep it.
“If I’s to leave this gun here, you’d use it—”
“—to shoot rats in my basement. Or a bald eagle perched on the clothesline in the backyard. Or for any other thing I happen to want to shoot.” It felt good to be angry. Anger was hot, and for a moment it warmed the coldness of her bones. “That is my gun. I bought it legally. I have the license to prove it. The gun belongs to me and if you walk out of here with it, that’s stealing. Given how much I paid for the stupid little thing, stealing it is bound to be a felony.”
The old man hesitated.
“I said, put the gun down.” There was such force and determination in her words she sounded like a detective in a cop show. “Unless you have somebody to feed your dog while you’re in jail, I suggest—”
“Alright. We best go, Sparks. Let this nice lady blow her brains all over the flowered wallpaper in the kitchen.”
He went to the hook behind the door and donned his raincoat. He snapped Sparky’s raincoat on him, picked up the lantern off the coffee table, turned the tab all the way until the yellow glow went out, leaving behind a red afterglow as the wick cooled.
“And take that … that thing with you!” She pointed to the painting, which had become as repulsive to her as a tarantula spider.
He looked at her for a moment.
“You just said your own self it’s against the law to steal, to take somethin’ that belongs to somebody else. This here painting ain’t mine. It’s yours. I only been keepin’ it for you all these years. You can do whatever you want with it, but my part in all this is over.”
She started to argue with him, but she didn’t want to engage him at all. She just wanted him gone.
He turned toward her and she steeled herself for some parting shot. But his voice was kind and gentle.
“I’ll see somebody comes by here early tomorrow. So you won’t have to…”
What? Lie here dead until the neighbors smell the stink? It was almost like he knew she’d been thinking about that.
“I’m glad I got to meet you.” The old man searched her face. “I was so hoping it was possible to … but I guess it ain’t.” He stopped again. “I’m sorry.”
Then he turned and walked out, letting the screen door bang shut behind him.
The brunt of the storm had spent itself and was blowing out over Whispering Mountain Lake. Here, it was only sprinkling and a piece of the full moon peeked out from behind scurrying tatters of clouds.
T.J. sloshed through the water pooled in depressions in the old sidewalk, with Sparky bounding along beside him, hopping the puddles. Now that the storm had passed, the dog’s high spirits had returned. They said dogs were much more sensitive than people about such things and Sparky’s vibrant personality was always subdued until he was sure the discontented rumble of faraway thunder wasn’t coming his way.
Dobbs had parked his Jeep in the driveway of the Watford House. T.J. opened the back door and let Sparky leap up into the seat, where his allover shake sent only a little water flying in all directions. Then T.J. got into the front seat beside Dobbs.
The two of them sat together in silence. T.J. felt spent, used up. It was that hour of the night when all bad things were possible, when the bogeyman came out of the closet and brought all his nasty friends. That hour when death seemed as near as the darkness, as cold as the moonlight and as certain as the coming dawn. He didn’t know if he’d ever felt quite as helpless as he did right now.
Dobbs said nothing, just sat behind the wheel, watching the wipers clear the last of the sprinkling rain off the windshield. He pulled his watch out of his pocket, the one on a chain attached to a belt loop on his pants, and looked at it, not that he wanted to know what time it was. It was just something he did — he’d pull the watch out, a gold-plated watch with ornate carvings on the front and back and a flip catch that released the cover so you could see the stylized Roman numerals on the face beneath the glass. His Uncle Hurl had given it to him when he was sixteen — T.J.’d heard the story a dozen times, the impression it’d made on Dobbs when he seen the gnarled, liver-spotted old hand lay the watch in the palm of the young unblemished one. It didn’t keep time, was like to tell you it was midnight when the sun was coming up, hadn’t worked when his uncle had given it to him all those years ago. But he’d pull it out anyway and look at it the way another man might smooth his mustache or slick his hair back from his forehead.
“She wouldn’t listen, would she?”
T.J. shook his head. “But I left the picture with her. I wouldn’t take it back when she tried to give it to me. And sitting there looking at a picture of your own self dead, how you gone look, that’d have to have an effect on somebody, wouldn’t it?”
He hated the hope he could hear in his own voice because he knew it wasn’t real hope but some sad cousin of desperation.
“Yeah, you’d think so.” Dobbs was humoring him.
“I bet she’s sittin’ in there right now, staring at that painting. Looking at it with the lights on. I bet she—”
A loud bang ripped open the night. T.J
. slumped back against the seat and put his head in his hands.
Coming off the Highlands Festival weekend was worse than coming off a ten-day drunk, not that Kavanaugh County Sheriff Brice McGreggor had ever been drunk for ten consecutive days. But he had policed drunks, crazies and teenagers on eight consecutive Highlands Festival weekends and he was here to testify that nothing short of an Ebola outbreak could possibly be worse.
Except maybe the Fourth of July hot on its heels, which this year was shaping up to be the Mother of all Fourth of July celebrations. The holiday, coupled with the grand opening of the Nautilus, the floating casino in the lake, would create a perfect storm of revelry it would take his department a month to recover from.
He looked at the pile of paperwork on his desk and decided he’d been wrong. The policing of the Highland Festival wasn’t as bad as clearing up the paperwork afterward. Traffic reports formed the biggest pile — DUIs and driving while impaired by some as-yet-undetermined substance, reckless driving, speeding, followed close behind creating a public disturbance, drunk and disorderly conduct and the Grand Kahuna of them all — underage drinking.
The sheriff picked up one of the underage drinking reports and shook his head. He flat out could not tell anymore. On his first day as a rent-a-cop security guard at the Mall of America in Minneapolis a decade ago, he’d “busted” two fifteen-year-olds trying to buy beer at a liquor store. They’d been easy to spot. Now, twelve-year-olds could pass for twenty — the girls, anyway. Wouldn’t want to be a young man in today’s world, trying to swim through the shark-filled waters of jailbait girls who looked way more like seasoned hookers than sophomores in high school.
Thank God for small favors, though. He didn’t envy the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Water Patrol, whose officers had to deal with all the same issues, but with the added wrinkle that their jurisdiction was twenty-five thousand acres of water and more than six hundred miles of winding shoreline.
There was a polite rap at his partially closed door before Deputy Raleigh Fletcher opened it and leaned in just far enough to announce, “The unit that was dispatched to the possible ‘shots fired’ on Sycamore Street — Stephens just radioed in, said it appears to be a suicide at the Watford House.”
Deputy Fletcher was the second in command every law enforcement officer dreamed of. Raleigh Davenport Fletcher was tall and blue-eyed, with piano key teeth — even had a cleft in his chin. He looked like the square-jawed good guy in a superhero cartoon. And he came from money. Old money. Charleston money, which meant that on special occasions his family would still haul out the silver that’d been hidden in the pigsty so the Yankee soldiers wouldn’t find it. And for all that, Fletch played everything strictly by the book, was a straight arrow, worked hard and always gave the credit to other officers.
He was everything a sheriff could want from a deputy. He had only one drawback. There were politically correct ways to put it now, Brice was sure, but truth was truth: Fletch was as dumb as a box of doorknobs, cursed with incurable stupid. Sheriff McGreggor suspected that Fletch’d been promoted through one special education class after another all the way through school by the force of his family’s influence, which likely landed him a slot in the police academy. He’d blossomed there, though. Oh, not academically — but he took to the hierarchy of law enforcement as naturally as a dog to a fire hydrant, was fearless in combat training, absolutely obedient and morally upright in the kind of intensely pure way only the very innocent or the very dumb could be. Working as a deputy sheriff in nowhere Kavanaugh County, West Virginia, should have been a knothole in the family tree, but they were just glad he had a job.
Give Fletch a clear task to do, break it down into reasonable steps, and he would run through brick walls to accomplish it. He was probably incapable of filling out an incident report, but he would cheerfully have followed Sheriff McGreggor down the barrel of a howitzer.
The sheriff pushed back from his desk, got to his feet and started for the door, his six-foot, five-inch frame moving with the economy of motion and latent agility of a former athlete. Which he wasn’t, unless diving into foxholes in Kosovo was considered an Olympic sport. Still, he possessed a big-man’s grace when other men his size were clumsy.
He smiled at Fletch, grateful for any interruption to take him away from the administrative work on his desk — even one as grisly as a suicide. The Watford House. He didn’t know who lived there now.
“Who called it in?” he asked as he lifted his hat off the hook by the door, hoping the rain had let up.
Fletcher looked at the clipboard in his hand.
“A mister…” The sheriff watched him sound out the syllables. “Ray-mond Dob-son and…”
“And T.J. Hamilton,” the sheriff finished for him and his smile broadened.
After they heard the gunshot, Dobbs called 911 while T.J. walked slowly across the sodden lawn back to the house and up the steps to the porch. He knocked loud, called out her name again and again. No one answered. The front door had been unlocked — he’d walked out of it only a few minutes before — so he could have stepped inside, could have gone to her. But he didn’t, just stood vigil by the front door. Didn’t go in.
Which was testimony to how his whole world had been upended by a chance conversation with a woman on this porch only a few hours before. Except that wasn’t when it started, of course. It’d started sixty years ago.
His decision to stay on the porch had nothing to do with the grisly nature of what he’d find if he went inside. T.J. Hamilton was a man well-acquainted with death. He’d seen it, in all its various forms — with its varying degrees of insult to the human body. There were an inexhaustible number of ways to die — and T.J. had been present for more than a representative sample. Hand grenades in Vietnam. These days, Marines dealt with more sophisticated things called IEDs, improvised explosive devices, but a hand grenade did the same kind of damage and sometimes it offered a couple of seconds’ warning. You saw it roll across the ground toward you, watched your best friend jump on it to save the rest of the squad.
He’d spent ten years as a soldier, a decade of his life in the jungles of Vietnam, and in other off-the-books places where his mission wasn’t acknowledged and he didn’t exist. Shoot, he hadn’t been out of high school a year when he’d gone boots down with the rest of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, wading ashore on China Beach north of Da Nang. Every day of those ten years had been the longest day of his life. Until the next one.
Add to that another two years in — what was the sexy term they used now? Black Ops — and when he showed up among the Hoosiers at Purdue University, he was the oldest student in his class. Purdue. That’s where he’d met the only woman he ever loved. Three years later, armed with a Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice and a new bride, he graduated first in his class from the Chicago Police Academy and spent the next thirty years with the Chicago Police.
All told, life had set T.J. Hamilton down in a front row seat at a command performance of man’s inhumanity to man for four decades. As often as not, though, man’s stupidity and indifference caused just as much carnage. It had become clear to him the day he watched the snow melt around the unrecognizable bodies of nine children laid out in a row after a drunk driver slammed into a school bus that stupidity and indifference killed more people than vicious intent. And them folks was just as dead.
So why did T.J. stand outside on the porch, uselessly calling out the name of a woman he knew was dead? Still unwilling to pick at that scab, he only allowed himself to understand a little of it, to see that a more elemental horror than anything he’d experienced in the years since had been set free in his soul when he looked at the painting he had kept for decades when he should have destroyed it, burned it like all the others.
It was a horror that had drawn first breath more than half a century ago and T.J. flat out did not want to go there again.
So he simply waited for emergency responders to arrive. Let them look at what he
could not. It was their job, not his anymore. He was a bystander, a spectator, a non-combatant.
As he stood there on the porch waiting, he felt such a tangled mix of emotions it was impossible to pull any one of them free. Except relief. He recognized that sensation as it washed over him. Yeah, relief. He had finally, finally heard the other shoe fall. The final shoe. What had begun when his mother fell off a ladder when he was eight years old had ended here where it started, this night, beyond that door. It was finally over.
He and Dobbs were shunted quickly to the side as soon as the paramedics arrived and then the sheriff. They gave a short statement, said they happened to be driving past when they heard a gunshot coming from the Watford House. T.J.’d met the new tenant that afternoon, knew she was a woman living alone, so they’d stopped to check on her. When she didn’t come to the door, they’d dialed 911 and stayed until the authorities arrived. After that, they stood on the far edge of the porch, waiting for the body to be wheeled away.
But instead of the controlled order of removing a body, there was frenzied activity. Voices calling out. Running feet. Then the gurney they thought would bear a sealed black bag burst out the door of the house bearing a woman to be whisked away in an ambulance.
Jessie Cunningham wasn’t dead. Correction: Bailey Donahue wasn’t dead.
Sheriff Brice McGreggor had approached them then. T.J. only knew the sheriff to speak to, not well, but what he had seen of him, he liked. He didn’t showboat, kept his head down and did his job. And he was a fellow Marine. There was that. T.J. had fought in the jungle; Brice in the desert. Semper Fi.
The sheriff carried a driver’s license in his hand. He watched the taillights of the ambulance disappear around the corner, lights flashing, siren waling, an odd look on his face. Then he brought his attention back to T.J. and Dobbs.