Mama had helped me collect fallen leaves from our yard, only the very finest, blemish-free specimens. We’d had a ginkgo in our yard too. Back inside the house, she’d set up the ironing board. With a hot iron, we’d pressed the leaves between squares of waxed paper torn out of the blue and white box in the pantry. The smell reminded me of melted crayons.
When we were done, we’d mounted the pressed leaves on cardboard squares that came back from the laundry with my father’s dress shirts. Mama had me carefully letter the name of each leaf on the cardboard. Red Maple. Pin Oak. Sycamore. Pecan. Ginkgo.
I’d loved the look of the leaves, which we pinned up on the kitchen walls. But I’d been a little mystified about the reason for the project.
“Why?” I’d asked, watching as the hot iron sealed the leaves inside the waxed paper. “Why do we do it this way?”
“So they’ll last forever,” she’d said, ruffling her hand through my hair. “Nature has a way of letting beauty disappear. If we left these leaves alone, they’d turn brown and crumble like dust. But we’re going to trick nature so your leaves will always stay just as pretty tomorrow as they are today.”
She had been right. The leaves’ brilliant color had stayed locked inside their waxen coat for months, until we’d replaced them with construction paper Easter bunnies made from cotton balls and broomstraw.
I heard the front door open behind me. Austin sat down on the stoop beside me. He patted his perspiring face with a handkerchief. “Well, we won’t have to have a steam facial this fall.”
“No,” I agreed.
“You all right?”
“Sort of.”
“Want to go back in now? The old guy’s getting pretty tuckered out. I don’t think he’s used to talking this much.”
I nodded and followed Austin back inside.
“I’d like a glass of water,” Bascomb said to me. “In the kitchen. And there should be a bottle of Scotch in the cabinet, under the sink. You could top it off with the Scotch. Three fingers should do.”
“I’ll get it,” Austin said.
I sat back down in my chair. When Austin brought his drink, Ba-comb took a sip, nodded, then put it down on the coffee table.
“How did my mother die?” I started, a flood of questions swirling around in my head. “Who killed her?”
He held up his hand. “There was no murder. It was an accident. Just a freak accident.”
“Then why didn’t you tell somebody?” I cried. “You son-of-a-bitch, you knew she was dead all these years?”
“Keeley,” Austin took my hand and squeezed it. “Let the man talk.”
Bascomb picked up the Scotch and downed half of it in one long gulp.
“It’s all right,” he said, smacking his lips. “She can’t say anything to me that I haven’t said myself.”
“What happened?” I demanded. “How did she die?”
“I wasn’t there, not right when it happened,” he said. “Sonya called me, at two in the morning, hysterical. Lorraine had already kicked me out, and I was sleeping on the sofa in my office. I went right out there, but it was too late. She was dead. Past help, you understand?”
“No,” I said stonily.
He reached for his drink and clasped it tightly between both hands.
“This is why she died,” he said moodily, staring down into the amber liquid. “The booze.” He looked up at me. “I quit after that. Didn’t have another drop until after the doctor told me about the cancer. Now I figure, what the hell?”
“Just tell me what happened, okay?” I said.
“They’d all been out at the camp that night, drinking. Darvis Kane, your mother, Drew, and that Plummer woman.”
“Lorna.”
“Yes. According to Drew, your mother and Kane had been out there all afternoon, drinking and fussing and cussing. Kane had an ugly temper, and it got even uglier when he drank. At some point, Drew said, Kane hauled off and slapped Jeanine right across the face. That’s when Drew sorta suggested that things were getting out of hand, and Kane might want to leave. And Kane did leave. He drove off in Jeanine’s Malibu in a big hurry, stranding Jeanine out there in the middle of the woods like that. So she called Sonya and asked her to drive out there and bring her home.”
Bascomb put his head back against the sofa cushions. “Twenty-five years. I didn’t realize it had been that long ago. After it all happened, it seemed sort of like a dream. So that’s what I treated it like, a dream that never happened.”
“That dream of yours was more like a nightmare for my daddy and me,” I said. “And it never would go away. What happened after Kane left? How did my mother die?”
“Kane came back to the cabin,” Bascomb said. “But this time he had a gun. He was waving it around, threatening to kill Jeanine. He got off a couple of shots before Drew tackled him and tried to wrestle the gun away. Somehow, another shot was fired. And this time, Jeanine was hit.”
He picked up the Scotch and drained the last sip from the glass.
“And that’s when Sonya walked in. Jeanine was bleeding, and Lorna was screaming, and Kane, when he saw what had happened, bolted. He was gone before anybody could stop him.”
“And my mother was dead.”
“There was nothing anybody could do for her,” Bascomb said. “They couldn’t call the police. How would they explain the circumstances? The married president of the local bank, in some remote cabin in the woods with his mistress? Drew was about to run for reelection to the County Commission. A married woman shot through the chest? And blood all over the floor of my cabin. They panicked. They’d all been drinking, and they just panicked. By the time I got out there, it was over and done with. All we could do was clean up the mess and get our stories straight. So that’s what we did.”
“Where is she now?” I whispered. “What did they do with my mama’s body?”
“I don’t know,” Bascomb said. “Drew never would tell me. It’s out there somewhere. He and Lorna hid it somewhere, but they never would say exactly where. I never have known.”
“You didn’t know?” I screamed, standing up. I was in a rage. A blind rage. I stood over Bascomb with my fists clenched, and he cowered back against the sofa cushions.
I picked up a sofa cushion and whapped him on the head with it. The knit cap flew off, and his bald head shone softly in the lamplight. “Don’t,” he whimpered.
“You didn’t want to know,” I cried. “You didn’t give a rat’s ass. None of you did. You could have called the police, told them what happened. Told them it was an accident. A big deal like Drew Jernigan, he never would have gone to jail. They could have blamed it all on Darvis Kane. And at least we would have known. At least we could have buried her.”
I had the cushion cocked and aimed again, but Austin wrenched it away from me. “Keeley,” he shouted. “Keeley!”
There were two more sofa cushions, but the fight had gone out of me. I looked down on the shrunken, pathetic husk of a man who stared up at me now, waiting…
“I don’t want you to die yet,” I said. “Not until you and Jernigan and Lorna Plummer answer for what you did to my family.”
I left the front door open and scuffed out through the carpet of softly fallen leaves.
61
It was Wednesday night. Salmon loaf night. After I dropped Austin off, I drove aimlessly around Madison, around and around the square, past the Charm Shop, then the drugstore, then the closed-up Piggly Wiggly, every place in town I could ever remember going with Mama. And then I drove out to the last place I’d seen her. Home.
I breathed a little sigh of relief when I saw that Serena’s car was not parked in Daddy’s driveway. I’d had some time to get used to the idea, and after some time spent with Serena, I’d concluded that she actually was a very nice person. Maybe not who I would have picked for him, but in real life, you seldom get to pick a parent’s new partner. Anyway, tonight needed to be a night for just the two of us.
“Hey, shug,” Daddy said,
when I came in the back door. He was bustling around the kitchen, whistling along with a big band tune on the CD player I’d given him for Father’s Day, and having a high old time. The room smelled like roasting meat and onions. It smelled familiar. It smelled like home.
He turned from the saucepan he was stirring and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
“What is it?” he asked. “You’ve been crying.”
“A little,” I admitted. “Can you put dinner on hold for a little while?”
He nodded. “Just let me turn off the potatoes. The chicken’s already done. I’ll leave it in the oven.”
I went to the liquor cabinet and got out a bottle of bourbon and two glasses. I poured some in each glass, then added ice and water. Daddy was sitting at the kitchen table. I held my glass up to his and clinked it.
“To Mama,” I said. “To her memory.”
He looked up, surprised. “That’s what this is about? You found out something?”
I sank down into my chair and took his hand in mine. “She’s dead,” I said softly. “She’s been dead all these years. She never even left Madison.”
He nodded. There were tears in his eyes. “I always had a feeling. Nothing I could put a finger on. Just a feeling. So. That’s it, then. She’s dead. What happened? How did you find out?”
I told him then, starting with our meeting with Sonya Wyrick and ending with Vince Bascomb. I left out a couple details, including the part where I’d hit a sick old man. That I wasn’t particularly proud of.
“I want to bring her home now,” Daddy said when I’d finished telling the story. “Give her a proper burial. And a headstone. In the family plot.”
“Bascomb says he doesn’t know where Drew Jernigan hid the body,” I said. “But I intend to find out. I want him to pay for what he did to her. To us.”
“Keeley Rae,” Daddy said, shaking his head. “You’ve done enough now. More than I could have done. You leave this up to me now.”
“But Daddy,” I protested.
He put his finger across my lips. “Shhh. I mean it. I want to think about this now. Think about what it all means.”
“Vince Bascomb is at death’s door already,” I said gloomily. “Eaten up with cancer, from the looks of him. And anyway, he claims he wasn’t out there when it happened. But it should mean obstruction of justice, for Drew and Lorna, in the very least,” I said hotly. “And even Sonya. Mama was her cousin. How could she cover up for those criminals? It should mean jailtime for all of them. And if the law gets involved again, maybe they can track down Darvis Kane. We know he was alive up until the mid-eighties. Maybe they could put his picture on that America’s Most Wanted program on television, and then—”
“Shhh,” Daddy repeated wearily. “Not tonight. Give me some time.” He got up from the table and went back to the stove. “Supper’s almost ready.” He opened the oven door so I could get a peek. “Coq au vin,” he said proudly. “Serena’s recipe.”
“Smells wonderful,” I said. But my stomach was in knots. I forced myself to eat a few bites of Daddy’s chicken, which, amazingly, tasted as good as it smelled. We managed some conversation, but whenever the discussion came too close to Mama, Daddy firmly declared the subject closed. I couldn’t understand it. This was the moment I’d been waiting for for years. We finally had some answers. But Vince Bascomb was right about one thing. It didn’t make us happy. And later, as I washed up the dinner dishes, I realized that it didn’t even make us any different.
My mother was gone. She’d been gone for almost twenty-five years. For a long time I’d expected her to come back again. When, exactly, I wondered, had I given up? And when had my father given up?
62
I threw myself into my work. All the structural and mechanical work at Mulberry Hill was done. The painters and plasterers were nearly finished. Will was in and out of town on business, but mostly out. And Stephanie Scofield was driving me nuts.
Her weekly visits had morphed into daily phone consults. “It’s me!” she’d chirp gaily. “I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking about the towel bars in the downstairs powder room…”
I’d been thinking about braining her with one of the aforementioned towel bars.
Finally, the week before the dove hunt, I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had one more buying trip to make for Mulberry Hill. The plan was for me to go up to High Point, North Carolina, to shop the after-market sample sales at all the big furniture showrooms. I’d pick up the last few pieces of furniture for the house, as well as shop for things for our other clients, and be back Friday, in time to supervise the preparations for Will’s big dove hunt.
So far everything was fine. Miss Nancy had the food lined up, and Austin had been designing “rustic chic” flowers for weeks. Before I left, I got caller ID for the phones at the studio, and instructed Gloria to keep Stephanie the hell away from Mulberry Hill, at any cost.
“You keep on avoiding her, she’s just going to come over here and be a pain in my ass,” Gloria complained.
“She won’t,” I assured my aunt. “She knows Will’s out of town, and I’ve told her I’m going up to High Point. At one point, God help me, she even talked about going with me. ‘A shopping trip just for us girls!’ is the way she put it. But she’s got some big closing this week, and we’ve had to put it off.”
“Pity,” Gloria said. She pushed away the stack of fabric samples she’d been sorting through. “Are you going to see Sonya Wyrick when you’re up there in North Carolina?”
I’d filled Gloria in on what I’d learned about Mama’s death, and hoped she’d persuade Daddy to let me deal with Drew Jernigan and the others. But to my surprise, she’d sided with her brother. “Your daddy knows best this time, Keeley,” Gloria had said.
“I want to see the look on her face when I tell Sonya I know Mama’s dead, and that she had a hand in it,” I told Gloria.
“But Wade said…”
“I know. And I promised him I’d let it alone. So I guess I will.”
And I meant to keep my promise to my father. But when I reached the Kannapolis exit off I-85, I thought about turning off. Telling myself it was just a pit stop. I’d top off the rental van’s gas tank, get a cold drink, and use the bathroom. But I wasn’t really thirsty, and didn’t need to pee. Without giving it another thought, I pulled into the Waffle House where we’d met with my cousin Sonya the previous month. I called information for her phone number, and reached her at home on my cell phone.
“Sonya? It’s me, Keeley Murdock.”
“Hey,” she said, her voice cautious. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said, trying to sound finer than I actually was. “I was just passing through town on my way to High Point, and I wanted to get a bite to eat. I’m up here at the Waffle House, and I wondered if you’d join me for a cup of coffee.”
“I’m kinda busy right now,” she said. “The grandkids was here this weekend, and the house is all tore up, and I got prayer meeting tonight, and I’m giving the lesson.”
“I’ve talked to Vince Bascomb,” I cut in. “He told me Mama’s dead. I know all about what happened that night. My daddy has hired a lawyer and is considering pressing legal charges against all of y’all.”
“What!” she shrieked. “I wasn’t even out there when it happened. If Vince Bascomb says I was, he’s a goddamn liar.”
Her churchiness had gone out the window with breathtaking suddenness.
“I’m at the Waffle House,” I said, my voice steely. “See you in five minutes?”
“Ten,” she said. “I got a cake in the oven.”
I ordered coffee and rye toast, and amused myself by reading the song selections on the tabletop jukebox, all of which included something about Waffle House in the titles.
I was on my second cup when Sonya came lumbering into the restaurant. She glared at me as she eased herself into the booth. “You got no right to be calling me up and making accusations about something that happened twenty-five
years ago,” she said, right off the bat. “If it hadn’t been for me, you still wouldn’t know nothing about your mama. I done you a favor, and look how you treat me. My own flesh and blood, and you’re threatening to call the cops on me? If your mama were alive today, she’d be ashamed of you.”
“I doubt that very much,” I said. “There’s just one thing I want from you. I want to know where her body is.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I leaned forward. “I don’t believe you. You lied before. Vince Bascomb told me you were there. It was pitch dark. Nobody around. Drew Jernigan didn’t hide that body by himself. I know you helped him.”
“Vince Bascomb would rather tell a lie than eat when he’s hungry,” Sonya said. “He’s a bad man. He’s spent his whole life whoring and drinking and sinning. If you want the truth about your mama’s death, you better ask somebody who knows the truth when she sees it.”
“He’s dying,” I said abruptly. “He doesn’t even weigh ninety pounds. He’s got nothing to lose now. Why would he lie about any of this? Come on, Sonya. I know you were there. I know you know where her body is. You say you’ve got religion now. You say you’re saved. Prove it. All my daddy wants now is to find Mama’s body and give her a decent burial. If you’re such a good Christian now, help us give her a Christian burial.”
She drummed her stubby fingertips angrily on the laminate tabletop.
Finally she folded her hands in front of her. “She was dead when I got there. I don’t care what Vince told you, she was already dead. Drew Jernigan and that fool Lorna Plummer were standing around like a couple of statues, and Darvis had already run off. Lorna wanted to leave Jeanine’s body in the cabin and set it on fire, but Drew wasn’t having none of that. He was afraid the fire would spread to his own place, or burn down the whole woods. He said he had a better idea. The well.”
“What well?”
“There was an old drinking well out at Vince’s hunting camp. It had gone dry years before; nobody ever used it. So that’s what he did. He and Lorna drug her out of there, and put her down in that well, and chunked in a bunch of rocks and stuff to cover her up. As far as I know, that’s right where she’s at today. But I had nothing to do with it. I stayed back behind in the cabin, waiting for Vince. And when he got out there, we cleaned the place up. And that’s all.” She put her hand on her heart. “As God is my witness.”
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