by Fran Rizer
“No, ma’am. I already et, but where you going next? I’d take another ride if you going anywhere I wanna go.”
“I’m headed back to town, to the hospital to see a friend.”
Rizzie smirked when I said ‘friend.’
“Reckon I’ll ride with you.”
“If you’re not hungry, how about a couple of iced teas to go,” I suggested.
“Sure,” he said and stepped behind the counter. He washed his hands before filling two go-cups and snapping lids on them.
“Do you let him do that?” I asked Rizzie as I paid her.
“You didn’t see me stop him, did you? He helps out here when the weather is too bad to catch crabs or anything. Tyrone’s old enough that I like to give him a little time off for things like ball games. I want him to stay in school and that seems the best way to keep him interested. Billy Wayne fills in. He’s a good worker and having him frees Tyrone up to date and be a teenager.”
I could hardly believe I’d never seen the boy before if he worked at Rizzie’s sometimes. I wasn’t exactly a stranger at the grill.
5:00 P.M.
I looked at the clock, it was already after five I talked to Loose Lucy until Luke arrived I’d put it off long enough. I headed back to the hospital to check on Loose Lucy’s surgery. When I parked, Billy Wayne said, “See ya later,” and left carrying his bucket and dip net with him. He must have put the stick with the cord and chicken neck in the bucket.
Loose Lucy’s bed was empty and I was considering asking a nurse if Ms. Robinson had even had her operation when she returned on a gurney brought by two CNAs. I understand that surgical patients have to be officially awake before they are brought from recovery, but Lucy looked completely out of it. The pretty red gown had been replaced with one of those cotton thingies that open in the back. To be honest, and I usually try to be, Lucy Robinson is an attractive woman, but she wasn’t at that moment. Her makeup was gone, and her pallid skin looked pasty. The sleek, smooth hairdo of earlier was pushed away from her face in tangles. The injured leg was covered with a sheet, but it was obvious that it was now in a cast.
A nurse followed them in and checked Lucy’s vitals after the CNAs transferred her to the hospital bed. She hooked up some monitors, looked at me, and asked, “Are you going to sit with her?”
“For a while.” “Press the button if you need me,” she said, motioned toward the control panel on the side of the bed, and left.
I stepped close to the hospital bed and leaned over Loose Lucy. “Are you awake?” I whispered.
She moaned softly.
“Lucy, are you awake?” I tried again.
Her response was another groan—a little louder.
I confess that I was tempted to shake her. Not hard, just a slight movement. I’d reached out when the door opened and Luke Robinson came in wearing scrubs. My intention quickly changed to simply stroking the back of Lucy’s hand.
“I didn’t realize you and my sister were close enough for you to want to sit with her,” Luke said. “Or did you come because it’s your brother’s fault she’s here?”
“My brother’s fault? He was trying to help her. “
“She’s been through enough. That dirty rat she lived with started beating on her. No man has the right to hit a woman.” His voice rose in anger. Lucy whimpered. She struggled to sit up, but Luke pushed her shoulders down.
I could barely hear her whispered words. “Josh is dead.”
“He’ll never hit you again,” Luke snapped.
“He wasn’t any good.” Those words were even softer. “Well, he’s gone now,” Luke assured her.
“He wasn’t any good,” she repeated, “but he didn’t hit me.”
Luke jumped back. His eyes narrowed and his jaw muscles clenched. “You said he abused you.”
“Living in that run-down hovel was abuse. I want a big nice place like Bill’s.”
“I think you’d better leave,” Luke told me. “She’s not talking sense.” He made a halfhearted attempt to smile. “Thank you for coming.”
Sensing that he would not change his mind, I headed back to my car. In the parking lot, I was surprised to see Billy Wayne leaning against my red rental car. His bucket on the cement had the dip net lying across it. He held a small package wrapped in butcher paper in one hand.
“I got what I come for and was hopin’ you wasn’t gone yet. I’d appreciate it mightily if’n you’d drop me off on your way back.”
“Drop you off where?”
“Anywhere outta town.”
I unlocked the doors and said, “Okay. Get in.”
“What you gonna do now?” he asked.
“I’m thinking about looking for my brother.”
“Did you lose him?”
I laughed before answering, “Kind of. He ran away because he was frightened.”
“When I gets scared, I go home. That’s what I always do if’n I’m afraid. Home is where you needs to be when you’se scared.”
“You may be right, but I don’t think my brother went home because there are too many people there. I wondered how frequently something had scared Billy Wayne enough to make him run home. Rizzie said he’d been bullied. They might have pushed it far enough to hurt him physically, more than just with words.
“I’m going to the old Halsey place and look for clues,” I said. “Do you want to come with me?”
“Sure.”
“What about your package there?” I motioned toward the butcher paper. “Do you have something that will spoil?”
“Won’t matter if’n it does. It’s more chicken necks for crabbing and the worst they smell, the better the crabs like ‘em.” He looked at the console and a longing expression came over his face. “Could we play the radio?” he asked.
I assured him that not only could we play the radio, he could choose the station. The music gave me time to think without feeling like I was neglecting the boy by not talking to him.
The thought had occurred to me that Bill wanted to talk to Loose Lucy. What if he went to the hospital, saw my car there, and “borrowed” it. What if, in his upset condition and that rainstorm, he was driving when the car hit the tree? What if while they were looking for me, Bill was the one injured and wandering lost in the woods near the Halsey place?
Years ago, I had an awful experience in the barn at the Halsey place. Did I have the nerve to wander around that deserted farm alone? Probably not, but I had no choice, and fate had put Billy Wayne in the car with me so I wasn’t by myself. I drove the red rental to where I’d seen my wrecked Mustang the night before. The condition of the tree made it easy to identify the exact spot.
The wrecker had towed the car away, but they hadn’t made much effort to clean up the debris from the crash. The front bumper lay on the ground along with pieces of metal, glass, and canvas from the rag top. I parked and got out to take a closer look. Billy Wayne followed me. I’d come here looking for “clues.” There were none. Just the remains of my beloved pony.
“Are these parts of your car?” Billy Wayne asked.
I nodded.
“What happen? Was you hurt?”
“I wasn’t driving. Whoever ‘borrowed’ my car was driving.”
“When you say ‘borrow,’ does you mean ‘stole’?”
“I’m wondering if my brother may have been driving.”
“You want me to pick up alla this stuff?” He waved his arm around the trash.
“I may come back later and do that, but for now, I want to go to the house and barn.”
We got back into the car and I drove to the barn. It was dilapidated—falling down far worse than the last time I’d seen it. Billy Wayne and I walked around, both inside and outside, but there were no signs anyone had been in there—probably not since Sheriff Wayne Harmon rescued me.
Going into the house seemed dangerous as well as useless. Some boards in the wooden porch and steps had collapsed, and part of the roof had fallen in.
“Is that wh
ere your brother used to live?” Billy Wayne asked.
“No.”
“I told you when I gets ascared, I go home. Let’s go look at his house.”
Then it hit me. The moped was missing from Daddy’s shed. Everyone thought Bill had taken it. If he did, he’d done exactly what Billy Wayne said. Bill had gone home.
Where would he go after that? It would be too dangerous to stay at Daddy’s. There were too many people there. The Parrish house had been home to my brother growing up, but now home was a new house with kennels and dog runs—a new house with a Man Cave upstairs that his wife had never been inside.
“You’ve got it, Billy Wayne. Now, let’s go look at my brother’s home.”
The thought did cross my mind that if I found Bill, I wanted time to talk to him without any of my family or the sheriff around. What if Molly had gone home from Miss Ellen’s? I couldn’t knock on her door and say, “I want to search the upstairs.” Or could I? Why not?
With the radio playing, we drove to Bill and Molly’s house. Her car wasn’t in the driveway, but the garage doors were closed. I parked the car and told Billy Wayne, “Come on.”
He was more interested in the dogs. “Can I pet them?” he asked and pointed toward the pens.
“Later.”
Only after I rang the doorbell and got no answer did I realize that I hadn’t even thought about how to get inside if the house was locked. I took my debit card out of my purse and tried sticking it between the door and the casing. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I obviously wasn’t accomplishing anything.
“Is you trying to break in?” Billy Wayne asked.
“It’s my brother’s house. It wouldn’t be breaking in,” I said though I thought it would be.
“Let me,” the kid said.
He pulled something that looked similar to a nail from his pocket and took my debit card. After he fooled around with them and the locks for a while, he said, “Nope. Can’t get in this way. Lemme try the garage.”
Shih tzu. That kid messed around with the keypad for the garage long enough that the overhead door squeaked and began rolling back. As soon as we’d both ducked inside, he lowered the door and tackled getting us into the kitchen with the debit card. In just a minute, we were there.
“How did you do that?” I asked with a lot of admiration and some disapproval.
“This inside door just has a regular old lock that anybody can open with a credit card,” he said. “The key pad is just numbers. Lots of people set ‘em with number patterns that are kinda alike. I can get in just about anywhere, but I just as soon you not tell folks.”
That was interesting to know, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I put my finger to my lips and pretended to zip them closed and throw away the key.
Billy Wayne followed me across the kitchen and dining room to the front entrance hall. The stairway was there.
Slipping off my shoes, I motioned Billy Wayne to follow me. I’d seen some magazine articles about Man Caves, but I had no idea what Bill’s would look like. The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked. I pushed it open. The room was a surprise. There was no pool table, nothing like that at all. A giant screen against one wall promised movies and computer projections along with surround sound that would provide an experience like a movie theater. The oak dining room table Daddy had replaced at his house last year served as a coffee table. Bill or someone had shortened the legs to make it the right height, and the tabletop was covered with games.
A two-piece sectional sofa overstuffed in light brown suede reigned in the center. A regular bed pillow and blanket lay on it and on top of that was my missing brother.
The look on Bill’s face when he looked up and saw Billy Wayne and me would have been a Kodak moment in the old days. Now it was a cell phone second. I took a quick snap and then said, “Do you realize half of South Carolina is looking for you?”
“I just needed some time. Did you find out why Lucy is lying about me?”
“Your girlfriend doesn’t like me. Plus she had surgery on her leg and isn’t very communicative right now.”
“I just don’t understand why she’d lie about me.” He glanced at Billy Wayne.
“Where’d you find him?” Bill asked.
“He saved me from a goose,” I said.
“Who goosed you?”
Billy Wayne and I both laughed. “A real goose,” the boy said. “It was in the road and wouldn’t let her get by.” Bill laughed, too, and Billy Wayne added, “I just shooed it away.”
“Do you like X-Box?” Bill asked the boy.
“Who don’t?”
I wondered what brought that up and then realized what my brother was doing when he set Billy Wayne up with an X-Box game and earbuds.
Bill turned his attention back to me. “What are you going to do now, Callie? Call Wayne and turn me in? Your own brother?”
“That’s up to you. I want you to talk to him. He’s been your friend for years, and I think he’ll treat you fairly. How much do you know about what’s happened since you ran?”
“Nothing.”
“The body in the bag was Josh Wingate, Lucy’s boyfriend . . . “
“Ex-boyfriend,” Bill interrupted.
“Okay, ex. Anyway, he’s been identified, or maybe I should say accused, of shooting the teenaged girl on I-95 a week ago.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“It gives someone else a motive. Also, now Lucy claims that Wingate wasn’t abusing her. She just wanted to get away from him. She also says that she went to you because she wanted to separate you and Molly and then live in this house with you.”
“You’re making that stuff up!”
“I’m not. I was there when she told her brother Luke.”
“I need to talk to her. Do you think that if I turn myself in, Wayne will take me to see Lucy.”
“Not really.” Wayne was a family friend, but he was in charge of law enforcement in Jade County, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he put Bill in the jail until he was questioned.
I looked over at Billy Wayne playing Battlefield 4. He still reminded me of Huck Finn, and I thought of one of my favorite scenes in that book. Huck dresses up like a girl. Not like Caitlin Jenner—but in a situation similar to ours— a disguise to find out information. In the book, an old lady knows Huck’s a boy because of the way he threads a needle. Not to worry—I couldn’t think of any reason that Bill would need to do any sewing.
“I have an idea,” I said. “I could take you to the hospital to see Lucy if you’ll wear a disguise.”
“It’s not Halloween. What do you want me to wear?”
“A dress.”
“You’re out of your mind!” Bill exploded.
“We could make it work,” I assured him.
“How? We don’t know a woman my size well enough to borrow a dress, and it would kind of give it away for you to go dress-shopping in the plus size department.”
“I know exactly where to get a dress that will fit you. Let me take Billy Wayne wherever he wants to go. You get a shower. Oh, and shave as close as possible.” I couldn’t help snickering.
“Wait,” Bill said, “where’s Molly? You’re not going to tell her I’m here, are you?”
“She and Jane are hanging out with Miss Ellen because the wedding has been postponed. I don’t know when she’s planning to come home.”
“Well, hurry. Do you need a key to get back in?”
“Yes. Billy Wayne opened your locks, but I won’t have him when I come back.”
I tapped the boy on the shoulder. He stopped his game, put everything back the way it was, and we were soon on our way.
Thinking I might do something to keep Molly away, I called Miss Ellen. “Food’s about ready,” she said.
“I’ll be there later, but will you tell Molly I need to talk to her and ask her to stay at your house until I get there?”
“No problem, Callie.”
7:00 P.M.
I looked at the clock, seven had come and gone I love playing dress-up even now that I’m grown Billy Wayne didn’t let me take him home. “No, thank you,” he answered that suggestion. “We moved when Maw taken me out of school, and she don’t ever want me to tell strangers where I live because the school people might put her in jail.”
“I consider myself a friend.” “I think so, too, but Maw and her broom might not think thata way.”
Unable to hear that without teasing him, I asked, “Your mother’s broom? She’s not a witch, is she?”
He hooted. “She don’t ride it. She uses it to spank me.”
I had no answer for that. He played the radio until we reached Middleton’s Mortuary. I invited him to come in and have a Coke or something, but he didn’t want to go into “that dead place.” I parked. He walked off down the street. I went in the back door and straight to my supply closet.
Most of the time these days, survivors bring clothes for their loved ones to wear for visitation and burial. Years ago, selecting something from the funeral home’s supply was more common. Otis and Odell didn’t have a wedding dress available, but they had black or burgundy dresses with ivory lace collars in many sizes. I picked a black one that looked like it would be large enough for Bill, pulled the same dress in a larger size, and put them both in a garment bag.
When I first came to work at Middleton’s, I selected the wrong size clothes at least half of the time. Since then, I’ve gotten really good at equating dress sizes with bodies.
After having to send me shopping to buy shoes for a few decedents, Otis had ordered some plain stretchable slippers from the mortuary supply store. Most people around here don’t choose a full-couch casket, but they still want footwear even though it won’t show with the halflids. I stuffed pairs of large and extra-large slippers in the bottom of the garment bag along with silky black kneehigh socks.
Now, the most important parts, I thought and opened my wig closet. If the deceased has lost only a little hair, like the spot on Betty Jo’s head, I sometimes cut hair from the back and glued it in where needed. If a woman was completely hairless, perhaps from chemo treatments, I supplied a full wig if requested. I picked a short gray one because I was picturing Bill as a little old lady. Scratch that. Bill would be a big old lady. I chuckled to myself when I grabbed a cosmetic kit.