Perdition

by R. Jean Reid

  “You didn’t think we’d find that poor boy alive hanging up in that tree, did you?”

  “I didn’t know … I didn’t know,” Nell repeated as the shock hit her. “I didn’t know what … to think,” she stumbled. “I guess I hoped that … the caller was … lying.”

  “Sorry,” Sheriff Hickson said, no hint of apology in his voice. “I’d of thought by now Chief Shaun would’ve told you everything you needed to know. That poor boy was swinging in a tree, a rope around his neck.”

  “Which tree?” Nell asked, then quickly said, “Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.”

  “That oak tree nearest the picnic table you were sitting at when I first got there,” he answered.

  Nell refused to ask him the question screaming in her head—had Joey been there the whole time?

  The sheriff continued. “I got to see the sight of him being lowered down by Chief Shaun and his men. Arrived back at our staging area at the site. Thank you, Miz McGraw. Chief had the morgue van and everything there. Just told me to stay out of his way. Nothing like being told to stay out of the way in my own jurisdiction.”

  “Just like you called the chief and cooperated with him when you found the body of Rayburn Gautier in his jurisdiction,” Nell reminded him.

  “So that’s your game, huh? Make it all my fault?” the sheriff retorted angrily.

  “No, I’m just pointing out that if you’d set an example of cooperation, maybe you’d be getting some in return. I wish both of you would act like grown-ups—”

  But the sheriff overrode her. “I suppose if I want to know what’s really going on, I’m gonna have to read about it in the paper, now you and your boyfriend got it wrapped up.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Nell retorted into the line that was already dead.

  Angry at the harsh start to her day, she slammed down the phone. Only then did she become aware that Josh was standing in the doorway of her bedroom.

  “Joey’s dead, isn’t he?” her son asked very softly, letting her know he’d overheard enough of the conversation to figure that out.

  Nell couldn’t delay the inevitable blow any longer. “Yes, honey, I’m sorry.”

  Josh’s face crumpled into anguished tears. Nell swung out of bed and went to him, wrapping her arms around him, letting him sob in her embrace. A minute or two later, Lizzie joined them.

  She asked the same anguished question. “Is Joey dead?”

  Nell merely nodded, then reached out with one arm to pull Lizzie into their embrace. She found herself crying with her children.

  The three of them remained holding each other for what seemed to be a long time. Lizzie was the first to break away, mumbling, “I can’t breathe. Got to blow my nose.”

  Josh slowly disengaged, saying “I can’t either.” He headed for the bathroom Lizzie wasn’t using. Nell, with no bathroom available, settled for pragmatically wiping her face and nose on the sheets, telling herself they needed to be washed anyway.

  Lizzie was the first to free up a bathroom, so Nell had her turn at a proper face washing. When she got out, she heard noises in the kitchen and found Lizzie fixing pancakes. She was pleasantly astonished to see her daughter cooking without being coerced into it.

  “Josh likes pancakes,” was Lizzie’s only comment when she saw Nell.

  They spent the day like that, the three of them, giving small comforts and mercies that they could. Lizzie even told a friend who called she couldn’t talk and came back into the living room to watch a movie with them. They made a brief trip, all three of them, to get extra spare keys made and extra phone chargers for both Lizzie and Josh, although Josh, not being the talker that Lizzie was, didn’t have battery problems. But Nell wanted to be fair and give them both something.

  She’d slipped away after breakfast back to her room, ostensibly to get dressed, but she also phoned Jacko. It was going to be a working day for him.

  It was only late in the evening, when she and Lizzie were finishing up the supper dishes, that the question Nell had dreaded all day came up. Josh had already completed his chore of clearing the table and taking out the garbage and had gone to his room to read.

  “Mom, how did he die?” Lizzie asked.

  “They’re not really sure yet,” Nell said. She didn’t want to lie, but to be gentle with the truth. “It may not have been … natural causes.”

  “You mean someone killed him?”

  “It’s possible. There will be an investigation.”

  “Murdered him?” Lizzie repeated. “That’s sick! Why would anyone … that’s just sick.”

  “It has me worried,” Nell admitted. “I want you and Josh to watch out for each other.”

  “But so far only boys have been killed,” Lizzie said.

  Nell was surprised at her observation. She hadn’t thought her brief mention of Rayburn Gautier’s death had caught more than a glancing moment of Lizzie’s attention. “Maybe. But there was a young girl found a few weeks ago. They assumed she drowned and didn’t really investigate. But with what’s going on, you need to be as careful as Josh does.”

  “Thanks for the cell phone stuff. I didn’t think you’d give in so easily.”

  “I’m not always a mean mom,” Nell said.

  “I promise not to talk forever. Only ‘hello, I’m on my way, goodbye’ or ‘help, I’ve been kidnapped, drop the ransom off on the park bench.’”

  Nell understood that Lizzie’s bantering was to fight the fear. “If you do get kidnapped, remind them your mother is a newspaper editor, not a banker. Suggest a year of free quarter-page ads instead of actual money.”

  With that the dishes were done, and Lizzie finally felt free to have a truncated evening of phone chatter.

  But that night, when she and Josh went to bed, they both left their doors open, as did Nell.

  twenty

  The Monday morning story meeting found Carrie in a major snit.

  “When am I ever going to get a break?” was how she greeted Nell. “You call Jacko and give him the best stories!”

  Jacko was doing his best to ignore her outburst, scribbling some notes on his pad. Nell was tempted to glance at what he was writing, because she suspected it had little to do with the story and more to do with avoiding Carrie.

  “Jacko was already covering the story and I felt it was better to drag him out of bed on a Sunday morning.”

  “So he gets the big stories and I get the sewage and water board?” Carrie fumed.

  “I needed someone following developments yesterday, okay? That doesn’t mean that Jacko gets the exclusive. With two murders, we’re going to have to give this major coverage. There are going to be a lot of stories to write. You’ll get your chance.”

  “So, what do you want me to do?” Carrie asked.

  “This is the murder of a child. What kind of coverage should we be giving it?” Nell tossed the question back at her. You want to be a reporter, learn to look for stories, not expect them to be handed to you, she thought to herself as she watched the puzzled frown on Carrie’s face.

  “What do you mean, ‘what kind of coverage’?” the young woman asked.

  We’ll be here all day asking the same question, Nell thought. She tried not to let what she was thinking show on her face. “Of course, there’s the straight news angle. But what else should we be doing? Where else do we dig? What feature stories should we consider?”

  There was an awkward silence. Carrie glanced at Jacko, hoping he would give the answers Nell clearly wasn’t going to offer. Jacko gave Nell a quick glance, then looked down again at his doodles, pretending to search for answers there. Nell suspected he had ideas but was trying to avoid the “brown-nosing” accusation that Carrie would be likely to sling at him if he voiced them.

  Nell gave them another beat, then decided she had a paper to run. “What do people want
to know? Other than what we can’t know at the moment—who the killer is. How about a story on what the experts recommend doing to protect your children? Or looking at crime in the area? Is there any other story that this might tie to? One of those ‘back in 1940 a similar murder occurred’ type of things?”

  Carrie’s face was blank at these suggestions; she’d apparently decided that neither of these stories was the route to the Pulitzer and therefore they were beneath her.

  “What about a look at how a typical murder investigation proceeds—something like real live vs. TV life?” Jacko offered.

  “That’s an idea,” Nell said, then pointedly added, “Do any of these stories appeal to you, Carrie?”

  “I get to do the fluff and he gets to do the actual investigation of the murder? I mean, I can talk to Chief Shaun and Sheriff Hickson just as well as Jacko can.”

  We got trouble right here in Pelican Bay, Nell sighed internally. “Okay, Carrie, why don’t you follow Sheriff Hickson, and Jacko, you take on Chief Shaun. I want you to work together on this, keep each other up to date. Don’t play Watergate, but one of the stories here might be the rivalry between the two men and the way it affects the investigation.”

  “Why do I get the sheriff ?” Carrie asked. It wasn’t quite a whine, but it was close, as if assuming she was automatically given the lesser of the choices.

  “Because the sheriff fancies himself a true Southern gentleman and a little flirtation will go a long way with him. Get him showing off for you and he may spill a lot.”

  “You’re suggesting I flirt with Sheriff Hickson?” Carrie asked, her opinion of the sexual attractiveness of the portly sheriff clear in her tone.

  “No, nothing so blatant, but a ‘gee, you must have a lot of responsibility, and you carry it so well and people must trust you a lot to keep electing you’ approach might be useful.” Nell inwardly sighed again, wondering if she was going to have to teach Carrie some of the most basic things about how to be a woman in a man’s business. A reporter used whatever tools he or she could, and sometimes for a woman it went back to that old sexual thing.

  “I don’t know—Jacko’s got prettier eyelashes than I do. He might do a better job of flirting with the sheriff,” Carrie said, but her tone lacked that whine that would have told Nell she still wasn’t satisfied. “But then again, he might do a better job of flirting with Chief Shaun than I would, too,” she added.

  Jacko didn’t look up from his pad, ignoring what seemed to be a dig at him. Nell wondered if she should have a talk with Carrie, tell her that impugning Jacko’s sexuality in front of her wasn’t accomplishing anything she might have thought it would accomplish. It didn’t make Nell think that Jacko was gay, only that Carrie was a petulant brat. She decided to let it pass this time. They were adults, after all, and they could figure it out. Besides, a lecture from her would probably fall on the same deaf ears that her lectures to her children fell on. And given that she was feeding, housing, and clothing her children, they had more incentive to listen to her than the cub reporters.

  “What about the features? Do you want to do any of them, Jacko?”

  “You know me, I love the musty old library. Can I see what other nefarious crimes have taken place here?”

  “Okay, go to it. Carrie, why don’t you do the ‘how to safeguard the kids’ one? That has to be a big concern for everybody now, and that should get front page play along with the murder story.” Front page should keep her happy.

  “This week’s edition?” Carrie asked.

  “If I get the copy in time,” Nell said.

  “Well, I’ll try my best … but flirting with Sheriff Hickson might take a lot of time and effort …” Carrie trailed off, clearly not about to promise to meet Nell’s deadline.

  Nell chose not to respond to her hedge. Instead she waved them off with her usual “Go forth and report.” She did notice that Carrie followed Jacko to his desk, quizzing him on where he thought she might find what she needed to know. His answer seemed to be the library, as a few minutes later they both left, walking across the green in that direction.

  Nell spent the rest of the morning doing her most hated task: balancing the newspaper bank accounts and going over financial statements. When Thom was alive, they’d traded off, first trying every other month, but then realizing that a little more continuity was useful, so each got half a year. “And you still had three months to go,” Nell muttered as she re-added a column.

  Jacko appeared in the early afternoon, but Carrie wasn’t with him.

  “So, have fun at the library?” Nell asked. She’d done her financial duty and was on her way to her reward, a turkey and avocado sandwich from the deli down the street.

  “Do you know what this town was originally called?” Jacko asked.

  Nell thought about pretending she didn’t, to let Jacko have his moment. But her vanity got the better of her—she wasn’t going to have her cub reporter tell her something she should know. “Perdition Point,” she answered.

  “And do you know why it was named that?”

  “Because the explorers that landed here found bones on the beach.”

  “Skulls, do you think?”

  “Most likely animal bones, from fishing and hunting,” Nell answered. “Still, they didn’t take it as a good omen and only lingered long enough to name the place.”

  “According to the old newspapers, Perdition Point has had its share of troubles. In 1947 a shrimp boat was stolen with the owner’s lad still asleep below deck. Lad, boat, and thieves were caught in the big hurricane that year and the only clue to their fate was a battered board with the boat’s name on it.”

  “I presume it came ashore in the same place the D’Iberville brothers saw their bones?” Nell joshed.

  “Same beach, close enough. And in 1951 there was an interesting fight between two gentlemen. Seems they were both interested in the same woman at the same time and they managed to shoot each other at the same time, so they died at the same time. The woman spent six months in jail for ‘fomenting murder’ and being the kind of hussy that would drive men to such depths.”

  “Any murders of children?” Nell asked.

  “Only one. In 1964 the sheriff’s office investigated a family living on the far outskirts of town. The complaint was cruelty to animals. They had several skinny dogs chained in the back yard. Turns out that the kids were chained, too. They were left in their own excrement and severely malnourished. One of the kids was dead when they got there—had been dead for almost a week, still chained with the other kids.” Jacko ended the story there.

  “That doesn’t sound like a good story to rehash,” Nell said.

  “No, it doesn’t. Particularly with the whispers about negligent parents.”

  “What are the whispers?”

  “What were the boys doing in the woods by themselves?” Jacko answered. “Neither of Rayburn’s parents were even home when he went to the woods; he was left in the care of his thirteen-year-old sister. Then on the bike trip, why wasn’t at least one of the adults in the lead? Why’d they let those boys ride on ahead?”

  “People desperately want to blame, don’t they?” Nell said softly, aware she was one of those parents who had let her son ride into the woods.

  “Yes, they do. Like we should always know where the monsters are,” Jacko quietly agreed.

  “We won’t run that ‘past crimes’ story. At least not now. Maybe later, in a few months, when …” Nell left the sentence unfinished.

  “I don’t think we should even mention the bones on the beach.”

  Nell gave him a wan smile and turned to go. Let sleeping bones lie. It was time for lunch.

  twenty-one

  “The town used to be called Perdition Point,” the TV newsman intoned. “With two children murdered, it seems to be reverting to its old name.” The camera pulled back to reveal a handsome, w
indswept man walking along the beach. “The French explorers who first landed on this shore were astonished to find the beach littered with bleached bones. Clearly, murder and mayhem are deeply imbedded in the soul of this sleepy Gulf Coast town. Today it lives up to its name, with the gristly murders of two young boys …”

  He turned the sound down. The VCR would capture it for later. He found TV to be blaring and simple, and this was one of his least-favorite reporters. Instead he turned to the paper, this time in satisfaction. He’d taken the entire front page. The lead story, of course was the murder of Joseph Sayton. There were quotes from everybody that had anything to do with it: the sheriff, the police chief, the district attorney, each given equal weight; local prominent citizens; several quotes from the searchers; some from the kids on the bike tour, although he did notice that Nell McGraw didn’t include her son. He savored his own quote, how concerned he seemed. The story byline was Jack Evens but he was sure the editor had had something to do with it. Then there was a brief story on the punishment for this kind of crime: premeditated murder was a death penalty in this state. It seemed that the good people of Pelican Bay wanted a foretaste of justice. That story, too, was bylined Jack Evens. The final story was one on how to protect children. Give them secret words that only the family knows, to keep a stranger from enticing them away with promises of rewards, or lies that a mother was sick and wanted the child to go with that stranger. He was familiar with all the rules listed there. They might work—but only with a stranger.

  He actually liked Nell’s old fashioned reticence. The TV played up the sexual angle, harping on the ways the boys had been abused before they died. “Repeatedly sodomized …” The TV droned into his thoughts. But Nell seemed to understand what it was really about. It wasn’t sex, it was power. Sexually, he was normal. He liked women. Sometimes he could play a little rough, but only when they wanted it. Or deserved it. But even that only left a few bruises and reddened buttocks.

  The murders are brutal. Evil isn’t too strong a word, he read in Nell’s editorial. They don’t just kill a child; they shatter the trust and innocence of the entire community. Our sons and daughters now live with our fears …