“That’s for me to decide. But when the time comes, I’ll let you know.”
“Okay,” I said hesitantly. The way she said it made me wonder if she was going to get me to kill someone for her or something.
Oh, well, there was no point in worrying about my deal with Carry until the time came for me to fulfill whatever she came up with. I decided to just ignore it for now and be happy I had swords.
I was just about to rush inside and call Dewey when my mother drove into the driveway. Unsure of how she’d feel about us being in the garage and playing with Pa’s tools, I nearly raced over to close the door, but realized she’d see me do it, and that would just make me look guiltier. Besides, way back when Carry helped me build the non-tree tree fort, my mother hadn’t been upset at all. She’d been right happy about it, in fact.
As I mostly do—at least more times than not—I decided honesty was the best policy and walked out of the garage into the afternoon sun with my swords in my hands to show her my and Carry’s handiwork.
“What’re you kids doin’ in the garage?” she asked, getting out of her car.
“Carry helped me make some swords so me and Dewey can pretend sword fight.” I held up the one in my right hand, pretending the sunlight was glinting off its hardened steel blade. It actually looked more like sun shining on dull wood with rounded corners that Carry had sanded so we wouldn’t hurt ourselves, but I had a pretty good imagination.
“Did I say you’re allowed to play in the garage?”
“I—” I started, but changed to “You didn’t say we wasn’t allowed to.”
“Don’t be smart with me, Abe.”
“Should we not have made them?” I asked, wondering why this was different than the fort had been.
For a moment she seemed at a loss for words. I think her mind was somewhere else and she wasn’t really sure what she was angry about. “You just should’ve asked first. Did you clean up after yourselves?”
I nearly laughed. That garage was such a mess, you couldn’t find an elephant in there with a magnifying glass. We had to clean up just to be able to get at things. So, “Yes,” I said, quite honestly.
“Good.” She still hadn’t really looked at my and Carry’s woodworking projects as she closed her car door and started toward the house. In her hand was a file folder.
“You never said if you liked my swords,” I said from behind her, still raising the one majestically. A slight breeze picked up, swirling leaves around my feet. They had fallen from the shrubs planted around the driveway.
“They’re fine. Just don’t play with ’em in the house.”
She walked up the front steps and was just about to open the door when I asked, “Somethin’ wrong?”
Stopping, she rested her forehead against the door. After a minute she said, “Listen, Abe, I’m sorry. It’s not you. Here, let me see your swords.”
I walked over and showed them to her.
“Oh, these are nice. Did Carry help you make them come to a point like this?”
I nodded. I decided not to tell her that I had to sign a pact with my sister in order to engage her services. “I think Dewey will like ’em,” I said with a grin. “We can pretend sword fight.”
“Just be careful. Just because they’re not metal doesn’t make them not dangerous. You could still poke out an eye with one of these.”
“I’ll be careful. We rounded the corners and made the ends blunt, see?” Then I nodded to the file folder in her hand. “What’s that?”
She looked at it and her expression fell. “Oh.” She took a breath. “It’s the background check Chief Montgomery ran on your pa.”
Suddenly, my swords were no longer important to me. Excitement frizzled through my body. It was like an electric bolt of lightning had erupted at my heart and quickly spread throughout my entire insides. “What’s it say? Can I read it?”
Looking down at me standing there expectantly, she exhaled so hard her shoulders heaved. “Come in the house. We’ll sit at the kitchen table and go through it together.”
I couldn’t get inside the house fast enough. Leaning my swords up against the wall beside the door outside on the porch, I went in and took off my shoes. It seemed to take her forever to get to the kitchen table where I was already anxiously seated and waiting. I could tell there was something inside that folder that my mother obviously didn’t like. Still, I was filled with anticipation. I never really got to know my pa. I barely even remembered him. Mostly I remembered the picture I carried around in my pocket that I found in my mother’s closet. And it seemed nobody would ever give me any details about him when I asked anything either. But now, here was a file folder, full of real information concerning my pa. And it was only a few feet from my hands.
We sat there, our chairs almost touching, and my mother laid the folder in front of her. “There’s not a lot of information here,” she told me. “Your pa never got in trouble with the law or nothin’ like that, thank the Lord”—she said “thank the Lord” in a way that made it sound like that was a potential possibility, given something else she found—“so it’s really limited to things like employment, family history, stuff like that. It’s really quite boring.”
“Then why are you so worked up over it?” I asked.
“I’m not worked up.”
“Seems like it to me.”
“Okay, maybe a little. But it’s for something dumb.”
“What?” I figured if she was worked up about it, it couldn’t rightly be so dumb.
“Well, in a way, I think your daddy lied to me, and that don’t sit very well is all.”
“Pa was a liar?” I didn’t know much about him, but this was the last thing I thought about my pa.
“Now I didn’t call him a liar. I said in a way he sorta lied to me.”
“What do you mean by sorta?”
“I mean he didn’t rightly tell me the truth.”
I couldn’t figure out the difference between that being just a “sorta lie” and a real lie, so I asked her.
With yet another sigh, she flipped open the folder. Inside was a document on blue paper with a staple in the corner. It turned out to have three pages to it.
“He didn’t not tell me the truth, I suppose, better explains it,” she said.
I scrunched up my forehead. “Huh?” I asked. “What does that mean? I don’t get it.”
“Your pa had a family he never told me ’bout. In fact, he had an entire past he seemed to have neglected mentionin’.”
“Doesn’t everyone have a past?”
“Yeah, but usually bits and pieces of it come up from time to time in casual conversation. Your pa kept things all to himself. He didn’t so much as even hint at any of this.” She was flipping through the pages. I still hadn’t heard a word of what any of “this” was.
“So he lied to you by not tellin’ you what he was lyin’ ’bout?” That question didn’t even make sense to me.
“This is why it’s not sittin’ so well, Abe. Part of me thinks I’m bein’ a fool for caring ’bout this at all. I mean, of course he had a past. Everyone has a past. Why did I expect anythin’ different from him? But for some reason, I never thought of his life before we met, and since he never mentioned it, it was like it never existed. And that life led into the life we spent together. So, in a way, to me, he had no life before our marriage. Our marriage was his life. Now I find out about all this stuff and that he really did have a life that led into our life together, and so it changes our marriage in a way. It’s sort of like our whole life together was a lie.”
She was sounding crazy, but I wasn’t sure I should tell her that. “Maybe Pa just didn’t think the stuff that happened to him ’fore he met you was important. Maybe in a way he liked pretendin’ his life didn’t really start until he met you.”
Her head jerked up and her eyes met mine. There were tears in hers, but they looked surprised.
“Did I say somethin’ wrong?” I asked, worried I was about to get i
n trouble.
She took me in her arms. “No, Abe. You just said possibly the single most right thing you’ve ever said.”
“I did?” I asked, my voice muffled by her shirt. I wasn’t even sure what I’d said. This conversation had stopped making total sense to me a while back.
When she let go, I asked, “Will you tell me what it says about Pa now?”
“Well, for one thing, the woman you met? Addison? She probably really is your aunt.”
I couldn’t help but smile. I’d met family. “Really? Is her last name Teal like mine?”
“Yup. Least it was last time these records were updated. Unless she got married since. And you do have two grandparents livin’ in Georgia. I knew he had parents. He had mentioned them from time to time, but only in passing. He told me he didn’t get along with them and sort of left it at that. From what little information I gathered from your pa, your grandpa ran the house like some sort of military sergeant. I never dreamed they was livin’ barely three hours away the whole time. The way your pa talked, it was like they was clear across the country or somethin’.”
“I have another granddaddy!” I said.
“And a grandma,” my mother said.
“Wow! This is really great! I can’t wait to tell Dewey! Are we gonna meet ’em?”
She looked at me sternly. “I dunno yet. That waits to be seen.”
“Waits for what?”
“For me to decide.”
I looked down at the table. “Oh.”
My mother flipped to the last page. I could tell there was something on that page she really didn’t like.
“What else does it say?” I asked.
“Nothin’ that concerns you.”
“Please? He was my pa and I don’t know nothin’ ’bout him.”
She looked into my eyes for a second.
“Please?” I asked again.
“Fine, I guess.” I watched her swallow hard before she continued. When she did, her voice was much quieter than before and it sounded like she might be holding back tears. “Says here your pa was married once before. Can you believe it? You know how young he was when he married me? He’d barely turned twenty. Well, he was even younger when he married her. He was only eighteen. They lasted two months.”
“That makes you mad?”
“He shoulda told me.”
“So you could get mad at him?”
“So I would know.”
“What would you have done?”
“Gotten mad at him.”
“I’m bettin’ that’s likely why he never told you,” I said. Why did this all seem so easy for me to understand and yet my mother seemed to be having such a hard time with it?
“He still shoulda told me. For better or worse. We vowed that. I’m supposed to know all the ‘for worse’ parts.”
“But this was before your weddin’.”
She glared at me. “Why don’t you run along and play with your swords? I want to be angry some more and you’re just makin’ it tough.”
“There anythin’ else in there about Pa?”
“Nothin’ interestin’.”
“You sure? You said that ’fore and then you tol’ me he was married once before.”
She lifted the papers off the table and snapped them in the air. “Well, let’s see. You wanna know his fishing license number? His driver’s license number? How about his Social Security information? I can give you some of his tax records if you’d like. Any of this sound like somethin’ you’d like to be let in on, Abe?”
I pushed myself off the chair. I could tell she was done showing me the file. “No,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know ’bout the family stuff.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’d really like to meet ’em,” I said.
“I know you would.”
“And I know you’re scared to,” I told her.
“I know you know. Now take off. You’re too old for your own good.”
“I know,” I said, and left the kitchen.
Leah watched her little Abe leave, wondering how in the world she’d managed to raise him all by herself and still have him turn out so well.
Then she thought of Miss Sylvie and realized she was going to turn out okay, too. It was just going to take some time, was all. Eli Brown had moved back to Alvin already and, even though Leah hadn’t yet paid him her little visit that she promised Sylvie she would, Sylvie seemed to be handling the situation just fine. Leah would go see Eli sometime in the coming week. She wasn’t worried. The man was harmless. She’d seen him when he’d been moved from Talladega to the Birmingham Work Release Center and the man she’d seen was a kind and gentle man, not a man worth being a mite scared of.
Sylvie was just afraid of her memories. And they were memories being amplified because they were coming from a five-year-old girl.
No, Leah wasn’t worried one bit about Eli Brown. That’s why she hadn’t bothered going to see him yet.
Despite Sylvie’s fears, nothing bad was about to happen.
Or so Leah thought.
Then, four days later, Sylvie found her cat, Snowflake, lying dead on her back porch.
CHAPTER 7
Leah was at the station when the call came in. Chris had picked up the phone and immediately Leah knew it was Sylvie by the way he rolled his eyes. “Yes, Miss Carson,” he said in that condescending voice that made Leah want to pistol-whip him. “And what can we do for you today?”
Sitting at her desk, Leah tried to keep looking busy, as though she wasn’t interested in listening to Chris’s side of the conversation, but the truth was that she was eavesdropping because if she didn’t take an interest she knew nobody else would. So, while she pretended to be going through files and looking things up on her computer terminal, she was actually on autopilot, eavesdropping on Chris sitting at the desk beside her.
It was probably pretty obvious to Chris. The station had only switched over to computers in the last year and Leah still wasn’t really sure how to use hers properly. Chief Montgomery liked to go on about how one day all the computers in all the police departments across the country would be connected and share a central repository of information, but that all sounded like science fiction to Leah. Right now, any data they wanted in the system, they had to put there and store on floppy discs that they kept in a cabinet. They had probably five hundred such discs and, once the data was inputted, it was easier to work with. But inputting it was a big job. This was why the only data Leah had access to was recent events that happened in and around Alvin. For anything else, they still had to order background checks or reports, usually from places like Mobile.
She knew just enough about her computer to get by. She wished she knew as much about it as her son did. Sometimes, after hours, when it was just her and Abe (and occasionally his friend Dewey), she’d let them go on the terminal. They were much better at it than her and even discovered a game they liked playing on it called Super Slither. Leah had no idea the computer even had games. She still didn’t understand why it does.
But for now, while she listened, she pretended she knew what she was doing. Even if what she was doing was only scrolling the bright green text of her contact list of other stations and emergency numbers up and down the dark green screen.
“Is that so?” Chris asked. “And how long do you figure he’s been dead?”
Dead? Who’s dead? This immediately grabbed Leah’s attention. She no longer pretended to be playing with her contact list or shuffling around papers. Now she was just in her seat, obviously paying attention to what Chris was saying to Sylvie.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “She. How long do you figure she’s been dead?” He wrote something down on the pad in front of him. “And what was the cause of death?” He wrote a bit more and said, “I see.”
She? Well, for someone being dead, Chris was remaining awfully calm. It better not be the baby, or there’d be hell to pay. In fact, she couldn’t think of anyone it could be that would all
ow for his demeanor to be so inappropriate at such news.
“Yes,” he said finally, still remaining calm as a salamander sunning himself atop a rock in mid-July, “of course we’ll send an officer out right away.” He sat back in his chair, half turned, and gave Leah a smile and a wink. “Yes, I’m aware of the severity of the situation. You just sit tight now, all right? Okay. Bye, Miss Sylvie.”
Reaching over, Chris dropped the receiver onto the telephone and said, “And now the community tax dollars shall once again be spent on yet another crazy quest for that woman.”
Leah didn’t share Chris’s lackadaisical attitude. She was anxious to find out about the details of the call. “What was that about? Who’s dead?”
Chris laughed. “You’re not gonna believe it. It’s her damn cat. She found it dead on her back porch. Now she wants to file a police report. I guess she suspects murder?” He made a gun out of his forefinger and thumb and pointed it at the floor. “Pow!” he said, lifting the barrel of his finger-weapon. “That’ll show you, you mangy cat. Next time you’ll know better than to mess with us.” He laughed even louder this time.
Still Leah felt anxious. “What did she say happened to it? What killed her?”
With a shrug, Chris said, “Damned if she knows. She said she can’t see no reason why the cat should be dead. It isn’t like it’s very old or nothin’. She sounded a bit loopy, if you ask me. I think she was pretty messed up about it.”
“You think?” Leah asked, standing from her seat.
“Where you goin’ so fast?” Chris asked.
“To Sylvie’s. To check out what happened to her damn cat. Some of us have to take our jobs a little more seriously.” Grabbing the keys to her car, Leah headed straight for the doors.
“It’s just a goddamn cat!” Chris yelled in her wake, his sentence getting cut off by the sound of the door slamming shut behind her.
Leah had been getting more and more annoyed with Chris’s attitude at work lately. It had gotten progressively worse since he single-handedly made what could’ve been called “Alvin’s biggest bust” (and was in some papers even as far up as Birmingham).
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