Hush My Mouth

by Cathy Pickens

  “Neanna called on her way here last Friday, then nothing. It was easier to drive here than to sit home and worry. I couldn’t help but see your angel sign when I drove into town. I appreciate you seeing me on such short notice.”

  “I’m not sure I’m the best person to help you. Dacus has a private investigator who is actually very good. I could put you—”

  “No,” she said, her tone sharp. “No. I’ve had enough of P.I.’s. You’re from around here, aren’t you.” She wasn’t asking. “You know people, know how things work around here.”

  “Yes.” My family had been here longer than dirt.

  She nodded at the confirmation. “I asked about you. People like your family. At least the people who work at the gas station on the north edge of town.” Her smile acknowledged the unscientifically small size of her sample. “The story is difficult. You can hire whatever help you need, but I need someone I can trust, someone—who can handle a difficult case and move quickly.”

  “You can’t know that about me from the gas station.”

  She smiled. “No, but they did tell me you were once a ‘big fancy lawyer in Columbia.’ After I called you to make the appointment, I stopped by the library to check you out online.”

  Hmm. I needed to check myself out sometime, see what popped up. “Okay, suppose you tell me about your sister. Then we can talk about next steps.”

  “Fair enough. To tell the truth, the concert wasn’t the real reason she came. She came looking for her aunt, for information about her death.”

  She noted my surprise.

  “Maybe you’ve heard about Wenda Sims?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m sure it was in the papers, but you’d have been young when she died.”

  Fran looked to be in her late twenties, a little younger than I was, but I let her tell her own story.

  “Wenda was murdered here in Dacus in 1985. She was found stretched out on a grave marker in a cemetery.”

  The lightbulb came on. “I do remember that.” I’d been in junior high school. It had been all the buzz for a few weeks, just because it had been so strange how she’d been found in the graveyard. In the way of small towns, it had probably disappeared as a topic of conversation because she wasn’t from Dacus and people figured she’d brought her trouble with her from somewhere else. “That was Neanna’s aunt?”

  She nodded, her expression somber. “She’d been strangled and displayed there, with her suitcase and makeup kit sitting on the ground at her feet. Neanna idolized Wenda—and, I’m afraid, idealized her. Neanna was only seven when Wenda died. She was Neanna’s fairy godmother, her shining light in an otherwise dreary and sometimes frightening family.”

  “Seven. That’s a tough age to—”

  “Lose someone? Particularly for Neanna. She wouldn’t talk about it for the longest. It just hurt too much. I think a lot of what she remembers about Wenda are her grandmother’s stories about how much Aunt Wenda doted on her. Neanna still keeps the Raggedy Ann doll on her bed that Wenda gave her when she was a baby.”

  When she wasn’t talking with her hands, they moved restlessly in her lap.

  “Neanna’s grandmother—we called her Gran—raised her after her mother ran off with some guy. Neanna was just a baby. Gran never said, but I assumed Neanna’s mama had a drug or alcohol problem. They didn’t hear from her after she took off. When we were in high school, Neanna finally found out her mama had died. It hit Neanna hard, finding out her mama had been dead for years.”

  “Had anyone looked for her mother?”

  “Off and on. It’s why I don’t trust private investigators. I watched too many of them take Gran’s money—and her hopes. She couldn’t afford it, but they didn’t care. Gran found out on her own that Marie had died in San Francisco a year or two after she left Atlanta. Gran found out our senior year in high school. Everything’s so emotional then anyway. You can imagine how hard it was on Neanna.”

  “What about Neanna’s father?”

  “Long gone. He’d disappeared when Neanna was a baby, never to be heard from again.”

  “How did you know Neanna?”

  “We’ve been best friends since kindergarten.”

  When she smiled, the fret wrinkles around her eyes eased. “We were in school together from then on. When we turned thirteen, Neanna’s grandmother started having some health problems—gallbladder surgery, diabetes, I don’t know what all. Neanna had always spent a lot of time at my house when we were little, and she stayed with us more and more whenever Gran had to go to the hospital. I don’t think Neanna’s teen years could have been much fun for Gran. Maybe she was remembering her own two daughters and how things hadn’t worked out too well, one murdered, one just gone. Neanna had a rebellious streak, at least when Gran was the one handing down ultimatums. Neanna would do anything for my dad, though. Eventually she just moved in with me and my parents.”

  She paused, staring into space—or across time. “I wish I could say we all lived happily ever after, but after we graduated from college, Neanna drifted from job to job. She majored in art, but she didn’t want to teach and she didn’t have the business head to become a gallery darling. So she took retail or waitress jobs, just something to pay the rent. She doesn’t even paint for fun anymore, which is a shame. If someone has a gift like that, she should use it.”

  “What do you do, Fran?”

  “Besides wish I was as talented an artist as Neanna? I own my own advertising and sports marketing firm.”

  That helped explain the professional polish, the creased slacks, the pearly white teeth, and why she was so much better at articulating her case than many of my clients.

  “You did have the business head, then.”

  “Yeah. Too bad we couldn’t team up somehow, huh? We talked about it, but things just settled into a routine. Neanna is still a member of our family. She’s there for Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays. And, I suspect, for the occasional loan from my dad.”

  She emphasized the word “loan” with crooked forefingers, hinting that her dad hadn’t looked for or expected repayment. Judging from her lack of bitterness, I suspected her dad was generous with both his daughters. Fran had the confidence and presence of a child who has been well cared for. Fran could be my sister—or at least a cousin. My hair had more gold than red in it, but the similarities outweighed the differences.

  “You said your family is from Atlanta?” I said.

  The essential Southern questions: Who are your people? Where are they from, and how long have they been here? Those pre-Revolutionary War families eligible for membership in the Colonial Dames got bonus points, followed by the Daughters of the American Revolution and finally the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In some sections, such as Charleston, anybody who’d arrived after the Revolutionary War could expect a slightly raised eyebrow and a sniff of superiority from someone whose ancestors had fled England and France no later than the eighteenth century in the face of religious persecution—or legal prosecution. Time was honored; the reasons they came were graciously ignored.

  The pecking order could be complicated—and in some places, it got so snobbish and tightly defined that if carried to its illogical conclusion, each clique would have but a single member. In the Upstate, we aren’t quite so regimented.

  People from outside the South take our questions as a rude intrusion or inscrutable put-down. Some raise their hackles at being called “Yankees,” not realizing that’s just a shorthand way of saying we might not know as much about you because we have limited ways to define you. To lots of Southerners, Ohio and New Jersey might as well be the same place, for all they know about either.

  Fran knew exactly why I asked. She knew the cultural shorthand. “We’ve been in Atlanta or around there since before there was much Atlanta,” she said, which meant they’d been there so long, it didn’t much matter whether they’d begun as red-dirt farmers, as merchants, or as plantation owners. She carried the ce
rtainty of knowing what she could call home. Her background would have pronounced differences from mine, but we knew each other all the same.

  “So you and Neanna grew up together. This aunt—Wenda—was Neanna’s real aunt?”

  “Yes. Her mother’s sister. Gran’s oldest daughter.”

  “Make sure I understand. Gran had two daughters—Wenda and Marie. Any other children?”

  “No.”

  “Did Wenda have any children?”

  “No.”

  “So Marie had Neanna, then left her with Gran.”

  Fran nodded.

  “When Neanna was seven, her aunt Wenda died. In high school, she learned Marie—her mom—had died, what? Seventeen years earlier?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And now Gran is dead.”

  She nodded, somber.

  “Was Wenda living in Dacus?”

  “No. She had a boyfriend who’d moved here or was doing some work here, though. Tank Smith.”

  I didn’t recognize the name. “Aunt Wenda was murdered twenty-three years ago. What made Neanna decide to come here now?”

  Fran shrugged. “I’m not quite sure—though it started after Gran’s death.”

  “Which was . . . ?”

  “Six weeks ago. She was Neanna’s last real relative.”

  “That must have hit her hard.”

  “Harder than I would’ve expected.” She glanced down at her hands, maybe remembering the emotion but not sharing it with me. “Anyway, Mama and I were helping her clean out Gran’s house. When Gran passed away, she was still living in the same little house she moved into when she’d first married, so she’d accumulated a lot of stuff. Neanna found a scrapbook and that was the start of it all.”

  “Scrapbook?” I pictured one with multicolored pages and ruffle-cut trims and stickers and cute captions, but that sort of craft-store creation didn’t mesh with the mental picture I had of a family with deadbeat dads and druggie moms.

  “Scrapbook, as in scraps. Yellowed news clippings pasted in a dime-store scrapbook, all about Wenda’s murder.”

  “A scrapbook. That’s—” I caught myself before I said, That’s creepy.

  Something in her faint frown said she knew exactly what I was thinking—and she agreed. When I thought about it, though, it made sense. Of course she’d clip the articles and hold on to anything she could. Anybody would. Maybe it was just the idea of a scrapbook that struck me as weird.

  “Most of the articles were from the Greenville and Dacus papers,” Fran said. “The Atlanta Journal-Constitution really didn’t cover it, I guess. Plenty of home-grown crime there. At first, the articles filled the front page, but it didn’t take long for the story to shrink out of sight. A few follow-up articles on the first anniversary, but eventually nothing.”

  “The whole scrapbook was just articles about the murder?”

  “The whole scrapbook. The only scrapbook. Gran had no photo albums—just pictures stuffed into drawers or a couple of shoe boxes. No baby books, no high school memory books or wedding albums. Just the one keepsake book. With the articles. And one photo stuck inside.”

  “Photo?”

  Her shoulders scrunched as if she was drawing back from something. “Laid in the front of the album, loose. Of Wenda’s body on the grave marker.”

  “You’re kidding? Where did she—how—?”

  “Who knows? We—Neanna and I—wondered the same thing. Where did she get it? A newspaper photographer? A passing motorist? Who knows? How would Gran get something like that?”

  And why would she keep it? On some level, like the newspaper clippings, I could understand why she might. After all, throwing it away wouldn’t put it from her mind. Maybe, like grief, it was more seemly when it was kept private.

  “Do you have the scrapbook?”

  She shook her head. “I guess Neanna brought it with her.”

  “What did the photo show?”

  She closed her eyes, whether to remember or forget, I couldn’t tell. Likely forgetting wasn’t an option for her, any more than it would have been for Gran.

  “She was lying on her back, her head lolled back with her throat exposed. She looked so vulnerable, I remember that in particular. She had a coat on—it made me think of a velvet opera coat, though I don’t know why it brought that to mind. Her dress was gathered at the front.” She swept her fingers across just below her collarbones. “Like one of those sixties’ peasant dresses, a tie-dyed print. She wore dark ballet flats.”

  “She died when?”

  “Nineteen eighty-five. I know,” she said with a shrug. “A long way from the sixties, but other pictures I saw of her always made me think of hippies. She wore her hair long, parted in the middle and pulled straight back.”

  Trends tend to sweep Dacus anywhere from three years to a decade after the fashion’s finished everywhere else. But Wenda hadn’t been from here. Had her retro look been out of fashion or all the rage? I couldn’t say.

  “Her suitcase sat on the ground at her feet, with one of those hard-sided makeup cases that would have been old even then. You could see lots of brown leaves around her, covering the ground like it was late fall or early winter.”

  I couldn’t quite picture the scene. “You said she was found on a headstone?”

  “Not like a tombstone. I wouldn’t have known that’s what it was except that’s what the news articles said. It looked more like a bench, with rolled stone arms at either end. Her head was tilted back over one arm, and her body stretched along the seat with her feet on the ground beside her suitcase.”

  “And no indication who took the photo?”

  She shook her head. “To me, it looked as though it was taken at night. You know how black-and-white flash photos sometimes look both bright and dark at the same time? It reminded me of that.”

  I couldn’t think of a gentle way to ask my next question. “In the photo, how did you know she was dead?”

  She bit her bottom lip and studied the dark oak floor beside my chair before she answered.

  “I saw the picture before I read the scrapbook, before I knew the details about what happened to her. At first, I thought she was wearing a heavy necklace.” She blinked rapidly. “The articles said her throat had been cut, that she’d been cleaned up and dressed before she was carried to the graveyard and—left. That’s why it looked like—” Her hand rose to her own throat.

  In my bright, high-ceiling office, I felt a chill. Packed up and sent on her journey. Whoever left her knew Wenda wouldn’t need whatever was in the suitcase.

  “If her aunt has been dead twenty years, why would Neanna come here now?” I circled back. Lawyers and cops know that repeating questions can shake loose new information.

  Fran shrugged. “She kept insisting she was coming to hear Nut Case play. Or, more particularly, their lead singer Gerry Pippen. But I’ve known Neanna for an awfully long time. Do you have sisters?”

  “One.”

  “Then you know, don’t you? She can’t lie to you, can she?”

  I smiled, not bothering to explain that Lydia’s a horrid liar. I probably am, too, I just like to believe I’m better than Lydia.

  “She loves acoustic music, and Nut Case is her favorite band. Even so, I couldn’t believe she let it interfere with our annual trip to the beach. For the last ten years, we’ve rented a cottage on Jekyll Island for this week in June. At the last minute, she called to say she couldn’t make it, that she’d join me after the first of the week.”

  “Did she ask if you wanted to go to the concert?”

  “She knew it wasn’t my thing. I’d really been looking forward to quiet time at the beach. Vegging out, reading, listening to the waves. Nut Case wouldn’t have filled the bill for me.”

  “Did she go to the concert?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “Anybody go with her?”

  “Some guy hitched a ride up here with her from Atlanta.”

  “A boyfriend?”r />
  “No. She got his name off an online ride board. Another Nut Case fan.”

  She must have read the concern on my face.

  “She checked him out. Some friend of a friend, she said. Somebody to keep her company, help her with the gas.”

  “Have you tried to reach him? Is he back in Atlanta?”

  She shook her head. “He planned to stay in Dacus for a summer job. That’s why I decided to come straight here when I couldn’t reach her on her cell. To find him or somebody else who went to the concert.”

  “Where was he going to work?”

  “I’m not sure. Some park or something? Is there an amusement park around here?”

  “No-o.” Not even close, unless he was commuting back to Six Flags Over Georgia or to Carowinds in Charlotte. Two or three hours to either. Unlikely. “Maybe one of the state or county parks? Is he a lifeguard?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I made a note: Call Edna Lynch. “Back to Wenda. You said she had a boyfriend in Dacus?”

  “He’d been spending time here. Odd thing was, he wasn’t here when she was killed. He was in Tampa that week.”

  “Then what was she doing here?”

  “That’s always been one of the mysteries. According to the articles in the scrapbook, she was killed somewhere else and moved to the graveyard. But as far as I know, no one ever officially answered why.”

  Even in 1985, deducing that she’d been moved was simple enough, since cutting someone’s throat deeply enough to look like a heavy necklace would have meant a lot of blood.

  “Any speculation about where she was killed?”

  “Not that I saw. I didn’t read every article. They got repetitious pretty quickly—mostly rehashing how little the police knew.”

  “I imagine Neanna studied the articles pretty thoroughly.”

  “Heaven help us, yes. To the point I was ready to shred them.”

  “She didn’t say anything about coming here because of her aunt. You just know she was obsessed with the scrapbook.”

  She nodded.

  Canceling a long-standing trip with your sister seemed pretty significant—at least it was significant to Fran. What was it about a twenty-year-old murder that compelled Neanna to come to Dacus? Or was it really just the concert? Did Fran have a tendency to overreact? Too easily become overwrought? Being a trial lawyer had hammered home for me the problem with having only one side of a story—it was rarely the whole story.