“May Ann assured me that in their frequent talks, Norma Jean really seemed to like Leon a lot but that it was more of a brother-sister thing, not sex or the pull of passion.”
“So, someone invented a vicious rumor that spread like wildfire and caused three people’s death?”
“Possibly … indirectly,” Fred said softly.
“To hell with indirectly,” I said, trembling with emotion, “I only see cause and effect. It was murder.”
“I’m afraid you’re incorrect. Stretching it, it might be called depraved indifference, but no one would ever suffer jail time because they started a rumor.”
“You may be wrong on that assumption,” I said grimly. “Rumors have to start somewhere. All you would have to do is trace it back to someone who can’t name a source.”
“It would all be for naught, my dear. You cannot bring the dead back or punish the perpetrator.”
“You’re probably right, Fred. Listen, I enjoyed our conversation very much. It’s been too long. I’ll call you again soon.”
“Jo Beth …”
“Yes?”
“Take care.”
“You too.”
I called Hank. His phone was finally answered by a deputy who informed me that Hank was out with Agent Fray and not expected back for at least two hours. I wondered what motel Fray used when he stayed in Balsa City to keep from driving sixty miles home late and sixty miles back early.
I called Susan.
“You busy?” Susan was usually alone at the bookshop in the mornings.
“Nope. Wasn’t last night terrible? Jasmine and I heard the blast way out on the lawn. When we got inside, you were the only person I could focus on. It must have been that Day-Glo orange suit. We both thought that you might have been inside when the shots were fired. I have heard from several people this morning what a heroine you are! The paper didn’t give you enough praise.”
“Lord knows, I didn’t want praise, just to get everyone out alive, and I didn’t even accomplish that. I got some shocking news this morning.”
“What?”
“Norma Jean wasn’t pregnant, and if she wasn’t pregnant, she might not have been having an affair with Leon. How about them apples?”
“Who said she wasn’t pregnant?”
“A very reliable source, I’ve been told.” I was going to start being more discreet in the future and not blab every rumor or conjecture that I heard.
“I’m sure my source is more reliable than your source,” she said complacently.
“Come on,” I said jokingly, “who told you?”
“I won’t be spreading rumors for a while, I’m afraid. My source will remain unnamed, just like yours. I feel bad that I had told you and Jasmine less than an hour before the shooting started.”
“You know I won’t spread it around, Susan. Give!”
“You have no intention of telling me where you got your information, why should I tell you mine?”
“Because I know when to keep my trap shut!” I retorted angrily. I bit my lip.
“I knew you were interrogating me, I just knew it!” she exclaimed in triumph. “You’re gonna track down whoever started this rumor, aren’t you? Your sense of right and wrong is stronger than that of the rest of us mortals. The sainted avenger strikes again!”
“You’re dead wrong. Don’t take that attitude, I was simply being curious. Also, you goaded me into saying what I did about my trap, admit it!”
“Yeah,” she said, trying to sound forgiving, “I did, so you’re off the hook for the mean remark.”
Tell me another one, I thought wearily. I’d be apologizing for what I said for the next year. Now I thought I’d try to spread more salve on the wound.
“I have a great plan for getting rid of Fray, the horse’s ass. Would you like to conspire with me to bring him down?”
God, what was I doing? I now had both feet in my mouth. Susan was one of the last people I would turn to for help in any conspiracy.
“I’d have to think about it. Tell me the plan.” She seemed to be interested.
“Gotcha,” I cried. “Just kidding! Wanna have lunch?”
The line was silent. Susan had hung up on me.
7
“A Visit with Jimmy Joe”
August 25, Sunday, 2:30 P.M.
I had told myself that I wasn’t about to go see what Jimmy Joe Lane wanted to talk about and truly believed it up until two P.M. At that point, I gave a fatalistic shrug, took a shower, and was now tooling along at fifty on a two-lane blacktop that led to Monroe Prison.
Taking my time, it would be a forty-minute drive. The temperature was in the high eighties but the wind was blowing from the northeast and I was comfortable without using the air. Low humidity made a bad tracking day, but coupled with a breeze it made the heat bearable.
I was driving my car because when locals spotted the van and had the time, they sometimes followed it because of the sheriff’s department seal and the black outline of a bloodhound painted on each side. Today it would have been mostly teenagers or singles in their early twenties, bored with small-town Sunday afternoon somnolence and craving excitement.
By the time I had checked in, been patted down for drugs by a female guard, and shown into the waiting hall, it was three fifteen. The crowd was thinning. Visiting hours were from one to four. I sat at a picnic table and listened for my name.
A tinny muted voice saying “Joel Simon” floated on the air and over my head. Only when they repeated it and the small green light winked on over the fifth booth did I realize they meant me. I rose and walked to the metal straight chair and stared at the stranger sitting behind a thick glass partition, his features screwed into a large feckless grin.
He was overdoing his welcome. He reminded me of my mother’s admonishment when I was six and was manipulating my face to show my anger at a playmate. “Goodness, child, what if it suddenly grew cold and your face froze in that position? Wouldn’t that be a sight?”
I didn’t remember Jimmy Joe from school. To the best of my knowledge, I had never laid eyes on him. His dark hair was shorn so close to his scalp that half the area seemed bald. His eyebrows were too thick and lush to match his denuded head. A sallow complexion was proof that he hadn’t been exposed to the hot Georgia sun for ages. I thought back to the timetable from Hank’s briefing. It had been six years, if I remembered correctly, since Jimmy Joe had been out, which only counted for eleven days of freedom and then three more years.
His faded jumpsuit was not the faint gray of the other prisoners; it was the same garish Day-Glo orange of my rescue suit. This meant he was prone to run, and they wanted to be damned sure that he could be easily seen while doing so.
I guessed—as best I could given that he was sitting—that he was my height and weighed about 140 pounds.
I pulled out the heavy chair, sat down, and raised an inquiring eyebrow. He quickly picked up the phone on his side of the glass, put it to his ear, and gestured toward the one by my right hand. I picked it up and spoke first.
“Are you Jimmy Joe Lane?”
“Yes’m, and I’m real proud to meet you at last. I surely admire your skills with dogs and I’ve kept a scrapbook of all your exploits that appeared in the Atlanta-Constitution and the Dunston County Daily Times.”
“I admire kind words, as most folks do, but I’m sure they weren’t the reason that you asked to see me. What’s on your mind?”
“I wanted to be sure that you knew I admired you so if you get upset with what I’m gonna tell you, you won’t leave without knowing how I feel about you.”
“All right.”
I sat and waited for him to get to the point. He placed both elbows on the narrow ledge in front of the glass and tilted his head to the receiver and gave me another huge grin.
“Do you remember reading about me? Nothing much for the last six years, but I’ve been cussed and discussed a few times myself. Do you remember the song they wrote about me?”
; “I didn’t remember you at all. Sheriff Cribbs had to fill me in. Now, what is it that you wanted to tell me that might make me angry? This is not a social visit.”
“I’m messing this up and I apologize. The only women I’ve talked to in the last seventeen years were kin to me, with the exception of a few female guards. I’m nervous. I’ll just blurt it out and hope you don’t get down on me. I wanted to tell you I’ll be leaving here soon, and I love dogs. I had bluetick hounds when I was growing up. I have never mistreated a dog in my life, honest. Don’t put any of your dogs on my trail…please?”
I stared at him. I couldn’t believe he could be so dumb and here Hank had been telling me how brainy he was. I shook my head in disbelief.
“You are nuts! First, you tell a complete stranger you’re planning on trying to escape from here, and second, you have the unmitigated gall to threaten my bloodhounds!”
“You’re not a stranger to me, ma’am; I’ve loved you for six years. You’re on my mind every waking minute of my day. I surely don’t want to harm them bloodhounds of yours and that’s gospel. You surely wouldn’t feel kindly toward my proposal of marriage if I did, I’m sure of that! I didn’t want to tell you so soon about awanting to marry you and all, but you sounded so riled I had to let you know that my intentions were honorable.”
I stood quickly, shoving the metal chair, which made a penetrating screech, like chalk drawn across a blackboard. My legs had worked faster than my brain in assembling his crazy message. I still had the speaker-phone in my hand.
“I don’t know you and have no desire to hear another word out of your mouth. I will report your conversation to the warden about a possible attempt to escape. If you should succeed in breaking out, my bloodhounds will track you in or out of the Okefenokee and run you to ground. That’s not a threat, it’s a promise!”
I slammed the phone harder than necessary in its cradle, spun on my heel, and didn’t stop until I reached the information counter near the front entrance. This gave me time to control my breathing and calm down.
Two women in front of me were chattering in Spanish and gesturing at their wristwatches. They seemed to be angry. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was ten minutes until four. My guess was that the guards had refused to send for whomever they wanted to see and they were protesting that it was still visiting hours for another ten minutes.
A bored guard slowly picked up the phone and requested an interpreter. He waved them aside and looked in my direction. I cocked my head to indicate the far end of the counter and walked several feet from the women and waited for him to follow me. He eventually moseyed on down to me, shaking his head.
“They don’t understand English, lady, so why did we have to move down here?”
“I doubt that. How many foreign women have you met in their early twenties that don’t understand English well enough to get by? I just didn’t want what I had to tell you to be overheard and repeated to any prisoners.”
“Why would they pretend not to understand me?”
He was not only bored but also pissed that he had been asked to walk a few extra feet and then had to lean over the counter to hear me.
“They were late getting here and are still counting on being able to see their men. They’re using their minority status to get special privileges.”
“Never happen,” he asserted. “Now, what’s this earth-shattering piece of news that you didn’t want spread to the prison population?”
I changed my mind. This guy was an idiot.
“I would like to speak to the warden,” I said, pronouncing each word distinctly.
A loud raucous buzzer sounded for a good five seconds, making me nearly jump out of my skin.
“End of visiting hours,” he explained, sneering because the racket had made me twitchy. “The warden doesn’t come in on Sundays.”
“Okay,” I said, being reasonable. “Make it the assistant warden.”
“He doesn’t work on Sunday afternoons.”
“Captain of the guard?” I hazarded.
“On vacation this week.”
Answer Man was having fun. He cocked his head and waited for my next guess. I should have dressed better. I wasn’t being taken seriously in worn jeans, T-shirt, and cross trainers in nightmare orange.
“To whom would I report a future jail break?” I asked politely.
“Me,” he answered, not batting an eyelash.
“You?” I repeated skeptically.
“Uh-huh.”
“Perhaps you should get pen and paper, so you won’t forget,” I suggested sweetly.
“I’ll remember.”
“A recent transferee from Atlanta, Jimmy Joe Lane, was telling me he’s gonna walk soon. He also mentioned my bloodhounds, in passing. I have the contract for search and rescue for this prison. My name is Jo Beth Sidden.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s it? ‘Uh-huh?’”
“Uh-huh.”
We both turned toward the loud conversation that began when a prison guard approached the waiting women. All three were speaking at the same time, and all energetically waving their arms. Answer Man and I couldn’t understand the words, but knowing the general drift of their request, it was easy to follow their progress by watching expressions and hand movements. With less than sixty seconds of rapid-fire negotiations, all three were smiling happily as the guard led them away toward the visitors’ area.
“Mission accomplished,” I remarked.
His look of consternation changed to aggravation.
“Anything else?”
“I want to apologize. I didn’t take into consideration that you might not be able to read or write. Shall I write the message and leave it with you?”
His seventeen-inch collar seemed to shrink. Suddenly a dull flush began to creep upward from his neck to his hairline. I’ve found that younger men will shrug off an insult better than older men will; the young hate to let the female know she has scored. This one was pushing fifty.
He gripped the counter until his knuckles were white and didn’t trust himself to speak. I decided to get out of there. It isn’t wise to insult a prison guard while you’re locked inside his place of employment.
I was halfway home before I began to see the humor in the situation. Jimmy Joe was a cocky little bastard. I began to chuckle at his positive attitude toward escape and his building of air castles about a future romance with yours truly. I decided right then and there that if he ever succeeded in making his way back to his beloved swamp, I just might not be the one to bring him back. I forgave him for warning me not to use my bloodhounds. I didn’t doubt his love of hounds for a minute.
I was feeling quite mellow when I arrived home. If I had known what was in store for me, I would have been wailing and gnashing my teeth. But, as they say around here when something is unexplainable, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”
8
“A Broken Promise”
August 25, Sunday, 7:00 P.M.
Jasmine and I decided to eat out, so we went to Pete’s Deli for baby-back ribs, corn on the cob, coleslaw, and beer. I had the beer; Jasmine drank iced tea.
We had chosen a booth on the right and I was sitting facing the doorway. When I saw Brian Colby enter, my gut began to clench even before I spotted Susan directly behind him.
“Susan just arrived with sleazebag Brian. Prepare to smile and make nice.”
“Lord, you were right. Behave…” Jasmine murmured.
A while back, Brian had been a bone of contention that almost ruined my friendship with Susan forever. My intuition—based on Colby’s possessive attitude toward Susan—made me suspect that Colby preyed on women. I had Hank check him out, and he confirmed my suspicions—Brian had a history of cozying up to women, and then bilking them of their money. Hank had run him out of town and Susan was furious that I had interfered. Now he was back. I’d have to grin and bear it.
“Hey, if it isn’t the dog lady! Howdy, J
o Beth!”
“How are you?” I said as I shook his outstretched hand. I gave a startled Susan a warm smile and held it in place as I stared into Brian’s eyes.
“Oh, I just keep turning up like a bad penny.” He gave an affable chuckle as he placed his arm around Susan. “I bet you never expected to see me again!” He not only wanted to pour salt on the wound, he wanted to rub it in.
“I was sure you’d be back”—I leaned toward him as if I was delivering confidential information—“Susan’s too valuable.”
His eyes narrowed to conceal his hatred. He got my message, Jasmine got my message; in fact, all of God’s children got my message except Susan. Her face was flushed with pleasure that Brian and I had obviously buried the hatchet. Little did she know that we both wished we could bury it between each other’s shoulder blades.
“Join us?”
“Thanks, but not tonight.” Brian answered without consulting Susan. “We have so much catching up to do, but you be sure to call us, you hear?”
He turned Susan adroitly, heading for the rear dining room where the tables had candles and were barely large enough for two.
“Take a deep breath,” Jasmine suggested, “you’re turning blue.”
“Did you hear that cocky bastard? ‘Call us.’ I’d like to ring his worthless neck!”
“Do you think she’s let him move in with her?”
“No way. Her parents are not only old-fashioned—they are positively Victorian. To them, their image is everything. They want her married and having grandchildren, not shacking up with a jerk who can’t commit. Thank God they still have control over the purse strings. They pay her credit card bills and receive copies of every charge. Brian could only take her for a few hundred before Daddy would tumble to it and go after him with tar and feathers as he had him ridden out of town on a rail.”
“He could still stay over on the sly.”
“Did I mention that Mommy hand-selects and pays for Susan’s daily maid, who cleans, does laundry, picks up dry cleaning, shops to stock refrigerator and larder, and probably listens to Susan’s voice mail?”
A Bloodhound to Die for Page 5