So much death in that house. So much to cover up. The curtains had long been stripped from the dowels above the balcony doors, so the presence spooking Babs that night did not take shape in a shroud of linen. In fact, according to her, there was initially no visible manifestation of anything at all, no chains dragged across the floor, no whoooooosh or whisper from spirits trapped between ether and earth. The night was neither dark nor stormy. The moon was full through a cloudless sky and from the bedroom’s infamous balcony Barbara could see beyond the lawn and pier the silver crescent that was the Gulf of Mexico. But, according to the senator’s widow, there was no phantasma or specter at all. Just the sense of a presence in the room.
And then it was gone.
“I felt like some spirit was next to me,” Babs insisted. “In bed with me, it felt like. And then it was gone and the air in my lungs was just sucked out. Just sucked out, and there I was gasping like a fish. Scared half to death!”
It should be stipulated that Barbara Stanton has been scared of one thing or another most of her life. Before her fear of scandal matured, a fear of rejection was paramount. Babs knew she wasn’t the sort of gal that got boys looking. She’s tall and angular with sharp features and a Roman nose. Blotched and freckled skin. Her hair was nice, thick and luxurious, but that wasn’t enough to quell the gnawing fear of abandonment by a boy, a club, or a sorority. Babs bought her way into Tri Delt’s beehive society, her daddy’s checkbook a reliable hedge against rejection from that quarter.
However, no bankroll could assuage the underlying insecurity which was Barbara Ann’s default position. The prospect of finding oneself without means warred with a fear of rejection from polite society. It was ironic that Barbara met Baxter Stanton in the summer of love and civil disobedience when slews of young people nurtured or spoiled in middle-class security abjured their parents’ bromides for countercultural alternatives. All you need is love, the song went, but Babs was not in tune with that nonsense. Girls could burn bras in California, if they wanted to, or march in Washington or Alabama. Barbara would happily forgo the uncertain benefits of liberation in return for status and security.
She was supervising her sorority’s newest bevy of sisters at an afternoon social when Baxter came strolling in with a half-dozen brothers of his fraternity. You don’t see these sorts of mixers anymore, unless you matriculate in the deep South, Ole Miss at Oxford, say. Maybe Alabama. But during the sixties Florida State could hang with the best. The white gloves, the diaphanous summer dresses, bared shoulders, and décolletage. The young men in pressed chinos and blazers.
Barbara spotted her husband-to-be the moment he stepped through her house’s wide french doors, and she wasn’t the only one looking. Stanton had a knack for getting noticed, and it wasn’t because he was handsome. He was short. He was skinny. But there was an ineffable charisma about the young man that everyone recognized. He was ambitious and made no bones about it, a cock-of-the-walk who’d tell anyone listening that one day he would represent the Sunshine State in the United States Senate. Babs wasn’t much interested in politics, but she did have a father with a bankroll destined to be indispensable to a young man’s ambition.
Babs was checking to make sure the punch bowl was not spiked, or at least spiked properly, when Baxter sauntered over. He looked like a bantam rooster, a straw-haired twenty-something strutting up in a light-blue blazer and button-up shirt. Had a loud necktie threaded through the loops of his slacks instead of a belt. She saw the flask in his hand.
“Let me help you out,” he said, smiling through a row of crooked teeth and before she could say boo he’d emptied a pint of bourbon into the punch bowl.
“What’s your name, dahlin?”
“Barbara. And you must be Baxter Stanton.”
“I love it when people know my name,” the young man confessed, which should have clued Babs at the outset what to expect from the man she would eventually marry.
Stanton was confident, crafty, and ambitious, but of humble means. He came from Perry, Florida, where his daddy worked twelve hours a day at the pulpwood mill. Barbara’s pedigree was no more distinguished, though zealously disguised. She was an O’Steen before marriage, a skinny girl closely related or at least dog-kin to half the penniless families in her county. But Barbara’s father amassed a fortune. O’Steen saved every dime he ever made off tobacco and timber and was one of the first in the region to cash in bigtime on federal subsidies of dairies.
The idea was to guarantee farmers a price for milk by paying dairymen to limit production. Barbara’s daddy took over a million dollars of taxpayers’ money in return for not milking his cows. Of course, the old man loudly denounced federal subsidies of any kind.
So would Baxter Stanton. Naturally.
“Whatever I got, I earned myself!” Baxter always worked that claim into his stump speech, neglecting to mention that an inherited estate seeded by taxpayers’ money made his political fortunes possible.
But the charisma came gratis. Within an hour of their meeting, Babs found herself following The Rooster upstairs with a Dixie cup of bourbon and a condom. One tumble in the hay got her pregnant. A million fears triggered with that insemination—fear or shame and embarrassment. Fear of hell-fire and damnation and whispers of damaged goods. She had to flee to Georgia for the abortion and was surprised, when returning to campus after the worst Christmas in her life, to find a note from Baxter in her room.
“I’d still like to see you.”
She would later have a daughter, her father’s spitting image many would say, and for a while it looked as though there was no need to be afraid of anything. Baxter won three terms to the US Senate and was well known as the Sunshine State’s favorite son. That was before the crimes and murder which brought his family to death and disgrace as well as ruin.
Barbara insisted that her daughter never left the mansion. She’d swear to anyone that Beth Ann regularly walked the upper stories, late at night, and that Baxter haunted the study, his boudoir, really, the location of countless infidelities. The senator’s killer was never found. That’s why Baxter could not rest in peace, Babs told Hiram.
He was crying for vengeance.
In the end, she blamed herself. Long before Babs lost her daughter and husband, she knew there was something foul as fish guts about Baxter’s associates. Even during the family’s halcyon days, she had known there was something dirty about her husband’s money. And yet she remained silent. She acquiesced.
In fairness, the cost of running for office encouraged short cuts. Beth Ann was only five years old when Baxter ran for the US Senate, coming from behind to beat a well-known incumbent, but that victory came at the cost of a king’s ransom. In fact, that first triumph was the seed of Stanton’s never-ending debt, and the machinations which ensued stoked Barbara to premonitions of doom. They were spending more than they were earning, but when she’d raise the issue with her husband, Baxter only replied that the cash was accounted for by the Miami Jew in charge of his never-ending campaigns.
“You’re just a worry wart,” Baxter said, dismissing her fears. “We’re fine. Never better.”
And she tried to believe him. She really did. That was her duty, after all, to cherish her husband, to accept his authority. Aside from the social mores enforced at her sorority, the Bible made clear that a woman was completely subservient to her husband. These were eternal truths that Babs had learned by heart. Take Genesis 3:16: “. . . thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Or what about First Corinthians 11:9? “Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man.”
It was not enough to believe your husband. You had to believe in him. That conviction set Barbara apart from many of her white-gloved sisters, most of them, probably. She was obliged to trust her husband.
To protect him.
To honor him.
Even if she hated him.
Babs’s father could not understand her anxiety at all. O’Steen loved
Baxter Stanton. Couldn’t get enough of him. Believed every single thing that came out of Rooster’s mouth. Baxter would install her father on the porch swing with a tumbler of bourbon and regale the old coot with privileged gossip or stories of intrigue, largely fabricated, that welcomed the dairyman into a world he’d never dreamed to inhabit. It was not uncommon for Senator Stanton to receive a thousand-dollar check after those soirees, and as the years passed Barbara became invisible to her father.
Baxter Stanton was making his fourth run to the US Senate when Babs discovered their daughter’s hogtied corpse. A few weeks later she witnessed her husband’s assassination. The press descended on her home, and Babs’s fear of shame was realized along with the reality of indigence. There was no money left in the senator’s war chest and no asset bequeathed to his widow aside from the now-notorious mansion on Pepperfish Keys.
Babs abandoned the house at the advice of friends and family. Every painting, plate, and spoon got put up for auction. She kept Rooster’s shotgun and a few personals, packing those leavings in a travel trunk passed down from some long-dead relative. Then Barbara left the keys with a real estate agent in Orlando and moved to a trailer park, confident that the mansion’s sale would stave off back taxes and penury. She lingered in a double-wide for months and months anticipating that relief, but the residence just would not sell. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The house was in terrible repair, and with a glut of subprime real estate already on the market no one was interested in a firetrap in the middle of nowhere.
So a little more than a year after she left the Keys, Barbara Stanton packed her steamer trunk once again and returned to her gutted home. The local Fox affiliate sent a reporter to cover that pitiful démarche. When asked what brought her back, Babs replied simply that she couldn’t stay away, which (who knows?) might be true. And so now here she was alone in this god-awful place when an unnamed presence wakes her from a nightmare.
How many times have you seen the movie where the always-curious coed abandons the safety of comrades and common sense to climb the dreaded stairs beyond which everyone knows Freddy waits with his awful claws?
Well, Babs didn’t do that, exactly.
What she did do was leave her bed and the threat of a succubus to unlimber the old double-barrel and creep barefooted to the balcony. This, as she told Hiram Lamb, “To make sure everything was all right.”
Not every trip to the balcony was prompted by a sense of dread. How many times had she lingered on this very gallery with Baxter to see the day’s troubles cured in a setting sun? Or to watch pelicans flying low over the water like squadrons of aircraft? Sometimes to wave at friends tying off their tony boats at the pier in easy sight below. Her daughter learned to water ski on the silver channel within view of the bedroom balcony. Those were memories pleasant to recall, a balm against nightmares and succubi.
On this occasion a breeze that should have been cool stirred the curtains at the balcony and as Barbara emerged to face a setting sun and amaranth sky she saw a light at the pier, just a moment’s flare, like someone lighting a cigarette.
In fact, Senator Stanton often took to the pier in the wee hours to enjoy a cigar. He’d always had trouble sleeping, Baxter had. Babs couldn’t count the nights she’d stirred to find him gone. Most times he was just making water, but if she did not hear the familiar flush from the bathroom she might leave her bed for the balcony and, yes, there he’d be. Having himself a smoke on the pier.
Stanton had been dead five years when his wife saw him once again lounging beside the water. When Hiram Lamb drove out to the Keys, Barbara plied him with her latest rendition of the encounter.
“It was Baxter, I’m tellin’ you, Hiram. Big as life. Sucking that damn cigar.”
Her next memories were not so precise. A sense of running. Of transportation. She left the house, that much is certain. Her feet were cut up—the once-manicured lawn now a treachery of sandspurs and broken glass.
Imagine a hobbled sprint for the pier.
“BAXTER!” She screamed across the grounds like a crazy woman. “BAXTER, DON’T GO!”
But then, as in the movie we’ve all seen, her husband vanished.
Gone.
Disappeared.
Nothing in sight but a miasma clinging to the slow-churning channel, and nothing to hear but a sough of breeze, a croak of frogs, and a grunt of gators.
“Baxter?” She made one last feeble inquiry, but there was no reply.
Babs probably realized, then, that she was just a silly old woman, an old bag stripped of money and position and driven by boredom or guilt or a collusion of medications to hallucination. She was okay with that verdict actually. Barbara is in some ways a remarkably resilient woman. She is reconciled to her fall from grace and faces with admirable aplomb the notion that she is going insane. But a few weeks after she saw her husband’s ghost, Babs returned to the pier where she found a stump of cigar.
Some weeks had passed before Babs revisited the pier. “I was afraid I’d see a ghost, I guess,” she told Hiram Lam. “Or maybe I just wanted to get rid of that filthy old lawn chair.”
In any case, when Babs returned to the dock she saw something that she missed on her earlier midnight encounter. It was the remains of a cigar. “Was right beside the lawn chair,” Babs told Hiram. “Right there on the pier. Here, let me show you.” Barbara produced the recovered stogie for Hiram’s inspection. It was a Cohiba, Hiram would later report. “Not the Cuban cigar, the other one, the Dominican. Still had the band.” Baxter’s preferred smoke, left behind like a tease or talisman and burned down to a nub.
Barbara Stanton’s repeated accounts did not improve her reputation among local citizens. Various versions of Babs’s aborted séance were widely repeated countywide, and even more widely ridiculed. Visits from the Virgin Mary were easier for Laureate’s citizens to swallow than reports of Senator Stanton’s ghostly resurrection. The skepticism greeting Babs’s several accounts did not surprise me. Any self-styled aristocrat in a community as hermetic and defeated as our own is a target for envy and opprobrium, and so it’s to be expected that Barbara Stanton, after flying so high and falling so low, would become the butt of coffeehouse banter, our corrupted royalty, our wilted rose, our Emily.
Crazy woman, folks scoffed over their lattes.
Fucking bitch, said others.
“Prob’ly just menopause,” Preacher Allen felt free to speculate. “That and all the drugs she’s taking.”
But Hiram Lamb defended Barbara’s evolving account as though it were holy gospel.
“There’s definitely stuff goes on at Pepperfish Keys,” he’d growl to skeptics. “Has been since God made dirt. You don’t believe it, go out there and spend a night yourself.”
This sort of chivalry is not what you expected to see from either of the Lamb brothers. Hiram’s defense of Barbara Stanton, in particular, was completely out of character. Hiram thrived on schadenfreude. He took glee in the misfortune of those less fortunate.
So why the sudden concern for the discredited widow of a corrupt politician?
I am embarrassed to admit that I neglected to ask that question. It did not occur to me to question Hiram’s motive for defending Barbara Stanton. I should have asked myself what prompted him to visit Babs in the first place. Sixty miles is a long way to drive for a ghost story that you can read in the paper. My antenna was rusted from lack of use, is my only excuse, though a cub reporter could have guessed it was not noblesse oblige that motivated Hiram to embrace Barbara Stanton’s preposterous story.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see that Hiram Lamb wouldn’t be offering a single word on Babs’s behalf if there was not something in it for himself.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Senator’s Ghost Leaves Cigar
The Clarion
When I was at the Boston Globe I was responsible for a column a week. Every now and then our chief would assign a story, but by and large I was my own boss. Of course, now that I actually am
the boss of my own paper, I have almost no control over what I write. Worse than that, I never have the luxury of covering anything in depth. I have eight columns to fill every week, and any subscriber wanting a print ad or picture gets priority over anything I want to feature in the paper.
Some days I feel like a gerbil in a treadmill, running like hell and getting nowhere. But I have to say that the weeks before and after homecoming provided a ton of low-lying fruit for my modest little rag. Besides homecoming and Halloween, we had the unsolicited sightings of flying objects and virgins and dead husbands all over the county. We even had a crew come down from Atlanta, from CNN, to do a piece on our localized and paranormal frenzy.
Some twenty-something film-school graduate from Emory interviewed me. She had no idea she was talking to a journalist who used to have a nationally syndicated column. So far as this entitled woman was concerned, I was just a small-town hick with a paper useful for swatting flies. Even so, I have to admit I was caught up in the moment. Been a long time since I’d been on camera for any reason, and I was willing to string the conversation along. In fact, the only reason I broke off the back ’n’ forth, was because Hattie’s nurse called me away.
Good damn thing too. Because if I’d ignored that nurse’s summons, I’d have missed the real story altogether.
Hattie Briar was my grandmother’s aunt by marriage, the oldest citizen in our county, close to the centenary mark, and a regular contributor to the Clarion. She’s installed in an assisted-living apartment over at Dowling Park, right there on a high bluff above the Suwannee River. Miss Hattie moved to the Park at her own parents’ deaths and is old enough to remember the orphanage that used to be there, old enough, for sure, to remember every aunt, uncle, and cousin in Laureate.
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