Cursed to Death

by Bill Crider

  But on down the street are Ashton Villa and the Bishop’s Palace, once a private home that would knock your eyes out if you could see it in the middle of a lavish country estate instead of cramped up between other houses of a less noble appearance. Galveston had once been the most powerful and richest city in Texas; now it was a vestige.

  I turned over to The Strand, named for the famous London street. This was where the town was really making its comeback, restoring the old buildings and regaining some of the grandeur of the past with the Tremont House and the 1894 Grand Opera House. I drove on down to the Medical Center, one of the few things in Galveston that Houston hadn’t managed to steal. The wonderful old main building, Old Red, was still there, but it was hardly visible from the street, thanks to all the new buildings that surrounded it and almost hid it from view. Evelyn Matthews worked somewhere inside the complex, but she had said that she wanted to see me later, at her home, so I wouldn’t bother to stop.

  I had a thousand dollars in my billfold and what appeared to be an unlimited expense account. Whatever she wanted was fine by me.

  I drove on up Seawall Boulevard and down to the South Jetty. The area was deserted, thanks to the weather, which had not improved a hell of a lot since my run that morning. I didn’t mind. I liked having the jetty to myself, and I didn’t feel too cold in the sweatshirt. The wind had died down somewhat, but the sky was still gray and low, the temperature still hovering in the forties.

  I parked the car and walked out on the jetty, which was basically just a pile of granite boulders with the Gulf water sloshing around them. It was fairly smooth walking if you kept to the middle, but the edges were just a jumble. The granite had been hauled in on railroad flatcars, and the railroad had been built right on the jetty as it got longer and longer. The engines had backed the flatcars right into the Gulf, so to speak.

  About halfway out I sat down and thought about Jan. Black hair, brown eyes that laughed all the time. White teeth, just the least bit crooked. The kind of kid sister that could keep up with her older brother when he climbed a tree or rode his bike. She’d disappeared at just about this time of year, or a little earlier. I’d missed her letters for a couple of weeks, and it was unusual for her not to write. So I called. No answer. I called back every few hours for two days; then I’d gotten into the Subaru and driven to Galveston. Her apartment had been neat but empty. There was dust on the tables and knick-knacks. There hadn’t been anyone there for a while. There was no note, no message, nothing. She was just gone.

  I’d gotten in touch with some old friends, including Dino. I’d talked to her co-workers, her friends, anyone who might have known her. They were no help. Neither were the cops.

  I waited. No credit card bills came in. There were phone calls, but just from people wanting to know where the hell Jan was. I couldn’t find her car. The cops couldn’t find any trace of it in their computer records of arrests or accidents.

  It was as if she’d just vanished into the Gulf breeze.

  There was nothing unusual about a woman vanishing, God knows. It happens every day, and probably several times a day, in and around a city like Houston, and Galveston is certainly a part of the Greater Houston area, no matter how much it galls the BOIs to admit it. Sometimes bodies and bones are found months or years later by some kid playing in a field or taking a short cut home from school. It makes the news for a day or two. Then everyone forgets.

  I showed her picture everywhere. In the places I knew she went, in the clubs and dives, in the shops and the corner groceries. Nothing. No one knew a thing, no one had seen her. For six months of hard looking, nothing. And all the time after that. Nothing.

  Dino was right. I’d quit the business for a year, obsessed with my own search, and I’d found nothing. It was time for me to get back to trying to find something for someone else. Just to see if I still could.

  But I knew I was never really going to stop looking for Jan.

  A woman and a small boy came out on the jetty. She was holding his hand. A gull flew down by them hopefully. The woman had on a long cloth coat, and the boy had on one of those iridescent jackets that looks sort of like a life jacket with sleeves. They were carrying a sack of popcorn, and the boy started tossing it into the air a piece at a time. He couldn’t get it high enough to interest the gull, but his mother took over and pretty soon there was a wheeling and screeching flock all around them. The boy was laughing and the gulls were swooping close enough to snatch even his clumsy tosses out of the air.

  I thought about the rat. Too bad he was at the other end of the seawall. He would have enjoyed the popcorn.

  After a while the woman and the boy left. The gulls hung around and picked up a few of the puffy bits lying on the jetty. Then some of them flew over to where I was sitting in hopes of picking up something else.

  “Forget it, gulls,” I said.

  They weren’t bothered in the least by my voice, and they screeched and swooped for a few more minutes before they gave up and went back to whatever it is that they do when they aren’t begging: sitting on posts, floating on the swell, scouting out new territory. Eventually I got up and went away myself.

  I killed a little more time walking around on the beach, looking for shells. Sometimes in the winter you can still find them, but not very often. Certainly not like when I was a kid and it seemed as if they were lying everywhere.

  When I figured that Evelyn Matthews had had plenty of time to get home from work, I got in the car and drove over to her house.

  It was easy enough to find, once I located the street among the Tunas and Mackerels and Dolphins. The house was just like all the other houses in that area; they looked as much alike as if they’d been stamped out with the same die. Frame structures with one-car garages, all part of a cheap and quick development a long time ago, but all well kept up and nicely painted now.

  I parked the car, went up the walk, and knocked on the door. I didn’t see a doorbell button.

  I didn’t know what I was expecting to see, but the woman who answered the door wasn’t it. I suppose that I’d associated the fact that she worked for Dino’s uncles with the time of their heyday, which began in the ‘twenties and extended into the ‘fifties. Let’s face it. I was expecting some kind of little old lady, but the woman who answered the door looked no older than I did.

  She was short, with dark hair and eyes, and her figure was what might best be described as voluptuous. She’d probably really been something thirty years ago.

  “You must be Truman Smith,” she said. Her voice was dark, like her hair.

  “That’s right,” I said. Before she could ask, I took out my billfold and handed her my ID. She looked it over and handed it back. Only then did she ask me inside.

  We walked into a small living room furnished with a love seat instead of a sofa, a couple of platform rockers, and a twelve-inch TV on a stand. There was also a small bookshelf against one wall, and I drifted over to it. I’m incorrigibly curious about what people read. There was no Faulkner, so there was no danger we’d be involved in a literary discussion. Her taste ran more to Bobby Jean Mason and Margaret Atwood.

  “Have a seat,” she said, and I sat in one of the rockers, which was covered with some sort of Early American pattern: lanterns, plows, harnesses.

  “Truman,” she said. “That’s a funny sort of name. Is it a family name?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s a political name. My father always liked that picture of Harry Truman holding up the newspaper headline declaring Dewey the winner of the 1948 election. He liked to see the underdog win.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Most people just call me Tru,” I said.

  “All right, Tru.” She looked at me with her dark eyes for a minute as if making up her mind about something. “Dino says I can tell you everything. He says you won’t involve me in any way that might . . . might . . . .”

  “I won’t compromise your position in town, not if I can help it,” I said.

&nb
sp; “That’s what I mean, I guess.”

  “Then don’t worry. Dino and I grew up together, played a little football together. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school, but we know each other pretty well. If you trust him, you can probably trust me.”

  “I’ll try,” she said. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  It was her house. I was so surprised that she asked; I said “no” before I thought about it. She got up and went out of the room, then came back carrying a table that looked a little like a TV tray. She set it down by her chair, and I could see a package of Marlboro Lights on it, along with a Bic disposable lighter and a pink ceramic ashtray shaped like a scallop shell.

  She tapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it with the Bic. She inhaled deeply and blew the smoke out in a long, straight jet. I don’t really mind smokers, and in fact she made smoking look so good that I was tempted to take it up myself.

  “What do you need to know?” she said.

  “Let’s start with you,” I said.

  “Me? But I thought—”

  “You thought this was about your daughter, and it is, but Dino didn’t tell me much, and I want to get a feel for things. So we’ll start with you. For one thing, you’re a lot younger than I expected. That is, if you worked where Dino said you did.”

  She smiled behind a cloud of smoke. “I’m forty-six.”

  She looked a lot younger than that. “Still, I would’ve expected someone around fifty. Maybe older.”

  She tapped her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. “You’re sure you want to hear this?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “All right. I came down here when I was fourteen years old. I wanted to be a whore.” She looked at me to see if I was shocked. I wasn’t, so she went on. “I was from Houston, and I’d heard about the houses here. Where I lived, you heard about places like that.”

  “You hear about places like that everywhere,” I said.

  She tapped the cigarette again. “I guess that’s true. What I mean is that where I lived, places like that seemed like an attractive alternative. Anyway, I hitched a ride to Galveston and showed up at one of the houses on Postoffice Street. There’s always a market for girls of fourteen.”

  I did some quick arithmetic. “You couldn’t’ve worked for very long. The last of those places closed in 1957.”

  “Technically, you’re right. But for a young, attractive girl there was still an opportunity for some free-lance work at certain hotels. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I needed the money, so I was able to keep working for a while.”

  I’d brought the folder Ray had given me, and I handed it to her. “Where does your daughter come into this?”

  She opened the folder. “Her name is Sharon. Didn’t Dino tell you?”

  I shook my head. “Dino didn’t tell me anything. I wanted to hear it from you.”

  She held the folder in her left hand, looking at the picture. In her right was the stub of the cigarette, which she ground out in the ashtray. “This picture was taken a few years ago, her senior year in high school. She’s nearly twenty now.”

  I did some more figuring. Sharon had been born when her mother was twenty-six, twelve years after she’d come to the Island. “Were you still, ah . . . ?”

  “Whoring? The word doesn’t bother me. I just don’t want people to know for Sharon’s sake. Yes, I was. I’d been on the circuit for a bit by that time, but when Sharon began making her presence obvious I came back here. I moved into an apartment, told people that my husband had died in an automobile accident. I got a Social Security card. I looked pretty good, and I had a good telephone voice. I’ve been a receptionist ever since.”

  I looked at her a little dubiously. “Most women with a background like you’ve described wouldn’t find it quite so easy to fit into the straight life.”

  She lit another cigarette, exhaled. “Nobody ever said it was easy. I did it, that’s all.”

  “You were never tempted to make a little extra money on the side?”

  “Tempted? Sure. But I never gave in. I had a job and a daughter. I wanted to keep both of them.”

  “How about romantic involvements?”

  She handed me the folder after a last brief look. “None. Oh, there were advances made to me from time to time, but that’s one thing about me that didn’t change; I still see men as good for only one thing.”

  “Let’s talk about Sharon, then. What’s the story?”

  For the first time she looked as if her calm facade might crack, but it was only temporary. Then she was in control again. I wondered if control was something she’d learned while doing her job on Postoffice Street.

  “She went out on Friday night. She didn’t come home. The next morning I called Dino.”

  “I’ve got to admit that’s succinct,” I said. “So. Where’d she go?”

  “I don’t know.” She blew another of the smokey jets.

  “Did she walk? Ride? Go alone, or with someone?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Look,” I said, feeling exasperated already, “you must know something.”

  She ground out the cigarette, looking at the ashtray instead of me. “No,” she finally said. “I don’t have to know something. My daughter lived here with me, but that doesn’t mean we communicated.”

  Something clicked. “She knew,” I said. I thought about it a minute. “She didn’t know, and then she knew. Recently.”

  Evelyn Matthews looked at the folder I was holding, but she still didn’t look at me. “Yes,” she said.

  I thought that now we were getting somewhere and that this might turn out to be easier than I’d thought. “Isn’t it possible that she just went away for a while to figure out how she felt about things? She’ll probably call soon, or come home. You can see that she’s had a shock.”

  She nodded reluctantly. “It’s possible, but I don’t believe it.”

  “Did she have any money? A car?”

  “She might have a little money of her own. She’s been working part-time in a little shop on The Strand.”

  “What does she do the rest of the time?”

  “She goes to the community college. She wants to be a lawyer.”

  “Boyfriends?”

  “No one steady.” She reached for the Marlboro pack, picked it up, and then set it back down. “I smoke too much,” she said. “There’s a boy she likes, Terry Shelton. You could talk to him. He works at the shop, too.”

  “What about the car?”

  “I have a car. Sharon doesn’t. Mine’s in the garage.”

  It was time to backtrack a little. “How’d you get to know Dino?”

  She smiled a reminiscent smile. “He used to hang around the house. He was just a kid, eight, ten maybe. He and Ray came around sometimes. We all knew he was related to the bosses, so we were nice to him. He never came in at night, just in the afternoon sometimes.”

  Something must have showed in my face.

  “Not nice to him the way you’re thinking,” she said. “Jesus. He was just a kid.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She waved it away. “No more than what most people would think. We were whores, after all. But we weren’t as bad as all that. Anyway, Dino remembers. He thinks of me as sort of one of the family. There’s not many of the old bunch left around here, you know?”

  I said I knew. “Did Sharon have any friends at the college, anyone she might have confided in?”

  She thought about it for a second or two. “There’s one girl there, Julie Gregg, who works in the Social Studies Department. Sharon mentioned her a few times.”

  “One more thing. How did Sharon find out about your past?”

  She reached for another cigarette and lit it, whether she smoked too much or not. “I wish I knew,” she said. “I wish I knew.”

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/>   Prologue

  One hot August night in 1897 Hartley Gorman got saved in the Pearly Gates Baptist Church. Within thirty minutes of the time he walked the aisle for Jesus, the preacher had him totally immersed in the murky waters of Orchard Creek. On the banks, watching avidly an event that most of them thought they’d never live to see, was most of the population of Pecan City, Texas, having piled into wagons, buckboards, surreys, gigs, and one-horse shays to get there in time.

  When Hartley Gorman walked out on the bank, mud sucking at his church-going shoes, water dripping from his sodden pants legs and running in streams out of his hair and down his face, he was vouchsafed a vision. He fell to his knees, threw up his arms, and pitched face forward on the creek bank. He was speaking aloud, but no one could understand the words, Gorman’s mouth being mostly full of muddy grass at the time. Nobody dared to turn him over while he was in the grip of the Holy Spirit.

  He told everybody who would listen later that he’d seen the Lord (though he was always a little vague on what He looked like), who had commanded him to build a school, a college where ladies and gentlemen could go to learn without being tainted by the evil influences of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, three things that most people in Pecan City thought Hartley Gorman knew plenty about himself. Not that he ever had anything to do with them again.

  In fact, Hartley Gorman became a saintly man, dedicated to his dream, which, thanks to the fact that Hartley was by far the richest man in Pecan City, soon had become a reality.

  By late the following fall, a little over a year after his vision, Hartley Gorman College’s first building was standing in all its glory, three stories high, with a veneer of native sandstone and a tall steeple on top. Twenty-two students had enrolled.