Sheriff Harley Flowers had been in Geneva’s class in school, and like most of the other boys back then, he was crazy about her—terrified of her, but crazy about her. That was the funny thing about Geneva. The more she told men where to go, the more they trailed after her like a bunch of lovesick puppies.
“I’ll tell her, Sheriff,” Lila said, stepping inside the cell. She had been so preoccupied with just getting herself inside that she hadn’t been paying attention to what was behind those bars. As she turned to face John, her hand flew up to her mouth and she gasped in horror. “Oh, dear heaven—who did this to you?” she cried.
John just stared up at her from the cot like it was all he could do to keep from screaming.
Just then Geneva came in. “What in the . . . Who dropped the chintz bomb?”
Eager to please Geneva, the church ladies had gone overboard, covering John’s cot with a floral quilt and tossing a matching seat cushion into the deputy’s armchair, which they had dragged into a corner of the cell.
“Looks like the honeymoon suite at a two-bit motor court,” Geneva said. “When did this happen?”
“Before breakfast,” John said.
“John, honey, I apologize. Some women just don’t know when to quit. Why on earth would you need a quilt in this heat? Is there anything you do need?”
“No—thank you.”
“Well, I reckon I’ll go tell Willadean there’s such a thing as common sense.”
“No, don’t do that,” John said. “I don’t want ’em to think—they’re Dovey’s church now, and I don’t want ’em to think she—just tell ’em thank you. Okay?”
Geneva smiled. “Okay. You know what, John Pickett—you’re good people. And I don’t say that to just anybody.” She looked at Lila. “Baby sis, I’m gonna go on home. You call me if there are any interesting developments—in the case, I mean.” Geneva winked at her sister as she left the cell.
“You should go too,” John said once Geneva was out the door.
Lila was startled. She had been waiting patiently for some time alone together so they could talk through whatever it was that had come between them. “But I—”
“I don’t want you here, Lila. You don’t belong here. Go on home to Pete and Dovey. They need you.”
She felt her eyes begin to sting and knew she had no choice but to go. “Well . . . if that’s what you want,” was all she could say before hurrying away from his cell.
Lila left the jail feeling like something terrible had just happened, but she wasn’t sure what or why. She wasn’t crying, but she wasn’t far from it either. All she could think about was getting home, so she quickly made her way down the street where she had parked in front of the town café. Just as she was about to get into her car, she spotted Celeste Highland and the sheriff, who were about to go into the café together.
“Harley, I can’t believe it took you so long to invite me to lunch,” Celeste was saying, her hand on his arm.
If Lila didn’t know better, she’d swear that woman was actually flirting with Harley Flowers.
A truck horn caught Celeste’s attention, and she looked up to see Lila staring at them. Her smile immediately faded.
“You go on in,” Celeste said to the sheriff, “and I’ll join you in just a second.” She walked over to Lila’s car. “Well, well, well. How’s everything at the jail?”
Lila was reminded of what Geneva always said about her: “Douse a pit viper with Shalimar and you’ve got Celeste Highland.” Her husband had a loud bark, but all the women in town knew that Celeste was the one who would bite—and laugh while you bled.
Lila didn’t answer as she opened her car door.
“I guess now we know who taught that boy of yours his violent behavior,” Celeste said with that cold sneer of hers.
Sometimes Lila wished she could be like Geneva, who would have known exactly what to say to take Celeste down a notch. But she didn’t have the strength to get into it with her. Instead, she just drove away, leaving the most hateful woman in town sneering on the sidewalk.
“Thank you so much, Sheriff Flowers,” Brother Jip said.
“No problem, preacher,” the sheriff replied. “Maybe you could pose with me for some pictures later if any reporters happen to be around. Offered Pickett the chance, but he ain’t very cooperative. Killer like him don’t deserve the publicity no way.”
Brother Jip smiled uneasily at the sheriff, who unlocked the cell door to let him in. It was almost five o’clock and he had meant to get to the jail a lot sooner, but with so many shut-ins to visit, it was hard to get to everybody.
“Brother John,” the preacher said, “I am Brother Jip Beaugard, Dovey’s pastor.”
John nodded hello but said nothing. He was leaning against the back wall of the cell, his arms folded across his chest.
“May I?” Brother Jip asked, motioning toward the armchair in the corner.
John nodded again but remained silent.
Brother Jip took a seat and looked around. “I see our ladies have been here,” he said. “They mean well, Brother John. It’s just that they have a hard time understanding that a man don’t need much pink in his surroundings.”
Still the tall man with the dark stare said nothing, and Brother Jip was at a loss. His commitment to the Lord and devotion to his flock were genuine. But faced with a wall like John Pickett, he tended to sputter and spout, saying silly things he had to ask God to stop him from saying the next time around. Visiting the sick and shut-ins, preaching from the Word, working with other pastors in the community—these were all fulfilling duties, ones that assured him he had followed his calling. But thrown into more complex situations like this one, he often felt inadequate to the task. He would just have to pray a silent prayer and then say whatever God led him to, which was what he was doing right now.
“Brother John,” he began, “I know I’m not your pastor. I imagine you look at me as just another meddlesome stranger come here for something to gossip about. But Dovey is a beloved member of our church family. So’s Pete and his kinfolks. I want you to know that we believe you’re innocent, and we want you to consider us your church family in any way you need us to be. I’m gonna leave my card with you, and I’m not gonna bother you, but just know that I’m here if you or Dovey needs me.”
He waited for some sort of reply, some sign that he had handled this difficult situation as God intended, but he was met with silence. Probably best to go now and give Dovey’s father his solitude.
Brother Jip tried to stand, but the chair was stuck to his wide rear end, and he had to push down on the arms of it to free himself. He looked up with a flushed face, embarrassed to death and certain John Pickett would be laughing at him, relishing the humiliation of an unwanted intruder.
Instead John walked over and extended his hand. They shook hands, and Brother Jip gave him his card. “Can I pray with you, brother?” the preacher asked.
John nodded, and Brother Jip reached up to lay a hand on his shoulder. “Almighty God . . .”
Thirty
MARCH 14, 1968
“Harley, I’m really trying to be fair here,” the district attorney said. “But are you telling me that you arrested this man, who has absolutely no connection to Isaac Reynolds, just because he was home that night—and before the FBI even identified the remains?”
The minute the DA’s plane had landed in Birmingham on Thursday morning, he had summoned Ned Ballard to the courthouse. The two of them, along with the sheriff, John, Lila, and Geneva, sat around a conference table in the DA’s office, with Pete and Dovey waiting outside in the corridor.
“It just fits,” Sheriff Flowers said, like any fool should be able to see it.
“What just fits?” the exasperated DA asked.
The sheriff sighed, as if he were growing impatient with slow people who couldn’t keep pace with the lightning speed of his logic. “First off, Miz Highland made her boy come forward and tell me he’s sure he recognized our suspect’s v
oice from the churchyard. It was the very same voice that scared the daylights outta him and his buddies when they was out on a ghost hunt.”
“It was my voice,” John said. “The gun wasn’t loaded—I just cocked it to scare them away. They were trespassing, and I told them to leave. They had no business there.”
“He’s right, Harley,” the DA said. “What else you got?”
“What about them truck tires getting shot out of the Highlands’ pickup?” the sheriff said. “What about that?”
“You mean the truck that was deliberately tearing up their cotton?” the DA countered.
“But still!” The sheriff was clearly getting worked up. “It shows he’s a violent cuss.”
“Can you even prove he was the shooter?” the DA asked.
“I would have if my deputies coulda found that gun.”
“Mm-hmm,” the DA said. “Next?”
Now the sheriff was obviously frustrated. “Reynolds was found in a cave in the hollow. That means he was murdered in the hollow. That means somebody who lives there did it. And the rest of the Picketts was away at that Brush Arbor. So that only leaves this one, who had to have killed him.”
The DA just shook his head. “Mr. Pickett, you’re free to go,” he said. “And Harley, I intend to have your badge for this nonsense.”
After the meeting, everybody stood around visiting on the courthouse steps—everybody except John. He had been quiet before they went into the DA’s office, most likely because he was anxious, Lila told herself. But when it was all over, he walked silently through all of them and past her, like he couldn’t even see her, then down the steps and around back to the parking lot, where Pete and Dovey had left his truck for him.
While Lila realized that the Picketts were intensely private people, she had yet to learn what her son already knew—that situations could hit John and Dovey in ways you wouldn’t expect. Had she understood that, Lila might not have ducked out of the crowd and back into the courthouse so she could take the rear stairs and catch up with John in the parking lot.
“John!” she called, half running to his truck. “John, wait!” He already had his hand on the door handle. “You want to go get some lunch or—”
“No.”
“Well, okay, I just thought you might want to—”
“Thank your daddy? I did that already.”
“I didn’t say anything about—”
“I just spent two miserable days and nights in a hot jailhouse getting treated like a criminal, and for what? For being home. And the only reason I’m not still in that jailhouse is because of you and your family. I’m not a free man because I deserve to be. I’m a free man because y’all say I should be. Why shouldn’t my family’s word be as good as yours?”
“I don’t know what to—”
“Just go home. Go home to your people. We don’t—make any sense. We’re just too—I can’t do this.”
He got into the truck and drove away from her. Lila felt sick and thought she might die if she couldn’t get away from the courthouse right this second. John had to know how much he had hurt her.
But it didn’t stop him.
Pete and Dovey swam to the pier and climbed out of the water. Usually they were loyal to McAdoo’s Lake, but neither one of them wanted to be around people they knew right now, so they had driven to a marina on the backwater, a little farther from town. On weekends it was packed, but on this Thursday afternoon, with the weatherman predicting rain, there wasn’t a soul in sight, not even the usual weekday campers. They lay down on a quilt Pete had spread in a shady spot. In such a beautiful place and with this much privacy, they would ordinarily be struggling to remember the Remington right about now. But there was a wall between them. So they just lay on their backs, looking up at the sky.
“Something’s wrong with them,” Pete finally said.
Dovey nodded. “With Daddy and Miss Lila.”
“What do you think it is?”
She sighed. “He put the walls up.”
“When? Did you see it happen?”
“Didn’t have to. I just know Daddy.”
“Well, I knew he’d wanna get away from that courthouse crowd, but Mama’s his . . . his . . . I don’t know what exactly she is, but I do know she never did anything but try to help.”
“I know.”
“And if she hadn’t . . . Dovey, I don’t understand why Miss Paul and your uncles didn’t come down to the jail.”
“Why’d you keep me away?” she responded.
“Because your daddy didn’t want—”
“Didn’t want me to see him locked up in that cell, right? The rest of my family—they knew he couldn’t stand for them to see it either. And they knew nobody at that courthouse would listen to anything they had to say. Since they couldn’t help him get out, they did the only thing they could for him, which was stay away.”
“Why’d you put clothes and food in your daddy’s truck?”
“Because he’ll want to get out of those dirty jail clothes as quick as he can, and he needs something to eat.”
“But he could get that at home.”
“He won’t come home, not for a while. Daddy has to handle bad things on his own. And I’m pretty sure Miss Lila won’t understand that. He doesn’t mean to hurt you when he turns inside like that. He just can’t help it.”
“But still, Mama and Daddy Ballard—you’d think he’d want to thank—I mean, without them, he might still be in jail.”
“That’s sorta the problem.”
“Dovey, I don’t understand that at all.”
“I know.”
“Well, can you explain it to me?”
“It’s hard.”
“But would you try?”
“Well,” she said, carefully considering her answer, “remember when you first learned how to ride a bicycle?”
“Yeah . . .” he said.
“Remember how your mother or your daddy would run alongside the bike to help you get your balance and keep you from getting hurt?”
“Yeah . . .”
“And you were so thankful they were there to keep you from falling, but at the same time, you wished more than anything that you didn’t need them, because as long as they had to help you, that meant you weren’t really riding on your own?” When Pete reached over and took her hand, she knew he understood. “Daddy just wishes he could ride on his own.”
When he had driven a safe distance from the courthouse, John pulled over to the side of the road and opened the paper sack on the seat of his truck. Inside he found a change of clothes, a smaller sack filled with sandwiches in wax paper, and a thermos of coffee. Thank you, my sweet girl. He followed the highway to a narrow dirt road that led deep into the woods near the river. Even this rough trail would play out before he reached his destination, but he didn’t care. He would gladly walk the rest of the way.
What he wanted was cleansing. From the shame and the stupidity. From the pain and embarrassment he knew this had caused his daughter. From the suffocating anger and resentment and humiliation. He had to get free of it.
When the trail ended, he stopped the truck, tucked the sack filled with clothes under one arm, and started hiking into the woods, which he knew like the back of his hand. It was a wonderful thing to know where he was going and how he meant to get there, without a single well-meaning do-gooder shoving him this way and that like he was nothing. The closer he got, the faster he walked, till at last he was running—running as fast as he could up hills and down, through the dense woods, his chest heaving, his heart racing, sweat flying off his face. At last he could see the familiar hillside where he would find a narrow opening. He climbed through it and into the darkness of a narrow cave, finding his way by pressing his free hand against the ceiling. Before long he could see light up ahead and knew he was almost there. He followed the light to a small grotto, where the sun beamed down over tall rock walls onto a sparkling pool of crystal-blue water.
Strangely enough, he
had found this place by getting lost long ago when he was out rabbit hunting, so focused on his prey that he wasn’t paying attention to where he was. Struggling to get his bearings, he had stumbled onto the tiny cave. Back then he wasn’t tall enough to feel the ceiling the way he did now, but even as a kid he wasn’t afraid of darkness. He liked it. And he had felt his way through it to the light of the grotto.
John was ashamed to admit he had never shared this place with Jack or Lottie. It wasn’t such a bad thing keeping it from his wife, because she was skittish of deep water, which you wouldn’t expect, given that she had grown up on a riverbank. Jack, though—he would’ve loved this place, and it was selfish to keep it from him. But the grotto was the only thing John had ever kept all his own, and he had never been able to bring himself to let anybody else in. He dropped the sack at the edge of the water, which rippled up from a natural spring somewhere far below. It was clear and deep and cold.
The pool wasn’t very big—maybe thirty feet across. But it was a breathtaking shade of blue, and it made such a peaceful sound, just a faint gurgling from that underground spring. On a hot summer’s day, it was pure bliss to dip down into those waters with the sun high above and the tall rock walls protecting you, and to know—or at least hope—that no one else could claim it or take it from you.
John pulled off his boots and socks, then unbuttoned his shirt and began peeling off the sticky, sweaty grime of the jailhouse. He stuffed his dirty clothes under a big rock and hoped they rotted fast, since he never meant to touch them again. Then he waded into the pool, feeling its floor with his bare feet. He knew the bottom would drop out near the center, and you could lose yourself in that depth. He treaded water for a little while but then relaxed, closed his eyes, and let the water take him down, down, down, till it covered his chest, his shoulders, his face—all the way down into the clear, cold water till he couldn’t hear or think or feel. When he couldn’t hold his breath anymore, he gave a powerful push with his arms and propelled himself up, breaking through the blue and back into the light.
Missing Isaac Page 23