by R. Jean Reid
Nell looked up at Jacko. “Good work. There may or may not be a story here—there is a story here,” she amended, “but I don’t think we can label people as members of the KKK on the basis of one sheet of paper.”
“No,” Jacko said quickly, “but we can research the names, see where that takes us. Some of these might have ended up in jail or someplace else that’s public record. I’ll keep digging and see what I can find.”
He left the lists on Nell’s desk. Whiz Brown had mentioned Frieda Connor and now she had a list alleging someone named Frederick Connor was a member of the Klan. Nell grabbed her phone book and looked for a listing for Connor. After a round of calling, she found an R. Connor over on Lancelot Lane, one of the tacky subdivisions on the east side of town. Maybe Frederick went by Rick. She dialed the number. After about seven rings, the phone was answered by a woman.
“Can I speak to Frieda Connor?” Nell asked.
“Who’s calling?” The voice sounded suspicious and guarded.
“My name is Nell McGraw and I’m with the Pelican Bay Crier.”
“You’re the paper lady,” the voice said. “Bet you’re calling about my stepdad and his Klan stuff.”
Nell was nonplussed it had come out so easily. “I’m looking into that allegation.”
“My mom passed away about two weeks ago,” the woman said. “I’m over here goin’ through her stuff, pitching most of it.”
“Where is your stepfather?” Nell asked.
“I don’t keep up with that bastard. He could of died for all I know. Last I heard was the nursing home out past the trailer park on 90.”
“I’ve heard a rumor your mother had some pictures from that era.”
“She might of. Lot of boxes. You’re welcome to go through any you want to.”
“When would it be convenient for me to come over?” Nell asked.
“I’m here now. Got a lot of stuff out on the street already for garbage pick-up tomorrow.”
“I’ll be there in about half an hour,” Nell decided.
This could be an exercise in frustration, Nell realized as she got up. Even if Whiz, in his desperation, had told the truth, there was no guarantee she would find anything. Even if she did, no promise it would tell them anything more than they already knew. She asked Jacko if he could pick up Lizzie and Josh in around an hour.
Nell told Pam and Ina Claire where she was going and headed out the door.
When she got to Lancelot Lane, the house was easy to spot; the one with piles of old boxes out front.
Nell found a woman about her age in the kitchen, and she introduced herself.
“I’m Angie Pitts.” The woman hastily brushed a hand off on her pants and shook with Nell. “Most of the stuff from the attic’s already on the curb. Been sitting up there for decades and if we didn’t use it in that time, no reason to think we might ever.”
“Ms. Pitts,” Nell said, “are you sure you’re comfortable with what I might find? Things that, well, make your family look bad?”
“Just don’t bring my name into it, that’s all I ask.” With a harsh laugh, she added, “You can’t make them look worse than they were.” She pulled up a sleeve and showed Nell a series of scars on her inner elbow. “See this here? Stepdaddy thought he’d teach me a lesson ’bout cleaning my room. Used his cigarette to do it. I got other scars, too.” She savagely threw a plate into the trash pile, shattering it. “Momma shouldn’t of married him, but she did. Stuck by him till a while back when he shoved her head into the toilet and us kids got together and kidnapped her. Put her in this house. Thought we got her safe, but he came crawling back and next thing he was living here. He stroked out a couple of years ago and we finally got some peace in the family.”
“I’m very sorry, Ms. Pitts,” Nell said. “That was a horrible way to grow up.”
“Call me Angie. Not fancy enough for the ‘Ms.’ stuff. You drag that bastard through whatever mud you feel like.”
“If I find anything, I’ll let you know before I decide what to do with it,” Nell told her.
“Don’t need to ask. Like I say, just don’t mention my name. I don’t know if I want to know what other crap he did. Bastard.” She shattered another plate. As if answering a question Nell had asked, she said, “Yeah, should be saving these plates, at least give ’em to the thrift shop, but I was forced to eat everything off these plates. Didn’t eat the spinach quick enough for him, he’d do things like shave soap onto the plate and force us to eat that. Teach us we could be eating stuff that really tasted bad, he told us. Once made my brother eat cockroaches.” Another plate shattered. “You know he messed with us girls. Never had no kids ’cause of him.”
“That’s evil,” Nell said. “No one should treat children that way.”
“You got it. Now you know why I don’t give a damn what you write about him.”
Nell could think of little to say to the woman’s volcanic anger. There were no words that, in a brief encounter in a tired kitchen, could matter a damn against the years of damage. Nell excused herself and headed to the curb to start looking.
She wasn’t dressed for sitting on a lawn and digging through dusty old boxes, but there wasn’t time to go home.
Most of the boxes had little of interest: old clothes, bank statements from the fifties, old magazines. There were several boxes of Confederate memorabilia, and others that held stacks of blatantly racist material, proof of his Klan membership. Nell was getting discouraged. She was through about two-thirds of them and had found nothing of real interest. She opened the next box and found stacks of letters. She started to pass on that box until she noticed the letters in one of the stacks were addressed to a woman named Alma Smyth. One of the names from Pelican Property was A.J. Smyth. Nell took that stack out and searched through the others, but found nothing else. A glance at her watch told her she would have to hurry to get a brief glimpse of the rest of the stuff. She opened another box, deciding Jacko wouldn’t leave the Crier building anytime soon, and Josh and Lizzie could hang out there until she got done.
In the bottom of the next carton, Nell found a beaten-up old metal lock box. She tried to jimmy it open, but couldn’t. It looked like it would hold things like insurance papers or deeds, papers once considered important. She set it aside and moved on to the next pile. And the next pile. When she finally finished with the last few piles, all that remained was the locked metal box. The sun was setting, and despite her exertion, Nell was getting chilly.
She picked up the metal box and headed back to the house, to see if Angie Pitts knew anything about it.
But when Nell showed it to her, she shook her head and said she’d never seen it before. Nell asked her permission to break it open.
“It’s trash, ain’t it?” was her answer. Then she called out, “Len? You want to come break open something for the paper lady?”
A man around Angie Pitts’ age joined them in the kitchen. He said nothing, just picked up the box and examined it. Then he took a screwdriver off his belt and used it to pry the lid open. Without looking in the box, he handed it back to Nell.
She set it down on a small cleared space on the counter and pushed the broken lid out of the way. A black cloth covered the contents of the box. Nell lifted it aside.
“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed and let the cloth fall back.
Her reaction garnered the attention of Len and Angie. He picked up the cloth and looked.
They had found the pictures Whiz Brown’s father had taken. Steeling herself with a deep breath, Nell looked again at the image confronting her. She recognized Michael, Ella, and Dora, but only barely. They were surrounded by about ten men, several of them holding guns or clubs. Michael’s wrists were chained and his face bruised and puffy. Both of the women had been stripped to the waist, their breasts exposed. The background was outside, in a wooded area.
“That what y
ou were looking for?” Angie Pitts asked. She seemed less upset than Nell, but perhaps her life made her more blasé about human cruelty.
“This is what I’m looking for,” Nell confirmed. “Can you recognize any of the men?”
Angie studied the photo, then stabbed her finger at a man in the back. “That’s old Fred, I’d say. Stepdad.” None of the other faces were familiar to her. Len even looked, but he hadn’t grown up in the area.
There were other pictures underneath the top one, but Nell didn’t feel up to looking at them. This one told her enough.
She thanked Angie and left her to their task of trying to destroy the memories with the plates.
As she had guessed, Jacko’s car was still in the lot. Nell clutched the box to her chest as if both protecting it and keeping it held down, like a creature with fangs.
Lizzie and Josh were on Carrie’s computer playing a game. They saw her long enough to know their mother was alive and well, and then Nell went to her office.
She set the box on her desk, unsure of what to do next. Her impulse was to hunt down Harold Reed and hand it to him. But, this late, he might be hard to find, and she was enough of a reporter to want to see—no matter how horrible—the photos. The one picture she had seen was too brutal, but there might be one she could use in the paper, to bring the horror of it home in a way words couldn’t.
Putting the box in a drawer, she went upstairs and asked Jacko if there was an update on Marcus. He was in intensive care, in critical condition, and he hadn’t woken up yet. Then he asked her if she’d found anything.
“Come to my office,” Nell said and left without waiting for him.
She put the box on her desk as he caught up with her. Wordlessly, she lifted the black cloth. She didn’t take the photos out of the box, instead keeping them contained there, flipping them up one by one. She tried to avert her glance from the fear and desperation in the eyes of Michael Walker, Ella Carr, and Dora Ellischwartz.
Like game hunters, they had taken pictures of their trophies. Both the woman had been raped; Ella Carr had a distant, vacant look in her eyes, as if she were already leaving the body she knew would not exist much longer. Dora Ellischwartz was still fighting, tears and anger on her face, a silent scream coming from her mouth. There was a shot of Michael on his knees, back to the camera, one leg clearly broken. One of the men had the barrel of a pistol pressed against the base of his skull. The next picture showed him lying on the ground, blood coming from the gunshot wound.
The final picture in the box was of the three of them tossed into the grave, with only the feet of the murderers visible. Nell gave a start when she realized one of the sets of feet were small. A young boy? Had someone brought his son along?
She closed the box and said to Jacko, “I’m going to call Harold Reed. And I’m going to ask a big favor of you.” She nodded her head in the direction of Josh and Lizzie. “Can you take them this evening? Pizza and a movie?” Nell dug in her purse for enough money to cover all three of them.
Jacko agreed. Nell suggested another night in their guest bedroom; that way, she could more easily update him when she got home. Plus she didn’t mind having an adult male around. She out-and-out lied to her children and told them she had paperwork to do and was sending them off with Jacko. A movie and pizza was enough of an enticement.
Nell called Harold Reed at home. She simply told him she had to talk to him and could he come to the Crier office. Those pictures felt too dangerous to move. Then she sat and waited.
When he arrived, Nell quickly told him what had led her to the photos—leaving out Whiz Brown’s part in it—and opened the box. She didn’t look at them. He was silent a long time, looking at the pictures slowly and carefully. When he finally finished, he looked up at her and asked, “Any idea who these people are?”
Nell told him about Frederick Conner, how his stepdaughter had identified him. “He must know who the rest of them are.”
“Yeah, but is he going to tell us?”
“Marcus would know,” Nell said. “This was a small town back then.”
They stared at each other, leaving it unspoken that Marcus might never look at these pictures.
“That could work for us and against us,” Harold said. Pointing a finger at the pictures, he added, “It’s not likely any of these men is going to be helpful.”
“Hattie Jacobs,” Nell remembered. “Marcus traced her. She’s living over in New Orleans. According to him, she had a cross burned on her lawn. She might recognize a few of these men.”
“She might. A long shot.”
“Is it all right if I talk to her?” Nell asked. Even if Hattie Jacobs couldn’t recognize anyone, she could still tell the story of what had happened to her. The DA’s office might not be interested in something they couldn’t prosecute, but Nell wanted to call the past to account.
“That’s okay. Just let me know if she has anything useful to say. Can I take these?” he asked, although it was clearly not a real question.
Nell hesitated. “I’ll need one to show Hattie Jacobs. And I want to run one of them in the paper.”
“That might be hard to look at.”
“I want them to look. All those silent people who let this happen,” Nell said vehemently. “Consider this—if I print a picture, someone might come forward who recognizes these men.”
“True. But it happened a long time ago,” Harold pointed out.
“Not long enough. They firebombed my building and Marcus’s house. They were hunting him and now he’s in a coma,” Nell said.
“Which ones do you want?”
She took the first one, for its group shot. And the one with the gun at Michael Walker’s head. It was brutal, but it wasn’t the obscene gore of the dead bodies, or the horror of the sexual assaults. Nell took the two pictures and hid them in the back of one of her file cabinets, then locked it.
Harold picked up the box and they silently left the building.
Nell felt heavy and tired as she headed home. She was halfway there before turning to drive by Marcus’s house, with a lost sense that he might be coming home. But the house was black and empty, most of the garage burned to the ground, the house itself licked by flames. She stopped briefly by Joe’s to see if they had heard anything. The bartender sadly shook his head no.
“Call me if …” Nell said. She was afraid her voice might break.
She got back in her car and went home. Jacko, Lizzie, and Josh had beat her there, by enough to have thrown popcorn in the microwave.
Nell sat with them, managing a few handfuls, but despite not having eaten since lunch, she had no appetite. She gave Jacko a brief rundown of her meeting with Harold Reed. After that, she begged off, not even bothering with a motherly admonishment of lights out by ten p.m.
Jacko got them to bed around then anyway by going to bed himself. Nell heard their shushed whispers and the squeak of the guest bedroom door as it shut. Her last thought as she drifted off to sleep was please give an old man a few more years of sipping beer at Joe’s Corner.
twenty-four
With Jacko around, Lizzie was on her best behavior. Both she and Josh were ready for school with no hurrying from Nell. Jacko was even gallant enough to drive them. I must look as tired as I feel, Nell thought.
She lingered over her coffee. The die had been cast. Those pictures changed everything. It could be easy, it could be hard, but they would find those people. It rankled her that a young boy had been there. Teaching the young to hate. Then Nell wondered, could it have been a woman? No, women should somehow be better than that. But Frieda Connor had stood by her man, whether he was beating her or another woman. Maybe she’d followed him even there. Had she turned her head, Nell wondered, as Dora and Ella were violated? Or had she enjoyed it? Or had she suffered the night before and was relieved it wasn’t her this time?
Nell put her coffee cu
p in the sink and left for work. It would be a long day.
When she got there, she found out it would be more than long.
Harold Reed was waiting for her. “He never woke up,” he said softly. “It’s murder now.”
Nell flared, “He shouldn’t be dead! He shouldn’t be … ” She felt as if she’d been hit with a body blow, a fresh jolt of the shattering from the night Thom died. She hadn’t saved him either. Grief and fury concatenated, turning into a rage that had no words and that she could not stop. She suddenly slammed her fist against the wall. She was utterly out of control, lost in a frenzy of anger and anguish.
As she raised her fist to strike again, someone grabbed her arm. Someone else pulled her away from the wall, holding her tightly. She struggled, then collapsed, wracking sobs coursing through her. Nell realized Jacko was holding her; Harold Reed had grabbed her arm, although his grip had changed to one of comfort rather than restraint. Pam was in front of her with a box of tissues.
Nell grabbed a handful of them and wiped her face. When she finally felt able to speak, she said, “I’m sorry. That was … I’m just sorry.” She took several breaths, wiping the still-oozing tears. “I won’t do it again. Just as long as no one else … ” She again sobbed into the ball of tissues. Then, gaining control, she said, “I’m okay. Well, not, but … will hold it together.”