“Actually, he was thought of as a very good man.”
“But you think he might have killed Grace?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Oh no,” Robert said a moment later. “Betts. I remember.”
“What?”
“I did not kill Grace. I loved her with all my heart.”
“Okay.”
“But I know who Justice Adams was. He wasn’t a good man. Not at all.” Robert faced me again. “And I did kill him.”
“Oh, dear. Why? Because he loved Grace?”
“Must have been the reason, or something like it. I must have been so angry. I was a gentle man, not a murderer. I can only think that he must have done something to hurt Grace. That would be the only way I could have killed him, or anyone.”
Perhaps there was a noble reason in there somewhere, but we still didn’t have the answers.
Robert continued, “I’m tired of being here, or having the urge to be here as the case may be. I’d just like to go back to . . . wherever I’m supposed to be.”
“Maybe you’re supposed to be here? Do you think?”
“No, I don’t think that at all. Nothing can change. You said it yourself.”
“True, but if Grace understands what happened to her, or if you understand how you could have possibly been so angry as to have killed Justice, maybe you’ll . . . rest better.”
He looked directly at me and for an instant I thought he was going to tell me something important, something about that place where he had been before he came back to Broken Rope. But it was as if a shield suddenly came down over his thoughts, as if he knew that admitting to being a killer was okay, but telling me any of the secrets about that other place was taking it too far. I’d seen the same sort of thing happen with other ghosts.
“I guess I just don’t know,” he said.
“You want to look inside the station? It’s still here.” I swallowed, hoping that it wouldn’t collapse again. “Jake, do you see the station?”
“No. I’m not seeing anything except you and the camera. But, Betts, do I understand correctly? Did Robert kill Justice?”
“I think so.”
“Get more about that if you can.”
“I’ll work on it. Come on, Robert. Let’s have a look around. Jake, point the camera over there. I’m going to see if we can find anything inside the station. It’s right ahead of us.”
Once Jake held the camera in what I thought was the right direction, I led the way with Robert in tow.
I carefully placed one foot up onto the platform. Then I stepped solidly with both feet.
“What do you see?” I asked Jake.
“You standing there.”
“Did you see me step higher up?”
“No, but I saw you take a step. You’re still on the ground.”
“Interesting.” I walked toward the doors, Robert still at my side. My footfalls made noise, but his didn’t. I was used to that.
The lobby was much as I’d already seen it on the way to Frankland, but there was one new addition. There was someone sitting in the ticket booth.
“I do believe we should have a chat with that man. There must be a reason he’s here,” I said as I moved quickly in that direction.
“Hello, miss, how can I help you today? Ticket to St. Louis, perhaps, or Springfield? We’ve got trains going both those places today, with stops along the way.”
The young man might have needed a meal or two, or he was just wearing a uniform that was a couple sizes too big. His long, skinny face and pointed chin exaggerated the small space between his eyes and the hat upon his head reminded me of an old-time train conductor’s hat: straight sides and a narrow brim. Tufts of black hair shot up around the hat, and his smile and voice were pleasant and friendly.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Isabelle Winston. You can call me Betts. May I ask your name?”
“Frederick Elvis Rothington,” he said. “People call me Elvis.”
I memorized the full name so I could tell Jake later. From inside the station, I couldn’t see him on the outside. I had no idea if he could see me.
“Elvis,” I said with a smile. If only he knew the future that name would bring. “We don’t have a lot of time, but I need to explain something to you. It will seem strange.”
Elvis blinked. “I feel a little strange, miss, so go on.”
There was no real Reader’s Digest version of the ghosts’ travels back to Broken Rope, but I’d explained it a few times by now and was getting a little better at hitting only the high points. Gram didn’t much care how clear she was with the ghosts, but I did and at this moment even more than usual. Elvis was here for an important reason, I was sure. He had an answer or some important part of the puzzle, or why else would he have appeared? I needed him to trust me quickly and enough to offer his contribution willingly.
“I’ll be,” he said when I’d finished. “How’d I die?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know much about any of the ghosts until I meet them the first time. I can research it and let you know just in case we meet again.”
“I’d like that,” he said. “Well, I think I’d like that.”
“You probably would,” I said.
“Alrighty, then. What can I do for you and Mr. Robert there?”
“I don’t know. Let’s start with this: Do you remember him?”
Elvis looked at Robert. Robert grimaced at us both. He wasn’t having a good day. Elvis blinked and thought and recognition briefly skipped over his narrow face, but it disappeared again quickly.
“I can’t be sure. He looks like so many of the passengers. After a while and unless they ride the trains lots and lots, everyone begins to look alike.”
“His girlfriend was a black woman who was murdered,” I said. Again, no reason for sensitivity. We needed answers.
“Oh, well, gracious, that does change things a bit. I might have seen him come in here with her a time or two.”
“Not possible,” Robert said. “Remember, Grace and I never met up here at the station.”
“Grace? Your girl’s name was Grace?” he said.
“Yes,” both Robert and I said hopefully.
“A negro woman named Grace?”
I cringed, though from his perspective Elvis hadn’t said anything wrong.
“Yes,” Robert said. I nodded.
“Grace was a beauty. She was here, I remember her. She came back for two days, claiming to be here to meet someone. Was that you?”
“Yes.”
“Why weren’t you here?” Elvis said. He didn’t vocalize the words “you fool” but I heard them in my head. Robert probably did, too.
“I was ill.”
“She didn’t know where you were. She didn’t know what to do.”
“I’m sorry,” Robert said with a sigh, reaffirming that he was truly tired of reliving this whole mess.
“Well, another man came along and took her right on out of here. He was a well-known man, but I can’t remember his name.”
“Justice Adams?” I said.
“That’s it! Yes, he came and took her away.”
“Did she go willingly?” I asked.
Robert looked at me briefly before he turned his attention back to Elvis.
“Let me . . . I don’t know. Gosh, she was the prettiest lady I’d ever seen, even if she was black and all,” Elvis said.
Again, I cringed and wanted a way to somehow reach into their long-gone and decayed brains, shake them up a little, and take these ghosts out of their racist and old-fashioned ways of thinking, but that wasn’t possible.
“Okay. Can you remember any specifics of what she was doing when you saw her, or her with Justice?” I asked. “Think about it, Elvis, please. We really need to know.”
Elvis ponde
red a moment. He cocked his head and squinted at Robert. He looked at me and then back at Robert again.
And then he said, “Ha! I believe I do remember.”
“Okay,” I said again.
“Yes, it was an ugly scene. The man named Justice sat with Grace for a day. Sat beside her, right over there.” He nodded. Robert and I turned and the benches in the lobby appeared. And then so did Justice and Grace.
“Grace!” Robert said as he ran to her. He went to his knees and reached for her hands.
But she behaved as though she didn’t see or hear him.
“Grace?” I said as I moved behind Robert.
No response. I reached for Grace’s shoulder, but my hand went through it, as if we weren’t surrounded by darkness.
“I think we’re just supposed to watch,” I said to Robert. I put my hand on his shoulder, and it landed, didn’t go through. “Right, Elvis?” I said as I turned. But he was gone. The ticket booth was empty. “Come on, Robert. Step back a little with me and let’s see what happens.”
Robert stood and we moved back just a little.
Grace and Justice unfroze and began talking.
“Grace, dear, the man isn’t coming. He’s not at his home. He’s abandoned you,” Justice said.
“No, I don’t believe that. It’s just not possible. Perhaps something happened to him. Perhaps he’s ill. I should ask around town for him. Someone is bound to know him.”
Grace made a move to stand, but Justice grabbed her arm and pulled her back to the bench.
Justice had a focused concentration to his gaze. It was something I hadn’t seen in the pictures of him, but I could tell that he never gave up; he always got what he wanted. He was intense, and depending upon who you were in his life, his intensity could have been a curse or a blessing.
It had probably served him well, but his glare at Grace, full of desire and determination, was disturbing.
I looked at Robert. He was watching the two on the bench closely, and I knew he saw it, too.
“Please release my arm,” Grace said.
Surprising me, he did release her. “I’m so sorry. I’m just scared for you, worried about you. Forgive me. I am not a violent man.”
His statement seemed like a pretty bad sign to me. He protesteth too loudly.
“I realize that, Justice,” Grace said, appeasing him with her own practiced tone. “And I’m ever so grateful. But I need to look for Robert. I need to make sure I have explored every possible corner before I leave Broken Rope. If he doesn’t want me, if I have been duped, then perhaps you and I shall meet again. The circumstances will be different, and we can discuss that at that time.”
“That’s my girl,” Robert said quietly.
“Fine,” Justice said, but it clearly wasn’t. Nevertheless, he continued, “Look for him. You won’t find him, I’m sure. I have business to attend to in town myself. Let’s meet back here tonight—if you don’t find him. If you find him, I won’t expect to see you.”
“All right.”
“Do you have any money, Grace?”
“Well . . .”
“I’ll tell you what, I will pay for your ticket home if you don’t find your Robert. Tonight, I will give you the money.”
“That’s how he got her to come back to the train station,” I muttered to myself.
She’d had no choice. It was truly a different time. There were no credit cards that she could have used to buy an emergency train ticket. She’d probably saved for the ticket that got her to Broken Rope, and she’d probably thought she wouldn’t need the safety net of enough money to buy a return ticket.
She was a woman alone. She was a black woman alone. At that time those hadn’t been easy circumstances.
“Thank you, Justice,” she said, but I was sure Robert heard her determination as much as I did. She did not want to come back to that station. She didn’t want to take money from Justice Adams. She probably didn’t want to take money from anyone. She’d had no choice.
“Oh, Grace,” Robert said. “I’m so desperately sorry.”
“You are welcome,” Justice said. “Now go. I will see you tonight. Right here. At this bench.”
Grace stood and stepped surely out of the station. As she moved by Robert and me, I missed the movement of air that should come with a person walking by.
“Isabelle.”
Elvis had reappeared over my shoulder.
“Yes?” I said.
“You made it here, Isabelle. This is where you will find all the answers,” he said. And then he surprised me even more by reaching for my face. He held it and kissed me softly, quickly, as if it was just his normal way of greeting me. Even still, I recognized that though they weren’t Jerome’s lips, it was unmistakably Jerome’s kiss.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Yes. I’d like to see you as myself, but I’m not sure that will happen. I have to go again,” Elvis said with a smile that was as close to the crooked one that belonged to Jerome as it could be.
“You know Elvis?” Robert said when the ticket taker had disappeared.
“No.”
“That kiss sure looked like you knew him.”
“It’s a really long story.”
“Oh, don’t tell me. I’ve got my own long story going to deal with. What do we do now?”
“I wish I knew. Did we learn much of anything?” I said.
“Justice and Grace really did meet.”
“And she really hadn’t found you,” I said.
“I am positive she never found me, Betts. Positive.”
“I’m going to go back with Jake to his archives and have him pull up the old newspapers from the days after they were to meet.”
“Why?”
“If there was a body, even an unidentified one, there might have been a story. Maybe that will give us more,” I said.
“How?”
“I have no idea, Robert, but it’s the only plan I can come up with at the moment.”
“All right. I’ll come with you.”
But he didn’t come with me. Suddenly, he and the rest of the station disappeared, poofed away. Since I had stepped up to get onto the station platform, my body braced itself as if I was going to fall to the ground. I didn’t. I was already on the ground. I looked over to see Jake still standing there with the camera held up and pointing this direction.
“Hi!” I called and waved.
“Hi. Did something happen?”
“What did you see?” I said as I hurried toward him.
“You walking around a little, talking to the air.”
“Hope the camera got more.”
“Me too.”
“We need to go back to the archives. Right now if possible,” I said.
“Sure. Let’s go.” Jake clicked off the camera and folded the screen in.
The barn doors, both front and back, had been locked when we’d taken the side path to the field behind the building. The back one still was, but as we came around the front corner of the building, I heard a voice coming from inside the barn.
“Hang on. Did you just hear something?” I asked Jake.
“I did.”
We tiptoed to the front doors. They were no longer locked. One was pushed in so that it created an opening of a few inches. Light from a flashlight beam danced around inside the barn.
And the people inside were definitely talking about murder.
Chapter 19
“This is where he was killed?” a familiar voice said.
“This is the spot. Right here, I was told,” another voice said. This one was even more familiar.
“Call Cliff,” I whispered to Jake. “At least a couple of Derek’s ex-wives are in there. I’ll stay here and listen, but get Cliff over here.”
I thought the two vo
ices I heard belonged to Ridley and Wendy, but I couldn’t be completely sure.
Jake stepped far enough away from the barn so they wouldn’t hear him but made sure he could still see me and pulled out his phone.
“He was hit on the head?” Wendy, I think, said.
“With a wrench,” Ridley, I think, said.
I wondered whether the murder weapon was common knowledge, but I couldn’t remember what had been shared with the public and what hadn’t.
“That’s awful,” Wendy said. “He was a boring idiot, but he didn’t deserve to die so violently.”
“I know. I actually spent a moment feeling sad about it,” Ridley said.
And then they did something that both surprised and scared me. They laughed. Both of them, with a cackle that was almost evil.
When they stopped laughing, as if they had to work to gather themselves, Wendy continued, “Do you think she did it?”
“Gosh, I don’t know. Anything’s possible. He put her through hell. He put lots of people through hell. It was his way.”
“Who? Which she?” I whispered.
“Right, well, despite the benefits, the whole thing was hellish. Still is, if you ask me,” Wendy said.
“It is.”
Jake came up behind me and tugged on my sleeve. He pointed toward the police station. The door was still closing, but Cliff was jogging this direction. I didn’t want to stop eavesdropping, but I didn’t want Cliff’s appearance to let the women know I was listening in on their conversation. I reluctantly stepped away from the barn and met Cliff in the street, just before he was about to step over the curb.
“You okay?” he asked me, but he looked at Jake, too.
“We’re fine. At least two of Derek’s ex-wives are in the barn. I don’t think they’re doing much of anything and I probably jumped the gun by having Jake call you, but it just seemed weird. I feel kind of dumb now. They might have been talking about the killer, using a ‘she’ pronoun. I can’t be sure.”
“You shouldn’t feel dumb. They’re trespassing. Roy and Bunny are the only ones with keys. I’ll see what I can get out of them and what they’re up to.”
I did regret having Jake call Cliff so quickly. Maybe I could have learned more if I’d just given it a little longer.
If Onions Could Spring Leeks Page 18