Nashville: The Mood (Part 1)

by Donald H. Carpenter

  She was a single mom, divorced twice, and looking to get married a third time. She had met a man a year or two before, and lived with him for a while, but the two had soon separated, with him moving out. They still saw each other fairly regularly, but the two of them seemed to know that they weren’t perfect for each other, only good enough until someone else better came along.

  Even today, two months later, she didn’t really know all that much about Ross. She had tried to engage him on his personal life—whether he was married or not, whether he had any kids, what he did outside of the office for leisure activity, and other things—but he had resisted all of her efforts. He had said he was married, but that his wife still lived in their last residence, and he had left it at that, with no further explanation. His wife had never called the office, to Darleen’s knowledge, nor had Darleen ever heard him mention her, or even her name. Once, Darleen had asked her name, but his phone had rung around that time, and he had simply brushed off the question, and never returned to the subject.

  She knew that he entertained clients in the evening, and sometimes even on weekends. But surely he couldn’t be doing that all of the time; there had to be something else to his life. She had never known him to go home to visit his wife, and at times she wondered if his wife even existed. She knew it was a leap of logic, but of the type that she had made many times in her life.

  Her latest theory, developed a month or so ago, had been that he had a girlfriend. She had no evidence of any sort to back this up; it was just a working theory on her part. But as working theories often do, they start off as just a possibility, and over time work toward becoming a reality. And so it was with Darleen’s mind, and this train of thought.

  The office telephone was quiet that morning, as it often was during these days. Once Ross had opened the office and made clients aware of its existence, there could be busy days and very slow days. It just depended on what they were working on, who was dropping by, and the nature of deadlines on particular projects. Some days, Darleen found it utterly boring, and other days she was stressed out with trying to get a report done before the day ended. It looked like today was going to be a leisurely day, with minimal interruptions, and plenty of time to do everything.

  Around nine-thirty, she finished typing a number of letters Ross had given her, along with an investment summary proposal. She saved all of the work on the computer and backed it up, and decided to take a break. She went into the break room and fixed a cup of coffee, and stood for a moment looking at a calendar on the wall. Then she made her way back to her desk, picked up the stack of letters and the summary, and walked it back to the end of the hall where Ross’s office was.

  As she set the stack on his desk, she paused and looked around the office. There had been days, during the two-month period, when he had been gone, and she had used the opportunity to scan his office: the shelves on the bookcase, the top of his desk, around the floor here and there, and on a table that sat over to the side near a corner framed by two full-length windows. She had never found anything really interesting, but she had never abandoned the thought that she might.

  She had never actually gone into his desk. Once she had gently pulled on a drawer, but it had been locked. She was a little superstitious, and maybe a little paranoid; she wondered if Ross had set a trap for her. In her old job, she had often gone into the desks of her boss and her co-workers over the years, and once one of her co-workers had set just such a trap, knowing someone had entered his desk, although he hadn’t known who it was. The thought of getting caught, though, had frightened her.

  She walked to the window and looked down into the parking lot, eight floors below. She looked to where he normally parked, a garage on the first level of the deck, but since it was covered she couldn’t really see anything where his space would be. She looked at the upper level open parking area, but she knew he never parked there. She thought about locking the front door, giving her time to go through things and put them back in order before she had to open it, but she quickly ruled that out; it would look too funny.

  While she was deciding what to do, Ross called. He said he was in St. Louis for the day, and was still planning on catching the late afternoon flight out, and being in the office in the morning. He was in somewhat of a hurry, and only wanted to check a few details of things before hanging up quickly.

  She set the phone down and approached the desk cautiously. She could tell the bottom right drawer was open just slightly. She would start with that.

  Randall Terrell entered Bosco’s and was quickly seated, late afternoon on a Wednesday. Bosco’s had a dark, cavernous feel to it, much like one would imagine a German beer hall to have. It sold finely crafted beers, and the food was generally well-regarded also. Terrell took a seat in the middle portion, off to the left, where he could keep an eye on the front door.

  Terrell was born in Memphis, to a poor family with eleven children. He was the only one who had gone to college; the rest were still in Memphis, working at odd jobs, or not working at all. He had always been different. Early on, it was obvious that he was much more academically inclined than any of his siblings, brothers or sisters. He didn’t always make straight A’s, but close to it. He studied hard to make the good grades, and won a scholarship to a small college in Chicago, where he had double-majored in finance and marketing. After graduation, he had worked for several corporations in locations around the country, including Cleveland, Detroit, San Jose, Colorado Springs, and San Antonio, before finally moving to Nashville. By the time he arrived in Nashville, he had experienced predominantly black areas, the area he still felt most comfortable in, predominantly white areas, heavily Hispanic areas, and somewhat mixed areas.

  When he first moved to Nashville, Terrell had seriously looked at buying a home in neighboring Williamson County, which featured the upscale areas of Brentwood and Franklin. One of the wealthiest counties in the country, it was Nashville’s most prosperous suburban area, with very large homes and large lots. At the time of the move, the country was still at the top of the housing boom, and the pricing of the homes in Williamson County had been somewhat out of Terrell’s range. Accordingly, he had begun to look around the city itself, and had settled into a condominium not far from Vanderbilt University. He had hit upon a good deal, and felt he had done well with the purchase.

  He watched the door, waiting for a woman to appear. He had seen her picture; she had sent it to him through the computer. They had originally met in a telephone conversation related to his job. She worked for a vendor of his company, filling orders as an inside salesperson. After a time of talking, the two had swapped photographs, and eventually agreed to meet.

  Sitting there, Terrell recalled his surprise at seeing her photograph. Her accent had been one with which he was not familiar. She hailed from south Louisiana, and it was difficult for him to tell what race she was. The general tone of the conversations, and the areas of interest they had gotten into, had given him the impression she might be white, but he was still surprised to receive her picture and see a striking blonde with long hair falling around her shoulders; the voice somehow didn’t go with the image. Now, he found himself waiting patiently for her, wondering where it would all lead.

  He had never dated a white girl before, although he had been in dozens of mixed social situations, and at times had detected an interest from some of them. He had never been against it; the right opportunity just had never presented itself at the right time. So once he had seen her photograph, he wasn’t put off by it at all, nor was he overly interested. He just approached it as he would any other relationship that might develop over a period of time, whether over the telephone, the Internet, or whatever. Terrell recalled even using advertisements in newspapers for a brief period just prior to getting onto the Internet in the mid-1990s.

  He looked around the brewhouse; it was almost completely empty, except for a couple of booths in the back on the opposite side of the restaurant, far from where he was sitting. He
checked the bar out; one man sat in the middle, opposite where he sat.

  Out of his peripheral vision, he saw someone approach the front door. He turned and looked up and saw a blonde-haired woman pushing the door open. She stepped inside and looked around, letting her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. He waved at her, she saw him and instantly smiled and walked in his direction. As he stood up, she took a couple of steps up into the area where he was seated and approached his table. She was a little bit taller than he, not much, but he noticed it. He searched her face; she didn’t look at all unhappy to see him.

  He extended his hand just before she extended hers, and they shook somewhat vigorously. “Lindy?”

  Reverend Charles Faulkner had presided over Missionary Baptist Church in Nashville for almost fifteen years. He had started out as a preacher in the Southern Baptist Church, but had migrated out some years before, because he found their policies too restrictive. After opening with a handful of members, he had grown the church into a congregation of almost five thousand people. He had his own radio show once a week, and he was negotiating for a television show. He sometimes appeared on panels on local television stations, discussing spirituality in the city.

  His church was known generally as a “feel-good” church among the more cynical of his fellow pastors around the city. That was a name someone had coined to represent a church that made its members feel uplifted about attending, rather than instructing them in the rules of life. It was a division that was growing wider and wider nationwide; Nashville had kept it under wraps for the most part. Individual preachers recognized that they couldn’t force people to attend their particular type of church, and over time there had been a gradual loss of membership among the churches with stricter doctrine, and a corresponding increase in membership among the churches whose teachings were, to say the least, somewhat loose.

  That split in the church, however, was not troubling Reverend Faulkner this morning; he had other things on his mind. Upon arriving at work that morning, he had a voicemail on his work phone from a reporter in Odessa, Texas. Odessa was where Faulkner was born, and had grown up. He had left there at age nineteen, and had only been back two times during the last twenty-five years. He had started his first church at age twenty-eight, in Palestine in eastern Texas, and had moved around, finally settling in Nashville in the mid-1990s. Most people were familiar with that part of his history, because it was clearly revealed on his curriculum vitae. What generally wasn’t known was what happened before then, before age twenty-eight.

  As soon as the reporter had identified his location, the reverend knew something was up. It could be a story in the works, a rehashing of what was to him old news long buried and best left unearthed. Or could it be something new? He thought back, back over many years, going over the same ground that he had run over at least a hundred times in his life, perhaps several hundred. The older he had become, it bothered him less and less, and yet he knew the potential was there to destroy him.

  He had only spoken of it a very few times, and those times had all been way back when, thirty-odd years ago. When he did, he always maintained that he saw a blinding flash of light, and that he didn’t remember anything else. Most people thought he was lying about that, or that he had completely deceived himself into believing it. He knew that people thought that way, but he took the position that the light was all there had been, and he never deviated from that version, either in telling the story to others, or—even more so—in his own mind. That’s what he would have testified to at trial, if his attorney had not worked hard to keep him off the witness stand. He had wanted to testify. Even then, he had that confidence that he could get others to believe him if he was allowed to tell his version uninterrupted, unfiltered, unquestioned.

  Over the years, the blinding flash of light, and how he saw it, had changed in his mind, much like a story in words can change over a long period of years. In earlier years, the flash of light was a quick burst that came and went quickly, leaving him to wake up without any sense of how much time had passed. As time went by, however, the flash of light had become slower, more long-lasting. There was still an initial flash, but it was not as brilliant, and it grew brighter slowly, over a period of what seemed like at least several minutes. Once it had reached its full brightness, it stayed with him for a long time before he came back to—reality?

  The telephone on his desk rang. He sat there, listening to it, watching it, letting it run its course. Soon it stopped, and a few seconds later his cell phone began to ring. He watched it, too, and waited for it to quit. He looked at the display; it was a number from west Texas.

  He had the feeling it was going to be a long day.

  Jean Dewey pulled into the parking garage at the medical complex where she worked. She was an accountant, responsible for the entire bookkeeping process at the organization, overseeing a team of nine people. She was responsible for collection of revenue data, creation of financial statements, and collections of debt, at least in an indirect way. She had worked there more than twenty years. Jean was married, with two children, and her only claim to fame was that she was the only niece of a somewhat legendary country music singer, Les Garvey.

  Garvey’s wife had died more than twenty years ago, and although he had continued his career, it had wound down about ten years before, due to ill health. His only daughter had never amounted to much. She had been an alcoholic and a drug addict, had never held a serious job, and Garvey had supported her over her entire life. But she had never cared for him during his period of physical decline, leaving that to Jean, who had voluntarily stepped up and handled all those details for the past ten years.

  It was a very rainy day, what turned out to be the end of a string of them in Nashville, but today was the absolute worst. Buckets of rain were pouring down, much heavier than the normal heaviest rains, and it had slowed traffic to a halt in many places. Finally, as she pulled into the garage, it seemed to lessen slightly but there was a terrible gloominess hanging over the city that she felt would probably be there all day.

  The voicemail light was blinking on her desk phone when she arrived at work. Before checking it, she dug into her purse and checked her cell phone; there was a message there, also. She hadn’t heard her cell phone ring, but that was common during her drive to and from work, as she normally played the radio at a fairly high volume. She had a bad feeling about the messages.

  She played the one on her desk phone; it was a home caregiver telling her that her uncle had passed away at his home only an hour before. The message on her cell phone was the same thing. She sat down in her chair, a blank look on her face, but a lot going through her mind.

  Right away, she knew there was going to be trouble, probably a lot of it. Garvey had put her in his will about a year ago, leaving her most of the estate, with the residue, a much smaller amount, to his daughter. When he had first announced it to her, she had actually tried to talk him out of it, saying that she didn’t feel right accepting a large inheritance for doing what she thought was the right thing for him. But he had insisted, and even after she told him, several times, to think it over carefully, and that she wouldn’t mind whatever he decided, he had come back each time and said that thinking about it had only strengthened his original decision. She didn’t know what he had told his daughter, but she suspected he had not told her anything. Otherwise, she thought, surely his daughter would have been much more volatile and angry during her occasional visits to him.

  Therefore, she expected trouble as soon as the contents of the will had been read to all concerned parties. Her cell phone rang; she could tell it was his daughter, Lucie.

  “Hello, Lucie.”

  “Jean, I know you haven’t heard about Dad yet. He passed away a short time ago.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Just a little while.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “He had suffered enough,” Lucie said. “There were times when I was hoping someone wo
uld step in and end itI know we’re not supposed to think that way, but I couldn’t help thinking it was best.”

  “I always get mixed up on things like that,” Jean replied. “I know that’s one way of looking at it, but I always kept hoping something would turn around, and he would get betterHe lived such a full life, and accomplished so much, I just could barely bear to see him the way he was.”

  “Have you seen his will?”

  “No, I haven’t seen itI don’t know what is in it, at least in any real way.”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted the last few. She should have just said that she didn’t know, and left it at that. Knowing Lucie, she knew that it would register with her in some way, and she would tuck it away, to bring it up at the most inconvenient time. But then again, she didn’t really care that much. She had never really wanted the bulk of the estate, and had even been troubled by the thought of it. But the idea of Lucie getting it against her father’s wishes was also somewhat unsettling to her.

  “When do you think we’ll start reading the will and settling the estate?” Lucie asked.

  The rain, and the general moodiness, settled over Nashville for a several-week period. People almost began to think it had settled in permanently; it was so unusual to go on uninterrupted for a few weeks. Toward the end of the three-week stretch, Cole Burton slipped into a little coffee shop out on Charlotte Pike, on the west side. It was a dingy little place, but one could turn off one of the main thoroughfares and onto a series of side streets, and work one’s way through a small alley, large enough for a car, and wind up in a somewhat private parking lot in the back of the shop.