by Lee Magner
“Yes,” Case said through clenched teeth. “It’s called C-H-I-C-A-G-O!”
Seamus looked at Case very closely.
“I had hoped to say farewell to the little girl. ‘Twould be a nice thing for me to give her some small token…”
“I think that would be a catastrophe,” Case said, shaking his head in exhaustion.
“I’m not leaving. Not yet. There is one piece of business that I have to take care of,” Seamus explained slowly. “After that…”
Seamus shrugged his indifference.
Chapter 8
Case had been hoping that Seamus would give up his intention to say a final farewell to “the little girl” before he left Crawfordsville. Luther tried to talk him out of doing it.
But Seamus was adamant. He wanted to go to the graveside of Lexie Clayton and nothing that Case or Luther said could persuade him not to do it.
So late the following Thursday afternoon, a disgruntled Case drove to the Oddfellows Cemetery, where she had been buried, so that Seamus could give her the final token that he had vowed to give to her.
Case opened the passenger door and helped Seamus out of the car. The old man was very unsteady on his feet, and his blurry vision was no help in stabilizing his balance.
Case looked around. It was deserted. He breathed a silent sigh of relief for that.
“Come on,” Case said, giving his father an arm to hold on to as they headed up the winding sidewalk that led into the grounds.
Seamus squinted and shielded his eyes from the bright sunlight. He felt the warmth against his yellowish skin and the light breeze that was skipping across the meadow and tickling the leaves of the hundred-year-old trees shading the cemetery’s rolling landscape.
“Is anyone else here?” Seamus asked, unable to see well enough to know for sure.
Case glanced around them again.
“No. Fortunately, not,” he said grimly.
“I told you we wouldna run into anyone,” Seamus said smugly. “Everyone’s gone home to fix their supper and watch the evening news—or maybe a game show,” he added wryly. “They only come to the cemeteries nowadays for burials and for Memorial Day.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” Case said grimly. “Next time, it might be something besides red paint that gets tossed our way.”
Seamus fell silent and worry wrinkled his brow.
“I hadna thought they’d do anything to you,” he murmured uneasily. “I thought it would only be me they’d hate.”
Case snorted his disagreement with that.
“I was the one convicted, not you,” Seamus said stubbornly. “The blame was placed on my shoulders. The jury said ‘twas I who did the deed and that I did it alone. Why should they want to hurt you? It’s not fair.”
“You never expected people to be fair,” Case stated. “Why start now?”
“Because I paid for that crime!” Seamus said hotly. His eyes flashed and he raised one fist angrily.
Case frowned and looked at his father closely.
“I know you pleaded not guilty,” he said slowly. “And I know that you couldn’t convince the jury that the prosecution’s facts were somehow wrong about Lexie’s death. But why do you keep insisting that you’re an innocent man, Da? It makes no difference now. You paid the price. You’re clean, you paid your debt to society, as they say.”
Seamus gave Case a curious, sideways glance, measuring him up and down as if for a new suit.
“Don’t you feel any remorse for her death, Case?” he asked softly.
“For Lexie’s? Hell, yes. I wish I’d been there to help when she needed the help. And I wish to hell I’d never taken her up to the hayloft or gotten involved with her the way I did,” he said irritably.
Seamus seemed dissatisfied with the answer, and he looked restlessly away from Case.
“Wait a minute,” Seamus said finally, pulling Case to a halt. “I need to catch me breath.”
Exertion did that to him now. His liver ailment was killing him quickly, but other problems were killing him slowly. His heart was weakening and his circulatory system wearing out. He often found himself breathless, even after a brief, slow walk.
After a moment, they continued slowly over the rise and into the main burial grounds.
Half the population of Crawfordsville had been buried in the Oddfellows Cemetery. As they slowly made their way among the headstones, Case looked at the names of some of the deceased.
“Do ye know where she is?” Seamus asked, gasping.
“I think the grave’s over there,” Case said.
He pointed through a row of old ornate white limestone headstones toward a newer section with grayish pink polished stone markers laid lower to the ground. He noticed a familiar name on one headstone as they walked by it. It was Henry Browne, Clare’s father. Case noticed there were potted flowers blooming in two clay containers placed on either side of the gravestone.
Clare or her mother must come and care for the grave, he realized. Even death had not severed the bond.
Finally, they found Lexie Clayton’s final resting spot.
Seamus knelt down and pulled Case onto his knees beside him.
“You may as well pray for her forgiveness, too,” Seamus muttered as he bent his head in prayer.
Case obliged his father, although he thought it was a little odd that Seamus was asking him to pray for her forgiveness. Even if he did feel a little guilty that he could have somehow protected her from what befell her, Case had never felt the need to beg her forgiveness.
When Seamus was finished, Case turned to lead him back to the car.
“I want to come again tomorrow,” Seamus announced.
“What?” Case turned and faced his father with real anger. “Are you crazy? If you keep coming out here, sooner or later someone else will be here at the same time that you are, and word will get around town that you’re visiting Lexie’s grave. Damn it, Da, don’t you know what that’ll do to people around here? We’ll be lucky if we’re not lynched from that tree hanging over Lexie’s headstone!”
“I’m dying. A little sooner won’t make much difference to me,” Seamus said with a careless shrug. “They’ll prob’ly leave you alone.”
“But why come back?” Case demanded, totally bewildered.
“I swore that if I ever left prison, I would pray a novena at her grave—nine days of prayer—to ask her forgiveness for the one who killed her.”
“Da, are you losing your mind? Why do you keep insisting there is some other murderer out there?” Case asked with the greatest consternation. “I’m beginning to think it’s your brain that’s been pickled, not your liver.”
Seamus stared long and hard at Case.
“There were some who thought that you might have been involved,” Seamus said slowly.
Case snorted his contempt for the theory.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t, and they had no reason to think that I was. So no one ever tried to make a legal case out of that piece of fiction.”
“Clare said she saw you that night…”
“Yeah. If she hadn’t, there would have been no corroboration for my alibi,” Case conceded.
“Was she telling the truth, Case?” Seamus asked in a low, taut voice.
“Of course she was!” Case exclaimed, growing angry with his father’s suggestive question. “Hell, you don’t think that I had anything to do with killing her, do you?” he demanded, so appalled that he was nearly speechless.
Seamus blinked and peered blurrily into his son’s face. Wistfully, he reached out and touched Case’s features, running a bony finger over eye and mouth and cheekbone.
“You sound like you’re telling the truth,” he said sadly. He grasped his head in his two hands and rocked slowly back and forth. “Ay, lad, don’t take up the drink. If I only had a clear head for all those things back then. But so much is lost in the black holes of alcohol… I don’t know what’s real and what’s not.”
“You’d been off the b
ooze for months until the night that Lexie died,” Case said, forcing himself to ask the question that had burned in his heart for fifteen years. “Why did you pick up that bottle?”
Seamus closed his eyes and his face was contorted in pain.
“I truly, truly do not remember ever takin’ a first drop of anything,” he swore. “And I do not remember going into a store to get the liquor. All I remember is walking toward town that evening and waking up with the bottle and the knife and Lexie’s body just before dawn. I don’t even know how I got to that motel. Maybe Lexie gave me a ride, like they said. Or maybe something else happened. Ay, but it is God’s own punishment for my sins that I was found guilty of something that I did not do.”
Case’s mouth went dry. In all the years that he had known his father, he had never heard him talk with such emotion about the night of the murder or his years serving in the penitentiary.
“You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?” Case said, just beginning to grasp the implications as he uttered the words aloud.
“By all the saints, I swear it,”’ Seamus whispered vehemently. He let his hands fall to his sides and stared at Case. “You always believed that I killed her, then,” he realized with deep pain.
“I believed that you were too drunk to remember what happened,” Case said in a strained voice. “But, yes… when they convicted you of murder, I believed that’s what the evidence proved.”
Sounds of footsteps approaching along the path interrupted their conversation.
Lavinia Browne came over the hill. She’d come to tend the flowers around her late husband’s grave. Upon seeing Case she smiled. Then she turned her attention to Seamus. Her eyes widened. Her pace slowed. And her mouth fell open in surprise.
Case and Seamus nodded and wished her a pleasant day.
Lavinia walked past them, nodding and holding on to her purse as if it were a ticket to sanity.
“I guess Lavinia was surprised to see you here,” Case said dryly. “It’s a good thing she’s not a gossip. Tomorrow you may not be so lucky.”
“You’ll bring me back, then?” Seamus said, his face pathetic in its eager, hopeful expression.
“Yeah,” Case said huskily. “I’ll bring you back. But you better add a prayer to keep lynch parties at bay,” he said with a bitter laugh.
Seamus grinned and held on to Case’s arm as they made their way slowly down the path to the car.
Pebbles skittered across Clare’s bedroom window, pulling her back from the brink of sleep. A second handful spit across the glass pane and she tossed back the covers of her bed to see what was causing the commotion. She opened her curtains and looked down to see Case Malloy standing below her window, a handful of pebbles ready to be tossed her way.
“Case!” She motioned to him that she’d be right down. Her nightgown was carelessly tossed onto the bed; clothes were hastily snatched from her dresser. Clare hopped into her things as quickly as she could and ran down the stairs still buttoning her blouse and fastening her jeans.
Case was sitting on the porch swing in the darkness when she opened the front door and stepped outside to join him.
“What is it?” she asked anxiously. “Is something wrong?”
“Something’s always wrong,” he teased. “But relax, this is just an information call.”
He patted the seat next to him and waited for her to sit down beside him. She sat and looked at him in surprise.
“Is your phone out of order, or something?” she asked, wondering why he’d come in person just to keep her updated. She assumed that’s what he meant by an “information call.”
“No. The phone works. But I didn’t want anyone listening in.” He sighed and leaned back in the swing. “Besides, I wanted to see you,” he said, a slow grin spreading across his roguishly handsome face. “And I figured it had been a few years since anyone had tossed pebbles at your window to get your attention, so…”
She cocked her head to one side to look at him.
“Not since you last tossed pebbles at my window, to be exact,” she admitted tartly.
“Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.” His grin widened. “I guess all those other guys you’ve been kissing in the past fifteen years aren’t the pebble-throwing type?”
Clare gave him a withering glance.
“That’s right. They’re too sophisticated for that,” she explained blithely. “They use car phones and e-mail and pagers and voice mail…”
His grin turned into outright laughter, although he struggled to keep it quiet. He didn’t want to wake up Lavinia or the next-door neighbors, or set all the local dogs to barking.
“I’m impressed,” he managed to say.
“At last,” she muttered. “I’ve impressed His Majesty Malloy!”
Clare sighed. Obviously, he wasn’t impressed. Not by her dates’ methods of contacting her, anyway, although he apparently found her exaggerated description amusing.
However, Case was in such a good mood, she didn’t mind that he was, once again, laughing at her lack of a titillating social life. It was good to hear him laugh again. To see him smile. To have him near.
Clare curled her legs under her and turned a little, so she could look at Case while he was talking to her.
He had settled comfortably in the corner of the swing, with one arm stretched out behind the back of the swing and his other arm resting on the swing’s arm. He was grasping one of the chains that held the swing suspended from the porch ceiling, and he was sliding his hand over the steel links, as if to diffuse some hidden tension.
“So what’s this information that brings you skulking beneath my window in the dead of night and tossing pebbles to drag me out of bed?”
“Seamus and I ran into Lavinia this evening.”
She nodded solemnly.
“She told you, then?”
“Umm-hmm.”
“Seamus is praying at Lexie’s grave.”
“Ohh.” Clare stared at him in shock. “So that’s what he was doing…”
“And he’s going back…”
“Oh, dear.”
“Eight more times.”
Clare knew she looked worried. Well, she was worried.
“He won’t listen to Luther or me, and he insists it’s a duty he has to perform before he dies.” Case shook his head and grimaced. “How the hell can I tell him he can’t say a prayer over Lexie’s grave, when it may be one of the last things he’ll ever do in this lifetime?”
Clare inched closer to Case and reached out to touch his arm comfortingly. “But if anyone else sees him there…”
“Yeah. You don’t have to paint me a picture, Clare.”
Clare bit her lip as a thought suddenly occurred to her.
“What?” he asked warily. Whatever she was thinking, it didn’t look good, if the alarmed expression on her face was any indicator.
“They’ll be decorating the cemetery for Memorial Day next week! And Seamus won’t be through visiting Lexie’s grave!”
“That’s just great,” Case muttered. “So the entire decoration committee will be marching around Oddfellows Cemetery while Seamus pays his final respects to the late and long lamented Lexie Clayton.”
Case rolled his eyes and grimaced.
“Maybe it will only be the last day of his novena,” Clare suggested thoughtfully. “They usually put up a platform the Wednesday before the holiday, but that’s generally finished before four o’clock. The Crawfordsville public employees are very punctual about that,” she told him.
“I’ll bet.”
“But the bunting isn’t draped until Thursday. And the flags don’t go out until the weekend, if they do what they did last year.”
Case grinned at her. “I knew you were a woman of important connections in this burg,” he drawled.
Clare laughed. “Let’s hope they all do what I’m expecting.”
He captured her hand and kissed the back of it. When she gave him a startled look, he explained, “For luck.”
Clare nodded and tried to ignore the familiar sensation aroused by his touch. He seemed relaxed and unmoved, she thought. So why did she respond to him so easily? she wondered in frustration. It wasn’t fair, damn it.
Before he noticed how he was affecting her, she blurted out the first question that came to mind.
“So I guess you and your father have opened up a whole new relationship?”
Case grew somber and nodded. “Yeah.”
“Is there a problem with that?” she asked hesitantly. “And… feel free to tell me it’s none of my business.”
He laced his fingers with hers and smiled slightly. “It’s none of your business.”
Her face fell.
“But I’m willing to make it your business if you’d be willing to listen,” he said.
His gaze leveled with hers, letting her see a little bit of his soul, just for a brief flash. It took her breath away. And she was lost.
“Of course I’ll listen, Case.”
He cleared his throat and struggled with the place to begin.
“You know, my old man and I spent the past fifteen years trying to avoid each other. So I spent that time believing that he was guilty of murder, just like the court said he was. And he spent the time thinking that maybe I was involved in some way, and if he couldn’t convince them that he was innocent, maybe he could do the time for me—let me have the second chance at a good life that both of us needed.”
Clare was aghast.
“But you had nothing to do with it!” she whispered emphatically. “You were here, cursing the flat tire on that motorcycle of yours, and walking all the way back to Luther’s farm. You couldn’t have gotten over to that motel and killed her.”
Case smiled and caressed her palm with his thumb in appreciation for her statement to the police fifteen years ago on those same facts.
“Seamus was confused some of the time during the trial. The binge drinking the night of the murder apparently triggered a blackout, and he kept having problems with mental orientation and concentration all through the preliminary hearing and the trial itself. I think he figured you were just protecting me.”