A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  Skidmore saw me looking at the setup and seemed to calm down a little.

  “That’s what I brought you,” he said, sighing, exasperation filling every word.

  “What is all that?” Andrews said, following our gaze.

  “That, gentlemen,” Melissa said proudly, edging into the kitchen, “is the most current and up-to-date voice recognition software in America. It’s what the sheriff’s been waiting for. He got it from the FBI.”

  Andrews looked at me, not Skid. “FBI? Really?”

  “That’s right,” Skid said, a little of his anger subsiding in the face of the new gadgets he’d brought. “This software has taken a sample of your attacker’s voice from his 911 call that I played you in the hospital. They say it can be as significant as a fingerprint.”

  “It’s going through every database in the country,” Melissa said, sitting down in front of one of the computers. “It’s listening to every 911 call ever recorded, every phone call to every police station in the past ten years, every anonymous tip or threat or—I mean, I hate to think of what else it’s listening to. But it’s already found three potential matches and we’ve only had it set up for half an hour.”

  “We haven’t listened to anything yet, you understand,” Skid explained. “We have to let it finish what it’s doing.”

  Melissa was staring at the screen in wide-eyed wonder. “Isn’t this amazing?”

  I found myself transfixed by her expression, and trying to think how old she was—twenty-four or so? I reminded myself that she was a person who’d been born into a world of computers. All I could think about was my grandparents sitting at that same table when they were her age, a time when the cabin had no electricity. I thought about a time, fewer than a hundred years before, when wood fire in the oven cooked the food, oil lamps lit the living room, and a lap dulcimer and cheap guitar made all the evening’s entertainment. And there I was, waiting for a computer, something the size of the file folder I was clutching, to check every human voice ever recorded in America.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this,” I said to Skidmore calmly, “but I did find something at Fit’s Mill that bears scrutiny—yours and mine both.”

  It was clear from his posture, the tension in his neck, and the way that he turned to look at me that the last thing he wanted to do in the world was hear what I had to say. But to his credit, he forced himself to ask, “What did you find?”

  “You’re not going to believe it,” Andrews joined in.

  I held up the folder. “I think I found some of the things stolen from my house when I was attacked. And I think I might have found out a lot more than that.”

  “He’s related to Jelly Roll Morton!” Andrews exploded.

  “Who?” Skid said calmly.

  “You can’t be serious,” Andrews said.

  “Not the point,” I insisted. “The point is that someone in Fit’s Mill, or someone from somewhere else who came to Fit’s Mill, collected genealogical records about me and my maternal heritage.”

  Skidmore shifted his weight to one leg and let out his breath. “I have no idea what you’re getting at.”

  “Right.” I sat back. “This is going to require—I’m going to have to try to piece some of this together as I go along. Do you want me to just talk, or do you want me to put it all together and then make some sort of presentation?”

  “Fever,” Skidmore began, the irritation returning to his voice.

  “I don’t know what it means,” I said quickly, “but my mother was hiding, for most of her life, something about her family heritage. And somebody else, maybe my father, maybe this strange character who keeps referring to himself as the Earl of Huntingdon—”

  “The old guy you saw us with in Miss Etta’s this morning,” Andrews filled in.

  “But somebody wanted me to find out what she was hiding,” I continued. “Somebody left clues. They were in the tin box behind the clock on the mantel for most of my life here in this house. I ignored them, the way you ignore a lot of things about your parents and your family when you’re a younger person. It didn’t make any difference to me at the time. All I wanted was to get away. I couldn’t wait to leave this place, and I couldn’t have cared less about my family heritage.”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with anything,” Skidmore mumbled.

  “It’s the root of what’s happened to me,” I told him. “Could you sit down?”

  “No.”

  “Look.” I shifted my weight on the sofa, “if you just sit down and listen for a moment, I can tell you what I think is the motive for the attack that almost killed me. And I can offer up a couple of prime suspects.”

  “A motive.” Skidmore looked away.

  “It’s the thing I haven’t wanted to think about,” I admitted. “I certainly haven’t wanted to talk about it. Why would a total stranger walk into my house, shoot me, call 911 to brag about it, and have such intense anger in his voice when he did? I may not be anybody’s favorite person, but I certainly can’t remember doing anything that would provoke that kind of venom.”

  “I’ve thought about this every day,” Skidmore admitted, finally taking a seat in one of the overstuffed chairs across from the sofa. “Lots of times I come to the conclusion that it’s my fault. Somebody wants to kill you because you’ve helped me in my work. You’ve been involved in the criminal world around here because of me. You’ve made enemies.”

  “Huh,” Andrews said absently, collapsing onto the sofa beside me. “I guess I’d kind of thought it might be somebody from the university. Academics? They really know how to hold a grudge.”

  Skid and I looked at Andrews.

  “You have no idea how vicious that world is,” he explained to Skidmore. “You make an enemy in academia, you’d better sleep with a pistol under your pillow.”

  I smiled. “This is a nice bit of Freudian follies. You’re both interpreting the motivation according to your own fears and foibles.”

  “And that’s a nice bit of alliteration, Dr. Devilin,” Andrews responded, “but I do, upon immediate examination, agree with your assessment.”

  Skidmore seemed less certain, but didn’t say anything.

  “No,” I continued, “I have to tell you the abbreviated version of a much longer story, a story that my mother may have told me, and also that might have been whispered to me when I was in a coma. It’s about my great-grandmother.”

  “God Almighty.” Skidmore shook his head, entirely exasperated.

  “You have to wait for the voice recognition program to work its voodoo anyway,” I told him. “Why not give this a chance, what I’m about to tell you?”

  He folded his arms in front of him, a thinly veiled, traditional gesture of unwillingness to listen, to accept.

  I plunged ahead anyway.

  “Early in the twentieth century in New Orleans,” I began at a healthy clip, “there was a man called Jelly Roll Morton. He is one of the people who might rightly be cited as the inventor of jazz. He was certainly the first published jazz composer. He played the piano.”

  “Damn it, Fever,” Skidmore swore.

  “If you interrupt me,” I said politely, “this will take longer. I’ll hurry.”

  He sighed deeply and closed his eyes.

  “Jelly Roll had a son, may have had many children, but the particular son in whom we are interested for the purposes of our story was named T-Bone. His mother was a Storyville prostitute called Eulalie Echo. T-Bone was raised in the brothels, taken to Chicago as a youth, and became a saxophone player. He fought in World War I, stayed in Paris when the war was over, and fell in love with a French woman named Lisa Simard. Unfortunately, the mother, Eulalie Echo, had other children. She was addicted to cocaine, a little crazy, and had followed Jelly Roll when he’d left New Orleans to go to Chicago. Jelly Roll did not recognize or acknowledge her and it made Eulalie Echo crazier. She raised another son, a boy who—have I mentioned that Jelly Roll Morton was an African-American and Eulalie Echo w
as a Caucasian?”

  “What?” Skidmore asked, more out of irritation than curiosity.

  “That’s an important part of this story,” Andrews chided me. “You should have mentioned that at the top.”

  “I forgot.” I shrugged.

  “You forgot?” Andrews sat forward. “It’s the most important element of the story!”

  “Right,” I agreed. “Right. Let me start over.”

  “Please don’t start over,” Skidmore said quickly. “I have a gun.”

  “This woman, the prostitute, was white,” I went on immediately, “and so T-Bone was a bit mixed. But the woman had another son by a white man, an anonymous white man, and that son was named Chester Echo. He is, apparently, the crux of the biscuit.”

  “I hate that phrase,” Andrews mumbled.

  “Please shut up,” Skidmore said in tones of mock-civility.

  “Chester Echo,” I went on, “was fed on the—fed on the burning coals of racial hatred, and he slept in the broken glass of rage.”

  Andrews sat up. “Now there you go,” he said. “That’s great.”

  “Not mine,” I admitted. “The point is, Chester was raised on racism, taught to hate, and the primary object of his hatred was, as it turns out, his half brother, T-Bone Morton.”

  “Why?” Skidmore asked, in spite of himself.

  “Because, as I have been told, the mother, Eulalie, was ashamed or enraged that she’d slept with a black man,” I answered, “or lots of black men, as a prostitute. Her general shame and rage, exacerbated by what may have been a prodigious amount of cocaine, made her insane. Her insanity poisoned her son Chester. Her son Chester determined that the only way to rid his mother of her troubles was to go to Paris and kill T-Bone, then wipe out all knowledge of his existence and the evidence of his mother’s degradation.”

  “It’s all very Shakespearean,” Andrews opined.

  “Not now,” I snapped at Andrews under my breath.

  “Hold on,” Skidmore said, unfolding his arms. “This has got something to do with that Klan-type operation over there in Fit’s Mill.”

  “You know about them?” I asked.

  “Sure. They’re organized as a nonprofit church, so their business has to be on record with the county. They call themselves the Sons of Wingfield, whatever that means, and they’re connected with several white supremacist organizations all over the country.”

  “How in the hell would you know about this?” Andrews had to know.

  Skidmore turned a withering gaze toward Andrews. “Being sheriff is not my hobby, Dinkus. It’s my job. And I’m really good at it. You don’t understand how I could get all this computer stuff from the FBI whenever I want it? I work with them all the time. Fever, here, doesn’t participate in every case I have. There are a hundred other police matters outside the confines of his little escapades with me, and you. The FBI, along with local law enforcement, has kept the Sons of Wingfield under fairly close surveillance—especially since September of 2001.”

  “Wait.” Andrews nodded slowly. “Because they’re considered a—what? A domestic terrorist organization. Good. They are.”

  Skidmore exhaled.

  “Okay but what I’m trying to tell you,” I broke in, “is that Chester Echo went to Paris to kill T-Bone Morton. Instead, this Lisa Simard, the woman T-Bone loved, killed Chester. Then T-Bone and Lisa had a child. Then Lisa was murdered. Not sure who did that, but T-Bone brought his baby daughter back to America. He landed in Chicago, which he knew to be the jazz capital of the world at the end of the 1920s. Turns out that Eulalie Echo found out that he was back and sent some of her friends, Chester’s friends, more Klansmen, to kill T-Bone in a dance hall. That didn’t happen, but T-Bone, for the safety of his daughter, gave the child to some people back in New Orleans who happened to be named Newcomb. Some of that family had already come to these mountains, as you well know, and founded Newcomb Junction that has now become Blue Mountain. They sent the baby daughter here, the child of T-Bone Morton and Lisa Simard, who married a Devilin and became my great-grandmother.”

  That broke through all of Skidmore’s walls. “What?” he said very loudly.

  “That’s what I said!” Andrews butted in. “He’s related to the man who invented jazz. Fever! Can you imagine?”

  “That’s what your little story means?” Skidmore asked me incredulously. “You have African-American kin?”

  “I’m not certain that’s the most significant point of my story…”

  “But you think it tells you why someone wanted to kill you?” he asked more slowly.

  “It might even tell me who tried to kill me,” I answered.

  Andrews turned fully my way. Skidmore leaned forward. Even Melissa, from her place in the kitchen, turned in her chair to see my face.

  “Who?” Skidmore asked.

  “The ghost,” I told them all, “of Chester Echo.”

  25.

  Little explanation of my suspicions was needed. Skidmore thought he understood immediately.

  “These boys, these Fit’s Mill boys,” he said, “they found out about your family, your great-grandmother, and they didn’t like it.”

  “I’m trying to tell you that it’s more complicated than that,” I said, staring down at the folder in my hand.

  “I think Travis did it,” Andrews insisted. “That seems obvious to me. He shot at us. At least twice.”

  “Travis,” Skidmore said, almost to himself.

  “I don’t get any of this,” Melissa called from the kitchen, her attention turned back to the computer screen.

  “You don’t get any of what?” Andrews asked.

  “I don’t think Dr. Devilin is right about this thing,” she said, not looking our way, eyes still glued to her work. “Sorry, Fever, but who cares about that stuff these days? I mean, who doesn’t get it that we’re all mixed-something-or-other. I saw it on television, the—what’s the percentage of black people in America that’s related to Thomas Jefferson? Like, did you ever see that show from the seventies that was actually called The Jeffersons? I guess they knew even way back then, right? We’re all mixed.”

  I stared blankly at Melissa’s profile. “I don’t know where to begin. I mean, I don’t know which one of my seven hundred responses comes first.”

  Skid smiled. “She’s young.”

  “I know,” I railed, “but she doesn’t ever watch the news? She doesn’t see what’s going on in America?”

  “I see,” she said matter-of-factly. “I just think that it’s all older people who have these problems. Nobody my age worries about that kind of thing anymore. Nobody cares what race you are, gee.”

  I looked over at Andrews and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if that were actually true?”

  “Yeah,” he answered, looking down, “but it’s not.”

  “I know.”

  Skidmore cleared his throat. “Maybe I should actually take a look at what’s in that folder you’ve got there.”

  I nodded and handed it to him.

  He opened it, sorted through the pictures, read the documents; chewed on the inside of his lower lip.

  In that silence, I finally had a moment to let a few things sink in. I had a chance to consider the new facts of my maternal heritage. I didn’t completely understand it, but I felt a certain dawning, odd pride. My body carried the genes of genius. On the other hand, the life experiences of Jelly Roll Morton could not have been further away from mine if we’d been born on different planets. I had no more understanding of his life, or the life of any person of color in America, than Andrews did. So I was left to wonder what the new revelation truly meant.

  I had always fallen down on a kind of Buddhist approach to family: biology is an accident of birth. You have to find, in this lifetime, your true family. It’s comprised of people you know and trust and love, no matter what the biology is. It had never made any sense to me that some people put so much stock in genealogy. On a practical level, I had always celebrated the fact th
at I was nothing like my mother, and even less like my father. So if it was the case that someone had tried to kill me because of ancestors I never knew, never even knew existed, then reality was, at best, a tentative and transparent folly, a play, or maybe a tale told by an idiot, filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing.

  I smiled at that, and leaned over to nudge Andrews. “Isn’t it about now that you should be giving out with the appropriate quotations from the Bard?”

  “I wondered what you were thinking about just now,” Andrews responded. “You seemed so deeply sunk in.”

  “I was.”

  “And didn’t you just tell me that not everything had to do with Shakespeare?” he asked.

  “I did.”

  “But now you want my pronouncement.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, oddly,” he began in his best scholastic tones, “Shakespeare does have a great deal to say on the subject of race.”

  I smiled.

  “In Othello, Iago hates his commander because of his race. To get even, he tells Othello lies about his wife to enrage him. He says, ‘I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear,’ which is exactly what Eulalie Echo did to her son Chester all his life. She poisoned her son with a unique brand of hatred until he was insane.”

  “Yes, Othello would have been the one I’d have started with.”

  “Or how about the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice,” he went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, “who says, ‘Misslike me not for my complexion.’”

  “But—” I began.

  “Or let’s try ‘Hate all, curse all, show charity to none.’ That sounds a lot like Eulalie, her son, and the boys of Wingfield or whatever they call themselves, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” I confirmed. “What’s that from?”

  “Timon of Athens,” he told me.

  “You’ve been collecting these in your mind for a while now, haven’t you?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Just waiting to say them.”

  “I have at least a dozen more,” he admitted.

  “Well, amusing as that is,” Skidmore said with absolutely no amusement in his voice, “I would like to interrupt with a little, well, useful thinking. I’m going to make Melissa stay here and babysit so that you don’t leave this house while I go to Fit’s Mill and see can I get some answers.”