American Ghost

by Janis Owens

If there was such a thing as salt in a wound, this was it—so stinging that he reverted to mimic. “Believe me, Jol—nobody gits it better than me. What I don’t git is why you’re so damn hostile. You know I loved you,” he said in a rising voice, as if she had argued. “And I never meant it to happen this way. I never did you any harm.”

  He paused at that, breathing hard, so pushing and persuasive that Jolie couldn’t resist evening the score with a little hard honesty, asking him frankly, “Really? You loved me. That’s what it was all about—you coming over here and talking to Daddy and combing the cemeteries and going over to Uncle Ott’s? You were studying the Injuns, trying to awaken us to the glories of our lost heritage?”

  His bold righteousness slipped a millimeter, but his answer was hardy. “What? You think I was lying?”

  “I think you’re full of shit.” She reached for the latch to slam the door. “You were digging up Henry Kite and nobody was talking, and me and Lena were just stupid enough to fall for it—”

  His reply was loud and profane, but Jolie wasn’t interested in idling there and shouting all night. She gripped the door to slam it in his face, but he wedged himself in and held up a hand of truce, still breathing hard, but finally parting with the pivotal bit of history he’d withheld twelve years before. “Morris Lens was my great-grandfather. Henry Kite shot him in the face.”

  Jolie was so vigilant in adulthood that it was rare for anyone to blindside her, but he did. She just stared at him, her hand on the door latch. “The deputy?”

  “The German,” he answered.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked in a voice so mild and honest that Sam seemed too flummoxed to reply.

  He released the door and straightened up and all but scratched his head, finally conceding, “I don’t know, Jol. It was easier not to.”

  If one person on earth understood the seductive allure of silence, it was Jolie Hoyt. “Ain’t that the truth?” she murmured, then added with true regret, “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “No,” he answered immediately, no longer combatant, but spent and exhausted, as if crossing the line to truth had cost him. “I’m not waiting for any more calls. I’ll come by in the morning. We need to talk.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Jolie was late to her meeting with the Cleary city attorney, Glen Malloy, an officious little pain in the ass of a man, who waited at her desk with his hands folded on his lap, the picture of judicial affront. She apologized profusely, then listened with half an ear to his usual huffing and puffing over the details of the city charter, first with her, then afterward, with the rest of the zoning board, who were equally split on the cell tower and openly contentious.

  It was past eleven when she pulled in her drive, the carriage house dark, the porticoes and porches draped in winter shadow. She didn’t even take off her coat, but went straight to the butler’s pantry in the dining room, a relic of the days of cocktail parties and banker’s soirees, a shrine to social drinking. Hugh had never got around to boxing it up when he moved, but left the mirrored, ornate shelves weighed down with all manner of snifters, tumblers, tulip, and crystal, the dusty old decanters dark with nameless spirits: old bourbons, brandies, sherries, and elixirs.

  She was a purist when it came to inebriation and ignored the collectibles in favor of a tumbler of straight Jim Beam. She usually mixed it with Diet Coke, but was too tired to go back to the kitchen and just stood there in the dark, sipping whiskey on the sly like a Baptist deacon. Then the landline started ringing in the kitchen, loud and long. No one called her at that number anymore unless it was family or an emergency. She paused, shoes in one hand, whiskey in the other, and waited for the answering machine to pick up. Her preset message droned through the empty house, then that obnoxious bleep, then a maybe four-second silence.

  She thought it was a hang-up and started upstairs, shoes in one hand, whiskey in the other, when Hugh’s voice suddenly sounded, light and resigned, and oddly distracted, as if starting in midsentence. “—so I guess you’re not picking up the phone. I understand you had a visitor today and would like to discuss it, at your leisure, of course. When you get around to answering the phone,” he droned, trying to be sarcastic and jovial, though real worry was in his voice. “I’m driving back tonight—will plan on lunch at the café.”

  He made no good-bye, just a quiet click of the phone. The whirl of the rewind filled Jolie with foreboding, thinking, Well, great. That’s what you wanted to hear, right before you went to bed—that Hugh was worried enough to cancel his Mardi Gras party, which was like saying the Muslims had canceled Ramadan.

  She added an Ambien to the whiskey, but still couldn’t cross the border to sleep. She hovered there on the twilit shadows, trying to reorder the pieces of the Hendrix puzzle in light of the new discovery, too tired and tipsy to make any headway and terribly, terribly sad, as if the melancholia and poverty of Hendrix were a living miasma that had clung to her and followed her home. She wished she were the kind of sane human being who could cry when overwhelmed and brokenhearted, but she couldn’t and just lay there, dry-eyed and desolate. On her third trip to the medicine cabinet, she saw a light flicker in the backyard and checked her clock: 3:45 a.m.

  She wasn’t the only resident of Casa Altman who wasn’t resting easy.

  She gave up the battle at six and fell into a fitful sleep, waking late and disoriented at nine thirty. She dreaded meeting Hugh, and took her time dressing. The weather channel predicted a high of thirty-six, which called for the warmest suit she owned, a Ralph Lauren, gray wool skirt-suit so stiff and insulated she never wore it more than twice a year.

  She tied an apron over all of it and made a late breakfast and delivered it to the carriage house, too distracted to make small talk with the Frazier brothers. She left the tray on the kitchen table and was thinking she’d head into the office and make a dent in the work she’d missed the day before when there was a knock on the front door, so insistent it echoed through the house.

  She was sure it was Hugh, that he’d driven straight through and decided to move his lecture to brunch, but when she swung open the front door, she found Sam standing there in the cold, dressed nearly identically as he’d been the day before, in khakis and a navy jacket, solemn, and a little strained. She was still feeling the effects of the pills and the booze, her first question, “What happened?”

  “Mind if I come in?” he asked.

  Jolie motioned him inside and realized the high, old hallway was nearly as cold as the porch, their breaths making faint vapor. She tried to lead him to the warmer kitchen, but he waved it away. “I won’t be long, have a budget breathing down my neck,” he murmured. “Was up half the night with my father, who has actually threatened to Baker Act me, said he was calling my brother this morning to fill out the forms. . . . Are you all right? You look a little worn.”

  “I feel like crap,” she confessed. She took a seat on a small sofa in the parlor and gestured for him to join her, though he preferred to remain standing.

  “Yeah, me, too. Didn’t sleep worth a shit.” He then seemed to realize he was being a less than cordial guest and nodded at the high-ceilinged, old room. “Nice house, by the way. Very plush,” he commented evenly, as if trying to insert a note of civility before breaching a painful subject.

  Jolie flashed a politician’s smile and wished it weren’t too early for a drink, as this obviously wasn’t going to be good, whatever it was. Sam’s eyes wandered the room even as he spoke, haltingly, as if bracing himself to confess to the most hideous crime. “I wanted to apologize for being such a duplicitous little shit when I was in Hendrix. I mean, I really was there for the Creek. You can call UF—they have the records somewhere. But I found your pop on the census, and I did kind of grill him, discreetly. I kept it quiet because Hendrix—it was a lockdown out there. I was afraid.” He paused. “I don’t know what I was afraid of. I just kept my mouth shut. And I shouldn’t have. Because it was chickenshit—and your pop was always
generous with me about all of it. He actually knew my granddad—or he’d met him,” Sam corrected, feeling in his coat pocket and handing her a two-by-two photograph of a bird-thin young man in the bulky coat and peaked cap of the Russian army, his face worn, but grimly determined, as if resigned to the hardships of life. “Your pop called him German, but he was Lithuanian, from Tauragé—right on the Polish border. It was always changing hands—maybe he preferred German. He’s sometimes listed as Prussian, on the census.”

  Jolie went to the hall window and held it to the light. “There’s a resemblance,” she noted, some infinitesimal sameness about their eyes and brow.

  “You think so? Nobody ever mentioned it—then again, nobody ever mentioned him. My great-grandmother remarried a man named Miller, but she was never the same after the murder. Never got over it, my grandfather says, and never talked about it, either. They even changed their name—added an e. To distance themselves, I think, from the whole thing—the lynching.”

  Jolie waited for the confession of their complicity in Kite’s murder, their justified rage. When Sam offered nothing further, she asked, “So what really happened? What’s the story?”

  “There is no story. Kite robbed him—shot him in the face. They offered my granddad lead horse in the lynching party, but he turned them down. He was, like, seventeen.”

  Jolie waited for something further, some bit of shameful detail. When it wasn’t forthcoming, she asked, “That’s the great mystery? Anybody in Hendrix could have told you that.”

  “But nobody would.” Sam took back the photo and put it away carefully. “My father has a deaf-mute approach to family history. Even my grandfather didn’t know where they buried him. They hustled him and his mother off to Tampa that afternoon—left old Morris right where he fell, as far as I know. Your pops told me where the store was, but it was long gone, and I walked every graveyard in the county—public and private—but found nothing.”

  Jolie’s expression changed to one of mild amazement. “That’s the great mystery you came to Hendrix to unravel? What happened to his body? You mean, where he was buried?”

  Sam was put off by her old tone of incredulity and answered flatly, “Yeah. He was observant. And his family in Tauragé ended up in a landfill, courtesy of the SS. He survived being conscripted and two years in the Russian army and jumping the Polish border, only to come to America and get shot in the face over a pack of cigarettes. It was a pissy thing to happen, after all he went through.”

  Jolie blinked at his vehemence and murmured, “Can’t argue with that.”

  Sam seemed slightly mollified by her agreement. “And the real kicker, the really pissy thing, is I’m as bad as my pops about deep-sixing it. My kid, Brice, he doesn’t know shit about any of it, he never will. There’s nothing to tell, and I could have done better. I could have asked your dad.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I was chickenshit, tiptoeing around. I thought I could find it myself. I hiked every little cemetery west of the river.”

  “I thought he was Jewish.”

  He shrugged. “What did that matter, in Hendrix? They didn’t remember his name. They thought he was German.”

  Jolie raised an eyebrow at the answer. “Oh, it mattered,” she echoed lightly. After a moment she reached for her BlackBerry. She hit a number with no explanation to Sam other than a raised index finger, a gesture to hold on, that she was working on it.

  When the connection picked up, her expression was suddenly all charm, her voice animated with political persuasion. “Hey, baby doll. . . . No, I’m still at the house, but headed your way. . . . Yeah, I know, he called. Tell him that’s fine, eleven thirty. But listen, pookie, where would a Jewish man who died in Hendrix in 1938 be buried? . . . No, he was, yeah. . . . Really? Cool. . . . Lense. L-E-N-S-E.”

  “No e,” Sam inserted. “Lens. Like the lens in glasses.”

  Jolie nodded and repeated the changed spelling into the phone. “You think? Could you check? . . . Yeah. It’s kind of a big deal.” Jolie smiled a white-toothed flash of Hoyt charm, as if the caller could see her through the line. “No, no worries. I’ll call her back when I get in—her and Carl, too. . . . Sure. I’m on my way—putting on my coat.” Jolie ended the call with another blast of affection. “Okay. Love you, angel. You’re the best,” she chirped.

  Sam watched the performance with a face of mild displeasure. “Who was that?” he asked when she hung up. “The boyfriend? He has that kind of juice? One phone call and he can unearth a seventy-year-old corpse, just like that?”

  “That was our beloved city clerk, Miss Faye.” Jolie put away the BlackBerry and went to the closet for her coat. “Her papa was a wingman for George Smathers, and she’s a second cousin of Lurleen Wallace,” she said as she searched for her coat. When she found it, she pulled it on. “If there’s a record within fifty counties, she’ll find it.” She flipped her hair out of her coat collar. “Trust me.”

  She was cut off by the chirp of the BlackBerry. A glance at the call number brought a flash of her old indomitable smile. “See?” On answering, she went in search of a pen.

  She found one on a side table and scribbled something in a margin of a scrap of paper that she silently passed to Sam: Temple B’nai Israel, Albany. M. S. Lens March 1893–October 1938.

  It was Sam’s turn to be flabbergasted. “They buried him in New York?” he whispered.

  Jolie lowered the phone to mouth Georgia, then ended the conversation with a murmur of praise and a heartfelt “Thank you, baby. You’re the best. Give yourself a raise.”

  When she was done, she hit the end button and held her hands wide, a magician completing her finale. Sam was dumbfounded. “How the hell did you do that? My grandfather searched sixty years.”

  Jolie made light of the small miracle, but her face was lit with that old pleaser satisfaction. “There aren’t many temples hereabouts, and the Sisterhood in Albany—they’re the queen bees.”

  “Jesus,” he breathed. “Whoever heard of a synagogue in Albany, Georgia? How can I be sure it’s him?”

  Jolie was used to the disbelief of mere mortal citizens when she displayed a bit of bureaucratic magic. “You can’t, unless you dig him up and do a DNA—and good luck with the temple on that. And go easy on the South Florida myopia when you talk to them. They were lighting candles in Albany when Miami was a cow town.”

  Sam looked at his watch. “It’s eleven o’clock. I might run up there right now. Want to come? It’s been a long time since I walked a graveyard with a beautiful woman,” he confided, happy to be back on the same team, and still, despite all good sense, unable to quit being so impressed with the power suit and long expanse of hosed leg. He was ready to forgive and forget and just be good pals again, maybe take a trip out to the old camper that night, just for old times’ sake.

  Jolie seemed less hostile to the prospect than she had before, almost regretful. “It’s second Tuesday. The commission meets at four thirty, and we’ve got a little zoning war brewing.”

  He took it with good grace. “Ah, well, I guess enormous family mansions do not pay for themselves.” He was about to try to nail a date to do something fun and nostalgic together—say, go through her father’s shed looking for a pair of severed fingers, or try to talk a temple into disinterring a seventy-year-old corpse—when a phone rang in the back of the house.

  Jolie held up a hand. “I need to get that. Faye only calls the house for emergencies.”

  She hurried to the kitchen, to the wall phone by the door, and answered without qualification, “Hey. I’m on my way.”

  A man responded in a thick country voice, slightly raised, as if trying to shout above the miles. “Sister Hoyt? Sister Hoyt?”

  At the use of her old church name, Jolie knew instantly that something was amiss and pulled the cord as far as it would go, to the back door. “Yes sir, this is she.”

  “Well, this is Brother Echols,” he bellowed, “from Cottondale,” the name not ringing
a bell till he added in that hardy country voice, “Sorry to be calling sa early, but the sheriff got up with me. Seems like they had a little accident last night at the church. You didn’t go lightin’ any lanterns, or candles, or sech, when you’se poking around thet old shed, did you?”

  “No, sir.” She pulled the cord around the corner to the pantry for privacy. “The electricity was still on.”

  “Well, maybe it was faulty wiring. Fact is, the place burned to the ground last night—or early this morning. Firemen couldn’t tell which.”

  “The church?” she whispered, though his voice was hardy.

  “Naw, shug, just the shed. Third tractor we lost this year. Don’t know what State Farm’ll make of thet. Did you git yer Deddy’s thangs?”

  Jolie couldn’t answer for a moment. She stood there in her big coat, her back to the door, and finally whispered, “No, sir. Not all of it,” her voice so blank that the old preacher instinctively went into a professional comfort-mode and asked if he could do anything, or call anyone, as if she’d lost someone in a car accident. “I wouldn’t worry it,” he said. “Old place was ready to fall in. Yo brother called, too.”

  Jolie straightened up at the news. “Carl called? Why?”

  The old preacher seemed surprised at the question. “Why, same as you—wantin’ the keys to thet old shed. You don’t thank he’d been careless enough to strike a match out there? An old farm boy like himself?”

  He said it as an insider’s joke, as Carl had in his sermons taken to painting himself as something of a bumbling old farmhand, with many references to mis-sown crops and mis-milked cows and the strange ways of the lowly chicken.

  It was part of Brother Echols’s rural-preacher shtick and meant to be a joke, though Jolie didn’t laugh, but answered in blank honesty, “I don’t know, Brother Echols. Did you give ’em to him?”

  “Naw, shug. I got the message on the machine. Would you tell him? I tried the number, but couldn’t git through.”

  She told him she would, then thanked him and hung up quietly, gathering her purse and taking care to open the door without a sound and slip out onto the stoop, which was cold as an icebox. The frost had held another night, the morning hardly brighter than it had been an hour ago when she took out the breakfast tray, though the carriage house was lit and awake.