Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Them-all was ungodly people who moved in over there.’ Yes, definitely she had forgotten what a heathen I was. ‘A low-down, shiftless, white trash woman with three brats but not a husband in sight, nor a job. Furree, her name was.’ She said it with the emphasis on the second syllable, so I pictured it with that spelling. ‘You know what all them Furrees is like.’

  All I knew was that the woman with three children was almost certain to be LeeVon’s mother and I had to remember her name, which was a challenge, as I had readily forgotten the names of everyone else Wilma Lou had mentioned. Low-down woman named Furree; desperately my brain fished for a mnemonic. Ferry boat? Fairy princess? Furry animal? As a child, I’d had a cat named Purry Furry. Mentally, I added that cat’s large fluffy image to the picture LeeVon had drawn of his family.

  ‘… Disremember the mother’s Christian name,’ Wilma Lou was saying with some annoyance.

  ‘How about the children?’

  ‘Oh, them.’ Wilma Lou elevated her gaze in a martyred way. ‘Three little girls all acted like no-account boys. It must have been four years I put up with them, because the littlest one was just a baby when they come and she was running like a wild animal with the others by the time they went. Four years and I never saw one of them clean or decent or going to church or school, just making trouble. Stole every mortal one of my bricks.’

  ‘Your bricks?’ My interest was quite genuine.

  ‘Left over from when Papa built my house. Them brats had no business taking them.’

  ‘What did they do with them?’

  ‘Piled them up and knocked them down and buried them in holes and suchlike nonsense. Their mother didn’t give them no sensible toys.’

  ‘I hope they didn’t throw them.’

  ‘They sure did. The oldest one was the wildest; she went and cut her hair off with a pair of scissors and got whupped for it. She threw bricks at her mother sometimes. But they was all bad children. Wet the bed. That woman didn’t hardly never do no cooking or washing but there was always sheets drying on the line.’ Wilma Lou shook her head, expressing a shocked and superior kind of pity.

  I nodded vaguely, concealing anger for the sake of the girl/boy no one had loved. I wished he had thrown a brick or two at Wilma Lou. Struggling to compose my voice, I asked her, ‘You sure you don’t remember the children’s names?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I ain’t give them a thought for fifty years. It was a blessed relief when they moved away.’

  ‘Moved away to where?’

  ‘Don’t nobody know. Now, that was peculiar.’ Zest for the memory made Wilma Lou sit up straight and look almost pleasant. ‘They went off in the middle of the night and didn’t give no notice, and I ain’t heard nothing about them since. Papa said they were skipping out on two months’ rent they owed, but I had a feeling it was something more than that, because what little bit of furniture they had, they left it behind.’

  Along with a freshly dug grave in the backyard, I hypothesized, and why had hawk-eyed Wilma Lou not spotted that? Duh, because it was covered with bricks, of course, as if the children had been playing.

  ‘Now, once them no-accounts left, things got better,’ Wilma Lou prattled on. ‘The next people moved in was named—’

  One more name would have endangered my precarious hold on Furree. (Furry Purry, Purry Furry, fluffy Payne’s Grey cat in painting.) With no effort at a graceful transition, I stood up. ‘Wilma Lou, I have to go now. Thank you so much for the iced tea and the company.’ I waved away her startled protests with both arms. ‘No, really, I must leave. I just remembered something. Thank you again. I’ll see you some other time.’ But not too soon, I hoped as I bolted out of her house.

  The sun had set, and it was pretty dark out there. I wanted to run, but I didn’t want to blunder into something, so I felt my way from her house to mine, all the time thinking, Furree. Furree.

  I had just gotten back into my own house and turned some lights on when the phone rang. Damn! In imminent danger of losing my grip on the name in my head, I grabbed for something to write with and something to write on – what came to hand was an orange magic marker and a paper napkin with pink flowers printed on it – and I scrawled FURREE before I ran for the phone.

  ‘Hi, Mom!’ It was Maurie.

  Instantly, I stopped cursing telephones. ‘Sweetie! How are you?’

  ‘Chuffed! I had a very good day, plus Cassie and I were talking about you. What’s new with you and your ghost, Mom?’

  That jarred me, partly with relief – Maurie, accepting after all – but partly with resistance to the term she had used. I answered slowly, ‘I don’t exactly think of him as a ghost.’ Even though he was, of course. He had died a painful death, he was angry, he was haunting the place where he had been hurt – all classic ghost behavior—

  Maurie yelped, ‘Him? Don’t tell me you have another one!’

  ‘Oh, shit.’ I’d messed up. ‘No, Maurie, it’s the same one, but you’re not supposed to know he was a boy. Please don’t tell anyone, promise? The police are keeping it back that he was a boy and he wet the bed and that awful mother of his punished him by making him wear a dress—’

  ‘What? I’m a girl, so is it a punishment for me to wear pants?’

  ‘Honey, whatever happened here went way past sexism. LeeVon died.’

  ‘LeeVon?’

  ‘I think his mother killed him.’

  ‘Your ghost’s name is LeeVon?’

  ‘According to his sister Bonnie Jo, yes.’

  ‘Is she a ghost, too?’ Maurie was beginning to sound a bit round-eyed, and I had to laugh, rueful.

  I said, ‘She might as well be a ghost unless I can manage to find her.’

  TWENTY

  Maurie and I talked for a long time, to my great satisfaction. Then, at the insistence of my body, I had supper – one of those Healthy Choice microwaved dinners. But while I was eating it, I looked in the Skink County phone book under F for Furree.

  Damn. I found no Furrees, Furees, Furries or Furrys.

  But finally, as if my brain functioned better after being fed, I had the sense to try Fe instead of Fu, and found nearly a whole page of Ferees.

  You know what all them Furrees (make that Ferees) is like, Wilma Lou had said.

  Actually, I didn’t know. But the way that sounded, the local police might know. I phoned Detective T.J. Tadlock, not just out of civic duty but really wanting to talk with her. However, I got her voicemail. I supposed she had to go off-duty sometimes, but dammit, why right now? With what the shrinks call ‘magical thinking,’ I phoned again, but, of course, the same thing happened and I left a message: my elderly neighbor said the victim’s family was named Feree.

  Then, feeling obstinate but trying to sound as sweet and Southern as pecan pie, I started calling all the Ferees in the phone book, placing check marks next to the few who answered, to whom I said, ‘Hi, y’all, I’m looking for Bonnie Jo. Y’all know where I can find her?’

  They didn’t. And they weren’t very polite about it, either.

  Partly because of this and partly because I had to stand in the kitchen to dial my old wall phone, I gave up for the night pretty soon. I felt tired and grumpy. LeeVon had kept me busy all day, so I had gotten nothing practical done. My laundry was piling up, as were dirty dishes in the sink. I was running out of everything and needed to go grocery shopping. I’d even forgotten to get the mail, and it could just damn wait until tomorrow. I watched some TV, attempted to solve a Sudoku at the same time, fouled it up and went to bed.

  Dressing to go in to work the next morning, Saturday, for a moment Detective T.J. Tadlock wished she could just wear a uniform and not have to make tricky decisions. She had given her all to be a Smokey, and she didn’t just mean hours of training at the gym to stay in shape; heck, she still did that. When it came to subduing a perp, she felt she could hold her own with any cop. But a plainclothes detective, female, very plain indeed in the clothes she could aff
ord, had to look professional.

  Still, uniforms or no uniforms, being treated with respect was more attainable for her than it was for her young, pretty female colleagues.

  The tricky decisions involved being dressy but conservative and never sexy. Sighing, T.J. selected a navy-blue top with a geometric print, matching navy knee-length skirt and navy cork-soled wedgies. The clothes fit her stocky body perfectly because she kept herself fit – no paunch, no flab and no damn cleavage. She took pride in that. Onward.

  The uniform at the desk said, ‘Morning, Detective,’ and handed her two messages. Saying something to the effect that yeah, it certainly was morning, T.J. took the papers and headed toward the coffee machine to get a cup of caffeine, black. Sipping it, she looked at the first paper: Beverly Vernon said the last name of the long-dead kid was likely Feree. T.J. smiled to herself, admiring the persistence of the woman, but the information was not much help. There were whole trailer parks in Skink County that should have been surrounded with razor wire and turned into jails to simplify the legal process. Most of the people in them were named Feree.

  The second message was a whole lot more interesting: a sheriff’s deputy on patrol had stopped a car matching the BOLO and had brought in the driver, Bonnie Jo Slegg, who had shown a disinclination to cooperate and therefore was waiting in a closed room, Interview 3.

  Immediately, T.J. went to have a look at her through the observation mirror and assessed her as a type she knew too well – no longer young but with no dignity of age, beaten up by life and poverty and probably boyfriends. Scraggly hair that had never known professional care. Probably snaggly teeth, ditto. Skinny with the emphasis on the skin, pallid, parched and hungry and not nearly as tough as it looked, psychologically speaking. Slumped at the table, Bonnie Jo looked sullen and vulnerable in the windowless room with handcuff bars and shackle rings mounted on the walls and floors.

  T.J. walked in, and Bonnie Jo jerked to sit up steely straight, like a sprung trap. ‘Hello, Bonnie Jo, I’m one of the detectives. Call me Tee Jay.’ Bonnie Jo Slegg was a witness, not a suspect, and T.J. wanted her to relax. ‘Can I get you a cup of coffee?’

  The Slegg woman sat with her mouth open and her teeth – the yellow-brown remains of her teeth – on display, but she didn’t answer.

  ‘Bottle of Dr Pepper? Something to eat?’

  No reaction.

  So much for hospitality. T.J. tried again. ‘Ma’am, you’re not under arrest or any sort of suspicion. We just want to talk with you.’

  Bonnie Jo Slegg got her mouth moving and spoke. ‘But I told them when they brought me in, I gotta get back! There’s groceries in my car and the milk and such is gonna spoil!’

  T.J. noted that, while there was no doubt Bonnie Jo was upset, she was not shrill, not whining, not even very loud. This was a welcome change from the usual and she gave her points for it. ‘You’ve been here for what, an hour?’

  ‘And the day getting hotter every minute!’

  ‘Where’s your car?’

  ‘Back on Gator Creek Road where they pulled me over, I guess.’ Then she sounded even more distressed. ‘Unless they towed it or something?’

  ‘Let me see.’ T.J. got up, went to the door and called the nearest rookie over, conveying directives for Bonnie Jo’s car to be brought to the station and her perishable foods refrigerated. This took no more than the normal amount of back-and-forthing with the rookie’s commanding officer, after which T.J. closed the door and returned to the table. ‘Is that better, Mrs Slegg?’

  ‘Don’t call me missus,’ she said, no longer upset but not happy either. ‘That slimy Bernie Slegg took off years ago.’

  T.J. sat down. ‘Was your birth name Feree?’

  Her eyes widened. ‘How’d y’all know that?’

  That clinched it for T.J.; she had felt pretty sure this was the right Bonnie Jo, and now she felt positive. But she didn’t reveal the source of her information; it was her job to ask questions, not answer. ‘And you had a brother named LeeVon?’

  Bonnie Jo shrank as if something threatened to hit her, and her face huddled into a mute sort of compression, childish despite her papery, crinkled skin. Jaw clamped, she did not answer.

  T.J. made sure to speak very softly, very gently. ‘The skeleton that lady found a week, ten days ago – wasn’t that your brother, LeeVon?’

  No response.

  ‘Just tell me one thing. Was he older than you?’

  This seemed to startle her into a slight surrender. She made eye contact and nodded minimally.

  This was good, because now that T.J. had Bonnie Jo’s birthdate from her driver’s license, it might help with finding her brother’s birth certificate. ‘Was he a year older than you? Two years?’

  But T.J. could see she had pressed too much. Bonnie Jo looked away and shuttered her face, mulish.

  ‘Nobody’s blaming you for anything, Bonnie Jo. You were just a little kid. Whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault.’

  Nothing.

  T.J. leaned toward her across the table. ‘Don’t you at least want to identify LeeVon and claim his remains so he can be buried in a proper grave with a marker?’

  She didn’t speak, but T.J. saw tears puddling in her stony eyes.

  ‘Miss Bonnie Jo, don’t you want your brother LeeVon put to rest with flowers and prayers?’

  The tears overflowed her eyes, but her rainy face didn’t move and she didn’t make a sound.

  T.J. passed the Kleenex. ‘I can see you do. So why not help it happen? Talk to me.’

  Silence.

  ‘I guess it’s a hard story to tell. Have you ever told anybody?’

  Bonnie Jo took a Kleenex, wiped her eyes, then broke the silence – but only by blowing her nose.

  ‘Have you ever told anybody in your whole life?’

  The woman actually shook her head with emphasis. No.

  ‘Are you afraid? I’m sure you were afraid when you were little, but you’re a grown woman now, Bonnie Jo, and nobody can punish you, can they?’

  Bonnie Jo just stared as if the question confused her.

  ‘It’s hard to tell a secret when you’ve been quiet for so long, isn’t it?’

  No response, not a flicker.

  T.J. decided it was time to push a little. ‘Bonnie Jo, why don’t you just go ahead and tell me?’

  It was as if she had stepped on a land mine. Bonnie Jo lunged to her feet, yelling, ‘What the hell would I tell you for! I ain’t telling nothing to you or nobody else, never! Ain’t nobody got no right!’

  T.J. asked without raising her voice, ‘What do you mean, no right?’

  ‘I mean what happened to LeeVon was a crying shame and ain’t nobody entitled to tell stories or talk stupid about it. What’s done is done and folks in this heartless world ain’t fit to know.’ But then she blinked and her voice, although still fierce, softened. ‘Except maybe for one. She might understand. That woman who done his picture.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  For the first time since I don’t know when, I slept late, waking up around nine a.m. I felt remarkably good, so refreshed that it was as if I had woken up young. As if I had become a child again, light-hearted, happy for no reason.

  Maybe even LeeVon had felt that way sometimes. I hoped so.

  The first thing I did when I got out of the bathroom was head for the studio, eager to see any sign of him, hoping he was back and that he was feeling better.

  Eureka! When I saw my offhand rendition of an old woman on the easel, I convulsed like a girl into a giggle fit: LeeVon had embellished it with a walrus-worthy mustache, a shaggy beard and hair bristling out of the ears, all in black crayon.

  ‘She looks more like Wilma Lou than ever,’ I joked aloud, laughing harder. But then a thought made me stop laughing. ‘LeeVon,’ I asked, ‘was this just for fun, or does she remind you of somebody?’

  Standing there talking to the air, I felt a bit demented, but decided I was no more crazy than people who prayed out loud. I wasn�
�t relaying a message to another world, either. LeeVon was right damn there, in my house, in my studio. I could feel him.

  I could feel his mood, and it made me sigh. ‘I can’t blame you for holding a grudge against her, kiddo. I’d be angry, too. But isn’t it about time you let it go?’

  Yeah, right was the sarcastic sense I got. Like that’s ever going to happen. She killed me. My own mother killed me.

  ‘Half a century ago. Sweetie, what’s it going to take for you to have some peace?’

  The phone rang, and I almost didn’t answer; it felt like such a rude interruption. But I did answer, and, weirdly enough, it was almost like a continuation of the same conversation. It was Detective T.J. Tadlock asking me to please come talk with Bonnie Jo about LeeVon.

  I did not take the portrait, because it had scared her. Instead, I carefully rolled the first picture LeeVon had left me. I did not want to rubber-band it – that’s a brutal way to treat art – so I reached up, yanked an origami butterfly down from the ceiling and tied its soft violet yarn around the tube of paper. Then, without even taking the time to eat breakfast, I went.

  Detective Tadlock must have been waiting for me, because there she was the minute I walked into the State Police building. Print blouse, straight skirt, low heels; a no-frills-no-nonsense woman. She didn’t thank me or waste time in small talk. She didn’t ask me what I was carrying. She said without preamble, ‘Nobody will be videotaping or recording. I will be the only one at the observation window. Bonnie Jo Slegg is here voluntarily and so are you. Neither of you is making a legal statement; since she is not talking to me directly, anything she says will just be hearsay. I hope she’ll tell you what happened to LeeVon, but I promise you, if anything weird comes up, I will forget it instantly.’ She glanced at my roll of paper, then lifted her heavy face to look me straight in the eye. ‘Do you understand what I’m talking about?’

  I hoped she could tell by my smile how much I approved of her. ‘Yes.’

  She led me to the interview room, opened the door for me and stepped aside. When I went in, Bonnie Jo’s clay-brown gaze shot at once to the roll of paper I carried.