Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  ‘Is LeeVon with you?’ she demanded, halfway to her feet, sounding more frightened than hopeful.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I found that, with her, I could be matter-of-fact about LeeVon. ‘I think he stays at the house.’ I sat down, not across the table from her but just around the corner. ‘That’s where he died, isn’t it?’

  She nodded and settled back into her chair, seeming to understand that ghosts haunted the places where they suffered wrongful deaths. ‘What’s that?’ She remained fixated on the rolled-up paper, so I slipped off the violet yarn, unrolled the picture and placed it between us so we could both look at it.

  She stared for several moments before she said in a whisper, ‘What is it?’

  ‘The first drawing LeeVon did for me.’

  She didn’t look at me but her voice glared. ‘What the hell you talking about? What you mean, he done this for you?’

  ‘I mean, a few days after I found the skeleton, I put out paper at night and found pictures like this in the morning. I assume they’re by LeeVon. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ She sounded shaky and sardonic. ‘That’s Ma with her whupping strap.’ Her thin forefinger with its frail, ragged nail hovered over the towering, shouting woman. ‘That’s my little sister, Sukie,’ she continued, pointing to the smallest figure. Her hand trembled, but her voice did not, as she moved on. ‘That’s me in the middle; I was five years old. And that’s LeeVon.’

  ‘Why’s he wearing a dress?’

  ‘Ma made him. We all three wore dresses all the time so she could get to our hind ends easier to whup us. But she beat LeeVon the most. And mocked him.’

  Bonnie Jo hadn’t yet looked me in the eye, and now she turned her face away. I wanted to know what else Ma had done to LeeVon, but sensed I needed to back off. So I asked, ‘Where was his father?’

  She slewed around to look hard at me. ‘We didn’t have no fathers. Ma didn’t do no marrying, just a lot of screwing around.’

  ‘Was her name Feree?’

  ‘Still is.’

  ‘She’s still alive?’

  ‘Alive and mean as ever in some government project up in Alabama. Flat on her back and it’s her turn to piss the bed. I hope she fries in hell.’

  I heard something ready to either snap together or break apart in her low-spoken words. She was as open to me as she would ever be. Keeping my voice as quiet as hers, I said, ‘Tell me what happened to LeeVon.’

  Observing from just outside the interrogation room, T.J. was taking notes and passing them on to an officer at a computer: search Feree, female, first name unknown, age approximately 85–95, check with Department of Indigent Elder Care in Alabama. Hearing that the abusive mother was still alive startled and troubled T.J., raising as it did the question of prosecution, if it could be proved that she was indeed responsible for the death of her son. In order to do that, witnesses were needed. Search local birth records approximately 1951–1954 for Suky/Sukie Feree. T.J. based those dates on Bonnie Jo Slegg’s age as recorded on her motor vehicle operator’s license. If LeeVon, Levon, Lee Von, Lee Vaughn, Leigh Von et cetera Feree was older than Bonnie Jo, he should have been in school, so T.J. had expanded the search for him to include kindergarten and first-grade school records countywide, but so far it hadn’t found him. If it wasn’t for his skeleton, T.J. would have found it hard to believe the boy had existed. Finding out anything about him was like trying to track a ghost.

  She had general ideas about his brief life, though, from observation of other dirt-poor families and, in fact, from growing up with them. She knew that his shoes had probably been a pair of secondhand or pass-me-down flip-flops, even in winter when the temperature dropped almost to freezing. His clothes – dresses – had probably come from thrift shop sales: stuff a grocery sack full for a dollar. He might not have gone hungry, but it was not likely he and his sisters often had a real cooked meal, unless it was maybe heated-up frozen pizza. More likely they had eaten canned ravioli, boxed macaroni and cheese, Ramen noodles, peanut butter, spongy white bread: the stuff the food pantries gave out free. T.J. pictured them snatching whatever was available, running off with it to eat outdoors, maybe getting a beating if they took something their ma wanted for herself. T.J. could not imagine there had been much dependable routine in the children’s lives, not with men coming and going, their mother partying with them and taking them for every penny she could get. No doubt there were single mothers who did a good job of raising their children, but the Feree woman sure as hell wasn’t one of them, making her son wear a dress and then mocking him, probably calling him a girl, putting down her own sex and despising men at the same time. T.J. had a pretty clear picture that LeeVon’s mama was a sociopath.

  By picture, she meant her own theories, not that weird painted paper lying on the table in the interrogation room. What that looked like, she didn’t want to know, or where it came from either.

  Almost whispering, keeping her gaze and her right hand on the crude picture of LeeVon in his triangle of a dress, Bonnie Jo said, ‘Ma didn’t want no boy child. She never called him LeeVon, just Lee or Lee-Lee. I think she told people he was a girl since the day she birthed him. She hated men, you know.’

  ‘She did? Because of, um, her job?’

  ‘Yeah, she said men only wanted one thing, and if she had her way, she would cut all their pricks off – every man in the world.’

  ‘Wow.’ Then my feelings splashed up against a wall of horror. ‘Oh, no, please don’t tell me—’

  ‘No. She didn’t do nothing to LeeVon down there. But she still messed him up pretty good.’ Tracing the drawing with her fingertip, Bonnie Jo spoke even more softly. ‘He wasn’t stupid. Since the time I can remember, LeeVon knowed he wasn’t no girl. I mean, it wasn’t hard for him to figure out once me and Sukie come along. Plus in our house it was hard not to see men sometimes with their pants down. So he knowed, but Ma kept on making him wear a dress just to spite him. She wouldn’t never get him no boy clothes, so he had to dress like a girl or go naked.’

  My emotions, in a whirlpool, spurted up an insight. LeeVon had painted pictures for me but never written anything on them, not a single word. ‘Was she so crazy she kept him out of school?’

  Bonnie Jo gave me a look of sour amusement. ‘She was crazy, all right. But none of us Ferees was ever much for school. Nobody come looking for us.’

  ‘Oh.’ The implications made it difficult for me to speak. ‘Nobody interfered.’

  Bonnie Jo heard what I wasn’t quite saying. She nodded. ‘It was hell. There was never a day LeeVon didn’t fight her back, and when she whupped him, she wouldn’t stop till he cried. She was mean to us girls, too, but not that mean. I remember one time LeeVon swore at her that he hated her. She said right back, calm as a carcass, “I hate you, too,” and I felt like it was true.’

  Five years old and faced with such a truth, Bonnie Jo could not have been much better off than LeeVon.

  The silence that followed was so hard and dark I had to break it. ‘So is that why she killed him? Because she hated him?’

  ‘No, it was because he wet the bed.’

  But Wilma Lou had said there were sheets drying on the clothesline all the time. ‘Once too often?’

  ‘No, it was usually me or Sukie that wet the bed. Us kids all slept in one bed, and Ma was in the other bed with a boyfriend or a bottle, and we was scared to get up in the dark and go to the bathroom when we didn’t know what was going on.’

  ‘But had she ever come close to killing you or Sukie?’

  ‘No. I’m not sure she meant to kill LeeVon. She just put him in the bathtub full of hot water, like, to teach him to be clean. He screamed and screamed and never stopped screaming, it was so hot. And she kept running it hotter, and she kept pushing him back into the water, it seemed like forever.’

  Perhaps I would not have realized how horrible this was had I not myself encountered the water in that house. I sat there in that police station interrogation room
thinking about scalding burns, deep ones, second or third degree, over most of the little boy’s body. And I couldn’t say a word.

  Bonnie Jo kept touching the figure of LeeVon in the picture he had made, stroking him. She kept her eyes on him. ‘Me ’n’ Sukie run and hid under the bed,’ she said in a whispered monotone. ‘We couldn’t stand it. But once she finally let him out and the noise stopped, we thought it would be OK, maybe. We stayed where we was and I guess we went back to sleep. When we woke up in the morning, we seen LeeVon laying on the floor in the bedroom with us, with the bottom half of him all swole up and—’ Bonnie Jo choked on what she was trying to say, but fought to say it anyway. ‘And red and split open like a hot dog over a campfire, and his skin falling off.’ She jerked her head around to look at me, eyes huge, words spilling like tears. ‘His skin puffed up in white patches then just slid on to the floor and laid there like toilet paper.’

  ‘Shhh,’ I said, ‘shhh. Oh, you poor thing—’ Or something equally inane, reaching toward her but hesitating with my hands in midair, not sure whether she would accept my touch.

  She kept staring at me. ‘He was making noises like an animal.’

  ‘He was still alive?’ The instant I said it, I knew I sounded unforgivably stupid.

  Bonnie Jo’s eyes narrowed and she flared at me, ‘Course he was still alive. It would’ve been too simple if he just died. Me and Sukie had to watch him and we didn’t know what was going on. Ma heaved him back up on to the bed and sprinkled baby powder on him. She give us Pepsi to feed him but he wouldn’t open his eyes or swallow or anything, just whimpered like a puppy. He was sweating one minute, shivering the next. After a while he got stinky, and yellow stuff started to come out of him like slime.’

  I could barely speak. ‘How long?’

  ‘How long this went on for? I don’t remember. It’s all a bad blur and I was too young – I didn’t understand what it was about. One day we woke up and he wasn’t there in the bed with us. Mom said he was gone and don’t ask no questions, just go put our stuff in trash bags because we had to move to Alabama. So we got out of there but it was all mixed up in my mind, like Ma done it to punish Sukie and me for spilling Pepsi on LeeVon. I thought maybe she give LeeVon away to a circus or a zoo or something.’

  I didn’t know what to say. There were a lot of things that clamored to be said. But what I finally asked was, ‘Where’s your sister now?’

  ‘Sukie? She come back here to Cooter Spring, same as me.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Before going back into that interview room, T.J. had found out two things. One, that old lady Feree, Romaine Louise Feree, was eighty-three. She must have started having babies without the benefit of marriage pretty damn young. The other was that Sukie Feree had done the same thing. She had produced two baby Ferees, both now grown, the boy doing OK in the Air Force but the girl a crackhead and prostitute.

  T.J. had to take a deep, steadying breath before walking into the room where Beverly Vernon and Bonnie Jo Slegg were talking. Both women hushed and looked up at her as if she was a stranger. Bonnie Jo seemed like the last leaf hanging on a tree, frail and shaky. Beverly Vernon seemed more like the tree, determined to support her.

  T.J. said, ‘Mrs Vernon, I need to speak with Miss Bonnie Jo privately.’

  But Bonnie Jo grabbed for the other woman across the table, clutching her. ‘No! She stays.’

  ‘Of course I’ll stay,’ said the Vernon woman in soothing and motherly tones.

  Restraining herself from letting go of a gusty sigh, T.J. sat down at the table with them rather than standing over them. ‘Bonnie Jo, I need you alone to get your legal statement concerning your brother’s death.’

  ‘You already know what happened.’ In her voice, T.J. could hear that she was choking back tears.

  ‘I know what happened and I would like to see your mother charged with murder for what she did.’

  ‘That’s all right with me.’ Bonnie Jo sounded pretty well used up. ‘She’s still mean as a snake.’

  ‘She’s competent to stand trial, then?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You wouldn’t consider her senile?’

  ‘Not hardly. She remembers all her cuss words. But it ain’t like I seed her lately. I can’t stand to go visit her no more than once a year around Christmastime.’

  T.J. confirmed the mother’s full name and current residence with Bonnie Jo, then said, ‘Sometime soon I need formal statements from both you and your sister, if possible. Does Sukie remember your brother’s death?’

  ‘We didn’t neither of us understand what was going on at the time.’

  ‘But she remembers.’

  ‘You better ask her.’

  Beverly Vernon butted in. ‘Detective, aren’t you getting a bit ahead of yourself? Doesn’t the District Attorney have to decide whether to prosecute?’

  ‘After I get the evidence together, yes.’

  ‘And even though it’s a murder charge, because the Feree woman is so old now, won’t there be some question whether to proceed?’

  ‘I’m sure there will be.’

  ‘And what will settle that question?’

  ‘You’d better ask the District Attorney,’ retorted T.J., who did not like finding herself to be the one interrogated. Also, there were things she could not say in front of Bonnie Jo.

  But Beverly Vernon seemed to know those things anyway. Turning to Bonnie Jo, she said, ‘It’s really all up to you and Sukie, depending on whether you decide to cooperate. And it seems to me that the first thing you need to know is what LeeVon wants.’

  Tough-minded, as was top priority for any detective, T.J. policed this statement. ‘You mean what you believe LeeVon would have wanted if he had lived.’

  Beverly turned her head with the patience of a kindergarten teacher. ‘No, Detective Tadlock, that’s not what I said. I mean what LeeVon wants right now.’

  This was the sort of thing T.J. was afraid of, but a detective cannot show fear. T.J. hardened her face. ‘What the hell are you talking about? You can’t expect me to deal with crazy ideas of—’

  The Vernon woman interrupted, steady-eyed and oak-solid. ‘Detective, you know exactly what I mean, and we all have to deal. Now, it’s not that I mind having LeeVon around the house. He’s good company. But he’s not a happy camper. He deserves to rest in peace, and we—’

  ‘We nothing!’

  ‘We need to do what would be best for him. He has victim’s rights, doesn’t he?’

  T.J. took a deep breath, let it out through her sizeable nose, then said, ‘You do what you need to do and I’ll do what I need to do, OK, Mrs Vernon?’

  Cassie had to admit that Maurie was redeeming herself from having fled when they were at Mom’s. Now, this Saturday, Maurie had sneakily and mendaciously phoned Aunt Gayle to make sure she would be at home; Maurie had made the trek from Ithaca and picked Cassie up at Creative Java; with Cassie in the passenger seat, it was Maurie who quested through Montclair to confront the dragon, Gayle Vernon Perkins, aka Grendel, in her lair. Silently, Maurie spurred her mechanical steed onward, and Cassie noticed an adamantine glint in her sister’s eye.

  They hardly spoke a word. The matter was too serious for chit-chat.

  Arriving at Aunt Gayle’s condo, Cassie wondered not for the first time why in the world this fashionable woman wanted the old Montclair house. It was shabby Victorian, whereas Aunt Gayle’s place was ultra-slick, ultra-chic, hard-edged modern, all chrome and glass, through which could be seen low-slung black leather furniture.

  Aunt Gayle herself met them at the coffered metal door wearing a sleek black tunic and leggings, edgy steel jewelry, and her hair all but lacquered into its red wedge. ‘Darlings!’ she cried, her coolly arched brows at variance with the warmth in her voice. ‘Cassie! Maurie didn’t tell me she’d invited you.’ Hence the raised eyebrows. ‘Please, come in.’

  ‘I think not, Ms Perkins,’ said Maurie in a remarkably flat tone Cassie had never heard from her.


  ‘Ms Perkins’ froze, teetering on five-inch heels. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Cassie fielded that like a pro, surprising herself. ‘You ought to beg our pardon, after trying to have our mother put away.’

  Maurie added, ‘I am very glad indeed to inform you that your ploy has failed.’

  With a hurtful pang, Cassie hoped this would become true. Mom still had her court hearing on Monday to get through.

  Her indignant aunt was saying, ‘Ploy? Just what are you accusing me of?’

  ‘We’re beyond “accusing.” It’s proven fact,’ Maurie said in the same stony tone. ‘What you did – having mom effectively kidnapped based on merest hearsay – was felonious, but it would be complicated to have you arrested by the authorities in Florida, so Cassie and I are more inclined to file a lawsuit.’

  Cassie expected her aunt to keep on protesting innocence, but quite the opposite; Gayle Perkins stood rigid, righteous and reddening with outrage. ‘I only did what I thought was best. You yourself said that your mother—’

  ‘Is my mother and you need to let her alone,’ Maurie flared with such heat that Gayle stepped back. ‘If you do not cease and desist harassing Mom and causing her mental anguish, Cassie and I will file against you—’

  ‘Oh, really?’ interrupted Gayle in a sarcastic drawl.

  ‘Quiet!’ Maurie snapped, teacherish.

  ‘Shut up and listen!’ ordered Cassie at the same time.

  ‘Listen? The coffee-brewer says listen? The P-H-whoopie-D says be quiet?’ Gayle laughed, but not very convincingly. ‘Who do you think you are? As far as I’m concerned, you’re just a pair of brat kids! I happen to know powerful people, influential people, and—’

  Cassie burst out, ‘Bullshit, Aunt Gayle! You’re just a poser, a snob and an aging hipster. Nobody gives a shit about you.’

  This shocked Gayle silent for just enough time to give Maurie an opening.

  Maurie went on, ‘File against you for punitive damages on the basis of unlawful detainment and defamation of character. You are to cease and desist any machinations involving our mother or you will be sorry. Are we clear?’