Cracker Town

by WF Ranew

  Wallace told them about talking to Jamison in his living room. When he got up to get a beer for the man, someone else had walked in the back door and sat in his kitchen.

  * * *

  He had a remarkable memory for details from 1973. But his sickness had freed his tongue. He had nothing to lose in the way of freedom.

  Wallace walked into the kitchen and got a glass to fill with water. He turned and jumped.

  “What the hell you doing sneaking up on me like that?” he spat out in a whisper.

  The man held his hands up to calm Wallace down and stepped over to quietly close the kitchen door to the rest of the house.

  “I followed the bastard over here. He wants to kill all of us. Well, mainly Cleet, but you’ll do,” Gordon Adan said. “He’s convinced you still have Cleet here.”

  “What do you want to do?” Wallace asked.

  “You know what I’ll do. Remember his little sister? And the others?” Gordon said in a low voice.

  Gordon reached over to the counter where Wallace kept the knives and picked up a meat cleaver. He held it up so that the blade glimmered in the kitchen light.

  “This ought to do it,” he said to his brother. “Ease him on back out the door, and I’ll be waiting by the old well.”

  * * *

  After the visitor walked out, Wallace opened the fridge and took out a cold one.

  His hand shook, rocking the can back and forth.

  He went in and handed Jamison the beer after popping the tab and sending up a spray of foam.

  Jamison took the beer and gulped it.

  When the man finished, he bent over to set the can on the floor and looked around the room.

  “Got a collection of shotguns yourself, Wallace,” Jamison commented.

  “Yeah, they were mostly daddy’s,” Wallace said. “He gave me that four-ten when I was eleven years old.” Wallace got up and went to the corner where the guns stood. They were about the only items in the room uncluttered and free of dirt and grime.

  He handed the unloaded shotgun to Jamison, who stood to admired it.

  “Hey, Jamie, you like guns,” Wallace said. “I got an old punt gun my great-grandfather brought over from England. It’s in the smokehouse. Come on and take a look at it.”

  Wallace took the gun back and leaned it in the corner.

  The two men walked back through the kitchen and out the back door.

  Wallace led Jamison to the smokehouse turned into a tool shed, where he kept the antique gun.

  The two men stepped down the back wooden steps and into the yard of mostly dirt and clusters of weeds.

  They passed the boarded-up well house a few yards in front of the shed.

  * * *

  When they got to the tool shed, Wallace turned around and said he had to go back into the house to get the key.

  Jamison stood there.

  Wallace took his time. He went into the bathroom next to the kitchen and peered through the curtain with the lights off. Jamison still waited.

  Gordon hadn’t got him yet?

  As Wallace walked out the kitchen door, he saw two figures, one slumping to the ground.

  Jamison might have felt something, but he did not live in agony very long.

  Gordon’s hand came down quickly and accurately to split open Jamison’s sweaty head. Blood spurted everywhere.

  Wallace backed away as Gordon brought up the cleaver and heaved it into Jamison’s shoulder.

  Jamison expired before the second whack.

  Every nerve in Wallace’s body seemed to quiver and scream out. His knees rattled so badly he had to sit down on the clay earth. He beheld the gory scene before him. Not ten minutes ago, Jamison was talking about shotguns.

  Gordon seemed so calm, something Wallace couldn’t comprehend. They stood there and stared at the bloody scene. Jamison’s head flopped at an odd angle to his body on the ground.

  Minutes passed as the two brothers stood over the body in the spray of light from the kitchen and the single bulb on the back stoop.

  Wallace didn’t worry about who knew about Jamison’s visit. Still, he was afraid. Why is Gordon so cool about all this? Always was. Shit, holy hell. Oh, yeah, right.

  Wallace thought about it and considered a plan. Risky, but it might just do the trick.

  He told Gordon what they could do with Jamison’s body.

  * * *

  “I didn’t know what a devil Gordon was until we went camping and fishing down at the flats one weekend,” Wallace told Red and Cleet. “I was probably twenty, and that’d put him right at sixteen. I remember because it was about a year after they sent Cleet off.”

  Wallace related some things about the camping trip and the topics of conversation.

  “He read his Bible a great deal,” Wallace said. “As a kid, Gordon was problematical, as they say. Always getting into trouble. When he was twelve, his mischievous behavior became anger and rage. Then he got saved. A Bible company man came in the shop one day and invited him to his church. The man also hired Cleet.”

  On the campout, Gordon recalled a night he spent with Mitsy Elton well before she died.

  “I honestly didn’t know a teenage boy could comprehend such behavior let alone do it,” Wallace said. “All Gordon said was he learned it from the Bible company man.”

  Wallace stopped talking and got up for a glass of water. He didn’t offer anything to Red or Cleet.

  He walked to the front window holding the glass and looked out over the pond.

  “I caught some fish in there when I first got here,” he said. “Got old pretty quick. They were small.”

  He related a story about how Mitsy Elton died.

  “That little gal, according to Gordon, was a pissant,” Wallace said. “Intimated he killed her. I’d suspected something like that. I didn’t figure Cleet did it. Hell, Cleet was slow and never all that crazy about girls. But Gordon, he was sex-crazed by the time he turned eleven years old. Told me he’d tapped that little honey bitch a lot before...before she died. Hell, I did too.”

  Cleet said nothing to the comments.

  Wallace continued.

  Gordon saw Cleet go into Mitsy’s house to sell her a Bible but figured his cousin was thinking something else at the time.

  Later in the day, Gordon asked Cleet how it went at Mitsy’s.

  “You told him she ordered a Bible but hadn’t paid for it,” Wallace said to Cleet.

  Cleet jumped into the conversation.

  “He also asked me if I’d had sexual relations with her,” Cleet said. “That’s not exactly how he put it, but I got the idea. I lied and told him no, hell no.”

  Wallace nodded.

  “Many years later and long after Cleet left town, Gordon came to see me. Things weighed on his mind, and he had to talk with me about them,” Wallace said. “He told me nothing I didn’t already know.”

  Wallace had spoken to Gordon after Walter Goings drove to Damville and met with the two brothers separately.

  “He came into town in that slick suit and shiny shoes and accused me of killing Mitsy,” Wallace said.

  “When was that?” Red asked.

  “Oh, before Cleet got out. He knew Cleet was up at the funny farm,” Wallace said. “Said he was friends’ with Cleet. It was in the summer of seventy-two, I’ll reckon. There about. But it was several months before Cleet got out.”

  “Did Goings also accuse Gordon of the murders?” Red asked.

  “Yeah, brother talked to me about it after Goings visited both of us,” Wallace said. He laughed. “Gordon wasn’t as upset as I was. Shit, here this man comes into town and accuses me of murder. None of his business who I screwed. Every boy in town did her.”

  “Gordon wasn’t angry with the accusation?” Red asked.

  “Didn’t seem to be,” the brother said. “He just laughed it off. Then right when Cleet got out of the hospital, the professor and his family got murdered. Guess maybe Preacher Gordon paid them a shut-in visit?” Wallace l
aughed as if what he’d told a joke.

  Red asked him to clarify.

  “Gordon was a preacher to the core,” Wallace said. “That gave him entry into people’s houses. He called these visits ‘shut-in calls.’ Hell, every preacher does that. Part of his job. But Gordon had something else in mind.”

  “And what was that, dare I ask?” Red said.

  Walter laughed again and got to coughing.

  “Gotta cut back on the cigar-smoking,” he said. When he caught his breath, he went on. “Gordon would visit widows, divorced women, spinsters, any woman, even married ones. He screwed dozens of them over the years. He kept one of his choir members on the side. It was open knowledge about her after his wife died.”

  Red moved back to the Goings family murders. He wasn’t sure about the plausibility of what Wallace told him. He knew a minister could visit anyone, but he needed to know more.

  “Wallace, what happened with the Goings family?”

  “Oh, hell. Used a meat cleaver. His weapon of choice,” Wallace said. “I happen to know he used one on Jamison, too. And probably young Mitsy.”

  Red looked at Cleet. He’d teared up. The man could have avoided time in a mental hospital if the cops had done their jobs better.

  “Why that particular weapon?”

  “When he got to be fifteen, Gordon got a job at a diner’s kitchen,” Wallace said. “He couldn’t stand working around with us grease monkeys. He fell in love with knives at that place. Always bring a new one home, usually pretty large ones. And very sharp. Said a man came around every month and sharpened the kitchen knives.”

  “You saw him kill Jamison with one?” Red asked.

  Wallace only nodded. “Cleaver off my kitchen counter.”

  “Afterward, you helped dump the body?”

  “Well, now.” Wallace seemed guarded. “It was Gordon. I couldn’t have stopped it.”

  “Where’s Gordon now?” Red asked.

  No answer.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Red didn’t drive out to the church immediately. That could wait, in his view. First, he wanted to hear Cleet’s reaction to their conversation with Wallace.

  The PI listened while munching on fried catfish as Cleet recounted his version of Mitsy Elton’s murder.

  It was one thing to hear or read an account of something told in snatches over the years in counseling sessions. Now Red got the whole story, in Cleet’s words, true or not, and it proved riveting.

  As Cleet approached the house around two in the afternoon, he saw a man ahead of him carrying a big Bible. The person turned and walked down the side of Mitsy’s house to the back. The man paused and looked up to the stoop.

  “He was my cousin, Gordon Adan,” Cleet said. “I didn’t know what he was doing there. It was hard to catch on to some things back then. I’m better now. Anyway, I turned and started home. About halfway there, I kept wondering why Gordon had gone to Mitsy’s and taking her a Bible. So, I went back to her house, walked up her front steps, and knocked on the door. Nobody answered.”

  As Cleet knocked a third time, he heard voices.

  “I looked through the lacy curtains and saw someone carrying her in his arms. I hid next to the front window and watched,” he said. “I listened. They raised their voices there at the sofa. That’s when things got confusing. The voice didn’t sound like Gordon’s. His voice squeaked at times. I thought it might be his brother, Wallace, but I knew he was at the auto repair shop.”

  Cleet fell silent. He hadn’t touched his catfish plate other than tasting a hushpuppy. He looked down at the restaurant’s aged linoleum floor for a few moments. Finally, he looked up and continued his story.

  “Apparently, she’d been with the boy once,” Cleet recalled. “She said he’d hurt her before.” Cleet pulled back away from the window as the boy knelt on the sofa over her. Then a shadowy figure appeared in the back of the hall. He heard Mitsy scream, “Stop. You’re hurting me.”

  The boy tore off Mitsy’s undergarments. That’s when Cleet heard another voice, a familiar one, but he couldn’t place it.

  “She seemed to change her tune a bit,” Cleet said. “She told him to be gentle with her and romance her some. Or something like that.”

  The boy wasn’t having it, according to Cleet’s account.

  The shadowy figure appeared closer to the sofa.

  “Right then, the view got all foggy for me,” Cleet said. “I felt numb, helpless. But I had to rescue her some way. At that point, I was in there watching. Then the scene turned to a machine-like hum. Mitsy screamed.”

  Cleet started banging on the window screen and finally hollered for his cousin to stop. He noticed Mitsy trying to reach down for the floor with her left hand. He couldn’t see what was there, but he figured she felt around for something to fight him off.

  “Stop!” Cleet cried out. Then he went over to the front door and shook the handle. It was locked.

  “I couldn’t see the room from the front door glass, so I walked over to the window again,” Cleet said. “By that time, the boy was hitting Mitsy with his fists. The shadowy figure picked up something off the floor. It was a meat cleaver or some kind of heavy blade. He handed it to Gordon, who brought it down onto her left neck.”

  Again, Cleet fell into silence for some minutes. Displaying little in emotion, he looked around the room.

  Red broke the quiet of the moment. “Cleet, what did you do then?”

  The man didn’t answer at first. Silence persisted until he got up and went to the bathroom. He returned in a few minutes, stumbling slightly on a crevice in the floor.

  Red reminded him of the question.

  “I ran like hell and didn’t even use the front steps,” Cleet said. “Just ran to the end of the porch and leaped over the azalea bushes. I got home and stayed there. I couldn’t believe what happened.”

  The next day in the late afternoon, the sheriff came to the house and handcuffed Cleet.

  “My brain fogged over again,” he said. “Next thing I knew, they drove me to the mental hospital.”

  * * *

  After lunch, Red and Cleet parted. Red drove to the courthouse and met with the sheriff. Cleet headed to Ellijay.

  The next morning, Sheriff Mason and two deputies went out to the retirement home and brought Adan in to interrogate him about the crimes so many years in the past. The older man, coughing a lot, answered some of the sheriff’s questions but mostly sat in stubborn silence.

  They also rode out to Gordon’s church on the Moultrie highway to question him. Gordon was nowhere around.

  What happened to Gordon Adan? Where was he?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Red intended to go after the Reverend Gordon Adan. The PI wanted conclusive answers to questions about the Goings family murders and Jamison Elton’s killing. Who knows, maybe the preacher might confess.

  Red doubted that would happen. When he last talked with the preacher, Red was again impressed by the man’s commitment to his church. Yet, something churned underneath his bright demeanor. It came through in Gordon’s eyes and the way he looked at people. He smiled a lot, but it seemed more like a smirk or snarl or vile snicker. Something buried deep tore at Gordon.

  Red considered Gordon Adan and killers he’d known over the years. The similarities in their personalities sent a shiver through him.

  * * *

  Most particularly, Red wanted to question Gordon about Mitsy Elton’s death and his motives for the crime. He figured Preacher Adan might have the answers. All of them.

  But getting Gordon to talk truthfully might prove difficult. Red first had to find him. He would go without Cleet since his presence might complicate the meeting.

  Cleet drove back to Damville, and Red left on his search.

  Second, Red wanted to confront Gordon as soon as possible. But he wasn’t out at the church when Red called. He spoke with Sheriff Mason, who contacted a church deacon he knew. The man mentioned the minister’s cracker house on the
Suwanee River where the famous waterway crooked in Fanning Springs, Florida.

  Red knew the area well. Years ago, he helped Florida authorities bust a bunch of drug-smuggling killers there.

  The river harkened to Stephen Foster’s songs about the South, one being “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River.” But anyone living the tune—on a bluff overlooking the languid steam—either had no worries or was on the run from something. You spent your day fishing on the remote stretch of the river or looking over your shoulder.

  According to Red’s sources, Gordon Adan loved to fish and play with his girlfriend. He inherited the property when his mother passed away. Wallace got the family home in Damville, and Gordon became the owner of the river retreat. The brothers sold her home in Macon.

  Gordon, now close to eighty, retired to the cracker house when he turned seventy-seven. He still kept his church ministry but brought on an associate pastor to take Sunday services twice a month.

  “It was hard for him to let go of the church,” Wallace had told Red. “It was his life, he built it, and he defined himself by that congregation. But, once Ginger Gail Gillis got shed of her husband, he hightailed it with her down to Florida.”

  Rubin Gillis died in an auto wreck a mile from the church where he and his wife had been members since its founding. The tragedy resulted from suspicious causes, as someone had tampered with his truck’s brake lines, rendering the vehicle unstoppable.

  As Rubin rounded a curve, a semi swerved over the center line and came straight toward him. Rubin tried to stop. He couldn’t. Instead, his car slammed into the ditch, flipped over several times, and landed top down in a cornfield. His cornfield.

  Red chalked that one up to Gordon Adan. After all, who most would want Ginger Gail’s husband out of the way before the retirement party?

  A lot of questions, but no man and no answers.

  Red drove back home to Savannah.

  * * *

  Gordon Adan knew Red Farlow would catch up with him sooner or later. He prepared for that moment since Red came to visit him back in the fall.