An hour and a half after I started, I was in Natchez and I stopped for a hamburger at a franchise place.
Maybe I was making this trip for nothing, but I couldn’t just wait by myself, and I especially couldn’t wait in the house on Park Boulevard.
After Natchez I stayed on 61, paralleling the Natchez Trace Parkway and slipping through Port Gibson and the other old antebellum river landings until I reached Vicksburg.
It was just after eleven, and there was still a small clot of Friday night traffic, mostly teenagers from across the river in Louisiana, but also a scatter of tourists here to see the Civil War battlefield.
What was it she’d told me?
I couldn’t sleep. I went for a drive. I do that sometimes.
I crossed the river on the old bridge and was back in Louisiana. I could smell the heat rising up from the bean fields, and the memory of projects David and I had done over the years flashed through my mind. We’d dug into a temple mound just south of here, in Tensas Parish, and we’d excavated a prehistoric village near Tallulah in the squalid August heat. Lots of sweat, lots of memories.
After refueling in Monroe, I headed north on 165, into the hills.
It was one-thirty when I reached Farmerville, a tiny settlement that had once been a cotton and logging center. I was in the pinewoods now, and the fresh smell of ozone had taken the place of the hot, wet river air.
A few years previously we’d done a project at the Lake D’Arbonne State Park, which some local politicos had brought into being by damming the bayou. Now I crept through the quiet downtown district and found the motel that perched on the north side of the lake. I woke up the clerk, took a room, and collapsed on the bed in my clothes.
Here, in the antiseptic surroundings of the motel room, with its institutional decor, perhaps I was safe from the ghosts.
The next morning, Saturday, I got up at nine and went to the dining room for breakfast. I ordered biscuits and asked the waitress if she’d ever heard of a minister named Thomas Wilbur.
She frowned.
“I know a Fred Wilbur. He’s pastor over at Shiloh Baptist. Is that who you mean?”
“How old is he?”
“Older than me, and I’m pushing forty.”
“Was his father a minister?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t go to that church. They’re out in the country, know what I mean.”
I nodded.
It made sense. The problem was that by now the elder Wilbur might be dead. There was only one way to find out.
I paid my bill and went back to my room, where I looked up the name Wilbur in the Farmerville directory.
There was a Thomas Wilbur listed on Highway 15, north of town. I thought of calling first to announce myself and then decided I’d have better luck face to face.
The cashier told me how to get there. It was two miles past the cement plant, a frame house on the right. But I ought to call, because the old man spent most of his time fishing these days.
I found it without any trouble, a single-story structure a hundred yards back from the highway. There was a vegetable garden to one side and an ancient Galaxie in the driveway. A couple of fishing rods leaned against the wall beside the front door, along with a tackle box. I knocked on the door.
The man who answered was about seventy, with gray, crew-cut hair and a T-shirt that said Renew.
“Reverend Wilbur?”
He nodded.
“Yes, sir.”
I told him my name. “I’m from Baton Rouge. I wonder if I could talk to you about something?”
The old man’s head gave a quick nod.
“Yes, sir. You mind sitting out here on the porch? I was getting ready to untangle one of my reels.”
I sat down beside him, legs dangling off the porch, while he opened his tackle box and took out a reel whose line was knotted with backlashes.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, fingers working at the tangles.
“Do you know a woman named Cynthia Jane Brown?”
I watched one tangle come loose, and he started to pick at another.
“I know her.”
“She was in some trouble back in the 1970s.”
“That’s right.” Another tangle came free.
“I wonder if you could tell me what it was about?”
The current knot was harder, and he turned the spool back a little to work at it from another position.
“Dope. Cynthia got in with some people who were selling dope.”
“Was she convicted of possession or distribution?”
“I think they said possession with intent to distribute.”
“Cocaine?”
“Marijuana. They didn’t have so much cocaine then. There was also attempted murder, but they dropped it to assault.”
“Attempted murder?”
“She stabbed one of the people she was buying it from. Turned out later he was trying to sell it to her little sister. They dropped it when she pleaded guilty.”
“You seem to remember it pretty well.”
The rest of the backlashes suddenly came loose, and he uttered a little sigh of satisfaction.
“Yes, sir. Always felt sorry for Cynthia Jane. Her father was a weak man. Drunkard. Cynthia fell in with a bad crowd, like a lot of ’em do. Motorcycle types. But I always thought she had something in her, something different.”
“How long did she serve in prison?”
“Two years. Then she got out, and I didn’t hear from her until she married that rich man, Devlin.”
“You’ve kept up with her?”
“Not until lately.”
The sickness in my belly started to creep out to the rest of my body. I wiped my face. My skin was clammy.
“Lately?”
He set the reel down and looked me in the eyes.
“She came up here a day or two ago. Looked me up. We talked a lot.”
I leaned toward him, senses suddenly alert. “When exactly? Was it yesterday or the day before?”
Wilbur picked up the reel and then reached into his tackle box for a can of oil.
“Let’s see, today is Saturday. She came up Thursday night, I guess, because she was here yesterday, Friday morning.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure as can be.” He finished oiling the reel and spun the spool. “Is it important?”
“Very important.”
Because if a man had left his house yesterday morning, he couldn’t have been killed a few hours later by someone two hundred miles away.
I relaxed for the first time since I had stared into Clyde Fontenot’s dead face.
“Do you know where she is now?” I asked.
He placed the reel back in his box and wiped his hands on a rag.
“I do.”
I waited, ready for him to tell me it was none of my business. But he surprised me. “She’s at the motel,” he said. “By the lake.”
“By the lake?”
“Yes, sir, that’s the one.”
The same motel where I was staying. I must have been so tired I’d driven right past her car in the lot.
“She’s still there?”
“I think so.” He got himself to his feet.
We shook hands.
“Thank you, Reverend.”
He nodded. “Goodbye, Mr. Graham.”
I left him on the porch with his fishing gear and drove back to town.
Marijuana in the sixties and seventies was a bigger crime than it is today. And if she’d tried to stab somebody who was corrupting her little sister, I could hardly hold that against her. But most important, she had an alibi for the murder of Clyde Fontenot, and since he had probably been killed by the same person who’d shot Douglas Devlin, she was innocent of that crime as well.
I came to the traffic signal in the middle of town and chafed as I waited for it to change. A few minutes later I turned into the driveway and wound slowly up the hill to the motel on top.
There was o
nly a sprinkling of cars in the parking area, an Olds, a carryall of the type surveyors use, a couple of pickups.
And down near the end a Ford station wagon that I recognized. Hers.
I wheeled in beside her and jumped out before the engine had stopped turning. I hurried to the reception desk, heart pounding.
I asked for Mrs. Devlin’s room, and they told me it was 250, on the other side.
So I had slept not a hundred feet from her.
I cut through the passageway and went up the steps and knocked on her door. There was no answer.
Sudden fear gripped me. What if she was inside, too depressed to come out? What if she’d taken an overdose? The minister hadn’t indicated there was a problem, but people sometimes concealed things.
I banged on the door again, and a maid stuck her head out of the room next door.
“There’s nobody in there. I just cleaned it.”
I thanked her and went back down.
Maybe she was in the restaurant. But there were only a few tables occupied, and she wasn’t at any of them. I decided to go back to my room and call Wilbur. Maybe he had some idea.
I opened my door and walked in. Something was different. I sensed it. I wasn’t alone.
All at once the door closed behind me, and I wheeled around.
She was standing there in cut-off jeans, a grin on her face.
“Hi,” she said.
TWENTY-ONE
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You’re shaking to pieces.”
“I guess it’s relief,” I said. “I’ve been scared to death.”
“About what?”
I told her about Clyde Fontenot and how I figured he’d been killed for the Oswald money and watched her face pale with the shock.
“And you thought maybe I …?”
“What can I say?”
She stepped back, nodding.
“I guess I can’t blame you. How did you find out I was here?”
“Just a guess.” I told her about how I’d found the letter from Thomas Wilbur in the trunk at the foot of her bed.
“I admit I didn’t have any business snooping.”
“No,” she said quietly. “You didn’t But I know leaving in the middle of the night seemed pretty odd. What else did you find in the trunk?”
I explained about the photo album and then about the receipts.
“It looked to me like you were trying to figure out how your husband managed to pay off some pretty hefty debts.”
“I was.”
“And did you?”
“I think so.”
“Was it the Oswald money, then?”
She exhaled and walked over to the bed and sat down.
“I think that’s the source, yes.”
“And it’s still somewhere on the property.”
“I think so.”
“He wouldn’t have taken it all and put it into his bank account?”
“Not Doug. He knew that would be a red flag to the IRS. He didn’t want any records, I’m sure. No, for his purposes it would have been better to leave it right where it was and draw on it when he wanted. He would eventually have spent it all, of course. He had no sense of self-denial.”
I nodded. “And the money stash is the reason you’re against the dam.”
“One reason.” She looked up at me, her eyes beseeching. “Don’t you see, Alan? I love that land. It’s all I’ve ever had. I stayed with a bad marriage for too long. I watched my son die. I don’t want it all taken away. The Oswald money would just make it possible to keep going. I don’t want to be rich. But I’d like to have enough to live on. The rest, well, I’d plan to turn it over to Mr. Wilbur for children with problems.”
I sat down on the bed next to her.
“Did you know Clyde Fontenot was looking for the money, too?”
“I wasn’t sure. Nobody took him seriously.”
“Somebody did.”
She reached out for my hand, and I felt her squeezing with her own.
“My God, it almost makes you believe that …”
“That the kids’ stories about Oswald are true. I know.”
“Did I really upset you that much?” I whispered. “You had to come up here?”
“That much,” she said. “The other night, when you backed off, I didn’t know … I thought there was something I’d done. Then I told myself not to act like a slut. I had to come up here and sort things out.”
“Are they sorted now?”
“For me, yes. What about you?”
“I don’t know.”
She took a step toward me and put her hands on my shoulders.
“Can’t I help you make up your mind?”
“Probably. That’s what bothers me.”
“Alan, you’re too good.” She stepped away quickly. “She must be some woman.”
“Some woman,” I repeated.
I drove down to a hamburger place and got the works, double everything with a couple of orders of fries and malts and soft drinks, just in case she didn’t like one or the other. When I got back, she was in a wet bathing suit, running a towel through her hair.
“They say exercise takes your mind off things,” she said wryly. “Let me get dry.”
She turned for the bathroom, and that was when I noticed the ugly rake-marks on her flanks.
“My God—” I started, but she wheeled to face me, so that I couldn’t see. “Did Doug do that?”
She bit her lip, and for an instant she seemed like a little girl caught out.
“No,” she said in a small voice. “I did.”
“What?” But even as I asked, I knew she was telling the truth. “But why?”
She looked me in the eyes then, and I saw something I hadn’t seen there before, something at once wild and desperate.
“Have you ever hated what you were so much you wanted to die? I guess if I’d had any guts I’d have cut my wrists. But instead I just raked my fingernails over my skin. I felt like I deserved the pain.”
I thought of the long nights in the women’s prison and nodded slowly. People did strange things in confinement, and who was I to judge?
“It’s okay,” I said and pulled her to me.
“Yes,” she whispered against my shoulder. “I keep telling myself that.”
It was deep into evening and we were sitting by the pool when I asked her about Timothy.
“Could he have done it, paid Oswald or been the paymaster?”
Her right hand twisted a corner of her blouse.
“Timothy was a hard man. He didn’t have any use for people different from himself. I was never close to him. If he’d ever found out about my trouble with the law, he would have disinherited Doug. Timothy’s people were plantation class. He was states’ rights, segregationist, anti-communist, isolationist.” She nodded. “Yes, if anybody could have done it, Timothy could.”
“And Doug was a lot like him?”
“Douglas wanted to be, but he was the weak son. Buck was more like Timothy. Doug told me when they were growing up, Buck kept to himself and left for the Army as soon as he could. I got the impression Buck inherited Timothy’s tendency toward action. Doug, the younger son, just talked about it.”
“There was friction between the two brothers?”
“The normal amount. I think Doug was jealous of Buck. But Buck only came back to visit once, and that was when Timothy died, so there wasn’t much to worry about. Buck wrote a couple of times a year, that’s all. He didn’t care about the land and he seemed to be happy with Doug managing it.”
“Doug’s friend was Blake Curtin,” I said and waited.
“Yes. But Blake went off to the Marines. Doug,” she said with barely concealed contempt, “never went anywhere.”
“Has Blake ever been examined to determine the cause of his speech loss?”
“I think he went to the V.A. hospital once. They sent him back without anything definite. But let’s not talk about all that. I want to forget it, at least for n
ow.”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“You know, I was scared to death when I checked in here that somebody would recognize me. I thought everybody on the street would look up when I drove by and say, ‘My God, it’s Cynthia Jane.’ But they didn’t. It’s so nice to know you can come home after twenty years and nobody cares.” She stretched and smiled. “I guess there’ve been plenty of scandals since then.”
“Like how you got into my room,” I said.
“That was easy. Reverend Wilbur called me as soon as you left, so I found the maid and gave her a cock-and-bull story and she let me in.”
We spent the night in our own rooms, and the next morning, Sunday, I drove back to Baton Rouge. Cyn said she wanted to stay a day or so longer, attend one of Wilbur, Jr.’s, church services, as sort of a tribute to the old man who had helped her. I had the old house to confront, because now that I had exorcised my fears about Cyn, I had only my own secret terrors to deal with. And only by dealing with them was there any hope of seeing past them to what was going on in Jackson.
It was one-thirty when I reached St. Francisville. I’d promised to be in the day before to sign a statement for Sheriff Cooney, but I figured one day didn’t matter, so I stopped at the courthouse and went inside. The sheriff’s office was the only office open, and when I told the woman deputy why I’d come, she gave me a funny look.
“It’s Sunday,” she said. “Come back tomorrow.”
I left, having done my duty, and arrived home just after two. The old house still loomed menacingly on one side of the boulevard, but I was ready to confront it now.
Because now I knew: The looks on my parents’ faces hadn’t been because of JFK; that had been a convenient maneuver of my mind, struggling to protect me by submerging a more personal problem into something cosmic.
After all, it had been cosmic to me.
I remembered it all now. My parents’ voices upstairs in that bedroom they’d shared for so many years. They hadn’t been yelling, but they didn’t have to. I’d known something was wrong as soon as he’d come in. He’d taken her by the arm, and they’d gone upstairs together that October afternoon, and I’d wondered if one of the aunts or uncles had died. I’d gone to stand outside their door and that was when I heard it.
Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries) Page 14