“Folks around here adore Miss Snopes.”
A cold chill settled over me as I recalled the two officers who had arrived with Mike last night. “Who …”
“Dean,” Betsy whispered.
Claudia closed her eyes. “Yes. Dean Sowers.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Pineville, Alabama, 1973
CIGARETTE SMOKE DRIFTED throughout the kitchen, wisps and tendrils stirring in the faint afternoon breeze and vanishing through the half-inch opening in the windows. The heat of dinner slid out as a mild moistness of the March wind freshened the air. William poured another cup of coffee from the pot Juanita had left simmering on the stove. He sat down at the table again, pushing his plate back. Roscoe toyed with his pork chop bone, even though it was bare of meat and sucked dry of juice.
Both of them tried to ignore the soft sobbing of Maybelle in the adjacent bedroom and the quiet voice of Juanita as she comforted her sister-in-law.
Roscoe cleared his throat. “Didn’t think y’all were going to have any right now. I thought you were going to wait till you were out of this mess.”
William sipped the scalding coffee and flinched. “This was an accident.”
Roscoe looked up at him. “A preventable one.”
William shrugged. “You hear that Bull Connor died?”
“Finally. Good riddance to bad garbage.” Roscoe put the knife down and pushed away the plate. “I saw Isaiah at the bank in Carterton last week.”
William sat quite still. “And?”
“He asked me if you were still interested in that big rig.”
Roscoe watched as William stared, unmoving, at the steam rising from his coffee. In the bedroom, Maybelle’s sobs had quieted, although Juanita’s voice remained a soothing drone.
“What did you tell him?”
“That you had taken a job making deliveries for a man in Gadsden and would have to see where that went.”
William snorted.
“Fortunately, he didn’t ask any more than that. But I think he knew. They all know, all the old men who run these towns. They just don’t talk.” Roscoe took a pack of unfiltered Camels out of his shirt pocket and shook one out. “But make no mistake. I won’t lie for you if someone asks specific.”
“I don’t expect you would.”
Roscoe lit the cigarette. “You said it would be a few months.”
William pointed at the bedroom door. “I can’t quit now. I got too much riding on the money.”
Roscoe nodded. “Maybelle still liking the new place?”
“Yeah. She’s fixed it up real sweet-like on the inside. The baby will have his own room. We’ll have y’all over soon.”
Roscoe hesitated. “Who’s the landlord?”
William looked away a moment. “Chris. Pass me a Camel.”
Roscoe slid the pack across to his brother. “Chris? As in Christopher Patton? Didn’t know he’d branched out into real estate. His daddy must be proud.”
“I’m sure he is. And, um …” William paused to light the cigarette. He inhaled deeply and let the smoke trail out slowly. “… his daddy has him riding with me on the runs.”
Roscoe leaned back in the chair, fighting the surprise and the fear. “You have lost your mind.”
“What am I supposed to do? Tell ’em how to run their business? Old man Patton wants Buck to teach Chris the business. Buck ain’t much keen on it, but they’re making it work.”
“Why in the world … I thought you said business was off.”
“Shine business, yeah. More and more places have liquor by the drink. Less demand. But plenty of folks still need cheap booze. And we’ve started running … other things.”
“Drugs?”
William flicked the first clump of ashes into his abandoned dinner plate. “Nah. Buck doesn’t want any dealings with drugs. There’s a couple of other groups already running them, don’t like competition. One right there in Fort Payne is particularly nasty. Buck doesn’t want to fight the feds and other organizations.”
“So what are you running?”
“Cassette tapes.”
Roscoe didn’t get it. “The kind you can buy anywhere?”
William shook his head and sipped the coffee. “Nah. These are live concerts, back door copies, stuff like that. We run ’em into Gadsden, Birmingham. That’s why they want Chris to go with me. Learn that side of it, where to sell. Kids mostly, suburbs, projects—doesn’t matter. White kids buy from him. Black kids buy from me. Money’s good.”
“For cassettes of music.”
William shrugged and looked out the window.
“So. Not just cassettes.”
“Don’t ask about this, Roscoe. Just don’t.”
“Sounds like you’re more likely to get caught.”
William took a long drag, nodding. “Another reason for Chris to come along. Baby boy gets caught, Daddy pays all the bills.”
“So he says.”
“Well, I know you won’t.”
“Got that right.”
William looked around the kitchen. “Juanita got any of her fried pies tucked away?”
Roscoe pointed at a Hoosier cabinet on the back wall of the kitchen. “Top shelf. Hand me one while you’re at it.”
His brother stood and pulled open the door on the cabinet’s hutch. He prowled about a few seconds, then pulled out two half-moon-shaped pastries. He handed one to Roscoe. “So why were you over to Carterton talking to Isaiah?”
Roscoe sniffed, twirled the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. “I did it.”
William froze, then dropped slowly back into the chair, a wide grin slowly spreading over his face. “You for real?”
Roscoe couldn’t hide the pleasure anymore and grinned. “Yep. I signed the lease this morning. Made the first payment.”
“Like you said, on that place next to Ed Walker’s hardware?”
Roscoe nodded. “Yeah. Isaiah’s giving me the loan on the first stock inventory, which will ship in this Thursday. Appliances in the front, repairs in the back.”
“Well, you been slaving for old man Holland so long, it’s about time. You got savings to back it up?”
Roscoe took a short drag, then stubbed it out on his plate. “Enough to tide me over in an emergency, but not much else. I’ll be working harder than I ever did for Mr. Holland.”
“You think they’ll accept a black man on the square?”
“I reckon so. I talked to Ed. He seemed OK. The pols over to the courthouse may not like it too much, but I been in their houses aplenty, working on their stoves and fridges. They know what I’m about.”
William laughed. “I’ll tell Chris to keep ’em off your back. His daddy ought to be good for something besides bailing his kids outta jail.” When Roscoe didn’t respond, William’s laughter faded, and he clapped his brother on the forearm. “Seriously, man, I wouldn’t involve you with this stuff.”
“Just don’t get yourself killed.”
“Doin’ my best, brother. Doin’ my best.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Pineville, Alabama, Present Day
I STAYED SO long at the museum that afternoon that dusk had settled on Pineville before I made my daily jog. Misses Claudia and Betsy had been more than eager for me to gather the names of Vietnam veterans for their records, but just a few hours prowling in old newspapers and record books had told me that I’d already mined that field. Most of the vets had moved away or passed on. Miss Betsy said the rest didn’t even acknowledge there had been a war, much less their part in it. That left the three I already knew about: Hal Prentiss, Trapper Luke Davidson, and Roscoe Carver.
As I stretched, then set out on the run, I found most of Pineville deserted. The dinner hour had passed, and everyone had already watered the flowers, traded all the latest gossip with the neighbors, and burrowed in for the night before my feet slapped their way down Maple Street. All that was left were random clusters of children chasing fireflies. I loved the fact that in an era of
video games and smartphones, kids still loved chasing dancing lights at dusk.
I was glad, too, for the time alone. As much as I wanted another chat with Miss Doris, I also needed to plan to decide exactly what I would do next, who I would talk to, and how I’d react when the news leaked out about why I’d truly made Pineville my new home.
I tried to clear that thought out of my head. Pineville most certainly was not home, and it would become even less like one shortly. Pineville had destroyed my family. As much as I liked some of the people here, it would never be home.
Which, of course, made me think of my real home, that cottage in Nashville with hardwood floors, Craftsman trim, and knockout roses ringing the brick walls outside. It was cozy and I adored it, my refuge from the world. I’d bought it after the divorce from Tony, who had kept the furniture and the house we’d bought together in Brentwood, that nouveau riche area south of Nashville. I didn’t fight it—I hated that house and the overpriced antiques he’d peppered it with in order to impress his clients. I especially hated the big four-poster king-sized bed in the master suite.
The rhythmic sound of my feet on pavement sped up as an image of that monster flitted through my head. With its posts as thick as my thighs and a heavy wooden canopy, it anchored a room that reminded me more of a movie set than a bedroom. I had despised it even before I caught Tony in the middle of it with two of his high-profile clients, a power couple under investigation for mail fraud. The woman he’d been caressing had invited me to join them.
I had walked out and not seen him since, so my last memory of him was a freeze-frame of those wide, sensuous brown eyes, cunning and smirky underneath a shock of silky hair as thick as any I’d ever had my hands in. Eyes cloudy with desire and satisfaction as he’d assumed he would pull me into his world.
He later blamed my obsession with Daisy Doe as the reason he’d strayed, but Tony’s affairs had been about money, not passion. He loved manipulating people much more than he loved taking them to his bed. Even me. And when he’d learned he couldn’t manipulate me into giving up my family—including Gran—he’d turned everything he had against me. He’d planned for me to discover him in that tryst, and he never really believed I would be willing to walk out and leave it all behind. Tony believed that because the trappings meant more to him than I did.
That part I’d never told Gran about. She despised him enough just thinking he’d cheated on me—and that he had a punch like a Golden Gloves boxer. Gran had grumbled that any man who’d hit a woman who carried a gun for a living had to be a few sandwiches short of a picnic. When she suggested that she could make a connection between his manhood and her pinking shears, I reminded her that not even Tony O’Connell was worth going to prison for, for either of us.
But the rest, the truly evil rest of it, the reasons that Tony still lived like a bore worm in my heart, that was between me and God.
God. I glanced up, almost involuntarily, as if I expected to see an old man’s face hovering in the sky. I knew better. Gran had taught me a lot about God. What she hadn’t taught me, though, was how to forgive God for Tony and Daddy and Mama … and all the other pain my family had been through. For no good reasons, at least none I could see.
I left Maple Street at the park and made a circuit around the grassy square, breathing hard, the sweet scents of honeysuckle and wild onion tickling my nose.
The pain Tony had left in me made sure I wanted nothing out of that house. His alimony payments made up the difference. They paid for my cottage, allowing me to finally make the leap in careers that had brought me here. I had left the Nashville Police Department and Tony behind and had been working for my father’s former law firm as an investigator when my mother died. The timing had been right to finish this. To end the horror that had hovered over my family for more than fifty years.
So maybe that’s why. All the pain. To bring you here.
No! I pushed the thought away. I refused to believe that God would allow so much pain to come to people, just to push me to this point in time, to this place.
For a time such as this.
That quotation from the book of Esther hung in my head like smoke. I ran faster, trying to clear it. No. Nothing could be worth what we’d been through.
I circled behind a set of swings, where a lone father pushed a giggling girl, repeating a singsong rhyme as she squealed and begged, “Higher, Daddy!”
“Higher, Daddy!”
I stumbled over an uneven clump of grass and almost went down as a sharp memory flashed through my mind, almost blinding me. “Higher, Daddy!” I slowed and then stopped next to a towering oak tree. I pressed my hands against it and stretched my legs, then prowled back and forth in front of it so that my muscles wouldn’t cramp.
I couldn’t have been more than three. We were moving out of the only home I knew, and I’d been crying most of the day. The huge moving truck appeared like a dragon to me, rumbling and consuming our stuff. I clung to a stuffed bunny and kept hiding in one closet after another. Finally, my father had pulled me out and carried me to the back yard. He’d cuddled me, whispering. What his words were I couldn’t remember, except that he made me laugh. Then he’d set me in one of the swings on the playset we were leaving behind. He pushed me higher and higher until my mother called us. Until it was time to go. Exhausted, I’d slept in the back seat all the way to Tennessee.
I paced in a wider circle, not wanting to cool down yet. Finally, enough of the memory passed that I could run without tearing up. Focus on the case. On the here and now.
As an adult, I knew our move had been a shift from the military JAG office to a civilian position in Nashville, but as kid, it felt as if my life was ruined. My friends, gone. Daddy had made it OK by showing me he was still there, still taking care of me. It was just the reassurance I needed at that age. My mother told me that life had been great during those first months in Nashville, but it was a short-lived reprieve. Slowly the obsession returned, until in 1984 he felt he had enough evidence to force a confrontation with Esther Spire’s killer.
Apparently, he did.
But I did not. I had remnants of his files and a few hints that might mean nothing. A cat disgruntled with a deputy who had worked my father’s murder. A pharmacist who had signed my father’s autopsy report. And Roscoe, who had found the first body and might or might not remember something from that time. I had gathered as much physical evidence as I could. It was time to start asking some specific questions. That was what solved most cold cases. Not physical evidence. Questions. The right questions to the right people at the right time. Buried memories solved more cold cases than DNA. DNA just made better news reports.
Where to start? The minute I pressed Miss Doris harder about those years and her son-in-law in particular, she’d get suspicious … and her network of “girls” was no place to drop a secret. Roscoe might answer without spreading the word, given what I knew of him from my father’s files. Doc … maybe.
I exited Maple and rounded the square again, my feet drumming a steady rhythm as I passed the last open shops. As the lights winked out, I spotted a sign that seemed distinctly out of place to my city-bred mind. There, taped to the window of the florist, a bright-green poster board held the message SADDLES NOW AVAILABLE.
My feet slowed and I stopped. Saddles? In a florist’s shop?
Then it all came back. Floral saddles. Sometimes called clips. For the tops of gravestones.
So … there might … just be a way to get the town talking about Daisy Doe again without me completely dropping the veil. There was something I could do, if I could do it without anyone finding out, that might just start tongues to wagging.
After all, Decoration Sunday was coming, and I knew a grave that definitely needed tending.
It took a couple of days. I didn’t want to break my daily routine of work, shower, nap, run, supper too much, or Maude would notice. So I let her think I was shopping for date-night outfits in Gadsden for two days just before Decoration Sunday.<
br />
The graveyard at Pine Grove was unlike any of the city cemeteries I’d known. Each family’s plot stood out for its unique border, ground cover, and headstones. Between the graves, the sandy ground shifted underfoot, occasionally dropping grains into any passing shoe. Patches of grass marked unused plots, but those were few and far between. The cemetery dated back to way before the founding of the church, and some of the earliest graves were from the 1700s. A dirt road circled through the middle of the cemetery, and on the far side of it, some plots had become so overgrown that they had reverted back to the forest that encircled the area. Broken primitive headstones could be seen among the trees, covered in lichen and pocked by two hundred icy winters and roasting summers.
The sadness I felt over the forgotten, abandoned graves surprised me. Especially since I had come to tend just such an abandoned grave.
I parked in a curve of the dirt road and slid out, my gaze taking in the full view. Wind, forced into a stiff breeze by the parallel ridges on either side of the valley, stirred my hair, and I pulled it back into a ponytail. The air felt hot and dry, and everything smelled of mown grass and damp earth. I dragged my duffel of tools from Belle and headed past a few of the older plots.
Daisy Doe’s grave was near the back of the cemetery. No borders or flowers, just a sandy plot with a tiny headstone. Wilted dandelions sprouted from beneath the granite, and dried spikes of ragweed poked up through the red sand. Someone had spent the money to have four lines engraved on the stone:
DAISY DOE
UNKNOWN FEMALE
DIED 1954
BELOVED MOTHER
I stared at the last line—an obvious nod to my father, the boy abandoned by his mother’s death. I wondered if they knew exactly how beloved she’d been. “Bobby Doe” supposedly had not talked at all after he’d been found. Who told him she was gone? Old JoeLee or one of his minions? A social worker? I’d read a lot of my father’s diaries, but he’d never discussed that part … or his silence, beyond noting the fact that he’d remained mute until he’d learned English and a new resident at the group home had befriended him about a year later.
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