“Doc’s been telling me that for a while,” Hick admitted. “I just don’t know …”
“The only way to do something is to just do it. Just stop.”
Hick shook his head. “But we need to find out about Grant—”
“There will always be another Grant, another appointment, another case. You think these pills are helping you, but they’re not. Even after a full night’s sleep, you’re not yourself. They aren’t helping you at all.”
He sighed and rubbed his face. “What time is it?”
“Eleven o’clock.”
“Shit.”
Carol rose and went to the chest of drawers, opening one and finding an extra blanket. Tossing it to him, she said, “Here. I suggest we try and get some sleep.” She paused at the doorway. “No more cigarettes?”
Hick coughed. “Not tonight, anyway.”
“Good.” She smiled and closed the door behind her. After Hick rose and used the toilet, he was surprised to find himself shivering as if he was cold when he climbed back under the sheet. He wrapped the musty-smelling blanket around him and waited for the shaking to stop. The dream had been so vivid and the thick smell of smoke in the room made it impossible to forget. He wanted to call home and see how the boys were but knew he would only wake Adam or Royal or whoever was at the station that night. He let the feeling pass, closed his eyes, and wished for sleep to find him.
A loud crunch caused his eyes to flutter open. He rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but the crunching sound again slammed into his brain. He opened one eye and saw Carol sitting in a chair beside the door, eating an apple.
“Christ, do you have to make that much noise?” he grumbled.
Taking another loud bite she said, “Yes. And you’re welcome.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe for saving you from becoming barbecue.”
Hick threw his arm over his eyes. “Yeah. Thanks for that,” he mumbled. “What time is it, anyway?”
“Nine o’clock.”
Hick shot up in bed. “What? Why did you let me sleep so late?”
“Because, frankly you seemed to need the rest.” She held up a small paper cup. “I went to the café and grabbed some coffee. Ken was there, and we chatted a bit and then Lowell showed up. I told them both you were a little under the weather.”
“Thanks.”
She took another loud bite and then looked at the apple core meditatively. “By the way, Grant’s funeral is going to be at the Cathedral in Little Rock next Tuesday. I’m not going to be able to go, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to stay much longer. We have to get this thing wrapped up quick. Ernest’s funeral is Monday. They’ve been waiting for his out of town relations to arrive, and I’m expected to be there.”
Hick rubbed his eyes and frowned. “We’re running out of time and I slept in.” He checked the end table and saw the Phenobarbital was missing. He turned a questioning glance toward Carol.
“It’s in my room if you need it. I just think having it sitting right beside you is too much of a temptation.” She chucked the apple core into the wastebasket. “So what’s our plan for the day?”
Hick reached for the paper cup of coffee she handed him and took a long gulp of the hot liquid. “Well, for starters I’m going to need to get dressed. Let me think about it in the shower.”
Carol wiped her hands on her skirt. “Fine. Come next door when you’re ready.”
After she closed the door, Hick threw the old blanket aside and climbed from bed. Stumbling into the bathroom, he noted the charred bedspread in the bathtub. It was a reminder of how much he really did owe Carol. He picked it up and examined it. There was a sizeable hole burned through, but the newspaper he’d been reading took the brunt of the heat. He undressed and then dumped the bedspread on the floor.
Climbing into the tub, he turned on the shower and placed his hands on the wall, letting the hot water pour over him. He inhaled deeply, trying to get the steam into his lungs to clear his mind. With his eyes closed, he recalled each fact of the case, one after another, and it felt like his wheels were spinning in mud. He had two, possibly three murder victims, something that must be a record for a town like Birch Tree. But who was behind all this and why?
What he needed was a Maggie pep talk where she would listen and then remind him of all he’d accomplished since accidentally being elected sheriff in a too-close three-way election. Instead, as he picked up his razor, he was faced with nothing but a steamy mirror and a dripping, iron-stained faucet.
“Son of a bitch!” he complained as the razor nicked his chin. He quickly reached for some toilet paper and his glance fell, once more, on the scorched bedspread. He stared at the hole he’d burned into the fabric and then tossed the razor aside.
Carol was waiting outside leaning against the car when he emerged. “Well?”
“We need to go back to the church.”
21
Friday, September 9, 1955
“May I borrow a cigarette?” Carol asked. “This church visiting is making me antsy. Though my mother would be thrilled, I haven’t spent this much time in a Catholic church since I was a student at St. Theresa’s.”
Hick gave Carol a sideways glance as he handed her the pack, and then put the car into gear. “Funny, I never really thought much about you being Catholic.”
“Well, that makes two of us. I don’t think much about it either.”
“What does that mean?”
Carol lit the cigarette and took a draw. “It means I no longer practice my religion.” She turned and looked out the window. “In fact, I don’t really practice any religion at all.”
Hick struggled with what to say. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to church, but he never considered himself as not being religious. He just always seemed to have some excuse for not going. It suddenly occurred to him that he’d stopped attending church even on those Sundays when he could. A shadow of regret fell upon him as he thought of Maggie sitting there alone. “Why did you stop believing?” he asked Carol, trying to shake the heavy feeling.
“Like many things, that was Uncle Arthur’s doing,” Carol said, flicking some ashes into the ashtray of the car. “When he was on the West Coast working in the internment camps, he began to write home during the war discussing them and how American citizens were being denied due process. And I would read newspapers with headlines saying ‘Japs transplanted’ and kept waiting for some sort of response, some sort of outrage from my church. I was at an impressionable age and, let’s just say, I wasn’t impressed. I couldn’t understand why this was happening, and I was hearing nothing about it from the pulpit or from my friends. It was like they pretended these camps didn’t exist and this injustice wasn’t happening.”
“It sounds like you expected an awful lot,” Hick said. “What did you think they could do?”
“They couldn’t do anything. But to ignore it, to overlook gross injustice because of some kind of misguided sense of patriotism …” She shook her head. “To my way of thinking, it was nothing short of cowardice that nothing was said, that no one denounced the evil our own government was perpetuating. It was never spoken of at church or at home. Inconsistency is something I can’t abide. I got tired of hearing that ‘God is love’ while His people practiced paranoia and hate.” Turning, she gazed out the window, and then sighed. “Anyway, I haven’t been back to church since I went to college.”
“Do you miss it?”
Carol took a drag. “No, I don’t. I have had more peace of mind since leaving then I ever had while I remained. I mean, it took a while. I think dying was the thing that frightened me the most. I would lie awake at night and imagine death and think to myself what it would be like to just be … through. No afterlife, just darkness. Just a cessation of my consciousness, just nothingness. Kind of like when you turn the television off. My life would be a little dot that would linger and then just vanish.” She shrugged. “But I’ve come to terms with
it, with the fact that one day I will no longer exist and everything, for me anyway, will just … stop.”
Hick said nothing, but his hand tightened on the steering wheel. The idea of Maggie was as vivid today as when she was alive. The thought that she was somehow no more made his throat swell.
He glanced over and saw Carol looking at him, her mouth downturned and her eyes sorrowful. “I wasn’t thinking, Hillbilly. I shouldn’t have said anything. But, you did ask.”
“Don’t be sorry. You didn’t say anything I haven’t already thought myself.” He pulled into the parking lot and stopped the car, then stared at the church. “But you must know Father Grant was no coward.”
Carol paused with her hand on the door handle. “I would like to have known him better. In my experience, I’ve seen more moral courage outside the walls of a church than I ever saw within. Take racism. Every day colored people are turned away from restaurants, they’re forced to sit in the back of the bus, drink from different water fountains. For every Father Grant, there’s another who chooses silence in the face of injustice. The problem is you never know whether the silence is due to fear or tacit approval. As we used to say in law school, ‘Qui tacet consentire videtur.’”
“What does that mean?”
She opened the door. “It means he who is silent appears to consent.”
Hick’s mouth went dry as he watched her walk toward the church. Silence. Like the silence of a soldier who watches an infant gunned down the way he did in the war. The silence of a man who lacked the courage to speak when he should have. He closed his eyes and the closest thing in years to a prayer rose in his mind. He begged God to show him, just once, that he was forgiven. A glint of sunlight reflected off the steeple and caught his attention and he followed a great blue heron winging its way through the golden glow of the sunshine, heedless of the sorrow below.
Carol turned toward him with a questioning glance and he opened the door and joined her.
Inside the rectory was chaos. There were men everywhere sweeping, and clearing out Grant’s office. Jeanine was not at her desk when they entered and Hick hollered, “Hello?” She emerged from the office covered in soot and carrying a box.
“Why, hello there,” she said, setting the box down upon her desk and wiping her hands. “As you see, we’re trying to finish up all the cleaning before the construction team gets here on Monday to repair the walls and roof.” A small sob escaped her. “It seems strange that we’re fixing up the place for someone new. I was just getting to know Father Grant, and I didn’t even get to say good-bye.” She sighed. “I guess you never know what will happen.”
Hick’s last sight of Maggie in the rearview mirror of his car as he left with Carol last year for Broken Creek flashed through his mind and his eyes burned with tears. He sniffed and asked, “Is Father Glennon here?”
“Oh no,” Jeanine replied. “He’s gone to Little Rock to see about the funeral arrangements.” Her chest puffed out when she added, “I don’t know why they can’t bury Father Grant from here. None of us will get to go the mass. It’s just aggravating, is what it is.”
Glancing into Grant’s office, Hick said, “We were hoping to look in Grant’s office one more time but it looks pretty busy in there.”
“They’ve been clearing everything out of there like it was rubbish,” she said with a frown. “Truth be told there’s not much worth saving.” She pointed to the box she’d been carrying. “The sacramental records were saved, but not much else.”
“What about Father Grant’s personal files? Are you aware of any papers from Pinewood Prison Farm?” Hick asked. “Do you know if they survived?”
Jeanine stared blankly. “I’ve never heard of any prison records. Why would Father Grant have records from a prison?”
“He worked there as chaplain years ago,” Carol explained.
Jeanine shook her head. “I’m sorry but if it wasn’t sacramental it would not have been in the safe.” She appeared to be thinking and added, “His personal papers and correspondence would have been in his file cabinet or desk, but I can’t see any of that would have survived.”
Hick nodded toward the office. “Would it still be in there?”
“Oh no,” Jeanine said. “Everything has been thrown out by the trash barrel.” Her voice cracked when she added, “to burn.”
“Do you mind if we take a look out there?” Hick asked. “To see if anything looks important?”
Jeanine shrugged. “Go right ahead. It’s bound for ash anyway. Help yourself.”
The sunlight stabbed Hick’s eyes as they stepped from the darkened rectory. Scanning the horizon, he spotted a large mound of broken furniture and headed in that direction. They stood before it and Hick felt dismayed.
“What an absolute mess,” Carol said with a frown.
Hick spied a filing cabinet and headed toward it, throwing open the first drawer. “Nothing but ash,” he said with disappointment. “Hardly a page intact.”
“What did the files contain?” Carol asked.
“Grant only showed me the file on Abner Delaney because he thought it might help keep Abner’s boys out of Pinewood. He said he never showed the files to anyone because he felt that it would be betraying a confidence to the men he kept them on. I can tell you that Abner’s file had a photograph, records of his court proceedings, copies of correspondence to his family, and Grant’s own personal comments on how Abner was treated. As for the others, I have no idea.”
“My God,” Carol said with an exasperated sigh. “With that sort of information about the prison and how it operated we could be looking at anyone. A complicit warden, a corrupt judge. I’m sure there are plenty of individuals who would do anything to keep that kind of information from the public.”
Hick finished his inspection of the filing cabinet. “If someone wanted that information gone, they succeeded. It’s gone.” His eye fell upon a frame, tossed among the rubble and he went and lifted it. It was the cross-stitch sampler. He took his handkerchief and wiped the soot from the glass. One thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead – Philippians 3.
Carol was walking back and forth among the rubbish in a grid pattern. “Nothing,” she said, with a shake of her head.
Hick turned and watched her as she walked, meticulously searching the ground beneath her. His eyes scanned the horizon and the sight of what appeared to be a shovel near a tree caught his attention. He moved toward it and saw that a hole had been dug beneath the tree recently. He picked up the shovel, let it bite into the earth, and lifted something heavy wrapped in newspaper.
Joining him near the tree, Carol asked, “What did you find?”
Squatting down beside the hole, Hick began to unwrap the item from the newspaper. “I wonder why this is here,” he said, staring down at a gun.
22
Friday, September 9 1955
When Hick was in Europe, during World War Two, Sergeant Pat Brody had handed him a Smith and Wesson with, “You might as well hold on to this. It won’t help that poor son of a bitch any more.” Hick had put the revolver in his knapsack as he and Brody watched the medics carry away the young lieutenant. It was typical to take weapons from fallen soldiers, but a revolver was an uncommon asset for an artillery man.
Staring at a similar gun lying in the grass, Hick felt a wave of nausea. Although he had never fired the lieutenant’s revolver in battle, it had been his companion in the night when he held it in his hand and contemplated how easy it would be to end all the pain of war, how easy it would be with one bullet to the temple to forget the terrible thing he had done. He had grown attached to the gun, keeping it with him always, believing that it gave him some sort of control in the chaos. It gave him the ability to go home whenever he chose …
“Lowell said that crazy clodhopper plopped his gun on the desk when he confessed,” Carol said breaking into Hick’s thoughts. “So whose gun is this?”
Hick hesitated to retrieve the pistol from
the grass and Carol noticed. “You don’t much care for guns do you, Hillbilly?”
“Why do you say that?” Hick asked, with an edge to his voice.
“Well you don’t carry one, which is unusual for a sheriff, to say the least. Even Ken noticed.”
“Well, maybe Ken ought to mind his own goddamned business.”
“Geesh, don’t get defensive. I just asked a question.”
Hick sighed. “No, I don’t carry a gun. I don’t need a gun in Cherokee Crossing.”
“And that’s the only reason?” Carol asked, with a hint of skepticism in her voice.
“Yes.”
She shrugged. “Okay.”
Hick pulled out a handkerchief and picked up the gun. He carefully opened the cylinder. “It’s been fired. There are only two bullets left.” He looked around him. “Why would it be out here? It’s not rusted or muddy. I don’t think it’s been here long.” He inspected the gun. “It’s a .45 caliber. Do you know what caliber gun Skaggs turned in?”
“I could ask Lowell, but do we trust him?”
“No, but we’re going to have to. We need to see the gun Skaggs turned in and the casings. I reckon he kept them in an evidence bag. I know I would have.”
Carol nodded. “He did. The evidence bag was on the desk when we picked up Ernest’s personal effects. It had casings and gun noted on it.”
“This gun was left here for a reason. Someone was coming back for it. Someone who thought they’d be back to pick it up in a day or two.” He rubbed his eyes and then made up his mind. “I hate to say it, but we’re going to have to take this to Sheriff Lowell and see what he knows.” He pocketed the gun and then turned to head back to the car almost stumbling over Lavenia Skaggs carrying a box to the trash pile.
“Where the hell did you come from?” Hick asked, momentarily startled by her sudden appearance.
Lavenia appeared nervous. “I wasn’t spying. I need to talk to ya’ll.”
“About what?” Carol asked.
“I’m worried. There ain’t many on this green earth cares about me and mine. We’s orphans now ’cause pa killed Father Grant on account of me. And Father Grant never done nothing wrong. He was a good man and now he’s dead and it’s all my fault.” She gulped back a hiccupping sob and continued, “I hate what my pa did and I hate that he done it on account of me.”
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