Below the Surface

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Below the Surface Page 15

by Cynthia A. Graham


  Lowell’s face tightened and the blood drained from it. His eyes darted from Hick to Carol and he licked his lips. “You turning me into the Feds?”

  Hick sat in the chair in front of Lowell and leaned forward. “Honestly, I don’t give a shit about your bootleggers. But I don’t cotton to lazy investigating.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about that gun Skaggs gave you. Did you check it out?”

  Perspiration was forming on Lowell’s forehead. “I never needed to. I put all the evidence aside for the marshals, but since Deem killed himself they never came for it.”

  Carol stepped forward. “We’d like to see the gun.”

  “Whatever you want,” Lowell said, his hands trembling and his walk sharp and shaky as he rose from his desk. “It’s back here.”

  Hick and Carol followed him to the evidence room in the back of the station. There were filing cabinets and boxes everywhere. Lowell easily found the box he was looking for and brought it to the metal table in the middle of the room.

  “There ain’t a lot in here. Just his sworn confession and the gun, plus a couple of casings we recovered at the scene. The place had been pretty wrecked by the fire so we didn’t find much.”

  Using his handkerchief, Hick reached into the box and pulled out the revolver. The gun appeared to have been recently, but improperly, cleaned. The bluing on the barrel was pitted and there was a bit of surface rust. Squinting, Hick noticed filth in the barrel of the revolver. He smelled it, and then opened the cylinder.

  “No firing pin,” Hick said, looking at Carol and Lowell. “Deem Skaggs couldn’t have fired this to save his life.”

  “What?” Lowell took the gun from Hick and stared at the weapon. “But how can that be? He threw it right on the desk and said he’d used it to kill those men. Could the pin have broken off between here and the church?”

  “It could have,” Hick conceded. “But inside the barrel is filthy. Even with the pin, I doubt Deem could hit the side of a barn with it.”

  “But why …?”

  “There’s a lot of why’s to this case and I think we need to open up and start working together,” Hick said.

  Sheriff Robert Lowell sat at his desk and shook the bromo-seltzer into a glass of water. He took a long drink and then wiped his head with a handkerchief. “I tell you things like this don’t happen here in Birch Tree. They just don’t happen.” He wrung his hands and said, “If Skaggs’s gun didn’t kill Father Grant and Ernest Kelly, why’d he turn it in? And whose gun is that?”

  “Let’s talk a little bit about Nicodemus Skaggs,” Carol said, reaching for the pack of cigarettes Hick held out. “It’s clear he thought there’d be no consequences for killing a priest who was proselytizing his daughter.” She lit the cigarette and took a long drag. Turning to Hick, she said, “But the question is, do we really even think Deem Skaggs believed Grant converted Lavenia or was that his convenient excuse?”

  Hick shook his head. “I don’t believe for a minute Deem thought anything was going on with Lavenia. There’s no reason for him to think it. But, I do believe that for five hundred dollars, he’d do just about anything.”

  “Five hundred dollars?” Lowell exclaimed. “What are you talking about?”

  “It seems Skaggs had five hundred dollars buried on his property when he died. Matt Noble spied him burying it. After Deem died he dug up the jar and gave the money to Lavenia,” Carol explained. “Which, of course, begs the question. Where the hell did Deem Skaggs get five hundred bucks?”

  Lowell shook his head. “You mean to tell me you two think someone paid Nicodemus to shoot Father Grant?”

  “Or take the blame,” Carol offered.

  “It’s hard to say,” Hick said, with a shrug. “But I think it’s worth investigating. The evidence points to the fact that someone else was involved in this thing.”

  “Ain’t nobody in this town got five hundred dollars to just give away,” Lowell said with a frown. “And I mean nobody.”

  “You get a lot of folks passing through?”

  “We get a fair amount.”

  “Why don’t we look at the motel register and see if anyone of interest—”

  The phone rang loudly, interrupting their conversation. “Excuse me. I have to get this,” Lowell told them. He picked up the receiver and said, “Sheriff. Yes. Why yes, they’re right here,” he said, his glance moving from Hick to Carol. “I see. They did? Well, I’ll send them your way. Yes, thank you.” He hung up the phone and said, “That was Jeanine over at the church. She says to tell you a package arrived today she thinks you’ll be interested in.”

  “A package?” Carol said. “I wonder what that could mean.”

  “We best get over and see about it.” Turning to Lowell, Hick said, “Can you check the motel register for any out of town visitors the day Grant and Kelly were murdered?”

  “Sure,” Lowell said with a shrug. “Anyone in particular I should look for?”

  “Pay special attention if anything indicates they came from Little Rock or had anything to do with the prison system here in Arkansas,” Hick said.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because Grant knew enough to get a lot of folks in trouble,” Hick said. “It may be he knew too much and someone got spooked. Let us know what you find.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Lowell said.

  Carol grabbed the gun she and Hick had found at the church. “I’m keeping this for now.”

  They climbed into the car and Hick watched Carol place the pistol in the glovebox. “You sure you want that thing around?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “It may be we need it.”

  Jeanine appeared angry when Hick and Carol walked in the door and she met them, hands on hips and a scowl on her face. “I’m doing my best to help Lavenia get this place cleared out and Father Grant’s old parish is sending more. This package just arrived today, and I can’t decide whether I should open it or send it back. But I thought you might like to see it.”

  Hick glanced at the box and saw the name of Esther Burton, Father Grant’s secretary from Broken Creek, on the return address. “I wonder what it could be?”

  “I have no idea,” Jeanine said.

  “Should we open it?” Carol asked.

  Hick looked at Jeanine and she nodded. “We may as well. It’s not marked personal so it may be parish business.” Reaching into her drawer, Jeanine pulled out a pair of scissors and cut away at the tape securing the box. She fished out a letter and glanced at it, then frowned. “Does this mean anything to you?” she asked, handing the letter to Hick.

  Carol leaned over his shoulder and peered at the letter as he scanned it. It read: This box contains all the Smith files I could find. I will keep looking, but I’m almost positive that this is all of them.

  Hick reached into the box. “These are some of the files Grant kept when he worked at the prison.”

  “Smith!” Jeanine exclaimed. “That was the name of the woman who called to thank Father Grant! The one who said, ‘he’ll know I mean’. Her name was Iris Smith.” Jeanine closed her eyes and put her hand on her forehead. “I’m such a ninny. How could I forget a simple name like that?”

  “You have any idea where she might have called from?” Hick asked. “You’re positive she wasn’t here in town at the motel by any chance?”

  “She was not here when she called,” Jeanine replied. “Like I said before, it was a station to station call and I didn’t recognize the telephone exchange she gave me.”

  Hick pulled a stack of files from the box. “It’s a long shot, but there may be some clue in here. It might not hurt to look through them and see if anything sheds a little light on why Ernest Kelly was here.”

  “I need to get back to the hotel,” Carol said. “Washington is supposed to call at four o’clock.”

  “We can run back, take the call, and grab some dinner to bring back,” Hick suggested.

  Carol’s face flushed.
“Um, I had a dinner date tonight at 6:00, but I’ll be glad to cancel it.”

  Hick shook his head. “You might as well go. I won’t get through all of these tonight anyway.” He sighed. “I’m afraid there’ll be plenty of work left to do in the morning.”

  Carol looked unsure. “I don’t want to leave you holding the bag. It isn’t fair.”

  Hick glanced at his watch. “I’ll just get started tonight. But it’s getting late in Washington so let me run you back to the motel. After that, I’ll get a start on these.” He noticed Carol’s unsure expression and added, “Chances are we’ll find nothing in here. There’s no point in cancelling your date.”

  “I’d be glad to take you to town if that’s where you’re headed,” Jeanine said to Carol. “It’s on my way.”

  Carol hesitated. “Are you sure, Hillbilly? Ken would understand.”

  Hick waved her aside. “We’re leaving soon so you might as well enjoy a night out.”

  “I could have him drop me off here after dinner if you’re staying late.”

  Hick rubbed his eyes. “I don’t think I’ll be that long. I’ll just get a start and we’ll tackle the rest head-on in the morning.”

  Jeanine was gathering her purse and jacket. “Are you ready?” she asked.

  Carol again hesitated, but Hick waved her on. “I’ll only stay until I’m hungry, then I’ll grab something to eat and go back to the motel. We’ll start full speed tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Don’t stay late. Okay?” Carol said, with a slight frown.

  Hick sat down at Jeanine’s desk and lit a cigarette. “I won’t.”

  25

  Friday, September 9, 1955

  The box of folders sat on the desk, and Hick knew they would not be easy reading. Although Jeanine’s desk was now tidy, the still-present smell of smoke from the fire was thick and oppressive. Hick rose and lifted the window. The sun was at an angle where its rays filtered in between the venetian blinds and bathed the room with a pleasant glow that was occasionally freshened by a cool breeze wafting in through the window.

  Hick reached into the box and thumbed through a stack of folders, noting that some had the words, May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace, scrawled across the front. He separated those from the rest and decided to start with them.

  Opening the folder on top, Hick pulled out the picture enclosed. It was a young, colored man whose eyes seemed to hold a sadness and resignation. “These folders are the last days of the lives of men, men made in the image and likeness of God, but who were treated like brutes.” Hick recalled Father Grant’s words and that same sadness and resignation in the priest’s eyes the first time Hick met him. And, yet, he kept the folders, he kept writing, he kept demanding justice for the oppressed. But why did he bother? He had to know that there would be no justice coming. And now these men were gone and there was nothing anyone could do to bring them back. So why had he kept them? What was the point?

  The young man’s name was Isaiah Smith and he had been sentenced to the Pinewood Prison Farm for vagrancy. He lasted only two months at the farm before dying in a prison yard brawl. It was clear Grant knew little about him and the young man had been subsequently buried in an unmarked grave at the prison. The folder was slight with no details on Isaiah Smith’s life before incarceration and few details on what he’d endured. And yet, here he was, staring out from the picture.

  Hick turned that folder over and picked up the next. The old white man’s face appeared to be sunburned and grizzled, his light eyes sunken, his lips parched and thin. He had been sentenced to ten years at Pinewood for larceny. He died in an accident at the prison. Grant wrote: With the deplorable working conditions experienced at this institution it is no surprise this man died of his injuries … injuries he would not have succumbed to if he was not malnourished and neglected.

  It was grim reading—face after face of men, arrested for as little as standing on a street corner too long. Their punishment was to become so-called “leased convicts” used to farm cotton and subjected to long hours of back breaking work beneath a hot, unforgiving sun.

  Edward “Doogie” Smith, Phillip Michael Smith, John Thomas Smith, Henry Baker Smith, name after name rose from the grave, showing Hick their worst moments, their crimes, their sufferings, their loves, and their lives. Some had detailed notes, stories of families left behind and a craving for freedom, but others showed only misery endured in prison. And there were still others that contained only a name and photo, like that of Isaiah Smith.

  White men, colored men, young men, and old men rose up at Hick like ghosts from the past. The one thing they held in common was their powerlessness. Like Abner Delaney, they were without connection, resource, or aid, victims of a system that was stacked against them. It occurred to Hick that the faces that stared out from the photos, the hands that held the sign displaying the numbers that would identify them for the rest of their lives, belonged to men who had been robbed—robbed of their freedom, of their families, and, many times, of their lives. And Grant never differentiated between the guilty and the innocent. Some confessed their guilt and Grant noted that without flinching. And he prayed with them and consoled them just the same.

  The task had been enormous and had obviously taken a tremendous toll on Father Grant and, yet, he’d continued. But for what? Hick knew Grant had sent a summary to the governor but he’d never heard that anything became of that. These men were gone. They were beyond anyone’s help now.

  Why had Father Grant put himself through the agony of reliving the horror of Pinewood Prison Farm? He had meticulously written every detail he could recall. Why would Father Grant devote so much of his life to a cause that could not be won?

  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. Hick recalled Carol’s words about the Japanese internment camps and then thought of the painstaking efforts Father Grant had made to do just that, to denounce the evil he witnessed. Cowardice was not a quality Father Grant possessed. In the war, bravery and victory were equal, two sides of what was understood to be the same thing. There was no point to a war you did not intend to win. But how much courage would it take to fight a war simply because it was right? How much bravery did it require to sacrifice one’s own life in small pieces every day to fight a war that could not be won?

  Although Grant had never gone to battle, he was still a soldier, like Hick, who had been scarred and neither Grant nor Hick had been able to leave their ghosts behind. But Hick began to realize that Father Grant knew that redemption came through small everyday acts of humanity, that the only way to keep the beast at bay was simply to be decent and not surrender. Hick recalled Grant’s last cross-stitched sampler: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. Grant had tried to put the past behind him and had done his best to move forward with his life. But he had not forgotten. Some things are impossible to forget.

  A gust of wind shook the venetian blinds causing them to shudder, and Hick rose to close the window. He paused and watched the sun slowing arcing toward the west. Night would fall and he would, again, feel the sadness that came with missing Maggie. He turned back to the office and recalled seeing Lettie Mae Skaggs, crawling there the first day he and Carol visited. A surprisingly forceful feeling of pain shot through him, pain at never seeing his baby, of never knowing her, or holding her, of never even knowing her name. She was nothing to him but a vague idea. An unidentified, nameless ache.

  He sat back down and looked again at the box of folders. They had been meticulously saved with the pictures and names of the inmates and it suddenly came to Hick that these men, holding their identification numbers, had been more than the numbers they came to be known by. Grant wrote the notes and took down their personal information in an attempt to restore to them what had been taken away: their humanity. He took what would have otherwise been a number, or a statistic, and made damn sure that someone would
remember who these men were, who they loved, and what they suffered.

  Were these men now somewhere with Grant thanking him for the empathy and kindness he showed them when they were in a place where those qualities were hard to come by? Hick could not be sure if Grant had saved these men from any sort of hell, but he slowly came to realize that Grant had saved them from being forgotten, and that was no small thing. To die and simply vanish leaving nothing behind, nothing to indicate you ever existed, Grant had, at least, saved them from that.

  Hick lit a cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke that lingered in the evening ray of sun, rolling and expanding before vanishing. Carol Quinn said she was at peace with the notion that when she died she simply ceased, that there was nothing else, that death was the end. But if what Carol said was true, why did he feel Maggie’s presence with him so strongly at times he would reach out for her? Why did it feel as if she were lingering, pleading with him to not forget?

  He took a long draw and let the smoke seep from his nose and stared out the window with a grim determination. He knew Maggie was, in a very real way, still with him. She was there in the sons that hurt him to look at. She was there in the children who remained and who he had walked away from. He closed his eyes in shame and then took a deep breath. He had to make sure she was not forgotten. Saying her name caused him so much agony, he’d ceased to speak of her. But he needed to. He needed to make sure his boys never forgot how exceptional she was. She was never just Hick’s wife; she was one of the kindest people he’d ever known, a person in her own right, a force to be reckoned with. She never gave up on him when he was hurting. Instead, she spurred him to be better and to help those who needed it. When Hick was investigating the Delaney brothers, Maggie took in the youngest, Mourning Delaney, when their mother died. She had loved the girl like she was her own flesh and blood. Maggie should not, would not be forgotten. He would see to it. He owed her that.

 

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