CHAPTER 23

Roy Tull,

Halifax County, North Carolina, Saturday, July 23, 1949:

He was fishing with a cane pole held out over the muddy water when the car hit the bridge railing above him. There had been occasional cars and trucks passing overhead, and their tires on the boards made a brief sound like a musical riff as they drove over the small bridge. When they left the other side he could look up and see them briefly on the road before they were swallowed by the greenery, and it was mildly interesting to guess what kind of vehicle had played the short wooden song before it appeared at the other end.

This one played only a few staccato notes before there was a loud crack and its headlights appeared at the edge of the bridge, looking surprised. It was a big touring car, creamy yellow with red wire wheels, and it paused and then followed the broken railing down into the water. The people in the car screamed as though they were on an amusement park ride. It was less than a half dozen feet from the roadway down to the water, but the car broke the surface with an impressive splash, which drenched the boy. He set his fishing pole down beside him.

The car had landed on its wheels. The creek was neither deep nor fast-moving, and the water just broke over the window sills of the vehicle. He could see heads. There were at least four people inside. A woman continued to shriek, sounds of alarm rather than pain. The boy knew the difference. The driver’s door was pushed open against the slow current, and a man waded toward him. He was a handsome man. His pale suit and red suspenders matched the car. A woman’s voice followed him.

“Get some help, Francis! Send that boy for the police!”

He turned and looked back at the car in the middle of the stream. Only the top of the hood and the tall roof were visible above the gentle stream.

“For what?” he called back. “Are you nuts? I can’t have the cops here! We’ll be all over the papers.”

Another man had levered himself out of the vehicle, and he waded chest-deep to the front passenger door. He slowly forced it open and helped a woman emerge. She was very pale and had dark hair plastered to her cheeks. Even from the river bank, the boy could tell that she was beautiful. Another woman continued to scream from the back seat.

“OhmyGodohmyGod I’m stuck. I’m gonna die here. Somebody. Get me out, don’t leave me. Pleeeease!”

The wet man on shore looked at the boy and jerked his head toward the car.

“See if you can help out, wouldya? Six bits in it for your trouble.”

The boy stood up and waded into the water. He automatically scanned for snakes. In Georgia, they would have been a concern in water like this, but North Carolina was altogether more civilized, even with its snakes. Still, the habit was ingrained. The water was cool and felt good. He made his way to the car. The second man and the dark-haired woman were by the rear door, and they looked at him as he came near.

“My leg. Owwww--Larry, get me out,” the woman in the car wailed.

The second man, Larry, looked at the boy through water-spotted spectacles which had miraculously stayed on his face during the crash.

“Hush a minute, Bappie. You’re in no danger. What’s your name, son?”

“Roy, sir. Roy Tull.”

“Can you swim, Roy? Her leg is stuck fast somehow. Let him by, Ava.”

“I can swim, sir.”

The man said there was no danger, but Roy had seen the big car shift in the current. He knew that the bottom of the small river was uneven and that the car was resting close to the hole he had been fishing. If it dropped even six inches, the woman in the back seat would drown. The woman named Ava looked at him. Her dark eyes were apprehensive. She knew.

He took a breath and plunged. There was almost no visibility under the water. He could make out the edge of the car door and nothing else. He felt his way down the woman’s leg, and sensed her trying to pull away from him. He felt the problem--the seat cushion she sat on had dislodged and slid forward in the crash, trapping her ankle on the floor. He pushed at it hard. It only had to give up an inch before her leg came free.

The group of them thrashed their way across the soft bottom to shore. The first man, Francis, was standing up on the bridge with another man who had stopped his car to offer help.

“This fellow’s going into town,” he called. “He’ll have them send a wrecker for us.”

“Have a taxi sent, too,” the woman called Ava said. “Unless you want a parade. Ask him if he has a cigarette. Mine are wet, and I want one awful bad.”

Francis scrambled down the embankment and held out a red-and-white package of Luckies. He lit one and handed it to her

“You can scram, kid,” he said, doling out smokes to the others. “Give him a buck, Larry.”

“Wait,” Ava said to him. “Don’t leave. I need to talk to you. Get your dollar, though, before they forget all about you.”

Bappie sat on a rock and rubbed her ankle. “This would be a party if we had a bottle,” she said.

“We do,” Francis said. “Hey, kid. Be a sport and get wet again. It’s a good cause. There’s a bottle in the map box.”

Roy did as he was asked. The water seemed colder the second time in, and the car waiting in the middle of the creek seemed like a dead animal. He wasn’t quite sure what the map box was, and he submerged himself several times before he located the bottle.

“I had a full one in there, and a half-full one,” Francis said when he handed it to him. “He brought the full one. You’re all right, kid. You’re a real lucky charm.”

“What’s your name?” Ava asked.

“Roy Tull, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Roy Tull. That could have ended badly for my sister. I want to repay your goodness.”

“Awwww, leave the kid alone,” Francis said. “He has places to be.”

She ignored him and kept her dark eyes on Roy’s. She was very beautiful for a white woman. “I came from here,” she said. “I lived here as a girl. Do you live nearby, Roy? Are you a dark son of Carolina?”

“I stay with my aunt, ma’am. I come here from Georgia.”

“What do you want most?” she asked. “What can I do for you?”

The question confused him, but he thought he’d better answer. “I want to be a doctor, ma’am. A doctor.”

She looked steadily at him for a moment and then looked over her shoulder at the second man. “Can he do that, Larry? Be a doctor? Is there a school?”

“I don’t know. There are Negro doctors, I suppose. Winston-Salem, maybe.”

“See about it,” she said. “Look after it. I want this boy to become a doctor, if that’s what he wants to be.” Her eyes returned to his. “Good luck, Roy Tull.”

***

Present Day:

When things went bad, they went bad fast.

I met Sydney for breakfast in Atlanta, at a place called the OK Cafe. I had never liked to eat in the morning. I pushed away my fried potatoes, nearly untouched, and concentrated on my coffee. Across the table, she ate pancakes, eggs, and sausage with complete concentration.

“How’s yours?”

“Good,” she said between mouthfuls. “I’m an absolute pig for breakfast. I probably won’t eat again ’til tomorrow.”

I looked out the window. Two Atlanta police cruisers pulled in and parked away from the other cars in the lot. Four officers met between them, walked across to the front door, and out of sight. In a minute, a hostess led them back and past our table. They were all large and creaked with the weight of the equipment they carried. The last one caught my glance and held it until they were past our table.

“So what do we know?” she said. “Enough to make a decision?”

“How do you mean? Decide on what?”

“Primarily, whether to chase this any further. Is Wanda Sutton your blackmailer, and if so, what are you gonna do about it?” She waved happily to our server and indicated her empty cup. “Bottom line--do you think she’s guilty of extortion? If you do, what have you seen supports that?”

“Run-down house with a brand new Harley in the drive,” I said, ticking off a finger. “Restored antique station wagon, with what sounded like a hot rod engine under the hood. Recent purchases, and not cheap either.”

“Huge big-screen television on the wall,” she countered. “I’d like one of those myself. My TV’s so old it has dials on the front.” She looked up at the waitress and nodded her thanks for the refill.

I asked for the check.

“Also remember,” she said, “that if these people got a windfall, they aren’t likely to redecorate their house. They won’t invest, or tour Europe. They’ll buy some toys, but a lot of any windfall is going to partying. Mother and son both.”

I remembered something. “The boat. New, and looked like he used it once and lost interest.”

“Right,” she said. “Lots of recent money, and no one’s working at a legit job. Wanda gets a small monthly check, and Arthur probably sells a little dope--no apparent reason for sudden wealth. Without trying to prove anything, does your gut tell you it’s your dad’s money?”

“I think so, yes.”

“And talking to them? Impressions?”

“Guilty as hell. She’s insanely angry, and he’s ready to blow just at the sight of me.”

“Agreed. By rights, you should take your suspicions to the cops. You could get someone to listen. Blackmail’s a serious crime, and Crider probably has a contact in the system that he could push a bit to investigate. But it’ll be tough to prove the money was your dad’s--my God, he’s dead. Your biggest and only witness is gone. It would drag out for years. Legal fees, whatnot--a couple hundred thousand would be long gone before you ever saw a cent of it.”

The check came. I waved Sydney off and counted out some bills. “I don’t need the money,” I said. “I told you that. Forget that part of it.”

“You could probably tip off the tax people if you wanted to cause them some trouble. Let them show the IRS where the income to buy all the stuff in the driveway came from. These aren’t sophisticated people, and they have a long history of trouble. They’d feel like the roof had fallen in.” She fished in her purse. “I need a cigarette. Let’s go outside.”

“I think,” I said when we were on the front steps, “that I don’t have a whole lot of stomach for destroying these people. My dad’s gone. I’ve been trying to imagine what he’d want. I think he’d tell me that enough is enough. Terrifying these poor, ignorant people might feel like sweet revenge, but maybe it’s bad karma.”

It was just getting light, and the air was already warm and humid. It was going to be a scorcher. I loved the air in the South. On the island, summer mornings were often cool enough to need a jacket. Sydney was taking deep drags on her cigarette.

“So what do you want, at the end of all this?” she asked. “What’s the best outcome in this shitty situation? Your dad killed her dad, and she got her revenge years and years later. What’s the ending?”

“I’d settle for confronting Wanda,” I said slowly. “I don’t care about her son. What happened behind that store has taken out so many lives. I just want some end to it. It’s a cliché, but I want my dad at peace.”

I nodded to myself and thought about it. That felt right. We had stopped walking, and Sydney stood still and looked at me.

“I can’t quite put my finger on it,” I continued, “but I think my dad wants me to break the cycle. I don’t know what he would have told me if he had lived long enough to tell me the whole story, but he was haunted. I want all of this to stop.”

“Then let’s talk to Wanda again. You can tell her what you think she did, and see what develops.”

“I know what you did,” I said softly.

Sydney raised an eyebrow in question.

“I know what you did. That’s the message she left my dad on his machine, and that’s the message she left me. Time to turn it back on her.”

“Done,” she said. “I’m gone for the rest of the day. How does tomorrow morning work for a trip to see her then?”

I agreed, and she dropped me off at my father’s house.

“We need to confront her,” I told Molly. “We need to tell her that we know about the blackmail.”

“Will that do any good, Mike? I mean, she’s an old woman. She’s been bad her whole life. Do you expect to change her? Do you think she’ll just see the light?”

“I’m not sure. I can feel my dad’s hand here, somehow. She needs to know she didn’t get away with it.”

We sat in silence for at least a minute. Finally she spoke. “In a very real way, she killed him. She at least precipitated his death.”

“It seems like that,” I agreed, “but is that what my dad would tell me? He was also tired of the whole thing. Maybe he wanted it to stop.”

“Yes. You know what’s missing? In that whole story about your dad, and what happened when he was a little boy--from the very first, do you know what’s missing? What could have changed all of it?”

“What’s that, Molly?” I asked.

“Forgiveness. No one ever got forgiven for any of this, at any point. That’s what’s kept this alive.”

I thought about it. “You think my dad wanted me to forgive her?”

“I didn’t know your dad,” she said. “You have to decide if he did and then do it for him.”

“I really do love you, you know that?”

“Yes. I know that. I’ll go with you when you go see her.”

The phone rang. It was Roy Tull. “You busy?” he asked. “You and Molly feel like getting a line wet?”

“I don’t fish,” I said, “but I’d like to get outside.”

I covered the phone and asked Molly. She shook her head no.

“I want a nap,” she said. “Go ahead. It’s nice that he’s reaching out to you this way. Have fun.”

“Molly’s pretty tired, but I’ll be over in a few minutes.”

The doctor met me at his front door. “Come on in, Mike. I’m going to carry a jacket, I think. At my age, it can feel cool down at the water. Be right back.”

He went up the wide main staircase and disappeared. The expansive front hall gleamed with lemon polish. Just off of the front entrance, the glassed French door that led to the doctor’s office area stood ajar. I saw a figure standing behind the sheer curtains.

The old house was silent, except for the gentle tick of a brass clock that sat on a table at the bottom of the stairs. Everything was tinted yellow by the late-afternoon sun. As I watched, the office door swung gently closed and latched.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Tull,” I said. “I won’t ever show up without an appointment.”

For the second time in her presence, I felt a purple-white pop behind my eyes and saw the image of a tree, like a photographic negative. It had bare branches. It’s a hanging tree, I thought.

Roy came back downstairs. I glanced over at the office doors. The figure behind the curtains was gone.

Outside, the doctor went into the garage. He emerged with a red plastic toolbox and well-used rods and put them into the trunk of his car.

“Where do you fish?” I asked him as we drove off.

“Oh, hell, it’s just the river for me. I fished my whole life, sometimes for my dinner, and I never had benefit of a boat. Put me on any river bank and I feel right at home.”

He parked on a dirt shoulder and led us down a scrubby, wooded path to the water. “If you grew up here, you know what a copperhead looks like, don’t you?” he asked over his shoulder.

“I know what they look like.”

“Good. My eyes are shit. Pull me out the way if you see one. You have snakes in Canada?”

“Snakes, yes. Nothing on the island, though, and nothing poisonous at all.”

“Not like here, then, where you step all over them. It’s worse, of course, as you head south. Funny, the nicer the weather, the more nasty, venomous shit you have to deal with.” After a pause, he laughed. “In your case, seems like that holds true for people, too. Bet you’ll be glad to get back up north.”

“Actually, I’m close to wrapping up and getting a flight.”

“Good. Better you get on out of here. You sent Wanda Sutton around the bend, I think.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“I’ve talked to her on the phone since you went to her house,” he said. “She’s damn near beside herself.”

“She’s been calling you? Really?”

He ignored my question and reeled his line in. He was quiet and pensive. “Is that what you were after? To drive that old woman crazy?”

I felt my face get hot. “Do you feel sorry for her, Roy?” I asked. “After what she did to my dad, you think I should have taken her age into account and left her alone?”

“I didn’t say that, not at all. I’m just curious what you think you’ll get from her.”

I thought about it. “I want an admission of guilt, Roy. I want her to say she’s sorry, even if she’s not. I want an apology to my father, even if it’s too late.”

“You think she’ll give you that?”

“Maybe. And you know what I think my dad would say?”

He looked up from the water and held my eyes.

“I think,” I went on, “my father would say that the apology was enough, and that she needed his money more than anyone else, including me, and to leave it alone from there.”

He nodded. “Maybe so.”

“But I will see her again,” I said. “Before I go home I’m going to see her again. I want that confession, and I want that apology.”

I felt some clarity and resolution for the first time in days, and it was like a weight being lifted off me. We looked at the muddy water for an hour more without a nibble and then headed back.