Chapter Fourteen

After days of steady drizzling rain, a rare December sun emerged that made it hard to study for exams. Andy and I drove to Muir Woods, where the trees sparkled in the new light and the earth smelled of fallen evergreen needles. Christmas soon, I thought, wondering what the holiday would be like in Mississippi this year, a new baby and me with Berkeley on the brain. We brought our books to study, but as soon as we settled beneath a redwood tree, Andy sat in his lotus position and looked at me. “This is a good time to talk,” he said. “You spend too much time at the movies. We need to camp more often, like Big Sur.” It was not the first time he’d complained about the old movies I liked to watch.

“You missed Greta Garbo last night,” I told him. “’I vant to be alone’,” I said, imitating her accent.

“That’s just it. We don’t spend enough time together.” He didn’t even know Garbo’s most famous line.

A squirrel leapt from one redwood branch to the next, showering us with little crystals of rain from the night before. I brushed off my history book and put it away. “You’re always chanting, that’s why.”

“Try it with me,” he said, putting his hand on my knee. “Or don’t you even care?”

“We care about different things,” I said. The sweaty warmth of his palm left my knee, leaving a cool spot.

He rose and pointed to the backpack he had leaned against a tree. “Don’t be cavalier with my things,” he warned me, and soundlessly walked away from me, across the soft dark earth. Overhead, a hawk soared, dipping and turning, its wings spread so wide that the movements felt like music, and nothing else mattered for those moments.

In the silence on the way back, leaves scuttled down the sidewalks of Marin County like the thin brown lizards when I first gave him a ride on Mount Tamalpais.

When I pulled into the driveway, a woman in stiletto heels stood on the front porch, her hands cupped to the front window, peering inside. She had the highest beehive hair-do I’d ever seen. When she heard the truck, she turned around.

“Who is that?” asked Andy, his first words since leaving Muir Woods.

“Loretta Holliday?” It was an apparition I could barely believe.

All the worst of Mississippi had come to visit me in my new life, and I wanted to turn and run back to the truck. But there she was, waving to me. “Jubilee Starling?”

What could I do but wave back?

The past year had not been good to Loretta. She still wore a scarf around her neck, but it was wound more tightly, like a bandage hiding wrinkles, as close as a noose. Her green eyes glittered through false eyelashes and her lips were smeared with red lipstick. I remembered the way she had scraped the mud off her high heels on the edge of my truck, that day I picked her up on the highway, when she was just standing there, looking lost.

It was Biloxi, Mississippi, back in spades, when Loretta teetered across the porch on those high heels, holding her hand out, the long red nails like ten little daggers. “It’s little Jubilee, isn’t it?” she said, and took my hand.

Andy whispered under his breath, “Amazing.” Loretta extended her hand to Andy, and it took him a second to shake it. His eyes glowed like he was meeting a movie star, or another X-ray of a woman’s torso. He had never looked at me that way.

But she ignored him, studying me instead. “Your hair’s so pretty and long, I almost didn’t recognize you.” She reached out and stroked my hair, and it surprised me how good it felt. Nobody strokes your hair like somebody who’s been a mother. “You were always so kind, picking me up when I didn’t have a ride.”

Andy’s eyes flicked over at me. “It was nothing,” I said, embarrassed.

“I’ll never forget your kindness.” She pressed her cheek against mine, and the smell of rose water and face powder filled my nose. “Such a sweet girl. I just had to see you again.”

I didn’t have a choice but to invite her inside. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” blared from Peter’s stereo in the living room, his way of getting adrenaline up for an exam. When he and Lisa saw the three of us come in, he turned down the sound and stared.

“This is a friend of Jubilee’s from Mississippi.” Pride rose in Andy’s voice, the same triumph as when he knew that I played trumpet and they didn’t.

“It’s Mrs. Holliday.” My words sounded like the squeak I still occasionally got on the trumpet. Peter and Lisa couldn’t take their eyes off her. We all trouped back to the kitchen while Andy heated up the tea kettle. Peter pulled an extra chair up to the table beneath the tapestry hanging from the ceiling. And then no one had a choice but to listen. All those months in Whitfield had wound Loretta up as tight as the scarf around her neck. She gazed across the table at me, one arm slung over the back of the chair, like it was perfectly normal for her to be there. Che crept up and jumped softly into her lap, curling into a ball.

“I make you nervous, don’t I, honey?” she asked me, stroking the cat’s yellow fur. “But never you mind, you’re looking pretty now. That acne didn’t even leave a scar. You got yourself a boyfriend.” She tipped her beehive at Andy. “And you always so sweet, too. Not like that Charlene. Mean as a cat in heat.”

I pushed back my chair and leaned my arms on the table, a battle position. “Don’t you talk that way. There’s not a thing mean about Charlene.” The tea kettle began to whistle, piercing the kitchen like a siren.

“Oh, the girl prides herself on it. Nothing wrong with pride. That’s a sweet little baby she’s got, though. And you haven’t even seen him,” she told me, taking the cup of hot tea Andy offered. “Family’s important.”

“She has finals,” said Peter. “We all do.”

“Finals?” said Loretta. “Only one thing’s final, and that’s death. What’s this?” She picked a brown sugar cube from the sugar bowl, her fingernails like tweezers.

“Sugar,” said Lisa, breathlessly, as if she still couldn’t believe the creature before her.

“I like sugar in my tea. You got a little ice for me, and a nice tall glass? That’s how we like it where Jubilee and I come from.”

“Where I came from,” I whispered, hoping only my friends would hear.

Loretta stirred the sugar into her cup while Lisa filled a glass with ice cubes. She poured in the contents of the cup without spilling a drop, and kept talking. “I got your address from your stepmother, that Marilyn girl your dad married. Not nearly so pretty as your mama was, but what’s a good man like your dad to do? He needed somebody to help him control you girls. And he had his manly needs.” The virile needs of a man. Had Mr. Pickens told the whole town?

A smirk edged across Peter’s face, and despite the hand he put over his mouth, she spied it with a magpie look. “Maybe you don’t have any yet, son,” she said, and he reddened while she turned back to me. “I waited for you to come home, but Sylvia said you wouldn’t be back till Christmas.”

“I don’t have many friends in Biloxi, Mrs. Holliday,” I said, more for the sake of Lisa and Peter than anyone. Surely Mrs. Holliday knew Biloxi wasn’t the kind of place that liked it when you stopped going to church, or painted your nails purple and green. In Berkeley, people said it didn’t matter how you dressed or what you looked like. But that wasn’t really true. You had to look like it didn’t matter, or people would treat you like an alien, like they did in Biloxi.

“No, you never had many friends, did you, darlin’?” asked Loretta. “You weren’t popular the way Kathy …”

Lisa gulped, gathering her nerve to speak again. “Popularity is false consciousness.”

“Nothing false about Jubilee, no, honey. But let me have my say. Lord knows, I’ve lived with a horrible truth all these years.” She folded her hands on the table, like she was about to tell me a story that began with ‘once upon a time.’ “My Joe died, shot in the neck in a fight in the Drop Inn Grill in Gulfport. I don’t know who did it, nobody was willing to say they knew Joe’s killer. But of course they did. Wasn’t no one sad to see Joe Holliday leave this world.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Loretta’s face stretched into a thin smile. “No, honey, you’re not. But it’s mighty nice and polite of you to say that. Your mama raised you right.”

The image of the burly man who used to wear camouflage hunting jackets even when it wasn’t deer season came to my mind. I remembered how Loretta was scared of going home that day I gave her a lift, how she looked behind the bushes for Joe and talked about getting the locks changed. I could still see her at Mama’s funeral, the thin, penciled eyebrows and green eyeliner, the chiffon scarf with leopard spots wrapped around her neck. When she smiled, she didn’t look so different anymore, her mouth filling the boundaries of her lip pencil.

The smile left her face now. “Oh, that Joe was grisly looking, laid out on a slab. Hadn’t shaved in three days, I reckon, and you know what they say about how hair keeps growing when a body’s dead … Oh he looked a mess, you should’ve seen him.”

“What’d he look like?” asked Peter, and Lisa’s eyes widened at him, horrified.

Loretta didn’t seem to hear. “I had to identify him down at the morgue. Now that’s something to put a lady through, who’s been shut up at a place like Whitfield for nearly a year, for no reason at all, shut up with alcoholics and kleptomaniacs and murderers. But I’m not ashamed of it. That’s where they put you if they don’t know what else to do with you. Time was,” she winked at me, “we thought Jubilee might wind up there, in Whitfield. At least that’s what Juanita Kelly used to say.” She looked over at Peter. “Juanita worked at the Dairy Queen, you know.”

Peter shook his head. “No,” he said. “I didn’t know. But she’s a jerk, if she said that about Jubilee.”

That woman at the Dairy Queen had refused to serve Rob and me once because my fingernails were painted with black and green stripes. “Tain’t nat’ral,” she informed me, swishing her scoop around in a bucket of sudsy water, like she wanted to rinse me away, too. Rob said her ice cream “tain’t nat’ral” either, it was full of chemicals. It didn’t make a bit of difference to her. She was already waiting on a truck driver, a man with tattooed biceps bulging beneath a thin tee-shirt. We were so mad at Biloxi we drove all the way to New Orleans and ate beignets in the French Market.

Lisa’s lips tightened. “No one ever could have thought Jubilee …”

But Loretta tossed her hand through the air, as if throwing away Lisa’s words. “It was that weird nail polish and driving that death truck, that’s all. But tell you the truth? I knew she’d make it.” She pointed at me. “And I knew the good Lord would take Joe Holliday from this earth, and I knew it would be by another man’s wrath. I was glad to see Joe Holliday dead, and I’m not ashamed to say it. Not that I ever would’ve done it myself, you know.” She lifted her glass of tea and took a delicate sip. “But it was a relief, him lying cold, not able to touch Kathy or me again.”

“How’s Kathy?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

She patted her hair. “Did this,” she said proudly. “It’ll last me at least a week. Best hairdresser in Mobile. She could give you some make-up tips, honey. But I didn’t come all the way here to talk about Kathy.” She lit a cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke. “No, I’m free now, and I can talk. Levi Litvak,” she waved the cigarette at me. “He didn’t kill your mom.”

“What?” I spilled my tea, thoughts tumbling so fast in my head that I couldn’t even wipe it up. Lisa sponged up the table and I watched, so disoriented that a shaft of sunlight pooling there seemed, for a moment, part of the spilled liquid. “If he didn’t, who did?” The room spun, as if the world were changing in a matter of seconds. The paramedics had been in white like moon-walkers that April morning. The sun had been too bright to see clearly and now I felt blinded again.

“Honey, all these years, I been living with the memory of you and Harry working on your Mama’s dead body. I was there, darlin’, I saw it all. Joe was aiming for Levi with that knife.” She closed her eyes, her eyeballs moving beneath the thin lids, like they were looking for something in the darkness. “I dream about it, you there in your slippers and robe, Harry calling Bernice’s name.”

“You were there?” I was back, in the driveway, over four years ago, but I couldn’t see Loretta.

She stubbed out her cigarette. “In the garage, behind the bookcase your Mama was working on. That’s where I ran after Joe did the killing. That’s God’s own truth I lived with. But now I can come clean. Joe’s not ever killing anybody else, not even me or Kathy. Levi didn’t kill Bernice. He wasn’t a murderer, God rest his soul. And God rest your Mama’s.”

The wind had been knocked out of me, and it was hard to talk. “But what about that letter to the Times-Picayune?” I finally asked. “He confessed, all about how he couldn’t live without his sugar muffin. Do you remember that?”

“’Course I do, I wrote it. Levi didn’t have a thing to do with that letter.” She closed her eyes tight again. “I’ll never forget it, sitting there at midnight at the WLOX office, Joe Holliday beside me with a gun in his hand. ‘Write it,’ he said, acting like James Cagney or somebody in those gangster movies he loved. He liked Cagney, except for the dancing stuff. Sissy, he said. Anyway, I typed. My hands were shaking so bad …” She held them out and shook them, to demonstrate.

“How did you know they called each other sugar muffin?” I could still see the little “i” jumping above the other letters in “muffin” in the fuzzy newsprint.

“Dahlin’, how did you know? That’s the question.” She squinted at me. “I heard Levi on the phone every day. Don’t forget, I held down the fort at WLOX. Not much escaped me. It was ‘sugar muffin’ this, ‘sugar muffin’ that, every time he’d be whispering on the phone. It was enough to drive me crazy, much as I cared about him, myself.”

“But why would your husband want to kill my mother? It can’t be true.” All those years of dreaming about Levi Litvak, confronting him, couldn’t have been for nothing.

Tears welled up in Loretta’s eyes, and I remembered the way she’d patted her hair the morning of my mother’s funeral, saying how she was going to miss Mama’s voice lessons. “Joe was after Levi Litvak. Bernice got in his way that morning. I’m ashamed of it, but I’ll tell you this: Joe Holliday was in the Klan, and Levi was on their death list. He was a Jew, you know; they thought he was an outside agitator.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “Besides, your Mama wasn’t the only one in love with him, not with a good-lookin’ man like him, no sirree. Joe hated Levi because he knew I loved him.” She looked around the table at all of us. “It drove me crazy to hear Levi talk about his ‘sugar muffin.’ Like he did it just to hurt me, to drive a knife right through my heart.” Her face blanched. “Sorry,” she said, but she went on. “Levi won my heart in an instant and Joe knew it. Killing him made Joe a hero in the Klan. He went up to McComb, a celebrity. He had stalked Levi that morning, all the way to Bernice’s house, with me following, a good bit back.”

A grim smile stretched across my face. “That was brave. Why didn’t you tell the police?”

She ignored my question. “I had practice dealing with Joe. I’d been following him for weeks. He’d been saying he was going to kill Levi. I warned Levi, but he didn’t believe me, just like he never believed he was really on those Klan lists.”

“Is she for real?” Lisa breathed at me.

“I heard that, honey, but I’m going to choose to ignore it. In Whitfield, you learn to ignore a lot of things. I had a roommate, she’d tear down the walls if she could, tore out her hair and chewed it like a cow on a cud. I tried to do her nails once, you know, try to fix her up, and she came close to pouring my polish remover right down her throat. So I learned some lessons in ignoring folks. Why, even my psychiatrist, he lied to me. Dr. Santamaria, that was his name. You’d think, with a name pretty as that, he wouldn’t gaslight his own patients. He told me Joe was probably schizophrenic, but when I asked him about it later, what does he say? He stares at me with his little beady black eyes and says, ‘I never said that.’ Something wrong with that man. He was crazier than I’ve ever been.”

“I believe it,” said Andy. “I’ve been in a place like that,” and Loretta looked at him with new respect.

She stubbed out her cigarette. “Bernice was trying to break up with Levi, and he came to your house to beg. Must’ve been desperate, risking everything like that. Through the hedge, I could see clear as anything. Levi got in the pick-up beside Bernice, and then Joe yanked open the door and jumped Levi. It would’ve been him dead …”

“The wrong person died.” Peter whistled softly.

“Your Mama tried to stop him,” said Loretta. “She threw herself at Joe, and the knife hit her right in the heart. She was the hero, not me. Joe ran for his truck, he’d parked around the corner, and I could hear him trying to start it up. I knew how mad he must’ve been, that truck not starting on the first try at a time like that.”

“Levi Litvak just left Mama there?” At that moment, I hated him almost as much as Joe Holliday.

She rested her chin in the palm of her hand and closed her eyes. “Levi was standing in your driveway, staring at Bernice, then in the direction where Joe was cranking his truck, like he couldn’t decide what to do. When the kitchen door opened, Levi ran for his own car. Harry never saw him.”

A shudder ran over me, the kind that Grandpa would say meant that a rabbit had run over your grave.

“It’s hard, I know,” Loretta whispered, her voice a thin rasp. “Even now, I can see every detail. It bothered me so much I made up stories to tell myself Loretta and Levi weren’t really dead. Got to the point where I believed my own tales.”

“Did you lose a scarf that morning?” I asked, glancing at the green silk wrapped around her neck.

“I don’t remember a scarf. There was so much happening all at once.”

“A red scarf, with orange flowers? I found it in the garage after Mama died. Daddy thought it was evidence, but the police wouldn’t listen. We kept it, all this time.”

Mrs. Holliday twisted a gold costume ring on her index finger, gazing in the distance. Finally, she said, “Levi gave Bernice a red scarf and some sweet perfume for Christmas. He asked me to help pick it out, and that was mighty hard, I tell you. But I bet she was going to give those nice presents away.” She gave me a hard look. “Just like she gave up Levi. She never stopped loving your dad.”

I wanted to go straight home to Biloxi and burn that scarf. Daddy had saved the wrong evidence. “You knew who killed my mother and you let us torment ourselves, wondering. You let a murderer go free.” I thought of how Daddy insisted Dr. Powell write “accidental death” on the certificate. “Daddy kept telling everybody that what happened in the truck was an accident. It was too horrible to think of anything else.”

“Let him call it that,” said Loretta. “Who can blame him? No man wants to think his own wife has a lover.”

I felt like pulling her scarf tighter, strangling her. “The only man Mama loved was Daddy. She told me so.”

Loretta twisted the ends of the scarf into a knot. “I felt bad about you girls, alone with no mother. I used to call you on the phone, just to be sure you’d gotten home from school all right.”

The silent phone calls, when I would breathe in rhythm with someone who seemed like my twin, came back to me. “That was you?” My “twin” had been Loretta Holliday.

“It just gave me some comfort, hearing you girls breathe, knowing you were alive,” she said.

“Why didn’t you tell the police?” asked Andy, his hand resting on my arm. “It’s illegal to withhold information about a crime.”

She shot him a disgusted look. “You never saw Joe Holliday when he was in a rage, his fists balled up, or waving his gun, and me and my little daughter knowing the thing was loaded full of bullets. He blasted a hole through the kitchen wall once. The whole town knew. Everybody talked about that hole in my wall. Nobody wanted to come fix it. I had to stuff it with newspaper to keep the possoms out of the garbage.” She sighed. “He’s dead now, cancer would’ve got him if a gun didn’t. Lungs, you know. All those cigarettes, one right after the other, but that’s just my idea, just me talking. But nobody can stop Loretta Holliday from talking now.” Then, at last, she stopped. She took a cigarette and dangled it in her lips, unlit, squinting as if surveying the damage she’d done.

What was Levi Litvak feeling when he drove his Thunderbird away, leaving Daddy to find Mama? If I can’t have my sugar muffin, no one can … but those weren’t Levi Litvak’s words anymore, they belonged to Loretta Holliday, her husband’s pistol cocked at her head. “What was Levi Litvak thinking,” I said, “leaving Mama like that?”

“Nothing,” said Loretta. “A man who thinks he’s got a killer on his tail, he runs like a bat out of hell. You can ponder that in your heart forever, but the bat out of hell is what you’ll come up with every time.”

I hoped Loretta had made Joe Holliday suffer during their marriage. I thought about the woman who’d cracked an imaginary bullwhip over Mr. Miller’s back at Parchman, and then stolen the real whip, “Black Annie.” Even with all the fear she lived in, she’d stolen that whip to take after Joe.

“Does Dad know about Joe Holliday?” I whispered. “Does he know about Levi Litvak?”

“He was out tending his roses when I told him Joe killed Bernice. ‘Live by the sword, die by the sword,’ that’s what he said. Said he wished he’d been the one with the sword who killed him, and then asked the good Lord to forgive him for that. I told him Levi Litvak was there, too, and he said he was one of Bernice’s best bookcase customers. Then he went back to those pretty yellow tea roses without hardly looking up.”

I remembered how Daddy had stood on the porch of Ernie Crenshaw’s house with his fist drawn back, ready to hit Ernie’s father. But he’d stopped himself. Daddy would never have killed Joe Holliday.

Loretta turned to Andy. “Now tell me, young man, is there a powder room in this lovely house?” She rose, a presence bigger than life, like a cartoon character at Disney land, costumed so thickly the person inside was barely imaginable.

Andy pointed to a door down the hall. My eyes filled with tears, imagining Daddy bending over his tea roses, with Loretta at his side, her words swarming in the air like so many gnats for Daddy to swat. He knew how much Mama had loved him. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, but Lisa was there with a tissue.

Loretta came back in to say she’d rented a car to drive down to San Jose. “Been good to see you, honey,” she said, and put both hands flat against my cheeks while she pressed her lips against my forehead. “You come see me in Biloxi, you hear? Good girls don’t stay away from home long.”

We walked her out to the street, where a silver Ford was parked crookedly, one wheel on the sidewalk. She climbed in, arranging her scarf carefully on her lap.

Hadn’t seen her cousins in San Jose in a blue moon, she said. I hoped they knew what awaited them. She blew a kiss and cranked the motor. Lisa tissued off the lipstick left on my forehead in the shape of Loretta’s puckered mouth.

I managed to wave as she drove off, though my hand felt heavy, as if I were saying good-bye to a lot more than Loretta Holliday.