I’m sure a psychic experience in which you see a couple of little kids go up in flame wasn’t what a normal person would label as “fun.” But saving those children had been.
Sometimes Jackie had a way of looking at me that made me feel like I could solve all the world’s problems. At other times, she made me feel old and decrepit. Whatever she thought of me as a physical specimen, she certainly looked surprised when I grabbed her backpack and mine and headed back down the trail. It was easier going on the return because, if nothing else, the cobwebs had been cleared away.
Then there was the ride in the truck. As we bounced along the trail, the look on her face reminded me of something my cousin Noble liked to do. He was blessed—or cursed as one of my female cousins said—by not having the Newcombe looks. In other words, Noble had a face girls love. He’d go into town, do his “shy-little-me act” as a cousin called it, and a girl would inevitably sashay over to him. Noble would eventually treat her to a “Newcombe special” which was a fast pickup ride across deep ruts. Afterward, he’d come home and entertain us all with vivid accounts of the indignation and fear of the girls.
Back then I never appreciated the humor or the appeal in what Noble did. I’d always wanted to spend time with a town girl—namely, one who wasn’t likely to give birth at sixteen—but my looks and my shyness didn’t attract those twinset-clad girls with their perfect pageboy hair and single strands of pearls. It wasn’t until I was at college and away from the stigma of the Newcombe family that one of those girls paid any attention to me. When I met Pat she was wearing a sky blue twinset, a darker blue skirt, and a strand of creamy white pearls. “Fake,” she told me later, laughing when I asked her to leave the pearls on while we made love.
On that day when I was driving the truck across the ruts, I finally understood why Noble had so loved scaring those town girls. Jackie’s face bore a combination of fear and excitement that did things to me in a sexual way. She looked at me in horror, true, but she also looked at me as though I were a magician, a race car driver, and a rescuing hero all in one.
After the exhilarating experience of saving the kids was added to the thrill of the drive, I don’t know what would have happened if Dessie hadn’t shown up. While Jackie and I had bought pizza and beer, my mind was tumbling all over itself with images of a naked Jackie with little rings of black olives scattered over her nude body. I could imagine myself drinking beer and trying to decide which delectable little ring I was going to eat next.
I was trying to figure out how I was going to make this vision a reality when we arrived home and Dessie was standing there waiting.
Since the last time I’d seen her and she’d unveiled the sculptures, I’d had some time to think and—Well, okay, Jackie’s sarcastic, albeit painfully true, remarks had dimmed some of the stars in my eyes. Maybe it hadn’t been so tasteful of Dessie to unveil a statue of a man’s beloved, deceased wife in front of guests. And, yes, Jackie was right that that sort of thing pretty much always produced tears. I didn’t, however, agree when Jackie said, “Especially in someone as soft and sentimental as you are.” That didn’t sound very masculine, so I protested. Then she pointed out that I had written some books that were “pretty weepy.”
Okay, so she had me. Jackie had a way of seeing to the heart of a matter, which was a good thing. But, sometimes, I really wished she’d keep her mouth shut about what she saw.
By the time I was to leave for Dessie’s house on Sunday, I wanted to call her and tell her I wouldn’t be able to make it. At breakfast Jackie made a remark about which of the little statues that Tessa and I had bought Dessie would replace first. I was determined not to let Jackie see what was in my mind, so I began reading the nutritional content on the back of the box of that cereal she eats. “Amazing,” I said. “This stuff has more vitamins and minerals than three of those green pills you take.” I’d read the label on those, too.
When Jackie narrowed her eyes at me, I knew she knew I was avoiding her comment.
The night before, Dessie had stayed until a little after midnight. I’d had to give a couple of huge yawns to get her to leave. Of course I knew what she wanted. She was after a trip to my bedroom.
But I couldn’t do it. A couple of hours before I’d been lusting after Jackie, and I wasn’t the kind of man who could change from one woman to another in the course of an evening.
Besides, Jackie made me laugh. Her sarcasm and black humor nearly always amused me. When I was around Jackie I felt alert, and as though something exciting was about to happen. Jackie was interested in things in the same way I had been before Pat died. I was finding Jackie’s photography fascinating, and I had a good time when she invited people over.
So I sat there that night and tried my best to talk to Dessie, but I couldn’t seem to get into it. For one thing, the conversation always seemed to go back to her and her sculpture. If I mentioned a movie, that would lead to her remembering some movie that was the inspiration for a bronze she’d made for some really famous man. “Not as famous as you are,” she said as she looked over her wineglass at me.
Of course I knew she was hinting that I buy a bronze from her. But that didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that she didn’t ask a word about what Jackie and I had been doing when we’d called and asked for her help. Wasn’t she curious about why we’d needed to find a specific house, and why we’d had to find it fast? But Dessie never mentioned the incident.
After Dessie left Saturday night—or, actually, it was early Sunday—I fell into bed and slept hard.
The next morning I studied the back of the cereal box and made no comment on Jackie’s snide remark about the little frogs and other beasties that Tessa and I had scattered about the garden. I didn’t even comment when Jackie said that maybe Dessie could make a frog with a mouth big enough that Tessa and I could hide inside it. I started to say that that was a great idea, but I knew Jackie was baiting me and trying to get me to—to what? I wondered. Not go to Dessie’s house that afternoon? Did Jackie want me to stay home and try out some of the new camera equipment we’d ordered together?
Jackie and I had talked about how to open her business and we’d decided she needed to photograph some kids for free. We could use those pictures to publicize her work. She’d be able to get some people to drive to Cole Creek, but she was also going to need to do a lot of location shooting.
We’d decided that Jackie could start her photography career by taking photos of Tessa. “And Nate,” Jackie said. “Don’t forget that he’s a kid, too. And pictures of him would certainly sell a lot of portraits.” As I was supposed to, I grimaced and pretended I thought Jackie was after young Nate. But, actually, I thought photographing him was a good idea. The art director of my publishing house knew some photographers in the fashion industry. Maybe they’d like to see pictures of beautiful Nate. If the camera loved him, he had a chance at a career that would support him and his arthritis-crippled grandmother.
His grandmother had done well at selling the junk from the house. It seemed that there were people in the U.S.—and Europe, which surprised me—who wanted old Statues of Liberty, and they were willing to pay for them. When Nate returned from a day of hacking away at the man-eating jungle around my house, he packaged what his grandmother had sold and took them to the post office.
On Sunday morning I was thinking of helping Jackie photograph both Tessa and Nate, and I knew I’d rather do that than spend the day with Dessie and be hit up for some giant bronze statue. Of what? Truthfully, after hearing Dessie’s descriptions of her previous sculptures, I liked Jackie’s big-mouthed frog idea the best.
When it was time to go to Dessie’s, I just left. I started to say goodbye to Jackie, but I didn’t. What was I supposed to say? “Bye, hon, see you later”? And, also, I didn’t want to hear any more sarcastic remarks. I especially didn’t want to hear Jackie tell me about whatever I was going to miss that afternoon. Part of me wanted to tell her that if she had a vision to be sure and call me. But that was like telling an epileptic that if he had a seizure he should call.
I took the car, leaving Jackie with the truck. It wasn’t until I got to Dessie’s that I realized I had the truck keys. I flipped open my cell phone to tell Jackie I had them, but then I closed the phone. I knew it was wrong of me to leave her with no transportation. I even knew I was being a throwback to a caveman for doing it. On the other hand, who could fight centuries of tradition?
I dredged up a smile and knocked on Dessie’s door. She had a pretty house, even if it was a little artsy for my taste. All those wind chimes on the porch would drive me mad.
When Dessie opened the door, I let out my breath. I hadn’t been aware of it, but I’d been dreading what she’d wear. Would it be cut down to her belt buckle? But she had on tan pants, fairly loose, and a big pink sweater with a high neck.
“Hi,” I said, handing her the bottle of wine Jackie told me I was to take, and following her into the house.
Right away I saw that Dessie seemed nervous about something. She had a table set up in her small dining room that was off her kitchen, with big double glass doors leading onto a brick-floored, covered patio. It was a beautiful day and I wondered why we didn’t eat outside.
“Mosquitoes,” Dessie said quickly when I asked.
“But I thought—” I began, but stopped. There were so few mosquitoes in the Appalachians that they weren’t a problem.
She seated me with my back to the glass door, which made me feel jittery. As a kid, I’d learned to sit with my back to the wall because cousins tended to leap in through windows. All too often I’d been jolted when frogs, snakes, and various colors and textures of pond slime were dropped down my back through the open window behind me.
We had just sat down to eat when a lawn mower was started just outside the door. The resulting noise made it impossible to speak.
“Gardener!” Dessie shouted across the table.
“On Sunday?” I shouted back.
As she started to answer, she looked to the left of my head and out the glass doors, her eyes widening in horror.
I twisted around just in time to see a young man push a mower across a bed of tulips. When he got to the end, the grass littered with chopped-up tulips, he turned to look straight at Dessie and smiled. A malicious smile. A jealous, angry-lover smile.
It was that smile that made me relax. Maybe I should have been angry to realize that Dessie had been flirting with me because she was having a fight with her boyfriend, but I wasn’t. When I saw that she was attached, more or less, to a guy who was obviously quite jealous, all I felt was relief.
I pressed the napkin to my lips, said, “Excuse me,” then went outside and spoke to the young man. I didn’t take time for small talk. I just told him that I wasn’t a rival, that it was business only between Dessie and me, and that he could stop razing the tulips.
When he didn’t seem to believe that I wasn’t insane with lust and love for Dessie, I understood. To me, Pat had been the most beautiful woman on earth, and I never understood why other people didn’t think so, too. But Dessie’s gardener was young and I wasn’t, so he eventually believed me and pushed the mower back into the little shed at the end of the garden. I stayed outside for a few moments while he went inside. After a while, an embarrassed-looking Dessie opened the glass door. I noticed that her lipstick was gone so I guess she and the Lawn Mower Man had made up.
“You can come in now,” she said and I smiled. Gone was the aggressive-salesman tone in her voice and gone was the flirt.
I said, “Now can we eat outside?” and she laughed.
“You’re a nice man,” she said and that made me feel good.
We moved food and dishes outside, and we both relaxed and enjoyed each other’s company. Unfortunately for me, she’d read all my books so there was nothing new I could tell her about myself. But Dessie was full of stories about her life, both in L.A. and in Cole Creek. She made me laugh about what she’d been through when she was on a soap because the viewers thought she was the tramp she portrayed.
I sipped beer, munched on little puffy, cheesy things she seemed to have an unlimited supply of, and watched her as I listened. The stories she told were hilarious, but they had an often-repeated quality to them, and there was a sadness in her eyes that I couldn’t figure out. I’d heard that she’d decided to stay in Cole Creek to pursue her real love, sculpture.
I’m not sure what it was, but something wasn’t ringing true. There was a look of longing in her eyes that I couldn’t figure out. From the sound of her voice as she told the stories, she’d loved L.A., and loved her job. So why did she give it up? Couldn’t she have combined sculpting and acting?
When I asked her that, she just offered me more of the little cheesy things. I said no, but she still jumped up to go get them. When she returned, she told me another funny soap opera story. By three I was getting bored and wondered if it was too early to leave. She must have sensed my restlessness because she suggested I see her studio. It was a separate building, big, modern, beautiful. Through a carved wooden door, we entered a small office, and on the desk was a photograph of two teenage girls laughing and hugging each other. They were Dessie and Rebecca.
I’d almost forgotten that Rebecca worked for Dessie. I started to ask about her, but Dessie opened two wide doors and we went into a marvelous room. It was the size and height of a six stall barn, with light everywhere. Windows ran along one long wall, enormous cabinets along the other. The ceiling had rows of skylights, and at both ends of the building were tall, wide, sliding doors.
Dessie had several big projects going, and in one cabinet were a dozen small clays of projects she hadn’t yet made. Most of her sculptures were of people. She had a nice one of old men sitting on a park bench that appealed to me. Life-size, I thought, it could be kind of interesting in my garden. Tessa and I could play checkers with the old men.
But before I could ask about it, she reached behind a cabinet frame, withdrew a key, and unlocked a cabinet door. “I only show these to very special people,” she said, her eyes twinkling.
Uh oh, I thought. The erotica. The “collection” of porno.
But when Dessie opened the cabinet and the automatic light came on, I laughed. Actually, I snorted at first, then I let out a real laugh. I looked at Dessie. Could I pick them up? Eyes twinkling even brighter, she nodded yes.
Inside the cabinet were small bronzes of nearly everyone I’d met in Cole Creek. But they weren’t exact likenesses; they were caricatures. They looked like the people, but they also showed their personalities.
The one my hand went to first was a six-inch-tall Mayor. Dessie had exaggerated his strange body and facial features. “Pompous windbag” were the words that came to mind. Dessie had shown him rocking back on his heels, his belly stuck out, his hands clasped behind his back. “You should name it ‘Little Emperor,’” I said, and Dessie agreed.
Next I picked up Miss Essie Lee and gave a low whistle. Dessie had shown her as a skeleton. Not a real skeleton, but it was as though Dessie had covered a figure with skin—no muscle or fat—and put Miss Essie Lee’s vintage clothes on her.
There were several other statues of people I didn’t know, but I could guess their personalities. She told me one was of a former client, an odious man who’d wanted a fawning, self-loving sculpture made of himself. She’d done it, but she’d also made a small one that showed the man with long, narrow teeth and eyes that exuded greed.
“Remind me never to ask you to do a portrait of me,” I said.
Dessie was about to close the door when her cell phone rang. She grabbed it out of her belt holster so fast she reminded me of an Old West gunslinger. When she looked at the caller ID, her face lit up, so I was sure it was Lawn Mower Man.
“Go on,” I said, giving her permission to leave her guest alone.
After she was out of the room, I shut the cabinet door, but then I saw that below it was another cabinet door that was also locked. On a hunch, I reached behind the door frame where the other key had been hidden and, sure enough, another key was there.
I knew I was snooping, but I could no more have stopped myself than if I were an alcoholic locked overnight in a liquor store. Quickly, I inserted the key and opened the door.
Inside were two items. One was a small bronze of seven people standing in a line: five men and two women. These weren’t caricatures; they were realistic. Three of the men were older, one of them quite old, while one was a kid who didn’t look too smart. He looked like someone who if you said, “Let’s go rob a bank,” he’d say, “Sure, why not?”
The two women were both young, but one was as ugly as the other was beautiful. The women stood in the middle of the group, side by side, but not touching. It was easy to see that these two women were not friends.
And what was easier to see was that the ugly one was either a younger version of Miss Essie Lee or a close relative of hers.
When I heard Dessie laugh in the other room, I started to close the cabinet door. But there was another item in the cabinet with a cloth covering over it.
Maybe it was the writer in me that made me jump to conclusions, but I was sure the seven people in the bronze were the ones who put stones on that poor woman back in 1979. And my writer’s mind was spinning with the thought that under that cloth was a casting of the woman who’d been crushed.
As I heard Dessie’s returning footsteps, I yanked off the cover—only to reveal a little bronze of Rebecca. She was young and smiling, but it was indeed Rebecca.
Superman would have envied the speed with which I closed those cabinet doors and put the key back in its hiding place. When Dessie returned, I was placidly looking out the glass doors at the shattered tulips.
After her phone call, she got rid of me pretty quickly, so I guessed she and her jealous boyfriend were ready to finish making up. I was glad to go. Maybe Jackie and I could still do something today, I thought.
But as I pulled out of Dessie’s driveway, it began to rain and by the time I got home, it was a downpour. I can’t describe my disappointment when I found the house was empty. Jackie’s big camera bag was gone from the hall closet so I knew where she’d gone.
Without me, I thought. She went on a hike without me.
Or with someone? I thought, and that annoyed me even more. I called Nate’s house and his grandmother told me Jackie had called and left a message, but that Jackie wasn’t there. I called Allie, but Jackie wasn’t there either.
I didn’t know who else in Cole Creek to call, so I sat down to wait. When I got hungry, I started making spaghetti—which consisted of dumping a jar of sauce into a pan and turning on the gas.
The pasta was done and the rain was coming down hard, but, still, there was no Jackie. A couple of times the lights flickered in the house, so I got out candles and two flashlights, then made myself a small plate of spaghetti. I’d eat more when Jackie got back and we could eat together and tell each other about our day—as we usually did.
Finally, when it was nearly dark outside, I heard the front door open. I jumped up from the table and ran to the door. When I saw Jackie—and registered that she was safe and unhurt—I put on my best angry-father look and prepared to dump an ocean liner full of guilt on her. How dare she not let me know where she was? She could have been hurt or had a vision. Obviously, I needed to know where she was at all times.
But Jackie never even looked at me. She was covered in her giant yellow poncho, her big pack on her back, just her face peeping out, and her eyes were…Well, if I were writing a bad novel, I would have said her eyes were “full of stars.”
Whatever her eyes were full of, they certainly were blind. She looked straight ahead, without seeing me, and I’m certainly no small item easily missed. She went toward the stairs—dare I say “as though she were floating”—then up the stairs to her room.
Standing at the bottom, I looked up in wonder. Jackie didn’t usually “float.” No, she ran and she jumped, and she had an unnatural inclination to climb on rocks and ladders, but she never, ever “floated.”
I went up the stairs and stood outside her door for a few moments, contemplating knocking and telling her I’d cooked something. For a moment I allowed myself the pleasure of imagining Jackie’s remarks about my cooking, and my ensuing witty replies. And for a few seconds I let myself remember my little fantasy about the black rings of olives on Jackie’s pale skin.
I raised my hand to knock, but when I heard her humming and the bathwater running, I put my hand down and went back downstairs. I tried to watch TV, but I was restless and went into the library to search for something fabulous to read instead. Nothing interested me so I went upstairs to my office and turned on my computer.
I’m not sure why I did it, but I logged onto the Internet and went to a search service to see what I could find out about the people who had been alive in Cole Creek in 1979.
I typed in the names of anyone in Cole Creek I could think of, including Miss Essie Lee, and all the names of the seven founding families that I could remember.
What came up on the screen were obituaries—and what I saw shocked me. The head of the Cole family, Abraham, had died in 1980 in a freak accident. He’d been on the highway just outside Cole Creek and had a flat tire. A man driving a truck carrying a load of gravel had stopped to help the old man. But the mechanism that made the bed dump had malfunctioned and the entire load of gravel had dropped onto Abraham Cole and killed him.
I leaned back from the screen, trying to comprehend what I was seeing. Abraham Cole had been crushed to death. By rocks.
Edward Belcher had also died in 1980, when a Wells Fargo truck went around a corner too fast. They had just picked up a load of gold and the weight, combined with the nervousness of the driver, had made him misjudge the angle of the curve. Edward had been waiting for the light to change, and the truck had toppled over on him.
In other words, he’d been crushed to death.
“By money,” I said aloud. “As he lived.”
I found an article describing the death of Harriet Cole Landreth in a car wreck. Before I read the newspaper account about what had happened, I made a little prediction, and, unfortunately, I was right. She’d been trapped under the weight of her automobile when it tumbled down the side of a mountain. The car wasn’t found for two days so Harriet had had a long, slow, lingering death.
Getting up, I walked away from the computer. Revenge? I wondered. Had some relative of the crushed woman’s taken revenge and seen to it that her murderers died as she had? But how had he done it? I wondered. How could a person arrange for a dump truck to discharge its load? A truck full of gold to tip over? A car to plunge down a mountain and not burn but to crush its passenger?
I went back to the computer and read the end of the article on Harriet Cole’s car wreck. She was survived by her husband, her daughter, and her mother, who had been in the car with her. “Mrs. Abraham Cole is in the hospital in critical condition,” it said.
Taking a deep breath, I pulled up Harriet Cole’s obituary. She’d been only twenty-six years old when she’d died. There were four paragraphs about her family being one of the founders of Cole Creek, and it said that her father had predeceased her. Her mother’s name was Mary Hattalene Cole, but there was nothing about her condition at the time of her daughter’s funeral. Harriet’s husband was listed as Reece Landreth, and her daughter was—
When I saw the name I drew in my breath. Jacquelane Amarisa Cole Landreth. JacqueLANE. As in Harriet Lane, the president’s lovely niece.
Leaving my office in a rush, I went down the stairs so fast I nearly slid. Jackie’s bedroom door was still closed, so I tiptoed down to the entrance hall. There on the little table by the door was Jackie’s handbag. Every man on earth knows that the ultimate taboo is looking inside a woman’s handbag. It ranked right up there with cannibalism. A woman might have her purse stolen, but everyone knew that only a real sicko would actually go through it.
I had to take a couple of breaths before I slid the zipper open. As much as Pat and I had shared, I’d never gone through her handbag.
Considering what I was doing, I used as much courtesy as I could muster and pulled her wallet out with just my thumb and forefinger. I told myself I wasn’t really snooping. I only wanted one thing: her driver’s license.
It was on top, in the little see-through compartment of her wallet. I held it up to the light and looked. Jackie’s whole name was Jacquelane Violet Maxwell. JacqueLANE. As in Harriet Lane, the woman her father had a crush on. And Violet was, no doubt, for Miss Lane’s violet eyes.
I sat down hard on the chair by the hall table. Congratulations, Newcombe, I told myself. You just found out what you didn’t want to know. The woman you hired was almost certainly an eyewitness to a murder. And worse, she probably saw her own mother, as well as her grandfather, commit that murder.
I sat there for a long time, holding Jackie’s driver’s license, glancing at it now and then, and trying to think about what I may have done. My snooping may have put someone’s life in danger. Jackie may have been very young when she saw the murder, but it was obvious that she could remember a lot from the time she was in Cole Creek.
She remembered every inch of the old house I’d bought. Two days ago I’d found her tapping on a wall in the kitchen. I didn’t bother to ask what she was doing, but stood in the doorway and watched. After a moment, her tap sounded hollow and she said, “Found it!” She often knew where I was, so I wasn’t surprised when she turned and looked at me.
“I went to put the olive oil on the shelf but the shelf wasn’t there,” she said as she picked up one of the knives I’d bought. It had a serrated blade and the ad said it could cut aluminum cans in half. (It could, too, because Tessa and I had cut through six cans before Jackie made us stop.)
I watched as Jackie felt along the old wallpaper, then began to cut. After about ten minutes of feeling and cutting, she peeled down a big square of wallpaper to reveal a mouse palace. Insulation (probably illegal asbestos), dirt, globbed-up paper, threads, lint, and hair of what looked to be four shades, were all matted together with many years of mouse pee and millions of little black droppings.
Behind the nest were boards so greasy they made my uncle Reg’s car repair shop look clean. That’s why the shelves were covered over. If it’d been me, and I’d been given a choice between cleaning those shelves and wallpapering over them, I would have definitely wall-papered.
“A good place for food storage,” I said.
Turning to me, Jackie made a wicked face while rubbing her hands together. “Mr. Hoover will now do his work,” she said as she ran to get the vacuum.
By the time I came down to lunch, the shelves were clean and shiny, and the kitchen smelled like the bleach Jackie had used to clean them.
I didn’t bother to ask Jackie how she’d known the shelves were there. And she seemed to take her knowledge for granted. As she dished up some kind of shrimp thing and four steamed vegetables, she ranted on and on about what kind of lazy idiot would board up a closet rather than remove a beehive, and who would cover over shelves just because they had about a hundred years of grease on them.
I put my head closer to my plate.
So, anyway, I knew that Jackie’s memories of the time she was in Cole Creek, no matter what her age, were clear. I doubt if any court would convict people for murder based on what Jackie remembered, but then I’d never thought that murderers were logical people who would stop to reason out what they were going to do.
On the other hand, based on what I’d seen on the Internet, everyone who had been involved—or who I thought was probably involved—seemed to have died soon after the woman did.
I put Jackie’s license back in her wallet and her wallet back in her handbag just where I’d found it, then zipped her bag closed and went back upstairs.
The search service had found one more name. Miss Essie Lee was the sister of, and the sole surviving relative of, Icie Lee Shaver who had died in yet another “freak” accident. Seems Icie Lee had been walking in the woods and fallen into an old well. She’d been buried to her neck, but the rotten timbers of the old well had held enough that she’d been able to breathe. Eventually, after a day or two, her struggles to free herself had caused the walls to collapse on her.
“Crushed,” I said aloud. As they had all murdered, so they had died.
I shut down my computer and went to bed, but I didn’t sleep much. The images from the words that had come up on my computer screen haunted me. The words “as they lived” kept running through my head.
At three A.M. I gave up trying to sleep, put my hands behind my head, and stared up at the fan on the ceiling. It was going full speed and I stared at the little wooden end of the chain as though it were a hypnotist’s sphere.
As the first ray of sun came in through my window, I thought that if I wanted to know who had crushed that woman, I should read all the obituaries for the year after her death. Based on what I’d found so far, whoever had died by being crushed had probably participated.
When I had things sorted out a bit in my mind, I began to relax and finally fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until noon. When I saw the clock, I felt a sense of panic. Where was Jackie? She was so industrious that I could always hear where she was, but the house was absolutely silent.
I found Jackie sitting at the kitchen table playing with one of the neatest gadgets I’d ever seen in my life. It was a tiny Hewlett-Packard color printer, and beside it was a little camera with a door open on its side.
I’m ashamed to say that, as I sat down at the table and watched that little machine make a perfect print, I forgot all about who got crushed and why. When I started playing with the two pieces of equipment, Jackie didn’t say a word, just got up from the table and began scrambling eggs.
The printer was very simple to use, and by the time Jackie put the eggs in front of me, I’d made two 4 x 6 enlargements. One was of roses on a fence, and the other was a photo of a red and white tablecloth, a wine bottle, and half a loaf of bread.
“This what you did yesterday?” I asked, smiling. A picnic by herself?
But my question seemed to disturb Jackie because she snatched the little disk out of the printer, stuck it back in the camera, pushed some buttons, then put the camera back on the table. I knew without a doubt that she’d just erased the two photos of the picnic. As for the photos I’d printed, she burned them in the flame on the stove.
Of course I was dying to ask questions, but I didn’t. Besides, Jackie gave me a look that said that if I asked anything, she’d make me sorry.
That was okay, I had my own secrets. I never even considered telling Jackie what I’d found out on the Internet. I also wasn’t going to tell her that Harriet Cole’s daughter had the same unique spelling of her name that Jackie did.
For the next two days, all I can say about Jackie’s behavior is that it was odd. She didn’t act like herself. Not that I’d spent masses of time with her, but after the Sunday I spent with Dessie, Jackie seemed to change. It was as though her mind was elsewhere. She cooked three meals a day for me, and she answered the telephone, and she even told Nate what to do in the garden, but there was something different. For one thing, she was quiet, hardly ever saying a word. And for another, she wasn’t moving around much. Three times I looked out my office window and saw her just standing there, staring into space. It was like seeing a hummingbird with its wings still, motionless.
Of course I asked her what was wrong, but she just looked off into the distance and said, “Mmmm.”
I tried to get a reaction out of her. I told her Dessie and I’d had a fabulous time together on Sunday. No comment from Jackie. I told her Dessie and I’d had great sex together. “Mmmm,” was all Jackie said as she kept staring into space. I told her I was running away with Dessie to Mexico and we were taking Tessa with us. No comment. I told Jackie I was in love with a green-eyed grizzly bear and she was heavy with my child. Jackie said, “That’s nice,” then wandered outside.
On Wednesday, she took some snapshots of Nate with that new camera of hers—I didn’t say so but I was a little hurt that she’d bought that and the tiny printer without letting me help choose them. When we saw the photos, Nate looked like something out of a fashion magazine. And that was without a bath.
When I tried to talk to him about the possibility of a future in the fashion world, he wouldn’t consider it. I understood. What self-respecting male wanted a job being photographed? On the other hand, the money could be very good. I wanted Jackie to talk to him, but she stood at the far end of the garden and wouldn’t get involved.
On Thursday morning the FedEx package from the man in Charlotte finally arrived. Part of me wanted to open it and part of me wanted to burn it instead.
I’d had a couple of days to think about the situation now. I’d decided that some very angry people had piled rocks on a woman back in 1979, and that Jackie, as a child, had seen it all. After the murder, I think someone played vigilante and somehow, one by one, killed all the people who had committed the murder.
If my theory was correct, then Jackie was in no danger. And as far as I could tell, she knew nothing about the later vendetta killings. She knew only about the crushing.
Jackie also knew the reason her mother, who was probably one of the murderers, gave to justify killing the woman. She’d said that people who loved the devil had to die.
The devil made me do it, I thought. Isn’t that the reason that’s been given for so many murders over the centuries? “It wasn’t my fault,” I heard people on news programs say. “The devil controlled my mind.” When I first met Jackie she’d told me that the townspeople believed a woman had been in love with the devil.
I put my hand over my eyes. If Jackie was safe, then we could stay. But if we stayed, I knew myself well enough to know that I’d dig until I found out the truth about why that woman had been killed. What human emotion had driven them to murder? And I deeply wanted to know who had avenged her death.
With shaking hands, I opened the FedEx package. The top page was a letter of apology. The man had been ill so he was late in sending the material, but he hoped I’d still send the autographed books. That’s one for him, I thought. I hadn’t been ill, I’d just forgotten to send the books.
The photograph of the remade skeleton was what I wanted to see, and it was at the bottom of the stack. When I pulled it out, I saw the face of a pretty woman, probably late thirties, and I had no doubt she was a relative of Jackie’s. When Jackie was the same age, she was going to look a lot like this woman.
As I stood there looking at the picture, I tried to figure out who she was—other than the woman on the bridge, that is. She wasn’t Jackie’s mother because I was pretty sure her mom had been crushed by a car.
I flipped through the papers the man had sent me. “Unknown” was everywhere. She was an unknown woman and it was unknown whether her death was an accident or a murder. The police might have been able to figure it out by the way the stones were on top of her, but by the time the police had arrived, the kids who’d found the body had removed them all. It seems the girl who’d “heard” the crying during the night had been screaming hysterically that they needed to “let the poor woman out,” so all the stones had been taken off the skeleton.
The police had interviewed the kids and each of them had been positive about the way the stones had been arranged. But half had been positive one way, and the other half were sure of another way. In the end, the evidence had been “inconclusive.”
I looked at the names of the kids and wondered what I’d find out if I put them through a search service. Even as I was telling myself I shouldn’t do such a thing, I turned toward the stairs to go up to my office.
But I was stopped when Tessa threw open the front door, and, running full speed, leaped up on me, her legs around my waist, her arms tight around my neck.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, kissing me all over my face.
I had no idea what she meant but it was nice. She wasn’t old enough to have developed pretenses, so whatever she was feeling came out honestly and openly.
“What?” I asked, smiling. The whole packet about the murdered woman had been knocked out of my hands and was now spread on the floor under my feet. I wanted to leave it there and hoped it fell through the cracks.
I pulled Tessa’s arms from around my neck so I could breathe. “Thanks for what?”
“The gnome.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. When we’d bought the garden statues, we’d spent quite a bit of time debating about gnomes, but I was pretty much against them. When I was in the first grade, Johnnie Foster and I’d had a fight when he’d said I looked like a gnome. I’d never heard the word before so I asked the school librarian and she’d handed me a book. I didn’t like what I saw.
Truthfully, I was afraid Tessa wanted gnomes in the garden because she liked me.
I peeled Tessa off my body, stood her on the floor, and began picking up the papers.
“Who’s that?” she asked, looking down at the photo of the re-created face. As with most kids, Tessa conserved her energy and didn’t help me pick up the papers.
“Just somebody,” I said, shoving all the papers back into the cardboard envelope. I didn’t want Jackie to see anything inside the packet, so I put it in plain sight on the hall table. I figured that if I hid it inside a book in the library on the top shelf, she’d find it in about three seconds.
“Okay,” I said to Tessa. “What’s this all about?”
“You bought the biggest gnome statue in the whole world and put him in the garden. He’s wonderful and I love him. Thank you.”
For a nanosecond it flashed through my mind that Jackie had got together with Dessie and commissioned a gnome statue. Sure. And a frog was coming next week.
I put my hand out for Tessa to take and we walked out to the garden together.
She was right.
Sitting in the shade on one of the old park benches Nate had repaired was what looked to be a gnome. Standing, it would have been about five foot four, with a big head, a powerful torso and short, strong limbs. The eyes were wide open, but sightless, the mouth slightly open. It had big eyes with thick lashes, a wide nose with a horizontal end, full lips, huge ears flat to the head, and long black and gray hair pulled back into a braid.
“Ssssh,” Tessa said, pulling me by the hand. “He looks real, doesn’t he?”
I let her lead me around the bushes to see the rest of the “gnome.” He had on dark green pants, a worn yellow shirt, and a purple vest that was covered with hundreds of little enameled pins of insects. An entomologist’s dream.
While Tessa went forward to get closer to the creature, I stood back and stared. He wasn’t a statue, but a man. And he was sound asleep. He was sitting upright on a bench, his eyes wide open, but he was asleep.
Way inside my mind I knew I should be telling Tessa he was real and that she should get away from him, but I couldn’t seem to move. Of course I knew who he was. It was just that I’d never seen him in person before.
Reaching out, Tessa touched the man’s cheek. He didn’t so much as move an eyelash, but I saw that he instantly went from asleep to awake. A light came into his eyes and he was looking at me.
“Hello, son,” said my father.
“Hello, cousin,” said my cousin Noble as he stepped out of the bushes.
Both of them were smiling at me.