When I awoke on Monday morning, I half expected Jackie to be gone. It would fit her independent nature to up and leave, a note on the refrigerator. For a while I lay there imagining what the note would say. Would it be sweet? Or acid? Or just practical? She’d contact me and tell me where to send her paycheck, that sort of thing.
When the unmistakable smell of ham sizzling in a skillet wafted up to me, I pulled on yesterday’s clothes so fast I put my shoes on the wrong feet and had to switch them.
In the kitchen, Jackie had her back to me. She had on her usual teeny, tiny clothes that hugged her curvy little body, and I was so glad to see her I nearly hugged her.
Instead, I got myself under control and said gruffly, “I thought you were leaving town.”
“And good morning to you, too,” she said, pulling a ham steak out of a big skillet.
“Jackie, I thought we agreed that you were going to leave town.”
She set a plate full of ham, fried eggs, and whole wheat toast on the table. I assumed the food was for me so I sat down in front of it.
“I was thinking,” she said as she poured herself a bowl of what looked like sawdust. “Since no one knows I remember Cole Creek, then no one here will know that I may have seen a murder when I was a kid. Right?”
“I guess not,” I said, mouth full. She’d cooked the eggs exactly the way I liked them.
“So maybe if no one tells anyone that I remember this town, no one will know I was here. That way, we can research and ask questions, and if the murderer is still alive he’ll—” Breaking off, she looked up at me with wide eyes.
“Will only want to kill me when I find out too much,” I finished.
“Yeah, I guess so,” she said, looking down at her bowl of ground-up twigs. “Not such a good idea, huh?”
Not really, I thought. A truly bad idea. But then that old curiosity popped up again. Why? Why? Why?
“Your eyes are going round and round like pinwheels,” Jackie said. “Do you think smoke is going to start coming out of your ears?”
“Only if I set your tail on fire,” I shot back at her.
I’d meant my remark as a reference to a devil’s tail, but Jackie cocked an eyebrow at me as though I’d made a sex joke, and to my disgust I felt my face turning red. Smiling, she returned to her carpenter’s special.
“So what’s your plan?” she asked and I could tell she was laughing at me. Why, oh, why, did each generation think it had been the one to discover sex?
“I don’t know,” I said, flat-out lying. “I have some writing to do that’ll take me a couple of days so why don’t you—” I waved my hand.
“Keep busy?” she asked. “Stay out of your hair? Go play with the other children?”
“More or less.”
“Great,” she said, taking her empty bowl to the sink.
I knew from the way she said it that she was up to something, but I also knew that if I got her to tell me, I’d then have to tell her what I was planning to do.
We parted, and I went up to my office to start calling people. There was a famous true crime writer with my publishing house and, through my editor, I got her phone number and we had a long talk. I had no idea how to investigate an old murder, so she gave me some tips—and some of her private phone numbers.
Without giving too much away, I told her about the skeleton that had been found and that the police had taken away. She asked for dates and said she’d call me back. A few minutes later she called and gave me the name and number of a man in Charlotte she said knew about the case.
I called him, introduced myself, promised him six autographed books (I took down the names to be inscribed in the books) and he started telling me what he knew.
“We never found out who she was,” the man said. “We concluded she was a hiker and an old wall fell on her.”
“So you never found out who did—? I mean, you think it was an accident?”
“You think she was murdered?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I heard that the kids around here made up a story about—”
“The devil,” the man said. “Yeah, one of the cops told me that. Somebody said she’d been ‘consorting with the devil’ so the townspeople dropped a pile of rocks on her.”
I drew in my breath and let it out slowly so my voice wouldn’t squeak. Here at last was someone else who’d heard Jackie’s story. “That’s kind of unusual, isn’t it? I mean, a devil story like that.”
“Hell no. Nearly every long-dead body we get in here has some story attached to it. And this one was found by a hysterical girl who said she’d heard the dead woman crying.”
“You have a great memory,” I said with admiration.
“Naw. Bess called me earlier and I pulled the file. She was a pretty woman.”
“Bess?” I asked, referring to the true crime writer. I’d seen photos of her and “pretty” didn’t come to mind.
“No,” the man said, chuckling. “The woman who was buried under all that rock. We had one of those clay heads made of her.”
As Jackie’d said, my eyes began to whirl. “If I give you my FedEx number could you send me a copy of everything you have?”
“I don’t see why not. We showed copies of her face all over that little town of—What’s its name?”
“Cole Creek,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
I could hear someone speaking in the background and the man gave his attention to the voice. When he came back on the line, he said, “Look, I gotta go. I’ll send this stuff out to you ASAP.”
I gave him my FedEx number, hung up, then leaned back in my chair and looked up at the ceiling. Why was I doing this? I wondered. I was no sleuth. I had no desire to meet a murderer on some dark and stormy night.
I just wanted—
And that’s where the problem was, I thought. I had no goal in life. I had enough money to live well forever, but a man needed more than that.
Closing my eyes, I remembered those first years with Pat and how wonderful they’d been. Nothing on earth could match the excitement of having a book accepted for publication. It was satisfying in a deep, soul-gratifying way.
I remember thinking, Someone wants to read what I wrote. I’d only been able to come to terms with that thought when I told myself that people wanted to read about Pat’s mother, not me. Somewhere along the way, though, I’d realized that I was selling myself and it felt good to be wanted. But I’d lost it all, lost that driving force even before Pat died, and nothing had felt as good since.
Until now, that is. Every day I could feel a little bit of myself returning. I could feel the old Ford coming back, the one who’d fight to the death for a cause. As a kid I’d been determined not to be like my relatives, so I’d fought like a pit bull to go to college. Nothing my backward, iron-headed relatives said or did made me lose sight of my goal.
But since Pat died, I’d done nothing. I hadn’t felt the need to write, hadn’t felt the need to do anything. Even before she’d died, I’d achieved every goal I’d ever set myself and then some.
But now…Now things were changing. Was it Jackie? Was it she who was bringing me back to life? Only indirectly, I thought. Truthfully, it seemed to be all of it: the house, the town, the…The story, I thought. The story that would answer that ageless “Why?”
With every step I took into this mystery, I seemed to prove that Jackie’s original story was true. But the best news I’d heard was today’s. Maybe kids had made up a horror story about the woman’s death. This meant that if Jackie lived in Cole Creek as a child she could have heard the story from some sadistic kids who got their thrills from frightening a small child.
On the other hand, maybe the kids had just told what they knew. Since the body wasn’t found until ’92, did that mean the devil story started then? If so, Jackie would have been old enough to remember if she heard or saw or—
I put my hands to my head. This whole thing was getting to be too much for me. Be
sides, my stomach was beginning to rumble so I headed downstairs. Wonder if there was any ham left? And, by the way, why had Jackie changed from being adamant about “no ham” to frying me a big steak? Was she trying to give me a heart attack? What would be her motive? Hmmm. Was there a story in this?
I’d gone down just two steps when I was met by Jackie running full speed up the stairs. Two flights and as far as I could tell she wasn’t even winded.
“You’ll never believe what we found in the garden,” she said, her eyes so wide they nearly ate up her face.
“A dead body,” I said.
“Have you ever had therapy?”
“Considering the last few days—” I began, defending myself, but Jackie didn’t listen. Turning, she ran down the stairs.
I followed her and found my heart pounding by the time I met her at the side door. She didn’t say anything but she took note of my out-of-breath state. Maybe I should lay off the ham for a while.
“Come on,” she said, excitement radiating from her like sunbeams.
I’m not sure what I expected, but not what she showed me. It was an old building that had been hidden behind a mass of what looked to be unpruned grape vines and pubescent trees. All I could see was double glass doors, peeling white paint, and broken panes of glass.
Nate was standing there, his shirt off and sweating, a ringer for one of those models in a Calvin Klein ad, and all I could think was that he and Jackie had been out here alone all morning.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Jackie was saying. “Tessa found it. Remember when she disappeared on Friday night and Allie said she was probably inventing something?”
For the life of me I couldn’t remember who Tessa was.
“Allie’s daughter,” Jackie said, frowning. “Remember?”
I looked at the old building, looked back at Jackie, and I knew she wanted something. No one on earth could get that excited about a standing pile of termites without a reason. “All right,” I said, “how much is this gonna cost me?”
Nate gave a kind of laugh, then said he thought he’d go work on the front yard for a while. After he was gone, I looked at Jackie. “What’s this all about?”
“A…a summerhouse,” she said. “You could write out here.”
She knew very well that I liked being at the top of the house and looking out at the mountains, so I didn’t bother to reply to that statement.
After a while she gave a sigh and pulled open one of the doors to the building. I was surprised the hinges held. I followed her inside. It was two rooms and had probably been built to be a garden house with attached storage. There was one fairly large room with floor to ceiling windows on two sides. A wide doorway in one solid wall led into a storage room that was also quite spacious. My main thought was disgust at the state of a property that could hide a building this size.
Jackie was chattering nonstop, pointing out the big galvanized sink in one corner of the second room, and talking about the light coming through the cracked and broken windows in the main room.
My stomach gave a loud rumble. It was nearly two o’clock and I was hungry, but I was having to listen to this build-up to a punch line that didn’t seem to be coming any time soon.
“You’re hungry!” Jackie said in a loving and kind tone. “Come on and I’ll make you some lunch.”
Fifty grand, I thought. That’s what this great concern for the state of my belly was going to cost me. Never mind that I was under the illusion that this young woman was my employee and was therefore to do what I wanted her to. I’d been married. I knew what that sweeter-than-nectar voice meant. Jackie wanted something big from me.
I didn’t say anything as I followed her into the kitchen. And I sat in silence as I watched her scurry about making me a sandwich Dagwood would envy, and a cup of soup. It was some kind of expensive soup with one of those labels meant to make it look like it came from Aunt Rhoda’s kitchen, but it still wasn’t homemade.
Heaven help me, but I began to tell Jackie about this wonderful bean soup that Pat used to make from scratch. The truth was that Pat had found out she could empty four different cans into a pot and it came out tasting pretty good. Pat’s mother was a cook; Pat was not.
It was interesting to watch Jackie’s face fall when I mentioned “homemade soup.” She stopped in the middle of the kitchen, her eyes wide in horror.
It was difficult for me not to laugh, but I was willing to bet that I got homemade soup tomorrow. Obviously, whatever Jackie wanted with that old building was important to her.
Throughout lunch, she chatted in a way that was meant to amuse me. Geishas weren’t as charming as she was.
I ate in silence and waited to see when she was going to drop the stone on my head.
By four she’d maneuvered us into the newly-furnished small parlor, and I was beginning to get sleepy. I’d been charmed all I could take. All in all, I liked the tart-tongued Jackie better.
Gradually, the words “business deal” came through to me and I realized she was at last getting to the heart of the matter. Since I’d been dozing, I’d missed a lot of what she was saying, but it seemed that she wanted me to back her in some kind of business venture.
Here. In Cole Creek.
I blinked a few times to clear the sleep out of my eyes and said, “Yesterday we were talking about your getting out of Cole Creek as fast as possible because you may have witnessed a murder, but today you want to open a business here?”
“Yeah. Well,” she said. “I—” Lifting her hands helplessly, she looked up at me, her eyes pleading. “Couldn’t you write about something else?”
“So now it’s my fault,” I said. “Did it occur to you that if I write about something besides the devil story there’s no reason for me to be in this dead town?”
“Oh,” she said, her eyes downcast, but then she looked up at me brightly. “You’ll never be able to sell this house so maybe I can stay here and be the caretaker.”
“And run your business,” I said.
Jackie looked at me as though I’d won the prize.
I leaned toward her. “In all your buttering-up of me, did you ever tell me what business you want to open?”
She opened her mouth as though she meant to say she hadn’t been “buttering me up,” but the next second she jumped up, leaped over an ottoman, and I heard her running up the stairs. I leaned back in the chair—a nice one. In fact I liked all the furniture Jackie had bought—and closed my eyes. Maybe twenty winks would do me good. Help me to think.
But Jackie was back in about three minutes and she dropped two books on my lap. On top was a big, color, trade paperback on photographing children, and she opened it to the last few pages. There were some truly exquisite black-and-white photos of children by a man named Charles Edward Georges.
Jackie sat down on the ottoman at my feet. “Taken with all natural light,” she said quietly.
It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. There were six double-page photos made by this man and in the background could be seen windowsills with peeling paint.
I flipped through the book. Wonderful photos of children. Black and white. Color. Sepia. Studio portraits, candids. Several had been taken in a lush garden. A garden like the one around my old house could be.
I put that book down and picked up the other one. It was a smaller paperback, published by the University of North Carolina, and it was on orchids in the southern Appalachians.
I looked at Jackie. “Hobby,” she said, meaning the portraits were to make money, the flower photos were to be a hobby.
Putting the books down, I leaned back in the chair, and said, “Tell me everything.”
It took some questioning on my part, but I was finally able to figure out why she’d called off her wedding and why she’d been so angry at her former fiancé. Seems the jerk had stolen her life savings, money she’d planned to use to open a small photography studio.
I pointed out that she could prosecute, but she said her former f
iancé’s father was a judge and his cousin was president of the bank. I’d not grown up in a circle of judges or presidents of anything, but I sure did know about the “ol’ boy system.”
As I listened to her, I thought I might call a lawyer I knew and see what could be done about this. While I was thinking, Jackie said something that caught my attention.
“What?” I asked.
“It was the name Harriet that did it,” she said. “And the dates, of course.”
“What was?”
I could see that she was itching to say something snarly to me because of my inattention, but since she was hitting me up for investment money, she didn’t dare. Brother! It was tempting to see how much she’d take and still pretend to be sweet-tempered.
“Harriet Cole,” she said with exaggerated patience. “It was the name that got me. See, my father had a…Well, a bit of a fetish about Harriet Lane. She was—”
“The niece of President James Buchanan,” I said. “Magnificent…” I held my hands out in front of my chest.
It was quite gratifying to see Jackie’s eyes widen in surprise. How many people knew such an obscure piece of information? “Right,” she said slowly, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “Anyway, I think I got scared because when I heard the name ‘Harriet’ I associated it with my father and thought maybe she’d been my mother.”
She hadn’t told me this, but I’d guessed something of the sort that night at the party. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to not know who your parents were. I’d never met my father, but I certainly knew where he was. Hell, I even knew the number on his shirt.
“So now you’ve decided you’re safe,” I said. “And that you saw nothing, and you have no connection to anyone in town. All because you found a rotten old building buried under half a ton of overgrown grapevines.”
She gave a little smile. “More or less.”
I wasn’t going to tell her so, but the man inside me was jumping up and down and shouting, “Hallelujah!” I don’t know what it was about that empty little town, but I was beginning to like it there.
“Okay,” I said, and I could see that it took her a moment to understand that I was saying yes to her project.