A Violent End at Blake Ranch (28 page)

“Why did he do that?”

“I suppose he didn't want me to have a reminder of what happened. As it was, Mamma said I had nightmares for a while.”

“I wonder if you would take a walk with me around the property?”

She looks surprised. “Sure. Let me change shoes.”

I feel as if talking to her away from the house I might be able to get more out of her. We head out into the fallow pastureland to the grove of post oaks beyond, where we'll be out of the sun. Charlotte is no chatterbox. We walk along quietly until we slip into the grove of trees. It has been so hot that many of the leaves are turning brown and dropping off, so that we walk on a carpet of leaves and brush. I think briefly of snakes and keep an eye out for the copperheads that are so plentiful around here. A copperhead bite won't kill you unless you're very unlucky, but it will make you plenty sick.

Charlotte knows as well as I do that snakes abound out here, and that's why she changed into heavy walking shoes. She's got on jeans and a white T-shirt. I notice that she has lost weight in the last couple of weeks.

“Charlotte, what I'm going to ask you will be hard for you to answer, I know. Do your best.” I glance over at her. A dew of perspiration shines on her top lip, and her cheeks are pink.

She notices me looking at her and meets my eyes. “I know you might find this hard to believe, but I don't have anything to hide.”

“I want you to think back, when the incident happened with Nonie.”

“Okay.”

“Before Nonie got you to climb up onto the chair with the rope around your neck.”

“Ugh! I haven't thought about that in . . . that's not true. I thought about it several times when Nonie—or rather the woman we thought was Nonie—was here.”

“Then maybe you can tell me. What did Nonie say to you to get you to put a noose around your neck?”

She stops walking and turns toward me. “You know, that's one thing nobody ever asked me. I guess they assumed I was too young to remember.”

“Do you remember?”

She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “A little. I remember she came to my room and said I'd been bad and I had to come with her.”

“Did you know what she meant?”

Her eyes search mine, then they focus somewhere beyond me. “I must have. I remember feeling sick to my stomach, as if I'd been found out.”

“What kind of relationship did you have with Nonie? She was six years older. Was she nice to you? Did you play together?”

“Billy was the nice one. He always had time for me. Was always patient.” She cocks her head. “Nonie . . . what I remember is that Nonie was always off somewhere. Always busy.”

“Off somewhere like . . . ?”

“Off in town. She would ride her bike into town. It made her seem a lot older to me. I always wished I could go with her, but when I asked she'd tell me I was too little.”

“If she was here at home, where would you likely find her?”

She grimaces and shakes her head. “I don't remember that.”

“Okay, so the day she came and got you and said you had been bad, you don't remember what she meant?”

“I remember that I was scared—I don't know why. I had never been afraid of her before. When I saw that she was taking me outside, I was so scared I peed in my pants.” A smile hovers around her lips. “That wasn't unusual. I was easily scared and I was always peeing my pants.”

“Something she said scared you? Or the way she was acting?”

Charlotte stops walking and puts her hands on her hips and looks off into the trees. Gradually she shakes her head. “I don't know.”

“Did she have the rope with her?”

She looks surprised. “No. We stopped by the barn and she got it. I asked her what it was for and she said something smart aleck like, ‘that's for me to know and you to find out.'”

“And she took you to the tree . . . and then what?”

“I can see the rope in her hands. It was big, heavy.” She opens her palm out as if the ghost of the rope is there. “I don't know what kind of knot it had in it. I don't see how she could have tied a knot in a rope that heavy.” She stops and frowns. “I don't have any recollection of her putting it on me. The next thing I recall is her telling me to climb up onto a chair.” Awareness floods her face. “I remember asking her what a chair was doing there, and she said she put it there. I must have been afraid of her because I normally would have stood on the chair gladly. I loved to climb onto everything in sight. Mamma was always fussing at me, telling me I was going to fall off and bust my head. But I started crying and told Nonie I didn't want to climb up there. She said I had to. I asked why, but I don't remember what she said.”

“Let's take it slow. Did you holler for anybody to come? Did you try to run?”

She shakes her head. Her eyes are full of the horror of what she's telling me. “I remember I was upset because my shorts were wet. And then Nonie said, ‘You have to do this because I know you won't keep your mouth shut.'”

“Keep your mouth shut about what?”

Charlotte's eyes widen. “I have no idea. This is the first time I've ever even remembered that. My family tried to get me to forget what happened so it wouldn't traumatize me. Maybe she thought I was going to tattle about something I knew about her, but I don't have any idea what that was.”

“But eventually you went ahead and climbed up there anyway.”

She nods her head and hugs her arms to herself. “Then she threw one end of the rope over the branch and drew it tight around the trunk of the tree. After that she told me to put my head through the loop in the rope.” She shakes her head vigorously as if to clear out the image. “Hard to grasp that this really happened. Seems like something I imagined.”

“What's strange to me is that you actually did it. Were you used to obeying your sister?”

“Always. She was older and I thought she was the most sophisticated girl I could ever imagine.”

I find Adelaide in her kitchen making a big pot of chili. She tells me that John is in the barn and Skeeter is keeping an eye on him so she can have a few minutes to cook.

I lean against a wall near her. “Did you ever meet any of your mother's relatives?”

“Mamma told me everybody in her family was gone,” she says. “Her mamma and daddy died when I was little.”

I clear my throat. “That's not entirely true,” I say.

Last night I woke up in the wee hours and realized that I needed to look farther into Lilah and Aaron Cousins's past. This morning I located the marriage records and found out that Lilah Cousins's maiden name was Gitlen. Turns out that Aaron Cousins was an only child, but Lilah Gitlen had two brothers, one older, one younger. Her younger brother is still alive.

“Yeah, alive and kicking,” his daughter had said when I located her in Tyler. “He lives in a retirement community an hour away from here. Plays golf morning, noon, and night.”

Now I tell Adelaide that I found that she has an uncle and some cousins living in east Texas.

“It can't be the same people,” she says.

“Did you ever look for relatives?”

She turns off the stove, lays down the knife she was cutting onions with, and faces me. For a minute she stands there without speaking. “Why would I? I believed Mamma. Why would she lie to me?”

I'm beginning to suspect that lying runs in the family. Because I think Adelaide knows more than she's telling. “Could be she had a falling-out with them and wanted to put it all behind her,” I say.

“That makes sense. She didn't like to talk about her family. You know how little kids are. They want to know everything and it was the one thing she refused to go into.” She goes over to the kitchen table and sits down heavily. I sit down across from her.

“You didn't find anything in her belongings pertaining to her family after she died?”

“No. She wasn't one to keep things.”

Adelaide has told me so many lies that I don't believe her. “Are you sure?”

She's looking at me as if I'm holding a hammer over her head. “You say there's an uncle?”

“Yes, and he has a daughter. That would be your first cousin. I talked to her this morning.”

She draws a sharp breath. “You talked to her? What did she say?”

“She told me she knew her daddy had a sister—that would be your mother—but he wouldn't talk about her or why they were estranged.”

“I see.” Her shoulders sag a little, as if she'd expected a blow and had dodged it. “I guess that's why my mother never mentioned him. Like you said, there must have been a falling-out.”

“There's more,” I say.

She closes her eyes, hand to her mouth. When she opens them again, for the first time she looks really scared. “What is it?”

“Your daddy didn't die in the war.”

She nods, but again I get the sense that she was expecting something different—something worse. “I did know that. I pestered my mamma to tell me about him, and she admitted that she told people that he died in the war because it was easier. She said he got in trouble with the law and was killed. I've lived with that since I was a young girl.”

“Have you ever told the rest of your family?”

She shakes her head. “Just John. What would be the point of telling the kids? It has nothing to do with them. They never met him or knew anything about him. He was just some stranger from the past, and you know how kids are. If it doesn't have to do with them, they don't have much interest in it.”

I'm only half-listening, aware that she is babbling on. And I suspect that she's trying to lead me away from some point that she wants me to miss. But what?

“One more question. You've been investing for quite a long time with Les Moffitt. Where did the original money come from for that?”

She sits up taller, looking outraged. “I don't think I have to tell you that, do I?”

“No, you don't have to. Is there some particular reason you don't want to?”

“It's private. It's none of your business.”

“It is if it has something to do with why Susan Shelby was killed.”

“That's ridiculous. We invested that money a long time ago. I told you it was money my mamma squirreled away for me. She was very frugal and was a good money manager. I was always grateful that she left me a little nest egg.”

“Yes, that is what you told me. But I think you're not telling the truth. I had a talk with Charlotte this afternoon and she told me that when Nonie was persuading her to put that noose around her neck, she said she had to do it to keep Charlotte from blabbing something she knew. And I think you know what it was Nonie was talking about.”

“I don't believe Charlotte remembers that at all. It's nonsense. She was eight years old. What could she have known that would make any difference to anybody?”

I get up from the table, tired of going around and around with Adelaide. “Adelaide, I'd like to go back and take another look at the room Susan Shelby stayed in while she was here.”

“What for?”

“I'm looking for something. You mind if look? I can get a warrant if you'd prefer.”

She snorts. “Go ahead. Won't do you any good. Billy has been sleeping there. He took everything out that belonged to that woman.”

“What did he do with it?”

“Threw everything into a box out in the barn.”

“Then I'll start there. Is Billy around?”

“No, he went off to buy groceries. Then he was going to pick up Trey after school.”

When I walk into the barn, Skeeter is watching John walk around with a saw in his hand.

“What do you need?” Skeeter says to me.

“I want to take a look at Susan Shelby's belongings,” I say. “Your mamma said Billy brought them out here.”

Skeeter shrugs. “I don't know where they are. Daddy, put that saw down.” John wanders back into the room where the tools are kept, and Skeeter follows him.

Over in the corner I find a large cardboard box that wasn't here the first time I was in the barn. I open it and find all the belongings that I saw in Susan Shelby's room. There's a purse that I don't remember seeing the first time. There's hardly anything in it—a wallet with eight dollars, a lipstick and comb, a bus ticket receipt, and a package of chewing gum. But no identification at all. Susan thought ahead. If anybody went through her things they wouldn't have found anything that gave away that she was an imposter. And that's why she told Charlotte she didn't drive, because she couldn't produce a driver's license without giving away the truth. I carefully go through the pockets of the clothing.

Finally satisfied that what I'm looking for isn't here, I straighten up. John is back in the room with the saw, and Skeeter is starting to lose patience with him. “Daddy, let's go back in the house now. There's nothing here for you.”