Buried Memories (8 page)

Betty smiled affectionately at Shirley and reached out to take her hand. With little hesitation, she said, “Okay, but we have to do it like this. You can never tell a soul. Got that? Not Larry, not your sisters, not anybody.”

“I won’t,” Shirley said. “No one will ever find out. I’d be too afraid for anyone to know. What’s next?”

“Tell Larry that Wayne and I got into a big brouhaha and I’m scared shitless of him. Say I don’t want to be home alone tonight in case he comes back and wants to hurt me again. Then you come over after dinner and we’ll wait ’til dark before we stick him in the ground.”

Shirley leaned against the wall and nodded sadly. She wanted the whole matter to disappear. How could her own mother involve her in a murder? Worse yet, what would her mother do to her if she didn’t help? She already knew what had happened to Wayne.

For the rest of the day, Betty lingered at Shirley’s house and talked. She couldn’t stop rambling on about shooting Wayne. While Shirley wanted to forget, her mother continued talking as if needing the discussion as a catharsis.

“If someone saw what looked like a grave it might attract attention,” Betty said. “And I don’t want any of those damn dogs in the neighborhood comin’ over and digging him up. Tomorrow, we’ll go to Seven Points and get some cinder blocks. We can build a patio over him and no one will ever know he’s there.”

A nearly full moon rose in the darkening October sky when Betty unlocked the front door of her trailer and pushed it open. She motioned for Shirley to go inside.

“No, you first,” Shirley said, breathing deeply to calm her jitters. Her teeth involuntarily chattered, and she thought she might throw up. Cemeteries scared her silly, let alone walking into a house that hid a dead body.

Betty went directly to the kitchen and opened the pantry where her white poodle lived while she was away from home. As the dog hopped out into the room, Betty picked him up and said, “Hello, sweetkins, have you missed your mommy? You’re my good baby aren’t you?” She reached into the pantry and retrieved a small dog biscuit. “Here, you deserve a treat. You’re such a good little boy.”

Then the smile fell from Betty’s face, and she said dispassionately, “He’s back here.”

Hesitantly, Shirley followed her mother down the hall. Betty flipped on the bedroom light, then slid back the closet door. Shirley wanted to shut her eyes, but curiosity made her look. She could see a big blue mound crouched inside. It looked like Wayne was in a sitting position.

“We need to wait until it’s so dark that we can’t see our hands in front of our faces.”

Shirley nodded, knowing it was already dark, but they first needed to bolster their determination to get through this task. “We don’t have to stay here in the house, do we?” Shirley asked. “Can’t we build a bonfire outside like we did the other night?”

Her mother nodded, and Shirley went into the fastidiously clean compact kitchen and collected milk, vodka, Kahlua, a metal pitcher, and two plastic glasses to take outside.

Once in the yard, both women used flashlights to gather branches that strong winds from the lake had blown from Betty’s trees.

Shirley glanced up at the velvety black sky. With fewer city lights to compete with their intensity, the stars glittered brightly and looked close enough to touch.

Betty scooped up several armfuls of leaves and scattered them over the dry wood. Her match ignited the leaves, and they flamed instantly. Now they had a fire that warmed their bodies and distracted their minds from what waited inside the closet.

A car roared by with a loud muffler, and Betty turned to look.

Shirley watched her mother’s silhouette against the fire, then shifted her attention to the flickering sparks until they rose above the trees and the wind swept them away. She tried to focus on the fire’s glowing red ashes and curling gray smoke, but her mother wanted to talk about Wayne’s last five minutes. Shirley had already heard too much, but she let her mother get it off her chest while she slipped into an illusion of listening. She inhaled the smoke and thought of happier family times—going on family vacations, taking off for an afternoon of shopping at one of the Dallas malls, and having Christmas dinners with her big family sitting around a white clothed table.

Shirley mixed the ingredients she brought and made a pitcher of white Russians. The women sipped and talked and soon both of them could feel the intoxicating fumes of the sweet Kahlua. After a couple hours, Betty glanced at her watch. “Almost midnight,” she said. “It’s time.”

Staggering, Shirley slowly stood up, extended a hand to her mother, and looked into her eyes. Betty had that “business as usual” demeanor that Shirley found impossibly hard to accept under the circumstances. It seemed ludicrous to be disposing of a body with the woman who always reminded her to wash her hands before dinner.

They trudged back inside the trailer and swayed down the hall. Once in the bedroom, Betty opened the closet door and tugged on the sleeping bag. Wayne’s body felt as heavy as concrete, so they began dragging him. Shirley grabbed what felt like feet while Betty labored with the upper torso. Shirley saw an outline of a head through the heavy canvas as her mother took hold of it. Both women bent over at the waist and panted hard while they slowly slid the body across the carpeted floor. Then they dragged it down the hall and out through the trailer’s rear exit.

When they first went outside with the sleeping bag, the moonlight shined impossibly bright. Shirley glanced at the road, worried that someone would come driving down their street, or have Ray Price come by, the security officer who made routine drive-throughs of the area. All noises seemed magnified. Cicadas buzzed loudly and waves from Cedar Creek Lake slapped against brick and stone retaining walls as the women bounced Wayne Barker down the three back steps. Then they jostled him over ground that held thin, sparse grass because of the ever-present shade. While he lay by the side of the grave, the women cleared out the loosely crumbled soil with shovels Betty had hidden under the trailer. They rolled him into the four-foot-deep opening and tried to flatten him as best they could. Then unceremoniously, they picked up their shovels and blanketed him with dirt, one spadeful at a time. As Barker became more concealed, moonlight shined on the mound that grew disturbingly high, forcing them to scoop the rest of the soil into flower beds and pots—anywhere to camouflage the existence of a grave.

“Cinder blocks will hide all that,” Betty said, slurring her words.

After they finished their chore, they went back into the house and got very drunk.

Shirley lay awake all night in the spare bedroom at her mother’s. With Bobby at a friend’s house for the night, she had access to the trailer’s only other bedroom. Every time she thought of her mother sleeping in the next room, the room where she’d killed Wayne Barker the night before, chills bounced up and down her spine.

The next morning, Shirley sluggishly pulled herself out of bed and went over to the window. Sunshine walked across the lawn, mottled by trees, but enhanced the mound of dirt she had hoped was only a bad dream. She rubbed her pounding head, feeling much older than her twenty-four years. Then she jumped as music blared from her mother’s room.

In no time her mother stood at Shirley’s bedroom door. Shirley squinted in disbelief. Betty looked pretty. She wore a pair of freshly pressed jeans, a soft turquoise sweater, and perennially perfect makeup. “Time to rise and shine,” Betty said pertly. “I’ll go put on the coffee and make some toast. We’ve got to get to Seven Points and pick up those blocks we talked about.”

EIGHT

At five in the morning, Betty called Jerry Kuykendall. It was the time he’d be expecting her to deliver her husband for his ride to work, as she had five mornings every week.

When Kuykendall answered the phone, Betty said, “Wayne’s run off.”

The man gasped. “Run off?”

“Unh-huh. We had a little fight last night and he stomped out. Said he needed to buy some cigarettes, but I haven’t seen him since.”

“This is so hard to believe,” Kuykendall said. “Guys like Wayne don’t just leave. I’ve got him in charge of a big crew we have going this morning. Talked to him just last night and he sounded fine. He even asked my boy to spend the night.”

“Well he’s gone. It doesn’t make any sense to me either.”

“Did he say where he was going? There must be some way I can get hold of him.”

“I have no idea. If he knew where he’d be, he didn’t tell me.”

Kuykendall pondered Wayne’s disappearance for three days. How could a man be such a contradiction—dependable at work and a flake at home?

After finishing his third day of work without his best employee, he drove by the Barker home to see if he could learn any more about Wayne’s abrupt departure.

Kuykendall remembered all the good times he and his wife had with Wayne and Betty—spending the day fishing, or going to McClain’s and eating fried catfish. He pulled up to the trailer and relief flooded through him when he saw Barker’s truck parked in the driveway. “Thank God,” he said as he turned into the driveway and pulled behind the truck.

He strolled to the familiar porch, swathed in flowers, and rang the doorbell. But something about the blond woman who answered the door wasn’t familiar at all.

“Sure glad Wayne’s changed his mind,” he said, nodding toward the truck.

“What the hell you talking about?”

“Well, obviously Wayne’s come back. You said he’d run off.”

“He did leave,” Betty replied, acting more antagonistic than emotional over Wayne’s sudden departure. She secured the lock on the screen door.

“I never heard of a man leaving without taking his truck,” Kuykendall said.

Betty flashed him a hostile stare. She didn’t invite him in, nor did she appear interested in talking. “I’ve told you all I know. Wayne got mad and left. He hasn’t called me or anything since.”

“Well, shoot. I sure need him back on the job. If you hear from him, please let him know his job’s waiting.”

“All right,” Betty replied, almost shutting the door in Kuykendall’s face.

He stood staring at the closed door knowing something was wrong. What happened to the friendly Betty who had spent so much time with him and his wife? Where was the woman who frequently invited his son to spend the night with Bobby, then fixed pancakes for the boys the next morning?

As he went back to his car, he looked again at Wayne’s truck. A man just doesn’t leave his new pickup and go away willingly.

Kuykendall was still questioning Wayne’s disappearance when Betty showed up the following Friday at his office to collect Wayne’s paycheck.

Betty needed a man like people need air to breathe. Her job at the Cedar Club fulfilled that need perfectly, as it allowed her to meet dozens of men.

Located on Seven Points’s Highway 274, the club could easily be found as the highway crossed the only intersection in town that had traffic lights. The wheels of customers’ cars had to crunch over a gravel parking lot that separated the club from the highway. Housed in a sterile-looking, concrete-block structure that had been painted numerous times, the club’s current color was gray. The window glass, also coated with gray paint, kept out sunshine and prying eyes.

Inside the place, a customer had to take a moment for his eyes to adjust to the cave-dark interior. Once adapted, customers could see a U-shaped bar in the middle of the large room, with dozens of glasses hanging upside down from an overhead wooden rack. Four pool tables sat to the left of the bar, and several dart boards were bolted on walls to the right.

By the time people stepped onto the charcoal-color tile floors, no one sensed they were drinking in the middle of the day. Nor in the early morning for that matter. Like other bars in Seven Points, it opened early for business and Happy Hour ran from seven to eleven in the morning. For some, drinking their breakfast was a way of life.

The selection of men varied. Hard-working cowboys breathed the same smoky air as retired oldsters, and having a full set of teeth was not a customer requirement. But every now and then someone attractive with a decent job dropped by. Betty kept her antennae up for them. Her caustic wit and salty tongue fit in perfectly with the bar crowd, and the majority of patrons loved her.

Tonight she dressed in a conservative gray blouse tucked into a gathered gray-and-coral print skirt. The hem of her skirt flared out as she spun away from the bar with a tray of four draft Coors, taking them to a table where one of her customers had just sneezed. “Whew, I’ve got a cold,” the man drawled in his slow colloquial twang.

“No shit. Now we all have a cold,” Betty said, not looking up as she placed a beer in front of each patron.

“I covered my mouth with my hand,” her customer protested.

“That’s a hell of a big job for one hand,” Betty said, and turned on her heel.

Waves of laughter erupted behind her, but she ignored those people when she caught the eye of a handsome new customer. He sat watching her, and also laughed. She stepped over to his table, and said, “What would you like, sir?”

“You,” he said. “Why don’t you come sit down here?” He patted the Naugahyde seat of the chair next to him.

“As much as I’d like to, I’m afraid fraternizing is against the rules. Besides, you look like you wouldn’t have any trouble finding company,” she said with a wink.

“This place has rules?” he asked, sincerely surprised.

“What’s your name?”

“My friends call me Jimmy Don.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Don.”

He smiled. “Do you have an answer for everything?”

“I wish.”

“When do you get off work?”

“Late. Those big brown eyes of yours would be pretty sleepy if you waited for me. I go home sometime between one-thirty and two.”

“That’s past my bedtime. I’ll need to catch you when I don’t have an early shift the next day.”

“Shift?”

“I’m with the Dallas Fire Department.”

“What did you do before that?”