Cemetery Road (Sean O'Brien Book 7) (5 page)

I checked my phone. One missed call, and it was from Dave. I played his message: “Sean, if you get this, call me as soon as you can. You have a visitor, and it’s related to the letter Curtis Garwood sent you. He sent it to someone else, too, and she’s here at the marina asking for you.”

SIX

J
esse Taylor hoped he’d be there, but he wouldn’t bet the farm on it. Jesse could detect from the phone call that Harold Reeves was only meeting him because of their history together as kids. Both had been robbed from a natural transition, a coming of age, from boy to man. Maybe Harold would show up at the Waffle House. If not, that would speak volumes in a small town of less than ten thousand people. And it would mean that Jesse was going to start from scratch to find old men long overdue to be prosecuted, or the graves of those who died in their care.

Jesse locked the door to his room at the Heartland Motel, a chalky-white, single story, ragged structure that had a lot of tread wear since it was built in the 1950s. He left behind the chemical bleach smell in his room and walked across the parking lot, which was peppered with cracks and water-filled potholes. He stopped to light a cigarette, looking down at his reflection from the black water inside one pothole, mosquito larvae wriggling at the surface. He had forty-five minutes before his meeting with Harold at the restaurant, a few blocks from the motel.

He walked to the corner on Lafayette Street and headed right, stopping at a crossing, waiting for the light to turn green. A Marianna Police Department cruiser eased up to the intersection, stopping, the officer’s eyes hidden behind dark glasses, but Jesse knew the
patrolman was watching him. Jesse lit a cigarette and crossed the road, his eyes trained on the sidewalk in front of him. The patrol car drove by slowly, the officer turning left.

The Jackson County Courthouse was to his right. Old live oaks stood on the grounds, the limbs casting dark shadows over concrete shrines to the Civil War. Jesse knew the exact tree that the mob had hung Claude Neal from in 1934. A year before Jesse’s father had beaten his mother senseless, the old bastard had proudly pointed it out to him, like the tree was a monument.
No wonder I never amounted to much. Maybe I can still right a wrong or two
.

Jesse sat on a bench, watching people coming and going from the building, attorneys carrying briefcases bulging with files. People carrying human baggage, often stuffed with shame or hurt. Looking for some way out of a bad situation. But it was here where Jesse’s situation went from bad to horrible. He stared at the exterior of the building, remembering the day he was sentenced here. The outside of the courthouse had been updated, but it was the inside where Jesse’s life was forever changed.

He remembered the elderly, white-haired judge who wore a black robe and a reputation of stubbornness.
In God We Trust
was highlighted on the dark wood wall behind the judge’s bench. He never looked at Jesse as he sentenced him to ninety days in the Florida School for Boys. It might as well have been ninety years, because if Jesse lived ninety years, he felt his soul would never be cleansed of those ninety days. He blew a long breath out of his cheeks, his chest hurting. He glanced at his watch and walked toward the Waffle House.

Approaching the restaurant door, Jesse could see his reflection in the glass, and he could see the patrol car making another round down the street, the same officer in dark glasses looking toward the Waffle House as Jesse went inside.

Half of the booths were filled with diners. Four people sat at the counter, two paramedics, radios on their belts, and an earpiece in one ear. Jesse walked by the counter, looking for Harold Reese.
What the hell would he look like today?
Jesse spotted one man, sitting alone in a back booth, the furthest one from the front door. It was Harold.

Jesse walked up to him and said, “Been a long time. I think the last time I saw you was at Daytona, the time Dale died.”

“Yep. He was the best. Junior’s junior. What can I say? How you been, Jesse?”

“Somehow I find a way to climb outta the fox holes of life, barely.”

“I know what you mean.” Harold wore faded jeans and a NASCAR T-shirt. His whiskered face was deeply lined from age and the Florida sun. He had the look of a man who’d made his living outdoors, a farmer or fisherman.

Jesse took a seat opposite Harold. “I sure appreciate you meeting me.”

“No problem. We sort of grew up together.” Harold sipped black coffee.

“Man, what keeps you here. After the shit you experienced at the school, how could you have walked the same streets as those butchers through all these years?”

Harold looked out the window to the steeple of a church in the distance. He turned his pale blue eyes to Jesse. “Where could I have gone? I got deep roots in Jackson County. My granddaddy fought the yanks in the battle of Marianna. I have forty acres, a small house that’s long been paid off. I hired on with the post office and somehow managed to stay as a letter carrier for thirty years, and then I retired. I was lucky, after a lot of failures, to find a good woman who could put up with me, my quirks. And today we have two grandchildren.”

Jesse smiled. “I’m happy for you. You’re a better man than me.”

“On the phone you told me about Curtis Garwood’s death. Reading his obituary made you want to come back here, why?”

“Because it reminded me of how our lives got derailed off the tracks by some mean sons-a-bitches that never paid for what they did. I’ve been thinking about this for years.”

“You picked a helluva time to start your crusade. Most of those men are dead. The state attorney looked at it a few years back. Said nothing was prosecutable, statute of limitations and whatnot.”

“Murder’s prosecutable. Curtis’s death—by the way, he took his own life, brought back memories of Andy Cope. They were good friends. You remember Andy?”

“Yeah. His sister has tried more than once to get an investigation going. But man, you’re talking about a kid who vanished a long time ago.”

“I know they killed Andy in there one night. It was the night Andy told me and Curtis he was gonna run away. He wanted me to go with him, but I was too damn scared. I heard the shots, between booms of thunder. I’d just taken the garbage out. I didn’t see ‘em killing Andy, but we never saw him after that night. He never ran away. They shot him. Curtis was never the same. He never talked about it either. There’s no mistaking the sound of a 12-gauge shotgun firing double-aught buckshot. I’ve fired enough rounds through the years.”

Harold looked around the restaurant. “Jesse, lower your voice. This town’s got bigger ears than you understand. You need to go talk with Andy’s sister, Caroline Harper. See what she’s been up against. I’ll give you her address.”

“Caroline Cope…I remember her. So she’s been trying all these years to find Andy?”

“I believe she gave up on finding him. She’d hoped to find what happened and who did it. Now, I think she just wants to find Andy. To find his grave, I guess.”

Jesse looked across the restaurant for a second. “I remember Andy and Caroline walking home from school. Always together. He tried to take care of her, and he was just a kid, too.”

“Yeah. Her husband died a few years ago, heart attack. She has one daughter who lives in California. When the state attorney was looking at claims of child abuse in 2010, right before they shut the place down, Caroline was doing all she could to get investigators to look into what happened to Andy. She didn’t get very far. Nobody in this town wants to go there. It’s like they just want to distance themselves from a sleeping evil right on the edge of Marianna. I’ll give you directions to her place. Another thing, the state’s got that place up for sale. They may have an offer on it. I heard a developer wants to build houses and golf courses—a damn country club.”

“Somebody’s got to stop that. Nobody should be playing golf over the bones of kids. I got to do something quick—”

“Ya’ll ready to order?” A waitress approached the table. She was in her early forties, green eye shadow, a fingernail-sized birthmark on her neck, and graying hair in a ponytail.

Harold said, “Just more coffee, Lisa”

Jesse leaned back in the booth. “That’s fine for me too.”

She nodded and left. Jesse lowered his voice. “I believe there are a lot more bodies buried around that school. There has to be. We both knew kids like Andy who simply disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. They didn’t run away, Harold. For God sakes, you know that. Nobody has a right to build over them.”

Harold stirred sugar into his coffee. “Jesse, you ought to leave it alone. Just go on back to Jacksonville and forget it, okay?”

“No, I can’t. Not any more. I stopped at the school on the way here. It’s all locked up. Spoke with a security guard, Johnny Hines. Remember him?

Harold nodded. “What’d you tell him?”

“I asked him if Hack Johnson was still above ground.”

“What’d he say?”

“Let’s put it this way, he didn’t say Johnson was dead.”

Harold released a deep breath. “You asked the wrong guy. Hines is tight with the Johnson family. Might as well be on their payroll. Now they know you’re in town.”

“You were a letter carrier. What’s their address?”

“He lives way the hell back in the swamps. He’s got a hundred acres, fenced. His family lives back there in trailers, doublewides. They pretty much sum up the definition of survivalists. I heard the grandsons cook meth and sell it. One of those boys, his name’s Cooter Johnson, drives around town in a late fifties model Ford truck, painted canary yellow. He shoots pool a lot at a place called Shorty’s. But if I were you, I sure as hell wouldn’t go in there alone.”

“I got no beef against a grandson. I’d like to pay the old man a visit, though.”

“You don’t know if it was him who killed Andy. Johnson was one of the meanest. He liked to see blood fly on the first lick of the strap. You could never get to him today. And if you decide to head back in those swamps, then you’ll be doing what Curtis did. You’ll be committing suicide.”

SEVEN

C
urtis Garwood left a clue, but he didn’t leave a name. Before I returned Dave’s call, I remembered in Curtis’s letter he wrote that he’d sent a copy to Andy Cope’s sister. I stood on my dock and called Dave. He answered after a half dozen rings. “Sean, I was just leaving the Tiki Bar, heading back to
Gibraltar
for an espresso. Where are you?”

“Standing in wet swim trunks.”

“Poolside, no doubt, with a lovely lady, perhaps?”

“Max is the lady. The river will do as a pool in ninety-nine degree Florida heat. Who’s my visitor?”

“Name’s Caroline Harper. She drove down here from the panhandle, Jackson County to be exact.”

“Let me guess—Andy Cope, the boy Curtis mentioned in his letter, was her brother.”

“
Was
seems to be the operative term. I spoke with her briefly. Met her in the marina office paying my slip rent. She was asking where she might find you. I told her that you and I were friends and that I could get a message to you if it was important. After some gentle
prodding, she shared that she’d received a copy of Curtis’s letter and then wanted to meet Sean O’Brien, someone who might help find her deceased brother’s grave. Sounds like a tall order to me.”

I said nothing. The sound of a bumblebee darting in and out of the lavender trumpet flowers that were growing across an embankment and down my seawall invaded the momentary silence. The flowers were thick, and in the breeze they resembled cascading water spilling over a sluice into the river.

“Are you there, Sean?”

“Yeah, I’m just thinking.”

“Did you, perchance, pick up the second letter or package Curtis mailed to the postal box?”

“No.”

“Understood. Whatever it contains, I surmise, will be in someway linked, even by proxy, to Miss Harper or most probably to her brother, Andy.”

“I think the reason Curtis sent a second package is because he knew, if I opened it, if I take it, I would deal with whatever’s in the envelope and accept his offer.”

“It’s not as much an offer, Sean, as it is a challenge, a proverbial Oedipus riddle. And speaking of the Greeks, Pandora’s box was not a box. It was a simple looking jar—until it was opened.”

“And it was a myth, but don’t tell Nick.”

“What shall I tell Miss Harper? I left her at a corner table in the Tiki Bar overlooking the marina. She ordered hot tea and said she’d wait there until I told her whether or not I reached you. Time hasn’t been too kind to her, Sean. She has the thousand-yard stare, the look of someone who’s been denied of the one thing that propels all human growth.”

“What’s that?”

“Hope.”

I watched Max chase a field mouse as we walked toward the cabin. Dave exhaled in the phone. “I can tell her you’re not accessible, send her back to the Florida Panhandle. You’re under no obligation to meet someone who sort of materialized here at the marina, connected to you only because she was copied on a letter addressed to you. This is not a chain letter, however, it has that ominous feel. What would you like for me to convey to Miss Harper?”

“Tell her to order another cup of tea. I’ll be there soon.”

EIGHT

C
aroline Harper seemed out of step in a dockside bar filled with people who walked to the beat of a different drummer. The Tiki Bar was about half filled with shrimpers, deck hands, boat captains, weekend bikers, and tourists on all-day happy hours. It wasn’t hard for me to spot her. She sat alone, reading a book at a corner table in the bar. The rustic bar was a restaurant stripped of any pretense. It sat above the marina water on stilts. Its thatched roof of dried palm fronds was somewhat covered in pelican poop, the wooden sides of the bar faded from time and salt water. Plastic windows were rolled up, and a breeze carrying the scent of garlic crabs and broiled fish drifted across the Ponce Marina.

Dave had described her well—early sixties, platinum gray hair pinned up, the pensive face of a woman who’d endured a hardscrabble life probably more difficult than most. She’d set her paperback book on the table, one of a dozen large wooden spools previously used by utility companies to store power-lines. The tables were shellacked, turned on one end and bolted to the knotty pine floor, which was stained from spilled beer, grease, and sometimes a splatter of blood.