Cemetery Road (Sean O'Brien Book 7) (6 page)

Max followed me through the restaurant, her tail wagging when Roberto, the cook with a full beard and belly to match, came from the kitchen near the bar and said, “Hey, little Max. You wanna fry?”

She snorted and Roberto used one of his large hands to lift a French fry from a bamboo basket lined with newspaper. “Sean, last time I saw Max, Nick Cronus brought her in here and let her sit on a barstool for a little while.”

“She likes German beer. It’s the dachshund in her.” I grinned. “Come on, Max. One’s enough.” She followed me across the restaurant to Caroline Harper’s table, diners in tank tops and shorts pointing at Max and smiling. Caroline Harper looked up, not sure whether to smile or ask me a question. I said, “Are you Miss Harper?”

“Yes. Please call me Caroline.”

“I’m Sean O’Brien. Sean works fine for me.” I smiled.

“Thank you for willing to meet with me. Please, sit.” Her pale blue eyes tried to mask worry, maybe fear. She glanced down as Max approached, sniffing the base of the table and sitting next to my feet. “Your dog is so precious. My neighbor had one for years. How long have you had him or her?”

“Definitely her. Long enough to know each others quirks.” I smiled, letting her take the time she needed, hoping my comment would put her at ease.

“It looks like she knows her way around this restaurant. How’d you choose a dachshund?”

“I didn’t. My wife Sherri did a few months before her death. And so now it’s Max and me.

“I’m sorry for your loss. Your friend, Dave, said sometimes you live on your boat here at the marina.”

“I have an old cabin about fifty miles inland. My boat’s an ongoing work in progress.”

“Is that the boat Curtis Garwood chartered?”

“Yes.”

Her chest rose, she swallowed dryly. Caroline reached in her purse and withdrew a photo, placing the picture on the table toward me. It was the image of a boy, maybe twelve or thirteen. Handsome. Staring directly into the camera lens. “That’s a picture of my brother, Andy. Curtis mentioned him in his letter to you.”

I said nothing, picking up the photo and looking closer at it. I could see a dusting of freckles across the boy’s forehead. I set it down. “And I’m sorry for your loss, too. He looks like a fine boy.”

She smiled. “He was…he was the best older brother a girl could hope for. We did a lot together growing up. Andy had to grow into…he became more of a protector for me than our stepfather. I’d always suspected they’d killed Andy while he was being held in the Florida School for Boys. My family received a letter and a brief call from the warden telling us Andy had run away. But where would he go? He was only thirteen. I’d heard talk that there might be hidden graves of boys killed and buried on that reform school property. I’ve tried to get the police to open a file, to start a case. They still call him a runaway, a missing child. And after all these years, they won’t do anything, especially in Marianna.”

“And then you received a copy of Curtis Garwood’s letter.”

“Yes! It was like a new door had opened where one had been nailed shut for years. I was so sorry to read Curtis took his own life. I remembered him as a kid who had lots of those little Matchbox Cars. When the other boys didn’t spend time with Curtis, Andy did. Curtis was always trying to get money to buy more of those little cars.” She bit her lower lip, looking at her brother’s picture. Then she raised her eyes up to me. I could see a vein pulsating on the right side of her neck. She took a deep breath. “Sean, would you…could you maybe look into Andy’s disappearance? He didn’t deserve that fate. He was just a boy—a child. He was sent there because he skipped school twice. The principal wanted to make an example out of Andy. My brother was so bored in that country school. He had a quick mind, and he could make a hundred percent on tests without having to study. He liked the library and read voraciously, something our stepfather ridiculed him for doing. He simply didn’t like Andy, and our mother was too scared, a self-inflicted learned weakness, to do anything about it. Our stepfather accused Andy of stealing money from his wallet. He even called the police to our house to scare Andy. A few weeks later, Andy told me in confidence that he suspected one of his friends, a boy who’d been at our house that day, had stolen the money. But Andy never accused him of it. You know who that boy was, Sean?”

“Curtis Garwood.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “That’s impressive. How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Andy said two days after the money went missing, Curtis had a dozen new Matchbox Cars.” She leaned back in her chair, watching a family enter the restaurant and take seats around two of the spool tables. She stared at a boy who was about the age of her brother in the picture. She
said, “That family just seated by the waitress is a happy family. You can tell by their smiles, by their joking with each other. The oldest boy reminds me of Andy. The boy handed his mother the menu first. He’s quiet. He’s considerate. You can tell. He’s going to have a chance to come of age, to live his life. Andy never got that. It was as if he was born in the wrong time to the wrong family.” She looked at me and said, “Will you help me?”

“I’m not sure what, if anything, I could do. If your brother was killed, his killer or killers are probably dead by now. There may be no one left to bring to justice.”

“Sean, my brother, and other boys like him, were considered by the state as nobodies. Throwaways. No one was ever held accountable because no one cared. Even if you can’t find any of the men responsible for my brother’s death, maybe you can somehow find my brother’s grave. A few years after Andy never returned home, my mother divorced our stepfather. She married a decent man. They’re both dead, buried in a plot next to my grandparents. I want to find my brother’s hidden grave and bring him home to the family plot. Will you help me?”

I nodded. “I’ll look into it. Do what I can. At this point, I don’t want to promise you something I can’t deliver.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong, Sean. You’ve already delivered it to me. You’ve given me something I haven’t felt in almost a lifetime.”

“What’s that?”

“Hope.”

She reached in her purse and removed a second, identical photo of her brother. “Please, take this. If you need a reminder of what I’m hoping for, it can be as close as your shirt pocket. Where will you start?”

“By looking in a post office box.”

NINE

T
here’s something odd about opening a post office box that’s not yours. It’s almost like opening a letter that’s not addressed to you. I thought about that, stepping inside a post office I’d never been to, opening a box I’ve never seen. I walked up to box 129 and inserted the brass key. And there it was, a manila envelope fitting neatly into the large box. I glanced over my shoulder. Three people, less than twenty feet from me, stood in line at the counter to claim packages or buy stamps. The clerk, late fifties, bloodhound eyes, glasses perched at the tip of his nose, looked over at me with a detached glance.

I pulled the package from the box and read the address. The same neat handwriting, the same fountain pen. Curtis Garwood had written my name in the address, but at this point, it didn’t make it much easier. I started to open the large padded envelope on a table used for preparing packages. I glanced at one of the three cameras I’d spotted entering the building and thought otherwise. If it was some kind of physical evidence in the killing of Andy Cope, the evidence chain had been broken a long time ago. But there was no need to empty the contents on government cameras.

I walked across the parking lot to my Jeep, the hot sun on the back of my neck. I sat behind the wheel, lowering the windows and using a knife I carried in my console to carefully open the package. There were two stacks of one hundred dollar bills, a hand-written letter, and something at the bottom of the package. I looked inside and saw a shotgun shell. I found a pencil in my console, inserted it into the open casing and lifted out the shell. It was a spent shell—the casing, and it was one of the older varieties, a paper casing with small images of pheasants on the exterior. I lifted the shell to my nose. I could smell the faint odor of burnt powder from a 12-gauge shell that was probably fired a half-century ago. I set the shell on the top of the console and read the letter—most likely the last thing Curtis Garwood wrote in his life.

Dear Sean –

If you’re reading this, I can assume you’ve decided to take the job, and for that I’m eternally grateful. I’ve enclosed fifteen thousand dollars for your expenses and time. That’s the best I could do. The shotgun shell I’ve included in here was used to kill Andy Cope. I say that because I was hiding when I saw three men chasing Andy one night. I‘d taken the trash out and decided to spend a few minutes smoking a cigarette behind a brick tool shed. A thunderstorm came from nowhere. That’s when I heard them chasing somebody. It was three men. Although their backs were turned to me, as they chased him, I heard one of them yell, “Stop! Don’t make us cut you down, Andy.”

The man who yelled was the one we called the Preacher, because he liked to quote old testament Bible verses before he beat us. He had a tattoo of the Southern Cross on his right forearm. He called his tattoo the Southern Cross of Justice. They shot the first round in the air. Andy stopped and turned around. Then there was a crack of lightning and Andy ran. The man in the center, I believe it was the Preacher, shot him in the back as Andy ran toward the only oak tree in the field. That’s where he fell, at the base of the tree
.

The men picked up the first shell casing. But they couldn’t find the second. In that burst of lightning, I saw the casing fall behind a log. The next morning I found it,
and I’ve kept it all these years. I hid that night while they picked up Andy, his head hanging down and his body limp. I knew they’d killed him, and I knew they’d do the same to me if I told anyone. I have few regrets in life, but that’s one I’m taking to my grave. Wherever they buried Andy, I believe other boys were buried there, too. They had no right to do that to kids, and that’s all we were – scared kids. I hope you will find courage and success where I could not. And I pray for your soul, Sean, because if you go there, you will meet some people who sold theirs a long time ago
.

Sincerely
,

Curtis Garwood

TEN

T
he last time Jesse Taylor entered the Jackson County Courthouse he left in a deputy sheriff’s car. And, today, he was here to see the sheriff. He’d called to make an appointment, but was told the sheriff was tied up in budget meetings. Asked what it was in reference to, the receptionist said Jesse could speak with an investigator within the cold case division.

The investigator was forty-five minutes late. Jesse sat on a hard plastic chair inside the receiving lobby of the sheriff’s department. Three chairs down was an African-America woman, leafing through a tattered copy of People Magazine, one of the pages falling to the floor. She picked it up, glancing over to Jesse. He could see that her face was slightly swollen on the left side, her left eye dark with bruises. She quickly turned her head.

Jesse looked at the clock on the wall close to the reception desk.
More than fifty minutes late
. He got up and walked over to the woman behind the counter. She stopped pecking at the keyboard in front of her, looking up at Jesse. “Yes sir.” Her tone was flat. Hair bobbed around her ears, round face, multiple piercing spots on her earlobes. No earrings.

“I was wondering if you heard from Detective Larry Lee. He’s almost an hour late.”

“He’s still in the field. Last communications he said he was heading back to the station. Detective Lee knows you’re here, sir. It’s been a busy day. Active cases are a priority.”

“You mean over cold cases.”

“I didn’t say that. Please, just have a seat.”

Jesse turned to walk back across the lobby just as two men came in from the entry hall. They were laughing at something. One wore an open brown sports coat, white shirt and khaki pants, badge barely visible on his brown belt. He had a neatly trimmed salt and pepper beard on an angular face, toothpick in one corner of his mouth. The other man was tall, wide-shoulders, his dark hair cut military style. He picked up two messages on the desk, waited for the receptionist to press a button under her counter to allow him access to a locked door near the desk. He turned to his partner, “Catch you in a few. We’ll go over the Barfield case.”

The man in the sports coat nodded and turned toward Jesse. “Are you Mr. Taylor?”

“Yes sir.”

“I’m Detective Lee. How can I help you?”

Jesse looked around for a second. “Do you have somewhere we can talk, maybe an office?”