Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (22 page)

THE BUS CAME
just as he was knocking on her classroom door. The girls looked up, saw the uniform and ran for the exits. It was a Bone Pile reflex and not to be taken personally.

Melveena smiled in welcome. “Sheriff. Won’t you have a seat.” Memphis folded his long frame into one of the kids’ chairs. He felt like a lonely Indian boy a few grades behind, a boy so desperately in love with the young nun who taught them that he’d committed small acts of classroom disobedience just to be allowed to stay in at recess and study her.

“I need to know the particulars of the Reverend’s rings. They’re missing.”

“Those rings were trash.”

“Well, someone took them, and I need to know what they looked like. And you notice things like this.”

“Well, let’s see. One had fairly large stones set in the shape of a horseshoe. One was pavé, in the shape of a four-leaf clover. One was a lion’s head, with fake rubies for eyes and a fake diamond in the mouth, like, held in the teeth?” She made a claw shape with her manicured hands to demonstrate. “Another one had ‘canary diamelles,’ which is QVC lingo for big yellow zircons. He had two in the shape of the Cross. A big one, and a smaller one he wore on his pinkie. The other two were just great big ugly rings, Memphis. Monstrous type rings. And there wasn’t anyone in that Park who didn’t know they were fakes. No one.”

Memphis thought about it. “That means that whoever killed him came from outside the Park?”

“From Ochre Water, you mean? Or farther away?”

“Well, what about Bone Pile?”

“The folks around here loved him.” She flashed that smile.

“How are the kids taking it?” Memphis could hear the kids in question outside, playing some kind of singing game. Their voices floated out the open bus windows.

“They’re heartbroken, of course.” Melveena strode over and slammed the window. “These girls are beyond devastated.”

Memphis looked at her tall frame standing between him and the light of the closed window. He thought about that third-grade teacher. “Can you tell me which of these girls were members of the Church of the Open Arms, Melveena?” She listed their odd names, and he wrote them dutifully in his notebook. “Have you noticed anyone up here with new boots? It’s a long shot, but I’m looking for new boots.”

“I probably haven’t seen a new pair of boots in Bone Pile in all the time I’ve worked here. There are boys in my school wearing their grandfathers’ boots. They just pass them down.”

He stood then. “Good afternoon, Miz Melveena.”

“Afternoon, Sheriff.” She shut her door, opened her window and watched him go to his car.

HIS CELL PHONE
rang on the way back to the office, with news. Gator had his hearing, and he was out. “There just isn’t enough of a judicial backlog in these parts to keep a man in jail with no legal reason,” Memphis complained to Hiram. “Even a man like Gator Rollins.”

“Yes Sir, Sheriff.”

He hung up and thought about Minah’s warning that a man got the death he deserved.

Once, he’d arrived at the scene of a three-fatality accident scene. Marva Jean Delaney and her baby, Jonathan Junior, had been coming home from her parent’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration when a drunk driver in a Chevy truck had strayed across the highway line, head on into Marva Jean’s Volkswagen Rabbit. She’d died instantly, the impact of her head to the windshield enough to shatter her skull.

Jonathan Junior had been riding in the back, just like he was supposed to be, strapped onto a car seat, just like he was supposed to be. He didn’t have a mark on him. He looked like he was sleeping. He wasn’t. That old car seat from a tag sale in Ochre Water had bad straps. Just enough slippage to let that tiny neck snap like a wishbone.

Oh, Memphis had wanted to cry out to the unfairness of a God that would take a young mother, an innocent baby. While on-duty, he questioned men, not God. So he made some notes, dried his eyes, and took a look at the other driver.

Jarvis Headwall, a drunken no-account from Ochre Water, had bled to death after being cut to ribbons. It had taken him two hours to die, according to the ambulance driver.
The folks who found him said he was hollering up a storm, the idiot, twisting around and making himself bleed even more. If he’d a held still, he might a made it. By the time we got here, we couldn’t save him
.

Memphis had looked at that place in the road, a place where the world lost a baby, his mother, and the man who’d killed them. He’d tried to see more than the horror of it. He’d tried to see the mercy in it. The innocent ones, at least they died quickly.

When tears over the lost child started streaming down his cheeks, he knew he’d reached his limit. It was time to rest. He radioed the office. “I’ll be at home seeing to the animals, Hiram.”

He drove the miles to his farm carefully. At one point, he woke just as his wheels hit the gravel shoulder. He whistled like a bird, sang the Tennessee Waltz, counted mailboxes out loud.

Home had never looked so nice.

John Lee, the ancient German shepherd sleeping in the kitchen corner, looked up, thumped his tail. John Lee was a veteran police dog, retired with honors from the force at age nine. His bad hips were nothing unusual in a shepherd, but he still made it in and out of the dog door when he needed to. Memphis filled his bowl, and noted with satisfaction that the old boy still had his appetite.

He uncovered the cage in his kitchen and smiled at the little faun-colored heads poking out of the teardrop-shaped nest. “Morning,” he mumbled, embarrassed by his affection for this pair of finches. He fed the birds, blowing away the chaff, smiling at their angry scolding and hopping about. Guarding those eggs.

He took of his boots, washed his hands, lay down on his couch, and went soundly to sleep. He dreamed of Tender.

As young men, Tender had been a model of dignity, his hands on the strings of a fiddle or on the keys of a piano, his head cocked, his big ears held just so, so that his eardrums could vibrate with that sonic brilliance that only he could hear. Memphis didn’t understand the brother he had now, the way he swallowed hard whenever he sent his eyes up the street to Fossetta’s trailer. The way he let that little woman yell at him, as if he deserved it.

That was not the brother who visited his dreams.

In his afternoon dreams, Tender roamed the lanes and avenues of the Park in a navy blue robe, the crest glowing golden over his heart. His feet were bare and bleeding, his hair streaming away from his head. His silver eyes loomed huge. He shone as a visionary, a prophet, a mobile home Moses.

I heard it, big brother,
he kept saying.
I heard it.

Lord have mercy on us all.

TENDER LACOUR’S MONDAY
was no better than his Sunday, which had been pretty nearly as bad as his Saturday, though of course not as bad as his Friday. He’d awoken early to the sound of Rhondalee raging at her granddaughter. “Don’t tell me you’re wearing that!”

Annie’s voice had sounded as husky and sullen as her mother’s had been back in the Gospel circuit days when she protested one of Rhondalee’s get-ups. “OK, I won’t tell you I’m wearing it, Gramma. But I am.”

He’d stumbled in to the kitchen and stood quietly behind Annie, who modeled a pair of worn-out boy’s overalls and a child’s western shirt from the days of Tom Mix. Those, and her new boots. Rhondalee was throwing sparks. “She says she’s wearing that!”

“She appears to be wearing it, yes.”

“Don’t you tease me! I won’t have looking like that! She looks like a hobo! She ALWAYS gets like this when her mother is in town!” Rhondalee had grasped for her arm, but Annie Leigh had slipped out the door. “The devil’s business!” cried Rhondalee, shaking her finger at the child’s back. “She’s always up to the devil’s business!”

“I’ll go get her.” Tender walked out the door and got into his truck.

“You never back me up!” Rhondalee shouted out the door after him. “You always take her side!”

Tender’s fingers found the keys in the ignition. So that’s where they’d gotten to, the darn things were out here in the truck. He fired it up and backed out of the driveway. As soon as he turned onto the highway toward Ochre Water, he saw her standing with her thumb out, storm clouds flashing in her eyes. She looked just like her mother.

He pulled over next to her. “Where you headed?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Would you like a ride?”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

They didn’t talk much as they rode. He put on a Dolly Parton tape. She turned it up and sang along. Her singing made the hair on his arms dance, and his heart threatened to fill his mouth. The song ended before she brought her old grandfather to tears. “Hey! I got an idea! Why don’t you marry Fossetta? She cooks real good, and she’s way nicer than Gramma. And she’s quiet. She looks real pretty with her clothes off, too. I seen her through the window.”

“You shouldn’t be peeking in windows, little girl.” Thoughts of Fossetta, her two-colored eyes, her ample, shifting body, that honeyed glory of her hair, sent him onto a tailspin of longing and guilt.

“Grampa, I hear somebody mashed the Reverend dead.”

“So it appears.”

“Do you think he’s in Heaven?”

He cleared his throat. “Well, he’s somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Good question.” The Reverend was there, now, the place where all the mysteries were revealed. Someone had sent him there with a knock on the head. Tender wished the Reverend could send back word, shed a little light on the matter. Just pitch back a ring from the Great Beyond, a note wrapped around it, something to the effect of, “It’s all true, Tender.” Something to give him a little hope, a little faith.

“He was murdered, right?”

“That’s right, Annie. But don’t you worry. Your uncle Memphis will figure out who did it. And until he does, I’ll keep you safe.” She made a sound that, to his tender ears, sounded like scoffing. “All right then. Perhaps you’ll keep me safe.” She smiled, then. A smile from his granddaughter might be all he could ask of a day.

They were back home.

He parked the truck on Sweetly Dreaming Lane. “I’ll see you later, Grampa.”

“You going up to your mother’s?”

“She won’t be awake yet. I’ve got other business.” Annie slipped away. Her grandfather sat for a moment, looking at the door of the trailer next to his. He thought it might be the door that opened on Paradise, but he doubted he would ever know. Paradise, he knew, was not to be his. And nothing was there to take its place but that howl, that hum, that noise that rose up on him now and then, making him fearful. He heard it again. What is that, he wondered, that scream of fury that filled his head and made him cover his ears with his hands, what was that sound that made him want to call out to his lost God for mercy?

Overcome, his head slumped over the wheel. And that was where Rhondalee found him, “Passed out like a damn Indian in his truck,” a half hour later, when she stepped out the door to go to work. She promptly relieved him of his car keys, and reaching gently into his back pocket, the wad of cash he kept stuffed back there.