Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (44 page)

ISAAC WOKE WITH
a full bladder and a crick in his neck from sleeping in the cab. He stepped out, sorely tempted to relieve himself on Levi Skinner’s front lawn, which is what she did in the morning when she had to go too badly to get up to the Blue Moon. But her father slept under an old wool blanket on Levi’s lawn. Just a perpetual campout, here at the trailer park. He glanced at the sleeper door, knowing she was in there, wondering when she’d wake, and of course he saw it. Right there, below the door. Right where he couldn’t miss it. The small pile of his belongings, his guitar, camera case, backpack, all stacked up tidy in an unmistakable message. He wanted to kick something, to smash something. He was through with being hurt, he was through with trying and hoping and attempting to communicate. Even with all that, he somehow resisted the urge to take a nice long whiz on the tire of her rig.

He gathered his things and what was left of his dignity, and started up Sweetly Dreaming Lane towards the highway.

MINAH WAS THE
only woman in the park who took the time to say good-bye to those nameless women with their thin necks and long dresses. While they loaded all those boys into the backs of the van with hardly a word, Minah handed out bags of sandwiches, bottles of lemonade, travel-sized packages of Kleenex. “You all have a good drive back, all right?”

The wife nodded. “We will, thank you.”

“We’re all just so sorry about how this came out,” said Minah. Oh, she knew what a bad piece of business that Gator had been, but she hated the sight of so many women and boys left to fend for themselves. She’d been there with her own son. “We’re all worried about you. You know, we could set you up here in the Park, help you with those boys.”

“We’ll be fine,” the wife said with dignity and composure, “We believe he’ll be back.” The woman’s eyes glowed. “Yes. And we’ll walk in the gardens, together.”

Well, that was just a little too creepy for Mynah. There were limits to what a person could hear, and still be polite. How much of this was a person with any common sense whatsoever supposed to listen to? She turned away, and noticed two men approaching.

First came Quentin Romaine, tugging along one of those rolling suitcases. Minah had no idea what he might have in there, but he sweated with the effort of it, and it bounced behind him like a loaded freight car. Maybe he had his lawn jockey in there. “Hi, Ladies!” he called. “We talked about my coming with you to help with the driving? I’m all set to go! I can’t wait to go somewhere where it’s clean of the mud races, if you know what I mean. Too much of that around here, what with your spics and beaners…” He would have gone on, but no one was paying him any mind. He looked over his shoulder to see the approach of a small, muscular man with a shorn head and dark skin wearing a suit with wide lapels and stitched-in creases in the trousers. With his two-toned shoes and pressboard suitcase, he looked like a Delta Bluesman.

“Goeth thou to Moab?” He shone in the sun, his natural power around him like a mantle, his Bible under his arm. The women responded to him like still water responds to the touch of a fingertip. They rippled and shimmered and reflected. They straightened their postures, arranged their patchy heads of drab hair. Even the boys settled down a little, looking at this strange man in their midst.

Finally, one of the seven wives of Gator Rollins spoke up. “Please ride with us.”

“Why, thy offer pleaseth me verily.” He looked at the vans for a moment, shaking with the thudding bodies of boys who had already gotten too bored to sit still. “This din doth displease the Lord.” Miraculously, the vans stopped their bouncing. Asa bowed. The wives smiled.

Quentin turned a deeper shade of purple and set off back down the road, his caboose of a suitcase threatening to tip over. Minah went home to think on it.

The days had a steady pattern since she’d retired as cook for Ochre Water Elementary School’s lunchroom. There were strays to feed and a coffeepot to wash. There were ladies’ magazines, the source of all the clippings for the community bulletin board. And there was yarn, yarn, a never-ending rainbow of acrylic yarn to be knitted and crocheted into baby blankets, potholders, toilet paper cozies, afghan blankets. As Minah worked, she wondered if her grandkids would ever visit her, and what all those bright California children with their lessons and sports and great big ranch house on the cul de sac would think of a place as full of crazy doings as the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park. Well, she thought, there was just no telling, was there. Folks just did what folks did, when you looked at the whole scale of it. Folks just pretty much did what they did, yes, they did.

She made a pot of coffee and put a coffeecake in the oven, because she was always ready for a visitor.

“BY GOSH,” MINAH
said to Memphis a little later, “Those ladies gave me the heebie-jeebies. I tell you, Memphis, I don’t know what they’ll do now.”

“Well, maybe Asa can help them out a little.” Memphis was trying to be serious since Minah was so desperately earnest, but the thought of Asa Strug heading to Utah with a caravan of wives was difficult to take too seriously. “Maybe Asa will get a job.”

“Doing what?” Minah shook her head. “Changing the reader board outside some Utah movie theater? No, I don’t think Asa Strug is the answer to anyone’s money troubles. Especially not the money troubles of seven widows with more little boys than I could count. I suppose it was financial worries over supporting that many women that drove Gator Rollins to steal those rings. He must have been desperate for money.” Minah peered fiercely over her bifocals.

Her eyes did more than challenge him, thought Memphis with a shiver. Her eyes, he decided, warned him. “I’d like to talk with you about that, Minah.”

She leaned back, adjusted her wig and crossed her arms across her polyester-clad bosom. “You go ahead and talk, Memphis. I think I’ll just sit right here and do some listening.”

He sighed, sipped his coffee. “I’ve closed the case on the Right Reverend Henry Heaven. Evidence was found in Gator Rollins’ motel room that made it seem that he might have killed the Reverend. Namely, those rings. And of course he was fleeing the scene after kidnapping my great niece in his vehicle when he died. Gator didn’t comport himself like an innocent man.”

“Well I doubt very much that man was innocent. I mean, look at those wives of his. Most of them aren’t even twenty. He always struck me as a nasty piece of work.”

“So you’re saying you think he did it?”

“I didn’t know Gator Rollins and to tell you the truth, I didn’t want to.” Minah’s voice was oddly guarded. “I’m saying maybe he had the death he deserved, too.”

Memphis looked at her, his grey eyes full of bafflement. “Who decides that, Minah? Who gets to decide what kind of death a man deserves? The court of public opinion? A pack of vigilantes?” He leaned back, shook his noble head. “We have courts of law for a reason.”

Minah frowned. “Do you remember Claudette Sprecker? That useless boyfriend of hers? That Fred Rettel?”

“Of course I do.” These were Ochre Water folks. Rettel had lived with Claudette and her four year-old son, Tyler. He’d never had a job, but Claudette was the night manager at the Denny’s in Ochre Water. Fred had moved in, helped himself to her home, her car, her paycheck, and it turned out, her son. Repeatedly, over the course of a year, until that poor child started kindergarten and told a teacher, because he was afraid to hurt his mother’s feelings. “I arrested Fred Rettel myself.”

“And you did a good job, Memphis. You got him good, and the charges stuck. And that man got six months in a treatment facility in Modesto and then he was back out on the street, looking for another tired woman who needed help raising her boys. He hurt that little boy for a year, Memphis. What kind of a world is it for a child, when the man does half the time the boy did?”

He looked at her, infuriated and ashamed. Yes, he knew the justice he represented had limits, he knew that. But what kind of a world would it be if everyone took justice into their own hands? So he said it out loud. “In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never heard of a Bone Pile girl getting into trouble. And Bonnie MacIver is pregnant. She went to the Church of the Open Arms.” He would never eat the coffeecake, but found himself pinching away bits of the crumble topping. “The Bone Pilers were church people. And the pastor of that church was kicked to death with boots, Minah. Pointy toed leather boots.”

“Like every man in this Park wears.”

“Yes. And like the Bone Pilers wear. And all the Bone Pile men just happened to be out of town that night at a fiddling festival in Idaho.”

“Have you made sure of that?”

He nodded. “I still have connections to call in that world, and I checked it out. About forty of them drove up there. They paid their entry fees, they participated. Minah, one of them won. The timing is off. They didn’t have time to do it on the way home.”

“Then who killed him?”

“I don’t know.” He took a sip of coffee, even though it had gone cold. “The most likely suspect was my niece, purely based on timing and circumstance. She had no motive to kill him and Raven is not a killer. But her boots checked out clean. And that leaves Bone Pile.” He thought about kicks with boots, and what it would take to pry the Bone Pile men out of theirs. Maybe he could take someone from the lab up there and test the boots, pair by pair, while the owners looked on. He imagined them scattering to the deep hills to protect the sanctity of their footwear. “It seems to me that the only person who would kill over a girl is her father.” He thought for a bit. “Or maybe a mother? I do believe that if a child belongs to you, you’ll do whatever you have to, to keep that child safe.”

Minah looked sad and old. “A mother makes some dreadful sacrifices to keep a child safe, Memphis. Sometimes she sacrifices the child.”

He studied her face, so sweet and kind and honest and grieving. Minah knew something. Minah Bourne knew everything. But she was telling nothing. “I believe the Reverend interfered with Bonnie. I think that’s why the Bone Pilers stopped coming to church and stopped letting their girls go to school. Melveena was rounding them up every single day after the murder. Which brings us to Gator Rollins. He had no motive at all, Minah. I don’t think he did it.”

“You think his motives are clear? What motive did he have for taking Annie Leigh like that? I think that man is lucky he died in that fire. You talk about some vigilante justice. If he hadn’t died, I can’t imagine what folks around here would have done if he’d harmed our Annie Leigh any worse than he did. When a Park only has one child, she belongs to all of us.”

So the motive came down to who belonged to who. Who a child belongs to. Who did Bonnie MacIver belong to? “Someone framed Gator. The only reason to frame someone is to take the blame off someone else. And to be honest, my main suspect was my niece.”

“What?” Minah nearly spit out her coffee. “Why on
earth?
”

Memphis just shook his head. When suspicion slid over on Raven, who had cared enough about Raven to make sure the suspicion landed on someone else? Who, besides himself, his brother and her mother, loved Raven enough to set up someone else for murder to clear her?

It all boiled down to who belonged to who.

Bonnie MacIver belonged to a hill town. Raven belonged to the LaCours. There was no connection. No one who cared about them both, no one… no. There was one. Only one. One person who cared deeply for both of them.

Wrath is the work of women and gods.

Maybe, he considered, the question isn’t which gods. Maybe the question is, which women.

“I have a choice, Minah. I can be a good sheriff, or a good man. I wonder which will win, today.” Minah’s face told him exactly which way she hoped it went. Memphis lay his arms on the table and lowered his head to his arms, an honest man humbled before the truth.

Minah rose and busied herself. There was a cake plate to cover, a pan to be washed, a counter to be wiped. A little sweeping, a little thinking about lunch possibilities. Tending to her own business.

A loud rapping broke the silence. Out on the porch, Annie Leigh stood among the tunafish cans licked clean by generations of fat, contented strays. She was shouting through the screen door. “Uncle Memphis! Guess what!”