Mama Stalks the Past (15 page)

“Abe’s doing all he can,” Mama said, confidently. “These things take time to work out.”

Annie Mae Gregory had by now walked over to a nearby chair and flopped her large body down into it. She sighed. “Well, I for one say that if Abe had caught the person when poor Hannah was killed, Nat would be alive today and you, well, you—”

Sarah Jenkins interrupted Annie Mae like she hadn’t been listening to her. “Hannah didn’t deserve to die like that, I don’t care what people are saying.”

Carrie Smalls, who had also made claim to a chair on the other side of the empty bed, scolded, “Now, Sarah, Hannah had her faults, we all know that!”

“Hannah had more than faults.” I remembered my earlier thought that she might have known that somebody would kill for her land. “She had an enemy, big time!”

Annie Mae Gregory looked at Mama as if to
suggest that even the good Candi Covington had an enemy that she had pushed so hard he had finally tried to kill her. “Doesn’t matter what you do to a person, there’s no reason to kill, now is there, Candi?” Annie Mae asked.

Whatever Mama’s thoughts on the subject, she ignored Annie Mae’s question. Instead, she asked, “Do either of you ladies remember Leroy Mixon’s son?”

“Of course we do,” Carrie Smalls answered. “He was kind of sickly like his Mama.”

“Reeves kept stowed up with a cold like I do,” Sarah Jenkins said, feigning a cough. She fished around in her enormous purse for a cough drop, pulled out two boxes, chose the cherry-flavored.

“Stella always had to purge that boy,” Annie Mae added.

“Is the boy still around these parts?” Mama asked.

The three women looked at each other and laughed. “Child, Reeves has been gone from home for years,” Sarah Jenkins told Mama.

“That boy was one of those people who leave home and never look back,” Carrie Smalls said firmly.

“Didn’t even come to his Daddy’s funeral,” Sarah Jenkins said as she pulled a handkerchief out of her purse.

Annie Mae Gregory shook her head. “Leroy
Mixon wasn’t exactly the kind of daddy you’d care much about.”

I cleared my throat. “Have any of you seen Reeves Mixon lately?” I asked.

Nobody answered my question. The three women were silent. All three stared at me, without a word.

I tried another direction. “Have you heard that anybody has seen him?” I asked them.

Annie Mae Gregory shook her head. So did Carrie and Sarah. “Reeves was fifteen, sixteen when he left home,” Annie Mae said. “That was over twenty years ago. I reckon that’ll make him …”

“Thirty-five,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to know which direction Reeves took when he left the area, would you?”

The women laughed. “Course we do,” Carrie Smalls said.

“He’s somewhere in Florida,” Sarah Jenkins said.

“My sister’s boy said he ran into Reeves a few years back,” Annie Mae Gregory told us. “It was in Daytona. Or was it that place where the mouse is at?”

“Orlando?” I asked.

“Someplace in Florida.” Sarah Jenkins said it firmly. “Reeves’s down around there someplace.”

Mama yawned, this time closing her eyes and letting them stay closed. Carrie Smalls rolled her eyes and sighed hard, but then she stood and walked toward the door. “It’s late,” she announced. Sarah Jenkins and Annie Mae Gregory promptly fell in behind her. “I guess people will be glad to know you’re all right, Candi,” Carrie told Mama. “Glad to know that you know who tried to poison you.”

Mama opened her eyes. “
No, I don’t
,” she said, knowing that nothing she could say would stop this trio from spreading untruthful information throughout the county.

“Course you do,” Carrie Smalls said as she passed across the threshold into the corridor.

Annie Mae Gregory didn’t speak, she just nodded her head knowingly, her chins wobbling.

“I don’t understand you,” I said to Mama in exasperation after the women had gone. “They talked about you behind your back, practically accusing you of murder, and you treat them like they’re diplomats.”

“That’s a good analogy,” Mama said.

“You can’t make me believe it doesn’t bother you that they suspect you of poisoning Miss Hannah and Nat,” I said.

“Not really, but it’s because I’ve got the upper hand,” Mama confessed.

“Mama—”

“Simone,” Mama interrupted, “I’ve convinced Calvin Stokes, Judge Thompson, and Abe to keep Hannah’s will a secret for three more weeks.”

“Why?”

“Because after you told me about what they were saying about me, I know that those three will spread so many lies about me all over the county, I won’t be able to hold my head up.”

“Who cares what they say? It’s the person who tried to kill you that you should be worried about.”

“I can find that person better if people don’t know about the will,” Mama insisted. “I won’t have to spin my wheels defending myself.”

I nodded. But the truth was that I wasn’t as sure about Mama’s rationale as she was.

T
he next morning things seemed a little more hopeful. For one thing, Mama, who’d had a good night’s sleep, seemed almost her old self again.

Dr. DeFoe visited her early, around five. While he examined her, I took the opportunity to look for Gertrude. She had mentioned the day before that she would be on duty early this morning. I wanted to check to see how she was coming with the list of hospital workers I’d asked for. I still wasn’t convinced that somebody who worked at the hospital wasn’t behind Mama’s poisoning. That list would be the first step in finding out who that person might be.

But Gertrude was hedging. She hadn’t done
anything toward getting me the list. I made her promise to work on getting it.

When I got back to Mama’s room, Dr. DeFoe had gone on to his next patient. Mama was sitting up. Sheriff Abe stood next to her bed.

“Meant to come more oftener,” he was saying when I entered the room. “This whole mess has got me jumping like a grasshopper.”

Mama nodded.

“I was in Columbia yesterday meeting with the State Law Enforcement people about Hannah’s and Nat’s deaths. DeFoe called to tell me that you were finally conscious, that you were going to pull through.”

Mama seemed satisfied with the sheriff’s explanation of his neglect. “Did you get anything important from SLED?” she asked her old friend and sleuthing partner.

“DeFoe told me that he had sent the stuff he pumped from your stomach to the lab by a courier. Since I was there, I went to the lab directly. I pressured them a bit to get them to analyze it so quickly. Usually takes longer. Speaking of longer, good thing you came back to the hospital that night,” Abe said. “DeFoe said you might not have made it if you hadn’t.”

“I would have never returned if I hadn’t gotten that phone call,” Mama said.

“Who called you?” the sheriff asked.

“I don’t know who I talked to, but she said she was calling for Trudy Paige. If Trudy hadn’t told that person that I was waiting for her at the Country Café, well—”

Abe scowled. Abe is a thin man with soft gray hair at his temples, deep lines in his face, and a mouth that turns down to show a bottom row of teeth. “I’ll put Rick to hunting down Trudy Paige.” Rick was Abe’s deputy.

“I’ve got information on Trudy.” I decided that this was something I wanted to be a part of. “She used to work right in this hospital. That is, until she quit right after Nat died.”

“Trudy told me she hadn’t quit,” Mama said. “Told me that she still works here.”

Abe shook his head. “I’ll get to talking with the people here at the hospital. It shouldn’t be too hard to track her.”

“What about Reeves Mixon?” I asked.

Abe looked confused. “Reeves who?”

“Never mind about Reeves,” Mama said. “We need to find Trudy.”

“Yeah,” Abe said, easing toward the door. “That girl set you up, all right.”

“Wherever you find Trudy, let me know,” Mama told him.

“I’ll let you know as soon as I put my hands on her,” Sheriff Abe assured her, and I knew he would keep his promise. He looked at Mama
again, as if to assure himself that she was okay, then, with a nod, he left.

“Now that we’ve got Abe searching for Trudy,” Mama told me, the moment the sheriff was out of hearing range, “we’ve got to find Reeves Mixon.”

“You
do
think Reeves has something to do with this whole thing?”

“I think he might have wanted his land back,” she replied. “We’ve known all along that Hannah inherited that land from Leroy, but we didn’t know about Stella Gordon or her son Reeves. It’s something we must look into.”

One thing still puzzled me. “Why didn’t you want me to tell Abe about Reeves?” I asked.

“Abe will have his hands full finding Trudy. Besides, there ain’t no law against Reeves leaving home twenty years ago, is there?”

“Okay,” I said reluctantly, “I’ll call Sidney later this morning. Ask him for some more time off to stay with you.”

“No, don’t do that,” Mama said. “I’ll be all right.”

“Do you honestly think that I could do anything in Atlanta knowing that you’re here at the mercy of a killer?”

“Dr. DeFoe thinks I can go home tomorrow. I’ll need to rest. I don’t imagine anybody will
come into my own house to harm me,” she retorted.

“How about you going to Atlanta with me? You can rest at my apartment.”

“I don’t think so,” Mama said. “My home is where I want to be.”

“Daddy, Will, and Rodney will feel better knowing that you’re away from Otis for a while,” I pointed out craftily. I knew Mama wouldn’t want Daddy and my brothers any more worried than they had been.

“I’ll think about it,” Mama said absently, like what she was thinking about was something other than staying in my apartment in Atlanta.

On Tuesday morning, we took Mama home from the hospital. Will went back to Florida, and Rodney flew back to New York. Cliff and I were finally headed back for Atlanta.

“I’ll run a paper trail on Reeves Mixon when I get back to Atlanta,” I promised Mama.

“Abe needs to find Trudy. I’m going to make that woman tell me why she lied to me if it’s the last thing I do,” she said, her voice determined. A chill ran through me. The last time Mama talked to Trudy Paige, it had almost killed her.

“And Simone,” Mama said, looking at me
soulfully. “We’ve only got three weeks, three weeks before the will is released to Probate.”

“I know,” I said, softly, suspecting that the release of the knowledge about the will was more threatening to my mother than the person who had tried to kill her. The idea that people here in Otis were gossiping about her was very hurtful to her.

I traced Reeves Mixon from the moment he left Cypress Creek when he was fifteen, twenty years earlier, to his first job, caddying at a golf club in Daytona. Once I got his Social Security number, the rest was easy. I checked for a driver’s license, credit reports, tax and bank records. I had a lot of experience doing this kind of research, working for Sidney’s law firm.

Six months after Reeves left Daytona, he’d moved to Orlando. A year after that, he showed up in Miami. There he stayed for five years. The next time he worked, it was in Orlando at one of the same golf clubs he’d worked at before.

Reeves hadn’t married. At least I couldn’t find a marriage license. And he owned no real estate. I searched not only the tax records of every county he’d lived in since he left Otis, but also all the surrounding counties. And he didn’t own a car either: I checked motor vehicle records—no car tags, nothing.

The one thing I did discover was that Reeves
Mixon had a serious drinking problem. Hospital records came from all over Florida. He had been hospitalized many times for alcohol poisoning. Reeves was no social drinker; the man drank a lot of liquor and he drank it fast.

The last record came from Orlando Regional Medical Center. Reeves had been diagnosed as having cirrhosis of the liver; he’d stayed a few weeks and was released. His prognosis was poor. The report was dated in May, six months earlier. And there the paper trail ended.

Everything I’d learned of Reeves made me see him as a sad person. He was a loner, with no family. He wandered from place to place. He drank too much. He’d been in and out of hospitals and had finally ended up with a disease that would soon kill him. If it hadn’t already.