Mama Stalks the Past (8 page)

“I’m not dressed,” I protested.

Daddy braced Nat against his shoulder and lifted him out of the chair as if he were a child. “Then it’s you and me, Candi,” he said. “We’ve got to get this boy to the hospital now!”

Nat blinked. “I-I can’t see,” he choked. “I can’t.” He sounded like he couldn’t believe what was happening to him.

“It’ll soon be all right, once we get you to the hospital,” Daddy told him.

“Wait!” Mama put the bucket on the floor, ran to the hall closet, and brought out coats. She tucked one around Nat, one around Daddy. She threw her fuzzy pink slippers into a corner, trading them for a pair of boots.

“M-my eyes hurt,” Nat whimpered.

“Take it easy, boy,” Daddy told him. “We’ll
have you to the hospital directly. There’s nothing to worry about, son!” He no longer sounded angry. Instead, he sounded very worried.

I joined my parents in Otis General Hospital Emergency Room for the second time in less than twelve hours. When I walked in, Nat was in a bed, his bandaged head propped up higher than the rest of his body. He looked so defenseless. Now I understood what Mama had said earlier. Nat really was a lost child who needed someone to take care of him.

Daddy was talking to Dr. Jamison, the same doctor who had examined Uncle Chester last night. The doctor’s thick black curly hair seemed to sparkle in the bright hospital light. “I’m going to have him admitted,” the doctor told Daddy. “He has a concussion, you know. You got him to the hospital quick, that’s good!”

Daddy nodded grimly. “I did what I had to do.”

The doctor took out a small white pad and pencil. “Tell me, what happened to the young man?” he asked.

Daddy shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t take time to ask him.”

“You don’t know who hit him so brutally?” The doctor frowned.

Daddy tucked his hands in his pockets, a gesture
he uses when he feels tense but is trying to fake it. “No,” he said brusquely.

The doctor looked him directly in the eyes. “Police will want to know,” he said.

Daddy’s eyes didn’t blink. “Then they’ll have to get the story from Nat,” he said. “When he came to our house, he had already gotten busted.”

The doctor looked confused. He slipped his little pad back in his pocket. “I’ll have to tell the police you brought him here,” he said.

Daddy’s hands slipped further into his pockets. “Tell the police anything you want. My wife and daughter were with me having breakfast, Nat started banging on the window, we opened it, and,” he pointed to Nat, who was moaning softly while Mama held his hand, “this is what we found.”

Dr. Jamison smiled and nodded politely, as if he didn’t quite believe Daddy’s story but was too courteous to dispute it. “Thanks very much,” he murmured, then turned and walked away quickly down the long white corridor.

“You’re going to be all right,” I whispered to Nat. He looked at me, then closed his eyes. A tear rolled down his bruised face. His lips quivered and I imagined he was praying that his dead mother would come walking through the door and protect him from all the world’s misery.

Ten minutes later, my parents and I were in their car underneath the stoplight on King Street. Mama shook her head. “Nothing about this whole thing makes sense to me,” she said. “Who would want to hurt Nat like that?”

“The secret to this mess is in that envelope,” I said. “Once we find it, well find Miss Hannah’s murderer, and maybe—”

Mama cut in before I could finish my sentence. “And maybe save her darn fool son’s life!” she said softly.

M
y parents had taken the previous day off to keep their appointment with the lawyer Calvin Stokes. Today they both went to work, Mama to the welfare office and Daddy to Westinghouse, Micarta Division.

I was alone in the house, but I couldn’t seem to settle down. The weather was cold, the November sky gray, heavy with icy rain. Inside was warm but, for some reason, it too felt as depressing as the outdoors.

Of course, I missed Cliff. I cursed the fighting Zwigs whom I hoped never to meet, and I cursed Mr. Zwig’s live-in secretary for getting herself pregnant. It’s not fair, I thought. These people
who don’t even know I exist shouldn’t impact my life.

For the twentieth time that morning, I glanced through the window at the little house next door, the house where Hannah Mixon had lived and where she had died. Smalls Lane is a cul-de-sac. Besides my parents’ house and Hannah and Nat Mixon’s, there are four other houses on Smalls Lane. Each has a large yard planted with oak and magnolia trees. Behind Smalls Lane is a patch of woods that is a mile deep. On the other side of those woods a highway leads to Highway 6, the road that takes you to Darien.

Miss Hannah’s house is cement block. It had originally been painted white and green. Now, its exterior was faded, its awnings dirty. Everything about the house needed repair. It was a shabby sight, as dreary as the weather.

On the other hand, my parents’ home is a sprawling brick ranch with huge, bright rooms that are filled with objects from Daddy’s tours around the world. Daddy had purchased this property years earlier when they were first married, before my two brothers and I were born. I suspected that, even back then, Daddy planned to build on it whenever he retired. He always intended to call Otis home, no matter where the Air Force took him.

I sighed. Otis seemed so peaceful. Why would anybody who lived here poison Miss Hannah? Why would someone try to kill Nat? It was true that Miss Hannah was hateful, but as far as I could tell that was her only sin. And Nat, poor Nat, a thirty-year-old uneducated man whose only errors seemed to be that he was never trained to do anything productive and that he couldn’t seem to hang on to a dime. It was true, Nat probably owed everybody in Otis money. Last year, he’d borrowed twenty dollars from me, which, now that I think of it, he never paid back. Could the attack on him last night have something to do with his bad habit of borrowing money? Maybe, I thought, he owed someone a lot of money and that person had murdered his mother, thinking that Nat could repay him back with Hannah’s insurance money.

As a paralegal, I decided, I’d been trained to dig, to find a trail and follow it. I sat down with a notepad to jot down questions that I intended to find answers to. On the top of one page I put down, MISS HANNAH:
At least 60 years old. Married at least twice. She must have had Nat when she was 30. Check into her past … her husbands … her relatives … check county tax records to see when she bought the 250 acres of land … find envelope … Find Bible!

On the next page, I wrote, NAT:
Thirty, uneducated
,
loves to gamble, hang out at Melody Bar. Check into his friends … his girlfriends … people he owes money
.

Anything else? I wondered as I fidgeted with my pencil. Nothing came to mind. I picked up the remote and clicked on the television. A talk show had a mother and daughter who had switched roles. That was as senseless, I thought, as a murderer being a part of the serene Otis community. I clicked off the remote.

Next I checked out Mama’s bookshelves. She had a collection of books that she had gotten from the places where she and my father traveled. I found one that interested me. I curled up on the sofa and read until I fell asleep.

Around three o’clock I was up again wandering around the house. Lunch had been a thick ham sandwich and a cup of hot tea with lemon. I was sitting with my notepad again, trying to figure out a motive for Miss Hannah’s murder, when the doorbell rang. Surprised, because I didn’t expect a visitor, I disarmed the alarm system and opened the front door to find Sarah Jenkins, Annie Mae Gregory, and Carrie Smalls standing on Mama’s doorstep.

“Thank goodness you’re home,” Carrie Smalls said, pulling at the front door to escape wind and rain.

“Ladies,” I said, ushering them into the dry, warm house. I closed the door behind them.

Annie Mae Gregory is a huge, dark woman. Her black eyes are small and very piercing—in her fat face, her eyes always remind me of a raccoon’s. She has small black moles on each side of her face that extend from her bottom eyelid down to her neck. When her head is tilted a certain way, Annie Mae looks a little cross-eyed.

Sarah Jenkins, on the other hand, is a tiny, frail-looking woman with a pecan complexion that’s filled with wrinkles. Mama has told me that Sarah Jenkins is obsessed with her own health and visits her doctor’s office at least once a week. Today, she smelled sour, like vinegar and garlic.

Carrie Smalls is very tall, with mocha-colored skin and long straight hair that hangs to her shoulders. She looks younger than the other ladies but, I believe, that’s because she dyes her hair an extraordinary shade of jet black. Carrie Smalls has a strong chin, thin lips, and eyes that seldom seem to blink. She has a strength about her. It’s Carrie Smalls’s strength that gives the three women their presence when they are together. And when they’re together, you know gossip is on the menu.

“We came over to ask you what happened to
Nat Mixon early this morning,” Carrie Smalls began, her intense eyes locked on my face.

My mouth opened, but nothing came out. For a moment, I really didn’t know what to say. I finally stammered, “Would you ladies like a cup of tea?”

“Lord, yes,” Sarah Jenkins exclaimed, wrapping her neck with a thick scarf of navy wool. “Dr. Clark told me yesterday to stay in out of this weather, what with my various ailments.”

Annie Mae and Carrie decided they would like tea, too.

After I hung up each of the ladies’ coats in the hall closet, I directed them into the kitchen. Once I had them seated and had turned on the teakettle, Annie Mae Gregory opened the conversation. “Simone, we got news that somebody hit Nat Mixon over the head.” Her jowls shook as she spoke.

“Yes,” I said, my mind wild in trying to figure out how to handle this. Mama held that these three women knew useful information. You could say Carrie, Sarah, and Annie Mae were the town’s historians—they knew everything about everybody in Otis.

Sarah Jenkins took out a handkerchief and blew her nose. “Your Mama and Daddy took Nat to the hospital just after daylight,” she said.

I took cups and saucers from the cupboard, all
the while wondering how these women had learned so much in such a short time. The FBI could use their skills, I thought, and tried not to giggle. “What can I tell you?” I said.

Carrie Smalls tilted her head upward. “Tell us whether or not you saw anybody hanging around Nat’s house, anybody who would try to kill the boy?”

I was speechless. “No,” I said, at last. Then I decided that this wasn’t my expertise. “Maybe you ladies would enjoy your visit more if Mama was here,” I said, reaching for the telephone and dialing Mama’s office number. “Maybe she could come home.”

“We tried to see Candi,” Sarah Jenkins said. “We stopped by the welfare office before we came here. Candi was busy, she wouldn’t see us.”

“She was talking to that womanish Tippy Turner,” Annie Mae Gregory said. “That girl’s carrying her third child, and ain’t about to marry that good-for-nothing boyfriend of hers.”

“Maybe Mama is free now,” I suggested, waiting for the receptionist to answer the phone. After a moment, Mama was on the other end of the line. “Mama,” I began, “Sarah Jenkins, Annie Mae Gregory, and Carrie Smalls stopped for a visit and—”

“She’s coming home?” Carrie Smalls asked. Her nose twitched.

I said good-bye to Mama, who had just ordered me not to say a word, and replaced the phone. “Yes. It’s only a five-minute drive from her office. Meantime, I’ll fix you ladies tea and give you a piece of Mama’s sweet potato pie.”

The ladies had just cleaned their plates when Mama walked into the room. My mother had a look on her face that was a mixture of amazement and satisfaction. I surmised she was surprised that the women were so determined to get their information. Still, she was happy to be able to have this chat with them. “Ladies,” she said, taking off her coat and laying it on a chair.

“Candi,” Sarah Jenkins said, “it’s so nice to see you, dear. I declare you look younger each time I see you.”

“You’re looking well, too, Sarah,” Mama replied.

“Ain’t doing good though,” Sarah Jenkins said. “Dr. Clark got me on heart medicine now, you know.”

“No,” Mama said, shaking her head.

I wondered why a woman with a heart problem would be facing this weather just to talk about somebody else’s business. But I was smart enough just to sip tea and say nothing.

Mama shook her head again. “I’m real sorry
to hear about your heart, Sarah. And I’m sorry we couldn’t talk at the office, but—”

Carrie Smalls interrupted. “We would have never bothered you at your job or come here, Candi, if we weren’t so worried about Nat.”

“Nat is going to be all right,” Mama said.

“We stopped by the hospital to see the dear boy, but he was sleeping, and James’s cousin Gertrude wouldn’t let us wake him,” Annie Mae Gregory said.

Sarah Jenkins wrapped her hands around her bosom, pushing up her breast. “So, we came straight to you, Candi. We knew that you’d tell us how the poor boy is doing!”