Morgan James - Promise McNeal 01 - Quiet the Dead (15 page)

Fletcher was several feet away before I found my tongue. “Mr. Enloe,” I called out, “thank you. Thank you for coming over here to see about me. Thank you.” I waved him goodbye. He pretended not to hear me, then waved back, before he disappeared into the pine thicket.

Sheriff Mac made a pretense of looking for the prowler’s tire tracks in the drive and shook his head with discouragement. Even I could see the gravel masked any tire patterns or footprints. After going through the community servant speech about how the department would do the best they could, he admitted it would be almost impossible to catch the prowlers, unless they returned. Sheriff Mac reminded me to call 911 if I needed assistance and promised to check with the closest neighbors beyond Enloe’s house to see if they heard or saw anything unusual. He also reminded me to call the phone company to have the wires repaired. I thought it odd he didn’t ask any questions about who might want to frighten me. He probably thought the incident was as random as Garland’s description of Becca’s drive-by shooting.

As to the snake, Sheriff Mac extracted the knife from my door with his handkerchief wrapped around the handle and let both snake and knife fall into a black plastic bag that he deposited in the trunk of his cruiser. “Well,” I said to Susan, as we waved goodbye to the Sheriff, “I think I’ll go ahead and paint the whole door red. They say a red door keeps out the evil spirits. What do you think?”

“I think you are much too cheerful for someone who had a dead snake on her door not two minutes ago.”

I rubbed my hands together. “Ah, my dear, the plot thickens,” I said as I headed back into the house.

“What does that mean, Miz P? You know something. Come on, you have to tell me,” Susan pleaded as she followed.

Once back in the kitchen, I checked Mamma Cat’s food bowl and stroked her skinny furry head. “You, my pet, are the best watch cat in the county! I love you, I love you.” She was very appreciative and purred in return. Suddenly I was very hungry. “Let’s have cinnamon toast. How many pieces can you eat?”

“Two, and tell me why you are smiling.”

I waved the butter knife triumphantly. “Because, I think I know at least one of the prowlers.”

“No way! Who?” She exclaimed, and retrieved the bread from the pantry.

“Mitchell Sanders.”

“The lover guy Paul Tournay sacked? Make mine heavy on the cinnamon.”

“Sure, lots of cinnamon. Mitchell Sanders’ white Ford Explorer was parked at Paul’s when I got there. A Georgia tag, I might add. And I bet he doesn’t want Paul to give Becca control of the trust, because he still thinks he can scam some for himself.”

“No offense, Miz P. but that is pretty thin. There are about a million light colored SUV’s with Georgia tags. And besides, how would Mitchell Sanders know where you lived?”

“How? I’ll tell you how. When I left Paul’s house yesterday and got back into my Subaru, I had to move papers from the driver’s side seat. Bills I needed to mail. I thought maybe I’d not tucked them under the visor well enough and they’d fallen on the seat. Now I realize Mitchell had rummaged around in my car before he left, probably trying to figure out who I was. He found the bills, bills with my return address on them.”

“So, you think Mitchell Sanders is behind the doll thing, the snake, and shooting at Becca Tournay?”

I nodded my head. “Could be. He might profit if Paul keeps control of the trust, and he had plenty of time to shoot at Becca in Atlanta and make it up here by three am. My guess is that Mitchell Sanders thinks I would stay in North Carolina and busy myself with finding out who nailed a snake to my door, and that wouldn’t leave me time to interfere with his plans for Paul and the trust. Course, Fletcher Enloe said there were two of them. The question is: who is the second person, and why is that person so invested in keeping my nose out of the Tournay trust? Mitchell must be just a part of the equation. The tall person in the rain slicker is the other part. I feel it in my bones.” Susan looked interested, though skeptical, and rightly so. There were a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. Two things I did know: Mitchell Sanders would lead us to the tall person wearing the long rain slicker, and somehow Stella Tournay’s murder was part of the picture.

“I’m with you, Miz P. You see, I told you. This really is a mystery. What are we going to do next?”

“Get your pad, Susan. Let’s make a plan. The first thing is for me to make an appointment go over the trust records at Garland’s office. Tomorrow, if possible. And, I’ll call Paul Tournay to ask if he has talked to Mitchell Sanders again. Who knows? The two lovers may have kissed and made up. Later today we need to go through Paul Tournay, Sr.’s book. There is a clue there somewhere, and I need your help to find it. We also need to compare notes again on Boo Turner.”

Susan’s hands went up to slap the sides of her head. “
Crap
,” she shrieked.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“It’s the Turner’s. I forgot to tell you about this.” She reached inside her manila folder and handed me a single sheet of paper.

Slanting the paper towards the light, I squinted to make out the face on the page. “Who is this? The copy is pretty washed out.”

Taking a deep breath, Susan continued her story. “Well, I went back on line and looked up Angel Turner through a couple of advanced search engines.” Whatever an advanced search engine was—I nodded my head feigning understanding, and tried to hide the computer knowledge gap between our generations. “Yeah, isn’t that way cool?” I nodded more vigorously, pretending I not only knew what she was talking about; but was thrilled with it. “Under one of the periodical searches I came up with this article in the
South Carolina Islander
—it’s one of those upscale Chamber of Commerce slicks that promotes local business and culture.”

Even on a fuzzy printout from the computer, the young woman shown was quite striking. “Wow, so this is Angel Turner? She looks like an African princess or maybe even….”

Susan finished my sentence. “A fashion model. Is that what you were going to say?” Actually I was going to say actress, model was close enough. “Well, she was a fashion model. Scan down the article to about the middle. You’ll see she was with some high class agency in New York for several years, before going home to St. Helena to open her antiques business.”

I read through the article and studied her photograph again. The woman was elegant, long graceful neck, chiseled cheeks, and judging by comparing her to the others pictured, she was tall. “Well, well, isn’t this interesting? She must be Boo Turner’s granddaughter.”

“Yeah, and Angel seems to be quite the entrepreneur,” Susan commented. “Boy, I envy her hair. Look at all that long gorgeous stuff. If I spent a week in the beauty salon, they couldn’t get mine to do that. What do they call that style? I forget.”

“That style, my dear,” I replied, remembering Paul Tournay’s description of the woman with Mitchell at the restaurant, “is called corn rows. Takes hours and hours to do, and costs as much as my Subaru.”

Susan narrowed her eyes with disbelief.

“Well, maybe not quite as much as my Subaru, but a lot more than I spend for haircuts in a year. Course that isn’t saying much.”

Susan was definitely excited by her discovery. “I can tell this little old magazine article is more important than I originally thought, Miz P. What does it mean?”

“Paul Tournay tells me Sanders is an antiques dealer, and your article says Angel Turner has antique shops in Beaufort and in Atlanta. Paul also says he caught Mitchell in an intimate little scene with a beautiful, tall, black woman. I want you to call the number for Boo Turner down in South Carolina. Call from Granny’s because that phone has a block on it to keep it from being traced—thanks to the Goddard twins. Just see who answers the phone at Turner’s house. Let’s see if Angel is there. Wouldn’t it be interesting if she weren’t there; and we could link Mitchell Sanders with Angel Turner?

Susan frowned. “I’ll call. But I have no idea what it would mean if the two know each other.”

“I ‘m not sure either. Let’s do it anyway. Call it fishing.”

“Read the directions and directly you will be directed in the
right direction…” ……The Doorknob, Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

10.

Graduate school taught me that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung coined the word “synchronicity” to explain events we might view as ordinary coincidence, except the occurring events seem to have extraordinary personal meaning. Jung taught that these events could connect with unresolved emotion and bring that emotion closer to the surface, and perhaps even engender resolution. For instance, after my divorce my sales job sent me to Savannah for a meeting. I hated my job and loathed sales meetings. To delay the unpleasant I took a train from Atlanta to Savannah, meeting a pleasant woman from Iowa. We shared experiences of being single moms as we passed the miles of flat middle Georgia landscape. I learned she was an emergency room nurse who hated to fly, also headed to Savannah for a meeting. I confided I wanted to go back to school to become a counselor, but couldn’t manage the tuition, not with a son to raise and an ex-husband who considered his child support less important than his sailboat payments. As it turned out, her meeting was for a foundation that awarded scholarships to single moms. With her sponsorship I received a scholarship, and coupled with student loans, found myself sitting in a classroom learning about Carl Jung.

Coincidence was both of us being single moms traveling to Savannah for a meeting. Synchronicity was meeting her at a critical time in my life. I believe what we call good luck, or even bad luck, or intuition, as well as psychic knowledge, and my sometimes-disturbing dreams, are all rooted in the universe’s rules of synchronicity. How these rules operate is a mystery to me, I just know the rules are at work, continuously. During my early years as a counselor, I found accompanying a client on a journey to recognize those patterns of synchronicity immensely gratifying. I came to believe when we pay close attention to the significance of what that synchronicity could mean to our own inner journey, and then participate in the event with purpose, we ride the miraculous oneness of our universe.

Lofty thinking for so early in the morning, I told myself, as I aimed my Subaru south to Atlanta for the second time this week. Did I still believe in synchronicity and our oneness with the universe? That was an easy question. Yes, I did. So what happened to me? When did walking the journey with a client to find the synchronicities stop being gratifying? That was a harder question. Somewhere along the way I began to doubt I had a gift for helping anyone, and was profoundly frustrated with so many long journeys and not enough destinations. Still, I was the one who kept a sign on my desk that read, “I am here for the journey, not the destination.” My nagging Should-Girl Committee member reminded me it was my own fault if I couldn’t focus on the journey—only the journey. I changed lanes to pass a truck heavily loaded with great orange pumpkins, then sipped my coffee and reminded myself that nobody “cures” anyone else. The person wanting to be healed does the job of healing. Yet, too often I sensed I was more invested in my clients’ wellness than they were. The stripped down, ugly truth was I became sick and tired of listening to so much complaining and so little willingness to take responsibility, to do the necessary work for healing, because like anything worthwhile, healing is hard work. I should know that from personal experience, being the evader of hard work that I am.

As I remembered the frustrations, just before I closed my practice, I think the last straw was a client I’d worked with for several months—she of the “oh, poor pitiful me” variety—who, in my professional opinion, suffered from a lifetime of acute selfishness, and a severe absence of gratitude. I had the overwhelming urge to get right up in her beautiful pampered face and yell, “
Just put on your big girl panties and deal with it. That’s what the rest of the world does
.” A couple of days later, I found a ceramic bobble-head do-dad thing that said just that. So I replaced my “here for the journey” sign with the silly little woman tugging up her pink panties. Maybe I should have gotten therapy myself, instead of retiring. Certainly my education taught me that if my client were skilled at taking responsibility, she would not be my client. Ah well, for better or for worse, forty-five days later, I bought Granny’s Store and my house on the creek.

My thoughts drifted back to Fletcher Enloe’s jabs about January McNeal. Could my great grandfather have lived in Perry County? Was I drawn to that Western Carolina location by something other than what seemed to be a good real estate deal? Was Carl Jung’s theory at work, again, in my life? I committed myself to some serious genealogy sleuthing as soon as this business with Paul Tournay was settled.

I drove south; passed through Cleveland and picked up Georgia 400 just outside Dahlonega. My heart ached to hear Luke’s voice and know he was safe. No point in stopping back in Dahlonega though. He wasn’t there. All I could do was pray he would call me soon. I forced myself back to the Tournay case, and another verity of the human condition. We are all a stirring pot of desires and needs, and I could see those converging forces playing out with Becca and Paul. Both needed love, and then worked at cross-purposes for finding love. Becca’s angry defensive personality, desiring punishment for a son she should have cherished, resenting him for his place in her father’s heart, precluded her from love. Mitchell Sanders was needy for money and security he thought Paul’s five million dollar trust would provide. And Becca’s father, what had he needed? What had it been like for him to live with the knowledge he killed Stella? If indeed he had killed Stella. Would that act have crippled his spirit and diminished his ability to show love for his daughter? Then there was Stella, of course. Explosive, tormented Stella. What did she want from me? What motivated her to visit my dreams?

How about Boo Turner? Where did he and his granddaughter, Angel, fit into the puzzle? I had a growing sense of a connection, one that began to flower the night before as Susan and I studied Paul Tournay’s book. I could not see the shape or color of that connection, yet I felt its breath as surely as I would a stranger’s standing behind me in the dark. After I learned what I could about the trust from Garland’s records, I’d have another talk with Paul. His grandfather may have shared more than he’d volunteered. I relished the last sip of lukewarm coffee and anchored my red and white Dunkin Donuts cup in the holder. My mouth watered thinking about a couple of warm, yeasty donuts. How could I even think about something sweet this morning after all the sugar I ingested last night?

Yes, last night. It was dusk. I stood at the kitchen window looking out into the yard where a young stand of sugar maples, swaying in the rising breeze, was just beginning to show tinges of orange fall color. The previous night’s rain had sent drier browning oak leaves to the ground, where they lay billowed against the tree trunks. Winter was marching into Appalachia. In an hour it would be dark, cold enough for a fire in the fireplace and quilts on the bed. I wondered if the steady breeze would be enough to keep fog from forming. I hoped so; I was a little girl trapped in a dark closet when the fog smothered around me. Farther beyond the kitchen window my three resident crows assembled on the pasture fence rail to scream torments at each other for reasons known only to them.

Daniel leaned against the butcher-block countertop, his booted ankles crossed, hat in one hand, holding a grocery bag stuffed with clothes and toiletries for Susan in the other. Her black bristled hairbrush protruded from the bag like a periscope. He was mounting an argument for Susan staying the night with me, but I found it hard to focus on his words. The cawing of the crows took me beyond the room and the expanse of my yard, deep into the shadowy forest climbing the mountain behind my house. I thought of the wagon I’d heard in the early morning. The sluggish metallic laboring of wheels and an image of a gaunt January McNeal standing in the bed of the wagon, gray mane of hair tousled by an early morning wind, was still fresh in my mind. My stomach quivered and I thought I smelled charred wood. I knew I would have to walk the abandoned road climbing Fire Mountain soon, to satisfy my need to know if the wagon I heard was real, or a dream layered in early morning consciousness.

“Promise, are you hearing me?” Daniel asked.

I physically turned to Daniel, leaving Fire Mountain behind. “Yes, Daniel. You’ll get no argument from me. I’m glad for Susan’s company tonight.”

“Good,” he continued. “I doubt your prowlers will come back with another vehicle parked in the yard; but just in case I stopped at Fletcher’s coming over and told him the plan. He’ll be listening out again tonight, while he’s working late in his front room.”

“Buying and selling merchandise on EBay, I bet,” I interrupted.

Daniel frowned. “Lord, woman, I hadn’t figured you for the nosy type. Lucky for you he is up late, wouldn’t you say?”

I was chastised. “Yes, lucky for me,” I replied and smiled.

“Fletcher will call me if he hears or sees anything out of sorts. I can be here in fifteen minutes, but even fifteen minutes can be a long time if you are frightened, so leave the outside lights on and try not to panic. And don’t go shooting out into the yard. You might hit a deer, or shoot Fletcher. I told him to stay home, course that old man marches to his own drum, so I wouldn’t trust him not to come over here.”

Susan came into the kitchen from the front of the house. “Hey Daddy. Who you talking about shooting somebody?”

“Nobody is shooting anybody. I don’t even own a gun,” I announced.

Susan and Daniel gave each other a knowing look and then shook their heads, as though in pity. “Miz P.” Susan spoke to me as she would a somewhat doltish relative, “You live twenty miles from nowhere. In the mountains. We got snakes, coyotes and bears. A girl alone needs a gun. Don’t worry, me and Daddy will get you a good rifle and teach you how to shoot it.”

“No, I don’t want a rifle. I’d probably just shoot myself in the foot. I hate guns.” I noticed a burned thatch of weeds in Susan’s right hand and smelled a strong unpleasant brackish odor in the kitchen. “Susan, what is that stuff? It smells like singed hair.”

Susan raised her weed filled hand, sending more burned hair smell in my direction. “This here is wormwood, witch hazel, and mugwort. You’ve got it growing all over the back of your property. I picked it while you were in the shower, and I’ve been making a circle around the house, burning it as I go. Smudging for protection, just like my MaMa Allen always does at her house. And you better believe no prowler ever crossed her door yard!”

Daniel smiled indulgently at his daughter. Though repulsed by the strong order, I was fascinated. “Your grandmother taught you to do that? Is she an herbalist?”

“Well, I’m not sure what you’d call her, but she knows everything about everything that grows here in the mountains. Actually, she’s my great-grandmother. She’s eighty-two. Sharpe as a whittled stick. You’d like her.”

Daniel must have realized I was counting years. “My daddy’s mother died when he was nine. MaMa Allen is my granddaddy’s second wife. Married her when my Daddy was sixteen. She was closer to my dad’s age when she married Grandpa. Guess the idea of older men marrying young didn’t raise as many eyebrows then as it does now.”

Raising my own eyebrows, I suppressed an angry thought about my ex-husband and his folly for young women. Bless his little black heart.

Susan continued her thread of thought. “I think Granny and Miz P. would like each other. Don’t you think so, Daddy?”

Daniel tilted his head slightly and gave me an intense look, hesitating just for a moment. “Well, maybe. They do seem to favor one another some. You know MaMa, Susan, she doesn’t suffer fools in silence.”

I felt my face flush with anger. “Are you saying I’m a fool, Daniel?”

Susan howled in laughter and poked gently at Daniel’s arm. “You put your foot in it now, Daddy!”

Daniel slapped his Stetson back on his head and dropped the bag for Susan on the counter. “No, that is not what I’m saying. I swear, Dr. McNeal, you can’t see a compliment coming on a freight train. I’m leaving now. I got cows to tend.”

Susan disposed of the remainder of her weeds, or should I say herbs. We warmed up left over pot roast from the refrigerator for an early supper, and about seven o’clock she drove down to Granny’s to call the phone number for Boo Turner in South Carolina. According to Susan’s report, an answering machine with a dusky, sexy voice, told her the Turners were unavailable and gave a cell phone number to call. She waited an hour and called again. Same message. When she returned, we got to work on Tournay’s book,
Carolingian Art: Diverging Genius
, taking turns reading the book aloud.

I went first. After several scholarly pages of text laying out a historical landscape of Europe in the late 700’s, Tournay moved on to the crowning of Charlemagne as King of the Franks in 771, and his concerted efforts to consolidate fragmented regions of Europe into a unified Christian state. Tournay explained that Christianity at that time was primarily an eastern religion with the central church located in Constantinople. For the next twenty-five years after Charlemagne united the Franks in Europe, he mounted a series of bloody military campaigns against the “aggressive, pagan” Saxons, Lombardy, Westfali, and, apparently, just about any other non-Christian group he could march against. By 800 AD, the Carolingian Empire reached from Aquitaine in South West France to the River Vistula in Poland, and Europe was well on its way to being Christian. “Not bad for a king without heat seeking missiles or armored tanks,” I remarked, trying to lighten up the dry text. Susan was unimpressed. By this point she was fidgeting in her chair with boredom and I was not far behind. I turned the book towards her to give her a full view of a color portrait of the crowned, jeweled robed Charlemagne, described by the author as being handsome, well over six foot tall, of stout body, with beautiful white hair and beard.