Morgan James - Promise McNeal 01 - Quiet the Dead (6 page)

I waited and let the silence grow, hoping Paul would fill in details about Mitchell’s lie. He didn’t. Finally I moved on. “I understand Paul. I’ve kissed enough frogs to know the princes are few and far between.” His smile was sad and resigned. “Let me ask you something else, if I can,” I continued. “Not that it has anything to do with the trust; it’s just that as a person who is interested in the paranormal, I am curious.”

He eyes brightened. “Oh, you mean Grandmother’s ghost. Isn’t that wild? I thought I saw her several times during the months after I moved here. In fact I told Mitchell about it. Shortly after he moved in with me, whatever it was went away. I realize now it was probably just this old house, and the play of shadows through the oak trees.”

“Where did you see her?”

Paul stood up and waved me to follow. “Come on back to the bedroom and I’ll show you. Though, mind you, now I don’t think I saw anything except shadows.”

We went back to the foyer, and then up three steps to the left, turned down a hall and then into a large master bedroom on the rear of the house. He stood before three nearly floor to ceiling windows facing the rear yard and pointed. “Down there, towards the creek. Do you see the crumbling stonewall, the old gristmill parapet I told you about? See where the wall comes across the creek and almost touches the side of the house? All three times I thought I saw her, she was walking on the wall, headed away from the house, and then disappeared across the creek.”

I followed his direction, looking out to the yard, beyond a stand of low-armed oak trees, to an old wall, a narrow expanse of eroded stone and concrete, pockmarked and spongy from the relentless assault of upstream water and sand. It seemed a punctuation point drawn from the house outward. The sight of it drew a shiver from the base of my spine to my hairline. I could see it did, indeed, extend out into Howell Creek, the creek Paul’s grandmother was left hanging over, and the creek of my dream. “When you say she disappeared across the creek, does the wall go all the way to the other side?”

“I think it does. At least when I was a kid it did. I haven’t been down there in some time. Years ago, when the creek was low it used to be possible to walk across and not get your feet wet.”

“What was it about the figure that made you think it was your grandmother?” I asked, seeing in my mind a clear black and white image of the cloaked figure moving slowly across the wall. It was a woman, a tall woman. She doesn’t look back at the house; she wants to get away. She has a purpose, a clear purpose. I felt my face flush hot and sweat bead on my forehead. Paul’s voice interrupted.

“I told you, Dr. McNeal. Now, I don’t think I saw her at all. It was all just a play on shadows and my imagination. Mitchell and I stayed up many nights looking for her again; it was like a game for us. Exciting, you know, at first; of course I would usually fall asleep before him, but anyway, nothing else happened.”

“When you thought you saw her, what do you remember about her?”

He paused for a moment, hands pressed together and against his lips much like a child offering a prayer. “As I recall, she was tall, long hair, and possibly thin like Grandmother. It was hard to tell really because she was wearing some sort of cape thing around her shoulders. I had the distinct feeling the figure was a woman; no, it was more than a feeling. I’m sure it was a woman. I’ve been an actor long enough to know the difference in the gait of a woman and a man. And she moved carefully, controlled, like a dancer, like grandmother.”

“Paul, you saw a lot of details in just a shadow.”

“Well, she was very real to me at the time. In fact, I was pretty upset and called Papa. I’m sorry I called him; that was stupid. He got more upset than I did. It was immature of me to bring up his pain; I really wish I hadn’t. Oh, the conversation was awful. He rattled on and on in French. My French is pretty basic, and he was talking pretty fast, so I ‘m not sure what he was saying. I was glad to call him back later when Mitchell and I decided it was the limbs of the oak trees playing tricks with my imagination. I remember Papa said to me, ’you are a good boy, Paulie. Leave the dead; their debts are always paid.’ What ever that meant. We didn’t talk about the ghost thing again.”

“What a strange thing to say, ‘their debts are always paid.’ What do you suppose he meant?”

“I have no idea. He just seemed to feel better knowing I was not seeing ghosts, that was all I cared about.”

“Umm, so it was Mitchell who helped convince you there was no ghost, just shadows?”

“Well, him and my good sense. You don’t believe in ghosts, do you Dr. McNeal?”

I wasn’t sure how I wanted to answer that question. Fortunately, the skinny gray cat took that opportunity to skidder out from under the bed and run towards the main part of the house. “You see how sneaky she is,” Paul called, as he ran after her, with me a step behind, “she’s inside again and she’ll disappear down the basement stairs before I can catch her. That’s what she does. When I catch her upstairs, she runs for the basement and somehow finds her way back outside.” As he reached the kitchen, Paul screeched and his arms shot upwards like Moses railing against the heathens. “And look, the evil animal has been in here eating the leftover chicken salad.”

He was right, chicken scraps littered the counter top where the cat had picked through our plates. No doubt she was raiding the kitchen while we were eating our yummy chocolate dessert. I had to smile. “Perhaps you don’t feed her enough.”

“Feed her enough?” Paul’s nostrils flared with anger. “She isn’t even
my
cat. She’s some scruffy stray who managed to have kittens out by the side of the house and I can’t catch her to take her to the county animal shelter. After this, you better believe I will get animal control out here now and she and her mangy babies will be history.”

My warmth and compassion for Paul was dissipating as he ranted about the poor mamma cat with babies to feed and no warm home, or assurance of food. What did he expect? Should she phone for fish take-out! “So you’d send her and her family to the pound? That’s like a death sentence with no chance for appeal.”

He exhaled heavily, “I know, I know, but what else can I do? I don’t like cats. The fact is they scare me. They never do as they are told and are just as likely to scratch you as purr. They are always ‘pet me, don’t pet me, pet me.’ My God, that sounds just like my mother! I
do not
want to be a murderer, for pity sake. I’ve even asked some of the guys at the theater to take them; no one is interested. Nobody has enough room for a mother cat and kittens.”

At that moment I was struck with a momentary lighting bolt of insanity and someone else’s voice inside me chirped up. “I have five acres and a small barn. Help me gather the cat family up and I’ll take them home with me.”

Paul grinned as though I had given him a new Porsche to replace the old Jag in his driveway. “Fabulous idea. I’ll donate a laundry basket and a soft blanket to the deal. Come with me and I’ll show you where she has hidden the kittens.”

Securing the cats was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Paul led us outside to the far right of the house to what seemed to be a closely pruned pyracantha bush, all thorns, waxy green leaves, and hard red berries. At closer look the bush’s almost solid growth was trained to camouflage a chain link enclosure on the side of the house. As he easily lifted the front panel of the enclosure, which was hinged along one side, I realized the logic of the enclosure: it screened a concrete stairwell leading down into the basement of the house, and sure enough, snug and dry among leaves and pine straw at the basement door was our skinny mother cat nursing two equally skinny kittens. I was amazed at her resourcefulness. “How did she get out here from the inside of the house?”

Paul pointed to the sagging basement door. “Look, see that wide crack along the casing where the wood has rotted? I think that’s where she gets from the basement back outside. The hole is just wide enough for her skinny body to pass through. I wanted to fix the door because God knows what else can crawl through, but I refuse to ramble around in that dank basement long enough to hang a new door. I hate dark basements. Besides, replacing the door might cut Mamma off from her babies.”

“So, you’re not as mean as you pretend to be. Good man.”

He gave me a sheepish look and held the basket while I coaxed Mamma into it with the last of the luncheon chicken. While she chewed, I lifted the two frail babies in beside her and we secured the basket in the rear of my Subaru. As I closed the door, I saw Mamma curling herself around her babies and nudging them to nurse again. Mission accomplished.

Paul extended his hand. “Thank you for taking the cats, and for being so understanding. I know you are working for my mother and are technically the enemy, but I’ve enjoyed our visit. And please tell Garland Wang, diplomatically, if you can, what I said about the trust and my house. So long as I get the house she can have the rest. Maybe that will finally make my mother happy, for once in her life.”

I took Paul’s hand to say goodbye, then he impulsively drew me into a hug. I liked this young man. Sliding into my Subaru, I started the car, and then lowered my window. “Don’t forget to go to the courthouse and record that deed.”

Paul waved. “I’m on my way.”

“Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s question.”
…Edgar Cayce

5.

Retracing my route, I drank in the tree-shaded beauty of the Buckhead neighborhoods leading me back to Howell Mill Road, West Wesley, and then to Peachtree Road. Buckhead was once an outpost settlement far from Atlanta proper, known only for a crossroads tavern with a buck deer’s head mounted above the bar. Today Buckhead is acknowledged as the “Beverly Hills” of the South. It’s the place where new money and old forged easy, and sometimes not so uneasy, alliances; a neighborhood like no other that is the embodiment of Atlanta’s coronation of queen of the New South. Steep gabled Tudor mansions, Neal Reid designed English cottages and Hollywood hued Italian villas, punctuated streets of antebellum red brick mansions. Buckhead breathed a bittersweet reminder of how much I loved, and missed, this city. Atlanta is like a relative who sometimes behaves badly, and may disappoint and even embarrass me, yet she is family nevertheless, and inextricably part of my blood.

I crept along with the north bound traffic, and somewhere between the 1930’s pink stucco Alhambra apartments on Peachtree Road, and my favorite Italian restaurant at the corner of Paces Ferry Road, a pang of loss in the pit of my stomach reminded me that I had abandoned the queen of the South, left her for another town, another state. Gone were the days when I could pleasure ride through Buckhead anytime I felt the need to dream myself into one of her grand homes. How could I do that? What was I thinking? I watched the familiar places pass and feared I’d always be homesick.

After I waited in stalled traffic through three lights at the intersection of Peachtree and Piedmont Road, the Should Girl committee member, who looks a lot like Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine character, called in from her tidy office in my head. “Hello, Promise dear. I see you, you know. What are you doing? Wallowing in self pity again?” Her voice is as annoying as a potato grater against a knuckle. “Let me get this straight. You are depressed because you moved away from all this traffic, crowds and crowds of people you don’t know, and will never know, stifling summer heat, and high property taxes. You are longing for a neighborhood you could never afford to live in, even if you stayed here and worked another hundred years. Get a grip, Miss Prissy. You should be ashamed of yourself. No whining! Babies whine. Big girls cope. I have to go now. I’m composing an alphabetical list of all your mistakes, and believe me, I’m very busy.” I hate it when Ernestine is right, especially when I’m in the middle of a good whine. A soft concert of mewing called to me from the rear of the car, making me smile. I was now grandmother to two tiny kittens, and mother to probably the most raggedy, pitiful looking feline in the State of Georgia. What was I thinking, indeed!

Remembering why I was driving north on Peachtree Road, I called Garland on my cell phone. Paige, as always, was the soul of English gentility and apologized for Garland being “presently detained on the telephone.” I chose option number one and left a voice mail for him to call me back. Stop and go traffic gave me plenty of time to think about my meeting with Paul Tournay and recap exactly what I’d learned from him. Would any of what I learned help Garland’s case?

I made a mental list. Number one: someone had sent Becca a threat in the form of a doll with a damaged face. I didn’t believe that someone was Paul. No help there. Number two: Regardless of what he thought before, Paul says he now believes he did not see Stella’s ghost wandering about the property. Nothing there to convince a judge he is unstable. Number three: Paul is a successful gay man living an open and seemingly quiet lifestyle in Atlanta. Him and thousands of others in Atlanta. Nothing unusual about that. And whose business is that anyway, thank you very much! Number four, and most important: Paul says he is willing to give the trust to Becca so long as he keeps the Tournay house. So there we were, nothing I learned about Paul would help Garland; yet Becca still wins, if she isn’t too greedy. I was glad it seemed the issue would be resolved out of court. Paul Tournay seemed a decent man, better adjusted than one would expect with a mother like Becca, and I hated the thought of him and his mother battling it out in front of a judge.

Speaking of his mother, my thoughts turned to Becca. Was Paul correct about his mother? Did she really feel any love given to him by his grandfather was love denied her? My counselor’s heart felt compassion for Becca. My judgmental side recoiled from any mother who rejects her child, and saw Becca as a vampire in a pink suit. She was all take and no give. She also reminded me of one of the reasons I retired from counseling. My brain, and heart, were overloaded with selfish folks like Becca who believed they were entitled to a charmed life, when even the best of us get our share of pain and disappointment. Who first told the lie that life had to be fair, and good girls and boys always win a prize? Sorry, if we live long enough, we should know better. I think whoever figured out that goodness has its own rewards was wise, and knew that sometimes that reward is all we get. And that’s fine with me. I think the system works because it’s what we do with our pain and disappointment that either brings us to the circle of grace or leaves us outside looking in.

“Good grief!” I said aloud, and shook my head to clear away the preaching. “Just listen to you. Go start yourself a church, or get your mind back on track. And whatever you do, stop talking to yourself. Hormones. Got to be hormones.” Checking the car in the lane beside me to see if the driver was giving me a wary look for carrying on a conversation with myself, I was relieved to see he was so occupied on his cell phone, I could be buck-naked singing the Star Spangled Banner and he would not notice.

At the forked split of Peachtree and Roswell Roads, I decided to continue north on Peachtree to the commercial district of Chamblee and pay a visit to Garland’s wife. Not that Aileen and I were close friends; this wasn’t a social call. As an ex-reporter and now the darling of the local television talk show venues, I hoped Aileen Wang’s research department could answer some questions for me. Garland’s case seemed to be tumbling into his lap, a done deal, as he says; but regardless of what was to happen with Becca and Paul, and the lucrative Tournay trust, it was Stella Tournay’s face that haunted me, and now I knew that it was her death that drew me back to Atlanta.

As I parked in front of WQQX’s converted warehouse turned television studio on New Peachtree Road, I contemplated leaving another message for Garland, then decided against it. He would call me when I rolled back around to his priority list. Instead, I cracked the windows for the feline cargo in the rear of my Subaru and headed for Aileen’s private kingdom in tele-land. This was not my first trip to WQQX so I knew how to quietly let myself into the semi-darkness of the studio, with its complicated maze of moveable partition walls defining production areas, bell jar sealed sound rooms along the outside perimeter, and lifelines of wires and cables snaking along the floor and coiling overhead. I could not conceive how any of this madness culminated with the magic of sound and pictures on my television set.

Aileen’s assistant, the 5th Avenue stylish Barkley, who today was tres chic in a black silk dress shirt, open at the neck and paired with soft cream gabardines, noticed me wandering into the periphery of the late afternoon taping. With a black loose-leaf notebook, crammed to overflow with papers, balanced on his right hip, he waved a ballpoint pen towards me in a commanding sweep, and then lowered red tortoise shelled glasses a bit farther down his perfect pointy nose to stare at me with a frown. I could tell he was thinking I was the proverbial picture of a frumpy old broad in my shapeless dress and jacket. And, Barkley was right. I was definitely not dressed well enough for a visit to the world of the beautiful people. His face softened when he recognized me, and we waved to each other as I tried to decipher his hand gesture. Then with a tilt of his duo-toned blond and black spiked head, and a flick of long fingers attached to the most elegant hands I’d ever seen on a man, he motioned again. I finally understood he was directing me back to Aileen’s personal office, a space as unaffected and spare as Garland’s beehive of carved mahogany office suites was plush.

Once alone in the office, I moved around Aileen’s desk—a semi-circular stainless steel affair with a glass top thick enough for Fred Astaire to dance on—to the floor to ceiling corner windows and a view of the busy iron highway stretching out not two hundred feet beyond. Now a connective point for the Norfolk Southern Railroad, this freight rail yard has bisected the city of Chamblee’s business district since the early part of the twentieth century. During World War I and II, thousands of troops moved in and out from Chamblee, either bound for war, or returning as wounded soldiers. Today, a battalion of blue and gold CSX diesel engines pushed and pulled back and forth on convergent tracks, connecting flat cars stacked high with tractor trailer boxes containing everything from automobiles to orange juice. I remembered Aileen once told me being an intimate spectator to the power of these mighty metal giants was an unmatchable thrill, and that she had her most creative ideas while standing at these windows.

“The railroad made us what we are, Promise,” she’d whispered, as though telling me a secret, “and one day, you will see, they will redeem us.” I have no idea what we were to be redeemed from, yet you have to pause in awe at a grown woman who so loves trains. That being said, I had a suspicion any show of raw power was a thrill for Aileen, whether it originated with trains or not. Scrutinizing the ten or so locomotives working along the rail, I chose my own iron hero and followed his slow grinding and methodical pressing forward, then reversing, as he connected to a chain of rust red boxcars and open flat beds, and awaited my five minutes with Atlanta’s most popular talk show host, for a five minute audience was the message Barkley’s gracile hands signaled I would get.

I was considering Barkley’s hands and how whenever I saw them I thought of a Balinese dancer striking pose after pose with similar emotional finesse, and wondered if he practiced those hand signals in private before a mirror, when the office door opened and Aileen breezed in with a flourish. The only accompaniment missing from her entrance was a drum roll. Barkley trailed behind, furiously taking notes on a clipboard. “No!” she answered to a question I’d not heard, “Tell the bastard I will not edit his interview. He knew my rules when he agreed to do my show, and it
is
my show, so I make the rules. Truly, I hate those cry baby types.”

“Should I tell the Senator you make the rules and you hate cry babies?” Barkley quipped as he wrote.

Aileen reacted to Barkley with all the charm of a Cobra. “Only if you want to be unemployed. You know what to tell him …just make nice. You’re good at the smoothie stuff, Barkley, and you know it. That’s why I pay you way more than you are worth. Just get rid of him. I don’t care who he is; he is a bore and I’m not talking to him again.” In her three steps to join me at the windows, Aileen was a changed woman: calm, sweet and docile. “Hello, Promise. It’s so wonderful to see you.” She greeted me with a warm smile and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “How are you? Garland didn’t tell me you were in town. Of course, Garland tells me nothing, so what should I expect?”

She smelled of a delicious perfume, part sandalwood, and a hint of sweet and mysterious. I would bet that fragrance alone was enough to disarm most of her male, or female, guests; but make no mistake; Aileen was much more than a fragrance. Even though she was petite, hardly five feet tall, she gathered a room of people around her like a sea goddess drawing in her nets. That talent for commanding attention, paired with combative green eyes and sable black hair, made Aileen seem always to be the tallest person in the room. I noticed she had a new hairstyle, very nice, parted high to one side and blunt cut at a forward angle at her ears: two hundred dollars at a Buckhead salon, no doubt. I made a mental note, again, to find somewhere to get my hair done, tomorrow. There had to be someone talented in North Carolina for less than Buckhead prices. I’d ask Susan. I returned Aileen’s smile and hugged her. She and Garland sparred like dueling partners most of the time, and somebody always got nicked in the battle, yet I cautiously admired Aileen. She was successful, tough, focused, and tenacious, if not tactful. I admired the successful, tough, focused and tenacious parts. I, myself, am always more tactful than I want to be, owing I believe to my mother’s insistence that politeness is the most important virtue, next to cleanliness. “I am fine, Aileen. You look stunning, as usual. Thank you for seeing me without an appointment. I know Garland says you won’t even see him without an appointment.”

“Oh pooh, that’s just Garland. I like you better than him. And besides, after you helped me so much with Sara during those terrible times, I would keep the President waiting to see you. What can I do for you? You look like a lady on a mission.”

“Well, actually I am. I’m doing a small job for Garland and need some information about a death in the 1950’s. I wondered if you had access to any newspapers or county records from back then?”

“Do we have access? Honey, you would not believe what we can get from the Internet.” Aileen struck a confident pose with both hands at her hips and winked at me. “Use my computer in here. Barkley can help you, and get you online with our passwords. Just don’t tell anyone about the sites you access, not even Garland; some are, shall we say, somewhat restricted. I’d stay and help you myself, except I’m just taking a potty break from an interview with one of our esteemed city councilmen. I’m about to ask him why lingerie purchases from Victoria’s Secret showed up on his city issued credit card statement, unless, of course, he planned to wear the items to council meetings.” She assumed a satisfied predator’s smile. Poor guy. He was thrashed wheat and just didn’t know it yet. “Gotta run. Call me tomorrow if you need anything else. We don’t tape tomorrow, so I’ll have time to chat.” With that, Aileen was gone, leaving behind the smell of fine perfume and triumph in the air.