Roots of Murder (4 page)

Nell took the final sip as she heard the doorbell ring. She quickly got out of the tub, rinsed the glass, and brushed her teeth, then threw on clean sweatpants and a sweatshirt before joining her kids for supper.

Halfway through the pizza, Lizzie looked sharply at Nell. “Mom, are you okay?” she asked.

“Fine,” Nell answered. “Just tired.” The Scotch had mellowed her out, she realized, enough that Lizzie noticed.

“You sure?”

“I'm sure,” Nell answered, a testiness creeping into her voice. “Just tired,” she said with a ring of finality.

“Okay, whatever,” Lizzie answered.

Josh started talking about a TV show he'd recently seen about shipwrecks in the Gulf. Nell was too tired to do more than listen, trying to nod attentively, but couldn't do what she should do, which was not leave her young son the burden of being family peacemaker. When Josh paused in his story, Lizzie stood up and asked if she could finish eating while watching TV. Nell nodded, adding that Josh could also go and watch. It had been one of the family rules, that they would eat together.

That night Nell's sleep was troubled with thoughts of old bones hidden in the woods and new threats from a drunk and his family. And the scrutiny of her children.

four

They woke to a
downpour. Nell had mercy on her children and drove them to school instead of sending them on the bus. After watching long enough to ensure they didn't melt in the dash inside, she headed to the office of the
Pelican Bay Crier
.

Pelican Bay was an old Mississippi Gulf Coast town, and its center was clustered around a green square—or rectangle, really—with the requisite statues of Civil War generals. Confederate, of course. The old county courthouse, long past its use and now containing
high-end
retail shops of the quaint sort, sat at one end; the sprawling new city hall complex occupied the other. The Crier building was situated halfway between, on one of the long sides of the rectangle. Other buildings clustered nearby, mostly professional offices for law and accounting. The library sat across the square.

It was a very picturesque setting, although what it gained in beauty, it lost in practicality. There was a narrow
one-lane
road around the square, with deliberately high curbs to ensure that no cars dared to park on the green. Since it wouldn't do to have a parking lot marring this pristine scene, parking spaces were tucked off in inconvenient places. The ones the Crier staff used were hidden behind city hall, convenient for the workers there but a long walk for everyone else. Nell could cut through city hall, but that still left her half a long side away from the Crier's front door.

By the time she reached the ten steps leading up to the paper's massive oak door, her feet were soaked. Given that most of her staff worked newspaper hours, not school hours, she was the first one in. Fumbling to unlock the door only gave the rain one last chance at her.

Nell flipped on lights as she hastily tossed her umbrella in the stand. It dripped copiously, as if saying “see, I did keep a lot of water off you.” A quick glance at her appointment book told her this would be a busy day. The mayoral election was coming up, so despite her lament to Kate about slow news, there were many events vying for the front page. It just didn't feel like news because the election was almost a done deal. Hubert Pickings, the current mayor, had little chance of losing. The talents and abilities of Mayor Pickings sorely tempted Nell to write an editorial about the benefits of term limits.

She also wanted to follow up on the bones. Two skeletons meant two missing people. Someone somewhere had wondered what happened to them, reported their disappearance. The Crier's archives—conveniently located downstairs—seemed a good place to start.

Thom's grandfather had either had the foresight or the luck to buy a bigger building than was needed for the first few decades of the paper's life. One of the older structures in Pelican Bay, it had been the city hall in the early 1900s. When the city hall outgrew the space after the second world war and moved to its new digs, Thom's grandfather had bought the building. And because the town square was built on the highest ground, there was enough elevation for basements, which was unusual for this part of the Gulf coast. The Crier had a large one, which served as its “morgue.” The basement also contained a space, still called the darkroom, for the computers and printers the staff used for photos.

The size and location of the Crier building worked well. Reporters had quick access not only to the paper's archives, but to city hall and all it contained: the mayor's office, the offices of the aldermen, the rest of the usual administrative offices, and the police station. The modern courthouse, less conveniently, was situated on the outskirts of town.

Nell knew it would help things to have a better idea of how long the bones had been buried, but she wasn't going to wait until the expert from LSU arrived. She picked up the phone to call Kate but realized it was not yet eight thirty and the bike store didn't open until ten. She guessed Kate's home number was the same one her uncle had had, but her request wasn't urgent enough to disturb Kate's morning. Plus, Nell had to admit, much as she'd enjoyed—no, needed—the field trip yesterday, she still felt too consumed by grief to reach out for new friends. Calling Kate at home was too close to offering a friendship she didn't feel up to pursuing.

She sat at her desk, but her vision was caught by the shaft of gray light cutting across Thom's desk. I have to do something about it, Nell thought. In the past weeks she had opened the drawers and started to sort through them, but it was too hard to simply place the memories in boxes or throw them out.

Nell swiveled so his desk was firmly out of her sight. She started making up a list of assignments. Jacko was a
digging-in
-
old-records
hound. That was the easy choice. He was young, barely out of college, still with the dewy skin of a boy turning to a man and the eagerness of one who had not yet stumbled and fallen hard. He was also slight, about Nell's height, with blond hair and blue eyes, the kind of looks that would turn him into a teen heartthrob if he sang or acted. The bone story was hers, but he would be a great assistant on the research end. Carrie she would send off to campaign events. Carrie was pretty and young, and well aware of it. Her hair was streaked with blond highlights, making it more than just brown. She tended to wear clothes that emphasized her cleavage and small waist. She'd looked great on paper, but she was turning out to be Nell's problem child while Jacko was the find. Carrie could be good but she was high maintenance, needing a lot of direction and feedback.

Jacko's assignment was easy. Nell could just tell him to find anything that might relate to two people missing years ago.

For Carrie, she couldn't just say, “Go cover the most interesting of the campaign events.” She would have to suggest to Carrie where to go, what to look for, and even hint at questions.

Nell glanced over the list of events. What would have been the easy one, a picnic in the square, seemed unlikely given the downpour. That was too bad, because candidate E. Everett Evens was a lively character. He was running on what Nell called the
Gone-With
-
the-Wind
platform. He wanted to restore the good old days; not that he specifically named slavery or lynching or women being unable to vote, but those seemed the eras he harkened back to. He could be counted on to say things like, “Back then we didn't have teenage pregnancy, homosexuality didn't exist, the races knew their place, and women were happy doing their Godly duty of raising children and taking care of their men.” She wondered if he would take the rain as a sign of whom God intended to vote for.

Another candidate, Marcus Fletcher, was speaking to the local chapter of the NAACP that night. His campaign had been
low-key
, as if he recognized that, no matter what his qualifications, Pelican Bay being
sixty-four
percent white made it unlikely a black man would win the mayor's race. That was a story waiting to be written, Nell thought; not about one man's political ambitions but the whole fabric of how the races in this town interacted, what had changed since the civil rights movement. And what hadn't. Nell remembered the hardware store manager's treatment of the two black boys. That was out in the open; what happened in hidden places?

Like the woods. Nell suddenly remembered reading about the search for Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, the three civil rights workers killed in northern Mississippi. The searchers had found a number of other bodies in the woods: the black men—and women—whose lives were considered cheap and easy to throw away.

Nell suddenly shivered. That could tear this town apart. If that was what had happened to them, if they had died from that hatred.

Nell turned her attention to the more mundane and safe thoughts of where she would send Carrie. Somehow the local NAACP meeting didn't sound like the best place. I'll go, Nell decided. The paper didn't need to mirror the
narrow-mindedness
of the town.

This decision would also mollify Carrie, as that left her covering the only real candidate, Hubert Pickings, the current mayor. Nell considered him a drab, humorless man with an IQ lower than his belt size. Although he had quite a pot belly, that still didn't give him the intelligence to govern a real town. The best that could be said was nothing disastrous had happened in the last four years.

First on the schedule was the mayor giving a scouting troop an award for cleaning up part of the beach. It was at the Legion Hall and had the kind of buffet dinner he liked to linger at. Kids and no questions from the press was about the perfect event for him. Carrie could handle that. Nell hastily scribbling some question ideas that Carrie might be able to flirt her way into asking. She didn't think Pickings would really answer them, but her hope was he would say something inane enough to put on the front page. His cronies would accuse her of being a biased liberal intent of furthering her agenda. If being liberal was telling the truth, then they were right. Thom's father had said that
even-handedness
was pissing off everyone.

She put checks next to some of the other events on his schedule—not even Carrie deserved to have to go to them all—that also seemed good ones to cover. She'd have to trust Carrie would follow through.

Nell heard the front door open, a heavy thump as if something had been tossed into the center of the room, then the door slamming shut. She sat for a moment but heard no footsteps.

Cautiously peering out of her office door, she saw no one in the main room. Then she spotted it. In the middle of the floor was a rock with a note tied to it. What, Nell thought, am I stuck in a nineteenth century melodrama? At least they were polite enough to toss it in the front door instead of breaking a window. She slowly walked to the rock, still listening for any sound of their return.

Seeing and hearing no one, Nell picked up the stone. The note was wet, indicating that the perpetrator hadn't been prepared to deal with the elements. It was smeared but still legible.
“Free J.J.,”
it read, then added, “
n
ext time mite not be a rock
.” The writing was crude and the rock thrower not only hadn't thought about the rain, but he didn't possess a good dictionary either.

The door opened again. Nell hoisted the rock, poised to throw it if need be.

Dolan, the paper's business manager, entered. “Goodness!” he exclaimed at seeing Nell standing in the middle of the room ready to throw a stone at him. “And I thought that Mr. Thomas had some unique ways of communicating with the staff.”

Nell quickly lowered the rock. “Sorry. Someone just came and left this for me. I was worried they might be coming back.” She handed the note to Dolan.

He glanced at it, then said, “Going to give it to the police?”

“You think Acting Chief Brown will consider this his jurisdiction?”

“He just might, especially if you show him a map,” Dolan answered dryly.

“Only a stone's throw from the police station.” In a more serious tone, Nell said, “Will it do any good? They didn't break the window, so no vandalism. Of course, I know it has to be one of the Jones brothers, but how to prove it?”

“No, Chief Brown won't do anything official—you'd have to be dead for that—but maybe if someone talks to the Jones boys, they might think twice about pulling this kind of stunt again.”

“Under the table, man to man, so to speak?” Nell said acerbically. “The duty of the good ole boy network to protect widows and children?”

Dolan looked stung by her retort. And why shouldn't he?

Just then Jacko, Pam, and Ina Claire came in the door, their three umbrellas entwined to offer maximum protection.

“I'm sorry, Dolan,” Nell said softly. “Too much … stress.”

Dolan nodded but without really looking at her. Any reply he might have made was lost in the onslaught of complaints about the rain.

No one commented on the rock Nell still held in her hand. She turned and went back to her office. Through the open door, Nell watched her staff: Pam at the front reception desk, Jacko at the cubicle behind her. Dolan had his office in front, and Ina Claire, who managed the classifieds, had a small office next to his.

They're uneasy with me, Nell recognized. How can you not say something to a woman standing in the middle of the room holding a wet rock? Unless you're so unsure of how to approach her that you can't think of what to say. It was another empty place that Thom had left. He had been jovial, friendly, the one easy to talk to. He could also dither and dawdle and wasn't good at making decisions; that had been Nell's strength. Thom took the staff out the back door and across the street for coffee or bought the drinks after work. Nell would tag along, let Thom tell a few stories, listen to a few, create the camaraderie needed to work together; then it was Nell's job to say it was time to get back to work or to go home. When she'd returned—was it only two weeks ago?—she'd fallen back into the things she usually did. Nell could see the stories, see all the
follow-through
needed, think of the hard questions, the good ones. Thom usually led at staff meetings, handing out the assignments Nell had thought up. Her
father-in
-law had once said Thom did all the people work and Nell did all the real work. If he had a wife like Nell, he added, he would have turned the paper into a daily that everyone in the Southeast had to pay attention to. Nell had smiled at his wistful comment and didn't point out he could have had a wife like her. He'd chosen not to.

In the month since Thom's death, Nell had little interaction with the staff other than what was necessary. She hadn't recognized the distance and unease she was creating. If she was going to run this paper, she was going to have to learn to be at least adequate at the things Thom did. He would have known what to say about the rock. How could she expect her staff to talk to her if she didn't talk to them? Still she sat at the desk, paralyzed at the thought of going back out and … ? Taking on Thom's role? Despite how stiff and awkward she would appear?