Shivaree (14 page)

McAvoy grabbed her wrist, bending it with more pressure than she would have thought him capable of mustering. “Now, you listen up. I don’t really think you have anything to do with Ovid’s state, but I am not a fool. There is something you are not telling me. If Ovid passes, I will cut him open, and if I don’t find his lungs eaten up with cancer, I will go to the sheriff and spin him the kind of story that will make sure you swing. Unless you start talking. Now.”

With her free hand, she pried the old man’s fingers from her wrist, then took a step back. “I heard voices. I heard the Judge, and I heard a woman . . .”

McAvoy looked at her through narrowed eyes. “You recognized the voice?”

Lucille knew that once she spoke the words, she’d never be able to take them back. “Yes, sir. It was Miss Ruby.”

The doctor lunged at her, and Lucille jumped back, fearing he would strike her. Instead he stopped and fell back against the closed door. He started to speak, then stopped. Finally he said, “Woman, you must have taken leave of your senses.”

“You may just be right about that, Doctor, but I know what I heard. The Judge, he and Miss Ruby were talking. He was begging her. Pleading with her to leave him be.”

“You heard someone in there harassing your employer, and you didn’t step in to help him?”

“No, sir. I heard Miss Ruby in there with her father, and sir, I ain’t ashamed to tell you I was too afraid to open the door. I done seen . . .” She was about to tell him what she had witnessed in her own yard, but she stopped herself. It was bad enough to risk being on the hook for the Judge’s death. She didn’t need anything else laid at her doorstep.

The Judge had made sure she could never escape Conroy by public transport, but Lucille began to wonder if she should just start walking. If she kept off the main roads and hid during the day and walked by night, maybe she could get to where she wasn’t recognized, where she wasn’t thought of as the Judge’s chattel. Of course, in the event that the Judge didn’t make it, her flight would be read as her confession, and that would spell her end. Even if she weren’t officially convicted and hung on the gallows, she knew she’d end up swinging from a tree limb. Lord knew, one ride to the pearly gates worked just as well as the other. No. She needed to sit tight for now. If the Judge died, and she managed not to get blamed for it, she’d join her children. It was the only plan that made sense. After all, if she fled and the Judge
didn’t
die, he’d hunt
her down and have her brought back as surely as he’d done with Ruby.

“You saw what?” the doctor pressed her, pulling her out of her thoughts.

“I done seen Miss Ruby being put in that crypt next to her mama.
I knew they ain’t no way she could be in this house. Not really. But she was. I didn’t just hear her voice; I
felt
that it was her.”

“What do you mean, you felt it?”

Lucille drew her arms in around herself. She felt trapped in this airless space. She wanted to fling open a window or, better yet, leave this hall, this house, leave Conroy altogether. “When Miss Ruby came back from Los Angeles, you and the Judge, you thought she was sick. But she didn’t come home sick. She came home
wrong
.”

The doctor stepped toward her again, this time with less violence, but still with determination. “I don’t have time for your Negro superstitions.” Lucille was more than happy for him to believe she was suffering from delusions if it meant he no longer held her under suspicion. He shepherded her down the hall and toward the stairs. “I need to use the phone. Don’t worry”—he held up his hand to fend off an objection she had no intention of making—“I will speak in veiled terms of the situation. You go put on some coffee.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, relieved to have a task that didn’t require her to be near the Judge.

“And Lucille . . .”

“Yes, sir?”

“Whatever it is you’re thinking, you need to keep it to yourself. Don’t go sharing your nonsensical ideas with anyone else, and don’t you go getting the other coloreds worked up about any of this either. From now on, you do as I tell you, and that might just help me forget how guilty you look right now, hear?”

Lucille nodded. “I’ll get that coffee.”

TWENTY-SIX

Corinne sat at the edge of the water for what felt like hours. She stared into the depths, doing her best to convince herself she had been dreaming, that her first day in Conroy had been too much for her, that she had sleepwalked into the water and had been awakened by its cold currents. Deep down, she knew that was bullshit. She had spent years in a war zone without suffering any hallucinations, but the only two alternatives she could come up with were that she had gone mad or the woman from the photo truly had called her out for a starlight swim before disappearing into thin air. Corinne felt another chill and wrapped her arms around herself, doing her best to rub the goose pimples from her flesh. Her damp and muddied gown clung to her like a second skin. She forced herself to her feet, then took a few stumbling steps toward the sleeping porch. She would get inside and change. Rinse the mud out of her gown in the sink.

Suddenly, the darkness was pierced by the porch’s light being turned on.

The screen door squeaked open, and Ava stepped out and stood beneath the light, the brightness of which reflected off the white lace cap she wore over her hair rollers. Her pink robe glowed like the dawn. She scanned the field with one hand over her eyes, the other resting on her hip. Corinne fought the urge to turn and run before Ava spotted her, but it was too late by the time the thought occurred to her. She had already been spotted. Ava stomped out from under her hundred-watt halo into the shadows. “Good Lord, girl, what is wrong with you?”

“I just wanted to cool off,” she said, but even though Ava’s face was now obscured by darkness, she could tell the woman’s expression had grown even more sour. She knew Ava would launch into a lecture, so she tried to cut her off. “I only meant to dip my feet in the pond, but I slipped.”

Ava started to speak, but then shook her head. “Get on inside and clean yourself up. Dr. McAvoy needs your help. Clay’s gone to fetch Elijah out of the barn. He’ll drive you into town once he’s up.” Ava headed back toward the light without another word.

“Wait.” Corinne hurried forward and grasped Ava’s forearm. The older woman froze, her eyes delivering a withering glance to the spot where Corinne’s flesh connected with her own. Corinne felt a nearly physical shock from the venom in her soon-to-be mother-in-law’s eyes. She pulled her hand back. Ava’s angry eyes rose to meet hers. “Dr. McAvoy wants my help? Why?”

“It seems you make quite the first impression. On the menfolk, at least. He has requested your help in caring for a patient. A special patient.” Ava scanned her up and down. “If he saw you like this, he might question the wisdom of that.” Then she tugged the screen door open and let the spring slam it shut in Corinne’s face.

Without stopping to consider the dismissive gesture, Corinne pulled it open, and hurled herself over the threshold. She wouldn’t dream of refusing to help care for someone in need, but the odd hour of the request, combined with the fact she had spoken only briefly to the doctor on the train, raised a lot of questions. “Who is this patient? Why me? Why not a local nurse?” she asked in quick succession. Ava turned to face her, her eyes hard. Her expression showed Corinne that she considered her questions, or perhaps any question, impertinent.

“I don’t know for sure. The doctor wasn’t forthcoming with details,
but as you’re to be taken to the Lowell house, I think it’s safe to assume the
patient is Judge Lowell, the most important man in these parts. As to
why
Dr. McAvoy would ask for you rather than a woman with good sense, I’m sure that is a question the doctor will be asking himself in an hour
or
two.” Ava reached for the knob of the door leading into the kitchen.

“Why do you hate me?” Corinne heard the question spill out before she could prevent her tongue from asking it. “Is it the woman in the photo? The beautiful girl with the dark eyes? Ruby. Did you want Elijah to marry her?”

Ava looked back over her shoulder, her eyes wide. Her lips parted, but then cinched shut. She turned away, twisting the doorknob a couple of times before opening the door. “That girl is dead,” she finally said without looking back. Her voice changed, sounding weaker, perhaps defeated. Something about the way she spoke told Corinne all she needed to know. “But no, I would not have chosen her for my son . . . And I do not hate you.” The words came out in a near whisper, as delicate as a spider’s web. “Now get changed. Elijah will be ready soon.” She paused. “I’ll put on some coffee.” She pulled the door shut behind her.

Corinne lowered the Roman blinds, relying on the light seeping in from behind the chifferobe and the blinds covering the porch light to change from her wet gown. She wished she had time for a hot bath or, better yet, a shower, to wash away the pond water and the clinging remnants of the already distant nightmare. She opened a drawer and tugged out clean underwear. Before she closed it, she slid her hand into it and found her pistol. Corinne felt safer with its velvet-swathed metal beneath her fingertips. Logic told her that she would have no need for the firearm tonight—after all, she had sensed that McAvoy was harmless, avuncular even. The circumstances of his request for her to help nurse the ill—or was it wounded?—judge felt odd, but there was no need to see this as anything more than an emergency situation that called for her nursing skills. Conroy was a small town in a mostly rural area, so perhaps she was just the closest nurse. Yes, logic told her she would have no need for the gun. Still, instinct insinuated that she might.

She told herself she was being foolish. She had come to live among these people, to become one of them, and the surest way to inclusion was not to carry around a firearm to use against them. She took the gun and returned it to the drawer.

Her angry subconscious caused hot prickles to dance along her skin, but it admitted defeat and bargained with her to at least transfer the roll of bills she had stashed next to the gun into her bra. She had heard others refer to this instinct as “fight or flight.” An inappropriate response in this situation, perhaps—no, certainly—but something chewed on her gut, and her gut had carried her through Korea and her own family war zone prior to that. Again she considered taking the gun. Instead she fastened her bra and stuffed the soft purse filled with bills inside the left cup.

“You about ready?” Elijah’s voice startled her. She spun around and took in his silhouette, which the porch light had cast on the blinds. For a moment, she was tempted to raise the blinds and show herself to him. Would the sight bring fire to his eyes, or would it cause him to turn away and yearn for the beautiful Ruby? Corinne reached out, felt the fabric of the blinds beneath her fingertips.

The door to the kitchen banged open to reveal Ava with a steaming cup of coffee in hand. “Not just yet,” Corinne replied, quickly stepping into a modest, button-front blue dress, not too terribly different in style from what a lot of stateside nurses wore as a uniform.

“Thank you,” she said, stepping to the door that led from the porch into the kitchen and accepting the coffee from Ava.

Ava lifted her head and addressed her son’s shadow. “Dr. McAvoy called ahead. The ferry is waiting for you.” She turned to Corinne. “Don’t dawdle.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

The glow of a kerosene lamp cast a halo on the grimy table where Charlie
Aarons sat shirtless, sweaty, and hunched over, one arthritic hand rubbing
t
he other that was cramped around the latest addition to his collection of
French postcards. These were the queens of his three-room, no-electricity,
no-plumbing castle. It was hours until dawn, and he should be asleep on the thin feather mattress he called a bed, but Charlie’s body ached too
much to let him sleep, no matter how many times he tipped the Mason jar
to his lips. Charlie made his living doing odd jobs, mostly for the Dunne
family who lived across the field, barely a mile as the crow flies, but his only sure source of income was what he made working for the funeral home out by the river’s bend. Tonight, his arms and shoulders and back ached from the digging it had taken to plant Joe Gentry. His manhood ached from the fantasies fed by the dirty pictures that were now spread
out before him. Grave digging was a young man’s work; rutting between a woman’s thighs was a young man’s pleasure. Charlie had long since stopped being a young man, but he forced his body to work like one. In
revenge, his body remembered the needs no woman was willing to satisfy.

Charlie shook a cramp from his hand, letting the whore’s photo fall as he did. It landed on top of the others. Yesterday, the picture had been new. Exciting. Her clean-scrubbed face and innocent expression had fueled his fantasies. In his mind, he’d taken her in just about every way a man could have a woman. Now her tired eyes mocked him. She was just another dirty whore lying in a pack of them.

But in the end, they were all dirty whores, every single last daughter of Eve. God had put them on earth to serve men. To please men. Charlie was a man, but still they looked on him like he was nothing more than trash. Even the waitress at the diner, the one with the wide, pockmarked face whom he thought of as “Bucktoothed Betty,” though he knew Betty wasn’t her real name. He took another sip of the moonshine, the smell of the corn liquor like sweet, hot garbage in his nostrils as he struggled to remember her name. It failed to come to him, but what the hell, it didn’t really matter what she called herself. To him, she’d always be Bucktoothed Betty.

Betty would linger around the tables of the other men she served, leaning in toward her customers, inviting them to reach out and place their clean, smooth hands on her, maybe on the small of her back, or if she was lucky, lower. But she always took her time finding
his
table, and hurried away as soon as she laid his coffee and eggs before him. She tried never to look at him, and when it could not be avoided, she focused on the cataract that clouded his bad eye. Still, his good eye undressed her until she stood before him as naked as any of the women who splayed their legs on his postcards.

Another sip of liquor turned his mind from the waitress to that smart-mouthed girl he’d delivered out to the Dunne farm. He remembered her name, which had been drilled into his mind by Mrs. Dunne. A beauty compared to Betty, but still a plain girl when he considered her against the naked French girls looking up at him from his table. Even so, that Corinne was a healthy girl, a girl with a sturdy frame. The kind of woman who could struggle up against a man’s weight, not just lie pinned beneath it. Still, after Ruby, she was a step down for young Elijah.

Charlie felt himself stiffening at the thought of Ruby. She’d been so beautiful. So proud. She never would have considered giving herself to him in life, but in death she’d looked so sweet and cool and willing. He’d gotten to see what she had to offer, all right. As he dressed her, he even got to let his hand run along her breast, down her stomach, clean down to just above her secret place. The Judge would have hanged him if he’d even suspected the thought had entered Charlie’s head, but Charlie would’ve liked to hike her skirt right back up and mount her before he laid her out in her shiny steel coffin. If he could’ve found more than a moment alone with her, he might’ve done just that.

As the fantasy insinuated itself in his mind, Charlie’s breath grew heavier, and he pushed his hand against the tabletop to force himself up. His hand shook as he dimmed the lamp’s flame, extinguishing it. Light, dark, it didn’t matter to his eyes, not when his vision was blurred with need. It was the need itself that called for darkness, that cried to be hidden. His gnarled fingers struggled with the buckle of his belt. He tugged the leather strap from its loops and swung it with such ferocity that it cut through the air with a whistle. The metal buckle swooped down and bit into his skin. A sharp intake of breath. He let the sting linger, then swung the strap against his back again and again.

Sweat formed on his brow, then his chest as the rhythm of the strap and the pain carried him away, raising welts, which were the price of his
pleasure. His left hand lowered itself beneath the band of his trousers. At his
own touch, he gritted his teeth and raised his head. Through his narrowed
eyes, he saw a face on the other side of the window, watching, mirroring his
own pleasure. Charlie quickly freed his hand and fell back from the table.

“What are you?” Anger overtook him. Anger at having been caught, at having been interrupted after he had already paid his price. “Watching a man like that? Some kind of pervert?” His passion was washed away by a hot flash of shame. His heart felt like it would explode. In the next instant, he realized the face must have been his own reflection, and he very nearly smiled until he noticed the blue light that shone from the other’s eyes. Then the blue light was gone, and the face along with it. Charlie took a few careful steps toward the window, drawing near the glass. He leaned forward, his stomach pressing into the sink’s cold porcelain, his hand grasping hold of the manual pump that fed water into it. The windowpane suddenly shattered inward, and Charlie fell backward onto the floor, raising his arm to shelter his eyes from the shards of glass. When he looked up at the broken window, he saw that it had been smashed by the force of his own dog’s muzzle. The dog, Tic, pulled back, then lunged again, weakening the wood between the panes.

“Ask me in.” A woman’s voice, a familiar voice, came from the dog’s mouth. Tic then growled and backed away.

“What the hell?” Charlie asked no one in particular, as he struggled to place the voice. Somebody was fucking with him. This had to be some kind of damned joke. He’d seen a man talking with a doll in his lap at that vaudeville show in Tupelo. This was the same trick, nothing more.

Tic made another angry lunge at the window, and Charlie twisted around on the floor, pushing up to his knees. This time the animal made its way through, but a broken pane nearly severed its right front leg as it tumbled to the floor. Unable to stand, the beast wailed in agony, but then it began to drag itself across the kitchen floor, growling and snapping. Charlie whipped at it with his belt, but the dog caught the strap in its mouth midair and yanked it from his hand. Charlie pushed himself back in quick and jagged movements until he felt the pain of the welts on his back make contact with the wall. He couldn’t risk taking his eyes off the dog, so he moved sideways, feeling behind himself until he found the open threshold leading to the main room.

Tic strained and tried again to stand, but the floor was wet and slippery from the dog’s own blood, so much blood that Charlie wondered how it could still be alive. Something, a quiet voice at the back of his own mind, told him that the dog wasn’t really alive. Tic whined as he continued his slow slide toward Charlie, not from pain but from the frustration of not being able to reach his prey. Tic’s head turned at an angle. “Ask me in,” the voice said once more. The dog’s eyes shone blue with the same haunted, fiery hate Charlie had seen in the eyes of the watcher from the window, then Tic’s head fell flat.

Charlie’s bare feet pumped against the kitchen floor as he forced his way through the doorway. He carried on, moving backward, crossing the whole of his main room, stopping only when his back thumped against the wood of his front door. He reached back over his shoulder, feeling around until he found the brass doorknob. He was almost ready to turn it, to open the door and make a run for his truck, when he heard a woman’s laughter coming from its other side. He froze as a banging began, fists pounding, shaking the door. The pounding stopped, only to be replaced by something worse: the scratching of desperate—no, hungry—animals. A whining he well knew, the sound of another one of his dogs. It was the bitch, Tac. She was young and willful. He’d had to take a strap to her more than once, and he knew the sound she made when she was scared. But this time she wasn’t scared of him.

His own whimpering reached his ears, and he hated himself for it.

A pane of the window in his front room shattered, and a hot breeze blew through. “Open the door, Charlie,” the woman’s voice called through the opening. Charlie forced his eyes closed so that he could concentrate. He
knew
this voice. But it was impossible.

Charlie’s breath came in hard gasps now, and his heart was pounding like it wanted out of his chest. He fought until he could remember how to make a sound. “You done had your fun now,” he said, his voice breaking. “Get on out of here. Go on,” he called out as loud as his failing lungs would let him. “Get on home now.”

Again he heard the woman’s shrill laughter. “One last chance, Charlie,” she said. “Ask me in, and I might let you keep your balls.” His mind tried to deny what his gut knew—who
she
was—but his body couldn’t. He pissed himself. His whimpers grew to sobs.

The door began to shake again behind him, causing his sweaty palm to lose its grasp of the knob. Now he could hear the howling of both his remaining dogs behind the door, feel each jarring of the wood as they took turns slamming their weight into it and clawing it. He spun around, calculating the distance back to the kitchen. He knew the woods around this place better than anyone. Could he get out the back and make it past the tree line? The front door was weakening, a bulge forming behind his back, and it wouldn’t be long before his animals broke through . . . and turned on him. He forced himself into a crouching position, then rose to his feet. The dogs seemed to have stopped their assault, but then the door burst out of its frame, large splinters scattering across the room.

His dogs, Tac and Toe, padded through the ruined door, each stopping a few feet before him, waiting obediently for their mistress’s command. “You should’ve asked me in, Charlie.” Her voice came from the bitch’s muzzle. “I might have gone easier on you then.” Now her voice came out of the remaining male. “I might have let you serve me.”

Then, just beyond the splintered opening that had once held his front door, he saw Ruby, her eyes beckoning to him, erasing any fear, any thought of resisting. He shuddered at the sight, not in fear, but in desire. For the briefest of moments there was no sound, only stillness.

Quicker than his eyes could register the movement, Ruby pulled back, away from the opening, away from his house. She stopped when she reached the middle of the field, nearly glowing in the darkness. He stood and walked to the gaping opening of the door so he could get a better look at her. She was beautiful, perfect. She wasn’t a whore like all the others. For the first time in his life, Charlie knew what it felt like to be in love. He took a deep breath, a sense of peace rising up in him. Then the dogs fell on him, snarling, biting, knocking him down. The bitch sunk her teeth into his leg, gushing blood all over the denim of his pants. The young male took his other leg. They spun him around and pulled him facedown from the house and onto the porch. His face banged again and again and again against the concrete steps, knocking out the few front teeth he had. Blood filled his mouth as the dogs dragged him away from any hope of safety and into the woods.