Sweet Jiminy (4 page)

Chapter 5

W
henever Willa
walked into the HushMart superstore, she felt like she was arriving in another country and should have to show her passport for entry. An entire populace could live in the building and have everything they needed at their fingertips, at low, low prices. It was a wonder of a place.

She still occasionally happened upon entire sections that seemed new to her, and she wondered if the store was secretly expanding at night. The lot that had been zoned for it backed up to a limestone cliff, so there wasn't anywhere obvious for it to grow, but Willa had a hunch that those light green–vested managers were far too innovative to let a little geology hamper their progress.

“Have you sampled our hickory-smoked chew toys?” a voice chirped.

It was one of the green-vests, offering what appeared to be a barbecue-scented shoe.

“No, thank you,” Willa replied.

“They're for dogs. Do you have a dog?”

Willa shook her head.

“Then you're in luck! The store's opening a pet zone next month, so you can buy one!”

“Buy one? Fayeville's already got more dogs and cats than people who want them,” Willa protested.

It was true. Puppies and kittens were regularly deposited at the large collection of Dumpsters near the interstate to fend for themselves, or dropped from the bridge into the river to end things more quickly. This wasn't a town that was sentimental about such things.

“Those are all mutts,” the HushMart minion said dismissively. “We'll sell purebreds here.”

Willa absorbed this as she glanced around at the floor-to-ceiling shelves that seemed to stretch for miles.

“Can you point me toward the silver polish?” she asked. “I get so turned around in here.”

“Straight that way, past the photo zone, third left into Household Care,” the employee replied obligingly, before turning to thrust the chew toys in front of another shopper.

Willa made her ambling way through the photo zone, marveling at the variety of cameras and camera accessories she passed. Her husband Henry had been a photography aficionado, and Jiminy clearly enjoyed her Polaroids, but Willa herself had never had much interest. She appeared in photos if another pointed a camera at her, but she'd never played an active role in capturing images. When it came down to it, she was a fundamentally passive person—someone whom things happened to, rather than someone who made things happen. Though she and her granddaughter had never been close, until recently, she'd felt they shared this characteristic. But lately, Jiminy had seemed almost intent on shaking things up. It went beyond the Polaroids—there was a new restless questing to her that surprised and unsettled Willa. Willa didn't feel up to any fresh challenges. She felt weary and nervous.

“Now, what was it I was looking for?” she said aloud as she turned away from an aisle filled with albums.

What she wouldn't give to have someone sure and trustworthy beside her, whispering the answer in her ear.

Don't be a coward, don't be a coward, Jiminy repeated in her head, waiting for it to seep in and give her strength. She'd climbed over the fence and taken a long walk down the hill toward the river, in search of fresh views and solitude to think and plan. But now she was trapped and terrified, looking around for weapons.

The rock in her hand wasn't large enough, and the only other things she could spot around her were twigs. Why didn't her grandmother have a dog? Some vicious, snarling, loyal dog who'd never let her go on walks by herself? If she got out of this alive, she swore she was going to get one.

“GO AWAY! GO! LEAVE ME ALONE!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

They moved closer, and she backed away farther, trembling.

 

“I guess she's really scared of them.” Willa sighed as she stared out the dining room window. “That must've been why she was asking me how often they maul people. I thought she was joking. Who's scared of cows?”

Beside Willa, Lyn chuckled harder.

Willa was aware that this was the first time Lyn had smiled in her presence since their uncomfortable phone call. Even the yellowcake had only elicited an expressionless “Thanks.” Willa beamed, grateful that her granddaughter's cowardice could bridge this divide.

“Should we draw straws to see who has to go rescue her?” she asked.

Lyn looked at her, eyes sparkling.

“She ain't my blood,” Lyn replied. “So you can go draw your own straw.”

Willa blinked in surprise, then burst out laughing, just as Lyn clutched her sleeve and pointed out the window.

“What's she doing? Did she just drop to the ground?”

They both stared in disbelief.

“Sweet Jesus, she's playing dead!” Lyn exclaimed.

Now they were both laughing uncontrollably, gasping for breath.

When Bo stuck his head into the room a moment later, Willa and Lyn were doubled over, holding onto each other, tears streaming from their eyes.

 

Every time Jiminy screwed up enough courage to try to cross the field again, the cows would crowd around her, practically pressing into her flesh. There were bulls in there, too. Any one of them could charge her, trample her. The only ones that looked harmless were the calves, but they were the most dangerous of all, because they came with mothers who would kill to protect them. She knew she wasn't supposed to get between a calf and its mother, but when they all crowded around her like this, how could she keep track?

She never would have embarked on her walk in the first place if she'd thought there was any chance of this sort of encounter. Her grandmother had told her that the cattle had been moved to the fenced-in fields at the back of the farm for the next few months, so Jiminy had believed the fields between the house and the river were scary animal–free. But they'd appeared out of nowhere and descended upon her, and now she was pondering the very real possibility that her last moments alive would be filled with the smell of manure.

Just when Jiminy had closed her eyes to shut out the horror, she heard another voice.

“HUP, HUP, outta the way. HUP, HUP!”

She opened one eye tentatively. There was Bo, in the farm truck, parting the herd as he drove slowly toward her. He stopped a few feet away and climbed out. Unarmed, he continued his hup-hupping. The cattle didn't disperse, but they moved enough out of the way to allow him to reach her.

She flung her arms around his neck.

“Thank God you came,” she exclaimed.

Only the fact that she was trembling stopped Bo from laughing.

“It's okay, I got you. We'll just walk back to the truck now.”

“Watch out for the big one, I think he might charge,” Jiminy whispered. “I'm just going to shut my eyes and hold onto your arm.”

Bo nodded and guided her.

Even when Jiminy was safely in the passenger seat of the truck, she still worried they were in danger.

“Just hurry, but not too fast to agitate them,” she said as the cattle continued to swarm. “If a couple of them charged, they could tip over the truck.”

Bo continued to work hard not to laugh.

“They're not going to tip over the truck. They're not going to kill us. They don't want to kill us; they would like us to feed them. They're used to people walking or driving through the field to put more hay out for them to eat. That's why they hurry over to you. That's all they want—hay.”

Jiminy absorbed this. Bo watched her cheeks blush crimson as she looked anywhere but at him. He reached out to touch her arm.

“Hey,” he said gently.

“I heard you the first time,” she snapped. “Could you please just drive?”

Bo kept his hand on her arm.

“No.”

Jiminy turned to him. On him, really.

“What kind of rescuer are you? Just get me out of here. Please! I'll drive, if that's the issue. Just scoot over.”

She made a move to switch places with him.

“You're being silly,” he said. “You've got nothing in the world to be scared of, do you understand?”

“Move!” she replied.

She tried clumsily to switch spots with him, throwing her leg over his lap and reaching her hand past him to grab the edge of the driver's seat to help hoist herself over. There wasn't anything graceful about her maneuver, and she was about to be stuck in an awkward position if he didn't help her out. So he obliged, scooting beneath her to the passenger side as Jiminy climbed all over him. It was the most intimate they'd ever been with each other, and for a brief moment all Bo could think about was how her breast had brushed his shoulder and how much her hair smelled like coconuts.

Jiminy was similarly flustered. She gripped the steering wheel to steady herself, acutely aware of how Bo's skin had felt against hers, and that she wanted to touch him more. Her cheeks blazing, she kept her eyes averted and hurried to switch the gears from park to drive. But she stopped abruptly, distress joining the other emotions playing across her features.

“What's the matter?” Bo asked.

Jiminy said something in a voice several decibels too soft for a human ear to decipher.

“What?” he asked again.

When she spoke this time, it was just barely audible.

“I didn't know this was stick. I don't know how to drive stick,” she whispered.

When she looked up, Bo kissed her.

 

Jean Butrell was aiming her rifle at some deer when she heard tires on the gravel. She sighed and put the rifle down. At least the sound of the car would scare the deer away from her flowers for an hour or so. But if they came back when she was alone, she'd pop 'em. To think that she'd once put a salt lick out there for their enjoyment. How naïve she'd been. Salt one day, prize-winning geraniums the next. They deserved to die.

The car had to be Jiminy, who'd been coming to Jean's regularly ever since she'd discovered that Jean had an Internet connection, a rare and precious hookup among Willa's friends. Most of them didn't consider themselves members of the technological age and were happy to be bypassed by tweets and blogs, even by online shopping, which many of them would have found extremely convenient. The Home Shopping Network and the telephone were still their tools of choice.

Jean was an aberration. She'd had an Internet connection for five years now, and prized it above all else. During thunderstorms, she dreaded losing electricity almost solely because it would mean getting knocked offline. She had a real passion for games like Halo 3 and the ones on Pogo—the kind you could log on to and play against people from all over the world. Her grandsons had introduced her to them over a Christmas holiday, and she'd come straight home and ordered up service. She was addicted.

“Knock, knock,” Jiminy called from the porch.

“Who's there?” Jean called.

She hoped for a knock-knock joke, but Willa's granddaughter was too literal.

“It's Jiminy.”

“Come on in,” Jean replied, covering her sigh with a bright smile. “Can I pour you some iced tea? It's hot out there.”

Jiminy shook her head.

“No, thank you, I don't need anything. How's it going?”

Jean appreciated the attempt at small talk.

“Oh, I'm all right. My suck-egg dog of a son called again, but I screened him.”

The elder son who'd confiscated her driver's license. Not the one who'd fathered the two grandsons who'd taught her how to play blackjack online. That son was a saint.

“Maybe he's just worried about you,” Jiminy offered.

“I hope so! I hope he worries his little conniving, controlling squirrel brain sick,” Jean replied. “The computer's all yours, sweetheart. I don't have a game appointment for another few hours.”

“Thanks,” Jiminy said gratefully.

She hurried to the living room desk and logged herself on to her saved searches. There was the article that she'd come across the previous afternoon and been yearning to investigate further. Jiminy scanned it quickly, looking for the name she'd spotted.

Were it not for the tireless efforts of Carlos Castaverde, this long-ago murder would have remained unsolved, languishing in the cold case file cabinet in the basement of the Putner County Courthouse. But Mr. Castaverde refused to let justice die along with an innocent victim.

That was it: Carlos Castaverde. According to this article and another one in the
Greenham Gazette,
Carlos Castaverde was a persistent journalist-lawyer who had successfully reopened and solved seven civil rights cold cases. His latest efforts had led to the conviction and imprisonment of an eighty-four-year-old ex-Klansman who had kidnapped and lynched a young man by the name of Jackson Honder for “leering” at a white woman in September 1955. According to law enforcement officials at the time, no one in Jackson Honder's small town had seen or heard anything, and no arrests were ever made. Until over a half century later, when Carlos Castaverde began investigating. After interviewing Honder's brother and sisters, along with some neighbors and a sheriff's deputy, Castaverde determined that contrary to the official record, pretty much everyone in town knew exactly who had committed the murder. A few more months of legwork and two eyewitness accounts later, and Carlos had his man. The Honder family expressed their incredulity and gratitude to the
Greenham Gazette:

“When Carlos first came round, I thought, let's let bygones be bygones and be done with it,” said Honder's sister Maggie Jayce, aged eighty-two. “But now that Jackson's killer is behind bars, I feel like somethin' that was turned upside down in the world just got set right again.”

The killer was someone who'd continued to live right alongside the Honder family for fifty-three years. And they'd all known. All of them. Jiminy couldn't imagine how that must have felt. How do you greet a man who murdered your brother? How do you stand in line at the post office with him, or pass him in the dairy aisle, or pump gas alongside him, knowing all the while? How did they stand it? And would they just have kept on standing it, day after day, had Carlos not come along?