The Truth Hurts (24 page)

“Who?” I ask them, practically beg them. “Who?”

“And the land with the caves on it—” Austin says.

For the first time, Eulalie speaks, sounding infinitely weary. “We all know who you mean, Austin.” She turns her beautiful face toward me. “We all know who these people are,” she says, tapping the papers with her fingers. And to the others, she says, “Let’s face it. It couldn’t be more clear if their very names were spelled out for us.”

My heart is beating so fast.

“I’ll swear I would never have thought they were smart enough,” Eulalie says with a sigh.

“It didn’t take many brains or much courage, either, for that matter,” her husband remarks with a wry twist to his mouth, “to round up a dangerous bunch like the eight of us, and then to ambush two unarmed people on a deserted highway in the dark.”

Across the table, Marty Wiegan’s face darkens with anger.

“Then you think this could all be true?” I ask them.

Around the table, they nod their heads, they murmur affirmatively.

“You could take this to the sheriff?” I ask them. “Or the FBI? They could issue warrants on these people you’re talking about, and arrest and charge them with the murder of my parents?”

Marty throws down his napkin onto the tabletop and I hear him curse under his breath. Anne, his wife, who is seated to my right, reaches for my hand to hold. “Marie, I think that I can safely speak for all of us when I say that we all believe that this account may well be true. And we all know exactly to whom it refers. But it won’t do you any good to go looking for any of them. We can give you the names, but you won’t have ever heard of them. They were all ignorant, crude men, KKK members, and you won’t even recognize their names.”

“That’s all right, that won’t stop the police from—”

“They’re all dead, Marie,” her husband tells me, angrily.

“Dead? What?” I am confused by this. “How can they all be dead? Were they killed, or something?”

“No,” Clayton says, speaking coolly enough to nearly sober me. “Nothing like that. These were older men at the time, my dear. They did their bad deeds, they lived their squalid lives, and they died in the usual kinds of ways. Disease, heart attacks, what have you, nothing out of the ordinary. They’re just dead and gone, that’s all.”

I’m stunned. My parents’ murderers. Dead, themselves.

“Where’s the justice?” Anne Wiegan asks of no one in particular.

“But . . . ,” I say, then stop, trying to figure out what my own last question is. “But . . . if you think this story is true . . . and you believe you know who these people, these killers, were . . . and if they were KKK members . . .”

There is a charged, expectant silence around the table now.

It is Clayton Fisher who breaks in to state the appalling question for me, to his friends. “Why would the Klan have killed Michael and Lyda if they were all on the same side? And if Michael and Lyda weren’t allied with the Klan, then were they still on our side? And if that’s so, and they weren’t the ones who gave our names away and betrayed us that night, then . . . who did?”

The couples, old friends, former revolutionaries in their quiet ways, look around the table at one another until finally Austin Reese asks, “Who were the only people who didn’t get either marched downtown or arrested that night?”

His wife moans and puts her face in her hands.

“Hubert,” somebody else whispers. “And Rachel.”

“No,” I hear another person cry. “No!”

“Why would they? Of all people?” Eulalie demands. “Why
would
they?”

“There may have been some private grudge that we don’t know about,” her husband suggests. “Or maybe for money.”

“I don’t know about the grudge part,” she argues back at him, “but I certainly don’t believe it could have been for money. Because if it was, where did it go? As far as I can tell, Hubert and Rachel have never been anything but poor.”

“I didn’t say it had to be a lot of money,” he gently points out. “Jesus himself was betrayed for a mere thirty pieces of silver.”

“What shall we do?” Marty asks them suddenly.

“I’ll see the sheriff in the morning,” Clayton says. He pats the copy of the story I forced them to read. “I’ll take this with me.”

“Not so fast, Clayton,” Lackley Goodwin says. “You can’t just go charging in there accusing people of murder, not even dead men, not even
those
dead men. We’ve got to think about this some more. If we go accusing people, we’ve got to do it coherently, we’ve got to have all the answers to all the questions that are going to get raised.”

“Like what?” Austin asks him.

“Well, for one thing, why would they only embarrass us, but then kill Marie’s parents? I mean, we didn’t even get arrested! Did they hate Michael and Lyda more for some reason? Were Michael and Lyda a bigger threat to segregation than we were?”

“It was Michael who started Hostel, remember,” Clayton reminds them in his most authoritative banker’s manner, and nobody contradicts the frank and painful things he says next. “He sniffed out the liberals among us and recruited every one of us. I think we all have to admit that Michael was our guiding light. Would we ever have started such a thing without him? There’s a simple answer to that, whether it flatters us or not, and that answer is a no. Would we have reestablished it without him? We did not, did we? Time has already told the truth of that. When they removed Michael they removed our brain, and when they killed Lyda, they took the heart clean out of us. Lyda was our passionate one, wasn’t she? She was a burr under the saddles of the bigots from the time she was a little thing.”

“How could my father stand to teach there?” I blurt, wanting to know what I’ve always wanted to know. “How could any of you?”

Lackley Goodwin nods, as if he understands my total incomprehension. “When you live in the water, Marie, you’ve got to swim. We would have been working in racist environments
any
where we went, not just at Jim Forrest. But since we were there, it was superb cover—”

“I
knew
it,” I whisper.

“We thought that no one,” he continues, “would ever suspect two teachers and a couple of administrators from Jim Forrest—”

“And one banker from town,” Clayton interjects.

“Hubert says that my father got a phone call that night,” I tell them. “It sounds as if it was a warning, but who would have known to call them?” I look over at Eulalie. “I think that’s why they didn’t go to your party that night, Eulalie. I think they were planning to be here, but then my dad got that phone call.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a warning call,” Austin Reese says, slowly, as if he’s thinking out loud.

“What do you mean, Austin?” Delilah asks him.

“I mean, maybe it was intended to get Michael and Lyda scared and running, so that then they could be ambushed outside of town.”

Theirs is a sudden appalled silence, into which I toss the question, “Why didn’t they take me with them?”

“I’m sure they meant to come back for you, child,” Eulalie says.

“Well, then, if they couldn’t do that, why not just leave me in the house with the people who worked there, or send me home with Rachel? Why leave me in a rundown motel where anything could happen to me?”

“If they were running from the Klan,” Lackley Goodwin tells me, “they’d have likely been scared their house might be torched that night, and they wouldn’t have wanted to get any of their black employees into trouble, either. They couldn’t very well have sent you home with Rachel or with Hubert, because they were Hostel members, too.”

Delilah adds, gently, “I’m a mother, Marie, although my children are grown. But if I thought that somebody was going to come looking for Lackley and me to kill us, the last thing I’d want is to have our children with us. And if on top of it, I didn’t have much time to plan what to do with them, why then I just don’t know what I’d do.”

“Why not leave me with Julia and Joe?” I persist.

“Because—” Anne Wiegan suddenly glances at my cousin, who has sat through this without saying a word. When Nate catches her glance, he saves her from having to answer.

“Because,” he says, “my parents might not have helped them.”

We all sit for a moment with that awful realization.

“Was the motel Hubert’s idea?” somebody asks then.

None of them seems to know. I interviewed Hubert, but that was a question I didn’t think to ask him. They suspect it doesn’t matter who had that idea, however, and I agree with them.

“I’ll bet it was Hubert,” Anne Wiegan says, and then sounding infinitely sad, she adds, “at least he thought to spare the baby.” She looks directly at me, and I see in the candlelight that tears are running down her face. “I loved your parents dearly, Marie. I grew up with your mother, she was always one of my best friends, but she always seemed special somehow. She thought bigger than the rest of us, she did bigger things, she was braver and bolder than I could have ever hoped to be. When she brought your father home with her, I thought he was the perfect man for her. At first, I thought he was unfriendly, as if he thought he was too smart and sophisticated for the likes of us, but when you got to know him he was the kindest, most honest man, he really was. That’s why it was so shocking when it seemed they had betrayed us. I didn’t think I’d ever get over the hurt of that. And now it pains me more than I can say to find out that we were the ones who betrayed them, all along, by not believing in them. We should have
known,”
she cries to the others. “We should have known that Michael and Lyda simply couldn’t do that.”

“But the FBI said it was them!” Delilah says. “Clayton, isn’t that what that FBI friend of yours told you?”

Across the table from her, he nods, looking grim.

“The Feebs always have their own agendas,” Marty says, darkly.

“What should we do now?” somebody asks, for all of them.

“I want everyone to read and reread this carefully,” Clayton directs, taking unquestioned charge now. “Make notes. Write down anything that supports what we believe to be true. We’ll meet tomorrow night to decide exactly what we’re going to say and to whom we’re going to present it.”

“Where?” Austin asks him. “Do you want us here again?”

“At the inn,” Marty suggests. “I’ll tell Mo to put on some coffee and save us the parlor.”

“We owe it to Marie,” his wife says, looking directly at me.

“No,” I tell them, my voice quavering for the first time. They aren’t the only ones who are feeling guilty, but at least I have the excuse that I never knew my parents, or only knew them through the memories of people like these. “Nobody owes me anything. We owe it to my parents.”

At the door, when the “party” finally breaks up, Eulalie folds me in her arms and whispers, “Oh, my God in heaven, can you ever forgive us?”

28
Marie

“There’s at least one thing wrong with their theory,” Steve tells Nate and me as we all walk back to the inn following the party. His unemotional tone has an astringent quality that sharply cuts into the wallow of emotions that the booze and the amazing evening have left me in. “It’s fine to identify the men who killed your parents. That’s one thing. But if they’re all dead, then who sent that story to you?”

“Who is Paulie Barnes, in other words,” I say, slowly.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “And what’s his connection to all this?”

“And why,” my cousin adds, “did he bring you here . . . why did he bring
me
here?”

“To reveal the names of the killers?” I guess.

“But why does he think he needs me, for that?” Nate asks. “And why did he pick such a cruel way to do this to you?”

I sag against him, and he quickly puts an arm around me to prop me up. “It isn’t over, is it, Nathan?”

“Not on your life,” Steve says.

“I call
that
an unfortunate choice of words!” I mumble, making my cousin laugh. “But speaking of my life, do you two realize we’re only two blocks from where it started?”

“You want a plaque on the door?” Nathan jokes.

“No, I want to go over there.”

“Now?”

“Sure. Why not? It’s a beautiful night, we have the streets to ourselves, we don’t have anything else to do, and I want to walk over there. Will you guys come with me?”

Steve doesn’t really have a choice, not if he wants to guard my body, but even Nathan agrees to come along. I offer each of them an elbow as we walk along, but only he hooks his arm through mine.

The old homestead appears even larger by night than it did by day. There are three stories, counting the large attic, and by modern-day standards, it’s nearly a mansion. My mother came from a bit of money herself, and my father’s traitorous parents made a lot of money writing screenplays during the years when better writers couldn’t get hired because of their alleged Communist affiliations. It all came down to me, what my aunt and uncle didn’t spend on my education and vacations for all of us, but this house didn’t. They sold it when they moved Nathan and me to Florida, and they used the proceeds to buy their next house. (My father had made the mistake of making his brother-in-law my trustee.) “Marie’s parents would want her to have a nice place to live” was their rationale at the time for spending my money on a vast place on the water, and when they sold that, they made another bundle and claimed it all belonged to them, since “Marie’s parents would want her to have a nice place to come home to anytime she wants.” I long ago decided that it isn’t worth fighting about, although if my life had turned out differently, if I hadn’t made so much money of my own, I might have another attitude about it.

The last owner of this house was out of luck, apparently.

Though the white paint is dingy gray and peeling now, there’s still enough of it to make the house gleam white under the quarter moon. We amble up one side of the circle drive, not even trying to be quiet, since the houses on either side appear to be vacant, too. Once this was a gorgeous block of southern-style homes, all grace and charm, but now it has an empty, haunted atmosphere.

“Too bad,” Nate says, and I know what he means.

Too bad this beautiful house is falling down, too bad the town is deteriorating, too bad for so many reasons, too damn bad.

“I want to go inside,” I announce.

“It isn’t safe,” Steve warns.

“And it’s all boarded up,” Nate observes, pointing out the plywood that is nailed over one of the downstairs windows.

“Well, I know one room that will still be open,” I tell them. “Follow me.”

I take off toward where I see that the gravel drive branches into the west side yard and I follow that weedy path until it brings us around to the rear.

“Oh, my God,” I breathe, and stop in my tracks.

“What?” Nate asks, sounding alarmed.

“It’s the magnolia tree! The one that James told me he could see from the window of the parson’s chamber.”

“Don’t scare me like that. I thought you saw a ghost.”

The old tree has grown to monstrous size, which magnolias can do here in the South. Its branches push against the house now and offer even more privacy and darkness than they did when my parents were hiding runaways here.

“Come on!”

The past, as it’s been told to me, is rushing in on me now. Maybe it’s the mint juleps I drank, maybe it’s the accumulation of all that’s happened in the last few days, maybe it’s only that I’m living on an emotional edge, but I feel as if I’m walking back into that night when my parents disappeared. There’s the door at the back of the house, the one that was always left open in the old days so that visiting preachers might come in and stay the night. I touch my hand to it, and it gives, and as it gives way into a dark and empty room, I feel as if I can sense them on the other side of the wall. I hear Rachel talking to the other black woman my mother sometimes hired. I hear my parents talking in their room upstairs as they dress for the Fishers’ picnic. I hear a telephone ring, hear my father walk to answer it, hear the muffled distress in his voice. I hear a baby cry and my mother hurry to comfort it.

“It’s creepy,” Nathan says, behind me.

Steve hasn’t come in. When I look back and see him framed in the doorway, he looks as if he doesn’t want to join this game.

“The bed probably was there,” I tell Nathan, pointing to where I mean. “Look, here’s the bathroom! Not much left of the fixtures. James said this was the first time in his life he ever used indoor plumbing.” I walk back out of the bathroom and into the bedroom again. “And over there, that would be a natural place to put a table.”

“There’s something on the floor,” Nathan says, his voice sounding hollow in this echoing room. “Somebody left something here. You want a souvenir, Marie?”

“What is it?”

He’s standing nearer to it, so he bends and picks it up.

“Just an ashtray. Some homeless person must have spent the night in here. He left his cigar.”

The hair stands up on my head, on my arms, on my neck.

“His what?”

“Cigar.”

Max Cady smoked cigars. In MacDonald’s book
The Executioners,
Max Cady smoked cigars.

Somehow, I manage to get out the words to tell them.

“Jesus, Marie! You’re scaring the crap out of me,” Nate exclaims, once he’s heard it. Quickly, he sets the ashtray back down on the floor. “You think this Paulie Barnes was here?”

I hurry over to crouch down and take a look.

Just as in the book, this is a “well-chewed” cigar.

“Yes,” I say, feeling like a deer being watched by somebody in a hidden blind. “Let’s get out of here.”

“You can’t say that soon enough to please me,” my cousin says and helps me to my feet so fast he nearly knocks me over. “Let’s get the
hell
out of here. But how did he know we’d do this?”

Thinking of the incident with the hawks in the Keys, I say, “He didn’t. He just likes to plant his little traps in case I fall into them.”

As we hurry back down the gravel drive, I’m thinking,
He’s been here, he’s been in Sebastion.
Or, worse, he’s in Sebastion now.

I’m shaken by finding the cigar, and so I disappear quickly into my bedroom, leaving the men to talk about it if they want to, or watch TV, or read, or sleep. I just want to be by myself. No, that’s not true. I want to be with Franklin.

Since the closest I can get to doing that is with my computer, I turn it on and check my E-mail. When I see his familiar e-address in my mailbox, I nearly feel like crying from gratitude.

“All right, I’ll tell you about the damned dog,” he starts in, and even with all that has happened tonight, even after being scared out of my wits by a well-chewed cigar, I can’t help but grin at my computer screen. He sounds so pissed. Just like Franklin.

The damned dog’s name is Mabel. We’re keeping her, because there’s no way to take a dog away from little kids. I should say
I’m
keeping her. Truly refuses to have her stay there until Mabel is house-trained, so I’ve got the job of crate-training her. Don’t get me started on this. This isn’t what you need to know anyway.

We tried to track Mabel through humane societies, dog pounds, and pet shops, but no luck. What we’ve finally decided is that she’s a stolen dog. Yes, I’m doing everything I can to find her owners—that’s the only possible way of getting rid of her that the kids could understand—but I’m not hopeful. I think we’ve got us a dog.

Oh, all right. She’s a nice dog. Poops a lot.

In the bedroom in Sebastion, I suddenly have a fit of the silent giggles. Out of an act of meanness, something rather adorable has come. The kids must be thrilled, even if their parents aren’t.

Franklin’s E-mail continues:

As for the ribbon with the card that had your name on it, it’s just a generic ribbon and card with your name typed on it. Probably impossible to trace,but that doesn’t mean we won’t try. I’ve talked to Detectives Anschutz and Flanck, by the way, and the three of us are coordinating everything we’re doing.

Okay, I told you about the dog. Tell me about you.

And that’s all. No “Love, Franklin,” no endearments, no nothin’.

But it’s way more than enough. It speaks of continued care and concern, and that’s all I need to feel right now, that’s almost comfort enough. And suddenly I realize it would be stupid to withhold from him the information about what has happened tonight. I’ve got to tell him. He can share it with the detectives. I need their expertise, all of it. And so I spend the next hour writing everything I can think to tell him, and I send it off into the ether.

My mailbox chirps. A new E-mail has arrived from Paulie Barnes.

My dear Marie,

Do you give any thought to life after death?

If there is such a thing, will you come back to haunt me? How will I know that it’s you, my dear? Will you slam doors, make the lights flicker, pour salt into sugar bowls as poltergeists do? I can’t quite picture you making whoo noises in the night, or floating down corridors in a filmy white dress—

Reading that, I remember my dream and am frightened and appalled that he could latch on to an image so close to the reality of something in my own head.

They say that when dead people hover around the living, it is because they are stuck at the place where they died. They can’t move on. I hope for your sake that doesn’t happen to you, Marie, because I don’t think you’ll want to linger in the place where I will kill you. Believe me, you won’t like it there. You won’t want to be conscious there even one more minute than you have to. But then, you don’t have to worry about that, because I’ll be helping you to hurry on to investigate the afterlife.

When you’ve severed the thread of life, once you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, I suggest that you speed away. Unless, of course, you wish to stick around to see how our book is doing?

I tell you what, Marie. I promise that I’ll drop back by the place where you died to give you a sales report. I’ll read the reviews to you and any fan mail we receive through my E-mail that cannot—as you have no doubt learned by now—be traced by any law enforcement agencies.

And now for your final assignment, your last chapter.

You’ve written how we “met,” which is to say how I first contacted you. You’ve written as much as you know about your own background. And you’ve done a nice job of describing for me your terror at what awaits you. Now I want you to write down your feelings about what it is like to know that you’re going to die very, very soon, and that you don’t know where, or why, or how, or by whom. Submit that to me by morning, Marie. If you don’t, I’ll be checking in with your cousin Nathan to see what he can tell me about you, and I won’t ask him gently.

It is signed as always, “Yours truly, Paulie Barnes.”

And at the top is the now-familiar return address in the body of the E-mail: [email protected].

Without even stopping to wonder if I’m doing the right thing, I forward it instantly to Franklin. Somehow, just knowing he’ll know makes me feel a little better. He hasn’t said he misses me—though why should he, all recent things considered? He hasn’t said he loves me, nor have I said it to him, he hasn’t even said whether his ex-wife is going to “allow” me into her children’s lives again. But he’s still there. Still hanging in here with me, through everything. Through thick and thin, some people might call it, which is on a moral par, I’d think, with those other well-known clichés such as “rich and poor, in sickness and in health.”

I think I can get to sleep on the strength of that, alone.

It’s only as I’m falling asleep that something else strikes me.

Our shy innkeeper, Mo Goodwin, is so quiet and unprepossessing that I didn’t even notice her absence tonight. I did note that only white former members of Hostel were there, but I hadn’t missed Maureen. She said she’d been invited, too, but she never showed up, and nobody mentioned her. Somehow I have a feeling that’s the story of Maureen Goodwin’s life, that she never shows up and nobody misses her.