The Truth Hurts (27 page)

When something grabs me, at first I think it’s tree branches.

Only when the grasp tightens painfully do I realize it’s human arms.

“Nathan,” I sigh, in relief. “Thank God you—”

A hand comes over my mouth. I feel myself lifted, then carried, and more swiftly than I would have imagined possible—so quickly I can only think of killers I have written about and how fast they moved when they caught their victims, too fast for most people to have time to think, to react, to resist—I feel myself flung into a vehicle, a backseat. Hands grab mine, hands grab my feet. I am bound before I can kick, before I can claw. Tape is slapped onto my mouth and over my eyes. I feel my tied wrists lifted and something attached to them. The same thing happens to my ankles. When I tug, I feel myself trapped at both ends of my body, unable to do more than squirm and make grunting noises. That movement results in a horrible blow to my shoulder. The message, though not spoken, is excruciatingly clear:
Shut up and stop moving.
Fuck you, I think, and keep grunting my animal noises through the tape, through the awful pain in my shoulder, my limbs. I keep squirming, moving. Maybe there’s something I will hit with my movements, something that will make a noise, alert other people, get me help—

The next blow is terrible and repeated three times.

I would scream with pain, but I can’t.

If I cry, I may not be able to breathe. I cannot cry at this pain.

He’s getting his wish, whoever he is. I subside. I lie still.

I feel something thrown over me that covers me from head to foot, a blanket or something even heavier, a tarp.

33
Marie

For what seems an endless time, I hear chaos.

Then there are sirens, shouting, more sirens. From the sounds of it, a fire is being desperately fought.

I am left alone in this vehicle.

When I recover enough from the shock and agony of the blows, I try to move, to make enough noise to be heard, but it’s useless. There’s too much noise outside, no one will hear me.

I give up and lie there, concentrating on getting air through my nose.

After a few minutes to recover, I try to escape again. And then again. I keep trying until I finally have to admit to myself that I am captured, and there’s not one damn thing I can do about it.

Paulie Barnes,
I think, as I lie there.

I guess I am going to meet you, at last.

There’s time to think, if only I can get my fear-soaked mind to calm down a little bit. There’s time to go back over everything that has happened since only last week, to remember the E-mails, the surprises, the threats, the coercion, the fear. But out of all of that jumble of remembering, only one new thought emerges: logically, there are only a few reasons I can think of why the deputy sheriff “couldn’t tell” me why Clayton Fisher previewed for her that material about my parents’ deaths. If he was there only to make sure the Templetons got accused, as I first suspected, I don’t really think she would have been fooled by his suave attitude. She’s so protective of them that surely even Clayton would have gotten her defenses up. So what did that leave as possible reasons for his surprising visit? It occurs to me now that he could have told her something incriminating that she couldn’t reveal because it wasn’t proven yet, or he could have told her something she couldn’t reveal without exposing him as the source of the information. What was that wily old banker doing? Was it just a small power play, jumping the gun to show he still held the reins in town? Or is there something he knows that he didn’t want his friends to hear? And then it hits me: as the main banker and loan granter in town, Clayton would always have known who owned pickup trucks, and who owned land with woody areas, and who owned property with caves on it.

There was a pickup truck in his own driveway last night, an old one that looked as if he kept it around only because he had some affection for it. I’d be surprised if he actually drove it anymore; he and Eulalie surely prefer the new black Cadillac that was parked next to it.

Half the men—and some of the women—in this town no doubt have always owned pickup trucks and not just the rednecks, either. But not all of them would own land outside of town.

I’m sweating under the heavy plastic tarp. I’m worried about Nathan and whether or not he got safely out of the fire. It’s almost more than I can do to try to think my way out of this, but if I can’t move, I don’t see how I can fight my way out of it. If my captor ever lets me loose, my limbs will be stiff, the blood will have run out of them, my throat will be raw from all the smoke I’m breathing in through my nose. I’ll be lucky if I can walk, much less run or kick or scream.
Think, Marie.
It’s the only defense I have right now. But at least if I die, I’d like to know who killed me, and why.

I remember something that Steve said back in Florida around the time that all of this began, hundreds of years ago. He said I was probably going to be safe, for a while, because there was still the book to write. But he warned me that eventually Paulie Barnes would attempt to separate me from everyone who might be able to help me.

And that is just what he has done.

“He’s very efficient,” Steve warned us.

Right again.

When my captor comes back for me, I cannot see him.

I can only listen as a door in this vehicle opens, as he gets in and arranges himself on the seat, which I take to be the driver’s. I hear him starting the engine.

I hear and feel us driving off.

He says nothing, whoever is at the wheel.

It seems we drive forever. At moments, that’s all I want to do, just keep driving so that I never have to find out what awaits me at the end of this long ride.

But finally, as things must, I sense the end coming.

We have traveled over paved roads, and then over a rough road.

He stops the vehicle. I still don’t know for sure what it is. Car? Truck? I think it’s a truck, partly because of the sound the doors make when they close. And also because there’s a faint smell of diesel fuel, although that could be a diesel Mercedes, but there’s also a feeling of greater size than a car. As he drove, I heard a constant rattling of metal, as if something was rolling around in a flatbed, and there seemed to be a louder, more hollow noise under the tires on the road.

I hear him open his door. Get out. I don’t hear it slam shut.

He’s leaving his door open. Why? So he can leave fast?

It’s a shock to hear the door closest to my head open, such a shock that my whole body retracts from it. I pull back instinctively against my bonds, as if I might be able to withdraw from what comes next.

His touch on my body.

He pulls at me, yanking my whole body across the rough floor, hurting me with every movement, until he can grab me well enough to pull me out entirely into cool air and soft rain. He stands me up and then abruptly lets go of me. My limbs numb and paralyzed by my bindings, I fall hard to the ground, screaming inside my taped mouth at this new, shocking pain.

Down on the ground, he rips the tape from my mouth.

My eyes are still covered so I cannot yet see who he is.

Rough hands grab me under my arms and pull me up again, and I fight to keep my balance. I smell sour breath. I smell cigar smoke. I’m standing now, but dizzy, in pain, afraid of falling hard again. And then I do fall, crying out.

“Christ, unleash her,” a man’s voice says.

Oh, God, I know that voice!

Then in what seems like one blinding movement, the tape is torn from my eyes. I feel a touch of metal against my ankles, and then suddenly my legs are free. I feel another press of metal against the inside of my right arm, and then my hands spring loose.

“Get up,” the same voice commands.

I stand blinking in darkness.

I am in a field bordered by thick woods.

And I see that Paulie Barnes is not one man but three.

Marty Wiegan, Austin Reese, and Lackley Goodwin.

They are the reason why Clayton Fisher went alone to see the deputy.

It was Franklin who said maybe it’s more than one man.

Now I finally get it, the importance of the John D. MacDonald book, the “clue” in the book that Aileen Rasmussen kept harping at me to figure out.

It was all in the title, I didn’t even need to know anything else.

These are The Executioners of my parents.

Lackley Goodwin, looking gaunt as a cancer victim in the final stages, asks me, “Do you know where you are?”

I look around me, try to answer, but start coughing and cannot speak at first. Finally, I say, “How am I supposed to know that?”

One of them steps up and turns me roughly around, 180 degrees, and then gives me a little push in the middle of my back. Just as I lose my balance and scream out, a hand grabs my arm, pulling me back to an upright position. I had felt as if I was about to fall into space, and now I see why: he has pushed me up to the very brink of a hole in the ground, a dark drop-off.

“Now do you know where you are?” Goodwin asks me.

But I don’t, I’m confused, I don’t get it.

“No,” I tell them.

“Don’t you know a cave when you see one?” he asks, in an insinuating tone that sends cold shivers through me. Behind me, two of them snicker.
My God, they’ve brought me to the cave where they buried my parents’ bodies.
Now that I know that the dark hole—maybe ten feet across at ground level—is a cave, I begin to hear something from its depths: running water, a sound of a waterfall deep within.

“This is where you dumped my parents.”

“Very good. It’s too bad that you’ll never see it by daylight, because this is one of the prettiest caves in all of Alabama, if I do say so myself.”

Carefully, very carefully because I’m afraid of losing my balance, I turn around so that I can see them all. It scares the hell out of me to have my back to the cave, to that terrible drop into nothing, but I have to see them.

Even in the darkness I can see that they’re smiling at me. They have shotguns, each of them.

“I don’t understand,” I admit to them. “How could you do something like that to my parents—or to me—and still be the kind of people who would help civil rights workers escape to freedom?”

Marty is the one who fits the last horrifying piece to the puzzle.

“What makes you think,” he says, with a sly grin, “that they escaped from us?”

B
ETRAYAL

By Marie Lightfoot

—•—

CHAPTER EIGHT

F
rom the time they were boys growing up together in Sebastion, they adored plots and plans, sneaky tricks, practical jokes, subterfuge, and sabotage. If they had been born in a later generation, a game such as Dungeons and Dragons might have satisfied their lust for adventure and subversive action. Perhaps they could have satisfied that urge with something innocuous like “paint ball,” where they could chase one another in the woods, carrying fake guns loaded with paint to shoot harmlessly at their “prey.” Or maybe when they were young men they should have joined the CIA or the FBI and openly claimed what they were born to be by their very natures: spies and double agents.

But they weren’t born into an age of fantasy and fun and games; they were born in more serious times. The guns they learned to use in their boyhoods were real. The issues that galvanized them were as real as ammunition. And so their boyhood desires had all the opportunity in the world to develop into the real thing. They came by their motives honestly, too; those motives were bred intothem as naturally as they, themselves, were born into their own secretive natures, for they were all three born into the comfortable status quo of the white South. In common with most of their peers, they liked it just fine and would do almost anything to keep it that way. In their case, they did do “anything.”

“Lyda’s brought herself home a Yankee husband,” one of the three informed the other two, early on. “I hear he’s a real strong integrationist. How about we have a little fun with Lyda and her new husband? He’s got himself a job at the college; we’ll be working with him, we may as well have some fun with it. Let’s just sidle up to them and see what the enemy is up to, how about it? We’ll have us a good time.”

That’s all it was at first, nothing more than a parlor game, really, putting one over on that silly Lyda Montgomery with her silly views on race relations. A side benefit to their game was that it pleased their wives, who had grown up with Lyda and been influenced by her liberal views. For Melinda, Anne, and Delilah, it came as a relief when their husbands seemed at first to be charmed by that handsome, smart new husband of Lyda’s, and then even to admire him. It was fun to form a little social group with the Folletinos, whom the other wives admired, and who had such interesting and brave ideas about just about everything.

The men played up to Michael, agreeing with him when he ventured radical views, but doing it quietly, so he’d think they didn’t want to get themselves or him in any kind of trouble. They pretended great respect for him. All the while they saw him as one of those deadly earnest sorts, like annoying Lyda, an intellectual who took himself and his damned causes seriously enough to be amusing to them but dangerous to the white society they cherished.

“You’ve got to blend in around here,” they advised him.

Watch how we do it, they told him.

They showed him how to act like everybody else, so nobody knew what you really thought, how deeply—deeply!—you wanted freedom and justice for all those poor suffering black folks. Voting rights! Free and equal accommodations! Equal job opportunities!

“Absolutely, Michael, we couldn’t agree with you more, and if there’s ever anything that we can do to help. . . .”

They were natural recruits for Hostel when he formed it.

“Lyda doesn’t quite trust us,” one of them observed to the others.

“We’ll have to prove ourselves to her,” another one said, with a crocodile smile, and so at the first opportunity, he said to the other members of Hostel, “the next time you get a name of some poor black kid who needs help, give it to us and we’ll pick him up.”

They were kind as butter on a burn to every refugee they picked up and delivered to a first-level safe house. They didn’t want any of the escapees to complain about them. By the time there were reasons for complaint, it would be too late for anybody to hear about it. But all of that changed when they got the opportunity to move a man along to a second or third safe house. That’s when they got to take off their masks of tolerance. That’s what they lived for, those were the moments of their glory.

“You’re getting out here.”

“But there ain’t no house, here, where am I s’posed to go—”

“Just follow the way my gun is pointing, son. That’s where you’re supposed to go.”

It was a service they were performing to humanity, to their own families, to their precious way of life that had existed for a hundred years, and to the South as they knew and loved it best. Get rid of the troublemakers. Eliminatethe bad seeds. And no one would ever know, because if an unknown black man didn’t get on a bus going north, if he didn’t make it all the way to Chicago or New York City, there was no one but themselves to know.

“We heard from his auntie in Philadelphia. He got there fine.”

“Michael suspects something,” one of them said one day.

“What? What could he suspect?”

“I think maybe he got word that the last one we drove never made it to the North. He asked me about it, he said was I sure that was the boy’s mother who called me.”

“What’d you say?”

“What do you think I said? I said I was positive.”

“Did he believe you?”

“Of course, but that won’t be the end of it.”

“Then let’s us make an end of it.”

“How?”

“That cave is big enough to hold two more people in it.”

“What two?”

“Michael and Lyda.”

“If we do that, it’ll be the end of Hostel, too.”

“Good, I’m tired of this game. If we’re going to end it, let’s do it up right and let’s do it in a way that nobody will ever suspect we had anything to do with any of this.”

“How?”

“We know something about Michael that most people here in town don’t know, don’t we? His own parents are Communists. There’s an FBI program, COINTELPRO, that’s still on the lookout for Reds. All we have to do is tell them that Michael has Communist connections and they’ll break up Hostel as a potentially subversive organization.”

“You sure about that?”

“I’m positive. They use it all the time like that.” He laughed. “You ever hear of ol’ Ben Turner?”

“No.”

“Benjamin Turner was his name. He was the first Negro ever to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Selma, Alabama. This was during the Reconstruction, in the 1870s, you know. Well, sir, Turner was so furious about how Selma got treated during the war that he, himself, introduced the bill in Congress that gave back to the Confederate soldiers their rights to vote and to hold office.” He smiled a bit. Michael is a bit like that, isn’t he? You might say that he belongs to the great foolish tradition of Benjamin Turner. By meaning well, he has let the snakes back into his very own garden where they will proceed to bite his friends to death.”

“What’s going to happen to us if Hostel gets opened up to public view?”

“We get embarrassed, I guess. But isn’t that better than getting charged with a bunch of murders, even if they were only of Negroes?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have gotten involved with any of this.”

“Are you kidding? We’re soldiers. We have served history.”

“You’re right. We should be proud. When do you want to do this?”

“There’s a party at the Fishers on the night of June twelfth. All the white Hostel members will surely be there. I think that’s the night to do it.”

“Well, if we’re going out, let’s do it in a big damned way.”

The planning was simple but precise: deliver the facts about Hostel to the FBI on the condition of their own anonymity as double agents. Urge the FBI to plan a breakup of Hostel on the night of June 12. Suggest that they blame Michael Folletino for the arrests that night, telephone Michael and anonymously warn him that Klan members were coming to torch his house and kill him and Lyda. Warn him to get out of there as fast as possible. Then follow them and wait for the right place and opportunityto ambush them. The only tricky part was timing. If they got held downtown at the police station too long, they’d miss their best chance to kill the Folletinos. But the FBI got them out quickly. All they had to tell their wives then was that they were going out in their trucks to check up on the black members of Hostel. Then they were free for the rest of the night to do whatever they wanted to do.

They couldn’t know that the president would help them out by giving a speech that inflamed their fellow bigots, drawing them to the streets to watch the parade of Hostel members, drawing down even harsher fates onto the black members, and creating such chaos all over the South—what with the speech and the Medgar Evers assassination—that nobody cared when a couple of wrongheaded white people went missing.

It didn’t even take them long to get forgiven by their friends.

“We never meant it,” they told the society into which they’d been born. “We were only playing along to see what the rest of them were up to.” And to their own wives and to Eulalie and Clayton, they said, “We’re telling people that we were only playing along with Hostel, so maybe we can find out what they’re up to. If that’s what we have to do to serve integration, why, we’ll gladly humble ourselves to do it.”

But it wasn’t much of a game, not compared to the excitement of what they’d already experienced, and over the years, it paled. They craved another game, a bigger one with stakes as big as what they used to know.

When the Folletinos’ famous grown-up writer-daughter first appeared in Sebastion, asking questions, they took it as a warning shot.

“If she ever really tries, she could find out something.”

But she didn’t really try, she eased off, let it go.

And then one day Lackley Goodwin happened to glanceat a
People
magazine that his daughter Mo had brought home with her from the supermarket. And there was an article about little Marie Folletino and her black boyfriend, just like her parents would have wanted her to have.

“Read this,” he told his two friends.

Their amusement turned to dismay and fury when they read:

Lightfoot’s own past is shrouded in tragedy due to the mysterious disappearance of her parents from their home in Sebastion, Alabama, when she was only a few months old. The author acknowledges she has attempted to apply the same investigative techniques she uses in her books to solving that personal mystery, too.

“I haven’t gotten very far with it,” she says.

But now and then she gets strange phone calls that lure her on to finding out more.

“Somebody leaves me messages,” she tells
People,
“in which they claim to have knowledge about my parents, but they never tell me what it is. They sound sincere and scared, that’s all I can say. I wish whoever it is would contact me again.”

The three men looked at one another.

Apparently, they had a traitor somewhere near them.

Lackley never suspected it was his own daughter, not until the night of the meeting with the Fishers at the inn when they were going to discuss the “guilt” of Rachel and Hubert, a handy pair of scapegoats. That’s when he sneaked upstairs to search the Folletino daughter’s room and found the note that Mo had written her:
“Can I talk to you? I’m the one who called you.”

“How are we going to find out who it is?” they asked one another at the start, long before they knew the traitorwas one of their own offspring, and the least likely one, at that. Long before they knew they were going to have to set a fire to destroy all—all—of the traitors who threatened them.

“By forcing things,” Austin said. “By playing a little game with the daughter, just like we did with her parents, and with the very same conclusion for her that there was for them.”

Until the very end, when Lackley suffered qualms about his daughter, it was all great fun, serious and deadly fun, a recapturing of the finest hours of their valiant youth. They were soldiers again, outsmarting all enemies, banding together in a tight brotherhood of thrilling espionage.

They devised a scheme to plant a story in a tabloid that would serve as a first notice to her. They would invent a stalker, an anonymous killer who threatened her and forced her to do what they wanted her to do. He would tell her he had a harebrained scheme to write a book with her about her own death, so that she would be forced to tell them everything she was doing, every step of her way, and so that they could get her to give them all of the information she had already gathered about her parents and their disappearance.

Quickly, step by step, they would lure her here.

Austin would plant himself near her in Florida so that he could spontaneously act as needed, move as she moved, furnish details the three of them needed to convince her that the man they invented, “Paulie Barnes,” was genuine.

The other two would stay behind in Sebastion, seeing to airline tickets, a room at the inn, planting the idea for a copycat picnic at Eulalie’s house with their wives.

“You know, it could be her aunt and uncle.”

“What could be?”

“Our traitor, maybe it’s Julia Montgomery who’s placing those calls to her.”

“Julia doesn’t know anything.”

“Maybe, maybe not, but she and Joe might have suspected something.”

“So what? If there were ever people opposed to integration—”

“Then maybe it’s their son, that Hollywood liberal. He’s more like the Folletinos than he is like the Montgomerys. Maybe he heard them talk about us sometime, maybe he put something together—”

“But then why wouldn’t he just tell his cousin that?”

“I don’t know. But let’s bring him here and find out.”

Their skills were rusty from long disuse, but they sharpened them.

Once upon a time they were able to move at a moment’s notice, make contingency plans at the drop of a hat, strike with cunning and subterfuge, kill without warning, which they would get a chance to demonstrate when they ran Marie’s bodyguard off the highway.