Walking Through Shadows (15 page)

I smiled at that. “I knowed you was. I told Mr. Cotton that on our trip.”

Sheila squeezed my hands. “Papa said he loved me too. Like you Stoney. He said he wouldn’t hurt me no more if’n I’d come home. I knowed that were a lie. He can’t keep hisself from it. We was still sitting in the truck then, and I eased over to the door, thinking to jump out if I had to. Papa grabbed my arm, said, ‘Sheila, you’re mine. You got to come home.’ I said, ‘No, Papa. It’s Stoney I love now.’ Then he hit me on my mouth, and I grabbed the door handle and fell out on the ground. I jumped up and ran, but he come after me with the hammer he keeps in the truck.”

I could near ’bout see her flying through the woods, barefoot, her hair a-flying around her, her quiet as a dead person, him in his work boots hollering over her head. “He caught you?”

“No. He seen I was too fast for him. Stoney, I jumped fallen logs like a deer and zigzagged through them trees like a squirrel being chased by a hawk. He didn’t have no chance of catching me.”

“But he threw the hammer?”

“Uh huh. He throwed it like a tomahawk, but it went low and I thanked the Lord for that. If’n it had caught my head, I reckon I’d be laying dead on them pine needles.”

“You think he meant to kill you?”

“I know it. He said so. He said if’n I wouldn’t come back to him, then I wasn’t gonna come back a’tall.” Sheila moved closer and wrapped herself around me like she were a snake and I was a rope. “Stoney, I come back. I’m home now.”

I pulled her off. “Sheila, we got to get this settled. Can’t be waiting around for him to show up here one day and kill you.”

She put her cheek on my back and kissed me between my shoulder blades. “He ain’t gonna do nothing of the sort. He’ll go off and get hisself sobered up and he’ll go home and things will be just like they was. I ain’t scared of him, Stoney. Really I ain’t.” She dug her fingers into my arms. “I want you to promise me you won’t go after him. He’d kill you, Stoney. Shoot you with his shotgun like you was a possum frozen in the light of his torch. Promise me you’ll stay away from him.”

“I can’t do that,” I said.

She started to crying then. Big old tears like hard raindrops fell on my neck. “Please. Promise me. I won’t ask you for nothing else. Not ever.”

“I said no.” I got up. I wanted to go out on the porch and roll a smoke, think on what she’d told me.

“Stoney,” she said. “If’n you don’t promise me, I’m gonna put a fairy spell on you and you won’t be able to do no loving. I done put one on my papa. That’s why I ain’t scared of him no more.”

I knowed there weren’t no such thing as a fairy spell, but I let her think she fooled me. “How’d you do it? You got a voodoo doll hid around here somewhere?” When I said that, I remembered seeing her messing with a little ole rag doll I thought must’ve come from Annette’s toy box, but maybe it weren’t Annette’s doll, and I reckon I was a little worried then.

“How I done it is a secret,” she said. “Don’t nobody know it but Mama and me and my grandmama who’s under the ground and can’t tell nothing now.”

So when I heard from Sheila’s mama at church the next Sunday that Mr. Carruth was back home, I didn’t go over and kill him. Didn’t go, but I should have. That’s another regret I’m gonna have weighing on me for the rest of my life.

Another thing changed after that Louisiana trip. I couldn’t understand it, but Mr. Cotton seemed different to me. I can’t say what it was, nor even how he was changed, but I felt uneasy when I went down to milk. It was like he were watching me, expecting me to steal from him or something. Then Mrs. Cotton started acting funny too, just the opposite of him. She smiled at me more, seemed happy when me and Sheila stopped by on our way to town. At first, I thought it was because of her being so het up about the baby, but this was more like it was us that was making her feel good.

I asked Sheila did she notice how Mrs. Cotton was grinning at me like I’d won the bull riding at the rodeo or something. Sheila put her hand over her mouth and pulled her lips out. “Maybe she knows a secret I know, but you don’t.”

“You and her got a secret?”

Sheila shook her head. “I ain’t telling. Not yet.”

I got to admit I starting guessing what it was. I sat on my milking stool pulling on teats thinking about that secret. I ran through all the possibilities I could imagine. A new truck, a better guitar, another trip to a better place than Louisiana. Then it come to me that maybe Mr. Cotton was going to give me a big raise with a piece of land to build a better house on. He had plenty; he could afford to show some generosity. That was probably why he was watching me so close like, to see if I was ready to step up to a better life. Well, I was ready. I’d show him that I could out-milk, out-shovel, out-drive, out-do anybody in anything. Sheila had said it. I was her king; all’s I needed was some land to rule over, and it looked to me like I just might get it.

The day I found out Sheila’s secret marks the end of my life. Not eighteen years old yet and it’s all over or it might as well be. Who would have believed that Sheila Carruth Barnes, a plain girl with a hump on her back who couldn’t read nor write, would betray her husband. No one would have predicted it. No one could ever understand what I felt when she told me, and even if someone could, I don’t have no words to tell it.

On the morning of that day that was to turn out to be my last, Sheila stopped at the Cottons’ house to borrow a catalog before she come home from cleaning up down at the barn. She were barefoot, left her boots at the dairy. She had on a yellow dress too pretty and nice for work, and she’d pulled her hair back with some twine and stuck a clover bouquet in the knot she made. I watched her coming back home. and when she saw me, I waved to her. I was hungry, hadn’t ate since the night before and she hadn’t left nothing on the wood stove.

When she came up the steps, I pointed to the book. “What you got that for? We ain’t got no money for ordering nothing outta there.”

She grinned. “I know. It’s my wish book though. I got things I want to look at and dream on some.” She rocked the book against her chest. “It’s about the secret.”

I sat at the kitchen table flipping through the book while Sheila fried up some ham Miss Cotton had gived her. There sure wasn’t no land in the catalog, and my spirits was lowering as I turned through the pages of fancy men doodied up in high-class suits. I turned on back to the home section and seen couches with roses on them, curtains, and dishes, and then hot water bottles, and torches and rubber tires.

When Sheila set the ham down, I grabbed a piece and burned my fingers. “Ow!”

Sheila sat on her chair. “Hot, silly. Use your fork.”

I had my elbow on top of the book while I ate and I tapped my hambone against the cover. “What you planning on getting me in there?”

Sheila chewed a while on a big bite of ham. “Tonight. I’m telling it all tonight.”

She wouldn’t say no more, and that left me studying on that catalog all day. If she was just wishing like she said, then it wasn’t nothing for me, but then she’d said the secret was in there, hadn’t she? I broke my record milking that night, and Mr. Cotton said he guessed I was in a hurry to get home. I said I was. I was planning on heating some water and taking a long bath in the tin tub while Sheila finished up at the barn, and I’d put on some of that sweet-smelling cologne she give me, to be ready for my surprise.

I guess things would have turned out the way they did, no matter what, but I’ll never know for sure. I was halfway up the hill when I seen Hugh’s truck parked underneath the oak tree. I hoped he and Earlene hadn’t brought the boys with them. I was in no mood for their racket tonight. When I opened the door and went in, I saw that it was only Hugh, and I was glad for that until I seen Sheila’s face. She was still wearing her yellow dress, but she’d taken her hair down and hadn’t combed it so that little bits of blonde stood out in clumps around her ears. She looked real unhappy, and I reckoned Hugh had said something mean to her. “You’re late for work,” I said. “You better hurry up and get down to the barn.”

She didn’t say nothing, just ran past me and out the door like a rabbit. I frowned at Hugh. “What’d you say to her?”

Hugh was sitting on the couch and he lifted his hands and shrugged. “Nothing I know of.” Then I saw the jug on the table. He lifted it and held it out to me. “I brought over a little celebration drink.”

I took a long pull on the jug, wiped my lips with the back of my hand and set the bottle back. My throat burned like fire. “What we celebrating?”

“I got a big raise today. Bought Earlene a Buick.” He took a swallow from the jug and handed it back to me. “That’ll make a man outta you. I came by to see if you want to go with me to pick up the car tomorrow. Supposed to be ready around noon.”

“I might,” I said, knowing I wasn’t about to go into town with him to watch him strut around at an automobile dealership. I sat down on the couch feeling all the air going out of me. This was the night I was going to find out the big secret about me. It was my night to celebrate, not Hugh’s. I wished he would go on home, but I wasn’t wanting him to think I was jealous or nothin’. “Why didn’t you get a Dodge?” I asked. “They’re better than Buicks.”

I didn’t get a rise from him, and that made me madder. When we was little, Hugh would pick on me about something or other, and then when I’d get mad, he’d act like I was crazy and tell Mama he didn’t know how come I was hitting him. I don’t know how long Hugh sat there on my couch, drinking from the jug, passing it over to me, like he was some kind of preacher doling out charity to the poor, but after a while, I knew I’d had enough. I stood up and walked to the door. “Time to go, Hugh. Sheila’ll be back soon and we got plans. Say good-bye, brother.”

Hugh staggered to his feet and patted the jug. “I’ll leave this here for you. I got such a big raise I can buy more.”

I opened the door and let it slam behind him. When I turned back to the front room, it wanted to lift up on one side and throw me, but I kept my hand on the wall and made it back to the kitchen table. Sheila had two plates set out and on the center of the table, there was a milk bottle with one of Miss Cotton’s roses stuck in. She had covered our dinner with a dishcloth and I thought about going over to the stove and lifting it to see what we were having, but I didn’t feel like standing up, so I laid my head down on the plate to wait for Sheila.

When I felt her hand on my head, I raised up and pushed my head against her stomach. She stood for a while, holding my head, not saying nothing. “Hugh’s gone,” I said.

“I seed that when I come home,” she said. “You had some of that jug, didn’t you?”

“A little.”

Sheila went to the stove. “A little too much. You want your supper?” She lifted the cloth and I smelled fried chicken, and there would be milk gravy.

I sure wanted that chicken, but I said, “I want to know the secret. What’s my surprise?”

Her back curled up, and when she turned around, I seen she was finally smiling. “I can’t tell you in here. This secret’s got to be told in the bed.”

I made it onto my feet then. “Okay, let’s go.”

Sheila puckered her lips out like she does when she’s trying to figure out her letters I tried to help her with. “Ain’t we got to eat first?”

“We can eat after.” I held out my hand. “Come on.”

Sheila put on that green nightdress I hadn’t never seen before. “Miss Cotton gived me it for tonight, and I got to wear it,” she said, when I told her that she didn’t need no gown.

I remember her standing there in that gown. The room was a fuzzy blur, but she stood out, a sharp image in my mind. I can still see the way her lashes brushed against her cheek when she looked down at her feet. She had brushed her hair back behind her ears and they sat small and pink against her head. I thought how in the last month her face had taken on more color, was rounder, and she seemed older and softer. I told her she was beautiful. I meant that too. Her eyes held me, and I saw how much she loved me.

Sheila was dancing around then, twirling like a top, her gown floating, rising and falling against her legs. She took my hands and I stumbled around the room, trying to keep step with her, but I was getting dizzy and said for her to stop.

Then we was laying in the bed, but she wouldn’t let me inside her. Said I had to wait. Said she was gonna tell me the secret first.

I raised up on my elbow. “What is it?” I asked her.

Her hands went round behind my head and she pulled me to her. I felt her mouth wet and soft against my ear. She whispered the words. “Stoney, you and me is gonna have a baby.”

The morning after the Barnes girl was found, I made my first trip to the basement of the Lexie County Hospital where Casey Pottle conducted autopsies. I woke up famished, having missed my dinner the evening before, and I asked Alberta to prepare a substantial omelet for me. I was midway through breakfast when Mother came into the dining room in her dressing gown. “You were late getting home last night,” she said, sliding into her chair and nodding for Alberta to pour her coffee.

“I was covering a murder case. A girl who worked at the Cottons’ Dairy out on Carterdale Road was found strangled and beaten in their cornfield.”

Mother rattled her cup as she set it on the saucer. “My goodness! Do you have to be the one to write about it?”

I frowned. “Afraid so. There’s no one else to do it.”

“I’ll have toast and orange marmalade,” she told Alberta who was standing at the door pretending she wasn’t listening. Even though Mother celebrated her fifty-third birthday, she watches her weight and has the figure of a young girl. “Oh, Leland, I know Rowena Cotton. She must be devastated to have such a thing happen. Have they caught the murderer?”

“No. I interviewed the sheriff yesterday, and he said he doesn’t have any suspects, but he seemed confident there’ll be an arrest soon.” I daubed my lips and folded my napkin beside the plate. “How do you know Mrs. Cotton?”

“Her mother is in the Ladies Auxiliary, and she occasionally accompanies her. They’re a fine family. I believe they’re related to the Natchez Bancrofts who own the logging company. Eva Bancroft had three daughters. The youngest died of cancer; you may remember the obituary on her, Doris Vitter was her name. Then there’s Leda, who lives with that Sylvia Bartheleme over on Third Street. People talk about that relationship, but I don’t know if there’s fact in the rumors. Then Rowena is the middle daughter, I believe, and I think she has a child named Annie, or something like that.”

“I haven’t met Mrs. Cotton yet, but I plan to interview everyone involved. The dead girl was a Carruth from Mars Hill, so I guess I’ll have to drive out there too.” I looked at my watch. “Eight twenty-five! I’ve got to rush, Mother. I’ll see you tonight.” I brushed her cheek with my lips and breathed in her dusting powder, which was a lovely scent to carry with me on this unpleasant day.

Casey Pottle had finished his autopsy and was sitting in his small, cluttered office when I peeked in. “Hey, Leland, you here for the scoop?” He waved me in and I stepped over the piles of books and folders littering the floor. “He reached across the desk and lifted a manila folder. “Sheila Carruth Barnes. That’s the one you’re interested in, huh?”

I lifted my brows. “Did you do another autopsy today?”

Pottle grinned. “Nope, just making sure. You wanna see the corpse? She’s still here, quiet as a mouse.”

“No,” I said too quickly. “I saw her yesterday before they brought her here. She was so small, looked more like a child than a grown married woman.”

“Well, she better be a married woman because she was definitely doing a married one’s duties.” He tapped a line on the page he withdrew from the folder. “Found a fetus of approximately eleven weeks in her uterus.”

I leaned forward to look at the report. “She was expecting?”

“Yep. No doubt about it, but it’s a wonder she lived long enough to get that way.”

I took out my pad and began to jot my first notes of the day. “Why do you say that?”

“Well, of course, there are the fresh wounds and bruises; she was definitely strangled. I could tell that by just looking at the marks around her neck, but there were a lot of other scars indicating past injuries. Her ribs had calcium deposits indicating they’d been broken some time back. There is evidence of other broken bones, scar tissue where I’ve never seen it. I’d guess she was used to pain. I’d say she lived with it from her first years on this earth.”

“So maybe this time someone went too far?”

Casey closed his file. “I can’t say, of course, but in all my years in this job, I haven’t seen a young woman’s body so damaged. If the person who’s been beating on her all this time didn’t kill her, he ought to be electrocuted anyway.”

I thanked Pottle for his time and hurried over to the jail. I wanted to see what the sheriff thought about the autopsy report, but he had already left for the Cottons’ place, so I went on to the office to check in with Mr. Elzey, the owner and publisher of The Lexie Journal.

“Nice write-up on the murder, Graves,” he said to me. “A little high-toned for a hard news story maybe.” He lifted the morning edition and read aloud. “Mrs. Barnes wore a sheer nightdress trimmed in yellow.” He leaned forward and retrieved a noxious cigar from the smoke stand beside the desk. He drew on it and for a moment his face was obscured in a gray cloud. “But some folks care about the visual detail, I suppose. Might make for a more interesting story, reels them into the scene, you know.”

I’d already read the piece in the paper at home earlier, and I was dissatisfied with it because it was too terse. I thought it was in dire need of more descriptive language.

Mr. Elzey stuck his pencil behind his ear. “So you need to get out to that dairy barn and find out all you can for tonight’s print run.”

“That’s where I’m heading,” I said.

“This’ll be a nice change for you, boy. You been to too many weddings and soirees lately. Do you good to quit writing about seed pearls and Blue Danube waltzing. Write about the real world, cow shit and bloody bodies. Real life.” He laughed.

I formed a pithy retort, but it would have been wasted on Mr. Elzey, who thought the purpose of life was to aim a gun at a beautiful doe and blow its head off so that he could sit beneath it while he dined.

In my blue Pontiac I settled back and cleared my mind of the task before me. I hummed a few bars of the Blue Danube waltz and then couldn’t stop hearing it repeat over and over in my head until I reached the Cottons’ drive. I saw the sheriff’s patrol car parked beneath the oak in the front yard, so I decided to visit the girl’s parents out on Mars Hill.

I got lost twice trying to find the Carruths’ house. The roads weren’t marked, and the directions I had scribbled the day before were vague. I drove past the shack twice before I realized that it was inhabited when several young children appeared in the yard. I called to them. “Hello, is this the Carruths’ house?”

The oldest, maybe ten or eleven years old, stepped forward and peered in the passenger’s side window. “Huh?”

“Are you the Carruths?”

“Yeah. We them.” He backed away while I got out and went around to the front of the car. “Our sister got herself kilt yesterday.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here. Are your parents at home?”

He pointed to the house, an unpainted box, set beneath a rusted tin roof. “They in there.” I walked up to the edge of the porch weighing my chances of falling through the bowed boards that slanted down from the structure. “Hello? Mr. Carruth? Mrs. Carruth?”

I heard more children talking, a baby crying, and then the screen door was flung open by a man smaller than I. His brown hair was threaded with gray stripes, and although his face was lined with deep crevices, I judged him to be around forty. He was wearing overalls and no shirt, and in his hand was a straw hat with a wide brim that for some reason made me think of a picture of Huckleberry Finn in one of my childhood books. There was nothing amusing or charming about this Huck Finn, however. He frowned at me. “Whaddya want?” he said in a near growl.

I backed down the steps. “Good morning, sir. My name is Leland Graves. I’m a reporter for The Lexie Journal.”

He made no move forward. “What’s that? The Lexie what?”

I should have guessed this wasn’t a family who had a paid subscription for newspaper delivery. “It’s the daily paper. In Zebulon. The newspaper?”

“Okay, whaddya want?” I noticed his hands then. They were far larger than most, wider than a much bigger man’s hands. I shuddered, imagining them around the girl’s neck.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions about your daughter. I’m following the investigation into her murder.”

Mr. Carruth let go of the door and it banged against the weathered frame. He crossed his arms over his chest, hiding those ape-like hands beneath his armpits. “Ain’t no need for no investigating. He done it. I know he kilt her, and I told the sheriff to lock him up.”

I scrambled in my shirt pocket for my pen and pad. “Who? Who killed your daughter.”

“Stoney Barnes. My no-good-for-nothing son-in-law. He’s your murderer. Write that down and print it in your paper.”

“Do you have any evidence to support that?”

“Evvv eye dence!” That’s the way he said it, accenting the “i”. “You goddamned right I got evvv eye dence. He hit her plenty of times. She was scarit of him. He beat her and he kilt her.”

I saw the way of it then and put away my pad. I had intended to ask to interview Mrs. Carruth, but I made a hasty retreat to my car. An exceptional writer can fill in any information he’s missing in the interest of his safety and well-being.

My interview with the Cotton family stood in stark contrast to the Carruth debacle. Their home was a neat white clapboard, raised in the back, so that from the screened porch there was a lovely vista of rolling meadows and verdant pasture land. Mrs. Cotton was charming, a true beauty with soft waving chestnut hair, delicate bone structure, wide-set brown eyes that filled with tears when she described her relationship to the dead girl. She offered me coffee and tea cakes, which I declined. We settled into the cane-backed rockers and then Mrs. Cotton told me that Sheila Barnes had worked for them for two years. “Lloyd, my husband, didn’t really need her, but we learned that her father was beating her and she needed to get away from him.” I thought of those hands of Mr. Carruth’s again and nodded my understanding. Mrs. Cotton bit her lip. “I thought she was safe here, but now, oh, dear Lord, she wasn’t safe at all.” I wanted to offer comfort, but I didn’t know what would be appropriate, so I looked down at my pad and waited until she regained her composure. “Sheila was as dear to me as my own child,” she said.

This last remark reminded me of the autopsy report, but I kept that bit of information to myself. I was hesitant to ask her about anything too coarse, but I knew that I must if I were to write an accurate account. “Er, Mrs. Cotton, I have to ask you an unpleasant question.” She pressed her lips together as if she knew what I was going to say. “Mrs. Barnes, Sheila, did she and her husband quarrel often?”

Mrs. Cotton looked down at her folded hands. “I, I’d rather not comment on private conversations. I’ll just say Stoney and Sheila were so very young and inexperienced. All couples have a period of adjustment.”

“But they’d been married for quite some time, hadn’t they?”

“Mmmm. Nearly two years. That’s not long.”

Mrs. Cotton’s daughter, Annette, came out onto the porch just then. She told me she was “real close to twelve years old.” She would most likely grow into a real beauty like her mother some day. For now, she was a gangly child, freckled-faced, with straight brown hair pulled back in a ponytail that hung low on her head. She said that Sheila was her best friend, that she knew her better than anyone in the world, and that whoever killed her better pay for her death in the electric chair. I said her sentiments were those of Sheriff Vairo exactly. When I tried to ask the girl about the husband, Stoney Barnes, Mrs. Cotton frowned and shook her head. “Annette doesn’t know anything about their personal lives.” So I had reached another impasse and thanked them for their hospitality before heading for the dairy barn to speak to Mr. Cotton and the workers.