Walking Through Shadows (17 page)

I answered the phone when Digger called to say he and Shorty were free to come home. After I told Daddy, Mama called Grandma so she could tell Angilee. Angilee is Digger’s wife and she makes the best chicken pie in all of Mississippi. We don’t have any help in the house because Mama is just too picky and hard to please. Grandma doesn’t care if her sheets aren’t folded into a perfect square. Mama went and laid down on her bed and said she was going to take a nap and for me to answer the telephone if it rang.

I got out my Parcheesi game, but it wasn’t any fun playing by myself, and I wandered around the house, wishing I could go up to Stoney’s. I needed to talk to somebody about Sheila, but Mama didn’t want me to talk about her. She hadn’t let me say hardly a word to the reporter, and I could have given him a better description of her than anybody else. I wondered if maybe our names would be in The Lexie Journal. I thought Mr. Graves was just about the most elegant man I’d ever met. He was wearing spectator shoes, a blue suit with a maroon stripe, and a pink shirt. Daddy wouldn’t be caught dead in that shirt or the bow tie that moved up and down when Mr. Graves talked.

I went to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. I was a woman now, not some kid to be shushed up when I had something to contribute to a conversation. That’s how it should be, but that wasn’t the way things were going so far. I sat on the floor beside the tub and laid my head on my knees. I hadn’t gotten to tell Sheila I started my period, and she would never know that my hair didn’t curl. And she hadn’t told me her secret either.

When Mama had woken me up the day before and told me to get dressed fast, that Sheila was missing, I thought she meant that Sheila was missing some thing, not that it was herself. Of course, I soon realized the truth, and I was sure that I would be the one to find her. After all, I knew all of her hiding places. The first place I looked was the smokehouse, but when I pulled the string cord for the single bulb hanging in the center of the meat hooks, all I saw were a rake, a hoe, a sling blade, and some bags of 13-13-13. Then I got the Ever Ready and pointed it up into the fig tree, expecting to see her legs dangling down, her grinning white face appear in the orb of light. I called her name over and over. “Sheeeeelia, Sheilaaaaa, She Laaa.”

After I helped Mama and fixed her some oatmeal, I took off up to Sheila’s house. Stoney and Digger had gone out to the Carruths’ which I knew was a wasted trip since Sheila would never go out there alone at night. It was around six-thirty now, and the sun should have been rising behind the car house, but later I decided that it knew it shouldn’t shine on the sorrow we were all to feel that day.

I saw her house as if I’d never seen it before. I stood in the yard beneath the gloomy sky, and stared at it. The boards holding up the rust-stained tin roof had weathered to a dull gray, having lost their dress of white paint years ago. A pair of narrow rectangle windows matched on either side of the front door, which was shut and unwelcoming. Their bedroom was to the left of the front room, and I imagined Sheila on the patched sheets, curled on her side. I walked around the house and tried to peek in the window, but rising on my toes, I could only see the foot of the bed, a chest of drawers, a small trunk, some clothes on the floor. I staggered back and tripped over an oak tree root and fell, banging my knees. Little red dots formed on my knee cap, and bending over, I licked them and kissed my scratches. Sheila had taught me this routine, saying it was better to soothe your own wounds than run to someone else because you can’t count on finding love every time you need it. I got up then and went on around the house, circling the kitchen windows, too high up to see in. When I came back to the front, I walked up the wooden porch steps and then cupped my hands to look through the front room window. I saw the battered couch I always sat on when visiting; there was the big radio Stoney had bought, and some newspapers littering the floor. On the table in front of the couch beside a ceramic jug was an enamel dishpan filled with water and a gray rag was draped over the side of the pan. Did Sheila wash in the front room instead of the kitchen? Suddenly, a terrible thought came up in my head. The well! What if she’d fallen in the well, and I raced across the yard, my heart rat-a-tatting like a drum. But there was the tin bucket hanging on its usual peg and the board that covered the opening was in place.

I stayed away from my own house most of the day. I couldn’t look at Mr. Carruth without seeing the poker he’d struck Sheila with in his hand. Mrs. Carruth’s eyes scared me too; she looked like a crazy person who might be capable of just about anything. I tried to stay near Stoney, but there were too many people wanting to shake his hand, slap his back, tell him that his wife would be found safe and sound. I could tell he knew different by the way his eyes would slide over people’s heads to avoid looking straight at their lies. I caught a glimpse of Daddy a time or two and ducked down behind bushes or whatever was handy to hide in. I knew he’d send me inside to sit with Mama and wait, and I couldn’t do that, no, I couldn’t have stood it. I had to be looking for my Best Friend. She’d expect that of me.

I stood up and looked in the bathroom mirror again. I was glad I hadn’t been the one to find her, and I didn’t care a rotten fig if I was never going to have curly hair.

After I left the Cottons’ Dairy, I drove up to Stoney Barnes’ house to interview him again, but he wasn’t at home, and the house was dark. I nearly sat in one of the pair of ladder-back chairs on the porch to wait for Barnes to return until I saw that the wood was rough and thought better of it, thereby saving my suit pants a snag or two. I did walk around the yard a bit, trying to get a sense of the place and its inhabitants. I thought of the girl’s body wobbling on that stretcher, of the shack out at Mars Hill, of that father of hers with those unnatural hands. I think I was half-expecting some sort of ghoulish face to appear in one of the windows of the house, which had taken on a gothic ambience in my mind. I decided right then to go back into Zebulon and check in with the sheriff.

Sheriff Vairo was just getting into his patrol car when I steered my Pontiac into the space beside him. He waved me over. “You want some news to write up for your column, boy? Jump in. You can get a scoop if you hurry.”

I detest the word “scoop.” It conjures a gum-chewing swell with his hat cocked back and a pencil stuck in his ear, and I deeply resent being referred to as “boy,” which is what most people in Lexie County call Negro men of all ages. But I didn’t hesitate to open the passenger door and slide into the automobile that smelled like a mixture of an outhouse and a cigar factory. I breathed through my mouth, and then said, “What’s our destination, Sheriff?”

“Hospital. Got us a fracas going on over there.”

“A fight? In the hospital? Who? Why?”

The sheriff pulled out into the street narrowly missing a dog that scuttled out of our way. “The Barnes boy and Thad Carruth. Pottle called and said they were fighting over the release of the body. Said he had her out on the table nicely stitched up, and they both busted in about the same time wanting to take her home to be laid out. Before he knew it they were both pulling on her this way and that. Said Jane Madison, the nurse, walked in and nearly fainted when she saw the stitches ripping out. Pottle didn’t see who threw the first punch, but they were into it when he called me.”

My mouth was so dry I had to moisten my lips with my tongue before I could speak. “Why, that’s, that’s, barbaric.” I took out my pad and pen, but my hand was shaky, and I looked out the filthy window at the gray stone building that was the Lexie County Hospital. It could have been Frankenstein’s laboratory. I half expected a man-made monster with a crooked line of raw stitches to walk stiff-legged across the lawn toward us. But there was only Mrs. Quinn holding up the forearm of her son, Jimmy, who was shrieking like a banshee over, I assumed, the small bandage on his left cheek.

Clyde Vairo and I ran down the cement steps to the basement two at a time and skidded into each other trying to make the turn into the morgue. I had expected shouting, rough language, something of that sort, but all was quiet. Casey Pottle intercepted us before we entered the room and ushered us into his office. “They’ve gone,” he said. “Left just minutes before; I’m surprised you didn’t run into them.”

Sheriff Vairo’s disappointment was visible, and I realized that he’d drawn his gun when I saw his hand return to his hip. “Well, hell, Casey, why didn’t you keep them here? You knew I was on my way.”

Pottle’s shaking hand pulled out a drawer in his desk and lifted a pint bottle. He uncapped it and took a long swallow before he answered. “Keep them here? I’m just lucky they didn’t take a swing at me. I don’t think either one of them would have cared if they’d killed me.”

“Where’s the body?” I asked him. “Did they take her?”

Casey shook his head. “No, no. She’s still here. Come see.” He got up and grabbed his keys from the wooden letter box on his desk, and we followed him out. He unlocked the door to the morgue and Sheriff Vairo stuck his head in and whistled. “Whew, I reckon they did have themselves a ruckus in here.” I looked around him and saw that the room was ransacked; tables overturned, steel instruments scattered over the floor, the rollaway table I assumed the girl had been lying on was turned on its side with two wheels pointing up at the ceiling. I realized I had been holding my breath when I began to feel dizzy. I held onto the wall and let the sheriff and Pottle go farther into the room without me.

Pottle stood in the center of the room beside the tipped table. “Now you’re catching on, Clyde. There wasn’t a thing I could do to stop them.”

“So how’d you get them out of here without her?” The sheriff looked down at the sheets that lay on the floor beside his feet. “And where is she?”

Pottle pointed to a door to our left. “In there. When the fight moved out into the hall, I ran to her and dragged her in there. Locked her in the storage closet. When they run back in here, each trying to be the first to get back to her, they saw that she was gone, and got quiet. I told them that I had called you to come and lock them up and that you had the say of who takes her. Mr. Carruth left first and the Barnes boy kept picking up things and dropping them, and then all of a sudden, he wheeled around and ran out too.”

I closed my eyes and for a brief moment I saw the two of them pulling her body apart like a wishbone. I thought of Odysseus meeting Agamemnon in the underworld, and I said, “Nor would they close her two eyes as her soul swam to the underworld or shut her lips.”

The sheriff stared at me and shook his head, but Pottle nodded agreement. “Never in all my years,” he said. Then he turned to Sheriff Vairo. “So where should I send the body?”

“Nowhere. Keep her here. Say she’s evidence; say that you got more to do on the autopsy.”

“But she’s got to go in the ground eventually.”

Sheriff Vairo snapped back. “I know that, Casey. I just want some time.”

When we got back to the jail, our deputy and the only other full-time law enforcement person, Sam Mueller, told the sheriff Mr. Carruth had been there “all riled up like a setting hen.”

I was glad we had missed him.

By the end of the day I knew who the prime suspects were, but the sheriff wouldn’t let me write much about his investigation. “I’m giving you the scoop,” he said, “but you have to give me your word you won’t print anything until you get my okay.”

I said that would be acceptable, that I appreciated the opportunity to learn about how a criminal investigation is conducted. I knew the only reason the sheriff was amenable to my presence was that he was anticipating my writing that he was the hero of this story.

My piece was short, but my notes were prolific. Beneath the heading “suspects,” I drew lines for three columns. The first subheading was “vagrant,” then “Stoney Barnes,” and the last column was titled “Thad Carruth.” The sheriff was most doubtful that a vagrant had committed the crime. “You go in that house, you’ll see they didn’t have nothing worth stealing. If I was looking for some cash or valuables, why I’d break in at the Cottons’ house, not their tenant house. And the girl wasn’t raped, so it wasn’t some pervert type.”

His deductions seemed logical. “So, Sheriff, what about the father, Thad Carruth?” I was thinking of those plate-sized hands.

“Well, we know he beat her. We know he is a violent man who can’t control his temper. You saw that at the morgue. Lloyd Cotton told me he knew for a fact that he had come up to that house when the boy wasn’t home. Beat her…maybe violated her.” Sheriff Vairo’s eyes were on me for my reaction, and I’m sure he was satisfied that I was disbelieving and horrified by his information. After a minute he went on. “So he could have gone up to his own daughter’s house, knowing her husband was at work, was going to take her in her own bed. She struggles, tells him to get out, he won’t go, she’s small and can’t fight back none. He chokes her. Then he panics, knows Stoney Barnes will come back home, find her, maybe guess he done it, and then come after him. So he totes her out to the cornfield, hoping that when she’s found, people will think she was killed out there.”

“Can Mr. Carruth account for his whereabouts when she was murdered?”

“He said he was possum hunting all night on the Whittingtons’ land, but nobody was with him to prove it. I asked his wife a few questions, and all she knew was that he was back home when she got up around five that morning, and she said they didn’t eat possum for breakfast.”

“What about Stoney Barnes? What makes you suspect him?”

The sheriff took a sip of coffee from a stained cup that looked in dire need of a good scrubbing with disinfectant. “Well, he had the best opportunity to kill her. There wasn’t anybody there with them after his brother left that night.”

“They had company that night?”

“Yeah, the oldest Barnes boy, Hugh. He brought over some hooch and both of them boys was most likely drunk as skunks that night. Every one of them Barnes boys gets wild with liquor in them. The old man too. So could be Stoney gets drunk, him and the girl get into it. Lloyd Cotton knows for sure that he’s given her a black eye before, so he’s capable. Then he goes too far, chokes her, thinks just like I said with the papa. Panics, totes her to the cornfield, hoping folks will think she was killed out there.”

I thought back to my brief interview with Stoney Barnes. His sorrow, his regular features that would be most attractive to the fairer sex, his quiet voice, his youth. He didn’t seem like a person who could strangle a young girl he obviously loved very much, carry her body all that way to the cornfield, and once there, raise his boot and stomp her head into the ground.

“So you’ll question him too?”

“Yep. I’ll go out to the Cottons’ place and have a talk with him first thing in the morning.”

I rose from my chair to return to The Journal offices. I asked one more question. “Who will get the girl’s body then?”

Sheriff Vairo smiled. “Whichever one I don’t lock up for her murder.”