When Will the Dead Lady Sing? (24 page)

“Daddy cried? He never cries.”

“He did that day. And he said, ‘I can’t stand this, Daddy. I’m sorry. I’m real sorry. It was all my fault. What do you want me to do?’ Do you know what Pop did?”

“Took him out and beat him with a belt?”

I was horrified. “Does your daddy hit with a belt?” I couldn’t believe it, but mothers don’t always know their sons.

Tad shook his head. “No, ma’am, but my friend’s daddy does.”

“What Pop did was hold out his arms and give your daddy a hug. Then they went out to look at the car, and Pop told Walker he had to keep it clean for the next three months. Cars get real dusty going up and down that gravel road.”

“That’s all Pop did to punish him? Daddy would have grounded me for life.” He set his bowl on the table. “Well, I need to go do some homework.”

“Carry that bowl to the sink and rinse it out,” I told him. “And while you’re going, take mine, too.” After he’d gone, I lay there and muttered, “Sorry, Boss. I blew that one.”

The phone rang in a few minutes, and it was Walker. “I heard Tad’s staying at your place a few days. Can I talk to him?”

I wanted to beg, “Be nice,” but I made a rule years ago not to tell my children how to raise their children unless they ask. What makes me think I’m such an expert, anyway?

“Tad,” I called. “Your daddy’s on the phone.”

We didn’t have an extension in the guest room, and he must not have known about the one in our bedroom, because he went to the kitchen. I heard him answer tentatively, “Hello, Daddy.” Then his voice went real soft. In a few minutes I heard him laugh, then hang up.

He came back to the room. “Daddy laughed when I asked him about getting Pop’s car in the ditch. He said that now, every time he asks to borrow Pop’s car, Pop laughs and tells him not to drive it in a ditch.”

“Yeah. I forgot to tell you about that part of the game. When you use the magic formulas, not only do your points get erased, but your memories do, too. Even if you remember the bad thing that was done, it seems funny or unimportant. Did you tell your daddy about the barn?”

He got real interested in a wart. “I started to, but he said we wouldn’t talk about it now, that it was done and there wasn’t anything we could do about it.” His shoulders bowed under the weight of that.

I wanted to “smack Walker upside the head,” as Clarinda or Hector would say. Tad stood. “I guess I better go back to my homework. They give us too much, Mama says.”

The phone rang again as he walked toward the door. “Answer that for me,” I requested.

He picked up the receiver and his eyes grew wary. “Yessir? Oh. Yessir, I know. That’s what Me-mama said.” Long pause. I was about to gesture for him to hand me the phone when he took a big breath and words tumbled out. “I am sorry. I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t mean to burn down Uncle Ridd’s barn or cost you all that money, but I did it.” Tears streamed down his face. He grabbed a tissue and swabbed them, but kept talking. “I wish I hadn’t. Can you—uh—uh—” He slid his eyes my way, pleading for help.

“Forgive,” I said softly.

“Can you forgive me? Please? I’ll do anything you tell me—What?” Another long pause. “Yessir, I can do that. Thank you. I love you, too.”

He hung up and turned away. “That was Daddy again,” he said, wiping his nose. He nearly set the tissue on the table, then remembered and took it to the wastebasket. “He said he remembered that part you told me, about him and Pop.” He heaved a big sigh. “He said I need to call Uncle Ridd, too.”

“Shall I dial his number right now?”

He lifted his chin. “Might as well get it over with.”

I called Ridd and told him to come up for a minute. Tad had something to say to him. When he got there, he looked edgy, as anxious as Tad for this to be over.

Tad threw me a pleading look, but I didn’t say a word. He took a big breath and said, “Uncle Ridd, I’m—I’m sorry I—I burned down your barn. I want you to forgive me.” He had a ways to go—it sounded more like a command than a plea—but at least he went on. “I’ll do whatever you want me to. I could wash your truck,” he suggested quickly.

Ridd hesitated, then put out his hand. Tad looked at it uncertainly, then put out his own. “I forgive you,” Ridd said solemnly. They shook. “How about if instead of washing my truck, you—” He stopped, and I suspected he was thinking furiously, trying to overcome his belief that Tad couldn’t do a thing.

“He could help you scrape and paint your house,” I suggested. “He’s a good painter.”

Tad blinked, probably thinking it was a long way from painting by numbers to painting a house. Ridd thought it over, then nodded. “We’ll think how many hours would be fair, and you can help me scrape and paint the side the firefighters damaged. Fair enough?”

Tad nodded. “Yessir.” His head was high, his eyes shining.

Ridd reached out and rumpled his hair. “I wish you’d come on down to our place again. We sure miss you. Aunt Martha was saying not an hour ago that she wished you were there to help her figure out how to do something on the computer.”

He turned to me. “Could I go now, Me-mama? I mean, if you need me to help you—”

“I’ll manage,” I told him. “Run and get your things, and you go on down and help Aunt Martha. But anytime you want to come spend the night, give me a call, okay?”

I watched them go out, Ridd’s hand resting lightly on Tad’s shoulder and Tad’s arm around his uncle’s waist, and thought that confession is like a waterslide. It looks easy when it’s somebody else doing it. But standing at the top of that chute looking down—

“I’ll get around to it,” I muttered crossly to nobody in particular. “Don’t rush me.”

19

I lay there thinking that if Tad could do it, I ought to be able to do it, too. But I wanted to wait until Joe Riddley was real mellow. It’s one thing to confess when the other person knows they’ve been wronged. But to inform Joe Riddley I’d been carrying on with Burlin behind his back—well, I couldn’t do it while I was stuck in that cast. It complicated my life enough already. I’d figure out the best way to tell him once it was off.

He came in around nine thirty and was delighted when I explained what Tad had done. But he said, “I’ll miss having the kid around. That was a great idea you had, inviting him here.”

Great idea
I
had?

He slung his cap onto a living room chair. “I’m going out to the garage a little while to set up my shop. Call me for the ten o’clock news.”

I got so interested in my book, I almost forgot the news. When I switched it on, the announcer wore a bright red smile to report that the economy was up, although I doubted if that fact would affect her six-figure salary one way or the other. Then her face grew grave. “We now bring you a late-breaking story.”

I was so busy wondering if television news reporters practice facial expressions in front of a mirror at announcing school—whether they have a list of looks they have to master, like “caring,” “serious,” “tragic,” “delighted”—that the picture took a second to register on my brain. Then I yelled, “Joe Riddley, come in here! It’s our murder.”

He arrived in four long strides and sank into the handiest chair. The screen showed the Hopemore water tank in all its faded glory.

A screwdriver fell to the floor unnoticed as Joe Riddley said out loud what I was thinking. “With all the murders going on around the country, why would national news report on a homeless woman killed under a small-town water tank?”

The reporter told us in a bland, modulated voice. “Fingerprints have confirmed that a woman found murdered beneath a water tank in Hopemore, Georgia, yesterday morning is the wife of former congressman Burlin Bullock.”

Now I knew why the barracudas had circled Burlin.

Neither Joe Riddley nor I said a word as the water tower gave way to a video clip in which a stocky young woman with shoulder-length blond hair and a friendly square face waved to the camera. She could have been the granddaughter of the woman I’d found. How could one woman age so much in less than forty years?

In the film, she held a small dark-haired boy who clutched her tight around the neck with one arm. It was obvious they enjoyed being so close. Beside them stood a younger Burlin, looking proud, but unfinished, somehow.

The next clip showed the same woman dashing from a courthouse, shielding her face with a clutch bag. I hadn’t heard a word the announcer had said for some time. I tuned back in as she was saying, “. . . convicted of killing a five-year-old child in a drunken-driving incident.”

I stopped listening again.

The camera returned to the water tank, making its pitiful debut on national news. “I hope everybody in town is watching,” I told Joe Riddley, “and that they’ll all notice how tacky that thing looks. I just hate for the whole country to see it looking like that.”

The clip ended, appropriately, with a shot of a buzzard glaring down from one of the struts.

During the series of commercials that followed, we sat silent.

A light rain fell outside, a steady
drip, drip, drip
. Droplets of sorrow for poor, poor Sperra. I wondered where she had been all those years she was supposed to be dead, who they had buried in her place, how that had happened. Was her “first” death simply a publicity ploy? Had they paid her not to come around again? Or was it an honest mistake?

I tried, but could not imagine the paths you’d need to travel to get from a congressman’s house to Hubert’s barn. I remembered that Burlin had mentioned she used to be a folk singer and felt I’d drown in sadness as I thought of her perched on Hector’s broken-down porch singing and strumming Helena’s old guitar. Given the state of the rest of Hector’s house, I doubted if the guitar had been in very good shape. The fact that Sperra would play it at all—and accept it as a gift—showed how hungry she must have been to perform. I found myself whispering, “Thank you for giving her that last happy afternoon before she died.”

Had it been hard to give up her singing? I hadn’t said anything at the time, but it had irked me how casually Burlin had said “she gave it up” in the same sentence with “of course.”

I looked across the room at my husband in the shadows. “I need to thank you for something.”

“What’s that?” Joe Riddley bent to pick up his screwdriver.

“For never thinking I ought to give up who I was because I married you. For letting me be myself, and never expecting me to turn into somebody whose only role in life was to help you become who you could be.”

He grunted. “Good thing I didn’t. But if I hadn’t liked you the way you were, I wouldn’t have married you.” His dark eyes rested on me briefly. “Let’s stay up to see what they say at eleven.” He headed back to the garage.

Outside the windows, night closed down around us like mourning. While Joe Riddley puttered in the garage, I lay there thinking how dreadful Sperra’s life had been. Bo perched on the back of a dining room chair, preening his breast feathers and muttering soft obscenities. I didn’t bother to hush him. For once, he was expressing my feelings exactly.

After a while, Joe Riddley came back in. “I don’t see how it can be true,” I told him. “Burlin and Georgia both told me Sperra died twenty years ago. Georgia said they had a quiet funeral.”

He gave a sour grunt. “Now they’ll have to have a public one.” He sat back down in his chair and reached for the remote to change channels.

This one, too, showed the famous Hopemore water tank. Then the scene changed to Annie Dale’s front porch, where the Bullocks stood in a family tableau. The shot had been taken at dusk, so I presumed they had canceled their evening meeting.

Lance stood in the center wearing his navy blazer with khaki pants. Georgia was to his right, in her navy suit, white blouse, and patriotic scarf. Renée was behind Lance, next to Burlin, and I couldn’t see what either of them were wearing, but Binky, to Lance’s left, was again in her navy dress and pearls. I wondered if she were one of those women who bought one good traveling outfit and figured she could wear it daily because so few people saw her twice—or noticed her at all.

I also wondered if they had deliberately arranged themselves artistically, the three tall ones in the middle, or if that was just a familiar way to pose. Edward stood by Georgia, holding her arm. All the men looked appropriately somber. Binky dabbed her nose with a handkerchief from time to time, but Georgia was composed and beautiful. Edward had his full attention on Lance, as if transmitting his speech by mental telepathy.

“We are as baffled as anybody,” Lance assured the viewers. “We were informed twenty years ago that Mama died in a fire. We’ve never had any reason to believe otherwise. For her to turn up here, like this—” His voice broke. He ducked his head and turned away.

Burlin reached out to the camera. “Be assured, we will get to the bottom of this. This is terrible for all of us.” He turned to indicate Georgia, Binky, Renée, and Lance, who now held tightly to his wife’s hand. They nodded in unison.

I held my breath, afraid I’d see that shot of me with my arms on Burlin’s, but it didn’t appear. Instead, the camera shifted to Chief Muggins in front of our police station. He stood with his chest thrust forward, his head held high, and every cap on his teeth bared in a smile. “We are on top of this,” he promised. “I expect to make an arrest in a very short time.”

Now, there was a promise designed to ruin my sleep.

20

Even before I woke Thursday morning, my subconscious started worrying about whether my picture would be in the paper. I came to consciousness ready to do whatever it took to be sure I saw the paper first. It was an hour before I usually got up, so maybe I could camp on the stoop and catch the paper man as he drove past. He might make an exception and bring it to our door.

I hauled myself and that heavy cast out of bed, hopped by the bathroom to brush my hair and teeth, then shoved the walker ahead of me down the hall. Lulu was delighted to see me, and squirmed around my foot. I obviously couldn’t take her for a walk, but I hopped over to let her out the back door. “Don’t you go out of our yard,” I warned softly, although I don’t know how I thought she could figure out where the property lines were.