Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  “Go ahead and start the video,” she said to the class. “I’ll be back in just a moment. I’m going to leave the lights on so you can take notes. The test will include all the material on the video so make sure you get it.”

  She walked out into the hallway. We followed.

  “You say you want to help Michael,” she said when she had closed the door, “but it’s a little late for that now. Where were you when he needed you before all this happened?”

  “He’s your best chance of getting back your brother without him getting hurt,” Rachel said, nodding toward me.

  “What did he need help with?” I asked.

  The doors at the end of the hallway opened and a tall, thin black man in a light blue sports shirt with his name and GCSC stitched on it came in. He held a bottle of cleaning solution in one hand and a rag in the other.

  “I’m not going to do this here,” she whispered.

  The man entered the classroom closest to us and turned on the lights, leaving the door open behind him.

  “Has he contacted you?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m not saying anything else. I’m going back into my classroom and if you interrupt me again I’ll call campus security and have you removed.”

  I knew there was no way a campus this size had security, but when she turned and walked into her classroom I didn’t try to stop her.

  “That went well,” Rachel said.

  I shrugged. “About as well as I expected. Come on.”

  “Where we going now?”

  “Across the campus to talk to her mother.”

  24

  Unlike Tracy Jensen, her mother, Wanda, was warm and friendly. We found her cleaning the large classroom used by the nursing program. In addition to the usual tables, chairs, and podium, it had built-in cabinets and drawers for supplies, a sink, and room on the side for two hospital beds. Simulating a hospital room, the beds were separated by a curtain and held resuscitation dummies hooked to empty IVs.

  Like the tall, thin African-American man from the other building, Wanda wore a light blue sports shirt with GCSC and her name embroidered on it. The shirt was untucked, its tail resting on the navy blue jogging bottoms covering her large backside and thighs. She was on her hands and knees scraping something off the floor when we walked in.

  When she glanced back at us she smiled, and stood, which took a while and required the use of a nearby table and chair.

  “Lot easier to get down,” she said.

  I thought about the book on the fabric of the universe I had been listening to, and how it had described gravity as warps and wrinkles in space-time like a wooden floor with water damage.

  “Gravity gets the best of all of us,” I said.

  “Yeah but some of us have more mass than others,” she said. “Still, drop me and my anorexic daughter off the Empire State Building, we’d hit the ground at the same time.”

  I must have looked a little surprised, because she smiled and said, “I’m reading a book on the fabric of the cosmos to my husband. He’s legally blind but loves books like that, so he’s giving me an education.”

  “I’m reading the same book,” I said. “Well, listening to it.”

  “Do you understand it?” she asked.

  “Only some,” I said

  She smiled. “I know. Used to think I was somewhat smart until I started reading all this bucket stuff.”

  I smiled. I loved being surprised. It was refreshing.

  “Bucket?” Rachel asked.

  “Something about if there were nothing in the universe—no planets, stars, or people—would the contents of a spinning bucket feel any effects.”

  Rachel looked confused.

  “Is the universe a something or a nothing,” I explained.

  Wanda smiled.

  “If you take all the letters out of the alphabet,” I said, “would there still be an alphabet?”

  Rachel shook her head.

  “Once you get it all figured out,” I said to Wanda, “you can explain it to me. I’m John Jordan, by the way. I’m—”

  “I know. Your daddy’s the sheriff of Potter County and you’re the chaplain at the prison.”

  I nodded. “This is Rachel Mills from FDLE. We’re trying to find Michael.”

  She shook her head and I thought she was about to shut down, but she said, “I don’t know what that boy was thinking. Just about to get out and he does a damn fool thing like that.”

  “There had to be a good reason,” I said. “Any idea what it might be?”

  She shook her head.

  “If you know, you need to tell us,” Rachel said, her voice harsh and demanding. “We’re his best hope of—”

  “If I knew I would,” she said.

  I looked at Rachel with narrowed eyes and shook my head.

  “Sorry,” she said to Wanda. “Your daughter wasn’t helpful and made it clear she didn’t ever intend to be.”

  “My daughter’s under a lot of pressure. ’Course she puts it on herself. She’s very hard on herself. Doesn’t feel as though she can relax or let her guard down. Not even for a minute. She feels she has so much to overcome, to prove.”

  “Why?” Rachel asked.

  I knew the answer and was hoping Rachel wouldn’t ask

  the question.

  “Because,” Wanda said, “her father’s a cripple, her brother’s in prison, and her mother’s a janitor.”

  I thought about how much more comfortable Wanda was with herself than Tracy. She had nothing to prove, nothing to apologize for, no agendas or motives. She just was. And it was a thing of beauty. How does a mother like Wanda have a daughter like Tracy?

  “What I’ve seen,” I said, “her mother’s the best thing going for her.”

  She smiled. “Thank you.”

  “Nothing happened with you or your husband that might make Michael think he had to get out now, did it?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Nothing has changed. Things are very difficult for us—financially I mean. We can’t afford to live here anymore. We’ll probably move up to Pottersville. Somewhere like that. Might be your neighbors. But we’ve always been poor, and I haven’t said anything to Michael.”

  “What about a girlfriend?” I asked.

  “If he has one I don’t know anything about it.”

  “If he contacted you or came to see you would you tell us?” Rachel asked.

  She shook her head again. “No. Probably wouldn’t.”

  This was a direct contradiction of what she had said earlier, but I didn’t say anything.

  “So he could be hiding at your house right now and you wouldn’t report him?”

  She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “But he’s not. You’re welcome to check.”

  “We will,” Rachel said.

  “No we won’t,” I said.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Mills,” Wanda said, “I’d try to talk Michael into turning himself in, but I wouldn’t turn him in. I couldn’t.”

  “I understand,” I said. “If you think of anything, please let us know. You can reach me through the prison or the sheriff’s department anytime.”

  “I will,” she said. “Michael talked very highly of you. Please find him. Please don’t let anybody hurt him. He’ll have had a good reason for running. Bet my soul on it. Please find him before anybody else do. I don’t want some trigger-happy kid to kill my boy.”

  25

  “I still can’t believe you made me ride in this thing,” Rachel said.

  We were getting back into the pimped-out Monte Carlo in the mostly empty Gulf/Franklin Center parking lot.

  “Hate the game not the player,” I said with a smile.

  She laughed.

  When I cranked the car and turned on the headlights, I could see Wanda Jensen’s coworker walking toward us. I cut the lights, switched off the car, and Rachel and I got out.

  “That your ride?” he asked, his voice matching his incredulous look.


  “Doesn’t look like a pimp, does he?” Rachel said.

  “It’s a loaner,” I said.

  “From who?”

  “My dad.”

  He looked even more confused.

  “You and Wanda work together?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  Soft spoken and easy going, he was as much as six inches taller than my six feet. His dark skin shined even in the dim light from the street lamp above us, and I couldn’t tell if its sheen was the result of oil, sweat, or the thick humidity of the moist night air.

  “You know her family?”

  “Daughter teaches here,” he said. “Son’s in prison.”

  “They racist?”

  “Miss Wanda’s not,” he said

  “What about Michael?”

  He shrugged. “’Bout like most people ’round here. He kill that brother on the river?”

  “You think he could?” I asked.

  Brow furrowed, eyes narrowed, he cocked his head to the side and considered me. “Most men could kill, but it’d take a bastard and a half to do something like that.”

  “Could he?”

  “Can’t say he couldn’t,” he said. “Don’t seem like the type. But hell, most of ’em don’t, do they?”

  I get most depressed when I’m lying alone in the dark, tossing and turning in my uncomfortable bed, unable to sleep. My little life closes in on me and I feel the full weight of the futility I’m only vaguely aware of most other times.

  It happened later that night in my dark bedroom, as lightening from an approaching rainstorm intermittently, momentarily blinded me as it shot through the windows and lit up the small room. The brilliant light was followed by a low rolling thunder in the distance.

  It was times like these, when the darkness descended, that I relived my failures, mistakes, and regrets in obsessive detail, wondering what I might have done differently, wishing I could take back so many decisions, imagining where the path not taken would’ve led.

  I never felt more alone or lonely than I did in moments like this. Thinking about all the ways I had managed to alienate others, isolate myself, all the choices away from instead of toward friends, family, and lovers. Why did I need so much space? It was a slow suicide, a potentially fatal flaw I still didn’t fully understand.

  Anna’s pregnant, I thought. Mom’s dying. I’m utterly and completely alone.

  This nearly always happened when I laid in bed for too long unable to fall asleep or when I fell asleep only to wake a little while later. I felt myself being pulled down—not into the underworld of dreams and rest but into a deep abyss of darkness and despair.

  Everybody saw through me. No wonder I was all alone. I deserved to be. I was every bad thing anyone had ever thought I was, and so much they were unaware of. I was a phony, a fake, a hollow, shallow person. Nothing meant anything. Nothing mattered—and what if it did? Was God something I created to give me a sense of purpose, some sort of order to the chaos, some semblance of meaning to the madness.

  Even as I felt the emptiness, I knew it wouldn’t last. I knew I would feel differently in the morning, but so deep was my sense of futility that I couldn’t help but believe that what I was experiencing now was reality, the rest of the time a carefully constructed facade to help me get through the day.

  Eventually the first few raindrops pelted the thin glass panes of my windows and pinged off the tin roof, followed by a downpour that brought release, relief, and finally sleep.

  I hadn’t been asleep long when the first call came.

  “You the one asking about Mike?”

  The hoarse, twangy female voice was coarse in a way only alcohol, cigarettes, and hard rural living could make it.

  “Who?”

  “Mike. Mikey. Michael Jensen.”

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “Someone who knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “What he’s capable of.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just ’cause a man goes to prison for one thing don’t mean he don’t do other, worser things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Ain’t gittin’ into ’pecifics. Just sayin’ don’t believe he ain’t dangerous. I was with him. I know. I know firsthand what he’s like.”

  “Did he hit you?”

  “No,” she said. “He beat the shit out of me.”

  “Did he rape you?”

  “Ain’t rape when it’s your wife. Least that’s what he used to say. Shit. I didn’t mean to . . . Fuck . . . I’ve said too much.”

  She hung up.

  The second call came a few minutes later.

  26

  After being sent home from the hospital to die over six months ago, Mom had lived much longer than anyone imagined she would.

  Now she was being put back in the hospital.

  Jake had called and asked me to meet him there. As much as he wanted to be with Mom, he hated hospitals and was extremely uncomfortable in situations like this. I could hear both sadness and fear in his voice and told him I’d get there as fast as I could.

  Suddenly my self-pity and sadness seemed silly and self-indulgent. I could lose my mom tonight. As I sped toward Bay Medical Center in Panama City, I couldn’t think of anything else—not the finality of Anna’s pregnancy, not the lynching of a black man who was already dead and my best friend’s reaction to it, not the escape of an inmate or his mother’s concern about him, not the new chaplain who’d soon have my job, and not the serial rapist branding his victims with a knife.

  As much as those things mattered to me, they didn’t mean anything at the moment.

  Though I was here strictly as a son, I parked in one of the places reserved for clergy because it was closest and quickest and not being used in the middle of the night.

  I found Dad and Jake talking with the doctor outside her door. He was a short, fat man with thick, longish, curly black hair and glasses.

  “I was just telling your father and brother that your mom’s suffering from bleeding esophgeal varices.”

  “Her throat’s bleeding,” Jake said.

  “We’ll treat it with endoscopic sclerotherapy,” the doctor said, “but if we can’t get it under control . . .”

  He drifted off and let that hang there a moment. None of us spoke into the vacuous void.

  The truth is,” he said, “she’s already lived longer than we thought she would. She may just surprise us again.”

  “What she needs is a transplant,” Jake said.

  The doctor nodded. “A liver transplant would be a highly effective treatment,” he said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “And who knows, we may still get one. Does she have at least six months sobriety?”

  We all looked at each other.

  “I think so,” I said, nodding. “There haven’t been any signs. And I’d know them.”

  “He’s a drunk too,” Jake said to the doctor, nodding toward me, and I could detect no malice in his voice. “She ain’t been drinkin’.”

  “Well let’s hope for the best,” he said.

  “Is there anything we can do to help her chances of getting a transplant?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “All we can do is wait.”

  Jake sighed and turned and walked into Mom’s room.

  “Thank you,” I said, and Dad and I followed after Jake.

  Mom was sleeping in a nearly upright position, her mouth open, distressed gurgling and snoring sounds coming from it. Her jaundiced skin looked as thin and taut as parchment, etched by fine lines and small wrinkles.

  “God I can’t stand to see her like this,” Jake said.

  Dad nodded.

  “She’s gonna be okay,” Jake said. “All she’s got to do is hang on until we get her a transplant. And she will. She’s strong.”

  Convinced more than ever that Mom had been holding on because Jake was unable to let her go, I started to say something to him, but knew he would never hear it. Besides, how could I encourage him to let
our mother die?

  Mom’s lids parted and she looked up at us with weak, sallow eyes.

  She seemed to be taking her final breaths, her helplessness increased by her inability to speak.

  “We’re here, Mama,” Jake said, as only a Southern boy could. “We’re right here.” Without meaning to, Jake sounded patronizing.

  She gave a half-smile half-frown expression that made my eyes sting and moisten.

  “We’re gonna get you a transplant, Mama,” Jake said, his voice cracking slightly as his eyes filled with tears. “I swear to God we are.”

  Her lids closed and she fell back asleep.

  We were quiet for a long while, but eventually, inevitably our talk turned to the case.

  “I think he was messin’ around with some white woman,” Jake said, “and her husband decided to teach him a lesson.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “You think he learned it?” I asked, an angry edge of sarcasm in my voice.

  “I’m just sayin’ that’s the most likely thing that happened. It could be your inmate, but then why string him up?”

  Ignoring Jake, I turned to Dad. “I think we’re spending too much time looking in the woods,” I said. “If he’s still in the area, he’s probably holed up on a houseboat or in one of the camps, waiting for things to die down so he can slip out—probably on a boat. He could head either direction on the river, come out at any town along the way, and disappear.”

  Dad nodded. “I’ll have them start searching the camps and houseboats in the morning.”

  “Rachel Mills said they found water in the victim’s lungs,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But they don’t think drowning is the cause of death.”

  “But at some point he was in the water,” I said.

  We grew silent, our gazes drifting back to Mom.

  “We need to get someone to stay with her,” Dad said.

  “I’ve got somewhere I have to be,” Jake said.

  “I’ll stay,” I said.

  “But for how long?” Dad asked. “You two can’t do it alone. We’ll have to hire someone. Have either of you called Nancy?”

  “I ain’t callin’ her,” Jake said.