“He mentioned the possibility of suicide.”
He stares at the middle of the rug, seeming thoughtful, then says, “I wouldn’t think Cliff was the type. But then I didn’t have much to do with the case. The sheriff and the coroner did most of the work.”
“Do you remember if there was anyone who had something against him?”
“He hadn’t been back long, if I remember correctly. I think he had a girlfriend, but I don’t think he was having any women trouble.”
“Was there any tension between him and Oakes or Roberts?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Are you still in touch with Deputy Roberts? I couldn’t find him in the phone book.”
“Curtis?” He picks up his mug from the coffee table. “He’s been dead for years. Some type of cancer. I suppose it’ll get us all in the end. I’ve resigned myself to that much.”
“Shit.” No Roberts, no Oakes, just this friendly brick wall of a man. “Sorry.”
“Doesn’t bother me. I feel like I’m not being much help to you.”
“Do you think he fell and that was it?”
“Sometimes there’s no understanding these things.” His blue eyes move from her to the mantel. “I had a daughter, Charlotte. She died a few days after she was born. Doctors never could tell us why.”
“I’m sorry.” She looks at the mantel but doesn’t see any baby pictures. “What about Curtis Roberts? What was he like?”
He leans back in the chair. “Curtis? Not much to tell. Curtis and me never got along. He was about as sharp as a butter knife. Dropped out in the eighth grade. He was with the department till he retired. I was only on it but three years. I wasn’t precisely cut out to be a lawman and finally we had a good crop and I got my CPA.”
“Do you remember if the possibility of homicide was raised?” She looks at him, but his expression doesn’t change.
“I’m sure the sheriff looked into all the possibilities. It’s hard to recall details now. But they must’ve had to rule that out.” He glances behind her at the window.
She turns too, her eyes filling with sunlight. A car door slams.
“It’s real good to see you, Billie. You doing good?”
She turns quickly back to him. “I’m doing okay.”
They almost whisper.
“I was sorry to hear about your mother. I met her one time and she seemed like a good, strong lady.”
“She was.”
His eyes never leave hers.
“I found out I went missing,” she says.
“You don’t remember?”
“Not really.”
“That’s okay. You were real little.” He leans forward. “You had a scraped knee. Remember that?”
Her hand goes to the knee still raw from the fall off her bike where a scab is just starting to form.
The front door opens. It’s Harlan, clean-shaven, in a white polo and wraparound black sunglasses, looking like the kind of preppy kid she never would’ve hung out with in high school.
“Hey there, son,” says Mr. McGee but he is still looking at her.
Harlan walks halfway into the room. “I need to talk to you, Dad.”
“Well, Billie’s talking to me at the moment. Can it wait?”
“No, I don’t think it can.”
His father looks at him fully now. “Take your sunglasses off and act like you’re somebody.” He stands. “Billie, excuse me for a moment.”
They disappear into the kitchen and she can’t make out anything but the sharp murmur of voices. Something’s wrong. She stands and puts her back to the foyer so she can take out the gun and check the safety. Whatever’s happening probably has nothing to do with her. But Harlan didn’t even say hello. The voices come closer and she jams the gun into the back of her shorts.
Mr. McGee comes back in, subdued somehow, almost sad. Harlan stays a few steps behind him, saying nothing.
“Harlan’s just reminded me of something I need to take care of. Could we chat another time? Whenever suits your fancy.”
“Sure.” It’s like he’s been turned against her.
As Mr. McGee walks her to the door, his hand softly touches the top half of her back. “Thank you for coming by.”
BILLIE IS WALKING IN THE DRY DITCH RUNNING ALONGSIDE THE MAIN road when Harlan’s white truck appears. Nowhere to hide unless she lies down in the dirt.
Harlan pulls up, rolling down his window. “Hey.” His stupid sunglasses are back on.
“What the hell was that?”
“You want a ride?” he says.
Crazy fucking white people. “Go away.” She starts walking again, a spatter of rain hitting her on the forehead.
He drives alongside her. “My dad wants me to give you a ride home.”
“That’s nice of him. I like to walk.”
“It’s gonna pour down rain any minute.”
She glances up at the darkening sky. “I like the rain.”
“Why did you bring a gun to visit my father?”
She stops. He brakes. “What are you talking about?” she says, but the words are automatic, the gun is digging into her spine.
“It’s sticking out the back of your pants. My mother saw it and about lost her mind.”
“Why? People around here are armed all the time. Everybody’s packing in Walmart.”
“I ain’t,” he says.
A grasshopper leaps and spins in front of her shoe. “Well then, you’re practically a pacifist.”
“She thought maybe you had bad intentions.”
“My intention is to protect myself.”
“From my dad?”
“My uncle told me to be careful.”
“My dad would never hurt anyone, especially not a woman.” He takes his sunglasses off.
God, what’s wrong with her, he is not even that good-looking. Certainly not her type. “It’s weird to me that your mother would freak out. And you know what else? I have a hard time believing that you really didn’t know my dad died in those woods.”
He jerks closer to the window. “Is that what this is about? My family had nothing to do with that.”
“You were a baby. How would you know?” she says as the sky opens.
“C’mon,” Harlan says, pushing wide the door.
“Go home.” The shoulders of her shirt are already soaked, mascara starting to drop under her eyes.
He drives next to her through the downpour until she reaches her porch, then he parks and gets out.
“Hey, you got something there.” He points at her and hops up on the porch.
The dog is barking. “What is it?” She combs her fingers through her hair. “It better not be a bug.”
“A little leaf.” He walks up to her and picks it out.
“Rufus!” she shouts at the door. “You can go now,” she says to Harlan.
“I did you the service of picking a leaf from your hair and that’s what I get?”
“Very funny.” She unlocks the door and lets Rufus out. He sniffs Harlan and leaps out into the rain. “Your dad was on duty when they found my father’s body. But apparently he doesn’t remember shit.”
“Look, I think it’s natural for you to be curious. But I know there are things he wouldn’t do. My father is a good man. He doesn’t drink anymore, he goes to church twice a week. People have a hard time talking about bad things that happened in the past, that’s all.”
“It didn’t happen in the distant past to my great-great-grandfather. It happened to me, I was there.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” He sighs and looks out at his truck. “I better go. I’m working the night shift.”
“Thanks for the escort.”
“I could come by tomorrow, if there’s something in the house you need help with.”
“I have someone coming in from out of town.”
He looks at the screen door as if they’re lurking inside. “I better go.” He walks down the steps, then turns. “Do you need the help?
”
She shrugs, tired of the McGees, tired of having to fight for what she doesn’t know.
“I could look the house over for you,” he says. “Tell you what repairs you might need. I’ve done some construction work.”
She opens the screen door and grabs the towel for Rufus. “Sure.”
“I’ll come by the day after tomorrow then?”
“Okay,” she says.
At 4:00 A.M., Billie wakes. She wakes hungry, her mind whirring before she can catch up. She goes to the kitchen and makes herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich so she can figure out what she thinks.
Jim McGee
WHAT JIM MCGEE CANNOT SAY TO BILLIE JAMES, CANNOT EVEN PUT into words in his own head, is: There was a time I knew Cliff like I knew my own body. His walk. The way he breathed, the length of the air he took into his chest. When we were boys running through the brake, I could feel him move without looking. I always knew where he was and he always knew where to be. When I was in trouble, he’d come running. I’d look out my bedroom window, raw from a whipping, and I’d see him coming up the lawn. He wouldn’t say nothing, just sit with me in my room. I loved Cliff, loved him. But our bond was nothing spoken. We ourselves wouldn’t have known what to call it. It was just there like the trees, the birds, the fields—a naturally occurring thing.
The girl looks like them both. Not that he remembers her mother much, but something about the shape of Billie’s face calls Pia back. So it’s true; deep down he has always believed that Billie would come back. Even if there is nothing any damn good for her here but an old shack and an aging drunk.
They spoiled him. Dee. Jim always thought that. But he was the baby of the family, even to Cliff who was almost old enough to be his father. More of a father to him than the man that was. A gift from God, Miss Ruby used to say. Dee grew up spoiled and did what he wanted, never making nothing of himself—not like Cliff who had the energy of three men—and now look at Dee, a broken-down man. But then Cliff brought too much on himself, wanted to change too much too fast. Nobody was ready for him and his damn photographic memory.
Jim remembers trying to get the little girl to sleep in Harlan’s room, how Harlan was so small he was sleeping in a Moses basket by their bed. How Billie kept kicking her legs and sitting up, her eyes on him in the dark, checking that he was still there. She would roll away on the trundle bed then back, put her little butt up in the air like a caterpillar, kick her leg off and on the bed. You got the wiggles he said from the rocking chair. When he picked her up, she immediately put her head down on his shoulder. He walked the room, rubbing her back. A moment later he felt her little hand rubbing his. Children always know who to trust, his wife said. We better hope she don’t know nothing about anything, he told her.
They hadn’t had Charlotte yet, only their newborn son, but rocking Billie in the chair in the nursery he started to think of how one day he’d like a daughter. Marlene snuck in and hissed at him to lay the girl down, that she was asleep, but he still hadn’t finished telling her with the way that he rocked her how sorry he was for what he hoped she hadn’t seen.
Then she was gone, and the next night at three in the morning, he was so sleep deprived he started thinking of how they should have kept her and raised her, how they could give the child what she needed better than her unstable mother, how he could make it all up to her. He could hardly believe himself when he woke up in the sunlight next to Marlene feeding Harlan.
Then there was Dee’s face at the funeral, how the sulk of it surprised him. Dee did not cry. Jim cried, but then he’d barely slept for the last two months. The day, the night—it was all one long shaggy thing. The boy was not a good sleeper from the beginning. Even now Harlan has nightmares.
His wife comes into the living room. He can tell by the pinch of her forehead that she is anxious.
“Marlene,” he says, but that is all he wants to say. He shouldn’t have let Billie leave like that. She deserved something more.
“I did it in a fever. I had to do something so I called Harlan. That girl was worrying me. She seemed so tense and when I saw she had a dang gun in her back pocket, I just about died. I thought she might have come here for a reason.”
“Marlene, I’ve got my gun on me too.”
“In a holster where it belongs, not hanging out in the open.”
“She was nervous.”
“She doesn’t remember, does she?”
The question hangs in the air between them too long.
“No,” he says, though he can’t be certain. “Don’t pitch a fit.” Billie didn’t seem to know him.
“Why in the world did she come back?”
“She’s just curious.”
“But why now? It was a long time ago.”
But Marlene of all people knows that God is beyond Time. Isn’t He? That’s a question for the new pastor. “She’s inherited her daddy’s house,” he says.
“You shouldn’t have talked so much. You should have said you didn’t remember anything.”
“Don’t fuss at me.”
“She hasn’t come here to live?”
“No, I don’t think she has.”
“I feel for her losing both her parents at so young an age, I do.”
Marlene had him talk to a preacher once. He was a visiting preacher from out of town. Jim tried to talk, but he had to talk around things, and it didn’t do him any good. But it shouldn’t surprise him that there would be no relief.
“It was years ago now,” he says for Marlene’s benefit. “Whatever she might think she remembers isn’t what happened.”
“It’s a disgrace. But you had absolutely nothing to do with what went on.” Marlene is looking hard at the floor. “Do you want a sandwich?” she asks, her voice high and absent. “I made a couple from the chicken last night.”
“That’d be nice. I’m heading back out to the fields directly.”
“It’s on the shelf in the fridge. Oh gosh, I think we’re going to have book club here next week. Guess that means I have to clean the good china. You know I always had a feeling—in my heart I knew she would come back.”
“It don’t matter now,” he says, but he can see that it does. “Don’t mention to any of them ladies that she came by. Not to your church group either. Last thing we want.”
“We should have offered her something to eat,” Marlene says pretty much to herself as she walks out.
Dr. Melvin Hurley
BILLIE OPENS THE DOOR. “CURTIS ROBERTS IS DEAD.”
Melvin steps inside, yanking off his prescription sunglasses. The room is awash in sun and loud music. “How do you know?”
“What?” She puts down her bottle of beer and moves away to turn the volume down on an old silver boom box. “Let’s go out for doughnuts. I need sugar.”
“Who told you about Curtis Roberts?”
“Mr. McGee. Oh yeah, I went to see ole Mr. McGee.”
The house is much too hot for his blazer. His deodorant is already struggling in the day’s heat. “I had imagined that we were going to see Mr. McGee together.”
“Sorry. I couldn’t wait. It was probably the wrong call.” She picks at something gummed to the bottom of her T-shirt. “I brought my gun.” There is dirt under her fingernails.
“I didn’t— I wasn’t aware you carried a gun.” He strips off his jacket.
She laughs with little mirth. “It was my uncle’s idea. He thinks some white supremacist smashed the back window. Clearly he didn’t know I was raised as a pacifist. I did think that a gun would make me feel better. But maybe I wasn’t really thinking. I’ve been meaning to practice out here sometime with some bottles, but I should’ve gotten a rifle I think. A rifle would feel more authentic, more Billy the Kid. And yes, so Curtis is dead.”
“I hesitate to come across as preachy, but you do realize that most people end up shooting themselves or their family during a home invasion.” He sits down on the armchair and rips a piece of gum from the jumbo pack in his jacket.
“I’ve heard something like that.” Her Band-Aids are gone, all that is left is an angry blister between her thumb and forefinger that she keeps touching. “It’s not like I know what I’m doing. Why are you gnashing on that piece of gum?”
“Sorry.” He covers his mouth and spits it out.
“It’s fine.” She sits on the floor. “You were just chewing it so violently.”
“I’m trying— I am in the middle of quitting smoking.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before? I had a boyfriend who quit. Well, who quit like seven times. It was terrible. For both of us. Chew away. Really.”
“Thank you. I do want to take this opportunity to remind us both that we might never know what precisely happened to your father on that night.”
She finishes her beer. “Especially now Curtis Roberts is dead.”
“But I think we need to verify that this is indeed the case. Did Mr. McGee say anything else of note?”
“He remembered me, he said. Or that he’d met me as a kid. We didn’t talk long because his son came home.”
“It sounds to me like we’ll have to have another conversation with him, a recorded conversation.” He can afford to be forgiving today.
She itches a mosquito bite on her inner elbow. “I think I freaked them out.”
“Perhaps I should come back when you’re feeling better.”
“I know I did.”
“Well, it’s very likely that you were probing into something most would much rather forget. One way to think about it is that at that time, and arguably still at this time, a black man’s death wasn’t all that important to local authorities. Which poses the question: Is the issue one of negligence? And did they investigate well, or at all? Or, as I’ve said, it’s not inconceivable that in 1972 white police officers in the South were to some degree responsible for the death of a black man who had been a civil rights activist. Or, could it have been one of those cruel freak accidents?”
“It must be hard to end his biography.”
“A Gordian knot of questions.”
“I need another beer.” She gets up and goes into the kitchen.
“I’ve never managed to produce a full draft,” he says in her direction. “But like you I feel called here for a reason.”
The Gone Dead Page 13
