Who Let That Killer in the House?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  I looked across the room at Yasheika, standing forlornly by the window. “You’re right. It doesn’t say much.” It didn’t explain why he’d done what he had. It didn’t even explain the burned papers in DeWayne’s wastebasket. Now that I’d seen the Internet articles, I suspected the unburned letters might be the end of the word “raped.” If I’d found those articles easily, somebody else could have, too, and sent them to DeWayne with a note written in purple ink. Was that what DeWayne had burned?

  “Was there anything DeWayne was scared of people knowing besides what happened to your daddy?” I asked.

  “Could somebody have gotten hold of something and threatened him with it?”

  “Oh, my God!” It was a gasped prayer. “But nobody around here knew. How could they?”

  “Knew what?” I reached up and turned the light out again so she couldn’t see my face. I felt pretty small, pretending I didn’t know when I did. Besides, I was afraid my face would show my disgust at what she was about to tell me. Part of me still admired and respected DeWayne Evans, but most of me was plumb sick to think we’d put him in charge of young girls after what he’d done.

  Yasheika began pacing, an agitated shadow that passed back and forth in front of the window. “DeWayne’s first year in college, he went to a party and got a little drunk. Afterwards, a white girl claimed he raped her. DeWayne said he didn’t even know her—thought maybe he’d danced with her once at the party. But she described what happened in lurid detail.”

  I was listening the way I listen on the bench when perpetrators’ families claim their son or daughter is innocent. I’ve heard it too many times to believe it. But Yasheika surprised me.

  “At the trial, DeWayne’s lawyer got the girl to admit she had lied, that her boyfriend had put her up to it because DeWayne had made the baseball team and he hadn’t. He hoped if DeWayne got expelled—well, anyway, DeWayne was completely exonerated and she and the boy were expelled instead. Charged with perjury, too. But before she confessed, the story was in the papers, with DeWayne’s picture and everything. Everybody on campus read those stories.” Her voice grew bitter. “A lot more than those who read the little paragraph saying he’d been cleared.”

  Including me. I was so ashamed of myself for stopping without checking that last Internet article. Mama always said it’s human nature to be more willing to believe bad things about a good person than good things about a bad one.

  Yasheika was still talking. “DeWayne told me later that going through those weeks were like reliving the bad time with Daddy all over again. People whispering behind their hands, pointing at him, turning their backs. For months he had nightmares, shakes, the whole nine yards. Missed a semester of college. He even transferred colleges and lived at home until he graduated. He said he couldn’t stand going back to people staring at him and talking about him.”

  No wonder Yasheika had gotten into Yale. She went right on to figure out what I was getting at without my saying another word. “You reckon somebody found those articles? If they threatened to spread that story around—” She didn’t have to finish. I knew how people would talk, the way they would avert their eyes, wondering how much was true. I knew it as well as she did. Maybe better—I’d lived in Hopemore all my life.

  She said real low, to herself, “If he’d had to go through that a third time, it would have killed him.” Then she realized what she’d said and pressed one hand to her lips.

  But Yasheika was a fighter. She was soon muttering to herself, figuring things out. “Somebody had to have talked to him after he left for school—or sent him something there. Nothing came to the house—I got Friday’s mail, and yesterday’s mail hadn’t come before he left—so if there was something like that, it must have gone to the school. You didn’t seen anything like that on his desk, did you? I heard you were the one who found him.” Her voice dropped and she looked down at her hands, twisting and untwisting in her lap.

  I sighed. “Something I will always regret. But no, I didn’t see anything like that on his desk.” There was no point in telling her I’d seen burnt ashes in his wastebasket, since I hadn’t poked through them and wasn’t positive what they had been. Having lived with Joe Riddley while he was a magistrate and now being one myself, I have a lot of respect for being real accurate when giving evidence.

  She flipped on another light. “I won’t sleep until I know if the police found anything like that. Do you know where your son keeps his phone book?”

  “Honey, I know the police number by heart.” I called out the numbers as she dialed. After she told the officer on duty who she was and what she wanted, she listened, then dropped the phone into its cradle without saying good-bye. When she turned, she was shaking as bad as DeWayne had in my office, and she spoke in little gasps.

  “They found ashes in DeWayne’s wastebasket. They’ve been sent to the lab for analysis—but he said . . . he said they looked like Internet printouts. You know it’s those stories—it has to be, doesn’t it?”

  “It seems pretty likely.”

  She stumbled back to her chair and fell into it, still shaking. “Poor DeWayne. He must have found them there this morning right after he saw the front of the house. No wonder he went over the edge. He thought it was all going to start again.” Tears glistened in her eyes and she swiped them angrily away. “Whoever sent them as good as killed my brother!”

  I had one good candidate. Smitty might look like something from a horror movie, but if he played computer games, he knew how to use the Internet. “Do you know if DeWayne taught Smitty Smith—the kid with the shaved head and one long string of hair, the one who made those rude remarks at Myrtle’s last Saturday?”

  She collapsed against her chair and laid her head back in pure exhaustion. “Was that just last Saturday? It feels like a year ago.”

  I agreed, but I didn’t want to lose our train of thought. “Could DeWayne have flunked him? Could Smitty have a grudge against him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if DeWayne taught him. What makes you think it could have been him?”

  “One of his gang confessed to painting the picture on the school, and I think Smitty planned that whole thing. A witness gave him an alibi for that night, but he’s probably lying. We know he’s a racist, so if DeWayne flunked him—”

  Her lips twisted. “That kid looks like a lot of teachers have flunked him. You think the kid would want to kill DeWayne for that?” Disbelief and anger rose in her voice.

  “The intention may not have been to kill DeWayne,” I reminded her, “just scare him, or run him out of town.”

  A soft drumroll filled the room as she pounded the arms of her chair with both fists. “If he sent DeWayne copies of clippings from that trial, he as good as tied that noose. Have you told the police this?”

  “Not yet. It’s just an idea, so far.” I wondered how far Ike had gotten in looking at the locker room and whether he’d decided that DeWayne could have or could not have, in fact, hanged himself. But why would somebody send the clippings, then kill DeWayne? And how had anybody gotten in the building without passing Clint Hicks cleaning his nails in the front hall?

  Something else had been bothering me all day. I spoke more to myself than to her. “What I really don’t understand is why he would hang himself. He had a lab full of chemicals.”

  Yasheika gave a sad little snort. “It’s not that easy to kill yourself with chemicals. DeWayne talked about that a lot. Most stuff either maims you or kills you slowly and painfully.” She clenched and unclenched her fists, and her voice grew bitter again. “If he wanted to do it, I guess he didn’t want to take the time to figure out what would kill him fast. Besides, if he’d mixed gas strong enough to kill him right away, it most likely would have killed whoever found him, too.”

  I pictured Ridd sticking his head in the locker room with fumes rolling out to greet him. Trembles started in my shoulders and moved down my whole body. “Dear God,” I breathed, not knowing if I was voicing terror or t
hanksgiving.

  We sat in silence until the hall clock chimed three. Then I pulled myself to my feet, feeling like my body had added a hundred pounds since I sat down. “I’m exhausted, and you look like I feel. Let’s don’t talk about this any more tonight, okay? I came down to get some warm milk and graham crackers to help me sleep. You want some? Or some wine? Cindy is sure to have wine.”

  “I don’t drink milk, but I wouldn’t say no to a glass of wine.”

  We raided Cindy’s kitchen like two conspirators. Yasheika chose wine, cheese, crackers, and an apple she found in the refrigerator vegetable bin. I put a mug of milk in the microwave and found graham crackers and peanut butter. We both felt a little lighter as we carried our loot to the table. As I sat down, Cindy’s Irish setter, Red, lumbered over from his basket to doze on my feet. Trying to talk about anything except DeWayne, I asked, “How long have you known you wanted to be a lawyer?”

  Yasheika turned her wineglass around in front of her. “I never wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a phys-ed teacher, or an accountant like Ronnie. I love sports and math pretty equally. But I’m becoming a lawyer to get my daddy out of jail.”

  “You could be a phys-ed teacher or a rich CPA and hire a lawyer,” I pointed out.

  She shook her head. “Nobody would work as hard on his case as I will.”

  I drank the last of my milk. “Well, after you’ve become a lawyer and gotten your daddy out of jail, maybe you can become a gym teacher. You’re real talented in working with a team, and not everybody has that gift. Not everybody keeps the same job all her life, either.” I started to push back my chair. “We better get up to bed. Ronnie’s coming early in the morning.”

  “Yeah.”

  Her tone dismissed him as unimportant, which made me mad. “Don’t be rough on him, honey. He spent all day yesterday driving you around, and he’s hurting, too. You lost a brother. He lost one of his best friends.”

  She thought that over, tracing a design on the tabletop with one long slender finger. Finally she gave a short nod. “I know I ought not to be so mean to him, but it gets me, the way he’s always so nice. He’s just like DeWayne—never fights anybody for anything. Lets people walk all over him with that great big smile.”

  “Not always,” I corrected her. “He was on the high-school debate team and did real well. Joe Riddley suggested Ronnie become a lawyer, too, but Ronnie said he didn’t want a job where he had to be fighting somebody all the time.”

  “See? That’s what I told you.”

  “Did DeWayne tell you about Ronnie’s family?”

  “No, but I know his grandmother. She doesn’t have any trouble fighting.”

  “You got that right. Clarinda makes everybody toe the line, including me. But I meant his mother and daddy. You didn’t hear about them?”

  She shook her head and didn’t look real interested, but I told her anyway.

  “Ronnie’s daddy beat his mother all their married life. Beat Ronnie, too. Broke his arm when he was just a baby.” I had her attention now. “Finally, one night Buck took his gun and shot Janey, right in front of the child. Killed her, and died in the electric chair for it.”

  I gave her a minute to let that sink in, then added, “Ronnie has a sweet nature, yes, but he also used to have a terrible temper. He’d throw a fit about anything that didn’t go his way. That memory you have of him giving you the ball with a great big smile? The next minute, he probably grabbed it back and bopped you with it. You just don’t remember. But one day down at our house when he was about seven, he got so out of control, he took a stick and started beating our dog because it wouldn’t fetch a toy he’d thrown. That’s when we all took him in hand. We taught him that he may have been raised to hit and fight, but he didn’t have to live that way. And Ridd and Joe Riddley taught him that hitting a woman is something no nice boy would do.” I licked peanut butter off my fingers. “So don’t think because Ronnie’s gentle, he’s a wimp. He’s not. He knows what he is capable of and chooses not to let that control him.” I’d said more than enough on that subject, so I changed it. “Before we go to bed, I have one more question. In all that talking DeWayne did this week, did he mention Hollis? She went to see him Wednesday.”

  Yasheika gave a small snort that was close to a laugh. “She sure did. Nearly embarrassed DeWayne to death.”

  “Can you tell me what it was about, or is it too private?”

  “It was sort of private, but it was so vague, I’ll tell you. She wanted to know what a hypothetical person should do if she thinks somebody she knows is sleeping with somebody she shouldn’t be sleeping with. Should that person tell, or is it none of her business? And what if the person would get in bad trouble if she tells?”

  “The person who told, or the person she was talking about?”

  “I asked DeWayne that. He said she wasn’t clear on that point.”

  I tried to think that out while Yasheika drained the last drops of her wine and set the glass on the table. “I sure wish she had come to me instead of DeWayne. He’s—” She stopped, gulped, and went bravely on. “He was shy, and after what happened to him in college, he had a hard time talking about sex at all. Talking about it with a teenager in a miniskirt?” She gave me an impish grin. “Ooo-ee! He said he didn’t know where to look. Besides, he said he had no idea who she might be talking about, and he didn’t want to know private things about her mother, her sister, maybe Bethany, or even me.”

  “Bethany?” That upset me so much, I jumped. Poor Red, napping on my toes, gave a low woof of portent.

  “Or me,” Yasheika reminded me, “although I don’t know who DeWayne thought I could be sleeping with. I don’t know any guys in town except Ronnie, and we certainly aren’t on those terms.” At least this time she didn’t say his name like it was poison.

  She got up and went to wash her plate and glass. “DeWayne worried all evening about whether he’d handled it right. Kept feeling like he’d let her down, that he should have had a good answer when he didn’t.”

  “What did he tell her?”

  She turned and leaned against the counter. “Said he needed to think it over and he’d get back to her. He wanted me to tell him what to say, because he didn’t have a clue. After what he’d been through, he didn’t want somebody accused of something they weren’t doing.”

  I was so bothered that Hollis might suspect—or even know—that Bethany and Todd were messing around, I scarcely noticed when Yasheika picked up my dishes and went to wash them, too. Was that why Hollis had been avoiding Bethany? Should I mention this to Martha?

  Yasheika’s chuckle rolled over her shoulder. “The end of their talk was real funny. DeWayne said Hollis flew right off the handle. You know how everything’s either hot or cold with that girl? Well, she said that folks are all the time saying if you think something’s wrong, you’re supposed to tell a grown-up you trust, and he wasn’t helping her at all. Then she flipped her hair at him and stomped out. Poor DeWayne.” I heard a sad smile in her voice.

  I got up to put away the milk. “He never talked with her again?”

  “Not that I know of, except when he called to tell her she’d made the all-county team. When she made up some excuse not to play, he figured she was still mad.”

  That might explain Hollis’s flood of tears. Did she regret the way she’d ended their last conversation?

  Yasheika yawned. “I think I can sleep now. Thanks for talking. And please don’t think badly of DeWayne. He never was strong after Daddy went to jail.”

  “I don’t think badly of him, honey. He was a fine man with some deadly wounds.” I went to give her a hug. “Starting tomorrow, I will do all I can to help find the person who drove him to do what he did.”

  She headed for the stairs, but paused at the door. Her voice was low and venomous. “You better find him before I do.”

  19

  Sunday I woke early and lay in bed trying to figure out how to casually ask Ridd if DeWayne ever taught Smitty without h
is suspecting why I was asking. Joe Riddley and the boys get so upset when I investigate things, I have to tiptoe around them the whole time. Mama used to say, “No woman worth her salt lets her menfolk know half of what she is doing or a quarter of what she can do.” I used to accuse her of being a hypocrite and a manipulator and swore I’d never grow up to be like that. I sure wished now I’d asked her to teach me how.

  I also tried to figure out how I could talk to Tyrone. I had a hard time believing he’d have painted DeWayne’s house the night after his hearing, but Smitty seemed to have a strong hold over him. Somehow, we needed to break that hold.

  For starters, I had to haul myself out of bed and prove to Clarinda that I could cook.

  Ronnie arrived before we finished eating. He didn’t look any more rested than Yasheika did, and she looked as terrible as a pretty girl can look. Wan and weepy. But I noticed her glancing at him when she thought nobody was looking. Finally he took them to Clarinda’s and the rest of us went to church.

  Have you noticed that in this entire dreadful week, I hadn’t seen Sara Meg? When she walked into church with Buddy, I felt like one of us must have been on a long trip. According to the bulletin, the youth choir was singing. Garnet always played for them. That morning, Hollis was supposed to sing a solo, but I doubted she or Bethany would appear.

  Buddy looked real spiffy in a tan seersucker suit, the kind my daddy used to wear. Poor Daddy never looked that good in his, though. Sara Meg wore a beige linen shirt with huge wooden buttons down the front and a long matching skirt. On me, that outfit would have looked like feed sacks sewn up to clean house in. On her, it looked chic.

  I waved for them to come sit with Joe Riddley and me. As they slid into the pew, Buddy leaned across Sara Meg and said softly, “I still can’t get over DeWayne. Everybody’s going to miss him.”

  I nodded sadly and swallowed a lump in my throat. “I guess Hollis and the others on the team won’t be singing.”

  Sara Meg surprised me. “Oh, yes, they will. Hollis came by this morning for her Sunday clothes. She said all the Honeybees in the choir decided to sing in honor of Coach Evans.”