Who Let That Killer in the House?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  Ronnie grabbed his shirt. “I’m just asking for one word, Buddy. All I need is a simple ‘no.’ Can you give me that much?”

  When Buddy hesitated, Ronnie drew back and planted a lovely punch on Buddy’s face. I wished Yasheika could have been there to see it.

  29

  A police cruiser wailed down our road and skidded to a stop on the gravel just as Buddy bloodied Ronnie’s nose.

  Joe Riddley, Sara Meg, and Hollis arrived in Sara Meg’s SUV in time to see Ronnie send Buddy crashing to the ground. He still lay there winded when Yasheika and Garnet pulled in behind the SUV.

  Sara Meg ran at once to kneel by Buddy while Isaac James and a deputy strolled over from the cruiser.

  “What happened here?” Isaac addressed Ronnie and me, but Buddy hauled himself to a sitting position, cradled his head in his hands, and answered.

  “You aren’t going to believe this, Isaac, but I brought Garnet, there, down here to see if she could remember why she jumped in the cattle pond earlier this evening. Then Judge Yarbrough showed up and starting hitting me with pine logs, and Ronnie showed up right after that and tore into me like a wild man.” He gave Ronnie a grin. “Of course, I gave as good as I got.”

  “That the way you saw it, Ronnie?”

  Ronnie felt his jaw gingerly. “Partly. My grandmama heard Joe Riddley had gone to the hospital with Garnet’s mother, so she told me and Yasheika to come down and see if Miss Mac was all right. Grandmama’s been pretty nervous about the way Miss Mac’s been riling Smitty Smith, you know?”

  “I know,” Isaac told him.

  “But Miss Mac wasn’t home, so we waited for her on the porch.”

  I didn’t know Joe Riddley had come up behind me until I heard a little snort at the word “waited.” He and I had done some serious “waiting” on that same porch in our day.

  Ronnie was still explaining. “Then we heard cars, and her dogs set up a ferocious noise. Lulu, there, was about to tear the kitchen door down to get out, so we brought her with us and came to investigate. We found Miss Mac here pounding away at Mr. Tanner with a rotten pine log.”

  Buddy was the first to laugh, and the rest joined in. In the midst of that general hilarity, Isaac peered around. “Where is the log?”

  “Sawdust,” I said. “It was rotten, all right, through and through. I certainly didn’t hit him that hard.” Folks laughed again.

  Isaac looked at the crowd. “We got a report that Garnet Stanton was abducted from Hopemore Hospital by her uncle Buddy Tanner. Miss Stanton, are you here?”

  “Yes.” Garnet, who’d been standing with Yasheika beside my car, edged out of the shadows and winced as her bare feet met sharp stones.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded. “Yasheika, I told you to take her back to the hospital.”

  “I did,” she assured me, “but we saw your husband, Hollis, and her mama just leaving the hospital parking lot, so I blew the horn to make them stop and told him you and Mr. Tanner were having a fight out on your road. They tore off in his direction, and Garnet had a fit until I followed him.”

  Ike called to Garnet, “Would you come over here, please, where I can see you?” When she edged a bit closer and he saw that all she had on was a johnny gown, he said hastily, “That’s fine. Now tell me in your own words what happened tonight.”

  Garnet looked around at the faces bathed in soft light. People weren’t laughing any longer. Art stood down by his car, so brokenhearted I wanted to cry just looking at him. Hollis stood alone by the silver SUV, her freckled face crumpled like she’d cry again in a minute if we gave her cause. Sara Meg knelt by Buddy, strained and anxious. Buddy frowned at Garnet from where he still sat on the ground. Ronnie nursed his jaw and dabbed his face with a tissue from a box Yasheika held ready in case he needed more. I didn’t know how I looked, but it certainly wasn’t my best, after all I’d been through. The only one of us who looked halfway normal was Joe Riddley, who Mama used to say would keep his looks through a tornado.

  Lulu, sensing that something was wrong, whined. Garnet looked down at her, and it was to Lulu that she spoke. “I tried to kill myself tonight. It wasn’t right, I know that now. I’m sorry. But Buddy—Buddy—” Her voice dwindled to a whisper and disappeared.

  “What about your uncle?” Isaac’s voice was gentle.

  Garnet took a long time answering. I saw Hollis open her mouth, but Joe Riddley held up his hand and she closed it again.

  Garnet looked from Hollis to Buddy, then back at Isaac. She took a deep breath and spoke like one having a final say before going bravely to the executioner. “Uncle Buddy seduced me when I was twelve. Ever since then, he’s”—she swallowed and seemed to have a hard time framing a word—“used me like a wife.” Her head bent in shame.

  I heard Yasheika moan and saw Ronnie steal an arm

  around her waist. She seemed glad of his comfort.

  “Wait a minute here!” Buddy shouted, holding up a hand to ward her off.

  “You’ll get your turn,” Isaac assured him. “Go on, Miss Stanton.”

  “At first I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know it was wrong. But then Uncle Buddy kept saying we mustn’t tell Mama or Hollis”—her eyes flicked toward Hollis, then back to the ground—“and finally, Hollis started suspecting this summer and staying at the house all the time. I was scared Buddy would get mad, so I knew I had to do something.”

  I knew exactly what she had decided to do, and when. “I need a job!” she had cried after she’d heard about her piano pupil.

  “I tried avoiding him, but he kept pestering me, wanting—wanting—” She stopped and left that unfinished. “I asked Art to take me to my daddy’s relatives down in Swainsboro. I don’t know them, but I thought they’d let me stay there awhile, maybe. But Mama found out . . .” She looked at Ike, and her eyes swam with tears in the moonlight. “I didn’t want to live all dirty like this. . . .”

  Sara Meg rose to her feet and shouted, “Not one word of this is true, and you know it! Why are you saying such things about somebody who’s been so good to us? We couldn’t have made it without Buddy. So why are you spreading this pack of lies?” Her voice had grown shrill. When she came to an abrupt stop, the crickets trilled louder, taking up the slack.

  “Okay, Mr. Tanner. What do you have to say to this little lady’s statement?”

  Buddy hauled himself to his feet, as well, and straightened his shirt and pants. Ruefully he looked at a rip in his sleeve. “I think my whole dadgum family has gone crazy with this full moon. I hear it takes some people that way. Sara Meg getting herself all hot and bothered here. Hollis, Garnet, even Mac there—of course, she’s not in the family, but we’ve seen so much of her lately she might as well be. Poking her nose into everything, meddling—well, that’s neither here nor there. But all I can say is exactly what Sara Meg just said. It’s a pack of lies.” He raised both hands and shrugged. “There’s just not a dadblamed thing I can do to prove it.”

  “Talk to Martha, Isaac,” Joe Riddley said behind me. “She’s an expert on child abuse. She can tell you some of the symptoms, and you can ask around and see if they fit Garnet. Martha and I both think they do,” he added. I suspected he wanted to get that in the notes the deputy was writing in his notebook over beside the cruiser.

  Isaac gave a short nod. “I happen to be an expert, too. My uncle abused one of my cousins for several years before anybody found out what was going on.” He spoke gently to Garnet. “I don’t know if it makes any difference to you or not, but I believe your story, and I’m proud of you for finally having the courage to tell it. Come on, Buddy. Let’s you and me take a drive.” He rolled out the familiar words of the Miranda warning.

  “No!” Sara Meg cried. She clutched Buddy’s arm. “You can’t arrest him! He hasn’t hurt anybody.”

  Isaac gave her a long, level look. “Ma’am, the hurt he has inflicted is only beginning to be known. This child will live with it the rest of her life.”

  “Buddy?”
Her plea came out a whimper.

  He looked down at her in contempt and tugged his arm away. “This is all your fault. Do you know that? You never paid me a speck of attention, once you met Fred.”

  “Fred?” She sounded as confused as I felt.

  “You married him and off you went to Gatlinburg, leaving me home with Fred’s fat old mama. If Anne hadn’t died, I don’t know when you might have come home.”

  “Anne?” She seemed to have reached that stage of numbness where all she could do was parrot his last word.

  “Anne Colder. Surely you remember her? Or were you too much in love to notice she died? Gerrick Lawton killed her, you know.”

  “Playing house.” I didn’t know I was going to speak until I did, but so long as I had the floor, I might as well get it all off my chest. “DeWayne was remembering how you all used to play house in the cemetery. Anne was the mama, you the daddy, and he the little boy. Did you try to play house for real that Saturday when DeWayne didn’t come? Was Anne the first, before Garnet? And when she objected, did you hit her with a rock until she died? Then you’d have gone home to wash, because you have always liked things neat and tidy, but Fred’s mother was old and hard of hearing. She wouldn’t have known you were in the house until you came in the back door wheedling for a picnic lunch. That gave you a real good reason to go back and discover the body. Poor Gerrick was just icing on your cake, wasn’t he?”

  Yasheika shrieked and would have flung herself on him, but Ronnie held her back. She sobbed loudly in the shadows.

  I didn’t pay them much attention. I was remembering Buddy’s tears in the courtroom, those nights when he woke screaming in his bed. Was it all an act? Why hadn’t anybody checked his story more carefully at the time? Looked for bloody clothes? Seen if one of DeWayne’s tramps had been around that day?

  Because Gerrick had panicked. He knew, God help us all, that our fathers and mothers, like theirs before them, had taught us to trust the word of a white child over that of a black man. In that bright, truth-filled moonlight, those sins rose up to haunt me, and there was no place short of heaven to make that story come out right.

  Buddy ignored everything I had said. He was still talking to Sara Meg. “Whatever happens to me, remember it is all your fault. You never loved me the way you loved the others.”

  “What others?” Sara Meg’s voice was a hoarse whisper. She reached out and clutched his shirt again, every line of her body pleading with him to say none of this was true.

  “Fred, Garnet, and Hollis.”

  “You love Garnet and Hollis,” she protested.

  His lips widened in a smile. “Oh, yes. I have loved Garnet.”

  I considered getting sick all over the road. Hollis gagged

  noisily.

  He turned and pointed to her. “You even got my name. My name!”

  Sara Meg stepped back, puzzled. “It was our mother’s name.”

  “It was my name. Mama was dead. What did she care? But I cared. I didn’t want anybody else called Hollis. But what did you care? You never cared about me. Never! You went to college and left me with Daddy. Daddy! Nobody would believe the things he did to me after you left. You think what I did to Garnet was nasty? When you get to hell, ask our daddy what he did to his own little boy!” He turned away, shaking and white.

  I felt as if I’d stepped out my front door and discovered the porch was no longer there. How had we failed to notice what was going on?

  Phrases flitted through my head, phrases I’d heard on television or read in newspapers: “He was a quiet person. A real sweet man. Nobody would have guessed he’d do such a thing.”

  But we wouldn’t have guessed because we’d never looked. We were all too busy. We consoled Walter, took him casseroles, then left him alone. We thought it was admirable the way he took care of Buddy when Sara Meg went to college. We never asked how the child was dealing with his mother’s death, why he became so quiet and mature after his sister left. Later, we never wondered why as a young man he was content to spend all his time with Sara Meg and her girls, never wondered what was going on all those hours Sara Meg was at the store. We stayed busy while a warped child grew to manhood, and we never saw.

  Isaac James stepped forward and put out his hand. “Come on, Buddy. Time to go. Judge Yarbrough, since you were present here, I’ll need to request another magistrate for the preliminary hearing.”

  There are no words to express how glad I was about that.

  I went to the hearing with Joe Riddley, Ridd, Martha, and Bethany, to support Hollis and Garnet. Isaac had persuaded Chief Muggins to reserve the murder charge while they lined up more evidence, which eventually would include Buddy’s pocketknife and the two last pages from Tyrone’s notebook, found hidden under the blotter on Buddy’s desk. The initial charges, therefore, were child molestation, enticing a child for indecent purposes, and incest.

  We all agreed that was enough.

  I never attended a sadder hearing. When Garnet started to testify, and began, “Soon after Daddy died . . . ,” there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.

  Well, except two.

  The judge was sad, Isaac was sad, the defense attorney was sad, the witnesses were sad, Sara Meg was devastated, and even the newspaper editor wore an unusually mournful face.

  The only person who wasn’t sad was the defendant. He sat there the whole time as if he’d dropped in for a little while because he had some time on his hands.

  30

  The last Saturday in June was a gosh-awful, muggy day.

  That afternoon, the Hope County senior girls’ fast-pitch softball team played their district championship game. Our mayor had declared it DeWayne Evans Day in Hopemore, and over three hundred people drove ninety miles each way to cheer the team.

  We were a miserable bunch of fans, though. As we waited for the game to begin, gnats swarmed like one of Moses’ plagues, biting us in places we’d forgotten we had. The sun beat down on our heads, burning any places where we’d forgotten to apply sunscreen. Under a red Yarbrough’s cap that I’d brought from the store to match Joe Riddley’s, I could feel my new hairdo, which Phyllis had fixed just that morning, getting as limp and dry as Spanish moss.

  As much as we were sweating in the bleachers, the girls had it worse on the field. “I hope Ridd and Ronnie brought enough water and Gatorade,” I told Martha, beside me. Clarinda sat on my other side, with Cricket between her and Joe Riddley. The way Clarinda was handing Cricket juice boxes, he’d spend the game running up and down the bleachers to the bathroom.

  Martha shaded her eyes under the straw brim of what Ridd called her “mule’s hat” and peered down at our team’s bench. “They did. Yasheika insisted on it. I sure was glad she flew back here after DeWayne’s funeral up north, to help coach. Ridd’s not real confident about the team, to tell the truth. They haven’t had a lot of time to practice.”

  I tried not to notice how much better the other team was catching and hitting in their pregame warm-up.

  “That girl is still determined to go to law school,” Clarinda said in disgust, “even if the governor pardons her daddy. Says she wants to major in sports law.”

  I hadn’t thought Joe Riddley was listening until he chimed in. “Good for her! With the money professional athletes make, she can support us all in our old age.”

  Martha waved back to Bethany, who had looked up to see where we were sitting. “You think those letters you all wrote the governor will get Gerrick pardoned?”

  “I hope so.” I waved, too. “It wasn’t just us. Isaac James wrote, and several county commissioners.”

  Joe Riddley reached for his third juice box. He’d be the one taking Cricket up and down. “Gusta told me she called the governor.” He thrust the straw through that little-bitty hole without having to wiggle it like I always did. “She says they used to play hide-and-seek together in the mansion, back when her granddaddy was governor and his was Speaker of the House.”

  Martha chuckled. “We can all
relax, then. If Augusta Wainwright was on the case, Gerrick will be out of prison by Labor Day. Anybody want a Coke while they’re still cold?”

  Augusta Wainwright is past eighty, one of my oldest friends, and the closest thing we have to aristocracy in Hopemore. As I took a Coke, popped the top, and took a long swallow, I remembered a Sunday when she’d been the one to lead our Sunday school class in prayer. She was praying for the safety of missionaries in a war-torn region and ended with, “And, Lord, you know I am not accustomed to being denied in these matters.” Ever since, that had summed up Gusta for me.

  “What’s Ronnie gonna do now that Buddy’s office is closed?” Martha leaned across me to hand a Coke to Clarinda. “You think he’s going to stick around here?”

  Clarinda huffed. “Says he’s going up to New Haven to get a job there.” You’d have thought he planned to go to the top of a Himalayan peak and become a hermit.

  “Clarinda doesn’t want him to leave,” I said, “but he could do worse. DeWayne once said that Ronnie and Yasheika were like magnets with the same pole, always repelling, but DeWayne’s death has changed them. I’m betting they’ll get married.”

  Now it was Joe Riddley huffing. “Woman, let them decide that for themselves, in their own good time. We don’t want Ronnie rushing into things and winding up like I did, shackled for life.”

  “Don’t want nobody rushing into things,” Clarinda seconded the motion.

  “I wish the game would rush,” Cricket complained. “How many more minutes, Pop?”

  He was distracted by a woman with a tin of oatmeal cookies, who was handing them up and down our row. I smiled my appreciation, and told Martha softly, “Seems like half the women of Hopemore brought cookies to share today. We’ll all go home five pounds heavier.”

  “Don’t you think folks are looking for ways to make up for not noticing what was going on over at the Stantons’ and stopping it sooner? I’ve seen lots of positive changes in town since Buddy got arrested.”

  I sighed. “I just wish people would stop talking about it. From the number of ‘eyewitness’ accounts going around about that night down on our road, you’d have thought we’d had a circus out there and sold tickets.”