I looked at the ground. “She’s my cousin. My grandmother’s brother was her grandfather.”
That just confused him. “Grandmother’s ... grandfather ...”
I shifted. “I knew her when we were kids. Haven’t seen her in a really long while. Last I saw of her, they’d carted her away to Milledgeville.”
Milledgeville State Mental Hospital — in the old days you’d make fun of other kids by saying, “Are you from Milledgeville or something?” Like everybody in the town was off. Wouldn’t have wanted to be on their city council back then.
She nodded. “Yeah. I was in and out of that place for years.”
I took a little breath. “Really?”
“Well, when I was in there first time, you know, Momma and Daddy died.”
I nodded. “Now that you mention it, I think there was talk around our house about it.” It was coming back to me. They’d killed themselves in a suicide pact. They’d thought the end of the world was just around the corner. That’s why they’d taken Sylvia/Lydia, their only daughter, to the mental hospital. She’d refused to join them. Even at her young age she’d tried to reason with them. Their response had been to lock her up. This may explain to all and sundry the further complications of the concept “It runs in the family.” I could only imagine what it would do to me if I’d been locked up when I was that young — and then my folks had iced themselves on top of it. I looked over at Dalliance, and all of a sudden I wasn’t completely mad anymore. I was just thankful I’d had a pal like her since I was a kid. Plenty better than having to face it all alone, like Lydia’d had to.
Lydia went on. “I was adopted by the Habershams. They couldn’t have children. When I got out of Milledgeville, I went to an orphanage in Hapeville. They got me there. They had all my names legally changed. It was their idea of giving me a fresh start.”
Dally was curious about that one. “Fresh start?”
“The Habershams knew my family history, but they didn’t really think I was insane. The only real reason they ever used to send me off to the hospital every once in a while, when I got older, was that I was what they called a wild child. If I did something they thought was strange, they’d pack me off again. Most of the time it was something really small. Like once I wanted to get a tattoo of a mermaid on my forearm. It was my Popeye phase. That made them really nervous.”
I nodded. “I met them. I can imagine.”
Dally jumped in. “Yeah. Okay. Whatever. I guess what I’m really more interested in is why you’d marry Lowe Acree in the first place. He was just, like, the town bully or something — him and his cousin, Tommy. What was the attraction?”
“He said he loved me.”
Dally gave her a look. “Uh-huh.”
She smiled. “My head’d been messed with so much at that point, I would have believed it if he’d told me I was Santa Claus. I just would have started handing out presents.”
My turn. “Uh-huh. There’s got to be more. Maybe there’s a story that goes with it. Ms. Oglethorpe loves a good story.”
38 - A Marriage Proposal
Lydia obliged. She told us how she’d been minding her own business, as much as she could, when something wicked came her way — in the form of a rich, handsome businessman.
*
“Miss? Excuse me, ma’am?”
She dropped her rigging, slung herself over the hold, and looked at the guy on the dock. “Uh-huh.”
“Are you Lydia Habersham?”
“Yup.”
“June over at the DeSoto told me about you. I’d like very much to catch me a big old fish. She says you’re the best.”
“She’s a friend.”
“My name is Lowe? Lowe Acree? I got a bank over in Tifton, and I got a few weeks off, here. I was hoping to start now and go all weekend, at least.”
“It’s seven hundred and fifty dollars a day.”
“Whoa. Everybody else is five hundred, tops.”
“Then go with everybody else.”
“How come you’re so much more?”
“Keeps out the pikers.”
Lowe Acree smiled. “Uh-huh. Well, then. I’m no piker. When do we leave.”
“Shove your stuff up on deck. I’ll cast off.”
Her hair was nearly white from being in the sun all the time, but her skin was still pale. She took Lowe’s elbow as he came on board. “I got some number-two-hundred sunblock, or some such. I think it even keeps out X rays. I use it and I never even tan. I suggest you put some on. The sun’s brutal out there.”
He waved her off. “Aw, I could use a little sun on me.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
They were underway in five minutes. Lydia was very good. That day Lowe caught a marlin, a shark, and about half a dozen smaller fish. He decided to keep them all.
When the sun was setting, and Lowe was putting some Intensive Care lotion on his sunburn, they headed west, toward the coast.
“Well, Lydia — this has indeed been a day worth the money.”
“Yup.”
“Could I interest you in a little beverage over at June’s at the DeSoto? Maybe a bite of dinner? My treat.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on. No harm. I do believe you are the most beautiful woman I ever saw in my life. What color hair is that?”
“Usually what they call auburn, but the sun’s bleached it out. I don’t know what they’d call it now.”
“They’d call it remarkable.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re not buying any of this, I see.”
“Nope.”
“You don’t intend to go out with me.”
She throttled the engine. They were coming into dock. “Nope.”
“No matter what.”
“That’s right.”
“Not even for somebody rich enough to set you free.”
She laughed. “Free from what?”
He looked out to sea. “Well, how about from your parents? Parents that bounce you off to some mental hospital every time you get a slightly unusual notion in your head.”
Lydia made a face. “That damn June. She has to tell everybody everything about me.”
He was serious. “Look. I’m somebody who knows what it’s like to be a wild child in a dead garden.”
She just stared. “Nice turn of the phrase.”
“You know what I’m talking about. I’m a wild boy in my hometown. The only difference is, I happen to run a lot of it.”
Lowe Acree went to the wheel. Lydia had stopped piloting her little boat, and Lowe took charge. He guided the vessel safely homeward. While he did, he spoke very softly to her. “I’d like to have a little talk with your parents. I’d like to ask them for your hand.”
She didn’t bother looking at him. She didn’t know what to say. “They’re not really my parents, you know.”
He smiled. She didn’t see it. He spoke even softer. “I know.”
“I’m adopted.” She was watching the sun set out over the water.
The boat knocked the side of the dock; Lowe secured it. “Feel like scallops? They got a great coquilles Saint Jacques over at The Hut.”
“I know.”
He smiled. “I guess if you told anybody about this ... I mean, imagine how insane all this would sound. You meet a guy one day and he spends a few hours with you and he knows for good and all that he wants to marry you. I mean it — I imagine how really out-of-touch this must sound.”
She was slowly regaining her composure. She had a method. It was simple. Whenever the events of her life threatened to capsize the still, small boat of her mind, she imagined calm waves on the shore of a golden beach and said the word waves over and over to herself as she breathed out. Events in life were just waves on the sand. No more. No less. Just waves. No value, no meaning, no import. No other thoughts or images were allowed to permeate this single-mindedness of the image; the repeated word. And in a while, she was calm.
She finally looke
d at Lowe. “As it happens, imagining how insane all this would sound is one of the few things I’m really good at.”
“Plus, knowing where the marlins are.”
She actually smiled. “That too.”
“So. Scallops?”
She smiled. “What could happen — it’s just a few scallops.”
Lowe went to the refrigerated hold and checked his fish. “This is going to be some good eating. You can make arrangements to have it cut up and frozen and sent to my home?”
Lydia nodded.
Lowe helped her off the boat, and as they walked toward The Hut, he took her hand. “I’ll treat you so well. I’ll never do anything you don’t want me to do. Everything will be all right. You’ll always be the perfect girl for me, and I’ll always love you. You’ll never want for anything, and as far as this part of the world is concerned, you’ll be kind of like royalty, Southern aristocracy. It’ll be just like a dream.”
And so they were married. There was a big wedding. All of Savannah’s aristocracy was there — along with a few guests from Beautiful. Then the blushing bride went, like Ruth, into another land: Tifton. Where her husband went, she would go. His people would be her people. His home would be her home. She became Mrs. Lydia Habersham Acree — and not one of those three names was actually her own. It was, in fact, very much like a dream. But what Lowe Acree had in mind was a different kind of dream altogether.
39 - The Belly of the Beast
What Lowe Acree had in mind was a nightmare. Lowe had forgotten to mention that he had a temper, and that this temper was often enhanced by the use of a drug he concocted by means of his connection with a very lucrative chemical franchise. It was a combination of heroin, cocaine, and a remedy for seasickness. He injected himself with this drug, and his talent for prodigious violence became Promethean. On many occasions it occurred to him to give Lydia some of the same drug, but his greed always prevented it. He wanted it all for himself. Besides, she didn’t need it. She was so frightened when he was in these moods that she’d do anything he said.
She got lost in a kind of trance after a while. None of it was real to her, the whole marriage idea. It all started seeming ... well, like a dream. As promised.
“Every time he’d take the drug, he’d get worse. First it was just yelling and hitting. Then it was little games he’d play — stalking and ... I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I just came to accept it as a normal part of my life, like any other incident: no value, no import. Just another wave. I didn’t have any other way of dealing with it. I couldn’t see a way out. Maybe that sounds strange — but you don’t know how a thing like that is from the inside unless you’ve been there yourself.”
Maytag made as to get up and go to her, but Dally put her hand on his arm. Lydia was deep in some dark place now — you don’t wake up a sleepwalker, they say.
“Then there was a moment that Lowe’s violence got beyond his ability to control it. It was a dilly. He wanted to meet some men out beyond the legal limit of the country, out on the high seas. These men had a huge supply of heroin and a bigger supply of cocaine, and they were willing to sell it to Lowe for lots of money.”
Dally shifted. She knew something rough was coming. I don’t know how, but I could tell she was about to get up and go away.
“The day began like any other in the previous weeks. I ended up piloting the boat out to sea and he got wasted, started threatening to toss me overboard. I started yelling back at him, and he whacked me good in the head maybe a couple dozen times. I went down.”
All this was with no hint of strangeness or disgust. It was all just a part of the play. She was just an actor, strutting and fretting her hour away.
“I couldn’t breathe, I think he might have broken my nose. I must have passed out. Lowe was too far gone to know that I’d lapsed into deep unconsciousness.”
She closed her eyes.
Maytag got up. “Stop.”
Peachy took him by the arm, nudged him away. Maytag didn’t resist. I think he might have been crying.
Lydia just went on. “I think surely Lowe, at the time, must have been farther away from normalcy than he’d ever been. He was in the middle of his deal with these drug men. I’m sure he said it didn’t matter about me. He said to just leave me. They’d come back later. They’d revive me. I’m guessing the men gave him a ride back to shore to where he’d stashed the money. They just left the drugs on board with me. Everything would be fine. Why worry? Everything was taken care of. Nothing to worry about.”
I had to stop her. She was about to lose it. “Hey, Lydia ...”
But it only served to prompt her farther into the story. “As they were leaving, I vaguely remember the youngest man, a Cuban boy really ... he helped me to the cot down in the hold. I was barely breathing.”
Dally was up now, wandering a little way off, like it was a botany lecture in which she had little interest, but I could tell she was still listening.
“I have no idea how long I slept. When I woke up, everyone was gone. I roused myself, not really sure of anything that had gone on.”
I suddenly remembered something. “Hey. On your boat. There’s a copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. That yours?”
She smiled and nodded, a little released from the awful spell of the memory of that day. “You remember that book?”
I smiled back. “Sorta.” I looked over at Dally. “Charles and Mary Lamb, they tell the stories from Shakespeare’s plays to little kids — like me and Lydia, at the time.”
Dally was anxious to get the story over with. “The point is?”
I shrugged. “It was something of a clue. Probably one of the things that made Sylvia/Lydia show up in my dream deal.”
Dally was still too impatient. She looked at Lydia. “So, you stayed out at sea?”
She nodded. “Found the drugs on my boat and tossed them over the side. Cleaned up the boat. Threw all my clothes away — just like Flap’s grandma. I moved the boat around in the sea, over by some of the smaller islands, where they wouldn’t find me. Swam for hours every day in the salty water, washing it all away. Over and over I just kept saying waves. The sky was blue, the sea was calm, the days were numberless. The mind was clearing. Got back in the boat. Headed home.”
Dally was confused. “You had no clothes?”
“Nothing I’d ever worn in my relationship with Lowe — I made sure of that. I found one of my old swimming suits in a cedar chest under the guest bed.”
“How long did it take you to get back?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But there was a big fuss when I got there. They said I’d been gone nearly three weeks.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I saw the newspaper article at June’s.”
“Lowe was waiting for me at home — I mean my parent’s home. They’d all agreed that the situation — my being gone so long — was too strange to let me wander around unsecured from then on. The parents didn’t even want to listen to my version of the story. I could go back to the mental hospital, or I could stay married. That was that.” She looked at one of the grave markers. “I still thought — even after all that — it wasn’t a bad way to get out from under the folks at home. I couldn’t bear to be with them. I think they call it being between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
Maytag and Peachy were milling around a little ways off. They didn’t care to hear any more. Dally had nodded her head through most of the tale, her eyes nearly closed. I was feeling a little like I had the flu, my own self.
Lydia was droning on. “I have absolutely no idea why Lowe thought he’d want to marry me. Whacking me for no reason, yelling at me in church. We went to church, can you believe it? When his boss, the president of the bank, got married to some secretary half his age? I made the mistake of crying at the wedding. It just made me so sad to see that girl marrying a man old enough to be her father just so she could have money. Lowe beat me up right there in the church. Most of the people just pretended not to see it, can you imagine?
That was just before Lowe died.” She fixed a gaze on me. “Why do people want money so much, Flap?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you?”
“Nope. I’m motivated by other things.”
“Like ... what?”
“Well, right at the moment I wouldn’t mind finding Lowe Acree alive and killing him all over again. Thinking I’d bury him up to his neck in calamari, and use his melon for batting practice.”
“Nice image.”
“Thanks. And these things I would do for the love of it. Money would not be my object.”
“So you can’t tell me why people are like Lowe.”
“Nope. I can’t tell you because I just don’t know.”
“Well, then.”
I wanted to let her off the hook, get some rest, but I still needed some other information.
“Sugar? Where ... where do you reckon you’ve been all this time? I mean, while the cops and the Turner twins and June and half the police force of Savannah — not to mention yours very truly — have been searching everywhere for you?”
“I’ve been with a kid named Ronnie Tibadeau.”
Just shove a lightning bolt up the back of my neck, why don’t you.
“Ronnie Tibadeau?”
“Yeah, he’s a grungy little runner for Lowe and Tommy. I’m pretty sure he ran up to Atlanta now and again with supplies for the drug dealers there. Anyway, he and Tommy Acree found me at the house out on the island ...”
“Okay, I’ll bite. Which island?”
“Cumberland?”
“Pretty, post-Frank Lloyd Wright job with an upstairs?”
“Yes. How do you — ?”
“— I’ve been there.”
Nothing surprised her that night. “Okay. Anyway, they found me there. Wasn’t that hard, really. It’s where I always go to get away from trouble in these parts.”
They must have collected her just before the Turner boys got there. Timing’s everything, even in weirdness. “So where did they take you?”
“I don’t know. Someplace around here.”
“When?”
“Flap, honest, I don’t know. Time is a little ... skewed just now.”
Too Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 2) Page 17
