“A trial?” Ruth sounded as if she’d never put lawyers and courtrooms together.
“Yes. A kiddie-porn case.” Mary pushed back from the table, anxious to let Danika in before the doorbell rang a second time. “I’m sorry, Ruth, but I’ve really got to run—”
“Oh.” Ruth’s voice faded to nothing.
“But thanks for asking me. I really appreciate it.” Mary paused, hoping that Jonathan might ask to speak to her, but Ruth gave no indication of that.
“Well, if you change your mind and want to take a break, Tremont’s only about three hours away from Atlanta.”
“Thanks, Ruth. I’ll keep it in mind. Give Lily a hug and kiss for me and I’ll look for you on TV.” Ruth said goodbye. Mary hung up the phone and hurried to the door, casting a wistful glance at the photo of Jonathan, the man who should have been hers, holding the baby who should have been theirs.
Four
Wednesday, October 9
Tender Shepherd Home for Girls
Franklin, Tennessee
STUMP LOGAN EASED back in his chair, pleased with the plans he’d scribbled in his notebook. After he’d talked to the remaining two people he trusted in Carolina, he’d begun reading up on his Cherokee history, spending most of the past twenty-four hours checking maps and historical markers and the various old routes that traveled the length of Tennessee. At first he’d put down words awkwardly, with lots of cross-outs, but now his thoughts flowed smoothly from his head to his fingers, their passage marked only by the scratch of his pencil on paper. It felt calming, in a way, to map out this new plan for Mary Crow. Almost as relaxing as a chocolate bar.
Suddenly, as he bent over his studies, a woman’s voice filled the room. “Duncan? Are you there?”
Logan’s heart fell. His alter ego, Clootie Duncan, would have to put away his plans for now. His employer beckoned, via the intercom that connected her room to his.
“Duncan?” the voice warbled again, pitched somewhere between irritation and concern. “You’re not having any trouble, are you?”
“No,” he muttered to himself. “I’m just dandy.”
He dropped his notebook in the desk drawer, closed his eyes, and sighed. He supposed he should feel more kindly toward Edwina Templeton. She had hired him without a glance at his made-up references when he had showed up at her door, classifieds in hand, applying for the position of “live-in security guard.”
“I pay well, Mr. Duncan,” she informed him as they chatted on her porch. “My business requires loyal and extremely discreet protection.”
“What business are you in?” he’d asked, wondering what kind of work this dumpy, spavined woman might do.
“I run a home for pregnant girls,” Edwina replied, her squint-eyed smile as inscrutable as the statues of Buddha he’d seen in Vietnam.
He’d looked at the freshly painted porch of the old plantation house, set squarely on fifty acres of prime Tennessee farmland, and said, “I didn’t know pregnant girls went anywhere anymore.”
“The rich and religious do.” Edwina brushed a bright red ladybug off the sleeve of her blouse. “That’s why I need security.”
“For what?”
“Raging hormones can make this a pretty volatile place, Mr. Duncan. I need someone to make sure my girls stay put and that their young bucks don’t come visiting. Someone to make especially sure my girls don’t change their minds when it comes time to give up their babies.”
“So you run an adoption agency?”
Again, that Buddha smile. “I make unwanted babies disappear, Mr. Duncan. Most of them are adopted. A few meet more controversial fates.”
Good God, he thought. This woman runs a one stop chop shop for sluts in trouble, probably breaking every law in Tennessee. He understood, then, Edwina’s need for protection and why she was willing to pay five hundred dollars a week, plus room and board. With an inscrutable smile that mirrored her own, he’d offered her his hand and his assurance that security-wise, she need never again draw a troubled breath. Three minutes later, after explaining that he was never to answer her telephone, park in her parking spot, or entertain women in his room, Edwina hired him.
But when she took him inside to show him his accommodations, he regretted not having asked for more money. Outside, the house gave the appearance of an old planter’s house. Inside, it looked like a museum. Though he knew nothing about antiques, everything from the crystal chandeliers to the brocade drapes bespoke money, and lots of it. Edwina Templeton craved things, he decided as he followed her up a wide staircase carpeted with a red oriental runner. Fancy home furnishings for sure; what else, he had yet to determine.
On the way to his room, he learned that his coworkers were Paz Gonzalez, a diminutive Mexican who did various chores around the farm, and his wife Ruperta, who cleaned the house and cooked. Once inside his room, he saw that Edwina’s acquisitiveness did not stop at antiques. She had equipped the room of her security officer with a small arsenal of computers and weaponry. Besides a beautiful old Winchester .70 and a Smith & Wesson 686, she kept an array of Tasers, small devices that looked like remote controls, but which shot electrical darts instead of bullets and reputedly could immobilize anything short of a charging rhinoceros. On an old roll-top desk sat a police scanner, a tuner that broadcast the latest weather information, and a brand-new laptop computer, hooked up to the Net on a DSL connection. He found it amusing. Edwina Templeton seemed to covet the very old and very new, both at the same time.
As she showed him the closet and the bathroom that opened off his bedroom, he fingered Clootie Duncan’s Commit Your Life To Jesus card, which he kept like a talisman in his pocket. The only thing he’d committed his life to was killing Mary Crow, yet Jesus again seemed to be helping him out. With Clootie’s name and Clootie’s wallet, he’d just driven up in Clootie’s stupid little Ford Escort and landed a job with a single woman who had guns and a fair amount of cash behind her. Now all he had to do was figure out how to use this old bitch to his advantage.
He’d done that one day in June, shortly after he’d put some newly unpregnant fourteen-year old back in the car with her parents. As he closed the car door, a headache struck him like a lightning bolt. The world—people, trees, the farmhouse itself—spun with a sickening, neon-lit glow. It hurt so bad, he couldn’t move. Not his feet, not his arms, not even his eyeballs. He could do nothing except stand by the driveway, staring as the girl’s black Beemer became a dot in the distance. All at once he felt a great clap of thunder, then he hit the ground, hard. His last conscious thought was that he was dying, and that it wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d expected.
A few hours later, though, he awoke, alive enough to realize that he lay nude on his bed, with Edwina Templeton gazing down at his nakedness. She examined him for a full five minutes, intensely studying everything from the medal he wore around his neck to the scars on his lame right ankle, bending so close to his penis that he could feel her damp breath upon it. He submitted to her scrutiny without moving, wondering if maybe he was the first male she’d ever seen. Then he remembered seeing her diploma from nursing school. Nobody, he figured, could go through that without seeing at least one man without his clothes on. Maybe she’d known men only in theory, though, and not practice. He hid a smile. Though the thought of congress with this woman sickened him, if it helped him get what he wanted, he would teach Edwina Templeton about the function of men, as well as their form.
It had been laughably easy, even for a rough hewn pawer like himself. A longing smile, a flower plucked from her own garden, help placing a stupid-looking chest she’d bought in New Orleans. Women fell for the most trivial of things, and Edwina was no exception. He’d risked it all late one night when she came into his room to ask him some computer question. Pushing aside his topo maps of downtown Atlanta, he’d chanced a kiss, full on her mouth. She’d instantly opened her dressing gown, and mome
nts later they lay in his bed, squeaking the bedsprings as frantically as any of the teenagers who camped here to have their babies.
Stupid cow, he thought now, inwardly shivering at the memory of Edwina’s too-wet tongue in his mouth, her stubby fingers squeezing his scrotum like it was an overripe tomato.
“Duncan?” The intercom squawked again. Any moment she’d appear at his door, coming to see if he had fallen to the floor, jerking in one of his fits. Though she’d granted him access to everything—her guns and her computers and her cars—he hated everything about her, from the scuff of her house shoes on the bare floor to the way her fingernails curled up at the ends.
“Five minutes,” he stalled her. “I’m in the middle of something.” Five minutes would be all he had, now that he’d given her a time. Unconsciously rubbing the medal around his neck, he pulled his Mary Crow list from the drawer. Guns, camera, and laptop he had. Now he just had to figure out how to weasel the van and a long weekend out of Edwina.
“Duncan!” Edwina’s command blasted through the intercom.
“Coming!” He shoved the list back, pulled out a half-eaten candy bar, and stuffed it in his mouth. The sweet, dark cocoa calmed him, softened the static in his head. You’ve done this before, he reminded himself. You can do it again.
With chocolate sweetness filling his head, he headed toward Edwina’s bedroom. He hadn’t quite decided the best way to approach her. Maybe it would come to him while they attended to what was always their first order of business.
“What were you doing in there?” sitting up in her big walnut four-poster, with her brown hair loosened from its bun, she looked like some aging Scarlett O’Hara. Several antiques magazines lay open on the bed, and he could see where she’d circled some crazy-looking old bed in an auction catalog.
“Reading,” he lied as he swallowed the last of his chocolate.
“About what?”
The next person I need to kill, he thought as he bent to pull off his boots. “Cherokee Indians,” he replied, landing somewhere in the vicinity of the truth. “They suffered a lot in Tennessee.”
“So? A lot of people have suffered in Tennessee.”
He unzipped his fly and removed his trousers. It used to unnerve him, stripping in front of her, but she took a strange pleasure in it, and now he just thought about other things while he did it. If it got him out of her bedroom faster, so much the better.
All at once a bolt of pain shot up behind his left ear. At first he thought his knees would buckle, then oddly, his penis grew hard, straining at the fabric of his shorts.
“Well, look at you, Duncan.” Edwina cooed. “You must have missed me while you were gone.”
Just like a sore tooth, he thought, then he put that notion out of his mind. Tonight he needed to give the devil her due. Edwina satiated was far more malleable than Edwina left wanting.
He climbed on top of her, pleasuring her in the ways he knew she liked. He kissed her for what seemed like hours, fondling her lumpy breasts, rubbing the inside of her thighs. Finally he pushed himself into her and began the rut she so loved. Twenty-five, thirty, one stroke for each of his fifty-seven years. When his back began to ache and he feared his head would burst, she arched and sucked in her breath, grabbing the pillow behind her head.
Usually he dressed right after they finished. Tonight he rolled off her and sat on the side of the bed, watching her as she lay with her eyes closed, her upper lip moist with sweat. She opened one eye and gave an earthy cackle.
“What’d you do on that trip of yours, Duncan? Get a scrip for Viagra?”
Despite his disgust, he smiled. He was in no way the man of his youth, but he could still put it to even a saggy old bag of bones like this. “Nah. Nothing like that.”
“What then?”
“Visited my brother, mostly.” He flashed back to Little Jump Off, the way Walkingstick’s wife looked that evening, bare-breasted, nursing her kid.
“Bullshit.” Edwina shot the word at him like a knife. She stared at him, the soft repose of her face gone. “What do you want, Duncan?”
“What makes you think I want anything?”
“The way you did what you just did.” She sat up and covered herself with her gown. “I’m not a fool.”
“Okay,” he said, slumping his shoulders slightly, hoping to indicate humility. ”I need your help.”
“For what?”
“I need to get rid of a baby.”
“A baby? Where on earth did you get a baby?”
He feigned embarrassment. ”I knocked someone up.”
“You?” She spat up a laugh. “When?”
“Before I came here. I didn’t know anything about it until I went home.”
“You’re kidding, I hope.”
“No.” He sighed deeply. “It’s true.”
“Doesn’t the mother want it?”
“She wants to join the Air Force. Fly planes. Bomb terrorists.”
“Then why don’t you take it? You’re quite the man between the sheets these days.”
He faked a slow, sad smile. “I’m almost sixty years old. I have fits and a bum leg. What kind of life could I give a child?”
Edwina narrowed her eyes at him, as if trying to decide how much of this to believe. “What kind of baby is this?”
“A girl. Pretty. Healthy, too.”
“How old?“
“Three months, I think.” He hoped he was somewhere in the ballpark on this one.
“Is she white?”
“Partly.”
“Sorry, Duncan.” Edwina flopped back on her pillows. “The market’s full of half-black babies.”
“She’s not half-black,” he replied. “She’s half-Cherokee.”
“What color is that?”
“Like coffee with a lot of cream.”
“Is she retarded?”
“No. She’s perfect.”
Edwina stared up at him. He knew she was mentally rifling through the files she kept on her computer. Did she have anybody who wanted a light brown baby? More important, could she find anybody who would pay money for such a child?
“You say the mother is willing to surrender her?“
“She wants me to come get her in Knoxville this Saturday. I was hoping you’d loan me the van and let Paz ride along to help.”
“What for?”
“So I can bring my baby back here, and you can find her a home. It would be an adoption, only without the overhead of a pregnant girl. Pure profit.” There. He’d dropped his hook. Now all he could do was wait to see if she took it.
Edwina gazed, unseeing, at the ornate bed she’d circled in the auction catalog. “This baby is three months old?”
“’Yes.”
“That’s past the prime age.” She frowned at him. “Plus you’d have to get the mother to sign some papers.”
“Not a problem,” he assured her.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” She gathered up her antiques magazines and plumped up her pillows. “Stop by my office in the morning. I’ll let you know then.”
“Thank you,” he said, pulling up his trousers.
“Don’t thank me yet, Duncan,” she snapped. “When I do a favor, I expect a lot in return.”
Expect all you want, sister, he thought as he hurried toward the door. Expecting ain’t getting, in my neck of the woods.
Five
Friday, October 11
Little Jump Off, North Carolina
THE RASPY, INSISTENT caaww of a crow awakened Jonathan Walkingstick. All night he’d slept in the same position, his back turned to his wife, his body stiff with anger. Though Ruth had slept beside him, she lay equally rigid, facing the other side of the bed. The fight that had been simmering between them all week had risen to a boil last night, spilling over and blistering e
veryone at Little Jump Off with caustic words and bitter accusations. Clarinda, Ruth’s newly arrived cousin from Oklahoma, had finally tuned them out by sticking her nose in the latest Danielle Steel novel. Little Lily, however, had no escape from their hostility: long into the night the baby had squalled inconsolably. When they were at last able to silence her, they both lay down in icy silence, both keeping to their own sides of the bed, careful not to let their bodies touch.
Caaawwww. The crow cried again. Jonathan raised up. In the leaden light he could see most of the parking lot, the highway that curved along beside it, and past that, the river beyond. Wispy tendrils of early morning fog rose from the Little Tee, making it look hot instead of cold. The Styx, Jonathan thought, remembering his old mythology book and the seething stream that bordered the ancient Greek underworld. Maybe that was where they lived now. Some backwoods corner of Hades reserved for people ill-suited to be married to each other.
He sighed as he watched the fog curl wraith-like into the air. Last night they’d fought over a man who’d called and wanted to hire him out as a boar guide. Last week they’d fought over her taking Lily to the rally in Tennessee. Last month they’d fought over Ruth contributing a hundred dollars to a Micmac Indian running for a congressional seat in Maine. Maine! One way or another, it always came down to money. He hoarded dimes like a squirrel hoards nuts; Ruth spent money as if they were rich. He had thought Lily’s birth might make his wife more cautious with their dollars, but Ruth had grown worse, throwing money away on the most ridiculous of things. If Lily got sick this winter, he didn’t know what they would do. He doubted Ruth’s goofy herbal remedies would make much headway against pneumonia or the croup.
A sudden dark movement caught his eye. The crow that had awakened him swooped from the roof and landed in the parking lot. It strutted over and hopped up on the rim of the trash barrel beside the gas pump. With a flick of its sleek black wings, it began to pick through the garbage, expertly perusing the trash for a cast-off French fry or moldy crust of bread.
Call the Devil by His Oldest Name Page 4
