Flannery eyed the two troopers standing around, realizing they and the others could easily take the shoe from her. Behind them, Hollis made his way over, an anger set in his brows, his walk.
She held the shoe up to Mr. Flagg and he took it, but not before she’d sneaked and snatched off the little flower Mama had made for it.
I have to keep it. She needed to hold on to something, to some piece of Patsy, no matter how small. Hold something that said this was all real. Take a part of Patsy back home, a missing part of herself. Flannery closed a fist over the muddy clump of tattered threads, moving her hand behind her back.
Mr. Flagg handed the shoe over to his assistant and dismissed him.
“I’m sorry for your loss, young lady. And your mother’s, of course,” the coroner told her. “We’ll take good care of this, and get everything back to you as soon as we can.” Turning to Hollis, he added, “Mighty sorry, son. I’m glad Martha isn’t alive to see this.”
Hollis hung his head at the mention of his mama who had died a decade ago.
“I’ll be in touch,” Mr. Flagg said to him. “Please give my condolences to your father.” The coroner lightly patted Hollis’s shoulder before heading back into the small crowd of officials.
When the coroner was far enough away, Hollis took Flannery’s arm. “Why don’t you go home and let these boys do their job.”
“They said something about murder, Hollis. Murder.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Hollis peered over his shoulder to the Mercury.
“How could that be?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But it sure as shit wasn’t no murder, peaches. Now you need to go home to Jean. I can have my deputy drive you.”
“I can make it okay,” Flannery said, suddenly thinking about her mama. Mama. How would she tell her; what would she say? It would be rough telling her Patsy would never have another birthday, take all Mama’s hope like that. Flannery felt the horror rise up.
Hollis saw it too. “Maybe I should see you home. I can talk to Jean with you—”
Flannery stiffened, remembering the last talk that had taken place, the night of the prom. “I’ll be okay. When do you think they’ll hand over the remains?”
Hollis grimaced. “Soon as they sift through the bones. They’ll need to photograph, identify, and sort them.”
A trooper came up behind them and tapped Hollis on the shoulder. “Can I talk with you a sec, Sheriff?”
Hollis moved away, and Flannery sneaked closer to the assistants who were working their way around the car. She watched quietly, listening to them describe items they’d sealed into plastic.
Minutes later, one of the coroner’s assistants piped up. “Found something, Roy.”
Flannery turned to the voice and stepped up even closer, cat-like, toward the man, stretching sideways to steal a peek, listen in.
The assistant held up Patsy’s other prom heel in one hand and a bullet in the other. “Bingo,” he said, placing the muddy shoe to the side. “Damn. Would you look at that, Roy,” he marveled, unaware of Flannery. “The river sure keeps a strange grave. Found it crammed inside this mud-caked shoe.” He wagged the bullet and then dropped it into a plastic bag with bits of other small debris, jiggling the sack before passing it to the coroner. “Those two had trouble on their tails, sure enough.”
Flannery heard the bullet’s tiny clatter in the sudden quieting; the sound pulsed loudly in her memory. Hollis’s voice on old Ebenezer Road back then, her fevered lucky wishes, and the clapping of pearls against the shiny bit of hard luck she’d pocketed it with that night.
CHAPTER 21
Feeling faint, Flannery dropped her head and reached out an arm. Hollis rushed over and grabbed it. Carefully, she straightened with his help, unsure of her footing.
“I better see you home right now,” Hollis said, his face rinsing of color.
“No,” she said, struggling to pull herself out of the haze. “I can see myself home—”
“Don’t worry. I’ll have my deputy drive your car out to Jean’s tonight. I’ll follow him and make sure he gets it back safe to you.”
Reluctantly, Flannery handed him her keys.
They drove in silence back through the Palisades. Flannery stared out at a whir of passing mountain rock and scraggly trees.
After a bit, Hollis said, “That bullet could’ve come from anywhere, you know? We don’t want to alarm folks. We have to stick to what we told back then. For our families’ sake.”
Flannery shook her head. “We need to tell them what you know. Should’ve told them everything back then on prom night. Everything.”
Hollis tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Flannery, think how it would crush our families, your mama hearing about your sister’s . . . well, your sister’s indecency like that.”
“It’s indecent not to tell,” she huffed.
“Not to tell everyone what? That we’re burying the town tramp?”
“How dare you.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Flannery. To drag up old hard feelings like that. I’d have to tell everything. I’ve got a wife and kids to think about. A good, decent job here.”
“This isn’t about your decency. You have to tell now. Someone was shot, and someone else did the shooting.”
“It’s likely Danny did it playing around.”
“We can’t be sure someone didn’t aim to hurt them. You don’t get shot in the arm playing around. I think someone did this.”
“Can’t think of a soul who would wanna hurt those two.”
“I didn’t see him toting a gun that night. Only you. Where did he get the gun to play around with, Hollis? Huh?”
“Dammit, Flannery! He had himself an old .22. Shit, you know my family.” He cut a worried eye to her. “Us Henry boys have always had guns. We grew up carrying guns around with our teddy bears before most babes can suck a month off their pacifiers.” Hollis shifted uncomfortably in his seat, glanced out the car window.
“You’re the sheriff. You need to go right back there and tell about prom night. About the fight. About the drinking. You—”
“Quit harping on me, dammit!” Hollis stuck up a hot hand and banged it on the steering wheel, making Flannery sink back into the seat.
“You need to listen to me on this one, peaches,” he snapped, slamming his fist down on the dash twice, “and shut your big flap. Shut it.”
Instinctively, Flannery raised a hand to shield her face, shrinking back against the door.
Her ex-husband behaving like that and worse, countless times, surfaced like a striking rattler. It didn’t matter that she had long since left him. It didn’t take much to rise the fear. She had struggled mightily to shed that history. But no matter how much she tried, something as harmless as the unexpected slam of the door from a burst of wind or a dropped dish or the pop of a bottle cap brought it screaming back, the terror, the overriding fear of what would come next. It’d been many years, but it felt as raw as yesterday.
“H-Hollis,” she tried to breathe.
“Shut up about old history,” Hollis ordered with a final thump to the dash. “That’s nothing but school-yard shit, and ain’t half of it true.”
* * *
The summer of ’52 came and lingered in Glass Ferry with no word of the missing teens, and nary a peep from Patsy.
Flannery longed for any sense of normalcy, for school even, looking forward to September. She and Mama barely slept, keeping at least one ear cocked for the telephone to ring, a window to open, or a door to shut. Hoping.
During the day, Mama kept the curtains drawn tight. She wouldn’t let any of her canasta-club ladies come visit, telling Flannery to send them away when they tried. Keeping her teen daughter inside, refusing to let her walk to town or see anyone herself.
If Flannery argued to go out, Mama would cry, scaring Flannery into silence. When the twins’ birthday rolled around, Mama surprised Flannery and pulled back the drapes. Then Mama b
aked Patsy a strawberry cake, the first one.
Flannery had been so relieved to see Mama up and moving, lit up like that, she’d passed on Mama’s offer to make a birthday pie for her own celebration.
Mama was sure the birthday cake would summon Patsy home. And soon the house was festive with their chatter. “Go bring up my music,” Mama said, sending Flannery down to the cellar for the old records she’d stored after Honey Bee’s death.
Flannery scampered downstairs. She remembered how scared Patsy was of the dark cellar. How her sister would cry if she had to go down there alone. How Honey Bee’d used busted tombstones for the cellar floor because concrete was so expensive. He’d collected and hosed off the crumbly gravestones to “keep you from carrying the dirt upstairs to Mama’s nice rugs.”
Honey Bee and Uncle Mary had gone over to Pleasant Hill to see the folks called the Shakers. The religious group sold pieces of spent and busted tombstones, the ones that were old and broken, erecting new ones for their dearly departeds. Honey Bee covered the entire cellar floor with the Shaker gravestones.
But in order to turn on the light down here, you had to stand on Polly Meachum’s headstone, the pitted slab rugged under the dangling bulb at the bottom of the stairs.
Patsy’d claimed her legs pricked with a rash, darn near buckled, every time she yanked on the light chain. That the young girl, Polly, was reaching up to snatch her away to the dead. Patsy mused Polly’d surely died of boredom, same as the rest of those boring deceased folk in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, after Honey Bee had come home talking about the ways of the peculiar folks.
Honey Bee and Uncle Mary told Mama that the Shakers didn’t believe in getting hitched. They thought God was both a man and a woman, so all folks were made the same as Him. “All of us are brothers and sisters,” the Shakers proclaimed to Honey Bee and Uncle Mary that day, and they’d insisted it would be a sin to marry your relations like that. Have babies with your kin.
Honey Bee’d said the Shakers were simple folks, smart farmers, but for all their religion, and it was indeed mighty, they sure knew how to put a fever in their feet and kick up a heel or two.
“Saw ’em grab the Hallelujah in their bones and shimmy like the devil with its tail caught under Heaven’s porch rocker,” Uncle Mary’d said. “Shakers they be.”
At the bottom of the cellar steps, Flannery reached a hand down and scratched furiously at her itching leg, snagging her nylons. Sighing, she yanked on the light, eager to get Mama’s records. She thought about the Shakers’ simple life, and how Patsy liked to make fun of them.
Flannery knew her sister didn’t want simple, didn’t want to be a farm wife, Patsy wanted a smart businessman, tall, red dance heels, fun friends, and a fancy Sears Modern home in a pretty place that didn’t stink of bourbon. Flannery worried that Patsy might never come home.
“Flannery,” Mama called from the top of the steps, “don’t forget Jelly Roll Morton.”
“Found it,” Flannery said, spotting it atop the stack of albums on the shelf. Honey Bee had picked up a lot of records in his business travels downriver.
Happy for Mama’s changed mood, Flannery toted the records up from the cellar for the birthday celebration and plopped them on Honey Bee’s old cellarette in the parlor. She cranked up the Victor record player in there and put on all of Mama’s favorite music. Spun Cab Calloway tunes for her, played Joe Turner’s “Low Down Dirty Shame Blues,” and watched Mama light her itchy soles with some fancy footwork when Slim Gaillard’s “Palm Springs Jump” swept through the room.
It was the very best birthday present Flannery could’ve had, seeing her Mama living and the life lit in her feet like that. The first of many of the false celebrations.
And a week later when the cake still sat on the counter, Patsy’s sixteen white-striped candles cemented in the pink icing, Mama’s mood changed, the curtains were drawn again, and Flannery pleaded with Mama to call the doctor. “Mama, I heard the doctor can fix all kinds of ailments, and he has medicine—”
“Will his pills bring Patsy home?” Mama said, saddened, tamping the discussion.
Sylvia Jenkin came over three times that summer and probably snooped a lot more that Flannery didn’t know about. Twice with her husband, Davey. Mama looked at Flannery and pulled her into the dark hall, tapping a hushing finger to her mouth as the neighbors knocked on the front door. In a moment, Mr. and Mrs. Jenkin went back to the kitchen door.
Flannery poked her head around the corner. Slinking up to the windows, the Jenkins cupped their hands to the glass, peering inside.
Mr. and Mrs. Jenkin were troublesome neighbors, “busybodies,” Mama and Honey Bee told the girls long ago. Meddlesome folks who worried and wormed their way into other people’s affairs, pretending to be helpful. Until no one was looking. Always doling out advice with a Bible in one hand and a gun-cocked finger in another, the Jenkins had a need to feel almighty.
Childless, the Jenkins would yell at the twins if they wandered onto their property, chase Flannery and Patsy off, or scold Mama if the girls’ laughter carried too high a pitch. Once the neighbors sent a note to the girls’ teacher, complaining about their tomboyish ways after they’d climbed the chinaberry tree down the road.
Honey Bee was sure the difficult neighbors had poisoned his beloved cattle dog after the old pooch dug a hole in their flower bed to escape the heat on a summer day.
“There’s a name for those kind of folks,” Honey Bee’d said, “a name good folks don’t say but they all know, and it comes from the most disgraceful part of a foul person.”
Then Honey Bee would mutter under his breath, “Liddle dirty diddle-dicks,” until Mama had to shush him, run him out of the room with a snapping dish towel she always had stuck in her apron pocket, taking halfhearted licks to his tucked hip and head.
With Patsy gone, Mama wandered the old house endlessly like a ghost looking for its haunt, calling the bones of their dwelling awake with her restless pacing throughout the nights, her breaths of despair filling wall-to-wall, rinsing the corners and crevices with her tears.
Flannery knew the house itself was miserable. It shifted differently, popped and screeched, wriggling its bones from the weight of all that sadness. Flannery begged Mama to have the ladies over so the two of them could bake cookies and forget about Patsy, just for a while. Asked to go to town so she could see some kids from school since they lived too far out for classmates to come calling.
“Come on, Mama. A little company. Please,” Flannery whittled. “Or, let’s dress up in those pretty little circle dresses you made last fall. Put on our gloves and go to town. We can take a ride to Lexington and see the window dressings downtown. Maybe a trip to Joyland—”
“I’m too tired, Flannery.” Mama brushed the thoughts aside. “And it’s stingy to think of yourself when your sister could be in trouble out there.”
Flannery hadn’t been to Joyland since Honey Bee’d passed. She thought of holding Honey Bee’s strong, leathery hands, strolling amongst the booths, seeing the rides and all the happy folks with the smells of summer lit in cotton candy, hot dogs, onions, and sweaty excitement.
He’d taken the whole family many times, mostly on the last day of the season when the park would give away a shiny new automobile to one lucky visitor.
Patsy and Flannery had ridden the carousel with the big, sparkling gold and blue horses. Flannery loved the carousel. On the hottest days, the horse and saddle felt cool on her skin. And always later the girls would dare each other to ride the big wooden Wildcat roller coaster.
They’d go off together on the Pretzel canal ride favored by the older kids, eagerly climbing inside the metal cart that promised a mysterious trip into a cool, dark tunnel. In the channel they were spooked by the sudden and loud, creaky noises, panicked by loudly clanging cymbals, and unnerved by the film of thin, creepy hanging threads, until the cart glided around the last bend for an abrupt but terrifying glimpse of a wooden cutout of a bucking billy goat. Flannery al
ways had to beg Patsy to ride it with her. She just couldn’t do it alone even though Patsy was sure to suffer nightmares for a week or more after.
Nothing changed over the years, but going to Joyland always seemed like her very first visit. And nothing beat the pool either. During the summers the twins had taken some free swimming lessons offered by the park. Though Flannery had learned to swim in the river, it was still a blast to dip into the big Joyland pool whose signs boasted that swimming in it was like “swimming in drinking water.”
At night, Joyland brought in famous singers like Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman to their dance hall. For a fifty-cent admission adults could have themselves a big shindig.
One summer, a townswoman, widow Nester Parrish, joined the Butler family at the park. After a full day packed with swimming and rides, Mama and Honey Bee went dancing that night inside the Joy Club, leaving the twins in Nester’s care.
Flannery and Patsy got to see the amusement park all lit up, and when Nester wasn’t looking, the girls peeked inside the dance hall and saw Count Basie playing to a packed dance floor full of twisting, hopping, jitterbugging adults.
The girls had caught the fever too, all riled up, shimmying and dancing together under the twinkling Ferris wheel lights, giggling and singing until Nester threatened to turn the little heathens over her lap and whoop them a good one.
Thinking about the old days like that made Flannery press Mama again.
“Mama, come on, let’s go back to Joyland. Please,” Flannery said, digging in harder. “It’s too sad waiting around like this. Joyland’s a short drive. A fun day away. Summer is nearly gone. It’ll be fun, and if Patsy comes home—”
“Flannery Bee.” Mama warned the discussion was wearing her.
“We could have your ladies over and chat some?” Flannery pushed harder. “Please, Mama. I’ll make some Benedictine sandwiches and mix the punch for your card game. You can fix your deviled eggs, and oh, some of your orange pound cake would be nice. Please.”
The Sisters of Glass Ferry Page 15
