“Here with the Henry boys,” Flannery added.
“Danny and Sheriff Henry?”
“Yes. Patsy and Danny didn’t have their licenses yet. When their double date canceled, Danny’s daddy had the older brother, uh, Hollis, drive the two to the dance.”
“And you say the Henry boys came over and picked up Patsy? You last saw them here?”
“I . . . Well, I had to go to work that night. I left as soon as they got here. Mama had canasta club and left before the boys arrived.”
“Okay.” He scribbled notes. “So the last time you saw them was here at your house?”
“Yeah, and we all took off about the same time. I walked to Chubby Ray’s, and they drove off to the prom.”
The trooper made more notes in his pad and then piped, “Did Patsy own a gun?”
“Gun? Patsy? You don’t think Patsy—?”
“Ma’am, we’re just trying to locate the gun. Did Patsy have a. 38? Your family own one? Ever have one?”
“She did inherit an old pistol from my daddy, but she never bothered with it.” Flannery went over to the secretary, opened it, and found the old Robin Hood No. 2. “Loaded, Trooper.” She pointed to the gun, and he stood and took a minute to study it. “Just a .32. Supposedly, that and some old bone dice were given to the Butler family by Jesse James in the 1800s.” “Sharp five-shooter,” the trooper said, picking it up, inspecting the walnut handle, the name on the barrel, before putting it back. “Any other guns?”
“A shotgun in the hall closet, same as most families have. These are the only ones I can recall,” Flannery lied, dropping her gaze to her daddy’s old wristwatch, tugging at the leather band sweating her skin.
“Other than James’s pistol, any others—a .38?”
Hollis had one, and so did Honey Bee, but she reckoned now was not the time to talk about that to a lawman.
“Mrs. Hamilton?” The trooper cocked his head at her. “Ma’am, if there’s anything else you can remember, anything you might want to—?”
“No, Trooper, just the old Robin Hood,” Flannery said, knowing her own paddle would be just as hard for all her lies.
Her daddy had given his .38 to old Sheriff Jack Henry that fall day in ’47 after the run-in with the moonshiners. Sheriff was waiting at the dock when they’d pulled the ferryboat in. Waiting with an outreached hand and his own knowing. “Honey Bee,” he’d called out to her daddy.
“Skip the trial, Jack, and let’s go straight to the execution,” Honey Bee’d said.
“I better keep that fine snub nose for your and everyone else’s safety,” the sheriff said, and nothing more.
As far as Flannery knew, no one, other than her, Honey Bee, and the old sheriff, ever learned about the pirating fishermen. Well, maybe Uncle Mary knew. He knew mostly everything and had the eyes of an eagle.
“Did Patsy or Danny ever drink alcohol?” the trooper asked, taking his seat again.
Flannery hoped he was through with his questioning. Reluctantly, she sat back down and said, “Mama doesn’t allow liquor in the house.”
“Ma’am”—the trooper tapped his pen on the notebook—“do you know where those two might have gotten a gun? Anybody else who owns a gun like that? We heard Danny only owned a. 22. Any ideas?”
She knew a .38 and .22 were worlds apart. Honey Bee’d taught her, same as every Kentucky daddy taught his small sons about guns and bullets, and even skilled the sons they didn’t have: their tree-climbing daughters. And, Honey Bee’d even gone after his prissy Patsy, too, demanding she learn to shoot so she could defend her property and her honor from the “dangerous hill men, even madwomen,” he’d claimed, who were lurking in these parts, ready to strip her of either. Or both.
Flannery rubbed her sweating palms against her jeans. “I can’t be positive about all that back then. It was so long ago.” She looked up at the ceiling as if trying to recall. “No, I can’t think of anyone who has a gun like that.”
“Any friends who might’ve been mad at both of them? Or maybe one of them?” the trooper pried.
“No, and I know my sister wouldn’t have done it, shot him in the arm like that. If Patsy aimed to shoot someone, she’d hit him dead-on in a killing spot like my daddy taught us. She wouldn’t have had to waste a second bullet.”
The trooper bobbed his head a little proudly, understandingly, like he’d been taught the same.
He stood. “If you can think of anything else, anything at all, please call Post Seven and ask for me.” He handed Flannery a card, turned toward the door, and stopped. “Oh, there’s one more thing: The examiner needs to make sure each family receives, uh, everything.”
“When can we bury her?”
“The coroner is set to release the remains as early as Monday. You can call the funeral home and have them picked up from the examiner’s office. Let me just make sure I have everything. Can you tell me exactly what Patsy was wearing that night?” He opened the pad, waiting.
“An ankle-length lemon chiffon dress and cream-colored Mary Janes,” Mama called down from the stairs behind them.
“Mama.” Flannery whipped around. “You need to relax some before you fall flat on your tail.”
Mama waved away Flannery’s concern and slowly descended. She rested a shaky hand on the trooper’s arm. “She was so beautiful, Trooper, in her grandmother’s pearls. Did you find them, Trooper? Did you find my family’s pearls?”
Trooper Green flipped back through the pages of his notebook, studying. “No, ma’am,” he said, stumped. “None listed here. They combed every inch of the car, and all around in the water where the car rested down by Johnson’s boat dock, Mrs. Butler. There were only her shoes and a compact mirror, I’m afraid.” He looked through the pages again and checked to be sure. “No, ma’am. Nothing’s here.”
“But she had on the pearls I gave her.” Mama hurried over to an end table in the parlor, and plucked up an old photograph of her mother wearing the pearls. “Here.” She shoved the frame into the trooper’s face. “They’re right here on Mama. Same as they were on Patsy. They have to find them,” Mama insisted, looking at Flannery, her old eyes crinkled and filling fast. “I want to hold them and remember my baby just the way she was on her last night with me. Smiling like that, looking dazzling for her dance in her grandmother’s pearls. We have to find them, Flannery. You saw them on her, didn’t you?”
Flannery could only nod, the truth swollen in her throat.
CHAPTER 25
To have lost so much and so fast before the old electric daisy clock in the kitchen could strike ten that morning was more than her mama could bear. That her daughter was dead was insufferable; that she could possibly find another part of her, hopeful.
“Take me there,” Mama begged after the trooper left. “Flannery, take me to the Kentucky so that I can at least search for them. Have the one last bit of her happiness to remind me how she was the last time I held her. Take me to Johnson’s boat dock. I have to find the pearls. For the sake of—”
“No, Mama. You need to try and rest some—”
“I’ll rest when I have all of her. I can’t have my beautiful baby back, but maybe I can have at least that much. What that wicked Kentucky robbed me of, and is still thieving from me.”
Flannery called the doctor to the house. He gave Mama a newer sedative, more powerful, he promised, telling Flannery to make sure they both took it easy.
Flannery went to the hall closet and rummaged through boxes of bullets on the shelf. She found an old carton of .38s pushed toward the back. She looked inside. They were the same size as the one she’d found on Ebenezer back then. And the same kind of bullet that fit into Hollis’s old snub nose.
She rattled the box, and a sickening feeling had her reeling, left her weak and reaching for the doorjamb.
Rubbing her brow, she felt an early truth sink in. “I loved her, too,” Hollis said. Had he been jealous of Danny all along? Loved Patsy more than Danny? “Never stopped,” he admitted.
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She tapped the box of bullets, remembering Honey Bee’s gun they’d fit into.
Flannery took another kind of inventory—about Hollis, Patsy’s buried underwear, and the odd bullet she found prom night—and the more she thought about it all and that day back then, the more she worried that Hollis had done something bad, awful, maybe even as dreadful as shooting his own brother. Those brothers must have fought over Patsy.
More awful, Hollis’s snub nose had to be the gun that discharged, the only gun shot—Honey Bee’s gun that the old Henry sheriff had taken for hush, the one he’d passed to his son—and the pistol that had, in an unknown way, done Patsy and Danny in.
The older brother had been packing that night. What Hollis had done, she could only surmise. But what he was hiding was big, and they both knew it.
Exhausted, feeling a headache coming on, Flannery shoved the bullets back on the shelf and went up to her room to lie down. A minute later, sleep grabbed hold.
It was nearly three in the afternoon when Flannery awoke. She hadn’t slept that soundly since she got here, and she yawned and stretched, feeling somewhat better. Then just as quick plucked through her worries again, letting them scrape at her.
Padding down the hall to check in on Mama in the master bedroom, Flannery had an uneasy feeling, a foreboding. Mama was gone.
Calling out for her, Flannery hurried downstairs to the kitchen. But Mama wasn’t anywhere. When Flannery looked outside, she saw that her mama’s old Buick was gone too.
“Dammit.” She cursed herself for not keeping a better eye on Mama and not hiding the car keys. Where could she have gone? Flannery’s heart sank as she called up Mama’s last words. “Take me to the Kentucky.”
Surely she’d just gone to town on errands. Maybe picking up some groceries at Spanks, or something she needed from Chubby’s drugstore. But the doc had promised Flannery, her mama’s medicine was newer, powerful. Mama could hurt herself, or someone else, lit like that, driving those twisted roads out there.
Flannery called the sheriff’s office. Hollis answered, all business. And she was too, the urgency too great. She asked him to send someone to Johnson’s boat dock to look for her mama, then pulled on her sneakers and hurried out the door herself.
Flannery drove to town first. Hurrying into Chubby’s, she looked around the drugstore and in the soda fountain area. The place was full of old-timers drinking coffee, chatting at the lunch counter. It got quiet when they saw her. She walked past two boys playing a pinball machine and over to two men seated at the end of the counter, asking if they had seen Mrs. Butler.
“No, ma’am,” one fella said. “I hope Jean’s okay. Sure sorry about all her troubles. Yours too.”
Flannery looked closely at the man and remembered Smitty Donner was the old hardware store owner. “Thank you, Mr. Donner.”
Mr. Donner nodded. “Never seen such a mess of trouble. Poor Jean, having her daughter murdered like that.”
Flannery winced. “Mr. Donner, Patsy wasn’t murdered.”
“Well, her beau was, and that’s close enough. And folks ain’t talked of nothing else since, worrying who might’ve done it. Lord, there ain’t been a murder here”—he scratched his chin, trying to recall—“well, since Leelum Shrivers shot that hobo for stealing his pig near ’bout thirty years ago.”
Mr. Donner goosed his jaw and looked around at the counter and tables shrewdly like the murderer might be in the store, sitting at this very counter.
The other folks lined up on stools beside him murmured agreement, shifting their eyes Flannery’s way, crackling their red-vinyl seats, stretching for a peek.
“You shouldn’t carry tales,” Flannery chided Mr. Donner, and shot a scolding eye to the others.
A woman poked her head up, leaned out from the end, and called, “Oh, hush, Smitty, you know the sheriff done said his brother probably shot himself.”
“Yeah,” another said. “I remember when Danny got it for squirrel hunting, and his pa always fussed about him shooting up barns. ’Member that, Smitty?”
Mr. Donner grunted over his afternoon coffee.
Flannery sighed. “Mr. Donner, if you see my mama would you tell her I’m looking for her?”
A woman sitting at a table behind Flannery cleared her throat. Flannery turned and saw Mrs. McGregor, her and Patsy’s old eighth-grade teacher. “Always knew Patsy had a bit of wildness. Chasing the two Henry boys like that. It don’t surprise me one bit.” Mrs. McGregor murmured her blame over the lip of her coffee cup and sweetened it with a “bless her heart.”
A few teens huddled at another table drinking sodas, whispering, and darting nervous glances Flannery’s way.
In the booth across from the teens sat Violet Perry with three small kids. Violet pursed a vinegary red pout at Flannery, then dismissed her and pulled out a tube of lipstick from her purse. Flannery watched Violet sweep her lips, hideously stretch her thin mouth, twisting all catawampus-like with the paint.
Violet hadn’t softened her makeup with age. Instead she wore the bright apple-red rouge and lipstick to liven up her long, spent-bloom face. It looked to Flannery like her two scoops of fun had melted long ago.
“Mommy, my straw. Can’t get it, Mommy, help,” Violet’s toddler daughter whined, and shot up from the bench, teetering on her knees, wagging a paper-wrapped straw above her cola.
Scowling, Violet hit her nose with the lipstick and slapped the straw out of her daughter’s hand. The girl shrank back into the booth, eyes welling, and turned her face, ducking. Flannery saw the bruises covering the child’s neck and jaw. Violet grabbed her daughter’s arm and squeezed hard, jerking, leaving behind another angry red mark.
Flannery felt the fire crawl up her neck, the same as on that prom night, the same as when Violet Perry and the others had left their invisible angry marks on her. No different than those her ex-husband had given her many times.
For a minute Flannery wanted to leave her own right across Violet’s tight and overripe tomato-red lips. Smear that cheap lipstick right into the dangly grape that hung in the back of her throat and down into her dark, ugly soul. Leave her with what she’d given the child. She was halfway to Violet’s booth when a voice stopped her.
“Flan?” Junior Ray creaked opened the kitchen door and called out, marshaling her anger back. “It’s Flan.” He sidled up next to her, wiping his hands with a dishrag. “Good to see you.” Junior smiled a little sadly and kissed her forehead.
“Junior.” Flannery turned herself from her flame. “H-How’s Tonya and the kids?”
“Fine. Tonya and I were just talking about dropping by with a dish this weekend. I’m sorry, Flan. Really sorry for your and Jean’s loss. We always prayed to have those two home. Just not like this.”
Grateful for his kindness, Flannery thanked him. She muttered something about finding Mama and quickly excused herself. Standing out on the old broken sidewalk in front of Chubby’s, she felt busted. A shop bell rang, and she sucked down fresh air and shook off the helplessness filling her.
After a moment, she looked over at the tiny post office, the washateria, the lot next to Spanks Grocery Store. Her mama’s car wasn’t anywhere around. Shading her eyes with a hand, Flannery searched on the other side of the post office to the sheriff’s small building. She didn’t see Mama’s car there either, or any official ones parked in front for that matter.
Walking shop to shop, Flannery asked around, though deep down she knew it was a delay. Mama was likely where Flannery thought, and the law would beat her to it. It was all a postponement, a farce, and she was avoiding having to face herself, face what she’d been hiding all these years, and what Mama and others might find.
Flannery turned to the hardware store next to Chubby’s and stepped out farther on the sidewalk, peering past the drugstore to Junie Bug’s Hair Styling. She walked down to Junie’s and glanced in the big window, then on past the barber’s to peek into Glass Ferry Dry Goods.
Finally, Flannery got into
her car and drove off to Palisades Road. She pulled into the grassy lot at Johnson’s boat dock and easily spotted Mama standing in her nightgown, knee-deep in the muddy Kentucky. Onlookers pointed to the old lady and screamed for her to come back.
Flannery opened her car door at the same time a deputy arrived, and they raced to the river.
The deputy yelled out, ordering Mama back onto the bank.
Car doors slammed behind Flannery, and there were more shouts, more warnings. Then the sound of a siren.
Mama looked up and spotted Flannery. “Help me find Patsy’s pearls, Flannery. I can’t find them,” she hollered, waving and splashing in the water. Mama ducked under for a few seconds, then bounced up, her gray hair plastered, her cold lips trembling, her old powder-pink gown soaked, clinging to her old. sagging flesh and brittle bones.
The deputy hollered again. “Mrs. Butler. Come back here! Mrs. Butler . . . Get back now.”
Mama waded out farther and ducked under the dark brown waters yet again.
“Mama!” Flannery screamed and rushed into the river, fighting the cold, pulling water to get to her.
Someone called out, shouting “Mrs. Butler!” and dove into the water, passing Flannery and pulling hard, arm over arm.
Flannery shook her wet head and wiped the water from her eyes. Trooper Green swam toward Mama. He grabbed the old woman’s arm, but she wriggled out of his grip and went under again.
The trooper disappeared under the murky waters, and seconds later buoyed back up. Taking in a big breath he went under again, and, after many agonizing seconds, he popped back up with Mama in his grip.
Flannery made her way sloshing back to shore with Trooper Green trailing and her sputtering Mama despondent in his arms.
The Sisters of Glass Ferry Page 19
