I went inside, made some hot tea—Bewley’s Irish breakfast from my last trip to Ireland—and, in an act of defiance, took it back outside to the patio. No cowardly rat was going to steal my river from me! Of course, now I knew that Mr. Morgan had his World War II Colt close at hand. But I did take the phone out with me. And as I sipped, I programmed the detective’s number into my speed dial—just in case I ever needed to dial it quickly. I could always delete it when this ordeal was over.
On Tuesday, between checking discount fares to Chicago and planning a Thanksgiving-week trip to Disney World for a family of eight, I thought a lot about Rosie Layne. The idea of Rosie as Jacqueline Miller’s mother was new to me, but Rosie Layne had dealt with this for over forty years. How had she lived with it? She had moved—when? decades ago—almost to Hazel Miller’s back door, close enough to watch the little girl she had given up grow up. Had she regretted giving up her child once she had a mansion of her own? Did she wish she had toughed it out in those early years and raised her daughter under her own roof? How had she agonized as those stories of Hazel’s substance abuse had become common knowledge?
At lunchtime, I drove through Oak Hill to Hazel’s house, then to Rosie’s. Then I turned into the alley behind Hazel’s and found my way to Rosie’s from there, tracing the path from one house to the other. Lined with hedges and browning clumps of flowers, the neighborhood was quiet. As I drove, I saw neighbors in sweatpants walking in the autumn sun, docile dogs pacing them. The two houses were closer than two football fields, and no one would have thought anything of Rosie Layne walking briskly through this alley, pumping her hand weights over her head.
I pulled off and parked. I couldn’t stay long. In this neighborhood, someone would call the police or their private security firm if a strange car sat parked too long. I got out and started walking. At least I could get a little exercise.
I had walked about fifty yards when I met a woman heading toward me. Fiftyish, short salt-and-pepper hair. As she approached, I slowed.
“Excuse me.”
She moved farther away from me and slowed, looking at me warily.
“Excuse me,” I repeated. “I’m Campbell Hale.” I thought giving my name might ease her apprehension, and what did I have to lose? Whoever was after me knew who I was anyway. “I just want to ask you a few questions.” I reached into my purse and flashed my IATA card; it was a travel-agent ID card, had my photo, and looked vaguely official. “What can you remember about the afternoon Hazel Miller died?”
She crossed the road and walked faster, not making eye contact with me.
I walked on. A half block later I crossed the road to speak to a woman walking—or being walked by—a miniature pinscher. It snarled protectively at me.
“Excuse me.” I flashed my meaningless ID again. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Rosie Layne.”
She glared at me and allowed the pinscher, who didn’t know he was miniature, more leash.
I backed off and walked to my car, feeling stupid. Nashville has the reputation for being one of the friendliest cities in the nation, or at least we hear that on local news every now and then. I certainly couldn’t prove it by these people. Of course, in a neighborhood as privileged as this one, I should have expected them to be protective of their own privacy and their neighbors’.
After a drive-through Burger King lunch, I was stuck on the phone at work until after everyone else had left, so I had to face the dark parking lot alone. I hate the earlier sunset in the fall; I don’t like going out from work to my car after dark. Somehow it feels more vulnerable than going shopping or out to eat after dark.
A shadowy figure leaning against my car seemed to justify all those half-dismissed fears. I shifted my keys in my hand to position them as a weapon and started calculating whether I could unlock the office door, get back inside, and relock it before he could reach me. I kept meaning to take a self-defense course, but I never got around to it. I had a sudden vision of MaryNell standing by my intensive care–unit bed, saying, “I told her to get a dog and take tae kwon do.” The shadow moved.
Should I scream? I felt my throat tighten. Could I scream? The offices on either side were closed. Would anyone hear me if I did?
The shadow detached itself from the car.
“You really shouldn’t wander around dark parking lots alone.”
Then I did scream.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” Detective Davis said. He didn’t sound sorry. He sounded like he’d enjoyed it.
“Does being a policeman mean you get to terrify innocent people?”
“No, not innocent people. You, however, I have complaints about. It seems someone matching your description, driving an old red sports car, has been harassing the law-abiding, taxpaying, mayor-knowing ladies of Oak Hill.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. You have dinner plans? Let’s go get some supper, and you can talk me out of arresting you.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Sure, but with dinner you don’t have to post bail when you’re through.”
“Where’s your car?”
“Over there”—he gestured vaguely—“but I think I’ll ride with you. I’ve never ridden with a crim— with an alleged criminal in a vintage red Spider. How about Carrabba’s? I was going to have a sack of Krystal, myself, but in this car, I don’t think so.”
He wanted to know about the Spider. He asked about the torque and power-to-weight ratio. I pulled the original owner’s manual from under the glove compartment, its olive cardboard cover slightly frayed at the edges. He pored over graphs of speed and rpms at each of the five forward gears and asked how fast I’d had it up to. I’d had it to 105 once on an oval track with nobody else around except a friend who worked there. The detective—“you can call me Sam if I’m not going to have to arrest you tonight”—was impressed that my dad would buy a red Spider for a girl in college. “He must have style, your dad, and he must love cars.”
“I guess.” I don’t know that I had ever thought about it that way. Dad and Mom always had solid, reliable, large American sedans, usually white, very safe, very comfortable. Very dull. I had always thought that when my dad drove my car and fiddled with it and talked to the mechanic it was because he loved me and wanted me to be safe. He does, of course, but maybe Sam was right. Maybe he loved cars; maybe he loved this car.
Over bruschetta, Sam told me that an officer had seen a pickup driving slowly past my house. The officer was suspicious and ran the tags. It belonged to Jay Miller. Driving slowly in Nashville, however, while unusual, was not officially a crime, he said. “Well, actually, it is now, but only in the fast lane of divided highways.” I told him about Doug’s conversation with Franklin Polk in the courthouse stairway. He raised an eyebrow, took out his notebook, and made a few notes, then shrugged.
He looked at me long enough that I felt uncomfortable. More interrogation technique, I thought. I wanted to lower my eyes to break the contact, but I was determined not to let this man intimidate me.
“Campbell,” he said finally. “Family name?’
“Yeah, grandmother’s maiden name. Her parents emigrated from Inverness just before she was born.”
He nodded, giving nothing away. Then he smiled. “Nice name.”
Before I knew what had happened, I was telling him my life history, starting with the story of that grandmother as an accidental civil-rights activist.
As a working mother in the sixties, she had had to be efficient, fitting errands into small pockets of time. She had gone to Harveys department store on her lunch hour one day, trying to pick up something, eat lunch, and get back to work in an hour. She stopped at the Harveys lunch counter to get a sandwich before dashing back to work. She waited for the waitress to notice her, but the girl stayed at the other end of the counter.
“My grandmother had no time to waste, so she kept trying to get the waitress’s attention. Finally, she’s running out of time and she says to the young
woman on the stool next to her, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m sure she sees me, but she won’t come over. I’ve got to get back to work.’
“‘I think it’s because you’re sitting next to me,’ the woman said, quiet, almost embarrassed.
“My grandmother was exasperated. She was late; she was hungry. ‘Why?’
“The woman was almost apologetic. ‘I’m colored.’” I laughed. “When my grandmother tells the story, she insists she hadn’t noticed that before, and I always believed her. She used to say she had a one-track mind. Now we’d call her focused.”
Sam was watching me, smiling a little, listening.
“She sat a while longer, then apologized to the woman beside her. She told her, ‘I’m sorry. I wish I could sit with you all day, but I’ve got to get back to work. But I promise you I’ll never shop here again.’ She went back to work and wrote a letter to the owner about the experience, telling him exactly why she would never patronize his store again.”
“Did she ever shop there again?” Sam asked.
“Not as far as I know.”
She was just an ordinary working mother, helping her husband provide a home and education for her children. Her trade wasn’t enough to make a difference in Harveys’s bottom line.
“And that store closed years ago,” he said and laughed.
Except for the sermon about minding my own business, not obstructing justice, and letting the police do their jobs, not to mention acting like I have a grain of sense and not putting myself in stupidly dangerous positions, dinner was sort of fun.
He told me about his daughter, a high-school sophomore, who lived with him. He’d been divorced for seven years, liked movies and fishing, but rarely had enough time to do either.
It seemed that Metro’s finest hadn’t figured out that Jacqueline Miller was Rosie Layne’s biological daughter. “We still don’t know that’s true,” Sam insisted after I explained my theory. I quietly gloated; he looked annoyed. The detective and his staff had talked to everyone in the neighborhood, including those who lived or walked near the alley. The police had asked them to call if they remembered anything else or if anything unusual or suspicious happened.
Apparently they considered a strange woman with questionable identification asking questions on the street to be unusual and suspicious. They had called.
The police had already talked to Jacqueline, of course, but they would check her account of where she had been and with whom on the day Hazel had died. And they would talk to Rosie Layne and make another round of the neighbors with some new and more specific questions.
I drove Sam back to my office, where his car was parked. He put his hand on my shoulder, started to say something, then stopped. I waited.
He patted my shoulder. Like my dad. “Be careful. Don’t do anything stupid. Somebody—besides me—doesn’t like you poking around in this.” He tapped my car affectionately as he climbed out and closed the door. He got into his own car and watched as I drove off.
Something was nagging at me. Something about seeing him in his car reminded me of my vandal speeding away. It wasn’t that I thought Detective Davis was the vandal, and the car I had glimpsed that night certainly wasn’t his. He drove a plain, conservative, nondescript, government-issue sedan. It looked anonymous, almost invisible. No, it wasn’t that, but my mind was insisting that I knew something, something important.
I tried to remember on the way home, driving across 440, slowing for the never-ending construction, but the more I tried to pin down the memory, the further it seemed to slip from my grasp.
My fumbling hadn’t produced anything. Zilch. I hadn’t eliminated anyone. And Sam was right. I was obviously annoying someone. Someone didn’t want me asking questions. I wished I could figure out who was annoyed with me—besides the annoying detective, of course, and Franklin Polk; and Jay Miller, who insisted I was victimizing him; and Doug, as usual; and Stick.
At home, everything looked secure. I had left lights on inside, outside. I gathered up my things—tote bag with work papers, purse, newspaper, keys—before I opened the car door. As I hurried to the house, I heard a car driving by slowly. I turned as I was unlocking the front door, surprised at how afraid I was. It was Detective Davis. He had followed me home. He lifted a hand to wave, and I went inside.
I couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed with him for frightening me or grateful that he’d followed me home. I couldn’t quite get to grateful, but I knew I felt a little more secure knowing he was paying attention. I couldn’t help wondering if he gave that sort of protection to everyone.
Chapter Twelve
On a day like today, if I was just seven,
I’d lie on my back, watch the clouds in the heavens.
—Jake Miller, “I Just Want to Be Here with You”
The message light on my answering machine was blinking. I looked for a pen and pad and sat down to listen. I have a love-hate relationship with answering machines. Without one, I’d feel that I was missing life-changing, destiny-driven messages. But I hate that feeling when I come in from a long day or vacation to the nagging blinking of that light. There are people who’ve called, it says, people who want me to do something, say something. People who know me well call my cell phone. But no matter how tired I am, I can’t ignore that light. It might be a client stuck somewhere. Silent. Blinking. Demanding. You asked for this, it says. You asked them to leave a message. You said their calls were important to you and that you’d call back. All this, plus I had been a little afraid of my answering machine since that angry message from Jay Miller.
I had fourteen messages, three from clients. One needed a ticket to leave for Charlotte on the early flight in the morning. That was going to mean more phone calls, but it wasn’t a problem. Another was leaving on a cruise in four weeks and didn’t have documents yet. She had paid for this cruise months ago and couldn’t understand why they hadn’t sent her tickets. The third was ticketed to leave at 6:24 the next morning and needed to change his ticket. His meeting was still on, but it had been moved from Houston to Dallas. And, by the way, had he told me to reserve him a car? He needed one, but now he needed it in Dallas, not Houston.
Two were from my mother, who is afraid she’ll catch me driving if she calls my cell. One was from my friend MaryNell. I’d missed a call from her on my cell earlier. Did I want to go to a movie this afternoon after work? We could make it a matinee at Green Hills or Opry Mills and save a few bucks. Too late for that.
One was from church, letting me know about a death in the congregation. One was from a woman in my book club letting me know that next month’s book would be Moby-Dick. Did I need a copy? Two were from telemarketers; they’d be calling me back.
Three were hang-up calls, numbers blocked from caller ID.
One was from Rosie Layne.
“I understand you’ve been making certain inquiries about me,” said the dignified voice, eerily like and unlike the stage voice I was so familiar with. “I am at a loss to understand why, but I would prefer that you talk to me rather than to my neighbors. I will call again later.”
Guess she didn’t want to leave her number.
I handled the clients, called my mom, then found my copy of Moby-Dick and took it to the tub with a cup of tea. I poured in lavender bath gel, and it wasn’t long before I was nodding into my bubbles, Queequeg getting mixed up with Jay Miller and that wax statue of Jake becoming a huge whale tattooed in rhinestones. It was time to go to bed.
* * *
At seven the next morning the phone rang.
“Miss Hale?”
“This is she,” I answered.
“Rosie Layne.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I stuttered.
“You may come to my house this morning. Will eleven do?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Maybe I should have told her I’d have to check my day planner, see if I could fit her in, but somehow I didn’t think it was really a question.
“Very well. I assume you know wher
e I live.” Her voice was heavy with sarcasm as she hung up.
At seven minutes before eleven I parked in the circular drive in front of Rosie Layne’s house. As I rang the bell, I noticed the security camera focused on me. I was nervous. Should I ignore it or look it in the eye? Would looking at it make me seem too conscious of it, as if I were checking out the security, casing the joint? Would avoiding it make me seem as if I had something to hide? I waited and tried to appear poised and keep myself from fidgeting.
At 11:01, the door opened and a woman of about Rosie Layne’s age appeared, matronly and neatly dressed. “Yes?”
“I believe Ms. Layne is expecting me. I’m Campbell Hale.” The left eyebrow rose. The woman reminded me of a particularly intimidating librarian at my high school, Mrs. McKeever. Unseen monitors of security cameras might intimidate me, but I had learned to face Mrs. McKeever’s worst years ago, matching the woman’s gaze, steady and unblinking. Yes, I have a pass. I am supposed to be here this period.
“Yes. You may wait in the library.” The library! I knew it. She held the door as I entered, then closed it behind me. She crossed the marble hallway quickly and I followed, the sound of our shoes on the marble floor breaking the silence in the house.
She led me into a sunny room with book-lined walls, raised the eyebrow once again, and left, shutting me in. I looked around the room as I waited. Rosie’s house was very different from Hazel’s. There were framed album covers, posters, and gold records, but they weren’t the focus of the room. The upholstery was bold, bright florals. Matching love seats flanked a fireplace and faced each other across an Aubusson rug. A leather wing chair stood beside a piecrust table by a tall, wide window. Another was across the room near the door. Small occasional tables held lamps and waited for cups of tea, books put down for a moment of conversation. Leather ottomans were nearby. Strategically placed floor lamps suggested that this room was actually intended for reading and the comfort of readers. The books were new and old, hardback and paperback; they looked read. The windows were large with sheer curtains pulled wide and valances matching the upholstery. It was a warm room, tasteful, friendly.
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