Still Waters...

by Crysal V. Rhodes

  Bev sat in the chair beside her sister’s bed, having taken her mother’s place keeping vigil. Dana’s condition hadn’t changed. By the time Ray and she had reached the hospital her foot felt much better and she was able to walk with the slightest hint of a limp. On the way, she and Ray hadn’t discussed the kiss. He seemed to sense that she didn’t want to do so, and he was right. Bev rarely acted impulsively. She liked to think things through. Ray impressed her as a man who did the same, because there had been nothing impetuous about the kiss between them. It had been slow and deliberate, and it told her in no uncertain terms that he cared.

  Ray was good people. There was no doubt about that. Her family members couldn’t say enough good things about him, but her daughter still confessed to having reservations about his complicity in coming to Stillwaters with Dana. However, she had admitted to Bev that she was glad that he had finally come clean.

  “Mama.”

  Bev looked up to see her daughter entering the room. Thad was beside her.

  “We’re about to head out now. The limo is here to take us to the airport.”

  Bev rose from her chair and gave her a kiss and a hug. Darnell and Thad were off to Virginia, where they were to begin production on a new film.

  “What about Nia?” Bev had wanted to keep her granddaughter while they were on location, but Dana’s accident had changed her plan.

  “Nedra and Sin are bringing her to us on their way to New York City. That way we won’t have to go and get her,” Darnell informed her.

  “I wish that we could delay filming,” Thad said, sounding regretful, “but…”

  “No, no.” Bev kissed him on the cheek. “You two go on. I’ll keep you updated on Dana’s condition.”

  With a final farewell to both Bev and Dana, the couple started out of the room. Darnell stopped suddenly and, digging into her purse, returned to her mother.

  “I forgot. Dana had a cell phone in her jacket when the police found her at the house…”

  “The police?” That was the first that Bev had heard about the authorities being involved. “I thought that her cleaning lady found her.”

  “She did, but when I talked to her she said that she had called the police first because Dana’s front door was cracked open…”

  “I didn’t know that.” Bev sat up, interested in this new information. “Why would her door be open?”

  “That’s what the cleaning lady wondered. She said that she knocked, but when Dana didn’t answer she thought that the place was being robbed. That’s why she called the police. After they arrived she went in and identified Dana.”

  “Maybe she was on her way out, forgot something, and went back upstairs.”

  “Who knows? Anyway, the hospital gave Grandma the cell phone, along with her other possessions, and she gave it to me to hold.”

  She withdrew it from her purse and handed it to Bev. “Dana’s secretary came by this morning. She said that Dana’s clients and friends have been calling the office for her. She needs to know what to tell people. I told her to keep telling everyone that she’s unavailable and leave it at that.”

  “That sounds good.” Bev pocketed the phone.

  “Come on, babe,” Thad urged his wife from the open doorway. “We’ve got a plane to catch.”

  Darnell looked at her mother guiltily. “I’m sorry that I won’t be here to help you through this.”

  Bev waved her away. “You’re a phone call away. When you get there don’t forget to call me.”

  Darnell and Thad closed the door behind them, leaving Bev alone with Dana. Getting up, she went to her sister’s bedside. If it hadn’t been for the array of tubes and beeping gadgets, Dana would look as though she were sleeping peacefully. Bev caressed her sister’s hair.

  “Ray Wilson kissed me.”

  It was the first time that she had said the words out loud. Sadly, it was a confidence that she doubted she would have shared with Dana if she had been conscious. Yet who else could she have told? It seemed to be such a little thing compared to what Dana was facing, and she wasn’t about to worry her mother with something so trivial. Darnell had business to attend to and was still suspicious of Ray. When they were growing up she had always shared her crushes with her cousin Gerry. He had been the one to spot the losers, and sometimes he chased them away. For some reason he hadn’t liked Colton. They had argued about it, and when she eloped he had been devastated. She and Gerry hadn’t reconciled until after her husband’s death.

  Over the years she had been sparing in sharing information about her love life with anyone, including Gerry, but she had a feeling that the family members who knew Ray would be delighted to hear about his kiss. Or would they? After all, he had supposedly been engaged to her sister.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do about my attraction to him” she told Dana. “But that man does know how to kiss.”

  “That’s nice, you’re talking to her.”

  Bev jumped, having been unaware that someone else was present in the room. She smiled weakly at the nurse, wondering how much she had overheard. As the woman bustled around the room attending to Dana, she cheerfully informed Bev of the benefits of communicating with comatose patients.

  “You would be surprised how much they seem to hear,” she said before leaving the room.

  Bev wasn’t sure if she wanted Dana to remember any of her breathless confession.

  Settling back in the chair, she prepared to enjoy the quiet that had returned after the chattering nurse’s departure. Opening her purse to retrieve her glasses so that she could read a magazine, she discovered the two books that she had slipped inside when Ray and she had gone to Dana’s condo. In the excitement over her bruised foot and Ray’s kiss, she had forgotten that she had the address book that had been lying on top of Dana’s nightstand. She had found the journal in her underwear drawer. It had been Bev’s plan to use the address book to contact Dana’s friends just in case—

  Dismissing that negative thought, she opened the journal. As invasive as it might be to her sister, she wanted to get to know Dana as she’d never known her before. Right or wrong, she was going to read her journal. Whatever happened, she didn’t want her little sister to be a stranger to her ever again.

  CHAPTER 11

  Ray had taken Ginny home to get some rest and had drifted off to sleep himself. He was sleeping peacefully when his cell phone rang. Groping for it on the nightstand, he answered groggily. A strident voice startled him fully awake.

  “How dare you be a part of this?” The voice on the other end was hoarse with rage. He recognized the caller as Bev.

  “What are you talking about?” He dragged himself to a sitting position in his bed.

  “I’m talking about you knowing that Dana thought that somebody in our family killed Mitch, that’s what!”

  Ray’s mind grasped what she was saying. “Is Dana awake?” He didn’t want to confirm or deny Bev’s words until he found out how she knew.

  “No, she’s not.” Bev was pacing on the sidewalk outside the hospital. The anger she felt was consuming her. She couldn’t stand still. Her cousin had taken her place in Dana’s room while she went outside and called Ray. “I found her journal when we were at her house and I brought it with me to the hospital. It’s all in here.” She shook the journal she was holding toward the sky as if she wanted God to strike it from her hand. “Including the fact that she told you. Are you telling me that you didn’t know?”

  “You said that it’s all in there, why would I deny it?” Ray was glad that she knew. He felt a sense of relief.

  “You could have told me.” Bev’s tone expressed her disappointment.

  “I told you that was your sister’s place,” Ray said firmly.

  Bev started to protest, but she knew that he was right. If she had known, she would have confronted Dana and the breach between the two of them would have widened. He had recognized that.

  The journal had spelled out how Dana had duped him into accompanyin
g her home, hoping that he would play detective along with her. It also railed against his refusal to cooperate once he discovered what she was up to. Ray came out smelling like a rose, and here she was angry at him because he’d done the right thing. She knew that wasn’t the real reason for her call, and he challenged her on it.

  “Why did you call me, Bev?”

  The wind left her sails. Finding an empty bench, Bev sought refuge on its metal surface.

  “How could she think that, Ray?” There were unshed tears in her voice. “How in the world could she even form a thought like that about anybody in her own family?”

  Ray heard her pain and confusion. “Mitch committed suicide, and she won’t accept that. I think that it’s as simple as that.”

  “If you say so.” Bev felt defeated. She was too tired to argue and too hurt to talk any longer. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  She disconnected and slumped on the bench. That was where Ray found her a short while later when he arrived at the hospital. If she was surprised to see him it didn’t show. She looked up at him with sad, swollen red eyes.

  Without a word, he sat down on the bench next to her, put his arm around her shoulders and drew her to him. Bev didn’t resist. She needed comfort. Her soul was in distress. She laid her head on his shoulder.

  “How she must hate us.” Bev’s voice was raw with emotion. “How little she must think of us.”

  “Actually, I think that she’s proud of being a member of your family,” Ray whispered into her hair.

  “She’s got a strange way of showing it!” Bev pulled back and looked at him. “Do you know who we are? What we’ve achieved? Nobody in our family is a killer! We’re about building up, not tearing down. It was the hatred of others who were hell-bent on destruction that led to the death of Grandpa William.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Bev released herself from the comfort of his arms and got to her feet. She resumed pacing. The story of her grandparents was a Stillwaters family legend. It was part of the foundation upon which their family had survived and thrived.

  “I don’t think that you’ve ever seen a picture of my Grandpa William, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Grandy keeps a picture of him on the nightstand beside her bed. If you ever got the opportunity to see that picture, you couldn’t help noticing that my grandfather was very fair. My great-great-grandmother was fathered by her master. Grandpa William looked like her. He was light enough to pass for white. Anyway, Grandpa William’s father gave him the money to open a business…”

  “I know,” Ray interrupted. “Grandy told me that her husband owned a mill, and that he was quite successful. She said that he bought a plot of land where Stillwaters is now and built a house for his family.”

  Bev observed him with raised eyebrows. It seemed that Grandy had told him a lot. That came as a surprise. Her grandmother was rarely open with people she didn’t know.

  “Yes, that’s right. Grandpa lived in the town south of Stillwaters for nearly a year building his business, and the townspeople thought that he was white.”

  “I assume that he didn’t tell them any different.”

  “No. We have always been a family that lets people think what they want. He had the house built for his family on the land that our family’s town is on now, and Grandy and their kids moved there. They didn’t socialize or have anything to do with people in the area. They lived quietly and kept to themselves, and they lived far enough from town that they could do that peacefully, for a while. That is, until the folks in town found out that Grandpa was colored. That’s what people called black folks back then.”

  Bev sat back down on the bench next to Ray. She didn’t like recalling this part of the family history, but it was essential. “By that time Grandpa was making money left and right. Ironically, a lot of the men who participated in what eventually happened, worked for him in the mill. But that didn’t matter. Hatred and jealousy have no boundaries.

  “A group of them caught Grandpa William coming home from work one evening. They beat him so badly that he couldn’t even crawl, and they dumped his bloody body outside of Grandy’s house and stood there laughing, waiting for her to come out and get him. I guess she was supposed to be scared. But the blood of Maroons flowed through her veins and she had a surprise for them. Grandy didn’t come out of that front door empty-handed.”

  Ray chuckled. He had no doubt that Esther Stillwaters took care of business. She was a formidable woman, but as Bev continued he discovered just how strong she was.

  “The shotgun Grandy was carrying was long, and it was loaded, and she was mad. Her belly was swollen with three babies, but she stood there and told those…those dogs to get off their property or she would kill them. She took dead aim at the leader of that mob and blew the hat off of his head to make her point.”

  “Did they get the message?”

  Bev nodded. “They got it, but Grandy knew that they would be coming back and that they had better get out of town before they did. But Grandpa wasn’t in any shape to be moved. So there Grandy was, pregnant, and she had four stair-step babies and an injured husband depending on her. She had to make some difficult decisions. She couldn’t move Grandpa by herself, so she made the choice to stay and fight if she was forced to.”

  “Stay?” That surprised Ray, although he could understand Esther’s dilemma.

  “Grandy stood guard all night with that gun in her hand while she nursed Grandpa and took care of Uncle William, who was a baby. She put Aunt Sarah, who was six years old then, and her younger sisters on a bareback horse and sent them alone to ride the twenty miles through the night to get to the Stillwaters and the Freedoms so that they could come help her.”

  “And the girls made it.”

  “But not before the mob burned the mill to the ground, and then came for Grandy and Grandpa.”

  Ray was on the edge of his seat. “How did they escape?”

  “If it hadn’t been for some black people who worked at the mill, they never would have gotten away. The mob came to the house and burned it down. Meanwhile, Grandy and Grandpa had to be snuck out of town, hiding in the false bottom of a wagon like the slaves our people had never been. Grandpa William had to be drugged so that he wouldn’t cry out. The journey proved too much for Grandpa’s broken body. By the time they reached their people Grandpa was dead.”

  Bev stopped to gather her emotions. Her grandparents’ story always affected her.

  “That’s heartbreaking.” Ray took her hand and squeezed it in empathy.

  “Oh, there’s more. The stress of what she had been through caused Grandy to go into premature labor. She gave birth to her three babies the day after Grandpa died, but they were tiny and had to struggle to survive. Only two made it. Uncle Gardner died. So Grandy buried her husband and child, then she swore on each of their graves that no matter what it took, she would take them back to the land that my Grandpa had bought for his family and place them where they belonged. She did just that.”

  Bev finished the story with a satisfied sigh. “These are the people we came from. There are no murders among us, and I’m going to prove it.”

  “And how are you planning on doing that?” Ray was almost reluctant to ask.

  “By proving to Dana that Mitch committed suicide.”

  “That’s already in black and white in the coroner’s report,” Ray assured her. “I don’t know if you knew this, but Mitch had prostate cancer.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Bev hadn’t been privy to his medical condition. “But what I’ll do is get his autopsy report and go over it with a fine-toothed comb, gathering all of the information that I can to verify the original ruling.” Bev straightened up rejuvenated. “Did Mitch leave a suicide note?”

  “No, but even if he had Dana was so obsessed that she wouldn’t have believed it anyway.”

  “She will when I get through.” Bev’s melancholy had disappeared. She got up from the bench. “I’ve go
t to get back upstairs. Gerry took my place in Dana’s room and I’ve been gone much longer than I told him that I would be. He and Uncle Gerald said that they’ll sit with her tomorrow so that Mama can get some more rest. Meanwhile, I’m going to call the car service and have it take me back to Dana’s house to see if I can find some more of her journals.”

  Ray stood up and faced her. “I don’t think that she’s going to like you invading her privacy.”

  Bev was dismissive. “So she can sue me. If she can disgrace our branch of the family with her scandalous accusations, then I can invade her privacy.”

  Ray was still resistant, especially as he recalled his last conversation with Dana. “What if she found evidence that it wasn’t a suicide, but that it really was a homicide?”

  Bev looked incredulous. “How could she? The proof is on record, and I’m going to make sure that she knows it.”

  Ray sighed in resignation. “You don’t have to get the service to take you to her house. I’ll drive you.”

  “You’ve done enough.” Bev smiled up at him. “Besides, don’t you have to go back to work?”

  “I’m like the Stillwaters family,” Ray said and stood up. “I own my own. I can do anything that I want. What time do you want me to pick you up tomorrow?”

  “Ten should be fine.”

  “Okay, I’ll be here. First, I’ll take you back to my place to get some rest…”

  “But…,” Bev started to protest. Ray pressed a silencing finger to her lips.

  “I’ll take you to Dana’s place after you get some sleep.”

  Bev took a soldier’s stance and saluted. “Yes, sir!”

  Ray laughed. “So you’re a comedienne now?”

  Bev walked up to him until their bodies were flush. She took his chin in her hand and gave him a kiss that was long and slow. She broke it, then backed away.

  “No, I’m the woman who wants to thank you for coming to be with her,” she whispered.

  Stunned, Ray could only look at her. Long after she had disappeared through the hospital doors, he still stood rooted, unable to move.