Legacy of Masks

by Sallie Bissell

  “Yes, ma’am, it’s fine,” Kayla assured her. “I called her twice, early this morning.”

  “Well, Avis, you call me when you get ready to come home,” her mother said, eyeing the house as if she expected to see another bloody tomahawk dangling from the upstairs window.

  “I will, Mom.” Embarrassed by her mother’s protectiveness, Avis scrambled out of the car at Kayla’s heels. When the old blue Ford finally started backing out the driveway, she felt a great wave of relief.

  “Sorry,” she said to Kayla as an elderly Lab hobbled up to greet them, his tail wagging with joy. “I don’t know why she’s treating me like such a baby.”

  “Probably because she’s never left you at a house where someone’s been murdered,” Kayla said matter-of-factly as she gave the dog a pat, then unlocked the front door.

  As Kayla began disarming the complicated alarm pad by the front door, Avis realized she was way out of her league. This was real. A living, breathing person had been killed here, not some character in a paperback book. Although the house looked normal, with the distinctive Keener noise-deadening carpet throughout, a heavy disinfectant odor permeated the air, along with a silence that she found more disturbing than a scream.

  “Where’s your mom?” whispered Avis, not wishing to bother whatever lived here, unseen.

  “Downtown, in court.” Kayla gave a sheepish grin. “So’s my dad. I told your mom a fib. I knew she wouldn’t let you come over with nobody home, so I just pretended to call. I was really listening to the answering machine.” Oblivious to the silence, she walked down a hall decorated with old school pictures and family photographs. “You want something to eat before we get started?”

  “Sure.” Avis was too scared to be hungry, but she dutifully followed her hostess to the kitchen. Although it boasted the latest stainless steel appliances, the sink was full of dirty dishes, and someone had left a chair upended at the table. Kayla hurried over to straighten it. “My mom’s been pretty busy lately,” she said apologetically. She ran hot water over the dishes and squirted in some liquid detergent, then opened the refrigerator. Apparently the Daws lived on Budweiser beer and foil-covered casseroles. Avis saw no milk, no eggs, no butter, not even one of the liter-sized Cokes that her mother sometimes bought as a treat for her and Chrissy.

  “Sorry there’s not much to choose from,” Kayla said. “I don’t guess Mom’s had a chance to go to the store.”

  “That’s okay,” Avis replied hastily, although she wondered how busy you had to be to forget things like milk and eggs. “I’m not all that hungry.”

  “Wait.” Kayla reached back in the cavernous refrigerator and pulled out a carton of orange juice and a mound of something wrapped in tin foil. “Mrs. Follis made us one of her coconut cakes. They’re real good.”

  The two girls sat at the table and ate coconut cake and orange juice. Avis found the combination disgusting, but she ate without comment. It was the best Kayla had to offer; to refuse it would be rude, and she didn’t want to rock the boat of their tenuous new relationship. They ate without talking, the blossoming camaraderie they’d enjoyed in Avis’s room quashed by the house’s oppressive atmosphere. Though the mournful silence thundered in Avis’s head, Kayla seemed not to hear it at all. Avis was dying to know if the house had ghosts, but figured that now was probably not the best time to ask. When they finished their cake, Kayla said, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  Avis followed Kayla upstairs to a corner bedroom that was obviously the abode of a young athlete. A poster of the entire Tennessee women’s basketball team hung on the wall, and an array of basketball trophies glittered from a shelf above Kayla’s bed.

  “Wow.” Avis blinked at all of Kayla’s gold-plated booty. “You’re really into basketball.”

  “I just play softball for fun,” Kayla told her. When I graduate from high school, I’m going to play basketball at UT.”

  “You must be pretty good.” Avis said it wistfully, keenly aware that she was not any better at basketball than she was at softball.

  “I’m okay. I used to practice a lot with my dad.”

  “Don’t you still?”

  “Nah. He doesn’t do stuff like that anymore.” Kayla sat down on her bed and studied Avis with expectant eyes. “I’m not sure when my parents will get home, so let’s get busy looking for clues. What do we do first?”

  Suddenly Avis went blank. Nancy Drew would have done things one way, Hercule Poirot another. Avis Martin had never done any real detecting in her life. “Let’s go to your sister’s room,” she suggested desperately, grasping at the first thing that popped in her head. “And look around.”

  “The police already did that,” said Kayla. “They stayed over here the whole day it happened, taking pictures and bagging up stuff.”

  “But they might have missed something. They didn’t know her like you did.”

  “Okay.” Kayla shrugged agreeably. “Come on.”

  They went back out into the hall. Kayla led her past one closed door, then stopped at the next. Avis’s stomach clenched as she realized how close they’d been sitting to the actual murder scene. She held her breath, steeling herself for her first glimpse of where Bethany Daws’ life had so violently ended, but when Kayla opened the door, Avis felt a deep pang of disappointment. She’d expected something––a ghostly shape hovering over the bed or blood sprays on the wall. Instead, she saw just a tidy bedroom of a once popular teenage girl––purple-and-gold pom-poms over a mirror, a little stuffed teddy bear on the bed, a CD player on a bookshelf with some CDs stacked next to it.

  “Did the police dust the room for prints?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Yeah, but Coach Keener had all that cleaned up.”

  “Coach Keener?” asked Avis, frowning.

  “Yeah. He’s been great. Sent us to my grandmother’s house for a week after the funeral. He had the whole house cleaned, special, while we were gone. The basement and attic, too.”

  Avis’s stomach gave a violent wrench. What had made her think she knew anything about investigating a murder? Right now Kayla was expecting her to find some clue that would nail the killer, and she didn’t even have the slightest idea about what to look for. She was a fraud of the most awful kind; in just a few moments Kayla would realize that, and the one new friend she’d managed to make would be gone forever. She would have to start the seventh grade totally alone.

  “Okay,” said Kayla cheerfully. “Where do we begin?”

  “We look at stuff,” Avis answered with authority, trying to sound as if she combed through murder scenes every day.

  “What stuff?”

  “All of her stuff. Anything could be a clue. You take her desk. I’ll go through her closet. You look at every shred of paper, I’ll search the pockets of her clothes. If anything looks unusual, call me.”

  “Okay.”

  Praying that they would find something, Avis opened the closet door. All of Bethany Daws’ clothes hung neatly on hangers, her shoes lined up on the floor. As Kayla began to sort through the items on the desk, Avis started rummaging through the dead girl’s clothes. She went carefully through every pocket, but when she finished, she’d found only a wadded up tissue, an old ticket stub from the movie Cold Mountain, and twelve cents in change. No clues in the closet.

  “Find anything?” she asked hopefully as Kayla rummaged through the desk’s bottom drawer.

  “Nothing special. A hall pass from school. Her work schedule at the café.” She closed the drawer. “What do we do next?”

  “Look through the books in her bookcase,” said Avis promptly. “Flip through the pages to see if she hid any notes. I’ll look through the CDs. You can hide a lot of stuff inside a CD box.”

  While Kayla rifled through Bethany’s books, Avis opened each of her CDs, prying up the plastic inserts, peering behind the thin paper labels. Though she worked her way from Norah Jones to Matchbox Twenty, she found nothing. Again, her stomach clenched. Kayla was expecting results
and she was coming up empty. This was growing worse by the minute.

  She looked up to see Kayla reshelving the last book. “Any luck?” she asked hopefully.

  “Just this picture of Ridge,” said Kayla.

  “Let’s see.” Avis got up from the floor to look at the picture Kayla held. Apparently it had been taken just weeks before. Bethany and her boyfriend sat beside a swimming pool. Bethany had worn a huge Carolina T-shirt over her bathing suit while her boyfriend wore cutoff jeans. Avis blinked at the image. Although Ridge Standingdeer wore his hair like a skinhead, he looked like a movie star and gazed at Bethany in a way that made Avis feel funny inside.

  “Golly,” she whispered, wondering if any boy would ever look at her like that. “He’s really cute.”

  “He’s also really nice,” Kayla added. “And he really loved Bethany. He’d never have killed her.”

  The ardent tone in Kayla’s voice again reminded Avis of her sorry detective charade, only this time she felt a wave of true nausea. Whether it was her deception or the lethal combination of orange juice and coconut cake, she suddenly knew she needed to get to a bathroom, and fast.

  She gave the picture back to Kayla. “I need to use the bathroom,” she said, trying to keep her voice from wobbling.

  “Come on,” said Kayla. “You can use mine and Bethany’s.”

  Kayla led her back out into the hall. She opened the next door on the left and turned on the light. “Come on back to my room when you’re done.”

  “Thanks.” Avis closed the door behind her and raced for the commode. She reached it about two seconds before a cascade of undigested coconut cake erupted from her mouth. Sinking to her knees, she clasped the toilet with both hands, clumsily knocking over a basket of magazines in the process. As she vomited, she squeezed her eyes shut, knowing that every heave of her stomach was making her friendship with Kayla Daws a thing of the past. Absolutely nobody would ever invite anyone back to their house who started hurling their food in midvisit.

  Minutes later, she felt weak and drained, and the only thing she wanted was to call her mother and go home. This detective visit had been an utter disaster. The best she could hope for now was that Kayla would have mercy and not tell everyone on the softball team that nerdy Avis Martin had come over promising to find clues to a murder and had wound up puking in her toilet.

  With a deep, humiliated sigh, she began to gather up the magazines that had spilled from the basket. As she scooped up old issues of Glamour and Mademoiselle, something sharp dug underneath her thumbnail.

  “Ouch!” She lifted the magazines to see what had punctured her finger. Stuffed in between the pages of an old Elle she found a small, blue spiral notebook. Not fat, like the ones they used in the sixth grade, but the thin-ruled, high school kind. Opening it, she found an uncapped pen stuck between two pages. On the last page, the round cursive writing stopped in midparagraph, as if the writer had been suddenly interrupted. Then Avis’s heart stopped: Nearly every page had a doodle on it, and every doodle included the initials “RS”, or “RS + BD,” or “Mrs. Ridge Standingdeer.”

  “Oh, my gosh!” she whispered, her fingers trembling. She’d just found Bethany Daws’ diary.

  23

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Ravenel slammed his office door so hard that the stuffed owl suspended from his ceiling dropped one of its tail feathers. Mary had walked back from the courthouse with him, both of them tight-lipped and furious, keeping a reluctant lid on their anger while on the streets of Hartsville. Now, alone in Ravenel’s office, their hostilities bubbled over like milk left on too hot a flame.

  “I just stopped in to wish Ridge and Brendle good luck,” said Mary, dodging the swaying owl. “I wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known you were going to be there.”

  “I got the call from Barb Wood at six A.M. this morning, Ms. Crow.” Ravenel tore off his elegant jacket and tossed it over the one chair that didn’t have books piled on it. “Brendle’s father dropped dead on a business trip to Tokyo. The judge didn’t want to postpone everything, so she asked me to step in.”

  Mary looked at her next-door neighbor’s wild assortment of stuffed birds and raccoon skulls. His office looked like a broom closet in the Smithsonian Institution. “I still can’t believe you’re really an attorney.”

  “Well, gosh. Let me prove it.” Ravenel turned and flipped through some dry-mounted maps behind his desk, then pulled up something in a battered picture frame. He held it out. Through a layer of thick dust she could see that it was a cum laude JD from the University of Virginia. She didn’t know what to say. Virginia was one of the best law schools in the country. She couldn’t fathom that this bombastic misogynist had actually sat through classes there.

  He blew the dust away from the diploma and peered at the lettering. “Yup. This here says I did purty good at lawyerin’. I reckon Judge Wood knew what she was a-doin’.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Mary snapped. “Virginia just seems a bit too genteel for the likes of you.”

  Ravenel gave her a dark look. “Where did you go to school, Ms. Crow? Cherokee Tech?”

  “Emory,” Mary countered proudly.

  He laughed. “Ah, the college that Coke built. You ever litigate a trial before?”

  “Many times. For the past ten years, I was ADA for Deckard County, Georgia.”

  “What’s your conviction rate?”

  “A hundred percent.”

  Ravenel snorted. “Out of how many cases? Three?”

  “Twelve capital murders. I lose count of the lesser charges.”

  “Then what the hell are you doing here in Pisgah County?” demanded Ravenel. “Working the other side of the aisle?”

  Right now, Mary was wondering that herself. After nearly two months, she still had no water, at least half the county hated her for killing Stump Logan, and she would be in deep, deep shit with Jonathan as soon as she told him what she’d done today. “I grew up here,” she finally told Ravenel. “I wanted to come back home.”

  “You wanted to come back home?” He mimicked her as he sat down behind his desk. “Jesus Christ, a homecoming! Now, there’s a concept I’ve found to be highly overrated.”

  He didn’t ask her to sit, so she emptied one chair of its collection of U.S. Geological Survey papers and plopped down in it. Ravenel sat with his eyes closed as if the air was too highly charged for his delicate sensibilities. When the silence grew unendurable, Mary said, “You know, I could ask the same of you.”

  “What?” He peered at her through half-opened eyes.

  “What are you doing here?”

  A delicate chambered nautilus shell sat perched on one corner of his desk. For a long moment he stared at it, then he spoke with what sounded almost like regret. “I used to be the criminal litigator for the biggest firm in Charleston, South Carolina. My honorable, oh-so-proper partners sold me out, so I came up here.”

  Mary wondered how a criminal defense attorney could screw up that badly, then she decided spitefully that Ravenel had probably gotten someone so egregiously guilty off the hook that his partners had forced him out, for the good of the firm. Usually, that was when defense lawyers struck out on their own, writing their own tickets with high-profile clients. Ravenel, though, had chosen another path. “Why did you come here?” she pressed him. “Why the mountains?”

  “My family has property here. And I personally have become very concerned with the recent dismantling of our environmental statutes. The Smoky Mountain Defenders files suits to at least slow that dismantling down, since no one in either Washington or Raleigh seems to give a shit about stopping it altogether.”

  “So you started a snail-darter practice.” Mary remembered the famous little endangered fish that had tied up the Tennessee courts for years.

  “Yes, I did,” Ravenel answered evenly. “Which brings us back to my original question. Why is a sleek little ex-prosecutor like you taking such an interest in this case? It has to be mor
e than the fact you’re both Cherokee.”

  Mary thought of the look in Ridge’s dark eyes, his whispered hawazah––please.

  “The boy’s employer is a dear friend of mine,” said Mary. “Hugh Kavanagh asked me to take the case, originally. And I think that Turpin’s trying to push this through.”

  Ravenel hooted. “Boy, nothing gets by you, Counselor. Of course Turpin’s pushing this through. He couldn’t get to Raleigh on his barbecue laurels, so he’s decided that putting someone on death row might help his chances.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Mary shot back.

  “Well, since I would like to stay in Barbara Wood’s good graces, I’m going to defend him. You can do what you please. Go back to playing mountain monopoly with that moron Keener. I understand Bear Den and the Saunooke Hills are enviable properties to acquire.”

  Inwardly, Mary winced. Twice in two days she’d been characterized as being Deke Keener’s girl. She did not like the way it made her feel inside. Still, Ravenel had the law on his side. Judge Wood had appointed him, and unless Ridge himself officially fired Ravenel and hired her, she could not just invite herself to join his defense. However pleadingly the boy might look at her, she was trapped.

  “Okay, Ravenel. I guess you must know a little bit about a courtroom. Just tell me––lawyer to lawyer––have you met with Standingdeer privately?”

  “I have. At eight o’clock this morning.”

  “Then what’s his version of the story?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t need to know. No defense counsel wants to know that.”

  “Well, what does your client think of jail?”

  “What would you think of jail, Ms. Crow? I assume he finds it somewhat less appealing than the Plaza Hotel.”