Legacy of Masks

by Sallie Bissell

  “But he’s not going to write to us.” Avis pushed off against the wall with her bare feet and started the hammock swinging.

  “Then let’s ask your mom to take us to see him. ‘Mrs. Martin, would you drive Avis and me down to the jail? We need to talk to Ridge Standingdeer. Who? Oh, you know. He’s the Cherokee witch accused of murdering my sister.’ ” Kayla hated it when Avis acted so stubborn.

  Avis sighed. “Look, even if we could persuade somebody to take us to the jail, they wouldn’t let us in. You have to be related to somebody in jail, and you have to go at special times, and you have to stay with an adult.”

  Kayla shot her friend a curious look. “How do you know?”

  “I called the jail,” replied Avis. “While my mom was taking a nap. I tried to sound older. I don’t think they believed me, but they answered my questions.” She took a swig of Coke. “We’re not going to get to go see Ridge, so you’d better start trying to figure out why your sister would buy an insurance policy.”

  Irritated, Kayla jumped out of the hammock. She walked over to the deck railing, her throat constricted with tears. It all seemed so stupid and hopeless. Bethany was dead. Her mother spent her days in bed like a zombie while her father relieved his frustrations with Budweiser beer and an occasional right cross to her jaw. All while a boy she knew was innocent rotted in jail and she sat in Avis Martin’s hammock, with Avis pretending to be Nancy Drew or Miss Marple or whoever the hell else she babbled about. She ought to just leave now. Walk back to her house, get on her bike, and pedal down to the jail herself. Maybe she could throw rocks at Ridge’s window, or demand to see him, as her right as an American citizen. Or maybe she could say she was Ridge’s long-lost sister and talk her way inside. He had called her that one time, when she was out with him and Bethany. “Little sister,” he’d said, laughing. “Lie in the backseat and sleep. . . .”

  “Holy shit!” she cried, as a sudden memory flashed through her brain.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Avis, alarmed. “Did you get stung by a sweat bee?”

  “I think I know what Bethany meant by an insurance policy! I think I know where she buried it!”

  Avis was so stunned, she slipped out of the hammock, landing with a thud on the deck. “What are you talking about?”

  “It was back in the spring, after Jeannette Peacock had a sleepover for her birthday party. Ridge and Bethany picked me up. We got hamburgers and drove around. I was really tired, since we hadn’t slept much, so I curled up in the backseat. They went up to Laurel Overlook,” said Kayla. “It’s where everybody goes to park.”

  Avis scrunched up her nose. “Ugh! Did they make out and stuff, with you right there?”

  “No. They just parked and talked. I did see them kiss a couple of times, though. They thought I was asleep.”

  “What did they talk about?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing much. She wanted him to take her to the prom. He didn’t know what a prom was.”

  “What’s this got to do with him hiding her insurance policy?”

  “I’m coming to that.” Kayla took a quick gulp of Coke. “I was half-asleep in the backseat, when all of a sudden they got out of the car. That woke me up, so I watched them. I thought they were going to have sex.”

  “Did they?” Avis asked, bright-eyed and breathless.

  “No. They didn’t hug or kiss or anything. They walked over and knelt down underneath a tree.”

  “Maybe Ridge believes in tree gods, like the Druids.”

  “They weren’t kneeling to pray. They were crouching down. They looked like they were burying something.”

  Avis rolled her eyes. “Kayla, why didn’t you think of this before?”

  “I forgot about it. It was months ago and I wasn’t really sure it happened. When I asked Bethany about it the next day, she just said I’d dreamed it.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Avis. “What did they do after that?”

  “Nothing.” Kayla shrugged. “They came back to the truck, holding hands. I must have gone to sleep for real then, because the next thing I knew, Ridge was carrying me to my front door.”

  Avis got to her feet and began to pace, her bare feet slapping softly on the wooden deck. “How did you see all that stuff at night?”

  “The moon was full. That’s why they went up there in the first place.”

  Avis frowned. “Do you know the way to this Laurel Overlook?”

  “Kind of.”

  “How far away is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could we walk there?”

  “No, it’s too far. We’d never get back in time.” Kayla sighed. Ever since her sister’s murder, everyone’s parents had tightened their curfews. This summer, no one in Hartsville was playing outside after dark.

  “My mother might drive us there,” said Avis. “At least it’s not a jail.”

  “Yeah, and what do we say when we get up there? ‘Excuse us, Mrs. Martin, but we have to go look for a hole in the ground where Ridge Standingdeer might have buried my dead sister’s insurance policy’? That’s crazier than asking her to take us to the jail,” Kayla said, evening the conversational score between them.

  Avis didn’t give up. “Okay, okay. You’ve lived here all your life. Surely you must know somebody else who would take us up there.”

  For a long moment, Kayla stared at the hammock. When she turned back to Avis, she blinked back tears. “Before, any of Bethany’s friends would have taken me. Now, nobody calls us anymore. It’s like we’ve all gotten contagious with something.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Avis said softly. “People are jerks. We’ll think of some way to get there.”

  Just then, Mrs. Martin pulled around to the back of the driveway, the brakes on the blue Ford squealing. Chrissy scrambled out of the car still in her pink bathing suit, looking like some small animal, recently drowned.

  “I’ve got it,” Kayla said quietly, waving at the little girl who danced around the driveway, the blacktop singeing the soles of her bare feet. “I know how we can get there.”

  “How?” asked Avis.

  “We can ride our bikes.”

  “I don’t have a bike.”

  “What do you mean you don’t have a bike? Everybody has a bike!”

  “Well, I don’t,” snapped Avis. “I’ve never had one,” she added proudly, relegating bikes to the same inferior category as pimples on her chin or Ds in school.

  Kayla started to say something else, then she realized that Avis had probably never had a bike because her parents hadn’t been able to afford one. The Martins didn’t have a computer or a DVD player or a lot of stuff her family did. “Can you ride one?” she asked tactfully.

  “I don’t know.” Avis shrugged. “I rode my cousin’s bike, two years ago.”

  “Okay. Then you get your mom to let you come over and spend the night at my house. My dad’ll tap out halfway through the late news. After that, we’ll sneak out. I’ll ride Bethany’s bike and you can ride mine. We ought to be able to get to Laurel Overlook and back before morning.”

  “I don’t know, Kayla.” Avis frowned.

  “We can take some candy bars from your house, and a shovel and flashlights from my garage,” said Kayla. After all of Avis’s yammering about being a detective and solving crimes, she wasn’t about to let her chicken out over a stupid bike ride. “Put up or shut up, Avis,” she said sharply. “It’s the only way we’re going to find that policy in time to save Ridge.”

  Avis stared out at the dark green pines that surrounded her backyard. Her chin wobbled so that Kayla thought she might start crying, but then she seemed to resolve some conflict inside herself. “Okay,” she said, swallowing hard. “If my mom’ll let me sleep over at your house, then we’ll ride our bikes and we’ll find out what Ridge buried on that hill.”

  27

  The ancient mask possessed an awful beauty. Carved of pale white beech, it was stained from eye sockets to jowls with bloodroot, giving the
impression that the bear was weeping blood, howling in mute outrage centuries old. To Mary, it seemed to wail for those who had no recourse, while demanding vengeance from those who could act in their behalf. She could feel those deep, unseeing eyes working on all of them, and for once not even Ravenel dared break the silence of the room.

  “Do you know what that is?” Ravenel’s sidekick finally asked, speaking surprisingly fluent Cherokee.

  “A bear mask.” Mary replied in English, reluctant to say the thing’s true name.

  “It’s big medicine,” the man replied ominously, eyeing the mask as if it might be radioactive. “Holy as a drum. Now you have to do what it wants.”

  Mary frowned. “How did it get here?”

  “The Ani Zaguhi. They turned themselves into smoke and brought it under the door!”

  “Would somebody please explain what the hell you two are talking about?” Ravenel interrupted. “I mean, should I alert the media or just call the local ghost-buster franchise?”

  “The Ani Zaguhi send them,” said Sylvia Goins. “Ridge said those masks are like a curse.”

  “The only Ani Zaguhi I know is sitting in jail right now,” Ravenel sneered. “In no position to curse anything other than his own rotten luck.”

  Ravenel’s friend looked at Mary and started to giggle. “That just shows how much he knows, eh?” He turned to Ravenel and held his thumb and index finger an inch apart. “You white people know that much.” He winked at Mary. “All the rest, we keep secret.”

  Ravenel snorted. “Did you two work this out earlier or are you just making it up as you go along?”

  Jonathan stepped forward, looking down at the shorter Ravenel as if he were a mealworm. “The Ani Zaguhi send the bear mask when they need help. Whoever gets it is honor-bound to respond.”

  Mary carefully unhooked the mask from the doorknob. Ravenel’s friend gasped as she touched it, as if it might turn her to dust. The mask was old and exquisitely beautiful, and attached to the back by a strip of deerskin was a single eagle feather.

  “Aiiiieee!” Ravenel’s friend jumped back. “They sent an eagle feather! To a woman!”

  Mary’s hands trembled. Even with her sketchy knowledge of Cherokee lore, she knew that an eagle feather was an honor of the highest order, a gift signifying huge respect. Seldom were they given to men, almost never to women.

  “So what does all this mean?” asked Ravenel.

  I don’t know,” Mary replied, impatient with his skeptical carping.

  “Maybe that you’re canceling your rather terse note of yesterday?”

  She looked at Jonathan, knowing that the mask could totally derail all the plans they’d discussed this morning. Although she did not for one moment believe that the Ani Zaguhi turned themselves into bears and cursed people who refused to help them, she did believe there could be people who lived so deep in the woods that they’d become rents in the fabric of time. If that were true, then one of those people might certainly want to save someone they loved; one of them might be begging her for help.

  “I can’t say what it means yet, Ravenel,” she said, holding the mask tightly. “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

  She and Jonathan walked into her office, closing the door on the three people who still stood gaping on the landing. Laying the mask down on her desk, she went over and wrapped her arms around him.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said, burying herself in his sweet, warm smell, the feel of his arms around her. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “What do you want to do?” His voice was tender.

  “I want to have a life with you and Lily.”

  “Then what’s stopping you?”

  She opened her eyes and saw the mask, with its eagle feather, glowing like bleached bone in the sunlight. “The same thing that would stop you, I imagine.”

  “Do you believe in the Ani Zaguhi?”

  She struggled to give voice to her feelings. “Do I believe there could be an old tribe of Tsalagi, deep in the mountains? Yes. Do I think they’re going to put a curse on my head if I ignore that mask? No.”

  “There are more ways to be cursed than by the Ani Zaguhi.” His smile was ironic.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are cursed by your own blood, Koga. You won’t turn the mask down because you won’t dishonor your mother’s memory.” He held her close. “I knew it the moment I saw it hanging on your door.”

  She closed her eyes, his shirt soft against her cheek. How well he knew her troubled heart! “What do you think we should do?”

  “What we both have to do.”

  She knew without asking what that was. She would go back and work with Ravenel, for Ridge. Jonathan would go to the job in Tennessee, for Lily. She looked up at him, terrified at the thought of losing him all over again, after having come so far to find him. “Can’t we talk about this? Ridge’s trial won’t last forever.”

  “Neither will Pomeroy’s job offer,” said Jonathan. He shook his head. “Let me go home and give him a call. Maybe he can hold it for me a little while longer.”

  She stepped back and looked up into his eyes. “I love you. I still want to be with you.”

  “I know you do.” He smiled down at her. “We can talk about it tonight. Right now, I think you’d better get busy.”

  With a sorrowful glance at the bear mask, he turned and walked out of her office.

  She fought back a moment of panic, when she was tempted to run after him. Let’s just pack up my stuff and pretend this never happened, she’d say. . . . But the mask with its request for succor kept her in her office. Jonathan was right about one thing: As much as she wanted to make her life with him, she could not make a happy life until she saw this through. She watched out her window as he got in his truck and drove away, then she strode over to Ravenel’s office, entering without bothering to knock.

  “Yes?” He looked up from behind his desk, startled. He was alone, with a shot glass and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey in front of him. Carefully, Mary picked the brimming glass up and moved it to the corner of his desk, beyond his reach.

  “Okay, Ravenel, since happy hour doesn’t officially start for another seven hours, why don’t you tell me where we are in this case.”

  “Exactly the same place as yesterday,” Ravenel announced snidely. “My experts still haven’t found any leaks in the state’s case.”

  “Any offers on the table?”

  “With the forensics and all that circumstantial evidence and the whole town cheering him on, Turpin’s in the driver’s seat.”

  “Have you considered asking for a change of venue?”

  “So moved and subsequently denied. Wood wants to get this over with.” Ravenel shrugged. “I figure it’s one thing we can use on appeal.”

  “So what’s your game plan?”

  “Kick as much dirt on their evidence as we can. The boy has maintained his silence, so I can argue anything.” Ravenel glanced at the whiskey; a sheen of sweat began to glisten on his forehead.

  “And you think that’s the way to go?” Mary had never been able to tolerate the willful ignorance that defense attorneys thrived on. Though she knew they considered it the best way to mount a defense, it felt to her like going to the doctor and then ignoring your own pathology report.

  Ravenel nodded. “I know it flies in the face of your prosecutorial modus operandi, but for us, sometimes what actually happened is the last thing we want to know.”

  She noted with pleasure that sweat had begun to drip from Ravenel’s face. He must want that drink pretty bad, she thought, making no move to give it to him. She reveled in his discomfort for a moment, then asked him her final question.

  “Okay, Ravenel. I’m back on board. Tell me how I can help.”

  “You could return my whiskey. That would be a good start.”

  “Sorry. I’ve got to do more than that.”

  “How about returning my whiskey and going away?”

&nbs
p; She lifted the glass. “Point me in the right direction, and it’s yours to enjoy.”

  Ravenel gave a quick little grunt, as if she’d poked him in the stomach, but he must have realized that she meant business. When next he spoke, it was with resignation.

  “Okay, Ms. Crow, do as your mask commands. I don’t, though, have the time to get you up to speed on defense strategies, so why don’t you just play investigator and leave the courtroom stuff to me. Frankly, I think the only way this boy will get off is if somebody else nails the killer.”

  “So that’s my job?” asked Mary. “Find the murderer of Bethany Daws?”

  “You’re the one who got the eagle feather, Ms. Crow.” Ravenel looked at the whiskey as a dying man might eye water. “Not me.”

  She returned to her office. As soon as she closed the door, the mask began exerting a strange power on her, relegating to Ravenel and all his pontificating no more importance than a fly buzzing against a screen. She wondered, as she looked into the shadowy holes of its eyes, how old the thing was, if the Ani Zaguhi had sent it as far back as when de Soto tromped through looking for gold. She felt its worn smoothness in her hand. Who knew how many lives this mask might have touched?

  “Okay, yonah ahgudulo,” she said, tracing the bloodroot-stained tears. “Let’s see what you can do.”

  She went back to Ravenel’s office, wrapped the mask in one of his camping blankets, and asked for the keys to his car. “Just for a little while,” she explained. “My car’s still at home.”

  He tossed his keys in her direction. Minutes later she was heading toward the Justice Center, driving a battered Subaru that smelled like a mixture of whiskey and Sterno. She pulled into the lot and parked in the sunniest spot she could find, hoping the heat of the day might burn the stink out of Ravenel’s car.

  She insisted that Officer Jane bring Ridge up from his cell. In the interview room, she watched the boy walk toward her, his expression unchanged from her last, farewell visit. He at least ought to look glad to see me, she thought with some irritation.