by P J Parrish
With sodden shoes, he continued up the small incline to the cemetery. In the mist, the headstones seemed small, insubstantial things, like they were slowly being absorbed into the earth. Louis stood, looking down at Amos Brandt’s grave.
What am I doing here?
Looking for answers.
You don’t even know the questions, Louis.
He knew that a troubled sixteen-year-old girl had somehow come to believe she was a murdered black woman from long ago. And he knew he had to find an explanation for her memories. Yesterday, after the session at Dr. Sher’s home, he had asked Amy if she could remember ever visiting a cemetery. Amy said she had a fuzzy memory of old gravestones in trees. Had Jean brought her here once? Or had Geneva just told her about a family plot far beyond the cornfields?
Had she seen the name Isabel here?
A sound behind him made him spin around. He half expected to see the strange old man with his dog. But there was no one.
You got kin here?
The old man had asked him that. Why had it stuck in his mind?
Don’t you want to know where you come from?
Lily had asked him that.
And what had he answered? What would be the point?
It was a harsh thing to say to a child, let alone his own. He had realized it as soon as he said it. What made it worse, it was not something he even truly believed. He used to believe it, back when having no ties to anyone took the shape of freedom rather than loneliness.
What would be the point? He still wasn’t sure. Maybe just to feel connected to something tangible and unbroken? His mother was dead, and he had no idea where his half-brother and sister were, or if they were even alive. He had no one he could claim as his blood — except Lily.
The sun had broken through the clouds. The letters on Amos Brandt’s headstone took shape. Louis stared at them for a moment, then turned away.
He walked slowly through the clearing, examining every headstone he saw. Just the same names he had seen before.
There was one last piece of half-buried granite. He knelt in the damp grass, digging it out. His fingers stiff with cold, he scraped the dirt and moss out of the faded carved letters. It said: MURIEL BRANDT.
He hadn’t seen this one on his first visit. He stood up, wiping his muddy hands on his jeans. In the quickening light, he could see there were no other headstones he hadn’t examined.
No one named Isabel was buried here.
After one last look around the cemetery, he left.
Louis hung up the pay phone with a sigh. He had called Joe to tell her where he had gone. She hadn’t chastised him, but he could almost imagine what she was thinking: What are you doing chasing down ghosts in graveyards? She had, however, felt compelled to tell him they had only two days before they were scheduled to appear again in custody court.
He didn’t need to be reminded. The thought of turning Amy over to Owen Brandt made his stomach turn.
“You want a fresh cup?”
Louis looked up at the kid holding the coffee pot and nodded, going back to his stool. The kid refilled Louis’s mug and retreated to the far end of the counter to read his book.
Louis ate the last of his omelet, observing the kid. He was black and slender, with the red-rimmed eyes and chin stubble of a hard studier. It struck Louis that the kid had the same lone-wolf look he himself had at that age, when he had sat in this very seat at the Fleetwood Diner, lost in his prelaw books. Louis wondered what the kid was reading.
At that moment, the kid closed his book, giving Louis a look at the cover: Pathologic Basis of Disease. Louis smiled slightly. Premed.
“Excuse me,” Louis called out.
“You want more coffee?”
“No, just some help,” Louis said.
The kid came toward him, pushing his glasses up his nose. “With what?”
“Is there a historical society or something in Ann Arbor?”
The kid frowned. “Historical society? Probably, knowing this burg. What kind of history you interested in?”
“Black,” Louis said. “Especially slave history, the Underground Railroad.”
The kid rubbed his whiskers. “I saw a sign over on Main the other day in a store window. Something about African-American Cultural Society or something.”
“That might do.” Louis rose, leaving a twenty on the counter. “Thanks. Keep the change.”
“Hey, thanks, man, I can use it.” He pocketed the bill. “Can I ask what you’re looking for?”
For some strange reason, Mel Landeta’s line popped into Louis’s head: Cherchez la femme.
“A woman,” Louis said.
The sign in the storefront on Main was hand-lettered: ANN ARBOR AFRICAN-AMERICAN CULTURAL CENTER. An old neon martini glass above the door told of the place’s previous life as a cocktail lounge.
Inside, the fifties-style blond-wood bar was still in place, cardboard boxes covering it and filling the liquor shelves behind. Turquoise vinyl booths lined one wall, with tables and chairs stacked in the back. The lights were off, giving the place an alleylike feel.
“Hello! Anyone here?”
He heard the click of heels on terrazzo. A woman emerged from the back, carrying yet another cardboard box. She was tall, about forty, with close-cropped black hair, wearing a black sweater and slacks and big gold hoop earrings.
“Can I help you?” she asked, setting the box down on the bar.
Louis came forward. “I’m looking for some information on the Underground Railroad.”
“We’re not officially open yet,” the woman said. She reached over the bar and hit a light switch. The fluorescents spit and hummed into life. “As you can see.”
In the harsh light, the woman’s odd beauty registered. She had smooth, dark skin and a long, solemn face that made Louis recall a Modigliani portrait he had seen in a book once. The book had sat on his foster mother Frances’s coffee table, a big shiny thing that went untouched except for all those times as a kid when he furtively thumbed through it looking for naked women. The Modigliani face had stuck in his mind, because it looked just like an African mask he had seen in one of Phillip’s National Geographics.
“The grants just came through last month,” the woman said. “All we’re doing now is bringing in the stuff from storage. We don’t even have our computers yet.” The woman saw his disappointment and offered a smile. “Maybe if you told me exactly what it is you’re looking for?”
“I wish I knew,” Louis said, shaking his head. “I’m trying to find out if a farm near here could have been a station on the Railroad.”
“Well, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti were right on the routes.” She hesitated, then moved away, her long fingers tracing the writing on the boxes. She stopped, dug inside one box, pulled out a paper, and unfolded it on the bar in front of Louis.
It was a map of southern Michigan, with colored lines cutting up from Ohio and Indiana, across lower Michigan toward Detroit and over to Canada.
“There were seven main routes on the Underground Railroad, and three of them ran right through here,” she said. “Where is the farm?”
“South of Hell,” Louis said.
The woman pointed to a red line that ran up along Lake Michigan, veered east to Lansing, then south. “This is the old Grand River Trail,” she said. “A slave using this route probably would have gone right through there.”
Louis couldn’t take his eyes off the red line.
“Do you know much about the Underground Railroad?”
Her soft voice drew his eyes up to hers. She wasn’t patronizing him, but he had the sense that she had asked this question of many others before. She had the evangelistic energy that all good teachers had.
“I know it wasn’t a real railroad.”
She smiled.
“How did a place become a station?” he asked.
“There were always people — Quakers, abolitionists, and just regular folks — who hid runaways. We think there were as many as three thou
sand people involved when the system was running at its strongest.”
“Where did people hide?” Louis asked.
“Churches, barns, attics, cellars, anywhere they could,” she said. “The stations were about twenty miles apart, and there were secret ways to alert someone that it was a safe place, like a lighted candle in the window. Some say the patterns of quilts were codes, but no one has proven that.”
“Michigan was a free state,” Louis said. “I always thought once someone got this far, he was safe.”
She shook her head. “They could still be captured and sent back. Especially after 1850.”
“Why then?”
“Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. There were so many escapes that plantation owners in the South pressured the government to step in. The act gave slave owners the right to come up here and hunt down their ‘property.’ There were posses of men called slave catchers who were paid bounties to capture runaways and take them back to the South.”
Louis was thinking now of Amy’s tortured account of Isabel’s death. “What happened if someone got caught helping a runaway?”
“They could be fined and imprisoned,” she said. “At the least, they were hassled by the law or others in the community. At the worst, they were killed.”
Again, the images from Amy’s dream came to Louis. Men on horses with torches and dogs. A woman hanged from a hook and buried alive, as a white man in eyeglasses — Amos Brandt? — stood by and watched.
“Is there any way to find names?” Louis asked.
The woman just stared at him.
“I mean, of runaways or people who might have helped them?”
She gestured toward the boxes. “Oh, Lord, we have thousands of records here, journals, photographs, ledgers, property records. People have heard about us and keep bringing things in.” Her hand dropped. “But we are years away from getting it all organized.”
“So, you would have no way of telling me if a man named Amos Brandt had a station somewhere on his farm?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Or the name Isabel? She was a black woman who-”
The slow shake of her head cut him off. “Except for me, everyone is a volunteer here,” she said. Again, she sensed Louis’s disappointment, and her eyes softened. “But you’re more than welcome to look yourself.”
Louis let out a long breath, his eyes dropping to the map spread on the bar. When he glanced up, there was a mild look of pity on her face.
“Is this woman part of your family?” she asked.
“No,” Louis said. He held out his hand. “Thank you for your time.”
She shook his hand. “Can I give you my card? If you find any proof that your farm was a station, we’d really like to hear about it so we can document it.”
Louis took the card. Daphne Mayer, Ph.D. He was about to give it back, telling her he wasn’t going to be in Ann Arbor much longer, but then he paused. He dug in his jacket, found his wallet, and pulled out Eric Channing’s business card. He spotted a pencil on the counter and used it to scribble his name on the back of the card.
He handed it to the woman. “On the small chance you do find something about the Brandt farm, could you call me?”
She looked up at him with mild surprise on her face. “I can do that, Sergeant Channing.”
He pointed to the card and smiled. “I’m on the back. Louis Kincaid. And I’ll be leaving town soon. But the sergeant will know where to find me.”
She pocketed the card and give him a smile of her own. “I hope you find her,” she said.
“Thanks.”
Louis eyed the mountain of cardboard boxes. But as he said it, he knew that even if Isabel was buried in there, no one was ever going to unearth her.
Chapter Thirty-two
“So, how does this regression stuff work, exactly?” Shockey asked.
Louis turned to him. The detective was perched on the edge of the piano bench in the far corner of Dr. Sher’s living room. Shockey’s face was wan, lines cutting deep parentheses around his mouth, his eyes red-rimmed and puffy. Louis wondered for a second if the guy had been hitting the bottle hard again, but something told him it was a different demon chasing him this time.
Jean. Always Jean.
Shockey had been watching Amy all morning. And Louis had the feeling that it wasn’t out of some newfound love for the girl. Shockey was still obsessed with finding Jean, and he now believed that Amy was his last chance of doing that.
That is why he had insisted on coming to see Dr. Sher with them this time. Dr. Sher was going to make a last attempt to access Amy’s memories of her mother’s murder. And Shockey wanted to be here to see it.
Louis watched as Shockey chewed at his ravaged cuticles. Amy was across the room, lying quietly on the settee as Dr. Sher prepared to put her under hypnosis. A part of him understood what Shockey was going through. To find out you suddenly had a kid, that was hard enough. But then, what did you do with all the emotions swirling inside you? Especially that one nagging feeling that maybe you didn’t feel any close connection to this person, this little stranger, you were supposed to care about?
Louis sat down on the bench next to Shockey.
“What happens? Does she just, like, go to sleep or something?” Shockey whispered.
“Kind of,” Louis said.
Shockey heaved a sigh and rubbed his face. Louis rose and went over to stand next to Joe near the French doors.
“What’s the matter?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” Joe said quietly, her eyes on Amy. “She’s having trouble going under. She was nervous all morning about this. She is really afraid she’s going to fail again.” Joe hesitated. “This means everything to her, Louis, finding her mother.”
“Joe, her mother is dead,” Louis said.
Joe gave him a sharp look. Louis let it go, focusing his attention on Dr. Sher.
It looked as if Amy was finally going under, and now Dr. Sher was trying to get her to zero in on the night of Jean’s murder. Amy’s face was tight with concentration, which Louis knew by now was not a good thing.
“Let that go for now, Amy,” Dr. Sher said gently. “We’ll start with something easier. Tell me about your life on the farm. And I want you to see it not like when you were little. Try to remember it as you are now.”
Still, Amy was silent.
“Where are you? Tell me what the room looks like,” Dr. Sher prodded.
“I’m in my room upstairs at the end of the hall. There’s pink wallpaper with the old-fashioned people, the big white house and the horse and carriage,” Amy said softly. “I like the wallpaper, because the house looks so beautiful and the people look so happy.”
“Did you feel happy there, in the farmhouse?” Dr. Sher asked.
Amy gave a slow, almost imperceptible shake of her head. “Only when Poppa went away,” she said softly. “When Momma and I were alone, we were happy.”
“Yes. Your mother played the piano for you.”
Amy nodded. “She sang the French song for me over and over. She taught me all the words. She said it was about angels looking over us in our hiding place. She said I had to learn it in French so it could be our secret song.”
Amy’s brows knitted.
“What’s wrong, Amy?”
“He hits her,” she said. “He hates it when we sing, and he hits her.”
Louis glanced at Shockey. The man was rigid, his face pale.
“What else can you remember, Amy? Tell me more about your father.”
Louis looked back to Dr. Sher, and he knew she was trying to lead Amy slowly to the murder. Louis wondered if Shockey was going to be able to sit there and passively listen if the worst came out. He tensed, ready to lead Shockey out of the room if necessary.
But Amy didn’t — or still couldn’t — go to the night of her mother’s murder. Instead, she began a slow and chillingly calm litany of abuse.
Winter nights with blankets withheld. A sweltering summer
day spent locked in the dark attic because she had wet her pants. A terrified run down to the cellar and out through the cornfields, where she hid listening to her mother’s screams coming from the house. No children to play with, no school allowed except what Jean could teach her at the dining-room table. And always the threat that if she ever told anyone, she would be thrown in “the hole” — the outhouse.
Owen Brandt’s treatment of his wife and her child had gone beyond cruelty. It had been a calculated plan to isolate them, tear them down physically and psychologically, until their wills were broken and their world had been narrowed down to that hellish house.
Louis listened to it all with clenched jaw, his hand finding Joe’s and holding it tight. And Shockey? At some point, he had got up from the chair and gone to the window, where he stood, head bowed, quietly weeping.
Louis was watching Dr. Sher. The woman looked shaken to her core and didn’t seem to know what to do next. Then, with a glance at Louis, she sat up straighter, stopped the tape to turn it over, and hit the play button again.
She knew she had to get Amy to the murder somehow.
“Amy,” Dr. Sher said, “can you remember the last time you saw your mother?”
It took a long time, and finally Amy nodded.
“What happened that day?”
“Momma was gone all day,” Amy said. “I think she went to sell vegetables, but maybe not, because I remember now it was very cold and raining hard. But she was gone a long time.”
She fell silent. Oddly, she smiled slightly.
“Momma was always so happy after she got home from selling vegetables. I loved seeing her happy like that.”
Louis heard a sound. Shockey had turned and was watching Amy again.
“We’re in the parlor playing the piano and singing our song,” Amy said, still smiling. “Momma tells me a secret. She says we’re going to run away soon.”
Amy’s smile vanished.
“Poppa is home. He sees us at the piano. He… he hits Momma. He… he starts to come for me, but she stops him, talks to him and takes him upstairs. I… can hear them up there. I can hear him making ugly noises and hear Momma crying. But she told me never to come upstairs, just wait for her to come back and get me. She told me to go to my hiding place and wait.”
