Dally nodded. “Uh-huh. He wanted Black Pine Mountain.”
“So why didn’t he just get it?”
I jumped in again. “They wouldn’t sell. Guess why?”
Mustard looked at me. “Too many ghosts.”
Well — right. I raised my eyebrows. “In essence.”
Dally added, “And guess what skull that is we found up there.”
Mustard got wide-eyed. “Christy Rayburn!”
“Nope.” I shook my head. “The unborn sister of Ginny McDonner.”
Mustard’s expression changed radically. “That poor little thing. That’s where they buried ’er? Up there?”
“That’s right.” Then I let the last arrow fly. “But speaking of Christy, guess what about her.”
Sissy guessed this time. “She’s buried up there too.”
I let a second of silence set the stage for the big announcement. “Not in the least. Christy Rayburn is still alive.”
Big reaction. Mustard fell forward and stomped on the floor. Sissy jerked around so quick, it upset the baby, who started wailing.
Dally and I could barely contain ourselves.
Dally had to have the last word. “It’s Miss Nina. Miss Nina is Christy Rayburn. The Little Girl of Lost Pines has, in fact, been haunting you all for all these years — from over at the restaurant.”
There was much disbelief and ‘Oh, my God’ and all manner of incredulity before things calmed down again. Then the atmosphere kind of settled back and the baby went to sleep and Sissy started yawning.
I figured this news would be enough to fire conversations in Lost Pines and Oglethorpe family reunions for the next ten or maybe even twenty years, but the time for us to take our leave of this particular adventure had come.
We told them how Cedar had carted the old bat off. She actually spit on the ground when he put her into his police-mobile. A couple of hundred years earlier she would have been a candidate for burning at the stake. As it was, Cedar figured she’d spend the rest of her days in a nice home — one that was supported by our tax dollars. More head shaking and allowing as how life was just the strangest thing ever.
We probably bid as fond a farewell as I’ve ever personally been a part of. What with the hugging and the back patting and the one-more-no-really-just-one-more look at the baby, it probably took the better part of an hour. Leaving like adults, Dally and I used to call it when we were kids. Kids say goodbye and split. Adults say goodbye, then talk some more, then say goodbye and make all types of observations about the trip and the weather and such, and then say goodbye and start to plan the next trip, and then … you get the picture.
Dally understood when I told her I had to stop by the hospital to see what was what with the Moose. Even after all the weird revelations over at Miss Nina’s I’d remembered to fill up a grocery sack with some very crispy fried okra. Just the thing for a gunshot wound.
Moose was asleep after his surgery. The bullet went right through his side. Messed up some muscle and a little of his guts, but I figured he had plenty of both to spare. And Fedora assured me that what he’d said was true, he actually had been shot plenty worse than that.
Fedora himself was in a reflective mood. He knew that he and the big guy were going to the joint for kidnapping, but all his questions were about Ginny. Was she all right? Were her parents all right? Did she get some dinner?
Then he looked at me and said a strange thing.
“That Miss Nina broad? Some people never grow up.”
I asked him what he was talking about.
He looked deep into the corner of the room, where it was dark and calm. “After a certain age a person really ought to quit with the blamin’ other people for the way things turned out, and take it on the chin like everybody else. A kid’ll go on all day about how it was somebody else’s fault, but an adult person oughta straighten up an’ fly right. So she had it tough when she was a kid. Who didn’t, if you don’t mind my askin’? Eventually you just have to stop blamin’ your old man or your old lady or all the other people that done you dirt. Ya just got to move on down the line.”
I thought it was quite a speech, coming from a guy who was moving on down the line to a federal institution for kidnapping a minor.
We spent a while debating the Wicher-suicide issue. He couldn’t get it right in his mind that a guy could feel so guilty and lonely and sad that he’d actually drill a hole in his own heart.
One of Duffie’s boys came around after a while and told me that visiting hours were over. He was actually very gentle about it, I thought. I handed over my bagful of okra, tipped my hat, and shoved off.
Dally’d been chatting it up with a couple of the nurses. They all hushed up pretty solid when I came around. I figured they’d clammed up on account of they thought I was another hood like the two guys I’d just been visiting. Dally just smiled, and we trundled out the emergency-room door and into the light of the moon.
28. La Grâce Dieu
It was going for midnight by the time we were in the car and headed down the road south, back toward Atlanta — back home. The air was very clean, and the night was perfect. Not a cloud in the sky. The roads were completely free of snow, but there was plenty on the side of the roads for making with the picturesque view-ology under a big full moon.
We shuttled down the road a comfy forty miles per, and rounded the turn right there by the McDon-ner place, when wouldn’t you know: We saw a bright flash of red in the road right in front of us.
I slammed on the brakes and we shushed for a moment, but we managed to stay out of the damaged corn area in general.
I put my arm out to Dally. “You okay?”
She peered into the darkness. “What was that?”
I got out of the car. There wasn’t a thing on the road in either direction. I was just about to make an astute observation about the nature of ghostly objects in general, when an eerie noise came from the side of the road.
I zipped my head around.
Then the voice. “I’m all right.”
David’s head popped up. A second later he stood in the ditch by the side of the road trying to get his bicycle up. “This damn thing.”
I went over to help him. Red reflectors. Maybe a dozen of the things.
I touched one. “These things just saved your life.” He was disgusted. “I don’t know why I ride this bike. I can barely make it up the small hills, and I always have to walk it up the mountain. Doctor said it’d be good for my cholesterol, but it surely is bad for my temperament.” He tossed me a look. “You want it?”
I pulled my head back. “Me? I like my cholesterol. I want all I can get. Plus, a thing like this? Riding a bike? It’d mess with my image to no end.”
He sighed. Then he collected himself. “You and Ms. Oglethorpe leaving?”
“Uh-huh.”
He leaned over and waved at Dally. “Hey.”
She waved back.
He shook his head. “Heard all about it. Who would ever have thought Miss Nina …”
I shook my head too. Then — and I don’t know what made me do it — I stuck out my hand. “Just wanted to say … something about how much I got out of your service, odd as it was.”
He took my hand and smiled. “Who can explain the ways of faith?”
I nodded. “Not me.”
“But you got something out of it.”
“I did.”
“Something that helped bring a little girl home.”
“I guess.”
“Well, then.” He gathered up his primitive method of locomotion. “You’ve done quite well. Finish the wine, and have a safe trip home.”
And he was on his bike and around the corner, flashing all kinds of red around the road.
I shot a look to Dally. “Not one word about this coincidence.”
She smiled. “I would never dream —”
“Let’s get going.”
We were well down the road, a nice tape of Vivaldi’s Spring in the cassette play
er, before I felt like asking, “What’d he mean by, ‘Finish the wine, then go home?’ I mean, what do you think he meant?”
She was looking out the window. “How’d he even know we had wine?”
I nodded. “That’s right.” I squinted. “What’ve we got? Like, half a bottle still left from the church plus another full one?”
She looked at me. “Yup.”
I started scouting the side of the road. “Then let’s finish the bottle we started; make with the roadside picnic — like you wanted to in the first place.”
One glass each. Well under the legal limit. I never drive if I’ve had more than half a bottle — I might have mentioned I’m not that fond of driving anyway, so any excuse would do to keep me off the roads. But we had to finish the ceremony, didn’t we?
It wasn’t too long before I spotted one of those roadside-overlook jobs. It was really just a place to pull off and have a gander at the valley below and the wide expanses of wide expanse. There was a concrete picnic table. Dally fetched what was left of the open bottle.
I poured. “I’m really glad you remembered to snag this when we went back to the church for your car going over to Miss Nina’s.”
She turned her head. “I didn’t get this. I thought you got it. You’re the one who can’t live without this stuff.”
I looked at the bottle. “I didn’t get it.”
She only had to ponder a second more. “That’s how Dave knew we had the wine. He must have put it back in my car.”
I picked up my glass. “I didn’t even know he was there.”
She shrugged. “Me neither.”
I sipped. “So … what was he doing up there, skulking around and not making himself known?”
She looked out at the view. “I don’t know.”
I looked at the side of her face. “Show a little enthusiasm. Maybe this whole deal is a little more complicated than we thought.”
She shrugged.
I took a deep breath. I wanted to pursue the last little drop of mystery, but I could tell Dally herself had other fish to fry, so I skipped the minor stuff and went to the heart of the matter. “Sugar, you’ve been on the verge of something since we started this trip. You said you brought the vino for a special purpose.” I looked around, tried for the charming smile. “So here we are. Moonlit night. Good wine. The gig up here is solved — over and done with. I’m all ears. Spill.”
She nodded, took another fair-sized sip. No eye contact. “Okay.” Big pause, little sigh. “Look, when I was down in Savannah, last month?”
“Yeah?”
“I had a little trouble.”
I sat up. “What kind of trouble?”
“Had to … go to the hospital.”
I set down my glass. “Jesus, Dally. What for? Why don’t you tell me these things? Damn.”
She took another sip. “I’m telling you.”
“So what for!”
“That’s not really important. Turned out to be nothing, but I found out something while I was there that I’ve still got to think over.”
I was absolutely baffled.
She looked at me, finally. “I don’t think I … I may not be able to have kids.”
I leaned forward on the table and stared into her eyes. “I had no idea you wanted to.”
She smiled a little. “Yeah. Me neither — until I found out I might not be able to. Then, you know … suddenly it’s, like, an issue.”
“Are they sure? I mean, sure that you can't?”
She took in a deep breath. “Well, no.”
“So … that’s what you want to talk about?”
She looked away again. “Not really … not yet. I just wanted you to know, is all. For some reason.”
More baffled than ever. “Okay, then, what’s the wine and the picnic for?”
She sipped. More nodding. “Well … I just wanted to tell you — I think I’m going to be gone for a little while.” Big sip, still avoiding eye contact. “Maybe hit Europe. I hear they’ve got a lot of nice stuff in Parisfrance.”
She said it just like that, like it was one word. Parisfrance.
I looked out at the night. “Yeah. You know how fond I am of most things French.”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
I didn’t feel like explaining what the news was doing to my mood. “How long you plan on being gone?”
“Oh … not long.”
“Just a kind of getaway.”
“Yeah.”
I picked up my glass again. “Well — you have been working pretty hard lately, what with getting the new club going and everything. You could use what the straights call a vacation.”
That made her smile a little. “A what?”
“Yeah. It’s an American invention where you don't actually work all the time.”
“Vacation, huh? Like the sound of it.”
I tossed back a goodly portion of my glass. “But don’t stay gone too long. You know how I languish in your absence.”
Another laugh. “Yeah. You don’t do squat when I’m not around, do you?”
“I barely move.”
She finished her glass. “Okay, it’s a deal. I’ll only stay gone as long as I absolutely have to.”
I finished my glass. I reached out without thinking and clutched her hand a minute. “What a fine, fine woman you are. And look — you never can tell, right? I mean, medicine — it’s more guesswork than science most of the time, don’t you think?”
She squeezed back a little harder than I thought she would, and for a change I had the impulse to say something to her that I didn’t.
We finished the wine in silence, and the moon spilled everywhere. If you’d have taken a deep enough breath, I think you could have smelled spring coming.
The rest of the drive back to Atlanta we finished out Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and Van Morrison and the Chieftains’ Irish Heartbeat. Dally didn’t make it past Vivaldi. She was sound asleep. I turned down the treble a little, so as not to wake her up.
Now, a guy like me — who doesn’t do much when a certain fine, fine woman isn’t around — has a lot of time for idle reading. This is how I know about a guy named Charles Lamb. He was some kind of English writer who was pals with Wordsworth. Lamb wanted to get married, I gathered, to some belle name of Alice, but she up and married somebody else instead. He was not happy. So he’s sitting in his armchair one night, and he suddenly has a vision of two little ghostly kids standing beside him. They tell him, “We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been …,” and so forth. He wrote about it in something called Dream-Children.
So as I was driving down the highway at midnight, when the hands of the clock were pressed together like they were praying, and Dally was fast asleep beside me, I developed another theory about ghosts. Maybe they weren’t all psychological manifestations of some kind of guilt after all. Maybe, sometimes, a ghost was an echo — an echo of longing, or loss.
*
Or maybe, if the moon is right, and spring is in the air, and you have a little luck on your side — a ghost could just possibly be the promise of a happier ending than you might imagine.
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Easy as One Two Three (A Flap Tucker Mystery) Page 20
