“I know. I’ve tried. He won’t talk to me on the phone. He must know something is off. I need to come home to have that conversation. We’ve been through too much and he deserves an honest discussion, in person. But I can’t come home yet. I’m on borrowed time down here. I can feel it. I need to finish this first. Then I’ll come home and he and I will talk.”
“Fine. I’ll postpone, but not for very long, Olivia. It’s not just you in this. You have to come clean with Leo. And I haven’t seen Logan all summer. You really are on borrowed time down there.”
I made my way slowly toward the courthouse to meet Elliott. I could feel life barreling toward something. I just didn’t know what would happen when it hit.
The long, deep staircase up to the courthouse door was wide and shallow and forced you to walk in a strange processional, always making you step up with the same leg.
Walking through the revolving oak doors assaulted me with cold, stale air. It smelled like dust and floor polish. There was a metal detector just inside the entrance; the juxtaposition of it with the old-fashioned entrance and grand foyer just looked silly.
I was lost in thought as I gathered my bag from the metal detector’s conveyor belt. The booming voice of Jimmy startled me, snapping me out of it. “Don’t let her in here, Knox. That girl’s nothing but trouble.”
I turned around to see Jimmy coming across the foyer. I put a smile on my face trying not to look on the outside like I felt on the inside. “Are you trying to get me kicked out, Jimmy?”
“Yes, I am.” He came over and gave me a little hug.
“Listen, I wanted to thank you again for letting us use your boat.” Elliott and I had taken it out to the Ruins on a few occasions. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Of course not. Eli’s the only one who ever fills it with gas so you two keep using it. I just saw him upstairs.” He pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the licensing office sign and said, “Are you two here to apply for a marriage license?”
“A what!”
Jimmy and Knox, the ancient security guard in his oversized ill-fitting outfit, laughed at my outburst. Jimmy said, “I’m just messing with you.”
“Ha. Right. That’s a good one.” I said good-bye to Jimmy and headed upstairs toward the records office. It was on the second floor right next to the license office where I assume one would go to apply for a marriage license.
I opened the door to the small, quiet room and saw Elliott standing at the tall counter with his back to me. Just seeing him had an immediate calming effect. That rushing clock in my mind slowed down when I spotted him.
Elliott turned when I came in and smiled at me. He reached out for my hand and pulled me up next to him at the counter. Yes, calm. I couldn’t let go of his hand.
Elliott was speaking quietly, the way you do when you’re in an unfamiliar office space. “There you are. I’ve been telling Maggie what you’re looking for. She thinks we might be able to find some old plat maps in the basement archives.”
I smiled at Maggie. She was behind the counter and on the phone, but she smiled back at me. I asked Elliott, “Do you think I could get a copy of Oliver’s birth and death certificates here too?”
“Probably.”
Maggie finished her phone call and gave me her full attention. I gave her Oliver’s name and dates of birth and death and asked if I could get copies of his records. She was writing his information down on a form and without looking up asked, “Are you next of kin?”
My heart sank. I didn’t know why I wanted to gather these things about Oliver. Maybe because I was now viewing myself as his namesake. But I did want to know, and now I would have to go back into the Internet searches to find it.
Elliott answered for me. “Yes, she is.”
“I am?”
“You’re his niece.” He winked at me imperceptibly. “You and Georgia are his next of kin.”
Elliott was trying to bypass some red tape, but in a way he was right. Georgia and I were the only family George and Oliver had left and I, for one, didn’t want their memories forever trapped at the bottom of the lake.
As Elliott and I went down to the basement of the courthouse I told him about my unexpected visit from Buddy and the treasure trove he had shared with me. I couldn’t wait to get home and show him all of the pictures.
Elliott held the door open for me. “Buddy’s like your personal redneck fairy godmother.”
We entered the basement armed with our approved request forms for the plat maps and Oliver’s records. The basement was like that of any ancient office building. The linoleum tiles were chipped at the edges and stained with decades of shoes scuffing over them. The air felt cold and damp and the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead gave off a strange blue cast.
We walked into a small windowless room and were greeted by the usual, Hey Elliott, how’s your father feeling? I had become accustomed to people saying that by rote when they saw him.
The woman looked at our request form and told us she would have the copies of the birth and death certificates ready shortly. The old plat map would have to be ordered, but she would pull the records from the last transfer of ownership of the property for us.
Then she pointed to the reference numbers on the request for Oliver’s death certificate. “Eli, this has a coroner’s report attached to it. You can get that now while you wait.” She wrote some numbers on a slip of paper, gave it to Elliott. “You want to just pull this yourself?”
Elliott opened the door to the storage room and turned a dial on the wall. A series of round halogen lights overhead began to spring to life, illuminating a cavernous space stacked as far as I could see with rows and rows of file cabinets.
It took a minute for the lights to get up to their full power and Elliott explained that they were on a timer so if we would be in here for longer than five minutes we would need to reset the dial or they would switch off automatically, leaving us in the dark.
I looked at the small piece of paper with the call numbers scrawled on it. “How in the world are we supposed to know where this is?”
Elliott took the paper from me. “I come in here all the time to pull records for stories. I can find it.”
I looked over his shoulder as he traced his finger along the cabinet numbers until he found the one he wanted. He opened the drawer and flipped through it, reading through the tabs, then pulled out a manila folder.
I had never read a coroner’s report before and it seemed a bit ghastly. The first page was a form with blank spaces to note the location of the body, if rigor mortis had set in, time of discovery of the body, etc. The second page was equally helpful with boxes one could check if the method of death were by an apparent gunshot, ligature, drowning, knife wound, etc. How handy. I was relieved to see that the box for “photographs” had not been checked.
Elliott was reading the report with a practiced eye. He flipped through all the pages and then looked at me and said, “Suicide.”
“What!” I looked at the page trying to see how he had deciphered that from the technical jargon and medical notations. “Uncle Ollie killed himself?”
Elliott raised his eyebrows at me. “Uncle Ollie?”
“I’m trying to humanize him. Where does it say suicide?”
Elliott pointed to one section of the written report. “It says ‘intentional drowning,’ but it doesn’t say how they came to that conclusion. The last page has the eye witness’s report.” He flipped to the end of the stack of papers. “It’s missing.”
“Of course it is. Why is half the stuff we’re looking for missing?” I sat down on the floor feeling tired and just a little defeated as I looked over the report again.
Elliott asked, “You okay?”
“It’s nothing.” I wasn’t sure what to say. “My mom’s birthday is in two days.”
He sat down next to me, taking my hand. “I’m sorry. I should’ve realized.” The puzzled look on my face must have asked how he could have known that her b
irthday was looming because he answered. “It’s on her birth certificate, which I’ve looked at a dozen times. Are you sad?”
“Yes. I’m also . . . Georgia and I were planning to scatter the ashes on her birthday.” Elliott didn’t say anything but his grip on my hand tightened. “I just talked to her and put it off for a bit.”
“What happens after you scatter her ashes?”
I didn’t say anything, which probably told him volumes.
We sat in silence on the floor of the records storage room underneath the open metal drawer for a few minutes. He knew exactly what this all meant. It meant that once my mother was put to rest this thing was over. I would leave. Right? Wasn’t that the whole reason, the only reason, I was even in Tillman? Finally he stood up. “I’ll go see if the other stuff is ready yet.”
Elliott went to retrieve the birth and death certificates and the land ownership information. I was holding the coroner’s report in my hand. It was hard to stay caught up in your own tiny drama when you were reading through a report describing a suicide.
I turned the file over in my hands and looked at all of the doodles and scrawl on the front. There was a lunch order and a few telephone numbers on one side. The other side had a list that looked like locations. Probably the last time people had seen Oliver. One note was circled. It read: “R. Ridge. Witness—Johnnie Bryant. Questioned/released. Doc—suicide.”
The hair on my arms stood straight up and a chill ran through me. R. Ridge was Rutledge Ridge; I was sure of it. And Johnnie Bryant must have been questioned about Oliver’s death and then released when it was ruled a suicide. Wasn’t Johnnie the man who served with Oliver in Vietnam and then came back here with him after the war? Was he staying at Rutledge Ridge? And why did they think him suspicious enough to question him when Oliver died?
I said out loud, “What’s your story, Johnnie Bryant?” Just as the words came out of my mouth the light’s timer on the wall clicked off and the room went completely black.
The instant darkness surprised me and I sprang to my feet. In doing so I managed to impact, at full steam, the open metal drawer above my head. There was a splitting pain. As I went to crouch down and cradle my head, my foot slipped on the file folder I had dropped. It acted like a banana peel taking my feet out from under me. I went completely horizontal before landing with a crack on my head.
Things were fuzzy and black.
Then blinding light.
Elliott was holding me and someone kept talking about blood. Was it my blood? I heard Jimmy’s voice say something about head wounds bleeding like a stuck pig. That wasn’t very nice. Was I the pig in this scenario?
Elliott kept talking to me, trying to make me speak. My head hurt too much to talk. I wanted them to turn the lights out. I was moving. Elliott kept pushing on my head where I had hit it. I desperately wanted him to stop doing that.
I heard another familiar voice say, “Let’s take her to Maggie.” But I couldn’t make sense of that or figure out whose voice it was.
I came to, more or less, a minute later in the backseat of a car with my head in Elliott’s lap. His clothes were covered in blood. That seemed completely illogical.
Elliott’s face had the strangest look of concern. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him look like that before. It still hurt my head when he spoke. “Liv, can you keep your eyes open for me? We’re almost there.”
I was so confused. “You’re bleeding?”
He smiled at me. “No, sweetie. That’s you. You cut your head. I think you need stitches. Hang on, okay?”
I tried to pull his hand off my head so he would stop pushing on the cut. He kept his hand in place. “I need to keep pressure on it. Do you feel nauseous at all?”
My head hurt a lot and Elliott wouldn’t stop with the vice and the sun was hurting my eyes. I decided that I wanted to go back to sleep. Elliott wouldn’t let me do that either.
TWENTY-FOUR
I was finally fully awake and aware of the fact that I had a “self-induced traumatic brain injury” as Elliott was jokingly calling it. Once he was assured that the cut was not that deep, and that the bump I had sustained by falling on my head was a fairly minor concussion, he had left his state of panicked concern and gone back to his usual state of making fun of me.
Elliott adjusted the ice pack he was holding on my head. “So I understand you hit your head on the file cabinet when the lights went out, but how’d you manage this bump on the back?”
I was holding his other hand in both of mine, keeping myself steady. “Don’t laugh.”
“I won’t laugh.”
“After I jumped up and cut my head I slipped on the folder and fell backwards.”
He laughed until I looked like I might cry again; then he managed to control himself. We were waiting for the numbing to take effect on the area of the cut so that it could be stitched up. I looked around the room where he and I waited alone. It was a doctor’s office but not an exam room. I was still fuzzy on the details.
“So where are we and how did we get here?”
“We’re in Maggie’s office and we rode here in Emory’s car.”
I was shocked. “What? How did that happen? Why was he there?” I added in a whisper, “Is he following me?”
“How hard did you hit your head? No, he wasn’t following you. He was there . . . Well, I don’t know why he was there. When he saw me carrying you out he practically drove his car onto the sidewalk to load you in and then rushed us here.”
I was still whispering. “You don’t think this is all a bit fishy? He just happened to be there? When I’m knocked unconscious and bleeding?”
“You knocked yourself unconscious.” Elliott gently moved the hair off my face and looked at me. “You were white as a sheet when I found you. There was so much blood. I couldn’t figure out what you had done or how you had gotten hurt. You were just on the floor in a pool of your own blood, out cold, when I came back in the room. It scared me to death. I grabbed you and was running out the front door of the courthouse, carrying you, with Jimmy clearing the way. I’m not even sure where I was going. I think I was running to get my car to take you to the hospital. Emory pulled up and looked you over. He told me to put pressure on your head to stop the bleeding and he put us in his car. You bled all over the backseat, but he didn’t seem to mind. He brought us straight here and got Maggie to look at you. If I had tried to get to the ER we’d still be driving.”
Well, that didn’t really jive with my theory that Emory was some sort of rich, sinister townie who was out to get me. I didn’t have much time to think about that though because the doctor came in to sew me up.
Maggie, the doctor, looked to be close to my mother’s age. She had lovely silver hair in a neat sweeping bob and she spoke in a soft calm voice. Her cool, delicate hands worked quickly sewing up the cut and she chatted with me, as doctors do, to distract me from the unpleasant business she was attending to. I think her demeanor had more of a healing effect on me than the pain medicine and ice packs combined.
When she was finished, Elliott helped me up and took note of all of the instructions about ice and pain and not getting the stitches wet for a day.
I put my hand out. “Thank you so much, doctor . . .”
She shook my hand. “Maggie. Everyone just calls me Maggie.”
Later that evening, after dinner, I was nursing my head as Logan scanned in all of the pictures from the shoebox. I said to Elliott, “I really liked Maggie. She was so nice. She kind of reminded me of my mom.”
He was reading something, distracted. “Yeah, she’s great.”
Logan cut in. “Maggie sewed you up?” Her mouth turned up on one side, smiling.
“Yes, how do you know her?”
“Everyone at the marina knows Maggie. She’s Emory’s wife.” Logan held up the picture she had just scanned to show me. It was Oliver, George, Nate, and Grant sitting in the bullpen at a baseball game. Oliver’s uniform was covered in dirt and Grant was rubbing som
ething into his glove.
“She is?” I was surprised. Maggie seemed so lovely. Why would she be married to Emory?
Logan was laughing now. “Yeah, and she sewed you up.”
“Why is that funny?”
“She’s a vet, Liv. Technically she’s a large animal vet.”
I looked over at Elliott. “You took me to a veterinarian?”
Elliott shrugged. “She sews everybody up. Whenever anyone needs stitches we always go to Maggie instead of driving all the way to the hospital. She doesn’t mind.”
Logan was laughing and calling me a large animal. I threw my half-melted ice pack at her.
I looked over to Elliott, trying to change the subject. “What are you reading?”
“The papers we got from the courthouse today. I forgot about it what with all of your dramatic falling and bleeding.”
I would never live this down. First the knee, then the shoulder, and now this.
Elliott showed Oliver’s death certificate to Logan. She said, “That’s weird that he drowned.” I was thinking the same thing. How does one “intentionally drown” anyway? Logan continued, “ ’Cause remember that thing Florence told us about Oliver having to save George from the river one time? Oliver was such a good swimmer. And he was in the navy in Vietnam, right? I mean here you are, this guy that loves the water, and you chose drowning as your way to kill yourself. It’s totally sad.”
I knew something had bothered me about Oliver having died by drowning and that was it. By all accounts he was such a good swimmer. He must have really wanted to die in the lake. In the place where he grew up. I looked out the window, into the night, at the black hole in the distance that marked the boundaries of the water, and I shivered. Why did he want to die so young? My mind kept flashing back to the pictures of Oliver after he returned from the war, and I could hear Buddy’s voice in my head saying, Oliver had a lot of scars.
I continued the thoughts in my head out loud. “Oliver must have been traumatized by the war. Actually, I think maybe he was in trouble even before the war, but that experience didn’t help.” I pointed to the folder. “Did you see the note on the outside of the coroner’s report folder? They questioned Johnnie Bryant at Rutledge Ridge about the death. I wonder if there was something suspicious about it.”
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