by Ninie Hammon
“We never did tell Melanie about this part, it was just our secret. But when Joy was with us, we made it a special point to let that child get grubby as she wanted to! We let her play in the dirt! In the mud! We’d let her wallow around on the ground, a wrestlin’ with the dog, or wade through the puddles on the way to the barn to pet the calves. We went out and bought a couple of changes of clothes—pants and t-shirts, socks and shoes—and soon as Melanie pulled out of the driveway to go to work, we’d change Joy’s clothes and let her have a good time.”
Mac chuckled. “Jonas, that’s a wonderful story! Why didn’t you ever tell Melanie and me about it?”
“Oh, it just never come up right to say it without it sounding like we didn’t think she was a good mama.”
Mac started to reach for the ignition key, assuming Jonas had had his say, strange as it was.
“I’m not finished,” Jonas said.
Mac settled back in the seat.
“About a hour before Melanie was supposed to come pick Joy up, we’d get her all cleaned back up again, of course. Fact is, sometimes she was so dirty, we had to hose her off ’fore we could even take her in the house! In the summertime, she used to love to run through the backyard sprinkler naked, and sometimes I’d chase her with the water hose, a’squirtin’ her. Then we’d give her a bath, wash her hair, put her back in whatever pretty little get-up Melanie had her dressed in, and she’d be sittin’ there neat as a pin when Melanie came through the door and give her a big hug.”
“Like I said, Jonas, that’s a wonderful story, or confession if that’s what you want to call it. Sparked, I’m sure, by Princess’s story about giving her little sister a bath in a washtub. But I don’t get your point? Why did you have to tell me this right now. What’s so urgent about it?”
“I told you the story so you’d know how I know what I’m about to tell you.”
“Which is?”
Jonas took a deep breath. “Which is that Joy has a shooting-star birthmark on her right butt cheek.”
“What?”
Jonas patiently repeated himself, speaking very slowly. “I said, Joy has a shooting-star birthmark on her right butt cheek. Exactly like the one Princess described. Maggie and I commented on it lots of times, only we thought it looked like fireworks. A red spot and a spray of red marks coming out from it.”
“I don’t understand what you’re—”
“You probably never seen it, Mac. You shipped out so soon after you adopted her. And knowin’ how shy Joy got when she was four or five years old, you didn’t likely see her in the bathtub by the time you got back.”
Mac suddenly felt like he was running through a knee-deep pond of molasses. He was struggling to get his mind around what Jonas was saying, but….
“Well … no, I didn’t. I mean, Joy was a very private little girl, kept the bathroom door locked so—” He stopped, his mind spinning. “Jonas, what’s your point? Or do you have a point, beyond the fact that Joy may have a birthmark similar to—?”
“Not similar, Mac. The same.”
“Okay, the same. So?”
“Didn’t you see it? You’ve been sittin’ across the table from that woman every day this week—couldn’t you tell?”
A wide hole opened up in Mac’s belly, like the one Princess described, the one she called fear.
“Tell what?” He gasped out the words because he could feel—he couldn’t see it yet, wouldn’t see it yet—but he could feel the answer coming. The way you have a sense of something hurling toward you in the dark.
“How much Princess and Joy favor each other.”
If Mac had been standing, he’d have staggered backward from the blow. As it was, he collapsed back against the car door, his eyes wide, a great roaring in his head.
That first day. The first time he ever saw Princess. She’d been facing the wall, and when she turned around toward him he’d been struck by how familiar she looked.
He couldn’t place it then. Or wouldn’t place it. Perhaps it was the scarred face and brown teeth that threw him off. But now it was undeniable. Joy was the image, a younger, red-haired version of Emily Prentiss.
He dragged in a ragged breath. After all, he’d always been good at spotting a family resemblance.
“Are you suggesting …?” He couldn’t finish the sentence. So many thoughts were flitting around in his head he couldn’t concentrate on any of them. “You don’t think Joy—?”
“Is Angel, Princess’s little sister?” Jonas finished for him. “Yeah, Mac. I do. The little sister she was supposed to have murdered.” Jonas paused for a beat. “And from the look on your face, you think so, too.”
No! His mind backed up from it, the way you instinctively draw your hand back when the dog you were about to pet snarls at you. No, it couldn’t be!
“Jonas, that’s insane. Why would Princess confess to a murder if she didn’t do it?”
“Ain’t that obvious? Not but one reason a person’d confess to murder. She owned up to killing that child because she believes she did.”
“Princess just thinks she killed Angel?”
“Mac, that woman’s dipstick don’t touch oil! Surely you can see that. She had a hallucination or something about killing her little sister, obviously really believes she done it. She’s loony.”
“You’ve only been around Princess for a little while, and I’ll grant you she was more psycho today than usual, but—“
“There ain’t no buts to it, Mac. She is psycho. We’re talking about a woman who lost two candy bars in a sealed cell on death row.”
Mac started to correct him. Tell him it was the Long Dark.
“And all that nutty talk ’bout a witch a’chasin’ Joy. A witch, Mac. She’s crazy. She’s spent the past fourteen years believin’ she murdered her little sister. If that ain’t crazy, what is?”
Mac couldn’t go there, wouldn’t go there.
“Jonas, you’re taking a little thing like a birthmark and some similarity … you’re not making good sense.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Mac. Good sense is exactly what I am makin’. You said she was arrested at a circus in Fisherville. That ain’t but about forty miles from your church in Seagram, Arkansas. I bet if you looked it up and compared the dates—when she was supposed to have killed that child and when you found a child in your church the same age, with the same birthmark and the same red hair—I’m bettin’ those dates’d match up snug as bookends. Shoot, Joy might even have mentioned Princess when she was little, and you just thought she was talkin’ ’bout some storybook character.”
“Okay … okay,” Mac stammered. “You’re sayin’ Princess left her little sister in my church, but she thinks she murdered her? So how’d she think up all that blood? She was covered in blood when they found her, and there was hair, her little sister’s hair on—”
“You reckon anybody bothered to make sure that blood didn’t come from Princess? That was 1949, Mac, in a little bitty Oklahoma town. Maybe Princess was hurt, in a car wreck, or had one of them seizures of hers and hit her head. Maybe that’s what caused the hallucination in the first place.”
Jonas sat back and shook his head. “I don’t have all the answers here, Mac. But I’m tellin’ you, if some woman all covered with blood come walking up to me and confessed that she’d just chopped somebody up with a ax—and that somebody was nowhere to be found—I don’t think I’d be out there checking to make sure her story lined up.”
“But the hair …?” Mac’s voice was shaking.
“I can’t explain it all. But just because I don’t understand exactly what did happen don’t mean it didn’t happen.” Jonas thought for a moment. “I figure Princess must have cut all Angel’s hair off for some reason. Joy’s hair was short as a boy’s when she was left in your church. Long as Princess said her little sister’s hair was, you cut it off, there’s gonna be hair all over everything.”
Mac couldn’t argue it. Couldn’t argue any of it right now. His mind was i
n a blender set for puree.
But it did fit. God help him, it did fit! A giant puzzle dumped out of a box onto a table and all the pieces fell into place. And even if they hadn’t, there was nothing, absolutely nothing that could explain away the uncanny resemblance between his beautiful red-haired daughter and the scar-faced woman who sat so profoundly still in a manila envelope room down the hall from the Long Dark.
And Princess knew it, too! Her instant fixation on Joy, her concern for Joy, her fear for Joy, the response she had to Joy’s pictures. Somewhere deep in the poor woman’s addled mind, she knew Joy was the beloved little sister she had lost.
“I understand all this is a shock, Mac,” Jonas said kindly. “I don’t blame you for being upset. But you see what I’m saying, don’t you?”
Mac didn’t speak, just stared straight ahead at nothing. A breeze kicked up and pushed fresh air with the smell of rain in it through the car. Mac’s heart was thudding in his chest to the rhythm of the chanting in front of the prison. People protesting the execution of Emily Gail Prentiss for the murder of her little sister fourteen years ago.
The final piece. Chink! Murder. Deep in his soul Mac knew—just like that lawyer of hers had known—that Princess could never have murdered anyone.
“You do see it, don’t you? Answer me, Mac.”
Mac stopped breathing. The whole world and everything in it stopped, too. There was a pause, a beat, before it all cranked up and started moving again. During that shrapnel-sharp fragment of time between one heartbeat and the next, everything shifted. After it, nothing in Mac McIntosh’s life was ever the same again.
“Yeah, Jonas.” The words tore holes in his throat when he said them. “Yeah, I see.”
Jonas let out a long breath. Then sucked in another one.
“I hate to be the caboose a’pushin’ the train, but there’s a lot at stake here. That poor woman is fixin’ to die. We don’t do somethin’ quick, she’s gonna get executed for killing somebody who ain’t dead.”
He stopped again, lowered his voice and said softly. “And there’s Joy to think about, too. She don’t even know she’s adopted. What’s all this gonna do to her?”
Another blow to the belly! Joy! What about Joy?
Mac groaned out loud. Jonas reached over and put his hand on Mac’s shoulder.
“Look, why don’t we just take this one step at a time?”
“Fine by me.” Mac felt giddy, drunk. “So what’s the first step?”
“I’d say we gotta verify that birthmark. Make sure I’m not just a old man with a bad memory.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Walk up to my sixteen-year-old daughter and ask her to drop her drawers so I can check out her butt cheek?”
Jonas laughed, a strained laugh but it was genuine. Mac even smiled a little.
“I’ve got a better idea. Maggie and me, we took pictures of little Joy a’playing in the mud, running in the sprinkler. I can’t imagine there’s not a shot of that birthmark in one of them pictures.”
“You’ve got pictures?”
“Whole roles of ’em—dozens and dozens. ’Course we never showed ’em to you and Mel, but we kept ’em. They’re in one of them boxes up in your attic.” He paused. “Somewhere in your attic.”
Chapter 19
Mac pulled his car in beside Jonas’s pickup truck in his driveway and the two men went into the house. Jonas called Guadalupe and asked about Maggie. Mac watched his face as he talked and knew things hadn’t gone well on the home front while Jonas was at the Iron House talking to … his granddaughter’s sister.
Mac and Melanie had spent hours wondering aloud about the child who’d been left marking up a hymnbook in the little church sanctuary. Did she have brothers and sisters? And what about her parents? What happened that they’d had to give her up, that they had no place for her? Now he knew the answers to those questions, at least some of them. Yes, Joy did have family, an older sister named Emily. Her mother had died bringing her into the world, so her older sister had had to raise her, loved her desperately, tried to do a good job, but she was just a child herself, an epileptic and … Okay, she was off in the head, too. And Mac believed Joy’s father had been killed in a car wreck, Princess’s version of what had happened to their father, not Jackson Prentiss’s. Now that he’d seen the man up close, he had no trouble at all believing Prentiss lied about Princess’s age, too, so she’d get the death penalty. The man was a monster in a human being suit.
It was absolutely horrifying that Jackson Prentiss had been Princess’s and Joy’s stepfather! It made him physically sick to think of the man anywhere near either one of them. He was profoundly grateful that Princess got her little sister away from Prentiss, gave her a home and a family.
Cold dread crawled into his belly, a lazy rat, and began to chew on his insides. How could he tell Joy all this? How could he tell her that the family she grew up in, the only family she’d ever known, wasn’t her family at all, that the mother whose death she was grieving wasn’t even the first mother she had lost? The poor kid’s mother dies, then she finds out the woman wasn’t really her mother in the first place, that—
Oh, Melanie, what have I done?
And what was he about to do?
Jonas hung up the phone, but sat with his hand on the receiver for a few seconds. Then he looked up at Mac.
“Maggie threw food all over Lupe,” he said, his voice flat and toneless. “Called her awful names and splattered her with ...” He couldn’t finish.
“I’m sorry, Jonas.”
“Now she’s just sittin’, though, wringin’ her hands and shakin’ her head and mumbling.” He offered a little smile, then it drained off his face. “How pitiful is that! When you’re thrilled your wife is sitting in a chair talkin’ nonsense.” He shook his head and stood up. “Never thought I’d see this day. You’re young and in love—this ain’t what you look forward to when you say you want to grow old together.”
“Jonas, I—”
“Never mind, I’m just babblin’ my own self. ’Fore long, it’ll all be over.”
Mac wasn’t sure what he meant by that. Before he could ask, there was a rumble of thunder and the wind brushed the bushes up against the living room windows.
“It’s stormed dang near ever’ day this week,” Jonas said, like he was glad to change the subject. “Lupe said she wasn’t busy, didn’t mind stayin’ the evening.” He looked at Mac. “Let’s get to it, son.”
Mac nodded.
“I’ll get the boxes out of the attic and bring them down here,” he said. “It’s too hot to go through them up there and the light’s not very good.”
“That’s a lot of boxes to haul down the stairs. I don’t have no idea which ones those old pictures are in.”
“We’ll just keep looking until we find them.”
Mac went upstairs to the hallway between Joy’s room and the bathroom. A door in the ceiling there concealed the fold-out stairs to the attic. He climbed up into the dusty darkness, waved his arm around above his head until he connected with the string that turned on the only light, a bare bulb suspended from the high-pitched roof.
All manner of the family’s flotsam and jetsam was assembled there, from old Christmas trees to ugly lamps and cast-off furniture. At one end were stacked eight to ten large cardboard boxes, way back in a corner with all manner of debris in front of them. They belonged to Jonas and Maggie, but had been moved to their daughter’s house five or six years ago after a persistent leak in their own attic threatened to damage their contents.
Mac picked up the one box he could get to, hauled it to the stairs, and maneuvered his way down with it. Jonas was waiting at the bottom to take it from him. Before he headed up the stairs to start digging his way back to the other boxes, he heard Joy come in the front door.
“Hey, sweetheart, I’m up here,” he called. She came to the bottom of the stairs and looked up at him.
“What are you and Grandpa doing up there?”
He stared down at her and didn’t answer. He was fixated on her face, wondering how he could possibly have missed the resemblance to Princess. It was haunting.
“Daddy? You’ve got the funniest look on your face. What are you staring at? Do I have a zit on my nose?” She turned to her grandfather. “Will you tell me what you guys are doing?”
“We’re looking for something your grandmother and I put in one of these boxes years ago,” he said.
Mac stammered, “Why don’t you go pick out a casserole and put it in the oven for dinner, Okay?”
“Okay.” She turned and disappeared.
Mac looked at Jonas.
“Yeah, I saw it,” Jonas said softly. “Don’t know why we need to find a picture. Her face alone ought to be proof enough.”
He picked up the box and carried it down to the living room while Mac went back up into the attic to start moving things around. Getting the platform rocker and the antique sewing machine out of the way was going to take some doing.
By the time Mac and Jonas finally had all the boxes sitting at the far end of the living room, the casserole was ready to come out of the oven. Joy set the table and they all sat down to dinner. Mac would later remember that meal as the strangest one of his entire life.
They talked, but it was skating-on-the-surface-of-reality conversation while three gigantic elephants sat in the middle of the room. Each of them was preoccupied with something they weren’t talking about; none was interested in anything the others had to say.
The storm hit halfway through dinner. Rain and wind pelted the house and the lights blinked on and off a couple of times. When the meal was over, Joy washed the dishes, Jonas dried them, and Mac put them away. Then Joy practically bolted up the stairs to her room, obviously grateful she’s been spared the “date alone with daddy” that had been planned for the evening. Within seconds, the voice of Neil Sedaka wailed, “They say that breaking up is hard to do. Now I know, I know that it’s true ...” from behind her closed door.
Something was wrong with her, all right. Mac wasn’t so dense that he missed that. But whatever it was, it could wait. It wasn’t a matter of life and death.
