by Ninie Hammon
Mac had planned the script so Princess would have to write some of the same words that were in the note she’d left in the church: “Got no plase for her so plees giv her a gud hom.”
“It doesn’t matter how the words are spelled,” he said. “Just write this down: ‘Please’ …”
She wrote “Plees.”
He gave the rest of the words to her one at a time: “give Reverend McIntosh my body to take home. He’s got a good place to bury it. Emily Prentiss.” That construction provided eight words—please, place, give, to, home, a, got and good—that were also in the original note. He spelled “Reverend McIntosh” for her, but let her struggle with the other words. When she finally finished, she shoved the pen and notepad back across the table at him with an exhausted sigh.
“Whew! I’d forgot how hard writin’ is. Will that do?”
Mac stared down at what she had written. Then he handed it wordlessly to Jonas. The old man didn’t even bother to take out his glasses to examine it. He didn’t need to.
Though the pen strokes were awkward from lack of practice, the backward-slanted letters were unmistakable. The misspellings were identical. You didn’t have to be a handwriting analyst to see that the same person had written both the note Jonas was holding and the one in Mac’s pocket.
He took the pad of paper back from Jonas and sat looking at Princess. He didn’t know where to begin, how to tell her the good news that her sister was alive! And she wasn’t going to die.
“You got the funniest look on your face,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. In fact, everything’s …”
His voice trailed off. Then, because he didn’t know what else to do, he just reached into his pocket and pulled out the sealed-in-plastic visitor’s card. He placed it on the table beside what Princess had just written and scooted them both back across the table toward her.
“Princess, this is going to be really hard to explain. But please, just hear me out.” He tapped the visitor’s card and then the page she had written in his notebook. “You can see for yourself. It’s obvious. The same person wrote both of these. And the person who wrote this one,” he pointed to the visitor’s card, “left her fingerprints on it, too. And they’re still there.”
She gawked at the plastic-wrapped card with wide, shocked eyes. Her gaze leapt to his face, then back down to the card. She suddenly sucked in a gasp, buried her head in her hands, and started to cry.
Mac looked a question at Jonas, who shrugged. This wasn’t how either one expected the discussion to begin.
“Princess, stop crying and listen to me. I know you don’t understand, you don’t know—”
“I understand all right!” she gasped, her voice thick and tear-clotted. “It’s you don’t understand.”
She cried hard, wrenching, heaving sobs. Mac tried repeatedly to get through to her, but she was too caught up in emotion to respond. Finally, he shouted at her.
“Princess!”
She stopped in mid-sob.
“Princess, look at me.”
She lifted her head; tears streamed down her scarred face and dripped off her chin.
“I know you think you killed your little sister. But you didn’t. She’s alive. She’s—“
“Of course she’s alive! I know that. But please don’t tell nobody!”
Mac stopped breathing, looked up and saw Jonas was as stunned and slack-jawed as he was.
“What did you say?”
“Why’d you do this? Why’d you but in now, when it’s almost—”
“Princess, I’m trying to save your life! You confessed to a murder you didn’t commit. And you’re about to be executed.”
“I didn’t ask you to save my life. You got to leave this be. You can’t tell nobody!”
“Of course, I’m going to tell—”
“No! “ she wailed. “You can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll ruin everything! I worked so hard for all these years ...” She shook her head and started to cry again, sobbing out, “You don’t understand.”
Mac sat back, stupefied. His ears were ringing, the way they’d buzzed deep inside when mortar shells had been exploding all around him in Pong Min Jong. He could barely hear Jonas’ voice when he spoke.
“Miss Prentiss, you keep on sayin’ we don’t understand and you’re da-gone right about that! You got to help us out here. You got to tell us what in the Sam Hill is goin’ on.”
Princess struggled to stop crying. She dragged in a sniffling breath and let it out in a slow, hiccupping stream. She took another breath and another.
“Okay,” she finally whispered. “I’ll tell. But the two of you—” She looked pointedly at Mac and then Jonas. “You’re the onliest people on earth I ever told. And you got to promise me—”
“I’m not going to promise anything,” Mac said. “Just tell me!” He realized he was practically shouting again. “I’m sorry. Look, I … just start at the beginning, when you ran away, and tell us what happened.”
Princess reached up and wiped the tears off her cheeks, but her eyes still brimmed with unshed ones threatening to spill down her face.
Then she spoke, her husky voice ragged.
“It was the night I give Angel a bath, the time I told you and Mr. Cunningham about—and that was it, wasn’t it?” She looked at Jonas. “Soon’s I told about that birthmark, you wrinkled up your brow and I wanted to cut my tongue out. It’s just I ain’t used to doing that, having a conversation and knowing what not to say.”
“You didn’t do nothing wrong,” Jonas said.
“Talk to us,” Mac said.
Her lip quivered and when she pressed her lips tight together she blinked and splashed more tears onto her cheeks. She ignored them and took a deep, shaky breath. “All right. It was the night I got soap in Angel’s eyes and she cried and cried.”
Chapter 23
Joy grabbed her books and bolted out of American history class so fast she almost knocked down the teacher, a doddering old man whose memory was failing him. Just before class let out, the students had managed to convince him that he’d never assigned the homework he wanted them to turn in.
She hurried down the hall, not meeting anyone’s eyes, rushing to get out of the building before Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee got out of their last class, home economics, down by the gym. She didn’t have the time or the emotional energy to talk to her friends right now.
How could she stand there watching Beth blush when a cute boy said “hi” to her in the hall?
Or worse—listen to Shirley gush about what a “dreamboat” the President was, giggling that he and Jackie must still “do it” because she was pregnant. The First Lady was going to have a baby and the whole world was celebrating.
Well, nobody was celebrating Joy’s pregnancy. It was so not a cause for celebration that Joy was about to … ?
To what?
Kill her baby.
The words formed in her head as clear as a church bell on a cold morning. Joy literally staggered from the force of them, ducked into the girl’s bathroom by the auditorium door and stood trembling in one of the stalls, sucking in great gasps of air to keep from being sick.
She hadn’t let herself go there, had tackled any rebel thought, grabbed it by the scruff of the neck, stuffed it down into a trunk in a dark corridor of her mind, and then sat on the lid.
But there it was, right in front of her. Reality. She was about to drive out to a creepy house in the country where a filthy old woman was going to—
No! It’s not a baby! It’s just … cells, a glob of cells, that’s all!
You couldn’t kill something that wasn’t alive. It wasn’t human, a person. Not yet. It was just … potential life. An it. A thing that she had to get rid of or her life would be totally ruined. Facing her friends, the members of her church, her father pregnant was totally unthinkable. She would do absolutely anything to keep that from happening.
Det
ermination calmed her. She would be strong. She had to be. There was only one way out. And once it was over, she could pick up her life where she’d left it and go on. Everything would be fine tomorrow. She just had to manage somehow to get through today.
She’d worn a skirt, a black one with a can-can slip, and she’d stopped by the drugstore on her way to school that morning and bought a whole box of Kotex. She’d done everything the woman had instructed her to do—except find someone to drive her home. As she pulled the big white car out of the school parking lot and headed toward Route 79, she actually prayed, the first time she’d prayed in … since her mother died.
“God, please … What will I do if that woman turns me away? Please help me!”
But she didn’t really believe God would help her do what she was about to do. She was on her own.
As Joy drove south from town on Route 79, she took no notice of the ugly black storm clouds building in the sky ahead. Her hair was always encased in an Aqua Net Hair Spray suit of armor to maintain her Annette Funicello flip; on particularly windy days, she wore a headscarf. But she wasn’t even thinking about her hair now. The day had turned off unseasonably hot and muggy and she rolled Mr. Wilson’s window down and let the wind blow in her face. Her hair broke free of the hair spray’s hold on it and danced around, tickling her nose. She took deep breaths of warm air that smelled of rain and tried to wipe her mind completely clean, to blot out everything, to think no thought of any kind.
Into that emptiness, images formed, pale and dreamlike.
She is riding in a car at night, bouncing on the seat as wind blows her hair into her face. She is laughing and the woman driving the car laughs with her. But the woman is not her mother. It’s someone she’s never seen before, but who looks eerily familiar.
Though indistinct and blurred, the images seemed remarkably real. But when she concentrated, tried to get a better look at them, they dissolved, disappeared, puffs of smoke from the red embers of a dying fire.
By the time she pulled up in front of the house where honeysuckle trellises entombed the porch, she had a speech all mapped out in her head, knew exactly what she would say when the woman wanted to know who was going to drive her home. She’d tell the woman … Joy suddenly realized she didn’t even know the woman’s name, didn’t know what to call her.
What difference did it make what her name was? It’s not like they were going to exchange Christmas cards.
She sat for a few minutes, her fingers gripping the steering wheel so tight her knuckles were white, trying to control her breathing and stop her heart from pounding. She could feel every beat of it in the big vein in her neck. But she couldn’t calm down and decided it didn’t matter anyway. So she got out of the car, crossed the dirt yard, and stepped up onto the splintered boards of the porch. She didn’t even have to knock. The woman opened the door before she had a chance and looked anxiously out over Joy’s shoulder toward Mr. Wilson parked just outside the yard.
“You didn’t bring anybody with you, did you?” she wanted to know. “Somebody to drive you home? You said you didn’t have anybody, isn’t that right?”
Joy launched into her speech.
“No, and I know you said I had to, but I couldn’t find—”
The woman cut her off.
“It’s all right,” she said, and seemed to relax. She turned and fixed her eyes on Joy for the first time. When she spoke again, her voice was hollow-sounding. “I’m going to put you to sleep and then everything will be fine. You won’t need anybody to drive you home.”
Joy was puzzled, but so relieved that she wasn’t going to be turned away, she didn’t dare ask any questions.
The woman made no move to let her into the house, just stood there, like she was dazed. Her face was so distorted Joy couldn’t read the look on it. The moment drew out until Joy finally remembered the money. She reached into her pocket and took out the envelope that contained the $100 she had withdrawn from her savings account yesterday.
“Here’s the rest of the money, the final payment.”
The woman took the envelop and tossed it carelessly onto a table by the door, then stepped back and gestured for Joy to come in.
“My name’s Wanda,” she said. “And I’m going to take very good care of you, just like your mama would want me to. In a little while, it will all be over. Over and done with. Forever.”
Joy stepped into the house and the woman closed the door behind her.
* * * * *
When Princess finished her account, she sat with her hands folded on the table in front of her. She was swaddled in stillness, but power and intensity throbbed beneath it, a hand grenade wrapped in a silk handkerchief.
Jonas was the first one to find his voice.
“How old was you, Missy, when all this happened?”
“When they arrested me, I just had turned fifteen years old. Jackson lied, told ’em I was seventeen, so I’d be tried as a adult. They couldn’t give me the death penalty less’n I’s a grownup.”
Silence again.
“Why?” Mac asked tenderly. “Why’d you do it, Princess?”
She looked down at her hands folded on the table, then spoke one word with a thousand shades of loathing.
“Jackson.”
The hair on the back of Mac’s neck began to stand up. She still wouldn’t look at him or Jonas, just stared at her hands. She pulled in a deep breath and held it. After a heartbeat of silence, her siren’s voice spoke words crafted from razor blades and jagged glass. Words you couldn’t even get near or they’d slice you open all the way to the bone.
“Angel ain’t my little sister. She’s my daughter. Mine … and Jackson’s.”
Mac couldn’t breathe. Every speck of air had been sucked out of the room by the nightmare horror, bald and almost smoking, a truth so unthinkable it lay beyond the drapes and furnishings of his simple, ordinary life.
Princess was Joy’s mother?
And Jackson Prentiss was Joy’s father!
“I’m sorry Rev. I know it’s hard to hear a thing like that. But you asked to know the whole of it, and there it is.”
Jonas was struggling, too. His face had turned gray and he was mumbling, “ … red hair. That fella did have red hair.”
“Jackson told on the stand how Mama died havin’ Angel, said that’s why she was so precious to him—’cause his wife give her own life for her little girl. Made the jury feel so sorry for him.” Princess lifted her head and Mac fell back from the rage and loathing in her eyes. “Well, Mama never done no such a thing! She died of a fever, and ’fore she was even cold in the ground, Jackson up and says I got to marry him. He always had looked at me funny, made my skin crawl, but I never thought … Shoot, it was just a couple of weeks after my birthday; I’s only thirteen.”
Thirteen years old!
“I said no, said I wasn’t gonna do it! And he tore into me somethin’ fierce. Come up side my head with a piece of firewood and I liked to a-died my own self. That’s when I started havin’ them fits, after he beat me that time.”
Mac was filled with an inarticulate, maniacal rage so powerful it swept every other emotion out of his soul. For the first time in his life he knew without doubt that he could strangle the life out of another human being with his bare hands.
“One of the elders in the church performed the ceremony, said it was legal in Arkansas and maybe it was.” She made a humph sound in her throat. “Guess Jackson finally come to his senses though, thought better of marryin’ a little girl when I got … in a family way. He yanked me out of school and wouldn’t let me set foot outside the house so’s nobody’d see. Made me tell people Angel was my little sister, that he’d ’dopted us. Wouldn’t let her call me Mommy, neither. She’s the one turned Emily Prentiss into ‘Printhess.’”
She sat back in the chair then and her eyes stared at a distant nothing.
“That shack we lived in didn’t have no runnin’ water and I had Angel there one day while Jackson was at work
in the sawmill. I was just a kid myself, didn’t have no idea what was happenin’ to me or what to do. It’s a miracle of God either one of us lived through it.
“Jackson come in that night, musta heard the baby crying outside. All he said to me was, ‘It a boy or a girl?’ When I told him it was a girl, he said we’d call her Angela, after his mother. I figured he could call her whatever he wanted; I’d already give her a name. ’Cause from the very first moment I held that squirmin’ little’un in my arms, bloody and white stuff all over her, I knew who she was. She was a Angel.”
Princess described how Jackson had gone back outside to the well and drawn a bucket of water. He brought it back to the house and warmed some up so Princess could clean herself and the baby while he scrubbed up the mess of the birth. He heated up a can beans for supper and brought Princess a plate while she lay in the bed with the baby.
“The next day, it was back to normal. He never paid no attention a’tall to that child. Oh, he got drunk and brought her home this lacy, white, store-bought dress one Christmas, but lots of times we didn’t have no food to eat and I had to go a-beggin’ from the coloreds at the bottom of the hill. He went back to … messin’ with me, just like he always done, but right after Angel was born was when I got that stuff on my face, my chest and my back, them awful bumps. Jackson hated that, said it made him sick, that I’s so ugly it made him want to puke when he looked at me.”
Jonas spoke softly, the venom in his words as poisonous as a snake bite. “Somebody ought to of put a shotgun barrel down that man’s pants and blown his privates out the back side of his long johns.”
Princess actually smiled.
“I didn’t care that he acted like Angel wasn’t there. That just meant she was mine, all mine.” She looked sunshine out her eyes at Mac and Jonas. “I don’t have words fine enough to say what a gift she was to me, how my heart filled up to burstin’ ever day with lovin’ her. Ever’ breath I took, I took for her; ever’ thought was ’bout my Angel. She was everything good and beautiful and holy in the whole world, all wrapped up in a little girl with red curls.”
