Everything was still, and too quiet. Was this how it sounded when someone’s life was gone? I stopped, listening for any sound, anything that moved.
“Bertie!” I said softly, afraid to speak too loudly, though I wasn’t sure why. “Bertie, are you here?”
“Mrs. Jones?” Louella stepped into the kitchen. Her eyes were wide with fear. “Can you come back here? My mom is in the living room.”
“Louella, the police are outside. Do we need—”
“No. Harley came over because my mom told him to. She needed to talk to him, to say what she needed to say. We knew the cops would follow him here. I’ll get them soon. But she wants to talk to you first.” Her voice was filled with an emotion I couldn’t identify.
I followed her into the living room, still wary of nutmeg, but there was only the leftover smell of rotisserie chicken, green beans, potatoes boiled, then forgotten, on a back burner. It was a small, sad room, everything about it worn and tired. The walls, once white, had faded to the dull color of evaporated milk. A big-screen television, long broken, had been pushed into a corner and a smaller sat in front, a sign that nobody had the strength or energy to move either one. A coffee table, stained to look like mahogany, was in front of the couch, which was upholstered in yellow and green and spotted with tufts of cotton peeking through tears. A vase of plastic tulips, hot pink, was in the middle of the coffee table. Bertie’s gloves, the same color and covered with blood, lay beside the vase.
Bertie was on the couch, face grim, eyes filled with terror. Louella sat beside her, holding her hand. I sat on the other side. Bertie reached for my hand, and I squeezed it gently, letting her know I was on her side, whatever she said. I was here for her for all those times she’d been there for me.
“It’s my fault,” Louella said, her voice low and filled with anguish. “All of it is my fault. It is because of me and what I did.”
Bertie shook her head, a faint, halfhearted smile on her lips.
“I made my choices. I did what I did. I guess I just couldn’t take any of it anymore. None of it! It had to come out like it did.
“I never told you this, daughter, but my father was a batterer. You had a good daddy, I had a bad one. Maybe that was how it started, him beating me and my mother until we were bloody, me tucking that pain and fear away inside of me so deep I didn’t know it was there until it came out. Charlie brought it out.”
I recalled what she’d said about her father at that bar after the memorial. I hadn’t paid much attention then and I should have. She continued speaking, her tone gentle, a mother speaking to a child she loved, wanting her to understand.
“I knew what I had to do when you told me,” she began. “Then seeing how he was beating on Tanya, getting worse every day, like my father did on my mother, and then thinking about what he had done to you. All of them ruined you: Charlie, Dennis, even Harley in his own way.”
“I thought you went home, Mom, after our fight I thought—”
Bertie gently put her fingers on her daughter’s lips, silencing her. “I didn’t want to believe it. I went back to the office, sat there for a while. Got sick to my stomach. Went into that nasty bathroom just crying, then went back to the office. I was looking for Tanya. I wanted to talk to her. I heard him yelling at somebody, screaming like he was out of his mind. I sat there listening. I thought it might be Tanya, then maybe Dennis, because his laptop was still there. I sat there, thinking maybe I should go home. I didn’t know what to do. Seems like I always ended up doing nothing but feeling ashamed. I put on my coat, hat, and new gloves, all ready to leave, then changed my mind when the yelling stopped.”
She paused for a moment, as if remembering something she’d tried to forget, and then spoke in a tone filled with regret.
“There is something hard in me, Louella. You know that better than anyone.” Louella nodded that she did. I’d seen glimpses of it, too. “After being fired so close to retirement, after Ronald left me like he did, and all the rest of it. All the kindness in me was gone.”
“Like me, Mom? I was all the rest of it.”
“No, never you,” she said, but we all knew that wasn’t the truth.
“I went into his office. He was nasty as always, yelling at me in his ugly way, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he said, like I didn’t have a right to live. ‘What they hell are you doing here?’ after what he had done to my daughter, to me! He turned his back on me like I was nothing. I picked up that gun and shot him dead.”
Her words were casually spoken, emotionless. I wondered how I could have sat next to her for so many months and not sensed the rage she held inside. Her devil had been poked for years and none of us knew it.
“I realized Harley was the one he was yelling at, but I didn’t know he’d picked up the gun and left his prints on it till later; that was luck, I guess. I had to tell Harley I was sorry because I knew he didn’t do it. He needed to know the truth. He didn’t deserve to do time for something he didn’t do. I told him I was sorry when he came in here.
“But Dennis? He was beating up on Tanya, so it felt good to hit him hard with that bottle. I didn’t think there’d be so much blood, though, ruining my pretty pink gloves,” she said with the barest hint of a smile.
Louella’s eyes filled with horror at her mother’s words. Her gaze followed mine to the gloves on the table, then returned to her mother.
“You okay now, Mom?” she said quietly, like any child worried about her mother’s well-being. Bertie smiled, full and bright, showing just the glint of a gold tooth like she had so many times when she made me feel better.
“Yeah, baby. I’m just fine now,” she said.
Aunt Phoenix’s text about anger burning it all clean came back to me then. As usual, she got it right.
I left the two of them sitting together, Louella still holding her mother’s hands, Bertie rocking back and forth as if comforting herself. I stepped outside to get the police, who were puzzled, then surprised by my sudden appearance. Harley, locked in the squad car, nodded when he saw me, letting me know he was okay.
“Officers, the person who killed Charlie Risko and Dennis Lane is inside her house,” I said, my voice shaking so hard I wasn’t sure they understood me. They glanced at each other, and then at Harley. Hands on holstered guns, they followed me into Bertie’s place to hear what she had to say.
* * *
It took a while for things to get back to normal at Risko Realty. We’d been through two murders, a suicide, and shared a work space with a “nice” lady who shot one man in cold blood, bashed in another’s head with a bottle, and we’d never suspected a thing. Juda’s despair and Bertie’s quiet rage haunted us all; none of us had seen the depth of their sorrow. Tanya closed the place for a while because too much had happened. But after two weeks she opened it back up. She owed us, she said, because we were her family. We were Louella’s family, too, and each of us reached out to her in our own way. Like a family, we needed to heal together until we were strong enough to set out on our own.
And as it usually does, life eventually fell into place. Louella became a Realtor and joined the company. Vinton visited Atlantic City, stayed for a while, and had lost most of that gray glimmer by the time he returned. He told Tanya about Juda’s files and they burned them, which was good for them both. (I still harbored some doubts about Tanya, but for the time being tucked them in the back of my mind where they could do no harm.) The influential ladies of the Aging Readers Club (Harley’s angels in high places) kept their word—and faith—and continued to look out for him. As for me, I felt stronger, too, and was finally able to meet Lennox Royal for lunch.
“You know you were the key to solving all this,” he told me as we were finishing our shrimp in oyster sauce. “You were everybody’s best friend, everyone depended on you, from that kid Harley to enigmatic Tanya to that crazy murdering woman. You know what you are, Odessa Jones? You are the rainbow in everyone’s cloud,” he added with a grin.
I re
cognized the words as one of Aunt Phoenix’s favorite Maya Angelou sayings, twisted a bit to work for me. I thought about telling him, then decided not to. It is no small thing for a man to love the name Odessa and quote Maya Angelou even if he doesn’t know he’s done it.
“Thank you,” I said, and finished my jasmine tea.
Dessa’s Go-To Cake
I call this my “Go-To Cake” because I can bake it quickly, take it anywhere, and count on folks to ask for second and third helpings. It’s basically a pound cake with a down-home twist, also known as a 7-UP cake. That humble soda (Aunt Phoenix calls it “soda pop”) is a main ingredient. Truth is, any lemon and lime soda will do—but why take a chance?
Here’s what you need:
(First, take out the butter and eggs so they’re room temperature—it makes things go quickly!)
1½ cups softened unsalted butter
3 cups granulated white sugar
5 large eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (Don’t be cheap. Use real vanilla extract.)
1 teaspoon almond extract (If you like a lemony taste, use lemon extract instead of almond—or use all three if you dare.)
¾ cup 7-UP
Confectioner’s sugar for dusting, when the cake has cooled
1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.
2. Grease and lightly flour a 10-inch tube pan (or fancy Bundt pan) and set it aside.
3. In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well each time you add one. Add the flour and the extracts. Beat well. Gently fold in the 7-UP, ¼ cup at a time. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.
4. Bake for 1¼ to 1½ hours. You’ll know it’s done when you poke a toothpick into the cake and it comes out clean. Transfer the cake from the oven to a wire rack and let it cool for 15 minutes. Unmold it on the rack and let it cool completely, and then, and only then, dust it with as much confectioner’s sugar as your heart tells you to.
Photo courtesy of Paul Chinnery
Valerie Wilson Wesley is the bestselling author of the Tamara Hayle mysteries, which include When Death Comes Stealing and Dying in the Dark. Among her award-winning novels are Playing My Mother’s Blues, Always True to You in My Fashion, and Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do. She is also the author of the paranormal romances When the Night Whispers and The Moon Tells Secrets, written under the pen name Savanna Welles. A former executive editor of Essence magazine, she is married to noted screenwriter and playwright Richard Wesley and has two adult daughters.
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