The Devil Came Calling (Rolson McKane Mystery Book 2)

by T. Braddy

  She barked again. “I’m not talking about that. It’s like, I mean, your conscience. She and I, we had us some pretty good times, and it makes me nervous just thinking about them days. You sure you want in on it? You sure you want to be chucking rocks at this particular wasp nest?”

  I closed my eyes, thought about it for a second. “I sure do.”

  There was a lengthy pause on the other line.

  “Good,” she said, “because I want to hear what she was like before she turned into a monster.”

  The call went dead in my ear.

  * * *

  Mickey let me off the hook for the night so I could have dinner with Winston and his daughter. I also think he could tell I was going through something I didn’t quite know how to deal with, but he never mentioned it.

  “Whatever keeps you upright and clear-eyed,” Mickey said, just about every time I suggested I take some time off to work on my sobriety. “Guy who doesn’t drink working at a bar is rare as tits on a june bug.”

  Sneaking out a half-hour earlier than Mickey suggested gave me time enough to go for a brief run along the edge of River Street. My back held up all right, though I don’t think the full force of the injury had quite struck me yet.

  I got a weird existential pang when passing the one house, the two story place where I’d seen what I perceived to be a little girl’s face, but otherwise it was an insignificant run. I was way off my best time and walked a little more than usual, but I figured that had to do with being up all night.

  When I got back to the house, I came in through an open back door. I’d intentionally left it ajar since last night, hoping that Willie might make it back by himself, if he’d gotten scared off, but the darker edges of my imagination wouldn’t allow me positive thoughts. If these assholes were willing to run me down with a car, what were they capable of doing to an old, half-blind mutt?

  Still, no sign of Willie. I didn’t go looking for him again. Part of me was afraid of what I’d find. I showered and dressed and was on Winston’s doorstep in about thirty minutes. I knocked and waited, hearing someone bounding around on the other side of the door.

  “Who is it?” the voice on the other side called.

  “Johnny Mercer,” I said.

  The door, still chained, opened slightly. “I”m sorry,” the girl standing there said, “You’ve got to sing me the first bars of ‘Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home’ to be let in the house.”

  “Really?”

  “Them’s the rules, Mr. Mercer,” she replied. “Should be a cinch, since you wrote the song.”

  “Yaelis!” called the voice from somewhere inside the house. “Company.”

  Her eyes twinkled as she laughed and unlocked the chain, her face vanishing for just a moment before reappearing again. She threw the door open wide and wrapped her arms around me in a bear hug. “Come here, you old drunk, and give up the lovin’.”

  “Yaelis,” her father warned.

  She let go, and I winked once, and she went padding through the house to the kitchen.

  Winston was elbow deep in crab cakes, beads of perspiration forming at his temples from the exertion. He managed a faint, I’m-working-here kind of smile. “These damned things are going to kill me,” he said.

  The crab cakes evoked the fulsome essence of the sea, a scent extended by the grease splattering the countertops.

  “Cooking southern is a messy business,” I said, plopping down on a stool.

  “Tell me about it,” Winston said, stirring the vegetable medley sautéing in an adjacent pan. As he did this, his eighteen-year-old daughter snuck one of the finished cakes and secretly tore it in half, passing the larger portion to me.

  “You ready for a 5K yet, Rolson?” she asked, seating herself at the dinner table, where a whole backpack’s worth of textbooks lay spread out in front of her. “I’m thinking of doing a Halloween run with student council, and I figured that, hey, since you’re into getting yourself in peak condition, you might as well join us.”

  “And embarrass myself in front of you?”

  “Oh, that happens whenever you come around. Whomp whomp.”

  Winston flipped a crab cake. “I don’t know where she gets this blistering sense of humor,” he said. Acting put-upon, secretly loving every minute of it.

  “Oh, I see you talk to people when they slip up, and I can guarantee you we have the same genetic predisposition to sarcasm and asinine behavior.”

  “Language.”

  “Asinine isn’t a curse word, dad. Is it, Rolson?”

  “Got me.”

  “It comes from ass. Like, being an ass. A jackass, probably. But ass, nonetheless. Asinine. Like an ass. Dad, dad. I just said ass, like, six times.”

  “Say it again, and your ass will be grass–”

  “And you’re the lawn mower. I get it, I get it.”

  “So you do listen to me sometimes.”

  “Only when you say curse words.”

  “Well, then, in that case, maybe you should set the damn table.”

  “See?” she said, straining to hold back giggles, “blistering sense of humor.”

  But she did set the damn table, and we gorged ourselves on crab cakes with a butter sauce Winston said was a secret family recipe. “We call it ‘stone sauce,’ because what’s in it will turn your arteries into rocks.”

  Yaelis regaled us with tales of high school, which was so far removed from mine and Winston’s experiences, it seemed interesting. Recovering alcoholics, like golfers, only have one real topic of conversation, so it was nice to hear about something outside our combined realm of interest. Her singular performances included gossip no one but her and maybe the trot line of her social network cared about, but she spoke about it with such immediacy that we, as her audience, couldn’t help but cheer for her against the backstabbing monsters lurking the hallways of her high school. Her anecdotes sounded like something straight out of John Hughes – a reference that might have flown right by her, if she weren’t so smart and interested – and she basked in the attention.

  “This one girl, Rashonna, is so jealous that her boyfriend is crushing on me, she tries to piss me off by calling me ‘blackspanic’ to the other girls in her little circle. She says she don’t like me because I’m mixed, but it’s really because Hector wants to go out with me.”

  “Hector Trejo is a silly little cabron.”

  Yaelis laughed. “Dad, it doesn’t sound right coming out of your mouth. Mom would’ve died hearing you right now.”

  Winston smiled, hiding a deep crease of sadness lurking beneath the surface. He chewed his veggies. “She tried to teach me Spanish, but mostly I just learned how to listen to her. Then, at last, I could pick up on what she was telling my mother-in-law, your granny Rosalie, about our fights and disagreements.”

  Yaelis turned to me. “Granny Rosalia still lives in El Salvador. I want to go visit her this summer, after I graduate. She can’t come here to see me, so I’m going to fly down there and wear my cap and gown just for her. Her, and all the other relatives down there I haven’t seen since–”

  “Since you were about eight.”

  “So ten years. Whoa. And I don’t want to stop there. Mr. Rolson–”

  “Just Rolson,” I said.

  “Rolson–”

  “Mr. Rolson,” her father cut in.

  “Whatever. Mr. Rolson McKane” – she giggled – “My plan is to visit family in El Salvador and then work my way through South America to Brazil. I want to see every continent. That’s my ultimate goal.”

  “Even Antarctica?”

  “Even the snowy desolation that is Antarctica. I read up on that place. It’s one of the most uninhabitable places on earth, but people ran a marathon there. 26.2 miles. In the snow. For real.”

  Her father’s right eyebrow raised in bemused skepticism. “So you want to go visit a bunch of crazies.”

  Yaelis pointed her fork at him. Her father raised his hands in surrender, and she continued with her br
eathless daydreams. “I want to see the world, but first El Salvador. The family, they’re always posting updates on FaceBook and sending me pictures of the family from way back when, including old pictures of my mother. I should show them to you sometime.”

  “I’d love that,” I said.

  “Maybe after dinner? I mean, mom was super hot, so it’ll be, like, a total treat for you.”

  “Yaelis.”

  “Yes, dad.”

  “Table manners.”

  “Dad.”

  “Daughter.”

  “She was hot.”

  “Yes, she was. Now, finish your plate.”

  We had a pleasant dinner. I managed to lean back and observe their routine, the exasperated father and precocious daughter bit that doesn’t seem to get tiring when you’re part of it. The fact that they were likely doing it for my benefit gave it the extra oomph it needed to be gut-busting. Yaelis would say something off-color, much to her father’s chagrin, and he’d try to force her into some kind of approximation of politeness, but she’d undercut it with her wit and humor. Then, the cycle started all over again.

  I did end up going upstairs to see Yaelis’s collection of family pictures. Winston had to take a call from a guy in AA he sponsored, so he waved us off.

  Y’s mother was just as beautiful as she had implied: short and petite. Long, dark, curly hair and penetrating eyes. Big eyes. The kind of eyes I’m sure Winston got lost in when they started dating. Yaelis looked just like her, with a slightly darker complexion.

  “Dad doesn’t talk about her all too often, but I bring her up so he doesn’t let his emotions get stiff. I try to keep them stretched out, because it can’t be one of those things that turns into, you know, like a black hole or something. Like, I don’t want to feel like we can’t talk about her just because she’s gone. She may be dearly departed and all, but in her wake she’s left, I don’t know, a lighted trail behind, something that glows in my mind. Dad’s, too, if he would just let it.”

  I wished I could feel it, or experience it, that I could channel that extrasensory feeling for her to see that her mother was still around, not just a two-dimensional image to be plucked occasionally from a memory box.

  All of the pictures themselves had been stuck into her bureau’s mirror or push-pinned to the wall. I walked among them like an observer in a gallery, allowing the silence to dig in and take up space between us.

  “When she got diagnosed – he took it the hardest.”

  Her voice quavered, and she didn’t talk for a long time after that. I respected her pain, kept moving from picture to picture. She really had been a beautiful woman, and Yaelis took after her.

  After a while, she said, “He likes you, Mr. Rolson. A lot. He doesn’t have any friends. He’s got lots of people in the program who come by, lots of people who need something from him to keep sober and stay out of trouble, but I don’t think you need that from him, and that’s why he likes you so much. You keep to yourself, and you fight your addiction quietly. So, thank you. He needs somebody like you in his life, and it gives me hope he’ll get to be his own person again someday.”

  She got up and hugged me, and she didn’t say anything, but somehow I didn’t think this was about me, not really, so I just let her cry.

  * * *

  I trundled back downstairs, a little weak on my feet, and bellied up to Winston’s kitchen bar for a well-timed decaf.

  “The strong stuff gives my belly fits this time of night,” he said by way of apology.

  I drank the thick black muck in a kind of daze, staring down into my glass.

  “Yaelis, she puts on a good front about her mama,” I said.

  Winston was leaning against the sink, arms crossed, mug on the counter in front of him. He was giving me a knowing look, and it wasn’t a happy one.

  “She gets into them pictures, and it’s c’est la vie, call in the dogs. She’s a strong girl, but you put a real slice of reality up to her, and she can’t hang. It’s– she ain’t supposed to be able to hold up, you know?”

  “These things take time.”

  “She ain’t had nobody but us,” Winston said. “She talks about seeing relatives, but, man alive, that’s easier said than done. I want to help her, but Christ, I barely got enough in my wallet to make this house a home, let alone think about the broader world.”

  I swirled a spoon in my coffee for no reason at all. “She’s survived the worst part of it. Time and wounds and all that.”

  His smile was filled to bursting with melancholy. “I suppose the neap tide on her anguish was some years ago, but I can’t help but think about a book I read some years ago. The author, famous guy, said Paris was a place you could take with you, and, wherever you went, it was right there with you.”

  “Sure. A Moveable Feast.”

  “Yeah, well, grief is the same way. She isn’t the girl to let such things go, and wherever she is, that will be the seat of her grief.”

  “Sometimes the world bends you to its will,” I said, “and we all have to fit into the scheme, I reckon.”

  “Her mama getting sick was the twelve o’clock bell in the midnight of my life. I seen people get bad tidings, been on the receiving end myself. Beat a fit of cancer broke out on me some years back. But, whoo Lord, I wasn’t prepared for the day she got that news.”

  Winston scratched the back of his head, ran his hands over his face. His eyes glistened with coming tears. A quick, rusty throat-clearing on his part seemed to bring him back to normalcy.

  “How long was she sick?”

  “Oh, she went quickly, once the cancer got its hooks in her.” He took a sip of coffee, put the mug back. Stared at his hands as he continued. “Year, maybe. Could’ve been ten years, the way it felt. She, well, she fought the prognosis, which wasn’t good in the first place. She read every piece of literature she could get her hands on, tried nontraditional methods for curing it. All the hippie-dippie stuff, you know. She was grasping at anything could get her through it.”

  “But nothing seemed to work?”

  Winston shook his head. “She lost weight. They did a second surgery, to remove a second mass from her liver. And then, she...”

  He lowered his head, ran one hand across his eyes, held it there. Then he sniffed back whatever was trying to escape.

  When he spoke again, his voice was a few tones higher than normal. “She just wasted away. Nothing worked. Doctors didn’t know what the hell was wrong. They’d be telling you about these treatments, all the while you look in their eyes and see they don’t know what in God’s name is going on, either.”

  “How did Yaelis take all of it?”

  “Hard. But she was strong. Refused to leave her mother’s side, even when it got hard to look at her. There comes a time when the person you knew is gone, and this waxen sculpture of a being is all that lies before you. Once that happens, it’s difficult to feel anything at all. The emotional pain, it just wears you down so that you don’t even feel it, not really.”

  Winston straightened up, drank from his coffee. “Rolson,” he said, “I believe that’s all I feel like telling you tonight. Let’s talk about the blues instead.”

  I said, “I think that’s what we’ve been talking about all this time.”

  He smiled woefully and said, “Rolson, sometimes I wonder if you’re able to talk about anything else.”

  seventh chapter

  Two days gone, and no sign of Willie. I continued to leave the back door open, and for a few days, nothing bad happened. I let the feeling of loss about that goddamned dog linger, but every day, the brick holding the door open slid a little bit, and soon the door would close itself. Anyway, Vanessa was beginning to take up an increasing amount of headspace, so I was having trouble focusing on my lost stray.

  I had the meeting with Jess. She showed up at the coffee shop in another red outfit. Something told me it was her go-to color, and she looked like the human embodiment of sparks.

  From far away, at least. Onc
e she collapsed into the booth across from me, it was apparent she was fucked up. More than fucked up. Obliterated.

  Her eyes were heavy but dilated, and she smiled a smile unbefitting her overall appearance.

  “So, let’s get on with it,” she said, trying not to slur with a passion that she probably thought would make it convincing.

  I slid across a cup of coffee. “You’re twenty minutes late.”

  “I had some things to do,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend–”

  She made a sweeping gesture with one hand, as if to say I didn’t mean to get plastered. It just kind of happened. I was suddenly glad I hadn’t scheduled the meeting after my shift at the bar.

  She kind of stared, that slack-jawed junkie look settling into her face. I waited it out.

  Finally, she said, “Loads of people go to Richie’s to stay sober. I’m not one of those people.”

  I shrugged. “You get what you need by cranking out; that’s your business.”

  Her demeanor changed somewhat. “I mistook you for one of the holy roller double-As. You been sober a long time?”

  “Six months. Well, six months coming up. Next week.”

  “Congratulations.” The word sounded like it had been forced out through a deflating balloon. “You sure you don’t have something to say to me? Try to give me a pep talk?”

  “I know enough about getting fucked up to keep my mouth shut. It ain’t easy, and sobriety ain’t for everybody, though more people probably need it than seek it out. Then again, that’s true for most things.”

  She blew on her coffee, which wasn’t hot, and then took a measured sip. Her eyes rolled with ecstasy at first taste. “Caffeine,” she said. “I wish they could just inject it directly into my veins.”

  She drank her coffee. Took her time getting back to the conversation.

  “So,” she said, her fingers tapping the table, “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  She sighed. “That’ll take a while.”

  I shrugged.

  Her fingers stopped tapping the table. She glanced up with a look that sent my heart into tremors. She was a strung out, beautiful mess, and I hadn’t expected for the weight of my loneliness to hit me, but it did just then. I had to will myself to maintain focus. She said, “Can I go smoke first? I need a cigarette.”