“Let me get a washcloth,” said the aide and raised the bed up from its position near the floor before stepping into the bathroom.
Sorrow welled up within me as Jay-Jay put one arm around his tearful sister and, with his other hand, smoothed back his mother’s tousled hair. I linked my arm through Daddy’s and was leaning against his shoulder when I noticed that one of the pillows had fallen on the floor under the bed. I stooped to retrieve it and a cold chill ran through me as my brain tried to make sense of what I was seeing on the pillow’s underside.
A small patch of bright red.
“Where’d that come from?” asked the aide. She looked at my aunt’s lifeless form, bewildered. “I left her with two pillows under her head. No way could Miss Rachel pull one out and throw it on the floor. And where’s her pillow slip?”
“Somebody go get Dwight,” I said and stopped her before she could wipe the blood from Aunt Rachel’s nose.
“Dwight?” asked Sally, bewildered.
“Noses don’t break by theirselves,” Daddy said grimly. “Somebody put that pillow on her face and mashed down real hard, so yeah, we need Dwight up here right now.”
*High Country Fall
CHAPTER
5
No one is so old that he does not expect to live a year longer.
— Cicero
As soon as he saw the blood-spotted pillow in my hands and took in the situation, Dwight phoned for reinforcements, then asked Daddy and my cousins to wait downstairs. I laid the pillow on the bed and started to follow, but he held me back and closed the door to the hall. “You okay, shug?”
I nodded even though there was a lump of grief in my throat that I couldn’t quite swallow. “This is so weird, Dwight. We knew she was dying, and if she’d gone like we expected, we’d be sad, but we’d also be feeling a bit of relief that it was finally over. But to go like this? To be smothered so hard it broke her nose?” I tried to blink away the sudden tears that blurred his face.
He took me in his arms and gently stroked my hair. “I know, shug. I know.”
He didn’t rush me, but when I was able to talk again, he said, “What went on here today, Deb’rah?”
I understood his need to switch from husband to lawman, and I tried to match his professionalism, but it was hard with Aunt Rachel lying there so still and silent, her bright blue eyes forever closed.
“They say she started talking a little before noon and she was still talking when I got here after work,” I said. “She talked till she was hoarse. Not to us. She didn’t know we were here. She thought she was a girl again and that Jacob had just drowned. She used names I’ve never heard and it was like one name would call up another. She switched from Jacob and Jed to when Jay-Jay was born and then back to the twins again.”
Dwight’s been a virtual member of our family since before I was born, so he knows most of our family stories and I didn’t have to explain who Jacob and Jed were.
“She finally went to sleep about thirty or forty minutes ago, then Aunt Sister accidentally spilled a drink on the bed so we all cleared out of her room and went downstairs while the aide changed the linens. You got here about ten minutes after that.”
“Everybody left?”
“I think so. I didn’t count heads but I’m pretty sure nobody stayed behind. The aide—I think her name is Lois—she can tell you.”
There was a tap on the door, and as one of his deputies poked his head in, Dwight gave me a quick hug and asked me to go wait with the others.
As I walked downstairs, I passed a tearful Lois, who was being escorted up by one of Dwight’s officers.
By eight o’clock, I was getting antsy about Cal. When I called Dwight’s mother to let her know what was happening, Miss Emily assured me it would be no trouble for him to stay overnight, but Wednesday was a school day for them both. She’s told the school board that she’ll finally be retiring in June, and even though they had already announced that my brother Zach would succeed her as principal, I knew she was trying to get through a lot of work so as not to hand him any unfinished business.
At that point, only a few of us remained in the family waiting room. The church women had packed up their casseroles and jugs of tea and left after giving Sally and Jay-Jay their sympathies. Jay-Jay is divorced, with no one to go home to, and he’d told Sally’s husband that he’d see she got home safely.
Aunt Sister was physically and emotionally exhausted and her daughter tried to take her home, but she wouldn’t leave. Seth and Minnie were still there, too, because they had driven Daddy over from the farm and he didn’t want to go till he’d heard whatever Dwight could tell us. I told them he could ride back with me, but Seth, who’s five brothers up from me, said, “Naw, honey. We’ll sit a while longer.”
“We’re fine,” Minnie said, and went back to texting on her phone.
All our phones kept chirping as those who had left earlier heard the bad news and called to see what was going on. When you have eleven older brothers, it doesn’t take long for all the dots in the family network to connect. Barely an hour since Aunt Rachel died and both brothers out in California had already checked in.
“Sounds like a bunch of spring peepers in here,” Daddy said sourly. He doesn’t hold with landline phones all that much and he certainly doesn’t see the point of walking around with a phone in his pocket.
Out of respect, we either turned ours off completely or put them on vibrate, except for Minnie, whose thumbs kept flying across the screen. She and Seth are the hub of our family and our first go-to in times of crisis, but this seemed a lot of traffic, even for her.
Jay-Jay put his phone in his pocket. “Did you get all the stuff she was saying, Sal?”
Sally stuck out one thin but still shapely leg and smoothed down the turquoise leggings, which had bunched up below her knee. “Some of it. The burned babies? That was Jannie Mayer and her little girls.”
“Such a horrible thing,” said Aunt Sister. “You reckon thinking about Jacob called up Jannie?”
“Who’s Jannie?” I asked.
“You must’ve heard about that,” said Sally. “Richard Howell’s sister? Their parents were killed in a car wreck when they were teenagers, and their grandmother finished raising them. Jannie was married and Richard was in med school when she died so the house sat empty for a year or two till Jannie’s husband left her with two baby girls. She had to move back to that old tumbledown house where she could live for free.”
“So the Richard she kept talking to was Dr. Howell?” I asked.
Sally nodded. “He was in his first year of residency when the house burned with his sister Jannie and her two babies in it.”
“Now I remember,” said Aunt Sister. “He never quit blaming himself, did he?”
“Not his fault,” Sally said. “You heard Mama. The house was a tinderbox, but Jannie had no place else to go after her husband left her without a penny to even buy fuel oil instead of that old woodstove.”
“Rachel said they thought a log fell out of that heater in the kitchen,” said Daddy, “and it went up like a Roman candle. Pure lightwood.”
“And Rachel had to stand there a-watching it burn,” said Aunt Sister, “knowing they was inside and there won’t a blessed thing she could do.”
“Mama was the one who had to call and tell Richard,” said Jay-Jay. “The only good part, if you can call it good, is that they found the baby in her cradle and Jannie and the other baby in bed, like they’d laid down for a nap, so they probably died from smoke inhalation and never knew the house was on fire.”
“Jay-Jay and me, we were coming home on the school bus that day,” Sally said. “It was winter and we could see the black smoke rising way above the trees. I knew it was either our house or Jannie’s or Miss Kitty’s. I felt guilty for years.”
“You?” I said. “Why?”
“Because I knew Mama had already bought our Christmas presents and I was going to get a twin sweater set and some black satin sheet
s I’d been wanting. So I was glad it wasn’t our house till I heard about Jannie and those babies. And of course, Richard blamed himself ’cause he was away doing his residency and not there to save them. I got over it. Got over those satin sheets, too, about the third time I slid out of bed. But he never did, did he?”
“You always did have outlandish tastes,” Aunt Sister said. “Whoever heard of giving a sixteen-year-old girl black satin sheets?”
I had to smile at Aunt Sister’s predictable comments even as I now remembered hearing my mother read aloud the story that was rehashed in the Dobbs Register when Dr. Howell funded the Jannie Howell Mayer Memorial Burn Unit for our hospital back when I was a teenager. Mother approved of civic-minded citizens who gave back to their communities, and now I realized why he was visiting Aunt Rachel this afternoon even though he wasn’t her doctor. Out on a back-country farm road, he would have known her, and she and his grandmother would surely have been friends.
Jay-Jay wasn’t distracted by satin sheets. “But the way Mama kept talking about the twins?” He leaned back heavily in the chair and his belly strained against his khaki pants. He was as plump as Sally was skinny and that extra layer gave him a face that was almost as wrinkle free as hers. He rolled down the sleeves of his blue checked shirt and buttoned the cuffs. “I just don’t get it. She almost never talked about them when we were growing up, did she, Sal?”
“Not really.” Sally frowned as she tried to remember. Like Jay-Jay, like her mother, like most of the rest of us, her eyes were the same forget-me-not blue as Jay-Jay’s shirt. “I mean, it’s not like it was a forbidden subject or something we weren’t supposed to mention. She’d look a little sad whenever it came up, but now that I think about it, she never brought it up or talked much about that day itself—who was there or how it happened.”
“And I never saw her cry or carry on about them like she did today,” said Jay-Jay. “She always warned us to watch out for each other if we wanted to go swimming, but she never stopped us from going.”
Sally smoothed the short straight bangs of her purple wig and turned to Daddy and Aunt Sister. “What really happened, Uncle Kezzie? How could Jacob have drowned in a place where he must have been swimming his whole life? And why would Jedidiah run away like that?”
“I won’t there,” Daddy said gruffly, and I realized he never talked much about them either. “I was down in the woods that day and didn’t get back there till atter they’d pulled him out of the creek.”
Seth gave me a discreet wink. Daddy didn’t have to say what sort of work took him to the woods back then. We could guess.
He seldom alluded to those years after his father died when he was actively making moonshine himself, dodging patrol cars and delivering untaxed white whiskey to local shot houses as a way of providing for his mother and his siblings. Later, after he was married to his first wife, his mother dead and his sisters married, after the baby boys started coming and there was a little more money, he would supply the equipment, the sugar, and the grain for a much larger operation. He hired others to make it for him and they hired men to haul trunkloads of full half-gallon Mason jars all up and down the eastern seaboard. He was never arrested for running a still, but he did do eighteen months in a federal prison for income tax evasion when the feds tied him to a little crossroads store that bought a lot more sugar than he could prove that the store sold.
My mother’s father was a prominent attorney in Dobbs, and when he grudgingly accepted that she was determined to marry a bootlegging ex-con come hell or high water, he somehow managed to get Daddy’s prison record expunged as his wedding present.
“Them boys was supposed to be suckering tobacco that day, not larking in the creek,” he said.
“Jed stuck with the suckering,” Aunt Sister said sharply. “You know he did, Kezzie. I was right out there in the field with him. It won’t his fault what happened to Jacob.”
“Wish you could’ve made Jed know that,” Daddy said. “I sure couldn’t.”
Before we could get back on that carousel of questions that might never be answered, Dwight finally came downstairs from Aunt Rachel’s room.
“Dr. Singh’s already examined her,” he told us, speaking to Sally and Jay-Jay.
Our current medical examiner is a pathologist and keeps an office there at the hospital.
“As we thought, she was smothered with that pillow. It’s her blood. If it’s any help, he says that it would have been so quick that in her condition, she couldn’t have suffered more than a few seconds. There’s so little blood, her heart couldn’t have beat more than a time or two, and if she was unconscious instead of just sleeping…”
Sally nodded numbly.
“Was there anything special about her pillow case?”
“Pillow case?”
“The aide said one’s missing. She says she put a fresh one on that pillow and now it’s gone. She also swears there was no blood on that pillow when she changed it.”
Sally frowned. “Was it linen? With a lacy edging? I brought four of them over when she came to hospice. Mama never had many fancy things but she took a liking to linen a few years back. Remember, Jay-Jay?”
“Five hundred dollars for a set of bed sheets? Damn right, I remember.”
“We went in with Dad and bought them for her sixty-fifth birthday,” Sally said. “Then she went out and bought another set of matching pillow cases because they both slept on two pillows. She just loved the way linen got so silky feeling when it’s ironed, the way it felt against her face. I thought it would comfort her to have them here. Why would somebody steal one?”
Even Aunt Sister, who clearly categorized linen sheets with black satin, had no answer for that.
“Anybody have a grudge against her?” Dwight asked.
The question was meant for my cousins, but we all shook our heads automatically.
“Who inherits?”
Jay-Jay gave an exasperated snort. “Inherits? This is Mama, Dwight, not Doris Duke. What the heck did she have for anybody to inherit? Most of what they got for the farm went to the hospital when Dad got sick. There might be a few thousand left after we pay all of Mama’s bills, but it’ll take that to get the house fixed up good enough to sell.”
Sally glared at Dwight. “And before you start thinking Jay-Jay and me are ready to sail off to the Caribbean—”
He held up his hands to stop her attack. “Whoa, Sally. I don’t think that either of you could do that to your mother.” He gave a placating smile. “Besides, everyone says you two came downstairs here and didn’t leave, but what about the aide?”
“Lois? You thinking Lois—?” Sally shook her head. “Never in this world, Dwight.”
“She had the most opportunity and I’m hearing that y’all left her alone in the room with Miss Rachel right before it happened.”
“She’s been alone with Mama off and on for the last two months,” Sally said. “If she was going to hurt her, why would she wait till so many people were here?”
“To maybe spread suspicion around?”
“Never!”
“Then who else was here this evening who’d have a reason to do this?” Dwight asked. “And don’t tell me nobody, because that pillow didn’t wind up pressed against her face all by itself.”
He looked at each of us in turn and then sighed. “Okay. We do it the hard way.”
He turned to Mayleen Richards, one of his deputies who had joined us. “Get as many of the names as they can remember.”
Practical-minded Minnie reached out and touched his sleeve. “I’ve already got the kids working on it, Dwight. They were all taking pictures and videos on their cell phones and they’ll forward those to you with a list of all the names they know as soon as you tell me where.”
I should have realized.
“God bless technology,” Dwight said.
CHAPTER
6
Nor was he great only in public and in the eyes of the community; but he was even more e
xcellent in private and domestic life.
— Cicero
Aunt Rachel was buried Friday morning next to Uncle Brack at Bethany, his family church down near Makely, amid his Morton kinfolks. Even though her death was officially declared a homicide, Dr. Singh had decided that the state could dispense with an autopsy. Not just because Aunt Rachel was Dwight’s aunt by marriage but because, in his experienced opinion as both a doctor and the county’s medical examiner, the immediate cause of death was a pillow held forcibly over her nose until she quit breathing.
Had it not been for those few drops of blood—“Sheer carelessness,” he’d said disapprovingly—her death would have gone down as a long-expected and natural ending.
“Who the hell kills a dying woman?” he’d asked angrily. “And how stupid was it to think no one would notice that pillow under her bed?”
He and Dwight had hypothesized that the killer must have acted on the spur of the moment and in such haste that he was too afraid of being seen to risk taking the pillow away.
(“Or she,” said my cynical mental pragmatist as he listened to them speculate.)
“Maybe he thought that no one would see it till after Aunt Rachel was moved and the bed was being stripped,” I said. “The pillow case could go out in a purse or pocket but by the time the pillow was found, a little blood in a hospital room might not have seemed important.”
“I doubt if he was thinking that far ahead,” said Dr. Singh, pausing to shake hands with Dr. Howell, Aunt Rachel’s one-time neighbor, as he was opening the door of the car parked a few feet on the other side of ours. It was a mid-range Toyota and not the Cadillac or Porsche most successful doctors of his age usually drove.
Between private practice and shrewd investments, Richard Howell could have retired to some tropical island by the time he was my age. Instead, he continued to head the burn unit at the hospital and was one of Dobbs’s most generous benefactors. In addition to the hospital wing and a state-of-the-art burn unit, he had established a couple of scholarships for physician assistants at Colleton Community College in memory of his nieces. He’s had just about every civic honor that could be bestowed on someone not in public office and had been Dobbs’s “Citizen of the Year” twice. His name is mentioned in the local papers almost every month. Gray haired, with slightly rounded shoulders and rimless half-glasses that kept slipping down his thin nose, he was now hailed by an elderly couple who had approached from the other side. I remembered that they had been in Aunt Rachel’s room, too. They moved with the careful attention the very old give to their fragile bodies.
Designated Daughters Page 4
