Mama Stalks the Past

by Nora Deloach

  Mama was reading my mind again: She shot me one of those looks as she sat down. “What are you going to do with Hannah’s acres?” she asked Raven. Her eyes went to Moody, who looked increasingly miserable.

  Raven filled her mouth with a large portion of the turnip greens. She shook her head and pointed to her mouth. Mama, who looked earnest and concerned, waited. “I’m going to sell it,” Raven said, as she pushed her fork into the plate of greens again.

  I could have croaked. “Sell it?” I exclaimed, putting down my knife and fork and picking up my napkin. “I thought you’d want to keep it in the family.”

  Raven shook her head. “Me? No.” She filled her fork again. “I like money, the things money can buy. I’ve already got a buyer!” she said. We watched her chew, swallow, then gulp the third and final fork of greens. Her plate was empty again. I wondered if she was going to ask for more.

  But seconds later Raven’s greedy, determined expression became one of uncertainty. “Those greens … don’t seem to be agreeing with me … feel like I’ve got indigestion,” she mumbled. Beads of sweat were popping out on her forehead.

  Mama adjusted her glasses low on her nose. Her mouth formed a grudging line, like she was offended by Raven’s sudden illness and Raven’s claim that her sickness must have come from Mama’s cooking.

  Raven blew out a breath, then shoved her plate back. Her light skin turned ashen. She tried to get up from the table but stumbled back into her chair. Cliff shot a look at me, but nobody moved to help Raven, not even Moody. He just sat staring at her like he’d never seen her before and what he saw he didn’t much like.

  “Are you hurting?” Mama asked her, her voice calm.

  Raven made a funny noise, deep in her throat. A tear sprang from one of her eyes and trickled down her cheek.

  The air in the room suddenly seemed thick. Under the table, I placed my foot on top of Cliff’s and applied pressure. His expression didn’t change.

  Raven shivered, as though a current shot through her. Then she doubled over, clutching her stomach and moaning. Nobody moved.

  “I’ve poisoned you,” Mama told Raven serenely. “The same as you poisoned me.”

  Raven’s body was shaking. Mama looked sterner than I can ever remember seeing her. “I’ve given you a good dose of arsenic,” she said, coldly.

  Moody didn’t move, didn’t say a word. He stared at his mother.

  “Raven should be dead in a half hour!” Mama told us, folding her napkin and laying it neatly on the table beside her plate. “That is, if she doesn’t tell us why she killed Hannah and Nat and Trudy Paige, and why she tried to kill me!”

  Moody took a deep breath. The young man looked like his relief was as great as if he had been trudging along an ocean floor with billions of tons of water pressing down on him and had abruptly been transported to dry land, where only air weighed on his shoulders. He looked like he knew that he himself had finally escaped death.

  Raven’s dark eyes widened. “I didn’t …” she started to say when another pain hit her. She gasped. “For God’s sake, get me to the hospital!”

  Mama shook her head. She carefully smoothed her napkin. “That’s why you lured me to the hospital that night, isn’t it?” she told Raven. “You knew I’d get treatment right away, knew they’d get the poison out of me before I died of it. You needed me to live, so I’d give you that land, isn’t that right?”

  “No!” Raven hollered. Her eyes glittered like a sick animal’s.

  “I’m not as benevolent as you,” Mama continued. “You’ll be dead before I call the paramedics.”

  “Moody!” Raven screamed, appealing desperately to her son.

  Moody shook his head but didn’t look at his mother.

  “You are all murderers!” Raven gasped. “Killers …!” Another pain silenced her.

  Nobody moved.

  “Well, isn’t it nice,” Mama said serenely. “A dinner fit for a king. Or should I say a dinner fit for a killer?”

  Raven’s body shivered. The sweat poured from her skin. She gagged. Without hurrying, Mama went into the kitchen and came back with a foot tub, which had a small amount of water in it along with a dash of Lysol. She set the tub down in front of Raven.

  “I’m dizzy …” Raven complained.

  “You’re a nurse,” Mama told her. “You know the next thing is convulsions and then a coma.”

  Another tremor shook Raven’s body.

  “Okay,” she wheezed. “I admit to it!”

  “Admit to what?” Mama asked. “I did it!”

  “Did what?”

  “I … killed Hannah and Nat!” she cried.

  “And Candi?” Daddy asked.

  “I didn’t want to kill you,” Raven gasped. She looked pleadingly into Mama’s eyes. “I just wanted to scare you … into giving me the land.”

  Mama nodded. “I know that now. But surely you didn’t have to poison me to do that. You could have just asked. It was never really my land. I would have given it back to Nat. But you killed him, too.”

  Raven’s eyes widened. Her face was slick with sweat. “Get me to the hospital,” she pleaded, “before I die!”

  Sheriff Abe and Rick Martin entered Mama’s dining room. “You won’t die,” Mama told Raven as the sheriff started reading her her rights. “I didn’t put that much of the digitoxin that I got from Gertrude in my turnip greens!”

  In the silence that followed after the sheriff and Rick Martin led Raven to their patrol car, which was parked behind our house, Cliff cleared his throat. “Like I said before, I don’t know if any of what she just said under duress will hold up in a court of law.” He shook his head.

  “Now that we know she’s guilty, maybe we can find something more concrete,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what she did.” Moody’s voice was so faint we almost didn’t hear him.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  Sheriff Abe took Raven Wescot to Otis General Hospital. There her stomach was pumped. Then, the sheriff took her to jail. The next day he drove her to the State Penitentiary in Columbia. Moody Hamilton turned state’s witness against his mother; six months later, Raven was tried and found guilty of the murders of Hannah and Nat Mixon, Trudy and Mama’s attempted murder; the trial lasted all of three days.

  When it was over, she was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Moody was sentenced to five years’ probation for his role in the assault on Nat’s life.

  Mama prepared one of her feasts. The menu: chicken breasts with marmalade, a garden vegetable lasagna, baked potato salad, mustard greens, okra, rice, gravy, string beans, glazed carrots, and brown rice. Dessert: A pumpkin-pecan pound cake and a lemon cream pie.

  Will and Rodney came home to celebrate with Mama, Daddy, Cliff, and me. Sheriff Abe, Rick Martin, and Moody had been invited, too. So was Kilroy, who’d driven down from Atlanta for the event.

  The meal was well on its way when Rodney brought the table talk around to murder. “Mama, if I’m out of line asking you to tell us about the poisoning and how you got on to Raven, then excuse me. It’s just that I missed the trial, and there’s so many things I don’t know about what actually happened.”

  Will put his fork down for a moment. “Yeah, it’ll be helpful if you start from the beginning, Mama. You know, give us details.”

  Mama glanced around her table. Her gaze stuck on Moody briefly. Moody shifted in his chair.

  “I don’t know if Moody wants to hear us talk about it,” Mama told my brothers.

  Daddy did a neck roll, like he was trying to relieve tension. “I can’t think of what hasn’t been already said, what with the trial and all,” he said.

  Moody’s voice was so low we all had to lean forward to hear him. “It’s all right with me,” he told Mama. He shifted in his chair again.

  Mama sipped from her coffee. Then she said, “Moody, you are to be complimented. I know how hard this was for you. Without your testimony, the evidence against Raven wasn’t very s
trong.”

  “I know,” he murmured.

  Mama smiled and nodded. “You said at the trial that you only knew your Mama, Raven, a short time. How was that?” she asked.

  When Moody looked up, I changed my opinion of him. He wasn’t the sly, fluid man I’d made him out to be when I’d first met him in the club’s parking lot. This was a young man with a sense of innocence and compassion.

  “Raven left me with my grandma when I was a baby. As far back as I can remember, the only Mama I knew was Grandma,” he told my mother.

  “Talk is that your grandma was a good woman,” Mama said.

  I’d never seen Moody smile before. His smile lit up his whole face. “Grandma treated me good every day of her life!” he exclaimed.

  Daddy coughed. “You were good to her, too,” he said.

  “I did my best by her. I was all she had.” Moody hesitated. “At least that’s what I thought until Raven showed up!”

  Nobody spoke.

  “It was a real surprise when she came claiming to be my mother. Grandma had never mentioned her. Every time I’d asked about my Mama or Daddy, Grandma would say she was all the Mama and Daddy I needed. After a while, I started thinking they must be dead. When Raven told me that she was my mother and that she had a plan that would make us a lot of money, I was surprised. She told me she needed my help. She had met one of our kinfolk in the hospital where she was nursing. He was dying, she told me.”

  “Orlando Regional in Florida was where Reeves Mixon had last been seen,” Kilroy explained to us.

  “Raven told me that Reeves’s land had been stolen from him, and that after him, she was the rightful heir to the land since Grandma was Stella Gordon’s half-sister.” Moody shook his head. “Grandma never mentioned Stella Gordon to me. I had no idea that we were kin until Raven came.”

  “Your grandmother was an outside child,” Daddy said. “Sometime a person like that claim kin, sometime they don’t.”

  Moody glanced at Daddy, then looked away. You could see that knowing his grandmother had been born out of wedlock still made Moody uncomfortable. He shifted in his chair. “Raven told me that Reeves wanted his land to go to a Gordon before he died.”

  “But he never got his wish; he died before Raven had finished her work,” Mama said softly.

  Moody nodded. “The next thing I heard Miss Hannah was dead, had been poisoned. Raven went to the funeral, hung around with Nat, acting like she was a friend. I didn’t think too much about it.”

  Mama looked at the sheriff. “Abe, what made you decide to have an autopsy done on Hannah?” she asked.

  The sheriff put down his fork. He’d been feasting greedily on Mama’s garden vegetable lasagna, his favorite, but now he was working on dessert. “The undertaker’s assistant called me. I wasn’t too convinced. I know how these young people are, but I ordered the autopsy anyway. Then I stopped by Hannah’s house, where I found the receipt showing that she’d paid Calvin for some legal work. Calvin told me about the will, about Hannah’s land going to you.”

  “I was surprised you didn’t talk to me about it,” Mama said.

  The sheriff picked up his fork again. He was on his third piece of Mama’s pumpkin-pecan pound cake. “I ain’t never suspected you of doing anything wrong, if that’s what you mean,” he told Mama. “I just wanted to get information.”

  Mama smiled.

  Daddy had an annoyed look on his face. I decided to change the subject. “Why did Reeves write that letter? The one about Stella’s death?”

  “I guess he wanted Miss Hannah to know that he was going to get revenge,” Mama told me. “When Hannah got Reeves’s letter, she did what she thought was right. She willed the land to me so that Nat wouldn’t get killed for it. But Reeves died without knowing that.”

  “How did the note get behind the chimney in the old house?” Rick Martin asked.

  Mama cut him another slice of cake before she answered. “Hannah hid it there for me to find. I guess she didn’t want it in her house in case Nat stumbled across it and found out what she knew. She figured I’d go out to the old house right away, thought I’d want to look over the property I’d inherited. She didn’t figure on the wind knocking down some more bricks in that old chimney so that I almost didn’t find it.”

  “And Reeves, how did he get there to die?” Cliff asked.

  Moody coughed. “I didn’t mention this at the trial because nobody asked, but …”

  We waited. But when I glanced at Mama, I was certain she knew exactly what Moody was going to say.

  “The truth is,” Moody continued reluctantly, “Reeves died in Florida, in Raven’s house. She didn’t want to fool with burying him so she drove him home, here to Otis, then got me to help her take him out to the old house. She said the wild animals would eat him. She said nobody would ever find him.”

  I shivered, remembering the sad, bloated body in the decaying house.

  “That woman is mean, ain’t she?” Rodney murmured. My brother Will, whose mouth was full of lemon cream pie, nodded.

  “After Miss Hannah died, I wanted to warn Nat to watch out ’cause Raven was after him.”

  I snapped my fingers. “That night we saw you go to Nat’s front door!”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t want to believe that Raven had done anything to old Miss Hannah, so I turned around and went back home. When I asked Raven about Miss Hannah’s death, she admitted to it. She told me that since I’d helped her handle Reeves’s dead body, I’d just as well go all the way and help her kill Nat since I was a part of what she had already done!”

  “So you waited for him in the dark that night?” I asked.

  Moody’s narrow face looked regretful. “When Nat came home, he was drunk. I hit him two times with that hammer, but then I smelled his blood and I couldn’t hit him again!”

  I made a point of making eye contact with Moody. “Nat told us that the person who hit him smelled funny. What was he talking about?”

  Moody turned his head slightly. He shuddered. “Chloroform. Raven used it on Miss Hannah to knock her out before she injected the arsenic. That night, she tried to put a rag soaked in chloroform over Nat’s mouth, but he fought so hard, she couldn’t do it. Like I said, after the second blow, I just dropped that hammer and ran. Raven figured I hadn’t killed Nat, so she picked up the hammer, hit him again, then followed me.” He shivered again. “After that night, I told her that I couldn’t help her anymore. Killing people ain’t my nature.”

  Cliff cocked his head in Moody’s direction. “How did she poison Nat when all those people were around him in the Melody Bar?”

  “I was in the club at the time. Nat was pretty drunk, he was spending money, buying drinks for everybody. I saw Raven slip inside, saw her stand next to him, then slip back through the crowd. A few minutes later, he fell to the floor.”

  Mama frowned. “I can only imagine her fury when she discovered that after those two killings, she couldn’t get the land after all.”

  “Raven really wanted to kill you, Miss Candi,” Moody said. “But she decided the only way for her to get the land was to pretend to be trying to kill you so that you’d be scared into giving it to Hannah’s kin. She was sure that sooner or later, you’d track her and give the property to her.”

  For a moment, nobody spoke.

  Moody sighed. “I hadn’t seen Raven since Nat died. She must have slipped in and out of town. But then she came to my house. She was so happy. You’d finally found her, she told me. Calvin Stokes had contacted her.”

  “So you don’t know when she hooked up with Trudy Paige?” Mama asked.

  Everybody at the table stared in Mama’s direction but it was Sheriff Abe who spoke. “When the hunters stumbled upon Trudy’s body we found a note in her pocket. She had been offered a hundred and fifty dollars to play a trick on Candi,” he told us. “A black bird was drawn as a signature on the note, the same bird we found on the note in Trudy’s wallet.”

  Mama frowned. “That trick she
got paid for was to lure me to the café and then back to the hospital.”

  The sheriff nodded. “SLED’s forensic verified that Raven was with Trudy when she died,” he said. “That evidence is what the prosecutor used to convince the jury that Raven murdered Trudy, too.”

  Daddy leaned back in his chair and raised his arms, lacing his fingers so his hands were resting across the top of his head. “That land didn’t mean anything to Raven, but it meant everything to poor Reeves. I reckon when Raven told him that she was his mother’s niece, the poor boy thought if she had it, it would once again be in the Gordon family, where it belonged.”

  “You don’t think Reeves knew that Raven was going to sell the land, do you?” Cliff asked.

  “Heavens, no,” Mama replied.

  “What a trap you set for Raven,” I told Mama. “I liked the way you didn’t put much food on the table. It took all I could do not to ask for more.”

  “How did you know she’d come here for dinner?” Will asked. “I think if I was a poisoner, I would have been too scared to eat anybody else’s food.”

  Mama laughed. “First, I knew that Raven had no idea I was on to her. And I knew she wanted that land bad enough to kill three times for it. To make sure she’d come, though, I told Calvin to make it clear that her coming to my house for the meal was an important part of me giving her the land. It was the best way to ensure that she’d show up,” Mama said.

  “She was glad for the invitation,” Moody said.

  “Fortunately, Raven had a good appetite,” Mama said.

  “Everybody knows what a good cook you are, Miss Candi,” Moody said. “I told Raven it was a privilege to sit at your table.”

  When everybody at the table enthusiastically agreed, Mama smiled. These were the kind of compliments that pleased her.

  “Mama, what are you going to do with that land now?” Rodney asked. “It does belong to you.”

  Mama crossed her arms under her bosom. “I’m giving it to Moody here,” she said, her eyes resting thoughtfully on him. “It’s Gordon land. His grandma was a Gordon. It’s rightfully his.”

  To everybody’s surprise, however, Moody disagreed. “I don’t want it,” he said quickly and too loudly. “It’s tainted. I don’t want no tainted land!”