Waking Up Dead

by Margo Bond Collins

  “You can just move right back in here with me, Ashara Jones,” Maw-Maw said.

  “No, Maw-Maw, I can’t.”

  “So what do you propose to do to keep Howard away from you?”

  “He didn’t seem too anxious to find me yesterday,” Ashara said. “You said he was on his ass on the couch watching Court TV.”

  “Well. Yeah,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean that he didn’t go by the bank at some point. He knows where you work, Ashara. And by now he probably knows where you live, too. It’s not like I’ve been following him around twenty-four/seven, shorting out computers all over town. He’s certainly looked it up by now.”

  “But he’s not going to do anything while I’m actually in the bank.” Ashara shook her head. “I have to go to work. That’s it. No more discussion.” She drained her cup and went to the kitchen. I could hear her rinsing it out in the sink.

  “Isn’t Stephen supposed to call you once he’s finished talking to Rick McClatchey this morning?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “So how can you possibly take that call if you’re at work?”

  “I’ll keep my cell on vibrate. I am allowed to take breaks, you know.”

  I sighed. “At least wait for Stephen to get back to town so he can follow you home after work?”

  Ashara nodded. “I can do that.”

  “And promise not to leave the bank at all today until then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “I’m going to ride to work with you to make sure you get there safely.”

  “Yeah?” said Ashara. “And what are you going to do if something happens?”

  “Rush back here and have Miss Adelaide call 911.”

  “Oh. That’s actually not a bad plan,” Ashara said. “Okay, then. Let’s go.”

  We were both quiet on the way to the bank until Ashara said, “I have another reason for going in today.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I wrote down the serial number of that bill you and Stephen got yesterday. I’m going to make some calls during my lunch hour and see if I can find out whether or not it really was the one stolen from that bank in Atlanta.”

  “Really? You can do that?”

  She shrugged. “I can try.”

  We made it to the bank without incident.

  Maw-Maw and I spent the rest of the day watching Law and Order re-runs on television. At one point, she waved her hand at the screen. “See? What did I tell you? Private citizens don’t need no warrant.”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “They clearly don’t.”

  It was strangely relaxing, spending the day with Maw-Maw. She didn’t make any demands, didn’t ask any awkward questions.

  It was a peaceful day.

  If I’d known how long it was going to be before I had another day that peaceful, I would have savored it a bit more.

  I got Maw-Maw to call Ashara at noon.

  “Anything yet?” Maw-Maw asked. I leaned my head in close to hers in order to listen in on the conversation.

  “Not yet,” she said. “I’ll call you as soon as I hear from him.”

  She finally called us at three. “Stephen’s back in town,” she said. “He’s meeting me here and then we’ll come over there. I don’t know what he found out--he said he wants to wait until we’re all together so he only has to tell it once.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said into the receiver Maw-Maw was holding. “I can’t believe you didn’t make him tell you. That’s crazy-making.”

  Ashara laughed. “I tried, but he wasn’t having none of it. So we’ll see you in a couple of hours.

  Stephen followed Ashara home from work that afternoon. We think now that that was probably when Howard started putting everything together--he either followed them then or later that day and figured out that the guy he’d helped change a tire was connected to the pretty black girl he’d been following. Or rather, we think he started putting together almost everything, anyway. He couldn’t have known about the whole dead chick watching him kill Molly, working on getting his ass thrown in jail, searching his house, and such business.

  But of course, we had no idea Howard was on to us, so we just went on with our plans.

  Maw-Maw and I had spent much of the afternoon speculating on what Stephen had found out from Rick. But nothing we came up with--none of it very plausible, to be honest--even came close to what he announced after we’d all gotten settled in Maw-Maw’s living room.

  “Are y’all ready for this?” he asked, pausing dramatically.

  “Tell!” Ashara demanded.

  “Rick McClatchey’s wife, Molly McClatchey. . . .” he paused again, looking around the room at each of us.

  “Enough already. Quit with the drama and just tell us,” I said.

  Stephen grinned. “Her maiden name? Mary Ellen Powell.”

  We all gasped.

  “As in James Powell?” I asked.

  “As in,” Stephen said, nodding. “Daughter of James Powell and Gloria Lee Powell of Alabama.”

  “Damn,” Ashara said, on a long exhale.

  “Ashara,” Maw-Maw warned.

  “I’m just saying what we’re all thinking, Maw-Maw,” Ashara said.

  “She’s right, Miss Adelaide,” I said. “This is the connection we’ve been looking for.”

  “Still doesn’t tell us how Clifford Howard got involved,” Maw-Maw said.

  “You know what? I’ve actually got some ideas on that,” I said. “But I’ll need some help from Ashara and Stephen on the research end. I think we can probably start with the internet, but it might take a little more than that. Maybe a trip to Atlanta?”

  Ashara and Stephen nodded. Maw-Maw rubbed her hands together with glee. “And if you’re going to Atlanta,” she said to me, “you can’t go without me.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Miss Adelaide,” I said, smiling.

  * * * *

  We stopped by Ashara’s place for her to pick up some new clothes; she said if she was going to keep working, she needed more than the three outfits she kept at Maw-Maw’s. Stephen tried to argue with her--he said that he wore pretty much the same three outfits to work every week--but I had to agree with Ashara. Men, we explained, could get away with that more than women could. And even these extraordinary circumstances couldn’t change that fact.

  So we stopped in front of her house and they went inside, Stephen leading the way after she’d unlocked the door--just to check things out, he said.

  I stayed outside, drifting around the perimeter of the house and keeping watch. Only one car drove by the whole time, and it wasn’t Howard’s SUV.

  After a while, though, I got bored. They seemed to be taking an awfully long time to just “grab a few clothes.” So I stuck my head in through the door and called out.

  “What are you two doing? Hurry it up!”

  I heard a strange scuffle in one of the bedrooms. “Nothing,” Ashara called out.

  My eyes narrowed. If they had chosen this time for a make-out session, I might have to kill them. See how they liked being the dead ones, for a change.

  I slid into the house and followed Ashara’s voice. They were indeed sitting on a bed, but they had a laptop in front of them.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I demanded. “We need to get out of here before Howard shows up and kills you both.” I shook my head in disgust. “What was so important that you had to deal with it here?”

  I moved around behind them so that I could see the screen. Ashara closed the computer.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Ashara said again. Her voice cracked.

  “Liar,” I said. “You two are acting like I caught you looking at porn or something. What gives?”

  Stephen sighed. “You might as well show her,” he said.

  “You think so?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  She flipped up the screen.

  It was an article from the Dallas Morning N
ews.

  About my murder.

  “You two looked me up?” I asked incredulously.

  “Well,” said Ashara, “yeah. We were . . . you know. Curious.”

  “Great,” I said. “You risk your lives to look me up on the internet.” I shook my head. “Come on. Get your clothes and let’s get out of here. You can look me up again over at Stephen’s if you want to.”

  Back in the car, though, I couldn’t contain my own curiosity. “So what did the article say about me?” I asked.

  They seemed reluctant to answer.

  “I was there, you know,” I said. “You’re not going to tell me anything I don’t already know.”

  Ashara took a deep breath. “It said you were found murdered and . . .”

  “And raped,” I said in my most matter-of-fact voice. “I assumed they’d figure out that part.”

  “Does that not bother you?” Ashara asked in a small voice.

  “It bothers the hell out of me,” I said. “Did you find out anything about the guy who did it?”

  Stephen shook his head. “It said you were his second victim. There have been two others since then.”

  I stared at them for a long, silent moment.

  “You mean that son of a bitch is still out there raping and killing women?” I asked, my voice harsh and dry sounding. It wasn’t really a question. I never felt so powerless in my life. Fine. Afterlife.

  “Yeah.” Ashara’s voice was a soft whisper.

  “And I’m stuck in fucking Alabama trying to get some schmuck who killed one woman put away.” I slammed my hand into the back seat of the car--rather ineffectively, since my hand slid through the leather and into the seat, halfway up to my elbow.

  “You’re doing good here,” Stephen said. I’m sure he was trying to make me feel better.

  “And who the hell is out there doing good for all those women in Dallas?” If I’d been alive, tears would have welled up in my eyes. As it was, my mouth just tightened as I stared out the window.

  “You don’t know,” Ashara said. “Maybe some other ghost is out there trying to solve your murder.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “Maybe Molly McClatchey and I traded places.”

  “You never know,” Stephen said. “Stranger things have happened.” He paused for a minute. “Actually, I take that back. I’m not sure stranger things have happened. But it’s not totally out of the question, given your own presence here.”

  We pulled up into the parking lot of Stephen’s apartment building.

  I sighed. “Well, in the end, I am here, and nothing seems likely to change that anytime soon. So we might as well keep working on this murder. Maybe we can go figure my murder out when we’re done with this one.”

  Neither Stephen nor Ashara answered me. I either didn’t sound very convincing, or they didn’t know what to say to the angry dead chick in the back seat.

  * * * *

  “So what are we looking for?” Stephen asked as he dragged an extra chair over to the computer so that both he and Ashara could sit. I hovered behind them, leaning forward slightly so I could see.

  “I want to know who James Powell’s father was. The James who was named after Jimmy Powell the bank robber.”

  “You think we can find that information?” Ashara asked.

  “I don’t know if we can find it online, but we might be able to find it in Atlanta. Still, I think checking the internet is worth a try.”

  “Do you think the father’s name would even be recorded?” Stephen asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I know that if I were the one to get pregnant, I’d want to make sure the deadbeat dad who helped get me there was in the records somewhere.”

  “I don’t know,” Ashara said. “The forties were a different time.”

  “But people don’t change all that much,” I said.

  Stephen was already typing search terms into Google.

  “This may take a while,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got nowhere else to be.”

  “Me, either,” Stephen said. “Work’s been slow lately, what with the boss in jail and possibly headed to prison and all.”

  “But I do have to go to work tomorrow,” Ashara said.

  “If you get tired, you can just crash here,” Stephen said.

  I’ll just bet she can, I thought. But I kept the thought to myself.

  As Stephen narrowed the search and began scanning through websites, I turned to Ashara. “So did you find out anything about the bill?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I sure did. It definitely came from the Atlanta robbery. And I also found out that the bills were discontinued in the thirties. So those bills were already old when Jimmy Powell and the Howard brothers stole them.”

  “That seems kind of odd,” I said. “If they were discontinued almost twenty years before the robbery, wouldn’t they have been kind of rare?”

  Ashara shrugged. “Maybe not. Remember, this wasn’t all that long after the Depression. People who had lost money in the market crash were probably unwilling to trust banks for a long time. There were some people who had probably stashed away their cash--under mattresses, in iceboxes, in jars buried in the ground.”

  “But probably not in the oven,” I muttered, thinking about my search of Jeffrey McClatchey’s house.

  “What?” Ashara asked, her brow wrinkling in confusion.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I guess you had to be there.”

  She shook her head again and turned back to the computer and Stephen.

  “Find anything?” she asked.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve been searching the genealogy sites and have found seven James Powells born in Georgia within the right time frame. I’m giving it a three-year window, just in case Miss Adelaide was wrong about the exact year this all happened.”

  “But no clue about which one is our James Powell?”

  He shook his head. “No. If I’d thought to ask, Rick might have been able to tell me.” He shrugged. “Then again, maybe not, he was pretty upset about what Miss Adelaide said to him about his brother.”

  “What did she say?” Ashara asked.

  “I’d forgotten you weren’t there,” I said. We repeated to her what Maw-Maw had told Rick McClatchey about his brother.

  Ashara closed her eyes and shook her head. “She’s right, of course, but sometimes that woman don’t have a lick of diplomacy.”

  “You sounded exactly like her just then,” Stephen said, grinning.

  “Yeah, I know. I suffer from the same problem,” Ashara said.

  Stephen printed out a list of James Powells and their respective birth dates and places. “Okay,” he said. “It looks like it’s going to be a trip to Atlanta tomorrow to see if we can find these birth records.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Ashara. “Try just looking up ‘Georgia birth records’.”

  We waited for a minute while Stephen scrolled through a page.

  “Cool!” he said. “We could order them online.” He started typing information into the computer, then stopped.

  “Wait,” he said. “Okay. Listen to this. Under the ‘Birth Certificates’ heading, it says this: ‘Georgia law and Department Regulation limits access to these documents to the person named and parents shown on the birth records, and the authorized legal guardian or agent, grandparent, adult child, or spouse.’ Does that mean we’re not allowed to see them?”

  Ashara and I both leaned in closer to read the text.

  “I think so,” I said. “That’s really weird. Especially if you’re looking for a birth certificate that’s at least sixty years old.”

  Stephen leaned his elbow onto the desk and rested his chin in his hand. He started tapping his chin with his forefinger.

  “If we can’t find the records there,” he began, “then maybe . . .”

  “. . . They’re at Molly McClatchey’s,” I finished for him.

  Ashara nodded. “Makes sense. It is her grandmother we�
�re talking about, after all.”

  “Unless the family tried to hide from her father that he was really the younger Mary’s son,” I said.

  Stephen shrugged. “We won’t know until we try,” he said.

  “So, shall we go?” I asked.

  “Now?” Ashara’s eyes grew round.

  “I can’t think of a better time,” I said. “It’s dark, so no one will see us. No one is watching the place. It’s the perfect time.”

  “Or it’s just possible that you’re wrong,” Ashara said. “It’s dark, so anyone who does see us is going to know we’re up to no good.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Anyone who sees us going into Rick McClatchey’s house at any time is going to wonder what we’re up to. This is the biggest news story to hit this town in years. If we get caught, we’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.” I paused for a moment. “Or at least, you are. They won’t know I’m there.”

  “Then why don’t you just go look?” Ashara said.

  “Because I can’t move things very easily. And paperwork like that is going to be filed away. I need someone with a real body to come with me.”

  “Now, girls, don’t fight,” Stephen said.

  Ashara and I both whirled on him. “Don’t call us girls,” we said in unison. Then we looked at each other and burst into laughter.

  “So we’re breaking into Rick McClatchey’s house tonight?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” said Ashara.

  “Women,” said Stephen, shaking his head. “I’ll never really understand them, will I?”

  “Nope,” Ashara and I replied in unison.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Stephen pulled in and parked one street behind McClatchey’s house. The sun had set and darkness settled in over the town. “We’ll be able to cut through between the houses and get in through his back yard, which has a big wooden fence around it, less chance of being seen that way.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  He gave me a “don’t-be-stupid” look. “Because the man was my boss,” he said in a too-patient voice. “He threw barbeques at his place every summer. I’ve been to his house before.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Stephen rolled his eyes at me.