Hush My Mouth

by Cathy Pickens

  “The dudes who suggested we film there sure didn’t tell us about that.”

  “No way we wanted to disturb anybody.”

  “Or have the police come threaten us,” Trini spoke up. “Said they’d arrest us. For trespassing and for vandalism.”

  She’d taken the warning to heart, that was obvious.

  “Who suggested you film in the graveyard?” Melvin asked.

  Colin shrugged. “Dunno his name. Tall dude, mullet. And one of his buddies. Stopped us on Main Street. Word’s out about our project.” He nodded, his spiky hair waving with pride.

  Coughing really isn’t a good way to disguise a laugh. I tried anyway. Melvin gave me a stern glance, one that said, Don’t get me started.

  “Do you have any usable footage so far?” Melvin asked.

  The three faces told the tale.

  “No. Nothing yet.”

  “Except the freaky lady dressed all in black,” Trini said. “With the air horn.”

  “We got good leads, though,” Colin said, preferring to look ahead to success rather than behind.

  “Going to Moody Springs tonight,” Quint said. “Like you suggested.”

  I started to warn them away from Moody Springs, given that Neanna’s body had been found at the overlook not far from the springs, the same overlook reputedly used by the ghostly hitchhiker. Moody Springs was a little distance from the overlook, though, and I didn’t want to encourage them by mentioning the recent death, fearing what the possibility of fresh ectoplasm might urge them to do. I didn’t want Neanna’s death to become a curiosity.

  Melvin nodded, his look solemn—the only way he could avoid trying a fake cough of his own. “I should explain how difficult it is to get funding for movie or television investment. My clients, for example, would consider it too risky.”

  Crestfallen expressions replaced optimism on the three faces.

  “Filmmakers often have to provide start-up funding on their own. I know that’s not easy to hear, but you’ve already found a way to start, and that’s better than most with your dream do. Lots of artists start the way you are starting. You may find funding is easier to obtain when you have something to show an investor, something to establish your credentials.”

  Their forlorn expressions softened.

  “Street cred,” Quint said.

  “Starve for your art, man,” Colin said, grasping the vision. “Gotta believe in it before anybody else will.” He nodded, first to Quint, then Trini, who nodded in return. The optimism was spreading.

  “Well, thanks for your help.” Colin stood. “Gotta go get set up for tonight while it’s still light. Scout locations, plan shots.”

  The three waved good-bye and loped out, pulling the door shut behind them.

  I stayed in my seat, giving Melvin a mischievous smile. “Good fatherly advice there. Too bad they didn’t quite hear it.”

  “Hear what?”

  “You telling them to go home.”

  “They have to figure that out for themselves. Thought I’d at least plant a few seeds of reality. They might sprout.”

  “You always handle them nicely,” I said, but I couldn’t stay sincere for more than a moment. “Who knows? They might really have a hit series on their hands. Then you’ll be sorry. You could have been on the ground floor.”

  He got up, stretched, and headed into his inner sanctum. Over his shoulder, he said, “Don’t you have work to do?”

  I’d once again climbed almost to the top of the stairs when I heard my phone. I took another detour back to my office.

  Shamanique was hanging up as I closed the door from the entry hall.

  “Wrong number,” she said. “I got what you wanted on Nut Case.” She handed me a printout. “Here’s their schedule. Been in Charlotte. Good news is they’re back here tonight for a show in Clemson. Opening for some band at Littlejohn Coliseum. You might could catch them there.”

  Not a bad idea. “Any tickets available?”

  Her eyebrows came dangerously close to her slicked hairline. “You don’t have to go to the concert. Besides, you don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  Her pitying look reminded me too much of her aunt Edna. “Headbangers.”

  “I thought they played some kind of acoustic music.”

  “Don’t know about that. Maybe this guy does that on his own. But Drip Dry is headlining. They got their own cult.”

  “But if I want to see this guy—”

  “Wait outside. He’ll be through early. Slip some green to one of the security guards. Those guys don’t get paid nothing. Give him a message for Pippen. Or find out where the band is staying.”

  I studied her with new respect. “You’ve done this before.”

  She just stared up at me from her desk chair, her eyebrows raised. What I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell Aunt Edna.

  “Slipping past the guard is one option,” I said. “Can you call—what were their names? Out at the Pasture? Ash Carter and Lenn Edmonds. See if either of them has a contact number for the band.”

  She pursed her lips, her only acknowledgment that I might have struck on a better plan.

  I changed clothes and spent the next couple of hours soaking the crystal wall sconces in dishwashing liquid and rehanging the now-sparkling prisms on the hall fixtures. Once I saw the pattern for the pieces, the puzzle wasn’t that difficult to fit together. I couldn’t let it lie around for long, though; I didn’t want to forget how to reconstruct it.

  Shamanique came back to the kitchen as I dried and admired a clean sconce. I like having something to show for my labors.

  “I called that Pippen guy, said you’d like to meet with him. He can do six, before the show. He’ll leave a pass at the back gate. I might have given him the impression that you were thinking about hiring him.”

  “You might have?”

  “Just said a friend of yours had met him. When he asked which gig, I said he’d have to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “What? You think he’d’ve jumped at the chance to be questioned about what he’d had to do with a dead girl? Don’t think so.” She popped her head in a sassy side-to-side.

  She was a quick study.

  “Point taken,” I said. “You heading out?”

  “You better be, too, if you gonna make it to Clemson.”

  Almost five o’clock. I raced upstairs to change into jeans and a black V-neck tee that should pass for appropriate concert wear. I could add a touch of eye makeup and lipstick at traffic lights on the way.

  With only summer-school classes in session and the day employees gone before five o’clock, parking wasn’t too bad on campus. I still had a hike to the mostly underground basketball arena, with its mahogany steel exoskeleton. I walked halfway around the perimeter before I spotted a tractor-trailer rig parked on the side street. I’d never paid attention to the short drive that ran into the building or the massive door where equipment was off-loaded and groupies could hang out awaiting their favorite rocker.

  The guard motioned me through after only a moment of skeptical study. His directions to the green room were easy to follow. The group gathered in the spartanly furnished room was low-key, not at all what I’d expected.

  Several guys in tight, tattered clothes sat around with blackgarbed young women, talking quietly or nibbling from the nuts, cheese, and fruit on trays around the room. It had the air of a family gathering before a football game started on television.

  Nobody even glanced at me as I stood in the door. I reached and tapped the arm of a girl as she wandered past me. A sweep of jet-black bangs covered her black-edged eyes. She shook her head when I asked about Pippen and wandered away. Somebody cranked up a CD player.

  My reddish-gold hair must have stuck out in the sea of deepdyed black because before I could flag down someone else a shaggy-haired young man in a white button-down shirt approached me.

  “Avery Andrews?” He leaned in close to my ear, the pulsing music loud enoug
h to draw conversation close.

  He cocked his head toward the door. “Step outside?”

  I nodded and followed him into the hallway.

  “Get you something to drink?”

  “No, thanks. I won’t take much of your time. Just some quick questions.” I slipped a picture of Neanna out of my pocket—a kittenishly cute photo Fran said they’d taken on a trip together before Fran went away to college, a much kinder likeness than the morgue photo Fran had viewed to identify her sister.

  “I believe she met you during your concert at the Pasture last week.”

  His eyes narrowed, wary. “Yeah?”

  No need to waste time on a warm-up act. “She came from Atlanta to see your concert. She was a big fan. A guy said you met her, talked for a while.”

  “Yeah. Talked. That’s all.”

  He didn’t give the impression he trolled the loading dock looking for an easy lay after every concert, but he certainly was defensive all of a sudden.

  “I wanted some idea how she looked to you that evening, what she talked about. I’m just trying to understand her state of mind that night.”

  “What’s to tell? She was a nice kid, that’s all. We talked about music, about where the band was playing next. She asked me to autograph a CD. That was pretty much it. Just a nice kid.”

  “Did she seem drunk? Stoned?”

  He shook his head. “Not that I could tell. Not when I saw her. But we talked maybe five minutes total. At the end of our first set.”

  “Did she seem depressed? Anything unusual?”

  “No, but I didn’t know her. How would I know what was unusual? What’re you getting at?”

  “Her sister hired me to find out who she saw, what went on that day.” I looked him in the eye, wanting to gauge his response. “She died that night.”

  He drew back, his brows knit in concern. His surprise seemed genuine. “What happened?”

  “The police believed she shot herself.”

  “No.” The word came quiet, involuntary. He stood mute a moment, studying my face. “She was such a nice kid.”

  “Yeah. Her sister isn’t—willing to be convinced that she killed herself,” I said. “She’s asked me to look into it. Anything you could tell me would be a help.”

  He kept shaking his head, studying the polished tile floor of the wide, empty hallway. “I—just that she was sweet. Funny. Soft-spoken. Not sleazy. She didn’t come on to me or anything. Lots do, almost like they think they’re supposed to. She just really liked the music.”

  I let the silence settle on us.

  He looked up. “She did say something about being on a quest. That the concert that night was the portal. Does that mean anything?”

  “Yes.” It didn’t mean anything new, though—and nothing I needed to tell him about. “That’s all?”

  “Yeah,” he said and bowed his head again, as if offering a benediction. He returned the photo to me.

  “I just wanted to get an idea about where she was and how she acted that evening.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

  Was his sadness real, or was he a professional performer, good at improvisation?

  I’d let our conversation float gently with the current. Time to take the cross-examination in a different direction. “Where were you between 1:00 and 3:00 A.M.? After the concert.” Sometimes it’s best to pitch it hard and fast.

  Pippen didn’t miss the harder edge in my voice. His gaze met mine.

  “Packing up my gear. I crashed in some no-tell motel down the road, on the outskirts of some little town. Alone.” He added the last with emphasis.

  “No nubile groupies?”

  His mouth tightened. “At the Pasture? You’re kidding. That cheap-ass operation attracts—I don’t even have words to describe it. Rednecks wanting nothing but cheap beer buckets. Older women pretending clown makeup hides the sags and wrinkles. Sleazy guys ready to get it on with anything that looked like it would say yes.” He shuddered. “Not a one of them interested in music. A sappy soundtrack for their sad lives, maybe, but not music.”

  Was he trying out new lyrics? “You saying you didn’t have any fans there?”

  “A few. Your—client, Neanna. And a couple of local kids.”

  “Thought you were supposed to be pretty popular.” I was trying to goad him. In this well-lit, empty hallway, I didn’t have a bailiff to back me up if the witness got angry, and the crowd in the green room looked too mellow to come to their own rescue, much less mine.

  He fixed me with a controlled stare. “Not with the rednecks and rejects at a place like the Pasture.”

  “So why’d you play there?”

  “Favor for a friend. A guy who plays some backup for me was supposed to do it. He had a better gig come along, but he didn’t want to break his contract, get a bad name in the business. I was in the area, and the owner agreed to the substitution.” He shrugged. “Like his clientele would care.”

  “So how did your fans find out you were playing there?”

  “My Web site. I asked them. Said they knew where the Pasture was, so they came. Everybody else in the area just waited for the date here, I guess.”

  He had an answer for everything. Was that because the truth usually offers answers or because he was well rehearsed?

  “When did Neanna leave? Was she alone?”

  “How should I know? Just because I had so few fans there doesn’t mean I was keeping tabs on them. I was working. The house band and I started jamming on some redneck music the crowd enjoyed. I wasn’t paying attention to your friend.” His tone wasn’t as annoyed as mine would have been.

  I handed him my card. “If you think of anything else.”

  “Yeah.” He glanced absently at the card and slid it in his hip pocket.

  “Thanks.”

  I walked around the circular hall back to the loading ramp. The guard held open the door for me and wished me a good night.

  I stood under a floodlight, breathing the warm evening air. So where did that leave me? She hadn’t appeared drunk, drugged, or depressed. She hadn’t hooked up with her musician idol, if the musician could be trusted. She hadn’t left with Skipper, if he could be trusted. Taken at face value, the interviews told me she’d listened to a concert, which had probably moved from some of her favorite music to an updated version of “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer.” Then she’d left, driven to a scenic overlook, and shot herself. At an impossible angle.

  The more I thought about it, the outlandish experiment Rudy and I had talked ourselves into made sense. Tomorrow could be interesting.

  Thursday Morning

  My cell phone rang at seven the next morning. Only my dad calls that early, mostly because that’s not early to him.

  “Hullo?” As I spoke, I realized my breath reeked from the Mellow Mushroom garlic and cheese pizza I’d had the night before in Clemson. I’d walked from the coliseum to the former frat house and sat there mentally processing what I didn’t know about Neanna.

  “Missed you last night,” Dad said.

  “Last night?”

  “At Emma’s soccer game.”

  “Ah, man. I forgot all about it. Something came up at the last minute.”

  “Just checking to make sure you were okay.”

  “Ran down to Clemson to interview somebody. Darn. I’d been looking forward to it.”

  “She was looking for you.” He was quiet for a long pause. “It’s awfully easy to disappoint a seven-year-old. Sometimes we forget how big things are to them.”

  His words were gentle, but they hit me in the chest like a fist.

  “I feel awful. Something came up, for work. I completely forgot.” I was offering him grown-up sounding justifications. Nothing that excused it in my mind—or Emma’s.

  “She’ll understand. Just worried that something had happened. That’s all. Talk to you later, honey.”

  I lay back in the bed, sick at my stomach. Emma always seemed so matter-of-fact
and in charge, but she was a kid. How could her aunt Bree—her toddler mispronunciation that had become a nickname only she used—let her down? As I lay staring up at the soaring ceiling and the deep crown molding, I wondered what I’d heard in my dad’s voice. His words hinted at more than an abstract fatherly observation. Who had disappointed him when he was seven? And how? How sad that he still remembered whatever it was.

  Missing the soccer game wasn’t the big deal. Letting Emma expect me and then not showing up—that was the big deal. I needed to make it up to her. Maybe lunch would be a start.

  The sooner I got to work, the more time I could free up later. I threw back the sheet and headed to the shower.

  I didn’t hear Shamanique come in, but when the phone rang at eight-thirty, she answered it.

  I’d made it to the entry hall with my cup of tea when I heard her say, “Avery Andrews, attorney-at-law. May I help you?” Pause. “May I say who’s calling?”

  That sounded professional.

  “Avery! Oh, there you are. Rowly Edwards for you.”

  Yelling from the outer office was not so professional. We’d work on that.

  I took the call in my office.

  “Rowly! How are you?”

  “Wondering why ever’ time I hear from you, you got yourself mixed up with some bad number.”

  “You mean to tell me Dirick’s not the president of the Atlanta Jaycees?”

  “Ha. Unless that stands for Juvenilely ‘Carcerated instead of Junior Chamber of Commerce.”

  “A record, huh.”

  “Not all juvie, either. Started young, hadn’t stopped. Property crimes, mostly. Graduated to domestic violence—two charges, two different ladies.”

  “Gosh. How old is he?” I hadn’t imagined him old enough to get in that kind of trouble that many times.

  “He’s twenty-one.”

  Violence usually escalates, takes time to build, both in a person and in a relationship. Dirick Timms wasn’t wasting any time.

  “Do have some good news, though. Or maybe only good for Mr. Timms. He couldn’t have been in your neck of the woods causing problems last Friday. He has the best kind of alibi.”

  “Locked up?”