Reckoning and Ruin

by Tina Whittle

  “Stop making this personal. Why is John’s—?”

  “Because he gave it to me in return for wiping his debt clean. And then he walked out the front gate.”

  “Walked?”

  “Don’t believe me? Come on.”

  He turned and headed for the house, shoving the marshmallows into his pocket. I cursed and followed him back up the path and inside the house. He walked with purpose, shoving open the door without announcing himself, passing Cheyanne in the kitchen with the girls. They giggled and stirred a pot on the stove, their mouths already smeared with chocolate. They didn’t see us, but Cheyanne did. Her predator eyes watched us all the way out of the great room.

  Jefferson turned left, down the hall leading to the bedrooms. It was hushed in this part of the house, uncomfortably private. I followed, not saying a word. He went to what had been a closet when I was little, but which was now a state-of-the-art safe room, with a bulletproof door and a security console inside. During Jasper’s attempted coup, it had been fully stocked with shotguns and pistols and rifles and stacks of ammo, doomsday quantities.

  No longer. The room was now stripped to the basics—landline, radio, first aid kit. Crates of water and a stack of blankets.

  Jefferson pulled up a chair and sat down at the computer station. He tapped the keys, and a four-plexed screen appeared showing real time footage of the backyard, the dock, the gator pit, and the front gate. He tapped again, and one square expanded to fill the video monitor. Then it went dark. And then it started rolling.

  I immediately saw a figure I recognized. “That’s John.”

  Jefferson didn’t look my way. “Yep. On the Harley. Now watch this.”

  I watched as he fast-forwarded past John knocking on the door, disappearing inside, then coming back out. When he left, though, he walked right past the bike until he was out of frame, leaving Jefferson alone.

  I turned to the actual Jefferson, standing there fuming with righteous indignation. “Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?”

  “Because I don’t need any more trouble in this house, and I knew you’d go straight to your cop friends and tell them all about it. I don’t know what happened to John, but that was the first time I’ve seen him in over a year and it was the last time I’ve seen him since. He was trouble then, and he’s trouble now, and I don’t need it.”

  “He’s vanished.”

  “Not because of me.”

  I tapped my foot. In the kitchen I heard a shriek of joyous laughter. I could smell something baking, something sweet. It was almost dinnertime.

  “When was this?”

  “Friday morning. He accused me of following him and Hope, told me he didn’t want trouble, they were trying to get off to a fresh start. I told him he wanted a fresh start, he needed to wipe his tally sheet clean with me. He said that was what he’d come to do.”

  Then he’d walked down to the Whitemarsh Island Walmart and called Train.

  “So he gave you the bike and you called it square. That’s all he took out of here?”

  “Yep.”

  I pointed at the screen. “Then what’s that he’s sticking in the back of his jeans? A going-away present?”

  Jefferson gave me an elaborate shrug. The Boone family might have gotten out of the drugs and tobacco and moonshine dealing, but they carried guns like stray dogs carried fleas.

  “Hope found a pistol in the glove compartment, a JA-22 in mighty sad shape. Said she’d never seen it before.”

  Jefferson didn’t drop his eyes. “You don’t say.”

  “John never liked guns and didn’t know crap about them, which is why I’m not surprised he’d shove a junk piece like that in his pants. He tell you why he wanted it?”

  “Nope. But I guarantee you I wasn’t the reason. He walked outta here clean slate. Nothing to fear from me.”

  I started to argue, but Cheyanne came to the door, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. She looked straight at Jefferson. “There’s some sheriff’s deputies want to talk to you.”

  “Where?”

  “Out front.”

  Jefferson shot me a look before he rose to his feet. “This your doing?”

  I raised my hands, palms out. “Don’t look at me.”

  He took Cheyanne by the elbow and led her into the hall. I heard muffled conversation, heated, with my name rising up like a bad smell. Eventually, Jefferson headed back into the great room, leaving me alone with Cheyanne.

  She filled the doorway, glowering. “We ain’t had no problems with the cops until you showed up. Now we got the law on our lawn.”

  “Well, I didn’t put ’em there.”

  “Like hell you didn’t. So you listen up and you listen good—I have worked too long and too hard keeping this family together to let you destroy it.” She shoved her sleeves up. “I’ve got two little girls. And the only thing they’ve got is me, their daddy, and this land. That’s why we have cooperated every step of the way, so that we could keep this house for them, so they’ll know what it is to have a home. And now you come, dragging trouble—”

  “I’m not dragging a damn thing.”

  “—like I don’t have enough to deal with from…”

  She bit back her words. Anger glowed high on her cheekbones, but something else too. Fear, a bright shining wash of it.

  “Cheyanne? Who’s causing problems besides the law? Jasper?”

  “It’s nothing I can’t handle myself.”

  She came into the room and planted herself in front of the video monitor. On the screen, the deputies were talking to Jefferson. They stood on the front porch, Jefferson stood inside the door. The conversation went on this way for several minutes, and if I hadn’t known the context, it would have seemed friendly, man-to-man stuff. No warrants were produced, no handcuffs either. Eventually Jefferson shut the door and came back inside the safe room.

  Cheyanne cut to the chase. “Well?”

  “Apparently somebody beat up Jasper, and the law decided I might have had something to do with it.”

  Cheyanne’s jaw dropped. “You? You ain’t even been up there.”

  “Apparently some skinheads got into it with him. Now he’s in a hospital bed, saying I sicced them on him.” His mouth twisted in disgust. “Like I’d have anything to do with those neo-Nazi sons-a-bitches.”

  I stayed quiet about my conversation with Shane the PT, but I remembered him saying clearly that Jasper had started the altercation. Had he done it simply so that he could blame Jefferson for the attack? That sounded like something right out of his playbook. He wouldn’t cop to that, of course…but his talkative physical therapist might be willing to drop some information if could catch him somewhere besides inside the detention center.

  I stood up, shouldered my bag. Cheyanne and Jefferson switched hard looks on me.

  “I think it’s time I showed myself out,” I said.

  ***

  Jefferson walked me back to my car, not from courtesy. He didn’t speak. Some part of me felt the pull of the blood we shared, but another part despised him, and I couldn’t figure out how both parts co-existed simultaneously. Across the water, I heard the bellow of a bull gator staking its territory, marshmallows forgotten. I rolled up my window and started backing out. That was the problem with gators—no matter how many marshmallows they ate, they were still gators.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  My cousin Billie wasn’t convinced that John had fallen upon foul play. “Come on, Tai. Be for real.”

  “I am for real!”

  It was only the two of us around the kitchen table. Billie had the broad shoulders of my mother’s people, but where I was freckled and dirty blond, she was pale-skinned and black-haired. She’d been lean as a whippet last time we’d visited. Now her cheeks bloomed full and rosy, her pregnant belly swollen and round. I’d always seen her i
n mechanic’s coveralls, axle grease under her fingernails. She wore maternity jeans now, and one of her husband’s blue work shirts with Travis embroidered on the pocket.

  “You know John, and you know chances are good he’s turned tail because he owed somebody money.”

  “John gave Jefferson his Harley. They called it even.”

  She waved her hand like she was shooing a fly. “So? The Boone family ain’t the only business in town. I bet there’s lots of people eager to take out some interest on his hide.”

  Billie was my cousin in some manner I didn’t understand—my family tree had branches that split and converged in unseemly ways that my mother had erased from the official record. She’d rewritten her life when she married my father, setting her sights on some upwardly mobile future far away from Savannah. My father’s first and greatest betrayal, the one she’d never forgiven him for, was taking a professor’s job in town instead of moving her to North Carolina, where his people rolled around in tobacco money.

  “That’s probably true,” I admitted. “But I can’t see him leaving Hope behind.”

  “She leaves him, he leaves her, you know them two play this game.”

  “This time it’s not a game. I went to their trailer. I’m telling you, something bad happened there.”

  She sighed and stretched her legs out in front of her. She’d offered to put me up for the night, and I’d gratefully accepted. Her house was modest, but it was fresh-paint and sawdust new, a starter home in one of the more affordable Southside subdivisions.

  “Did you see Boone?” she said.

  “I tried, but the people at Memorial won’t even admit he’s in the hospital, much less ring me through. And he doesn’t carry a cell phone. He’s convinced the NSA has them all bugged.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  I spun my cell phone around on her brand new kitchen table. No word from Trey, not even a text. Of course it was Monday, and he’d had a full day. Still.

  “Billie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think people can change? I mean, in real fundamental ways? Or do you think we’re stuck being who we’ve always been?”

  “Jesus, girlfriend, what kind of question is that?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Never mind. I’ve obviously exhausted myself stupid.”

  “Then go to bed. That’s where I’m headed.” She shoved herself up from the table awkwardly. “The baby’s room is made up for you. Don’t mess with anything. And no smoking anywhere in the house.”

  “I quit, remember?”

  “Right. And if you hear footsteps in the hall, don’t shoot, it’s just me having to pee again. Travis will be in around ten. Don’t shoot him either.” She put a hand to the small of her back, regarded me from the doorway. “I’m kidding, you know.”

  “I know.”

  She nodded. We had years between us, lots of them.

  “’Night,” she said.

  I watched her waddle her way down the hall, swaying. “’Night.”

  ***

  The baby’s room was decorated in ocean colors, blues like deep water, greens like beach glass. A girl, Billie said, although she and Travis were still arguing over what her name would be.

  I started to drop my overnight bag at the foot of the twin bed, but the whisper of a rug looked too delicate. Everything in the room smelled like baby powder, like an invisible infant was already swaddled in the vast white pine crib. I felt lumbering, coarse. When my phone vibrated with an incoming text, I snatched it up.

  But it wasn’t from Trey. It was an unknown number. I thumbed it open even though I already knew what it was going to be.

  Sure enough, it was a photograph, this time of a…I peered closer. Was that an oak tree? Hard to tell from the image, though the English ivy wrapped round the trunk was clear. The words, however, were murky and meaningless.

  How closely she twineth, how tight she clings.

  I shook my head. I never thought I’d regret skipping English class twice in one week.

  ***

  After making sure Billie was in her room, I tiptoed out the back door onto the patio, pulled up one of the plastic chairs, and called Trey. He answered on the first ring.

  I tipped my head back and watched the evening clouds scuttle across the sky. “How’d your meeting go today?”

  “It was…interesting.”

  “And the upshot?”

  “Still to be determined. Legal will keep me informed.”

  “And you’re okay?”

  A pause. “I’m okay.”

  I told him about visiting Train’s shop, checking out the trailer, and filling out a report with the police. I emphasized the part where I kept both gun and cell phone handy at all times, skipped the part about my visit to the prison. He was behaving, and I didn’t want him to blow a gasket and come barreling down to Savannah in full guard dog mode.

  “What time will you be home tomorrow?” he said.

  “Um…about that.”

  “Tai—”

  “I still have to see Boone. I went out there today, but he’s in the hospital again.” I hesitated. “I did talk to Jefferson, though.”

  Trey didn’t reply, but I felt his hackles rising. He’d decided Boone wasn’t a threat, not to me anyway, but he harbored major reservations about Jefferson.

  “Stand down, boyfriend. It’s not like I went trekking to some Klan outpost in the middle of nowhere. He and his wife and two little girls are staying at the house now.”

  “Oh. When did that happen?”

  “Probably right after the marina got seized. And I know you don’t trust him—I don’t either—but I’m reasonably sure he didn’t have anything to do with John’s disappearance.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because John gave him his Harley. Wiped the debt clean. I saw the evidence myself.”

  Trey didn’t interrupt, not even to insert the word “alleged” in there anywhere. I pulled at a tuft of grass, and the crisp green smell hit me with a rush of memory and longing.

  “We’re still talking foul play, though. If you’d seen that trailer, you’d agree. Plus I suspect Hope is getting some help from somebody on Jasper’s side of the fence.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  I took a deep breath. I had to come clean about this part. “I got another insider tip.”

  Trey’s voice hardened. “From whom?”

  “Probably from the same source who slipped me the photo outside the History Center. Only this time she left it on my front door. Well, sort of. She actually left it at Raymond Junior’s, and he brought it over.”

  “She? Raymond saw her?”

  “No. But it has to be the same person. The handwriting matches and everything.”

  Trey digested this piece of news. I could feel his frustration through the line. Every time he thought he had the shop’s hatches battened down, some mishap revealed new leaks in his system.

  I sifted the grass between my fingers, watched it fall back to the ground. “Also, I got another photo, like, fifteen minutes ago. Not in person, though. On my phone.”

  Silence. One of those heavy, edged silences.

  “Trey? Are you freaking out?”

  “No. What did it say?”

  “This is gonna sound ridiculous, but it’s a picture of a tree and a snippet of poetry. A live oak, to be specific. And the poem is something about twining and clinging. I’ve got a text in to Rico to see if he’ll translate poet-speak for me.”

  “Did you run the geotagging data?”

  “The what?”

  “Digital images contain data about location. Unless the data profile is deliberately stripped, you can tell where it was taken, when, sometimes even under what conditions and with what kind of camera.”

  “How do I do that?”
<
br />   “Rico can do it quite easily.”

  “Of course. I’ll ask him.” I dug my toes deeper into the turf. “This is a good thing, right? It means my informant is most likely still in Atlanta. Because this is the first tip that’s come by phone and not hand delivery.”

  Several seconds passed. “A reasonable assumption, if not certain by any means. Rico’s analysis should help in that determination.”

  He didn’t use the word “stalking,” but I knew he was thinking it. I didn’t tell him that was only the half of it. That the more I talked around, the more I understood that something big was winding itself up, getting ready to strike. And whatever it was, it was sneaky and mean and fierce enough to take a chunk out of me.

  He stayed quiet. There was expectancy in the silence, and I fought the keen desire to spill the whole of my day, even the prison visit part. He was taking everything more calmly than I’d expected. Maybe Rico was right. Maybe he could maintain that calm better than I’d imagined. I’d opened my mouth, unsure of what might come out, when headlights swung down the driveway, briefly illuminating the backyard. Travis, home from second shift at the docks. Time to get back inside and get ready for the morning.

  I cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear. “Trey? Are you really okay?”

  He didn’t answer, and I felt the first prickle of apprehension. He was doing what he always did when an inconvenient truth threatened to fall out of his mouth—clamming up. My imagination provided a suggestive scenario about what that secret might be, and I gritted my teeth. I would kill Gabriella, I would throttle her with my bare hands.

  “Whatever it is you’re not telling me, spill it.”

  A long excruciating pause. “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”

  The night was alive around me—crickets, frogs, nocturnal things. The darkness had texture, like it was woven out of black silk, even in Billie’s neighborhood, which had been erected on top of a sinkhole and was surrounded with streetlights and yard lights and porch lights, lights of every kind.

  “You really are keeping something from me, aren’t you?”