Deadly Kiss

by Bob Bickford

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Captain Richardson. I am not completely satisfied with the performance of one of our engines, so we are going to head back to the airport and have it looked at. Please follow your flight crew’s instructions. You can expect a safe landing.”

  Liar, I thought.

  A stewardess stood in the aisle and scanned the rows of seats. She fell heavily into the passengers sitting beside her as the plane tilted and dropped into a crippled turn. A few isolated screams rose, but generally the cabin felt smothered with a crushing paralysis.

  “Flight attendants, prepare for landing.”

  The fallen attendant got to her feet. She made her way shakily to an empty seat, sat down, and began to shout. “Heads down, stay down, brace, brace! Heads down, stay down, brace, brace, brace!”

  From behind us and forward in first class, the voices of other crew members joined the chant, like a group of nuns performing a strange liturgy in the dark cabin, shouting the same words, over and over. People looked at their neighbors and then heads disappeared as they hunched over and stared at the floor. I felt the back of my seat shift when the person sitting behind me grabbed it.

  “Brace, brace brace! Heads down, stay down, brace, brace! Heads down, stay down, brace, brace, brace!”

  Noise from the remaining engine rose as we dropped lower, and the flight attendants were accordingly louder, sounding as though they were willing us to stay in the air. I risked sitting up, and looked out my window.

  The lights of the city reappeared, even closer than they had been. We seemed to be far too low. Lit rooftops came up to meet us and then disappeared as we suddenly floated into the dark space over the airfield. The wheels touched and rolled. We were down.

  I didn’t hear the flurry of announcements after we came to a stop and were met by a flotilla of red and blue lights. Stairs were brought and we walked through the gathering of emergency vehicles and began the long walk back to the terminal building. It seemed that every muscle in my body hurt, as though I had badly overused them.

  I numbly followed the line of people into the building, up a flight of stairs, and then down a long fluorescent-lit hallway. Noises were strange and muted. My ears seemed to be packed with cotton. A set of glass doors opened at the end, and we were back in the warm and quiet commotion of the concourse. Groups of airline employees stood, stopped in mid-conversation, and stared at us almost furtively.

  The people in front of me headed vaguely for seats in the lounge or toward the information counter. I walked past them. A young couple sat on the vinyl seats with two small children; the parents stared straight ahead at the floor, not touching each other. There was no question that they had been with me. We were marked.

  Leaving my luggage behind, I headed for Canadian Customs and re-entered the country, then headed outside to find a taxi and a hotel. I seemed to move in a zone of absolute silence, and I wondered if I were in some kind of shock. When I had checked into a room near the airport, I called Angela.

  “Where are you?” she demanded.

  “Still in Toronto. The plane had some kind of problem. We got turned around. I’ll leave in the morning.”

  “Damn it, Mike. You need to be here. I’m down here alone. Have you even arranged a service yet?”

  “There’s a funeral home that’s meeting the plane. I’m letting them make the arrangements.”

  When we hung up, I undressed and lay in the dark. After a while, fear came creeping in, and I got up and turned on a light. I was in a strange bed, in a strange room, in a building full of strangers that I would never see again. It was not a night that I wanted to be alone.

  I turned the unfamiliar pillow and felt myself slide toward sleep. The flight attendant who had warned me showed me that spirits still moved around me. It didn’t occur to me that her warning may not have been about the troubled flight, but what waited on the other end of it.

  PART II

  COBB COUNTY,

  GEORGIA

  CHAPTER 11

  Sam Latta, Wanda Sutton,

  Marietta, Georgia, Tuesday, December 3, 1946:

  It was a cold day, and the boy shrugged deeper into his wool sweater. The winter sun worked feebly against the grayness of the day and provided no warmth. Trees were bare and the road was mud. The red clay gave the world its only color. The cold season in Georgia was made more bitter by its brevity.

  The boy spent the rest of his life in the area, and the general store would stand after he died, but he never again walked through its door. Today, however, he had been sent on an errand that took him past it. There simply was no other road to where he was going. He had little understanding of death, but he knew of ghosts and accepted their existence in the same way that all children did until the teaching of adults had hidden them away. He was also of a sufficient age to feel guilt, although he didn’t know the word for what he felt.

  When the structure came into view, the boy stopped in the road. It seemed to glow in the thin light. The shades of Floyd Sutton and Willard Davis did not visit from whatever place for child-killers they had gone to, at least not regularly. The building was haunted, nonetheless, by what they had left behind.

  Sutton’s widow, to everyone’s surprise, clung to the store, and she remained almost reverent about the places on the floor where their blood had soaked into the old wood. After the first month of fretting over people’s footsteps on the stains, she began to keep a display of goods over each spot. She pushed those aside when she was alone in the store to gaze at what remained of her husband and her brother.

  Her daughter was neglected. People had died, and lives were altered and ruined for her honor, but her well-being became of no consequence. She came and went as she pleased and could have kissed a hundred black children, one by one, and it would have gone unnoticed by her mother.

  There were no cars parked in front of the store. Its distasteful history aside, the girl’s mother had little head for business, and her spotty ordering of new stock made the place an unreliable place to shop. The last of the regular white patrons drifted away. The Negro customers who attended the back door were more flexible about their demands, and the store’s history was also of less consequence to them. The death of Eli Tull at the hands of the owner was no reason to condemn his widow, and even Eli’s mother was seen at the back door as often as ever. Neither woman acknowledged what had passed between the two families.

  The boy began to hurry as he drew abreast with the entrance to the store’s lot. He could hear his own breath rasping in the cold air. The front door of the store opened, almost as if it heard him passing. It was exactly as he had imagined it. Dread flooded through him, and his steps slowed as the little girl crossed the porch, descended the steps, and crossed quickly to the edge of the dooryard. She stopped there as if forbidden to enter the roadway.

  “I know what you did,” she said.

  He stopped, and they stood and stared at each other. She was thin and pale. Her face was dirty and her blonde hair needed to be brushed. She had no coat and started to shiver.

  “I know what you did,” she repeated.

  The spell was broken, and the boy took to his heels and ran.

  “I know what you did!” she screamed, and her voice broke.

  She began to cry and stumbled into the roadway to watch his retreat. Tears ran down her cheeks, but she stood in the cold and did not wipe them away.

  ***

  Present Day:

  My ex-wife met me at the arrivals gate in Atlanta at lunch time the next day. She was clearly annoyed.

  “Couldn’t you have gotten another flight last night?” she asked. “Did you even try?”

  “I wasn’t in any shape to get back on a plane last night, Angela.”

  “Planes lose engines all the time,” she said. “You needed to be here. Let’s get your bags.”

  “Got it. Just this.” I indicated my carry-on.

  “Is that your way of saying you won’t be staying long?” she asked. “Sa
me old Mike. You haven’t changed. Do the bare minimum you see as your duty and then get the hell out. Why didn’t you have him cremated?”

  “I might do that. I have no idea what he wanted. I have to find out.”

  She stared at me. “Drag a coffin thousands of miles and then cremate him?”

  She turned and began walking toward the street exit, high heels tapping on the cement floor. Her legs were long, and I hurried to keep up. Trailing her, I caught her scent, exclusive and wonderful.

  “I need to find my mother,” I said. “I’ll try to put him with her. I don’t know if she was buried or cremated, so it depends on that.”

  She looked back at me sharply. She was slender and very pale, with a graceful walk. Long hands seemed to never stop moving from her hair to her purse to her buttons, alighting only for a moment on each thing, before moving busily on. In contrast, her lovely face moved little. When I talked to her, she often looked back at me with absolutely no expression and then looked away again without replying. She radiated a general sense of impatience with those around her, but displayed an occasional whimsy which charmed me.

  She unlocked the car door for me. “Are you going to tell me about it?” she asked. She kept her eyes on the road as she entered the freeway that encircled the city of Atlanta. The traffic ran faster than most places.

  “Yes. He told me a story. He didn’t finish, and there are things I don’t understand yet. Let’s get the funeral home stuff done first, and then I’ll tell you what I know.”

  A few hours later, I sat on the edge of the hotel bed and thought a little about my father, and a lot about drinking. It had once been so easy to know what to do at times like this, so automatic. There was a knock at the door, so soft that I wondered if it was at another door up or down the hall. I crossed and opened it.

  Angela stood there. I took her wrist hard and pulled her into a kiss, closing the door with the side of my foot as we dragged each other toward the bed. She undid the button on her jeans, lay back, and looked up at me.

  “Get the light,” she said, stretching her arms over her head.

  “No. I want to see you, Angela.”

  “But I don’t want to see you.”

  When I came back, she was naked under my hands. The soft skin on the inside of her thighs radiated heat against my face. She smelled like withered roses, the fragrance corrupt beneath the sweetness, and she tasted like ashes and lost love. She rolled over and I kissed my way down her back. I found her most intimate places, but I couldn’t get close. I had never been so lonely in my life and wondered if she felt the same.

  When we were done we lay in absolute dark. I held her, my history, my past, my once-upon-a-time princess. My life was haunted by spirits of the dead. I lived alone on an island where the shadows of long ago came back to life and walked around. The warmth of her pressed against me was a bridge back to the safe and normal life I had lost.

  “I’m sorry I ruined us,” I said.

  “You didn’t choose what happened,” she murmured. “Neither did I. It just happened.”

  She shifted away from me, just a tiny movement, and I pulled her back.

  “So tell me the story,” she finally said.

  “Not now,” I breathed. I was falling asleep.

  “Yes, now,” she said. “I want to be done with it.”

  I began to speak softly into the dark. The air conditioner hummed underneath the window as I took her into the heat and humidity of a sixty five year-old Georgia summer, back to dirt roads and fishing holes in the muddy water under wooden bridges and a single kiss that had killed four people.

  It was a kiss that had slept for decades, but was now awake. My father had passed out of the story and left me alone with it. The more that I knew, the more I resented him for it.

  When I finished telling it, at least as much of it as I knew, she stirred.

  “That’s it?” she asked, her breath warm against my chest. “The little boy was killed. His father shot the men who did it, and then he was executed? That’s the end?”

  “No, there’s more. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what my father did, or what he knew. I don’t know why it matters all these years later. I don’t know why he thought he had to run away from these people.”

  Angela’s breathing steadied and I felt her sleep. I lay awake for a long time.

  “I’m going to find out, though,” I told the dark room. “I’m going to end it and keep you safe, Dad. I promise.”

  In the morning, the bed beside me was empty. I showered, dressed, and walked up the hall to Angela’s room. When she answered my knock, I saw the suitcase on the bed behind her.

  “I’m not staying for the funeral, after all, Mike. I changed my mind. I don’t belong here. I have to go. Right now. Sam would understand.”

  “How could you fly all the way down here and not go to the funeral? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Mike. Listen to me. I’m seeing someone. What happened last night is what doesn’t make sense. I can’t be around you. I’m sorry.”

  I was seeing someone else, too, so I could hardly explain the desolation that flooded me. I felt abandoned. “Are you at least having breakfast with me?”

  “I had coffee,” she said. “I’ll wait for you if you want to grab some, but there’s a flight to Toronto at ten. I want to catch it.”

  I drove her to the airport. I felt terribly alone, even with her sitting beside me in the rental car. When she was checked in, I walked her to the gate. She kissed me briefly and walked away to find her plane. A few steps away, she turned back. “Did you mean what you said last night?” she asked. “About getting to the bottom of this? About keeping him safe?”

  I was surprised by her question. She had been awake then, and listening to me. “Yes.”

  “You’re going to keep your dead father safe?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re a little bit fucking crazy, Mike. You know that?”

  “Not about that,” I said.

  She stared at me for a long moment and then nodded once. She turned and walked away.

  CHAPTER 12

  Sheriff Ben Early,

  Cobb County, Georgia, Friday, October 1, 1948:

  Ben sat in his radio car. He pressed a fingertip to the chrome horn ring and then wiped the smudge away. He repeated the process several times before he slapped the white Bakelite wheel and looked out the window at the road. He was parked under a billboard outside the city limits, ostensibly to watch for speeding cars, but really to think things over.

  He had served out a decade as sheriff, and this was likely his last term. Things had soured over the past few months, and while Georgia voters could generally be depended on to honor and prefer tradition, the flood of GIs returning from Europe and the Pacific meant that a younger man with military experience would likely hold his office after the next election.

  He fished a package of Old Golds from his shirt pocket and lit one. He cranked the window down and made sure the blown-out match was cool before he threw it out. The tobacco smelled familiar and comfortable. He was settled contentedly back in his seat when the radio under the dashboard made noise. He leaned forward and adjusted a knob before he unhooked the heavy microphone. “Go ahead, Shirley.”

  “Sheriff, we have a caller reporting an incident past the four corners on Barne’s Ferry Road. Call was made from the old general store.”

  “Incident? What kind of incident? Caller say if it was coloreds or whites?”

  “Don’t know, didn’t say--just something bad happening.”

  “You have another car in the area?”

  “No, sir. Leonard’s on his break. He swung by home to take Mary to the doctor’s office. You’re the only unit in the area.”

  “Wait a second, Shirley. You said call was made from the store? That can’t be right.”

  The dispatcher said something else that was lost in static.

  Ben adjusted another knob. “Store’s closed,” he said. “No phone
there, not one that works anyway. Where was they calling from?”

  “I don’t know, Ben. I thought they said they was at store. I couldn’t even tell you if it was a man or a woman.”

  “All right, leave it. If you get another call on the incident, let me know.”

  He was puzzled. He couldn’t think of a working phone anywhere in the area.

  “Sheriff, caller said four people are dead. So far. So far, they said. Something terrible must be going on.”

  Shit, he thought. He was reluctant to leave his sanctuary of tall grass and red dirt underneath the billboard. He keyed the microphone. “I’ll be out that way for a look directly, Shirley.”

  He sat back to finish his smoke. Odd to have a call like this when the weather was cool--tempers normally boiled in the heat. Generally, Negro problems sorted themselves out without white interference, and it was best that way. It was like dogs fighting in the yard--if you left them to it, they solved it their own way. Try to break it up and it lasted longer, and like as not you got bit for your trouble.

  Regretfully, he butted his cigarette, adjusted his trooper’s hat, and started the car. He drove slowly along the ruts that led out from under the sign. Once he was free of the scrub and onto pavement, he switched on his siren. It wound up slowly. He was about six miles away. With any luck the troublemakers would hear him coming and clear out. Less than ten minutes later, he turned onto the packed dirt in front of the old store.

  The place had been shut only a few months, since Verla Sutton’s suicide, but it looked like it had been abandoned for years. Trade had dropped off after Floyd Sutton and his brother in law had killed the Negro boy, and their subsequent deaths on the property had nearly doomed the place, although Verla had tried to make a go of it. The discovery of her body hanging by a rope from the rafters with a kicked-away ladder beneath it had been enough. There were no buyers, although the location was good. No one would touch it. Ben suspected that eventually the county would take it for taxes and the building would be torn down.