Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  “Maybe—” I started to say, and Jubal jumped.

  “Lord, Lilly, you liked to have scared me plumb outta my skin.”

  “Sorry. But I don’t think telling Demetrious about this will help anything.”

  Jubal nodded. “I reckon you’re right.”

  Now that I wasn’t calling in the law, there didn’t seem to be any reason not to handle the bottles, and I pulled on my gloves and put my hand into the mattress and pulled out a few more. “This one’s about full,” I said, opening the lid. I recognized Percocet, and snapped the lid on again. Another one had half a label on it still, no name, but part of the prescription number was still on the label, and the name of a drugstore. That might bear some looking into, and I put the bottle on the edge of the bedside stand.

  “Let’s flush the pills,” I said, though part of me rebelled at the waste. “And bag up the rest. Why don’t you go get me some more garbage bags?”

  “Can do, can do,” Jubal said, and went out the door.

  I rifled through the collection, setting aside the bottles that still had drugs in them, so I could flush the contents. The few with scraps of labels with numbers or information on them I slipped into the baggy pocket of my coveralls.

  When I fished around for the last time, I found a small notebook, stuffed inside the mattress, and I pulled it out.

  Just one of those little books people used to carry around before everything became electronic, something you used to buy at dime stores before dime stores became as obsolete as these little notebooks. I opened it, half expecting a list of her drug transactions, given how precisely she kept records of just about everything else.

  But no, it wasn’t a list of her narcotic purchases.

  The notebook was filled with Willette’s distinctively large and clear handwriting, handwriting I recognized with a start, maybe a little pang. Bold and big and neat. Wholly unexpected penmanship from a crazy woman with a drug addiction problem.

  I started reading. It was a list. A list of phone calls. Phone calls she had made, or received, with the time and the date, plus the name of the person she had talked with. Dating back three years. I didn’t doubt I’d find companion notebooks listing all the phone calls she had made for all the years before that, if I looked long enough.

  Because even Dr. Hodo had noted this: Willette was a list maker.

  Something I did. Something I did with reason and sense and care—or so I told myself. Lawyer lists I could justify.

  Yeah, but here was the truth.

  Sometimes I just made lists.

  Damn. If there was one thing I did not want to be, it was a chip off the old block.

  But there you have it; I made lists of my phone calls too. But I made these lists on my time sheets, to ensure I could bill clients for my phone calls, I hastily told myself. I couldn’t imagine why Willette would keep such a careful record of the people she had called.

  Curiously, I started flipping through it, looking for the end, thinking maybe there was something in it that might help me find out who wanted to kill her, who brought her the drugs, or why she had apparently killed a man. Maybe this was the clue I’d hoped to find in the garbage.

  Mostly she had called Dan.

  Plus, Willette had made a few phone calls to Eleanor Spivey, a few to businesses, and even one to Patti Lea. And here was a big surprise, maybe a half dozen calls to Jubal.

  Not a lot of phone conversations with Jubal, really, given that the list covered a three-year time frame.

  But a lot of phone conversations with a man with whom she personally had no known basis of friendship or kinship. Or at least none I knew about, as I didn’t really know squat about my mother’s life.

  Making a mental note to ask Jubal about this, I kept flipping. Near the end of the book, I saw several phone calls from Ray Glenn listed, no doubt the harassing ones Dan had told me about, the ones where Ray Glenn tried to collect money for a refrigerator never delivered. I turned the last page, but before I could read it, Jubal was breathing over my shoulder.

  “What you got, a diary or something?” he said. For a big man, he was light on his feet.

  “Just a little notebook, bunch of scribbling. Doesn’t look like much,” I said, shutting the book then slipping it into my pocket.

  “Looked like a bunch of phone calls or something. Your mom, she keep lists of phone calls?”

  Jubal didn’t sound happy. I made a mental note to check the book on the last few days and see if they had talked recently. But not now, not in front of him.

  “Just a bunch of nonsense,” I said, and jumped back to work to try to hide my lie.

  As we bagged used tissues, and I confronted more evidence of a seriously defective gene pool, I asked Jubal what he knew about Ray Glenn.

  “Nothing much. You know, what ever body else knows.”

  “Did you know Willette? I mean, before all this?”

  “Yep. Your momma and me go way back. We went through school together. I kinda had me a crush on her long about senior year, but she wasn’t gonna end up with no man got his hands dirty making his living.”

  “You had a crush on Willette?” This so stunned me I stopped stuffing trash bags with rank garbage and stared at him.

  “Well, yep, your momma was a fine-looking gal. And that way she had of keeping off to herself was kinda…well, I reckon, kinda mysterious. And she was smart. Made good grades. Her momma kept her dressed real pretty too.”

  I nodded, trying to imagine a world in which Willette was young and smart and desirable to the young men in the town. Certainly my own father had married her a few months after he’d hired her for his legal secretary.

  “Yep, Willette was a looker,” Jubal said, sounding nostalgic. “You got to figure you got them good looks of yours from somewhere. Though your grandmother was a pretty woman too. And Willette took her looks after her momma. Why, I remember…” But Jubal stopped. “Well, it was a long time ago, you know. And Hank’s momma, God rest her soul, was a fine woman, and a good deal sturdier in the mind, I reckon, than Willette.”

  Before I could explore this further, Patti stuck her head in the door. “Y’all might as well come take a break. Demetrious brought us all some sodas and told us he’s been over to the hospital, checking on your mother.”

  “Thankee, thankee,” Jubal said, and I followed him out of the bedroom.

  In the den, while everyone sipped from cans of Cokes, I nursed my bottled water, and Demetrious assured us Willette was fine, that is, for a comatose woman. Wearily, I closed my eyes as everyone started talking, and I let the gossip float around my head. Then I tossed out a question that had been bothering me. “Why y’all think Ray Glenn had a big, expensive house? I mean, he was a repo man, right? And maybe an assistant store manager.”

  “Well, he was pretty much running that store for Lonnie, especially after Lonnie got elected to the commission,” Dan said. “I think they made a lot of money off their used appliances, and from their stuff they bought right off the boat.”

  “Right off the boat?” My ears pricked up at that.

  “Ray Glenn was also Lonnie’s buyer for secondhand appliances from Miami, Atlanta, and New Orleans. Had him a big trailer, went to auctions and such,” Demetrious said.

  Hank tumbled in, took a cold Coke from the cooler, and stopped working to gulp it down while he listened to the talk. “Ah, that’s the good stuff,” he said.

  “Yes, Coke’s the best,” Dan said.

  I eyed the cooler of cold Cokes. I glanced at my tepid water. I thought about caffeine and sugar. My tongue curled in my mouth.

  Well, hell, when in Rome, I thought, and reached into the cooler, took a can, and while everyone stopped talking to watch me, I paraded into the bathroom, washed the top of the can off with hot water and soap—I mean, okay, but you don’t know what’s been scurrying across the top of those cans—and then opened it. I sipped.

  Damn, it was good. I dashed back to the living room so as not to miss any chatter, alre
ady a little rush of energy pulsing into my system.

  “What about that right-off-the-boat thing?” I asked, and took a big gulp.

  “Ray Glenn also picked up major appliances in Miami, right off the ship too. Saved a ton of money that way, no land shipping charges if he got the appliances right at the dock,” Demetrious said.

  “You know, they plain don’t make anything in this country anymore,” Hank said.

  “This here Coke is still made in this country,” Dan said, a professional pride in his voice. “Right up there in Atlanta.”

  “Sure hits the spot, don’t it?” Hank said, after drinking the whole can in one big swallow.

  I held out my bag of plastic and aluminum. “Recycle,” I said on reflex, but what I was thinking was: Miami, Atlanta, and New Orleans? The three crime capitals of Dixie? Used-appliance auctions, my ass; Ray Glenn was dealing in stolen property, or worse, no doubt with Lonnie’s full knowledge. That big house of the now-dead Ray Glenn began to make a lot more sense to me. Demetrious had to suspect this. I studied his face, his eyes locked on mine, and I saw him shake his head no in an almost imperceptible way.

  “I got to go,” Demetrious said. “I’ll be in touch. Just wanted to let you know I’m checking in on Willette, and she’s doing fine.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” I said, needing some fresh air and a moment alone with him.

  “You have a lovely place, and I’m glad to see what you are doing with my grandparents’ old pasture.”

  “It’s sure a pretty place. I hope to keep it, but you know, it’s going to be rough with that big lake development coming in.”

  “But Shalonda said nobody was threatening you with eminent domain.”

  “Nope, not yet anyway. But even if we hold on to our place, what’s it going to be like? Eventually, if those damn developers have their way, we’ll be surrounded by a bunch of big houses full of people who don’t know a thing about our county, and don’t care.”

  “A bunch of big houses,” I said. “Jubal just talked about the lake and that marina resort.” Though I did remember Shalonda mentioning a housing development, that had gotten lost in the rampant chaos of the last couple of days.

  “Jubal didn’t tell you the half of it. Those resort development people are planning on putting in a whole subdivision of lakefront homes to sell at a half million and up.”

  “Half-million-dollar houses? In Bugfest? Who in the hell do they think will buy those?”

  “Retirees from up North. That’s what they’re planning on, now that Florida’s full up. Got the idea that what with our low crime, clean air and water, and not but being sixty miles from the Gulf of Mexico, that anybody left up there that isn’t already in Florida can come here.”

  “But there’s not the roads, or the shopping, or the medical facilities to support that.”

  “Damn straight, there isn’t. But a majority of the commissioners are for this, like that damn Lonnie Ledbetter. They plan on big high-end shopping malls coming in on the tail of the resort and the big subdivision, then they’ll up the taxes and put in the roads, expand the hospital.”

  “Up the taxes. Yeah, I’ve seen this before. They’ll up the taxes so high that the folks who’ve been living here and farming for a hundred and sixty years can’t afford to pay their property taxes and have to sell out to the developers, and next thing you know, Bugfest is gone.”

  Like, I thought for a moment with a pang in my chest, Sarasota was all but gone. Like all of coastal Florida was about gone. Like central Florida was going.

  “Yep, happening all over north Georgia, in the mountain towns,” Demetrious said.

  I thought of the gentrification of the poor parts of Sarasota, and the displaced lower-income population forced out to make way for the rich people, and I wondered: Where will these people go? Where would the small farmers go when they were shoved off their land to make way for “shoppes” and people from somewhere else?

  “It’s a kind of blasphemy,” I said, “so-called progress, forcing out the rural folks, off their own lands.”

  “The real blasphemy, you ask me, is what that big lake will do to those woods on the north side of the lake,” Demetrious said. “The commissioners are planning a twelve-hundred-acre lake. That’s twelve hundred acres of woods and people’s farms that are going under water. Now where are the deer and the fox and the raccoons and the wild turkey in these woods suppose to go live?”

  On the north side of the little lake, a wild forest of oak, pine, redbud, and sweetgum grew. I had tromped through every inch of it as a child or teenager. “Yeah, I’d hate to lose that,” I said.

  “They aren’t old-growth forest, none of that’s left in this county, but those woods are about as close to old-growth trees as you’re going to find around here,” Demetrious said. “Damn that Lonnie Ledbetter for voting to bring it all down.”

  Yeah, damn Lonnie, I agreed. What the hell is a forest full of live things and hundred-year-old trees to a man who just sees them as something to destroy to make room for more money in his pocket?

  “The families pushed out will find someplace, not as good a land, but still, a place they can live. But all those deer, turkey, bobcats, raccoons, and such, where are they going to go when that big lake and Sleepy Creek Development takes out those woods?”

  “I don’t know. Same as in Florida, I guess they just die.”

  “Yeah, they just flat-out die.”

  On that sad note, we said our good-byes.

  When I stepped back inside, I grabbed up a big bag of garbage to tote to the Dumpster when Jubal looked me over carefully and said, “You know that man seems almost normal, most a the time, don’t he?”

  “Hush, Daddy,” Hank said.

  “What? What?” I said.

  “Nobody told you about his picking up roadkill for the turkey buzzards?” Jubal said, eyeing me like a good audience.

  “Daddy, I don’t think—”

  “He feeds roadkill to the buzzards? Isn’t that kind of…redundant?” I asked.

  “It’s ’cause he saw a bunch of buzzards get hit by a truck once, while they were picking at a dead raccoon in the middle of the road, and ever since then, he got him this notion that he’d help ’em out, keep the buzzards from being roadkill themselves, if he fed ’em off the highway,” Hank said, in a tone that suggested he, Hank, thought this was a fine and normal thing to do.

  “Where’s he feed them?” I asked.

  “Had a place right by his barn, but that Shalonda—she’s a firecracker, ain’t she?—made him move it way out back, way from the house and barn. Said those buzzards spooked her some, hanging around on the tree limbs, watching her when she worked her garden or hung up her laundry,” Jubal said.

  As I let that image sink in, Hank took my bag of garbage. “Let me tote that out for you, you sit and rest a bit,” he said.

  Before he could drag my garbage sack outside to the Dumpster, a herd of teenage boys with wide shoulders came thundering into the room, bringing a rush of wild energy with them. “We got that kitchen done,” one of them said.

  After that, nobody wanted to talk about Demetrious collecting roadkill to feed the buzzards, we all wanted to see if it was safe to go into Willette’s kitchen. So, we trotted into the room, me cautiously in the rear, in case a flying pan of spoiled food hurled itself at us, and Patti started oohing and Hank was full of pride over his boys. I tiptoed around them and peeked into the kitchen. It did look a hundred percent better. Now I could see the sink, the top of the counter, and the floor. But I wouldn’t eat anything in it.

  “Well, that calls for a celebration,” Hank said, and steered us all back to the living room. Hank told all his boys to grab a Coke, toss the empty cans in “Miss Lilly’s recycle bag,” and then do whatever Miss Patti wanted them to do next. With a latent drill-sergeant’s talent, Patti Lea soon had them toting salvageable antiques and wood furniture outside into the sunshine, where Jubal, once he’d finished a monologue on the evils of eminent do
main, which nobody much cared about or listened to, took a broom and started brushing off four decades worth of dust, soot, and stuff I didn’t want to look at close enough to identify. How Hank and his boys had gotten out of school, I didn’t know. Frankly, didn’t care, I was so grateful to them.

  Around noon, I made the executive decision that I needed a vegetarian lunch rather than the Mr. Chick buckets that Dan had fetched for everyone. While Patti Lea was making sure all the wrestling boys washed their hands good, I snuck out and ran to Dan’s, where my first order of business was to shower. After I had washed off as much of Willette’s house as I could, and possibly my top layer of skin, I fished out Willette’s notebook full of her personal telephone history to study while I munched on trail mix bars and apples.

  There, on the last page of the notebook, were the three phone calls that Willette had made the day she allegedly shot Ray Glenn. One to Simon McDowell, one to Lonnie, and one to Jubal.

  Well, what now? I thought. Whatever could she have had to say to Simon and Jubal? Lonnie, maybe I could understand, something about Grandmom’s house, probably.

  I puzzled a bit, and then pulled out the pill bottles that had bits and pieces of labels on them, and double-bagged them and put them in my purse, figuring I’d check with the drugstores on the labels and see if I might convince somebody to violate those new federal privacy statutes and tell me whose name might match the prescription number. That person, or persons, might be a good place to start trying to track down Willette’s supplier. A couple bottles were from Tru Blue Drugstore, and that made me think I should ask Jubal exactly what he did at the Tru Blue, and if it was within his scope to access its computer, and, maybe, the other pharmacies’.

  Then, bing! The dust cleared in my own brain as the obvious slapped me upside the face. What if Jubal had been stealing pharmaceuticals from Tru Blue and supplying them to my mother?