Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  “Someone, like, say, an irate Simon, must have impressed upon Lonnie the need to get a real deed with Willette’s real signature on it. Simon had to be afraid Willette would raise a stink, and sue to get title back to her place. Everything gets put under a microscope in a trial. At the very least, it’d go into the public record that Simon’d overpaid and raise ugly questions,” I said, as Shalonda nodded.

  “You don’t want to shine too much light on a bad thing, do you?” Shalonda said.

  “Exactly. The way I figure it, Lonnie went with Ray Glenn to Willette’s that night, planning to get her to sign a deed he’d prepared and backdated,” I said. “He carried that sixty-five thousand in cash with him. I mean, he had the money now that he had Simon’s bribe, and Lonnie probably hoped he could just pay Willette what he owed and get her to sign the quit-claim deed. He could get that substituted for the fake one easy enough. I’m not sure how Lonnie figured to keep Willette quiet about all that, but it doesn’t matter now. Something went wrong, and Willette shot Ray Glenn, and Lonnie ran away. But Bobby and Becky were in the tree house and saw him run out.”

  “And Willette was too upset to tell Demetrious what’d happened. No way that woman was able to tell him anything. Way he told it, she was just a-screaming and a-screaming.”

  “Yeah. No doubt.” It also occurred to me that this whole experience had probably gone a long way to validate Willette’s rule that nobody was allowed inside her house in the first place.

  And somebody—like Simon the hospital administrator with a prior employment history that included a thorough knowledge of prescription drugs—was able to see to it she never could tell Demetrious what happened that night. All he’d had to do was augment the Thorazine with a few roofies. That is, just long enough to buy him the time to kill her with red ants so it would look like a horrible accident and not murder. When that failed, and Simon heard Dr. Hodo was going to bring Willette out of her drug stupor, no doubt he’d had a chance to slip her some LSD, enough to make her seem psychotic and to force Dr. Hodo to sedate her all over again.

  And keep her sedated until he could figure out how to kill her while she was under guard by both police and her own kith and kin.

  “But how did Simon know Becky and Bobby saw Lonnie run out from Willette’s while they were sitting up in that tree house?” Shalonda asked. “And how come that would even matter?”

  “I don’t know. But I can sure guess that Simon didn’t want Lonnie getting caught by the law because he was sure to try and talk his way out of trouble by pointing the finger right at Simon. So Simon’s the one probably killed Lonnie.”

  “Praise the Lord, then, it was Simon and not Demetrious,” Shalonda shouted, and slumped with relief. And then she brought herself back to the really important thing: saving Bobby, Becky, and Armando. “So those kids are another loose end for Simon, ’cause they tie Lonnie into the mess and raise some questions that get back to Simon.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. Once Ray Glenn got killed, the stakes jumped pretty high. Under the felony-murder doctrine, Simon is as guilty as if he shot Ray Glenn because he set it all in motion.”

  “Yeah, I got it,” Shalonda said.

  “I say the place to start looking for Bobby, Armando, and Becky is at Simon’s.”

  “Yeah, but we’re going to tell Rodney first,” Shalonda said.

  Neither of us could stand to give voice to the great fear that it might already be too late. But Shalonda understood when I said, “Time is of the essence.”

  “I can call him quick. Have him get out there to Simon’s place.”

  “He might need to get a warrant or something, but you call him for backup while we drive.” Actually, I didn’t have a clue as to whether Rodney would need a warrant or not where the lives of kids were involved. Hey, I’m a medical malpractice attorney, not a criminal defense one, but I didn’t want to take the time to call Philip and ask. What I wanted to do, very badly and right then, was to go find my nephew and his girlfriend and Bonita’s son. Yeah, and the damn ferret too. I mean, he was a weird little guy, but he had once saved my life.

  “Use my cell to call Rodney while I drive.”

  “Well, let’s go then,” Shalonda said.

  There was no argument on my part over Shalonda’s company, especially since she had already dug around in Demetrious’s closet earlier that day and pulled out a traditional .12-gauge shotgun, which she had left stashed in the trunk of my faithful Honda.

  “You know how to use that, don’t you?” I asked when she pulled it out of the trunk right before we set off to catch Simon and rescue the kids.

  “It’s for show, white girl, I can bluff with this thing better’n I can shoot it.”

  I wanted Shalonda to load the shotgun, but she said, “Lord says, you live by the shotgun, you die by the shotgun. I ain’t taking no loaded gun with me.”

  Even in the face of Shalonda’s stubbornness, I tried again to convince her that a couple of loads wouldn’t hurt. I mean, the list of the known dead stood at two, and the list of the missing was growing by the hour.

  But Shalonda would not budge. She was not loading that shotgun.

  Even as we sped away to Simon’s place, I was pretty sure we were going to regret not putting shells in that .12-gauge.

  chapter 54

  Well, damn, I thought as I smashed in Simon’s window, there being, in my mind at least, no particular reason to try to hide this B and E. I sure hated that my first visit back inside my grandmom’s house had to be under these circumstances.

  But at least I was too busy looking for kidnapped teenagers to get mopey or nostalgic.

  And too in a hurry to fool with those damn lock picks.

  The good news was that Simon was not at home to get in our way as we ransacked the house he probably didn’t really own.

  The bad news was that we found nothing of kids or clues as to where they might be.

  I did find something very interesting, though—Willette’s missing bank records, plus her monthly statements from her stockbroker. No doubt Simon had broken into her house the night she shot Ray Glenn and taken them in an attempt to hide the fact Lonnie still owed her $65,000 on my grandmom’s house, and therefore didn’t own it when he sold it to him. Simon must not have had the time or the skill to find her gray metal box full of important papers, with the contract for the deed. But I took a quick glance through the paperwork he had stolen, and could easily trace the deposits from Lonnie. Yep, they definitely stopped long before they should have, like $65,000 short. As for her stock account, even I was momentarily impressed by her portfolio. Hmm, I thought, I’ll be able to get Dan to reimburse me for anything I might have to pay that psych nurse or Dr. Hodo. Then I reprimanded myself for thinking about money while the kids were still missing.

  Missing, as in not in the house. But there were the outbuildings and forty acres yet to search, and we headed out to the barn and the pump house.

  Even with the fearsome-looking though unloaded shotgun, I was edgy about Simon—what if he drove up? I’d made a passing effort to hide my Honda in the middle of a long row of well-spaced blueberries. I mean, if nobody walked through the blueberries, the car was probably hidden. But hidden car or not, the busted window in the front of the house was pretty darn obvious, and if Simon showed up, he might kidnap us, or he might freak and hurt the kids.

  If he hadn’t already.

  No, I told myself, put that thought out of your head.

  Besides, we had backup coming just any minute now.

  Shalonda had left word over a broken cell-phone connection with the 911 dispatcher to tell Rodney and the high sheriff to get out here. If Rebecca had good sense, and she seemed to, she’d also called the sheriff about Simon. A small army of armed uniformed officers had to be on the way, right?

  So, while Shalonda toted her shotgun, and I relied on backup arriving any minute, we searched all the outbuildings.

  Nothing.

  “No kids and no Demetrious,�
�� Shalonda said, sounding weary and forlorn. She wandered off briefly back to the garage to make sure we hadn’t missed any trap doors or some such thing.

  “Come on, let’s walk along the lake, make sure…” I paused. Make sure what? There weren’t bodies floating in it? Children chained to trees?

  Shalonda and I galloped down to the shoreline and studied the lake. A blue heron was wading along the eastern shore, looking for its supper. A small flock of wood ducks floated mid-lake, and on the other side, I saw the sloping, green hills of a cow pasture, a few Black Angus grazing in the sun. Beyond that, as far as I could see, were dense woods of old oaks, pine, and sweetgum.

  In the center of the lake, a small island stood, surrounded by submerged logs, covered in the olive-colored sliders—the lake turtles named for their habit of sliding into the water at the approach of anyone. In the early spring, I knew that island would turn yellow from the woven vines of Carolina jasmine, and as the jasmine faded, the pale pink and white of the wild azaleas would take over until the island became a dense, green thicket by summer.

  Closer to me, a couple of small egrets with their big yellow feet patrolled the edge of the lake. I’d grown up calling those egrets “cow birds,” because they mostly followed the herds, literally standing on the cow’s back, catching and eating the bugs the cattle naturally attracted.

  Watching the lake, I was hit by a wave of grief almost as overwhelming as my fear for the kids. Damn Lonnie, damn the commissioners. This stable, healthy lake would be submerged into a big, fake monster-lake. The island, the pasture, and the woods would all be underwater soon. And the sliders, the egrets, the ducks, and the herons would have to cope with crowds of bass boats and kids on Jet Skis. The trees would be lumbered before the damming and the flooding, their pulp sold to paper mills. And all those creatures that lived in those woods would drown, or die from loss of habitat.

  The native landscape of my childhood was going to be nothing more than a weekend resort for city folks who didn’t know, and didn’t care, what life they had killed to get those few days on a big-ass man-made lake.

  But I didn’t have time to waste on getting angry. I had to find Bobby, Becky, and Armando. So, I gave the lake a last, careful study, and Shalonda and I ran around the edges calling out names and getting no answer. We poked around in deep bushes, shoving aside poison ivy and Virginia creeper, finding nothing but more vegetation. Even in the cool of the autumn day, we worked up a sweat before we looked each other in the face, in defeat.

  Satisfied we were not going to find the kids along the shoreline, we walked back to the barn we had already fruitlessly searched. Had we missed any possible hiding places?

  While staring at all the nooks and crannies, I noticed an electric meter on the side of the barn. The wheel in the meter was whirling around like a windmill on amphetamines, and I wondered why Simon would need that much power in his barn. But when I looked closer, I noticed that the line ran away from the barn and cut through the woods.

  Well, that was interesting, I thought, and grabbed Shalonda. “Let’s follow that power line, and see what’s at the other end.”

  Thus, we went running off into the woods, leaving my only marginally hidden Honda and a busted window as a calling card for Simon, should he come back to the house he paid $400,000 for but still didn’t own.

  chapter 55

  There’s nothing like a brisk jog through the dense brown, orange, and green woods of the red hills of Georgia in the fall to make one appreciate the virtues of good shoes, bug repellent, and a machete.

  Too bad what I had were my sister-in-law’s boots, not even a bottle of citronella, and a high school girlfriend with an unloaded shotgun.

  Which is to say, I had a few bites, the gnawing suspicion that the boots didn’t really fit so well after all, and scratches from the thick limbs and scrubs that didn’t give way easily as we followed beneath the overhead power line. The whole time we were shoving our way through brambles often stronger than we were, Shalonda kept wondering out loud why on earth the Rural Electric Co-op people hadn’t cut beneath the line. “They’re always cutting the trees under the lines out to our place. Look at this mess here, come any old kind of storm, and there’s gonna be a tree down on this line.”

  Me, see, I didn’t care if the mystery power line crashed and burned so long as Armando, Bobby, and Becky were not under the tree when it fell.

  But we both stopped short, and shut up with our litany of what was in the larger sense minor complaints when we saw where the power line went.

  To the old cemetery. The one with the glorious Confederate dead, the ghost of the hanged man, the relatively new fence, and rows and rows of people who could finally answer the question of what lay on the other side.

  “Dead people need electricity?” I asked, testing Shalonda’s concept of the rhetorical question.

  “There’s that old church in there,” Shalonda said, “the one you asked about. I guess they ran the line off of your grandmomma’s place way back, being the shorter distance, to save money instead of putting up a whole new line out there. She was pretty smart to make ’em get their own meter.”

  “Yeah, but you said the county bought that church and nobody uses it or the graveyard anymore.”

  “Well, then let’s go see.” Shalonda hoisted up the shotgun on her shoulder, scampered up the slatted wood gate, and hopped over. I followed.

  Sure enough, the power line went into the old church on one side, but it also extended beyond the church, into the center of the graveyard, where a clump of trees, newly expressing themselves in red and orange, blocked our view.

  First things first, I thought, and tried the front door to the old building in front of me.

  The church was locked, of course.

  “Now, see, if you’d put shells in that gun, we could have blasted our way in,” I said, after yanking on the padlock and finding it secure. “Guess we’ll have to bust a window out and crawl in.” I was aiming a rock at the front window.

  “You ain’t busting up any of this old stain-glass,” Shalonda said. “Not when we can get in from the back.”

  So we huffed our way around to the back, busted out a plain old glass window, picked the shards out of the way, and crawled into the dark church through the window.

  I flicked on a light switch, and no illumination came forth, and I cursed myself for not bringing the flashlight from the Honda, and double cursed the quaint church-building notion that semiopaque stained-glass windows and dark interiors would please God. I mean, God made the sun and the bright blue skies, so it seemed to me He’d appreciate some of that shining through into His house.

  Feeling my way in the gloom, I found a breaker box inside the church, and fingered them till I could figure out all the breakers were switched off. But that power meter on the barn had been twirling around like that line was responsible for air-conditioning all of southwest Georgia.

  Right now I wanted light, and I didn’t care if I ran up some church’s bill. I switched all the breakers back on, and then we went through the church turning all the light switches on. Fortunately, a couple of bulbs still worked, and we got a meager light.

  The church seemed eerily like it had the last time I was in it—when I was sixteen, on a mission I’d rather not disclose at my current age. Preserved, like a museum piece, with the old wooden pews and the roughhewed altar. Even the smell was the same—a cross between ladies’ Avon talc, musty hymnals and prayer books, and clean human sweat. The place had never been air-conditioned.

  In the dim light, we searched high and low.

  No sign of the kids, no sign of Demetrious, and no sign of Simon.

  In fact, no sign anyone had been inside the church in years. Dust lay ghostly on all the surfaces, and the only footprints in the sand and dust on the floor were our own.

  “Come on. Nobody’s in here, let’s get outside and keep looking,” I said, as if Shalonda couldn’t have figured that out by herself.

  We crawled
back out the window, this time dislodging an impressive spiderweb with a late-season golden orb about as big as a pet hamster. “Now ain’t she a beauty,” Shalonda said, staring at the spider.

  She was, but I was in no mood to admire a big banana spider. “Nobody’s been using this place. Not for a long time. We got to trace that line to its end.”

  Just beyond the church, front and center at the beginning of the graveyard, a battered sign read: WE’RE GROWING. JOIN US.

  “Reckon they meant the congregation, or the cemetery?” I asked.

  “Not the church,” Shalonda said, “judging from that spiderweb.”

  And not the cemetery, since Shalonda said it wasn’t used anymore.

  Just an old leftover sign. With a leftover church.

  And a power line to something else.

  We trudged along, under the power line, until we were deeper into the old graveyard.

  Deep into the part where the hanged man’s ghost reportedly ate children and teenagers.

  Okay, I was a long way past believing that old nonsense, passed down by grown-ups who didn’t want kids horsing around and smoking rabbit tobacco or marijuana among their dead family.

  But I knew ghosts were real.

  I’d seen one pretty darn recently.

  So, I stepped forward through the freelance thickets and huckleberry bushes with a tingling sense of unease running up and down my back.

  chapter 56

  My brother Delvon likes to tell me that I need to relax, that God will provide me with what I really need, when I need it.

  In theory, I believe this. In practice, relaxing and trusting are not my things. I like to keep my fridge full, my cupboards fuller, and my tools sharp. I’m the kind who doesn’t need to rush to the store when a category 4 hurricane is coming: I’ve been hoarding batteries, dried fruit, brown rice, and bottled water for Armageddon for a long time.