by Laurel Dewey
Jordan bristled at the question. “No, Jane. Killing is not in my bloodline.”
Jane was beginning to feel more centered. “So, killing was something you started on your own?”
Thick silence fell between them. “I don’t think we have enough candle power in this room to build a third-degree light, do you?”
For whatever reason, Jordan wasn’t interested in discussing the notorious murder of Daniel Marshall. “Do you know all of the stories that came before your birth because of your intuitive gift that you got from your mom?”
“Some of it. The rest I read in this little book.” Jordan handed the weathered leather book to Jane. “My mother’s diary.”
“I thought she couldn’t speak English?” Jane opened the book.
“She learned it quickly during the time my father and she spent alone together in St. Lucia. And my mother also had help from her own mother who picked up some English from my maternal grandfather…a white Englishman.” Jane looked up at Jordan with a slightly stunned look. “Yes. You see? Patterns , Jane. Patterns of deception breed unchecked through the generations.”
Jane glanced at the pages, many yellowed and stained by time. There was a sentence written in Patois that repeated throughout the diary, usually written at the end of one of Maureen’s entries:
Mwê ni èspwa pou la yonn kilès ki sa fè mwên
tjè feb antyè ankò
“What does this mean?” Jane asked, pointing to the Patois words.
“I don’t know. Whatever it says, I have to assume she wrote it in Patois to keep it a secret. Patois was never a written language so when people eventually tried to translate it, the words were written phonetically and not always with the same letters.”
“Can’t you go on the Internet and find some references?”
“I don’t own a computer. Remember? No phone. No TV.”
Jane asked Jordan for a piece of paper and she copied the mysterious sentence with the flicker of the candlelight to illuminate the page. “So, when did you find out that Maureen was your mother?” She folded the paper and slipped it into her jeans’ pocket.
“I always felt something was off. When you unconsciously live a lie, you live a false life. Even if you don’t know you’re living a lie, you still feel it. You never feel like you’re home. Like you’re safe. I always wanted to know the truth, no matter how painful that truth might be. Living a lie is always more painful.”
“Not to be rude here, Jordan, but I can’t tell your skin color under all the grime. Was that an obvious factor?”
“Oh, Jesus. Drop the bullshit, PC politeness, Jane! My mother’s a mulatto and so am I. For all I know, I’ve got cream in my coffee from way back. Except for the curly hair,” he touched his tangled locks, “I can easily pass for whitey. “We sho is good at dat!” he said in an exaggerated ghetto drawl. He leaned forward. “It wasn’t skin color that made me question my truth. You look for patterns in crimes. I’ve learned to look for patterns in families. Patterns of subterfuge fascinate me… the way a secret festers and develops a heartbeat of its own. When you think you can hide or suffocate something, you’re kidding yourself. Because the thing that is hidden will always reach out and demand to be acknowledged. That is how I started on my quest.” Jordan leaned forward, clasping his dirty hands together. “We learn about ourselves through two ways: the stories we’re told and our experiences. But then there’s your gut! You know? That middle section that churns when two and two doesn’t equal four. When the stories you’re told don’t resonate with your own experience or your gut, that’s when you feel like you’re going crazy. But you’re not crazy at all…even though everyone else keeps telling you that you are! The past holds the answers that influence the future. You’ll never walk freely into your future if the ghosts from the past are clawing at your heels and begging to be acknowledged.”
“It’s one thing to suspect something is false. It’s quite another to have it proven.”
“Yes, yes. The moment of realization.” Jordan stood up and walked around the kitchen table. His towering presence seemed larger than life in the tiny cabin. “I was eight and I heard a fight one night downstairs in my father’s study. It was between Maureen and my father. Mrs. Copeland was gone that night… some charity event in the city. The voices in the office got louder and so I crept downstairs and listened at the door. I didn’t understand most of it, but I sure remember my mother saying that when two are of the same blood, they both have the right to know. My father said that if she was going to insist on making demands on him, no good would come of it. I remember he said he cared for her, which I thought very odd at that moment because my father was such a cold individual. But he said as much as he cared for her, he couldn’t risk his reputation.” Jordan stopped, the memory still bitter. “As much as he loved her… and he did love her…his fucking reputation was more important.” Jordan returned to the seat next to Jane. His eyes filled with heavy tears. “I went upstairs and crawled into bed. A couple hours later, my mother came into my room. She was crying and it scared me. She held me for what seemed like forever and then she whispered in my ear the words I will never forget. ‘You’re my blood and you will forever be in my heart.’ I didn’t know what that meant when I was eight. I never told a soul what she said so there was no one to explain it to me. But that didn’t mean that the truth didn’t speak to me in my own heart.” He held the leather book tightly to his chest. “She gave me this book before she left. She told me to keep it in a safe place and for me to read it when I was much older. And so I hid it under a floor board that was under my bed…” Jordan looked off into the distance for a moment. “Humph…I guess that was the first time I hid something of value under my bed.”
Jane felt slightly uneasy with that revelation. “You told me that she died when you were eight. What happened?”
“She scared my father. Her ability to see the future and have a knowing that defied logic was a liability. She was dangerous , Jane. So the son-of-a-bitch called the family clean-up man, Edward Butterworth…Eddie…and he drove my mother to an asylum in upstate New York where she was locked away and her secret buried forever.” Jordan balled his fist on the kitchen table. He appeared to go into a slightly altered state. “Four years later, when I was twelve, I was alone in the house. I missed my mother desperately, and so I uncovered the diary for the first time since she’d given it to me and started reading. I didn’t understand the sexual aspects of it, of course, but I got loud and clear who she really was to me and those words she whispered in my ear before she left suddenly made sense. I was vindicated! All those feelings I’d felt… all the disconnect…all the lies… Suddenly, I wasn’t crazy anymore! I had to find her! I went into my father’s study and looked through every drawer to find anything I could on where she might be. I found a check stub written out to a hospital in upstate New York and another one to the same place for expenses. They were four years old. I got the phone number from Information and I called the place. I was pretty savvy for a twelve-year-old. I asked in the most adult voice I could muster if there was a Maureen Lafond there and they told me that she had lived there for only a short time before she departed.” Jordan’s voice filled with emotion. “She died and I know why. When you don’t allow someone to be who they are… when you take away their heart, they die. I’m sure my father got the call and made arrangements for the burial, thus, the check written for expenses. The Copelands have to make sure they tidy up all those nasty loose ends. Once again, Eddie Butterworth made sure any whisper of Maureen Lafond was silenced.” He leaned forward, rubbing the front of the leather diary with his thumb. “You see, Jane, you can’t cage a spirit like my mother. You can’t drug it. You can’t strap it down in restraints or put it in a straitjacket. The only way you shut up that kind of person is to kill them.” Jordan sat up, awash with bubbling anger. “They must be destroyed! They must be annihilated! They must be sacrificed!” He twisted his foot into the ground. “Squashed like a bug until nothing is lef
t to show they existed! Destroy them!!” With that pronouncement, he violently kicked over the small table next to Jane that held the glass bowl of bloody water and the small candle. The glass shattered, as the crimson water quickly extinguished the candle’s flame. “But you know what? You never kill their spirit!” His face flushed with rage. “And when wronged, that spirit will haunt and stalk a family bloodline forever until they are acknowledged and their secret is brought into the light of day.” He stood up and screamed, “The only way to stop the pattern of deception is to shout from the rooftops the thing that is considered so vile, so sick, so humiliating and let it live in the light! Then, and only then, can the dead be free and you can live your life on your own terms, without carrying the hell of others on your back!”
Jane let Jordan’s frenzy subside as her fingers crept closer to the Glock. She watched as he separated from himself and then gradually come back together. Once he was back inside of his body, there was a profound sadness that gripped him; a pain so deep in his bones that she thought he would break in two. “You think any of the asses in this town have the guts to dig their hole and scream their secrets into the ground?” Jordan asked.
“I’m not following you, Jordan.”
“Don’t you know the story of how Midas got its name?” Jane shook her head. “It’s based on the legend of King Midas. You’d think it had to do with gold, with all the money that flows through town. But it’s got to do with the Greek legend when Midas had the temerity to declare that Pan’s music far outshone Apollo’s. Apollo declared that King Midas’ ears were depraved and, thus, were transformed into the ears of a jackass, long in length and hairy. But Midas felt he could hide this curse under his turban and so he did and no one knew his secret… except, of course, his barber. But when Midas confronted his barber and asked him, ‘Barber, do you see anything odd about me?’ the barber, knowing he would be killed if he acknowledged what was so obvious, shook his head at King Midas and said, ‘No, sir. I see nothing.’ And each time Midas saw his barber and asked the same question, the barber continued to deny the obvious deformity. Until one day, it became too much for the barber to keep silent because the secret was eating away at him. So the barber went out into the meadow, dug a hole in the ground, and kneeling down, whispered the story into the hole before filling the hole with dirt. But then, a thick bed of reeds sprang up from the hole where the secret had been buried. Along came a musician, who fashioned a flute from the reeds. But when the piper played the flute, no music was heard. The only sound was the echoing cry, ‘King Midas has donkey’s ears!’ And that declaration was caught by the wind and carried back to the townspeople, never to be a secret again.” Jordan looked at Jane. “But none of these dwellers in Midas can even get around to digging their hole! It’s quite a town to call home, isn’t it?” He seemed to drift away. “Home…you can’t go home again, Jane. But if you don’t make peace with it, home will always haunt you.”
There it was again, that damned literary connection to the Thomas Wolfe novel. She’d heard it twice from his lips. Jane recalled the overpowering way she felt when she was sitting on the bed at the B&B and falling into the written clues that were draped on the clothesline. As she moved into the core of the person who wrote those lines, she recalled the desolate ache of isolation and heartache that reverberated from the pages. There was the graphic horror of desperation and the imploring for someone—anyone—to listen. The clue that echoed right now to Jane was the non sequitur: I BEARED MY SOUL AND STILL YOU IGNORE ME??? Indeed, Jordan had bared his soul to Jane. Quite possibly, she was the only person he ever shared his family secret with and perhaps, she hoped, he would divulge more soon. As long as she acknowledged him, the door might still be open. If he was involved in any way with Jake Van Gorden’s disappearance, she needed to keep that proverbial door ajar.
“Are you able to…connect with your mother on the other side?” Jane asked.
Jordan hung his head. “No. There’s a wall that I can’t ascend. No matter how much I meditate or drink the blue lily tea, I can’t find my mother in the ether. But I dream about her. It’s always the same dream.” He walked to the window by the front door and pointed outside. “I walk up the path that leads to this house and I stand still. And I feel her close by. The front door opens and my mother walks out onto the porch. She’s not thirty anymore. She’s in her eighties. But she’s still beautiful. She walks over to me and she holds me and I’m whole again. She whispers in my ear, the same way she did the last time we were together on this plane. She says, ‘And in the quiet it comes. Not from a shout. But in a whisper.’ All that went before is washed away and my heart is finally free. And then I wake up and I’m back here and I curse God for his indiscriminate love.” His hand began to shake uncontrollably. Jordan looked down at the hand as if it didn’t belong to him. “I’ve never spoken that dream to anyone.” His face etched with apprehension. He turned to Jane. “You… have you had that same dream?”
Jane tried to remain stone-faced even though the question sounded psychotic. “I don’t think so,” she replied in the kindest way possible.
He moved closer to her, his boots crushing the broken glass from the shattered bowl. “Are you certain?”
“Yes. I’m certain.”
His hand still shook with an anxious tremor. “This means something,” he said, regarding his shaking hand. “This always means something!” He grabbed Jane’s shoulders. “We’re connected, don’t you see?” His eyes were wild and remote.
Jane wondered how quickly she could get to her Glock. The only way out of this was to change the subject, but she was coming up short on options. She blurted the first thing she could think of. “You mention dreams…what about that other dream you told me about? Remember? The one about the little kid you call Red? You know, the one you said came to the back gate of your property in Short Hills and talked to you with his mind? You still dreaming of him?”
Jordan’s eyes washed with sadness. She could see that he wanted to pursue the obsessive connection he had regarding the dream of his mother and how it could be tied to Jane. The fact that Jane disarmed him by altering the subject didn’t seem to set well with the man. Almost instantly, his hand stopped shaking. He let out a long breath of air. “Red…Yeah… Every fucking night he comes to me. Why? Is he coming to you?”
Jane remained stoic under a ball of nerves. “No, Jordan. Why would I dream of Red? That’s your dream.”
He thought about it. “Who said it’s a dream?”
Jane felt trapped. In her opinion, the conversation had taken a seriously dark turn. Whoever this Red kid was, whether he was real, made up, a projection of Jordan as a troubled child or a twisted version of Jake Van Gorden, she didn’t know. But she craved more physical distance from Jordan. Jane stretched, allowing a few more inches of freedom from his glare. “You told me it was a dream.” She slowly got up, making sure that her movement was calculated and smooth.
Jordan stood up, engaged by the new shift in conversation. “I know. I know. But what if…what if he’s coming to me and trying to tell me something? What if he’s trying to send me a message?”
Jane needed to end this fast and get out of his cabin. “Okay, look, you told me that you just started dreaming about this Red kid recently…”
“Right!”
“And you don’t know his name, and the last contact you had with him in the real world was a few months before you killed Daniel Marshall…”
“Six months!” Jordan corrected. “It was six months. He stopped coming to the gate. But I never knew why!”
“Right. Exactly…” Jane maneuvered her way around the kitchen table.
“So, why am I suddenly dreaming about him now, Jane?” Jordan’s voice was becoming distressed.
“It’s okay, Jordan. You need to calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down! I can’t stand it when people tell me to calm down!”
“Fine. Stay up all night and obsess on Red.”
“I
might just do that…” Jordan turned away, buried in his private thoughts.
“I’m going to go now.”
“Yes. Right,” Jordan’s mind was occupied elsewhere. “Goodnight.”
Jane observed him. Suddenly all the fear she felt just minutes before dissolved. She walked to the door, crunching the broken glass bowl under her cowboy boots. For whatever reason, she felt a need to reach out to him verbally. “Thank you for helping me tonight,” she stammered.
“Yeah… sure…” He was still locked in his thoughts.
They didn’t call the guy anti-social for nothing. “Okay,” she touched the door handle and he suddenly turned to her.
“Hey, Jane?” She turned to him. He’d quickly lifted out of his quandary and was focused on her with renewed interest.
“Yeah?”
“I got another riddle for you. The strange man who lives in the log cabin promised the detective today that he will tell her a big secret on the day before two days from the day after tomorrow. Since today is Saturday, on what day will the strange man who lives in the cabin tell the detective the big secret?”
Jane’s mind worked out the numbers in her head. “Monday?”
He smiled. “See you then.”
CHAPTER 21
It was closing in on 8:45 pm when Jane rolled back into Midas. All she wanted to do was head to her room at the B&B, soak in a hot bath and go to bed. But after she took a gander at her leather jacket and saw the splatters of blood across it, she knew she had to resolve it before she encountered Weyler. The high country night air carried an icy sting through the shattered driver’s side window. Shit. That was going to be another complication to explain.
There was only one person she could think of to go to for help.
Jane parked the Mustang around the back of The Rabbit Hole. Checking the menu on the outside of the building, she found the phone number and dialed. The bartender answered. Jane announced who she was and told him to ask Hank to meet her at the back entrance. No sooner did she walk around the building than Hank was waiting for her.
