by Billie Letts
“Well, I don’t plan to stay around long,” Mark said.
“That’s probably a good idea. And I think it’d be better for me and Kippy if you didn’t come out here no more.”
“Am I bothering you?”
“No, but Oliver wouldn’t like me talking to you again.”
“I can’t understand why it would bother him for me to stop in to buy a soda.”
“Please, mister,” she said, “just don’t come back.”
Not far from the bait shop, Mark passed Kippy walking beside the highway carrying a fishing pole and coffee can. Mark turned the car around, driving slowly some distance behind Kippy until he climbed through a fence, waded through high weeds and disappeared into a grove of trees.
Mark parked on the shoulder, then followed in Kippy’s path, which led to a pond where two cows stood knee-high in the muddy water near an earthen dam.
Kippy was threading a worm onto a fishing hook when he heard steps behind him. Turning, he saw Mark and smiled.
“You gonna fish, too?”
“No. But you don’t mind if I keep you company, do you?”
“If I catch Old Tom, you can take him off the hook for me, but you’ll have to be careful, ’cause catfish have real sharp teeth.”
“Yes, they do.”
“But don’t tell my daddy you helped me, ’cause he don’t want me to talk to you no more.”
“Why?” Mark asked.
“He said your mama died and you were real mad. Are you mad?”
“No. I’m sad, though.”
“I know why. It’s ’cause when someone dies, they never come back. Not people or dogs or babies or horses or squirrels or dogs.
“I had a dog named Skippy. He was a receiver ’cause he was supposed to go pick up birds my daddy shot. But Skippy didn’t like dead birds, so my daddy kicked him and he died because Skippy was a piss-poor receiver.
“Mama buried Skippy down by the creek, but I dug him up so he could chase his ball, but he didn’t. He didn’t eat the bone I brought him, either. And he didn’t even try to get away when I picked ticks off his ears. He was dead, I guess.”
“Yes, it sounds like he was.”
“I almost died when I was little. I had to have an operation on my heart ’cause my heart didn’t work right. And the doctor charged a whole lot of money.” Kippy laughed. “Mama says I have a heart that’s richer than she is.”
“But your heart works right now, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, but if that doctor made a mistake, I would be dead. Just like Skippy. And when you’re dead, you never come back. Never, ever, never.”
Later that afternoon, Teeve was on the front porch watering her hanging baskets when O Boy pulled up and parked in the driveway, causing a commotion among the reporters and cameramen who’d been at the curb all day waiting for some action.
As O Boy sauntered toward the house, a woman with a microphone trailed him.
“Hey,” Teeve yelled at her. “You’re on private property. My property. Back your ass up to the street or I’ll call the law.”
“Evening, Teeve,” O Boy said.
“I mean the real law.”
Ignoring her sarcasm, O Boy smiled. “How’re you feeling? Heard you’ve been nursing a pretty bad cold.”
“Is this a social call? You come to inquire about my health?”
“Well, I’m a sociable guy. You know that. And I’m here to socialize with your houseguest.”
“Who?”
“Come on, Teeve. Everybody in the county knows he’s been staying with you.”
“I’ve heard those rumors, too.”
“I aim to talk to him, Teeve.” O Boy’s smile had disappeared, and his voice had turned ugly. “Now.”
“Then I’d better let you in before you shoot me.”
O Boy followed Teeve inside and back to the den, where Ivy was reading and Mark was asleep in the recliner. When Teeve touched his shoulder, he jumped, then blinked several times as his eyes adjusted to the light.
“Your friend the sheriff is here,” Teeve said.
“After our last conversation, I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again, Harjo.”
“Why is that?”
“Figured you’d hightail it back to Hollywood, seeing as how our town seems to cramp your style.”
“I’m adjusting.”
“That’s nice. But if I was you, I wouldn’t get too comfortable here.”
“I have the feeling you’re about to tell me why.”
“Be my guess that someone thinks you’ve overstayed your welcome in DeClare.”
“Now why would you say that?”
“Hear you and Ivy went out to Arthur’s trailer couple of days ago. You want to tell me about that?”
Ivy said, “He wanted to see where—”
“I’m not talking to you, Ivy.”
“Ivy drove me out, we looked around,” Mark said. “I walked through the trailer, then we left.”
“Did you find anything of interest?”
“No.”
“Have you been back out there?”
Mark shook his head. “Once was enough.”
“Well, won’t be much reason for you to go back now. Someone set fire to it a couple of hours ago.”
“Set fire to it? Why in the hell would anyone want to . . .”
“I think whoever torched that trailer was sending you a message.”
“Which is?”
“Someone wants you gone.”
April 5, 1968
Dear Diary,
Martin Luther King was killed yesterday evening. It was on television all night long. Today in study hall we were talking about it and I started crying. Richard Graham who is a senior asked me what was wrong. When I told him, he laughed and said, “So another nigger bit the dust.”
I got so mad I hardly remember slugging him in the stomach, but Row said I hit him so hard he threw up. I got sent to the principal’s office, but Mr. Gordon didn’t do anything to me. He said if he’d been there, he might’ve hit Richard, too.
Spider Woman
Chapter Twenty
Mark had seen plenty of press conferences on TV; still, he wasn’t prepared for the pandemonium awaiting him as he and Hap stepped through the door and onto the sidewalk in front of Hap’s office.
More microphones than Mark could count had been mounted onto a lectern, and there was constant movement from the crowd that spilled into the street as people with cameras and minicams jostled for position.
Reporters began shouting questions as soon as Mark and Hap appeared, and when the crowd surged forward, two policemen stepped in to escort Mark to the lectern.
When Hap raised his hand and said, “Good morning,” the gathering quieted. “My name is Hap Duchamp, attorney of record for Dr. Mark Albright, who has asked me to announce that a reward of fifty thousand dollars is being offered for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the killer or killers of his mother, Gaylene Harjo, in 1972.”
A murmur ran through the crowd, someone whistled and a few actually applauded.
“Now, Dr. Albright will read a brief statement he has prepared, but he will decline to answer questions at this time.”
Hap moved aside, allowing space for Mark at the lectern, but his feet wouldn’t budge. His mouth had gone dry, and an unsettling sensation low in his stomach was threatening some kind of rebellion.
“Mark?” Hap whispered. “You ready?”
Mark nodded, stepped reluctantly to the lectern, then looked over the crowd, where he saw Arthur McFadden and O Boy Daniels shoulder to shoulder.
Hap tried again. “Go on.”
Mark studied a typed statement he held in a trembling hand, the statement he’d read several times in Hap’s office, but the words were now indecipherable, the characters seeming to belong to another language.
Mark cleared his throat, then said, “I’m glad,” but his voice fa
iled him, so that the words came out sounding like “Ham gad.”
When someone laughed, he glanced up once again, but this time he spotted Ivy standing near the back of the throng. She winked and gave him a thumbs-up.
Finally, he placed the sheet of paper flat on the lectern, then focused on the typed lines until the words emerged as English again.
“I’m glad to have the opportunity to speak to you this morning,” he said, his voice growing stronger.
“A short time ago, I discovered that I was adopted when I was ten months old. Curious about my birth mother, Gaylene Harjo, I came here to DeClare, intending to meet her. But soon after my arrival, I discovered she had been murdered and I was presumed to be dead. As you can see, that is not the case.”
Two teenage girls on the sidewalk giggled but were quickly silenced by a stern-looking woman beside them.
“I plan to remain here, welcoming the chance to talk to someone, anyone, who might have information important to me and the family I’ve recently met.
“Please, if you think you can help at all, in any way, come forward. You can reach me through Mr. Duchamp’s office.
“Thank you.”
As they planned, Mark and Hap retreated immediately into Hap’s office, where Frances locked the door as soon as they were inside while a barrage of questions echoed from the street.
“I’ve never seen so much traffic on this road,” Ivy said. “Nothing much out here but the Green Country Plant Farm, a small nursery.”
“Maybe there’s a sale on roses,” Mark said.
“I have a sneaking suspicion we’re not the only ones driving fifteen miles from town just to see a trailer.”
“A burned trailer at that.”
“Well, the story was in today’s paper, along with that dorky picture of you in a tuxedo. And with your press conference, there’s bound to be a lot of curiosity.”
“I thought I looked quite debonair.”
“I thought you looked dorky.”
After Ivy negotiated a turn, she put her hand low on her abdomen and said, “Okay, kid. Settle down.”
“The baby?” Mark asked.
“Feel right here.” Ivy took Mark’s hand and placed it flat against her belly.
“That’s quite a kick. Girl or boy?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve had an ultrasound, right?”
“Sure, but I asked my doctor not to tell me the sex.”
“Any particular reason?”
Ivy’s expression changed, but Mark couldn’t read it. “Yeah,” she said. “A very particular reason.”
When the van topped a hill, they saw two dozen slow-moving vehicles stretched out ahead of them.
“This is incredible,” Mark said.
“Lets you know what an exciting place DeClare is. A trailer burns and half the town comes out to gawk.”
Movement was slow but steady. And the nearer they got to the trailer, the stronger the smell of smoke. Several blackened tree stumps still smoldered, and wooden fence posts burned away at the bottom, hung from strands of barbed wire.
Crime scene tape had been stretched across a wide area, and the fire chief’s bright red SUV was blocking the turnoff to the trailer; standing just off the shoulder of the highway, a man in a baseball cap was waving cars on by.
Ivy said, “That’s Matthew.”
When she pulled up and parked behind the SUV, Matthew yelled, “Sorry, ma’am. You’ll have to keep moving. No one’s allowed . . .”
As she rolled down her window, he grinned, said, “Hey, Ivy,” and tipped his cap.
“Thought you retired, Matthew.”
“Yeah, I have. Just rode out here with the chief, see if I could lend a hand.”
“I think you two have met,” Ivy said, gesturing to Mark.
“Hello again,” Matthew said. “I didn’t know until this morning who you were. Hap’s real closemouthed about this business.”
“I didn’t get a chance to thank you for brunch.”
“Why don’t you come back next Sunday? You, too, Ivy. I’m doing something with tofu and curried figs.”
“I appreciate the invitation,” Mark said, “but—”
“Looks like there was a hell of a grass fire out here,” Ivy said.
“I’d say it burned off four, five acres, but it started in the trailer. Of course, everything’s so dry, it all went up. Chief’s back there now with the fire marshal and a couple of state boys, but it’s arson, that’s for sure.”
“Any idea who started it?”
“Kids, maybe. Doesn’t look professional. Found the empty gas can, box of kitchen matches. We’ll have to wait to see if they can get any prints.”
“O Boy came by last night,” Ivy said. “Seemed to think somebody might be sending a message to Mark.”
“Must be easier ways than this.”
“You think someone was trying to get rid of some evidence out here?” Mark asked.
“Can’t imagine there’d be anything left to find. The law went over this place with a fine-tooth comb. More than once, too. Been a number of transients in and out of the trailer for years. I understand a homeless family lived here for months. And kids discover it all the time. A good place to have sex, do some drugs. What in the world would have been left to find?”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
When a car pulled up behind Ivy’s van, Matthew waved them off. “You can’t park here,” he yelled. Moments later, the car drove away.
“We’d better get out of your way,” Ivy said.
“Sorry I can’t let you all back there.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “We’re just like everyone else. Curious.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think you’ve got more than curiosity invested in this.”
“Matthew, you take care.” Ivy started the van.
“Will do. By the way, construction isn’t finished at Tinker Junction,” Matthew said.
“They’ve been working on that junction for over a year.”
“Yeah, but it’s a real bottleneck out there now with all this traffic. If you’re headed back to town, I’d take Sowell Road.”
“Thanks, Matthew.”
As Ivy pulled away, Mark said, “You’ve no idea how close we came to danger.”
“What kind of danger?”
“Tofu and curried figs.”
“Gosh, I haven’t been on this road in years,” Ivy said. “I think the last time I was out here was for Kippy’s welcome home party.”
“Welcome home from where?”
“He had heart surgery when he was eight or nine. Spent weeks in the hospital. When he got out, Carrie had a party for him. Most of the kids in our church came.”
“So, the Daniels lived out here.”
“Yeah. That was their house.” Ivy pointed to a clapboard house with peeling paint, a sagging roof and a broken window covered with masking tape. A rusted-out hull of a pickup shared the yard with a few chickens and some hounds.
“How long did they live here?” Mark asked.
“Years. I think they were living here when Kippy was born. And they didn’t move until after his surgery.”
“And this road’s less than a mile from the trailer?”
“Aunt Gaylene’s trailer?”
Mark nodded.
“Well, it’s a lot less than that if you go by foot,” Ivy said. “Cross the creek and it’s probably no more than a quarter mile.”
“So they were neighbors when she was killed.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“I don’t know.” Mark stared at the house until they were well past it. “But it’s interesting.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Teeve waited for Lonnie Cruddup to shuffle out so she could put the CLOSED sign in the window and lock the door. As he walked past her, he was still grumbling about being “evicted” before closing time.
&nbs
p; He was always the last of the domino boys to leave and always the one who complained about the pool hall shutting down at six o’clock, which he called “the shank of the evening.” He often whispered to his gang that Teeve, twenty years his junior, was “an old manless woman” who went to bed with the chickens for want of something better to do, whereas, he pointed out, his libido was just waking up when the sun went down.
Lonnie wanted his acquaintances to think he was a man for whom the night was long and full of lusty adventure. Unfortunately, all he had to look forward to at home was drinking a glass of Metamucil, injecting insulin in his thigh, scooping poop from the cat litter box and watching an hour of Matlock before bed.
But he was especially upset at being turned out today, not because it was ten till six, but because Ivy had, only a few minutes earlier, arrived with Nick Harjo, causing Lonnie to turn up his hearing aid. He recognized this as an opportunity to redeem himself with the community after having spread the erroneous news of a stranger in town with rabies.
He’d been able to catch a bit of the whispered conversation between Mark and Teeve taking place at the counter, something about O Boy Daniels’ old house on Sowell Road. But before Lonnie could discover the point of the discussion, Teeve had sent him packing.
She watched him push his way through some reporters outside the pool hall, then she joined Ivy and Mark in the café, where Ivy was washing out the coffeepot and Mark was attempting to sweep, though it was obvious he was a stranger to the broom.
“I’ve been thinking about your question, Mark,” Teeve said, “and I don’t remember Gaylene ever mentioning O Boy coming to her trailer. Now, Kippy came by from time to time when he managed to slip away from Carrie. She tried her best to keep him home, but he escaped every once in a while and crossed the creek.”
Mark nodded, thoughtful as he made jabbing swipes with the broom.
“Be honest with me, Mark,” Teeve said. “Do you think O Boy had something to do with Gaylene’s murder?”
“He might. When Ivy told me he’d lived near the trailer back then . . .”
“No more than a stone’s throw,” Teeve said. “I’ve thought from the beginning that he was involved.”
