The Secret of Magic

by Johnson, Deborah

  “May I ask,” said Regina, “why you’d gone to Alabama? I don’t want to seem impertinent, but . . .”

  “You’re not impertinent. I’ d gone over to visit my sister in Tuscaloosa,” said Anna Dale. She’d been sitting rigidly in her chair but now she eased back into it, “and I was coming back home on the Bonnie Blue. They took a different route than they normally did, stopped the bus in Aliceville, where they kept all those German POWs. That’s where the trouble started—in Aliceville.”

  Anna Dale Buchanan told it all. How she’d seen Joe Howard first when he got on the bus in Tuscaloosa, the medals, how he’d got off, got on again in Aliceville, the prisoners, the little colored boy who was sitting beside him . . .

  Regina thought, That must be Manasseh, the child Peach told me about.

  “. . . And two other little boys—white ones. Twins, it looked like. Their mother knew the bus driver, at least she talked to him like they already knew each other. I don’t know where she got off. Maybe here. By the time I got to Revere I was so flustered. Too flustered. I wasn’t paying attention. By then, you know, they’d taken Joe Howard off.”

  Regina writing all of this down, her fountain pen leaking ink, but she didn’t open her purse to forage for another. It might distract Anna Dale Buchanan, and she didn’t want her to stop thinking, to stop talking, to lose the thread of her tale.

  “Who took him off?”

  “Men,” said Anna Dale.

  “White men?” Regina’s voice was barely a whisper.

  Anna Dale nodded. “Oh, yes, they were white.”

  “Did you recognize them, any of them?”

  Another quick glance at Mary Pickett, who had gone pale as marble, hands folded in her lap, for once not saying a word. “No. I’m sorry I didn’t,” said Anna Dale, then, “Not really.”

  Not really? What did that mean? But Regina decided she’d go into this later.

  “How many were there?”

  “Five. Six. Maybe more. It was hard to tell. Some of them stayed outside.”

  Regina went back. “Not their faces . . . But did you recognize anything else?”

  A pause, then, “Shoes. One of them had on a mighty nice pair of boots for someone . . . Well, for someone like that.”

  Regina had no idea what “like that” meant, so she asked.

  “Bad folks. That . . . element. No account. Masks on their faces.”

  “Masks? As in the Klan?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe they just wanted to puff themselves up, pretend they were in something strikes fear like the Klan.”

  “But why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know . . . Maybe they were just . . . jealous.”

  “Jealous?” said Regina, completely dumbfounded.

  “Men are coming home with medals on them, talking about veterans’ rights. Black men coming back like that.” Again, Anna Dale hesitated. “Some white men, they’re not used to that. You know the type. They do what they’ve always done under the circumstances.”

  “So they were in the Klan?”

  “No. No, not really.” Mrs. Buchanan was getting flustered again. “But masked. Not with sheeting, though, flour sacks.” As if this made a difference. “With holes cut out but not lining up, if you know what I mean. Eyes weren’t always where they should be, noses, either. Like things had been put together real quick.”

  “And you? What about you? How did you feel? What did you see?”

  “Well.” Anna Dale sighed. “I was appalled. The whole thing was a shock, even Joe Howard’s part in it. Like I told you, he cussed. But soon as I got off the bus, I went straight to Rand Connelly. He’s the sheriff. He knows me. His granddaddy and my daddy used to small farm near each other out there in the county. I told him Willie Willie’s boy had been taken off the bus at the state line. That part of Alabama—it’s home to some rascally types. I told Rand he’d better start looking for Joe Howard before somebody did something we’d all regret.”

  “Did he—the sheriff, I mean—ask you if you knew any of those people? I’m talking about the ones who took Lieutenant Wilson off the bus?”

  “I told him I had my suspicions.”

  This was new. Regina looked up.

  “Suspicions?”

  “It was those shoes. Nobody has hand-tooled boots like that here, not normal people. Mississippi’s a poor state. And then”—the room tensed up around them; Regina could feel Anna Dale not looking at Mary Pickett—“there was the car.”

  “The car?”

  “A blue Buick. Parked off the side of the road. They hid themselves, but they didn’t think to hide that.” Anna Dale shook her head. Carroll County folks.

  A blue Buick parked by the side of Mary Pickett’s house. Jackson Blodgett’s car. That’s what Willie Willie had told. But Jackson Blodgett involved in something like this—a rich man who still sent flowers and candy to Mary Pickett? Who had been married to her? Surely that made no sense.

  Regina said, “But you didn’t see a face, so you couldn’t be certain.”

  Anna Dale’s lips tightened. “That’s what the sheriff said when I told him. ‘Now, Miss Anna Dale, you didn’t really see much, and you wouldn’t want to libel somebody, now, would you?’”

  “Mrs. Buchanan, but once you’d talked to him, what happened?”

  “He told his deputy to put me in that little Ford patrol car they got and carry me home.”

  Regina decided to try again. “I mean, Mrs. Buchanan, what did he do about Joe Howard?”

  Anna Dale Buchanan shook her head. “I just told you—he had his deputy put me in the car and carry me home. That’s what he did. The sheriff—Rand Connelly’s his name, but I imagine I already told you that. Anyway, he didn’t speak a word about Joe Howard. Didn’t ask me one question. When the deputy took me to the car, I looked back and saw Rand leave the jailhouse. I saw him take off down the street.”

  “Do you have any idea where he was going?

  “I don’t know where he was going,” said Anna Dale. “He didn’t tell me. But I imagine, given the direction he turned in, he was on his way to the Times Commercial building down Main, and if he was on his way there, he meant to see Jackson Blodgett.”

  Regina looked up. The ink smudged on her finger had taken on the irregular smear of a bruise. “It’s been a year. What made you decide to tell all this to Miss Mary Pickett now? I assume you did tell her everything you’ve just told me.”

  Anna Dale hazarded a brief glance at Mary Pickett, who nodded. Barely discernable, but Regina caught it.

  “I did,” said Mrs. Buchanan.

  “Then why come forward now?”

  “I read in the Times Commercial about the grand jury, and I knew they were writing about Joe Howard. There wasn’t that much, just a thimble full of information, but it was him, all right. And I knew they—the sheriff, and probably the district attorney—knew I’d been on that bus, but nobody had called me to testify, nothing like that. I thought the whole thing had just been, maybe, forgotten. That’s usually what happens. In those cases.” Anna Dale stopped, coughed discreetly. “But when I found out it hadn’t, I thought it best to get in touch with Miss Calhoun.”

  “You called Miss Calhoun before you checked what the district attorney knew, or didn’t know?”

  “Willie Willie works for Miss Calhoun.”

  “No, he doesn’t. Not anymore.”

  “Well, he used to. As far back as anybody can remember, he always worked for her, for the Calhouns. That makes her responsible,” said Mrs. Buchanan, as though this explained everything. “Besides, by the time I told her, I’d already tried telling the others. They knew all about me. The sheriff did; that means the rest of them did as well. But no one cared what I had to say. They didn’t want an eyewitness. Honey . . .” She shook her head. ”Weren’t you listening at all?”

  Ye
s, Regina had been listening and listening hard. She followed Mary Pickett out into the hallway thinking that she probably wouldn’t call Thurgood with this. It was still too early, everything nebulous. But she would find a way to get in to the district attorney. Something had made him ask for a grand jury investigation, and something had made Judge Timms call one. In Mississippi. Where “those cases” were never prosecuted. So she’d try again at Bed Duval’s office. And there were those children—the two white ones with their mother, the little black boy who had sat next to Joe Howard. Mary Pickett had pooh-poohed the idea that he’d be any help. But Mary Pickett had already shown a marked tendency to want to hide a lot of what she knew. Even now, standing in the hallway, her hand had beaten Mrs. Buchanan’s to the front doorknob, as she tried ever so hard to be extra-polite through clenched teeth. Lovely cake. Wonderful tea. Hope to see you again shortly. Thanks so much for your help. Mary Pickett desperate to get out of there. Regina could tell.

  But maybe Anna Dale couldn’t. She excused herself—“For just a second. If you don’t mind.”

  Anna Dale hadn’t quite turned her back before Mary Pickett wiped the smile from her face. There wasn’t much to see in the small hallway—a table, a Dresden shepherdess lamp, a Blue Boy reproduction near the stairway—but Mary Pickett did her best with what she had. Everything got a thorough scrutiny, her full attention. You’d have thought she was in the Louvre.

  Regina wasn’t fooled. Cool as a cucumber, she thought, or at least that’s what Mary Pickett was trying to be, but she was no noir heroine, no Veronica Lake or Gene Tierney. Mary Pickett’s face was far too open for that. It gave things away—maybe not everything, but enough. And there had been something about that car. Something about it had surprised her, had shocked her, even. Regina could think of only two things. Either Mary Pickett had known about that car and hadn’t wanted Regina to know about it or else what she’d heard had been a disagreeable revelation to Mary Pickett as well. Easy enough to find out which, though. A simple call to Mrs. Buchanan, a private one, following up, should tell her what she needed to know.

  When Anna Dale came back she was clutching a copy of The Secret of Magic. It was just like the one Regina herself owned, a first edition. She recognized it right away as Anna Dale held it out to Mary Pickett.

  “Miss Calhoun, if you wouldn’t mind? Of course, I couldn’t get it here in Mississippi, the banning and all.” Mrs. Buchanan’s cheeks turned rosy as she said this. “I had a cousin send me a copy from a nephew stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco. I wonder if I might get you to affix your name to it?”

  “Why, I’d be right honored, Mrs. Buchanan,” said Mary Pickett, a bit rosy herself as she searched in her purse for a pen. The tension had disappeared off her face. If anything, she looked faintly amused, as she flourished a tidy BEST WISHES! M. P. CALHOUN onto the flyleaf.

  “Thank you so much,” whispered Anna Dale. “I don’t know what’s wrong with those folks down Jackson. Yours was just a feisty book. I loved it. Just loved it. Those children. That mischief. That Jack. He reminded me so much of my Butch.”

  • • •

  THEY WERE OUT on the sidewalk now, Mary Pickett and Regina, each tapping along briskly to her side of the car.

  Mary Pickett looked down a street where people were pretending not to look back at her, at them. “It was kind of her to talk to you, kind and maybe a little foolhardy. She’ll lose friends anybody finds out about it, that’s for sure. And don’t for one minute think it’s going to make a tinker’s damn worth of difference to Bed, to any of them. To the way things will work out in the end. Do you hear me?”

  Mary Pickett talking and talking.

  Regina nodded. She heard her. And she had questions, too, she wanted to ask. About Jackson Blodgett. About that blue Buick. About that little colored boy, and the white ones, too, for that matter. But these could wait. Anna Dale Buchanan, with her covert copy of The Secret of Magic, had seeded something in Regina, the first faint hint of an idea.

  • • •

  BY THE TIME they reached Calhoun Place again, the idea had grown into a full-out plan. Regina hurried up the stairs in the cottage to the bedroom and her own copy of The Secret of Magic, which was still on the little blue-painted bed table where it had been laid. As she snatched it up and saw a parcel. Brown-wrapped, string-tied, it lay stark against the worn chenille spread. Left on the pillow so it couldn’t be missed. Regina reached out for it and, as she did, looked quickly around to see if whoever had left it might still be there. She felt her flesh crawl, couldn’t tell if this came from fear—or anticipation.

  But no one was there with her. Not a sound from the cottage except its own creaking, so she reached over, undid the simple bow of twine, pulled back the wrapping, saw the shirt for the first time. Again, she glanced around, and again she saw no one. She wondered who had put this package here, how this shirt—dazzling as snow against the brown earth color of its packaging—how exactly it had gotten here and what it might mean. Frowning, she lifted it up, shook it out. It had been so heavily starched that there was a crinkling sound and some few flakes floated away when she did this, falling from the creases along which it had been folded. Creases so crisp they looked like they had been carefully ironed in to stay. She’d seen lots of white shirts since she’d come to Revere. A long-sleeved white shirt seemed to be the uniform of the Southern male, black or white. But this one was different. She saw that right away. The fabric better. The detailing more precise. The buttons silver—or at least silvery. Whatever they were, they were bright.

  Only one thing wrong with it, but this one thing was glaring. There was a button missing, the third one down from the top. It had been lost someplace, somehow, and not replaced and the loss was made glaring by the two rust-colored splotches that had taken its place. Hardly bigger than quarters, they were free-form and jagged, and reminded Regina of a child’s finger painting. But not quite. She had no idea what they were. Regina leaned closer, smelled Fab detergent and bleach. Clean smells. Still, the shirt wasn’t exactly what she would call clean, not with the free-form of those smudges on it. Frowning, she lifted the shirt closer. That’s when the note fell out.

  It had been hiding within that brown paper parcel, maybe wrapped up in the shirt itself, surely concealed by it. The paper it was written on was old, yellowed by age and dried out by it, with embossed pink and blue roses along three of its sides. Everything in the pale colors that brought to mind fading. Especially since they framed words that were stark black with new ink, but as clear and forceful as Mary Pickett could have written out in her perfect Palmer penmanship hand.

  Hide Me.

  8.

  Next morning, Regina showed up so early at the Duval law offices that even Miss Tutwiler had yet to arrive. Eight o’clock sharp. She heard the courthouse bell pealing. The door was unlocked, as she had suspected it would be, so Regina went directly in and perched lightly on the edge of the waiting room chair nearest the desk.

  She was still there when Miss Tutwiler came in through the back. The receptionist whistled—“I’ll Be Seeing You,” something they’d played all the time when the war was on—as she opened the shades, picked the mail from under the slot. Only when Miss Tutwiler straightened up—“Oh, Sweet Jesus. My poor back!”—did she catch sight of Regina . . .

  “You again!” she exclaimed, mouth widening, eyes narrowing; this morning all her pin curls carefully undone. “You better haul your butt on off that chair and out that door, and I do mean right this minute. I already told you once. I’m not studying to tell you again!”

  Naturally, Regina Mary Robichard, Esquire, no longer quite so fresh from New York, had expected this reception. She said, “When the district attorney gets in, please tell him I’d like to see him. I’ll be waiting for him out front.”

  With that, she nodded politely and stepped back into the sunshine, where she noted with satisfaction that the square was filling up. Th
e more, the merrier, she thought grimly, anticipating what was to come.

  Last night, watching out for palmetto bugs, she’d searched until she found what she thought might be a safe hiding place for the shirt, which was hard in a cottage that had no built-in closets and no bureaus or wardrobes with drawers. Finally, she discovered what she thought might be at least a good enough place behind an old barkcloth curtain—green palm leaves fronting a tan background—that covered the lower pipes under the kitchen sink and hid Dutch Maid cleanser, and a box of Ivory Flakes detergent, bottles of lye and Three Seal ammonia and, way in the back, a sack full of rags. She stuffed the shirt in the middle of these. Not the best hiding place maybe, but at least something.

  It never entered Regina’s mind that she might not actually hide the shirt, that she might show it to someone. There was something about the urgency of that Hide Me note that made her do exactly as it said. What else could she have done, anyway? Ask Dinetta or Willie Willie? Mary Pickett? Any of you leave a stray shirt on my bed? Who’s is it? What’s it mean? No, Hide Me said enough. For now. Whoever had put it there would come forth, would give her more instructions or more facts, of this Regina was certain. Just like she was sure this shirt had something to do with Joe Howard, with her investigation into his death. How important it was, she had no way of knowing—not yet, anyway. And maybe it was nothing, not crucial at all. Maybe it was what it pretended to be, a child’s finger painting on a clean white shirt. But she’d hide it anyway and not mention it until it was mentioned—as it would be, and probably sooner rather than later, by the person who had come in her door, come up the stairs, put it on her bed.