“‘Gavin Lawless, rising music star, told this reporter that repressed memories recently resurfaced during sessions with a prominent California regression therapist. Those memories became the basis for “Don’t Forget,” a ballad that is sure to rock the world of folk music as well as the city of Macon ,where Jimmy Mitchell disappeared a number of years ago.
“‘Lawless, who may have witnessed his cousin’s murder, suffered a breakdown following the incident. He’s hoping additional sessions will fill in the story gaps and eventually lead to the prosecution of those responsible.’”
All Jennifer could do was shake her head. “So what do we do now? I don’t feel good about your staying by yourself.” Or with Gavin.
“Me, neither,” Leigh Ann confessed.
“Want to crash at my place?” Jennifer offered.
“No offense, Jennifer, but a couple of ten-year-olds with slingshots could pretty much take us.”
“Teri, then? She does have a brown belt in karate.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you?”
“Monique? Her husband is a gun collector.”
“Antique?” Sam asked.
Jennifer shook her head. “More like AK-47s. Uzis. You know, if someone makes it and it can run through twenty rounds in twenty seconds, he has at least one. Plus about three kinds of ammunition to use in it. The man could be his own gun show.”
“Sold,” Leigh Ann declared. “Do you think she’d mind?”
As crusty as she could sometimes be, Jennifer knew that Monique would do anything to help anyone in their writers’ group. The question was whether or not Leigh Ann could put up with staying there.
“I’ll give her a call,” Jennifer volunteered, rising and taking up the receiver of the wall phone.
Chapter 30
As far as Jennifer was concerned, the gloves were off. It was time to take matters into her own hands. No more Mr. Nice Guy. She knew who won the “worst bet” boyfriend award, hands down. Besides, she could forget about getting any sleep that night.
When she’d handed the phone to Leigh Ann, Monique had given her express instructions to bring her work on a thumb drive, so she could spend the time at her house writing, and to plan to call in sick at work. She didn’t intend to let her out of her sight, not for one minute. She’d added that Leigh Ann needn’t worry; her husband had shown her how to use at least half a dozen of his favorite weapons, evoking an image that Jennifer tried hard not to think about: Monique wearing a sweatband around her forehead, a shirt with the sleeves torn out, and crisscrossed leather bands of ammunition.
Her knuckles went white as she gripped the steering wheel of her little Beetle, angry that she had been put in this situation, angry that her friend was in danger, angry that Danny was dead.
It was late, and she knew she shouldn’t be out by herself. But now that Leigh Ann was safely tucked away at Monique’s—Sam had insisted on following them over to the Duprees and then had left as soon as they pulled into the driveway—she had one more stop to make.
Leigh Ann was a lousy liar. Her voice had a tendency to get the tiniest bit higher whenever she deviated from the truth. Jennifer knew her well enough to spot it right away. Of course, Gavin had told her where he was staying even if Leigh Ann had tried to deny it. Jennifer had made her crack during the car ride over to Monique’s.
He’d gone all the way north to Forsyth, to the Holiday Inn. Not that far really, but out of the range that most people would be looking if they were scouring Macon for one Gavin Lawless. Macon had enough motels to keep someone busy for quite some time.
She parked the car in front of room 117 and got out. It was close to two o’clock in the morning, but what the heck. Musicians kept late hours, or so she’d heard. Frankly, she didn’t care if she woke him. He’d more than inconvenienced her with his reappearance in Macon, and he was going to answer for that inconvenience right now.
She could see just a hint of light through the break in the drapes. He must still be up, either that or he slept with the lights on. She’d been doing a lot of that herself lately. She pounded on the door with her fist.
After several seconds Gavin opened the door, a towel wrapped around his right hand. Without a word, he motioned her inside, locking the door behind her. Then he unwrapped the towel and lay the gun that had been hidden beneath it next to the lamp on the bedside table.
She noticed a bad scrape across his forehead and a bandage wrapped around most of his forearm.
“They’re coming after Leigh Ann,” Jennifer said, anger seething in her chest.
Gavin cocked his head, and for a moment Jennifer thought she saw what looked like panic ripple beneath his features. “Is she all right?”
She nodded, swallowing hard. She felt somehow used by them, whoever they were, as though she were now their instrument, their vocalization of the threat to stop whatever it was that he was doing. “Her brake line was cut, but she couldn’t have made it anywhere. Too many stops and starts in that parking lot.”
“Good. So where is she?”
“Someplace safe. I’m sure she’ll call you tomorrow even though I told her not to.”
Gavin raised his chin and offered her a grudging grin. “I’m beginning to understand why Leigh Ann likes you.”
“I wish I could say the same about you. You must be crazy to give a story like that to Teague McAfee.”
That made his grin slip away, and she was almost sorry she’d said it. He seemed very alone somehow, hiding out in that motel room with no one to watch his back while he slept. She hadn’t seen him speak to anyone else the night of the reunion.
“I know what you’re doing, Gavin,” she told him. “You need to stop it. This is serious. People are getting hurt.”
“I can’t stop it, woman. I didn’t start it.” He shook out a cigarette from a pack lying next to the gun, his hands trembling, and lit it with a match, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs. Then he lay down on the bed, one arm folded behind his head against the pillow, his legs crossed at the ankles and his boots propped on the bedspread. The sheets lay crumpled beneath him. Maybe she had awakened him.
She pulled out the straight-backed chair from the desk and sat down stiffly. His seeming relaxation was a kind of power ploy, her discomfort her response.
“How do you know that Jimmy Mitchell is dead?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow at her.
“I don’t necessarily believe you killed him, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t think you would have come back and stirred things up this way if you had.” At least she hoped he wouldn’t. She’d prefer to think of that gun whose barrel was pointing straight at her on the table as a defensive weapon. “Repressed memories won’t hold up in a court of law.”
He drew hard on his cigarette and blew smoke in her direction. “So?”
“You’ve got to tell somebody everything you remember sooner or later. The fewer people who know, the more danger you’re in.”
That observation didn’t cut it. He was studying her, obviously unconvinced that she cared one whit about his being in danger. “Give me one good reason I should tell you anything.”
“My gut tells me that whatever happened to Jimmy Mitchell all those years ago is the reason Danny Buckner was murdered. Danny was my friend. Now Leigh Ann has been threatened. What’s going on is personal to you. What’s going on is personal to me, too.”
Gavin rose up on the bed, pulling his legs up Indian style. He must have some pretty strong abs under that dingy T-shirt. He leaned forward, his elbows resting at his knees, and took another puff on his cigarette. He coughed, and said, “Okay.”
She held her breath and leaned forward, too, as though somehow meeting him, at least symbolically, half way.
“Jimmy told me he was going to see someone that night.”
“The night of the prom.”
“Right.”
“Do you know who?”
He shook his head. “If I knew who, we wouldn’t have to go throu
gh all this bull.... I smoked a lot of weed back then. Getting high was one of the few things I did well. Sometimes I drank, too.”
Jennifer noted the use of the past tense. “Were you high that night?”
“Feeling no pain.” He flicked ashes into the ashtray he picked up off the bedside table.
“So how, exactly, do you know Jimmy’s dead?”
He paused and stared at her for several seconds before saying, “I buried his body.”
Chapter 31
Jennifer’s jaw hung open as she stared at Gavin. “You buried him?”
Gavin nodded. “As best I can tell. Like I said, I was high when it happened.” He ran a hand through his hair, the one with the cigarette.
She clamped her hands over her mouth to keep the words from coming out, to keep from telling him what a fool he’d been to do drugs, to let something fog his mind on a night when he needed to know exactly what was going on.
“First, let’s go through what you actually remember, on your own,” she said, consciously keeping the anger from her voice. “Jimmy called you that night and told you...”
“I’d seen him earlier in the day. In person. He said he was going out and not to come over trying to find him. He gave his parents some cover story about going to the movies with Ben Underwood. He said he’d found something out that he had to take care of.”
“What do you mean, take care of? Was he planning to hurt someone?”
Gavin pursed his lips at her.
“I’m a very literal person,” she explained. “I don’t want to misunderstand what you mean.”
“I guess he meant to warn whoever it was. Jimmy wasn’t a fighter.”
“How did you know where to find him?”
Gavin lifted himself off the bed and began to pace, as if the agitation of that night were stirring inside him. “He told me he was going down to the school. He said he’d have Ben bring him home, that he’d call when he got there. If he wasn’t home by one, I was to come after him.”
“So he knew he was in danger.”
“No, Jesus, woman, follow what I’m saying. If he had, he would never have gone.”
Gavin had adopted a most irritatingly condescending tone. But she didn’t call him on it. She didn’t want to take the chance he’d stop talking.
“He said he needed some place private to talk. He said he planned to go down to the river, just below the high school.”
“So you followed him down there, all alone, at one o’clock in the morning.” Man, was he stupid.
“I know I headed over to the school sometime close to eleven.”
“Because?”
“Because I didn’t like the feel of it. And because I wanted to tell him that trying to reason with people who make a habit of screwing everybody over ain’t gonna get you nowhere. If he had something on somebody, he should have gone to the police.”
“Maybe he didn’t have any evidence.”
He gave her a superior smirk. “So what?”
“You were high when you went after him.”
“Absolutely. I’d downed probably a six pack. I don’t know how much weed I had.”
“And?”
“And the next thing I really remember is waking up in a hospital. They say a policeman found me walking along I-75 about four o’clock that morning. They said my clothes were all torn up. I don’t remember any of that.”
“When did you find this regression therapist?”
“About a year ago. I was finally making enough money.”
“He helped you?”
“She. Yeah.”
“So tell me, what did she help you remember?”
“I did go down to the river. I couldn’t find Jimmy, so I worked my way down the bank.”
“With a flashlight?”
“With the full moon. But yeah, I’m sure I had a flashlight.”
She nodded, feeling the shivers take her once again. “And you found him.”
His pacing stopped and he sank back down on the edge of the bed. “I found his body not all that far from the trees where I’d come out the first time. I’d missed him. He was lying in the shadows. I was looking for...something different.” He paused, and she waited while he stubbed out the cigarette. “I remember the moisture on my hands when I touched him. He must have been soaked with water. He was so still. His skin had already started to cool.”
“How could you be sure he was dead?”
“His eyes were wide open. They didn’t move.”
“You must have held your flashlight on him.”
He nodded, lighting up another smoke. “After ten minutes without oxygen, they say the brain is irrevocably damaged. I figure it took me longer than that to find him. Have you ever seen a dead person?”
Once, up close and personal, she’d stared into a dead woman’s eyes and fainted. Death, despite how people like to picture it as sleep, is something quite different. She’d seen it, and she was certain, so had Gavin.
Gavin’s experience, whatever it really was, had settled so deep inside of him that he’d pushed away the memories. Between the words she heard his anguish. He had found Jimmy, limp and dead, abandoned on the bank of the river. His friend, his cousin. Alone in the dark. She couldn’t even imagine his horror. If it had been her, she probably would never have slept again.
“Why did you bury him?”
“Because, somehow, I knew they’d be back to get rid of him.”
So the paranoia was nothing new. “They who?”
Again he shook his head, apparently exasperated with her.
“Okay, okay.” She backed off. “Sorry.”
“We—Jimmy and me—had a fight earlier that day. I...” He punched the pillow hard with his fist.
“That’s why you had the regression therapy. You were afraid you might have killed him,” she whispered.
He shook his head. “No way.”
She could see the sweat bead on his forehead. She knew he was lying. It had to be his worst fear.
“Maybe he simply drowned,” she offered.
“Swimming in the river at night? We weren’t stupid enough to do that in the daytime. Besides, his neck was broken. When I lifted his head to try to give him mouth-to-mouth, I could tell.”
He’d apparently forgotten to add that little bit of information earlier. In his dreams, at least, he’d tried to save him. “I see. So you buried him.”
“Damned right. Before they could come back and dispose of Jimmy. I picked him up and carried him a good ways up the bank. I remember the weight on my back.”
“How were you able to bury him? You couldn’t have had any tools with you.”
“I found some kind of overhang, and I shoved his body back up under it, just to get him safe, so I could have time to think. Then I realized how soft the dirt was. It had stormed the night before. I got on top and loosened the dirt from above using my pocketknife, the flashlight, and the weight of my body.”
It couldn’t have been much of a grave even then, probably just enough so no one would have noticed the body. Nobody, when they’d searched for Jimmy, had known to look along the river.
“Where exactly?”
“I’m not sure. The river seemed to dip back in that spot, and there was some kind of big tree right by there. The roots were what caused the overhang to form.”
She nodded. Stupid kid, worrying about a killer coming back who probably had no intentions—
“I was patting mud into place when I heard them. At least I think I was. I remember dirt all over my hands.”
He wasn’t looking at her anymore, but at the far corner of the room. She didn’t dare speak or make a sound for fear he’d stop.
“They had those large flashlights like in E.T. and the X-Files. The beams cut back and forth through the trees and the bushes, rising into the sky and sweeping back across the clear areas like a searchlight.
“I saw the lights before I saw the shadows. I felt like I was on some kind of bad acid trip, like some kind of homing
device was shooting out. Looking for Jimmy. Looking for me.
“I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I rolled back among the trees. I didn’t have the courage to come out and confront them. Hell, I couldn’t even breathe.”
“How do you know they were after Jimmy?” she whispered.
“One of them said something like ‘We’re too far down. I left him back that way.’ That’s when the lights swung back around and seemed to go back in the direction they’d come in.”
“You don’t know who they were?”
He shook his head.
She felt so sorry for him that if he’d been almost anybody else, she’d have gone to him and put her arms around him. He didn’t know what was real and what scenes he’d patched in from movies or TV or his favorite novels. Repressed memories were notoriously unreliable. Except the ones that weren’t.
“How many people were there?”
“I don’t know.”
“All males?”
He shrugged. “The one who spoke had a deep voice.”
“You never told anyone.”
“I told you, I couldn’t remember. It’s coming back, though. The more I talk about it, the more real it seems.”
“Ben Underwood took the blame.”
Gavin looked straight into her eyes. “He was questioned, never accused.”
“You might have cleared him.” She didn’t add, and ended his nightmare.
“How do you figure that? I don’t know who killed Jimmy. I don’t know who was out there that night. How do you know it wasn’t Ben?”
Perhaps the guilt he carried for Underwood’s suffering was why he’d come back. That and the fear that had settled deep into his bones.
Chapter 32
She couldn’t sleep much of what was left of that night. Gavin’s words kept replaying in her mind. She had to know if what he told her was the truth. Was Jimmy really buried somewhere along the riverbank?
Gavin couldn’t go down there; that was obvious. Who knew what would happen if he actually came face-to-face with his cousin’s body? He’d fought for years for stability.
Dying to Remember Page 14
