That night in the desert, seeing the carpet of tarantulas move to an unknown destination, I still would have rejected any argument that God might be behind my existence, for I was blind, determined to live the illusion of self-sufficiency.
Now, when I stopped to consider all these mysteries, it seems equally preposterous to think such a world could exist without the unseen hand of a Creator.
In the sunshine, in the cemetery, I felt cold. Alone. With my hope for Claire gone, all I had left was to find the answer to my mother’s absence. At best I would find she was dead. At worst, that she was alive somewhere and had no love or curiosity for me. But until I found these answers, I saw no place to go with my life.
I continued to search for Ruby Atkins, and when I found her, I understood why Geoffrey Alexander Gillon had smiled in that strange manner when he had informed me where to find her.
She’d been buried here.
I should have wondered how Gillon knew. But that wouldn’t occur to me until it was much too late.
I was staring at the letters chiseled into granite as a large woman rounded the corner of the church. She was an old black woman, who moved as if her shoes fit too tightly against corns and bunions. She wore a loose, multicolored dress that gave indication of her bulk yet concealed the exact lines of her massive body.
“What bidness you got here?” she demanded. “What you doing amongst all those dead folk?”
She covered the distance from the church to the graveyard and stood close enough for me to hear her labored breathing as she continued to squint at me in suspicion.
“I was looking for someone I was told I could find at this church.”
“Middle of the week? Only two people here is my husband Samuel and me. He’s pastor of this fine church, gone today to visit his ailing brother. And I just stopped by to practice at the organ.”
Her hands went to her hips. “I know you ain’t here for me or him. So’s whoever told you to come here looking is as big a fool as the person what listened. And I guess I’m looking at one of those two fools right now.”
I smiled. “Yes, ma’am. I’d agree with you, except I did find who I was looking for. Ruby Atkins. Trouble is, I didn’t expect to find she was resting in peace.”
“What bidness you got, looking for Ruby? It’s been years since the Lord took her home.”
“She worked in my mother’s household,” I said.
“She was your mama’s maid is what you’re saying. Don’t need to pretty it up for me, like there was some shame in what Ruby did to get bread for her family.”
“Yes, ma’am. I do apologize.”
“Your mama’s maid. What call you got to look for your mama’s maid?”
“I was hoping to ask her some questions.”
“C’ain’t ask a dead person questions.”
“Yes, ma’am. I didn’t realize she was dead until I found the tombstone.”
The old woman would have none of my excuses. “Who you be?” she demanded.
“Nick Barrett.”
The old woman gave a groan of surprise. “Your mama was Carolyn Barrett!”
She tottered closer and grabbed my wrist. “Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow when my Samuel is here. Me and my Samuel’s been waiting a long time for you.”
Chapter 15
During lunch, Amelia had given me permission to visit her father. She’d suggested late afternoon. So it was, with the day beginning to lose its heat, that I walked down the hallway to his room once again.
This time, when I politely rapped my knuckles against the door to room 2553, I found Edgar Layton awake and sitting in bed, dressed in dark blue silk pajamas and watching ESPN on the color television mounted from the ceiling above his bed.
The old man gave his attention to me. His eyes glowed from beneath the bony brows of his large head.
“You some sort of preacher or charity worker? I thought I’d scared all of you away. It’s been a week since anybody tried to save me from eternal damnation.” Layton’s legs were covered by a blanket. Beside his left leg, on top of the blanket, was the remote control for the television. Layton lifted the remote and clicked off the television. “But go ahead, sit down. One form of entertainment is as good as the next.”
I had tried this scene out in my head a dozen different ways. In the end, I had decided this depended on Layton’s vulnerability to the close approach of death. Wondered if Layton actually had the answers in the first place.
In all the ways I had gone through it, I’d not once expected to find myself so skittish, filled with nervous adrenaline.
I pulled up a chair. “No preacher,” I said. “Nicholas Barrett.”
Layton’s intense glowing eyes stared at me, like lit candles from the depths of a carved-out pumpkin.
I stared back at the formidable bone structure of the man’s face and head. The man had been there for both of the tragedies in my life. Looming way above me when I was ten, his chief of police’s hat throwing a big shadow, the deep raspy voice telling me I was better off without a no-good tramp of
a mother. And when I was nineteen, helping the ambulance driver pull me out from behind the steering wheel of a wrecked Plymouth Valiant, shining a flashlight hard in my eyes, the same deep raspy voice boring into me from behind that light and cussing me out for stupidity and drunkenness.
“Nicholas Barrett.” A slow, lazy, triumphant smile crossed his face, his intended effect ruined immediately by a painful cough that shook his body as if he were a rag doll in the grip of a terrier. “I thought I’d sent you running for good.”
**
After the car accident, while I was in the hospital and an hour before Helen had arrived to give me a legal agreement to sign, I’d heard the door open. There was a slight squeal in the hinges; I knew to listen for it.
Even though the sound of the hinges thrilled me with hope, I left my eyes closed.
This time, I told myself without opening my eyes, it will be Claire. She is my wife. Surely the footsteps I hear are hers, not from a nurse or doctor.
I had not seen Claire since the night of the accident. More accurately, I had not seen her since falling asleep in the car. She was not there when pain called me forth from internal darkness to the darkness of the night, my head and chest leaning against the steering wheel. She was not there when I was loaded onto the ambulance stretcher. She was not there waiting for me at the emergency room. All I knew was that she survived with little injury; that she had not appeared once in the two days I’d been in the hospital; that my lower right leg had been neatly sheared off by a surgeon—just below the knee—and that nurses changed the dressing twice daily.
Once again, I was disappointed when I opened my eyes.
It was not Claire. But a large, square-headed man in a police uniform who had reminded me of Frankenstein’s monster when I was a boy.
I licked my lips. I was in constant thirst and constant pain.
Edgar Layton sat beside me and stared at me.
I had been hoping for Claire but also expecting the police, so I was not surprised at this man’s arrival.
I licked my lips again and reached for a glass of water at my bedside. Just before my fingers closed around the glass, the large, square-headed man pulled the glass away. He drank the water in several gulps and set the empty glass down near my fingers. Layton smiled the smile of complete control.
“I am Chief Edgar Layton,” the man said. “I am in charge of the investigation of the accident that put you here in the hospital.”
He introduced himself as if I wouldn’t know him. As if he hadn’t turned me away from his office when I was a boy, stopping by to ask him if he had news about my mother.
Chief Edgar Layton lifted the blanket off my legs. “I understand you lost part of a leg,” he said. “Tough break for a kid. But then stupidity has its price.”
I was angry that this man was trying to bully me. Anger gave me the courage to remain silent.
“I also understand that one
of the passengers is still in a coma,” he continued. “The deMarionne kid.”
“Claire’s brother, right? Philip. Not Claire.”
I had been reassured a dozen times a day by nurses that Claire was not hurt. Still, I wanted to hear it from the man in charge of investigating the accident.
“Does this mean you can’t remember much of what happened?”
“Just tell me it isn’t Claire.”
“It’s her brother. I doubt he’s going to live when they pull the tubes out of him. And if he does live, he’ll be a vege-
table.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said.
“Tell me about the accident,” Layton said. “Start from the beginning.”
“I don’t remember a thing.”
“Don’t lie to me, son.”
“I don’t remember a thing.”
“I found you behind the steering wheel. At the hospital they found high levels of alcohol in your blood. If the deMarionne kid dies, you’ll be charged with manslaughter. That family has got a lot of money, a lot of connections. You’ll do some hard time. Especially since you stole their daughter.”
“I don’t remember a thing.”
The man in the police uniform reached inside his shirt, pulled out a black-and-white photo, held it in front of my face. It showed me, slumped behind the steering wheel of the Plymouth Valiant. “All the jury needs to see is this. It’ll be an open-and-shut case. In front of a judge who is the next-door neighbor to the deMarionnes. A judge out to hang you if he could.”
“I don’t remember a thing.”
The man in the police uniform slid the photo back inside his shirt. He dug into a shirt pocket for a toothpick. Leaned back, chewed on the toothpick.
“Fact is, taking all of this to court won’t bring back the deMarionne kid. It will just add to the hell that his parents are already facing. It won’t help the Barrett family to be involved in another scandal involving white trash in their own backyard.”
Another scandal involving white trash in their own backyard.
Edgar Layton let those words hang there, accusatory. I understood the implication. And could say nothing in my own defense. I wondered if he remembered me as a pitiful ten-year-old kid, pleading at the police station for any answers about my mother.
Layton said, more or less grunting, “If this goes to court, the newspapers will splash the deMarionne name and the Barrett name across headlines for a week, maybe two. Neither family wants to see that. I’m here to help them. Which means today is your lucky day. I’m going to give you a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Layton leaned forward. He pulled a small notepad out of his other shirt pocket.
“Yup, kid, all you have to do is write and sign your confession, and this little matter will drop right out of sight.”
Another grunt. “At least for as long as you stay away from our fine city.”
**
“Tell me about my mother,” I said to Edgar Layton. “The truth.”
“You’ve come back for that? For some grand deathbed confession?”
I felt a thrill of discovery. His answer had revealed more than perhaps he intended. It was not a denial that he knew the truth. But an affirmation that what he knew needed confessing. For the first time since arriving in Charleston, hope filled the sails of my journey.
“Some people in your situation,” I said, keeping emotion out of my face, “would take that opportunity.”
“My situation. Say it the way it is. I’m dying. My insides are eating me up. I vomit blood and pieces of my stomach. I’ll be dead in a week. Probably less. Too bad, so sad.”
“Some people vomiting blood and pieces of their stomach in the last couple days of dying,” I said, “just want to talk to someone.”
He tried propping himself on his elbows. Failed. Fell back. “Not me. All I want is morphine.”
“I hold copies of two police reports that describe the same accident,” I said. “The one you released officially. And the one that sent me away.”
“Are you threatening me? As if I would care if anyone knows about something I did that long ago?”
“You owe me,” I said, disgusted at the whine in my voice.
Layton pressed the buzzer at his bedside. “Unless you’re here to give me morphine, go away.”
I saw no choice. I went.
Chapter 16
On my return to the bed-and-breakfast, I passed the Barrett mansion on South Battery. It was the opposite direction from the deMarionne residence, with the bed-and-breakfast roughly in the middle of the two mansions, so I’d had no need to pass it as I made trips from the inn, and until this moment, I had avoided it.
Now, however, I wanted to test myself. Had I managed to toughen myself enough that it and its memories would not affect me?
It was three-storied with the prerequisite ponderous columns in front, columns that supported a long, wide second-floor balcony above the entrance. Aside from those columns and the massive twin steps leading up to the mansion, the box-shaped architecture itself showed no imagination, only a blatant display of the prodigious amount of money it had cost the merchant who originally built it centuries earlier.
I had lived there—the unwanted nephew and cousin—from the day my mother ran from Charleston.
I had lived there until my elopement with Claire.
I had lived there with Pendleton.
**
Thursday my mother left Charleston by train. Left me by train.
The following Monday, I was back from the beach house with the other Barretts, and they had taken me to the mansion.
Not to my home. Not to my mother.
Constantly for three days earlier—the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—I’d asked when my mother was going to return to pick me up as promised. My questions had been met with evasions that I did not understand until arriving at the Barrett mansion that Monday.
My suitcase was in one of the upper bedrooms, and I sat on the bed, staring at the dim, musty oil paintings that I had no inkling were to surround me for the rest of my adolescence.
Pendleton arrived and stood in the doorway of the bedroom. “Nicholas,” he said.
His voice was oddly muffled by the nose I had broken a few days earlier. His nose was still plastered, the flesh around his eyes had settled to a puffy, deep blue. He’d avoided me until then, not wanting me to see how much I had injured him. Whatever pride he might lose by allowing me to see my handiwork, however, was more than offset by the value of the article on the front page of the folded newspaper in his hand.
He threw it at me. It landed on the bed. I picked it up. I was too naive to understand the value of this article for Pendleton and foolishly read it in his presence.
TRUST FUND DISAPPEARS: Local attorney Geoffrey
Alexander Gillon has reported that $300,000 is
missing from a trust fund established for a child in Charleston’s prominent Barrett family.
While details of the fraud have been withheld to protect the Barrett family, police confirm that other family members have filed a missing person report on Carolyn Barrett, widow of deceased war hero David Collin Barrett. Police also confirm that a search of her town house in the Ansonborough district shows that a departure had been planned.
“Her suitcases are gone and by all indications most of her clothes and personal belongings are no longer at home,” said Charleston Police Chief Edgar Layton. “Furthermore, records show that she purchased two train tickets for a midnight departure on Friday, and witnesses confirm she was on the train with a naval ensign named Jonathan Britt.”
The missing money had been put into a trust fund for her son, Nicholas William Barrett, other family members say.
“We believe she not only ran away from her son,” says Lorimar Barrett, a fifth-generation Charlestonian and uncle to the motherless boy, “but she took his inheritance too. She has literally left him a penniless orphan. But our own family will not abandon him as she has.”<
br />
Charges have been filed against Carolyn Barrett, and a warrant has been issued for her arrest.
Pendleton, standing there in my room on the second floor, had waited until I fully comprehended what I was reading.
When I looked up at him, he was ready with his reason for bringing the newspaper to my attention.
“So,” he said, pointing at the plaster on his nose, “do you think I deserved this? Or that maybe I was telling the truth?”
He was also ready to flee. He reached the stairs at the end of the hallway as I roared out of the bedroom. There, within sight of the adult world below, he was safe from me.
“What is it, Pen?” his mother called from the sofa, where she was reading a romance novel.
“Nothing,” he said. He gave me a smirk before sauntering down the stairs. “Nothing at all.”
**
I stood on the sidewalk, washed by the perfume of the immaculately tended flowers and honeysuckle and climbing vines.
I probed my soul for any reaction to the sight of the mansion. This was where I had endured the death of my childhood. This was where Pendleton had taken his new bride, Claire, assuming lordship of the estate following the deaths of his parents.
I stared at the mansion and felt nothing.
Apathy, it has been said, is a much more damaging emotion than hatred. When you hate, you are on the far side of love.
It pleased me, this apathy.
As I congratulated myself on my emotional distance from my past, the purring of an automobile engine disturbed my thoughts.
I looked to my left to see a late-model BMW slow and turn up the drive of the Barrett mansion. It was black with tinted side windows. As it turned, however, I saw a flash of the driver through the windshield.
Pendleton.
I stumbled as I turned away in haste.
I walked as quickly as I could.
I told myself that Pendleton had not looked at my face, that our eyes had not met, that he hadn’t seen me in front of the mansion like a boy looking through a window into a candy store.
And I chose to believe my lie.
Chapter 17
Out of the Shadows (Nick Barrett Charleston series) Page 10
