Again, I nodded.
“Lord, Lord, Lord,” she said. “The guilt I’ve suffered since that night. I’m almost glad you’re here to give me the chance to confess.”
“That night?”
“The night your mama left Charleston. See, when all the newspapers went on and on about her leaving like she did, I should have stepped forward and told it different. At least, the part that I knew was different.”
I leaned forward.
“What you need to understand,” Opal said, “is that Ruby should have been there. But it was me instead. I’m the one he saw from the doorway. Not her. She died instead of me.”
Opal told me what she saw that night. And finally I understood why my mother had left with Edgar Layton. It began with four packed suitcases on the hardwood floor, just inside the door of the town house where I was raised. . . .
**
My mother was carrying the fifth suitcase down the stairs when the doorbell rang.
She set the suitcase beside the others. She opened
the door to see the large unsmiling face of Chief Edgar
Layton.
He filled the entire doorway, looking even taller with the hat on his head. He took it off, showing the flattop brush cut that added intimidation to his ugly features. He held the hat against his chest, faking respect for her that they both knew he did not have. The light from behind her spilled over her head and onto his face, showing thickened scars on his eyebrows, scars from his legendary boxing days. Her shadow fell across his chest, like a small black paper cutout against his uniform.
“Hello,” she said.
“Mrs. Barrett,” he said. He didn’t blink, his eyes dull dark rocks in his enormous head. “I’m sorry to intrude.”
There were stories about Layton. How he’d beaten a black prisoner to death with his bare hands. How he knew every prostitute in town. How his position as chief was a brokered deal between the mayor and the old Charleston aristocracy. How Layton used his position to help those people keep their power, always mindful to set aside more than a little something for himself.
“No intrusion . . . ,” she said, lying as a southerner is required. She gestured at the suitcases. “I’d invite you inside, but as you can see . . .”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Looks like you’re going on a trip. Which makes it even more difficult to tell you why I have stopped by instead of calling on the telephone.”
Beyond him, she saw the chief of police’s car. The motor was running, the headlights throwing twin circles of yellow on the cars parked in front.
“You see,” he said, “there is some news I believe can only be delivered in person.”
“Yes?” Her voice was high and strained.
“It’s Nick,” he said.
Her world was reduced to watching his lower face, the way his lips moved as he talked, as if her eyes might actually see the words enter the air as he told her more. She reached up to her face and touched the deep cut on her cheekbone.
“There’s been an accident out at the beach house,” he continued. “I’ll take you there myself.”
She nodded, numb. “Is . . . is he dead?”
“No.” Layton gestured for my mother to step outside to the waiting car. “My instructions are to take you there as quickly as possible.”
“Mizz Barrett? Ever’ting be all right?” It was a voice from the top of the stairs, from a black woman carrying another suitcase. Opal, who was there instead of Ruby.
“I’m not sure,” my mother said. “I’ll be back when I can. Finish up and go on home when you are ready.”
Layton’s eyes met the eyes of the black maid. Only briefly. His predatory look chilled her, and she turned around.
Layton led my mother into the night, to the car where Amelia lay hidden on the floor in the back.
**
My cup of tea was half empty and cold by the time Opal finished.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Your sister Ruby. I thought she was my mother’s maid. But you said you were there at the top of—”
“She was your mama’s maid all right. They’d been friends all their lives. But Ruby took sick that day. Your mama needed someone to help her pack. Ruby asked me to go in her place. Your mama needed it. She was in some kind of mood that day. Not much use getting everything together. She was crying hard, telling me that she wanted to leave this hateful city. Wouldn’t even go to the doctor to get her face looked at, even though a half dozen times it started bleeding again.”
I dropped my eyes to stare at my shoes. That was my last image of my mother, of the deep cut on her cheek.
“What it was,” Opal said, unaware of the renewed surge of the guilt I always carried, “was that I should have gone to the police as soon as folks said your mama had run off. Because I knew different. She never came back for those suitcases I helped her pack.”
“But you didn’t . . .”
“I was afraid. Of that man. The chief of police.”
Opal poured more tea for me. She stood. She walked around the room, straightening pictures on the wall that did not need straightening.
I added more sugar and milk to my tea and waited until she returned.
“People think we’re stupid,” she said. “They look at the color of our skin. They look at the part of the city we come from. They look at how and where we work, and they think we’re stupid. I fought all my life against that. I went back and got my high school diploma after my boys were grown. I go to college for night classes now that my husband’s passed on and this place is too empty. I’m old and I’m black, but it doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
She lifted the teapot to pour yet again, so distracted she forgot she’d just filled my cup. She set the pot down.
“That night long ago, I saw that man in your mama’s doorway. I saw him, too, in the car that run down my sister. Sure I did. It was a rainy day, the next day, a Friday. I’d gone with Ruby to get a sack of groceries. Halfway home, I remembered I’d forgotten some vanilla for a cake I wanted to bake that night. I ran back to the store and was just about caught up with her when that car passed me and run into her ahead of me. Think I didn’t recognize that big ugly head of the one and only chief of police of Charleston? Think I was so stupid I couldn’t figure it out? He thought it was Ruby at the top of the stairs. She and I had a strong family resemblance. To a man like him, I’d bet all of us look pretty much the same anyway. I remembered the way he’d looked at me when I was looking down on him. It was the look of death, and the next day my sister Ruby was dead. Now who you think I could go to and tell that story? Me, a young black woman in the South in a city like this, up against a man like him? And how long you think before I get run over myself and leave behind two young boys? No, sir, I kept my mouth shut and have suffered with that secret ever since. My own sister dead and I couldn’t do a thing about it except keep my mouth shut.”
Opal began to cry silently.
I lifted a napkin from the serving tray and handed it to her. “I understand,” I said.
“Don’t tell me you understand!” It was a quick moment
of savageness, a glimpse of the strength and willpower that had taken her through life. “You won’t ever know what it feels like to keep that kind of poison inside.”
I thought of my mother’s face as Opal had seen it. I thought of the tiny, deep cut. In truth, I could have disagreed with Opal. I knew how the poison ate.
**
I moved from the sofa and stared out the window at the quietness of life outside. Elderly men and women walked slowly on the brick sidewalks that cut attractive paths across the grounds. Some used canes or walkers. Others did not but were betrayed by stooped backs or uncertain steps.
“I’m sorry,” Opal called out to me. “I had no right to talk to you that way. It’s not your fault this happened.”
Again, in truth, I could have disagreed with her.
As I turned toward Opal, I forced myself to keep my own shame and guilt a
nd regret out of my face. Because of me, her sister had been killed. Unlike Opal, however, I would not confess.
“Thank you for your help,” I said. “Perhaps it would be best if I left now.”
Opal made no effort to offer me more tea. In the South, that was a firm good-bye.
She escorted me to the door. “I hope you find your mama,” she said, just before opening the door. “I didn’t know her like Ruby did. I’m not sure there’s anything else I can tell you that might help.”
“It’s been a long time,” I said. “I’m not expecting much.”
“All of it has been a real shame. A real shame. My Ruby gone. You growing up like you did.” She frowned and shook her head. “Your mama’s sister is the one that should have took you in, especially with all the money she had and how your mama helped her get it.”
“My mama’s sister?”
I recalled what Pastor Samuel had told me this morning: Sure, your mama had an older sister that worked some and helped the family, but shortly after their daddy died in the bathtub, that girl run off. No one knew to where, and no one heard from her again.
Opal was nodding gravely as I continued. “Her sister,” I said, “ran away when she was a little girl. I never met my aunt once when I was growing up.”
Opal’s eyes widened. “I thought you knew. I thought your mama would have told you sometime before she left.”
“Knew?”
Opal grabbed my elbow. Firmly.
“Come inside,” she said. “Maybe I can help you after all.”
Chapter 27
I stood on a brick walkway in a garden dominated by three oak trees draped with Spanish moss. The shade of those trees covered a profusion of subtropical flowers and foliage plants. Hummingbirds darted in tight circles around a feeder. The buzz of bees was soothing on a windless day, the heat pleasant in the late afternoon.
Paradise. If a person could set aside who owned the garden.
That owner of the garden knelt in front of me as she weeded among ginger lilies. She knew I stood behind her but had refused to rise and greet me.
“A few days ago,” I began, speaking to her back, “I was in an antique shop on King. I saw a chair I was tempted to buy. Italian craftsmanship, if my relatively untutored guess is correct. A very striking piece. What made it memorable were the feet of the chair. Each one was a talon clutching a smooth ball. I can’t imagine how many hours it took to carve this chair of beauty. In the end, I didn’t purchase it.”
“No?” She finally spoke, the woman kneeling in front of me. Her hands, however, kept busy. They were protected by garden gloves, and with precise, calculated fury, they struck at weeds. The right hand jabbed with a tiny hand spade; the left hand plucked the offending plant.
“It was far beyond my price range,” I said. “Still, I seriously considered it. Sentimental value and all that.”
“Really.”
I couldn’t see her face. She wore a wide-brimmed garden hat with dark protective netting that wrapped down and under her chin. The rest of her clothes consisted of overalls. I’d interrupted what looked like a seriously planned gardening session.
“Really. You see, I was certain this chair once belonged to the mother of the woman I married. I’d seen it in the family mansion countless times. It saddened me to think that this once proud family had been reduced to the common plight of selling household furnishings.”
“Perhaps,” the woman said, “they simply tired of the chair. That happens, you know.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I said. “You’ve always been vain, almost triumphant about the fine furnishings of your household.”
Helen deMarionne sighed. She set aside her garden tools. She rolled off her knees and sat with her legs tucked behind her. I still saw little of her face, screened as it was by the dark netting and the shade of the wide-brimmed hat.
“Have you come to gloat? Come to inquire what has happened to our family fortunes?”
“I just want truth.”
“Read the Bible. I’ve been told it has all the truth you need.”
“I need to know what happened to my mother.”
“This is becoming tedious,” Helen said, settling against the soil. “We’ve been through this already. I want the truth about how my son died. Which you refuse to give me. And I’ve told you everything I can about your mother.”
Helen appeared comfortable, reclining as she was on the warmth of the soil. I was not.
I took a bamboo chair from a sitting area nearby and moved it close to Helen. I sat.
“I believe there is much more you can tell me about my mother.” I hoped my voice hid all of the conflicting emotions I felt. I thought of the letter I had received, and those ten cryptic words.
Ask Helen deMarionne the truth. She knew your mother best.
“As her sister, perhaps you did know her best.”
Helen’s stillness became utterly rigid. “You know,” she said softly.
“You ran away when she was a child. You returned. She introduced you to Maurice deMarionne. I imagine it was your idea, not hers.”
“She owed me because I kept our father from her. I have no regret about making my sister make payment for that. I found out who she’d married, how she was living. So, yes, I returned. It would have done me no good for anyone here to know where I’d been or how I had lived. I made her vow to keep it a secret that we were sisters. Your mother owed me and she knew it.”
Helen’s head did not move while she spoke. She kept her face resolutely away from me. Her voice had no inflection.
“I was the oldest,” Helen said. “The first to develop. I could see my father begin to watch her like he had watched me. With that ugly want on his face. I couldn’t let it happen to her, the way he’d been with me. She was sweet, innocent. She didn’t yet think of the world as a place of the users and the used, not like I had learned. So one night, he was drunk, taking a bath. He called for me. When I opened the door, I had a bat in my hand. Hitting him, I started to cry, because it was as good as I had ever felt. I hate him for the fact that I enjoyed hitting him until he died. The police knew who had killed him. And why. But in that section of town, sometimes it was better for justice to take its own course. After that, I ran away. Atlanta. I had learned a lot from my father about men. It helped me survive. Here in Charleston, marrying Maurice was no different than what I’d done in Atlanta. Except the money was better and I had respectability.”
“I am not here to judge you,” I said. “At least not for that. I was orphaned. You were my only family. You could have taken me in.”
“So that the entire world would wonder why? I liked my past where it was. Behind me. There was no need to have people doubt the fictional past I had created for myself. You were already taken care of by the Barretts. You didn’t need me.”
“Claire is your stepdaughter. Not your daughter. There was nothing to stop us from marriage. You destroyed that for me.”
She sighed. “I had it planned so well. Claire would
marry Pendleton. Even then, I foresaw the day that the deMarionne funds would become a dry well. Pendleton’s family had money. You didn’t. It was that simple. If Claire married into the Barrett fortune, which Pendleton would someday control, I would never lose this house and this life. I’d sold my soul for this life. I wasn’t going to lose it to keep you happy.”
“Except now the IRS has frozen Pendleton’s accounts and you have started selling your antiques.”
“I am very aware of the irony,” she said. “Everything that I had planned so carefully now in tatters. If only I would have known then what I know now.”
“Which is . . . ?”
She answered me with a long, long silence.
As for me, I didn’t know what else to say. Her choices had become irrevocable acts. Screaming in anger at her would change nothing. Asking her again and again would not gain me any knowledge about my mother, not if she refused to tell me more. I had no leverage against her. And
her sense of moral obligation seemed so cold and weak that I held little hope of appeal.
I stood from the chair.
“You love her still?” Helen asked, her head still hidden and facing away from me.
“Claire? She is a married woman.”
“Last night, I wanted to talk to her, but you appeared. So I talked with her today. She’ll divorce Pendleton for you.”
“And we can become yet another tawdry couple playing out a soap opera of affairs among the upper crust of Charleston?”
“Leave Charleston with her. You’re rich. You can afford it.”
“I am not rich,” I said. “I have not kept any of the money you sent me.”
She snorted. “Truly?”
“You can’t understand that, can you? I didn’t sign that annulment for the money. I only took it because it would cost you. I hope you find it amusing that aside from my monthly needs, you supported orphanages wherever I traveled.”
Helen stood too. She dusted off her knees by slapping them with the garden gloves she’d removed from her hands.
“Leave Charleston with her,” she repeated, her back to me, staring at the high hedge that fenced in this garden. “You’re a rich man. Not from what I’ve sent. But from your inheritance.”
“My trust fund money disappeared with my mother.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “but that’s nothing compared to the Barrett fortune. That’s the irony. You’re entitled to half. By law, you’ll get what’s owed to you before the IRS can take it from Pendleton.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Let me give you some priceless knowledge, Nick.”
“I’m listening.”
“First of all, I want you to know I did not discover this until recently. Had I known from the beginning . . .” Her voice drifted.
It was surreal. The prettiness of the garden. The butterflies and hummingbirds. The flower blossoms. The light rustling of leaves as a breeze began to caress Charleston. All of the world’s life continued, while Helen and I were frozen in this moment.
“You were not the love child of an affair,” Helen said.
Out of the Shadows (Nick Barrett Charleston series) Page 16
