Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  But Sadie and I knew these were not ordinary cards. Reluctantly, I picked them up. They seemed hot to my fingers, alive with their own heat. The cards weren’t a good sign. It was Maddie who saw it first, who said excitedly: “Look!”

  Taped to the back of the deck, to the four of hearts, was another key, this one modern and efficient-looking, stamped with a number.

  The key to a safe deposit box.

  Sadie and I never really believed these cards still existed. Our second cousin Bobby had embellished their place in McCloud lore, along with a lot of other things.

  As kids, Bobby persuaded Sadie and me that aliens left crop circles behind the barn (Bobby was van Gogh with a tractor), that an ancient monster lived in one of the creeks on the property (it turned out to be a pregnant beaver), and that Dr Pepper’s secret formula contained prune juice (that may be true). A boy of many strange talents, he walked around in the summer with a plastic Baggie full of dying flies, which he caught with his bare hand in mid-air.

  Mama told us that didn’t mean he would grow up to be a serial killer and asked us to be patient because his Daddy was mean. She didn’t put it that way, but we knew. We’d seen the marks on Bobby’s legs, a telltale sign of parents who still thought it was OK to pull switches off trees and use them on little boys against the will of nature.

  When someone asked me a few years ago why I chose to work with kids on a rough emotional path, I’d surprised myself and said, “Bobby.”

  One Saturday afternoon when I was in middle school, Mama dragged us to watch Bobby pitch a Little League game in 110-degree heat, and for once, he couldn’t get the ball to fly over the plate. His dad yelled from the stands: “You piece of puke!” and stomped off, abandoning Bobby to gut it out on the mound with no ride home. Bobby struck out the next three batters. Later, his dad took the credit for firing him up.

  But on the day Bobby talked about Tuck and those cards, the adults had exiled us to the orchards, ordering us to pick up at least seventy-five peaches apiece. If we threw even a single peach at each other, Granny warned we’d be forced into summer slavery making jam—hot, steamy work, and I never failed to burn myself on the sterilizing pan.

  Bobby, however, provided all the entertainment Sadie and I needed by immediately falling face-first into a trail of fresh cow patties. He was about ten at the time, too cool to cry and desperate to save face.

  “Hey, I heard a story about your brother the other day,” he said, as the three of us walked toward a cement pond where he could wash up.

  “Don’t talk about our brother.” Sadie gave him a small punch in the arm. “It’s disrespectful to the dead. It’s not your business. God, you stink.”

  “Don’t say ‘God’ like that,” I said automatically.

  “I swear, I think you’ll want to hear this. It’s spooky. My mom told me. Come on. It’s firsthand.”

  Sadie and I shrugged. Everything Bobby recounted was “firsthand.” But we yearned for any details about Tuck, whose face was dissolving like a photograph under water. He’d died when I was six and Sadie was two.

  Mama was at fault for that. She never spoke of our brother. She had erased all signs of his existence, removing every picture from the house with Tuck in it.

  We sat Bobby out to dry on a patch of dry ground a smell-proof distance from us.

  “Go ahead,” I commanded.

  “My mom says your Granny is a good Baptist, but she does a lot of battle with the spirits. They come to see her at night in her dreams. Even a psychic at the Texas State Fair told your Granny she was one of them, but even more powerful. Did you know your Granny could tell the future with cards? Mama said she can tell when a tornado is whippin’ up.”

  Bobby watched for shock on our faces, but Sadie and I already knew this part of the story. We were familiar with Granny’s “feelings,” because they sometimes prevented us from leaving the house. We both knew she could do a lot more than predict the weather.

  Because of that, we often begged her to read our fortunes, but Granny had to be in just the right mood. If she wasn’t, she’d usually shoo us away and say gently, “Life is meant to be a surprise.”

  Bobby caught a fly in his hand, generously set it free, and continued. “Well, the night that your brother, um, died, it was his eighteenth birthday. And your Granny was going to give him a special birthday reading. So your Granny laid the cards, and all these dark cards began to turn up.”

  Bobby was clearly enjoying himself, and he could tell he had us. His voice lowered an octave, and he crept closer. I still remember the stench of cow dung and rancid creek water that clung to both him and his words.

  “So your Granny snaps up those cards in a rubber band and refuses to read them. Tuck just laughs, kisses everybody goodbye, and heads out to ride around and do some celebratin’. Around midnight, he dropped off a friend and headed home. He took a shortcut on some back roads. They say he was goin’ fast. That big eighteen-wheeler was sittin’ with the lights off smack in the middle of a farm road, the driver drunk off his butt and asleep. Tuck was under it before he even knew it.”

  I could feel the warm rush of blood to my face and a pain in my gut as if Bobby had punched me with his pitching arm, hard. Sadie’s mouth was open in a perfect circle.

  We’d never been provided details of the crash. In the years since, I’ve thought dozens of times about looking up the story in the Fort Worth newspaper archive to see whether the facts matched Bobby’s story. I never did.

  “Shut up, Bobby,” I said furiously. “Just shut the hell up.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.” Sadie’s little body was dry heaving, bent over.

  Bobby being Bobby, he couldn’t shut up, and I was too busy holding Sadie’s hair back to stop him.

  “Your Granny never touched those cards again,” he persisted. “They had ducks on ’em, I think. I heard she burned ’em in a witch’s ceremony.”

  I took a threatening step forward and Bobby did what he did best. He ran.

  Granny turned the peaches Sadie and I gathered that day into twelve pretty jars of jam, but that batch always tasted bitter to me.

  CHAPTER 9

  I turned the key over in my hand, grateful for the four-letter imprint on one side: “BOWW.” Otherwise, the search for a mysterious safe deposit box somewhere in the behemoth state of Texas—or maybe anywhere in the forty-eight contiguous states—could have swept us on a useless, consuming journey.

  Instead, it was almost too easy. Our search took approximately thirty seconds of old-fashioned thumbing through the Yellow Pages. There it was, a discreet ad in the bottom right corner of page 41. Bank of the Wild West, 320 West Third Street.

  Quaint. I’d never noticed it once in all my years of traipsing around downtown Fort Worth. It certainly wasn’t an institution I ever heard Daddy or Wade mention. What reason would Mama have to use it?

  “Mom, we’ve got to go,” Maddie said, tugging on her arm. “It’s almost three.”

  “We’re registering for school today,” Sadie told me apologetically. “The M through Z’s start signing in at three-thirty. And we’re wallpapering her locker with peace-sign paper and buying a Taylor Swift lunchbox. It’s been a long-standing date. Maybe we could go to the bank tomorrow. I don’t think we’ll be back by the time the bank closes.”

  She hesitated at the door. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to the bank.”

  I desperately didn’t want to go by myself. To open a box of Mama’s secrets in a strange bank without someone to catch me when the earth shifted. But, even more than that, I didn’t want to wait. Or involve Sadie and Maddie unnecessarily. I needed this to be over as quickly and cleanly as possible.

  “Tommie, are you sure? You don’t look … like you feel good.”

  I knew she was thinking about the lavender. Wondering if her tough, fear-no-bull big sister was going the way of her patients.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. “I’ll pick up the stuff, dump it i
n a bag, and bring it back here. We’ll open up everything together tonight.”

  Forty-five minutes later, an assistant bank manager quickly put that thought to death. Ms. Sue Billington strode over when I stepped into the Bank of the Wild West as if she were on a mission to sell me the latest Buick. She was dressed in a JC Penney uniform: navy blue two-piece suit, starched white shirt, suntan hose, and black Easy Spirit pumps. I saw a bulge on the left side near her size 12 waist. She was packing.

  She also carried invisible red tape, which she had been wrapping around and around my head for the last seven minutes. We glared at each other across her shiny, glass-topped desk, empty of everything but a computer, a phone, a pen, and a spanking-new empty yellow legal pad.

  Her voice was breathy, sweet, patronizing. I stared at her mouth, a leathery pink purse, the lines around it creased from an overgenerous application of Maybelline foundation a couple of shades too dark, maybe in an effort to match the suntan hose.

  The little mouth kept saying versions of “No way.”

  “I’m her daughter,” I tried again. I slid my driver’s license back at her, leaving a smudgy trail on the glass. “I’m her guardian. My sister and I share control of all her legal matters. I have the key to her safe deposit box in my hand.”

  “Please lower your voice, ma’am. I heard you the first time and the second time.” She spoke slowly, reminding me of the Sunday School teacher who’d slapped me with a name tag that said “Sinner” after I’d raised my hand and suggested hell might not exist. I think I tried to pronounce the word “conceptual” to no avail. Granny was big on jump-starting our vocabularies at a very young age.

  “Ms. McCloud, your mother has no other business with this bank. According to our computer”—she paused and tapped the space bar three times—“the box has not been opened for a number of years. We are not privy to any legal authority you may have over Mrs. McCloud’s affairs. You brought no documents with you. You are not listed here as the one person who has permission to open the box.”

  “Who is?” I asked impatiently.

  “Ms. McCloud, you must know I can’t divulge that. All I know is that your driver’s license says you have the same last name. A common last name, I might add. In this era of identity theft, I would think you would be grateful that we undertake such diligent precautions.”

  The truth was, she was right. I knew it. I kicked myself for not talking to Mama’s lawyer before showing up.

  “Our father just died,” I persisted.

  “I’m real sorry about that,” Sue Billington replied tightly, unmoved. As I stood to go, she beamed a row of snowy veneers at me, probably a month of her salary. She chose that moment to parcel out the piece of information she knew I’d want most.

  “You and your sister should really coordinate with your brother, don’t you think? He was here recently asking about the same box. He was much more polite, if I do say so.”

  Then she bent, retrieved a paper towel and Windex from under her desk, and, with a businesslike spritz, wiped my fingerprints off the glass and into oblivion.

  I slipped on my Maui Jims as I exited the bank into the blinding sun, wondering why people thought sunglasses helped them hide.

  I’d never felt more exposed, more vulnerable in my life.

  The perfectly innocent new mother pushing a stroller by me right now had no idea I wasn’t staring at her sleeping baby because he was adorable under his ducky blanket but because I wanted to warn him that life was not going to be what he expected. That it was random and unforgiving. Forget Daddy’s death, Mama’s dementia, their apparent lies. Tuck’s death alone proved that.

  A fresh wave of grief rolled over me. For Daddy? Or Tuck? I blinked back tears.

  Who could be impersonating Tuck? Why?

  The man in a suit wrestling with an overstacked Subway sandwich on the bench across the street had no idea that I wondered, Is it you? Are you pretending to be my dead brother? Are you watching me?

  Get out of your head, my psychologist brain advised. Do something.

  The sandwich guy tossed what was left of his early dinner in the trash and wandered up the street to report back in either at his boring office job or to a goon in a cowboy hat and a black vehicle.

  I took over his spot and dialed up W. A. Masters, our family lawyer. A brilliant legal mind and an old University of Texas buddy of my grandfather’s, W.A. didn’t use office technology invented after the electric pencil sharpener—certainly not a cell phone. His equally ancient secretary, Marcia, promised to hunt him down the old-fashioned way, walking over to Riscky’s, a barbecue joint and his favorite place to drink a tall glass of iced tea with four Sweet’N Lows in the late afternoon while he sorted through the next day’s round of court appointments.

  I assumed that W.A. knew nothing about this key or the contents of the safe deposit box, that it was another of Mama’s secrets, popping up like dormant locusts released from years of imposed napping. At the moment, I actually felt relieved that Ms. Billington, armed with window cleaner and her rolls of crimson tape, was an implacable fortress in the way of anyone trying to get in before I did.

  I hung up and felt a little better. I did wish I hadn’t worn such a short skirt, something plucked out of Sadie’s bag, because the bellman across the street was enjoying the view. My sweaty thighs were sticking to the wooden bench like a pre-schooler’s. Sadie’s white T-shirt with a small pink sequined heart was like a second skin on me, the neckline a little too cleavage-happy. As for her short red cowboy boots … well, it was that or flip-flops and I could hear Granny nixing that from above as inappropriate going-to-the-bank attire.

  I tipped up my sunglasses and checked the time on my cell phone—5:14—then slipped them back down.

  “So you decided to show.”

  The voice was low, rough, behind me, and I nearly fell off the seat.

  I whipped around.

  Jack Smith grinned and slid onto the bench, throwing his good arm lightly over my shoulders. The other was in a sling.

  Surely I could take a one-armed man. My purse was on the ground by my feet. There was possibly some very old pepper spray in one of the pockets. Daddy’s unloaded pistol was at the ranch. My .45 was in its home under the pickup seat.

  Where the hell was that bellman now? The side street had emptied. Quitting time.

  “Relax,” Jack said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What are you doing here?” I snapped, throwing off his arm.

  “Seriously? I’m living here.” He pointed across the street nonchalantly. “Aren’t you taking me up on my invitation to talk?”

  I stared in the direction of his finger.

  “The message I left on your phone,” he said impatiently.

  Oh, shit.

  Etta’s Place. The name was barely visible from here, gold-lettered on an old-timey hanging sign over the door. I’d been too deep in my head for the past fifteen minutes to even notice the hotel. It was like Etta was pulling the strings and not necessarily for me.

  “Let’s go up to my room,” he said, rising. “So we can speak privately.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Wound pretty tight, aren’t you, Tommie? I just want to help. Come clean.”

  “Really?” I asked sarcastically, my eyes sliding down his jeans. No bulge at the waist. No ankle holster. Loafers. No socks. White ankles, with a low-sock tan line, like a runner or a sailor.

  He leaned his face closer, providing a graphic view of bloody slits and bruises. “I’ve been lying to you, I admit it,” he said. “About the story I’m working on. I don’t really give a crap about horses.”

  I stood shakily.

  “Here is where we say goodbye, Jack Smith.”

  I’d taken three steps in the other direction when he spoke again. His tone was overly casual, sending a chill through me.

  “That’s too bad, Tommie. I could tell you a few things about your mother. Ingrid. Except that’s not her real name.”
>
  “What did you say?”

  He ignored me or didn’t hear, moving quickly, already at the opposite curb near the hotel entrance.

  He wanted me to chase him.

  OK, Jack Smith.

  I’ll chase.

  I reached the hotel about ten seconds after he disappeared inside. The bellman instantly swung the door open for me, his eyes glued to my ass.

  “I’m five hundred an hour,” I snapped at him. The expression on his face was worth about that much.

  Jack opened the door of the room sweetly nicknamed Etta’s Attic before my second knock. He must have leapt up the stairs two at a time to beat my ride on the elevator.

  “Welcome to the honeymoon suite,” he said with a wide smile.

  Etta’s Attic was on the fourth floor near a fire exit. Small kitchen. Cozy, colorful king-sized quilt on the bed. Comfortable-looking couch. An open laptop on the bed.

  A Beretta M9 and a shiny silver Smith and Wesson Magnum on the antique writing table.

  Jack drifted over and picked up the Beretta. Now was the time to decide this meeting was a bad idea, not worth the price of what he had to tell me. The .500 Magnum was a bastard of a hunting gun. I’d only shot one once and that was enough. Jack flipped the safety on the Beretta and set it back down.

  “It’s this story I’m working on,” he said apologetically. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I usually don’t carry a gun. I just use my hands as weapons.” He thrust two short kicks in my direction and punched the air twice with his uninjured fist. I could see the bulge of a muscle. He offered up another stupid grin.

  Those moves didn’t work out so well for you yesterday, pal.

  I stayed rooted to my spot in the doorframe, a decision to make.

  Walk into the room and shut the door. Or run like hell. I was pretty sure this guy was crazy. Jack didn’t fit neatly into any psychological profile. My mind ran through a list of possibilities. Schizophrenia, narcissism, bipolar disorder.

  Mythomania, the art of making crap up.