by Rita Kano
She glanced at the clock again. No amount of rushing could get her to work on time now. And after all, late was late, what would another five minutes hurt? Shirley stared at the blank side of the paper as the seconds ticked away with images in her mind of fellow employees shrinking back at her uncharacteristic, untimely entrance and pointing to their watches with smirked faces. Yes, she had slapped a good try onto a very common rationalization, but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t be late for work. Shirley placed the folded paper on the desktop.
She had taken only five quick steps away when she stopped and shook her head. Go, you’re going to be late! Her mind observed. You can’t leave now. A weaker voice retorted. She turned around. On the desk lay the reason Miss Bessie told a lie and behaved so strangely. Was the object of Bessie’s concern connected to Martha Ann’s disappearance?
Shirley leaned into the temptation to call her office with the excuse of illness. She could certainly get away with it. There was no doubt about that. No one at the office would even consider the possibility Shirley Foster would do what came as naturally as breathing to her fellow employees… lie. She took a step toward the desk. She could do it, she said to herself as she placed another step. Yes. She could do it. But could she live with it?
Shirley slammed shut the front door of her house leaving the paper, possibly a letter penned by the same hand as the two wrapped in buckskin, awaiting her return from work.
Chapter 8
The Curse and the Rhyme
Home. Finally. Shirley couldn’t remember a slower more tedious day. And although she had been a full ten minutes late for work, no one knew. She was the first to arrive. Not even John, the janitor who unlocked the building every morning, had seen her enter through the side door.
Shirley didn’t follow her usual routine of tossing her handbag and car keys down on the dresser near her bed and then kicking off her shoes. She couldn’t sacrifice another minute of precious time. She grabbed the paper Miss Bessie left with her and carefully opened the folds. The paper, as Shirley had guessed from its aged appearance was indeed another letter in the same hand and wording style as the other two. Even though it was quite short, a clear picture emerged; one that provided the missing piece of Shirley’s suspicions. It read:
That which they say about me is not true. To know this is the reason my beautiful fair skinned, red haired angel did not arrive at the meeting place burdens my heart with unbearable heaviness. Although my constant dream has not faded, I will make only one final attempt to prove the genuineness of my words and the blasphemy of theirs. As Daniel entered the lions’ den, so will I. On Sunday next at the meeting hall you will see the love that shines forth from my eyes. Will Sunday, September 18, in the year of God 1898 be the beginning of my life or the end?
Red haired angel… Yes. The letters and Sadie Redding’s diary were connected. And a date… at last she had a clue that gave her a position in time and a place to begin.
Shirley slipped out of her shoes and unfastened the belt of her dress, but all too soon sorrow tempered her joy. She thought she knew the answer to the question that ended the solemn note. Will Sunday, September 18, in the year of God 1898 be the beginning of my life or the end?
She closed her eyes and bowed her head as if standing over the casket of the voice in the letters. A tear rolled from her eyes to the corner of her lips. He who loved a red haired girl had met an untimely end. She felt in her bones that he had.
If long ago, a young man lost his life for a mere chance at love, did his death mark the beginning of many years of retaliation, spilling blood from one century into another? That could mean all the disappearances in the Britt, Lovett and Redding families were nothing short of murder. And as the lines of coincidence shattered, the mystery that had begun in 1898 began to take on all the earmarks of an old fashioned feud.
Shirley refolded the letter Bessie brought to her and leaned back in an over-stuffed recliner. Her head lay heavy against the cushion. Her eyes darted about blindly as a desperate mind searched for the next door to push open.
Martha Ann was out there somewhere. If a chance of finding her alive remained, time would allow no mistakes. That meant Shirley couldn’t waste time on library research to connect the dots of what may or may not be recorded in Purity’s annals around the turn of the century. Besides, as she understood the riddle that spat out of Johnny Bullock’s nasty little mouth: A redhead goes missing and nobody cries. Look in the closet, you’ll find their lies. Tell what you saw and everybody dies, there wouldn’t be any truth to be found anyway… just well-arranged fabrications.
Shirley saw only one approach standing open before her. She had to drive out to Miss Bessie’s house and ask, beg, whatever it took, to read the diary. No doubt she would find in Grandma Sadie’s diary what Miss Bessie read and found so frightening… a truth the town of Purity had kept hidden for years. A truth lost in a rhyme that had become the curse of every redheaded child born into the generations of Nash Britt.
No time to waste. Shirley jumped up from the chair and rushed out the door. Her stomach, well accustomed to an early evening meal, growled and twisted as the door slammed shut. Miss Bessie told her to stay away, but she couldn’t respect her wishes with so much at stake. Shirley thought about calling, but that wouldn’t do. Miss Bessie would most likely hang up… forewarned and forearmed. Bessie would just have to be made to understand.
Shirley knocked on Bessie Redding’s’ front door until her knuckles turned pink and tender.
When that failed she began calling out to her, “It’s me, Miss Bessie. Shirley Foster. I need to talk to you. It’s very important.”
No response came. Bessie’s Plymouth, parked under the carport, made it unlikely she wasn’t home.
A quick walk around the yard found the back porch and the garden plot absent of Miss Bessie. Shirley returned to the front door and knocked again. Maybe Bessie had been in the bathroom before and unable to hear her.
“Miss Bessie. It’s Shirley Foster. I need to talk to you. Please open the door.”
Once again, there was no answer. Shirley tried the knob. It turned.
“Miss Bessie,” Shirley called through the slight opening. “Miss Bessie?”
She stepped inside.
From the hallway she could see the back of Bessie’s head in the rocking chair facing the television set, but the TV wasn’t on. As far as Shirley knew, Miss Bessie’s hearing rated better than most her age. Had Bessie simply ignored the knocks at the door knowing her visitor was an unwelcome one? Or could she be sleeping soundly enough to be unaware of Shirley’s arrival?
“Miss Bessie,” Shirley called softly, walking just as softly closer to the chair to avoid startling the old lady out of a deep sleep. “Please pardon my intrusion, but I…” One hand covered Shirley’s mouth and the gasp. Miss Bessie, sitting with a Bible in her lap, stared comfortably into the face of her beloved redeemer.
Shirley dropped to her knees beside the chair. “Oh, Miss Bessie… Miss Bessie, I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but Martha Ann and Lizzie need your help. Where’s the diary? I need Grandma Sadie’s diary. Please, Miss Bessie. Where is it?” She placed her hand on top of Bessie’s.
After succumbing to tears, Shirley recovered her composure and glanced around a room cluttered with vases, statues and wall hangings of every sort and various tastes. A display of gifts, Shirley imagined, received from children and grandchildren on birthdays and Christmas time. “You’re going to be missed, Miss Bessie.” Shirley dialed 911. “There isn’t must time. Where’s the diary?” she said again as the ringing began. “If only you could point the way.”
When help arrived, Shirley’s grief bore the weight of an extra burden. The paramedic reported that Miss Bessie hadn’t been dead very long. She had passed away within the hour. It was more than likely, she heard Shirley knocking at the door and calling her name, but had been unable to respond.
A heart attack, said the coroner’s report a few days
down the road. But to Shirley it was murder pure and simple. Albeit a murder she’d never be able to prove. Miss Bessie had become another victim of the curse of the rhyme. She had found Purity’s lie in her Great Grandma Sadie’s diary… the diary that could very well save Martha Ann’s life, if that possibility remained. It could also save Lizzie’s life. Unfortunately, Miss Bessie had hidden it in a place where no one would think to look.
Shirley returned home exhausted of mind and sustenance. While two chicken tamales and a handful of fries heated in the oven, she picked up the phone to call Nash and reluctantly share the bad news of Miss Bessie’s death. She had dialed the first three numbers, when she quickly replaced the receiver. As over as her quest to save Martha Ann and Lizzie seemed, she could not bring herself to accept defeat.
She had missed something.
She felt it breathing cold on the back of her neck. She heard it telling her to turn around. Turn around. Just turn around. But as hard as she tried, Shirley found herself unable to make sense of the bizarre prompting.
She shook her head to whisk the tortuous thoughts away, but they persisted. To end the torment she tried to accept that her quest to find Martha Ann failed. But, she couldn’t admit defeat. The slimmest of chances remained and it jammed the crack in the door she didn’t want to close.
Shirley turned the lights off, lit a candle and slumped back into her favorite chair once again. The letter Miss Bessie gave her lay cradled in her hands. Candlelight flickered, the wall clock ticked and shadows in the room grew larger, stealthily closing in around her as they slipped about behind the blink of an eye. Twice Shirley glimpsed a crouched, black creature dart across the room. An illusion, of course, but her spine stiffened and she sat up straight as a board. Yes! Yes, it was an illusion… just the sort of trick of the imagination that brings the world hidden within the distraction of details racing into focus. An illusion that, with any luck, could show Shirley what she had missed.
She sank back into the cushions and began to contemplate the trickery of words. Behind the most seemingly insignificant of lies, lurked a shadow. Everyone gives the truth away, like it or not, with slips of the tongue. Those words… sounds so crowded by the boisterous, the angry and the clever … were the words seldom noticed. They were the ones Shirley needed to hear.
With her focus redirected, she began to see the challenge before her as the opposite of putting an incomplete puzzle together. Instead of searching for the missing piece chewed up by the dog, or swept into the trash, she began looking for the one to pull out of the picture.
As Shirley back-tracked the events of the past few days, she realized the letter in her hand looked exactly like the ones that appeared on Nash’s doorstep. If they had all been pulled from the same box… she stopped in the tracks of her thoughts and examined the paper closely in the light of the candle flame. Like the others, the air of another time seeped out of its pores. “Exactly the same,” she whispered. So, like the letters bound in buckskin, this one too, could be impervious to destruction. But if it weren’t… yes, yes, of course… if the paper in her hand was not impervious to fire, a new path would present itself.
Blocking all thoughts to the depth of the door waiting to be opened or the proverbial rug that could be jerked out from underneath her, she touched the corner of the letter to the wavering flame.
Leaping up from the chair, her hand barely escaped the burst of fire as the letter fell into ashes and scorched the table scarf.
Shirley stood disarmed in the faint light, her lungs tasting thin streams of drifting smoke. Her thoughts drifted, too, back to the days she spent in the home of the Cox sisters. Eunice, Quessie and Agnes taught her that not everything is either black or white. She had come to understand that answers to questions aren’t always a simple, yes or no. But this? How could it be… she asked herself? How far beyond the ordinary could the answers be?
Shirley posed the question with the timid placement of a child’s first step. Was Nash’s observation that the letters in his possession were haunted correct? What was it he said? And clear as a Sunday morning church bell guiding a lost soul to the doorstep of belief, the words came back to her.
There’s a spirit trapped in those letters. Stretched across time. Forwards and backwards. Trying to take back what was his. Instead, he’s takin’ what’s ours.
Merciful heaven! A bolt of fear shot through Shirley sharpened by the impending unknown. The possibilities left her trembling between the shadows surrounding her. And there, in the fading light of her comfortable reality, she asked a question she never imagined she would and could not speak out loud.
Chapter 9
Grandma Sadie’s Diary
Shirley’s curiosity about unimaginable possibilities took the back seat to her gnawing hunger. She forced it to wait, for the time being, within her more comfortable reality. Sitting in front of the TV, watching a rerun of Perry Mason, she dipped French fries into her favorite sauce, a mixture of mayonnaise and ketchup, a combination she had loved since a child. The only taste sensation that topped this one consisted of spreading the two condiments generously between slices of soft white Wonder bread.
As she finished her meal, dreading the end of a very satisfying distraction and the unexpected emergence of a question to which she had no answer, Perry began cross-examining the victim’s husband. With the hands on the clock closing in on the hour, Shirley knew Perry would soon trap his suspect and solve the case. Mason’s brilliant talent for noticing wallflowers hidden within the clutter of the obvious inflated Shirley’s jealous bone. Perry saw what no one else at the crime scene noticed. The victim, aware of her impending death, had left a clue for the police. She formed the letter ‘F’ with her body; the first letter of her husband’s name. That observation, despite its lack of legal power, expounded by Mason’s powerful voice, shattered the defenses of the perpetrator who shouted, “I didn’t mean to! It was an accident! It was… I…” And then amid courtroom buzz, the murderer slumped back into the coils of a trap cunningly executed.
“Oh, Miss Bessie, Miss Bessie… why didn’t you leave me a clue?” Shirley spoke out loud as she often did to separate important thoughts from the mundane.
Barely had the sound of her question faded when her spine stiffened and three thoughts dangled together like popcorn on a string.
Miss Bessie knew you were at the door. She knew you wanted to read Grandma Sadie’s diary. She knew time had caught up with her and the town of Purity.
Poor Miss Bessie. With the help of Perry Mason, could a second look reveal a clue? Shirley hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but Bessie’s right hand forefinger pointed to the Bible in her lap.
“Oh, my goodness,” she exclaimed. “Did you leave a sign? Were you pointing the way to the diary?”
Shirley clicked off the TV with a mumbled thank you to Perry Mason and rushed out the door as quickly as she could grab a flashlight, car keys and one more French fry dipped in mayonnaise and ketchup sauce.
Twenty minutes later, her car rolled around to the back of Miss Bessie’s house guided only by the light of the moon. She took the caution of driving with the headlights off so she wouldn’t draw attention from passersby. The house, although a considerable distance from the road, stuck out all too visible in the wake of circumstances. By now everyone in the area knew what happened to poor Miss Redding and would most likely call Sheriff Pate if they saw any sign of activity that shouldn’t be there.
On the back porch, Shirley aimed her flashlight up to the corner eaves where country dwellers most often keep a spare door key for family and neighbors, should a key get lost or there be an emergency. Shirley qualified her illicit entry as the most dire of emergencies. Sheriff Pate and his deputies locked the house up tight before they left, checking both doors and windows. She hadn’t seen them check for a spare key.
Shirley stretched up as far as she could, but the height of the eave couldn’t be reached even from her tiptoes. Looking around for something sturdy to
stand on revealed a big metal washtub, which answered her need perfectly. She turned the tub upside down and stepped up onto it. “Oh.” she cried out when the bottom flexed and popped under her weight. Shaken off balance, Shirley dropped the flashlight as she grabbed a porch post to steady herself. “No, No...” said Shirley. The fall had knocked the beam out. She retrieved the flashlight, slapped it a few times and the ray reappeared. She thanked her lucky stars without considering the possibility that this was one of those nights when everything that could go wrong… would. Even with the extra 12 inches of tub beneath her, Shirley still had to stretch for the eave, which forced her to put the flashlight down so she could hold onto the porch post, as she stretched the fingers of one hand over the dark, dusty ledge.
Just as they reached the expected key, the metal bottom of the tub popped again. At the same moment, something brushed against her right leg. Distracted by her faltered balance, she didn’t see the shadowy image slip out of sight around a corner of the house. Shirley held onto the post, steadying her body and her nerves with deep inhales of night air filled with the scent of corn stalks drying in the fields. Upon retrieving the key, and managing not to fall off the wobbly tub bottom, she unlocked the back door of Bessie Redding’s house.
The Bible still lay on the table beside the chair where she discovered Miss Bessie dead. Shirley sat down on the floor, wedged the flashlight in her armpit and ruffled through the Good Book’s pages looking for a note that only she would understand; the clue to where Bessie hid Grandma Sadie’s diary. First, she looked for the obvious, a recently penned, fresh paper tucked between the crinkly pages. Inside, she found a bookmark and a dry, flattened pansy. She flipped to the front and back of the Bible hoping to discover something written inside the covers. Nothing was there.
