The Keeper Returns (The Wallis Jones Series Book 3)

by Martha Carr

  “Yeah, of course I did, first thing,” he said, “I have two boys of my own.”

  He looked like he needed comforting but Wallis couldn’t care less in that moment. Her son was missing and in the hands of Management. Just before the police had pulled up she had gotten the call. When she heard Harry’s voice she had to take a moment to remember why he sounded so familiar.

  “Hello Wallis. I know where Ned is,” he had said, and given her the address. It was that simple. She didn’t ask for an explanation about any of it. She didn’t care. And she didn’t offer one to the coach either. Wallis sped off, leaving him standing there, still waving his arms, yelling at her as she pulled out of the parking lot, tires squealing.

  Ned had looked so small on the stage and worse, so happy. Soaking in all of that adulation like he was the little prince. It was too much to take in and know what to do with all of it.

  Add all of that to this young boy trying to become a young man and Wallis worried where the breaking point might be. She caught a glimpse of him as he turned into the building. He was talking to another boy and laughing. That was something, she thought. He’s made a friend.

  It still didn’t stop her from wondering how long it would be before Ned wanted to talk to her again.

  Wallis pulled away from the middle school, intending to head for the office but found herself turning corners till she was sitting in front of the tall, glass greenhouse, sitting back on Alan Vitek’s property, gripping the steering wheel. Alan was parking his car in the long driveway and saw her sitting there. He came trotting up the slight incline and tapped on the passenger side window. Wallis startled but unlocked the car.

  “We meet again,” he said, sliding into the seat and shutting the door. “You keep stopping by like this and I’ll have to put you to work. There’s always a lot of digging or fertilizing of something to do,” he said, smiling.

  “I feel like I can’t breathe,” said Wallis. “Just this morning I was happy and thinking maybe things were getting better. And nothing really happened. Nothing. And here I am again.”

  Her body started to shake as she tried to hold back the tears. “I can’t fix him. I can’t fix what’s happening. I can’t fix anything.” She was shaking her head as if she could will it all away.

  “Well, it would appear that you have made this life very hard on yourself. Let me give you a very simple piece of advice. Stop insisting people do to suit you.”

  “Oh, God, my mother does this to me,” she saying rubbing her face. “No offense but I’ve never really been able to get these sayings.”

  Alan laughed and said, “Is being in control working out for you, plain and simple?”

  “No, not at all,” said Wallis, blowing her nose into a Kleenex she found in her purse.

  “Then stop.”

  “What if people die?”

  “Then they do. Why do you think I carry a gun all the time?”

  “That’s really not going to fly for me.”

  “I get it, I truly do. But until you can be okay with whatever is about to come you’re going to try and control it. It’ll make you miserable, every time.”

  “I can’t do it, not today, I’m sorry,” said Wallis.

  “It’s okay,” said Alan, his Appalachian accent stretching out the ‘a’. “Fortunately there’s time. Take all the time you need,” he said, opening the car door. “Me on the other hand. I have to get to work. Stakeouts are boring but necessary. Have to go pack my lunch, say hello and goodbye to the wife. There’s a smile. Thought I could get just a one out of you.”

  Wallis glanced in her rear view mirror just in time to see the white van glide down the street behind them.

  Alan glanced over his shoulder and looked in the direction of where Wallis had been watching. “Ah, I see our friends are back.”

  “You know them?” asked Wallis.

  “Ma’am, I have been around this town for a very long time.”

  “Why can’t they watch everybody from satellites like they do on TV?” asked Wallis.

  “I’m afraid that’s probably more like the Jetsons than real warfare.”

  “You think we’re at war?”

  “Don’t you?” asked Alan.

  “How much do you know?”

  “In the end, very little,” he said, smiling. “It all eventually passes, Wallis, even this. I tell you, this may be a small, Southern town but we have a nice little murderous cottage industry going on here. You know, it’s easier to hide something big in a small place. Nobody is thinking that Richmond, Virginia is the center of the world. Well, except for me, maybe.”

  Wallis gave a weary smile. “I need to go too. Thank you for never looking like you want to panic. I think that’s why I come here when I’ve had enough. You never get ruffled.”

  “You observe enough, you try to fix it yourself enough and eventually you catch on to which one is working. You’ll find out,” he said, as he gently closed the car door and gave Wallis a wave.

  The van was still idling at the end of the block. Wallis was about to pass them when she decided to stop and park behind them. She got out and went to her trunk, taking out the crow bar from the well. She marched to the back of the van, planted her feet and started banging on the door with her fist.

  “Open up! I’m not going away till you open the damn door!”

  Finally the windowless door on the back opened up and a surprised man in the familiar dark blue suit Wallis was getting used to seeing on Watchers, held onto the door like he was going to slam it again at any moment. He kept looking back and forth between Wallis and the crow bar.

  “You tell your bosses, whoever or whatever they are, I’m not playing anymore. The Black Widow is going to do whatever it takes to get you all to back the hell off my family. Whatever it takes,” she said, swinging the crowbar up into her arms. The man abruptly slammed the door.

  It popped back open again in a moment and Wallis could see he was sweating heavily and had a gun in his hands.

  “Shoot me and a lot of hell comes down on you. I don’t know if you’ve met the older version of me yet but she’s twice as frightening. Either shoot me or put it away,” said Wallis. “You know who I am, already, and you know nobody wants me dead or I have a feeling I would be already. So either go away or shoot me.” The door slammed shut again.

  Wallis lifted the crowbar over her head and started swinging, denting the back as the van revved its engine and peeled away.

  Wallis walked back to her car and tossed the crowbar on the seat next to her. “I’m done playing it your way,” she yelled inside of her car where no one could hear her. She screamed until her throat hurt. “No one cares anyway,” she whispered.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Harriet had wandered deep into Hollywood Cemetery by herself. She was running an errand. It didn’t matter that it was well after the evening news, which she rarely missed. Her car was parked out on Cherry Street that wound down one side of the vast cemetery. The rolling grounds covered one hundred and thirty acres of what was originally known as Harvie’s Woods, another old Virginia family name. On the far side were now other, smaller and lesser-known cemeteries for johnny-come-lately’s who didn’t have space in Hollywood passed to them by family but wanted to get as close as they could to what was prime real estate for the dead.

  It didn’t matter to Harriet that she would have to walk well over a mile to get to her destination. She was visiting family and was appropriately dressed in low heels, a dress and family pearls. What Harriet liked to call the icing on the cake.

  She firmly believed no lady would ever go anywhere without just the right amount of icing. Too much though and it was just as nauseating as too much icing. Too little and it was just as disappointing as dry cake. Harriet loved the image.

  The cemetery was dreamed of in 1847 as a place grand enough for the South’s most valiant sons and daughters.

  The acreage was split up along gentle hills with a winding road that continually doubled back on it
self, creating what was hoped to be a bucolic setting. It was also a fitting place to stand guard over dangerous secrets.

  Harriet could feel the pinch in her shoes as she made her way down Clark Springs Road, on the northern side, just inside the cemetery. She knew better than to try and take a shortcut on any of the smaller roads that ran across the cemetery. None of them wove a straight line but made endless loops instead and would have been at least twice as long to cross.

  A couple of times she thought she heard something and stopped to listen carefully but then the air would hang still and dense with the wet cold and only the sound of the trees groaning from the wind in the top branches.

  A possum crossed the road ahead and made her gasp, grabbing the pearls at her throat and counting them like rosary beads. They looked so much like over-sized rats but Harriet knew they meant her no harm.

  Her destination was almost to the far side where she also knew there were nearly eighteen thousand Confederate Soldiers lying peacefully in their graves at a low end of the cemetery. A ninety-foot pyramid made of large, hand-made bricks stood in the middle of the soldiers that always reminded Harriet more of the Masons than of a Confederacy.

  The lines, even then were more divided by who belonged to Management and who belonged to fledgling groups that were trying to push them out or at least balance the power, than they did to North and South. That war had been the first time families were divided down the middle and chose sides that caused generations to stop speaking and eventually lose touch with each other.

  Harriet knew all about the divisions that splintered different generations that had come before hers and she was determined to never let that happen to her. Her only child may have chosen a mate that didn’t fit what Harriet had envisioned but she would be damned to hell before she’d let even her beliefs separate her from her flesh and blood forever.

  Family was everything to Harriet, even if she never spoke a word about her own side of things. Once she had accepted her role, she knew that her past would have to disappear.

  Wallis occasionally would ask for stories about Harriet’s side of the family or what her childhood had been like in Georgia. Every time, Harriet’s mood would instantly grow darker and she would give a short answer with an edge to her voice. Anything to get Wallis to stop asking.

  If anyone else thought to ask, Harriet would give a vague answer and quickly change the topic by asking them about themselves. Everyone loved to tell their own stories more than listen, anyway. Eventually they stopped asking and most people assumed Harriet was from Virginia after a while. The truth was, Harriet had not set foot in Virginia till college when she entered the College of William and Mary and learned a thing or two about the places where family lines and American history intersect into the present day.

  She met Walter Jones in her junior year when he was returning from the Korean War as a young soldier. He had served as a radio engineer and didn’t see much action but he still seemed worldly to Harriet.

  There was one large hiccup in their courtship. It was Walter’s mother, Mary who objected to Walter marrying outside of what she saw as their kind. Harriet’s family was not in Management and never had been invited to be within the ranks. They were not only not of Virginia’s bluebloods, they weren’t from the finest Georgia families either. They were what others in the South would call scrub. Hard-working people who made a living but never a name for themselves.

  Walter’s mother was sure it would bring ruin on the entire line and Mary knew the secret of the Jones’ line. She thought that their future had an element of destiny that had to be preserved. Too much dilution of the family bloodlines would make it more of a gamble that future generations would know what to do just because it was in their bones.

  What she didn’t know was how much Harriet wanted to rise above the opinions of others and become something more than Southern scrub. Harriet wanted to erase her past, erase her childhood stories, even from her own memory until all that was remembered was that she was a Jones and deserved respect.

  No one needed to know any other truth. It’s what was necessary if she was going to preserve her cover. The Circle knew what they were doing when they had recruited Harriet in college and gotten her in front of Walter Jones. She was the perfect blend of shallow chatter and cold-blooded efficiency to get the secret out of him and eventually steal part of it.

  It’s also what brought her out on a cold Richmond night to wander through a hilly cemetery. Fortunately, the stars were out again, the moon was full and it was easy to see the path ahead of her. She passed Midvale Avenue and knew she was more than halfway there but the urgency made her feel like she needed to rush even though no one else knew anything about what she was doing.

  She knew in her heart that her part of the secret had to still be safe but she needed to see it again with her own eyes. Management was getting antsy, taking Ned along for a ride like that and then having that man Harriet had despised from the get-go, Harry, show up at a meeting. There was no predicting what they might do next.

  She rounded the next curve and saw the beginning of the Confederate soldiers’ graves and took a sudden right toward the river and down a grassy hill. The grass was wet from an evening mist and she had to move more slowly to prevent herself from slipping and injuring an ankle. Then it would be almost impossible to explain what an old lady was doing in the middle of a cemetery late at night, so far away from her family’s plots.

  She knew she would have to just claim she suddenly missed her dear, late husband who was buried in another section and she had become confused in the dark and the late hour about the right road to take to find his final resting place. Not everyone would believe the story, though and that would cause some danger.

  The wrong people would start to speculate about where she was found. Better to slow down a little and ensure she got there safely and then departed in one piece.

  She calmed herself down figuring out where the landmarks were, nearby. Somewhere close were twenty-five Confederate generals and two United States Presidents.

  The entire cemetery was built on one of the prettiest hills in the city, thought Harriet. Perhaps it was a waste of good real estate but the way they felt the need to chop down a tree and building something in its place these days made Harriet think that somehow it had all turned out for the best. Richmond was known as the City of Seven Hills, even though there were far more than seven and no one had ever been able to agree on which seven the founders had intended to designate.

  One of the most prominent was Oregon Hill, which included Hollywood Hill where the cemetery sat, surrounded on one side by the James River, rolling past spots that were deep and cool, while other places suddenly grew rocky. The entire river was dangerous to swimmers and had signs everywhere that entering the river was forbidden, even though people occasionally tried, sometimes with the predicted disastrous results.

  The other long side of Hollywood Cemetery used to but up against mostly working class bungalows but those were being quickly eaten up by the encroaching school, Virginia Commonwealth University. The university had started out as a small adjunct to another college but had grown into an enormous campus that never seemed to stop growing.

  Harriet crossed over two more, smaller roads till she came to Westvale Avenue where she took a moment to gather herself and take a deep breath. Her shoes were soaked through and her feet were growing icy cold but she was close and it would all soon be over. The time had come for her to turn over her part of the secret. The war had convinced her of that fact. The balance between the two powers was threatened and it needed to be restored, no matter the cost.

  The night was cold by Richmond standards with a sharp wind that swept through the cemetery just often enough to make Harriet wish she had given in and gotten one of those puffy coats she saw women wearing in Martin’s grocery store. So far, she had refused to follow along and was wearing a long, wool coat with a matching sash around the center. The further she went, the heavier the coat felt
but it didn’t sway her at all from where she was headed.

  Along the far side of Westvale Avenue was a mausoleum tucked into a hillside so that the entrance was the only part still visible, making it almost disappear into its surroundings. English boxwoods near the entrance helped further to tuck the marble entrance back till it seemed like too much trouble for tourists to come close and take a look.

  Harriet stopped in front of the door and took a look around to see if it was even possible that someone else might be nearby, even at that time of night. She knew she was taking a great risk and she needed to be careful.

  She pulled an oversized iron key out of her purse and put it in the lock, turning the key with effort till she heard the distinctive click. It was fortunate that she went through this exercise at least once a year, just in case, but usually under better circumstances.

  She grabbed hold of the blackened metal ring and pulled back, using her body weight as she leaned back to pull the door open just enough to let her slide inside. Once inside, she slipped the key back into her purse. If it was ever lost that would be the end, she thought. There would be too much explaining to do to try and make a replacement.

  When Walter was still alive there had been a groundskeeper, Mann that Walter knew was an old family friend. Harriet had never heard Walter use his last name and it never occurred to her to ask. He would have known what to do. She was sorry now that she didn’t know his family name so she could go looking for others to see if he had a son, someone who would be willing to take over and help Harriet.

  But Mann had died years ago, not too long after Walter, and was buried in a cemetery somewhere clear across town. There was no one left that Harriet knew of anyway, who would do her bidding, no questions asked. She missed that part of her life with Walter most of all.

  The tomb looked undisturbed. That was good, thought Harriet. She stopped to take in the scene and remember Walter for a moment. It was her usual habit. There was time to look for what she had come all this way to see. She wanted to remember her old life for just a moment longer when Walter was alive and the community gave its respect to her so easily. Even Wallis made a point of seeing her more often in those days. It was hard to last longer than a purpose for being, thought Harriet. It was as if her expiration date had come and gone and now she was just supposed to exist till further notice. Even this part of her life, this mission was ending. So be it.