by Brynn Bonner
“Yeah,” I said, flipping through the diary and skimming. “I don’t see anything here about what happened between Riley and Johnny over this. There’s a long gap here, the longest I’ve seen. She didn’t write for a couple of weeks and then this”:
Johnny is gone. He has told everyone in the county he wouldn’t go and fight so no one was surprised he would run off. It is a terrible shame to bear, but folks don’t know the half of it and it’s best they never know it all. Renny is pitiful. I don’t know how to comfort the girl except to let her know she always has a home here with Riley and me. She’s still hoping Johnny will come back, but Riley and me know better. My heart is heavy but we will all have to pull together in the traces and make a good life for this baby.
“I must have the book that comes just after yours,” Esme said. “Celestine writes here that an elderly lady named Mrs. Yarborough saw Johnny boarding a train with a knapsack. Mrs. Yarborough was fond of Renny and let it be known that if she’d suspected the scoundrel was running out on Renny and his baby, she would’ve flogged him with her cane. She was also highly offended he’d gotten on the same train as young men in uniform. Celestine says Mrs. Yarborough’s eyesight was poor and she was easily confused, but that it was good Renny believed her, so she’d accept Johnny was gone for good and she could get on with making a new life for herself.”
My cell phone rang and almost simultaneously Esme’s started singing from her purse. Jack and Denny were both calling in with a report. Once Denny had seen the tarp he’d called out the crime techs. The preliminary test showed the substance on the tarp to be blood, but there were no details beyond that.
“They’re packing it up to take it to the lab,” Jack said. “This may still turn out to be nothing. Denny says it could just as easily be animal blood, but I don’t think he believes that. Plus, he called Beth and she confirmed they had a dun-colored tarp. I’ve gotta wait here to lock up so I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Esme and I clicked off our phones at almost precisely the same instant and compared notes. Jack had read Denny right. He fully expected the results would show the blood on the tarp belonged to Blaine. That didn’t prove that Blaine was killed at their home, but it certainly gave weight to the theory. And it raised a lot of questions, most centering around Beth.
“She’ll be okay,” Esme said, reading my mind.
“How do you always know what I’m thinking?”
“Just because I never birthed children doesn’t mean I don’t have a mother’s heart. I’d never try to replace your mom, but there’s no law says you can’t have two.”
“I think Mom would be happy about that,” I said.
“She is,” Esme said, with certainty.
“You’ve heard from my mother?”
“Calm down,” Esme said. “No messages, no unfinished business. But she’s a soul at peace and I’m certain she’s very proud and happy with the choices you’ve made in your life—so far anyway,” Esme said, tipping her head to give me the look over the top of her reading glasses.
I smiled, thinking of how much my mother would have loved Esme. Mom was always drawn to the unusual. “Okay, thanks for that, Mama Deux,” I said. “And the choice I’m making right now is to toddle up and get some sleep. You?”
“I’ll read on a little longer,” Esme said. “Now that I know what Celestine was trying to tell me, maybe I can find a way to give the poor woman some comfort.”
I put on my PJs and crawled into bed—and was instantly wide awake. My mind ping-ponged between conviction that Beth had been abused and thinking I’d gone off the deep end. By the time I drifted off I was certain I’d hyped this up in my own mind, influenced by what we’d learned about Beth’s grandmother. Beth and Blaine surely had their problems, and given Blaine’s wandering eye, he was no candidate for Husband of the Year. But a cad was one thing, an abuser quite another.
I finally drifted off into a hard sleep and dreamt of little feist dogs wearing children’s school shoes and soldiers throwing civilians from trains. And then Celestine was there in a flour sack dress, shaking me and telling me it wasn’t right again and again. I tried to slip from her grasp but she held firm. I woke to find Esme’s hands on my shoulders, her face inches from mine.
“That’s not what she meant,” she said, her voice raspy. “It was something else, something horrible. Wake up, Sophreena.”
I squinted against the light as Esme switched on my bedside lamp. She sat down on the edge of my bed as I pushed myself into a sitting position and tried to get my mind in gear.
“Oh, Sophreena, we have done it now,” Esme said, clucking her tongue. “I don’t know how we’re ever going to tell Olivia about this.”
“What?” I asked, wide awake now.
“I know what happened to Johnny Hargett,” Esme said. “Oh Lord, Sophreena, what a mess. I wish we’d never gone looking. Celestine wrote it all down in her last diary, on the very last pages. It’s like her dying declaration.” Esme opened the notebook she’d been clutching. “Listen to this”:
By the grace of God I have lived a long and mostly happy life. I was blessed with a good man to share my joys and trials. He was a good man, the best man I ever knew of and I want you to remember that, Olivia, if ever you read this. Riley and me made a promise long years ago we would never speak of this to another living soul, and we never did. But I am getting myself ready to cross over the river Jordan and this is weighing on me something terrible. I do not want to take it with me when I go. I know this might make you despise our names and remember us badly, Olivia, but I pray not as we did the best we knew how and always loved your mother and you with all we had in us.
If you have read my books I kept you will already know that Riley and me found out that your daddy was ill-treating your mama when she was carrying you. Riley spoke to him about it and he made a solemn vow it would never happen again and that he would straighten up and do right by the both of you. And things went along pretty good there for a little while, but then Johnny got a notice that he’d be under charges if he didn’t report for the draft and he went on a bender and everything fell apart. We heard terrible noises and hollering and Riley went running out to the little house to stop whatever was going on. He told me later if he hadn’t come he believed Johnny would have killed your mother. He was crazy out of his head.
I took care of your mother and Riley hauled Johnny off down to the river and out onto the train trestle where they used to go when they were boys. Riley wanted someplace where he could hold him and not have him run off, and where he could cool down some himself because he was so mad he didn’t trust himself. He started in talking to Johnny, trying to make him understand what he was doing was wrong, but Johnny was too full of whiskey and fear and hatefulness to listen. He told Riley that Renny was his wife and he could do with her whatever he pleased and it wasn’t nobody else’s business and that he’d teach Riley to butt in and then he hit Riley so hard in the stomach it doubled him over. They got into an awful fight and then Johnny tried to get past him, yelling about going back to the house to teach Renny to keep family matters to herself. Riley tackled him and they fought hard and that’s when it happened. Riley hit Johnny and he went right through the uprights and over the side of the trestle and fell to the river below. Riley heard a scream and a noise like something soft hitting something hard, sounds that stayed with him all his life. It was sounds he heard in nightmares and in his waking hours, too. Riley went as fast as he could down to the riverbank, but he couldn’t find any sign of Johnny. The water was high and the river flowed fast that time of year and it is filled with big rocks and all kinds of entanglements from the roots of trees and such. Riley walked the banks all that night and we did it together all day the next day, but we never found a sign of him. Riley knew Johnny was dead, as nobody could have survived that fall. But he needed to find him for all kinds of reasons that probably don’t make good sense all these years later. Riley couldn’t stand it that he didn’t have a Christian burial beside where their
mama and daddy found their final resting place. Riley was destroyed. He blamed himself. He grieved for his brother and yet hated the thing his brother had become.
We had an awful dread the body would be found, and then were sick it wasn’t and Johnny was out there by himself to meet his maker without even a send-off with some love in it. He most likely got tangled up in roots or in some of the junk people used to dump into the river before there was landfills. We couldn’t bear to think about that, about Johnny being left in that cold dark river all alone.
Riley struggled about whether to report what happened to the sheriff. Not out of fear for his own self, but because of your mother. He asked me did I think Renny would take this all on herself and believe she caused it by telling. I said she surely would. Your mama was like that, especially in those days when she was so young and with her feelings so tender because of her condition. We decided we couldn’t let your mama know what had happened. We agreed we’d let her think Johnny had just gone off again, at least until after you were born and your mama was stronger.
Then the talk around town picked up about Johnny running off to avoid the army and it seemed like that would be a better thing than the truth of it so we didn’t dispute it. Renny had shame to bear, we all did. But she was saved from a terrible guilt that would have followed her all her life long that she was the cause of what happened. That helped me and Riley hold up under the burden of it. You can’t ever know what this did to your Uncle Riley. He was never the same after that and he paid for his part in it a thousand times over. I pray you won’t harden your heart against him, but if you do you have to give me my share, too. Him and me talked it over and decided the best way we could make it up was to watch over your mama and you and do all we could for you. And I want to think we did.
We loved your daddy, Olivia. We did. But it was like he had some kind of sickness and we couldn’t help him. We didn’t know about any syndrome-this and disorderthats back in those days.
I expect you’d like to know if your mama ever knew any of this. The answer is I just don’t know. She surely never heard one word from Riley or me, but she was a smart woman and there was times when I was pretty sure she suspected something like this. Maybe not that Johnny died, but that Riley had run him off or something like that. But after you came along she turned her face to you and never did dwell on bad things. She loved you with everything in her, and me and Riley loved the both of you. That’s one reason I’m leaving this behind. I think you’ve got the right to know it all and it can’t hurt any of us now. I am old and I am weary and I’ve carried this long enough so I will lay it down here on this page. I’m not brave enough to tell you while I live. I’ll leave it up to a wisdom greater than mine to lead you to read this or to keep it locked away in some dark corner or put it in a burning fire unread.
With my dearest love until we meet up yonder,
Aunt Celestine
“Holy crap,” I breathed.
“Uh-huh,” Esme said, closing the book with a snap.
fifteen
I WAS RAISED CATHOLIC BUT my attendance at Mass is spotty and usually prompted by a rough patch in my life. Though my own life was humming along pretty well right now, I was feeling a lot of anxiety about people I care about and I find comfort in ritual.
Esme didn’t say anything when I came down fully dressed, but she gave me a nod of approval. Esme, as usual, was dressed to the nines for church in a shirtwaist purple knit dress with a sage-colored belt so wide I could have worn it as a tube top. She had matching green spike heels and a multi-strand necklace of lamp-work beads in every conceivable color. For the life of me I could never figure how she pulls these odd combinations off, but she looked stunning.
“I’ll probably see Olivia at church,” she said. “I’ll ask if we can stop by this afternoon. We may as well get this over with.”
“I haven’t exactly figured out how to tell her yet.”
“Not the kind of thing you blurt out at Sunday dinner between ‘this fried chicken is really crispy’ and ‘pass the mashed potatoes,’ is it?”
“No, it’s not, and there are still a couple of things bugging me.”
“Only a couple?” Esme said. “For you that’s pretty good.”
I ignored the jib. “What about the old woman, Mrs. Yarborough, the one who saw Johnny getting on the train?”
“You read what Celestine said about her, poor eyesight and prone to confusion. She was probably just mistaken. And anyhow, Celestine knew it wasn’t true.”
“And the arrest record?” I said.
“You know very well most forms of identification back then had no photograph. I can think of all sorts of scenarios where vagrants might have found Johnny’s body and filched his ID,” she said with a shiver. “But I don’t like thinking too hard on that ’cause it’s too grisly.”
“Yeah, it is,” I agreed. “I just want to make sure we give Olivia the most solid information we can get.”
“What is it you’re always preaching about firsthand reports?” Esme asked.
“That weight must be given to a description of events provided by a source with firsthand knowledge as long as they have no motive to misrepresent the event,” I recited. “But it doesn’t take the place of getting hard evidence.”
“Which we can’t do in this case, since only three people in the world knew what happened and they’ve all passed on. And since you academic types are so dead set—you’ll pardon that expression—against accepting my word for anything those folks might have to say after they pass, we’re stuck with what we’ve got.”
Esme left for church and I still had a half hour—and an idea. I went into the workroom and powered up my laptop. I called up a series of maps and traced the path of the river that ran through Crawford, noting the counties downstream. Starting with the county closest to Crawford I checked death records for the time period in question. This was a long shot, as most records from that era haven’t been digitized yet, but sometimes you get lucky—and this time I did. Sort of. Two counties south from Crawford I found a death certificate for a John Lamont HARNETT. The date of birth matched Johnny HARGETT and the one-letter discrepancy was likely a typo or a misreading. The box checked for notification of next of kin said UNKNOWN; cause of death listed was drowning. The date of death was also listed as UNKNOWN, but was estimated. The date fell two weeks after Johnny and Riley had their altercation on the railroad trestle.
I thought of what Esme had said about the paper identification from those days. There surely would have been water damage. And how many people could there be in that small area with the first and middle-name combination John Lamont and the same date of birth. It was far from definitive proof but I was reasonably sure I’d found Olivia’s father’s death certificate. But there were still two conflicting pieces of information I needed to sort out: the arrest report and the sighting of Johnny by Mrs. Yarborough.
I dashed off an email request for a copy of the original documents, hoping they would contain a physical description, and made a note to check the newspaper archives for more info. I sat back in my chair, feeling both relieved and terribly sad. If this held up we’d answered Olivia’s most pressing question, but it was a disturbing story.
* * *
Olivia met us at the door and I noted the pink was back in her cheeks and she moved more spryly, almost like her old self. She was smiling but I could tell she was holding back, a part of her partitioned off with worry about Beth. It made me think of a saying Marydale spouts now and again about her two grown-up kids and their life challenges: A mother can only be as happy as her unhappiest child.
We went into the dining room and Olivia showed us the scrapbook pages she and Beth had done. They were beautiful. The items on the each page had good balance and weight and they’d used embellishments judiciously to help tell the story rather than obscure it. There was copious script on each page documenting everything known about each photo and weaving the family narrative through.
“Wo
w, you get a gold star,” I said.
“It’s mostly Beth,” Olivia said.
“Where is Beth?” I asked.
“She’s upstairs, resting,” Olivia said. “She went to church with me this morning and it was hard. People either wanted to say their condolences all over again, or they pretended not to see her at all.”
I feared this was the least of what Beth was going to get as the investigation into Blaine’s death wore on, especially after word got out that their home was the likely scene of the crime. And with Arlene Overton running her mouth about her crackpot theory.
“What was it you wanted to tell me?” Olivia asked. “Esme said you’d found something. I’m dying to hear.”
Esme looked at me, but I found myself tongue-tied. The genealogist in me was ready and eager to give a report. The friend in me was not. If this had been a couple of generations removed from Olivia, it would have been different. Clients can be more detached as they move back in time to more distant antecedents. But this was Olivia’s father and though she’d never known him, this information about both his life and his death would be upsetting. And worse still would come the revelations about her sainted uncle Riley and aunt Celestine and what they’d kept from her throughout her entire lifetime.
Esme saw me struggling and said to Olivia. “Let’s sit down to talk. We’ve found out what happened to your daddy and it’s going to be a hard story to hear.”
“Should I get Beth?” Olivia asked uncertainly.
“Let us tell you first and you can decide,” Esme said.
Olivia’s smile faded. She sat down at the table and folded her hands in front of her as Esme opened up the diary and spoke softly. “I’m going to read you something your aunt Celestine wrote a few months before she died. You need to hear this in her words.”
Olivia listened, her face occasionally contorting. There were silent tears and shuddering breaths, but that was all. No histrionics. When Esme was done reading we sat in silence to let Olivia collect herself.
