Chasing Fireflies

by Charles Martin

  “William . . .” Jack rubbed one hand with the other. “Something’s happened.”

  Liam leaned in and listened as though his ears were plugged with cotton.

  “It’s your boy . . . somebody . . . somebody found out . . . and well . . .”

  Like a dog studying something he didn’t understand, Liam’s head tilted, weighing what he heard.

  Jack spread a letter on the table. “They left this . . .”

  A typewritten letter read simply: $4 MILLION IN UNMARKED $100S. WATERTIGHT. LEAVE ON TOP OF CLIFFORD WILLOWS CSA GRAVE, CHRIST CHURCH CEMETERY. MIDNIGHT, TOMORROW. NO FEDS. OR WE’LL SEND YOU YOUR SON IN A BOX CUT FROM YOUR OWN LUMBER.

  The only asset Liam had left was his 25 percent ownership in the Zuta. His 6,500 acres were estimated at $7,000,000. Five minutes later, he had sold it to Jack for $4,000,000. He kept two things—neither of which Jack wanted: the house in which he grew up and where his father and wife were killed, and DuBignon Hammock.

  Using his connections in the banking industry, Jack acquired the cash, noted the serial numbers, packed two duffels to overflowing, and dropped both on top of the grave. To protect himself and defend against foul play in case the deal went bad, Jack brought in the sheriff and a local attorney to witness both the packing of the duffels and the drop. They placed the money on top of the grave, sat with the engine running in the parking lot, and waited.

  The kidnappers never showed.

  An hour later, the three spread out looking for the boy, but there was no sign of him—or the money.

  The following day, somebody dropped the boy’s burnt body on the courthouse steps, and the following day one of the prison guards slid the news article through Liam’s prison bars. The State of Georgia let Liam out of prison long enough to bury his son. He was driven to the morgue, given fifteen minutes with the body, then driven to the Buffalo, where he canoed across to DuBignon and dug a 4x2x6-foot grave next to his wife’s. A few hours later, they drove him back to Atlanta to serve the remaining forty-six-and-a-half years of his prison term.

  Walking back into prison, Liam shut off his mind, cut away his heart, and wrote “Willee McFarland” inside the collar of his shirts and the waist of his shorts. For two years, he existed. He read books, studied orchids, and talked to the hands that fed him food behind the cafeteria line. The glove-covered hands belonged to a female voice, and while she could see him, he never saw her. Until a year later, that is, when for no logical reason I can uncover, the governor of Georgia signed a full pardon. Willee McFarland walked out of prison—father-less, wifeless, childless, penniless, and free.

  The pardon reads “. . . for hardship, time served, and evidence that has since surfaced that was not available during trial.” Seems sort of weak, doesn’t it? And no, I’ve never been able to find that piece of evidence either.

  Willee had walked almost a mile down the road when a ragtopped Mustang pulled up alongside. The driver stuck out a gloved hand, and for the first time he saw the face attached to it. Lorna Sanchez was a Mexican bombshell who looked like a cross between Madeline Stowe and Elizabeth Taylor.

  Before meeting Uncle Willee, Aunt Lorna was a twice-divorced waitress and part-time housecleaner working the cafeteria line at the Fulton County Penitentiary. So when Unc tells you he met his wife in prison, he’s not kidding. They met sometime in his first month and spent the next three years getting to know one another across the glass. Lorna says he wooed her with his charm and the way he holds his mouth when he talks. Unc says she seduced him with her spaghetti. If that’s true, then she seduced a couple hundred men.

  “You can get in this car if you tell me the truth and only the truth, every time you open your mouth. From now ’til forever.”

  He squatted next to the car and threw his bag over his shoulder. “Lorna, my daddy told me that at the end of the day all I’ve got, the only thing I can control is my word—” He looked back at the prison. “And to this day, I’ve kept it.”

  Unc promised her a rather certain life of poverty, hardship, and endless hounding rumors. The two married and moved to his childhood home back in Brunswick.

  Lorna walked through the front door, saw the red stain in the foyer, and asked, “What’s that?”

  “It’s a long story, but it doesn’t start here.” He took her to the Sanctuary, sat her down next to the graves, leaned against his daddy’s marble tombstone, and started at the beginning. A year went by, but Lorna’s body would not give them children, so they jumped through some hoops and registered as a foster home.

  After all my research—and the writing of my thesis—three questions remain: First, who stole the bank securities, and where are they? Why would William Walker McFarland steal them? What did he have to gain?

  Second, the coroner said Perry Kenner didn’t appear to have powder residue on his right hand. If he’d shot a .45-caliber revolver, chances are good there’d have been some type of residue. So if Perry Kenner didn’t shoot Ellsworth and Suzanne, who did? And if he did, then who shot Perry Kenner?

  Lastly, who kidnapped William Walker McFarland Jr., and how’d they find out his real identity if the documents were sealed? How did the swap go bad, who killed him, and what happened to the cash? In twenty years, shouldn’t some of those serial numbers have been circulated through?

  Oh yeah . . . and what was the evidence that brought about the pardon, and where is it?

  Chapter 9

  I showered and shaved in the dark, but it’s hard to hide in my old apartment, and Tommye had always been a light sleeper. I finished shaving and splashed on some aftershave, and she sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. She looked pale.

  She stretched. “I love that smell.”

  “Yeah.” I smiled. “It’s hard to beat Old Spice.” I slapped my face again. “Nothing but the best for my face.”

  She held a rubber band between her teeth, did that thing only girls can do with their hair to push it into a ponytail, then grabbed the rubber band and did the one hand flip, wrap, and flip. Half-awake, she hobbled out of bed, brushed her teeth, popped a handful of pills, and walked across the room where, with no warning whatso-ever, she stripped down to absolutely nothing.

  I was not expecting that.

  I guess my mouth was pretty far open, because when she turned and began walking to the closet where I kept the ironing board, she saw me, and a look of confusion spread across her face. Two seconds later, she saw herself. She stopped short, closed her eyes, and said, “Sorry. Old habits—” She shook her head.

  I grabbed my keys, threw on my cap, and slipped into my flip-flops. Pulling the door behind me, I said, “The rain over the last couple of nights has probably raised the water level in the swamp. Thought maybe I’d go down to Gibson Island this afternoon and see if the war-mouth have come in. You want to go?”

  I heard the pitter-patter of feet, then she stuck her head around the door. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  “Aunt Lorna and Unc’ll probably go.”

  “Even better.”

  I smiled and pulled my cap down. “I don’t know how they fish in L.A., but down here we cover up a bit. Keeps off the sun and the mosquitoes. Although I doubt the mosquitoes have ever seen anything like you either.”

  She nodded and tried to rub the sleep off her face. “I suppose I had that coming. See you later.”

  Unc and Aunt Lorna had one phone in their house. It hung in the kitchen, its dial worn and yellowed. It was not unusual for Unc to get calls from customers this early. I sat closest, so when it rang I answered it. In the background I heard someone being paged over an intercom, followed by a series of dings, and then somebody tapped the phone.

  I added powdered creamer to my coffee and asked again, “Hello?”

  More tapping. That’s about when I woke up. “Sketch, is that you?”

  Several taps.

  That confused me. “Wait, wait. One is yes. Two is no.”

  A second passed. One tap.

  I sipped and burnt my lips. “A
re you okay?”

  One tap.

  “You want to talk with me?”

  One tap.

  “Can it wait a day?”

  Silence, followed by one tap.

  “I’ll get there soon as I can.”

  I hung the phone back in the receiver as the first hint of sunshine was breaking the treetops in the distance. One of Aunt Lorna’s peacocks strutted across the shadows beneath the kitchen window. In the pasture out beneath the setting moon, several Brahman cows grazed quietly and three or four turkeys marched single file along the fence-row. Unc cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows, bringing me back inside the house.

  “Oh,” I said, pointing my mug toward the phone. “That was the kid. Said he wanted to talk with me.” I shook my head. “Actually, he tapped the phone.” I turned up my cup, rinsed it in the sink, and then headed for the door. I pushed it open, then turned. “I met a friend of yours yesterday.”

  Unc raised his eyes but not his head. “Yeah.”

  I smiled. “Mandy Parker . . . she works with the DA’s office.” I waited for a reaction, but didn’t get one. “She had an old picture of you.” I paused, letting the effect set in. “The kind where your hair is messed up and there’s that big ruler on the wall behind you.” I smiled. “She said they’d be placing the kid in a day or so.”

  Unc looked at Lorna, and then both looked up at me. He folded the paper. “That okay with you?”

  “You never needed my permission before. Why now?”

  “This one’s different.”

  “How so?”

  He sat back, tilted his hat, and stared out the same kitchen window. “Twenty-seven years, five months, and six days ago, my three-year-old son faced a real similar thing . . . He sat all alone with people he didn’t know, waiting for somebody to rescue him from a world that scared him.” He folded his napkin and wiped the corners of his mouth. “No kid should ever have to know that.” The creases in his face showed, like they did whenever the sun got bright. “Lorna and I . . . we just thought we’d sit in while all of you work to figure out that kid’s story.”

  Aunt Lorna reached across the table and held his hand. I shut the screen door and then looked back through the screen at a man who’d carried the weight of the world on his shoulders for most of his adult life. I once thought maybe that weight was a chip. As I got older and could see the forest for the trees, I saw that it was more like a yoke.

  “Yes sir. It’s all right with me.”

  I idled Vicky down the drive to the hard road, where the glisten off the train tracks caught my eye. For a moment I sat there like a man staring into a campfire—seeking the ghost of the Silver Meteor.

  I thought about young Tillman McFarland unloading here with nothing but a box of tools and hope. And thought of what he started. But it wasn’t the sound of tires on gravel, the four wood ducks jetting overhead at nearly forty miles an hour, the train in the distance, or the lost sound of my father’s voice that gave me pause. It was Tommye’s laughter. There was no getting around it. Tommye was a pretty woman—some would say “drop-dead gorgeous,” and they’d be right—but it was her laughter that was beautiful.

  Chapter 10

  In the hospital, the guard was gone, but his chair remained. Outside the door, a male nurse stood over a rolling cart filled with prescriptions. The newspaper was spread across the top of the cart, open to the sports page. I motioned to the paper. “Smoltz pitch last night?”

  He shook his head. “Some new guy. Gave up only two hits. Chipper hit a three-run dinger in the sixth. Braves won by five.”

  “He’s a shoo-in for Cooperstown.”

  He nodded.

  “Something told me this would be a good day.”

  I walked into the room, but it was empty. The bed was made and the kid was gone. I looked around for some sign that he was still here, then turned back to the nurse. “Where’s the kid?”

  He shook his head. “They checked him out this morning.”

  No wonder Sketch had called me. “Where’d he go?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “He leave anything?”

  “You might check with the doctor.”

  “Thanks.”

  I walked across to the nurses’ station and spoke to a lady who seemed to vaguely recognize me. “The kid that was in that room . . . where’d he go?”

  She pointed down the hall toward the elevator with her pen. “Doctor sent him home this morning.”

  “Home?”

  She nodded.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Are you related to the boy?”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m with the paper. We’re trying to—”

  She held up her hand. “Can’t help you.”

  “Thanks.”

  On the first floor, I called Mandy Parker. “Mandy, this is Chase Walker.”

  “Thought you might be calling. You at the hospital?”

  “Yeah. Where’s the kid?”

  “Glynn County Boys’ Home.”

  “Please don’t tell me that. When?”

  “Early this morning.”

  I took a deep breath. “Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

  By the time I turned six, I’d lived in half a dozen foster or group homes. Seems like somebody was hell-bent on moving me around as much as possible. About the time I got my sheets warm, somebody came in, loaded me into a car, and drove me someplace else. Don’t get me wrong, homes for children are needed, but it’s a lot like purgatory. Why prolong the suffering; why not just get it over with?

  Your entire life is consumed with two opposing ideas: On the one hand, you know you’ve been abandoned, rejected, thrown out on the street. Otherwise, you’d be with your parents. The flip side tells you that they could come to their senses, change their minds, and come barging through that door at any second. For that reason, you learn to sleep with one eye open. Because when they do, you want them to know that you’ve kept up the vigil. That you believed. That you hoped. Problem is that around the age of six, your eyelids grow heavy.

  I walked into the GCBH and signed in with the receptionist. “I’m here to see a little boy who was brought in this morning from Southeast Georgia Regional Medical Center. Goes by a John Doe name at the present.”

  She checked what looked like a logbook, then pointed behind her. “Second hallway on the right, third door on the left.”

  “Thanks.”

  The door was cracked and a fluorescent light flickered on the other side, so I knocked lightly and pushed gently. The room was small, about the size of a broom closet. If it had been gray at one time, age had turned it an off-shade of mildew green. No books, no TV, no radio, and no window. The only color in the room was the red ink on the poster that gave escape instructions in case of a fire.

  I took a shallow breath as a host of memories flooded over me that I had no desire to recall. I shook them off.

  Sketch sat at a small desk opposite the bed. A single-bulb, green-shaded banker’s light was on, and he sat huddled over his note-book. He was dressed in new jeans, a baggy T-shirt, and flip-flops. When I walked in, he looked up and showed absolutely no reaction whatsoever.

  “Hey, Sketch.” I sat on the bed and looked around the room. “Looks like they moved you to a new place.”

  He looked around as if the obvious was obvious to him too.

  “How you feeling?”

  Just then, a janitor pushing a dolly loaded with several cases of empty soda pop bottles passed in the hallway. Sketch saw the dolly pass, looked off into space, then slid from his chair and walked into the hall. He followed the janitor a ways, his little flip-flops smacking his heels, turned left, and stopped when the dolly stopped outside the men’s bathroom. When the janitor walked inside, the boy knelt next to the empty bottles.

  Evidently, between the nurses and the antibiotics, his back had quit oozing and was no longer soaking through his shirt. And his glasses seemed to fit his face. He leaned in close, read a bottle, and t
hen pointed. I leaned in and saw nothing but a swallow of backwash that remained in the bottle. He pointed again. I felt like we were playing charades.

  I held my hands wide like I was telling a fish story, then narrowed them to just a few inches apart. “Big or little word?”

  He shook his head like he didn’t have time for all that foolishness and pointed again.

  I looked again, but still nothing caught my eye. I put one finger in the air. “First word. First letter. What’s it start with?”

  He rolled his eyes and opened his sketchpad. In two seconds, he drew the outline of a shape and held it up for me. It looked like a soda bottle. I reached into my pocket and pulled out two quarters. “You want a soda?”

  He shook his head again, smacked the paper with pencil as if he were saying Pay attention!, and drew another picture. He held it up, and this time I saw a truck—the kind with roll-up doors on the side that delivers cases of beer or soda.

  This time I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  He looked into the men’s bathroom, and when he didn’t see the janitor, he slid the bottle from its blue plastic container and held it out, motioning me to look closer. He turned it slightly and pointed at the name of the bottler stamped into the glass.

  I read it aloud. “Jesup Brothers Bottlers.” I looked at the kid, who was looking at me. I read it again. “Jesup Brothers Bottlers?”

  He nodded.

  I held the bottle. “Does this have something to do with you?”

  He pointed at the bottle, then opened his sketchpad and pointed at the picture showing the man from the waist up.

  I put two and two together. “Does Bo drive that truck?”

  He shook his head, flipped a page, and pointed to the hand holding the pliers.

  I picked up the bottle. “Does Bo work on those trucks?”

  He looked over each shoulder, then nodded quickly and darted back down the hall to his room.

  Jackpot.

  I followed him to his room, where he was trying to climb up onto the bed. His right foot was slipping on the double sheet, and all he was doing was pulling the sheet off the bed. I knelt down and held out two hands like you do to help somebody up on a horse. He hesitated.