Raveled

by McAneny, Anne

  “Really? I should quote back to you some of the things you said over the years.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Mrs. Smith said with a nasty finger pointed at my mother’s face.

  I loved that my mother’s memory remained strong when she needed it most.

  “I most certainly will,” my mother said.

  “Do not speak ill of the dead, Justine. And in this case, the murdered.”

  “My husband paid for his alleged crimes with his life, Elise. What more do you want?”

  “I want her to shut her lying trap,” Mrs. Smith said, evidently surprised to hear such crudity coming out of her own mouth. But she shook it off and forged ahead. “At least my John went and made something of himself. He’s moved on, as I think we all should.”

  My mother opted for an understated, powerful glare from below, a mocking, disdainful glower that let Mrs. Smith know exactly how disgusted she was with her. Then she spoke, in measured, precise tones.

  “I agree with you, Elise. Now take your own advice and move on.”

  Mrs. Smith remained rooted, unaccustomed to anyone giving her orders.

  “Step aside, Elise. This is a public sidewalk and you’re blocking our way.”

  “I will not. Not until I hear you call off your pit bull of a daughter.”

  “This is my final request.”

  They held a silent standoff for three of the longest seconds of my life. Longer than the time a customer pulled a gun on me in Puccio’s before an undercover cop shot him. Longer than the three seconds it took each juror to say Guilty in the privacy of the room where they’d slurped coffee, eaten donuts, and decided my dad’s fate.

  And then, slow motion beauty kicked in. My mother reached out with an age-spotted hand at the end of her short arm, cupped Mrs. Smith’s wrinkly elbow, and shoved her to the side with surprising force. Mrs. Smith’s ungainly stumble made my day. She regained her balance soon enough, but as we marched past without looking back, the peripheral sight of her gaping maw made me smile—and proved to the world that Mrs. Smith was indeed still capable of facial expressions.

  We walked in silence for a solid minute, reveling in the afterglow and maybe feeling a bit of remorse—that last would be all on my mother’s part. We decided to skip the bite to eat and headed to the car. Before getting in, my mother turned to face me. “Allison, I need you to leave things be.”

  “I can’t, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not up to you.”

  “It’s as much up to me as you. I was his daughter, and Kevin his son.”

  “What does Kevin have to do with this?”

  I gestured for her to get in the car and spent the ride home explaining some of the situation to her, along with Kevin’s pleas.

  “I hoped it wouldn’t ever come to this, Allison,” she said as we arrived home. “You really need to drop the whole matter, for everyone’s sake.”

  “Why?” I said. If she could give me a solid enough reason to stop, I’d give it due consideration.

  A bit of her earlier ferocity returned. “Trust me on this one. Let it be.”

  Not even close to solid. “If I stopped,” I said, “Kevin wouldn’t. It’s eating him away inside. I need to help him.”

  She shook her head and harrumphed as she got out of the car. She trooped into the house, good and pissed.

  Chapter 22

  Allison… present

  The ringing of my phone shocked me late that night while I sorted through papers in the evidence box from my father’s case. The caller couldn’t be anyone from New York as this was probably the first Friday night I’d been available to answer my phone in years. Mondays and Wednesdays were my nights off, never Fridays. I searched for the phone on the pink and blue gingham bedspread of the guest bed my mother had put in after I moved out. Not sure anyone had ever slept in it besides me. By the sixth ring, I found the elusive device beneath a photo of Shelby Anderson’s bloated corpse, her body partially eaten by fish while it marinated in Licking Dog Creek for two weeks. I flipped the photo face-down, matching the way her body was found.

  The number of my caller was unfamiliar so I answered blind. “Hello?”

  “I guess I owe you for covering for me in Jasper’s room.” It was Ray from Ravine Psychiatric, but his voice was the definition of jolly on downers.

  “Hey, Ray, no problem. You were doing me a favor.”

  “Against Ravine policy, I should stress again.”

  “I know. Thanks again. You rock. Hey, I called earlier to see how Jasper was doing but I couldn’t get any information.”

  Ray sighed, long and heavy. His voice splintered with his next few words. “That’s why I’m calling. You weren’t listed on the card or anything but I thought I should let you know. I couldn’t decide if I should or not ‘cuz I know you lied to me. But I’m erring on the side of me not feeling guilty for not having called.”

  “You lost me there, Ray. Could you break that down a bit?”

  “Sorry,” the big guy said. “Okay, first, I have terrible news. I’m sorry to have to tell you this but they transferred Jasper to Link General Hospital and he passed away late this afternoon.”

  My heart stopped. Or it fluttered. Either way, it did something arrhythmic it wasn’t supposed to do and I had to bend my head to my knees to stay conscious. I swallowed a huge lump and tried to speak but couldn’t. I had really liked Jasper; we were two odd peas in a pod that didn’t thrive well in Lavitte’s clay soil. Jasper dead? From clam sauce?

  “Allison, you there?”

  “MmHm.”

  “I guess you found out about the coma. I didn’t even know until later. Don’t know why they were being all secretive about it, but he never came out of it.”

  I tried to replay my phone conversation with Jasper but heard only the blaring screech of my mind’s merry-go-round. Then, from within a deep layer of grey matter, my cynicism rose up and regained its captaincy. A question fell from my lips before its implications formed in my head. “Will there be an autopsy?”

  “Oh, gosh,” Ray said, “I don’t know. I suppose there might be.”

  “I need to know, Ray. It’s important.”

  “Okay, sure. Here’s the other thing. I said earlier that I knew you lied to me.”

  “Yeah, about what?”

  “Well, you weren’t a cheerleader.”

  Seriously? He was gonna call me on that?

  “Were you?” he said. Judgment and hope fought for dominance in his tone.

  “No, Ray. I wasn’t a rah-rah girl. Sorry I lied.”

  “And you aren’t really going to Jasper’s reunion tomorrow because you didn’t even graduate the same year, did you?”

  I sat up fully in my bed, my feet finding firm ground on the hardwood floor. “Ray, what’s this about? How do you know all this? Has someone been asking about me?”

  “No, no. It’s just that, well, I don’t know if Jasper even liked you and I hate to think I violated his room on the final day of his life with a sworn enemy. He scribbled over your picture, you know.”

  “What picture?” I asked.

  “The one in your yearbook.”

  Yearbook? So Jasper did have old yearbooks in his room. Maybe in that closet I hadn’t opened.

  “Talk to me here, Ray. I’m confused.”

  Ray huffed and I knew that he really would let the guilt gnaw at him until his dying day if he thought he’d disrespected Jasper in any way. “They sent me to his room to gather a few things and I came across some yearbooks in his closet. He had one from each year he was in school. I remembered what you said about being a cheerleader, and, well, I took a moment to peek through to find you and Jasper. But you weren’t in the group cheerleader picture—”

  Yes, Ray, get over it. I wasn’t a damn cheerleader.

  He continued. “And you weren’t in any of the senior class photos, but I did find you in the underclassmen, the year Jasper was a junior and you were a freshman. And that’s where I saw that he’d written r
ight across your face.”

  “He wrote across my face? Or crossed it out?”

  “Scribbled a bunch of random letters. Maybe an acronym for You Were Not My Friend.”

  Curiosity pushed aside my grief. Could Jasper have scribbled through my photo in anger over Bobby’s death? Or maybe he’d had the hots for Shelby Anderson and resented my entire family. Sins of the father and all that. But that didn’t seem Jasper-like. Could someone else have been thumbing through his yearbook, seen the Fennimore name and reflexively written something hateful? Not much of a stretch. But what if it was a message from Jasper? He knew from our conversation that I suspected he had a yearbook in his possession. It would seem a logical place for a message, but certainly not enough space for the promised thousand words.

  “What letters did he write, Ray?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. The book’s up in his room and I can’t leave the front desk.”

  “I need to know exactly what he wrote. I need to see that yearbook.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ray said, trying to exert some power over a hopeless situation and maybe exact a bit of revenge.

  “No, I really need to see that yearbook. In fact, all of them that he had. Can you hold onto them for me?”

  “Why would I? Besides, I can’t remove anything from his room. It’s possible the police may have to go through his possessions. They do that sometimes when a patient dies.”

  The police? No. Not good. If it wore a uniform and carried a gun, it was possible Mayor Kettrick wielded influence over it. And if Smitty’s parents were suddenly mingling with the Kettricks, and if Smitty had caught wind of my visit to Jasper... shit! I had signed my real name in the visitor registry. I wasn’t sure I’d even scratched the surface of this nightmare yet.

  “Listen to me carefully, Ray. I know you don’t owe me, and I did lie to you. But with very good reason. This will sound dramatic, but I need to see those yearbooks and I’m leaving right now. I’ll be there in a few hours. Is there any way you can get your hands on them for me?”

  “Allison, why? What’s going on?” The urgency I’d hoped for had entered his voice.

  “It’s too much to go into, but I think Jasper was trying to tell me something important.”

  “Oh all right,” he said, exasperated. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Have you told anyone else about Jasper’s death?”

  “Not me, personally. His doctor probably called the people on his card. Let’s see. There was an uncle in Tennessee and another aunt and uncle in Florida. I guess both his parents had passed, as we know—”

  I could barely stand the chattin’ on the porch and settin’-a-spell tone in which Ray was rambling but I held my tongue. I needed this jolly rodeo clown on my side.

  “He hadn’t listed any girlfriend or partner or anything like that,” Ray continued. “And, oh yes, I had to access the billing system for Dr. Graft so she could let the insurance company know. He was covered under some arrangement through a benefactor or something. I don’t remember. But we had to call him so he could get it straight with the insurance.”

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  “I’ve plum forgot. There’s been a lot going on.”

  “Could you look it up again? Maybe in the billing system?”

  “No can do, Allison. I can’t access the billing system once they shut it down for the night. Besides, it’s confidential. HIPAA and all that.”

  “Ray, this is crucial.” I didn’t want my mind to go where it was yearning to go. I had signed on for turning over a few stones. I’d had no intention of heaving a shovel, chopping through roots, and digging a grave. But my mind zipped ahead anyway and once again, words fell from my mouth before I’d fully accepted them myself. “Lives may be at stake.”

  Ray gasped. He next spoke in a whisper. “I really can’t get into the system.”

  “If I said the name of his benefactor, would you remember it?”

  “I think so.”

  “Was it Smith? John Smith or Abel Smith?”

  “No, nothing that simple.”

  “Was it Enzo Rodriguez?”

  Please let it be Enzo. Please let his guilt over a few innocent shots of moonshine have extended to caring for all the injured parties touched by Bobby Kettrick.

  “No, not that one either.”

  “Was the insurance through a company called Lube Auto?”

  “Lube Auto? I go there all the time. No, definitely not them paying for Jasper’s stay here. That’d be pretty weird.”

  I closed my eyes. “Was the name Kettrick? Robert or Georgia Kettrick?”

  “Yes! That’s it. Kettrick. Robert Kettrick was the name.”

  So Mayor Kettrick knew exactly where Jasper Shifflett was and what he’d been up to. Did that include the names of his visitors or the contents of his phone calls?

  “Does that help at all?” Ray said. “I can’t believe I remembered the name.”

  Ray sounded like he’d won a carnival game. He may as well have just knocked the hell out of a sand-filled bottle with an old softball.

  I felt like the bottle.

  Chapter 23

  Allison… present

  Luckily, before I’d hung up with Ray, I’d asked him to erase my name from the visitors’ log at Ravine. He was definitely reaching the end of his tether on favors for me but he promised he’d do it, or at least scribble it out since I’d signed in pen. Maybe the Kettricks didn’t yet know I’d been there. What did they know? They’d been at Smitty’s house the other day so they had to know I was nosing about. Had their presence at the house been at the Smiths’ bidding or at their own? They also knew Jasper was dead, or at least the mayor did. Had they already informed the Smiths about Jasper’s sudden passing?

  My thoughts raced faster than my mom’s car, which was now doing eighty easy on its way to Ravine. I needed to talk this out with someone and there was only one local person I could think of who wouldn’t mind me calling at 11:30 p.m. on a Friday. Charlie. I dialed the number he’d given me the other day in case I wanted to get together to nosh on sushi or tapas—a bit of underhanded humor since neither was available in Lavitte.

  Charlie must have programmed my number into his phone because he answered with, “Little Allie Fennimore, I’m sorry, but if you’re drunk and randy, I can’t help you. Your feminine wiles hold no sway with me.”

  I let Charlie’s humor mellow over me. God knew I needed it as I sped towards a psych ward under the cover of night to decipher Sanskrit on my face in a twenty-year-old yearbook. “My feminine wiles don’t even hold sway in New York with heterosexual men after three Maker’s Mark shots.”

  “Haven’t you learned anything as a drink wench? Go for the saps drinking worm-bottled tequila. Messes with their eyesight. At least you’ll have a chance.”

  “Thanks a bunch. Hey, I have a question for you. You sober by any chance?”

  “Lord, no.”

  “Good. Then you’ll talk more. I came across something and I don’t want to get you too involved, but what do you know about the relationship between the Kettricks and the Shiffletts?”

  “Still turning over graves, Sweetheart? ‘Cuz I’m worried someone’s gonna sneak up behind you and shove you in.”

  “I’ll be holding the shovel, but thanks for your concern. Now, the Kettricks and the Shiffletts. Whaddya got?”

  “Okay, you mean between Bobby and Jasper, or between their parents?”

  “The parents. Did Bobby’s parents have a soft spot for Jasper? Or did they socialize with Jasper’s parents?”

  “Ha! That’d be quite the evening out. The Kettricks were royalty in town. Dirty money, maybe, but it put them at the top of the pecking order. They wouldn’t have been caught dead with the likes of the trailer-bound Shiffletts. And have you forgotten how sickly Jasper’s mom was?”

  “No. I remember.” The penciled-in eyes. The deathly pallor.

  “She was always battling something,” Charlie said. “Bad
immune system, I guess. Looked like a transparent waif. Tried to get work a couple times but would end up bedridden in no time flat. Her husband wasn’t much better.”

  “What did he do? I have no recollection of him around town.”

  “That’s because he was gone most of the time. Coal miner. He stayed with relatives in West Virginia a lot. When he did come back, it was just to cough up his black lung disease all over the wife. I mean, that family was just too depressing to think about.”

  School must have served as a hiatus for Jasper, a place where teachers and fellow students could attempt to stimulate his considerable intellect rather than demand his medical ministrations. What a major downer to go home every day. No wonder he’d clung to Bobby and Smitty. They’d lived life out loud, filled with energy and bravado, even if it was at the expense of others and on the edges of juvenile delinquency.

  “Do you think it’s possible Mayor Kettrick felt sorry for Jasper, maybe took him under his wing and funneled some money his way?”

  “For a bartender, you really suck at human nature.”

  “I do not.”

  “If you didn’t, you’d know that Mayor Kettrick only helped himself—to money from everybody else’s pockets, and to the boudoirs of other men’s wives.”

  “What about Mrs. Kettrick, then? Would she have thrown some money at Jasper’s family?”

  “Mayor Kettrick kept her on such a tight leash, I’m surprised she didn’t have neck burn. She was more like a disciplined pet than a wife. He gave her an allowance and convinced her she was too dumb to understand the household finances. You know the type.”

  “How do you know all this, Charlie?”

  “My mother got her hair done the same time as Mrs. Kettrick, every third Thursday at Libby’s Salon. I used to go with her and just lose myself in the gossip. Two hours of pure heaven.”

  “Hard to believe Mrs. Kettrick would be brave enough to say anything negative about the Mayor.”

  “I’m telling you, that salon was a cocoon of intimacy. The things the ladies would blurt out in there. And of course, they’d all gossip about each customer after she left. That was the best part.”