Chloe got out of her chair, slipped Wanderley’s jacket off her shoulders and draped it over Jo’s. She sat down next to Jo and put her arm across the back of Jo’s chair. I glanced at Wanderley, but looked away. He was watching Chloe, and his eyes were heavy with love and longing. It was a private look and I was sorry I’d intruded.
“He wanted to know what I was doing there, and I said I thought he knew because I saw that in a movie. He said he was going to call the police and I said, ‘Call them, then,’ because I knew he wouldn’t and he just stood there holding the door open with one arm and pouring down underarm odor all over me but I didn’t make a face and he said, ‘Come in, then,’ and I did because I knew his gun was outside and I’m stronger and faster than he is—”
Ruiz thumped the table and we all jumped. He got up and leaned over the table, putting his face right into Jo’s. I stood up and said, “Back off.” Wanderley stood up and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Bear.” Ruiz barked, “Sit down!” I didn’t move. Ruiz moved back a foot. I waited and he waited and we sat down together.
He said, “I’m going to interrupt you for a minute. You’re from Sugar Land, aren’t you? Lotus-eater land. Maybe your daddy thinks life is so safe out there in outer suburbia he doesn’t need to teach his girl how to protect herself.” He lowered his black brows at me. “I’m here to tell you that you aren’t anywhere near as strong as Mr. DeWitt—”
Jo interrupted, “I’m a dancer. I train every day. I can—”
“No!” Ruiz didn’t get out of his seat but he leaned as close to her as he could without getting up. “You are a hundred pounds of nothing. You know what strength is in a fight? It’s weight. It’s mass.”
Jo said, “Yes, but—”
“I’d be hard-pressed to find a single guy in this whole building, and I’m including all the skinny little white guys, who couldn’t take you down. And your self-confidence, your self-delusion, is stupid and dangerous. Bianca, tell her.”
Dabriel said, “First, let’s—”
“Would you tell her?”
Dabriel made a tchh noise with her teeth and put her pen down. She faced Jo. “I’m trained and I’m trained well. If I have to, I fight and I fight hard. But the number one rule is, don’t get in the fight. A man held a gun on you and you went back for more. Alone and at night. What you did was criminally stupid. I’m embarrassed for you.”
Jo was scarlet and her eyes flooded. My heart felt for her but Dabriel was right. She just was. I was going to let Jo take that one. Chloe didn’t like it one bit, though. She dropped her arm from the back of the chair to Jo’s shoulders, looking daggers at Wanderley who said nothing.
“Okay,” Jo said, “then I’m stupid.” She tried to control the tremble in her voice. “Do you want to hear, or not?”
Dabriel said, very controlled, very patient, “I didn’t say you were stupid. I said you had behaved stupidly. Everyone in this room has behaved stupidly. Don’t do it again. That’s the message you should be hearing. Now. Tell us what happened.”
But Jo was lost in tears now. She started to talk twice, choked on her tears and buried her face in her hands. I picked my chair up and put it down behind Jo’s. I turned Jo’s chair around until she was facing me. I took Jo’s tearstained face in my hands and I kissed her forehead. Found my handkerchief and gave it to her and she gave her nose a good blow.
“Josephine Amelia,” I said, “Here’s the thing. Right this second, I do not give a dang what you did. By the grace of God, and by that grace alone, you are here and you are safe and right now, that’s all I care about. That’s all. You want to go home and I want to go home and all these good people have homes to go home to, as well. And Baby Bear and the pugs are at a stranger’s house and they probably want to go home, too. And no one can go home until you tell us what happened. So take a breath, and ask God for strength, and tell us the rest of your story. Can you do that?”
Jo took a long, shuddery breath, and nodded.
“Okay, then,” I said, “let’s turn your chair around.” I turned her chair around. “And you hold your head high, and you tell us what happened.”
Jo gathered herself and began again. “Mr. DeWitt let me in and he told me to take a seat. I sat down on that booth seat at the kitchen table and he said to tell him straight why I was there and I said it was because he was the one who killed Phoebe and he did it by putting Phoebe’s mom’s medicine in a power punch and I knew it because Phoebe had left me a message on her phone and I was going to tell the police. All that was made up, but, see, I thought that if he got all upset and started crying and said he would never, ever hurt Phoebe, that he loved her and couldn’t get over her dying, then I would have told him I made it all up and told him how sorry I was and that Phoebe really loved him and always said such good things about him. But he didn’t say any of that. Instead, he said why hadn’t I, then, called the police, and I said because I wanted to know why he’d killed her. And he said he was going to get a drink and he went to the sink, and when he turned around he had a gun in his hand. And that was when he taped me to the table and I knew he meant to kill me, too.” More tears but she wiped them away. I reached my arm around her and took her hand.
“He said it was Mr. Pickersley’s fault that he lost his daughter and now Mr. Pickersley’s daughter was dead, too. I said I thought it was so he could have Phoebe’s trailer and all her money and that she’d trusted him and loved him and she had come to him when something bad happened to her and instead of helping her he had killed her and he would go to Hell for that and the fires of Hell would crisp his skin and that’s when he taped my mouth shut.”
Where the heck had that come from? My daughter talked like a 1930s backwoods evangelist. Crisp his skin? Not that I disagreed with the gist of what she said.
“He said he was going to kill me and drive Mom’s car to the Houston Ship Channel and push the car into the water and that people would be eating crab at Pappadeaux’s Seafood Kitchen and that crab would be fat off my flesh . . .”
Yeah. Mitch DeWitt was going to Hell and getting his skin crisped. Yes sir.
“. . . and he said everyone would just think I was a runaway. But he didn’t know about the dogs in the car and Baby Bear would have torn his throat out.”
Or Baby Bear would have been killed, too. Along with Rebecca’s pugs.
“And then Dad and Detective Wanderley came and that’s all.” Jo wasn’t crying anymore. She was relieved to have it done.
Ruiz said, “That’s quite a story, Jo. We can’t use it, of course. It’s interesting, but we don’t have any proof. It’s your word against his.” He looked deflated. Dabriel capped her pen and put it in her breast pocket.
Jo reached into the flannel shirt and fumbled with her bra. I said, “Jo . . .” She pulled out her cell phone, clicked and scrolled and laid it on the table.
“It’s the Smart Recorder app. It was four-ninety-nine, Dad, it goes on your card. I’ll pay you back, but you have to use a credit card and you won’t let me have one even though Cara has one. I borrowed yours.” She touched the screen. First there was her voice, traffic noises in the background, an occasional yip from an excited pug. She set out her plans and the recorder shut off. Jo touched the screen again.
This time we heard Jo knocking on the aluminum screen door, Mitch DeWitt answering. And then everything. Just the way Jo had told it. When DeWitt told Jo he was going to kill her and dump her body in the ship channel, I jumped out of my chair. Walked to the door and leaned my back against it. Walked to the other side of the room. Back to the door. Checked the change in my pockets. Bowed my head and thanked my God.
I wanted to hit someone.
From the recorder there was the sound of breaking glass, the struggle, the explosion. Jo touched the screen and the recorder shut off.
Chloe, Wanderley, Ruiz and Dabriel sat staring at Jo’s phone. At last, Dabriel picked t
he phone up.
“What was that app, again?”
Ruiz put his fist in his palm and cracked his knuckles then cracked the knuckles on his other hand. He blew a stream of air out his nose.
“That recording wouldn’t have been worth anything on the bottom of the ship channel, Jo,” he said.
“I set it to upload to the Internet. Automatically. Alex will get an alert.”
“Ah, well. That’s all taken care of, then. Of course, you could still have been on the floor of the ship channel. On your way to becoming some crab’s dinner. And from there to being served with drawn butter at Pappadeaux.” He made smacking noises with his mouth.
“Detective Ruiz?” I said, “Could you not? Please?”
Jo pushed back from the table and stood up. She spoke to Detective Dabriel. “Can you use it? Can you get him for killing Phoebe?”
Dabriel didn’t mess around. “Yes, Jo. I think we can. I think we’ve got him.”
Jo dropped to her knees and burst into tears.
Twenty-five
There was a FOR SALE sign in front of the Pickersley house. I called several times. Each time, Mark’s mom or dad answered. It was never a good time for me to talk to Mark.
The seventh or eighth time I called, Mark’s dad said, “Preacher? Don’t call no more. He ain’t coming to the phone. Mark and the boys, they’re trying to put all this past them. They’re coming up to New Orleans with us and we’ll keep an eye on them. If Mark feels the need to talk to you, he’s got your number. So don’t call, okay?”
• • •
Somehow the gnome-as-weapon story got out. Monday morning I went outside to get the paper and there was a garden gnome on my front porch. He held a solar light lantern aloft. I put him in the garage. Tuesday morning there were six of them—two on the porch, the other four scattered over the lawn. Baby Bear peed on one of them before I could get them all picked up. On Wednesday there were more than thirty and I hollered at Jo to get her butt out of bed, this was all her fault and she could get them picked up and stored away. I made a NO GNOME ZONE sign and stuck it next to the front porch.
By Thursday morning we had forty-two gnomes, and when I unfurled the weekly local paper, The Fort Bend Sun, there was a picture of our gnome-bedecked front yard with the caption “No Roam—Gnomes’ Home” on the front page. Friday morning the gnomes spilled over into our neighbors’ yards.
By Saturday morning, we had collected 388 garden gnomes. We boxed them all up and stuck them in the back of Alex’s truck. He wouldn’t let me drive but he said it was okay if Baby Bear came, too. Jo sat in front with Alex and Annie and I clambered into the backseat and made sure our seat belts were buckled. Baby Bear squeezed in as best he could.
We dropped most of the gnomes off at the East Fort Bend Human Needs Ministry Resale Shop. They were tickled. From there we headed out to Green Vista.
Lacey Corinda was also tickled to see us. She laughed out loud as we unboxed the forty garden gnomes we had brought her and stroked Baby Bear’s head—best buds from the time they’d spent together. She hauled some chairs out of her trailer and made us sit there while she made hot cider. Jo and Alex lined the gnomes around the base of the trailer—it looked like a battalion of gnomes was guarding Miss Lacey’s trailer.
We filled her in on the rest of the story and she wagged her head and clucked her tongue. Miss Lacey wasn’t any older than me, but she had the mannerisms of my grandmother.
We ran out of words and Miss Lacey said, “I want to thank you for doing your best to make up for the loss of Hilliard.” So, uh, Hilliard was too personal to be replaced. Even by forty gnomes? Oh well. “Now,” she said, “let’s talk about that favor.”
Oh, yeah. She had refused payment when Annie and Stacy had come by to get the dogs, telling her, “The preacher and I have an understanding.” A week later, I was about to have that understanding explained to me.
“What I want,” said Lacey, “is for you to come out here and hold services. I want songs and communion and a sermon. Make it twenty minutes or so. Too long and I’m gonna fall asleep.”
“Lacey, I’m in the pulpit over in Sugar Land every Sunday morning.”
“Doesn’t have to be Sunday morning. Doesn’t even have to be on Sunday. Every day is the Lord’s day.”
I thought for a while. Yeah, I could fit that in. “Okay. I can do that next week.”
“Every week. I’m going to ask some friends, too.”
“Every week?”
“That’s right.” She nodded.
“I don’t think I can do it every week, Lacey, I’ve got responsibil—”
“Tell you what. You commit for a month. Then we’ll talk. How’s that?”
The young man who had supplied the rope to leash the dogs the week before stepped out of his trailer. He saw us and smiled. Lacey waved him over, introduced him as Max and he joined us for hot cider.
You know what? My daughter was alive. Both my daughters were alive. I had a beautiful wife and I loved her. Baby Bear was luxuriating in the cool November air and I had returned Rebecca’s pugs home to her safe, if flatulent (the ham bone and beans had been, no surprise, a colossal mistake—Annie and Stacy had driven home with the windows open weeping from the smell and their own hysterical laughter). I thought Jo could do worse than Alex. He wasn’t that bad.
I looked around me at the rows of trailer homes, some of them neat and tidy and cared for, some of them not. I looked at the woman who had held my weeping daughter on her lap, a stranger’s child drenched in blood, who’d brought who knew what troubles with her. Lacey had not hesitated to take Jo into her arms. The day was bright and darkness was past. God had been good to me.
“Okay, Lacey. You’ve got me for a month.”
Safe from Harm (9781101619629) Page 33
