Amazing Grace--A Southern Gothic Paranormal Mystery

by John G. Hartness

  “Mr. Miller?”

  “Yes, I’m David Miller. Can I help you?”

  “Mr. Miller, I’m Lila Grace Carter. I live over on Spring Street. I…I’m working with Sheriff Dunleavy investigating your daughter’s death, and I have a few questions, if you have a few minutes.”

  “Can this wait, Ms. Carter? This isn’t a good time. My wife just learned that my daughter’s best friend Shelly…” His face crumpled for an instant, but he pulled himself back together. “I’m sorry. We just got some sudden news, and my wife is very upset.”

  “I understand, Mr. Miller. I was just with the sheriff,” I said, wondering a little how the word got out this fast. Sheriff Dunleavy would have barely had time to go talk to Shelly’s family, and the Millers already knew. Word spreads fast in small Southern towns, and never faster than when the news is awful. “But we would really like to get any information you have as soon as possible. If there’s any way…”

  “Okay, fine,” he sighed. “But out here. My wife is…resting right now. I don’t want her disturbed.” He motioned to a pair of white wooden rocking chairs on the porch, an accessory that almost should come with the porch in the rural South. I took a seat, and he put his hand on the other one before stopping himself.

  “I’m sorry, I’m being rude,” he said. “Can I get you anything to drink? Sweet tea? Pepsi? Ice water? I think there’s even some Cheerwine in there. I don’t know what all people have brought, but there’s at least half a dozen two-liters on the kitchen counter.”

  “I’m fine, Mr. Miller. Please, sit down for a minute.” He sat, and we rocked while I tried to figure out where to begin.

  “I know some of these questions will probably be repetitive, but with Shelly’s disappearance, there might be a connection—”

  “Do you think whoever hurt my Jenny took Shelly, too?” he asked. There was a flicker of hope in his eyes that I had to temper, or he wouldn’t be able to focus enough to be any use to me.

  “I don’t know, sir. I just know that we’re a small town, and a pretty safe one, usually. But here we are with two best friends falling victim to something, I don’t know if it’s bad luck or what, within just a few days of each other.”

  “It’s not bad luck,” Mr. Miller said. “Somebody came into this house and killed my Jenny. If that’s the same person that hurt Shelly, then I reckon I’ll have help when I gut the bastard. If it wasn’t, then I’ll get him all to myself.”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that. I wasn’t really working for the police, just working with them. A little. Begrudgingly. Plus, I pretty much agreed with him. I decided to just let it lie, rather than trying to give him some line of righteous crap about what his daughter would have wanted.

  “Mr. Miller, can you think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt your daughter?” I asked, keeping my tone as gentle as I could. I’d helped Sheriff Johnny with a few cases, but I’d never talked to a grieving parent while I tried to find out who killed his child before, and I felt like I was walking on eggshells.

  “No, nobody. She was a cheerleader, in the FCA, ran track, was vice-president of her class, all that stuff. She was a sweet child; everybody loved her.”

  “Was there anyone with a grudge, anyone that may have imagined some reason to dislike her? A classmate, and ex-boyfriend, anything like that?”

  “Nothing,” he insisted. “Jenny didn’t date. It wasn’t allowed. We let her go out in groups and some double dates with Shelly, but nothing serious.”

  I tried a different angle. “What about Shelly? Was she as…well-liked as Jenny?” I knew the answer I expected, and Mr. Miller didn’t disappoint.

  “No,” he said quickly. “Shelly was a little wild. She was something of a mean girl, and I know she put down some of the less popular girls in school. Jenny was always telling us about something Shelly had pulled on an underclassman, or a girl in their gym class, or some poor child that tried out for the cheerleading squad.”

  “Did Jenny mention anyone specifically that Shelly was particularly rough on?” I knew that anyone with a grudge against Shelly probably didn’t care much for her best friend, either. I’d also spent enough time with teenaged girls, having been one once upon a time, to know that whatever Shelly did, it was unlikely that Jenny was blameless in the affair.

  “I can’t think of…wait, there were a couple.” The distraught father held up a finger as ideas came to him. “There was Ian Vernon, the photographer for the yearbook. Shelly hacked his phone and sent texts to all the girls in school with dirty pictures, making it look like it came from Ian.”

  “That’s more than a little mean girl stunt, Mr. Miller. That could cause serious problems for Ian in the future.” I was expecting some teasing, but not hearing that Shelly committed a felony to harass a classmate.

  “I know, but you know how kids are, right?” I decided not to get into that discussion with him just days after the death of his daughter. “Was there anybody else that might hold a grudge against Shelly?”

  “I guess any girl that didn’t make the cheerleading squad probably hated both of the girls,” he said. “Jenny and Shelly were the ones who decided on the team, with some help from Miss Hope, their advisor. Last year there were a few girls who got upset, but from what I understand, they put some new systems in place this year to make it more transparent. Score sheets and things like that, and they had individual meetings with all the girls after tryouts to tell them why they didn’t make the squad and what they could work on for next year. From what Jenny said, it worked real well.” I knew Debbie Hope, and that sounded like something she would do. She was a heavy girl in school, and now that she had started teaching, she was the kind of teacher that wanted everybody to feel like they were being treated fairly.

  “What about boyfriends?” I asked again. “I know you said Jenny didn’t date, but what about Shelly?” I found it hard to believe that two high school cheerleaders wouldn’t at least go on dates.

  “She had a few boys that she went out with from time to time, but nobody serious. Jenny and Shelly would go to the movies with Derek and Edward sometimes, and I think Shelly went to the prom with Tony Neefe last year.”

  “Who did Jenny go with?”

  “She didn’t go. She was supposed to go with Steven Whitaker, but he started dating a girl, and he wanted to take her instead. So, Jenny didn’t go. She was just a sophomore, so she still had two proms, so she wasn’t upset.”

  “Really? Had she bought a dress?” I remembered back in the Dark Ages when I went to prom—buying the perfect dress was more of an ordeal than trying to keep your knees together all night after the prom.

  “Oh, no,” her father replied. “If I’d laid out that kind of money, there would have been a whole different conversation. No, she never…” He choked up, probably thinking of all the pretty dresses he was never going to get to buy his little girl. My heart broke for the poor man, but I felt like I had to keep pressing. With two dead girls within days of each other, there had to be some connection, if we could just see it.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Miller. But could you just—”

  “What are you doing here?” I turned looked up at a pretty blond woman in her early forties standing on the other side of the screen door. She was obviously Jenny’s mother—the hair, eyes, and nose were almost identical. But I’d not seen Jenny’s mouth twist up into that kind of scowl, and I’d certainly not heard her speak with such venom.

  “I’m sorry.” I stood up and held out my hand. “I’m—”

  “I know who you are, charlatan. Reverend Turner has told me all about you.” Mrs. Miller spun around and disappeared into the house. I heard her footsteps stomp through the house, then I heard the sound of a refrigerator opening and closing with a thud.

  The angry woman walked out onto the porch holding a blue and white Pyrex dish with flowers that I recognized as my own. “We didn’t wash the dish because I wouldn’t touch any food that came from your house. When Reverend Turner told me you c
ame here, I couldn’t believe him. I couldn’t understand for a second why a heathen like you would want to set foot in the home of a God-fearing family in their time of grief. And now I come out onto my front porch and see you flirting with my husband? You need to leave, right now, and take your witchery with you.”

  I was stunned. Speechless. I’d been called a lot of things in my life: heathen, godless, witch, liar, fake—you name it, I’ve heard it. But I’ve never in my life had someone speak to me with the abject loathing that Tara Miller unleashed on me in her den.

  I looked down, working hard to keep my temper under control. It was not an inconsiderable struggle, but I somehow managed to speak with a civil tongue. When I felt like I could speak without screaming at her, I said, “Mrs. Miller, I am so sorry for your loss, and the last thing I want to do right now is further upset you or your husband. I will go, but please understand that the police have reason to believe that Jenny may not have fallen, and now they have found Shelly Thomas’s car in John D. Long Lake, so they have asked me to help with the investigation. I am not trying to do anything other than ask your husband a few questions—” I snapped my mouth shut as she held up a hand.

  “Out,” she ordered. “Get out and do not ever set foot on my property again. Take your dish, and your lies, and your devil worship and stay the hell away from my family.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t see any way to do anything else, so I just nodded my head and turned to go. I stopped on the sidewalk and turned around, looking at the grief-stricken man sitting in the rocking chair and the fuming woman just inside the threshold. “I hope y’all can find peace. I hope that the police can find who did this terrible thing and bring them to justice. I am truly sorry for your loss.”

  Then I turned and walked down the sidewalk, got into my truck, and nestled the casserole dish onto the passenger side of the bench seat amongst a jacket and some other junk to keep it from sliding around. I put then the old girl in gear and pulled onto the street, making a right turn, then a left, then another right until I sat in the parking lot of the big Presbyterian church where I grew up.

  I unfastened my seatbelt, leaned my head on the steering wheel, and let the tears of pain and shame and anger pour down my face. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I shouted in the privacy of my truck’s cab. “Lord, I know I don’t talk to you as often as I should, but I have to ask—why can’t they just let me try to help them? Why do these people have to be so damn mean?”

  I sat there for a couple more minutes, then pulled a pack of Kleenex out of the glove box and blew my nose. I tossed the tissue into the passenger seat floorboard and got out to walk the cemetery and talk to my people a little while.

  Chapter 9

  Walking amongst the dead always brings me peace somehow. I know it’s the opposite for a lot of people, but I find the company of the resting dead awful relaxing. As much time as I spend with the restless dead, it’s exceedingly peaceful to walk among those who have gone on from here.

  So that’s what I did. I walked along the front row of the cemetery, right there on Front Street, with my truck parked all catty-wumpus like I’d been drunk as Cooter Brown when I pulled into the parking lot. I lingered for a second in front of the three-sided monument that Cousin Bowman had collected money from everybody in the family to put up back in the 1964. My daddy gave him twenty dollars and bought four copies of the book he wrote about our family’s travels across the ocean from England to the South Carolina upstate, and told Bowman to get the hell out of his face and not to never ask him for another dollar while he was trying to eat.

  In defense of Daddy’s manners, he said he was trying to eat some of Aunt Eller’s coconut cake, and her coconut cake always was everybody’s favorite. She’d make this three-layer white cake so moist if you squeezed it, you could get water for days. Eller always made Cool-Whip icing with a bunch of shaved coconut all through it, so you got some coconut in the icing between the layers of the cake, too. It wasn’t like some of them store-bought coconut cakes, which is basically a white sheet cake with some coconut sprinkled on top. I tried for years to learn how to make cake like Aunt Eller, but I never could figure it out. Then she passed, and then Daddy passed, and I never married, so I didn’t have anybody to teach me, nor anybody to eat it, so I just quit trying. It’s probably been twenty years since that old Tupperware cake carrier has seen any use.

  I looked at that monument, tracing the Carters, and the Thomases, and the Feemsters all the way back to whatever little piece of English soil they sprang up from. The original Johnny Thomas in this part of the world was from Wales. He was old Sheriff Johnny’s grandpappy with about a dozen greats in front of it. Me and Johnny always knew we were some kind of kin, but being Southern, we just called it “cousins” and let it go at that. My mama always could rattle off what number cousin you were to somebody and how many times removed, but I never got the hang of it.

  I walked a little farther and took a seat on a headstone in front of my granny’s stone. I was sitting on Mr. Bo Mickle’s stone, and I usually made it a point to apologize to Mr. Bo for disrespecting him that way, but I’d been doing it so long by that point that I reckoned Mr. Bo would have found some way to let me know if it bothered him.

  “Hey, Granny,” I said. She wasn’t there, of course. Granny died when I was about thirteen, and she didn’t linger but a couple of days. I met her right here the morning after her funeral and watched her walk into the light. It wasn’t like she walked up into the clouds like the end of Highway to Heaven episode, but there was a bright white light, and she told me she loved me, and told me to be good, and then she turned around and went away. So, I knew she wasn’t listening in, but somehow that made it easier to talk.

  “Granny, I’m having a terrible time with this one. The poor little girl wants my help so bad, but her mama and daddy won’t have any of it. Her mama won’t, anyhow. That preacher Turner has got his hooks into her so deep you’d think she was going to make a big donation or something. I’m sorry, that wasn’t very Christian of me. But he just makes me so mad sometimes. It’s like he knows I want to help people, and he keeps trying to get in my way anyhow.”

  I got down off the top of Mr. Bo’s rock and moved over to sit cross-legged on the grass right in front of Granny’s stone. I’d done this forever, but the older I got, the harder it was to get up off the grass when I was done. I reckoned it wouldn’t be too many more years before I was going to have to have a cane or some kind of walking stick if I was going to go traipsing around in cemeteries. This one wasn’t too bad, but some weren’t maintained as good, like the one where Pap was buried.

  Yeah, Granny and Pap didn’t lay to rest together. They weren’t even in the same town. Granny was right here in Lockhart, but Pap was way over in Chester. He remarried after Granny went, and that was about the last we saw of him. It was like he wanted nothing more than to forget our family and go be with a new one. I didn’t like it, and I could tell it hurt Mama something awful, but we respected the old man’s wishes and left him alone. He lived a long time after Granny passed, ’til he was well into his nineties. I only heard about it when he died because I read the obituary. There was no mention of our family in the listing of relatives. Since I wasn’t family anymore, I didn’t go to the visitation.

  I did go to the funeral, though. I stood back away from everybody and watched them lay the old man to rest. When all the rest of the mourners got back in their cars, I walked up to the graveside and stood there for a minute watching the men lower the casket into the dirt. I was just about to walk back to my truck when he stepped up beside me.

  “You still see ghosts, Lila Grace?” my dead grandfather asked me.

  I nodded. I didn’t really want to talk to him. I didn’t know what to say. This was the man who had made me a rocking horse for Christmas when I was three years old. A rocking horse I had until I was a grown woman and gave it to a young couple at the church who had a little boy who loved to play cowboy. This was also the man who abandoned my
mother when she needed a parent most, when she was burying her own mother in that ugliest cycle of life. The man that turned his back on my family for over two decades, and now stood next to me while I watched his body being lowered into the ground and tried to decipher my feelings.

  “I expect you got some questions. If you’d see fit to come with me for a minute, I’d like to answer ‘em.”

  Well, the old man knew he had me then. I was so curious when I was little that he used to call me “Cat.” “Get on out of here, Little Cat,” he’d say when he caught me snooping in his or Granny’s closets, trying to find Christmas presents or birthday presents, or just old pictures of him from the War or of Granny when she was young woman.

  None of that curiosity faded as I grew up, and getting older did nothing to tame that curious Little Cat, so I followed the old man. He walked around to the back of my truck and motioned at the tailgate. I opened the tailgate and sat down on it. He sat next to me, and this let us sit together without being forced to look at one another. I liked that arrangement.

  “Best thing about driving a truck, Little Cat,” he said. “You carry your car, and a table, and a seat with you all in one.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I said, my voice suddenly that of a seven-year-old girl again.

  “Why not? It’s what I’ve called you for years.”

  “No,” I corrected. “It’s what you used to call me. You ain’t called me nothing in years.”

  “Well,” he said, looking at the laces on his boots. He was dressed like I always used to see him, in a checked flannel shirt, blue jean overalls, and brown work boots. Most ghosts present wearing what they died in, but some wear what they’re most comfortable in. Sometimes they’ll get a look at their funeral, and all of a sudden it will switch to what they were buried in. Dickey Newton showed up one day wearing nothing at all, dead as a doornail and naked as the day he was born. I sent Dickey away and told him not to show his face, or any other part of himself, around me until he learned to manifest himself at least a pair of britches.