Amazing Grace--A Southern Gothic Paranormal Mystery

by John G. Hartness

  “You got another one of those?”

  “Smurfette glass? No, I just got the one set. I got Papa Smurf, Smurfette, Brainy Smurf, and Gargamel and that cat of his.”

  “Azrael,” he said. “But I meant a coaster.”

  “Oh!” I grabbed him a coaster and sat down behind the stack of folders. “Where should we start?”

  “Let’s look at your suspect list compared to mine and see who I have an alibi for already,” he said. He leaned over and picked up a slim black briefcase I never even noticed him set down on the floor. An iPad and a portable keyboard appeared, and he looked up at me.

  “Aren’t we Mr. Technology?” I teased.

  “I’m old, Lila Grace, but I ain’t dumb. This thing is the best thing that’s happened to law enforcement since the bulletproof vest. Camera, communication device, and all my case files right in one place. I don’t know how I caught any bad guys without it.”

  “Might have involved more running, old man,” I said with a grin and a poke to his belly.

  “Hey!” he protested. “I’m a sheriff now, I don’t have to run. I have people for that.”

  “You have Jeff for that,” I corrected. “I’ve seen Jeff run. It looks like a cross between a very slow ostrich and a demented hippopotamus. That boy is a lot of things, but coordinated and athletic are not any of them.”

  He laughed and nodded. “Jeff is an invaluable asset to the department, but he ain’t gonna win any forty-yard dashes, that’s for sure. Now, who do you have on your list that still looks good to you?”

  “Well, there are the girls that didn’t make the cheerleading squad, but double homicide seems a bridge too far even for a heartbroken teenage girl, and I’ve seen some things in that regard.”

  Willis looked like he was about to say something, but shook his head like he was changing the topic and said, “We talked to all the girls who tried out the past two years and didn’t make the squad. All but one of them had an alibi, and she was so tore up I can’t imagine it was her. Turns out Jenny was actually working with her some weekends to get better so she could audition again next year.”

  “That definitely doesn’t sound like anybody with enough of an axe to grind to murder someone,” I said. “What about the kids from the church beach trip last year? Reverend Turner seems to think there may have been some alcohol involved, and possibly even…” I lowered my voice. “Sex.”

  The sheriff grinned but shook his head. “There were only half a dozen people on the trip in addition to Jenny and Shelly, and three of them were girls we’d already cleared. The three boys all have solid alibis. Turns out in a town this size, it’s pretty easy to account for most everybody’s whereabouts on a Friday night after a home football game.”

  “Most of the underage population is either in the parking lot of McDonald’s, the parking lot of the high school, or over at the dam parking,” I said.

  “Some of them have started going out to the landfill now,” he added.

  “That’s a new one on me, making out at the trash dump.”

  “The older section of the landfill is pretty nice. They’ve put down sod and landscaped it. I think the county is talking about building a golf course out there once they get one or two more sections filled up,” Willis said.

  “I think I’ll stick to making out in the comfort of my own home, thank you.”

  “Is that an invitation, Ms. Carter?” he asked. “Because I have to remind you, I’m still on duty.”

  I smiled at him, enjoying the flirting. “Why, Sheriff, I thought you were on your lunch break.” I batted my eyes at him, then laughed out loud at the flush that crept up his cheeks.

  “Lila Grace, you might be the single most infuriating woman I have ever met, and I was married. Twice!” he spluttered, laughing a little.

  “Twice, huh,” I said.

  “Yep,” he said. “Three times, if you count being married to The Job, which both of my wives accused me of on more than one occasion.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He sighed, then looked at me for a second, like he was making up his mind. “Well, I reckon we oughta go ahead and get this all out in the open. The first time I got married, I was twenty-two years old, full of piss and vinegar, and raring to arrest every bad guy in the world. Gina, that was my wife’s name, was a great gal, good-looking, good cook, good job as a CPA for some high-rise accounting firm downtown.”

  “What happened?” I repeated.

  He gave me one of those “I’m getting to that” looks that men get when you’re trying to get them to talk about something they don’t want to talk about, usually their feelings on something deeper than football.

  “She got pregnant and wanted me to leave the force. Said she couldn’t see herself raising a kid not knowing if I was going to walk through the door at the end of my shift or not. I didn’t want to quit, but she was dead set on it, so I filled out the paperwork. I was going to work security in the building where she worked, getting fat and watching security cameras.”

  “But that didn’t happen,” I said.

  “No, that didn’t happen. She lost the baby, and there were complications from the miscarriage that made her unable to get pregnant again. I stayed home with her for a week, then she practically pushed me out the front door to go back to work.” He looked at me with a sheepish grin. “I’m not real good at sitting still now, and this was thirty years ago. You can imagine what I was like then.”

  “I’d rather not,” I said with a smile so he knew I was just teasing.

  “So I went back to work, and after another week or so, she went back to work, and we settled back into our everyday lives. Then one day I come home and she’s standing in the kitchen with my paperwork to leave the force in her hand. She starts screaming at me about why I haven’t put in my notice yet, and how I don’t care about her if I’m going to keep putting my life in danger, and all this stuff about how me being a cop is selfish, and I’m just standing there with my mouth hanging open like a trout laying on a dock.”

  He took a deep breath, then dove back in. “When she lost the baby, all the thoughts of leaving police work went out of my head. To me, that was the only reason I was quitting, and now that we weren’t going to have a kid, I figured I’d just be a cop the rest of my life. But to her, me leaving the force was more about her feelings and a lot less about the kid thing.”

  “I see both sides,” I said, not wanting to step on his fragile ego and tell him that he was an idiot. He probably already had that much figured out.

  “Yeah, and I was a kid, too. I’d see things a lot differently now, but back then, I could barely see past the end of my own nose. So we had a huge fight, and she threw me out. Told me I had to choose being a cop or being married, that I couldn’t be both. And, being stupid, and stubborn, and twenty-six, I became another statistic about cop marriages.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But at least you had her for a little while.” I didn’t mean to throw that out there. Didn’t mean to make it about me, but the look of pity that flashed across his face for just a second told me that’s exactly what I’d done.

  “Yeah, I had a couple of good years with her, and a few really bad months, but all in all, it turned out for the best in the end. She married a guy who moved up to become the CFO of that company she worked for, and she quit working at thirty-five to take care of three adopted kids and do charity work. We haven’t spoken in years, but I get a Christmas card every year.”

  “That’s nice,” I said. “At least it ended up good. What about your second wife?”

  His face darkened, and I knew that we’d crossed into a topic he wasn’t very comfortable with. “That’s a much uglier story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  His words were telling me to say no, but his eyes told the story of a man who really needed to talk. I leaned forward, put my hand over his, and said, “Talk to me, Willis.”

  Chapter 23

  He smiled across at me, his brown eyes squint
ing a little. It was a slow smile that started at his eyes and flowed down like molasses, but never grew very big. “It’s not a huge tragedy, Lila Grace, don’t worry. I’m not so noble as to have sat by her bedside for a year while she slowly withered from cancer or anything like that. No, it’s a boring story with a few exciting moments, but there’s unfortunately nothing unusual or even uncommon about it.”

  I didn’t speak, just held on to his hand and kept looking at his face.

  “Okay, fine,” he said after the pause grew to uncomfortable lengths. “Nancy and I were both married before, and both divorced when we met. It was one of those rare things—we met as adults not in a bar, not as a hookup from friends, and not in a church.”

  “Where did you meet, then?” I asked. He’d hit the top three places I knew of that grown-ups met, so I was genuinely curious.

  “Waiting in the lobby of an oil change place. I was getting my cruiser worked on, and she was getting the brakes checked before a road trip. I needed new windshield wipers, and she turned out to need new brake pads, so we started talking. I ended up sticking around an extra hour after my car was done, just to talk to her.”

  “That’s sweet,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, she was easy to talk to, and easy on the eyes. I reckon back then I probably wasn’t too bad to look at myself. I was a good forty pounds lighter, with a little more hair on top, and a lot less hair in my ears.”

  “You’re not doing too bad for an old man, Willis,” I told him, patting his hand.

  “Flattery will get you pretty much anywhere you want to go, pretty lady,” he replied, and I felt the blush creep up my chest to my neck. I looked away from his eyes for a second, and he resumed his story. “So we went out a few times, and after a little while, we decided that we liked each other more than casually. She wasn’t crazy about the idea of marrying a cop, but I’d made detective by then, so I wasn’t walking a beat anymore. At least I worked hard to convince her that was safer, anyway.”

  “We dated for about a year before we got married, and were married for a good eight years.” He chuckled. “I usually tell people I was married for six good years, and two lousy ones, but that’s not fair to Nancy. She was great to me, right up until the time it all fell apart. I wasn’t as great to her, though.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Same thing that happened with Gina. Same thing that happens to most cops, I guess. At least from talk around the stations, anyway. I got promoted to homicide, started spending more and more time out at night, at crime scenes and dealing with informants, suspects, and other unsavory types. It made me a darker man, and I was never exactly the life of the party. After a while, I wasn’t the man she married anymore, so…”

  “So…what?” I asked. “You’ve got to remember, I’m the old spinster. I’ve never been married, to a cop or to anyone else, so I don’t know what ‘so…’ means.”

  “She cheated,” he said bluntly. My eyes snapped up to his face, and I could tell by the set of his jaw and the flat gaze he directed at the table that it still hurt him to the core, even now. “She cheated, with a guy from her work. A middle manager named Rico, who was in good shape, used a lot of hair product, and paid her a lot of attention.”

  I eyeballed the buzzed gray stubble sticking out maybe a quarter-inch from his head. “I can see how you would lose out in the hair product department.”

  Willis laughed, a genuine laugh with just the lightest hint of self-deprecation behind it. “Yeah, I didn’t do a lot of that kind of stuff even back before I started going thin on top. Once I hit thirty-five, my hairline didn’t recede, it went into full retreat.”

  I chuckled, and said, “That’s funny, that’s about the time my boobs started moving south for the winter and never came back north.” We both laughed with the ease that only people who have grown into being comfortable with themselves can have.

  His smile faded away, and he said, “There’s more. Because when you have a man in his late thirties, who’s spent a life in law enforcement, and he finds out that his wife is unfaithful, you have one of three possible outcomes. Way too often, it ends up with the cop knocking his wife around. Well, the only redeeming quality I held onto in this mess is I never hit Nancy, or any other woman that wasn’t actively trying to kill me.”

  I filed that away for future investigation because I thought there was a little too much specificity in that sentence to not have an interesting story buried in there somewhere, but I kept my mouth shut. I just sat there, waiting for the rest of his moment of confession.

  “It’s pretty obvious from the fact that I’m sitting here that I didn’t swallow the barrel of my service weapon, although I’ll admit I thought about it more than once. This whole scene cost me years of therapy.”

  “So that means you did exercise Option Number Three?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he nodded.

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “I waited outside their work, followed them to a motel where they met up to have sex, and when they went into the room, I waited about fifteen minutes, then knocked on the door.”

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “Oh yeah. Rico came to the door, and I broke his nose with it. I shoved the door into his face, then shoved my way into the room. I beat the shit out of him with my wife naked and screaming the whole time. I broke his nose, three ribs, his collarbone, one arm, and three bones in my right hand. I went full crazy on his ass. I’m not anywhere close to proud of it, but it happened, and I’ve got to carry it with me.”

  “What happened after that?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the whole sordid story, but he seemed like he needed to get it all out, so I figured I’d better let him lance the whole thing, as it were.

  “I sat down in the one chair in the room—you know how those cheap motel rooms are set up, with a little crappy table by the window and one chair over there. Well, I sat down in that chair and just stared at Nancy. She was scared, and I couldn’t blame her. I figured she would be, that’s why I made it a point to leave my gun in the car.”

  “I sat there for a minute, then she called the cops. I didn’t go anywhere, but I did tell her she might want to think about putting some clothes on before they got there. She wore a sheet into the bathroom and came out about the same time the first patrol car got there. I was still sitting at the table, my badge out in front of me, both hands in plain sight. Rico had managed to sit up and had his back to the dresser, a towel over his junk, and another one pressed to his bleeding nose. He was spouting all kinds of crap about suing me and making sure I spent the rest of my life in jail, but it was all crap.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I’m a big dumb ox sometimes, Lila Grace, but I ain’t stupid. I knew going in there how everything was going to play out, and it went just about how I expected it to. I got busted back down to a patrolman, spent a month suspended without pay, and ended up giving Nancy pretty much anything she wanted in the divorce. She got the house, both cars, and all our savings. I got to keep five grand in our bank accounts, my clothes, and my bass boat. I had to borrow a truck from a friend to tow the boat out of our driveway so I could sell it for enough money to buy a beat-up Saturn.

  “But I didn’t serve any time. I knew the cops that came to arrest me. I went through the academy with one of them, and I’d met the other one a few times at union meetings. They didn’t hassle me much, and I didn’t give them any crap. The DA didn’t push too much, and Rico couldn’t get them to press anything more than assault charges. Intent wouldn’t stick because I left my gun in the car, so I obviously didn’t want to kill him. I paid a fine and did community service for that, and the whole thing was behind me. I haven’t seen Nancy since we met in the lawyer’s office to finalize our divorce. She sold the house and moved to Phoenix, and I decided that I’m pretty much not the marrying type.”

  “I don’t know that I think that’s very fair, Willis,” I said. “But if that demotion is one of the thin
gs that kept you from getting a job in a bigger city, I can’t say as how I don’t like it at least a little bit.”

  He smiled at me, a shy little thing that kinda danced around the corners of his mouth and eyes for a few seconds, then ran away when it saw me looking. “I ain’t proud of what I did, but I’d do it again. That little sumbitch needed an ass-whooping, and I reckon it was on me to deliver it.”

  “Is this where you go into some stupid diatribe about the man code?” I asked, taking a sip of my tea.

  “No, this ain’t got nothing to do with the man code,” he said. “This is just about being a decent human being. Marriage is supposed to be sacred, and it ain’t something to interfere with. I wasn’t the best husband to Nancy, I know that. But I didn’t deserve having that little snake come into my relationship with his good teeth and his hair gel and steal my woman away from me. It hurt my pride, probably more than it heart my heart. If I was to be honest about it, me and Nancy had been growing apart for a while, and it was almost something of a relief when we finally split up.”

  “But your pride demanded that you beat somebody up over it.” I heard the disapproval in my voice, but I didn’t mean it much. I grew up in a small town around men, and I knew them to be fragile creatures. The big idiots could cut a finger off with a chainsaw and keep going with it wrapped in duct tape, but God forbid you hurt their feelings.

  “Yeah, it did,” he sighed. “It ain’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, but it makes the top five, that’s for damn sure. Come to think of it, most of the rest of them involve a woman, too.”

  “Where does going out with a woman who talks to dead people rank?” I asked. My voice was softer than I wanted it to be, and the joking lilt I planned on being there was missing somehow.

  He reached across the table and took my hand in his. “Lila Grace, I know you ain’t crazy. I know you ain’t evil. I don’t know how it is that you see and hear the things you do, but I know them to be true things. So as far as I’m concerned, you ain’t a woman who talks to dead people, you’re just a woman. A woman I’m mighty interested in getting to know a lot better, and I don’t give a good goddamn who in this town thinks they’ve got something to say about that.”