A Visitation of Angels

by Carolyn Haines

  Not twenty feet away is a well. The bricks that form the well are handmade, probably from slave labor. A bucket hangs at the top.

  I step out of the shadows of the barn and she sees me. She looks up for a moment and then continues her play. She is not upset that I am there. I continue toward her. When I use the edge of my work boot to scruff away the wall of her playhouse, she stands up. Fear sparks in her eyes. She sees something in my face, in my stare, that scares her. She sees her fate coming.

  “You better go away. My mama won’t like you here.”

  I step into the pretend house she has drawn. Anger and stark fear show in her eyes.

  “You’d better leave. My mama will shoot you.”

  I look toward the back porch of the house. There is no one there. No one to witness my actions. I grab the child by her shoulders, my fingers digging into her thin flesh. When she tries to fight me, I hit her. Hard. There is a snap and she slumps. She is not heavy as I carry her to the well. I drop her in, waiting for the splash before I leave.

  Chapter 16

  I woke up gasping for air, unsure where I was. The baby curled against my body, a little webbed hand pressed against my temple as we both slept. I forced myself to breathe, to calm a little before I rose. The dream was not a dream. While my body had slept, my spirit had lived a journey. I no longer doubted Elizabeth Maslow’s version of the murder of Ruth Whelan. She spoke what was true and accurate. The horror of what she’d described was exactly as a woman had died. I knew this, because I, too, had witnessed a terrible murder.

  Conversation drifted to me from the kitchen. Elizabeth’s and Michael’s voices rose and fell in a friendly manner. Michael was telling her about the accident that could have killed both of us, about the man in a green hood, about the danger that surrounded Reginald, Elizabeth, Callie, and myself. He didn’t say it, but I knew that now Michael had been tainted by association with us. His focus was on others, though, and he urged Elizabeth to leave Mission for the baby’s sake.

  “There is nothing you can do for Slater McEachern,” he said. “The man sealed his fate when he went up against Lucais. He knew that and he did it anyway.”

  “He was trying to protect Ruth.”

  “And no one could do that. And now you can’t protect McEachern. Cut your losses and get out of town. I won’t be far behind you, but you have to get the private investigators away. They’re in danger.”

  I eased out of bed, careful not to wake Callie. Not likely—she was sleeping soundly and at peace. When I stepped into the kitchen, Elizabeth and Michael stopped talking. Elizabeth studied me.

  “You had a dream, didn’t you?”

  She knew. “Yes.”

  “Did you see Ruth’s murder?”

  I shook my head. “No. I saw how Hildy was murdered.” The full horror of it was still with me and I know it was evident on my face.

  She sighed heavily. “I’m sorry. That must have been awful.”

  I nodded but didn’t speak.

  “Did you see who did it?” Michael asked. It was odd that he didn’t question the validity of my dream.

  “In the dream it was me.” My voice broke and I turned away for a few seconds before I found my control again. Elizabeth came to me and eased me into a chair at the table beside Michael. She stroked my hair, a gesture that gave comfort.

  I looked at the kitchen clock and felt another shock. Only ten minutes had passed since I went into the bedroom to lie down. In a span of ten minutes I’d witnessed a murder and had a visitation by an angel. Time in the netherworld was elastic. I knew this from dealing with spirits, many who lived the day they died over and over for decades, if not centuries. They never aged or moved forward in time, stuck between the worlds of the living and the dead.

  “Are you saying that you killed Hildy Morse?” Michael started to rise but Elizabeth signaled him to remain seated.

  “No, that isn’t what she’s saying.” She turned to me. “Tell us the dream.”

  Talking about the horror of what I’d seen made me relive it, but I told them, step by step. “I heard her body hit the water at the bottom of the well.” I swallowed. “I hope she was dead before that.”

  “You hit her?” Michael picked up my right hand, examining the knuckles that could have been bruised and swollen in the car crash—or if I’d struck a young girl hard enough to break her neck.

  “Raissa didn’t hit anyone,” Elizabeth told him. Michael was struggling to catch up with the truth that Elizabeth and I knew.

  “Someone hit Hildy. A man. I merely relived it in the dream.”

  “Who? What man?”

  I held out my hands, remembering the coarse, dark hairs on the knuckles of the person who grasped Hildy’s thin shoulders and then punched her hard enough to knock her unconscious and possibly snap her neck. “He had dark hair. The killer had dark hair. His knuckles…”

  “Almost everyone here does,” Michael said. “Can you tell us more details?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Michael may not be on our side, but he isn’t on theirs, either. He’s marked by association.”

  She’d accepted Michael and was willing to share information with him. I began with what I had witnessed and what I had deduced. “Hildy knew him. She wasn’t afraid of him at first, but when he deliberately scuffed away the outline of her pretend house…she was afraid then.” She’d seen something in his eyes, some warning of what was to come, but she’d reacted too slowly. “It was almost as if she recognized him, but then realized he was someone else entirely.”

  Michael frowned. “Are you saying the killer possesses the bodies of people and forces them to kill?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying. Only that Hildy knew him and wasn’t concerned, until she saw something in his eyes. Something that frightened her.”

  “But she didn’t run,” Michael pointed out. “Or scream.”

  I remembered the paralysis of my dream, the inability to move my limbs. “Sometimes the body doesn’t obey.”

  “Do you remember any more details about his appearance?” Elizabeth asked.

  “He had a kind of big belt buckle. He wasn’t wearing the suspenders so many men here wear.”

  “Shoes?” Michael asked.

  “Work boots. But newer. Nicer than most.”

  “Shirt?”

  I tried hard to pull up the memory of a shirt and finally got the sleeves and the tail hanging loose. “White. Starched. But he dresses slovenly.”

  “I know this man,” Elizabeth said quietly. “It’s the same man who killed Ruth.”

  “How do you know?” Michael asked.

  Elizabeth and I shared a look before she answered. “I saw Ruth’s murder in exactly the same way—as if I were the killer. And I know the killer is not Slater McEachern. That’s why I can’t leave town. Now Raissa has seen Hildy’s murder. We have to find this man and see that the murderer is punished and an innocent man is set free.”

  “You’re never going to get McEachern out of this.” Michael was suddenly angry, and I recognized that his anger was coming from fear. Fear for all of us. “No one is going to believe this foolishness, that you dreamed the murder. You need to accept that and save the people you can.”

  “Do you know who killed them?” Elizabeth inhaled sharply and glared at Michael. “Do you?”

  Something sparked between them. “I don’t know, but I suspect. I think maybe you do too.”

  “But why would Lucais kill Ruth? She made a living breaking the law, providing those men what they wanted, but she was discreet. She gave Lucais his kickback, and she never challenged him. She never talked. She hardly went to town. More often than not I’d get her supplies. She stayed clear of town and gossip.” Michael stood and paced the kitchen, his shoes echoing on the wide-plank floor.

  “Don’t wake Callie,” I told him.

  He stopped pacing and leaned against the sink, his gaze out the window.

  He seemed lost in thought.

  As worried as I was for Sla
ter McEachern, I had other concerns. My partner hadn’t returned, and Reginald was as vulnerable as the rest of us. “Elizabeth, where did Reginald go?”

  “He didn’t say.” She tried to hide her worry, but I saw it. “He said he wouldn’t be gone long, but he’s been gone for a while.”

  “He said he wouldn’t be far from me having dinner with Michael.” I remembered that with a surge of fear. Had he been following me and Michael? Had the men in green hoods stopped him as well? Was he lying on the roadside injured? Dead? Was he in jail?

  “I—”

  Michael abruptly turned away from the window he’d been gazing out of and faced us. “Someone is out there.” He jerked a thumb toward the window. “It’s one, maybe two men. They’re moving around the property.”

  The gut-punch of fear made me sit up straighter. “Who?”

  He shook his head. “Too dark to see anyone’s features, but I saw someone going inside the barn. It’s likely the watchers. They know you’re here, Raissa. They know I’m here.”

  “The horse!” I pushed back from the table. Cruel people often picked on helpless animals to inflict torment.

  “Mariah won’t let anyone catch her,” Elizabeth assured me. “She’s smart like that. She’ll be out in the back field. They won’t bother her. I see those creepy men around here a lot. They watch, but they’ve never taken any action.”

  “What if Reginald drives up?” If they were out there, waiting, they could shoot him when he arrived. I cast about for a reason for his absence. “He said he would be close to me, but maybe he changed his mind.” I grasped at any reasonable excuse. “Even if he drove to Victoria for gasoline, he should be back by now.”

  “I can go and look for him.” Michael needed a job, something useful. But taking off into the night in a car that might or might not run was foolish.

  “Stay here, please.” I had another thought. I’d seen Hildy murdered. Her neck snapped. What had the local coroner said about her cause of death? “Do you know if the ruling on Hildy’s death has been given?”

  “It will be accidental,” Michael said. “They’ll claim she fell into the well while she was playing.”

  “She was never a foolish child,” Elizabeth said firmly. “She wouldn’t play on the edge of a well.”

  “Maybe not, but that will be the official verdict. As soon as Lucais can get the word out that her death was accidental, he’ll pick up McEachern’s trial again. You two have to believe that no one in Mission is going to believe there is a killer loose, especially a child killer. They don’t want to believe that. It makes them feel unsafe. The town is going to willingly believe that Slater killed Ruth and that Hildy fell into a well while she was playing in the yard.”

  That would make Hildy’s mother’s life a living hell of guilt and blame, but that was clearly not a concern. A plan was forming. A dangerous one, but perhaps a necessary one. “Is there a coroner in Victoria?”

  Michael caught on quickly. “There is, but that doesn’t do us any good. They’ll bury Hildy day after tomorrow. No one will question the Mission coroner’s ruling. Children die of accidents every day in Alabama.”

  “Does Lucais control him, the Victoria coroner?”

  “I don’t know,” Michael said. “A body hasn’t been autopsied since I came to live here. Ed Cleverdon rules on cause of death in this county. He’s not a doctor, but for most people who die, it’s pretty simple. Logging accident, mining collapse, heart goes out…”

  “So there really is no way to prove if anyone else was murdered. If it vaguely resembled an accident, there’s no further investigation.” I tried to swallow my frustration, to think logically and not emotional.

  “You’re right, Michael.” Elizabeth put the kettle on for more coffee. “Ed’s a pleasant enough guy, but he has no medical training. He finds what Lucais wants him to find.”

  The minutes were ticking away and there was still no sign of Reginald. I was desperate for something to do, something I could control. “We need Hildy’s body.” Neither Michael nor Elizabeth disagreed. “If her neck is broken, as I suspect, that will show she was murdered. At least it supports what I saw in the dream.”

  “She could have broken her neck in the fall,” Elizabeth said. “That won’t work.”

  I wasn’t an expert on autopsies, but I’d read a lot of murder stories and studied the procedures of an autopsy for my first case. “We can put forth the theory she was murdered. It will at least be grounds to continue to delay McEachern’s trial until we can provide a real coroner’s report on Hildy’s death. “It’s the only thing we have right now. So we need a real, medical autopsy on Hildy.”

  Michael leaned forward. “But we don’t have Hildy’s body. Mrs. Morse isn’t likely to just give us her child’s body so some doctor in Victoria can cut her up to look inside.”

  His words made me cringe. The idea of Hildy cut up like an experiment was hard for me to take, but an innocent man’s life was on the line and a child killer was walking free. “That’s why we have to steal it.”

  “Oh, no!” Elizabeth grabbed my arm. “You are not going to try to steal a body!”

  “Oh, but I am,” I said. “We are. If we can get Hildy to Victoria, maybe an autopsy will prove a killer is still on the loose here. It could save Slater, or at least give us time to come up with something to save him.”

  Michael drummed the top of the table with his fingertips. “She’s right, Elizabeth. We don’t have anything else and if they bury Hildy, we’ll never get permission to dig her up.”

  “This is too dangerous.” Elizabeth put her hands on the back of a chair. “You can’t attempt this. If you get caught…My God, Michael, you know what will happen. Stealing a body! They’ll catch you before you get on the outskirts of town. They won’t wait for a trial. They’ll string you and Raissa up right away. You won’t help Slater McEachern one bit, and you’ll be dead.”

  The cold truth of what Elizabeth said couldn’t be ignored. Neither could the fate of Slater McEachern. “What else can we do? We can’t prove Lucais killed Ruth Whelan, though we all suspect him. We don’t have another suspect. Who else in town might want to harm her? We need a theory to investigate.”

  “Junior Albee was in town the day Ruth was killed, and the day Hildy was killed.” Michael spoke with some hesitation. “The young man isn’t right, but I never thought of him as a killer.”

  “Who’s Junior Albee?” I asked.

  “Deakle Albee’s son. Deakle is a big wig in Victoria. He carries a lot of weight,” Elizabeth answered. “Junior isn’t right. Something happened to him a year or so ago. It was a big secret, but it was some kind of sickness—maybe a fever? Anyway, he came out of it…damaged. I’ve always viewed him as harmless. He wouldn’t harm anyone, and especially not a child. Besides, he lives in Victoria, and no one would speak against him.”

  “Why would they protect Junior and not Slater?”

  Elizabeth answered immediately. “Deakle is one of them. He has money. And power, and he leaves Lucais alone to run Mission as he pleases. Deakle is more a ‘live and let live’ kind of man. Victoria is different. No one man has a strangle hold on the town like Lucais has on Mission. In Victoria, there are more people, more money, more churches, and different ways of thinking.”

  “You have to understand the history of Mission,” Michael added. “I spent some time figuring out how everything worked when I moved here. Lucais’s family—the Wilkins family—was one of the first families to settle. Lucais’s father owned the land the town is built on. He was a charismatic man who set up a church and those who bought—or were given—the property for their farms agreed to be a part of his church. Rankin Wilkins had a vision of a godly community where all who lived here had the same belief. He’d seen the conflicts that tore apart other churches or communities when doctrine was questioned. He made sure that those who settled in Mission were of the same mind as he was.”

  “I’m sure it sounded like a good deal for the men.” I couldn�
�t help my bitter tone. “Not so good for women and children, who are treated like property here. The men push their wives and daughters into virtual slavery. It works out well for the males.”

  “I’m not defending the situation, but that’s been the lot of women for a long time, and not just here in Mission.” Elizabeth spoke softly.

  Michael and Elizabeth were both right. It wasn’t even Lucais’s fault, not fully. The Constitution had been accepted one hundred and thirty-three years ago almost to the day, and women had just gotten the right to vote. Not every state had ratified the 19th Amendment. Alabama had not. This was a systemic problem with the entire culture, not just the settlement of Mission.

  “Tell us more about the Wilkins clan,” Elizabeth said, smoothing over the raw emotion. “The more we know, the better we can plan. Since you’ve talked with some of the men, you probably know more than us women are ever told.”

  Michael thought for a minute before he spoke “Lucais keeps his finger in everyone’s pie. If you own anything within the city limits of Mission, you’re obligated to Lucais one way or the other. There’s no such thing as a clear title, meaning a lot of people don’t really own the land they live on. The power to control the land comes down from Lucais’s father Rankin, who made sure the people here were financially obligated to him. Initially the plots of land were offered cheap. But there were strings attached. Lots of strings. And people didn’t want to fight Rankin or Lucais. They learned quickly that it was not in their self-interest to buck the Wilkins family.”

  “What does Lucais want?” If I could figure that out—and Reginald had been taken by the Mission men—perhaps I could bargain for him.

  “He wants control, and he intends to have it.”

  “That’s why he hates Slater McEachern.” I didn’t understand the details, but I knew I’d hit on the truth. “Slater McEachern challenges Lucais’s rule, doesn’t he?”