Edge of Dark Water (8 page)

Terry finished up with the wood and came over and sat by me on the porch steps. I could feel the heat off his body and I could smell his sweat.

“Well,” his mama said, still standing on the steps. “I’ll leave you two to visit. But don’t forget your other chores, Terry. You know how your daddy gets when they’re not done.”

“He’s not my real father,” Terry said.

“You don’t mean that,” she said.

“I do mean it.”

“Well, it’ll take a little time to adjust.”

“By the time I adjust, the world will be made anew,” Terry said.

“We won’t discuss it right now…Sue Ellen, it’s good to see you.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

She went in the house.

I said, “You hurt her feelings.”

“I know,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. It’s not her I don’t like. It’s that man she married and all his kids. The smartest one of them barely knows to get in out of the rain, and only does so with considerable encouragement.”

“I’m wanting to look at that map again,” I said. “I’m wanting to find that money.”

“You sure?”

“I am. Jinx might come, and she might not. But I want to go.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“I think I got in too big a hurry the other day,” Terry said.

“You don’t want to go now?”

“No. I want to go. But I think we should find the money, and then we have to dig up May Lynn and burn her, and I need to do some work on that barge so it can run cleaner down the river.”

“You know how to do that?”

“I know how to do a lot of things. My real daddy taught me things, and he taught me how to teach myself about things I don’t know. He taught me how to study, and my mama taught me the same.”

“How much studying you need?”

“For what we have in mind, little to none. But I need time. Burning a body takes more time and work than you might think. You need a real serious fire, and we have to have it someplace where we won’t be seen. I have an idea for that, but I’d rather not discuss it until I’ve had time to consider on it awhile. Thing we should do first is determine if the map is real, and if it is, we have to find out if there’s any money buried out there.”

“Then we steal it.”

“You’re reconciled with that idea now?” he said.

“If ‘reconciled’ means I’m fine with that idea, I am.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Terry said.

T
erry got the map from a hiding place in the house, put on a shirt, and then we took a walk down the street. There was a graveyard nearby, and we went there. It was a private place to talk. We sat where we often sat, on a metal bench under a spreading oak tree in view of the Confederate dead; rows and rows of sun-shiny stones that held down old rebels who had been shot or died later of wounds, or old age, or disappointment.

We unfolded the map and stretched it out between us and looked it over.

“What I can’t figure,” Terry said, “is what these humps are. Everything else on the map seems accurate, but I can’t make them out, and then there’s the name written here, Malcolm Cuzins.”

I nodded, said, “I figure we can go back there and look things over more carefully and see what we can come up with. Maybe if we look again, something will jump out that fits this. I thought it might mean hills, but after we got to where we was going, there wasn’t any hills. There’s nothing out there but a few trees and—”

And then it hit me.

I looked at Terry. “We are the dumbest people that ever walked on a spinning earth.”

“How do you mean?” he said.

“Look out there,” I said, waving my hand toward the graves.

He looked.

“Okay. A bunch of dead people with rocks on their heads.”

“That’s it, the stones,” I said. “We been overthinking things.”

“You mean that old graveyard up in the pines?”

“Well, I don’t mean this one. Sure. Those humps on the map could be gravestones.”

“But the tombstones there have mostly been removed by vandals,” he said. “Or broken up.”

“Yeah, but that don’t mean these humps don’t mean a graveyard. That would be a way the map drawer could remember things. A graveyard is supposed to have gravestones, even if it don’t. There might even be a stone or two left up there we ain’t seen, and one of them might have the name Malcolm written on it. The money might be there.”

“You know, Sue Ellen, you may be correct. We should check it out. We might get lucky.”

“I figure luck is either a plan or an accident,” I said. “What we have is a plan.”

We went over to see Jinx and helped her finish up her chores. She got us some boiled eggs and wrapped them in a black-and-white checkered cloth and put them in a syrup bucket. We borrowed one of her daddy’s shovels and she told her mama we was going digging for fishing worms, and the three of us lit out. We used the leaky boat again and paddled across the river, not too far down from May Lynn’s house.

Following the map the way we had gone before, we got to where the graveyard was, stopped, and took a breather. Underneath the trees there were shadows, and the shadows lay where the graveyard was said to be. It was supposed to be haunted by the ghosts of those buried there. Some said it was a graveyard full of slaves, others said it was the graveyard of a family long forgotten. Some claimed Christian Cherokees had been buried there.

It was cooler in the shadows and the trees dripping cool water from the rain of last night made it even cooler. There were no gravestones visible, but there were slumps in the ground where aged graves might have been. There were no fresh diggings, however, and after poking around with the shovel, we finally wore out looking, stopped, and sat down on the ground under the pines. Jinx pulled the eggs in the cloth from the bucket, and we took one apiece and started peeling. We ate and thought and listened to birds.

The boiled egg was good but dry, and I was wishing for some water, when Terry said, “Look here.”

He pushed the rest of the egg into his mouth and stood up, talking around his chewing. “I’m sitting on an old gravestone.”

Me and Jinx got up and took a look. It was a rock that had a name carved on it, and some dates. It had fallen over, or maybe had been placed flat to begin with. The name on it wasn’t Malcolm Cuzins, but still, my heart beat faster.

We went back to looking around with a new fire in our bellies, and before long, Jinx said, “You gonna like this.”

Me and Terry went for a look-see, followed Jinx’s pointing finger. Near a crop of poison ivy there was a slight slope, and through a split in the pines above there was so much sunshine coming in it looked as if it was being poured from a bucket. What it was pouring on was a stone. It had fallen over but was supported by a mound of dirt. It was easy to miss and had near-blended into the pine needles on the forest bed. There was a name on the stone, and the sunlight made the name stand out.

It read:
MALCOLM CUZINS
.

“Ain’t that something?” Jinx said. “Here we was just looking and looking, and we sat down to have a boiled egg and we found it.”

“It’s God’s will,” Terry said.

“Or we found it because we had a map and was looking around,” Jinx said.

I grabbed up the shovel, knocked the poison ivy back, and started digging. I could tell pretty quick that the dirt had been moved and not too long ago. My first thought was May Lynn might have got to the money already, but then the shovel clicked on something; I dropped it, got down on my hands and knees. So did Jinx and Terry. We all started scraping the dirt back with our hands.

As we dug, the day slipped away, and I heard a whip-poor-will call from somewhere over the hill. We kept digging.

My fingers wrapped around something solid, and I called out. Terry and Jinx started helping me dig there, and in no time at all we came upon a large piece of crockery. It had a tight cover on it, and when we felt around the lid, we realized it had been sealed with wax.

We dug more, knocked away the dirt around it, and lifted it out. It was a small crockery pot, but heavy enough. Terry pulled out his pocketknife and trimmed around the waxed-on lid until the wax was loose enough we could get the lid off. There was a bag inside with a blue-and-white flower pattern on it. I pulled it out. I recognized it as a match to the pillowcases and curtains and May Lynn’s dress. It was pretty heavy. It was tied shut with a string. Before I could loose the string, Terry went at it with his pocketknife. We opened the bag and looked inside.

It was full of greenbacks, and even a bit of change. There was a daddy longlegs in there, too. He was dead and dried up, like a salesman’s heart.

“Oh, hellfires,” Jinx said.

“That’s a lot of money,” I said.

“I don’t mean that,” Jinx said. “Looky there.”

She was pointing at something in the grave. It was right under where the crockery had been. We had been so excited we hadn’t noticed. It was a row of teeth, and they was partly coated in clay.

“Well,” Terry said. “It is a graveyard. You are going to find bones.”

“Yeah, but look there,” Jinx said, and pointed again.

Down a ways was a hand. The hand still had some flesh on it, and there were worms digging into it.

“Them worms would have done chewed up anyone buried long ago,” Jinx said. “This fella may not be fresh as this morning’s milk, but he’s fairly new to the ground.”

“She’s right,” Terry said. He stood up, got the shovel, and started gently digging around the body. It took a long while, but in time it was uncovered. It was a man in a brown-and-white pin-stripe suit, lying slightly on his side with his knees pushed up toward his middle. The teeth we had seen was in a skull. A lot of him was missing, but he didn’t need any of it back.

The white stripes on his suit had turned the color of the red clay, and there wasn’t any shoes on the feet, just brown silk socks with blue clocks on them. There were still strips of flesh where the face had been, and on the skull was a brown narrow-brimmed hat. It was crushed up, but it was easy to see that, like the suit, it had been something that cost money and most likely went with a new cigar and gold watch chain.

Terry got down on his hands and knees and looked the body over. He said, “It still has an odor about it. You’re right, Jinx. He hasn’t been in the ground all that long.”

Terry opened the man’s clay-caked coat. When he did, way it stuck to the rotting body, it made a sound like something ripping. He reached inside the man’s coat pockets, but there wasn’t anything in them. He fumbled through the outside pockets and found some threads and a button. He pulled off the hat, and when he did the man’s skull crumbled somewhat. You could see that the back of his head had been crushed. Terry took the hat, which was dark in the back, and shook it into some kind of shape. He looked inside of it and let out his breath.

“It has his name stenciled on the inside band,” he said. “Warren Cain.”

He showed it to us. I let out my breath.

“Wasn’t that name in May Lynn’s book?” I said.

“That was the man her brother was running with,” Terry said. “The one who helped him rob the bank. Now we know what happened to their partnership.”

“And if that ain’t enough, they took his dadburn shoes,” Jinx said.

“Jake would be my guess,” Terry said. “It would make sense they came here to bury the money, and an argument ensued—”

“Ensued?” Jinx said.

“Started,” Terry said. “And when it did, it turned ugly, and Jake killed him, buried him, and put the money on top of him. My assumption is they had already dug the hole for the money, and Jake didn’t want to dig another. Probably caught him from behind with the shovel.”

“Maybe there wasn’t an argument, and he planned to kill him all along,” I said.

“Either way makes sense,” Terry said. “He killed him, hid the money on top of him, and took his shoes because he liked them. He’d have probably taken the hat and the suit, too, if he hadn’t covered them in blood by hitting Warren with that shovel.”

“That’s all tough on the dead man and all,” Jinx said, “but maybe we ought to count the money. Ain’t like he’s gonna get any deader.”

We counted it twice. There was close to a thousand dollars. When we put the money back in the bag, it was on the edge of night.

“It’s like we done dug up a pirate’s chest,” Jinx said.

“It is at that,” I said.

Jinx cleared her throat, said, “You know, that’s a lot of money even if we don’t burn May Lynn up.”

“We have to stick to the plan,” Terry said.

“Do we?” I said.

“We do,” Terry said. “She’s why we found the money.”

“We sure gonna use a lot of it going out to that California,” Jinx said. “We could use a lot of it someplace closer.”

“That sounds greedy,” Terry said. “If not for her we wouldn’t have known about the money, and when it comes right down to it, it’s not our money.”

“When it comes right down to it,” Jinx said, “it’s not her money, neither. Nor her brother’s. It come from a bank.”

“Do you think her daddy knows where it’s buried?” I asked.

Terry shook his head. “He did, he would have already dug it up and drank it up. He’s not exactly a salt-away-for-a-rainy-day sort of individual. Jake told May Lynn where it was when he was sick because he didn’t want anyone else to know. She obviously didn’t have time to dig it up and leave before things went wrong.”

“Think she knew about the murdered man?” I said, nodding at the hole.

“I don’t know,” Terry said. “I think when Jake realized he was dying he had her draw up the map and didn’t tell her his bank-robbing buddy was here under it. Listen, we want to get out of here, don’t we?”

Me and Jinx nodded.

“Here’s our chance,” Terry said. “And we ought to take May Lynn with us.”

“She’s pretty snug in the graveyard,” Jinx said.

Terry gave Jinx a hard look. “She’s our friend.”

“Was,” Jinx said.

“Should we forget her because she’s dead?” he said.

“I ain’t forgetting her,” Jinx said. “I remember her real good. But what I’m saying is she’s dead and there’s a lot of money in that bag and I don’t think she had plans to share it with us.”

“Does that matter?” Terry said.

“You got the bus tickets to get, the food for going out there, someplace to stay, and so on,” Jinx said. “It can run into some expense, and I’m not sure that’s how we want to spend the dough.”

“May Lynn didn’t want to end up buried in some hot plot of dirt in the pauper’s section of the local graveyard,” Terry said, “and I don’t think we should let her.”

I have to admit, thinking about digging her up and setting her on fire and going all the way out to Hollywood to dump her ashes seemed less appealing now that we had a huge bag of money. I was a little ashamed of myself for thinking that way, but there you have it.

“Well?” Terry said. “That’s not what we want. Is it?”

 “No, I reckon not.”

Jinx’s face twisted up, then slowly straightened out. “Okay,” she said, and the word struggled out of her mouth like a rat out of a tight hole. “Sure. Let’s burn her up and haul her out.”

“Good,” Terry said. “It’s decided.”