Tangled Roots (22 page)

I expected to see a glimmer of tears in her eyes but they remained tear-free. “I can’t even begin to imagine how hard her death must have been for you,” I said. I meant that sincerely. Mama had had a child that only lived a few minutes after it was born and even fifty years later, talking about the loss of that baby still brought tears to her eyes.

“Don’t you have any children, Ms. Clayton?”

“No, I don’t,” I said with an inward sigh of relief. I didn’t know when or even if I’d ever be ready for that responsibility. Even the thought of owning goldfish made me feel twitchy.

“Then you’re right. Unless you have a child you can never know the heartbreak of losing one.”

“Was it hard raising her all on your own?” I asked after draining my coffee cup and putting it on the table.

Melvina shrugged nonchalantly. “Even though her father and I never married, he supported Gina financially. Money was never a problem, but she was always asking about him. I never told her who he was. He’s married with a family of his own. He wasn’t interested in being a father to Gina. I didn’t want her getting her heart broken the way I did. But she did get to know him at church, just not as her father,” Melvina said, not quite able to hide the anger and bitterness in her voice. She got up from the table and took our empty coffee mugs over to the sink. I wondered what she meant about Gina having known her father but not as a father.

“How did Gina die? Was she sick?” I figured she wouldn’t mind me asking since she was being so open about her personal business, but I noticed her back stiffen before she turned to answer.

“Gina had a lot of allergies. She’d grown out of most of them by the time she was a teenager but she remained deathly allergic to bee stings. She had an EpiPen that she was supposed to have with her at all times. But she was a typical irresponsible teenager. I was always on her about making sure she had that EpiPen. We were at our church’s annual picnic and I remember seeing her laughing and talking to her friends. An hour later, I found her unconscious in our car. By the time the squad got her to the hospital it was too late. The thing that haunts me the most is that I found her EpiPen in my purse. I could have sworn I’d made her put it in her pocket before we left for the park,” she said. She was clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap. I wanted to hug her or squeeze her hand, but I knew she wouldn’t appreciate the gesture.

“Could she have put it in your purse?”

“That’s what Reverend Rollins seemed to think. He saw her playing basketball and thinks she probably put her EpiPen in my purse so she wouldn’t lose it.”

How convenient
, I thought. Rollins had been in the perfect position to not only kill Gina but to comfort her grieving mother and wash away any doubts Melvina may have had about what happened to her daughter.

“I only met Reverend Rollins recently. He’s quite a man, isn’t he?” Melvina’s head snapped up and she looked at me oddly.

“Yes, he is an amazing minister and an amazing man. We have quite a lot in common,” she said softly, looking down at her lap.

Indeed you do
, I thought. Was it possible Melvina still had feelings for Rollins even though he’d broken her heart and never wanted to be a father to their child? Something seemed odd about that to me in light of the bitterness in her voice just a few minutes ago. I also remembered the look on her face when she’d seen me sitting in his office. Was she still in love with him?

“Does anyone know why Gina was in the car?”

“She must have been changing out of her basketball shoes. I don’t know why else she would have been in the car. I found her slumped in the backseat and a spilled pop can was next to her on the floor. When they did the autopsy there was a dead bee inside her clothes. It must have stung her on the neck. Her throat had swelled shut and she suffocated.”

A grim mental image of a frantic girl unable to breathe, turning blue, and probably knowing she was going to die flashed before me. How had Rollins done it? I’d been to my share of picnics and knew how many bees were constantly buzzing around the trash cans and food tables. Did Rollins see Gina playing basketball and take her a can of pop with a bee trapped inside it and put it in the car with her as she was changing her shoes? Did he take her EpiPen from her as she struggled to inject herself and then put it in Melvina’s purse afterwards? I suddenly felt sick and didn’t know if it was from the thoughts popping into my head or from all that chili and pudding I’d consumed earlier. I needed some fresh air because something else was beginning to bother me.

“Are you okay?” Melvina asked.

“Yeah,” I said, slowly shaking my head to clear my thoughts. “But I’ve taken up enough of your time. I should go so you can get back to your writing.” I stood up and put my coat on.

“We haven’t even discussed your writing yet,” she said, following me to the door.

“Oh, that’s okay. Maybe when you have more time we can get together again.” I hurried through the living room past a sleeping Pookie, and paused at the door. In doing so, I noticed a green-and-gold Holy Cross choir robe hanging on a coatrack by the door.

“Oh, you sing in the church choir?” I asked Melvina.

“No. That was Gina’s choir robe. I should have given it back to the church, but I just haven’t been able to,” she said, fingering the folds of the robe.

“Well, thank you for your time, Ms. Carmichael,” I said before walking out the door.

I was halfway to the bus stop when I heard Melvina calling after me about forgetting my signed book.

As the bus headed back downtown, I had a chance to think about what had been bothering me. I was getting some very conflicting views of Morris Rollins. When Melvina described Gina’s father, she’d clearly been bitter, but when she talked about Reverend Rollins her whole attitude changed and I saw love and admiration in her eyes. I also thought about my visit to Joseph’s aunt, Pearl Strong. When she talked about Joseph’s father it had been with scorn and anger, but when she mentioned Rollins as someone who could have given wrong information about Joseph going swimming, she didn’t believe it. Why was I getting so much conflicting information? It was as if Pearl and Melvina had been talking about two different men. So, if Morris Rollins wasn’t Joseph and Gina’s father, who was? And why in the world would Rollins be listed on the death certificates of children that he hadn’t fathered?

I found myself back at the library, more confused than ever. I grabbed some scrap paper and wrote down everything that I knew so far about the deaths of Joseph Porter and Gina Parks: Both had died during Holy Cross Church picnics; both deaths had been ruled accidents; both Joseph and Gina had known their fathers, though Melvina claimed that Gina didn’t know he was her father. Gina and Joseph’s father was a member of Holy Cross Church, yet Morris Rollins was the only man’s name that had been mentioned during both my conversations about Joseph and Gina’s deaths. Rollins had been present during both deaths, had profited monetarily from the deaths, and he had been trying to cash an insurance policy on Inez, as well.

I wondered if Rollins had been in Detroit when Ricky Maynard was killed. How could I find out? Deciding to take advantage of the vast information resources around me, I headed over to the periodicals desk again. The same bored-looking, mullet-wearing librarian from earlier was manning the desk.

“You’re back. What can I help you with this time?” he said, smiling.

“This time I need to know how I can find news stories on a specific person that have appeared in the
Willow News-Gazette
. Can you help me?”

“You happen to be in luck, young lady. Two years ago we undertook a major indexing project. We’ve indexed all the news stories that have appeared in the
News-Gazette
for the last ten years. So as long as what you’re looking for has occurred in the last ten years, you should be able to find out what issue and date it appeared in the
News-Gazette
.”

“Wonderful. I need articles from about two years ago.”

He led me over to a set of alphabetized drawers where I got to work looking for articles on Morris Rollins. I had very little luck finding out news on Rollins specifically, but I was able to find a multitude of articles on Holy Cross, even one about major damage to the church’s roof from a fallen tree during a storm. Finally an article that had appeared in the
News-Gazette
a year and a half ago caught my eye: HOLY CROSS CHURCH INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN INTERFAITH CHURCH CONFERENCE. I jotted down the date of the article, then got the microfilm from the periodicals desk so I could read it. It wasn’t much of an article, more like an announcement:

There was a small picture of a group of Holy Cross Church members, including Morris and Nicole Rollins, Rondell and Bonita Kidd, and several other people I didn’t recognize, that accompanied the article. The article didn’t mention exactly when the church convention was being held but it still put Rollins in Detroit the same month that Ricky had been run down. I glanced at the picture and was again struck by how different Rollins and Rondell were physically. The only thing that they had in common was their height. Then something else clicked in my mind. Melvina had mentioned that Gina had gotten her basketball prowess from her father, who’d played basketball for Springmont High. I’d assumed she meant Morris Rollins, but now I wasn’t so sure. I knew one way to find out.

I headed over to the reference department where I knew they kept copies of all the Springmont High School yearbooks back to the thirties. I didn’t know exactly how old Morris Rollins was — somewhere in his early fifties, perhaps — so I grabbed several years’ worth of yearbooks and headed to an empty table. I started with 1960. My eyes had started to cross and I was getting a headache from looking at so many bouffant hairdos and cat’s-eyed glasses when I finally found a picture of Morris Rollins. It was in the 1962 yearbook. Rollins had been skinny, geeky, and almost unrecognizable with thick horn-rimmed glasses and a side part in his short hair. I searched throughout the yearbook and didn’t find a picture of him anywhere other than with his graduating class.

But I found other pictures that sent chills up and down my spine. While it appeared that Morris Rollins hadn’t been anything special during his high school years, his half brother Rondell was a different story. Rondell Kidd had been a member of the honor society, choir, and was a standout on both the football and basketball teams. He’d also been prom and homecoming king. Unlike the overweight, poorly dressed man he’d become, his high school pictures showed that Rondell had been handsome. And while the pictures still showed him to have been a somewhat large young man, he’d been solid, without an inch of the flab that now encircled his waist, and his clothes had fit properly.

I knew plenty of men like Rondell from my own high school days. Popular, handsome guys who’d never been able to translate their high school popularity into the real world. Guys who still tried to wear the same size clothes they wore in their glory days and never changed their hairstyles. In light of how popular he used to be, playing second fiddle to his older brother Morris must be torture for Rondell. I thought back to what Pearl and Melvina had said about Joseph and Gina’s father: He had a family of his own that included a daughter and an uppity wife. The uppity wife part sure sounded like Bonita Kidd, but I hadn’t heard anything about what Rollins’s late wife Jeanne had been like. She could have been uppity, too. Rondell Kidd was a devoutly religious man who worshipped his wife and didn’t seem like the type of man to cheat, let alone father illegitimate children. Plus, cheating on your spouse and fathering children with other women didn’t make a man a murderer, just sleazy. And if Rondell had killed Ricky, Gina, and Joseph, what was the motive?

As far as I could tell, Rondell didn’t seem to be showing any signs of living the high life. He and Bonita wore outdated, well-worn clothes. Their cars looked to be well taken care of but were older models. They had a nice, but hardly extravagant house. Shanda went to an expensive college yet she lived at home, saving the Kidds the expense of dorm fees. So, if the motive had been money, where was it going? As far as I could tell, the only one living in the lap of luxury was Morris Rollins. The only one who’d benefited from the deaths of Ricky, Joseph, and Gina was Morris Rollins. So why the conflicting views? There were too many questions swirling around my tired brain.

I leaned forward and rested my head on the table I was sitting at and closed my eyes. I told myself it would only be for a few minutes, but soon I found myself sliding into a fitful sleep, only to jerk awake as new even-more-sinister thoughts hit me: Did Rollins kill Nicole because he mistook her for Inez? Was that the reason Inez had screamed, “Daddy, don’t”? Was he hiding his daughter until he had a chance to kill her for real? It was time to get Inez out of that house and to the police before she suffered an accident like her half siblings. I called Detectives Harmon and Mercer but was told they were busy and couldn’t be disturbed. I left a message for them to meet me at Rollins’s house, then gathered up my stuff and headed out to catch the bus to Briar Creek.

I waited, skulking around at the entrance to Rollins’s driveway for a half an hour before I got tired of waiting and headed up to the house. I should have waited for the detectives, but all I could imagine was a doped-up Inez being smothered with a pillow by her father. There were no cars in the driveway but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one parked in the four-car garage behind the house. I didn’t dare knock on the front door because I knew that that bulldog of a nurse was probably watching Inez like a hawk. I walked around to the back of the house. There was a swimming pool taking up most of the backyard, and a stone deck with two levels that ran the length of the house. I peered into the house through the French doors off the patio straight into the family room. The nurse was sitting on the couch watching TV. I ducked down behind a large terra-cotta planter by the steps and waited. Finally, I saw the nurse get up and head to the refrigerator. I ran all the way up to the top level of the deck. There was indoor/outdoor furniture and a hot tub on the upper level, as well as another set of French double doors. I looked inside and saw that it was a large bedroom, probably the master suite. I turned the handle on the door. It was locked — surprise, surprise.