Tangled Roots (6 page)

“Miss Clayton, this is my wife, Bonita. Bonita, Miss Clayton works with Shanda at Clark Literacy Center.” Rondell Kidd grinned at his wife and put a beefy arm around her shoulders, pulling her tightly to his side. He was looking at her like she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Bonita, however, gave her husband a pained look and extricated herself from his grasp. Shanda looked like she wished the earth would open up and swallow her.

“So, you’re the teacher from that center Shanda’s always going on about,” said Bonita Kidd. She looked me up and down and, by the dismissive look she gave me, I could tell that I’d been deemed unworthy to breathe her rarified air. I hated people like her.

“Yes. Shanda’s been a great help to us at the literacy center, Mrs. Kidd. I’m trying to persuade her to become a teacher. She’s a natural with the students.”

“You mean she actually interacts with those people?” she asked, looking at Shanda with a horrified expression. “I thought you told me all you did was grade papers.”

Shanda looked like she might cry, which was more emotion than she’d shown during her cousin’s funeral.

“It isn’t God’s plan for Shanda to teach, Miss Clayton. After she graduates, Shanda will be in charge of marketing for Holy Cross Ministries. Isn’t that right, baby?”

“Yes, Mommy,” Shanda said in a small voice.

I really wanted to tell Mommy where to go. But I knew I’d only be burning bridges if I did. I needed to stay on good terms with Shanda in order to get info on Vaughn. If ever there was a time to kill someone with kindness, it was now.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kidd, if there’s been any misunderstanding about Shanda’s duties. But our students at the center are there to better educate themselves and Shanda has been an excellent role model for them,” I said, with a big phony grin that made my face ache. Like I’ve said before, I’m not big on diplomacy.

Bonita Kidd looked at me like I was a lower life-form and declared, “The only thing that will help those people better themselves is if they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. By the way, Miss Clayton, what church do
you
belong to?” The three of them were staring at me.

I felt like a contestant on a game show who was about to blow my chance at a new washer and dryer. I haven’t attended church regularly since I left high school and I hated when people asked me about it. I knew what was coming next. Once I said I didn’t belong to any church they would make it their personal mission to bring me back into the fold. I decided to beat them to it.

“Ah, well, actually, I was seriously thinking about joining Holy Cross. Reverend Rollins personally invited me to come to a service and I plan to take him up on it.” It wasn’t exactly true but they didn’t know that.

At the mere mention of Rollins’s name, Bonita Kidd visibly relaxed. Her husband and daughter, noticing the change in her attitude, relaxed also. This woman must be a joy to live with.

“Well, if the Reverend invited you, then by all means you must come. I’ll look forward to seeing you at one of our services. Have a blessed day, Miss Clayton.” Bonita Kidd turned on her heel and walked away with Rondell and Shanda trailing behind her.

Since I’d been dismissed, I decided to go to the restroom before going home. I was sitting in a stall when I heard two people walk in.

“Poor Nicole. Did you see the way Reverend Rollins had to practically carry her in and out of the church? She must be just tore up over Inez,” said one woman in a nasal voice.

“She must be feelin’ real guilty right about now, don’t you think? I mean, she and Inez used to be best friends, even closer than sisters. They haven’t spoken a word to each other in three years,” said the other woman.

“Girl, who could blame Inez? I wouldn’t be talking to my best friend either if she married my daddy six months after my mama died. And you know what people were saying, don’t you?” asked Nasal Voice.

“Yeah, that Nicole was carrying on with the Reverend while Jeanne was dying. Well, I don’t believe it and you should be ashamed to even think it. That poor man has been through enough without having people talking about him behind his back.”

“I didn’t say I believed it,” said Nasal Voice, sounding put out. “I was just asking you if you knew what other people were saying —”

I heard the women’s voices trail off as they left the restroom. Morris Rollins sure did have a way with women. I was more curious than ever about a man who could inspire so much loyalty.

Now I knew why Inez had really turned her back on her family and church. I left the restroom and looked for Mama so we could leave. She’d gotten a ride home from Alex, which told me she was pissed.

On my way home, I decided to go check out Inez’s apartment. I never knew her very well but I did know that she lived in an old Victorian mansion on Linden Avenue that had been converted into small apartments. She lived in the basement. I’d run into her a couple of months ago when I’d been seriously contemplating moving and had been looking at an attic apartment across the street from her place. I never found a place with rent as cheap as what I was already paying.

I stopped home to change my clothes first and discovered that Timmy was gone. I tore up the apartment looking for him. Hoping that maybe he was trying to trick me, I even looked under my bed. No Timmy, and no note explaining where he’d gone. I sat on my couch to calm myself down and hit redial on my phone to see if he’d made any calls. Mama answered the phone and I quickly hung up. She was the last person I’d called before I left for the funeral. I was not up to listening to her scold me about Reverend Rollins. Timmy hadn’t made any calls and there was no note. Where the hell was he? Why did he leave?

It was getting late and I still needed to get over to Inez’s before the apartment was packed up. I changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and headed out the door and down the steps. My landlady, Mrs. Carson, was sitting on her porch in her usual striped housedress. Her hair was braided into a crown that sat regally atop her head.

“What have you done now, missy?” she asked me, her eyes narrowed suspiciously. Her Siamese cat, Mahalia, was draped across her lap and looking at me with her usual disdain.

Mrs. Carson is Mama’s best friend and I wouldn’t have been surprised if Mama had told her all about the interaction between Morris Rollins and me at Inez’s funeral. Renting from my grandmother’s best friend had its advantage by way of reduced rent. The disadvantage was that Mama always seemed to know my business. I didn’t have time to be scolded by my landlady, either, so I hurried down the steps, hoping to get away before she could pull me into a conversation.

“Nothing, Mrs. Carson,” I said, starting to walk past her on the way to my car.

“Then why them police officers come by to see you?” I froze and turned to face her.

“What police officers?” I felt my palms get sweaty. Did they know Timmy was hiding out in my place? Did they take him away?

“That hatchet-faced white woman and her fat sidekick. They was knocking on your door a couple a hours ago. I told ’em you was at a funeral. They said they’d come back.” She stroked Mahalia, who purred with pleasure.

“I have no idea why they were here,” I told her, feeling relieved that they hadn’t hauled Timmy away. What did Harmon and Mercer want with me now?

“Well, you be careful wherever it is you rushing off to in such a hurry, you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I got into my car and took off, convinced that Timmy had left because he thought I’d told the police where he was.

I
t was after five by the time I got to Inez’s place. I got out of my car and looked around. I love Linden Avenue. It’s a historic street that used to be one of the places the wealthy citizens of Willow lived. The large mansions of yesteryear have been transformed into apartment buildings and two-family dwellings. Very few of the houses were single-family homes anymore. It was always cool and dark on Linden Avenue due to the massive elm trees that lined the street on either side; their branches met and made a canopy that kept the sun out in the summertime. Now, the trees were beginning to lose their leaves making the street feel naked and exposed.

Inez’s apartment was located in the basement of a large Victorian mansion that had been recently restored back to its original lavender, pink, and green exterior. The house reminded me of a fancy wedding cake with colored fondant icing. I was standing by my car trying to figure out how I was going to get into Inez’s apartment when the front screen door to the house opened and an elderly white man walked out onto the porch. He spotted me and nodded hello before sitting in a rattan chair. It was now or never. I walked up on the porch.

“Hello, sir. Do you know if the landlord is in?” The man looked up at me with watery blue eyes. He ran a trembling hand over a white tuft of hair that was sticking straight up from the front of his bald, pink head. He must have been in his eighties and looked like an elderly Kewpie doll.

“I’m the landlord. How can I help you?” His voice sounded reedy and high-pitched, like an old phonograph record.

“I’m a member of Holy Cross Church and I’m here to pack up Inez Rollins’s apartment.” I wondered if Morris Rollins would uninvite me to his office for a
chat
if he knew what I was about to do.

“Oh, yes. That was a real tragedy,” said the old man, shaking his head. “She was such a nice young lady. Never had a bit of trouble out of her. It’s just a shame.”

“Yes, it was. Her funeral was today and her family wants to get her personal effects packed up.”

“Where’d you say you were from?” he asked, looking confused.

“Holy Cross Church. Inez’s father is the minister. He’s too upset to come over here himself.” It was mildly disturbing to me how easy lying was getting to be. But just mildly.

“Honey, don’t you have any boxes with you? How are you going to pack up anything?” He looked around like he was expecting boxes to jump out of the bushes.

Uh-oh. I felt like a fool. I hadn’t thought about boxes when I came up with my brilliant plan. But an excuse quickly popped into my head. “I have a roll of trash bags in my car. First I’m going to get rid of all of the trash, then bag up what’s going to Goodwill.” Actually, it wasn’t a lie. I did have a roll of trash bags in my trunk from the last time I cleaned it out. I sprinted down the front steps and retrieved the bags, waving them to show the landlord I wasn’t lying.

“Oh, okay. Well then, follow me.” He slowly raised himself up from his chair and held the screen door open for me. I walked into a small dark foyer that smelled of garlic and fried onions. My mouth watered. Someone must have been cooking their dinner and I was tempted to knock on their door and ask for some.

“This way, miss,” said the landlord, walking ahead of me and gesturing for me to follow him down the long hallway. He was walking so slowly I almost stepped on the backs of his shoes. When we reached the end of the hallway, he paused in an archway that led down a set of about a dozen steps ending at a door.

“Here it is. I’d open the door for you, but I have a devil of a time getting up and down these steps.”

“No problem, Mr.—”

“Hathaway, Cecil Hathaway. And you’d be?”

“Cleopatra Jones,” I replied innocently. I felt bad about deceiving him but I wasn’t about to give him my real name.

“Cleopatra. Now that’s a nice name. It’s got a nice ring to it. Of course, nowadays everyone’s named Tiffany, Britney, or Amber. Can you imagine a woman my age named Britney?” We both laughed and then suddenly he became serious.

“Can I tell you something, Cleo?” he asked, looking around like he didn’t want anyone to hear him. My heart sank. I didn’t really want to hear what he had to tell me, figuring it could be anything from the irregularity of his bowel movements to an abduction by aliens. But I wasn’t going to tell him no. He still had the key.

“Sure, Mr. Hathaway. What’s on your mind?” I braced myself for the worst.

He leaned in close and looked around again. “I don’t think Miss Rollins is resting in peace,” he whispered like he’d just sprung some state secret on me.

I figured it would be something weird but was glad it was relatively tame. I could tell by the way he was looking at me that he was expecting me to be shocked. So I played along.

“Really! Wow! Oh my gosh! What makes you say that?” I opened my eyes wide with shock and amazement. I felt like I was faking an orgasm.

“Well, I’ve been hearing some mighty strange noises coming from down there after she died. I bet her spirit can’t move on because of her violent death,” he said, leaning even closer. His breath smelled like cinnamon candy.

“What kinds of noises?” I was reluctantly curious.

“Scratching noises, like someone is trying to get out,” he whispered.

We both stared down at the door to Inez’s apartment. I couldn’t hear anything, but I was suddenly spooked. I felt something cold touch my hand and I jumped. But it was just Cecil Hathaway pressing the key into my palm.

“You be careful down there, young lady,” he said, and made his way slowly back towards the front door. I heard the screen door creak open and shut as I headed down the steps to Inez’s apartment. I paused and pressed my ear to the door. I still didn’t hear anything. Feeling more than a little foolish, I unlocked the door and walked in.

I felt around on the wall for a light switch, bumped into something and almost screamed. But once I got the lights on, I could see it was just a wooden coatrack with a denim jacket and an old black sweater hanging on it. The apartment itself was one large room that was divided into two sections: a living room, which probably doubled as a bedroom, and a kitchen area. I ventured farther into the living room. It was hot and stuffy inside the apartment and it smelled like spoiled milk and garbage. If Inez’s spirit had come back to her apartment, it was probably to open a window and empty the overflowing trash basket I spotted across the room in the kitchen.

The apartment was sparsely decorated with expensive-looking furniture that didn’t match. In fact, it looked like two different people had decorated the place. The floral print chintz sofa clashed with the black lacquer Oriental coffee table. There was a small, round, chrome-and-glass table next to the couch, with a neon purple ceramic lamp perched on it. A small television set sat on a red wooden TV stand with a VCR sitting on top of it and a CD player on the shelf below it. There was a picture of an attractive, middle-aged black woman in a fabric frame sitting in the middle of the coffee table. I guessed it to be her mother. There weren’t any other pictures that I could see. The apartment was very neat.

I pulled one of the bags off of the roll of trash bags, tossed the rest on the couch, and headed into the kitchen area. A large square table with a long, flowing, white embroidered tablecloth that could have been an heirloom dominated the space. A look in the sink revealed a bowl filled with mushy cereal and curdled milk. I held my breath and emptied the bowl and rinsed it out. I looked in Inez’s refrigerator and found a carton of spoiled milk, which I also poured down the sink; a pack of hamburger; a wilted head of lettuce; half a dozen eggs; a lemon; a bottle of wine; and some Chinese takeout containers from the Red Dragon. There were some frozen dinners and a half gallon of rocky road ice cream in the freezer. I bagged up the reeking garbage to take out when I left so Mr. Hathaway wouldn’t get suspicious. I found some canned vegetables, a box of instant rice, several boxes of cereal, and some soup in the cabinets. There was a set of green tin canisters on the kitchen counter by the sink. All of them were empty except the smallest one, which held a small bag of weed and some rolling papers. The lower cabinets held pots and pans.

There was one closet in the apartment that was jam-packed full of clothes and shoes. The tiny bathroom had a tub, a sink, a toilet, and very little room for much else. The bathroom cabinet held birth control pills, aspirin, Band-Aids, toothpaste, mouthwash, and an almost empty tube of KY jelly. A set of wicker shelves on the wall above the toilet held towels and washcloths. A makeup bag sat on the tank behind the toilet and a toothbrush sat in a cup on the sink alongside a bar of dried-out soap.

I was getting frustrated. Inez certainly didn’t believe in any kind of clutter. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but it didn’t appear that anything that could help Timmy would be found in this apartment. So far, the only things I’d found out about Inez were that she loved her mama, liked to get high, had no talent for interior decorating, and experienced vaginal dryness. There was no note on the wall from her ghost, scrawled in blood, declaring, “Timmy didn’t kill me.” What a waste of time.

I started to leave when I heard voices at the top of the steps. I put my ear to the door and heard Mr. Hathaway telling someone his theory about Inez’s spirit and the strange noises. I then heard what sounded like several people walking down the steps towards the apartment. I panicked. It must be the church sisters from Holy Cross. How would I explain what I was doing here? I looked around frantically for a place to hide and dove under the kitchen table just as the door, which I’d forgotten to lock, opened.

“I don’t know anyone named Cleopatra Jones from the church, do you guys?” I heard one woman ask. The woman’s companions indicated that they didn’t, either.

“Hello,” someone called out.

I held my breath.

“There ain’t nobody in here,” declared yet another voice.

“Poor old man. He must be senile,” said a third voice. I heard murmurs of agreement.

“Either that or he’s been watching too many old movies. He probably thinks Cleopatra Jones is down here having tea with Foxy Brown and Shaft.” The woman’s companions laughed.

I peeked out from beneath the tablecloth and saw three sets of feet. My heart was beating furiously. My plan was to stay under the table until they left but I had no idea what I would do when they decided to pack the tablecloth.

“Come on, y’all, let’s get this over with.” I heard the sound of boxes being dropped on the floor and settled myself into a more comfortable position.

After about five minutes of listening to them pack and comment on Inez’s effects, I detected movement to my left. I turned and came face-to-face with the source of the scratching noises Mr. Hathaway had been hearing. And it certainly wasn’t any spirit. It was a rat. Now, I have no problem with spiders, and I actually think reptiles are cute. But, Kendra don’t do rodents of any kind, especially rats. The rat was standing on its hind legs twitching its nose at me. It was probably a standard-sized rat. But at that moment it looked the size of King Kong.

I could feel the scream welling up in me all the way from the tips of my toes. When it finally reached my lungs, I let out a high-pitched shriek that left my chest burning. I tried to stand up at the same time, lifting the heavy kitchen table several inches off the ground, and banging my head hard in the process. I felt myself start to lose consciousness. Before I was completely out, I heard the sound of feet hitting the floor as the church sisters fled the apartment.

I woke up under the table with a throbbing headache. I lay there for a few minutes feeling dizzy, looking around slowly. I was alone under the table. My rat friend was gone. But I wasn’t alone in the apartment. I could hear someone walking around. I figured the church sisters must have come back or maybe Cecil Hathaway had decided to brave the stairs. I could only imagine what those poor women must have thought, seeing the table rise up off the ground to the soundtrack of my scream. They must have thought that not only was Inez’s spirit in the apartment, but she was pissed as hell. I checked my watch and was surprised that only fifteen minutes had passed.

The dizziness finally subsided and I sat up and peeked out from under the tablecloth again. This time it wasn’t the church sisters or Cecil Hathaway. It was Shanda Kidd and Vaughn Castle. Shanda was still in her funeral clothes but Vaughn was dressed in a red-and-black silk tracksuit. I could smell his lemony cologne from across the room. Now that I knew what kind of a person he was, he wasn’t nearly as handsome to me as he had been. They were standing together in front of Inez’s open closet. Vaughn was rummaging through the closet, looking for something.

“Let’s go, V. We’ve done enough with the phone call and the tissue. The police are already looking for Timmy,” whined Shanda. She looked like a sulky child with her arms crossed and her lips poked out.

“I wanna make sure they got enough shit on that muthafucka to send him away for life. This might do it,” he said, pulling a blue silk scarf out of the closet. I could see the initials I.R. stitched into one corner of the scarf.

“What are you going to do with that?” Shanda asked warily.

“I ain’t doin’ shit with it. You’re gonna go to Milton’s crib to console his mom. Then when she ain’t lookin’, you’re gonna plant it somewhere. That way if the cops search the place again they’ll find it and connect Milton to Inez.” He was looking smug like he was some kind of a criminal mastermind. What a loser.

Shanda looked doubtful but she took the scarf and quickly stuffed it into her pocket like she didn’t want to touch it.

I was stunned. Not because Timmy had been right about being set up, but because Shanda was in on the plot, too. How could she? They finally left and I waited about ten minutes to make sure the coast was clear before emerging from under the table. I looked around, hoping not to see Mr. Rat and quickly locked the apartment and left. When I walked out onto the porch, Mr. Hathaway was sitting in his chair, asleep and snoring softly. I quietly placed the key on the table next to him, hopped in my car, and didn’t look back.