The Truth Hurts (26 page)

31
Marie

Hours later, after nightfall, I am back at the inn, wearily climbing the stairs to my suite. There’s nobody around to greet me, and I’m glad of that. If the Hostel members had their meeting, I missed it, and I’m glad. They can do what they want to, I don’t care. I don’t want to see anybody, I don’t want to have to talk to anybody.

I just want to get onto my computer and flame-throw a scorching E-mail at Paulie Barnes. Maybe he’s a brother and sister, or maybe he’s not, but I still think of him as one man, one evil entity. It’s the only way I can picture him in my mind, and right now I know how I want to see him look when he reads what I have to say. I want his eyebrows to singe when he reads it. I want his fingers to blister when he touches his keyboard to open it. I want his eyes to fry in his head when he sees what I say to him. And if what I have to say doesn’t set him on fire, I want spontaneous combustion.

If he weren’t playing his games, if he hadn’t forced me to hire Steve, if he hadn’t brought me here, if he hadn’t lured Nathan here, if the whole thing hadn’t unnerved Nate to the point that he fled, then Steve Orbach wouldn’t be lying in intensive care in Birmingham, Alabama, right now.

“Damn you” is too mild a curse
.

Maybe the police won’t be able to find him. But I’ll go after him, to the end of my days, if I have to. I may have chickened out long ago when it came to pursuing the truth about my parents, but I won’t give up on this one.

Steve is alive, but with grievous internal injuries, broken bones, and a head injury for which the standing procedure is to induce a coma until and if the swelling in his brain recedes. He has never regained consciousness.

I open the door to my suite and nearly faint to find a man in it.

“Surprise!” says my cousin, who is sprawled on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table. He grins at me, as if nothing has ever been wrong between us. “I lost my damned wallet, can you believe that, and they wouldn’t let me on the airplane. I was so pissed, I wanted to tell them to take their empty seat and shove it. I’ll get home some other way. What’s the matter with you? You look like you lost your best friend.”

I just stare at him. I can’t even tell him. My mouth won’t work.

“Oh, hell. What? You still mad at me for leaving?”

Without a single word, I walk past him and go into the other bedroom and slam and lock the door to it. From the other room, I hear my cousin calling in a plaintive, annoyed voice, “Marie!”

I know I have to tell him. I just can’t do it until I am sure that I won’t direct that flamethrower at him.

I open my E-mail, ready to do battle with Paulie Barnes.

But he has beat me to the scene of carnage.

What I see, what I read, fills me with horror.

Dear Marie,

Did you think I didn’t mean it?

You misjudged me, didn’t you? You decided that because I hadn’t really hurt anyone up until now that I never would do anything like that. It’s too bad—for your “bodyguard”—that you didn’t believe me. His injuriesare entirely your fault. You must blame yourself, you and your foolish cousin. I don’t recall granting him permission to leave. Perhaps now both of you will take me more seriously?

So that large young man was your protection, was he?

How safe do you feel now, my dear?

Yours truly,

Paulie Barnes

I jump out of the chair as if the E-mail were a snake.

Steve warned me of this. He told me so. When I first hired him, he predicted that eventually Paulie Barnes would try to separate me from everyone, including him, and that’s when he would strike at me. He has done it. He has managed to separate me from Franklin, from my hometown cops who know me and would take a personal interest in my welfare, from the professionals who normally assist me, and now from my bodyguard. And if Nathan hadn’t come back, I’d even be separated from—

I run across the room and fling open the door to the other bedroom.

“Nathan, what’s the real reason you wanted to leave today?”

He’s reading in the bay window, and now he glances up, looking like he used to look when I would catch him doing something he wasn’t supposed to do, like eating my Popsicle.

“What do you mean? I just wanted to go home.”

“You don’t look like it now. You look perfectly happy to sit there reading forever. How come you just had to go home this morning, but you don’t just have to go home tonight?”

Unless I’m mistaken, the “caught” look on his face is turning to serious fear.

I hurry over to him, kneel down beside him, take his hands and beg.

“Please. Please tell me. It’s really important to tell me the truth.”

Nathan looks around, almost as if he thinks somebody else might be in the room with us. He lowers his mouth to my left ear and he whispers into it, “I got an E-mail last night, Marie. From him. He said I had to leave you this morning, or he’d hurt you. He said I had to pretend to go back to L.A. and he said that I couldn’t tell you why. He even told me to drop the wallet, to give me an excuse not to get on the airplane. He said it was okay for me to come back here tonight.”

“Why did you do it?”

“So he wouldn’t hurt you!”

“But what did you think he was up to?”

He shrugs, looking unhappy. “I just thought it was some kind of crazy test, you know? Like he was testing to see if he had me under control the way he has you. And I don’t think I’m smart enough to mess with that. I didn’t dare tell anybody. I would have told Bruto, but how do I know that he’s not Paulie Barnes himself, just jerking you around for his own pleasure? I didn’t know what to do except to do just what he said. That’s what
you’ve
been doing. If even you follow his instructions, I figured that’s what I’d better do, too.”

Now it’s his turn to plead with me.

“What’s going on, Marie?”

Before I answer him, I get to my feet and walk over to the side of the drapes and pull the cords to close them. Then I ease down onto the bay window cushions with him.

“He’s not Paulie Barnes,” I tell him gently. He’s going to feel terrible about this, and I can’t prevent it. “Steve took the Lexus. He was going to try to catch up with you at the airport and give you your wallet. On the way, he had a terrible accident. He hit an overpass. He had to be life-flighted into Birmingham, and he’s in a hospital now in critical condition.”

I watch his tan fade, as if I had pulled a plug that drained him of color.

“I thought it was an accident, Nathan,” I continue. “A cop even asked me if it could have been a suicide attempt. But I just now read a new E-mail from Paulie Barnes. He’s taking credit—if you want to call it that—for causing Steve’s accident.”

As I expected, he looks completely stricken, horrified.

The first words that come out of his mouth are the right ones.

“Is Steve going to be okay?”

He didn’t think of himself first, he thought of someone else.

“I don’t know, sweetie.”

And then he says the next best thing he could say.

“What can I do?”

This
is more like the Nathan I love.

“You can go with me to the local sheriff’s department and help me tell them that we believe that Steve was either forced off the road, or was a hit-and-run.” I take hold of one of his hands again. “I was a jerk this morning. I’m really sorry.”

But he only smiles sadly, and this time it is Nate who gets to forgive me.

“What were you supposed to think? I did it on purpose so you wouldn’t ask many questions. I knew it would piss you off.” He grins just a tiny bit, though it disappears quickly. “I’m sorry I left you thinking that I had deserted you. But I hope you know I wouldn’t really do that?”

“Not even if I was up a tree?”

“What?”

He was too young, he doesn’t even remember.

“Nothing. Thank you. If I wasn’t sure of it before, I am now. Come on, let’s go.”

“This is my fault. What happened to Steve is my fault.”

“No! If there was ever anything in this lifetime that was not your fault, Nathan Montgomery, this is it. It’s Paulie Barnes’s fault. You were trying to help. He was trying to kill.”

Deputy Sachem is off duty, but within twenty minutes she comes in to hear this story of ours. In civilian clothes, she still looks like a cop, just like Robyn does when she puts on a pair of blue jeans and a Florida Marlins T-shirt over bare feet. I’ve had Robyn and Paul out in my little boat and I’ll swear they looked like detectives even in their swimsuits.

When we’re finished talking, Florence looks at me strangely.

“What?” I ask her.

“How could this Paulie Barnes know your friend would be alone in the car?”

I blink, unable to answer that. It hadn’t occurred to me.

“Common sense,” she continues, “would say that you’d be there, too, wouldn’t it? Would you have been driving?”

“No, I’d have been in the passenger’s—”

I don’t even finish the phrase. Nathan hasn’t seen the car. Florence and I have. We stare at each other now in the shared knowledge of exactly what happened to the passenger’s side of the Lexus.
The good news,
I think at that moment,
is that if he was trying to kill me, that must mean he’s finished with me.

But the bad news, from his point of view, is that I’m not dead yet.

“Who was the tow truck driver?” I ask her.

That pisses her off. “It was Hubert Templeton. So what? It’s Hubert at least one-fifth of the time we get calls, because he owns one-fifth of the tow trucks in Sebastion. This happened to be his time up. What? You think Hubert made himself a little business? Got there early and forced your friend off the road so he could tow the car?”

“We wouldn’t know his motive,” Nate says, coolly.

“Well, I
would
know his motive for just about everything,” the deputy snaps back at us. “It’s goodness, that’s what it is.”

“If you say so,” Nate says.

She picks up a pen from her desk and rams its point into a pad of paper at her elbow. “I do damn well say so.” But at the back of her eyes, do I see the beginnings of doubt? Is she wondering about the coincidence of the only black man who didn’t get arrested, who didn’t pay any penalty for his Hostel membership, just happening to show up at the scene of a near-fatal accident that could easily have included me in its body count?

Is Hubert Templeton “Paulie Barnes”?

“I don’t understand,” I say, talking out loud, “why a black man would betray Hostel and then turn my parents over to be murdered by the Klan.”

“You can’t understand it,” the deputy says, more calmly now. Calmly enough to sound convincing. “Because it didn’t happen. Couldn’t happen. Would never happen in a million years, or even for a million dollars. Trust me on this.”

Nate and I glance at each other. I can tell what he’s thinking:
If you say so.

32
Marie

Nate wants us to drive into Birmingham tonight to sit by Steve’s bedside, but speaking of motives, I know guilt when I hear it, and so I plead complete exhaustion. I figure that only by piling on another kind of guilt can I hope to dissuade him; merely telling him that we can’t do anything for Steve won’t work. I agree with him, though. I wish we were there. I wish somebody could sit by his bedside.

“Does he have any family?” Nate asks me on the way back to the inn. “Do you have to call his mother—oh.”

When we enter the inn, we smell cigarettes.

There’s a light coming out from under the door of a room I think might be Mo Goodwin’s bedroom.

“I sure hope she’s awake,” I whisper to my cousin, “if she’s smoking in there.”

Nate purposely stumbles against a table leg, making a small racket.

“That ought to do it,” he says, with a small grin for me.

And sure enough, as we’re going up the stairs we hear the television change channels in her room. If Maureen wasn’t awake before we got home, she is now.

 • • •

I take my shower first, and then turn it over to Nate.

By the time he’s finished and calling good night to me from the front bedroom, I’m deep into some reading. “ ’Night,” I offer, absently. It’s my goal to carefully reread and rethink everything I have about my parents and their friends. As I do so, I can detect my own skepticism about them, my own bitterness that I felt when I originally wrote some of this stuff. I never believed that my father felt so desperately sad when he left me. My account of what my mother and father are alleged to have said that night reads like sarcasm.

I want a chance to rewrite it.

Now I do want to write a book about them, about the modern-day Underground Railroad they started here in Sebastion, and about their courageous friends of both races.

Now, at least, I’ve got a real story to tell, and it’s my story, too.

There are only a few things missing now.

Maybe I’ll dream of the solutions while I’m sleeping tonight.

I lay the papers down on the floor by the bed, turn out the lamp, lie back on the pillow, and close my eyes. But not to sleep. Scenarios and unanswered questions float through my mind, a couple of which I haven’t had time to think about any earlier today.
Why did Clayton Fisher take the account of my parents’ murders to the sheriff’s office this morning instead of waiting, as I thought he had promised, for the agreement of the other members of Hostel ? What was their reaction when he told them he did that ?
Did
he tell them ? Why did he jump the gun like that, rushing to accuse Hubert and Rachel Templeton ? A couple of other, apparently unrelated things pop into my mind, seeking connection and explanation. Why didn’t Mo Goodwin join her parents and their friends—and my little group—at the Fishers’ party ? She told us she was invited to it. When we got home from it, she was here. So why didn’t she go ? Is she just too much of an introvert to face that much socializing ? She’s surely known these people all of her life; she even worked for Clayton for a time at the bank, she said. You’d think there could hardly be a more comfortable social occasion than that, among old friends of her
family,
one of them her former employer and his wife. I suppose, however, that for a truly shy person, there’s really no such thing as a comfortable social event. I wouldn’t know from shy, myself, but I think it must be a horribly crippling condition. I’m a recluse, myself, at times, but that’s just the result of being a full-time writer. I can’t say that I “enjoy” it, exactly; it’s just how the job gets done. Nobody remarked upon Mo Goodwin’s absence, at least not in my hearing, not even her parents. Wouldn’t you think, I ask myself as I lie there not sleeping, that somebody would have thought to ask, “Where’s Mo ?” But as far as that’s concerned, why was she the only one of the next generation who was invited ? Probably only because she used to work for Clayton, I decide, and because she knows us a little bit from being our innkeeper here.

Suddenly, I just have to know the answer to something.

“How late is it?” I mutter, and look over at the bedside clock.

Eleven. Too late to call Florence Sachem at her home? In my mind’s ear, I can hear Robyn Anschutz chiding me, “Marie. It’s never too late to call a detective with an important question or observation about a case.” When Sachem gave me her card today I weaseled out of her a home phone number and wrote it on the back of the card. I fling myself out of bed and rummage through my purse until I locate it, and then carry it over to the telephone on the desk.

That’s odd. I’d swear I left my laptop on the right side of this desk and not on the left where it is now. Maybe Nathan moved it? Or, more likely, Mo was up here cleaning, although after dinner seems rather late to be doing that. Then I recall seeing Rachel Templeton on the stairway. She was working late. That must be it.

Only then, as I’m sitting down there, do I notice two small, pale pink notes that have been left on the desk for me. The top one says, “Ms. Lightfoot. Please call the intensive care unit at Birmingham Medical Center and ask for Jean.” It’s signed, “Mo,” and she has written down a number for me. I drop the deputy’s card. Without even pausing to read the second note underneath, I make the call. “This is Marie Lightfoot,” I tell the female voice who answers. “I got a message to call Jean?”

“This is Jean,” she says, and her voice goes so soft and kind that I could scream. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Lightfoot. I’m afraid I have to tell you that Steven Orbach passed away three hours ago.”

I must be saying words, because she answers me.

“Yes, tomorrow is fine,” I hear her say, apparently in reply to something I’ve told her. “We’ll wait for your instructions. Since you’re not his immediate family, is there anyone else you’d like me to call for him?”

“No,” I tell her. “There’s no one else.”

Gently, I set the phone down.

I look toward Nate’s bedroom door, but there’s no light coming out from beneath it. I can’t bear to wake him to tell him this terrible news. I can’t bear even to
be
awake to know it.

Oh, Steve, you had so little time to be a free man.

He had such a sad, violent and limited life, and it didn’t seem likely to get much better, not at the heart of it, at the heart of him, not even with a massive infusion of money from his lawsuits. (Oh, I can’t bear to tell Tammi Golding, either—his lawyer, my friend.) Did anybody ever love him? Would anybody ever have? There’s no chance for that now.

During our trip here, he gave me one glimpse inside of his current life when I asked him, “How is it for you, being free?” He was blunt. “It’s not a friendly world for people like me.”

I get up from the desk, walk over to the bed, lie down again, bury my face in a pillow, and whisper into it, “I’m sorry, Steve, I’m sorry your whole life sucked.” I sob until I almost fall asleep, but just before that happens I am jolted awake by the realization that the sheriff’s department may not know that their “accident” report is now a homicide.

I sit at the desk again, calling from the darkened bedroom.

As I wait through several rings for the deputy sheriff to answer, I watch the movement of shadows on the thin white curtains I have pulled across a window. It’s the branches of the oak trees, dancing in a wind that has kicked up, a precursor to rain. I remember rain. We used to have some of that back home in Florida. Carrying the phone with me, I walk over and pull the curtains back. Then I tuck the phone receiver under my chin so I can raise one of the window panes to see if the air smells like rain and—

“Hello?”

“Florence, this is Marie Lightfoot.” I don’t even bother to apologize. “Do you know that Steve died at the hospital tonight?”

“No,” she says, sharply. “Nobody told me.”

“So it’s a homicide investigation now.”

“Maybe. I’m sorry about your friend.”

“Maybe? I have something to ask you. The other Hostel members who were at that picnic the other night specifically asked Clayton Fisher not to talk to the police until they’d had a chance to be sure of their theories. They didn’t want to accuse the Templetons, any more than you want to, not until and unless they felt really sure of their facts. So I was awfully surprised that you already knew, and that Clayton had already been in to see you. Why do you think he did that?”

There’s a long silence, long enough for me to ask, “Are you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. I can’t tell you that.” But then she can’t resist adding, sarcastically, “Maybe it’s because he thinks as highly of the Templetons as I do, you ever think of that? Maybe he just wanted to give me a chance to see what’s coming up against them.”

“That’s not exactly an objective point of view, Deputy.”

“Yeah, well, you’d think it was if you really knew them.”

And you can lump it, if you don’t like it,
is the meaning I infer from her tone. Someone less prejudiced in their favor might think that Clayton jumped the gun because he was convinced of their guilt. Someone might think that he didn’t want to take the chance that his white friends would chicken out of accusing their black civil rights compatriots. As smooth and forceful as that old banker is, he’d have known how to plant suspicion without appearing to personally accuse them.

As she’s talking, I notice the second message, the one I ignored in the aftermath of learning of Steve’s death. Ordinarily, my heart might beat faster at the sight of what it says, as if what she’s saying in my ear isn’t enough to do that already. This message is also from Mo, judging by the look of the similar handwriting, and it says, “Can I talk to you? I’m the one who called you.”

She called me? For a moment, I don’t get it. When did she call—?

Oh, my God. So she’s the one!

Three times in the past, I’ve had mysterious phone calls from some woman who never seemed to catch me when I was answering the telephone. It was always a brief, scared-sounding message hinting that my anonymous caller had something important to tell me about my parents.

Recalling that voice, I think, yeah, could have been Mo.

Soft voice. Shy, scared, deerlike quality. A southern accent that was perceptible even in the few words that were left in her messages to me. Yes, I can believe it was she.

“Florence,” I interrupt. “I have something else to tell you. . . .”

Somehow, afterward, I finally sleep.

Something wakes me again. A smell of smoke? I look at the clock: 1
A.M.
A very strong smell of smoke, and getting thicker, worse. I cough, then cough again.

Move, Marie!

I struggle out of bed, calling, “Nate! Nate!” When I reach the door that separates our room, I feel it with the palms of my hands to see if there’s fire on the other side, but it is as cool as air-conditioning. I fling it open and call, “Nate, there’s smoke, wake up!”

When he doesn’t get up from the bed in that room, I hurry over to shake him awake, only to find that he’s not even there. For a wild moment I fear that he has changed his mind and fled back to L.A. after all. No, that can’t be. I know now that he wouldn’t do that. I run back into my bedroom, throw on slacks over the underpants and long cotton shirt I wore to sleep, slip into sandals, grab my purse and my laptop computer, and head for the door to the suite.

It is slightly warm but doesn’t have the heat of fire.

I open it and look out into the hallway.

There’s a thin layer of smoke floating up from downstairs. I hear a noise, a crackle, like flames.

“Fire! Fire! Wake up!” I scream, and go pounding on doors to wake people. “Fire! Get up!” As the other guests start to come out, looking frightened and half-asleep, I head for the stairway. Halfway down I meet my cousin coming up. Even in the midst of greater shocks, I’m surprised to see that he’s fully dressed in the clothes he wore earlier this evening.

“Nathan, is there a fire downstairs?”

“It’s in Mo’s bedroom,” he says, looking frantic.

“Oh, my God! Why were you down there?”

He takes my hand, and as he’s running past me, pulls me with him back upstairs. “I was looking for a cigarette,” he says over his shoulder.

“But you don’t smoke!”

“After this day? Are you kidding? Anybody would start smoking again! I wanted a drink and a drag. I thought she’d have one.” When I look back down, he violently tugs at me, almost pulling me off balance. “Don’t go down there, Marie! We’ve got to get people to a fire escape, did you notice if there is one? There has to be one, doesn’t there?” He glances back at me again, looking anguished. “There were flames in her doorway, Marie! I couldn’t get in. I couldn’t get in to save her! We’ve got to get out. Everybody does. We’ve got to get everybody out!”

“Nine-one-one?” I shout out at him in the increasing noise and chaos.

“I called them! Get out now!”

He pushes me toward a door that another of the guests has opened onto a fire escape at one side of the big house. I run toward it, thinking that Nate is right behind me. But when I step onto the wrought iron of the fire escape and turn back to check on him, he’s no longer there. “Nathan! Nathan!”

“Go, go! Move! Let us out!”

Other guests are crowding in behind me. I’m blocking their escape. There’s nothing I can do but start down.

“Nathan!” I scream, looking back as I descend.

We reach the bottom of the fire escape and now I see flames through the windows of the first floor. My God, it’s already out of control. Where is that rain I thought I smelled a little while ago?
Nathan! Nathan!
While other guests run away from the side of the building, I start to run around it, desperately looking for a way I can get back in. The flames haven’t reached the second floor yet; there’s time . . . plenty of time . . . I know it, I know it . . . for him still to get out. What’s he doing in there? Why did he go back? Was there some other guest he was trying to save?

“Nathan!” I scream, and I realize I’m sobbing it.

I run around the other side of the house, nearest Mo’s bedroom, where the heat is greatest, where the shadows are thickest from the trees that shelter the house. In the near distance I hear a siren.
Hurry, hurry!
I can’t get in this way! I can’t find a way in anywhere! The heat is intense, the smoke is becoming blinding. If I don’t leave this area, I could lose my orientation and actually run toward the fire by mistake. While I still can see where I’m going, I turn toward the deeper shadows and stumble into them.