The Truth Hurts (28 page)
Authors: Nancy Pickard
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #General
They could do it again, one more time, they knew they could.
This was going to be fun.
34
Marie
I am so horrified and nauseated at what my executioners have implied that I can barely stand up on my own.
“You
killed
them? You
killed
those men?”
“Not all of them, just as many as we could get away with doing.”
I can’t tell who said that. I don’t care. They’re all the same to me.
“Is there anything else you want to know?” one of them asks me.
“How did you do it? Why did you kill my parents? Why have you done this to me?”
“Shall we tell her?” That’s Austin’s thin voice, I think.
And so they do tell me, giving me the information I will need to close the book on my parents’ deaths. Their tone and their words mock me, my parents, and the good cause of the real civil rights. It’s all I can do to stand there hearing it, without breaking down, but I let them spin it out, let them brag on themselves, because every minute they talk is a minute more that I get to live and to try to think of a way out of this.
But at the end, I have thought of no way out.
When they’re finished, when I finally know that I am going to lose everything anyway, I hurl their contempt back at them with everything I’ve got in the last few minutes of my life.
“Oh, you really changed history, didn’t you?” My own voice drips a sarcasm that could shorten my life by a few seconds, but I can’t help myself now. “You sure made a big difference in the history of the world, didn’t you? Hell, you must have slowed down the march of civil rights by, what, a few hours? People all around the country and the world were so horrified by what people like you were doing to black people down here that civil rights legislation suddenly looked like the right thing to do, didn’t it? Because of that week! Because of murderers like you! Aren’t you proud? Just think what you accomplished! And, hey, just look around you! The proof of how much difference you made is everywhere now, isn’t it? I can see it when black people check into any hotel they want to, and go into the finest restaurants. I can see it in public swimming pools . . . in television commercials . . . on the Supreme Court . . . in presidential cabinets. I see it in mixed marriages and on baseball fields. Wow, you guys sure stemmed the tide of history, didn’t you? And just look what you did to your own hometown—it now has half the population it used to have, most of the businesses are closed, the whole town’s in complete decline. And you can take the credit for all that!”
“Shut up!” Austin snaps at me. “We’d be heroes if people only knew.”
“Oh, right,” I shoot back at him. “You want heroes? I’ll give you heroes. How about the black sharecroppers who walked miles on their bare feet, hungry and terrified, in order to line up in front of courthouse doors to try to register to vote when they knew even before they ever left home that it wasn’t going to happen for them that day and maybe on no other day in their whole life? And then when they went home, they knew they could get turned off their land, fired from their jobs, beaten or burned out, just for having made the trip. You want people to pick their heroes? Okay, then! We’ll pick them from the poor and the frightened black sharecroppers who knew fear—every single day—like you have never known it. We’ll choose our heroes from the ordinary people who stood all day in the sun, day after day, to try to register to vote. The ones who were bitten by dogs and beaten by cops. The ones who were cursed at and spat at and raped and murdered and thrown into jails for wanting to be treated like full human beings. They were scared to death almost all of the time, every day of their lives for themselves and for their children, but they walked for freedom anyway. Don’t you
dare
try to claim the title of hero for yourselves.” I can’t help it. Saliva pours into my mouth like a physical symptom of the contempt and loathing I feel for them, and I spit, aiming it at them.
The blow from one of their hands comes at me so fast I have no defense against it. I don’t even know which one of them hit me. It knocks me sideways, instead of backward, leaving me prone and teetering at the edge of the abyss. I’m breathless from the pain of it, trying to hang on to my wits. When I look up again, when my vision clears, I see what awaits me next.
They raise their shotguns to their shoulders and aim them at me. They aren’t even going to put a bag over my head, like they did with my parents, to spare themselves the sight of my head exploding. At any moment they’re going to pull their triggers. I can’t get up and run or they’ll shoot me. I am faced with certain death from them in front of me and almost-certain death from the fall behind me.
I won’t let them have the satisfaction.
In the instant before the blast comes, I roll over the edge. My feet drop heavily into nothing, my fingers cling to the top. I was hoping against hope for the miracle of a ledge below the surface, or a tree root to cling to, or rocks on which to plant my feet. There is nothing, only emptiness and the knowledge that I can’t hang on for more than a few seconds. By that time they will be here. They will point their weapons down onto my head, my dangling body, and they will do what I have only ineffectually delayed. Or they will do what I’ve seen a million times in movies—one of them will raise his foot and bring the sole of his shoe down on my hands.
In my anguish a cry rises from my heart and screams inside my head, shocking me in my last moments:
Daddy! Mommy!
My killers are above me now. I feel their shadows.
I will drop, I will release my grip, I will die on my own.
But when the blasts come, they aren’t aimed at me.
The body that tumbles into the cave is not my own, though it nearly knocks me down with it. And the strong hand that reaches down and grasps one of my forearms to hold me up belongs to Deputy Sheriff Florence Sachem. “I can’t hold on,” I whisper to her.
“You don’t have to,” she tells me. “I’ll hold on to you.”
She and her men have shot my would-be executioners.
The one who fell past me into the cave was Austin Reese. Lackley Goodwin and Marty Wiegan lie wounded on the ground above. As for me, I am weeping as I am pulled from the cave where my parents lie below. There was a part of me that almost wanted to go, a part of me that almost believed that if I let go and fell I could finally see them, finally be with them. Now I’m glad to be alive as I lie gasping on the ground, recovering my breath and strength. But there will always be a part of me that longs for them.
“Have you seen my cousin?” I ask her as she escorts me away.
She nods, smiling slightly at me. “He got himself a little singed getting Mo Goodwin out of there, but he’s going to be fine.”
Nathan rescued Mo! I’m so glad, so proud. This will change him.
She helps me into the backseat of her sheriff’s car, gently because my shoulder may be dislocated and I hurt all over.
“Why did Clayton come to see you?” I ask her again.
“He wasn’t accusing them,” she says and smiles reassuringly at me. “He was protecting them. He felt the Reeses, the Goodwins, and the Wiegans were rushing to judgment, and he wanted to warn me. Mister Clayton thinks the world of Hubert and Rachel. He didn’t want to see them hurt. And while he was there, he said he could think of other people who owned pickup trucks, who had fields outside of town, who owned property with caves on them. People named Reese, Goodwin, and Wiegan.”
“I knew it,” I murmur to myself.
In the car, driving away from that killing field, she says to me, “Then there was the fire, and your cousin was frantic because he couldn’t find you. And when I looked around about the only other people I couldn’t see after that fire got put out were those three good citizens. They were gone. Their trucks were gone. You were gone.”
The deputy smiles, grimly, sadly.
“I just followed history to find you,” she says.
We gathered two nights later for a picnic in the Fishers’ yard. Florence Sachem was there, looking like a cop in a dress. She arrived with the good news that the prosecution was already gearing up for the two surviving killers. Clayton and Eulalie were there, of course, though they looked like wraiths, so heartsick were they by the knowledge of the murderous heart of Hostel. Mo Goodwin was there, looking freer without the burden of the awful lonely knowledge of what her father and his friends had done, and Hubert Templeton came alone. “Rachel, she’s too bitter,” he confided in us. “Too bitter. I think one day it will kill her, this bitterness, and there is nothing I can do to cure her.” Nathan and I sat close together, and he insisted on holding my hand until Franklin arrived, a surprise visitor from another planet, to take his place and put a strong arm around me.
Clayton seems older now, less suave and sure of himself.
“I think Sebastion died that night,” he told us. “I always wondered what went wrong with this town, where we went wrong to make it slide downhill so fast, but I never knew the horror at the heart of it. I thought it was something as banal as the economy, I didn’t know it was . . .”
The old man trails off, leaving his wife to sigh and whisper, “Our fault. We didn’t see the truth of them. Why not? I’ll never know why not. I’ll never forgive us.”
“Cut that out, Eulalie,” Hubert chides her. “We did some good.”
“On balance?” she replies. “Was it worth it, Hubert? To save a few at the cost of killing others?”
“We had to try,” he says. “We were part of something bigger and that bigger thing,
that
was worth it. It was a war. We won, Eulalie. We took some bad hits. But we’re still winning.”
Mo sits near me, and I reach for her hand. “You called me those times. What did you know? What were you going to tell me?”
“From the time I was a little girl,” she says, “nobody ever knew when I was around. I could listen in. I could overhear things. Terrible things. I had to tell somebody, but I was afraid of my father, afraid of what he and his friends would do to me if they found out what I knew.”
Her mother hasn’t come. None of the other wives have.
It’s a terrible thing to believe something about your family and then to discover many years later that you believed a lie. I know all about that, because for most of my life I believed lies about my parents. Or half-believed them. I didn’t want them to be true, and it is the greatest gift imaginable to know that all of us were wrong. Their bodies will be brought up from the bottom of the cave, if we can manage it, along with those other bodies of men who were young and angry, scared and brave beyond measure. Families will be sought and notified. As for my family, my parents will be buried, not here in Sebastion, but in Florida, where I am, where I can visit them and get to know them in a different way, as the people they really were, a mother and father I can love.
A memorial will be built, not to my parents or to Hostel, but to those other men who died on the dangerous road to freedom.
Franklin kisses the side of my face to let me know he cares.
“I wish I could have known them,” he says to us.
Eulalie glances at me and I hold her gaze as I say, “I wish I could have known them, too.”
35
Marie
The Miami Book Fair is a monster, one of the largest in the world, with authors and publishers, editors and agents, and thousands of readers flocking in to buy books, get autographs, hear speeches, and sit in on panels. They’ve put me on a panel with some of my favorite Florida writers: T. J. MacGregor and Rob MacGregor, Elaine Viets, and Martha Powers. I wish John D. MacDonald could be here. I’d ask him to sign a copy of
The Executioners
for me.
I don’t think this panel is going to make it through to the end, though.
There’s a storm coming up over Miami Beach; we can see huge black thunderclouds from where we sit in an open tent, each with a microphone in front of us. We’re seated at a long table on a dais that has been set up in front of a big crowd of readers, bless their hearts for coming.
I think we’re all about to get drenched.
We’re so excited at the idea of it that none of us can keep our minds or our mouths on our topic. The audience members keep nudging one another and looking east. T. J. MacGregor is signaling to her beautiful daughter, Megan, to ask if she’s got their umbrella. In the third row, I see my assistant, Deborah, bend over and bring hers out from under her chair. I would ask Franklin DeWeese if he thought to bring an umbrella, since I neglected to—but he’s off at the children’s section with Diana and Arthur. I didn’t recommend that he bring them to hear me and these other writers talk about murder and mayhem. I wouldn’t get to share an umbrella with them, anyway, even if they were here listening to my panel, because I’ve been declared off limits by their mother. She can’t stop her ex-husband from continuing to see me, though. I can’t believe—can’t bring myself to accept the possibility—that this situation with the children will last. I miss them. It makes my heart ache even to consider the awful possibility of never hugging Arthur again. I’m glad to be distracted by a question from the audience.
“Ms. Lightfoot?”
“Yes?”
“I hope you don’t mind if I ask this, but are you ever going to write a book about what happened to your parents?”
“Yes, I probably will. In fact, a lot of it’s already written.”
Beside me, Martha Powers exclaims in her throaty voice, “Rain! I felt a drop!”
There’s a stir of excitement in the crowd and on the panel.
We’re going to have to clear out of here at any minute if the lightning gets any closer. We smile with delight at one another, wondering what to do next. I literally don’t know what the next few moments of my future hold. Maybe I’ll be answering another question from the audience, maybe I’ll be fleeing the storm.
But there’s one thing I do know.
I may not be able to predict my future, but I finally know my past.
