The Truth Hurts (4 page)

B
ETRAYAL

By Marie Lightfoot

—•—

CHAPTER THREE

F
or six straight days leading up to the cataclysmic events of June 12, 1963, mind-boggling news seeped out of the South. It moved, as fast as television could beam it, around a mesmerized and appalled world. And that was even
before
the seventh day, when apparently nobody took the good Lord’s admonition to give it a rest.

That stretch of seven days started, maybe symbolically, with seven black people being terrifyingly forced from a Trailways bus and then jailed in Winona, Mississippi. Ironically, they were fresh from a nonviolence leadership-training course. Just as the world was already worrying about their fates, a courageous Movement leader traveled to Winona to try to free them, and he promptly vanished into a cell there, too. All that week, no word of their fates leaked out of that black hole.

Then police attacked people praying in a voter registration line in Danville, Virginia. With fire hoses and billy clubs, local cops sent forty citizens to the hospital, for the “crime” of wanting to vote.

Then came U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, boldly proclaiming the federal government’s intention to integrate the University of Alabama. All hell broke loose. Governor George Wallace vowed to block the schoolhouse doors.

Tensions were running high, as the saying goes. It was hard to imagine how they could run any higher. But then came the night of June 12, 1963, when everything good and bad seemed to climax all at once. President John F. Kennedy gave a surprise speech on national television, the most important speech on “the Negroes” since Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Kennedy branded civil rights a moral issue, lifting it higher than the political arena for the first time. Enraged by the speech, a bigot in Mississippi hopped into his car and raced through the dark streets to assassinate the black civil rights leader Medgar Evers in his driveway. Evers’s wife and children were in their living room, having just watched the president’s speech, when they heard the gunshots that killed their husband and father.

On that same night, and mostly unnoted by the rest of the world because there was so much other bigger news to cover, there were violent reactions to the speech and the assassination in towns and cities all over the South, including in little Sebastion, Alabama, northwest of Birmingham.

In Sebastion, a local cell of civil rights workers was broken up that night, and the young white couple who betrayed them disappeared forever.

“We called ourselves Hostel,” Eulalie Fisher reminisces from her grand Victorian home on the main street of Sebastion, decades later when it’s safe to admit such things. She’s eighty years old now, a grand dame of the South, and still a beauty with her white hair arranged softly in a chignon and her slender, graceful body wrapped in a silk robe. Smoke rises from the cigarette in the long silverholder she weaves through the fingers of her right hand. She takes only small, infrequent puffs, but uses the holder as a wand to wave, point, underline, and otherwise punctuate her remarks. Her accent is refined and yet deeply southern, like grits soaked with the finest New England maple syrup. (“I was sent away to finishing school,” she says, the explanation for many a cultured inflection among the older women of the South.) “It was meant to be a pun, a play on words, if you will.
Hostel,
because we provided safe houses for black people on the run. And
hostile,
which was how we felt about segregation.”

Michael Folletino started it, she claims, shortly after he moved to Sebastion from L.A. with his new bride, the former Lyda Montgomery. In secret, he “felt out” the residents of the town, discreetly determining which side they were on, segregation or integration, and winnowing from the sympathizers those, like Eulalie and her husband, Clayton, who might have some courage to go along with their private convictions. He was in the perfect position to do so, having accepted a position as a professor at an all-white college and as the husband of a local girl, the socially prominent daughter of dyed-in-the-cotton Old South whites.

“Of course, Lyda went right along, but then she loved him madly, and she’d always been a rebel.

“Our little band, Hostel, operated like a modern-day underground railway. We provided safe haven to people, mostly black people, in danger. We arranged transportation for them to safer places. And all the while, we continued the pretense of being bigots, to keep our activities a secret. We couldn’t afford to be open in our opposition to segregation, not if we wanted to continue to help people who were in the direst need. If we had behaved like anything but hypocrites, we’d have been watched constantly, and harassed. Our homes would no longer have been safe places for anyone to hide. We couldn’t have come andgone unobserved in our cars. And so we acted the roles we’d been playing all of our lives anyway—traditionalists, with a sentimental soft spot for ‘good’ Negroes, a sense of our own superiority as white folks and rich ones, and a hatred for the integration that challenged all of that.”

For two years, Hostel operated like that, Eulalie claims, successfully ferrying the wounded and the frightened, the threatened and the vulnerable, to relative safety. Some refugees stayed a night or two at Eulalie and Clayton’s big house; a number hid in the parson’s chamber attached to the back of Michael and Lyda’s beautiful home.

“A parson’s chamber was a bedroom that was built onto the back of a house,” Eulalie explains, stabbing at the air with her cigarette in its holder, as if she is pointing to an actual location. “The door was left unlocked, so that itinerant preachers would have a place to spend the night. Michael and Lyda had the only parson’s chamber in town, and it was perfect for our purposes.”

She pauses, turns, and lifts her face, as if to gaze into a mirror, while the smoke from her cigarette trails away from her. “I think that Michael and Lyda may have picked that house for that reason, alone. After they disappeared, her brother sold it, and it was never again used for such a noble purpose. But then, none of our houses ever was again.” She pauses for an even longer moment, lifts her chin a little higher as she seems to gaze into the invisible looking glass. “And none of us was, either.”

4
Marie

I walk into my home with the tabloid in my hand, only to be met in the kitchen by my assistant, Deborah, with a computer printout in her hands. But that’s not what I notice about her first. What fills my line of vision is the distress on her face.
She knows,
is my first thought, and I feel ashamed, because I’ve let her down.
She’ll feel betrayed by me, because I didn’t confide in her. When she inquired about my family, I brushed her off, saying that I really didn’t want to talk about them.

“Hi,” I say, feeling my face grow warm. “You’ve seen it?”

Deb—only a year out of journalism school, tall and skinny and teetering over me on her platform sandals, dressed in one of her outrageous sundresses, with her platinum hair frizzed out like a 1960s radical—Deborah, funny, naive, and as smart as her near-perfect score on the SATs—starts to cry as she approaches me.

“It’s so
mean,
Marie! How could anybody
do
this to you?”

I feel ashamed all over again, only this time it’s because I realize that I’ve underestimated her. She’s not going to blame me for keeping my secrets. Of course she isn’t. That wouldn’t be like her at all. She’s going to feel bad for me before she even thinks of herself. I should have given her the same benefit of the doubt that she’s now so generously giving me.

“How did you find out about it, Deb?”

“From this E-mail,” she says, handing it over to me. “It’s so
mean!”

I look at the piece of paper, expecting to see a printout copy of the tabloid article, but there’s more than that. When I see what
else
is written there, accompanying the article, it causes my breath to hitch and gives a greater and more ominous significance to her words.

Dear Marie,

How do you like my little surprise, Marie? How should I spend my five hundred dollars? I know! Why, I believe I’ll spend it on additional surprises for you, Marie.

Paulie Barnes

My God
. It’s the tattletale, the “unnamed source” who sold my life to the tabloid. But I’ve never heard of a Paulie Barnes. Who is he? Where’s he coming from? And why is he picking on
me ?

There’s a P.S.:

Don’t waste time trying to trace my E-mail address. It’s encrypted. If I could choose an uncoded one, it would be [email protected]. How do you like that one?

My insides do an unpleasant dance when I read that. This is a spooky coincidence, because I was thinking of John D. MacDonald just this morning in the checkout line at Publix. One of his most famous novels, and the scariest book I ever read, was
The Executioners.
When Hollywood made two movies from it, they changed the title to
Cape Fear.

Anyone who has followed my career and read interviews with me would know that whenever I’m asked to name my favorite books, I always mention that one, and how deliciously it frightened me the first time I read it many years ago. Does this “Paulie Barnes” know that?

“Who is he?” Deb is asking me. “Who’s this Paulie Barnes, Marie?”

“I don’t know.”

To his P.S. he has added:

Like Max Cady, I’ll be around, Marie. Count on me. Your own parents abandoned you, but I will never leave you.

If I felt a chill before now, I feel downright flash-frozen now.

“And who’s Max Cady?” Deb wants to know, dabbing at her tears of outrage and sympathy on my behalf. She obviously hasn’t read that book, or she’d know instantly. Out of all the fictional villains in the world’s literature, Max Cady isn’t one you’d ever forget. Or, at least, I never have.

I glance up at her, trying to keep my own voice steady.

“He was the bad guy in a suspense novel, Deb.”

“Weird” is all she says.

I don’t tell her that he was a true psychotic, probably one of the purest ever portrayed in fiction. He was out for revenge against an entire family, because of what he perceived that the father of that family had done to him. He could not be stopped by the cops, or by any other conventional means. He just kept coming at them, like a missile with a malevolent consciousness, aimed in one direction only, from which he could not be deflected except by his death, or theirs.

I smile reassuringly at Deb, or at least I hope it’s reassuring.

There’s no reason for her to have to worry about this.

“There are a lot of nuts in the world, and this is just one more of them. Let’s sit down, Deb, and I’ll tell you the truth behind the tabloid story. Forget about this Paulie Barnes, he’s just some nasty ol’ tattletale who used me to make a few bucks. Screw ’im.”

She laughs a little at my show of nonchalant bravado, and I’m relieved to hear it. If she understood the meaning of his literary references, she probably wouldn’t find me so amusing, but thank goodness she doesn’t, at least not yet. It strikes me that this dear young woman is more or less a part of my small “family” now. As Nathan is. And Franklin and his children. And the scattered few I count as real friends. Is somebody—this Paulie Barnes—really after me and, by innocent association, them?

I try to shake it off as Deb and I sit down at my kitchen table so I can tell my story to her, the one that’s overdue for her to hear. No doubt I’m taking this strange E-mail contact too seriously, and only because I was already shaken up by the tabloid story.

And maybe that’s how he planned it,
is the unwelcome thought that pops next into my mind. The problem with being a writer is that sometimes I have too much imagination for my own good; the problem with being a true crime writer is that my imagination can work overtime when it hops onto violent tracks. This may be one of those times.
But maybe he planned to throw me off balance with the tabloid revelation, forcing me to deal with the public fallout from that, while he moved in closer for his own purpose. Whatever that may be. Max Cady.
The Executioners. Cape Fear.

I can’t bring myself to think about those implications now, or what they suggest about some malign stranger’s “purpose” in my life. It’s probably all nonsense anyway. He’s probably just some trickster, shooting his meager wad by hawking my story to a tabloid. And that’s probably going to be the last of it, and all we’ll ever hear from him.

It’s a lot of “probablies.”

“I was born in 1963,” I begin, and then slap my forehead to demonstrate what a moron I am. “Wait a minute! We don’t have time for this! I’ve got to proof my galleys, and you’ve got to get my publicity material mailed off to the Miami Book Fair. And you know what? You don’t have to hear this all at once from me right now, anyway. I’ve written it down. I’ll give that to you and you can take it home and read it, if you want to.”

“Okay,” she says, and then blushes. “Franklin called.”

I’ll bet he did.
“Thanks, I’ll call him right now.”

After rooting through my files to locate my unfinished book,
Betrayal,
and handing it over to Deborah, I leave her working in my living room. That leaves me free to quietly shut myself in my office to make the call. Let her think I want to talk intimately, romantically to my boyfriend. I may be doing that—I certainly hope so—but I’ll also be talking privately to my prosecutor. I want some advice about what to do—if anything—about this Paulie Barnes, who has disturbed my life like a tornado dropping down from a cloudless sky.

But once I’ve told him everything, my prosecutor’s best advice turns out to be, “Let’s take the kids and go to the Keys for the weekend, Marie. I’ve got a friend with a condo on Key Largo that I can rent if it’s empty, I think I can manage to leave work a little early, we can scoop up the kids from their schools, and all drive down together.”

“That’s a fabulous idea, Franklin.” I am, in fact, overjoyed at the idea of a weekend trip, a minivacation, and an escape from the fallout from the tabloid article. At the same time, I’m a little unnerved by the prospect of a weekend with his children, though I don’t say so. If we do this, it will be our first time for such intense togetherness. “But I have to . . . I want to . . . pick up my car from the shop tomorrow, and it won’t be ready until late afternoon. Why don’t you take the kids and I’ll meet you down there?”

“Deal. Nobody will be able to find us. We can talk.” There’s a pause and then he sounds as if he has moved his mouth closer to the phone. “We just won’t be able to do much else.”

“With the kids there, you mean?” I laugh a little. “How do parents ever manage to have sex after the kids are born?”

“I’ll show you,” he whispers into the mouthpiece, sending sexual electricity shooting through me, and pushing an involuntary little moan out of my mouth. Neither of us speaks. The silence is erotic. I’m really sorry to have to bring our conversation back around to a less sexy topic. A little huskily, I say, “What about the tabloid story, Franklin?”

“What about it?” he asks, sounding a little hoarse, himself.

“Aren’t you upset?”

“After I got over my initial reaction, no.” He has backed away from the mouthpiece of his telephone and is sounding businesslike again. “I don’t think it’s worth getting upset over. Hell, you’ve had reviews that said worse things about you than that did, Marie. And I’ve got political opponents who say things about me that make tabloids look like church newsletters.”

I have to smile, albeit wryly. It’s true, what he says.

“Well, then what about this Barnes person, Franklin?”

“In the first place, that’s probably not his real name—”

“Oh, right.” I feel like smacking my forehead again. “Duh.”

Franklin chuckles. “In the second place, he hasn’t done anything illegal. And in the third place, fuck him.”

This time I’m the one who bursts out laughing, not only from the tension-relieving surprise of hearing Franklin say that, but also because he and I so obviously think just alike.

Take
that,
Paulie Barnes, whoever you are!

While I’m at the phone I check for messages, wondering if there is a reaction from anyone else yet. I think
The Insider
only went on sale today, but I know the mainstream media check the “tabs” for leads on stories. Ever since the
National Enquirer
broke the news about one of the Clinton sex scandals, and they turned out to be dead-on with their reporting, nobody has dared to ignore or disdain the tabloids to quite the same degree as before.

Sure enough, there’s a message waiting for me from the publicist assigned to me at Hudson House, my longtime hardcover and paperback publisher.

“Hi, Marie!” Over the phone, Connie Dellum sounds even younger than she is; her voice has a high, lilting cheerleader quality that normally I find endearing, although maybe I wouldn’t if she weren’t also as efficient as she is young. But this morning that trilling voice sounds wildly inappropriate, though that’s not her fault. On my voice mail, Connie enthuses: “I don’t know what’s going on all of a sudden, but I just got into the office and there are messages from
Time
magazine and Fox News, wanting to interview you! This is so great! Do you want me to have them call you? Or should I get their numbers and tell them that you’ll call them?”

“Great,” I say, unhappily.

Oh, Connie, if you only knew, which you will soon enough. You’re going to have a hell of a publicity challenge facing you now. I suspect the head of publicity will step in and take over, after consultations with the president, publisher, my editor, and my agent. Publicists get used to handling anything—canceled airline flights on book tours, bad reviews, drunk authors, and signings where nobody shows up. Like a jack-in-the-box, they pop right back up. But this may finally test their resilience. How are they going to put a good “spin” on an author labeled “racist”?

If
Time
and Fox are on my trail, can
Newsweek
and CNN be far behind? There’s no hot scandal consuming the news right now, so I’ll make a tasty little bit of filler for them. I can just imagine myself as an item in sneering columns of celebrity news. But maybe not just yet, not if they can’t find me to get a denial, or a “no comment.” While I feel a bit calmer since talking to Franklin, I don’t feel sufficiently sanguine to talk to any journalists, not even to tell my side of the story. But then, what is my side of it, and what is the story? All I can say is, “I was a baby. I never knew my parents. And I don’t know much about them.”

Quickly, I place a call to Connie to tell her why I’m suddenly so “hot”—if she still doesn’t know—and to ask her to see if she can find out the real name of the “source.”

When I return to my living room, I find my assistant curled up on the couch, reading the chapters I’ve written about my parents. So much for getting any real work done today, I guess. But I pass on by without saying anything, and just head on into the kitchen to fix us some lunch. Let her read. As fast as Deb reads, and as short as that partial manuscript is, it won’t take her long to finish.

And after all, it’s not as if she holds the whole story in her hands.

I don’t know if anybody does.