You Believers (28 page)

“So can I meet him? Come on, Jesse, I know he could fence these coins. Might even want to keep them for his kid. You seen his kid yet?”

“What you talking about?”

“You told me you were gonna go see his kid at the hospital?”

“Maybe I already did that. Maybe I’m on my way out to your house to eat some of that dead man’s ham with you and your granny.”

“Don’t be coming out here. My granny, she’s got a way of knowing things, and she didn’t take too kindly to you eating all the cookies and drinking her Coke.”

“Look, man, I got shit to do. I missed visiting hours today, and Zeke’s gonna be pissed.”

“You can see him tonight,” Mike said. “They’ve got visiting hours at night.”

Jesse laughed, a hard sound. “Would that be Mike Carter trying to tell Jesse Hollowfield what to do?”

“Just call Zeke, please. See if he has any use for these coins. He might want that gun too. You want the gun?”

“I’d bet a hundred bucks you don’t even know if that gun works because you don’t have the balls to go firing off a gun anywhere near where you might get caught.” Mike heard his granny coming down the hall. “Am I right? You never even fired the gun.”

Mike hung up the phone. She watched him. “Why you looking like that? Who was that on the phone?”

“Salesman.”

“I didn’t hear the phone ring.”

“That’s because you don’t hear everything, Granny. How about you have a look at the surprise I’ve been working on for you?” He opened the oven, took the ham out.

She looked around the kitchen. “Praise the Lord. Baby, how’d you do this?”

“I had a little money stashed away. Now, you sit and let me serve you.”

She sat and smiled. “Thank you, Lord, for the small wonders of this world.”

“It’s just a ham, Granny.” He sliced the ham. Put some on her plate. He sliced open the potato, forked brown sugar into it. He
checked the beans, trying to go through the motions like this was an everyday thing, but she was watching him.

“Why ain’t you eatin’?”

“I’m not hungry just yet.”

She studied him. “Sometimes we’re hungry, but we don’t know it. You got to eat, Mikey.” He poured the beans into a bowl, set it in the table. But his granny’s eyes wouldn’t leave his face, so he made himself a plate and sat with her. He lifted his fork, and she reached, touched his arm. “We should say grace.” He nodded, bowed his head, and wondered who’d be next on Jesse’s list. That girl had touched his arm, said,
My name is Katy
. His granny squeezed his arm. “You all right?”

He cut into his ham. “It’s just gonna keep on going.”

“What? What are you talking about?” She was eating now. And she was liking it. At least he had done one good thing.

“I’m thinking about that old farmer across the field. What’s the trouble of living when we all just die in the end?”

“There is an afterlife. There’s a reward for the children of God, baby.”

He looked at the clock. Visiting hours at the hospital would start in a couple hours. They’d be over at 8:30. He was wondering if Jesse would make his granny’s house the next place on his list after he saw Zeke. Mike knew he was the one loose end, and Jesse was too smart to leave a loose end, especially when there was a thousand-dollar reward. He watched his granny spread some of the apple jelly on her ham, put a dab on her sweet potato.

He stood. “I need to make a phone call, Granny.”

She nodded, cut another piece of ham. “Go on, baby. I’m gonna sit and keep on eating. Mercy, it’s good to have something besides chicken and eggs.”

He bent and kissed the top of her head. She always smelled clean, not like most old people. “If things work out, I’m gonna take you out for a shrimp dinner next week.”

“How you gonna do that?”

“I’m gonna make a phone call.”

She put down her fork, put both hands flat on the table, looked up at him. “You know something about that girl on the news.” She looked up at him the way she used to when he’d done something wrong and she’d say,
Go cut me a switch, and it better be a good one because you don’t want me cutting the switch I’m gonna take to you
.

He picked up his plate, scraped it into the trash, and put it in the sink. “I don’t know nothing about that girl.”

She tracked him with her eyes. “You were looking at it on the TV.”

“Granny, the whole town’s watching that story on TV. People don’t get attacked in Land Fall. That’s a gated community.” He washed his plate and knife and fork and put them in the drain.

“Who you fixin’ to call?” She was back at cutting into her ham. Maybe he could fool her.

“A girl,” he said. He wondered how he could turn Jesse in without his granny finding out. The news had said anyone turning in information could remain anonymous.

“Well, what’s this about you taking me for a shrimp dinner?”

He ran the baking pan under hot water, squirted soap on it, let it sit. “This girl, she likes me. She’s an assistant manager at the Golden Corral.” He winked at his granny. “Just might get a girl and a job all in one week.” She nodded but showed no interest in his words, was too busy scraping the bits of sweet potato from the skin. He wanted to say,
I’m sorry
. He wanted to tell the truth. He wanted to be the boy she believed he was instead of the man he’d come to be.

“You do what you’ll do, Mike. Just remember what I told you about how God knows every little secret thing we do. He wanted to cry. “I’m gonna make that call now.” He went down the hall, stood still, and squeezed his eyes shut. If he made the call, it would all be over. With the thousand dollars he could get out them both of town and leave the whole mess of Jesse behind. He moved into his granny’s room, sat on her bed, and stared at the phone.

He dialed the number, and when a woman’s voice answered, he slammed the phone down.

He could feel Jesse, hear him laughing.
You don’t have the balls to fire a gun where you might get caught
. He was right. He was always right. Except for this girl. He’d meant to kill her, but somehow she’d gotten away. The world didn’t always go according to Jesse’s plan. He picked up the phone again, listened to the dial tone. Everything would flip if he made this call. Maybe the world would start going his way. He sat there breathing. There was a ringing in his ears. Then a ringing in the air. It was the phone. Of course they’d ID anyone who called. He picked up the phone.

The lady sounded like a cop. “Did you just make a call to this line?”

“Yes,” he said. “It was an accident. I dialed the wrong number.”

“Do you have any information about the assault on the girl at Land Fall?” He felt the blood rushing in his head. She was a cop. “Just say yes or no.”

“No,” he said. “It was an accident. I’m sorry.”

“People don’t call this number by accident. And we don’t take kindly to pranks.”

“It was a mistake.” He looked down, saw the dirt he’d tracked on his granny’s rug. He should have taken off his shoes when he got back from the farmer’s house. He’d tracked dirt all over his granny’s clean floors. Like the rat.

“Sir, we know this is the Carter residence.”

“It’s my granny’s house.”

“And you are?”

He could imagine the squad cars coming while she kept him on the phone. “I’m just visiting,” he said.

“And you are.”

“I’m Jimmy,” he said. “From Rhode Island.” Like the chickens, he thought. He wanted to beg her now,
Just please let me off the phone
.

“Jimmy,” she said. “From Rhode Island.” She knew he was lying. She was probably looking at his rap sheet on her computer screen.

“Do you know an Estelle Carter?”

“She’s my granny,” he said.

“Does she know anything about the assault?”

“How do I know, lady? Now, could I please get off the phone? I’m sure you’ve got other people trying to call.”

“No. We don’t.” The silence sat there. And just like with Jesse, Mike knew if he waded out into that silence, he’d slip and fall.

He looked up, saw his granny. She was staring at the clumps of mud from his shoes on her rug. She bent, clinging hard to her walker as she picked up a piece of mud. She held it, looked at him.

“I gotta go. My granny’s calling.” He hung up the phone. He looked up at his granny’s face. There’d be little room for lying now.

“Michael Ray Carter, I didn’t raise a boy to be a stranger.”

“I’ll clean the rug.” He wanted to stand, run from those eyes of hers, but she was standing in the doorway.

“Just who is Jimmy from Rhode Island?” She wouldn’t look at him now. She was looking at the mess on her rug.

“You heard that?”

“I heard that.”

And once again the silence spread like a great icy lake between them.

She straightened up, stared at him. “You know something about that girl. You could do one right thing here, Mikey.”

One right thing. Mike knew he could do one right thing now, but even with the thousand-dollar reward he’d never really get out from under all the wrongs Jesse had done. He nodded, kept his eyes on his granny as he picked up the phone.

Never Had a Need to Go over This Bridge

It was a day like so many days when you think you know where you’re going, and the road bucks and you get thrown to a place without a map. You look around and try to get your bearings where low, thick clouds hang all around you, keeping you from knowing which way the sun goes.

Livy, of course, was nervous about meeting Roy, just another cop in her mind. She was also already grieving about seeing the place where he’d found Katy’s truck, the lake that according to everyone was Katy’s happy place to be. I waited on Katy’s porch while Livy paced inside, talking to her husband on the phone, moving through the house, picking up things, putting them down while she nodded, said things like “Yes,” “I know,” “I understand.” I could only take so much of that. I moved away from the door and looked out at the lush yard, heard the songbirds, and I wondered how many more times in my life I’d be standing on
a missing
woman’s,
likely a dead woman’s
, porch while her flowers keep blooming and the breeze riffles through the trees.

I had Roy’s voice-mail message looping in my head: “The girl woke up. The girl from Land Fall. We might have a good lead, Shelby.”
It’s the kind of message that drives me crazy in the way it offers something, gives nothing. He breathed a minute, that way he has when he’s thinking, then said, “It’s a miracle she lived. Livy Baines won’t want to know the things he did to that girl.” Then that breathing again while he picked his words: “I’m heading to the hospital now.” I stepped out in the yard, stood under a maple tree, and admired the way Katy had arranged geraniums and asparagus ferns and plant spikes in pots on the front steps. She was so careful with making pretty things. And I tried to tell myself there was a chance Katy had just run off, but with the weeks crawling by and not a word from her, I was having deep doubts about a happy ending. My talent’s giving hope to other people, but that can be hard when you’re feeling your own hope flickering, just on the edge of going out.

I went back up on the porch to remind Livy I was waiting. We were supposed to meet Roy out by Lake Waccamaw. If it weren’t for Roy, I knew Wilmington police would still be thinking Katy Connor had run off to Fort Lauderdale. Livy thought she was just meeting him to thank him and to show him Katy’s scrapbook, but I knew from Roy’s message that she was about to learn something more.

We were late, but the lunch crew at the Lake Waccamaw Inn would keep the place open for Roy. It’s like his satellite office out there. They have loyalties to him and me. It was about two years before Katy disappeared that we’d found Sam, the fry cook’s, daughter. Her name is Desiree. Seems to me any parent naming a girl Desiree is asking for trouble. But then again, trouble comes to any name you could choose. She was fifteen and just never came home one night.

She was gone for three months, and the cops had given up on looking, but I wouldn’t. I knew she wasn’t dead. I could see it in Sam’s eyes. He knew his girl was alive out there. Sam, he had hunter’s eyes, not the grieving gaze I see so often on a parent’s face. His eyes
were steady, deep and brown and always scanning the horizon for where she might be. So we kept looking. I’d seen Desiree before, figured she had a reckless streak. Her mom had left her with her dad and run off to Vegas when Desiree was only three. Sam tried, but he couldn’t cure the girl’s what-the-hell attitude. Seemed like there was just a hard spot in the girl’s heart where her mom used to be. And that can be a danger.

After we’d searched just about every square mile of swamp and woods and back roads for thirty miles around, and after I used my sources on drug houses around Wilmington, we knew where she was most likely to be: Myrtle Beach. Roy made some calls, and Sam and I went down there and put flyers out offering a reward. It wasn’t two weeks before we found her in a crack house. She was sitting in a back room, just waiting on a bed in her bra and panties, smoking a cigarette, flipping through some magazine. She screamed this little sound when we pushed the door open. It wasn’t the prettiest way for a daddy to find his girl. Once she saw it was us, she came running to Sam, said,
I’m so sorry, Daddy, so sorry; just get me out of here
. She wasn’t all angry and arrogant the way most of them get when you do a rescue. She seemed sincere, as if she’d just gotten lost in the woods and needed her daddy to come find her, lift her out of the brambles and the weeds.

That was one fine thing to celebrate. Sam bought Roy a case of Miller Lite and me a bunch of roses, the kind that smell like roses and not some refrigerated thing the way most store-bought roses smell. He knew I had a soft spot for roses, and Sam knew that was just the kind of pleasure I’d want. I might come off as a hard-ass—have to—but you put a sweet-smelling rose to my face, press those petals on my nose, let me breathe it in, and that thin, hard shell I keep just under my skin, it starts to melt. Roy watched me that day, breathing in those roses. He laughed a little and said, “There she
goes,” and without a word, with just a look to each other, we knew how that night would end.