Roots of Murder Read online

  Agree, then do it your way, had been one of Thom’s mottoes. Nell saw no reason not to apply it to her mother-in-law. “I will try to make sure that the kids are either with you or some other adult if things come up.” She wondered if TV would count as having adults around.

  Lizzie finally came out of her room. In teenage obviousness, she rolled her eyes at the thought of having to call her grandmother to babysit if Nell wasn’t here. Nell pretended not to see.

  “However, I really wasn’t coming over here to check on you,” Mrs. Thomas continued. Lizzie rolled her eyes again, even more obviously to make sure that Nell saw. “I wanted to know if you’ve been getting phone calls from”—she looked down at a piece of paper in her hands—“Tanya Jones.”

  “She’s calling you?”

  “You know who she is?”

  “Yes, don’t you?”

  “The name is … a little too familiar to me,” Mrs. Thomas said slowly. “What have you said to her?”

  So I have to reveal all my dealings while you keep yours to yourself, Nell thought. Maybe it was how women survived in the South thirty years ago—never reveal an opinion until it was safe.

  “I’ve told her to … ” Nell searched for a polite way to say it. “That I will do everything I can to see her husband in prison.”

  Mrs. Thomas slowly nodded, still maddeningly not revealing her thoughts. “Mrs. Jones told me that her husband has had time to think things over in the jail—she said they just couldn’t afford the bail, it was set so high and that it must be nice to be friends with a judge—that he was reading the Bible and had seen the error of his ways.”

  “Nice to know he’s seeing errors. To me she said he made one mistake and he shouldn’t have to suffer years in jail for one minute of mistake.” They were standing in the kitchen; much as she wanted to sit, Nell was reluctant to do so as it might inspire Mrs. Thomas to do the same and extend her visit. But she was curious about Tanya and her new approach. Curious and angry.

  “I gather she thought that appealing to the Christian in me might be her best argument,” Mrs. Thomas said.

  “And did you find it ‘appealing’?” Nell asked.

  “Perhaps if J.J. Jones has finally found God in jail, then that’s where he should stay. The outside didn’t seem to be leading him down a righteous path. But she didn’t quite stop with his jailhouse conversion. She also mentioned that his brothers aren’t happy about him being locked up. She said”—Mrs. Thomas again consulted the paper—“that they were really upset about not having their little brother to help at the garage and she didn’t know what they might do.”

  “They threatened us?” Nell almost shouted. Josh, still holding her hand, squeezed it.

  “Not us. You. She said … ” Mrs. Thomas glanced at the paper but read nothing off it; she was avoiding looking directly at Nell. “She said they’ve always protected their little brother, and, as angry as they are, she wouldn’t want to be you.” With that, Mrs. Thomas looked again at Nell. “Tempting as vengeance is, can you pursue it if there’s danger?” She gave a bare nod of her head towards Josh and Lizzie.

  Nell was silent, her outrage unspeakable—at least in words she could use in front of Mrs. Thomas, Josh, and Lizzie. Finally she said, “How dare she? A hint of a threat and I’m supposed to back down? Let him get away with his drunken murder?”

  “What do you gain and what do you lose?” Mrs. Thomas asked, the same words, the same cadence, that had so often come out of Thom’s mouth.

  Seeing the echo of her dead husband in his mother took Nell to the hollow place where anger and grief seemed unquenchable. She burst out, “I lose my self-respect, I lose my chance to live in a moral world, I lose the rule of law if it can be overcome by a whisper, I lose … ” She faltered. I lose Thom’s memory if it can be so easily sold away. She didn’t say that to Mrs. Thomas. Nell continued, her voice harsh with fury: “What do I gain? The illusion of safety. Let’s make the streets safe for drunk drivers. It can be Josh or Lizzie next time. Besides, it’s the state vs. Jones, not Nell McGraw vs. Jones.” But she was the state’s star witness. If she decided not to cooperate, the case would be hard to prove.

  No one spoke. Finally Nell broke the silence. “I’m not angry at you, Mother. I know that you’ve just been tapped as the messenger. But I am angry at … ” At everything, certainly at Thom’s death and the shallow people who didn’t want their mistakes to interrupt their lives, but also at living a life that was Thom’s dream, having to raise their two children alone, the implacable changes that had slammed into her life.

  “I understand, but I thought you should know,” Mrs. Thomas said in the cool voice of hers that never let Nell know what she was really thinking.

  “I do want to know. Tell me if she calls again. But it doesn’t change things,” Nell answered firmly.

  There seemed little else to say. Mrs. Thomas picked up her purse and with a hug and a kiss from Josh and Lizzie, and a brief, stiff hug for Nell, she left.

  Lizzie revealed the real reason for coming out of her room. “Mom, what’s for supper? I’m starving.”

  “Mary’s Pizza,” Nell answered. That would make Josh and Lizzie happy and it would get her out of cooking. It would also give her a chance to soak in the tub while waiting for the food to arrive.

  While Josh and Lizzie were in the kitchen making the momentous decision of which toppings to get, Nell slipped behind the bar in the den and poured herself a generous dollop of Scotch. She put the drink in the bathroom before heading back to the kitchen to give Lizzie the money for the pizza. She told them to be vigilant for the sound of approaching food.

  We now worry so much about each other, Nell thought as she started the bath running. She added water from the tap to the Scotch, then took a long swallow. One week after Thom had died, and four days after the funeral, she’d drunk herself into oblivion. It had been a moment of sheer self-absorbed self-pity. She’d thought Josh and Lizzie were safely in bed and sat in the living room, refilling her drink time and again, attempting to slip into a void that didn’t have sharp knives everywhere she turned: the desk in the corner with invitations replied to for events they would never attend together, a bed that seemed too empty and the groggy moments when she reached for him, the sailboat-pattern dishes he had liked so much—all the little details and moments that had been their life together were still so present in this house. In that lonely hour, Nell couldn’t bear to look at them. So she’d refilled her glass again. But Josh and Lizzie weren’t asleep enough to ignore her dropping the glass on the kitchen floor. They’d come running out of their rooms, too keenly aware that people close to them could get hurt to ignore the harsh shattering of glass. Nell was too drunk to hide it even from her children.

  Lizzie had simply wailed, “Mom, I can’t believe you’ve done this!” and stormed back to her room. Josh had silently cleaned up the mess even while Nell told him to leave it until morning.

  The next day, Nell had simply said, “I’m sorry, I just fell apart. It won’t happen again.”

  Now they worried about one another. Too much? What was too much worry? Josh and Lizzie would worry if they saw Nell take a drink. She would worry about them worrying. Mom was all they had left and if Mom couldn’t function … She took another sip, then stripped off her dirty clothes and stepped into the tub, with the Scotch carefully placed on the floor. Sometimes it felt like the days were made of these fragile moments—her mother-in-law stopping by, wanting to take a drink after a long day. These should be small moments in an average day, but now they had long shadows.

  Nell took the final sip as she heard the doorbell ring. She quickly got out of the tub, rinsed the glass, and brushed her teeth, then threw on clean sweatpants and a sweatshirt before joining her kids for supper.

  Halfway through the pizza, Lizzie looked sharply at Nell. “Mom, are you okay?” she asked.

  “Fine,” Nell ans
wered. “Just tired.” The Scotch had mellowed her out, she realized, enough that Lizzie noticed.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Nell answered, a testiness creeping into her voice. “Just tired,” she said with a ring of finality.

  “Okay, whatever,” Lizzie answered.

  Josh started talking about a TV show he’d recently seen about shipwrecks in the Gulf. Nell was too tired to do more than listen, trying to nod attentively, but couldn’t do what she should do, which was not leave her young son the burden of being family peacemaker. When Josh paused in his story, Lizzie stood up and asked if she could finish eating while watching TV. Nell nodded, adding that Josh could also go and watch. It had been one of the family rules, that they would eat together.

  That night Nell’s sleep was troubled with thoughts of old bones hidden in the woods and new threats from a drunk and his family. And the scrutiny of her children.

  four

  They woke to a downpour. Nell had mercy on her children and drove them to school instead of sending them on the bus. After watching long enough to ensure they didn’t melt in the dash inside, she headed to the office of the Pelican Bay Crier.

  Pelican Bay was an old Mississippi Gulf Coast town, and its center was clustered around a green square—or rectangle, really—with the requisite statues of Civil War generals. Confederate, of course. The old county courthouse, long past its use and now containing high-end retail shops of the quaint sort, sat at one end; the sprawling new city hall complex occupied the other. The Crier building was situated halfway between, on one of the long sides of the rectangle. Other buildings clustered nearby, mostly professional offices for law and accounting. The library sat across the square.

  It was a very picturesque setting, although what it gained in beauty, it lost in practicality. There was a narrow one-lane road around the square, with deliberately high curbs to ensure that no cars dared to park on the green. Since it wouldn’t do to have a parking lot marring this pristine scene, parking spaces were tucked off in inconvenient places. The ones the Crier staff used were hidden behind city hall, convenient for the workers there but a long walk for everyone else. Nell could cut through city hall, but that still left her half a long side away from the Crier’s front door.

  By the time she reached the ten steps leading up to the paper’s massive oak door, her feet were soaked. Given that most of her staff worked newspaper hours, not school hours, she was the first one in. Fumbling to unlock the door only gave the rain one last chance at her.

  Nell flipped on lights as she hastily tossed her umbrella in the stand. It dripped copiously, as if saying “see, I did keep a lot of water off you.” A quick glance at her appointment book told her this would be a busy day. The mayoral election was coming up, so despite her lament to Kate about slow news, there were many events vying for the front page. It just didn’t feel like news because the election was almost a done deal. Hubert Pickings, the current mayor, had little chance of losing. The talents and abilities of Mayor Pickings sorely tempted Nell to write an editorial about the benefits of term limits.

  She also wanted to follow up on the bones. Two skeletons meant two missing people. Someone somewhere had wondered what happened to them, reported their disappearance. The Crier’s archives—conveniently located downstairs—seemed a good place to start.

  Thom’s grandfather had either had the foresight or the luck to buy a bigger building than was needed for the first few decades of the paper’s life. One of the older structures in Pelican Bay, it had been the city hall in the early 1900s. When the city hall outgrew the space after the second world war and moved to its new digs, Thom’s grandfather had bought the building. And because the town square was built on the highest ground, there was enough elevation for basements, which was unusual for this part of the Gulf coast. The Crier had a large one, which served as its “morgue.” The basement also contained a space, still called the darkroom, for the computers and printers the staff used for photos.

  The size and location of the Crier building worked well. Reporters had quick access not only to the paper’s archives, but to city hall and all it contained: the mayor’s office, the offices of the aldermen, the rest of the usual administrative offices, and the police station. The modern courthouse, less conveniently, was situated on the outskirts of town.

  Nell knew it would help things to have a better idea of how long the bones had been buried, but she wasn’t going to wait until the expert from LSU arrived. She picked up the phone to call Kate but realized it was not yet eight thirty and the bike store didn’t open until ten. She guessed Kate’s home number was the same one her uncle had had, but her request wasn’t urgent enough to disturb Kate’s morning. Plus, Nell had to admit, much as she’d enjoyed—no, needed—the field trip yesterday, she still felt too consumed by grief to reach out for new friends. Calling Kate at home was too close to offering a friendship she didn’t feel up to pursuing.

  She sat at her desk, but her vision was caught by the shaft of gray light cutting across Thom’s desk. I have to do something about it, Nell thought. In the past weeks she had opened the drawers and started to sort through them, but it was too hard to simply place the memories in boxes or throw them out.

  Nell swiveled so his desk was firmly out of her sight. She started making up a list of assignments. Jacko was a digging-in-old-records hound. That was the easy choice. He was young, barely out of college, still with the dewy skin of a boy turning to a man and the eagerness of one who had not yet stumbled and fallen hard. He was also slight, about Nell’s height, with blond hair and blue eyes, the kind of looks that would turn him into a teen heartthrob if he sang or acted. The bone story was hers, but he would be a great assistant on the research end. Carrie she would send off to campaign events. Carrie was pretty and young, and well aware of it. Her hair was streaked with blond highlights, making it more than just brown. She tended to wear clothes that emphasized her cleavage and small waist. She’d looked great on paper, but she was turning out to be Nell’s problem child while Jacko was the find. Carrie could be good but she was high maintenance, needing a lot of direction and feedback.

  Jacko’s assignment was easy. Nell could just tell him to find anything that might relate to two people missing years ago.

  For Carrie, she couldn’t just say, “Go cover the most interesting of the campaign events.” She would have to suggest to Carrie where to go, what to look for, and even hint at questions.

  Nell glanced over the list of events. What would have been the easy one, a picnic in the square, seemed unlikely given the downpour. That was too bad, because candidate E. Everett Evens was a lively character. He was running on what Nell called the Gone-With-the-Wind platform. He wanted to restore the good old days; not that he specifically named slavery or lynching or women being unable to vote, but those seemed the eras he harkened back to. He could be counted on to say things like, “Back then we didn’t have teenage pregnancy, homosexuality didn’t exist, the races knew their place, and women were happy doing their Godly duty of raising children and taking care of their men.” She wondered if he would take the rain as a sign of whom God intended to vote for.

  Another candidate, Marcus Fletcher, was speaking to the local chapter of the NAACP that night. His campaign had been low-key, as if he recognized that, no matter what his qualifications, Pelican Bay being sixty-four percent white made it unlikely a black man would win the mayor’s race. That was a story waiting to be written, Nell thought; not about one man’s political ambitions but the whole fabric of how the races in this town interacted, what had changed since the civil rights movement. And what hadn’t. Nell remembered the hardware store manager’s treatment of the two black boys. That was out in the open; what happened in hidden places?

  Like the woods. Nell suddenly remembered reading about the search for Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, the three civil rights workers killed in northern Mississippi. The searchers had fou
nd a number of other bodies in the woods: the black men—and women—whose lives were considered cheap and easy to throw away.

  Nell suddenly shivered. That could tear this town apart. If that was what had happened to them, if they had died from that hatred.

  Nell turned her attention to the more mundane and safe thoughts of where she would send Carrie. Somehow the local NAACP meeting didn’t sound like the best place. I’ll go, Nell decided. The paper didn’t need to mirror the narrow-mindedness of the town.

  This decision would also mollify Carrie, as that left her covering the only real candidate, Hubert Pickings, the current mayor. Nell considered him a drab, humorless man with an IQ lower than his belt size. Although he had quite a pot belly, that still didn’t give him the intelligence to govern a real town. The best that could be said was nothing disastrous had happened in the last four years.

  First on the schedule was the mayor giving a scouting troop an award for cleaning up part of the beach. It was at the Legion Hall and had the kind of buffet dinner he liked to linger at. Kids and no questions from the press was about the perfect event for him. Carrie could handle that. Nell hastily scribbling some question ideas that Carrie might be able to flirt her way into asking. She didn’t think Pickings would really answer them, but her hope was he would say something inane enough to put on the front page. His cronies would accuse her of being a biased liberal intent of furthering her agenda. If being liberal was telling the truth, then they were right. Thom’s father had said that even-handedness was pissing off everyone.

  She put checks next to some of the other events on his schedule—not even Carrie deserved to have to go to them all—that also seemed good ones to cover. She’d have to trust Carrie would follow through.

  Nell heard the front door open, a heavy thump as if something had been tossed into the center of the room, then the door slamming shut. She sat for a moment but heard no footsteps.