Sleep Softly. Gwen Hunter
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turned off the basement lights, the door behind him open. The only light downstairs now came from the window into the pink room. It cast a soft glow in the hallway.
From the kitchen he heard off-key humming, familiar, congenial. Still silent, he set the hammer on the step and carefully stood, locking the door behind him. Again he pocketed the key. Pasting a smile on his face, he went to the kitchen.
After Special Agent Julie Schwartz left, I stood at the kitchen sink and washed dishes by hand. Neither of us had eaten all day, so I had whipped up cheese omelets with bacon, and we’d eaten while she’d questioned me. The meal obviously wasn’t by the book, but we both had wanted to get the day and the interview over with, so Julie had compromised.
I put the plates in the drainer and turned to the skillet and omelet pan. I had a top-of-the-line Kenmore automatic dishwasher, so it wasn’t as if I had to wash them by hand, but my body was exhausted and my brain needed the mindless chore of washing and rinsing. When the last dish was clean and left to airdry on the plastic drainer, I poured myself a glass of wine and walked out to the swing on the screened back porch.
Night was falling. The cop cars were long gone. Jas would be home soon, and Nana and Aunt Mosetta were sure to come by. Even if my lack of sleep hadn’t left me with a sensation of cotton wool between my ears, the coming confrontation would have. The moment Julie had left, I should have gone directly along the path through the woods to Nana’s house. The woman was psychic. She would know when the last cop was gone; Nana knew everything about her land, everything except that a little girl had been buried on it. And what Nana didn’t know, she would spy out through the side porch with the binoculars she had kept there since Jack had died.
In spite of what I knew I should do, I was just too tired. Let them come to me. I sipped the wine, smelled the fresh scent of horse and hay, watched as Johnny Ray let the last mare out into the back pasture, her form moving darkly against the setting sun, bright red on the horizon. Mabel, I figured, from the size and the way she moved, lumbering and just a bit stiff from the day’s ride.
Elwyn was long gone. I hadn’t even seen the horse trainer today, but I was fairly certain the cops had. They had spoken to everyone associated with the land except Jas, and they would get to her tomorrow.
Johnny Ray stumbled and went to his knees while closing the paddock fence, pushed himself back to his feet, using the gate as a prop. Drunk as two skunks. He would sleep it off in the barn tonight.
Could Johnny Ray be the killer? How about Elwyn? Do I have a murderer on the payroll? Jas dated Elwyn for a short time after he came to work here. Did she date a murderer?
It was a silly thought. Johnny Ray was too wasted to carry out a murder except maybe one of drunken passion. If someone tried to take away his bottle before he was ready to let it go, he might do some damage, half by accident as he fell on them. Elwyn was from up north. He lived in town in an apartment. He didn’t know about the family graveyard plot or much of anything about South Carolina. He had Internet access to look up graveyards, and he had enough time off to do any crime he might be capable of. But where would he keep a young girl? In his apartment in DorCity, as locals called nearby Dorsey City? In the tack room in the barn? No. Not Johnny Ray or Elwyn.
“I hope that’s bourbon and you have enough for me.”
I jerked, sending the swing off at a jittery angle and back. “Nana.” I hadn’t heard them walk up. Nana and Aunt Mosetta climbed the steps and walked onto the dark porch. “It’s wine. Let me get—”
“I’ll get my own liquor,” Nana said and moved into the house. She knew her way around as well as I did and she saw better in the dark. The bourbon was kept on hand just for her anyway. I hated the stuff.
“I been telling that old woman she got to give up hard liquor. At her age it be going to kill her,” Aunt Moses said as she levered herself into the heavy captain’s chair she preferred. The chair had wide arms to bear her weight, and its legs splayed out at slight angles to make it steady. The firm cushion I had supplied supported her back and protected her thighs from the wooden seat and was pretty, according to Aunt Moses, a bright floral pattern totally at odds with the rest of the porch.
“I’ll drink if I want to. Stop badgering me. I’ve been badgered enough today by self-important cops not old enough to drink this.” She saluted us with the lowball glass, bourbon straight up, no ice, no water. The very thought made my stomach ache.
“So. Fill us in.” Nana settled into a cushioned deck chair with her denim-clad legs out in front, ankles crossed, her hands warming the glass across her T-shirted middle. Even in the dark, I could tell that she had showered and pulled on tomorrow’s work clothes, her steel-gray hair still wet and curling around her ears.
Aunt Moses pulled her terry-cloth housecoat closer around her shoulders and said, “You badgering the girl you own self. Whyn’t you jest set and be quiet. She tell us in her own time.” When I didn’t respond, Aunt Moses said, “Well?”
I guess that meant my own time was now. I started from the beginning and walked them through my day, through everything I saw and remembered. After my recital, they were silent, the only sound the wind through the trees, the squeak of the swing as I moved it with a toe. “It was pretty awful,” I finished, “and they seem to think it could be a Chadwick who killed her.”
“Ain’t none a my peoples. Ain’t,” Aunt Moses said. “But I answer all they questions and lets ’em look around all they wants. They gots to clear my peoples ’fore they can find the real suspect.”
“She’s been watching CSI reruns. Thinks she can help the cops,” Nana said.
“I can help the police. They sends a real nice black woman to the house to ax me questions. I ’member time when a black woman woulda been cleaning the toilets at the police station. This gal was a special agent with the FBI. She treat me real nice when she ax me questions and I answered her. You was mean and rude to the man who talking to you. I hear that tone on your voice when he axing you questions.”
“The so-called man talkin’ to me was young enough to be my great-grandson and had a disagreeable manner. He never once called me ma’am. My grandsons speak to me without a ‘yes, ma’am’ and a ‘no, ma’am’ and I wouldn’t be polite to them either. I didn’t have to be polite, I only had to answer his questions, that little officious, pipsqueak Yankee.”
I smiled into my wine and wished I had brought the bottle. I caught a whiff of Aunt Mosetta’s latest favorite perfume, night-blooming jasmine, a gift from my daughter for Mother’s Day last year.
“You look all done in, Ashlee,” Nana said.
“I haven’t slept in two days. I’m worn out. In fact, I’m not sure I’m not dreaming right now.”
“You come to your senses about that new forensics job? It ain’t you, girl. It ain’t you.”
“Ash can do that job and any other one she want. I seen how they gather up all the evidence and find the killer. Ash can do that iffn she want.”
Nana shook her head. “Ash has been like a boat with no rudder since Jack died. First trying to run his business, then selling it.”
“She made a fortune. Ash no silly girl.”
“Then leaving the Dawkins County Hospital and going to that new, big hospital in Columbia. Now this forensic stuff. She doesn’t know what she wants. Hasn’t, since finding out Jack had cheated on her with that worthless best friend of hers.”
Something twisted painfully deep inside, burning. It was a familiar pain, one I always felt whenever I remembered that I had lost Jack and my best friend Robyn, all in one fell swoop. Whenever I remembered that he hadn’t loved me as he should. As he’d promised. “I am sitting right here with the two of you, if you’ll remember. And I’m not deaf.” My voice sounded cool and controlled, not as if it were burning a hole in me. “If you’d like me to go inside so you can gossip over me in private, I’ll be happy to.”
“Sounds jist like her mama,