American Ghost (23 page)

“Didn't thank you did,” Hollis rejoined quickly, touchy at the hint of big-city smart-assness when speaking of so sacred a subject. “But somebody does. I'd like to talk to your
sources.
”

“In
Hendrix
? What makes you think they're even alive? I mean, I wrote that thing in '96. They were old, even then.”

It was Hollis's turn to be annoyed, as he'd assumed it was recent work, a stupid assumption, now that he thought of it. In a rare show of temper, he rapped his knuckles on the desktop.

“Damn,”
he whispered, staring out the smudged window at a depressingly urban stretch of pebbled roof and treeless parking lot. He considered it a moment, till the single obvious lead came to him. “I can talk to Jolie Hoyt. She still lives there. She might know.”

At the mention of the name, Lense's face went suddenly, carefully blank. “Maybe, but Hoyt's a common name out there. Half the county is a Hoyt,” he explained, though the evasion was obvious. He proved it in his next breath, when he asked with great, guarded nonchalance, “Were they really involved in the Kite murder?”

“
Hell
yes, they were involved. Everybody in Hendrix was—Cleary, too. Doan ever let 'em tell you different.”

Mr. Lense didn't argue the point, but retrieved a paper clip from his desktop that he unbent absently. “Which ones?”

“Don't know no names. I'se a kid when Mama put us on the train. My brother Chollie—he remembers more. Done things to Kite I wouldn't have done to a dog. You know thet?”

Sam Lense kept his eyes on his paper clip, thoughtful, a little grim, and shrugged to indicate that, yes, he had heard rumors to that effect. “Yeah, but Hendrix was always a Red Stick town, and Florida aborigines often tortured their enemies—dismembered them ceremonially. I think Kite might have fallen into some sort of deep-seated, archetypal pattern.”

“A
whut
?”

Lense refused to repeat it. “Never mind. Well, shit,” he said after a glance at his watch. He came to his feet in dismissal. “Well, as much as I'd love to sit and chat about ritual mutilation, I got a quarterly meeting and budget pending.”

Hollis had noticed that the empty offices had come back to life, a steady stream of clerks and secretaries and staffers drifting across the hall to the conference room. He saw it was time to be leaving and came to his feet and extended another hand to Mr. Lense, to thank him for his time.

Mr. Lense accepted with another firm shake and lowered his voice. “And I'd keep to the main roads in Hendrix, if I was you—wouldn't go down there alone unless I had to.”

He said it without macho swagger, in a low-key note of caution, offered so seriously that Hollis paused in the door to ask, “It's still that way?” The comfort of the old B&B had made him think it might be otherwise.

Sam Lense met Hollis's eye a moment in answer, then took a step back into his office and yanked his shirt from his waistband with impatient hands, exposing an intricate tracery of well-healed scars, now faded to a pearl gray. Hollis was retired military and knew a rifle wound when he saw it.

“Hendrix?”
he murmured in a small, wary voice, as if the town were a physical entity, capable of evil intent.

“A stray shot by a poacher on the river.” Mr. Lense dropped his shirt and went about tucking it in. “Or that was the official verdict. If I was you, I'd go to the archives and do my legwork there. The Hoyts”—he paused—“they're a slippery bunch.”

“Including Jolie?”

Mr. Lense looked pained at the question, but was grudgingly positive. “She's all right—safer than Hendrix, at least.” He tucked in his shirt as he walked Hollis to the elevator. “Lives in Cleary, I hear—somewhere downtown. She's probably at work this time of day, shouldn't be too hard to find.”

Hollis was glad of the tip as he'd not got around to sniffing out his landlady's day job. “She work at the bank?” he asked as he punched the down button, opening the scuffed metal doors.

“Try City Hall. The mayor's office.”

Hollis raised his eyebrows. “She works for the mayor?”

For the first time, he got a ghost of a smile from the hardworking Mr. Lense, who leaned in and dropped his voice to confide, “She
is
the mayor.”

“Of Cleary?” Hollis cried, more shocked at this than he'd been at the sight of Sam's chest. “A Hoyt?”

“From Hendrix.” Sam grinned, then added in an even slier aside, “You ever watch televangelists—you know, the God channel, on TV?”

“Never,” Hollis murmured.

“Watch it tonight, around eight. Might see a familiar face.”

J
olie Hoyt's meteoric rise in local politics was neither as melodramatic nor torrid as either Hollis Frazier or Sam had imagined it to be from afar. She actually walked a well-trod path blazed by the clubwomen of previous generations, who'd proved their mettle in political deal-making on beautification and temperance boards across the South. They were perfumed, be-gloved, well connected, and ruthless, and the bane of any elected official who crossed them.

Jolie emulated them as closely as she did every other mother figure in her life and took the plum job of mayor after paying her dues in the ordinary way, with a long stint on the Historic and Beautification Board, and back-to-back terms as a rare female city commissioner. Her rise had been quick, but hard-won, as she had no deep roots in Cleary proper to recommend her, other than Hugh, who alienated as many voters as he won with his smart mouth and condescending ways. Her real base was her old pals in the Garden Club set, who were her great and steadfast supporters as she transformed the faded, deserted little downtown into a well-known stop on the local antiques circuit. The oasis of cobblestoned streets and graceful Drake elms had won a Florida Main Street Award, and a bit of national attention.

After four years in office, it was still her crowning achievement, though she'd grown into the job in time and learned to satisfy the conflicting
agendas of her varied constituency, which was rural enough to still be rigidly divided by race and economics. White Cleary was still numerically the majority, though they were increasingly split along the blue-state, red-state divide. The latter was working class, churchy, and pro-business in any form, be it farming, nuclear waste, or bringing in prisons. They liked homeschooling, guns, and Fox News and were generally supportive of Jolie in that she was churchy, pro-jobs, and laughed at their jokes. But she was a slightly better fit with what served as blue-state in Cleary—a vocal, politically correct handful of young lawyers and doctors and artistes who weren't locally grown, but had come to the area for the rural charm and had a great commitment to preserving a small-town aesthetic. They went practically insane at the cutting of the most rotten urban oak.

The locals called them
yuppies,
and they called the locals
rednecks,
and the white vote usually split between them, leaving the city government to be largely decided by the hitherto ignored sector of Southern politics that was black Cleary. This was a sizable base, the third generation of the slaves of a few local plantations, and the old turpentine camps, who had memories as long as the Hoyts, maybe longer. They were children of the civil rights era and had only voted for a Hoyt after Jolie had done the one thing that no white candidate had done before: she'd taken the fight to the churches.

That was her home turf, after all, and the month before her first election, she'd appeared at any church that would have her and spoken for three minutes at the end of the service. She hadn't tried to avoid the obvious, but admitted that, yes, she was a Hoyt from Hendrix, “. . . and I know that out there in your cemetery, the saints of God who have gone before are rolling in their graves this minite. Which is the reason I'm here: to tell you that I ain't a racist and I never was, and if your children went to school with me, they know that—you ask 'em, they'll tell you. Neither was my brother, Carl. He was an
idiot,
but he wasn't a racist. And if you're worried I won't give the black citizens of Cleary a fair shake, well, take a good look around the city offices next time you pay
your electric bill, and tell me how many black folk you see working there now, in the cable company or water treatment, or on the commission. You ask yourself how less represented can you get than you are now. If you're ready for a change, so am I.”

That was her basic message, straight and to the point, and with such a blunt appeal she had taken office and kept it two terms, running City Hall much as her father had run his church, with equal parts affection and exasperation, and a keen understanding of the imperfectability of man. There at first, she had taken pains to explain to everyone, in Hendrix and Cleary alike, that Hugh was her
business,
not her
romantic,
partner.

But as the years went by, she had mellowed in the way that all Southerners do and had pretty much embraced her reputation as a hustling country girl who'd worked her way out of poverty by dint of a good pair of legs and a nose for aligning herself to the right menfolk. That reputation, like everything else in her life, was true as far as it went (it just didn't go very far). She was never tempted to wax too nostalgic over her lost childhood, as Carl did, and aside from the occasional trip to El Bethel to attend the odd funeral or visit one of the old Sisters, she no longer concerned herself with its mysteries, till the Frazier brothers laid the matter on her doorstep.

•  •  •

When she left the carriage house that morning, she went straight to her office at City Hall, which, thanks to her superior skills in snagging beautification grants, was housed in a forties-era bungalow a block off Main Street. Jolie found it hopping as usual on a second Monday, as the electric bills had gone out the Friday before and such was the compactness of Cleary's citizenry (not to mention their cheapness) that the smallest infraction merited a phone call to City Hall, or in a few cases a visit to wave the offending bill in the city staff's face and demand divine justice.

Jolie didn't stop and chat as she usually did, but went straight to her
office at the end of a long hall, which had once been a closed-in sun-porch and still faced a bit of original garden. She loved the view, even in the doldrums of winter, but had yet to figure out a way to properly heat the room, thanks to the bank of drafty double-paned windows. Her fabulous tiger-oak desk—a gift from Hugh on her first day in office—was cold as a block of ice, and without taking off her coat, she dropped her purse in her desk drawer and went down the hallway to the city manager's office at the far end of the house.

Tad was the junior member of the staff, a tech genius with a degree in public service, who was putting a wife through law school at FSU. He was off on Mondays, his office a study in creative chaos, though his computer was a Mac Pro, loaded with every spy, search, and storage device known to man. Jolie applied the passwords and began punching, searching the web for the irritating piece of character assassination that had fallen into her lap that morning at breakfast.

She thought she'd find it buried in some deeply encrypted file in some code-accessed database and spent the morning skimming individual files on the state archives. She uncovered much of the same old ground on the Hendrix Lynching, including the photo of Kite, tied to a tree, hanging between heaven and earth. This very image was often used as a stock photo to illustrate the practice of lynching, and Jolie paid it little mind, clicking quickly on till she came upon a poorly designed website on the Five Civilized Tribes, garishly colored, bracketed by a banner headline that flittered from ads for local real estate and cures for erectile dysfunction.

The author's name was proudly displayed:
Samuel B. Lense, the University of Florida,
the adjoining essay obviously culled from his great Indian study, with no clue from where or how the data had been drawn. It was just a disjointed pile of anecdotes, numbers, and hard history, occasionally divided by bold-faced subtitles, as if someone had scanned a file cabinet into a database. All of it was familiar—old Hendrix tales of Camp Six and the census, graveyard notes and tombstone inscriptions—until she came upon a heading provocative enough to
make the hair on her neck stand up: “The Illustrious Hoyt Tribe of Hendrix.”

She could feel the color rising in her cheeks as she read, this section much more casual and chatty, suggesting an immediate image of Sam lounging around the little camper in his underwear and dissecting the Hoyts with relish. There was a page or two of outlandish theory on the origin of the term
Little Black Dutch,
similar to the smart little explanation he'd given her that first night at the café. Much was made of the census and where the Hoyts appeared on it. Then the narrative broke off and was subtitled a final time: “The Hendrix Lynching.”

“Son of a
bitch,
” Jolie murmured.

She expected an in-depth exposé of the Kite murder, but the section was brief and primarily dealt with odd details about the turpentine side of the Hammond Lumber Company, Camp Six. She vaguely remembered Sam's being fixated on it, back in the day, and here he did indeed wax eloquent about how awful life must have been there, his distaste seasoned with a good bit of Olde European Socialism that made Jolie roll her eyes, even as she read (liberal
and
exploitive: now there was a guy!) till the final paragraph:

In 1938 Hendrix became a name of infamy, after a particularly gruesome lynching of a local man named Henry Kite, who was accused of murdering a shop owner in cold blood, plunging the area into four days of racial violence where five people were hanged, including the mother and sister of the accused, the latter heavily pregnant.