American Ghost (30 page)

She was cut off by the chirp of the BlackBerry. A glance at the call number brought a flash of her old indomitable smile. “See?” On answering, she went in search of a pen.

She found one on a side table and scribbled something in a margin of a scrap of paper that she silently passed to Sam:
Temple B'nai Israel, Albany. M. S. Lens March 1893–October 1938.

It was Sam's turn to be flabbergasted. “They buried him in New
York
?” he whispered.

Jolie lowered the phone to mouth
Georgia,
then ended the conversation with a murmur of praise and a heartfelt “Thank you, baby. You're the best. Give yourself a raise.”

When she was done, she hit the end button and held her hands wide, a magician completing her finale. Sam was dumbfounded. “How the hell did you do that? My grandfather searched sixty years.”

Jolie made light of the small miracle, but her face was lit with that
old pleaser satisfaction. “There aren't many temples hereabouts, and the Sisterhood in Albany—they're the queen bees.”

“Jesus,”
he breathed. “Whoever heard of a synagogue in Albany, Georgia? How can I be sure it's him?”

Jolie was used to the disbelief of mere mortal citizens when she displayed a bit of bureaucratic magic. “You can't, unless you dig him up and do a DNA—and good luck with the temple on that. And go easy on the South Florida myopia when you talk to them. They were lighting candles in Albany when Miami was a cow town.”

Sam looked at his watch. “It's eleven o'clock. I might run up there right now. Want to come? It's been a long time since I walked a graveyard with a beautiful woman,” he confided, happy to be back on the same team, and still, despite all good sense, unable to quit being so impressed with the power suit and long expanse of hosed leg. He was ready to forgive and forget and just be good pals again, maybe take a trip out to the old camper that night, just for old times' sake.

Jolie seemed less hostile to the prospect than she had before, almost regretful. “It's second Tuesday. The commission meets at four thirty, and we've got a little zoning war brewing.”

He took it with good grace. “Ah, well, I guess enormous family mansions do not pay for themselves.” He was about to try to nail a date to do something fun and nostalgic together—say, go through her father's shed looking for a pair of severed fingers, or try to talk a temple into disinterring a seventy-year-old corpse—when a phone rang in the back of the house.

Jolie held up a hand. “I need to get that. Faye only calls the house for emergencies.”

She hurried to the kitchen, to the wall phone by the door, and answered without qualification, “Hey. I'm on my way.”

A man responded in a thick country voice, slightly raised, as if trying to shout above the miles. “Sister Hoyt? Sister
Hoyt
?”

At the use of her old church name, Jolie knew instantly that something was amiss and pulled the cord as far as it would go, to the back door. “Yes sir, this is she.”

“Well, this is Brother
Echols,
” he bellowed, “from Cottondale,” the name not ringing a bell till he added in that hardy country voice, “Sorry to be calling sa early, but the sheriff got up with me. Seems like they had a little accident last night at the church. You didn't go lightin' any lanterns, or candles, or sech, when you'se poking around thet old shed, did you?”

“No, sir.” She pulled the cord around the corner to the pantry for privacy. “The electricity was still on.”

“Well, maybe it was faulty wiring. Fact is, the place burned to the ground last night—or early this morning. Firemen couldn't tell which.”

“The
church
?” she whispered, though his voice was hardy.

“Naw, shug, just the shed. Third tractor we lost this year. Don't know what State Farm'll make of
thet
. Did you git yer Deddy's thangs?”

Jolie couldn't answer for a moment. She stood there in her big coat, her back to the door, and finally whispered, “No, sir. Not all of it,” her voice so blank that the old preacher instinctively went into a professional comfort-mode and asked if he could do anything, or call anyone, as if she'd lost someone in a car accident. “I wouldn't worry it,” he said. “Old place was ready to fall in. Yo brother called, too.”

Jolie straightened up at the news. “Carl called?
Why?
”

The old preacher seemed surprised at the question. “Why, same as you—wantin' the keys to thet old shed. You don't thank he'd been careless enough to strike a match out there? An old farm boy like himself?”

He said it as an insider's joke, as Carl had in his sermons taken to painting himself as something of a bumbling old farmhand, with many references to mis-sown crops and mis-milked cows and the strange ways of the lowly chicken.

It was part of Brother Echols's rural-preacher shtick and meant to be a joke, though Jolie didn't laugh, but answered in blank honesty, “I don't know, Brother Echols. Did you give 'em to him?”

“Naw, shug. I got the message on the machine. Would you tell him? I tried the number, but couldn't git through.”

She told him she would, then thanked him and hung up quietly,
gathering her purse and taking care to open the door without a sound and slip out onto the stoop, which was cold as an icebox. The frost had held another night, the morning hardly brighter than it had been an hour ago when she took out the breakfast tray, though the carriage house was lit and awake.

Hollis answered on her first knock, his face alight. “Didju find 'em?” he boomed.

Jolie put a finger to her mouth. “Not yet,” she whispered. “I'm going out there now. Need you to do me a favor. Could you run out to Sister Wright's and take her to her son's in Bonifay? Tell her you're a state trooper, or with the EPA. Tell her the chickens polluted her well or something. I don't care what—just git her out of Hendrix.”

“Whut happened?” he asked, his eyes on the strange car in the drive, Sam's state car with yellow tags, which made it look like an official vehicle of the FBI.

“No time,” she told him as she headed toward her car. “Just go out and see to Sister Wright. Tell her I sent you,” she whispered.

Hollis called for her to stop, but she waved him away. He went back for his keys and hot-stepped it down the gravel to his Lincoln. He popped the trunk and felt around in the tire well for a gun he kept with his spare—a good-size Glock that he took to the bank when he made his weekly deposits. He checked the clip, then flagged Jolie in the drive and offered it through her lowered window. “Safety's right there. Nine shots, automatic. Like shooting a cap gun: bam, bam,
bam
.”

Jolie stared at it in horror. “I will
not,
” she breathed. She kept her eyes on the house. “And keep Sam here as long as you can. Tell him I got called out on a city emergency, or the pipes burst at the treatment plant, or—I don't know. Think of
something,
” she begged, “but do
not
let him go to Hendrix.”

She was gone at that, whipping around and onto First Avenue, Hollis striding behind, the Glock in hand, shouting, “Take the
gun
!”

J
olie didn't pay Hollis so much as a blink of attention, but drove like the wind down the narrow country highway to Hendrix. She didn't slow till she swung into the drive of the parsonage, which was as weed-grown and deserted as it had been the afternoon before, the only sign of the night's excitement a twin set of churned ruts from the fire truck, which circled the parsonage, then exited at the road.

She followed them to the corner and stopped short at this new view of the backyard, strewn with rock and glass and blasted, splintered trees. The shed itself was simply gone, burnt to its limestone foundation, the skeleton of the tractor sitting right where she'd left it, in a waist-high pile of rubble, ghostly and blackened, sending up a dozen plumes of smoke.

She didn't get out or go any farther than the edge of the house, just felt for her BlackBerry and called Faye and (mercifully) got Tamara. She left her a message of where she was and when she'd be back—in time for the meeting, but not before, and begged her to call Hugh. “Tell him I'll see him tonight, after the meeting. Maybe I'll be back before,” she hedged, though Tamara was having none of it.

“Where
are
you? Something's cooking around here—Faye all but wringing her hands.”

Jolie put her off with a quick “I'll tell you when I see you. Just call Hugh—and listen, baby, call my brother, Carl—”

“Oh, he called, or his wife did. Called fifty times. You all right? Because something really is cooking around here. I don't know what, but something is
up
.”

“Later,” Jolie promised, then hung up and tried both Carl's and Lena's cell phones, but got no answer. She left Carl another message, and with time running out, wheeled around in the yard and headed to her uncle Ott's—his old house in town, on a side street by the post office.

She didn't bother to get out as it was clearly vacant—the curtains drawn, the chimney not blowing smoke as it would on such a cold day had Ott been home. She figured he was at the fish camp, which was damn inconvenient, as it was still famously primitive, only accessible by boat, without phone lines or indoor plumbing.

Fortunately, Vic Lucas had expanded the KOA to offer half-day boat rentals, nothing fancy, just small jon boats with kickers for tourists who were willing to sign a liability waiver for the privilege of spotting an alligator in the wild. Jolie parked at the old concession stand and negotiated a half-day rental with the skinny teenage clerk Vic had hired for the slow season. While he was gassing it up, she went to her car and searched through the clutter of junk in her trunk, looking for whatever stray sweatshirts or socks or gloves she might have.

She found a few mismatched socks that she stuffed in her pockets, and a thick, old Mexican blanket covered in sand that she and Lena took for the kids to sit on at the beach. She wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl and was digging around for a pair of leather florist gloves when a car jerked to a halt in the gravel behind her. The two-tone, dove-gray Cadillac Seville, the slope-backed kind they used to make in the mideighties, was one Hugh had taken a liking to and never traded in.

He got out briskly, dressed in the loungewear he sported at his river house—a maroon wool dressing gown over a pair of broad, gray-striped pajamas. The result was almost vaudevillian, though his face was anything but amused.

“My gosh, you scared me,” she groused, though he ignored her irritation, his still-handsome face drawn in lines of old-school, sniffling impatience.

“You're actually taking another sick day while the city braces itself for a lawsuit, and going off on some”—he paused, having a difficult time laying hands on cutting-enough words—“ghoulish, graveyard jaunt.”

Jolie was running out of patience with his high-handedness and returned to her glove search. “Did you come here for a reason? Or just to nag the hell out of me?”

“I
came,
” he answered sonorously, “to see if I could talk sense into you before you allowed yourself to be drawn into some pointless, political shakedown, by people who are not connected to your city or your influence, in any way.”

“They're connected to Hendrix,” she began, but was cut off by his noise of outrage.

“Oh? And it was the Hendrix city hall they traipsed into, with their nonsensical demands?” He moved around so he could face her, stooped low over the trunk, his voice lowered for emphasis. “They are banking on your guilt, and no more concerned with historic injustice than the man in the moon. I am frankly amazed you allowed yourself to be drawn in. Henry Kite's been dead seventy years. Let him
lie
.”

Jolie was taken aback by Hugh's voicing of the dreaded name, which was anathema to the sons of the men who'd made the bulk of their fortune deforesting the swamps and maritime woodlands of Old Florida. They were educated men, the sons of planters and governors and bankers, who read books and went abroad and feared neither ghosts nor curses, sheriffs, or legal recourse. They traded in human bondage as surely as their planter fathers, but were civic-minded, building charming downtown parks, and enormous, amber-planked houses from wood plucked from the hearts of their finest groves. They were gentlemen and, among themselves, realistic about the unsavory aspects of their industry. They hired brutality if they themselves did not possess it and never thought to stand in the dock for any of it, till shortly after midcentury when the
wretched big dailies in South Florida began their digging. At first, it was more annoying than anything, till the unexpected drama of Rosewood spun out, proving against all good reason that dead men could indeed rise from the grave and, in the stories of their scattered daughters, find their voice and
talk,
and walk among the living.

She blinked at Hugh in wonder. “I can't believe you even said the name.”

In the silence that followed, the skinny clerk whistled from the dock, signaling the boat was ready. Jolie waved her thanks and slammed the trunk.

“I don't have a choice, Hugh. I'm in too far—”

“Of course you have a
choice,
” he snapped with rare bad manners as she headed for the dock, blanket in hand, with Hugh following close behind, still talking. “. . . you have a city to run and a lawsuit pending, and a very qualified city attorney to handle these sorts of things.”

Jolie didn't answer till she was on the dock, eyeing the little boat. “So this was what it was all about? Selling me your house? Getting me in politics? To keep me
busy,
and out of Hendrix?”