Dream With Little Angels (26 page)

I
wasn't entirely sure what to do. In all the commotion, my mother seemed to have completely forgot about me and, from what I could tell, I was no longer in any danger from either Jesse James or his grandpa on account of one lying close to death in the cornfield and the other being eaten by maggots in the shed behind me while he rotted away in the waning heat of late afternoon.

Officer Jackson's cruiser pulled up. Just like that day at Robert Lee Garner's, he shut down his siren, but left the red and blue lights flashing. “Jesse's in the cornfield, Chris!” my mother yelled to him as she ran to the burned-out husk of the old barn. “I had to put one in the back of his knee. He's unarmed.”

Pausing upon seeing me, Officer Jackson asked, “What're you doing here?”

“Helpin',” I said.

He gave me a dubious look. “Bet you are,” he said, then jogged out to the field, where Jesse James Allen had begun screaming in pain amidst the broken patch of corn.

I once again fell back on my theory that forgiveness came easier than permission and started toward the old barn, reaching it barely after my mother did on account of the cornfield being much farther from it than the new farmhouse.

“Abe!” my mother said in a clipped whisper. “What the hell are you doing? I told you to stay in that goddamn car!”

I was very aware of her gun and remembered quite clearly how she acted the night we caught Carry with the boy in the car, but I wasn't scared. There were some things a kid of eleven years just had to be part of. And I'd come way too far to give up now. I'd never forgive myself if I did. Dewey wouldn't, neither.

I could tell she wanted to give me a speech about listening to her when she told me to do something, but there were far more important things she had to deal with first. So instead, she said, “You are going to get
such
a talking-to when this is all over, let me tell you what. You're turning into your goddamn sister!”

Suddenly I had new admiration for Carry and her change in attitude. It took a lot of guts and bravery to keep up this sort of thing. But I was already heavily invested. There was no turning back.

Besides, from where I stood,
I
was the one who found Grandpa Allen
and
the wheelbarrow. I had played just as much a part in this as she had, possibly even more. Geez, I was even the one who convinced her Mr. Robert Lee Garner was actually innocent. In some ways, I was starting to think, without me, she might never have got this far in her investigation. Of course, that was the old eleven-year-old version of myself talking. I had started noticing lately that there were two different versions of me going on in my body—the little boy who was a lot like Dewey, and another one who was starting to be a lot more grown up.

“Oh my God,” my mother gasped when we entered the dilapidated barn. At one time, it was a three-story structure with a hay loft, but much of it was now gone, mostly due to the fire, the rest due to time. Lengths of wooden boards that once ran along the outside had fallen away, leaving open rectangles to the outside. Those, combined with the gaping holes where doors and windows had once been, allowed the dusty light of the westerly sun to fall eerily through, casting weird patterns surrounded by even stranger shadows around them. It was like walking into the mouth of some sort of deformed clown. In some places, like the back corners, it was near on pitch-black.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case in the center area of the back wall. Tiffany Michelle Yates stood there, her arms stretched straight above her head. Her hands were tied to a metal hook hanging from a thick black chain. The chain went right to the top of the barn, looping over one of the ceiling's crossbeams before coming back down where the rest of it wound around a rusted winch with a red handle. The winch was bolted to the wall barely three feet away from Tiffany.

Her head lulled limply forward. Her black hair, matted with hay and dirt, hung down over her chest. I'm pretty sure my mother and me had the same thought at nearly the same time: We were too late. There was no indication of life in the way Tiffany Michelle hung there. She wore a big, oversized gray T-shirt that came nearly to her knees, and for all I knew, there was not another stitch of clothing on her.

The sun's orange light poured down on her through an oddly shaped hole in the barn's roof, lighting her up in the middle of all that darkness as though she were under a spotlight. It kind of made her look like an angel, and I remembered asking Dewey if he thought Mary Ann Dailey was with the angels now after reading what it had said on her tombstone behind Clover Creek First Baptist.

I hoped Reverend Starks was right and that God didn't see color so that Tiffany Michelle Yates could be with the angels now, too.

“Tiffany?” my mother asked softly. Apparently, she wasn't quite as positive as me about Tiffany's condition.

There was no reaction, though. Tiffany Michelle just continued hanging there from that rusty hook, her entire body limp.

My mother said Tiffany's name twice more, and I think she was about to give up when those strands of black hair moved slightly. “She's alive,” I said, amazed.

“Tiffany,” my mother said again. “It's okay. You're safe.”

Slowly, Tiffany Michelle raised her head and I had to take a step back. It was her eyes. They terrified me. They were wide with fear and looked at us the same way a coyote looks at you when you happen upon it accidentally in the woods. She no longer appeared anything like the little girl with the big ice cream cone and that pink dress. Now she looked like some sort of wild animal.

Silver duct tape covered her mouth. In places, dried blood stained the gray T-shirt hanging over her. It looked like the blood in the wheelbarrow, only not nearly so thick.

My mother took a slow step forward. “Tiffany, honey, it's okay. You're safe now. Jesse James is in custody. He can't hurt you anymore.”

Tiffany's eyes stayed wide.

From her belt, my mother removed her flashlight and played the beam across Tiffany, hesitating only slightly on the trickle of red running down the inside of her left leg. It looked fairly dry, but not nearly as old as the blood on her shirt, and ran all the way down to her toes, which barely managed to touch the hay-covered dirty barn floor. Jesse had tightened the winch just enough to keep her heels elevated. I couldn't imagine how uncomfortable she must have been hanging there like that.

My mind tried remembering back to how pretty she had looked that afternoon on Main Street, with her hair freshly washed and tied back with that thick yellow ribbon. Now she resembled something out of a horror movie. No matter how hard I tried, I could not overlay the two images inside my head.

“Tiffany, can you understand me?” my mother asked, keeping her voice quiet and soft.

Tiffany nodded, her eyes starting to focus normally again.

“Good. Jesse James is in handcuffs. I shot him in the leg. You're safe. He can't hurt you anymore.” She looked straight into Tiffany's eyes and repeated this last part. “He can't hurt you anymore. Do you understand?”

Again, Tiffany nodded. Tears began to well in her eyes.

“I'm going to remove the tape from your mouth,” my mother said. “Is that okay?”

Tiffany confirmed it was.

“This may sting a bit. I'll try to go slow,” my mother said. She went slow enough. The tape left a sticky residue around Tiffany's mouth, and her lips were near on blue in color, but having the duct tape taken off seemed to bring her some relief.

Her chest heaved as she took several deep breaths, but otherwise she said nothing.

“That blood on your leg?” my mother asked. “Are you injured? Or . . .” She trailed off. My mother's blue eyes met with Tiffany's brown ones. They gleamed with an intensity that relayed some sort of information between them I had no way of grasping. But right away, my mother nodded in understanding and, with one more step, came close enough to wrap her arms around Tiffany's head and pull her gently against her chest. “It's okay,” she said, patting the back of the girl's head. “He can't hurt you anymore. It's all going to be okay.”

After a long hug, my mother inspected the winch holding the chain in place. It didn't take her long to figure out how to unlock it and turn the handle so the chain lowered enough that both of Tiffany's feet were flat on the barn floor. Then she removed her knife from her belt and cut the knot free that tied Tiffany Michelle's hands to the hook. Almost immediately, Tiffany's legs gave way and she collapsed. My mother managed to catch her just in time before she landed in the sawdust and dirt covering the wooden floor.

Officer Jackson came in the same way we had. “I've got Jesse James cuffed in the back of my car. I've already read him his rights,” he said. He lowered his voice as he approached us. Tiffany Michelle Yates was still wrapped in my mother's arms. I was starting to feel awkward and in the way.

“How is she?” Officer Jackson asked.

My mother gave him a look similar to the one she'd shared with Tiffany. Again, I didn't understand it, but Officer Jackson replied with, “Jesus Christ.”

“How's Jesse's leg?” my mother asked him.

“He'll live.”

She frowned. “I almost wish I'd aimed higher.”

“No, you don't,” Officer Jackson said. “You did it
right
. And you saved her life.”

“Yeah, well, I should have saved two
more
of them,” she said.

Two dried pools of blood were on the floorboards farther along the wall. “Hey,” I called out. One looked fairly recent—even the hay on the floor in that area was stained a brownish scarlet. The other one, even farther down, wouldn't even have been noticeable if the sun hadn't fallen since we arrived, stretching the odd-shaped span of now golden light far enough to show it. It was old and faded. Years of hay and dirt had all but covered it up except for those places where the floorboards happened to somehow be clean enough to see it. “What're they from?”

Right away, I saw Tiffany Michelle grow tense and look away. She had no desire to think about them stains and I pretty much figured she must know something about them.

My mother examined them with her flashlight. Her face grew even more serious as she looked to Officer Jackson. “Get someone from Satsuma or Franklin down here to do some lab work,” she said. “But my money's on that middle one matching the blood of Mary Ann Dailey.” Tears were in her throat. You could hear them as she continued. “And I bet that far one?” Now the tears were in her eyes as she struggled to finish. “That far one's probably from Ruby Mae Vickers.”

The setting sun had brightened the back corner of the barn enough that Officer Jackson noticed a large butcher knife leaning against the wall. He snapped on a pair of gloves and picked it up carefully by the handle using just two fingers. The blade had been sloppily wiped. Blood still caked its edges. The wooden handle was soaked in it.

Tiffany Michelle gripped my mother harder than ever. She buried her face in my mother's chest as Officer Jackson dropped the knife into an evidence bag.

“I gotta get this girl to the hospital,” my mother said.

Officer Jackson nodded. “One thing, though,” he said. “I'm having some problems followin' all this. I mean, sure, I'll give you Mary Ann Dailey, but Ruby Mae Vickers? Ruby Mae turned up
twelve years ago,
Leah. Jesse James would've been six years old back then. It makes no sense.”

“None of this makes no sense, Chris,” my mother said. “Look around you. What we walked in and found here today, this little girl the way she is”—she pulled Tiffany Michelle in even tighter—“
that
makes no sense. I mean, Christ, what's happened to this world?”

M
y mother didn't say a word about the case for the next few days. Mainly she slept. I think everyone agreed the ordeal had put her close to dying of sheer exhaustion and frustration, so nobody bothered her while she spent most of that time in bed. Uncle Henry didn't even ask a single question about what happened.

Then, four nights later, with my door halfway open, she seemed to get some of her energy back. She'd gone to the station for a couple hours earlier on, and now, as I lay in my bed, I listened to her explain everything that happened to Uncle Henry. A lot of what she told him hadn't made sense to me back at the Allen farm, but hearing it again cleared things up a bit. There were still parts I didn't quite understand, but I resigned myself to the fact that I probably never would completely.

After Officer Jackson took Jesse into custody, a team of officers from Mobile came up and took Jesse James Allen back with them to some hospital in Birmingham, where he was currently under guard and being analyzed by psychiatric experts, or something like that. I wasn't exactly sure what that meant. I mean, I knew that meant he was probably on the floor for mental patients, but usually the people who got sent there were somehow sick in the head. I had known Jesse James Allen when he was still in school, and he always seemed normal to me.

Then I remembered Dewey telling me what his pa had said about Jesse James not being right since the fire. I figured maybe there was some truth to that.

“So,” I heard Uncle Henry ask. “The blood stains. Were they—”

My mother cut him off. “Well, the middle one—the
fresh
one, although I hate sayin' it that way—turned out exactly how I thought. The blood belonged to Mary Ann Dailey. Jesse must've hung her a few feet farther along the wall from where we found Tiffany Michelle, and when it came time, he just slit her throat right there and waited until she bled out.” She took a deep breath. “That's why we didn't find no blood in the truck. Well, that and the fact he used a hay bag to wrap her in before transporting her to where he left the body.” Once again, I could hear tears in my mother's voice. I was getting used to the sound now.

“Seems awfully well thought out to me,” Uncle Henry said. “Especially from what little I know about that kid. Jesse James Allen's always struck me as a bit simpleminded.”

“Me too, Hank. But we found the bag he used. He even knew to wear gloves so he wouldn't leave any prints. We found those, too. They was with the bag.”

“It's almost like he read a how-to book on murderin' or somethin',” Uncle Henry said.

“ 'Cept the problem there is that Jesse James Allen don't know how to read,” my mother said. “Other than real basic stuff.”

“Then, how—” Uncle Henry started, but stopped halfway through his sentence and changed topics. “What about that other blood stain. Did it come from Ruby Mae?”

My mother blew her nose. I assumed she was crying. “We're still waitin' for the official forensic reports, but initial analysis shows a probable match. The blood types are the same, and the team from Mobile have already put the age of the stain around the same time, so I think it's safe to say that it did.” She hesitated, then added, “Poor little Ruby Mae Vickers, hanging there all by herself for three months a dozen years ago.”

“Tiffany Michelle Yates disappeared before Mary Ann Dailey's body showed up. Were they both in that barn at the same time?” Uncle Henry asked. This was a question I hadn't thought of.

“That's something we don't know yet. Tiffany Michelle is in the Alvin Hospital Psychiatric Care Facility. They don't want to push her into answering any questions too quickly. But by the way she buried her face into me when Abe pointed out the blood, and especially her reaction to the knife when Chris picked it up from where it had been leanin' against the wall, I think it's a fair bet they were not only both there, but Jesse killed Mary Ann in front of Tiffany.” Her final words broke into tears. “Can you imagine, Hank? Can you even
imagine?
”

“No, Leah, I can't. Not even for a second. But there's a big element to all this that doesn't make a heckuva lot of sense. I'm sure you've realized this. If that
is
Ruby Mae's blood on the floor of that barn, that means the three cases are connected. But Jesse James Allen . . .”

“Was six years old when Ruby Mae was killed,” my mother said, interrupting him. “That one had everyone ponderin'. But the therapist in charge of interviewing Jesse at the facility in Birmingham has already managed to unroll most of that mystery. Even though it's only been barely three days. You remember, Hank, how six years or so ago, Jesse James Allen stopped going to school?”

“Yeah,” Uncle Henry said. “Right after his family's farmhouse burned down. George Allen needed him on that farm after that and, like I said before, from what I heard, Jesse wasn't too good at school anyway. He was probably much more of an asset to Grandpa George, who was left with nobody 'cept those Mexicans during the harvestin' season.”

“Right,” my mother said.

“And I remember the two of them, George and Jesse, built that new farmhouse entirely by themselves,” Uncle Henry said. “What's this got to do with anythin', Leah?”

My mother didn't correct him about the farmhouse construction. “Well, from what we've gathered so far,” she said, “both George Allen and Jesse's father, James, molested Jesse. They started when he was really young, from about five or so.”

“You're shittin' me.”

“God's honest truth. They didn't stop, neither. It kept on goin' for years. Then, and this is the horrible part—not that the last part wasn't horrible, but this is . . . well . . . unspeakable—when Jesse was six, the two men kidnapped Ruby Mae Vickers and tied her up in the barn, exactly the same way we found Tiffany Michelle Yates, only a little farther down. I reckon they used that same winch and all, only that chain was looped over three or four rafters instead of just the one.”

There was a pause and then my uncle said, “I don't believe it.”

“It gets worse, Hank. For three months, they raped that girl every which way you can imagine. Many times they brought little Jesse in, makin' him watch and even participate while they did it. Then, one day, somethin' happened and they got nervous, I guess, 'bout being caught.”

“I know what happened,” Uncle Henry said. “
You
happened, Leah. They got scared because you refused to let up on that case, and you scared them.”

“Hank,
don't
. Sayin' that is the same as sayin' I killed her.”

“No, sayin' that is sayin' you came a lot closer to savin' her life than you've ever given yourself credit for.”

I listened to another spat of tears before my mother spoke again. “At any rate,” she said, “they got nervous and so they killed her. Slit her throat right there in the barn and let her hang there like a piece of beef until all the blood run out. Oh, Hank, it's just so awful. When she was finished bleeding, they wrapped her in a hay bag, drove her out to Skeeter Swamp in the dead of night, and dumped her beside that willow tree across from Bob Garner's ranch.”

“Jesus,” Uncle Henry said.

“They even made little Jesse come along for the ride, tellin' him if he ever breathed a word of anything that happened regardin' Ruby Mae Vickers to anyone, he'd end up just the same way she did, throat slit and all. Hank, the boy was barely two months out of his sixth birthday. What does somethin' like that do to a six-year-old?”

“Damned if I know, Leah,” Uncle Henry said. “Nothin' good, that's for sure. So I guess this puts Bob Garner in the clear.”

“Yeah, we let him go on Monday. I've never done so much apologizin' in my life. I told him he owes everything to Abe. Without my little boy, he might still be in jail.”

“Abe?” Uncle Henry asked. “What could Abe possibly have had to do with it?”

“That's a long story. I reckon I best let him tell it. You can ask him in the morning.”

“So, what's gonna happen to Jesse James Allen now?”

“He'll be institutionalized for a long while, maybe even the rest of his life. According to the doctor, even Jesse's mother and grandmother knew about the molestin' . . . well, at least about Jesse being molested anyway . . . they just pretended it wasn't happenin'. 'Course that left Jesse with absolutely no one to turn to, nobody he could trust. You put a child in a situation like that, I don't see how he can help but become some sort of sociopath. Then, on top of all that, he literally watches while everyone in his family except his grandfather, who was probably the worst goddamn bastard of the bunch, burn up in a farmhouse fire.”

Mr. Garner told me and Dewey that when the fire happened, the authorities investigating construed it as accidental. Now, listening to everything my mother and Uncle Henry was saying, I thought about poor Jesse James Allen and how scared he must've been growing up in that house, and started wondering how accidental the blaze really was.

“Do you know yet what happened to George Allen? Did Jesse kill him?” Uncle Henry asked.

“No, unfortunately,” my mother said. “I reckon, somehow, there would be a weird sort of justice in it if he had, but the autopsy report said the man died of congestive heart failure over a month ago.”

“And Jesse just stuck him in a tool shed?” Uncle Henry asked, his voice full of disbelief.

“I don't reckon the kid had any idea what to do with him. I'm surprised George Allen didn't end up down by that willow tree, to be honest.”

“I can't imagine,” Uncle Henry said.

“Neither can I. But when you think about it a certain way, it's hard not to feel at least a little bad for Jesse James Allen. He must have been so lonely on that farm after George died. And having to walk by that tool shed every day, knowing his grandpa was inside . . .” She paused. “So, I guess he decided to fix his problem the way he had been taught to do as a kid: Find somebody to make your life less lonely, use them all you can, then get rid of them. He only knew one way to do all that, and so he did it exactly the same way his father and grandpa had done with Ruby Mae Vickers.”

A very long stretch of silence followed, finally broken by Uncle Henry. “Well, I suppose Sheryl Davis will be happy now.”

“Why's that?” my mother asked.

“She'll once again get a chance to enter her strawberry rhubarb pie in the bake-off after all this year. We've still got three weeks until Thanksgiving. Plenty of time to organize the fair.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” my mother said. “I almost want to keep it canceled just out of spite. Some people's priorities never cease to amaze me.”

I started to nod off after that. Their conversation quickly dissolved into the normal type of conversation my mother and Uncle Henry used to have before little girls started going missing from Alvin, almost as though the whole incident never happened. But it wasn't like that for me. The experience of seeing Mary Ann Dailey dead beneath that tree, and then being there when my mother found Tiffany Michelle Yates alive, stayed with me and would for the rest of my life. I often dreamt of them. Sometimes the dreams were good, sometimes they were nightmares, but it didn't matter. Having gone through the ordeal and being nearly as close to the case as my mother was a life-changing experience I wouldn't trade for anything.

Some of the real gory details I never divulged to anyone, Dewey included.
Especially
Dewey, actually. I figured one of us having to go through life with something like this in his head was enough. I
did
tell him what my mother said about me being the one who helped free Mr. Robert Lee Garner from jail and how my mother shot Jesse James Allen in the back of the leg, though. That last part, Dewey made me go over at least ten times. I think he kept expecting me to change some detail or something and that would prove I had made the whole thing up.

But I never did.

My story always stayed the same, and continued to throughout the years. I would always remember every detail, right down to Jesse James lying there in the field, looking near on as dead as the cornstalks surrounding him.