Dying to Tell (19 page)

Jake knocked on the door, and Sadie drew a deep breath, as if she needed it for courage. An elderly woman in a pink double-knit suit opened the door, her face weathered but kind.

“Ma’am, I’m Sheriff Jake Blackwood, and this is Sadie Nettleton.”

“Dora Mae Coker,” the little woman said. “Come on in. We don’t get many visitors out here.”

“We’d really like to speak to your husband,” Jake said.

The woman pinched her lips together, accentuating the lines bracketing her mouth. “What’s this about, Sheriff?”

“Just a patient he had a long time ago,” Jake said.

“All right, but I’ll warn you. He’s not having a good day.”

Sadie frowned. “What do you mean?”

“He took the Alzheimer’s awhile back,” Dora Mae said. “Half the time he doesn’t even know my name, and we’ve been married fifty years.”

Frustration knotted Jake’s insides. “Well, ma’am, we’ll try not to upset him.”

“Good, ’cause that nosy reporter Brenda Banks got him all riled up when she came out here.”

Jake and Sadie exchanged a look.

Mrs. Coker gestured for them to follow her. The house was riddled with homemade throws, pillows, and needlepoint wall hangings. Three cats lay in fur balls around the fire, and dust coated everything in sight.

Dora Mae led them to a sitting room that overlooked the river, the dim gray light spilling in, casting shadows on the chipped, faded walls. Her husband was slumped in a rocking chair with an Afghan spread over his legs, staring out the window. He looked feeble and weak-eyed, his age-spotted skin pale.

“Jonas, the sheriff and this nice lady are here to see you,” Dora Mae said.

The man’s bushy white hair stuck up in disarray, his skin leathery and sagging, his eyes vacant as he turned to look at them.

“I’ll get y’all some coffee,” Dora Mae said, then disappeared from the room, her orthopedic shoes clicking on the wood floor.

Sadie and Jake seated himself across from him in two wingback chairs. “Dr. Coker,” Jake said. “We need to talk to you about the time when you ran the free clinic in town.”

His eyelids fluttered as he moved his mouth from side to side.

Jake leaned forward in the chair. “You had several patients, children you treated, who were referred to the Slaughter Creek Sanitarium.”

“One of them was my sister, Amelia Nettleton,” Sadie said. “Do you remember her?”

Other than a slight twitch of the man’s eyelids, he showed no response.

“You also treated a boy named Joe Swoony,” Sadie said. “His mother said he presented with symptoms of autism and schizophrenia.”

Coker’s glazed eyes shifted slightly, as if for a moment, the name registered.

“And you took care of a patient named Grace Granger. Later she had a lobotomy.”

This time Coker gripped the edges of the rocking chair with his gnarled hands.

“Did you perform the lobotomy?” Jake asked.

Coker’s eyes twitched, flashing to him. But he clamped his lips shut and didn’t answer.

“Were you giving them some kind of experimental drug?”

“Drugs?” he muttered. “Not time for my drugs.”

Sadie gently touched his hand. “Were the patients mistreated?”

Coker mumbled something indiscernible, and both Sadie and Jake leaned forward to decipher his words.

“If you didn’t perform the lobotomy, you knew about it, didn’t you? Who did it?” Jake continued.

“Did things we shouldn’t have,” Coker said in a raspy voice.

“What kind of things?” Jake asked.

Coker curled his fingers into Sadie’s hand. “You...look just like her.”

“Like Amelia,” Sadie said with a nod. “Yes, she’s my twin sister, Dr. Coker. You immunized us when we were little.”

Coker’s bushy eyebrows shot up for a moment. “Like your mama...”

“You knew my mother?” Sadie said in a hushed whisper.

“I told them not to hurt her and your daddy,” he said in a choked voice. “I told them she didn’t know...”

Sadie’s face turned a chalky white. “What are you talking about? My parents died in a car accident.”

Jake frowned. Granted the man was suffering from dementia, but in that moment he seemed perfectly lucid.

“Tell me,” Sadie pleaded. “Did someone cause their accident?”

But Coker turned back to the window, a shuttered look passing across his face as if he’d closed the curtain on those memories.

Dora Mae tottered in, and Jake stood. “Mrs. Coker, did you know anything about your husband’s work at the free clinic years ago?”

“Yes, of course,” she tittered in adoration. “My husband was a generous man. He felt sorry for all the folks that couldn’t pay, and he refused to let a child go untreated. Folks called him their savior.”

Jake shoved his hands in his pockets. Had Coker been a savior?

Or had he taken advantage of poor families and innocent kids?

Dammit, he wished he knew who Brenda’s source was.

And what kind of experimental project she was talking about.

By the time Jake drove Sadie back to the funeral home, her head was swimming with worry for Amelia.

Coker had also raised questions about her parents’ deaths.

She struggled to remember her mother, but she’d been tiny when her mother died. Papaw and Gran had taken her and Amelia in, and then Amelia had started having horrible nightmares.

Sadie massaged her temple, desperate to recall the years before Amelia had started having episodes. Talking about the voices and the other people who lived in her head.

A faint memory of their grandfather carrying them for a hayride in the back of the wagon when they were four surfaced, and tears pricked her eyes. She and Amelia had been like two peas in a pod, inseparable. They’d slept together, eaten together, shared their own secret language.

That night they’d laughed and giggled and whispered stories about the silly faces they wanted to carve on their pumpkins and the scarecrow Papaw had erected in the pumpkin patch.

Amelia had seemed perfectly normal.

Had she been normal at one time? And what exactly caused that to change?

She desperately wished she could turn back the clock. Wished she could change what had happened to steal her sister’s life.

Jake parked at the funeral home and leaned against the seat. “I understand you’re upset about Coker’s comment about your parents, but remember he’s suffering from dementia, Sadie. He could be confused.”

“I know.”

“I’ll find out who worked with Coker at the clinic,” Jake said. “Another doctor, nurse, receptionist—maybe someone else knew what was going on.”

Sadie twisted her hand together. “Thanks, Jake.”

For a moment, he looked at her with such longing that Sadie yearned to spill the truth.

But she didn’t think she could stand to see the look on his face when she told him that his father was dead, and that she’d helped cover up his murder.

So she fought her instincts as she climbed from his car and headed into the funeral home, a two-story Georgian house that had been renovated years ago.

Dr. Coker’s comments about her parents’ deaths not being an accident and about her mother taunted her. What if her mother had discovered that Amelia was being mistreated? Her natural instinct would have been to protect her daughter, to report the abuse...

Had someone killed her to keep her quiet, then made it look like an accident to stave off suspicion?

The scent of roses and some flowery air freshener, sweet and cloying at the same time, lingered in the air as she entered,
reminding her of her grandmother’s funeral. She’d been irritated at the people who laughed and chatted around her coffin as if they were having a family reunion or a tea party.

As an adult, she realized that sharing stories and memories of loved ones and friends comforting one another was a natural part of the grieving process.

But at the time, her grandmother dead of a sudden heart attack, she’d wanted to scream at everyone to shut up. How could they laugh when her gran would never smile again? When she’d never make homemade apple pie or hang the sheets on the clothesline to dry so they smelled fresh, like spring rainwater?

“Sadie Nettleton,” a thin man with a bad comb-over said as he approached her, leaning on his cane, “I’m George Pelverson, the director of Slaughter Creek Funeral Home. I’m so sorry about your loss.”

Sadie accepted his extended hand, swallowing her distaste at the cold, slimy feel of his skin. Was it her imagination, or did he smell like formaldehyde?

“Thank you.” Her gaze swept across the foyer, from its cozy seating nooks to the two viewing rooms on the left and right. A small chapel was attached, with access off the hallway and outside. “Did you know my grandfather, Mr. Pelverson?”

“Of course.” The old man coughed into his hand. “You don’t remember me, do you, Sadie?”

Sadie frowned and studied his face.

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid not.”

He patted her shoulder with a gnarled hand. “That’s understandable. You were just a little girl when your gran passed.”

“You ran the funeral home then?” Sadie said, a distant memory tickling her conscience. The man who’d helped her grandfather had been robust, dark-haired.

But age had robbed him of his girth and hair.

“I knew your grandfather from church. We sang in the choir together. He and your grandmother brought both of you girls to
Slaughter Creek Baptist when you were children.” He adjusted his glasses with a trembling hand. “People couldn’t get over how much you two looked alike.”

And how crazy Amelia was.

But she was determined not to revisit that part of the past. “Mr. Pelverson, you probably heard that my sister shot Papaw.”

He pursed his thin lips as if trying to hold his tongue. “Yes, I’m sorry. Walt did everything he could to help little Amelia. He grieved his heart out that she never got well.”

Sadie frowned at his wording. “Did he discuss her treatment with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did he mention anything specifically about the hospital? Maybe a doctor or nurse he didn’t like? Or that he was worried Amelia was being mistreated?”

A tense second ticked by, as if he were contemplating his answer. Somewhere in the background a telephone rang, and Sadie heard a woman answer. The front door opened, and a deliveryman from a florist shop entered with a cross-shaped wreath made from yellow roses.

“Slaughter Creek Baptist sent these for a Mr. Walt Nettleton,” the deliveryman said.

The director signed the slip, then directed him to the viewing room to the right.

Sadie thought she detected relief on his face that they’d been interrupted. “Mr. Pelverson,” Sadie said more firmly. “Was my grandfather upset about something before he died?”

“Just Amelia.” He wheezed for a breath. “He said he blamed himself she was the way she was.”

Sadie swallowed hard. “What did he mean by that?”

“I don’t know,” Pelverson said. “Mental illness was something to be ashamed of back in our day. I suppose he meant it ran in his family.”

Sadie stewed over that possibility. As far as she knew, no one else in her family had a history of mental illness.

A headache pulsed behind her eyes, and she rubbed her temple, afraid one of her notorious migraines was setting in.

“We’re working on your grandfather, but I’m afraid we can’t fix his face.” Pelverson’s weary sigh rattled through the room like bones creaking, dragging her from her thoughts. “If I were you, I’d keep the casket closed. You can put a nice framed photograph of him on display so folks will remember him the way he was.”

Sadie grimaced.

Papaw might have had a few friends, but Amelia’s illness had always scared people away.

“A closed casket it is,” she said, keeping her emotions at bay.

“Let’s choose a coffin, then we can select a time for the service and post it in the paper. Then you can run home and bring us back some clothes, whatever you want to bury him in.”

Realizing she’d gleaned all she could from the funeral director at the moment, she let her questions slide. Maybe the people who attended the funeral would shed some light on her grandfather and the past.

A numbness settled over her as they discussed the details for the service. She asked him to have one of her grandfather’s friends choose the hymns to be sung and the Bible verses to be read.

Then she thanked him and stood, her nerves frayed. “If you think of anything that had upset my grandfather, please let me know.”

He adjusted his bifocals. “Sometimes we just have to accept things, Sadie.”

But she couldn’t accept it without trying to understand the situation. She’d done that when her sister killed Jake’s father, and she’d regretted it ever since.

She wouldn’t do that again, no matter how painful the truth was for her or Amelia.

Unease nagged at her as she left the funeral home and drove back to the farmhouse. Storm clouds had darkened, gathering in packs, so she stopped at the grocery and picked up some staples, then hurried home. The wind had picked up, the temperature dropping, leaves swirling across the withering grass.

She rushed the groceries inside, then remembered the horses and dragged on her coat and boots to take care of them.