Jacob's Ladder (11 page)

He'd rolled into Shady Grove without any forewarning, without any time for Rose to prepare herself, and then he'd just broken the news that her father was sick and that she needed to let him make peace before he died, as if she owed it to both of them.

Rose thought about Rip with Victoria at his side, the way the younger woman kissed him on the cheek, the easy way her thick hair danced in the breeze, her deep summer tan, even though it was well before tanning season, her long legs, her narrow waist.

Rose felt the knot tighten inside her chest as she remembered the likes and the looks of Victoria Griffith and the fact that Rip had decided to make it part of his business and part of his honeymoon to stop by the campground in West Memphis and counsel his ex-wife about his ex-father-in-law.

“He had no right,” she said aloud to herself, and began to see the act as completely selfish on Rip's part. She began thinking about the nerve he'd had in coming and his complete disregard for where she had arrived in her journey in her relationship with her father.

She thought he was arrogant and inappropriate for searching for her and then just dropping by to see her. She thought all of these things, feeling both vindicated and indignant, when suddenly from her perch of righteous anger, she recalled a night with her husband several years before the divorce, the night her father was admitted to the nursing home.

Captain Burns was to be released from the hospital after becoming gravely ill due to the damaged condition of his liver. He had spent more than three weeks in the intensive care unit, two more weeks that followed on a medical-surgical unit. Rose, working as a nurse in the same facility, spent a great deal of time checking on him and talking to the doctors about his prognosis, his living situation, and the best-possible scenario for him as a single person with liver disease and someone beginning to demonstrate signs of dementia or even, perhaps, Alzheimer's.

Before his hospitalization, no one was completely sure about his mental condition. He was forgetful and there was a history of him wandering into unfamiliar places. There were also a few reports from neighbors of him acting in a disorienting or confused manner. He had even wrecked his car and started a small kitchen fire, but these were only occasional incidents.

When confronted, he seemed clear, and he certainly refused to accept that anything was wrong with him. He absolutely dismissed any notion that he was functioning at a diminished capacity. There was never a discussion with him about making any living changes.

After the hospital stay of so many weeks, however, with his physical weakness and his observed mental deficiencies, all of the medical personnel working with Captain Burns agreed that upon release from the hospital he would not be able to live alone.

Rose had spent days, weeks even, in conversations with social workers, doctors, friends, her husband, and her brother. She had tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to talk with her father. Finally, after much deliberation and a decision that she would not let him live with her, she found a place where she believed he would receive the best care. With much agonizing and trepidation, she signed the papers committing her father to a nursing home.

It had been an extremely difficult time for her. Without her brother's input or assistance, she was forced to make the decision by herself, and when her father discovered that it was she who had committed him, he was enraged.

He was so upset with her, in fact, that the day he was to be transferred to the long-term-care facility, he had to be placed in restraints. He had made it very clear not only that he was not going to go to the nursing home without a fight and would escape if taken there but that he was also going to kill the person who had signed the papers admitting him.

When her father, heavily sedated, was taken by ambulance to his new home, it was strongly suggested to his daughter that she not visit for a few days. The director of the facility had called her personally and said that it would be most helpful to have a little while to allow the new patient, her father, to become acquainted with his surroundings, that they have some time to find more effective means to support Captain Burns with this difficult transition, and that it would just simply be best for her to wait a couple of weeks before making her first visit.

Receiving such advice brought lots of emotion to the surface for Rose. In spite of the troubled relationship she had endured, she was still her father's only caregiver and she remained concerned about the man she had hated for so many years. She was, however, also relieved not to have to deal with him in this new setting, relieved to have some time to rest after the long and exhausting period she had endured while his mental condition and physical illness had worsened and since he had been hospitalized. She was facing so many complicated emotions that she didn't know how to feel about anything.

The day her father had been admitted to the nursing home, Rose returned to her house from work, worn thin from worry and fatigue, to find that Rip had been home all day and had prepared the only meal she had ever known him to fix.

This night, this dinner—this was the memory she thought of as the day of her ex-husband's sudden visitation, the day of the discovery of a murdered man, drifted into the darkness there by the Mississippi River.

On the night of her father's admissions, Rip met Rose at the door with a glass of wine and one long-stem red rose. He then led her straight to the table, guiding her into her seat. He fed her baked chicken, which she remembered was kept in the oven much too long, mashed potatoes that were so dry and lumpy that she had choked on her first spoonful, and a salad made with too much dressing. The dessert, she recalled with a smile, had been perfect, however. He had bought two pieces of cake from a local bakery and had added a big helping of ice cream on the side.

He didn't say much about the day, about what he understood his wife had been wrestling with. However, after explaining his methods of cooking, about everything he had learned and done, how he'd actually enjoyed being in the kitchen, he did finally say something about the decision his wife had made.

Rose still remembered how his simple way of summing things up, his firm gesture of empathy, had melted away so much of her sorrow. “Rose, you've done the right thing,” he said as she finished the dessert. “Your father needs the care of somebody else, somebody who doesn't have all the history that you have.”

She'd swallowed and listened.

“Those nurses there will be able to make him take his medicine, eat his meals, and they won't allow him to hurt anybody. You can't do that. He has had power over you your whole life and he knows that; as long as he knows that, you can't take care of him. You just can't. And it's really okay that somebody else does.”

She recalled how the words felt that night so long ago, the kindness in them, the generosity and wisdom behind them. On that complicated and difficult night, she loved her husband for knowing the right thing to say at a time when she felt so empty of pardon for herself. And as Rose rested against a river tree at the end of the day he had come to her new home on the arm of a new wife, she knew that in spite of everything else Rip had done to her, done to the marriage, because of that one pure evening, she could not hate him or demonize him.

With a plate of dry chicken and lumpy potatoes, with a slice of chocolate cake and the words she was desperate to hear, he had freed her from the bondage of old chains. He had given her permission to unbind herself from her father's heavy hand. Although there were lots of reasons to despise him, Rose knew, because of that night, she could not dismiss the man who had only months later chosen someone else to love.

She sat for just a few minutes longer down by the riverside, thinking of love and loss of choices and betrayals. She realized that she had only one thing that had to be done before this night was over, that she didn't have to make any decision right then about her own family.

She took off the bracelet and slipped it in her jacket pocket.

She did not have to decide about returning to Rocky Mount or whether to give her father room to say what he might or might not desire to say. She did not have to leave Shady Grove anytime soon.

Now, she told herself, she would only need to return what wasn't hers. After that, she would be out of the business of another family's crisis and she would then figure out how to handle her own.

TWELVE

It was almost midnight when Rose got up from the bed after watching a few shows on television and flipping through some magazines, trying not to nod off. She figured it would be easier to stay awake until it was time to go, rather than set the alarm and get only a couple of hours of sleep.

She already had on her thick blue sweatpants, her black hooded sweatshirt, and her dark cap. When she decided it was the right time to return the bracelet, all she needed to add to her wardrobe were her shoes, which she slipped on at the door. Once she was completely dressed, she quietly left her camper. Adorned in such dark and heavy clothes, she was prepared both for the chill in the night air and for hiding in the darkness.

She crept along the driveway, past the other campers, hearing only the noises of the river at night. A barn owl called from across the shore, searching for his evening meal. Crickets sang from the tall grass lining the pond and from the long, empty fields. The slow waves fell against the banks. It was mostly quiet, and Rose was soon distracted from her task as she stopped to listen to the sounds she had grown to love.

A recent resident of Shady Grove, Rose often went outside for late-night walks. She and Tom would meet on the path between the campground and the small lot where he lived. They would walk through the memorial site where his friend Lawrence Franklin was buried and where the ghosts of fallen slaves had finally settled and rested.

When they met that way, late at night, they spoke very little as they moved along the trails, and during those long dark hikes along the shore and across dusty paths, Rose had fallen in love with the life that emerged on the banks of the Mississippi River in West Memphis.

She shook the gentle thoughts from her head and resumed her walk, moving beyond the campsites and into the area that had been closed to campers. She hurried ahead and continued to think about Tom and the way he had softened her spirit, opened her knotted heart. She missed him and wondered what he would say about this late-night adventure, her theft of the bracelet, and then her return at midnight to the crime scene.

She hoped that he would be home the next day so that she could include him in all of her deliberations and decision making. She knew that had he been with her during the day, he probably would have told her that she shouldn't always follow Ms. Lou Ellen's advice. He had mentioned to her before that although he was deeply committed to their mutual friend, he had discovered that the older woman was not always the right one to seek out for counsel.

“Lou Ellen has some unique ideas,” he had said when Rose was thinking about answering a chain letter that Ms. Lou Ellen had copied and sent, a chain letter promising money and good health. “She's smart, but she's not always careful,” he told Rose. “And she somehow always manages to escape her ill-planned schemes, but she's lucky that way. I'm not sure everybody else has that much good fortune.”

Surely, Rose thought, he knows her better than I. And as she moved toward the part of the campground where she had found the dead man, the part that had been recently sealed off and had, by that late hour, developed an eerie air about it, she considered that maybe this hadn't been the best advice to heed. She decided to complete the task as quickly as she could and return home.

She headed toward the small field, hurrying over to where she had first found the bracelet. She walked across the overgrown path and through the patch of weeds. She planned to go just a few more steps, drop the dead man's jewelry in the grass, and then swiftly head back to her camper, forgetting about the interesting symbols, the beautiful turquoise, and the motive for murder. She was going to let the sheriff tend to the homicide and she was going to spend her time trying to figure out what to do about her own situation.

Rose was only a few yards from the old Coachmen when she pulled the bracelet from the front pocket of her sweatshirt, held it tightly in her hand, used her shirt to wipe off her prints, and knelt down to dispose herself of it. Just in that instant, she saw a light shine right above her head, right where, only seconds before, she had been standing. She remained in a squatting position and carefully spun around, replacing the bracelet back into her pocket.

The light was coming from a boat docking not more than fifty yards away from where Rose was kneeling. She heard the voices of at least two men as they gathered very near to her. One of them seemed to be giving instructions as the vessel pulled up on the bank; another one was shining the light in her direction, reporting any activity around the camper and also explaining where they were on the river. She wasn't sure if there was anyone else with them or not.

She froze, uncertain if she had been noticed. Since she thought the light had shone above her head and because it didn't seem that the men were in a hurry to get to where she was, she hoped that she had not been discovered.

Slowly, she crawled through the grass, under the yellow police tape, and over to the scene of the crime. She heard the men coming toward her. The beam of the flashlight moved all around her as she crouched down. Without knowing what else to do, she felt for the steps of the trailer, gently crept to the bottom one, reached up, and was able to grab the handle to the closed door.

With the light dancing along the side of the trailer, Rose could tell that the window she had broken earlier in the day had been sealed with duct tape. But in turning the handle, she immediately knew that the door had been left unlocked. Hardly believing her good fortune, she remembered Tom's thoughts about Ms. Lou Ellen, and she silently thanked the heavens for lending her some of her friend's excellent luck.