Kindred Spirits (7 page)

“But look where the
restaurant is,” I say. “1616 Rose Street, Lexington, Kentucky. Adam, the man
who runs this restaurant is Charlie Thomas’s son.”

“Like I said, there are
probably ten million guys named Charlie Thomas. How do you know this one is
Charlie T’s son?”

I
can’t really explain how I know, except to say that when you have the Sight,
sometimes the truth hits you and lights up your brain like fireworks. “Adam, I
just know.”

He doesn’t say anything
at first, but when he looks at me I can see he believes me. Then his eyes light
up. “Hey,” he says. “Dad has a conference in Lexington Saturday after next. Mom
and I were going to go with him to do some shopping. Why don’t you ask your mom
and Granny if you can come with us? The site for this restaurant says it’s
right next to UK, which is where Dad’s conference is. Maybe we could go there
and talk to Mr. Thomas.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but
we’ll have to be careful. I would think that if your dad was accused of murder,
you’d be pretty sensitive about it, and you might be a little freaked out if
these kids you didn’t know came up to you and wanted to ask you about it.”

“You’re probably right,”
Adam says. Then he grins. “That’s why I’m going to let you do all the talking.”

I can’t get over how nice
the Sos’ car is. The back seat, where I’m sitting with Adam, is covered with
spotless tan upholstery and is softer than my bed. The stereo system fills the
car with classical music. As the violins swell, my stomach flip-flops. I’m
excited.  I don’t get to travel much.

Other than an occasional
trip with Mom to Berea to visit some of her old college friends, we don’t stray
much past Wilder and the nearby, slightly bigger town of Morgan. When I beg Mom
to take me to Lexington, she always says, “Hm, I don’t trust my old rattletrap
of a car enough to drive it that far away from home.”

But that’s not the real
reason. All I had to do was look in Mom’s eyes to see into her mind where the
truth hid. Lexington was where she lived with my dad, was where they lived when
he died, so going there and seeing things like their old apartment building and
the pizza place where they used to eat hurts too much. Seeing the big hospital
downtown where the doctor said “I’m sorry; it’s too late to save him” hurts
most of all.

But I want to see where Mom and Dad
lived, so I can imagine the times and places they were happy together. I want
to make sense of the past.

Lexington probably
doesn’t look like a big city to people who are used to Louisville or Atlanta,
but to me it looks huge. The buildings are way taller than any of the buildings
in Wilder or Morgan, and here near the university there are book stores and
music stores and restaurants advertising Japanese, Indian and Mexican food. I like
it here. When I see a window with a spider design and
The Cafe Anansi
painted
on it, I nudge Adam and point it out to him.

Mrs. So drops Dr. So at
the building where his meeting is. “We’ll come get you at one-thirty she says.
Then she turns to us and asks, “Well, are you ready to shop?”

Mrs. So finds a parking
space on the street. “So,” she says, once we’re out of the car, “where do you
kids want to go? I don’t care where else I go as long as I get to the Oriental
Market.”

Adam winces. “Uh-oh.  I
smell kimchee in our future.”

“What’s kimchee?” I ask.

“You’re lucky not to
know,” Adam says. “It’s this rotted cabbage stuff Koreans like to eat. Mom and
Dad can’t get enough of it.”

Mrs. So gives her son a
playful shove. “It’s fermented cabbage, not rotted cabbage, and it’s very good.
And I would rather eat kimchee any day than your American hot dogs. At least I
know what’s in kimchee.” She feeds some coins into the parking meter. “So where
do you want to go? I’m sure Adam wants to go to that place that sells used
movies.”

“Yeah,”
Adam says. “I thought I might take Miranda there and to a couple of other
places. Maybe we could go to a couple of other stores while you shop at the
Oriental Market. We could meet you at the car at noon.”

Mrs. So purses her lips.
“I don’t know. Do you think it would be safe?”

“It’s broad daylight,”
Adam says, “and we’re not little kids.”

“No,” Mrs. So sighs, “I
guess you’re not my little baby anymore.” She winks at me. “But he’ll always be
my little baby, really.”

I smile at her, feeling
Adam’s embarrassment. “Go on,” she says after thinking a minute. “But be
careful. And have a good time.”

The sign on the Cafe
Anansi’s door says it doesn’t open until eleven, so we kill some time at a
store next door that sells used paperback books, music, and movies. I buy a
couple of books, a mystery for me and one of those stupid teen romances that
Abigail likes to read, and Adam gets all excited because he finds a copy of
“Daughter of Dracula” on DVD.

When we walk out of the
store, the sign on the Cafe‚ Anansi’s door says ‘Open.’

It’s a small restaurant,
shiny clean, with African masks and carvings on the wall. A man in an orange
and green loose-fitting shirt who looks like he’s around my mom’s age is
standing behind the cash register. “Can I help you folks?” he says.

“Uh, yes. We’d like two
Cokes and,” I scan the menu on the wall looking for something that we can both
pronounce and afford,”and two pieces of sweet potato pie.”

“Coming right up.”
Moments later, he sets two cans of coke and two paper plates of pie on the
counter. “That’ll be five dollars even.”

As I
hand him the money, I say, “Are you Mr. Thomas?”

“Sure am,” he says, grinning. “Who wants
to know?”

“I’m Miranda Jasper, and
this is my friend Adam. We’re from Wilder.”

“Wilder?” His smile shuts
off like somebody flipped a switch.

“Yessir,” I say. “Do you know it?”

Mr. Thomas shakes his
head. “I reckon you know I know it, or you wouldn’t be asking me. What did you
do, wake up this morning and decide you wanted to get a look at the son of the
man who killed those women back in the day?”

“Your dad wasn’t a
murderer, Mr. Thomas,” I say. “We know that, and we’d like other people to know
it, too.”

Mr. Thomas wipes a
counter that isn’t dirty. “Well, young lady, it seems to me you’re about
seventy years too late to do any good. My daddy served thirty years of hard
time for a crime he didn’t commit. By the time he got out and got a job and got
married, he was older than I am now... too old to be just starting out in life
and too scarred to put the pain of the past thirty years behind him. He had had
his life taken away from him, and even with a wife and son who loved him, he
never got it back. So unless you and your friend can travel back in time, I
don’t reckon there’s much you can do to make a difference.”

Half of me wants to turn
around and walk out, but the braver half of me says, “What if we proved he was
innocent and cleared his name so he wouldn’t go down in history as a murderer?
Would that make a difference? At least to you?”

Mr. Thomas shrugs. “Maybe
to me; I don’t know. But it’s not like you kids are gonna be able to figure
this out. You’re what, ten years old?”

“Eleven,”
Adam says, sounding offended.

“Oh, I beg your pardon,
then,” Mr. Thomas says, laughing.“That gives you one more full year of
investigative experience.”

“Mr. Thomas,” I say,
deciding to take a risk since we’ve got nothing to lose, “You might think I’m
crazy for saying this, but I’m not like other eleven-year-old girls. I...I can
see things.”

Mr. Thomas raises an
eyebrow. “What kind of things?”

“I have the Sight. Well,
that’s what everybody in my family calls it. But you could also call it being
psychic or having ESP. All the women in my family have it. My mom, my granny.”

“They live in Wilder
too?” Mr Thomas asks.

“Yessir. My granny’s name
is Irene Chandler, but her maiden name was Stone. Her mother had the Sight,
too. She lived out in the woods near Wilder and made potions and tonics for
people.”

“Huh,” Mr. Thomas says.
“Your granny’s mama, she wasn’t the one they called the Witch Woman, was she?”

I grin. “That was her. Of
course, they call Granny and Mom both that now.”

“My daddy used to tell me
a story,” Mr. Thomas says, “about his little baby cousin. The baby was real
sick, wouldn’t eat or move his bowels, and the doctor told the family there
wasn’t anything he could do; they just had to let nature take its course. Well,
the family wasn’t gonna give up that easily, so they took the baby to this old
lady everybody called the Witch Woman that lived out in the woods. She gave the
baby some kind of tonic, and it fixed him right up.”

“That would’ve been my
great-grandmother,” I say. “So do you think, out of respect to her, you might
talk to us a little?”

“Well,
I don’t know that my talking to you will do much good,” Mr. Thomas says, “but I
don’t guess it’ll do any harm either.” He glances down at his watch. “Lunch
rush won’t start for another twenty minutes.  Sit on down.”

The three of us sit down
at a table, and I take a bite of my pie. The crust is buttery and flaky, and
the filling is sweet and spicy at the same time. “This pie is great,” I say.

Mr.Thomas smiles. “My
mama’s recipe. All the American food I cook here I learned how to make from my
mama. My mother was from Wilder, too. She was one of the folks who got forced
onto the trains the night of the murder. She was just a girl, not much older
than you. She ended up here in Lexington with her parents. Every week she’d write
my dad in jail and tell him she loved him and she’d wait for him. She waited
thirty years even though he begged her to find somebody else, he said thirty
years was too long to ask somebody to wait. When they finally got married, Mama
thought she was too old to have a baby, but well, here I am. A miracle, she
always called me. But I’m getting ahead of myself. You wanted to hear about the
murder.”

“Yessir,” I mutter around
a mouthful of pie. Adam, I notice, has already polished his off.

“Well,” Mr. Thomas says,
“Daddy always said he didn’t do it, that he didn’t have a reason to do it. He
said the Jameson sisters were good to him. They gave him little jobs around
their house and paid him better than most white folks would. He was delivering
the sisters’ newspaper when it happened. He said Mildred Jameson had asked him
in to move a piece of furniture for her, and a white man was in the living room
with Helen. After that, he said, his memory always got foggy.

There was yelling and a
struggle and two gunshots. And then the white man fetched him a blow to the
head with a poker that knocked him out cold on the living room floor.”

The
black hand prints on Adam’s living room wall flash into my mind. If Charlie T
was knocked in the back of the head, he could have fallen into the wall,
bracing his hands against it as he slid to the floor. His hands would have been
black with the newsprint from the papers he had been delivering. “I know just
where he fell,” I say.

“So.” Adam finally finds
his voice. “If Charlie T saw the man who shot the Jameson sisters and hit him
in the head, why didn’t he tell the police?”

Mr. Thomas smiles, but
it’s not a happy smile, exactly. “You kids today can’t understand what it was
like back then. Nobody would have believed my daddy’s word over a white man’s.
Before the white boy knocked my daddy out, he told him, ‘If you say one word
about what really happened, you won’t live long enough to go to trial, and your
mama won’t live long enough to cry at your funeral. You say you did it, you’ll
serve your time and live to be an old man. If you say I did it...well,
accidents happen all the time, now don’t they? And wouldn’t it be a shame if
one of them happened to your mama or daddy or sister?”

My eyes are wet with
tears of anger, and when I look at Adam, his are, too. “But he never told you
the white boy’s name?”

Mr. Thomas shakes his
head. “No, he never did, no matter how much I begged him. He said he didn’t
want me to take it in my head to go and get revenge on that man. He said if I
tried to, I’d just wind up in jail myself. Daddy said the best way I could make
up for what happened to him was to stay in school and make something out of my
life.”

I look around the
spotless restaurant. “And you did.”

Mr. Thomas nods. “Yes, I did. And Daddy
got to see me graduate from college before he died, which he said was the
proudest day of his life. He seemed almost happy that day.”

“Just
almost?” Adam says.

“Almost was as close to
happy as he ever got,”Mr.Thomas says. “How could he be happy when he had had so
much of his life taken away from him? When his good name was ruined forever? It
gnawed at him, just like it still gnaws at me. Because of what they did to him,
Daddy was never at peace.  Even when he died, he wasn’t at peace.”

“Your dad never dropped
any hints about who the killer could have been?” I ask.

“Never did. I remember
once, though, Mama let it slip that the boy who did it was the son of some big
man on the Wilder City Council at the time the murder happened. No colored
person stood a chance in the face of power like that, she said. But Daddy
shushed her before she could say anything else.”

“Well, that gives us
something to go on anyway,” I say.

Mr. Thomas smiles and
shakes his head. “If you kids want to, you can look up the names of all the
government officials in Wilder back then and see which ones of them had sons.
Probably most of them did. But you’re not gonna get far with this. Everybody
involved in the case is probably long dead. And you know what they say, ‘Dead
men tell no tales.’”

I think of my
conversations with Abigail and of the Jameson sisters’ messages in Adam’s
house. “But dead girls do.”