No Way Home (13 page)

“I told you,” Gray said patiently. “It was some black guy. He didn’t have anything to say. He wouldn’t give his name. He was just calling to hassle us. I told him to call the sheriff if he knew anything.”

“But that was the whole point,” Lillie insisted. “In case someone didn’t want to go to the sheriff.”

“Lillie,” Pink said. “For God’s sakes, stop this. Grayson did the right thing. He told the man to call the sheriff. If the guy knew anything, if he called Royce, don’t you think we’d know it by now?”

“I know it,” she said. “I know.”

“Well, if you know, then why don’t you cut it out?”

After they both had left the table, she remained behind, slumped in her chair, staring blindly at the mess around her. Pink was right. She was clinging to this idea of the ad as if it held some sort of hope for her. But hope for what? she wondered. Even if someone did call, it would not bring her baby back. It was all she could do to clean up and fall into bed.

The next morning when she awoke, the house was quiet, and she was alone. Like a boxer who had fought on, glassy-eyed and wobbly kneed, she was finally flattened to the canvas. She knew that she had to face her loss.

It took her a long time to get up. When she did, she forced herself to go to the kitchen and eat a piece of toast. Next she took a shower and washed her hair. Then she went back to her bedroom.

The sunlight was coming in through the bedroom window, falling across the pale green and rose patterned carpet that she had kept from her grandmother’s house. She looked at the bed, but then went instead to her dressing table and sat in front of it, beside the open window. She closed her eyes and breathed in the clear October air. Autumn in Tennessee was never really crisp, the way they said it was in New England, for example, but in those early autumn days it had a silky coolness to it, and the sky, through Lillie’s lace curtains, was a baby blue. Lillie sat quietly with her hands in her lap, letting the pain wash over her, taking in her loss, accepting it in a way that she had, to this point, avoided. It was the kind of day that made you glad to be alive. Lillie brushed the tears off the familiar tracks down the sides of her face. After a while she knew what she wanted to do.

Slowly she got up and went to the closet. She took out a pair of gray corduroy jeans and pulled them on. She noticed, with a vague feeling of surprise, how they hung from her narrow hips and bagged at the waist. Everyone had been scolding her, telling her to eat. For the first time it was apparent to her that she must have lost quite a few pounds. She used a belt to secure the pants around her waist. Then she went to her bureau and looked in her sweater drawer. She was reaching for the drabbest sweater she had when her eye was caught by a sapphire-blue cotton sweater that Michele had bought for her on her last birthday. It was a big, bulky sweater, the kind that young girls favored these days. Lillie would never have bought it for herself, but Michele had clapped when her mother put it on, and Lillie had to admit that it suited her very well. Michele had boasted that she knew it would. Lillie pulled the sweater out and put it on.

Finally dressed, she sat down at the dressing table and looked at herself in the mirror. Her skin was the palest it had ever been. The sunlight seemed to kindle the ends of her dark, wavy hair as it dried in waves to her shoulders and even her eyes seemed lighter than usual, as if the sun were filtering through them, washing out their color. Although she was of a fragile build, Lillie thought of herself as a strong person, a healthy person. But the woman in the mirror looked evanescent, like a puff of smoke in the process of dissolving. Lillie reached into her makeup drawer and dusted a little pink blush on her cheeks. She could see now why Brenda had mentioned her lack of makeup. She looked ghostlike, even to herself. The pink blush helped. She put a creamy rose color on her lips, but she left her eyes alone. Tears would wash the makeup away anyhow. She pulled her damp hair back into a clip, although some of the clean tendrils escaped and curled around the taut, pale skin of her temples.

She got up from the vanity and walked out of the house. She went out into her garden and stood amid the withered summer blossoms and the bright, hearty autumn blooms. The day was even lovelier and more bittersweet than she had imagined. She went and got her garden tools from the storage shed, then returned to the garden. Bending over, she slowly began to clip. Candy-pink, gold and russet, the dahlias and zinnias fell into her basket. A few cream and peach roses still nodded in the breeze. She clipped them too and added them to her bouquet. She stood up and rubbed her back. Then she went into the house and filled a mayonnaise jar with water. She arranged the stems in the jar, and replaced her gloves, clippers, and basket in the shed. Then she picked up a trowel and the flowers and headed for the car in the driveway.

Across the street, the old horse was snorting in the field behind the fence. Lillie hesitated for a moment at the car door. Then she set the flowers down on the seat and crossed the road to the fence. She pulled up a handful of grass and offered it to the old beast. The horse lifted its nose over the railing and nibbled from her palm. Lillie ran her fingers over the horse’s coarse mane and leaned her head lightly against its warm nose, which felt soothing on her cold skin. The horse quickly lost interest in the grass and turned away. Lillie walked back across the street and got into her car.

It was only about a two-mile drive to the cemetery, but the quiet roads of Felton had never looked more beautiful and tranquil to Lillie. She welcomed the pain that flooded her heart. The flowers in their jar sat upright on the seat beside her, like an obedient child.

She parked the car along the road and walked through the iron gate that was the only marker for the old town cemetery. They had chosen a lovely spot for the graveyard long ago. Trees sheltered it and farmlands surrounded it. Black-eyed Susans and bright-orange butterfly weed grew wild along the slope that led up to the graves. Lillie had not been back since the day of the funeral. It had been crowded that day, and the rainy atmosphere had been charged with anger and tension and tears. Now, as she walked to the spot where Michele was buried, she felt the peace and the imperturbable, endless quiet of the place.

She was still some distance from the grave when she suddenly saw that she was not alone. She was startled, so certain had she been that she was the only one there. She wondered if she had been speaking aloud to herself. But no, Jordan Hill was clearly unaware of her presence. He knelt on one knee at the gravesite, staring at the white cross that temporarily marked the spot until a stone could be placed there. The shadows of the branches above shifted across his stooped shoulders, and as Lillie came closer she could see that he was shivering as he knelt there, although the day was still mild. She did not want to startle him, so she gently spoke his name.

Jordan rose awkwardly to his feet and looked at her with glistening eyes across the crumbling stones of the cemetery. Lillie’s heart turned over in a long-forgotten way at the sight of his sorrow. She tried to summon the old anger, but it seemed unimportant for some reason. She looked down at the flowers in the jar.

“I thought I’d put these on the grave,” she said.

She could see him swallowing, gazing away from her. He cleared his throat and smoothed his mustache in a nervous gesture. “Well,” he said in a hoarse voice, “I’ll get out of your way.”

“It’s all right,” she said. She walked over to the grave and crouched down beside it. She set the jar down and took the trowel from under her arm. “They’re from the garden.”

“Well, they’re beautiful.”

Lillie poked the trowel into the earth. The red soil was already getting a hard winter crust on it. After a moment, Jordan knelt down beside her.

“Would you mind if I did that?” he said.

Lillie looked at him for a moment. Then she handed him the trowel, leaned back, and held the flowers steady on her lap as he dug. She watched his hands work, and they seemed more familiar to her than his face. When he reached for the jar and their fingers touched, she felt a shock, as if she had not realized that the hands were flesh. It was as though she had been seeing them in her memory.

Jordan planted the jar in the hole he had dug and then patted the earth around it. He sat back and looked at the flowers and the cross. Then he bowed his head. Lillie did the same.

She had wanted to be here alone, to speak to her daughter in her heart. She knew Jordan’s presence should seem a terrible intrusion, but it did not. She said her prayers, and her heart spoke freely. In spite of all that had happened, she felt oddly comforted that they should be there together, Michele’s mother and father.

When Jordan reached his hand out to help her to her feet, she did not spurn it. The bitterness was not there. He has his own tears, his own pain, she thought. She let him help her up. The silence between them was awkward but not rancorous. He was looking at her in a strange way, and she suddenly wondered if perhaps her sweater might look too gay, too colorful to him, for he was dressed in the sober tones of mourning.

“I guess I should be wearing black,” Lillie said, “but I wore this sweater because she gave it to me.”

Jordan’s grave expression turned to surprise, and then he smiled and his eyes filled up with tears. Lillie was reminded of a rainbow that appears while it’s still showering. “She had your number pretty well,” he said.

Lillie started to speak and then stopped. She might not feel bitter, but she still did not want to talk to him about Michele. She turned her back on the grave and started walking toward the car. “Do you need a ride?” she asked. “I didn’t see another car here.”

“I walked over from my mother’s,” he said. “I guess I was coming to say good-bye.”

“You going back?” she asked politely.

“This afternoon.”

“Oh.”

They walked sideways down the hill, through the gate, and back to where her car was parked. A hoary brown chicken-turtle was making its way slowly across the country road on crooked feet. Jordan walked over to it, lifted it up, and placed it on the other side as it paddled the air in alarm. Then he came back to where Lillie was leaning against the car.

“Life goes on, I guess,” said Lillie.

Jordan frowned. “So they say.”

“That’s what everyone keeps telling me,” she said. “I guess I’ve been a little deranged since this happened.”

Jordan nodded. “Have you gotten any response to that ad you put in the paper? Did anyone call?”

“One crackpot. That’s all.”

“I was thinking of stopping by to see the sheriff before I left. Although he and I never did have much use for one another.”

Lillie sighed. “I think you’d be wasting your time. All they know now is who
didn’t
do it. Namely, Ronnie Lee Partin. I’ve been trying to…well, I can’t. I can’t keep thinking about it. It’s out of my hands. Maybe I’m just focusing on the murder so that I won’t have to think about the fact that Michele is gone. I’ve got to accept the fact that nothing, nothing is going to bring her back. Everyone’s been telling me that and they’re right.”

Jordan shoved his hands in his pockets and let a deep breath out slowly. His dark brows formed a heavy line low over his eyes. “Lillie, I know that’s true. But I still want the bastard caught and locked up and throw away the goddamn key.”

Lillie looked up at him and their eyes met like two vigilantes acknowledging one another. Then Lillie shook her head. “I believe I’ve been flirting with a nervous breakdown. And I can’t afford to fall apart. I still have a family to think of.”

Immediately she regretted saying it. He hunched his shoulders in a way that said, more clearly than words, that he was completely alone. It’s his own doing, she reminded herself.

Jordan looked out at their surroundings. “You know,” he said, “I remember walking out here when I was a boy. The town cemetery. It was just a spooky place to run by on Halloween.”

Lillie nodded and said nothing.

“You can go far away from here but there’s nowhere else quite like it. It’s in your heart, this country. I meet people all the time who have no feeling for their home, for the place they grew up. They really don’t have a place that calls to them. Somehow, when I had Michele, I always felt that a part of me was still here. Still belonged.”

Lillie looked out at the peaceful fields. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never really been anywhere else.” Then she scuffed one shoe along the road. A wild aster twisted in the laces. “Well, that’s not true. I’ve been in the airports and the hospitals of a couple of big cities in fact.”

Jordan looked at her, as if expecting anger, but there was only a faraway look of memory in her eyes.

“Well,” she said briskly, “we’d better be getting back. What time is your flight?”

“Four o’clock. Out of Nashville,” he said. He came and opened the car door for her. Then he went around and got into the passenger’s seat.

Lillie looked back at the gates of the shaded cemetery. “She always looked forward to going up to New York to see you. She was so proud of that. That you were on TV. She loved that.”

“I loved her,” he said quietly.

Lillie turned on the engine of the car. She did not look at his face.

The Reverend Ephraim Davis stood on the steps of the town hall and breathed in deeply of the clear air. He felt light of heart and peaceful of mind as only a man can feel when he has done the hard thing, but the right thing, and he knows it. He had spent two sleepless nights after talking to that young boy, the dead girl’s brother, on the telephone. His conscience told him to go to the sheriff and his instincts for survival told him to get in his car and head right back home to Memphis.

His sermon went unwritten, his Felton parishioners unvisited, while he pondered the problem. Perhaps he knew all along what he was going to do. He was a man who had dedicated his life to doing the right thing, and so he had thrown up his breakfast and then, with a fearful, prayerful heart,, come to see the sheriff.

Now he felt buoyant, relieved, and even rewarded. It had been easy, in fact. The sheriff had been interested and polite. He was clearly a former military man, and the Reverend Davis, like many of his generation, had a lot of respect for soldiers. This was not some pot-bellied redneck sheriff. No, this was a gentleman who called him sir, asked him a couple of questions, and thanked him with a handshake for coming forward with his information. Now, he felt, he could go back to doing the Lord’s business with a clear conscience. He had done his duty as a citizen and a man of God. He virtually skipped down the steps toward his car. He was hungry, and he was partial to the barbecue at Otis’s Pit Stop, but this time he thought he would pass it up. He wanted to get back to the church and the work he’d been called here to do. As he walked off the last step he passed a rugged, handsome-looking white man in a dark-gray jacket.