‘Randy White?’
‘Likely enough, Clamp weighted him well. No one expects he’ll ever come out of the water.’
‘I suppose…’ He let his voice fade away and shut his eyes.
Suddenly, he didn’t want to hear anything more.
EIGHTY-TWO
Five weeks later, when it was not quite September, Mac had stepped out his front door to throw the last of his duffel bags into his truck, when Jen Jessup came up the front walk, carrying a folded newspaper and a brown paper bag.
‘April called me. She said you’re heading north.’
‘You’ve been avoiding me.’ She’d returned none of the half-dozen calls he’d made after he got out of the hospital. He held the door open for her and they went inside.
‘I figured I’d give you some time; I figured I’d give Laurel some time. And,’ she said, ‘I figured I’d give me some time.’
‘You know I submitted my resignation?’
She nodded.
‘The city manager is capable, though he’s going to have a long rebuilding process, now that all the city trustees have quit and hired their own lawyers.’
‘You were going to slink out of town without saying goodbye?’ she asked.
‘That gets back to you not returning my calls. Anyway, I’m keeping my house. Grand Point is going to be a mud pit of lawsuits, countersuits and criminal complaints for years. I’ll be back for depositions.’
‘For your own suit against the county as well, though I hear you still can’t remember those last few seconds on the dais?’ She fingered a ragged bit of jewelry hanging on a slim chain around her neck.
‘Peering County is talking a two million dollar settlement.’
‘It will be fascinating to see what your sense of morality does with two million dollars.’ She handed him a copy of the DeKalb Examiner. ‘Every fact is there, plus as much as the editor let me infer.’
Her story took over the entire front page. ‘About Laurel?’
‘Roy Powell tells me it’s justice for Laurel if Clamp gets life without parole for Betty Jo Dean. Roy says going after anything more is greed,’ she said.
‘Anything more is more justice,’ he said. ‘I heard Clamp is talking.’
‘He wants to visit Betty Jo’s grave, can you believe?’
‘He loved her, according to what Luther Wiley said on your recording.’
‘He said he promised he’d take her to California and marry her, even try to have another baby.’
‘She was pregnant?’
‘Only until Doc Farmont fixed it.’ She shook her head. ‘Clamp said he begged her for two days in that cabin, trying to convince her things could be fine, but she kept looking at the walls, at the floor – everywhere but at him. Roy says that even now, Clamp sounds more regretful than horrified, as though he and Betty Jo had had a spat, is all, and that it could have been mended, if only that damned Sheriff Milner hadn’t started sending searchers down to the cabins and given him no choice other than to kill Betty Jo.’
‘He cut off her head, for the bullet.’
‘He said he had no choice about that either, but he couldn’t bear to part with it afterward, and kept it so he could visit her regularly down by the river.’
‘My God.’
She opened the brown paper bag and took out a pint of Scotch and two clear plastic cups. Her hand shook as she filled one and handed it to Mac. Then she filled another cup for herself and raised it in a toast. ‘To Betty Jo Dean. She spat in his eye.’
For a moment they said nothing, then Mac asked, ‘What’s Powell doing about Luther?’
‘Since they’ll likely never identify the arsonist, prosecuting Luther for burning your place is on the back burner, if you’ll forgive the metaphor. Luther thinks he’s scot-free.’
‘Damn that Luther,’ he said.
‘Page two,’ she said.
He opened the paper. Her byline ran above a smaller story, about abuses at Maryton Cemetery.
‘I was there when they exhumed Betty Jo Dean, remember?’ she said. ‘The digger exposed the side of an adjacent casket – a rotting casket. It was buried not two years ago, without a vault. Luther’s going to do long, hard time for cutting corners at Maryton.
‘April said she’s leaving in a month for a teaching job downstate?’ Jen’s voice quivered slightly. Something more was on her mind.
‘It’s poor and rural, but she’ll live like royalty with her half of what we got from the Bird’s Nest.’
‘Plus whatever you pass along from your two-million-dollar settlement?’
‘She’s more than earned it.’
‘Maggie is already down in New Orleans?’
He grinned. ‘Abigail Beech told her the spirits are friendly there, if she’s interested.’
‘And she’s interested?’
‘Apparently she saw things here – apparitions.’
‘Betty Jo Dean’s ghost?’
‘I didn’t ask.’
She nodded, her smile gone. ‘I keep seeing the way Jonah Ridl stared at me when he paused with his gun. He was seeing a ghost, and that gave Jimmy Bales enough time to kill him.’
‘He was seeing Laurel, and he wouldn’t have wished for a finer last sight.’
‘I saw your ghost, too, Mac.’
He groaned.
‘Not you,’ she said, ‘but the ghost that haunts you.’ She poured another inch into her cup and raised the bottle.
He shook his head. ‘I’m driving.’
‘And not commenting,’ she said.
‘I’ve got a cabin rented through Christmas.’
‘Autumn in the piney woods? Sounds marvelous.’ She looked away. No doubt something more was on her mind.
‘As I said, I’ll be back for depositions.’
She set her cup next to the bottle on the table. ‘Remember I said I was good at rooting out old information, and that I might need to understand why a man would ignore an indictment and a failing restaurant to concentrate on a decades-old murder of a girl he hadn’t even heard of until recently?’
He took the bottle and poured himself a shallow sip.
‘Holly Anderson,’ she said, ‘was born two weeks and two days before Betty Jo Dean. Holly was a pretty girl, an excellent student and, according to the meager press accounts at the time, beloved by her friends and family. In 1982, Holly Anderson was abducted outside the drug store where she worked. She’d been waiting for her stepbrother to pick her up.’
Mac knocked back the drink. ‘Her stepbrother was paying no attention to time that day. He was hanging out with a couple of pals three blocks down, being cool, being stupid.’
‘Holly was found murdered three days later, but the cops never developed a single workable lead. The story disappeared from the papers right away.’
‘Dead girl. Dead case.’
‘Is she with you all the time?’
‘Not all the time.’
‘Want to know about something else I’m wondering about?’
‘Sure. I mean, I guess.’
She lifted the small, odd-shaped piece of plastic hanging around her neck. ‘I’ve taken to wearing this to remind myself of nobility.’
He looked closer, still not understanding.
‘It’s part of the micro SD card from my cell phone,’ she said. ‘If intact, it would store pictures.’
‘Ah,’ he said, understanding.
‘I know only one person who would step in front of a son of a bitch to protect justice. That could only have been instinctual.’
When he said nothing, she nodded her head abruptly, as though making up her mind about something, got up and headed to the front door. He followed her out, puzzled.
She’d parked next to Mac’s truck. She opened her car trunk, took out a large suitcase and threw it in the back of Mac’s truck, alongside his duffel bags. And then she opened the passenger door and got in, to wait.