“What’s that in his hand? A knife?” Jude asked leaning closer.
“Yes,” Hattie said, reaching forward and touching the dark blade. When she pulled her fingers away a sooty gray paint remained.
Jude frowned.
“He’s missing fingers.”
Hattie nodded.
“You think this is the man that killed Rosemary?” Jude asked.
Hattie heard the skepticism, but she didn’t fault her. Jude had never understood, perhaps people who didn’t see spirits were incapable of understanding the mysteries of the world. Hattie didn’t understand them either, but she never doubted their authenticity. Seeing is believing, her daddy used to say.
Jude opened her camera bag and slipped the strap over her neck, adjusting the camera before snapping several photos. Hattie watched Jude twist the lens and fiddle with the little dials.
“Why are you taking pictures of it?” Hattie asked.
Jude paused, the lens to her eye.
“To see it better, and I’ll take the photo to Grimmel and that detective, Bell. If this guy was local someone will remember him, an injury like that would not be soon forgotten.”
“She knew him,” Hattie murmured.
“Who?”
“Rosemary. When he opened the cabin door, she recognized him, but she wasn’t expecting him.”
Jude let the camera dangle against her chest and took a seat next to Hattie.
“I didn’t remember this morning and then I saw the painting…” Hattie swept a limp hand toward the picture. “The memory of it returned. I was Rosemary, sitting on the floor of the cabin and the door swung open. For a minute I couldn’t see him, it was so bright and then-”
“You felt the murder?”
Hattie frowned searching for the sensations, but they hung at the periphery of her awareness. They floated like tiny black spots behind her eyes and when she turned to catch them they flitted away.
“He was familiar, and I was, or Rosemary was, disappointed. Then she noticed the knife, and she wasn’t scared at first. She thought it was a joke, or he was teasing her.”
Hattie drifted as she spoke, the room undulated and drifted like it was not made of wood and metal, but water, the colors flowed and seeped. She stared through her apartment into another time and place, a dense forest, sun slanting through a doorway, blood spattering the face of the man above her.
“Here,” Jude thrust a glass of tepid water into Hattie’s hands. She hadn’t heard Jude get up or turn on the faucet. Her hands shook as she lifted the glass, but she drank to appease her sister who looked concerned and perplexed.
“How can this be real?” Jude asked. “I mean, you experienced a murder that happened over thirty years ago. Is there any chance you’re…?”
“Making it up?” Hattie asked, setting the water on a little glass coaster, a gift from Gram Ruth.
Jude nodded.
“No, but how do I know? How do I explain this?”
“I guess the best way to know for sure is to follow this,” Jude gestured to the painting, “and see if anything comes of it. What’s that?” Jude went to the painting and knelt, pointing at a little rounded white shape on the floor.
“A hat. A woman’s hat with lace around the rim. Rosemary wore it into the cabin.”
Jude bit her cheek and lifted her camera, zooming in on the hat and taking a picture. It didn’t look like a hat, only a little white blob, but maybe some detail was tucked in the painting and Jude would catch it later.
“I want to develop these in the dark room today, but we could have dinner later?” Jude asked.
Hattie looked at her surprised. Jude never asked her to have dinner. An occasional breakfast, a cup of coffee, but dinner was usually a time for Jude to go on a date or socialize with her girlfriends. Hattie did not have a single memory of Jude inviting her to dinner.
“Good grief, don’t look at me like that,” Jude snapped. “I didn’t offer you an organ. It’s dinner. We can go to Randy’s Diner by my apartment.”
“I’d like that,” Hattie said, folding her hands in her lap and trying to hide the smile growing on her face. “I’m helping with a potluck at the church, but I can ride my bike from there.”
Jude rolled her eyes.
“Why not drive your car?”
Hattie shrugged.
“It’s too big. I don’t like driving it.”
Jude sighed and patted Hattie’s knee.
“I’d die before I gave up my car. Freedom, Hattie. This is a man’s world, but in a car, you can go anywhere.”
Jude
Jude and Clayton spent three hours in the newspaper dark room before returning to his messy desk. Jude’s images of Hattie’s painting were drying on the line. She had offered Clayton a brief explanation but kept most of the details to herself.
“Thank you, Clayton. I know I give you a hard time, but I’d be lost with you,” Jude said, almost putting her hand over Clayton’s and thinking better of it.
He looked up from his desk, where he’d been rifling through several newspapers, surprised, a blush turning his freckled face beet colored.
“You’re welcome, Jude. And even though you’re having a strangely sentimental moment, I won’t ask you out. That’d be opportunistic of me.”
She grinned and rolled her eyes.
“You’re right.”
“It was very bold of your grandmother to turn your mother in while hosting her funeral at her own home,” Clayton said, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Right? How is it even possible?” Jude muttered, feeling the rage bubbling. She had to stay on task. If she wound back the clock to that horrible funeral and her equally horrible grandmother, fawning over Jude and her siblings, she wanted to puke or worse punch the old woman in her heavily made-up face.
“She knew Sophia had a different name, her hometown was over a hundred miles away, a whole other time, no obituary - only close friends and family,” Clayton murmured. “That’s how she got away with it.”
“But why didn’t my dad put a stop to it?” Jude asked. “I mean after he realized Gram had my mom institutionalized, why didn’t he blow the whole story up?”
Clayton offered her a sympathetic look.
“Unfortunately, those are questions for your grandmother, Jude. And sooner or later you’re going to have to ask them. You know that, right?”
Jude huffed and pulled a cigarette from her purse, lighting it and a second for Clayton which he coughed on at first. He always wanted to smoke with Jude despite his tendency to hack on every inhale.
“I’m not ready to talk with her. I’m afraid what I’ll do. And honestly, I want to find my mom first. I want the truth.”
“And the trail on your mom has gone cold?”
Jude nodded, taking a drag and leaning back in her chair. Her shoulders and neck ached, and her eyes felt crossed from hours in the dark room.
“I’ll make some calls today. Maybe I can help you find her,” he murmured.
Chapter 28
September 1965
Sophia
“Thank the heavens for you, Kent,” Sophia whispered digging through the duffel bag and finding a small change purse with twenty dollars.
She’d found a wool sweater in the bag the night before, and slept in a small grove of apples trees. After piling herself with brush, leaving only a small hole to breathe, she felt warm and safe.
Even if Kaiser searched the woods, he would likely pass her by.
Apple trees held a special place in her heart. Her father had grown them on her childhood farm. She and her bothers had picked them, and her mother baked pies and applesauce from their fruit. Her daddy used to tell her about his own mother, an Irish immigrant, that revered apples as sacred. She insisted on always burying the dead in her family with apples tucked in their coffins. That way, they can get reborn, her father would say with that mischievous gleam in his eye. Afterward he’d make up a story of a young woman who buried her husband with an apple and he came back as a ghoul.