Black-Eyed Susans (23 page)

“I’m
leaving.” I say this yet remain planted on the couch. “I’m done with
your dumb games.”

“That’s your decision,
Tessie.”

I was in the tree house.

She had called my name from the kitchen
window. I thought she wanted me to help with the dishes. She always made a mess. Grease
and flour everywhere. Crusted pans. Dirty bowls in the sink. Daddy said it was the price
for biscuits that crumbled in your mouth, fudge frosting, fried okra scramble with
potatoes and tomatoes that we ate like popcorn, cold, as leftovers.

I was in the tree house.
But I
ignored her.

“You found her on the kitchen
floor.”

My heart bangs against my chest.

“You were eight years old.”

Her face is blue.

“She died of a stroke,” he
says.

I pull up the skirt of her apron. Cover her
face.

“Are you angry that she isn’t
here? That she left you?”

I was in the tree house.

I didn’t come when she called.

The guilt is roaming free now. Almost
unbearable.

“Yes,” I breathe out.

The object in the third plastic evidence bag on
Jo’s desk is tiny, probably never of importance to anyone but me and its first owner, a
little girl in a frilly petticoat who is long dead and buried.

When I was fifteen, I found the ring in the
bottom of a basket of junk in an antiques store in the Stockyards. It was so caked with filth
that I didn’t see the inset pearl, like a microscopic spider’s egg, until I got it
home. The ring fit perfectly on my pinky. The owner of the store told me it was a Victorian
child’s ring from the 1800s, probably gold-filled, which is why she said she could give
it to me for $35, but certainly not the $10 I suggested. Lydia countered to the woman that she
wouldn’t have known the ring existed if we hadn’t wandered in. “Tessie could
have just stuck it in her pocket,” Lydia spewed indignantly, at which point I slid an
extra $25 of my Christmas money across the counter and dragged my best friend out the
door.

Halfway down the block, Lydia decided that I had
purchased the ring against the will of the universe and wanted me to return it.
It’s
bad luck to wear the jewelry of a dead stranger. Who knows what kind of terrible things
happened to the girl who wore it? In Victorian times, children were raised by cruel nannies
and saw their parents once a day by appointment. Winston Churchill said he could count the
number of times he’d been hugged by his mother.

By the time we arrived at the
bus stop, Lydia was even more insistent, to a higher degree of craziness than usual. She made
the leap from the grubby little object on my pinky to the Hope Diamond.
It grew in the
ground for 1.1 billion years before it exploded out of the earth and then cursed almost
everyone who touched it. Marie Antoinette got her head chopped off and her princess friend
was hacked to death with axes and pikes. It even hexed the innocent mailman who delivered it
to the Smithsonian. His family died, his leg got crushed, and his house burned
down.

Say what you want about Lydia Frances Bell and
her ridiculous chatter, she said things I never forgot. If she were standing here, she’d
be alternately dismayed and thrilled to be starring in the kind of morbid tale she devoured
and repeated over and over.

The lieutenant is holding the ring so the pearl
faces me like a blind eye. Everyone is being courteously silent. The weight of their
expectations is suffocating.

“Yes, that was mine,” I affirm.
“It went missing right before I testified at the trial. Lydia thought the ring was bad
luck and wanted me to stop wearing it.”

“Why did she think it was bad
luck?”

Pearls bring tears. Suicides and insanity, murders and carriage crashes.

“She didn’t believe you should wear
the jewelry of dead people unless it belonged to someone you once knew. History was important
to her.”
And she was right,
a Susan chimes in my ear.

It’s true—the ring was on my finger
when he threw me in that hole. Everything else I wore that night—my favorite black
leggings, Dad’s Michigan T-shirt, the cross necklace that Aunt Hilda gave me at my
confirmation—disappeared. The ER doctors cut off every bit of it and handed it over to
the police.

The night nurse was the first to notice the ring
while checking my IV, a couple of hours after my pacemaker surgery. I could feel her wriggling
it off, her fingers floating like feathers across mine.
Shhhhh.
When I woke up, there
was a pinched, untanned circle where the
ring had been. A month later, at
home, I discovered that someone had tucked a hospital Bible into a pocket in my suitcase. When
I opened it up, an envelope was taped to Psalm 23, the ring tucked inside.

The first thing I think when I hear the thump
is that Charlie has tumbled out of her crib. It takes an instant of consciousness to realize
that Charlie has not slept in a crib in thirteen years. She’s tangled in the covers
beside me, red hair splayed on the aqua pillowcase like she’s floating in an ocean.
It’s coming back to me now: our late-night marathon of
The Walking Dead,
popcorn, and cheddar cheese chips. The antidote to identifying inexplicable objects dug out of
your best friend’s back yard.

I’d shut off the TV in my bedroom around 1
A.M.
That could have been thirty minutes or four hours ago. It’s pitch
black outside the window. I reach over to touch Charlie’s bare shoulder to be sure
I’m not dreaming. It feels velvety and cool, but I don’t make the usual move to
cover her up.

A low hum of chatter, as the Susans gather in my
head to confer. I feel for the phone in the bed, where it usually sleeps beside me: 3:33.
Charlie’s breath is even, and I decide not to wake her. Not yet.

I hear it again. The leaden sound of something
dropping, like the lid of a trunk. It’s outside, toward Charlie’s room, but
definitely not in the house. I slip over to my closet. Drop to my knees to grope around the
shoe rack that hangs over the door. Second row up, fourth pocket over. My fingers tighten
around my .22. For three years after the trial, this pistol was tucked in my size 2 waistband.
I considered a bigger weapon, but I didn’t want anyone to see the bulge against my bony
hip. Especially not my dad. Lucas secretly taught me to shoot when we weren’t sneaking
around accidentally making Charlie. He insisted on one thing when he pressed the .22 into my
hand for the first time: Go to the gun range like it’s a church, at least fifty-two
times a year.

I’ve always hoped it’s OK to shoot
more than you pray, because
that’s how it’s turned out. Lucas
has urged me to trade up for the last ten years, but I can’t imagine any gun but this
one in my hand.

I shake Charlie’s shoulder and she groans.
“
Not
morning.”

“I hear something outside,” I
whisper. “Put your slippers on. And this.” I toss over a sweatshirt, hanging out
of my hamper.

“For real?”

“For real. Get
up.
”

“Why aren’t you calling the
police?” The sound is muffled, as she tugs the hoodie over her face.

“Because I don’t want us to be on
the evening news.”

“Is that your gun? Mom.”

“Please, Charlie, just do what I say.
We’re going to slip out the back door.”

“That makes no sense. The … thing is
out there.
Isn’t this why we have an alarm system so freaking sensitive that
it goes off every time I turn up Vampire Weekend? Shouldn’t we at least look out the
window and make sure it’s not the garbage truck?”

It’s at times like this that I wish I had
a daughter who wasn’t so wrapped in the confident armor of her beauty and intelligence
and athletic grace. Instead, she is just like the Before Tessie. Both insisted strange noises
outside the window were teen-age boys with soap and eggs, not monsters with rusty shovels and
guns. Most of the time, they were right.

“Charlie, I just need you to do what I
say. Follow me.”

Another thump. Now tapping.

“OK, I heard that. Weird.” Charlie
is quickening her steps behind me as we navigate the darkened hall and living room. The shades
are drawn as usual, but I don’t want to flip on any lights.

“Follow our fire drill plan,” I say.
“Go to Miss Effie’s. Bang on her back door. Call her house if she doesn’t
answer. Here’s my phone. If I’m not there in five minutes, dial 911.”

“Keep it. I already have my phone. What
are you going to do?”

“Don’t worry, Charlie. Just
go.”
Run.

I push her out the back door, into utter
blackness. The last thing
I see is the fleeting deer flash of her
pink-and-white polka-dot pajama bottoms between the pine trees that border our properties.

I creep toward the front yard, using my photinia
bushes as a shield. The thumping hasn’t stopped, just moved inside me, to my chest. The
gun is cocked in my hand. I want to be done with him. Tonight.
Forever.
I peer
through a branch.

What the hell?
Four gray squares are
stuck in the middle of my yard like a row of gravestones. A small shadow hovers beside one of
them, bathed in faint light.
A time-traveling Victorian girl searching for her ring?
I blink hard to make her go away. Instead, the shadow rises. The ghost child transforms into a
man with a flashlight and a shiny gray nylon sweatshirt.

“Hey!” My reckless scream rips the
air.

I make out a Nike swoosh, black hair, a wiry
beard, before the man flips off his flashlight and runs.

If he’s running, dammit, so am I. Across
the yard, down the street. Feet pounding. He’s too fast to be my monster. Young legs.
Marathon legs. I am still fast, but not this fast. The slippers flop on my heels.

All of a sudden, he slows. Maybe he’s
stepped in one of our historic potholes. He’s taking aim. I raise the .22 in warning
just as he presses a car remote, triggering the taillights of a parked sedan. In seconds, a
car door slams and he’s screeching off. I can’t make out the license plate.

I turn back. It’s not a cemetery in my
yard. I’m staring at crude plywood signs. Hate shimmers off them.

Just one of the crazies.

I’m not relieved.

I have the sudden, certain
feeling I’m being watched.

Charlie.

The house next door, still dark.

My feet tear up the ground to Effie’s. I
bang hard enough on the front door that something inside clatters to the floor. There’s
no answer.

I kick off my slippers on the porch and race to
the back. I’m thinking of my monster, standing under my windowsill. Of my daughter, in
her polka-dot pajamas.

I hurl my fist at Effie’s back door. More
strangling silence. I survey the back yard, open my mouth again to scream Charlie’s name
but nothing comes out.

My frantic gaze lands on Effie’s rickety
garden shed in the back. In seconds, I am yanking open the door, ripping it half off its rusty
hinges. Charlie is crouched in the corner by two bags of compost. The phone is pressed to her
cheek, half-illuminating her face.

“Mom!” She is in my arms in seconds.
A car has screeched to the curb. And another. Siren lights are filtering through the
bushes.

A large shape is walking toward us, blinding us
with his flashlight.

“I’m a police officer. Did one of
you make a 911 call?”

“Yes, I’m Charlie. This is my mom.
We’re OK.”

I nod, unable to speak. Gruff conversation
floats from the front yard.

The policeman’s light continues to travel
over us. When he’s apparently satisfied we aren’t hurt or dangerous, he turns it
on the shed.

The light trickles like water into the corners,
up and down the walls.

He sees nothing out of the ordinary because he
thinks what he’s seeing is perfectly ordinary.

I’m seeing, but not understanding. I just
know it’s not ordinary.

Row after row of garden diggers.

They hang neatly in every square inch of
space.

“Do you believe in the devil,
Tessie?”

Great. Like I don’t get enough of this
from Aunt Hilda.

“I mean it in a very metaphorical
sense. I want to talk about the Black-Eyed Susan killer today. I think it would help
when you’re testifying to understand him a little better. That he’s flesh
and blood. Not mythic. Not Bluebeard. Not a troll under the bridge.”

My heart beats a little faster. My hand
reflexively moves over the lump above my left breast, the metal chunk under my skin that
keeps my heart beating at a minimum of sixty beats a minute. I run a nervous finger on
the straight three-inch scar. Lydia is already looking for a bikini with a strap that
will cover it up.

“We don’t know anything about
the creep,” I say stiffly. “We never will. He isn’t talking. His
family says he’s normal.” I don’t ever say his name out loud.
Terrell Darcy Goodwin.

“I treated a serial killer
once,” he says. “He was the smartest, most calculating person in the room.
Could charm a million dollars out of an old lady, and did. He blended in, and stood out.
He liked to get to know his victims and use that knowledge to scare them out of their
minds.”

“The pig-and-daisy card at the
hospital.” Out of nowhere.

“Do you think he sent that to
you?” he asks.

“Yes. I think it
made me go blind.”

“That’s good, Tessie. Excellent
progress. Whether he sent it or not, it was a trigger for you. You control your mind,
Tessie. Never forget it.”

I’m nodding. I’m flushing a
little, embarrassed by his compliment.