Black-Eyed Susans (3 page)

A slight edge has crept into his voice. He
is gently telling me not to screw them.

“There are several reasons,” I
say unsteadily. “I can show you one of them.”

“Tessa, I want to know
everything.”

“It’s better if you see
it.”

I lead him down our narrow hall without
speaking, past Charlie’s messy purple womb, usually pulsing with music, and throw
open the door at the end. This wasn’t in my plan, not today anyway.

Bill looms like a giant in my bedroom, his
head knocking into the
antique chandelier dangling with sea glass that
Charlie and I scavenged last summer on the gray beaches of Galveston. He ducks away and
brushes against the curve of my breast by accident. Apologizes. Embarrassed. For a
second, I see this stranger’s legs tangled in my sheets. I can’t remember a
time that I let a man in here.

I watch painfully as Bill absorbs intimate
details about me: the cartoonish portrait of Granddaddy’s house, gold and silver
jewelry littered across my dresser, the close-up of Charlie staring out of lavender
eyes, a neat pile of freshly laundered white lace panties on the chair, which I wish to
God were tucked in a drawer.

He is already edging himself backward,
toward the door, clearly wondering what the hell he has gotten himself into. Whether he
has pinned his hopes for poor Terrell Darcy Goodwin on a crazy woman who has led him
straight to her bedroom. Bill’s expression makes me want to laugh out loud, even
though I am not above entertaining a fantasy about an all-American guy with two degrees,
when my type runs the opposite direction.

Even though what I’m about to show him
keeps me up at night, reading the same paragraph of
Anna Karenina
over and
over, listening to every creak of the house and finger of wind, every barefoot midnight
step of my daughter, every sweet sleep sound that floats out of her mouth and down the
hall.

“Don’t worry.” I force
lightness into my voice. “I like my men rich and less altruistic. And you know
… old enough to grow facial hair. Come over here. Please.”

“Cute.” But I can hear relief.
He makes it in two strides. His eyes follow my finger, out the window.

I am not pointing to the sky, but to the
dirt, where a nest of black-eyed Susans is still half-alive under the windowsill,
teasing me with beady black eyes.

“It is February,” I say quietly.
“Black-eyed Susans only bloom like this in summer.” I pause for this to sink
in. “They were planted three days ago, on my birthday. Someone grew them
especially for me, and put them under the window where I sleep.”

The abandoned field on the Jenkins property
was licked to death by fire about two years before the Black-Eyed Susans were dumped
there. A reckless match tossed by a lost car on a lonely dirt road cost a destitute old
farmer his entire wheat crop and set the stage for the thousands and thousands of yellow
flowers that covered the field like a giant, rumpled quilt.

The fire also carved out our grave, an
uneven, loping ditch. Black-eyed Susans sprung up and decorated it brazenly long before
we arrived. The Susans are a greedy plant, often the first to thrive in scorched,
devastated earth. Pretty, but competitive, like cheerleaders. They live to crowd out the
others.

One lit match, one careless toss, and our
nicknames were embedded in serial killer lore forever.

Bill, still in my bedroom, has shot Joanna a
lengthy text, maybe because he doesn’t want to answer her questions on the phone
in front of me. We meet her outside my window in time to watch her dip a vial into the
black speckled dirt. The squiggly charm on her necklace, glinting in the sun, brushes a
petal as she bends over. I still can’t recall the symbol’s meaning.
Religious, maybe. Ancient.

“He or she used something besides the
dirt in the ground,” Joanna said. “Probably a common brand of potting soil,
and seeds that can be picked up at Lowe’s. But you never know. You should call the
cops.”

“And tell them someone is planting
pretty flowers?” I don’t want to sound sarcastic, but there it is.

“It’s trespassing,” Bill
says. “Harassment. You know, this doesn’t have to be the work of the killer.
It could be any crazy who reads the papers.” It is unspoken, but I know. He is
uncertain of my mental state. He hopes I have more than this patch of flowers under my
window to bolster a judge’s belief in Terrell. A little part of him wonders
whether I planted the flowers myself.

How much do I tell him?

I suck in a breath.
“Every time I call the cops, it ends up on the Internet. We get calls and letters
and Facebook crazies. Presents on the doorstep. Cookies. Bags of dog poop. Cookies
made
of dog poop. At least I hope it’s just dog poop. Any attention
makes my daughter’s life at school a living hell. After a few years of beautiful
peace, the execution is stirring everything up again.” Exactly why, for years, I
told Angie no and no and
no.
Whatever doubts crept in, I had to push away. In
the end, I understood Angie, and Angie understood me.
I will find another way,
she had assured me.

But things were different now. Angie was
dead.

He’d stood under my window.

I brush away something whispery threading
its way through my hair. I vaguely wonder whether it is a traveler from
Granddaddy’s basement. I remember sticking my hand blindly into that musty hole a
few hours ago, and turn my anger up a notch. “The look on your faces right now?
That mixture of pity and uneasiness and misplaced understanding that I still need to be
treated like the traumatized sixteen-year-old girl I used to be? I’ve been getting
that look since I can remember. That’s how long I’ve been protecting myself,
and so far, so good. I’m
happy
now. I am not that girl anymore.” I
wrap my long brown sweater around me a little more tightly even though the late winter
sun is a warm stroke across my face. “My daughter will be home any minute, and
I’d rather she doesn’t meet the two of you until I’ve explained a few
things. She doesn’t know yet that I called you. I want to keep her life as normal
as possible.”

“Tessa.” Joanna ventures a step
toward me and stops. “I get it.”

There is such a terrible weight in her
voice.
I get it.
Bombs dropping
one two three
to the bottom of the
ocean.

I scan her face. Tiny lines etched by other
people’s sorrow. Blue-green eyes that have flashed on more horror than I could
ever fathom. Smelled it. Touched it,
breathed
it, as it rained down in ashes
from the sky.

“Do you?” My voice is soft.
“I hope so. Because I am going to be there when you excavate those two
graves.”

My daddy paid for their coffins.

Joanna is rubbing the charm between her
fingers, like it is a holy cross.

I suddenly realize that, in her world, it
is.

She is wearing a double helix made of
gold.

The twisted ladder of life.

A strand of DNA.

One week later. Tuesday, 10
A.M.
sharp. I am back on the doctor’s plump couch, with
company. Oscar rubs his wet nose against my hand reassuringly, then settles in on the
floor beside me, alert. He’s been mine since last week, and I will go nowhere
without him. Not that anyone argues. Oscar, sweet and protective, makes them
hopeful.

“Tessie, the trial is in three months.
Ninety days away. My most important job right now is to prepare you emotionally. I know
the defense attorney, and he’s excellent. He’s even better when he truly
believes he holds the life of an innocent man in his hands, which he does. Do you
understand what that means? He will not take it easy on you.”

This time, right down to business.

My hands are folded primly in my lap.
I’m wearing a short, blue-plaid pleated skirt, white lacy stockings, and black
patent-leather boots. I’ve never been a prim girl, despite the reddish-gold hair
and freckles my wonderfully corny grandfather claimed were fairy dust. Not then, not
now. My best friend, Lydia, dressed me today. She burrowed into my messy drawers and
closet, because she couldn’t stand the fact that I no longer make any effort to
match. Lydia is one of the few friends who isn’t giving up on me. She is currently
taking her fashion cues from the movie
Clueless,
but I haven’t seen
it.

“OK,” I say.
This is, after all, one of two reasons I am sitting here. I am afraid. Ever since they
snatched Terrell Darcy Goodwin away from his Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast in Ohio
eleven months ago and told me I would need to testify, I have counted the days like
terrible pills. Today, we are eighty-seven days away, not ninety, but I do not bother to
correct him.

“I remember nothing.” I am
sticking with this.

“I’m sure the prosecutor has
told you that doesn’t matter. You’re living, breathing evidence. Innocent
girl vs. unspeakable monster. So let’s just begin with what you do remember.
Tessie?
Tessie?
What are you thinking right now, this second? Spit it out
… don’t look away, OK?”

I crane my neck around slowly, gazing at him
out of two mossy gray pools of nothingness.

“I remember a crow trying to peck out
my eyes,” I say flatly. “Tell me. What exactly is the point of looking, when
you know I can’t see you?”

Technically, this is their third grave. The
two Susans being exhumed tonight in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Fort Worth were his
older kills. Dug up from their first hiding place and tossed in that field with me like
chicken bones. Four of us in all, dumped in the same trip. I was thrown on top with a
girl named Merry Sullivan, who the coroner determined had been dead for more than a day.
I overheard Granddaddy mutter to my father, “The devil was cleaning out his
closets.”

It is midnight, and I am at least three
hundred feet away, under a tree. I have darted under the police tape that marks off the
site. I wonder who the hell they think is walking a cemetery at this time of night but
ghosts. Well, I guess I am.

They’ve erected a white tent over the
two graves, and it glows with pale light, like a paper lantern. There are far more
people here than I expected. Bill, of course. I recognize the district attorney from his
picture in the paper. There’s a balding man beside him in an ill-fitting suit. At
least five policemen, and another five human beings dressed like aliens in Tyvek suits,
wandering in and out of the tent. I know that the medical examiner is among them.
Careers ride on this one.

Did the reporter who wrote Angie’s
obituary know that his words would pry loose the rusty lever of justice? Create a small
public
outcry in a state that executes men monthly? Change a
judge’s mind about exhuming the bones and considering a new trial? Convince me
once and for all to dial the phone?

The man in the suit suddenly pivots. I catch
the flash of a priest’s collar before I duck behind the tree. My eyes sting for a
second, struck by this furtive operation and the supreme effort to treat these girls
with dignity and respect when no one has a clue who they are, when there is not a
reporter in sight.

The girls rising out of the earth tonight
were nothing
but
bones when they were transported to that old wheat field
eighteen years ago. I was barely alive. They say that Merry had been dead at least
thirty hours. By the time the cops got to us, Merry was pretty well scavenged. I tried
to protect her, but at some point in the night I passed out. Sometimes, I can still hear
the animated conversation of the field rats. I can’t tell anybody who loves me
these things. It’s better if they think I don’t remember.

The doctors say my heart saved me. I was
born with a heart genetically on the slow side to begin with. Add the fact that I was in
peak running condition as one of the nation’s top high-school hurdlers. On a
normal day, doing homework, eating a hamburger, or painting my nails, my pulse clicked
along at a steady thirty-seven beats a minute and crawled as low as twenty-nine at night
when I slept. The average heart rate for a teen-ager is about seventy. Daddy had a habit
of waking up at two every morning and checking to see if I was breathing, even though a
famous Houston cardiologist had told him to relax. For sure, my heart was a bit of a
phenomenon, as was my speed. People whispered about the Olympics. Called me the Little
Fireball because of my hair and my temper when I ran a bad time or a girl nudged me off
a hurdle.

While I fought for life in that grave, the
doctors say my heart wound down to around eighteen. An EMT at the scene even mistook me
for dead.

The district attorney told the jury that I
surprised the Black-Eyed Susan killer, not the other way around. Set off a panic in him,
prompted him to get rid of the evidence. That the large bruise on
Terrell Darcy Goodwin’s gut in the blown-up exhibit photograph, blue and green and
yellow tie-dye, was my artwork. People appreciate pretty fantasies like this, where
there is a feisty hero, even when there is no factual basis for it.

A dark van is slowly backing up to the tent.
O. J. Simpson got off the same year I testified, and he massacred his wife and left his
blood behind on her gate. There was no solid DNA evidence against Terrell Darcy Goodwin,
except a tattered jacket mired in the mud a mile away with his blood type on the right
cuff. The spot of blood was so tiny and degraded they couldn’t tackle DNA, still
fairly new in criminal court. It was enough for me to hold on to back then, but not
anymore. I pray that Joanna will work her high priestess magic, and we will finally know
who these two girls are. I’m counting on them to lead all of us to peace.

I turn to go, and my toe catches the edge of
something. I pitch forward, instantly breathless, palms out, onto an old broken
gravestone. The roots have bullied the marker until it toppled over and broke in
half.