Burying the Honeysuckle Girls (10 page)

A moment later they showed up, Jay holding Rowe by the scruff of his golf shirt and pushing him forward. A red-hot asphalt burn shone along the length of Rowe’s face. Jay shoved him into the backseat with a warning glare and slammed the door.

I lifted an eyebrow.

“Told you,” he said. “I’m a fighter.”

We made our way back to the hotel. “Listen carefully,” I said to Rowe, who was set up in a desk chair between the two beds in our hotel room. The curtains were drawn and the AC was off. Rowe was flushed with sweat.

“You are going to tell me everything that happened that night with my mother,” I continued. “Everything. Or I’m going to burn down your miserable life. Do you understand?”

The side of Rowe’s face was already scabbing. He looked worse than miserable already. Jay told him to call his wife again and tell her he was going to be stuck in Birmingham for just a few more hours.

“She’s not going to buy it,” he said. “She’ll call the police if I’m not home soon.”

“You’re full of shit,” I shot back. “You think your wife doesn’t know about your special zipper bag of pills? You think she doesn’t know everything you get up to? She’s not going to call the police. Not unless she’s finally had enough of your nonsense and is ready to pull the plug on your operation.” I snuck a glance at Jay. “Or, how about this? If you really think she’s worried, I’ll be more than willing to call her and tell her you’re safe and sound up here, just settling some differences with one of your former underage, recently rehabbed clients.”

He studied the stained popcorn ceiling, his lids fluttering down over his eyes. Jay, propped against the headboard and staring daggers at him, ordered room service. I sat, barricaded by pillows, on the other bed. I couldn’t imagine eating. All I could think of were those two bottles, Mrs. Cheramie’s Lortab and now Val’s Dilaudid, nestled together in the zippered compartment of my purse. I pinched at the bridge of my nose and tried to think about babbling brooks and sunsets and other inane bullshit.

“Can I have one of those cheeseburgers?” Rowe asked Jay.

“Talk first,” I said. “Food later.”

I saw a small flash of fear in his eyes.
Good.
He should be scared. I had a wheelbarrow full of dirt on him, and he knew it.

“So,” I began. “You lied about leaving my mother at Walter and Val’s and driving home.”

He nodded.

“You went in with her.” Another nod. “And you saw everything.”

He chewed at his lip. Suddenly, I saw the TV remote whiz past Rowe’s head. He ducked just in time and the chair teetered. His legs flailing, he finally managed to right himself.

“Hey!”

“We need to hear words, asshole,” Jay said. “Words coming out of your mouth.”

“I was with her that night,” Rowe said. “I saw everything.”

We waited.

“I gave her the Haldol. We used to meet in the parking lot at school.”

I closed my eyes. “I need to know everything,” I said. “Start talking.”

Chapter Fourteen

Monday, September 17, 2012

Birmingham, Alabama

“My mom was on the board at Pritchard,” Rowe said. “She used to bring home a lot of stuff from there. Haldol, Seconal, and Darvocet, I think. She used to hide it in the canopy over her bed. I don’t know if she was planning some grand exit or what. I think she was very unhappy.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about your mother’s suburban malaise,” I said. “Get to the point.”

I was about to find out about the real Trix Bell, and I was steeling myself for it. I’d only known one side of my mother. The mom who had played with Wynn and me in the clearing. Who’d shown us how to pull the stamen through a honeysuckle blossom and catch the drop of nectar on our tongues.

That mother had cooked collards and cornbread and had hummed songs she’d learned from her mountain-bred mother. She’d recited Latin poems when she folded the laundry or weeded the garden.

Veni, Creator Spiritus,

mentes tuorum visita,

imple superna gratia

quae tu creasti pectora.

Rowe began again. “I started off by stealing a few bottles of pills here and there and slipping them to your mom.”

“You mean, you sold them to her,” I said.

He shrugged.

“She paid you, right?” I prodded. “In cash?”

“I guess. I don’t really remember.”

“Then think about it.”

“Yeah. She paid me in cash.”

“You’re lying.” I looked at Jay. “He’s lying. Call his wife.”

“No—” Rowe said.

I leaned forward. “My father kept a tight rein on my mom. He gave her just enough cash for groceries, dry cleaning, the post office. She had to save receipts for him. There’s no way she would’ve had extra money for drugs.”

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple dipping like a bobber on the end of a fishing line.

“Stop fucking with me, Rowe.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. But you can’t tell anyone about this. It’s a . . .
web
, okay? There are a lot of people—” His head dropped, his scalp showing through the spikes of his hair. A buzzing started up inside me, the faintest current. Now we were getting somewhere. Finally. Rowe spoke to the carpet. “Your father—Elder—set the whole thing up with my mom. I think they had something going on.”

I went cold.

“I don’t know if he paid my mom or if they had some kind of an arrangement between them.” He coughed. “I knew he didn’t want either of them involved in the actual transactions. I mean, he was attorney general, and she was a hot-shit diva in the community. So they got me to do their dirty work. My mom gave me the pills. I’d head out to the parking lot after school, give them to Trix, and that was that.”

“What about what Val Wooten said?” I asked. “About my mom running around with a teenage boy? That was you, right? You weren’t just handing her a bottle of pills every couple of weeks? There was more between you two.”

His face went sheepish like a boy’s, and the side of his lip curled up in spite of himself. “She liked me, okay? She used to talk to me in the parking lot. She asked me if I’d go riding around with her out in the country. We drove around like that sometimes. She really liked the country.”

I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t ignore the revulsion that surged through me. How could my mother have spent time with this animal? How could she have been so stupid?

“She’d tell me things,” he said. “Things about her childhood. And her mother.”

It felt like my neurons were crackling. “Like what, exactly?”

“She’d lost her mom at an early age. Five or six, I think. Her mom was sent away to Pritchard. It was hard on Trix.”

“Why did they send her to Pritchard?” Jay asked.

“I don’t remember. She was . . . she was sick or something, I think. Schizophrenia, maybe?”

There it was again—schizophrenia, the common denominator. “Did she tell you anything about Elder?” I asked. “Their relationship?”

“Just the stuff you’d expect. That he was controlling. Hard on her. Hard on you and coddled Wynn.” He flicked his eyes to me. “She said they never had sex.”

“Right,” I said, voice dripping with sarcasm. My middle finger itched so bad, I had to tuck it under the opposite arm. I couldn’t afford to alienate my only source of information now, but Rowe was tempting the hell out of me.

“Yes,” Rowe said. “That’s right. Your father and your mother were in a loveless marriage.”

“And you’re saying that she came on to you.”

“Yeah.” His voice was defiant. “That’s what I’m saying.”

There was a beat or two of silence where I considered if I actually had it in me to wrap my hands around his head and plunge my thumbs into his eye sockets. To push and push and not let up until his blood was running in rivers down my arms. I gritted my teeth, rolling the image around in my mind, then blinking it away.

“But,” Jay said, “Trix never explained why Elder wanted her to take the Haldol? Y’all didn’t talk about that?”

“No, we did. She said her mom had something, and there was a good chance she’d get it too. She knew Elder was worried about his position and how she reflected on him. All that political bullshit. But I mean, I kind of understood why Elder wanted her on the pills. No offense, but your mom was kind of a basket case. Like you’d just be talking to her for a few minutes, and you could tell right away something was wrong with her.”

A rush of protectiveness welled up in me.
Asshole.

“Like what?” Jay asked.

“Like she always seemed like she was in the middle of a panic attack. She twitched, you know? Trembled, sort of. She always looked nervous. Her voice shook. And sometimes she’d mumble stuff to herself in the middle—”

I broke in. “It was a prayer she liked to say. She chanted it. Lots of people do that. It doesn’t make her a basket case.”

“Yeah.” He caught my eye. “I remember now. It was a Catholic prayer. Which was weird because I didn’t think y’all went to church.”

That was a mystery to me too, why my mother had latched on to that particular prayer, but there was no way in hell I was going to tell Rowe that.

“Back to the drugs,” I said. “My dad wanted her to take them to make sure she didn’t flip out and jeopardize his career?”

“The election was a big deal. A lot of bigwig supporters writing a lot of checks. I think he was always worried about her. Then something happened—she got this letter—and she got worse.”

My nerves crackled again. It felt like a dozen tiny chain saws sawing their way through my insides. A letter. Here was something—finally. A clue in the midst of all this mess.

“Trix told me this letter rattled her, really freaked her out. Elder didn’t know about it. She didn’t show it to him.”

“You saw this letter?” I asked, hope lifting inside me.

Rowe shook his head. “She told me about it.”

“What did it say?”

“It was kind of bizarre. I don’t really remember.”

“Try,” Jay said.

Rowe slumped back and searched the ceiling. “It was from some lady who’d known her family, up in the mountains in north Alabama. The lady wanted to meet Trix, to talk to her, on her thirtieth birthday, at Bienville Square.”

“Why?” I asked. I could barely breathe.

“I don’t know. She wanted to tell her stuff she needed to know? Family stuff, I think? Honest to God, I don’t really know. Mostly Trix said it was just a bunch of weird shit about Trix turning thirty and how it was a strong age—all this feminist crap about women coming into their own when they turn thirty.” He shrugged. “I mean, look, I was a seventeen-year-old idiot. It didn’t compute.”

He was a middle-aged man, and, from the looks of it, it still didn’t compute.

“Trix got really worked up about that letter. God, if I could tell you . . . It sounds strange but I think she actually had the idea that this woman was like some kind of witch. An oracle or something, from the mountains. That she was coming to impart some magical gift that had belonged to her mother and grandmother. Something that could save her from going nuts. Fucking loony toons, right?” He laughed. “I mean, it was actually kind of sad. She really believed it. But she was so messed up about her mom, I guess she needed something to hang on to. I felt really sorry for her. But honestly? That was when I thought maybe Elder had the right idea, pumping her full of pills.”

“Did she meet with the woman?” I asked.

“I snuck out and drove her to Bienville Square the night of her birthday. She was wearing this gold dress . . .”

His voice thinned. He seemed to momentarily waver in and out of the room. All I could see was my mother. The gold dress, sparkling in the moonlit clearing. Tears rose in my eyes.

“She told me to stay in the car, and she walked to the center of the square. It was raining, I think.” Rowe twitched, lost in the memory. “When she came back, I don’t know, like fifteen minutes later, she was different. Changed.”

“Changed? How do you mean?”

He blinked. “She was shaking really hard, like ten times the normal amount. I mean, really amped up. Like she’d finally snapped her fucking pencil for good, if you know what I mean. She said she had to go to Birmingham, right then, to get something. She asked me to drive her.”

“Get something? What?”

I felt like I was on the final hill of a roller coaster, barreling toward that last, terrifying tunnel. Where all the answers awaited me. But Rowe wasn’t ready to go there. He squirmed in the chair and addressed Jay.

“Look, man. I gotta take a piss big-time.”

“Then you better talk faster.”

Rowe
pfft
ed and shook his head.

“Talk, Rowe,” I ordered him, trying to control the tremor in my voice. “What happened at the Wootens’?”

“She wanted to sneak in like we were spies or something. We found him . . . your uncle Walter . . . sitting in the living room. He had a gun. An old rifle.”

I thought of the rifle I’d seen over the Wootens’ mantel, the one with the brass plate on the stock.

“Is that what my mom wanted? The gun?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it was. But her uncle was cleaning it,” Rowe said. “Or maybe . . .”

I leaned forward. “Maybe what?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it looked like he had the barrel to his head. His forehead, you know?” Rowe’s eyebrows lifted and he looked from me to Jay. His temples gleamed with sweat.

I pictured the rifle between the old man’s knees, pressed against his head. His hands reaching down to the trigger. “He was trying to shoot himself?” I asked.

“I guess, I don’t know. Maybe I’m making that part up. It doesn’t seem right now. I mean, why would he have been doing that?”

Everything was buzzing now. There was a full-on electrical storm raging inside me. “Go on.”

“So we come in,” Rowe said. “And this guy, Uncle Walter, puts the gun down. Wait. No. That’s not what happened. Trix took the gun away from him. She takes the gun, and she starts yammering about it. She’s talking about the gun, saying she’s going to take it with her.”

“What for?”

“Beats me. But I’m telling you, she’s obsessed with taking the fricking gun. And then she’s peppering him with all these questions about what happened to her mother, his sister.”

“Collie.”

“Yeah, Collie. She asks him about how Collie ended up in Pritchard when she turned thirty, and what happened to their mother, Jinn, when she turned thirty. She’s talking crazy. Absolutely bonkers. Then her aunt comes in. Val. And she says Trix needs to see a doctor, and she should probably go to Pritchard too.”

“And?”

“Trix loses her shit. I mean one hundred percent flips the fuck out. She starts waving the gun, pointing it at everybody. She says she has to take the gun. Take it somewhere, I can’t remember. And then she fires it.”

“Walter’s gun? At who?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it. It matters.”

“I don’t know, Althea. All of us, I guess? She didn’t hit anybody. But I mean, Jesus, she shot a gun inside their house. Walter crawled around the furniture somehow and knocked her down. He kind of tackled her, and she went down. They fought, scuffled, for a minute or two.”

“He hit her?”

Rowe cut his eyes at Jay. “He, ah—she was going wild, and I think he might’ve hit her a couple of times. Like with the flat of his hand or something. Just to stop her.”

“You let him hit my mother?” I felt my fingers start to itch again, my blood warm in my veins.

“She fucking shot at him, Althea.”

He was right, I knew it, but I couldn’t stop myself. I’d been pushed past some kind of line, and all I could think was how badly I wanted to wrap my fingers around his neck. Squeeze until the breath went out of him.

“You watched a man hit my mother,” I said evenly. “And then you stood there and let him put her in a mental hospital.”

Rowe’s eyes darted nervously to Jay. “She was out of control.”

I scrambled up, aimed myself at him, and launched off the bed. At the last moment, right before I landed on him, right before I was able to sink my fingernails into his fleshy jowls and rip him to shreds, Jay caught the back of my shirt and pulled me back.

He swung me onto the bed, where I landed with a whump. I crawled under the covers and pressed my face into the hotel comforter. The pungent combination of bleach and sweat and stale cigarettes filled my lungs. I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

“I’m sorry, Althea,” Rowe said. “I’m sorry. I was a kid. I didn’t know what to do. She took a shot at us. She could’ve killed somebody.”

I didn’t answer him.

After a long time, Jay spoke in a quiet voice. “What happened next? After Walter got the gun?”

“Elder showed up,” Rowe said. His voice had taken on a penitent tone. “He took Trix home. I got out of there. I didn’t want any more to do with the whole situation.”

“What did your mother say?”

“I didn’t tell her what happened. I didn’t tell anybody. The next day I heard they’d taken Trix to the hospital but she’d had an aneurysm and died. I guess that was why she’d been shaking so much. And acting so crazy. I mean she probably had schizophrenia, but I guess she had the aneurysm too. Maybe because of all the pills.”