Burying the Honeysuckle Girls (13 page)

Toward the end of my cleaning frenzy, something yanked me back down to earth—Wynn’s name coming from the TV. I stopped midscrub and sat on the edge of the bed, riveted to the screen.

A local news anchor was talking about my brother, calling him things like “the heir to the throne” and “the newest member of Alabama’s Bell political dynasty.”

Dynasty seemed overshooting it, I thought, since it was really just Dad and Wynn. But whatever. Those people made up whatever they needed, whenever they needed it.

They rolled some tape of Wynn, standing by the river’s edge alongside old Gene Northcut, Dad’s former benefactor. A bruise shadowed the underside of Wynn’s cheekbone, and, as the breeze ruffled his hair, he grinned, an act that I imagined took every ounce of his willpower. I wondered if his ribs hurt from getting smashed in Jay’s car door. I hoped so.

“My sister has had her struggles in the past few years,” he was saying to the reporter off camera. “She’s a recovering addict and suffers from schizophrenia. She is currently being treated, a fact which my opponent is trying to twist in a sad attempt at mudslinging. The truth is, my ability to effectively govern the great state of Alabama has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with her condition.”

So I was being treated, was I? I reached out, turned up the volume.

Wynn went on. “In fact, in honor of my sister’s condition, I’m actively supporting the restoration of Old Pritchard Hospital. I’m having it listed on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the few remaining examples of the groundbreaking health-care reforms our state pioneered back in the nineteenth century. This gentleman”—Wynn gestured to Northcut—“Mr. Gene Northcut, a longtime member of the Alabama Historical Association, has agreed to start with a memorial that will mark Pritchard, finally and deservedly, as the hospital that changed lives.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Why in the world would my brother want to open up that can of worms? With the connection between that hospital and his family, you’d think he’d avoid the place like the plague. For that matter, how had Wynn’s opposing candidate gotten dirt on me? It was like freaking junior high all over. I switched off the TV in disgust.

When I’d finally exhausted myself, and the air smelled nice and chemically, I stripped the dingy linens off the bed and laid out on the bare mattress a pink-and-purple sleeping bag I’d bought at the dollar store. I climbed into the bag and placed the cigar box in front of me. Took everything out and laid the items in a neat row. I closed my eyes and the words filled my mind.

Come, Holy Spirit, Creator blessed,

And in our souls take up Thy rest;

Come with Thy grace and heavenly aid

To fill the hearts which Thou hast made.

I opened my eyes, half expecting there to have been a miracle. An answer. But there were just six pill bottles, the prayer, the wine-bottle label, and the hair clip. I stared at them until they blurred, but nothing new came to me. It was all the same. Clues that told me absolutely nothing.

Chapter Eighteen

October 1937

Sybil Valley, Alabama

Jinn had never seen the inside of Tom Stocker’s house. Even when they were kids and she’d gotten an invitation to Tom’s birthday party, an event that promised store-bought ice cream and a magician, she hadn’t gone. She hadn’t had a nice-enough dress.

When she finally did see it, she was surprised at how simple it was. The front hall was hung with green-and-gold-striped wallpaper, but the worn wooden floors were bare, and the iron chandelier was too small for the space. Also, there were chunks of mud, leading in a trail up the stairs. It looked like a mole had emerged from his muddy underground tunnel to explore the premises.

Jinn followed Tom into a shadowy room to the left of the hall. Its windows were shuttered and curtained, and the gaslight sconces flanking the marble fireplace, cold. She stood uncertainly behind a large carved and tufted sofa. She’d never seen a library in a house before.

Tom had positioned himself a respectable distance away—by a heavy bookcase with glass doors—and was regarding her with mild eyes. He hadn’t acted surprised when she’d knocked on his big, white front door just after eight that morning, just greeted her and asked her if she’d like a cup of tea.

But now that she was safely inside his house, she felt his eyes roving over her face. Searching. She thought of the lump on her temple. It was hard not to reach up and touch it.

She produced a small purse from her pocket and held it out to him.

“Would you keep this?” she said.

He didn’t answer.

She jiggled the purse. “For Collie?”

“What did he do to you?”

She wished he would quit glowering. She smiled brightly. “I’ll leave her a note. Hide it in the cigar box she keeps. My daddy used to smoke Red Ravens, way back when. He gave me the box, to put my treasures in, and I gave it to her.”

She was jabbering, like Howell said she tended to do at certain times. She clamped her mouth shut.

“What’s in there? Why do you need to hide it?”

Jinn cleared her throat. “Howell found most of what I’d saved. But I hid this in the flour jar. I want to save it for Collie.”

“What’s he done to you, Jinny?”

She opened her mouth. The words didn’t come out. They’d wilted somewhere in the back of her throat, like a handful of dead meadow flowers.

His face had gone crimson, his eyes narrow. “Jinny, I swear, I will kill him—”

“No.” She laid the purse on the table by the sofa. He didn’t even glance at it, never took his eyes off her. “No,” she said again, with finality.

She fiddled with the button on the sleeve of her dress. Everybody minded their own business up here on the mountain, did their duty before God. It was her duty to be a good wife, no matter what Howell did.

“I haven’t said anything, because it wasn’t my place,” he said. He was watching her—so closely she felt heat creeping up her neck. “It wasn’t my place, but I swear, Jinny, I’ll make it my place, just say the word. We can go away,” he said. “You and me, Willie, and Collirene.”

Her eyes fastened on his. She couldn’t think clear.

“Go away with me,” he said.

She managed one word. “Where?”

“He wouldn’t find you in London. I bet he can’t even find London on a map. It’s beautiful there. The flowers . . .” His voice trailed off. He scooped up the purse, crossed the room, and tucked it into an oblong, black-lacquered box on the mantel. He turned back to her.

Time stopped. Everything stopped but the drumming of her heart.

“California,” she said.

And then, in a split second, he was in front of her, inches away, his breath hot and sweet in her face. “Yes, California. San Francisco, San Diego. Wherever you want.”

“I can’t . . .” She was going to bring up something about God and the Bible and the fires of hell, but she shut her mouth when she saw the way he was looking at her. His eyes were large and sad. He looked lost in the twilight of the big room.

“All you have to do is say the word,” he said.

There was more than just God. She couldn’t leave her mama, in that house with her father. She couldn’t leave Walter, to be raised by Howell and Vernon. He was only a boy, after all. Just a little boy.

Before she could say no, Tom kissed her. His kiss was different than she expected. Of course, there was a world of difference between kissing a thirteen-year-old boy and a thirty-year-old man, but it wasn’t just that. He seemed so . . .
desperate
. His lips were different from Howell’s. Softer. Hungrier. His skin too. It was soft and rough all at the same time. Her head filled with a pleasant fog at the pressure of their mouths, the burn of his whiskers. She imagined that if she could press her face against his for a long-enough time, their skin would fuse. They would become one person.

He cradled the back of her head with his hand as the other grasped the back of her dress. He pressed himself against her. Now everything was leaping and twisting inside her, pulling her toward him. She put her hands on his chest, grasped at his shirt, but he pried her fingers loose. Pushed her away.

“Jinn. You’ve got to go on home now,” he said.

“Don’t send me away—”

“We’ll go to California. The first night of the revival, when everybody’s busy.”

“I can’t—”

“I’ll wait for you,” he said. “You and Collie slip out. Come to the house, and we’ll go. Now you’ve got to go on home, Jinny. We’ve got to play this smart.” His face was so grave. Scared, she thought, with a twinge of distress. She’d never seen Tom look scared of anything. And she hated it, the both of them bruised and beaten down with fear.

“Run away with me,” he said again.

She pressed the tender spot on her temple. “No,” she said.

Even if it wasn’t what Tom wanted to hear or what she wanted to say, the word still felt cool on her tongue. Delicious, like a sip of honeysuckle wine. If she said no to Howell like that, he’d go crazy, throw her against a wall. Then again, if he found out she’d been to Tom’s house, he wouldn’t just send her to Pritchard, he’d kill her.

“No,” she said again, louder this time, relishing the way the word slipped from her mouth and filled up the room.

Tom smiled, like she’d said something particularly endearing, then took hold of her hand. He led her to the door and told her to go home.

Chapter Nineteen

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Tuscaloosa, Alabama

When I mentioned to the lady on the phone at Pritchard I was interested in seeing a grave of a relative who’d died while a patient, her voice took on a decidedly guarded tone. She informed me that I would need to make an appointment with an official of the hospital and, furthermore, that there was no one available for tours of the old hospital or cemeteries until Tuesday. I wanted to chuck my phone across the room in frustration.

Instead, I dropped it on the bed and pulled the painting out of the cigar box. I smoothed the tiny watercolor on the bedside table under the hanging lamp and studied it, like I’d done a hundred times before. It was the only item in the box that seemed like it could be connected to Collie, my grandmother, but I had no idea what it meant.

It was a detailed, if amateurish, work that showed two women sitting under a vine-covered arbor, facing each other. One of the women could easily be Collie—probably the younger one, the one with a dark brunette flip and pink dress. She sat with crossed legs, a cigarette aloft in her fingers. She was hunched slightly, bent toward the other woman. In fact, every inch of her—eyes, arms, legs—seemed to be trained on her companion. That woman looked older, but far more elegant. She wore a white coat with a wide collar, and her red hair was swept back in a smooth twist. Her lips were scarlet against the pale face. The initials
LW
were painted into the lower-right corner.

Collie sitting with another woman—meeting with her, maybe—the two of them deep in conversation. I thought of my mother meeting the woman at Bienville Square. The oracle, Rowe had called her.

Her honeysuckle girl.

I folded the painting and looked around the room. Four days of hanging around Crimson Terrace with nothing to do but sample all the spiciness levels of KFC fried chicken? Three more nights hiding from cockroaches in my too-short sleeping bag? It was complete and utter bullshit.

I wasn’t going to do it. I couldn’t afford to.

I tucked the painting into my purse and left.

Driving west on 215, I tried not to think about how I’d just had to use Jay’s credit card to gas up his car. And how, at this very moment, the thirty-seven-dollar charge was zooming its way to his bank statement.

I’d had no choice. But running that card through the slot on the pump released a whole herd of butterflies in my stomach. If Wynn and Dr. Duncan swooped down on me in a couple of days, I’d know Jay was an enemy. If not, I’d have to admit I’d misjudged him, and maybe, when I’d caught them about to meet in Birmingham, he’d only been trying to talk Wynn into giving up his vendetta against me.

In the distance, I saw the tall red-brick pillars that marked the entrance of Old Pritchard. I turned between two pillars crosshatched with dead vines. They bore twin bronze plaques that read, “Pritchard Hospital, Est. 1851.” One of the original gates, twined with the same brown vines, had been pushed back, a rock jammed under it to keep it open. I drove between majestic rows of live oaks, bouncing over the broken-up asphalt. When I came to the circular front drive of the old hospital, I slowed. There was a huge, rusted iron fountain in the center. I maneuvered around it, marveling at the detail, then parked and climbed out.

The structure was immense—a red-brick Gothic castle, with stone-capped bay windows, crowned by a magnificent center tower and belfry that pierced the hot, cloudy sky. More towers and spires dotted the wings that flanked the main building. Two enormous magnolia trees stood sentry at the end of each massive wing. The lawn, grown high with weeds, fell away from the structure. Cicadas buzzed in the midmorning heat. A bank of gray clouds was roiling on the horizon. I could taste rain in the air.

If what Val had said was true, my mother had been here in this very building. And my grandmother, Collie. And then both of them had died in there, somewhere, hidden away in the maze of towers and spires, windows and rooms. Once there had been hundreds of patients crammed into this place, doctors and nurses, administrators. But looking at the dark windows, I knew—my mother and my grandmother had died alone.

The sadness—their sadness—seemed to expand and fill in the spaces between my skin and veins and organs, until I wondered if I would even be able to move again.

I finally forced myself to go on. Around the east wing of the building, and down the vast, sloped grounds, I followed a promising-looking weedy path. The cemetery crowned a bald, sunbaked hill, about a quarter of a mile behind the hospital. A large filigree iron sign—new, from the looks of it, and reading “Old Pritchard Cemetery”—arched over the entrance. I was pouring sweat by the time I passed under it and looked out over the rows of neat iron crosses dotting the field.

A breeze whistled through the iron sign and lifted my soaked hair. I stared in disbelief. The cemetery was enormous; stretching for acres. There were at least a thousand graves, maybe more, stretching all the way to a line of far-off trees and crisscrossed by grassy paths. The markers—a few of which were festooned with sun-worn silk flowers—were engraved with two-, three-, and four-digit numbers. No names.

I’d never find Collie in here.

“Official tours are on Tuesdays.” The woman behind the desk kept her eyes trained on her computer and sucked at her teeth.

I’d managed to find the operational part of Pritchard Hospital on the far side of the property. It was closer to the interstate, across from a smattering of fields and small farmhouses. The administration building itself was a squat brick structure, the shade of an acorn squash. Just beyond it sat the three-story patient hall, a formidable U-shaped structure of matching squash-brick. Its windows were dark and covered with steel-gray screens. Over all this, in the distance, loomed the Gothic towers of the old building.

Inside, the administration building was clean and well lit, if a bit on the dingy side. Pretty much like the inside of every rehab and psych ward I’d ever seen. The smell was familiar too. It reeked of an odor I knew well—the smell of hopelessness.

“Yeah, I heard about the Tuesday thing,” I said. “And I’m sorry to ask for favors, but I’m going to be out of town on Tuesday. So I was wondering”—I lowered my voice—“if it wouldn’t be
too horrible
if I took care of it on my own? If you could just look up my grandmother’s number, I’ll scoot over there superfast, snap a pic, and be out of there in, like, nothing flat. Won’t tell a soul. Tick a lock.”

I flashed her a bright smile. She stared at me, dead eyed.

I leaned on the counter. “So. If you could just look up her number. Collirene Wooten Crane. Date of death, 1962.”

She sucked at her teeth one more time, this time picking the offending object out with two delicately pointed coral nails. She smeared whatever it was on a napkin beside her keyboard. “Official tours are Tuesdays only,” she said.

I tried my best to keep smiling as she went back to her work. But what I really wanted to do was deliver a hearty, roundhouse slap to each jowly cheek.

Down the hall, I heard a door open. An African American woman in her twenties, wearing a no-nonsense button-down and a headband that held back a sheaf of wild curls, stopped at the counter beside me. She nodded a greeting. Her eyes, behind black-rimmed glasses, were kind.

“How are you today?” she asked me.

“Oh,” I said, “good, thanks.” Even though I wasn’t, not at the moment. But flies with honey and all that bullshit. I widened my eyes, hoping to look innocuous. “I’m just trying to locate a relative.”

“A resident?”

“Former. She died in 1962.”

“Oh. Well. Denise should be able to help you with that.” The woman cleared her throat at her colleague across the counter. “Denise, I’m running next door for a sec.”

“Uh-hm.” Denise was back at her dental ministrations, this time the molars. I felt vaguely nauseated.

“Would you mind picking up my line? I’ve been waiting on the Foley call all day, but, I don’t know, they’re tied up, I guess. Anyway. I just don’t want them to get my voice mail.”

“Uh-hm.”

The woman waited a fraction of a second, I guess for Denise to make eye contact or communicate a shred of concern, but apparently she couldn’t be bothered. The woman made a sound like she might say something else, then changed her mind and left. I looked down the hall and spied her office door, opened just a crack.

“Well,” I said to Denise. “I guess I’ll see you Tuesday.”

She didn’t even grunt. I headed down the hall and glanced back quickly before slipping into the young woman’s office and into her mesh office chair. Her computer screen was still up and glowing. The room smelled of spearmint and something else. Something really good, like fresh-out-of-the-oven brownies. My mouth watered as I scanned the monitor, and I realized I hadn’t eaten a thing in the past twelve hours. I told myself to focus and started to click around in the open database, trying to find some file that sounded like it might contain past patients’ burial numbers.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that every file on her desktop was password protected. Which meant I was shit out of luck, as I pretty much sucked as a hacker.

I looked around the room, my nerves twanging. I knew I should get the hell out of there while I still had the chance, but I didn’t move. I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I couldn’t. I hadn’t found what I’d come for, and I refused to go back to the Crimson Terrace and twiddle my fingers until Tuesday.

I looked out the window beside the desk. It had finally started to rain, and there was a knot of people—patients, I guessed—working along a path leading to a soccer field. I watched them rake, hedge, and spread pine bark over begonia beds. There were a couple of teenagers too, beyond them, playing a game in the drizzle. All of them looked so normal. So sane. Why didn’t they just run across the field and into the woods and disappear when no one was looking?

Then, suddenly, above them, a large, black bird appeared, circling over the kids. It cruised lazily down and landed on the top bar of the soccer goal. I sat up. The bird was huge. Not a crow. A raven. I stiffened.

There’s no such thing as a . . .

In a panic, I pushed back from the desk just as the door opened, and the woman—the woman whose office I had snuck into—saw me. I stood.

“Is there something I can help you with?” she asked.