Mama Stalks the Past (21 page)

Raven’s gaze drifted away from Moody. “I told you I had to finish nursing school, had to get a job.” She paused. “But all of that is behind us now,” she added cheerily.

From that point on we talked about land that had been handed down from generation to generation and how difficult it was for families to keep it intact. Daddy did most of the talking.
“Forming a land company and incorporating it is the thing to do,” he said. “That way, no matter how many generations come and go, the land will always stay with the family.”

Moody, who didn’t eat much, took long pauses between bites. At one point, he raised one hand to his mouth, put a knuckle to his teeth, and gently chewed on it. Raven gobbled up four or five bites in rapid succession, saying little, but agreeing with most of what was said. She seldom looked at her silent son. Suddenly her eyes were scanning the table.

Mama was the first to notice. “What are you looking for, Raven?” she asked.

“Turnips,” Raven replied. “There’s no more in the bowl.”

Mama smiled. “There’s plenty in the kitchen. Give me your plate and I’ll get it for you,” she said. Raven handed her the plate; Mama excused herself and headed off toward her stove.

Daddy kept talking about land. “There are people,” he told us, “who think that selling land and getting the money is the best thing. Grant you, you can’t eat land, but it’s still money. Take for instance this property, this house. If I ever got in tight for some cash, I could borrow on it, use this house and land as collateral.”

Raven didn’t say anything, but the expression on her face showed that she was more interested
in what Mama was going to bring out of the kitchen than what my father was saying. Mama came back and handed Raven her plate. “I. don’t know the last time I’ve eaten such good greens,” Raven told her.

Daddy grinned. “Candi knows how to lay it on you,” he agreed, reaching for the bowl of candied sweet potatoes.

“I’m glad you like them,” Mama told Raven. “Eat up, there’s plenty more in the kitchen,”

I hid a smile, wondering whether it would dawn upon Raven that if there was so much food in the kitchen why was it that it hadn’t been put on the table.

Mama was reading my mind again: She shot me one of those looks as she sat down. “What are you going to do with Hannah’s acres?” she asked Raven. Her eyes went to Moody, who looked increasingly miserable.

Raven filled her mouth with a large portion of the turnip greens. She shook her head and pointed to her mouth. Mama, who looked earnest and concerned, waited. “I’m going to sell it,” Raven said, as she pushed her fork into the plate of greens again.

I could have croaked. “Sell it?” I exclaimed, putting down my knife and fork and picking up my napkin. “I thought you’d want to keep it in the family.”

Raven shook her head. “Me? No.” She filled her fork again. “I like money, the things money can buy. I’ve already got a buyer!” she said. We watched her chew, swallow, then gulp the third and final fork of greens. Her plate was empty again. I wondered if she was going to ask for more.

But seconds later Raven’s greedy, determined expression became one of uncertainty. “Those greens … don’t seem to be agreeing with me … feel like I’ve got indigestion,” she mumbled. Beads of sweat were popping out on her forehead.

Mama adjusted her glasses low on her nose. Her mouth formed a grudging line, like she was offended by Raven’s sudden illness and Raven’s claim that her sickness must have come from Mama’s cooking.

Raven blew out a breath, then shoved her plate back. Her light skin turned ashen. She tried to get up from the table but stumbled back into her chair. Cliff shot a look at me, but nobody moved to help Raven, not even Moody. He just sat staring at her like he’d never seen her before and what he saw he didn’t much like.

“Are you hurting?” Mama asked her, her voice calm.

Raven made a funny noise, deep in her throat.
A tear sprang from one of her eyes and trickled down her cheek.

The air in the room suddenly seemed thick. Under the table, I placed my foot on top of Cliff’s and applied pressure. His expression didn’t change.

Raven shivered, as though a current shot through her. Then she doubled over, clutching her stomach and moaning. Nobody moved.

“I’ve poisoned you,” Mama told Raven serenely. “The same as you poisoned me.”

Raven’s body was shaking. Mama looked sterner than I can ever remember seeing her. “
I’ve given you a good dose of arsenic,”
she said, coldly.

Moody didn’t move, didn’t say a word. He stared at his mother.

“Raven should be dead in a half hour!” Mama told us, folding her napkin and laying it neatly on the table beside her plate. “That is, if she doesn’t tell us why she killed Hannah and Nat and Trudy Paige, and why she tried to kill me!”

Moody took a deep breath. The young man looked like his relief was as great as if he had been trudging along an ocean floor with billions of tons of water pressing down on him and had abruptly been transported to dry land, where only air weighed on his shoulders. He looked
like he knew that he himself had finally escaped death.

Raven’s dark
eyes
widened. “I didn’t …” she started to say when another pain hit her. She gasped. “For God’s sake, get me to the hospital!”

Mama shook her head. She carefully smoothed her napkin. “That’s why you lured me to the hospital that night, isn’t it?” she told Raven. “You knew I’d get treatment right away, knew they’d get the poison out of me before I died of it. You
needed
me to live, so I’d give you that land, isn’t that right?”

“No!” Raven hollered. Her eyes glittered like a sick animal’s.

“I’m not as benevolent as you,” Mama continued. “You’ll be dead before I call the paramedics.”

“Moody!” Raven screamed, appealing desperately to her son.

Moody shook his head but didn’t look at his mother.

“You are all murderers!” Raven gasped. “Killers …!” Another pain silenced her.

Nobody moved.

“Well, isn’t it nice,” Mama said serenely. “A dinner fit for a king. Or should I say a dinner fit for a killer?”

Raven’s body shivered. The sweat poured
from her skin. She gagged. Without hurrying, Mama went into the kitchen and came back with a foot tub, which had a small amount of water in it along with a dash of Lysol. She set the tub down in front of Raven.

“I’m dizzy …” Raven complained.

“You’re a nurse,” Mama told her. “You know the next thing is convulsions and then a coma.”

Another tremor shook Raven’s body.

“Okay,” she wheezed. “I admit to it!”

“Admit to what?” Mama asked. “I did it!”

“Did what?”

“
I … killed Hannah and Nat!”
she cried.

“And Candi?” Daddy asked.

“I didn’t want to kill you,” Raven gasped. She looked pleadingly into Mama’s eyes. “I just wanted to scare you … into giving me the land.”

Mama nodded. “I know that now. But surely you didn’t have to poison me to do that. You could have just asked. It was never really my land. I would have given it back to Nat. But you killed him, too.”

Raven’s eyes widened. Her face was slick with sweat. “Get me to the hospital,” she pleaded, “before I die!”

Sheriff Abe and Rick Martin entered Mama’s dining room. “You won’t die,” Mama told Raven
as the sheriff started reading her her rights. “I didn’t put
that
much of the digitoxin that I got from Gertrude in my turnip greens!”

In the silence that followed after the sheriff and Rick Martin led Raven to their patrol car, which was parked behind our house, Cliff cleared his throat. “Like I said before, I don’t know if any of what she just said under duress will hold up in a court of law.” He shook his head.

“Now that we know she’s guilty, maybe we can find something more concrete,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what she did.”
Moody’s voice was so faint we almost didn’t hear him.

S
heriff Abe took Raven Wescot to Otis General Hospital. There her stomach was pumped. Then, the sheriff took her to jail. The next day he drove her to the State Penitentiary in Columbia. Moody Hamilton turned state’s witness against his mother; six months later, Raven was tried and found guilty of the murders of Hannah and Nat Mixon, Trudy and Mama’s attempted murder; the trial lasted all of three days.

When it was over, she was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Moody was sentenced to five years’ probation for his role in the assault on Nat’s life.

Mama prepared one of her feasts. The menu: chicken breasts with marmalade, a garden vegetable
lasagna, baked potato salad, mustard greens, okra, rice, gravy, string beans, glazed carrots, and brown rice. Dessert: A pumpkin-pecan pound cake and a lemon cream pie.

Will and Rodney came home to celebrate with Mama, Daddy, Cliff, and me. Sheriff Abe, Rick Martin, and Moody had been invited, too. So was Kilroy, who’d driven down from Atlanta for the event.

The meal was well on its way when Rodney brought the table talk around to murder. “Mama, if I’m out of line asking you to tell us about the poisoning and how you got on to Raven, then excuse me. It’s just that I missed the trial, and there’s so many things I don’t know about what actually happened.”

Will put his fork down for a moment. “Yeah, it’ll be helpful if you start from the beginning, Mama. You know, give us details.”

Mama glanced around her table. Her gaze stuck on Moody briefly. Moody shifted in his chair.

“I don’t know if Moody wants to hear us talk about it,” Mama told my brothers.

Daddy did a neck roll, like he was trying to relieve tension. “I can’t think of what hasn’t been already said, what with the trial and all,” he said.

Moody’s voice was so low we all had to lean
forward to hear him. “It’s all right with me,” he told Mama. He shifted in his chair again.

Mama sipped from her coffee. Then she said, “Moody, you are to be complimented. I know how hard this was for you. Without your testimony, the evidence against Raven wasn’t very strong.”

“I know,” he murmured.

Mama smiled and nodded. “You said at the trial that you only knew your Mama, Raven, a short time. How was that?” she asked.

When Moody looked up, I changed my opinion of him. He wasn’t the sly, fluid man I’d made him out to be when I’d first met him in the club’s parking lot. This was a young man with a sense of innocence and compassion.

“Raven left me with my grandma when I was a baby. As far back as I can remember, the only Mama I knew was Grandma,” he told my mother.

“Talk is that your grandma was a good woman,” Mama said.

I’d never seen Moody smile before. His smile lit up his whole face. “Grandma treated me good every day of her life!” he exclaimed.

Daddy coughed. “You were good to her, too,” he said.

“I did my best by her. I was all she had.”
Moody hesitated. “At least that’s what I thought until Raven showed up!”

Nobody spoke.

“It was a real surprise when she came claiming to be my mother. Grandma had never mentioned her. Every time I’d asked about my Mama or Daddy, Grandma would say she was all the Mama and Daddy I needed. After a while, I started thinking they must be dead. When Raven told me that she was my mother and that she had a plan that would make us a lot of money, I was surprised. She told me she needed my help. She had met one of our kinfolk in the hospital where she was nursing. He was dying, she told me.”

“Orlando Regional in Florida was where Reeves Mixon had last been seen,” Kilroy explained to us.

“Raven told me that Reeves’s land had been stolen from him, and that after him, she was the rightful heir to the land since Grandma was Stella Gordon’s half-sister.” Moody shook his head. “Grandma never mentioned Stella Gordon to me. I had no idea that we were kin until Raven came.”

“Your grandmother was an outside child,” Daddy said. “Sometime a person like that claim kin, sometime they don’t.”

Moody glanced at Daddy, then looked away.
You could see that knowing his grandmother had been born out of wedlock still made Moody uncomfortable. He shifted in his chair. “Raven told me that Reeves wanted his land to go to a Gordon before he died.”

“But he never got his wish; he died before Raven had finished her work,” Mama said softly.

Moody nodded. “The next thing I heard Miss Hannah was dead, had been poisoned. Raven went to the funeral, hung around with Nat, acting like she was a friend. I didn’t think too much about it.”

Mama looked at the sheriff. “Abe, what made you decide to have an autopsy done on Hannah?” she asked.

The sheriff put down his fork. He’d been feasting greedily on Mama’s garden vegetable lasagna, his favorite, but now he was working on dessert. “The undertaker’s assistant called me. I wasn’t too convinced. I know how these young people are, but I ordered the autopsy anyway. Then I stopped by Hannah’s house, where I found the receipt showing that she’d paid Calvin for some legal work. Calvin told me about the will, about Hannah’s land going to you.”

“I was surprised you didn’t talk to me about it,” Mama said.

The sheriff picked up his fork again. He was on his third piece of Mama’s pumpkin-pecan
pound cake. “I ain’t never suspected you of doing anything wrong, if that’s what you mean,” he told Mama. “I just wanted to get information.”

Mama smiled.

Daddy had an annoyed look on his face. I decided to change the subject. “Why did Reeves write that letter? The one about Stella’s death?”

“I guess he wanted Miss Hannah to know that he was going to get revenge,” Mama told me. “When Hannah got Reeves’s letter, she did what she thought was right. She willed the land to me so that Nat wouldn’t get killed for it. But Reeves died without knowing that.”

“How did the note get behind the chimney in the old house?” Rick Martin asked.

Mama cut him another slice of cake before she answered. “Hannah hid it there for me to find. I guess she didn’t want it in her house in case Nat stumbled across it and found out what she knew. She figured I’d go out to the old house right away, thought I’d want to look over the property I’d inherited. She didn’t figure on the wind knocking down some more bricks in that old chimney so that I almost didn’t find it.”