Morgan James - Promise McNeal 01 - Quiet the Dead (8 page)

“Well sure, Miz P. I don’t mind to.”

Now I was confused. Her reply, ‘don’t mind to,’ was another one of those mysterious mountain idioms. Was that a yes, or no? “Susan, does that mean you will do it?”

“Well, yeah, Miz P., that’s what I just said.”

“Okay, thanks. Have you got a pen?”

“Oh crap, here comes Luther Goss. I’m just going to put the phone down here on the counter till I see what he wants.” I was clueless as to who this Luther Goss person was, and had no choice other than to wait, and listen to Susan’s conversation. A male voice said something not understandable in an unmistakable hillbilly twang, and then Susan’s voice bellowed through the phone. “I done told you about a hundred times, Pinky, the Goddard twins sold out. We don’t sell what you are looking to buy. Just go on home and sober up?”

Goss yelled, “I mean it woman, get on back there to where they keep the good stuff and bring me a bag, or I swear to God, I’ll kill you dead!”

The next sound I heard was a loud whack, like a walnut being cracked, then a scream, and the male voice. “Shit! You done broke my fingers. I’m gonna sue your ass!”

“Go ahead, sue. I don’t care if you do. You come around here again making threats and I’ll break more than your sorry lazy fingers. Now get the hell out of here. I told you, we are out of the homegrown business.” There was a pause, and then Susan spoke again. Her voice was calmer. “You pitiful fool. You know I’ll call Sheriff Mac as soon as you walk out that door.”

I heard the bell on the store’s front door jingle and Susan pick up the phone. Her voice was a lot more composed than I felt, just listening to the exchange between her and the Goss person. “Can you believe that Luther Goss? Comes in here drunk trying to threaten me with a stupid Wal-Mart water pistol. He must think I am about as dumb as a dirt pile, or one of his….”

“Susan, Susan,” I interrupted. “What happened? What was that cracking noise? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine. Just let me take a couple of deep breaths.” She exhaled into my ear. “I’m just royally pissed at Pinky.” I counted three more audible breaths, and she continued. “Well, what happen was, Luther, aka Pinky, Goss– who was nicknamed Pinky in high school for reasons we do not want to go into right now, or
ever
, because I can assure you I have never seen, nor do I ever want to see, any of his hidden body parts—just stumbled in here insisting I sell him some pot. I tried to tell him those days are over. Fool’s all tanked up—pulled a little plastic pistol out of his jacket pocket and waved it in my face. I’m sure not going to put up with that crap, especially not from Pinky Goss, of all people. That’s why I have a sawed off baseball bat under the counter. I knocked the pistol out of his hand. Well,” she hesitated and reconsidered, “actually, I wracked him across the knuckles and he dropped the gun. I don’t think I broke any bones.”

“A baseball bat? Good grief, I heard him holler. Has he left the parking lot? You need to call the Sheriff, in case Goss comes back.”

Even though I couldn’t appreciate the humor in the situation, Susan’s explosion of deep-throated infectious laughter made me want to laugh along with her. “Pinky won’t come back. The fool sashayed over to the cooler on his way out the door and snagged a six-pack of Budweiser. I can see him from the front window, he’s pedaling down the road with the beer in the basket of his bike.”

“Susan, are you telling me this Goss person came to Granny’s to buy pot, armed with a water pistol, and then made his getaway on a bicycle?”

“Yeah, he’s riding off down the road on an old junker American Flyer. That’s cause he keeps losing his drivers’ license to drunk driving charges. It’s really kind of sad, when you think about it. His Mamma worked like a mule all those years at the mill to raise those boys, and look at what she got for her misery. Not one of the three is worth a ripped umbrella in the rain. Lord, you just never know about kids, do you Miz P?”

True enough, but I was still concerned Goss may come back. “Susan, shouldn’t you call the sheriff about Goss’s threat to kill you, and about him stealing the beer?” Susan didn’t answer. “Are you still there?”

“Yes Ma’am I’m here. I was just thinking. Maybe we should let him alone so he’ll run his mouth to all his worthless friends. If he’s not in jail, the word might get around faster that the Goddard twins’ side business is over. Two or three of those no-account guys have come in lately, hanging around looking suspicious, acting like they are about to ask for the extra special cornflakes.”

“Umm,” I considered Susan’s logic. “I think you are right. Just promise me that if any of them come around again and even hints of trouble, call the sheriff. I don’t want you getting hurt trying to fight off a bunch of dopers with a ball bat.”

“Don’t worry, Miz P., I may be country, but I’m smart enough to know my limits.”

“Good girl. Now back to what I called about. Write this down. I need you to Google someone for me. The name is Boo Turner; he’s a musician, or was. If he were still alive he would be an old man by now, maybe in his eighties. Boo Turner. You got it?”

“I got it. You want me to call you at home later tonight with the information?”

It was six-fifteen, and all I saw was bumper-to-bumper Atlanta traffic in my rear view mirror. “No. I think I’ll stop and spend the night at my son’s house in Dahlonega. That’s only about thirty miles north of here. I’m too tired to drive back tonight. I’ll call you later this evening. Lock up and go home. You’ve had enough of Granny’s for the day. And Susan, thank you for everything you do.”

“Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t going away.” …Elvis Presley

6.

Night moored peacefully in the North Georgia valleys by the time I drove from Atlanta to Dahlonega; but higher mountain slopes, visible in the near distance, held fast the purple and pink of disappearing day, like a lover unwilling to release a kiss. Early settlers, ravenous for newly discovered gold, called these hills, sown tight with pine, dogwood, and oak, the promised land when their greed expelled the Cherokee off the landscape during the 1830’s. Today, the gold was in the land itself. Cows grazed tentatively beside multimillion dollar golf courses, and upscale retirement communities marched up the hills along the highway leading into town. How long would it be before the cows went the way of the Cherokee?

Even though I was hungry, I didn’t want to stop again after my hurried shopping for cat family supplies at the Kroger, just south of Dahlonega. Besides, I hoped my son, Luke, would be home and we could have dinner together. I could make home cooked biscuits, bacon, and cheese grits. His favorites. My mouth watered.

Once I crossed the Chestatee River Bridge into Dahlonega and snaked up Crown Mountain to drop down into the town proper, I tried a third time to call Luke. His home phone rolled immediately to voice mail. Knowing his job with Acadia Oil required traveling, I tried to remember if he’d called to tell me he would be gone on another extended trip. Surely, I wouldn’t forget something as important as that. Of course, Luke was a grown man and certainly didn’t have to check with Mamma to leave town. Still, I worried. I’m a mother, what else do we do? By the time I listened to Luke’s voice mail message repeat itself, I was through the town square, past the Gold Museum celebrating the 1828 gold rush, and passing North Georgia College and State University. I quickly turned left into the horseshoe at front campus and parked to rummage in my purse for Luke’s new cell phone number. Why he gave up his old number with the four zero four exchange, I had no idea. This new one carried an exchange I didn’t recognize and was still not imprinted on my brain for recall. Probably Acadia Oil’s idea to consolidate costs.

Speaking of Acadia Oil, I wondered, not for the first time, why an oil company would recruit a double major in languages and psychology. Maybe because Luke was one of the few graduates having at least a passing command of Arabic? Well, perhaps it is a good thing, I mused. He certainly seems to make more money at Acadia than I ever made with psychology, doctorate and all.

Luke picked up on the second ring. “Yes?”

I was a little taken aback. Yes? What kind of hello for your mother was, yes? “Hey, Sweetheart. I’m headed to your house. Could I maybe spend the night? Are you going to be home later? I’ll cook if you are.”

“Mom. Uh…hey.” He hesitated. I imagined him raking thick, mahogany-colored hair from his forehead. Beautiful McNeal hair, Mamma always said, certainly not a Barnes trait from his father. “Well, uh, I’m…not there. I’m out of town. You know where the spare key is. Go on over. I’ll call you when I get stateside. Maybe sometime next week.” Luke sounded anxious and in a hurry to get me off the line.

“Are you okay?” A few seconds of silence. “Luke?”

“Sure, Mom, I’m fine. Just a little busy right now. No problem. You go on to the house and enjoy yourself. You know where everything is.”

Suddenly I remembered something. “Wait, don’t hang up yet. Do you still like jazz?”

“Mom, that is a truly weird question right now. Yes, I do. Why?”

“I just wondered if you recognize the name, Boo Turner?”

“Mom, is this a trivia contest? Or are you snooping around in something you don’t belong in,
again
?

“No, I am not. Are you laughing? I hear you laughing. I just need some information on Boo Turner, that’s all.”

“Mom, anybody who knows anything about the history of jazz knows Boo Turner. Why do you need to know about Boo Turner? Wait, don’t answer that question. I really don’t have time. But Mom, tell me there are no contraband cigarettes as part of this scenario.”

Why can’t everyone just forget about the highjackers and my car being peppered with bullets? After all, the guy was Garland’s client, not mine. I heard another male voice over the phone line.

“Let’s boogie, Bucko.”

Had I heard correctly? Bucko? “Luke, who is that?”

“Mom, I have to hang up now. When you get to the house, check some of those books Dad gave me the last time he moved, bookshelf to the right of the desk. I think you’ll find Boo Turner in one of them. And Mom, stay out of trouble. Okay? Love you.” The line was silent.

I did not like the way that conversation went. Being brushed off by my only son hurt. And who would call Luke “Bucko?” No, I didn’t like the conversation
at all.
But what could I do? I sighed and pitched the cell phone back into my purse, disappointed that I would not be seeing Luke, and wishing I’d gotten a frozen pizza at the grocery store. “Well girls,” I called to the cat family in the rear of the car, “I guess it’s a fish sandwich to go.” Pulling back into the main street, I headed for a local drive through and ordered fries and two sandwiches, one for me and one for Mamma cat. It had been a long day. She deserved a treat, and I deserved the comfort of French fries with lots of ketchup.

Later I sat in Luke’s study where everything seemed to be organized and filed away alphabetically. Not a piece of junk mail or stray paperclip left on the desk, no old magazines strewn on the floor, in fact, as I looked around, the whole house was too neat, even for me. What was this? Susan was right. Who knows how kids will turn out? Luke was such a slob as a teen that I regularly discovered black banana peels and glasses of liquids spontaneously growing penicillin beneath his bed. Look at him now. His house didn’t look as though a person really lived there, maybe stopped by occasionally for a change of underwear, but no sign of a person nesting in and being at home. Work must be consuming too much of Luke’s life. I made a mental note to have a long talk with him.

In thinking back over the past five years, much had changed for my son, in addition to buying this house. He was now a very grownup man, not a freshly graduated star student of the University of Georgia. He had responsibilities today not dreamed of five years ago, and flew all over the world for Acadian Oil… with someone who was calling him Bucko, of all things. What was that all about? My mother radar detected a worrisome pattern on the screen that I couldn’t identify. I yawned and told myself I could spend the rest of the night worrying about Luke, to no avail. Better force myself back to the question I’d called Luke about—who was Boo Turner? Once I answered that, maybe I’d know what Turner had to do with my uneasy feeling about Stella Tournay’s death? Another question kept pecking at me—what did a jazz musician and an art professor have in common that would keep them friends for so many years?

Luke was correct. When I checked the bookshelf beside his desk, there were several books about jazz mixed among those he “inherited” from his dad when my ex-husband shed wife number three and lived for a short time aboard his sailboat, the
Mambo Mamma
. I pulled the three most promising looking titles from the shelf and tried to relax into the desk chair to read. What a stupid name for a sailboat, I thought,
Mambo Mamma
. Buried anger at the sheer immaturity of the man I thought, at one time, was the end all and be all of my young existence, soured my stomach. I had been divorced from Randall Barnes much longer than I had been married to him, but how could I not be angry all over again when his eight by ten glossy photograph, with a tanned arm draped across the shoulder of wife number four, stared at me from the top of Luke’s desk.
What a jerk!
Fatigue was winding me up like a toddler with a pound of chocolate in his tummy.
Look at that girl! She is probably the same age as Luke
. I suddenly realized the man’s wives are getting younger, thinner, and blonder with each one. Pretty soon, by wife number six, they would be baby, anorexic, flaxen-haired specters. Too spooky!
What a waste! May he choke on a peach pit
. I turned the photograph face down.

How unlike my mother, the beautiful Rose Marie Fitzgerald McNeal, I am. Once I asked her how she could love my father after so many betrayals and disappointments. She replied, “Oh, Honey, when you love a man and he gives you all he has to give, there isn’t any more. How can you blame him for that?”
How? Where should I start?
I opened the top drawer of the desk, raked my ex’s photograph into the dark recess, and closed it securely.

This is the same mother who told me, while in a less charitable mood, the story of my name. It would seem my father spent much of his time, when he was sober enough to do so, chasing the one ‘big’ poker game, the value of which, according to him, would rival today’s Georgia lottery winnings. On the day I was born, he was in a game in Ocilla, Florida, a very long way from Atlanta, Georgia, where my mother was in labor. Somehow they connected by phone and she extracted a tearful promise from him that this game would be his last. As a reminder of his oath, my parents named me Promise Fitzgerald McNeal. My father broke his promise countless times over the years, and my mother forgave him each and every time. I came to accept his indifferent attitude towards fatherhood, but forgiveness still eludes me. Right is right and wrong is wrong.

My mind segued back to my ex-husband. Sure I blamed him for lacking loyalty, and not loving me as much as he loved himself; though I think the reason I finally divorced him was I just couldn’t endure the unhappiness of always coming up short-handed with him. Randall Barnes just wasn’t worth it. No man is, to me. I’d rather have nothing than the rollercoaster my mother rode for over forty-five years. I glanced over at Mamma Cat, snug and warm in her basket by the heat vent in the corner, just to see if she had an opinion on the matter. I took her loud purr and half shut eyes as a gentle suggestion that I was wallowing like a muddy pig in a deep hole of self-pity. Enough nostalgia. I needed to get back to work. Back to Boo Turner and the connection I could feel, though not yet see, between him and Stella Tournay’s death.

Of Luke’s three Jazz books, the second I opened contained the most extensive information on Boo Turner: born Solomon Beaumont Turner on St. Helena Island, on the coast South Carolina, in nineteen twenty-two. He was nicknamed “Boo” by his grandmother Turner, whose family had lived on St. Helena since the 1700’s, first working the rice plantations as slaves, and then as fishermen, when slavery ended. Turner expressed no love of the sea, or fishing, and left home at sixteen to follow a dream of playing cornet. After drifting for couple of years around the clubs of New Orleans, at age eighteen, the successful jazz group, “Night Jazz Train” hired him. The article did not say how or when a fisherman’s son from rural South Carolina came to learn the cornet, or to own one, only that beginning in nineteen-forty, Boo Turner toured England and Europe with “Train” where he was billed as the “second” Louis Armstrong, even though, by that time, Armstrong had traded the cornet for his signature trumpet.

The article went on to list locations Turner appeared and the accolades he received from critics and peers for the unique easy swing style he coaxed from the cornet. He was paired in several critiques with jazz giants Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. The writer noted Boo Turner was cheated of similar stardom by the fact that he left the band in nineteen forty two when the United States entered the second world war, and Jazz Train returned to America. Turner remained in Europe during, and after, the war, thus perhaps missing his window of opportunity for major success in the U.S. He launched an American tour with his own group, The Blue Notes, in nineteen fifty-one. However, American jazz culture seemed to have had only enough room for a limited number of stellar personalities of his genre, and Boo Turner’s name never made it into the commercial universal mind. He finished out his career crisscrossing the Atlantic, and touring the United States and Canada in an endless string of short engagements, shows, and festivals. In nineteen sixty-two he was awarded the prestigious French prize, “Animer,” for his contribution to the jazz art form. Turner’s last appearance noted by the writer was a retrospective of the fifties, when he briefly came out of retirement for the nineteen-eighty New Port Jazz Festival. In closing, the writer opined “all of jazz owes a debt to Turner for the nuances in warm mellow tones he lured from his instrument.”

I sat for a moment holding the closed book and thinking. Well, that was interesting. But what did I learn about Stella? The article confirmed Turner was probably in France at the same time as Stella and Paul Tournay. They could have met there—at best a tenuous connection. He was born in South Carolina in nineteen twenty-two, the book was printed in nineteen ninety-one. I had no idea if Turner was dead or alive. I opened the book again and flipped back to the beginning. The article said Turner was born on St. Helena’s Island. I recalled St. Helena’s as one of the Sea Islands near Charleston and Beaufort, South Carolina. Becca said the awful doll was shipped from Charleston.

Something niggled at the back of my mind. Why was St. Helena so familiar? What else is St. Helena known for, besides Boo Turner? I tried to reach back into my memory for something I knew about St. Helena, though I was sure I had never visited the island. In all the trips I’d made to the Charleston area my route had pretty much remained the same: enjoy the beach at Mt. Pleasant, walk around the old town to gawk at historical homes along the Battery and pricy antiques I could not afford, eat massive amounts of local seafood, and cruise through the open air shops at the downtown Charleston Market for local art and crafts.