Private Entrance (The Butterfly Trilogy) (7 page)

     "Did you notice that I didn't get as much applause for your list? The audience didn't get it that your list was more difficult. It was clever in fact." His eyes twinkled in admiration. "The harder lists, or the ones that look harder, are in fact easier to remember. Words are distinct separate entities, they form pictures in the mind. And most people choose categories without realizing it—Biblical names, birds, gemstones. But
your
list, bland almost meaningless monosyllables, all running together, 'fat rat bat,' making it difficult to hear the breaks. As if you threw me one long twenty-syllable word. Very smart. How did you know?"

     "A hunch."

     "Do you get a lot of hunches?"

     She paused. This was the moment of truth, when most men turned off. She would see the little switch in their eyes, the interest dimming, and she could see them mentally search for reasons to leave. But she needed to know. "I'm a psychic reader."

     "Really?" he said. "Interesting." Accepting it just like that.

     And Coco's heart did a flip-flop.

     "How do you do it? Ouija board?"

     Full marks to him. "I read people. Usually by touch. It's called psychometry. I hold an object and read its history. I'll be happy to give you a reading sometime." Any excuse to touch him. "And incidentally, ouija boards are not genuine psychic tools. They were invented as a parlor game in the nineteenth century. The name is 'yes' in French and German—
oui
and
Ja.
"

     "That's almost interesting," Kenny said with a dimpled smile and Coco felt another sweet jolt in her heart.

     "What brings you to The Grove?" he asked. "It certainly can't be for any beauty treatments. What's to improve?"

     This was getting better by the minute. "I won a contest. In fact, I'm going to have dinner with your boss tonight. Who is this Abby Tyler anyway?"

     "A very nice lady who rescued me. Literally saved my life."

     Coco waited but he looked away and addressed his coffee. "A story for another time."

     A man with a secret. Coco was a sucker for men with secrets. If she reached out right now and touched him, would his secret be revealed to her? She cleared her throat and casually stirred her drink and tried to sound offhanded as she said, "So you, um, must travel a lot with your act."

     "No. Never been away from the West Coast."

     "Oh?"

     "Born in Seattle, grew up in Seattle, got my degree in computer engineering there, then moved down to Silicon Valley. I was doing my nightclub act in San Francisco when I was approached with a job offer to work here at The Grove."

     "But you would
like
to travel someday? See the world?" she asked hopefully.

     "I'm happy where I am."

     "Do you read a lot of travel and geography books?" Her hope was growing thin.

     "Not particularly. My hobby is mathematics. I like to work difficult equations. Why this interest in travel? Is it what you do?"

     Coco was disappointed. She had pinned such hopes on him, she was
warming
to him, but he wasn't the one. "I'm sorry," she said, pushing her chair back and standing up. She had to nip this in the bud before her heart became entangled. "I just remembered something I have to do."

     "But—"

     "Thanks for the coffee," she said and was gone, out of the main hotel, down the myriad paths where guests strolled and laughed, through the trees and shrubs until she was back at her own cottage, slamming the door behind herself, throwing her purse onto the sofa and reaching for the crystal ball.

I
T WAS THE GETAWAY SUITCASE.

     After thirty-three years, Abby still hadn't thrown it out. The case was old and battered, the handle broken and repaired, locks replaced, the inside lining still torn. For years she had kept it as a reminder. Should she ever get over-confident and relax her guard, the suitcase brought her back to reality.

     But that was not why she took it down now from the top shelf of her closet, her hands trembling, her heart filling with pain and memories, drawing the old suitcase into the noon sunlight that streamed through her bedroom window. She brought it out because of what was inside.

     The issues of the day weighed upon her—Maurice threatening to quit; the nagging feeling that Jack Burns should be watched; and Sissy and Coco—
one of you might be my daughter.
Abby had a million things that needed seeing to, but emotion overcame her, so that she sat on the bed to run her hand over the worn leather of the suitcase.

     And remember...

     The inmate's name was Mercy, a young black woman whose head was shaved smooth as a billiard ball. Skinny with haunted eyes, Mercy didn't speak as they crossed the dusty yard.

     "What about my suitcase?" Emmy Lou said as she followed Mercy through the cool dusk. It was 1971, the trial was over, the jury found her guilty of a crime she did not commit, and now she was at the prison to serve her life sentence. She had been processed through and she wanted her suitcase. Granddaddy Jericho had packed it for her.

     Mercy didn't answer and Emmy Lou noticed there was something wrong with her mouth.

     Barrack Twelve was a long building made of wooden siding and a tar paper roof. Inside, two rows of beds stood beneath barred windows, with a narrow aisle down the center. Some of the beds were occupied, women lying down or sitting, some reading, others playing solitaire or checkers, and some just staring into space.

     "There's your bed," Mercy said and Emmy Lou saw that she had no teeth, even though she didn't look older than twenty.

     When Mercy started to turn away, Emmy Lou said, "Wait, please. My suitcase. How can I get it?"

     "We ain't allowed personal possessions." And Mercy was gone.

     White Hills Prison was a garment factory, and the inmates earned eleven cents an hour for their labor. As soon as she could, Emmy Lou purchased a writing tablet, envelopes and pencils and spent her free time writing letters to her public defender, the judge at her trial, the sheriff who had arrested her, the county prosecutor, even the editor of the Pecos newspaper—anyone she could think of who might have the clout to get her case re-examined. She protested her innocence, but never mentioned the drifter with whom she had had a brief summer romance. Although her suspicion that he was the one who killed Avis grew with each day that she didn't hear from him, she had no proof, and perhaps a small part of her held out hope that he wasn't guilty after all. Her letters were filled with her fondness and high regard for Avis and about the fact that she used that shovel all the time, which was why her fingerprints were on it. Emmy Lou poured her heart into those letters, and sent them off every week like doves of peace, to wait hopefully for responses.

     In the meantime, there was her baby, growing within her, and which she loved with all her heart.

     Emmy Lou hated the words "bastard" and "out of wedlock." Artificial, manmade words that had nothing to do with nature's law. How could a baby be illegitimate? Might as well call a seedling illegitimate, or force male and female flowers to marry before they could cross-pollinate. And it wasn't even one of the Ten Commandments:
Thou shalt not bear bastard children.
The inmates told her that because she wasn't eligible for parole for fifteen years, she couldn't keep her baby, that it would be taken from her. So Emmy Lou wrote letters to her grandfather and the other folks in Little Pecos, begging them to take care of her baby until her appeal came through.

     She was in the recreation room writing letters when they came for Mercy—the matrons, with their clippers and shavers and anti-lice shampoo, chasing her around the room until they tackled her and scraped the "pickaninny fuzz," as they called it, off her scalp. Once a month they did it, and Emmy Lou didn't know why, because none of the other prisoners had their heads shaved, just Mercy.

     It was a cold January day and she thought Mercy would be better off with hair on her head, but the matrons had their way until Mercy's head was smooth. No one came to her rescue, and when Emmy Lou went to Mercy's side, some of the others muttered, "Nigger lover," but Emmy Lou ignored them.

     They had nicked Mercy's scalp so Emmy Lou got a wet towel from the bathroom.

     "It's coz I'm Negro," Mercy said, running her hand under her nose. "They don't like the new de-segregation laws so they punishing me."

     It was strange to see a young woman with not a tooth in her mouth. And was it her imagination or did Mercy look even thinner than when Emmy Lou had first arrived, four months ago? "You need teeth," she finally said because it had to be said.

     Mercy nodded. "I fell in with a bad man. Thought he loved me. He tried to force me to prostitution, but I ain't no whore. First john he connected me with, I nearly bit his cock off. My so-called boyfriend knocked all my teeth out, said I wouldn't be doing
that
again. Why I killt him."

     "Can't you get dentures?" knowing that some of the women took advantage of the prison having a dentist.

     "Got 'em," Mercy said unhappily. "But I can't wear 'em. They hurt." She pulled back her lips to expose sore gums. "Why I don't eat, why I don't talk to no one. I look like a freak, girl like me looking like a old lady."

     Emmy Lou wrote to her grandfather and asked for magazines and gum, and for a special item, which she told him to label "vitamins" as she suspected the prison authorities wouldn't let her have it.

     The package came a week later. She gave the magazines and gum away and found Mercy out in the yard, at the edge where the chainlink fence met freedom.

     "Got something for you, Mercy."

     The black girl shivered in the biting winter wind. "Go away. They all laugh at me, say I'm fallin' for a do-gooding white girl."

     "Here," Emmy Lou said, holding out the small bottle.

     Mercy narrowed her eyes. "What is it?"

     "It's called Tincture of Cloves. My Granddaddy makes it from his own clove tree. Rub a little on your gums, it makes the pain go away. Put some on and wear your dentures for five minutes. Do it a little longer each time, pretty soon your dentures will feel as comfortable as an old pair of shoes."

     It was the beginning of April when Emmy Lou was in the mess hall eating a potato and corn dinner when the hall fell silent. They all turned to see, walking proudly with her head high, Mercy grinning with a mouthful of white teeth.

     She had done as Emmy Lou said, using the tincture to get her mouth accustomed to the dentures, eating porridge and mashed potatoes, graduating to vegetables and bread until she could wear her teeth all the time and eat anything.

     The transformation was stunning. Cheeks and lips no longer falling in, Mercy walking with a straight back and meeting people in the eye. A new, strong Mercy that no one would mess with, not even the matrons with their clippers.

     There was no stopping her from talking after that. "Momma was a scrubwoman," she told Emmy Lou as they walked in the exercise yard, Emmy Lou
supporting her back now that she was eight months pregnant. "It might have been dirty work, but she was proud and she had her dignity. She coulda sold her body to feed us kids, men comin' around all the time on account of she was so beautiful. But Momma was a good Christian woman and said if she got down on her knees it would be either to pray or to scrub floors, not to satisfy some man's need."

     They stopped at the chainlink fence to ponder the plains that vanished into eternity. "You have a dream, Emmy Lou? Something you want to do before you die?" A twenty-year-old asking this. "My dream is to see the fog rolling into the San Francisco Bay. I come from the dustiest spot in Texas, where the dust gets under your skin and behind your eyes, and I saw this travelogue at the picture show, San Francisco with hills and cable cars, and this big white cloud sailing across the water from the ocean, swallowing up that big red bridge, lonesome foghorn calling out in the mist, and it like to have cleaned that Texas dust right out of me. Came right here," she said, tapping her breast, "and settled there, calling me to go someday."

     Emmy Lou's dream was to get out of prison before her baby was born. She would have her baby in freedom, they would go back to Little Pecos and live with Jericho, and the two of them would teach the child how to grow God's green things.

     Emmy Lou was fastening hooks to men's zippered prison pants when she was ordered to the infirmary for a vitamin shot. Her pains started soon after, as she was taking her tray to the cafeteria window. She cried out and slumped, and Mercy was there to grab her, so it was Mercy who got her to the infirmary and Mercy who was recruited to help because the usual infirmary trusty was laid up with adult tonsillitis.

     "It's too soon," Emmy Lou cried, shocked at the severity of the pain. She still had three weeks to go. Was something wrong? "Call my grandfather! Promise me! He must come and take my baby."