Rock-a-Bye Bones (29 page)

Her blue beehive jumped a foot taller. “Stop that, Sarah Booth. Spawn is an unacceptable term. Just get pregnant. Look, roll the dice. DNA is a crapshoot anyway. Maybe you'll get lucky and get a good baby like Libby.”

“In contrast to a bad baby?” I had her on the ropes.

“You haven't lived until you have a baby that cries or won't thrive or stays sick and worries you to death. Yes, a
good
baby is one that is happy and joyful and will grow up to be a happy, joyful adult. Like Libby. That's the kind of baby you want.”

That was true, so instead of arguing, I grabbed my clothes from the floor. I had no idea if Tinkie and Oscar had left or what had happened while I was drifting along the River Lethe, unmindful of anything around me. Gertrude could have slipped into the house and slit me from gullet to stern.

“Right now, Marge, I'm not interested in a baby. I have work to do. You know, that occupation that keeps a roof over our heads.”

“You think you're so different from Marge.” My beautiful haint, still sporting blue hair but completely herself, stood up. “That's a problem in this world. Folks see the differences. Just remember, our differences are only skin deep, but our sames go down to the bone.”

With that she was gone on the lingering scent of baking sugar cookies. I had been handed a lesson in humanity by a blue-haired cartoon.

*   *   *

I took a steaming shower, put on jeans, boots, and a flannel shirt and went down to the kitchen. Coffee smelled heavenly, and I poured a cup of black and grabbed a strip of bacon. Someone had been busy, but now there was no evidence of anyone in the kitchen or the house. Not even my hound was around to wish me good morrow.

“Where the heck is everyone?” Since I'd been abandoned, I was forced to talk to myself. Coffee in hand, I stumbled back through the dining room and halted. Someone had made pinecone turkeys, and a huge cornucopia graced the dining room table, which was set with my mother's Thanksgiving bone china plates edged in gold. Autumn leaves were scattered about the center of each plate, and Native American designs rimmed the edges. I loved this china set, and someone had taken the time to put a beautiful forest green tablecloth under the china, crystal, candles, and other elements of a proper table setting.

But where had everyone gone? It was as if the decorator fairies had come, spruced up the house, and stolen my friends and pets.

And then I heard laughter. I rushed to the front door where Harold was unloading bales of hay, pumpkins, and two dancing scarecrows to stage the front porch. Keeping him company were Tinkie, Oscar, and Scott. Libby, only her eyes exposed beneath the bundle of clothes, gurgled happily in the playpen, which had been moved to the porch where Tinkie could watch her.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” Scott said.

“You guys! This is wonderful.”

“Thanksgiving isn't going to just happen, Sarah Booth.” Harold loved to tease me, and he did it with great style. “You have to make the holiday arrive.”

“I have the best friends ever. Come inside and have some coffee.” I wanted to kiss them all.

“Do you like it?” Harold asked as he arranged the scarecrows and plugged them in. They ran through a fine do-si-do and then started over to the catchy music.

“Where in the world did you find this?” I was amazed. Harold could find anything.

“At the gettin' place. I wanted to be sure this Thanksgiving gathering was festive. I've also arranged for square dance lessons for all of us. Something to burn off some of the calories we're going to eat.”

In a million years I'd never have thought of square dance lessons, but it was the perfect treat for a day devoted to gluttony. We could eat and then dance, and then eat again.

“Harold, you are the party prince. You think of everything.”

“I know how much it means to you for this Thanksgiving to be special. I'm happy to help. You've got your hands full with the search for Pleasant and the manhunt for Gertrude.”

I'd missed god-knew-what while I was sawing logs. “Speaking of the devil, any updates?”

Tinkie sat up. “Two bounty hunters, a man and a woman, checked into The Gardens B&B. Pretty ironic that they're living in Gertrude's former business. And they are not shy about telling folks their business. In fact, they're passing out flyers of Gertrude with reward money attached. That, combined with what Yancy Bellow offered, has upped the ante.”

“It will be a bitter irony if they catch her, maybe in the flower beds.” Gertrude, whatever her faults, had an amazing green thumb. The grounds of the B&B were some of the most beautiful I'd ever seen, ablaze with the fall colors of gold, purple, maroon. Each season presented with showy blossoms, and the autumn belonged to the mums. “Is it Dog and Beth?”

Tinkie shook her head. “Junior was pulling your leg. He hired some bounty hunter named Clete Purcell and his partner Dave something from New Orleans. This has nothing to do with Dog and Beth.”

“That Junior. Daddy always warned me he was a card. It's too bad, though, that Dog isn't in town. Gertrude would make an excellent TV episode.” Frankly, I didn't care if Scooby Do brought her to justice, as long as she was caught.

“You'd better get cracking if Pleasant Smith is going to make it home to spend Thanksgiving with her family.” Harold avoided looking at Tinkie or Oscar as he spoke. He wasn't being cruel. It was merely a reminder for them to keep their hearts as protected as possible.

We trooped into the house and cleaned up a breakfast that would have filled three-dozen hungry farmhands, and then I picked up my keys. “I'm going to work.”

“We're almost done decorating,” Harold said. He checked his watch. “I have to go to work, too. How about we finish this evening?”

“Great.” Since I was in need of babysitters, it would be nice to have something productive to do with our time.

“Would you mind dropping Libby by Madame Tomeeka's?” Tinkie asked Oscar.

“Sure.”

Oscar kissed her cheek with such gentleness my heart twitched. “I'll be at the bank. Call if you need me.”

“And I'll be at the club,” Scott said. “We'll meet back here when we can.”

We all nodded. It would be a great Thanksgiving celebration, but only because I had such incredible friends.

*   *   *

With the baby safely delivered to Tammy, and the critters in the backseat of the Cadillac, Tinkie and I were ready to find Pleasant. Although my gut knew beyond a doubt that Carrie Ann, Lucinda, and Tally had engineered Pleasant's disappearance, I couldn't figure out where they'd taken the young woman or why they were still holding her.

Tinkie was all in the game as we drove to the spot on Highway 12 where Dewey Backstrum had been killed. I wanted her to examine the scene of the crime, even though there was nothing there to see but a bare stretch of road and empty fields. I also wanted her to meet Frankie. The DNA test results for Frankie's paternity weren't in yet. A backlog in the state lab was working in Tinkie's favor. But I thought if she met the young man, she'd see he was kind and decent. It might help, when the time came.

Off to the west a storm was brewing, and a massive thunderhead loomed, but it was far in the distance. Storms could sweep across the flat land of the Delta in record time. The assault was often quick and short-lived, but sometimes the black clouds moved slowly, a behemoth of rain, thunder, and lightning. I hoped this storm stayed to the west and moved north or south rather than on top of us.

We exited the car into a stiff easterly wind, blowing away my hopes of avoiding the rain. The storm would be here, and if the wind was any indication, it would be here quickly. As I diagramed what I thought had happened with Dewey Backstrum and Pleasant, Tinkie visualized it.

“If Pleasant had stopped to help Mr. Backstrum, it's possible she may have witnessed the hit-and-run. Her abduction may have nothing to do with the Delta State scholarship,” Tinkie said.

She was dead right. “I believe those men, Rudy, Owen, and Luther took her. I'm still not certain about Rudy's role in this. But I believe Owen and Luther still have her. While these men may have done the kidnapping and hostage holding, I think those little high school bitches and Carrie Ann masterminded the operation.”

“We need to focus on two questions. How can we prove it and where can we find her?”

She was exactly right, and I knew where to find a source who might give some insight into Potter. “Let's take a drive to Parchman.”

Tinkie blanched, but she didn't refuse. “What do you hope to find there?”

“Owen and Luther both did time. Maybe someone at the prison knows about their habits, places they might hide out. There is reward money on this, and it's enough to maybe bribe someone to talk.”

“Oscar isn't going to like this one bit,” Tinkie said as she got behind the wheel. I slammed my door and she was grinning. “A prison adventure. Makes my heart go pitter-pat.”

Sometimes I underestimated my partner and I needed to stop doing it.

We dropped by the Three Bs grocery first, and I introduced Tinkie to Frankie and gave them a few minutes to chew the fat about Libby. Tinkie seemed somewhat relieved when we left the store for the short drive to the state penitentiary.

“He's a nice young man, isn't he?”

“He loves Pleasant. I'm pretty sure he's the father.”

“Yes, I can see it. Libby has that same tender look.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence, but it was not uncomfortable. Tinkie seemed to be processing Frankie as Libby's father, and I was figuring out what to say to the prison warden that would win us an interview with anyone who knew Luther or Owen and who would voluntarily talk to us. A call from Coleman might smooth the way, but I thought we'd try it on our own first. I'd resort to Coleman as a last ditch effort.

We had no difficulty getting past the guard station, after an assistant warden agreed to meet with us. I'd been to Parchman on several occasions. My father had worked with clients there, men and women, before a separate female prison was built. My father believed that some inmates had been railroaded in a system that punished blacks and the poor far more severely than others. Daddy had saved two men from the gas chamber, which was the means of execution at the time. In more modern times, Mississippi had upgraded the state-administered death system to lethal injection.

Prisons are bleak places no matter the season, but winter is particularly depressing in a prison that stretches across twenty-eight square miles of some of the most fertile land in the world. While the warden's office was warm and sunny, the land seemed drenched in desperation and despair. The blues were born at Parchman, and if not born, then nurtured into a musical form that expressed both the joy and sorrow of life, the love of a good woman and the temptation of a bad one, the injustices yet also the small pleasures that make life worthwhile.

As Tinkie and I waited in the small but comfortable office for the deputy warden to personally hear our request, I thought about my father, who'd been greatly taken with Alan Lomax's work in collecting blues from Mississippi prisoners.

“Parchman is a place where the blues find you, no matter how hard you hide,” was a quote my daddy said often enough for me to remember it all these years. While Parchman had a terrible reputation for abuse in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, it was also the first prison in the nation to allow inmates conjugal visits, though not to female inmates, who had no such rights. Mississippi was, and will always be, a state of great disparity and conflict when it comes to justice and equality.

The office door opened and a pleasant-featured young man with blue eyes and sandy hair introduced himself as Deputy Warden Kim Lambert. “I understand you're requesting to speak with inmates who knew Luther Potter and Owen DeLong.”

I explained about Pleasant, the baby, and her run-in with the men. “There is a reward, and the donor who put it up would be glad to send it to the inmate's family.”

“Wait here. I'll check and see what I can find. I know a couple of guys who were buddies with those two.”

Cooling our heels in the administration building, I worried about Sweetie, Pluto, and Chablis out in the car. The windows were cracked and the day was mild. Still, I didn't like to leave them for long. As it turned out, we didn't have to wait. Lambert returned with two names, but only one man had agreed to speak with us.

We followed the warden, wondering if we'd have to use the phones behind glass partitions that I'd seen in movies. We didn't. Lambert showed us to a small room with a table and three chairs.

“Jimmy will stay with you,” Lambert said, indicating a muscled guard who stood in the corner at parade rest. “Do not pass anything to the inmate. Do not attempt to touch him or make physical contact. Stay in your seats. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” we said in unison, and we weren't being smart alecks, either. I had one criminal on my butt and I didn't need to get in Dutch with another.

When we were alone in the room with Jimmy the guard, I turned to my partner. “Are you ready?”

“As I'll ever be.” She squeezed my wrist lightly. “This is the break, Sarah Booth. We'll find Pleasant today and have her home for Thanksgiving.”

I searched her face for the distress those words were bound to give her, but I saw only peace. Somewhere in the long night, Tinkie had finally accepted that Libby would live with her birth mother.

“You'll see her every day,” I whispered. “I believe that.”

Tinkie's smile held a tiny drop of sadness. “I believe it, too.”

 

22

Buster Beech, shackled at the wrists, waist, and ankles, clanked into the interview room looking bored and sleepy. He wasn't a big man, but he carried himself with pride. His head was closely shaved, and his prison jumpsuit was neat. When he sat down across the table from us, I couldn't help but notice the prison ink that showed a skull on one bicep and a snake on the other. The guard linked his handcuffs to a chain that went to a bolt in the floor.