Signs in the Blood (26 page)

But don't worry none about hit, said Rom, for hit'll likely fade. Now let's us help her find the tit; her suckin'll help you to get the afterbirth out.

My breastes was hot and tender to the touch and at first hit hurt as she sucked. But hit felt good too and I lay there just a-worshippin that little babe while there was more pains and then the afterbirth come out. Rom cleaned me up and gave me some more tea and some of the cornbread too, for I was plumb empty feelin. What are you goin to call her? Rom asked, and I said right away, I'll call her Malindy atter our mommy.

Hit was nigh dark when Mister Tomlin come home. I was dozin and dreamin when I heared the sound of hoofbeats. I tried to set up, thinkin that it was Levy come atter me at last but then I heard Romarie say, Well, Mister Tomlin, yore wife and babe are both just fine.

She lifted Malindy from my side and held her out for him to see. He reached out and laid back the blanket she was wrapped in. Why, says he, it's a little girl, beautiful just like her mama.

CHAPTER 21

H
AWKINS
E
XPLAINS
 (
M
ONDAY)

M
UM, THE STUPID BATTERY
'
S DIED!
”
L
AUREL
appeared at the door, waving her digital camera in frustration. “Plus, we're going to have to head back; I'd forgotten that I have to stop by my apartment before I go in to work.” As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she registered the fact that Mary Cleophas was nursing a baby, “Oh, wow, I didn't realize—”

“You're right, Laurel,” said Elizabeth. “It
is
getting late. I'll help you put the paintings back.” She gave her daughter a meaningful look and motioned her outside. “Mary Cleophas, I could bring you some food, some hot food, and whatever—”

“I thank you kindly, ma'am,” Mary Cleophas replied, bending her head to kiss her baby, “but Daddy'll be back later on and he allus brings us some fried chicken and taters from one of them places up on the highway.” She smiled serenely at Elizabeth. “I'd be proud was you to come back in a few more days when Daddy ain't here. I get awful lonely sometimes.”

Elizabeth started out the door, then turned back. The sun struggling through the grimy panes of glass in the little window lit up the form of the girl sitting on the old cot, turning her hair to a pale golden halo. The paper cranes seemed to flutter in the mazy air and the scene was suddenly heartbreakingly beautiful.

“Mary Cleophas,” said Elizabeth. “What's your baby's name?”

The girl looked up. “The Lord ain't yet told my daddy what hit is. But for now I call him Ishmael cause him and me's in the wilderness, like Hagar and Ishmael in the Book.”

Laurel was obviously bursting with questions as they returned the paintings to the little room, but she waited till they were on their way back up the mountain to ask them. Elizabeth hesitated when it came to describing the grotesque sight of the baby's naked body. “It's a . . . a correctable birth defect. The baby was meant to be twins but the second one never developed fully and never separated. It's the sort of thing that used to end up in a freak show but now surgery could fix it.”

“Do you think Mary Cleophas knows that?” Laurel asked. “She seemed to me like she was pretty otherworldly. Or maybe just simple. Where's the baby's father anyway?”

Elizabeth drew a deep breath. “Well, she said she didn't have a boyfriend—that it was like when God the Father gave Jesus to Mary.”

“A virgin birth? Oh, please!” Laurel snorted and strode ahead on the trail. “Do you think her father believed
that
?”

Climbing steadily behind her daughter, Elizabeth replied, “That's not what she told her father; it's what her father told her.”

“I don't get it,” said Laurel, stopping in the middle of the narrow path and swinging around to face her mother. “What are you trying to say?”

“I'm not sure,” said Elizabeth, her mind racing over the possibilities. “Laur . . . maybe John the Baptizer is the father of the child.”

“Oh, Mum!” Laurel cried. “Do you really think that her own father . . . ? Oh, that totally sucks!”

“It's just a feeling I have,” admitted Elizabeth. “Mary Cleophas seems so innocent—not like a girl who would even
have
a boyfriend, much less lie about one. And she's evidently completely under her father's thumb . . . although she was willing to defy him and see Cletus . . . and us. And she may be a little simple. I just don't know . . . maybe we ought to talk to Social Services. . . .”

Laurel was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Could we wait just a little bit? I mean, she doesn't seem afraid of her father, it's not like she's in real danger. And what if he's not the father of the baby? She could have lied when she said she never had a boyfriend. We ought to find out for sure first. If we call Social Services, they'll roar in there, take away the baby, probably put John the Baptizer in jail, and Mary Cleophas in a juvenile home,
then
try to find out the truth. What if there's some other explanation? There's got to be a better way!”

Back at home Laurel grabbed some bread and cheese for her lunch and flew out the door, calling back to her mother not to do anything about Mary Cleophas and her baby just yet. “I'll be back out Wednesday and we can figure out what's best, how to help Mary Cleophas,” she promised.

Elizabeth stared after her daughter, feeling lost.
What's the right thing to do?
She found the telephone book and looked up the number for Social Services. She looked at it for a long time before dialing. When a recorded voice told her that the line was out of order, she hung up the phone with a feeling of guilty relief.
I'll figure out what to do later,
she told herself.

She sat by the telephone, thinking about Cletus and Mary Cleophas.
The squirrels in the knapsack were for her, but he never got to give them to her. She's still waiting and hoping to see him. He would have given them to her before going home. And the sang plants, were they for Harice's father? What if Cletus got both the sang and the squirrels up on Devil's Fork and then . . . that's where something happened. He dropped the knapsack and eventually Pup dragged it home.

Devil's Fork. She dug into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the strip of fabric she had found on the fence at the top of the mountain. Again she saw Hawkins, in the camouflage uniform of the militia, in charge of training a new cadre of bigots.
How could I have been so wrong about him? Have I been wrong about everything? And where does that leave the theory that
Birdie
killed Cletus? Nowhere, I sincerely hope. But what can I do about any of this?

Elizabeth had always found that when she was faced with a problem, hard physical labor was the best way of clearing her mind so that a solution could eventually emerge. She spent the afternoon in her garden, weeding and hoeing, and planting several rows of sweet corn. Sweet corn was always problematical, she thought, as she covered the newly planted rows with old chicken wire, kept for that purpose. First you had to protect it from the crows that dearly loved to pull up the sprouting kernels by their first tender shoots. Once the corn was almost knee-high, the crows lost interest and the chicken wire could be removed. Then, often as not, a hungry cow would spot the delectable green leaves and push her way through the fence to mow down the corn, leaving behind just several satisfied cow plops. And if, by some miracle, the corn survived to make ears—then there were the raccoons and the corn worms, and the crows again.

“Why the hell do I plant corn anyway?” she asked herself as she carried a last rock from the road to anchor down the chicken wire.
Is it just because I always have? Or is it part of an ongoing battle against Fate? Do I put up with the aggravation of losing most of the time for the sheer joy of an occasional win?

Elizabeth glanced up at a crow who had been watching her with considerable interest from its perch in a nearby pear tree. Striking a dramatic pose, she declaimed in a loud voice, “‘In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud.' Something, something, something . . . ‘My head is bloody, but unbowed!'”

The crow flapped lazily away with a derisive caw and Elizabeth turned to see Ben, a basket of eggs in his hand, coming out of the chicken house just below the garden. He looked at her in amusement and called out, “Is that what an English major does when she's out standing in her field?”

She was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch with a pre-dinner glass of wine when Phillip Hawkins came walking up the road. Her three dogs were trotting alongside him in a companionable manner. Her first impulse was to go into the house and shut the door, but curiosity won out and she stayed where she was.

He was out of breath when he reached the porch, “Elizabeth, I need to talk to you; I know what you must be thinking but it's not like that—Could I please have a glass of water first?”

She brought him the water without saying anything, resumed her chair, and waited, rocking slightly. When he had drunk the water and caught his breath, he began. “I guess I should have told you from the start the real reason I moved to Asheville. Janie was part of it; I really did want to be around to keep an eye on her; she does have problems; that much was true. But there was another thing.

“That militia place has got your sheriff's office worried and they wanted to get someone inside. Obviously it couldn't be one of the local cops, so Sheriff Blaine contacted my boss—they went to school together—and Blaine thought it would be safe bringing in someone from the other side of the state. It was an informal arrangement; officially, I'm on leave. So I showed up one weekend at Devil's Fork claiming to be a cop who was fed up with the preferential treatment minorities were getting—a cop, in fact, who'd been fired for his rough handling of some well-connected African-American guy. And they bought it: They checked around, but we had done our homework and they found the answers we wanted them to find. Flinn put me to work training a batch of recruits. And that's when you showed up.”

He looked at her to see what her reaction was but she kept her face still and said nothing. He went on. “I should have known when your dog showed up at Devil's Fork that you'd be after her before long. Some of the guys had caught her and thought they could use her in their night games.” He looked apologetically at Elizabeth. “But I pulled rank and said I'd take charge of the dog. I tied her up and was going to sneak her out and bring her back here. I figured I'd let her out down at your lower place and get back to the compound.”

“Why didn't you just call and tell me where she was so I could stop worrying?” Elizabeth asked in a frosty voice.

Hawkins ran a hand over his bald scalp. “I thought about it. But I didn't want to answer questions about where I was; I figured I could get her back to you almost before you missed her. That was dumb and I'm really sorry that I caused you to worry. But how the hell did you know she was there, anyway? I about had a heart attack when I looked up and saw you in that guy's truck, just staring at me with those blue eyes.”

After almost half an hour of explanation on both sides, the chill around Elizabeth's heart began to subside and she invited Hawkins to stay for supper. As they sat at the table with their reheated leftovers—shrimp and andouille sausage jambalaya that she had pulled from the freezer—he seemed eager to tell her some of what he had learned about the militia. “You've trusted me and I'm going to trust you. But this is hush-hush stuff, Elizabeth. So please don't let it go any further.”

His brown eyes bored into hers. “A lot of those guys are just fairly harmless macho types playing soldier, but the higher-ups—Flinn and those around him—are linked to another group out in Montana. I think they're expecting a big shipment of automatic weapons and other matériel that's illegal for civilians to possess. And when that shipment arrives”—he grinned widely—“they're busted, and Devil's Fork can grow up in weeds.”

Hawkins told her that he had heard about the skunk left at her door. “Some of the eager beavers saw you in town with one of the Mexicans and decided it would be a fun little ‘night mission' to leave you their calling card, some postcard they'd found that looked threatening. One of the new recruits knew who you were and where you live, and it was his idea—”

“Phillip,” she interrupted, “could these creeps have been responsible for Cletus's death? That pool where you were having the training exercises—”

“That was the other thing I wanted to tell you about,” he broke in. “You remember I told you about my buddy the medical examiner? Well, R.L. was in town last week for a meeting and we had lunch—you ever been to that Japanese place on Broadway? Great food . . . anyway R.L. told me that she'd found the same anomalies in that Dewey guy's lung tissue as there were in Cletus's—”

“Wait a second.” Elizabeth put down her fork. “Your buddy R.L. is a she?” An unexpected and unidentifiable emptiness assailed her heart.
What does it matter, Elizabeth?
she thought fiercely, remembering the attractive woman she'd seen lunching with Hawkins.

“Sure, Rhoda Liliane Levine, that's my buddy R.L. Like I said, R.L. and I go way back. Anyway, I took her to lunch at that Japanese place and she told me about the second autopsy. Then she got into telling me all her troubles—seems her girlfriend dumped her for some chick she met when she was running a marathon—”

“Wait another second . . .” her heart soared and she began to grin,
but why should it matter to me?
—“R.L., good old R.L., she's . . . she's
gay?”

“Sure,” he said, confused, “didn't I mention it? Anyway, here's what I've been doing . . .”

Hawkins went on to explain that he was trying to find out if the militia had been behind the deaths of Cletus and Dewey. He had taken a sample of the water from the militia's pool that he was sending off to R.L. to see if it was a match for the water found in the lungs of the drowned men. “I've been dropping hints and asking leading questions, but so far nothing. Flinn and his boys either don't know or they aren't saying. But if the water sample is a match . . .” He speared a piece of sausage and chewed it with greedy gusto.

Two cups of coffee later, Hawkins stretched luxuriously. “Man, it's been great to get away from those crazies for a while. But if I'm not back pretty soon they may start to wonder.”

They walked together to the porch and Phillip put out his hand and said, “Thanks for believing me, Elizabeth. I would have hated it if—”

“Me, too,” she said, and they shook hands solemnly. Hawkins suddenly slapped his breast pocket. “Let me give you my cell phone number; out here in the mountains and valleys it only works some of the time, but I'd like you to have it.” He pulled out a little notepad and a pen and scribbled a number. Ripping out the page, he offered it to her. “I feel like Sam would want me to keep an eye out for you, and—”

She stared at the piece of paper, then slowly took it. “You know,” she said, “I've pretty much learned to take care of myself, Phillip. I don't like having to depend on anyone else.”