Thoroughly 03 - Who Invited the Dead Man? (35 page)

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Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

BOOK: Thoroughly 03 - Who Invited the Dead Man?
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In the middle of all that commotion, before any of us could stop her, Terri sprinted through the narrow opening in the door.
Everybody except Meriwether and Darren jumped up to follow her. We wound up in a jumble at the doorway. Jed pushed the hardest and I was right on his heels. As we reached the front porch, we saw a blur of white as Terri raced across the lawn and jumped into Gusta’s Cadillac. As usual, Otis had left the keys in the ignition.
She made ruts in our lawn as she turned and peeled out of the yard. Jed ran to the BMW, me close behind. He had the engine roaring before I slammed my door. “The sheriff will get her,” I promised. “I told him she might try to leave my house tonight. He’s got a deputy stationed at the end of the road.”
Jed didn’t slow a whit. He raced backward down our drive like one of the Petty boys. On the road he spun gravel as he made the turn. The misty rain was still falling.
My hands clenched into fists as we rocketed through the night. I saw Terri’s own car beside the road near Hubert’s, where Jed and Maynard had waylaid her. Up at the highway, I heard a siren open up. When we reached the corner, we followed the sound—turning right, away from town. “She’s heading for I-20,” I said unnecessarily. “Probably making for Atlanta.”
Ahead of us, Buster’s deputy wailed in her wake.
Our part of Georgia is along the geological fall line where the Piedmont drops to the coastal plain. Since our county hasn’t felt a need for many four-lane roads, the road we were on was hilly and narrow, dropping off at the side in some places nearly thirty feet. But Jed grew up on Hope County roads. He just gunned his motor and raced after them. I found myself sneaking peeks at the speedometer and whispering,
“DearGoddear-GoddearGod.”
I didn’t know if I was praying that we’d catch her or that we’d all be safe. Once in a while a suspicion flitted through my head that I even hoped she’d get away.
I kept sneaking peeks at Jed, too. I’d known him since he was knee-high to a gnat, but that night he was fueled with a fury I hadn’t seen before. Was it for his uncle or for Meriwether’s grandmother that he felt such rage? He hunched his shoulders and clutched the wheel as the speedometer climbed to heights I never hope to experience again.
Terri was a nerveless driver. I had to give her credit for that. She pushed Gusta’s old Cadillac harder than anybody knew it would go. Our speedometer was hovering over one hundred when we suddenly saw her swerve from the right lane into the left. A slow car was dead ahead. At the top of the next hill, we could see another approaching.
I still live those three seconds in my nightmares. The deputy and Jed slammed on brakes, fought to keep their cars on the slick road. Terri sped up and jerked her wheel to the right.
She overcompensated, fishtailed all over that wet road, and then, in a heart-stopping second, plunged into an abyss of kudzu.
30
It took a lifetime for the deputy and Jed to both stop, turn, and get back to where Terri went over. The other two cars had stopped as well.
As soon as Jed stopped, I jumped out my side and peered over into one of those places where Georgia soil is still following Sherman to the sea. In summer the deep, eroded gash of earth would be filled with kudzu, that pernicious vine somebody brought from China to prevent erosion. It now overruns the South, thick green leaves that climb our pines and snake down our hillsides. By late autumn, kudzu was nothing but thick ropy vines, but they had broken Terri’s fall.
In the dimness, the Cadillac lay on its back, tires still spinning, looking like Lulu hoping to get her belly scratched. Terri, little more than a glimmer of white top and white face, lay on her back in kudzu vines, flung a good twenty feet from the car. She hadn’t bothered with a seatbelt.
The drivers of the other two cars, one elderly farmer and an excited teen, were making sharp little grunts of dismay. “She’s gotta be twenty feet down there, and there’s no good way to get to her.” Without a word, the deputy dashed back to his cruiser and grabbed the phone.
I stood on the side of the road shaking like a kudzu leaf in the wind, except the kudzu had lost its leaves and there was no wind. Jed peered all along the bank, hoping for a miraculous staircase—or at least an easy way down.
I got the miracle, but it wasn’t stairs. I was peering through the dimness at Terri when suddenly I saw a flash of white. “She flung out her arm! She’s alive!” I yelled to the deputy in the car. “My God, she’s alive!” I bent over the gully and shouted down, whether she could hear or not, “Help’s coming, honey. Hang on! Help’s coming.”
But there was no way down. No way down at all. The red clay banks were crumbly and pitted where rivulets of rain had washed them out.
A second cruiser slid to a stop behind ours and a red-faced beefy deputy jumped out. He hurried toward me, took one look down, and sucked in a long whistle. “Boy! We had a gully like that on our place, growing up. Try and climb down there, and you’d plunge under the kudzu and never be seen again.” He didn’t seem to expect me to answer, because he turned at once and went to talk to the first deputy.
They and the other men were still by the cruiser scratching their heads when Sheriff Gibbons pulled up. I stayed where I could see Terri.
Like I said, Buster is a marvelous officer of the law. In less than a minute he’d gotten on his radio requesting a helicopter rescue. I remembered how he had fought for three counties to go together and buy a helicopter for this very sort of thing a year back, and how much opposition he’d had before they bought it. As I stood on the gully bank praying for Terri, I sent up a word of thanks for Buster.
A sizable crowd gathered before the helicopter arrived. Folks are real friendly about stopping for wrecks around where we live—and real curious. Buster had to send the deputies out to light flares to protect rescue workers and flag traffic on its way. Everybody’s face looked tense and worried in the flashing lights. I saw Darren’s yellow Beetle pass several times, but they wouldn’t let him stop. If I hadn’t been a judge, they’d have tried to send me home—but they wouldn’t have succeeded. I was also a mother, and as long as Terri lay like a rag doll below us, I planned to stay. I kept my eyes on the sky and my ears tuned for the first thunk-thunk-thunk in the sky.
Watching that rescue was like watching a miracle. I couldn’t believe it when the technicians swung down from the belly of the ’copter and actually managed to lift Terri inside. They flew off into the night sky like a giant mosquito rising from the swamps.
Seeing the sheriff nearby, I said, “Your deputy deserves a commendation for good driving. He didn’t drive her off the road. She swerved to avoid another car and overcompensated.”
He took off his hat and ran his hand over his hair, then put the hat back on. “You deserve a paddling for being here. Do you know what Joe Riddley would do to me if anything happened to you?”
“I didn’t exactly think,” I admitted.
“I hope you think up a better story than that before you meet up with Walker and Ridd.” He gave me another look and shook his head. “This is a historic moment. You went off without your pocketbook.”
 
I called Ridd and asked him to send Bethany down to sleep at our house. “I may have to be out late, and I don’t want Joe Riddley waking up with nobody there.” Bethany had done that before and not minded. By way of explanation, I said that Miss Gusta’s assistant had been in a bad wreck and I needed to check on her in the hospital. “Martha’s working tonight,” he told me.
If anybody could get Terri in and out of an emergency room in record time, Martha could. But her brown eyes were worried when I got there, and she shook her head when she saw me. “She’s not good, Mac. Not good at all.”
“Can I see her?”
“The sheriff’s got a deputy at the curtain, but we can ask him.”
He stepped aside to let me in. “Sheriff said you’d probably be here. Her boyfriend’s in there already.”
I found Darren in a chair holding one of Terri’s hands. Her head was bandaged, her face white beneath it. An IV went in one arm and a monitor overhead graphed her heartbeat. It was, I saw, erratic and fast. Her head was restless on her pillow.
Darren turned, his eyes enormous and accusing. “What happened?”
I breathed a prayer for wisdom before I answered. “She was trying to outrun a deputy, and had to swerve to miss a slow car in her lane. She lost control and wound up in a gully.”
“She didn’t kill anybody,” he insisted. “I know she wouldn’t.” His orange hair blazed like a torch in the room. “Alice wouldn’t!”
“She isn’t Alice, Darren. She’s Terri, Alice’s sister. It was Alice who drowned.”
“No way!” He breathed the words like an angry dragon.
“Yes, way,” I said automatically, echoing little Cricket’s favorite response.
“Darren?” The word was little more than a breath on the wind. We both bent to the bed. Terri’s eyes flickered open. “Don’t hate me,” she whispered. “I had to kill him. I had to. He—”
“Don’t talk,” Darren urged. “Rest. You can talk later.”
She shook her head. “No. Now.” She closed her eyes and seemed to gather strength, but tears squeezed between her closed lashes. “I thought he’d ruin everything.” A sob tore itself from her throat. She took a couple of deep breaths. Behind me, I felt the deputy come into the room.
“Why did you choose my house?” I simply had to know.
“I didn’t know. I meant to take him . . . deserted road. Say we were going to my spaceship. I went to Bi-Lo for plastic gloves.” She stopped and spoke in short raspy phrases. “I saw him . . . walk down a road. . . . I followed . . . picked him up . . . told him . . . show him my spaceship.” She paused again to catch her breath.
“That’s weird,” Darren muttered. “This whole thing is weird.”
Terri opened her eyes and gave him a special smile. “You’re not weird. Just me.” She rested so long I thought she was finished, but she was just gathering strength again.
She looked pleadingly at me. “He said . . . not your name . . .” Again she stopped.
“ ‘Mizzoner’? Is that what he said?”
“Yeah. Mizzoner . . . said he promised to mow. Made me stop at a house. I saw your name . . . on mailbox. He said he had to go in to say he’d be back . . . gone a long time . . . I went in, too, and . . . dining room screen . . .”
Again her head tossed on the pillow. Martha came in to put something in the IV. “She’s tiring. You all need to go.”
“Wait!” Terri raised one arm and winced with pain. Her chest heaved with the effort to breathe. “. . . told him. . . . lie on mail . . . close his eyes . . . I’d beam him up. He never knew a thing.”
She sighed again, and her head flopped to one side. Martha hurried to take her pulse. “Out!” she said. “All of you. She must rest.”
Terri’s eyes fluttered open once more. “Darren’s good. So very good. . . .” The last word was no more than a sigh.
We had turned to leave when we heard her give a sharp little cry. “Mama!”
Teresa Civilis was gone.
31
DECEMBER
The first Sunday in December, Gusta called to say she was coming to see me. She surprised me by arriving in a taxi. “I’ve decided not to buy another car,” she said, unbuttoning her coat. “I don’t know a thing about buying cars, and who would drive it? Otis’s license has been pulled, and he refuses to drive again anyway—he’s certain that everything that happened was his fault for leaving the keys in the car. Pooh and I have decided we’ll take taxis from now on.”
That day was unusually warm, so I suggested we sit on the side porch, out of the wind but in the sunshine. We each chose a rocker, and I handed her a mug of coffee.
“I still can’t believe that girl was taking my money.” Her gnarled hands shook at her own incompetence. “Do you know that she had deposited all of that month’s rent checks into her own account that afternoon? Over in Sandersville. Meriwether says she was planning to leave in a day or two, close her account, and vanish.”
“You’ll get the money back,” I reminded her. “And you’ve still got her computer with your ledger entered into it. Once you learn to use the program, you can enter checks yourself. You can stamp them, and you can deposit them. You won’t need an Alice or even Meriwether.”
“She didn’t even have an aunt in Jacksonville.”
“She must have gone out of town to deposit checks in different towns.”
“And have a holiday at my expense.”
Something in her tone made me ask, “You miss her, don’t you?”
She sipped her tea, then confessed. “I do. I’d gotten used to having her around.”
“You paid for her funeral, too, didn’t you?”
Her gray eyes slewed my way. “How’d you know that?”
“I know you.”
“Somebody had to. They buried her in Macon, beside her mother and sister.”
I looked down the drive, where Joe Riddley and Darren were coming back from a slow walk to Hubert’s pond. “I don’t know how long it will be before Darren recovers. He wanders around here like a shadow of his old self.”

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