Alabama Noir

The Price of Indulgence by Carolyn Haines

Downtown Mobile

The fishy smell of Mobile Bay came through the open car window. Jackie watched the sun come up, casting gold shimmers on the light chop. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel of the old blue Plymouth Fury, listening to the radio and waiting. The local AM country station was filled with static and aggravation, but soon the Salvation Radio Hour would be on. Brother Fred March preached the fiery word of the Lord and offered to save sinners who bought his prayer cloths or blessed water. Stupid suckers.

Jackie sank deeper into the bench seat, shifting to avoid a spring. She lit a cigarette and let the smoke roll out of her mouth. She’d never learned to make smoke rings.

“Hey, you alive?”

She sat up taller and caught the image of the big man in her side mirror. Merle Boykin, one of her best customers.

“More alive than you want to mess with.” She opened the car door and got out.

“You a feisty thing.” Merle looked her up and down, lazy and deliberately offensive. “Like those cutoff jeans.”

“If you had gunpowder for brains, you couldn’t even blow your nose.” She brushed past him and opened the trunk. “There it is. You carry it inside if you want it. I’m not your pack mule.”

“Girl, your good looks take you only so far. Push a little harder and see what you get.”

Jackie grinned. “Try your luck, asshole.”

Merle turned his attention to the gallon glass jugs in the trunk. He lifted one and looked through the clear liquid. “You ain’t got your daddy’s manners but you inherited his touch with a still. Never knew a girl could cook mash like you.”

“You want it, haul it out of my trunk after I have the money.”

Merle counted out the bills in twenties. He handed her the cash and then lifted the moonshine out of the trunk. He made eight trips to the ramshackle building that sold bait, fishing gear, rented boats, and also offered white lightning to trusted customers. Jackie leaned against the side of the car and watched him work.

“Your daddy always helped carry it in,” Merle said as he hefted two more gallons.

“My daddy was a good man. He died about thirty yards from where I’m standing. Being good didn’t matter a bit to the man who shot him.”

Merle shook his head. “That eats at you long enough, you’re gonna be shittin’ in a bag.”

“Thanks for the medical advice.” She slammed the trunk. The rear of the car still sank low to the white shells of the parking lot.

“Jackie, there’s no undoing what happened to your daddy. I don’t know who shot him, and fact is, I wouldn’t tell you if I knew. You gone get yourself hurt. There’re mean and powerful people out there. They’ll shoot you too.”

“If I thought you knew, I’d see that you told me.”

Merle slammed the trunk hard. “See you in a week.”

“My date with destiny.” She got behind the wheel, closed the door, and spun out onto the two lanes of the causeway that connected Mobile and Baldwin counties. The bay ruffled on her left, and the marshlands and rivers on her right. In ten minutes, she was cutting under the Mobile River via Bankhead Tunnel, a span of roadway that made her feel like she was in the belly of a snake. When she shot up into the light and sun again, she was in downtown Mobile.

She snapped the radio back on.

“God offers sinners the perfect miracle, absolute redemption. Even those who have died and are moldering in the ground, awaiting Judgment Day, can be helped. God wants to love and forgive. I can intercede with God on behalf of those you love, those awaiting final judgment, those who will live eternally in the fiery lake of hell if you don’t take action. Cash, check, or money order will do. Don’t let the flames of damnation lick the flesh of those you love. Send twenty-five dollars right now and the name of the person I need to pray for. God hears me, and He listens. Let me save the ones you love from eternal hellfire.”

The city had begun to awaken as she drove past the businesses and houses, many sporting evidence of the long occupation of the city by the French and Spanish. Wrought-iron balconies, stucco, windows that opened wide and were used as doors, the patio entrances that led back to what had once been stables and elegant bricked courtyards. This was Mobile, all shaded by the monster live oaks she loved.

When she passed the small, cinder-block AM radio station, WRED, she pulled to the curb and stopped. Brother Fred March was inside, doing his live radio show. She recognized his brand-new black Cadillac parked right at the front door. The morning deejay who ran the station was playing a gospel song, “Jesus Is Coming Soon” by the Oakridge Boys.

For the next half hour, she watched the squirrels run up the live oak trees and listened to Brother Fred.

“The Lord Jesus carries your sins every day. He can wash you clean and intercede for those who have gone before you. Here’s that address again. Cash, check, or money order and the name of the person I should pray for.”

The show always ended with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Before the song had even finished, the door of the radio station opened and Brother Fred stepped into the October sunlight. Tall with wide shoulders, he was a handsome man with his pomaded black hair. Before the ministry, he’d been a dock worker. Ten years of hard labor had given him a physical presence. Greed had given him the golden ticket of fleecing the desperate.

March lit a cigarette and a big diamond on his finger glinted. He didn’t even glance at the old Plymouth across the street.

Brother Fred wasn’t a very perceptive man, but to be on the safe side, Jackie had put on sunglasses and a scarf to hide her white-blond hair. She watched the radio evangelist pull hard on his cigarette and then flick the butt into the grass. He walked around the car and she took note of his fancy suit and cowboy boots. They were made of ostrich and cost a pretty penny, but God wanted him to have them. Brother Fred said so on the radio, and his flock had ponied up the bucks to buy them.

The evangelist left the radio station in a spray of gravel. Jackie waited a minute, then fell in behind him, heading west. The minister’s Cadillac cut through the October morning like God’s black missile. Brother Fred paid no heed to speed limits, which forced Jackie to do the same. When he turned into a new subdivision of brick ranch-style homes on the outskirts of Mobile, she passed the entrance, then returned, cruising until she found his car parked halfway behind a redbrick house with gray shutters. She brought the camera with a telephoto lens from the backseat just as March got out of the Caddy and knocked on the front door.

The woman who opened it wore a flimsy white negligee and a big red smile. March swept her into his arms and hurried inside, but not before Jackie had half a dozen photos.

The newsroom of the Mobile Register was already filled with cigarette smoke when she clanked out of the decrepit old elevator and went to her desk in State News. She was little more than a cub reporter. She typed up the columns from far-flung community correspondents, wrote obits, helped the back shop proofread legal notices and the classified ads. When none of the male reporters were available, she sometimes got to pursue a crime story. Her boss said she had a flair for sniffing out stories.

At her corner desk she began to type Octavia Fairley’s community column and four obituaries. At least she didn’t have to write weddings. Her boss came out of a meeting.

“I’m done with my work. Can I go to the darkroom?” She pushed her rolling chair away from her desk and stood.

Clint assessed her for a moment. “Somebody dug up a grave over in Wilmer. You want to check it out, Hepburn?”

Clint was a big fan of old movies and Katherine Hepburn was a favorite. She already had her car keys in hand and her purse on her shoulder. “Address?”

She’d grown up on the west side of Mobile County and she knew every back road. The cemetery wasn’t that far from where she lived. “I’ll be back after lunch.”

“Jackie, were you out on the causeway this morning?”

She stopped in the doorway, debating whether to lie or not. Bootlegging wasn’t an approved hobby for newspaper employees. “Yeah, I was.”

Clint sat down at his desk. “I know your father’s death eats at you, but you need to let it go. If you don’t, you’ll end up bitter and unhappy.”

A smart-aleck retort came to her, but she stopped. “Thanks, Clint. I am trying.” She walked through the newsroom, ignoring the elevator, and took the stairs down to the lobby and out into the sunshine.

A solitary sheriff’s deputy stood over the open grave in the middle of a small church cemetery. The body had been buried only two days before. Now the coffin had been opened and the body taken. Latter-day grave robbers.

“Who was she, Sandy?” There was no headstone. The grave was too raw.

“Cornelia Swanson, high school senior. Auto accident. It’s killing her folks.” Deputy Sandy Stewart backed away from the grave and stopped in the shade of a big live oak. It was the only bit of beauty in the sad little cemetery.

“You thinking vandals or someone personally connected with the dead girl?”

“More likely revenge,” the deputy said. “Jet Swanson has some serious detractors. Some say he had a beef with your daddy.”

“My daddy didn’t rise out of the grave to steal a dead girl’s body. Not unless you know something I don’t.” Anger made Jackie’s words hot.

“You got a short fuse where your daddy’s concerned.”

“Do you have a suspect or not?”

“Not. Wouldn’t tell you even if I did.”

Sandy Stewart was normally easygoing. Jackie had brought out his obnoxious streak. “I’m going over to the Quik Mart there to get a Coke. You want one?”

“Sure.” He took the peace offering.

She got the cold drinks and walked back, handing him the icy can. They popped the tops and drank. The day was hot for October. “Did you know the girl?”

“In passing. She was shy. She’d just taken a job at the Quik Mart after school. Said she was saving to go to college.”

“What caused the wreck?” Jackie asked.

“Drunk driver. He wasn’t hurt. Not even a serious scratch. She was dead at the scene. She was Jet’s only child.”

“That couldn’t have been planned.” She thought a minute. “Could it?”

Stewart shrugged. “Facts don’t matter to Jet. Now they’ve gone and stolen his girl’s body. Going to be hell to pay. You keep your head down and don’t try talking to Jet. I’m warning you, he’s not above hurtin’ you because he’s hurtin’.”

“I can take care of myself, but thanks.”

Stewart only lifted his eyebrows. “Your daddy said the same thing.”

Jackie froze. “You know who hurt my daddy?” She had suspected all along that the sheriff knew who’d shot Jackson Muldoon. He just chose not to do anything about it. Jackson was a bootlegger and because of his profession had given up any claims to justice.

Stewart leveled a gaze at her across the red clay wound of the earth. “Your daddy sold hooch, but he paid off the sheriff and he traded honest as far as I ever heard.”

“If it wasn’t the law or his customers, then it had to be his competition. Was Jet a competitor?” Her daddy had never talked business with her. She’d accumulated his old customers because he had a name for quality and a reputation he was proud of. Quality moonshine was a family tradition.

“Steer clear of Jet.” The deputy frowned. “Not that you’ll take my advice. Girl, you got a streak of self-destruct a mile wide.”

Jackie had heard that before. “You got any idea who dug this girl up?”

“Nope. I’m just hoping we can find the body before it shows up someplace that’s going to make the national news.” He gestured toward the empty grave. “She was one of those Angels in White. Did the singing on the radio. You know, they pledge to be pure and sing at the revivals for that Brother March.”

She looked down into the hole where the coffin had been opened. The pink silk lining was smudged with dirt. The body had simply been pulled out and taken. “Did this girl have a boyfriend? Someone who might be... strongly attached?”

“Now that’s some sick stuff you’re sayin’.”

“Hey, I’m not the one riding around with a dead body in my car.”

“No, you’re ridin’ around with a ghost, Jackie. That can be just as dangerous.”

“Thanks, Sandy. I’ll quote you in the paper. Give you some fame.”

“Keep it. Fame never leads anywhere good in Mobile.”

Jackie finished her story and waited while Clint read it. The photograph of the empty coffin in the grave was haunting and disturbing. She didn’t know if the paper would run it or not. She honestly was torn herself. The prospect of taking a hard dig at Jet Swanson, who she suspected was involved in her father’s death, and the grief the photograph would give Mrs. Swanson, were conflicting impulses. Clint gave her a nod of approval and dismissal.

Dusk was falling quickly, and she’d been up since four a.m. She left her car parked in the newspaper lot and walked up Government to Royal Street. Work-a-day employees were headed out of the city to Midtown or the apartments along Airport Boulevard near the mall. The day people abandoned the streets to the sizzling neon signs, rock music coming out of bars, and the men who came into the port city from around the world to sow their wild oats.

Two blocks over she pushed into the Port of Call. The bar was so dimly lit that she had to stop to let her eyes adjust. Euclid Adams was behind the bar; Martha Lowell, aka Candy, was on the stage. She wore a pink-and-white-striped baby-doll outfit that emphasized her cleavage and long legs. She was a good dancer. Not all of the stars at Port of Call were. Some had all the right moves in other athletic pursuits.

Jackie settled at the bar. Euclid put a Diet Coke in front of her. “When the streets are clear, I’ll pull around back.”

“How long you gonna cook mash, Jackie?”

“Haven’t decided.” She’d known Euclid since she was twelve and started riding with her dad when he made his deliveries.

“Your stories in the paper are good. Folks say you got a set of huevos. They also say you gone end up dead, just like your daddy.”

Jackie sipped her cola through a straw. “Could be.”

Euclid leaned down on the bar so he could look her eye-to-eye. “Girl, you need to stop whatever plan is churning in that brain of yours. I see clear as day you’re about to get yourself caught in a gill net. That kind of ending isn’t pretty.”

“Where’s Lyda?” She finished her soda with a loud slurp.

“In the back. You should leave her alone. She’s not feeling good.”

“I need to ask her something.”

“Don’t let Johnny catch you back there. He says you make the girls unhappy by telling them things they don’t need to hear.”

“Yeah, like in five years they’re gonna be strung out, diseased, and living in a homeless shelter?”

“Yeah, stuff like that.”

Jackie nodded. “I won’t be but a few minutes.”

“If Johnny comes back, I’ll play Frijid Pink on the jukebox.”

Jackie ducked behind the curtain that separated a long, narrow hallway with doors on either side from the rest of the bar. As she passed a door, she heard a man laughing. Some of the girls were already at work.

She knocked on the third door to the left and opened it. “Lyda?”

The young woman was stretched out on a sofa, her gaze unfocused. A half-finished vodka on the rocks was sweating on the bedside table. “Go away.”

“Lyda.” Jackie sat on the floor beside the bed. “I’ll get some coffee for you.”

The woman shook her head. “Let me ride this high a little longer. You don’t know what it’s like to be free.”

Jackie shifted to her knees and brushed the hair back from Lyda’s forehead. Lyda March was only a few years older than Jackie, and she had once been beautiful. She’d danced in New Orleans in the finest gentlemen’s clubs. Now she was back home, performing as Lyda Monarch to avoid soiling her family’s name.

Jackie got coffee from the bar. She had to get Lyda on her feet. Johnny Zenata didn’t put up with dancers who were too loaded to work. “Lyda, do you know a girl named Cornelia Swanson?”

Lyda looked down. “Sweet Cornelia.”

“Lyda, she’s dead. Did you know that?”

Lyda nodded. “Newspaper. Car wreck.”

Jackie heaved a sigh of relief. Lyda wasn’t as far gone as she seemed. “Did you know any other of those girls? The White Angels?”

“I know things my daddy did that you’d like to know.” Lyda pushed past her and went behind a screen to dress. She was done talking.

Twenty minutes later, a shaky Lyda was in her cowgirl costume and standing upright. Jackie ushered her to the stage just as Johnny Z. came in the back door. He scowled and started to push Lyda, but Jackie stepped into his hand.

“Don’t.”

He grinned. “What’s Lyda to you?”

“A human being.” Jackie’s fists were clenched.

“If you say so. I don’t care if she’s a one-legged pig as long as she dances and the men buy drinks.” He waved around the bar, which had begun to fill up with shadowy men who sought out the dark booths around the edge of the room. In a far corner, pool balls clacked. Johnny started to turn away but Jackie grabbed his arm.

“I want to take Lyda home to her father. She needs to dry out and get clean.”

Johnny’s eyes narrowed. “Her daddy doesn’t want her. What do you have between your ears, mashed potatoes? He don’t want a junkie stripper whore showing up on his doorstep. Lyda has enough sense to know that even if you don’t.”

“He’ll take her in.” He would too, or she’d print the photos of Brother Fred and his negligee-clad mistress and glue them to the doors of his church. The things he’d done... nice people didn’t talk about those things and no one would believe Lyda now. It wasn’t the same, but at least Jackie had the goods on him with his mistress.

Johnny eyed her. “You involved in digging that girl up? I knew you were crazy, but that takes it. You’re trying to play in the grown-ups’ sandbox, Jackie. You’re gonna get hurt. Jet Swanson will cut out your gizzard and feed it to you.”

The ringing phone woke Jackie and she knew the newspaper had run the photos of the empty coffin — with her photo credit.

“Hello.” She turned on the burner for hot water.

“Stay away from that still.” The line went dead.

The caller was male. She walked to the end of her driveway in her T-shirt and panties. There were no other houses around. She picked up the paper and opened it to State News. There was the photo of the coffin and a much more suitable shot of tombstones shaded by the big oak tree in the cemetery. It looked haunted and sad. The empty grave seemed... depraved. She sighed. It was going to be a long, long day.

She showered and built up the wood for cooking. The two Taggart boys would be by to keep the fire burning.

It was only six o’clock when she got to the paper, so she went into the darkroom and processed the film she’d taken of Brother March. She printed up ten big glossies of March with his mistress in his arms. Both faces were clearly visible. She went to her desk and tucked them into a manila envelope and put them in her purse.

From the cross-reference directory she looked up the address of the house Brother March was partial to visiting and got the name of the woman who lived there. Charlotte Rush. She addressed an envelope to her, slid in a photo, and put it in her purse to take to the post office.

She wrote six more obituaries. The afternoon deadline came and went.

Clint came out of his office. “Jackie, the sheriff called. They have a lead on that missing body. The sheriff asked for you. Specifically.” Clint stared at her, giving her the chance to explain.

“Where is it?”

“They left her sitting on the front porch of a house, 125 Walton Street, in the Golden Heights subdivision on the west side of town.”

She felt the flush rise to the roots of her hair. It was the same address on the envelope she was getting ready to mail.

“Does that mean something to you?”

She shook her head.

“What’s going on with you?”

She felt the weight of what she knew pressing on the back of her throat, but she swallowed it down. “That’s just such a gruesome thing to do. Leaving a dead girl’s body on someone’s porch.”

“Put her in a rocking chair by a geranium. Run out there and get some photos and interview Charlotte Rush. Find out how she’s connected to all this.”

“Yes sir.” She grabbed her purse with the photos in it and her camera.

“If folks were upset with an empty coffin this morning, they’re going to be choking on their toast over this. Do your best to be tasteful.”

“Right. Tasteful.” And she was out the door.

She went to the post office and sent the photo to Charlotte Rush. Dead girl on her porch. Blackmail photos. Tomorrow would be an interesting day in Fred March’s life. And it was just the first drop in the bucket.

She parked behind a patrol car, glad that by the time she got there the body was covered with a sheet. It sat bolt upright in a chair, the position of the body telling her that rigor mortis had already set in. She had to wonder how the grave robber had gotten the body to bend into a sitting position. It was downright creepy.

She set to work under the watchful eye of a deputy. The sheriff pulled up and stopped in the drive to talk with some of the other law officers. Jackie ducked inside to find Charlotte Rush sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee untouched in front of her.

“Get out,” Charlotte said. “I don’t want the newspaper here.”

“Did you know the Swanson girl?” Jackie asked. “Cornelia was such a good girl. She was an Angel in White in the church right down the road.”

Charlotte stood up. “What are you talking about?”

“Cornelia Swanson. The dead girl on your front porch.”

Charlotte leaned against the sink she was laughing so hard. “You fool. That’s not a dead girl. It’s a mannequin. Someone dressed up a mannequin and left it on my porch. Those fool deputies called it in that it was that dead girl that was stolen from her grave.”

Jackie felt the sweat slip down her back and into the waistband of the jeans that hung on her hips. Mannequin. Someone had left a mannequin in a rocking chair. She went outside and pulled the sheet off the body. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to paint the mannequin’s face and dress her in a red, sheer nighty that looked like it came from Frederick’s of Hollywood.

She took the photos, capturing the glassy-eyed stare of the plastic woman. When she looked down the driveway, Sheriff Hilbun and all the deputies were clustered, watching her.

“I heard you thought it was the body of that girl someone dug up,” Hilbun said.

“Yeah, that was the call that came in to the paper.”

“Must have been old home week with Charlotte Rush for you,” Hilbun said.

Jackie sensed the ground had shifted. “Why should it?”

“Your daddy was sweet on Charlotte. He never mentioned that, did he?”

Jackie rubbed the back of her neck beneath her long blond hair. “No, he didn’t. I guess he figured his love life was none of my affair. He’d be right about that.” She picked up her equipment and left the men standing in the driveway.

Jackie sat on her own front porch with a glass of whiskey on the rocks. She sipped her drink and smoked a cigarette. She thought back on the evenings her daddy came home late, smelling of perfume and drink. She’d never asked him. She’d never wanted to think of him with anyone other than her mother, who’d died when she was thirteen. Cancer. A long, ugly death that stole everything from Tilda. First her health, then her looks, then her joy in living, until she’d finally had enough.

Jackson had seen her through it all, feeding, washing, cleaning, bathing, loving. Jackie had never begrudged her dad the solace of another woman after Tilda was gone. But she didn’t want to know the details or the woman. But Charlotte Rush?

She threw her cigarette butt into the dying flower bed and went inside to sleep.

She was up early the next morning, long before dawn. As she headed downtown, she watched the colors of the sky shift from indigo to peachy shades of gold and finally the blue-white of fair weather.

She parked in the newspaper lot and locked her car. When Jet Swanson appeared from behind the corner of a building, she couldn’t stop herself from reacting. She uttered a cry and stepped back.

“You shouldn’t have made that picture of my daughter’s grave.” His eyes were flat but alert.

“I get an assignment from my boss and I do what I’m told to do.”

“Somehow I don’t believe that, Jackie. I know you.”

She’d recovered her balance. “And I know you. Why do you think I’d do something like that?”

“That’s what I’ve come to ask. Why? And to tell you I want my daughter’s body back. I want her back in the ground and left alone. Now, you’ve got till midnight tomorrow to put her right back in that coffin. You call me when it’s done and I’ll send some boys around to fill in the dirt.”

“You’re making a lot of assumptions.”

“Folks said you’re smarter than your daddy. Prove it. This is your get-out-of-jail-free card, Jackie. Put her back. That’ll be the end of it.”

“And if I don’t — assuming I have a dead body hidden somewhere?”

“I can put you in that coffin and cover you up. One way or the other, I’m telling my wife that a dead girl is in the cemetery. You get me?”

“Why would I take your girl like that? What have you done that makes you think I’d even attempt it?”

“You’re smart, but you aren’t right, Jackie. Obsessed with vengeance. That’s the word. It’s no secret you think I killed your daddy.”

“I do. Are you denying it?” Her body was trembling.

“You’re not such a fool that you think I’d admit it even if I had done it.” He leaned in and tucked a stray curl behind her ear. “Midnight tomorrow. I’ll be waiting at the cemetery.”

He brushed past her and walked away, disappearing down the gray street in the pale light of dawn, leaving her to face a long day of questions and anxiety.

Jackie woke from a troubled sleep to the sound of gunshots. Just as she sat up in bed, the window of her room shattered. Glass blew in toward her, and she ducked and rolled. Two bullets smacked into the bedroom wall.

When her breathing finally settled back to normal, she crawled up and got a rifle from her father’s closet. She went to the back door and slipped into the night. She couldn’t see, but neither could they.

A milky film of fog covered the stars and moon, dripping steadily from the trees onto the dying leaves. She knew the woods and moved through the trees without hesitation, making her way to the narrow road. When she saw the sandy lane, she found a place tucked near a fallen scrub oak and set up the rifle, braced on the tree. A hoot owl cried into the night, and she was glad for the company. Whoever had taken a shot at her house was gone. The wild creatures told her that much.

She went back to her house and examined the damage. It was more warning than threat. Not worth involving the law, who’d been eager for an invite onto her property since Jackson had died. She’d handle this herself.

Her phone rang, startling her to the point that she almost dropped the rifle. She put it away, convinced the danger had passed. For the moment. She answered the phone, expecting to hear Jet Swanson’s voice. Instead, there was only the sound of breathing, and in the background, a sweet chorus of young women singing “Softly and Tenderly.” She realized it was a recording. A train whistle shrilled in the distance, but she couldn’t tell if it was on the recording or from the location of the caller.

“Who is this?” She waited. “Who is this?” She was hanging up when she heard what she thought was a sob. The line went dead.

Jackie held the phone for a long moment before she put it back in the cradle. She pulled on her clothes, grabbed the rifle, and headed to the still. Long before she got there, she saw the fire. Someone had torched her still. The blaze danced above the treetops. An explosion that literally rocked the car told her there was nothing to salvage.

She swung the car so the headlights illuminated the path through the woods and stopped. A white dress had been draped over a set of shrubs. The Empire waist and longer skirt told her exactly what kind of dress it was. She slammed on the brakes and froze. “Angels in White.” She whispered the words aloud before she leaped out of the car and snatched the white dress. She completed her U-turn and headed away from the still, going as fast as she dared.

There was nothing she could do to save the operation. Someone had put her out of business. Destroyed the thing her father took pride in. And left her a message. Angels in White.

Her certainty that Jet Swanson was the man responsible for her father’s death was shaken. Jet would kill a man, no doubt about it. He would kill a woman. But he would not dig up his daughter or use her church clothes to make a threat. Fire trucks passed on the main road. She gave the police another fifteen minutes to get to the scene, then grabbed her camera and drove to the still. Taking photos for the newspaper gave her a reason to be at the scene. An empty gas can had been left fifty feet back from the still. Hardly necessary with that much alcohol right at hand.

To her surprise, Deputy Stewart was the man in charge. “Any clues as to what happened?” she asked.

He scoffed. “I thought you might be able to tell me.”

“I was home, asleep. Heard the sirens.” The flames had died down considerably, and the volunteer firemen were spraying the surrounding trees to prevent sparks from jumping.

“Who would want to put you out of business, Jackie?” The deputy gently grasped her shoulder when she started to turn away. “You’ve been poking into someone’s business. This is a message. If you don’t heed it, they’re going to seriously hurt you. Just like they did Jackson.”

“Who killed my daddy?” She kept her tone flat.

“Knowing won’t bring Jackson back and it could get you killed.”

She thought about showing Sandy the dress. It was the best evidence and she’d plucked it from the scene. Angels in White. Dead Cornelia Swanson. An empty grave.

She drove straight to the newspaper and turned in her film of the fire. She wrote her story and left it on Clint’s desk.

She made her last delivery at the Forest Grill, a bar on old Highway 45. Freddie McGee was a favorite customer. He was older with bad knees so she unloaded the moonshine. She put the jugs behind the counter. The building was half general store and half bar, with a short-order cook to boot. Dolly Mason could whip up a grilled cheese in under three minutes. Jackie didn’t even have to order. Dolly put the sandwich and a cup of coffee in front of her at the bar.

“I heard about the fire.”

Jackie felt the pressure of emotion yet again. She blinked back her tears. “I’m done, Dolly. I’m thinking about moving into town. Maybe buy one of those little cottages on Mohawk or Japonica. Not too close in.” She was surprised at how much she revealed and how these thoughts had come, unbidden, to her mind.

“You don’t need to be out in those woods alone. Moving into town is a good idea, hon. Maybe find you someone to date.” Dolly picked up a strand of Jackie’s hair. “You could be pretty if you let yourself. Eat your sandwich.”

Jackie sipped her coffee. She had to get back to the newspaper. Clint would be looking for her. She took a big bite of the sandwich and peered at the wall behind the bar. The place was old and not all that clean. Her eye caught a photo of three very young men at the pool table, holding sticks and grinning at the camera. Two small girls sat on the edge of the table. One had white-blond hair.

Dolly followed her gaze. “That’s your daddy.” She took the picture down and gave it to Jackie. “He was a handsome man. When he was young, all the women had a crush on him. He was also a bootlegger, which made him dangerous. Like a pirate.” She laughed. “When he married your mama, we were all heartbroken. I don’t think he ever looked at another woman after he said his vows. The same can’t be said for the other two. They were tomcats in heat.”

Jackie knew her father, but not the other two men. They were so young. “Who is that?”

“You don’t recognize Sheriff Hilbun?” Dolly pointed to the man on the left. “And that one there is Mobile’s most famous radio minister, Fred March.”

“And that is Lyda.”

“She used to go everywhere with Fred. Places she shouldn’t have gone.”

Jackie ran a finger over the glass that protected the photo. “So that’s my dad, the sheriff, and a television minister. That’s quite a trio. They were friends?”

“Once upon a time Lloyd Hilbun and Fred March were stevedores at the dock. That’s where the sheriff got his base of support to run for office, and Fred went in the other direction. He learned the power of persuasive talk as a union organizer.”

“Was Jackson a stevedore too?”

Dolly laughed again. “Not on your life. You father never worked for anybody but himself. He cooked mash alongside his daddy, who learned from his daddy. That’s why all your daddy’s clients kept buying from you. That’s generations of trust and quality. They kicked about buying from a girl — I heard them — but in the end, the ties were too strong.” She patted Jackie’s arm. “What are you going to do now?”

“I’m still deciding.”

“Your daddy wanted you to go to college. Get an education. He said legal liquor would push the bootleggers out if the law didn’t.”

Jackie didn’t say anything.

“I’m not your mama so I don’t have a right to offer guidance, but your paw and I talked sometimes. He was so proud of you, Jackie. He said you could be anything you wanted.”

Jackie stood up and put the picture back behind the bar. She had to get to the paper before Clint blew his stack, but she had one stop to make. She turned back at the door. “Who killed my daddy?”

“Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. No one here would. That information won’t do anything but hurt you.”

The white dress she’d found in the woods was still in the backseat of her car. Angels in White. How long had that eaten at Lyda?

She parked behind the strip club and went in the back door. Euclid saw her and filled a glass with crushed ice and Diet Coke. He put it on the counter. “Sorry about your still.”

“End of a family tradition.”

“What are you aimin’ to do?” Euclid leaned on the bar.

She shrugged. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose, right?”

Euclid came around the bar. “Johnny’s on his way. Lyda’s been sick and missed her performance. He’s goin’ to pin that on you.”

She slurped the last of her Diet Coke. “I have to see Lyda. I got something of hers I need to return.”

“What would that be?”

“A white dress. She left it at my place.”

“I don’t know if she’s awake. She’s in bad shape.”

“What kind of shape are you in, Euclid?” She picked up one of his hands and examined his nails.

“What are you doin’?”

“Looking for graveyard dirt. Lyda didn’t dig up that dead girl by herself. Johnny Z. is crazier than a shithouse rat, but he didn’t do that. Had to be you.”

Euclid snatched his hand away. “You can’t prove it.”

“I don’t want to. Where’s the body?”

“It’ll show up. When the time is right.”

Jackie tapped the bar lightly with a finger. “I know what Fred March did to Lyda. But what about that dead girl’s mama?”

Euclid looked down at the bar, wiping at imaginary spots with his shirtsleeve. “Folks get hurt in the fallout. You should know that, what with your daddy getting shot and all.”

“Who shot my father?” She caught his wrist and dug in with her fingernails.

“Stop.” He shook her off. “You need to get out. Johnny said he’d hurt you if he caught you here again.”

She left him and walked through the curtain and into the long hallway that smelled of beer and piss. She opened Lyda’s room without knocking. Her friend was on the sofa, her eyes closed, her face pallid and waxy.

“Go away, Jackie. We aren’t friends.” Her lips barely moved.

“Why’d you torch my still?”

“I set you free.”

“Why’d you do that?”

Lyda pushed herself up so that she was leaning against the arm of the sofa. “I’m dying.”

Jackie shut off her emotions, refusing to feel anything. “That’s not my fault.”

“No, but it’s your daddy’s. And the sheriff’s. Everybody knew what Fred was doing to me. No one stopped him. No one lifted a hand. Not Jackson. Not the high sheriff. Even when I was working in New Orleans, Fred would show up. It wasn’t until I got sick that he stopped. Then he had the Angels in White to fill in the dark places in his soul. He didn’t touch those girls, though. He preserved their innocence. Because he had too much at stake. But me, he ruined me for anyone else. For love or having a family. And no one stopped him. Not even your daddy, who set such a store by you.”

“You left that white dress so I’d know you set the still on fire.”

“I did. You deserve to know. You’re the only one who tried to help. And I did set you free. You’d’a run that still until you dropped dead in the woods because it was your precious daddy’s. Now you can move on.”

Lyda knew her better than she knew herself. The taste of freedom in the back of Jackie’s throat was bittersweet.

“Lyda, have you seen a doctor?”

“Liver’s gone. Hepatitis.” She shrugged. “Shit happens.”

“Where’s Cornelia Swanson’s body?”

Lyda grinned, the skin pulling over her skeletal features. She’d gone far downhill in the few days since Jackie had last seen her. “In the trunk of my daddy’s car. He’s been driving his dead princess around for days. Imagine that.”

Lyda forced herself off the sofa, stumbling as she went to a dresser in a corner of her room. She opened the top drawer and brought out a tape recorder. “This is all you’ll need, Jackie. The whole story. Even the part about who killed Jackson.”

“It was Fred, wasn’t it?”

She nodded. “My dear daddy wanted to make an issue out of bootlegging and warned Jackson it was coming down. Jackson threatened him about Charlotte Rush, and about his visits to me in New Orleans. Next thing I knew, Jackson was dead.”

“The law won’t be able to make charges stick about digging up that dead girl. Fred’ll get out of it.”

“Maybe. But I left another recording with the body. One he won’t get out of so easily.”

“How do you know he won’t remove that before he calls the sheriff?”

Lyda inhaled and flinched. She put a hand on her side. “That’s the real reason I burned the still. They’ll be investigating.”

“You’re framing a man for something he didn’t do.”

“Because the things he did do, he’ll never be punished for.” She sank back onto the sofa and turned away. Her chest rapidly moved up and down and Jackie thought of two cocks she’d seen fighting in a farmyard. The fierce fluttering of a desire to maim and mutilate. She knew it too well.

“Let me get you some help, Lyda. Have you even seen a doctor?”

“I don’t want help. I want revenge, and then release.”

“But—”

“Just let me go. That’s the kindest thing you can do. Let me go.”

Jackie believed her. Lyda had loosened the tethers long ago. Fred March had set her on that path. He’d stolen her will to live, her innocence, and her best friend’s father.

“I’ll call the sheriff for you. And I’ll do what I can to protect Euclid.”

Lyda nodded. “I’ll tell your daddy hello for you.” Her expression held a hint of the old Lyda. “And Jackie, I don’t want to be buried. I want to be cremated and my ashes spread in the Mississippi River. I want to wash right on out to the gulf and the Caribbean islands I always dreamed of visiting. Let me go, okay?”

“You’re going whether I let you or not.”

“We’re alike that way. If you write a story, use a picture of me dancing in my cowgirl outfit. Back from the first, when I looked good. Now get out of here.”

Jackie walked out and closed the door. Lyda would be dead within weeks. If her plan to frame Fred March failed, she still had her exit.

Johnny Z. was coming down the hall, a scowl on his face. Lyda had escaped him too.

Jackie nodded at Euclid as she crossed through the bar. She couldn’t help her friend, but she would see that Fred March was held accountable. Brother Fred was about to discover that the wages of sin were high, though nothing compared to the price of indulgence.

Come Like a Thief by Anthony Grooms

South Titusville, Birmingham

Dr. Blackwood taught literature at Miles College, but I knew him from St. Paul’s Lutheran, where Daddy had started to take us after we left the Presbyterians. Dr. Blackwood was a thin man, not much taller than five feet, a dapper dresser, with bulging eyes and a thin line of mustache, like it had been drawn with a fountain pen across the ridge of his lip. I loved to hear him speak. His voice was soft and crisp and he used words that I didn’t know the meaning of. I doubt if anyone who sat on the porch watch on that fall night understood half of what he said.

“Prof,” Mr. Snodgrass (we called him “Snotty”) said, “that’s a mighty good speech! Good ’nough to deliver from the pulpit at Sixth Avenue. You could drive ole Wilson right on outta there. He puts the dead to sleep. God up in heaven be snoring through his sermons. The Lord’s head be falling down and rolling around His neck like a ball on a billiard table.” Mr. Snodgrass spat tobacco in the bean can he kept with him. “’Cept nobody in hell know what you be talking about.” Mr. Snodgrass was a bulky man, whose size should have been intimidating, except his body slouched, making itself look soft. He walked with a stoop as well. He worked in the warehouse at the Golden Flake plant. “You never knew tater chips could be so heavy,” he often said.

I could see Dr. Blackwood’s lips twitching in the silver light that shone through the front-door window onto the porch. “I am too often amused by your flights of imagination, Snodgrass, but to make a spectacle of the Divine is defamation beyond redemption.” The whites of his eyes caught the light. My father, who made up the north-facing point of their triangle, shifted toward me, a sly grin, siding with neither man. The shadow of the Remington 11–48, a shotgun he had managed to keep from his time in the service, moved along the porch railing as it lay across his lap, pointing out into Center Street. I ducked behind the curtain, lest he saw me and sent me to bed.

Like in practically every other household in South Titusville, my parents were teachers. My father worked at Lawson State, a vocational college where he taught painting. The test of a good painter was that he could carry a loaded paintbrush across a room, like a debutante balancing a book on her head, without spilling a drop. Papa had studied at Tuskegee Institute, living among the black airmen who would make up the 332 Fighter Group, and the syphilitic farmers who unwittingly became the guinea pigs of the US Public Health Service. He occasioned, too, to meet the humble, effeminate, and by then very frail inventor George Washington Carver. This touch with greatness, he said, always inspired him to do right by people. Mommy taught second grade for Birmingham Public Schools, where in addition to buying school supplies with her salary, half that of white teachers, she would buy shoes, toothbrushes, clothes, and lunch for the poorer of her students.

Early that week, Williams’s Store, a mom-and-pop sundry shop, which Sister and I frequented after our trips to the library, had been dynamited. We loved to buy the hard candy from the store, not so much for its taste, but because of its price: two for a penny. A nickel could keep us in candy for days.

Why the store was bombed was a mystery. Bombings — dynamite, Molotovs — were common in Birmingham’s black neighborhoods, especially those that were encroaching into whites-only zoned areas. But South Titusville was not one of those communities. It was self-contained, mostly content, mostly complacent, or so it seemed on the surface. It was a neighborhood where nice colored folks minded their business, went to work, to church, to school, and prettified the front yards of their quaint brick and clapboard ranches. But beneath the surface, as in every black neighborhood, bubbled the slow boil of discontent, whispered in the churches beneath the call and response, or over the fence between neighbors, or on playgrounds among children tossing a softball. The city had closed all the parks that year in resistance to integrating them. The next spring would see thousands of children, some as young as six, march in protest, bitten by police dogs and bowled over by jets of pressurized water. I would be among them. That night, though, no one knew by whom or why Williams’s Store had been shaken off its foundation and gutted by fire from two sticks of dynamite tied to a brick thrown through the window. But for the week since the bombing, on nearly every street corner in Titusville, both North and South, sat men with guns on porch watch, waiting, as Mr. Snodgrass summed up, “to blow open any Klan sonofabit’ stupid enough to drive down Center Street.”

“The white man,” Dr. Blackwood said as he rolled the knuckles of one boney hand within the palm of the other, “has but one reason to oppress the Negro” — he lowered, shook his head, and recited — “Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa.”

“Yass,” Mr. Snodgrass drawled. My father nodded in agreement.

“They deem to assert a hideous hegemony over us for their parasitic profit. But the Klansman is a white man who has no reason, none other than to brutalize. I am put in mind of Mr. Justice. The pitiable soul.”

Mr. Snodgrass folded his arms across his chest. As he was the south-facing point of the triangle, the pistol he held, also a take-home from war service, pointed briefly in my direction. “Reginald, it was.”

“Roland, if memory serves me well.”

“I knew his Daddy from when I worked over at TCI.” Mr. Snodgrass leaned toward Dr. Blackwood, but kept his arms folded around himself. TCI was a blast furnace, one of several which, though diminished, still sooted the skyline. “It was Reginald. He wasn’t doing nothing. Just walking down the road.”

“Black as the night is black.”

“Just minding his own business,” my father said, and let out a long sigh.

“And what they did to him, I didn’t see in Korea. And I saw a lot I won’t even tell ’bout. But they sliced him like a pig farmer take a razor to a shoat. Clean off. Then stuck ’em down his throat. What the purpose of that? Boy nearly choked to death and would have too.” For a long moment all that could be heard were the grinding screeches of the last of the cicadas. I turned away from the window, an ache from my navel to my knee, remembering the story of Ronald Justice and questioning my future as darkness swelled in me.

It was several minutes before the conversation picked up again, as if they were all lost in contemplation. I, too, was full of worried thoughts. I was twelve and beginning to feel the sap of manhood springing in my limbs, and with it, not so much a greening, but a blackening of expectations. What had happened to Ronald could happen to any black boy. I would have gone to bed at that point, but Mr. Snodgrass asked, “Whatever happened to Reginald? Did he go up north or something?”

“I never heard. Not even that,” Dr. Blackwood said.

I moved back to my peephole behind the curtain and saw that the men seemed to have drawn closer together, forming a conspiratorial circle cut across by the rectangle of light that came through the door. I put my ear closer to the window screen.

“There was that so-called reporter, an investigatory journalist from one of the Northern papers, he said. Philadelphia, he said.”

“Oh, yass. I do remember that fellow. Nosier than a six-toed mole. Come snooping around the yard at TCI asking about the boy. It was the end of late shift and that probably was the reason he snuck by the gate. He asking about Justice. By then they was gone. Where, I don’t know. Up north, I guess. But he come asking and nobody, and I mean nobody, would speak a word to him. You never seen so many shoulder-shrugging Step’n Fetchits shuffling through the smoke and shadows. No suh, boss, I don’ know nuffin’ ’bout what choo talking ’bout. Flares were going off and throwing that red light on them, and they looked like they just raised from the grave. The cub come round to me. First I act like he wasn’t even there. But then I said to myself that I wasn’t fixin’ to play no bug-eyed Sambo. I looked him right in the face, his eyes in shadow but somehow still sparking when those flares goes off. Do you know where the hell you is? Asking ’bout that boy? Do you even know where the hell you is? His mouth opened wider than a cow with a cattle prod up her ass. Too flabbergasted to get out more than a whoosh. He was a young fellow, Irish by the looks of him.”

“Yes. Yes. But of course, I recall him well. A scarlet-haired, freckled-face youth. A so-called all-American visage. His name was O’Brien. Thomas O’Brien.”

“O’Brien is right — nah! — Brown. Timmy — Timothy Brown it was. I know ’cause he followed me home. I was living round Avenue A in Fairfield then, not a quarter-mile from the furnace. Air in the house got so smoky you couldn’t sleep some days and for the clanking and clunking too. But not a minute after I got home I heard the dogs barking and growling and come a knock at the door. Sun not even up yet. Cracked the door and there he was standing in the slit of light and looking like a chicken. Hair standing up like a rooster. Asked if the dogs gone bite. What choo want? I said it just like that. I didn’t cotton to no white man. Them ain’t my dogs anyway. He mumbled out something ’bout the Inquisitor. ’Bout then, one of the dogs took a snap at him and I pulled him on in. Don’t need no white man bit up in my yard. What choo want?

“The fellow still looked shaken to me. Had that look like he got surprised one day and his face never went back. He wanted to ask me questions about that boy, and was it a better place here than at the plant.

“Ain’t no one damn place better than the other. You can get killed any damn place.

“He sat down like a fat man with broke legs. Heard my kitchen chair squeak. Wife gone to work, though. Day work over the mountain. She had left me a pot of greens, cornbread, and a little fried meat. I always ate my supper in the morning. So I offered the man some to be polite, never expecting he would say yes. So I fixed it up the best I could and served it to him. And he ate too. Right slow at first, like he had to smell it, and then a little piece and a little piece more. Then he was smiling and shoving it on in, chewing and grinning, ring pinkie in the air, like he always ate this way. Ain’t this one hell of a strange thing to see? I was thinking. A white man, sitting and eating at my table, eating greens and cornbread for breakfast. I had to shake my head.

“Then he took a pencil and a little pad of paper out of the breast pocket of his jacket and set them down on the table beside his plate. He looked up and smiled, but his eyes darted around like he was nervous too. You know Reginald Justice? he asked me.

“Naw, I said, I didn’t know the boy. Seen him once or twice, but can’t say I know him. I worked with his daddy, though.

“Well, tell me about his daddy. I told him what little I knew, but it wasn’t enough to get a story out of. Then he say, Did the daddy ever mention that the boy had been seeing anybody? A girlfriend?

“If he did, I don’t remember. I guess the boy was normal and that would have been a normal thing.

“A white girl. Girl the name of Ella Grimes.

“Damn! Bread dropped out of my mouth it hit me so hard. Grimes. That Grimes gal. I started to say I didn’t know a thing he was talking about — and truth be told, I didn’t. But I did know that Grimes gal, ’cause her daddy worked the snort valve just a way ’cross from where I was on the slag pot. Won’t let no colored work the valve. Thought we wasn’t smart enough. We shovel the coke and sinter. Pour off the slag. The gritty work. Controlling the valve was hot work too, but that was a white man’s job only. He had to be right up next to them air heaters. Likely, it would cook him if he wasn’t careful. But Grimes, as far as I knew, was a decent white fellow. He never said a word to me, but he never said a word against me, either. But you don’t know what a man will do if you mess with his daughter.

“When I got my tongue back I ask how he knew this. He said he had been investigating over in Hueytown. Talk was the boy and the gal had been seen together outside the plant gate. More than once. She would bring her daddy some lunch. But that would have been about midnight. What kind of gal be hanging around a plant yard at midnight?”

The glider squeaked as Mr. Snodgrass leaned over the arm to pick up his bean can. Dr. Blackwood cleared his throat, apparently to interject, but Mr. Snodgrass held up an index finger with the hand that still held the revolver. “I asked him how he knew. Who he talking to? I was hoping against hope it wasn’t Grimes. But no, it was some of them rough boys, three or four of them, over at Hueytown High School.

“He looked kind of nervous when he said it and run his fingers through that stiff lock of hair on his head. Then he said, and he looked down, They told me the girl liked the nigger — then he looked up — That’s their word, sir — he called me sir, but he might as well had kept it at nigger. No offense. I don’t talk like that. Then he stared at me, that surprised look on his face. I could have slapped him into next week.

“But I bit down hard and said, And then what?

“The girl said that she liked the boy.

“I snorted I was so mad. But they didn’t do nothing to the girl. They just cut up the boy?

“Well, one of them said that the girl was his girl and he was glad somebody taught the, uh... well... the, uh, Negro a lesson he won’t forget.

“But the boy you talk to, he didn’t do it?

“The cub shook his head. Said the rumor was the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy. He said it like that was funny. I just grunted. I knew who they was. Those gray-sheet-wearing sonofabit’. Don’t wear white like the regular Klan and the meanest sonofabit’ there is. They the ones beat up Nat King Cole. Beat Shuttlesworth and his girls too.

“Then he wanted to know if I could confirm the relationship. What relationship? A colored boy don’t have no relationship with a white girl. A white girl is death to a colored boy and any colored boy with a grain of sense know that, so unless Reginald had himself a death wish—” Mr. Snodgrass was shouting, realized it and quieted. “But had I ever seen the boy with the girl? he wanted to know. And what if I had? Seeing them together don’t mean they was together. Lots of people wait by the plant gate if they know somebody that work up in there. And then, I noticed he hadn’t wrote a word on that tablet. Not one scratch. Something don’t smell right here, I thought. What paper you say you work for? He said again something about the Inquisitor. Something close to that. I said, And you ain’t gone use my name?

“Confidential, he said.

“Well, confidential or confounded, I told him just like that, I’m done.

“But did you see the two of the together?

“You need to leave.

“Just answer the question.

“You need to leave, right now.

“But what about the dogs?

“I got a dog, I told him. It’ll bark over here and bite over yonder. Now get! I stood up and made like I was reaching for my pocket. He got my meaning and soon went on out. I watched him from the door as he was sidestepping the mud like a sneak dragging his shadow behind him.” Mr. Snodgrass spat a big plug of tobacco into the bean can.

A car accelerated on a nearby street, its engine rising to a whine nearly as loud as the cicadas. The men sat up, looking out from our hilltop porch into the darkness where neither streetlights nor moonlight shone, to TV-lighted windows and the rooftops of Titusville. After a moment they relaxed, the sound of the car muted by distance.

Dr. Blackwood let out a curt sigh and reached into his jacket’s side pocket and took out a shiny flask. “I believe that deserves an ameliorative.”

“And a drink too,” Mr. Snodgrass said. The men passed the flask among them sipping and coughing. Out of the same pocket, Dr. Blackwood took a matching cigarette case, triggered a switch that popped it open, and offered it to the other men. Neither of them took a cigarette and he asked if they were “quite certain,” and picked a thin hand-rolled cigarette out of the case and placed it at the corner of his mouth. He snapped open a shiny lighter which flared blue, casting momentary light on his bony face. He blew out smoke through his nostrils.

“Snodgrass,” he said to my father, “is a highly imaginative narrator. I doubt if any fact in his tale is accurate. Ah yes, To make a poet black, and bid him sing! Snodgrass sings like a whip-poor-will.” Dr. Blackwood’s lips twitched. My father broke into a broad smile. Mr. Snodgrass spat into the bean can. “Yours was not the only encounter with that intrepid investigator. He ventured onto the campus and somehow found directions to my office in the basement of Ramsay Hall. It’s a close, windowless room, so damp at times that the covers of my books curl. But it is the garret from which I launch like Daedalus. Yes. Yes. I know why the caged bird beats his wing / Till its blood is red on the cruel bars. Barely did he knock before poking that scarlet pompadour into my sanctuary. My goodness, I rarely let my dear students in, and here he is, a white man, broadcasting imperium with a swagger as if he were the primogeniture of Czar Nicolas and Cleopatra. I can’t say I wasn’t startled, but I restrained from outburst and continued to jot down the rhyme which he had nearly joggled out of my head. I made him stand for a minute, before I looked up.

“May I help you? I inquired.

“He dragged my bergère, my good reading chair, from its place in the corner to the front of my desk. He made some hasty, excited introductions, and I was to believe that he was an investigative journalist from Philadelphia. The Inquirer, he said. But something was distinctly off about him, and every hair on my head prickled. Fill-er-delf-ia, he said. Not Fila-dail-fia or FIL-de-fia, as natives might say.

“The Inquirer? Oh, how prestigious, I said. I put my pen in the stand, and turned the pages of my cahier against the blotter. So kind of you to visit. He spoke rapidly enough for a Philadelphian, but there was a lilt that placed him farther south. Maryland, Virginia, perhaps. So I inquired, How does it go in the City of Brotherly Love?

“Just great! he said.

“I suppose they must be, this time of year, the weather so pleasant in the spring. And the Swann Fountain at Logan Square as lovely as Trevi, but much more restrained. It’s called Swann Fountain, you know, but there isn’t a swan to be found. Not a one. It’s only named for a family called Swann, not the fowl.

“His eyebrows arched, or at least one of them did — and he took on that look Snodgrass described. He suspected I was testing him.You’ve been to Fill-er-delf-ia?

“Oh yes, I said. Mind if I smoke? I offered him one and he took it. I lit it for him, then my own. A minute passed as we took in our smoke, and not an iota of recognition from him of the trap. You see,” Dr. Blackwood turned to Mr. Snodgrass, “The Inquirer building is located near Logan Square where there’s quite a famous fountain, which is called Swann after the family and, incidentally, features many small figures of the bird, as well. But people get it the other way around, thinking the fountain is named for the birds. This urchin was an impostor.”

“I thought he was a rascal!” Mr. Snodgrass said.

“And to close the trap, I asked if he would like a cup of tea, or a glass of water. Except, I didn’t said wa-tah as a Southerner might, but wood-er as a Philadelphian would. And I observed him closely, and yes — not recognition, not familiarity, but the slightest crinkle of confusion on his brow. What should have sounded familiar to him did not! And so I leaned back in my desk chair, hoping my face did not show the smirk I bore toward him, and inquired as gentlemanly as I could muster, And how may I help you?

“Oh, he said, and took a pad and stub of a pencil from his pocket. Something he had seen in a movie, no doubt. I wonder if he’d thought to wear a fedora with a placard marked Press stuck in the band. He meandered — groping like a man destitute of vision in a room full of knives. Some whites are that way. Afraid to say the obvious, as if to acknowledge that I am a Negro is an insult to me. So I said it for him. And that very same question he asked you, Snodgrass. Did I know the Justice boy? Suspecting his perfidy, I declared that I had never heard of him, or the incident in which the poor lad was injured.

“You mean he was... what! I feigned shock. Eunuchized! Who would do such a thing? And in America too.

“The coifed clown went on quite awhile, chattering now that the subject was open. He explained as he explained to you, Snodgrass, about his intelligence from the hooligans at Hueytown High and the KKK of the Confederacy emasculating the boy and leaving him for dead. He went on about the girl too, Emma, not Ella. Quite the Queen of Sparta. A willowy, smoky-eyed blonde by the way he described her, his eyes bright and a pearl of spittle at the corner of his mouth. He claimed the Justice lad met her at the plant gate every night, by arrangement. She pretending to bring supper to her father, and he — well, it was never clear what rationale he was to give. This he claimed the girl said, though he never talked to her directly, or so he told me. He went on in a loquacious stream that grew more rapids-filled as he went. I learned more and more about the qualities of young Emma, even details about her fetching eyes and her nymphet physique. All the time, I remembered young Roland Justice, one of the few students I let into the office. Tall, he was, sepia, good-haired, and as athletic as a young John Henry. He would have been quite the ladies’ man, but he was a dreamer. Though he had more than a few infelicities in his articulation, I enjoyed listening to his dreams. He wanted to be an astronaut, he said. He wanted to fly off to the planets.” Dr. Blackwood paused, blew smoke through his nostrils, and added with a snort, “What Negro doesn’t? But I encouraged him. To dream, even so quixotically, adds a glimmer to the gloom.”

Like many boys back then, I too wanted to fly off to the planets. It was the years of the Mercury program and five men, that is to say American men, had gone up into space in the past year and a half. Just two weeks earlier, Wally Schirra had completed six orbits around the earth and the president said we were going to the moon!

“I had no heart to tell the boy of poor Captain Dwight. Why snuff out his flame? The example of Captain Dwight served as sufficient precedent.”

My father groaned, a sound of agony and agreement. I learned much later that Captain Dwight had been the first black man to apply to join the astronaut corps, but officials had bullied him away.

“Finally, I’d heard more than enough of the calumny, and was about to ask the white deceiver to leave my office, when he put a finger to the corner of his mouth to wipe away a luscious glob of drool that had collected there and I saw a small, broad ring on his pinkie. A woman’s ring. Gold and garnet. And I made out quite clearly the H-U-E-Y of Hueytown High inscribed around the stone. I checked my anger. The poem had been written, so to speak. Now only the rhyming couplet remained unfinished.

“And you believe them to have been lovers? I asked.

“His face flushed, a flare of anger or embarrassment or both. No, he said. Nothing like that. She wouldn’t have been caught dead... He composed himself. I’m only saying what I heard.

“But why would the boy have been so severely punished, if it were not true? If there had been no true romance?

“Romance? There ain’t no romance.

“Romeo and Juliet. O, happy dagger, / This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die.

“What? He rose from my chair in a near bolt, both fighting and fleeing. You need to be more respectful.

“Indeed, I said, and as he turned I changed my tone to lure him back, back for the final conceit, Young man, one question, please.

“He turned.

“When is her birthday? Emma Grimes? When is her birthday?

“January... He looked puzzled. January the fifteenth. Why?

“No important reason. Just curious. Always curious, I am. I thanked him for his visit, and slowly, as if he were struck dumb by my inquisitiveness, he left the office. I sat listening to the clank of his heels on the stairs. For some long moments my mind seemed clear, not a jingle or rhyme in it. Then the image of that poor lad, lying in a ditch in the darkness with his pants soaked with blood. What horrifying thoughts must have filled his mind. Worse than the pain he must have felt, he must also have felt the fetid gloaming of his future pressing down on him. And then my anger flashed. What an insidious pogrom this petulant pareidolia wages against us! While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, / Making their mock at our accursèd lot.”

The men were silent, but all leaning in, while Dr. Blackwood finished his cigarette and crushed the stub with his foot. “The garnet,” he said quietly, “is the birthstone of January.”

“You don’t think he did it?” my father asked.

“No.” Dr. Blackwood shook his head. “Not the crime. But he couldn’t believe that she hadn’t.”

“Damn!” my father said, and suddenly stood and brought the butt of the shotgun to his shoulder. The other men stood up too, staring into the distance, over the rooftops. I stood. To the north, far down Center Street, a bright light blossomed, momentarily casting an orange bubble in the blackness. There was no sound of the blast. No whine of the speeding car. No screams of children or shouts of the men who undoubtedly rushed to the flames. No sirens. Only the imperturbable cacophony of the cicadas.

What Brings You Back Home by Michelle Richmond

West Mobile

What brings you back home? people want to know.

“Work,” she replies.

The assumption is that she has returned for a certain kind of work, as innocuous as it is forgettable. She’s in marketing, right? Or is it advertising? One or the other. For some big tech company in California. Married to a guy from San Francisco. She doesn’t come home much, hasn’t since she met the guy. That was probably fifteen, sixteen years ago. She loves it out there, despite the fires and the earthquakes.

Only after she is gone, after the puzzle pieces have fit together, will someone say, “Who knew?”

Well, she knew. She’s not one to make it up as she goes along.

Driving through West Mobile on her way from the airport, she sees a subdivision where the pecan grove used to be. The subdivision isn’t new, but it’s new to her. It looks like it sprung up in the early aughts, one of a few dozen such subdivisions that rose from bare ground, each with a name splashed in cursive across a grand entrance. The entrances were usually made of brick, often whitewashed. For some reason, the developers in those decades gravitated toward the word plantation, as though it were aspirational rather than shameful, a word without a history. This one is called Plantation Estates. The whitewash has faded, leaving the bricks a muddy shade of gray. Someone has done a nice job with the landscaping, though, a wild tangle of hot-pink azaleas blotting out the first four letters, so that the sign reads, tation Estates.

Meditation Estates, she thinks.

Invitation.

Rumination.

Adaptation.

Lamentation Estates.

Ha! That’s it. She likes the sound of it: Lamentation Estates.

The subdivisions spread west toward the airport starting in the eighties and on through the nineties and beyond, out across the pecan groves and pastures. The subdivisions were once populated by people who liked their houses clean and new, who thought “previously owned” was a kind of a curse, people who didn’t appreciate the charm of the old homes on Dauphin Street, who didn’t like what was going on downtown. Now the city is booming, and people from all over move to Mobile without a history, not knowing West Mobile from Dauphin Street, picking houses online, surprised by how cheap they are, in comparison, but surprised they’re not even cheaper, because, after all, it’s Alabama. Not that long ago, four hundred grand would get you a mansion in Mobile. Now it just gets you a pretty nice house.

Like the other subdivisions along this flat stretch of green, the luster has worn off of Plantation Estates. The community pool has gone mossy. The tennis courts are unkempt. The houses weren’t built to last, and it shows. People love it here anyway, their own hot, humid slice of the Southern dream. Which is different from the run-of-the-mill American dream, by the way: friendlier, and with more mayonnaise. Besides, who needs a community pool when you have a better one in your backyard?

At the ass end of the seventies, her parents bought ten acres of land where Plantation Estates now stands. Her mother’s get-rich-slow scheme involved pecan trees. She and her sisters spent one sweltering summer on what her mother called the land, plucking pecans out of the dirt where they landed, collecting the hard brown shells in black garbage bags, which they transported in the family station wagon to a nut-processing facility way out I-65. It took about two hours to fill a garbage bag, and she and her sisters each earned $2.50 per bag. She doesn’t know what the real profit margin was — whether her mother pocketed ten cents per bag or ten dollars. She doesn’t know if her mother was subsidizing her and her sisters, or if she and her sisters were subsidizing her mother.

She remembers it as a summer of sunburns, raw fingers, and high hopes. At some point the family abruptly stopped going to the land. She doesn’t know what happened. She doesn’t know if they sold it, or if they lost it — her family seemed to always be losing things in those days — or if they never really had it. Maybe they made a down payment on the land, and that was it. Maybe it was done with a wink and a handshake, and the raw deal was so embarrassing in hindsight that her parents never mentioned it. They were, by all accounts, a sweep-it-under-the-rug kind of family.

How perfect is it that her target lives in that subdivision? Not in the biggest house, but in the second-biggest. On a quadruple lot, no neighbors on either side or behind, because he likes the privacy, and he can afford it. He bought the house when his boys were still small, when the subdivision was still going up.

The five-star hotel downtown is a real five stars. Everything is sparkling clean. The handsome concierge is sporting a rainbow tie, and even though he can’t be a day over thirty, he speaks in the gentrified way of old Southern queens, who owned gay before it was acceptable in these parts, but often married women anyway, for the sake of their genteel mothers. Maybe Mobile has changed, a little.

A woman in a pastel-blue sundress presents her with a mimosa upon arrival, which is nice, then a second mimosa after she finishes the first, which is exceptional.

She holds her breath when the porter takes her bags, but figures it would arouse suspicion if she tries to take them herself. Anyway, she doesn’t want the staff to think she’s not a tipper. It’s always like this: she doesn’t mind tipping, but she hates having someone carry her bags. It makes her feel colonial. When you come from poor, poor is always in your head, and there’s a part of you that imagines your own grandfather carrying some guy’s bags, calling a stranger “sir.” Her grandparents were sharecroppers, traveling from farm to farm in Louisiana and Mississippi, picking whatever needed to be picked, mostly cotton, their pale Irish skin blistering until it peeled. Coming from what was once known, unsympathetically, as “poor white trash,” she’ll never not feel like an impostor at a five-star hotel, although she sure as hell prefers them to the Motel 6.

“Your granddaddy put himself through college washing other boys’ laundry,” her mother has said a thousand times. She thinks of it every time she takes her clothes to the dry cleaner, and it’s her familial guilt that makes her keep her mouth shut every time a silk blouse comes back ruined or a cashmere sweater doesn’t come back at all. Every time she feels like complaining to the dry cleaner, she imagines her grandfather hand-washing laundry in the middle of the night, toiling for the future of the family, and that shuts her right up, even though she never met him because he died before she was born, and anyway, her aunt has always disputed that story about the laundry. Her mother has never been the most reliable narrator of their family’s history.

In her room, after the porter leaves, she takes off her shoes and jeans and lies on the cool white bed in her T-shirt, enjoying the chemical chill of the air conditioner. After a while she gets up and showers. The bathroom smells like gardenias, and not just because of the soap. There are actual gardenias, fresh-cut, arranged in a mason jar. A nice touch — the mason jar — as if someone at the hotel has been watching Chip and Joanna on TV and wants to bring a touch of casual Southern charm to the five-star experience. She has always loved the sickly sweet scent of gardenias, though the opaque, velvet whiteness of the flowers strikes her as funereal.

It’s half past nine in the evening when she gets out of the shower. She slathers on the hotel lotion, dresses in skinny jeans, sneakers, a long, flowy silk blouse, blow-dries her hair, puts on more makeup than usual but less than the mimosa lady. Her husband always joked that “the natural look” took an hour to achieve and looked about as natural as a dog in flip-flops.

She puts the suitcase on the bed and unzips it. She throws aside the piles of socks and T-shirts, opens the zipper compartment, retrieves the Sig Sauer that she picked up at a gun show near the airport — no ID required, no background check, just cash and a big-ass smile. The guy who sold her the gun was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a robed Jesus holding a machine gun, defending the Statue of Liberty from a burka-clad figure wielding a machete. So much for subtlety. She wonders what her mild-mannered, laundry-washing, turn-the-other-cheek-preaching grandfather would think of this passionate new marriage between guns and Our Lord and Savior.

She slides twelve rounds into the magazine, loads the magazine into the Sig Sauer, flips the slide release, and places the weapon into the small of her back.

Time to go to work.

Let’s say you have made a life together. Let’s say this took half a lifetime to accomplish. Let’s say that, after several years of trial and error, you met the one. You quickly disentangled yourself from previous entanglements, because it was obvious: him. You forged a bond. You lived together first to test the waters, though it turned out they didn’t need testing; the water was fine. It was more than fine. You got married, had a child. Let’s say you were blessed with far more than you ever asked for — the good career, the nice house in a small town in California, the vacations to Canada and Oregon and Mexico and, occasionally, Europe. Let’s say the child was challenging, on account of her strong will, but she was happy and healthy, and you knew that stubborn nature would do her good, in the long run. You knew she would always stand up for herself. Also, even as a toddler, she had such a strong sense of justice, a kind of explosively righteous anger when she sensed someone — anyone — was being mistreated.

The husband was hardworking and funny and attentive, great in bed, and if you sometimes fought, you always came back together. There was no one you’d rather grow old with — really. Twenty years later, he was still the one.

Let’s say everything was going according to plan, and better. Let’s say you were happy. Genuinely happy. On a razor’s edge of happiness, holding your breath, thinking, How can this last?

Let’s say it didn’t.

It’s 11:01 p.m. when she pulls into Plantation Estates. She leaves the headlights off, rolls slowly through the azalea-covered entrance. She’s charted it all out on Google Maps. She has photos of the house from Zillow. Not just photos but an actual walk-through, a video. How many times did she mute the Muzak and watch that walk-through in slow motion? The entryway, the living room, the open-plan kitchen, up the stairs to the master bedroom, down the stairs to the basement fitness room.

She deactivated the Nest Cam online before she drove into the neighborhood. She did it from the parking lot of a motel on Government Street, connecting as a guest to the motel’s free Wi-Fi. The motel’s password was easy to figure out — Guest2018.

So was the senator’s. He’s a well-known Bama fan, and he graduated in 1988. Bama88.

It doesn’t matter how much you tell people about the fragility of their “smart homes,” they will continue to choose dumb passwords, passwords they can remember.

His wife isn’t home tonight. His two mostly grown sons are away. It’s so easy to map a person’s home these days, to map a person’s life. So many details are public. The wife is the CEO of a telecommunications firm, and she spends a lot of time giving speeches. This week she’s in Iowa. It’s good for his brand — such a visible, attractive, articulate wife. Well-spoken but soft-spoken, powerful without committing the cardinal sin of losing her feminine charm. A powerhouse in her own right. Why isn’t she the senator, instead of him? At press events and rallies and town halls, someone invariably asks, “When’s your wife gonna run?” and he invariably smiles and says, “The day she runs is the day I hang up my hat. One politician in the family is enough.”

She checked the sons’ Instagram and Facebook profiles before she left the hotel, just to be 100 percent certain. The youngest son just posted drunk pictures from a frat party at Vanderbilt, and the eldest is leading an all-night coding session at his start-up in Greensboro, North Carolina. By noon tomorrow, she knows, the wife and sons will be heading home, converging in a cloud of shock and grief, a thousand unanswered questions. She feels bad for the sons, not necessarily for the wife. The wife helped him get where he is. Half a million dollars and counting from the NRA, the organization that would most keenly approve of her back-channel, unlicensed, untraceable purchase of the Sig Sauer.

She knows from interviews that he exercises in his home gym, at night between ten thirty and eleven thirty, while watching TV. He is regimented in his exercise schedule. He claims to only need six hours of sleep per night, and he says doing the elliptical before bed helps him sleep like a baby. He’s not shy about his state-of-the-art sound system, or his affection for eighties TV. In an interview for a regional magazine last year, the wife said she had the whole thing soundproofed to save their marriage.

The sliding glass door on the back of the house is easy enough to open. He has never given up his pride at being a regular guy, living in a regular neighborhood, foregoing the security detail.

She finds him in the basement. It looks just like it did in the Zillow walk-through, only without the wallpaper. He is on the elliptical, facing a large wall-mounted television, his gray sweatshirt and blue running shorts streaked with sweat. The TV surround-sound is turned up loud, Hawaii Five-O — the original series.

If he were to turn around, he would see a woman who looks like a Girl Scout mom or mabe a new neighbor. She is not a scary person. She waits a moment. Perhaps he will turn around. She wants to tell him why she is doing this. She wants to tell him he is only the first one.

She wants to tell him she is starting at home. She wants to say, This is the only way to make you people listen.

Standing four feet behind him, she is not certain she would find the words. She is not certain she would be so articulate, or that she could even go through with it.

He doesn’t turn around.

Is it even worth going into the details? The phone call from her sister, saying, “I just saw the news and wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

She was in the middle of trying to find colored ink cartridges for the printer, because she needed to print some photos for her daughter. She was sitting on the floor of the hallway, going through the cabinets where she thought the extra ink cartridges would be, if they had any.

“What news?” she had asked, holding her breath, but of course she already knew what kind of news it would be, because it was always that kind of news, once every couple of weeks or so. You just hoped it didn’t happen in your town. You never thought it couldn’t — that kind of arrogant assurance, “it doesn’t happen here,” ended at an elementary school in Connecticut — but you hoped it wouldn’t. You hoped your town would be spared.

“Are Brian and Dottie at home?” her sister had asked carefully.

She could hardly get out the word “no” — wasn’t sure if she said it, or if she just thought it so loudly that her sister heard.

“Where?” she asked.

One beat, two, an eternity. “Burlingame Avenue,” her sister said.

“I have to go.”

She called her husband, but there was no answer. She got in the car, hands shaking. They had gone out to Walgreens. Dottie had a poster due the next day. She was Star of the Week in her fourth grade class. They needed poster board, foam letters, and photographs, which was why she was searching for ink cartridges.

The last thing Dottie said to her was, “We never have anything we need in this house!” The last thing she had said to her daughter was, “I love you.” Because that’s what you say when you’re a parent — no matter how mad your kid is at you, no matter if they won’t say it back. You say “I love you” when they walk out the door, in case.

Goddamn poster board. Goddamn Star of the Week.

That first month, she kept finding herself parked in front of Walgreens, in a haze, sitting there, about to go in to buy poster board. If she could just get the poster board, none of this would happen.

Here’s the thing: you have to start somewhere. A law is a law is a law, until somebody changes it. Death is impersonal until it happens to your family. She knows this, everybody knows this. But she wants people to know it in their guts, the way she does. She wants this man’s wife to feel it when she wakes up in the morning, rolls over in bed, and her husband isn’t there.

She even wants the sons to feel it: the absence of their father.

They won’t know her name tomorrow. It will be years before they know her name, because this is a very long story. Longer than she wants it to be. It starts in Alabama, but who knows where it will end? She’s determined to pull the pesky thread until the whole thing unravels.

Advertising? an old friend asks her on Facebook.

Marketing, she clarifies. Like any decent campaign, this one won’t mean anything until it goes viral. One dead senator is a story, sure, but what she wants is much bigger. A movement. Something so catchy, the public can’t turn away.

For a campaign to really take fire, you can’t let the messenger get in the way. It has to be an invisible machine. No one can know who’s working the levers.

In order to go viral, a campaign must be visual. Some say it’s wrong to show the bodies of the victims. She understands, she gets it. On the other hand, she thinks of Emmett Till, how his grieving mother insisted on a photograph that changed the whole conversation.

Only bodies show the true nature of the violence. Without the bodies, the brutality is whitewashed, a blurred vision with a movie-like sheen. Just another action movie you forget after you leave the theater. All the movies run together; they’re putting out so many these days. Her own family’s death barely made the news. Only seven people died at Walgreens, after all. Twenty-three had died in a mass shooting on a high school campus the week before, fifty-seven at a concert a few months before that. “The incident” at Walgreens hardly even qualified, to the outside world, as a horror.

Four months after the senator’s death, when the mystery remains unsolved, she takes a flight to Paris, a bus to Belgium. At an Internet café in Brussels, she enters the dark web. She posts three photographs of the senator lying on his living room floor in his own blood. There is a hole in the back of his head. This was not a matter of torture, but of expediency: she wanted to make it quick, and did. From the angle of the photo, you can see the exit wound in his forehead. The phrase exit wound sounds tidy; the reality is not.

After he fell she put a hole in his back, another in his right calf, another in his upper arm. Four bullet wounds, just like her nine-year-old daughter. She wanted to show what a body with multiple gunshot wounds looks like. Not under a body bag, but in full color.

Six months before she entered the sliding glass door at Plantation Estates, nine weeks before the murder of her husband and child by a man with a history of mental illness who legally obtained an assault weapon in Nevada and brought it across the state line to California, where such weapons were illegal, the senator had stood on the senate floor and lambasted the parents of dead elementary schoolchildren for “politicizing” a school shooting. He had led the charge against a bill that would prevent people with mental illness from purchasing weapons, and had sponsored a bill making it illegal to publish photographs of the bodies of victims of mass shootings.

There are those who will say that her grief made her crazy, but the fact is, her grief made her rational.

She had expected to feel more. She had expected to hate herself. But as she stands over the senator’s body, gazing at the shredded exit wounds, the bits of brain and tissue scattered across the room, amid the rising stench of it, she does not feel guilt. She feels sadness, but not for the dead man on the floor. She is thinking of her daughter at Walgreens, and of her husband, who would have shielded their daughter’s small body with his own if he’d had the chance. But he’d been in the next aisle over, and the gunman got to him first. He had been shot in the back, running toward their daughter. Only after the fourth bullet struck him did he collapse, and he was hit with three more after that. Then, one aisle over, the gunman found their daughter, crouching on the floor, trying to hide behind a sheet of neon-green poster board. The whole thing was caught on the store’s surveillance camera.

The next day, after the detectives had completed the crime scene investigation and brought her family to the morgue, she insisted on seeing the bodies of her daughter and husband. She was told that she should not see them, but who was she, what kind of wife and what kind of mother, if she could not face the truth of what happened to her husband and child?

The senator had often boasted that he kept more than a dozen guns at home to defend his property and his family. “A gun in every room,” he’d say with a wink. “If the bad guys come to my house,” he had drawled in a widely televised ad for his latest senatorial run, “they’re gonna have a fight on their hands.” In the advertisement, which had been, after all, too common and too cliché to go viral, the polished wife and his polished sons were all holding guns of their own.

All along, she had suspected he might use one of them on her, and this thing might all be over before it really began. A failed marketing campaign, like so many other failed marketing campaigns.

So be it, she had thought. If she died, she died. She does not believe in heaven, and yet... if, somewhere in the ether, some atom of her dead husband and child exists, perhaps she would find them there. Probably not. And yet.

She walks back out through the sliding glass door into the hot, sticky Alabama night. She is wearing plastic gloves, plastic covers over her shoes. She is waiting for lights and sirens, but they don’t come.

She is thinking, This should have been more difficult.

Walking through the yard, she feels the crunch of pecans underfoot. She reaches up and touches the leaves of a tree, rubbing them between her fingers. She remembers the last time she was here, thirtysomething years ago, on the land that was briefly in their family, until suddenly it wasn’t. She and her sisters had competed to see who could gather the most pecans. In her sweat-drenched shirt, she lugged the heavy bag from tree to tree. Later, after the trip down I-65 to the nut-processing plant, they returned home and her mother had made the first and only pecan pie of her childhood.

“How Southern are you?” her husband once said affectionately. “You don’t even like pecan pie.” Her mother’s pie was burned around the edges, a heap of brown on more brown. The outside of the pie, where the pecans had caramelized, was pleasingly crunchy, the burned taste not unpleasant. Inside, the pie was dense and gooey, the sugar so sharp it hurt her teeth. She and her sisters sat hip to hip on the floor in front of the television, drinking cold milk and eating pie.

She had a strange sense of elation but she felt it couldn’t last. She didn’t know what or why. She had that fragile feeling of her life existing on a knife’s edge, as if the universe itself were a razor-sharp blade that could slip at any moment and slice right through her happiness.

Murder at the Grand Hotel by Winston Groom

Point Clear

Gordon V. Pumps whacked at the bamboo in the canebrake as if he were possessed. He saw in each whack of the gleaming machete a death stroke against his nemesis, Horace P. Dumpler, head of the Alabama Department of Revenue, who was trying to put him out of business — or so he was convinced.

Gordon V. Pumps gathered the cane in his arms and threw it into the back of his truck, then headed to his house in Point Clear, not far from the Grand Hotel. The hotel had been a fixture on its great spot of land since 1842, and was considered a queen of Southern resorts.

Gordon had unctuously befriended a desk clerk, knowing firsthand that Dumpler visited the hotel for a week every spring to play golf, at which he was basically no good since he was a hunchback, although he excelled at putting. He played in a foursome with several of his revenue agents. That’s how Gordon had encountered him, a year earlier.

For three decades Gordon had offered the public sightseeing trips into the exotic Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, which was the second largest of its kind in the country, and luxuriated in a diverse plethora of flora and fauna. Gordon had fished and hunted the Delta since he was a boy and knew as much, if not more, about it and its various features as anyone. He had a pleasant, folksy manner of speech and some people went on his trips just to hear him talk. He had a few years back taken courses and received a degree in what amounted to swampololgy from a local university, and he considered what he did more than mere sightseeing — it was educational.

That was where the rub with Dumpler came in. The previous year, while visiting the Grand Hotel, Dumpler had read a piece in the local newspaper on Gordon and his boat, and on a whim had booked a trip. The price was eighty dollars per passenger, and Dumpler had graciously included his revenue agents — cum — golf foursome in the retinue.

Everyone seemed fascinated as Gordon pointed out eagles’ nests, eagles, cormorants, mergansers, herons, pelicans, snipes, wood ducks, ibis, alligators, nutria, wildcats, deer, feral hogs, possums, raccoons, various types of snakes, poisonous and otherwise, and turtles that sunned themselves on logs in the early spring.

The revenue agents asked questions about all this, but Dumpler’s mind seemed to be elsewhere. Then, when Gordon cut off the engine to drift up on a flock of white pelicans, Dumpler broke the silence by proclaiming in a stentorian voice, “You must make a good living doing this.”

The pelicans, of course, flew off.

Gordon was somewhat taken aback. “Not bad,” he replied. “When the weather’s good.”

“Well, let’s see,” said Dumpler, “today with us you’re making $320. If you have an afternoon trip, that’s $640 — I’d say that’s better than just not bad.”

“Like I said, there’s a lot of days when I’m down because of weather.”

Since the pelicans had taken off Gordon cranked up the engine. They’d been out a good two hours so he headed back to the dock. Everybody left seemingly satisfied and Gordon thought no more about these men until Monday morning, bright and early — at seven a.m. in fact — when a woman, wearing a purple pantsuit and a man’s felt hat, showed up at the dock as he was preparing the boat for an eight o’clock trip. She said, “My name is Lucille Bratt and I’m from the Alabama Department of Revenue.”

Gordon smiled politely and replied, “Pleased to meet you.”

Lucille Bratt got right to the point: “Are you paying your Alabama State entertainment tax?”

“The what?”

“The entertainment tax. It was passed by the state legislature six years ago.”

“Never heard of it,” Gordon said.

“Ten percent of every dollar you take in,” said Lucille Bratt.

“Ten percent? What for?”

“You are entertaining people and they are paying for it. It’s taxable.”

“Well, my business is more educational,” Gordon told her. “There are 346 different birds in this Delta, and I can spot every one of them. From time to time.”

“Doesn’t make any difference,” the woman said. “People with these duck-boat tours, and those folks down at the gulf who have the parasailing concession — everybody’s got to pay it.”

“Well,” Gordon said, flustered, “I never heard of it. I’ve never heard any of the fishing guides mention it.”

“They got themselves exempted.”

Gordon stood there flabbergasted. Finally he said, “How did you come to be here telling me all this today?”

“My boss brought it up.”

“And who would that be?”

“Mr. Horace P. Dumpler, commissioner of revenue for the state of Alabama.”

“Dumpler? You mean the guy I took out last Friday?”

“I guess so,” Lucille Bratt responded. “He was the one who told me about you. Said to tell you he had a nice time.” She fumbled in her large handbag. “I’ve got these forms for you to fill out and sign. You’ll have to pay the tax this year and back taxes for every year from the date the act was made into law.”

“I’ve what?” Gordon exclaimed.

“It’s the law,” Lucille muttered resignedly.

On the back steps Gordon had taken out his $400 eight-inch Shun Hiro Honesuki butcher knife and was splitting the cane four ways from the top. He had already cut it into a dozen sixteen-inch pieces. He thought of Dumpler and sneered. When he had gone back six years to when the Alabama Entertainment Act was passed, he’d calculated that it would have amounted to approximately $28,000 in back taxes. Cash. That was on top of his federal income tax, his regular state income tax, sales taxes, boat taxes, car taxes, etc., etc.

He didn’t have it. He would have to sell his boat. It would be the end of his business. He’d hired a lawyer but nothing could be done. The unfairness of the exemption for the fishing guides rankled him as well. He was providing an educational service. He was seventy-four years old, and he was dispensing all the wealth of knowledge he had accumulated up in this Delta since he was a boy of eight and his father had taken him duck hunting.

All his life he’d tried to be a good citizen — well, maybe in his drinking days he’d strayed from the narrow path, but those were long behind him. He’d always paid his taxes, he’d served honorably in the army in Vietnam, in combat. Served his country and now in his twilight years it was treating him thusly!

A murderous scowl twisted Gordon’s face. That low-life Dumpler! he thought. Comes on my trip, accepts my hospitality, then turns on me like a snake. Now Gordon was sitting on the back steps of his house trailer carefully shaving one end of each of the bamboo pieces. It was large, heavy bamboo, similar to the kind they had encountered in Vietnam. That was what had given him the idea — a punji stake trap for that scumbag Dumpler.

On the golf course no less. It was an intricate plot but rewarding in Gordon’s mind. He’d seen a number of punji pits in Vietnam — about three feet square and three feet deep, camouflaged. He could dig that in a night. He would do it about twenty yards from the eleventh hole on the Lakewood course, one of two eighteen-hole courses that the hotel maintained.

The plan was so ingenious that it gave Gordon a warm feeling inside, a premature sense of accomplishment. Number eleven was a short hole and there was a bit of swamp alongside the fairway in which he could hide and watch both the tee and the lie of the ball. His dog Lesly, perhaps the best bird dog in the South (everybody said that about their quail dogs), was intricately involved.

Having shaved each of the punji stakes to a point as fine or finer than the $400 Shun Hiro Honesuki knife, he gathered the pieces and placed them in a preheated 375-degree oven where they would bake all night. In the morning he would plunge them into a bucket of ice water, and when they had dried they would be as razor sharp and strong as the tempered steel in the Shun Hiro. The Viet Cong dug punji pits on trails everywhere Americans patrolled and not a few soldiers were maimed and even died from their wounds. The bamboo stakes were so strong they would actually go through the soles of leather boots until the army wised up and put metal plates in the soles, but that didn’t make walking patrol any easier. The worst thing was that the Viet Cong smeared the tips of the stakes with human feces to create horrible and dangerous infections. That would be the finishing touch, Gordon thought, knowing full well where he would obtain the feces for that rat Horace Dumpler. There would be no steel plates in boots here. Only flimsy golf shoes. Gordon rubbed his hands.

While the stakes were baking in the oven, Gordon got into his truck with a shovel and drove to the Lakewood golf course of the Grand Hotel, and trudged to the eleventh hole, Dogwood run, now bathed in the light of a silver three-quarter April moon. He’d already sighted in the spot for his pit and had brought a small wheelbarrow with him to dispose of the excess dirt.

Lesly’s role had been well rehearsed. He would hide in the swamp with Gordon until Horace Dumpler and his companions appeared on the eleventh tee. It was a fairly long way off but Gordon would be able to identify Dumpler because as a hunchback he never used a driver or even irons — he always used his putter, even to tee off. That might seem ridiculous but he’d perfected long putts up to fifty yards, and on a short hole he could be on the green in three shots; once there, he was deadly at the cup. Gordon had watched him every day since he’d arrived. At the cup, Horace Dumpler cleaned up.

The trick was to watch and make sure Dumpler was up to drive — or putt, or whatever it was he did — and then, when the ball got down close to the green (and the punji pit), it was Lesly’s time to go into action. On Gordon’s signal he would rush out and grab the ball and deposit it just on the far side of the punji pit, so that Dumpler would have to address his shot by standing on the pit — then, voilà! For the time being Gordon had put a piece of plywood over the hole, covered with leaves to disguise it, but as Dumpler’s foursome neared, he would replace it with a light screen, camouflaged with leaves, which would immediately collapse when stood upon.

He could picture Dumpler writhing in agony when he fell into the pit, one or more of the deadly stakes driven into his feet and legs. Infection would begin immediately. Death, hopefully, would follow.

The first of the foursome teed up his ball. He drove a shot that landed square in the fairway, about forty yards from the pit. Gordon held Lesly back by his collar and he struggled to break free.

The others took their turns and then Dumpler addressed the ball with his putter. His first putt was straight down the middle of the fairway, but about a hundred yards distant. Dumpler, in his peculiar crouch, ambled down from the green toward his ball. Apparently it was the practice of the others to let their boss take more shots out of turn in order to catch up.

Dumpler hit his putt, which rolled to a stop within ten yards of the green and about fifteen yards from the punji pit. Gordon released Lesly’s collar and he shot out from the edge of the swamp and scooped up Dumpler’s ball with one smooth motion, turned, and trotted over to the lip of the pit and dropped it on the ground.

It all happened so fast that no one in Dumpler’s party seemed to notice.

That bastard, Gordon thought. Probably has these clowns playing with him on taxpayer money — hundred-dollar green fee — five times a week, plus meals, drinks, rooms, tips. Probably costing the taxpayers five grand. Maybe more. Bastard!

Dumpler approached his ball with a frown on his face. The others were standing around at the edges of the green, waiting. Gordon felt his throat tighten.

Dumpler had carried his putter over his shoulder but now swung it down as he reached the ball. He stood just beyond the leafy spot and scratched his ass, looking from the ball to the green. It seemed to Gordon that he could have used a 9-iron here, even with his hunchback crouch, but he kept to the putter.

Dumpler took a step forward onto the top of the pit. As his foot was still in the air, Gordon caught his breath and grimaced. The foot hit the pit. Nothing happened. The other foot stood on the pit as well, and Dumpler addressed the ball.

“Scheisse!” Gordon hissed, and slapped his forehead. He had forgotten to remove the plywood and insert the screen. Dumpler made his putt, which rolled right up the slope and onto the green. He then hunched over the ball and knocked it right into the cup. The others began to nod and clap. Dumpler smiled. The golfing party moved on.

Gordon sat at his kitchen table, steaming. It had been one of the dumbest mistakes he’d ever made, but he was determined to make up for it.

Later that afternoon he sidled up to one of the bellmen at the Grand Hotel and inquired what room Mr. Horace Dumpler was in. “I have a gift for him,” Gordon told the man nicely.

All through the cocktail hour and dinner Gordon secretly watched the Dumpler party. After dinner (in the most expensive restaurant in the hotel — steaks and champagne all around) they repaired to Bucky’s Birdcage Lounge for nightcaps. The men sat at the bar talking to several women, one of whom was, of all things, a dwarf, apparently on holiday. Gordon shook his head. He watched as long as he could, then snuck out and got his old golf bag, which he had left with the parking valet. Inside was a large, heavy, finely sharpened ax, a length of rope, an eyebolt, a small collapsible ladder, a measuring stick, a stud detector, a metal rod, a portable drill, and some light string.

He hid in the bushes waiting for Dumpler and his friends to go by; it was close to midnight when he heard them coming. It was too dark to see but they were headed back to their building, which was on the harbor where the boats were docked. Fourth floor. They had adjoining rooms.

Gordon gave it an hour and then went into action. He entered the building in the parking garage and took the elevator to the fourth floor. When he got to Dumpler’s room he put his ear to the door. Dead to the world inside.

He worked quickly, taking out the ladder, the drill, and the eyebolt. In the ceiling Gordon made a small hole in a stud that was, fortuitously, directly in line with Dumpler’s door. He used the metal rod to screw the eyebolt into the wood.

Bastard! he thought. Probably wasted a thousand bucks more of the taxpayers’ money tonight, and he wants to put me, an honest working man, out of business.

Gordon used the measuring stick to cut the rope so that it would put the ax exactly five feet and four inches high in the doorway. That’s how tall he figured Dumpler was. He tied the rope securely around the end of the ax handle and ran the rope through the eyebolt, winching the ax tightly against the ceiling; then he affixed the light string to the end of the rope and put the ladder and the drill away.

Gently, on tiptoes, Gordon tied the end of the string to the doorknob of Dumpler’s room. He moved the golf bag around a corner, then marched up to Dumpler’s door and banged on it five times with his fist. In a crack beneath the door he could see a light come on, and then he heard a voice complain.

Gordon stepped back into the shadows to watch the fun. The door opened and, as planned, that broke the string. This set the ax free in a huge swing toward the center of the door, and whoever stood there — namely Horace P. Dumpler — would get the blade right in the center of his face.

There was a muffled sound of locks being turned and then the door sprang open. Simultaneously the heavy ax, its razor-honed blade gleaming in the hallway ceiling lights, swung down toward the door. Gordon waited intently for the grisly thud.

But this did not happen. Instead the ax swung back, and then back and forth several times, before dangling to a rest in the middle of the hallway beneath the eyebolt. Puzzled, Gordon stepped out of the shadows, and there in the doorway was — the dwarf! Dumpler had apparently picked her up in the bar and brought her back to his room! The ax had swung a good foot and a half above her head.

Scheisse! Gordon thought. How could I have known?

Gordon followed Dumpler all that day and the next, trying to find an angle. He noted that at precisely five p.m. Dumpler visited the indoor swimming pool. He liked to dive, it turned out, and was fond of doing flips on the diving board. There was no lifeguard and few other people visited that particular pool, as there were several outdoor heated pools they could go to.

On the third day Gordon waited for Dumpler, hiding in some plants by the indoor pool. The revenue chief arrived exactly on time. The dwarf was with him — that could be a snag. She sat down in one of the lounge chairs beside the pool but Dumpler took off his robe to reveal only a bathing suit. His hump gleamed like a polished dromedary’s dome in the ceiling lights.

Gordon slipped out into the hall and went to the reception desk. “Could you page a Mr. Horace Dumpler?” he asked innocently. The receptionist obliged, and Gordon sidled back toward the hallway where he saw Dumpler striding importantly through the doors leading to the reception desk.

They passed quickly in the hall; Gordon deliberately stared at the wall hoping Dumpler wouldn’t recognize him. He didn’t, though Dumpler did find something vaguely familiar about the encounter.

Gordon walked quickly into the pool area and stripped off his shoes, pants, and shirt. Underneath he had on a bathing suit. He went straight to the diving board clutching in his hand a bottle of Johnson’s baby oil. He stepped out on the diving board and there squeezed the contents as discreetly as possible onto the very end of the plank. Then he bounced once, held his nose, and went feetfirst into the warm, heated water.

This ought to break his crooked neck, Gordon thought as he got out of the pool. Then he went over and engaged the dwarf in conversation.

Dumpler returned looking puzzled, muttering something about strange things happening in the hotel. Seeing that the dwarf was engaged in conversation, he went immediately to the deep end of the pool, stepped up, and addressed the diving board. Measuring distance like a football placekicker, Dumpler backed all the way up and then ran forward.

When he reached the end of the board, he hit the baby oil and took off in the air, sort of like Rocket Man. But instead of doing a half flip as Gordon had envisioned, landing on his head on the springing board, Dumpler did a complete flip and a half, landing on his ass on the end of the board, which then propelled him — sproing! — straight up in the air once more for two additional flips before he hit the water in a kind of modified swan dive.

Both Gordon and the dwarf, whose name was Lorraine, watched this spectacle speechlessly. Dumpler’s head soon emerged from the water and he cried out, “By God! Did you see that!”

Lorraine began to clap and shout. Dumpler staggered up the steps and out of the pool, into the waiting arms of his lover. They both jumped for joy.

“I was twenty years in the circus and I ain’t never seen anything to match it!” Lorraine exclaimed.

Dumpler, noticing Gordon, said, “Say, haven’t I seen you someplace before?”

Gordon stood for a moment twisting his hands. “Well, yes, you have. I have the boat that takes people up in the Delta.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” Dumpler extended his hand to Gordon, who shook it lightly. “Say, I’d like to take that trip again. I’m here till the end of the week. How about it?”

“Well...” Gordon replied. He was thinking, thinking, thinking...

“My golf buddies have to go back on Friday... so it would just be me. I hope that’s all right.”

“Ah, yes, yes, certainly,” Gordon told him.

“You know what I liked about that last time?” Dumpler enthused. “The alligators. I liked the way they come out in the springtime — especially that big fellow. How big did you say he was?”

“Seventeen feet. Maybe a little longer. Nobody’s been exactly able to measure him.”

“My, my,” said Dumpler, “a man-eater. My, my.”

“Yes,” Gordon responded, serenely now. “Just meet me at the dock at eight a.m — or should we make it nine?”

“Eight,” Dumpler said. “That last trip — don’t know when I’ve enjoyed myself more! Just you and me!”

“Yes,” Gordon smiled. “Just you and me...”

Sweet Baby by Ace Atkins

Gu-Win

She’d been so damn cute once, not even six years old, with big false eyelashes and a curly blond wig. People would travel for thousands of miles just to look at her on that shopping mall tour of ’08, get her to autograph her signature porcelain doll, or hear her sing her hit YouTube song, “Sweet, Sweet Baby.” Onstage, they’d dress her up as a rodeo chick, a genie, a pirate, and even a Vegas showgirl. Feather headdress, tall plastic heels, fishnet stockings, and attitude to spare. Her momma took a lot of heat for the showgirl costume, thousands of letters and e-mails to the cable channel asking why in the world a mother would want her child to look like a gosh-darn streetwalker. But her mother, Big Nadine, would look right in that camera, a Virginia Slim tucked between her fingers, nails long and red as blood, and say there wasn’t nothing wrong with the costume, only with twisted, sick minds.

“Did it all start with pageants?” the man asked. He drove the black van in shadow, a hulking shape over the wheel speeding east along Corridor X toward Birmingham. Speaking with no accent, sounding like some kind of Yankee.

“At first,” Cassie Lyn said. “After I won runner-up in Little Miss Lower Alabama, that’s when I got noticed by Rick. He was the talent scout up in Birmingham. Mainly he worked with rodeo dogs and race car drivers. But he told Momma he saw something in me. They took a video at that pageant in Wetumpka and that’s how I got on that show.”

“You sure looked good on TV,” the man said, following the highway blasted straight through hills of rock and stone, winding its way through the darkness from her hometown of Gu-Win. “You were so photogenic. So sassy. Such a cute little mouth on you. Blue eyes as big as marbles.”

“Is that why you come for me?” she said. “Now I’m nearly eighteen.”

The man didn’t answer as they shot past a Love’s Travel Stop and Cracker Barrel settled down in a valley below the interstate, Cassie Lyn hungry as hell, not eating since her evening shift at the video trailer. Cassie Lyn TV. She wondered if he’d feed her before he got to wherever it was they were going. He was a white man, maybe thirty or forty, with thin black hair and a mustache. He wore thick glasses and one of those shiny black windbreakers her granddaddy still wore. Members Only. The man didn’t give his name. And she didn’t ask.

She turned around toward the backseat of his car and saw a large section of rope, zip ties, and some silver duct tape. A shiny revolver, probably just a.22, showed from his jacket pocket.

“You didn’t need that gun.”

“Would you have come anyway?”

“I would’ve hopped in the car with the devil himself,” she said. “To get free of that place. Is that who you are? Mr. Satan himself come up to Alabama to find Miss Cassie Lyn, former pageant baby all growed up?”

The man didn’t answer, a long strange silence between them as they passed Cherry Road, and headed onto I-65 South that ran from Birmingham down to Mobile. His face flickering in and out of darkness from the tall lights along the guardrail.

“I wanted to hear you sing,” he said. “It’s sad you don’t sing anymore, Cassie Lyn. It makes me so very sad.”

“What do you want me to sing?”

“Come on,” he said. “You know. Everybody on this planet knows your song.”

“‘Lady Marmalade,’” she said. “Shaking my little tail in that French maid outfit? Like when I was a kid, on the show.”

“Exactly like the show. I even brought you that very same outfit. I bought it on eBay for a hundred dollars.”

“That all you want from me?” she said. “For me to shake my tail? Or are you wanting a whole lot more?”

“I don’t know. I guess I want everything.”

Cassie Lyn could never remember a time she wasn’t famous. Big Nadine said she’d been born wanting to perform, strutting right out of the womb and giving a big dazzling smile to the doctor. Ta-da, I’m here, covered in placenta and blood. When she was an infant, her mother sewed custom outfits for her, satin and rhinestones, denim and sequins, little cowboy hats, berets, and big straw sun hats. She learned to dance at ten months, got her ears pierced before she was one. Cassie Lyn not recalling what life was like without blush and lipstick. Big Nadine saying that God had given her a gift, a pinkish light shining across the sky the night she was born, never mentioning her no-count daddy who she’d only met twice. Their life nothing but pageants, from Baby Miss to Petite Miss all the way up to Little Miss. The plan — to hear Big Nadine tell it as they crisscrossed Alabama from one high school gym, church rec center, or livestock arena to the next — was work your way up to the big show. Miss Alabama. Miss America. Or Miss USA if that didn’t work out. On the cable show, Cassie Lyn got famous for saying she was all about the money. Money, honey. Where my money at, Big Daddy? Twitching that little behind and shaking her index finger.

Those were the good times, the high times, when she and Big Nadine split their time between Gu-Win and their condo in Orlando, Florida, shooting their reality show. Her new stepdaddy with the boat in Tampa. The money had been good, real good, almost enough to make her forget what it had been like when her momma didn’t have a car that would run or having to sleep in some crummy old trailer. They went to Universal Studios and Disney World for free. Pictures with Minnie and Goofy. A princess makeover at Cinderella’s castle.

Momma said she was proud. So very proud.

Folks comped them rooms at hotels in Las Vegas and over in Branson, Missouri, her big blue-eyed face with big red lips on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and her own line of gentle hand soaps. Momma said the design had been inspired by something called the Shroud of Turin.

But then there was that breakdown at Legoland, caught on a thousand different iPhones for the whole world to see. Cassie Lyn taking her little fists to that sculpture made in her image, the damn thing fat and blocky and seeming to mock her — index finger raised. Big Nadine said that’s what killed them. And that woman never forgot, telling Cassie Lyn that was the reason things turned out the way they did, how their whole damn life crumbled and turned to Shit City, making them both broke and unimportant and worse yet, a sideshow treasure back in Gu-Win. Snickers behind their back at the Piggly Wiggly. Folks wanting to lay hands on them at the Shell station, praying for their future. More little kids — cuter and brighter, shaking their asses even harder at Big Nadine’s classes at the Baptist church and finally that metal prison where they kept all those cameras. Cassie Lyn TV.

Watching “Sweet, Sweet Baby” twenty-four hours a day on the Internet... Rick, the agent’s idea. It had something, a revenue stream is what Rick called it. Kept them fed and clothed. But Cassie Lyn knew that wasn’t even a proper way to keep a dog.

She worked that goddamn trailer day and night, nothing to do but eat ice cream, stare at those six eyes watching her everywhere but the toilet, while she watched real TV or exercised in her underwear. All you had to do was sit there and take requests from subscribers. A man once offered her a thousand dollars to eat a banana real slow. Most wanted her to get nekkid but that wasn’t part of the deal. Her mother called Cassie Lyn TV wholesome online entertainment. The video trailer was just another step in reality entertainment is what Rick said. This would be just a stepping stone back to the cable network.

But when that man, BIGDADDY88, offered her a way to escape, she didn’t give it a second thought. How the hell could it be worse?

“What are you thinking about?” the man asked.

“That trailer,” she said. “Cassie Lyn TV. Big Nadine never did tell me how much money we made.”

“It was a subscription service,” he said, heading toward the bright lights of Birmingham. Cassie Lyn hoping she was getting kidnapped back to Florida. Florida sure would be something. Palm trees, sand, warm breezes across her bare legs. “It cost nineteen dollars for the first month and then thirty-five after that. If you paid up front for a year, it was an even two hundred. That was really the best deal.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Well, that didn’t include the tokens,” he said. “You probably made most of your money on token sales.”

“I know all about the tokens. They make a jingle sound every time they slip into the virtual piggy bank.”

The van smelled like hamburgers, burned meat, and onions. There were fast-food wrappers and empty cups down at Cassie Lyn’s feet. The man fumbled with the radio, finding a local Christian contemporary station playing that song “Only Jesus” by the Casting Crowns. Big Nadine sure loved their music, saying she’d first heard them on Mike Huckabee’s radio show, being real impressed they’d been one of the only American bands to perform in North Korea.

“You can make real good money on the Internet,” Cassie Lyn said. “I just wish I knew how much. Big Nadine told me that I didn’t need to mess with all that business.”

“What your mother did to you wasn’t right.”

“Momma says she did her best.”

“She used you,” he said. “You should be a star on the Disney Channel right now like that Selena Gomez or Demi Lovato. That tall pasty girl from Bunk’d, Peyton List? You’re a hundred times prettier than that skinny Peyton List.”

“That was the plan.”

“What happened?” the man asked. “How could Big Nadine screw it up so bad?”

“Guess you didn’t see what happened at Legoland?”

The man snorted, the engine revving them up past seventy miles per hour, passing signs advertising VISIT MOBILE, “America’s First Mardi Gras” and billboards proclaiming HELL IS REAL, the front of the van all black and slick, reflecting light along the darkened interstate. “That’s not what did it,” he said. “What happened is your stupid mother devalued the Cassie Lyn brand. She took it too far, too fast. It didn’t bother me when they first started selling your dolls on QVC, but when y’all did the skin-care line, shampoo, and costume jewelry, it made me sick. Even before the spinoff show and the meltdown, you’d already become overexposed.”

“Overexposed?” she said. “That’s why we went back home.”

“To Guin.”

“We live in Gu-Win.”

“That’s not what the sign said.”

“Gu-Win is between Guin and Winfield,” she said. “Wasn’t a bad little town before they built the interstate and made us a drive-by community. We’ve still got a Walmart and a drive-in movie theater called the Blue Moon. My momma ran a vegetable stand right off the highway for nearly fifty years selling tomatoes, corn, cantaloupes, and hot-boiled peanuts. Fifty years, can you imagine?”

“I hate to say it, but your mother treats you like a trained monkey. I think she went back home because she couldn’t cut it. Back to a forsaken state like Alabama? Does Big Nadine drink? She looks like a drinker, with her face all big and pink. Someone who’d down three or four lemondrop martinis a night.”

“Momma’s a Baptist,” Cassie Lyn said, her little hands folded in her lap, bubblegum nail polish starting to chip. “Sometimes she’ll slip and have one margarita at Los Amigos over in Hamilton. We like that place lots better than La Casa Fiesta. Big Nadine says they make the best taco salad in the whole state.”

The man didn’t answer, just drove with his mouth shut. Cassie Lyn grew quiet too, as they took a wide turn on the overpass right through Birmingham, headed toward the tall hills, and she looked over the city to see if she could spot the Vulcan statue. If the eyes were red, that would tell Cassie Lyn something, a sign from Jesus that she needed to go ahead with what she’d planned. She knew what she was doing walking out of that trailer with her pink backpack slung across her shoulder, seeing that black van parked out by the roadside. Everything she owned in the world in the backpack: two changes of clothes, her special teddy bear Reuben, sixty-two dollars, and her MacBook Pro.

“Can I at least ask your name?”

The man didn’t answer.

“Can I call you Daryl?” she said.

“Why?”

“’Cause first minute I laid eyes on you, when you hopped out of that van, I said to myself, That looks like a Daryl. Also, you had what Momma called crazy eyes. I could see it when you took off your sunglasses, playing that loud music from your car stereo. What was that song anyway?”

“‘I Want to Know What Love Is.’”

“That some kind of praise music?”

“It’s Foreigner.”

“Hmm,” said Cassie Lyn. “Sounded like they were speaking English to me.”

The man reached down, knocked an old tape into the radio, the praise music going away, a heavy guitar chord vibrating the insides of the car. “How about this?” he said. “Journey. You like to rock, sweet baby? I’ll play you some real music from back in my day.”

“Where the hell we goin’, Daryl?”

“I can’t say.”

“Why not?”

“You might run off.”

“Run off?” Cassie Lyn said. “Why on earth would I do that? This is the best goddamn day of my life.”

“Me kidnapping you?”

“Yes sir,” she said. “But you better stop off for a six-pack and Marlboros soon. I don’t travel on no fumes.”

“Don’t you see what I brought?” Daryl said, wiping his eyes, nearly in tears. “Look in the back. I brought duct tape for your pretty little mouth. Ropes to bind your sweet, delicate limbs. And you know what? If you’d fought me, I even brought a gun. Doesn’t that scare you? Doesn’t that just chill you down to the bone, thinking on what I might do?”

“There’s an exit coming up,” she said. “I think they got a Stuckey’s. You mind getting me a pecan log? Sweet baby’s getting hungry.”

PICTURE UP, B ROLL OF TODDLER CONTESTANTS TAKE THE STAGE... BIG SMILES. SPARKLY DRESSES. BLING PERSONIFIED.

CUT TO:

INT: EMBASSY SUITES, NASHVILLE.

Big Nadine rushes around the motel room in a frenzy. Her assistant, Rosalita, runs into the bathroom and closes the door to the camera crew, sobbing.

BIG NADINE: The hair didn’t curl, we was running late on time, my dumb-ass boyfriend didn’t find the right ho-tel. We are standing around at the lobby, waiting for him to show up with Cassie Lyn’s wardrobe. I don’t think any of this could go anywhere. This is the big time. This isn’t just any competition. This is gosh-darn Little Miss Sassy Nashville. This is the damn Daytona 500 and the Super Bowl rolled into one. My people have messed up. And Cassie Lyn knows it. Look at her in tears, that little girl. I hate to disappoint her. This is all about her. All about her.

Close: Cassie Lyn in full makeup and pajamas, playing with an iPhone, looking up at Bugs Bunny on the motel television.

BIG NADINE: If that little girl ain’t happy, Momma ain’t happy. I think we better just pull this thing. Stop it. I can’t put my little girl onstage like this. It just tears the guts out of me to send her on not pampered and prepared. How in the world could Rosalita be so almighty stupid as to mess up that wig? There ain’t nothing to it. It’s just some basic bouncy curls, made stiff with rollers and some hair spray. I swear to Jesus Christ Himself that woman didn’t have but one job to do. I’m gonna send her on back with my boyfriend. That dumb bastard got himself drunk last night at an Applebee’s in Chattanooga calling me like I’m supposed to come get him and make things right. He has all Cassie Lyn’s things. How damn hard is that to remember?

INT: EMBASSY SUITES LOBBY.

Cassie Lyn, six, in a blue-velvet tracksuit, hair and makeup done, as they wait for a ride to the convention center.

INTERVIEWER: Are you nervous?

CASSIE LYN: Nope.

INTERVIEWER: Do you hope you’ll win?

CASSIE LYN: I guess so. I hadn’t really given it much thought. I’m really hungry. After the competition, Momma says she’ll buy me some Popeyes fried chicken. I haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday. My stomach is making weird sounds like it’s mad at me.

INT: HOTEL VAN — DAY.

Big Nadine stares out the window, hand touching her temple, crying.

BIG NADINE: Well, it’s all about her and for her. If Cassie Lyn ain’t happy, I’m not happy. This is all about her. All about her.

Daryl looked tired, rolling into the Stuckey’s off the Hope Hull exit at nearly three o’clock in the morning, only to see it was closed down for the night. Cassie Lyn turned to him, giving him that real pouty look with her bottom lip poked out. “Sure had my heart set on a pecan log, Big Daddy.”

“Pecan log?” Daryl said. “I thought you had to pee-pee. Damn it. Just get on back in the van and we’ll go across to that Love’s. I need to get some gas anyway.”

“Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“You said somewhere real special and real warm,” she said. “Is that true?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you gonna kill me?”

Daryl didn’t answer, stroking his mustache, knocking the black van back in gear, driving slow and careful, blinker flashing to make a right turn. His face still half-covered in shadow.

“You sure are funny,” she said, trying to brighten the mood. “Where is that little outfit, anyway?”

“The French maid?”

“Yes sir,” she said. “You’ve got the song? ‘Lady Marmalade’?”

“I have the Moulin Rouge soundtrack on cassette,” he said. “I taped it off HBO last year. Between us, I think you outdid Pink and Lil’ Kim. And that Christina Aguilera. They don’t have a thing on sassy little Miss Cassie Lyn.”

“I’m not so little anymore,” she said. “My ass is as big as a steer.”

“Don’t you say that,” he shot back, pounding the wheel. “Don’t you ever say that. Those people making comments online don’t have a soul. You’re as pretty as you’ve always been. Who am I to complain about a few extra pounds? I’m fat and bald. I lost my job selling TVs at Sears. My good years left the station about fifteen years ago. You look great, sweet baby. You look so damn great.”

“Do you love me?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “What do you think this story is all about?”

It was morning by the time they got to Gulf Shores, Daryl nearly nodding off at the wheel as he pulled into the Red Roof Inn parking lot. Cassie Lyn finishing up her third warm beer, eating a package of little donuts from the gas station, powdered sugar scattered across her little chunky legs. Looked to be nothing around them but miniature golf centers and water parks. Across the street, she saw a sign for a place called The Track that offered go-cart racing and an arcade for the kiddos.

“Don’t you even think about running.”

“How many times I got to tell you, Daryl? I’m not scared. Not one damn bit. I’m excited. Excited about where we’re going. Excited about our future together.”

“Not even a little bit scared?” Daryl said. “You do know I’m going to have to tie you to the bed while I get some sleep. And if you try to run or scream, I’ll have to put that duct tape across your pretty little mouth. You’ll have to take in all your air from that pert little nose.”

“I won’t run,” she said. “I won’t scream. But if you tie me up and tape up my mouth, just how am I gonna sing ‘Lady Marmalade’ for you?”

Daryl shifted behind the wheel, like his insides had suddenly seized up, pain somewhere deep in his tight blue jeans. In the early morning light, she noticed his thick glasses were dirty and smudged. White powdered sugar on his mustache as he looked out at the motel lobby, thinking on the best way to play things.

“You’d do that for me?” he said. “Why would you do that?”

“Because you gave me a ride,” she said. “You’re my hero.”

“I’m not gonna drop you off like some kind of hitchhiker, Cassie Lyn. You’re coming back with me to my special home. I spent the last two months getting the basement all nice and ready for you.”

“Like a pet,” she said, smiling, twinkle in her eye. “Right?”

“Don’t say that. Don’t you ever say that. You’re not a pet. You’re my special princess. My sweet, sweet baby. My cutie patootie.”

“Go get us the key, Daryl,” Cassie Lyn said, touching his bony knee under the wheel. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Cassie Lyn watched Daryl run across the parking lot toward the office, reaching down and unzipping her backpack. The laptop was charged and ready, the gun strapped to her meaty little thigh. In the early morning dawn, Cassie Lyn let down the passenger window and breathed in that Gulf Coast air, smelling just like summertime. Ah.

Wouldn’t be long now.

The French maid outfit was a little snug, Daryl obviously not aware Cassie Lyn had put on ten more pounds over the holidays. There had been boxes of holiday cookies, Conecuh sausage, and dozens of little candy canes she sucked on in that elf costume. Every day was so damn boring in that little airless trailer, nothing to do but watch television, mostly the Hallmark Channel, and flip through trashy magazines Big Nadine bought for her at the Piggly Wiggly. National Enquirer, US Weekly, Cosmopolitan, and when she really felt generous, those big deluxe magazines that cost fourteen dollars about Jesus or the Civil War. Since Cassie Lyn had dropped out of school at eleven, Big Nadine figured buying her reading material was part of her education.

She stared at herself in the mirror, smudging on the eye shadow and combing through her lashes with mascara. She’d normally have stuck on some falsies, added some blue or pink extensions into her hair. But Daryl, or whatever his name was, would have barely noticed. The man’s hand shaking as he lowered himself into a chair by the window of the Red Roof Inn, Cassie Lyn telling him to be patient, she’d be right back.

Cassie Lyn had set up her MacBook on the dresser, telling Daryl that she needed it to play her signature song. Daryl had offered to play his scratchy tape from his busted-ass boom box, but Cassie Lyn said it’d be more special, more like the show, if she handled it herself. She’d set the screen with a nice view of the room and then left to get ready.

“My God,” he said. “You’ve grown up. You’re all grown up.”

“You don’t like that?”

“No,” Daryl said. “It’s just different.”

“Good different or bad different?”

“You’ve gotten boobies,” he said. “Big fat boobies.”

“Sit on the bed, Daryl, and shut your mouth.”

Daryl adjusted the thick dirty glasses on his face and did as he was told. The carpet was blue, the bedspread was gold and stained. Cassie Lyn reached for the coils of rope and threaded it through the headboard. She could hear the trucks and cars zooming past on the highway, morning light shining through the curtains, the yells and screams from the kids at the go-cart track. She bound his wrists nice and tight like she’d learned from Big Nadine’s third husband, the sailboat captain. Just as Daryl was about to protest, she ripped off a nice thick strip of duct tape and covered his mouth. “Sit tight,” she said.

She removed his dirty glasses, his eyes looking like they were going to pop from his head. Daryl just getting the idea.

She walked over to the dresser, pressing the space bar to illuminate the screen. Cassie Lyn TV was live and streaming. She already had 562 folks watching, more following every second. When she got to two thousand, she’d start taking requests.

Cassie Lyn pressed play on iTunes and “Lady Marmalade” started pumping from the tiny speakers, sounding tinny and hollow as she began to shake, bend over, and smack her butt. Looking between her legs, she could see more and more and more followers coming online. Request after request before even asking.

When she’d realized that BIGDADDY88 was finally coming for her, she’d changed the settings on the Cassie Lyn site, sending money into her own personal account, something she’d had for three years but Big Nadine never knew about.

Cassie Lyn set her foot at the edge of the dresser and unstrapped the gun from her chunky little leg.

Daryl’s eyes got real big as she posed in front of the camera, Daryl being able to see himself as clear as a reflection in the mirror. Cassie Lyn brought the little barrel up to her lips and blew on it as if it were hot. More and more and more requests. More cutesy poses. Shoot him! Kill him! Right in the nuts! People online were like this. So damn bloodthirsty behind the keyboard. They wanted to see some real fun, reality-based action.

Cassie Lyn bent over the keyboard and simply typed: HOW MUCH?

Before even pressing send, TOKYOJOE09 presented an offer even larger than she’d imagined. It was what Cassie Lyn had decided was her “getting with the program” amount.

“So sorry, Daryl,” she said, aiming the pistol at him strapped to the bed. “Ain’t nothing personal about it.”

He was screaming down deep behind the tape, thrashing in the bed from side to side. Snot coming out of his nose. Cassie Lyn aimed the pistol, turning back for a moment to see how high her tokens had gone. Spinning and spinning, coins pinging and pinging that piggy bank.

It was enough. It would get her far. She turned back to Daryl with a big ol’ pageant smile. Make ’em love you!

“It was never about you, sweet baby,” she said. “It’s all about the money, honey. Good night, Big Daddy.”

The man closed his eyes and began to weep.