Wild Orchids Part 14

He was looking at me in triumph for having remembered this, but I still couldn't move. "So you think the townspeople are saying that a woman, some tourist maybe, was accidently killed, and, later, the local kids made up a devil story around the accident?"

"I think so," Ford said. "That would explain why the story is in no books about local legends. Maybe no one could verify it."

He was obviously trying to calm me down. Or maybe he was trying to make himself believe that there'd never been a murder. "That makes sense,"

I said and saw him smile a bit. What an ego he had! He thought he could say something totally stupid and I'd believe him. "I'm sure no one has ever written a word that isn't true. And I'm sure that if some writer heard a whopping good tale about the townspeople getting together and crus.h.i.+ng some woman because they believed she loved the devil, that the writer would never tell such a story unless he could 'verify' it."

Ford gave a little one-sided smile. "Okay, you win. We writers do tend to stretch the truth. Whatever, I do think this town is keeping one very big secret. And I think Miss Essie Lee has been trying to distract me with the Edward and Harriet story."

"But who cares about love when there's horror, right? Is the best-selling writer in the world a romance writer? Or does he write about horror?"

After a few moments of silence, Ford spoke. "So what do we do now?" he asked softly. "I thought this was a hundred-year-old devil story, but I think it may be a twenty-some-year-old murder story that several people in this town know about. In fact, I'm beginning to think that someone-or more than one-may have killed a woman and the murder was hushed up."

"And the murderers went unpunished," I said, holding on to my legs tighter.

"Which means that he, she, or they are probably walking around free- and would probably kill again to keep from being found out."

I took a deep breath at that. I'd slipped out of my shoes so I concentrated on my bare toes. Anything rather than think seriously about what he was saying.

"Jackie," he said softly, making me look up at him. "Before we came here, I searched fairly thoroughly for any mention of this story anywhere, and I found nothing. The only place the full story seems to exist is in your head.

When you add the detail you know to the way your father absconded with you..." He motioned toward the old Time magazine on the little wrought-iron table. "I think maybe you were a child in this town and you saw something truly horrible."

I didn't know what to say to him. I tried to imagine myself on a bus, and the bus was moving. Moving to where? I wondered. All I'd ever had in my life was my father. After he died I'd stayed in the town where I'd lived with him. I'd even said yes when a man I didn't really love asked me to marry him. I'd said yes to roots and to belonging somewhere.

But now here I was in this house that I knew so very well, with this man I had grown to like, and I was going to have to leave and go somewhere "else," a place where I knew no one.

"You think I saw that woman killed?" I asked.

"I'd say there's a good chance that that's what happened," he said as he took both my hands in his, and his touch was comforting. "It seems to me that you have a couple of choices now. You could stay here and maybe find out the truth of something awful that happened to you, or-"

"Or I could run as fast and as far as I can and get away from here," I said, trying to smile. "If I did see some woman... crushed to death, I don't think I want to remember it. I think G.o.d made me forget because I'm supposed to forget."

"I think that's a wise decision," he said softly, leaning back in his chair.

After that we sat in silence, listening to the sounds of the approaching night. All that went through my head was, Last night. Last night. This was my last night here with this funny, generous man in this beautiful old house.

CHAPTER NINE.

Ford

Okay, so I was curious. Occupational hazard. Murder wasn't something I knew much about. Manslaughter, yes. I'd had a cousin or two who'd gone berserk with a shotgun, but there'd been lots of booze and lots of pa.s.sion involved.

I couldn't imagine what would make someone-or a group of people- pile rocks on a woman until she was dead. If it had happened in the 1700s I could almost understand. I once saw a special on TV about the Salem witch debacle and scientists now believe the grain in that year had a kind of mold on it that was, basically, LSD. The theory proposed was that those little girls who accused people of witchcraft were on a major hallucinogenic trip.

That explained the past, but what about something that happened in the seventies? If the woman's death had been an accident, why wasn't it reported? Or maybe the woman had been alone when a wall had fallen on her. But if that was the case, how did Jackie know so much about it? But Jackie said she didn't know what was truth and what she'd added.

As always, the why of it plagued me.

When I awoke on Monday morning, I half expected Jackie to be gone. It would fit her independent nature to up and leave, a note on the refrigerator.

For a while I lay there imagining what the note would say. Would it be sweet? Or acid? Or just practical? She'd contact me and tell me where to send her paycheck, that sort of thing.

When the unmistakable smell of ham sizzling in a skillet wafted up to me, I pulled on yesterday's clothes so fast I put my shoes on the wrong feet and had to switch them.

In the kitchen, Jackie had her back to me. She had on her usual teeny, tiny clothes that hugged her curvy little body, and I was so glad to see her I nearly hugged her.

Instead, I got myself under control and said gruffly, "I thought you were leaving town."

"And good morning to you, too," she said, pulling a ham steak out of a big skillet.

"Jackie, I thought we agreed that you were going to leave town."

She set a plate full of ham, fried eggs, and whole wheat toast on the table.

I a.s.sumed the food was for me so I sat down in front of it.

"I was thinking," she said as she poured herself a bowl of what looked like sawdust. "Since no one knows I remember Cole Creek, then no one here will know that I may have seen a murder when I was a kid. Right?"

"I guess not," I said, mouth full. She'd cooked the eggs exactly the way I liked them.

"So maybe if no one tells anyone that I remember this town, no one will know I was here. That way, we can research and ask questions, and if the murderer is still alive he'll-" Breaking off, she looked up at me with wide eyes.

"Will only want to kill me when I find out too much," I finished.

"Yeah, I guess so," she said, looking down at her bowl of ground-up twigs. "Not such a good idea, huh?"

Not really, I thought. A truly bad idea. But then that old curiosity popped up again. Why? Why? Why?

"Your eyes are going round and round like pin-wheels," Jackie said. "Do you think smoke is going to start coming out of your ears?"

"Only if I set your tail on fire," I shot back at her.

I'd meant my remark as a reference to a devil's tail, but Jackie c.o.c.ked an eyebrow at me as though I'd made a s.e.x joke, and to my disgust I felt my face turning red. Smiling, she returned to her carpenter's special.

"So what's your plan?" she asked and I could tell she was laughing at me.

Why, oh, why, did each generation think it had been the one to discover s.e.x?

"I don't know," I said, flat-out lying. "I have some writing to do that'll take me a couple of days so why don't you-" I waved my hand.

"Keep busy?" she asked. "Stay out of your hair? Go play with the other children?"

"More or less."

"Great," she said, taking her empty bowl to the sink.

I knew from the way she said it that she was up to something, but I also knew that if I got her to tell me, I'd then have to tell her what I was planning to do.

We parted, and I went up to my office to start calling people. There was a famous true crime writer with my publis.h.i.+ng house and, through my editor, I got her phone number and we had a long talk. I had no idea how to investigate an old murder, so she gave me some tips-and some of her private phone numbers.

Without giving too much away, I told her about the skeleton that had been found and that the police had taken away. She asked for dates and said she'd call me back. A few minutes later she called and gave me the name and number of a man in Charlotte she said knew about the case.

I called him, introduced myself, promised him six autographed books (I took down the names to be inscribed in the books) and he started telling me what he knew.

"We never found out who she was," the man said. "We concluded she was a hiker and an old wall fell on her."

"So you never found out who did-? I mean, you think it was an accident?"

"You think she was murdered?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "But I heard that the kids around here made up a story about-"

"The devil," the man said. "Yeah, one of the cops told me that. Somebody said she'd been 'consorting with the devil' so the townspeople dropped a pile of rocks on her."

I drew in my breath and let it out slowly so my voice wouldn't squeak.

Here at last was someone else who'd heard Jackie's story. "That's kind of unusual, isn't it? I mean, a devil story like that."

"h.e.l.l no. Nearly every long-dead body we get in here has some story attached to it. And this one was found by a hysterical girl who said she'd heard the dead woman crying."

"You have a great memory," I said with admiration.

"Naw. Bess called me earlier and I pulled the file. She was a pretty woman."

"Bess?" I asked, referring to the true crime writer. I'd seen photos of her and "pretty" didn't come to mind.

"No," the man said, chuckling. "The woman who was buried under all that rock. We had one of those clay heads made of her."

As Jackie'd said, my eyes began to whirl. "If I give you my FedEx number could you send me a copy of everything you have?"

"I don't see why not. We showed copies of her face all over that little town of-What's its name?"

"Cole Creek," I said.

"Yeah, that's right."

I could hear someone speaking in the background and the man gave his attention to the voice. When he came back on the line, he said, "Look, I gotta go. I'll send this stuff out to you ASAP."

I gave him my FedEx number, hung up, then leaned back in my chair and looked up at the ceiling. Why was I doing this? I wondered. I was no sleuth. I had no desire to meet a murderer on some dark and stormy night.

I just wanted- And that's where the problem was, I thought. I had no goal in life. I had enough money to live well forever, but a man needed more than that.

Closing my eyes, I remembered those first years with Pat and how wonderful they'd been. Nothing on earth could match the excitement of having a book accepted for publication. It was satisfying in a deep, soul-gratifying way.

I remember thinking, Someone wants to read what I wrote. I'd only been able to come to terms with that thought when I told myself that people wanted to read about Pat's mother, not me. Somewhere along the way, though, I'd realized that I was selling myself and it felt good to be wanted.

But I'd lost it all, lost that driving force even before Pat died, and nothing had felt as good since.

Until now, that is. Every day I could feel a little bit of myself returning. I could feel the old Ford coming back, the one who'd fight to the death for a cause. As a kid I'd been determined not to be like my relatives, so I'd fought like a pit bull to go to college. Nothing my backward, iron-headed relatives said or did made me lose sight of my goal.

But since Pat died, I'd done nothing. I hadn't felt the need to write, hadn't felt the need to do anything. Even before she'd died, I'd achieved every goal I'd ever set myself and then some.

But now... Now things were changing. Was it Jackie? Was it she who was bringing me back to life? Only indirectly, I thought. Truthfully, it seemed to be all of it: the house, the town, the... The story, I thought. The story that would answer that ageless "Why?"

With every step I took into this mystery, I seemed to prove that Jackie's original story was true. But the best news I'd heard was today's. Maybe kids had made up a horror story about the woman's death. This meant that if Jackie lived in Cole Creek as a child she could have heard the story from some s.a.d.i.s.tic kids who got their thrills from frightening a small child.

On the other hand, maybe the kids had just told what they knew. Since the body wasn't found until '92, did that mean the devil story started then?

If so, Jackie would have been old enough to remember if she heard or saw or- I put my hands to my head. This whole thing was getting to be too much for me. Besides, my stomach was beginning to rumble so I headed downstairs. Wonder if there was any ham left? And, by the way, why had Jackie changed from being adamant about "no ham" to frying me a big steak? Was she trying to give me a heart attack? What would be her motive?

Hmmm. Was there a story in this?

I'd gone down just two steps when I was met by Jackie running full speed up the stairs. Two flights and as far as I could tell she wasn't even winded.

"You'll never believe what we found in the garden," she said, her eyes so wide they nearly ate up her face.

"A dead body," I said.

"Have you ever had therapy?"

"Considering the last few days-" I began, defending myself, but Jackie didn't listen. Turning, she ran down the stairs.

I followed her and found my heart pounding by the time I met her at the side door. She didn't say anything but she took note of my out-of-breath state. Maybe I should lay off the ham for a while.

"Come on," she said, excitement radiating from her like sunbeams.

I'm not sure what I expected, but not what she showed me. It was an old building that had been hidden behind a ma.s.s of what looked to be unpruned grape vines and p.u.b.escent trees. All I could see was double gla.s.s doors, peeling white paint, and broken panes of gla.s.s.

Nate was standing there, his s.h.i.+rt off and sweating, a ringer for one of those models in a Calvin Klein ad, and all I could think was that he and Jackie had been out here alone all morning.

"Isn't it wonderful?" Jackie was saying. "Tessa found it. Remember when she disappeared on Friday night and Allie said she was probably inventing something?"

For the life of me I couldn't remember who Tessa was.

"Allie's daughter," Jackie said, frowning. "Remember?"