Die Job (8 page)

“What?”

She pounded her fists on her thighs. “See, I knew no one would believe me!”

“Wait a minute.” I held up a calming hand. “I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. Why don’t you think it was an accident? Did you see something?”

She didn’t answer; instead, she shoved a hand into her pocket and came out with a crumpled piece of paper. As she
smoothed it out, I could see it was an article torn from a newspaper.

“Did you see this?” she asked. “It was in today’s
Brunswick News
.”

I shook my head and she passed it to me. “Depressed Teen Injured during Ghost Hunt,” the headline read. I glanced at Rachel, but she had her head bowed, her hair a dark curtain obscuring her expression. Scanning the brief article, I read that “Braden McCullers, eighteen, suffered head and other injuries in a fall at the Rothmere mansion near St. Elizabeth Saturday night. He was taking part in a school-sponsored field trip to scientifically dispute the presence of a nineteenth-century ghost in the antebellum home, according to Merle Kornhiser, principal at St. Elizabeth High School. Police sources are calling the fall an accident but say the teen had a history of depression. He remains in intensive care.”

I folded the page carefully along its creases, playing for time. Newspaper articles and TV reports about teen depression flashed into my head. I thought I knew what was troubling Rachel. “Are you afraid Braden tried to commit suicide?” I finally asked.

“No! But that’s what people will say. And it’s not true. He told me about his depression when we were dating. Not many people know. He was taking antidepressants and was involved with a study to, like, test a new drug.”

A bus slowed but I waved it on. Belching diesel smoke, it picked up speed. The fumes drifted around us and I coughed. “If you don’t think it was a suicide attempt, then what—”

“He was worried about something this past week.” She plucked at the metal strands of the bench seat with a fingernail. “But not in a sad kind of way. He wasn’t worried about
himself. He said he knew something and was wondering if he should intervene.”

“Knew what? Intervene how?”

“I don’t know!” She flung her head up and her eyes, worried and defiant, met mine.

I hoped Rachel was making a mountain out of a mole hill, but she clearly needed someone to take her fears seriously, so I did the best I could. “What, exactly, did he say?”

“He gave me a ride home on Thursday. We stopped at the marina and walked all the way out the boardwalk in the marsh, out to where those benches are where the bird watchers like to sit?”

I nodded. I knew the spot she meant. It was a peaceful place surrounded by cattails and swamp grasses, home to dozens of bird species. A wooden bench, with the names of many visitors etched into its boards, looked out over an expanse of marsh to where the St. Andrew Sound glinted in the distance. I liked to sit there myself at this time of year, when the tourists were mostly gone, and inhale the slightly sulfurous scent of the marsh and listen to the cries of the water birds.

“Anyway, he recited a bit of that Donne poem, you know, the one about ‘No man is an island’? He was always doing that when we were together—saying bits of poems. He even wrote a few. And then he talked about, like, our responsibilities to each other and said he had a hard decision to make. He said that sometimes knowledge is a curse and that he felt he needed to intervene.”

“ ‘Intervene’? That’s the word he used?”

Rachel nodded. “Yeah, like, he said it two or three times.”

“But he didn’t say what he was referring to?”

“No. I asked him. He said he had a responsibility to be discreet until he’d made up his mind about what to do.”

“And you have no clue what he was talking about? He didn’t bring it up again on Friday or Saturday?”

“I didn’t see him Friday,” Rachel said, “and he was all jumpy last night. When I asked if he’d made a decision, just concerned-like, you know, not trying to be nosy, he told me to drop it.”

I heard the hurt in her voice and reached over to squeeze her hand. “And now that’s he been hurt, you think this plays in somehow?” Like maybe he was dealing with something he couldn’t handle and he tried to kill himself? I didn’t say it aloud, but the thought crossed my mind.

“I don’t know,” Rachel said, frustrated. “I just don’t want people saying he tried to kill himself, and I don’t see how it could’ve been an accident. He wouldn’t have gone up the stairs just for nothing. And he wouldn’t have fallen for no reason!”

“You think there was someone else there?” I asked slowly.

“It’s the only thing that, like, makes sense,” Rachel said. “Isn’t it? Some
one
or some
thing
got him to climb the stairs. And who knows what happened then?”

BY THE TIME I STARTED BACK TO ST. ELIZABETH, HAVING failed to get Rachel to come with me, I was confused and disturbed. Traffic on the interstate flowed freely, giving me plenty of opportunity to chew on what Rachel had said. Despite Braden’s history of depression, I was inclined to agree with her that he hadn’t seemed suicidal at the ghost hunt. Preoccupied, maybe, but not suicidal. Besides, who would choose such a bizarre place to end their lives? And, throwing oneself down a couple of flights of stairs was hardly a guaranteed ticket to the cemetery, as Braden’s fall proved. Surely, anyone intent on ending his life would pick a more effective method? Without even wanting to, I quickly thought of three or four better methods.

And an accident seemed almost as unlikely as suicide. Braden was a football player, an athlete, for heaven’s sake. How likely was it that he would trip going up the stairs or stumble
coming down and not be able to catch himself on the rail or regain his balance? And why had he gone upstairs in the first place? I tried to think it through from his perspective. Rachel goes to the bathroom, leaving Braden in the parlor. He’s tired of doing EMF readings. He wanders into the hall and looks around, maybe studies some of the paintings. Then . . . what? He hears the booms from the fireworks and decides to go upstairs to get a better view. I shook my head. That didn’t make sense. He’d have gone out the front door to see what was going on.

I realized the speedometer had crept over eighty and eased my foot off the accelerator. Despite not wanting to be, I was more than half convinced that Rachel’s answer was right: someone else had been there. Someone being on the landing wasn’t necessarily a problem, but where had they disappeared to when Braden fell? Why hadn’t they gotten help? An itchy feeling crept up my back and I wriggled my shoulders against the seat back to erase it.

Without my consciously planning to, I ended up in front of Mom’s house rather than at my apartment. The light purple Victorian with the dark purple and white gingerbread had been my home until I went to the University of Georgia. When I left college after two years to go to beauty school, I’d moved back in and lived there until I followed Hank to Atlanta and began working at Vidal Sassoon. The magnolia trees with their spreading branches and glossy leaves, the hammock swinging gently, and the spacious veranda with its mismatched chairs and elephant plant stand cum table were so familiar I frequently didn’t notice them. Right now, maybe because I’d spent time in the fear-clogged and antiseptic hospital environment, I felt a rush of affection for the place. Fire ant hills and fallen pecans dotted the yard and I avoided the former and scooped up a handful
of the latter as I took the walkway around the side of the house and let myself into the kitchen.

“Mom?”

“Up here, honey.” Her voice came faintly down the back staircase that went from the kitchen to the upstairs hall.

Leaving the pecans on the counter, I grabbed a banana and peeled it as I climbed. I found Mom in the guest bedroom, ripping wide strips of packing tape from a roll and crisscrossing them over the window panes. She wore black knit slacks, a white tee shirt with black stars on it, and white sneakers and was standing on a step stool. She looked over her shoulder as I came in and smiled.

“You really think Hurricane Horatio is going to hit, huh?” I asked around a mouthful of banana.

“Well, that’s what the forecasters are saying. And it might be a category three before it hits the coast, so I think it’s best to be prepared, don’t you?”

“Probably.” I plopped the banana skin in the trash can. Tearing some tape off the roll, I handed it to Mom. The tape didn’t keep the windows from breaking if a tree limb or flying lawn chair hit them, but it helped keep the glass from scattering all over the room.

She stuck it on the highest window and tried to smooth out a wrinkle as I told her about my conversation with Rachel.

“That poor boy,” she said when I finished. “And his poor parents. I’m so blessed that neither you nor Alice Rose ever had any problems like that, although I did wonder if Alice Rose might not have been a teensy bit depressed after Owen was born.”

“Really?” I hadn’t noticed anything different about my younger sister after she had Owen.

Mom nodded. “Don’t you remember how weepy she was,
and how she kept worrying that the house was going to burn down or that Wade would get in a wreck on the way home from work?”

I remembered; I’d put it down to her usual drama-queen tendencies. Alice Rose was an awfulizer: if one of my nephews had a rash, she was convinced it was smallpox; if her CPA business had a slow week, she knew they would lose their home.

“Anyway,” Mom said, folding up the stepladder, “I think you should look into it, Grace.”

“What? You do? Look into Braden’s accident?”

She nodded. “Yes. If nothing else, it might help Rachel feel better about the incident, poor thing. Or, maybe you’ll find out that someone
was
on the landing and did see what happened. Knowing for sure that it wasn’t a suicide attempt would probably give the McCullerses real peace of mind. You could call John and see if the police know anything else.” She sent a sly smile my way.

John Dillon was the special agent in charge of Region Fourteen of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, headquartered in Kingsland. Mom had a soft spot for him since he’d helped rescue me from a murderous Realtor in August. I fought to control the betraying heat that rose to my cheeks.

“The GBI isn’t involved with this case, Mom,” I said. “It’s strictly a local police thing.” Before she could say anything else, I added, “I suppose I could go back to Rothmere and look around. And maybe talk to Glen Spaatz and a couple of the kids who were there. I’ll be out at the school this week, anyway, shaving heads for the school fund-raiser. What could that hurt?”

IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK WHEN I PULLED UP IN FRONT OF ROTHMERE.

A handful of cars sat in the small lot near the carriage house museum and I figured some off-season tourists were visiting the mansion. Crossing the oyster shell driveway, I pushed open one of the heavy oak doors and stepped into the hallway. Voices came from somewhere to my right, maybe the ballroom. The cadence sounded like a docent lecturing about the house. I stood for a moment, taking in the feel of the place. What must it have been like to own all this, to stride across acres and acres planted with tobacco and sugar? To entertain a hundred friends and neighbors in the ballroom? I could almost hear the notes of a Virginia reel if I strained my ears. To sit down to a family dinner in the glow of candlelight, waited on and pampered by servants? I made myself consider the less romantic aspects of plantation life: visiting the outhouse in all weather, dying in childbirth, women having no more rights than a dairy cow, the horrors of slavery. All in all, I’d take working for a living in the twenty-first century over the life of a nineteenth-century plantation owner.

Shaking off my fanciful mood, I strolled around the hall, not sure what I was looking for. I guess I was hoping that a moment of intuition would tell me why Braden climbed the stairs to the landing. I studied the oil paintings, as Braden might have, and tilted my head back to enjoy the sparkle of sunlight on the chandelier’s crystals. I avoided looking at the floor until I neared the staircase; then, I didn’t see any sign of the bloodstain. I let my breath out, not aware I’d been holding it. The old oak planks were so darkened, scarred, and stained with who knew what across the centuries that Braden’s blood had already blended with the mansion’s history. I tentatively put one foot on the lowest stair.