Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 01 - Hurricane Season (12 page)

Josh was backing down the street nodding good-bye to Ludie.

Ludie’s right, thought Lily. He’s staying on the island.

She waited until Josh turned around and Ludie was struggling back up her steps, then slipped by Ludie’s house. Josh was deep among the pines and azaleas of the overgrown park, but Lily no longer cared about catching up with him.

She heard a motor sputter and come to life. By the time she reached the pier he was a blot on the green water. A blot moving, she noted as she stood shading her eyes, directly toward the southern end of St. Elmo Island.

Lily leaned against the railing of the pier. The young man—Josh, he had told Ludie his name was—had made the anonymous call and told Woody where to find Diana’s body. She was sure of it. But how would he have known? He had been up to something. Maybe he killed Diana himself. Maybe he was a man she ran into somewhere and treated mean. He might’ve been the one who wouldn’t stand for it.

But Woody had said Wesley confessed to killing Diana. Lily thought of Wesley in his choir robe, his hair bristling, his Adam’s apple bobbing as the choir struggled through “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Wesley and his tract about lust. Wesley admiring the
Island Queen.
Her eyes burned from the dazzle of the water, and she turned away. Religious fanatics had caused a lot of trouble in the world before now, she knew. But Wesley had always seemed more pitiful than dangerous.

She wandered back toward her car. Now that she was in town, she supposed she ought to visit Wanda. She contemplated her daughter without enthusiasm. Something had gone wrong between her and Wanda. Perhaps it was Wanda’s insistence on marrying Woody. Their son, Junior, had always acted like a smaller version of his father, and Lily had never warmed up to him much. She and Wanda had fallen into a routine that could barely pass for intimacy. And now with Aubrey the way he was, who did she have left? Lily blinked the thought away as she slid into the baking-hot Nash. Wanda would know the sheriff’s department gossip about the murder, and that was good enough reason to visit.

Wanda and Woody lived in a fairly new house in what once had been planned as a subdivision. The developers had found, however, that few St. Elmo citizens were interested in moving from town to the sandy, blistered, shadeless lots of St. Elmo Heights. Only a handful of flat-roofed, pastel-painted stucco houses had been built before the project was abandoned. Woody had bought one, so Wanda lived surrounded by an acre of sandspurs with no water, not even a stream, in sight. Lily wondered how she could stand it.

As she turned into the driveway, she realized it was getting toward noon, and hoped Woody would be too busy to come home and eat dinner. She had seen enough of him for one day.

Wanda was wearing shorts and a sleeveless blouse, her legs and arms looking white and thin. Her brown hair was in pin curls with a bandanna tied around it. She invited Lily into the shadowy living room, the Venetian blinds angled against the sun. An ironing board was set up on the back breezeway, and on a table next to it the radio was murmuring.

“I was just about to have some Jell-O. Would you like some?” Wanda’s offer was listless.

The Jell-O was lime, with fruit cocktail suspended in it, and it started to form a green puddle as soon as it was put on the saucer. Wanda served it with Saltine crackers and a dot of mayonnaise on top. Over that and iced tea, Lily learned that her grandson was enjoying third grade. When the subject was exhausted, Lily said, “Guess Woody’s been busy, with Diana Landis getting murdered.”

“St. Elmo will be a better place with her gone.”

Wanda seemed to expect life to be as spotless as the rooms pictured in fancy magazines. “Diana had troubles, just like the rest of us,” Lily said, distressed by the admonitory tone in her own voice.

“She certainly has caused Woody enough trouble.”

“How? He’s arrested Wesley, hasn’t he?”

Wanda’s mouth was tight. “Yes he has, and thank goodness. Now maybe things can settle down.”

“Has Snapper been rough on Woody?”

“Not really. He even refused absolutely to use his pull in Tallahassee to get any help with the investigation. Woody was gratified. But Woody was walking on eggs the whole time. All he had to do was rub Snapper the wrong way, and…” Wanda’s voice trailed off at the image of Woody’s wrecked career.

Lily remembered Snapper’s expressed faith in Woody’s ability as a lawman. But Woody had never investigated a murder before. “Is Snapper satisfied it was Wesley?”

“Seems to be. What Snapper’s really thinking about, Woody says, is the election, because now he’s sure to win.”

“How’s that?”

“Diana was costing him votes, and now she’s gone. It gets his name all over the papers, too. There was a reporter from Tallahassee here, and somebody may even come up from Jacksonville. Snapper can run for senator next time, Woody says.”

Lily crumbled a Saltine. “How did Woody know that Wesley did it?”

“That little fellow that sells bait? Gus Avery? The one with the thing on his neck? He’d been off fishing and come back, and he saw Wesley high-tailing it away from the
Southern Star
and into the woods. He didn’t think much about it then, because Diana usually had men around, so he went on home. When he heard she’d been killed, he told Woody.”

“So Woody tracked Wesley down?”

“Didn’t have to. Went to his rooming house and there he was, with his Bible on his knees, reading about the whore of Babylon. He practically fell all over Woody to tell him he killed her.”

“Did he say why?”

Wanda’s cheeks colored. “No. But you can just about bet she tried to get him to do something—you know.”

Lily knew, and in fact it sounded plausible. Why, then, did the young man named Josh still seem so important? “Did Woody find out who made that call? The anonymous one?”

“Woody figures it was just somebody passing who didn’t want to get slowed down. Would you like a piece of pound cake?”

Lily left Wanda ironing Woody’s uniforms and listening to “The Romance of Helen Trent.” The store, dusty and quiet as it was, looked like a haven. She paid Sara Eubanks and sat on a stool behind the counter, glad for a glimpse of the bay through the screen door.

She wondered if anyone on the island knew the man named Josh. She needed some more nets from Sam Perry. It wouldn’t hurt to go over there one day soon, and—

The screen door flew open, and a group of children banged in, shouting about candy.

Whatever Lily was going to do about Josh, it would have to wait for another day. In the meantime, her thoughts turned to Wesley again and again during the long, sleepy afternoon. He might have killed Diana, but he had also stood beside Lily and admired the
Island Queen,
and she had felt in that moment that he wasn’t a complete fool. He would need more than Mrs. Chillingworth’s cake to let him know somebody was thinking about him.

She told Aubrey at supper. When she explained about Wesley’s being in jail and ended, casually, “So I thought I’d drive in to see him this evening,” Aubrey’s reaction surprised her.

“What for?” he said, marking the first time in months he had asked her a question.

She was almost too astonished to reply. “Just to, you know, see how he is, maybe take him something,” she fumbled.

“Boy killed somebody. Better stay away,” Aubrey said, and reached for another corn muffin.

Lily was in a dilemma. Aubrey had shown a slight concern for her welfare. To encourage him, surely she should give in and do as he advised. What difference did it make if she went to see Wesley or not? Yet she knew, as sure as she was sitting there, that she meant to go ahead with her plan.

“I won’t stay but a minute,” she said, and Aubrey finished eating in silence.

The courthouse was locked, and the entrance to the jail around back was dark and forbidding. Clutching a few back issues of the
Saturday Evening Post
and a bar of lavender soap for Wesley, Lily approached the dimly lit concrete stoop. Through the screen door she could see a desk and, seated at it, Deputy Cecil Barnes. Wesley was too important, she judged, to be guarded by the regulars, most of whom would, so Lily had heard, turn their backs on anything if you gave them a pack of chewing gum.

Cecil was cleaning his fingernails with an attachment on his pocket knife. He looked up when Lily entered, and his voice registered surprise when he said, “Good evening, ma’am.”

“Evening,” said Lily. “I’ve come to visit Wesley Stafford.”

“Well now, ma’am. ”

Lily had anticipated that whoever was watching Wesley wouldn’t want to let her see him. She was prepared for stronger opposition than Cecil Barnes could offer. She had the advantage with Cecil because one Christmas years ago she had caught him stealing a peppermint candy cane and promised not to tell his daddy if he wouldn’t do it again.

“I have some things I want to give him,” she said, displaying the soap and magazines, “and I thought,” she added in sudden inspiration, “he might want to join me in a word of prayer.”

Having conferred on herself semiofficial status from the Lord, Lily had no doubt that Cecil’s next move would be to get out the keys. In fact, after a short hesitation, he did just that. “Come on in here, ma’am,” he said, unlocking the door to the cells.

The St. Elmo jail had two cells at the end of a short corridor. In one, the bunk was occupied by a motionless figure. In the other, crouched on the floor near the bars, where the corridor light could reach the leaves of his open Bible, was Wesley. His lips were moving. He didn’t look up when Cecil said, “Miz Trulock’s here to visit.”

“Hello, Wesley,” Lily said.

In the subdued light, Wesley’s face looked knobby. A smudge darkened his cheek, and one lens of his glasses, Lily saw, was cracked.

“What happened to him?” she asked Cecil.

“Resisted arrest a little.”

“I thought he confessed.”

“He did, pretty much.” Cecil stood watching Wesley.

“I’m not here to help him escape,” said Lily. “You can leave us alone for a word of prayer.”

Cecil bobbed his head and returned down the corridor. Lily knelt outside the bars and said, “Wesley.” She shoved the
Saturday Evening Posts
toward him. “I brought you some magazines.” He didn’t respond, and after a moment she held out the bar of soap. “And some soap.”

Wesley swayed forward.
“Save me, O God
,” he said,
“for the waters are come in unto my soul.
”

Wesley’s voice had always been rich and full, his best feature. Now harsh with anguish, it had an eerie power. If he could only preach now, Lily thought, he’d convert all of St. Elmo.

“I’m sorry,” she began, but he wasn’t listening.

“I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.
”

As always when she heard the psalm, Lily thought King David must have known a place much like St. Elmo. She, too, had seen deep mire, deep waters, floods. She understood what it meant for the waters to enter your soul, or thought she did. She reached through the bars and touched Wesley’s shoulder.

He looked at her. “It’s me, Lily Trulock,” she said. “I brought you something.”

She could see no recognition in his eyes. He drew a breath and said,
“I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God.
”

He was crazy. Lily felt cold, confronted with it. Wesley’s face, however, seemed to burn. He clutched at her sleeve, pulling her close enough to feel his breath as he continued the psalm, dropping his voice to a fervent half-whisper.
“They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head: they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty: then I restored that which I took not away.
” She felt his hand shaking. “That which I took not away, Miss Lily.”

One of his eyes seemed weirdly divided by the broken lens of his glasses. “You know me, then,” she said.

He turned back to the Bible and read,
“Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink: let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters.
”

Kneeling there with the smell of lavender faint in her nostrils from the soap she still held, Lily felt dizzy. What was Wesley telling her?
I restored that which I took not away.
Could that mean confessing to something you hadn’t done? “Did you kill Diana?” she whispered.

He closed his eyes and once again his lips moved soundlessly. Although she remained minutes longer, he didn’t look up or speak again. She got to her feet and left him.

Cecil was cleaning a rifle, the parts spread on a white dish towel on the desk. “See all you wanted?” he asked with the suggestion of a smirk.

“How did Woody get the idea he killed Diana?”

Cecil ticked off on his fingers. “Feller seen him running from the boat. We went to his rooming house. He’s there reading his Bible and crying. He tells us he done it.”

“How’d his glasses get broken?”

Cecil was shamefaced. “He run off. I had to stop him. But when the sheriff asked him if he’d killed her, Miss Lily, he says, ‘Yes, God forgive me,’ and cries harder.” Cecil’s face had a mulish look, and Lily didn’t argue.

Aubrey was asleep on his porch cot when she got home. She took the Bible from its shelf and turned to the sixty ninth psalm, in which King David complains of his afflictions and prays for deliverance. She read it through. Wesley was asking me to help him, she thought.
Deliver me out of the mire,
he had said,
and let me not sink.
But what could she do? The face of the man named Josh came into her mind. He knew something about the murder. She had already planned to see what she might find out about him. Would that help deliver Wesley out of the mire? Was it, in any case, her business to deliver him?

Maybe it wasn’t. But Woody, she knew, would never admit that Wesley might not be the murderer. Snapper was satisfied. She was the only one who cared.

Poor Wesley, she thought, with his Bible and his broken glasses. He was in the psalm, too. She ran her finger down until she found the verse, which was addressed to the Lord:
For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.