Uncivil Seasons (3 page)

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“Um!” Mangum unlocked the door to the records room. “Joanna Griffin! Amazing. And asking for you like a sphinx out of a story, when the only people that call me out of the blue are trying to sell me light bulbs.”

“Joanna Cadmean. She married a Cadmean.”

“Isn’t there anybody in Hillston besides me that’s not part Cadmean or a damn Dollard like you?”

“My name’s not Dollard. My name’s Savile. I’m the only Savile in Hillston. There must be two hundred Mangums.”

“At least. And I’m hoping to add more.”

“Even if they’re part Cadmean?”

“Well, hey, nobody’s perfect.” Pencil tight in his teeth, Cuddy rummaged through the file cabinets. “Okay, here it is. Griffin, Joanna. Looks like a couple dozen cases here. Also looks like she was what you might want to call a volunteer worker. I don’t see where they ever paid her a damn penny.”

“How do you charge for visions?” I took the file from him.

“What’s her name, Jeane Dixon does all right. Course, she’s on a big scale. Like, will Elvis come back from the dead? Lord, I hope so. Well, don’t hog it. Read.”

The file began decades ago, when one day a Hillston girl of good family had walked into the police department and shyly announced to the desk sergeant that she knew where the bodies of two missing local coeds were buried. They’d been missing for over a month. She was taken to the office of the young assistant solicitor, Rowell Dollard.

The girl explained to him and to the incredulous police that whenever she saw photographs of the missing coeds, she saw them being forced down wood basement steps into a black space. She went on to describe, in precise detail, what turned out to be a half-burnt, long-abandoned country church thirteen miles south of Hillston. Even as the squad cars followed her lead, bouncing over the clay-clotted road into overgrown woods; no one really believed the girl. They didn’t believe her until the two corpses were dug from their shallow graves in the church basement, behind the wood steps.

After the department agreed that she couldn’t have killed the coeds herself, after a student confessed that he had, they asked Joanna to tell them what her secret was. She said she didn’t know. Images like these had been coming into her head since she was little. Naturally, she didn’t like it. Not only was she a freak to her schoolmates, the visions themselves brought on violent headaches, and were followed by a terrible depression. She was horrified by the discovery of the bodies. So were her parents. Embarrassed, they had her put under observation at the university, where she was a freshman. There, parapsychologists asked her to look at the backs of cards and read what was on the other side. She did so. The university concluded that if there were such a phenomenon as mental telepathy (and about this they disagreed), then Joanna Griffin was telepathic.

The Hillston police became less skeptical. When a local three-year old disappeared, his mother begged the police to call in Joanna. Joanna told them where to find the well shaft he’d fallen down, and still lay in, alive. She picked a suspected arsonist out of a lineup and recounted each moment of his crime to him so vividly that, terrified by her sorcery, he confessed both to that, and to two other unsolved arsons.

Of course, sometimes her sibylline visions were too vague to follow, and sometimes she had nothing at all to tell the department that had sheepishly gotten into the habit of calling her in whenever they had no leads and the news was publicly wondering why. The papers called Joanna everything from a mystic to a charlatan, and one literary journalist dubbed her “the Carolina Cassandra.”

Then suddenly, after two years, Joanna stopped working for the police and left the university for a term. When she came back to town, strangers continued to pester her with demands that she locate misplaced trinkets and wandering spouses, that she tell them where to find good jobs, that she bring back their dead. She asked them please to stop asking.

“Can you imagine,” Cuddy said, “having no choice but to really see what’s going on in the rotten world? You know? Not being able to blink your eyes? Seeing all the old smut in the heart, and the tumor on the bone, and somebody’s future that’s never going to happen? God damn! Can you imagine being her?”

There was a rumor that she’d attempted suicide in college, but that her family had hushed it up. Then she’d eloped with one of the Cadmean sons, and the visions, as far as anyone knew, had ended. “Marriage’ll do that,” Cuddy remarked. Perhaps after she had become a member of his family, old Briggs Cadmean forbade her to hallucinate, thinking it unseemly for a daughter-in-law of his to be even mentally trekking through creek bed and alley, feeling her way to the deserted, or raped, or stabbed. Dreaming her way to death.

Cuddy closed the file of yellowing papers. “I thought I heard she died.”

“Christ, I’m almost scared to go meet her.”

“Well, if you get a chance, ask her if she can help me win the basketball pool.”

“All right. So long, I’m going out.”

“You just got here. Why don’t you come up to my office and do some police work, just to keep your hand in. Take your pick. Who keeps stealing Mr. Zeb Armel’s Pontiac every night and driving it ‘til the tank’s empty? And my bet’s Zeb Jr. Who is exposing his private parts to Mrs. Ernestine Staley when she walks down Smith Road to collect her mail? And, my question, why in the world did he pick her? Who held up the Dot ‘n’ Dash? And, of course, why is there blood and fingertips all over the By-Ways Massage Emporium parking lot?”

“Sorry. I’m on special assignment. I’m going to East Hillston about the Dollard jewelry.”

“Across the Divide? Over to where us poorfolk were herded together and told, ‘Let them eat Twinkies.’ That East Hillston?”

“Right.”

“Well, don’t ask any tattooed greasers to step outside, General Lee.”

I left him at the elevator door and crossed the marble lobby back out into the snow.

Never ask a greaser with tattoos on his knuckles to step outside, especially if he’s smiling, and combing his hair with a switchblade.
Those were among the first words Cuddy Mangum ever said to me. And although we’d been born in the same year, in the same town, we were never in one another’s homes until after I joined the police department ten years later, and we met again in the hall where I’d seen him today. He’d made the remark our senior year (mine in a New England prep school, his in Hillston High). I was back home to escort a debutante to a dance, and we’d come in our formal clothes at dawn to an all-night diner. As soon as we sat down, three hoods leaned into our booth and began making vulgar cracks. I asked them to step outside. Somebody tall and thin, seated by himself at the counter, all of a sudden spun his stool around and faced them. He said, “Wally, don’t talk dirty in front of a lady. I think you left your brains out in your Chevy; why don’t you and your pals go look for them, how about?”

And after a volley of muttered obscenities, Wally clanked off and his friends followed.

It was when I came over to the counter to thank Cuddy Mangum that I got the advice never to ask tattooed greasers to step outside. He added, “They never read your rule book, General Lee.”

“Mind if I ask—is Wally a friend of yours?”

“He’s my cousin.” And my rescuer spun his stool back away from me and picked up his textbook and his doughnut.

Ten years after that, when he and I were introduced by Captain Fulcher, I said, “Oh, we’ve already met.”

Cuddy took a doughnut out of his mouth and nodded. He said, “Especially now you’re in the police business, don’t ask a tattooed greaser to step outside.”

It was his parting shot whenever I told him I was going to East Hillston, far from Catawba Drive and my family’s circle. Cuddy leaned out into the hall while I was waiting for the elevator.

I inched my old Austin timidly into East Hillston. I hadn’t been drinking long enough not to be still afraid of the snow. With me was a list of Cloris Dollard’s stolen property that probably wasn’t very accurate. She had been a woman of property, but not a careful or a frugal one. She’d spent her life as cheerfully as all the money she’d given to Hillston charities, and all the money she’d spent to buy the random wealthy clutter of belongings she’d given away or left behind. What had proved less fragile than their owner—and had not been stolen by her murderer—Cloris’s daughters had come from other cities and taken home with them, or stored in the basement. Rowell, who liked to keep things, would not let them touch his wife’s room.

I had searched in the house through the clutter, looking for a clue among boxes of clothes, photographs of golf trophies, her first husband’s sheet music, and her daughters’ camp crafts; among drawers of old theater programs, packets of seeds, keys and buttons whose uses had been lost for years. I was looking through a past of good looks, marriages, travel, civic duties, through the loose ends of an easy life, for a clue to tell me that Cloris’s death had not happened, as Fulcher believed, by the unlucky accident of indiscriminate violence, but for a cause particular and personal, and so discoverable. I’d found nothing.

Now I was doing instead what Cuddy had long ago warned me detectives actually do for a living. I was walking, with a list of stolen property, into every pawnshop, secondhand business, and disreputable jewelry store in town. I was waiting for someone to give me a clue. Most of the stores are in East Hillston. None of the owners had seen any of Cloris Dollard’s property. Not unless they’d seen on their customers some of the used clothes she was always donating to Goodwill.

The good will performed locally by Cloris Dollard and her friends, and by Susan Whetstone and her friends, was for the benefit of this section of town called East Hillston, which meant poor Hillston, which meant the area bordering the side of downtown Hillston that had gone out of business when Cloris and her friends had stopped shopping there twenty years ago and had driven off to the new malls and had never come back except for charity’s sake.

Sister Resurrection walked fast along the streets of East Hillston, dawn to dark, the smell of her rotted sweaters as familiar as her stick with its wood cross taped to the top and her unsparing eyes that kept waiting for God to burn up the world. Men and women who worked the lowest-paid assembly line jobs at C&W Textiles lived here; so did most of Hillston’s blacks; so did the few Greek and Italian families, after three generations still known to their neighbors as “the foreigners,” who owned corner groceries and submarine sandwich shops. They lived here in all that were left of the massive Victorian frame houses built after the Civil War, when East Hillston had been the center of town. Boarded up or doled out as shoddy apartments, the old homes were rotting beneath layers of bad paint and cheap linoleum. Beside them, even shabbier little oblong boxes had been thrown up on what had once been big lawns where summer parties played croquet. These little 1940s duplexes, faced with stucco or aluminum siding, now hid behind all the pickup trucks and rusty Chevrolets scattered over the yards. The worst place to be from in Hillston was East Hillston. It was where Cuddy Mangum had grown up.

The Mangums had lived three blocks from the old, shambling, two-story Gothic house that somebody named Pope had owned as far back as the town records went. Somebody named Pope had been on the police books as far back as those records went, too. At present, various assortments of Pope brothers and their wives lived in the house and were periodically arrested for stealing cars, hijacking cigarette trucks, and brawling in public. Long ago, their mother Edna had just picked up her raincoat and walked out of the house. She’d left when her youngest boy was twelve. She’d never come back. The boys’ father, T. J. Pope, had died while waiting trial for murder: he’d killed a mechanic who overcharged him.

Cuddy said the Pope brothers were hereditarily unreformable, but their marauding was checked by a congenital stupidity (evidenced by their having hidden three thousand dollars belonging to Cherokee Savings and Loan under a junked bus in an old cardboard suitcase that had “Edna Pope, 1002 Maple Street, Hillston, N.C.” tagged to the handle), and so, at any given time, a few of them were likely to be sidelined by prison.

Cuddy Mangum kept up with the Popes. He called me with the latest news shortly after I’d gotten home from East Hillston and was changing into a suit to go meet the psychic Joanna Cadmean out at Pine Hills Lake. His call came when I’d just hung up the phone and poured a drink after listening to my uncle Rowell Dollard tell me, again, to go arrest someone for killing Cloris. I thought the ring now was Rowell calling back. My uncle was persistent. He hated to lose. At fifty-eight he played squash twice a week, and he played and played until he won. If I beat him two out of three games, he’d pant, “Let’s make it three out of five.” Captain Fulcher was scared that if we didn’t find Cloris’s murderer fast, Rowell would do it himself, and then have all of us fired, as, long ago, he’d gotten V.D. Fulcher’s predecessor fired. Rowell liked to do things himself; he’d insisted on acting as a father to me even during the time when I already had one.

The call, however, was from Cuddy, using a British accent, “Lawry Whetstone here, old boy. Understand you’ve been banging my memsahib. I say, bad show.”

“What do you want, Cuddy? A part in our next play?”

“What are you doing right now?”

“Changing my clothes.”

“You know, I wonder if you’re not some kind of pervert. There’s something un-American about the way you’re always playing the piano and changing your clothes. Want to get in on a real arrest; score with V.D.? Meet me at the Popes’ house on Maple fast as you can.”

“Christ, what have the Popes done now?”

“Charlene called up the station …”

“Graham’s wife?”

“Preston’s. Charlene is Baby Preston’s wife. Can’t you keep up? Old Graham’s wife gave him the heave while he was in the tank for trying to collect insurance on a semi he poured kerosene all over and lit a match to about the time everybody was getting out of church and strolling by his house to watch him do it. Whooee, I love those Popes! Graham’s wife’s the daytime bartender at the Rib House now, but she put on a lot of weight snacking on the job and lost her looks. Charlene called….”