Mama bobbed her head. “Y-yessir.”
“I’m glad you’re okay, Mrs. Butler. And no harm. I live over the ridge.” He pointed to the cliffs. “Won’t be no trouble to run home and change,” he told her, easing up on his lecture, offering a kind smile. “Okay. No more swimming for now. You best get dry, ma’am.” The trooper dipped his head to Flannery.
Mama’s old friend, Myrtle Taylor, walked up behind them. “I heard there was trouble. I heard the sirens and told my Harry I’d walk straight down to the dock and see. Look at you, Jean. Oh dear,” Mrs. Taylor fussed. “Let me help you home, honey. Home and dry, sweet pea.”
Flannery released Mama into Mrs. Taylor’s steady arms, grateful for the help. “Thank you, Mrs. Taylor. You’re a godsend.” Flannery balled the hem of her shirt and wrung it; the sopping clothes clung wet, chilling.
Mrs. Taylor helped Mama into her car, easing her into the passenger side. Flannery jumped into her Chevy and pulled out of the lot, with Mrs. Taylor following Flannery close behind in Mama’s car.
Inside the house, Mrs. Taylor phoned her husband and told him to pick her up later in the evening, that she would be helping the Butler women, visiting with her old friend Jean.
Flannery mounted the stairs. She changed out of her wet clothes and took a bath, while Mrs. Taylor fussed after Mama.
Flannery soaked up the horror of the afternoon and the close call of almost losing Mama. A hard, undeniable truth crept in. Something had to be done, and she now knew exactly what that something was. Flannery finished scrubbing and stepped out of the tub.
She dressed and then went to Mama’s room. Mrs. Taylor had a blanket wrapped around her dear friend. “I should draw her a hot bath,” Mrs. Taylor said. “It’ll take off the chill. Wouldn’t that be nice, Jean?”
Mama nodded weakly.
Flannery offered to lend a hand, but Mrs. Taylor insisted she would help, for Flannery just to relax, that she’d see to Mama’s bath, give her a clean gown, and put her friend to bed. “Heavens, you women have been through enough. It’s time to let an old family friend help some.” Mrs. Taylor smiled.
“I’ll just be downstairs,” Flannery told them. “I’ll put on a pot of tea.”
Flannery pulled out a pair of her old leather boots from her closet and slipped down to the parlor and pulled them on. In the kitchen, she made tea and then dialed the old rotary. “Sheriff Henry, please,” Flannery said quietly for the second time that afternoon.
Seconds later Hollis answered the phone. “Sheriff Henry.” “Hollis, it’s Flannery—”
“Flannery, I heard. Is Jean okay?”
“She’ll be fine.”
“Good, the last thing I need is another body in the river.”
“She’s okay. Mrs. Taylor is here helping me with her now. I need to talk to you right away.” Flannery wrapped the phone cord around her hand, gripping the receiver, looking out the window toward the river.
“What about? Look, Flannery, I’m very busy,” Hollis said, annoyed.
Flannery looked over her shoulder, then cupped her hand over the receiver. “It’s about Patsy and—”
“I already told you. You need to let that go.”
“I need the truth.”
“Listen—”
“No, you listen—” She squeezed the phone, knocked her boot against the base of the counter.
“Patsy was a whore,” he bit out in a hard whisper.
“That’s my sister you’re talking about, you bastard, and I won’t let you—”
“God, woman, give it a rest. Give your mama some peace!” For a few seconds the phone went silent, and she feared he’d hung up on her. Then he said, “Shit, for the love of all that’s holy, leave it be.”
Flannery flexed her cramping fingers around the phone and whispered, “I’m telling you, Hollis, if I don’t talk to you soon, I’m going to go talking to someone else. Maybe”—she drew a breath—“the state police . . .”
He hissed into the receiver. “Shit, Flannery. I’m in the middle of something.” She heard paper rattle, then his sigh. “Okay, I’ll swing by tomorrow at lunch.”
“No,” she said, shaking. “Not tomorrow. Not here. Mama . . . Mama’s not well, and she can’t be disturbed. I’ll meet you now.”
“It’s too busy and loud here, and I can’t get away until after six.”
Flannery stretched the cord over to the screen door and looked out toward Ebenezer, then down at Honey Bee’s old watch to her fast-ticking eight minutes—Patsy’s minutes, all Flannery’s stolen minutes, and those robbed from her unborn children.
In Hollis’s voice came a ringing of untruths and truths. It all hit her. Flannery knew she wouldn’t have left Glass Ferry if Patsy were still here. Wouldn’t have cut off her one and the same and married that bastard Mark Hamilton. Wouldn’t have lost her babies and with them a chance for family, for children of her own.
That all of it was, most surely, Hollis’s foul doing. He’d interfered with so many lives. Hers, Patsy’s, and Danny’s. And Mama’s, poor Mama’s. His meanness, lust, and false, rotted power had rooted all this. Flannery pulled her anger into a hard fist, slapped it against her thigh, knocked her boot against the door.
“Listen. I sure hate to hear you tearing yourself up over all this old stuff, peaches.” Hollis dropped a concern into his voice. “Henrys and Butlers have been like family,” Hollis murmured, soft and syrupy, pulling in doubt.
She let the anger in her voice weaken some. “It hurts not knowing, Hollis—”
“I’m feeling it too. Danny was a good brother. Hell, a better kid than me. I’m trying to be a better man now, Flannery.”
“I just can’t take knowing they were harmed. That my twin might’ve been hurt like your brother. My poor mama’s beside herself just thinking—”
“Hell, I love your mama like my own. Louise checks in with a dish every month, visiting Jean. I lowered her property bills the last ten years to ease her pocketbook. Did Jean tell you that? Tell you I only stamp a due of a measly two dollars on her yearly taxes?”
Her mama hadn’t asked her for extra money in a long time, though Flannery sent her a check every month.
“I care, Flannery. Let’s just put this behind us. I know your daddy was a forgiving man. Me too—”
The words of the thieving river rats lit fresh, and she shifted, tapping her boot against the floor. The crumbs Hollis fed Mama came from guilty fingers.
“Fight for it,” Honey Bee’d said. “Don’t let him pinch one tender second from you. . . .”
Flannery slipped out the door, stretching the long curled telephone cord with her. “Meet me on Ebenezer.”
A short silence filled the airways, then Hollis grumbled, “I can be there at 6:15.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
CHAPTER 26
Flannery moved under the old elm, the last hours of daylight falling through its branches, dancing across her itchy feet.
In the distance, sleepy cowbells jangled over on Parsons’s farm as his cows lumbered home for the evening. Overhead, swallows swooped for supper, and a single cardinal tasseled a lilt onto its crest, racing home to its branch. A wind dropped and set its teeth into tall grasses, combing wild onion and tangling fencerow jasmine honeying the June air.
Flannery trembled a little. She couldn’t shake off the earlier chill from the river. And being here in the pull of the leaving hour didn’t help matters. Normally, it didn’t bother her, but today it exaggerated all uneasy feelings.
She spotted an old gasoline can sitting next to the cemetery’s iron gate and frowned. Folks were always dumping stuff out here, the high school kids leaving behind their beer bottles and trash, and once even a ratty couch.
Flannery tried to flick off her bad feelings and nudged her boot at the patch of dandelions and forget-me-nots beside her foot.
She looked over at the scraggly flowers at the crumbly chimney, and hugged herself, remembering the time when she and Patsy had gone picking where they weren’t supposed to.