Shivaree (4 page)

Corinne picked up her bags. They were heavy, but she was used to moving dead weight. Charlie made a motion to help. “I can manage,” she cut him off.

“Have it your way,” Charlie said, shrugging as he walked around the truck to the driver’s side.

Corinne approached the bed of the truck and hefted the heavier of the two bags. The dogs snarled at her in unison. Corinne stopped and fixed her eyes on theirs, one after the other. “I am not afraid of you.” One of them lunged toward her, and in spite of her determination not to show fear, she pulled back. She looked up to see Charlie staring at her, the corners of his mouth turned up.

“Down,” he commanded, and all three dogs collapsed. “Go on,” he said to Corinne. “They ain’t gonna bother you now. You just got to show them who’s in charge. It’s the natural order.”

Corinne didn’t respond. She tipped the first bag over the side of the truck and into the bed. One of the dogs shifted, but they all stayed in prone positions.

She picked up the smaller case. “I’ll keep this one on my lap.”

“Fine by me,” Charlie said, “but we need to get a move on. The farm’s a good twenty miles from here, and if we miss the next ferry ’cross the river, we won’t get across till past lunchtime.”

FOUR

Wilson McAvoy took advantage of the empty infirmary at the mill to get out and check on his godson, whose Christian name was Ovid, but who was known around these parts simply as “the Judge.” Locals joked that a man brought before the Judge was just as likely to face the noose for jaywalking as for murder, and McAvoy had to acknowledge there might be a tinge of legitimacy to the jest. Truth was, the man for whose moral upbringing he shared responsibility had grown into a cold-hearted bastard with a twisted sense of justice that had little to do with the law he’d vowed to uphold. The only reason McAvoy felt compelled to look after him was his fond memory of the man’s father.

McAvoy hesitated before knocking on the Judge’s door. He’d stopped by several times in the two months since the death of Ovid’s daughter, but nearly every time the maid Lucille had turned him away, saying the Judge didn’t feel up to receiving visitors. Wilson couldn’t just walk away, though. A brief feeling of regret caused his shoulders to slump. Hell, Ovid might be “the Judge” now, but Wilson had helped bring him into this world almost half a century ago. He had slapped his ass and then heard his first cry. That he should feel such ambivalence toward the grown man hinted at his own failure to honor his duties as godfather.

He only wished he’d been around to help with Ruby’s birth, for then he might have saved Ovid’s wife. Perhaps Ovid’s soul wouldn’t have atrophied if his bride had survived. But there was no use playing the
what if?
game. Ovid’s wife was dead, and now his daughter was gone too. And while McAvoy’s regret over Ruby’s mother’s death was real, the guilt he felt over Ruby’s demise knocked the wind out of him. He’d done all he could for her, but it would’ve been better for everyone if she’d never come back to Conroy. Half the town had shown up for her funeral, not because they mourned her passing, but because they wanted to make sure she was good and gone. She’d been her father’s daughter all right—the worm-ridden apple hadn’t fallen far at all from the tree. If he had stepped up earlier, when she was still just a girl, maybe he could have set her on a different path. But he hadn’t, and he’d go to his grave regretting that he’d let Ovid mold her into his own image.
What if, what if.
There they were again, those words. Perhaps those two tiny words were bound to be the heavy burden of any man who’d lived long enough.

Wilson considered heading back to the mill, but he stopped to ring the doorbell. He waited, taking in the late afternoon sun that had finally managed to pierce the pulp plant’s haze. There was no answer. Now,
that
was unusual. Lucille was ordinarily here at this time of day. He rang again, then circled around the porch to try and peek through a window. The curtains were pulled tight. He returned to the door and placed his hand on the handle, easing it open. “Lucille? You here?” he called, even though he knew she would have heard the bell and opened the door if she were. “Ovid? It’s Wilson.”

He stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind him. Instantly swallowed by the gloom, he banged into the hall table with his ever-ready medical bag. He waited until his eyes could adjust before carrying on down the hall. “Anyone home?” To the right was the sitting room. Even though the heavy red velvet curtains had been pulled shut, there was more light here than in the hall. The air was still and hot in the house, nearly as warm as it was outside even though all the light had been blocked from the house. The curtained crimson rectangles that glowed on the western wall of the room provided the only illumination. Wilson made his way toward the rightmost one, reaching out to pull open the drape.

“Don’t.” Ovid’s voice came from the room’s darkest corner. Wilson looked over to see his godson slumped over in the wingback chair that sat there. Even in the somber light, he could tell Ovid was in bad shape. “The light bothers me. I’ve had such terrible headaches lately.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Wilson said, taking note of the man’s labored breathing. “Lucille should have had the sense to call.”

“I forbade her.”

“Well, that woman has more sense than to listen to you when you are in this state. Where is she, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“It isn’t like her to be late.”

“Not once in ten years,” Ovid said, seemingly exhausted from their short conversation. Wilson reached over to the table beside Ovid’s chair and turned on the lamp. His hand brushed a silver-framed photo of Ovid’s daughter, taken when she was as tiny as a porcelain doll. It teetered, but McAvoy managed to right it before it toppled. Then his eyes fell on Ovid. The sight of his godson nearly made him gasp. He wasn’t yet fifty, but he’d aged a decade since Wilson had last laid eyes on him some weeks ago. Ovid’s jet-black hair had turned a steely gray, and his skin showed an odd bluish cast and looked bruised and purple beneath the eyes. Despite the heat, he was dressed in a heavy overcoat with a thick knitted scarf around his neck. Wilson tried not to show his shock. Without waiting for an invitation—or permission—he sat his bag down on the table and went to Ovid’s side. Taking the man’s hand, he worked his fingers down to his wrist. The pulse was weak, thready. The skin cold.

“Lucille been feeding you right?” he asked.

“I don’t really have much of an appetite anymore.”

“And how are you sleeping?” Wilson let go of the wrist and fetched his stethoscope from his bag.

“Nightmares,” Ovid said as if that were a complete answer. Wilson put the stethoscope into his ears and opened his friend’s coat to place the diaphragm against his chest. The man’s heartbeat wasn’t racing, but it was still too rapid for a resting state. He undid the scarf.

“I’m so cold,” Ovid protested, but Wilson paid no heed. He ran his hands over the lymph nodes. They were slightly swollen, and a little bruising was evident on the right side of the neck.

Wilson ran his hand down Ovid’s stomach. “Tell me if this hurts,” he said, pressing in. A flinch was the only answer. “Well,” Wilson said returning his stethoscope to his bag, “I don’t know what’s causing it, but you, my friend, are showing clear signs of anemia.”

Ovid said nothing. He didn’t seem interested one way or another. He reached up and wrapped the scarf back around his neck.

“We should get you to the hospital in Tupelo, have them run a few . . .”

“No. No Tupelo. No hospital. I can’t be seen like this. You know that.”

“But Ovid, you can’t just hole up in here and expect people not to talk. When did you last preside over court anyway?” The Judge waved his hand in the air like he was trying to shoo away a lazy fly. From the gesture, McAvoy surmised that Ovid’s official duties were the least of his worries. McAvoy always made an effort to overlook the less savory aspects of Ovid’s
dealings
, but the Judge’s extracurricular business activities were obviously what was weighing on his mind.

McAvoy had fulfilled his duty to the Judge, and Ovid had rejected his opinions and advice. He had loved Ovid’s dad, yes, but the son had not inherited the characteristics that had endeared the father to him. He allowed himself to wonder if the world would be a better place without the Judge in it. Perhaps the best course was to do what little Ovid would allow him to do, then let God do the deciding. “Well, don’t you worry. We’ll get you fixed up right quick. I’ll get Lucille to start you on a diet with plenty of iron. And I’ll drop by later with a couple of secobarbitals to help you sleep.”

“I don’t want pills.”

Wilson cursed himself for his own stupidity. Ruby had developed a taste for barbiturates, even before she’d taken off. They’d been trying to wean her off of them, when she up and disappeared. “I’ll drop a couple off anyway. Take ’em, don’t take them, but you need to rest.”

“I should have never let him take her,” Ovid said. McAvoy knew whom he was talking about, of course—the man he blamed for Ruby’s drug use, the one who’d later stolen her away from Conroy. “I should have known the son of a bitch was trouble and turned him over to Frank and Bayard.” It was a well-known secret that Bayard Bloom and Frank Mason acted as the Judge’s enforcers and, McAvoy reflected, executioners. This was no world of innocents, though, so he’d waste no tears for the missing. It had been this pair of ruffians the Judge had tasked with going to California to retrieve Ruby. McAvoy cursed their success in the job.

“I should have killed him myself,” Ovid said. “If I’d known she’d run off with him like she did . . .” He struggled to catch his breath. “I mean, damn it, Wilson. All his talk of movie stars and his pretty ways. I thought the boy was one of those
introverts
. It never occurred to me that she wouldn’t be safe with him. I’d’ve had his balls for cufflinks if I’d known the truth. How did they get their hands on drugs anyway? Must’ve been through the coloreds.”

McAvoy understood why the Judge was mystified. After all, the Judge controlled all trafficking in the three surrounding counties, outside of a few daring fools who had begun to make inroads in the area with goods obtained from sources in Memphis. He didn’t like the direction in which Ovid’s thoughts seemed to be headed. It’d be just like the Judge to order a few disciplinary strikes against the entire community, just to send a message to the few who’d misbehaved, so he presented his godson a different and more distant scapegoat. “I understand the boy frequented jazz clubs in Biloxi. Those musicians are walking apothecaries.” He patted the Judge’s arm. “But you need to calm yourself. It won’t do you any good to think about it now.”

“He’s the one who put that motion picture nonsense in her head, you know . . . That they could go out to Hollywood and become movie stars, the both of them.”

A remarkable face surfaced in Wilson’s memory, a young man with golden curls, nearly indigo eyes, hollow cheeks, and Roman nose. Any number of people might have made fools of themselves over that face. Really, it came as no surprise that a beautiful, bored girl like Ruby had fallen under his sway and attached herself to his dreams.

“I’ve asked myself a thousand times,” Ovid continued, “where I went wrong with her. I thought I’d raised her better than that. But when it came down to it, she ran off like a blue-tick bitch in heat.”

McAvoy decided to let Ovid pretend he’d been a good father. Ruby was gone and buried. No good would come from criticizing the man now, and maybe a little pious fiction would help Ovid pull himself back together. And who was he to cast stones? McAvoy had his regrets, just like Ovid did. “Well, what’s done is done. Now we need to work on getting you well again.”

“I just can’t figure out how they got their hands on the money to leave town. That boy never earned an honest dollar in his life.”

“Well, Ovid, there are many ways to turn a dishonest dollar,” Wilson said, instantly regretting the irony of his words, but Ovid seemed to take no heed. “We need to get you up to your room. You think you can make it if I help you?”

The Judge stayed deep in thought, and it wasn’t clear whether he was considering the weighty issue of his daughter’s fate or the question of his own remaining strength.

The doctor turned at the sound of approaching footsteps. Whoever had entered the house must have come in through the kitchen. “Lucille?” he called out.

“Yes, sir,” Lucille responded. “Oh, Doctor McAvoy, it’s you,” she said as she moved into the room, a mixture of pity and fear crossing her face as she took in the sight of her employer. “It’s good you came.”

“You should have called me, Lucille,” Wilson said, taking care to sound duly stern.

“I know, sir. I wanted to, but . . .”

“No buts, Lucille.” The severity of his tone caused her to wince. “No excuses. Now I need you to help me get the Judge up to his room.”

“Yes, sir,” she said and rushed forward to assist him.

“How long has he been like this?”

“Well, sir, he ain’t really been himself since . . .” she started, then stopped herself. Wilson understood the rest. Just after Ruby’s passing. “But he didn`t start feeling poorly till last week. He’s much worse than when I seen him last, at Saturday lunch, that is. He just said he was a little tired when I was leaving, but . . .”

Wilson calculated the amount of time the Judge had been on his own. Just shy of forty-eight hours. “Okay, Ovid, on three,” he said, although he wasn’t sure the Judge had even heard him. He positioned himself on the Judge’s right side and signaled with a nod that Lucille should support him on the left. “One, two, three.” Wilson nearly toppled over when the weight he’d been expecting didn’t manifest itself. He was amazed by how light the man had become. The Judge was wasting away. “Lucille, you run up and make sure his bed is ready. I think we can manage on our own.”

Lucille acknowledged the command with a curt nod and headed immediately toward the stairs. “I don’t want to sleep,” the Judge murmured into Wilson’s ear.

“You need your rest. We’re putting you to bed so that you can get it.”

“But the nightmares. I can’t stand them.”

“They’re only dreams. They’ll pass.”

The Judge grasped his upper arm, much more tightly than Wilson would have suspected his remaining strength could manage. “She comes to me, Wilson. Ruby comes to me, and her eyes are on fire. Blue like the center of a flame.”

“That’s enough, Ovid. It’s only your illness working on your grief. Speak no more of it . . . to anyone.” Wilson assisted the much younger, but strangely aged man to the foot of the stairs, then helped him begin the arduous climb. Lucille met them at the head and, slinging the Judge’s arm over her shoulder, helped him the rest of the way to the foot of the bed.

Once the Judge was sitting steadily enough, Wilson pulled Lucille aside. “The Judge seems to be suffering from anemia and exhaustion,” he said under his breath. He reached into his own wallet to pull out a five-dollar bill. “You get on down to the butcher and pick up some liver—chicken, beef, I don’t care what kind. Fry it up light so it’s still good and pink and get it up here as quick as you can.”

She nodded and lowered her hand so that he could place the bill in it. “And Lucille,” he said as she was about to leave the room, “tell no one about the Judge’s condition. You hear me?”