Jeff Abbott - Promises of Home

“I don’t understand. Why?”

“I don’t know. Did Clevey Shivers ever come and talk to you about your daughter?”

She didn’t answer at first and I took another gulp of the dreadful Kool-Aid, wondering if it’d rot my teeth.

“He came by a couple of months ago. He was writing an anniversary piece on the hurricane. He asked me all about how much I missed Rennie.” She offered the box of chocolates to me; I declined. She popped one in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Ain’t that the stupidest thing you ever heard? Asking a mother if she misses her child? That Clevey fellow just kept saying how sorry he was about her dying.”

“Did you ever think that maybe her death wasn’t an accident?” I asked. “I know the coroner said it was.”

“I know what that coroner man said,” she answered gruffly. She glanced at the pitcher. “Pour me some more, would you? My throat’s dry.”

I refilled her glass. She sipped. “Rennie was trouble then and she’s trouble now.”

That seemed a heartless way to refer to your dead child, but Mrs. Clifton’s voice was anything but callous. Mournful and bitter. I sat again.

“Do you know why on earth she would have been out in the middle of a hurricane?”

Thomasina Clifton didn’t answer me right away. When she did, her voice was lower in pitch, like she’d chalked her throat. “I don’t know. Finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? She was gone a lot of the time without explanation. I couldn’t control her easy.”

It wasn’t an answer; it was her own grief speaking. I stayed silent.

“Maybe she was gatherin’ flowers for that lady she worked for.” Mrs. Clifton shifted in her chair.

The premise was ridiculous, but it was an opening, and I went for it. “Ivalou Purcell? How did Rennie get along with her?”

“Not well. That Purcell woman was jealous of Rennie. Jealous of how young and pretty a girl she was.”

I thought of Ivalou’s sour face, the pinched way she looked at people. Envy seemed right up her alley.

“Could you be more specific?”

“You got to understand what kind of girl Rennie was,” Mrs. Clifton said, sipping from her sugared drink. “Headstrong. Did what she pleased and ever-body else be damned. Lord, she was a handful to me. Willful at times, if she didn’t get what she wanted.”

“And what did she want?”

“I shouldn’t-I shouldn’t talk about my child this way.” She stared up at a picture on the TV, an old, grainy color photo of herself with three young girls. “That’s Rennie in the middle. My other girls still live here in town. They’se married with they own kids now. I don’t want to talk about Rennie.”

I knelt by her and took her hand. “Mrs. Clifton. I don’t want to dredge up unpleasant memories for you. I’m sorry if I have. But two men have died, a third’s been shot, and I think it might have to do with your daughter’s death. Please, won’t you help me, before someone else gets hurt?”

Her ample fingers closed convulsively over mine. Her bottom lip trembled. “She was pregnant when she died,” Mrs. Clifton whispered. “I begged them to keep it out of the papers. I used to clean for old Dud Schiller, who was the editor then. He kept it out of the news. She was only six weeks along. My baby was pregnant.” She began to cry, short heaving sobs. I held her hand and rubbed her shoulder till she was still.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “It must’ve been a horrible shock.”

“That she was pregnant? Not so much as you think. She was always stringin’ some boy along.” Thomasina Clifton mopped at her tears. “That was part of the reason that Ivalou Purcell hated her so. She thought Rennie was after her daughter’s beau.”

“Wanda’s boyfriend?” It didn’t make sense until I remembered that Wanda was about four years older than Ed. That distinction hardly matters in your thirties, but when Ed and I were twelve, Wanda would have been Rennie’s age.

“Yeah. A football player that Wanda was sweet on named Glenn Wilson. He died a few years back in a car wreck. He was seeing Rennie, secret like. She thought I didn’t know, but I did.” She sniffed. “A white boy and a black girl couldn’t really have dated out in the open then, but I saw ’em kissin’ on the porch one night. God, it made me mad. I tried to tell her she had no business datin’ a white boy, but she didn’t pay me no heed. She always went for fellows she thought she couldn’t have.”

I remembered Glenn Wilson. He’d been a big, likable guy, easygoing, popular in town. He’d played football for Sam Houston State and married a college sweetheart. I even remembered hearing about when he and his wife had been killed three years ago, driving back to Houston after the Labor Day weekend. Everyone said what a terrible shame it was.

Had he gotten Rennie Clifton pregnant? Had Wanda or Ivalou found out? How would they? And why, still, was she out in the middle of that storm?

“Did you know Rennie was pregnant before she died?”

Mrs. Clifton shook her head. “No. She didn’t tell me. I guess she knew, though. Her period was always real regular.”

Maybe she’d seen a doctor. Maybe-I remembered the clinic. “Did she ever mention a fellow named Steven Teague?”

Mrs. Clifton furrowed her face in thought. “Not that I recall. Who’s he?”

“A psychotherapist who lived here around the time Rennie died.”

She shook her head. “Don’t recognize the name. Rennie was a handful, but she sure weren’t crazy.”

I knelt by her again. “Did you ever think that Rennie was murdered, Mrs. Clifton?”

She took several deep breaths. “I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe it was just God callin’ her home. When they told me she was with child, I thought that Glenn had killed her when he’d found out… but that didn’t seem right. He wasn’t the kind of boy to kill. That Wanda, though…” She left her sentence unfinished. “There wasn’t no evidence she’d been murdered. The coroner said it was an accident. I couldn’t argue. I didn’t.”

“Was there anyone else you suspected?” I asked.

“No. No one else wanted to hurt my girl. She didn’t have many friends, she kept to herself, she worked at Miz Purcell’s, and she helped me out some with my work.”

“She helped you with your housecleaning?”

“Yeah, she sometimes helped if I had a big house to clean.”

“Who were you working for when Rennie died?” She scratched her chins, and began rattling off names. Grayson, Kucerak, Hubbert, Montgomery-names that didn’t connect to the case. I didn’t bite my lip till she mentioned Hart Quadlander.

I parked the car in my driveway, noting automatically that Sister’s car was still gone and neither Candace’s nor Clo’s car was there. I only hoped that Mama hadn’t been left to her own devices.

I rubbed my eyes. I’d left Thomasina Clifton forlorn with her oversweet Kool-Aid and a load of terrible memories to mull over. I was a jerk, no doubt about it. The limp body of Rennie Clifton rose through the currents of my memory, as clearly as when I’d first seen her corpse, and I tried to force her out of my mind. Trey’s body replaced hers, and then Clevey’s face, smiling in a rictus of death. The gagging cherry taste of the Kool-Aid came back into my mouth and I swallowed hard. I needed food and sleep and some quiet to think.

I thought I’d get those restoratives right away. Until I opened the front door and saw my house had been ransacked.

“Your tie is crooked,” I said, straightening the dark knot at Mark’s throat.

“Does it matter?” He squirmed under my ministrations.

“Yes, it does matter. You want to look nice for your father’s funeral.”