Greg Iles - Turning Angel

I nod slowly, not quite believing that this is happening.

Jenny holds out the box. “I want you to give me your word as a gentleman, Penn. I know that word is sort of outdated, but I still believe it applies in some cases.”

“You have my word, Jenny.”

Even as I accept the box and cradle it under my right arm, I wonder what I’m doing. How can I defend Drew in court if I’ve vowed to make sure he is punished if he turns out to be guilty? Maybe that’s why I’m taking the box. Maybe it’s my way out of defending Drew at trial.

“Daddy?” Annie calls from the living room. “Who is it?”

“I’m going to run on,” Jenny says.

“I don’t know what to say, Jenny.”

She turns away, walks to the top step, then looks back. “The district attorney told me Kate was pregnant. It must have been Drew’s baby.”

I nod slowly.

“Do you think he would have married her, Penn? Tell me the truth.”

“Jenny, that’s the one thing in this whole mess that I’m absolutely sure of. He’d have married her tomorrow if he could.”

She tilts back her head and blinks away tears, then gives me a shattered smile and hurries into the night.

In the silence on my front steps, I feel tears coming to my own eyes. How did we bring ourselves to this pass? Jenny Townsend in her solitary grief; Drew sitting alone in jail; Kate Townsend lying dead on a slab somewhere in Jackson, an ugly Y-incision stitched into her torso; an empty chair at Harvard that will now be filled by some luckier kid who will never know what tragedy brought him or her there. Did all this result from Drew’s forbidden love of Kate? Or do I trace it back to Drew’s wife and the hydrocodone addiction that Drew says killed their marriage? Or-

“Daddy?” Annie calls from the door. “Can’t you hear the phone?”

“No, Boo,” I say softly. “I’m coming.”

I walk to the kitchen and pick up the telephone. “This is Penn.”

“Penn? Walter Hunt.”

It takes me a moment to switch gears. Walter Hunt is an accountant who lives in Sherwood Estates, and a neighbor of Drew’s. He has two kids in St. Stephen’s.

“What can I do for you, Walter?”

“Nothing for me, but I thought you’d like to know-Ellen Elliott is piling up furniture and all kinds of stuff in her front yard. Looks like Drew’s stuff to me-golf clubs and skis-guns, too. To tell you the truth, it looks like she’s building a bonfire.”

Jesus Christ. “Thanks, Walter. I’m on my way. Where’s Tim?”

“Timmy’s over here with us. My wife went over and slipped in their back door.”

“Don’t let anybody call the police. I’ll be there in no time.”

“Hurry, Penn. Ellen’s so toasted, she can barely walk.”

I’m sitting on my front steps with Annie, waiting impatiently for Mia Burke to arrive. Annie is playing Scooby-Doo on her Game Boy Advance. I’m trying to focus on the perfume of a white narcissus, which blooms liberally on Washington Street this time of year, but at this moment it’s hard to enjoy anything. My mind won’t leave the Jimmy Choo shoe box I just hid atop the armoire in my upstairs guest room, the box that contains the secret history of Kate Townsend’s life with Drew. I shudder to think what would be happening now if the police had discovered that box during a search of Jenny Townsend’s house. The only thing keeping me from going through Kate’s personal things right now is my fear that Ellen Elliott may do something to hurt Drew as badly as she can out of revenge.

After failing to reach Ellen by phone, I called Mia, who agreed to watch Annie until I get back. Before she hung up, Mia told me she had something to tell me about “the Kate situation,” but she refused to say more on her cell phone. Since Mia is plugged into the high school information grid, she may know things that I or the police couldn’t discover in a year of asking questions.

Annie looks up from the glow of her Game Boy and fixes me in a serious gaze. “Daddy, everybody keeps asking me why I wasn’t in the pageant this year. Why can’t I tell them?”

I take a deep breath and sigh. The Confederate Pageant has been the center of white social life in Natchez for the past seventy years. Replete with hoop skirts, sabers, and rebel uniforms, this celebration of pre-Civil War life in the Deep South is one of the most politically incorrect spectacles in the United States. Yet it remains an institution that most of the affluent children in town participate in-as velvet-clad toddlers dancing around a Maypole, clean-cut high schoolers waltzing with flattered tourists, or intoxicated college kids trekking home three times a week during March to don Confederate regalia and march to the strains of “Dixie” as members of the “Confederate Court.” Being asked to take part in the pageant is a mark of social distinction-based largely on one’s mother’s or grandmothers’ service to one of the powerful “Garden Clubs”-and certain roles confer star status on those offered them.

Annie has already played starring roles in the pageant, and this year she was offered a spot in “The Big Maypole,” one of the vignettes with roles for fourth-graders. This made my mother happy, but I was ambivalent about it. Mom believes Annie will be damaged more by not participating in the pageant with her friends than by acting in a racially questionable production whose subtleties she can’t even understand. “After all,” she asked, “what harm did it do you? You were in the pageant from the age of four to twenty, and you’re as liberal as they come.” I laughed, but Annie proved her wrong. A nine-year-old with black friends can easily grasp the issues, and when I explained them to Annie, she asked me to decline the role for her, which I did. I also asked her not to make a big deal of it at school, since so many kids in her class would be taking part.

“But I mean, ” Annie says in an exaggerated voice, “what’s the point of not doing something if you don’t tell people why you’re not doing it?”

As usual, she sounds five years older than her true age, and also as usual, she’s right. If you’re going to try to change things by example, you have to let people know what you’re doing and why, even if you’re only nine.

“You’re right, punkin. Go ahead and tell them why you’re not doing it. But you’d better expect some strong reactions, maybe even from your teacher. Things change slowly around here.”

She nods seriously. “I’ll think before I talk.”

I wish some adults I know would do that. “Good girl.”

“Dad?” Annie asks in a tone of some anxiety.

“Yes?”

“Timmy’s mom came and picked him up early from school today.”

Images of Ellen Elliott fill my mind again. “Did anyone say why?”

“No. But I heard some teachers talking in the hall. They said Dr. Drew was in some kind of fight, and that he’d done something bad.”

Damn gossips. “Did they say what he’d done?”

“No. But one of them called him a bad name.”

“Which teacher did that?”

“Mrs. Gillette.”

A cranky old sourpuss. I silently mark Mrs. Gillette down for further attention. “Dr. Drew hasn’t done anything for kids to worry about. You don’t pay any attention to people gossiping, okay?”

“I know. I just wanted to tell you, ‘cause Timmy’s seemed really sad lately.”

As I put my arm around Annie and hug her tight, a pair of headlights comes up Washington Street at slightly over the speed limit, then slows and darts to the curb in front of our house. Mia jumps out of her Accord with a smile on her face and a CD case in her hand.

“We’re gonna do some dancing, girl!” she says to Annie, popping out her hip in a move that seems to travel up her spine and out to her stiffened fingers by some occult law of physics.