Bree said nothing.
Naomi said, “I’m sure she’s just under a lot of stress.”
“Or bailing on me,” Stefan said in a fretful tone.
Bree and Naomi had tried to assure him otherwise. But after they’d left the jail, they’d gone by Patty Converse’s place. Her car was gone, but from what they’d been able to see through the window, her stuff was still inside. Naomi had tried Patty’s phone number several times, but got voice mail.
So they’d come back to the railroad tracks around four that afternoon.
A train rumbled at them out of the south. Bree and Naomi walked well back from the tracks in order to see the tops of the freight cars. But they were all bare of riders, even the caboose. Another train came a few minutes later out of the north. It too was riderless.
“I’m thinking this is a little bit like the needle in the haystack,” Naomi said. “I mean, we can’t watch all day.”
Bree thought about that, looked around, and then back toward the thicket of trees between the tracks and the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. The trees overlooking the tracks triggered a memory of Ali watching some show on the Outdoor Channel the other day.
“Is there a store here that carries hunting and fishing gear?” Bree asked.
“There’s an army-surplus place that does, I think.”
They were soon back in the car, driving west of town to P and J’s Surplus. They went in and were greeted with several Confederate flags on the wall.
Bree ignored them and found the only salesperson, a heavyset white girl in her midteens named Sandrine. She looked at Bree suspiciously and at Naomi with mild interest.
“I seen you in the papers and on TV,” Sandrine said to her. “You’re defending that kid killer, right?”
“I’m Mr. Tate’s attorney,” Naomi said.
“You’re following the case?” Bree asked.
She shrugged. “Papa says I shouldn’t pay attention to any of it.”
“Why’s that?”
“Just niggers killing niggers, he says. No offense. I’m just quoting.”
Sandrine said this offhandedly. Bree swallowed her reaction by wondering how many people in and around Starksville thought about the case like that.
Naomi managed to stay composed as well, said, “We’re here looking for something to buy.”
“Yeah?” Sandrine said, perking up. “What’re you looking for?”
Bree told her, and the girl came waddling and smiling right out from behind her little counter. “We got it all at P and J’s! Got six of them in just the other day. How many you want?”
Bree thought and then said, “We’ll start with two.”
Chapter
66
West Palm Beach, Florida
Burning cane filled the air with smoke again as I drove toward Belle Glade, wanting to be there and in Palm Beach and in Starksville all at once.
It was five twenty in the evening. I’d spent the day with Drummond and Johnson, who’d quickly reached staff at both the Abrams and Martin residences and confirmed that Coco had painted the women’s portraits. None of the staff knew who Coco was, however, much less where she lived.
Maggie Crawford’s estranged husband, John, was fishing in Alaska. The Boob King had been in surgery all day and was unreachable. So was Elliot Martin, Lisa Martin’s billionaire husband, who was in Shanghai on business.
They’d left messages with all their aides. On the way to Mize Fine Arts on Worth Avenue, Johnson called up the Internet on his phone and ran a search for a Coco in Palm Beach and the surrounding areas. There was no such listing.
Then we’d found Mize Fine Arts closed during prime shopping hours, and no one answered our knocking.
“I’d like to go in there and look around,” Johnson said as we turned away.
“I’m sure you would,” Drummond said. “But I don’t think a name on three paintings gives us a search warrant. And that looks like a serious alarm system. You wouldn’t be able to explain yourself if you were somehow caught inside.”
When I looked at Drummond, he winked at me.
We went to Mize’s home. It must have been a grand place once, not huge like the megamansions out on Ocean Boulevard, but an impressive structure. The front yard and gardens were nicely maintained. But the manor itself needed painting. And up close, you could see the front door required varnishing, and the stucco siding was in minor disrepair.
Drummond rang the bell. There was no answer. He rang it again.
I wandered around the side and into the shadows between the house and a bamboo hedge that separated it from the place next door. The walkway was busted concrete overgrown with weeds. The backyard was worse, looked like it hadn’t been tended in months. A gutter downspout was disconnected halfway down from the roof. The lower part hung by a bracket.
“If he’s in there, he’s not answering,” Drummond said when I returned.
“I’d check the tax rolls on this guy,” I said.
“Why’s that?”
“He’s not taking care of his property, which means he’s under financial stress of some sort.”
Drummond called in a request for all information on Jeffrey Mize as we returned to the car.
“We’ll have to sit on the place,” Johnson said.
“And the art gallery,” I said. “Sooner or later, Mize or Coco will show up.”
Because Johnson was the only one who had seen Coco in person, he went to watch the shop. Drummond and I sat on the house until it was time for me to go learn what had become of my father.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” the sergeant said before I left.
Driving north out of Belle Glade an hour later, there was a bug hatch, and so many insects smashed into the windshield that it stayed smeared no matter how much wiper fluid I used. Near the Pahokee city limits, I stopped to fill up with gas and clean off the windshield, then I drove into town, seeing signs about the high school football team.
Drummond said the high school teams at Pahokee and Belle Glade always ranked among the top teams in the state and together had put almost sixty players in the NFL. Pretty impressive when you consider the economic devastation. There were fewer businesses in Pahokee than there’d been in Belle Glade.
But the Cozy Corner Café on Lake Street was still open. I parked in front. The humidity this close to Lake Okeechobee was stupefying. In the ten steps I took between the rental and the front door of the café, I was drenched, though maybe that also had to do with the sudden nervousness that swept through me. What had happened to my father all those years ago?
There were six customers in the café, though only one was female and alone. She smiled at me, waved me over. A pretty, plump older Latina woman with a beaming smile, she got up out of her booth, pushing back her long ponytail of black hair flecked with gray, and adjusted an attractive purple batik dress. A small, simple wooden cross hung on a chain about her neck.
“Dr. Cross?” she said, smiling as she took my hand in both of hers and peered kindly up at me through wire-rimmed glasses. “I’m Reverend Alicia Maya. I understand you’re interested in Paul Brown?”
Chapter
67
Over the course of an hour, an iced coffee, and a slice of pineapple pie, Reverend Maya told me what she knew about Paul Brown. She’d met him shortly after she had taken over the small Unitarian Universalist church in Pahokee as a first-time minister.
“I was twenty-five, right out of divinity school and sure I could change the world,” Reverend Maya said. “You wouldn’t believe it now, but back then, Pahokee was a thriving place. Everyone had jobs. People came here for jobs, including Paul Brown.”
Reverend Maya said Brown showed up at one of her evening services. He was weak and limped terribly.
“He stayed after the service,” she said. “He said he had no place to go and would be glad to clean the church if I let him sleep there. I was doubtful, but I could see he was a man in pain beyond the mere physical, and I said
yes. He ended up living in the church for about eight months, working out in the picking fields in the day, cleaning the church at night.”
I held up my hands. “Before we go any further, can you answer a couple of quick questions?”
“I’ll try.”
“After Brown died, did you call someone named Clifford Tate in Starksville, North Carolina?”
The reverend cocked her head, looked off, and then said, “Yes. I believe the name and number were in a little book I found with Mr. Brown’s things.”
The loss of my father felt strangely final then, and it must have shown on my face because Reverend Maya said, “Sergeant Drummond said he was a relative of yours?”
“I believe he was my father,” I said.
She blinked, took a big breath, said, “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
Reverend Maya said Brown seemed to be a tortured man doing his best to atone for past sins, though he was evasive when it came to discussing their nature. He rarely spoke to her, but she often found him kneeling in prayer.
“I’d ask him what he was praying for,” the minister said. “All he would say was ‘Forgiveness.’”
“He never told you what had happened? What he did?”
The minister looked conflicted and I could tell it had something to do with confidentiality between a minister and a member of the flock, even a dead member of the flock. So I told her about Jason Cross.
Reverend Maya listened raptly as I described my parents’ descent into hell. I told her how my mother had died and about my disjointed memories of what I’d believed for three and a half decades was the night my father died.
“Mr. Brown confessed some of that to me, though there were never any names used. He said he’d killed his wife because she was suffering so.”
“I think that’s true. Did he ever mention us, the children? Or his mother?”
She nodded. “He did. He said his children were living with his mother somewhere up north, and that they were doing much better without him.”
Reverend Maya said that one evening several months after Brown had appeared at her church, she’d gone to check on him. Brown wasn’t there in the little room where he lived. Then she heard a shot and found him lying dead behind the church. He’d shot himself in the face with a shotgun.
“Can I see where it happened?”
She shook her head. “The church was a termite-ridden building that was torn down about five years after I left to take over a church in West Palm. But I’d be glad to show you his grave, if you’d like.”
“His grave. I’d like that very much.”
Chapter
68
“We’ll take my car,” Reverend Maya said. “Funner.”
To my surprise, she led me to an older-model, gleaming, two-door white Mazda Miata convertible roadster.
“Do all Unitarian Universalist ministers drive sports cars?” I asked.
She laughed. “This one does. It’s my single vice in life.”
The reverend was good at her vice; she drove the Miata on the rural roads beyond the decaying streets of Pahokee as if she’d had race training somewhere. I never got the chance to ask her if she had because she peppered me with questions about my life and my family.
I could tell by the end of the fifteen-minute drive that Reverend Maya was as good at probing for the soul of things as she was at driving.
“You’ve led an amazing life by any definition,” she said as she downshifted and turned through the narrow gate of a small cemetery out in the countryside. “I think Paul, uh, your father would have been very proud of you.”
I smiled, choked up, and said, “Thanks.”
Biting insects whirled around us the second she stopped the car. But then she reached into her glove compartment and pulled out two ThermaCell bug repellents. She clipped one to her purse. I put mine on my belt and was glad to see the thing worked.
We walked forward two lanes in the cemetery and took a left toward the chain-link fence and the dense vegetation beyond it. At the end of the row there was a simple reddish granite slab about the size of two bricks set side by side.
PAUL BROWN
DEDICATED SERVANT OF HIS LORD, JESUS CHRIST
I felt my shoulders slump a bit reading those words and then the date of his death below. I thought back through the years, wondered where I’d been when my father killed himself.
I’d been, what, twelve? Thirteen? Did I ever once think of him back then?
I doubted it, and that admission let loose a trickle of raw emotion that had been building since I’d come upon the gravestone of my dad. My head swung slowly back and forth. My lungs fluttered for air.
He’d killed my mother and escaped prosecution only to be consumed by guilt and grief. The dam burst in me then, and I gave into it all, the tragedy, the loss of my father a second time. Burying my face in the crook of my arm, I broke down sobbing.
I felt Reverend Maya’s hand rubbing my back.
“Hard thing,” she said. “Hard, hard thing.”
It was almost a minute before I could control myself. I sniffed and looked away from her, said, “Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” she said in a soothing tone.
“I feel bad about all of it.”
“I think it would be natural. What are you most upset about?”
I thought about that and anger pooled in me. “I didn’t have a dad. That’s what I’m angriest about. A boy deserves a father.”
“He does, and I’m sorry,” she said, deep empathy in her expression.
“There’s nothing for you to be sorry about,” I said in a hoarse voice. “My father made his decision. I’m sure he thought it was the right thing to do.”
“But it’s still a hard thing.”
I nodded. “It was like a door slammed shut on him the night he died. And then, just in the past few days, that door was open, just for a second, and I caught a glimpse of a secret passageway, but it ended at another locked door. One that will stay that way forever.”
Reverend Maya seemed to feel my pain as if it were her own, and she didn’t speak for a moment. Finally she said, “Do you need more time alone?”
I gazed down at the gravestone feeling wrung out, and then I said to my father’s ghost, “I love you, Dad. I forgive you, Dad.”
Reverend Maya patted me on the back again as I walked away from the gravestone. We were quiet on the drive back to Pahokee.
“I hope I’ve helped to give you closure, Dr. Cross,” she said after I’d disentangled myself from the Miata.
“I wanted to know my father’s whole story, and now I do, and now I’ll have to learn to live with it, and so will my grandmother.”
Reverend Maya gazed at me for a long moment, and then said, “I have to go home and make dinner for my husband, who should be getting off work about now, but I wish you and your family all of Jesus’s blessings.”
“Thank you, Reverend,” I said, smiling weakly and nodding. “I wish the same for you and your husband. And drive safe.”
“Always,” she said. Then she put the Miata in gear and sped off into the gathering night.
Chapter
69
It began to rain as I drove across the bridge around eight thirty that evening. I was debating when to call Bree. A part of me wanted to pick up the phone right then, but I didn’t want to churn the emotions all over again while in public and behind the wheel. I’d call when I got back to my room at the Hampton Inn after checking in with Sergeant Drummond.
But neither Drummond nor Johnson answered the phone, and when I drove by Mize Fine Arts, I didn’t see any sign that the place was under surveillance. I drove on toward Mize’s house, knowing that I was doing what I often did in turbulent times. I was turning my mind to a mystery and an investigation as a way of escaping the rest of my life.
I should have gone somewhere to eat, then returned to my hotel and tried to get an earlier flight back to North Carolina. Instead, I was in front of Mize’s hous
e, relieved to see Drummond’s vehicle right where I’d left it.
I drove around the corner, parked out of sight, and strolled down the sidewalk as nonchalantly as an African American male can in Palm Beach. Johnson saw me in the passenger-side mirror and unlocked the car.
I climbed in the backseat.
“Success?” Drummond asked, looking at me in the rearview.
“It was a great help. She was a great help.”
“Then we’re happy.”
“Yes, thank you, Sergeant.”
“Least we could do.”
“Given up watching the store?”
Drummond gestured through the windshield. “Those lights went on about an hour ago. Don’t know if it’s part of a security system or if Mize is in there.”
“How long are you going to sit on him?”
“I don’t know. Until I—”
“Sarge,” Johnson interrupted. “Garage door’s going up. Which car’s it gonna be? The Lexus or the…”
The rear end of a dark green convertible backed out of the garage into the turnaround. The top was up, and the car had to have been forty years old. It looked to me like something Sean Connery might have driven in his years as Bond.
“An Aston Martin DB Five convertible,” said Johnson appreciatively. “A very rare car. A very fast and nimble car. Roadster.”
“We’ll stay with it,” Drummond said, starting the car.
The roadster pulled out, revealing the silhouette of a tall figure behind the wheel. The car turned away from us, heading north at a rapid but legal clip toward Worth Avenue and Mize’s shop.
“You going to pull him over?” Johnson asked.
“I want to see where he goes at night after ignoring our phone calls and door knocks,” the sergeant said.
“Maybe he goes to Coco’s place,” Johnson said.
“You’re thinking they’re in this together?” Drummond asked.