Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work Read online

  I had come straight back to my apartment after leaving the Varsity, hoping she’d be here waiting for me.

  She was not.

  I hung around for a while, trying to do homework and work on the cases while waiting for her to call.

  She did not.

  After a while I gave up and walked to Scarlett’s.

  The dark path was spooky and seemed dangerous, and I wondered if Cedric was buried somewhere in these woods.

  I heard something a few feet off the path and turned.

  Through the bushes I could see a middle-aged white man leaning against a tree, his trousers down around his knees, a young black woman kneeling in front performing fellatio on him.

  Were Ronald Nolan and Laney Mitchell doing something similar when little Cedric ran by? Is that the way it really happened? Why was Cedric headed back to the apartments? Had he forgotten something? Did he see something or someone who scared him? Was Nolan telling the truth?

  “Make mine a double and keep ’em coming,” I said to Margaret as I reached the end of the bar and the stool I thought of as mine.

  “I’ll join you,” she said. “It’s been a day.”

  “Wait,” Susan said, walking up behind me. “You’ve been doin’ so well.”

  “I’m still doin’ well,” I said, climbing onto the barstool.

  “Then don’t blow it by jumpin’ down this particular rabbit hole. There’s nothin’ good at the bottom of it. You’ve got to know that better than me.”

  I looked at Margaret.

  “I could just as easily pour you coffee,” she said.

  “Et tu?”

  She shrugged. “Let’s both have coffee tonight.”

  “I’ll talk about the case with you,” Susan said. “You can ask me anything you want. And when I get off in a little while I’ll even go back to your place and watch a movie with you. Whatta you have?”

  “Sixteen Candles—”

  “My favorite.”

  “Oh sexy girlfriend,” Margaret said in her best Asian accent.

  “Lots of sugar,” I said.

  They both voiced their approval.

  Margaret poured the coffee and shoved cream and sugar toward me as Susan climbed up on the stool beside me.

  I had not mentioned Laney Mitchell to either of them again. As far as I knew neither of them had any idea she had run after Cedric the night he disappeared or that doing so might be connected to what happened to her. And they weren’t going to hear it from me—not until I found out if there was anything to it. So I decided to pursue another line of questioning with them instead.

  “What do y’all know about Creepy Daryl Lee Gibbons?” I said.

  “He scared Cedric,” Susan said.

  “I know Lonnie beat the shit out of him tryin’ to find Cedric,” Margaret said. “Don’t blame him. He was the most likely suspect we had. If there was even a chance he had taken Cedric, that he could still be alive, he had to try to find out . . . no matter what it took.”

  “What it took was twenty-three stitches and a lot of bandages and pain meds,” Susan said.

  “I don’t think Creepy was the only one Lonnie pummeled tryin’ to find out what happened,” Margaret added.

  “You don’t remember him being around here that night, do you?” I said. “Could he be who Cedric was running from?”

  “Didn’t see him. Don’t think he was around. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered and worried if it was someone coming in or going out of here that night that killed him.”

  A thought occurred to me—one I couldn’t believe I hadn’t had before—one I had to act on immediately.

  “Can I borrow your phone?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Margaret said, “but be a lot quieter to use the payphone outside. Here’s a quarter.”

  “Thanks.”

  It was late, but this couldn’t wait. I was sure I would wake him—him and his sweet wife, but I couldn’t not call him right now.

  The phone booth was at the end of the lot down near the sidewalk on Memorial Drive.

  I walked directly to it, stone cold sober, light but steady traffic streaking by on Memorial.

  Dropping the quarter in, I dialed the number I had long since memorized.

  Frank Morgan answered trying not to sound like I had just woken him up.

  “I want to meet with him,” I said.

  “John?”

  “Sorry, yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  “I am.”

  “You sure?”

  “I want to meet with him, Frank.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who. Can you set it up?”

  “It’ll take some doin’, and I’ll have to be there, but yeah, if you can pass a background check, I can set it up.”

  “Would you?”

  “I will.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Not sure if I’ve told you lately, but you’ve been a grace to me—one of the few since I’ve been here. And ’less you think that’s drink talking, I haven’t had one in awhile.”

  I started to hang up.

  “Before you go,” he said. “I spoke with the attorney representing Martin Fisher’s mother. Told him how good you were to the kid, how bad the mom was, how you took care of him and never even saw her the entire time they were your neighbors. Told him to reconsider.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “That if he didn’t take the case someone else would. I told him we’d produce credible witnesses to refute everything the absentee mother said and that supported everything you said—including law enforcement officers.”

  “What’d he say to that?”

  “Says that’s the way it works. We produce witnesses and they produce witnesses. Wouldn’t back down. I told him the only thing of value you owned was a VCR—and that it wasn’t worth that much. And that’s when he let it slip.”

  “What?”

  “Since you were living in what was technically a college dorm, he thinks they can get EPI and Chapel Hill Harvester Church to settle for a sizable chunk of change.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  The blow was devastating—the embarrassment alone was more than I could handle, but to have the church and college on the line for something I was involved in?

  “It’s the way people like this think.”

  “I . . . I can’t . . . I don’t know what to say. It’s too much.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself. I haven’t given up on this. We’ll get it straightened out.”

  After hanging up, I was too upset to go back into Scarlett’s right away.

  For a while I just paced around the mostly empty parking lot.

  “You okay?”

  I turned to see Lonnie locking the front door of his video store.

  I shrugged.

  “What is it?”

  I told him. Not in detail but enough to give him a sense of what I was dealing with.

  “You know what to do,” he said. “Don’t need me to tell you. Let go of what you can’t change anyway and change what you can. Breathe in peace. Breathe out worry and stress. You can do it. Say the Serenity Prayer with me.”

  I did.

  “Again.”

  This time he took my hand in his as we prayed the prayer together again.

  “God grant me the serenity to accept thing things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You gonna be okay? I can call the guys over and we can have a meeting right now.”

  “I’m okay. Thanks.”

  “Not thinking about drinking, are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Will you call me if you need anything?” he asked. “Anything at all?”

  “I will. And thanks again.”

  28

  Though Susan had offered to come back and watch a movie with me, I went home alone.

  I was upset by the news Frank had given
me, but was I also hoping Summer would come over at some point.

  Perhaps. But that was only part of it. I wanted to work my walls, compile the information I had received so far, to look over things in the light of the new details I now had.

  I intended to go straight in and get to work.

  What I did instead was collapse onto my bed and fall fast asleep.

  Soon I was dreaming.

  Summer and I were standing in the woods between Memorial Manor and Scarlett’s, talking about Cedric and the other still-missing boys when they began to rise out of the ground around us.

  Digging, scratching, scooping, they clawed their way out of their shallow graves, their faces, hair, and clothes caked with dirt and mud, twigs and bugs sticking to their hair, dried blood clinging to their soiled and tattered clothes.

  I was saying something when I woke up but had no idea what.

  When I went back to sleep, Mickey Davis was demonstrating how easy it would be to snatch a kid. One moment we were riding in his car on I-20 toward downtown, the next he was pulling up to a street corner where a barefooted, shirtless young black boy in only cutoffs was walking home with a can of snuff.

  “Get in,” Mickey said.

  The kid did as he was told.

  “See?” he said to me.

  “Yeah, see?” the kid said. “Nothing to it.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” they said in unison. “Nothing means nothing.”

  The next morning, during a discussion in my New Testament class, I was struck by how different I was from the other students, how different my experience was from theirs.

  It wasn’t just that their paradigm and approach to religion and the Bible was far more concrete and literal than mine, it was that this classroom, the school, the church, the practice of their faith was all consuming. I was sure they must, but it didn’t seem like they had a life outside of the school and the church.

  Maybe it wasn’t that they didn’t have one, but the way being part of the school and being a member of the church defined, dictated, and determined their lives entire.

  There had been a special service at the church the night before. I was the only one not in attendance.

  When I offered a dissenting opinion, a different way of seeing the same dynamic—namely God’s work in the world—I was told that I just didn’t get it. I would have if I had attended the service, heard the bishop’s message, a message they referred to as the rest of the revelation.

  “God’s only work in the world is through his church,” one student said. “It’s only those aligned with his purpose, his set-aside and chosen people, who can come into agreement with him to bring about his kingdom on this planet.”

  It must have been obvious that I didn’t agree.

  “You disagree?” he said to me.

  “I do.”

  When I didn’t elaborate, he said, “Why?”

  “Your supposition is rooted in tribalism,” I said. “It’s the old us-and-them formulation. I don’t see it that way. I think grace flows through whoever allows it to. To label a group of people as special, as the only ones used by God isn’t just imperceptive, it’s dangerous. It’s the same kind of thinking that says there’s no truth outside of a particular sacred text, or a specific spokesperson for God. It’s limiting to the point of absurdity. If there’s a God, a creative, loving force that transcends being itself, she can’t be limited to a single religion, book, prophet, or—”

  “Pronoun, evidently,” another student said.

  “Exactly. It’s like Paul Tillich said—‘God isn’t a being, but the ground of all being.’”

  “Tillich also said ‘the first duty of love is to listen,’” Dan Rhodes, the professor, said. “We need to make sure we’re all doing that, all listening to one another.”

  What if Martin’s mother’s lawsuit causes all this to go away? What if it damages it beyond repair? What if I’m responsible for that?

  It felt funny to keep calling her Martin’s mother, but I had never met the woman, didn’t know anything about her—including her name.

  I nodded. “Sorry if I didn’t listen like I should.”

  “I’m not saying you didn’t,” he said. “Just reminding us all that we need to. Let’s listen to John some more. Share with us what you’re feeling, what you’re hearing, what you’d like to say.”

  “Thank you. I don’t have answers, only questions. I believe the religious experience can be approached as a way of having all the answers or as a way of having none, of only having profound questioning. Back to Tillich—this will be the last time I quote him today, I promise. He said something to the effect that being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even when they hurt. For me . . . I just feel . . . like maybe our conversations and explorations are sometimes too confining, too reductive for the topics we’re discussing. I’m sure it’s just me, though. Thanks for letting me share that.”

  He nodded. “You make a good point. We believe we’ve been created in the image of God. We must be careful not to return the favor.”

  “I don’t understand,” another student said.

  “We have to make sure we’re not making God over into our image, that we’re not making an idol out of ourselves—our own beliefs and preferences and limitations and superstitions.”

  “Which I know I’m guilty of,” I said.

  “We all are. First step is to recognize it. Can’t deal with it until we do.”

  That made me think of AA and Lonnie’s small, sincere group, and I committed to going later in the day.

  Thinking of Lonnie led me to Cedric and gave me an idea. It would require yet another favor from Frank Morgan—something I had to be getting close to exhausting but had yet to.

  Thinking of Frank in the context of this class and conversation made me think of how much good he did in the world, how much the force of God worked through him, though he would never see it that way. He was not a member of any church, wasn’t religious in any way but the ways that mattered.

  “Sorry again for waking you up last night,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said.

  I was in Randy Renfroe’s office after class, calling Saint Frank.

  “Not so sorry to keep me from asking for another favor or two, though.”

  He laughed.

  “It’s just a thought I had,” I said. “Remember me tellin’ you that Ada Baker claims her son Cedric calls her from time to time?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Could we put a trace on her phone so we can track down whoever it is doing the calling—if there is someone?”

  “It’s a great idea,” he said. “I just don’t know logistically if it’s something I can get done. What’s the other?”

  “Trying to find a guy named Daryl Lee Gibbons.”

  “What’s his story?” he asked.

  I told him.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “You commit to going home for the holidays and really make an effort to patch things up with your dad, and I’ll see what I can do about both. Deal?”

  I thought about it for a moment. Thanksgiving was a few weeks away, and I had pretty much decided to stay up here that weekend, but . . .

  “Deal,” I said. “Thanks, Frank.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot. That hit-and-run you asked about.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No evidence that it was anything but,” he said. “In fact, cop on the scene theorized that maybe the driver didn’t even know he’d done it. There were no skid marks. Looks like he never even braked.”

  “Which is exactly how it would look if it wasn’t an accident.”

  When I ended my call with Frank, I walked across the hall to the chapel.

  Classes completed, students gone for the day, most of the small staff at lunch, the chapel was empty, quiet, and dark, just the way I liked it.

  For a while I just walked around the
chapel, thinking, praying, wrestling with my mind.

  I was missing Summer, agitated that I hadn’t heard from her. I was anxious about the cases, the lawsuit, my conflict with my fellow students and my estrangement from my dad, and many other things I needed to let go of.

  Which was what I was here for.

  “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” I said aloud into the silence of the sacred space, “the courage the change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  After a while of saying it, I began to practice it, and eventually I began to feel somewhat centered again.

  29

  That afternoon I went to the AA meeting in Lonnie’s storage room.

  I was sitting across from a partially visible poster of Dressed to Kill, the Brian De Palma Hitchcockian erotic thriller with Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson. The top of the poster read “Brian De Palma, the master of the macabre, invites you to a special showing of the latest fashion . . . in murder.”

  It peeked out from behind a shelf of cat food and cases of Coke—the latter Lonnie both sold and consumed.

  As we said the Serenity Prayer and went over the Twelve Steps, I realized I had been using them to deal with Summer’s disappearance from my life, the lawsuit, the case. Rather than remaining upset or so out of sorts I wasn’t good for much of anything else, I had practiced accepting what I couldn’t change and changed what I could.

  The process and practice of AA didn’t just work for alcohol addiction.

  “I want to talk about something today that we can all fall victim to,” Lonnie said. “Being dry drunks—something that happens when we stop drinking but don’t change our mentalities, don’t change our stinking thinking.”

  The two other men nodded as if they knew what he was talking about.

  “Sobriety isn’t just stopping the consumption of alcohol,” he said. “It’s a way of life, of being. It’s a complete change in our way of thinking, behaving, living. It can only happen when we deal with our defects of character.”

  “Drinking is a symptom not the disease,” one of the other men added.

  “Exactly.”

  “Drinking is our way of dealing with the disease,” the other man said. “The worst way.”