Fallout (Joshua Stokes Mysteries Book 2) (10 page)

“Why did you wait so long to tell him of this?” Joshua wondered aloud.

“I tried, honestly I did; however, he refused to speak with me right after she disappeared. I think he thought I helped her to run away or something. I reported what Anna had told Mattie and me to my husband, and to the chief of police.

The police did not pay much attention to what I told them though. They all assumed that Anna had run away with this young man because he disappeared too! I even told them what Mattie had seen when she read the tealeaves and your mother’s palm. Of course, the police really frowned upon that. They said that Mattie was just an old soothsayer and folks that believed in all of
that
stuff were just plain gullible.”

“What did she see?” Joshua asked quickly.

Vivian hesitated, smoothing her skirt and then she asked Joshua if she could have one of his cigarettes. He handed her one, lit it for her, and then lit one for himself.

“Mattie saw danger surrounding Anna. She broke down, grabbed Anna’s hands, and told her she must avoid this man. Anna thought she was talking about the young salesman, however, Mattie said ‘the Elder is the Cock of the Roost.’”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Joshua asked, quickly trying to figure it out in his own mind. Who was the Cock of the Roost?

“We asked Mattie to elaborate on her vision,” Vivian said, “However, she became all flustered over what she saw when she took your mother’s hands. She stared through the curtain at you, said ‘poor child’, and then became still and quiet. She was squeezing Anna’s hands
very
tightly and Anna tried to pull away. We thought Mattie was going into a trance of some sort.” Vivian took a long draw off the cigarette. Joshua waited for her to speak again, although it was hard for him not to question her.

He wondered why no one had ever followed up on her telling them about the young salesman stalking his mother; that was what it was, stalking. Neither his father nor the police had followed up on it that he knew of, because he had checked the records for the year she disappeared when he first became a cop.

His mother’s disappearance was why he had joined the police force in the first place; much like her wanting to work at the courthouse hoping to find records of her brother and sister. If his mother did keep a journal, maybe she wrote that man’s name in it. Maybe she wrote her feelings in it. Maybe it contained what he needed to find out what had happened to her. Maybe it was stored with the rest of her belongings!

Joshua realized that he was still staring at the picture in the photo album and that Vivian remained quiet. She had remained quite so long that Joshua looked up from the photo album and asked again, what was it that Mattie had seen when she looked at his mother’s palms. Vivian was rigid and white as a sheet. At first, he thought she was in some sort of trance, but suddenly she moved and snubbed her cigarette butt in the ashtray. Then she asked if she could have another one. She said that it was too early in the day to have a glass of wine. Vivian said that she had been quit smoking for thirty years, but now felt she needed one. Joshua obliged, and then waited until she had taken a long draw.

“My sweet Mattie wasn’t going into a trance, Sheriff, she was having a stroke. Whatever she saw that day, she was never able to tell us. I know that whatever it was it haunted her. After the stroke, she tried to talk. Many times, she tried to write something too, but it was just chicken scratch on paper. Mattie died two weeks later. Anna and I tried to figure it out but never could. Anna said that there had not been any older men bothering her or watching her that she knew of. She had not had to work at the store with your father for several months, therefore had not encountered any new people.

The only places she went were here to my house, to the TG&Y, maybe to your school, and of course to church. When y’all moved out there, she had started going to that little holiness church there in Semmes. She said it gave her comfort knowing that Jesus watched over her. However, very briefly, Anna did wonder if maybe Mattie was talking about one of the men that attended the church, but she did not believe that it could be any of them.” Vivian became quiet and Joshua spoke what was on his mind.

“It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed,” he recited a verse his mother had told him after the event at school when Jimmy James had called her a ‘McIntosh Cajun.’

Vivian looked at him with tears in her eyes; however, Joshua was not looking at her. He had not taken his eyes from the album since he gave her the cigarette. Then he said, “If Mattie said the elder was the cock of the roost, she was probably referring to the salesman’s father; he was also a traveling salesman, right? I can tell you right now that the nut does not fall far from the tree. If the younger man was a stalker…” Joshua’s voice dropped off as if he was thinking.

“Did Annaleigh ever tell you what this man’s name was? Did she write it in the journal?” Joshua questioned, hoping his mother had told Vivian. His mother would have known that man’s name if he and his father both frequented the area and the store.

“Yes she did. She told me his name was Dickson or maybe Dixon with an x.”

The name was like a slap in the face to Joshua. It had not dawned on him to check different spellings of the surname when he checked the files looking for information on the father of the Dixon brothers; he supposedly hung himself in the attic of the old funeral home in Citronelle. Joshua determined that he needed to make a trip to Citronelle as soon as he got the chance to do so and look through some of the local records.

“What is it, Sheriff? You look as though you have seen a ghost.”

“I have, sort of,” Joshua replied. If his suppositions were right, the murdering gene the Dixon’s carried, could go back further that just two generations.

“I need to go now. I have enough information to get me started into a more thorough investigation,” he said, still looking down at the album that was open to the picture of him, his mother, and Mattie. “Do you mind if I borrow this album for a bit. I’d like to get copies made of these photographs.”

“No, honey, I don’t mind; just please bring it back. It is all I have left of your mother and Mattie. When I look through these pictures, it is almost as if they are sitting beside me. I’m getting up in age and likely not to be around too many more years.”

Joshua looked Vivian in the eye. She was probably close to seventy; she was still a handsome woman. He smiled at her and told her that of course he would bring it back and that he would guard it with his life. He thanked her for all the information she had given him and then he walked back through the kitchen toward the front door. When he stepped into the kitchen, he saw Georgia sitting at the table peeling potatoes.

“Be careful mister
police
man. You know not what you find when you open doors that have been closed a long time,” Georgia spoke without looking up from the table.

“Georgia!” Vivian exclaimed from behind him. “You hush that now. Don’t go trying to frighten people.” Joshua stopped and stared at Georgia a moment.

“Do you have the gift of sight too?” he asked.

“Don’t pay her any attention, Sheriff, she just wa-” Vivian began, but was cut off.

“No’am, I not, I speak only the truth of what I see,” Georgia replied, still not taking her eyes from the table.

“Georgia is a granddaughter of my Mattie,” Vivian explained. “You and Georgia use to play together when you were children.” Both Georgia and Joshua’s eyes went to Vivian and then each other. Neither of them remembered playing together. Joshua tipped his hat and continued toward the front door. He walked the two blocks back to his patrol car and got in, laying the photo album on the seat beside him. He placed his hand over it protectively. Flashes of memory sparked in short bursts of a picnic at the park. He had no sooner sat down when a car pulled up beside him; it was Deputy Cook.

“Where the heck have you been, Sheriff? We’ve been looking for you for over an hour.” Joshua did not feel that it was anyone’s business where he had been, however he did respond to his deputies question, but with a question of his own.

“Why have y’all been looking for me?” he asked.

“We think we caught that Mexican that killed the Vice’s and that nig-colored woman down in Theodore. The patrolman in Bayou La Batre picked him up after he stole a suit of clothes off a clothesline. A woman seen him taking the clothes and called in a description of him and her husband’s clothes that he took. They are holding him down there until you send someone to transport him to the county jail. You know they don’t have but the one patrolman down there, he can’t leave 'em unprotected.”

“Well, what are you waiting on, you and Davis go get him.”

“Yes, Sir” Cook exclaimed, grabbing his microphone and radioing Ida Mae to tell her to get a hold of Davis for him. Joshua hoped it was the
right
Mexican they held and that he could get rid of the burden that was weighing heavy because of that man.

After the way he felt seeing the Vices’ and the old Negro woman murdered like they was, he did not trust himself to transport their killer. Someone that preyed on the old and infirmed did not deserve to be treated with a gentle hand. He would just as soon shoot him as to look at him and he still might if the urge came over him to do so.

Joshua lit a cigarette, and then drove through the tunnel to the Causeway. It was the only crossing into Baldwin County other than by boat or ferry; at least without having to go fifty miles out of the way.

He drove along the causeway for about a mile and then pulled into a small park that sat along the bay waters. Joshua parked and then walked out onto a short dock that jutted out into the briny water of Mobile Bay.

A gentle breeze blows his memories back to childhood; this time, he remembers. He is wading in the water, holding onto his mother’s hand. He looks up at her. She is also in the water, wading knee deep at the waters edge. Her soft brown eyes are aglow with happiness. She holds tightly to his hand and is telling him not to let go because she does not know how to swim… the young Joshua looks around. There with them is Vivian; she is young and vibrant like his mother. Mattie, with her tattered rag tied on her head and an umbrella shading her from the sun, sits on a stool smiling a toothless smile. A young black girl, that must be Georgia, is on her knees building a castle in the sand. It is just the five of them.

Underneath the pines, behind Mattie, a picnic blanket lays spread out on the ground, the remnants of their meal drawing flies. When he looks past the blanket, an old station wagon parked at the other end of the small park catches Joshua’s attention. A man watches them from a distance; his stance seems familiar.

A sudden gust of wind brought Joshua from his reminiscing. He lit a cigarette and walked back toward his patrol car. He felt much like a small boy who was lost and alone as he got into his car and drove out to the main road.

Joshua drove to the courthouse and went straight to the records office. A girl with an unruly mop of dark hair peeked up at him from under fringed bangs. Mischief filled hazel eyes questioned him as to why he is standing in front of her desk. He noticed that the freckles across her nose ran no further than just below each eye. She turned her eyes from his to look at her nails, and then blew the dust off them. She then gave him a look that asked if he was dense or something.

He did know how to take her; she seemed laid-back and lazy. Joshua asked her to gather and bring the arrest records and mug shot books from 1930 through 1940 to his office. When she gave him a strange look, he ignored her.

“It may take me a minute or two to get them together for you, Sheriff. But, I will start on it now,” she said quickly when he raised an eyebrow at her. He was about to tell her to snap to it. From the looks of the place, she did not do much more filing than she was doing when he walked up to the partition and that was to file her nails.

Joshua left there and walked toward the evidence room. There was a steel door now where once there had been just a normal door; it was locked. Aggravated, he turned back toward the desk, but the girl from the desk was coming toward him with a set of keys. She unlocked the door, let him in, showed him where the lights were, and even that there was a flashlight in a desk drawer in case he needed it and then left.

In the room, there were boxes piled from floor to ceiling stacked on rows of back-to-back shelves that were at least thirty feet in length. On the end of each row was written the years that were placed on each row of shelves. On the furthermost row to the left were 1750 - 1850, the second from the end was 1850 - 1875, and the next was 1875 - 1900 and so on. Joshua located the 1925 - 1950 shelves and began his investigation of the records housed on it. The lighting sucked; it forced him to procure the flashlight and return. He had been in the room before, but it had been at least twenty-five years since he had.

The writing on the end of the boxes was faded with age, many hard to read. Some boxes were light, not filled with much. Several were heavy, filled with papers and other evidence that had been stored away. He went from box to box; shining the light on each until he made it to the end of the row… he was overwhelmed.

Joshua did not know where to start. Most of the boxes held ordinary paperwork from murder cases and robberies that were tried in court, solved, and the perpetrator sentenced to time in jail or sent off to Holman Prison to serve out their sentence or to be executed.

He was about to give up when he saw a box on the bottom row that was covered with dust. Spider webs also ran from the corner of the shelf to the box. He pulled it out from under the others and shined his light on the writing on the end. The words UNSOLVED jumped out at him!

As he toted the box to the desk at the front of the room, he wondered how he had overlooked the box the first time he searched the room; but then remembered that the room and boxes were not nearly as neat as they were now.

The lighting at the desk was much better. Once there, he read the rest of the writing on the front of the box. It said, unsolved reports, 1930 thru 1940 - filed by Joseph Jernigan. When he read the name, a mental image of the man flashed through his mind.

Joshua remembered a Detective Jernigan; he was part of the City of Mobile’s Police force, not the County. Joshua was on the Cities force until he bought the cabin. That was when he transferred to the County Sheriff’s Department. When working for the city, one had to live inside the city limits.

He remembered that Jernigan had once walked up to him, started to say something, and then changed his mind and walked away.