CJ made a grunting noise. “So you're gonna talk to her tomorrow, then? No holiday falls on tomorrow.”
“I ... I hadn't thought about it. Maybe. I don't know.”
“Christmas is gone, New Years is gone.” CJ shrugged. “Let's see ... Martin Luther King Day is coming up. You gonna use that for your next excuse? Maybe you won't want to mess up the day that celebrates Dr. King's birth either.”
Theresa thought that was funny too. Apparently, to her, it was even funnier than the wisecrack about the boy who cried wolf.
Neil stood. “Okay, I'm about to go. It's obvious that I've worn out my welcome.”
“Boy, sit down.” Theresa wiped moisture from her eyes.
“No,” Neil protested. “Apparently you and your sidekick husband here think this is some kind of joke. I'm dealing with a very stressful situation, and the two of you are getting your jollies off of it.”
CJ looked up at him. “Do you see me laughing? Am I laughing?”
“I don't
see
you laughing, but I hear it. The two of you are working together. You're the ventriloquist, and the sounds are coming out of your dummy's mouth.”
In a flash, Theresa was back on her elbows. Getting to her feet wasn't nearly as easy, but she didn't have to struggle for long. Before Neil could even figure out what he'd said to generate such a reaction, CJ was standing in her stead.
“What did you just call her?” CJ was three inches from Neil's face, and he looked about two seconds away from speaking in unknown tongues ... and not the holy kind.
“What?” Neil batted his eyes while the ticker tape in his mind tried to reverse and detect the error. “What?” he repeated.
“You just called Resa a dummy, and not only is that inaccurate and inappropriate, but it's also endangering.
Your life
, that is.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Neil held up both his hands in surrender. The closest he and CJ had ever come to fighting were the arm wrestling matches they used to challenge each other to in their college days. Sometimes Neil would win, and other times CJ would. At this stage of their lives, Neil wasn't sure who would get the victory, but he wasn't curious enough to try to find out, either. He took two steps back. “Hold up, man. You know that's not what I meant. Bad example. Bad example, okay?” He watched CJ's facial muscles relax. “It was just a poor choice of words. All I was saying was that you were doing the laughing, but the sound was coming out of Theresa's mouth. That's all. I wasn't going for any name-calling.” As CJ backed away, Neil mumbled, “Good Lord. Just a few weeks ago, y'all were about to turn the church office into a Hampton Inn; now you want to turn your living room into Caesar's Palace. I'ma pray for y'all.” He began heading for the front door.
“You don't have to leave, Neil,” Theresa said.
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don't. Dinner should be ready now, and you know you love my meatloaf. You should stay and eat with us.”
Theresa's meatloaf was good, true enough. And Neil hadn't eaten one morsel of food all day, but he still declined. “I should be getting on home.”
“Come on, Neil,” CJ chimed in. He pointed at the couch that Neil had been occupying until just a short while ago. “Sit down, bruh. It's cool. I'm fine now.”
Neil looked at CJ and scowled. “Man, ain't nobody scared of you. You think I'm leaving 'cause of you? Man, I coulda took you in my sleep.”
CJ laughed. “Whatever it takes to make you feel better, bruh.”
Neil stretched his body. “I wasn't supposed to be over here this long anyway. When I first got here, I told y'all I was just gonna be here a few minutes.” Neil looked at his watch. “It's been almost two hours. I still need to get that work done before I go to bed tonight. I fooled around and let the entire holiday break pass and didn't complete the electronic files that I need to update in the school database. I gave Ms. Dasher half, and I took the other half. She'll never let me live it down if she has hers done when we return on Wednesday and I don't.” Neil walked to their front closet and retrieved his coat.
“Man! That sure is sharp,” CJ said, admiring the black number that Shaylynn had bought Neil for Christmas.
Neil laughed. “Yeah, I know. You said that when I first got here.”
“Did Shay tell you that I helped her pick it out?” Theresa reached over her shoulder and patted herself on the back. “I did good, didn't I?”
“She told me that she picked the coat, but you picked the color.”
“That's true.” Theresa finally relieved CJ of his duties and managed to sit up straight. “She wanted to buy a brown one; talkin' 'bout, âBut Solomon looks so good in chocolate.'”
Neil laughed at Theresa's pitiful attempt to sound like Shaylynn, but he felt himself blush behind the compliment. “She didn't tell me that part.”
“I told her to put that mess back. You already have enough brown in your closet, including a coat.”
“I already had a black coat too.”
“Yeah, but not like that one.”
CJ agreed. “Yeah, bruh. This one is way sharper than that long one you have.”
Neil couldn't seem to stop smiling. Shaylynn did, indeed, make a good choice. Both of them had to laugh when they opened their gifts on Christmas Day, because both had bought coats for the other. Shaylynn's peacoat looked good on her too. Not as good as that ring would have looked on her finger, but that was another story. Neil shook the thought from his head.
“You want me to fix you a plate to go?” Theresa offered. “The meatloaf is ready by now. It'll only take a minute.”
“It's gonna take you more than a minute just to get up off that couch.”
“Shut up.” Theresa threw one pillow at Neil for what he said and another at CJ for laughing at it.
“Oh.” Neil snapped his fingers after tossing the pillow back on the sofa. “I still need to get that list from you, CJ. I need that in order to complete the updates tonight.”
“I'm gonna help Resa in the kitchen. You can go in my office and get it. You can't miss it. It's the red folder in the bottom tray on my desk.”
Neil knew the layout of the Loather home almost as well as he knew his own, even though theirs was much larger. Before CJ and Theresa got married, he used to spend a lot more time there than now, but not much about it had changed. Just more flowers and other girlie stuff than before, but the layout virtually remained the same. The baby room was the biggest change, and even that room was already there. Thanks to Shaylynn's genius, it just had a totally different look now.
When Neil reached his pastor's home office, he stood in the doorway for a moment and looked around. CJ had to have about the neatest office he'd ever seen. All of his reading matter, mostly biblical resource material, was neatly lined on the bookshelves. All of his writing instruments were standing upright in a pencil holder. The big framed photo of his parents was hanging on the wall so straight that it looked like it was a permanent part of the structure itself. CJ spent hours in that office during the course of the week, but that couldn't be detected by looking at it. Neil knew that all the credit belonged to Theresa. Before CJ got married, just getting from the doorway to his desk was an Olympic sport.
As Neil approached the desk, he saw the red folder. Like CJ said, he couldn't miss it. It was the only red folder in the bottom tray. No ... actually, there were two of them. Neil didn't realize it until he began pulling one out and saw that there was another one beneath it. Not knowing which was the right one, he flipped open the cover to inspect the contents. At first he didn't know what he was reading, but it was in CJ's handwriting. The sentences on the page were broken and sketchy. It seemed like the outline for some sort of mystery-thriller that CJ was embarking upon writing. It sure would be a good one. Just the rough draft drew Neil in and kept his eyes scanning the page.
Had interview with sole witness who refused to give his name... murdered victim involved in illegal gambling... drug laundering... prostitution. . . you name it ... was unfaithful to his wife during entire marriage ... loved call girls ... bought women like most men bought suits ... dirty politics ... paid by drug lords ... something happened shortly before murder ... had a life change and came to Christ ... conscience kicked in ... was about to pull the cover off of the operation ... friends became his enemies ... price put on his head ... murder for hire ... city and state officials probably all involved... sole witness to the murder still lives in fear of his own life ... the shooting was definitely a political cover-up ... Kris-Cross P.I. conclusion: Mayor Emmett Ford was a dirty politician who was murdered because he got saved...
Neil's eyes skimmed over the writings three times. Then they did it a fourth time, just to be sure that they had viewed it right the first, second, and third time. The words hadn't changed. The meaning hadn't changed. Shaylynn's beloved Emmett was a crook. A drug-funded, sleazy-politicking, whore-hiring crook. The shock of the earth-shattering revelation rendered Neil speechless. The best he could do was mouth the words:
Oh. My. God!
TWELVE
Shaylynn turned over and moaned. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the covers of her comfy temporary bed felt even better now than they had when she lay down about ten hours ago. Every time she visited the city that she'd once called home, Shaylynn lodged at the same bed and breakfast. Lucus and Alice Jessup, the retired white couple who owned the business, repeatedly gave Shaylynn the star treatment during her infrequent visits. The Jessups had once been her neighbors when she was married to the city's new mayor. They were two of the very few true friends she ever felt she had while living in Milwaukee, and whenever Shaylynn came into town, they took her in as if she were family, and never publicized her being at their establishment.
Because of the high-profile individual Emmett was, and the still unsolved status of his murder, even all these many years later it was a sure thing that Shaylynn's privacy would be interrupted by the media if her presence was ever leaked, so she kept as low a profile as possible. Only those she knew she could trust to keep her visit confidential could know that she was in town. Her former parents-in-law certainly weren't going to blab. They wouldn't dare do anything that might give Shaylynn another fifteen minutes of fame, and that was just fine with her. Attention was the last thing she wanted.
It had been her intent to go to her old neighborhood today. Although Shaylynn had made this special return trip to Milwaukee every year for the past six years for Chase to spend some quality time with her estranged former in-laws, Shaylynn hadn't seen the house in which she and Emmett had shared a life, since she and her son made their initial move away from the city when Chase was only nine months old. She'd always avoided that side of town like the plague, but this year, she'd made a mental note to incorporate it as a part of her visit. It was a part of the closure process that she'd set in place for herself, but the snowfall over the past two days had forced her to delay her plans.
Shaylynn sat up in her bed, stretched her arms, and looked around. The walls of her secret quarters were a welcoming shade of powder blue, and they were a perfect match for the white bed linen that was patterned with light pink and baby blue pinstripes. Aside from the white wooden furniture, there was very little to the decor in the room; just a beautiful bouquet of fresh pink and white carnations that sat on a corner stand, and one large framed photo that was mounted on the wall above the entertainment center. The picture showed an endless view of the blue waters of the ocean with sailboats drifting in the distance.
The interior decorator inside of Shaylynn couldn't help envisioning the room looking quite differently. As nice as the space was, to Shaylynn's professionally trained eyes it looked more like something for an adolescent, rather than an adult. If the room was placed in her capable hands, she would replace the enlarged mounted photograph with a framed oil painting of some kind. Maybe a family of deer grazing by a brook in a forest. The only existing decor she would keep was the bearskin rug that lay on the wooden floor at the foot of the bed. Beige walls, mahogany furniture, burgundy and cream floral curtains, and a solid burgundy bed comforter with matching throw pillows in assorted block patterns of burgundy and beige would replace everything else. In Shaylynn's opinion, her ideas would mature the room and give it a cozier feel ... like the warm colors did in her Solomon's home.
Solomon
. The random thought of him briefly took her to Atlanta, Georgia, and recent memories curled the corners of her lips upward. She still couldn't believe the irony of them both gifting each other with new coats on Christmas. The one Neil bought for her wasn't built for Wisconsin's winters, but she loved it so much that she'd packed it and brought it along for the ride anyway.
A long yawn returned Shaylynn's mind to her current surroundings. Her room was comfortably toasty, but last night's news reports said today's outside temperatures would remain below zero. She kicked off her covers and walked to her window, opening the curtain just wide enough to peer outside. Her prayers had been answered. The snow had stopped falling, but the blanket it left behind appeared to be five inches thicker than it was when she arrived. From her view, Shaylynn could see the trucks at work, once again, clearing the roadways, so that driving would be a safer and easier task for Milwaukeeans who needed to get from point A to point B. There were very few things that Shaylynn missed about the city that had elected her husband as its first African American mayor some years ago, but the mounds of snow was one of them. As a young bride, she used to enjoy watching, from the window of her sitting room, as the white stuff accumulated on the ground like fallen blown kisses from heaven. Something about being in love had the tendency to put a romantic spin on everything.
Winter expectations were only one of many differences between Milwaukee and Atlanta. It tickled Shaylynn when she heard her new Atlanta friends talk about how cold it was down there. Compared to Wisconsin's brutal temperatures, an average winter day in Atlanta was like beach weather. Just last month, in mid-December, shortly before the Christmas break, nearly all the schools, churches, and even some of the businesses in metropolitan Atlanta had shut their doors for two entire days because two inches of snow had fallen overnight.
Two
inches!
She guessed if they ever got even half of what Milwaukee had on its ground right now, those in political power would urge the president of the United States to declare the entire city a disaster area.
The ringing of the telephone drew Shaylynn's eyes away from the goings-on outside her window. Only two people, Lucas and Alice Jessup, knew how to telephone her on the landline of her room, and she knew that only one of them would actually do it. “Good morning, Mrs. Jessup,” she said immediately as she placed the phone to her ear.
A soft laugh preceded the response of, “Morning has long come and gone, Shaylynn. It's afternoon now. You had me worried. I just wanted to check to be sure you were okay.”
“Yes, maâam. I'm fine. I didn't mean to worry you.” Shaylynn looked at the clock beside her bed. She knew she'd slept late, but she didn't realize it was already after one. She released another yawn. “This is what happens when you give me such a comfortable bed.” The truth of the matter was that she'd been up so late last night talking with Neil on the telephone that it was nearly three o'clock this morning by the time she got to bed. And then one of her favorite Julia Roberts movies came on, and even as she lay in bed, she watched it in its entirety before finally drifting off to sleep around five.
Alice laughed again. “Well, I'm glad you like it. You know it's always our pleasure to have you here. Have you eaten? The staff told me that you never picked up your breakfast tray this morning. They said when they came by your room, the food they set out for you at nine was still there. You must be starving by now. Lucas and I are having lunch in our private dining chambers, and we'd be glad to have you join us.”
Shaylynn mindlessly rubbed her stomach. For its clientele, Jessup's Bed & Breakfast only offered one meal a day: breakfast. And that was provided in one dining area where all of their guests were served at once by the hired staff. Most of the guests checked out shortly after eating and continued on their merry way. That was the normal run of things. Shaylynn's extended stay was very out of the ordinary. Each day, she had taken advantage of her VIP option to have her breakfast delivered and set outside the door for her to pick up and bring inside her room to eat in private. When she was done, she would place the tray outside the door, and a staff member would come by at an assigned time and pick it up.
Today, Shaylynn would gladly embrace a change, especially since she'd slept through her morning meal. Alice was an exceptional cook; not as good as Ella Mae, but she definitely knew her way around a kitchen. Since being in Atlanta, Shaylynn had heard some of the black residents there say ignorant things like, “White people can't cook,” but she knew better. A person couldn't get much whiter than Alice Jessup, but she held her own, and could out-cook and out-bake plenty of the black people Shaylynn knew; herself included.
“I have Cornish game hen.” Alice sang out the words as if she had tied the baked bird at the end of a string and was dangling it in Shaylynn's face.
Shaylynn imagined the perfectly seasoned entrée being fresh out of the oven, lying in a roasting pan and surrounded by a colorful sea of yellow onions, red potatoes, and green peppers. It was one of Alice's signature dishes, and just the vision of it made Shaylynn lick her lips. “Thank you. I'd love to join you,” she finally said. “I need to talk to you and Mr. Jessup anyway. I want to get your thoughts on something.”
“Splendid.” Shaylynn didn't know if Alice was referring to her joining them for lunch, or her request to use them as sounding boards. “Lucas is running an errand, but he'll be back any minute. Can we expect you in about half an hour?”
“Yes, ma'am. I'll be there.”
“Okay, dear. We'll see you in a little bit.”
Shaylynn headed to her private restroom as soon as she hung up the telephone. It was another perk that all of the guests didn't get. Jessup's Bed & Breakfast was a ten-bedroom estate that Lucas and Alice had purchased with their life's savings, and then they immediately began making a lucrative return on their investment by providing posh accommodations for strangers who were passing through town, or locals who just wanted an overnight getaway. Most guests only stayed for one night, but a few were known to linger a little longer. Two of the ten bedrooms were executive suites. One was the permanent living quarters where Lucas and Alice stayed. The other was extended to any other guest who was fortunate enough to have the deep pockets to afford it. Thanks to the small fortune that Emmett had left her, Shaylynn was one of those people, but thanks to her relationship with the Jessups, even if she weren't, she'd still be allowed to stay there. Shaylynn's executive suite came with a private bath, but the other guests shared four public unisex facilities.
Refreshed from her hot shower, Shaylynn stepped out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her freshly moisturized body. The mirror inside was so fogged with steam that she couldn't see how her braids looked pulled back in the high ponytail that she'd created. She finished preparing, using the mirror that was attached to her dresser. It only took a few minutes for her to pull on her blue jeans and the pink turtleneck sweater that Ella had bought her for Christmas. Pink was one of Shaylynn's least favorite colors, but she certainly wasn't going to take back or exchange a gift that Neil's mother had given her. Besides, Shaylynn had to admit it looked great with the pink snow boots that she had bought just so she had shoes to complement the sweater. Her smooth chocolate skin needed no makeup, but she applied eyeliner and lipstick before closing her eyes and saying a silent prayer.
A lot was depending on what happened in the next hour or so, and Shaylynn's stomach fluttered in anticipation. She hoped ... prayed to get something more than just lunch from the Jessups.