“I like to have you both here. My children.” Her voice faded.
There had been another child. My brother, Billy. I remembered him as a tall, lanky boy who drove the tractor and was always followed around by at least six big dogs. The dogs would smell him, then follow him slavishly for the rest of their lives. Billy was ten years older than me, and he was killed in Vietnam. The loss of a child should have brought my mother and me closer together, but it didn’t. She blamed Dad for Billy and me for Annabelle.
“I’ll put some coffee on,” Dorry said. “Maybe Carson will tell us about the killings on the coast. I saw it on the late news yesterday. They found five bodies in a mass grave last Thursday, and then last night a girl was killed on a pier, right, Carson?”
Dorry meant well, but I could cheerfully have cut out her tongue.
“Five bodies in one grave and a girl murdered!” Mama put her hands on the table. “What is this world coming to?”
“The five bodies are almost twenty-five years old,” I said.
“And you’re writing about this?” Mama’s voice was suddenly strident. She hated what I did for a living. She thought it was ghoulish and adversarial. She called it “making trouble” for folks or “poking into other people’s business.”
“Yes,” I said, rising from the table. “I’ll help Dorry with the coffee.” The cell phone in my purse rang. “Excuse me.” I grabbed my purse and went into the bedroom that had been mine.
I closed the door, walked across the polished pine floor and the handwoven rag rug and sat on the chenille bedspread patterned with a smiling sun. I was momentarily taken aback by the black-and-white photographs on the wall. They were my first attempts at photography.
“Lynch,” I said, because it could be nothing other than business.
“We identified the girl. Pamela Sparks. She has a four-year-old daughter.” Avery Boudreaux’s voice was flat. “Mitch told me I was supposed to call before six,” he said.
“Shit.” I was digging through my purse for a pen and paper. “Just a minute.”
I took down the particulars as I asked Avery for details. He answered grudgingly, and I didn’t blame him. He also confirmed the identity of four of the five bodies in the grave of the Gold Rush parking lot. As I’d thought, they were the girls who’d gone missing in ’81. There still wasn’t a line on the fifth body.
I hung up, dashed down some thoughts on my pad and called the newspaper. It was past the six-o’clock deadline for Sunday’s paper, but I knew they were saving room for me on the front page. I’d talked with the weekend editor, and he knew the gist of what my story would be. The television had scooped us Saturday evening with the story on the murdered girl, but we’d have the big story, identifying Pamela Sparks and tying the five bodies to the Bridal Veil Killer. I also had the identities of four of those girls confirmed. It was going to be a story that would have some of the larger tabloids hovering on our doorsteps.
“My dad’s got a computer. I could write the story and e-mail it to you,” I told the editor. That would allow me at least a chance to polish it.
“You’ve got half an hour,” Clive said. “Make it tight.”
I went to the dining room, where everyone looked up. Mother was clearly aggravated that the meal had been disturbed by my work. Dorry was worried, and my father was sad. “I have to write a story. Can I borrow your computer, Dad?”
“Sure,” he said. When Mom started to protest, he waved her to silence. “She’s working, Hannah. She’s taking her job seriously. Can’t you let that be enough for right now?”
I wanted to thank him, but it would only have made for a scene. Instead, I went into his study and wrote the story and e-mailed it in, then called to confirm that Clive had it. When I returned to the dining room, they were finishing their coffee and an Italian cream cake that Dorry had made that morning. She loved to cook, and she was a fabulous pastry chef. She could do it professionally if she chose.
“Cake?” Mama asked.
“No, thank you.”
“You’re too thin. Cake would be good for you,” she insisted, cutting a slice and putting it on the bone china that had been her mother’s.
I took the saucer and put it down at my place. She passed me coffee.
“Was the call about the murdered girl?” Dorry asked.
I frowned at her. “Yes.” I took a forkful of the cake I didn’t want and put it in my mouth. Alcoholics seldom eat sweets. That’s why my mother had insisted. I swallowed.
“Well?” Dorry leaned forward.
I started not to answer, but it seemed pointless. They’d read it in the paper the next day. I told them about seeing the girl on the dock, about the bridal veil, about the other girls and who they were and what little I knew about their deaths.
“That is the most gruesome thing I’ve heard,” Mom said. She folded her napkin and pushed back her chair. “For the life of me, I don’t understand why you want to live your life in that environment. It’s ghoulish.”
The cake on my saucer was a small mound of crumbs. I pushed them around with my fork, stopping when I realized how juvenile it was. She couldn’t force me to eat it. I looked up. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mom. It’s my job.”
“You could have been anything. A vet. A doctor. You were plenty smart.”
“If you think journalism is gruesome, you should hear Tommy talk about some of the things he cuts out of people,” Dorry said. “Last week he was removing this guy’s gall bladder. It had ruptured, and he found gangrene all in his stomach. Now, that’s gruesome.”
Instead of a reprimand, Mom turned to Dorry. “Tommy sure is working hard. I worry for him. He has this compulsion to save everyone, and it’s wearing him down.”
I was glad the conversation had turned to Saint Tommy. If Dorry never did another thing in her life, it was enough that she’d snared Tommy Prichard, surgeon extraordinaire, breeder of magnificent specimens of children, witty conversationalist, humanitarian and, most important of all, Mississippi boy.
The courtship had been hotly contested. Tommy was born in McLain, a small town on the Chickasawhay River. He had “I’m getting out” written all over him. He was a superb athlete, a baseball player who could hit and catch. He played shortstop on the high school team, which was where Dorry met him when he was a senior. McLain played Leakesville, and on one sultry spring afternoon, Dorry and I went to watch the game.
Tommy got a scholarship to the University of Southern Mississippi, where Dorry decided she was going. She tried out for the college dance squad, the Dixie Darlings, and ensured herself a place in Tommy’s line of sight. But there was another girl with the same idea. Lucinda Baker knew a good thing when she saw it, too.
Never one to act in haste, Tommy vacillated between the two girls for most of his college career. He’d date Dorry, until she got too demanding, then he’d switch to Lucinda for a while. When she disagreed with him or began to expect a certain kind of treatment, he dumped her and went back to Dorry.
As Tommy’s college days at USM drew to a close, and it was certain he’d go to medical school in nearby Mobile, Alabama, on a very nice scholarship, Dorry gave up. She started dating a young man from Hattiesburg. Tommy proposed instantly. They were married within a semester of Dorry graduating from college. Instead of a college degree, she got pregnant with her first child.
“Tommy loves his work. He operates almost every day now in Mobile. There’s no one else who can perform the delicate surgeries that he does.”
I drifted back into the conversation as Dorry gathered up the cake saucers, sweeping mine away before Mother could comment. “I thought he was opening a clinic here in Leakesville so he could spend