“Did Elijah run away?”
“No.” Spittle had dried to white globs at the corners of Althea’s mouth. “I asked him flatly if anyone had hurt him—his mamma or uncle or anyone. Elijah just looked at me for a long time. I remember I could hear the wall clock in the silence, the minutes climbing and multiplying. Then the boy slid his hand out from beneath mine and held it against his chest, rubbing it with his other hand, as if I’d burned him. ‘Uncle David was mad,’ he said. ‘I went away.’
“I opened my mouth to speak just as a shadow loomed over us—the boy’s mother stood in the kitchen doorway, looking like the ghost of a woman who’d been thrown off an old pirate ship. There were black circles around her eyes and that scar along the side of her face.” Althea raised one thin arm, the elbow like a knot in the trunk of a tree, and mimed where Veronica’s scar had been down the side of her own face. “It looked bright red against her pale skin. She’d damn near given me a stroke sneaking up on me like that.”
“What did she say?”
“She told me she thought her boy might still be feeling a bit under the weather and it was probably best for me to finish up with the lessons before I caught whatever illness he had. ‘Ma’am,’ I told her, ‘I don’t think there’s a thing in the known world this little boy can give me be worse than what I already got.’ But she said, ‘Go on now,’ and floated out of the room.
“By that point, I’d already made up my mind to go to the board and tell them what had happened. And that look the boy’s mamma had given me . . . well, it just chilled me straight to the bone and made me sicker than any chemotherapy I’d ever had. So I packed up my things and left the house.
“The following week, my stomach had gotten so bad that I called myself out sick. When it didn’t look like I was going to feel any better, I called out for good. I never went back to that house again.”
Without a doubt, Althea Coulter was a tough old woman who wasn’t easily spooked, yet I wondered just how much of a role her stomach cancer actually played in her reluctance to return to the Dentman house, or if it had served as a convenient excuse.
“As far as you know,” I asked her, “did anyone ever report any suspected child abuse?”
“Other than my suggestion to the board that something strange was going on in that house,” Althea said, “I don’t believe so. And understand I never suggested any type of child abuse to the board.” Again, her small eyes narrowed. They were the color of candle wax threaded with reddened blood vessels. “These are strange things you’ve come to ask me, son. You’ve already said you don’t think what happened to that little boy was an accident. Care to tell me what you do think happened?”
“I think he was killed.” The words came assuredly and without reservation. Any doubt I’d been holding on to regarding this scenario was gradually sloughing away. “I don’t know how to prove it, but I think the boy’s uncle did it.”
The old woman raised her eyebrows, and it was almost comical. “Have you gone to the police with your theory?”
“Sort of,” I said, thinking, What theory? All I’ve got are a bunch of innuendoes, hunches, and an unfinished, handwritten manuscript. There is no motive, no hard evidence. “My brother’s a cop. I spoke to him about it.”
“What did he say?”
I smirked. “That I should let things go. That I’m digging around and wasting all this time—chasing what I started out following, as you say—for no reason.”
A wry smile caused Althea’s cadaverous face to look somehow more sinister. Death was breathing down her neck; all of a sudden I caught a whiff of it—the stale, decaying, almost sweet smell of a mummy. Then she shifted in her bed. “You’ve asked me all your questions?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Because I have one of my own,” she said. “But if I’m gonna ask it, I’m gonna need some water to wet my throat. They’ve got cups at the nurses’ station out in the hallway. Would you mind?”
I went into the hallway. There was now a young nurse, attractive and middle-aged with very brown skin and nice teeth, behind the circular Formica desk. I requested a glass of water for Althea, and she said it would be no problem. Then she asked if I had already signed the visitors’ log. I assured her I had not. To this, she only smiled wider and slid a clipboard in front of me. There was a pen attached to it by a length of string. For reasons that still remain a mystery to me, I printed the name Alexander Sharpe in the appropriate box, then handed the clipboard back to her.
“Even trade,” said the nurse, accepting the clipboard and handing me a Tupperware pitcher half-filled with water and a small plastic cup with the hospital’s initials printed on the side in permanent marker.
Back in the room, I filled the cup with water and handed it to Althea. She accepted it, holding it with two hands like a child, and I watched her with some trepidation, certain that she would either spill the water all over herself or begin choking on it at any moment. But she did neither.
“Ahhh.” She sighed, emptying the cup. She seemed much weaker than she had just moments ago—the death clock, clicking one more minute closer to demise. “Good, good.”
I took the empty cup from her. “More?”
“Not unless you want to buzz someone in here to change these sheets in about three minutes.” Althea waved a brittle hand at me, and I set the cup down beside the photograph of her son. “Stuff goes through me like lightning nowadays.” She blamed the medication she was on for thinning her blood.
Sitting down in the chair, I folded my hands between my legs and leaned closer to her. “What is it you wanted to ask me?”
“Earlier you mentioned ghosts.”
“Yes. I asked if you believed in them.”
“Did I give you an answer?”
“No.”
“Would you like to hear one?”
Feeling that she was toying with me, I couldn’t help but grin. I said, “If it suits you.”
Jangling like a newborn colt, the old woman raised her arms and flattened out her wrinkled bed-sheets. She sucked in a shallow breath as her eyes began to tighten with what I believed to be deeper scrutiny of my character. But as she began to speak again, I realized she was going back to her youth, retracing those fading footprints down the path of her own childhood.
“In the summer of my sixth year,” she began, “my mother took odd jobs throughout the county. You see, my father had run off the previous summer with some woman he’d met down at Orville’s drugstore—this was in Louisiana, where I grew up—and my mother wasn’t going to let her only child starve because of him. He left her with nothing but the clothes on our backs and the ramshackle little tar paper hovel over in Cameron. We’d needed a car soon after he’d left, and I remember going with my mother to the used auto dealer off Best Street where, for one hundred and seventy-five dollars, she bought an old Chrysler the color of a house fire and about as reliable as the man my mother cursed the whole drive back to Cameron.
“The jobs my mother took consisted of housekeeping services for a rotation of regulars in the upper-class section of the city—great big gabled mansions with white columns and gardens so rich and thick you could actually get lost in ‘em. She hit each house on her rotation once a week, and since I was too young to be left on my own and because there was no sense in payin’ a babysitter more than my mamma was probably making cleaning those big houses, she dragged me along with her.