Dale set his jaw and something in his eyes told Jude he was holding back.
“You know something I don’t?” he asked, eyes boring into her.
The hairs on Jude’s neck stood on end and she shook her head, slipping her hand back into her pocket to touch the little blade.
“Knife was in her barn. She said she found the body, but how’d the knife get in her barn? Her footprints were all over and her mama cleaned her up, but she had blood on her all right. They found her bloody smock in the wash bin.”
Jude grimaced, imagining her mother running home, terrified, covered in the blood of her murdered friend.
“So, they tried and convicted her then?”
Dale shook his head.
“She took off, ran away. That just made her look more guilty. But you can’t run away from a crime like that, it follows you like a mad dog, even if ya shoot it, it gets right up and keeps comin’.”
Jude followed the line of Dale’s eye to the child who kicked higher and higher on the swing, her hair whooshing forward and covering her face each time she went back. Jude wondered if he saw his own sister there, swinging, smiling.
“My mama found that girl, believe it or not. All the way up in Cadillac, over two hours drivin’ from here. My Aunt Katherine lives out that way and my ma went for a visit. She was pickin’ up a few things at the grocery and that Sophia Gray walked right in front of her.”
Jude slumped back in her chair with a sigh, understanding how Sophia’s past finally came back to claim her.
“So that’s what happened,” Jude sighed.
Dale glanced at her funny, and Jude tried to return her expression to one of indifference though she assumed the beer was reducing his ability to notice one way or another.
“Yeah. She wrote down the lady’s license plate and they tracked her back to a big ole fancy house. My ma figured she’d try to run again, but the woman who’d been harboring her gave her up, said she’d been livin in fear her whole life. Thought Sophia had likely murdered again but couldn’t prove it.”
Jude frowned.
“The woman that hid Sophia from the police as a girl turned her in?”
“Yep.” Dale scratched at his chin, examining his fingers afterward. “Guess the rich lady’s dead husband took the girl in without askin’. The woman only found out later she was a little murderer. She wanted to give her up, but things got all tangled. The girl, Sophia, went into the asylum and my ma could rest knowin’ that Rosemary’s killer was punished.”
Jude realized she’d begun to squeeze her can. She loosened her grip before she sprayed both of them with beer. Gram Ruth had turned her mother in. She’d given her up.
“I‘m really intrigued by this, Dale. I appreciate your sitting with me. What happened to Sophia’s family?”
Damien
Damien stood in the cave of trees and watched her. Hattie’s man-sized sweater had fallen down, revealing one pale shoulder. Tendrils of honey colored hair blew lazily in the wind having escaped from the sloppy ponytail at her neck. The canvas before her depicted the towering oak tree in the center of the clearing, but he thought he saw faces in the whorls of bark and the chaos of leaves.
Hattie’s slender arm wove back and forth, brush in hand, streaks of green revealing deeper shades to the forest beyond the tree. She paused, put the brush unwittingly against her temple where it left a streak of green before returning to the canvas. Damien smiled and stepped from the trees.
“Hattie,” he called.
Her shoulders grew rigid and the supple flow of her arms became stiff. She craned around in her chair, eyes wide at the sight of him.
“Hi,” she said, looking at him, but also beyond him as if she had been in another dimension as she painted and not fully stepped back into their own.
He waved, and hurried across the expansive yard, feeling awkward. The space was wider than he realized, and his initial trot lost its momentum and turned into a long gait. He realized, not for the first time, that something about Hattie turned him into a bumbling idiot.
She didn’t stand, but smiled up at him, a palette of paints nested in her lap.
“Hey,” he offered her a little pat on the shoulder, self-conscious in his formal slacks and tie. He tugged on the tie. “I was at a department meeting just before this.”
Hattie didn’t say anything. She was not a woman of many words and as usual he tried to fill the emptiness with his own.
“Beautiful painting. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I stopped by the church and Pastor Greg said I’d find you out here.”
“My mama was a painter,” she told him, shifting back to her canvas and smudging a branch with her finger.
He nodded, rocking on his heels and fought the urge to lean forward and wipe the smear of green paint from her temple.
“A lot of our patients paint. Not to say there’s a connection,” he added quickly. “I mean some doctors have surmised a possible link, but I think the insane merely need an outlet. In fact, more creativity is encouraged. Idle hands are the devil’s plaything after all.”
He could not stop talking. The only consolation was that Hattie seemed only to be half-listening as she studied the painting before her.
“Do you sell your paintings?” he asked.
Hattie frowned and shook her head.
“Is that the usual thing to do?” she asked, again leaning forward to smudge an edge of the sky. The simple movement altered the painting. The sky now had a dark shadow as if a storm were coming.
He shrugged and adjusted his tie again, pulling it loose and balling it in his fist.
“I don’t know, maybe. I mean there are people who sell them, and you’re very talented. I’m sure an art dealer in town would happily display them for you. I have a friend in Chicago who owns a gallery. I could speak with her…” but he trailed off when Hattie stood and set her paints on the chair.
“No, thank you,” she told him. More of her hair had pulled free of her ponytail. Some caught in the smudge of green paint, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Your detail is amazing,” he said, leaning toward the painting. The ridges and curves of the trunk were identical to the tree in front him. He felt like he looked at a photograph, but again with the added sense that faces peered out from the within the bark, trapped there, screaming.
He shivered and swallowed the lump in his throat.
“Are there faces in your painting, Hattie?”
She frowned, and bit her lip, nodding.
“I see things, sometimes. They’re people, but they’re… more like spirits,” she whispered.
“Shall we walk and talk?” he asked, offering her his arm.
She nodded, not taking his arm, but wandering toward the trees.
Jude
“Grimmel Gray, at your service, young lady. Shopping for a new television, are ya? This Westinghouse right here is full color and insta-on TV, meanin’ you don’t have to wait.” The man rested a beefy hand on a large television sitting on the ground, balloons drifting above it.
Jude stared at him, dumbfounded. He was a spitting image of her twin brother, Peter. If she’d doubted the story of her mother’s life before, she was quickly abandoning her skepticism.
“I’m not looking for a TV,” she said, watching his face fall. “I’m looking for you.”
He rested his hand on his chest as if to say ‘who me?’
“Okay, well that’s a slight more interesting. Are you one of Sophia’s friends?”
Jude’s eyebrows shot to her hairline at the mention of her mother’s name.