Brambleman Read online

  “Mrs. Talton? It’s me. Charlie Sherman.”

  “Oh.” She let out a woeful little moan and stood up straight. “I thought you were … I’ve been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, you know.”

  “Yes ma’am, you told me. Do you know why I’m here?”

  She brightened. “You’re the man he brought to finish the book.” She went to the desk and turned on the lamp. “How’s it going?”

  Charlie sat up and rubbed his face with both hands. “I passed out.”

  “That’s all right. I hope it’s not boring. I see you read to page one hundred and one.” She emphasized those last few words, making it sound like the most fascinating number in the universe.

  “Oh, no. It’s … interesting. I just … just … had a rough day.”

  “I understand. I’ll make you breakfast and we can talk about how we’re going to proceed.”

  He thought he should proceed out the door. On the other hand: food. “OK.”

  Kathleen left to putter in the kitchen. Charlie looked at the clock and groaned. It was 4:05. He’d slept less than an hour and had a miserable, hungover feeling without having experienced the joy of drunkenness—a vice he’d sworn off the day Beck was born. (The morning after, actually.)

  The dream had seemed so real; the events were etched in his mind. Maybe editing the book was possible, after all. Charlie returned to the manuscript, but he was tired and the words made no sense. They were just scratches on paper. He put his head on the desk.

  “Breakfast is ready!” Kathleen called out. Charlie glanced at Momo’s picture on the wall, muttered an expletive, and padded into the kitchen in muskrat-scented crew socks.

  “What’s wrong?” Kathleen set a plate of scrambled eggs and toast on the table. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “No, no.” Charlie shook his head. “Ghost isn’t quite the word.”

  He couldn’t get Momo off his mind. He kept seeing his gargantuan cousin-in-law bending over, picking up a Hardee’s cup while serving his community-service sentence. In 1987, Momo had pleaded no contest to charges of battery and making terroristic threats after he punched out and threatened to kill a white civil rights marcher during the second Forsyth County protest. And now Charlie was burdened with the suspicion that the racist thug had killed a man in the first march and gotten off scot-free. Make it go away!

  While thoughts of Momo tended to diminish Charlie’s appetite, the smell of fresh coffee revived it. As he ate, he looked at the old lady in a threadbare burgundy robe across from him at the rickety table; she’d pulled her hair up in a bun, so she now looked semi-presentable, which was more than he could say for himself. He studied her kitchen. The finish on the old white curved-top Kelvinator refrigerator had worn to black around the handle. She must have lived here forever, poor woman. He guessed that all she had besides this fixer-upper house was her demented dream to publish her late husband’s work. He hoped she wasn’t thinking that the book would make her rich, because it wouldn’t. He wasn’t even sure it was a book. After reading a hundred pages, all he could say was that it appeared to be well on its way to becoming a gigantic mess.

  “So you’ll do it?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry. What?” He stopped mid-chew and looked down at his hand, which was resting on a check made out to him—for twenty-five hundred dollars. “What’s this?”

  “A retainer. Or is it called an advance?”

  “For what?”

  “Editing Thurwood’s book. I’ll pay you twenty dollars an hour and we split the royalties fifty-fifty. That’s what he said to offer you.” She patted her hair. “Don’t worry. I’m not in it for the money. We just need to get this done.”

  He sat there, mouth unhinged, looking like he was about to swallow a rabbit whole. Finally, he managed to say, “You should use this money to fix up the house.”

  “Oh heavens, I have plenty of money.” Kathleen got up and went into her bedroom. After fumbling and clunking around, she padded back into the kitchen holding an armful of papers. She produced statements from brokerage houses, mutual funds, and banks for his inspection.

  “You shouldn’t be showing me these things,” Charlie said. However, he was curious, and after a polite pause, started looking through the papers.

  Hmm. This certainly changed things.

  “And two certificates of deposit in a safety deposit box for fifty thousand each. I was hoping I’d be a millionaire.”

  “Don’t forget to count your house,” Charlie said.

  She leaned forward like a willing con victim. “I own it, free and clear. How much is it worth?”

  “In Virginia Highlands?” He chuckled. “You’re a millionaire, easy.”

  Her face filled with joy. “You’re good luck already! You made me rich, just like that!” She snapped her fingers. “As for the house, Angela—that’s my daughter, she hates me, you should know—she gets it when I die.” Kathleen went on, adopting a grumbling tone. “If I fix it up, she’ll have me committed. She already keeps me prisoner here. Made me turn in my driver’s license. She claims I’ll lose my car, but I think she wants it for herself.”

  Charlie shook his head and smiled. “Come on. She doesn’t hate you.”

  “You don’t know her. She only comes to see me once a week. She’s got a girlfriend, a cute young thing. And I do mean girl.” Kathleen frowned and shook her heard. “She shouldn’t date her students. Thurwood wouldn’t have put up with that. Don’t tell her I told you about the money. Anyway,” she said, brightening, “I need a business write-off. A writer, anyway.” She laughed, amused by her turn of phrase. “There is one other thing. You have to sign a contract. He’s bringing it by—”

  “Who is?”

  “Him. The man you came here with.”

  “Trouble?”

  She gave him an incredulous look. “Is that his name?”

  “It’s as close as I could get. And it suits him.”

  “Well, he’s bringing it by later today.” She looked out into the darkness. “It is today, isn’t it?”

  “Uh, yeah. I suppose it is, at that.”

  “Do you have a place to stay? He said you needed one.”

  “When?”

  “Now, I guess.”

  “No, I mean when did he talk to you about all this? He didn’t stay five minutes last night, just long enough to introduce us.”

  “He called me,” Kathleen said. “Must have woken me up.”

  This baffled Charlie, since he hadn’t heard the phone ring.

  “He said, ‘There will be miracles, but you won’t like most of them.’ Oh, and he said, ‘No cops.’ I wonder why he said that.”

  Charlie shrugged. “That’s how he rolls.”

  She wore a puzzled expression. “He rolls? What does that mean?”

  “Just an expression. I guess he doesn’t like cops.”

  “Anyway … you can stay in the basement rent-free while you work on the book. You are going to edit it, aren’t you?”

  Charlie sipped coffee and pondered his situation. He’d been struggling recently to write fiction for an hour at a stretch. Now this opportunity popped up. Funny-strange how a job had come looking for him, brokered by the weirdest dude he’d ever met. And it involved Forsyth County, of all places, land of his accursed in-laws, and Momo, the unnamed assailant. There were also nuts and bolts to consider. A lot of detail work, but the breadcrumbs were there. So what if the book sucked? Many did. Just add it to the pile. And there was that check—with the promise of more to come. The woman had plenty of money, so it wasn’t like he’d be bleeding her dry even if he logged some serious time on the project. If he could whip Thurwood’s doorstop of a manuscript into shape and get it published, it would look good on his résumé. Royalties would be icing on the cake.

  “I can stay rent-free?”

  Kathleen nodded and pointed at the door leading to the cellar. “Take a look.”

  He opened the door and flipped on a light at the top of the stairs. H
e stumbled down creaking wooden steps into a cold, dark, mildewy little world. He saw a bare bulb dangling from a joist and pulled its chain, illuminating the water heater and furnace. He listened to the whoosh of gas and suspected he’d need a carbon monoxide detector. Old paneling bowed out from cinder block walls. As for furniture, there was a metal-frame foldout cot with an old mattress that appeared to have been home to some hungry rats, a desk, a card table, and two metal chairs. The green shag carpet had to go, but it looked like it would put up a fight.

  There was a separate patio entrance; the door’s panes, like the overhead windows that ringed the basement, were caked with decades’ worth of greasy dust and grime. The basement opened onto a small back yard surrounded by a weather-beaten, gap-toothed wooden fence. The small detached garage behind the house looked like it could topple over or come crashing down at any moment.

  He climbed the stairs to the kitchen. At the top, he turned for one last look. What a dump. Only a truly desperate man would accept such abysmal quarters. “Can I move in today?”

  “Certainly. I don’t see why not.” She handed him a set of keys along with the check.

  “I need to get some things from my house.”

  “Didn’t you walk here?” she asked.

  He groaned. “Yeah, I did. I’m kind of stuck.”

  “Here, take my car.” She grabbed a key from a nail on the kitchen wall and handed it to him. “It’s old, but it doesn’t have many miles on it because I don’t drive. It’s in the garage out back.”

  She was handing him so many things: money, house keys, car keys, hopes and dreams. He should give her something, too. A promise, then. “I won’t let you down.”

  “I know you won’t. God sent you here. If you cheat me, you’ll answer to Him. Or Her.” She looked at the wall, then turned back to Charlie. “This is all new to me. Before tonight, I didn’t believe. Now I know. It really is amazing.”

  “Yeah. That’s one word for it. I’ll be back in a while.”

  Charlie stepped outside into the cold night and walked along the driveway—two concrete strips separated by patchy grass—to the weathered white garage, which was now illuminated by a spotlight shining from a corner eave of the house. After he struggled with it for a minute, the flip-out door rose with an ominous groan to reveal a silver 1986 Volvo sedan. Charlie squeezed into the narrow space between automobile and wall and fumbled in the dark to unlock the car door. The wind picked up and the garage moaned. He crammed himself into the car, plopping onto the cold black seat.

  At first, it wouldn’t start, the engine having fallen out of the habit of running. After a couple of tries, the battery started to fade. On the fourth try, the engine went rur … rur … and started, sputtering badly. He idled the car for a minute, watching the exhaust in the mirror forming a malevolent cloud behind him. A creaking rafter persuaded him to get moving before the garage collapsed on him like an evil tool shed in a Stephen King novel. He inched out and backed down to the street. The car’s timing was off. While he waited and hoped for the engine to hit its stride, he picked up a scrap of paper from the seat and turned on the dome light to examine it: a Kroger receipt, two years old.

  After a minute, the ancient Volvo’s engine fell into a steady rhythm. Charlie drove off, marveling at how the night had turned out. This was madness, of course, but he wouldn’t let that stop him. As his beloved Dr. Hunter S. Thompson once famously said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

  It was time for Charlie Sherman to leave the ranks of the amateurs.

  * * *

  Charlie couldn’t guess what would happen when he returned to Thornbriar, but he knew things couldn’t continue the way they’d been going. After all, his marriage had been deteriorating for several years. Susan had grown testy after Beck was born and more so when Ben arrived. The main problem was Charlie’s decision—his wife no longer considered it a mutual agreement—to stay home and take care of the kids while he wrote books. This made sense at the time, since she was making more at the bank than he was at the public relations firm. Plus, he hated flacking, whereas she liked money. Years later, his failure to get published made his career path seem like a horribly stupid mistake.

  Charlie loved his children, which was more than he could say about his wife these days. Of course, she had plenty to say about him, too. He wouldn’t be surprised if, when he returned to the house, the cops were still there, taking notes while she continued her head-shaking, fist-waving rant.

  Why had a border-state Yankee (the most ornery kind) from Missouri married this Southern girl from the whitest county in Georgia? Well, first of all, they met in Macon, and the only thing to do there was boink each other. There certainly had been an attraction. She was barely out of high school when they met, not even twenty years old, and he’d impressed her with his intellect and his position as a newspaper editor. He’d fallen for her because she was a saucy blonde and kind of hot. Actually, pretty hot. “Brassy and sassy,” she liked to say. That demeanor was a facade to hide her innocence, and as it turned out, she had a hill-country You Break It, You Buy It policy. They’d married within a year (most of her relatives were surprised to find out they didn’t have to).

  Gradually, disappointment had worn off her playful edge, and now she acted like a troll half the time. Charlie thought she was still attractive, though in recent months he’d looked at her more with resentment than desire. Even with all their problems, life together had been bearable until the previous Fourth of July, when their marriage imploded, with the help of two of her most intolerable and intolerant family members—one of whom had apparently killed a college professor for sport.

  Charlie rounded the sweeping curve of his block in the old Volvo and saw the porch light burning at 2567 Thornbriar Circle, a ranch much like the other houses on his relatively quiet suburban street. The windows were dark. The cops were gone. As he exited the car, an early morning train rumbled in the distance, sounding its horn at a crossing. He crunched the Volvo’s door shut and squished across the driveway on prune-like toes in tattered shoes. He unlocked the front door and stepped into the foyer. Sirius was there to greet him, planting a cold nose on his master’s hand.

  Charlie walked past the half-bath, switched on the kitchen light, and glanced down the hall. The master bedroom door was closed. He tiptoed down the hall and stepped into his office. He was relieved to see that his computer hadn’t been confiscated. He shuddered at the image Susan had seen, and wondered if the dispute over it would end their marriage.

  The trouble had begun the previous afternoon while Susan was out shopping for post-Christmas bargains. Charlie was working on a freelance article about Clint Brimmer, a violent racist recently freed from prison. That morning, there had been a newspaper article about Brimmer, once a candidate for governor of Georgia. More recently, he’d been convicted in the cold-case 1965 bombing of an AME Zion church in Montgomery, Alabama that blinded the janitor. After serving ten years, Brimmer had been released from jail on Christmas Eve. Charlie figured he could interview the villain for a magazine article.

  During his Internet search, Charlie stumbled across the Forbidden Speech website, which contained links to neo-Nazi, skinhead, and Klan sites. And to interracial porn, as well. It was amazing. He’d found a website that featured both racist propaganda and black-on-white sex to taunt the bigots—was the Web great, or what? Out of curiosity, he opened the link for Jungle Fever, thinking he’d see something from film director Spike Lee. Nope. Still, it required further investigation.

  Charlie slipped a movie in the DVD player for the kids to watch in the family room, then locked his office door, still intending to do more research on Brimmer. But first, Jungle Fever. The website was fascinating for about ten minutes, and then, inevitably, it became boring and shameful. Just as he lost interest, he heard the garage door opening, thumping and rattling on its chain drive. Charlie clicked away from the site, signed off the Internet, pulled up his pants, turned off the computer, and we
nt to help his wife bring in packages.

  After cooking dinner, eating, and clearing dishes, Charlie went out to the garage. And that’s where he was when he’d heard Susan yelling.

  Several hours had passed since then, so maybe she had calmed down at least a little. Charlie closed the office door and returned to the kitchen. He opened a can of Alpo for the old golden retriever. Sirius gobbled from his bowl.

  Now for a change of clothes. Charlie slipped into the master bedroom, where Susan snored lightly. Perfect, he thought. Sleeping through the breakup of our marriage. Then again, she could sleep through anything. He grabbed sweat pants and a clean Henley from a chair in the corner, then fumbled around in his dresser for white socks and underwear. He changed in the kids’ bathroom.

  “Is that you, Daddy?” Rebecca called out from her bedroom at the end of the hall.

  “Yes, sweetie.”

  “Will you sing me a song? I need to go back to sleep.”

  “My clothes are wet. Let me change.” He threw wet garments in the hamper, then checked on Benjamin, destroyer of glasses. The boy breathed softly as his father bent over him and stroked the hair off his forehead before kissing it. In her room, his six-year-old daughter lay under a huge pile of covers, staring up at him with big round eyes.

  “You’ve been asleep, haven’t you?” he asked. “You haven’t been waiting up, I hope.”

  “I woke up when Sirius barked. What time is it?”

  “It’s still nighttime.”

  “Why’d you go away?”

  “So you were up.”

  “For a while.”

  “I needed time to think.”

  “Are you mad at me for calling the police?”

  “Oh.” He slumped down on the bed. “You did that?” He stroked Beck’s long brown hair. “Why did you think you had to do that?”

  “You and Mommy were yelling at each other, so I prayed and God told me to.”

  “Really.” It was just like someone with Cutchins blood in them to bring the Almighty into a domestic dispute.