Close to the Broken Hearted (19 page)

“I don't think that's true,” Leah said.

“What part?”

“All of it. First, I think
you
took your brother's death the worst. Look how it's still affectin' you. And second, I don't think he'd want to see any of his family die.”

Finally, Sylvie looked up at Leah. “He killed himself because of what happened over Caleb. I didn't do that. I
couldn't
do that. I'd be too . . . scared.”

Leah reached out and touched Sylvie's hand. “That's not fear, Sylvie. That's strength. Don't confuse the two.”

“And he was the one always askin' me if I was okay. Kept askin' if I needed to talk to somebody about it.”

“Talk to somebody? You mean like—”

“Like a professional. Like a shrink or somethin'. He told me that could really help.”

“It probably could've,” Leah said. “It probably
still
could.”

“Well, I don't know about that. When he'd say it back then, I'd just get mad and ask him what the hell he knew about what helps with anythin' cuz all I hear at night is him cryin' himself to sleep cuz he lost his little boy.” Her eyes grew wet.

“Have you ever
tried
talkin' to anybody?”

Sylvie hesitated. “Not really.”

“Not really? Or not at all?”

“Well, I saw this psychologist for a while right before I met Orwin. I only saw him three or four times. I was goin' through a rough patch at school. He didn't help. He thought all my problems were cuz of Caleb when they were all cuz of school. All he wanted to talk 'bout was Caleb. I went to talk 'bout school.”

Leah pulled out her pad. “Can you give me the name of the psychologist?”

“I can't remember. He was provided through assistance. Langwood or Langdon or somethin' like that. I was just comin' outta foster care at the time.”

Leah wrote these names on her pad.

“You ain't gonna talk to him, are you?”

“Would it be okay if I did?”

Sylvie thought about it a moment then shrugged. “I guess. We didn't really talk 'bout nothin'.”

“And he was here in Alvin?”

“No, Satsuma.”

“Okay, thanks.” Leah put her pad back in her pocket.

A silence fell over the table for a few moments, finally broken by Sylvie. Leah noticed she'd become more and more open with her. Probably, Leah thought, because she had grown to trust her. “You know, there were many times I wished it was me instead of Caleb that Preacher Eli shot that evenin'.”

“I think that's normal.”

“Sure didn't
feel
normal.

“Anyway,” Sylvie said, “now that Pa's gone, I feel so bad 'bout all those mean things I said. I wish I had the chance to take 'em all back.”

Leah locked fingers with Sylvie. “Oh, honey, I'm sure he understood. He was goin' through the same things you were.”

Sylvie went quiet for a long while. When she spoke again, she said, “I guess in the end he proved I was right: He really didn't know how to make things easier. If he did, maybe he'd still be here.”

“You can't think that way. You'll eat yourself up with the maybes and the guesses. Things are as they are. Everythin' happens for a reason.”

“I don't believe that.” Sylvie had let go of Leah's hand and was now looking at her fingers while they drummed on the table. “If you believe that, you have to believe God has a sick sense of humor. I want to believe God didn't play any part in what happened to my family. That He somehow managed to stay out of it, and I'll still find them one day when I leave this place and everything will make sense. But it's so hard to keep any faith sometimes.”

“Do you go to church?”

Sylvie laughed. “Haven't done so in a long while.”

“You should come with us sometime. We try to attend regularly.” Truth be told, Leah's “regular” church attendance was more sporadic than she liked to admit. But she considered herself a God-fearing Christian woman just the same.

Sylvie laughed some more.

“I'm serious. Why are you laughing?”

“I have a baby. What would I do with her while I was in church?”

“Babies are allowed in church. There's lots of them there.”

“Well, we'll have to see.”

Leah gave her a warm smile. “Think 'bout it.”

Sylvie looked into her lap and fell silent.

“Do you mind if I keep askin' questions?” Leah asked.

Sylvie shook her head silently.

“Did your pa ever do anythin' or act in any way that was unusual?”

Yet another laugh escaped Sylvie's lips. “He was the opposite of unusual. His world ran by his habits. He kept them up all the time. Out in the fields by six, Mother had breakfast on the table for him at eight; she had lunch ready at noon sharp. Twice a week he'd drive down to Mobile for supplies and things like that.” She'd left out supper from her list of meals, and Leah figured, despite what she'd said about memories, there were some she really wanted to keep suppressed. Suppers were probably high on that list.

“Sounds like a good life.”

“I don't know if he'd agree,” Sylvie said. “Like I told you, he wasn't happy. He lost a lot. Then he finally gave up on it all, including me.”

Leah sighed. She had no idea how to respond to something like that. There were some wounds that would just never heal, and nothing she could say was going to alter that.

She decided to change the subject. “Did he ever . . .
buy
things? For you and your family? Expensive things? Jewelry, maybe? Did you go on vacations? Anything like that?” Leah actually felt dumb even asking this question.

Sylvie laughed again. The girl could change her demeanor in a heartbeat. “Are you serious? Miss Teal, we lived a very simple life. We was farmers. We didn't ever go
nowhere
. I ain't never been on no vacation in all my life. I don't think I ever owned a piece of jewelry. No, my pa was a very sensible and practical man.”

Leah knew in the back of her mind that there was some question to just how sensible he was. He had spent a lot of money on
something,
she just didn't know what, yet. From Sylvie's bedroom down the hall, she heard the baby wake up and start crying.

Sylvie looked at her. “I gotta go see to her.”

“Okay, last question. Then I'll let you be. Do you know if your pa had a will?”

Sylvie mulled this over. “To be right honest, I never thought 'bout it. There never seemed to be any point in pursuin' somethin' like that and I'da thought if there had been one, someone woulda said somethin'. Ain't like we had nothin' anyway.” Sylvie said most of this sentence as she walked away from Leah, leaving the kitchen and heading down the hall toward the cries of the baby.

Leah made a mental note to do a search for a will left by Tom Carson.

Sylvie returned with the baby on her breast, happily suckling away. Once again, Leah was impressed with how much of a good mother she'd become, given all the weaknesses she'd been handed in life. “You had a ranch, Sylvie,” Leah said. “That was worth somethin'.”

“Now what would I do with a ranch?”

She had a point, Leah guessed. “Listen, Sylvie. I want to thank you for takin' the time to talk to me.”

Sylvie looked at her expectantly. “Will this help with anythin'?”

“I dunno yet. But I'm not givin' up until things make sense to
me
. So we're on the same team. Remember that, okay?”

“Okay.”

Leah headed back out into the rain and got into her car. She drove toward home, both happy and frustrated. Happy that Sylvie was able to answer her questions without it causing her much undue duress, and frustrated because her answers hadn't seemed to answer anything. By Sylvie's account, Tom Carson was an ordinary man who had extraordinary things happen to him. If this turned out to be true, based on Leah's detective background, this would make him the exception to a very rigid rule.

T
he property report Leah requested from the Mobile public records office finally arrived. Strangely, Abe had gotten the mail that day and had it sitting waiting for her on the kitchen table when she got home from work. For the past few days, Abe had been getting the mail every day. She was surprised at this new interest for him. Until now, he'd never paid much attention to the mail. Leah found his sudden concern over it weird, given that he didn't get any mail himself.

Oh, well,
she thought, opening the manila envelope.
Kids go through phases. Be happy it's just mail he's interested in, Leah, and not something like setting fire to the house.

She pulled the report from the envelope. There wasn't much there, just seven photocopied pages. One was a recent property assessment notice. The next five pages matched the survey maps she found in the Alvin records office exactly, right down to having “Unlisted” as the owner. She was starting to get very frustrated until she came to the final sheet.

This one was different. It wasn't a map. It was a page of information and history about the property, showing all the buying, selling, and any liens that were against it over the past thirty years.

Thirty years ago, the property was listed as vacant, which, the clerk at the records office had told Leah, is the usual way of saying it simply belonged to the county. “So there goes your poppa's claim 'bout ownin' it, Eli,” Leah said quietly.

Then on July 8, 1963, the property was sold to Tom Carson for nine thousand dollars, which exactly matched what both Eli Brown and Tom Carson had reported to the police during their interviews after Caleb was killed.

For all Tom Carson's financial problems, the report showed no liens against the property the entire time it was in his possession. In fact, the report was strangely quiet until January 25, 1981. The ranch was then sold at auction by the Alvin First National Bank and purchased by a Mr. Argo Atkinson for $34,000 even.

Leah flipped back to the survey maps and checked the little box in the lower right corner. “Not a bad price for a ranch that would be assessed at one hundred and twenty thousand dollars barely a month later, Mr. Atkinson,” she said. “Whoever you are.”

How did he manage to buy it so low? Had nobody else been interested in it? Maybe the two strange back-to-back deaths of Sylvie's folks had everyone spooked about the place. People could be weird that way. Leah bet the bank was a bit peeved. They wouldn't have gotten back near the money Tom Carson had owed them from that sale.

She'd never heard the name Atkinson before, but a question still hung in Leah's mind. Why had he bought the place? Was it as an investment? Had he just planned to sit on it? He was paying tax every year on that land—at the
appraised
cost—and yet it just sat there. Nothing had been done to it in the eight years since Tom Carson died. Other than the ravages of time and storms, everything was exactly as it had been that day. Or at least it was last time Leah checked.

Surely this Argo Atkinson had some plan for the property when he initially bought it. Could his plans have somehow gone wrong?

She found the last value that the property was appraised at:

It was the same parcel of land. Three hundred and twenty acres. It hadn't been broken up at all. And Argo Atkinson had made near on a quarter of a million dollars on his investment in eight years. That wasn't too bad, in Leah's eyes. So maybe it
was
just an investment.

But it had been a while since she'd been out to the ranch, so maybe things had changed since she was there last. Perhaps it was time for Leah to make another visit to 405 Bogpine Way. In the meantime, she was going to have Chris try to figure out who this Atkinson fellow was. She decided she'd radio him on her way out, and ask him to search the Alvin directory for anyone with that name. She doubted an outsider would be much interested in a ranch here in a small town like Alvin. Especially one, as her son had so eloquently put it, so close to a bog full o' stinky old toads.

 

The Carson Cattle Ranch (as it used to be known) was pretty much exactly as Leah expected to find it. At least it appeared that way from where she parked on the dirt drive leading up to the old farmhouse. Wildflowers and grass had taken over all of it that they could, but otherwise the place was just the way Tom Carson left it.

The steel gate at the street that ran between two wooden fence posts had broken from its hasp, so it was easy enough to swing out of the way so she could drive inside. The gate was flaked with dark red rust and squeaked as she pushed it open. Leah drove inside and parked at the end of the drive, staying close to Bogpine Way.

It had continued raining the past two days, although not nearly as hard as it had on that first day after the period of all the sunshine. Today there was a slight drizzle in the air and the cloud layer floated high in the sky, giving everything above the horizon a gunmetal-gray backdrop. The wind Leah had trudged through the other day when she drove out to Sylvie's was gone. Now it just felt wet and muggy with a slight mist that hung along the sloping ground.

Getting out of the car, Leah pulled the hood of her sweatshirt up and walked to the farmhouse.

The first thing she noticed was the smell. It was wafting down from Beemer's Bog like sulfuric acid. It was the sort of thing she doubted she could ever get used to. The second thing she noticed was the sounds of the toads. It wasn't even late spring when you expected a lot of toads. Beemer's Bog had to be a quarter mile from where she was and still all she could hear was them toads croaking. She couldn't imagine what the stench and sounds must be like if you went to the end of the property line where it came right up against the edge of the bog itself.

She was starting to see why there might not have been a lot of interest in purchasing this place at auction way back when this Argo Atkinson fellow basically stole it.

The farmhouse was built from timber that had weathered over time. It was gray, but then it had been gray even in Tom Carson's time—it had never been painted. She tried the front door and found it unlocked.

Stepping inside, she pulled off her hood as she came in through the living room, the same way Eli Brown must've entered on that fateful evening when everything changed for the Carson family. Leah could only imagine what it must've felt like sitting up at that kitchen table (which had long since been replaced by a new one, now covered with a layer of dust) while that old man trudged across the floor in his muddy boots with that gun in his hand.

Leah came up the short bank of stairs to the kitchen. Even though there was no blood left in that room, the shadows of death still remained. They ran through the cracks in the floorboards like Caleb's blood had that day Eli Brown had come. In Leah's head, his gunshot rang out, echoing through the kitchen, filling the darkened halls and winding its way up the stairs to the lonely bedrooms.

She saw the chair—not the same chair, mind you—but a chair in the same place Tom Carson had sat with his son in his lap when that bullet had left Eli's gun. She knew the scene by heart. She knew Sylvie had been seated to Tom's right, facing the doorway. She knew that Mother had been across the table from her husband, unable to do anything but look on in horror as her baby was taken away from her much too early.

Too many people knew about what had happened and, once again, Leah was beginning to see why Mr. Argo Atkinson got such a deal on this place. Who would buy a property with a farmhouse still full of the stench of death and its wicked memory? It lay everywhere she looked even though there were no physical signs of it at all. You could just
feel
it somehow. Something about the place wasn't right.

She suddenly wasn't sure she wanted to meet this Mr. Atkinson after all. She also wasn't sure she wanted to continue on through the rest of this house.

Strengthening her resolve, Leah stayed inside and began exploring the different rooms. The dust that had covered the kitchen table and countertops continued on, covering everything. She could taste it in the air. Corners were tangled with cobwebs. The farmhouse now belonged to nature and to its own past. It didn't feel like it had any place in time anymore.

At the top of a narrow staircase that led to the upper floor, Leah discovered Sylvie's room. It was exactly as Sylvie had left it when they'd found her pa hanged from the oak and put her into foster care. Most of Sylvie's things were still here. Her closet even had clothes hanging in it, unused for years. Little girls' clothes. Sundresses and pink and yellow things that were never to be worn again.

Leah found it all very sad. Something about the room just cried out loneliness. It was as though it was lost in its own shadows and engulfed in its own memories. Leah couldn't stay any longer in it and moved on through the house.

Next, she came upon the Carsons' bedroom and found it very stark and cold. It was a room that didn't feel like it could contain any love. She wondered if it ever had.

Caleb's room was a different story altogether. Like Sylvie's it still contained pieces of a childhood lost. There were toys in a toy box that would never again be played with. There were clothes in a chest that would never again be worn. But Caleb had died nine years before Tom Carson hanged himself.

So what did that mean?

This room had been kept as a living memory to a son the Carsons could never get back. They hadn't been able to let Caleb go, and now Leah wondered how much of this room was currently taking up Sylvie Carson's mind. Surely it couldn't have been easy living with this constant reminder of what had happened right beside where she slept every night. It had to take its toll. Sometimes, the best of intentions turn out to do the most damage. This was something Leah was learning all too well.

On top of the chest of drawers were dusty old photos of little Caleb in frames. Some of him playing with Sylvie, some of him out on the farm. In each one, he had a great big smile on his face.

Leah had noticed no such pictures in either of the other two bedrooms.

After seeing Caleb's room, Leah decided she'd been through enough of the farmhouse and went back outside. Deciding the rain had pretty much gone away, she opted to leave the hood of her sweatshirt down. The air still felt wet and, along with the scent of the bog, the gentle wind carried the smell of the woods.

She walked to the barn. She knew this area well. She had been called in when Tom Carson's wife was found dead in a horse stall. The stalls still looked the same to Leah as they had that day, only now there were no flies. There was nothing. Just a stillness. The hay still lay scattered across the wooden slatted floor. The white boards of the stalls still stood with marks where the horses' tack had run ridges into them. But no horses had been here for eight years.

She left the barn and walked out through the fields. First the horse field then on into the cattle field. Both fields and the entire property were surrounded by a white wooden fence made from three horizontal boards running between fence posts. The fence still stood, but much of it had fallen. Eight years of being ravaged by storms had taken its toll. In places, just individual boards were missing. In other places, entire sections had blown down, leaving gaps like missing teeth. Leah took advantage of these spaces to avoid any climbing. She kept going until she came to the woods on the other side of the cattle field.

And soon, there it was. The oak tree Tom Carson was found hanging from.

She remembered coming to the crime scene that day not really knowing what to expect and nearly getting sick at the sight of what awaited her. She could still see marks around the bough where the rope had been looped overtop.
Some marks never go away
.

The clouds overhead broke apart, revealing a watery afternoon sun. Leah stared at that oak for some time, not knowing what compelled her to keep looking at it. But it wasn't until the sun began dropping that she started back for her car. The whole time she'd been standing at that tree, she'd been lost in thoughts of things that hadn't crossed her mind for some time. Thoughts of her dead husband, Billy. Thoughts of her children. Thoughts of Sylvie and the baby. Thoughts of her own pa.

And strangely, while she had stood there, she had forgotten all about the terrible smell of the bog and hadn't heard the incessant croaking of toads.

Getting back into her car, she pulled out onto Bogpine Way and headed home. The road obviously got its name from the bog and the fact that tall, spindly pines lined either side of it. It was a curvy road that ran right up and out of Alvin if one kept going north past the Carson Cattle Ranch. But now she was headed south, back down toward town. Back toward life.

Her radio crackled. It was Chris. He was reporting back about his attempts to find this Argo Atkinson.

“Hey, Chris,” Leah said. “Give me some good news.”

“Afraid I can't. There's no Argo Atkinson living in Alvin or no Atkinson of any variety that I can find.”

“What about other cities nearby? Can you try them?”

“Already have. Satsuma's a bust, and so is Atmore. I checked all the smaller directories. They came up blank. Conecuh County, though, they got Atkinsons, let me tell you. Got a Thelma Atkinson out in Castleberry, but I called her and she doesn't have any recollection of bein' related to nobody by the name of Argo. Same goes for Gus Atkinson in Evergreen. Ditto for Art Atkinson in McKenzie and Daisy Luanne Atkinson in Repton. No Argos. No relatives named Argo. Same story with Cliff—”

“Okay, Chris, I get your point.”

“Ah, good. So, yeah, nothing on Argo Atkinson.”

“All right, thanks for tryin' at least.”