Authors: Jonathon King
E
arly on a Sunday morning I packed up an overnight bag, folded a Florida map and started driving to church. Our list of clergy possibilities had been whittled by callbacks. I’d left two more messages for the pastor at the Church of God in Placid City that went unanswered. Billy and I had discussed the possibility that we might be on a fishing trip in a much larger sea. It had only been a rumor that the male descendent of our gunman Jefferson had become a preacher, and even then we were only guessing that he had stayed in the state. Billy expanded the search parameters into northern Florida and was talking about pushing it up into other Southern states. He’d even forwarded the idea that the grandson could have changed his name after leaving Everglades City in the 1970s and disappeared anywhere.
But Mrs. William Jefferson’s accent and her affirmation that her husband had roots in southeast Florida made a visit imperative. Her single comment kept rolling in my head, the jagged edges refusing to nub down. “That part of the family has
been
passed on.” The reticence in the voice of the wife of a country preacher pushed me on.
Southern Boulevard carried me through the urban sprawl of West Palm Beach, and twenty miles out, the land turned open and flat, with sugar-cane stalks, freshly tilled vegetable fields, and sod farms that lay as green and uniform as felt on a forty-acre billiard table. Route 441 took me nearly to Belle Glade, a farming town that has supported a migrant community of field-workers and seasonal pickers for more than half a century. The town sits at the southern curve of massive Lake Okeechobee, but I couldn’t see the water. A huge earthen dyke had been constructed here by the U.S. government in 1930. It was their response to the hurricane of 1926, which brought more rain in its march from the tropics than anyone had seen or imagined in their worst nightmares. The storm twisted up waves on the lake that surpassed ocean swells and sent the power of tons of water surging over the southern banks and sweeping over the town of Moore Haven. Many of the 2,500 residents killed were never found, their bodies buried in churned black muck—all that was left of the rich soil that had made the region the world’s green emerald of winter vegetable growing. In the wake of nature’s disaster, man became determined to tame her. The dyke was built and the natural flow of fresh water to the Everglades, which runs from this point for more than a hundred miles to the end of the Florida peninsula, was forever changed—many say for the worse. The same charge was raised when the Tamiami Trail builders constructed their road, when Cyrus Mayes and his sons helped put down the first unnatural barrier to the flow of shallow water to Florida Bay. If one considers such evolution to be evil, then there was enough complicity to go around.
I cruised slowly through the sugar cane capital city of Clewiston and then northwest past a sign that read
OUR SOIL IS OUR FUTURE
. Then the highway opened back up. With every mile the elevation subtly changed. Pine lands, with individual, polelike tree trunks and green, tasseled tops, lined the road. The landscape was occasionally interrupted by carefully laid out orange groves, the rows running to the horizon and the close trees already showing gobs of the ripening fruit. I timed myself by the mileage signs along the way and made it into Placid City just after eight. There was little movement on the Sunday morning streets. I made two loops into commercial and residential areas that went no more than two blocks off the main highway. It was a narrow place of clapboard and red brick, pickup trucks and broom-swept sidewalks.
When I pulled into Mel’s Placid Café, I turned off the engine and let the constant road noise of the trip leach away. There was a gray dust on the step up to the low porch of the restaurant and curtains on the windows. It was not until I reached for the door handle of the truck that I noticed a car parked across my back bumper. It took up the entire pane of my rearview mirror. “Jesus, Max,” I whispered to myself. “You do attract them.”
When I stepped out of the truck, there was a little man leaning up against the front bumper of a Crown Victoria. It was the kind of car a big man might drive, and he looked out of place next to it. I pretended I was counting out my change from my pocket while I measured him. He was dressed in khaki, but it looked more like a style than a uniform. There was no adornment on the shirt, no epaulets or insignia, only the one single gold star pinned over the left breast. I cut my eyes through the parking lot and saw no patrol cars or backup vehicles.
“Mornin’,” he finally said, knowing that I was stalling. “One beautiful Sunday morning.” He emphasized the observation by looking up at the treetops and sky. The man’s head was bald and tan, and if he was more than five feet seven, I was being generous.
“You do have a gorgeous piece of country here, Sheriff,” I said, guessing.
“And mighty quiet too, Mr.…” He bumped himself off my fender and reached out his hand.
“Freeman,” I said, stepping forward to accept the small but firm handshake and thinking that little men in positions of power always had a habit of squeezing one’s hand a bit more strongly than needed. “Max Freeman.”
“Mr. Freeman,” he said with a politician’s smile. “I welcome you to Placid City. You came just for the delights of Mel’s home cooking?”
“Not solely,” I said. “Though I’m sure it will certainly be worth the trip, Sheriff, uh…”
“Wilson,” he said. “O. J. Wilson.”
It was difficult to judge his age. There were prominent crow’s- feet at the corners of his
eyes
and three rows of worry lines across his forehead. But he was fit and there was an energy coming off him that belied an older man. He was looking up into my
eyes,
trying to hold them, and it did not please me. I’d done the same in street interrogations and didn’t like being on the other side of the stare.
“You former law enforcement or military, Mr. Freeman?” he asked.
“You have a preference, Sheriff?”
“Sorry, just the way you carry yourself,” he said. “No offense meant.”
“None taken,” I replied. I was actually intrigued by his slightly bulldog bearing. “I was a cop, up north. I’m working as a P.I. now, mostly out of West Palm and Lauderdale.”
“You’re on business then, up this way?”
“Just checking on an estate matter, for an attorney,” I said.
He nodded as if he understood and reached out to touch the side of my truck.
“Nice truck,” he said. “You a hunter, Mr. Freeman?”
“No, sir. Never have been.”
“Then there wouldn’t be any firearms back behind the seats there, correct?”
“I do have a permit for a concealed handgun, Sheriff. And that’s in a bag behind the seat.” I wasn’t sure where this was going, but I did believe O. J. Wilson had his reasons and I really was in no mood to rile him.
“Would you like to take a look, Sheriff?” I said, and reopened the driver’s-side door and folded up the seat.
“I would, thank you,” he said, and bent in. He was short enough so that the floorboards were above his knees, and he reached in and gave my backpack and the sleeping bag I kept there a thorough going over. While he was bent inside, a couple parked their car and walked past us into the café. They did not so much as look back, as though the sight of the local constable going through a stranger’s vehicle was as routine as the Sunday paper. When he was done he arranged the bags back the way they’d been.
“Thank you, Mr. Freeman. I appreciate your cooperation,” he said, stepping back like some baggage security guard at the airport.
“Mind letting me in on what this is all about, Sheriff?” I said.
“Well, sir. I can’t really,” he said, dismissing me. “Let’s just say it’s a precaution and leave it at that if you don’t mind, Mr. Freeman. Like you said, it’s a beautiful and peaceful Sunday morning.”
“No, sir. That was your description, Sheriff,” I said, but the little man had already turned and headed into Mel’s, leaving me to stand and simply wonder a bit before I finally climbed the stairs and went in to have my breakfast.
I was still frowning when a bell hanging on a curled piece of soft iron rang as I opened the door. The waitress actually said, “Howdy.” A middle-aged man with a rough and mottled complexion tipped the bill of his John Deere cap as we passed and I nodded back. I sat at an empty table in the corner that was covered in a red and white checked cloth and decorated with a single plastic geranium. The waitress was dressed in jeans, with a string apron and a flowered western blouse. She smiled as if I were a friend.
“How you doin’ today, sir? Can I get you some coffee to start?”
“You read my mind, ma’am,” I said, and then asked about the special. When she came back I hooked my thumb at the front of the room and said, “Your sheriff always so attentive on Sunday mornings?
She put a wrinkle in the side of her mouth and shook her head like a mother who was just told her son was teasing the girls again.
“Don’t y’all worry about O. J.—he don’t mean nothin’ by it,” she said. Then she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Truth is, he’s like a protective daddy. The man got the worst luck with them gunshot killin’s, and he thinks it’s his fault they can’t solve ’em.
“Killings?”
She smiled again and said, “You’re not from around here, are you?
“No ma’am.”
“Well, sir,” she began, her voice dropping even further, “we might be the smallest place in the state with a real-life serial killer out there.” I could see John Deere pulling the brim of his hat farther down, and I guessed he’d heard the town gossip doing her thing before. “He’s been knockin’ off the bad boys of Highland County for more than fifteen years now. Every couple of years or so, another one drops, an’ everyone gets themselves all in a fuss about how we ain’t so far from the big city after all. Poor ol’ Sheriff Wilson just took on the chore of finding him. Likes to frisk every stranger that comes through here.”
“Annette?” John Deere had held off as long as he could. “Can we order over here, please?”
The waitress rolled her eyes and winked at me. I grinned back, friendly-like, and ordered the breakfast special—eggs over easy and biscuits with brown gravy.
I ate without interruption and gave the waitress’s gossip little thought. Every little place has something, and violence doesn’t have boundaries. Who isn’t capable of it? You don’t have to be a cop for long to find that answer: everybody. When Annette brought my check I asked if she could give me directions to Pastor Jefferson’s Church of God.
“You really ain’t from around here,” she said. She told me the way in lefts and rights. I tipped her like a city boy at 20 percent and got a big thank-you in return.
The white frame building was set well back off the road in a slight gully. There was no sign at the road entrance, but several cars and trucks were already parked on the brown grass to one side. I turned down the worn dirt drive and like the other early arrivals, parked in the shade of a stand of century-old oaks. The Reverend Jefferson’s church reminded me of the plain, clapboard Quaker buildings in central Pennsylvania. The steeple was canopied and slatted at the top to vent hot air. The windows were tall and narrow, and none held the adornment of stained glass or anything more fanciful than simple double molding. I sat in the truck and watched folks arrive for the 10:00
A.M.
service. They were a democratic group. A middle-aged white couple, he in a western string tie and tan sport coat, she in a patterned dress and a white embroidered sweater. A black family, the parents in clean, pressed white shirts and dark trousers and skirt, their three matching sons trailing behind, the top buttons at their necks done tight. A group of what I guessed were Seminole Indians climbing out of a big, club-cab pickup, the men in polished cowboy boots and the women in large, brightly colored skirts. Their hair was pulled back, black and glossy, and their stoic faces carried the classic flat and sharply angled forehead and nose.
I waited until near the hour and then got out and slipped on my navy sport coat and went in. I nodded and politely smiled as I found a seat in the back. The interior was as understated as the outside. The plain wooden pews were worn, the lacquer rubbed dull in some spots by years of wool and canvas, cotton and polyester. The ceiling was beamed and the highest windows let the morning sun streak through, illuminating lazy drifts of dust in the air. The altar was small and white and the expected dominant feature was a floor-to- ceiling cross behind it. The place looked like it could hold fifty congregants at most. There were some thirty-five this morning, and they all rose at some signal that I didn’t see.
Pastor Jefferson looked young for fifty. His hair was dark, full and conservatively cut. He was slightly built and it was difficult to judge his height, but his face and shoulders were all angles and sharp corners.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning, Reverend,” the congregation returned.
“God be with you.”
“And with you.”
Let us pray.
I was the only one who did not lower my head as Jefferson recited. As he scanned the room, he picked me up in a second, a tall stranger in the back pew of his church. His voice was clear but not strong. He depended on the words themselves and not his performance of them. He was as plain as the physical structure. I was too far away to discern the color of his eyes.
“Please, be seated.”
The service was informal and simple. The pastor’s sermon was personal and grassroots. He came across as patrician and neighborly at the same time. He kept the Southern drawl out of his diction during his readings, but let it slip through when he turned a phrase out of the Bible. I saw him stop his eyes on several of the congregants during the sermon, though he seemed to avoid mine. When the offering plate got to me I noted that it was filled with envelopes, all of which, I assumed, contained member tithes. I slipped a twenty under them.
When the service ended I stood watching until the last folks had filed out. Jefferson was outside at the bottom of the steps, clasping each hand and giving them a personal word. There was no one behind me when he looked up into my face and took my hand. His grip was soft and I could feel delicate bones through tight skin. He waited an extra few beats as the last true parishioner stepped out of earshot. His eyes were a dark blue that I had never encountered before.