A Long Time Gone

by Karen White

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

"We Walker women were born screaming into this world, the beginning of a lifelong quest to find what would quiet us. But whatever drove us away was never stronger than the pull of what brought us back ..."
When Vivien Walker left her home in the Mississippi Delta, she swore never to go back, as generations of the women in her family had. But in the spring, nine years to the day since she' d left, that' s exactly what happens-- Vivien returns, fleeing from a broken marriage and her lost dreams for children.
What she hopes to find is solace with "Bootsie," her dear grandmother who raised her, a Walker woman with a knack for making everything all right. But instead she finds that her grandmother has died and that her estranged mother is drifting further away from her memories. Now Vivien is forced into the unexpected role of caretaker, challenging her personal quest to find the girl she herself once was.
But for Vivien things change in ways she cannot imagine when a violent storm reveals the remains of a long-dead woman buried near the Walker home, not far from the cypress swamp that is soon to give up its ghosts. Vivien knows there is now only one way to rediscover herself-- by uncovering the secrets of her family and breaking the cycle of loss that has haunted her them for generations.

Release date: June 3, 2014

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 432

Sample

New American Library Titles by Karen White

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Vivien Walker Moise

INDIAN MOUND, MISSISSIPPI
APRIL 2013

I was born in the same bed that my mama was born in, and her mama before her, and even further back than anybody alive could still remember. It was as if the black wood of the bedposts were meant to root us Walker women to this place of flat fields and fertile soil carved from the great Mississippi. But like the levees built to control the mighty river, it never held us for long.

We were born screaming into this world, the beginning of a lifelong quest to find what would quiet us. Our legacy was our ability to coax living things from fallow ground, along with a desperate need to see what lay beyond the delta. A need to quell a hurt whose source was as unexplainable as its force.

Whatever it was that drove us away was never stronger than the pull of what brought us back. Maybe it was the feel of the dark Mississippi mud or the memory of the old house and the black bed into which we’d been born, but no matter how far we ran, we always came back.

I returned in the spring nearly nine years to the day after I’d left. I’d driven straight through from Los Angeles, twenty-seven hours of asphalt and fast food, my memories like a string guiding me home. The last leg from Little Rock to Indian Mound was punctuated by bright flashes of lightning and constant tornado watches on the radio. I kept my foot pressed to the accelerator as strong winds buffeted my car. It didn’t occur to me to stop. I had a trunk’s worth of hurts piled in the car with me that only my grandmother Bootsie could make go away. She would forgive those long years of silence because she understood doggedness. I’d inherited it from her side of the family, after all.

It was nearly dawn when the storm passed and I crossed the river into Mississippi and headed east on Highway 82 and into the heart of the delta. The hills and bluffs to the west disappeared as if a giant boot had flattened all the land between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, creating a landscape as rich and fertile as it was difficult to contain and control. This place of my ancestors was known to make or break a man, and I figured by now the scorecard was about even.

I’ve been a long time gone. Billboards and highway lights fell away, leaving behind empty fields and ramshackle structures swallowed by kudzu, turning them into hulking ghosts haunting the roadside. Sinewy cypress swamps randomly appeared as if to remind us of our tenuous hold on the land. The predawn flatscape flashed by me in shades of gray, as if the years had absorbed all the color, so that even my memories were seen only in black and white.

A therapist had once told me that my hindsight color blindness was due to an unhappy childhood. I tried to tell him that I had never considered my motherless childhood to be unhappy. It was more of an accumulation of years filled with absence, that perhaps black and white were simply the colors of grief.

The rising sun had painted the sky pink by the time I passed the sign for Indian Mound, the first seeds of panic making my heart beat faster. I glanced over at my purse, where I kept my pills, wondering whether I could swallow them dry again as I’d been doing for most of the trip. My throat felt sore, and my hands shook. I’m almost home. I turned my gaze toward the dim light outside that seemed to swallow my car as I passed through it, and pressed my foot harder on the accelerator.

I slowed down, trying to avoid the increasing amount of debris tossed across the road, the tree limbs, leaves, and roof shingles that seemed to have been scattered by the hand of a careless child. I caught up to an old, faded red pickup truck as it slowed down at the bright flashing red and blue lights of a police car stopped in front of fallen electrical lines. A large, brindled dog, his lineage as indecipherable as the vintage of the pickup truck in which he sat, stared at me with a lost expression. A police officer guided our way around the danger zone, his other hand reminding us to slow down. As soon as he had disappeared from my rearview mirror, I sped up, passing the truck and maneuvering past a mailbox that stood upright in the middle of the highway as if it were meant to be there.

My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and I thought of the pills again, and how easily they could take away the pit of worry that had begun to gnaw at me. I went faster, clipping a tree limb with my left front tire and hearing a crack and a thump of the split wood hitting metal. I kept going, realizing that I was prepared to drive on the rim of a flat tire if I had to. I’ve been a long time gone.

I turned off the highway onto a dirt road studded with puddles and rocks. The road bisected a large cotton field, the furrows drowning in standing water. I remembered this road and had turned by instinct. It probably had a name, one we’d never used when giving directions to the odd visitor. We usually instructed visitors to turn right about one and a half miles past the old general store, which leaned to the left and still had a Royal Crown Cola sign plastered over the doorway even though it had been abandoned long before I was born.

The store was gone now, but I still knew where to turn in the same way my hair still knew where to part no matter how hard I tried to tell it different. But the road was the same, still narrow, with the tall white oaks—taller now, I supposed—creating a green archway above. Tommy and I used to race barefoot down this road, watching our feet churn up dust like conjured spirits.

My back tires spun out, bringing me back to the present and slipping my car off the side of the road. Panicking, I gunned the engine, succeeding only in digging the wheels further in muck. Although I knew it was useless, I gunned the engine two more times. I stared through the windshield down the tree-shaded road. It had taken me nine years to come back. I figured stretching it out for a few more minutes wouldn’t matter.

I began to walk, my leather flats sticking to the Mississippi mud as if reluctant to let me go again. A murder of crows sprang up out of the trees, cawing loudly and making my heart hammer as I tried counting them, recalling the nursery rhyme Mathilda had sung to me as a child.

One for sorrow,

two for mirth,

three for a wedding,

four for a birth,

five for silver,

six for gold,

seven for a secret never to be told,

eight for heaven,

nine for hell,

And ten for the devil’s own self.

I clenched my teeth, wishing I’d taken another pill. I glanced over my shoulder at the car, realizing too late that I’d left my purse. I’d almost decided to go back when a flurry of wings made me look up. Seven black crows, their inky black wings seeming wet in the light of the sun, swirled and dipped over me, cawing and cackling, then took off again across the field.

My throat stung as I walked faster, feeling light-headed as I tried to recall the last time I’d eaten. And then the trees by the side of the road fell away and I stopped in a large clearing with a wide, paved drive edged with centuries-old oak trees. The old yellow house of indeterminate architecture with columns and porches and an improbable turret and at least three different roof styles stood before me in all of its confused splendor. It was an anomaly among all the Greek Revival homes of the region, as peculiar and original as the women who’d lived there for two centuries. My heart slowed as if Bootsie were already with me, letting my head rest on her shoulder. I had come home.

Despite the storm, the house appeared almost untouched except for the litter of pink azalea petals that had been stripped from their stems and scattered around the drive and yard like fuchsia doubloons from a Mardi Gras float.

Grass blades stuck their tips out of standing water in the yard as if struggling for breath, the water reflecting the sky and odd yellow house. Its windows stared down on me with reproach, as if wondering at the audacity of the return of another Walker woman, my hubris in believing it wanted me back. But I’d lived my first eighteen years inside its walls and had run through the fields of cotton that surrounded it. This house was the only spot of color in my monochromatic memories.

I listened for the songbirds, as much a part of my memory as the landscape. Except for the crows, the only sound cutting the silence was that of dripping water as it fell to the ground from the eaves and chipped paint of the old house, and from the arthritic fingers of the oak trees. I slowly walked up the wooden steps to the wide porch, pausing to take off my mud-caked shoes and leave them by the side of the door, just as I had done as a child. I placed my hand on the large brass knob of the front door before deciding to knock instead.

I knocked twice, waiting for the tread of my grandmother Bootsie’s footsteps, or the glide of my mother’s bare feet. Or even the heavier tread of my older brother, Tommy. But all I heard was the sound of the water leaking from the house. Drip. Drip.

I hesitated for a moment, then reached for the knob. It didn’t turn. In all of my years growing up, the front door had never been locked. I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d known I was coming after all. I stood for a moment with my hands on my hips until I remembered it was a stance my mother had frequently used, and dropped them again. The air was heavy with the scent of rain and the boxwoods that had begun to creep over the porch railings unchecked.

I slid my shoes back on and crossed the drive to walk around the side toward the old carriage house that had been converted into a garage sometime in the twenties. I recognized Bootsie’s 1977 white Cadillac convertible and my heart lurched with relief. A white pickup truck with an enormous toolbox in the bed that I assumed was Tommy’s sat behind it, and next to it was a dark sedan that looked suspiciously like an unmarked police car. I didn’t take the time to think about why it was there. I walked quickly now, no longer caring about avoiding puddles, needing to be embraced by my grandmother until I no longer craved my pills to soothe away the hurting.

I moved to the backyard, looking toward the rear of our property, toward the forest full of sweet gums and pines, the solid land giving way to the swamp and giant bald cypress trees that Tommy had once told me were over a thousand years old. A lone cypress tree had managed to take root on higher ground halfway between the house and the swamp, standing by itself among the sparse grass and haphazard pine trees whose scraggly branches always made them look bewildered next to the corded majesty of the giant cypress. I’d called it “my tree” as a child, and I longed to sit in the comforting shade of its branches again.

But the landscape had been altered. Limbs and leaves mixed blindly with papers and other indistinguishable man-made debris. A porch swing that I remembered had once hung on the front porch sat right side up, its chains missing, in the middle of the yard. Close by, almost as if they’d been set there on purpose, were the two metal chairs that had always graced my grandmother’s vegetable garden. They had once been a neon lime color, but sun and time had faded them into a disappointed green. With the swing, they formed a cohesive seating group, almost as if the wind had decided in the middle of its destruction to take a break.

I paused, feeling my equilibrium shift as if I’d just stepped off a moving sidewalk. I took in the three figures standing in the near distance, and then waited for my gaze to register what they were standing next to, blinking twice until I understood. My tree, the stalwart reminder of the best parts of my childhood, had toppled over, clipping the edge of the old cotton shed. The roots were singed black, with chunks of bark encircling the area. I imagined I could smell the burnt ions in the air from the lightning strike, still feel the atmosphere pulsating with the power of it.

“Bootsie?” I called out, my walk becoming a run. Three heads turned in my direction just as another cluster of crows flew out from the dead tree, their shiny black bodies seeming to mock me.

I stopped in front of the small group, my breath coming in gasps, as we regarded one another, all of us looking as if we’d just seen a ghost. Nobody said anything as my gaze moved from one person to another, registering my brother’s face, and then another man, and then my mother. Whereas Tommy wore jeans and an untucked shirt, like he’d just been roused from bed by the sound of a lightning strike, my mother wore a silk brocade cocktail dress taken directly from the Kennedy White House, complete with rhinestone earrings and matching bracelet and ring. I recalled seeing a photograph of her mother, Bootsie, wearing the same ensemble.

My mother turned to me with mild surprise. “Vivien, I know I’ve told you before that you should never leave the house without lipstick.”

I stared at her for a long moment, wondering if there was more to this altered landscape than just a fallen tree.

My brother hesitated for a moment, then took a step forward to embrace me. He was ten years older than me, and almost a decade had passed since I’d last seen him, but now, at nearly thirty-seven, he still looked like the gangly and awkward boy I’d grown up with. Tommy’s shirt was soft and worn under my fingers, and I clutched at the familiarity of it. “It’s been a while.” He didn’t smile.

My lips trembled as I tried to smirk at his vast understatement, as if we both believed his words could erase nearly nine years of silence. “Hello, Tommy.” I forced a deep breath into my lungs. “Where’s Bootsie?”

His eyes softened, and I knew then that I’d lost more than just time in the last nine years. “You’ve been gone awhile.” His gaze drifted to our mother in her cocktail dress and high heels and something icy cold gripped the area around my heart.

Before I could say anything, the other man stepped forward. Tripp Montgomery was as tall and slender as I remembered him, short brown hair and hazel eyes that always seemed to see more of the world than the rest of us. He wore khaki pants and a long-sleeved shirt and a tie, which only added to my confusion. I looked at him, wondering why he was there and hoping that somebody would tell me this was all a dream and that I’d soon awaken in my bed in the old house with Bootsie kissing my forehead.

“Hey,” Tripp said, as if he’d just delivered me to my front steps after school. As if the earth had somehow stopped spinning in this corner of the world and everything was the same as when I’d left it. Except it wasn’t.

“Why are you here?” I asked, plucking at one of the random questions I needed to ask to make the ground beneath my feet stand still.

His face remained impassive, but I thought I saw a flicker of what looked like sympathy pass through his eyes. “I’m the county coroner.” He stepped back, allowing my gaze to register the gaping hole in the ground that the intricate root system of the giant cypress had once inhabited. The grass around the edges was blackened, wood and bark sprinkled like confetti around the wounded earth. And there, nestled inside the dark hole like a baby in its crib, were the stark white bones of a human skeleton.

My hands began to shake, my vision marred by mottled dots of light. I struggled to focus as I stared at the skull, unable to look away.

I forced myself to look at Tripp and saw that he was staring at my hands as if he knew why, like he’d always known everything about me without my ever having to open my mouth. I tried to clench my fingers into fists, but they were shaking too hard. The dots of light had now become streaks across my vision, and I tried to focus on Tommy again, but my mother’s voice broke through the pounding in my head.

“Have you taken my car keys again, Vivien? I can’t seem to find them.”

I looked down at the dirty white of the forehead bone, now shimmering in the bright morning sun as if it were trying to speak to me. I started to say something, but the light suddenly dimmed and I closed my eyes as I felt myself falling, still seeing behind my eyelids the glow of white bone against dark, dark earth.

Chapter 2

Adelaide Walker Bodine

INDIAN MOUND, MISSISSIPPI
JUNE 1920

Everybody has secrets. Even thirteen-year-old girls like me who nobody paid any attention to, like we were supposed to be too busy with our dolls and pretty dresses and birthday parties to notice that the judge’s wife spent a lot of time alone in her house with different traveling salesmen, or that Mr. Pritchard, who owned the drugstore, always gave you free penny candy if you came in around closing, because
he was too drunk from drinking bottled medicine by then to make change.

And I knew that my mama had jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge when I was ten because my daddy had been killed in the war and she just couldn’t take to life without him. I wish she’d asked me first, because I would have reminded her that she still had me. But I couldn’t say that to anybody, since I wasn’t supposed to know anything important. So I spent a lot of time outside halfway closed doors just so I could know what little I did.

My best friend was Sarah Beth Heathman, whose daddy was the president of the Indian Mound Planter’s Bank on Main Street. I didn’t have many friends on account of what my mama had done, like other parents were afraid that something like that might be catching. I was told that Mama had fallen into the river on accident, but I guess nobody else believed that either.

But it worked out, since Sarah Beth didn’t have many friends, either, on account of her parents being so old. They were old when they had her, and even older now that she was fourteen. Maybe that’s why Sarah Beth was so wild, or at least that’s what Aunt Louise called her. But it seemed to me that whatever crazy idea Sarah Beth came up with, I was always happy to go along.

On a Wednesday in late June, I was sitting under the cypress tree in my backyard filling my lungs with the thick warm air while pretending to read a book. I’d been staring at the back of my house, wondering why it was still yellow when everybody else’s house was white. I’d been told my great-grandmother had come from New Orleans, had the house painted and the odd castlelike turret added to one side, then given birth to a daughter before leaving it all behind to return to New Orleans. When the house became mine—and it would, because Aunt Louise told me that some papers meant that the house was always inherited by the oldest girl—I promised myself that I would paint it white.

I sometimes wondered if Uncle Joe—my daddy’s brother—and Aunt Louise and my cousin Willie ever thought it should be their house, since they were stuck taking care of me and forced to live there. I’d hear my aunt fretting about the house needing painting or another leak in the roof, but then she’d look at me like I was a kitten drowning in a puddle and she’d get all choked up, and hug me like I was the only thing that mattered. She loved me like I was her daughter, and I appreciated that. But she wasn’t my mama. My mama had walked off the Tallahatchie Bridge and left me behind.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, the men had all gone back to work after dinner, and the women were sponge-bathing themselves before collapsing onto sofas or beds in a cloud of flowery perfume and baby powder. A horn honked in the front drive, and I ran to find Sarah Beth in the backseat of the family’s Lincoln, their driver, Jim, behind the wheel.

“Want to go to a picture show?” she asked, smiling sweetly through the car window.

We’d already seen Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde three times. I should have known that she was up to no good. Jim dropped us off at the theater, and Sarah Beth waited for him to drive away before she told me her plans.

Twenty minutes later, I was wishing I’d said no. The sun was hot enough to burn the wings off a mosquito, and I could feel it prickling my scalp under my hair. Aunt Louise called it strawberry blond, but it was still just red to the Barclay twins, who always wanted to rub it for good luck before a baseball game.

I tramped through the tall grass behind Sarah Beth, keeping my face down to avoid getting more freckles. I’d be grounded for sure if Aunt Louise counted one more than I’d had the night before. She’d told me that all the women on my mama’s side of the family were great beauties, and that I just needed a little more time to grow into my looks. But when I looked at myself in the mirror, I knew it would take more than just time. Aunt Louise still wore corsets and hadn’t bobbed her hair, so I knew better than to listen to her about beauty.

“Are we almost there?” I asked for the third time, noticing how the pale skin on my forearms had started to turn pink.

“Almost. Stop being such a baby.”

I stopped for a minute to catch my breath, feeling the sweat run down between my shoulder blades. I glared at the back of Sarah Beth’s head full of dark brown hair and skin that never freckled or burned. I wondered how I was going to explain how I got sunburn sitting in a theater.

“Where are we going?” I shouted at her. We’d walked through the downtown area of Indian Mound and straight through a neighborhood of run-down houses that both of us had been promised a switch to the backside if we ever wandered into, then right through the other side, where tall Indian grass separated the town from the cotton fields. I looked down at my dusty shoes and considered for a minute that I should take them off along with my socks and go barefoot. But chigger bites on my ankles would be a lot harder to explain to Aunt Louise than dirty shoes.

Sarah Beth reached a dirt road and headed down it, and I followed, because I didn’t have anything better to do. She stopped and waited for me to catch up and it took me a minute to figure out where we were. There was a low iron fence in front of us with an open gate hanging catawampus from a single hinge like a dog panting in the heat. Somebody had tried to keep the grass cut, but long strands of it stuck out from the bottom of the fence.

I looked up, recognizing the back of the old Methodist church. People went to the new church closer to town now, and I’d never thought to wonder what they did with the old one. Which was nothing, I guess, but leave it be.

“This is a cemetery,” I whispered, afraid I might wake somebody up.

Sarah Beth rolled her eyes. “Of course it is. It’s the best place for secrets.”

Pretending not to be afraid, I followed Sarah Beth through the gate to where rectangle-shaped gravestones sat upright in rows like teeth. In the back corner, separated from the stone markers with a low metal chain, were rough-looking wooden crosses, each with a hand-painted name and dates. Some had little messages on them like “Gone but not forgotten” or “In the hands of Jesus.”

Sarah caught me looking at them. “Those are for the coloreds. They don’t have money for nice markers, so they make their own.” She began walking down one of the rows, being careful not to step on top of any of the graves. Everybody knew that was really bad luck, and that the angry spirit would follow you back home. I carefully placed my feet where hers had been. I figured I had enough spirits at home to worry about bringing home another.

“Why are they in the corner like that?”

She stopped, then turned around to look at me. With an exasperated sigh, she said, “Because they’re colored.”

I stared at her back as she kept walking, thinking about all those bodies buried in the ground and how once you became all bones it probably didn’t matter what color your skin had been.

Sarah Beth stopped, squatting next to five tiny stones stuck right next to one another. A rosebush had been planted at the foot of the middle one. It was clipped and the dirt around it didn’t have any weeds, so it looked like somebody came by pretty regular-like.

A yellow jacket lifted off a dandelion to buzz close to me and I jerked back with a little scream.

“Shh,” Sarah Beth hissed, her finger across her lips.

“Bees make me sick,” I hissed back. “If I get stung you’ll have to carry me to Dr. Odom before I stop breathing. And then you’ll be sorry you yelled at me.”

She frowned, then turned back to the stones while I moved to stand behind her, avoiding the dandelions just in case there were more bees.

My eyes moved from one stone to the next. Each had the same last name—Heathman—and each of them had only one date, going from 1891 through 1897 like some kind of filing system.

“That’s your last name,” I said to Sarah Beth, trying to sound observant and intelligent, which was normally her job.

She rolled her eyes. “I know. That’s why this is a secret.”

I looked at her silently, afraid to open my mouth so that she’d know that I had no idea what she was talking about.

With the same kind of exaggerated patience that Aunt Louise showed when she was trying to tell me why I couldn’t roll up my dresses on hot days or cut my hair, she said, “These are my brothers and sisters. I know it. The last one, Henrietta, died nine years before I was born. Mama always calls me her miracle baby, and now I know why.”

“There’re lots of Heathmans in Indian Mound. How d’you know they’re not cousins or something?”

“I wrote down every Heathman in town and there are no aunts, uncles, cousins, or anybody who would have been old enough to have babies that were the ages of these babies. Except for my parents. That’s why I’m the miracle baby. Don’t you remember that Bible story Mrs. Adams told us in Sunday school about Abraham’s wife, Sarah, who had a baby even though she was old? Just like my mama!”

“But why wouldn’t your mama have told you about your brothers and sisters?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it makes her too sad.”

“Have you looked in your family Bible? Every baby born in the family is supposed to be listed in the front.”

She stared at me in surprise, then shook her head, making me feel very smart. “I’m not allowed to touch it. We keep it in Daddy’s study on a shelf. Mama says it’s too old for me to look at it; that’s why she gave me a new one for my birthday.”

A slow grin formed on her face as she regarded me. “She usually takes another bath when she wakes up, and Bertha does the grocery shopping on Wednesdays. If we hurry, we could make it back and take a peek.”

Without waiting for me, she took off at a run, and I followed her because it had sort of been my idea. She lived closer to town than me because of her daddy being president of the bank, but in the middle of the afternoon I was about to die of heatstroke by the time we ran up the steps onto the columned porch. Her house looked like one of the old plantation homes in Natchez, but it was new. Sarah Beth made fun of my house, saying it looked like it didn’t know what it wanted to be—something I knew she’d heard her mama say. I could usually shut her up by telling her that it had been in my family for more than one hundred years and would one day be mine.

We very carefully opened the front door, then paused on the threshold. I breathed heavily as Sarah Beth put her finger to her lips, as if I needed to be reminded that if her mama caught us and told my aunt and uncle, I wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week.

We tiptoed over the thick rug of the foyer and into her daddy’s office. It smelled like pipe smoke, a smell I liked but one I could never separate from Mr. Heathman. Sarah Beth moved directly to a bookcase behind the large desk and pulled out a thick black leather Bible.

She placed it on top of the desk and, with a deep breath, she opened the front cover. I was a good head taller than her, so I could easily see over her head to the facing page, where two columns of names and dates were neatly filled in on the left side of the paper.

Carefully, Sarah Beth used her index finger to march down the list of names, coming to rest on the final five in the last column. John Heathman, 1891. William Heathman, 1892. Margaret Heathman, 1893. George Heathman, 1895. Henrietta Heathman, 1897.

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A Long Time Gone

Karen White

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