Dream with Little Angels

Book 1: Alvin, Alabama Novel

by Michael Hiebert

Genres: Coming of Age; Mystery

Synopsis

Michael Hiebert’s remarkable debut novel tells the riveting story of a small southern town haunted by tragedy, one brave woman’s struggle to put a troubling mystery to rest—and its impact on the sensitive boy who comes of age in the midst of it all.

Abe Teal wasn’t even born when Ruby Mae Vickers went missing twelve years ago. Few people in Alvin, Alabama, talk about the months spent looking for her, or about how Ruby Mae’s lifeless body was finally found beneath a willow tree. Even Abe’s mom, Leah, Alvin’s only detective, has avoided the subject. But now, another girl is missing.

Fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Dailey took the bus home from school as usual, then simply vanished. Townsfolk comb the dense forests and swampy creeks to no avail. Days later Tiffany Michelle Yates disappears. Abe saw her only hours before, holding an ice cream cone and wearing a pink dress.

Observant and smart, Abe watches his mother battle small-town bureaucracy and old resentments, desperate to find both girls and quietly frantic for her own children’s safety. As the search takes on a terrifying urgency, Abe traverses the shifting ground between innocence and hard-won understanding, eager to know and yet fearing what will be revealed.

Dream with Little Angels is by turns lyrical, heartbreaking, and shocking—a brilliantly plotted novel of literary suspense and of the dark shadows, painful secrets, and uncompromising courage in one small town.

Release date: April 26, 2016

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

Twelve Years Later

When she was nearly fifteen, my sister Carry got her first boyfriend. At least that was my mother’s theory when I asked why Carry suddenly seemed to live in a world I no longer existed in. She used to goof around with me and Dewey after school. Then, in the summer, she stopped paying much attention to us. After school started, she just ignored us altogether.

“I reckon she’s shifted her interests,” my mother said, washing a plate at the kitchen sink. “She’s round ’bout that age now.”

“Age for what?” I asked.

“For boys.” She sighed. “Now we’re in for it.”

“In for what?”

“The hard part. My mama said my hard part started when I was thirteen, so I guess we should consider ourselves lucky.”

I didn’t rightly know what she was talking about, but it sounded like something bad. “How long does the hard part last?” I asked.

“With me it lasted ’til I was seventeen. Then I got pregnant with Caroline.” She let out a nervous laugh. The Virgin Mother dangling from the silver chain around her neck swayed as she laughed. My mother always wore that chain. It had been a gift from my grandpa. “Let’s just hope hers ends differently and not worry about what stretch of time it takes up, okay?”

I agreed I would, even though I still didn’t rightly know what it was she was talking about. But I had other, more important things to worry about anyhow. A month ago, the Wiseners sold their house across the road because Mr. Wisener got work in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The house was purchased by a Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow from Sipsey, who moved in shortly thereafter. My mother took me and Carry over two days later with a basket full of fresh-baked biscuits, golden delicious apples, and ajar of her homemade blueberry jam, and introduced us. The jam even had a pink ribbon tied around its lid. She made me carry the basket.

The door was answered by a tall, thin man, with dark brown hair trimmed short and flat. His most distinguishing feature was his square jaw that, from the look of it, hadn’t been shaved in at least a few days. The rest of his facial features, like his forehead and eyes, were more or less pointed.

“I’m Leah Teal,” my mother said, “your neighbor from across the way. An’ this here’s Caroline, and this is my little Abraham.”

“Here,” I said, holding up the basket.

“I’m Wyatt Edward Farrow,” he said after a hesitation. I got the feeling he wasn’t used to strangers showing up on his doorstep with baskets of biscuits, and he didn’t know how to properly respond to our welcoming. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and pensive.

I don’t think he trusted us.

“Pleased to meet ya,” he said, but by the way he said it, I had a hunch he didn’t like meeting people much. There wasn’t a trace of a smile on his thin lips. I was relieved when he finally took the basket from me, though. It was getting heavy with all them apples in it.

An uncomfortable silence followed that my mother broke by asking what it was Mr. Farrow did for work.

Something flashed in his gray eyes, and I got the distinct feeling Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow didn’t like being asked questions just as much as he didn’t like strangers on his doorstep. “I’m a carpenter,” he said. “Work out of my home. Hope the noise don’t bother ya none.”

“Hasn’t yet,” my mother said with a warm smile.

Mr. Farrow didn’t smile back. Something about him didn’t sit right with me. It was like he was being sneaky or something. “Haven’t been doin’ nothin’ yet,” he said. “Still settin’ up my tools in the garage.”

“Well, I’m sure it will be fine,” my mother said.

“Sometimes I work in the evenings,” Mr. Farrow said. He narrowed his eyes and looked from me to Carry as though daring us to tell him we took exception to evening work.

“I usually do, too,” my mother said, “so that should work out fine.” That my mother just told this suspicious-looking stranger that me and my sister spent most nights alone in our house didn’t settle so good with me at all. I was glad when she followed by telling him what she did for work. “I’m a police officer. My schedule’s a bit irregular too, at times.” I saw a slight twitch in one of his eyes when she relayed this information, though he hid his reaction well.

Three days later, Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow finished setting up his tools. The sun had just dropped behind my house and me and Dewey were in the front yard trying to see who could balance a rock on the end of a branch the longest. It was an almost hypnotic exercise, especially with the quiet singing of the cicadas drifting by.

That was until a loud roar suddenly ripped through the evening.

Dewey and I both jumped, our rocks tumbling to the ground. My heart raced against my chest. Trembling, we both stared across the road. Behind Mr. Farrow’s garage door, something had sprung to life.

“Sounds like a mountain lion,” Dewey said, his eyes wide. Dewey was my best friend for as long as I could remember. He lived eight houses down Cottonwood Lane, on the same side of it as me, and we were almost exactly the same age. His birthday came two days before mine.

My heart was slowing back down to normal again. “Must be a saw or somethin’,” I said. I told him about Mr. Farrow being a carpenter. “Least that’s what he claimed. At the time, I didn’t believe him.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “He just seemed to me like he was lyin’ about it.”

“Why would he lie about somethin’ like that?”

“I don’t know. I just didn’t trust him.”

“Sure is loud.”

With a whir, the sound stopped. Me and Dewey stood there in the dim purple light of early evening, watching the garage door expectantly. From underneath it shone a narrow strip of white light. Sure enough, a few minutes later something else started up and we both jumped again. This thing was higher pitched than the other and even louder.

“Sounds like a hawk,” Dewey said.

“Lot louder than a hawk,” I said.

That night, me and Dewey heard ten different animals screaming from inside that garage. For the week following, we spent most of our evenings lying in my front lawn, our chins propped up on our hands, staring across the road, listening to Mr. Farrow work and speculating on what it was he could possibly be building. Far as we could tell, he never left that garage. The windows in the rest of the house were always dark.

“Part I can’t figure out,” Dewey said, “is when does he go to the bathroom? We should at least see lights come on sometime for that, shouldn’t we?”

“Maybe he just goes in the dark.”

“Maybe.”

A few days after that, Dewey made the observation about the roadkill.

We were coming home from school when he said it. Dewey and I had walked to school together for as long as I could remember, but that would all end after this year. Being so small, Alvin had only an elementary school. For middle school and high school, you had to go down to Satsuma. For four years, Carry spent over two hours total on the bus going to and from school and I listened to her complain about it every day. Well, until this year. Now that she was the right age for boys, she didn’t talk much at all to me anymore. I wasn’t looking forward to going to middle school. I enjoyed my and Dewey’s walks.

Autumn was doing its best to settle in. We walked along Hunter Road, beneath the tall oak trees, sunlight filtering down on us through their almost orange and yellow leaves. Neither of us had said much since leaving school. I was hitting the ground in front of me with a piece of hickory I found a couple blocks back, and Dewey had his head down and his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. By the way he walked, he seemed to me like he was thinking hard about something, and I didn’t want to interrupt.

Finally he looked up and said, “Have you noticed anything different lately?”

I thwacked the trunk of an oak with my hickory. “Different like what?” I asked.

He hesitated like he was thinking whether or not to tell me. “I just . . . a week ago I started noticing there weren’t no dead animals on the road anymore.”

I laughed, but he was serious.

“So I have been payin’ attention to it ever since. And for a week now, I ain’t seen a single piece of roadkill anywhere.”

“I guess the raccoons are getting smarter,” I said and laughed again. I reckoned this was a strange thing to have spent so much time over.

Dewey stopped walking, so I did, too. “Abe, you don’t think it’s strange? For a whole week I ain’t seen a single dead squirrel, chipmunk, snake, possum, nothin’. Hell, not even a skunk. Even when old Newt Parker was still alive, you still saw at least a couple skunks most weeks.”

“Newt Parker never really ate roadkill,” I told him. “That was all just third grade stories going around.”

“He did so. Ernest Robinson said he saw so himself. Said he was riding his bike past the Parker place one afternoon and old man Parker was sitting right there on a chair out in the front lawn munching on road-killed raccoon.”

“Ernest Robinson is full of crap. How did he know it was ’coon?”

“Said it looked like one,” Dewey said. “What else looks like raccoon but raccoon?”

He had a point there, but I still wasn’t convinced. “How did he know it was road killed?”

Dewey had problems answering that one. Eventually we started walking again and I resumed hitting the ground with my hickory stick. “I still think it’s strange that I haven’t seen any for a week,” he said.

“You want me to go find a rabbit and throw it in front of a car for you?” I threw the hickory into the woods as we turned down our street.

“I just think it’s weird, is all,” he said, and that was the end of it.

Except after Dewey had brought it to my attention, I couldn’t help but start looking for roadkill everywhere I went. Soon I understood Dewey’s concern. After only three days of seeing none, a feeling of uneasiness began creeping into my stomach. By the time a whole ’nother week went by, we knew we had stumbled onto evidence of foul play of some sort. Only neither of us could come up with an idea of what sort of foul play could possibly result in cleaning up dead animals from every street in Alvin.

It was a mystery that wove through my brain nearly every minute I was awake. While I ate breakfast, while I sat through school, always. Even while Dewey and I laid in the grass staring at the strip of light beneath Mr. Farrow’s garage door on the side of his darkened house, and pretended to ponder what he might possibly be constructing, we were actually trying to puzzle out the roadkill phenomena. When I finally went to bed, at least an hour was spent staring up at my ceiling while my mind made one last attempt at solving the riddle before shutting down for the day. Neither me nor Dewey could come up with any sort of explanation for what we were witnessing or, I suppose, weren’t witnessing would be more precise. Even if an entire family of Newt Parkers moved into Alvin, they couldn’t possibly eat up all the roadkill in the whole town. Nothing about it made any sense.

Then, four days later, Mary Ann Dailey disappeared.

The Daileys lived on the other side of town. Mr. and Mrs. Dailey had two daughters, Ella Jane and Mary Ann. Even though Ella Jane went to my school, I didn’t really know her well on account of she was a year below me. But Carry knew Mary Ann, who was a grade ahead of her. They rode on the same bus to school every day.

Carry had been home a couple hours when Dewey’s mother called him for dinner from up the street. A rumble in my stomach told me it was time for me to be doing the same, so I went inside to find Carry sitting on the sofa talking on the phone. I figured that’s what she’d been doing since she came in. Most of her time at home these days was spent talking on the phone. She didn’t speak much to anyone else, though. Especially not to me.

I didn’t bother asking her about dinner. It became apparent early on in the summer that, unless I wanted to starve to death, I better learn how to fix my own food. Luckily it wasn’t hard. My mother always left us something in the fridge ready to be heated up. Today it was leftover green bean casserole. I was just spooning a portion out on a plate when my mother came in the door. Right away, I knew something was wrong. She wasn’t supposed to be home until eight.

She marched straight into the living room and told Carry to get off the phone. “I’ve been trying to call for an hour and a half!” she said.

Sitting up from where she had been strewn across the sofa, Carry told the person on the other end of the line that she had to go. “My mother is flippin’ out ’bout somethin’.”

I half expected my mother to blow up from the look my sister gave her. “What’s so important?” she asked after hanging up.

“You get that tone out of your voice right now, Caroline Josephine!” my mother said.

Carry’s gaze fell to the carpet. “Sorry,” she said.

My mother’s voice went quiet. “Mary Ann Dailey’s gone missin’,” she said.

Carry looked up, surprised. “She was just on the bus with me twenty minutes ago. I saw her get off at her spot.” I almost laughed out loud when she said twenty minutes.

“It was closer to two hours ago,” my mother said, “but, yes, I know. I’ve already spoken to a lot of your friends. She got off the bus, but never showed up at her home. Mrs. Dailey called the station a half hour later.”

Carry flopped back down across the sofa, her blond hair bunching up against the worn armrest. “She’s probably downtown or something, hangin’ out with friends. It’s Friday night. Even here in this stupid little town, we do have lives.” That tone was still in her voice. Even I could hear it, and sometimes I wasn’t so good with that sort of thing.

“Well, that’s a possibility,” my mother said. “I have Chris driving around looking for her.”

Christopher Jackson was the other officer who worked with my mother at the Alvin Police Station. He started a few years back, and I still remembered how much of an uproar some folks made about it on account of him being black. There were still folks occasionally outright refusing to acknowledge his authority, and whenever that happened, Police Chief Montgomery went and paid them a little visit. After that, they generally didn’t make such a fuss anymore. I like Officer Jackson. He was always very nice to me and Carry whenever he saw us.

The telephone rang and on reflex Carry sat up, her hand jerking toward it. My mother beat her to it. “I’ll get it.” Carry sneered at her as she answered. When my mother either didn’t notice the sneer or just chose to ignore it, Carry dropped the sneer onto me. I turned away, looking up and listening to my mother’s side of the phone conversation.

“Hello? Yes, Mrs. Dailey. No, not yet. We’re doin’ our best. I’ve got an officer checkin’ around there right now. No, ma’am.” There were lots of pauses between my mother’s responses, but this one was the longest. Finally, she said, “Mrs. Dailey? Listen, I’d appreciate it if from now on you call through the station instead of my home. No, ma’am, I understand that, but there’s always one of us there who can answer any of your inquiries. Well, ma’am, I appreciate that and it’s nice of you to say so, but, no, that ain’t the way it works. I promise to call as soon as we know anythin’. In the meantime, if you think of anyplace else she may have gone, let us know. Just try to stay calm. There’s no need to worry yet. You know how girls her age are. Yes, ma’am, you certainly did tell me that already. Thank you, ma’am.”

She hung up and let out an exhausted sigh. I looked up at her expectantly, realizing I was still holding the plate of cold casserole.

“Why is she calling you at home?” I asked.

She sighed. “Cuz she don’t want to talk to Chris. Says only another parent could possibly understand what she’s goin’ through.”

“But it’s really cuz Officer Jackson’s black, ain’t it?”

My mother hesitated. “I don’t know, honey. Maybe. Maybe not. She’s pretty stricken with grief right now. I would be too if it were you or Caroline that went missin’.” She looked to Carry. “Caroline, are you absolutely certain there ain’t nowhere else you can think of where she might be? Someplace maybe her other friends wouldn’t want to have told me about?” This caught my attention. Seemed like a weird thing to be asking my sister. “Like, does Mary Ann have a boyfriend, maybe?”

Carry shifted uncomfortably on the sofa cushion, looking to me like she wanted to bolt from the room. “I hardly know her, Mom,” she said.

“But you ride the bus with her every day. You must hear things. You must see her at school.” Squatting down, my mother had reached out and gently pushed Carry’s bangs off her face. “This is important, honey. It’s not like you’re tattlin’ on your friends when it’s somethin’ like this.”

A tinge of anger flashed in Carry’s blue eyes, as though my mother had just offended her. I didn’t quite understand why. “I know it’s important,” she said. “You think I’m lyin’? I don’t know if she has a boyfriend.”

“Are you absolutely certain?” I wondered why my mother thought my sister might be confused on such a point.

Carry got real angry now. “Yes! I’m absolutely certain! To the best of my knowledge, Mary Ann Dailey does not have a boyfriend! My Lord, is this how you treat all your witnesses? Or is it just me you don’t believe?” Jumping up from the sofa, she stomped out of the room. I heard the slam of her bedroom door following shortly thereafter.

My mother looked down at me in frustration.

“This part of the hard part you tol’ me ’bout?” I asked.

She nodded, frowning.

“Hope it don’t last long,” I said.

“Oh, we got a while to go yet.” My mother’s attention drifted to the living room window that looked out over the front lawn. Thick, yellow drapes hung down on either side of it. She didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular, and I got the feeling her thoughts were someplace else entirely.

My eyes were drawn to Mr. Farrow’s garage door squatting across the road with its white-toothed sneer. The view was partially obscured by the cedar shrub growing between our front steps and the living room window. The shrub was in much need of trimming, just as the lawn was starting to be in serious want of mowing. My mother used to pay Luther Willard King ten dollars to ride his bike over and do all the yard work every couple weeks, but it had been a while since he came around. My mother told me Luther Willard’s father had gotten very sick near the end of school last year, and Luther Willard didn’t have time to come out and help her anymore. His own mother needed his help now.

Even though he wasn’t working, my mother still got me to ride my bike all the way across town every two weeks to give him the ten dollars anyway. It was a long way to his house. The Kings lived down Oakdale Road, in a section of town known as Cloverdale where most of the other black people in Alvin lived.

“How come he still gets paid for doin’ nothin’?” I asked the first time she sent me.

“He ain’t doin’ nothin’,” my mother said. “He’s lookin’ after that family. He’s got three younger sisters, a mama, and a really sick papa to tend to.”

“How do they all live off ten dollars every two weeks?” The youngest two were twins and only three years old, but I thought even three-year-olds must eat more than ten dollars’ worth of food every two weeks.

“They get other money, too. But not a lot. Our ten dollars means a lot more to them than it does to us.”

That hadn’t made much sense then. To me, ten dollars was ten dollars, no matter how you looked at it, or who was doing the looking. Then, the first time I brought it over, I figured out what she meant. The farther you went down Oakdale, the deeper you went into Cloverdale and the more rundown the homes became. The ride to Luther Willard’s took me all the way past Blackberry Creek, almost to the turnoff leading to Cornflower Lake; one of the prettiest yet poorest areas in all of Alvin.

The Kings lived in an old green shotgun house that looked just about ready to fall in on itself. Some of the wooden slats were missing from the front, and the roof drooped to one side. I left my bike lying on the edge of the road and stepped across the yard where the twins sat, their legs almost as black as their shadows being cast by the early-afternoon sun. They played there in the dirt; there was no real lawn to speak of. Neither of the girls had shirts or shoes on, and their shorts were dusty and torn. They looked up at me with interest as I passed, their eyes and teeth bright white against their smudged brown faces, a swarm of midges buzzing over their heads. I noticed a thick caking of dried mud beneath their fingernails and toenails.

I climbed the broken steps to the porch and opened the screen, nearly pulling it off its hinges. Most of the screen was busted. I knocked on the wooden door behind it and glanced back at the two girls. They no longer paid any mind to me, they were back to playing in the dirt. Leaning against the side of the house, I recognized Luther Willard’s bike. Most of the white paint had flecked off since I last saw it, and it looked more rusted than I remembered it.

The other King daughter answered the door. She wasn’t nearly as dirty as the two in the yard, and her clothes looked recently scrubbed, although awfully worn out for a girl who couldn’t have been no older than six, and probably outgrew things at least once a year. I reckoned they were hand-me-downs from someone who probably over-wore them in the first place.

“Luther round?” I asked.

She stood quietly considering me, and for a minute I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Eventually, though, she nodded and trod off inside. From one of the rooms, someone suddenly began coughing something fierce, with wheezy breaths drawn in between sounding so thin, I expected them to end the life of whoever they were coming from at any moment.

The coughing continued as Luther Willard, wearing a gray T-shirt and worn jeans, appeared in the doorway, looking at me, puzzled. He had short, curly black hair and scratched at the back of his neck as I held out the ten dollars to him. “This is from my mama,” I said.

I thought he was going to cry, so much disappointment fell over his face. “Tell her I’m sorry, but I can’t do her work this week,” he said. “I probably won’t be able to for quite some time.”

“She knows,” I said, still holding out the bill. “She says she’s gonna pay you anyway, on account of she doesn’t want to lose your services once you’re ready to come back.” My mother had told me to say this, explaining most folks don’t like accepting anything that even slightly smells of charity. But they have no trouble taking the money so long as you can give them any reason to feel it’s okay.

This one felt a bit farfetched even to me, and as Luther Willard stood there thinking it over, the summer sun beamed down hot on my neck and back. His father coughed and wheezed up a hurricane in the back room, and I thought for sure Luther Willard was just going to send me back with the money, making my entire ride out here a complete waste of time. A trickle of sweat ran from under my unkempt hair, winding its way down the side of my face until I wiped it off the edge of my chin with my arm.

Finally, Luther Willard took the bill from my hand and a great big grin spread across his thick lips. “You tell your mama I’ll be round as soon as I can and that I’ll make sure she’s got the prettiest little yard in all of Alvin,” he said.

I said I would do just that, but really I was just happy he took the money.

The twins once again watched me as I walked back to my bike, only this time I noticed different things about ’em. Somewhere in those big brown eyes was a mixture of sadness . . .