Murder Through the Grapevine

by Teresa McClain-Watson

Genres: African American Christian; African American Mystery & Detective; African American Romance

Synopsis

Roni Jarrett was once in love with a high-rolling strip club owner who used her and abused her. He caused her to lose the job of her dreams, not to mention her self respect. With nothing left but her newfound faith in Christ and her old BMW, she hits the road and ends up where she started, in her old hometown. With a new job in an upscale beauty salon, and a position as music director for her church, she's doing all she can to live a life that's pleasing in the eyes of God. Unfortunately, other people's drama has a way of following Roni Jarrett and it follows her to her new life in Florida. When her best friend from childhood turns up dead in the streets, the local police behaves as if Roni may have had a hand in that death, and everything changes. Roni finds herself caught up in a dangerous maze of gossip and lies that could lead to her own destruction. The only man willing to help her, Police Chief Don Gillette, is a gorgeous hunk of a human being who makes Roni's heart pound, but his own reputation causes even more drama to enter her life. Roni is tested time and again as she struggles to understand what is happening around her. Her budding relationship with Don Gillette, a relationship that seems sent from God, may get caught in the wreckage too. Will Roni's newfound faith be able to withstand so many trials, and will Don Gillette turn out to be the love of her life or the worst thing that had ever happened to her?

Release date: April 24, 2012

Publisher: Urban Christian

Print pages: 489

Sample

What looked like crazy was taking place at the Zion Hope Missionary Baptist Church as I walked into the huge, steeple-topped sanctuary and made my way toward the choir stand. I walked in slowly, because I couldn’t believe my eyes. Sisters, good, church-going sisters, were having a fit about song selection, their shouting voices carrying high up in the rafters, and everybody and their mama was trying to get in on the free-for-all.

I almost turned around and walked back out. I wasn’t with this, not today. Not after the kind of workday I’d already had. But I had no choice. Those wild-acting sisters, those card-carrying members of the lunatic society, also happened to be the choir that I directed.

“You can dry those eyes now,” I decided to say above their yells, “’cause I’m here!”

I waited, standing in front of the chaos with my briefcase in one hand, my sheet music in the other, praying that my little show of humor got somebody’s attention. But it didn’t. Didn’t stop one yell from coming out of the mouth of not one of those yelling sisters.

Not that I was surprised. Other than my best friend, Pam, who was twenty-four, and a handful of other choir members, I was the youngest thing there. And the fact that Alan Simms, the head of all of the church’s auxiliaries, would have selected some youngblood like me to direct the choir never set right with Bernadette Finch, the former director, and the person who was undoubtedly the leader of this craziness.

I kept repeating,” May I have your attention?” At my insistence, it took a loud drumroll from our drummer to get them to even look in my direction. When they did, I pushed my small glasses up on my small face and stared right back at them, anxious to find out just what brought on this incredibly inappropriate conduct.

“I want one person, and one person only,“ I said, “to explain to me why it is that the members of this choir, this Christian choir I remind y’all, are behaving like pure fools up in here. Nope, I didn’t say everybody. I don’t need everybody trying to talk at the same time. I said one body. One person.” Then I turned to the one I just knew was behind the entire affair. “Sister Finch, why don’t you enlighten us?”

She didn’t hesitate. She stood up on her big bulk and folded her big arms. “You’ve been directing this choir for four months now,” she said, all five-ten of her towering over me, “and we’ve been sitting back and letting you do your thing. But enough is enough.”

A few of the other senior members hollered, “All right, now,” causing me to roll my eyes.

I can’t help it. When I feel I’m getting a bad rap, I get defensive.

“This is supposed to be a church choir,” Sister Finch went on, “a good, hymn-singing, gospel choir, not some rhythm and blues band,” she said with a sweep of her hand, directing it toward me first, and then to the equally surprised drummer.

Actually, I never cared for the blues, or any of the tunes of the day. I loved the classics, from Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” to Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” to anything Debussy, but it wasn’t as if it mattered. Finch wouldn’t have been any less outraged if she discovered that my taste in music was far less syncopated than what she’d thought. That woman wasn’t complaining about my musical taste, she was complaining about me.

“Just what are you trying to say, Finch?” I asked her point-blank.

“I’m not trying to say anything,” she said even more pointedly. “I’m saying that the type of music you been selecting ain’t working. That’s what I’m saying.”

“And you saying right!” one of her buddies in the back row shouted out.

“Tell the truth and shame the devil!” another one shouted.

But Finch was her own encouragement. She went on without hesitation. “We’re supposed to be here to sing praises to the Lord, not put on no Rick James concert!”

Since many of my younger members didn’t know who Rick James was, and since they were generally tired of Finch and her mutiny anyway, they revolted too. Only, their angst was against Finch.

“What Roni trying to do for this choir is a great thing,” Pamela said as she stood.

Pamela Tate was my closest friend here in Melville, the first person who showed me any kindness when I was a stranger here, just passing through my old hometown on my way to greener pastures, or so I’d thought. What I liked most about Pamela was her natural honesty. Girlfriend called it like she saw it and didn’t worry about what grief it caused. When I’d first met her, I didn’t like that particular quality about her; she was almost rude, it seemed to me. Now I was feeling the sister. Honesty was what folks needed, whether we could handle it or not.

“Y’all used to be singing all off-key,” she went on, with her honest self, “didn’t know the words half the time. Then got mad when people tried to tell y’all something. That’s why Dr. Simms hired Roni. She’s a professional. She’s a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, which, for all y’all that don’t know, is one of the most prestigious colleges in this country. She knows her thing. The rest of us, including you too, Sister Finch, wouldn’t know sheet music from sheet rock. So, naw, I ain’t wit’ this. Count me out of this mess here. I say Roni Jarrett is our choir director, Dr. Simms hired her for good cause, and we should support her.”

All of the younger members agreed, standing in support of Pamela’s statement.

But none of the seniors agreed, standing too, in opposition, and before I knew it, they were all at it again.

It got so bad, and so loud, Luther Montgomery, the head of our deacon board, had to come down from his office upstairs and tell my members to knock it off. And even that didn’t work.

I gave up, which wasn’t all that hard, since I was already bone-tired, and decided to let them do their thing. I grabbed my sheet music and my briefcase and headed for the exit. “Let me know what y’all decide,” I said to nobody in particular, since nobody was listening to me anyway.

I drove home, to Elkin Street, taking the longer route behind the high school and then pulling back out onto Spears, then Jacobson, and then Mark Russell Ridge. It was just past seven thirty on a cool fall evening, and the middle-class residents of Melville, Florida had packed up and gone indoors, leaving a calm quietness in the air that managed to relax me too.

When I got to Elkin, however, my neck of the woods, I was on guard again. That calm quietness was gone, as the sounds of nighttime in the hood came to life in its usual grand way with rap music blaring, loud and argumentative conversations, and constant activity.

One teenage kid was chasing another one across the street and they both ran in front of my car, causing me to slam on brakes. Meanwhile a no-nonsense-looking brother was slamming some strung-out junkie against the side of a house, and then pinning him with a crowbar. I stiffened, tired of all of this drama, although I wasn’t exactly used to anything else.

I’d returned to Melville eight months ago from Newark, New Jersey, after the school I worked for found out about my past and fired me on the spot. I was devastated, because I was caught so off guard, because that past of mine seemed an eternal burden. But I also knew that the Lord Jesus Christ was my Savior and He would not leave me twisting in the wind. So I got myself together, said my goodbyes to those few teachers who didn’t suddenly see me as the scum of the earth, and moved on.

I ended up moving South, heading for Miami, but not before stopping through Melville. I’d lived in Melville for the first fifteen years of my life, up until that earth-shattering night when my parents died, and I wanted to see if I’d remember anything. Unfortunately, I remembered too many things, most of them stark reminders of how painful my life had been since I left Melville. So I decided it would be best to forget the memories, and move on.

But first I stopped at Mae’s, a local diner, for a quick road break. It was then that two things happened within minutes of each other: I met Pamela Tate, who sat at my table because the diner was so crowded, and Anne Ziegler, the owner of the Queen Anne Beauty Salon.

Pamela and I hit it off right away, as she told me her entire life story in sixty seconds: was an attendee but not a graduate of Florida A&M University; used to work in her parents real estate business until her big mouth scared away too many customers; was now a teller at the bank, where she was too busy counting money to run her mouth; one dog, no children, and desperately seeking a good man. She talked fast and furiously, sometimes in a sister-girl street lingo, and sometimes like a valley girl. She was petite, as I was, but she was shorter and had more curves, the kind of phat sister that brothers went insane over. Ironically, she said the same thing about me.

“If I had your perfect, creamy brown skin, and those big beautiful Asian eyes, and all that long, thick, wavy hair ... child, please,” she’d said as she made herself comfortable at my table. “Nobody could tell me a thing ’cause I’d be Miss Thang. Hear what I’m saying? I’d be it.”

She said this with laughter because she was probably only kidding, but I was in such a bad way eight months ago, and any kind word was welcome.

After staring at me for a few seconds longer, however, she reached a more certain conclusion, saying, instead, that I needed to ditch the glasses. “I mean, they’re small and stylish, I’ll give you that, but why not contacts or LASIK surgery?”

I was too nervous to put contacts into my eyes, and nobody was doing any surgery on me, those were the reasons, but I wasn’t about to tell some stranger all of that. I didn’t have to anyway, because Pam, being Pam, kept on talking.

“I can still see the beauty of your eyes even with your glasses on, so I guess that’s why you keep wearing them. But they do make you look a little nerdy, girl, for real. And the way you keep pushing them up on your face makes you look a lot like the female version of Urkel.”

When I asked her who in the heck was that, she laughed again. “Steve Urkel? The nerd with the pencil pile in his shirt pocket and the pants pulled up to his chest? Come on! He used to be on that old TV show when we were kids?”

When I still didn’t appear to get it, she shook her head. “You are so not hip.”

Anne Ziegler came into Mae’s a few minutes later, talking so loud on her cell phone that everybody turned to see who in the world could be that obnoxious. She had her expensive handbag hanging from her shoulder, her white, tailored pant suit sparkling against her black skin, her four-inch high heels banging the mess out of the hardwood floor. She stopped by our table, just to say hey to Pam and to let her know that she was looking for somebody to manage her salon and wanted Pam, who seemed to know everybody, to spread the news.

As soon as Anne left our table and met up with her lunch companion, Pam spread the news to me, urging me to apply. All I had told her about myself was that I was on my way to Miami to hopefully find a decent job. How that translated into managing a hair salon in Melville was beyond me. But she was so insistent, and I was so afraid that I was about to let some grand opportunity pass me by, that I got up, went over to Anne’s table, and introduced myself.

All I had to mention was that I was a graduate of Juilliard, that I’d received a bachelor of music degree with a major in piano, and she hired me on the spot. She didn’t even care that I had absolutely no background in managing a beauty shop, or anything else for that matter, but that was the kind of strange turns my life had been taking.

Pam later said how she could tell that I was one of those elite-school-educated sisters, and that if she knew Anne Ziegler, she knew that such superficial credentials would impress her. I didn’t care at all for the way she phrased that, especially in light of how difficult it was for me to receive those “superficial” credentials, but I understood where she was coming from.

And that was how I wound up back in Melville, alone and still not certain that this was the best move I could have made. But at least I’d made a move.

Less than two months later, when it appeared to me that I was in this for the long haul, I purchased a home in what Pam often said wasn’t just the hood, but the sho nuff hood, a part of town bustling with so much illegal activity and poverty, everybody called it Dodge. Pam often told me that if she’d known where I was going to put down roots, she would have tied me up, kidnapped me, and knocked some sense into my head.

But I knew what I was doing. I knew my budget, and, if truth be told, the limits my less-than-stellar past placed on me being able to gain a bigger budget, and that little frame-styled, two-bedroom, one-bath home in not the best neighborhood in town, was barely within that budget to begin with. Forget what those houses in the so-called better communities would have cost.

So I proudly purchased my first home (with reasonable mortgage payments), painted it a bright yellow with grass-green trim, and reworked the entire yard. Soon my neighbors also caught the fever and started sprucing up their places too. All, except the owners of that apartment complex across the street. I can’t even front. It was an eye sore, with faded gray peeling paint on the walls, dirt for grass, and a group of guys always hanging out on the stoop. They’d sit around smoking that dope disguised as cigars, shooting those dice and passing around dollar bills, listening to their loud gangsta rap and spinning around their souped-up rides as if they were proud to be a menace to society in general, not just to these poor folks in Dodge.

When I drove my red, aging BMW onto the driveway of my bright yellow house, I was treated to an unobstructed view of Juno Curtis and his boys on the stoop of that complex across the street. When Juno wasn’t selling weed, he was our neighborhood watch, if you could believe that. If he liked you, he kept an eye out for you. His liking me, however, never stopped me from telling him about his behind and how wrong what he and his boys were doing. Although his boys wasn’t having it, Juno would at least listen to me, nod his braided head occasionally, sometimes even act as if he was hearing what I was laying down.

But tonight I didn’t even bother to lay it down. I was too tired. My day job as manager of Anne Ziegler’s salon had me running like the Road Runner on crack, all over the place, all because Anne came up with this bright idea to have a half-price hairdo day.

Quite naturally many of the sisters in the hood, who normally viewed Queen Anne’s as a little too ritzy for their taste and pocketbooks, showed up in force. It was a madhouse.

Then I had to endure that madness at choir rehearsal.

Now Snoop was on the radio across the street dropping it like it was hot, and Juno and his boys were laughing and talking louder than Snoop was rapping. I barely had the energy to throw up a hand in a lame attempt at a wave, let alone lecture anybody.

That still, however, didn’t stop Taneka Dupayne from running over.

“I’m broke, Neka,” I said to her quickly, all too familiar with the girl’s drug habit.

To my surprise, however, she wasn’t looking for money.

“It’s not true,” she said in a voice that didn’t even sound like hers. Even her eyes, which never looked clear, looked too clear tonight. “They gonna claim it’s true, but it’s not, and you can’t let them get away with it, Roni.”

“Girl, what are you talking about?” I asked her, more interested in getting my briefcase out of the car than paying attention to her.

“You can’t let them get away with it!”

“Neka,” I said impatiently, about ready to get rude, but then I looked at her more closely. What I saw stopped me cold. Sister looked bad. She was a crack addict, everybody knew that, but that’s not what I meant. She looked sad, as if everybody was disregarding her and it was tearing her apart.

Taneka was only a year older than me, but that drug life had her looking an eternity older than my twenty-seven years. And she looked fed up, like somebody who never seemed to catch a break. That was what I saw when I looked into her eyes. Girlfriend needed a break.

“Why don’t you come in, Neek,” I said to her, taking her by her razor-thin arm. “We can talk inside.”

I had known Taneka Dupayne since childhood, when we were both fast-tailed kids running around Melville as if we just knew life would be a breeze for us. We met when I was twelve years old and attending a public school for the first time in my life. My parents, who were jazz musicians, weren’t getting as many gigs as they used to, and could no longer afford a private school education for me.

Public school was a cultural shock, as the girls there automatically disliked me, claiming that I thought I was cute, when I thought no such thing. And they especially hated my guts when boys started favoring me. I was bullied and beaten and threatened daily so much so, I often feigned illnesses to avoid going to school. As the year progressed and the violence and hatred against me only escalated, I even considered harming myself for real so that I could have a long convalescence and thereby avoid school altogether.

Before I could fully formulate my plan, however, I was attacked viciously by a group of girls who acted as if they’d planned to do the harming themselves. This wasn’t their usual “knock-her-upside-her-head-and-pull-her-hair-out” fight, because one girl, JaQuana King, actually had a razor blade. Before she showed her weapon, however, I fought back as best I could, although I was greatly outnumbered and outsized. But when she whipped out that razor, my heart squeezed in fear.

She grinned, knowing she had me then, and said she was going to slash that cuteness right off of my face and cut that long, thick hair right off of my head. I had thought about doing myself some harm, it was true, but this was a far cry from what I had in mind.

During that same time Taneka had a reputation for violence far worse than JaQuana’s. It was Neka, after all, who had been suspended for bringing a switchblade to school, bump a razor, and everybody knew she was somebody you just didn’t mess with. She, in fact, had been watching the fight all along and was doing nothing to stop it. But when she saw that razor blade, she would later tell me, she knew that something had to give.

The fight was already one-sided, she’d said, five girls against my small self, but now, with the introduction of the razor, it was downright wrong.

Neka got in between JaQuana and me and told JaQuana if she wanted to slash somebody, to slash her. Since JaQuana had no idea what Taneka might be carrying, a switchblade or even worse, she backed up.

Neka reached into her windbreaker pocket as if she was about to retrieve her own weapon, and JaQuana took off running, her buddies right behind her. Neka bent over laughing.

I dropped down on my rump, stunned with fear, realizing how close I’d come to certain deformity.

We became fast friends after that, first at school only, and then after school, doing everything together. I discovered that Neka wasn’t as bad as she let on, that she was actually a kindhearted soul who had taken on that tough girl image when she had been bullied and beaten herself because boys found her attractive, too, and a few of the other cute girls couldn’t stand it.

But instead of fighting back on their terms, the way I had attempted to do, she took the fight to a new level. That was why she brought the switchblade to school, why she’d jump into the face of any one of those girls who so much as looked at her the wrong way. She was determined to make them fear her. And they did.

And after that day I was suddenly associated with Neka, and was feared too. It changed my life. I loved school again, not just because those foolish girls had left me alone, but also because I could do my work without all of that pressure on my back. And Neka and me got tighter and tighter, hanging out more and more, until we discovered that we trusted no one else but each other. She told me about her alcoholic father and do-nothing mother, and how she wouldn’t introduce me to them because of how they were.

“If they knew I had a good friend,” she’d said, “they’d try to take that away from me too.”

She never told me what else they had taken from her, and I didn’t ask. She didn’t need me judging her, but to be her friend. And I was.

It was a bond I thought would last forever. And it held strong for years, until that dreadful night when my parents left home for one of their jazz club gigs and never returned.

I’d called Neka as soon as I heard the news, and she rushed over. She was sixteen at the time and had left her parents home, deciding that she knew a little more than she probably did. She was living with Hakeem, some older boy she thought was in love with her, and he drove her over as soon as she got my phone call. She, in fact, wouldn’t leave my side and even offered for me to stay with her and Hakeem, and that she would get a job and support us both.

But the social workers were already there, and they wouldn’t allow me to spend so much as a night at Hakeem’s. Neka herself was a troubled kid, they insisted, and Lord only knew what Hakeem was. So they carted me off, called my only known living relative, my father’s sister, who lived in New Jersey, and made me wait in a group home until she could find the time to come and get me.

Neka and I tried to stay in touch by telephone, and we even tried on two occasions to bust me out of that prison of a group home, but nothing worked. And then my aunt showed up, and I was forced to move away from the only town I’d ever known and the only friend I’d ever had, only to get saddled with a relative who cared more about partying than she ever cared about me.

Neka had had her troubles too, during my group home days. Hakeem had kicked her out, and she found herself going from man to man, from nothing job to nothing job, until the last time we talked on the telephone, the night before I left for Newark, I could hear the desperation in her voice. Life was whipping her, and she was just about ready to lay down and let it.

Me and Neka both went through our own private hells in our own separate corners of the world after that night, where life turned out to be more like a whirlwind than any breeze for either one of us. And where now, looking at Neka, looking at the old friend I’d hardly recognized when I first came back to Melville, I couldn’t help but wonder why it was that I made it through, while she, who used to be by far the tougher of us two, was still suffering from the choices she’d made when she was only sixteen.

By the time I got her inside of my home and gave her a glass of water, however, I could tell that she wasn’t just suffering, but was on the verge of total collapse. She sat on that leather sofa in my small living room and stared into space, rocking back and forth and mumbling to herself despite my repeated requests that she let me in on her little conversation. Soon tears came to her large, staring eyes, and she looked at me as if she was seeing me for the first time.

I sat across from her, in my high-back chair, and that look in her eyes made my skin crawl.

“You can’t let them get away with it,” she said.

“What are you talking about, Neka? Who are they, and what are they trying to get away with?”

She began shaking her head, her dark, thin face hollow, almost skeleton-like “It’s a mess. A mess, you hear me?”

“What’s a mess?”

Taneka shook her head again.

“Neka, what’s a mess?”

“You got to promise me. You’re a churchgoing lady, Roni. You’re the only one I know who can promise me. Promise me, Roni. Promise me you won’t let them get away with it.”

My heart dropped for Neka. She looked as if she was about to explode with anguish. For a hot second I got scared myself. What was wrong with this sister, I wondered. But then I exhaled, and gave in. I felt I had no choice.

“Okay, Neka, I promise.” I pushed my glasses up on my face the way I was prone to do whenever I was nervous, and then I quickly demanded to know just exactly what I was promising.

She looked at me, stared at me, and then smiled a kind of sad, bitter smile. “She was gonna cut you,” she said.

“Cut me? Who?”

“She was gonna cut you with that razor blade.”

I stared at Neka. “You mean JaQuana King back in school?”

Neka nodded her head, smiling again, this time as if it was some inside joke.

“That was a long time ago, Neek.”

“Long, long ago,” she said. “So long ago.” Her . . .