Wild Orchids Read online

  When I awoke on Monday morning, I half expected Jackie to be gone. It would fit her independent nature to up and leave, a note on the refrigerator. For a while I lay there imagining what the note would say. Would it be sweet? Or acid? Or just practical? She’d contact me and tell me where to send her paycheck, that sort of thing.

  When the unmistakable smell of ham sizzling in a skillet wafted up to me, I pulled on yesterday’s clothes so fast I put my shoes on the wrong feet and had to switch them.

  In the kitchen, Jackie had her back to me. She had on her usual teeny, tiny clothes that hugged her curvy little body, and I was so glad to see her I nearly hugged her.

  Instead, I got myself under control and said gruffly, “I thought you were leaving town.”

  “And good morning to you, too,” she said, pulling a ham steak out of a big skillet.

  “Jackie, I thought we agreed that you were going to leave town.”

  She set a plate full of ham, fried eggs, and whole wheat toast on the table. I assumed the food was for me so I sat down in front of it.

  “I was thinking,” she said as she poured herself a bowl of what looked like sawdust. “Since no one knows I remember Cole Creek, then no one here will know that I may have seen a murder when I was a kid. Right?”

  “I guess not,” I said, mouth full. She’d cooked the eggs exactly the way I liked them.

  “So maybe if no one tells anyone that I remember this town, no one will know I was here. That way, we can research and ask questions, and if the murderer is still alive he’ll—” Breaking off, she looked up at me with wide eyes.

  “Will only want to kill me when I find out too much,” I finished.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” she said, looking down at her bowl of ground-up twigs. “Not such a good idea, huh?”

  Not really, I thought. A truly bad idea. But then that old curiosity popped up again. Why? Why? Why?

  “Your eyes are going round and round like pinwheels,” Jackie said. “Do you think smoke is going to start coming out of your ears?”

  “Only if I set your tail on fire,” I shot back at her.

  I’d meant my remark as a reference to a devil’s tail, but Jackie cocked an eyebrow at me as though I’d made a sex joke, and to my disgust I felt my face turning red. Smiling, she returned to her carpenter’s special.

  “So what’s your plan?” she asked and I could tell she was laughing at me. Why, oh, why, did each generation think it had been the one to discover sex?

  “I don’t know,” I said, flat-out lying. “I have some writing to do that’ll take me a couple of days so why don’t you—” I waved my hand.

  “Keep busy?” she asked. “Stay out of your hair? Go play with the other children?”

  “More or less.”

  “Great,” she said, taking her empty bowl to the sink.

  I knew from the way she said it that she was up to something, but I also knew that if I got her to tell me, I’d then have to tell her what I was planning to do.

  We parted, and I went up to my office to start calling people. There was a famous true crime writer with my publishing house and, through my editor, I got her phone number and we had a long talk. I had no idea how to investigate an old murder, so she gave me some tips—and some of her private phone numbers.

  Without giving too much away, I told her about the skeleton that had been found and that the police had taken away. She asked for dates and said she’d call me back. A few minutes later she called and gave me the name and number of a man in Charlotte she said knew about the case.

  I called him, introduced myself, promised him six autographed books (I took down the names to be inscribed in the books) and he started telling me what he knew.

  “We never found out who she was,” the man said. “We concluded she was a hiker and an old wall fell on her.”

  “So you never found out who did—? I mean, you think it was an accident?”

  “You think she was murdered?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I heard that the kids around here made up a story about—”

  “The devil,” the man said. “Yeah, one of the cops told me that. Somebody said she’d been ‘consorting with the devil’ so the townspeople dropped a pile of rocks on her.”

  I drew in my breath and let it out slowly so my voice wouldn’t squeak. Here at last was someone else who’d heard Jackie’s story. “That’s kind of unusual, isn’t it? I mean, a devil story like that.”

  “Hell no. Nearly every long-dead body we get in here has some story attached to it. And this one was found by a hysterical girl who said she’d heard the dead woman crying.”

  “You have a great memory,” I said with admiration.

  “Naw. Bess called me earlier and I pulled the file. She was a pretty woman.”

  “Bess?” I asked, referring to the true crime writer. I’d seen photos of her and “pretty” didn’t come to mind.

  “No,” the man said, chuckling. “The woman who was buried under all that rock. We had one of those clay heads made of her.”

  As Jackie’d said, my eyes began to whirl. “If I give you my FedEx number could you send me a copy of everything you have?”

  “I don’t see why not. We showed copies of her face all over that little town of—What’s its name?”

  “Cole Creek,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  I could hear someone speaking in the background and the man gave his attention to the voice. When he came back on the line, he said, “Look, I gotta go. I’ll send this stuff out to you ASAP.”

  I gave him my FedEx number, hung up, then leaned back in my chair and looked up at the ceiling. Why was I doing this? I wondered. I was no sleuth. I had no desire to meet a murderer on some dark and stormy night.

  I just wanted—

  And that’s where the problem was, I thought. I had no goal in life. I had enough money to live well forever, but a man needed more than that.

  Closing my eyes, I remembered those first years with Pat and how wonderful they’d been. Nothing on earth could match the excitement of having a book accepted for publication. It was satisfying in a deep, soul-gratifying way.

  I remember thinking, Someone wants to read what I wrote. I’d only been able to come to terms with that thought when I told myself that people wanted to read about Pat’s mother, not me. Somewhere along the way, though, I’d realized that I was selling myself and it felt good to be wanted. But I’d lost it all, lost that driving force even before Pat died, and nothing had felt as good since.

  Until now, that is. Every day I could feel a little bit of myself returning. I could feel the old Ford coming back, the one who’d fight to the death for a cause. As a kid I’d been determined not to be like my relatives, so I’d fought like a pit bull to go to college. Nothing my backward, iron-headed relatives said or did made me lose sight of my goal.

  But since Pat died, I’d done nothing. I hadn’t felt the need to write, hadn’t felt the need to do anything. Even before she’d died, I’d achieved every goal I’d ever set myself and then some.

  But now…Now things were changing. Was it Jackie? Was it she who was bringing me back to life? Only indirectly, I thought. Truthfully, it seemed to be all of it: the house, the town, the…The story, I thought. The story that would answer that ageless “Why?”

  With every step I took into this mystery, I seemed to prove that Jackie’s original story was true. But the best news I’d heard was today’s. Maybe kids had made up a horror story about the woman’s death. This meant that if Jackie lived in Cole Creek as a child she could have heard the story from some sadistic kids who got their thrills from frightening a small child.

  On the other hand, maybe the kids had just told what they knew. Since the body wasn’t found until ’92, did that mean the devil story started then? If so, Jackie would have been old enough to remember if she heard or saw or—

  I put my hands to my head. This whole thing was getting to be too much for me. Be