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Chapter 26

A lice packed a bag and drove us over to nearby Acworth where we blitzed through the Dollar General, gathering snacks, drinks, and enough feminine toiletry supplies to last us a couple of months. Back at my house, I packed one bag for me and Mere, then secured the top back on the Jeep. Ramsey didn’t come when I called so I left dishes of food and water on the back porch in case he ventured back home.

At the end of all that, Deputy Inman still hadn’t called me back.

I drove us back into town, fighting the fear and grief roiling in my gut. We rolled past the courthouse, the hotel, and Billie’s. Ox Dalzell was just coming out of the restaurant door, to-go coffee cup in hand. He caught my eye and raised the cup to me. My mouth went dry, but I nodded back at him and waved like I didn’t have a care in the world. I gripped the wheel and gunned it in the direction of Lilah’s.

When Mere scrambled into the passenger seat of the Jeep, she was ecstatic to see Alice. She took note of the Dollar General bags and Alice’s duffel. “Is Ms. Tilton going on a trip with us?”

“I was thinking we might take a girls’ trip, up north,” I said. “To Maine, maybe.”

Mere’s eyes went round. “Where Grandma lives?”

“That’s right. I thought it would be fun for Alice to come along. But not for sure. I mean, I have to work, and Alice still has to get ready for school to start. So we’re not a hundred percent sure we’re going, but we did think it sounded kind of fun, so we went shopping for supplies.” I was babbling, I knew it, and shut my mouth before I said too much.

“It’s Ms. Tilton, Mom,” Mere corrected me.

“You can call me Alice if we go on the trip,” Alice said to Mere. “How’s that?”

“What about Ramsey?” Mere asked. “Is he coming with us?”

“He’s fine,” I said briskly. “At the vet.” Another lie I’m telling to my daughter. Add it to the list.

“We need to make one quick stop, and I’m going to need you to stay in the Jeep when we get there, okay?”

“And then decide if we’re going on a girls’ trip or not?”

“That’s right. Good girl.”

Ox Dalzell’s three daughters by his second, substantially younger wife, Nora, lived out at their mother’s childhood home, a sprawling place on acreage just outside of town. When Nora Dalzell died, she left the girls the house, the only thing she owned independently of her husband. Ox had held up the issue in court. That’s when the girls hooked up with Wren Street and her art school friends and moved to the Dalzell-Davenport house. Apparently, after Wren took off for California, the court awarded the girls the house and they moved in.

The house was on the opposite side of town from the Cleburne farm, which I was glad of. I maneuvered the Jeep down the long driveway that led to the house. It was a massive seventies-style ranch, all angles of stone and timber. I parked, told Mere to honk the horn if she saw somebody coming. “We won’t be long.”

Alice rang the doorbell. I could hear chiming inside, but there was no answer. I peered inside a long slender sidelight beside the door, taking note of the lacquered flagstone floors, popcorn ceilings, and groovy chandeliers. There was almost no furniture, rugs, draperies, or art hanging on the walls. Against a long wall of sliding glass doors that ran along the rear of the house, I could see a long sofa. One of those modern numbers that looked like a beanbag but probably cost five figures. There was a can of Diet Dr. Pepper on the floor beside the sofa.

“They’re probably out back,” Alice said. “Come on.”

We walked around the side of the house, greeted with a view of something out of a 1970s movie set. A vast green lawn, shaded by enormous leafy trees. In the middle lay an aqua-blue kidney-shaped pool with a bright pink float that looked like a donut with sprinkles. Bright yellow plastic chaises and patio dining sets were scattered around. The cloying smell of weed filled the air.

Under the shade of a fringed umbrella sat three young women, dressed in a variety of sarongs and bikini tops or nothing at all. Two of them had long hair. The third sported dreads. All three were smoking.

Alice lifted her hand. “Hey, y’all.”

“Alice!” screeched one of the girls with a top on. “My bitch!”

We headed toward them. When we got there, one of the girls with freckles and reddish-blond hair kissed Alice on the cheek. “My baby, baby bitch,” she repeated. “Where you been, sweets? I haven’t seen you in forever.”

“Oh, you know, getting ready for school.” Alice turned to me. “Y’all know Billie Hope, right? The one who runs the café? This is Justine . . .” She pointed to the one who’d kissed her. “Annaliese . . .” A girl with vine tattoos over nearly every inch of her body and wearing no top saluted me. “And Boo.”

“Emmaline,” said the girl in dreads, and I immediately recognized her from Garnet’s catfish place. She had on a ratty T-shirt, knotted at her midriff, cutoff navy Dickies, and a scarf that looked like an honest-to-God, vintage Pucci holding up her locks. Her legs were propped up on the mesh plastic chair. They were bug bitten and scraped up. She offered me a perfunctory smile and then fixed her gaze on her joint.

“Baby’s not Boo anymore,” Justine said, and pouted. “She’s Emmaline. Want a smoke?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve got my daughter in the car.”

“I wanted to ask y’all about Wren,” Alice said. “Have any of you heard from her lately?” She hesitated. “Billie lives in the old Dalzell-Davenport house, and she found something of Wren’s and wanted to send it to her.”

Justine tapped her bitten fingernails on the glass table. Annaliese took a long drag off her joint. Emmaline/Boo said nothing.

“Wren ghosted us,” Justine said wryly to Alice. “Just like she did you. She’s in California, supposedly. I don’t know where.”

Alice sighed. “I still find it so weird that she just took off like that. Don’t you?”

Justine shrugged. “I guess so, if it was anybody else, but this is Wren we’re talking about, you know? The girl who moved into an old house so she could connect with the spirits. Who had dreams and visions.” She addressed me. “That was when we were going through some legal stuff with our dad, and fighting over this house, so Wren invited us to hang out with her and her New York friends who had come down to help with the . . .” She trailed off.

“Podcast,” Emmaline said to me. “We were going to do a podcast about General Sherman burying alive the families of Confederate soldiers in a gold mine.”

“Whoa,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Sick, right?”

“Sounds amazing,” I said. “The podcast, I mean, not the burying alive thing.”

Annaliese chimed in. “It was amazing, at first. There were these guys living in the house with us, these incredible musicians from New York. It was like this unbelievable jam session in the house every single night, with really good wine and everybody just vibing. The Fearz sisters came down from Maine. The big oil family. Some tech billionaire’s son, I can’t remember his name. And, of course, Wren’s best friend from Pratt, too, the girl whose family owns like half of Canada—”

“Madge Beatty,” Justine supplied.

“She was pretty cool,” Anneliese said. “A sculptor. She and Wren met at school. She was the one who told Wren about the gold mine. Her ancestor had been trapped in there with the rest, but supposedly they escaped and ran to Canada.”

“So this Madge Beatty had come down to help Wren with the podcast?” I prodded.

“And contacting the spirits of the dead,” Annaliese said.

“Did it work?”

“Of course it didn’t,” Justine said. “Because that stuff is complete bullshit. Anyway, after a while it wasn’t really our scene. Annaliese and I kind of gave up on Rasta. And then there was the whole no running water or electricity and the freaky séances thing—so me and Annaliese dipped.” She cocked her head at her youngest sister. “Emmaline stayed, though.”

I looked at Emmaline. She looked immensely uncomfortable.

“What happened then?” Alice asked.

Emmaline looked at her sisters.

“Tell them,” Justine said.

Emmaline examined her thumbnail. “After Annaliese and Justine moved out, things went downhill. Wren was getting really tense about the whole gold mine situation. She was convinced George Davenport had found out the location of the entrance, and people in the town had gotten rid of him, like a conspiracy or whatever. She started calling his great-grandchildren down in Orlando, like, incessantly. Harassing them, basically, until they threatened to call the police and take out a restraining order against her. That’s when most of the rest of the group moved out. The musicians, the Fearz girls, and the tech kid.”

“Wow,” I said.

Annaliese blew smoke sideways. “By then, Wren had run out of ideas. She’d already asked everybody in town about Sherman killing people. Nobody knew anything. They thought we’d made up the gold mine. They said it never existed.”

“And Wren was driving Madge nuts, too. She finally ditched us one night without even telling anyone,” Emmaline said.

That finger of dread was working its way up my spine. Madge left the group without so much as a goodbye?

“Have you guys heard from Madge since then?” I asked.

They all said no.

“We weren’t as close to her as Wren was,” Emmaline said. “I never exchanged numbers with her. I don’t even think she owned a phone.”

“Anyway, then Wren left,” Justine said. “That’s when we got our house back from Dad, and Emmaline came home.”

I zeroed in on Emmaline. “You haven’t heard from Wren since?”

She shook her head. I reached into my purse and pulled out George Davenport’s Crown Royal bag.

“I found this in my house—the Dalzell-Davenport house—the other day.” I poured the nuggets out on the glass table. Their eyes widened and all three leaned in as if magnetized by the metal.

“Holy shit—”

“—balls—”

Emmaline just stared in silence.

I spoke in a steady voice. “Madge and Wren were right about there being a gold mine in Juliana. I believe it’s located on George Davenport’s property where he found these gold nuggets. I also found a ledger hidden in his desk where he’d made a list of supplies to make an explosive device. I think he did find the entrance and was going to attempt to blow it open. But he couldn’t because he got sick, and his family whisked him away to Florida. And then the town bought the house and acreage.”

“Why?” Alice asked. “Why buy it and do nothing with it? A gold mine would be an incredible economic resource.”

“Maybe because it was the site of a particularly gruesome war crime?” Annaliese took a deep drag on her joint. “The old guard are weird. They get really hung up on stuff making Juliana look bad. They like to keep that squeaky-clean image.”

“I don’t know,” Alice said. “It seems a story like that, Sherman murdering a bunch of their citizens, wouldn’t make the town look bad. It would only boost our visibility. You know—‘come to Juliana and witness the site of a horrific result of our nation’s greatest tribulation.’ Juliana would be like Gettysburg or Andersonville. Bring in a lot of tourist dollars. Besides, it’s not like anyone alive now was responsible for what happened there.”

Justine leaned back in her chair. “Look, Alice. Wren got a death threat for asking questions. Whether or not the thing really happened”—she glanced at her sisters—“the three of us have decided it’s not worth it to keep digging. The old guard is the old guard. Pissing them off is just not worth it.”

“Do you think they’d follow through, though?” I asked abruptly. All three girls’ eyes swiveled to me. “Do you think any of them are actually capable of killing someone to keep the gold mine murders a secret?”

Before anyone could answer, we heard a “Well, hey, hey, hey!” on the other side of the pool. I hastily swept the gold nuggets back into the bag and stuffed it in my purse, turning to see Ox Dalzell, his glasses glinting on his bald head, ambling toward us.

“Look at what we got here. What’s happening, girls?”

Dressed in a dapper green glen plaid suit with a wide, pink tie, he looked like he’d just left a long, martini-filled lunch at the country club. At his appearance, his daughters all noticeably stiffened. Emmaline tucked her legs demurely beneath her chair. Annaliese drew up her sarong to cover her breasts and stubbed out her joint. Justine just stared balefully at him. I tried to look nonchalant.

“All my girls in one place,” Ox said, hands on his hips. “How’d I ever get so lucky?”

“The patriarchy?” Justine said.

He didn’t respond to that, instead turning to me and Alice. “Hey, girls. Taking a day off work?”

“Yessir,” Alice said, automatically dropping into that southern way young women had around here of addressing men older than themselves, a tic that I had begun to detest.

“Ox, good to see you,” I said, as if I hadn’t just seen him outside of Billie’s. He was following me, for sure. I hoped he hadn’t seen the gold nuggets.

Ox turned to his daughters. “See, girls. These young ladies work for a living. They get up every day and go to a job and work all day until the job is done. And that’s why they get paid.”

“Actually, I pay myself,” I said. “As well as everyone else on my staff. Also, Emmaline has a job. I saw her at Garnet’s the other day.”

Ox smirked at me. “Yeah, I heard Jamie Cleburne took you there for catfish po’boys.” He turned to Emmaline. “You gonna open up a restaurant, Boo, like Mrs. Hope here? Takes a lot of elbow grease, my dear. Ain’t that right, Mrs. Hope? But it’s an honorable occupation for a woman. Y’all have a natural way in the kitchen. I mean, not my girls, but I’m pretty sure it’s in most female DNA and they can learn. Maybe Billie here can teach you?”

Jesus, this guy. I shook my head at him, and he sent me a wink, like we were all in on the joke together.

“If you weren’t already spoken for,” he said, “I’d marry you myself.”

“Dad,” one of the girls said.

I sent him a flat smile and checked my phone. Still no call from the deputy. I was getting antsy. Beyond antsy.

He clapped his big, meaty hands together and surveyed his sullen daughters. “Listen up, girls. The judge finally ruled on my appeal, and I’ve got some news. The house is mine now and whatever’s left inside that you didn’t sell. You girls are gonna have to clear out, sorry to say. Get yourselves a new place. Get jobs maybe, like Alice and Billie here—”

Annaliese bolted up out of her chair, slamming the lighter on the table, and walked back into the house. Emmaline stared at her hands as they gripped her knees.

“That money is ours, Dad,” Justine said. “This house is ours. Mom left it to us. Us . Her daughters.”

“Or you could get yourself husbands like normal girls do,” Ox went on like he hadn’t heard her. “Quit smoking all that pot. Get married and have children and let your husbands take care of you.” His voice had risen, his shiny scalp glistening and pink in the hot sun. “There are a couple of single fellas who’ve moved down for the Initiative. Justine, what about that fellow Jack? The one that’s going to open up a Tex-Mex place?”

“Oh my God,” muttered Justine.

Emmaline’s hands moved from her knees to the edge of the table. She still didn’t meet his eyes. “Dad, Mom wanted Annaliese to go to art school. She wanted Justine to travel—”

“You girls have a bigger calling than going to art school or traveling the goddamn globe!” Ox snapped. “You support Juliana. You stand for this town, no ifs, ands, or buts. You hear me? There is no other choice, not if you’re a Dalzell. Dalzells pull their weight to keep our town in business.”

Something on Justine’s arm caught my eye. A delicate gold bracelet with two charms dangling off it, an N and a J . Her mother Nora’s bracelet.

Suddenly the air was filled with the insistent sound of a honking horn. The Jeep’s horn, I realized.

Mere . . .

“Excuse me.” I took off, racing around the side of the house, skidding to a stop when the Jeep came into view. A tow truck was pulling out of the Dalzells’ driveway, the Jeep’s rear end lifted high in the air, attached to the truck’s winch. Mere sat in the driver’s seat, her eyes huge and panic filled. She was clinging to the steering wheel and pounding at the horn with all her might as the truck pulled the Jeep down the drive.

I ran toward the tow truck, screaming at the top of my lungs for the driver to stop. “Mere! Mere!”

I hit the window with the heels of my hands, but when I saw Mere going for the handle, I realized my mistake.

“No!” I yelled at her. “Don’t open the door. Just stay there! Stay there!”

I ran alongside the tow truck, but it was gaining speed. Alice was right behind me now and we were both screaming. I charged ahead of her, circling around the front of the lumbering vehicle.

“Stop!” I screamed with everything in me and held out my hands. “ Stop! ”