The Clouds Roll Away Read online

  On the windowsill family photographs showed a pretty woman with rolled hair. A small child grinning from a tricycle. A school portrait of a dark-haired girl with eyes like Angela Crell’s. The oldest photograph’s sepia hues matched the faded leaves outside. Wearing his Confederate cap, the famous general held an unwavering gaze. There was no telling whether the portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest was taken before or after the Civil War, before the South came tumbling down, or after, when Forrest launched plans for his family circle, a poisoned-arrow enterprise named with a confusion of Greek and Scottish words.

  The Kuklos Klan.

  When the can was empty, Angela Crell lifted the funnel from the tube, her voice rasping with words about goodness and light. She pushed the cap into the tube’s end and tucked the quilts around her father.

  “Ring the bell if you need anything.” She reached over, turning up the radio.

  We wound back through the satin forest to the trailer. Angela lit up a Salem, taking a long drag, sucking hard like somebody coming up from deep water. Beside her on a wide table sat a sewing machine.

  I waited, figuring she needed another hit.

  She took it and stared at the floor littered with torn thread.

  “You wired?” she asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Are you recording me?”

  “No.”

  She waved the cigarette. “Whatever. They didn’t do it.”

  “Who?”

  She leaned forward, speaking into my coat. “The Klan did not light up that cross.”

  I opened my coat, moving the blazer too. Her eyes lingered on my hip holster. “I’m not wearing a wire. What about the car bomb?”

  “Wasn’t them neither,” she said.

  “Then who was it?”

  She gave a tense smile, revealing front teeth that crossed over each other. “I’m only talking to you because some things need setting straight.”

  “Things like what?”

  “These old guys couldn’t light a candle, forget about a cross. You saw my daddy. Does he look like he could do that?”

  I glanced around the room, running my eyes over the bright satin. “And you’re sewing, what, choir robes?”

  She tapped the cigarette against the ashtray. “I’m just saying is, if the FBI’s watching my daddy, it’s a waste of time. He’s done. He can’t even talk. The cancer took his tongue. So don’t pin this on them.”

  “Miss Crell, the Klan left its signature at the crime scene.”

  “And you want me to believe you don’t got a wire on. You sure do sound like a lawyer.”

  “I’m not a lawyer. I don’t have a wire.”

  She waved the cigarette again.

  I gave her a moment, studying her face. Her eyes were electric, cheekbones high, her frame as delicate as a ballerina’s. And I’d seen the tender smile she bestowed on her father. But her beauty had a corrosive edge to it, as if the attitudes swirling around her had dripped like battery acid. According to DeMott, she once worked as a nurse, doing hospice in the county. She took care of his grandmother and some of the older black women living on land the Fieldings rented out. DeMott claimed Angela Crell treated her patients equally, black and white, but her seamstress talents were one of those open secrets small places whisper about.

  “DeMott says you took care of his grandmother.”

  “Good woman,” she said. “I like that family. Well, some of them.”

  “And you took care of some black people near Weyanoke.”

  She looked at me, disdain in her eyes. “You think I’m okay with them, long as they’re dying?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She lit another cigarette. “You know what bothers me more? The TV reporters. Making it sound like this guy’s totally innocent.”

  “Who?”

  “That rapper, whatever his name is. I saw the story they did on Entertainment Tonight. Made me mad as hell. He talked like he’s a victim.”

  “He is.”

  “You ever listen to his music? My daughter plays it. I hear stuff about how evil the white man is, how great it is to kill cops. If the Klan ever said something like that, I swear, you Feds would come after every last one of them. But this guy does it and makes millions of dollars. Nobody bats an eye. When somebody gives that trash back to him, suddenly he’s the victim. Give me a break.”

  “Miss Crell, a teenager died in that car. He was incinerated. Judging by the satin you’ve got in here, somebody’s holding Klan meetings.”

  She smashed the cigarette in the ashtray. “I’m trying to raise a kid and take care of my daddy. So I take measurements; I sew robes. I don’t ask questions. It’s how we get by.”

  “Do they pick up the robes?”

  I saw fear in her eyes.

  “You going to haul me into court?”

  “I can keep you out of court. With conditions.”

  “I knew this was a bad idea.” She lit another cigarette, fingers shaking.

  Dropping my voice, I explained how confidential sources worked. If I could rely on her for crucial information, if revealing her name would compromise the FBI’s ability to fight crime, I could keep her identity anonymous. “You’ve leveled with me up to this point,” I said, “and I appreciate it. If you want to stay out of court or jail, keep your business, then . . .”

  I let the rest hang in the smoky air.

  “I mail the robes,” she said, sighing. “Post office boxes only. Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas.”

  “What about Virginia?”

  She stared at the floor again. She was a woman who probably never got many choices, who played the hand she was dealt. I saw no ring on her finger, but there was a daughter. No mother, but a father whose neediness pulled like a physical hunger. And a background of bigotry for a nurse who earned a reputation of tenderness and mercy for both white and black patients. Angela Crell knew what most people realize too late: nobody, but nobody, gets out alive.

  “You give me your word?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She spoke staring at the floor, her voice a low rumble. “My mama sewed the robes before me. She taught me how to work the satin. But when I was grown, the orders stopped coming in. You couldn’t support a rabbit. I’d stitch a robe for somebody’s funeral, something for the man to be buried in.” She looked up, giving a soft laugh. “Like Jesus would want to see that, right? I went to nursing school and took up the hospice work because it meant I could stay in the county and be here when Tina came home from school. But about three years ago, the orders started coming in. Robes, emblems. Flags. Lots of them. When the doctors found the cancer in Daddy, he needed help and there was enough sewing I could quit nursing and take care of him.”

  “So these are new robes, for new recruits?”

  Her green eyes filled with turmoil. “You gotta let me keep my business. It’s the only support we got.”

  “I won’t interfere. Where in Virginia are they coming from?”

  “I never get their real names. They go by Grand Wizard, stuff like that.”

  The trailer door whipped open and a large girl stomped inside. She stared at me, narrowing her gray-green eyes.

  “You was supposed to be here an hour ago,” Angela Crell said.

  The girl’s mouth was red and swollen. “I’m here now.”

  “Get in the house and start on dinner.”

  The girl stomped through the satin forest and her mother turned to me, speaking loudly enough to be overheard.

  “I’ll call you when the order’s ready,” she said. “About a week. Thanks for stopping by.”

  I took my cue, silently handing her my card and walking outside. The cats still roosted on the steps, and the wind was picking up the dead leaves, swirling them in the air, stirring them inside an invisible cauldron.

  chapter sixteen

  Driving back to town, I listened to a voice mail from Milky Lewis, then swung by the Lucky Strike building.

  Milky was standing on a six-fo
ot wooden ladder in the art gallery, hanging pictures on the brick walls painted white. In the varnished yellow pine floor, his dark reflected image looked like a shadow.

  “You g-gotta help my c-cousin.”

  “We’re talking about Zennie?” I asked.

  “I ever t-talked to you about some other c-cousin?”

  “Milky, I’m not sure what you mean by helping her, but that’s not really my job. I want to talk with her, but I can’t make promises.”

  He jumped off the ladder, landing with a shuddering thud. “Sh-she got herself a k-kid. You know that?”

  “Let’s take this up after the new year,” I said. “I got shifted off that case. And what I’m working right now is urgent.”

  “Urgent? That g-girl could die.” He squinted his amber eyes. “I ever asked you for one f-favor?”

  “No.”

  “No.” He handed me a slip of paper with an address scrawled in blue pen. “T-talk to her. Make her listen.”

  Make her listen. Good one. “Milky, if I led you to believe—”

  “Her boy’s not but f-five years old.”

  I sighed.

  “One more thing,” he said. “D-don’t make her mad.”

  The hair salon where Zennie Lewis worked was one link in a national chain that stretched across America and boasted cheap haircuts for anyone who walked through the door. This particular franchise was located in the dullest section of Broad Street, an inchoate strip west of town where fast-food joints squeezed in with brick houses rezoned into offices for dentists and chiropractors and the occasional psychic palm reader.

  When I opened the salon door Thursday morning, the air smelled of berry shampoo and hot hair. The young woman behind the cash register looked up expectantly. Purple streaks wove through her short black hair.

  “Hi there!” she said. “What can we do you for? Trim, haircut?”

  “Trim.”

  “Great! Take a seat. I’ll be right with you.”

  “I was hoping Zennie was available.”

  “Zennie?” She ran her eyes over me. Dark eyes lined with lavender shadow that struggled to match the hair streaks. “You want Zennie?”

  “My friend got a great haircut, and when I asked who did it, she told me it was Zennie.”

  She ran a painted nail—another shade of purple—down the calendar page on the counter. Sawing her jaw back and forth, letting me know that she was insulted or that I was some kind of idiot, she said, “Name?”

  “Mary Mitchell.”

  “Have a seat, Mary.”

  I sat down in one of the fake leather sling chairs near the door and read gossip magazines dated a week back. Several had stories about celebrities and Thanksgiving. Actors, actresses, pop music stars. There was even a photo of RPM, described as a “rap mogul,” volunteering at a soup kitchen in New York with other famous people. Everybody talked about “giving back,” though it occurred to me that sentiment never included refunds for bad movies, and a photographer always happened to be present to capture these moments of altruism. That was apparently Wally’s role in RPM’s latest mission to Liberia. Publicity made the world go round.

  “Mary?”

  I looked up and saw a face like a golden brown cabochon. Her black hair was straightened, pulled back into a short ponytail, revealing her rounded cheeks that dimpled with her smile. Like Milky, she had amber-colored eyes, but hers were the size of buttons. And not even the plastic apron could disguise her curvaceous figure. Zennie Lewis was what Southern women meant when they said a girl was “cute as a bug.”

  But when I stood, laying aside the gossip magazine, her smile faded, kidnapping the dimples.

  Something had given me away, maybe something Milky had told her.

  I followed her back to the shampoo sinks where she reached up and yanked a nylon smock off the shelf, snapping it open like a bullfighter. She closed it tight around my neck, then picked up the sink hose, testing the water with one hand. I eased back on the reclining chair and she leaned over me, her voice a whispered growl.

  “Nice try, Mary.”

  “You’re going to scald me. Turn it down.”

  Making a face, she twisted one of the knobs. The water turned cold. Very cold.

  “Milky’s worried about you,” I said.

  Her rounded face held a mixture of pride and anger. She began shampooing my scalp, using a force that shook my entire body. I let her, hoping the exertion would wear her down.

  It did, a little. The water came back on at room temperature.

  “So you two share a grandmother,” I said.

  “What?”

  “If Milky’s your cousin, you share a grandmother.”

  No response.

  “Is she still alive?”

  “Who?”

  “Your grandmother.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “What’s she like?”

  “She kills chickens with her bare hands.”

  Throwing a towel over my head, Zennie rubbed like my hair was on fire and then tied the towel into a turban so tight my eyes had epicanthic folds. I followed her to a chair near the bubble-headed hair dryers. A woman was reading one of the celebrity magazines.

  I sat down, Zennie yanked off the turban, and my long hair flopped on the nylon smock. I stared at the mirror, watching her face. What made cabochons so valuable was the radiating star of light emerging from the curved shape. On Zennie, that light emerged from her eyes, the amber color luxurious, mesmerizing. I stared into the mirror, watching her pick up a lank strand of wet hair, gently tugging it to full length. She contemplated my appearance with a certain detachment.

  “You always wear it like that?” she asked.

  “My hair? Yes.”

  “Just hanging down around your face?”

  “Well, I wear a ponytail sometimes,” I said, feeling oddly defensive.

  “It does nothing for your face.”

  I heard nothing harsh in her tone. She spoke with authority, a calm that comes from knowing, and not for the first time, I wondered about people’s attitudes, whether half the world’s agony would evaporate if each person discovered the talent God gave them instead of squandering days painting by numbers laid out according to someone else’s preference. Parents. Peers. Pastors. We read books bursting with self-help, about roads less traveled and finding bliss and all these so-called secrets to life. But they all left out the most crucial factor. We fought an enemy, invisible yet definite, who diligently worked to block us from our intended purpose, keeping us from the one thing that brought joy, that connected us to each other and to our Creator. Condemned and resentful, miserable and uncertain, we filled our minds with chatter from talk show hosts, always hoping for the answer, when all the while one simple supernatural prescription waited: “Come to me.”

  In the mirror, I saw Zennie move from side to side of the chair, suddenly lost in the graceful dance of her talent, her purpose. The reason behind my visit was suddenly gone. And I let it go.

  “What do you suggest?” I asked.

  “You need some pizzazz.”

  “Pizzazz?”

  “Yeah, holiday pizzazz. Milky said you were pretty, but you need to play it up.”

  “What kind of pizzazz are we talking about?”

  “Put your chin down,” she said.

  “Not too much.”

  “Keep your head down.” She began snipping the scissors, still moving from side to side, and when she walked over to the mirror, pulling a comb from the jar of blue disinfectant, I saw a picture tucked into the mirror’s corner. A little boy.

  “He’s got your dimples,” I said. “What’s his name?”

  “Zeke.” She placed her small hand on my head, gently tilting. “You got kids?”

  I shook my head.

  “Hold still. No kids?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Girl, I ain’t married either, but at least I got a kid outta the deal.”

  “And if something happens to you, what h
appens to him?”

  The scissors stopped.

  I looked up, our eyes locking in the mirror.

  “Milky’s got a job,” I said. “Going to school, putting his life together. But the other guys in that gang are behind bars. It’ll be decades before they hug their kids again.”

  She held my gaze in the mirror. She whispered, “Nothing’s gonna happen.”

  “I hope that’s true. But if you love your son, you’ll get away from those guys.”

  “Put your head down,” she ordered.

  I hesitated. I was tempted to say more, but I was dealing with a wounded creature, one who saw every offer of help as another opportunity for pain.

  In those cases, it was always best to leave the plate of offered food and slowly back away.

  chapter seventeen

  It was a haircut that demanded itself. A haircut that would make headlines for an actress who worked a soup kitchen once a year after appearing in terrible movies.

  No doubt about it: Zennie was talented.

  But for me, the cut was a shock. I was not a pizzazz kind of gal, and when I snuck into the office on Thursday, I was only too happy to stay in my echoing hovel for a day of KKK research.

  Our Bureau files showed nothing on World War I weapons caches in Virginia. Or North Carolina or West Virginia, where the KKK claimed strongholds. Mustard gas did show up in other places—Austria, Sierra Leone, Iraq—but lewisite was almost nonexistent, an arcane chemical killer. Frustrated by the dead ends, I called Nettie Labelle at the lab and asked about the explosives evidence from the car bombing.

  “Pipe bomb plastique was just regular old C-4, duct-taped together,” she said. “They’re running traces to see if we can track down the tape manufacturer, where it was sold. I’ll let you know ASAP about what comes back. But the accelerants—”

  “Let me guess.”

  “Alex Trebek, Raleigh Harmon would like to answer the daily double for one thousand.”

  “What is mustard gas and lewisite?”

  “That’s correct. You win. And you lose. All at the same time. But I did get a number for you.” She rattled off ten digits so quickly I had to ask her to repeat them, twice. The last time she repeated the numbers so slowly it was annoying. I felt like calling her Annette.