The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [16]
Then it was over, the anchorman back. “Anyone with information as to the whereabouts of Mrs. Constance Dupree Simons is urged to contact authorities immediately.”
He gave a small nod, turned to another camera, on the screen behind him now a lighthouse. “Sullivans Island authorities predict the new leash law—”
I turned to her. She was looking at me, smiling.
“No one more invisible than a doctor’s wife,” she whispered.
She brought her other hand from where it’d been in the pocket of her skirt. “You need to give this to him,” she whispered, and held that hand over mine on the bed, my fingers curled and holding on to the sheet.
I couldn’t move. This was her. Constance Dupree Simons.
She reached with her other hand to mine, gently folded open my fingers. Her hand was soft, just like her movements, and like her face, her hair. All soft, and suddenly, with the way she touched my hand, I believed her: she didn’t do it. Even if she was smiling after seeing her dead husband fed into the back of an ambulance.
She lifted my hand up, put something in it.
It was warm and hard, a little heavy, the size of the bottom end of a quart beer bottle: a warm, flat piece of round glass. I didn’t look at it, let her ease my hand back to the bed, my eyes on her.
She nodded at my mom again. “You cherish her,” she said, then, quieter, “I have no children of my own, and had always hoped to be cherished.”
I nodded.
“And tell Leland,” she said, “that I did not do it.” She paused, touched at my hand, in it that piece of glass. “And tell him I loved him.”
I tried hard to believe what was going on here, that she knew where I was, how to get to me to tell me what she needed Unc to know.
Finally, I whispered, “Yes ma’am.”
She turned, slow, like she might be sleepwalking, and started for the door, opened it. Light crashed in on her, made her a silhouette to me. She stood there in the doorway, staring straight ahead, then looked back to me one last time.
Still smiling, she nodded, and stepped out into the light.
I brought my hand up, wanted to see what it was she’d given me, so important she’d walk into a hospital, the sheriff and police both after her for murder.
I held it close to my eyes, tried to see it with the light from the doorway but only caught the reflection of that light. A piece of glass was all it was, a little rough on the edges.
I looked over at my mom, wondered if she’d wake up if I turned the lights on, then sat up, slow, so my head wouldn’t fall off, and scooted to where the rail stopped down near the foot. I turned, stepped to the cold floor. All I had on was the thin dresslike thing they gave you, and my underwear, and now my back went cold for the sweat, and I shivered.
I looked to Mom again, then started across the room, my head heavy and big, and I was at the oak door into the bathroom, and I opened it, pulled it to behind me before I turned on the light.
I forgot to close my eyes, and the room exploded white, shot through me for a second, and I squinted hard, opened my hand.
It was brown and shiny, just like glass.
But sealed inside the glass, or whatever it was, was a little pinwheel of pine straw or sweetgrass, every half inch or so a wrap around the straw with a strip of wider straw, like the very center of a sweetgrass basket. It was just three circles, a tiny spiral of a basket, there inside the glass.
A spiral.
Those shapes Unc’d made on the ground, then wrecked. He’d been drawing sweetgrass baskets.
I looked in the mirror, saw a kid with his mouth open, his hair all plastered to his head for sweating in his sleep.
Sweetgrass baskets?
Tell Leland I didn’t do it, she’d said.
But sweetgrass baskets?
Sweetgrass baskets, those baskets made of coiled sweetgrass and