The Angel Whispered Danger - By Mignon F. Ballard Page 0,1
Daddy getting a divorce?” Josie stared into her lap, and the catch in her voice was barely noticeable. But I noticed it, and it was all I could do to keep from stopping the car, pulling my hurting child into my arms and kissing her doubt away. Lately, however, my daughter had become an untouchable: no good night kisses, no impromptu hugs, and the lack of them was peeling away at my emotions a little at a time. If emotions could bleed, I’d be a big red puddle. A Band-Aid wouldn’t help either of us.
“Your dad and I just need to take a little time to work things out,” I said, trying to speak in a steady voice. “This training session’s important, and he needed extra time to prepare for it. That’s why he couldn’t go to the beach.”
I wished that were the only reason. The truth was that things hadn’t been right between my husband and me since we lost our baby during the third month of my pregnancy over two years before. Over a period of time, my once warm and lovable husband had turned into an unapproachable stranger. Ned hadn’t been invited to go to the beach, and from all indications, wouldn’t have accepted if he had, but I was already in the dump heap as far as Josie was concerned, so why pile on more?
“So, when’s he coming home?” she wanted to know.
Please don’t ask, because I don’t know! “The seminar lasts several weeks,” I said, “and your dad’s conducting one of the later sessions, but he’ll phone, Josie. You know he won’t forget you. Your daddy loves you, and so do I.”
Something that sounded very much like a snort came from the seat beside me. “Hey, how about some ice cream?” I offered, seeing a fast-food restaurant ahead. “Been a while since lunch.”
“I’m not hungry,” Josie said.
How could somebody one-third my age who didn’t even come to my shoulder aggravate me so? I found myself grinding my teeth. “Come on now, Josie, you have camp to look forward to this summer—why, just think, in a couple of weeks you’ll be swimming and canoeing—all that good stuff, and when we get back from Uncle Ernest’s, you’ll have a brand new bike to ride.” Since he would be away for her birthday, Ned had given our daughter her present early.
“I don’t want to go to Uncle Ernest’s! It’s creepy there. Darby says you found a dead man in those woods. And there’s an old graveyard back there, too. He says it’s haunted.”
“Josie, your cousin’s just trying to scare you. There used to be a church adjoining Uncle Ernest’s property, but it burned years ago. The cemetery behind it has been neglected, I’m afraid, but it certainly isn’t haunted. When did Darby tell you that?”
“When we were there at Christmas. He said I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”
I wondered who had told Darby. My cousin Marge’s boy was not much older than Josie, and both were impressionable.
“Well, did you?” she persisted. “Did you really find a dead man? Darby said he’d been murdered!”
“That was a long time ago, honey,” I said. “I wasn’t much older than you.” So why did it seem like yesterday? To this day, I avoided that section of the thicket behind Bramblewood.
“Weren’t you scared? Was it somebody you knew?”
Scared wasn’t the word. Every time I thought of that day, I felt again icy flames leap in my belly. The man, a vagrant, had been dead for at least twenty-four hours, we learned later. His blue eyes stared at nothing and dried blood matted his hair. He lay across a fallen log close to the trail that meandered along a tributary of the Yadkin River at the far end of my uncle’s property, and the cigarettes that had probably dropped from the pocket of his blue denim shirt were scattered on the ground.
“Of course I was scared. We were all scared, but that’s not going to happen again. He was somebody just passing through, and even after we learned his name, nobody knew who he was or why he was killed.”
Tobias King. The name still sent a spike of fear right through my middle. My friend Beverly, who had been with me that day, experienced nightmares for years, and my cousin Grady won’t talk about it to this day.
“How do you know that whoever killed him won’t come back?” Josie asked, glancing over her shoulder as if the murderer were in hot pursuit.