And Now She's Gone(101)

There was just one other customer. On the other side of the diner, an old black man sat in a booth near the jukebox, which was now playing “The Great Pretender” by the Platters. His hands cupped a mug of coffee.

Gray ordered chicken-fried steak and grits—she didn’t make either dish at home. She found the Percocet vial in her bag and shook one out. This was the best kind of food to take with pills. As she waited for her meal, she flipped through her phone and found the notebook pages she’d photographed at Mail Boxes Etc.

Belize … Belize City … apartment in Ladyville $650!! 2bd 1 bath but too close to police station … Buttonwood bay? $750 … Unclaimed b … 5k Ermond 501-223-0010



“Right,” she whispered. “Who is Ermond?” She dialed the number. How far ahead or behind Alabama was Belize time?

The line rang … rang … “Yeah.” The man sounded as though he’d run to the phone. “Ermond Funeral Home,” he said. “Weh di go ann?”

Kriol. Crap. Gray said, “I’m sorry?”

“Da how yudi du?” the man asked, slower.

Gray said, “English?”

“Yes, how may I help you?”

“May I speak to Ermond, please?”

“I am Ermond.”

Gray cleared her throat. “You and I talked maybe a few days ago?” She glanced down at her notes. “About unclaimed … five thousand?”

“Yes. You get the hair? You get the nail? I take ’em and you get the body nobody want. You get the det’ certificate, too. People come, cry and sing, that’s extra. Cash only. I can do cremation—very nice service. Very nice. When you come down?”

Her hands were shaking. “Next week?”

“Good. Got a good one for you. Car accident. Nobody can tell what’s what. A shame.”

“Sounds…” Gray swallowed. “Sounds good. Your address?”

“Off Western Highway. Belize City. You can’t miss it.”

Was Isabel Lincoln buying an unclaimed body from a funeral home in Belize?

If so, who was she planning to pass off as dead?

“The hair and nails,” Gray said. “Proof for the death certificate and insurance company.”

She was planning to pass herself off as dead. The woman with the official name change from Elyse Miller would be “dead.”

But what was her endgame?

“Insurance,” Gray whispered. “Half a million dollars. That’s the endgame.”

Lottie returned with food as well as a thick steak knife and extra napkins. “Enjoy, baby.”

Gray loaded her bowl with sugar and butter, just like Mom Twyla had eaten her grits. Better than the salt, pepper, and cheese grits that Mom Naomi liked.

When she was bites in, a man slipped into her booth and sat across from her. He grinned at her, and his whiskey-brown eyes glinted like stars. “Since when did you start eating grits?”

Gray’s belly dropped, and her bottom half warmed.

Otis Redding sang about trying a little tenderness …

“You’re crap at looking over your shoulder.” Sean Dixon plucked the saltshaker from the holder. “I’ve had someone tailing you for a week now. He was standing in line behind you in Vegas when you bought your ticket to fly down here.”

“Squeeze her, don’t tease her…”

Sean smiled. “You should already know this, Mrs. Natalie Dixon: I will never go away. And you can call yourself by some other name, but you will always be my wife. ’Til death do us part, baby. ’Til death do us part.”





55


Panic burst around Gray’s body, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

Sean Dixon was now shaking salt into Gray’s bowl of sweet grits. “I watched you waddle”—he moved the shaker from her grits to her cup of coffee—“around a cemetery today. What was that about?”

Gray wanted to throw that coffee in his face. She wanted to scream, Get away from me!, but she couldn’t move.

He sat the saltshaker down, reached across the table, and laid his hand atop hers.

She whispered, “What do you want?”

“I wanna make it right between you and me. How can I do that?” The veins in his eyes were red and wild, crisscrossing each other like highways on a map. “Don’t you want it to be the way it was? Friends again? Lovers again? I mean … looking at you now, it’s obvious that no one wants you. I loved you when you were a buck five. I’ll love you now, fat ass and all.”

Lottie’s squeaky shoes announced her arrival. She set a menu and glass of ice water in front of Sean. “You want something, sugar?”

Sean said, “Nothing for me, thanks.”

Gray tried to pull back her hand.

Together, they watched the waitress shuffle back into the kitchen.

The old man nursing the coffee shuffled out into the rain.

The jukebox clicked, and Stevie Wonder sang, “I never dreamed you’d leave in summer…”

Sean held their clenched hands against Gray’s cheek. So cold, his hand. So familiar against her face, that hand. A sob was growing in her chest, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was.

A diner off a small highway in Mobile, Alabama?