“I need you to come with me,” he says, regarding me like a newborn fawn. “It’s important,” he adds when I hesitate to follow.
The black ferns, despite their ominous color and spiky fronds, are soft as the brush against my ankles. A thick carpet beneath my feet as we work our way closer to the memorial.
Davis squats down low to the ground and points to the road ahead, just before the plastic garden. “What do you see?”
It almost feels like a trick question. I shrug. “Fake flowers. The road.”
He nods. “Okay. What do you not see?”
I regard the pavement again, still not getting his meaning. “I don’t know.”
“This is the scene of a car accident, what do you not see?”
I remember the time Papaw and I were in a car accident, sort of. He had to slam on the brakes to keep from running over Mrs. Cole’s young cocker spaniel, who had streaked across the road right in front of us. The sound of the squealing tires against the pavement were as loud as the dog’s frightened yelp.
“Skid marks.” I realize. Suddenly interested, I slowly move forward; all that anxiety about being here tries to rise up, but I push it down, as far as it will let me, because I need to understand what Davis is talking about.
He stands. “I know the ambulance picked her up here. But where are the skid marks?”
As I walk, I swing my foot back and forth, gazing over the weeds and ferns for glimpses of the ground underneath.
“You know what else I don’t see?” I say, after making a few laps over the area. “I don’t see pieces of her bicycle. Not a wheel spoke. Or a chip of a broken reflector.” We spend a little time combing over the area, picking through the grass, looking for any evidence. We don’t find anything more than broken beer bottles and fast-food trash.
Davis slowly nods, seeing the new conclusions I’m drawing. Things he hadn’t considered.
“She wasn’t hit here,” I say. The realization sinking in. I walk farther down the road to where there aren’t any trees and the landscape opens up to cotton fields. I stand in the center of the road and turn in a circle.
“We’re at Three Way,” I say, even though Davis already knows this section of the road leads three different directions. “Town of Black Fern is that way.” I point down the curved road toward home. “Gas station where it forks toward Mercer City that way.” I cast my arm a third of the way between north and south. “And what’s that way?” I point toward the center of east and west, at the white peak of a home’s roof hidden within the oak trees.
Davis speaks a whispered “Oh.”
Sugar Hill Plantation. It hits me like a ton of bricks.
“But now the question is,” Davis asks, “where does that side road lead?” He points to the field road the farmers use to maneuver their combines so they don’t drive over the cotton. A smile slides on Davis’s face. “Let’s go see.”
His truck bounces and shakes as he attempts to avoid the shallow mudholes and dodge the downed branches.
He and I are both surprised when, after not too long, the weedy dirt road turns into gravel, which soon after becomes pavement. The roof and shoulders of Sugar Hill Plantation are slowly revealed as we get closer.
Over the horizon, the tall pickets of a rusted green iron gate rise with a massive capital R in its center, lording over the dead. The historical Rutledge family cemetery. Gravestones here date back to the early 1800s. The land is filled with decaying jagged teeth in a carpet of green grass.
From the dilapidated condition of the fence, this entrance isn’t maintained anymore, probably from lack of use. It opens with a gritted hiss and a howling yawn. I swipe the crumbly green flakes of paint off my hands.
I take off suddenly, needing to find something—anything—that will confirm the picture that’s now forming in my mind.
Davis hurriedly tries to catch up as I rush down the road, looking for skid marks.
“Why was Adaire riding her bike that day? What was so important she couldn’t wait until I returned her car?” I ask Davis, who’s scanning the side of the road for any signs of evidence.
“Because she couldn’t see Saturday clearly, it was too foggy,” he says.
“Bingo.” Now Davis is finally starting to see meaning in everything I’ve been telling him. “She discovered something. Something important. Something so urgent she had to address it right then and there. Enough to ride her bike for miles to get to it. Whatever it was, I think it was here.” I halt so quickly Davis slams into me. Then he sees it, too.
Parallel lines of slanted S tire marks. Scattered within the dried crabgrass, chips of broken bike reflector. I hold up an orange piece to show Davis.
“Damn, Weatherly.” That’s all he can manage under the weight of what we’ve just discovered.
“Yeah,” I say. This is big, and we both know it. But I still don’t understand.
What where you doing out here? I silently ask Adaire, scanning the cemetery as if a giant lighted arrow will appear and point the way.
“We better go,” Davis says quietly and tips his head toward the gardener pruning the roses out back.
We’re a good piece down the road when Davis says he will try to talk to Wanda up at the courthouse and see if she can’t find a car title or a vehicle registration for Lorelei and get a VIN number to track her car and find out where it ended up.
I pull the blue bottle stopper out of my pocket and turn it over in my palm a few times. A glimmer of light from the fading sunlight flickers through it.
A recipe to see.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out what Gabby was referring to that could help me see what Adaire saw.
“Ha!” I say, realizing the recipe, or many recipes, are right in front of my face every day when I do the dishes at our kitchen sink. Right there in that narrow window is our family’s magical recipe box.
“Drop me off at Raelean’s instead.”
“Are you sure? Because mom wouldn’t mind you staying with us a few days until things cool off.”
“Tell your mama I appreciate her. But I need to see about something first.”
