Smarty Bones Read Online Free PDF Page B

kudzu in Sunflower County.”
    Oversized sunglasses shaded Tinkie’s blue eyes, but consternation hardened her features. “Just like I intend to eradicate this Olive Twist person. She has no right to be here tampering in our history.”
    She was aggravated, and I understood. Tinkie didn’t mean legal right, she meant something far more difficult to pin down. The legends, stories, and places were ours. Not personally hers or mine, but the collective “ours” of the state. We passed folklore and tall tales down from generation to generation. This community knowledge partially defined us. The Lady in Red was part of this, a story every Delta child knew, and most of us had made up our own interpretations of where she’d come from and who she was. And none of them involved Abraham Lincoln.
    My mother had told me the Lady in Red legend when I was nine. She and my father had driven me to Egypt Plantation to see the manager’s house where the coffin had been accidentally unearthed.
    I could still hear my father’s voice. “They were digging a field line for the septic tank here at the manager’s house when they hit the casket. They brought her up and discovered she was a beautiful woman. Lots of red hair piled up on her head. And she wore a red velvet dress with a white collar. Whoever buried her had loved her, because the casket was cast iron and made to order. It was shaped to her body and then sealed with a glass top. The coffin was filled with alcohol, and the body was perfectly preserved, but only for a short time. The backhoe cracked the seal on the coffin, and as the alcohol leaked out, the body decayed.” My father had put a hand on Mama’s back. “Something sad transpired to bury her here, alone, without any of her loved ones around.”
    My father had been a lawyer, and he didn’t spare me from the realities of life and death. He protected me, but he didn’t try to paint a pretty picture when it didn’t fit the scene.
    “When did you first hear about the Lady in Red?” I asked Tinkie.
    “I was maybe seven. I was at the bank spending the afternoon with my father. Mr. Sampson from Holmes County came in for a visit. He and Daddy were friends, and the subject of the Lady in Red came up. They both told me about it and how no one knew who she was. I remember thinking how sad it was. She was buried in the yard of a house with none of her people around her.”
    “That’s exactly what my father said.” I pondered another question. “Do you think she’s one of Oscar’s or Cece’s relatives?”
    “Anything is possible, but I doubt it. If she were a cousin, the Richmonds would have gotten her body to Sunflower County for burial. They wouldn’t have left her in a backyard. It just doesn’t make sense.”
    “Remember the stories we made up about her? She was always exotic, always a woman of wealth.” The memory came from that point of innocence that made childhood so wonderful. Children seldom fantasized about starving or ugly people, at least not little girls in the Delta. It was always princesses or movie stars or women who had a grand destiny.
    “It doesn’t matter where she came from, she’s ours now. She isn’t up for inspection or dissection by outsiders.” Tinkie pushed her sunglasses up her nose. “I won’t have it.”
    “Legally, I don’t know how to stop Twist. She can write what she wants.” I had to be up-front. Once Tinkie dug in, she didn’t give up.
    “Do you think she was murdered?” Tinkie asked.
    “Murdered and then preserved? The casket had to be expensive. Probably shipped up from New Orleans.” In a weird way, it made sense. Sometimes people killed the very thing they loved the most. The expensive funeral preparations and the unmarked grave would follow that train of thought.
    “Maybe she was running away from her wealthy New Orleans husband,” Tinkie said.
    “Maybe she was meeting her lover. A tryst that went wrong.”
    “Maybe she was foreign, like a mail-order