Free Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery by T. Blake Braddy

once or twice when he was much younger, and several times more recently. Always alone. Always unsmiling. He had spent a few years elsewhere and had returned to work “a real job,” as Janita put it. He'd been an artsy-type, like the hipster kids down at Savannah College of Art and Design. He never quite lived up to his potential. He went right to hanging drywall until he could get a teaching certificate.
    "He seemed like a wonderful person," I said, when she was done.
    "It's a custom for people to give glory to the dead," she said, wincing at her own words, "but in this case, everything I could say about my Emmitt is true. He was an angel of this world, wouldn't hurt another person even if it was deserved. He was a quiet, gentle boy. He grew into a quiet, gentle man. Nobody who knew him would want him hurt, not for any reason. He'd never gotten into so much as a fistfight in school.”
    “I hope they find out who did this,” I said. Acknowledging that I had begun a surface investigation into the matter seemed unnecessary and potentially insulting in the moment.
    She gave me a penetrating look and continued. “The image I still have of him is one where he's just learning how to play the guitar. Just ten or eleven years old, balancing that big acoustic on his knees. The way his legs dangled from the chair he sat in made him look like a ventriloquist's dummy. But he learned quick, and he loved to play, could sit down and strum for hours without looking up. If he hadn't been so interested in everything, he might have become a famous guitar player, something like that. I guess. I don't know. My mind feels so cloudy right now."
    "I hate to ask this, Mrs. Laveau, but why didn’t you go to the authorities yourself? In your own words, he'd been gone for some time."
    She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief pulled from her purse. "My son was a rambling soul, never could get tied down too long. This was the longest he'd spent in the Junction. He'd been saving money, like always, so he could travel around, do something else for awhile."
    "I see."
    "He didn't come home for a few days, and I didn’t worry at first, because I knew how he could be, so I just washed his clothes and put them in his room. Folded them up and smelled them, smelling him, and then put them away. You just don't ever know sometimes, Mr. McKane, the last time you're going to see someone you love. I had a brief flash of that myself recently, you understand."
    I did. "I'm sorry," I said impotently. "For everything, especially what I could have controlled. Never thought being careless would hurt anybody but myself, ma'am. I was wrong, and I'll be reminded of that night for the rest of my life."
    "Wasn't my time to go," she said, finally, confidently. "I got no other way to explain it. Wasn't my time to go, and it definitely wasn't your time to go to jail. I don't bear no grudge against you, because now it seems so petty. And I used to be one to do things I might advise against now. Hmm. Do you believe in fate, Rolson McKane?"
    "I don’t know that I do. I heard you've been lobbying for them to take it easy on me. I hope that's why you're out here this afternoon, to shed some light on a topic that's got me worried and confused. No offense."
    Janita peered over my shoulder, focusing maybe on the yard through the blinds and maybe nothing at all. There was always the woods. They loomed over everything now, literally and metaphorically, and I was continuously thinking of them. I suspect that Janita Laveau thought of them now quite a bit herself.
    I knew how frantic the mind becomes when somebody dies, how it scrambles through mental archives, pulling and storing the most important ones for later and immediately dumping those without any real meaning. There wasn't a memory of my mother's life that I hadn't compromised. Time and drink and just life in general had ravaged the old file system, made my mother into a representation of the real thing instead of the real