Frost appeared to be fighting back tears. He paused and gathered himself.
“We must do something about the sleazy tabloid journalism in this town,” Frost said addressing the reporters in the room. “Over a span of two weeks, we have had two suicides because of Walker Holmes and his Pensacola Insider. The man is a menace.”
The sheriff paused to let the words sink in. “Holmes hides behind freedom of the press and ruins lives and destroys this community. It’s time the law-abiding, Christian people of this county put this man out of business.”
I took two pain pills and went to sleep while I was thinking about the time I finally met Mari’s family.
Bringing your boyfriend or girlfriend home to meet your family was an Ole Miss tradition. No relationship was considered serious until that happened. Mari passed the test with my family effortlessly. Her dry sense of humor won over my dad, and her manners impressed my mom. When my younger brothers pranked her, Mari not only laughed it off, she pranked them back.
My family was easy. Mari’s would be a different story. She hadn’t brought many boyfriends home to meet her family—only two during her first two years at Ole Miss. The Rebel football player she dated before meeting me never was introduced to her family. There was a good reason. Mari’s father was a lifelong LSU season ticket holder for football, basketball, and baseball, and the boy wasn’t worth the headache it would have caused Mari.
She had chosen a different path, forgoing the Bengal Tigers for the red and blue Ole Miss Rebels. Her parents supported their only child and defended her choice to her grandparents, aunts, and uncles. But their love for Mari didn’t make it easier for the hated Ole Miss boys brought to Eunice, a little Louisiana town in the heart of the Cajun plains between Lafayette and Lake Charles.
Mari wouldn’t tell me much about her family. She said it would have given me an unfair advantage. This was a test, and she wouldn’t let me cheat.
The Gaudet family was old school. College boyfriends did not sleep under their roof with the daughter in a nearby bedroom. I would stay in the guest bedroom of Grandma Gaudet. Her family insisted I have breakfast with Mari’s grandmother Saturday morning. If she liked me, she would invite her twin sister and Mari’s uncles over to meet me. If not, I would pack my bags and head back to Oxford, like the last boy. Her dad would bring Mari back to the campus on Sunday.
We took my car to Eunice, arriving near midnight. I let her drop me off at her grandmother’s house, and her Uncle Tom, who still lived with his mother, showed me to my room.
At 6:00 a.m. I woke, showered, and found Grandma Gaudet sitting at the kitchen table impatiently waiting for me. In her sixties, she was dressed in a purple jogging suit with gold tennis shoes. Her eyes were the same bright blue as Mari’s, and her auburn hair had a little touch of gray at the temples.
“Good morning, Mrs. Gaudet. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
In a voice raspy from years of smoking Kools, she said, “Call me, Grandma.”
She poured me a cup of black chicory coffee. “Milk is in the refrigerator, sugar on the counter by the toaster.”
I drank it black, no need to complicate the morning any more than it would be. “Thank you, Grandma.”
She smiled. “Mari says you’re a writer. What have you written?”
I told her that I had interned with Commercial Appeal, the daily newspaper in Memphis.
“Did you cover any murder cases?” she asked.
I nodded and told her about a trial I covered that had garnered some national attention.
The case had started when two marines heard a woman screaming in the woods near the Millington Naval Base north of Memphis. Minutes later, a beat-up, green Mercury station wagon nearly ran them over. The car was familiar around the base. It was owned by an air conditioning technician who lived in base housing with his wife, an enlisted sailor.
A few hours later, law enforcement found the mutilated body of nineteen-year-old Lance Corporal Suzanne Marie Collins. Covered with over a hundred wounds, she had been violated with a tree limb that had been shoved so far into her body that it punctured a lung. The autopsy showed her skull had been fractured with a screwdriver.
The cops arrested the repair man. His attorney tried to convince the prosecutors that he suffered from a multiple personality disorder. All the networks picked up the story of the gruesome, senseless crime.
“You see the body?” she asked as she poured me a second cup of coffee.
“No, ma’am, but I did see crime scene photos and read the autopsy report,” I said, not mentioning how I almost vomited when I saw the photos.
She said, “Do you buy the story of his multiple personality that would mean he was too crazy to know right from wrong?”
“No, his story never made sense. He was wearing a bloody T-shirt when they arrested him. The screwdriver was found in his car. He claimed that he had been drinking at home. When he drove back to the liquor store, he accidently hit Collins who was jogging near the park, and he had offered to take her to the emergency room. He alleged that he couldn’t remember many details after she got into the car.”
I got up and added milk and sugar to my cup. “He said voices in his head told him to kill the girl. No one believed him, not even his wife and sister.”
Grandma Gaudet smiled.
