The Dangerous Edge of Things - By Tina Whittle Page 0,33

in his nose, and a goatee, neatly-trimmed and black as his eyes, which were hidden behind dark sunglasses this morning.

I jumped up and grabbed him in a bear hug. Up close, his skin looked darker than usual, more café than au lait. I waited for the Hollywood smile, but it was low wattage.

I pulled off the shades. His eyes were red-rimmed and bleary.

“Jeez,” I said. “How much sleep did you get?”

He snatched the glasses back. “Three hours, and that’s roundin’ up.” He sat down, spread his legs. “So what’s the plan?”

I shouldered my tote bag and grinned at him.

He sighed loudly. “Oh crap.”

***

We took his car, a leased Chevy Tahoe that wolfed down a third of his take-home pay. He’d recently converted the sound system to MP3, so I no longer had to kick through a pile of CDs to make room for my feet. He had one of his mixes playing, the bass cranked up so high his car was practically bouncing off the line. The bank employees walking down Peachtree stared, like they knew exactly who we were.

“Go left,” I said.

We inched down Peachtree for a half mile or so, past the commuters, past the newspaper men hollering the Journal-Constitution headlines. I saw a panhandler talking on a cell phone while another slept under a blanket of wrapping paper.

Rico followed my directions without question, heading south until we hit the old part of the city, where the lofts of Cabbagetown rose over the MARTA railway line.

“Great,” he said, “we’re going to the zoo. You know I hate the zoo.”

“Not the zoo.”

“Unless the pandas are out. I’ll go see the baby panda.”

“Maybe later. Turn left.”

Rico squinted ahead. “Oh man, I hate it when you do this to me.”

“Do what?”

“Drag me into your ghost shit.”

We pulled in front of the arching brick gates of Oakland Cemetery, eighty-eight verdant acres dotted with some of Atlanta’s most elite dead people. The azaleas had yet to burst into full glory, but daffodils dotted the walking path in profusion. Two runners and their dogs stretched at the entrance as a docent gathered a group of tourists.

I shook my head. “I told you, ghosts don’t usually haunt cemeteries—not enough residual energy.”

He continued reluctantly through the gates, parking just past the visitor’s center near an enormous magnolia. We got out with some door slamming on Rico’s part, some kicking and muttering too.

He peered over his sunglasses. “White chicks and ghost shit. I do not get it.”

As we walked, I opened my Beaumont folder. It now contained an article about the reburial of Charley’s great-grandfather near the Confederate section. We followed my map to that area of the park, where I spotted the enormous stone lion I’d seen in the picture at Jake Whitaker’s office. The Southern Cross fluttered crisply above the marble creature, its paws clutching a cannonball, its face contorted in dying anguish.

Rico stopped walking and took off his sunglasses. “Oh no, we are not doing Gone with the Wind.”

“At least it’s not ghost shit.”

“Look at this skin, baby girl, what color is this skin?”

I patted a massive bicep and grinned. “Hot chocolate.”

“Shut up.” He put his sunglasses back on. “You better have a good reason for dragging me to the Great Cracker Burial Ground.”

“Stop being deliberately offensive, you know I hate that. I’m looking for somebody.”

“Clark Gable?”

“No. Somebody who was buried here last year. Or reburied here actually.”

“So this is ghost shit.”

I ignored him. The Oakland Preservation Society representative I’d spoken with that morning had been very helpful—when I mentioned the lion, she knew exactly which grave I was talking about. Even though the last plot had been sold in 1865, families occasionally put one up for sale, and the Oakland staff maintained a list of interested buyers, like Mark Beaumont. She’d demurred when I’d asked how much it had cost.

“Over there,” I said.

Shadrick Turner Floyd’s grave nestled under a dogwood. It wasn’t in the Confederate section proper, but in a private plot next to it. I got out my cell phone and took a picture.

“It’s a pretty spot,” I said. “You can see the lion, the obelisk—”

“The MARTA,” Rico replied.

To prove his point, a train rumbled by. Private Floyd didn’t have as prestigious a plot as the late Maynard Jackson, the city’s first African-American mayor—his grave was sited catty-cornered with a prime view of the Atlanta skyline—but it wasn’t bad.

“They imported him from Charley Beaumont’s hometown in…” I peered closer at the tombstone. “Tennessee, apparently, not far from South Carolina-Georgia border. Found the