Across the Way Read online

  Also by Mary Monroe

  The Neighbors Series

  One House Over

  Over the Fence

  Across the Way

  The Lonely Heart, Deadly Heart Series

  Can You Keep a Secret?

  Every Woman’s Dream

  Never Trust a Stranger

  The Devil You Know

  The God Series

  God Don’t Like Ugly

  God Still Don’t Like Ugly

  God Don’t Play

  God Ain’t Blind

  God Ain’t Through Yet

  God Don’t Make No Mistakes

  The Mama Ruby Series

  Mama Ruby

  The Upper Room

  Lost Daughters

  Gonna Lay Down My Burdens

  Red Light Wives

  In Sheep’s Clothing

  Deliver Me From Evil

  She Had It Coming

  The Company We Keep

  Family of Lies

  Bad Blood

  Remembrance

  “Nightmare in Paradise” in Borrow Trouble

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.

  ACROSS THE WAY

  MARY MONROE

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 2 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 3 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 4 - ODELL

  CHAPTER 5 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 6 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 7 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 8 - ODELL

  CHAPTER 9 - JOYCE

  CHAPTER 10 - JOYCE

  CHAPTER 11 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 12 - JOYCE

  CHAPTER 13 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 14 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 15 - ODELL

  CHAPTER 16 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 17 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 18 - ODELL

  CHAPTER 19 - JOYCE

  CHAPTER 20 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 21 - ODELL

  CHAPTER 22 - JOYCE

  CHAPTER 23 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 24 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 25 - ODELL

  CHAPTER 26 - ODELL

  CHAPTER 27 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 28 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 29 - JOYCE

  CHAPTER 30 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 31 - ODELL

  CHAPTER 32 - ODELL

  CHAPTER 33 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 34 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 35 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 36 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 37 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 38 - YVONNE

  CHAPTER 39 - MILTON

  CHAPTER 40 - JOYCE

  CHAPTER 41 - ODELL

  CHAPTER 42 - ODELL

  CHAPTER 43 - JOYCE

  CHAPTER 44 - JOYCE

  CHAPTER 45 - JOYCE

  EPILOGUE - JOYCE

  ACROSS THE WAY

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  DAFINA BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 by Mary Monroe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2019953565

  Dafina and the Dafina logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-1617-0

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: April 2020

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1619-4 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-1619-1 (e-book)

  This book is dedicated to my beloved cousins,

  Alice Curry and Donnie Ruth Franklin.

  Acknowledgments

  It is such an honor to be a member of the Kensington Books family.

  Selena James is an awesome editor and a great friend. Thank you, Selena! Thanks to Steven Zacharius, Adam Zacharius, Karen Auerbach, Vida Engstrand, Lauren Jernigan, Samantha McVeigh, Elizabeth Trout, Robin E. Cook, the wonderful crew in the sales department, and everyone else at Kensington for working so hard for me.

  Thanks to Lauretta Pierce for maintaining my website.

  Thanks to the fabulous book clubs, bookstores, libraries, my readers, and the magazine and radio interviewers for supporting me for so many years.

  To my super literary agent and friend, Andrew Stuart, thank you for representing me with so much vigor.

  Please continue to e-mail me at [email protected] and visit my website at www.Marymonroe.org. You can also communicate with me on Facebook at Facebook.com/MaryMonroe; and Twitter @MaryMonroeBooks.

  Peace and Blessings,

  Mary Monroe

  CHAPTER 1

  MILTON

  November 1939

  WHAT WAS THIS WORLD COMING TO? I DONE HEARD—AND TOLD—a lot of outlandish fibs myself, but this one took the cake.

  Me and Yvonne had a lot of enemies, but I never expected one to stoop low enough to finger us with a made-up story about a crime that could have got us lynched or sent back to prison for life. I still couldn’t believe them peckerwood cops busted up the birthday party that me and Yvonne was having to celebrate Willie Frank’s thirty-fifth birthday two nights ago and arrested us for setting up a white girl to be raped.

  This was the second time I’d been busted on a bum rap. Thirteen years ago, one of my buddies invited me to go to a grill with him to celebrate my twenty-first birthday. Even though me and him had done a slew of robberies and broke into rich folks’ houses together, he hadn’t bothered to let me know that he was going to rob the place that night. The night cook always worked alone and had been robbed before, so he was prepared. As soon as my buddy pulled out his gun, the cook grabbed a gun from under the counter and shot him dead. I didn’t have nothing to do with that crime, but nobody believed me. I spent the next eight years working on one of the most brutal prison chain gangs in the state. Yvonne had had her troubles with the law, too. Before we met, she’d spent a couple of years locked up for causing an old woman to fall and break her hip when she’d tried to detain Yvonne during a shoplifting incident at a candy store.

  We had turned our lives around, got married two years ago, and started a bootlegging business. Prohibition had ended years ago, but a lot of folks still bought alcohol from bootleggers because it was cheaper so we jumped on that bandwagon right away. On top of going into a profitable business, me and Yvonne had even found Jesus. Being on the straight and narrow hadn’t done us much good, though. Because here we was, back in trouble with the law again anyway. I could not believe it. What had I done to be in a pickle for the second time for something I didn’t do? I wondered. God must have been punishing me for all them other crimes I’d got away with. I pushed that thought out of my mind because it was so unpleasant, it gave me a headache.

  Two days in that nasty town jail had been hell. During that time, me and Yvonne had got roughed up something terrible by them punk deputies. Two of them nasty buzzards had even made a sport of Yvonne, raping her right before my eyes.

  If it hadn’t been for Willie Frank, a righteous white dude I’d met in prison, there was no telling what else might have happened to us. He was our best friend and business associate. To make a long story short, since we bought all the liquor we sold our guests from Willie Frank, he got his uncle Lamar to pull some strings to help us get out of jail. That old man owned a lot of land and his wife’s sister’s daughter was married to the district attorney, so he had a lot of pull in Branson, Alabama.

/>   Lamar Perdue and Sheriff Orval Potts was close buddies and because of “lack of evidence” it had been easy for Lamar to get the charge against us dropped. It hadn’t been cheap, though. Lamar had paid Sheriff Potts two hundred dollars, but he wanted us to pay him three hundred back. Me and Yvonne was already struggling just to get from one day to the next. We knew it was going to be hard for us to come up with that kind of money—and Lamar wanted it by the end of this month. That meant we had only about three weeks to get it. Even if I busted into a dozen houses and stole everything I could carry, there was no way I could come up with three hundred dollars in three weeks. Besides, I had stopped breaking into houses a long time ago. I had quit while I was ahead because I did not want to get arrested again. If I went back to prison, I could handle it, but Yvonne was too dainty to do another stint. I knew I’d have to do something real drastic to get the money we owed Willie Frank’s uncle, and I didn’t care what it was.

  A few colored folks had issues with me and Yvonne being so close to Willie Frank because he was the lowest kind of white: a tobacco-chewing, snaggletooth, uneducated hillbilly that made his living running a still. We didn’t care. He was still good people as far as we was concerned. Not only was he a lot of fun; he sold his liquor real cheap to us. But he made the other bootleggers he supplied pay full price. Even with his raggedy teeth, he was still a good-looking guy. He loved the ladies, and they loved him because of his fun-loving attitude, thick blond hair, and blue eyes. And he was a generous soul. He spent a lot of the money he made on colored women. Next to me, he was the second most popular trick that went to Aunt Mattie’s whorehouse.

  * * *

  I felt so much better when Willie Frank drove us home from jail this afternoon. He’d stayed with us for a little while and then he drove over to Cunningham’s Grill, a popular roadhouse on the outskirts of town, to let Mr. Cunningham know we’d be back tomorrow. I worked there as the head cook and Yvonne waited tables. Willie Frank was also going to spread the word among some of our regular guests that we was back in business selling liquor at our house.

  He’d said he’d come back to our house tomorrow, but he returned half a hour later with more unpleasant news. “I hate to tell y’all, but Lyla Bullard and her cousin Emmalou told me they done got too skittish to come back over here. They was at the grill when I got there and told me as soon as I walked in the door.” Me and Willie Frank occupied the living-room couch. Yvonne was slumped in a chair facing us, staring off into space one minute, sighing and fidgeting like a worm on a hook the next minute.

  “I’m sorry to hear that we lost their business. A lot of colored men came to drink with us because of them,” I replied. Lyla and Emmalou was two middle-aged white women who had come to the house on a regular basis. They had been present on the night of the arrest. I was going to miss them. Maybe it was for the best. Some of our colored female guests didn’t like all the attention they got. For all we knew, it could have been one of them black-ass heifers that made the call to Sheriff Potts! If that turned out to be true, when me and Yvonne found out who they was, we was going to chastise them just as hard as we would a man. I gave Willie Frank a weary look and held my breath for a few seconds as I stroked the two-day-old bristle on my chin. I hadn’t shaved or took a bath since Tuesday morning. I couldn’t wait to get in the bathroom and freshen up. But I wasn’t going to leave the room while Willie Frank was on the premises. His company was so important to me, I wanted to spend as much time around him as I could. Especially after all he had done for us this week. “I hope nobody else decides to stop drinking at our house. If you was to cut us off . . .” The thought of losing Willie Frank was so distressing, I couldn’t even finish my sentence.

  He gasped and looked at me like I was crazy. “Hush up! I can’t believe you said that! You ain’t got to worry about me deserting y’all!” he blasted as he wagged his finger in my face.

  “Whew.” I wiped off the beads of sweat that had bubbled up on my forehead. “I’m glad to hear that. But I had to bring it up,” I said with a sheepish grin. “Now that that’s out of the way, let me go on. I’ll tell you one thing, I won’t rest easy again until we chastise the devil that got us in trouble. When we find out who they is, we should break some limbs or give them a acid facial. I just might throw in a few knife wounds, and a death threat to boot.”

  Willie Frank was as anxious to get his hands on the culprit as we was. The look on his face now was so scrunched up in anger, it made me cringe. I hoped me and Yvonne never ended up on his bad side. Losing Willie Frank as a friend was the least of my worries. I couldn’t figure out why such a farfetched thought even entered my mind in the first place. I couldn’t think of nobody who looked out for us the way he done. As far as I was concerned, he was more like family than our real families was.

  “Y’all know I’m ready, willing, and able to help,” Willie Frank said. “We hillbillies believe in mountain justice. I suggest something more severe and permanent, like a shotgun blast to the head.”

  Yvonne gasped and sat up ramrod straight, with her eyes as big as pinecones. “Willie Frank, honest to God, you think we should kill somebody?” she asked.

  He answered right away. “Yup. As long as that person can still breathe, he’d still be a threat. Now if y’all don’t want to take a chance on something else happening, take my advice.”

  Yvonne looked at me with a curious expression on her face. When she raised her eyebrows, I nodded. And all three of us smiled.

  CHAPTER 2

  YVONNE

  I NEVER THOUGHT I’D BE DISCUSSING MURDERING ANOTHER HUMAN being. There was a few I’d locked horns with over the years that I would have loved to bump off, though. Like them three nasty dogs that got me pregnant and left me to fend for myself. But the person who had lied about me and Milton setting up a white girl to get raped had crossed a line. He deserved to die. Whatever Milton wanted to do, I’d go along with it.

  After I thought a little more about Willie Frank’s suggestion, I said in a flat tone, “If we going to kill somebody, I don’t want to do it on no Sunday. That would be sacrilegious. I don’t even cuss on the Sabbath.”

  “Sugar, like Willie Frank said, we got to do something so this bogeyman won’t be a threat no more. And don’t worry. I wouldn’t stoop low enough to kill nobody on the Lord’s day neither. But first let’s wait until we find out who it is before we decide what to do,” Milton replied.

  “Why would it make a difference who he is if we going to kill him?” I wanted to know. “Let’s come up with a plan now.”

  “Well, it could be somebody we can’t get at without no witnesses seeing us. Or they might have a gang and weapons and shit. This is one thing we need to think through real good. I just hope it ain’t one of our friends.” Milton suddenly looked so miserable, and I could understand why. The thought of somebody we was close to betraying us almost made me sick to my stomach.

  “Swallow me a frog! If that’s the case, he ain’t no friend!” Willie Frank hollered with his eyes blazing with hate. “Don’t spend too much time thinking this thing through. Lollygagging could be a big mistake. We don’t want to give that booger enough time to do something fatal. Good God! I’d be devastated if y’all got killed. Ma, Pa, and all the rest of my folks done got so attached to y’all, they’d never get over it neither.”

  Hearing them ominous remarks must have got to Milton. He flinched and looked at me with a dazed and confused expression on his face. I didn’t wait for him to respond to Willie Frank’s outburst. I responded for him. “We won’t waste too much more time. I want to get this over with as soon as possible.”

  When Willie Frank left our house again, me and Milton cuddled up on the couch in our bathrobes. Even though we’d drunk two jars of moonshine apiece since we got home, we was still on edge. I could tell from the way he groaned every time he moved that he was still hurting from head to toe. I was, too, but he’d been beat up more than me and had more bruises. “My body been on hold for two days. I need
to go sit on the commode for a while. After I relieve myself, I’m going to wash my hair,” I muttered as I toddled up.

  “Stay in the bathroom as long as you want, sugar. I’ll just lay here and relax and organize my thoughts.”

  “I need to organize my thoughts, too.” I sighed. “I got so many I don’t know how my head can hold them all.”

  Half a hour later, I walked back into the living room with a towel wrapped around my head. Milton was hanging halfway off the couch. “I feel so much better,” I said. I plopped down next to him and he leaned in to hug me. I flinched and scooted a few inches away.

  “I’m sorry. I know that what them deputies done to you is still fresh on your mind.”

  I held up my hand and wagged a finger in his face. I was ready to put that incident behind me and stop talking about it. “Milton, I done almost forgot what it felt like.” I was as mad as I could be about them deputies raping me, but I wasn’t going to harp on it. I didn’t want Milton to be no more upset than he already was.

  “Oh. Well, the way you just reacted when I touched you—”

  I cut him off right away. “That ain’t the reason I flinched. I done that because I’m scared and I’m going to be scared until we collect them three hundred dollars to give back to Willie Frank’s uncle.” He hugged me again. This time I didn’t flinch. “Milton, I want you to know right now that what happened to me in that jail cell could have been a lot worse. Let’s be glad it wasn’t. So, we don’t never need to conversate about that no more.”

  “Oh?”

  “I just want you to know that that episode won’t have no effect on our lovemaking. Okay now. Let’s talk about something else.” I puffed up my cheeks and blew out some of the stale air I’d been toting around way too long. I’d rinsed out my mouth with salt and hot water a little while ago, but it hadn’t done much good. The inside of my mouth still tasted like I’d been chewing on an old shoe. “If I can get up enough nerve when we go back to the grill tomorrow, I might ask Mr. Cunningham to loan us some money. But that’s only if he’s in a good mood.”