“She must’ve brought the child home with her. They’re not at the house.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nobody was home when I got there after work.”
She waited for him to close her door and walk around the hood. He was moving quickly and jumped into the driver’s seat like a boy. “I hate for Madeline to be in that neighborhood, it just smells so awful,” she said, waving a perfumed hand before her nose.
He put the car in gear and drove up the hill, turning down Ditch Street and driving past a row of narrow, tin-roofed houses, their windows yellow with kerosene light, until he stopped in front of Vessy’s. The house was dark, but he still got out and knocked.
He sped a little as they rolled on toward home. Willa put a gloved hand on his arm. “What is it?”
He motioned with his chin. “No lights on at home, either.”
They went in and searched for a note, a clue. Willa went to a drawer in the walnut breakfront and retrieved her bottle of Canadian whiskey, pouring herself a long swallow into a cut-glass tumbler. A tremor ran through her hand as she drank.
Acy came back from the old carriage house and sat down, taking her drink and downing it. “They’re not here.”
“Maybe Madeline became ill and she took her to the doctor.”
He let out a sigh. “That’s got to be it.”
But after an apologetic phone call, he came back into the dining room and said the doctor hadn’t seen them. By this time it was nine o’clock. He went to the neighbors on either side. Mrs. Spurlen hadn’t seen Vessy or Madeline all day. Mr. Scott, who owned several farms but had retired to town, brought his great gray eyebrows together and asked if there was any trouble.
“No, nothing at all,” Acy told him, backing off the old man’s broad stone porch. “We’ve just got our schedules mixed up, and we don’t know where Vessy brought our little girl tonight.”
The old man checked his outsized pocket watch. “It’s late, but if you want I’ll go and check somewheres. You ask the doctor?”
“Yes. It’s all right. I’m sure she’ll turn up shortly.”
“Oh, Acy?”
“Yes?”
“Are you going to have your back fence painted?”
“What? Oh, sure.” He was walking backwards toward the street.
“I know it’s just the alley, but we have to keep it looking good, what with the automobiles using it as a shortcut and raising the dust. There were even horses early this morning.”
“I’ll have a man get on it next week.”
“Thanks.” Mr. Scott closed his door and turned off the porch light.
When he got home, Willa was crying, and he sat next to her on the divan, attempting to calm her. He made them both cups of tea, which they drank at table, saying nothing. Waiting. For the first time he missed the girl’s face, the bright newness of it, even her pert refusal to grant him much in the way of affection. The child-noise she’d made was a beating heart in his house. For a brief second he wondered how the girl’s parents had felt, but he killed that thought as quickly as he’d slap a mosquito.
At ten o’clock, he had an idea and found the new battery-powered flashlight and walked down into the backyard. At the gate he shined the light in the alley and saw the apple-shaped leavings of a horse. Perhaps two horses. He walked next door and knocked on Mr. Scott’s door until the old man came downstairs and appeared in his pajamas, blinking through the partially opened door. “What is it?”
“Sorry to get you out of bed, Jess, but you mentioned horses were in the alley?”
“Horses? Where?” He looked out over the lawn into the blackness.
“This morning. You told me.”
“Oh. Yes. Two of them.”
“On a wagon? Was it the lumber company?”
Mr. Scott paused a moment. “No, a man was leading them. I was on the way to my garage and I saw him. I started to call for him not to let the animals dawdle and smell up the neighborhood.”
“Just him?”
“That’s all I saw. Has your little girl come home yet?”
Acy liked for things to be orderly, liked for them not only to fall into place, but also to stay there, and now someone had broken the order in his life. “We’re doing what we can. This man, can you describe him?”
“I don’t remember. I just saw a man.” Mr. Scott put two fingers on his chin. “He was big. Wore a pretty big hat, and not a bad one. Probably a Stetson. Certainly not trash.”
“Anything else?”
“I just glimpsed him. He was just walking the horses, holding the reins.”
“What time?”
“I beg your pardon?” Mr. Scott put one bare foot out onto the porch floor.
“What time of day was all this?”
“Oh. It was early. Maybe eight or so.”
“Thank you, Jess.”
“Do you need for me to do anything?”
But Acy had already gone out to the street and was feeling for the gate in the moonless dark. A moment later, Willa heard him come up the steps and let him in.
“Does Vessy have any friends who come by on horses?”
“I don’t know. She’s so cross I don’t know if she’s made any friends at all since she’s been living here.”
“Someone was in the alley with saddle horses right after we left the house.”
“Do you think she planned an outing and something went wrong?” Willa stood up and clenched her fist, but it occurred to her that she didn’t know who she was angry with and sat back down. “Should we call the sheriff to look for them?”
“Does Vessy have any man friends?”
“How could she? Have you smelled her? Just the essence of pine oil and kitchen smoke.”
Acy looked at her, trying to smile, but failing. “I’ll call the sheriff. But you know, we’ll have to be careful what we tell him.”
Her eyes grew wide, as if she’d just remembered where the child had come from. “Could her parents have-”
“Her parents wouldn’t make off with her like that. They’d come straight up the hill.”
“Oh God, Acy. Do you think someone found out? And where’s Vessy?” She stood up quickly and put a hand against a daffodil in the wallpaper.
“It doesn’t make sense. But if we don’t call the sheriff tonight, he’ll find it odd.”
***
THE SHERIFF ARRIVED at their house at ten-forty-five. He was middle-aged, a politician of sorts, ambitiously dressed in a suit. Acy held a thirteen-thousand-dollar mortgage against his new house, so he took off his fedora, came in politely, and listened politely. Then he told them that Vessy probably took the girl off and would have a good explanation come morning. Just to be sure, he’d drop by the train station and the wharf boat and ask if anyone had seen something they all should know about.
Acy started to tell him about the horses, but something-perhaps his most fearful suspicion-made him hold back. “In the morning, then.”
***
HE LAY AWAKE all night, thinking about the girl, while his wife roamed the house from bed to bed, finally settling on the divan downstairs. Before the sheriff drove up in the morning, Acy had already told Willa what he thought. “The Skadlocks have taken her back. That’s the only thing I can figure.”
They were seated at the kitchen table drinking tap water. Willa looked at him, incredulous. “Why? We paid them what they asked, and it was a lot of money.”
They both were quiet for a long time before the sheriff came, hat in hand. He stood in the dining room, studying the china cabinet, and said he’d searched Vessy’s cabin and found nothing out of the ordinary. Her few clothes seemed to be there and not a thing had been moved out that he could see, but then, the furniture came with the place, even the cheap enamel pots and the rusty knives and forks. She owned almost nothing.
“When are you going to start looking for my child?” Willa said, glancing at her husband.
The sheriff explained what he could do and left as qu
ickly as he could.
Acy stared through the front window as his Ford chattered away down the hill. “I can’t even leave to look for her,” he said. “Not right away. I couldn’t explain my absence.”
“If Skadlock does have her, you can’t lead the sheriff to him.”
He continued watching the lawman’s departure, as though envious of his motion and freedom. “But where’s Vessy? That’s the part I don’t understand.”
“Maybe he bought her off and she left for the mountains.”
He looked long at the bare dining-room table, the empty chairs. “I don’t have any idea.”
“Are you going in to work?” She was twisting a handkerchief in her hands.
“I don’t think it would look right.” His stomach rumbled and he glanced at the kitchen door. Looking down, he saw that his shirt was wrinkled, but there was no one to iron it. Most days he felt his life was on schedule like a crack passenger train, but not today. Now all he could do was wonder where his little girl might be.
Chapter Twenty-six
GRAYSONER WAS ON a branch line, the track so buckled that Sam fought off seasickness in the rocking coach. He checked into a hotel near the river, washed the cinders off his neck, and walked back down to the desk, where he found that the Wellers hadn’t come in yet. About five o’clock that afternoon he heard the Ambassador’s whistle upriver and walked over to the wharf, striding along a line of spindly Ford trucks and mule-drawn coal wagons awaiting the boat’s arrival. He was already red-faced, not from the heat of the day but from his shame.
The boat came in bearing the soot of her last season, and a coal gang came off and set planks from the fuel galley to the wharf. After a minute Elsie and August appeared on the main deck and crossed onto the dock as soon as the main stage had been set down. Neither would look at him as they approached; instead, they looked beyond him, studying the town they now had to go against. She was thinner, her face without color. August had grown taller in the intervening months and was as thick as a man. When they stood next to him, August dropped his suitcase and wheeled. Sam felt the percussion of an open-handed slap that nearly knocked him over. His mother grabbed the boy’s arm and stepped in front, pushing him back.
“I’m not going to hit him again,” August said. “But I wanted him to know what I think of him.”
Sam staggered in a circle and blinked at the fire dancing in the left side of his face. “I thought I was doing the right thing when I did it,” he said, holding a hand to his cheek.
Elsie dropped her arms and looked at him. “You decided we weren’t good enough for our own little girl.” Her voice was without anger, yet without the least of kindness. “I know what you did and why you did it, and it makes me feel like trash.” Her accusing eyes drilled into him. “Do you think people down on their luck don’t deserve their own children, Sam?”
He stepped back and looked down at the tarred wharf. “I wrote you that I was ashamed.”
She bent down to her suitcase and August did the same. “You wrote a letter.”
The way she said this sounded as if she had practiced it for days, and the color rose in his face again.
August switched hands on his suitcase. “You can tell people you’re sorry all you want. But what’s that compared to what you did, what you’re sorry about.”
The hotel sign was visible up the hill, and the Wellers started toward it, Sam following and anxious to get the whole day over with. It could only get worse, he thought, considering what they had to do next.
***
HE TALKED to the middle-aged hotel clerk and discovered that Graysoner, though a small place, was the county seat. He got the location of the sheriff’s office, and at eleven o’clock the three of them walked into the courthouse through a rattling twelve-foot-high door made of carved and varnished hardwood. Up two flights of curving stairs, they found a deputy who told them the sheriff was out on an investigation and would probably be back at one o’clock. Sam stopped Elsie when she began to tell why they were in town.
“We’ll come back then,” he said, taking her arm.
Once on the street, she asked him why he’d cut her off.
“You don’t play much poker, do you?” He guided them into a café across the street where they sat in a booth and ate breakfast. At the end of the meal Elsie looked across the table at him and said, “Do you think we’ll need to get a lawyer involved in this? I’d hate to have to pay one.”
“I don’t know. We’re in another man’s henhouse here. Nobody knows who we are.”
“I’ll have to trust you to handle the talking.”
He shook his head. “I’ll do my best.”
August made a disapproving noise in his throat.
“Son, you’ve bulked up some since I’ve seen you. Been lifting weights?”
“I found a job loading wagons with sacks of stove coal.”
“You can’t get away from that soot, can you?”
The boy said nothing to this.
***
THE SHERIFF was late, so they waited in his echoing outer office in hard chairs until they heard a door open somewhere inside, then the deputy motioned them to come forward.
The sheriff, his hair neatly combed and parted in the middle, gave them a brief introductory smile, showing his straight rank of teeth. His scan of evaluation raised the hair on Sam’s neck. “What can I do for you people?”
“It’s a long story, but this woman and her son are my friends, and this lady’s baby daughter was stolen from her in New Orleans.”
The sheriff leaned back in his spring-loaded chair. “A stolen baby girl,” he said airily. “So why aren’t you looking in New Orleans?”
“I’ve seen her here in town.”
The sheriff did not seem surprised. “You have? And when was that?”
Sam looked at August and swallowed, then explained how long it had been.
“Why’d you wait so long to see about this?”
“That’s neither here nor there,” Sam said. “We’ve come to claim her and bring her back into her family. This is Elsie Weller, her mother.”
“That right?” The sheriff’s question carried a note of disbelief.
Elsie drew a photograph from her purse and placed it on the desk. “Yes, I’m her mother and this is Lily. She was three when she was abducted, and now she’s four.”
The sheriff looked at the photograph without picking it up. He pursed his lips. “Where exactly did you see her?”
“In the yard of a man named Acy White. I talked to some maid about her in the alley.”
“And why didn’t you come to me then?”
He glanced at a bookcase filled with leatherbound volumes. “She looked well off. Mr. Weller had just died, so I made a mistake and kept quiet about it until recently. When I realized I was wrong.”
“About what? The girl’s identity?”
“About not telling Mrs. Weller right away.”
The sheriff came forward decisively in his chair. “This sounds a little fishy to me, all of it.” He turned to Elsie. “You say your husband’s dead?”
“Yes. He died from-”
“I’m not interested in his health problems. I’m just trying to figure out who you are. How do you support yourself?”
“My son and I work on the Ambassador.”
“That the excursion boat? What, might I ask, do you do?”
“My son plays the saxophone, and I do some singing. Mostly I waitress.”
“So you’re musicians,” the sheriff said, as if this explained something. “You live on the boat, do you?”
Elsie sat up straight. “We keep rooms in Cincinnati.”
The conversation went back and forth like this for fifteen minutes, until the sheriff stood up and pulled down his vest. “I’ve known Acy White for a long, long time, and I know he’s a fine man who would never do anything unethical.”
“We know the girl’s here,” Sam told him. “I saw her. I met the people he hired to steal her away
.”
The sheriff waved him off. “Two things you have to know. Even if this child was stolen, which I’m rock-hard sure she wasn’t, it happened out of my jurisdiction and I can’t have anything to do with it.”
“Can’t, or won’t?” Elsie asked.
“Have whichever word you please,” he said. “Do you want to hear the second thing?”
She nodded, casting Sam a sour look.
“The Whites reported to me a few days ago that their daughter, Madeline, has disappeared. Along with their cook, Vessy.”
There was silence in the office, and then, after a few moments, a burst of explanations, accusations, and denials, all leading to an outright argument.
***
THE THREE OF THEM stood on the sidewalk, confused and angry, and Sam felt the anger turning against him. Looking up and down the long, clean street, he could smell the café but nothing like the stench of New Orleans. The storefronts were spotless, bright awnings fending off the heat, windows filled with merchandise. “I feel like jumping in the damn river,” he said.
August spat on the curbstone. “Where do they live?”
Sam looked up the hill, wondering where the boy he’d known last year had gone. “Way up there, at the top.”
Elsie began walking. “Let’s go, then.”
***
THEY WENT to the front gate and opened it. Elsie rang the bell. The house loomed, quietly. Then she knocked. After a long while, August stepped around her and pounded on the door with his fist, then tried the knob, but the door was locked, and as he rattled it they all sensed the heaviness of the wood, the wide bolts thrown into the frame.
Elsie stepped back into the yard and looked up at the broad windows cinched with squares of colored glass. “Are you in there?” she yelled. “We need to see you about our little girl.”
To her right a neighbor, an old woman wearing an alarmed expression, came out and stood on the steps, but Elsie yelled again, “We know you took her, and we want to get her back.”
Sam stepped out next to her and checked all the windows himself, but they showed no faces, just recently cleaned glass, blank and facing west. One broad pane captured a cloud like a picture frame, but besides this, there was no movement. After a while they walked around back and tried there, knocking and yelling until a city policeman drove up and told them to please leave, that they were disturbing the neighbors. “They’ve left home,” he told them.
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