(4/10) The Julius House

by Charlaine Harris

  “I think maybe you’d better tell me about the Youngbloods, Martin.”

  “I told you, Shelby needed a job . . .”

  I gathered my courage. “No, Martin, tell me really.”

  He was hanging up the dishtowel on a rack mounted beside the sink. He got it exactly straight.

  “I wondered when you were going to ask,” he said finally.

  “I wondered when you were going to tell.”

  He turned to face me and leaned against the counter. I leaned against the one at right angles to him. I crossed my arms across my chest. His sleeves were rolled up and his tie was loosened. He crossed his arms across his chest, too. I wondered what a body-language expert would make of this.

  “Are the Youngbloods my jailers? Are they here to keep an eye on me?” I thought I’d lead off with the most obvious question.

  Martin swallowed. My heart was pounding as if I’d been running.

  “I knew Shelby in Vietnam,” he began. “He helped me get through it.”

  I nodded, just to show I was registering this information.

  “After the war . . . after our part of the war . . . I’d met some intelligence people in Vietnam. I spoke some Spanish already, and so did Shelby. We had some Hispanic guys in our unit and we spoke Spanish with them, got a lot better. It was something to do.”

  Martin’s knuckles were white as he gripped his crossed arms.

  “So, after we left Nam, we left the Army but we signed on with another company that was really the government.”

  “You were asked?”

  “Yes.” His eyes met mine for the first time, the pale brown eyes edged with black lashes and brows that were Martin’s most immediately striking feature. “We were asked. And in our—working with us, was Jimmy Dell Dunn, a swamp boy from Florida who’d grown up next to some exiled Cubans. His Spanish was even better than ours.” Martin half smiled and shook his head at some fleeting memory of a time and place I couldn’t even imagine.

  “What we did was,” he resumed, “sell guns. Really, we were giving them away. But it was supposed to seem like we were an independent company selling them. What can I say, Roe? I thought, at least at the beginning, that I was doing something good for my country. I never made any personal profit. But it’s become harder and harder to know who the good guys are.” He was looking out the window into the night. I wondered if the Youngbloods could look outside the side window of their apartment and down into our kitchen. I could not move to draw the curtain.

  And Martin had his own private view of darkness.

  Guns. Guns were better than drugs. Right? Of course with all Martin’s trips to South America, I had been worried Martin’s pirate side had led him into the dangerous and lucrative drug trade, though Martin had often expressed profound contempt for those who used drugs and those who sold them. Guns were better.

  “And we delivered them, in some very remote places, to right-wing groups. Some of these people were okay, some were crazy. They were all very tough. A few were just—bandits.”

  I pulled my glasses off and rubbed my eyes with my hand. I had a headache. I put them back on and pushed them up on my nose with a finger. I stared past Martin ’s arm. I needed to get some Bon Ami and really scrub that sink.

  “And one day—it was about midmorning, we were up in the Chama Mountains . . . we were making a delivery to one of the better guys. Out of nowhere, we were ambushed by another group who’d heard somehow about the delivery. I got the scar on my shoulder, Shelby got a worse wound in the leg. And Jimmy Dell got his head blown off.”

  I took in my breath quickly. I was married to man who had witnessed this barbarity, this horror, had been part of it. I began to shiver. I wanted this story over.

  “Shelby and I got out of there, just barely. We had to leave Jimmy Dell, and he was our pilot. Shelby knew enough about the copter to get us out, though he was bleeding like a stuck pig. And then it took us a while to heal. We heard the group we were supposed to take the guns to were all dead before we got there. When we came back to the States, Shelby went to see Jimmy Dell’s family in Florida. Jimmy Dell had been the oldest kid by far, and there were five more after him. The youngest one was Angel. She was too young then, Shelby thought, and Mr. Dunn surely thought so, too. So Shelby wandered for a while.”

  And Martin had gone to stay on that isolated farm in Ohio with a man he hated, just to have a familiar place to recover. And while he was there, he hooked back up with Cindy. And they married. And he never told her this. Or not all of it. Ridiculously, I could not stop shivering.

  “After a few years Shelby went back to Florida. Angel had gotten interested in martial arts in high school after something happened to her, and she got Shelby interested, too. They got married, and they began working as a team of bodyguards.”

  Gee, I wondered whom you would work for in southern Florida.

  “But they didn’t want to work for that kind.” My face must have spoken for me. “So later, mostly they worked at the smaller movie studios up and down the East Coast, guarding people who were there temporarily. Some of the people were pretty famous.” Martin attempted a smile. “And they did some stunts in karate movies, too. Their last job was for a woman who told Shelby she owed a lot of money to the wrong people.

  “She didn’t owe it, Roe.” Martin looked directly at me. “She’d stolen it, and they found her. They let the Youngbloods live, but they gave them a beating they’d remember. Angel was in the hospital, still, when Shelby came up here to find me. In their line of work, you can’t get insurance, and they were broke, and they needed to leave the area for a while. I’d been worried about you being out here by yourself when I was out of town, and the apartment being empty . . . you’re shaking.”

  He came over to me in two steps, waited a moment to see if I would hit him if he touched me, then put his arms around me. I felt his heavy muscles encircle me, and I had the stray thought that the workouts I had attributed to a desire to stay fit and look good were actually aimed toward keeping him ready for self-defense. I lay my head against his thick chest and let some of the shaking be absorbed by him.

  “So,” he said to the top of my hair, almost in a whisper, “what’s going to happen now?”

  “I’m going to get some Bon Ami and scrub the sink.”

  Martin held me away from him. He was angry. “I’ll go in the family room and work until you feel like talking.”

  He left the kitchen through the hall door, his shoes making little noises on the hardwood as he crossed the hall.

  I got the Bon Ami and a sponge with a rough scrubbing side, and set to work. I thought of a conversation I’d had with my mother. We’d been talking about love, and she’d said that women who stay with men who damage them have some deep need to be damaged; they can’t possibly love the damager, that can’t be the reason they stay. A woman with a strong sense of self-preservation will leave the bad relationship to save herself; the self-preservation will kill the love, so the individual will leave and be saved from further harm. My mother had cited herself: When my father had begun to be unfaithful, she had left, and she no longer loved him.

  I loved Martin so much it made me catch my breath, sometimes. He had not told me the whole truth. I was going to stay. I had no idea what he was thinking, sitting there in our new room in our new house.

  I rinsed the Bon Ami out of the sink. It was gleaming. It had probably never been so clean in its entire existence.

  I seemed unable to string a coherent chain of thought together. I was relieved beyond measure that it hadn’t been drugs. I would have had to leave. Guns were bad. Could I live with guns? I could live with the guns. And why on earth had Martin fallen in love with me, anyway? It was like a mating between a Martian and a Venusian. I doubled over and put my head on my arms on the counter and began to cry.

  Martin heard and came in. He hated it when I cried. He turned me around and held me, and this time I pressed against him, hard, as though I were trying to crawl inside his sk
in. After a few moments, this had the inevitable effect, even under the emotional circumstances. Martin moved restlessly, and I kept my arms wrapped around him and raised my face to his.

  Chapter Nine

  Martin left for work the next morning still eyeing me warily but apparently relieved that I was quietly working on whatever reaction his revelations had raised.

  I watched him walk to the garage. I had the window open to let in the cool morning air, so I heard him tell Madeleine in no uncertain terms to get off the hood of his Mercedes. Martin was so fond of his car that he would not leave it parked at the airport when he had to catch a plane, but instead invariably took one of the company cars, so the cat was living dangerously. Madeleine sauntered insolently out of the garage as Martin backed out, reversed on the concrete apron, and took off down the gravel. I went out with the bag of cat food and filled her bowl. She rewarded me with a perfunctory purr. I sat on the steps in my bathrobe and watched her eat every bit of kibble.

  I went through the rest of my little morning rituals in the same numb way. I’d been faced with something so bizarre it was just going to take me a little time to assimilate it. I thought of the men some of my class-mates had married: a hardware store owner, an insurance salesman, a farmer, a lawyer. My dating a police officer had been thought very exotic by my friends. Police officers were too close to the wormy side of life, the side we didn’t see because we didn’t turn rocks over.

  For whatever reason.

  From our beautiful triple bedroom windows that looked out over our front yard, and across the road, to rolling fields, I spied Angel Youngblood going out for her morning run. This time she was wearing solid gold. She did her stretches, in itself an impressive sight, and then she began to run. I watched her lope down the driveway and out onto the road, long legs pumping in rhythm, blond ponytail bouncing. Angel was energetic. Soon she would be bored.

  I had an idea.

  I was watching for her when she came back, and when I figured she’d had time to shower and dress, I called her. I’d found their number written on the pad by the telephone on Martin’s desk when I’d gone to make an errand list the day before.

  “Angel,” I said after she answered. “If you wouldn’t mind coming over after you’ve run whatever errands you need to run, I have a project.”

  That morning I grasped the true beauty of the concept of having an employee. Angel and I didn’t know each other, were bound by no ties of friendship or kin or community, but she was bound to help me achieve my goal.

  And since Angel was an employee, she had to help me without protest. She had come over in blue jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers, looking like a healthy farm girl who tossed bales of hay up to the loft with her bare hands. I had braided my hair to keep it out of the way. I had assembled a retractable metal tape measure, a pad and pencil, and a copy of the most comprehensive newspaper article dealing with the Julius family’s disappearance. I’d had that stuck away in a file for years, since I’d thought of doing a presentation on it for the Real Murders Club.

  I intended, of course, to find the Julius family.

  I handed the article to Angel and waited till she read it.

  Police continue their search for the T. C. Julius family, reported missing yesterday morning by Mrs. Julius’s mother, Melba Totino.

  Mrs. Totino called the police after walking across to the family home from her adjacent garage apartment Saturday morning and finding no one at home. After some hours of waiting, and the discovery that the family car and truck were still in the garage, Mrs. Totino reported the disappearance.

  Missing are T. C. Julius, a retired army sergeant who had hoped to open a business locally; his wife, Hope; and their daughter Charity, 15. Julius is described as 5-11, 185 pounds, 46, with graying brown hair and blue eyes. Hope Julius has dark brown hair, blue eyes, is 5-4 and 100 pounds. She is 42 years old, and is suffering from cancer. Charity Julius, who had just begun attending the Lawrenceton High School, has blue eyes and shoulder-length brown hair. She is approximately 5-4 and 120 pounds.

  The Juliuses had moved to Lawrenceton four months ago to be close to Mr. Julius’s only surviving relative, his aunt, Essie Nyland. Mrs. Nyland is described by friends as being distraught at the disappearance. “She’d been so happy at T.C. moving here, since she’s in poor health,” said one neighbor, Mrs. Lyndower Dawson. “I’m afraid this will finish her.”

  The day before the disappearance appeared to be a normal one, Mrs. Totino told local authorities. She reported spending most of the day in her own apartment and joining the family for meals, as usual. She said Harley Dimmoch, a friend of Charity Julius’s from their previous hometown of Columbia, S.C., visited the family. He left before dark, having spent the day helping Mr. Julius around the house.

  In the late afternoon, local contractor Parnell Engle arrived to pour the concrete for a new patio T. C. Julius had planned at the rear of the house. He saw and spoke to Hope and Charity Julius, who both seemed normal at that time.

  Detective Jack Burns describes his department as “pursuing all leads with the utmost vigor.”

  “It doesn’t look as though they left voluntarily, since the family vehicles are still in the garage,” he commented. “On the other hand, there are no signs of violence and all their possessions are still here.”

  He urged any resident who has knowledge of the Julius family to call the police station immediately.

  There were pictures with the article: a shot of the house and a studio portrait of the family. T. C. Julius was a sturdy man with an aggressive smile and a square face. His wife, Hope, looked thin, frail, and ill, shrunken to the same size and frame as their teenage daughter. Charity Julius had shoulder-length hair that turned under neatly and an oval face like her mother’s. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but she was attractive, and she held herself like a girl who’s used to being a force to reckon with.

  "That’s this house,” Angel commented, studying the picture. She checked the date at the top of the article. "Over six years ago.”

  "Where do you think they are?” I asked.

  “I think they’re dead,” she answered without hesitation. “He just moved here. He was going to open a new business. No mention of trouble in the marriage. No mention of the daughter getting into trouble with the law. He’d just built the apartment for the mother-in-law, so he must have been able to tolerate her. No apparent reason for him to do a flit, especially taking the wife and daughter with him.”

  “I think they’re still here. The car was still here.”

  “But the killer could have taken them away in his or her own car,” Angel objected reasonably. “What if the Dimmoch boy took them away and dumped them on the way home?”

  “Then why haven’t the bodies turned up?”

  “Not found yet. They haven’t found Hoffa, have they?”

  I would not be daunted. “I just think with the car here, with the bodies not having been found elsewhere, that the chances are good they’re here somewhere. ”

  “So, what do you want us to do?”

  “I want us to measure every wall and floor and anything else we can think of.”

  “You don’t think the police did all that?”

  “I don’t know what they did, and I’m not sure I can find out. But I’ll try. This is just step one.”

  “Step one. Huh.” She thought about it for a second and shrugged. “Where do we start?”

  “The apartment, I’m afraid.”

  “But the mother-in-law, Totino, says she was in the apartment all day. Or at least most of the day,” Angel amended, checking the story again.

  “So we start with the least likely and eliminate that,” I said.

  Angel looked at me consideringly. “Okay,” she said, and we gathered our paraphernalia and started to work.

  We were halted after an hour and a half by the arrival of Susu Hunter, who had been my friend my whole life. She hollered from the front porch.

  “Roe! I know you’re here somewhe
re!”

  Angel and I extracted ourselves from the toolshed at the back of the garage, dusty and warm and fairly covered with cobwebs. The toolshed was an area I had overlooked during my house renovation. You could tell Mr. Julius had intended to use it often: There was pegboard lining the walls with hooks still protruding, and a workbench with a powerful fluorescent light overhead had been added. He had also altered the doors, apparently: They were extra-wide doors that swung back completely. Now it held some boxes of tools Martin had apparently not opened since he had been transferred to Chicago and lived in an apartment instead of a house. The boxes were keeping company with a lawnmower whose pedigree I could not figure out; perhaps it had been Jane Engle’s. Assorted rakes, hoes, shovels, a sledgehammer, and an ax filled out our tool repertoire. Everything was grimy.

  So, as I say, when Angel and I emerged, we weren’t at our best.

  “Look at you, Roe!” Susu said in some amazement. “What on earth have you been doing?”

  “Rearranging the garage,” I said, not untruthfully. We had done a certain amount of straightening since we were in there already. “Susu, this is Angel Youngblood, a new arrival to Lawrenceton.”

  Susu said warmly, “We’re so glad to have you here! I hope you like our little town. And if you don’t have a church home yet, we’d just love to have you at Calgary Baptist.”

  I wished I had a camera tucked in my pocket. Angel ’s face was a picture. But underneath the gritty life she’d led in the past few years, Angel Dunn Youngblood was a true daughter of the South. She rallied.

  “Thank you. We like it here very much so far. And thanks so much for inviting us to your church, but right now Shelby and I are very interested in Buddhism. ”

  I turned to Susu in anticipatory pleasure.

  “How fascinating!” she exclaimed, without missing a beat. “If you ever have a free Wednesday noon, first Wednesday in the month, we’d love to have you come speak at the Welcome to Town Luncheon.”