by Ann B. Ross
The boy came back into the front room, his face a picture of despair. I could’ve felt sorry for him if I hadn’t been so put out with that woman for going off and leaving him.
“Come here, Bud,” Deputy Bates said, pulling the boy to him. “Your mother said she was going to Raleigh, remember? She’s learning a trade and then she’ll be back to get you. It makes sense that she’d take her furniture with her, or maybe she’s stored it for when you’ll be back together. Don’t cry, now. This doesn’t mean anything.”
Well, maybe, I thought. That woman ought to be strung up for leaving her child with strangers the way she’d done.
“Since we’re here, I guess we ought to look around,” I said, taking note of the smallness and sparsity of the rooms. No matter how nice Little Lloyd thought it was, his father had certainly not squandered money on his little love nest. I could’ve felt some shame over his stinginess if I hadn’t been busy trying to picture him in it.
The rest of the house was as bare as the front room; not even the kitchen appliances had been left. Deputy Bates looked in all the closets, checked the ceilings for access to an attic, which he didn’t find, and then went out through the breezeway to the garage.
“Y’all stay there,” he called as the boy and I started to follow him. “Go back out to the car, and I’ll be there in a minute.”
I wasn’t interested in an empty garage any more than I was in an empty house, so it suited me to put my hand on Little Lloyd’s back and turn him around. The sooner the child got out of there, the better, it seemed to me.
We sat in the car with the windows rolled down, waiting in the afternoon stillness for Deputy Bates. It was hot and humid, with butterflies flitting among the shrubs by the porch, insects chirping, and Little Lloyd sniveling in the backseat. I handed him a Kleenex from my pocketbook, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say to him. We both had our problems.
“What if my mama don’t ever come back?” he said, trying to choke back the tears.
“She will. I wouldn’t worry about that.” But of course that’s what I was doing.
“But I mean”—he stopped, his throat thick with misery—“I mean, what if something’s happened to her and she can’t come back? I don’t know what I’d do.”
My land, the child thought I’d turn him out cold on the streets. Where did he get such an idea?
“Well, for goodness’ sakes,” I said. “If something’s happened to your mother, which I very much doubt, you’ll stay with me until better arrangements can be made. So you don’t need to worry about that.”
I hoped I’d reassured him on that score, but I wasn’t about to commit myself to any long-term child care, no matter how pitiful the child. I was glad to see Deputy Bates close the front door of the house and walk over to the car. He got in and started it up, his face closed and thoughtful.
“Anything in the garage?” I asked as he backed down the driveway.
“Well, no cars. Just some oil spots and a few odds and ends.” He caught his bottom lip in his teeth, and glanced in the rearview mirror at the child, who was scrunched up in the corner of the backseat. “Miss Julia, I’m going to stop at that grocery store down the road and get us all a Coke. It’s hot as…well,” he said with a quick grin, “pretty hot.”
“Suits me,” I agreed. “I could use a Co-Cola, and I expect Little Lloyd could, too.”
Deputy Bates parked in the shade of a tree in the packed dirt parking area in front of the store. Tin signs, weathered and rust-streaked, advertised Winston cigarettes and Peeler’s milk. A hand-lettered sign on the screen door announced that fresh farm eggs and homegrown tomatoes were available. While we waited for the drinks, I got out of the car and sat on a bench under the tree, hoping for a breeze to cool me off. Lord, it was hot and heavy. I took last Sunday’s bulletin from my pocketbook and fanned myself with it. Little Lloyd stayed in the car, looking with miserable eyes at the front of the store.
Deputy Bates handed him an icy bottle through the window, then came and joined me.
“Miss Julia,” he said, in a tone that made me look closely at the frown on his face, “I’m going to let you take that little boy and drive back home. I’ll wait here for Sheriff Frady and some of the others, then ride back to town with them.”
“What? Why is Earl Frady coming out here?”
“I called him,” he told me, turning his steady gaze on me. “I found something besides oil stains in that garage; maybe nothing, but it looked like blood.”
IT WASN’T ENOUGH to have that worry on my mind all the way back to town. As soon as we pulled into the driveway at home, I knew something was wrong. Lillian was sitting on the back steps with her hands over her face. She sprang up as soon as she saw us.
“What is it now?” I wondered aloud.
She was at the car window before I got the keys out of the ignition, and the sight of her face made me forget about blood on a garage floor.
“Oh, Miss Julia!” she cried as I got out of the car. “You not gonna b’lieve…I didn’t know what to do! I been waitin’ for you to get home. Oh, Law, I ain’t never!”
“What in the world, Lillian?” I put my arm around her shoulders. “What is wrong with you?”
“I just went to the store, like I always do, an’ I locked the doors. You know I always lock the doors. An’ I didn’t even know it till I got the groceries put up, ’cause the kitchen ain’t messed up a bit. But then I went in the front room, an’ I couldn’t b’lieve it!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Somebody been in the house, that’s what I’m talkin’ about! Tore it up, too. Least the front room’s all tore up, I didn’t look no further. I come out on the steps to wait ’cause Unsolved Mysteries say don’t touch nothing when somebody break in yo’ house.”
“My Lord,” I breathed, feeling dizzy with all the implications. I put my hand on the car to steady myself. “Come here, Little Lloyd, and hold my hand. We better go see what the damage is.” He gave me his hand, and I tried not to think how many times he’d rubbed it across his nose. He held his grocery sack in the other. “Come on, Lillian.”
“We ain’t s’posed to touch nothing,” she warned me.
“I’m not going to touch a thing. But I want to see how much of the house they’ve been in, and see if anything’s been stolen. And I need to get to the telephone to call the sheriff.” Except he was at the other end of the county, along with Deputy Bates.
Lillian was right. The house had been ransacked, drawers pulled out of the desk and sideboard, with papers and silver dumped on the floor. The sofa cushions were on the floor, and the chairs tipped over. My needlepoint pillows had been hurled across the room, knocking over a lamp that lay shattered on the floor.
“Oh,” I said, holding to the back of a chair. “My Gone With the Wind lamp! Who did this? Who in the world is responsible for this?”
We went upstairs, my feeling of trepidation confirmed at the sight of the bedrooms. My dresser drawers had been turned out on the floor and on the bed, with underclothes strung everywhere. Clothes from the closet were piled on the floor, and shoe and hatboxes emptied and discarded. Even the bathroom cabinets and the linen closet had been cleared. It looked like someone had just swept his arm along the shelves, knocking everything to the floor. Soap, bath crystals, talcum powders, cologne, towels, washclothes—everything had been flung to the floor and walked on. A full roll of toilet paper was stuffed into the commode, along with the red rubber bag that had to do with my personal hygiene. The lemon scent of Jean Naté was almost strong enough to mask the putrid smell of the semisoft clump of you-know-what on my white Royal Cannon towels.
“My land,” I gasped, holding my hand over my mouth. “This is unbelievable.” I pulled Little Lloyd away from the door. He didn’t need to witness such an affront to sensitive natures.
“That the worst thing I ever seen,” Lillian said. “What kind of person do somethin’ like that? We better call the police.”
�
�I’m going to,” I said, pulling Little Lloyd out of the room. “But let’s check the other bedrooms first.”
They were the same. Little Lloyd’s room was worse than mine, if that was possible. The mattress had been pushed off his bed, where it leaned half on the floor. His clothes were on the floor and his cardboard suitcase had been cut and stomped. We stood there surveying this senseless damage, and I could feel Little Lloyd’s damp hand closing tighter on mine.
“I’m real scared,” he said.
“Don’t be,” I said. “Let’s go to the kitchen, and I’ll call the sheriff. Little Lloyd, don’t you worry. Somebody sick and evil did all this, but they won’t do it again. Don’t you be afraid; I’m going to see to it.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHILE I CALLED the sheriff’s office, Lillian paced the kitchen, wringing her hands in her apron. She cried and apologized for going to the store, taking all the blame on herself. Little Lloyd stood next to me, his eyes big with fright.
“They’re sending somebody,” I said, hanging up the phone and hearing the nervous words pour out of my mouth. “I told them to contact Deputy Bates, too. Now, Lillian, sit down and get yourself together. This was not your fault, and I don’t want to hear another word about it. Looks to me like it was either somebody looking for something in particular, or vandals who just like to tear things up for the sake of it. I didn’t see a thing missing, did you? Television’s still here, and so is my silver. I’ll have to go through the papers in the desk, but I can’t imagine anybody’d want canceled checks, can you? Sit down, Lillian. You’re making me nervous. We’ve got to think about who could’ve done this. Did you see anything missing? How you reckon they got in?”
She finally took a seat at the table and wiped her face with her apron. “I ’spect they climb up the back stairs. Didn’t you see Deputy Bates’s door standing open with the glass broke out?”
“You’re right. I did see it, but I was still thinking of what was in my bathroom to make much sense of anything else.”
It wasn’t long before two sheriff’s deputies arrived to look through the house and begin making a report. Would you believe they wanted to know my age? As if that had anything to do with what’d happened. Sheriff Earl Frady drove up soon after with Deputy Bates, and everybody had to tell their stories all over again. I was asked a dozen times if anything was missing, but the more I went through the house with one or the other of them, the more I was sure that not one thing had been taken. I was close to the end of my patience, what with uniformed officers trooping in and out, poking here and there and asking one question after another, until I saw one leaving with a large plastic bag held out at arm’s length. Deputy Bates asked if I wanted my towels back, but I told him not to bother. I appreciated them taking that calling card out of my bathroom, and I knew Lillian did, too.
By the time they all left, I’d had about as much excitement as I could stand. Lillian called two of her granddaughters to come help her straighten up the mess in the house, and I was grateful for them. Deputy Bates stood in the kitchen with a worried look on his face and a cup of coffee in his hand.
“Little Lloyd,” I said, “go out in the yard and play. You’ve been cooped up in the car or the house all day, and you need to be outside for a while. Here”—I reached into the pantry—“take this bag of Oreos. We may not have much supper tonight.”
He looked up at me through those thick glasses in a way that gave me a start. His eyes were so much like Wesley Lloyd’s sometimes that it was like looking at my husband before I ever met him.
When he left with his cookies, I turned to Deputy Bates. “What in the world’s going on here? First you find blood in that child’s house and now this house’s been broken into. I’m beginning to feel something bad’s going to happen every time I turn around. You don’t reckon whoever did this to my house was somebody you arrested, do you?”
“I doubt it, Miss Julia. I haven’t been here long enough to make anybody that mad at me. But to catch you up on the other, we had the crime-scene unit down at Bud’s house, and preliminary tests confirm that it is blood. Human or not, we won’t know until we hear from the SBI lab. There wasn’t a lot of it, some spattering and a long smear on the wall. And a little pool on the floor, which was still sticky. That means it got there fairly recently, although the humidity in the closed garage may’ve had something to do with that. I’ve got bad news for you, though. If it’s human blood, you’re going to have to tell Sheriff Frady how you came to have Bud with you. We’ll have to track down his mother, using every method we have, to be sure, first of all, that it’s not her blood since she was the last known tenant of the house. And as far as we know, you were the last person to see her around here. Tracing her is going to open a whole can of worms for you.”
“A can of worms is right,” I said. I leaned against the kitchen counter, tired to death of all the complications that Wesley Lloyd had left me. “You know there was somebody with her when she left here. I told you she wasn’t driving the car, so I wasn’t the last one to see her.”
“I know. But we don’t know who that was. We don’t know if she went straight to Raleigh from here or whether she went back to her house. We don’t know if the blood was in the garage before she brought Bud here or if it got there after she left him. We don’t know anything, and won’t, until we find her. I just want you to be prepared. You’re going to have to tell the investigating officers everything that’s happened. And be prepared for the possibility that Bud’s mother knows something about the blood in her garage. Or that it’s hers.”
“Oh my Lord,” I said, holding on to the counter. “You don’t think something’s happened to her?” I was ashamed to admit that my first thought was of being stuck with that child forever, in spite of reassuring the child to the contrary not three hours earlier. “That poor woman,” I said, quickly getting my mind in the proper frame.
“It’s too early to know. But for now I’m going to the hardware store and get some more locks for your doors. And a pane of glass for the broken one upstairs.”
“Go to Prince’s Hardware,” I told him, “and charge it to my account.”
I went into the living room to help Lillian and her two grands, but she told me to keep out of their way. So I went outside to the backyard and sat with Little Lloyd in the glider. I folded my hands in my lap and sighed.
“You want some Oreos, lady?” The child held the package out to me.
“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, taking one. “But call me Mrs. Springer, not lady. That sounds like you don’t know who I am.”
“No’m. I mean, yes’m.” He nibbled a cookie all the way around, then started back at it like a mouse, taking tiny bites until he had only a little nubbin of the center left. Wesley Lloyd had had peculiar eating habits, too.
It made me nervous to watch him, so I said, “Don’t you want to play?”
“No’m, I don’t much feel like it.” He turned his head toward me when he spoke, but still wouldn’t look me in the eye.
I didn’t feel much like talking, so we ate Oreo cookies and listened to the birds in the trees.
Before long, Lillian stuck her head out the back door and called me in. “You got company,” she said. “Miz Conover and Mr. Sam and yo’ preacher, they all here to see ’bout you.”
I sighed and got up, telling Little Lloyd he’d be better off to stay outside. “If you haven’t already learned it,” I said, “news gets around fast in this town. I wouldn’t be surprised if the nine-one-one line wasn’t connected to the Presbyterian Women’s Prayer Chain.”
I was glad that Lillian and her girls had started with the living room, because it was straightened enough to receive company by now. They were all there: Sam, sitting at his ease in a chair, hat on his knee and a concerned look on his face; LuAnne, chirping around in her usual excited state; and Pastor Ledbetter, standing by the front window like he was daring the burglar to try it again.
Pastor Ledbetter and LuAnne started toward me,
talking at once, asking how I was, what was stolen, did I know who’d done it. Sam stood up when I came into the room, but he hung back waiting, I guess, to get a word in edgewise.
“Everybody’s fine,” I assured them. “Have a seat now. I appreciate your concern, but it’s nothing. Just vandals, most likely.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Pastor Ledbetter pronounced. “There’re no morals left anymore. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better, as the Bible tells us. The closer we get to the millennium, the more of this kind of thing we can expect. It starts with the breakdown of the family, Miss Julia, which is why it’s imperative for you to get that child back with his own family. You don’t want to be standing in the way of a united family, and my counsel is to get that boy back with his kin. All this trouble dates from the time you agreed to take him from his mother.”
Sam frowned, opened his mouth, then turned away from the pastor like he had to get himself under control. I took a deep breath, not wanting to admit that I, too, had wondered if the break-in had had anything to do with Little Lloyd. But I just shook my head, realizing it was too much trouble to straighten the preacher out on the matter of me taking a child from his mother. I’d hardly had a choice.
So I just said, “I appreciate your concern, Pastor, but please remember that I wasn’t the one who had a family to break up in the first place.”
“But it’s incumbent on all of us,” he said, “to put into practice family values. Biblical family values.”
I couldn’t understand why he was blaming me for a break-in at my own house and a breakdown of all families everywhere. I’d had enough of it.
“Which biblical family would you be talking about?” I snapped, having in mind all the adultery, fratricide, incest, murder, multiple wives, envy, and downright meanness displayed by any number of families in the Bible.