And of course there was her beloved Fred. She missed him terribly. During the days, she could pretend he was still out working in the fields, but the nights and mornings made it painfully obvious he was gone; but she would see him again, all of them, thanks to the Lord who provided a way. The older she got, the sooner it would be.
Evelyn and Beulah stood back to admire the newly adorned tombstones. It was unlikely anyone else would, it being such a small and private cemetery, but Beulah knew her duty. It was right to remember the dead.
On the way back, Beulah and Evelyn were quiet. Cemeteries had a way of doing that. They made you think about your life and how much time you might or might not have left. If there was any regret Beulah could say she had, it was being too reserved in her emotions. When she looked back at the many times she could have said more to Fred, Jo Anne, even to her parents and Ephraim, she wished now she had told them more how she felt, how much she loved them.
Those opportunities were lost, but she had today, this living, breathing moment.
“Evelyn, you are my dearest friend,” Beulah said. “And in case I’ve never told you, I love you like a sister, even though twenty years separate us.”
Evelyn’s eyebrows flew up, and Beulah saw tears in her eyes. “Oh, Beulah, you know you’ve been family to me.” Evelyn reached across and grabbed her hand. “Thank you for telling me that. I needed to hear that today.”
Back at the house, Beulah called upstairs, “Annie, do you want some supper?” She wished she could manage the steps and check on her granddaughter.
In a moment, the door opened and Annie came out. Her eyes were heavy and swollen, her hair messed up.
“I don’t, but I’ll fix you something.”
“No sense in that. I put on another mess of green beans to cook before we went to the cemetery, and they’re almost ready.”
“Oh, Grandma, I forgot you wanted to go. I’m sorry.”
Beulah noticed her voice was low and hoarse as she plodded down the wooden stairs in her sock feet.
“Now, don’t worry about that. You had other things on your mind. These last few hours in the kitchen have done me more good than anything.”
“I fell asleep after Cam came over.” Annie sat in a chair, her shoulders sagging as if she carried a fifty-pound feed sack on her back. Beulah knew she had done more than sleep by the looks of her red eyes, but that could go unsaid.
“Couldn’t patch things up with her?” Beulah asked, her back to Annie while she dished out two bowls of green beans and new potatoes.
“You saw her tear out of here. Jake came over right after that and said they’re going back to Cincinnati,” Annie said, her face resting on her closed fist, elbow on the table.
Beulah carefully carried the beans to the table. Annie jumped up. “I’ll get drinks.”
“Silverware too, please.”
Annie set the two glasses of iced tea on the table and went back for the silverware.
“I don’t feel like I know who I am anymore. I’m acting like a crazy person, but Jake is about to make the biggest mistake of his life. Evelyn knows it, you know it, I know it, but Jake doesn’t know it. And he’s the only one that counts.”
The beans were delicious, salty and seasoned with fatback. There was nothing like fresh green beans. Beulah ate slowly, savoring every bite.
“Are you worked up over Jake’s potential mistake or do you think it might go a little deeper than that?”
Annie looked at her grandmother and her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve made a terrible mess of things. I have no right to make it worse.”
Beulah nodded. “I believe it will all work out in the end.”
“How can you be so confident?” Annie asked her, finally eating her beans.
“Because I’m praying and trusting God to work it out,” Beulah said.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Annie finished cleaning the sink, locked the doors downstairs and went up to her bedroom. She rubbed the back of her neck, trying to work out the knotted muscles. Jake wanted to be her boyfriend in high school. Is that what he was telling her?
She sat looking at herself in the mirror of her dressing table, her face washed and her hair pulled back in a headband. Jake had said, “When you chose Brett Bradshaw.”
Her eyes fell on the silver cross lying in her jewelry box. She reached for it and the cross felt cold in her hands, the silver chain soft and delicate. Annie held it up and let it shimmer in the reflection of her ceiling light.
Jake gave it to her the night of her sixteenth birthday. Her grandmother had made a cake with butter cream icing and pink writing that she squirted out of an aerosol can. It was a family dinner that included Evelyn, Charlie and Jake. Her grandfather gave her a hundred dollar bill, with his chuckle. Her grandmother had looked at her sternly and advised that she use it for clothes and not music. Her grandfather had said, “Now, Beulah, it’s her birthday—and she can spend it however she wants.” His eyes twinkled. Annie hugged him, feeling his whiskers scrape the side of her face and smelling the tobacco from his pipe.
Later, she and Jake had walked to the crossover. It was nearly dark, the April days not as long as the days of summer. When she opened the package from Chaney’s Jewelry store, she held her hair up and let Jake clasp the chain around her neck.
“It’s beautiful. I love it.” Annie reached over and hugged Jake as tightly as she could. “Jake, will we always be best friends, even when we’re older?”
“More than best friends,” he said, smiling at first and then getting a serious look on his face. “Do you want to go to the homecoming dance with me?”
“Sure. Who else would I go with?”
But two weeks later, Brett Bradshaw started hanging around her locker between classes. He was on the football team, and she had thought he was cute since the summer before when she saw him at the pool. Never would he have looked her way, she thought, but making the cheerleading squad had changed everything. It was as if a whole new world was opened up to her with the cool kids. She was invited to their parties and included in their circles before school, at lunch and after school.
When Brett asked her to homecoming, she had to calm her voice before saying yes so she didn’t squeak it out like a rusty hinge. She was still smiling when Jake came by a few minutes later. Jake wouldn’t mind, she told herself. He didn’t even like dances; he’d told her that.
But he had seemed to mind. When she told Jake about Brett, he seemed disappointed in her. She thought it was because he didn’t like Brett very well and he was being protective. Now she knew it was more, and in truth, she had known it even then.
Annie lay in bed, unable to sleep. Like letters unread for years, she kept turning memories over in her mind, each one a new revelation in light of what Jake had said.
Their friendship had changed after she started dating Brett. Never before had she realized when the rift started. She’d never really thought about it.
Jake started hanging around the baseball players and a girl named Emily. He became a standout on the baseball team and earned a scholarship to college. In his free time, he worked on the farm with his dad.
Annie hung around a different group in high school where her social life was filled with late-night field parties after the football games. Bourbon mixed with Coke and hooch flowed freely, and everybody felt young and invincible. Her grandmother only let her spend the night with a couple of girls, screening the parents as one can only do in a small town where everybody knows everybody’s relatives and they knew who watched their kids or not.
But they had their tricks and learned how to sneak out of the house without a soul knowing it. For some like Annie, there was a tree near an upstairs window, a creaky window pushed up earlier in the day, a car waiting on the country road.
Jake and Annie saw each other on breaks during college, caught up on what they were doing and news of mutual friends, but that had been the extent of it. Jake had always been an important connection to her pas
t, but never did she think he could be part of her future. Their lives had long ago taken different roads.
“Who called this morning?” Annie set the risen dough in a bowl in front of Beulah. The phone had rung early while she was still in bed.
“Joe saw that woman out by the creek again. He said she was sitting there staring into the water as if she were half-asleep. He watched her for nigh about half an hour before he had to go check the cows,” Beulah said, turning out the dough on the biscuit board.
“I’m calling Jeb again. How hard can it be to run plates? It should take seconds.”
The call went immediately to voice mail. Annie left a message and then decided to call the sheriff. The sheriff was on vacation and his deputy was reticent to get involved since the state police were already on it.
“They’re not exactly on it,” Annie explained. “Jeb is a friend who agreed to help us, but he’s too busy with another case. We just need somebody to run plates.”
“I’m sorry,” the deputy said. “We’ll have to talk to Jeb first. We’ll contact you as soon as we talk to him.”
Annie hung up the phone. “Good grief,” she said aloud. All roads ended with Jeb Harris and he was down in some hollow in Eastern Kentucky.
Annie took baskets out to the garden and worked row by row picking beans, and even zucchini and squash. The garden was coming in earlier this year, her grandmother had said, partly because she had planted earlier and partly because there had been good hot days and plenty of rain.
Beulah was seated at the kitchen table when she came in, ready to start breaking beans, her coffee cup full beside her.
“That’s a nice mess,” she said. “At least two cannings.”
Annie was amazed at how her grandmother could judge by looking at the pile of raw vegetables. Sure enough, a few hours later, fourteen quarts of beans sat on the counter, the heat emanating from the jars. As they cooled, the lids would start popping, which was music to Annie’s ears. It meant the canning took, but would need another several hours of cooling before she moved them to the cellar.
The phone rang as Annie was drying the canner. She handed the phone to her grandmother before going back to the sink.
Annie took the empty baskets to the back room so they would be handy for the next harvesting. It would be awhile longer on the next round of green beans, but peppers, onions, squash and zucchini would keep her busy. Sweet corn and tomatoes would be ready for picking soon. And now, Annie could be here to see it all come in if she would only make that phone call to Bob Vichy. But somehow, her courage faded when she picked up the phone. There was no way to go back once she placed that call. She had made so many mistakes in her life. She was afraid of making another.
That night, Annie tossed and turned, twisting the bedcovers into knots. By midnight, she gave up fighting the covers and went downstairs for a cup of hot tea. She put on a kettle of water and set a pot of chamomile to steep. She sat with her robe pulled tightly around her, waiting on the tea and anxious for the steaming comfort of the warm brew.
Jake was never far from her thoughts. The few weeks of recaptured friendship had been such an unexpected gift. How could she have known this friend from her childhood could turn into this kind of man …? But she was in a long line of women and men who had learned that lesson the hard way.
It wasn’t meant to be. She had to hope he would forgive her immature actions with Camille, hope they could have some sort of relationship as neighbors, if not friends. She would tell him how wrong she was and that she would do everything in her power to make Camille welcome. God would give her the strength to do it and to even grow to love Camille. Who knew, they might be as close as her grandmother and Evelyn someday. Weren’t all things possible?
Finally Annie felt she might be able to sleep. She washed out her cup and emptied the tea kettle. She was about to turn off the kitchen light when the shrill sound of the wall phone cut through the night’s stillness.
“Hello?”
“Annie? It’s Betty Gibson. The old stone house is on fire! Joe was out with Jake pulling a calf on Evelyn’s farm when they saw flames in the second-floor window. He called the fire department and they’re on their way over there right now.”
“Oh no!” Annie said. “I’ll wake Grandma.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Annie pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt and grabbed her tennis shoes to put on downstairs. She flipped the light on in her grandmother’s bedroom. Her grandmother sat up, her face frightened and alarmed.
“Who was on the phone?” she asked.
“Betty Gibson. The stone house is on fire! Do you want to go with me?” Annie knew the answer, but she asked it anyway.
“Good heavens, where’s my housedress?”
Annie reached for one her grandmother had worn that day and helped her change.
“Be careful, we’ll go slow. There’s nothing we can do anyway,” Annie said.
They heard sirens wail, slowing for the turn on Gibson Creek Road. Annie was afraid that in their excitement, her grandmother would wrench her knee. She told herself to calm down and walk slowly with her to the car.
On the car ride over, Beulah prayed aloud, “Dear God, please keep everyone safe.”
Annie prepared herself to see the house in a smoldering pile of stones, but when they arrived, she could see the flames were contained in the second-floor room.
“It might be saved,” her grandmother said, telling Annie she had prepared herself for the same thing.
A water truck was parked in front of the house with two hoses attached. Men were pulling the hoses off the side of the truck to position them according to the directions of one of the firefighters. Annie’s heart skipped a beat when she saw Jake, in jeans and a T-shirt, his muscles glistening with sweat from the heat. He worked alongside the men holding the hose as water surged in an arc to the fiery hole in the roof. Joe was there too, helping to feed the hose so they could move in any direction needed.
Annie could feel the intensity of the flames, even from the safe distance where they parked. The men were much closer, taking the brunt of the heat. Steam rose from the house as water doused the wood rafters. Annie watched, mesmerized. The roof over the second-floor room was completely gone, giving it an eerie look under the bright spotlights. Was Stella inside?
Betty met them at the car.
“Joe saw it just as it started,” Betty said, her white teeth glowing in the firelight and a bead of sweat on her nose. “He was faced toward the house while Jake was pulling the calf.”
“Tell Beulah what you saw, Joe,” Betty said as Joe joined them.
“We were near the fence between you and Evelyn when I noticed flames licking up inside the upstairs window.”
“And you didn’t see Ms. Hawkins?” her grandmother asked, her voice getting hoarse.
“Her car is gone,” Annie said.
“Looks like they’re about to get in. Then we can see what’s what,” Joe said.
“Joe Gibson, don’t you go in there,” Betty called after him.
“Lord Jesus, please let every living thing be out of that inferno,” Beulah prayed aloud.
“Amen,” said Betty.
A state police car pulled up. Detective Jeb Harris got out. “Everybody all right?” he asked.
“Jeb, we’re all white-eyed!” Betty said.
He addressed Beulah. “When I heard it was your place, I called in to see if anything came up on those plates. One of the boys ran them while I waited. The car is registered to Stella Hawkins, Chicago, Illinois. She’s a missing person.”
“What do you mean?” Annie said. “Did she do something wrong?”
“We don’t know yet. We have a call into the Chicago PD to get more details. First and foremost, we want to make sure she’s not in the house. Let me talk to the chief over here and see how things are coming,” Jeb said, making his way over to an older man in a fire hat and large coat.
The men were making headway with the fire, and
in a few minutes, they had it out. A spotlight shone on the house from the fire truck, lighting the way for the men as they worked. In the place of licking flames up to the heavens, a smoldering billow of smoke drifted upward and the stench of water-soaked burned wood filled the air. The house would survive this night, but not without significant damage.
A generator powered two spotlights that shone on the site and when Annie saw Jake go into the house with two other men, her heart lurched, feeling the same fear Betty expressed. Was it safe? Even though the fire was in the upstairs room, couldn’t timbers fall and hurt someone downstairs? Annie chewed on her lip until she saw Jake follow another man out the door a minute later. Across the span of the yard, their eyes met. He turned to one of the men and said something, then walked toward them. Annie noticed his shirt was soaked through with sweat, soot smeared his forehead and his dark hair curled around his temples.
“Jake, did they find anybody?” Betty spit out the question on all their minds.
Jake took a deep breath. “Nothing yet, but it’s too soon to tell. They’re going to put a guard out here and leave it until morning.”
“We’ll go on back to the house and put on some coffee. Tell the men to come by as soon as they finish,” Beulah said.
“I’m sure they’ll appreciate that,” Jake said. He nodded at Annie and turned back to the house. Her legs felt like butter and she sunk back into the driver’s seat of the car.
Back at the house, Betty put on a kettle for tea and made two pots of coffee. Jake came in with two of the firemen and it took everything Annie had not to go to him. Instead, she filled his coffee cup, black as she knew he liked it, and handed it to him without a word.
The conversation went on in subdued tones with her grandmother sitting at the kitchen table, her leg stretched out on an empty chair.
“Too hot tonight ….”
“Good sign we didn’t find anything so far ….”
It was well into the night, but they were all too wound up to go to bed. Annie missed Evelyn’s soothing words in the group, but she was in Lexington taking care of her sister Dixie, who broke her arm.
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