Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery

by Barbara Neely

  BLANCHE

  ON THE LAM

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 1992, 2014 Barbara Neely

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book maybe reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 1941298389

  ISBN 13: 9781941298381

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253,

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  Books by Barbara Neely

  Blanche on the Lam

  Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

  Blanche Cleans Up

  Blanche Passes Go

  For my sister Vanessa

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  “Have you anything to say for yourself?” The judge gave Blanche a look that made her raise her handbag to her chest like a shield.

  “Your Honor...I'm sorry...I...”

  “Sorry? It most certainly is sorry! This is the fourth, I repeat, the fourth time you've been before this court on a bad-check charge. Perhaps some time in a jail cell will convince you to earn your money before you spend it, like the rest of us. Thirty days and restitution!”

  “But, Your Honor...” Blanche's legs were suddenly weak. Her hands were freezing. Beads of sweat popped out on her nose. She wanted to tell the judge that a jail cell was cruel and unusual punishment for a person who panicked in slow elevators. She also wanted to ask him where the hell he got off, lying about her like that! This was her second, not her fourth charge. Furthermore, just as she'd done the last time, she would have made good on the checks even if she hadn't been summoned to court. Hadn't she already covered three of the five checks she'd written? And right here in her handbag she had the forty-two-fifty she still owed, plus fifty dollars for the fine—same as the judge had made her pay last time. But last time she'd had a judge with his mind already on the golf course. He'd hardly bothered to look at her. There'd been no talk of jail that time.

  “Your Honor,” she began again.

  The bang of the gavel was like a shot fired in the room. “Next case!”

  “Come along.” The matron's hand was pale as plaster against the deep blackness of Blanche's upper arm. Blanche looked around the courtroom, but no one was interested enough to look back. She was already being replaced before the judge by a stooped, sad-faced white man with cut-up shoes and hands red as raw meat.

  She was taken to an anteroom with metal tables and chairs that looked like every prison movie she'd ever seen. A dark blond, bullet-headed boy in jeans and cowboy boots sat on a long bench against the far wall. Sheriff Stillwell stood beside him, his short, bandy legs bowed beneath the weight of his belly. His right hand was on his pistol, his eyes were boring a hole in the opposite wall. Blanche tried to catch the boy's eye, to see and be seen by someone before they both disappeared into...She clutched her stomach and half-turned to the matron.

  “I gotta use the toilet!”

  The matron gave her an annoyed frown, looked at her watch, then pulled Blanche through another doorway that led onto the back corridor. Diagonally across the hall, between the staircase and the men's room, was a door marked LADIES.

  A dingy skylight threw murky light down onto a cracked marble floor. A mottled basin and a toilet stall were crowded together in a space hardly large enough for the two women. Blanche entered the stall and padded the seat with toilet paper before sitting down to ease her bowels with as little noise as possible.

  “I'll be right out in the hall,” the matron muttered in a disgusted tone.

  Blanche put her elbows on her knees and fumed. Thoughts scurried in and out of her mind like mice in an abandoned kitchen. I shoulda known better, she told herself. She rocked back and forth on the commode. Shoulda known. She wound her arms tightly round her body, comforting herself in the same way she did her children. She closed her eyes and saw the judge accusing her of being lower than snake shit. She opened her eyes, only to see where she was and where she was headed.

  She knew she should be making a mental list of all she would need in jail that Durham County would surely not provide. She should be planning what she wanted her mother to tell the children. She should be convincing herself that she could and would survive the next thirty days. Instead, she raged at the judge for being an unfair dickbrain, and at herself for ignoring all the signs of trouble coming:

  The way her hand had itched and throbbed at the same time as she'd stood in her kitchen reading the court summons; the way the glass she was drinking from just before she left the house for court had suddenly developed a crack while she held it to her lips. She'd ignored both events despite her claim that reading people and signs, and sizing up situations, were as much a part of her work as scrubbing floors and making beds. She threw her head back to keep the tears from falling and wished the most vain hope of all—the chance to rearrange her life so that she would not be in this situation.

  Shoulda stayed in New York, she told herself; at least I made enough to cover my checks. And she could do a lot better there now that dotcom money was adding names to the list of New Yorkers with more money than anyone ought to have. But the day Taifa and Malik came home from school and told her about the man who'd tried to entice them into his van with the promise of a Run-DMC tape was the day Blanche knew they had to leave New York. She'd gathered her children and her belongings and headed for the relative safety of Farleigh, North Carolina, where she and the children had been born.

  And this was what it had gotten her.

  Why the hell hadn't she borrowed the money and paid it directly to the stores and utilities instead of writing those damned checks? Too proud, she remonstrated with herself. Still dreaming. Still hoping to find an employer willing to pay for a full-service domestic instead of the bunch of so-called genteel Southern white women for whom she currently did day work. Most of them seemed to think she ought to be delighted to swab their toilets and trash cans for a pittance. Farleigh was not New York, or even Raleigh or Durham, and certainly not Chapel Hill, where there were plenty of professional and academic folks eager for good help. Farleigh was still a country town, for all its pretensions. The folks who lived here and had money, even the really wealthy ones, thought they were still living in slavery days, when a black woman was grateful for the chance to work indoors. Even at the going rate in Farleigh she'd found no black people in town who could afford her—not that working for black people ensured good treatment, sad to say.

  Too proud. That was always her problem. The first time she'd been summoned to court about her checks she hadn't known what to expect and hadn't asked anyone. She didn't want to admit that she worked six days a week and still didn't make enough money to take care of herself and her children. Her low salary wasn't her fault, but it still made her feel like a fool, as if she'd fallen for some obvious con game.

  “Hurry up in there, gal!” />
  The matron's gruff voice ripped away all pretext that time was standing still. Blanche cast about for something to hang on to, something that would help her get through what lay ahead. Had she been the woman her mother had raised her to be, she would have prayed. Instead, she decided to get a lawyer. Shoulda had a lawyer all along, she chided herself; not to have done so seemed stupid now. After all, she'd intended no crime. If four of her employers hadn't gone out of town without paying her, she'd have had enough money in the bank to cover the checks. She was smoothing down the skirt of her dress and still fighting off the desire to scream, and plead, and wallow in her fear, when an explosion of voices erupted in the hall.

  The sounds of men shouting questions and the shuffling of feet came clearly over the transom. Blanche picked up her handbag and left the stall without flushing the commode. She stood listening as the noise in the corridor grew even louder. She eased the outer door open just a crack.

  The matron was standing to the left of the door, almost in front of the men's room. She was facing down the hall, away from Blanche, toward a group of men with cameras, note pads, and microphones. They were circling someone Blanche couldn't see but who she was sure must be the county commissioner recently charged with accepting bribes.

  She was positive he wouldn't get thirty days. A little bad publicity, and a lot of sympathy from people who might easily be in his position, was about all he'd get. She turned her head and looked at the stairs on the other side of the bathroom—stairs that led down to the outside, according to the EXIT sign above the stairwell.

  Blanche opened the bathroom door just wide enough for her to slip into the hall. She crab-walked to the waiting stairs. The part of her that had been raised to believe in and obey the law was urging her to turn back before it was too late. But turning back was made impossible by the thought of thirty days of walls pressing closer, of living behind a door she couldn't open. She egged herself on with the thought of the commissioner getting off scot-free.

  She ran down the stairs on tiptoe. She flattened as much of herself against the clammy green wall as she could, for a stout woman, and wished she could fade into it. One flight. Two flights. She could still hear reporters upstairs screaming questions in high-pitched voices. She concentrated on the door marked EXIT, ordering it to be unlocked, to not be surrounded by sheriff's deputies on the other side.

  A great sob welled up in her chest at the sight of the dark underground parking lot she found when she pulled open the heavy door. She didn't see anyone, but she knew better than to run. A running black person was still a target of suspicion in this town, even if the runner was a woman. She crouched quite low and, despite her forty years, zigzagged across the parking lot toward the opening, bright with outside light.

  She was in back of the courthouse. She stepped out onto the pavement, straightened her dress, and walked quickly away from the courthouse and the few blocks of downtown stores. She moved with as much of an air of a woman going about serious business as she could muster—eyes straight ahead and a serious set to her mouth. Her ears strained for a siren or the sound of her name being called in a way that meant “Halt!” She fought the urge to look behind her or to look for streets that might take her to her neighborhood. Anybody who watched TV knew it was dumb to try to hide out at home. A young white woman with a small child gave her a curious look. Blanche hurried around the next corner. She knew she'd be less noticeable if she slowed down, but her legs wouldn't let her. Her brain had given them the “Run!” message and they were bent on following that order.

  She had a naturally long stride and generally walked so fast that her friend Ardell refused to walk anywhere with her. Now she whipped around corners and down unfamiliar streets until her heart pounded on the wall of her chest like a prisoner demanding release. The pavement rushed up to slap the bottoms of her feet—hard, jarring slaps made more lethal by her size. Though she didn't consider herself fat, she did admit to having big bones and hips. And breasts and forearms to match, when it came right down to it. Only her legs were on the smallish side. However, they didn't have any trouble carrying her as fast and as far as she wanted to go.

  For the first time in her life, she wished for the kind of gray and rainy day when people seemed to pull inside themselves, unwilling to look out and see the world, see other people. See her. She walked on at top speed until she was so out of breath she was forced to stop. She leaned against a nearby tree. She needed to think, make a plan.

  Around her lay the clipped and tamed lawns of one of the sidewalkless worlds where she went to scrub floors and make beds for women whose major life goals included attempting to supervise her doing their housework, and bragging to their friends about how well they'd trained her. This particular neighborhood was at the high end of the ones in which she currently worked. No buildings could be seen from the road, but the presence of solid old houses with more than one kind of domestic help could be felt in the air. She wished she had a little white child to push in a carriage or a poodle on a leash so she'd look as though she belonged there.

  She walked along the narrowing road until she reached a street sign—Grace Road and Cranberry Way. Where had she seen Cranberry Way before? She took a few more steps before her memory caught up with her. She stopped to root around in her sturdy, all-purpose black handbag. She pulled out a small, dog-eared notebook, wet the tip of her finger, and quickly flipped through it until she found the page with the note she'd made. She'd scribbled the name of the family so that now she couldn't make it out, except that it began with a C and ended with an S. The address was clear—One Cranberry Way, 8:30. The week-long job she'd canceled out of this morning was around here somewhere.

  It was a Ty-Dee Girls job. She didn't like working for domestic agencies, particularly this one. The wages were even lower than what she got on her own, and the people who ran it were nasty as castor oil. But they were a steady source of extra income while she was building up her private clientele. She'd known for weeks that she wasn't going to take the Ty-Dee job. She'd lined up more lucrative work for the week. She'd meant to call the agency days ago, but it had slipped her mind, until this morning. They'd been pissed as hell that she'd canceled at the last minute. They weren't so likely to find a replacement for her with no notice. If she got lucky, this could be the perfect place to hide until she could get safely out of town. If Ty-Dee had already sent someone to the job, Blanche would claim her showing up was some sort of mix-up and just tiptoe away. Now to find the place.

  She hurried down Cranberry Way, hoping she was going in the right direction. A sharp curve in the road turned out to be its end. She was smack up against a high wrought-iron fence with arrowhead spikes along the top.

  Blanche turned and stared down the road she'd just traveled. The enormity of what she'd done settled over her like one of those gray clouds she'd been wishing for earlier. Instead of looking for a hiding place, she wished she could just get out of town. Find the nearest highway and get as far away from Farleigh as she could get, that's what she wanted to do. But she had more than her wants to consider; there was also Mama and the kids.

  Lord! She could see and hear the whole thing—the sheriff banging on Mama's door, Mama huffing and fussing while the sheriff was questioning her about Blanche's whereabouts, opening her closet doors, leaving footprints on her linoleum. Mama would definitely throw a conniption! Would she be able to keep the kids from knowing what was going on? Blanche shook her head to dislodge the picture of a beefy deputy dragging Taifa and Malik away from Mama's outstretched arms. She told herself that her being a fugitive wasn't reason enough for the county to take over the care of a couple of black kids with a grandmother more than willing to keep them. She knew she was just frightening herself, as if her situation weren't scary enough. Still, the picture of her sobbing children wouldn't go away.

  She'd been reluctant to take on the role of parent to her dead sister's two children, even though she'd promised her sister she would do so. It had taken a year a
s an adult runaway in California before she could finally face the task. When she'd returned from California—from what her friend Ardell called “Blanche's first chance"—she'd taken responsibility for the children even though her mother, who'd had them while Blanche was away, was not at all happy about giving them up.

  “First you run off hollerin' about how you don't want these children takin' over your life. Now you come back here and break my heart by draggin' my grandbabies off to New York! Don't no child need to be in New York!” her mother had told Blanche when she came for the children. It was her next words on the subject that now bothered Blanche: “Better not be no next time. I might not let 'em go.” Her mother's voice was so clear in Blanche's head they might have been standing face to face. The “next time” her mother had warned her against was equally present. Blanche rubbed her upper arms and shivered. Somewhere nearby a mourning dove seconded her growing despair.

  TWO

  “There you are!”

  Blanche whirled around. The left half of a woman's face with one large, gray-blue eye was peering out at her from an opening in the fence.

  “At least you could have phoned to say you'd be late! I've been trying to get your agency on the phone for hours. But I knew that if you came at all, you'd come to this gate! I just knew it!” Triumph struggled with peevishness for control of the woman's voice.

  “That agency always sends you people to this gate, even though I've told them repeatedly not to do so.” She raised her arms above her head and tugged at the high gate. The bottom of her apple-green blouse crept out of the waistband of her skirt. A bit of beige silk slip hung from beneath the hem.

  “Well, don't just stand there! We want to leave immediately after lunch.” The woman stood back from the gate and motioned Blanche inside.

  “Where's your bag?” The woman's pale eyes made contact with Blanche's dark ones for half a second. The woman's face was older than her light, breathy voice. Not-so-small wrinkles branched out from her eyes and down her cheeks. Wavy lines creased her forehead, and the skin around her mouth was beginning to pucker. Her sharp-featured face with its wide-set eyes and high, sloping forehead reminded Blanche of the pet ferret her Uncle Willie used to keep for hunting rabbits. Cropped blond hair accentuated the point of her chin and her rather long neck. She was a few inches shorter than Blanche's five foot seven and looked anywhere from thirty-five to fifty. Whatever her age, she was in better shape than Blanche, flat-bellied and wiry. She held herself very straight but relaxed, in the way of women who have been schooled in posture.