He grabbed the will before Emmeline could cough on it again. He held it gingerly, as though it were one of those smallpox blankets the early settlers gave to the Indians. Blanche half expected him to whip out a pair of rubber gloves. He laid the last page on the table beside his briefcase and motioned Blanche and Nate closer. He handed the pen to Blanche and pointed to a line beneath Emmeline's signature. Blanche wished she'd said she couldn't write. But at least it didn't sound as though Mumsfield was being cut out of his money, only having it handled by his cousins. Blanche wrote her name in a round, girlish hand on the line next to Archibald's manicured pink-white finger. It occurred to her that just because Mumsfield's cousins were handling his money was no reason to assume his money was safe. Archibald took the pen from her and handed it to Nate. Nate leaned stiffly over the table and signed his name in shaky script.
“I'd like to stay and chat, Cousin, but I can see that you need your rest.” Archibald stuffed the pen and the will in his briefcase and moved quickly toward the door. Emmeline coughed again, as if to hurry him along. Everett followed him out of the room.
Grace dismissed Nate with a nod and a vague smile, and told Blanche that Everett would lock up. Nate followed Blanche down the back stairs.
“What do you make of all that?” Blanche asked him.
“I sure wisht I wasn't in it.” His eyes looked older than dirt. His shoulders drooped. “You ain't from round here, is you?” He gave Blanche a searching look that took in her hair, and her feet, and all in between. Including, she thought, some parts that don't show.
“Farleigh,” she told him. “But I been living in New York for a while.”
“Figures. You talk like city. Fillin' in for them Toms who works for 'em in town, hunh?”
Blanche nodded. “What about you?”
“I been working for this family since Miz Em was a girl. Come here to work when I was twelve years old. So was Miz Em. We got the same birthday, ya know.” Nate hooked his thumbs in the straps of his overalls. “I worked for her daddy and her daddy's daddy. Outlived both them suckers.” Nate chortled a vicious little laugh and headed for the back door. “I was looking forward to going to Miz Em's funeral, too,” he added. “But now...”
“Why you say that? She ain't dead yet, and neither are you.”
Nate hesitated. “Miz Grace is one of them kinda people always worried about her standin' in the community—that's how she puts it, like she was some kinda church or the government or something. That's how I know it's got to be him that's behind this mess.”
“What mess? You mean the new will?”
Nate went on talking, but he didn't answer Blanche's questions. “I never thought he was much. Course, he thinks plenty of hisself. Hardest work the man does is brushin' back his hair. Unless you call gamblin' and runnin' after women 'work.' He's kinda like a pet Miz Grace bought to show off to her friends. To prove she could get her a man, too, I guess, even though he is a hand-me-down, so to speak.” Nate rubbed his jaw. His whiskers rasping against his hand sounded like shifting sand.
“Maybe I made a mistake,” he said. “Maybe I was wrong 'bout him bein' too lazy to cause any harm 'cept to run through Miz Grace's money quick fast and in a hurry. Or so they say.”
“I still don't understand,” Blanche told him.
Nate opened the back door, then turned to look at her. His eyes called her to attention. “You don't need to understand,” he told her. “I wisht I didn't.” He put on his baseball cap. “You look after yourself, Miz City.” He tipped his cap in her direction and went quickly out the door.
Blanche followed him and called softly to him to come back. Nate waved to her over his shoulder, shook his head from side to side, and kept on going. Blanche could tell from the way he shook his head that it was useless to run after him. He was through talking to her for the night. Tears of disappointment sprang to her eyes. She hadn't realized how tightly she'd latched on to him, the only black person she'd been with since she'd left home for the courthouse. Once she'd gotten a glimpse of who he really was, she wanted to ask him how it was that Mumsfield didn't know about Emmeline's alcoholism, what it was that made Grace so nervous, and why had he changed into a statue in Emmeline's room. But he was gone, and she was standing there being a meal for the mosquitoes. She swatted at one buzzing near her ear.
The night wrapped itself lovingly around her limbs. Some long-locked door creaked open almost wide enough for her to see inside, to remember how it was she knew the night so well and felt so very comfortable in it. With her moment of near-remembrance came a sense of personal worth, of strength, and fearlessness that buoyed her. She was distracted from her memory by a sharp bite on her ankle. But the feeling roused by her almost-recollection was so sweet she couldn't let it go. She turned out the kitchen light and sat down on the back stoop.
The stars were bright and silver-blue. The moon was a child's drawing, lopsided, bright, and full of magic. Blanche stretched out her arms and let her head fall back. She could feel muscles pulling in her forearms and tightening at the back of her neck. She relaxed against the step and stared out into the deeper dark that hung above the garden and in the pinewoods beyond.
Night Girl. She hadn't thought about her private game for years.
Cousin Murphy was responsible for Blanche's becoming Night Girl, when Cousin Murphy found eight-year-old Blanche crying because some kids had teased her about being so black.
“Course they tease you!” Cousin Murphy had told Blanche. She'd leaned over the crouching child as she spoke. Blanche could still smell her Midnight Blue perfume and see her breasts hanging long and lean from her tall, thin frame.
“Them kids is just as jealous of you as they can be! That's why they tease you,” Cousin Murphy had told her. “They jealous 'cause you got the night in you. Some people got night in 'em, some got morning, others, like me and your mama, got dusk. But it's only them that's got night can become invisible. People what got night in 'em can step into the dark and poof—disappear! Go any old where they want. Do anything. Ride them stars up there, like as not. Shoot, girl, no wonder them kids teasing you. I'm a grown woman and I'm jealous, too!”
Cousin Murphy's explanation hadn't stopped kids from calling her Ink Spot and Tar Baby. But Cousin Murphy and Night Girl gave Blanche a sense of herself as special, as wondrous, and as powerful, all because of the part of her so many people despised, a part of her that she'd always known was directly connected to the heart of who she was.
It was then that she'd become Night Girl, slipping out of the house late at night to roam around her neighborhood unseen. She'd sometimes stop beside an overgrown azalea by a rickety front porch and learn from deep, earnest voices of neighborhood deaths and fights, wages gambled away, about-to-be-imprisoned sons and pregnant daughters, before her mother and her talkative friends had gotten the news. This prior knowledge had convinced Blanche's mother that her child had second sight.
Everything I was then, I am today. Blanche examined the idea and discovered all of her Night Girl courage and daring still in the safe in the back of her brain and growing more valuable every day. Without even realizing it, she drew on it when she needed to, like at the courthouse. Her break from there might turn out to have been a crazy thing to do, or it might not. In either case, it was the act of a take-charge kind of woman. A Night Girl kind of woman. Too bad she didn't also have the second sight her mother claimed for her. She could use it to make some sense of what Nate had said. She couldn't dismiss it. A black man in America couldn't live to get that old by being a fool. Tomorrow. She'd tackle him then. She yawned, said goodnight to the night, and went up to bed.
She lay naked on top of the sheets, hoping to attract a bit of the breeze she could hear stirring the pine trees. Despite the coolness of the evening, her high, narrow room was still full of afternoon warmth. She wondered if Taifa and Malik were asleep. She could see their round, plump faces, replicas of their daddy's sloe-eyed Geechee good looks. Did they suspect something was wrong?
Kids were so good at feeling out situations.
She fell into a fitful sleep in which she was chasing a blood-red bus down a long, narrow highway and was in turn being chased by Mumsfield. Trees with prison matron branches reached out for her, but she knew she'd be safe as long as she kept moving.
“What do you think, Blanche? I trust you, Blanche!” Mumsfield shouted from behind. But she couldn't spare the breath to respond.
Up ahead, Malik and Taifa beckoned frantically from the back of the bus. She was carrying Mumsfield's automobile tools under her left arm. Instead of her own hair, big, fat gray sausage curls flopped about on her head.
FOUR
In the morning, Blanche put on underwear still slightly damp from last night's washing. While she sipped her first cup of tea at the kitchen table, she listened for voices, footsteps, or the sound of water running overhead. Nothing. Ordinarily, she'd have flipped on the radio and twiddled the dial until she found something other than hillbilly music and preaching. Radio—especially late-night radio, when she could pick up stations from California and French-speaking stations from Quebec—soothed and energized her. It provided living proof that the world was still out there and, therefore, at least theoretically within her grasp. The most nasal and nagging of her employers' voices could be tuned out if the radio was playing. She'd once been a TV soaps addict. But for there were too many people on it telling her she needed to look and act and buy like them in order to be all right. Radio was willing to go where she went and to let her decide what the people whose voices she heard looked like. But this morning her plans required quiet.
Grace had told her they'd want breakfast at 8:30. The kitchen clock said 6:15. A good time to pay a visit to the front rooms. Blanche regularly used the front rooms in houses where she worked for more than a day. It was something she had to do, it would be bad luck not to. She preferred to wait until her employers were out and were expected to be gone for some time. But, to her knowledge, these people had no plans to go anywhere, and she would be in the house only a few more days. She had to take her chance while she could. Twice she'd been caught taking liberties with her employers' space. Both times she'd been in the bathtub.
The first time she'd been caught by Hazel Spence, a rich Long Island widow for whom she'd worked two days a week for nearly two years. The widow had called Blanche's use of her bathtub, bath salts, inflatable bath pillow, and elegant back brush a breach of her privacy, if not an illegal use of her possessions. She'd fired Blanche on the spot and refused to pay her the wages she'd already earned.
The second time she'd been caught by David Lee Palmer, the brother of her first Farleigh customer. He'd made her pay in a much more painful and private way. She hadn't bothered to report it to the police. Even if they'd believed her and cared about the rape of a black woman by a white man, once it came out that she'd been attacked while naked in her employer's bathtub, she'd never have been employed in anybody's house in town again. But she still had hopes of fixing that motherless piece of shit one day.
Neither incident had stopped her from taking her ease among the items she spent her time tending. On the few occasions that she'd stopped to think about what she was doing, she'd recognized that sitting in their chairs, looking out their windows, using their telephones and stereos were ways of getting some of her sold self back. For while the work beat anything else she'd tried—it at least didn't have the routine of an assembly line or the tyranny of a supervisor out to make promotion—she wouldn't be doing it if she didn't need the money. If she had money, she'd move to the Caribbean and open a guesthouse for hardworking women like herself: reasonably priced comfort, good food, no men or children allowed.
Now she walked slowly down the hall toward the living room, once again listening for sounds or movement from above. Still nothing. If no one had been at home, she might have switched on the stereo. There was a time when she'd have gone to the television and turned on a soap opera. But she'd given up soaps when she'd found herself worrying about whether Meg should marry Peter or Carl on Moments of Our Lives on the very same day that she lost her wallet, got a notice from her landlord saying her building was being condoed out of her price range, and one of her best-paying clients announced she was moving to Europe. She'd decided then that she didn't need to be involved with anything that kept her from dealing with the real world, since it was surely going to deal with her, no matter who Meg married. Nowadays, she was more likely to loll in an easy chair and leaf through whatever books or magazines might be about. Over the years, she'd picked up information on everything from medicine to map-making from her employers' reading material.
She fluffed a few cushions and wiped a speck of dust from the coffee table before choosing her seat. She sat on the sofa. The chair where Grace had sat crying provided a better view, but Blanche didn't go near it. Gloom and tension still hung around that chair. She leaned her head back against the comfortable sofa and put her foot up on the edge of the coffee table. She let her eyes roam over the scene out the window. It was another lovely Carolina morning. The pine trees were blue-green in the morning sun. She could hear three different birds' songs, none of which she could identify. In between the chirping and whistling and twittering was the sound of the pine trees rustling like women switching in silk petticoats. Blanche set her mind to rest there, on the view, thinking of nothing, only seeing and listening, marveling. She was always amazed at how very beautiful the everyday world was down here after the concrete bleakness of most of New York.
Despite her crazy dream, she had slept well and had risen with more optimism than she'd felt since she took off from the courthouse. She had a plan. With a little luck, she was just hours, at the most days, away from getting her tax return. Ardell was to pick up the check, borrow Leo's car, meet Blanche, and take her someplace where she could cash it. She'd ask Ardell to bring the kids to meet her, so they could talk about her leaving and say their goodbyes. After that, she and Ardell would drive to Durham, where Blanche would get the bus north. She saw herself as already gone from this place, from this state, out of the sheriff's reach. It wouldn't take her more than a year to get herself enough steady customers or a long-term position with a decent wage. She was very good at and proud of what she did in a world where that combination was harder to find in many professions. Somehow she would convince her mother to give up the children when she was settled. Just as she would find a way to make the children understand that her leaving them behind was both necessary and temporary. They had surely built enough trust in her by now for them to handle it—which was not to say that any of it was going to be easy on anybody.
At the same time, Blanche caught her breath at the thought of months without kids to tend, of once again taking whatever risks she saw fit with no concern for anything beyond herself, as long as she could send money to her mother. There's nothing wrong with looking forward to having my own life back for a little while, she defended herself. After all, she hadn't chosen to be a mother. She scoffed at the inner voice which argued that she could have refused her sister's request. How did you say no to your dying, widowed sister? When Rosalie had asked her to take the children, the cancer had already spread beyond her breasts. Blanche had agreed, almost in the belief that by doing so she was warding off the inevitability of Rosalie's death. Rosalie's other legacy was the unanswered and unanswerable question of whether Rosalie had meant to punish her by making her the children's guardian.
Blanche had never made a secret of her decision not to have children. Rosalie had always chided Blanche about it, calling her selfish and unwomanly. It didn't bother Blanche. She understood her sister too well. But it bothered Rosalie. Rosalie had never been able to accept that her way of life wasn't the preferred way for everyone she cared about. For over a year after her death, Blanche had hated her dead sister for having proscribed her life. But she knew that Rosalie had loved her children dearly. She would never have left them to someone she didn't believe would really care for them and love them, no matter
what her other motives might have been. And I'm sure as hell hooked now! she laughed to herself and shook her head. She sat for a few more minutes, then rose, adjusted the crotch of her panties, and went to the front door.
She'd heard a car in the drive around five that morning and assumed it was someone delivering the newspaper. Evidence of the soundness of her hearing and assumption lay on the stoop. Her heart skipped twice as she leaned down to pick it up. There would be no picture of her, she was sure of that, only her name. Enough to make her mother and her children both frightened and ashamed, not to mention how the people in this house would react. She turned the newspaper in her hands, stared at the ducks gliding across the pond, and tried to quiet her breathing. The newspaper rustled. She willed her hands to stop shaking, took the paper back to the sofa, and scanned the front page. Nothing. Nothing inside the paper either. She knew her crime was a piddling bit of business compared to murder or robbery. It hadn't even occurred to her that her escape would make the regional radio and TV news. She was glad her mother and children would be spared reading about her in the newspaper. But she'd expected a certain amount of local fuss. She'd outfoxed her so-called betters, tricked those who needed very badly to believe she was too dumb to do so. The sheriff's office wouldn't take kindly to it. So, there was something frightening about this lack of mention in the paper. She searched its pages once again, article by article. Still nothing. She was about to have one last look, when the hair on the back of her neck rose to attention. She changed her position from sitting on the sofa to leaning over it, plumping up the cushions.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Why, good morning, Blanche White!” There was a chuckle in Everett's voice. He drew her name out so that it sounded like a taunt. “You're looking quite chipper this morning. Country air seems to agree with you.”
Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery Page 6