Miss Julia Rocks the Cradle

by Ann B. Ross

  I turned so he couldn’t look too closely and started walking toward the back door. He followed, holding my arm. “A friend of hers,” I said. “Just visiting, and this will teach me not to take a walk in a strange town. I’ll be leaving in the morning, well, this morning now that it’s already here.” I inserted the key, turned it, and opened the door. “See? They gave me a key because they know I’m prone to long walks. You can run along now. Thank you for your help.” I closed the door in his face and hurried through the kitchen and up the stairs to the safety of the bedroom.

  As I closed the door and turned the lock, I flipped on the chandelier and nearly screamed at the apparition in front of me.

  “Oh, Lord,” I gasped as I recognized myself in Hazel Marie’s full-length mirror. Twigs and hemlock needles and leaves sprouted from my head to my toes; my coat was smeared with mud, my face scratched, tights torn, shoes clumped with mud, and my hair was straggling all over my head and in my face. I looked like a wild woman and I was shivering like one too. No wonder the deputy wanted to take me to the emergency room.

  And it was Sunday morning. Sam would be expecting me in church.

  As tired as I was, the excitement of seeing him, sitting with him and holding his hand, gave me a spurt of energy. And assuring myself that no ghost would dare darken the door of the First Presbyterian Church, I began to get out of my torn and muddied clothes, figuring they were all destined for the trash. Normally I preferred a bath to a shower, but that morning I took both: a shower first to wash my hair and a bath to soak out the soreness that was sure to come.

  Dressing carefully in my most elegant outfit—a lavender wool skirt and a matching jacket with braid on the placket and the cuffs—I prepared to meet my returning husband, all the while hearing the sounds of early risers downstairs. Babies were crying, the refrigerator door was opening and closing, water was running, and Mr. Pickens’s heavy footsteps were tromping back and forth between the kitchen and bedroom.

  Deliberately putting aside all thoughts of the strange occurrences of the previous night, I concentrated on making the most of the next hour or so with Sam. Taking a last look in the mirror, I almost gave up. I’d had to wash my hair—a part of my toilette that I’d given over to Velma years before—and I couldn’t do a thing with it. There it lay on my head, flat and unstyled. I needed Hazel Marie and her curling iron.

  So down to the kitchen I went, yawning and creaking as my aching body protested each step. If you want to know the truth, I could hardly straighten up, and soaking in a tub hadn’t helped.

  “Why, Miss Julia,” Etta Mae said, working away at something by the counter. “You’re up early.” She was in her usual jeans and sweater, which meant that she didn’t have going to church in mind.

  “I couldn’t sleep for some reason,” I said and opened the freezer and looked in. “Lillian left some blueberry muffins. How does that sound for breakfast?”

  “Sounds good to me. Soon as I plug a couple of little mouths, I’ll fry up some bacon.” She started out of the kitchen, turned around, and said, “You look real nice this morning.”

  “Thank you, but my hair’s a mess,” I said, touching it selfconsciously. “I hope Hazel Marie has time to work on it for me.”

  She did: after the babies were changed and fed, Mr. Pickens was out of the bathroom, Lloyd had been sent back upstairs to dress for church, and we’d all eaten, she sat me down in front of a dresser and heated the curling iron.

  “What did you do to this?” Hazel Marie asked as she ran a comb through my lank hair. “It looked so good yesterday.”

  “Slept wrong on it, I guess. It was standing up on one side, so I washed it.”

  “Well, don’t do it again.” Hazel Marie picked up the curling iron and went on. “I don’t want to burn you, so stay real still.”

  That was hard to do, for I was so full of what I’d discovered during the night that it was all I could do to stay quiet, much less stay still. I had a great urge to tell her about Helen and Thurlow, but restrained myself because I couldn’t figure out how to tell it without telling how I’d found it out. And I wanted to tell Sam first. Not that he’d be awed by such an unlikely coupling—as Hazel Marie would be—but because I wanted him to understand that I was not the woman involved with either Richard or Thurlow, thereby bringing our estrangement to a conclusive end.

  Busily curling and back combing, Hazel Marie said, “Your hair’s gotten so long, I think I’ll do it up in a chignon.”

  “Whatever works,” I murmured, half asleep from being up all night.

  “There,” Hazel Marie said, waking me with a hand on my shoulder. “How do you like it?”

  I blinked and gazed bleary eyed but pleased in the mirror. “Why, Hazel Marie, it’s beautiful.”

  “Whoo,” Etta Mae said, coming into the room. “That bun on the back of your head is what I call glamorous. You’re really stylin’ now, Miss Julia.”

  Taking a hand mirror, I looked at my hair from all sides, becoming more and more pleased with what I saw. I was now as far from the apparition I’d seen in another mirror as I could be. You’d think I was an entirely different woman, which was just fine with me. I didn’t want anybody putting two and two together and coming up with Mrs. Sam Murdoch.

  Just as Lloyd and I were leaving for the service, having bypassed Sunday school on the grounds of needing my hair fixed, Lillian called. “Latisha ’bout to have a fit to come see the babies. So, ’less somebody already cooked something, I’ll fix us all some dinner.”

  “Nobody’s cooked a thing, Lillian,” I said, laughing at the thought. “I was just going to make sandwiches, so you come right on. We’ll be happy to have you.”

  Lloyd and I slipped into our usual pew, where Sam was waiting for us. He smiled at me, patted my hand, and leaned close to whisper what I expected to be a loving compliment on my elegant appearance.

  Instead, just as the processional started and we began to rise, he said, “Had a little excitement at my house last night. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  Well, that took my mind off the service. Did he suspect that I had been the excitement? Surely not, I reassured myself—he wouldn’t have welcomed me so warmly. Still, it worried me, which was about the only thing that kept me from falling asleep.

  And a good thing it was, because Pastor Ledbetter’s sermon topic didn’t bode well for keeping me awake. He prided himself on being up to date—au courant, as Emma Sue called it—on what was going on in the world, especially in Abbotsville and, more particularly, in his congregation. And he could find Scripture verses to back up whatever stance he wanted to take on any given topic.

  I was sure that the pastor would preach on the place of women in the Church, which, according to him, was not up behind the pulpit. About once or so a year, he felt compelled to preach a sermon having to do with women, and each time he did I wondered whom he was aiming at: Emma Sue or me. And with Emma Sue coming home from Mildred’s impromptu tea, rhapsodizing about Pastor Poppy Patterson, I thought he’d figure it was time for another dose of straight talk so we wouldn’t get any feminist ideas.

  That would be fine with me—I’d heard it all before and I could catnap without missing a thing. The only reason I was there that morning was to be with Sam, anyway.

  So when the pastor announced that his text was from the book of First Samuel, specifically King Saul’s consultation with the witch of Endor, I wondered what had set him off. It never took much—reading or hearing of spiritualism, Ouija boards, children dressed as ghosts and goblins on Halloween, even Halloween itself. But this time it had been an article in the Asheville paper about a coven of witches dancing around a tree.

  I began to nod off as he droned on about Saul’s fear of the Philistine host and how the Lord’s help was no longer forthcoming. Going to the witch of Endor, Saul begged her to call on the deceased prophet, Samuel, to give him military advice.

  “And when,” Pastor Ledbetter went on, “against her better judgment, she called f
orth Samuel out of the earth, Samuel said to Saul, ‘Why hast thou disquieted me to bring me up?’”

  That woke me up. Had I disquieted Richard in the toolshed? Heaven knows I hadn’t meant to.

  But no, in the light of day and sitting in church, I could discount to some extent what I’d seen and heard the night before. I mean, I didn’t believe in ghosts, yet here was my own pastor speaking of them as if they were actual beings. He didn’t say that the shade of Samuel was imaginary or that Saul was mentally ill or that the witch of Endor used a magic trick. He was saying that the ghost of Samuel was real and reachable.

  For the rest of the sermon my eyebrows stayed up as far as they would go. It was the only way I could keep my eyes open as I waited to hear what could be done once a dead person was disquieted.

  Not much, as Saul learned. I comforted myself by recalling that, unlike Saul, I’d visited no witch and done no calling forth. If there’d been any disquieting of Richard’s rest, it’d been done by Helen, not me.

  With that reassuring thought, I dozed off during the collection, only to be startled awake when the pastor announced the closing hymn. I came to enough to catch Sam and Lloyd grinning at each other.

  “Tired, honey?” Sam whispered.

  I nodded as we stood. “Babies cried half the night,” I murmured, and hoped he believed me.

  After filing out of the church as slowly as I could manage so everyone who’d heard James’s grocery aisle news could see that Sam and I were together, I asked him to have Sunday dinner with us.

  “I can’t, sweetheart,” Sam said. “Pickens is coming over to discuss moving arrangements—he’s still not comfortable about taking over my house. So man to man, I’m going to convince him that it’s the best plan for all of us. And,” he went on, smiling, “James has been cooking all morning.”

  James, again!

  So Lloyd and I left the church, my mood lighthearted because Sam was making plans to return to the head of my table, where he belonged.

  As we waited for passing traffic before crossing the street, what I saw parked in front of my house made me want to turn around and go back. Maybe I could tell Lloyd that I needed a private word with Pastor Ledbetter or that I’d left something in the pew or that I had to ask LuAnne about the Cirle meeting. But we were too close and I wasn’t quick enough to come up with a single valid excuse to avoid what was waiting for me.

  Chapter 46

  “Wonder what that patrol car’s doing at our house,” Lloyd said.

  “Probably looking for Sam,” I said, as dismissively as I could. “They may have arrested an old client of his. Latisha’s waiting for you, so you run along and I’ll see what he wants.” By this time a vaguely familiar deputy had crawled out of his car and was waiting for us on the sidewalk. “Watch the traffic, Lloyd,” I went on, “and tell Lillian I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Lloyd scampered across the street, gave a friendly wave to the deputy as he went by, and disappeared into the house. I walked sedately up to the officer, keeping a serene but slightly questioning expression on my face, as if willing, but not necessarily eager, to help our local law enforcement personnel.

  “Mrs. Murdoch? ” he asked, seemingly hesitant to question me. In the daylight, I saw how young he was and how unsure he was in dealing with influential and law-abiding citizens.

  “Yes?” I observed him coolly, noting his name tag—Deputy Will Powers—and met his eyes as if I had nothing to hide.

  “I’m, uh, well, I was on duty last night and I picked up a woman, a lady, who seemed to be lost and, well, a good bit confused. She told me she was visiting you and directed me here, although I wanted to take her to be checked out at the emergency room. She looked pretty messed up. Well, not really messed up, ma’am, I mean, more like she’d had a rough time.” He stopped and I waited, giving him no help at all. “Well, anyway, I got to worrying about her, thinking I might shoulda taken her to the hospital anyway. And, uh, I just wanted to make sure she’s all right.”

  “How very thoughtful of you, Deputy Powers,” I said in a distant manner. “I’ll be sure to commend you to Lieutenant Peavey. Your concern is well placed. We’d noticed a real deterioration of my friend’s cognitive functions since her visit last year, so we put her on a bus home this morning. Her daughter is, as we speak, making arrangements for full-time care.”

  “Then that’s a relief,” Deputy Powers said. “I sure didn’t want to miss something on my first week of patrol duty. But, Mrs. Murdoch, I don’t want to offend you or anything, but up close, the two of you could be sisters. Not,” he hastily added, his face suddenly tinged with red, “that you look anything like she did last night, but I mean, up close. Kinda.”

  I permitted a condescending smile to tighten my mouth. “She was once a beautiful woman, so I’ll take that as a compliment. Now, they’re waiting Sunday dinner for me, so I must go in. Thank you again, Deputy, for your commitment to duty.”

  I offered my hand in a queenly manner and he hesitantly shook it. Then I turned and walked toward the house without glancing back, but listening as he got into his car and drove away. Gaining the living room, I closed the front door and leaned against it, drained from withstanding his dutiful follow-up on a possibly vagrant woman.

  If that close call hadn’t taught me the value of good grooming, nothing would.

  After we’d finished lunch, which we called dinner on Sundays, I longed for a good long nap. I stayed awake, though, because I half expected Sam to show up with Mr. Pickens after they’d concluded their negotiations as to who was going to live where. It was a settled fact that Lloyd’s inheritance could buy almost any house that Hazel Marie and Mr. Pickens wanted, on the grounds that the child needed a place to live. But Mr. Pickens was the last person on earth who would accept such a handout. Yet he was also about the last person on earth who could afford the kind of house Hazel Marie would want. I’d done my job of instructing her in the finer things of life almost too well. Not that she was demanding the best, not that at all. In fact, I think she’d live in a tent if Mr. Pickens was in it with her, but with a family of five, a little more than a tarpaulin was clearly called for.

  Sam’s solution was for them to move into his house, although the problem of financing their stay remained. Could Mr. Pickens buy it with no help from Lloyd’s estate, which he wouldn’t accept anyway? Would they rent it? Rent to own? Or as Sam had suggested, live rent-free and take care of it?

  There was no easy answer, considering Mr. Pickens’s commendable yet obstinate determination to take care of his own family, as well as his lack of funds. I didn’t care how they worked it out, for I had already decided to suggest that Lloyd remain with me until Hazel Marie felt comfortable managing a house and those twin babies on her own. Which, if my luck held, would be about the time Lloyd went off to college.

  As it turned out, both Sam and Mr. Pickens lingered and lingered as the afternoon wore on. So I helped feed the babies, feeling almost like an old hand at it by now. As I held a bottle and rocked one of them, unsure who it was, I almost nodded off until I began to wonder what was delaying the men.

  Of course! What would be more natural than that Sam would ask Mr. Pickens’s opinion about the prowler they’d had the night before? I could just picture the two of them, with James adding his two cents, reconstructing the crime. But, I reassured myself, I’d worn gloves, leaving no fingerprints, indeed leaving nothing but an overturned tin can and a million screws scattered across the garage floor.

  And footprints! I realized. Footprints in the muddy ground around the garage, across the yard, and into the Masons’ yard, and if Mr. Pickens was bound and determined to stay on the trail, across the street and on and on right straight to a certain toolshed.

  “This baby’s asleep, Hazel Marie,” I said, too edgy to keep sitting there. “Shall I put her down?”

  Etta Mae stopped folding baby garments and walked over. “I’ll take her. I need to put her in her little Sunday outfit.”

 
Hazel Marie put the one she was holding on her shoulder and patted its back. “Thanks, Miss Julia, for helping out. We’re trying to straighten up in here before people start dropping in. Binkie called and asked to come by to see the babies, and LuAnne wants to come, and no telling who else. And I don’t know what I’m going to wear. I can’t get into anything.”

  “Give it time,” Etta Mae said. “You’ll lose that baby weight soon enough. You already are, it looks to me. Just put on something loose and you’ll look fine.”

  “Well,” Hazel Marie said, “I had to wear safety-pinned skirts early on, so I guess I can do it again. Oh, and Miss Julia, Helen Stroud called too. She wants to come by, and I’m so glad. I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  “Me either,” I mumbled, although it hadn’t been all that long since I’d seen more of Helen than I’d wanted to.

  “Oh, and something else,” Hazel Marie said, “we ought to be thinking about christening these babies pretty soon, don’t you think? I don’t know what the right age is to do it, though I’ve seen Pastor Ledbetter christen toddlers and on up. I don’t want to wait that long. I want my little girls christened as soon as possible. I think I’ll sleep better when they are.”

  Etta Mae laughed. “You’ll sleep better when they stop waking up every two hours. But I know what you mean. I like the idea of christening infants, although the church I grew up in didn’t believe in it. You had to be old enough to know what you were doing, and we got baptized in a river instead of sprinkled on the head.”

  “Christening, baptizing,” I said, “I’m not sure I know the difference, if there is any. Although I don’t think you’d christen an adult. That’d surely be a baptism. Let’s talk to Pastor Ledbetter, Hazel Marie, and see what he says.”

  “Yes, I thought I would.” Hazel Marie gazed off at the ceiling for a while—a sure sign of some deep thinking. “You know how the pastor, after he christens a baby, always carries it up and down the aisle so everybody in the church can see it? I just worry that if he tries to carry two, he might let one slip.”