Under a Cloudless Sky

by Chris Fabry

  Jerry pulled out his phone and scrolled through his contacts and punched a button. He frowned when the call went to voice mail.

  “I bought her that cell phone so she’d always be able to communicate, and I doubt it’s ever been charged.”

  “If we don’t call the police, what do we do?”

  “Let me drive to the store and do a sweep through town. She’s probably buying up all the flour and sugar at Walmart. She might have rented a U-Haul to get a bigger load. Though I doubt that. She wouldn’t spend the money on the rental.” He said it with disgust.

  Jerry had always had a problem with the way their mother lived. She could have bought a large estate and hired several servants on her inheritance, but she had insisted on living simply and only off her husband’s income and now his retirement.

  “And what am I supposed to do?” Frances said.

  “Stay here. If she comes back, pry the keys out of her hand.”

  They locked eyes. There was nothing that could prepare a son or daughter for the loss of a parent. There was also nothing that could prepare a grown child for the possibility that the same parent had been abducted or, perhaps worse, had run away from home. In that moment, something akin to fear and tenderness passed between them, a sense of knowing each other at the core, even if it was only for a moment.

  Frances retreated inside and sat at the kitchen table. She needed to think positively, not about her mother becoming disoriented while driving and winding up in a cornfield. Not about the reports of heroin addicts looking for things to steal. Not about news reporters doing live shots in front of her mother’s house and a young female reporter saying, “Many in this community don’t understand how her children would leave an old woman alone to begin with. An heiress to a coal fortune lived in this house behind me. She was reportedly worth millions, but now she’s vanished and her children are answering some hard questions.”

  Frances spread out a hand to smooth the tablecloth and imagined herself looking into a camera lens and saying, “If you’re holding her, please let her go. Please don’t hurt my mother.” And then all the tabloids and social commentators would weigh in about the believability of Frances and her brother and how much they’d be getting from the inheritance and what they might have done with the body.

  So much for thinking positively.

  That line of thought led Frances back to Jerry’s quick response about the police. Was it really because he wanted to save his mother embarrassment or did he need time to cover his tracks? The thought made her shiver—and wag a finger at herself. There was no way Jerry would ever harm their mother. And yet, what did friends and family say about serial killers when they were interviewed? As investigators lugged away body bags, neighbors always said, “He was the last person I would ever suspect.”

  Jerry was a contractor and had invested in several dubious parcels of land through the years. Some of them were successful, others weren’t, and Frances always wondered how he was able to make ends meet. Jerry was not the most fiscally responsible in the family. And his wife, Laurie, was known to go overboard shopping for their two children and herself.

  Someone pecked at the front door and Frances jumped. She hoped she would see her mother wearing that impish grin of hers. Instead, a man stood alone, looking at Frances’s car in the driveway.

  “Hello,” Frances said, opening the door.

  “Hi there, ma’am. I’m from down the road. Drew Fetty.” He handed her a rolled-up newspaper from the end of the driveway. “I tried to call Jerry and apologize, but I couldn’t reach him last night. I left a message but thought—”

  “Apologize for what?”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well, I came over here yesterday . . .” He paused. “You’re the daughter, aren’t you?”

  Frances nodded and invited him inside.

  “No, ma’am, I just wanted to apologize for upsetting her. I didn’t mean to but I can see now that it was bad timing.”

  “You mean you upset my mother?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I came over about the car. It’s the perfect thing for my daughter. She thinks I’m going to get her some old beater. I’ve been talking that up and kidding her about finding a rusty truck. Your mama has taken really good care of her car and it’d be perfect for driving to work. Evidently I jumped the gun. Miss Ruby didn’t know you were selling it.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Yeah, I feel bad. I left a message for Jerry, like I said, but I wanted to make sure she’s all right and to say I didn’t mean to upset her.”

  “It was a misunderstanding,” Frances said, wondering what Jerry had been thinking.

  “That’s exactly what it was, a misunderstanding. If I had it to do over, I would hold my horses. Can you tell her that? Is she here?”

  “No, she’s not. But I’ll tell her when she gets back. I’m sure it will all work out.”

  “I sure hope so.”

  “It was sweet of you to come by. Thank you.”

  He gave a gap-toothed smile and turned to leave, then looked back. “Fred over at the shop said he’d give it a once-over this afternoon. You know, just to check it out. I’m not worried about the engine compression.”

  “I think we should wait on that for now, Mr. Fetty.”

  “Of course. Hold the horses. You have Jerry call me.”

  She closed the door and watched him through the small windows as he walked to the road and disappeared behind a willow. Had his conversation with Ruby the day before sent her mother reeling? It made sense.

  There was something strange about the man returning this morning, though. Frances wanted to do a background check on Drew and see if he had any priors. He could have come here to mention his conversation to make things sound plausible later.

  She shook the thought away and straightened the kitchen, though everything was neatly piled around the room. Aged cookbooks sat on a dusty shelf underneath the phone mounted to the wall. Newspapers from the previous six days were stacked on a dresser that had been moved into the kitchen corner to store papers and display her mother’s cake creations. Frances removed the rubber band from around the fresh newspaper and unfolded it on top of the pile. She noticed a headline about Iraq. Another headline said, “Wreck Snarls Traffic on I-64.”

  She glanced at the photo, then turned the paper over. She didn’t want to think of all the things that might happen to her mother in traffic. It was one thing to take out a mailbox or sideswipe a car in a parking lot, but what happened if her mother went the wrong way on the interstate and hit a semi?

  She had to think of something uplifting. Something positive. Maybe her mother just had a doctor’s appointment she hadn’t told them about. Maybe she was there now because she didn’t want Frances to worry. She’d kept the cancer diagnosis a secret and was going for early morning chemo.

  Frances stared at the cakes on the table. There had been three yesterday and now only two remained. Perhaps Ruby had remembered the extra set of keys and was taking a cake to someone who wasn’t feeling well. Her mother used food as medicine and as a gift for the soul—it was her one way of connecting with others.

  Beside the newspapers were two stacks of mail. The phone bill and the electric bill needed to be paid and there were already stamps on both return envelopes. A yellow sticky note with her mother’s scrawled handwriting showed when to mail the payment. Beside the bills was another stack, every envelope torn open haphazardly with arthritic fingers. There was an unopened Our Daily Bread and an update on a ministry based in Colorado that had somehow gotten her mother’s address.

  At the bottom of the stack was a card sent from Asheville, North Carolina, the return address headed by the name Rev. Franklin Brown. Frances opened the card and read.

  Dear Queen Ruby,

  Just wanted you to know we received your generous gift and the tapes. There were a few songs I have never heard and I’m working on putting them in our rotation. Thank you, as always. Very thoughtful.

  My humble
thanks for helping us keep the ministry going in your neck of the woods. If it weren’t for people like you, this music and this old radio voice would be silenced. So I am in your debt.

  I’m praying you are doing well and that you’ll be encouraged in some way by what you hear today. Remembering Leslie fondly as I write this. I miss him with you.

  Sincerely in the love of Christ,

  Franklin Brown

  Frances recognized the name as someone her mother listened to on the radio. That she had a personal relationship with him surprised Frances. She put the card back in the envelope and straightened the pile. If her mother caught her going through her things, she would bristle.

  Oh, that her mother would return and bristle, Frances thought.

  She went to the phone in the living room, the one with the big numbers and the giant caller ID she had bought for her mother after the phone incident no one brought up anymore. The time her mother had been scammed. Scrolling backward through the incoming calls, she recognized the last names of two church members. There were calls from telemarketers or pollsters that had gone unanswered, which pleased Frances. One number from the 304 area code was listed several times, also unanswered. There was a call from Julia, Frances’s daughter, who was at college. Frances smiled at this, knowing how much it meant to her mother to hear from Julia. There was also a caller listed as unavailable.

  She scrolled through the outgoing calls and noticed one to Eula’s Salon the day before. Two days earlier her mother had dialed a number in the 704 area code. She wrote that one down and stuffed the paper in her pocket. She had also dialed Julia the same day.

  Glancing out the front window and seeing no sign of her brother or mother, Frances wandered into her mother’s bedroom. For some reason the closet drew her and she slid the door from the left and looked at her mother’s clothes. Ruby had a hard time letting go of any outfit she might wear again, which seemed to be everything she’d ever owned. At the bottom of the closet was a shelf for shoes. She slid the door from right to left and noticed a box that brought back memories.

  Frances had found the box in her mother’s closet when she was five years old and had removed the stylish boots that laced to the top. The box could hold all the dolls Frances owned if she stacked them on top of each other.

  Frances remembered the gasp behind her and the look on her mother’s face, one of pure horror. “Don’t you ever let me catch you in here with those again, you hear me?” her mother said as she swatted Frances’s behind.

  Later that night as Frances was tucked into bed, her mother apologized. “It’s just that some things are personal. You’ll understand when you get a little older.”

  “Mama, why do you keep shoes you never wear?”

  Ruby had looked at her with a sadness Frances recalled but still could not comprehend. “I need you to leave my things alone. Do you understand?”

  Frances stared at the box now and wasn’t sure she ever understood. And she realized she’d never asked.

  She heard the front door open and hurried to the living room.

  Jerry stood at the kitchen table, his hand on the back of the ladder-back chair. Frances would have described her brother as a blank slate or a hard read. His face rarely betrayed what was happening behind the curtain, if, in fact, there was any activity there. But now the consternation he felt inside was written on him like some childhood memory verse.

  “I drove to every place I could think of and didn’t see a trace. Beauty salon, church, the FoodFair, even Walmart.”

  “What about the doctor’s office? Do you think maybe she could have made an appointment we didn’t know about?”

  “She lets me or Laurie drive her because she doesn’t like driving in town.” He opened the top drawer of the dresser in the corner and pulled out an inspirational calendar with pictures of sunsets and flowers. The day’s date was blank except for the tiny note, Take medicine that was written on every day. “She writes down the doctor’s appointments. There’s nothing here.”

  Frances took the calendar and flipped back a month and forward and nothing stood out to her. Just reminders about birthdays and anniversaries. There was a question mark scrawled on Saturday’s date but nothing else. “What do you think that means?”

  “Who knows?” Jerry said.

  Frances put the calendar away. “What about the cemetery? Maybe she wanted to visit Dad’s grave by herself.”

  “Can a person spend that long at a cemetery? I hadn’t thought of that, but she ought to have been back by now if that’s where she went. That road is winding and narrow and it has drop-offs.”

  Frances looked up. “There was a man who stopped by. Fetty. Do you know him?”

  “Drew?”

  She nodded. “He came to apologize about talking with Mom about her car.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud. I told him not to say anything.”

  Frances tried not to show her frustration, but she didn’t do a very good job.

  “I saw him in town and he mentioned the car and his daughter,” Jerry said. “I told him we might be looking to sell it.”

  “You should have made it clear.”

  “All right, next time we take the keys from our mother, I’ll remember that.”

  “Jerry, we need to call the police. Something is not right.”

  He pursed his lips and looked back at the table. “Weren’t there three of those here last night?” he said, nodding toward the cakes.

  “I think so.”

  His eyes darted. “Maybe that’s where she is. Off with a fresh cake for somebody.”

  “I don’t know. It’s a possibility, but I think it’s time—”

  “Give it twenty-four hours. She’ll call us. We’ll find her. We can figure this out and save her and us a lot of trouble.”

  Frances stared at the cakes, sitting like twin towers. “If we haven’t found her by this time tomorrow, I’m calling.”

  “Deal. I’ll head to the cemetery.”

  13

  RUBY REGALES BEAN WITH STORIES OF HER TRIP TO THE THEATER

  BEULAH MOUNTAIN, WEST VIRGINIA

  EARLY SEPTEMBER 1933

  Though Ruby’s father was not a religious man himself, he allowed her to attend church with Bean and her mother. If that was what she wanted to do on Sunday mornings, it was her decision. After church, Ruby ate dinner at Bean’s house.

  Her father had become less averse to Ruby and Bean’s friendship because, Ruby assumed, he must have seen the comfort such a friend gave a girl who felt alone in the world without her mother. That Ruby enjoyed the company of Bean’s mother was natural, though the man tried to have the lady at the company store take that role. Ruby wasn’t having it because Mrs. Grigsby was a thin, droll woman who seemed to want to keep her from ever smiling again. Bean did a spot-on impression of the woman, curling her lips and furrowing her brow, and Ruby laughed every time she saw Mrs. Grigsby because Bean’s impersonation was so good.

  There was still a cloud over Ruby’s father, however. He would get into a funk over work and the conflicts with his partner, Thaddeus Coleman, or perhaps over the memories of his wife. He tried to mix with the workers, but that was difficult because of his station. He was the co-owner, and there was a chasm between the upper crust and the common, though her father envisioned something different.

  Occasionally he took Ruby to dinner in a neighboring town or they would travel overnight by train on short trips to hotels. Once they went to Parkersburg for dinner and a moving picture show. The next Sunday, Ruby filled Bean in as they walked home after church.

  “Tell me what the train’s like,” Bean said. “I want to know every little thing. And the hotel. What movie did you see?”

  The film was King Kong and Ruby described the innocent but beautiful look of Fay Wray and how the film reminded her of the story Beauty and the Beast.

  Bean closed her eyes and said she was trying to conjure up the giant ape crawling to the top of the Empire State Building. “What does the E
mpire State Building look like?” she asked as they walked into her house.

  Ruby tried to describe it. “King Kong swatted at the airplanes flying around with one hand and he held on to Fay Wray with the other.”

  “How did he keep from squishing her?” Bean said.

  Bean’s mother laughed as she brought food to the table. A simple meal of potatoes and green beans and some kind of meat Ruby couldn’t identify and didn’t ask about.

  “What was the theater like? And what did you eat?”

  Ruby smiled and told her about the tall, block building with the white columns in front and the marquee outside.

  “What’s a marquee?” Bean said.

  “It’s the lighted sign out front that you walk under. Bean, you have to go with me. The carpet is as thick as moss by a tree stump. You sink in all the way to your ankles. And the popcorn and cotton candy are so heavy in the air you feel like you’re eating it with each breath.”

  Bean took a deep breath.

  “It’s impossible not to eat something while you’re there,” Ruby said. “But there are so many choices. They have chocolate-covered peanuts and hot cashews and jujubes and red and black licorice, just like we have at the store.”

  Bean took a bite of green beans. “I can almost taste it. What did you get?”

  “Popcorn and cashews. The sweet stuff hurts my stomach.”

  “I’d have had all of it. One of everything.”

  “And then we went inside the theater. Mirrors on the walls and glass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Posters of movies that are coming and chairs so soft you sink down deep.”

  “It sounds like a dream,” Bean said.

  Mrs. Dingess listened to the description as closely as Bean did as they ate Sunday supper. “The way you describe it, it’s almost like being there, Ruby.”

  When they finished, the girls cleared the table and Bean pumped water to do the dishes. The two laughed as they cleaned the plates and let Bean’s mother rest. The baby was growing and moving and sapping the woman’s strength.