Her Own Place

by Dori Sanders

  She thought of what Ellabelle had said about it being odd that Mr. Fletcher hadn’t told her where he was going, or why. Ellabelle was trying to make her suspicious of Mr. Fletcher; perhaps Ellabelle was a little bit jealous. She wondered where Mr. Fletcher was going. Why did he have to leave so suddenly, without any warning? From what she had heard of his telephone conversation, money was involved. She could have loaned him a little money, but he hadn’t asked her to do it. Of course Mr. Fletcher had no way of knowing how much money she kept hidden away right there in the house.

  He was coming back. After all, he had left his trunk up in his room, hadn’t he?

  She rose to her feet. Slowly, she began to feel knots tightening in her stomach. This is silly, she told herself. She’d been watching too many shows on that TV set. She walked over to the earthenware vase by the front door, where she kept her umbrellas, and reached down into it for the cotton drawstring bag with the money.

  It was not there. No, she remembered, she had moved it from the vase last Sunday and put it somewhere else. Behind the flour bin in the kitchen? She hurried into the kitchen, pulled the bin away from the shelf. It wasn’t there.

  She began to feel hot all over. Where had she last hidden the money? She swept a stack of magazines off the top of the old wooden chest in the hallway, opened it, pushed aside the toys she kept there for her grandchildren. The bag wasn’t there, either.

  Oh, Lord, she thought, oh, Lord. Where did I hide the money? I’ve forgotten where I put it the last time I hid it.

  Something else that Ellabelle had said now flashed into her mind. Ellabelle had said that it seemed strange that Mr. Fletcher could be so sure of getting a seat on a reserved-seat train like the Southerner, when he had no reservation. It was true; he had seemed to go right aboard the train without so much as even asking the conductor whether there was any room for him inside. It was as if he already had a ticket, Ellabelle had said. But if—

  She began tearing about the house, racing to the usual places where she had hidden the money in the past. Her throat was dry, her face was on fire. She could feel her heart inside her chest beating like an express train. Where had she last hidden the cotton bag with her five thousand dollars inside it? Had Fletcher Owens gone off with her money?

  : 19 :

  About eleven-thirty in the morning Ellabelle drove to Mae Lee’s house. When she walked up the front porch steps, she noticed that the front door was ajar and the lights were on. She called out to Mae Lee and cautiously pushed the door open. The house was in shambles. Ellabelle screamed, “Oh, Lord, oh Lord. She’s been robbed.” She slammed the door closed and started backing her way toward the front steps. As she hurried toward her car, she caught sight of Mae Lee at the edge of a flower bed, down on her knees, pulling things from her garden basket.

  Ellabelle hurried to Mae Lee’s side. She dropped to her knees and put her arms around her friend, but Mae Lee sprang free, stood up, and backed away like a frightened animal.

  Ellabelle grabbed a firm hold on her.

  “Poor baby,” she moaned. “What’s wrong?” She looked at Mae Lee’s torn dress. “Who did this to you? When did it happen?”

  Mae Lee only stared at her.

  Ellabelle started screaming. “Oh, my Lord, you’ve been attacked, I’m calling the police! Oh, no, I’m taking you to the hospital. You look like you’re having a stroke.” Beads of sweat poured from Mae Lee’s body; she gasped for her breath. Ellabelle grabbed Mae Lee’s arm. “You’re coming with me.”

  Mae Lee was like a child. She settled into the front seat of the car. Ellabelle fastened a seat belt around her shaking body.

  “I don’t know where it is,” Mae Lee whispered. “I don’t know where it is.”

  “Where what is?”

  Mae Lee didn’t reply for a minute. “It’s gone,” she finally said.

  “Oh, Lord, Mae Lee you are starting to talk out of your head,” Ellabelle moaned.

  Fortunately, Dr. Bell was already at the hospital, on call for another patient. He checked Mae Lee’s blood pressure and shook his head. “It’s way up. I’m going to have to keep you here for a while,” he said. “We will need to run some tests.” Mae Lee was breathing normally again.

  “Oh no, oh no,” she repeated over and over. “I’ve got to go home, doctor. I’ve got to go home.”

  She stood up and backed against a table, sending a tray crashing to the floor and a nurse rushing into the room.

  The doctor took her hand. “Something is wrong. What’s upsetting you so much?”

  Mae Lee’s eyes searched his face as if for some flicker of hope. “It’s, it’s . . .” she broke off and turned her face away.

  “Something has happened to one your children. I’ll try to reach one of them.”

  Mae Lee turned to face him. “No! Don’t call my children!” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Promise you won’t call them. I swear I won’t eat any more pork meat again.”

  Dr. Bell frowned. “There is something that’s upsetting you and it’s not pork meat.”

  He took her blood pressure again. He took Mae Lee’s hand. “Mae Lee, your blood pressure is too high. I can’t let you go home without running some tests. I think it’s best for you to stay here. Let the nurse give you a sedative so you can get some rest. We’ll see how things are later on.”

  Ellabelle didn’t wait to hear what Dr. Bell had to say about Mae Lee’s condition. She called Taylor.

  She started crying as soon as Taylor answered the phone. “Taylor, baby,” she cried, “you’ve got to come home. It’s your mama. She’s bad off, she’s talking out of her head.”

  “What happened to her? Where is she? Is she all right?” Taylor’s voice cracked. “Ellabelle, please don’t cry.”

  “I brought your mama to the hospital. Dr. Bell is with her now. I have to go now. Just come, Taylor.”

  Ellabelle rushed up to Dr. Bell when he entered the hall. “I called Mae Lee’s son. He is on his way here. What’s wrong with her, doctor?”

  Dr. Bell shook his head. “I don’t know. Do you have any idea what caused her to become so disturbed?”

  Ellabelle started wringing her hands. “To save my life I can’t figure out what happened to her. At first, I had the notion she’d been robbed. But then when I saw her condition, I didn’t stop to check things out.” Ellabelle glanced at several of Mae Lee’s concerned coworkers, anxiously waiting to learn about Mae Lee’s condition. She dropped her voice, “Dr. Bell, did you notice that her dress was torn? Some crazy maniac didn’t, didn’t. . .” her voice trailed off.

  Dr. Bell read Ellabelle’s concerns. “No. There were no signs of having been exposed to violence of any kind.”

  Mae Lee was asleep under sedation when Taylor reached the hospital. After the nurses and hospital volunteers assured him that Mae Lee would receive their very special attention, he left with Ellabelle.

  At his mother’s house, Taylor helped Ellabelle straighten things out, and tried to make some sense of what might have happened. Why had clothes been pulled from closets, groceries and pots and pans from pantry shelves, pieces of furniture been moved around, and the interior of the house generally taken apart? It was as if his mother had had a fit or something, and in her frenzy had pulled everything out. And, if his mother had not done it, then who had? Robbery seemed unlikely, if only because Mae Lee’s purse lay on the coffee table in the living room, untouched, with forty dollars inside.

  He called his sisters and told them that their mother was in the hospital, and that tests were going to be run, but that Dr. Bell did not believe that things were grave enough for them to come rushing down to Rising Ridge. But within six hours of his calls, all four sisters were there. They met with Dr. Bell and several other physicians on the hospital staff. Other than the fact that Mae Lee’s blood pressure was up, Dr. Bell told them, there were no physical symptoms to indicate anything abnormal about their mother’s condition. His first thought, he said, was that she had suffered a stroke, but thus
far tests had shown none of the indicators that accompanied strokes. Once Mae Lee had awakened from the sedation she had seemed normal, except that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—talk, other than to say emphatically that she wanted to go home. They were going to keep her in the hospital for another twenty-four hours in order to run some more tests, but if no further evidence of physiological damage or impairment was turned up, Mae Lee might as well be taken home. “It’s as if your mother has experienced some kind of emotional trauma,” Dr. Bell said, “and is in a state of shock.”

  Mae Lee’s children were afraid that if all five of them trooped into the hospital room together, their mother would be frightened and would think that she was seriously ill. When she got home, she would find them all there, but not until after Taylor and Annie Ruth had explained that they had been worried when they were told she was in the hospital, and had insisted on coming to see her.

  Mae Lee’s passivity was baffling. Taylor, Annie Ruth, and Ellabelle took turns staying with her in the hospital. She lay in her bed taking little notice of what was going on. When they tried to talk with her, she scarcely answered. From a medical standpoint there seemed to be nothing wrong with her.

  Outside, in the hallway, they kept trying to understand what could have happened. Ellabelle told about how they had taken Fletcher Owens to the train, but insisted that there had been nothing unusual about Mae Lee’s behavior either then or on the drive back to Rising Ridge. Whatever had happened, it seemed, must have taken place after she had returned home. But what could it have been? The doctors at the hospital could find nothing. Yet here was their mother, who had always been so capable, so full of life and in control of everything, lying in her bed, seemingly uncomprehending, like a child.

  On the scorching-hot day that Mae Lee was discharged from the hospital, Taylor, Annie Ruth, and Ellabelle helped her down the hallway, out through the lobby, and into the car. The ladies of the hospital auxiliary stood by to give assistance if needed. Mae Lee hardly noticed them. When they arrived home, her three other daughters were waiting for her. Fletcher Owens’s trunk had been moved out into the hallway and a rollaway bed placed in the room he had used, so that Dallace and Nellie Grace could stay there. Amberlee and Annie Ruth would sleep in the double bed in another room, and Taylor set up a cot on the sun porch for himself.

  After Mae Lee had been taken to her room and was being installed in her bed, Taylor stood out in the hallway staring at Fletcher Owens’s trunk, then shrugged his shoulders and joined Amberlee and Nellie Grace oh the front porch. He didn’t share his thoughts. After a while Ellabelle and Dallace came out and joined them. “Your mother’s asleep now,” Ellabelle said softly. “I can’t bear to watch her lie there like a little helpless baby. But at least she seems less agitated, now that she’s home.”

  “I’m not sure we should have brought her home,” Dallace said. “I think she’s had a stroke, no matter what they say. I really think we should have moved her to a hospital in Charlotte.”

  “We can still take her,” Nellie Grace put in quickly. Annie Ruth, however, shook her head. “Mama won’t go. You would think that with all the new medical research, the doctors could say what’s wrong with Mama—whether she’s had a stroke or not. It seems to me her confused state of mind proves that’s what probably happened. We’ve all heard what effect there is on older people when the brain is deprived of oxygen for just a short time.”

  Ellabelle didn’t agree. “I believe if Mae Lee had had a stroke the doctors down at the hospital would have known it. Clairene’s mama was rushed there a few weeks ago, and they said right off she’d had a stroke. They didn’t have a speck of trouble pinpointing the problem,” she said.

  Nellie Grace shook her head sadly. “Maybe Clairene’s mama didn’t have old Dr. Bell. He’s been practicing for so long, sometimes I question whether he’s really competent. Older people aren’t very open-minded and can’t always keep up with what’s new.”

  Ellabelle looked over the top of the sunshades resting on her nose. “Dr. Bell didn’t decide it by himself. He called in young Dr. Gregory, who is well known and highly respected around here.” She shifted uneasily in her chair. She could see that Mae Lee’s children weren’t impressed by him, either.

  Taylor walked inside to look in on his mama, and promptly returned. “She’s still asleep,” he said. He pulled a chair forward and sat backward to face them, holding on to the back rail as though he needed it for support. “She seems restless even when she’s sleeping,” he said. “I think we ought to try and get her over to Charlotte as soon as we can.”

  Ellabelle shook her head. “Annie Ruth is right. Mae Lee won’t go. Give her a little time to come to herself, children. See what happens.” They agreed that Ellabelle was right. It would be very hard to get her to agree to go; still, something had to be done.

  The house was within the city limits, yet from the corner of the porch where Taylor was sitting, the view opened out to uncultivated farmland. Parched, open fields that spread out empty and unproductive, like their own thoughts. Taylor gazed at a flower bed, filled with blooming flowers in spite of the grass that almost choked them out. Earlier, after the peonies had bloomed, his mama had asked him to weed. He’d never gotten around to it. Taylor thought about Fletcher Owens’s trunk still in the house, and how well and happy his mama had been the last time he had visited. He also thought about his own failure to find out more about the roomer.

  “Ellabelle,” Taylor asked, “how much do you know about Fletcher Owens?”

  Ellabelle shrugged her shoulders. “Probably no more than you or your mama. He was a nice respectable man, it seemed. Still, there’s one thing about him that still eats on my nerves the way sour apples set my teeth on edge. It was the way he just up and left.” She had the girls’ attention now too. “He didn’t say a word to Mae Lee that he was going to leave until the night he got the call to leave for the station. Then he didn’t say where he was going, or when he was coming back.”

  Taylor stood up. “Ellabelle, I’m going to visit Cousin Warren and a few people. If you don’t mind cooking something, I do believe I’ll be hungry when I get back.” Dallace volunteered to go along, while the others stayed behind to help Ellabelle with the cooking.

  “I’m afraid you won’t find out much from Warren,” Ellabelle told them. “Mae Lee said he’s getting awfully vague.”

  When Taylor and Dallace got to Warren’s house, they were disappointed to find him so confused. Warren had been in poor health when they’d visited earlier in the summer, but he hadn’t been disoriented. Now, however, when they asked him about Fletcher Owens, he looked at his wife, Lou Esther, and asked, “Do we know this man Owens?” Then without waiting for her to answer, he turned the conversation back to the old days. “You’ve got a smart mama, she’s got a good business head on her shoulders. One of the best. She knows how to make a dollar and how to save it. Of course, I helped her out with handling the money. I insisted that she put her money in the bank. Thank the Lord she listened. I drove her over to the bank myself; she put every penny in. Mae Lee always did listen to me.”

  Warren turned to face Taylor. “She put the boy’s name on the bank account with hers. You see, he lived the closest to her,” he said, as if he were talking to someone other than Taylor. He raised his eyes to look beyond the young man. “I miss seeing my little buddy, but he’ll come back to see me one day.”

  Warren was confused, but he was right about one thing— Mae Lee had indeed put Taylor’s name on the bank account all those long years ago. Taylor had forgotten all about it, but Dallace remembered. She cast a questioning look at her brother. She wondered if he was thinking what she was. Fletcher Owens might have been a con man. Had he gone off with their mother’s life savings?

  Taylor looked at his watch. “We hate to rush away, Cousin Warren, but we have to get back home,” he said.

  Taylor was locked on target now. Dallace almost had to run to keep up with Taylor as he hurried to the car. “We’
ve got to get to the bank.”

  At the bank the manager, Jackson Rowe, was ready to lock the door when Dallace and Taylor rushed up, but he let them inside. Taylor checked the joint account. There had been no withdrawals for some months, since well before Fletcher Owens came to town. So, they were back where they started.

  “I still think Fletcher Owens might be involved in this,” Taylor declared. “I wonder where he’s gone?”

  “Ellabelle said he didn’t tell them,” Dallace said.

  “I wish we knew more about him,” Taylor said.

  After supper Mae Lee’s children made the decision that Annie Ruth was right; her mama should stay with her in Greensboro, but first she should be taken to the Duke University Hospital for testing. Annie Ruth’s sister-in-law, a registered nurse at Duke Hospital, would be asked to arrange to get her admitted for a checkup there. The only trouble now was, who would tell their mama about the plans?

  All day and the next the children stayed close to their mother, taking turns at Mae Lee’s bedside. Mae Lee had nothing to say to them. They worried about her. She had always been overjoyed when they were home again; now it seemed to make no difference to her. Obviously something was very wrong. What was going through her mind, they wondered. She seemed to be off somewhere in a world of her own. Or was anything going through her mind? Did she even know that they were there, all of them? Did she understand that? Did she realize that there was anything unusual about their all being there at home with her? They couldn’t tell. All they could do was to stay with her, looking after her wants, making sure that somebody was at the bedside at all times.

  : 20 :

  What her children could not know, of course, was that not only was Mae Lee perfectly aware of their presence in the house, but the one thing she wanted was for them not to be there—to leave her alone, so that she could continue to look for the money. She was sure it was somewhere in the house, but where? Where had she hidden it? She couldn’t believe that Mr. Fletcher had taken her $5,240.22. But where had Mr. Fletcher gone off to, so suddenly and with no explanation? If Mr. Fletcher had taken her money—the very thought made her groan inwardly. Had she made a fool of herself, fallen for the man, been taken in by him, when all that he had been after was her money?