by Ninie Hammon
After a brief hesitation, she said, “Maggie.”
“Maggie…what?” He prodded for a last name, but the little girl only looked at him. There was a moment of awkward silence. “Well, I’m glad to meet you, Maggie.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir,” she said. The lilt of the dialect in her speech was unmistakable. Clearly, she had come from deep within one of the inner rings of the circle. It seemed impolite to ask Piper what the little girl was doing here with the child standing right there with Sunshine…Sadie! It hit him that Sunshine looked as content in the little girl’s arms as a puppy snuggled up to its mother. And unlike her nickname implied, Sunshine didn’t warm up to anybody.
“Do you mind if I take the little one outside?” Maggie asked. “Wildflowers smell so good. We could pick some and put them in a vase in Nan Marian’s room.”
Nan Marian? Carter hadn’t heard the term since he was a little boy and his mother told him stories about her own grandmother. The word for grandfather had been…what was the word? Tide! Nan and Tide.
“It’ll be dark soon.” Maggie’s tone changed to firm and intense. “I’ll watch her careful! You needn’t worry your head about that.” She pronounced “about” so it sounded like “a boot.”
“Fine then, run along.” Piper’s voice had a sort of hysterical cheeriness. “I’ll fix supper and call you when it’s ready. Do you like—?”
“I like everything,” Maggie said. She set Sunshine on the floor and paused. “At least…I think I do.”
“Sabie pick dis much flowers.” Sadie spread her little hands as far apart as she could reach, then turned and raced for the back door. The child never walked if she could run.
When the screen door closed behind the two children, Piper let her breath out in a whoosh and sank down onto the arm of the overstuffed chair in the parlor.
“Uh…what just happened?” Carter asked.
“I have no idea. I’ve been living in the Twilight Zone ever since that little girl showed up on the porch yesterday morning.”
“Who is she? Where’d she come from?”
“I don’t know and I don’t know.”
“You look like a woman who could use a hug.”
Carter walked over, pulled Piper to her feet and took her in his arms. It was a totally fraternal hug. Brother/sister. Carter prided himself on that—he’d been able to keep the platonic lid on his feelings. He would not make a move of any kind on Piper until Grayson was…out of the picture. He didn’t want Piper to have to live the rest of her life with the reputation that she’d had a thing for the brother of her poor husband—and Grayson would automatically be granted poor-husband status because he’d been a soldier fighting a war.
She sighed in his arms, then stepped back and flashed him a distracted smile.
“It’s been one of those—”
“Sit down.” He pulled a chair out at the kitchen table and held it for her, then sat down in the one opposite it. His heart was racing. He couldn’t do a thing about that. Merely being in her presence sent his hormones into overdrive, but he was very good at hiding it. He’d had years of practice.
For a moment, his mind threatened to mutiny, to rip the seals off the locked door of his memories and grant him a visceral reenactment of the agony of learning that the woman he loved—the only woman he ever had or every would love—had eloped with his younger brother. But he shut the systems down and offered Piper a pleasant smile.
“Now, I want to hear the whole story. Blow by blow.”
He listened attentively, asking a few questions here and there, as Piper recounted how the little girl had shown up out of nowhere on the front porch Wednesday morning. Described how Sadie had broken the ice. And after a couple of glasses of lemonade, three scrambled eggs and four pieces of fried toast—with Marian’s special tomato jam—the child had allowed Piper to unbraid her hair, warm some water on the stove and fix her a bath.
“She closed herself up in the bathroom, very private. I gave her one of my nightgowns while I washed her dress and hung it out to dry. But when I was braiding her hair later, I saw huge bruises on her neck and down her back. Somebody beat her up—really badly. She’s bruised all over.”
“What did she say about it?” Carter asked.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Come on, Carter, how many things can nothing mean? I asked, and she didn’t answer.” Piper mimicked her own concerned voice. “So Maggie, honey…what happened to you, your eye and your lip?” She mimicked Maggie’s reply. “Nothing.” Then she said, “Something did. Something…or somebody…hurt you, blacked your eye and split your lip—who was it?’ ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t remember,’ is all I could get out of her,” Piper said. “And the thing is…I believe her, Carter. I don’t think she does know.”
“You think she has amnesia?”
“Maybe…or something like it. She didn’t seem to be lying, covering up for somebody. It looked like she was trying to remember but couldn’t.”
“You don’t suppose somebody hit her so hard she…”
“I asked her where she came from, and she just pointed toward the mountains. As hungry and thirsty and dirty as she was, she must have been wandering around in these woods for days, could have come from”—Piper made a sweeping gesture—“anywhere.”
“Not generic anywhere. With that lilt, definitely Whoopie Country.”
“Which brings me to the what-do-I-do-now part?”
“You can’t just say, ‘She followed me home, Mom. Can I keep her?’ She’s not a stray.”
“But I can’t send her back to a place where somebody’s going to beat her!”
“Piper,” Carter said, his voice quiet, “that decision isn’t yours to make.”
She looked at him like she was about to go off again, but didn’t.
“It’s like she…like she’s always been here. Okay, I know that’s crazy, I’m only saying that’s what it feels like.” Her voice began to rise again. “How can I give her up to somebody who—?”
“Tomorrow you have to take her to the sheriff’s office,” he said, keeping his voice steady and calm. “I’ll stay with Ma and Sunshine. With the weekend coming up, maybe Maggie could stay with us until—”
“Us? It’s Thursday. You’re here for the whole weekend?”
“I didn’t just show up, I was sent.”
Before he had a chance to say more, the back screen door opened and Maggie stepped inside, then held the door for Sadie. The toddler walked through it with the exaggerated slowness of a waiter balancing full wine glasses on a tray. Held out in front of her in both hands was a bouquet of wildflowers, complete with a generous sampling of thistle and weeds.
Maggie held a single perfect rose.
“For Nan Marian,” she said. “Roses are her favorite, you know.”
Chapter 8
The Cochran County Sheriff’s Department was in the courthouse at the center of the square in Chandler, eleven miles down Sadler Hollow from Sadlerton. An imposing, gray limestone structure, it boasted a shiny brass dome and war memorials out front that listed the names of the county’s fallen. The one for World War I was the tallest. A bronze statue of a uniformed soldier, rifle at the ready, stood on a base of granite where the names were inscribed. The World War II memorial looked more like a giant headstone, wide, with no statue. The names inscribed there were on bronze plaques attached to the front and back sides.
Piper had grown to hate the memorials after Grayson went to Vietnam. She couldn’t walk past without envisioning the one they’d build to honor the Vietnam dead. She had no doubt they’d erect a memorial. West Virginians were patriotic—proudly, loudly, fiercely patriotic. As a percentage of population, more mountaineers volunteered for military service than men from any other state. She could envision his name there, the first one, of course. Dead soldiers were always listed alphabetically.
U.S. Army Chaplain Grayson Allen Addington. Only his n
ame, nothing left of him but letters etched into a piece of metal on a stone, snowcapped in the wintertime and a landing/crapping spot for pigeons in the summer.
She gripped Maggie’s hand tight and marched by the memorials without looking, climbed the wide concrete steps and pushed open the door.
Sheriff Clifford R. Bayless’s office was on the ground floor. It was the office where property taxes were collected, so Piper had been there before, but that’s not how she knew Sheriff Bayless. He’d been a deputy when she first met him. He was one of the officers who’d taken Riley away in handcuffs after he and his gang of thugs had beaten Carter half to death one night after a football game. He’d only been in jail a few days, of course. Though there’d been a dozen witnesses, Carter had refused to name Riley and his friends as his assailants. The McCulloughs and the Campbells didn’t need the law interfering in their family business, thank you very much. They settled their own scores.
But Piper always believed her mother and Marian had stepped in to keep the situation from escalating into more bloodshed. Darlene Campbell and Marian Addington had cut a deal that Carter wouldn’t testify—or retaliate—if Darlene kept Riley under control. Nobody on the planet could have done it but those two women and what could have started an all-out war was swept under the rug and forgotten. Piper’s mother’s influence was so strong that the pact held even after she died a year later.
“Hidy, Piper,” said Ramona Richards, the clerk who worked the front counter. “Where’s that precious little girl of yours? I swear, that child’s as perfect as a life-sized doll. I never seen the like.” Before Piper could answer, Ramona spotted Maggie. “And who’s this pretty little thing?”
Piper had cleaned Maggie up the best she could, had mended the torn sleeve and holes in her dress, pressed it, even found two pieces of ribbon to tie the ends of Maggie’s braids. There were no shoes in the house that would fit Maggie so she was barefoot, but so was every other kid in Sadler Hollow in the summer time.
“Is Sheriff Cliff around handy?” Piper asked, blowing by Ramona’s questions about Maggie. “I sure do need to talk to him.”
“Nope, sorry. He’s up Wheeling for the day. Then he’s going to visit his daughter in Pittsburgh. Won’t be back till Monday.”
It hadn’t occurred to Piper that she might not be able to talk to the sheriff about Maggie.
“Can Phil help you? He’s holding down the fort till the sheriff gets back.” She gestured toward the open office door where a beefy man with a barrel chest and a head of salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from his forehead was talking on the telephone. The nameplate on his desk read Deputy Sheriff Philip Higgins.
“Sure, I guess. Phillip’s fine,” Piper said. Deputy Higgins’s daughter Allison and Piper had been friends in high school until Allison got pregnant when she was fifteen and dropped out. He hadn’t been a deputy sheriff then. He’d been a coal miner.
The deputy hung up the phone, and Ramona went into his office to tell him Piper needed to see him.
“You sit out here for a little while, okay?” Piper told Maggie, then went into the deputy sheriff’s office, closed the door behind her and sat down in the straight back chair next to the desk. After a few minutes of when-have-you-heard-from-Grayson and what’s-Allison-doing-these-days, Piper told him why she’d come. She saw him study Maggie through the glass in his office door as she told her story.
“She don’t know her name?”
“Or won’t say. I don’t know which.”
“I can see she was beat up.”
“She’s got a whole lot more bruises you can’t see.”
“She showed up on your porch yesterday morning, so that means she’s been missing from somewhere at least twenty-four hours.”
“More like three days. Before she got to my house, she’d been out in the woods for at least a day and night, and I think two’s more likely. She was dirty, had twigs and sticks in her hair where she’d laid on the ground, and she was about to starve to death.”
“Why didn’t you bring her in yesterday? You musta known somebody’d be looking for her.”
“Because…oh, what can I say, Mr. Higgins…I mean Deputy Higgins. I… she’d been beat up, and I couldn’t stand the idea of turning her back over to whoever beat her.” She lowered her head and whispered. “And I still can’t.”
“Well, right now, far as I know, there ain’t nobody to turn her back over to.”
Piper raised her head.
“We ain’t had a report of a missing kid anywhere in Cochran County, and we’d have been notified if there was a kid missing in any of the counties around.”
He looked back out at Maggie.
“Send her in here and let me have a little talk with her. Maybe I can get her to tell me her name.”
Piper went out to where Maggie was sitting and sent her into the deputy’s office. He closed the door behind her. She saw him come around his desk and sit down in a chair beside Maggie, and she appreciated that. About ten minutes later, Maggie came out with a coin in her hand.
“Deputy Higgins said there’s a machine in the basement with pop!” she said. Her eyes were bright. “And look what he gave me. Can I go?”
“Sure you can.”
Maggie unexpectedly threw her arms around Piper’s waist in a tight hug, then turned and hurried out the door. Deputy Higgins had watched the scene from his office. He motioned for Piper to come in and sit back down.
“I’m thinking maybe she really don’t know her name,” he said. “But she’s from Whoopie Country all right, from somewhere so far back up one of them hollers Christmas gets there a day late. There’s some Gregorys live near Chimney Rock…but I’m thinking the McIntyres, maybe. There’s a passel of them and half of them’s redheaded. I’ll take the afternoon and do some nosing around.”
Piper’s heart ricocheted from her toes to her throat.
“What do you know about those people, the McIntyres?”
“They’re dirt poor and ain’t a one of ’em’s dragging a full string of fish. That Maggie seems like a quick little thing, doesn’t strike me as…I’ll have to see what I can find out.”
“And if you find…you’ll take her back up there and leave her? After they beat—?”
“No, not if they beat her. The child welfare people from Charleston will get into it then, but you know as well as I do folks got a right to raise up their kids as suits ’em. Besides, she didn’t say nothing to me about getting beat up, said she didn’t know how she got them bruises.” Piper opened her mouth to speak but he held up his hand. “I know, you can’t hardly get kids to rat out their parents, no matter how bad they’re treated.”
Piper would have, if there’d been anybody interested enough to ask her. But she’d had no one to stand up for her, had been rescued by circumstance—and a bullet from William McCullough’s gun. When her older brother told her their father was dead, her first thought had been: “I wonder if I’ll be able to cry at the funeral.”
“Let’s take this one step at a time, Piper,” the deputy said. I’m assuming you’re willing for her to stay with you until—”
“Of course, she can stay with me!”
“I’ll dig around and then I’ll come by your place if I find anything. If you don’t hear from me, come back into the office Monday morning, and we’ll figure where to go from there.”
Piper left the office and started down the hallway to the stairs leading to the basement. Her hands were trembling, but the ball of terror in her stomach had eased some. Nobody had reported her missing! That was amazing. Three days and nobody’d even gone looking for her! But at least she hadn’t been snatched away from Piper on the spot. That was something. Actually, that was quite a lot.
As Piper got to the end of the hallway, she heard a sound from below, echoing in the empty hollows of the marble floors and concrete walls. It was a child’s musical laughter, carefree and joyful. What on earth had struck Maggie funny about a soft drink machine? Better question: How
could a child like that not even be missed?
* * *
The Huey taking Grayson to Saigon set down in a rice paddy halfway there to pick up a soldier who hadn’t gotten out of the trees quick enough when the flyboys came over with napalm. He had no face, his features had melted like wax, and he was screaming, wailing. They hooked him up and started pumping fluids laced with morphine into him through an IV. The corpsman squeezed the plastic bottle of liquid to push it faster into the guy’s vein, but he kept shrieking, a sound that must have been shredding his vocal chords. On and on and on. Then he stopped, like turning off a tap. And the corpsman reached up and clipped off the IV. The only sound for the rest of the ride was the wind whooshing through the open doors.
Grayson was still wet from the shower, itching in the fresh fatigues, as the sergeant at Ton Son Nhut Air Base inspected his paperwork. The ink on it was as damp as the back of Grayson’s neck. The sergeant nodded, then looked up at him.
“PFC Maddox’s body shipped out yesterday. You’ll connect in San Francisco and accompany him the rest of the way.”
Then he pointed toward a transport. The doors were sliding shut. The ground crew had started to move the ladder away.
“You make it out to that plane, and you’ll be in Hawaii in thirteen hours—but you gotta factor in the seventeen-hour time difference and the international date line. Next flight’s—”
Grayson turned and started toward the aircraft.
“Son, you’re gonna need some American money and—“
Grayson didn’t wait for the rest. He merely snatched the voucher out of the sergeant’s hand and bolted toward the ladder crew, waving his papers and hollering, “Wait, one more!”
There were no stewardesses serving lunch on Military Air Transport Service flights. MATS, affectionately referred to as Maybe Again, Tomorrow, Sometime. But cold K rations tasted fine—just fine!—because this wasn’t an ordinary transport for Grayson—it was a Freedom Bird, the flight taking him home. He tried to sleep to make the time go faster. He did doze some, but it was hard to sleep through the whoops and groans of the soldiers engaged in a never-ending poker game. Or through the monologue of the black soldier with a gold tooth, which seemed unending, too. His wife was meeting him for a week of R&R in Hawaii, and he talked too loud and described in way too much detail what he was going to do with her before he even took his boots off.