by Reid, Don
“How do you spell that?”
“H-o-l-y-o-k-e.”
“That’s a new one on me, pal.”
“Then do you have a city map?”
“Let me see.” The man behind the counter fumbled with a lot of papers. “I’ve got a state map and a county map and … no. No city map.”
“Then where could I buy one on a Sunday morning?”
“Oh, you wanna buy one? Right back there on that rack.”
J. D. smiled to himself and walked out with a city map. He sat under the steering wheel and unfolded it to its fullest size. He scanned the index, and there it was. Holyoke Ln. E6. He put one finger on E and the other on 6, and sure enough, when they met he couldn’t find Holyoke anywhere. This seemed to happen every time he tried to read a map. So he just focused on a small section in the area and looked intently until he saw the little dead-end street that was a lot closer to F7 than it was E6.
The traffic was mercifully thin. It was church time on a sunny Sunday, and he figured most everyone was either in the sanctuary of their choice or on their porch reading the paper or in the mountains or the lakes for the weekend. He was probably the only person in the whole town looking for the home of a woman he had read about in the obituaries that morning. Two more rights should have him at 327 Holyoke, but then what? He wasn’t sure why, but he had to at least see the house where she had lived. He envisioned himself walking around the yard. He knew that could lead to an arrest, but with the state and the mood he was in this morning, he was willing to risk it.
There it was! On the left. A small white frame house. He slowed to a crawl and then finally stopped in the middle of the street. A short front yard just off the sidewalk. Two steps up to a porch with a lounge chair and a swing. In the back he could see a fenced-in yard. That had to be for Champ. There were flowers everywhere. Every kind imaginable that would still be in bloom in early September. She obviously loved color, and the beds around the sides of the house were peppered with blues and yellows and reds. To the right was a short driveway and … why hadn’t he seen that immediately? In the driveway was a car. A green Ford that looked less than two years old. Was this hers? Had she still been driving at eighty-one? Or did it belong to someone who was inside? His questions were answered almost as if he had asked them out loud, because at that instant a woman, looking to be in her late sixties, came bouncing out the back door and put a large box in the trunk of the Ford Five Hundred.
Chapter Twenty-four
J. D. drove to the end of the dead-end street and turned around, giving himself a little more time to come up with a good story about who he was and why he was here. He wanted to have it all planned out in his head before he walked up and introduced himself to the woman loading the car. He just needed some time to figure out what he was going to say. By the time he had come back up the street and was pulling to the curb in front of the little white house, he still had no idea. So he just turned off the engine, got out, and walked up the couple of steps to the front porch. He had come this far not knowing what he was doing, so why stop now?
Just as his foot hit the porch, the front door flew open, and a huge golden retriever took a leap and hit him in the chest with two enormous front paws. J. D. laughed, grabbing the dog with both hands and ruffling the hair on top of his head. “Hey, boy! You nearly knocked me over.”
The dog panted and smiled and panted some more, and J. D. was instantly on his knees, rubbing the dog’s head vigorously. The woman who had been loading the car a few minutes before came rushing out and said, “I think Champ likes you, mister. He’s such a friendly pup and so full of energy.” And then, in the same breath, she changed the direction of her one-sided conversation and said to the dog, “Leave the man alone, Champ.” And then to J. D, “I hope you like dogs, ’cause that dog sure does like you.”
J. D. looked up at her and, never taking his hands off the animal, said, “I love dogs, and he’s a pretty one.”
“My name is Lucille Tanner. Are you a neighbor? We don’t live around here, so we don’t know many of Auntie Liz’s neighbors, but she sure had some good ones. They all looked in after her and saw to her needs. Some really good people in this neighborhood. Where do you live? Next door? I think that’s the cutest house next door. You’ll have to tell me where you got that porch awning. It reminds me of a house we had at the beach one time.”
J. D. was digesting the situation almost as fast as Lucille was talking. Not quite, but almost. This must be Lizzie’s niece. If he underplayed his part just enough, Lucille’s constant, breathless chatter could work to his advantage. Keep her talking, and he could find out everything he needed to know.
“So which house is yours?”
“Well, none of them actually. I don’t live in this neighborhood.”
“Oh. How did you know Auntie Liz? She had so many friends. People just seemed to take to her. All kinds of people.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m just a friend.”
“Well, I know it’s a little soon, but we’re going to get this house ready to put on the market. Just as soon as we get some of this stuff cleaned out inside. My husband, George, is in there now. He’s started in the attic, and I have never seen such a mess. Mind you, I loved my Auntie Liz, but I do believe she saved everything she ever owned. Get down, Champ. Leave the man alone.”
“He’s not bothering me. I love dogs.”
“I love ’em, too, but I don’t want ’em all over me. She never disciplined her animals, but she loved this one. Took good care of ’im. I have to say that. You’re a friend of Auntie Liz’s. You say you’re not a neighbor. You knew her well?”
“Well, yes. I knew her and thought the world of her.”
“She was a good woman, wasn’t she? Everybody who ever met her just loved her to death. And she had so many students all those years she taught that she kept up with. They would call her and write to her, and they always sent Christmas cards. I just don’t know how I’ll ever get the word to all of them that she’s passed. I was thinking about putting a piece in the paper out there in Missouri or something like that. You know, just to let them know. They all thought so much of her. How did you know her then? And what’s your name?”
Lucille was making J. D. dizzy. The number of subjects she could cover in one take was putting him in a fog. He wasn’t sure he could think fast enough to dodge this ole gal.
“My name’s J. D. Wickman. And I was real sorry to see in the paper this morning about your aunt.”
“We knew it was coming, but you know, you’re still never prepared for these sort of things. I’m all the real family she has left. She only had the one brother. That was my father. He was older than she was, and he died at Pearl Harbor. I never knew him. He was shipped out before I was even born. Before the war even started. It was just them two. My daddy and Auntie Liz. And when she got married and moved out to the west she never had much family out there either. Her husband, now, his name was Bob Stockendale, he was killed in the war just like my daddy. A different war, but still just the same. I only saw him once, I think. They were only married for a few years, and then there she was all those years by herself. Never remarried. Should have. I told her all the time she should have. We used to write real regular, and I told her she needed a man. But Auntie Liz—boy, she had a mind of her own. What’s your name again?”
“Wickman. J. D.”
“What’s that stand for? That J. D.?”
“John David.”
“I like that better. I’ll just call you John. That’s easier. My husband had a cousin they called B. B., and I thought that was the silliest thing I ever heard. I just called him Bob. I never knew what the Bs even stood for, but I just called him Bob. Auntie Liz did a lot of charity work at the library here after she retired. She loved books. Loved to read. She’s got rooms full of books in there. I don’t know what we’re going to do with all of them. Is that where you knew her from? The library?”
“Yes.” J. D. knew if he was just patient and waited
, Lucille would provide his cover for him, and she did.
“I think Champ really likes you. Don’t know what we’re going to do with him either. We live up in Virginia, and we can’t take him. George has huntin’ dogs, and I don’t think they’d mix. That’s why we can’t stay more than a couple of days. We’ve got dogs and grandchildren up there. I hope we can get all this mess cleaned up in a couple of days. We’ll have to come back for the sale. Heaven knows when that will be. There’s just so much to do, and I guess I’m not getting much of it done standing out here talking to you. Do you want to come in?”
“Sure. I’ll help pack things up if you would like for me to.”
“We can always use another hand.” She opened the screen door, and they went inside, the dog leading the way. “This is the living room. This is where the neighbor across the street found her. Bless her heart, she was sitting right there in that chair, reading one of her novels. She loved mysteries. And it was as if she had just fallen asleep. The neighbor was bringing her mail in, and she knocked on the door, and when Auntie Liz didn’t answer, she looked in the window and saw her just sitting there as if she’d fallen asleep. Peaceful-like. What a sweet way of goin’. She called the ambulance, you know, the rescue squad, and they broke the lock and came on in. But she was gone when they got here. Just slept away. Heart attack, I guess. That’s how they came up with the time of death. They figured she’d been dead about thirty minutes by the time they got to her. George! George!” she yelled up the steps. “He can’t hear me. He must be in the attic.”
Her attention was quickly back on J. D. “For instance, here’s an old box of pictures we found this morning. I don’t know who any of these people are. I never knew any of my family. Never even knew my grandmother or my grandfather for that matter. I might have seen him once, but I can’t clearly remember.” All the time she was talking, she was handing the pictures to J. D., and he was leafing through them. “Now, that one I’m pretty sure must have been my grandfather, even though there’s nothing written on the back.”
J. D. looked at the tall, thin figure in the three-piece suit and saw Paul Clem staring back at him, his foot raised on the bumper of a 1936 Chevy. Before he thought, he said, “Yeah, that’s him all right.”
“What? You didn’t know him did you? Of course you didn’t. How old are you, son?” Then she chuckled.
“No.” J. D. faked a laugh while cold perspiration broke out on his neck. “I just meant Lizzie looked exactly like him.”
“Lizzie. Funny you should say that. No one called her that anymore. Did she tell you to call her that? Because she was always Miss Elizabeth to all her students and friends. But speaking of my grandfather. I said I never knew him. Did you know what happened to him? Did she ever tell you?”
“No, she never said much about him.”
“I’m not surprised. I mean, I think he was a good man and all, but he had a lot on him. Lost his wife, then lost a son in the war, and one day he just took a shotgun and went upstairs in the front room and ended it all. Shot himself in the head, and nobody at home except poor Auntie Liz—and she was just a teenaged girl at the time.”
J. D. froze at the memory of seeing that final image in the upstairs bedroom. Was the movement he saw really Paul, and could it have been …? He was afraid to finish his thought.
“Right in the house. What a shame. What a crying shame for poor Auntie Liz. It was no wonder she never talked about it. Here are some empty boxes, John. You can pack those books over there and all those knickknacks. She had oodles, didn’t she? This was the room she lived in most. I think there were nights she never even went up to bed. She just slept in that chair. Everything she needed was right here at her fingertips. The TV, a radio, her sewing basket, all those books. And look. Here’s her little Bible they gave her when she was in grade school. A little New Testament. Do you have any idea how old that is?”
“Yeah, I think I do,” J. D. said, absently touching the ragged corners.
“You just make yourself at home. I’ll go up and help George. He falls sometimes. Has trouble with his balance, and he’s got no business up there in that attic by himself.”
And as Lucille’s voice trailed off going up the steps, J. D. knelt down and rubbed Champ’s head again. He needed a minute to think about Paul and the shadow at the window, but he was having trouble processing everything that was being thrown at him. He looked around the room and found it hard to believe that the old woman who had just died here three days ago was the same teenaged girl he had just talked to three days ago. The air was suddenly thick, and his emotions almost too much for him to handle. Champ saved the day when he licked him on the side of the face and brought him back to reality.
J. D. stood and walked around the chair. He looked at the pictures on the wall. Landscapes and flowers. No family portraits or snapshots. The curtains were old and dark, and the room-size rug was worn at the edges. The books ranged from the classics to the mysteries Lucille said her aunt loved. There was everything from Chaucer and Twain to Erle Stanley Gardner and Ngaio Marsh. They were all arranged in alphabetical order according to authors. He looked through the Cs, and sure enough, there was a hardback copy of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library. The same book he still had in the back of the van. He had made a good choice after all. He said aloud, “I knew you’d like that book, Lizzie.”
“Did you say something?”
J. D. turned quickly and saw whom he assumed to be George standing at the bottom of the stairs.
“You must be George Tanner. I’m John Wickman.”
“My wife said you were down here. I’m on my way to the basement. She’s still upstairs. Tell her where I am if she comes down. And don’t let her talk your leg off.”
“I’ll do my best.”
J. D. sat down in Lizzie’s chair. The chair she had died in. He looked across the room at the nineteen-inch TV and the lamp sitting beside it and filled his mind with the idea that he was seeing the final things she had seen just before she closed her eyes for the last time. Champ came and put his chin in J. D.’s lap. With one hand J. D. rubbed the dog’s head, and with the other he reached down and picked up the TV listing insert she had kept on the floor by her chair. Under the paper was an old tan sewing basket. He picked up the basket with his free hand and put it in his lap. He opened it. It’s strange, he thought, how we all keep close to us the things we love the most. The things that tell our life stories.
He reached inside the basket, and among the threads and buttons and thimbles and little packs of needles, he picked up some old campaign buttons. One for somebody named Turner who had run for the Senate in Missouri. A Truman button from 1948. Two movie tickets to the Rialto. This could have been the last movie she and Robert had gone to see together. Coins. Some nickels and dimes and some old eagle half-dollars. A picture in a small silver frame of a man in uniform standing in front of a tank. Robert, again, he was sure. There were a couple of keys, maybe to the house but probably to nothing. Keys often have a way of outstaying their usefulness and even their memory. He looked at a picture of a small country church, and on the border she had written “Easter Sunday 1953.” And in the very bottom of the basket was something yellow he couldn’t quite make out. He dug with his one hand, still stroking Champ’s head, and touched something round and plastic. He picked it up and recognized it immediately. It was a pill bottle, and the faint, faded letters, almost unreadable with age, said, Dr. N. Annata—J. D. Wickman—Amoxicillin. And it was dated three days ago. September 13, 2007.
J. D. began to cry. And he was still crying when Lucille came down the steps. She went to him and hugged him and said, “That’s okay, honey. We all loved her so very much, didn’t we?”
Chapter Twenty-five
The two-hour drive home from Fayetteville was the shortest trip J. D. had ever made. He was aware of nothing the entire way, and when he reached Hanson, he had no memory of any part of it. He had been on autopilot since he pulled away from the curb in front o
f Elizabeth Stockendale’s house—or, more precisely, from the moment he had reached into that old wicker sewing basket and touched a small plastic bottle that had traveled through and bridged time in a way he still could not fathom. His mind was numb, slipping in and out of reality, trying to register what had happened to him in the past six days. He attempted to piece it all together as the road signs and mile markers whizzed past his windshield. And it was truly as if they were going past him instead of the other way around. He had no sense of movement or control. And no matter how much he tried to make it all fit, the one word that kept haunting him was why. The what scared him to death. The how puzzled him. But the why haunted and ate at him like a hungry demon. He had to talk to someone.
Karlie was his first choice, but he knew it would only drive her further away. She didn’t understand what had happened to him—and how could he blame her? After all, her stand was the rational and conventional one. Ask a hundred random people on the street, and they would all agree with her that he needed psychiatric help. And then there was Jack. His oldest and dearest friend, who’d been with him through boyhood scrapes and teenage dreams and neighborhood pranks and all of life’s problems. They had a bond that couldn’t be broken with sword or hammer. But this … this had broken it. He could see it on Jack’s face. Jack doubted him. Jack had never doubted him before. This was a first. And how could he blame him, either? He had to admit that it did sound like the rantings of a madman.
There was only one place he could go, and he suddenly realized he was already headed in that direction. He turned down his second dead-end street for the day. How peculiar that Lizzie and Lavern both lived on a dead-end street.
J. D. walked up the short pathway to the front door and banged the brass door knocker three times. After about twenty seconds, he did it again. He looked at his watch and saw it was almost five thirty. He had stayed a lot longer in Fayetteville than he meant to, but helping Lucille and George clean out some of the rooms had been a comfort to him, and he felt a little closer to Lizzie the longer he stayed. Lucille and George told him to come back tomorrow if he liked, as they wouldn’t leave until sometime Tuesday. He told them he might and meant it.