by R. R. Banks
What the hell was going on here?’
Coy looked at her angrily, then stomped across the office to a filing cabinet. He sifted through files inside and then pulled out a manila envelope. Out of it he withdrew a card that he carried over to the counter. He glared at Rue suspiciously as he held the card and the piece of paper up, then looked over the top of his glasses at both. I assumed that the card that he had gotten out of the file was the original hold request filled out by Rue’s father years before and that he was now scrutinizing the signatures on both to make sure that the letter he had just received really was from the dead man.
“Well?” Rue asked.
Coy looked at her again, the expression on his face tense.
“Fine,” he said. “Fill this out.”
He handed Rue another card, which she filled out hastily and shoved it back toward him. Coy took all three pieces of paper, put them back into the envelope, and tucked it back into place in the filing cabinet. He then stomped through the door behind him into the back of the office. A few moments later the door swung open and he came through looking like a reject Santa Claus with a bulging mail sack over his back and a crate tucked under his arm. He brought them into the middle of the lobby and dropped them at Rue’s feet, then headed back to the back room. She stared at the mail, stunned either that her plan worked or at the sheer volume of mail that was now sitting on the floor. Potentially both.
A few moments later Coy came back again with another load of mail. These, too, ended up on the floor in front of Rue.
“Is that it?” she asked.
“One more.”
She let out an exasperated sigh as he made his way into the backroom again and came back carrying a crate that looked like it was entirely full of fruitcakes. He set this down on the floor and looked at Rue pointedly.
“Now that’s it.”
Without offering to help her carry the haul out to her car, Coy returned to the counter and flashed me a smile.
“Can I help you?”
I walked carefully around the pile of mail as Rue grabbed one of the bags and started out of the office. Placing the envelope that had contained the mysterious letter from Steven McAllister on the counter, I looked at Coy.
“Do you happen to know who sent this?” I asked.
Coy picked up the envelope and turned it over a few times.
“Doesn’t look like it has a return address.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t. The letter inside was signed Steven McAllister.”
Coy looked up at me blankly.
“Then I would venture to say that it came from Steven McAllister.”
“But that’s the thing. I don’t know a Steven McAllister. I don’t know any McAllisters. I was hoping that you might have seen who mailed it and recognize him. Maybe he actually came into the post office.”
Coy shook his head.
“No. I would have remembered that. This here is my post mark and it means that it was actually mailed from someplace.”
I had the visual of Coy standing at the counter with a pile of mail, stamping each piece, and handing it to people coming in to get theirs for the day. His operations couldn’t be so complex. I nodded, feeling defeated, and took the letter from the counter. When I turned around I saw Rue coming in for another trip with her own pile of mail.
“Can I help you carry some of that out?” I asked.
She looked up at me gratefully.
“Thanks.”
I grabbed a crate and followed her out to her car, where I shoved it into the back next to a frilly pink car seat. The cushioned headrest insert was a reminder of just how tiny her newborn daughter was and I got an unexpected pang in my heart thinking about Lorelei. At just a year old she was already growing up so fast and I found part of my mind and heart longing for those days when she was still a squishy little newborn.
“So how did you manage that?” I asked.
Rue looked up at me.
“Manage what?” she asked.
“Getting permission from your dead father to release the mail.”
She laughed slightly.
“Oh, that. Silly Putty.”
“Silly Putty?”
She nodded.
“I found a document with his signature on it and used Silly Putty to pick it up and transfer it to another piece of paper, then I outlined it in another pen, picked it up again, and transferred it onto the release that I wrote up.”
“That’s devious,” I said with a laugh.
“It was actually Richard’s idea. I never would have thought about it.”
“Ah, yes. Your fiancé,” I said. “I read the article.”
We laughed and she nodded, looking slightly embarrassed at the acknowledgement of the tiff I had witnessed between her and Coy.
“Yes, that would be him.” She looked at me in the same way that I had seen so many people in the Hollow look at me since I had gotten back. “And how about you? Anything special going on in your life?”
It was a somewhat feeble attempt at skirting around the questions that she really wanted to ask, but I went along with it. That was part of growing up in the Hollow. At some point, everyone was up in everyone else’s business. It was just how we functioned.
“Well, since you’ve been deprived the journalistic majesty that is the Holler Holler, you may not have heard that we’re trying something new at the farm this year.”
“I had heard something about that,” Rue said. “Something about a haunt?”
I nodded.
“That was Roman’s idea. He thinks it will bring business to the farm again.”
“I’m guessing Roman is the mysterious man who’s been seen hanging around your family’s farm?”
“That would be him.”
“He certainly has the tall, dark, and handsome thing going on.”
Her tone sounded leading, as if she was trying to get me to tell her something about our relationship, but the truth was that I didn’t have anything to tell her that I thought she didn’t already know, or at least suspect.
“He does,” I agreed, then went for the big reveal, knowing it’s what she wanted anyway. “Lorelei is looking more and more like him every day.”
Rue glanced over her shoulder toward the post office.
“I’d be careful. You might end up with a birth announcement in the newspaper.”
“Oh, I already had one of those,” I pointed out. “Besides, I know everybody who’s seen him has figured it out. It’s not like she looks terribly like me.”
“So, what is…. I mean…. are the two of you…”
I could see her mind churning, trying to figure out how to ask the question that I knew that she wanted to without sounding like she was sitting around under the dryers at the Up-Do or Dye beauty shop. I was briefly tempted to see just how much she would squirm and if she would eventually give up or if she would actually ask, but I decided against it.
“No,” I said simply. “We aren’t. But he wants to know Lorelei and I suppose he has the right to.”
“Do you really think that’s all it is?”
I was surprised by the question. That’s not what I would have thought that she would have on her mind. My mouth opened and closed a few times but I couldn’t figure out any words to say. Finally, I found a few, though they were likely not the most effective.
“Do I really think that’s all what is?”
I never cease to amaze myself with my mastery of the English language.
“That man doesn’t look like he fits into the Hollow terribly well.”
“No,” I said. “He’s fairly out of his element here.”
Rue nodded knowingly.
“Yet he came all the way out here and hasn’t left since he got here.”
“I told you, he wants to get to know the baby.”
“Take it from someone who has been in this type of situation,” Rue said, leaning down to pick up the crate of fruitcakes, “a man like that isn’t going to go out of his
way and change his life completely just for a baby. If that was the case, he would have just gotten custody of the baby, or at least gotten a court order requiring you to bring her to him for visitation. He wouldn’t move his life out here, stop working, and put everything on hold. A man like that has something else on his mind.”
“Like what?”
“Babies change men. As soon as they find out that they’re going to be a father, or that they are a father, they see the whole world differently, and that definitely applies to the woman who carried that baby. Your Roman isn’t just here because of Lorelei. He’s here for you. Now you have to decide what you’re going to do about that. If you really do only want him here to get to know the daughter that the two of you share, then you have to make sure that he knows that. Because if you don’t, he’s just going to keep trying.”
“What if I don’t know what I want?”
Rue gave a small smile.
“You have to be willing to find out.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Roman
Bitsy looked distracted when she got back to the house. She walked directly into the kitchen and put down three heavy-looking objects she carried under her arms.
“What are those?” I asked, coming into the room with the baby in my arms.
“Fruitcakes,” she said.
“Oh. I thought that they looked a bit festively wrapped for bricks. Why do you have fruitcakes?”
Bitsy looked at me as if she was struggling to process something, then shook her head, squeezing her eyes closed briefly.
“Um, it’s kind of a long story. How’s the baby? Was she good?”
She came toward me and scooped Lorelei out of my arms and onto her hip. The baby gurgled her happiness and gave her mother a kiss. Bitsy smiled at her, seemingly lost in enjoying a few seconds with her daughter.
“She’s good. She got tired of walking around in circles so we’ve been working on the Itsy-Bitsy Spider. I figured that one was appropriate for her to know.”
She laughed and nodded.
“And one that I have been actively avoiding since she was born,” she said. “But I guess I can’t really deprive my child of a childhood song so quintessential that even Mr. Non-Baby himself knows it.”
“I’m not Non-Baby,” I argued. “I just never really interacted with a lot of them. But I was one myself once and Nia was one and I spent some time with her when she was. I remember some of the stuff.”
“The greatest hits.”
“Something like that. So, did you find anything out at the post office?”
She shook her head.
“Only that Coy is stubborn as an old mule ox but he can be fooled by a toy.”
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head.
“Again. Long story. He doesn’t know who sent the letter. It was mailed from somewhere. So, I don’t know what to do now.”
She looked sad and I took another step toward her.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She shook her head and shrugged slightly.
“I don’t know. I guess it sounds silly, but I was starting to feel optimistic about this whole thing. Your stories were total disasters, just like I thought they would be, but that letter. Something about it is so intriguing. I thought that it might be the perfect basis for the haunt. Now, even that’s over.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I told her. “All you did was go to the post office to find out if Coy knew the person who sent it. You’re going to give up that easily?”
“I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do,” Bitsy said, sounding defensive.
“I just didn’t imagine you as the type of person who would just throw in the towel without even putting any effort into it. If you think that that letter is going to make the haunt what it should be, then you need to find out what it’s all about.”
“Me?” she asked. “I’m supposed to do this all by myself? You’re the one who came up with this big idea, and then you’re just going to throw me out on a limb all by myself and make me figure it all out?”
“I didn’t say that. If you want my help, I’m glad to give it to you. You’re the one who didn’t ask for my help or for what I thought that you should do. You just rushed off to the post office.”
“Well, what do you think we should do?” Bitsy asked.
“You said that your family has been here for a really long time.”
“Even before the Hollow itself.”
“So maybe what this McAllister guy is talking about is something that happened a long time ago.” I hesitated before I asked my next question, not wanting to offend her, but honestly not knowing. “Is there a library around here?”
“A library?” she asked.
“Yeah. Somewhere where we can look up the farm. Look at property records, deeds, birth records, death records…those types of things.”
“What you probably want is the courthouse. That’s where those kinds of records would be. That and we can use my computer.”
“No library? I mean, the courthouse might have records and things, but they are unlikely to have newspapers and other things that would be useful.”
Bitsy looked to the side.
“Well…”
Half an hour later we were walking up the front steps of a house on the other side of the Hollow. Lorelei was sleeping in Bitsy’s arms and I was carrying far more belongings and accessories than I could ever imagine a little baby would need.
“What are we doing?” I asked. “I thought we were going to the library.”
Bitsy rang the doorbell and made a hushing sound. I couldn’t tell if she was hushing me or the baby, but I went ahead and went silent anyway. A few seconds later an ancient woman came to the door and opened it. She peered out through the ornate storm door at us.
“Hi, there, Bitsy,” she said.
“Hi, Miss Daisy Pearl. We’re here for the library.”
“Well, come on in, then,” the elderly woman said, unlocking the storm door and pushing it out of the way so that we could go inside. “I’ll take that pretty little one off your hands while you’re doing your research. Just bring everything right into the parlor.”
I followed Bitsy into the house and was immediately caught by the warm, nostalgic smell of cookies baking. It was one of those smells that always made me feel like a little boy, a disarming feeling that wasn’t always welcome. When I felt that way, all I wanted to do was sit down with a glass of cold milk and a pile of cookies and pretend that nothing else existed in the world, remembering a time when I could hide from the stress and chaos in my life in the warmth and fragrance of my grandmother’s kitchen. While there were times when I loved the way that this felt, there were also times when it kept me from feeling as powerful as I needed to be to take on some of the things that I faced each day.
I lowered the bags and folded playpen that I carried to the worn but well-loved rug in the middle of the parlor and turned to watch Bitsy hand Lorelei off to Miss Daisy Pearl. The baby didn’t even stir and the elderly woman settled into a rocking chair next to the window, seamlessly moving into a smooth glide as she stared down into Lorelei’s sweet face.
“Come on,” Bitsy said.
“Where are we going?” I asked as I crossed the room toward her.
“The library,” she said. “Didn’t you say that’s where we would find the most information?”
I felt confused, but I followed her back through the foyer and toward the kitchen. The smell got stronger and I saw cooling racks lined with perfect little rows of cookies filling the counters and table. I resisted the urge to grab one and followed Bitsy toward a door tucked in the back corner of the room. She opened it and used a chain hanging from the ceiling to turn on a single bulb positioned over a narrow flight of bare wooden steps leading down.
“Are we researching the story to turn into the haunt, or are you bringing me down here to make one?” I asked.
Bitsy glared at me over her shoulder and start
ed down the stairs. Though I had only been partway joking, I followed her through the door and down the first few steps.
“Close the door,” she called up.
Oh, perfect. So, no one can hear my screams. Maybe I should just go ahead and tell her.
I closed the door and continued down the stairs. When I reached the bottom, I was surprised to see not the damp, dingy basement filled with old onions and disintegrating cans of food that I was expecting, but rather a clean if grey room lined with bookshelves. Three tables were in the center of the room and a fourth was positioned against the stone wall beneath a narrow window to the far side. A rug that likely started its life upstairs in the parlor and made its way down here when the one upstairs was acquired got a second chance cushioning a cluster of aged, but comfortable-looking chairs in one corner. It looked, for all rights, like a tiny library.
“The Whiskey Hollow Library?” I asked as I approached Bitsy.
She looked around and nodded.
“Miss Daisy Pearl’s family has been acting as historians for the Hollow since the beginning. They’ve gathered up books from yard sales and when people have died, and they’ve kept up with the Hollow and everyone in it as best as they can.”
I was impressed. I never would have imagined anything like this would have existed in this unassuming little house, or even in the Hollow in general, and I felt a hint of guilt at the assumptions that I was so quick to make.
This was working out even better than I hoped it would.
I walked up to the table where she was standing and looked down at the book she had already pulled out.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Whiskey Hollow’s answer to the census. Miss Daisy Pearl’s family has been writing down the names of everyone who lives here since the beginning. Look.”
She pointed at the last page where “Lorelei Galloway” had been written alongside her birthdate. There were only two names beneath hers. One was a baby born just weeks before, the other, a man a few years younger than me, both with the same last name. I felt a pang in my heart, and looked at Bitsy again.