When Did We Lose Harriet? Read online

  “I don’t know what fair’s got to do with it,” he said glumly, “but if it’s what I’ve got, it’s what I’ve got. Come on!” He pulled himself to his feet and reached for my hand. “We’ve got to plant rosebuds while we may.”

  “Surely it’s ‘gather’ rosebuds?”

  He shook his head firmly. “Nope. I want them to multiply. Come on!” He tugged my hand, and together we ran, laughing, through the heat.

  Twenty-Five

  Does not wisdom call out? Does not

  understanding raise her voice?

  Proverbs 8:1

  While Josheba and Lewis were gallivanting all over Old Alabama Town, I, MacLaren, was trying to talk some sense into Carter. When he came by to see Jake, I walked him to the elevator. “Dee Sykes identified that picture as Harriet, Carter.”

  He said a word he would never say in front of Glenna, then turned bright red. “I’ve heard worse in my life, honey,” I told him, “and you’ve got a lot on your plate right now.”

  “You don’t know the half of it, Miss MacLaren. A lot of people are on vacation this week, another batch is down with a virus, and we’ve had a series of burglaries that have us all hopping. And now you tell me we may have messed up a case back in June. That’s going to mean an incredible amount of paperwork, and the Sykes family is important enough that it could hit all the papers. That isn’t going to make anybody happy.”

  He’d left out one thing. “You haven’t even mentioned the trouble of finding out when and how Harriet died.”

  He cleared his throat and looked miserable. “I doubt we ever will, ma’am. Not after all this time. Forensics could tell us how long she lay there, by looking at the…uh…well, maggots. But after that long lying out, nobody could tell when she died.”

  I heaved a deep sigh. “I hate to think of that child being just one more unsolved murder, Carter.”

  “She wasn’t murdered, Miss MacLaren!” Can’t you get that through your thick head? He didn’t say those words, but they rang in the silence, and his face was flushed from holding them in. “There was absolutely no sign of foul play. That girl just got sick and died. Look, it’s really great what you’ve already done, but it’s also enough. With Jake going home tomorrow—”

  He didn’t have to finish the sentence. We both knew what he meant. His mama just hadn’t taught him any polite way to say it: Old woman, bug off!

  He jabbed the elevator button. “I guess you’ll be heading back up the road pretty soon, won’t you?” He didn’t need to sound so relieved.

  “Pretty soon, I guess. By the way, Carter, I took Jake’s car to William Sykes’s mechanic this morning, and found him fixing William’s truck. It has a streak of darker red paint on it that the mechanic and I both think came off Jake’s fender.”

  Carter looked at me with what I hoped was admiration and not exasperation. “You sure do beat all. Just happened to use William’s mechanic, huh? Will he testify?”

  “Since I was pretending to be a friend of William’s, I couldn’t ask. Besides, I doubt we’d ever bring charges. But at least the mechanic will remember, if it comes up again.”

  “I’ll go see him tomorrow. I owe it to Jake.” Carter took down the address. “You said the person who ran you off the road had long blonde hair. Mr. Sykes is nearly bald.”

  “Maybe he had on a wig. I don’t know. I didn’t get that good a look. Or maybe it was Ricky. Did you ask him?”

  He frowned and scratched the back of his neck. “We can’t find him. Somebody went by the trailer where he used to live, but his girlfriend said while he was in jail, she threw out all his stuff and moved her brother in. She didn’t know where Ricky is.”

  “Good for her, at least. Now, Carter, I sure do wish you’d try to find somebody who saw Harriet after June fourth. That’s the day her trustee took her to the bank.”

  “Bank?”

  I realized I hadn’t told him everything, but from the way he was eyeing that open elevator door, this wasn’t the place or the time.

  “Tuesday morning is the last definite time anybody remembers seeing her,” I said hurriedly. “I wish you’d see if you could find somebody who saw her later.”

  He left without promising a thing.

  On the way back to Jake, I remembered something: June fourth was a Tuesday.

  I puttered around Jake’s room for a minute or two, watering his flowers and straightening his blind, then I asked, real casual, “Did you work the desk down at the teen center on the first Tuesday in June?”

  Jake glowered. I was interrupting a rerun of Perry Mason. Jake prefers his mysteries in one-hour segments with somebody else doing the detecting and doing it fast. “How do you know anything about a teen center, Miss Nosy?”

  “Because some woman from your church made me cover for you last week. You owe me one, brother, and don’t forget it. But don’t worry about that right now. Just stir your brain cells a minute and tell me if you volunteered down there the first Tuesday in June.”

  He thought a minute, then nodded. “Sure. It was my first day, because school had just let out.” He turned back to Perry Mason, who was doing his usual fancy stuff in the courtroom. Then Jake’s brain finally kicked in. “Are you poking your nose into something that doesn’t concern you, Sis?”

  “No, Bubba. It concerns me. It concerns me a lot. So let Perry Mason handle his own case for a minute and help me with mine.”

  “I swan,” he said, disgusted. “Leave you alone in a town for one blooming week, and you dig up a mystery.”

  “I didn’t exactly dig it up—more like pulled it up. So would you tell me what you remember about that morning?”

  He was silent. I could almost hear him turning mental pages. “I had to go to the dentist first, I remember. Hated to be late my first day, but a crown came off the day before, so I called the director and told him I’d get there as soon as the dentist could glue it back. He said one of the kids would answer the phone until I got there. Little white girl. Only one I ever saw down there, in fact, and she was just there the one day.”

  “Harriet?”

  “Yeah, Harriet. Not a name you hear much anymore.”

  Speak for yourself, I thought. “Did Harriet stick around after you got there?”

  “Yeah, all morning. In fact, she was fixing to leave when I did, so I gave her a ride downtown to catch a bus.”

  I couldn’t believe this! “Did she say where she was going?”

  “I don’t remember—wait, she said something about miracles. No, I know! She asked if I believed in miracles, and I said, ‘Sure I do.’ Then she said, ‘Well, maybe I’m gonna start believing in them too.’ Her eyes were right pretty—yellow and shining. I don’t think I’ve seen her around the center since that day, though. What’s this about, Clara? Why do you want to know about Harriet?”

  “You’ll need to ask Glenna—and here she is.” I turned him over gladly to the next shift. I figured Glenna would tell him enough to satisfy him but not enough to upset him. Glenna didn’t know yet that Harriet was dead. I hoped she’d have enough sense to leave the Buick out of the story, too.

  When we got home that night, I had one of those moments of deep sadness that always come after somebody dies. I stepped out of the car and took a deep breath of thick, hot air sweet with honeysuckle, roses, boxwood, and Russian tea olive. Then it hit me that Myrna and Harriet couldn’t enjoy that splendid evening. I found myself brushing away angry tears for two women I never actually knew.

  Propped on my pillow a little later, I reached for my Bible and hunted through the gospels for the parable of the lost sheep. When I located it in Matthew’s eighteenth chapter, I found, to my surprise, that it was framed as a question: What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off?

  “Not anymore,” I muttered bitterly. “We let them wander off and don’t even notice they’re gone.”

  What do you
think? The words leapt from the page as if newly written.

  That was the question, wasn’t it? Not what did anybody else think, but what did I—MacLaren Crane Yarbrough—think? I answered aloud. “I think somebody ought to find out what happened to that poor child, but nobody else but Josheba seems to care.” My eye fell on a later verse: Your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones be lost.

  Okay, so it was me, Josheba, and God, but two of us were fresh out of ideas.

  As I lay in the dim room waiting for sleep to come, I got to thinking about how often circumstances and people get woven together into a pattern none of us can see at the time. Some people would say it was just coincidence that Jake signed up for the center on Tuesdays, that he had his heart attack on a Monday so I went in his place, that I am the kind of person who can’t sit in a filthy room without cleaning it up, that I pulled out the sofa bed and found Harriet’s money, that Josheba—who was already concerned for Harriet—was at the library desk that particular morning, that Glenna has a cousin in the homicide division. I pity those people. They see the pattern, but miss the Weaver. As an archbishop of Canterbury once said, “Coincidence? Sure I believe in coincidence. When I pray, coincidences happen.”

  And in case you’re about to stand up and stump for free will, think about this: I had free will as to whether I sat in that filthy room without cleaning it. God just knew I wasn’t likely to do so. I guess it’s a matter of knowing the kind of threads you have to work with, and choosing the right ones.

  Which, considering the kinds of assignments I sometimes get, is a most unflattering thought.

  We trudged side by side, the brown-haired child and I. We passed through gates as large and hollow as the doorway to hell. Inside, I could see leaning white tombstones and tall obelisks crammed together against a dark gray sky. As we walked down a crooked dirt path between the tombstones, she reached out and clutched my arm. I looked at her. She had a new face. Harriet’s face. And she was terrified.

  Twenty-Six

  Poverty is the ruin of the poor.

  Proverbs 10:15

  Thursday morning, I lay in the dim dawn light listening to birds waking up, trying to think through everything I knew. I didn’t get any flashes of inspiration, but I did get a few more questions. What made Harriet suddenly believe in miracles? Who took her back to Dee’s for clothes? Why did she go to the cemetery? When? How? Where did she stay that weekend after she left Dee’s?

  It was possible I would never know all the answers, but I might be able to find some. Where she had stayed that weekend, for instance. If anybody knew, Kateisha would. And surely Harriet hadn’t walked to the cemetery. Was that where she was going when Jake took her to the bus? Would a bus driver remember her?

  Also, I wanted to visit the cemetery where her body was found.

  But first, this was the day we were bringing Jake home. I was both delighted and, as you can well imagine, full of dread.

  Sure enough, as soon as we pulled in their driveway, he growled right off, “Where’s my car?”

  Bless Glenna’s heart, she said, “It needed to be moved, honey, so I could get you close to the walk. Come on in, now, and let’s get you settled, so I can start fixing you some lunch.”

  Joe Riddley called not long after we got there. “Well, Little Bit, did you get the old deadbeat home? Let me yell at him.” As soon as they’d exchanged insults, Jake handed me back the phone. “I think he wants to talk to you again. I can’t imagine why.”

  “When you comin’ home?” Joe Riddley demanded. “Sunday suit you?”

  I couldn’t think of a single reason for staying later that wouldn’t bring him to Montgomery by tomorrow morning. “I’ll try to get a plane on Sunday afternoon.”

  He hooted. “You’ve been in Montgomery so long you just said after-noon, like they do over there. I need to get you back home so you can learn to talk right again. See what reservations you can get and call me back. I’ll be at the airport with bells on.”

  “Forget the bells, honey,” I told him. “Just be there on time.”

  Jake and Glenna both needed to rest after lunch, but I didn’t dare lie down. I feared my dreams. This might be a good time to see Kateisha, and maybe Josheba would like to go with me. “Want to meet me at the center and see what she has to say?” I asked.

  “I’ll do better than that,” Josheba offered. “I’ll come get you.”

  “Is Morse home yet?” I asked as I climbed in the car.

  “Not yet, but he’s promised to get back by Saturday. My club is having a big dance, and I don’t want to miss it.”

  Two blocks from the center we stopped for a light and saw Twaniba standing listlessly on the corner. Josheba rolled down her window. “Do you want a ride to the center? We’re going over to see if Kateisha is there.”

  “Kateisha’s home with toothache,” Twaniba murmured, scarcely moving her mouth.

  “Do you know where she lives?”

  “Yessum.” Twaniba gave lifeless but accurate instructions.

  Kateisha lived in one of the most dilapidated houses I’d ever visited, a dingy white bungalow with a sagging porch, faded brown trim, chipped cement steps, and a bare dirt yard. Not one flower bloomed around the spindly, untrimmed spirea that cowered in front.

  Kateisha herself was sitting on the edge of the splintery porch, picking her hair. She hadn’t made the spout yet today, so it all stood straight off her head like she’d stuck her finger in a socket. One cheek was plumper than usual.

  “I hear you’ve got a toothache,” I greeted her, concerned. “Have you seen a dentist?”

  “Don’t need no dentist. It’ll get better. Always does. What you all doing here?” She tried to sound casual, but I could tell she was both pleased and embarrassed.

  “Looking for you.” Josheba sat on the rough porch boards with her feet on a cracked concrete step. In honor of my new skirt, I decided to stand.

  “How’d you know how to find me? Did Screwy Lewey give out my address?”

  “No, it was Twaniba.” I swatted away a curious fly.

  “Good old Cowface.” Kateisha pulled a weed that grew up beside the porch and used it to tickle her plump, bare knee. She looked at Josheba from the corner of her eyes. “You still seeing Mr. Henly?” she asked suspiciously.

  Josheba laughed, but seemed nervous. “I’m not seeing him, girl. I’m engaged to a man named Morse.”

  Kateisha glowered. “You like him, though. I can tell.” She threw the weed into the dirt. “Could be dangerous. Harriet used to like him. Now she’s missing.”

  I looked at her sharply. “Do you think that’s why she’s missing?”

  Her big shoulders heaved in a shrug. “Don’t ast me. All I know is, Harriet got somethin’ on Screwy Lewey, and two weeks later she up ‘n’ disappeared.”

  “We think we’ve found her,” Josheba said flatly.

  Kateisha’s eyes widened. “Where? What she been doing all this time?”

  “If it’s really her, she’s dead, honey.” I gave her as many details as I thought wise.

  Kateisha sucked in her breath and winced as the air hit her sore tooth, but she didn’t mention the pain. She sat silent for some time, then demanded, “When, you say?”

  “June tenth, in Oakwood Cemetery.”

  “What’d I tell you?” Kateisha muttered in a low voice. “She got something on Mr. Henly, and somebody offed her.”

  “What do you mean she ‘got something on him’?” I asked. “What was it?”

  Josheba clasped her hands so tightly in her lap, the skin was almost splitting.

  “I don’t know,” Kateisha shook her head. “But ‘bout two weeks before school let out, Harriet say she found out somethin’ about Mr. Henly he didn’t never want nobody to know. She say she could get offed for knowin’, but he was payin’ her—”

  Josheba yanked a weed that was growing right in the step, and twisted it like she’d like to wring Kateisha’s neck. “That’s not the way it
was, Kateisha. I know what Harriet knew about Mr. Henly. It wasn’t anything to get killed for knowing.”

  “I know she hit on him for money not to tell,” Kateisha insisted, rolling her eyes.

  Josheba rolled her eyes right back. “So she couldn’t have been afraid of him, then, could she?”

  “Maybe not.” Kateisha picked her hair like she had nothing better to do. In a minute she muttered, “Harriet had something on her uncle, too, but I don’t know what. Bragged all the time he pay her ten dollars a week not to tell her auntie.” She wiggled around and stuck the pick in her back pocket. “Could be he offed her ‘stead of paying up one week.” She thought it over and rejected her own suggestion. “Nanh—he wasn’t payin’ that much.”

  I shared her doubts. “How about Ricky Dodd—do you know him?” I asked.

  “Sure. He ain’t much, but he was sorta like a brother to Harriet, you know? ‘Cept’n more so. I don’t worry over Dré like Harriet did Ricky. Dré can take care of himself—and if he don’t, it’s no skin off me. Harriet worried all the time over Ricky—but she didn’t take nothin’ off him. Said if he gave her trouble, she’d see he got busted.”

  “For what?” I wondered if Kateisha knew about Ricky’s recent jail stint.

  “Oh,” Kateisha waved casually, “you know. Drugs, that sort of stuff. He’s been in twict already.” She sounded like that was a normal part of life. Maybe in hers, it was.

  “Did you know that Harriet took a gun away from him?”

  “Course I knew. She stashed it in a drawer, but I told her she better put it in a safer place. Anybody coulda found it there—that cousin of hers, her auntie, her uncle, anybody. Even her auntie’s maid. Folks don’t look too kindly on kids with guns.” You’d have thought she was the world’s foremost authority on that subject.

  “So what did Harriet do with the gun?”

  “I dunno. Said she’d get rid of it, but I forgot to ast if she did.” Kateisha found a scab on her knee and started to pick at it.