Bound for the Outer Banks (2 page)

Chapter 2

Ella had thought of Blythe Barrantine a lot in the past two years of her nomadic living. She wondered if BeBe would be proud of her daughter for basically risking life and limb to help convict a man who’d taken her hostage in order to keep himself company on his new life on the run.

“What a selfish, cowardice Jackass,” would surely be her mother’s take on the situation. Ella constantly wondered if BeBe was aware of Ella’s tenacious character when faced with adversity. Her mother was such a believer in the phrase, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Ella wished BeBe had lived long enough to know that she was truly her mother’s daughter. Of course, if BeBe had been living, Ella would often chuckle to herself that there would be no need for any of this because BeBe would have found Dante Vitali and had his testicles mounted on a nice wood panel over the fireplace. Ella could hear her mother now explaining to some unsuspecting city dweller, “Oh yes, I bagged this one in Tunisia where I found him holding my daughter against her will. He used to be under the impression he had big balls working for some dangerous Italian Mafia outfit and keeping my little girl hostage, but they don’t seem so big anymore mounted up there on that big panel of Brazilian cherry.”

Ella knew that BeBe loved her more than anything else in life, and since Ella had lost her parents while only seventeen years old she felt cheated. Dante Vitali had begun to fill a void in her heart. With him she felt loved and protected for the first time since high school.

In a way Ella’s life had paralleled BeBe’s to an extent. BeBe lost her entire family, not due to death, but of her own accord. BeBe did not have a close circle of friends, and aside from a few work acquaintances Ella didn’t either. Eventually Ella’s mother married the love of her life and had a family. Ella had always assumed she would to. She had actually thought Dante Vitali was “the one.” Ella guessed this was where the parallels ended. There was also the lack of a best friend from childhood. She had never had a best friend like most kids.

Ella had always been the top student in her class, a fact which many of her classmates resented. Also, it seemed to Ella that the moment she walked into a room, every female in it made a conscious decision to hate her or avoid her altogether. BeBe used to reassure Ella that it wasn’t her problem. “Honey that’s those girls’ insecurity. You’re smart, talented, and beautiful. It’s just easier to be jealous or forget about you than to stand beside you and be compared to you. Don’t hate them back just because they’re ugly, stupid, and have no self-confidence.”

Weirdly enough this made Ella feel a little better about the situation. She knew there was nothing she’d done to deserve these girls’ ire. It was an inner conflict issue they needed to work out themselves.

“I’m so sorry you don’t have a Harmony in your life. I always pray that you’ll find one.” BeBe would often say.

Ella figured a lot of folks misunderstood what BeBe was saying and actually thought her mother was praying for harmony in Ella’s life, but she had spoken correctly. The similarities ended in BeBe’s and Ella’s young lives regarding having a Harmony.

Blythe Barrantine had been raised in the small town of Manteo, North Carolina on Roanoke Island, which was part of the chain of islands referred to as The Outer Banks. It was a coastal community full of history. She was the daughter of Hadley and Jackson Beatty. Hadley was the quintessential, entitled southern wife.

She was a member of the DAR, Junior League, and she hosted teas and brunches in their palatial late Queen Ann style house. Jackson was a well-respected attorney in the area who was known as an honest, forthright person. Three streets over, just out of the designated Manteo Historic District, was a run-down Texas cottage style home with weathered boards and a rusted tin roof. In this cottage lived Harmony Beauchamp, BeBe Barrantine’s best friend since they were “knee high to a grasshopper,” Ella’s mom would say.

BeBe and Harmony Beauchamp rode the school bus to and from the small Manteo Primary School together for six years. After school they’d pretend they were explorers and build forts made from downed limbs and pine straw. The two would roller skate down the streets of Manteo, play with their Barbie’s, and do their homework together. On weekends they would take little nets into the estuaries and try to find baby stingrays and seahorses. BeBe and Harmony were always careful to slide their feet along the sand under the water so as not to step on the back of any stingray bedding beneath the sand. They knew the result of being stabbed by a barb from a stingray and an injection of its venom would mean debilitating pain, muscle cramps, swelling, and possibly being banned from playing in the estuary by their parents, which would have been the worst result of all.

Harmony and BeBe stayed close enduring the “awkward” years through Manteo Middle School. They endured braces, periods, training bras, and all the other trials and tribulations of that transitional period together, before both blossomed into beautiful young ladies.

Both girls were tall and lanky with dark hair, striped with glossy copper highlights. They would always tell unsuspecting strangers they were twins and they would introduce themselves with silly made up names like Tilly and Milli, Cassie and Lassie, and Lovey and Dovey, as if BeBe and Harmony weren’t silly enough. Manteo was always full of tourists visiting The Lost Colony where in the 1500’s, a group of English settlers essentially disappeared, and to this day there were no definitive answers regarding what happened to them.

The girls were always making up tall tales about wild Indians still living in the woods rumored to be feeding on the occasional tourist. They told the unwitting sightseers of Manteo’s own Loch Ness type monster, a goliath sized sea snake they had dubbed “Leviathon.” BeBe and Harmony liked to tell this story most to the inexperienced tourists in the Kayak rental line.

The girls both tried out for cheerleader their freshman year at Manteo High School. They practiced their double stunts, tumbling, try out cheers, jumps, and dance routines together. At the end of tryouts, after both of their names were called out as having “made it,” the girls squealed and jumped up and down, hugging and congratulating one another.

They ran to Blythe’s house first announcing to Miss Hadley the good news. Blythe and Harmony repeated the tryout cheer for Miss Hadley ending it with a loud, “Goooooo Redskins!” followed by perfectly executed Herkie jumps. Hadley clapped her hands together and yelled “Bravo!” and hugged both girls.

“Momma, we’ve got to go tell Mrs. Beauchamp!” Blythe shouted, which was the name her mother always called her. Hadley Beatty had never liked her daughter’s nickname coined by a preschool teacher at the First Presbyterian Church of Manteo. She politely asked the teacher to cease calling her “BeBe,” but all the toddling classmates had already dubbed Blythe “BeBe” and Blythe loved her “new name” as she referred to it.

Harmony Beauchamp cringed every time anyone accompanied her to the run down cottage she called home. BeBe had never once commented on the fact that her friend’s home was virtually falling in on itself. There were holes in the front porch and random pieces of rotted lumber had fallen of the walls. The tin on the steep sloped roof of the Texas cottage had rusted but was still intact. Every time there was a downpour, Harmony fully expected it to begin showering inside the house.

The kids on the bus had been cruel to Harmony and her sister Melody, taunting them with phrases like, “We’re at the Beauchamp shack!” and “The Beauchamp shack, where cooties attack!” Luckily a new bus driver took over the route when Harmony was in third grade. She sent notes home to all the children’s parents stating that “taunting of any of God’s children would not be tolerated” and if it continued she would expel them from the bus and the parents would have to get out of their pajamas and drive their ill-mannered Godless children to school. After one particularly ferocious, stout, frizzy headed middle schooler named Lizzy was promptly expelled from the bus for announcing to everyone that Harmony Beauchamp’s house wasn’t fit for her dogs, parents took note. The riot act was read to their children and the taunting finally ceased much to Harmony’s relief. Blythe had always sat on the bus with Harmony and hated what the other kids said. She had tried to stop it but then they turned on her as well calling her “cootie lover.”

But on this day those taunts were the last thing on Harmony Beauchamp’s mind. She and BeBe half skipped and half ran up the gray sand drive to the house where the kudzu had begun to creep up the loose balusters on one side of the porch. Since Mrs. Beauchamp had up and left no one kept the growth of the kudzu in check. No spring flowers had been planted either. Although the cottage was in great disrepair, Myrna Beauchamp had always grown flowers from seed, since that’s all they could afford, to add some semblance of beauty to an otherwise depressing spectacle of wood rot, rust, and scrub brush.

Harmony ran to the tattered screen door, flung it open, and found her younger sister, Melody, putting water on to boil for a head of cabbage. Harmony grabbed her sister and twirled her around yelling, “I made it!” Melody began to shriek and jump up and down holding hands with her sister. Horace Beauchamp exited from his bedroom where he’d been napping since he was always fishing for his livelihood when the sun came up.

“What’s all this racket out here?” He asked.

Harmony approached her father while Melody and BeBe stayed in the kitchen clearly worried about his reaction to what they considered glorious news.

Harmony said cautiously, “Daddy, I made cheerleader.”

“Well, good for you but won’t that cost a lot of money?” Horace sputtered, clearly annoyed.

“I don’t think so,” answered Harmony. “except for maybe paying for my uniform.”

“Well, we barely have enough money for food since ya Momma runned off. Not that she made much at the Food World, but it helped.”

“But Daddy,” protested Harmony. “Please, this is really important.”

Horace retorted, “More important than eatin’? Go cry to your Momma. The answer is no.”

Ever since Myrna Beauchamp had run off with a door to door salesman hawking life insurance, Horace had been bitter and took out his anger on his two daughters who looked remarkably like their mother.

The salesman would come by and woo Myrna at the grocery store where she was a check out lady. When Myrna confided in him that had she not gotten pregnant with Harmony and married Horace Beauchamp, she would have liked to have moved to Nashville and tried her hand at making it as a singer. Myrna wrote her own songs and would serenade Horace and the children as she made supper every night. The shifty salesman convinced Myrna he had a brother in Nashville in the recording business and she walked out of Food World one day with Lindy Maddox, convinced that she would become a star and come back to get Harmony and Melody to live in her fine home in Nashville. Lindy took his time getting to Nashville and stopped in various and sundry cheap motels along the way, all the while painting pictures of his brother’s recording studio and rubbing elbows with producers and famous recording artists on a daily basis to the naïve Myrna.

It was late at night when the runaway lovers arrived on the outskirts of Nashville. Lindon announced he was out of cigarettes and that he was going to a convenience store up the road. After three hours Myrna Beauchamp knew the jig was up for her and Lindon and any dreams of becoming a star and pulling her daughters from the grips of poverty were now over. She took some meager earnings she had hidden in a dress pocket and bought a bus ticket to Raleigh where her sister lived. The last Harmony heard of her mother was that she had “taken to the bed” and tried to numb her pain of betrayal and lost hope with large tumblers of straight Wild Turkey Bourbon. Horace’s death threats if she pursued custody of their children had put an end to the thought of ever seeing her girls again anytime soon.