Death in Reel Time (10 page)

“She's not exactly a girl, Coco,” I said. “She's almost my age.”

“Oh, trust me, she's a girl,” Coco insisted. “A very impulsive, very unstable girl. But Marydale loves her dearly, so I know there's got to be something to her. I'll try to get to know her and mentor her if I can.”

“You're a good egg, Coco,” I said.

“I'm a fried egg,” she said. “I'm going home to sink into a hot bath.”

“Thanks for this,” I said, motioning to the printouts. “Great work.”

“I was taught by the best,” she said as she picked up her bag and made for the door.

I searched through databases on the Internet for a while, trying to catch Olivia's father's trail, but Johnny Hargett had left few footprints after he slipped out of Crawford, North Carolina, leaving behind his very pregnant young wife.

All I'd managed to find was an arrest record for John L. Hargett on a drunk-and-disorderly charge in a town about thirty miles south of Crawford. The name Hargett was not uncommon, but the middle initial narrowed things down. If this was our Johnny he'd spent three days in the county jail, was released, and walked out into the sunlight and right off the end of the earth. Or so it would seem. I made a note to follow up. Maybe I could unearth the actual arrest record.

I spent another fruitless fifteen minutes searching, but none of my sources coughed up any information. I decided to go back to mining Olivia's family artifacts.

Celestine Hargett's collection of diaries was enough to make my genealogist's heart go pitter-pat. She wasn't a particularly inspired writer, but she'd taken her teacher's instruction in the Palmer Method earnestly and her handwriting was consistent, easy to read, and tidy. And she was
dedicated.
She wrote in her journal daily, almost without fail. And even in those rare instances when she skipped a day or
two she'd do a roundup summary of what had transpired in the gap when she made her next entry. She was open and confessional in the diary—up to a point. She was circumspect enough that she must not have entirely trusted her hiding place.

I located the diaries that covered the period between Johnny and Renny's marriage and the time he disappeared and brought them to the worktable. Then I went to the closet and grabbed a stack of the dot-matrix printer paper I hoard for constructing timelines. I stretched it out along the length of the worktable, reinforced the perforations with tape, and drew three lines down the length of the paper: one for Olivia's paternal family, one for her maternal family, and one for historical events to set the family into the context of their times. I ticked in all the birth, marriage, and death dates that we knew and a few major historical markers, then opened the first diary and began to read.

October 25, 1941

I am bone weary, but proud. I put up fifteen pints of applesauce and eight of apple butter today. They looked so pretty I couldn't help but stand there in the cellar and admire the way the light from the window hit the sides of the jars. Riley helped me gather the apples from the orchard yesterday and Renny helped with the peeling, though the child is really more hindrance than help. She peels one for every four or five of mine and takes off half the apple with her knife. Though that's better than taking off a finger, which I can see she could do real easy. I saved all her peels to boil up to
make jelly if I can get the sugar. Else I'll strain it out for juice. No sense wasting.

But still and all, I do love having her here. She is good company and sweet as they come. She wants to learn how to do things and is trying her best to please Johnny, which is turning out to be no easy thing. As I feared, he is sulky and short with her when she doesn't do things the way he wants them done. The two of them put me in mind of younguns dressing up in the big people's clothes and playing house, neither of them with the first idea about cooking or cleaning or washing clothes nor nothing. Sometimes it is comical to watch, but other times it makes me sick to heart.

I read through several more entries, learning more about how many pints and quarts of things Celestine put by than I really wanted to know. She sprinkled in a little gossip and a few references to what was going on in Crawford. I scanned until another passage caught my eye:

November 24, 1941

Well, you'll never guess, but we are to be movie stars. There is a man in town who is making a picture show about all us folks who live in Crawford and he says he will show it in the movie house when it is done and we can come see ourselves. I wish we'd got more notice so I could've made a new dress, but I'll have to make do with one I've got because he'll just be taking the movies for the next two days. Everybody's all excited about it and that's a right good thing since we've mostly just
been scared and nerved up about the war here lately and not had too much cause to be lighthearted. Riley says we'll go into town both days and maybe we'll even get on there twice. He's going to wear his good suit and his nice Panama hat one day and his regular old work clothes on the other. I told him I will wear good dresses both days; I've got no wish to be up there on that big screen in an old housedress and apron. Renny is going to wear the dress she wore when her and Johnny married. It is store bought and is a little batiste dress with a fluttery skirt and lots of ruffles on the bodice and it fits her little figure to a T. And I know Johnny will go dressed to the nines. He's got a bit of the dandy in him.

So maybe Olivia
would
get to see people she knew in the Crawford movie. And maybe one person she never had a chance to know.

As promised, Tony had burned us each a copy of the movie, but with all that had happened we hadn't had a chance to watch it yet. I decided that should be the first thing on the agenda tomorrow. Maybe a movie would be the thing to distract Beth for a little while—if anything could.

T
ONY SET THE CRAWFORD FILM
up for viewing on Olivia's family room television. I'd prepared the night before by making copies of all the photos I could find from that time period among Olivia's family artifacts. There were precious few. Olivia's people were not avid photo buffs.

There were six photos of Celestine and Riley Hargett from that time period. They were black-and-white, scalloped-edged prints that had faded with time but at least we'd know who we were looking for in the movie. There was a studio portrait of Renny, and several small amateur snapshots. In nearly all of them she was smiling a tentative, shy smile, standing with her feet together and her shoulders slightly hunched, looking like a little girl making her First Communion.

Of Johnny Hargett there were only two likenesses from the period: one studio portrait and one almost worthless blurry snapshot.

I'd scanned nearly all of Olivia's photos since there were so few of them. In contrast to her wealth of diaries and
letters, there was a dearth of images. Since this was essentially a pro bono job, Esme and I wouldn't be scanning all of the family artifacts. Olivia had a computer and scanner and we would encourage her to scan everything and show her how to organize the digital images. It is tedious, time-consuming work we only do for our full-service clients. Likewise the scrapbooks. We'd teach Olivia techniques and help her organize the flow, but she'd be putting together her own heritage scrapbooks, and, in my humble opinion, that's how it ought to be. Which unmasks me as a total hypocrite. Although it seems wrong to me to pay an outsider to do such a personal thing as recording family memories, I don't mind at all collecting the hefty fees we get from full-service clients to do just that. Why, sometimes I
tsk
all the way to the bank.

I dealt the photos out to Tony, Olivia, and Beth, though I wasn't sure Beth was in any condition to recognize her own self, much less relatives from another era. She was pale, her movements jerky, her hair unwashed, and her eyes dull and hollow. I'd never seen her like this before. 'Course, she'd never lost a husband before.

But she was struggling to put on her game face. I suspected it was more to ease Olivia's mind than because she had the remotest interest in family history at the present moment.

Olivia studied the stack of photos. She was happy to see the ones of her aunt and uncle looking young and vital, and she smiled sadly at the ones of her mother. When she came to the studio portrait of her father she frowned. “I've never seen this picture before. Is this him?”

“Yes, that's your father, Johnny Hargett. You've never seen this photo?”

“Never,” Olivia said. “I'd remember. When I was little I used to ask what he looked like and I was told this”—she held up the blurry snapshot—“was the only picture we had.”

“The studio shot was in one of the boxes from your aunt's house,” Esme said. “It was inside an envelope.”

“Why in the world would they have kept it from me?” Olivia asked, though I didn't think she was expecting an answer. She studied the photo more closely. “He was very handsome, wasn't he?”

“Yes, he was,” I said. “I think Daniel looks a bit like him.”

I filled Olivia in on what I'd found out about her father, which was not much, and all of it bad.

“Well, that tells me something, doesn't it?” she said, pursing her lips. “Maybe he ended up in prison, for a long time, I mean. Is there any way to check that?”

“I don't think that's the case, Olivia, at least not in this state. I'll keep looking, but in the meantime, I've got to tell you that your aunt Celestine's diaries are real treasures. She writes with so much detail about her daily life and about the people she knows. We've barely begun reading them, but after we watch the movie we'll fill you in on what we've learned so far.”

“I can't wait to read them,” Olivia said. “I've wondered about those things all my life. I don't suppose she's let out any deep, dark secrets.”

I laughed. “Not unless you consider her recipe for pepper jam privileged information.”

“We're all set,” Tony said, clicking the remote.

“Should I make popcorn?” Beth asked, trying to bend her mouth into a smile, then wincing from the effort.

“I'm a Jujube gal myself,” I said.

“No food or drink,” Esme said sternly as she claimed a prize spot on the sofa.

“Don't expect a complicated plot,” Tony said. “Don't expect any kind of plot. This is like you were talking about with the aunt's diaries, except it's a whole town's memoir. Lots of details but not a whole lot of context, and there's no audio.”

A simple title,
Crawford, 1941
, lingered on the screen and I encouraged Olivia to do a running commentary on places and people she recognized while I jotted down observations that might warrant further research.

The title screen gave way to the march of the schoolchildren. They'd lined up by class, younger kids first, and paraded across the camera's focus field. Little boys in overalls or baggy trousers and girls in thin cotton dresses, all genders holding hands with no self-consciousness and clearly intrigued by the camera. Each class was led by a woman, almost all of them sporting wire-rimmed glasses and most with wavy hair pulled back and bundled at the neck. Some had kind faces and smiled at the children; others could have stopped a train dead on the tracks with a disapproving look.

“Recognize anyone?” Beth asked her mother.

“Some of the faces look familiar,” Olivia said with a frown, “but I can't put names to any of them.”

As the older kids trooped by there was bravado and swagger. Then came scenes taken around the schoolyard. I was amused to see that high school never changes much. There were fleeting shy smiles from the nerdy kids clutching their
stacks of books in those pre-backpack days. Then there were the jocks, their striped baseball caps cocked at jaunty angles, mugging it up and demonstrating their mighty swings as they tested the bats and tapped at the sandbag bases. Then the camera literally
caught
the outsider kids out behind the school building. A girl pulled a cigarette from her mouth and smirked at the camera while a boy looped an arm around her neck and pressed his cheek against hers.

“I don't believe it!” Olivia exclaimed.

“What?” I asked, my pen at the ready.

“That's Mrs. Porter. She was my fourth-grade teacher. The woman was the prissiest, meekest little thing you'd ever want to meet. I guess she wasn't always such a goody two-shoes.”

“People change,” Esme said with a laugh. “I sure wouldn't want you all getting hold of any high school movies of me.”

We sat through a visit to the hardware store, where an eager young clerk standing by a chest-high refrigerator demonstrated some newfangled ice cube trays equipped with a handy release lever to a young woman who seemed mighty impressed. Men examined hammers with great earnestness, as if they were complex tools whose function was difficult to divine.

Then the camera operator moved to the streets, catching anyone who came by on the sidewalk.

“Popsicles were a major food group to these people,” Tony said as a small girl walked by licking the last vestiges of sweetness from a stick. “Oh, and they love this one. It's in every single one of these old films.”

A young man riding a bike came even with the camera operator and suddenly hoisted himself up and put his foot
on the bicycle seat, his other leg held out behind him. He rode on by with a triumphant smile, then the action suddenly reversed and the rider went backward and came to a seated position on the bicycle.

“They'd run pouring lemonade backward into the pitcher, or somebody going off a diving board, then back up again.
Bloop
.” Tony made a cupping motion with his hand. “I mean it's funny, but not all that funny.”