Harvestman Lodge (21 page)

Jimbo Bailey took interest in the developing relationship between his two young friends, and began increasing his maintenance-related visits to Hodgepodge, using those visits to individually tease both Eli and Melinda and subtly encourage their interest in one another. To Eli, of course, he jokingly professed to be stealing Melinda away for himself, though he did his teasing in a way that always managed to pass along encouraging, positive things she had said to him about Eli.

Eli began to time his comings and goings, his lunchtime, and where he parked his car in the lot to make sure he encountered Melinda as often as possible. That she was making exactly the same kinds of efforts was obvious.

Life was good and looking like it could get better.

THE PROGRESS OF THE COMMUNITY’S Bicentennial Planning Committee was not really progress at all. Discussions tended to degenerate into arguments, and arguments led to factions sniping at one another.

There was one good development, though: Eli had persuaded the committee leader, Hadley King, to invite Melinda to join the group.

He told King: “She’s assigned by her station to keep up coverage of what we’re doing to celebrate our big community birthday, and she’s a local who knows Kincheloe County and Tylerville as well as anybody. She is a natural for the planning committee. And she’s smart as a whip.”

“And pretty as a picture, too, eh, young man?” the town historian said, grinning knowingly. “Nudge nudge, say no more, say no more!”

Eli had to smile. Hadley King spoke Python! One more thing to like about the man. King already was one of Eli’s three favorite local community figures apart from those he knew at the newspaper. The second favorite was Betty Harley down at the cafe. Lately Eli had begun making a point of going to Harley’s once a week for lunch and eating a shredded chicken breast sandwich with baked chips that Betty Harley stocked at Eli’s personal request. He washed down the healthier-than-typical-Harley’s fare with unsweetened iced tea, something Junior Harley declared to be an atrocity and abomination, a sin against all that iced tea was meant to be. From Junior, a well-liked man who almost made it to Eli’s favorites list himself, Eli received mostly questions about what Lundy was up to. He also relayed complaints from Bufe Fellers that Jake Lundy, as his favorite relative, was lax in keeping touch. From Betty Eli got questions about his work and an endless flow of gossip and news Betty picked up from customers.

Eli’s third favorite local was another female: Barbara Bell, a cantankerous lifelong spinster who was something of a female counterpart to Hadley King. Barb Bell did not take her lunches at Harley’s Cafe, preferring the somewhat more refined and far less greasy atmosphere of the Cup and Saucer, a downtown local eatery Eli sometimes visited on days he had bothered to wear a tie to work. It was good to be wearing a tie in case he ran into Miz Deb, who visited the Cup and Saucer almost daily. She favored tasteful ties on men representing the
Clarion
, ideally with white dress shirts.

Partly for the sake of healthier eating and personal economy, Eli brown-bagged his lunch most days. His best reason for doing so was that Melinda Buckingham usually did the same, and was always ready to take Eli up on his standing invitation to spend lunchtime with him. On pretty days, they ate at a picnic table out back. It did not escape their notice that, once Jimbo Bailey realized who were the most frequent users of that picnic table, he began keeping it covered with sturdy vinyl tablecloths he changed out twice a week.

“I think he likes us,” Melinda commented once the pattern became apparent.

“I think he likes us liking each other,” Eli said. “Us liking each other as such good friends, I mean.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said and then chuckled for a moment. He was glad he’d spoken. He knew what he’d meant, too.

“Hey Eli,” Melinda asked him one day at the table, “Has Jimbo ever said anything to you about the office down the main corridor from mine? The empty one?”

“No. But I’ve never asked him about it, though. I suppose it’s just one Keith Brecht just hasn’t been able to lease out yet.”

“Well, I did ask Jimbo about it, because I noticed he always looked over at that door in a … significant way, when he passed. Like there was something noteworthy about it.”

“No idea what that would be. What exactly did you ask him?”

“I just told him I enjoyed the quiet of my office, and the fact there wasn’t noise from on down the way, with that room being empty. Then he told me something odd: he said, ‘Lindy, there ain’t never going to be nobody using that room.’ When I asked why, he said it’s just because it’s one nobody would ever want.”

“This sounds like the opening lines of a ghost story. You know, the old haunted motel motif.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s anything like that. And if it’s haunted, the ghosts have never come over to tell me hello. But I do think maybe something happened in there sometime. Jimbo didn’t want to say much, though … I could tell that from his manner. The truth is, it all kind of creeps me out.”

“Well, there’s my next novel, if I decide to go the spooky, mysterious route:
The Empty Chamber of Hodgepodge Hall
.”

Melinda laughed and went back to her salad.

“IF YOU’VE GOT ANY NOTIONS that that gal is going to share anything more than lunch and car rides with you, son, you’d best divest yourself of any such thinking,” Lundy told Eli out of the blue in an afternoon parking lot conversation at the newspaper office. Eli had brought Melinda with him to the newspaper plant to introduce her to the three Brechts: David, Mr. Carl, and Keith. Introductions were superfluous, really; Melinda was a local person and already had encountered various Brechts at local events over the years, and they all knew of her through her family, her work in television, and her frequent mentions in the newspaper in the days she was Tylerville’s leading collector of scholarship awards.

In reality, bringing her to the newspaper office was, for Eli, an excuse to spend a little extra time with her and, he hoped, encourage the Brechts to perceive her as a colleague rather than a media competitor.

Melinda had gone ahead of Eli into the building, in search of a restroom, at the time Lundy buttonholed Eli outside his car and commenced his odd lecture.

“What ‘notions’ are you telling me to forget, Jake?”

“You know what I’m talking about. A girl that pretty, and sweet on you besides … your typical male starts getting notions about what he’s going to get from a gal in such circumstances as that, what he’s going to talk her into. What I’m telling you is to not be thinking that way in regards to that particular little lady. The family she comes out of, the way she was raised, the way her daddy thinks and acts – and, most of all, the temper he’s got – there ain’t going to be no rolling in the old haystack with that Buckingham gal unless you marry her first.”

“What’s making you go off on that subject, Jake? You got a dirty mind inside that watermelon-sized skull?”

“Just a realistic one, that’s all. I know what’s normal. And most normal males are going to get ideas, being around such a fine figure of a female. Don’t be giving me that saintly look, son. You got the same hormones coursing through your tubing that the rest of us do. You know exactly what I’m talking about, and you’ve thought about it. ’Fess up.”

Eli couldn’t deny that his thoughts about Melinda had at times drifted in the direction of those voiced by that crude trucker who had leered so openly at her, but he felt no obligation to “’fess up” about any such thing to Jake Lundy. “Jake, listen to me: Melinda and I, we eat lunch together, talk to each other all we can, and work on the Bicentennial Planning Committee together. Yeah, I know how pretty she is, and yeah, I like her … a lot. And yeah, I’d like to be more than a friend to her, and I’ve gotten some signals that tell me I already am. But this other stuff, all this about me getting ‘notions’ about ‘rolling in the old haystack’ or whatever, you’re way farther down the track than the train has traveled. Way farther.”

Lundy chuckled. “Turned you down already, has she?”

“Hell, Jake! This is ridiculous!” Eli started to stomp on up to the building and maybe slam the door going in just to let Lundy know how annoyed he was. Instead he took two steps, stopped, and turned back. “Tell me, though, why it is you picked just now to say all this stuff?”

“I’ve had that family of hers on my mind this morning. I saw Ben Buckingham unlocking his shop when I was coming to work. I know that bunch and their way of looking at the world. I know how that gal was raised and how serious her daddy is about protecting her from all the nasty young bucks out there on the prowl. There’s some history regarding all that that you’re going to find out about eventually. Not everybody knows about it because it kind of got swept under the rug, but some of us who know the Buckinghams well do know what really happened.”

“You’ve completely lost me.”

“Just take it this way: I’m going to warn you to step light and easy with that young lady, and don’t ever, ever let her daddy think you’re treating her like anything but heaven’s sweetest angel. If you do otherwise you’ll live to regret it. Or maybe not live.”

“I’m not sure what that means, Jake.”

“I’m saying that, to Ben Buckingham, that little lady is the proverbial silver chalice. And you don’t spit in the silver chalice.”

“No chalice-spitting planned. Like I said, Melinda and I eat lunch together and go to committee meetings together, and we went to a movie the other evening. We like a lot of the same things and enjoy talking and having a cup of coffee. We’ll have to see how matters progress from there, if they progress at all.”

“Just be aware that there’s one fellow in this world walking around with a permanent limp because he decided to ‘progress’ things with that young lady in the wrong way. Bam! Shot right in the leg, that boy was, by old Ben himself. Ben got lucky, though, because the fellow with the limp was prideful enough he didn’t want the circumstances of his wounding known, and went along with covering it up.”

Shot in the leg. Eli wrapped his mind around that phrase and decided maybe there was no particular reason to rush meeting Melinda’s parents, particularly her father.

“I bet you two burn up the telephone about every evening, huh?” Lundy said.

Eli had to admit that they did. Seldom had they left their offices and returned to their respective homes (Melinda had gone back to residency with her parents – temporarily, she vowed – after finishing her higher education) before they were on the phone together, talking sometimes for hours. Of all the things they did, those extended phone conversations came closest to confirming to them that there was much more to their feelings for each other – or at least the potential for much more – than mere professional association or friendship. Each time Eli talked with Melinda, he couldn’t help but compare the happy spirit of the conversation to the miserable confrontations that he’d come to expect whenever he called Allison, something he was doing less and less.

“I better get inside, Jake. Melinda doesn’t know anybody in the building, as far as I’m aware.”

“Just keep control of yourself around that pretty gal, Eli. I’d hate to see an old friend like Ben Buckingham blow the brains out of a new friend like Eli Scudder.”

Eli had not previously encountered this over-dramatic side of Jake Lundy. “That won’t happen. I’ll turn on the charm and win him over like I do everybody else.”

“You do that, son. Oh, and if you’re about to give her a tour through the building, I’d not introduce her to the press crew. Them boys are way too crude for you to inflict them upon her. Especially with the kind of pin-ups they got up on the wall behind the press.”

“David made them take those pinups down last Thursday. But even so, you’re right. I’ll keep Melinda out of the press room.”

IN FACT, WHEN ELI FOUND MELINDA she was already in the press room, facing a semi-circle of normally hyper-macho pressmen who had been struck silent and shy. The flawless young lady who had just wandered into their noisy, ink-stained world was not only the prettiest in several counties, but also a recognizable regional television personality. They were rightly awed.

“There you are!” Eli said to Melinda. “I wondered where you’d drifted off to.”

“I was just asking the boys here about how the press works, because I’ve never seen one before,” she said, cheerful and seemingly not all bothered by the blatant gawking of the pressmen. Used to such, probably. It angered Eli to know the kinds of things the pressmen almost certainly were thinking about. It was amusing, though, to see how thoroughly the testosterone-fueled group had been reduced to silent, schoolboy-shy mouth-breathers by the mere presence of a beautiful girl.

“Well, now that you’ve met the true intelligentsia of this operation, let me take you around to meet some of the lesser folks,” Eli said, taking her hand and feeling the bolts of jealousy fired at him from the eyes of the press crew. Tough luck, boys. Go find your own.

The rest of the introductions around the newspaper office were fast and easy, though Mr. Carl seemed wary of Melinda. Eli would later learn that this was because he saw all broadcast media as, above all else, competitors and usurpers of advertising dollars that should be his. He was not a businessman prone to be cordial to competitors. Unless, possibly, they possessed skill at playing bluegrass.