Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (4 page)

“That ain’t James Bond. That’s Gilly Jacana and he passed out more than an hour ago.”

“Unless he’s playing possum.”

“Gilly Jacana ain’t got the wits to play mumblety-peg. I could go over there and holler in his ear, and he wouldn’t catch one word of what I said. If you don’t believe me, then you just watch—”

“Okay, okay,” Estelle conceded in her regular voice, “but it can’t hurt to be careful. I don’t have any appointments tomorrow, and I was thinking about going into Farberville anyway to pick up a few things at the K-Mart. We could shop early, be at the courthouse the minute it opens, and be back in time for you to get ready for lunch.”

Ruby Bee took her time considering the plan. Since it wasn’t her own, she figured there had to be some holes in it somewhere. “What if the clerks in the office won’t let us look through the birth certificates?”

“Why wouldn’t they? They’re public records.”

“Maybe so, but bureaucrats can be slick as lizards when it comes to finding ways to protect their precious records. We could waste all morning arguing with them and still not get one peek at the record book. Anyways, I was thinking about coming in early to clean the pantry shelves. It sure does get dusty in there.”

“Suit yourself, Penelope Pine Sol.” Estelle slid off the stool and strode across the dance floor, her heels making more noise than spilt marbles.

Ruby Bee held back a smug grin and said, “What if his first name is made up, too? What if his ma named him Fred and he changed it when he went to Nashville? You aiming to write down the name of every single baby born that day?” Estelle kept going. “I might.”

“There could be a hundred names.”

“There could be a million names.”

“He probably wasn’t even born on Valentine’s Day,” Ruby Bee called as the door swung open to admit a stripe of sunlight. “How do you know he didn’t make that up on account of how romantic it sounds?”

“I don’t,” Estelle said by way of farewell.

Ruby Bee thought of a lot of other things she should have said, but decided there wasn’t any point in wasting any brilliant comebacks on Gilly Jacana. She settled for a righteous “Humph!” before she went into the kitchen and threw open the door of the pantry.

As she knew damn well, the interior was spotless.

“Mr. Ripley!” the secretary called as she chased him down the hall and finally caught up with him as he pushed the elevator button. “I’ve been trying to find you all day. Can you stop by the legal department before you leave? Geoffry wants to talk to you about some company down in Chattanooga that’s using Matt’s picture on billboards for a radio station.”

“Had I but known,” Ripley said in a stricken voice, grasping Amy’s shoulders and staring at her as if she’d announced a death in the family. “I was in Chattanooga all morning, although I traveled both ways by car rather than choo-choo. I went to see a man about a divorce.”

“You’re not married, Mr. Ripley.” He released her and leaned his head against the elevator door. “Alas, I am not. You’ve withstood my amorous advances, which is why I live at the PO.”

Amy didn’t bother to ask what that meant, because for one thing he lived in a real nice house up in the hills, and for another, he was always saying crazy things. It was hard to tell if he was making fun of her or just entertaining himself, but she had more important things to worry about. “Geoffry says he has to talk to you before you leave so he can file a suit in the morning. And Mr. Pierce says to be at the hotel by four to make sure everything’s ready.”

“Ready? Oh, my yes, everything will be ready,” Ripley straightened up just as the elevator doors slid open. He stepped forward without another word.

“What about Geoffry?” asked Amy. He bared his teeth as the doors closed. She watched the lights above the door flash as the elevator descended, then went back to her desk just as Geoffry barreled into the office.

“Did you ever find Ripley?” he asked.

“He spent the morning in Chattanooga discussing a divorce,” she said, taking out her compact to see if the encounter with Ripley had had any deleterious effects on her complexion.

“He’s not married.”

“That’s why he lives at the post office.” Amy replaced her compact in her purse. “He may be headed there now. Dial the zip code and see what happens.” Geoffry had liked her better when she’d been in the typing pool.

Katie Hawk looked up with the wariness of a child being offered a tantalizingly shiny piece of candy from a stranger. The analogy was apt. She was not yet twenty-one, petite and solemn-eyed, her black hair long and straight, her face gaunt. She had allowed Pierce to coax her down one of the shadowy corridors of the Opryland Hotel, and he was everything her mama back in West Virginia had warned her about—right down to his gold fillings.

“Yeah?” she said skeptically. “I’ll cut an album next fall?”

“As soon as you get back from this little trip, we’ll start looking for material. You can even do some of those syrupy ballads you’re so fond of.”

“You’ve talked out of both sides of your mouth before. How do I know you’re not just making all these promises just to save your investment in Matt’s new album?”

“Katie,” Pierce said in a stricken voice, his eyebrows plunging together, “your contract with Country Connections is a symbol of mutual trust. Trust and cooperation, of course. The only way we’ll get Matt to agree to this hometown visit is if you go, too. You do this little favor for us, and I swear on my granny’s grave that you can cut an album within a year. Then again, if we have to cancel the tour, it’s gonna put a real hole in our corporate resources. You’ll be lucky to cut a single.”

“This is blackmail, ain’t it?”

“I would never stoop to that, honey. This is simple bribery. Let’s go back to the party and I’ll make the announcement.”

They started toward the ballroom, Katie asking about the details of the trip and Pierce doing his best to describe an idyllic town in which the adults flossed daily and all the children went on to college.

“Lemme ask you something,” he said as they hesitated at an unmarked intersection. “Matt’s a good-looking guy, rumored to be quite the stallion. He bathes on a regular basis, and as far as I know, he isn’t into drugs or beating up on women. Gawd knows he’s got money to spend on a lady friend, and he might stay out of barroom brawls if you’d be a little friendlier. How come you don’t …?”

” ‘Cause three months later he’d be sitting outside some new girl’s front door, singing songs and swearing undyin’ love because she won’t let him between her sheets. Matt’s not famous for his attention span, you know.”

Pierce couldn’t argue with that.

“If he’s the one you’re talking about, I reckon he was born here,” Adele said uncertainly. “His mother was my sister’s gal. Belinda started raising cain the day she came into the world and everybody knew she’d been to Memphis by the time she was thirteen. She turned up sprung during high school, so my sister sent her to me.” She picked up the swim fins. “What size are these?”

“They’re the only ones I could find. Bear in mind this is November, Adele, and stores don’t carry much in the way of summer items.”

“November already? No wonder Miz Twayblade canceled the volleyball tournament.”

“I don’t recall a niece staying with you,” Mrs. Jim Bob said suspiciously. “An unmarried pregnant girl would have raised a few eyebrows right here in Maggody, too.”

“Which is why Belinda wasn’t allowed to set foot out of the house except to go down by the creek in the evenings. When her time came, she had a baby boy just as pretty as a new-laid egg.”

“So he was born in your old house out on County 102?”

“Are you saying we should have made her go out in the barn? Belinda weren’t no Virgin Mary.”

Mrs. Jim Bob had no doubts about that. “So then what happened?”

“Belinda and the baby stayed with us for another three months or so, then she found a job in Starley City and we lost track of her for a long while. Six, maybe seven years later, she showed up at her parents’ house with another bun in the warmer and a bad case of some fancy medical condition that took her and the unborn baby, too.”

“I’m sure she regretted all that fornication when she found herself stoking Satan’s furnace for all eternity. What about the baby’s father?”

“Belinda told me he was killed in a car wreck, and his parents said she was nothing but a tramp and anyone on the football team could have been the baby’s father. She had to admit there was some truth to that, and she couldn’t rule out the basketball team, neither.”

“What happened to the little boy?”

“My sister and her husband had no choice but to take him in and raise him. They took to shipping him to me for the summers, and I went along with it even after Mr. Wockermann passed away. But that boy was as wild as his mother’d been, and I finally told my sister I wasn’t gonna put up with him no longer. I swear, if he wasn’t trying to steal candy at the gas station or peek up girls’ skirts at Sunday school, he was pawing through junk in the attic. Mr. Wockermann used to pick up all kinds of trunks and cartons of diaries and old letters at church rummage sales. When someone moved away, he was quick to see what old papers they’d discarded. I told him time and again that he was wasting money, but he always said that one day he wanted to write a book about all the folks who’d ever lived in Maggody. Why would anybody read a book about a bunch of simple country folk, most of ‘em too stupid to spit downwind? Belinda’s little boy must have been the last one to even open some of those filthy old trunks. I can’t count the times I caught him hiding up there and had to tan his backside with a belt.”

“Sometimes you have to beat the sinfulness out of children what come from bad seed. When’s the last time you saw the boy?”

“I don’t rightly recollect, Barbara Ann Buchanon Buchanon. I get confused sometimes, especially when …” Her hand moved toward her hearing aid.

“You promised!” Mrs. Jim Bob said a mite more shrilly than she’d intended.

Adele grudgingly lowered her hand. “It must have been a good ten years ago. After three days, I put him on the next bus home, and that was the end of him. Unless you count when he came two years, I guess.”

“Matt Montana came to town two years ago?”

“I thought we were talking about little Moses Germander. He’s what came and sat right there and visited for most of the afternoon. He was all growed up and filled out. He brought me some real pretty flowers and a box of candy. I had to give the candy to Iva on account of the pecans. Pecans have always given me gas. Everything gives her gas, so I figured it didn’t matter either way.”

“What did he want?”

“He didn’t want nothing except to see how I was getting along. I’m old, you know. I’ve got my plot out by Mr. Wockermann and a paid-up burial policy that cost me three dollars a month for seventeen years.”

Mrs. Jim Bob was not about to be distracted by Adele’s approaching demise. She took a magazine from her purse and opened it to a photograph of a handsome young man in a rhinestone-studded suit. “Is this the boy?”

Adele frowned for a long time, sliding her tongue over her dentures and scratching her chin, letting the suspense build just to get even with her visitor. “Iva’s better at faces than I am, but I don’t think you should wake her. She’s been asleep like that since last Thursday or Friday. She ain’t dead, though. She grunts every time I poke her.”

“Is this the boy who came in the summers?”

“This cain’t be him. He wore ratty jeans and shirts with the sleeves chopped off. He was skinny as a rail, with red blistery pimples all over his face and back, and he wore his hair down to his shoulders like a girl. If Mr. Wockermann had been alive, he’d have dragged that boy down to the barber shop and held him in the chair while ol’ Grubbins shaved his head.”

“Is this who came two years ago to visit you?”

“I reckon it is.”

Mrs. Jim Bob thought she heard a muffled noise from out in the hallway, but she didn’t hear anything else and she finally dismissed it as a manifestation of Iva’s problem. When she looked back at Adele, she realized that her hearing aid had been turned on and the only responses from then on would concern the high jinx taking place on the far side of the moon.

Not that she cared. She had the story just as she’d promised Mr. Ripley Keswick in Nashville, Tennessee, and she had time to call him back and relate every word of it before she got dressed for prayer meeting.

The “real humdinger” of a wreck had made for a lively day, but the next day was less exciting than one of Brother Verber’s hell and-damnation sermons. I ran a speed trap at the north end of town until I finished my book, and then followed the school bus to the county line, watching the children behind the dusty windows stick their little pink tongues at me. The older ones, and we’re talking ten or eleven, preferred a more traditional hand gesture to express their contempt for the law. I figured we could discuss it in a year or so, when I caught them drinking beer, smoking pot, or drag racing out on the back roads. Maggody doesn’t offer its youth much in the way of wholesome entertainment. Count the condoms and the whiskey bottles out by Boone Creek if you don’t believe me.

It was close enough to dusk to call it a day, although not much of one. I drove back through town slowly, not sure if I wanted to go back to my one-room efficiency over Roy Stiver’s antique store and drown my sorrows in chicken noodle soup, or suffer through the whiny songs on the jukebox in order to get a decent meal.

Chicken soup it would be, I decided as I pulled into the parking lot in front of the redbrick PD and went inside. My latest gift from the town council sat on the desk, blinking angrily at me. The town councilmen—there’ll be a councilwoman right after the local ducks start quacking in French—don’t give me things in order to express their deep and abiding respect for my dedication to duty. They’re just too damn cheap to pay a salary for a deputy.

The red eye was menacing, the blinking nearly hypnotic. I eased past it and went into the back room to put my radar gun away in the metal cabinet that also held my gun and a box with my last three bullets. If the Four Horsemen were to come thundering into town, I’d shoot Famine first and then start drawing straws.