Miss Julia Hits the Road (28 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“Use your imagination, Julia.” She smothered another bout of laughter.

I suddenly realized what she was talking about, then wished I hadn’t. There are certain things that a decent woman simply does not nurture in her mind.

“Is it catching?” I asked, wondering if the hospital was equipped to handle an epidemic of disabled men.

“What?” LuAnne asked. “Oh, what he’s got? No, I heard that they think it’s some kind of allergic reaction to something he ate or drank. They’re giving him megadoses of one of those killer antibiotics.”

“Oh, my Lord,” I gasped, as a jolt of fear shot through me. “LuAnne, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you back.”

I slammed down the phone, cutting off her questions, sprang from the chair and nearly broke my neck running down the stairs.

“Lillian!” I called, dashing through the dining room and pushing through the kitchen door, my breath catching in my throat. “Lillian! Where is it? What’d you do with it?”

“What?” she asked, turning from the counter to stare at me. “What you talkin’ about? What’s wrong?”

“That jar! The one we took to Clarence Gibbs’s spring! Where is it? Oh, Lord, tell me it’s still here!” I grabbed the back of a chair with one hand, patting my chest with the other, so afraid I was trembling.

“What got you so het up ’bout that jar? They’s nothin’ in it but some ole cloudy water.”

“Oh, I hope! I hope it’s still full. Where is it, Lillian? I’ve got to see for myself.”

“It right there in the pantry on the top shelf, waitin’ for you to get it tested or whatever you gonna do with it.”

I ran to the pantry, jerked open the door, and saw the jar. Relief flooded through me. I got it down and examined it closely, holding it up to the light to determine if the water level was the same as it had been.

“Little Lloyd hasn’t been into this, has he?”

Lillian frowned at me. “What he wanta be doin’ that for?”

“I don’t know, Lillian,” I said, collapsing into a chair. “It’s just that little boys are likely to have a scientific turn of mind, and I was afraid he’d try testing this himself.” I held the jar up for her to look at it. “There’s not any of the water missing, is there?”

“You think he drink that stuff!” Lillian said, staring at me as if I’d lost my mind. “He got more sense than that.”

“I had to be sure. Lillian, I hate to admit this, but it looks like Clarence Gibbs is right. This water is potent beyond belief.” And I went on to tell her of the horrific growth potential lurking in the water of the spring, resulting in Thurlow Jones being the subject of widespread medical curiosity.

“Law!” she said, her eyes big enough to pop out of her head. “He musta drunk a bait of that stuff. All I ever heard was it took just a little sip to young a ole man up.” She stood looking off for a minute as she studied the matter. Then she started laughing. “That Mr. Jones, he sho’ got more’n he bargained for this time. I mean, he mighta wanted to jack things up a little, but how he think he gonna manage if he got to have a wagon to carry it around in?”

“Well, I expect he’s learned his lesson,” I said, still feeling weak from the fright I’d had. “Now, Lillian, we have to get rid of this. I’m not going to have it in the house a minute longer.”

“Th’ow it out in the yard,” she said, “an’ put the jar in the garbage. I don’t even want it in the dishwasher.”

“I agree, and I’ll do it right now.”

I went out into the backyard, holding the jar as far from myself as I could. We now knew the water’s baleful effect on the masculine half of the race, but who knew what it’d do to the other half?

I gingerly unscrewed the top and, walking over behind the garage to get as far from the house as possible, slung the water out around one of Lillian’s transplanted bushes. Let it do some good somewhere, I thought, and disposed of the jar in the trash container. Then I went back inside and thoroughly scrubbed my hands. No use taking chances.

I stopped and turned to Lillian, my hands still dripping. “I just thought of something. Thurlow not only drank from that spring, he fell in it. What if it works from outside in, instead of from inside out? Oh, my goodness,” I moaned, as I leaned against the sink. “What if Little Lloyd got some of it on him? I couldn’t stand it, Lillian, if something happened to that child.”

“Don’t you worry ’bout him,” she told me. “He stay in the shower more’n half a hour that night, an’ come out all shriveled up.”

“Good!”

Still recovering from my fright, I pulled myself up the stairs to call LuAnne back. I needed to soothe her hurt feelings after I’d hung up on her.

“LuAnne,” I said, sinking into my easy bedroom chair, “I apologize for being so abrupt, but there was a crisis in the kitchen and I had to see about it.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said, though she sounded a bit miffed about it. “Well, now that I’ve got you, let me tell you about the home tour. We’ve decided on a Christmas vacation theme. Each house on the tour will be designated a Christmas vacation spot, and yours is going to be Christmas at the Beach. Don’t you just love it?”

Well, no, I didn’t. I let the silence drag out as I fumed at the idea of bringing in sand and driftwood arrangements to go on my mahogany tables.

“Now, I know,” LuAnne said, trying to forestall my objections, “that a beach theme doesn’t sound like much, so I thought we’d change it to Christmas at
Palm
Beach. That’d be so much more elegant.”

“Maybe it would, LuAnne,” I said. “But I don’t know a soul who’s ever been to Palm Beach, much less at Christmas. So nobody’s going to know the difference between Palm Beach and Myrtle Beach.”

“Oh, Julia,” LuAnne said, exasperation clear in her voice. “Don’t you read
Town and Country
? Palm Beach means polo and international society. Tiffany’s and pearls and jewelry of all kinds, charity balls and lots of wealth. Why, I bet the arrangements in that category will be everybody’s favorites.”

“Good. Then you won’t have any trouble assigning it to somebody else’s house.”

“Now, don’t be that way,” she pleaded. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll enter that category myself, and decorate a tree with all kinds of jewelry. You know, pins and necklaces with colored stones and strings of pearls and gold bracelets and little twinkling lights. Oh, I can picture it now. It’ll be gorgeous, Julia, I promise you that.”

“Well,” I said, with a martyr’s sigh, giving in for Lillian’s sake and feeling a tiny bit better for it. “But I’ll tell you this, LuAnne: those arrangers better not come tracking sand in my house and ruining my Orientals.”

Keeping Lillian in mind with an effort of will after we hung up, I talked myself into being resigned to the beach theme, Palm or otherwise. I wouldn’t have minded so much if I’d thought the tour would bring in any appreciable amount, but I knew it wouldn’t. Still, I’d agreed to it, and I would endure it with my usual composure. But I didn’t have to be happy about it, and I wasn’t.

When I went downstairs, Lillian announced that she had to run to the grocery store. “I used ever’ bit of sugar in the house when I went on my cake- and pie-cookin’ spree.”

“Let me go instead,” I said. “I need to get out a little, anyway. After talking with LuAnne, I need some fresh air to cool me off.”

When I returned from the store, lugging several bags of groceries, which always happens when you go for one item, Lillian said, “Some man come see you while you gone.”

“What’d he want?”

“He don’t say. I tell him you gone to the grocery store, an’ he say he come in an’ wait for you.”

“Well, my word, Lillian, I hope you didn’t let him.”

“No’m, I say you likely be gone till suppertime, an’ he oughta call ’fore he come back.”

“Good.”

“Yessum, he real pleasant, say he like our house.”

“Typical salesman,” I said. “Trying to flatter so you’ll be in a good mood for whatever he’s selling. I’m going upstairs, Lillian, and work on the fund-raising books.”

As I turned to leave, she said, “I notice he have on one of them raincoats like yo’ pastor have. You know, with that plaid linin’ on the inside, an’ he have on a fancy hat with a little feather on it. Don’t nobody ’round here wear a hat like that. Baseball cap’s the best they do.”

That stopped me on a dime. Little Lloyd had seen a man in a Burberry raincoat and hat with Clarence Gibbs. I would’ve bet money—although that was not a custom of mine—that Gibbs had sent somebody to check out the property he already considered as good as his own. An appraiser, maybe, or some kind of inspector, either of which raised my blood pressure considerably above the normal.

“Lillian,” I said, irate now at the nerve of that arrogant and overconfident weasel, “if that man comes back, you send him packing. I don’t want him putting one foot inside this house.”

“Yessum, I will. But what if you home, an’ he asts to see you?”

“Then I’ll do it myself. Believe me, he is up to no good, and we don’t want him anywhere around here.”

I went upstairs, still fuming, and thinking of calling Clarence Gibbs and blessing him out for overstepping himself. Then I thought better of it.

Better to let him assume that I didn’t have a chance of redeeming my house and buying Willow Lane. I smiled to myself as I estimated the donations and sponsorships that were bound to come rolling in. He just didn’t know who he was tangling with.

It was a settled fact that I wasn’t one to count her chickens before they hatched, but if Thurlow Jones’s condition didn’t completely maim him, we had a good chance to meet Clarence Gibbs’s price, as well as his deadline.

So, in a fit of compassion undergirded by my own ulterior motives, I called The Watering Can and ordered a plant garden to be sent to Thurlow’s hospital room.

With the house tour and flower show fairly well under way, I was free to turn my mind to other aspects of our fundraising efforts. Number one on my list was bringing in the pledges and seeing where we stood on our journey toward our goal of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.