Miss Julia to the Rescue (10 page)

“Just stay in touch,” he said in his serious manner. “You have your cell phone?”

“Oh, my goodness, no. I forgot it.”

“I’ll get it. You ought to keep it in the car or in your pocketbook. And the charger. I’ll put that in your suitcase, so don’t forget to plug it in every night.”

“Thank you, Lloyd. Is there anything else I’m forgetting?”

“No’m, I just wish I was going with you. If I could drive, I’d even go by myself. Then you wouldn’t have to.”

I drew him to me and held him close. It was not something I frequently did, both of us preferring to express our affection in other ways, but the boy needed reassurance. He loved Mr. Pickens dearly, and I knew he would fret until we rolled back in with the daddy he’d only recently gained with his mother’s marriage.

“I better go, honey,” I said as he straightened up. “Etta Mae will be waiting for me. You take care of everybody and try not to worry too much. I’ll let you know what we find out and when we’ll be home.”

“Yes, ma’am, we’ll be all right. And don’t you worry, either, because I’m gonna be praying for y’all to have travel mercies the whole time you’re gone.”

I quickly turned and lifted the suitcase from the bed, not wanting him to see the tears that had sprung up in my eyes. From the way both of us were carrying on, you’d think I was flying off to the Holy Land instead of making a road trip to Mill Run, West Virginia.

Etta Mae, grinning and waving, bounded out the door of her single-wide as soon as I pulled up beside the awning. She was dressed for travel or for anything else that came up. I could tell because she was wearing what she always wore when she wasn’t working: tight jeans, plaid cotton shirt and pointy-toed cowboy boots, which she called her Dingos.

It wasn’t until we’d loaded her suitcase in the trunk, buckled ourselves in, tapped in instructions on the GPS and pulled out of the Hillandale Trailer Park, where she lived, that it hit me.
What in the world were we doing?
Heading off north-northeast, according to Lloyd’s map, into unknown country to meet with strangers, hoping to wrest Mr. Pickens from their clutches—it was enough to give a person pause.

But not me. I gritted my teeth and kept driving. We were packed and on the way, wholly committed to our rescue mission. But first I pulled into the drive-through at a McDonald’s on the edge of Delmont so we could get coffee to go with James’s bacon biscuits.

“Etta Mae,” I said, as I merged onto Interstate 26 West, “when you finish eating, reach into that tote bag in the back and get the map and the directions Lloyd got for us. You’ll have to help navigate because I’d feel better having a backup to this electronic voice. I’m not sure I trust some satellite roving around up there.”

“Me, either,” she said, leaning between the front seats to retrieve
the papers. “We need some idea of where we’re going. Even,” she said with a giggle, as she brushed biscuit crumbs off her jeans, “some idea of where we are at any given time.”

After several minutes of studying the map, Etta Mae folded it up, then read the printed directions with an intensity that meant she was memorizing them.

As we approached Asheville, barely thirty miles from Abbotsville, I took an off-ramp. “We better fill up,” I said. “I get nervous when the tank’s close to half empty.”

Etta Mae proved her worth again, self-serving the gas as efficiently as she did everything else. I took advantage of the ladies’ room, then she decided she should do the same.

Once we’d cleared Asheville and were on the beautiful stretch of interstate north of the city, Etta Mae said, “Now tell me again where we’re going and what we’ll do when we get there.”

So I did, recounting to her each step that had brought us to the current point. “So you see,” I summed up, “somebody has to do something, and we’re the only ones who can. Mr. Pickens needs someone to speak up for him because it seems he’s not able to speak for himself.”

“Well, I don’t understand why the sheriff is holding him incommunicado. Is he under arrest?”

I almost ran off the road. “I didn’t think of that! But, no, he can’t be. Surely the sheriff would’ve told Coleman if he was. At least you’d think he would. But that’s a good question, Etta Mae, because it would explain why they’re keeping Mr. Pickens from contacting anybody.”

“Yes’m, but even a hardened criminal is allowed a phone call, and I know J.D. is not that.”

“Of course he isn’t,” I said, although I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d come close a few times. “But it could be that that call he made, looking for Sam or Coleman, qualified as his one call, even if the connection was so bad I couldn’t understand him.”

We rode along in silence for a while as Etta Mae absorbed the information. Then she said, “Something else must be going on. A
hospital doesn’t withhold patient information from family members. Not that I’ve ever heard of anyway.”

“Well, I didn’t want to mention this because I didn’t want to scare you. And I don’t believe it anyway. But Coleman told me that the sheriff implied—take note of that, Etta Mae, he only implied—that Mr. Pickens is suspected of being mixed up in growing marijuana. Or making something in laboratories, which is ridiculous because Mr. Pickens is certainly no scientist.”

Etta Mae’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “
Meth
labs? You’re talking about meth labs? Listen, Miss Julia, the people who grow marijuana are bad enough, but we need to stay away from meth labs. Those people would as soon shoot you as look at you.”

“Oh, Lord,” I moaned, letting the car ease down below the speed limit. “That must be what happened to Mr. Pickens. He must’ve gotten too close. But, Etta Mae, if he did, it would be because he was trying to stop them, not because he was one of them.”

“Then I guess we’ll just have to convince the sheriff of that.” Etta Mae thought about this for a while, then she said, “Wonder what kind of man he is. The sheriff, I mean.”

By the time we’d gone through the easternmost tip of Tennessee and picked up Interstate 81 North into Virginia, I was feeling the effects of the coffee we’d had. I pulled off at the first rest area we came to and we both availed ourselves of the facilities.

When we were back on the road, Etta Mae adjusted her seat and dropped off to sleep. I kept myself alert by running over in my mind the various ploys we might use to get in to see Mr. Pickens. Should we go straight to the hospital? See the sheriff first? Try to find his doctor? Wander around like tourists until we knew more?

I drove on, watching the traffic, which was heavy with trucks, and fiddling with the radio. Stations came and went as we moved on through the rolling countryside of western Virgina, which was dotted with small towns off the interstate and farms along the side with cattle on seemingly a thousand hills. Giving up on finding a radio station with decent music, I listened for a while to a preacher
who was exercised about the downward trend of our country while I became more and more exercised about finding another place to stop.

When Etta Mae stirred and sat up, I said, “There ought to be a rest area fairly near. Would you like to stop?”

“Would I ever!” she said, then yawned. “I’m getting hungry, too. Those biscuits you brought hit the spot, but it’s getting close to lunchtime.”

“I’d like to make just one stop, but I don’t think I can wait to find a restaurant. See, there’s a sign—rest area two miles. Let’s make a quick stop there, then go on. There may be some restaurants around Wytheville, which is where we pick up 77 North.”

“Suits me. I’m about to pop.”

We came off the highway and nosed into a parking place as near the bathrooms as I could find. I locked the car, then hurried with Etta Mae to tend to what had become an urgent necessity. Remembering what Lloyd had said about praying for travel mercies, I gave thanks for the mercy of rest areas along the interstates.

“Want me to drive for a while?” Etta Mae asked when we returned to the car.

“Yes, if you’d like to. I want to study the map a little and see how far we have to go. But let’s watch for a place to get off and eat. No telling what will be available in West Virginia.”

It was a good thing that we found a fast-food place not far from our connection to the next interstate because the countryside became more sparsely settled along I-77. But the big trucks kept rolling along—behind, in front and alongside us.

Thankful that Etta Mae was driving, I clasped the armrest and closed my eyes when we went through a long,
long
tunnel. Then, almost before I could breathe easily again, we headed into another one.

Then we were on the West Virginia Turnpike, for which we had to pay to drive on. I’d thought that Virginia had rolling hills, but the ones now on each side of us were really rolling—knobby little hills, one after the other. Feeling comfortable with Etta
Mae’s steady driving, I whiled away the afternoon by reading the signs along the way, astounded at the names of towns hidden away, off the beaten path—Kegler, Pipestem, Odd, Flat Top—and wondered at the stories behind them.

“You getting tired, Etta Mae?”

“Not too bad,” she said. “We’ll be in Beckley in about an hour, I think. We turn off there, don’t we?”

I consulted the map again. “No, we turn off on 64 East before Beckley, but Beckley’s not far from the turnoff. Let’s stop there if we find a decent place and really look at this map. We’ll start twisting and turning on back roads then, and I don’t want to get lost.”

So we made another stop off the interstate, had a soft drink and stretched our legs for a few minutes, then drove on into Beckley to a gas station to fill up again. While Etta Mae filled the tank, I glanced up at the sky, where clouds were rolling in from the west, covering the sun and threatening rain. That didn’t bode well for traveling on unfamiliar roads, but I kept my disquiet to myself. Etta Mae was her usual perky little self, suggesting with a laugh that we ask for the key to the station’s restroom because it might be our last chance.

She laughed again when we were back in the car, turning at the instructions of the robotic voice of the GPS onto a two-lane road that took us deeper and higher into dark wooded areas. “I hope we don’t have to stop again. From the looks of this lonesome road, we’ll have to find bushes to get behind.”

One thing you could say for Etta Mae, she was the perfect travel companion as far as I was concerned because we were on the same wavelength. There’s nothing worse than accompanying someone with a large capacity.

I smiled at the thought of tromping through the bushes, but I was uneasy at being where we were, with pine trees edging the ditches on both sides of the road, very little traffic and rain spattering on the windshield. The sky was overcast, at least what we could see of it through the trees and the mountain rearing straight
up above the ledge we were riding on. And even though night was a few hours away by the clock, it seemed to be creeping nearer. To cap it off, wisps of fog slipped past us, an omen of more to come.

“Lord, Etta Mae, I’m feeling kind of lonely way up here. It’s as if we’re a million miles from home and we don’t know a soul.”

“Yeah, we do. We know J.D. Keep your mind on him and we’ll make it.”

That was comforting advice, which Etta Mae was good at giving, bolstering me enough to keep my mind on the prize. Excepting Sam, Coleman and Mr. Pickens himself, I couldn’t think of another person I’d rather have with me than Etta Mae Wiggins.

The rain continued to fall, never in heavy downpours, but steady enough to keep the windshield wipers going. With their monotonous flapping, I could’ve closed my eyes for a rest, but I didn’t dare. The car continued to climb, and even though the two-lane road seemed to have been recently repaved, it was narrow; and the ditch, or rather the chasm, on one side—my side—was getting steeper.

A van passed us going the other way and after ten minutes or so, a pickup with the hood wired closed followed it. We were almost alone with roadside signs the only indication of human activity. To take my mind off the deep gorge on my side of the car, I read them—deer crossing, danger: falling rock, slippery when wet, s-curve ahead—they were enough to put a person on edge, which was exactly where I was.