Miss Julia to the Rescue (40 page)

“Show him, Carl,” Agnes snapped, as if she’d had her fill of us. She turned—that see-through robe billowing out around her—and headed back to the house. “They can look around, then get them out of here.”

“Well, I never,” I mumbled, stunned by her rudeness. If people had shown up at my house on a mission of mercy, I would have at least invited them in for coffee. But to add insult to injury, she turned off all the outside lights, even the security lights on the far reaches of the property. Only the headlights of my car were still on, which made me worry about running down the battery.

Even Carl seemed startled to have been left in the dark. But he’d been given his orders, so he hooked a thumb at Ardis and said, “Easier to take the Jeep. Cheyenne’s in the women’s quarters over beyond the church.”

The church?
That was a surprise. I hadn’t known that New Agers believed in churches, church services being relatively recent compared to the centuries of pagan worship. I would’ve thought they’d have oak trees or corn circles or temples or maybe piles of stones to dance around.

I started to follow Ardis to the Jeep, but he said, “Etta Mae, you and Miss Julia better stay here. If the boy’s with Nellie, I’ll bring him back. If he’s not, I’ll deal with her. Y’all get in the car and wait for me.”

I started to protest, but he raised a finger and shook his head. “No tellin’ what we’ll find. Stay here.”

Ardis, I decided, had a highly developed sense of what was appropriate for delicate women to know. I understood what he expected to find, but Adam had not sounded like an exhausted lover on the telephone. And I didn’t believe for a minute that he’d given in to the wiles of a girl with hyperactive hormones.

Etta Mae and I stood there in the mist, watching as Carl drove the Jeep off the courtyard onto a track that went behind the garage and led to the expanse of the estate beyond the house. Ardis was off on either a rescue mission or a fool’s errand, and I was fairly sure I knew which it was.

“Let’s sit in the car, Miss Julia,” Etta Mae said. “We’re getting soaked.”

So we got in, but I didn’t like it. How could I sit in a dry car, doing nothing, while Adam might be dragging himself through a muddy ditch, trying to find a helping hand? We were wasting time waiting for Ardis to discover that Nellie was sleeping alone.

“Etta Mae?”

“Ma’am?”

“Can you drive Ardis’s pickup?”

She gave me a sharp glance. “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t touch that truck. It’s his personal vehicle and he loves it to death.”

“What’s so special about it? As far as I can tell, if you’ve seen one pickup, you’ve seen them all.”

“Not hardly,” she said. “It’s a heavy-duty Ram truck, Miss Julia, fully loaded with HEMI power, a four-door mega cab, off-road action, quad headlights, a Ram toolbox, a trailer hitch, center console, Sirius radio and a navigation aid. You’d need a training course to be able to drive it.”

I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. “Off-road action sounds interesting, but I guess what I’m asking is, can you drive a truck in general?”

She squinted at me. “I’ve driven one or two. Why?”

“Look there.” I pointed toward the open garage, lit up by my
headlights. “See that thing in the second bay? Looks like a buggy of some kind? I bet it’d be easy to drive.”

Etta Mae sat up and strained to see through the rain-streaked windshield. “That’s a golf cart. You’re not thinking… ?”

“I certainly am. Adam’s not with Nellie, and I doubt he even has been. He’s out in the weather somewhere, unable to get inside. The grounds are what need to be searched, not somebody’s bedroom. And that little go-cart thing is just what we need to look for him. Come on.” I opened the car door and stepped out.

Etta Mae just sat there, a deep frown on her face. “I don’t know, Miss Julia. Ardis told us to wait.”

“Leave him a note. Come on, if you can drive a pickup, you can drive a golf cart. It even has a canvas top to keep us dry. We’ll just drive around the front yard and along the back where the pool is and in and out of the trees along the edges—you won’t believe how big this place is.”

I walked into the garage with Etta Mae reluctantly following. We stood for a minute gazing at the open-sided two-seated cart with its little fat tires and no windshield.

“Try it, Etta Mae. See if it’ll start.”

She crawled in, but she did it gingerly, then she studied the unadorned dashboard. “There’s a key in the ignition.”

“Well, see. It was meant to be.” I got in on the passenger side and held on to a roll bar. There were no doors or seatbelts. “Crank it and let’s see if it’ll run.”

“You think we’ll get in trouble?”

“Agnes said we could look around, so that’s what we’re doing. Crank it up.”

“Well, okay.” Etta Mae turned the key and the little motor started up and began purring away. “Oh, that’s neat. But where’s the gearshift? I can’t find it.”

I helped her feel around the dashboard and the steering column, then felt around the floor and the seat. “Wonder what this is,” I said, moving a lever, thinking to adjust the seat.

The little cart spurted backward out of the garage, with Etta Mae yelling, “Whoa!” She hit the brakes just before we hit my car.

“Oh, my goodness,” she said, resting her head on the steering wheel. “It got away from me.” She sat up and blew out her breath. “We better figure this out a little better.”

After a few minutes of trying this and that, consisting mostly of searching around for driving instructions, she said, “It’s got two gears—forward and reverse—and I was looking for first.” She giggled nervously. “And guess what? No lights.”

“
No lights
?”
I said, feeling defeated before we’d even started. “How’re we going to search woods and fields without lights?”

“Yeah, and how’re we going to stay out of holes and ditches with no lights? It won’t work, Miss Julia. We’ll just have to wait for Ardis.”

I could’ve cried until something else came to mind. “Etta Mae, you know that big, heavy flashlight that Coleman has? You know, like all the deputies carry? Wouldn’t you think Ardis has one, too?”

“You mean a heavy-duty Maglite? I expect he does.”

“Run get it. If that Ram truck of his has everything you say, it’ll have a flashlight, too.”

She sat for a few minutes, considering the matter—probably wondering how free she should be with her date’s property. Of course she was prepared to drive off in who knows whose go-cart, so I didn’t think borrowing a flashlight should hold her back.

“Well, shoot,” Etta Mae said, and turned off the ignition. “If we’re gonna do it, we might as well do it. Be right back.”

She ran to the Ram truck and climbed up into the cab, and I do mean climb—I would’ve had to use a ladder. I could see her head moving around, ducking down then up as her hands searched high and low for the flashlight.

“Got it!” she said, running back and practically falling into the driver’s seat of the golf cart. “He had it in a special bracket, close to hand. Now to figure out how to turn it on.” She studied it from end to end, which was a good bit of ground to cover because the
flashlight was at least a foot long. “Here it is. See, Miss Julia, you turn this dial then punch the button on the end.”

She did it and nearly blinded me. Never had I seen such a beam as that flashlight put out—must’ve been about a million candlepower. “Okay,” I said, trying to blink away the afterimage. “You drive and I’ll light the way. Good gracious, this thing must weigh five pounds.”

“A couple, anyway.” Etta Mae fiddled with the gearshift. “I hope it’s in drive this time,” she said, with her foot on the brake. She turned the wheels, then cranked the engine.

And off we went across the courtyard toward the front of the house, Etta Mae hunched over the wheel, and me hanging halfway out of the cart, holding on to the roll bar with one hand and aiming the flashlight beam in front of us with the other.

“Throw it out a little farther, Miss Julia,” Etta Mae yelled. “We’ve only got one speed, and I’m outrunning the light.”

I half stood, trying to aim the beam far enough in front of the hood for her to see where we were going. “Watch out!” I screamed as the fountain loomed before us. The imminent collision had me swinging the beam all over the place.

Etta Mae swerved, almost throwing me out. “Aim it, Miss Julia! I can’t see!”

I steadied the light as much as I could while holding on for dear life. Etta Mae swerved the cart away from the fountain and bounced us off the pavers onto the lawn, mowing down a bed of annuals as she went.

“Twist the knob, Miss Julia,” Etta Mae said, straining to see what else she was about to run into. “See if there’s a broader beam.”

I did, casting the beam all around while I did it, and sure enough we soon had a beam that lit up a wide swath in front and to the sides of the golf cart.

After that, we began to get the hang of it and settled down to carefully search along the line of trees bordering the drive. Settled down, I say, except for when Etta Mae hit uneven ground, which
had us springing up and down and in and out of the seats, and almost entirely out of the cart. When we reached the front gate, Etta Mae turned to follow the rail fence to the corner, where she turned again to run alongside it at the far edge of the property.

I occasionally swung the light to the side to look across the lawn for any lump that might be a dying man. Each time I did it, Etta Mae screamed that she couldn’t see.

When we passed the house far to our right, a stand of evergreens blocked our way. Etta Mae slowed and stopped. “I don’t think we ought to go in there. We might get stuck.”

“It’s not that muddy, is it?”

“No, I mean stuck between trees. Let’s go along the edge and concentrate on the lawn. Because why would he go in the woods if he knew you were coming to pick him up?”

“You’re right. But I tell you, Etta Mae, I’ve got to swap places with you. I don’t know if I can drive this thing, but my arm’s about to break off. This light is heavy.”

“Okay, you can drive it. There’s nothing to it really.”

We exchanged places, and instead of sitting and holding the flashlight out to the side, she stood sideways so that most of herself was hanging out of the golf cart. She wrapped one arm around a roll bar and balanced the flashlight on the roof with the other.

“Don’t hit any bumps,” she said. “I’m hanging on by a thread.”

After a few unintended spurts of speed, accompanied by shrieks from Etta Mae, I managed to gain some control and drove us along the back edge of the manicured lawn. We passed from some little distance the cabana and pool where the garden party had been held. Then a white rail fence began again, which at least gave me something to steer by. I could hear horses snorting behind it, and figured that was the last place Adam would be.

Actually, I had counted on finding him along the drive, assuming that he would’ve been trying to walk out. Not having found him there, the next most likely place, it seemed to me, would be a utility building of some kind where a generator would be housed. And that brought to mind the possibility that Adam had been
burned or shocked when he was repairing it. Generators scare me anyway. Obviously, though, he’d fixed the thing, for Agnes had lights, even if she wouldn’t turn them on.

I tried not to think of what could’ve happened, turning instead to trying to see and steer at the same time. Maybe, I hoped, Ardis had shaken some information out of Nellie, and we’d have a better idea of where to focus our search.

I declare, it was worrying me to death that we’d come up empty so far. Adam had said he was at Agnes’s, and so were we. He’d said his truck was gone, yet we’d found it. He’d said he was dying, but where was he doing it?

I didn’t know what else to do except keep on looking, but if we didn’t soon find him and if Ardis had struck out with Nellie, I’d made up my mind to call in the professionals.

“Watch out!” Etta Mae screamed. “Turn, Miss Julia, turn!”

I zipped left, just missing another rail fence behind a huge structure that I assumed to be a barn—a fairly good assumption considering the odor and the nicker of horses. Could Adam be in the barn, curled up in a dry stall? Maybe, but I wasn’t eager to deal with large animals. Better to let Ardis handle that while we continued to search the grounds.

It was a fortunate turn I’d made in avoiding the fence, for we found ourselves on a wide gravel-covered path. It led away from the house and toward a cluster of shrubs and small trees with just the dark outline of what looked to be a shed of some kind. I slowed as we came abreast of it to let Etta Mae sweep the open structure with the light beam. Empty, except for a couple of bicycles and a wheelbarrow.

Etta Mae leaned under the canvas top of the cart to get my attention. “Slow down. I see some lights way over yonder.”

I took my foot off the accelerator and came to a stop, wondering who had lights that worked in spite of Agnes Whitman. Etta Mae pointed the flashlight to the right, lighting up a thick growth of laurel under a stand of trees some several yards from us. “See ’em?” she asked, and straining to see over the bushes, I got a quick glimpse of yellow light glimmering through the trees and the roof of a long, low structure that looked like a roadside motel.