Rock of Ages (27 page)

She kneels in the space between the heater and the hearth and duck-walks forward until she's so close she can smell the bricks. Only then does she switch on the flashlight, trying to shield it with her hands and point it directly into the wall she's facing.

She thinks she knows which brick it was, from the dream, the one she saw that day as a 10-year-old. When she starts working with her hands, though, she can't discern any give, anything to indicate that one of the bricks is loose.

It takes her 10 more minutes. She has to switch legs often, finally moving out of her crouch and kneeling on the hard bricks. Her arms grow tired from holding the light and feeling for the opening.

Then, as she is entertaining the thought that Jenny McLaurin's hidey-hole was mortared over long ago, she feels something. It's just a small wiggle in one of the bricks, probably the first one she tried, but now her fingers are more attuned.

She sets the flashlight down so she can use both hands and works the brick a few seconds in the dark. It definitely is loose. She can feel a slight gap now between this particular brick and the next one up. She breaks one of her nails trying to get a grip on it. Finally, she is able to drag the brick out a quarter-inch, then a half-inch, then a whole inch. She puts one hand at each side and carefully removes it, setting it on the hearth beside her. She picks up the flashlight and shines it into a pitch-black rectangle that smells of dampness and clay.

She can make out something pale at the other end of the light beam, but she can't identify it.

Georgia has always been afraid of spiders, and it occurs to her that there is no place she could think of that would seem more hospitable to the black widows she remembers from her youth than this dark, bricked-in emptiness.

She needs as much courage as she's needed all night to reach in that hole with her right wrist.

She brings the notebooks out one at a time, five of them in all, each the same brand, each five inches by seven. She reaches in again, wishing that she had remembered gloves, tempted to go in the kitchen to look for something to put over her hands, but the idea of Pooh's kitchen scares her more than black widow spiders.

In the end, she can feel nothing else in the hole she has uncovered. She makes herself touch every reachable inch of the hiding place. There is no ring, no stash of 20-dollar bills hidden away in 1963, nothing but cardboard and paper.

Georgia sits cross-legged now in the hearth. She picks up one of the tablets. There is no writing on the cover, nothing to indicate what it is, but when she opens it, she recognizes the precise, schoolgirl cursive script she remembers from Christmas and birthday cards.

The one she has chosen was the last one she retrieved, and it seems to be the oldest. Jenny has not written the year anywhere Georgia can find, but she realizes that this first notebook must be from the year she became a widow, 1991. Harold died in March, and the first entry is April 6:

It faired off today. The dogwoods are right pretty outside. Ilene and me went to the Bi-Lo, and then ate at the K&W
.

And that was it.

Georgia wonders if someone urged Jenny to start a journal after her husband died. Maybe whoever was minister of Geddie Presbyterian told her it might help her get through her sorrow.

Whatever its genesis, the journal is slow going as Georgia sits there in the hearth and flips through it with her free hand. It is mostly concerned with weather and shopping and church and the world outside her window.

Toward the end of the first year, though, Georgia sees something else, a sign that Jenny is starting to share more than the weather report and the church bulletin. Growth, a grief counselor or English composition teacher might call it.

December 22. I got a Christmas card from Georgia today. Poor thing. She's had it hard, with two divorces and Sarah and Littlejohn dieing too. It doesn't look like she's going to be here for Christmas
.
I don't blame her. Nothing but sad memories for her down here, I reckon
.

It must be terrible to love somebody enough to marry them and then have it fall apart like that. Harold and me had our moments, to be sure, but at least I know he's gone. A clean brake, I reckon you would call it
.

Georgia remembers how she felt that Christmas, two husbands, a mother, and a father gone in rapid succession. She had taken one of those tests that are supposed to tell a person how stressed out she should be, and she didn't share the score with her friends, for fear they would put her on suicide watch.

She looks at her watch. 10:15. She doesn't know what Forsythia Crumpler defines as early-morning hours, but she knows she should pack these notebooks, put the brick back and tiptoe out the same door she entered an hour and a half ago. She isn't sure she wants to read them, even when she gets back to safety, for fear of seeing her own self-absorbed life exposed. But she knows she will.

She can't resist looking at the first journal she took out, though. It is the most recent, still half-empty.

Georgia finds the last page on which there is writing. Jenny's script has gotten a little more shaky over the years.

She works backward, stopping when she sees a familiar name:

July 29. William Blackwell come by again today. I reckon I am going to do it. He says I can stay here just a long as I want to, that him and his boys will take care of me. I hate not to leave anything behind, but there isn't much I can do. I thought 50 thousand dollars would be enough to last me forever, that and the Social Security
.

I told him to go on and set it up with the lawyer
.

Georgia turns another couple of pages, speed-reading through circle meetings, a heat wave and Jenny's fascination with a prime-time quiz show that offers to make millionaires out of morons.

Another entry makes her stop:

August 20. Pooh has started coming by without William. They are my kin, or at least Harold was their kin, and I reckon Pooh can do for me same as his Daddy. But he seems like he resents it more, and sometimes I think I might just as well do it myself. When I asked him to help me get them curtins down from the window, you'd of thought I asked him to brake rocks or something. And that grass hasn't been mowed in two weeks. But I reckon I've got to put up with it. I've got to make what Forsythia calls adjustments
.

Georgia knows she should go, but it's as if she's watching the prelude to a train wreck. The entries fill her with anger and self-loathing. At one point, Jenny considers calling Georgia, but she doesn't want to disturb her “in the time of her loss.” She feels guilty for not going to Phil's funeral. As if Georgia had made it down to North Carolina when Harold died.

She promises herself she'll go in five minutes. Just one more.

She turns to the last page on which Jenny's script appears, now coming at a disturbing slant and much less legible than it was a few years before. She reads the last entry.

Oct. 14. Georgia's in town. I'll give her a couple more days to get herself settled, then I'll call her, might even drive over and see her, if I'm up to it. I don't drive that old car anywhere but to church. It needs a change of pace
.

I might ask her advise. She'd know what to do. I sure apreciate William and them helping me, but I don't think it's working out. That boy Pooh is just too busy, or lazy. It took him three days to get me my grocerys, and when he come yesterday, he was so mean
.

About the only time he shows me any attention is when he wants me to go walking with him outside. He likes to go down by the pond, which I'd just as soon have draned, before some youngun drowns in it. Says I need to get some exercise. I think to myself I get all the exercise I need, trying to get the ones I give my house to to keep me from starving to death and mow my yard once in a while
.

William's paying the bills now. At least I don't have to worry about that no more. But I need to get out of this, even if I have to get my house back, sell it and go into the rest home, go on Medicaid. That boy of his scares me. I can't hardly sleep worrying about it. I would ask Forsythia, but she'd just think I was a fool
.

Besides, she's not family
.

Georgia closes the notebook. The goosebumps have run all the way down her arms from her neck. She gives an involuntary shiver. She wants to leave this house so much that she has to force herself to go slow, replace the brick carefully and put the five notebooks in the same pocket where the Ladysmith lies, remembered again when she touches it. She backtracks out from the hearth and across the room, trying to erase any evidence that she was ever in this place.

Too little, she is thinking to herself. Too late for Jenny. Still, she knows. Even if no one else knows, she does.

She cracks the front door and peeks out. She is grateful that Pooh didn't bother to turn on his porch light before he left.

She tries to step as lightly as a spirit as she goes back across the yard toward the highway, stopping and stooping low whenever she hears a car coming, for fear someone will somehow see her in the darkness. She is shaking. She remembers how, when she was small, her father's and uncle's beagles would run up on her in the night when she was walking between their houses, scaring her so badly she would almost wet her pants. She is, after all these years, still afraid of the dark. Ghosts, a voice whispers in her ear, are possible. You know they are.

She wonders if, in the morning, there won't be two sets of telltale footsteps in the frost, one coming and one going across Pooh Blackwell's yard. She wonders what clues she has left in the living room waiting to be exposed by daylight. Her uneasiness is assuaged only by the near certainty that no living soul knows the thing she has stolen ever existed.

Finally, she is back on the weed-covered dirt road. She wants to run the last few feet to the van, but she makes herself walk, out of a child's belief that, if you panic, they'll run after you and catch you. You can't let them know you're afraid.

She unlocks the van and hops up into it, the keys already in her hand. She drops them on the floor as she reaches out for the ignition switch and curses as she feels around for them, finally retrieving them.

Only when she rises does she notice that the condensation is on the inside of the windows.

CHAPTER TWENTY

He stepped over the pizza box as he negotiated the space between the couch and the little table he was always tripping over. His balance was impaired by the beer in his right hand and the six he had already consumed.

He knew he needed to get things cleaned up. Maybe his mother would come over again, when his father was out. Old William made it sound like such a goddamn gift that he had this piece-of-crap house, with all the work it entailed.

This is
my
house, he's going to tell the old man one of these days. I took it, and I can do what I damn well please with it. Don't ever have to clean it again if I don't want to.

He was supposed to meet some buddies at the Rack 'Em, drink and shoot some pool, maybe go over to Sally's after, if they had any money. He slammed the front door and then almost fell on the steps, catching himself on the railing.

Good thing, he thought, you don't have to drive standing up. He laughed and took another swig. He wished he'd had the foresight to bring another Bud for the road; this one was half-empty. But it was too much trouble to go back inside. Screw it. He'd stop at the Get ‘n' Go and buy another one.

Pooh wedged himself behind the wheel, put the beer can in the cup holder and started his truck, his big red machine, in preparation for roaring down the driveway. His goal each time he left his new home was to see if he could clear the railroad tracks going at least 25 miles an hour, then make the almost-instant right turn onto Route 47 without hitting the brakes.

Brakes, like seat belts, were for pussies.

He almost didn't see the van.

There was just a quick flash, maybe light off a mirror or a windshield, as he was wrestling the big truck over the tracks and on to the state highway. It didn't really occur to him until he was a quarter-mile up the road that perhaps he ought to investigate.

His father always told him, if something doesn't seem right, it probably ain't right. Daddy, he concedes, was probably on the money on that one.

It was easy enough, after he left the Get ‘n' Go, to turn on to the Ammon Road in Geddie and then double back on the old road that came out half a mile east of his driveway. When he completed his circle, he saw it, sitting there on the dirt trail on the other side of the tracks, where no car really ought to be.

It could be kids parking, he thought as he slowed down and eased off the pavement, but it was a little too early in the evening for that, and it didn't look like something a teenager would be driving on a date.

Either way, he thought, it might be good for entertainment value. If it was just some kids, he'd at least scare the shit out of them.

He turned around and backtracked to the next place where he could cross the rail right-of-way, then bounced along the old parallel trail in the dark until he was no more than a hundred yards behind the partially hidden van.

He closed the door softly and walked as quietly as his weight and blood-alcohol level would allow, half-expecting the van to go tearing out on to the highway at any second.

But when he got there, there was no one inside. And then he noticed the Virginia plates, and suddenly he knew.

He went back to the truck, pondering how best to maximize this opportunity. One of the toolboxes behind the front seat yielded some duct tape. There was a workable length of clothesline back there, too, among the clutter on the floor. It was easy enough to break into the van. Pooh was not without his skills.

He thought about calling Eddie on the cellular phone to tell him he wasn't coming tonight, but then he said to hell with it.