She had three different ironing boards set up in her large untidy room. One, oversize, for sheets, tablecloths and such; a middle-size one for the usual clothes wash, and a baby one, a sleeve board it was called. Probably for the ruffles and laces. A screen closed off a corner of the room. Behind it, Aunt Georgie told me later, was the bed and washbasin. An old-fashioned rooming house with the bathroom down the hall.
“I don’t have your laundry done,” Gammer spat.
“I didn’t come for my laundry,” Aunt George informed her. “I didn’t bring any this week.”
“Then what you doing here?”
“I’m looking for Elektra.”
“Well, you can see she an’t here.” Gammer set the rocker rocking hard again. “She’s up at the lake with your sister.”
“She isn’t up at the lake. We’ve all left the lake.”
“Did you bring her back here?”
“We couldn’t,” stated Aunt George. “She left before we packed out.”
“Why did she leave?”
“That’s what I want to know. I want to ask her.”
“Well, she an’t here.”
“Where’s her room?”
“She an’t in her room.”
“How do you know she isn’t up in her room?”
Gammer cackled. A cackle laugh. I’d read of them. But I didn’t know there was really such a sound.
She dug her fist into a voluminous pocket in her skirt. “Because I got her key.” She unreeled a long chain attached inside the pocket. On the end of it was a large ring of keys. “She leaves it with me when she’s out of town. So nobody gets into her things.” She beetled suspiciously at Aunt George.
“You haven’t seen her since she came back? You haven’t had any message from her?”
Gammer kept humming “Nnnnoooo” and rocking harder. Like little boys do to make it go faster.
“Then where is she?” Aunt George said. Not exactly to Gammer. At her own frustration.
But Gammer responded. “She’s a Canuck. I told you that before. A Canuck witch.” She restarted the rocker. “She flew away-up high-way up high…”
“On your broomstick,” Aunt George bristled. She’d had enough of Gammer’s antics. She stood up and brushed the dust off her skirt, although the chair she’d sat on had been brushed by her handkerchief before she sat down on it. “If you do see her or hear from her,” Aunt George instructed, “tell her I’m looking for her. To pay her the money I owe her.”
The rocking stopped like that. “You can pay me. I’ll give it to her.”
“I’ll pay her. No one else.”
“You think I’d spend it on myself.”
“I pay what I owe to the one I owe.” With that she stalked out while Gammer was still embroidering her role as a caretaker of Electra’s money as well as her room. I sidled out beside Aunt George. I didn’t want to be left alone in that room with Gammer.
All the way to Main Street Aunt George kept talking to herself, not to me, about the perfidious Gammer and her grandniece. I managed to keep up with her fast walk by saving my breath. Only three blocks to Main Street.
Waiting to cross the street, I could ask, “Now where do we
go?”
“We’ll go to Gus Henschel’s. I understand his nephew, Voss, and that girl were what we used to call an item.”
“Did everybody know?” Somehow I’d thought it was a private affair, known only to Katty and her friends who saw than dancing together.
“It’s the talk of this town the way she went after him.” She was opening the door of the butcher shop before I could think of some excuse to keep from going in there. I didn’t want Voss to see me and think I’d talked about him and Elektra.
Voss wasn’t up front today. His uncle was. He was arranging steaks for his display case. “Morning, Miss Georgie,” he said, but it was a glum morning from his expression. “What can I do for you today?”
“You can let me talk to that nephew of yours.”
“Voss?”
“I understand that is the name.”
He peered over the counter at me. I was too young to be a friend of Voss so he dismissed me from his answer. To Aunt George he growled, “I’d like to talk to him myself. That javel never come back from the lake. That camp has been calling and calling him. He hasn’t been around there either.”
Aunt George was only temporarily speechless. “You haven’t seen Elektra?”
“That the pawky girl been hanging around him all summer?”
“She hasn’t been around lately?”
“Not since she went up to the lake with your sister. Leastways that was what she told him.”
Both of them gone. Together. But she wouldn’t go without taking her belongings. Yes, she might. If he was in a hurry. He’d have some money with two jobs. He’d buy her a new hairbrush and nightgown.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Uncle Gus was saying. “But he’ll be around once he runs out of money. I paid him before he went off to the lake that Saturday. He’ll be back.”
“I owe Elektra some money. I don’t like to owe money. If either of them turns up, you let me know. Right off. Hear?”
“I ain’t deef, Aunt George. I hear.”
And she stomped away, me trailing. Again talking to herself. “They’ll turn up when they want money.”
I could have told her they weren’t coming back. They had each other. But she wouldn’t have believed me.
II
Ten years ago. Eleven come summer. High school and college over and done. Two years assistant women’s editor on a medium-small-town newspaper. You want to know what an assistant women’s club editor covers? Women’s club meetings. Women’s club social teas. Women’s club holiday occasions. Washington’s birthday cardboard hatchets. Cotton Easter bunnies in straw bonnets. Fourth of July crepe paper firecrackers. September, miniature grandmothers’ school slates. October, take your pick, witches, brooms, jack-o’-lanterns. November, yarn turkeys. No need to illustrate December and January. How often can you write that the decorations were so charming, unique, attractive, amusing-add your own adjectives,
I couldn’t get out of the groove. The editor wanted me where I was. I could spell.
On a September morning, I read on the AP tape, DATELINE CLARKSVALE. HUMAN BONES FOUND AT LAKE QUICHIQUOIS.
I didn’t have to read on. I knew exactly where, and, without knowing, I knew who. And a chance to break from my shackles. I knocked on Editor Briar’s door. His office is a square of window glass, but we observed the courtesy of a knock. He was chewing his pencil. Obviously working on his weekend editorial. Yes, he uses a pencil. A yellow wooden pencil with very black lead.
“Mr. Briar,” I said, “I’d like to leave now. My page has gone to press.”
“Who’s going to read proof?”
“You are,” I told him. “Or one of those callow youths you call reporters.” I’d known Mr. Briar a long time. Since I was subeditor on the college paper. I knew how to give him just enough information to whet his news appetite. “I have a story that takes investigative reporting, and I want to get at it ahead of the pack.”
He stuttered and glowered and called anathema on my head. A hot story was for callow Quentin, the one he was training to be a star metropolitan reporter. Like he’d always wanted to be.
He was wasting my time. I interrupted him. “It just came over AP. Finding bones upstate. Human bones.”
His pink face glistened. “I’ll send Quent-”
“Indeed you won’t,” I countered. “I have the inside track. I was there.” Stress on there. “When that girl disappeared. I can beat the city slickers. They’ll be coming around. But I know these folks. See you Monday.”