The very first paper also reported that no evidence had been found to link the widow Dakin to the crime. She was not in attendance at the trial and could not be reached for comment. The paper also reported a strange coincidence. But we were to learn of that event through quite another channel and at another time. The last blotched paper reported the strange deaths of Judy DeLucca and Janice Hicks.
At the time, I paid next to no attention. Mama never was a newspaper reader—not of respectable ones anyway, and not even the tabloids, at the time—and I was too young to care about any part of a newspaper aside from the funny pages. And for all I knew then, the local newspaper was often late and ink-blotched into an unreadable condition.
“Miz Dakin,” Merry Verlow said softly. “May I have a word?”
Smiling graciously, Mama butted her cigarette in an ashtray and followed Miz Verlow back inside, where I was waiting.
“Did Calley break something? You just go right ahead and hit her.”
“I have not found that hitting children improves them,” Miz Verlow said, “and I know that it does not improve me.”
That brought Mama up short. She had taken Miz Verlow, who had given her back her own bedroom and put a light in it for her, for an acolyte. Now Miz Verlow was making declarations.
Miz Verlow went on. “I have put some gasoline in your vehicle and brought it to the back of the house. As a matter of convenience, it is my practice to ask guests to leave their car keys with me, as our parking space is so limited and vehicles may have to be moved. I have taken the liberty of unpacking your vehicle and sending your luggage to your room. You may store anything you wish in the attic, which is locked, of course. You need only ask for the key should you desire to retrieve anything that you choose to store at anytime. If you would like to go up now and see to its disposition—”
Mama’s mouth was set in a straight line that meant nobody was putting anything over on her. “I believe I’ll do just that.”
She started upstairs.
“Go out and play, Calley,” Miz Verlow said, without looking at me.
She followed Mama up the stairs.
Twenty-six
TO give the two women time to reach Mama’s room, I sat on the floor and worked at nonexistent knots in my laces. Then, leaving my tennies at the door, I went barefoot up the stairs.
They were above me, barely inside Mama’s room. To my dismay, they gave no sign of moving. I was expecting them to go in and close the door. But they just stood there, not even talking. When I reached the top of the stairs, Mama and Miz Verlow were in Mama’s bedroom’s open doorway, staring at me. Somehow they must have heard my creeping progress up the stairs.
I bolted for the bathroom. When the doorknob would not turn for me and I realized that it was occupied, I turned back to Mama and Miz Verlow, the panic on my face more genuine than it might otherwise have been.
Miz Verlow pointed down the stairwell. “Under the stairs.”
I whirled and raced down the stairs.
Behind me, Mama said, “I caint tell you how many times I’ve told that child not to wait until the last minute, Miz Verlow.”
I had little choice but to follow through with my feint and hie for the WC under the stairs. It was an unavoidably dark little room with a steeply rising ceiling and at that moment, unoccupied. I spent a few minutes closeted there. I decided I might as well, so I did. It was worth noting just how much I would be able to hear from that location. On exiting, I was careful to give the door a little more force than it needed to close, so that it would be heard upstairs. Going through the foyer to the screened door onto the porch, I opened it and then let it slap shut, as if a kid had run outside.
I crept up the stairs again. Mama’s bedroom door was closed.
I studied on my options. Ear to the keyhole was a ridiculously exposed position. There were doors up and down the hallway and on either side of Mama’s bedroom. Most of them opened on other bedrooms, or even small suites, as I would discover soon enough. I sidled along the wall, testing door-knobs as silently as I could, and preparing myself to explain to some adult that I was lost and could not remember which room was Mama’s. One after another doorknob proved unmovable.
Reaching Mama’s door, I held my breath past it. I turned the hall corner. The hall ended on the landing of the backstairs that went down to the kitchen. Only one full-height door broke the blankness of the wall. A small metal door was set in the wall at waist height. It had to be the laundry chute, the source of the whumps I had heard. When I tried the knob of the full-height door, I discovered a walk-in linen closet. Quick as a single beat of my heart, I was inside it, with the door closed behind me. Mama’s voice in relentless low complaint helped me locate the best listening post, the wall that the closet shared with our bedroom.
The closet walls were lined with cupboards below and open shelves above. On the open shelves were ribbon-tied stacks of towels. I used the cupboard counter to heist myself onto a shelf about six feet from the floor. A layer of towels softened the hard wood of the shelf, and stacks of them gathered around myself masked me from inadvertent discovery—so I hoped. In my pocket Betsy Cane McCall made an uncomfortable lump, so I extracted her and tucked her among the layered towels. Then I could open my ears completely.
“I know what was in my vehicle,” Mama said, her voice all sharp cutting edges. “Explain, if you please, why everything is not here.”
“But everything is, Miz Dakin.” Miz Verlow did not sound at all threatened.
Mama stamped her foot. “I will not be robbed again!”
Miz Verlow paused briefly and said, “I have heard it said that a thief cannot be robbed.”
“Just what’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I have given you refuge in my home as a favor to my sister, Fennie. This favor is not without its costs to me, Miz Dakin, as you can easily understand. You have very little means, and I am aware of no prospect of future income. You have a choice. You can accept my terms or you can go elsewhere.”
Mama tore a match across a matchbook with savage intensity, a flame popped and sizzled, and she drew on a cigarette. “Even if everything you just said was true, I don’t even know what your terms are!”
Miz Verlow told her.
Cleonie padded softly down the hall.
I held my breath again in the hope that she would pass by. The door open; she entered. She began to take linen from a cupboard. Then she turned to the towels. All at once she paused. She lifted the towels behind which I was hiding with Betsy Cane McCall. Cleonie hooked up an eyebrow at the sight of me.
I held my finger to my lips pleadingly.
Like a bird, she cocked her head and caught Miz Verlow’s deadly calm murmuring. Cleonie’s lips pursed in disapproval. She dropped the towels down in front of me again and picked up another stack. The door closed behind her.
Even a dunce could see that my luck was clinging to a cliff edge by its fingernails. I crept out of the linen closet half a minute after Cleonie left it. Before the second half of that minute had passed, I had hustled myself and Betsy Cane McCall right out of that house.
Beyond the first great dune and the raggedy parade of tall grasses, the water of the Gulf of Mexico worked quietly upon the sand. Morning light and low tide cast the beach as wide as a desert; there was no end to it in either direction. Breathless from my escape, I paused at the top of the dune to look all around.
Behind me, Merrymeeting stood high and alone. Nowhere could I see any other houses, only swales of sand and the strange greenery.
I wasn’t particularly interested in the house. Big as it was, I was no stranger to big houses. Unlike other houses though, this one stood on what seemed to seven-year-old me to be tip-toes. In this, it was more like Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin’s house on its brick piers than Ramparts or our house in Montgomery, which had actual stone-wall foundations and underground cellars. Piecrust lattice skirted the verandahs, hiding a considerable space beneath the house. Scribbles of evergreen shrubs sprawled low along the bottom edge of the latticework. Whatever color the structure had once been, the weather had beaten every bit of it out of the wood, shingles and brick, so the house seemed oddly insubstantial. An insistently real television antenna poked above one of the roofs. It made me think of the stave on which music is written. The antenna meant that Miz Verlow did not think that television was a passing fad. I had not heard a television yet but that only meant that it was off.