“No, no, no!” Her husky voice held the same vehement withdrawal as when I’d suggested earlier that she might let me crash on her sofa.
Hastily, I amended, “Or maybe we could meet somewhere? I’m at Dixie Babcock’s office on the sixth floor of the Global Home Furnishings Market and she could bring me anywhere you say.”
I raised my eyebrows inquiringly at Dixie and she nodded.
“Please? I really do need my things tonight and I’m sure you want yours?”
“Go to the open door,” she said at last
I looked around wildly. The Southern Retail Furnishings Alliance suite consisted of Dixie’s office and two smaller ones, a generous reception area and an overcrowded work/storage area that housed the basic machines without which no modern office can function: fax, communal printer, copier, microwave and coffee maker. From where I stood, every door in sight was already wide open.
“Which open door?” I asked.
There was a barking sound at her end of the connection. It took me a moment to recognize that the sound was laughter.
“On North Centennial,” she said. “I will leave your bag with Yolanda and you may do the same with mine.”
“Yolanda who? And when will you be there?”
Too late. The connection was broken. I tried to call her back, but after three rings, an operator came on the line to inform me that the person I was calling was unavailable at that time.
Savannah must have found the Off switch.
“Not to worry,” Dixie told me. “North Centennial? She probably means the Open Door Ministry. It’s a shelter for the homeless and Yolanda Jackson runs the soup kitchen for the hungry. The Father’s Table. I’ve volunteered there a few times. It’s not far.”
“May I come with you?” asked Heather McKenzie.
“Only if you promise not to spook her before I get my purse back,” I said.
Dixie picked up her own purse and keys. As she began switching off lights, the phone rang.
“That’s either Pell or the baby-sitter wondering where we are,” she said and picked up the receiver. “Dixie Babcock… Oh, Mr. Sherrin.” Her voice flattened and then became artificially bright. “Good to hear your voice, too. When did you get in?”
She gave us a pained look and her free fingers pantomimed a ponderous male mouth opening and closing with pompous authority. After a couple of minutes in which her side of the conversation seemed limited to “Yes, I see, yes,” she put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, “One of the directors. He’s liable to talk another twenty minutes. Why don’t you two go on ahead and I’ll catch up with you at the shelter—yes, Mr. Sherrin, yes I do see, but—”
She tore a sheet off her scratch pad and drew us a rough map of where to go.
“We can take my car,” Heather McKenzie said. “It’s just over in the Holiday Inn parking lot.”
As we left, Dixie’s voice followed us down the now-deserted hall, “Yes… I see… yes…”
After nearly three hours of new-furniture smells, it felt good to get outside to a spring night in North Carolina. Despite dew-dampened streets, car exhausts, and occasional whiffs of fried food, there was an overarching sweet freshness to the April air. Cars and shuttle buses had melted away for the evening and now High Point’s Main Street was almost as traffic-free as I remembered.
Just as Dixie Babcock was probably ten years older than me—“Than I,” came Aunt Zell’s schoolteacher voice in my head—Heather McKenzie was probably ten years younger. She was also several inches shorter yet her stride matched mine as we crossed Main Street to the Holiday Inn, and she seemed to be enjoying the cool air, too. Her camel slacks and teal blue blazer looked expensive and fit her compact body stylishly but they weren’t exactly designed for April in North Carolina.
“Wasn’t that jacket hot today?”
“If it stays this warm, I’ll have to buy something cotton,” she admitted. “I wasn’t thinking clearly when I packed nothing but wool and corduroy.”
“This your first time in the South?”
“First time to really look around and enjoy.”
“Oh?”
“Actually, I was born in Georgia, but my parents took me North when I was only ten days old. It’s so different down here, isn’t it? Everything’s already in bloom. Up there, buds are barely starting to swell.”
Her car was a white Lexus and the passenger seat was littered with maps and folders and a couple of empty fast-food bags.
“Sorry about the mess,” Heather said. “Just throw all that stuff on the backseat.”
As I gathered up a handful, a glossy eight-by-ten sienna-toned photograph slid out of one folder. It showed three people in a workroom or studio. Sketches of furniture groupings covered the bulletin board behind the tilt-top drawing table. The central figure was a small, dark-haired woman, who’d half turned on her swivel stool and had one high-heeled foot extended as if she were about to stand. She wore black slacks, a short-sleeved black turtleneck, and what looked like an authentic Navajo squash blossom necklace of turquoise and silver.
She was laughing at the two men, who looked as if they could eat her with a spoon. The first was casually dressed and unfamiliar to me, but the man in a sports jacket and tie was a much younger Jay Patterson, unmistakable with his broad face, square jaw and bulbous nose. It took me half a minute longer to realize that the small stylish woman in this photograph was the same chiffon-draped Matilda McNeill Jernigan that we were on our way to meet at a homeless shelter.
“Dear Lord above!” I exclaimed. “If this is what Savannah looked like when she left, no wonder people didn’t immediately recognize her tonight.”
Heather took the photograph and slid it back into the folder. “I just hope she’ll talk to me. You were with her tonight. What’s she like?”
“Nothing like the reactions I’ve heard from people who knew her. I thought she was someone’s eccentric mother or grandmother. She talked about the Market, but anyone who lives in High Point could probably tell you the same things she told me. Do you specialize in furniture people up there in Massachusetts?”
“Not really,” she answered vaguely.
We had turned off Main and were now driving east on Kivett Drive. Heather, who’d been in town long enough to get her bearings, pointed out various buildings: “The Hamilton Square showrooms are over there and Hamilton Wrenn’s here, and down that way’s a building shaped like the world’s largest bureau if you’re into that sort of thing.”
“I’m more interested in shopping than doing the tourist bit,” I told her.
“All the same, you really ought to go by the Discovery Center and see how a furniture factory works if you’ve never been inside one,” she said. “It’s amazing to see how they set the knives for cutting legs and spindles when a piece is in production.”
She turned left on North Centennial Street and soon pulled into the parking lot beside a red brick building. Open stairs mounted to the second floor and several men lounged there under the security light to smoke their cigarettes, a mix of black and white, drably dressed, an air of defeat on most of them. And even though I’d never seen them before, they were familiar to me. I’d probably see some of these very men in court next week.
Their eyes sized us up as we approached and when I said, “Yolanda Jackson? The Father’s Table?” a couple of them gestured to the short flight of steps that led down to a metal door beneath the stairs.
The basement was built of cement blocks. Beyond a small vestibule were double glass doors that led into a large and surprisingly cheerful dining area. Although the ceiling was low, there was nothing cavelike about the room. Its block walls had been painted off-white and someone had done fool-the-eye paintings which gave the illusion of looking out wide windows into a vaguely Biblical landscape of calm green hills. Painted geraniums bloomed on the “window ledges” and green vines seemed to twine along the top.