“Says someone was poking around her place last night.” Grandma leans in so she can whisper to Mama. “Says she got a close-up look. Says Juna looked right in her window.”
“You can’t leave me no more, Abey,” Miss Watson says. “Promise you won’t leave me no more.”
Abraham looks around the room, his eyes passing over every one of them. He’s apologizing in that silent way families have of apologizing to one another.
“I won’t leave you. And we’ll be married before you know it. Ain’t that right, Mary?” he says to Grandma, who is watching out the kitchen window and not much listening to Abraham. “Ain’t that right, Sarah? They’re going to see to a perfect day, aren’t you? A perfect day and we’ll be married. Juna ain’t going to ruin that. Ain’t no one going to ruin that.”
“Did you find cigarettes?” Annie asks, pulling away from Mama and stepping up to Miss Watson. “And did she have eyes like mine, as black as mine?”
Miss Watson’s eyes stretch wide. Even small as they are, they stretch open until they look almost like normal eyes. She nods, slow at first and then faster.
“Why is she here, Annie?” Miss Watson says. “What have you done to bring her here?”
“Don’t you ask such a thing of this child,” Grandma says, pushing between Mama and Annie to stand at Annie’s side.
“Please,” Mama says. “Let’s not stir up trouble. It was probably a neighbor, Abigail. Or kids, kids pulling a prank.”
“I’d rather stir up trouble,” Grandma says, “than see something befall this child.”
“Mother,” Daddy says, “you’ve no call to say that.”
“No call to say what?” It’s Caroline. She’s standing at the end of the table, staring at Miss Watson.
“Your Uncle Dale died because I didn’t speak my mind back then,” Grandma says. “Or rather I did speak my mind, but no one cared to listen. I knew that girl was bound to bring heartache, and I’ll not have it happen again.”
Mama takes a backward step.
“I’m sorry, Sarah,” Grandma says. “I don’t mean no harm, but I’ll not let you make light of what this girl’s telling us.”
“That’ll be quite enough,” Sheriff Fulkerson says, rubbing his forehead and lifting a hand to Annie so she’ll not answer Miss Watson’s questions. “Let’s not have this get the better of us.”
The men who came from Lexington told Sheriff Fulkerson he was a damn fool for wasting their time. They drove all that way to see what killed a woman old as Mrs. Baine? Old age killed her, they said. No trauma to the head or any other part of her. No bullet hole. No knife wound. No bruises around her neck. Sheriff Fulkerson asked if those men knew of Juna Crowley. They smiled when they said they did and then silenced themselves as if waiting for the sheriff to try to explain how Juna Crowley and the girl who looked just like her had one damn thing to do with this dead old woman. The men would have called Sheriff Fulkerson a damn fool all over again if he had tried to explain. Instead, he said none of those things, and the men from Lexington had patted him on the back and said that folks who grow old have a way of eventually dying.
“John, how about you and I take a drive,” the sheriff says. “Let’s us have a look around Abigail’s place.”
Pushing back from the table, Daddy pulls on his hat. “That all right with you, Abe? Caroline’ll see to Abigail. Take her upstairs, let her clean herself up.”
Abraham nods and pulls out Miss Watson’s chair as she stands. Caroline walks toward the living room and waits there for Miss Watson to join her. As she waits, Caroline keeps her eyes on the floor, won’t look at Annie. She’s remembered about the café and Lizzy Morris and Annie saying she saw Jacob Riddle in that well, and she’s back to being angry.
“Well,” Abraham says, his voice normal again and looking his usual size now that Miss Watson has left the room. “Look at here.”
He lifts one of Annie’s hands, the hand that holds the deck of cards Ellis Baine gave her.
“Here’s that deck I was looking for the other night.”
He takes the cards, tosses them in the air, and catches them one-handed. When Miss Watson was in the room, Abraham had shrunk in on himself, but with her gone, he’s looking happy, expectant, excited even. He’s all of those things because he believes it now for sure. First Annie saw her and now Miss Watson saw her. Aunt Juna is home.
“Thought I lost these,” he says as he tucks the deck in his shirt pocket, leans forward, and shouts after Miss Watson. “See there, Abigail,” he says. “Our luck is turning already. Found them cards we was missing. My lucky deck of cards.”
ALL AFTERNOON, ANNIE’S been watching for Aunt Juna from the bedroom window, but she sees Ellis Baine instead. She’s high enough to see the whole of the Baines’ place. He walks from his house, across the porch, and over to the well where Annie found his mama. He leans there, not drawing water, not doing anything, or maybe doing everything by standing where Annie can see him. He couldn’t possibly see her staring at him from such a distance, but he turns his head real slow the way a person does when he feels someone watching him, and it would seem he is looking in Annie’s direction. She steps away and presses herself flat against the wall, listening, though not sure what she’s listening for. But he doesn’t know which room is hers, couldn’t possibly know. She steps back where she can see and tries to decide if she’ll tell about the cards.
She spent most of yesterday and all of last night thinking about Abraham Pace and those cards. It means something that they are his, though she doesn’t know what. Ellis Baine will know, but she isn’t altogether sure telling him is something she should do. She’s still deciding when she hears the creaking and whining.
From her other bedroom window, she can also look down on the whole of the drive leading up to the house. She sees Ryce long before he drops his bike at the back porch. He’s here on his lunch hour again, one day after Annie saw Lizzy Morris at the café. Lizzy probably told him all about it last night. Probably told him Annie Holleran was, at the very least, wearing proper undergarments.
After dropping his bike, Ryce unrolls the one pant leg he’s all the time rolling up so it doesn’t get caught in his chain, walks up the stairs, across the porch, and knocks on the back door. Because the screen door doesn’t bounce in its frame and the hook latch doesn’t rattle for being left to hang loose and unhooked, Mama must have locked up tight when she left for town.
“Hello,” Ryce says, his voice drifting up to Annie’s open window. “Mrs. Holleran? Annie?”
Another knock. And then another. He stands at the back door a full five minutes, knocking and calling out. More and more, Ryce favors his daddy, not so much the look of him but in other ways. Ryce is already taller than his daddy and is more lean than stout. He gets that from his mama. He shares something different with his daddy, something subtle and not so altogether easy to name. Certain words he strings together, a way he nods his head while at the same time puckering up his lips, the posture he takes on when standing with his feet planted a shade too wide and his arms crossed.
Folks must see the same in Annie. Those who knew Juna Crowley must see Annie growing into her mama, taking on her ways and inclinations. Annie likely stands in a particular fashion that reminds folks of Juna, probably molds her face into an expression that is so like something Juna once did, must utter some phrase Juna was prone to uttering. Or maybe all that similarity comes from living with a person, soaking up a person, for all of sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen years. Sounding just like his daddy, Ryce keeps calling out, but no one except Annie is home to hear.
Daddy left early to make a run to the lumberyard. He’s picking up wood for cheap to build a few makeshift tables. Grandma is expecting more people than ever to come on Sunday, and late last night she decided they didn’t have enough seating and couldn’t Daddy find a way to give her more. Mama, Caroline, and Grandma went into town with Miss Watson to shop for something new and something blue and to stop her from worrying that Aunt Juna is back to ruin all her plans for a happy life. Annie had told Daddy she would be going to town with Mama and Grandma, and she told Mama and Grandma she’d be going to the lumberyard with Daddy. Everyone believed her, and now she finds herself home alone.