“Oh, yes,” I said, grinning inside and out. “I do indeed.”
And the last of my mostly self-induced stress about the book fair vanished. How could I ever have thought, even in jest, about changing jobs? Everything would work out, one way or another. Either people would show up or people wouldn’t, and all I could do was my best.
Plus, out here on the bookmobile, I came across things like this, seeing Mitchell Koyne, of all people, holding hands with a real-live successful professional woman. How could life get any better?
• • •
The second half of the day took us close to the area where I’d followed Mitchell’s truck, which meant we were nearing Neva Chatham territory. I told Julia about the incident, and she made sympathetic noises, reassuring me that my reaction to a gun pointed in my general direction hadn’t been over-the-top. However, she didn’t know anything about the eccentric Ms. Chatham and wasn’t sure she knew anyone who did.
“We’re in the opposite corner of the county from Chilson,” she said, a little apologetically. “I don’t know many people over here.”
So when the first group of bookmobilers came on board that afternoon, I started asking around, in a sideways sort of way. The first person I asked was a tailored elderly gentleman whom I might have wanted to introduce to my aunt if she hadn’t already been seeing Otto.
“Neva Chatham,” he said, smoothing his white mustache. “John Chatham’s daughter?”
I had no idea, but there couldn’t be many people walking around with the first name of Neva. “She lives in an old farmhouse out on Chatham Road.”
“That’s right,” my gentleman said. “John and Marie’s daughter. Only child, if I recall correctly.” He got a faraway look in his pale blue eyes. “They were good people. Sad, really, what happened.”
“Oh?” I asked. “What’s that?”
He shook his head, clearing away the memories. “What happens to all of us. We get old, we get sick, and we die.” He smiled, taking away the brutishness of his statements. “Don’t mind me, I can get a little maudlin in April. It’s the weather, you know.”
I blinked at him. It was the first of May, and the weather had turned sunny and bright and close to downright warm. But April can hang on inside you, so I knew what he meant.
At the next stop, I asked Mrs. Dugan, a patron I knew to be chatty, about Neva.
Mrs. Dugan sighed and shook her head, her white curls staying in place with steadfast firmness. “I worry about her, I really do. All alone in that big house with no one to talk to. She doesn’t even have cable television.”
“I heard she was an only child.”
She nodded. “That’s right. Doted on her father. Not sure she ever left home, especially after he got sick. Then he died and her mother just faded away, if you know what I mean.”
“How old was Neva?” I asked.
“When her dad got sick? Goodness, I really don’t know. I was just a little girl at the time, so she was probably somewhere in her twenties. And the poor man lingered so.” Mrs. Dugan sighed. “Probably lasted twenty-five years. Thinking back on it, he probably had multiple sclerosis. So little they can do about it now, and back then there was nothing.”
Which meant Neva was around fifty when her father died. She’d spent the most productive years of her life caretaking her father, then her mother, and never had a life of her own. No husband, no children, and now no grandchildren.
Mrs. Dugan was still talking, so I tuned back in. “How Neva managed to take care of her parents and run that farm I’ll never know. The place has been in her family since homestead days, so I doubt there’s a mortgage, but the property taxes alone must eat her alive.”
Property taxes. Yet another reason to put off buying a house. “It’s a working farm?” I asked.
“If you want to call it that.” Mrs. Dugan half laughed. “She has a few dairy cows and runs a summer farm stand, selling fruits and vegetables. Raises quite a variety, Neva does, with that greenhouse her granddad made. Gets strawberries before anyone else in the county.”
“She does this all by herself?”
Mrs. Dugan shrugged. “Must be. Makes jams and jellies, too. Gets a pretty penny for them, I’ll say that for her.”
But I was stuck back on the idea that Neva was all alone in her endeavors. “What about her other family, and her friends? What about neighbors? Do they help her? Farming is hard work, and . . .”
Mrs. Dugan was shaking her head. “Help Neva Chatham? I wouldn’t risk offering, not if my life depended on it. And honestly I’m not sure she has friends, not to speak of.”
There was a tug at my pant leg. I looked down and saw a small child looking up at me. He was maybe four years old with jet-black hair, big brown eyes, and the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a human. “Hi,” I said. “May I help you?”
He nodded. “Miss Neva is my friend.”
“She is?”
Again he nodded. “My mommy takes me to get raspberries. Miss Neva helps me pick the best ones.”
I smiled. “You like raspberries?”
He nodded vigorously. “Lots and lots. With cream. And just a little sugar, not too much, Miss Neva says, or you won’t taste the berries.”
Mrs. Dugan make a tsking noise and glanced down the aisle to someone who I assumed was the child’s mother. “His mother,” Mrs. Dugan said, “is perhaps a trifle lackadaisical in her childrearing efforts.”
“What’s lack-a-daisy?” the child asked.
“Something you’ll learn when you grow up,” Mrs. Dugan said, patting him on the head.
The kid glared at her, then spun on his heel and went to his mother’s side.
“Miss Minnie?”
I turned to see a middle-aged man looking at me. “Excuse me,” I said to Mrs. Dugan, and went to help him.
He looked past me, then said in a soft voice, “I heard what Mrs. Nosy-Toes over there was saying and I wanted to make sure you got the whole story about Neva.”
“Okay,” I said, quietly and cautiously.
“No one,” he whispered, “but no one, has been inside the Chatham house in twenty years, not since her mother died.”
I blinked at him. “That can’t be right.”
“Ask around,” he said. “No one has been allowed past the porch since her mother’s coffin left the house. More than a little weird, don’t you think?” He tapped his temple, shook his head, and went back to perusing the bookmobile’s small selection of travel books.
So, according to the adults, Neva Chatham was an eccentric recluse who shouldn’t be allowed near children. According to the child, Neva was a friend. What I needed to do was talk to the boy’s mother and get another adult point of view.
But when I turned around, they were both gone.
• • •
“You have reached the Carters’ landline. Please leave a message at the tone.” Beep.
“Hi, Rachel,” I said. “This is Minnie Hamilton from the bookmobile.” I’d asked Mrs. Dugan the name of the young woman with the little boy and she’d told me all about Rachel and her husband and Rachel’s mother and father. She would have gone on, I’d been sure, to share decades-old gossip about Rachel’s grandparents, but I’d cut in as politely as I could and thanked her for the information.
But this was the second time I was leaving a message and I was starting to wonder if I was ever going to hear back. I left a brief message, gave my number, and asked her to call, then hung up.
“Well,” I said, “what do you think?”
Eddie, who was sitting on the houseboat’s dashboard, turned his head ever so slightly in my direction. He might have been responding to my question, but he also might have been watching the seagulls wheeling over the blue waters of Janay Lake.