Dream With Little Angels (6 page)

Uncle Henry's eyes narrowed and he nodded solemnly. “Well, if you got a feelin', you got a feelin'. We all gotta trust our feelings. What do you think he's up to?”

Me and Dewey looked at each other and shrugged. “That's the part we been tryin' to figure out.”

“And the roadkill bein' gone,” Uncle Henry said. “That's definitely a mite disturbin', I'd say.”

“That's exactly what I said,” Dewey said.

Uncle Henry's fingers tapped a rhythm out on his cheek. “I wonder . . .” he said. “Do you think by any chance—I mean, you boys must've already considered this possibility—that maybe the two things are somehow connected?”

It was like a fork of lightning jolted into my brain the minute he said it. How could we not have seen this ourselves? I thought we were just too close to the problem to make out the entire forest, as my mother would say.

Just then Carry came in, slurping soup from a white handled bowl. I had no idea how long she had been in the kitchen, but obviously long enough to have heard some of our discussion. “Why are you encouragin' them, Uncle Henry?” she asked. It was a relief to see her disposition had brightened since getting home.

Uncle Henry shook his head and turned his palms upward. “I'm not encouragin' nor discouragin', I'm simply pointin' out facts and connectin' the dots.”

“You're encouragin' them to keep stalkin' the new neighbor.”

“We ain't stalkin',” I said. Then I looked at Uncle Henry and asked, “Are we?”

He rubbed his nose with his thumb. “I don't reckon so. So far you've just been inquisitive from a distance. Not sure where the line between inquisitive and stalkin' is, but I'm pretty sure you're still on the winnin' side at this point.”

“Well, you're encouragin' them to be strange, then,” Carry said, making one of her new faces she only recently came up with.

“You're just ornery cuz you discovered boys,” I said, quoting my mother as best I could without really understanding what it was I was saying.

“Oh, you got a boyfriend now?” Uncle Henry asked. “Anyone I know?”

“He lives in Satsuma,” I said, before Carry could answer. This was the first time I connected the boy problem with an actual boy
friend,
but it made sense. It also made sense that any boy my sister was seeing was living in Satsuma on account of I hadn't seen her with one here in Alvin. Of course, I was just hypothesizing.

Uncle Henry's eyebrows went up. “Satsuma? I thought all you young girls were after that farm boy.” He snapped his fingers, trying to recall who he was thinking of. “That Allen kid, what was his name?” The Allens had a soy and corn farm out along Highway Seventeen.

“Jesse Allen?” Dewey asked.

With another snap, Uncle Henry pointed at him. “Bingo.” He looked up to Carry. “Thought he was the dreamboat round these parts?”

“Jesse
James
Allen,” I clarified. A half dozen years ago, the Allens' farmhouse burned to the ground. Jesse James lost his mother, his father, and his grandma in that fire.

I knew all this because, on the day after the fire, Jesse James Allen had become the most famous kid in Alvin when the
Alvin Alerter
ran a picture of him and his grandpa on the front page asking folks to do what they could to help with food and clothing. I'm not sure how old he was in that picture, probably around my age.

He was still going to school back then, although he'd repeated a few grades. He wasn't much good at school. I guess that's why his grandpa pulled him out after the fire—because Jesse and school didn't mix, and because he needed Jesse's help on the farm.

I didn't know what all the fuss was about when it came to Jesse and girls, but they all seemed to like him. Especially during those years right after he dropped out of school. Maybe it was on account of him looking so much older than most of the boys his age, I didn't know. Or maybe it had something to do with him not having to go to school. All I knew was that even Carry seemed to develop a crush on Jesse as she got older. I still remembered a conversation we had had not that long ago. Maybe just a little more than two and a half years.

Carry had told me she reckoned Jesse looked like he should be in a band, either as a singer or a drummer. I wasn't sure why she picked those two choices. “Why not a guitar player?” I asked her. “Or one of them guys who plays keyboards ?” We had just come home from school that day. I hadn't even taken off my sneakers yet.

“Nope,” she'd said, all dreamy-eyed. “Jesse James is definitely the singer or drummer type. Don't you think he looks like Rick Springfield?”

I didn't rightly know what Rick Springfield looked like, but if he had a mess of black hair that hung down over his eyes so far he could barely see past it, and wore the same ripped denim jacket every single day of his life over top of a dirty white T-shirt, then I guessed she was right. “Isn't Rick Springfield a singer, though?” I asked.

“Yeah,” my sister said. “And an actor.”

“So, why should Jesse be a drummer, too?”

“Because drummers are cool. Maybe even cooler than singers.”

“No, they're not,” I said. “All they do is sit behind the band and hit stuff. They don't even really make music.”

She just gave me a look like I didn't have the slightest clue what I was talking about, and maybe she was right. She walked off down the hall to her room, leaving me standing in the kitchen, where my mom was cooking soup.

“That
is
what drummers do, ain't it, Mom? Just sit around and hit stuff?”

“Last time I checked, honey,” she said.

“How is that cooler than playing a guitar?”

“Can't help you there.” She had shrugged. “I lost track of what was cool many years ago, I'm afraid.”

I related all this to my Uncle Henry, Dewey, and Carry as I remembered it, but as I said, this memory was from two and a half years ago, and Jesse James Allen's popularity had diminished with time. These days, Jesse still lived on the farm with his grandpa, only in a new farmhouse they built the summer following the great Allen fire, with the help of the Mexicans who came up to work.

Carry laughed sarcastically at Uncle Henry's comment about Jesse being a dreamboat. I guess time had taken away her crush on him, too. She probably didn't like Rick Springfield anymore, neither. “Maybe back when I was ten,” she said. “Now he's just weird.” Then she sneered at me. “And you know nothin' 'bout my life, so quit pretendin' you do.” With that, she turned on her heel and stomped back to the kitchen.

“At least she didn't call you ass face,” Dewey said.

“Hey,” Uncle Henry said, “language.”

“Sorry,” Dewey said.

But I kept thinking about what Uncle Henry had said, about there being maybe a connection between the roadkill disappearing and Mr. Farrow moving into the neighborhood. This thought continued long after Dewey had gone home for supper.

My mother returned from work in time to cook dinner and, as she set a plate of fried chicken and mashed potatoes on the table in front of me, all sorts of possible connections still tumbled through my mind.

“You're awfully quiet there, soldier,” Uncle Henry said, picking up a drumstick.

“Thinkin' 'bout stuff,” I said.

He nodded, chewing.

Carry's attitude had made a strange about-face since we picked her up at the bus stop, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, she almost felt like the old Carry again. She dove into her dinner without any complaining. She even said
please
and
thank you
just as polite as could be. Of course I was immediately suspicious. Then, a few minutes after my mother finished serving and had sat down herself, I heard Carry twice catch her breath, as though she were about to say something and then, at the last minute, thought better of it.

“Mama?” she asked, finally. Now I was
really
suspicious. Carry never called my mother
Mama
unless she wanted something.

“Yes, honey?”

Carry hesitated slightly. Then when she spoke, she did so quickly, as though she wanted to get all the words out onto the table in a single breath. “This Saturday mornin', a bunch of my friends are getting together in Satsuma for pizza and an afternoon movie.”

My mother swallowed, but didn't say nothing.

Carry took the opportunity to continue. “I was wonderin' if I could go along with 'em. You know, on the bus and all that.” Her words kept speeding up. Pretty soon, I thought, she'd sound like the channel six weather guy. “I won't be late,” she promised. “I'll be home before supper.”

“Is Jessica going?” my mother asked. Jessica Thompson had been Carry's best friend since seventh grade.

Carry paused, and in that second, I saw the doubt in her eyes. Without question, my mother and Uncle Henry saw it, too. “Yeah, sure,” Carry said. “I think so.”

My mother and Uncle Henry gave each other a quick look. “Let me think on it,” my mother said. Carry gave her plate a frustrated frown.

“Oh!” I said. “Me and Dewey was wonderin' if he could sleep over on Saturday. His mama already said it's fine.”

“I'm working the night shift on Saturday,” my mother said, “so I suppose it's up to Uncle Henry.”

Uncle Henry wiped his hands with his napkin. “Well, I guess if you soldiers promise to stay in line, I'm up to it.”

“Thanks, Uncle Henry.”

Carry tossed the chicken wing in her hand back onto her plate. “How come he always gets everythin' he wants?”

“He doesn't get everythin' he wants,” my mother said.

“Whatever. I just asked to go to Satsuma and you have to ‘think on it.' He asks for somethin', and just
poof,
you say sure.” She made the
poof
motion with her hands. I thought she was getting a bit crazy.

“Honey, it's a bit different,” my mother said. “It's not that I'm tryin' to be mean or nothin', it's just . . . we still haven't found Mary Ann Dailey, and until we do . . .”

Carry burst from her seat. “What if you
never
find her, Mom? Do I
never
get to leave the house again? I am
so sick
of Mary Ann Dailey.” She stomped out of the kitchen. Her bedroom door slammed shut a few seconds later.

My mother and Uncle Henry continued eating in silence, as though nothing had happened. I kept looking from one to the other, waiting for them to say something.

Finally my mother did. “I don't know what to do with her anymore, Hank.”

Uncle Henry finished chewing and swallowed. “You askin' my advice?”

“I always want your advice.”

“Well, I would never assume to know better at parentin' than a mother, especially when that mother is you.”

“Yeah, but you managed to raise them two boys of yours, and they turned into fine adults,” my mother replied. “Somehow you made it through okay. So, yes, I'm askin' your advice, because I don't think I'm gonna be so okay if this goes on much longer.”

“Well,” Uncle Henry said, “first, you gotta remember mine were boys.” He nodded across the table at me. “This fine fellow here? He ain't gonna give you near the troubles that girl down the hall is. And if I had to place a bet, I don't think your troubles with her have nearly even started yet.”

My mother pressed her palm over her eyes. “Oh, don't say that. Please don't say that.”

Uncle Henry touched her arm. “She's a girl turnin' into a woman. You gotta expect some upheaval through that. And you can survive it if you learn how to roll with it. But I don't think you're gonna have any luck at tryin' to avoid it.”

“So you think I should let her go to Satsuma on Saturday?”

Behind his glasses, Uncle Henry's blue eyes gleamed. “She was rude and out of place, but what she said had some truth in it. You can't stop her life because of one missing girl. Eventually everyone has to—”

My mother cut him off. “We're gonna find her,” she said curtly, staring intensely back at him.

I didn't quite understand her reaction, but Uncle Henry just nodded solemnly and looked down at the table. “I reckon you will, sooner or later,” he said.

“It'll be sooner,” my mother said. She sounded almost angry.

Uncle Henry nodded again, but said nothing in reply. I had noticed my mother growing progressively more anxious with each passing day since Mary Ann Dailey went missing. She didn't talk about it much in front of me, but what little I heard made it sound like there wasn't a lot of progress in the case. There was a frustrating lack of clues and she was quickly running out of people to question. She had even made at least two trips I knew of down to Satsuma to talk to kids and teachers at Mary Ann's school.

She let out a sigh. “Okay, so I let her go to Satsuma. Now my second question: How much of what she's tellin' us that she's going to Satsuma for do I trust? You saw her face when I asked about Jessica Thompson. She ain't goin'.”

“Ah,” Uncle Henry said, obviously happy to have moved to a new part in the conversation. “Now that's a different question entirely. I reckon the
spirit
of what she's sayin' is true. I reckon she is goin' for pizza and a movie, but it's with a
friend
. Singular.”

One eyebrow lifted on my mother's face. “So, you're thinkin' the same as me, then.”

“Probably. And you're right. The Thompson girl ain't goin'. Caroline's hopin' you won't call and check up. She's hopin' you won't call her bluff.”