Safe from Harm (9781101619629) (13 page)

Nine

A
nnie Laurie let me sleep late. I could have slept even longer, since it was a Saturday, but Baby Bear pushed Merrie's door open with his nose, breathed heavily into my face, and communicated psychically that it was time we both got out on the levee and chased some squirrels. I groaned and turned over, but Baby Bear walked to the other side of the bed, put his front paws on the bed so he could get right in my face and said it all over again. I could have argued, but what was the point? Baby Bear only understands me when I'm saying what he wants to hear. You know, it's hard not to notice that even though
I'm
the one who takes Baby Bear for all the gruesomely long walks and runs a dog that size requires, it's still
Jo
who is his favorite.

Annie had left a note on the kitchen island—next to the bag of Gina Redman's rolls, so she could be sure I would find it—telling me that she'd taken Jo and some of her friends to the mall for the afternoon. That meant Annie was trying to distract Jo. It also meant that Jo had decided not to go to Saturday ballet class, something that was happening more and more since she hadn't made the cut at the ballet program.

I'd wanted to talk to Jo. About the drug thing. Not that I doubted her. But because I figured she might know someone who did that sort of thing. I could see that, that she could know someone who sold drugs and not tell me and Annie Laurie. I'm not sure I would have told my parents, at her age. As a matter of fact, I
know
I wouldn't have. Because I didn't.

I needed to go see the Pickersley-Smythes. As their minister. I hated that I hadn't yet touched base to see what I could do for them.

I called. The phone rang until the answering service picked up. I left my message.

Baby Bear looked at me and I looked back.

“Give me ten minutes, Baby Bear,” I said. I figured I'd take care of two tasks at once, and walk Baby Bear over to the Pickersley-Smythe house.

I needed to e-mail the news about Phoebe's death to a number of people at the church so they could rally around the family. The youth ministers needed to know, and the elders; whoever was heading up the prayer committee; the Ladies' Bible Class coordinator, who would put together a food committee to provide the eternal casseroles. With Baby Bear pulling at my sneaker, and a roll in my hand, I typed a message and sent it off and then took Baby Bear out the side door to the street. He hesitated. He preferred the levee to the street, but decided not to quibble and we set off toward the Pickersley-Smythes.

It would have been a shorter walk if we had crossed through the golf course, but on a gorgeous October Saturday, it would have meant interrupting a dozen games, and golfers have killed for lesser offenses. I used the greenbelts and that cut down the walk.

Baby Bear stopped and said hello to every child and every tree we passed. The greetings were different, but they both took time, as did the kids' questions.

“What kind of dog is that?” “Does he bite?” “Can I touch him?” “Will he bite me if I touch him?” “Can I sit on him?” “Will he bite me if I sit on him?” I always answer “yes” to the last question.

I got a new question that day: “How much did he cost?” That was a swatting offense when I was a kid, asking how much something cost. As it happened, Baby Bear was a gift, so I told the precocious mogul that Newfoundlands were free if you knew the right person. Let his folks deal with that.

There were several cars parked in front of the Pickersley-Smythes' house, and three in the circle driveway. There was a bashed and battered pickup that had been navy-blue once and was now faded to Confederate gray, and a pair of mint-condition Ford Fiestas, one lime-green and one egg-yolk yellow.

I tapped on the door.

An old woman in a pale-blue polyester pantsuit answered the door. I didn't know her but I recognized those eyes, in spite of them being swollen with unshed tears—she was the one who gave those blue eyes to Mark. And his children—all of his children.

I introduced myself and asked for Liz.

She said, “Oh,” uncertainly, looking from me to Baby Bear who grinned up at her like a benign Hound of the Baskervilles. Her breeding insisted that she invite the preacher in, but most preachers weren't accompanied by huge hounds.

I said, “If you don't mind, I'll wait for Liz out here. The weather is so nice.”

She didn't mind at all. I took Baby Bear off his leash so he could anoint the Pickersley-Smythe bushes.

A minute later, Liz was at the door, the Persian doing that ankle thing cats do. She put a hand out and said, “Please come in, Bear, we need you.” Baby Bear romped up to see if Liz might need him, too.

“Is your yard fenced in, Liz? He's not a digger.”

“It's fenced. I'll meet you around back.”

Annie and I garden together; we enjoy it. Even in the worst of the summer heat, we spend several hours at it every week. But when Baby Bear and I stepped into Liz's backyard, I quickly learned that money trumps labor.

The yard was full of gorgeous magnolias, tons of the ubiquitous crape myrtles, two orange trees and a fourteen- or fifteen-foot tall mature Meyer lemon tree. I will never be able to have a Meyer lemon tree. We don't get enough sun in our yard for fruit trees. All around the pool (of course they had a pool, this is Texas—
I
don't have a pool, but . . .) were huge terra-cotta urns with trailing pansies, yellow and blue and white and deep maroon and those near-inky purple ones. Pansies are annuals. You have to replant them every year. They can't survive the Texas summer.

There were also banks of Knock Out roses, red and pink and coral, and pink with yellow centers. October, and they're blooming their heads off, and they'll keep blooming until we have a frost, which here on the Texas Gulf Coast isn't always a given. The Knock Out roses hardly ever even get black spot. They're so hardy, Texas has started planting them on the sides of highways.

I turned in the yard taking in the colors, the sounds of the water falling into a mini grotto, and the sweet, green fragrances and the . . . stale cigarette smoke.

There on the patio floor was a pile of butts. Someone couldn't find an old flower pot saucer? Or a jar lid? Or
something
?

Liz's voice called me back, wanting to know if I was coming in. I'd been delaying.

I made sure the gate was securely latched, told Baby Bear not to drink too much of the pool water and not, under any circumstances, to get in to the pool. I pulled out my handkerchief and gathered as much as I could of the disgusting butt pile, and went to the back door.

The Pickersley-Smythes have a huge kitchen, a good thing as it was currently full of people, sitting at the kitchen table, hovering over the range top and rinsing out coffee cups at the sink. The twins were upstairs in the playroom with Mrs. Holsapple, the woman who came in to help with the boys, Liz told me, and Mark had locked himself into his study.

Everyone went all expectant when they saw me, and I greeted the people I knew—several women from the church were laying out casseroles that had been waiting in their freezers—evidently my e-mail had gotten a fast response—and there were some pound cakes out, too—it looked like the hard-and-fast had been relaxed for this day. There were several people there I didn't know. Liz made introductions.

“This is my mother, Susan, and my sister, Sue Ellen. Mom, our minister, Walker Wells.”

Susan and Sue Ellen could have been sisters instead of mother and daughter. But that was less of a compliment to the mother; in this case it meant Sue Ellen looked about as old as her mom did.

Both were big, broad women with strong features and big noses. Susan had dyed hair the color of a ripe banana. She wore a straight, navy dress that looked expensive, and she looked about as comfortable wearing it as I would have if I'd had to wear an expensive navy dress.

Sue Ellen was defiantly not dressed up, wearing a Texans jersey over jeans that fit her like panty hose. She wasn't being kind to those jeans and the jeans were getting their own back. As her mother struggled from her chair, Sue Ellen stuck her hand out for me to shake.

“Sue Ellen
Smith
,” she said, rhyming the last name with “myth.” She was making a point. It wasn't “Smythe” like Liz pronounced it.

“Don't get up, Mom, the preacher understands about bad feet. Don't you figure, Lizzy?”

Liz gave her sister a cool look and a cooler smile, and slipped out of the room with an excuse about checking on the boys.

I glanced down at Susan's feet. It wasn't that her feet were bad. It was that they were crammed into a pair of low-heeled black pumps—nun shoes, Merrie would have called them—that didn't fit.

After I had shaken hands and made the appropriate comments and ascertained that these were at least two of the smokers, to judge by their breath and teeth, I was led to the other end of the table where the old woman who had opened the door for me sat with two men. She was Mark's grandmother and the older man was Mark's grandfather. The other man was Jenny's father, Mitch DeWitt.

I'd guess the Pickersleys to be in their early eighties, but they hadn't been easy years. I've got eighty-year-olds in my church who travel to Estes Park, Colorado, every year and hike up to Flattop. If you've spent most of your long life working long, hard hours for small pay and fewer benefits, you won't be in the hiking crowd at eighty.

Mr. Pickersley had once been tall. He'd curled in as he aged and he was very thin now. His wisps of gray hair had been slicked straight back, and he wore a suit that had fit him when his shoulders were broader and he had stood straighter. His shirt wasn't new, and his tie was circa 1960. He had his handkerchief out and he mopped the tears from his face before gravely thanking me for taking the time to drop by.

Mitch DeWitt was a much younger man—he didn't look much over sixty. He'd lived some hard years, too. His shoulders were rangy with the kind of muscles that come from hard work in the sun, not from lifting weights at the gym. His tight, white shirt was sheer enough so that you could see the V-neck undershirt he wore beneath it and the pack of Marlboros tucked in his breast pocket. He stuck an unlit cigarette back in the pack and put a hand out to shake.

“You're the preacher, right? Phoebe died at your house, that right? You weren't even home—that's what I heard. Opened your house up to our little girl and then left her there to die all alone. I heard your daughter couldn't even be bothered to call nine-one-one like you see three-year-olds do all the time on the news, rescuing their mamas.” He held on to my hand while he said this. I caught a whiff of bourbon along with the smoke and it wasn't even noon.

I got my hand back. It had gotten quiet in the kitchen. People were listening.

I said, “Phoebe did die at our house. My daughter found her and called for help.” She had—she had called me. “We weren't expecting Phoebe and we didn't have any idea what kind of . . . what distress Phoebe . . .” I didn't know exactly what had happened. I let the sentence trail off, but I met DeWitt's eyes.

“I'm only saying, is all. Keeping it straight.”

Keeping what straight?

“Did you know Phoebe well, Mr. Wells?” This was Mrs. Pickersley. Her unadorned face was bleak with grief, but she offered up a tremulous smile, all the same. She put her cool, bony hand upon mine and clasped my fingers. Her wrinkled skin was as soft as an old dollar bill.

I told them I hadn't known her for long.

“She was our snowdrop, Mr. Wells,” said old Mr. Pickersley. “When she was a mite of a girl, her hair was as fair as dandelion fluff, her eyebrows so light you couldn't see them at all.”

His wife shook her head hard and she blew her nose into a crushed tissue. “All that black hair and the holes all over her dear face—that was a disguise, Mr. Wells. That wasn't Phoebe. She never did a thing like that 'til after her momma got sick.”

“We don't want you to think that was the real Phoebe,” said Mr. Pickersley. “She was grieving. You know how a long time ago, Hawaiians would knock out their teeth when someone died? Saw it in a movie. That's like what Phoebe did. Same idea. But she was still a snowdrop underneath.” He picked up his mug of coffee and brought it to his mouth but set it down without tasting it. “We'd like to know who gave her those drugs, is what. Our girl had to move all the way across Houston to your fancy neighborhood here to get mixed up in drugs. Someone is not raising their kids right.” He looked at me from under lowered eyebrow shrubs, not accusing, exactly, but looking for an accounting. “She was at your house and Mark tells us Phoebe and your girl had had a falling out, so—” He turned his hands palm up. “—I have to ask you, why, Mr. Wells? What drew her to your house? I don't want to think unkind thoughts, but I want to know why.”

I sat down at the kitchen table and gratefully clasped the mug of coffee someone set in front of me. “Mr. Pickersley, I don't know why she came to our house. She wasn't finding drugs there. We've never had that kind of problem with either of our girls. I'm kind of wondering if she wasn't looking for my wife, Annie Laurie. The girls didn't get on too well but Annie and Phoebe did. It's been more than four months since I've seen Phoebe over at our house. The girls did have a disagreement, and, you know, there were two years between them. Jo turned fifteen in September. That makes a difference when they're this young.”

Mrs. Pickersley murmured, “Three years, then.”

“What?”

She said, “Phoebe turned eighteen last January. She missed so many school days, nursing her poor sick momma, that she lost a year—they made her repeat it and that was a shame because her test grades were always real good. But that didn't matter. You miss so many days of school and you got to do the year over.

“Chet, here,” she patted the back of her husband's wrist, “he went on up to the school to talk to the principal but he said it was district policy and there wasn't a thing he could do about it. Said they'd sent home about twenty notices, but there wasn't anyone there except Jenny and Phoebe and Jenny was too sick to be bothered and Phoebe was determined to be there for her momma.