Tomorrow River (15 page)

C
hapter Thirteen

I
’m leading the way back home.

Woody is sandwiched between me and E. J. so he can grab her if she tries to get away. We’re at the spot on the path where the house will soon come into sight when E. J. whisper-shouts to me, “Shen . . . Shenny . . . ya gotta slow down.”

“I’ll do no such thing.” We stayed much later at the Triple S than we should’ve. Papa will probably still be napping, but if he isn’t, if we should run into him, he’ll smell the motor oil that’s sticking to our clothes the same way I am. Woody and I are taking a hot bath tonight, no ifs, ands, or buts.

E. J. shouts even more frantic “Stop!” and then there’s this flurry of activity.

Scared that Woody has sprinted off, I spin around and am relieved to see that my sister has done the exact opposite. She’s planted herself on the path and in doing so has tripped E. J., who is lying spread-eagled in a patch of ivy next to the trail.

“Kindly give a little warnin’ before you dig in, all right?” I say, backtracking to her side. I’m sweet-talking her because I’m already feeling contrite about being mean to her up at the Triple S. Sam was right. I
was
acting spoiled. Put upon by my twin, who I love with every ounce of my heart. What gets into me? I know darn well that she’d stop all this twirling, flapping, and running if she could. Woody has never liked perspiring all that much. Thinks it’s unladylike. “Pea?” I brush up her clumpy bangs and blow on her forehead. “Are you overheatin’?” I tap the rose-colored glasses low on her nose and wave my hand in front of her lime eyes, but she doesn’t blink. She’s locked onto something that she’s seeing over my right shoulder. I don’t see anything except for a couple of hot-headed cardinals, but I trust that my sensitive sister has picked up the scent of something that’s beyond me. Her nostrils are flaring.

I’ve got to get closer.

“E. J., quit piddlin’ around,” I call to him in the ivy patch.

“Come get her. She’s sensing something.”

“That’s what I was tryin’ to tell ya, Shen,” he says, getting up and dusting off. “Be nice if you listened to me every third time or so.”

“Yeah, well next time, speak up. I couldn’t hear your puny voice.” Once I’m sure he’s got a good hold of Woody, I take a few steps into the woods. She whimpers, but I pull back on a hickory branch anyway.

Bringing up my binoculars, I scan the surroundings for whatever it is that’s made my sister start twitching like a cornered rabbit. There’s Mr. Cole hoeing the vegetable garden with his straw hat on. Louise is having a hissy fit at his side. The two of them are bickering about something until Lou stomps off into the house. Maybe Mr. Cole found out about Lou’s chasing around the meadow with Uncle Blackie. I might’ve gone ahead and left an anonymous note in the shed for Mr. Cole that clued him in on their midnight meetings. I’m not saying that I for sure did, but there’s times that I get so worked up. It’s like . . . like I drank down a bottle of hundred-proof pissiness. I can blab out this thing and do that thing while I’m in that state. Look how I just treated Sam. Next time we go over to the Triple S the first words out of my mouth will be
Jackie Robinson
.

My eyes are searching the front of the house now.

I really must remember to speak to Mr. Cole about painting the second story shutters, and the doorbell, it’s hanging by a wire. But none of these odds and ends are what’s got Woody worked up. This is just business as usual. I still don’t see . . . wait. That shadowy figure in the corner of the porch. I’d know his outline anywhere. Papa was who Woody’s nostrils were picking up. I’m surprised she didn’t start howling. His Honor is lounging in one of the tall-back woven chairs. His mouth is moving, so he must be talking to somebody. I swivel my binoculars to the swing that hangs off the porch ceiling. There’s Sheriff Andy Nash gliding back and forth with icicle-shaped perspiration stains under his arms. He looks like he’s melting. Not like Papa, who’s looking cool as an igloo. Dressed in a snowy white shirt, his hair slicked back. I can almost smell his English Leather cologne from here. He took my tidying-up advice to heart and changed himself from the sloppy, grieving man I left up in his room into his sparkling, magisterial self.

He’s doing what I call his
regal routine.

I’ve seen him do this too many times not to recognize it. After Sunday Mass, he’ll stand on Saint Pat’s steps and slap the men jovially on their backs and spread the compliments so thick. “Why, don’t your wives look younger than springtime and aren’t your children cute as June bugs,” he says, like a medieval ruler passing out morsels of food to starving villagers on the way back to his castle. It’s perplexing and hurtful. How can he be so giving to them and so miserly to his own flesh and blood? I know he doesn’t mean to, but sometimes Papa makes Woody and me feel like we’re a couple of peasants who’ve got the plague.

Andy Nash has to be here for a reason. Papa must’ve come looking and rung him up when he couldn’t find us or maybe Lou opened her fat trap and ratted us out or . . . maybe the sheriff has come with news of Mama and I can call off my search, which quite frankly hasn’t been going too well so far.

If the sheriff
is
here to deliver a surprising report about our mother, then Woody and I will blow up balloons and I’ll bake a yellow cake and get out the butter brickle! But if he’s gabbing out on the porch with Papa to pass the time until his deputy arrives, I’ve got to come up with an escape route. Because after they find us, Papa’ll laugh and say, “Kids will be kids,” but once the sheriff leaves, he’ll march us to the root cellar. I can take that kind of discipline because my hide is tough, but Woody? She’s made more out of feathers than leather. I don’t think she can endure one more night on her knees, no matter how many stories I tell her.

After the first two times Papa dragged us down there, I got the idea of putting some important things inside a sack and took it to our home-away-from-home.

I pawed against the cool walls last night until I got to the bushel basket that the sack’s hid under. Opening it, I felt around for what I was looking for. Woody gets so scared of the dark that she can’t even cry so I right away lit one of the matches and set the flickering candle down close to her and said in my most loving voice, “Do you think you could draw a little?” I placed a spiral pad and a couple of pencils in the sack, too. “Something that would make you feel like you’re somewheres else.” The candlelight bounced off the cracked root cellar walls. Off my sister’s face. Even in all that decaying ugliness she looked beautiful.

She didn’t reach for her drawing stuff right away, so I nudged her and said, “Ohhh, I get it. You want to eat a little something first. Why don’t we crack open a jar?” That’s a joke. Woody and I cannot stand to even look at those jars of strawberry preserves that sit on that rickety shelf along the back wall, that’s how much we’ve eaten them. We got so hungry we ate the pickled beets, too. “Come on, pea. Drawing will make the time pass faster, you know that,” and then I started singing “Some Enchanted Evening.” Woody goes crazy for that song. When my voice wore out, I whispered her the story about two girls who go to a faraway beach with their mother, she likes that one most of all. “Once upon a time, it’s a perfect day. Not a single cloud in a baby blue sky. The girls’ mama is relaxing under a striped umbrella reading and watching her twins build sand castles.” My story was so believable Woody started drifting off. “Wake up,” I told her when she began listing. I found a mouse nibbling on her hair one night and after that, we don’t fall asleep no matter how whipped we are.

I mean,
I
understand why Papa puts us down there. All the liquor he’s been drinking has made him stricter, but he has never spared the rod. How else are sinful children to learn? The Good Book is clear on this subject. And Woody and I deserve to be punished. We’re
not
telling him the whole truth about the night Mama disappeared and somehow, some way, his under-the-influence brains knows that. Whenever he interrogates us, I leave out the part about Sam and our mother’s friendship and how I ran through the woods that night to his place looking for her. And then there’s Woody, who will not speak to him at all, which makes him worse mad to be disregarded like that. His Honor expects you to follow the rules. If you don’t, then you got to take the punishment. It’s his job.

Of course, E. J.’s noticed. He pointed at our scabbed knees and asked, “Why ya always got those?” I told him, “From kneelin’ on the root cellar floor, a course.” He grinned and asked, “And which root cellar floor would that be?” like he was waiting for me to deliver the punch line of another Bazooka joke. I didn’t want to embarrass him over his poor upbringing, so I told him, “It’s something rich people do, you wouldn’t understand.”

I reach into my pocket for a piece of pecan fudge that I keep in all my shorts for moments like these, but there’s nothing in there, not even lint. “Wait here and whatever you do, don’t let go of her,” I say, passing E. J. my binoculars. “I’m going in for a better look.”

Our sidekick doesn’t understand why we’ve got to be so secretive like we always are, but unlike Mama did to Sam—I am
not
spilling the beans. I expect E. J. to trust me and for the most part, he does. I drop to the ground and unlace my sneaker. Slide off my sock and ball it up. We had to give up using just our hands to clamp my sister’s mouth shut because she bit us too many times. “We got to keep her from howling. Stuff this in her mouth.”

“Aw, Shen,” E. J. says, holding the sock by the toe. “That’s so . . . it’s—”

“Ya think I don’t know it’s disgustin’? You got another idea then have at it. It’s the only way she’ll keep quiet without the fudge and I forgot to bring it, okay? Can’t remember everything, can I?” I say, feeling guilty that I haven’t.

E. J. looks at his love girl, and says, “Sorry, dear,” as he slips the sock into her mouth and gets her hands in his so she can’t dislodge it. I want to suggest that he take the rope off his pants and tie her wrists, but I know he won’t.

I warn Woody, “You can forget gettin’ an almond cream rub tonight if you spit that sock out. Mind E. J.,” and then I take off to make my way up closer to the house to find out what’s going on between the sheriff and Papa.

Over in the east yard, Mr. Cole has abruptly stopped pulling milkweed and started cutting down an apple tree that got diseased. He sees me, I know he does. Our caretaker mostly stays in the background of our lives, but Mr. Cole is
real
attentive to what plays out at Lilyfield. Especially if it involves Woody and me. He’s promised Beezy that he’ll keep her up-to-date on our well-being and takes that responsibility very, very seriously.

Mr. Cole gives me a wave and picks a baby green apple up off the ground and shines it on his pants. He knows they’re my favorites. He’s getting ready to shout out, “Hey, Miss Shen. Look what I got for ya,” so I shake my head as wild as I can. Mr. Cole stares back, confused, until I point to the porch. He nods, lifts the ax up to his shoulder, and begins chopping . . .
chu . . . chu . . . chu
. . . harder and faster. For good measure, he breaks into a round of “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad.” He can’t write his letters all that well, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a smart man. He knows that sometimes I got to slink about to get an understanding of what’s going on around here. The disturbance he’s making will cover up any noise I make.

I weasel through the bushes to squat down below the kitchen window, being ever so careful not to step on anything that might make Papa
snap
to attention. Him and the sheriff are only a few yards away. Above me, I can hear Lou in the kitchen beating a spoon against a bowl near to death. She’s making such a racket that I’ve got to work hard to hear the sheriff say, “. . . don’t really know for sure. Thought at first he’d drowned in the creek, but I got Perry Walker, the medical examiner from Charlottesville, to come take a look. He said there was no water in Clive’s lungs. Perry hasn’t run all the tests, but it looks suspicious. Murder maybe. Did you happen to hear anything out of the ordinary comin’ outta the Minnow place Friday evenin’?”

“Friday?” Papa replies. “Wish I could help you out, Andy, but as I recall, the girls and I had a light supper, played a game of cribbage, and turned in early that night.”

That’s not true. We don’t eat or play cribbage or do anything else nice together.

Papa then says to the sheriff in his most persuasive voice, “I’d certainly like to keep this incident quiet. With Founders Weekend coming up, we wouldn’t want to put a damper on the festivities with talk of something as nasty as a possible murder, would we? I don’t think my father would appreciate that.”

The sheriff says, “I take your point.”

Of course, he does. I admit, I’ve got some resentment towards him on account of the way he never found Mama, but I’m not letting that affect my assessment of his personality. Sheriff Andy Nash with his brown hair and brown eyes and brown uniform—if he was standing next to a pile of bull crap you’d never be able to make him out. It’s not like he’s evil or anything, he’s actually sort of nice. Just always seems like he’s more interested in glad handing than crime solving. Sam is usually so picky about who he spends his time with. What he sees in the sheriff is beyond me.

I can’t tell from where I’m crouched down, but I bet the sheriff is dabbing his chin with his red bandana. He does that a lot because he sweats a lot. “This heat is really something. Have you noticed the trees? They’ve been soaking in so much of this wet warmth that they can barely stay upright. Remind me of hoboes on a bender,” he says. “Can’t remember a summer this bad. Maybe in ’61, yeah, that was a scorcher. You could fry—”

“Was there anything else you needed to discuss, Andy?” Papa interrupts. “I’m afraid I’m rather pressed for time.”

“Well, now that you mention it, sir, I’d like to have a few words with the twins. Ya know how children can sometimes hear and see things us grown-ups don’t. I know they got that tree fort that overlooks the Minnow place. Would you mind?”