We continued in this vein, bringing up random suggestions of how we should proceed to get Sam back on track with his legal history. Mr. Pickens had less to say than either Sam or me, and I couldn’t help but notice how his eyes kept returning again and again to the dining room door. It was as if he were visualizing Hazel Marie pushing through it, eagerly laughing and talking a mile a minute, her face lighting up at the sight of him.
And to tell the truth, I would’ve loved to have seen her come frolicking through the door myself. As I thought about it, I realized how still and quiet the house had been these last couple of weeks. The joy that was Hazel Marie, before she turned sour on Mr. Pickens and before she knew what he’d left her with, was gone. I missed hearing her chattering around the house, missed listening to her sing a country song, missed her giggle at something that had happened at church or the garden club, missed her clattering down the stairs, calling, “Miss Julia, guess what!” I missed seeing the pleasure she expressed over a new dress or a slice of one of Lillian’s cakes or the sun shining through the latticework in the gazebo. And I missed seeing the delight she took in her son and in Mr. Pickens.
I could’ve shaken him till his teeth rattled for doing nothing to lift the pall of sadness in my house. If I’d ever had the slightest regret for taking Hazel Marie to my bosom, these empty days of gloom would’ve confirmed for me how much she contributed to my own well-being.
“Well,” Mr. Pickens said, putting his spoon beside the twice-filled bowl on his plate, “that was some good eatin’.”
I noticed a fine sheen of perspiration on his brow, which was no wonder since Lillian made her chili so spicy. Delicately patting my own face with my napkin, I said, “I hope it’s fortified you enough to go out again this afternoon. I’m anxious to get everybody seen as soon as we can. If Hazel Marie takes a sudden downturn, I won’t be able to accompany you.”
Mr. Pickens gave me a frowning stare, making me think he was going to ask a penetrating question. In which case, I determined to answer it as plainly and succinctly as possible, if for no other reason than to see what he would do. But he didn’t ask any kind of question, just stared a bit longer, then nodded.
“Okay,” he finally said, “Rosemary Sullins is the last one. We might as well go on and see her.”
“Don’t forget Rafe Feldman.”
“I wouldn’t bother with him, Julia,” Sam said. “It’d be a waste of time. He’s in the final stages of dementia, so you wouldn’t get anything sensible out of him.”
“Well, so far,” I said, “we haven’t gotten anything sensible out of anybody.” I pushed back from the table and stood. “I won’t be but a minute, Mr. Pickens. I want to check on Hazel Marie, then I’ll be ready to go. You know where the powder room is.”
Walking around the table, I put my hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Don’t be discouraged, Sam. When we sit down and put all this together, I expect something—one name or another—will jump out at you. Of course,” I said, thinking of Ilona Weaver, “one of them isn’t in any condition to steal anything, so I don’t know what good it’ll do. But we’ll keep working on it.”
Sam smiled up at me and put his hand on mine. “I appreciate what you’re doing, sweetheart. Seeing these people may not tell us anything, but it has to be done.”
“Right,” Mr. Pickens said. “Basic investigative work.”
As I gave Sam a final pat and turned to leave the room, Mr. Pickens said, “Tell Hazel Marie I hope she’ll be feeling better soon.”
I stopped without turning around, thinking that I should urge him to tell her himself, but decided against it for the time being. Lillian was with her, and Sam and I right here, making too much of an audience for a reconciliation or a knockdown, drag-out fight or any kind of confrontation between two people at such cross-purposes.
“Yes, I will,” I responded and left the kitchen, wondering if I’d made the right choice.
I knew I had as soon as I walked into Hazel Marie’s room and saw Lillian sitting on her bed, holding a Kleenex box.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, hurrying in. “Are you . . . ?”
Hazel Marie shook her head and wiped her streaming eyes. “No’m, I’m all right. It’s just hearing
him
! He’s just sitting out there, eating and talking like, like everything’s
normal
. And I guess it is. For
him
! But there’s nothing normal about the mess
I’m
in.”
“Well, for goodness sakes, Lillian,” I said. “Why didn’t you close the door?”
“I did, but she want it back open.”
“It gets too hot in here with the door closed,” Hazel Marie said, defending herself. “Besides, I shouldn’t have to close myself in just because
he
comes and goes as he pleases.”
“That’s exactly right,” I said, soothingly, but thinking that this was another example of an extreme emotional upset. “But we’re leaving now to go see somebody else on Sam’s list. So I want you to get some rest. Lloyd’ll be home in a little while, and you’ll want to be cheerful and perky for him.”
She looked up at me through red, tearful eyes. “Shouldn’t he be coming home for lunch? He’s over at the courts all day long.”
“Don’t you be worryin’ ’bout him,” Lillian said. “I ast him everyday what he have to eat, an’ he goin’ to that Country Club Grill an’ orderin’ they biggest lunch.” Lillian laughed. “I ’spect you stop worryin’ when that bill come.”
I surveyed the tray on the bedside table. “Speaking of that, Hazel Marie. You’ve hardly eaten anything. I thought you were craving chili.”
“I was,” she said mournfully. “Then I just couldn’t get it down. I’m sorry, Lillian, I know you worked hard on it. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
“Oh, I expect you do,” I said with a laugh, trying to lighten her mood. “Appetite changes are to be expected. It’s nothing to worry about.”
“That’s right,” Lillian chimed in. “You no diff ’runt from anybody else. Why, you not even bad as some I knowed. That little girl, name of Precious Watson, when she ’spectin’, she crave that white clay some like to eat. She out diggin’ that stuff outta the creek bank with a spoon everyday. An’ she be chewin’ on it the whole time till that baby come.”
Well, that took Hazel Marie’s mind off her own erratic appetite, and mine, too, if you want to know the truth. Wishing her a restful afternoon, I hurried out to join Mr. Pickens for our last visitation. And a good thing, too, for he was standing by the door, impatiently jingling the keys in his pocket.
Before I got the door closed good and my seat belt on, he had the car cranked and was backing out of the drive. “Which way?”
“West. I mean, east. Go east. Turn toward town and go across Main Street. Then right on Old Wellburn Road. We’ll follow that for a few miles to South Wellburn. You know where that is, don’t you?”
“Farming community? Beyond that big manufacturing plant?”
I nodded.
Then he asked, “What do they manufacture, anyway?”
Pleased that he was willing to converse, I was nonetheless chagrined that I had no answer. “Law, I don’t know, Mr. Pickens. They used to make blue jeans until the owners moved the business to China or Mexico or somewhere. I don’t know what they do now.”
He grunted.
Unwilling to leave it at that, I went on. “It really created hardships for a lot of families when they moved, though. I mean, that business was the basis of the whole county for years and years. Then they just up and closed it down. That plant sat empty for several years, and people were hurting. That’s when the state started the technical college here. To retrain people for other jobs, you know. Then some other business bought the plant and hired a few workers back. But what they do, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this, the place is just a ghost of its former self.” I finally ran out of anything to say and waited for his response.
I didn’t get one, so I summed up. “I guess that’s what you call outsourcing, isn’t it?”
“Not quite,” he said, his eyes on the road. “That’s what you call moving to a cheaper labor pool.”
“Oh.” Then, “I guess you’re right. Well, tell me about Rosemary Sullins.”
“You know her?”
“No, never even heard of her. Sam gave me her address, though, and I know about where that is. At least, she doesn’t live out in the sticks somewhere, so we shouldn’t have a problem.”
It wasn’t so easy, though, for it seemed that Rosemary Sullins lived in what was once a mill village—block after block of small, identical houses, most of them without house numbers. After stopping and asking a boy who was pumping up a bicycle tire, we found the house, which stood out from the others because of the chain-link fence around the front yard.
We parked by the curb, then got out of the car. Mr. Pickens, with admirable courage, walked right up to the gate and unlatched it.
I clutched at his sleeve. “She might have a dog.”
“I doubt it. Look around.”
I did, and saw what the practiced eye of an investigator had already noted. A plastic tricycle lay on its side, pails and shovels stuck up from a sandbox, and a red and yellow plastic sliding board leaned to one side on the uneven ground beneath a shade tree. A deflated basketball lay next to the porch steps.
“Kids,” Mr. Pickens said.
We walked up onto the porch where there was one Adirondack chair with an open Coke can on the floor beside it. An air conditioner, dripping water down the wall, rattled loudly in the window.
Seeing no doorbell or knocker, Mr. Pickens opened the storm door and rapped on the wooden door. “You introduce us,” he said, “and get us inside.”
A thin, angular woman opened the door and stared at us. She had grayish hair with streaks of white running from both temples. It was pulled back so tightly from her narrow forehead that it added to the gauntness of her face. She wore a pair of blue polyester knit pants that ended at her calves, reminding me of a certain green pair I’d once owned. A T-shirt with the logo of Tweetsie Railroad—namely a locomotive—hung loosely from her shoulders. And, Lord help us, I couldn’t help but notice her long toes with chipped polish gripping the flip-flops on her feet.
I opened my mouth to greet her, but her mouth flattened out into a thin line and she said, “I got a permit.”
“What?” I was confused.
“I only got four, so that’s home care,” she said. “I’m not runnin’ a day care, so I don’t need no more permits.”
Mr. Pickens picked up on her meaning before I did. “We’re not from Social Services,” he said smoothly. “I’m J.D. Pickens and this is Mrs. Julia Murdoch. We’d like to talk with you about that break-in at Sam Murdoch’s house. I’m not sure you know this, but some information relating to you and a few others was stolen in the break-in.”
“Something of mine?” She looked as confused as I was feeling. “Who did it?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out, Ms. Sullins,” Mr. Pickens said. “The only things missing are some interview cassettes and some case files. Yours were among them.”
She stood for some little while, staring at us, then her eyes drifted away. I was about to burn up on the hot porch, and the noisy air-conditioner was getting on my nerves.
“May we come in?” I asked, fanning the bodice of my dress. “The heat, you know.”
“I reckon,” she said, moving back so we could step inside what may have once been a living room. It was now a playroom with three toddlers playing on the floor and an infant asleep in a crib beside a green sofa that was propped up with a brick where a leg was missing. On a small yellow plastic table, there were a box of Ritz crackers and a jar of Jif peanut butter with a table knife sticking up out of it. One child’s face was smeared with what I hoped was peanut butter. Cracker crumbs crunched under our feet as we walked onto the indoor-outdoor rug, and an odor of milk, both fresh and regurgitated, mingled with that coming from an overflowing trash can of previously worn diapers.
As Rosemary Sullins turned around, I saw a long, thick switch of hair, coarse and stringy, more gray than white that was gathered by a rubber band on the back of her head. A ponytail, I thought, so unsuitable for a woman of her age. I noticed something else as she turned, as well. Those figure-hugging blue knit pants were tight everywhere except in the seat, which bagged, both noticeably and unattractively.
“Have a seat if you can find one,” she said, moving a full ashtray from the sofa to the top of a television set. Some sort of animated cartoon featuring chipmunks ran unheeded on the set.
I sat gingerly on the edge of the sofa, propping my pocketbook on my lap, and Mr. Pickens eased down beside me.
Rosemary Sullins pulled up a yellow plastic child’s chair and sat down, her knees hiked up high. “Well?” she said, her eyes narrowing at us. “Who else’s did they get?”
Chapter 29
Mr. Pickens leaned forward, readying himself to draw out whatever information he could from this person of interest. “Ms. Sullins,” he began, then winced as a piercing scream cut through the air. The baby in the crib startled awake with a cry, its little arms waving. It must’ve been used to the uproar, though, for it settled down and went back to sleep.
I thought I’d have a heart attack from the fright, but Rosemary Sullins had heard it before. She sprang from the plastic chair and ran over to two children struggling over some kind of toy.
“Greg’ry!” she yelled. “Let her have that. You hear me, let her have it!”
“I had it first!” the boy screamed, as he tried to jerk it from the girl’s grasp.
“I don’t care who had it first. Let her have it. I can’t stand that screechin’, my nerves is already shot.”
“But I got it first!”
Rosemary raised her hand. “You turn that thing a-loose or I’m gonna pop you one.”
I made to move, but Mr. Pickens put his hand on my arm and shook his head. It was just as well, for Gregory had turned it loose, but not before shoving the girl out of her chair. She cut loose with another unearthly shriek, and Gregory got his pop. It wasn’t much of one, I’ll have to say, but it was enough to send him to a corner where he sat, hunched over with his arms folded across his chest. He glared at Rosemary, his face red and streaked with the unfairness of it all. The first step, I thought, of growing up sullen and angry at the world.