Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind (9 page)

W
HILE
I
CALLED
the sheriff’s office, Lillian paced the kitchen, wringing her hands in her apron. She cried and apologized for going to the store, taking all the blame on herself. Little Lloyd stood next to me, his eyes big with fright.

“They’re sending somebody,” I said, hanging up the phone and hearing the nervous words pour out of my mouth. “I told them to contact Deputy Bates, too. Now, Lillian, sit down and get yourself together. This was not your fault, and I don’t want to hear another word about it. Looks to me like it was either somebody looking for something in particular, or vandals who just like to tear things up for the sake of it. I didn’t see a thing missing, did you? Television’s still here, and so is my silver. I’ll have to go through the papers in the desk, but I can’t imagine anybody’d want canceled checks, can you? Sit down, Lillian. You’re making me nervous. We’ve got to think about who could’ve done this. Did you see anything missing? How you reckon they got in?”

She finally took a seat at the table and wiped her face with her apron. “I ’spect they climb up the back stairs. Didn’t you see Deputy Bates’s door standing open with the glass broke out?”

“You’re right. I did see it, but I was still thinking of what was in my bathroom to make much sense of anything else.”

It wasn’t long before two sheriff’s deputies arrived to look through the house and begin making a report. Would you believe they wanted to know my age? As if that had anything to do with what’d happened. Sheriff Earl Frady drove up soon after with Deputy Bates, and everybody had to tell their stories all over again. I was asked a dozen times if anything was missing, but the more I went through the house with one or the other of them, the more I was sure that not one thing had been taken. I was close to the end of my patience, what with uniformed officers trooping in and out, poking here and there and asking one question after another, until I saw one leaving with a large plastic bag held out at arm’s length. Deputy Bates asked if I wanted my towels back, but I told him not to bother. I appreciated them taking that calling card out of my bathroom, and I knew Lillian did, too.

By the time they all left, I’d had about as much excitement as I could stand. Lillian called two of her granddaughters to come help her straighten up the mess in the house, and I was grateful for them. Deputy Bates stood in the kitchen with a worried look on his face and a cup of coffee in his hand.

“Little Lloyd,” I said, “go out in the yard and play. You’ve been cooped up in the car or the house all day, and you need to be outside for a while. Here”—I reached into the pantry—“take this bag of Oreos. We may not have much supper tonight.”

He looked up at me through those thick glasses in a way that gave me a start. His eyes were so much like Wesley Lloyd’s sometimes that it was like looking at my husband before I ever met him.

When he left with his cookies, I turned to Deputy Bates. “What in the world’s going on here? First you find blood in that
child’s house and now this house’s been broken into. I’m beginning to feel something bad’s going to happen every time I turn around. You don’t reckon whoever did this to my house was somebody you arrested, do you?”

“I doubt it, Miss Julia. I haven’t been here long enough to make anybody that mad at me. But to catch you up on the other, we had the crime-scene unit down at Bud’s house, and preliminary tests confirm that it is blood. Human or not, we won’t know until we hear from the SBI lab. There wasn’t a lot of it, some spattering and a long smear on the wall. And a little pool on the floor, which was still sticky. That means it got there fairly recently, although the humidity in the closed garage may’ve had something to do with that. I’ve got bad news for you, though. If it’s human blood, you’re going to have to tell Sheriff Frady how you came to have Bud with you. We’ll have to track down his mother, using every method we have, to be sure, first of all, that it’s not her blood since she was the last known tenant of the house. And as far as we know, you were the last person to see her around here. Tracing her is going to open a whole can of worms for you.”

“A can of worms is right,” I said. I leaned against the kitchen counter, tired to death of all the complications that Wesley Lloyd had left me. “You know there was somebody with her when she left here. I told you she wasn’t driving the car, so I wasn’t the last one to see her.”

“I know. But we don’t know who that was. We don’t know if she went straight to Raleigh from here or whether she went back to her house. We don’t know if the blood was in the garage before she brought Bud here or if it got there after she left him. We don’t know anything, and won’t, until we find her. I just want you to be prepared. You’re going to have to tell the investigating officers everything that’s happened. And be prepared for
the possibility that Bud’s mother knows something about the blood in her garage. Or that it’s hers.”

“Oh my Lord,” I said, holding on to the counter. “You don’t think something’s happened to her?” I was ashamed to admit that my first thought was of being stuck with that child forever, in spite of reassuring the child to the contrary not three hours earlier. “That poor woman,” I said, quickly getting my mind in the proper frame.

“It’s too early to know. But for now I’m going to the hardware store and get some more locks for your doors. And a pane of glass for the broken one upstairs.”

“Go to Prince’s Hardware,” I told him, “and charge it to my account.”

I went into the living room to help Lillian and her two grands, but she told me to keep out of their way. So I went outside to the backyard and sat with Little Lloyd in the glider. I folded my hands in my lap and sighed.

“You want some Oreos, lady?” The child held the package out to me.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, taking one. “But call me Mrs. Springer, not lady. That sounds like you don’t know who I am.”

“No’m. I mean, yes’m.” He nibbled a cookie all the way around, then started back at it like a mouse, taking tiny bites until he had only a little nubbin of the center left. Wesley Lloyd had had peculiar eating habits, too.

It made me nervous to watch him, so I said, “Don’t you want to play?”

“No’m, I don’t much feel like it.” He turned his head toward me when he spoke, but still wouldn’t look me in the eye.

I didn’t feel much like talking, so we ate Oreo cookies and listened to the birds in the trees.

Before long, Lillian stuck her head out the back door and
called me in. “You got company,” she said. “Miz Conover and Mr. Sam and yo’ preacher, they all here to see ’bout you.”

I sighed and got up, telling Little Lloyd he’d be better off to stay outside. “If you haven’t already learned it,” I said, “news gets around fast in this town. I wouldn’t be surprised if the nine-one-one line wasn’t connected to the Presbyterian Women’s Prayer Chain.”

I was glad that Lillian and her girls had started with the living room, because it was straightened enough to receive company by now. They were all there: Sam, sitting at his ease in a chair, hat on his knee and a concerned look on his face; LuAnne, chirping around in her usual excited state; and Pastor Ledbetter, standing by the front window like he was daring the burglar to try it again.

Pastor Ledbetter and LuAnne started toward me, talking at once, asking how I was, what was stolen, did I know who’d done it. Sam stood up when I came into the room, but he hung back waiting, I guess, to get a word in edgewise.

“Everybody’s fine,” I assured them. “Have a seat now. I appreciate your concern, but it’s nothing. Just vandals, most likely.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Pastor Ledbetter pronounced. “There’re no morals left anymore. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better, as the Bible tells us. The closer we get to the millennium, the more of this kind of thing we can expect. It starts with the breakdown of the family, Miss Julia, which is why it’s imperative for you to get that child back with his own family. You don’t want to be standing in the way of a united family, and my counsel is to get that boy back with his kin. All this trouble dates from the time you agreed to take him from his mother.”

Sam frowned, opened his mouth, then turned away from the pastor like he had to get himself under control. I took a deep breath, not wanting to admit that I, too, had wondered if the break-in had had anything to do with Little Lloyd. But I just
shook my head, realizing it was too much trouble to straighten the preacher out on the matter of me taking a child from his mother. I’d hardly had a choice.

So I just said, “I appreciate your concern, Pastor, but please remember that I wasn’t the one who had a family to break up in the first place.”

“But it’s incumbent on all of us,” he said, “to put into practice family values.
Biblical
family values.”

I couldn’t understand why he was blaming me for a break-in at my own house and a breakdown of all families everywhere. I’d had enough of it.

“Which biblical family would you be talking about?” I snapped, having in mind all the adultery, fratricide, incest, murder, multiple wives, envy, and downright meanness displayed by any number of families in the Bible.

“Oh, Julia,” LuAnne said, reaching for my hand and patting it. “You’re all upset.”

“Of course I am, LuAnne,” I said, snatching back my hand. “What do you expect after somebody’s been through my papers and underclothes and closets and drawers? Sam, have a seat. I don’t see anything funny about it.” I said that because he was smiling a little, even though his eyes were grave with concern.

“I don’t see anything funny, either,” he said, but by then I figured he’d seen the humor of somebody going through my underclothes. Drawers, too. That was Sam for you. “What does Coleman say about this, Julia?”

“He’s helping with the investigation,” I said, “and it’s too early to know anything yet. But I want you to know that having a sheriff’s deputy boarding in my house sure didn’t deter this burglar.”

“True enough,” Sam said, and got a faraway look in his eyes, so that I knew he was thinking things over. Probably coming to the same conclusion I had, that somebody had wanted something
bad enough to risk breaking into and entering this particular house.

After I assured LuAnne and Pastor Ledbetter that everything was under control, I walked out on the front porch to see them off. I wanted them gone so I could talk freely with Sam. LuAnne said Leonard was waiting for her to fix his supper but she could come back later and sit with me.

“No need for that, LuAnne,” I said firmly. “I’ll be going to bed early. It’s been a hectic day, and I’ll see you at church tomorrow anyway.”

When she realized that Pastor Ledbetter intended to linger, she let herself be persuaded to drive off. The pastor still had something to say to me, even though he knew Sam was waiting in the living room.

“Miss Julia,” he said, his voice taking on the tone of a doctor breaking the bad news. “I have to urge you again to give up this plan of keeping that child with you. This terrible occurrence ought to serve as a warning that something’s wrong about it all. You don’t know what you’ve got yourself caught up in, and you could be putting yourself in some danger.”

I longed to unburden myself to him and be guided by his advice, but I knew his agenda already and it didn’t fit with mine. Sometimes, a lot of times, we know what is right without anybody telling us. And I knew it was right that I look out for Little Lloyd whether the blood in his garage or the state of my house had anything to do with him or not.

“Pastor,” I said, “that little boy had nothing whatsoever to do with my house getting broken into. It was vandals, plain and simple. Besides, he was with me and Deputy Bates when it happened, and one thing has nothing to do with the other.”

“I’m not accusing the child, Miss Julia. All I’m saying is that once we head down the wrong track, we open ourselves up to all kinds of mischief. You’re putting yourself between this child
and his mother, and that’s just wrong. We have to do everything we can to keep families together, not break them up, don’t you agree?”

Well, no, I didn’t. I’d heard of too many families that needed to be broken up—cruel fathers, drunken mothers, drugged boyfriends, battered wives, and so on and so on. But I’d heard Pastor Ledbetter on all those subjects from the pulpit and, according to him, prayer and a good dose of family values would cure them all. To my way of thinking, about the only thing that would cure them was a baseball bat.

“Sam’s waiting for me, Pastor,” I said. “He probably needs to discuss some of Wesley Lloyd’s business matters. Thank you for coming.” I turned and walked back inside.

“Sam,” I said, shutting the screen door behind me, “do you think I’m breaking up that child’s family?”

He laughed. “Julia, the child’s father is dead and his mother’s abandoned him. Don’t let Ledbetter confuse you. The child has no family, unless it’s you and Lillian and Coleman. Use your head, woman.”

“I’m trying to, Sam. But I declare, it’s swimming by now, and you don’t know the half of it.” And I told him about the blood in the garage and what Deputy Bates had said about having to tell the sheriff everything. “Now, I reckon the social services will try to put Little Lloyd away somewhere. Busybodies, every one of them, and government interference, too. What would this town say if I let that child be treated like a pauper while I enjoyed Wesley Lloyd’s proceeds? I tell you, it’s none of their business who’s looking after that boy.”