Paddy Plays in Dead Mule Swamp (7 page)

Chapter 11

Since meeting Cora Baker in May, I’d
been spending some time with her each week, usually on Tuesdays.
Cora lives in the southwest corner of the county at the end of
Brown Trout Lane. Although her house is a cozy cabin on the
Pottawatomi River, the most intriguing thing about Cora’s place is
that she is privately assembling a Forest County museum in a pole
barn on her property. When I met her she had already been working
hard to inventory the entire collection in a computer database, but
it was way too big a job for one person. I like Cora a lot, and I’d
been helping with the project ever since we figured out who
murdered Cliff Sorensen, by using information from her newspaper
archive. I hoped to find out a lot more about Angelica Leonard from
Cora.

So, on Tuesday morning Paddy and I
pulled into Cora’s yard just as she was stepping out of her kitchen
door. She wore clean but faded overalls over a crisp blouse, her
signature style. Today the blouse was green, and she had her gray
braids pinned around her head, which indicated a
get-down-to-business mood. I’d called to warn her that I was
bringing the dog. She thought it would be all right for him to stay
in the office with us, and in fact, Paddy lay down placidly beside
the computer desk when I positioned myself at the keyboard. So far,
so good.

We were still working on taking
inventory of the boxes we’d brought down from the upstairs storage
area over a month before. It took a long time to enter all the
information about each item, decide if it would be displayed or
stored and then actually take care of it. Cora pulled open the
flaps on a cardboard box and lifted a stack of delicate white baby
clothes trimmed with handmade lace onto the table beside the
computer. As always, there was also a page of lined paper in the
box covered with Cora’s cramped handwriting. She made careful notes
about every item at the time it was collected.

“How’s it going with your red friend?”
she asked, nodding at Paddy.

“He’s certainly brought more activity
to my life. He needs to have a decent walk several times a day or
he can’t lie still.”

“I guess that means we won’t get much
done today,” Cora said, but she chuckled, so I knew she wasn’t
upset.

“We’ll see how it goes. But I want to
talk to you about something, anyway.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve gotten my first assignment with
Family Friends, and they sent me to meet Corliss Leonard and his
granddaughters.”

“I think I know where this is
going.”

“Corliss... Len... told me about
Angelica’s disappearance, and I thought I should at least read the
news articles about it. It looks like I’ll be spending some time
with Star and Sunny. I’d like to understand as much as I can about
what happened.”

“You’re welcome to read the papers, of
course, but they won’t enlighten you much more than what you
probably heard from Len. The whole thing came to a dead end really
quickly. There wasn’t much of an investigation, to tell you the
truth.”

“You remember when it happened,
then?”

“Sure. The Sheriff questioned that
boyfriend of hers...”

“DuWayne.”

“Yes, I’d forgotten his name. But,
anyway, his whole day was accounted for, and most everyone believed
that she just hitched a ride and got away from him.”

“Len seemed to think they got along
really well.” I didn’t mention talking with Paula.

“I guess DuWayne was OK. I talked with
him a few times in town and he was polite—not arrogant or
disrespectful, but he ran around with some pretty rough friends.
Mostly, he spent time with Marko Louama’s boy, Larry. Larry’s been
in trouble with the law since he was in junior high. There were a
couple of others in that group, too. Some girl from Emily City and
another young tough whose name I don’t know. But the girl was
Mexican, I think. I saw them a lot because I lived in town then.”
Cora hesitated.

“I know you used to be married to
Jerry Caulfield,” I admitted.

“Hmmm, I suppose that nosy Adele told
you.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d
already learned that Cora’s relationship with Jerry, the owner and
editor of the
Cherry Hill
Herald
, was a very sore topic.

Cora continued, “Well, we lived right
there, two blocks from Main Street, behind the newspaper office. I
couldn’t help but see them. There’s an empty lot beside the office,
and the building next to that was vacant then, too. That whole
group of kids—I guess most of them were done with high school, but
they were kids to me—thought that was an out-of-the-way place to
hang out. They’d laugh and smoke and push each other around.
Sometimes other kids came by.”

“Why were they in Cherry Hill if
DuWayne and Angelica lived in Hammer Bridge Town, and the other
girl was from Emily City?”

“That’s a good question, isn’t it?”
Cora said sarcastically. “I think they were all dealing drugs.
There was a lot of reaching into pockets and passing things back
and forth while trying to stay in the shadows.”

“How could Angelica spend time there?
She had two little girls.”

“I have to be honest and say that
after the younger one was born Angelica hardly ever came around
with the gang. Before that, though, she’d just leave the other girl
with her parents. They were clueless as to what their daughter was
up to.”

“Did you ever see DuWayne hit
Angelica?”

“One night he slapped her pretty hard,
but she slapped him right back. That Larry Louama was the one I
didn’t trust, though. He had a mean streak a mile wide. Assaulted
John Aho at the gas station when he was only sixteen, because the
pop machine was out of order. Went after him with a tire iron, but
no one was seriously hurt and John didn’t press charges. A foolish
decision, if you ask me.”

“Wow, this doesn’t sound like the
Angelica I’ve heard about.”

“Parents are always a little blind,
don’t you think? I’ll see if I can remember anything else, but
maybe we could work on these baby clothes now.” She picked up the
sheet of notes from the stack of small garments, and I turned to
the database and pulled up a screen for a new item.

Cora and I concentrated on inventory
for a couple of hours, after which we walked Paddy the length of
Brown Trout Lane. I had remembered to bring some training treats,
and we each practiced his new commands with him. The only other
fact I learned about Angelica’s friends was that Larry Louama had
finally been sent to prison for assault about four years
previously.

I left Cora’s mid-afternoon, and spent
the evening raking my yard and admiring my “new” house from all
sides. Robert had managed to match the old clapboards with some
salvaged siding from a demolition. As soon as it was all painted,
the house would almost look as if it had always had two stories
throughout. I liked it a lot. Between raking, hauling tubs of
debris, and bending to pick up Paddy’s tennis ball after each
retrieval, I knew I was going to be sore the next day. But Paddy
was catching on that he had to drop the ball when I told him
“give,” if he wanted it to be thrown again.

There was supposed to be a meeting of
the Family Friends committee on Thursday. I was looking forward to
that, not only so I could report on my progress with the Leonards,
but also because John Aho was a committee member. I wanted to hear
more about Larry Louama. However, on Wednesday evening Adele called
and cancelled the whole thing, saying she had a sore throat. She’d
contacted the literacy tutor, and Corliss Leonard would begin
meeting with her at the library.

My new upstairs was a mess with
plaster dust hanging in the air, but by the end of the week the
taping and sanding were done, and Gorlowski’s crew was moving on to
some other job. I tried to clear the chalky residue from enough
surfaces to make a clean work space and to clear my mind from
prejudicial thoughts about Angelica’s friends.

Chapter 12

Saturday came, and I had arranged to
swing by the trailer in Hammer Bridge Town to get Star and Sunny.
They planned to show me the material and pattern that Star already
had, and then we’d go into Emily City and visit the fabric
store.

Paddy came along for the ride, and I
planned to leave him at Fur and Fins for an hour of dog-sitting. I
knew the staff would also work on some training with him; I figured
a little more schooling couldn’t hurt.

When I reached the Leonard trailer,
the girls were not waiting outside, so I parked in their sandy
yard, told Paddy to be good, and climbed the crooked steps. As soon
as I knocked on the door, Star opened it and invited me inside. I
was a little surprised at her casual attitude, thinking she might
be embarrassed about their low-income living
arrangements.

Len was seated on the couch folding a
basket of laundry, and Sunny was eating toast with red jelly at the
counter which served to divide the kitchen from the living room. It
was a typical set-up for a single-wide trailer, made with cheap
materials. The dark finish of the cupboard doors was damaged at
many corners, revealing inexpensive press board, and the Formica
countertop was worn. I remembered to look at the appliances. The
stove had chipped enamel, and the refrigerator was rusting. The
handle was broken. The refrigerator probably had been purchased
used when the settlement had sprung up. Everything looked beat-up
and dingy, but the rooms were clean. There were no sagging curtain
rods, or gaping holes in the paneling with erupting insulation, so
typical of old mobile homes which have been subjected to years of
family life. Actually, I was impressed.

“Good morning,” Len greeted
me.

“Good morning, yourself,” I countered.
“I hear you’re going to let me steal these girls for another
day.”

He made a noise something between a
laugh and a snort. “I don’t think I had much to say about it.
They’ve made it pretty clear they intend to annoy you as much as
you’ll let them.”

Sunny licked jelly from her fingers.
“We aren’t annoying, Grandpa,” she said. “Miss Ana likes us, and
besides, we already did our chores, so we can go. You said
so.”

I smiled and shrugged as if to say, “I
can’t argue with that.”

Len said, “I was only teasing,
Sunshine. Wash up and show Miss Ana that project your sister was
working on with the clothes.”

While this exchange was happening I
had been looking around the room, thinking I could learn a bit more
about the family from their possessions. The thing which
immediately caught my eye was a tall set of shelves across the
inside wall of the living room. It was filled with hardback books,
and I thought it was an amazing thing to find in the small home of
a poor man who couldn’t read.

“Tell me about your books,” I said to
Len as I crossed to look at some of the titles.

“Oh, you know, my Becky was a great
one for reading. She bought used books at yard sales and would read
to all of us in the evenings. We kept the best books, and traded
the others for more. When the girls got old enough they would take
a turn with the reading, too. It’s one of the things I miss the
most.”

“I still read to us, Grandpa,” Star
said from the kitchen where she was rinsing off Sunny’s plate. She
sounded hurt.

“You do, you do,” he said. “And I love
you for it. I just miss your Grandma. I can’t help it.”

Star came and put her arms
around Len. I didn’t want to stare, so I turned to the bookcase. It
was filled with classics of all kinds. I saw
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
Little Women
,
Jane Eyre
, and
Red Badge of Courage
,
just for starters. One shelf was filled with Nancy Drew mysteries,
the
Chronicles of
Narnia
, Harry Potter books, and other
volumes for younger readers. Below that was a row of history and
philosophy books. I certainly had found the reason Len didn’t sound
uneducated.

Len’s voice brought me back from my
thoughts. “That’s Angie’s senior picture.” At the end of one row of
books was an eight-by-ten photo of a rather plain girl with the
same long face as Len, but she had a nice smile. It looked as if
she’d had her hair done professionally for the picture as it curled
in soft, even waves around her face. Beside that was a framed
snapshot of the same young woman with a dark man who was holding
the hand of a child. Angie cradled a baby. She looked much older
than she had when the school picture was taken, but the difference
couldn’t have been more than five years. It wasn’t a great photo,
and it was difficult to discern the features of the man who must be
DuWayne.

“See our school pictures!” said Sunny,
returning to the living room and pointing to the other wall. Two
frames, the kind designed to hold a small print from each school
year in an oval around the edge, with the current large photo in
the middle, displayed the growth of the two girls. I went over to
study them. Every one of Star’s pictures showed a serious
expression. I tried to figure out which one corresponded to the
year Angelica had disappeared. Sunny, on the other hand, seemed to
have a disposition to match her name, and she was smiling widely in
all her photos, even the one with no front teeth.