The Missing (21 page)

“She’s married to that foreman at the tannery, ain’t she?” Skadlock held up his boot and pretended to look at it.

“If she is, I don’t know it. Mr. White says she lives alone in one of those red tarpaper shacks this side of the boiler house.”

Realizing that his hair was being cut by the only barber in town, he changed the subject. “You know, I ate in a café the other day that put sugar in its cornbread.”

The barber quickened to the comment. “I know it. I guess somebody in New York thought it was a good idea. Me, I like the old pie-shaped cornbread with bits of crackling in it, salty as sweat.”

“Yessir. How about dodgers?”

The barber spoke solemnly for five minutes about his grandmother’s corn dodgers and blackberry jelly while Skadlock figured the schedule for the rest of the day.

* * *

FROM WHERE HE STOOD between two willow saplings half a block to the north, he saw her leave the backyard gate and enter the alley. He slipped out onto the sidewalk and affected a lazy saunter down the hill in the direction of Ditch Street and soon heard her come up behind him. He imagined she’d want to hurry home and put her feet up after working for the rich folks all day. When she came alongside, he pretended to be startled. “Hey,” he said. “I saw you somewheres today, didn’t I?” Her face was fairly narrow, her chin small, but a tough smartness hid deep in those pale eyes.

She gave him a quick glance, the kind of look she’d normally give a big strange dog, but she slowed down. “I was out behind the house where I work, and you was traipsin’ up the alley.”

“That’s right. You was playin’ ball with a kid had too much clothes on for this heat.”

She began to match his gait. “Ain’t that the truth. Missus ain’t happy less she’s got a week’s salary on that kid’s back mornin’, noon, and night.”

“You her nursemaid or something?”

Vessy raised her chin a bit. “I’m rightly the cook. But I watch the girl some.”

Skadlock stopped walking. “Cook, you say. You cook everday?”

“Yeah. I believe that’s what a cook does. It’s what I’m cut out for, anyway.” They started out again down the hill, walking slower. “You in town lookin’ for work? I heard some old boys say they heard the tannery’s hiring.”

He shook his head. “Naw. I just come to buy somethin’ for one price and sell it for another.” He practiced a smile on her.

What she saw was on the border of frightening, but she ignored his expression. “Like a horse trader.”

“Somethin’ like.”

“Well, my brother, when he was alive, he traded in mules and always went barefoot.” She gave him a longer look, noted his boots.

“I usually trade to advantage,” he told her.

He walked with her to the start of Ditch Street, a narrow lane of greasy dirt shooting off from the cobbles of the respectable street they’d come down. “So long, miss. It is ‘miss,’ ain’t it?”

“Yep,” she said ruefully. “Miss. Or maybe ‘missed.’”

* * *

HE LAY ON his single bed that night and looked at the ceiling, sipping from a pint of his own white-hot stock and thinking where he might run into her again. He was hungry and tired of the food he’d brought from home, bread he could drive tacks with and cheese that smelled like feet. Longing suddenly for his mother’s skillet-fried marsh hen with garlic, he was stunned by the thought that she would never cook for him and Billsy again. “Well, damn,” he said to the ceiling. Ralph never felt sentimental about one thing in his life, but at the present moment he felt heart pangs when he remembered the old woman pushing around a cut-up bird in a smoking skillet. He wondered long why she did it.

The next afternoon he met Vessy at the head of Ditch Street and spoke with her for another ten minutes. He noticed powder stuck to the sweat on her face and thought he detected the smell of violets or Sen-Sen. Later that night he showed up at her place, where they sat on her teetering porch in dry-rotted wicker chairs. They talked for an hour or so before he offered her a pour out of his flask. She sniffed at the inch of liquid in her cloudy water glass, then took it all down in a slug. “All fire and no ash,” she said approvingly. “Sure ain’t no singlings.”

“I figured a east Kentucky gal would know a good sip.”

She looked at him. “What exactly you do for a livin’ there, Ralph?”

“Oh, people hire me out to do things. Find things. Make things.”

“I bet some of them things flow in a bottle.”

“Could be.” He poured her another sip, and with this, she took her time, staring at him over the glass.

* * *

THE THIRD DAY was Saturday. That night he took her to a café and they each ate a plate of chops and vegetables. Walking back to her place, he asked about the child and she told him what she knew. They drank a pint between them sitting at the rough wood table next to her bed, and he leaned over and gave her a lasting kiss that she took as though it were a long-awaited letter from the mailman. Then she said, “Well, Mr. Ralph, that’s all right, but just to get things straight, you can kiss on me all you want, but I ain’t spreadin’ my legs for no man. I seen too many left with a big belly watchin’ a feller’s back walkin’ away.”

He lit a cigarette and looked past her at the bed, then he kissed her again as if he liked the taste of it. He straightened up in his chair and gave her his cigarette and watched her take a drag. “All right. You tell me how you think they got that little girl.”

“It’s somebody else’s, I know that much. Probably hired somebody to steal her away from her parents.” Her eyes narrowed. “You a detective or something?”

“No,” he said. “I’m the man got paid a thousand bucks to steal her.”

Vessy gave him back the cigarette and reached for the bottle. “Well, ain’t you a jack-in-the-box.” Her mouth formed a straight line. “What you want now?”

“I aim to steal her back.”

She stopped before taking a drink. “Excuse me, but that don’t seem too bright. The sheriff’s in Acy’s poker club.”

He pointed a finger up the hill to Lilac Street. “They can’t report me, not without admittin’ to a crime themselves. And I’ll sell that kid right back to them again, but this time for a cool two thousand.” He got up and put the cigarette in the trash burner, then turned to look at her. “Could you use five hundred of it?”

She glanced rapidly around her shack, every surface jaundiced in the kerosene light, as if she might never see it again. “What I got to do?”

“Can you ride a horse?”

She made a face. “What you think? I was raised ridin’ a mule to school, all five grades, then I come home to plow till dark.”

“I need you to help with the girl down to my place in Louisiana.”

She stuck a tongue in her jaw and thought about this. “And then what?”

He was not used to smiling, but smiled now and straightened his back the way a gambler with the winning hand does before he lays down his cards. “Sweetness, then you can do whatever the hell you want.”

* * *

HE STAYED at her place talking with her long after the streets were empty. The next day he laid low at the hotel. The following night, he walked over to Ditch Street, ignoring the aromatic fog rising from the steaming runnels flowing downhill from the tannery. She let him in and told him at once that Tuesday Acy would be away from the house early for sure, and that Mrs. White was leaving on the morning boat headed upriver to Louisville to shop. Neither would get home until five-thirty at the earliest.

He wedged back in the spindle chair and its joints popped like caps in a toy pistol. “You got pants you can wear under a dress?”

She nodded, sitting across from him at her table. “You got horses?”

“I got two set up to buy.”

“Neither one of ’em bite?”

“The ones I’m lookin’ at might not have teeth.”

She grinned, and a trace of a blush formed above her cheekbones.

He smiled back, his expression mysterious, the way some mean men smile at people, with the suggestion that he might bring her as far as he needed her, then leave her in the woods somewhere with a knot on her head. If Vessy read these notions on his face, she gave no hint of it. Taking his flask, she poured herself a small drink, hoping the taste would burn the tannery stench out of her nostrils. She smiled delicately into the glass.

ON TUESDAY at a quarter to six Acy walked home from the bank. His fine burgundy Oldsmobile stayed in the carriage house on the alley because he liked the exercise the uphill route gave him, even when he was tired, as he was today. When he opened his front door, the quiet was palpable, and at once he knew that something was different. No cooking smells. He looked at the floor, wondering if he had forgotten some event, perhaps a recital or music class for Madeline. Nothing came to mind. He went into the kitchen and put a hand on the stove, which was cold. Upstairs, everything seemed in order and the beds were made, which meant that Vessy, who did the housework when the maid was ill, as well as the cooking, had been in.

He decided to take the car down the hill and eat at the Wilson Hotel. At the restaurant, while waiting for his food, he studied his ironstone plate. Had Vessy taken ill? His wife, he knew, had caught the Galeno upriver to shop, and there were all sorts of reasons the old boat might be late getting back in. Perhaps Madeline had gone along, and Vessy as well, to help with the packages. Two young lawyers came over to join him, and soon he was talking of tax laws and thinking about the night’s steaks. He would have enjoyed a glass of wine, as in the old days before the war when drinking was legal. But the steaks arrived plump and running with hot fat, so he was happy.

* * *

THE GALENO had indeed developed boiler trouble and was limping downstream two hours behind schedule. Willa liked riding a boat upriver, imagining against fact that the dowdy, short-trade packets still running were grand floating palaces, but after dark she always wished she’d taken the train. She was tired, and the ladies’ lounge at the rear of the main salon had lost its gilt and gloss, the chair seats threadbare and smelling of coal oil. Two dour spinsters were returning from a doctor’s visit, and all they wanted to talk about were the limitless female problems they’d suffered. She passed the time by going through her two large bundles of purchases, one of which held even more shifts and pinafores for the girl. She was anxious to return and show her Madeline the new things, though the girl seldom reacted much to gifts of clothes. That would change as she got older and learned more about style and fashion. Willa had taught her many things already, although the girl still refused to call her Mother, or to wave at people properly, or to refrain from certain unruly expressions. The times she tried to feel close to Madeline, when the girl was in her lap and she was brushing her hair, the child would turn suddenly, staring at her as though Willa were a complete stranger. Then she would feel hurt and denied, but she was always able to cheer herself with the knowledge that at last, at long last, she possessed a child.

The Galeno landed after eight o’clock, and Willa called the house from the wharf boat and asked Acy to come down and get her. When he arrived, he helped her with her packages. “I guess we’ll have to drive by Vessy’s to pick Madeline up.”

“What on earth for?”

“She must’ve brought the child home with her. They’re not at the house.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Nobody was home when I got there after work.”

She waited for him to close her door and walk around the hood. He was moving quickly and jumped into the driver’s seat like a boy. “I hate for Madeline to be in that neighborhood, it just smells so awful,” she said, waving a perfumed hand before her nose.

He put the car in gear and drove up the hill, turning down Ditch Street and driving past a row of narrow, tin-roofed houses, their windows yellow with kerosene light, until he stopped in front of Vessy’s. The house was dark, but he still got out and knocked.

He sped a little as they rolled on toward home. Willa put a gloved hand on his arm. “What is it?”

He motioned with his chin. “No lights on at home, either.”

They went in and searched for a note, a clue. Willa went to a drawer in the walnut breakfront and retrieved her bottle of Canadian whiskey, pouring herself a long swallow into a cut-glass tumbler. A tremor ran through her hand as she drank.

Acy came back from the old carriage house and sat down, taking her drink and downing it. “They’re not here.”

“Maybe Madeline became ill and she took her to the doctor.”

He let out a sigh. “That’s got to be it.”

But after an apologetic phone call, he came back into the dining room and said the doctor hadn’t seen them. By this time it was nine o’clock. He went to the neighbors on either side. Mrs. Spurlen hadn’t seen Vessy or Madeline all day. Mr. Scott, who owned several farms but had retired to town, brought his great gray eyebrows together and asked if there was any trouble.

“No, nothing at all,” Acy told him, backing off the old man’s broad stone porch. “We’ve just got our schedules mixed up, and we don’t know where Vessy brought our little girl tonight.”

The old man checked his outsized pocket watch. “It’s late, but if you want I’ll go and check somewheres. You ask the doctor?”

“Yes. It’s all right. I’m sure she’ll turn up shortly.”

“Oh, Acy?”

“Yes?”

“Are you going to have your back fence painted?”

“What? Oh, sure.” He was walking backwards toward the street.

“I know it’s just the alley, but we have to keep it looking good, what with the automobiles using it as a shortcut and raising the dust. There were even horses early this morning.”

“I’ll have a man get on it next week.”

“Thanks.” Mr. Scott closed his door and turned off the porch light.

When he got home, Willa was crying, and he sat next to her on the divan, attempting to calm her. He made them both cups of tea, which they drank at table, saying nothing. Waiting. For the first time he missed the girl’s face, the bright newness of it, even her pert refusal to grant him much in the way of affection. The child-noise she’d made was a beating heart in his house. For a brief second he wondered how the girl’s parents had felt, but he killed that thought as quickly as he’d slap a mosquito.

At ten o’clock, he had an idea and found the new battery-powered flashlight and walked down into the backyard. At the gate he shined the light in the alley and saw the apple-shaped leavings of a horse. Perhaps two horses. He walked next door and knocked on Mr. Scott’s door until the old man came downstairs and appeared in his pajamas, blinking through the partially opened door. “What is it?”

“Sorry to get you out of bed, Jess, but you mentioned horses were in the alley?”

“Horses? Where?” He looked out over the lawn into the blackness.

“This morning. You told me.”

“Oh. Yes. Two of them.”

“On a wagon? Was it the lumber company?”

Mr. Scott paused a moment. “No, a man was leading them. I was on the way to my garage and I saw him. I started to call for him not to let the animals dawdle and smell up the neighborhood.”

“Just him?”

“That’s all I saw. Has your little girl come home yet?”

Acy liked for things to be orderly, liked for them not only to fall into place, but also to stay there, and now someone had broken the order in his life. “We’re doing what we can. This man, can you describe him?”

“I don’t remember. I just saw a man.” Mr. Scott put two fingers on his chin. “He was big. Wore a pretty big hat, and not a bad one. Probably a Stetson. Certainly not trash.”

“Anything else?”

“I just glimpsed him. He was just walking the horses, holding the reins.”

“What time?”

“I beg your pardon?” Mr. Scott put one bare foot out onto the porch floor.

“What time of day was all this?”

“Oh. It was early. Maybe eight or so.”

“Thank you, Jess.”

“Do you need for me to do anything?”

But Acy had already gone out to the street and was feeling for the gate in the moonless dark. A moment later, Willa heard him come up the steps and let him in.

“Does Vessy have any friends who come by on horses?”

“I don’t know. She’s so cross I don’t know if she’s made any friends at all since she’s been living here.”

“Someone was in the alley with saddle horses right after we left the house.”

“Do you think she planned an outing and something went wrong?” Willa stood up and clenched her fist, but it occurred to her that she didn’t know who she was angry with and sat back down. “Should we call the sheriff to look for them?”

“Does Vessy have any man friends?”

“How could she? Have you smelled her? Just the essence of pine oil and kitchen smoke.”

Acy looked at her, trying to smile, but failing. “I’ll call the sheriff. But you know, we’ll have to be careful what we tell him.”

Her eyes grew wide, as if she’d just remembered where the child had come from. “Could her parents have—”

“Her parents wouldn’t make off with her like that. They’d come straight up the hill.”

“Oh God, Acy. Do you think someone found out? And where’s Vessy?” She stood up quickly and put a hand against a daffodil in the wallpaper.

“It doesn’t make sense. But if we don’t call the sheriff tonight, he’ll find it odd.”

* * *

THE SHERIFF ARRIVED at their house at ten-forty-five. He was middle-aged, a politician of sorts, ambitiously dressed in a suit. Acy held a thirteen-thousand-dollar mortgage against his new house, so he took off his fedora, came in politely, and listened politely. Then he told them that Vessy probably took the girl off and would have a good explanation come morning. Just to be sure, he’d drop by the train station and the wharf boat and ask if anyone had seen something they all should know about.

Acy started to tell him about the horses, but something—perhaps his most fearful suspicion—made him hold back. “In the morning, then.”

* * *

HE LAY AWAKE all night, thinking about the girl, while his wife roamed the house from bed to bed, finally settling on the divan downstairs. Before the sheriff drove up in the morning, Acy had already told Willa what he thought. “The Skadlocks have taken her back. That’s the only thing I can figure.”

They were seated at the kitchen table drinking tap water. Willa looked at him, incredulous. “Why? We paid them what they asked, and it was a lot of money.”

They both were quiet for a long time before the sheriff came, hat in hand. He stood in the dining room, studying the china cabinet, and said he’d searched Vessy’s cabin and found nothing out of the ordinary. Her few clothes seemed to be there and not a thing had been moved out that he could see, but then, the furniture came with the place, even the cheap enamel pots and the rusty knives and forks. She owned almost nothing.

“When are you going to start looking for my child?” Willa said, glancing at her husband.

The sheriff explained what he could do and left as quickly as he could.

Acy stared through the front window as his Ford chattered away down the hill. “I can’t even leave to look for her,” he said. “Not right away. I couldn’t explain my absence.”

“If Skadlock does have her, you can’t lead the sheriff to him.”

He continued watching the lawman’s departure, as though envious of his motion and freedom. “But where’s Vessy? That’s the part I don’t understand.”

“Maybe he bought her off and she left for the mountains.”

He looked long at the bare dining-room table, the empty chairs. “I don’t have any idea.”

“Are you going in to work?” She was twisting a handkerchief in her hands.

“I don’t think it would look right.” His stomach rumbled and he glanced at the kitchen door. Looking down, he saw that his shirt was wrinkled, but there was no one to iron it. Most days he felt his life was on schedule like a crack passenger train, but not today. Now all he could do was wonder where his little girl might be.