Authors: Tim Gautreaux
GRAYSONER WAS ON a branch line, the track so buckled that Sam fought off seasickness in the rocking coach. He checked into a hotel near the river, washed the cinders off his neck, and walked back down to the desk, where he found that the Wellers hadn’t come in yet. About five o’clock that afternoon he heard the Ambassador’s whistle upriver and walked over to the wharf, striding along a line of spindly Ford trucks and mule-drawn coal wagons awaiting the boat’s arrival. He was already red-faced, not from the heat of the day but from his shame.
The boat came in bearing the soot of her last season, and a coal gang came off and set planks from the fuel galley to the wharf. After a minute Elsie and August appeared on the main deck and crossed onto the dock as soon as the main stage had been set down. Neither would look at him as they approached; instead, they looked beyond him, studying the town they now had to go against. She was thinner, her face without color. August had grown taller in the intervening months and was as thick as a man. When they stood next to him, August dropped his suitcase and wheeled. Sam felt the percussion of an open-handed slap that nearly knocked him over. His mother grabbed the boy’s arm and stepped in front, pushing him back.
“I’m not going to hit him again,” August said. “But I wanted him to know what I think of him.”
Sam staggered in a circle and blinked at the fire dancing in the left side of his face. “I thought I was doing the right thing when I did it,” he said, holding a hand to his cheek.
Elsie dropped her arms and looked at him. “You decided we weren’t good enough for our own little girl.” Her voice was without anger, yet without the least of kindness. “I know what you did and why you did it, and it makes me feel like trash.” Her accusing eyes drilled into him. “Do you think people down on their luck don’t deserve their own children, Sam?”
He stepped back and looked down at the tarred wharf. “I wrote you that I was ashamed.”
She bent down to her suitcase and August did the same. “You wrote a letter.”
The way she said this sounded as if she had practiced it for days, and the color rose in his face again.
August switched hands on his suitcase. “You can tell people you’re sorry all you want. But what’s that compared to what you did, what you’re sorry about.”
The hotel sign was visible up the hill, and the Wellers started toward it, Sam following and anxious to get the whole day over with. It could only get worse, he thought, considering what they had to do next.
* * *
HE TALKED to the middle-aged hotel clerk and discovered that Graysoner, though a small place, was the county seat. He got the location of the sheriff’s office, and at eleven o’clock the three of them walked into the courthouse through a rattling twelve-foot-high door made of carved and varnished hardwood. Up two flights of curving stairs, they found a deputy who told them the sheriff was out on an investigation and would probably be back at one o’clock. Sam stopped Elsie when she began to tell why they were in town.
“We’ll come back then,” he said, taking her arm.
Once on the street, she asked him why he’d cut her off.
“You don’t play much poker, do you?” He guided them into a café across the street where they sat in a booth and ate breakfast. At the end of the meal Elsie looked across the table at him and said, “Do you think we’ll need to get a lawyer involved in this? I’d hate to have to pay one.”
“I don’t know. We’re in another man’s henhouse here. Nobody knows who we are.”
“I’ll have to trust you to handle the talking.”
He shook his head. “I’ll do my best.”
August made a disapproving noise in his throat.
“Son, you’ve bulked up some since I’ve seen you. Been lifting weights?”
“I found a job loading wagons with sacks of stove coal.”
“You can’t get away from that soot, can you?”
The boy said nothing to this.
* * *
THE SHERIFF was late, so they waited in his echoing outer office in hard chairs until they heard a door open somewhere inside, then the deputy motioned them to come forward.
The sheriff, his hair neatly combed and parted in the middle, gave them a brief introductory smile, showing his straight rank of teeth. His scan of evaluation raised the hair on Sam’s neck. “What can I do for you people?”
“It’s a long story, but this woman and her son are my friends, and this lady’s baby daughter was stolen from her in New Orleans.”
The sheriff leaned back in his spring-loaded chair. “A stolen baby girl,” he said airily. “So why aren’t you looking in New Orleans?”
“I’ve seen her here in town.”
The sheriff did not seem surprised. “You have? And when was that?”
Sam looked at August and swallowed, then explained how long it had been.
“Why’d you wait so long to see about this?”
“That’s neither here nor there,” Sam said. “We’ve come to claim her and bring her back into her family. This is Elsie Weller, her mother.”
“That right?” The sheriff’s question carried a note of disbelief.
Elsie drew a photograph from her purse and placed it on the desk. “Yes, I’m her mother and this is Lily. She was three when she was abducted, and now she’s four.”
The sheriff looked at the photograph without picking it up. He pursed his lips. “Where exactly did you see her?”
“In the yard of a man named Acy White. I talked to some maid about her in the alley.”
“And why didn’t you come to me then?”
He glanced at a bookcase filled with leatherbound volumes. “She looked well off. Mr. Weller had just died, so I made a mistake and kept quiet about it until recently. When I realized I was wrong.”
“About what? The girl’s identity?”
“About not telling Mrs. Weller right away.”
The sheriff came forward decisively in his chair. “This sounds a little fishy to me, all of it.” He turned to Elsie. “You say your husband’s dead?”
“Yes. He died from—”
“I’m not interested in his health problems. I’m just trying to figure out who you are. How do you support yourself?”
“My son and I work on the Ambassador.”
“That the excursion boat? What, might I ask, do you do?”
“My son plays the saxophone, and I do some singing. Mostly I waitress.”
“So you’re musicians,” the sheriff said, as if this explained something. “You live on the boat, do you?”
Elsie sat up straight. “We keep rooms in Cincinnati.”
The conversation went back and forth like this for fifteen minutes, until the sheriff stood up and pulled down his vest. “I’ve known Acy White for a long, long time, and I know he’s a fine man who would never do anything unethical.”
“We know the girl’s here,” Sam told him. “I saw her. I met the people he hired to steal her away.”
The sheriff waved him off. “Two things you have to know. Even if this child was stolen, which I’m rock-hard sure she wasn’t, it happened out of my jurisdiction and I can’t have anything to do with it.”
“Can’t, or won’t?” Elsie asked.
“Have whichever word you please,” he said. “Do you want to hear the second thing?”
She nodded, casting Sam a sour look.
“The Whites reported to me a few days ago that their daughter, Madeline, has disappeared. Along with their cook, Vessy.”
There was silence in the office, and then, after a few moments, a burst of explanations, accusations, and denials, all leading to an outright argument.
* * *
THE THREE OF THEM stood on the sidewalk, confused and angry, and Sam felt the anger turning against him. Looking up and down the long, clean street, he could smell the café but nothing like the stench of New Orleans. The storefronts were spotless, bright awnings fending off the heat, windows filled with merchandise. “I feel like jumping in the damn river,” he said.
August spat on the curbstone. “Where do they live?”
Sam looked up the hill, wondering where the boy he’d known last year had gone. “Way up there, at the top.”
Elsie began walking. “Let’s go, then.”
* * *
THEY WENT to the front gate and opened it. Elsie rang the bell. The house loomed, quietly. Then she knocked. After a long while, August stepped around her and pounded on the door with his fist, then tried the knob, but the door was locked, and as he rattled it they all sensed the heaviness of the wood, the wide bolts thrown into the frame.
Elsie stepped back into the yard and looked up at the broad windows cinched with squares of colored glass. “Are you in there?” she yelled. “We need to see you about our little girl.”
To her right a neighbor, an old woman wearing an alarmed expression, came out and stood on the steps, but Elsie yelled again, “We know you took her, and we want to get her back.”
Sam stepped out next to her and checked all the windows himself, but they showed no faces, just recently cleaned glass, blank and facing west. One broad pane captured a cloud like a picture frame, but besides this, there was no movement. After a while they walked around back and tried there, knocking and yelling until a city policeman drove up and told them to please leave, that they were disturbing the neighbors. “They’ve left home,” he told them.
Sam walked over, and seeing that he was bright-eyed and young, not a small-town thug in a uniform, he asked him a question. “What do you know about the Whites reporting a little girl missing?”
“Her name’s Madeline. It’s been a few days now, but they think their cook made off with her.”
“Vessy?”
“That’s right.”
“Vessy what?”
The policeman pushed back his cap. “I don’t recall hearing.” He glanced over at the Wellers, who were still watching the doorknob. “It’s a funny thing about cooks and gardeners,” he said. “Hardly nobody ever knows the last name of one. Why do you think that is?”
Sam leaned a hip against the short fence and shook his head. “I guess some people think it only takes one name to call a dog.”
THE NEXT AFTERNOON August stayed at the hotel with a headache, and Sam and Elsie caught the sheriff in the hall of the county building. When they approached, he put his palms out in a pushing motion.
“I’ve got nothing to say to you.”
“We’d just like to know what you’re doing to find my daughter.”
“We’re doing a great deal to find the Whites’ little girl,” he said, then turned and began to walk off.
“I can’t believe you won’t go after kidnappers just because they’re your friends,” she called after him.
“I resent that.” He was still walking away. “I’ve already told you that the little girl was taken by the cook, I don’t know why. We haven’t had a ransom demand.”
“What kind of lawman are you?”
He stopped and looked at her. “Mrs. Weller, what kind of waitress are you?”
Sam took her arm and led her out into the sunshine, for her face had gone bone white and she was shaking with anger and fear. “Can you afford to hire a lawyer?” he asked.
“Not and eat too,” she whispered.
He looked up and down the pleasant street. “This isn’t good. I don’t have the money to hang around and track this Vessy character. The desk clerk says she could be in eastern Kentucky somewhere. From what I hear, the people up there back in the hills and hollers can’t even find each other.”
“How will we know,” she began, swallowing with effort, as if keeping down nausea, “if they find her? I’m nearly out of money myself.”
He looked up in time to spot the young policeman who’d shown up in the alley behind the Whites’ house. He was coming down the courthouse steps, looking in their direction.
Sam raised a hand. “Excuse me, Officer.”
“Do for you?” He walked over to them.
“I believe you’re the only man in town that would do a favor for that little girl.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” He grinned, and Sam could tell he hadn’t been a policeman long.
“If she’s found and brought back to town, how about sending me a telegram?”
“I reckon. Where you want me to send it? And I’ll need a buck, won’t I?”
Sam had a railroad ticket stub in his pocket and borrowed the policeman’s pencil. He fished a limp dollar out of his billfold and put it in the policeman’s palm along with his address in New Orleans. “If it costs more than this, let me know and I’ll send it along.”
“All right, then. I’ll be glad to.” The policeman touched the brim of his cap and turned away.
* * *
THEY DID what they could, spoke to whoever would speak, but next day the three of them were on the local train headed out through low alluvial hills toward the main line, where they would switch to the Illinois Central. Sam had used the hotel phone and found that the Ambassador was laying over downriver for boiler wash and coaling. On the ride down in the old varnished coach, they’d run out of things to say, and Sam was worried about the boy, who sulked against the window in the manner of an old man pained by some vast inner hurt.
“You going back to play with the band?”
“My coal-passing days are over, that’s sure.”
“You’re keeping up with the tunes?”
“I’m keeping up. What’s hard is I’ve got to teach myself technique. Since Dad’s gone, I don’t have any help.”
“Well…”
The boy turned and gave him a challenging look. “You know, I think I might have to kill him.”
Elsie looked up at the coach’s curved ceiling. “August, not now.”
“Kill who?”
“That man. The one who beat Dad up. The one they hired to get Sis.”
The locomotive whistled for a crossing, a sorrowing rise and fall of sound, and Sam glanced out the window at the engine, visible on the curve ahead. “He’d be a hard one to find, much less kill.”
“I’ve been to the library and studied maps of where that murderer lives. There are maps of every square inch of this country in the library, you know.”
“When it comes to killing, I believe he’s got the upper hand.”
“All I need is for him to walk in front of a gun.”
“And you have a gun?”
Elsie leaned toward him. “No, he doesn’t. Haven’t you ever been fifteen years old?”
“You better not let him think like that.”
“He’s entitled,” she said, sitting back. He again saw how thin she was, how pale, strikingly older. He didn’t think being alone could take that much out of a person.