Motherhood Is Murder

by Carolyn Hart

  The last two people to see Rebecca the evening she disappeared—the last, so far as anyone knew—was the attorney she worked for, Daryl Spalding, and the client who was sitting in Daryl’s waiting room that evening when Rebecca left work. Her ma was expecting her home early to help with her little niece’s seventh birthday party, Rebecca was to pick up the cake, and she sure wouldn’t miss little Patsy’s party. A foolish waste of money, a store-bought cake, but Patsy’s best friend had got one for her birthday, and Patsy was real set on the notion.

  According to Daryl Spalding, when he stepped out of his inner office to take the client on back, Rebecca was picking up her purse to leave. He said goodnight to her and stood for a minute talking with the client in the waiting room, there by Rebecca’s desk, idly watching through the front window as she cut across Main Street to her car. That was at 5:00 P.M. Her mother said Rebecca had planned to pick up the cake at the Corner Bakery before they closed at 5:30 and then go straight on home. Daryl said he saw her get in her car and drive off. He told the sheriff that he saw no one else in her car, and saw no other car pull out behind her as if to follow her white Grand Am. He’d gone on back to his office with Jimmie Shakes, who was having a heated property-line dispute with his neighbor, and that was the last, Spalding said, that he saw of Rebecca.

  Her car was found three hours later in front of the Corner Bakery with the cake box inside, the icing melting down through the folds in the box onto the upholstery, the evening was that hot, a scorcher even for June. Her car wasn’t locked. Rebecca’s mother had waited at home for her, distracted from the party, which was in full swing around her as she grew increasingly worried. Sometime after seven, she called Rebecca’s fiancé. He hadn’t seen or talked with Rebecca. She’d called the Corner Bakery, but it was already closed. She called the bakery’s owner at home, but there was no answer.

  Tommie answered her second call from his car, where he was already driving around town looking for Rebecca. It was Tommie who found her car. He called the sheriff at once, then called Mrs. Duncan. They could hardly hear each other, for the shouting children that filled her house. Rebecca’s car, its location, and the melting birthday cake were the only evidence the sheriff was able to procure that evening. Nothing in her car, or in her desk at work, or in her room at home, gave any indication of some destination or activity she might have wanted to keep secret. “Well,” some wag said, “maybe she’s went off trappin’ cats with Martha Bliss—trappin’ cats all night with the cat lady. Haw haw haw.”

  Most everyone in Greeley, one time or another, called Martha Bliss the cat lady, even if she was young and pretty, not the old hag that “cat lady” seemed to imply. With her long black hair and big blue eyes, Martha Bliss could melt a young buck right down to his boot tops. The studs around Greeley played up to Martha just like they did to Rebecca, but they laughed at Martha behind her back, her and her big city notions about caring for a bunch of cats.

  Generally, folks in Greeley considered cats about as low on the scale as the crows that steal seeds from your corn rows, gobbling up the kernels right behind a fellow as he walks along the rows planting. Crows slipping out of the sky silent as death to eat up your garden plot afore it gets started. Well, the stray cats was just as pesky, to most folks’ way of thinking—except the cats did do their share of mousing, you had to give ’em that.

  Most of Greeley’s cats wandered the rutted Main Street and home-places half wild, living in the bushes and fields or in the barn rafters, breeding mangy kittens all spring and summer. The chicken growers around Greeley valued them cats, though, to patrol their hundred-foot-long chicken houses. Be overrun with rats otherwise, rats killing and eating the young broilers; cats ate the rats, and the growers were glad to have ’em, cats as wild as coons or foxes. Only a few folk in Greeley, like Martha Bliss and Rebecca Duncan, and a few lonely old ladies, kept a cat indoors, right inside the house. But Martha’s foolishness over cats went a sight farther.

  Martha’s big city talk about what she called controlling feral cats, and neutering them, she got those fancy notions the year she spent away from Greeley down in Atlanta with her Aunt Hazel—come home as full of citified ideas as a pig full of slop. Imagine castrating all the tomcats in Greeley. Enough to make a donkey laugh. Martha wasn’t that old, neither, to have growed so peculiar in her ways, her being the same age as Rebecca, and as Florie Mae her ownself. Them three girls graduated high school just two year before Grady Coulter, Grady with his red hair and those flirty green eyes; all the girls had a crush on Grady in school and a lot of them still did, of which Grady was well enough aware.

  The Coulters was one of the first Irish families ever to settle in Greeley back before the War Between the States—called themselves Northern Irish. Most folks in Greeley was of Scotch descent, and some Cherokee blood mixed in. But you could bet your best hound pup that since that first Coulter arrived, back when Greeley was just a few log shacks and garden patches, ever’ generation since, there’d been at least one redheaded Coulter eyeing the ladies, and more than eyeing them.

  There was always redheaded children in Greeley, though in mixed company folk didn’t talk much about where that red hair come from. Grady Coulter and his daddy and his granddaddy before him and on back—the young ladies, and some not so young, flocked ’round the Coulter boys thick as flies ’round the sorghum pot. There’s stories a feller could tell, and more stories, about them Coulter boys. Granny Harkins knew all them tales. Granny likened Grady to a tomcat his ownself, the way he went a-ruttin’ after the women. Though maybe even Grady wasn’t as randy as that tomcat that agonized folk that spring, a hollerin’ and wailin’ up around Harkins’ Feed and Garden. You could hear that tom caterwallin’ all over Greeley as loud as a pack of coon-hounds. Cat was near as big as a coon-hound. Big, and mean enough to whip one of Luke Haber’s fighting pit bulls that got loose, sent that bulldog home just whimperin’ and bleedin’. That cat was so mean that when the neighborhood dogs around Harkins’ Store saw it coming they’d run the other way.

  Florie Mae Harkins, when she got up at night to nurse the baby, would hear that cat yowling outside the window, a-wallerin’ after her two girl cats that was locked up in the main part of the feed store. James said if that cat didn’t shut up he’d have to shoot it, and Granny said the same, glancing toward the closet where she kept her old shotgun. But much as Florie Mae disliked the big brindled beast and feared for her girl-cats, she didn’t want James or Granny to kill it.

  She wasn’t sure why that was so.

  Florie Mae got up a couple times ever’ night with the baby, but not only to suckle little Robert. No matter how tired she was, with helping James take care of the nursery, and with their three little ones, she hadn’t been sleeping real well. She’d been fidgety as a chigger-bit young’un; and the true cause of her wakefulness fretted and shamed her.

  Florie Mae knew well enough that her James was the best of husbands. He’d built the Feed and Garden from nothing, for her and the big family they wanted around them, and he was set to lay-by all he could for them. Worked from before sunup till long after cockcrow and never looked at another woman…

  Trouble was, he seldom looked at her, neither, no more, in just that way he onc’t had. Except it was time to make a baby. In between, James’s thoughts ran to the bookkeeping and the government forms he had to fill in and the nursery orders and feed orders, how many bales of straw and bags of fertilizer they’d be wanting to tide them to the next delivery. His mind was on the business he was building for her and the young’uns—as it should be. But Florie Mae was only twenty-three. And sometimes her needs was powerful.

  It wasn’t like she’d growed ugly and let herself go. She didn’t stay fat between the babies. She washed her hair and brushed it shiny, and mended and starched her clothes and tried to keep herself dainty. But most times James hardly saw her.

  She’d wake at night, in the dark when he was sleeping, and lay a hand on his shoulder and whisper to him, maybe e
ven nuzzle his neck a little, but James most never stirred.

  So she’d take up the hunger-crying baby, and she’d sit in the window nursing him, looking out at the feed sheds and at the greenhouses that was her province during the day. And always, her night-thoughts were on another, and that did shame her.

  Florie Mae and James and the three children and Granny lived above the big store; their four bedrooms and James’s office were up there. But their big old kitchen with its couch and easy chairs and TV and pantry and nice big wood stove, that was downstairs where it opened right into the store. They could see from the kitchen windows into the back part of the property, the big open space that was all concrete, where customers could drive on back behind the store to load up from the storage sheds that ran on two sides, or from the fenced nursery on the third side where they kept the bedding plants and vegetable sets and herbs.

  From upstairs, from their front bedroom windows, Florie Mae could see down Maple Street three blocks to the little shack beside the mercantile. Sometimes Grady Coulter’s light would be on, there, and she’d watch it, and she’d wonder if he was in there alone. She’d see his face in her mind, his laughing green eyes, his hair as red as the first turn of sourwood leaves in the fall. Red curly hair, such ruddy cheeks, and those knowing green eyes. She’d see his face, close-like, and could smell the clean, male scent of him, and she’d turn away from the thoughts that filled her, and pull the wrap closer ’round herself and the baby, huddle down with the baby, her face burning.

  Then on those summer nights, caught in her shameful dreams, she’d hear that big ole tomcat start in a-wallerin’ out back, and all her heat would turn to disgust—Granny was right when she likened Grady Coulter to a tomcat. Florie Mae, roaming the upstairs, staring out at the grassy side yard where the children played, she’d see that tomcat slinking through the shadows under the old jungle-gym and around the play-toys, moving low and sneaky, his shredded ears held low, his eyes glinting hard and hungry in the night, wanting her girl-cats. And his mean male lust would jerk her right back to good sense.

  Pacing the upstairs rooms carrying little Robert sweet and warm against her, looking out to the back lot where the hired boy Lester had left some kerosene cans stacked against the fence, she’d see that big ole tomcat creeping along there staring toward the closed back door of the store, hungering to get inside. Wanting at her own cats and at their little kittens. He’d kill the kittens if she didn’t keep the little families locked inside the feed store, kill them to make the lady cats come in season again. Granny Lee threatened ever’ day to shoot him, Granny loved the sweet girl-cats and their endless litters of kittens near as much as Florie Mae did, though the old woman would never let on. She never liked James to see her pet the kittens, but now they were getting bigger and playful and trying to climb out of the box, Granny was out there ever’ chance she got, a-pettin’ on them kittens.

  It was some after this second litter of the season came along, that tomcat got even louder and more troublesome, trying to sneak into the store in the daytime when no one was tending the counter, slip in and kill the kittens. That was when Florie Mae and Martha decided to trap him.

  Martha knew how to trap a cat, she’d done a lot of trapping with a group of folks who done nothing else, down in Altanta, trapped ’em, did what they called neutered ‘em, and turned ‘em loose again. Martha said if they could trap that tom and take him to Dr. Mackay to get him “fixed,” that would be the end of the trouble, that cat would stick to hunting rats and wouldn’t bother with nothing else. So Florie Mae had picked up a “humane” trap from Martha’s garage, taken it home in their stake-sided truck, and put it out by the sheds. It was the biggest cage-trap Martha had, with a trigger on the floor at the back that would make the door spring shut when the cat went inside to get the food-bait.

  She set it up just the way Martha’d showed her, tying the door open with bungee cords to begin with, putting a little bit of food way at the back, past the spring trigger, to get the cat used to it. When the tomcat started to take the food regular, then she’d set the trap for real, take the bungee cord off and set the door to fly closed. It was the first evening she set out that trap with a bit of fried chicken for bait, sometime after supper, that the sheriff stopped by. She came back inside to find him sitting at the kitchen table talking with James, both of them looking as glum as a pair of beestung bears. Two tall, lean men, brown and muscled. Sheriff Waller was a big man who’d once had a big belly, too, bulging tight over his uniform pants. Now, since he’d went to dieting, he was as slim as James himself. He’d lost his beer belly, but his jowls hung sort of loose where his face’d got thinner.

  “You been outside.” James said, looking at her yard boots. “Out in the back?” His brown hair was all mussed, standin’ up the way it did when he was botherin’, but his green eyes was clear on her, and caring.

  She nodded. “Out by the sheds.”

  “You stay inside now, Florie Mae. Something’s happened. You’re not to go out again for anything. Not after dark.”

  When she heard about Rebecca, she’d gone all shaky. She had gathered her two little ones close to her, sat holding them warm and safe against her, and the baby in his cradle right next to her, there in the hot kitchen, and she feelin’ scared even inside her own home. Even with James and the sheriff right there with them. Granny sat across by the stove, her face all hard lines and her mouth pinched. Granny had thought a heap of Rebecca Duncan, Granny always said Rebecca looked just like a hothouse daisy, with her pale gold hair and white skin. Rebecca still had a rag doll that Granny had made for her, a tiny doll with a daisy-print dress that Granny had give Rebecca when she was a tiny girl. Now, growed up, Rebecca kept that doll sitting on the dashboard of her car, kept it right where she could see it for good luck. Granny claimed that foreigners could say what they liked about the town of Greeley being small and backwoods compared to Birmingham or Atlanta, but folk had to behold that Greeley’s young women were lookers, and most of ‘em as sweet as the day is long.

  Granny made those claims when she was in a good mood. When she was in a rantin’ mood she’d rail on about how young people had went to hell, disrespectin’ their elders, sneaking away to the fields up to no good, instead of church on a Sunday, and generally behaving in ways Granny would never, as a girl, have thought of—though Florie Mae had heard different about Granny, from her own great aunts and uncles.

  The evening light was soft in the big kitchen. Florie Mae rose once, pushing the young ones away, to fill the sheriff’s coffee cup. Sheriff Waller said Rebecca hadn’t come home from work, told them about the birthday party, that Rebecca’s mother had called him, and that Tommie had found her car.

  Rebecca’d sometimes been on the wild side, when they were young girls, flirting up the boys. But now she was engaged to Tommie, she wouldn’t go playing around. Rebecca had dated Grady Coulter when they was younger, Grady and a couple of his wild friends. But she wouldn’t go with any of them now, no more’n she’d go away with dark-haired, wild-dancing Albern Haber or one of Albern’s drinking buddies. Rebecca never drank none when they was young, and she hadn’t put up with no nonsense from those that was drinking, no matter what the gossips said.

  No, Rebecca had her wedding dress all picked out, her Ma had reserved the church and ordered the invitations, and Tommie’d made the down payment to rent that little house at the edge of town. No, Rebecca sure wouldn’t run off, she and Tommie were as happy as pigs in slop.

  By morning the news was all over Greeley that Rebecca was gone. By the next night when she hadn’t come home, everyone was certain that someone had done her harm. Sheriff Waller thought so, he was quiet and sour. The police chief thought so, too, he told James she was likely dead—but how would he know? Greeley’s police chief didn’t know squat. Sheriff did most of the work, made most all the arrests, and ran the County Jail. Sheriff Waller said after he talked with Rebecca’s folks and with her little sister and with Tommie, that he was buck-cer
tain something bad had happened to her. Hearing it straight from the sheriff, Florie Mae was sick, thinking what might have happened to Rebecca.

  Ever since they were girls, she and Rebecca and Martha had run together, spent the night together, gone to the movies and skating, riding their bikes up to Cody Creek and Goose Lake, lying in the sun on Carver’s dock—McPherson’s dock now, since Idola married Rick McPherson and her mama left them the house. Idola was some younger, but summers they’d all run in the same crowd.

  This night, after the sheriff left, Granny looked hard at Florie Mae. “If someone’s out to harm young girls, missy, you’ll stay inside and take care.”

  “I’m not a young girl, Granny. I’m a woman. With three babies and one on the way.”

  “All the more reason. And if you’re such a growed woman, what you doing out there in the night playing at being a little girl, you and Martha Bliss, setting that fool cat-trap, like two children.” Granny looked at her so hard she made Florie Mae blush. “You’ll not go out there in the yard in the dark of night, Missy. Not until Sheriff catches whoever done this terrible thing to Rebecca.”

  “You don’t know what’s happened to her, Granny. You don’t know…”

  But they did know, everyone in Greeley knew Rebecca wouldn’t just up and leave. And Tommie near going out of his mind with worry, searching the fields and hills over and over the same ground, his pickup all muddy from driving the back roads, and Tommie harassing the sheriff every day for word of her.

  Every evening before dark when Florie Mae went to set the trap, it was the same, Granny scolding, “You won’t be going out in the yard after dark, missy. If Martha has any sense she won’t, neither. Sometimes I think Martha Bliss don’t have the sense God gave a chicken. Traipsing around setting them cat-traps. What makes you think that tomcat’s dumb enough to get hisself caught in some big ole wire cage?”