When Did We Lose Harriet?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  I’d heard Ricky talk. I appreciated how much editing Carter was doing for my benefit. I offered him a gift in return. “Ricky said he didn’t know Myrna. I have witnesses to that.”

  “He still says he didn’t know her. That’s all he will say, though, until he gets a lawyer. He’s been through the system a few times already. He knows the ropes.”

  “But he took a gun to her house, Carter? Why?”

  “That’s the weirdest part of all. He says he hadn’t had that gun for weeks. He swears Harriet’s had it.”

  “Harriet?”

  “Yeah. I told you it was weird. Beverly corroborates that, by the way. She says she bought the gun for protection before she met Ricky, and forgot all about it. Harriet found it and got real mad they had it, with Ricky being on probation and all, so she took it and said she’d put it in a safe place where it couldn’t hurt anybody. Looks like she didn’t.”

  I was cold all over. “Oh, Carter, I do hope she hasn’t killed her own mother!”

  Twenty

  Give beer to those who are perishing,

  wine to those who are in anguish;

  let them drink and forget their poverty

  and remember their misery no more.

  Proverbs 31:6-7

  When Josheba called Jake’s room to ask how he was doing, I couldn’t very well tell her about Myrna’s murder with old Big Ears right there. “I’d like to see you,” I said formally. “How about if we go out for supper? Glenna’s ordered a tray to eat with Jake.”

  Josheba plumb flabbergasted me. “Lewis is coming over to my place for lasagna and a glass of wine, Mac. Why don’t you join us?” Lewis? I’d thought Morse was coming home the day before. Before I could ask, Josheba urged, “Come on over. I’ve got plenty.”

  I accepted. The way those two bickered the first—and, so far as I knew, only—time they’d been together, I might be needed as a referee.

  I am ashamed to admit I’d never been a guest in an African American home before. I felt a bit dashing driving up to Josheba’s, and wasn’t sure what to expect. I discovered she lived just a few blocks from Glenna and Jake in a modest six-room brick house very like theirs. The main difference was, Josheba’s furniture was newer and better. She had a collection of African art and sculptures I could have appreciated more if I hadn’t been keeping one eye on Lewis and Josheba. The way they carried on in the kitchen, they could have known one another for years. I had never heard her laugh so much.

  The food was delicious, but while we ate I obeyed Josheba’s command to “fill us in on the latest developments.” My news got far more attention than the lasagna. They were as shocked as I that Harriet’s mother had been shot with a gun last seen in Harriet’s possession.

  “Tell me truthfully,” I finished, looking from one pair of concerned dark brown eyes to the other, “do you all think Harriet is the kind of child who would shoot somebody?”

  Josheba looked shocked. “No way!”

  Lewis looked grave. “I hope not, but she has a temper. If pushed far enough—”

  Josheba covered her ears with her hands. “I won’t listen to this! What are you going to do next, Mac?”

  “I’d like to go talk with Eunice again.” I was surprised to hear myself say it. I thought I was going to leave everything to Carter, but if Carter was looking for Harriet because he thought she’d shot Myrna, I wanted to find her first. “I think I’ll go offer condolences tonight and ask who else might have known Myrna was here. Do you all want to come?”

  Josheba nodded. “I’ll come. You, too, Mr. Henly?”

  We turned toward him and found him sitting slumped over with his eyes closed. “You praying?” Josheba demanded bluntly.

  “No,” he murmured, “I was just wondering if I’d brought out jigsaws the first day Mac came to the center, whether she’d have given this Harriet thing a miss.”

  “Think how dull your life would be,” Josheba scolded, but her eyes danced.

  “My life isn’t going to be dull for a long time, woman.” He pushed back from the table. “I’ve got a meeting. Call me, Josheba, and keep me posted.” He tried to sound casual, but he didn’t fool me one bit. I wondered if he knew about Morse—and where Morse was.

  When he was gone, I sighed. “I’d have felt a lot safer driving up there at night with Lewis along—even if he does rank as a suspect.”

  Josheba stared. “What do you mean a suspect, Mac?”

  I started gathering up dishes to take them to the sink. “Only so many people could have known she was in town, and Lewis was one. When Myrna called me, she said she’d already called the teen center.”

  Josheba followed me with the serving platters. “Well, you know good and well Lewis didn’t shoot her. He wouldn’t kill anybody!” She started rinsing dishes for the dishwasher.

  “Do!” I said, running some hot soapy water for the pots. “Sounds like you know Mr. Henly better than I supposed.”

  Her face grew slightly rosy and she turned away. “We’ve had dinner a couple of times, that’s all. As friends.” She moved to put things in the refrigerator.

  “A couple of times? When? And where’s Morse? I thought he’d be home by now.” My boys and I used to carry on that way. I hoped Josheba knew I was teasing.

  Her voice was muffled from having her head in the fridge. “Morse isn’t studying coming home. He called Friday to say the weather had cleared up, the river was fantastic, and he was staying an extra week.” She stood up straight and added, a bit defiantly, “And Lewis and me—well, it isn’t what you think, Mac. We had dinner twice, that’s all. After you and I went up to Eunice’s I dropped by to tell him about that visit and your break-in. He was about to get some supper before a basketball game, so he asked me to go along. Not having anything better to do, I accepted.”

  “That’s once,” I counted.

  “Well,” she looked a little embarrassed, “on Friday, when Morse called, I could hear a party going on in the background. Men and women. Morse likes to party. So when Lewis called right afterwards and asked if I’d like to get some dinner again, I was just mad enough with Morse to accept. I figured if he was having fun, why shouldn’t I?” She lifted her chin, then her eyes sparkled with mischief. “I must have been madder than I realized, though. I put on my prettiest turquoise pantsuit and my best perfume. But it doesn’t really mean a thing, Mac. Lewis doesn’t mean any more to me than those women up at the river mean to Morse, and I refuse to build a marriage on suspicion and jealousy.”

  “Next thing I know, you’ll be running for Miss Virtue,” I told her, scrubbing the baking dish. “But don’t you break Lewis’s heart, now.”

  From the happiness in Josheba’s laugh when I said that, I suspected if she wasn’t careful, she might break her own. It’s so easy, once we have put on the armor of resolve, to think we’re invulnerable to temptation.

  Josheba couldn’t stop talking about Lewis. When she went back in the dining room for the last few dishes, she called back, “I can’t break Lewis’s heart, Mac. He’s already given it to that filthy teen center. He just likes to have somebody to eat with before his evening basketball game. But he sure is fun to be with. That man can talk!”

  “Did he tell you anything about himself?” I asked as she returned. I wouldn’t mind knowing a bit more about Mr. Henly myself.

  “Sure. He told me about being a lawyer, and trips he used to take back when he was making money—Aspen to ski, the Bahamas and Jamaica for Christmas…”

  “Looks like he wouldn’t have wanted to give all that up for dirt and teenagers,” I commented, wiping the last counter. “Did you ask him about that?”

  “Yeah. He just shrugged and said, ‘Some things you gotta do. Sometimes you owe a debt you have to pay.’ Now come on, Mac, let’s get up to Eunice’s before it gets dark.”

  As I led the way to Glenna’s car, I couldn’t help wondering what kind of debt a man could pay off better as the director of an inner-city teen center than as a wealthy lawyer. Mayb
e I’d been the wife of a magistrate too long, but it sounded suspiciously like community service to me.

  Eunice’s house was dark and circled with crime tape, but on the porch of the house next door several women were gathered in a huddle. When I asked if they knew where Eunice might be, the crowd parted like the Red Sea. A stocky woman turned toward the open screened door. “Eunice,” she bellowed, “you got comp’ny.”

  Eunice appeared behind the screen. “Hello, folks. Thank you for coming.” She was neatly dressed in a gray skirt and white blouse—probably what she’d worn to work—but her hair was shoved about and her face was red and blotched from crying. “Come on in.”

  This house was different from its neighbor. Maybe it was people coming in and out, but it was scarcely cool. The living room was a small, dim cube filled with shabby overstuffed furniture all facing a huge color television. A collection of dusty china bells filled the sill of the picture window, a collection of dusty Avon bottles the top of the television.

  “My neighbor Raye Hunter’s lettin’ me stay here with her until the police are finished with my house. This here’s her granddaughter Jennifer.” Eunice flapped one hand toward a pretty girl with long black curls and bright pink lipstick watching a television program. Eunice’s eyes were rimmed with red. “So far I can’t seem to do anything but cry,” she apologized unnecessarily.

  She led us to the dining room, an arch away from the living room. It was far too small and brightly lit for the warm crowd it held. Instead of a maple table and hutch, Mrs. Hunter had an old red Formica table and an assortment of mismatched chairs that had probably been dragged in from the rest of the house. A couple of women stood and insisted we take their patched plastic seats. Eunice spoke to a skinny woman with carrot-orange hair hovering by the kitchen door. “Raye, these here are friends of my niece Harriet.”

  “Let me get you a beer.” Raye darted into her kitchen and reappeared almost at once with icy bottles, brimming with foam. I hate beer, but sipped mine to be polite.

  I was wondering how to start a conversation when Eunice did it for us. “It don’t seem right, Myrna coming so far just to die.” She sniffed.

  “When did she get here?” I asked.

  “This very morning. Took the all-night bus.” She sniffed again. Somebody pressed a blue tissue into her hand. “Me’n her wasn’t what you’d call close, but I can tell you, it upsets me to think of her coming home to see her baby, then getting herself killed.” The last word was a wail. Reaching for another tissue, she blew her nose like a trumpet. “Harriet and Myrna was all I had left in the world. Now Myrna’s gone and Harriet’s disappeared.”

  The girl in the living room decided the live show in the dining room was better than the one on the screen. She came in and held up part of the wall. “I read in the paper about a girl who disappeared several years ago.” I figured she was trying to show sympathy by making the only connection she could with Eunice’s grief. “She and her stepdaddy had a fight and she ran away with her boyfriend. Maybe that’s where your niece went.”

  “Maybe so.” Raye Hunter moved over to give her granddaughter’s shoulders a squeeze of praise. “Anyway, Eunice, I’m sure Harriet’s okay. Kids sometimes just need some space.”

  Eunice was momentarily diverted. “Did that girl ever come back?” she asked, dabbing her eyes with a sodden tissue.

  The girl shifted uneasily. “Uh, well…not exactly. But her mother saw her picture in the paper and recognized her.” Her voice dropped.

  “Why was her picture in the paper?” Raye wanted to know.

  The girl looked utterly miserable. She turned and muttered something we couldn’t hear. Raye shook her roughly and shoved her toward the arch. “Don’t you let her hear you say that!” she hissed.

  “It was in the paper,” the girl said sullenly, gliding back to the television show.

  Trying to distract Eunice again, I asked loudly, “Who might your sister have called in Montgomery besides me, Lewis Henly, and Ricky Dodd?”

  “Who?” Eunice seemed at a loss.

  “He’s a boy I saw running away,” I prompted her. “The police are holding him.”

  “I didn’t know his name. The police just said they had a suspect. And I don’t know why she’d have called him—or anybody else, for that matter, except maybe William Sykes. Dixie’s husband? He’s got a big store out on the Eastern Bypass, so I told Myrna to call and ask if he could give her a job, or steer her toward one. She wanted to stay home and…and make a fresh start.” She put her head down and bawled.

  Mrs. Hunter obliged with more tissues. Another woman came back from the kitchen with a fresh set of bottles, potato chips, and homemade onion dip. She set them down and announced, “I called the station. It’ll be on the ten o’clock news.”

  Eunice nodded without raising her head.

  I was horrified. “Don’t you watch it! You don’t need…”

  Josheba ground her heel into my toe as Raye asked, “Didja ask ‘em for a video tape? On account of it being in her house and all?”

  “Yeah. They said we’ll have to tape it ourselves. Do you have a blank tape?”

  “Yeah.” Raye went toward the living room.

  I sat there feeling sick. Nothing could make me look at any part of that gruesome afternoon again. My own memory was likely to keep me up half the night.

  Eunice, however, said with satisfaction, “The cameraman got good shots of me getting out of the police car and coming up the walk, and just when I first seen her, but he didn’t know how much they’ll be able to use.” She turned to me. “Did he get you, too?”

  I shuddered. “No, thank heavens. I left before the press arrived.”

  Raye Hunter looked up from where she was fixing a blank tape into the VCR. “Ain’t that always the way? And there you was, the one who found her. Looks like they’d have told you to stick around.”

  Eunice was ready to rehash her tragedy once more. “I went off to work and left her sitting right there in the living room, drinking her coffee and looking pretty as a picture. It don’t seem right that she’s gone.”

  I raised my voice and spoke to Raye. “The police said somebody called about hearing a shot. Was that you?”

  Raye shook her carrot head. “Lordy, no, I don’t hear a thing in the afternoon. I’m on disability, you know, so I have to rest. I lay right there on my couch with my TV stories, and the air conditioner runs so loud outside that window, I have to turn the sound up. I probably wouldn’t hear a fire truck less’n it come through the door.”

  “I don’t know who else it’d be, either,” Eunice said with a sniff. “All my other neighbors work.”

  I couldn’t think of another thing to ask, and I was feeling more than a bit queasy. Maybe it was the way Eunice was piling up sodden tissues right beside the potato chips and dip. I shoved away from the table. “We just wanted to tell you how sorry we both are. Don’t come with us to the door. We’ll find our way out.”

  “Thank you for coming.” Eunice extended a plump, damp hand.

  As we went through the screened door, we heard her confide to her neighbors, “That woman’s just like a sister to me. In and out of my house all the time. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

  Twenty-One

  They cannot sleep till they do evil;

  they are robbed of slumber till they

  make someone fall. Proverbs 4:16

  Monday night I didn’t dream about the brown-haired child. It’s hard to dream when you aren’t sleeping. Whenever I dozed, I saw a pale white face with a hole in its forehead.

  When I finally fell asleep, it seemed only a minute later that Glenna was shaking me. “William Sykes wants you, honey. He won’t come in, says it will just take a minute.”

  I dragged on my robe and stumbled to the front door. He stood at the bottom of Glenna’s three front steps, holding a plastic grocery bag.

  The morning was hot and still. Boxwoods beside the stoop sent up the delicious musty smell that a
lways reminds me of the house I grew up in, which made me greet William more pleasantly than I might have. “Good morning!”

  William looked very smart in a gray suit and red tie. He thrust the bag up at me. “Dee found these CDs in Harriet’s room. Can you get them to the kid they belong to?”

  He wasn’t dumb to come early. Before my first cup of coffee, I’ll agree to almost anything. “Sure.” I smothered a yawn. Sunlight slanted through the tall pines into my eyes. As he turned to go, I added sleepily, “Did you all hear about Myrna Lawson?”

  He turned back slowly. “What about her?”

  “She was shot yesterday in her sister’s living room.”

  His mouth fell open. “Dead?”

  I nodded.

  He came back to the bottom of the steps and stared up at me in disbelief. “Yesterday? Here in Montgomery?”

  I nodded again.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Very. I found her.” I had to take a deep breath at the sudden picture in my head.

  If I expected sympathy, I was wasting my time. “How’d it happen? Do they know?” He seemed awfully eager to know.

  “Not yet. Eunice said she’d told Myrna to call you about a job. Did she?”

  His head shot up like an animal scenting danger. “No way! And if she had, I wouldn’t have hired her. Can’t you just picture what people would think if I kept a peroxide blonde ex-hooker around the store? Havin’ her kid around was bad enough.”

  “You need to report Harriet missing,” I told him straight out.

  “We will, if she doesn’t come back by the time school starts. Until then, we don’t consider her missing. Now, please excuse me. I’ve got to get to work.”

  “But William!” I protested. “She’s just a child. You can’t—”

  “In some ways, she’s older than you and me put together.” He stomped down the walk, then turned back. “And you tell your cop buddy I’m not going down to look at every corpse he finds, either. It’s not like lookin’ at photographs, you know, and I’ve got enough to deal with at home trying to keep Mama and Dee from killing each other before Julie goes to college. Women!” With that flattering pronouncement, he drove away.