by Ann B. Ross
“Mr. Pickens, call me as soon as you come in. And in the meantime, I’m calling you at home.”
And I did that, too. His home phone rang for ever so long, as my hand on the receiver grew tighter and tighter.
“Yeah?”
“Oh, Mr. Pickens, you’re there. Thank goodness, I thought I’d missed you.”
“Who is this?” Mr. Pickens sounded as if he were still in bed and not a little cranky at being disturbed.
“Why, it’s Julia Murdoch. Wake up, Mr. Pickens, half the morning’s gone and I need to speak to Hazel Marie.”
There was a long silence on the line, in which Mr. Pickens was either yawning or going back to sleep.
“She’s not here,” he finally said.
“Now, listen, I know that you two want to keep me in the dark as to your personal lives, but I don’t have time for such niceties. I don’t care what you do or when you do it. So put her on the phone right now.”
“Miss Julia,” he said, sounding more awake by the minute. “Hazel Marie’s not here.”
“But she has to be! Have you looked around?”
“I didn’t get in till about four this morning, but I think I would’ve noticed if she’d been here. Now, what’s going on?”
“Oh, Mr. Pickens. She left here yesterday afternoon right after Brother Vern called her the whore of Babylon in front of Emma Sue Ledbetter, and Sam’s gone to track him down, and she’s not in her bed, and she hasn’t been there all night, and we don’t know where she is.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Oh, Mr. Pickens,” I cried, practically throwing myself on him as soon as he stepped into the house. While waiting for him Lillian and I had done little else but wring our hands.
“Tell me again,” he said, “and this time in detail. When did it all start?”
He put his hands on the back of a chair and leaned over it, his arms straight and stiff. Lillian sat hunched over the table, not even thinking to offer him something to eat—a clear sign of her distress.
So I began where it started, a week or so back, when Sam first told me that Brother Vern was back in town, carefully omitting the reason he’d come back—not wanting to ruin her reputation if I didn’t have to—and ended with Hazel Marie’s sudden departure. “And, Mr. Pickens, you wouldn’t believe the awful things that man said to her, and right in front of the preacher’s wife, too. She was so upset that she just took off, asking me to look after Little Lloyd on her way out. I thought she meant for the evening, but now it looks like she meant forever. And he doesn’t even know she’s gone, and how am I going to tell him?”
Mr. Pickens pressed his mouth together, his black eyes studying the tabletop intently. “I’ll check with Coleman first,” he said, relinquishing his hold on the chair and heading for the telephone to call Deputy, I mean, Sergeant Coleman Bates at the Sheriff’s Department.
Lillian and I stared at each other, hardly able to breathe, as we listened to one side of the conversation. Mr. Pickens explained to Coleman that Hazel Marie had been missing since the previous night, then asked about vehicle accidents and hospital admissions.
“He’ll call back,” Mr. Pickens said, hanging up the phone. “Now, think hard, Miss Julia, did she give you any idea of where she was going?”
“Don’t you think I have been thinking? No, she didn’t, because I thought she just wanted to clear her head after Brother Vern’s rampage.” In my distress, the words started tumbling out. “And, Mr. Pickens, I didn’t start to worry until Little Lloyd went to bed. But Sam said he was sure she was with you, and even if you weren’t home, she probably had a key and would just wait for you. And even then, I thought she’d come home sometime last night even though I didn’t hear her, which I usually do, but not always. It wasn’t until I saw her bed hadn’t been slept in, then called you and found out she wasn’t there, that I knew she was really gone. And, oh, Mr. Pickens, both of us were sleeping while our sweet Hazel Marie was out wandering around somewhere alone in the night.”
I put my head down on the table and cried, wanting so badly to tell them the real reason behind Hazel Marie’s flight from hearth and home. In my telling, I’d slid right over the question of Little Lloyd’s paternity, letting Lillian and Mr. Pickens think that Brother Vern was only up to his usual mischief. I’d gone over and over in my mind exactly what the meddling fool had actually said the day before, and as far as I could determine, he hadn’t come right out and named Lonnie Whitmire the child’s father. But Hazel Marie had seen the two of them together, so she would’ve known what he was about to say. Why else would she have run from us?
“What I don’t understand,” Mr. Pickens said, “is why she’d be so upset. She’s had to deal with her uncle before, so what made this time so different that she’d run off?”
“Yessir, tha’s what I want to know,” Lillian said, nodding solemnly. “Why she not slap him down like Miz Ledbetter do? Why she have to run away from all of us?”
I knew, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that this time everything was different because Brother Vern was claiming a different father for Little Lloyd and accusing Hazel Marie of long-term deceit and deception, and that a great and awful dread was building up in me that this time she might be running from the truth.
Chapter 38
Mr. Pickens couldn’t stand still. He paced the floor, slapping a fist into the palm of his other hand, his black eyes darting from one side to the other. “Where’s Sam?”
“He’s out looking for Brother Vern, and he still thinks Hazel Marie is safe in her bed. He doesn’t know we don’t know where she is, and I don’t know where he is.”
“He have a cell phone with him?”
“No, but wherever Brother Vern is, that’s where he’ll be.”
“Okay. Here’s my cell number,” he said. “Call me if you hear from her.”
“Where’re you going?”
“To the sheriff’s office to see Coleman. If Puckett’s doing any street preaching, he had to get a license. It should have his address.”
“I know he started a new business. Printing things, I think. But, Mr. Pickens, how is finding Brother Vern going to help find her? That’s the last place she’d be.”
“I know, but we have to start somewhere. And I want Sam to know she’s missing. In the meantime, you stay here. . . .”
“I can’t just sit here. I’m going with you.”
“We’ve had this conversation before,” he said, his face grim and determined. “You need to be here in case she calls, and if she does, call me on my cell. And I want you to do something else. I want you to call everybody Hazel Marie knows and ask if they’ve seen her.”
“I can’t do that,” I moaned. “She wouldn’t want everybody to know. Besides, if I tie up the phone, how’s she going to call?”
“Leave five minutes or so between each call you make, and she’ll get through. Now, I’m outta here. Lillian, make sure Miss Julia stays right where she is. I don’t want to be looking for two missing women.”
Lillian nodded at him, her eyes big with apprehension. Then she put her hand on my arm to keep me seated.
“All right, all right!” I snatched my arm away. “I’ll stay.” But I wasn’t happy about it. It just did me in to have to sit and wait while the men were out doing something—and usually not getting it done.
Before Mr. Pickens’s car, with its low rumbling motor, had gotten out of the driveway, the telephone rang. My heart leapt in my breast and I nearly crippled myself getting to it.
I answered it with an eager, “Where are you?”
“Why, right here, talking to you,” Emma Sue Ledbetter said, as my heart dropped like a lead balloon. “Who did you expect?”
“Oh, uh, I thought it was Sam, letting me know where to meet him for lunch.” I shook my head at Lillian to let her know it wasn’t Hazel Marie. “I have to get off the phone, Emma Sue. He’ll be calling any minute.”
“It’s only ten o’clock, Julia. You have plenty of
time to arrange a lunch date. But I won’t keep you, I just wanted to apologize to you for my behavior yesterday.”
“Don’t worry about it, Emma Sue. If ever a man needed swatting, Vernon Puckett did.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that. Jesus himself took a whip to the money changers in the temple, you know. No, I just couldn’t stand by and listen to that man castigate Hazel Marie. She is just the sweetest thing, and so spiritual. We have to stand up for each other, Julia.”
I didn’t know what to say. Hazel Marie was certainly sweet, I could attest to that. But if Emma Sue had known what Vernon Puckett was claiming, she would have to rethink her opinion of Hazel Marie’s spiritual quotient.
So I said, “Uh, huh.”
“No,” Emma Sue went on, “I want to apologize for slamming your door when I left. There was no call for that, and you know I am not ordinarily that rude.”
“Don’t give it another thought,” I said, shifting from one foot to the other in my anxiety. “Now, Emma Sue, I do have to go.”
“Wait, Julia, I have something else to tell you. You know about Dub and Clara and that electrician, don’t you? Well, did you know that Dub was fixing to sue him for stealing Clara’s affections?”
“I’ve heard all about it, Emma Sue, but I don’t have time for an update now. Besides, I think it’s ridiculous for a man to demand payment for a wife who wants to go.”
“Well, but, Julia, marriage is sacred, and it has to be preserved.”
“But not by buying and selling a woman’s affections, it doesn’t. I can’t be bothered with this now, Emma Sue, it’s all so sordid.”
“Well, anyway, they settled out of court, and Dub got seventy thousand dollars because he had them dead to rights.”
“My word, Emma Sue, I heard he was asking five hundred thousand, and he settled for seventy? If I were Clara, I’d be insulted.”
“Oh, Julia, you are such a liberal. And speaking of that, Larry is beside himself, wanting to know what you’re going to do about the session.”
“I haven’t had time to give it a thought, Emma Sue. I’m still praying about it, though, and I’ll let him know the minute I decide.”
“You can’t take too long. The election’ll be here before you know it. What you ought to do, Julia, is get Hazel Marie to pray for you. She’s come so far on her spiritual journey, and I just know she can guide you in the right way.”
My eyes rolled back in my head. “I’ll be sure and do that, Emma Sue. Now, thank you for calling, but, oh, someone’s at the door. Talk to you later.” And I hung up.
Lillian said, “Who’s here? I don’t hear no do’bell.”
“Nobody, Lillian. I just wanted to get off the phone. Now, help me think who to call about Hazel Marie.”
We spent the rest of the morning taking turns calling everybody in the Lila Mae Harding Sunday School class, the Tuesday morning circle, the book club, the bunco group, the PTA, and the dress shops downtown. It was hard work, for we couldn’t just come out and tell everybody that Hazel Marie was missing. The whole town would’ve been out beating the bushes, if we had. So we went all around Robin Hood’s barn to find out if anybody had seen her. A lot of little stories were told, like, Hazel Marie was on her way to the grocery store and we needed to add something to the list, but she’d said she had to run a few errands of her own beforehand, and had she stopped off at your house before going on to the store. We really needed a head of lettuce. Like that.
But nobody had seen her or heard from her. A lot of them offered to lend us some lettuce, though.
“Lillian!” I slapped my hand down on the table, struck with a new thought. “I don’t know where my mind is. Kinfolk! That’s where she is. She would go to family.”
“Who her fam’ly?”
“Well, that’s the sad thing,” I said, deflating in a hurry. “I don’t know a one. But let me think. I know that her mother passed on years ago, and I think her father remarried. I gathered that the new wife pushed her out of the house before she was old enough to take care of herself.”
“She don’t have no brothers or sisters?”
“I’ve never heard her mention any, so I guess not.” I mused on that for a few seconds, saddened that I knew so little of Hazel Marie’s early life. Hadn’t wanted to know, if you want to know the truth. As far as I’d been concerned, her life had begun the day she first showed up at my door, mainly because I didn’t want to hear the details of her connection to Wesley Lloyd. Now, though, I’d have given anything to know every last one of them.
“Anyway,” I went on, then stopped again. “Lillian! There is one person we haven’t called.” I jumped up and hurried to the phone. “Etta Mae Wiggins! They’ve known each other for years.”
I leafed through the phone book. “Let me see, she’s probably at work, so I’ll call there first. Here it is, Handy Home Helpers.”
The woman who answered the phone was not the most helpful person I’d talked to, in spite of the name of her business. In fact, she was right on the verge of rudeness, saying that Etta Mae Wiggins had called in sick that morning, and she’d had to get somebody else to fill in for her at the last minute, and furthermore personal calls were not encouraged at a place of business. She wouldn’t even give me Miss Wiggins’s home phone number, so I had to look that up, too.
“Some people,” I said to Lillian, as I listened to the phone ring and ring and ring some more. “She’s not answering, Lillian, and no answering machine, either.”
“Maybe she at the doctor’s, if she sick.”
“Maybe so. Well,” I said, finally hanging up, “we’ll have to keep trying. Miss Wiggins is our last hope, although I never thought a woman like her would be in such a position.”
I did not care for Miss Wiggins. She was too outgoing, too perky, too flashy, and too familiar with Sam. But at the moment I could overlook every one of her faults if she could lead us to Hazel Marie.
Chapter 39
About that time, two long and anxious hours after he’d left, Mr. Pickens returned. Both Lillian and I hurried to meet him at the door.
“Have you found her? What did Coleman say?”
“Where she at?”
“Let me get inside,” he said, for we’d waylaid him on the back porch, where it was too cold to stand around and talk. “No, I haven’t found her. But no accidents and no admissions to the emergency room, thank goodness. Coleman got me Puckett’s business address, but the place is closed up tight.”
“Oh, Mr. Pickens,” I moaned, standing aside but not too far away. “We’ve come up against a stone wall, too. Nobody’s seen or heard from her, and Miss Wiggins is not at home or at work, and I’m at my wit’s end, not knowing where to turn to next.”
Mr. Pickens smeared his hand across his face. “I still don’t understand why she’d take off this way. I thought she’d come to me if she had a problem. She knows I’d make it right for her.”
Well, not always, I thought. There’re some things that can’t be made right by anybody, no matter how good their intentions, and nine times out of ten they’re things out of the past that we’ve brought on ourselves. In spite of Hazel Marie’s philosophy, we have to live with the consequences, and that’s the fact of the matter.
I turned away so he wouldn’t see the distress on my face. Everything that was happening seemed to lead to the conclusion that Hazel Marie had a secret, the potential revelation of which was now tearing her apart and sending her scurrying off to who knew where.
“You’ve not heard from Sam?” Mr. Pickens asked.
“No, and I’m about half mad at him for not staying in touch.” I paused and reconsidered. “Of course, he doesn’t know that Hazel Marie didn’t come home last night. Maybe you ought to be looking for him, too.”
“I’m going to,” Mr. Pickens said. “I just stopped by to see if you’d heard anything.”
“I would’ve called you. Now, don’t stand around, Mr. Pickens, we need to find her before Little Lloyd gets home from school.”<
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“I’m gone, then.”
“Wait,” Lillian said, “lemme fix you a sam’wich to take with you.”
“He doesn’t have time for a sandwich,” I said, holding the door open. “He needs to be on his way.”
And so he was. I stood by the door, my nerves so on edge that I could hardly think straight. Listening to his car back down the driveway, I decided that I couldn’t sit around and wait much longer.
“Lillian,” I said, “I’m going to Miss Wiggins’s house, I mean, trailer. She’ll have to come back sooner or later, and I can get more out of her face-to-face than I can over the telephone.”
“Yessum, an’ I’ll go with you.”
“No, somebody has to stay by the phone. Where’s my pocketbook?”
“I don’t know, an’ you not about to go drivin’ off by yo’self. We got enough people running ’round where nobody know where they be. An’ we got that machine what say leave yo’ number an’ we call back, so I’m goin’.”
“Well, so we do.” It brought me up short to be reminded of the answering machine, mainly because I’d not given it a thought, hating to talk on one myself. And also, of course, because I wanted to speak directly to Hazel Marie if she called. But we’d waited all morning, and I was sick of it.
“Let me get my pocketbook then,” I said.
I hurried out of the kitchen, snatched up my pocketbook from the dresser in the bedrooom, and hurried back in, shrugging on a coat as I went. Lillian was doing something with peanut butter and crackers at the counter.
“We can’t linger, Lillian. Get your coat and let’s go.”
Lillian stuffed the crackers smeared with peanut butter into a plastic bag, and followed me out to the car. “We can eat on the way,” she said, settling herself into the passenger seat.
“I can’t think about eating now.” I raced the motor to warm it up, turned the heat on high, and backed out into Polk Street. Lillian grasped the armrest as I gave it the gas and we sped through town and out onto the state road that led to Delmont.
