Miss Julia Stands Her Ground

by Ann B. Ross

  Chapter 46

  It didn’t come to that, thank goodness, since my dancing days were all but over anyway. Wesley Lloyd remained undisturbed in his grave, and only a few knew we’d ever contemplated getting him out of it and sending him to a laboratory to have his insides examined for proof positive of Little Lloyd’s paternity.

  So I was glad that we were able to avoid such extreme measures, not because I had any lingering attachment to Wesley Lloyd’s person, or what was left of it, but because it would’ve meant coming up with a believable explanation, acceptable to every bridge, garden, and luncheon club in town. Hazel Marie didn’t need speculations running rife, and neither did I.

  But that night, just as I was looking with wonder and increasing joy at the roots of Wesley Lloyd’s gilded tooth, and offering up thanks that it hadn’t been impacted, then splintered, during extraction, Sam and Mr. Pickens came in.

  “Oh, Sam,” I said, “I’m so glad. . . .”

  “Where is she?” Mr. Pickens broke in, his brows drawn together in a worried frown. “Is she all right?”

  “Yes, and upstairs, but look at. . . .”

  “I’m going up,” he said, walking right past me and making no apologies for his abrupt behavior. “I’ve got to be sure she’s okay.” And off he went toward the back stairs.

  “Wait, I need to ask . . .” I started after him, but he was halfway up the stairs before I got to the foot. “Well, all right, but turn on some lights. It’s black as pitch up there.” Then I stuck my head up the stairs and called to him, “And don’t close the door.”

  “Julia,” Sam said, beckoning me. “Let him go. He’s been beside himself all day because we couldn’t find her.”

  I went to Sam and leaned against him, relieved to have him home where he was supposed to be. “I have to ask you something, Sam. While you were out gallivanting around and not letting me know anything, Lillian and I have about solved everything. Look at this, and tell me if it’ll work.”

  I held the watch up in front of his face so he could see it twirl on its chain. I smiled, waiting for him to realize the importance of the dangling appendage.

  He frowned as he looked closer. “I’ll bite. What is it?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him I was in no mood for jests, when an unearthly shriek split the air and echoed through the house. Lillian’s hands flew up and so did a three-quart saucepan. It fell, clattering to the floor, as she whirled around, yelling, “Latisha!” I gripped Sam’s arm, struck with fear as we all started toward the stairs.

  “They’s a man up here!” Latisha screamed. And down the stairs she came, shrieking and slipping and sliding and half tumbling until she landed with a bound in the kitchen. Terror stricken, she ran to Lillian and hid behind her.

  “Oh, my land, chile,” Lillian said, nearly collapsing in relief. “They’s not no man up there. That jus’ Mr. Pickens.”

  Latisha buried her face in Lillian’s skirt. “Well, he come outta the dark,” she said, half sobbing. “An’ I runned into him, an’ he like to scare me to death.”

  Sam started laughing, and when I could breathe again, so did I. Upstairs, doors slammed open and feet thundered down the stairs, the commotion sounding like a herd of horses on the loose. Hazel Marie and Mr. Pickens rushed into the kitchen, Little Lloyd, his glasses askew on his face, right behind them, yelling, “What happened? What happened?”

  Mr. Pickens, breathing hard, stopped short. “Where is she? Is she all right?”

  Hazel Marie’s eyes were still swollen, but she seemed somewhat resurrected with fresh makeup and a change of clothes. Catching sight of Latisha peeking around Lillian, she leaned over to brush away the child’s tears. “Oh, Latisha, are you hurt, honey?”

  Latisha shook her head as she buried it deeper in Lillian’s skirt. Mr. Pickens squatted down beside her. “I didn’t mean to scare you, little girl. But you know what? You scared me out of a year’s growth, and I can’t afford to get old that fast.”

  Latisha peeked out at him, the beginnings of a smile on her face. “You already ole, ’cause you got gray hairs on yo’ head.”

  “You got me there,” he said, and began to coax her out from behind Lillian.

  “First thing tomorrow,” I said to Sam, “Carpet is going on those stairs.”

  With the fright over and my pulse rate easing off, I quickly slipped Wesley Lloyd’s watch, chain, and tooth into my pocket and slapped the lid on the shoe box. This was not an appropriate time for Little Lloyd to be viewing his father’s remains.

  Turning to Sam, I whispered, “We need to talk. Let’s go back to our room.”

  Slipping out of the kitchen while the others were taken up with Latisha, we found privacy in our bedroom. “Sam,” I said, holding out the tooth to him, “tell me this thing has DNA in it, so we won’t have to go mining the cemetery to get some.”

  Sam took it from me, turning it around as he examined the roots and the surfaces of a molar that, as far as I could see, had not increased Wesley Lloyd’s level of wisdom by any degree whatsoever. “Whose is it?” he asked.

  “Why, Sam, it’s Wesley Lloyd’s. Who else’s tooth do you think I’d have? And if it hadn’t been for Lillian going against my explicit instructions, I wouldn’t have that. Now, will it suffice to lay this matter to rest?”

  “It might.” Sam looked at me, a broad grin spreading across his face. “It just might. We could ask Pickens, but maybe we’d better stick with Binkie. If she doesn’t know, she can find out. Even so, it might take a few weeks before we know for sure, and it’ll probably cost an arm and an leg.”

  “I don’t care what body parts it’ll cost—an arm, a leg, or a tooth—it’s one and the same to me. Just so we get at the truth and can hit Brother Vern over the head with it. But weeks, Sam? How’re we going to keep him quiet until the results come back?”

  “Once we tell Puckett that DNA testing is being done, I think he’ll be confident enough to want to wait.” Sam held the tooth up to the light, shaking his head in disbelief. “Who would’ve thought it?” Then he looked at me, a troubled frown appearing between his eyes. “What about Whitmire? You heard anything from him?”

  “No, and I don’t think we will. I think he’ll want to stay as far from Hazel Marie as he can get.” And I went on to tell Sam of our visit to the American Dollar store and the change Hazel Marie and I had made in his outlook. “I gathered from what he yelled after us that money was involved in some way, and he was being paid to tell tales on Hazel Marie. But, Sam, you should’ve seen how he backed down when Hazel Marie lit into him.” I bit my lip, recalling the scene. “I have to tell you, though, there might’ve been more between those two than I want to know. But—and I’m firm about this, and from Hazel Marie’s attack on him, she was, too—he didn’t have a thing to do with that child’s conception. Besides, he was a married man at the time.”

  Sam and I looked at each other. We didn’t have to say what we were thinking. Namely, that somebody else had also been a married man at the time, and it hadn’t stopped him.

  I bypassed that and went on to tell Sam about Brother Vern’s visit and how it had undone Hazel Marie, and how I’d promised her that we’d leave no stone or grave unturned until we’d proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Little Lloyd was a Springer through and through. Excepting, of course, the Puckett strain he got from his mother.

  “So, Sam, I am depending on this tooth to dig us out of the hole we’re in. And if it doesn’t, I don’t want to know about it. And I don’t want Brother Vern to know about it, either. I want to see a test result come back here that leaves no room for doubt, and I intend to have it that way if I have to fix it myself. It’s remarkable what you can do with a little Wite-Out and a copying machine.”

  “We won’t have to resort to that, Julia,” Sam said, as he turned the tooth around. “I think this is going to do the trick.”

  Then he gazed at me with what I took to be wonder and pure wide-eyed admiration. “In fact, it looks to me like you and
Lillian have saved the day.”

  “Well,” I said, a smile as broad as his spreading across my features, “what’s new about that?”

  Chapter 47

  We called Binkie the very next morning, and she explained the ins and outs of DNA testing and what laboratory to contact and how to collect and send off the samples. Would you believe you can get everything you need through the mail? As long as you have a credit card, it’s just like ordering from Neiman Marcus.

  Then there was the problem of getting a DNA sample from Little Lloyd. We couldn’t just ask him for it, because we’d been bending over backward to keep him from knowing he had an identity crisis. I certainly didn’t want him to find it out at this late date. And I couldn’t take him to a doctor to get it, because we’d have to explain to the doctor why we wanted it, and that would be just one more person in the know.

  Binkie said she could swab his mouth as well as anyone, since she had the whole do-it-yourself kit right there in her office. But Little Lloyd would’ve known exactly what was happening as soon as Binkie came at him with a Q-tip. He’s smart as a whip, you know.

  So I was about at my wit’s end. Here we’d managed to find that tooth with Wesley Lloyd’s DNA in it, saving us the trouble of digging him up, and you’d think it would be clear sailing from then on out.

  “Julia,” Sam said one evening, after several days in abeyance while we tried to figure out how to scrape the inside of the child’s mouth without him knowing it. We were alone in the living room, fretting over the problem. “Julia,” Sam said again, “let’s just tell him. We’ll assure him that we aren’t questioning who his father is, but that it’s a legal measure to prevent any question later on.”

  I was shaking my head all through his little discourse, but before I could say a word, he went on. “We can tell him it’s necessary because Wesley Lloyd never legally recognized him as his son. Stress legally, because we don’t want to stir up any doubts in the boy’s mind. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t.” I sprang from the sofa because I couldn’t sit still. “You don’t understand how sharp his mind is, Sam. He’d know in a minute that we were questioning his mother’s word and her morals, because he is well aware that his mother and father don’t have the same last name. He’s already concerned about his own name.”

  “Well, then we’re right back where we were before Lillian unearthed that tooth.”

  I shuddered. “Let’s don’t talk about unearthing. We escaped that by the skin of our teeth, thanks to her. But, think, Sam, there must be some way we can sneak around and get his DNA.”

  “Plenty of ways to get it, but doing it without his knowledge is the problem.”

  I paced the living room floor back and forth, trying to think of something. “Why do we have to fiddle around in his mouth, anyway? Didn’t you say they can get DNA from all sorts of places? We’re already using a tooth, for goodness sakes,”

  Sam looked up from under his eyebrows, smiling. “I don’t believe we can pull a tooth without him noticing. But,” he went on somewhat more seriously, “you’re right. Blood, skin cells, hair—which, by the way, has to have a root on it, so we can’t just snip some off—all of that can be tested. But the easiest and least intrusive way is to swab the mouth. That’s the way the lab kit’s set up, and since they’re going to have a hard enough time with Wesley Lloyd’s tooth, we ought to follow their instructions for Lloyd.”

  “Well, of course you’re right,” I said, about half done in because he usually was. I took another turn around the room, turning the problem over in my mind.

  “Well, Julia,” Sam said, slapping his hands on his knees and getting to his feet. “It’s past my bedtime. Let’s sleep on it and maybe things’ll be clearer in the morning.”

  “I hope so, because Brother Vern’s not going to keep quiet much longer.” I snapped off a lamp and walked across the room to turn off another one. “I’ll leave one on for Hazel Marie, although no telling when she’ll get in. I declare, you’d think they’d keep earlier hours, what with Mr. Pickens having to go to work in the morning.”

  Sam laughed. “He pretty much works when he wants to.”

  “Yes, and that’s the trouble with him. If he’d buckle down and settle down, he’d be a lot better off.” I fluffed up the pillows on the sofa and straightened the girandoles on the mantel. “I’m going to check on Little Lloyd, then I’ll be in.”

  “Don’t be long,” Sam said, as he headed down the back hall toward our bedroom.

  I tiptoed up the stairs, noticing a light from the child’s room spilling out into the hall. I bit my lip in dismay, fearing that he’d been awake and listening to what we’d talked about.

  I crept toward the door of his room and peeked around it. Every light in the room was on, but he was sprawled out in bed, sound asleep. I smiled with relief and carefully walked in to turn off the lamps.

  As I approached his bedside and looked down, my heart melted at the sight. There is nothing sweeter or more innocent than a sleeping child. I stood for a minute just to watch over him, as he rested there on the pillow, his wispy hair a disheveled mess and his mouth open, breathing in and out with little gurgling noises.

  I smiled, thinking how I would tease him about snoring as he had teased me on occasion. Then I stood stock still, stunned by a sudden realization. Turning on my heel, I hurried out and down the stairs, nearly crippling myself in my haste and in the effort to make no noise.

  Rushing into our bedroom, I hissed, “Sam, Sam, get up. Quick, we’ve got to do it right now.”

  Sam jerked upright in bed. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “Come on. Hurry.” I dashed around the room, looking for the implements from the lab kit Binkie had given us. “Where’s that Q-tip? Get up, Sam, I can’t do it. You’ll have to.”

  When I told him my plan, he laughed all the way up the stairs, until I told him he’d be mortally sorry if he woke the child. He held his hand over his mouth, doing his best to muffle himself, as he tiptoed behind me.

  When we got to Little Lloyd’s door, I let Sam take the lead. I pressed behind him, clutching a handful of pajama top. The bedside lamp I’d left on gave us a clear view of the child, still in deep and noisy slumber. Sam crept to the far side of the bed where the boy lay, with me making each step with him.

  “See how his mouth is open?” I whispered. “Just scrape that thing in there, and let’s get out of here.”

  Sam leaned over the bed, and I leaned over him. He eased the stick into the child’s mouth, touching neither lip nor tongue. He held it there, suspended for a moment, as Little Lloyd gently snored around it, unaware of what was being done to him.

  I nudged Sam. “Do it,” I whispered with some urgency. “Hurry, before he wakes up.”

  So he scraped the cotton-tipped stick along the inside of the child’s mouth, while I held my breath and watched. Just as Sam made one last swipe, Little Lloyd snorted and jerked his head away. I thought my heart would stop. Then he brought his hand up, and just as Sam retracted the stick, rubbed his nose fiercely. With a long moan, or maybe it was a sigh, he turned over in bed and curled up, fast asleep again.

  Sam clicked off the lamp, and we scurried out, carrying the precious essence of Little Lloyd on a stick.

  After carefully stashing our prize in a container, we fell in bed, congratulating ourselves and laughing our heads off.

  Contrary to what I’d been led to believe, it took only a few days to get the results back. That’s how it works when you go private and don’t mind the cost.

  Binkie called Sam and me to her office and went over the test results with us. They were as plain as the nose on your face. After deciphering the graphs and pointing out the statistical genetic odds to us, Binkie stacked the papers together and slid them into a manila envelope. “I can’t imagine you’ll ever need these,” she said, “but if I were you I’d keep them in a safe place. That tooth is probably in a million pieces by now, so you won’t be a
ble to use it again.” She stopped and squinched her mouth together. “I don’t know what happened to the gold that was on it. You want me to call the lab and ask about it?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t want anything more to do with any of it. As far as I’m concerned the matter is closed, never to be opened again.”

  Sam and I met with Brother Vern at Sam’s house that afternoon, and I don’t mind saying that it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to wave those papers in his face.

  “We have the proof now,” Sam told him. “Irrefutable proof that the boy is a Springer through and through. You need to go on about your business now and leave Hazel Marie alone.”

  Brother Vern’s face turned red as a beet, and I thought he might explode with frustration. He hemmed and hawed and expostulated, but all he could come up with was that science in all its forms, including evolution, would be the ruination of us all.

  Sam tried to explain the test results to him, but Brother Vern was not interested in being enlightened. “All I know,” he fumed, “is that Hazel Marie don’t deserve what’s come to her, and I won’t ever believe any different.”

  “Well, frankly,” I said, wanting to have my say, too, “we don’t really care what you believe. We want you as far from Hazel Marie as you can get, and it’s time you got started.”