Grandpa turned to summon David forward with a gesture. “We sure do,” he said, even though only his grandson and grand-nieces and nephews stood below him in the family tree. Grandpa hadn’t had much too be proud of in him of late, David couldn’t help thinking.
Then he remembered Susan, his guardian angel. Not that he believed in guardian angels, though he sure could have used one.
After they left the cemetery, Grandpa made a request. “Let’s take a drive,” he said. “I’d like to see the old neighborhood.”
It was a trip they’d taken frequently in the days when he’d been growing up and in those long slow drives through the countryside, David had heard many a tale, not only of Grandpa’s growing up days, but of those who had gone before, back to his grandfather’s own grandparents who had bought out a claim and homesteaded in the days before statehood.
The old house still stood, though crumbling with its porch fallen away and his roof aslant. Not having been painted within his memory, its shingles were bare wind-weathered wood and weeds grew up where there had once been lawn. “Lots of life in that old house once,” the old man said. “Me and Red, we used to have the whole upstairs to ourselves and we’d invite five or six other boys to sleep over.
He grinned, exposing still white teeth. “But the best times were camping out by the river. Did I ever tell you about the time I woke up to hear a snake rattling by my head.”
He’d heard the story, of course, but he shook his head allowing his grandfather the pleasure of retailing the tale of how his friend had shot the snake before it could strike.
“Loved hunting back in those days, but it’s been a long time since I could enjoy killing something just for pleasure.” He cracked a laugh. “My grandpa would say it wasn’t manly not liking to hunt, but in his day they ate what they killed and lucky to keep the family from starving.”’
The farm still belonged to his grandfather as far as David knew. That and several others around, acquired in his grandparents day. He wondered if that included the acres once belonging to the Lawrence family.
He listened to another story, this time one he hadn’t heard before, about how one of the covered wagons had sunk at the river crossing, leaving a pioneer woman and her babies to be rescued. His great-great-grandfather, who always emerged from these stories as something of a hero, had been one of the rescuers.
Elias Johnson had been a confederate war captain and a man of daring deeds, according to Grandpa. David had always wondered if all the stories he’d told had been true. Never having met the man who had died long before he was born, he couldn’t say.
The farms had been prosperous ones and the family had weathered the hard first years to a comfortable lifestyle. They’d worked incredibly hard and been loyal and devoted to each other, but even so, the years of drought and dust had demanded a high price. It was only the money infused from the wealthier side of the family that had enabled them to hang on to their land when their neighbors were being foreclosed. The other side hadn’t been into farming, but banking and business.
Grandpa didn’t talk much about what he called the pirate side of his kinfolk.
“Why did you let the old house fall apart, Grandpa,” he heard himself asking.
“Sentiment at first. Nobody wanted to live out here. Nobody wanted it. And it got so run down it was past saving by the time I inherited. It would have been better to tear it down, but I couldn’t be the one to destroy my family home.” He sighed. “A mistake. Nothing could have been harder than watching it fall apart over the years.”
They drove past, admired the little pond where Grandpa used to take him fishing when he was a kid, and then his grandfather pointed at a level stretch of land, scraped bare of any sigh of human habitation. “That was where Red lived,” he said.
In silence they drove back to town.
Chapter Fifteen
Susan wanted to help David more than anything in the world. With that in mind, she hovered in a corner, secluded behind a big upholstered reader’s chair and read from the WPA interview records, hoping to find some clue from the past that led to the threats of the present.
She had a sense of running out of time, that any minute something terrible might happen to David or his grandfather. In her panic she was unable to focus and words ran through her mind without meaning until a name caught her attention. Gertrude. The name she thought of as truly her own, the one that lay under the Susan she called herself these days.
She went back to start reading the report from the start. According to the note at the beginning, Bessie Watkins, the interviewer, had recorded the details of her meeting with Gertrude Elizabeth Messner, age 43 in 1937, who began by relating how she had at the age of eight come to the territory in a covered wagon with her family.
This was different from other interviews she’d read. This time she was living in the words, or rather reliving their revelations as though it was her own, so familiar story.
We came from Wise County, Texas with a group of friends, traveling in covered wagons in a kind of train. Mama gave birth on the way, another little sister, but the baby died and Mama, well, she was never strong after that. By the time we got here and claimed our farm and Papa and the boys built us a half-dugout to live in, she was sick abed and we girls took over with running the household.
My big sister, Mary Ann, she was sixteen and most as good a cook as Mama and she saw to it that we younger girls did our share.
There was six of us, three girls and three boys, and we all had to work and work hard to help Papa break the sod that spring and get the plantings started. We had chickens and cows we’d brought with us so we were better off than some folks. And no matter how hard we had to work just to get by, Mama said we had to be schooled. She’d been a teacher before she married Papa and she set up a school right there in the dugout. She might have to lie on her bed, but she saw that we learned reading, writing and figuring. And more than that, she’d brought books from home.
Books, Susan thought. And she remembered some of her old favorites with their faded old covers, The Secret of Steeple Rocks, The Girl Scout Mystery, Marcia Goes to College, Winnie Winkle . . . Girls series books mostly. She’d read them again and again.
Old books, books read by other, older girls in her family.
Susan felt as though she flushed hot, then turned cold with goose pimples on her arms, even though that was impossible. She was remembering.
“Whoever left this here?” an unfamiliar voice crashed into her reverie and the booklet lying on the table in front of her was abruptly picked up, its pages slammed shut. The teen who’d taken it from her was not entirely unknown to her. She’d been coming into the library since she was a little girl, but now she was acting like she owned the place. Susan followed her as she marched indignantly up to the checkout desk. “Mrs. Kaye, some lazy person left this clear across by the magazines.”
Mrs. Kaye smiled her patient smile. “Well, Penny,” she said, taking it gently from her. “That’s one of the booklets of WPA interviews made back during the thirties.”
“Doesn’t look much of a book to me,” young Penny said disdainfully.
“It’s a collection we prize,” the librarian admonished. “Let me show you where it should be placed. I’m just glad there are those interested enough to read these old stories.”
Susan followed Penny, having now placed her role in the library. Sometimes high school students, for various reasons, volunteered to work after school.
Mrs. Kaye placed the little book in its place among similar titles, explaining briefly to the girl about the unique information contained in this regional history section, adding, “And if they are interested in more, we have a lot of the interviews on-line. Just tell them to look up Beckham County WPA interviews.”
Susan’s interest sparked, but Penny seemed unimpressed. “Doubt if anybody’d be interested in stuff like that.” She scowled doubtfully at Mrs. Kaye. “Maybe teachers.
By the time he got his protesti
ng grandfather settled back at the assisted living center and stepped onto the front porch at home, David was limping badly, his wounded leg protesting too much activity. It didn’t help when he saw Simpson Allie, June’s son sitting in one of the porch chairs very much at home.
“Been waiting for you, Dave,” the surly-looking man said, somehow managing to make the words sound vaguely insulting as he got to his feet to confront the newcomer.
It was almost as though he expected an apology for David’s delayed return. “Figured the funeral was over a long time ago.”
David wasn’t about to explain that he’d taken his grandfather for a drive afterwards. He certainly owed this rather repulsive looking man no apologies.
Simpson was almost good-looking in a fair-haired dissipated way and David could see that his daughter had inherited some of her beauty from him. But it was a slimy, oily kind of masculine looks that made his stomach churn. He’d known men like this when he’d worked training soldiers. They never lasted long and if they did, the men around them were endangered by their presence. Everything was all about them, not about their fellows. They were never part of the team.
“Wanted to talk to you, Dave.”
David refrained from saying that no one other than family or close friends called him ‘Dave.’ But he refrained. “I’m listening.”
“You’re not treating my mom right, locking her out of the house this way. She’s done for the old man for nearly two years now and no complaints from him. It makes her look bad, you kicking her out.”
“He’s not here. He won’t need her until he comes back.”
“When will that be? When will he come back? You should see the old lady, bawling her eyes out at night, wondering about Henry. They’re friends, maybe more than that. Not right, you separating them like this?”
More than that? What was the man hinting at? David went a little sick at his stomach at the thought of his stately grandfather associated with a rough cob of a woman like that.
Without reply, he turned away from the intruder and, obscuring the site with his body, began to key in the entrance code.
Thus it was that the blow against the side of his head was unexpected and sent him reeling into unexpected darkness.
The hours dripped by slowly until the library finally was closed by Mrs. Kaye’s locking the big front door. Susan knew she should feel relief at the knowledge that she was now free to continue her search for what she now suspected was her own past.
She could click on her favorite computer and begin her search into the old records Mrs. Kaye had mentioned to Penny. She could look for more of the stories taken down by the WPA interviewers.
Gertrude. Perhaps her name had been Gertrude once upon a time. Certainly glimpses of the life that woman had lived were beginning to crack through her obdurate memory. She could recall as a flash of time, a little girl stumbling through tall weeds to find a rickety homemade child’s wagon, abandoned perhaps by an older brother. She was the girl and the brother belonged to her.
She could still see its naked gray wood and tacked on wheels and thought it had seemed a kind of treasure then.
And the puppy—Blackie they’d called him for the obvious reason that his furry coat was black as coal. She’d saved her pennies to buy a collar for him, for the little dog that was her first pet.
And yet with all her anxiety, she sat with her fingers on the keyboard, and found herself unable to act by keying in the words Mrs. Kaye had said would provide the entry code.
Something else bothered her. Something closer at hand invaded her with a sense of threat. David! What had happened to David?
Never before had she felt conscious of someone outside the library, but now she had to check, now she had to go see. She sat at the computer desk as the minutes trickled, then rushed by. The afternoon went past outside the windows, then evening came, earlier and darker now that it was beginning to be September.
She rehearsed her movements in her mind. She would get up from her chair and walk purposefully toward the front door, as she had done so many times before. She would open the door, which was locked from the outside, but would open for the one standing inside. She would open the door and step outside.
She didn’t know why it was she couldn’t walk through walls or closed doors, insubstantial as she was, but she couldn’t.
And once the door opened, she knew what would happen next, what always happened. She would be unable to take another step. Once she tried to reach her foot out to the first step outside, she would be stopped, her body unmovable, locked in place.
Still, with that urgent message beating in her mind that David needed help, she finally saw that the time on the computer screen said it was 7:57 p.m. She’d sat here delaying for hours while anything could be happening to David.
Suddenly stubborn, she got up, walked to the door, hearing as she never had before the soft padding of her footsteps and then, as she clicked the simple lock and turned the knob, the squeak of the opening door. She didn’t hesitate but took one step, then another and another and found herself standing on the outside steps with the cool air of night blowing against her face and the nearby streetlight casting its glow in her eyes.
No matter how it had happened, she was out, she was free. Without further hesitation, she went on down the steps and on to the sidewalk, crossing the empty street and heading toward the direction of the house she had seen pictured on the old photos, the house where David lived.
Windows, their lights smothered by curtains or drapes, glowed faintly as she passed by and dogs, more aware than their human family members, barked faint alarms as she passed. The house she recognized from the pictures showed lights only in the apartment over the separate garage, but a nearby streetlight cast some illumination.
The heart she wasn’t sure still existed seemed to beat faster as she went up the walk and then climbed steps to the wide front porch. She gave a startled cry as she saw him slumped there, hidden from street view by the porch railing. “David?” she whispered, kneeling at his side, and touching his face to find it sticky with blood.
He had wakened before, but only briefly, barely aware of a pounding headache and a whole body lethargy that kept him from struggling to full consciousness.
This time, though, the third or fourth time he’d peeped up into awareness, he seemed surrounded by the delicate scent of lilacs and found the scent enticing enough to make him want to open his eyes.
He lifted his lashes rather painfully, but then smiled to see the face looking down at him. She was as lovely as he’d known she must be, the oval of her face with those huge, slightly tilted green eyes looking at him with such concern. It was a face he thought he would have recognized even though he’d not seen it before, both because it so fitted her soft voice and was so very Susan-y.
He smiled. “I hoped you would come,” he whispered.
He was hurt. She had to get help. But when she yelled for help, her voice went mute as though to be heard by anyone but him was an impossibility. Glancing wildly around, at first she saw nothing that would help.
Then she saw the car parked in front of the garage. A careworn old black vehicle that had seen quite a battering in its lifetime. She opened the driver’s side door and pressed down on the horn, honking again and again until doors began to open down the street.
A man came down the steps from the apartment over the garage, scowled at the vehicle and asked gruffly, “What the hell?” He slammed the door, pushing her inside and started back upstairs when the sound died away.
“What’s going on, Simp?” a male voice called from across the street. “Get stuck on your alarm button?”
“Don’t have none,” Simpson Allie returned. “Somebody playing tricks, I guess.”
Inside the car, Susan pressed determinedly down on the horn so that it continued to squawk.
Within minutes her disturbance had served its purpose. Neighbors came out to complain about the noise and one of them, a little boy, tripped over D
avid Johnson lying unconscious on the porch.
She quit honking and watched, frowning, as Allie retreated up his stairs to the apartment above even as an ambulance, summoned from the fire station down the street, came on the scene.
Anxiously she ran to David’s side just in time for his eyes to open, “Susan,” he said gladly, seeming to look straight into her eyes.
“Is he dead, Mister?” the small boy who had made the heroic discovery asked with grim interest.
“No way.” She recognized the voice of the police chief, trailing after the paramedic and assisting firemen, pleased when he bent over David.
“Susan!” David demanded rather sharply.
“It’s all right, buddy,” Jon crooned in his deep voice. “We’re getting you right to the hospital. Heck’s already on his way there. You’re surrounded by friends.”
She wanted to tell them what had happened, how she’d found David there on the porch, bleeding and injured, but her voice was no good. She couldn’t even reassure David that she still waited at his side.
“I heard a horn,” he said weakly. “I knew she was summoning help.”
“Who?” Jon asked. “Who was calling for help?”
“Susan, of course. My guardian angel,” David answered irritably, then passed out again as he was carefully moved on to a stretcher and carried to the ambulance.
Susan watched them go, lights flashing as they headed, as she supposed, to the hospital.
Jon shook his head. “Out of his head,” he said worriedly.
She started to correct him, then realized that would be futile. He had addressed himself to the deputy at his elbow.
She watched them all move away, the police officers going to their car and the neighbors chattering together as they went back to their homes.
Finally, since there seemed nothing else to do and she was shivering at just the idea of the cold wind that now blew from the north, she walked back up the street to the library where she found the door still ajar and edged back into the calm, warm environment that was both sanctuary and prison.
Those Who Mourn: A Wolf Creek Mystery (Wolf Creek Mysteries Book 1) Page 11
