Something About Sophie

by Mary Kay McComas

  “Oh, sure. They fight constantly and they’re pretty gung ho about bringing home the best report card, thank heavens, but out on the football field they know they’re more of a force to be reckoned with if they stick together.” She started to wander, mentally, when he mentioned double- and triple-A divisions and championships and MVPs and tailbacks and downs. It was a survival mechanism her mother had perfected and passed on to her for every time her daddy launched himself into football speak—a peculiar language she not only didn’t understand but also didn’t give two hoots about.

  Not that Sophie wouldn’t have noticed Jesse if she had been listening. She came rushing up the stairs, did an indecisive shuffle on the landing, turned and started down the hall toward her—pulling at the hem of her cotton shirt, chewing on her lower lip, shaking her head in confusion and distress.

  “ . . . unless it’s an individual sport like wrestling or golf and then, of course, it’s a whole new story—it’s all-out war.”

  “Hollis, I’m sorry. Will you hold on a second? Something’s wrong.”

  “What? What’s wrong?” She heard him ask, his voice fading as she lowered her cell phone to her lap.

  “Jesse?”

  “It’s Maury Weims.”

  “Who?”

  “Maury Weims. He’s gone missing. No one’s seen him since Sunday afternoon.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I went to school with him. A year behind. He works at Kerski’s drugstore. Phil’s the manager. Phil’s his brother-in-law. He goes to my church—Maury, I mean. Phil, too. All of them do; the whole family does.” She went still, her eyes huge, her skin pale. “And he’s one of Cliff Palmeroy’s best friends. Cliff, Maury, and Frank Lanyard were tight as bark on a tree in high school . . . Jeremy Bates, too. The four of them.” She rubbed her brow, remembering. “They were a walking nightmare for anyone younger or weaker than them. You know how you hear about gentle family dogs turning vicious when they get together with other neighborhood dogs and start running in a pack? Jeremy Bates was a nice enough guy until he started running with Cliff and them. Lucky for him he was smart enough, and had the means and gumption to go off to college. And he never came back. Last I heard he was in California doing something. Real estate, I think, or maybe insurance—I always bunch those two together in the same category, for some reason. Probably because they’re always up in your face—telling you that you need more insurance or asking if you want to sell your bed-and-breakfast. And they never include the sentimental value in the net worth, of course, and if—”

  “Jesse.” Sophie touched the woman’s arm gently to break her frightened prattle. “Maury Weims.”

  “Oh. Yes. He’s missing. He . . . um . . . the creepy thing is: Frank Lanyard was the last person to see him.”

  That didn’t seem too creepy. “They’re friends, right?”

  “Not so much anymore. Not since Frank moved to Roanoke.”

  “They fought?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why is it so strange that they were together? Especially after a mutual friend of theirs has been murdered?”

  “Well, it’s not, except now he’s gone, too. And Frank is demanding that the Roanoke police put him in protective custody. He thinks his life’s in danger, too.”

  “Really? From who?”

  “He doesn’t know, but he’s terrified. Who wouldn’t be?”

  “How do you know all this? Have you talked to the sheriff?”

  She nodded. “Better. Mike.”

  Sophie paused to breathe. “Hold it.” She put her cell—and Hollis—back to her ear. “Hollis?”

  “I’ve been listening. Call me back when you know more, okay?”

  “Sure.” She disconnected and turned back to her landlady. “Mike told you all this?”

  “Yes, and I know what you’re thinking. But if you want to know something in this town, he’s the one to ask. People tell him everything . . . and if they don’t tell him, he gets the lowdown from the most reliable sources he knows—and he knows everyone.”

  Sophie personally knew of two such people in Marion who had the exact same powers of intelligence gathering that Jesse was describing, so she knew the phenomenon existed—and Mike seemed the right sort.

  “Okay. So, Frank is afraid for his life because Maury is missing and Cliff is dead—and the three of them, plus the other one—”

  “Jeremy.”

  “Right. The four of them were a young terror cell in high school.” She thought it over. “I think I met Maury. At the drugstore. He was at the register. Chubby, scarecrow hair, grouchy.”

  Jesse frowned. “Maybe you caught him on a bad day. I mean, well, he’s chubby and always in need of a haircut, but he’s not usually grouchy. He can’t afford to be—Phil’s the only person in town who’ll hire him—brother-in-law, you know; and the Rite Aid is less than three blocks away from Kreski’s. Then, too, poor Maury got into drugs and alcohol for a while. Heavily. It almost killed him before he went into rehab. He’s been sober—and trying to make amends with people for a long time now. Plus, he had some heart problems a few years back—that almost always causes people to evaluate their lives and start worrying about getting into heaven. Most of us have forgiven him but it’s hard to forget, you know? There are still a few holdouts.”

  “And no one has a clue where he might be?”

  “Mike says he told Leigh, his wife, Saturday night that he was driving down to see Frank first thing the next morning. He left before she got up to go to church and she hasn’t heard from him since. She called Frank late Sunday and he said that Maury left his house around two-thirty in the afternoon. So by then he’d had eight hours to make the two-hour drive back. Leigh is not a flighty woman, but Mike says that Frank’s being late, mixed with his odd behavior since Cliff died, she was immediately alarmed and called Fred.”

  “The sheriff.”

  A single nod. “He said he’d tell his men to keep an eye out for him but that being late wasn’t against the law, that maybe he ran out of gas or got a flat tire and had to walk to get help.” She sat down on the bed beside Sophie, as if too stressed to remain standing. “According to Mike, Leigh called back at midnight and again in the morning. By noon Monday, the sheriff had the Roanoke cops involved and that’s when he found out Frank had been asking for protection. That’s when he began connecting the dots and started thinking Maury’s disappearance might be linked to Cliff’s death and stepped things up, called in the state troopers.

  “Early this morning they recommended organizing search parties—which Mike wants to volunteer for—which is why he had to tell me all this—which he hadn’t planned to so I wouldn’t worry—which is so like him, you know. He’s always trying to take care of me—which I feel like I’m constantly scolding him for—which is ridiculous because any mother would give their life for a kid like him.”

  Tears brimmed. Sophie gathered her in her arms. “I love Mike.”

  “Everyone does.”

  “And everyone knows what a great mom he has.”

  “I know.” She chuckled and dabbed at the moist corner of her right eye. “But sometimes even that doesn’t explain him.”

  Sophie released her and bumped her with her shoulder, but she couldn’t disagree.

  They sat on the bed, side by side, laughing softly, clinging to the humor until it wafted away like a summer cloud and they fell into silence—and their own thoughts.

  “Are you going to let Mike go?”

  “Yeah.” She weighed the risks out loud. “He’s old enough. We believe in community. He’s going with Luke, his oldest friend, and his father who’ll keep an eye on both of them. And it’s the right thing to do.” Another statement she couldn’t dispute.

  Long after Jesse left to start supper, Sophie sat on the bed, new emotions churning inside her.

  Panic, because it was beginning to feel like she was trying to claw her way out of a locked box.

  Powerlessness, in that she yearne
d to challenge someone, fight back, battle past them—but she was swinging at thin air. Who was pulling all the strings?

  Pessimistic, because in her mind the Palmeroy murder and Maury Weims’s disappearance could very well be a fluke in the time continuum in relation to her appearance in town. Add Arthur Cubeck’s actions and the three events were as incongruous as congressional spending and common sense, as terror and reason and yet . . . As far as she knew, she was the only obvious common denominator to each event.

  Predestined, as she felt doomed to an end not of her making, without a choice, because it was getting harder and harder to pretend that none of what was happening in Clearfield had anything to do with her . . . especially in the pit of her stomach. From the moment Arthur Cubeck bequeathed BelleEllen to her twenty-five years ago, she was involved.

  No, she decided, more and more she was beginning to feel like the catalyst to a chain reaction. A really ugly one.

  Chapter Nine

  Sophie had long ago discovered that some of her most inspired moments occurred in the nimbus space between her dreams and full awareness. It was here, at age nine, that she realized that while the dishwasher remained broken, it was possible to dry more than one dish at a time by simply picking up two together, drying first the top and then the bottom of the set and then switch the plate positions—dry top to dry bottom again and the chore was done in half the time. Brilliant . . . well, at age nine it was.

  Another time, home from college on Christmas break, she became frantic as she looked high and low, for several days, for the ornate key that opened the cedar hope chest her father built for her. It was decided the lock would need to be picked and left broken or replaced. New Year’s Eve, as she lay dozing in bed, gripped in the futility of resolving to eat more vegetables—the thought of them drenched in chocolate an obscene prospect—she saw herself dropping the key to her chest into the hidden compartment of a jewelry box she’d gotten for her sixteenth birthday for safekeeping.

  In the gap of this semiconsciousness, everything seemed either too like the hole Alice tumbled into or so clear-cut a doorknob could understand it.

  Such was the case when she silenced her alarm clock and rolled away from it, still tired and sleepy from the questions that had plagued her sleep—and reluctant to face a day filled with yet more questions.

  But they simply wouldn’t stop.

  Since Arthur wasn’t her biological father, what was he to her? What had he done to her . . . or not done for her? Who was she? How and why was she conceived, and by whom? Arthur knew, but why had he kept it a secret? What would the attorney in Charlottesville reveal about her beginnings? Kissing Drew was a bad idea, right?

  A question for the back burner.

  Did the murder victim know what Arthur knew? How were the two men connected? Arthur sounded like an angel; Cliff Palmeroy seemed a devil—what did they have in common? Where was Maury Weims? Did having no future with Drew prohibit kissing him?

  She rolled back and scrunched her pillow impatiently.

  Who the heck slashed her tires? Was it mayhem or a message? If Maury wasn’t a grumpy person in general, was he testy with her specifically? She hadn’t had more than eye contact with Cliff Palmeroy—had she? What was he going to do with those pictures of her? He left a frail wife and two angry sons behind—did Maury have children? His wife must have loved Maury very much—she’d been very concerned about him—said she worried when he didn’t show up because he’d been acting so strangely since Palmeroy’s death.

  That wasn’t a question. Sophie opened her eyes. That was a fact.

  Leigh Weims, who was not a flighty woman according to Jesse, said her husband had been acting strangely since the murder. So, how odd did a man have to behave after the death of a friend before his wife could describe it as strange? In what way was he strange? What did he do? . . . and why?

  More questions. But a couple she could actually get answers for. Would Mrs. Weims talk to her, a stranger, at a time like this? She decided to call Billy; see how well he knew her and if he’d have time to talk with her. Maybe she’d tell him more.

  She flipped back the bedding to get up—her mind sluggish and full.

  It cleared right up, however, when she made it to the kitchen and found Drew there eating Wheaties and Jesse’s cran-banana-bran muffins.

  Ear-to-ear grins for them both.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi.”

  “No pie?”

  “Haven’t earned one.”

  A lighthearted scowl. “Are those my cran-banana-bran muffins?”

  “There’s more over there.”

  “She makes them special for me.”

  He nodded. “I noticed. No nuts.”

  “Extra crans.”

  “You’re allergic to nuts?”

  “No. I choked on one once. I feel safer when they’re not hidden in my food.”

  He nodded, satisfied. “One more thing to add to my book.”

  She set her cup of coffee, a plate, and a knife on the kitchen table across from him. “What book?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” he looked surprised. “I’m writing a book about you. It’s called, 20 Million Amazing Somethings About Sophie.”

  “Nuts make me nervous. That’s amazing, all right.”

  “Give me a break. I’ve barely started. I’m still on the first chapter. Writing is one of those things that can’t be rushed.”

  “What’s that?” asked Jesse, breezing in through the swinging door on the dining room side of the kitchen. “Who’s feeling rushed? There’s no rush. Mike makes a bigger mess than the two of you together.” She nodded toward Sophie. “Plus, she makes her bed every morning so—”

  “Oph.” Drew perked up, took an imaginary pen from his shirt pocket, and wrote the information on the palm of his hand. Confused, Jesse looked to Sophie.

  “He’s writing a book about me.” She popped the last bite of her buttered muffin in her mouth. “And he can’t be rushed.”

  “Oh.” Jesse picked up her mug of coffee and leaned back against the black tiled counter, deep in thought, while Drew picked up their dishes and stacked them in the sink and Sophie finished her coffee. They said their goodbyes and were in the kitchen doorway when she called out, “She hums in the shower.”

  “Oph.” He stopped short, pen and palm at the ready this time. “Sings or hums?”

  “Just hums, same song every morning.”

  Sophie groaned.

  “What song?”

  Jesse squinted, and with mischief in her voice, she said, “Well, if there’s one thing I know, I know my hums.” Laughing, Sophie started pushing him down the hall toward the door. “And even taking into consideration the bathroom acoustics and a pitch that makes the dog up the street howl, I’d recognize it anywhere.”

  “Jesse!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “One of my all time favorites . . . next to the Chipmunk Christmas song.”

  Wide-eyed recognition and delight lit his face. “ ‘Rubber Duckie.’ ”

  “Don’t be silly.” Heat climbed both sides of her neck as she opened the door. “It’s ‘Habanera.’ ”

  “Ha. That isn’t Jesse’s second-most favorite song.” He followed her out the door.

  “And ‘Rubber Duckie’ is?”

  “Maybe not anymore, but when we were kids and she was our babysitter, Ernie’s rubber ducky was right up there with Alvin’s hula hoop. Ask Ava and Billy. We sang ’em all the time. And if she put us to bed at night, she sang ‘Hush, Little Baby.’ In fact, when Mother finally let Billy have a dog, he named it Rover . . . from Jesse’s bedtime song.”

  “You know, I don’t think . . . well, I know, I never had a sitter who made the sort of impression or generated the sort of affection that Jesse did in your family—though, it’s not hard to see why.”

  He picked up his pace to beat her to the car door. “Jesse’s always been Jesse. And my mother’s always been my mother—the opposite of Jesse, who was more
spontaneous, less formal.” This was a statement, not a criticism of his mother, and one she could easily see. “Jesse was like a spring breeze blowing through our house. We were crazy about her.” He stood holding the car door open for her, smirking. “So if she says you hum ‘Rubber Duckie’ in the shower, I feel confident that she’s a reliable source and I’ll be putting it in my book as such. Unless, of course, you’d like to prove her wrong.”

  If his gaze had the power to turn her head in the most conventional of circumstances, a suggestive glimmer in his eyes had it spinning like a top. She grinned, refusing to giggle. She wouldn’t mind a shower in his presence—and not merely to prove Jesse wrong, which she wasn’t—but she simply couldn’t see any future in it. Sadly.

  “Okay. Fine.” She slipped into the car. “But I have a legitimate excuse.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m a kindergarten teacher. I need to be able to relate to my peeps.”

  “Ho! Good one.” He laughed.

  In her pseudo-rectitude she glanced up at his unrestrained enchantment and felt herself slipping into a familiar space in her heart; an unmanageable place full of dreams and fairy tales that allowed her . . . encouraged her, basically, to fall in love with the most out-of-the-question people. Like the two-week summer vacation romance in fifth grade; the church-sponsored foreign exchange student from Greece who moved in next door during high school; the severe and unrequited crush on her Romantic Poets professor, which was the longest interlude she’d had in college; and, most recently, the rebound relationship for a newly divorced parent of a prior student.

  Her love life was an unnatural disaster. She knew this—but she loved the skid, the spin out, the loss of her footing in the realm of logic and reason, and she cherished the joy inside. She couldn’t stop her fall for Drew. Wouldn’t. And she knew this, too.

  “I’m Daniel Biggs, Ms. Shepard. My father is Henry,” the forty-something attorney corrected her when she introduced Drew. “Dr. McCarren.” He waved his hand across his desk. “Please, sit. Be comfortable.” He led by example and a friendly smile. “I thought my associate explained—”