(4T) The Julius House

by Harris, Charlaine

  “Oh. Thanks so much. Excuse me now, I’m expecting Shelby to come home to eat in half an hour or so.” And Angel retired gratefully, bounding up the stairs to their apartment. I was relieved to see a little smile—a nonmalevolent smile—on her thin lips as she shut the door behind her.

  “What an interesting woman,” Susu said with careful lack of emphasis.

  “She really is,” I said sincerely.

  “How on earth did she come to be living in your garage apartment?”

  We began to stroll toward the house. Susu looked pretty, and a few pounds heavier than she’d been the year before. She’d just had her hair done in a defiant blond, and she was wearing sky blue polka-dotted slacks with a white shirt.

  “Oh, her husband is a friend of Martin’s.”

  “Is he any bigger than her?”

  “A little.”

  “No children, I guess?”

  "No ..."

  “Because I hate to think what size baby they’d have.”

  I laughed, and we began to talk about Susu’s “babies, ” Little Jim and Bethany. Bethany was heavily involved in tap dancing, and Little Jim, the younger by a couple of years, was up to his brown belt in Tae Kwon Do.

  “And Jimmy?” I asked casually. “How’s he doing?”

  “We’re going to family therapy,” Susu said in the voice of one determined not to be ashamed. “And though it’s early to tell, Roe, I really think it’s going to do us some good. We just went along for too long ignoring how we were really feeling, just scraping the surface to keep everything looking good for the people around us. We should have been more concerned about how things really were with us.”

  What an amazing speech for Susu Saxby Hunter to have made. I gave her a squeeze around the shoulders. “Good for you,” I said inadequately and warmly. “I know if you both try, it’ll work.”

  Susu gave me a shaky smile and then said briskly, “Come on! Show me this dream house of yours!”

  Susu’s dream house was the one her parents had left her, the one her grandparents had built. No house would ever measure up to it in her sight, and she was fond of dismissing our friends’ new homes in new subdivisions as “houses, not homes!” But she pronounced this house a real home.

  “Does it ever give you the creeps?” she asked with the bluntness of old friends.

  “No,” I said, not surprised she’d asked. Old friends or not, quite a lot of people had asked me that one way or another. “This is a peaceful house. Whatever happened. ”

  “I’ll bet sometimes you just wonder where they are.”

  “You’re right, Susu. I do. I wonder that all the time.”

  Susu gave a theatrical shudder. “I’m glad it’s yours and not mine,” she said. “Can I smoke?”

  “No, not inside. Let’s sit out on the porch. I have one ashtray to go out there on the porch furniture.”

  There was now a swing attached to the roof of the porch, and some pretty outside chairs arranged in a circle including the swing. There were two or three small tables available, and I found an ashtray for Susu to use.

  While we sat and talked of this and that, Shelby Youngblood pulled into the driveway and waved as he emerged from his car. We waved back and he ran up the stairs to his apartment, to his Angel.

  “Wow, he is big,” Susu commented. “Not a looker, is he?”

  “I think he is,” I said, surprising myself.

  “And you’re the woman married to Hunk of the Year.”

  “Shelby is attractive,” I said firmly. “I may be married, but I’m not blind.”

  “All those acne scars!”

  “Just make him look lived-in.”

  “Does Martin come home for lunch?”

  "So far, no. But he’s still catching up from the time we spent away.”

  “Jimmy had Rotary today. Let’s go in the kitchen and scrounge around for lunch.”

  We ate ham sandwiches and grapes and potato chips, and talked about my honeymoon and the latest meeting of the Ladies’ Prayer Luncheon. My old friend Neecy Dawson had objected to the guest speaker’s theology in loud, persistent terms, casting the ladies into a turmoil, and causing not a few of them to express the opinion it was time Neecy met God face-to-face.

  “She was a friend of Essie Nyland’s, wasn’t she?” I asked casually.

  “Neecy? Yep. Essie was a good friend of my grand-mother ’s, too, outlived her by twenty years, I guess. Miss Essie died . . . what? Six years ago now, must be. Neecy’s still going strong. She still knows everyone in this town, what they’ve done, and when they did it.”

  It struck me that I could have a profitable conversation with Miss Neecy. She’d told me of the arguments between the Zinsners when they built this house. It was that conversation that had given me the idea that there might be several hidey-holes the bodies of the Julius family could be in. That was the reason for the ground-zero search Angel and I were conducting.

  “You remember when the Julius family vanished?” I asked. I picked up Susu’s empty plate and my own and carried them over to the sink, admiring my new stoneware as I did every time I looked at it. Earth tones in a southwestern pattern . . . why on earth I, a native Georgian, felt compelled to have southwestern dishes I do not know.

  “Yes,” Susu said. “I’d just had Little Jimmy. You were working at the library, I think you’d only been there a year, right?”

  “Right. Over six years ago, now.” We shook our heads simultaneously at Time’s inexorable march.

  Susu looked at her watch and gave a little shriek. “Woops! Roe! I was supposed to pick up old Mrs. New-man at the beauty parlor ten minutes ago! I’m sorry, I’ve got to run! I invited myself and then I stick you with the dishes,” she wailed, and yanked her car keys out of her purse on her way out the front door.

  I stuck the dishes unceremoniously in the dishwasher, started our supper pork chops marinating in honey and soy sauce and garlic, and sat down to make one of those lists that were supposed to make me much more efficient.

  1. Finish measuring the house.

  2. Talk to Miss Neecy about Essie Nyland, also the Zinsners—where was the boarded-up closet?

  3. Possible to find the boyfriend, Harley Dimmoch?

  4. See if Parnell Engle will tell me about the day he poured the concrete.

  5. Ask Lynn or Arthur if I could see the file on the Julius disappearance, or if he would just tell me about it in detail.

  6. See if I could worm anything out of Mrs. Totino’s lawyer, Bubba Sewell (who was incidentally my lawyer and the husband of my friend, the former Lizanne Buckley).

  I was pleased. This looked as if it would keep me busy for quite a while. Right now, busy-ness was what I wanted. Maybe while I worked on the problem of the Juliuses, the problem of my husband’s secret life would sort of solve itself.

  Right.

  Chapter Ten

  "Sally,” I said quietly into the telephone on Martin’s desk. "I want to have lunch with you at my place or your place soon, okay? I need to ask you some questions. You covered the Julius disappearance, didn’t you? Do you still have a file on it somewhere, of your notes you took at the time?” Sally, cohostess at my bridal shower, had worked at the Lawrenceton Sentinel for at least fifteen years.

  “I don’t keep my notes on fiftieth wedding anniversaries or who won the watermelon-seed-spitting contest, but I do keep my notes on major crimes.”

  She sounded a little testy.

  “Okay, okay!” I said hastily. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how reporters do things!”

  “Yes, I have the file right here,” she said in a mollified tone. “And I can certainly understand why you’re interested. My better half—well, my other half—is attending a seminar in Augusta on interrogation techniques, so I’m footloose and fancy free for two days. What suits you?”

  “What about here, tomorrow, for lunch at noon?” I asked. I knew Sally, like all of Lawrenceton, wanted to see the house.

  I hung up as Martin came down the
stairs, sweating and relaxed after his session with the Soloflex. He played racquetball at the Athletic Club too, but sometimes the hours didn’t suit him. He liked having the exercise equipment at home.

  “I’m sweaty,” he warned me. I didn’t care since I could use a shower myself after my work in the garage that morning. Angel and I had finished our measurements later in the afternoon, and there was a four-inch question mark running down the middle of the garage, but I figured that was just where Mrs. Zinsner had demanded Mr. Zinsner make it a two-car garage. I didn’t think four inches was enough space to hide three bodies, and Angel agreed.

  I hugged Martin, sliding my hands around his waist and up his back.

  “Roe,” he said hesitantly.

  “Um?”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Yes. But I’m working on it.”

  “Working on it.”

  “Yeah. I suppose you didn’t tell me all that before we got married in case I wouldn’t marry you if I knew it. Is that right? Or did you just hope I wouldn’t ever ask? Or did you just think I was desperate or stupid enough not to notice that there were a few holes in your story?”

  "Well ..."

  “I’ll give you a clue, Martin. There’s only one correct answer to that.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t marry me if you knew.”

  “And that was the correct answer.”

  “Good.”

  “So now I have to decide how I feel about you wanting me to enter into marriage, a very serious thing, not knowing all the facts about your life. Am I flattered that you were so anxious to keep me that you wouldn’t risk it? Sure.” I traced his spine with my fingernail and felt him shiver. “Am I angry that you treated me like some fifties little woman, the less I knew the better? You bet.” I dug the fingernail in. He gasped. “Martin, you have to be honest with me. My self-respect—I can’t stand being lied to, no matter how much I love you.”

  The next day, the day I was going to have Sally Allison over to lunch, Martin and I had also been invited to dinner at the home of one of Pan-Am Agra’s division chiefs. This man, Bill Anderson, was a new employee, hired by Martin’s boss and sent to Lawrenceton to evaluate and expand the plant’s safety program. So I woke with a certain sense of anticipation. Martin was shaving as I groped past him into the bathroom for a quick stop on my way downstairs to the coffeepot. We were beginning to find our routine.

  He liked to be at his desk when the other Pan-Am Agra executives arrived. And Martin always looked spic and span. His clothes were all expensive and he liked his shirts taken to the laundry to be starched, which frankly suited me. I didn’t mind in the least dropping them by or picking them up. I hated ironing worse than anything in the world, and Martin, who could do a competent job of it, didn’t have the time or inclination unless there was an emergency.

  Luckily, we both liked noncommunication until coffee had been consumed. He would come downstairs and make his own breakfast and pour his own coffee. By that time I would have finished the front section of the paper, which I had fetched from the end of the driveway. He would read that, then I would hand him the inside sections. Martin was not much interested in team sports, I had noted silently. One-on-one sports, now that was something he checked the scores on.

  When Martin had finished the paper and his breakfast, we had a brief conversation about appointments for the day. He went upstairs to brush his teeth. I poured another cup of coffee and worked the cross-word puzzle in the newspaper.

  He came downstairs, gathered his briefcase, checked with me to make sure we didn’t need to talk about anything else, told me he was going to be out of his office most of the afternoon, and kissed me good-bye. He was gone by seven thirty, or earlier.

  I felt we had made a success of mornings, anyway. So far.

  This morning Angel reported about eight thirty.

  "Shelby says,” she began without preamble, "that we need to find out if an aerial search was made, particularly of the fields around the house.”

  “Hmmmm,” I said, and made a note on my list. “I’ll remember to ask that at lunch. A local reporter is a friend of mine, and she’s coming over for lunch.”

  “You sure have a social life.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re always having people over, or you go out, or people call you, seems like.”

  “I grew up here. I expect if you were still in the town you were born in, it would be the same.”

  “Maybe,” said Angel doubtfully. “I’ve never had that many friends. When I grew up, we lived way out in the swamps. I had my brothers and sisters. What about you?”

  “I have a half-brother, but he’s in California. He’s a lot younger than me.”

  “Well, except for some Cubans, it was just us out there. We pretty much kept to ourselves. When I was a teenager, I began to date . . . but even then, I was usually glad to get home. I wasn’t much good at small talk, and if you didn’t talk and drink, they wanted to do the other thing, and I didn’t.”

  We smiled at each other for the first time.

  Then Angel clammed up, and I realized she would only speak about herself in rationed drips, and I had had my allotment for the day.

  We went out into the bright spring air to measure the outside of the house. Then we measured each inside room and drew a detailed map of our house.

  “I guess sometime having this will come in handy,” I sighed, a comparison of figures having shown that the walls were only walls and not secret compartments with grisly contents. So much for a hidden closet.

  “Oh, I’m sure,” Angel said drily. “The next time someone wants to know how to get to the bathroom, all you have to do is tell him to go forty-one inches from the newel post, due east, then north two feet.”

  I stared at her blankly for a second and then suddenly began to laugh.

  Maybe our strange association was going to be more fun than either of us had anticipated.

  Angel looked down at the plans.

  “There was something in the attic,” she said.

  “What! What?”

  “Nothing, most likely. But you know the chimney comes up from the living room, runs up one end of your bedroom where you have a fireplace, goes through the attic and out the roof.”

  “Right.”

  “It seemed to me that in the attic there was too much chimney.”

  “They might be sealed up in there,” I said breathlessly.

  “They might not. But we can see.”

  “Who can we call to knock it down?”

  “Shoot, I can do it. But you got to think, here, Roe. What if there’s nothing there? What if you’re just knocking down a perfectly good chimney for the hell of it?”

  “It’s my chimney.” I crossed my arms on my chest and looked up at her.

  “So it is,” she said. “Then let’s go. You go up there and look, and I’ll go to the garage and get a sledgehammer and one or two other things we might need.”

  I let down the attic steps and climbed up. In the heat of the little attic, with sunlight coming in through the circular vent at the back of the house, I calmed down. The attic was floored, with the old original floorboards, wide and heavy. They creaked a little as I crossed to look at the chimney. Sure enough, the bricks looked a little different from the bricks downstairs, though I couldn’t say they looked newer. And the chimney was wider.

  I remained skeptical. I felt sure the police would have noticed fresh brickwork.

  Angel came up the stairs in a moment, the sledgehammer in her hand.

  She eyed the bricks. She slid on a pair of clear plastic safety goggles. I stared at her.

  “Brick fragments,” she said practically. “You should stand well back, since you don’t have safety glasses.”

  I retreated as far as I could, back into an area where I could barely stand, and on Angel’s further advice I turned my back to the action. I heard the thunk as the hammer hit the bricks, and then more and more thunks, until gradually that sound became acc
ompanied by the noises of cracking and falling.

  Then Angel was still, and I turned.

  She was looking at something in the heap of dislodged bricks and mortar chips.

  “Oh, shit,” she breathed.

  I felt my skin crawl.

  I scuttled over to Angel and stood by her looking down as she was doing.

  In the rubble was a small figure wrapped in blankets blackened by smoke and soot.

  My hand went up over my mouth.

  We stood for the longest moments of my life, staring down at that little bundle.

  Then I knelt and with shaking hands began to unwrap the blanket. A tiny white face looked up at me.

  I screamed bloody murder.

  I think Angel did, too, though she afterward denied it hotly.

  “It’s a doll,” she said, kneeling beside me and gripping my shoulders. “It’s a doll, Roe. It’s china.” She shook me, and I believe she thought she was being gentle.

  Later on, after we’d both showered and Angel had called a mason to come repair the chimney, we speculated on how the compartment had gotten sealed up, how the doll had been left inside. I figured that the story of Sarah May Zinsner’s desire for a closet and her husband’s sealing one up out of sheer cussedness had its basis in whatever had happened by the chimney. We ended up deciding that she’d ordered an extra frame of brickwork for shelving, to store—who knew what? Maybe she’d intended the shelving for the use of the maid who may have been living in the attic. But that final change had been the straw that had metaphorically broken John L. Zinsner’s back. He’d had the shelves bricked up, and while the mason was working, perhaps one of the daughters of the house had set her wrapped-up “baby” temporarily (she thought) on the shelves. Now I had it, all these years later, and it had scared the hell out of Angel and me.

  Somehow, when my mother called while I was slicing strawberries for lunch, I didn’t tell her about my morning’s adventure. She would be horrified that I was looking for the Julius family; also, I didn’t care to relate how deeply upset I’d been when I’d seen that tiny white face.

  For once, she didn’t sense that I was less than happy. That was remarkable, since we spoke on the phone or in person almost every day. She was all the family I had, since my father had moved with my half brother to California. That was something I had in common, I realized, with the Julius family. They had been nearly as untangled from the southern cobweb of family connections as I was.