“Did she talk to you about her marriage? Did you know she was unhappy?”
“Unhappy? Who told you that?”
“Nobody, really,” I said. “But I know there were rumors. Before she left. That she was running with a wild crowd. My aunt admitted as much to Daddy, after Mama left.”
Miss Graham reached for her cigarette pack. She shook one out and lit it. She inhaled and closed her eyes.
For a minute I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep. Finally she opened her eyes and exhaled loudly.
“I never judged Jeanine,” she said. “She didn’t ask my advice, and I didn’t offer any. I wasn’t her mama, and I wasn’t any saint. Never said I was. That said, I knew she was up to something she didn’t want your daddy to know about. The last three or four months, before she left town, she asked me to pay her in cash, instead of the usual check, which I was glad to do.”
“How much money would that have been?”
Her laugh rasped like a wood file. “Not that much. I probably only paid her twenty dollars a window, something like that. And most of the time she took it out in clothes. But those last months, she wanted cash money.”
“This wild crowd she was running with,” I said. “Who all were they?”
She raised one thinly arched eyebrow. “That was a long time ago, honey. People change.”
“But who were they? If I could find out, maybe I could talk to them. Somebody has to know something.”
She shook her head slowly. “See, these were people who were sliding around, messing around on the side. Churchgoing, respectable people. It wasn’t like they advertised what they were up to. It was all rumors, that’s all.”
“What kind of rumors? Come on, Miss Graham, it’s been more than twenty years. Nobody cares about this stuff but me.”
“That’s what you think,” she retorted. “Anyway, some of ’em are dead. Some of ’em moved on.”
“And some of them are still living right here in Madison. Tell me their names. Please?”
She reached for the coffee cup where she’d stubbed out her last cigarette, and flicked a half inch of ash into it.
“Do you remember your mama’s cousin Sonya?”
“Sonya Wyrick. But she moved away years ago.”
“To Kannapolis, North Carolina,” Miss Graham said. “Sonya and Jeanine were thick as thieves back then. Sonya’s marriage had just broken up, and she was wild as a hare. Dated every married man in town.”
“That’s why Daddy didn’t like her,” I said.
“He was about the only man in town who didn’t like her!” Miss Graham said. “I never could understand what they saw in her either. She was a hard-bitten thing, with bleached hair and little skinny legs. Talk was that she left those kids of hers alone at night, while she went tramping around till all hours.”
“Shawn and Tanya,” I said, suddenly remembering my cousin’s names. “One time they spent the weekend at our house. Shawn could spit through his front teeth. And Tanya wore a bra. Daddy was gone to a convention when they came, I think. It was like a big party. We stayed up late and had frozen pizza. And watched scary movies on TV.”
“I just bet,” Miss Graham said dryly.
“That’s all I remember about them,” I said. “I think that’s the only time they were ever at our house. And I’m pretty sure I never spent the night over there.”
“Your daddy wouldn’t have allowed it,” Miss Graham agreed. “Sonya Wyrick’s reputation was not very good around here.”
“Who else?” I asked. “You said there was a whole crowd she was running with. But that’s the only name I’ve heard. What about Darvis Kane? Did anybody ever hear from him after they left?”
She stubbed out her cigarette in the coffee cup and stood up suddenly. “I gotta open the door and air this place out. If Kathleen comes back in here and smells this smoke, she’ll have my hide.”
I followed her to the front of the shop. She picked up a heavy black flatiron and used it as a wedge to prop the door open. Warm air flowed in. She went behind a glass display case filled with old jewelry and bits and pieces of silver, and brought out a can of Glade air freshener, with which she proceeded to mist the entire store.
“That’s better,” she said, discarding the can in the trash.
“Now it smells like rose-scented cigarette smoke,” I said. “What about it? Darvis Kane had a wife and kids. Somebody must know something about him. The two of them didn’t just fall off the face of the earth. Just tell me a name, Miss Graham. Please? One name. Somebody who can tell me about my mother and Darvis Kane. I’ll be discreet. Nobody else has to know.”
“In Madison? Who are you kidding? If a mouse farts in this town, you know it before the smoke clears. Anyway, it’s all old history. What if you did find your mama? What would you do? What would you say after all this time? And how does your daddy feel about all this?”
“Daddy understands,” I said, putting some steel in my voice. “And I’ll figure out the rest when I figure out what happened to her. Which I fully intend to do.”
She sighed loudly. “I have to live in this town, you know. Talk to Sonya. Last I heard, she was still in Kannapolis. Shouldn’t be too hard to find, with a last name like that.”
“Thanks,” I told her.
“You might not thank me, after you hear what she has to say,” Miss Graham said, her voice sounding suddenly old and morbid. “Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.”
38
Austin waved at me from a booth tucked into the far corner of the soda fountain at Madison Drugs. He had a huge banana split in front of him, and a spoon poised to dig into it.
“I’m celebrating,” he said, before I’d even had a chance to slide into the booth.
“Hey, Keeley,” called Vivi Blanchard, who’s been waitressing at the drugstore for as long as I can remember. She nodded her head at Austin. “You havin’ what he’s havin’?”
“What he’s havin’ is a heart attack, Vivi,” I said. “I haven’t even had lunch today. Is there any chicken salad left?”
She turned around and opened the door of the refrigerator that stood behind the counter, holding up a half-full Tupperware dish.
“Have you got any ripe tomatoes?”
“Doc brought some in from his garden this morning,” she said.
“Good.” I could hear my own stomach growling. “Just some chicken salad and tomatoes then. And maybe a couple saltines? And a Diet Coke?”
“There’s pie,” Vivi said, winking at me. “One slice of lemon chess is all that’s left. I’ll have to throw it out if you don’t eat it. You want me to save it for you?”
I groaned. “Save me the pie and leave the saltines off then.”
It was late Saturday afternoon. The soda fountain was mostly empty, except for a handful of Little Leaguers and their dads, finishing off ice cream sundaes.
“Okay,” I asked Austin, after I’d greeted the dads and gotten the game results, “what are you celebrating?”
He picked up a file folder from the seat next to him and slid it across the table to me.
“Darvis Kane,” he said. “I believe I may have a lead on the whereabouts of the elusive Darvis Kane.”
My heart was racing, but I wouldn’t allow myself to touch the file folder. Not yet.
“You found the old employee records down in the basement?” I asked.
“Finally! Your daddy didn’t make it exactly easy. It took me forever just to drag the file cabinet out from under an old workbench. And it’s so dark down there, I had to carry all the old files upstairs in a laundry basket, just so I could read the labels. But I did it. I found Darvis.”
Vivi walked up to the table right then, with my chicken salad plate and my drink.
She set everything down, including my check. “Your daddy and them doing okay?” she asked.
“Just fine,” I said.
She hesitated a beat. “I’m sorry about what all you been through. That Paige Plummer oughtta be slapped into ne
xt week.”
“Thanks,” I said, hoping that would be the end of it.
“I never liked her. Nor her mama.” She lowered her voice, “Come to think of it, all of them Franklin girls was nothin’ but trash.”
“Well…it’s all water under the dam now.” I was starting to find that clichés were astonishingly useful when one was in a cliché-ridden situation.
Her red curls bounced as she nodded her head in complete agreement. Then she went off to check on the Little Leaguers.
“As I was saying,” Austin said. “Just like your daddy promised, I found the file with Darvis’s birthdate and Social Security number. I was so excited, I did eighty speeding back to town to get on my computer.”
I took a forkful of the chicken salad. “Okay, Nancy, what did you find out?”
“First off,” Austin said. “Darvis Kane was a Scorpio. That should have been a red flag right there. Your daddy never should have hired him. You know how Scorpios are. Back-stabbers.”
“A.J. was a Scorpio,” I said.
“Scorpios are very sexual,” Austin said, grinning wickedly. “And manipulative. They exert a sort of malevolent power over others.”
“Malevolent?”
“Don’t you love that word? You know,” he went on. “It was really inevitable that your mother would end up under that man’s influence.”
“Why?”
“She was born in January, right? An Aquarian. Aquarians are very susceptible to the charms of a Scorpio. They’re creative, but fragile in a way. Your mama never had a chance against a man like Darvis Kane.”
I pushed a bite of chicken salad around my plate with my fork. “Other than voodoo, what do you have that’s concrete?”
Austin opened the file and looked down at his notes.
“Darvis LeRoy Kane. Date of birth: October 30, 1948, in Wedowee, Alabama. Married to Lisa Franklin. Two children. Place of residence, Pine Manor Trailer Court, Lot 9C. Went to work for your daddy in October of 1977, as a salesman. Promoted to sales manager six months later. Employment terminated March 15, 1979.”
Austin looked up at me. “Your daddy kept sending his paycheck to Lisa Kane for two months after Darvis ran off with your mama. In fact, he probably would have kept right on sending it to her, except the last one was returned to him with no forwarding address.”
“After Lisa moved in with her sister in Athens,” I said. “That sounds exactly like Daddy. He felt guilty that his wife had taken those children’s father away from them. Even after Lisa Kane went around town saying awful stuff about us.”
I cut the tomato with the side of my fork. Red juices and seeds oozed onto the plate. I sprinkled it all with salt, tasted, and then sat back.
“What did you find out with your computer search?”
Austin mashed the banana with a bit of ice cream and tasted it. Next he heaped the whipped cream at one end of the dish and stirred it around with the syrup until he had a syrup and whipped cream soup. He smacked his lips after a couple of bites.
“Darvis isn’t dead either,” he said. “But Lisa Kane was more determined than your daddy, because she got a no-fault divorce from Darvis in 1982.”
“Three years later,” I said. “Wonder how she tracked him down?”
“She didn’t,” Austin said. “The state of Georgia did. And nailed him for back child support payments, to the tune of thirty-five hundred dollars.”
I put my fork down. “You’re really good,” I said, trying to control my eagerness. “So where is Darvis now? Can we talk to him?”
Austin frowned and dabbed at a bit of whipped cream on his upper lip. “I don’t exactly know where Darvis is. Yet.”
“How’d you find out all this other stuff? I thought you did a computer search and tracked him down?”
“I did the computer search, didn’t find a death certificate on file for him, but I also couldn’t find a recent address. So I tried Lisa Franklin Kane. And I found her. Simple as anything. She’s living in a little town in Florida…” He opened the file folder and paged through his scribbled notes. “Palatka, Florida. I think it’s somewhere in the middle of the state.”
“And she talked to you?” I found that hard to believe. “Willingly?” That didn’t exactly jibe with my father’ description of Lisa Kane’s hostile attitude.
“She might have misunderstood who I said I was,” Austin said.
“You made up a big fat lie,” I said accusingly.
“It’s called a pretense. Your professional private investigators use them all the time to dig up dirt. Anyway, why not? It wasn’t a lie that hurt anybody. I just told her I was an officer at a bank in Madison, and we had a safe deposit box made out to Darvis Kane, and there was twenty years’ rent due on it, and I needed to know where he was to send him the contents.”
“For real? What did she say?”
Austin winced. “Lord, God. The woman cusses like a trooper. She said her deadbeat rat bastard EX-husband had run off with another woman years ago, left her high and dry with two little girls to support, and by rights, anything in that box should go to her. I explained that her name wasn’t listed on the rental agreement for the box, and if she had a claim on it, she’d have to take it through the courts. That’s when she told me about the divorce and the back child support. She claims he still owes her thousands more, too, by the way.”
“Does she have any idea where he is now?”
He shook his head regretfully. “None. Lisa Kane seems to think he’s hiding out, not just from her, but from the law.”
“Why? What’s she think he’s done?”
“She just said he was a crook. ‘Once a crook, always a crook,’ were her exact words. Along with a lot of other words I won’t repeat in a family setting.” He looked around guiltily at the little kids at the next table, who were busy pelting each other with paper napkin spit-balls, and not paying the least bit of attention to us.
“What?” I leaned in closer to get the scoop.
“She said she’d do anything if I helped her track down Darvis Kane so she could get hold of the money in the safe deposit box,” he whispered. “And I do mean anything.” He blushed furiously.
“Austin! What did you say?”
“What do you think I said? I told her I was an officer of a bank, and her coarse language was offensive, and then I asked her if maybe her daughters had heard from their dear departed daddy.”
“Good idea,” I said. “I’d forgotten about the kids. Whitney and Courtney. They were a couple years older than me, so they’d be grown now, of course. What did she say to that?”
“She said on second thought, she didn’t want to fuck me. She suggested I go fuck myself. And then she hung up.”
I sighed and sat back in the booth. “Another dead end. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. It was all so long ago. And nobody wants to talk about any of it.”
“Hush!” Austin said. “It’s not a dead end. You just gave me Darvis Kane’s kids’ names. I can try and track them down, same way I did their mother. It’s worth a try. Anyway, what did you find out?”
“Next to nothing,” I said. “Chrys Graham says she knew Jeanine was up to something in the months before she left town, because she asked to be paid in cash, instead of in trade, or with a check. And she as much as said my mother was hanging out with a ‘wild crowd,’ but she wouldn’t name any names. Just said I should talk to mama’s cousin Sonya.”
“The one who moved to North Carolina?” Austin asked.
“Kannapolis,” I said.
Austin slapped the tabletop in triumph. “See? That’s not a dead end either. All we have to do is check in Kannapolis, North Carolina, for a Sonya…what did you say her last name was?”
“Wyrick,” I said. I took some money out of my billfold and put it on the table. I felt drained, defeated. The whole experience reminded me of chasing rainbows as a child. The closer I got to finding out anything about my mother, the more distant the truth seemed to be.
“Where are you going?” Austin demanded. “I thought we were going to do some computer research back at my place.”
“No,” I said. “I’m done with research. I’m going for a drive. A Sunday drive.”
“Today is Saturday,” he pointed out.
“So I’ll get an early start.”
39
I stopped at the Minit Mart on the way out of town, ran in and bought a four-pack of Jack Daniel’s hard lemonade. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, it occurred to me that this was the same place where I’d had my last sighting of Paige Plummer. The same place Will had demonstrated his kissing prowess. I opened one of the lemonade bottles and took a long swig. Not bad for screwtop. I thought about that kiss. That wasn’t bad either.
At first I didn’t have a plan. How unlike me. All my life I’d been a prodigious planner. I’d sketched and schemed and plotted and planned my life down to the last imported Italian silk tassel on the shimmery organza tablecloths at my wedding reception.
The tablecloths were in a box in Daddy’s garage. I’d never even unpacked them. And now it was Saturday night, and I had no plans, nothing to do, and nobody to do it with. Anywhere would work, as long as it was away from here, with trees and a view and nobody around.
The lake, I thought. I’ll go out to Lake Oconee and watch the sunset.
Lake Oconee isn’t one of those lakes that have been around forever. In fact, I’d been just a little girl back in the late seventies, when Georgia Power created the lake by damming up the Oconee and Apalachee Rivers and a bunch of other smaller, local creeks. The power company bought up millions of dollars’ worth of farm and timberland and created a 19,000-acre hydroelectric lake.
Our part of middle Georgia was changed forever after Lake Oconee was built. People who’d farmed their whole lives suddenly had a little bit of money, but no land to farm on anymore. Of course, the lake brought businesses, and jobs. People said the new lake had some of the best bass and crappie fishing in the state, because of all the old fallen trees at the bottom of the lake. Later developers moved in and built subdivisions, marinas, golf clubs, and fancy resorts. Only a few years ago the Ritz-Carlton opened a resort and spa on the lake—right on the same land that had once been a hunting lodge owned by the heir to a North Carolina tobacco fortune.
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