Miss Julia Raises the Roof

by Ann B. Ross

  “I’m so upset,” she went on, “and wouldn’t you know it, J.D.’s off on another case.”

  Mr. Pickens was a private investigator on retainer to a large insurance company, so he was frequently called away to look into suspected wrongdoings, like fraud, embezzlement, and other unsavory and illegal activities.

  “Who bought it, Hazel Marie? I can’t imagine it could be worse than just letting it sit there unattended.”

  “Oh, it could be worse, all right. A group—a nonprofit of course, that sits around making grandiose plans for others to carry out and pay for—they’ve bought it.”

  That was a surprise, as was Hazel Marie’s use of the word grandiose. But now that her twin girls had grown out of the baby stage, she’d embarked on a self-education course, looking up a new word every day and using it at least once. Apparently she’d successfully completed this day’s task.

  “What kind of group is it? I mean, why do they want a house?”

  “For a group home!” she said, as if she were gritting her teeth. “A residential group home, Miss Julia, and they’re putting it in a residential, single-family neighborhood, and they’re going to fill it with homeless boys, along with houseparents, counselors, and who-knows-what-else. I’m just sick about it, and I know that as a Christian I shouldn’t feel that way. But these will be boys in detention or on parole or already in a state of degeneracy—I don’t know exactly what. Mr. Pickerell—you know, he lives right behind the Cochran house, facing McKinley Street—he said he’d heard they’re what’s called ‘at risk’ boys, so what does that mean? What if it means they’ll be boys who’re on the verge of trouble? The only thing I know is that they’ll be right next door to my little girls, and I don’t like it.” She stopped as if she were out of breath. “And next door to Lloyd, too, and he’s just at the age to be influenced.”

  “Well, Hazel Marie,” I said, firming up my voice to encourage her, even as I thought that she’d used up a whole week’s worth of new words, “we’ll just have to do something about that.”

  “But what? They’ve already applied for permission from the zoning board, and they’re acting like they’ve gotten it or at least expect to get it.” Hazel Marie suppressed a sob. “They went behind our backs with that, too.”

  “What’s this group’s name?”

  “Homeless Teens, or Teen Home, Incorporated, or something like that.”

  “Well, my goodness,” I said, “I’ve already contributed to two nonprofit groups this year that’re looking after the homeless. Wonder what they did with it if another group had to be formed. Who’s on the board?”

  “I don’t know,” Hazel Marie said, sounding hopeless, “except I know the chairman or the president or whatever it is.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Madge Taylor.”

  “Madge Taylor!” I was so taken aback that I all but shouted the name. “Well!” I said with a huff of indignation. “We’ll just have to see about that.”

  Chapter 3

  That woman! I might’ve known she’d be involved in some way. Madge Taylor had come to town some ten or so years before—a widow with a young son, called Sonny, who now, with long hair, wispy beard, poor posture, and no ambition, was the culmination of every mother’s dread. Madge, to her credit, was devoted to him, smilingly brushing aside any concerns as he slouched his way through some kind of existential phase—whatever that was.

  But Madge didn’t let Sonny slow her down, for she was the ultimate do-gooder, always trying to get other people to follow through on the ideas she’d dreamed up. Now, I don’t mind doing a little good here and there, and I occasionally spread it around quite thickly. But I do it when I’m of a mind to do it, not when somebody else expects me to facilitate some wild and woolly idea she’s had.

  Instead of ranting about the Taylor woman, though, I calmed myself down enough to tell Hazel Marie that it wasn’t over until it was over, and it seemed to me that it had just started.

  “What does Mr. Pickens say about it?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t know yet, but I just know he’s not going to like having juvenile delinquents next door.”

  Yes, I thought to myself, and he’s not going to like his property values going down either, but I didn’t say that to her. She was concerned enough already.

  “Well, look, Hazel Marie,” I said, “do you know how far along they are? I know you said something about checking on the zoning, but are they still looking at the house or have they actually bought it?”

  “Jan Osborne told me she heard that somebody’s just closed on it. She lives on the other side of the Cochran house at the end of the block, and, Miss Julia, she is just beside herself about this. You know she’s a single mother—divorced, I think—with a thirteen-year-old daughter who’s as pretty as a picture, and she’s developing early, too. Can you imagine a houseful of boys living next door to her?”

  “Oh, my, that would certainly be cause for concern for her mother. But, Hazel Marie, if they’ve already closed on the Cochran house, that means they had enough money for the down payment—and I wonder where they got it. Nobody’s approached me to contribute anything.”

  “Well,” Hazel Marie said, sniffling a little, “they did me. Madge caught me right after church a few Sundays ago when both babies were crying, and she said she knew I’d want to contribute because Lloyd had been homeless at one time, and she knew that I wouldn’t want another child going through that.” Hazel Marie swallowed hard. “I gave her five hundred dollars, and J.D.’s going to kill me.”

  “Oh, my goodness. Well, just don’t tell him.”

  “If I’d known they were going to use my donation to ruin my own neighborhood, I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “Of course not. Don’t worry about it, Hazel Marie, but it just goes to show the kind of gall that woman has.” And it also went to show how piercingly accurate Madge Taylor could be in laying on the guilt. Hazel Marie was the perfect victim for her insinuations.

  “Now, listen, Hazel Marie, let me ask around and see what I can find out. What did you say the name of the group is?”

  “I’ll have to look in my checkbook to see who I made a check out to. Hold on a minute.” After more than a minute, she picked up the phone and said, “Homes for Teens, Inc., though Madge wanted me to put Homes 4 Teens, but I’d already written it the other way.”

  “That sounds like her—being as cute as possible. Well, Hazel Marie,” I said, feeling that I’d just found the plow to put my hand to, “one more question. Will they be taking in little boys—toddlers and so on? Or school-age children?”

  “No’m, it’ll only be boys aged fourteen to eighteen, about the age of her boy—which is strange because you’d think she’d already have her hands full with him, bless his heart. But, Miss Julia, you know they’ll be playing that loud music at all hours, and slamming doors, and yelling, and screeching off in their cars. And you know J.D.—there’s no telling what he’ll do with all that going on.”

  “Let me see if I can find out anything more, Hazel Marie. I’m sure we can do something about this. I’ll talk to Binkie first and see if anything can be done legally. Just don’t worry about it tonight.” And after a few more comforting words to her, I hung up, knowing that in spite of my urging Hazel Marie not to worry, that was exactly what both of us would do.

  Fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds! My word, that’s when their hormones were at peak activity. And they were already in trouble? That was not a good combination, because from the little I knew about the maturation process of male children, hormonal urges and delinquency often went hand in hand.

  Lloyd! I thought. What effect would a houseful of boys only a year or so older have on him? As far as I could tell, Lloyd had not yet felt the pangs of puberty. There was, however, now that I thought of it, the occasional croak in his voice and a shadowy hint above his lip, so maybe he was already in the throes
and I’d not paid attention.

  * * *

  —

  I desperately wanted to talk to Binkie, my curly-haired lawyer, but I refrained from calling her at home. She had limited time to spend with Little Gracie and Coleman, and for all I knew they might be in the midst of bedtime stories. But first thing in the morning, I would make arrangements to get her advice as to how we could go about preventing a precipitous move by unwanted neighbors.

  Madge Taylor, I thought, and sat back down on the sofa. The woman had to be suffering from a case of boredom like I’d never experienced. I knew that the cure for boredom was getting up and doing something—the more active it was, the better. And Madge must have known it, too. She was always coming up with some new plan that on the surface seemed beneficial to somebody, but which, on further examination, proved to be a repetition of something already in the works or completely untenable to put into effect.

  She didn’t take it well when a plan of hers was tabled or outright rejected. She put it around that a failure by the town or by a church to adopt an idea of hers and put it into practice was a rejection of poor, suffering humanity, of which Abbotsville had its fair share. But Madge couldn’t seem to understand that the many charities and nonprofit organizations already in the town were in need of help. They would’ve welcomed her with open arms, but, no, she had to have one of her own.

  You would think that sooner or later she would learn. But so far, she hadn’t. I happened to know that when she first came to town, she’d joined the First Methodist Church and left when they turned down her idea of making soup every Wednesday, opening the Fellowship Hall, and feeding the hungry—actually, anybody who walked in. The church had gone as far as putting a notice in the bulletin asking for volunteers for soup making, then shelved the idea when only one woman out of a thousand or so members on the rolls signed up for one Wednesday a month. And she’d had her right arm in a cast.

  Madge had then moved her letter to a small, but very active, Baptist church—their members were always volunteering to Walk for Hunger, or Run for Something-or-Other, or collect used clothing for the unclothed, or bring in a traveling evangelist, or sign up for almost any do-gooder activity in the town. Madge seemed to feel at home there, volunteering with the best of them. But it wasn’t long before she was church shopping again. There’d been several rumors about what had happened at the little Baptist church. All Madge would say was that they had no vision. Which, interpreted by me, meant that they wouldn’t jump on some bandwagon that she’d rolled out. Later I’d heard that she’d left because she’d asked the pastor to let her preach and he wouldn’t do it—not because she was a woman, as she’d claimed, but because she wasn’t a preacher.

  So now here she was in our Presbyterian church, and she’d gotten to us just as we were welcoming a new pastor. Pastor Larry Ledbetter had retired at the beginning of summer, and, perhaps unfortunately, he and his wife, Emma Sue, chose to remain in Abbotsville. Most retiring pastors moved away as soon as they could so that parishioners would look to the new preacher for pastoral care. But Pastor Ledbetter lingered on, seemingly unable to turn over the church to a callow and untried replacement.

  And that new pastor was one Robert Rucker, called from a small church in the eastern part of the state, but who was a native of some midwestern state. And those in the know will understand, because of where he’d grown up, that he would be less than familiar with the way things are done in the South.

  All of which is to say that when Madge showed up on our Presbyterian rolls as a new member, she found a comrade in arms. Somewhere along the line, Pastor Rucker had fallen for what was once called the Social Gospel, although more and more it was simply and incorrectly called Christianity. In other words, his mission seemed less as a teacher and caretaker of the flock—what being a Christian minister once meant—and more as a social worker and protester of civil wrongs—what the likes of him now called Missions or Outreach or some other euphemism.

  Lord, I didn’t know what we were going to do with that man. Sam and I had been in church every Sunday morning since Pastor Rucker had occupied the pulpit, and all I’d heard was some bleeding-heart sermon about what we weren’t doing to lift mankind out of the morass that we’d helped make. And I don’t mean that he was speaking of evangelizing the unsaved, nor was he speaking about the great dogmas of our faith, such as atonement, redemption, and such like. No, he was speaking of the need to go onto the highways and byways to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and register them to vote. In other words, Pastor Rucker was more interested in the needs of the body politic than the needs of the immortal soul.

  So when he and Madge Taylor met, it was as if they’d each found their counterpart. And I am not implying that there was anything sordid going on between then. Not at all, given the fact that Pastor Rucker was in his early thirties and Madge was pushing sixty if she was a day. Of course stranger things have happened, but not in this case.

  The first idea the two of them came up with was to convert the small day-care center that the church had opened some years ago into an elementary school for the underprivileged. Pastor Rucker had turned the pulpit over to Madge one Sunday to allow her to present their idea to the congregation. Their plan had been to expand the center from toddler care to children in the first three grades.

  It was the most impractical plan I’d ever heard. Neither had taken into account the need for accreditation not only of the school but also of the teachers they’d have to hire. And who would pay them, I’d like to know, as well as pay for age-appropriate desks, tables, and chairs? To say nothing of blackboards, small toilets, low water fountains, and who-knew-what-else. And they hadn’t even considered the fact that their school would take over more than half of our Sunday school classrooms, thereby ousting the very ones who had paid to add that building to the church in the first place.

  In hindsight, Pastor Rucker had made a strategic mistake by allowing Madge to present the plan to the congregation before feeling out the session. I’ll tell you, the telephone lines were humming that afternoon as members of the congregation called the members of the session to register their distaste of the plan.

  The session voted it down, but I’d known that wouldn’t be the end of the machinations between Pastor Rucker and Madge Taylor. They were made for each other. So if Madge was heading up this Homes for Teens nonprofit group, Pastor Rucker wouldn’t be far behind.

  Chapter 4

  “Binkie,” I said, taking a seat in the chair in front of her desk, having called for an appointment as soon as her law office opened that morning. “We need your help. I’d like to do this quietly and legally if we can. But if it can’t be done that way, I don’t mind at all being called every name in the book, because I want it stopped, and I want it stopped before it goes one step further.”

  “And what would that be, Miss Julia?” Binkie had been a very present help in times of trouble before this, and I trusted her quick mind and willingness to go to bat for me in other situations. So I told her of the plans for a residential group home next door to the Pickenses, and who would be housed in it, and whose idea it had been, and the type of homeless who would be living there.

  “So,” I said, “that house is totally unfit for what they want to do. Mainly because it’s in a settled residential area, and it’s next door to Hazel Marie.” Having delivered my complaint, I sat back in the chair and awaited her assurance that what I wanted could be done.

  “By the way,” I said before she could comment, “forgive me for being so exercised over this that I haven’t asked about Little Gracie and Coleman. How are they?”

  Binkie smiled. “They’re fine, Miss Julia. In fact, Gracie is now enrolled in the First Presbyterian Day-Care Center, so she thinks she’s a big girl now. But,” she went on, this time in her professional voice, “as to your problem. I know that the town designated that area a local historic district a few years ago, but I’m not sure where
the boundaries lie. But I can tell you now that as long as they don’t make any exterior changes to the house, being in a historic district won’t stop them. So they can do whatever they want on the inside. The first thing, then, that I’ll need to do is look at the zoning in that area. Off the top of my head, that entire west side all the way to Lee Avenue may be zoned R-15.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Essentially residential, and if that’s the case, a limited number of adult care homes are permitted. But you say it will house only fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds, who, under the law, are considered children, that is, under legal age. I’m sure that family care homes—which are in-home day-care centers for children of working parents—are permitted in that area, but they’re strictly supervised as to number and age of children and how many hours of the day they can operate.”

  “Hazel Marie tells me this group has already applied for a permit from the zoning board. Could that mean we’re too late?”

  “Probably not,” she said. “I’ll have to see how they’ve described what they intend to do. Here’s the thing, though: I’m positive that residential care facilities are not permitted at all on that property. The problem is, however, that the zoning ordinance isn’t exactly clear on the definition of ‘residential care facility.’”

  “Oh, my,” I said, sighing. “I should think that those ordinances would be quite specific, seeing that the area is within the town limits.”

  “Uh-uh,” Binkie said, shaking her head, “not necessarily. When those laws were passed, the town fathers wanted to make sure that the commercial district had plenty of room to expand. In fact, that whole area may be zoned C-4, which is neighborhood commercial. How far from Main Street is Hazel Marie’s block?”