Miss Julia to the Rescue

by Ann B. Ross

  I declare, I’ve never seen the like of what those three did. They threw a couple of ropes up over limbs still attached to the hemlock, making, it seemed, some sort of pulley that Josh was to handle from the ground. Then Ardis, after removing his tie and jacket, and Adam climbed the ladder to the roof. Each had a power saw tied by a short rope to his belt, so that the saw swung free but was close to hand.

  Lloyd came out in the yard to watch. With a worried frown, he said, “I hope those saws don’t have automatic starters. Somebody could lose something.”

  Etta Mae, joining us, looked up at the men with dangling power saws, and said, “Don’t even think that.”

  We were craning our necks to watch, and were soon reassured by seeing Ardis wrap the end of a pulley rope around a branch, pull a cord to start his saw, zip through the branch and let it fall free as Josh, at the other end of the rope, eased it gently to the ground. Adam followed suit, and within thirty minutes all the branches were piled on the ground, leaving only the large chunk of the tree trunk leaning against the house.

  Adam called to Josh to bring a tarp and a couple of staple guns, and before long the gaping hole in the roof was covered. The two men came down the ladder and, with Josh’s help, pushed the remaining part of the trunk off the house. It fell with a heavy thump to the ground, where it would stay until we could get someone to clear the yard.

  “Boy, that was something to see!” Lloyd said, admiration lighting up his face as the men, covered with wet leaves and sawdust, joined us.

  “It really was,” Etta Mae agreed, but her admiration was for only one of the men.

  Ardis McAfee smiled and winked at her as he passed on his way to the porch to speak to Mr. Pickens. “That’ll hold ’er for a while,” he said, indicating their Band-Aid approach to roof repair, “but you gonna need some carpenters and a roofer out here pretty quick.”

  “Soon as I can find somebody,” Mr. Pickens said, while I jabbed the air, pointing toward Adam, who was loading up his truck. “Can’t thank you enough, Ardis. I count myself lucky for getting shot in your jurisdiction.”

  “I been around some,” Ardis said, modestly. Then cocking his head in the direction of Adam and Josh, went on. “Them two boys know what they’re doin’.”

  So Mr. Pickens, with Hazel Marie cautioning him about doing too much, limped out to talk with Adam.

  Lillian stuck her head out the back door and called, “Supper’s ready. Y’all better come on.”

  Adam began shaking his head, as I issued a specific invitation to the table. “You most certainly are going to stay for supper,” I said. “Now go on in and clean up as much as you can. Giving you supper is the least we can do, although of course we’ll pay you, so you can’t say no.” Then when he looked up and saw Josh stepping up on the porch and going through the door, there wasn’t much he could do but follow.

  We all trooped inside, the babies crowing at the entertainment and Mr. Pickens still looking somewhat chagrined at not being able to climb a ladder to mend his own house. Men yearn to cut things, especially if a howling chain saw is involved.

  I took the baby from Lillian so she could begin dipping up food, and Hazel Marie gave hers to Etta Mae.

  Hazel Marie had not regained her color from the fright they’d had. She was still shaky and as white as a sheet, but still able to twitter around, thanking the good Samaritans who’d appeared almost out of the blue. She pointed the men to the downstairs bathroom, then said, “Almost every towel in the house is upstairs sopping up water. Etta Mae, would you mind taking some dish towels to them to dry off with?” Then she turned to me. “This’ll be the third time today I’ve set the table, but, oh, I am so thankful you had somebody to help us. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

  After we had unset the table, put another leaf in, then reset the table, people were crowding around, ready to eat fried chicken, creamed corn and all the other good things, including her world-famous biscuits, which Lillian was placing on the sideboard.

  Hazel Marie put the babies in their little carriers and placed them in a corner out of the way, then told everybody to sit wherever they wanted. We began lining up with our plates at the buffet when Hazel Marie’s country raising came to the fore. She arranged for the men to go first.

  As I stood next to her at the end of the line, I glanced through the arch into the living room and saw the sheriff’s niece put down a magazine and rise from the sofa to join us. And what I saw of her made my teeth hurt and my skin crawl.

  Chapter 43

  Her skin—what I could see of it, except her face—was absolutely covered in bold, graphic designs that swirled and blended into one another. If she’d been a wall, deputies would’ve been out looking for a spray painter.

  “Y’all,” Sheriff McAfee said as the young woman walked into the dining room, “this is Nellie McAfee, also known as Cheyenne. At least, locally. Come on, honey, and get you a plate.”

  I stared, then quickly turned away, wondering if I’d be able to eat with my stomach knotting up like it was doing. She had, of course, removed her raincoat, although she’d have been better off to have left it on. The white sleeveless, low-cut dress she was wearing served only to make the red and blue tattoos on her arms, across her shoulders and down on her chest stand out more starkly. The designs were so thick it took me a minute to focus on the swirling patterns that were filled in with different colors. There were flowers—roses, I thought—blooming on each shoulder, and leaves on a vine that climbed each arm, and like an optical illusion, little animal faces gradually appeared to peek out from behind a scroll. When she turned toward the sideboard, I was able to make out the head of a unicorn on her back.

  As my eyes traveled over her ornately covered torso, they finally landed on her clear and pretty face. With a jolt of recognition, I realized that the sheriff’s niece was the maid who’d directed me across the lawn at Agnes Whitman’s garden party.

  Right then, it all came together. That arrogant Whitman woman had had a hand in the desecration of this lovely girl, and would do the same, or worse, to Adam if she got her hands on him. And all in the name of religion. I felt sick to my stomach.

  The only good thing I could say about Nellie—I refused to think of her as Cheyenne—was that her face was not ruined by piercings. She wore earrings, like most women, and though they were large hoops, they were no larger than I’d seen on more conservative types. I, for instance, was wearing my good pearl earrings—the plain ones, not the ones with diamonds—and so was Hazel Marie, although hers dangled a little. Etta Mae, I noticed, wore tiny gold hoops with small gold studs in the three holes where stars had once been.

  But wouldn’t you know it? By the time I’d filled my plate, the last empty chair was right across the table from Nellie. It was all I could do to keep my eyes aimed in any direction other than straight ahead.

  Fairly soon, I realized that everybody else was having the same problem. Other eyes kept straying toward her, then quickly shifting away. None of it seemed to bother her. She had nothing to say for herself, attending only to her food and ignoring everybody else. Except Adam, who sat next to her. I saw her cut her eyes at him and give him a few shy smiles. He, on the other hand, seemed ill at ease, perhaps because he was eating with strangers, which can be hard on a shy person under the best of circumstances.

  “Well, I come down here,” Sheriff Ardis McAfee announced, “thinkin’ I was gonna get me a first-class witness against that crew of thieves we arrested. An’ all J.D. can tell me is that one of ’em had to relieve himself in the bushes. Beats all I ever heard.”

  It shocked me that the sheriff would bring up such an unsavory subject at the dinner table or, for that matter, anywhere in mixed company.

  “Well,” Mr. Pickens said, grinning, “I could’ve told you more if he hadn’t shot me. I was getting close, too close as it turned out, but I never saw what they were trying to move out of that barn.”

  “You pretty much led us to ’em anyway,” the sherif
f said, giving Mr. Pickens some credit. “When those hunters told me where they’d found you, I knew there was an old barn back in there somewhere, and figured they had them a meth lab. But we scoped it out while you laid up in the hospital, and didn’t see or smell any evidence. Figured then they were trying to move something they had stored there. We called in the ATF, and that was all she wrote.”

  “What was in the barn?” Lloyd asked, the very question I wanted answered, as well. “TVs and stuff they stole?”

  “Cigarettes!” Ardis said. “Cartons and cartons of cigarettes, stacked to the roof.” He started laughing. “Only problem was… well, except for a truck that wouldn’t run, that barn leaked like a sieve. And we’d had us some downpours. Those cartons got soaked through, and if you’ve ever seen a wet cigarette, you know what a soggy mess they had on their hands. They couldn’t of sold ’em even in New York City.”

  “And that young man Mr. Pickens was looking for,” I asked, “was he part of it?” Although I was hesitant to draw the sheriff’s attention my way, I spoke up for Mr. Pickens’s sake, hoping he’d get paid for his efforts, pitiful though they’d been.

  “Arrested him along with the rest of ’em,” Ardis said, “but he’s out now. He had a mama who went his bail.”

  Everyone at the table was fascinated with the tale of a police action against thieves, especially one involving Mr. Pickens. He, however, laughed off his part in finding and identifying the crooks, as well he should’ve, because he’d had to get shot to pinpoint their location.

  Then, in spite of my effort to keep my eyes averted, I saw Nellie McAfee’s ink-covered arm slide toward Adam, and, I declare, I do believe she laid a hand on him under the table. Her expression didn’t change—she looked as innocent as one of Hazel Marie’s babies. But Adam’s eyes popped wide open. He almost choked as he shifted away from her.

  I was astounded at her audacity—she was moving in on him, and right in public, too. Forwardness in a young woman is so unattractive. But it did make me reconsider the conclusions I’d previously jumped to. Maybe I’d been wrong all along about the source of Adam’s concerns. Maybe it wasn’t Agnes Whitman who was after him for religious purposes, but Cheynne McAfee for romantic purposes.

  Or who knew? Maybe it was both of them—each coming from a different direction to snare him into whatever strange rituals and ceremonies that were going on out at that Fairfields estate. And I couldn’t leave out the influence of that little pierced architect who’d taken it on himself to lecture me about Adam’s spiritual welfare.

  And I’ll tell you the truth, I’d had enough lectures from Wesley Lloyd Springer, the deceased husband I’d lived with for forty-some-odd years, to last me a lifetime. Every time I thought of Tucker Caldwell’s nerve in berating me for standing in the way of Adam’s so-called spiritual growth, my blood pressure shot up a mile.

  But Sheriff McAfee continued to hold forth, telling in detail about the confiscation of pounds and pounds of moldering tobacco.

  And I’d thought he was the tall, silent type—he certainly hadn’t had much to say in Mill Run, West Virginia. But maybe it was Etta Mae’s admiring face turned up toward him that kept him going on. Or the eager questions from Lloyd and Josh. Or Mr. Pickens’s leading comments that kept our guest talking.

  Not wanting to draw the sheriff’s attention to a certain escape from hospital custody, I’d mostly kept quiet, hoping that Etta Mae had put that little escapade in perspective for him. Still, there was a matter for which I felt he needed to be held accountable.

  So in a lull of the conversation, I ventured to ask, “You like fried chicken, Sheriff?”

  “Do I ever!” he said. “And this is about the best I ever had. You folks know how to make real southern fried chicken.”

  “Etta Mae and I had some in Mill Run that was quite good, at least while we were eating it. It didn’t sit so well later on.”

  “Bet you had it at Bud’s. Sometimes he uses his grease too long.”

  I put down my fork at the thought. “No, actually we had it at your church. Dinner on the grounds, you know.”

  “Well, I don’t …”

  Etta Mae jumped in. “Oh, I think we got the directions wrong, Miss Julia. We were at the wrong place, I’m pretty sure of it.”

  Uh-huh, I thought, pretty sure but not completely so. But I didn’t pursue the matter because talk of religion, along with politics, were not suitable topics for a dinner table discussion. Such controversial subjects can upset one’s digestion, you know, and mine was already upset enough by seeing what was going on across the table.

  Little Miss McAfee quickly lifted her hand as Lillian, with Lloyd helping her, circled the table, removing our plates and beginning to serve dessert. Adam kept his eyes down, refusing to even glance to the side. Josh, however, was as avid a listener to the sheriff as Lloyd and as hearty an eater as Mr. Pickens.

  “Well, I tell you,” Ardis said, pushing his dessert plate away when he’d finished the pound cake and ice cream, “that was as good a meal as I ever had.” He went on to thank Hazel Marie, who glowed under his compliments, and to praise Lillian to the skies. Then he tilted his chair back and proceeded to entertain us—feeling, perhaps, that as a guest, he was beholden for the meal he’d been served.

  Lloyd got him started again by asking, “Have you always been a sheriff, Sheriff?”

  “No, son, I was with the Charleston Po-lice for a few years, then decided I’d had enough of city life. So I moved to Mill Run, where the fishin’s good, and got on with the Sheriff’s Department as an investigator. Then when the old sheriff retired, I ran for the office, got voted in and been there ever since. But I tell you, boy, it was a wonder anybody ever voted for me, ’cause I got known as a joker. Couldn’t help myself, ’cause if you can’t laugh, you don’t last long in law enforcement.

  “I’ll give you a for instance. Not long after I was hired on as a deputy, I got a call to an area on the outskirts of town about a big ole horse that was galloping loose up and down the road. This was in the middle of the night. Well, by the time I got there, a man in a pickup had stopped and caught it—and it was a big ’un, lemme tell you, some seventeen or so hands high, like one of them Budweiser horses you see at Christmas. And lying underneath it was this woman—looked like a witch with her hair stringing out everywhere—and she was too inebriated to crawl out from under. Come to find out, it was her horse. She’d been trying to get it home, but it had stepped on her foot, so she was laying there cryin’ and carryin’ on, with that horse still high steppin’ around her. Well, I got the EMS guys out there and they dragged her out and got her to the hospital. Then a neighbor offered to keep the horse in his lot till somebody could come for it. And that was the end of it, until I got back in the squad car to let the sergeant know I was leaving the scene. When he asked how I’d handled it, I couldn’t help myself. I told him, I said, ‘Well, I got the woman taken care of, but I had to do something with the horse ’cause, you know, Sergeant, I couldn’t just leave it runnin’ loose. I had to do something. And with all that activity, it had gotten kinda skittish and was about to step on the reins that were trailin’ on the ground. It took me the longest to grab the bridle, but I finally got it and led the horse over to my squad car, meanin’ to bring it in to you. So I tied it to the rear bumper, and everything went real fine till I got up to about sixty…’ ”

  We all burst out laughing, and even Adam, as miserable as he was looking, managed to laugh.

  Chapter 44

  “That reminds me,” Mr. Pickens said, “of the time I was on the Charlotte-Meckleinburg force, working the third watch. It’d been a fairly quiet night, but cold, man, it was cold. So there I was coming out of a residential area, about to go up a ramp to I-77, when I saw a scraggly little kitten right on the curb. I stopped and picked it up, thinking I’d give it to one of the family guys when the watch was over. I swung back around and stopped at a McDonald’s and got it some milk and a hamburger.”

  “I didn’t kn
ow kittens ate hamburgers!” Lloyd said, laughing.

  “This one did—it was about half starved. I told ’em to hold the ketchup and pickle, and I didn’t give it much, afraid it’d get sick in the car. Anyway, after it ate, I let it wander around in the car and pretty soon it found a warm place under the passenger seat and, I guess, just went to sleep. Then I got busy and, to tell the truth, I pretty much forgot about it until I picked up a drunk who was walking along the interstate, weaving on and off the traffic lane. He was smelly and filthy, and, man, he was out of it. He kept mumbling about “ale-yuns,” which I finally figured out meant aliens, who were pinching and scratching him and hovering around with blue lights flashing all over the place.” Mr. Pickens stopped and laughed. “That was the light rack on my car, I guess. Anyway, I put him in the cage and headed for the city jail with him talkin’ and mumblin’, not knowing who or where he was. I wasn’t paying much attention to him—he’d given me no trouble—and I was just cruisin’ along, when all of a sudden he let out this blood-curdling yell that nearly gave me a heart attack. ‘Git ’em off me!’ he yelled. ‘Help, po-lice, the ale-yuns is on me!’ Well, I swung off the road, hopped out of the car and flung open the back door, thinking he was going crazy on me. And all it was was that little kitten had come flyin’ up out of nowhere and landed in his lap. It had clawed its way up his chest and was licking his face and beard, looking for more food.”

  While we laughed, Mr. Pickens began his awkward rise from the table, carefully standing upright as he suggested we move to the living room. Hazel Marie and Etta Mae took the sleeping babies to their cribs, and Lloyd and I cleared the table, taking dishes into the kitchen. Lillian then shooed us out, saying that she could clean up better by herself.