“What are those?” I asked, laughing.
“I ain’t got none myself,” he said. “So I took my pa’s. Don’t worry. I stuffed socks in the toes.”
“You look like a duck,” I said.
Shaking her head, my mother told him to climb into the back of the car.
As soon as we turned down Main Street, Dewey and I both gaped, saying, “Wow!” at the same time. Somehow, Mr. Robert Lee Garner managed to convince pretty much all of Alvin to come out and help look for Mary Ann Dailey. I couldn’t remember seeing this many people in any one place before anytime in my whole entire life. They spilled all down the street, gathering around the steps of the library. There were so many people, we had to park a half mile away in front of Igloo’s Ice Cream Parlor.
“There must be a thousand folks here,” I said.
“Well,” my mother said, “I don’t think there’s near a thousand. Maybe a hundred. I don’t think there’s even two thousand people living in all of Alvin, Abe.”
“Still a lot,” Dewey said.
When Isaac Crosby ran off, I couldn’t remember anybody coming together to try to find him. But then, everyone knew he’d run off on his own volition. They reported him missing to my mother, but Mrs. Crosby even said then, “I wouldn’t put too much effort into findin’ him. He wasn’t even smart enough to pack a lunch. That boy’ll be back on this doorstep in one day. Two at the latest. I don’t wanna waste any taxpayer’s money.”
I reckon with Isaac it was more a case of just seeing how long it took before he figured out what a stupid mistake he made. I remember hearing that the first thing Mr. Crosby said when he returned was, “Guess that shows you now, don’t it?”
Mary Ann Dailey was a different thing entirely. I was starting to realize folks were taking her disappearance very seriously. Seeing all these people standing around brought an uneasy feeling to my stomach. “How come some of ’em got rifles?” I asked as we walked through the crowd.
“They’re gonna be searchin’ in the woods,” my mother said. “Never know what you might find in the woods.”
“You mean like black bears and cougars an’ all?” Dewey asked.
She nodded. “You never know what you’re gonna find. Just always better to be prepared.”
The day was overcast and gray, with a chill breeze on the air. One of those days where you could almost taste the rain wanting to shower down from some of the black, heavy clouds hanging overhead. Mr. Robert Lee Garner climbed the concrete steps in front of the library, carrying an apple crate. His brown leather jacket almost blended into the red brick building behind him in the dull light. Even the American flag, snapping violently in the wind above his head, seemed colorless this morning. He set the apple crate at his feet.
Mr. Garner was sixty-eight years old and was one of them men who looked like he fought for each and every one of them years, barely winning every time he did. He was a stocky man with a large square head and barely any neck. He always reminded me of one of them army sergeants you see in the movies, especially on account of Mr. Garner liking cigars so much. Only, Mr. Garner had never been in the military. The military had a definite effect on his life, though. His father was a U.S. Air Force pilot during World War II and died during the bombing of Dresden. Then he lost his son somewhere in Beirut. Killed by a suicide bomber. Despite all that bad luck with the army, Mr. Garner was probably the single most patriotic person I ever met, with nothing but pride for our country’s military forces, and I never understood why—after how the military killed his papa and his son. My mother tried to explain it one day, saying that pride sometimes is the only way you can keep going after something like that, but it still didn’t make much sense to me.
I gave up trying to understand it.
“First o’ all,” Mr. Garner said. He spoke with a deep, powerful voice that once again made him seem like an army commander. As soon as he started talking, everyone in the crowd went quiet. “I wanna thank y’all for showin’ up so early on such a cold and miserable morning. It means a lot to me, and I know it means a lot to the Daileys. This is a terribly frightening thing for anyone to go through, as I’m sure you can all imagine. It’s especially terrible when it happens to folks as nice as the Daileys. When my Martha was sick all them months before the cancer finally took her, they were there for me, and now I hope that all’a you can join me in bein’ there for them. Right now, we just have a lost little girl on our hands. Nothing more than that. Let’s hope that together we can change that and bring her home today.”
Elbowing Dewey, I quietly pointed out the Daileys standing near the front of the group. Mr. Dailey put his arm around his wife as Mrs. Dailey burst into sobs, burying her face into her husband’s chest. I did a quick scan for Mr. Wyatt Edward Farrow, but didn’t see him anywhere. Not that I expected to. He didn’t seem like the helping type to me.
“Now there’s a lot of folks here and a lot o’ potential for this to all dissolve into anarchy unless we keep things organized,” Mr. Garner said. Bending, he took a stack of squares cut from construction paper out of the apple crate at his feet. He removed the thick elastic band they were bound together with. “What I’ve done is made up these colored cards. There’s five different colors. Red, blue, yellow, green, and black. Everyone should take one and pass them on. If you’re wantin’ to stay in a group, just take one color per group.” He handed them to Mr. Dailey, who began passing them around.
“Okay, now listen up,” Mr. Garner went on, reading from a sheet of paper. “Red cards will set out and search down around Cornflower Lake. Don’t forget to check the woods and the wetlands.” He paused, frowning as though he was trying hard to think of a better way to add the next part: “Yes, even the lake. Try to be as thorough as possible. Blue cards, same thing only Willet Lake. Yellow cards will be going through the woods in and around Clover Creek and the Old Mill River area. Green cards will take the grounds around and including Tucker Mountain. Don’t forget to check along the Anikawa and the valley running between it and Old Highway Seventeen. Finally, black cards will be searching the area on the other side of Tucker Mountain Road, following along the Anikawa, the Painted Lake area, and the swamp buttin’ up against my ranch.” He held up his card and I noticed him pause slightly, almost gravely. “I’ve got black.”
Someone passed my mother a card. It was also black. “We’re on Mr. Garner’s team!” I said excitedly, but my mother shushed me.
“Now,” Mr. Garner said. “I want to further thank Police Chief Ethan Montgomery and everyone at the Alvin Police Station for the loan of five of these high-powered walkie-talkies. Every group should take one. This is how we’re gonna stay in contact. The minute anybody finds anythin’, y’all let the rest of us know immediately. I don’t wanna be wading through Skeeter Swamp any longer than I have to.” I felt a tension ripple through the crowd following his last sentence that I didn’t understand. I made a mental note to ask my mother about it later.
“I’ll leave it up to you to organize yourselves within your own groups, but I strongly suggest assigning one person to be leader. This isn’t a popularity contest, this is a manhunt to find a missing girl. So let’s all put any egos we may have aside and work as diligently and efficiently as we can. Are there any questions?”
There weren’t none.
“Okay, then. Everybody in the black group, gather with me and Dixie down at Hunter Road. We’ll walk our way from there down to the Anikawa. Everybody else, make sure someone from your color group grabs a walkie-talkie.” He stepped over the empty apple crate and came down off the stairs with his rifle strapped over his shoulder.
“Guess we know who our leader is,” Dewey said.
My mother shushed him. Putting her hands on our backs, she turned us toward Hunter Street and we began walking, separating from the rest of the crowd as everyone figured out where they should be going. Mr. Garner swung his rifle into position while he whistled for his dog, Dixie, who was sitting patiently next to the library steps.
>
Dixie was a mottled brown coon dog. Mr. Garner had her for as long as I could remember, and even though she was getting on in years, she was still as fast and alert as ever. I’d once seen her chase down a jackrabbit from a standing start a hundred yards away.
By the time we broke apart, I realized my original estimate of a thousand folks was off considerably. Turned out to be twenty-two in our group, so my mother’s calculation was probably much closer than mine. I felt like part of a platoon of soldiers as we marched north down Hunter Road, continuing past where it turned into a dirt trail and then ended altogether at the grassy bank that rolled down into the Anikawa River. We crossed over using an old wooden footbridge made of six logs strapped together with steel ties. The bridge was much older than I was, but nobody doubted its safety as the river chopped and raged in the narrows beneath us.
We stepped off right at the edge of the thick, tangled woods that ran along this side. How deep those trees went in the northerly direction, I didn’t know. I did know we would come to Bullfrog Creek if we kept going maybe half a mile that way, and continuing on that path led roughly the same direction as the Anikawa, eventually taking us to Painted Lake.
There was a lot of dense forest to cover here. Much more, I realized, than twenty-two people could easily do in the course of a few hours. Then there was the whole area up past Painted Lake: the tree line that opened onto Mr. Garner’s ranch, and the wetlands we called Skeeter Swamp bubbling back across the river, where gators—big ones—regularly were spotted. Maybe that’s what made the crowd seem to react to Mr. Garner’s mention of the swamp earlier on.
“Let’s spread out and all head through the forest toward the lake,” Mr. Garner said. He gestured to my mother. “Leah, you take half the group and walk through until the creek, then follow it up to the lake. I’ll take the other half this way along the river. We’ll cover more ground that way.”
My mother nodded. “You two stay with me,” she said. “I don’t want you by yourselves.”
“Why?” I asked.
“In case somethin’ happens.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. But I have a gun.”
“So does Mr. Garner,” I said. “Can we go with him?”
She considered this, then called out. “Bob, do you mind if my boys tag along with you?”
“Not at all,” he said. “Come on, you guys, you can walk up front with me and Dixie.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, beaming. Dewey and I raced through the woods, ducking under pine branches and dodging the thick trunks of oaks until we caught up to Mr. Garner. We fell in close behind him, stepping on a soft bed of fallen leaves and undergrowth, occasionally climbing over the odd fallen log.
Mr. Garner happened to glance at Dewey. Without even a smile, he asked, “What’s with them boots, son?”
Dewey’s face flushed red. “They’re his pa’s,” I answered. “He ain’t got none of his own.” This seemed to satisfy Mr. Garner’s curiosity, for no more was said about it.
We had now separated from everyone else and, far as I could tell, were roughly following the Anikawa that was only a few hundred yards in. I sometimes thought I could hear it splashing off to our left, but I wasn’t sure. Mr. Garner seemed to know his way all right though, so I wasn’t afraid of getting lost or nothing.
As we walked, he scanned the forest around us, looking like some sort of eagle. His strides were so long, Dewey and I spent more time struggling to keep up than we did looking around the woods, but I reckon Mr. Garner did a good enough job searching for all three of us. Dixie trotted ahead a few yards, stopping here and there to sniff out a tree or stare down a squirrel that got her attention.
“Go get her, girl,” Mr. Garner would say, and Dixie would gallop through the woods while the squirrel scampered away or raced up the trunk of an oak.
I looked at the rifle in Mr. Garner’s hand. “Hope we don’t come across no bears.”
“I think we’re safe from bears,” he said.
“Then why’re ya carryin’ a rifle?” I asked.
“Just in case. You never know.”
I sighed, wondering why nobody could explain exactly what it was I never knew might be lurking out here, requiring the use of a rifle. I decided to let the issue drop for now. Instead I ran up, practically jogging to keep beside him, and asked, “Mr. Garner? You think Mary Ann Dailey’s gonna turn up today?”
The forest began breaking around us. Through the sparse trunks, I began to make out Mr. Garner’s ranch coming up on our right and the edge of Skeeter Swamp that flanked the Anikawa on our left. Mr. Garner’s attention immediately went to that swamp. Farther up, the river banked toward us and a stone bridge arched across, leading to a small hill where a willow stood, its leaves shaking in the morning breeze.
Without taking his eyes off that murky green swamp water, Mr. Garner responded, “I don’t rightly know. Sure hope so, Abe. Sure hope this don’t turn out to be another Ruby Mae.”
I searched my mind for any recollection of what he might be talking about, but I couldn’t remember anyone named Ruby Mae living in Alvin. When I tossed a puzzled glance at Dewey, he just shrugged back. “Who’s Ruby Mae?” I asked.
Keeping up his pace, Mr. Garner continued scouring the area, without answering me. I thought maybe he hadn’t heard my question and so I was about to ask again when he spoke. “Ruby Mae Vickers,” he said. “She was another little girl went missing from these parts, oh, must’ve been ten or twelve years ago.”
No wonder I didn’t remember. I was either not born or just a baby. “Was she related to the Vickers living out on Finley Circle?” The Vickers had five children, four boys and one girl. Far as I knew, none of them went to school. Most were probably too young though, I thought.
“Yup,” Mr. Garner said. “Ruby Mae was their first daughter.”
“And she went missin’?” I asked.
“Yup.”
“Just like Mary Ann Dailey?” I asked.
“Dunno yet,” Mr. Garner said.
“And nobody ever found her?” Dewey asked. He had jogged up on the other side.
Mr. Garner stopped and pulled a cigar from the front pocket of his jacket. Biting the end off, he stuck it in his mouth and lit it with a match. He blew a big puff of blue smoke into the cold morning air. Out here, surrounded by the woods, the wind wasn’t blowing nearly as hard as it had been out in the town, and the smoke kind of hung there like a sour cloud until we finally walked through it. This time, Mr. Garner went considerably slower.
“Oh, she turned up, eventually,” he said. We continued along the Anikawa River, just edging Skeeter Swamp that settled in on either side. “Just not in the same state she disappeared in. I found her a few months later. Her body turned up under that big willow.” He pointed across the river to the tree growing atop the small hill. Fresh flowers were scattered around the bottom of the trunk. I think they were roses. Red, pink, and yellow.
Dewey’s eyes went wide at this news. I couldn’t believe we’d never heard this story before. It was the sort of thing that would scatter through school faster than an outbreak of cooties. I wondered if maybe he was putting us on, but his face was serious. Very serious, in fact. “What happened to her?” I asked.
Mr. Garner pulled his cigar from his mouth. “Nobody ever did find that out.”
“Where did those flowers come from?” I asked.
Mr. Garner hesitated before answering. “I put them there.”
“How come?” Dewey asked.
“Let’s not talk any more about them flowers, okay?” Mr. Garner said.
From here we could now see most of Mr. Garner’s ranch. There was a structure set off from his house in the process of being built. “Whatcha making?” I asked.
“Tool shed,” he said.
“What for?” Dewey asked.
“Tools, likely,” I answered sarcastically.
“Actually, I just like doing things to keep me busy,” Mr. Garner said. “The devi
l finds work for idle hands to do. It’s important to remember things like that.”
I glanced back at the willow with the ring of flowers on the other side of the river as we continued.
“You reckon it was one of them cougars that got Ruby Mae?” Dewey asked.
Stopping, Mr. Garner once again inspected Dewey standing there in those giant boots. “Yeah, son,” he said, “I reckon it was some kinda cougar. Just not the kind you’s thinkin’. Somebody killed her and tossed her away afterward.”
We continued in silence. I don’t think neither me nor Dewey could think of any proper response to something like that. This was likely the reason for everyone reacting the way they did when Mr. Garner mentioned Skeeter Swamp this morning.
Once again, we entered a wooded area. We came to a rotted log in our path so big even Mr. Garner had to step up on it in order to get over it. Dewey and I struggled to climb across, the hollow wood breaking apart beneath our hands. Dewey had an especially hard time, being all clumsy in his father’s galoshes, but eventually we made it, just as the first heavy drops of rain fell through the thick ceiling of leaves and branches hanging above our heads.
Dewey and I pulled up our hoods. Mr. Garner didn’t seem to even notice. Something else was on his mind.
We were getting close to Painted Lake. I could hear Bullfrog Creek coming up along our right. Not only the water quietly rushing over the stones, but also the croaking of the animals that gave it its name.
Mr. Garner spoke again, but I got the feeling this time he was talking more to himself than us. “I sure as hell hope this don’t turn out to be another Ruby Mae,” he said.
That was all we heard of it for the rest of our wet walk through the trees and up to the lake.
CHAPTER 4
Nobody found Mary Ann Dailey even though they searched throughout that entire day and into the night. My mother brought me and Dewey home after our group finished up at Painted Lake, and made us a quick lunch before she went out again. I was glad she didn’t ask if we wanted to go with her. By then the rain was coming down something fierce, and I’d really had my fill of walking through the woods.
Dream With Little Angels Page 3
