by Laura McHugh
He’s lettin’ you go, but you ain’t free. You can’t tell Carl, can’t tell nobody. He’ll kill you, understand? Do you hear me? Ransome screamed in Lila’s face, begging for some sign that the girl understood, and her eyes flickered and her head moved in Ransome’s hands. She was nodding, yes, yes, and Ransome hugged her, a crazy, panicked hug, grateful that she’d made it through those first ugly minutes when everything could have caved in on her.
After Carl took Lila home for Birdie Snow to fix up, and Crete doubled Joe Bill over into a bag in the back of the Dodge and drove off, Ransome set out for her swimming hole. It was hidden in the cedars, spring-fed and deep, and she stripped to her drawers and untied her hair and dunked herself in the icy water. She stayed under as long as she could. The cold slowed her down, made her work for the surface. Back in the sunlight, nothing had changed. She was the same as she’d always been, no better. She didn’t know why she’d expected any different; she couldn’t step out of her own skin. She dressed soaking wet, wrung out her hair, and headed back to work. Her bones ached as the cold let go, and pretty soon she was right back to sweating.
It wasn’t long before folks started clucking about Joe Bill being gone. Sump’s ex-wife didn’t think it was a coincidence that he’d disappeared two days before his child support payment was due, and that, plus the fact that his truck hadn’t turned up, left little doubt what had happened. But then some of Sump’s pals brought up Lila, said he was planning to pay her a visit the day he went missing. Deputy Swicegood cornered Ransome one Saturday in the cereal aisle at Ralls’ and asked if she’d seen Joe Bill at the farm on the day in question. Angie Petree stopped in front of a display of puffed rice and cocked her head to listen. Junior Ralls watched from the meat counter, never taking his hand off the ham he slid back and forth on the slicer. Ransome told Swicegood she and Lila had worked the fields together like any other day. Didn’t see a thing.
That so? he sneered. Didn’t see one single thing all day? Not one thing caught your eye? Maybe I saw a snake, she said, laying in the dirt. But the next time I looked, it was gone.
Angie Petree nodded knowingly, and Swicegood grudgingly stepped aside.
Chapter 15
Lucy
I worked Fourth of July, a busy day for Dane’s, with both locals and out-of-towners swarming the river. Dad was working on the construction of a new Walmart in Branson, but he came home for the holiday weekend and made sure I got back to the house before all the drunks started setting off fireworks. Bess came over, and Dad gave us a bag of blacksnakes and sparklers he’d picked up from a roadside stand. We sat on the porch steps lighting our kiddie fireworks while the muted pops and cracks of more impressive displays echoed through the hills around us.
Dad went back to work on the fifth. I sat on the porch with my journal after he left, watching the breeze work through the hayfield across the road. I was working on a new list: “People Who Knew My Mother.” Dad, Crete, Gabby, Birdie, Ray Walker, Ransome Crowley, Sarah Cole. Not a lot to go on, since I’d already talked to Sarah, and since Dad and Crete never said much about her—and I’d mined everything Gabby and Birdie were willing to share, down to favorite songs and foods, which I’d cataloged in “Things I Know About My Mother.” That list had dark gouges along the bottom of the page. After my visit with Sarah, I’d written something about Lila not wanting me, then later scratched it out.
I’d always been able to talk to Birdie about Mom, but she told the same stories over and over, her favorite being about my birth. How Mom had hollered curse words during hours of back labor and insisted on scrubbing the nursery floor between contractions. How she’d let out this otherwordly scream when Birdie had dragged me out, sunny side up, and laid me slick and squalling on her chest. Then Mom had started laughing because she’d bet Dad I was a girl and she’d won naming rights. Lucy, after her grandmother Lucille.
Birdie’s other favorite story was about my mom showing up on her porch with a plate of squirrel dumplings, which were just about the best thing Birdie had ever eaten. She tried to teach me to make them from my mom’s handwritten recipe, but they never turned out right. Finally, I gave up, because Dad refused to eat them.
I wasn’t sure how well Ray Walker knew my mom, aside from witnessing the wedding. It would be easy enough to talk to him, though; he had an office down at the courthouse. Then there was Ransome. She’d worked with my mom on Crete’s farm, retiring a few years back when emphysema forced her to. I’d seen her plenty of times from afar, a stooped figure in the field when Dad and I drove by, but we’d never shared more than a few words. I knew she was over in Howell County now, at the same nursing home where my grandma Dane had lived out her days.
After a lengthy explanation of what to do if it wouldn’t start, Daniel let me borrow his truck to visit Ransome at the Riverview Care Center. Riverview had no view of the river. The flat, sallow building horseshoed around a gravel courtyard splotched with clumps of dead grass and potted marigolds. Dad claimed he’d brought me here to see Grandma Dane before she died, but I was too young to remember.
The front door opened into a dim common area where wheelchair-bound residents were parked too close to the television. Ransome sat in a folding chair against the wall, her arms resting on her walker. The walker had tennis balls on its feet, to make it easier to slide, and a basket holding an oxygen tank. She wasn’t quite seventy, but she looked ancient, mummified, draped with a quilt made of clothing scraps. Her mouth gaped open, drawn down at the corners and flexing, desperate for air despite the tubes delivering oxygen through her nose. Her eyes widened when she saw me, and her chest heaved like a frightened horse’s.
“My mind’s still good,” she rasped as I sat down in the chair next to hers. “Just my body giving up. Ain’t lost a lick of sense. They told me you was coming. So I know you’re not her. Not a ghost. You’re her little girl.”
I nodded and tried to smile at her wasted figure. “I’m Lucy.”
She stared at me, reaching out and pulling back, like she wanted to touch me but was afraid I might bite. “You remember me at all?” Ransome asked. Every few words were punctuated by a long scraping breath. “You was out to the farm a few times when you was little. I drove you around in the wheelbarrow? Fed you strawberries?”
I shook my head. “No. Sorry.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Well. You was little. Don’t expect you to remember a thing like that. So what is it you want, then?”
“You worked with my mother,” I said.
“Yep. From the time she got here to the day she ran off with your daddy. She didn’t work no more after that. Didn’t need to, I suppose.”
“What was she like?”
“She was pretty, you know that, and sharp. Hardworking. Daydreamer, though. She’d be staring at the sky, pulling weeds, had to stop her before she yanked up the carrots.”
“Did she talk to you at all about what it was like leaving home to come here? How she felt about working for Crete or meeting my dad?”
Ransome shifted in her chair. “She didn’t talk about home. Didn’t seem to miss it. We didn’t talk too much, really, about anything other than the work we was doing.”
“Oh,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. Ransome was one of the few people who’d been close to my mother, and she wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. “So she never mentioned a boy from back home? Or anyone else here aside from my dad?”
Ransome’s eyes watered, and she sucked in a wheezing breath. “Like I said, she didn’t talk about home.” She picked at the yarn ties on the quilt. “Why you coming around asking about Lila after all this time, anyhow?”
“She was my mother, and I never got a chance to know her. I was really hoping to find out more about her, get a sense of what her life was like. I want to know why she left. Do you know anything that might be helpful?”
She stared at me for a long, uncomfortable minute
, her mouth working like a fish’s. “I’ve had emphysema for a while now,” she said, “but it weren’t so bad till I come here. I could still get out in my garden. Fill up the hummingbird feeders. Could still smoke, too, even though the doctor told me not to. Now every morning the nurse comes in, I say if you’re not gonna gimme a cigarette, gimme a knife so I can slit my goddamn throat. She don’t do it. The smoke or the knife. I ain’t long for this place, thank the Lord, ’cause I can’t stand being stuck indoors, strung up to this cart. I forgot what dirt feels like in my fingers. It’s no way to live. So there’s not much can happen to me now if I say something. The worst could happen, I’ll be put outta my misery.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I done things I ain’t proud of. But I did what I could to help her, I tried.”
“It’s okay,” I said, my stomach tightening. “Just tell me what happened.”
“You know she worked for your uncle.”
“Sure. That’s why she came here in the first place. For the job.”
“Before you knew it, she up and married your dad and quit the farm. Now, Crete and Carl’ve always been close, but around that time, they had some sort of falling-out. It had something to do with your mother.”
“Why? Crete didn’t want Dad to marry her? Was he mad that she quit working for him?”
“Some of both, I imagine. Your mother stirred people up in ways you had to see to believe. Weren’t her fault, a course. There was something about her, a strange pull. You wanted to get close to her, touch her, smell her, see if she was real. It made people scared of her, too—angry with her for making ’em want her, or because she didn’t even notice ’em wanting her. Your uncle, he knew she was something special, and he didn’t wanna let her go so easy.”
If I’d had any say in the matter, I wouldn’t have let her go, either. I waited for Ransome to say something more, but she was staring into a past I couldn’t see, images that no longer existed anywhere except in her head.
“Was that all?” I asked. “She got between Crete and my dad?”
“It was an ugly time,” Ransome said. “But she came out okay. Better than okay. Husband, baby, house. Couldn’t want more than that.”
Her vagueness was exasperating. “What ugliness, exactly?”
“A deal was struck. It put a strain on things. Now, I said all I can live with, and I’m doing penance for the rest. In this life and the next, I imagine.”
“A deal? If you know what happened, why can’t you just tell me?”
She turned her attention to the quilt, running her finger along a seam. Her mouth opened and closed, but no words came out. She was one of the few people who could help me, and she wouldn’t. I wanted to throw myself at her feet and beg. I wanted to grab her shriveled body and shake out all the answers, though the look on her face told me how pointless that would be. Suffering had etched itself in the cracks of her weathered skin. It welled in her sunken eyes, gave off a sour smell. She was poisoned by the things she carried inside, things she refused to share. Oddly, her story ended with my mom being happy; she hadn’t mentioned the disappearance at all. So maybe whatever troubled Ransome came before and had no bearing on what followed.
“Thank you,” I said. I stood to go, and her gnarled fingers brushed my wrist. She emitted a series of internal creaks and rasps before she spoke.
“She liked her tea muddled with mint.”
I smiled. The herb bed beside the house was overgrown with mint. I’d tried tearing it out to plant sage and thyme, but mint always grew back and crowded out everything else. As I left Ransome in the place she’d never get out of, a warren of stale, dark rooms, I wondered what she’d done that she felt she deserved such penance.
Work kept me busy. Crete was back from his latest business trip, and I found myself scrutinizing everything he did, each word he spoke. I tried to picture him with my mother. Had he secretly been in love with her? Ransome hadn’t made it sound quite like that, but I was skeptical of all my previously held assumptions. Crete stepped up my responsibilities at the store, giving me some accounting, scheduling, and inventory tasks. When he wasn’t out at the farm, he spent most of his time in the office with the door closed. I’d started thinking that the next time I found his office empty and unlocked, I would sneak in and check his rental records, see who’d been in the trailer. So far, I hadn’t had the chance.
Since I was in charge of scheduling, I made sure that Daniel and I had the same days off. Until I could get into Crete’s office, our next best lead in figuring out what happened to Cheri was to find the man in the van, the one Doris had mentioned. Though I had no idea what to do once we did find him. He hadn’t exactly been friendly during our first brief meeting. I was hoping Jamie Petree knew him, but I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of asking him for help.
Bess and I talked on the phone most every night, though our jobs kept us from spending as much time together as we usually did in the summer. She told me she’d been seeing someone and wanted to tell me about it in person. To see my face when she said his name, because I just wouldn’t believe it. I hoped that her new guy was better than Gage Petree, or at least wasn’t worse.
Chapter 16
Lila
I was too alarmed by what Ransome had said to feel relieved when Carl scooped me out of bed and carried me to his truck. I grasped that I wasn’t supposed to tell Carl what his brother had done to me, and Ransome had made it easier by lying to him herself.
Back at Carl’s, I was placed in an upstairs bedroom with whitewashed walls and an old iron bed. Light filtered through the trees outside the window and played across the wood floor. I was grateful to be out of the darkness, to know night from day and sense the passing of time. Once I was feeling more alert, I realized the room was too feminine for Carl; it must have been his mother’s. There was a dressing table with a large round mirror across from the bed, and I could see myself propped on a pile of feather pillows. I looked like a storybook witch, my eyes ringed with shadows and my dark hair bushy and tangled.
I spent a whole week in bed, Birdie Snow feeding me pills and spreading sticky concoctions on my skin while Carl watched anxiously. I expected to be pressed for details about what had happened, but there were few questions. I got the feeling Carl didn’t want to upset me by talking about it, and I was terrified that Crete would come after me if I didn’t keep his secret. Though there was no hiding the bruises or the bite, Carl thought Sump was to blame. I didn’t know how much he’d told Birdie. She rarely spoke as she tended to me, aside from occasional orders for me to swallow something, lift my nightgown, or hold still.
By the end of that first week at Carl’s, my bruises had faded. I was able to get up and move around, though I felt nervous leaving the bedroom by myself, even to use the bathroom across the hall. Carl kept me company as much as he could, but there was someone else I wanted to see. I asked him for Gabby’s phone number.
Gabby sounded surprised and happy to hear from me, and it was good to know that I’d been missed. She asked if things had let up on the farm. Crete had told her I was too busy in the fields to work any shifts at the restaurant. I didn’t contradict what Crete had said, only added to it with the story Carl and I had agreed on—that I’d come down with something and gotten really sick. She wanted to know how I’d ended up at Carl’s, and all I could think to tell her was that he’d been worried about me. She had no problem believing it.
The next morning, Gabby stopped by, and Carl brought her upstairs to see me. She forced a smile and hugged me and didn’t say anything about how awful I looked. We sat on the bed, and she filled me in on all the gossip I’d missed. Everybody was talking about Joe Bill Sump running off to spite his ex-wife, who depended on him for child support. He was a snake-eyed son of a bitch, Gabby said, and she wouldn’t miss him at all. He’d never left her a tip in his life. I wondered if people were talking about me, too, but if anyon
e besides Gabby noticed or cared that I hadn’t been around the restaurant, she didn’t mention it.
Gabby insisted on coming over every day on her way to work. She would sit on Carl’s mother’s bed with me and style my hair or paint my nails or insist that I put on some blush. There was a man in the house, after all, and she didn’t want me letting myself go. Gabby had been through two new boyfriends since I’d seen her last. She asked me lots of questions about Carl, like how serious were we, and wasn’t it romantic that he’d brought me to his house to recuperate.
“Not that romantic,” I said. “I’m wearing his mom’s ugly-ass nightgown.” Gabby laughed, and I laughed, too. For the first time since leaving the garage, I let myself stop worrying that Crete would barge into the house and drag me back. I didn’t feel safe—memories of the attack hung over me like storm clouds—but somehow, in the bright bedroom, I felt a little less afraid.
Carl stayed in the house most days, though he left me alone much of the time so I could rest. I heard him downstairs rattling pans in the kitchen and watching TV. I’d asked him why he came back from Arkansas early, and he said there’d been an accident on the job site, and the project was on hold for a day or two. He’d been glad for the unexpected time off, because there was something he wanted to talk to me about. All he’d tell me now, though, was that it could wait. Everything could wait until I was better. I didn’t know how long he could put his life on hold for me. He’d been home from work for almost two weeks, and I fretted about what would happen when he had to go back.
Sunday evening, Carl brought two bowls of vegetable soup up to the bedroom so we could eat together, him in the chair and me with a tray on the bed. “Mmm,” I said, savoring my first spoonful. “I can tell it’s homemade. Is it Birdie’s?”
