by Vicki Lane
That Miss Birdie’s quite a character—nice little lady. And what about the way Laurie took to Cletus?
Rosemary could hear her father’s voice, kept low in the darkness of the barn. They had all gone to bed when it got dark, Uncle Wade to his tent in the other barn, the rest of them to their mattresses and sleeping bags on the upper floor of the main barn. As usual her parents were talking over the events of the day. She liked hearing what they said when they thought she was asleep. Not that it was ever very interesting. Except sometimes Pa had bad dreams and he said a lot of funny words. But then Mum would wake him and they would whisper. Once it had sounded almost like Pa was crying. That had been scary, but Mum had talked to him very quietly and in the morning Rosemary hadn’t been sure if she had dreamed it or not.
Laurie really has a thing for men. Her mother’s voice was smiling. I’m afraid I see trouble down the road. How are you going to feel when she goes out on her first date?
Oh, I don’t believe she’ll date. Pa’s chuckle made Rosemary feel warm inside, like always. Maybe when she’s twenty-one—and if I go along. Thank god, Rosie has more sense right now than any three teenage boys. We won’t have to worry about her.
There was a rustle in the darkness as one of her parents turned over. Sam, did you hear Miss Birdie when they left, inviting us to come to church sometimes? That little church down the branch?
Liz, you take the girls there and you know what it’ll be. They preach hellfire and damnation and it’ll scare the pants off the kids.
Her mother sighed. I know…. It’s just…Well, it would be a nice way to join in the community. But you’re right. There’re other ways.
Hellfire and damnation. Rosemary whispered the words, tasting their sounds. They felt dangerous—strong and hot in her mouth. Hell…fire…dam…nation.
Her father’s voice was a sleepy murmur now. Miss Birdie asked if Wade and I could patch the roof on their cabin and I told her we would. Don’t worry, Liz—we’ll get to know these folks on our own terms.
There was silence and Rosemary began to make a story. Shining Deer stretched out on her bed of sweet-smelling pine boughs, watching the moon climb the blue-black sky. The Indian princess was waiting for Ranger, her pet wolf, to return from the hunt. Far in the distance she could hear owls calling and—
Sam. Mum’s low voice broke into the story. I had a letter from my mother.
Pa didn’t answer but Mum went on. She and Gloria want to come visit…to see this place we’ve bought…and the house we’re building.
There was a loud sigh and her father said a bad word.
6.
CALVEN
Saturday, October 8
The dark figure pulled back, out of the depths of the refrigerator. Luminous eyes stared up at Elizabeth out of a dirt-smeared face. For a frozen moment the two stood silent. Then, with an unearthly screech, the intruder lowered its shaggy head and tried to butt its way past Elizabeth. A bulging plastic bag was clutched in one filthy hand and a carton of milk in the other.
“Hey, now wait just a minute. I think we need to talk.” Recovered from her momentary alarm, Elizabeth caught one bony arm in a firm grasp. “Who are you and what are you doing in my refrigerator?”
“Lemme go! I ain’t—”
“Mum?” Bright light flooded the room. Rosemary stood in the doorway, blinking owlishly. “Mum, what—Who’s that kid? And why is he…she…so dirty?”
The child, for a child it was, gave one fierce, hopeless tug, but Elizabeth held firm. The little arm was so thin that her fingers met around it, making her feel unpleasantly like a bully. The wide eyes gazed at her in appeal, then narrowed. “I ain’t no girl. My name’s Calven. Please, ma’am, I just needed me somethin’ to eat. I done run off from Bib.”
“Mum?” Rosemary looked very young, standing there in her faded plaid flannel night shirt, shining dark hair tumbled about her face. But she spoke sternly. “Mum, do you want me to call the sheriff?” Behind her, Ursa and Molly poked inquiring heads into the kitchen.
The boy’s arm jerked again, but Elizabeth again held firm. “No, Rosie. At least not now. Let’s find out what Calven has to say for himself.” Gently she propelled the boy to the cushioned bench in the corner of the room, taking care that she and Rosemary were between the boy and the door.
“Rosemary, why don’t you fix Calven a sandwich and a glass of milk? He can have something to eat before he tells us what he’s doing here.” She eased the carton of milk from the boy’s grimy clutch and handed it to her daughter. Rosemary raised her eyebrows in a brief question, but began to assemble the ingredients for an impromptu meal.
The two dogs bounded into the kitchen, jostling each other in their eagerness to investigate. “No! Down!” Elizabeth scolded, envisaging a disastrous confrontation as the faithful dogs, bent on protecting her, attacked the intruder. She grabbed their collars and hauled them away from the boy. To her surprise, he leaned out and began to pat Ursa’s broad back. The big dog’s plumy tail was waving happily as, Elizabeth realized, was Molly’s.
Feeling vaguely ridiculous, she released the dogs. They instantly crowded up to Calven, obviously recognizing an old friend.
“Hey there, ol’ Molly; hey there, Yoursa.” He looked up at Elizabeth. “I know them two, seen ’em in the woods back of this. Read their names offen their collars. They’re right friendly, ain’t they? I wisht I could have me a dog but—”
He broke off as Rosemary set a glass of milk and a plate with a thick ham and cheese sandwich on the little table under the window. His eyes widened at the sight and he darted forward.
Again Elizabeth interposed. “Maybe it would be a good idea for you to wash your hands first, Calven.” She spoke gently but firmly. “There’s a bar of soap over there at the sink.”
The child frowned but mutely complied, leaving dirty smears on the dishtowel Rosemary gave him to dry his hands. Then he slid onto the bench, hunched over his plate, and began to devour the sandwich. Wolf his sandwich, thought Elizabeth, watching him snap off huge bites and swallow them, virtually unchewed, helping them down with noisy gulps of milk. Rosemary refilled his glass two times before the plate was empty. Then she gave him a bowl of the leftover apple crisp, topped with a scoop of ice cream.
Calven’s spoon chased the last crumb of the dessert around the bowl, scraping furiously. Reluctantly he abandoned the implement and picked the bowl up to lick off the remaining film of ice cream. “Son, I tell you that’s good stuff. I kin hide me some ice cream.” He looked hopefully toward the container Rosemary was returning to the freezer.
“Calven, I don’t think you better eat any more right now. Let that settle a while. I don’t want you to get sick.” Elizabeth looked at the thin dirty child, wondering what had brought him to her kitchen in the middle of the night. He said he ran off from Bib—who or what is Bib?…Is this some neighbor’s child? Barefoot, for god’s sake, and it’s chilly out there. And filthy…he can’t have bathed in weeks. How old is he? Ten? Eleven? Maybe not that old; he’s not very big.
The boy was singularly unattractive: scrawny and pallid beneath the dirt. He wore a too large pair of camouflage pants, belted around his bony hips with a green bungee cord. A rip high on the side revealed no underwear, only pale, dirty flesh. The worn, faded T-shirt beneath the camouflage jacket—again, several sizes too large—advertised a waterslide in Gatlinburg in colors that had once been lurid but were now overlain with embedded grime. His hair, dark with grease and dirt, hung in limp hanks to his shoulders. And he stunk.
Elizabeth’s nose wrinkled but then as she watched, she saw that Calven had saved back two bits of crust and was offering them to the attendant Ursa and Molly.
She smiled. “They like you, Calven.”
He looked at her with an answering grin and his gray-green eyes suddenly came alive. “I like them too. They’s my friends.”
With a wrench, Elizabeth forced herself to the job at hand. “Okay, Calven, I need for you to tell me who your fol
ks are. They’re probably worried sick about you and—”
“Huuh!” It was a derisive snort. “Ain’t no one worried about me but Bib. And I already told you—I done run off from Bib.”
“Is Bib your father?” Rosemary stacked the dishes in the sink and came to sit beside Elizabeth.
“Him? Naw! He’s just my mama’s boyfriend. Mama, she’s in the hospital and her mama—that’s my mamaw—has to stay with her most all the time, so she done tole Bib to look after me. Weren’t no need—I kin do fer myself, long as there’s some food in the trailer. I kin fix macaroni and cheese out of a box and I kin cook frozen pizza. But Bib said we was goin’ campin’.”
Calven squirmed on the bench. “Funny kind of campin’, you ask me. We been stayin’ at that great huge house just over the ridge. I never seen so many rooms as that place has but Bib fixed us a place in the basement. There’s some says that house is haunted; my mamaw done told me folks has seen the ghost of a little girl over there. Bib says there ain’t no ghostes. And we ain’t seen none neither. But when Bib goes off like he does now and again, I tell you, I git out of that house fast as I can.”
The boy cut his eyes at Elizabeth with an air of sly amusement. “Bib had done told me to keep a lookout while he was gone t’other day. I seen you come over the ridge, down that same little trail ol’ Molly and Yoursa follows. Seen you walkin’ around like you was in a dream, talkin’ to yourself and lookin’ at stuff. I thought maybe you was a crazy woman.”
He sniggered. “Not too crazy, though. You took off like one thing when you heard ol’ Bib a-comin’. I like to bust out laughin’ when I seen you haulin’ ass up through them briars.”
Elizabeth studied the boy. Phillip had called her on Thursday with a carefully worded suggestion that she abandon any further exploration of Mullmore for the time being. He had taken pains not to appear to be telling her what to do, saying only that the sheriff thought that some questionable characters could be using the abandoned house for some undefined but probably nefarious activities. And now here was one of them, eating ice cream in her kitchen. “Calven, why are you and…Bib camping out over there, anyway?”
The child shrugged. “You got me. I asked Bib and he tole me weren’t none of my business.” He leaned toward them and confided, “I reckon he might be lookin’ fer something. He’s goin’ through all them empty rooms, a-tappin’ at the walls and floors. And he got him one of them detectors; been walkin’ up and down, inside and out with it.”
“Mum, didn’t Dessie tell us that there was a place there before the Mullins built that…that mansion? A real old farmhouse? I know sometimes people used to bury their money for safekeeping. Maybe that’s—”
“That there whole cove used to belong to my mama’s people.” Calven spoke with a certain pride, a deposed prince, reduced to rags but not without dignity. “They was some of the first that come into this country and they held that place fer nigh on two hundred years afore them Mullins bought ’em out. Mama tole me that my papaw’s daddy was one of the richest men in the whole county.”
“Calven, I still want to know why you were in my house—in my refrigerator—in the middle of the night. And I need to know where you should be.”
“I done tole you. I run off. Bib come back right after you hightailed it outta there t’other day. I didn’t say nothing to him about you bein’ there ’cause…’cause you weren’t doin’ no harm but I didn’t know Bib’d see it that way. And, son, I tell you what’s the truth: you don’t want Bib takin’ against you. So when he asked had I seen anything, I tole him no.
“But then that night, me and him was asleep in the basement and we heard someone comin’. We got out just in time and was hidin’ up in this place Bib fixed. We seen it was the sheriff and some deputies and we heard them talkin’ about some woman had been over there that very day. Bib lay there a-listen’ and I knowed he was goin’ to whale the tar out of me fer not keepin’ watch. So, when the sheriff and them left, Bib tole me to head back over the mountain to the trailer and he’d see me there and I’d git what I had comin’.
“Well, ol’ Bib, he slipped back down to the house to git his stuff and I took off fer the ridge over to Bear Tree like he done tole me. But I got to thinkin’ and figgered that without my mama nor my mamaw there to hold him back, he’d be like to kill me. So I just went along the ridge top a ways and come down here in you unses holler. I slept in your barn last night and I got me some food from that cabin over yon. But I was still hungry and—”
“Your mama and mamaw live on Bear Tree Creek? What are their names?” Elizabeth interrupted, hoping at last for something concrete.
“All us Ridders live there on Hog Run Branch—just off Bear Tree. My mama’s Prin Ridder and my mamaw’s name is Mag. Bib used to be married to my mama’s sister but she done run off and took their little girl too. Mama says that’s one reason Bib’s so mean—losin’ his little girl like that.”
Hog Run Branch. Elizabeth remembered traveling up that way with her friend Sallie Kate over a year ago. We passed a kind of clearing with four or five really awful trailers and a bunch of kids playing in the branch. There was a rotting deer head in the water. And a fire with a sofa smoldering on it. “Squalor Holler,” Sallie Kate had called the little community.
And this Calven, he was probably one of those kids. So now what? Do I take him back and deliver him to this Bib, who’s going to “whale the tar out of him”? No, of course not.
“Tell you what, Calven. How about if we find out what hospital your mama’s in and we take you to her and your grandmother? Would that work?”
The pale eyes regarded her suspiciously. “Right now?”
“No, tomorrow…that is, later today, after we’ve all had some sleep. There’s a comfy bed in the room across the hall from mine. But first, I think you’d better get cleaned up, okay?”
“I’m amazed you talked him into a bath.” Rosemary and Elizabeth were sitting in the living room, waiting for Calven to emerge. Elizabeth had turned down the bed in the guest room and readied it for her unexpected visitor. From the bathroom beyond the study, the shower could still be heard.
“Well, it was bribery. I’m afraid I told him if he bathed really good and washed his hair that he could have another bowl of ice cream.” Elizabeth furrowed her brow. “I got out a new toothbrush for him to use after the ice cream—I’m not sure how I’ll bribe him for that.”
The sound of running water ceased. They waited, almost holding their breath. At last came the creak of the bathroom door opening and the pad of bare feet.
“Son, that felt good! We ain’t had no hot water at the trailer ever since the tank busted. And campin’ out like we been doin’, ain’t nothing but ice-cold branch water.”
Calven—clad in an old pair of Laurel’s sweatpants, hastily shortened by cutting off the lower third of the legs, and an equally old sweatshirt—stood in the doorway, enthusiastically rubbing his wet hair with a towel. He looked much better, though still pale and woefully undernourished. And his hair, now that it was clean, was revealed as silver-blond.
“I’m glad it felt good, Calven.” Elizabeth reached out to scratch Ursa behind the ears. “You know, even these dogs like baths—once they’re in. Do you want that other bowl of ice cream now?”
The second bowl of ice cream had been devoured; the teeth had been brushed—no bribe needed this time; the filthy clothes had been dumped into the washing machine. Calven had crawled eagerly into bed, docilely accepting Elizabeth’s assurances that they would take him to his mother and grandmother the next day.
As Ursa and Molly positioned themselves on the guest room rug, Elizabeth and Rosemary said good night to the child. Elizabeth left the hall light on and started for her bedroom, but Rosemary clutched at her arm, whispering urgently, “Mum, do you think it’s okay…I mean, just to leave him? Should we lock the doors or—”
Elizabeth laughed. “Sweetie, I couldn’t lock him in if I wanted to. The front door key has been lost for I do
n’t know how many years and I don’t think there ever was a key to the outside door in the guest room. And I’m not about to stand guard over him. The idea of taking him to see his mother and grandmother seemed to suit him. If they can’t take care of him…Well, we’ll talk about that in the morning.”
But in the morning the boy had vanished, leaving Ursa and Molly happily snoring on the bed where he had slept. His wet clothes were still in the washer, but a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter were missing from the kitchen. On the counter lay a paper towel with a note scrawled on it. Thanks and plees don’t say nothing or I could get kiled.
7.
BIB MAITLAND
Saturday, October 8
“Phillip, I feel like an idiot.”
Elizabeth’s first move, on realizing that Calven was really gone, had been to call Phillip. Rosemary was still asleep; there was no point in awakening her just to tell her that she had been right, that someone should have kept watch. So it was Phillip who heard the first unchecked outpourings of Elizabeth’s guilty conscience. She quickly outlined the events of the previous evening, trying to present a coherent account. Soon, however, she felt a growing tide of anxiety washing over her and heard herself beginning to babble.
“I’m afraid he’ll be in danger…he’s just a little boy…and he’s barefoot and he’s afraid of this Bib. I should have made sure…. And you warned me not to go back over there and I should have realized—”
She broke off, hating the way she sounded. Like a bloody fool—appropriately enough. Forcing herself to breathe deeply, she struggled to reorder her thoughts.
“Elizabeth,” his voice was like a calming hand on her shoulder, “it’ll be okay. This isn’t your fault. Tell you what: I’ll get hold of Blaine. He’ll find the boy and get him to his folks.”
At last she put down the phone, feeling somewhat reassured, though still unhappy with her own negligence. Now I have to tell Rosie.
