When Did We Lose Harriet? (19 page)

The garage was a small concrete building, badly in need of paint, but restful. Its walls reflected the morning sun. Wildflowers bloomed in tall clumps of grass that miraculously poked their way through cracks in the pavement. I parked close to a stall where a blue backside was bent over the front fender of a red pickup truck, approached the truck, and checked out the fender. “Looks like they hit somebody,” I said pleasantly.

“A tree, he told me.” That stringy old man had probably been around the garage almost as long as it had stood. “Something I can do for you?”

I checked the card Julie had given me. “Are you Mr. McGuire?”

“Yessum, that’s me.” He wore his grease-stained chino shirt and pants with dignity.

“Is that William Sykes’s truck? His daughter gave me your name.”

He nodded. “Yep. Skidded in the storm last night. Needs a coupla dents removed.” He spoke in fragments rather than sentences, as if more accustomed to silence.

I pointed toward the Buick. “I’ve got a similar problem. Something skidded in the rain and hit me. Any chance you could make that good as new?”

The practiced hand he ran over my dents was oil-black in the seams and gnarled, as if it had worked with cars too long to ever be clean again. “Can’t get to it till tomorrow, and I’ll probably have to get a new fender and back bumper. Don’t make cars like they used to. And it sounds like you’ve got a problem with your rear end alignment, too. That’ll need fixing.”

“Whatever,” I told him. “Just work as fast as you can. The car belongs to my brother, and he’s getting out of the hospital in a day or two. He won’t be able to drive for a few days, but I don’t want him fretting over his car.”

His dark eyes glinted with amusement. “He know you banged it up?”

“No, and let’s keep it that way. That’s why I asked the Sykes’s for the name of somebody good and quick.” I went over and stroked the pickup fender. Against the vivid red was a darker streak of a different red—the same color as Jake’s Buick. I felt myself tremble with excitement, but I called as innocently as I knew how, “Look! It looks like this truck could have hit my car.”

The mechanic compared the smear on William’s right front fender and the dent in the Buick’s left front fender. “Sure does.” His experienced fingertips stroked my dent again. “How’d you say yours got banged up, again?”

“Somebody hit me in the rain. I didn’t see who it was.”

He shook his head. “It was a bad storm. You mighta got in Mr. Sykes’s way and he didn’t even know it. That’d be something, wouldn’t it? You knowing each other an’ all.”

“It sure would be something,” I agreed.

I left him Jake’s keys and telephone number and called a cab from his crowded little office. If necessary, I would have a witness that William Sykes’s truck hit me last night. But who was driving the truck?

Many a man claims to have
unfailing love, but a faithful man
who can find?
Proverbs 20:6

Mac was going to spend Wednesday afternoon with her brother. I—Josheba—was planning to put my feet up and do nothing. About two, Lewis called. “You free for a while? I’m taking this afternoon off, and there’s a place I want to go.”

My stomach did a queer flip-flop that was odd for somebody expecting Morse back by Saturday. “I guess so. I’ve got some studying to do, but it can wait. I’ve got some things to tell you anyway. Let’s take my car, though. I’m partial to air conditioning.”

“Me, too. Why do you think I asked you along?”

He came out to the car wearing a light blue shirt and white jeans and looking so fine I couldn’t help exclaiming, “You look
good
today!”

He checked out my white pants, batik shirt, and sandals. “You don’t look so bad yourself.” I’d better not. I’d spent the past half hour deciding what to wear.

Before I started the car again, I said, “I hate to start out the afternoon with bad news, but you need to know two things. First, somebody tried to run Mac down last night. Ricky’s out of jail, and it could well have been him.”

“Is Mac okay?” He looked so worried, I could have hugged him.

“Shaken up a bit, but okay otherwise.”

“Who bailed him out?”

“I don’t know. The police said it was somebody who wishes to remain anonymous.”

Lewis grunted. “That’s one anonymous donor we could all have done without.” He was silent a minute, then asked, “You said two things?”

That one was harder to say. “Mac and I think Harriet is dead. They found a body up in Oakwood Cemetery last month not long after she disappeared, and the artist’s picture looks exactly like her.” My voice wobbled a little.

He was silent a moment, then he laid one hand over mine. “I’m sorry, Josheba, if she is. I really did think old Harriet would come stomping back in one day to keep us all in line. You said they found her last month. Why are they just getting around to identifying her?”

“They aren’t identifying her, Mac and I are.” When I had explained, I finished up, “So the police aren’t sure yet, but we are. I can’t believe how sad this has made me, Lewis. I didn’t even know her well—just at the library—but I’ve been thinking about her all day.”

“Sounds like you could use some distraction. Start the motor, sister, and drive on.” He wouldn’t tell me where we were going, just said things like “Turn right at the second corner” or “Now go straight a while.” Finally we turned onto North Hull, and I knew.

“I haven’t been here since grammar school! I used to love to prowl around this place.” We were heading to Old Alabama Town, a few blocks where they’ve brought together a lot of old buildings to represent Alabama a
hundred years ago. There’s a farm, a church, an old grange hall, an apothecary, a little school—a whole little village right near downtown.

“I come here whenever I need to get perspective,” Lewis told me. “It reminds me that people in the past had problems, too, and things did change. Our problems won’t mean much in a hundred years, and maybe some more things will have changed, too.”

“We’ll be dead by then,” I reminded him.

“There is that,” he admitted.

The front office was crisp and cool, but when we went back out, the heat swelled back toward us like a wave. Lewis looked around, surprised. “I guess nobody else is around today.”

“Everybody else is smart,” I informed him.

He shifted his shoulders in his blue shirt. “It is a little hot and muggy today. Do you mind?”

“Sure I mind, but is Montgomery in July ever anything else?” It wasn’t very funny, but he laughed, then I laughed, then we both laughed just because we were laughing. In spite of all the worry over Harriet, I’d laughed more that week than I had since Mama died.

Then I felt a twinge of disloyalty to Morse. “I shouldn’t be here,” I told him.

He shrugged. “Well, so long as you are, you might as well have a good time. This is a day the Lord has made, Josheba. Let’s rejoice and be glad in it.”

I shook my head. “I told you, Lewis, I don’t believe in God anymore.”

He turned and gently tilted my chin. “Daddy got killed, so God gets the chill?”

“You got that right,” I said fiercely. “I won’t believe in a God who lets good people die. I want a God who keeps people from dying!”

He gently stroked my cheek with a finger as light as the kiss of a rose. “Honey, your daddy died because he
believed in a God who would die
himself
for somebody he loved. Think where you and I would be today if people like Dr. King and your daddy hadn’t lived and died. Their very lives were a prayer. And you know what else? Everything you’ve done this week to find Harriet is following right in your daddy’s footsteps. Don’t tell me you don’t believe in God. You pray and don’t know it.”

I broke away and walked angrily toward a house made of two separate rooms connected by a breezeway. As long as we were here, we might as well get our money’s worth, but I didn’t plan to speak to him again the entire afternoon.

Lewis caught up with me as I was climbing the steps. “They call this a dogtrot house. Actually it looks like a woman trot house to me. Can you imagine running back and forth every time your pot boiled over or your baby cried?”

I knew he was trying to make me smile, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Stalking away, I headed toward the old grange hall. It was infernally hot. Lewis found a switch to turn on ceiling fans, but they merely stirred the heat into a muggy stew. While he wandered about looking at faded pictures of once elegant houses—white folks’ houses, now destroyed by time—I strolled over to an old loom and stroked it gently. He came up behind me and covered my hand with his. I trembled, turned, and pulled away.

He drew me back and turned me to him. Before I knew it was coming, he bent his head and gently kissed me full on the lips.

I would have pushed him away, but the world was swinging around so fast I needed to hold on for dear life. I don’t know whether we stood there a minute or an hour. Probably somewhere in between. Finally I found the fortitude to jerk away. “No, Lewis!”

I hurried over to examine an old carriage as carefully as if I planned to buy it to ride my children in. He spoke
softly behind me. “You can’t just pretend this hasn’t happened.”

I took a step away and spoke over one shoulder. “I can try. And I can make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Oppressed by the heat and the weight of my own feelings, I stepped past him and into the bright sunlight.

In the shotgun house, I averted my eyes from the sagging rope bed and looked carefully at an insipid doll with a white china face. Lewis wandered into another room. I was glad he was away from me, but as I caught a glimpse of him through an open doorway, his back and trim dark head seemed dearer than any I had ever known.

Determined I could beat this thing, I wandered into the room where he was and looked over the furniture. Then, just as I turned to read a plaque on one wall, he turned to look at an old dresser on another, and suddenly I was in his arms again. Once more we seemed to fuse together.

He broke away this time, and gestured to the door. “Let’s go down on the farm, where it’s cooler.”

He led the way to a corner set up like an old farmyard, complete with log cabin. There he sank to the silver porch boards at the top of the steps and motioned me to sit down beside him. I made sure to leave enough space between us.

“This looks a lot like the house my granddaddy used to have,” he said when I was settled. “Feels like a good place to talk. How attached are you to this man you’re thinking about marrying?”

I was so startled that I replied in one word: “Very.”

“Then why are you spending so much time with me?”

I started to answer, but he held up one slim brown hand. “I know, you wanted my help in finding Harriet, right? But now you’ve found her. So why are you here?”

“Well,” I said slowly, “I guess because I enjoy your company. And as you yourself pointed out not long ago, surely a man and a woman can be friends without…”

He shook his head in quick denial. “I’m not as sure of that as I was.”

“Neither am I,” I admitted in a small voice.

We didn’t say a word for several minutes, watching a bright Monarch butterfly gently fan its wings on a head of Queen Anne’s lace. When Lewis did speak, he talked to the butterfly instead of me. “I want to tell you some things about myself, things I’m not proud of. After that, you may never want to see me again, but if you do, I won’t always be worrying you’ll find out.” He reached into his pocket, brought out a toothpick wrapped in plastic, opened it, and stuck it into a corner of his mouth.

“You look like a hayseed,” I muttered, hoping to distract him from getting serious.

“I am a hayseed,” he told me. “My granddaddy was a sharecropper. Now listen! When I got out of law school, I was plumb broke. I’d borrowed so much money I thought I’d never be able to pay it back, and everything was so expensive! Books, the right clothes for interviews, a car to drive—I had my eye on a Jag in those days.”

“Something’s happened to your eyes,” I told him, thinking of his broken-down Ford.

He laughed, but it wasn’t humorous. “Yeah. I started seeing more clearly. Back then, though, not too long after I found a job at the bottom of a firm in Nashville—the very bottom, sort of a glorified clerk—some men approached me. Told me they would lend me a condo in the Bahamas several times a year if I’d do a little job for them. I thought they wanted me to represent them, but that wasn’t it. They wanted me to pretend to represent them so I could travel back and forth and carry drugs.”

“You could have been arrested. Or killed!” I added, horrified.

He shook his head. “They had it fixed up so there wasn’t as much risk as you’d think. These guys knew what they were doing. And they offered me a lot of
money—like they knew exactly how much debt I had. I told myself I wasn’t using drugs or selling drugs, and if I didn’t bring them in, somebody else would. Why shouldn’t I get all that money? When I told you about how much money I used to make as a lawyer? It wasn’t as a lawyer.” He gave a bitter little grunt. “My granddaddy used to plow with a mule. I bet he never thought one of his grandsons would be one.” He fell silent.

“What made you quit?” Then I had a terrifying thought. “You did, didn’t you?”

He nodded soberly and threw away his toothpick as if it had suddenly gone sour. “One day I got a call to come get my little brother Tony out of jail. He’d been picked up selling drugs on his college campus. You know why he was selling? To support his habit. My baby brother! He was in college, with the whole world in front of him, and—” He shook his head and his eyes filled with sudden tears. “You can’t imagine how awful it’s been, Josheba. I’ve spent almost every penny I made carrying drugs trying to get Tony off them. He’s been in and out of rehab so many times I’ve stopped counting, and he never stays clean more than a month. Almost as bad as what’s happened to him is what it’s done to our mama. She wouldn’t believe it in the beginning. Now she’s given up hope.

“I found myself furious with whoever started him on the stuff. Then I found out it was somebody Tony met at my place one afternoon, one of my own contacts. When I pointed a finger at him, I pointed three at me. I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing and look myself in the mirror. I decided it was time to spend some time helping other kids stay clean. Call it penance, call it a memorial to Tony, call it whatever you want, but I quit the firm and called a law-school buddy down here who’s always worked with kids. He found me this job.”

He sighed. “Harriet found out about my past, by the way. Tony came by one day looking for money and when I
turned him down, he yelled something about my being high and mighty now, but pushing drugs before. I hadn’t, of course, not technically, but Harriet heard. She got on my case after he left, said she’d spread the word if I didn’t give her Coke money.” He laughed. “Like I told you once or twice before, it was a bit of a relief when she decided to up and go.” He sobered. “I wouldn’t have wanted her dead, though.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted out what came first to my mind. “Will you ever be a lawyer again?”

“I may go back to practicing someday. I don’t know. But I do know I had to tell you all this before I ask you to marry me instead of old what’s-his-name.”

I lifted my head, startled. He was serious!

He held up one hand to keep me from speaking. “Don’t answer yet. I don’t even want to know what you’re thinking right now. Just promise to think about it, okay?”

I dropped my eyes and studied a robin hopping around on the walk. “I don’t need to think,” I said stubbornly. “I like you, Lewis, but I can’t marry you.” I slid a few inches farther away and began to trace circles on a silvery old board between us. “You—this may sound trite, but you are very special to me. Very special,” I repeated with emphasis, “and I have never felt so cared for, so”—I raised my eyes to meet his—“so in tune with somebody.”

His eyebrows rose. “Never?”

I shook my head and answered honestly. “Never. But a few months ago I made a promise I intend to keep. Morse hasn’t done anything to deserve this.” I thought about Morse raging about that silly shirt, whining about the bad weather, or partying up there with any women who came along. “Morse doesn’t deserve this,” I amended it swiftly. “You matter to me a whole lot, but my word means something, too.”

“Even if the person you gave it to doesn’t.”

“Don’t say that!” I cried hotly. “Morse does matter, in many ways. He hurts me sometimes, sure. Deep inside I keep wondering if what I feel for you isn’t just a reaction…”

He reached out and gripped my wrist hard. “Don’t say that!” he repeated my own words. “What we feel is real and special and ours. Say it!”

“What we feel is real and special and…” I faltered, then looked him straight in the eyes. “…ours. You’re right, it is. But it’s got to stop.”

“You could change your promise,” he suggested, taking my hand and tracing a circle over and over in my palm. “Make it to me, instead. If you have regrets—”