“You were one of the men that found us, weren’t you?”
“Not really.” Michael glanced at Denn; then, as if suddenly coming to a decision, he said, “You see, I had a couple of boys working out here that day and-”
“Holy shit! Do you hear yourself!” Denn exploded in rage, springing down from the tailgate. “Boys? You’re reverting all the way back to type, aren’t you, Massa Michael?”
Even after all these years, his accent was more Long Island than Southern.
“Stop it, Denn.” Michael’s fist clenched and unclenched and the ice in his voice chilled the warm May air. “You’re embarrassing our visitors.”
“Well exscuu-uu-uuse me!” said Denn in a deliberately swishy Steve Martin takeoff. “No ice cream for me tonight, girls.”
He started off toward the barn, then turned back in an abrupt change of tone that sounded conciliatory to me. “We still didn’t decide on which slip for the next rack.”
“Use whichever one you like,” Michael said coldly. “I’m going to walk these ladies over to the mill.”
Out of a corner of my eye as we passed through an opening in the fence, I saw Denn flip him the bird before slamming the barn door with a bang.
11 its been one of those days
If there were homosexual marriages,” observed Michael as we hiked down the slope to where Possum Creek sparkled in the late afternoon sunlight, “gays could then get legal divorces and there would be a clean ritualistic break when things go wrong.”
“You haven’t seen as many messy divorces as I have,” I told him dryly.
We paused instinctively when we reached the bank and watched the slow-moving water ripple over rocks in the shallow creek bed. The dog, Lily, splashed out ahead of us and looked back to see if we were going to throw her a stick.
Gayle had pulled her sunglasses back down over her eyes. “Even when divorces aren’t messy, they can be sad,” she said, and I knew she was thinking of Dinah Jean and Jed.
“In any event, my apologies for that scene.”
For a moment as we stood on the creek bank gazing down into the water, I thought Michael was about to add something more and looked at him inquiringly, but Dancy reserve pulled him back behind that glass wall. Once more he became an urbane guide.
“Were you told that the first couple of days after you and your mother disappeared, the National Guard and everybody else were out looking for you?” he asked Gayle.
She nodded and brushed at a dog fly circling her head.
“By the fourth day though, they were starting to slack off. People began to think you’d never be found because they’d looked in all the logical places. Including the mill.”
“You searched it?” I asked.
“Not I. I would have that Thursday afternoon on my way out to the barn, but a couple of your brothers were here before me. Didn’t you know?”
I did, but I hadn’t realized he did.
“Just as I started to turn in, I met them driving out. Seth and-I get them all mixed up. Which is the one that’s an auctioneer?”
“Will,” I said. Was I being sensitive or was he talking about my brothers as if they were a litter of dogs? Just as numerous and just as indistinguishable?
“They said they’d checked it out and I saw no reason to do it again.”
Something snotty in his tone reminded me of Scotty Underhill ’s insinuations, and I was again on the defensive when I said, “They searched both floors. The mill was empty.”
He nodded after a split second, then continued his narrative for Gayle. “By Saturday morning, there just didn’t seem anywhere else to look. The weather’d been too wet outside, and I’d had to be in Chapel Hill all day Friday. But it faired off on Saturday, and I’d hired two guys to clear off the underbrush along the bank here while I was stacking bricks for my first kiln on the other side of the barn.”
More pesky dog flies had appeared and, as we talked, Michael pulled out his pocketknife to cut us some leafy twigs so we could brush them away from our heads.
Suddenly, from back up on the crest of the slope, we heard a car engine crank up with a loud racing of the motor, then a screech of brakes and a glimpse of the rear of the maroon Volvo as it shot out of its parking spot and almost slammed into the weeping willow beside the rail fence. There was another angry clash of gears before it dug out of the farmyard in a great cloud of dust.
A muscle jumped in Michael’s clenched jaw, but his voice was steady as he went on describing to Gayle that long-ago May morning-how the two workmen had followed the sound of her crying down along this very path. I lagged behind a moment, noticing that from this angle down below, the rose stakes nailed to the fence up there made an odd pattern against the sky.
Then, brushing at flies, I caught up with the others, and we retraced those workmen’s steps till we were opposite the abandoned gristmill. The creek was even lower this afternoon than it’d been back then, and we were able to cross on big flat rocks near the old dam without getting our shoes wet.
Lily beat us across and was waiting to shake water from her brindle coat all over our legs.
“One of them stayed here, the other hiked out and met me at the road as I was returning with their snacks.” Michael pushed the dog aside and it ran off up the bank. “The phone hadn’t been hooked up yet, so we had to drive back to the store. I called the sheriff myself and then drove on around and through the lane to wait for them.”
The mill yard was badly overgrown now. Pokeweeds were head high and beginning to put out flower stems. Poison ivy grew even more lushly. The trees around the stone walls were wrapped in vines as thick and hairy as a man’s arm, with rampant green leaves. Beneath the leaves were clouds of greenish-white blossoms. It seemed incongruous that anything so noxious could smell so sweet, but the air was permeated with a cloying fragrance I couldn’t quite trust.
The heavy wooden door had long since fallen off its hinges and we entered uneasily.
“As soon as I switched off my truck I heard your cries,” said Michael. “The sheriff had told me not to disturb anything, but I couldn’t just stand down here and listen. Besides, those two boys had already been up.”
The lower chamber felt pleasantly cool after the hot afternoon sun outside. Even better, we could discard our twig fly brushes. An end wall had half broken away and more vines had grown up through the opening where the paddle wheel had once turned. Sunlight off the water reflected light onto the stone stairwell.
“We came up these steps,” said Michael, “and I warned them to keep their hands in their pockets so we wouldn’t leave any extra fingerprints.”
The upper level was almost completely open to the elements now. Only a small section of the roof remained. Michael gestured to a spot near a sheet of fallen tin roofing. “Your mother was there. When we found her, she was on her back with her arms by her side.”
“The papers said it was like she’d been laid out for burial,” Gayle said in a small voice.
“Yes.”
There must have been bloodstains once, but eighteen years of sun and rain had scrubbed the stones clean.
Michael gestured to a spot further from the stairs. “You were over here, buckled into one of those portable plastic baskets that sit up on a metal frame. It was pink, like your blanket.”
Gayle pushed her sunglasses up as if the tinted lenses were keeping her from seeing what Michael seemed to be seeing all over again. Her eyes glistened as he described the scene.
“The sheriff said leave everything, but your voice was hoarse. Not like a baby at all. I unbuckled you and carried you downstairs and tried to get you to stop crying. You were so tiny…”
He took a deep breath, and Gayle put out her small hand and touched his arm.
Even then the Dancy in him, if that’s what it was, couldn’t let him sustain her touch. Not that he flinched dramatically or anything-I doubt if Gayle even noticed-but he shrugged self-deprecatingly and walked away from her
