“Would she?”
The other two shrugged and Dwight said, “Be a pretty 24 big coincidence if the money’s not connected somehow or other, but coincidences do happen. That’s why they’re called coincidences.”
“She tried to rationalize it by pleading poverty herself—that the house eats up so much of her income, she had to keep up her own appearances, and of course, all the doctor visits and the different medications they prescribe.
She’s so torn up over it, though, that she’s going to donate the money in Jonna’s name. And speaking of medicines,” I said to Lewes and Clark, “did Jonna’s doctor have a suggestion as to what Pam took from her medicine cabinet?”
Clark started to put me off, but Lewes answered candidly. “Her doctor didn’t, but the boy’s doctor prescribed some codeine-laced cough syrup a couple of weeks ago and that bottle doesn’t seem to be in the house.”
“Jonna probably threw it out,” said Dwight. “Mrs.
Shay said it made Cal so groggy that Jonna quit giving it to him.”
While we stood there talking in the doorway of the office Jonna and Frederick Mayhew had shared, five or six people arrived at the front entrance. I glanced at my watch. One o’clock. Opening time for the house, but these people, mostly women, seemed more like friends than casual tourists. Belatedly, I remembered that Mayhew had said that today was the monthly meeting of the Shaysville Historical and Genealogical Society at four o’clock, with a reception at three. The women headed through to the kitchen with boxes of canapes and the makings of punch.
Frederick Mayhew was everywhere, urging people to sign the register, suggesting that some of the men might begin setting up folding chairs in the double parlors, and giving us anxious looks every time he passed as if fearful we might rain on his parade before he could find the umbrellas.
“Any luck here in the house?”
“Nada,” said Dwight, “and we were from the attic to the basement. Looked under all the furniture, all the closets, in every storage chest. Not that there’s much of that upstairs. Like you thought, it’s just those two bedrooms that are furnished, Peter Morrow’s room on the second floor and Elizabeth’s on the third.”
“Smell any gardenias?”
“Actually, we did, so we turned that room inside out, but there’s no sign of Pam or Cal anywhere.”
“What’s next?” I asked.
“Radcliff’s got his people canvassing the area around the junkyard, but so far, ain’t nobody seen nothing,” said Agent Clark.
“We’re going to drive up into the hills and interview the cousins that the sister stayed with earlier this week,”
said Lewes.
“I guess I’ll stay here and keep going through Jonna’s records, see if I can spot anything out of the ordinary,”
Dwight said.
I saw the strain in his face, heard the frustration in his voice.
“I’m starved,” I said, trying to sound plaintive. “Could we go get something to eat first?”
He wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about finding a restaurant, so once I’d freshened up and we were in the truck, I suggested that we swing by a grocery store, grab some deli stuff, and take it back to the house.
That sounded better to him. “We probably ought to let Bandit out, too.”
Twenty minutes later, as we waited in the checkout lane at the local supermarket with sliced turkey, lettuce, sandwich rolls, and broccoli salad, Dwight reached for his wallet and a slip of paper fell out of his pocket. It was the little map Eleanor Prentice had drawn for him just before I showed them the parka I’d found.
“Damn!” said Dwight. “Dix Lunsford. I forgot all about him.”
“Who’s he?”
“Cleaning man for the Morrow House. He and his wife used to be the live-in help when the Shays had that bigger house before Jonna’s father killed himself. I think he still does some yard work for her once in a while, and his wife comes in once a week. According to Mayhew and Mrs. Shay both, they’re devoted to the family.”
Yeah, right. White employers always want to think that their black employees are devoted.
As soon as Dwight had paid for our food, he hurried me out to the truck. “If he’s known Jonna since she was a baby, then he knows Pam, too. Maybe he can tell us where she’d go to earth.”
Because Eleanor had combined the drawn map with oral instructions, I drove while he navigated.
Every little town in the South has its black section on the so-called wrong side of the railroad tracks or main highway, and Shaysville was no exception. A block of trashy unpainted shacks will butt up against blocks of modest but well-maintained bungalows. Most middle-class, white-collar blacks live in integrated neighborhoods these days, but the poor and working class still cling to the old familiar haunts.
“Take the next right,” Dwight said as I drove slowly down a street wreathed in the quiet of a cold Sunday afternoon. “It’ll be the third house on the right, brick house with green shutters. There it is. Pull in here.”
I waited in the warmth of the truck while he went up to the door and knocked. Then knocked again.
My disappointment almost matched his after it became clear that no one was home.
“Maybe they’re just having Sunday dinner with someone,” I said when he came back to the truck.
“Yeah, and maybe they’ve gone to Florida for the winter,” he said gloomily. “I’ll see if any of the neighbors
