concealed in the house, anticipating this very break-in.
This was knotty.
I called the police station and reported the break-in, and had a few moments to think hard.
The safest thing was a straight break-in. I don’t know nothin‘, boss.
It helped immensely that Claude didn’t come. Dedford Jinks, the detective who’d so frightened Bobo, and two patrolmen responded to my call. Claude was in a meeting with the county judge and the mayor and had not been told about the incident, I gathered from listening to the patrolmen.
Dedford was a good ole guy with a beer gut hanging over a worn belt buckle he’d won in his calf-roping days. He had thin graying hair, a thin compressed mouth, and a ruddy complexion. Dedford was nobody’s fool.
My story was this: I’d heard little noises, but thought that a member of the family had come in. From then on, I told the truth: I’d plugged in the vacuum and turned it on, I’d heard a big commotion, I hadn’t seen anyone.
After they’d checked out the backyard and found a gate unlocked, and many footprints in the flower beds, the police said I could go.
“I have to clean up,” I said, gesturing to the glass on the Winthrops’ thick hunter-green carpet. They’d gathered up the biggest pieces for fingerprint testing, but there were lots of fragments.
“Oh,” said one of the patrolmen, disconcerted. “Well, OK.”
Then Howell burst into the house, moving faster than I’d ever seen him move. His face was red.
“My God, Lily, are you all right?” He actually took one of my hands and held it. I reclaimed it. This was strange. I could feel the policemen looking at each other.
“Yes, Howell, I’m fine.”
“They didn’t hurt you?”
I gestured wide with my hands to draw his notice to my uninjured body.
“But the bruise on your forehead?”
I touched my face carefully. Sure enough, my forehead was tender and puffy. Thanks, Mr. Ponytail. I hoped his ear hurt.
“I guess I ran into the doorframe,” I said. “I got pretty excited.”
“Well, sure. But one of the men didn’t…”
“No.”
“I had no idea you were going to be here today,” Howell said, taking his snowy white handkerchief out of his pocket and patting his face with it. “I am so glad you weren’t harmed.”
“I came to do your wife’s closet. It’s just a twice-a-year thing,” I explained. For me, I was talking too much. I hoped no one would notice. I was rattled. I knew now that Howell was directly involved in this day’s peculiar doings. At least it was Howell who had let Ponytail in, so he had been here legitimately. I guessed Howell was now wondering where the hell his man was and what part he’d played in this fiasco.
“I’ll just clean up this mess and go,” I suggested again.
“No, no, you need to go home after this,” Howell exclaimed, his handsome, fleshy face creased with anxiety. “I’ll be glad to clean it up.”
Definite glances between all police personnel within earshot. Shit.
“But I’d like to…” I let my sentence trail off as Dedford raised an eyebrow in my direction. If I insisted longer, so would Howell, drawing more attention to his unusual preoccupation with my condition. He was obviously guilt- stricken. If he kept this up, everyone present would figure something strange was going on, and they might think it was more than Howell having an affair with his maid, which was bad enough.
“Where’s your car?” Howell asked suddenly.
“It wouldn’t start this morning,” I said wearily, by now tired of explaining myself. “I walked.”
“Oh my God, all that way! I’m sure one of these boys will be glad to give you a ride home!”
One of the “boys,” the older paunchier one with a disbelieving mouth, said he sure would be glad to do that.
So I got delivered to my house in style. My car was still in my carport, but with a sheet of yellow legal paper stuck under the windshield. It read,
“I know they ain’t no ordinance against it,” he replied, and his face closed like a fist. “Likewise they ain’t no ordinance against the blacks meeting to talk about it, which they aim to do tonight.”
“Where?”
“The meeting? At the Golgotha A.M.E. Church on Castle Road. We got to maintain a presence, case there’s any trouble.”
“That’s good,” I said, and after thanking the man for giving me a ride home (and being willing to part with information without asking any questions) I sat in my recliner and thought.
Chapter Five
I don’t know what I expected of the rest of the day. I think I expected the man in the closet to pop up any minute; to tell me what had happened when he left, to ask me if he’d hurt me in our struggle, to explain himself.
After seeing him everywhere I turned, now he was nowhere. I passed through being worried, to being angry, and back through worried. I made my feelings cool down, concentrated on chilling them; I told myself the fear and rage engendered by our silent struggle in Beanie Winthrop’s walk-in closet-what a location-had nudged me past some internal boundary marker.
Out of sheer restlessness, that night I attended the meeting at Golgotha A.M.E. Church. I found it with a little difficulty since it was in the center of the largest black residential area in Shakespeare, which I seldom had reason to visit. The church itself, redbrick and larger than I expected, was set up on a knoll, with cracked concrete steps bordered by a handrail leading up to the main doors. It was on a corner lot, and there was a big streetlight shining down those steps. Golgotha was so centrally located that I saw many people walking to the meeting despite the gusty cold wind.
I also saw two police cars on the way there. One was driven by Todd Picard, who gave me an unhappy nod. It was easy to tell that every time he saw me, I reminded him of something he wanted to forget. I felt the same way about him.
I went up the steps of the church at a fast clip, anxious to get out of the wind. It seemed to me I’d been cold all day. There were double doors at the top of the steps, and inside those, a large foyer with two coatracks, a table spread with lots of free literature on Planned Parenthood and Alcoholics Anonymous and the practice of daily prayer, and the doors to two rooms, one on each side, that I guessed were vesting rooms or perhaps served for choir practice. Ahead, there were two sets of doors into the body of the church. I picked the right set of doors and followed the flow of people into the sanctuary. There was a long center set of pews and a shorter set on each side, with wide aisles in between, the same conformation I’d seen in many churches. I picked a long central pew at random, and scooted toward the center to give later arrivals easy access.
The meeting was scheduled to begin at seven, and surprisingly enough it did. The high attendance on a cold school night was a measure of how strong feeling was running in the African-American community. Mine was not the only white face in view. The Catholic sisters who ran a preschool for disadvantaged children were seated some distance away, and Claude was there: a good public relations move, I thought. He gave me a curt nod. Sheriff Marty Schuster was sitting beside Claude on the dais. To my surprise, he was a small wizened man you would’ve thought couldn’t arrest a possum. But his appearance was deceiving; I’d heard more than once that Sheriff Schuster had cracked his share of skulls. Schuster’s secret, Jim Box had told me one morning, was to always strike first and hardest.
Claude and Marty Schuster shared the platform with a man I supposed was the church’s pastor, a short, square man with great dignity and angry eyes. He was holding a Bible.
Another light face caught my eye. Mookie Preston was there, too, sitting by herself. When Lanette Glass came
