He reddened when I didn’t speak. “I guess it’s a professional hazard, giving out emotional pats on the back,” he said finally. “I apologize.”
I nodded. “How is Krista?” I asked.
“She’s fine,” he said, surprised. “It’s a little hard to get her to understand that her friend’s mother is gone, she seems not to see it as a reality yet. That can be a blessing, you know. I think we’ll be keeping Eve for a while until Emory can cope a little better. Maybe the baby, too, if Lou thinks she can handle it.”
“Didn’t Lou tell me she’d taken Krista to the doctor last week?” I asked.
If Jess noticed the contrast between my lack of response to his observations about my family and my willingness to chatter about his child, he didn’t comment on it. Parents almost always seem willing to believe other people are as fascinated with their children as they are.
“No,” he said, obviously searching his memory. “Krista hasn’t even had a cold since we started her on her allergy shots last summer.” His face lightened. “Before that, we were in to Dr. LeMay’s every week, it seemed like! My goodness, this is so much better. Lou gives Krista the shots herself.”
I nodded and began opening cabinets in the kitchen. Jess took the hint and left, pulling on his heavy coat as he walked across the yard. Evidently he wasn’t going to stay at Emory’s long.
After he left I wrote a note on a pad I found under Varena’s phone. I hopped in my car and drove to the motel. As I’d expected, Jack’s car wasn’t there. I pulled up in front of his room. I squatted and slid the note under his door.
It said, “Krista O’Shea didn’t go to the doctor recently.” I didn’t sign it. Who else would be leaving Jack a note?
On my way back to Varena’s, I scavenged alleys for more boxes. I was particularly interested in the alley behind the gift store and furniture store.
It was clean, for an alley, and I even scored a couple of very decent boxes before I began my search. There was a Dumpster back there; I was sure the police had been through it, since it was suspiciously empty. The appliance carton Christopher Sims had been using for shelter was gone, too, maybe appropriated by the police.
I looked down the alley in both directions. Main Street was on one end, and anyone driving east would be able to glance down the alley and catch a glimpse of whoever was in it, unless that person was in the niche where Sims’s box had been located.
To the south end of the alley was a quiet street with small businesses in older houses and a few remaining homes still occupied by one family apiece. That street, Macon, saw quite a lot of foot traffic; the square’s parking space was severely limited, so downtown shoppers were always looking for a spot within walking distance.
It sure would be easy to catch a glimpse of Christopher Darby Sims while he squatted in this alley. It sure would be tempting to capitalize on the presence of a homeless black in Bartley. It would be no trouble at all to slip through the alley with, say, a length of bloody pipe. Deposit it behind a handy box.
The back door of the furniture store opened. A woman about my age came out, looking cautiously at me.
“Hi,” she called. She was clearly waiting for me to account for my presence.
“I’m collecting boxes for my sister’s move,” I told her, gesturing toward my car with its open trunk.
“Oh,” she said, relief written on her face in big bold letters. “I hate to seem suspicious, but we had a… Lily?”
“Maude? Mary Maude?” I was looking at her just as incredulously.
She came down the back steps of the building in a rush and threw her arms around me. I staggered back under her weight. Mary Maude was still pretty and always would be, but she was considerably rounder than she had been in high school. I made myself hug her back. “Mary Maude Plummer,” I said tentatively, patting her plump shoulder very gently.
“Well, it was Mary Maude Baumgartner for about five years, and now it’s back to Plummer,” she told me, sniffing a little. Mary Maude had always been emotional. I had a clenched feeling around my heart. I had a lot of memories of this woman.
“You never called me,” she said now, looking up at me. She meant, after the rape. I could never get away from it here.
“I never called anyone,” I said. I had to tell Mary Maude the truth. “I couldn’t face doing it. I had too hard a time.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “But I’ve always loved you.”
Always right to the emotional truth, no matter how uncomfortable. Could this be why I’d never called Mary Maude after my Bad Time? We’d let go of each other, taken a step back.
I remembered another important truth. “I love you too,” I said. “But I couldn’t stand to be around people who were always thinking about what had happened to me. I couldn’t do it.”
She nodded. Her red hair, almost to her shoulders, turned under in a neat curve all the way around, and she had heavy gold earrings in her pierced ears. “I think I can understand that. I’ve been all these years forgiving you for refusing my comfort.”
“Are we all right?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling up at me. “We’re all right, now.”
We both gave a little laugh, half happy, half embarrassed.
“So, you’re getting boxes for Varena?”
“Yeah. She’s getting her stuff out of the cottage. The wedding’s day after tomorrow. And after the murder last night…”
“Oh, right, that’s the place Varena rented! You know, the husband, Emory, works right here, with me.” And Mary Maude pointed at the door from which she’d issued. “He’s the sweetest guy.”
He would certainly have been aware of Christopher Sims’s presence in the alley in back of the store.
“So, I guess you knew this guy was living back here, the purse snatcher?”
“Well, we’d caught glimpses. Just in the two days before the police got him. Wait… my God, Lily, was that you who kicked him?”
I nodded.
“Wow, girl, what have you done with yourself?” She eyed me up and down.
“Taken karate for a few years, worked out some.”
“I can tell! You were so brave, too!”
“So you knew Sims was back here?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. But we weren’t sure what to do about it. We’ve never had any problem like that, and we were trying to decide what the safe thing to do was, and what the Christian thing to do was. It’s tough when that might not be the same thing! We got Jess O’Shea down here to talk to the man, try to see where he wanted a bus ticket to, you know? Or if he was sick. Or hungry.”
So Jess had actually met the man.
“What did Jess say?”
“He said this Sims guy told him he was just fine right where he was, he had been getting handouts from some people in the, you know, black community, and he was just going to stay in the alley until God guided him somewhere else.”
“Somewhere where they had more purses?”
“Could be.” Mary Maude laughed. “I hear Diane positively identified him. He told Diane at the police station that he was an angel and was trying to point out to Diane the hazards of possessing too many worldly goods.”
“That’s original.”
“Yeah, give him points for a talent for fiction, anyway.”
“He say anything about the murders?” Since Mary Maude apparently had such access to the local gossip pipeline, I thought I might as well tap in.
“No. Isn’t that a little strange? You’d think on one hand he’d be too deranged to understand that the murders are so much more serious, and yet he’s saying that he never saw the pipe until the police found it stuffed behind his box, you know, the one where he was sleeping.”
I noticed that Mary Maude had come to check me out without a coat on, and she was shivering in her expensive white blouse and sweater-vest embroidered in holly and Christmas ornaments. Our reunion had its own background sound track, as the loudspeakers positioned around the square continued to blare out Christmas music.
