The Julius House

had with my mother. We’d been talking about love, and she’d said that women who stay with men who damage them have some deep need to be damaged; they can’t possibly love the damager, that can’t be the reason they stay. A woman with a strong sense of self-preservation will leave the bad relationship to save herself; the self- preservation will kill the love, so the individual will leave and be saved from further harm. My mother had cited herself: When my father had begun to be unfaithful, she had left, and she no longer loved him.

I loved Martin so much it made me catch my breath, sometimes. He had not told me the whole truth. I was going to stay. I had no idea what he was thinking, sitting there in our new room in our new house.

I rinsed the Bon Ami out of the sink. It was gleaming. It had probably never been so clean in its entire existence.

I seemed unable to string a coherent chain of thought together. I was relieved beyond measure that it hadn’t been drugs. I would have had to leave. Guns were bad. Could I live with guns? I could live with the guns. And why on earth had Martin fallen in love with me, anyway? It was like a mating between a Martian and a Venusian. I doubled over and put my head on my arms on the counter and began to cry.

Martin heard and came in. He hated it when I cried. He turned me around and held me, and this time I pressed against him, hard, as though I were trying to crawl inside his skin. After a few moments, this had the inevitable effect, even under the emotional circumstances. Martin moved restlessly, and I kept my arms wrapped around him and raised my face to his.

Chapter Nine

Martin left for work the next morning still eyeing me warily but apparently relieved that I was quietly working on whatever reaction his revelations had raised.

I watched him walk to the garage. I had the window open to let in the cool morning air, so I heard him tell Madeleine in no uncertain terms to get off the hood of his Mercedes. Martin was so fond of his car that he would not leave it parked at the airport when he had to catch a plane, but instead invariably took one of the company cars, so the cat was living dangerously. Madeleine sauntered insolently out of the garage as Martin backed out, reversed on the concrete apron, and took off down the gravel. I went out with the bag of cat food and filled her bowl. She rewarded me with a perfunctory purr. I sat on the steps in my bathrobe and watched her eat every bit of kibble.

I went through the rest of my little morning rituals in the same numb way. I’d been faced with something so bizarre it was just going to take me a little time to assimilate it.

I thought of the men some of my classmates had married: a hardware store owner, an insurance salesman, a farmer, a lawyer. My dating a police officer had been thought very exotic by my friends. Police officers were too close to the wormy side of life, the side we didn’t see because we didn’t turn rocks over.

For whatever reason.

From our beautiful triple bedroom windows that looked out over our front yard, and across the road, to rolling fields, I spied Angel Youngblood going out for her morning run. This time she was wearing solid gold. She did her stretches, in itself an impressive sight, and then she began to run. I watched her lope down the driveway and out onto the road, long legs pumping in rhythm, blond ponytail bouncing. Angel was energetic. Soon she would be bored.

I had an idea.

I was watching for her when she came back, and when I figured she’d had time to shower and dress, I called her. I’d found their number written on the pad by the telephone on Martin’s desk when I’d gone to make an errand list the day before.

“Angel,” I said after she answered. “If you wouldn’t mind coming over after you’ve run whatever errands you need to run, I have a project.”

That morning I grasped the true beauty of the concept of having an employee. Angel and I didn’t know each other, were bound by no ties of friendship or kin or community, but she was bound to help me achieve my goal.

And since Angel was an employee, she had to help me without protest. She had come over in blue jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers, looking like a healthy farm girl who tossed bales of hay up to the loft with her bare hands. I had braided my hair to keep it out of the way. I had assembled a retractable metal tape measure, a pad and pencil, and a copy of the most comprehensive newspaper article dealing with the Julius’s family disappearance. I’d had that stuck away in a file for years, since I’d thought of doing a presentation on it for the Real Murders Club.

I intended, of course, to find the Julius family.

I handed the article to Angel and waited till she read it.

Police continue their search for the T. C. Julius family, reported missing yesterday morning by Mrs. Julius’s mother, Melba Totino.

Mrs. Totino called the police after walking across to the family home from her adjacent garage apartment Saturday morning and finding no one at home. After some hours of waiting, and the discovery that the family car and truck were still in the garage, Mrs. Totino reported the disappearance.

Missing are T. C. Julius, a retired army sergeant who had hoped to open a business locally; his wife, Hope; and their daughter Charity, 15. Julius is described as 5-11, 185 pounds, 46, with graying brown hair and blue eyes. Hope Julius has dark brown hair, blue eyes, is 5-4 and 100 pounds. She is 42 years old, and is suffering from cancer. Charity Julius, who had just begun attending the Lawrenceton High School, has blue eyes and shoulder-length brown hair. She is approximately 5-4 and 120 pounds.

The Juliuses had moved to Lawrenceton four months ago to be close to Mr. Julius’s only surviving relative, his aunt, Essie Nyland. Mrs. Nyland is described by friends as being distraught at the disappearance, “She’d been so happy at T.C. moving here, since she’s in poor health,” said one neighbor, Mrs. Lyndower Dawson. “I’m afraid this will finish her.”

The day before the disappearance appeared to be a normal one, Mrs. Totino told local authorities. She reported spending most of the day in her own apartment and joining the family for meals, as usual. She said Harley Dim-moch, a friend of Chanty Julius’s from their previous hometown of Columbia, S.C., visited the family. He left before dark, having spent the day helping Mr. Julius around the house.

In the late afternoon, local contractor Parnell Engle arrived to pour the concrete for a new patio T. C. Julius had planned at the rear of the house. He saw and spoke to Hope and Charity Julius, who both seemed normal at that time.

Detective Jack Burns describes his department as “pursuing all leads with the utmost vigor.”

“It doesn’t look as though they left voluntarily, since the family vehicles are still in the garage,” he commented. “On the other hand, there are no signs of violence and all their possessions are still here.”

He urged any resident who has knowledge of the Julius family to call the police station immediately.

There were pictures with the article: a shot of the house and a studio portrait of the family. T. C. Julius was a sturdy man with an aggressive smile and a square face. His wife, Hope, looked thin, frail, and ill, shrunken to the same size and frame as their teenage daughter. Charity Julius had shoulder-length hair that turned under neatly and an oval face like her mother’s. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but she was attractive, and she held herself like a girl who’s used to being a force to reckon with.

“That’s this house,” Angel commented, studying the picture. She checked the date at the top of the article. “Over six years ago.”

“Where do you think they are?” I asked.

“I think they’re dead,” she answered without hesitation. “He just moved here. He was going to open a new