The Julius House

“That’ll make Mandy happy. By the way,” the similar names had reminded me, “we’re going to dinner at Bill Anderson’s tonight. You sold them a house, didn’t you? What’s his wife like?”

“Nice enough, not too bright, if I remember correctly. They’re renting, with an option to buy.”

After we said our good-byes, and I returned to my task at the sink, hurrying because the attic escapade had made me late, I tried to imagine what my mother would do in my present predicament-but it was like trying to picture the pope tap dancing.

Sally arrived punctually, in a very expensive outfit that she intended to wear to rags. Sally had been forty-two for a number of years. She was an attractive woman with short permed bronzey hair. She was neither slim nor fat, neither short nor tall.

During the past two or three years, Sally had been close to breaking into the big time with a larger paper, but it just hadn’t happened. She had settled for being the mentor and terror of the young cub reporters who regularly came and went at the Sentinel as they learned their trade.

For the first time, Sally gave me a ritual hug. It was a recognition of the big things I’d undergone since last we met, the fact that I was now a respectable married woman, and not only married, but married to a real prize, an attractive plant manager who presumably had an excellent income. This really can all be conveyed in a hug.

“You look great, Roe,” Sally pronounced.

I don’t know why people seem impelled to tell brides that. Is regular sex supposed to make you prettier? A number of acquaintances had told me how great I looked since we’d come back from the honeymoon. Maybe only married sex made you look better.

“Thanks, Sally. Come on in and see the house.”

“I haven’t been in here in years. Not since it happened. Oh, who would have known there were hardwood floors! It looks wonderful!” Sally followed me around, exclaiming appropriately at each point of interest.

As I put lunch on the table, she told me all about her son Perry and the wonderful girl he’d met in his therapy group, and about her husband Paul and the shakiness of their new marriage.

“Surely you can work it out, Sally! You had such high hopes when you married him, and it’s only been a few months!”

“Fourteen,” she said precisely, spearing a strawberry with her fork.

“Oh. Well. Would marriage counseling help, do you think? Aubrey Scott is really good.”

“Maybe,” she said. “We’ll talk about it when Paul gets back from Augusta.”

“So, can you tell me all about the disappearance?” I asked gently, when she’d poked at her dill pickle for a few seconds of recovery.

“Do you have the stories from the Sentinel?”

“Yes, the main one. I really want to know what you didn’t put in the paper, or what stuck out in your mind. Were you out here then?”

“Along with a slew of other reporters. Though I did get an exclusive for one day. The disappearance was really hot for a while, until a week had passed with no news. But being the local reporter paid off.”

Sally laid down her fork and opened her briefcase. She extracted a few pages of computer printout from a file folder.

“Those are your notes?” I’d expected a spiral notebook with scribbles.

“Yes,” Sally said with a hint of surprise. “Of course I put them on a disk when I get back to the office. Let me see… this will be a reconstruction.” She glanced over the pages, organizing herself, and nodded.

“When the police got here,” she began…

There’s an old woman standing out in the driveway. She’s small, and gray, and alternately distraught and grumpy. Her name, she says, is Melba Totino, and she is the mother of Mrs. Julius, Hope Julius. They’re all gone, she says: Hope, and her husband T.C., and their girl, Charity. They vanished in the night. She herself had risen at her usual hour and gone over to the house to prepare breakfast, as she always did. She had expected all of them to be there, even Charity, who had been home sick the day before. Charity is a sophomore at Lawrenceton High, newly enrolled. She’d had a hard six weeks getting used to being in a new school, missing her boyfriend, but finally she’d adjusted. She’d had a low fever the past couple of days. But Charity, sick or not, now wasn’t in the house.

Melba Totino goes in by the front door, since the back door of the kitchen faced outward over a new expanse of concrete, poured the day before to make a patio. She is unsure whether or not it’s okay to walk on the concrete yet, so she goes to the front. The door’s unlocked. No lights on inside. No stirring, no movement.

Mrs. Totino steps inside hesitantly, calling. She doesn’t want to stroll in without warning. But no one answers her call. She creeps through the house, now anxious, looking about for signs of the untoward. The house is clean and peaceful. The cuckoo clock in the living room makes its brainless noise, and the old lady jumps.

Where is her daughter? Where is Hope? With approaching panic, the old lady finally screams up the stairs, but no one answers. Telling herself she is being ridiculous, and she’ll give them a real talking-to when they come home, Melba Totino sits at the kitchen table, waiting for someone to come. She doesn ‘t dare to touch a thing. The dishes are all put away. There is no coffee perking, nothing baking in the oven. After half an hour, she walks back out the front door and looks in the garage. She hadn’t bothered on her way over- why would she?

And now, as far as she can see, everything is the same. She doesn’t drive, she doesn’t know anything about cars, but this car is her daughter’s family car, the truck is her son-in-law’s pickup, with “Julius Home Carpentry” proudly painted on the side, phone number right below.

No one is in either vehicle.

She goes from the entrance to the garage past the stairs leading up to her apartment, across the covered walkway over to the house, into the his backyard. She is glad she has her sweater on, there’s a nip in the air for sure. There’s a turkey buzzard circling in the sky. The yard itself is empty. She looks up to the second story of the house, hoping to see movement at Charity’s window, but there is nothing.

Bewildered, trying to keep her terror a secret from herself, the old woman walks slowly back to the front of the house, still trying to keep pristine that new concrete that the owners of the house will never see again. Finally, after some interminable hours, she calls the police.

“Parnell Engle drove by that morning in his pickup truck,” Sally explained, “and since he’d poured the concrete the day before, naturally he glanced at the place as he went by. After he saw all the police cars there, he just happened to stop by the paper to check on his classified ad, and just happened to wander into the newsroom and let me know what he’d seen.”

“Naturally,” I agreed.

“Of course, this was a couple of years before he ‘found the Lord,’” Sally said. “Lucky for me, because I was able to talk to the old lady before any other reporters even knew something had happened. By the next day she wasn’t talking to anyone. Wonder where she is now?”

“In Peachtree Leisure Apartments,” I said smugly. “She gave me a wedding present.” It was not often I got to impart news to Sally.

“It’s odd she chose to stay here, with no family. I gather she and her sister had been living in New Orleans. Wonder why she didn’t go back?”

“She told me she was waiting for the Juliuses to turn up.”

Sally shuddered, and took a sip of her iced tea. “That’s creepy in more ways than one. You know, Hope Julius would be dead by now, even if she was alive.”

I raised my eyebrows, and after a second, Sally realized what she’d said. She shook her head in self- exasperation.

“What I mean is, Hope Julius had cancer,” Sally explained. “She had ovarian cancer, I think, very advanced. Though there was apparently little hope, she was undergoing radiation treatment in Atlanta. All her hair had fallen out… I remember seeing one wig and one empty stand in her room when the police let me walk through the house… Mrs. Totino said it was okay. One wig, a curly one that she wore almost every day, was gone. The one that