Authors: Cameron Judd
Apart from two fast trips to the kitchen to refill her coffee cup and one bathroom visit, she did not get out of bed again until she had read the entire collection of stories, nearly a ream of paper.
THE ILLNESS THAT HAD KEPT REV. Larry Cavness away from his Lower Lights Mission the day Eli visited had come and gone quickly. While Eli worked in his office, giving an initial edit to some of the bicentennial stories beginning to come in from the newspaper staff, meanwhile regretting that Melinda was not going to be in her office, a phone call informed him that Cavness was at the rescue mission and ready to speak with Eli anytime he wished. Finding no reason to delay, Eli was on his way within ten minutes.
Eli had developed an expectation of what Cavness’s appearance would be. He anticipated a typical gray-haired, distinguished and robust ministerial type. He was surprised.
Larry Cavness looked like he could be one of the very “flockers” to whose service his mission was dedicated. His hair was as gray as Eli had expected, but bushy, stylistically stuck in the 1970s, if it could be said to have a style at all. It was very nearly a ’fro. Cavness’s face was lean and craggy, nearly Lincolnesque. His feet were noticeably large; Eli remembered Feely’s mention of “size thirteen feet.”
It was surprisingly easy to imagine Cavness as a younger, wilder man, hiding in the shadows of church and hearing a sermon that would open his door to a new life. The traces left behind by the hard living of an earlier day were still on his face, as was the dancing girl tattoo on his forearm.
His welcome to Eli was sincere, as was his profuse apology for having missed Eli’s first visit. Eli assured him that his conversation with Donald New had been productive and had helped him understand the work of the mission, and to see a demonstration, in the person of New himself, that what happened at the mission was authentically life-changing, at least for some.
Cavness smiled. “You saw, I hope, the saying up on the wall in the worship room?”
“I did. Something about never underestimating … ”
Cavness quoted it for him: “Never underestimate the capacity of a man to change … ” He pointed his finger upward. “Or to be changed.”
“That’s a well-phrased statement, sir,” Eli said. “Your own words?”
“Words of truth, son. Straight-out truth. If they aren’t, then everything we do here is wasted, and everything I’ve staked my life on is false. But I’ve seen far too much to believe that. Too many fallen ones lifted up, too many broken lives healed. My own life chief among them.”
Eli wrote that sentence down word-for-word. Writing stories was easy when interview subjects were articulate, or at least able to express coherent thoughts. So far his information sources at the rescue mission had been of the best kind.
TYLERVILLE’S ARCADE BUILDING STOOD on Railroad Street as one of the town’s most distinctive and historic structures. Built in 1900, it was of simple design: a building that was a block deep and two stories tall, or three counting a publicly inaccessible cellar. The building was pierced front-to-back by an arch-topped tunnel walkway leading from the Railroad Street sidewalk over to McCormick Avenue. The doors at both the Railroad and McCormick entrances to the walkway were unlocked and wide open nearly around the clock, allowing a free flow of breeze and pedestrians.
A handful of storefronts and office spaces could be accessed at ground level off either side of the arched passageway. A staircase led up to the balcony-type walkway that gave access to the second-floor offices and shops.
Eli didn’t feel quite right, going to the Arcade building without Melinda. This was her kind of excursion, visiting a closed-up old law office to poke around in search of answers to unresolved questions. But Melinda was not at work today, and Eli was too curious to wait. So when his interview at the rescue mission was done, he drove downtown and headed for the Arcade, the key to Coleman Caldwell’s old law office in his pocket.
The period when the Arcade was a truly active center of town business was long past. Several of its businesses now were vacant, though once they had prospered in the days when hundreds of Kincheloe Countians flocked downtown on Saturdays for shopping and sidewalk socializing. The Arcade retained some lingering commercial life even now: a hobby shop, the Bowie and Carrigan Law Firm, the office of the public defender, a finance company. The latter was in the space where the late Henry Spancake once sold jewelry. Eli walked past them all and climbed the stairs to the upper walkway.
The door to the old and now-unused office of Coleman Caldwell, Attorney at Law, was one of the old classic variety with a frosted-glass window in the upper half. On the glass were painted Coleman’s name, title, phone number.
Dust on the key slot showed how long it had been since anyone had turned the lock, but it functioned easily and the door opened. Eli slipped inside, hoping no one was watching and wondering why a young stranger was entering a closed law office.
Caldwell’s space was divided into two offices, the front one, where Eli now was: the domain of the receptionist/secretary. The desk faced him, on it a couple of old ball-point pens, a blank yellow legal pad, and a black telephone with the sculpted look of a set decoration from a 1940s movie. The desk lamp beside it, the long-unused “Called While You Were Out” phone message pad, and the desktop itself were coated with a heavy layer of dust.
Eli flipped the light switch and discovered the old schoolroom-styled ceiling light still worked.
Lining the right-hand wall were metal filing cabinets. Most of the drawers proved empty, a few contained faded, never-used file folders, and one held a moldy rat’s nest made from rodent-shredded legal papers, letters, and yellowed envelopes. The rat had long since departed the earthly realm, its remains a dried, skeletal husk in the back right corner of the drawer. A wincing Eli closed the drawer fast.
A couple of drawers still held files with old correspondence and the like, nothing possessing any obvious relevance, and to Eli’s relief there were no more rat’s nests and no current rodent residents.
He glanced in the drawers of the secretary’s desk and found them completely empty except for an old letter opener. On to the back office, the one Caldwell himself had occupied. The same key that had given Eli initial entry worked in this lock as well.
Much more old junk here, and less tidiness. Nicer file cabinets, though – these were varnished hardwood trimmed in brass, probably antiques. The desk was oaken and big, similar to the one he and Melinda had found in the old office in Harvestman Lodge.
Finding the right key, Eli opened the locks on the desk and opened the drawers.
Caldwell had left behind much more than his receptionist had. Typical desk contents … Eli sorted through it as fast as he could, and found nothing interesting. He abandoned the desk and turned attention to the filing cabinets.
Within ten minutes he had stacked upon the desk several files, another filled manuscript box, half a dozen notebooks scrawled through from front to back. All of the items were labeled in ways that linked their content to Harvestman Lodge.
Caldwell had said Eli would be able to locate what he was looking for. It appeared that he had.
Could there be more? If so, where? Eli looked around the room and saw no unexplored cabinets, no overlooked file boxes …
Yet he couldn’t escape the feeling there was something he was missing. Try as he would, he could spot nothing to justify the feeling.
He noticed then the huge, old-fashioned schoolroom-style map of the United States that hung on one of the walls. The top of it was nearly at ceiling level. How close to the floor it reached he could not see because it extended down behind the filing cabinets, which is why he had not noticed it when he first came in.
And there was nothing gained in noticing it now. It was just a map.
Time to go.
Looking at the items he was preparing to carry out of the office, he wondered what Caldwell would think about him doing so. He’d told Eli to come and get the manuscript of his Harvestman-inspired novel. He’d given no specific permission to remove anything else.
Neither had he specifically prohibited it.
“Forgiveness is more easily found than permission,” Eli said aloud, quoting one of his late father’s frequent sayings, and prepared to leave with his documents.
He glanced out the window to the street outside and below, and went dead still. “Who the heck?”
Two men in one car, backing out of a street-side parking spot outside the Arcade. One had to be a Parvin; the distinctively glaring eyes were sufficient evidence of that. The other man was Asian. Korean parents, if Eli had to guess. His face had a long scar on one side.
He’d not seen an Asian in this town the entire time he’d been here, and wondered who this man was. It would be no real oddity for someone of foreign extraction to be in a college town, especially one with several industries, a couple of them internationally owned. Even so, something about this man caught the eye in an inexplicably unsettling way. Maybe it was the scar.
Leaving the Caldwell office suite in as neat a condition as he could, Eli scanned the room one last time, made sure the desk and cabinets were locked again, turned out the lights, and closed the door after one last stare at that big map behind the cabinets. Back in the up-front reception area, he made sure everything was closed and locked, and left behind the office suite of Coleman Caldwell, Attorney at Law, his borrowed materials under his left arm.
Walking out the Arcade front door, he noticed that the car with the two men was gone.
Unnerving, they had been, particularly the Asian one. He had no idea why.
Chapter Forty-Two
THE MESSAGE ELI FOUND ON his office answering machine when he got back to Hodgepodge literally made him feel faint and sick. He dropped into his chair and tried to take in the last thing he’d wanted to hear.
It was Lundy’s recorded voice: “Hey, buddy, Davy Carl asked me to call you and let you know some bad news. He’s pretty tore up over it and I think he was afraid he’d embarrass himself from crying on the phone. We lost Jimbo this morning, Eli. Another heart attack, this one the big one. He went fast and quiet, with his sister and his preacher there with him. That last part was just luck, or the kindness of God, or something, because there’d been no sign a new attack was coming and no call to the family and preacher to come in. The preacher just happened to stop by to see Jimbo when Flora was already there. Flora says Jimbo was happy and talking about all he was going to do when he got better. He told his preacher that he’d made his peace with God two days before, even though he felt sure he still had years ahead of him. Jimbo said he’d prayed to Jesus to be saved from his sins, and knew that he had been. That, of course, launched the preacher into a big long flowery speech about salvation, or so Flora said, and when he was finally done he asked Jimbo something. That’s when they realized Jimbo had slipped out on them while the preacher was talking. As peaceful a passing as a man could have.
“By the way, no staff meeting this morning. The Brechts are with Flora. She’s taking it rough, and so are they. Mr. Carl was sobbing like a baby, I hear. They’ve asked me to put together the obituary. Lucky for me, old workaholic Davy Carl had already put together most of the obit information on a disk, just to be ready in case Jimbo didn’t make it through his heart trouble. All I’ve got to do is put a little spark into Davy Carl’s writing so the obituary doesn’t come across deader than the one it’s written about.”
Eli was in tears himself when Melinda showed up at his door to give her usual good morning. It fell to him to deliver the news about Jimbo, and she shuddered into an emotional wreck in moments. Sinking into a chair, she buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
With no staff meeting to run to, and with Melinda similarly at loose ends for the moment and too emotionally jolted to function anyway, Eli simply sat silently with her and thought back on the happiness Jimbo had brought to him and Melinda through his simple kindness and gestures of affection, such as placing those lunchtime table covers on the picnic table out back, and the rings he had provided in his hope of seeing the two married.
In a burst of realization, Eli knew the moment had come. A Monday morning of a work week, a moment when both he and Melinda were struck numb by an emotional shock, nothing romantic in the setting, no planning or setup done … and yet it was unquestionably time. Eli opened his desk, reached in. From their small, hard-shell box, he removed the rings Jimbo had given him. He slipped the wedding ring into his shirt pocket, and with the engagement ring in his hand knelt on the floor beside his desk, and asked Melinda to stand.
He looked up at her tear-stained face and knew his own was probably as splotched, probably, and his eyes just as red. A man wanted to look irresistibly handsome when he made his marriage proposal, and Eli had serious doubts that he fit that bill at the moment.
“Dear Melinda, I had no idea when I woke up this morning that I’d be asking you this today. Especially at a time when something so upsetting has happened.”
“Oh, Eli … ”
“But in a way, it seems kind of fitting to do this now, considering it was Jimbo who made it possible. So maybe it honors him to do this on this particular day, to make a day of ending also be a day of beginning. And it’s a beginning I know Jimbo would have wanted.”