Muletrain to Maggody (10 page)

Lottie was eyeing the house. “I wonder if the doors and windows aren’t a little bit flimsy after a hundred and fifty years. We might just be able to slip inside and fetch the journal.”

“Slip inside?” echoed Elsie. “Don’t you mean
break
inside? That’s a crime, and I for one ain’t a criminal. I can just hear myself calling my sister from the jail and asking her to bail me out. What’s more, there are a lot of unsavory folks in jail, like bikers with tattoos and prostitutes with brassy red hair and skin-tight leather shorts. I have no intention of makin’ their acquaintance, thank you very much. I have been teaching Sunday school classes at the Assembly Hall for thirty years. I wouldn’t know what to say to ’em.”

Lottie continued assessing the window frames. “We’re not going to commit some terrible crime, Elsie. All we’re going to do is borrow the journal long enough to study it for clues. We’ll put it back exactly where we found it, and no one will be the wiser. There’s a big difference between stealing and borrowing.”

“There’s not a big difference between misdemeanors and felonies,” muttered Elsie, who watched police dramas, including reruns at all hours of the night. “We could end up doing ten years for breaking and entering.”

Eula’s lips began to quiver. “I think we ought to leave.”

“We’re not going to break anything,” Lottie said. “I’ll bet that window over there will slide right open. We’ll have to enter, of course, but we shouldn’t be inside for more than a few minutes.”

Her reluctant partners in crime followed her to the side yard. The windowsills were high, but someone had left a wheelbarrow near the back porch. Ignoring increasingly agitated whispers from Elsie and Eula, Lottie wheeled it under a promising window, settled it as firmly as she could, then grabbed Elsie’s shoulder and hoisted herself up.

“Just as we thought,” she said as she rattled the frame. “Once the lock slips, this is going to slide up smooth as silk pie. We’ll be in and out in no time.” She continued fooling with it, mindful not to crack the panes, until at last it obliged with a creaky grunt. “All right, here I go. As soon as I’m inside, I’ll help you all climb in.”

She hitched up her skirt and managed to get one leg over the sill. After some floundering and a few heart-stopping moments, she found herself inside what appeared to be a parlor. She put out her head out the window and said, “Let me make sure the coast is clear. Don’t either of you dare take so much as one step toward the car.”

After pausing to admire a cherry spinet, Lottie started for the doorway into a hall. She’d taken no more than two steps when an alarm began to whoop as if a freight train was bearing down on her. The sound was so loud that she could feel the floor throbbing. A mouse scuttled for safety, coming within an inch of her foot. Luckily, it veered away, since Lottie was incapable of moving, and barely capable of breathing.

“Are you okay?” shrieked Elsie.

Lottie shook her head, since she most certainly was not. Would an armed guard come thundering into the room, his gun pointed at her heart? Would slavering German shepherds appear to rip out her throat?

“Lottie!” Eula howled. “What in tarnation’s going on in there?”

As her knees began to fail her, Lottie tried to find a reply to what was possibly the silliest question she’d ever heard in all her born days.

Kevin found Dahlia sitting on the stoop of their back porch, her face all screwed up with misery, her red eyes hardly visible below her swollen eyelids, her nose dribbling steadily. He sat down next to her and took her hand. “What’s wrong, my love goddess? Did something happen? Are the babies okay?”

“They’re fine. Your mama agreed to look after them so’s I could take a nap.”

“And did you?” he said, bewildered. “Are you troubled by a bad dream? Should I fetch you a bowl of ice cream?”

“I don’t want nuthin’. Just leave me be, Kevvie. I’ve done something awful, and it bein’ Sunday, that makes it double awful. I was greedy, and now I got to suffer for my sins. I just hope this new baby won’t be born with Satan’s mark on its forehead or cloven hooves and little horns.” Tears began to stream down her face, catching on her jowls, and then making a zigzagged path through her numerous chins. “I must have broke two or three commandments today.”

Kevin did what he could to blot her tears with his shirt cuff. “What exactly did you do?”

“I lost my granny,” she wailed.

“She passed away?” said Kevin, who didn’t have a clue why Dahlia might feel responsible, unless she’d gone over to the old folks’ home and throttled her, which she’d threatened to do on more than one occasion. “She was real old, sweet-ums, and it was gonna happen sooner or later. Did someone call? Are we supposed to be making arrangements?”

Dahlia shoved him so hard he nearly toppled off the stoop. “I dint say she was dead! I said I lost her. I swear, Kevin Fitzgerald Buchanon, if you wasn’t the father of our children, I’d move to a city like Farberville and start lookin’ for a man smart enough to come in out of the rain! What’s more, he’d be real handsome, too, and most likely speak French.”

Kevin sat for a moment, racking his brain to figure out what in tarnation she was talkin’ about. It wasn’t raining, and as far as he knew, she didn’t speak French—or German or Mexican or even Canadian. He finally decided her hormones was actin’ up. “Why don’t we go down to my ma and pa’s and visit for a spell afore we pick up Rose Marie and Kevvie Junior?”

“Don’t you care about my granny?”

“ ’Course I do, but if she ain’t dead, well, I don’t know what you reckon we ought to do.”

“I lost her up on the ridge,” Dahlia said grimly. “I sweet-talked her yesterday, and she agreed to show me where the caves are so we could find the gold. I did it for you, Kevvie, so this is all your fault. We can barely afford groceries what with you making minimum wage. Once the baby comes, we’re gonna be buying more diapers, more medicine, more booties, more”—she began to hiccup—“more everything! I can clip only so many coupons, you know. I got blisters on my fingers from using the scissors so we can save five cents here and twenty cents there. If Jim Bob wasn’t such an ornery cuss, he’d give us a discount and pay you extra for overtime.”

“I still don’t understand about your granny,” he said, sidestepping a delicate subject. “You took her up on Cotter’s Ridge and then lost her? Did she run away?”

“In a manner of speakin’. I promised her that if she was to show me where the gold was, we’d buy her new teeth and a double-wide so she could live in the Pot O’ Gold. She seemed real tickled.”

“But then something happened?”

She gave him a stony look. “Yes, Kevvie, something happened. When God gave out the brains, were you crouched under the bleachers trying to look up the cheerleaders’ skirts? We started here and worked our way up the ridge. She knew of some caves, but they didn’t look big enough for a body to squirm inside. Then, about a mile later, she said there was a cave where she used to sit and cool off on hot afternoons. I waited outside on account of my delicate condition while she went inside. Two seconds later she came running out, flapping her arms and squawking like a goose. As best I could tell, she thought she’d seen a ghost in a Confederate uniform. Afore I could sit her down, she pushed me out of the way and disappeared up the logging trail.”

“Did you try to catch her?”

“How was I to catch her? She was movin’ faster than a preacher caught with his pants down in a whorehouse.”

Kevin gulped. “What about this ghost she sez she saw?”

Dahlia looked away. “Well, I wasn’t about to go in the cave, so I came back here. I’ve been waiting for her ever since. I thought about callin’ the old folks’ home, but then I figured I’d have to tell them that I’d let her go running off like that and they’d think it was all my fault. She’s most likely up there somewhere, bleedin’ or already dead, but I don’t see how we can find her.”

He knew that somehow or other it was all his fault for not finding a job that paid more than minimum wage. “Maybe I should go up to this cave and have a look,” he said, popping his knuckles for courage. “This ghost might have been in the act of collecting the gold when your granny saw him.”

“And then dropped dead again after a hundred and forty years, leaving the gold just lying there?”

Kevin tried to choose his words carefully. “It might not have been a real ghost. It could be it was just some feller in a gray shirt. Do you reckon you can show me the cave?”

Dahlia sucked on her lip as she gazed across the field that led to a line of scrub pines. “Maybe, but I ain’t sure, since my granny kept darting around picking wildflowers and looking for her old ginseng patches. We must have turned ever’ which way for most of an hour, but we was a good ways up the ridge and my legs were aching something terrible when she recognized the ledge over the entrance to the cave.”

“Were you anywhere near Robin Buchanon’s old shack?”

“I s’pose we could have been.”

“All right then,” Kevin said, beginning to feel right manly, like a star in one of those movies where soldiers went crawling up walls with grenades between their teeth. “I’ll go up there and take a look. Maybe your granny’s hiding inside. You go let Ma make you a nice cup of tea and wait for me there.”

“What if it was a ghost she saw?”

“Then I’ll just rip the gold right out of his hands.” He stood up and did as best he could to pull her to her feet. “Now you go on. I’ll be there afterwhile with your granny and a million dollars’ worth of gold.”

All in all, it wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the best he could do.

“Arly’s gonna be spittin’ nails,” Ruby Bee said as she pulled up in front of the foster home and parked.

Estelle adjusted the rearview mirror so she could apply a fresh coat of lipstick. “Then we’ll buy her an emery board with our million dollars. Do we have everything?”

Ruby Bee took the grocery bag from the backseat. “Here’s the gray wool shirt with shiny buttons, and that cute little hat we bought at the souvenir store. The drum’s in the trunk.” She paused, then said, “We don’t have to do this, you know. We’ve got no good reason to think Hammet might have seen these saddlebags filled with gold coins.”

“Maybe so, but I called his foster mother and he’s ours for the rest of the week. Don’t you go pretending you weren’t sittin’ right there when I called, Rubella Belinda Hanks. I promised Hammet he could be the little drummer boy that led the muletrain into Maggody that fateful morning. We are not gonna break his heart by telling him he won’t be in this documentary. He’s had a hard life, Ruby Bee, living all those years on Cotter’s Ridge with a mama that was nothing but an untamed mountain woman. You remember when Arly had to bring Hammet and his brothers and sisters down to Maggody, doncha? Not one of them had ever seen indoor plumbing, or electric lights, for that matter. I’d seen better-behaved wild dogs than that passel of foul-mouthed bushcolts.”

“Yes, but…” said Ruby Bee, not sure how to counter this particular argument, since she wasn’t sure why borrowing Hammet from his very civilized foster home was compensation for his first ten years with a mama known for moonshinin’ and, to put it politely, entertaining gentlemen callers, many of whom had fathered her children. “Well, we don’t really have any reason to believe he’ll know where the gold is. How long do you think we can keep him hidden until he scampers away to find Arly? He’s got this crazy idea that if he keeps pestering her, she’ll break down and adopt him, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen. She got mad when I tried to give her a goldfish, said she’d flush it down the toilet.”

“Are you saying Hammet’s a goldfish?”

Ruby Bee knew she was losing her grip on the conversation. “I said no such thing, Estelle. I never said he was a goldfish.”

Estelle repositioned a hairpin, then shot a last look in the mirror and opened the car door. “I should hope not. He’s not more than eleven or twelve years old these days, but I’m sure he’s still real sensitive on account of his upbringing. There’s no cause to rub his nose in it.”

Before she could take a step, the front door of the house opened and Hammet came bounding down the steps, as bouncy as an oversized puppy. His foster mother followed more sedately, although with ill-concealed enthusiasm.

“Here are his things,” she said as Hammet dove into the backseat. “Don’t concern yourselves if you need to keep him for a few extra days. There’s no school on Monday due to teacher conferences.”

“Where’s my drum?” demanded Hammet.

“We’ll get to that when the time comes,” Ruby Bee said. She pulled away from the curb before she lost her resolve—or came to her senses. “You got to get one thing straight, Hammet. Arly doesn’t know you’re coming. If she catches sight of you, she’ll have you right back here before your head stops spinning.”

“Her said I was gonna be in a movie,” he said, jabbing at the back of Estelle’s head. “Don’t Arly know what’s happening?”

Estelle turned around to look at him. “She knows about the movie, but that doesn’t mean she’s expecting you. We thought we’d surprise her long about Thursday evening, when you can have a picnic supper with all the famous actors. I figure we can gussy you up in the uniform and let you come marching down the road, beating on the drum, your face determined but with your little chin aquiver on account of knowing you’re in danger of being shot down in the dirt. Arly won’t have the heart to send you packing after that.”