Mark’s eyes were sincere. She wanted him to be right. She took the letter back, and scanned it again.
Was
there hidden emotion there? Some kind of necessary restraint? “Do you really think that could be it?”
“Sure, I do. I bet you get another letter in a few days, and you’ll see. He’d probably been wishing he could talk to you all this time, saving up all the stuff he wanted to tell you about his experiences with the outage. And let’s face it, it was pretty exciting stuff. When the post office opened, he probably rushed to get it all down. It’s kind of like he had to get all that out before he could get down to feelings. Those’ll come later. You’ll see.”
It made sense. Maybe she was jumping to conclusions. The pain in her heart gave birth to hope. “He is like that. I mean, he kind of has a one-track mind. He does always blurt out everything he’s saved up whenever we talk.”
“See? That’s all it is, Deni.”
She blew out a sigh and sat down next to him. “I feel like a bratty schoolgirl who hasn’t gotten her way.”
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m sure he loves you and misses you like crazy. He’d be insane not to.”
The sweet words took her by surprise, jolting her heart. Her lips softened into a smile. “Thank you, Mark.”
“I’m just saying, you’ve agreed to marry the guy. He’s gotta know how lucky he is. No way would any guy in his right mind just blow that off. Trust me, he’s thinking about you constantly.”
Drawing in a deep breath, she held his soft gaze for a moment before he looked away. Smiling, she folded the letter back up. She hadn’t thought that anyone could make her feel better about this — but Mark had done it. “You’re a good friend, Mark.”
He smiled. “Yeah, well, tell that to the neighborhood lynch mobs.”
As they resumed their ride, Deni wished she could return the favor and make him feel better too. But the neighbors’ disdain for him was obvious. There was no way to sugarcoat that.
T
HE GNOMES WERE STILL IN
L
ACY
F
RYE
’
S YARD, THOUGH THEY
looked older and more fragile. The high schoolers across the street used to have names for them, and occasionally one would get stolen and turn up at a pep rally or a football game, or on the principal’s desk. Usually the perpetrator returned it to its yard the next day. Who would want to keep it, after all?
Poor Lacy. She must have been constantly embarrassed.
Deni and Mark pulled into the driveway. They rolled their bikes with them up the sidewalk to the front door. Mark knocked. A woman in a cotton housedress answered the door.
“Yeah?”
Deni recognized the woman. She was the one who was always out tending the haphazard garden.
“Mrs. Frye?” Mark asked.
“Yes.”
Deni spoke up. “I’m Deni Branning, and this is Mark Green. We went to high school with Lacy and were wondering if she still lives here.”
Her mother turned back and yelled over her shoulder. “Lacy! For you!”
Deni looked at Mark. They’d hit pay dirt.
They heard footsteps coming down the stairs, then Lacy came to the door. Her eyes were dull as she regarded her visitors.
She had changed. In high school, she had dyed her dishwater blonde hair black, but now it was bleached to a platinum color. Her gold roots had grown out about an inch, giving it an interesting two-tone color. She was skin and bones — not the hard-work kind of skinny, but the kind that accompanied sickness.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“Lacy, do you remember us? Deni and Mark from high school?”
“Yeah, I remember. What do you want?”
Her tone was hostile, suspicious. For a moment, Deni wondered if she’d ever been rude to the girl. She probably had, back when her head was bigger and she thought more of herself than she should.
“We were wondering if you still hung around with Jessie Gatlin,” Mark said.
Lacy’s expression tightened. “Why do you want to know?”
“We’re worried about her,” Deni said. “My family found out that her four children have been living by themselves since right after the outage. Jessie’s disappeared, and we think something might have happened to her.”
Lacy peered at them from between her long bangs. “How do you know she wants to be found?”
Deni stared at her. “We don’t. But she has a responsibility to her children. If she doesn’t want them, we need for her to designate a relative that we can get in touch with. Do you know where she is?”
Lacy glanced back over her shoulder. Her mother was listening from a few feet behind her. “I haven’t seen her since before the outage.”
Deni wasn’t sure she believed her. She glanced at Mark and saw doubt on his face as well. She turned back. “What was she like the last time you saw her?”
“What do you mean, what was she like?”
“I mean, was she still on drugs after the outage? Was she withdrawing?”
Lacy glanced back again, then stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind her so her mother couldn’t hear.
Now maybe they’d get somewhere.
“It was bad,” Lacy said in a quiet voice. “She woulda gnawed off an arm for a fix.”
Deni tried not to linger on that image. “We found syringes in her purse. What was her drug?”
“Crank,” Lacy said.
Just as Deni had thought. Crank was one of the street names for heroin. Besides her acquaintance with a classmate who used the stuff, she’d done some research on the drug for a speech class in college. Heroin was one of the most difficult drugs to detox from.
“So, let me ask you this,” Mark said. “If she was addicted to heroin when the outage happened, and she couldn’t get anymore, what do you think she did about it?”
“Same thing the rest of us did,” Lacy said. “She spent whatever cash she still had on getting what she needed, and then she ran out. And like the rest of us, she was out of luck.”
“What happened?” Deni asked. “Did you get sick?”
“Sick isn’t the word,” Lacy said. “It’s painful and miserable. Your bones and muscles hurt, you vomit, you can’t sleep, and you think you’re going to die. Nothing better get between you and the needle.”
“How long does it last?”
“A week really bad. Some of the symptoms go on for weeks. Months, even.”
Clearly, Lacy was still in bad shape herself. “You said you found syringes?” she asked, desperation tightening her face. “Did she have any dope?”
If she had, Deni knew Lacy would have done whatever it took to get her hands on it. “No,” she said. “We didn’t find any.”
Lacy shrugged. “Figures. Nobody has any.”
“So the outage basically saved your life,” Mark said.
“Or ended it, depending on how you look at it.”
Deni tried to imagine what that meant. Did Lacy really feel that her life as an addict was more real than this one? How sad. She hoped Lacy could stay away from drugs long enough to think rationally again. “Jessie’s kids say she hasn’t been seen since two weeks after the outage.”
“Sounds about right. She probably had some dope on her or was able to get some for the week after the outage. After that, with no transportation to bring the stuff in, the dealers were running out, and there was no cash to pay for it. She probably got sick.”
“Do you think she would have put herself in harm’s way to get more heroin?”
Lacy started to laugh. “Of course. She would have sold her body … one of her children …
all
of her children. Those cravings, they control you, and a lot of people I know were in dire straits when the drugs weren’t coming anymore.” She studied their faces, then flipped her stringy hair back. “You know, people like you think they’re so much better than us. But you’re not.”
“I wasn’t thinking that.”
“Yes, you were. You’re judging me just like you’re judging her.”
Deni swallowed. She didn’t want to fight with the girl. Lacy looked beaten down enough. “I wasn’t judging you, Lacy. I feel bad for you. As much as I drank my first year of college, I could just as easily have been in your shoes.”
“You?” Lacy breathed a disbelieving laugh.
“Yeah, me. It just happened that my cravings for being a big shot were stronger than my cravings for a buzz. So I quit drinking.”
Mark looked down at her, clearly surprised.
Lacy seemed moved too. “You were always a big shot,” she said.
Deni swallowed. “Well, I’m trying to change.”
Lacy crossed her arms and looked down at her feet. “Jessie was raped by a neighbor when she was fourteen. She got pregnant, and everybody turned on her.”
Deni hadn’t known that. Everyone had just thought she was easy. If someone had just told them…
But who was she kidding? It wouldn’t have stopped the gossip.
“So she started using to numb the pain?” Mark asked quietly.
“Something like that.”
“She was pregnant again in tenth grade,” Deni said. “She never came back to school.”
“No, her folks took her and moved to Tuscaloosa after that. They wanted her to start over clean. But she was in too deep. She kept running away. She loved her kids, though. She always brought them with her. Some guy was always willing to put her up … for a while, at least.”
“Then you don’t think she would have left her kids intentionally?”
“Not for more than a few hours, or maybe a night.”
Deni pulled the notepad out of her back pocket. “Could you tell us some of the guys who’ve taken her in? Maybe she’s with one of them.”
“Doubt it. Most of them dumped her after she got pregnant. They always wanted her to get rid of the babies, and she would say she was going to, then before you knew it her stomach was growing. Some of them got real hot about it. One dude beat her to a pulp, but it didn’t hurt the baby.”
“Who was that?” Deni asked.
“Moe Jenkins, though he’ll deny it if you ask him. He’s the little girl’s daddy.”
“Sarah’s?”
“That’s right.”
“Can you tell us where he is?” Mark asked.
She shrugged. “He’s a jerk. I don’t know where he lives. I see him around sometimes, so I know he’s still in town.”
Deni wrote his name down. “Lacy, did she keep using during her pregnancies?”
“She said she didn’t, but I never knew for sure. They all came out all right, though, so maybe it was true.”
A
S
D
ENI AND
M
ARK RODE BACK HOME
, D
ENI TURNED THE
conversation over in her mind. “So what do you think?”
Mark shrugged. “I think when we find her, she probably won’t be in any condition to take care of those kids.”
“I don’t get it,” Deni said. “If she loved her kids enough to stay clean while she was pregnant, why wouldn’t she love them enough to take care of them? My mom would lay down her life for me.”
“Mine too.”
“But instead, Jessie winds up so addicted that she’d leave her children to fend for themselves with absolutely no resources.”
“It happens all the time,” Mark said.
Deni knew that was true. She’d had friends in college who had succumbed to drugs and dropped out, ruining their lives, changing their ambitions, their personalities, their character. But there was always hope for redemption. Hadn’t God redeemed her, when she was wallowing in a spiritual pit after her own rebellion? If he hadn’t given up on her, maybe there was hope for Lacy Frye and Jessie Gatlin.
“Deni, I have to go work at the well. But don’t go visit that Jenkins guy by yourself.”
She shook her head. “I’ll give his name to my dad and the sheriff, and let them handle that. I’m not brave enough to visit him alone. But I have thought of another way to get the word out that we’re looking for her. I’ve been thinking about starting a newspaper. The
Crockett Times
has been down since the outage, and the
Birmingham News
probably has too. I was thinking I could do one that focused on human interest stories. Like these kids, for instance.”
Mark laughed. “That’s a great idea. But how would you produce it without Xerox machines and printers?”
“I’d have to handwrite it. Maybe post it on the message boards around town.”
“Okay, I can see that.”
“I could call attention to the poverty in some of these apartment complexes. Those people don’t have any place to get water. I don’t know how they’re surviving. They have one grill to cook on and they line up for it. Your guess is as good as mine where they’re getting their food. They have no place to grow it. All they have is a paved parking lot. Maybe if I called attention to it, people would try to help them.”
“I like the idea, Deni. Somebody needs to help them.”
“And there are so many other things to write about.”
“Wouldn’t be any money in it, but it would sure be a great service to the community,” Mark said. “I think it’s an awesome idea. Sounds like the kind of thing that’s right up your alley. And it’ll keep your journalism skills fresh.”
It would also help keep her mind off Craig, she thought. Busyness was the best medicine she knew.
T
HE WORK THAT AFTERNOON WASN
’
T AS HARD AS
A
ARON HAD
expected. It was even kind of fun. The Brannings had sent him and Logan to fish for supper, and since he didn’t much like Logan, he sat down the pond from him behind a big tree. He tied his pole to a lower branch that hung out over the water, so he had his hands free to read through the letters he’d brought from home. He took all of them out of their envelopes and tried to figure out which letters came first.
His grandma’s cursive was small and as neat as a teacher’s. She had dated each letter at the top corner. The oldest one was on the bottom, dated six years before.
Dear Jessie,
I’m sending this to your old apartment in hopes that the post office will forward it. You need to know that as soon as you’re found, you’ll be arrested. We’ve filed charges against you for stealing from us.
I don’t know what you’ve done with the boys, but I pray you’re taking care of them. If you have any sense of right and wrong left inside you, you’ll turn them over to us. They don’t deserve what you’re putting them through.