She gave me a puzzled look. “I did the inventory exactly the way you said.”
“This isn’t about the inventory. Come in and sit down.” I held the door.
Bo squawked a welcome from the curtain rod. Cricket sat in my chair, drawing. Joe Riddley looked up from a seed catalogue. “Help, Crick, we’re being invaded by female relations.” He added, for my benefit, “Ridd lit out somewhere this morning, and Martha got called in to work early, so we’ve got a helper until his daddy comes looking for him.” I could tell Joe Riddley hadn’t heard about DeWayne any more than Bethany had.
Cricket gave me a quick glance and bent back to his crayons. “I’ll be finished in a minute.”
I picked him up and headed for the door. “You’re finished right now. We need you out front. Charlene? Don’t you need a helper at the counter?” Cricket got a kick out of standing on a chair at the register, taking money and putting it in the right places in the drawer. Charlene, whose grandchildren lived in Atlanta, kept assuring us she liked having his help.
“Don’t you mess up my picture,” he warned as he headed to work.
Bethany dropped into the wing chair. “What’s the matter?” Her eyes were wary.
I closed the door and sat in my own chair. “I’ve got something to tell you both. DeWayne Evans—” I started to say “died” but that wasn’t the truth and Bethany would hear it soon enough. I’d rather she heard it from somebody who loved her. “DeWayne Evans hanged himself this morning.”
Her shoulders hunched to shield her from what I was saying and she gave a yelp of disbelief.
Joe Riddley swivelled my way. “What happened? How’d you find out?”
“Ronnie brought Clarinda to do her wash this morning and DeWayne called him to say their front door got painted last night, like the school.”
“No!” Bethany clenched her fists to shut out this further pain. Tears trembled on her lower lids and spilled over. “Who’d do a thing like that? And why would he—he—”
“We don’t know yet. The police are checking things out. I went with Ronnie to see the house, and your daddy came
over and said we ought to go see if DeWayne was—all right.” My voice wobbled. “So we went to the school, and we—we found him.” I had to stop. My lungs weren’t working again.
“Daddy knows? He knew and he didn’t come tell me? He didn’t have the decency to come tell me?” She shook with rage. “It’s not true! It’s not! It’s not!” She flailed her arms so, Bo swooped overhead, in danger of hurting himself. I held up my arm for a perch while Joe Riddley pinioned Bethany’s arms to keep her from flinging herself to the floor.
He scooped her up like she was three years old. “Come here, sugar.” He held her on his lap like he used to, a big sprawling thing now with a tiny girl’s broken heart. As she wept against his shoulder, he stroked her hair.
I stroked Bo’s back and set him gently on my desk when he grew calm. My own eyes stung. When I finally trusted myself to speak, I said, “We need to think about the rest of the team. Somebody needs to get them together and tell them before they find out some other way.”
That quieted Bethany. She has always been good at thinking about other people as well as herself. “They’re gonna die,” she whispered, then realized what she’d said and gasped. “He can’t have done that, Me-mama. Somebody must have killed him. He didn’t have any reason to do it. He didn’t!” She took a deep breath and wailed, “I want my mama!”
I nudged Bo away from my phone and dialed the emergency room. “Martha? I know you’re working, honey, but we need you real bad at our office right now. Bethany’s just heard that DeWayne Evans killed himself this morning, and she’s pretty upset.”
“DeWayne?” Even Martha, who sees a lot of violence, was shocked. “I heard about his house—one of the deputies came by for coffee—but nobody said a thing about DeWayne.” Our law enforcement officers drink so much coffee in the emergency-room nurses’ station after they bring folks in, they tend to stop by for breaks on other days, too. Martha often brags that good coffee keeps her abreast of the news.
This time her sources were late. “He wasn’t found until half an hour ago. I know, because Ridd and I found him. It wasn’t the best morning either of us has had lately.”
“Tell Mama to come,” Bethany whimpered from her granddaddy’s lap. “I need her.”
“Did you hear that?”
“I heard it. As soon as I can get somebody to cover for me, I’ll be right over.”
Once she knew her mama was coming, Bethany calmed down and accepted my offer of a Coke. Then she asked, “Could I use your cell phone for a minute, Me-mama?”
“There’s a phone right there.” Joe Riddley nodded toward his desk.
“Yeah, but this is kinda private.” When I handed her the phone she left the office, already dialing. I heard her voice faintly through our thin old walls. “Hello, Todd? The awfullest thing has happened.” We didn’t see her again until her mother arrived.
Bless Martha’s heart. While she was waiting for her replacement to come in, she had called somebody from the school who was trained in grief counseling. “He’s going to call all the team, have them meet at our house, and tell them together,” she reported when she arrived. “He’ll be there when we get home.” Her face had been serious, but now it broke into a wry smile. “I saw my younger offspring running the store. Can you keep him awhile longer?”
“We’ll keep him until suppertime,” Joe Riddley offered. “Good counter help’s hard to come by.”
Bethany might be five inches taller than her mother by now, but she clung to Martha’s arm as they left.
Joe Riddley waited until the door closed behind them, then demanded, “How come you always land up in the middle of these things? That takes real talent.”
“Don’t you fuss at me, or you’ll have me crying on your lap like Bethany.”
“Not to worry. Not to worry,” Bo begged anxiously.
Joe Riddley held out his arms. “In that case, I’ll fuss. Come here.”
I didn’t climb in his lap—that wouldn’t look dignified if somebody passed our door and looked in. But I did go over and rest my head on his shoulder for a while. Some days are heavier to carry than others.
Clarinda doesn’t work Saturdays, except to do her own laundry if she hasn’t gotten to it sooner, so we generally eat dinner at Myrtle’s. That day, I couldn’t stand the idea of meeting people and hearing them talk about DeWayne, so I suggested that Joe Riddley and Cricket go down to Hardee’s and bring back hamburgers to eat in our office. As soon as they left, I turned to the computer.
The Internet is a fearsome thing. It holds enough dirt about people to create another planet and spews it willingly for anybody able to work a mouse. All I had to do was type in
DeWayne Evans
and it referred me in seconds to twenty-two articles. Nine were about the right DeWayne.
Two were from recent editions of the
Statesman.
I preened to think our little paper went all over the world via the Internet, whether anybody read it or not. The next article was about DeWayne’s previous baseball team winning the state championship. I doubted he’d killed himself over any of those, so I pulled up the next listing. That’s where I found what I was looking for: COLLEGE ATHLETE ACCUSED OF RAPE.
I had to get a Coke to help me through the next four articles. They reported that when DeWayne was a college fresh-man, he was accused of slipping something into a female student’s drink and raping her after a fraternity party. She wasn’t shy about telling her story. A large picture showed her, a slender white woman with straight blond hair falling in front of her face, clutching the arm of a male friend (also white) for support. I had only one article to read when Joe Riddley and Cricket got back, and I went off-line at once. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want Joe Riddley catching me reading up on DeWayne and accusing me of sleuthing. I simply couldn’t read any more. The way I felt, I didn’t want a hamburger, either.
While Joe Riddley and Cricket prattled on about nothing, I sat there wondering why our school board hadn’t found out about all that before they hired DeWayne. Why was he still permitted around young girls? Did Tyrone and whoever else had painted the school know, or was that caricature a well-aimed shot in the dark? That half-hour lunch seemed to last as long as Moses wandered in the wilderness. Finally Cricket stood up. “I has to go now. Miss Charlene needs me to run the register.”
Joe Riddley went down to the nursery to start getting ready for our Fourth of July sale. I paid a few bills, but all the time I was working, I kept seeing pictures in my head: a shy little boy with a big round head ducking and smiling as I handed him a cherry sucker. Coach Evans in his uniform proudly watching another Honeybee streak home. DeWayne in a yellow shirt sitting in Joe Riddley’s chair, trembling so hard he could not stand. The face of that young blond woman whose life had been so brutally damaged.
Tears filled my eyes again and again, and I drank so many Cokes that afternoon, their stock should have gone up five points.
You needn’t think I was getting much productive work done. I had about decided to go on home and bob around in the pool—one of my favorite places to wash off troubles—when the phone rang. “Mac, it’s Martha. We’ve had a good meeting, but the girls don’t want to go home. They’re crying and holding each other and say they can’t stand the idea of being separated tonight. I’d invite them all to sleep here, but—”
I knew what she didn’t like to say. Ridd and Martha lived in a small bungalow with two bedrooms downstairs and one they’d put in upstairs for Bethany after Cricket was born. It only had one bathroom—nowhere near enough for twelve girls overnight. We, on the other hand, had five bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs, plus another bathroom and a den with a sofa bed downstairs. We also had a swimming pool.
“Why don’t you take them down to our place tonight? You and Ridd can stay in our room and we’ll stay at your house with Cricket.”
“That would be marvelous.” She sounded so relieved, I knew she had hated to suggest the idea but had been holding her breath until I did. “I’ll tell them to go get their suits and pajamas and meet us down there.”
Before I could hang up, she said in a tentative voice, “There’s one more thing.”
Martha knows good and well that Joe Riddley and I will give almost anything we’ve got to somebody who needs it, and she wasn’t generally nervous about asking. So I was surprised when she came to a flat-out halt.
“What do you need?” I figured she wanted to know if she could raid our freezer for supper, and I was trying to remember how much hamburger we had, when she sighed.
“It’s Hollis. She wasn’t at the meeting, and Bethany says she didn’t accept DeWayne’s offer of a place on the new team. Oh, darn, we’ll need to call those girls, too—”
“Ridd can do that. You’ll have enough to do, getting the Honeybees fed and bedded down for the night.”
“I guess so. But somebody needs to tell Hollis what’s happened. Bethany says she’s scarcely left their house all week, but one of the few times she went out was to talk to DeWayne on Wednesday. She doesn’t need to hear about this by accident. I’d do it, but I can’t leave the girls.”
I’d rather have volunteered for an experimental case of West Nile Virus, but I said as willingly as I could manage, “Okay, I’ll go. I’m not getting much done around here anyway.”
15
On my way over, I tried to think how to tell Hollis what had happened. I’d seen her have a conniption over a rip in a new shirt, so I decided to take it in stages. First I’d tell her DeWayne died. Then I’d tell her he killed himself. I hoped to high heaven she wouldn’t start flinging her arms around like Bethany did. Hollis wasn’t tall, but she was sturdy. We might both wind up on the floor.
I also wanted to sound her out about whether DeWayne had ever made improper advances toward any of the girls. Could that be what had been bothering her this past week? If he had and had thought it was about to come out, he might have preferred suicide.
If I had thought he laid a hand on Bethany or Hollis, I might have killed him myself.
With those sentiments, regrettable for a magistrate and a Christian, I pulled into the drive.
The afternoon was delightful, so I expected the Stantons’ front door to be wide open to let in the breeze and save on air-conditioning. Instead, the door and all four porch windows were closed. From the front walk I heard a soprano run up and down a scale. Hollis must be practicing her voice lessons. I hated to interrupt, but I pressed the bell.
She peered through the glass, then fetched a key, unlocked a bolt, and slid off a chain. Few folks in Hopemore lock doors in the daytime if we’re home. Nobody I know puts on a dead bolt except at night. Only our most timid citizens use a chain.
When she finally got the door open, she stood there barefoot, wearing a T-shirt so long I could only guess she had on shorts underneath. Her hair was limp and dim as a dirty penny, and instead of greeting me with a tidal wave of talk, she stood there without saying a word.
“Was that you singing?” I asked. “It sounded real good.”
“Could you hear it plumb out in the street?” Getting her dander up when embarrassed—now, that was more like the old Hollis we knew and loved.
Relieved, I said, “Oh, no, just from the walk. May I come in a minute?”
Her eyes grew wary, but she’d been raised right. “Yes, ma’am.” She stepped back for me to enter. “We can go to the living room.” She sounded like it was the best she had to offer, but it wasn’t much. I saw at once what she meant.
When Sara Meg inherited the house, it had a boring yard, pallid rooms, heavy drapes and a few good Persian rugs. When she and Fred married, they poured their hearts into the place. He painted the chalky green exterior shiny white. She planted flower beds and laid a curved brick walk. While he painted inside and refinished the floors, she sewed curtains and slipcovers and painted lovely pictures for their walls. The living room, particularly, was such a happy place. The fabric on the sofa and a big overstuffed chair looked like somebody had flung daisies, daffodils, irises, and tulips all over them.