Harvestman Lodge (42 page)

“I try to be, Curtis. And just call me Amber, okay? Hey, when we get to that library, will you introduce me to your friend?”

“If you want me to. She’s a nice lady too.”

“Curtis, let me ask you something personal. Is that okay?”

“Uh … yeah. I guess so.”

“Is she your girlfriend, this library friend Kendra? Like you’d like to be with her for permanent, for good? Do you love her?”

Curtis was struck speechless. He’d never figured that his love for Kendra mattered, because no one, not even Kendra, could ever love in return a man as crazy as he was. Amber Goode’s query forced the question to the forefront of the moment, though.

“Do you, Curtis? I’m asking you for a reason, not just to be nosy.”

“I think that … I think maybe that … I …” He trailed off, then gave Amber a helpless look. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I love her. I’ve loved her for years and years now.” And saying it made him cry, though he wouldn’t have expected it.

“Oh, Curtis. I didn’t mean to upset you. But I’ll tell you why I asked.”

He shakily rebottled his spilled emotions. “Why?”

“I asked you because I believe everybody has the right to find the right person to love.”

“Even somebody everybody calls ‘Curtis crazy’ and laughs at?”

“Even him. Maybe especially him, because he is a truly good man.”

“But I can’t ask her to love me back, Amber. I got nothing to offer to her.” He paused. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Of course.”

He spoke softly, as if there were others there to overhear.

“I don’t make enough money at my work to live on. I can’t sell enough pencils to get by. If it wasn’t for Mr. Caldwell letting me live in his house and giving me food and sometimes some extra money, and getting me some help from the government, I wouldn’t be able to live except for maybe out in a tent with Plunker Williams, like I used to do.”

“Curtis, everybody has to have help sometimes. Everybody. If not money, then something else. My daddy once stopped to help Caine Darwin change a flat tire on his car. Mr. Darwin knew how to run stores and be a rich man, but not how to change a tire. He needed help, you see. Even him.”

“Yeah, but he’s a big man, important … and me, I’m … I’m a big nothing. I’m a nobody who don’t know how to do nothing but get laughed at and sell pencils. And you can’t take care of no wife when you sell pencils.”

“Let me tell you why I asked you about your friend, Curtis: because you could do a lot more than you think. You’ve got some problems dealing with shadows of power poles, sure, but beyond that you’re a hard-working, kind-hearted, capable man. I know several people working at the plant with me who have a whole lot less going for them than you do. You could do more than sell pencils. There are jobs at Spears-Hinkle, where I work, that you could do well. No lie.”

Never before had a serious thought of undertaking a real job crossed Curtis’s mind in anything more than a passing flash. The way Amber said it, though, it seemed like something that maybe could be real.

“What about the pole shadows?”

“We work indoors. No sunlight, no pole shadows. But even if there were, I truly believe you can shake that fear off you, if you want to bad enough. When I was a little girl, I was scared of bugs, any kind of bug. Praying mantises, worst of all. I mean, I wasn’t just a little scared – I was full-out terrified. Why, I couldn’t look at a picture of a mantis in a book, or even touch the page with the picture. Now, though, I can let a mantis crawl up my arm and just grin at him. I had one jump onto my face once, and I just calmly plucked him off and set him on a tree branch. No problem with mantises or any other kind of bug now.”

“How’d you do it? Get over being scared?”

“I just talked to myself over and over again, told myself what I knew down inside was the truth, that I was bigger than them and could hurt them a lot easier than they could hurt me. I told myself until one day I really believed it. And from then on it was a matter of just refusing to be afraid anymore.”

“I wish I could do that with being afraid of them shadows.”

“You can. You do know, in your mind, that they can’t really hurt you, don’t you?”

“Well … yeah. Yeah, I know. I just don’t feel it.”

“Forget about how you feel. Go with what you
know
. It’ll set you free, Curtis. Believe me, I know. You could get past your fear of pole shadows just like I did with bugs and mantises. You really could! And once you do it, you’ll be no different than anybody else. No more of that ‘Curtis-crazy’ nonsense. You could work a job that paid you better than pencils do, and maybe you could get with that lady you love.”

“You really mean it? About the job and all?”

“I do. And I know for a fact there are some easy line jobs about to open up at the plant next month, if you want to apply for one. I can put in a good word for you. You have to realize, I can’t make you a guarantee they’ll hire you … but I’d sure give it my best try. And the man who does the hiring there, he owes me some favors. Because I’ve done a few favors for him, shall we say. ’Nough said about that.”

He gaped at her, eyes big and beginning to water again. The part about the “favors” she did for the hiring man sailed right past him, but he understood the part the mattered, and that it could be life-changing for him. And maybe for Kendra.

“You’d show me how to ask for a real job?”

“I would. And I will, if you just tell me to. A way for me to help a friend.”

Tears streamed, and he managed to choke out. “Yes, please. I want to try. Thank you, Miss Amber. Thank you.”

She was struggling against tears of her own now, but she managed to smile as she said, “And Curtis … with a job like that, and with your girl working too, you could get married.”

He could not find his voice to speak again for two more miles.

Chapter Twenty-Four

KYLE FEELY HAD NEVER intended to become preoccupied with the story the ailing Jonas Corbin had told him. He’d crossed the line into obsession when he first obeyed the impulse to go place flowers at the cave where Corbin and his fellow firefighter had disposed of the burned corpse of the girl who died in the Millard Tate house fire. After that first trip, Feely had felt driven to go back again for further floral commemorations. Twice since that first flower placement he’d returned and left newer bouquets, feeling half-crazy for doing it.

It was a waste, he supposed, since there was no way a long-dead girl could know her life and memory were being honored. But that was true at every place on the globe where the dead were remembered: every mausoleum, every graveside. It simply seemed right to him that somebody should treat the lost girl’s memory with respect. So back again to this spot Feely had come, flowers in hand, once, then twice … and now a third time. White roses on this particular Saturday morning, bought at a florist three blocks from the church where he ministered and kept his office.

His obsession with Jonas Corbin’s grim and gruesome story had exhibited itself in ways beyond the mere placement of flowers at the dead girl’s resting place. Feely had begun investigating on his own the facts surrounding the story of the lost girl to see what more he might learn of her. His investigation had been subtle because he knew inquiries might easily stir unwanted repercussions from and among those locals who did not want old sins brought to light. Further, he was mindful of his pledge to Corbin to “do nothing” with information he had been told in pastoral confidence.

In the meantime, though, Feely simply had to learn what he could. This wasn’t the first time he’d thrown himself into an effort to find answers to questions others would prefer to leave unaddressed.

Junie was a big part of it. After hearing Corbin’s story, he’d been unable to shake off a sense of obligation to Junie herself. It would be wrong to allow her to be left as a barely remembered ghost of a misused human being.

Further, there probably were others out in the world with a right to know of her and about her. Junie had been born to an unmarried couple, and, if what Millard Tate always told Junie’s male visitors was true, Junie’s mother was pregnant with her even before she met Millard’s son, the late Roger Tate. Somewhere, then, there probably remained other, authentic kin of the late young woman: a biological father, aunts and uncles, cousins, maybe even grandparents.

Feely’s drive to learn about the girl had led him so far as to seek out and talk to Millard Tate’s only remaining offspring, the local mechanic and hobbyist photographer Roy Tate.

He’d called on Roy at his workplace on a Tuesday morning, and amid the clang and clamor of automotive repairs going on all around, had almost knocked Roy off his feet with one simple and straightforward pronouncement: “Roy, I’m here to talk to you about Junie, and pictures I hear you took back in the days she was being used for prostitution at your father’s home.”

Roy’s face had blanched at the jolting question, and he dropped the wrench he’d been using to perform some task on the undercarriage of a hoisted Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Roy came out from under the lift and gawked into Feely’s face as he asked, “What’d you just say to me, preacher?”

“I think you heard me. Can you step outside a minute where we can talk in private?”

Cigarette dribbling ash, Roy Tate went with Feely to the parking lot, where Feely raised the hood of his Toyota and allowed Roy to pretend to be checking the engine. They’d not likely be interrupted by Roy’s boss if Feely appeared to be a prospective customer.

“Tell me what you said again, preacher. You are the preacher, ain’t you? Feely? I worked on your old Fairmont once … ”

“That’s right. Kyle Feely. And I think you know what I said to you. I’m here to find out about the girl Junie, and about the pictures you’re said to have taken of her while she was, uh, involved with various men from our community back in the early 1960s. You’re own late father served as her procurer, and you secretly provided photo documentation to use should extortion become necessary. So goes the story I’ve been told. I assume you know what I’m talking about?”

Roy inhaled enough filtered smoke to cure a ham. After blowing it slowly out of his lungs, he flipped the cigarette away to the pavement and nodded. “Yeah, I know. But preacher, I don’t recall you ever being one who was with her. So why you stirring up that particular old pile of poop?”

“I never was with Junie, you’re right. And at the time Junie was doing what your father made her do, I’d have been even younger than she was … not a likely customer.”

“Why you butting in, then? No offense.”

“It’s because I know a man who was with Junie, more than once, and he happens to be not long for this world. Very sick, very. He’s a happily and faithfully married man now, one of my own church flock, and I’d like for him to have the privilege of dying without worry that there are still photographs and negatives out in the world revealing an indiscretion of his past, when he was young and immature and not yet the decent and devout man he became.”

Roy lifted a brow. “You’re asking me to give you his pictures, then. So you can burn ’em.”

“You catch on fast, Roy. Right. And the negatives, too. Not just his … all you’ve got. I figure if we’re going to clean house, then let’s really clean house.”

“I can’t do it, preacher.”

“You can. You can go to wherever you keep them, get them, and hand them over to me. Or you can destroy them before my eyes, if that’d suit you better. But I want them gone, gone for good. Not for my sake, but for – ” Feely caught himself right before he would have unthinkingly said Jonas Corbin’s name.

“The reason I can’t help you, Preacher Feely, is that there ain’t no pictures to give you. Never have been.”

FEELY HAD NOT EXPECTED to hear that. “You’re saying you never really took … ”

“Daddy made up that story about me taking pictures so that he’d have something to hold over the heads of them what got with Junie. Everybody knew I was into photography, so it was easy to believe what he told them. They were nervous anyway, doing what they were doing and knowing they had something to hide, so they all just took what Daddy told them as the truth, just in case. And I guess it worked, because that whole business has stayed secret, far as the general public, for more’n twenty years now.”

Feely was dumbstruck. Always a man to trust what his gut told him, he found himself instinctively believing what Roy was saying. For the first time he questioned how, in full secrecy, the logistics of an amateur taking surreptitious photographs in a darkened room could have been accomplished in the early 1960s without the photographer probably betraying his presence. It was more logical to believe Roy’s current assertion that no pictures ever existed than Millard’s self-serving old claim that they did. Millard shrewdly had banked not on actual possession of incriminating images, but on the readiness of guilty men to believe he
might
possess such and be able to ruin their personal lives.

“Once your father was gone, Roy, why didn’t you just get the word out that your father had lied about the pictures? You could have saved a lot of men a lot of heartache and guilt and worry over the years.”

“You can’t very well get word out to people when you don’t know who most of them are, can you? That whoring business was Daddy’s deal, not mine, and the men who came in to take advantage of it didn’t exactly sign a register at the door, like at a funeral home, y’know. Me, I never laid eyes on most of those men unless I just happened to look out the garage door when one was driving in. I spent my time either out at the garage working on cars and trucks, or down in my darkroom developing my pictures … the kind of pictures I
really
took: graduations and family portraits and baby showers and birthdays of old folks and all that. I was pretty good at that stuff, too. Still am, though I don’t do so much of it these days.”