In Search of Eden (31 page)

“God, I don't know what the deal is with that picture,” she said, and even though her heart still hurt, she felt a little bit better. “Would you figure it out?” she asked. “And while you're at it, would you help my dad to get better and make my mom like me?” She felt hollow inside when she prayed that part. “Or else help me to find my real mom if she would like me, but if not, then forget it.”

She was at the Hasty Taste. She braked to a stop and chained up her bike. Uncle Joseph said if he saw her bike unlocked again, he would impound it and make her pay to get it back. Then Grandma said,
“Oh, Joseph, do you really think someone's going to steal it in downtown Abingdon?”
And Uncle Joseph said,
“Ma, the whole world isn't Abingdon,”
and that reminded her of one more thing to
pray about. “And, Jesus, would you please make Uncle Joseph not be so grouchy, like he was yesterday,” she said. “Amen.”

She went into the Hasty Taste and looked around. She quickly realized Uncle Joseph and Uncle Henry had left already.

“Hey there, Eden!” Miranda came out from the kitchen. She looked pretty today. “Your uncle has already left.”

“I didn't come to see him,” she said, and before Miranda could ask her who she had come to see, Pastor Hector came in.

“Well, well, you're up and about early today, Ms. Williams,” he said.

“I came to see you,” she said.

“Well, what an honor. Come sit down. Could I treat you to some breakfast or perhaps a cup of coffee?”

“Coffee would be fine,” Eden answered, and she followed Pastor Hector to a booth and sat down. It was cool because Miranda came and filled up her coffee cup without even acting like it was any big deal and didn't even tell her she shouldn't drink coffee. And Pastor Hector knew Miranda.

“How are you doing?” he asked Miranda. “I see you've decided to stay with us for a while.”

“Yes, thanks to Eden,” she said, and Eden felt a little shy when Pastor Hector looked at her with a smile.

“That doesn't surprise me at all,” he said. “Eden is always watching out for the people she cares about. She's like her uncle that way.”

She picked at her fingernail, and after a minute Miranda took Pastor Hector's order.

“Would you like something to eat?” she asked Eden.

Eden said, “No thank you,” and opened four little containers of cream and poured them into her coffee, then stirred in five little packs of sugar. When she was done and it tasted right, she looked up at Pastor Hector. “I was wondering if I could talk to you about something,” she said.

He looked at her seriously and nodded. That's what she liked
about him. He didn't treat her like she was lame or something just because she was a kid.

“Sure,” he said. “Anything.”

She took the picture she had taken from the attic and set it in front of him. He looked down at it, then back up at her, then reached into his pocket and put on his glasses and looked at it again. When he was finished looking, he nodded and handed it back to her. She put it in her backpack so she wouldn't have to look at it.

Eden thought he might say something, but he didn't. He just looked at her but really quiet and calm, and all of a sudden that little bird came back, and she felt quiet and calm, too.

“I didn't know about that,” she said.

Pastor Hector looked real serious. “You like to know about things, don't you?”

She nodded. She waited again, but he just looked at her. So she finally asked a question. “Did you know about this?”

He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I knew.”

“How come no one told me?”

He was quiet for a minute; then he said, “I can't answer that, Eden. I can only tell you why I didn't tell you.”

“Oh. Well, why didn't you tell me?”

“Because it wasn't mine to tell.”

“Whose was it, then?” she asked, but she knew the answer. “Your mother's.

Your uncle Joseph's. But I will tell you one thing.”

“What?”

“This happened before your mother married your father.”

She felt a lot of the tight things come off of her then. “A long time ago?”

Pastor Hector nodded. “Yes. It happened before you were even born.”

She thought about before she was born, and in her mind she saw the outer-space wall in her room. Why, before she was born
was so long ago and far away that it was almost like it hadn't happened at all.

“Does that help?” he asked.

She nodded, and all of a sudden she liked Pastor Hector so much she thought she would cry. So she frowned and took a sip of her coffee. He reached over the table and held his palm out in front of her. She slapped it, and then they hooked their fingers together in the special handshake Pastor Hector had taught her. “Friends for life,” he said.

“Friends for life,” she repeated, and she was feeling lots better by the time she finished her coffee and rode her bike to school.

School seemed to take forever. Finally the last bell rang, and Eden hurried outside. It was a good day. The sun was still shining and it was warm. Pretty soon it would be too hot for long sleeves. She would have to ask Grandma to make her a horse shirt with short sleeves. Thank goodness she was done with her library restriction. Today she could do her rounds. She would be back to her normal routine on Monday, and she could do her homework after supper. Nobody had been doing her work, and there was a lot of stuff to catch up on. She crunched on the extra apple Grandma had put in her backpack, rode the bus into town, unchained her bike, then got on and rode down the hill, the wind cooling her head.

She made her first stop, parking her bike in front of the Hasty Taste and chaining it to the pump that had a bunch of flowers around it and water trickling out of it. Elna always fussed at her for doing it, but this time she was careful not to mash any of the flowers, and besides, Elna wasn't here.

The bell on the door jingled when she went in. She always liked that bell. It made her feel happy. Miranda was standing by the cash register with her sweater and purse.

“Hey, gal,” she said. “I was just getting ready to call it a day.
I'm beat. This getting up at five o'clock routine is something I'm going to have to get used to. But I love the job,” she said, and she looked like she meant it. Her eyes were shiny, and she was smiling like she was happy.

“Do you like your apartment?” Eden asked.

“I love it, love it, love it,” Miranda said. “Thank you. In fact, as soon as I get my first paycheck, I'm going to buy one of those little grills, and you can come over for hot dogs.”

“Okay,” Eden said, “but before you go, I need to ask you something.”

“Shoot,” Miranda said.

She waited while Eden set down her backpack and got out her notebook, and she didn't even laugh or smile like some grown-ups did when she wrote things down. “Okay,” Eden said, “I need to know if there's any news you've heard today.”

“Hmm. What kind of news?”

“You know. Just anything that might come in handy.”

“Let's see.” She looked up at the ceiling and then smiled. “I know. I heard Fred Ingalls tell Wally that his dog had puppies.”

“That bluetick hound?”

“That's the one.” Miranda nodded.

“How many?”

“Five,” she said, “and only one of them is promised. Henry Wilkes is taking it.”

“Good,” Eden said, writing it all down. “Anything else.”

“Um, yeah. Amos Schultz's wife went into labor in the middle of the night, and since they don't have a car, Amos had to ride his horse over to the firehouse, and a volunteer fireman came and was driving her to the hospital, but he ended up delivering the baby on the way.”

Now, that was news! She wrote it down, putting in a bunch of exclamation points. “Who was the fireman?”

Miranda made a face. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn't get that.”

“That's all right,” she said. “I'll find out. Was it a boy or a girl?”

“Oh! Ah, I don't know that, either.” Miranda gave her an apologetic look. “I didn't do such a good job of gathering information, did I?”

“You did all right,” she said. “It takes a while before you get the hang of it.”

“Well, I'll keep working at it. Maybe I'll do better next time.”

Eden was tired of writing things down then, so Miranda got her a chocolate doughnut and milk and said good-bye, and Eden felt happy again watching her walk across the street. She liked Miranda a lot. She suddenly had a great idea. She wrote it down in her notebook in capital letters and added a few exclamation points.

MIRANDA AND UNCLE JOSEPH SHOULD GET MARRIED!!!

But then she remembered that they didn't really like each other, so she scratched it out.

She took her doughnut to the table in front of the window. She ate all the icing first, then took tiny little bites and a drink of milk in between each one. When she was finished, she carried her plate back to the kitchen and left.

Next she went across the street to the post office.

“Hey, Eden, where you been?” Mr. Poncey gave her a big smile and handed her a stack of Wanted posters.

“It's a long story,” she said, not really feeling like going into the details right now. She thanked him and took the Wanted posters to the copy machine in the back room, where she made copies for her files and then punched holes in the new ones and took them out into the lobby and put them in the binder that was attached to the bulletin board. That way people could leaf through them while they were waiting in line and maybe catch somebody. Bad guys had to eat and go to the Laundromat just like everybody else, didn't they? Well, then, some regular people might just catch one of them.

“Bye, Mr. Poncey,” she said.

“Good-bye, Eden. Thanks. See you Monday.”

She waved good-bye, then went across the street to the bus station. Mrs. Joyce was working today instead of Floyd, and she was waiting on somebody now.
White female approximately five-feet-six-inches tall, gray curly hair, wearing a white pantsuit and carrying a green-and-white pocketbook. No visible markings or tattoos.
The lady finished at the counter and then went and sat down next to the door with one suitcase. Eden happened to know that the only bus leaving this afternoon was for Bluefield, West Virginia, with a final destination of Charleston.

“I'm done now, sugar,” Mrs. Joyce said. “Come on over and show me the pictures.”

So Eden took the new Wanted posters to the counter, and Mrs. Joyce put on her glasses. She leafed past the one of Usama bin Laden. There was a twenty-five-million-dollar reward for him, but Eden had already shown him around and nobody'd seen him, and Mrs. Joyce said there wasn't much chance he would come through Abingdon. But you never knew. She went through the others, even though Mrs. Joyce had already seen them, and then one by one she looked and shook her head. She took a minute when she came to the man who had too many wives.

“He sort of takes after that fellow that bought the butcher shop over at Damascus, but I guess not. I believe that new fellow has blond hair, and this fellow has brown.”

“He might dye his hair,” Eden said.

Mrs. Joyce shook her head. “I don't think it's him.”

But Eden wrote a note on the back anyway. She would show it to Uncle Joseph.

“I still don't think you ought to be reading all this stuff, child.”

“I don't read the small print.” Uncle Joseph had said to just read the heading at the top and look at the pictures. She asked him why and he'd said,
“Sometimes things get too heavy to carry, Eden. Let the bigger people carry this stuff for you until you're old enough.”
She had disobeyed him at first. She read about a man who killed his wife and his two children and set their house on fire, and she hadn't been able to forget about it for a long time.
So after that she just read the top line like Uncle Joseph said.

“See you later,” she called to Mrs. Joyce. And she set out for the police station.

Uncle Joseph wasn't there. Her desk was in the room across from his office where they kept the copy machine, and it was covered with papers to file, so she sat down and went to work. Officer Prentiss was the one she was supposed to go to if she needed help anyway, but mostly she helped him. He was kind of old and didn't know how to get on the Internet or type things, so she had shown him how to do that and how to Google things.

First off she separated all the papers into three piles: arrest reports, Wanted posters, and new warrants. Then she put them all into alphabetical order. She took a few minutes to look them over after that. There was an arrest report on Rachel Adkins for passing bad checks. Didn't know her. Another one for Donald Christopher Barnes for contempt of court. Didn't know him, either. There was another one for David Harklewood Jr. for trespassing at Wal-Mart after being forbidden to do so. She thought there were some Harklewoods who went to the Catholic church, which reminded her she hadn't checked in with any of her contacts there in nearly a week. She would have to do it on Monday. She glanced at the new Wanted posters and warrants, then started filing. When she was done, she marked her time on the card and set it on Uncle Joseph's desk. He paid her every Saturday morning. Three dollars for every hour she worked, and so far she had saved a hundred and fifty dollars. She didn't know what she was going to do with it yet, but it would be something good. She was thinking about buying a Buck knife, but Grandma had said no, and Uncle Joseph had shaken his head and said,
“When are you going to learn? Ask me first.”
So she had to wait awhile now.