Rock of Ages (26 page)

So, on this particular day, the one I've just remembered, Jenny had escorted me and Wallace into the kitchen, where there were enough tea cakes to induce diabetes. She made Kool-Aid to go with them. I can remember it was the orange kind, almost bitter compared to the teacakes.

She went back into the den. Mom wasn't there. She was sick or something and didn't come that day.

They had a little dachshund, Pete, and Pete wanted a cookie. Wallace said his momma didn't allow them to give cookies to Pete, and I said, shoot, I'll feed him a cookie if I want to, and Wallace said he was going to tell his momma.

So I got up from the table to go and ask Jenny myself, a teacake in my hand. I was sure she wouldn't deny me.

When I walked into the room where the adults were, they were all standing around that fireplace. I guess they didn't see me. Harold was holding a brick that I could see he'd taken out of the back of the fireplace, and Jenny was showing some papers to Daddy.

Jenny saw me first, and it was just about the only time I ever saw her look even briefly irritated with me.

“You go on back in the kitchen,” she said, frowning. “We're talking grown-up stuff here.”

I was so stunned that I turned and left the room, went back and sat down at the table and didn't lobby any more to feed the dachshund. I was not usually a child to take orders without demanding a reason. It was the source of much friction with my mother. So Jenny obviously made an impression.

On the way home, in the truck, I didn't ask Daddy about the brick and the papers. It seemed to me that they must have been doing something shameful, the way Jenny acted, and I guess I just didn't want to know about the kind of thing that made adults ashamed.

We were turning off the paved road when Daddy spoke.

“You're wondering how come Jenny acted like she did back there.”

He spoke softly, the way he always did to me, but it wasn't a question.

I nodded my head.

“Well, I'm going to see how good you can keep a secret. You can't tell anybody this, and if I ever find out you did, I won't ever tell you another one. We can't even talk about it again. So promise.”

I didn't even really want to know, but I was intrigued, and I loved that Daddy thought me a candidate to keep such an obviously important secret.

“I promise.”

So he told me about the hidey-hole.

Jenny and especially Harold, like a lot of people who were children of the Depression, didn't trust banks. They had therefore taken to hiding their most important possessions. One brick in the fireplace was loose, and there was a hollow spot behind it, a little nook where you could keep a small box safe from burglars. Harold had had the fireplace built that way, for that purpose. His first cousin in Clinton had kept a safe in his bedroom, and one night thieves broke in and carried it, and all his money, off.

“You can't steal what you can't find,” is what Daddy said Harold told him.

I don't know what they kept in there—probably Jenny's ring on the rare occasions like a trip to the beach when she didn't wear it. Maybe some government bonds, probably a lot of hard, cold cash, their will, a bunch of old letters. I don't even know what Daddy and they were looking at that day.

Well, they couldn't have pried information about that safe from me with bamboo splints under my nails. Daddy had entrusted me, and I wasn't going to let him down. He didn't say don't tell your momma, but I didn't, because he said no one.

It was at least three years later when Daddy mentioned the hidey-hole casually to Mom at dinner, and I realized that, of course, she had known about it, too. It wasn't just me and Daddy, which was vaguely disappointing. But I was proud that he would know I hadn't told her.

And now, lying in bed in the dark, my eyes so tired from reading that I can't hold them open. But with my body twitching and my brain running a hundred miles an hour, I know what Daddy was pointing to, in the dream.

I don't know where the information came from. I wasn't even thinking about the dream. Suddenly, though, there it was, in plain view of my addled brain.

Kenny and I talked about Jenny again, yesterday, although I'm sure he'd rather never hear any more about her or my runaway imagination.

He did indulge me, though, perhaps because we were both naked at the time.

We are going to the well too often, I'm afraid. My “visits” next door are starting to make Justin and Leeza suspicious, I think, even though most of their combined thoughts must be on the fast-approaching birth of their first child. They don't really have time to obsess over whether I'm engaging in inappropriate behavior. They probably can't even believe someone my age is capable of inappropriate behavior. Kids, I want to tell them, returning from a couple of stolen hours, you don't even know what inappropriate is, or how damn good it feels.

I remember being 27, and I remember how old I thought 52 was at the time. The very idea of someone that age having good, dirty sex might have, to use Phil's phrase, put me off my game.

It is difficult, though, to hide the aftereffects of something this good.

“Georgia,” Kenny groaned, “you said you were over this. You're way too smart to believe you're being led around by some dream, some vision. What next, a Ouija board?”

He talked me through it again, especially the part about no evidence worth mentioning, and the part about trying not to give Pooh further reason to believe I was his mortal enemy.

I ran my fingernail lightly along his thigh and tried to explain how I'd never had a dream quite like this one, never had a dream that left me with anything except fuzzy images and unsupportable feelings afterward.

“Well,” he said, “sometimes you just have to make yourself forget. Let it go.”

“Should I do as you do,” I asked, flushing with sudden anger, “or do as you say?”

He got my drift just as I began apologizing, telling him again that I would never, ever mention Cam Jacobs to another person.

“I'd just as soon you didn't mention him to me,” he said.

I am used to talking things out, not letting go until an issue is resolved. No one knows better than I that if Kenny believed Jenny really met with some kind of foul play, he would go a long way toward exacting some version of justice. He seems, though, to be willing to accept the most likely scenario.

I told him I would forget the dream when he was able to look me in the eye and swear to me he had never seen anything he couldn't explain out by the Rock of Ages.

He chose instead to draw me to him again, in a highly successful attempt at distraction.

Now, though, I sit up in bed, remembering the dream, remembering the way my father was looking at me, and at the brick fireplace, and I know.

I know.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

December 18

One minute, Georgia knows that she must act, no matter what the consequences. The next, she steps outside herself and sees what the rest of the world must see—a woman who has suffered great loss and has already had one breakdown in the last few months, a woman acting on “information” she dreamed.

Write it out, an advisor told her once, when she came to him with an idea for a master's thesis. If it makes sense when you write it out, it's probably a good idea.

Well, when she writes this one out, it doesn't seem too persuasive.

My cousin drowned. Unsavory people somehow managed to get the deed to her house and land. Her valuable wedding ring is missing. I found an old shoe in the weeds beside the pond that matched the one on her foot. My dead father came to me in a dream and told me to look for the answer in a secret hiding place that probably was forgotten or sealed long ago
.

And, of course, the secret hiding place is in the middle of a house owned and occupied by Pooh Blackwell.

The evidence is, indeed, tenuous. The risk seems great, the task beyond any skills a liberal arts major might have acquired from three decades of learning and teaching English literature.

And yet, sitting here on a cold, clear Saturday night beside the state highway leading out of Geddie, alone and more than a little afraid, she knows she has to act.

The red truck has been gone half an hour.

Forsythia Crumpler's new neighbor always leaves on Saturday night, and always comes home, loud and drunk, often with a few equally loud and drunken acquaintances, sometime in the early morning.

“I'd call the sheriff, if I thought they'd do anything,” Forsythia told Georgia. “But they'll just come out and talk to him, and then he'll be mad at me.”

Georgia didn't feel comfortable telling her to stand up for her rights. Who would protect her if Pooh did anything? Kenny, maybe, but she didn't want him to either kill again or be killed. The loaded gun she carries and the new information about Kenny's capabilities make her feel as if the raw and unthinkable, the thing from which she has always tried to shelter herself, is lurking just beyond her vision.

It hurt her to see her old teacher, one of the most fearless people she's ever known, cowed by old age and the inaction of others. Forsythia Crumpler was just one more reason to forget caution, if not sanity.

She is sitting in her van like something out of a bad detective story, wearing a sweater, and, over that, an overcoat with pockets big enough to hold a flashlight and the Ladysmith that she hasn't fired since the day Kenny gave it to her.

She has decided she doesn't want Kenny involved. If she had pressured him to help her, and he had obliged, and then things had gone badly, that would be one more thing for the monkey to chatter about.

If I'm wrong, I'll be wrong in private
.

Plus, as fearless as Kenny is, she doesn't believe he would ever break into someone else's house, even Pooh Blackwell's.

If Pooh should come back early tonight and catch her breaking in, she wouldn't even be within her rights to shoot him. He'd be entitled (and glad) to shoot her.

On a moral level, Georgia doesn't exactly see this as a break-in. Not really. After all, she does have the key.

That might have made the difference, in the end. She was getting out of the truck on Tuesday, and she dropped her key ring on the ground. Picking it up, she was struck with how many keys she had, some from houses in which she hadn't lived for many years. And then she saw the one on the end, really looked at it for the first time in nearly a decade.

She holds it in her barely shaking hand now. It is a dull brown and has not been inside the lock for which it was cut since the day Jenny McLaurin gave it to her.

“It's just in case,” she'd said that Sunday almost 10 years ago. “You know, in case something happens to me.” She had given another copy to Forsythia.

Georgia didn't have the heart to tell her she wouldn't be in East Geddie often enough to matter. Better she should give the second copy to some other old friend at church. But Jenny wanted her to have the key, and Georgia sensed that refusing it would hurt Jenny's feelings.

Well, Georgia thought to herself, standing there looking at the key, something did happen to you, Jenny. So maybe it's time to see if that old key still fits.

The hardest part about tonight was getting away from Justin and Leeza. They seemed offended when she told them she was going up to Greensboro to spend the night with an old college girlfriend. It was the only way she could slip away without arousing suspicion. She'd done it once before, so that she and Kenny could have an entire night together in one of the motels out by the interstate.

She almost gave up on the whole idea this afternoon when she saw how lost Justin looked. The baby could come at any time. All that kept her from staying was the calm, fearless way Leeza told her everything was going to be fine, no problem.

So Georgia went to a movie she never really saw, then ate a fast-food hamburger she didn't really taste, sitting in the van, and now, here she is.

She is parked well beyond the driveway separating Jenny McLaurin's old house from Forsythia's. A path runs alongside the railroad tracks, overgrown from years of disuse, but it serves her purpose. She can sit beneath the pines, the van half-hidden in the bushes, and wait.

When Pooh came tearing out, rumbling down the drive as if he were fleeing a nuclear attack, she was afraid for a split second that his lights might have picked up the van as he careered from one side of the dirt drive to the other for no apparent reason other than to raise hell.

But the truck never slowed. Pooh couldn't have even looked for traffic as he spun out on to Route 47, headed for Port Campbell, or wherever psychopaths go on Saturday night.

Fifteen minutes later, she finally convinces herself that he is indeed gone for the night.

She gets out of the van, closing the door softly, pushing on it until it clicks, and then locking it.

To her chagrin, her running shoes start squeaking in the dew-turning-to-frost along the side of the front yard. She stops twice to listen for a watchdog, or even a neighbor's mutt. Forsythia has told her that the only dog Pooh keeps is some kind of pit bull mix that she's never seen leave the pen back by the pond.

The key, she thinks, probably doesn't even work. I'm probably on a fool's errand, and if I can't open this door, then it's a sign, and I'll go back to being sane and logical.

She jiggles and works it for a long two minutes. Then, expecting nothing, she turns the doorknob, and almost stumbles into the living room. Of course, she thinks. Pooh doesn't bother to lock the front door.

The stench overwhelms her at first. She wonders if someone hasn't died in here. Maybe Pooh is keeping decomposing bodies under his bed. But then she realizes it's just an aversion to washing dishes or throwing out leftover food. She steps on something that crunches and gives, identifying it finally as a pizza box.

Georgia doesn't want to use the flashlight until she has to. She stands in the dark until her night vision lets her identify vague outlines and then specific items. She does bang her shin once on an unseen coffee table, but five minutes after she has entered the house, she is standing in front of the fireplace, separated from it by the oil heater. She works her way around the heater, being careful to duck and miss the stovepipe, burning herself once with a misplaced hand.