He gave a long sigh and his eyes closed again.
Dwight Bryant is detective chief of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. After calling the nearest rescue squad, I’d dialed his mother’s phone number on the off chance that he’d be there in the neighborhood and not twenty-two miles away at Dobbs, the county seat.
Four minutes flat after I hung up the phone, I saw his Chevy pickup zoom over the crest of the lane and tear through the arch of pecan trees. He was followed by a bright purple TR, and even in this ghastly situation, I had to smile at his exasperation as Miss Emily Bryant bounded from the car and hurried up the steps ahead of him.
“Damn it all, Mother, if you set the first foot inside that house, I’m gonna arrest you, and I mean it!”
She turned on him, a feisty little carrottop Chihuahua facing down a sandy-brown Saint Bernard. “If you think I’m going to stay out here when one of my oldest and dearest friends may be lying in there-”
“She’s not, Miss Emily,” I said tremulously. J.C.’s blood was under my fingernails from where I’d stanched his chest wound. “I promise you. I looked in every room.”
“And under all the beds and in every closet?” She stamped her small foot imperiously on the porch floor. “I won’t touch a thing, Dwight, but I’ve got to look.”
“No.” That was the law talking, not her son; and she huffed but quit arguing.
“Okay, Deborah,” said Dwight, holding the screen door open for me. “Show me,”
Forty-five minutes later we knew no more than before. The rescue squad had arrived and departed again with J.C., who was still unconscious and barely clinging to life.
Sammy Junior and Helen were nearly frantic over Beulah’s disappearance and were torn between following the ambulance and staying put till there was word of her. Eventually they thought to call Donna Sue, who said she’d meet the ambulance at the hospital and stay with J.C. till they heard more.
A general APB had been issued for Beulah, but since nobody knew how she left, there wasn’t much besides her physical appearance to put on the wire.
Dwight’s deputies processed the den and J.C.’s room like a crime scene. After they finished, Dwight and I walked through the house with Sammy Junior and Helen; but they, too, saw nothing out of the ordinary except for the papers strewn in front of J.C.’s bedroom dresser.
Sammy Junior’s impression was the same as mine. “It’s like Mama was interrupted.”
“Doing what?” asked Dwight.
“Probably getting Uncle J.C.’s insurance papers together for him. I said I’d take ’em over to the hospital tomorrow. In all the excitement yesterday when he broke his leg, we didn’t think about ’em.”
He started to leave the room, then hesitated. “Y’all find his gun?”
“Gun?” said Dwight.
Sammy Junior pointed to a pair of empty rifle brackets over the bedroom door. “That’s where he keeps his.22.”
Much as we’d all like to believe this is still God’s country, everything peaceful and nice, most people now latch their doors at night, and they do keep loaded guns around for more than rats and snakes and wild dogs.
Helen shivered and instinctively moved closer to Sammy Junior. “The back door’s always open, Dwight. I’ll bet you anything some burglar or rapist caught her by surprise and forced her to go with him. And then J.C. probably rared up on the couch and they shot him like you’d swat a fly.”
I turned away from the pain on Sammy Junior’s face and stared through the bedroom window as Dwight said, “Been too many cars down the lane and through the yard for us to find any tread marks.”
Any lawyer knows how easily the lives of good decent people can be shattered, but I’ll never get used to the abruptness of it. Trouble seldom comes creeping up gently, giving a person time to prepare or get out of the way. It’s always the freakish bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky, the jerk of a steering wheel, the collapse of something rock solid only a second ago.
From the window I saw puffy white clouds floating serenely over the farm. The sun shone as brightly as ever on flowering trees and new-planted corn, warming the earth for another round of seedtime and harvest. A soft wind smoothed the field where J.C. had been disking before his accident yesterday, and in the distance the pond gleamed silver-green before a stand of willows.
My eye was snagged by what looked like a red-and-white cloth several yards into the newly disked field. Probably something Buster had pulled off the clothesline, I thought, and was suddenly aware that the others were waiting for my answer to a question I’d barely heard.
“No,” I replied, “I’d have noticed another car or truck coming out of the lane. Couldn’t have missed them by much, though, because the vegetables on the stove were still hot. Beulah must have turned them off just before going upstairs,”
“It’s a habit with her,” Sammy Junior said. He had his arm around Helen and was kneading her shoulder convulsively. It would probably be bruised tomorrow, but Helen didn’t seem to notice.
“Mama burned so many pots when we were kids that she got to where she wouldn’t leave the kitchen without turning off the vegetables. She’d mean to come right back, but then there was always something that needed doing, and you know how Mama is,”
We did. We surely did, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do” must have been written with Beulah in mind. She always reacted impulsively and couldn’t pass a dusty surface or a dirty windowpane or anything out of place without cleaning it or taking it back to its rightful spot in the house.
Maybe that’s why that scrap of red-and-white cloth out in the field bothered me. If I could see it, so would Beulah. She wouldn’t let it lie out there ten minutes if she could help it, and it was with a need to restore some of her order that I slipped away from the others.
Downstairs, the crime scene crew had finished with the kitchen; and for lack of anything more useful to do, Miss Emily had decided that everybody’d fare better on a full stomach. She’d put bowls of vegetables on the counter, sliced the ham, and set out glasses and a jug of sweet iced tea. At this returning semblance of the ordinary, Helen and Sammy Junior’s three anxious teenagers obediently filled their plates and went outside under the trees to eat. Their parents and Dwight weren’t enthusiastic about food at the moment, but Miss Emily bullied them into going through the motions. Even Dwight’s men had to stop and fix a plate.
No one noticed as I passed through the kitchen and down the back steps, past the Johnson grandchildren, who were feeding ham scraps to Buster and talking in low worried tones.
The lane cut through the yard, skirted the end of the field, then wound circuitously around the edge of the woods and on down to the pond; but the red-and-white rag lay on a beeline from the back door to the pond and I hesitated about stepping off the grass. My shoes were two-inch sling-back pumps, and they’d be wrecked if I walked out into the soft dirt of the newly disked field.
As I dithered, I saw that someone else had recently crossed the field on foot.
A single set of tracks.
With growing horror I remembered the red-and-white hostess aprons my aunt Zell had sewed for all her friends last Christmas.
I ran back to my car, grabbed the sneakers I keep in the
trunk, and then rushed to call Dwight.
It was done strictly by the book.
Dwight’s crime scene crew would later methodically photograph and measure and take pains not to disturb a single clod till every mark Beulah had left on the soft dirt was thoroughly documented; but the rest of us hurried through the turned field, paralleling the footprints from a ten-foot distance and filled with foreboding by the steady, unwavering direction those footsteps had taken.
Beulah’s apron lay about two hundred feet from the edge of the yard, She must have untied the strings and just let it fall as she walked away from it.