Anna nodded. “Six months later. We got married right away, and a year after that, a precious little girl named Deborah came along.”
The girl thought about all that for several minutes. “I still don’t understand. Who rescued you? Did someone hear you scream?”
“No. No one from the station, or the nearby area, heard or saw anything at all. We survived only because of a quirk of fate. The phone Jack Speerman slapped out of my hand stayed on, and the connection stayed open. Mary didn’t hear everything, but she heard enough. She called 911 and the cops and ambulances were there within fifteen minutes. Mary saved our lives.”
“A lady you’d just met earlier that day.”
“Yep. An angel, according to your dad.”
“But — like Speerman said — how did she know exactly where you were?”
Anna grinned. “The windmill. That rusty old windmill, squawking away in the background. She heard it through the phone.”
Deborah was frowning again. “But to have heard the windmill noise earlier — to know where it was — Mary must’ve been in the woods after all.”
“She was. Just like the cashier at the station said. She told me later that she’d crossed the street and the field all the way to the woods after coming out of the restroom — but then turned around and went right back to talk to the folks who wound up letting her ride with them. Woody never saw her until she called out to him a few minutes later.”
“So you were wrong. He wasn’t lying.”
“I was wrong about a lot of things,” Anna said. “Turned out Woody’s odd behavior was because of his new position. He later transferred from sales to desk work.” She took in a long breath and blew it out. “Nobody was lying that day except Jack, and nobody had killed anyone except Stuart.”
“But Jack was guilty too, right?”
“Yes, he was. And he knew it.”
Deborah blinked twice, her eyes still wide. “Whoa.” She looked a little overwhelmed. “Has Daddy ever heard this story?”
“Oh yes.”
“What about Aunt Penny?”
Anna smiled again. “There’s something you probably don’t know about Penny. She used to be a nun. Or at least she trained for it. Then she changed careers and moved to Tennessee.”
Deborah gaped at her mother. “What?! You said you were telling me the truth!”
“I was.”
“But you said your friend that day... you said she was named Mary Patrick.”
“That was the name the church gave her — they do that. Her real name was Penny McDowell.”
Deborah turned and stayed silent for several moments, watching the countryside glide past the windows. “So Aunt Penny didn’t just save your life; she wound up introducing you to her brother.”
“And by doing so, made sure she would have a niece and nephew to come visit her once a year.”
Deborah giggled. It was a good sound, Anna thought, after what they’d been talking about for the past hour.
She thought about what Officer Keller had told her, after the incident with the would-be carjacker this morning. Was it true? Had what happened to her that day long ago really made her tough?
Maybe it had. But right now she didn’t want to be tough. She wanted to be a regular mother, the kind her kids could love and trust and play with before the world around them tried to make them tough. That would come soon enough.
“Mom?” Deborah said.
“What, honey?”
“The story you told me. Do you think about it much?”
Anna waited a long time before answering. Because the truth wasn’t the answer she wanted to give, or the one Deborah wanted to hear. Of course Anna thought about it, those things that had happened there in the piney woods beside the highway. She would always think about it. Sometimes, late at night, she could even hear the windmill again, the sound of those ancient, rusted blades turning around and around and around. But maybe now, now that the story had been told, she would think about it less. Who knew?
“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes I do.”
Deborah nodded, as if to acknowledge that the truth was always the best approach, honestly the best policy. They exchanged a knowing smile, Anna popped open another Coke, and little Charlie woke up in the backseat and rubbed both eyes with his chubby fists. Outside, State Highway 25 became 82 and then 45 and then pointed them north toward Tupelo and Corinth, straight as an arrow. Just south of the Tennessee line the sun broke through the clouds, waving them on.
It was a good day for traveling.
Anglers of the Keep
by Robert Busby
Olive Branch
Hunched over my ex-father-in-law’s front yard, molding a layer of pine straw around the purple lilac hedges and crawl-space grates wrapped around Lafayette’s sprawl of a brick one-story rancher, I heard the tires of Erin’s rental car massaging the gravel drive leading up to the carport. Erin had found a new breath of life after our divorce, quit her job as first-grade teacher at Bodock Elementary to pursue her PhD in American folklore at Oklahoma State University. Except for the semester she took off after Betty, her mom, was murdered a year and a half earlier, she’d been in Stillwater for four years of the five we’d been divorced. I was between gigs. Holding out for a management position, as they say.
Erin eased the car to a stop just short of the carport even though her father’s El Camino had not been parked there when I pulled in this morning. I’d assumed Lafayette was at the Feed Mill on Main Street, slugging coffee and shooting the shit with the other old-timers. Lafayette’s lungs were bad sick, figured he’d want to get in all the breakfasts he could. But it wasn’t like him not to welcome Erin home. The car door slammed. I stabbed the shears through the pallet of pine straw into the red clay underneath, made my way around the house along the stone path embroidered with monkey grass I’d planted for Lafayette last spring.
“Thought you might be over here,” she said.
She pushed herself off the hood of the blue Saturn. She wore a black wool turtleneck and when she uncrossed her arms her tits became ambitious. Her teeth gripped a peppermint candy. I folded my work gloves into the back pocket of my jeans and gave her a hug.
“I just came from the hospital,” she said. “Dad shot himself last night.”
“He all right?”
“He was cleaning that damn.22 revolver of his,” she said. “He forgot to unload it first. I flew in as soon as I got the call from the hospital.” She removed her plaid-lined parka from the car hood. “The bullet only got his ear.”
“Shit,” I said. “Should’ve called.”
She tumbled the set of keys around her finger. “Wasn’t so bad he couldn’t drive himself to the hospital. They’re keeping him there another night. I came by to get him a change of clothes.”
Erin invited me inside. A short, lopsided pyramid of empty beer cans squatted next to the garbage bin. Towers of newspapers and dirty plates had been erected on the dining room table when the kitchen sink had refused further occupancy. Erin reheated the leftover coffee in the carafe on the burner while we rinsed the dishes in the sink and sorted them into the dishwasher. Erin had always been attractively one diet away from what might be considered thick or hungry, filled out her jeans as if she’d been dipped up to her waist in a vat of liquid denim and left to air dry. Considering she’d flown into Memphis the night before and had immediately driven two hours south to the North Mississippi Medical Center in Gum Pond, twenty-five miles east of Bodock, and slept all night in a hospital room because her father had grazed a bullet off his head, she looked pretty damn good.