"The old lady."
"She wasn't always old, Lonnie. And it appears that her life may not have been as empty as everyone thought. She really did have a treasure out there, albeit it a personal y› one.
He held the package up, weighing it, thinking, I'm sure, of the damage that had accrued around it. "And Billy?"
"A messenger, maybe, delivering the necklace to someone here in town, or up in Memphis-with or without Miss Chorley's knowledge. Or it could only be that the necklace has been in the car all these years, forgotten."
"Here we've been thinking this whole thing had to do with money, drugs-"
"The usual suspects, yes. And it still may have. The necklace could be coincidence."
"That's a lot of maybes."
I spread my hands in mock resignation. "Go have your face-to-face with Harmon. If you choose to, give the necklace to him. For good or bad-I've no idea. See what happens."
"I'd be finishing Billy's job."
Again I spread my hands at the world's uncertainties, its unreadability.
As afterwards, driving home alone in the Jeep, listening to Eldon and Val, I shrugged at the same. Briefly Val retuned to one of the old mountain tunings, sawmill or double C, then came the hard stutter of clawhammer, and her voice.
Li'l birdie, li'l birdie
Come sing to me a song
I've a short while to be here
And a long time to be gone
CHAPTER TWENTY
So many stories leave you standing at the altar. The crisis has been met, the many obstacles averted or overcome, most everything's back to the way it was before or has righted itself to some new still point. You always wonder what happened to these people. Because they had pasts, they had lives, before you began reading. And they have futures, some of them, once you stop.
I remember a story I read years ago, hanging at a newsstand on Lamar waiting for the bar across the street to open for the day. Must have been the early seventies. I wasn't long out of Nam. On the first page this young guy stands on a hill looking down into the valley where the worms that tried to take over the world are dead and dying. He did that. He saved the world. Then for the next ten pages and the rest of his life he's living in a trailer park drinking beer for breakfast and bouncing off bad relationships.
That's pretty much how it goes, for most of us. We don't stub our toes on streets of gold and lead rich lives, we don't tell the people we love how much we love them when it matters, we never quite inhabit the shadows we cast as we cross this world. We just go on.
And some of us, a self-chosen few, go about finding how much music we can make with what we have left.
In my dream that night I couldn't find the town I live in. Friends and family awaited me, I knew, and I had started out for home hours before but somehow kept losing my way. Parts of the town, certain streets and buildings, looked familiar, others didn't, and I was always close, always almost home, but could never make it there. Occasionally in the distance I would catch glimpses of the sea, of high-rise buildings, of missile silos and grain elevators, of clouds and darkening sky.
I didn't go home or to the office that day upon returning from Memphis. Instead I did something I'd been putting off a long time.
The house had sat empty since the day Val died. I kept telling myself I should go over there, and thinking about it, but there was always a swing through the town in the Jeep that needed doing, or paperwork to attend to, or one more cup of coffee to drink at the diner, and I never did.
It didn't look greatly different from the outside, simply abandoned. I thought of faces-I'd seen a lot of them, in prison, and in my practice-that showed no emotion. Weather had had its way with roof and windows, and a tree nearby had split down the length of its trunk, taking out half a room at the back. Runners had advanced (the word politely came to mind) onto porch and sides.
I don't know what I expected to find, save memories. But I certainly didn't expect to find what I did. I used the key Val had given me when she planned to go on the road with Eldon, stepped in, and stopped just inside the door. As handy with a hammer or saw as with a banjo (her words), Val had been at work restoring the old house since before we met. Three rooms had been pretty much done, as far as basics go-framework, floors, walls.
Now it was all but finished.
I went from room to room: smooth hardwood banisters, coving expertly fitted at juncture of floor and wall, inlays of tile at thresholds, crown molding curved like bird wings overhead, two-tone paint in most rooms, what looked like period wallpaper in a couple of them. It was stunning.
Someone had spent a lot of time in here. Someone with amazing skill. And with motivations I couldn't even begin to guess at.
In this small town where we all know one another's business, or think we do. 'Round here you sneeze, Doc says, and the people four houses down yell Bless you.
Ever the lawyer, Val, as we found out following her death, had a will on file. The house was mine. I stood wondering, trying to imagine who might be moved to come here day after day, month after month, to do all this work, and what that person's reasons could possibly be.
Maybe, like so much in life, reason had little to do with it.
Then puzzlement turned to laughter at the sheer, wonderful craziness of this. You get to be my age, you figure life doesn't have many surprises left for you. And here I was, in my dead girlfriend's house that time and weather had done its best to destroy and that someone had gone hell-bent on bringing back to life.
I sat there most of the afternoon, on the floor, out on the porch, out under one of the trees, marveling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE BACK TO STORIES, then. Here's where we are. Here's what happened.
Next day, a little after noon but decidedly dark for that hour, I'm sitting outside the office in an all-but-deserted downtown. Lonnie is in St. Louis doing what he feels he has to do. Milly lies slowly fitting the pieces of her world back together in a Memphis hospital room. Val's house, my house, having withstood well over a hundred years of ravage and neglect, stands waiting for the blows that finally will bring it down. The weather service has announced a major storm heading directly toward us, torrential rains, sixty-mile-an-hour winds, funnel clouds. We can see it already in this plum-dark sky, smell it on the breeze beginning to assert itself, as lights go on in houses at town's edge. Birds have taken to, then deserted, the wires. Dogs bay in the distance.
The storm is coming in. And the town, in its last hour, is waiting.
My daughter sits beside me.
An hour ago the door opened, right beside the new window we at last got installed, and there she was. Longer hair, but looking much the same. Except for fresh stitches over one eye.
"Nice scar."
"Important thing is, he came around to my way of thinking."
"I'll bet he did."
After a moment she said, "Doc Oldham called."
"Man's a public nuisance."
We made coffee and sat around catching up, like so many times before. As though nothing were different. Her department had put in a computer system no one could figure out, there was a new drug on the street, last month they'd had a murder in, of all places, the Wal-Mart parking lot. I filled her in on Billy, Eldon, and the rest. Told her about Val's house. And how not long before she arrived, Isaiah Stillman and a group from the colony had come walking down Main Street, saying they were here to do what they could to help.
At her suggestion we took the last of the coffee outside and sat on the bench polished by a generation or so of butts.
"Good seat for the show," she said.
"Best in the house."
So here we are. The air is charged, electric. I think back to Lonnie's plane, that moment just before the ground lets go. That's what it feels like.