“What kind of stories?”
“Oh, you know, the usual threats. How if I didn’t behave, she was going to come steal me, cook me. Or throw me down her well. Which of course was bottomless. Or use my bones to make a nest for her vulture. Nana could be creative sometimes.”
“What did she call this woman?” Clarence asked. “She had to have a name.”
“Old Daisy. Never just plain Daisy. Usually Old Daisy. Sometimes Crazy Daisy, if she was going for a laugh.”
“Daisy? Seriously?”
“I know,” Paulette said, and tapped the detail photo again. “That’s the most undaisified woman I’ve ever seen.”
Will leaned toward her from across the table, and she mirrored him right back, as if the two of them were already excluding him. “How old was your grandmother when she first knew about Daisy?”
“She grew up around her. So, from the time she was a little bitty thing until she was close to my age.”
“What happened then?”
“She got hitched and moved a few miles away and squeezed out my mom.” Paulette swept the photos together and shoved them at Clarence. “Better put these up for safe keeping. We’re about to get nine kinds of messy here.”
He slipped them into their folder as the food arrived, beef ribs and pulled pork and slaw and onion rings made with jumbo Vidalias. A couple of bites in, he was willing to admit that, okay, Paulette knew her barbecue joints.
“How close did Ingrid live to her?” Will asked.
Paulette shrugged. “Down the road, is all she used to say.”
“How far does that mean?” Clarence said.
“I have no idea. You know country people. ‘Down the road a piece’ . . . that can mean just about anything.”
“But your grandmother saw her, right? These weren’t just stories to her, too?”
“Saw her all the time. Never up close, though. Nobody ever saw her up close. There’s some people, you know, they’re just not neighborly, so you let them be. Back then, I guess it was seen as more peculiar than it is now. Now it’s just a way of life all over. But even then, there had to be people like that, and I guess they didn’t push it. She did fine on her own, puttering around that old place.” Paulette grinned, recalling more. “That didn’t stop the area boys from trying to look. Nana Ingrid’s brother was one of them. They’d dare each other to sneak up close to Old Daisy’s property and try to get in a peek, and they’d get a good scare. Before they got too close, she’d spot them and screech at them and they’d scatter. In fact, that’s what some people thought that crazy singing she did was all about. To keep people away. Same as a rattlesnake shaking its tail.”
“A threat display.”
“And I guess it worked,” she said. “Have you got it? Can I hear it?”
She wiped her fingers with a Wet-Nap as they handed over the Walkman and the earphones. The tape was already cued up, and unlike many people, Paulette didn’t shut it down early. She hung in there until the end.
“I gotta say, that’s not what I was expecting,” she said while stripping away the headphones. “That doesn’t sound like a crazy person. It hardly sounds like a person at all.”
Clarence had always thought the same thing, but never liked to lead people to the conclusion. It was always more validating to see them arrive at it on their own.
“Maybe I’m just dense, but there’s one thing I’m not getting here,” she said. “If nobody ever saw your grandfather again, then how do you happen to have his last pictures and recordings?”
“The greed and kindness of strangers,” Will said.
“The camera was something he got while he was in the army. He epoxied a nameplate on it, so it wouldn’t be as easy for someone to steal,” Clarence said. “Three or four months after he went missing, our grandmother got a call from a pawn shop in Hays. The family had raised all the hell they could out here, her and our uncles . . . filing missing person reports, and they got it in some newspapers, and on the radio, a little TV. So the pawnbroker recognized the name when some vagrant brought in the camera and tape recorder in the same bag our grandfather used to carry them around. Oilskin, so it wouldn’t soak through if he got caught in the rain. The story the pawnbroker got out of him, once he got him past the bullshit about how they were his, was that he found the bag on a junk heap along the side of the road someplace west. By that time, he’d been carrying them around a couple weeks or more, until he could find someplace to sell them, so he couldn’t pin it down where he found them. Nobody got a chance to press him on it, because once he realized he wasn’t going to get any money for them, and maybe there was a murder investigation in it too, he was out the door and gone.”
Will cut in to finish as if he were feeling sidelined. “The pawnbroker wasn’t a big fan of the cops either, so he got in touch with our family directly. Said he’d get our grandfather’s things to them and let them decide what they wanted to do about that.”
“Decent of him,” she said. “What’d they do?”
“They had the film developed, had prints made, and copies of the tape. They sent them out to different departments. It didn’t help. Since there was no body and no car, I don’t think they were taking it seriously, once they understood that these trips of his weren’t anything new. I think they just figured he liked it that way and decided to stay gone. Start over somewhere else. He wouldn’t be the first.”
Paulette narrowed her eyes. “Wait a second. Nobody ever found his car, either?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t that seem weird to you that both him and his car vanish, but his camera and tape recorder get found?”
Will appeared mystified she would even ask. “That’s just what happened.”
“Yeah, but . . .” She pecked at the folder holding the photos. “Say Old Daisy is responsible. Somehow, some way. Somebody is, so let’s say it’s her. She gets rid of him. Obviously. She knows enough to get rid of his car, too. That’s pretty cunning. You can’t drop a car down a well. But then this bag of other things that could be tied to him, she’s so careless with it she just tosses it aside like it doesn’t matter? Even though she stood right there facing him as he took her picture? Does that make sense to you?”
Clarence stepped in, locking ranks. “Like he said. That’s how it happened.”
But Paulette was right. Sometimes it took an outsider to point out the obvious. It had never gnawed at him until now. He’d known the story since childhood. Had grown up taking every detail for granted without appreciating what some might actually imply.
“Daisy didn’t know what a camera was?” he mused. “She knew what cars were, she could see that, even if she didn’t drive one herself. But the camera and tape recorder . . . no. She didn’t know. In 1963, she didn’t know. How is that possible?”
“Like I said. She kept to herself and they were glad to let her do it.”
Clarence moved the decades around in his head like blocks. “How far back are we talking about with your grandmother, anyway? How old is she?”
Paulette did some quick calculating. “She’d be seventy-five, seventy-six now.”
“So if she grew up around Old Daisy, that’d be as far back as twenty years before our grandfather disappeared. Give or take. And she was old then?”
“That was the story. It sounded like she was one of those people who’d always been around, as far back as anyone could remember. But you know, some people, they look and act older than they really are, so that’s how it gets to seeming that way. And if you don’t see them up close . . .”