“I see,” I responded in a voice that I hoped was unemotional. The last thing I wanted to do was scare her off, and she looked like the type that scared easily. I was mentally composing my next sentence when she saved me the effort.
“I prayed before coming to see you,” she intoned, looking at the scuffed toes of her beige cowboy boots. “I prayed for a long time — a real long time.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” I told her, still treading on verbal eggs and trying to avoid making an omelet. “The weather’s nice tonight, warmer than New York.”
“After you left our place, did you go over to see my Aunt Louise?” Belinda asked.
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
“Mama said you would, if you hadn’t already stopped there before you came to our place. The second you drove off, she was on the phone to Aunt Louise, telling her you was probably headed out there.”
“Your Aunt Louise was expecting me, all right,” I said with a smile.
She actually reacted with a tiny grin of her own, if only for an instant. “Yeah, I just bet she was. She’s a pistol, that one is.”
“Based on what little I saw of her, I’d have to agree.”
Belinda made a clicking sound with her tongue. “She say anything to you about Clarice?”
“No. Should she have?”
“I’da been surprised if she did, to tell the truth.” She fell silent.
Clearly, this was going to take a while. But then, time was something I had lots of. “Who’s Clarice?” I persisted.
“My cousin — Aunt Louise’s girl. She’s younger’n me, by what, seven, almost eight years. And a heck of a lot better looking, I’ll tell you.” She smiled again, this time sheepishly.
“There’s nothing wrong with the way you look,” I said to her. “Does Clarice live with her mother?”
“No.” She studied her boots again, wiggling them. “She did up till she got married, and then again after her divorce! But she doesn’t now.”
In case you’re wondering, it had occurred to me by this point that her cryptic answers might be Belinda’s way of having sport at a city slicker’s expense, but I quickly dismissed the thought. Neither humor nor guile appeared to be in this country girl’s repertoire. “Where does Clarice live?” I asked.
“Don’t know for sure, but we all think New York.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where Charles was,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“I see. How long has she been gone?”
“Well... over a year now, I guess it is. Didn’t surprise me one bit when she left. Both Aunt Louise and Mama acted shocked, but I really don’t think they were. They knew Clarice had to do something.”
“Why did she have to do something?” I asked, advancing the conversation only as fast as Belinda’s measured responses dictated.
She made that clicking noise again. “Quite a few unmarried girls and women around Mercer go and get themselves pregnant, but hardly any do it by their first cousin. Clarice didn’t want to stay around town and have everybody watch her get bigger, especially because people would figure out who the father was. Besides, she wanted to marry Charles, real bad.”
“How did he feel about her?”
She kept looking straight ahead at the highway. “Far as I could tell, Charles didn’t give two hoots about her. She was the one who pushed it; she was after him almost from the minute he came back to town to look after my Aunt Marian — that was his Mama.”
“You said Clarice was married before.”
“Yeah, she was, all right,” Belinda sneered. “For less than two years, to Wendell Avery. Thank the Lord they had no kids. He was a bum before they got married, he was a bum when they was married, and he’s a bum now. Drove a truck, whenever he was sober, that is. Lives in Evansville, last I heard. He left town right after they split up, which is pushing three years ago now. Far as I know, he hasn’t been back to Mercer, good riddance.”
Things were looking up. She was getting more talkative. We might not be here all night. “So when Charles stayed here caring for his mother, he and Clarice saw a lot of each other?” I asked.
Belinda made an unpleasant sound that came out as a cross between a chuckle and a cough. “Uh-huh. Like I said, she started chasin’ him the minute he got to town. Said she wanted to help look after her aunt, but before he came, she hadn’t been out to see Aunt Marian more’n maybe three or four times, if that. My mama and me, we were there almost every day, and so was Aunt Louise.”
“Did Clarice have a job?”
“Same as me, she clerked in the mini mart that’s part of the big gas station out at the Six Corners just south of town — you went right past it on your way to our place. We each worked four days a week, on different shifts from each other. Clarice always acted like she was too good for that kind of stuff, though. Wanted to be an artist. She was forever painting pictures at home, of flowers and trees and even their barn and cows, if you can believe it. Can’t tell you whether the stuff was any good or not.”
“How did you find out she was pregnant?”
“Aunt Louise told Mama. She told Mama that Clarice wanted to marry Charles and go back to New York with him. Thing is, he never asked her, though.”
I nodded. “How long after his mother died did Charles stay in Mercer?”
“Oh, maybe two weeks, maybe three. We all helped him clear out the house, and then he put it on the market. His Mama had sold the land around it to another farmer a few years back. It took at least six months before the house sold, and at that, Charles didn’t get nowhere near his asking price. Nobody does around here these days, especially the farms.” She fell silent, maybe pondering the price of local real estate, and I had just about decided we would never get to the point when she spoke again. “Anyway, when he left town, Clarice was really low. She was maybe two months along, so she didn’t show yet. And then one day, it was probably about three weeks after he went back to New York, she packed a few suitcases and was gone — just like that,”
Belinda clapped once for emphasis, but her facial expression stayed eerily unchanged.
“And you’ve never heard from her?”
“That is God’s truth,” she whispered, finally turning to face me. She shook her head. “Can you believe it? If Aunt Louise had gotten some word, any word, I know she would’ve told Mama, and Mama would’ve told me. In fact, Aunt Louise telephoned Charles in New York three or four different times, and he always told her that he hadn’t heard from Clarice. But she didn’t believe him — she told Mama that each time, he was real short with her on the phone, and that wasn’t like Charles. He’s always been real polite to Aunt Louise — and to all of us.”
“Do you believe what he told your aunt?” I asked.
“No sir, I do not,” she said quietly but very firmly. “A few days before Clarice disappeared, or whatever you want to call it, she told me she was going to marry Charles en and where is this going to happen?’ I asked. And she said, ‘Soon.’ That’s all she said. She wouldn’t tell me nothing else, but she sure sounded positive about it.”
“Did Clarice’s mother make any attempt to find her, other than the calls to Charles Childress?”
“Aunt Louise phoned Information for all the area codes around New York City — there must be about six — and none of ’em had a number for Clarice Wingfield or Clarice Avery — she took back her maiden name after she and Wendell split up. And she’s never gotten a letter or even a postcard — nothing.”
“Was your Aunt Louise upset about Clarice’s pregnancy?”
“Yeah, I’d have to say so. Aunt Louise is the most religious one in the family. She goes to church every single Sunday. Not like me and Mama — we hardly ever go, except at Easter and around Christmas. And she’s even been both an elder and a deacon. When Clarice got divorced, Aunt Louise was real unhappy for a long time, even though she didn’t care for Wendell herself. Mama said she told Clarice that she was terrible, terrible disappointed in her.”