“Dang it all!” I am feeling more upset for me than him. After I got back to the fort, I planned to feed Woody and then the two of us would head over to the Triple S and sit on the steps of Sam’s cabin and talk about Mama’s passing. He has to know that she died and just didn’t say anything to us because he didn’t want to take away our hope. Our Speranza. Now he’s gone and ruined it all.
“What did you do?” I say. “Did you fall off the wagon?” I picture him and Curry over at the carnival grounds. Did that hobo say something to get him mad? Then Sam planted his fist on his chin and the sheriff was called in? Yes. That must be what happened. That’s why Curry was over at Beezy’s. He was apologizing to her for getting Sam arrested. But they all looked so friendly when I was watching them through my binoculars. I’m confused. “Did you get in a fight with Curry Weaver?”
Sam gives me an incredulous look. “Why would you think… it’s… it’s not like that.”
“Well, then how is it?” I ask, practically feeling the steam coming out of my ears.
“Shen… somebody reported to the sheriff that I had something to do with the disappearance of your mother,” he says.
“What? Why that’s…” I grab on to the half-raised car window to keep myself from tipping over backwards. “That’s-”
“Real wrong,” E. J. says, running over to the driver’s side of the car. “Beg your pardon, but that’s not right, Sheriff Nash. Sam and Miss Evelyn were the best of friends. They spent every Tuesday after-”
“E. J.!” I shriek, giving him the cut-throat sign over the roof of the car.
He looks back at me, stricken. “I mean… they knew each other a little but not so much that-”
“Calm down, son,” Sam says with a hint of a smile. “You’re going to blow a gasket.”
No matter how hard we were trying to keep Sam and Mama’s friendship on the q.t., seems like somebody found out. And unwitting E. J. has just confirmed it.
“Sheriff,” I say, putting on my most powerful Carmody smile, “I don’t know who it was that told you Sam had something to do with my mother’s disappearance, but whoever it was, they’re mistaken.”
Andy Nash doesn’t acknowledge me. He stares straight through the windshield and says, “I think you better go home now, Miss Shen.”
Vera, who must’ve been watching what was unfolding from behind Slidell’s plate-glass window, juts her head out the drugstore door and says, “Everything all right out here?”
Gazing into his light-colored eyes, I ask, “Is it, Sam?”
“If you could run over to the station to feed Wrigley, that would be much appreciated. And don’t worry.” And then to the sheriff he says, “All right, Andy.”
When the car pulls away from the curb, I’m shivering in my sneakers, but not because I think that Sam had something to do with my mother’s passing. I know he didn’t. There was somebody back in the clearing with Papa that night, but it wasn’t Sam. There is no way he could’ve made it all the way back to his cabin by the time I told Woody that I’d go looking when she was wailing, “Mama… gone.” I don’t care if Sam did answer his cabin door sweaty and with a shotgun.
E. J. is watching the county car disappear behind the courthouse. That’s where the jail is, down in the basement. He’s looking like he hopes a truck comes by and runs him down.
“I see that accusin’ look on your face.” He comes fast to my side, waving his hands like he’s got something awful stuck to them.
“You two, keep your voices down and get your butts in here.” I forgot about Vera. She’s still standing in Slidell’s open door in her peach waitress outfit and white shoes. “Got two brown cows already made up,” she says, and goes back into the shop looking vexed.
E. J., who normally wouldn’t have to be told twice when it comes to anything as delicious as one of Vera’s root beer floats, doesn’t budge.
I say, “You heard Sam. Somebody already reported to the sheriff about Mama and his friendship. What you said makes no difference at all. At least you didn’t mention that she’s dead.” I have never seen E. J. cry. Not even when he got bit by that sick dog and had to have those shots in his stomach. He’s got to be thinking the same way I am about how bad this could be. I guarantee you it’s halfway through town already that half-breed Sam Moody has been taken in for questioning in the disappearance of the white wife of Walter T. Carmody. Of course, I’m mad that he blabbed, but I can also feel his upset. E. J. panicked when he saw Sam in the back of the car, that’s all. Under normal circumstances, he is very tight-lipped. I knock his coonskin cap off his head so he can bend down and wipe off his watering eyes without me noticing. Opening the drugstore door, I say, “Ya hear that?”
E. J. shakes his head about off.
“Are you tellin’ me that ya can’t hear two brown cows mooing their heads off?”
“Shen-”
“Shut up and get in there, you fool,” I say, giving him a kick in the keester.
Chapter Twenty-four
It’s ten past closing at Slidell’s.
The tan counter with the red vinyl stools runs along the right wall of the shop. The lights are off, except for the one above the grill, but I can still see the aisles chock-full of soaps and hot-water bottles and coloring pads and crayons and anything else you might need. In the way back of the shop is where Mr. Slidell sits on a stool and doles out his pills. He’s a grouch. Vera told me that he’s all the time crabby because he’s been married to his wife too long. That I can understand. Sara Jane Slidell is the treasurer of the Ladies Auxiliary. She always went out of her way to be snooty to Mama, who she referred to as “the gal from up North.” It didn’t seem to bother our mother all that much when Mrs. Slidell was rude to her, but it did me. (I might’ve dropped a box of weed killer in her award-winning rose garden one night. I’m not saying that I did. But I might’ve. Twice.)
E. J. and I are dawdling near the front door, not exactly sure what to do. We’ve never been in here when it’s empty. The drugstore, especially the lunch counter, is usually bustling. When Papa was still sitting behind the bench, he almost always came home to check up on Mama’s whereabouts when Saint Pat’s bells struck twelve. Then he’d come back here to join the other members of the Men’s Club who traditionally eat breakfast at Ginny’s Diner and meet again at Slidell’s counter at noon. That’s how Vera knows His Honor personally. She serves him his tuna fish on toast, no pickle, no chips.
Vera looks up from the counter she’s wiping with a checkered red towel and calls, “What are you waitin’ for? An engraved invitation?”
Vera is twenty-eight years old, but looks younger with that pinkish skin that strawberry blondes have, a smattering of fairy kisses across her nose and eyes the color of a July sky. These days she’s a wonderful cook, but Beezy told me that she used to work entertaining the sailor boys over in Norfolk, where there’s the world’s largest naval base. Vera’s tough in her personality on the outside. Rough trade, you know. But on the inside, she is as mushy as one of her marshmallow cloud sundaes. She’s an animal lover, just like Woody and Mama. Over at her place, there’s a parrot named Sunny Boy living in a wrought-iron cage. He can say, “Ahoy, sailor, hop aboard,” and a few other things that I’m not allowed to repeat. Vera told Woody and me that she moved from Norfolk to Lexington “to get a new lease on life,” and now she works at Slidell’s and sings in the church choir. That’s how her and Mama became friends. They met over “Amazing Grace.” The Auxiliary Ladies don’t like Vera neither, but their husbands sure do. They’ll drop their keys on the other side of the counter and look up her skirt when she bends over to pick them up. As Grampa likes to put it, Vera is “built like a brick shithouse.”