Cementville (29 page)

Nobody said out loud that she had it coming—what kind of people would we be? We had seen Nimrod sitting there day in, day out, where she had arranged him by the window, grizzled head staring out into nothing, making some of us expect all the sons of Noah to come charging over the knobs gathering two of every kind. We privately thought of them, the young girl, the old man, cleaving as one to save the race there on the ark. We didn't say these things, of course. We are not that kind of people.

Mothers keep their children home and long for this summer to end, for the doors of the school to open wide and take them in. Maybe for those six or seven hours each day their children will be safe from whatever it is that's out there.

THIRTEEN

M
aureen sat at the kitchen table shuffling through the pages of the memoir that had tried to become a history but now looked like nothing more than the pitiful efforts a younger, stupider version of herself would have scribbled into the red diary. Where were the words that could tell this story right now, that could describe what was happening, that could make time stop long enough to stanch the flood of awfulness threatening her town? They weren't flowing from the end of her cartridge pen, that much was obvious.

She watched out the window where her father and Uncle Carl worked on the driveway gate at the top of the hill, hammering and oiling and coaxing the hinges to cooperate after years of idleness. Carl used a shovel to level out the peaks and valleys that had developed in the gravel over time, hindering the gate from swinging easily across the driveway. Maureen could not remember the gate being closed, much less latched, ever. Her father couldn't possibly think a chain and padlock were really going to make a difference. If a killer was intent on murdering them all in their sleep one night, no gate
could keep him out. Maureen watched them work. Her mother, sitting at the table with the
Picayune
, was watching them too.

“I'm not sure how much longer your uncle will be staying with us,” Katherine said.

“I've gotten used to him though,” Maureen said, and was dismayed at how unsurprising it was, hearing her mother say this, as if it was something she knew was coming. There was dismay too at the secret tremor in her own voice.

“Well. It's not working out,” Katherine said.

“I don't agree.”

Katherine had been staring out the window during this exchange, and she turned and looked at Maureen as if seeing a person she was not sure she recognized. She opened her mouth. She closed her mouth. She looked back at her midweek edition of the newspaper.

And Maureen understood what Uncle Carl had tried to tell her in his weird whispery way without saying it outright. She wasn't getting the whole story. Now the deeper truth hit her full in the face: It wasn't likely that she was ever going to get it, not from the adults around here, and not from a bunch of stupid, pointless research. She wadded her neat stack of notes into a tight ball. Her mother glanced up from the
Picayune
in time to see Maureen march across the kitchen and throw the big white wad of paper in the trashcan.

“Hold on, hold on,” Katherine said, rescuing the crumpled pages. She flattened them on the table. “Do you have any idea how proud I am of you—taking on a huge project—”

The set of Maureen's face stopped her. Maureen had been unable to look at her mother, to
look
, really, at anyone, for the last twenty-four hours. That was when official word came. A new murder. Not some drifter from fifteen or twenty years ago who everybody but Uncle Carl and some flimsy microfilm at the library appeared to have forgotten. Not some foreign war bride from far across the ocean who kept so close to herself that few could recall ever having an actual conversation with her.

Augrey Ferguson was dead. The word kept pounding in Maureen's head as if it had taken over the job of her pulse. Dead. Dead. Dead.

She hadn't gotten to know Augrey, the girl about whom everybody claimed to know everything. For Maureen, Augrey was the fascinating bad girl who would cadge things for you, particularly things that kids from respectable families weren't supposed to have. The Ouija board. A forty-five of “Louie Louie” that Maureen was pretty sure had been shoplifted from Newberry's (
This is
so
dirty
, Augrey had promised Maureen, pulling it out from under her blouse). Even a cigarette once. Now each time Maureen thought of Augrey, which felt like every minute of every hour, what flooded through her was not the dread of a lurking killer that appeared to have settled into Katherine's very bones. What sank in and wouldn't leave Maureen alone was an overwhelming sadness at the final and complete loss of any possible chance to ever know Augrey Ferguson. Augrey had walked through a door and it had closed behind her, and it was never going to open again.

Katherine broke into the thick murk. “Want to help me make some bouquets?”

Maureen took the basket Katherine thrust at her and listlessly followed her mother out to the cutting garden.

“They've organized a flower drive at Holy Ghost. We're supposed to drop them off at the cafeteria, then somebody will get them over to the funeral home. Evidently the Altar Society has come up with what they think Arlene Ferguson really needs.”

There it was again. The barely concealed disdain Maureen was beginning to suspect her mother held for everything about their town. “You don't like Cementville much, do you?”

Katherine knelt before a row of gladioli and clipped a few and laid them across the basket. “What's gotten into you, Maureen?” she said without looking up.

“Do you think you'd ever just, you know, leave?”

Her mother stood and rubbed her hands down her skirt and as she was about to answer, there was Carl, looming out of nowhere the way only Carl could.

“Could I have some flowers?”

“Sure,” Katherine said, handing him the clippers.

He gathered an assortment—lavender globes of Stars of Persia, white and yellow snapdragons, deep purple angelonia, and long stems of fragrant lilies, all gently swaddled in his big arms. Maureen and Katherine silently watched.

“What do you plan to do with them, Carl?”

He looked around him for a bit, as if Katherine might be talking to someone else. “I thought I'd take them to Miss Wanda,” he whispered to the ground.

“Oh. Oh, right. She and Arlene are cousins or something, aren't they? That's a wonderful idea, Carl,” Katherine said.

He held the clippers out to her, and after the tiniest flinch, Katherine took them. Carl disappeared into the house.

“Mom,” Maureen said.

Katherine busied herself arranging the flowers in the basket by size, longest on the bottom.

“Mother.”

Katherine looked up.

“You're afraid of him, aren't you?”

“Of course not.” Her mother pursed her lips in a laugh. “You really are too dramatic for words sometimes, honey.”

In the house Maureen found Carl at the kitchen sink filling several canning jars with water. “You've got more than you can carry,” she said. “Mind if I come along?” Without waiting for an answer, she helped him distribute the flowers into four jars.

Katherine met them coming out the back door. “Where are you going?” She looked at Maureen, not Carl.

“Carl can't carry all this by himself.”

“Let me drive you.”

“No.” In memory, she had never said that word to her mother, not in that way, not with that tone. To her surprise, Katherine stepped aside. Maureen followed her uncle across the yard, each of them hugging two Mason jars stuffed with flowers.

When they reached the head of the driveway, Katherine called out. Maureen backtracked to where her mother still stood at the kitchen door.

“Are you sure you ought to be going up there? Wanda's mother has been sick for a long time.” The basket of flowers they had cut for the Altar Society hung at Katherine's side. She tried to give Maureen her listen-here look. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I'm not sure Mrs. Slidell's health will support an outburst from Carl. Plus there's Wanda herself, with that condition of hers. Carl is likely to send her into one of her attacks.” She was about to launch into the standard lecture about how to behave, but Maureen cut her off.

“Carl has not had an outburst since the first night he came home from the hospital,” she reminded Katherine. “That was in June. And it wasn't even an outburst. He was just nervous from not being used to us and from missing all his crazy friends who he had only lived with for his entire adult life.” Maureen was surprised and angry and confused all at once and didn't know why she couldn't stop herself. “And, Mother, I am not some kind of feral cat that has never been inside somebody else's house before.”

“Okay,” Katherine said. “Okay.” She gave Maureen a quick hug and carried her flowers into the house. Maureen walked the whole length of the driveway without once looking back to make sure her mother hadn't changed her mind.

T
HEY WALKED THROUGH TOWN WITH
Carl's flowers. Maureen glanced at her uncle, her big hulking shadow. Katherine used to call Maureen “Daddy's little shadow.” She didn't follow her father around much anymore, and she didn't really know when she had stopped. Willis seemed to have caved in on himself somehow, as if something inside him had been scooped out, something that wasn't required for you to keep on breathing, but the absence of which left you no longer the person you'd always been. Not that he'd ever been a big talker. But he had always been present, Maureen always knew where he was.
She knew the smell of him by heart. He was sad about something, that much was clear, and it wasn't just an old car. But could he ever be sad enough to—

No, she couldn't let herself think that. Willis Juell would never, ever . . .

Maureen looked at Carl again, at his thick arms and big plodding feet. He'd been a little boy once, a motherless boy with a very sad father. He probably adored Willis, probably followed him around everywhere. Maureen could imagine how hard it was for Carl when his big brother went away to the Korean War. Had he gone to look for his father that day? Maybe there were chores he'd been meaning to finish, and that was what sent him into the barn where his father . . .

She had gotten used to Carl, to having him follow her up and down hills and around town, huffing along, trying to keep up. Today it was Maureen who trailed behind, weighed down by the bleak mood that had set in last evening when they heard about Augrey. After Giang Smith's body was found, her mother would only let Maureen venture off the farm if Carl went with her. Now with the news about Augrey, Katherine appeared not to trust even Carl.

So much had changed in the span of one summer. The world was becoming a place where she might never feel at home again.

They clopped over the last bridge in town and began the slow climb up Crooked Creek Road. Maureen felt the slightest shiver as they passed Nimrod Grebe's house, dark and deserted since his cousins moved him to a nursing home in the next burg. Nimrod may have been the last person to see Augrey alive, other than the killer. Bett Ferguson's yard, normally crawling with raucous children, was empty and quiet.

Johnny Ferguson's farm was perched almost straight across the valley from the Juell farm, on the opposite side of the river. The house on Buckskin Ridge was one of the last places left in the county without a telephone. Carl and Maureen were going on the assumption that Miss Wanda would be home. What did Wanda Ferguson do, living up there on that windy knob with her grandparents'
ghosts and her ailing mother for company? Maureen had not been to the Ferguson farm since she was little. The house was smallish, nicely kept up, peony bushes all across the front, the vegetable garden immaculate.

Carl knocked. Maureen didn't know she was nervous until her knees went watery. From inside came the sounds of somebody making their slow way to the door. She and Carl seemed to agree to an unspoken pact right then not to look at each other. The door opened and Loretta Ferguson Slidell stood before them, leaning on a cane.

Maureen would not have considered herself shy, so when no words came out of her open mouth she had to chalk it up to the flat-out beauty of the woman. Not beautiful like a movie star. She was more of a see-through, floaty vision, like the ghost of beauty. Where Maureen had pictured a decrepit and shrunken invalid, Loretta Slidell stood straight as a statue. Her pale skin held a few phantom freckles, as if some trace of the young girl she had once been was trapped inside and was being gradually erased. Her Dreamsicle hair floated in a loose twist, orange sherbet blended with vanilla ice cream. Maureen wanted to reach out and dip in a finger and taste it.