Miss Julia to the Rescue (24 page)

Before I could enter a protest, Mr. Pickens said, “I’m all right, honey. It started with my client, a Mrs. Hanson, in Winston-Salem, who hired me to find her son who’d been missing a little over six months. The local cops had investigated and sent out bulletins, but she felt they’d given up on it. And they had because, come to find out, this wasn’t the first time the boy had gone missing and not the first time he’d been in trouble with the law. He’d been arrested at least once on a marijuana charge and several times for vandalism and joyriding. Mrs. Hanson blamed it all on his getting mixed up with the wrong crowd.” Mr. Pickens stopped and seemed to gather his thoughts. “I keep saying ‘boy,’ but he’s twenty-two or -three, so with no evidence of foul play, the cops treated him like an adult who was free to come and go as he pleased. And also, come to find out, I was the third PI she’d hired. The others, she claimed, had just taken her money and done nothing. But I had something they hadn’t had: a ransom note that the mother had just received. It demanded twenty-five thousand dollars for his safe return, and a picture of the kid dated a couple of days before it came was sent along with it.

“Well, the mother was beside herself, but she wouldn’t call the cops in again. ‘They won’t do anything,’ she said, and told me she’d pay me the twenty-five thousand if I’d bring him back to her. Well,” Mr. Pickens said somewhat wryly, “that was a pretty good incentive, although I would’ve done it for my usual fee. See, the picture gave me an idea of how I could find him. Part of a sign on an old store was in the background, and the note itself gave me a
starting point. That and the picture told me I wasn’t dealing with the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

“Why, J.D.?” Hazel Marie asked. “What was in the note?”

“Well, first off, it was written on the back of a gas receipt from a station in Beckley, West Virginia.”

“Why, we went right through there!” I said.

“You sure did, and that’s where I headed. I put out some feelers and began looking around from there.”

Coleman grinned and shook his head. “Sounds like he’d been picked up by some real dummies.”

“That’s not the half of it. I figured from the first that this Harold Hanson hadn’t been abducted. He was part of it. Who else would send a picture of a kidnap victim standing out in front of a store sign and eating a popsicle?”

“My word,” I murmured.

“Well,” Mr. Pickens went on, “it took me awhile, but I finally found where the picture had been taken. I’d spread out my search from Beckley, going through some of the surrounding towns. Anyway, I was tooling along a state highway outside of Mill Run and saw it. Drove right past it, then it hit me. I turned around and there it was.”

Hazel Marie was holding one of his hands in both of hers, sitting on the side of the bed, entranced with the story of her husband’s expertise. “Oh, J.D., you are so smart. How in the world did you recognize it?”

He smiled at her. “Well, in the picture, it looked to be a sign across the top of an open structure of some kind, but all the picture caught was cept sunday in big letters.”

“Oh, my goodness,” I said. “It was except sunday, wasn’t it? luther’s flea market open daily except sunday. Etta Mae and I saw the same thing. Mr. Pickens, it’s just remarkable that you would recognize the place from that little bit in the picture.”

He shrugged to show it was all in a day’s work. “It was right on the side of the road, so I could hardly miss it. Then, well, I won’t
go into how I narrowed it down, but I spent some time in bars and roadhouses, and picked up a few leads.”

“We didn’t see any bars or roadhouses,” I said, “and we drove around the town a lot.”

Mr. Pickens gave me a quick grin. “They’re there, all right. You have to have a nose for ’em. Anyway, I got a line on a sorry group that was trying to buy, lease, borrow or steal a couple of delivery trucks to move some merchandise, which, from the way they were going about it, I figured was stolen.” Mr. Pickens grimaced at the recollection, looking a little abashed. “I never found out exactly what they had or where they’d gotten it—probably broke into a warehouse somewhere. But they had whatever it was stashed in this old, run-down barn back in the mountains because the truck they’d carted it in on had given out. I followed a couple of them back from a bar one night and spent a miserable few hours in the bush watching them. I was just waiting till sunrise to find my way out and report to the sheriff, but they found me first. One of ’em came out to relieve himself and came right toward me. I couldn’t move because he’d know I was there, so I stayed still and he stumbled over me. I ran and he shot. Shot wild because it was still dark, but he got me. Why they didn’t track me down—because I
was
down—I don’t know. Probably scared them as much as it did me. The next thing I knew, I was in the hospital without a thing to my name. Not even my name. I lost a couple of days somewhere in there before somebody found me.”

“Oh, J.D.,” Hazel Marie cried—literally, because tears were welling up in her eyes. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if they hadn’t found you. Why, you could still be lying out there on the cold ground to this day!”

“Yeah,” Coleman said, “but you know, they must’ve tracked you down, because somebody searched you. Probably scared them even more when they saw your license, so they just took off.”

“That’s what I figure, too,” Mr. Pickens said. “But I sure don’t come out of it looking too good. The doc said I probably hit my
head falling after I got shot. Some hunters found me in a gully, and I guess I was lucky not to get shot again.”

“Don’t you worry about it, Mr. Pickens,” I said, trying to put his mind at ease. “I think you did Sheriff McAfee a favor, because right before we left Mill Run the other night, Etta Mae saw a bunch of ATF men at the sheriff’s office getting ready to go on a raid. So, see, you did a good deed in spite of getting shot.”

“ATF, huh?” Mr. Pickens got a thoughtful look on his face. “That could mean a lot of things. So, Coleman, maybe it’d be worth going ahead and making a call to the sheriff. I’d sure like to know if they picked up the Hanson kid.”

I couldn’t blame him if it was that twenty-five thousand dollars that troubled his mind. The man deserved some compensation for the pain and suffering he’d endured. And the embarrassment of not only getting shot, but of
where
he’d gotten shot. It wasn’t as if he’d be able to show off his scars.

As that previous day’s conversation ran through my mind, I stood before my closet trying to decide what to wear to a garden party I didn’t want to attend. I wished Hazel Marie were going with me, but she wasn’t ready to leave either the babies with a babysitter or Mr. Pickens with James. I knew she wouldn’t when Mildred put her on the list, but she’d been pleased to get an invitation—hand delivered by a chauffeur, mind you, because the Whitman woman had waited too late to post them.

I decided on a voile frock—a flower print—because of the heat and a pair of white Naturalizer pumps because of their wide heels, which I hoped would keep me aboveground. Some of the younger women would wear sundresses, I was sure, because it was so warm, but when you reach a certain age and your skin reaches a certain level of wrinkled sag, you put aside anything that lacks adequate coverage.

Then, on a whim, I took down several hatboxes that were high on a shelf. Why not? I asked myself. It had been so long since I’d worn a hat, but what better reason to wear one than an outdoor party on the hottest day of the year? I lifted the lids of several boxes and wondered why I hadn’t gotten rid of all the hats that I no longer wore. There was a time, I mused, when I would never have darkened the door of a church without obeying Paul’s admonition to cover my head. He’d not said anything about covering anything else, but I’d considered both hats and gloves essential to
being appropriately dressed. I couldn’t recall when those two essentials had faded from use, but they had and now it was the odd woman who wore either or both to church.

But why not gloves along with a hat for the garden party? I rummaged through a drawer until I found my short kid gloves wrapped in tissue paper. They were a little stiff from being unused for so long, but with some smoothing over my hands and fingers they looked quite nice, and I hoped the Whitman woman appreciated my efforts.

As for a hat, I of course decided on a wide-brimmed one, quite suitable for such a party, even as I hoped there’d be an awning or a tent or a pergola or some form of shade. A large tree would do, if nothing else.

I declare, though, the hammering and sawing that Adam Waites was doing upstairs was enough to give me a headache and make me more willing to leave the house in spite of not wanting to go. But the cabinets and bookshelves in the sunroom were coming along and the room was beginning to look like a working office. I hoped Sam would be pleased with it, even though if we had an overnight guest we’d have to set up a cot in a corner.

No, I realized as my spirits dropped, overnight guests could use Lloyd’s room because he’d soon be gone. Thinking of what it would be like when he was no longer with us put a damper on the whole day, as if a cloud had suddenly covered the sun. I sat down to let the lonely feeling pass, reminding myself of my blessings even though the long list didn’t quite compensate for the loss of one item on it.

The trick was to stay busy, I reminded myself, and the following day would be full of decorating decisions. Something to look forward to, if I could. I would be meeting with an interior designer—not the one who’d helped Hazel Marie with her pink room, but a more conservative one in Asheville. Paint color for the upstairs bedroom along with fabrics for curtains, bedcovers and chairs had to be selected and ordered. Oh, and carpet for that room and the sunroom. Then I needed to decide on furnishings
for the new English library that would take the place of the downstairs bedroom, where I was now sitting.

A lot to do, especially with little heart to do it. Still, I owed it to Sam to make the house as suitable and comfortable for the two of us as I could. The two of us! That thought brought tears to my eyes as I realized that I was suffering from a favorite topic of the women’s magazines Hazel Marie loved: empty-nest syndrome.

And with that, I sprang from the chair, determined not to be a victim of every popular psychological or medical problem that came along. And why did it need a special name in the first place? Couldn’t you simply miss someone without having a medical label stuck on it? A plain, simple word like “heartache” would come closer to describing what I felt at the thought of losing that boy. Then I reminded myself that I had lived for forty-something years in an empty nest with Wesley Lloyd Springer and didn’t know I was missing anything. Well, yes I did. I just didn’t know
what
I was missing. Now I knew, and its name was Lloyd.

The drive to Fairfields was an easy one, although it was my first trip there since it had been built up, it being somewhat off the beaten path. I’d heard about the fine estates in the area and when I turned into the gated area, I was not disappointed. Not disappointed, but somewhat rattled because of another reason that kept me from fully appreciating the large homes and spacious lawns. I’d forgotten how carefully a large-hat-wearing woman has to maneuver herself when moving about. For instance, when I’d attempted to get into the car, the hat’s wide brim had struck the door frame, unsettling the whole thing and messing up my hair. It had taken almost ten minutes of sitting in a blistering hot car to readjust both hat and hair, and because I was using the small mirror on the back of the visor, I wasn’t sure how well I’d done it. Then when I’d slipped on my sunglasses, the hat canted to one side and I had to do more adjusting. Added to that, I found that the hat was so wide that every time I moved my head to check for
traffic, the brim grazed the headrest, knocking the hat off kilter again. So I drove the whole way hunched over the wheel to keep that blasted hat in place. I was in no mood for a party by the time I arrived.

But the Whitman estate was a sight to behold. Mildred had been right—I couldn’t miss it. I turned off the main road of the community and drove through an open wrought-iron gate onto a straight, tree-lined avenue, with lawn on one side and a rail-fence-enclosed horse pasture on the other. The drive proceeded a quarter of a mile to the châteauesque mansion at the end of it, although the closer I got, the less Frenchified it looked. In fact, it was a mishmash of different colored stones and stucco with a lot of Gothic windows, one huge Palladian window over the double doors and a slender tower at the far end. A huge fountain spurting water like a geyser stood in the middle of the front court. I thought to myself that if Tucker Caldwell had designed this monstrosity, I would unemploy him forthwith.