Rock of Ages (11 page)

She pulls into Forsythia Crumpler's driveway right on time and walks with no little trepidation toward the house.

Her old teacher answers the door on the third ring and lets her in.

“I'm sorry to disturb you like this,” Georgia says, “but there's something I have to ask you.”

“Before you do,” the older woman says, holding up her hand, “I've got to say something. I was wrong the other day, raking you over the coals and all, especially after all you've been through this year.”

“It's …”

“No, I've always had a bad habit of butting into other people's business. I don't think you did Jenny wrong. I know you'd have helped her if you'd known. I ought to have told you. I was just so upset.”

Forsythia Crumpler seems to be near tears, something Georgia hasn't seen before.

“No,” she says, putting a hand on Forsythia's shoulder, “you were right. I've been thinking about it. I asked myself what Daddy or Mom would have done, and they wouldn't have let this happen.”

“People are busier today, get distracted more. They don't live in the same town.”

The old woman grows silent.

“Thank you,” Georgia tells her. “Thank you for your forgiveness. It means a lot to me.”

They go inside and sit down to teacakes and coffee. They talk about old times, former teacher and star student again. Forsythia tells her how sorry she was to learn about her husband.

“I heard about it from Jenny,” she says. “I should have sent a card.”

“Lucky in something, unlucky in love,” Georgia says with a shrug. “I can't remember what it is I'm supposed to be lucky in, though. Maybe I ought to start playing the lottery.”

“Lottery!” her host says, some of her old vinegar returning. “They're trying to get it down here. A tax on morons.

“Well, what was it you wanted to ask me about?”

So Georgia tells her about the ring.

Jenny McLaurin didn't have much that the world might have called valuable. The house and land were about all she and Harold ever possessed. There was one thing, though. Harold had given her a wedding ring that was her pride and joy.

He'd won it, she would find out later, off a rich young man in one of the Saturday night poker games that were held in the back of Dawson Autry's store. The games were very egalitarian affairs, a chance for the dirt farmers and laborers to rub shoulders with lawyers and prosperous businessmen trying to show they had the common touch.

They way it usually worked out, the rich got richer. It was much easier for a man with $200 in his pocket to bluff than it was for one with twenty that he really needed to turn into forty. If one was a politician or wished to be one, it was wise to lose a little back at the end, though, a gesture as close to
noblesse oblige
as one was likely to find in eastern Scots County after the war.

One November night, though, Harold McLaurin's luck turned temporarily good.

He was in a game of seven-card stud, deuces wild, with two men he'd known since they were children, plus a barber from Geddie and a newly minted lawyer who'd come out from Port Campbell. The lawyer was the only son of a state senator, and everybody figured the boy would be one someday, too. He even had his father's name, with just another roman number attached. They called him Trip. People in Scots County tended to vote for familiar names, preferring the devil they knew.

The young lawyer had been drinking. What he'd had before he arrived, no one knew, but they'd encouraged him to try some of Parker Vinson's moonshine, and he no doubt thought that was part of the whole slumming experience, something to talk about after church the next day with other young members of his father's club.

He was winning at first, and then he was losing. One man who was watching said he had $300 on him when he came in. By 1:30 that morning, he was down to a few dollars he'd fished from his pockets, the detritus of 20-dollar bills he'd broken much earlier.

The last hand he played, he bet almost all of that on a pair of kings, a 5 and a 7, with two cards down. Only he and Harold McLaurin were still in the game and eligible to get the last facedown card. When he put the rest of his money in and got a third king, he knew he would win and have a great story to tell. One of his other “down” cards was a deuce.

When Harold anted up five dollars on the strength of his last card, the young lawyer couldn't find anyone to loan him the five he needed. There were a dozen people watching, and they were mostly pulling for one of their own.

“Give me one minute,” the lawyer said, and he stumbled out the door to his car.

He returned carrying a small velvet box.

“Bitch gave it back,” he'd said. “What'm I gonna do with a used diamond ring?”

He'd been carrying the two-carat ring around in the glove compartment of his car for two weeks, since Betsy McNeil found out who he had really visited on his last trip to Raleigh. (They would later marry anyhow after he bought her another, larger diamond. Then, a year later, they would divorce. The young lawyer would die a decade afterward in the snow outside a bar in Lincoln, Nebraska, shot through the heart, disbarred and disgraced.)

Nobody in the back room had ever seen a diamond that big. A couple of the spectators, if the conditions had been right, would have bashed his skull in for it.

“Tell you what,” he said over the raw pine table to Harold McLaurin, who had more or less quit drinking two hours before, taking only the tiniest sip when the communal jar came around. “I'll bet this ring here against 50 dollars. If you've got the balls.”

No one had ever accused Harold McLaurin of lack of nerve. His faults lay more in the area of patience and compassion. He might have slapped the lawyer across the room, but he knew what that diamond was worth, how painful it would be in the morning for the city boy to realize he'd lost it in a poker game to some redneck. It would not be a story he would repeat at the club. He would be glad none of his friends had come slumming to East Geddie with him.

Harold McLaurin was showing a jack, a 10, a 9 and a deuce. He counted his money, and all he had was 46 dollars.

One of the men who had refused to loan the lawyer a five handed one to Harold and got a dollar bill back.

To the lawyer's hurt, accusing look, he shrugged, “Well, I didn't think I could afford to lend five. Four, though, that's another matter.”

There was rough laughter around the room.

“Let's see what you got,” Harold said.

The lawyer showed the deuce and the king to go with the other two.

“Four kings.”

Harold didn't say anything, just turned over the pair of facedown aces he'd drawn first, to go with the wild deuce that was showing. Then, he flipped the last card to reveal the other deuce.

The lawyer looked at the four aces. He looked at Harold, looked around the room, looked back at the table. His options seemed to be limited.

He was still sober enough to grasp what he had done.

“Tell you what,” he said to Harold. “If you'll let me pawn this thing tomorrow, I'll bring the fifty right to your house, have it in your hands before you go to church.”

“I don't go to church,” Harold said. He reached for the ring when the young lawyer did, and the lawyer yielded first. “We didn't play for no IOU. We played for this”—he pointed to the velvet box, now closed—“and my fifty dollars.”

There was unanimous agreement around the table, and Dawson Autry himself, who had suffered some property damage in the past from disagreements over cards and money, gently but firmly helped the young man back to his late-model car and pointed him toward Port Campbell.

The lawyer actually did come to see Harold the next day, at his parents' house, where he was living until he and Jenny could get married. He was sober and hinted at legal ramifications if Harold didn't take the hundred dollars he had in his hand, five crisp twenties, double what Harold had bet.

“You're on our land now,” Harold told him. “You'd best be going. You go on and sic your daddy on us, if you want, but I don't expect it'll be worth it. I don't think he's a good enough lawyer to get that ring back, do you?”

He'd moved very close to the young lawyer, almost but not quite touching him. The other man backed away.

He promised that Harold hadn't heard the last of it, but Harold knew he had.

The next week, he gave the ring to Jenny, who would have married him anyway.

“So,” Georgia says, “the ring always meant a lot. Somebody would always bring that story up, although I don't think Jenny liked to tell it as much as Harold did.”

“I expect not.”

“But I don't remember seeing it, and nobody from the sheriff's department or at the funeral home mentioned anything about a ring being on her hand. Did they to you?”

“No.”

“And you were the one that found her? They said you identified her.”

“I identified her, but I wasn't the first one there.”

“You weren't?” Georgia wonders how it is that no one told her that before.

“No. I thought you knew. It was that big fat boy of William Blackwell's, the one they call Pooh. He came knocking on my door, all out of breath—which wouldn't have taken much—and said ‘Miss Jenny has drownded.'”

“So, he found her.”

“Yes. They did come by once every blue moon, to keep her from changing the will, if nothing else. I called the rescue squad and went out with him, and there she was. By the time I got out there, he had managed to snag her dress, I suppose, with a stick and dragged her to the edge of the pond …”

Forsythia Crumpler stops and pulls out a Kleenex.

“I just feel terrible about not checking on her after church. I just assumed she didn't feel like coming to services that morning. Sometimes she didn't.”

“Well, the coroner said she'd been dead several hours. There wasn't anything you could have done.”

Then Georgia tells her about the jewelry box she inherited, how it occurred to her that the ring might be in there, but it wasn't.

The older woman frowns and is silent for a few seconds before speaking.

“Yes. Goodness, I hadn't thought about the ring. She was very fond of it. I remember she told me once, must have been two or three years ago, that sometimes her hands swelled so much from the arthritis that she couldn't wear it. She said she took it off at bedtime every night and then would see the next morning whether that was going to be a ‘ring day' or not.

“Maybe she put it in a safety deposit box.”

“There's no record of her or Harold having one, at least not with their bank. I checked. You know, Mrs. Crumpler, I don't care about that ring, for me. I hope you know that. Daddy left us more than we deserve. But it's just eating at me that it's disappeared. She loved that ring. She wouldn't have been careless with it.”

Forsythia Crumpler nods and then frowns.

“Well, if it wasn't on her finger and it wasn't in her jewelry box …”

Exactly, Georgia thinks. Exactly.

When she gets back to the house, she calls the sheriff's office, where a secretary tells her Sheriff Hairr is busy “presently” but will call her back “directly.”

She only has to wait 15 minutes. Apparently, old classmates do get some special treatment.

“Thank you for returning my call so soon, Wade, uh, Sheriff. Sorry.”

“Not a problem, Georgia.” He has his sheriff's voice on, a mix of Gary Cooper and Buford Pusser. “What can I do for you?”

She tells him about the ring, asks him if anybody recalled seeing one on Jenny's finger or anywhere else, either at the pond or in the rescue vehicle or at the mortuary.

“Well,” he says, after a pause, “now that you mention it, I don't think anybody said anything about a ring, and I sure don't remember seeing one. What kind was it? I mean, how big was it?”

Two carats, Georgia tells him.

He whistles.

“Well,” he says, “there are some folks around here who are full of meanness, I won't argue that point, but I can't imagine somebody stealing a wedding ring off a drowned woman's finger.… no offense.”

“And I understand Pooh Blackwell, William's boy, was the first one to find her.”

“That's the way I heard it.”

“And he didn't see any sign of it, either?”

“Not that I know of. I can ask him.”

“Would you?”

“No problem. You know, he's just about completely moved into Jenny's place. Saw him the other day, burning some stuff out back. Had to remind him to get a fire permit.”

Georgia thanks Wade Hairr again and hangs up.

Just then, Justin and Leeza come in.

“They say it might be a Christmas baby,” Leeza says, her excitement evident.

“Wouldn't that be something?” Georgia says, still preoccupied. She sees Justin looking at her the way she used to look at him when she would catch him picking his nose in public.

“That's really great,” she says. “Christmas. Wouldn't that be amazing?” She flounders around for something that will show interest in her first grandchild. She really does care, but she's a little distracted right now.

“Ah, have you decided on a name yet?”

Another sore point. After they told her they wanted to be surprised, didn't want to know what the baby's sex would be, they'd also given her their list of boys' and girls' names. One of the female names had been Alysyn. Another had been Maree.

Georgia had looked at the list of names and could not stop herself from remarking that a girl bearing either of those names was going to spend a lot of her life spelling it out.

“Like Leeza with a ‘z'?” Leeza had said.

Leeza tells her that they have pared the boys' names down to Gregg (“Three g's,” Justin says, daring his mother to challenge it) and Mack. “Just Mack?” Georgia wants to say, but doesn't. One small step for diplomacy.