Chapter 19 Gone Girl
Gone Girl
Kate Shaw
Buck faces the crowd in his front yard with Sadie snug against his side.
She holds two-year old Baby Blue in her arms with Mary Harris clinging to her mama’s dress.
Buck’s voice is pained as he confides, “We be shameful parents cause we ain’t laid eyes on her since bedtime last night.
And this morning, everybody thought she was somewheres else.
Mary Harris say her side’a the bed was empty when she woke, but she thought her sister was doing chores. ”
A sob escapes the big man, and Sadie pats his chest and picks up the telling.
“It won’t till breakfast that we turn worried.
We thought she be with Aunt Marris cause she checks on her every day.
” The old woman sits in their midst in a yard chair.
Her face is serene and empty. “But Loretty won’t there. ”
Sadie’s jaw is set hard and her voice tight.
“Y’all know our girl be different and sit with dying folk to ease their way over.
Some days she head to the laurel hell near Peavine, so Buck hightailed it up that’a way thinking she might’a got hurt.
But he couldn’t find hide nor hair of her.
No fresh dug holes. On a normal day she don’t stay gone. Today ain’t normal.”
Sheriff Sykes from Burnsville twelve miles away pulls up in his squad car without sounding the siren.
His lone deputy Clayton Booker is with him, and that signals serious business.
The crowd parts so the officers can reach the Dillards.
They shake Buck’s hand and tip their hats to Sadie, whose eyes are now glazed over.
Sheriff takes out his notebook and pencil and turns to us.
“We need to take these folks’ statements then I’ll come talk to y’all.
We gonna need your help to bring Loretty home.
” They follow this hurting family through the yellow front door, which looks too bright against today’s sorrow.
The news continues to spread, and here comes Fleta Wright and her Crusaders for Moral Fortitude, a group of judgmental women formed to run me off when I came.
The women are a social group now and have become more friends than foes to me. Today they hug me.
Mr. Turner, the mailman, stops his car and offers to ask at every house on his route if they’ve seen a traveling girl.
Ellis Dodd, who makes fiddles, and Roosevelt Lowe, with his wooden leg and aging Plott hounds, have come to help.
So have Tattler, Jerome Biddle, and his nephew Harlan.
These men possess tracking skills that are renowned in these parts.
We stand around the yard and wait for officials to organize the search.
This June Tuesday our hearts have turned stone heavy.
The lawmen come back into the yard and the sheriff spreads a map of the county on the hood of his car.
“We’re here,” he says, pointing to a dot on the map with Baines Creek written on the meandering stream but not a village.
“We don’t know which direction Loretty went, but we’re going to start with a two-mile circle around here.
” His pointer finger loops the map. “We hope to find her or clues about her whereabouts. We aim to search the woods, barns, chicken coops, gullies, abandoned wells, and question every neighbor who ain’t here helping. ”
Sheriff takes off his hat, scratches his buzz cut, and settles his hat back on his head.
“You walkers spread out and travel slow. Look for a child’s footprints, broken twigs, and disturbed leaves.” He looks at his wristwatch. “It’s nearing ten, but we don’t know when she left, so we don’t know how far she got.”
Roosevelt Lowe shouts, “Time’s a wastin, Sheriff. Let Beanie and Weenie get on the hunt. Give ’em somethin that smell like Loretty.” His buckskin Plott hounds are as weathered as he is.
“I hear you, Roosevelt. If anybody finds her, fire two shots in the air. Two shots,” he repeats. “Let’s get going, friends.”
I join the wide search line that leads to the north where there are more boulders and thick underbrush and trucks can’t go.
We carry walking sticks to gently poke in the bushes and rock overhangs.
I walk near Eli and Tattler and his hunting dog Skunk.
Eddie and his older sister Weeza are with us, along with Jerome Biddle, the little lopsided man who has been a good neighbor to me.
He keeps me in firewood and venison and squirrel.
We don’t rush this beginning as we call out her name.
We don’t want to miss the leaving clues if she came this way.
We walk slowly with eyes downcast, walking and calling till our necks are stiff.
For hours we walk at a slow, thorough pace till we are surely past the two-mile mark.
I roll my shoulders, crane my head backwards and breathe deeply—
That’s when I see it. A child’s sweater caught in a high branch.
“Is that Loretty’s?” I point and everybody stops. They cluster beneath the tree, craning their chins up. “What do you think, Weeza? Does that look like it belongs to Loretty? But if it does, what’s it doing stuck up in a tree?”
“Ain’t never seed it. Don’t think it be hers.”
With his walking stick, Eddie snags the little sweater which has holes in it.
He hands it to me and I put it in my backpack.
It’s hard to stop looking, but by early afternoon with no other signs, our search party returns to the Dillard home.
We haven’t heard two shots fired that would signal the girl was found.
The only thing we bring back is the sweater hung up in a tree branch that Sadie confirms isn’t Loretty’s.
A pan of biscuits sits on the table, potato soup simmers on the stove, and three coffeepots perk to give sustenance to the search party.
We stand and eat and drink in silence, and trucks begin returning.
The men drag frustrated hunting dogs. No news is not good news.
Sadie stands at the front window with her forehead against thin glass, eyes closed, her pain palpable.
Before tender Buck and their children became her family, she fought a mighty war against a cruel husband and lost her baby.
Surely the universe won’t be as demanding of another innocent sacrifice, but all the same, I was wrong to think Sadie’s love and determination could keep her child safe.
Mr. Turner’s truck pulls in the yard and Sadie and Buck hurry toward him, hopeful. He gets out with a long face and is heartbroken to say no one saw Loretty today.
How can that be?
Then I think about Birdie, who’s only been dead ten days. Could Loretty have gone there to grieve? I say, “Did anyone check Birdie’s grave? The girl might be there missing her friend.”
I don’t say that Birdie asked Lydia Brown and me to watch over the girl. It made no sense that day and it still doesn’t, but guilt burrows in my mind. Was I supposed to do something to protect her?
Tattler, Eddie, and Harlan take off running over the ridge toward Birdie’s with their hunting dogs in tow. Sheriff yells after them, “Two shots if you find her, one shot if you don’t.”
Sadie Blue’s face lights up with hope. “She and Miz Birdie was awful close. Loretty was learning the healing ways from her. Her dying cut a hole in my little girl’s heart. I bet she be sitting by Miz Birdie’s grave, don’t you, Buck?”
Hope is a revitalizing thing, and we feel it ripple through the crowd.
The most direct way to Birdie’s place takes you through overgrown woods and massive boulders over a high ridge.
I can’t travel that way, but with youth on their side the boys should get there in fifteen minutes.
I glance at my watch. It’s twenty after three.
There’s abnormal quiet in the yard. Even the birds are silent.
Everyone looks in the direction the boys went.
Sadie and Marris sit side by side and Buck brings out an extra chair for me.
The old lady reaches over and pats Sadie’s hand and says, “You a good girl, Carly.”
Hearing that name shocks us.
Carly is Carly Hicks Blue, Sadie’s floozy mama who abandoned her at birth into the care of a tender-hearted drunk named Otis Blue.
He thought he’d won the prize when pretty Carly married him, but all she wanted was a daddy for her baby.
When that baby was born, she didn’t stay.
She left for something more. When Otis died, Sadie had to move in with her granny Gladys.
The name Carly isn’t welcome at the Dillard place.
“I’m Sadie, Aunt Marris. I ain’t Carly,” my friend says firmly. “Carly run off with a fancy man and leave me behind. Don’t go calling me Carly.”
Marris says again, “It be all right, sweet Carly,” and the smile on her old face is proof that what mind she has left has come unhinged. It’s why young Loretty spends her days tending to her.
I’ve never heard anyone up here speak about Carly Hicks except to say almost exactly what Sadie said: At sixteen Carly birthed Sadie and ran off with a fancy man.
That well-worn statement is a sad testimony to her character.
Makes me wonder why Marris is focused on that wayward woman now after twenty-seven years.
Better than most, I understand the complex tie between mothers and daughters and the way an unkind mother can work misery in the heart. I had a lifetime of disappointments and judgments. Sadie only has a ghost to hate. A ghost we thought was long gone.
Minutes tick by.
My watch nears three-thirty-five. Time enough for the boys to get there. The lot of us hardly breathe, hoping.
Then a shot reverberates through the forest.
Only one.