Chapter 29 Hunch
Hunch
Kate Shaw
My voice is strained talking to Eli on the phone. There’s no privacy in the workroom, and I’m embarrassed for Lydia to hear me beg.
Lydia scratches her right palm. It looks painful.
“Can’t say that I do,” Eli says without enthusiasm.
“Does Sadie or Buck know anybody there?”
“Don’t know that either.”
“Would it hurt to go to Micaville and ask? Somebody would have noticed, wouldn’t they?”
Eli is silent and annoyingly resistant, but I plow forward.
“If you can’t go, maybe the sheriff can stop by. It’s only a few miles from Burnsville. It should be an easy question to ask: Have you seen a new girl? You don’t have to tell Sadie and Buck what you’re doing unless you think they can help.”
He’s quick to speak, “I’m not delivering false hope, Kate.
Sadie’s taken to the bed and stopped eating.
No amount of coaxing will get her to swallow food.
What I need to bring her is Loretty, not a story or a wish.
” He is tired and dejected from ten days of dead ends, but so is everybody who cares about the girl.
“Lord, I wish Birdie was here,” he mumbles, “She’d know what to do.
She’d conjure up a vision in that red bowl like she did when Sadie lost her first baby.
Birdie saw three more coming. You remember? ”
“Eli, you’re talking about witchcraft while I’m talking about asking a simple question.”
He sighs. “I’ll try to go this afternoon. What time did you see her?”
“A little after five. We were driving east with the sun behind us, and they were walking west.”
“Anything else?”
“They each carried a basket, and as usual, Loretty was barefoot.”
“Okay,” he sighs. “I’ll call when I get back.”
“You have the card with my phone numbers?”
“Yes, I have the card.”
“Thank you, Eli. Truly. Thank you.”
I return to the worktable. “He’s going to check. He’ll call when he gets back. I don’t think he believed me,” I say, then point to Lydia’s inflamed palm. “Did you get into poison ivy?”
“It’s been bothering me since I saw Birdie.”
“Would ointment help?”
“Maybe. I’ll get some when we break for lunch and then wear a glove to protect the books.”
Lydia is taking notes on the first book and I the last while Gus is downstairs exploring in the bookstore.
My hope is still to find a clue as to how Birdie knew death was coming.
Her last book starts in late fall with a list of nature’s signs predicting the brutal winter, and I skim over them because it’s tedious and I won’t remember.
Then I’m surprised to find my name mentioned along with a small group that Birdie asked to join her in the cave.
I was the only one who declined. She even noted sending Tattler and Harlan to save me from my own demise.
Loretty’s name is entered often along with the lessons she was being taught, and Birdie noted the school closing and then there’s the entry Lydia Brown come to my door—
I call out. “Lydia, you’ll want to see this.”
She comes and looks over my shoulder, and when she sees her name in Birdie’s handwriting she gasps and reads, “Lydia Brown come to my door but it ain’t time.”
One sentence, but what a weird sentence.
“What does she mean?” I ask. I thought that week before Birdie died was the first time the two had met, but if the witch knew Lydia from before, why did she turn her away? One week later and the witch was gone, so when was the right time to talk if not that night?
Lydia clears her throat and explains. “That’s the only time I saw her, but three years back I found her name in a stack of papers at the library.
It was on an index card attached to a piece of homemade paper and I made a copy.
” She pulls a file folder from a drawer and shows me copies of the index card and the sheet attributed to Birdie.
It’s the illustration that is easier to understand: a palm with a trigon and the word Keeper beneath it.
I say, “Birdie had that triangle mark. And so does Loretty.”
Lydia holds out her hand with the inflamed palm. “As do I. I was born with this birthmark. Until now, I knew of only one other person who had it. Trula Freed. What does this discovery mean, Kate?”
I grin. “You’re asking the wrong person. I don’t understand mystical things, but it appears that you are tied in mysterious ways to Birdie and Baines Creek.”
In a daze, Lydia returns to the first book and, confounded, I flip ahead to Birdie’s final pages, the ones written closest to her death.
The first time I looked I was numb with grief and could barely make out the words through my tears.
In this place distanced from the pall of Baines Creek, I see more clearly—and what I see is chilling.
A kinship violation…Loretty the innocent… To right a terrible wrong.
For the first time, I think the missing child may be on a mission. May be doing work only she can do. I’ll tell Eli when he calls. After he goes to Micaville. After he asks about a girl. After he sees if my eyes deceived me.
We walk to the Diamondback Café for lunch, and Lydia knows I’m nervous to be away from the phone. She says, “If he calls while we’re eating, he’ll call again. Especially if he has good news,” and we order fried green tomato sandwiches on homemade bread and glasses of sweet tea.
“How’s your palm?”
She holds it up and the redness and swelling are nearly gone.
“Did you put ointment on it?”
“No, I forgot.”
“Then how did it heal so quickly?”
“Maybe it was trying to tell me something and now it has.”
But Lydia’s healed palm is the last miracle of the day.
Eli doesn’t call that afternoon, and we lock up the workroom, find Gus among the stacks, and go to the cottage.
Lydia fixes a light supper of lemon pasta and salad.
It’s now been eight hours since I spoke with Eli.
Time enough to drive to and from Micaville over and over.
“What’s keeping him?” I ask as if an inquiry will make him call.
“I don’t know,” Lydia says and mixes dressing for a salad of dandelion greens, heirloom tomatoes and goat cheese. “While you wait, why don’t you tell me about your preacher. You obviously respect him and his hopes for Baines Creek.”
“I do—most of the time,” I start, then feel guilty for criticizing the dedicated man. “Every Sunday he makes stone soup. Makes it in a big pot over an open fire. He wants his congregation to go home filled with more than the good word. Have you ever heard of it?”
“I have. It’s a clever folktale of fair trade: the traveling storyteller enticing his audience to add a little of this and that to the stones and water, until something edible cooks while he regales them with his tales.”
I remark, “I’d never heard of it before Eli. His starts with potatoes and onions then folks add a handful of whatever: mustard greens, ramps, scallion, wild mushrooms. That first time we met, his shirt sleeves were rolled up, and he was washing out the soup pot.
“One of the first stories he told me was about an exorcism. His daddy and granddaddy performed it on a man believed to be possessed by the devil. Eli witnessed it as a boy and said it was the pivotal moment that determined his future as a preacher.” I reach for a glass of Lambrusco wine Lydia has poured and take a welcome sip.
“And you thought…” she asks.
“It was useful and quaint. It supported his beliefs.”
“But not yours.”
“No. Not mine. Not at first. Not back then.”
“But something changed?” Lydia is genuinely curious and kind.
“Nearly dying but being saved changed things. Seeing mysterious lights. Hearing Birdie foretell. Baines Creek has been slowly wearing me down.
“A more recent faith story Eli tells is about Gladys Hicks. That’s Loretty’s great-granny.
She passed away in April. I’m told that the last time she went to church was when I came and spoke before the congregation.
She’d heard I was tall and wore trousers and my hair was cut short as a man’s, and her curiosity got the better of her.
She thought I’d be gone before I even got started.
“Anyway, Eli couldn’t get her back to church after that, but when she lay dying in her front parlor, he’d come by every day to pray for her.
She wouldn’t let him inside, so he stood on her porch and prayed loud enough for her to hear.
It wasn’t till she’d fallen into a coma and the family stood around her deathbed that Eli came in with his Bible.
“Now here comes the funny part,” I say, settling back in the chair.
“After days of being unconscious, her eyes started fluttering and she started grinning her toothless grin because her false teeth were in a glass beside the bed, and when she opened her eyes and saw everybody hovering over her, she declared in a raspy voice, Oh shit, I’m still here. ”
Lydia giggles because it’s funny, and I get tickled too, and we’re having a laugh at the expense of an old woman who thought she’d passed through the tunnel of light, when I ask, “What do you think happens after we die?”
“We go home.”
“You don’t mean our childhood home.”
“No. Further back to where it all starts at Finally There.”