Chapter 33 Kinship
Kinship
Kate Shaw
I need to find books Birdie wrote before Sadie was born.
I’ve got a sick suspicion about that kinship sin that involves Gladys Hicks and Loretty.
To my way of thinking, Marris confirmed that Carly is involved in the girl’s disappearance.
I’ll tell Eli and he can tell the sheriff.
Maybe they’ll want to track down Granny C, but I no longer fear that the girl is in danger.
She’s on some kind of quest. Relieving some of Sadie’s numbing grief is my goal today.
I leave Marris sitting on the side of the road and return to the Dillards.
I climb the stairs, knock on Sadie’s bedroom door, and open it a crack.
An army blanket is tacked over the window, so the room is dark except for the light from the open door.
Sadie’s body in the featherbed is so slight that at first I think it’s empty.
But then I see her small head on the flat pillow and her open eyes staring at the water-stained ceiling, her chest barely rising.
“Sadie?” I speak her name tenderly so as not to startle her. “It’s Kate.”
She doesn’t move.
There’s a washbasin and I wet a rag in cool water, ring it out and gently wash her moon-pale face.
She leans into my hand and sighs. I want desperately to tell her I know where Loretty might be, but I bite my tongue to keep from spilling an unconfirmed truth.
What I whisper is, “Hold on a little longer, dear friend. Hold on, please.”
I can’t find Eli to share Marris’s news of possibility, so I drive back to Little Switzerland.
It’s near closing time but Nancy lets me in the workroom at the top of the stairs.
I count back twenty-seven books to find a starting point near Sadie’s birth year.
I find 1947. Before Sadie Blue was conceived. When Carly was young.
I’m tender with the pages as I glide through the story of a traveling family that stayed in the mushroom cave while Birdie tended their ailing child.
And there’s the notions man whose wagon came once a year with buttons and colored thread and ready-made fabric.
And then I find what I’m looking for: the name Carly Hicks.
She’s described as a bright girl with the patient soul of a healer.
Her backbone is strong. There’s no hint that she was the kind to run off with a fancy man.
I take rudimentary notes about every Carly entry in that book, then move up to the next and watch the girl grow and stay loyal to mountain ways.
She becomes such a vital part of Birdie’s days that her name isn’t spelled out.
Birdie simply writes C, and I know it’s Carly, a girl who is thorough and doesn’t complain.
There are no references to her seeking something more, so what happened in ’53 to change things?
I’ve filled three pages with notes in Birdie’s words before dread seeps in.
The girl doesn’t want to go home. She finds excuses to stay with Birdie.
When she stays away too long, her daddy Walter comes for her, but he doesn’t enter the witch’s yard.
He stands at a distance, afraid of the power Birdie is teaching his girl.
He always found a way to pull Carly to him.
Then the girl got in the family way. A euphemism that could not be misconstrued.
No boy or man was mentioned in Birdie’s books—only Walter Hicks.
Now in a pickle, Carly married a tender drunk named Otis Blue and birthed her baby girl—then did the only thing she could to get away from Walter.
She left. Birdie wrote, Them Hicks need a great reckoning but Carly say no, and I do what she say.
The scene is set to right a nasty lie that spans twenty-seven years.