TWO
Up and down the street the people of Agatite bustled about their downtown business. It was a small downtown district, with a single street and a couple of side streets where shops and businesses thrived. Imogene stood in front of the small drugstore and stared hard at the moving knots of people in the bright April sunlight. Two blocks down she could see the corner of the railroad depot, and in the far distance of the other direction the street faded into the intersection where it met the main highway. She walked back and forth in front of the drugstore, becoming more and more angry. This was a nasty trick, Cora, she thought, nastier than the time last winter when you stayed out all night with those girls without asking our permission or even letting us know where you were. You will be punished for this, Imogene thought darkly.
Finally she could stand it no longer, and she struck out in the direction of the depot toward the central district of downtown. Maybe Cora had gone into the shop, found the old man busy, and then slipped out while he wasn’t looking. Maybe she was window-shopping. She didn’t have any money. Imogene had been careful not to give her any, although she hated to admit she was afraid Cora might sneak away and call Harvey or, worse, run back to him.
She stopped briefly in front of every store and shop on Main Street, even the hardware store, peering carefully into each window. At the Ben Franklin store she walked in and made the rounds of the aisles, checking for a glimpse of the white-and-pink dress or yellow hair of her daughter. But Cora wasn’t anywhere. Noon came, and people were walking up and down the concrete sidewalk, a few looking curiously at the fashionably dressed woman with the firmly set jaw and fierce gray eyes who seemed to be searching every store for something she couldn’t find.
When another hour had gone by, she went back to the courthouse and crossed the lawn to the bench and sat down. She was very upset, but she was determined to wait for Cora to come back, no matter how long it took. She lit a cigarette from the pack of Luckies she had dropped into her purse when Pete had denied they were his. It made her cough at first, but she smoked the cigarette down to a stub and dropped it into the grass, and in a few minutes she lit another. After another hour she promised herself that if Cora would just call off this silly, cruel game and come laughing back, she wouldn’t punish her after all. They would just forget the whole thing. Then she breathed a silent prayer and made the same promise over again, just to make sure.
About two-thirty a tap on her shoulder made her jump. She had been carefully scrutinizing every vehicle that passed down Main Street, hoping that Cora had somehow been picked up by some local boys or someone else and was out enjoying a ride and attention from strange admirers. But it was Luke Short who tapped her. He had parked the Hudson, she noticed, on the street beside the courthouse, a fact he was remarking on as her heart returned to its normal rate. He added with a slight grin that it was now in the shade and wouldn’t be too hot when they got in. The bill, he sheepishly muttered, was $35.50.
She counted out the money from her purse, and suddenly a hopeful thought struck her. “You haven’t by chance seen my daughter, have you?”
“Sure, ma’am,” Luke said, his chubby face grinning under smeared grease.
“Really!” She felt delight swim up through her body. “Oh, wonderful! Where is she?”
Luke’s smile evaporated when he realized that she meant had he seen her recently. “Why, ma’am, I seen her this mornin’. With you. When we towed in the car.” He saw her face fall and suddenly felt as if he had just played a cruel joke on her. He noticed her eyes flick across Main Street again. “You ain’t lost her, have you, ma’am?”
She looked at this simple mechanic in his greasy jeans and dirty shirt, standing awkwardly in front of her, shifting his weight from one bandy leg to another. He was hardly the type of person to become a friend, but she didn’t see that there was much choice. He was the only one, other than Pete, of course—the senile old fool—who had taken any interest in her problem at all, so she poured out her dilemma to him.
Luke listened carefully to her story. He immediately recognized that there was more to this than some silly girl out skylarking with a bunch of boys just to devil her mother on their vacation. But like most small-town people, he had a strong respect for other folks’ business, and the more Imogene talked about her daughter and her odd disappearance, the more uncomfortable he became. He decided that a well-placed lie might be in order. It might get him off the hook, too.
“Well, hell, uh . . . heck, ma’am. You know how kids are. She’ll probably turn up in a little bit full of Cokes and hamburgers. I had a niece did the exact same thing to my brother’s wife one time when they was visitin’ out in Arizona.” He looked into her gray eyes to see if she could sense that he was making the whole incident up. “Worried Bessie, that’s my sister-in-law, sick. She run into a bunch of kids and they had went off to get some hamburgers and Cokes, that’s all. She showed up two hours later, and, boy, her mama gave her hell, uh . . . heck.” He grinned, pulled out a toothpick from his shirt pocket and jammed it into his molars, where a stubborn piece of meat from his noon sandwich remained.
Imogene realized that Luke Short was to be no help at all, and she forced a smile and thanked him for his work and his comforting words. He told her to be sure to call him if she had any more trouble with the Hudson, and that he’d be sure to send Cora to her if he saw her. Then he strolled bandy-legged back to his garage, where he had a Chevy waiting to have the wheel bearings packed.
Imogene lit another cigarette and paced for a few more minutes in front of the red bench. Then she decided to make one more pass through town. This time she stopped in every store and shop and asked anyone she found if Cora had come that way. Everyone was nice and polite, and everyone offered to help by sending Cora to her mother should she turn up, but no one had seen her. Cora simply was not downtown.
Finally Imogene went back to Pete’s Sundries and Drugs. It was full of high school kids playing the jukebox, drinking sodas and Cokes, and eating ice cream. Pete was in back of the fountain, mixing drinks and sundaes, and he smiled broadly when Imogene came in, hardly noticing that she was studying the faces of every blond or partly blond girl in the shop. “Hi!” he boomed over the music. “Did you find her?”
Imogene retained control of herself. Panic was welling up in her like a flood, and she could feel her heart pounding in her ears. “Look,” she said in what she hoped sounded like a calm, reasonable voice, “are you absolutely certain that my daughter hasn’t been in here, that this isn’t some kind of joke?”
Pete shook his head slowly, the smile remaining on his lips. “It’s like I told you this mornin’, Mrs. . . . uh . . .” She didn’t help him this time. “Mrs. I ain’t seen her, not so as I’d know it was her, anyhow. A lot of these kids look alike to me.” This brought a giggle from the group at the fountain counter. “But nobody came in here before you did, except for Mrs. Thompson.”
Imogene leaned against the counter and felt exhaustion and frustration draining away all of what remained of her energy. She felt dirty, tired; her feet hurt from walking up and down the concrete sidewalks and in and out of stores, and, she suddenly realized, she was hungry. “Very well,” she sighed out. “We’ll play it your way. Maybe she offered you something to hide her or to lie to me or something. Well, whatever she offered to pay you, I’ll double it. No. Listen, I know she hasn’t any money, any cash, and she can’t get any, either. I’ll give you a hundred dollars, right now, cash! Just tell me where she is.”
Pete’s eyes widened, and several of the kids looked around. The jukebox had fallen silent after the last record, and her words carried through the entire shop. “Lady,” he said, “I don’t know what’s goin’ on between you and your daughter, if there is any girl and if she is your daughter, but I’m here to tell you that I think you’re nutty as a fruitcake!”
Several of the kids broke into laughter at this, and more of them focused their attention on the well-dressed woman who stood at Pete’s soda fountain offering him something that sounded like a fortune just to find some girl.
“All right!” Imogene said in a voice that began to crack a bit. “Five hundred dollars.” There was only silence. “A thousand!” she shrieked. By now all the kids were staring at her in wonder. Pete shook his head again and opened his mouth to speak, but Imogene put up her hand. “Very well. You ain’t seen her.” She mimicked his accent and fought for control. She needed to go to the bathroom, she suddenly realized. “What if I call the police? Would that make her magically appear?”
“That’d be Ezra Holmes,” Pete said in a flat voice, then he perked up. “Why don’t you call him over? His arthritis prescription’s ready anyway.” He enjoyed his joke, and there was a chorus of snickering among the kids, who felt the release of tension. “But he ain’t no police. He’s the sheriff.”
She took a deep breath to face the sea of faces that now either openly gaped at her or peeked from behind soda glasses. “My name is Mrs. Harvey McBride,” she began in what she hoped was a sane and reasonable voice. “My daughter, Cora McBride, came into this shop about ten-thirty this morning to buy an ice cream cone. She never came out, and I haven’t seen her since. I have been unable to find anyone who will admit that he’s seen her either.” She glanced at Pete.
“Lady,” Pete said, growing hot about being made out a liar in front of all the kids, “I told you I ain’t seen her, and I ain’t! Pete don’t lie!”
She ignored him. “She’s blond, eighteen years old, and very pretty. She is wearing a white-and-pink cotton dress, black-and-white saddle shoes with bobby socks, and . . .” She hesitated for just a moment. “And I am prepared to pay five hundred dollars, cash, to anyone who brings her to me or tells me where I can find her. Cash! I strongly suspect that she is hiding from me as part of a cruel joke, and I’m frankly tired of it. If she’s not hiding, then perhaps she has met with some sort of . . . of mischief.” She wanted to look at Pete in the worst way, but from the corner of her eye she saw him stiffen and thought better of it. “I’m going to wait on that red park bench over on the courthouse square”—she pointed out the window, and the kids all strained to see the bench, as if they hadn’t seen it a thousand times before—“and I will pay whoever comes up with her first. No questions asked.”
Imogene closed her speech and turned on her heel and walked out of the drugstore. She crossed the street at the corner and seated herself on the bench. Very well, Cora, I can play this game as well as you.
At five-thirty, when the shadows of the courthouse brought an unseasonable chill to the shade that now draped over that portion of the courthouse lawn where Imogene waited on the bench, she crushed out the last of the Luckies on the grass in front of her and went inside to seek out a rest room and Sheriff Holmes.