“That’ll be quite enough,” Sheriff Fulkerson says, rubbing his forehead and lifting a hand to Annie so she’ll not answer Miss Watson’s questions. “Let’s not have this get the better of us.”
The men who came from Lexington told Sheriff Fulkerson he was a damn fool for wasting their time. They drove all that way to see what killed a woman old as Mrs. Baine? Old age killed her, they said. No trauma to the head or any other part of her. No bullet hole. No knife wound. No bruises around her neck. Sheriff Fulkerson asked if those men knew of Juna Crowley. They smiled when they said they did and then silenced themselves as if waiting for the sheriff to try to explain how Juna Crowley and the girl who looked just like her had one damn thing to do with this dead old woman. The men would have called Sheriff Fulkerson a damn fool all over again if he had tried to explain. Instead, he said none of those things, and the men from Lexington had patted him on the back and said that folks who grow old have a way of eventually dying.
“John, how about you and I take a drive,” the sheriff says. “Let’s us have a look around Abigail’s place.”
Pushing back from the table, Daddy pulls on his hat. “That all right with you, Abe? Caroline’ll see to Abigail. Take her upstairs, let her clean herself up.”
Abraham nods and pulls out Miss Watson’s chair as she stands. Caroline walks toward the living room and waits there for Miss Watson to join her. As she waits, Caroline keeps her eyes on the floor, won’t look at Annie. She’s remembered about the café and Lizzy Morris and Annie saying she saw Jacob Riddle in that well, and she’s back to being angry.
“Well,” Abraham says, his voice normal again and looking his usual size now that Miss Watson has left the room. “Look at here.”
He lifts one of Annie’s hands, the hand that holds the deck of cards Ellis Baine gave her.
“Here’s that deck I was looking for the other night.”
He takes the cards, tosses them in the air, and catches them one-handed. When Miss Watson was in the room, Abraham had shrunk in on himself, but with her gone, he’s looking happy, expectant, excited even. He’s all of those things because he believes it now for sure. First Annie saw her and now Miss Watson saw her. Aunt Juna is home.
“Thought I lost these,” he says as he tucks the deck in his shirt pocket, leans forward, and shouts after Miss Watson. “See there, Abigail,” he says. “Our luck is turning already. Found them cards we was missing. My lucky deck of cards.”
? ? ?
ALL AFTERNOON, ANNIE’S been watching for Aunt Juna from the bedroom window, but she sees Ellis Baine instead. She’s high enough to see the whole of the Baines’ place. He walks from his house, across the porch, and over to the well where Annie found his mama. He leans there, not drawing water, not doing anything, or maybe doing everything by standing where Annie can see him. He couldn’t possibly see her staring at him from such a distance, but he turns his head real slow the way a person does when he feels someone watching him, and it would seem he is looking in Annie’s direction. She steps away and presses herself flat against the wall, listening, though not sure what she’s listening for. But he doesn’t know which room is hers, couldn’t possibly know. She steps back where she can see and tries to decide if she’ll tell about the cards.
She spent most of yesterday and all of last night thinking about Abraham Pace and those cards. It means something that they are his, though she doesn’t know what. Ellis Baine will know, but she isn’t altogether sure telling him is something she should do. She’s still deciding when she hears the creaking and whining.
From her other bedroom window, she can also look down on the whole of the drive leading up to the house. She sees Ryce long before he drops his bike at the back porch. He’s here on his lunch hour again, one day after Annie saw Lizzy Morris at the café. Lizzy probably told him all about it last night. Probably told him Annie Holleran was, at the very least, wearing proper undergarments.
After dropping his bike, Ryce unrolls the one pant leg he’s all the time rolling up so it doesn’t get caught in his chain, walks up the stairs, across the porch, and knocks on the back door. Because the screen door doesn’t bounce in its frame and the hook latch doesn’t rattle for being left to hang loose and unhooked, Mama must have locked up tight when she left for town.
“Hello,” Ryce says, his voice drifting up to Annie’s open window. “Mrs. Holleran? Annie?”