Letter From Home Read online

Barb’s eyes widened and her mouth hung slack.

  The silence in the room pulsed with the chief’s suspicion and Grandmother’s puzzled consideration and Barb’s shock.

  Gretchen frowned. Most people never even locked up their houses at night. Why would Barb lock the door to her bedroom? Why didn’t Barb answer?

  It was Grandmother who spoke. “Why, Chief Fraser,” she said, her voice holding almost a tsk-tsk tone, “a girl all alone in her house late at night. That was it, wasn’t it, Barb? You locked your door because your mama and papa weren’t home.”

  “Yes.” Barb bent, picked up the sheet, draped it around her shoulders though it wasn’t cold and pulled it across her front. “I didn’t like being by myself. I just turned the lock and went to bed.”

  The chief frowned. “When you got up, was it because you heard your mama come home?”

  “No. I heard Mama come in and I knew she was still upset and so I lay there real still.” Tears brimmed from her eyes. “She knocked on my door, but I didn’t answer. I pretended I was asleep. When Mama was upset, she was hard to talk to. She rattled the knob and that’s when somebody knocked on the front door. Everything happened real fast, somebody trying to shush her and Mama’s cry. I knew something bad was happening and all I could think of was getting away. I got up and ran to my window and pushed open the screen and went out. I ran up the road fast as I could.”

  “And that’s all you know, Miss Barb?” His voice was weary.

  “That’s all.” Her voice wavered.

  The chief clapped his hat on his head. “All right, girl. If you think of anything else, you call and I’ll come.”

  Grandmother moved past him, pulled the door open.

  The big man nodded. “Thank you, Lotte,” he said, but his eyes still watched Barb and his heavy face was dour.

  Only Gretchen could see Barb’s hands clasped under the sheet, her grip so tight the knuckles blanched.

  THE HOUSE WAS hot and still. The shades were drawn but the summer sun peeked around the edges. Gretchen struggled awake. The whirr of the electric fan stirred the air, but Gretchen felt sweaty from sleep, her head aching. She looked around the room. Her clothes lay in a jumbled heap where she’d dropped them. She stared at the alarm clock and felt a shock as she realized the time. She scrambled out of bed and hurried into the living room.

  “Barb?” Even as she called, Gretchen knew the house was empty. They’d put Barb in Jimmy’s room, but Barb was gone and so was Grandmother. They’d left her to sleep, a dreadful hot sweaty sleep with ugly visions of Mrs. Tatum, her body sprawled on the braid rug, her face distorted, her throat marked.

  The cuckoo clock chirped. Ten o’clock. She was late. Mr. Dennis despised people who weren’t on time. That was part of the reason he was usually mad at Mr. Cooley, who was almost always late. Except with his stories. He still got his stories in on time—if he was in the office.

  Gretchen dressed fast, in a cool summer dress with a white piqué top and red-and-white checkered gingham skirt. She slipped barefoot into her white sandals. The phone rang as she was pouring a glass of orange juice.

  “Hello.” She was breathless.

  “Mein Schatz—”

  “Grandmother”—Gretchen’s voice was sharp—“you shouldn’t have let me sleep. I’m late.”

  “That is why I have called. Do not worry, Gretchen. I spoke with Mr. Dennis and he understood that you had no sleep. I told him you would be there at eleven and he was pleased. He said”—she repeated the words uncertainly—“that there is big news on the wire and you can be of great help. Now, you must eat a good breakfast. There is a muffin and fresh strawberries. Oh, the pot is bubbling—I must go now.”

  Gretchen drank the juice, quickly ate the apple muffin. She gave her hair three quick swipes. It was a quarter after ten when she left the house. She could be at the Gazette office in less than five minutes. But first . . .

  THE DRAPES WERE drawn at the Tatum house. Gretchen opened the screen, knocked on the front door. The house lay quiet as death. Gretchen would have liked to whirl and run away. But Barb should be here. She wouldn’t have gone to work. Maybe she’d gone to Amelia’s.

  Gretchen waited a moment, twisted the knob. The door was locked. Nobody ever locked their front door. Or hardly ever. The rigid knob was an unyielding reminder of the unimaginable. Gretchen clung to the handle. Yesterday she’d looked through the screen at Barb’s mother, her face tight with anger, but vivid and alive. Mrs. Tatum could have had no thought that she was going to die so soon, that someone would walk through this door, this very door, and hands would clutch her throat and press until there was no more breath.

  Gretchen yanked her hand away from the knob. A murderer had touched this handle, turned it. For the first time since Barb had rattled her bedroom screen, Gretchen confronted the word: murderer.

  Who?

  The chief wanted to know about the quarrel between Barb’s mother and father. Barb was scared. She’d locked her door. Was she afraid of her father?

  Gretchen stepped back. The screen door sighed shut. She hurried down the steps, then hesitated. What if Barb was inside, all alone in the house where her mother had died? Gretchen glanced at the front windows. The shades were down. She started toward the sidewalk, stopped, shook her head, hurried around the side of the house. A recently painted white picket fence marked the boundary of the Crane yard. She glanced past a clothesline. Sheets flapped in the midmorning breeze. A Venetian blind jiggled in the first window, providing a slit just big enough to look through. Gretchen wondered what Mrs. Crane had told Chief Fraser. Gretchen passed a tipped-over hay wagon, a pile of weathered lumber, a rusted butter churn, a washtub sprouting ivy. She reached the backyard, skirted an overgrown garden.

  The door to the screened-in porch wasn’t latched. Gretchen listened hard then slipped inside. “Barb?” Her loud voice startled a cardinal in a wisteria bush. The sweet scent of the wisteria mingled with the sharper smells of paint and turpentine. Slowly, Gretchen walked toward an easel and looked at the half-done painting. A woman in a white dress rested languidly on a white wicker sofa. The only color was the red rose in one trailing hand and the red cushion bunched behind her head. The woman’s face was only partially glimpsed behind an open book held in the other hand. There was a sense of white and peace, red and vigor.

  The kitchen door squeaked open. Barb stood in the doorway. “Mama was a good painter.” Barb brushed back her tousled reddish brown hair, stared at the unfinished painting with red-rimmed eyes. “She was happy when she painted.”

  Gretchen took two quick steps to stand just in front of Barb. “Why did you go off without telling me? Why didn’t you answer the door?” She knew she sounded angry. She was. She hated the thought of Barb alone in the house.

  Barb slumped against the wall. “I came home. I had to.” Her voice was dull. “I want to be here for Daddy.” She took a deep breath. “But he hasn’t come. I don’t know what to do.” She wore a blue shirtwaist dress and white sandals, the bandage bulky on her right foot. Yesterday she would have been beautiful. Today her face was puffy and pale, her hair haphazardly brushed. She didn’t even have on any lipstick.

  Gretchen picked her way carefully because this might be the wrong thing to do, all wrong, but it might be the best thing to do. “Maybe you ought to go on to the courthouse. When there’s any word, they’ll know in the county attorney’s office.”

  Any word . . . Gretchen knew the police were looking for Mr. Tatum to tell him about Mrs. Tatum’s murder. And, she thought coldly, feeling an icy heaviness in her chest, to ask him where he was last night and how mad he had been at his wife and whether he’d come in the front door and quarreled with her. Gretchen frowned. “You said somebody knocked on the door. Your dad wouldn’t have knocked.”

  “No, it wasn’t Daddy.” Her voice was dull, but determined. “Daddy wouldn’t knock. He’d just come in.”

  “You’re sure you heard a knock?” They stood so close together, Gretchen heard
the soft, quick breath Barb drew.

  Barb’s eyes brightened, widened. “Somebody knocked. That proves it wasn’t Daddy.” Barb gave a sigh of relief. “I told the chief, but I’m going to tell Mr. Durwood. He can make the chief understand. Of course he will. I’ll go now.” She turned away, limping on her bandaged foot.

  Gretchen was almost all the way to the Gazette office before she wondered: What if no one believed Barb?

  . . . when I saw your picture on the page with the editorials. I remember you won a prize for an editorial in the Wolf Cry. You were always winning prizes. Anyway, there you were in the Times. The headline said: Around the World . . . by G. G. Gilman. You were in Rome and it was something about happy Italian memories. That’s nice, to have happy Italian memories. I wish I did. I had some good times—when I didn’t remember home. That was always the trouble . . .

  CHAPTER 3

  “GRETCHEN, MEIN SCHATZ.” I heard Grandmother’s voice in my memory. It was as if she were here and speaking to me. No one had ever said my name in quite the same way. Was it her German accent or was it the love that made the intonation so utterly unmistakable? In my heart, I felt like a girl again. Gretchen. That’s how Grandmother knew me. I’d been G. G. Gilman in newsrooms around the world for most of my life. The nickname, derived from my initials, sounded like Gigi, appropriate for a fluffy white Angora cat or a fan dancer. I like to believe I carried it off with flair. No one patronized me. Or, to be honest, no one ever tried it twice. I hadn’t been so tough in the beginning. The toughening started that sultry summer when Barb Tatum ran through the night to bang on my window screen. . . .

  “PRETTY UGLY, HUH kid?” Mr. Dennis’s rounded face sagged into creases like an old bloodhound. He leaned back in his swivel chair, arms folded, pipe clenched in one side of his jaw. “You feel like telling me?” His tone was quiet.

  Gretchen stood by his desk. She didn’t answer. She couldn’t answer.

  Jewell Taylor, her bluish white hair in a French twist, stopped typing. She made a soft, sad noise. The feather on her wispy hat trembled. “Walt, don’t make the child talk about it. Let Ralph handle it.”

  “Gretchen was there.” The editor’s tone was sharp.

  Gretchen stood still and stiff, reliving the night, how Barb’s fingers on the screen sounded like June bugs, the smell of newly mown grass at the Crane yard, the light spilling down from the pink ceiling fixture onto Mrs. Tatum’s sprawled body. . . .

  “But maybe not.” The editor puffed on his pipe and the sweet woodsy scent was comforting, like the crackle of a fire in winter. “Okay, Gretchen, I’ve got a couple of stories for you. Billy Forrester’s family brought him home from the army hospital in Kansas City. He lost both legs. They say he wants to go to college. And the First Baptist Church has a new pastor. And there’ll be a Red Cross bus to take volunteers to Tulsa Saturday to donate blood for the wounded overseas. We’ll do a box on page 1 for that. But first, clear the wire.” He jerked his head toward the clacking Teletype, paper oozing from the top, sloping down, and mounding on the floor.

  Mrs. Taylor brushed back a loose tendril of her snowy hair. “Have I got room today for that mug of the garden club president?”

  Dennis glanced toward the page layouts spread across his desk. “Nope. Too much jump from the Tatum story.”

  “All right.” Mrs. Taylor was always good-humored. In her world, if a story didn’t run one day, it would the next. As far as she was concerned, big stories came and went but weddings and funerals and club meetings were the heart and soul of the Gazette. As she’d earnestly said when she handed Gretchen the list of this year’s graduating class, “What matters are people’s names. That’s what they look for in the paper.”

  But Gretchen knew that everyone would read about Faye Tatum in this afternoon’s Gazette. And, as Mr. Dennis observed, Gretchen had been there.

  Gretchen took a step toward the editor. “Mr. Dennis, maybe if I wrote it all down. About last night.”

  He said quietly, “I’m not asking you to do that.”

  She rubbed tired eyes. “I know. I want to.” If she put the fear and horror into words, the words would be separate and distinct from her, leeching the harsh images out of her mind and onto paper.

  “Sure. Then see about the wire.” He swung his chair around, faced his typewriter.

  Gretchen slowly walked to her desk, sat down. For awhile, there was no sound except for the rattle of typewriter keys. Occasionally, Mr. Dennis grabbed the phone, barked out a number to the operator, asked quick, short, crisp questions. Gretchen heard his gruff voice in the background and felt safe. Mrs. Taylor talked to herself as she worked. Her cheerful chirp had become a familiar background noise to Gretchen.

  Gretchen stared at the yellow copy paper. She started, stopped, started again. It took almost an hour. Finally she had three double-spaced pages. At four lines to an inch, it ran sixteen and a half column inches. She pasted the sheets together, laid them in the incoming copy tray. Mr. Dennis nodded his head in acknowledgment. Mrs. Taylor reached out to pat Gretchen on the arm as she walked back to her desk. Gretchen felt drained, but there was a sense of relief and release. She reached for the slender phone book with a picture of the First National Bank on the cover. She looked up the number of the Forrester house, and picked up the phone. When the operator answered, she said, “Three-two-nine, please.”

  A woman answered. “Hello.”

  “Mrs. Forrester? This is Gretchen Gilman for the Gazette. ” She always emphasized the name of the newspaper. She was still amazed at the effect of her words, how nice most people were, how eager they were to be helpful and answer her questions. “Would it be okay for me to come over and talk to Billy? I’d like to do a story about him.” No legs. Never to be able to walk or run or climb. But he was home. What if Jimmy got hurt like that?

  “A story about Billy?” Mrs. Forrester’s voice quivered. “There used to be a lot of stories when he was the quarterback. They won state. It was three years ago. Only three years . . . Oh, God.” The phone was fumbled, dropped.

  Gretchen felt the hot prick of tears in her eyes.

  “Hello?” The voice was thin, but loud. Manly. “Billy here. Mr. Dennis?”

  “No, this is Gretchen Gilman. I’m working for the Gazette this summer and—”

  “Jimmy’s little sister, right?” A laugh. A nice laugh that sounded like Jimmy when he read about Archie in the comic strip, Archie and Jughead and Veronica. “I remember Jimmy. Best punter I ever saw. Where’s he now?”

  “In the South Pacific. We had a letter from him last week.” Such a short letter, mostly about how much he missed Grandmother’s hamburgers. “Billy, can I come over and talk to you?”

  There was silence on the line.

  Gretchen thought she understood, hoped she understood. “About your plans for going to college?”

  “College.” The little sound over the telephone wire could have been a cough or a sigh or a sob. “Yeah. Sure. Come anytime. I’m here.”

  Gretchen heard his pain and frustration in those two small words. “I’m here.” Where else would he be unless someone took him, the fast quarterback who’d fallen back behind the line once, so deep, then outrun them all past the goal line.

  “I’ll be there in a little while. Thank you.” As Gretchen was putting the phone down, she heard his thin voice, “Oh, Ma, don’t cry. Please, Ma . . .”

  The Gazette front door banged. Ralph Cooley strolled in, hat tilted to the back of his head, cigarette in his mouth, hand clutching a fistful of copy paper. He flapped the sheets. “Read all about it. Cops Hunt Killer. Dogs Called In.”

  Mr. Dennis’s chair squeaked as he faced the door, leaned back. His face had a look Gretchen recognized. Whenever Mr. Cooley ambled across the newsroom cocky as a rooster, Mr. Dennis’s face turned sour, like he’d eaten bad barbecue or maybe smelled a skunk. “Christ, Ralph, what’s kept you? You went over there at nine.” Mr. Dennis glared at the clock. It was just past noon.

 
Mrs. Taylor fluttered across the room. “Here’s the story on the Colman triplets. Did you know they named them Franklin, Winston, and Charles? Oh, I’ve got to hurry. It’s the Ladies of the Leaf luncheon. Gladys Rogers is going to review Pearl Buck’s new book.” Her high heels tapped as she hurried out.

  Gretchen checked the clock. Not quite noon. She grabbed her pica pole, the thin metal ruler with type sizes marked on the left and inches on the right, and hurried to the Teletype. Using her pica pole, she ripped the stories free, sorted them by origin. Each story had to be spiked. There were four spikes, one each for local, state, national, and international. The spikes were long, sharp nails that had been pounded through metal jar lids, then hot lead was poured in. When the lead cooled, the nails stood upright to serve as spikes for copy.

  Cooley grinned as he strolled past Mr. Dennis’s desk. He slouched into his chair, tossed some crumpled notes by the typewriter. “Patience, Walt. Nobody wanted to talk to me and finally I told the chief’s secretary I was going to run a story that law enforcement in the county had no news about Faye Tatum’s murder. That got me into his office. There are currents, Walt. Tricky currents. Lots of door banging. The stalwart chief and the ambitious prosecuting attorney are toe-to-toe, ready to fight. Lurking on the sidelines, ready to jump in the ring, is the sheriff. This is going to be one hell of a battle and I’m just the man to ferret out the real story. Did I ever tell you how goddam lucky you are to have me? Nobody ever got better stories for INS than I did. I ought to be the bureau chief in Dallas. I ought to have got the job in Washington. If I had, I’d be in London now or the Far East. Somewhere.”

  “Yeah.” That was all Mr. Dennis said, his face still sour.

  Cooley’s pleased look slid into a frown. He puffed his cigarette, shot the editor a brooding glance. “I can handle my whisky.”

  Mr. Dennis picked up a pencil, grabbed a sheet of paper. “What’s the chief got, Ralph?”

  Cooley shrugged out of his suit coat, draped it over the back of his chair. He spread out his notes, rolled a sheet into the Remington. “The chief is going to feel a lot of heat if he doesn’t find the husband pronto. The county attorney’s been on the phone already and he’s pushing the chief hard. No love lost between Durwood and Fraser. No trace yet of the husband. The sheriff’s got some men out with dogs. Anyway, I’ve got a hell of a lead.”