The Missing

“Little miss, you want to put on your nice new sundress?”

The girl sat up and smiled at her. Vessy pulled off her short stockings and ribboned pinafore. The child’s knees were what she wanted to see, and the skin there was smooth and white as milk. She dropped the sundress over her easy as a lampshade and then sat her on the bed to buckle on a pair of brown sandals, cupping the feet in her rough palms and feeling the soft bottoms. “Let’s see those toes.” Vessy flashed a playful smile and the girl giggled, drawing back her feet and sitting on them.

“I bet you want Vessy to play little piggy with them tootsies?”

“No,” the girl said, but she still held out her feet for the sandals.

Vessy wiggled the big toe and saw not a callus, dirt stain, or crookedness. She examined her ankles for scuffs and little scars. She held and turned the feet the way she would examine sweet potatoes at the market. Then she put on the sandals and led the girl downstairs for a glass of milk and a slice of sugar bread. They sat at the little porcelain breakfast table set by a window, where Vessy usually enjoyed the view down the hill toward the river. But now her eyes took in every detail of this child, sensing that something was badly wrong. Suddenly, she jerked up her right arm and feinted at the girl’s head as though she would strike her. Madeline looked up at the open fingers, but did not flinch.

“Orphanage my foot,” Vessy said under her breath. She knew orphans, white and black, and every one would jerk back and cower if anybody raised a hand to them. Orphans wore no shoes, or wrong-sized shoes in which their feet grew crooked. Their feet bore calluses, craters of sores, bite scars, toenails stobbed black, orange dirt stain, ankle meat clipped to white bone. Knees were crosshatched from working in crops or playing in common dirt, fingers stretched out by bucket or firewood chores. When Vessy rested her hand down on the fine hair, the child leaned into her touch and smiled. “Sweet Jesus,” Vessy whispered. “Where’d they find this baby?”

Chapter Twelve

SAM FOUND the Wellers outside their cabin and explained what he had learned from the Skadlocks and what kind of people they were, how they lived, that he was certain of their guilt.

As Ted Weller listened, his face turned to match the hard red surface of the shore pavings. “Why in hell didn’t you tell us this yesterday?”

“You know how it was. We had twenty-five hundred passengers last night.”

He raised both arms from his sides and let them drop. “Why didn’t you threaten them? They’re criminals.”

“I wasn’t exactly in a position to put any pressure on them. As far as the law is concerned, these people own their own country.”

Ted grabbed him by the arm and wedged him against a bulkhead. “You tell me how to get back in there and they’ll tell me something.”

Sam read his eyes and found them a mix of rage and fear. “Ted, I think they’ll kill you.”

His eyes flew wide and Elsie turned her face away. “They didn’t kill you!” Ted hollered. “You think I’m just big soft Ted the dumb German who all he can do is pound a piano. Let me tell you, I’m plenty tough. I grew up in a saloon.”

Sam pointed downriver. “Back in there where I went ain’t Cinci

“I don’t need law when my baby’s missing.”

Sam looked south along the bank understanding that Ted was going to do something stupid, and the sad part of it was that he agreed with his feelings. “You don’t know how to get back in there,” he said softly.

“I got a mouth to ask.”

Elsie put a hand on his shoulder. Sam imagined she was going to try to calm him, but instead she said, “I’ll get you money from the boat and you can ask directions at the station.”

“This is a bad idea.”

Ted glowered at him, his mustache blooming under his red nose. “You tell me where this place is. Right now.”

“No. I won’t be responsible.”

Ted slammed him against the bulkhead, hard. “Tell me or I’ll break you open like a dollar fiddle, damn you.”

Sam stared him in the eye. Ted was hoping for at least a chance of finding his family’s future, of gathering in his blood, but Sam remained silent, to keep him from getting hurt. He himself had been called Lucky so many times that he was begi

TED WALKED to the Y &MV station, bought a ticket, and boarded a mixed train going out at four to St. Frank. It was a bone-rattling ride in a wooden coach through cut-over land and weed-wracked farms. Two hours later the train jammed on its brakes at a dusty board-and-batten station and he stepped off into the still air and asked the agent for directions to the livery.

The little agent sized him up. “This here’s the last train tonight, so if you wait a bit I’ll give you a lift in my flivver.” He waited under the station overhang until the agent came out in the slanting light and turned the oily crank on his Ford. At the livery Ted got the owner up from supper and asked to rent a horse.

“Well,” the liveryman said, “I like your looks so I’ll let you have my wife’s mare, Sooky.”

Ted shook his head. “No thanks. I want the one called Number six.”

The liveryman fished a set of spectacles from his pocket, put them on, and looked at Ted more closely. “That’s not a good horse for a big fellow like yourself.”

“A man who rented it before says it’s what I need.”

“You can suit yourself, but that horse will try to gallop through a parked locomotive, it’s that stupid.” The man stalked off toward his sun-bleached barn.

Ted rode across the stream before full dark, then sat the horse on the far bank, reading a compass by the light of a match. The liveryman had explained where to go and to wait for the moon to come up, and after half an hour it began to rise above the line of cypresses, shining like a communion wafer. Ted put the horse forward, keeping the moon between the animal’s ears. He carried his pistol in one pocket, his big folding knife in the other, and his little girl in his thoughts. In the swamp he lost sight of the sky and became lost. He spilled his matches into the mud and couldn’t read his compass, but he kept moving, hoping he would blunder his way to the river, deciding that nothing could stop him. Number 6 brushed against a locust tree and Ted felt the thorns rake his calf, but he didn’t so much as turn his head at the pain.

THE NEXT DAY Sam was rushing through his lunch before the loading of the two o’clock crowd when Captain Stewart walked up to the table and asked, “Have you seen Mr. Weller?”

“I thought he’d asked you for the day off.”

The captain’s white eyebrows seemed to double in size as he leaned down. “He sent me a note to that effect but evidently did not wait for a reply. Who’s supposed to play for the two o’clock trip?”

Sam swallowed slowly, looking at his fingers. “Aw, I’ll cover it for him. It’s a church group, isn’t it? How much dancing are they going to do?”

“No offense, son, but I’ve heard you play. You’ve got to practice to get the stiffness out of your wrists.” He went upright, his back straight as a broom handle. “But go down and get ready while Fred Marble plays everybody on board with the calliope. And I’ll keep an ear on you.”