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The night before, my parents' friends had been talking about gang activity at the Bartley High School. Gangs! In the Arkansas Delta! In flat, remote, tiny, impoverished Bartley.
I guess in some corner of my mind, I'd expected Bartley would remain untouched by the currents of the world, would retain its small-town safety and assurance. Home had changed. I could go there again, but its character was permanently altered.
Abruptly, I was sick of myself and my problems. It was high time I got back to work.
I started, as I like to do, with a survey of the job to be done. Dill's house, which looked freshly painted and carpeted, was fairly straight and fairly clean—but, like the Osborns‘, it was showing signs of a few days of neglect. Varena wasn't the only one feeling the effects of prolonged wedding fever.
I had no guide here to show me where everything was. I wondered if A
That recalled me to the purpose of my cleaning offer. Before anything or anyone could interrupt me, I searched A
I found the memory book under her bed. Page 23 was missing.
I rocked back on my haunches, feeling as though an adversary had socked me in the stomach.
"No," I said out loud, hearing the misery in my own voice.
After a few minutes trying to think, I stuck the book in the rack on A
I had to face the fact that the page that had been sent to Roy Costimiglia and passed to Jack had almost certainly come from A
The book being in Dill's house perhaps raised the odds that someone besides Meredith Osborn might have mailed the page to Roy Costimiglia. At least, that was what I thought. But I wished I'd found the book anywhere but here.
If A
And if Dill's first wife had abducted Summer Dawn, what had happened to their biological baby?
As I paired A
It was another copy of the memory book.
I opened it, hoping fervently that A
"Shit," I said out loud. When I'd been young, and we'd gotten our yearbooks, or memory books, or whatever you wanted to call them, the first thing we'd done was write our names inside.
One of these books had to be A
Dill was using the third bedroom as a study. There was a framed picture of Dill holding a baby I presumed was A
I cleaned, scrubbed, and worried at the problem. I straightened and dusted and vacuumed and polished and mopped, and the activity did me good. But I didn't solve anything.
When I went in A
I shook my head. I would never have given the picture two thoughts if I hadn't known that the woman had eventually killed herself. So much despair, so well hidden. Dill had an unstable mother, had married an unstable wife. I was frightened that he could see something deep in Varena that we didn't suspect, some i
It felt odd to see Varena's clothes hanging in half of Dill's closet, her china in his cabinets. She had really and truly moved into Dill's house. That intimacy bore in on me how much Varena would lose if A
The wedding was so close. One more day.
Very reluctantly, I reentered Dill's office and opened the filing cabinet. I had put on a pair of fresh rubber gloves, and I kept them on. That shows you how guilty I was feeling.
But this had to be done.
Dill was an orderly man, and I quickly found the file labeled simply "A
As far as I was concerned, A
Blind alley. Dead end.
Suddenly I remember the negatives marked "Birth Pictures." Where were the family photo albums?
I found them in a cabinet in the living room and blessed Dill for being orderly. They were labeled by year.
I yanked out the one marked with A
And on the baby's bottom, a big brown birthmark.
This was proof, wasn't it? This was indisputably a delivery room picture, this was indisputably the baby born to Dill and his wife, Judy. And this baby, shown in a third picture cradled in the arms of the woman in the picture in A
The elation at finding something certain helped me through the pang of guilt I suffered as I extracted the key picture from the album. It, too, went in my purse, after I'd returned the photo album to its former position.