Fighting for Anna Read online

  What I didn’t see was a Jaguar.

  I climbed the ladder to check the loft, just to be sure. No Jaguar had levitated to the second story. I sat on the edge with my feet dangling, taking it in. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. The manure odor had dissipated with the doors open. Mostly now I smelled hay and dirt, a little bit of mold, and goats. Good smells. Smells that reminded me of house calls with my Papa long ago, when I had perched in many a loft, watching him.

  My brain switched slides on me to this barn, sixty years ago. Gidget’s father in overalls with a straw hat and a pitchfork, throwing hay into the stalls for a mother cow and her calf. A milking stool and pail sat outside the stall.

  “Daddy,” a little girl’s voice shrieked from outside my vantage point.

  A happy noise. Not a scared one.

  The man smiled. “In here, Anna.”

  “Take me for a ride in your car, Daddy.”

  Her father had levered up another forkful of hay and tossed it to the cow.

  “When you finish your chores.”

  I opened my eyes. Hay particles and dust were floating through the air into one of the stalls, but the man and his daughter weren’t there.

  So far I hadn’t seen a single thing that hinted at the location of the Jaguar, or Gidget’s daughter’s whereabouts. I was praying there’d be something in the safe. A receipt for a storage unit. A safety deposit box number and key. A deed to another piece of property that I hadn’t learned about yet. A note from a friend inviting her to store her vintage automobile at their place. A plat to this farm would be nice, too, come to think of it. An address and name for Gidget’s daughter would be best of all.

  “Where’s the dang car?” I muttered.

  Gertrude put her paws on a post, peering up at me and wagging her tail.

  The thought of doing the barn inventory this morning, or anytime, was daunting. But I had a productive idea: I could visit the oh-so-pleasant Jimmy. About the safe, the car, the daughter, and the price of tea in China.

  Back in the house, I found Jimmy’s address. I grabbed my handbag and Gertrude’s leash, calling to her as I walked through the back door and out the side gate to my car. She bounded over the tummy-high grass, her funny body long and thick, her locks and ears flapping. She was always making me smile.

  It turned out that Jimmy didn’t live far from Gidget. That was the good news. The bad news was that he lived at the stinky chicken farm.

  The ammonia stench overpowered me from inside my closed car. “Stay here, girl.”

  Gertrude snorted.

  I held my hand over my mouth and nose and marched to the front door. I rapped it sharply with my knuckles. After a few moments, when I didn’t hear any noise inside, I smacked it with my open palm.

  “Come on, come on,” I said under my cupped hand.

  Gertrude started barking in a pissed-off-dog way. I followed her line of sight. Jimmy was heading toward me. He looked a heck of a lot like my vision of Gidget’s father, except in blue jeans and red chamois and with buggier eyes. His big work boots were covered all the way to the base of the uppers in chicken poop. He lifted a hand in greeting. I lifted my free hand to wave back but kept the other one over my face.

  “You all right?” he shouted.

  I nodded and held up a thumb. When he was standing five feet from me, I said through my hand, “I was hoping I could seek your advice on a few things.”

  He stopped. “What fer?”

  “For my book. About Gidget.”

  He motioned to two metal gliders on his front porch. His house was not a lot different from Gidget’s, although it had been more recently painted. A rich, buttery yellow with sparkling white trim. I took a seat. He didn’t. I was glad to be in the shade, but felt a little power-played.

  “Do you know the combination to Gidget’s safe?”

  He raised his bushy white eyebrows. “Uh-uh.” He put his thumbs in his pockets.

  I took that as a no. “Rats. A lot of the things Ralph and I need might be in there.”

  “Huh,” he remarked.

  He was beginning to irritate me, so I smiled. “Also, I was wondering if you’ve been by her house any this week.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Oh, good. What for, exactly?”

  He shrugged. “Cover the window. Replace the doorknob. Fix the jamb and door. Check on the goats and cows. Look after the chickens. That kind of thing.”

  “I’ve only seen a few animals. I remembered a lot more. From once when I visited Gidget.”

  “I brought most of ’em over to my place. Easier to care for ’em.”

  “Oh my,” I said. “Okay.”

  “I’ll bring ’em back. I figured whoever”—he emphasized the word—“inherited would appreciate it.”

  “I expect so.” I clasped my hands in my lap. “Where are the chickens?”

  He gestured out toward his hen house.

  “How many? Animals and chickens, I mean.”

  “Five cows, eleven goats, twenty-three hens. Plus some pregnant Herefords and Boers I didn’t want to mess with.”

  “You missed one rooster. He serenades me in the mornings.”

  He smirked. “Wondered where he got off to.”

  “While you were there, did you check on things inside?”

  He shook his head. “Not ’cept the window and doorknob. Didn’t reckon there was any need, since you took the dog.”

  “Yes, right. So you didn’t take any letters from the kitchen?”

  “Uh-uh. Saw ’em. Didn’t take ’em.”

  Something about his answer niggled my brain, but it didn’t yield specifics. I decided to let it background process. “Did you check the doors?”

  His forehead wrinkled. “I opened the front door by prying out the nails holding it shut. Went out the front after I’d fixed it. Locked it. Didn’t check the others. Why should I?”

  “No reason. The back door was unlocked when I got there yesterday. I’m trying to get a fix on when that happened.”

  “Could be it was never locked.”

  “True.” But why would the police leave the scene unsecured? “Did you see anyone else there?”

  “I woulda told you if I did.”

  “Okay.” He was an ornery old cuss. “The art in that house is worth millions. Do you have any idea why Gidget was living like a pauper?”

  He nodded. “Said they were her treasures, and she’d rather starve than give ’em up.”

  I wasn’t surprised.

  “How’s your air conditioner?”

  He was surprisingly kind, deep down. “Not so good.” I frowned. “I’ve given up on it. I’m staying in Gidget’s place for now.”

  “Why’s that?”

  I’d assumed he’d heard. “Um, Gidget’s will?”

  He shook his head and hitched up his overalls.

  “She left the place to me.”

  His eyes batted once, twice, but his expression didn’t change. “Why fer?”

  “She wanted me to write her story.”

  He still didn’t change expression, but his eyes grew darker and the skin around his mouth, tighter. “Huh.” Then, “Wait here.”

  He shucked his boots off at a jack by the front door and disappeared into his house. When he returned, he handed me the keys to Gidget’s house and a page torn from a spiral-bound notebook, its crinkly edges still attached. On it, he’d written a phone number.

  “They’ll fix your air conditioner for ya. Tell ’em I sent you.”

  “Thank you.” I stood up. I needed to get out of there. My nose was growing used to the smell. “Just one or two more things.”

  He jammed his feet into his boots.

  “Did Gidget have a Jaguar? An old one?”

  “That fancy car of her father’s?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Tell me about that car.”

  He shifted on his feet, looked around like someone might overhear him telling tales. “Old man Becker saved some British heir during World Wa
r II. The family was so grateful they gave him an old SS 1. He was right proud of it.”

  “Wow, yes, that sounds like the one I’m looking for.”

  “Hasn’t been around the house since her folks passed. I reckon that’s fifteen or twenty years ago.”

  “Did she have friends or another piece of land or a storage unit? Anywhere else she might keep it?”

  He looked at me like I might be slow. “I never saw anyone else out there with her, except for Ralph.”

  His sorta answers caused my fists to clench. I flexed them. “Well, thank you.” I stuck out my hand.

  He wiped his on the sides of his dirty jeans, and I cringed. We shook and I headed back to the Jetta. I opened the door, to Gertrude’s delight, and he called after me, to her consternation.

  “She used to have a friend. Lucy. Works over at the Lutheran church.”

  “Which one?” I shouted over the dog’s hysterical barking.

  “The Wends.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  He looked at his feet, kicked at something on the ground, spit. “I’m purty sure I saw Lucy driving away from Gidget’s place in her brother’s van. Friday, maybe. A few days before Gidget passed.”

  I didn’t want to make too much of it, but it seemed like we’d had a breakthrough, and I accidentally peeled out in my excitement. When I looked back, he was watching me go, his hands on his hips. The last I saw as I drove off toward Serbin, he was walking over to his old pickup truck, cell phone to his ear.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Be good,” I told Gertrude. Once again, I left my car running and dog guarding it.

  She may have batted her eyes innocently at me. It was hard to tell since they were covered in locks.

  St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and its plain white facade didn’t look like much from the outside, but I knew better. Adrian and I had toured it along with the other Painted Churches of Texas a few years before. I stepped through the doors and was hit by a memory so vivid I could almost feel Adrian’s lips on my forehead. We’d stood inside this sanctuary, gazing in awe at the unexpected abundance of color. Murals crowded the walls. The columns, floor, and baseboards shone like marble.

  Adrian had put his arms around me and kissed me below the hairline on my forehead. “I feel God here.”

  How was it I kept finding myself caught in a space between then and now, and why did the past feel so much more real to me? I wanted to go back there, with him, but I couldn’t. I was here, now, with nothing but the memory of him. I touched my butterfly and let the doors swing shut behind me. “I do, too. And I feel you, my love.”

  A woman’s voice broke me out of limbo. “May I help you?”

  I put a hand over my eyes to help them adjust to the change in light inside the nave. I searched for her, my eyes roaming wooden pews facing an elaborate altar. An elevated organ—almost suspended in midair—was even with the pulpit, above the ground-level seating for the congregation. It gave me the feeling of looking up in reverence at the same time as down in gratitude and admiration. As hard as these people’s lives were, they took the time to honor God and show their faith through worship, even when they probably didn’t always find Him very benevolent. The Sunday school I’d attended as a child was training pants next to this. And my gradual distancing from religion since then made me squirm, like God could see me more clearly in here, and was disappointed.

  “Yoo-hoo,” the woman’s voice called from above. An angel?

  I lifted my gaze. A narrow upper balcony ringed the sanctuary, it too filled with pews. She was standing with one hand on the railing, leaning out toward me, smiling and waving. Golden light haloed around her hair, but she was just a woman.

  “Yoo-hoo,” I answered.

  “I’ll be down in just a sec.”

  “Thank you.”

  I ran my hand along the top edge of a pew. It was varnished smooth and sealed tight.

  “There you are.” Her voice was beside me now.

  I turned to her. “Here I am. I’m Michele Lopez Hanson.”

  “And I’m Lucy Thompson. I’ve heard about you.”

  The only surprise would have been if she hadn’t. “All good, I hope.”

  “Yes, indeedy. Must be quite a change from the big city.”

  “Well, it’s definitely less anonymous.” That wasn’t exactly true. My privacy in Houston last year was zip. Painfully zip, like running naked through Reliant Stadium when it was filled to capacity. But that was then. I was mostly over it.

  She smiled, controlled, from her lips to her pleated navy gabardine pants and white blouse. “What can I do for you today, Ms. Hanson?”

  “Please—Michele. I’ve come about”—I started to say Gidget but changed it at the last second—“Anna Becker.”

  Her brown eyes cast down, and her lips trembled. “I was afraid you were going to say that. Why don’t we have a seat.”

  Lucy lowered herself into the pew. Her soft brown hair, chin length, swung forward, hiding her face for a moment. Then she lifted her head. While her face bore wrinkles, the skin was pale and mostly smooth. She looked so much younger than Gidget it was hard to believe they were friends and contemporaries.

  I sat beside her and turned to face her, as best I could. “You were friends with Anna.”

  “Oh yes, we were friends. But that was a long time ago.”

  “Tell me about it. About her.”

  She looked up at me, her head tilted to one side. “Is this for that book you’re writing?”

  “Mostly. But not completely.”

  She nodded. “I heard Ralph is supposed to find a daughter nobody knew she had and give her some lost car. And you’re helping Ralph.”

  “And he’s helping me. If we find her daughter, she’s part of the story.”

  She drew in a sharp breath. “I’m not sure that’s a story that would need to be told.”

  “I’m sure Gidget had good reason for wanting her story”—I waved my hand in front of me—“out there.”

  “I have faith the Lord knows best in all things.”

  Ouch. “So, about Anna?”

  Her voice sounded resigned and a little sad. “You can call her Gidget. Seems like everybody does now.” She took a hymnal out of the pew in front of her. It looked nearly as old as the church itself.

  I waited her out.

  “First thing you need to know is that Anna Becker was a sweet girl and the best friend I ever had.” She put the book in her lap and started fanning the pages. “And the next thing I ought to tell you is that Gidget Becker was trouble and lived a life that shamed her parents and her community.” Her lips grew tight, and I could see she was struggling not to cry. “She left poor Jimmy at the altar, you know, when we weren’t even twenty years old.”

  I put a hand up. “No, I didn’t know. Altar? Jimmy?”

  She laughed, a bitter sound. “Well, I guess that’s where it all starts. And Jimmy sent you to me.” So he’d given her a call, warned her. “Can’t believe he didn’t tell you himself. The old fool, out there spending his good time and money on her after what she did to him.” She smoothed her lips, which had puckered as she spoke. “Shows you the kind of godly man he is.”

  “So, Anna was engaged to marry Jimmy?”

  “She was, and we were all at the church waiting for her to show up, when word came she’d run off.”

  “Wow.”

  She dipped her head.

  “So, you were her friend then. Did you see it coming?”

  “I hate talking about this—mind, I’ve kept it to myself for more years than you’ve been alive—and I resent that it’s at her instigation, for something I don’t find . . . savory.” She put the hymnal up and clasped her hands in her lap, her knees together.

  Again, I sat in silence, waiting. I could feel the story burning its way out of her.

  “Oh, all right. We were working together. Waitresses. At a diner in Brenham. Taking classes at Blinn. A red convertible Cadillac pulled up one day whe
n we were working. One with longhorns on the front end, very tacky. An older man in snakeskin boots was driving, but older’s all in the perspective.” She shook her head. “Younger than I am now. A young man and woman were with him, in their twenties. Anna got their table. She used to do this thing. She’d draw on the paper placemats or people’s bills. Caricatures, or whatever caught her fancy, and sign them.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “She was good, I’ll give her that. Wanted to be an artist since we were little. Won every contest and award you could imagine. But her father wanted her to do something practical, plus there wasn’t money to send her off to some ritzy art school.”

  I thought of Gidget’s work. She was more than good.

  “Well, after they left, Anna was beside herself. The man had written his phone number on his bill and left it with her. She said he’d offered her a job, working for him, and a sort of ‘scholarship’ to art school at the University of Houston.”

  “Oh my.” I crossed my legs and gripped my knee, trying to contain my excitement. I wished I’d brought a notepad with me. Some kind of biographer I was. Taking out my phone and starting to record now wouldn’t go over well, I was certain of it.

  “Yes, oh my. Her parents said no. As well they should have. It seemed highly inappropriate, not to mention unlikely. I thought she’d given up the idea until the day she didn’t show up for her own wedding.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she sniffed. “At the time, some people suspected she ran off with a former minister of the church.”

  “Really?”

  “She’d made eyes at him a time or two, and he moved away around the same time. But who knows? She just disappeared. Folks these days wouldn’t believe that could happen, what with Facebook and such. But back then, well, that’s more than forty years ago, and if you wanted to be gone, you were. Seventy miles away could be like another continent. She didn’t write home. Didn’t come back to see her folks. Nobody knew what she was up to. Her parents gave her up for dead, and her their only child. Not even any nieces or nephews, since both of her parents were only children as well.” She made a tsk noise. “Jimmy went on with his life and married a nice woman, now deceased.” She licked her lips. “And then a few years after she’d left, Gidget showed up in an expensive car. She’d gotten herself an art gallery and was living high, with a new name.”