"Yes, the main one. I really want to know what you didn't put in the paper, or what stuck out in your mind. Were you out here then?" "Along with a slew of other reporters. Though I did get an exclusive for one day. The disappearance was really hot for a while, until a week had passed with no news. But being the local reporter paid off." Sally laid down her fork and opened her briefcase. She extracted a few pages of computer printout from a file folder.
"Those are your notes?" I'd expected a spiral notebook with scribbles. "Yes," Sally said with a hint of surprise. "Of course I put them on a disk when I get back to the office. Let me see ... this will be a reconstruction." She glanced over the pages, organizing herself, and nodded. "When the police got here," she began . ..
There's an old woman standing out in the driveway. She's small, and gray, and alternately distraught and grumpy. Her name, she says, is Melba Totino, and she is the mother of Mrs. Julius, Hope Julius. They're all gone, she says: Hope, and her husband T.C., and their girl, Charity. They vanished in the night. She herself had risen at her usual hour and gone over to the house to prepare breakfast, as she always did. She had expected all of them to be there, even Charity, who had been home sick the day before. Charity is a sophomore at Lawrenceton High, newly enrolled. She'd had a hard six weeks getting used to being in a new school, missing her boyfriend, but finally she'd adjusted. She'd had a low fever the past couple of days. But Charity, sick or not, now wasn't in the house.
Melba Totino goes in by the front door, since the back door of the kitchen faced outward over a new expanse of concrete, poured the day before to make a patio. She is unsure whether or not it's okay to walk on the concrete yet, so she goes to the front. The door's unlocked. No lights on inside. No stirring, no movement.
Mrs. Totino steps inside hesitantly, calling. She doesn't want to stroll in without warning. But no one answers her call. She creeps through the house, now anxious, looking about for signs of the untoward. The house is clean and peaceful. The cuckoo clock in the living room makes its brainless noise, and the old lady jumps.
Where is her daughter? Where is Hope? With approaching panic, the old lady finally screams up the stairs, but no one answers. Telling herself she is being ridiculous, and she'll give them a real talking-to when they come home, Melba Totino sits at the kitchen table, waiting for someone to come. She doesn ‘t dare to touch a thing. The dishes are all put away. There is no coffee perking, nothing baking in the oven. After half an hour, she walks back out the front door and looks in the garage. She hadn't bothered on her way over— why would she?
And now, as far as she can see, everything is the same. She doesn't drive, she doesn't know anything about cars, but this car is her daughter's family car, the truck is her son-in-law's pickup, with "Julius Home Carpentry" proudly painted on the side, phone number right below.
No one is in either vehicle.
She goes from the entrance to the garage past the stairs leading up to her apartment, across the covered walkway over to the house, into the his backyard. She is glad she has her sweater on, there's a nip in the air for sure. There's a turkey buzzard circling in the sky. The yard itself is empty. She looks up to the second story of the house, hoping to see movement at Charity's window, but there is nothing.
Bewildered, trying to keep her terror a secret from herself, the old woman walks slowly back to the front of the house, still trying to keep pristine that new concrete that the owners of the house will never see again. Finally, after some interminable hours, she calls the police.
"Parnell Engle drove by that morning in his pickup truck," Sally explained, "and since he'd poured the concrete the day before, naturally he glanced at the place as he went by. After he saw all the police cars there, he just happened to stop by the paper to check on his classified ad, and just happened to wander into the newsroom and let me know what he'd seen."
"Naturally," I agreed.
"Of course, this was a couple of years before he ‘found the Lord,'" Sally said. "Lucky for me, because I was able to talk to the old lady before any other reporters even knew something had happened. By the next day she wasn't talking to anyone. Wonder where she is now?"
"In Peachtree Leisure Apartments," I said smugly. "She gave me a wedding present." It was not often I got to impart news to Sally. "It's odd she chose to stay here, with no family. I gather she and her sister had been living in New Orleans. Wonder why she didn't go back?" "She told me she was waiting for the Juliuses to turn up." Sally shuddered, and took a sip of her iced tea. "That's creepy in more ways than one. You know, Hope Julius would be dead by now, even if she was alive." I raised my eyebrows, and after a second, Sally realized what she'd said. She shook her head in self-exasperation.
"What I mean is, Hope Julius had cancer," Sally explained. "She had ovarian cancer, I think, very advanced. Though there was apparently little hope, she was undergoing radiation treatment in Atlanta. All her hair had fallen out... I remember seeing one wig and one empty stand in her room when the police let me walk through the house... Mrs. Totino said it was okay. One wig, a curly one that she wore almost every day, was gone. The one that was left was fancier, like she'd had her hair put up. She wore that one to church and parties." "Oooo," I said. "That's awful." A woman's false hair, sitting there in her room when the woman was gone.
"It really was," Sally agreed. She turned a page in her notebook.
"Why was the wig there, I wonder? That makes it look bad for Mrs. Julius." "Yes, it does. She wouldn't leave without her extra wig, would she? And the wig made the whole scene eerier... like Martians had beamed them up right after they'd made their beds that morning, but before they'd gone down to breakfast." "They'd made their beds," I repeated.
"Yes, unless something happened during the night, before they went to bed but after Mrs. Totino had gone to sleep up in her apartment." "And what time was that, do you remember?"
"Yes, I have it here... nine-thirty, she said. She was extra tired from all the activity of the day... the Dimmoch boy coming to visit Charity and help T.C., Parnell coming to pour the patio."
It was hard picturing that as exhausting since someone else had done all the work. I said as much to Sally.
"Yes, but you see, since her daughter was so ill she'd been doing most of the cooking, the evening meals anyway, and lots of the laundry, I gathered." "Maybe that was why T.C. was agreeable to building her the apartment? Because Hope was so sick?"
"That's what I presumed. I never met him. The few people who did meet him, like Parnell Engle, liked him, and liked Hope, too. The picture I get is of a rigid kind of man, very honest and aboveboard, very meticulous in his dealings, punctual, orderly; of course, some of that might be from being in the service for so long. As far as I can tell, Hope was not a strong person, emotionally or physically, and I'm sure her illness had sapped her." "And Charity?"
"Charity was a typical teenager, according to the local kids who knew her for a few weeks. She talked all the time about her boyfriend she'd had to leave behind when she moved here, but most of the girls I interviewed seemed to feel that was a ploy to make her look important. Though since the Dimmoch boy cared enough to drive over, I guess they were wrong. Her grades, if I am remembering correctly, weren't that good, implying either that she wasn't bright or that she was more interested in other things; don't know which. She was an attractive girl, they all said that in one way or another, even though she didn't seem so pretty in a photo. I managed to talk to a couple of kids who knew her when she lived in Columbia, and they all spoke of her as being a strong girl, one with a lot of adult qualities, especially after her mother got sick." I offered Sally another glass of tea. She looked down at her wrist.