The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [127]
Ava was staring out the window at a little clearing in the woods. “That’s where Mr. Ugly used to sell his peanuts, isn’t it, Daddy?”
There was nobody on the line. He didn’t recognize the number when he glanced at it. He snapped the phone shut and kept driving. After a minute he told Ava, “Mr. Ugly hasn’t been there in a long time.”
Caroline rang the doorbell of the house on Evergreen Street. It was only seven in the evening, but the sky had already darkened. She and Otis and Suzi stood on the deep front porch, waiting. It was an old Craftsman-style house, beige stucco and green trim, with steps and a railing leading up from the sidewalk and a little apron of a yard in front, all in surprisingly good shape. There were lights on upstairs. Caroline rang the bell again. Distant thunder rumbled, and a great gray cloud shaped like a steep cliff was creeping across the sky toward them from the Mississippi River. Did Grayson stretch all the way up here? Surely not. But there was a storm brewing. Wind blew damp air and exhaust fumes over from Madison Avenue, which mingled with the smell of the gardenia bushes around the porch.
“Somebody’s got to be in there,” Caroline said, and leaned on the bell again, longer this time. Otis walked over and peered in a window, and Suzi sat down on a glider. They didn’t have any luggage with them, because they’d left home in such a hurry.
On the sidewalk in front of the house, an anorexic-looking lady in baggy clothes walked up with three black Scottie dogs on three separate leashes. “Hurry up. Poop!” she ordered her dogs, who kept sniffing the grass but not pooping. The wind was picking up, blowing the woman’s hair into her eyes, whipping around the empty plastic poop bag she carried.
“We’re camping out right here till they answer the door,” Caroline told her children.
“They can’t hide forever,” Otis said, peering in another window.
“We ride to victory!” Suzi yelled.
They’d just driven nine hours to Memphis from Tallahassee and they were all zonked but pleased with themselves for having found the place.
Finally the door was flung open by a bearded young man wearing shorts who looked disheveled and hassled, his wire-frame glasses askew. He held an empty cardboard box in his hands.
Caroline, Suzi, and Otis looked past him into the living room, into the house owned by Marylou Ahearn, alias Nance Archer.
“Help you?” asked the young man.
“We’re looking for Marylou,” Caroline said. She had trouble saying that name in connection with Nance. Nance and Marylou seemed like two different people.
“She was by here earlier this afternoon,” the young man said. “Around four thirty.”
“Was there an old man with her?” Suzi asked.
“And a dog?” Otis asked.
The young man wrinkled his brow and exhaled loudly. “Are you selling something? ’Cause I’m broke.”
Caroline explained that they were friends of Marylou’s from Tallahassee and that they were concerned about her and wanted to catch up with her to see if she was okay.
“Marylou has friends in Tallahassee?” he asked, stepping back to let them inside. “She sure didn’t have many friends in Memphis.” He shut the heavy oak door behind them and quickly locked it. They all stood there in the foyer beside an old player piano. “She did have a man with her,” the young man said. “Wilson somebody. And her dog. Butter. He’s in the living room.”
“Buster,” Otis said.
“Who is it, Trev?” A sturdy young woman with a long dark braid and fluffy bangs, wearing overalls, walked into the foyer carrying an armload of books.
Caroline explained that they were friends of Marylou’s, and the young woman, who’d introduced herself as Katya, said, “You just missed Elvis Week. Did you come to see Elvis?”
“Not hardly,” Otis said.
Katya invited them into the living room, where she turned on a floor lamp