The conversation careened for a while, with me being called various names and being accused several times of failing to behave in a seemly fashion (a.k.a. one resulting in wedding vows and procreation). I participated only to needle her, and when the dust settled back on the barroom floor, I was standing on Lucinda Skaggs’s front porch. The paint was bubbling off the trim like crocodile skin and the screen was rusted, but behind me the grass was trimmed, the flower beds were bright with annuals, and the vegetable garden in the side yard was weedless and neatly mulched.
“Hey, Arly,” Buster said as he opened the door. “What can I do for you?” He was a small but muscular man with short gray hair and a face that sagged whenever his smile slipped. He was regarding me curiously, but without hostility.
I could have saved time by asking him if he’d murdered his wife, but it seemed less than neighborly. “Do you mind if I visit for a minute?”
“Sure, come on in.” He pulled the door back and gestured at me. “You’ll have to forgive the mess. Lucinda’s been gone a couple of weeks, and I’m not much of a housekeeper.”
With the exception of a newspaper and a beer can on the floor, the living room was immaculate. The throw pillows on the sofa were as smooth and plump as marshmallows, the arrangement of wildflowers was centered on the coffee table, the carpet still rippled from the vacuum cleaner. No magazines or books were in view, and unlike most living rooms in Maggody, no television set dominated the decor. On one wall an embroidered sampler declared that this was home, sweet home. Another hypothesized that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, and a third, ringed with coy pink storks, proclaimed that Shelley Belinda Skaggs had weighed seven pounds two ounces on November third, 1975.
“Lucinda’s hobby,” Buster said as I leaned forward to feign admiration for the tiny stitches. “She says that it relaxes her, and that the devil finds work for idle hands.”
“They’re very nice,” I murmured. I sat down on the sofa and declined iced tea, coffee, and a beer. “I understand Lucinda’s visiting her sister.”
He gave me a wary look, but I chalked it up to the inanity of my remark. “Yeah, she’s strong on family ties. There’s a sampler in the kitchen that says, ‘The family that prays together stays together.’ I guess she and her sister have been on their knees going on two weeks now.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen Shelley around town in a while. Did she go with her mother?”
“Not hardly,” he said with a brittle laugh. “Shelley took off a couple of weeks ago. I keep thinking we’ll get a call from her, but we haven’t had so much as a postcard.”
“Took off?”
He shrugged, but he didn’t sound at all casual as he said, “Ran away is more like it, I suppose. She and Lucinda had an argument, and the next morning there was a note on the kitchen table. According to Lucinda, the acorn can’t stray far from the oak, but she may be wrong this time.”
I glanced at the sampler behind me and did a bit of calculation. “Shelley’s a minor. Have you notified the police in the nearby towns and the state police?”
“I wanted to, but Lucinda kept saying good riddance to bad rubbish. She was real upset with Shelley for coming home late one night and called her a slut and a lot of other nasty names. She’s always been real stern with Shelley, even when she was nothing but a little girl in pigtails. When Lucinda wasn’t whipping her, she was making her sit in a corner in her room and embroider quotations from the Bible. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Lucinda say—” He broke off and covered his face with his hands.
It was not a challenge to complete his sentence: Spare the rod and spoil the child. I barely knew Lucinda Skaggs, but I was increasingly aware of how much I disliked her. She seemed to live from cliche to cliche, and I suspected she would have some piercing ones for yours truly.
I waited until Buster wiped his eyes and attempted to smile. “I’ll call the state police and alert them about Shelley. While you make a list of the names and addresses of your family and friends, I need to look through her things to see if I can find any leads. Also, we’ll need a recent photograph.”
Buster nodded and took me to Shelley’s bedroom. It was as stark as the living room, with dreary beige walls, a matching bedspread, a bare lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling, and only the basic pieces of furniture. A brush and comb were aligned on the dresser. The drawers contained a meager amount of folded underthings, sweaters, and T-shirts. In the closet, skirts and blouses were separated and hung neatly; had it been plausible, I was sure they would have been alphabetized. There were no boxes on the shelf, no notebooks or diaries in the drawers, no letters hidden under the mattress. The only splash of color came from a braided rug on the hardwood floor. The room, I concluded, could have passed inspection in a convent. Handily.
