Mama Cracks a Mask of Innocence (6 page)

“Then Brenda came. She was a beautiful little girl, the spitting image of Sonny Boy. From the moment he set eyes on that baby, he was crazy about her. And she him. I have to admit that I was jealous at first. I guess it was because I’d always imagined that’s how I would have been if my own father ever showed up.
Brenda didn’t disappoint Sonny either. That child clung to him like he was her breath.” Tootsie looked exasperated. I couldn’t quite figure if she was confused or sad.

“It’s a shame Sonny Boy died before he had a chance to see Brenda go off to college like he wanted to. You know, he had the biggest funeral I could afford,” she said, with a sudden burst of energy. “Why, Sonny Boy’s old high school classmates, family, friends and army buddies came to pay their last respects.” Tootsie stopped talking for a half a second and her eyes shifted downward. “My life has changed so much since he’s been gone,” she continued, a little more somber. “But Brenda—that poor child acted like she was going to die herself the day she saw the undertaker bury Sonny Boy! I tried to take Sonny Boy’s place for Brenda but there was nothing I could do. I finally faced reality: even though I had Brenda, I was by myself, just like I’d been before I met Sonny Boy.…”

“I was wondering whether Lew Hunter or Abe have been to see you,” Mama asked.

Tootsie nodded. “They came this morning with some men to look around in Brenda’s bedroom.”

“Did they find anything?”

“No,” Tootsie said. “There was nothing there.”

“May I take a look in that room?” Mama asked.

“Sure,” Tootsie agreed. “Like I told Abe, there’s nothing in there, nothing to be found.”

“Will you show me the way?”

Tootsie put the photograph back on the table,
then led us down a long hall. At the end was a door that led into a small but tastefully decorated bedroom. Mama and I stepped inside. Tootsie stayed in the doorway.

From where I stood, I could see a bed, a dressing table with two pieces of jewelry on it, a chair, a wicker basket full of books, and photographs of Tootsie and a man I assumed was Sonny Boy.

Mama walked inside and opened the closet door. Stacked shoe boxes, an overnight bag in a corner, pocketbooks on racks, sweaters, dresses and blouses were all in place. Mama closed the door. “This is the neatest teenager’s room I’ve ever seen,” she said.

“I cleaned the room,” Tootsie admitted. “I put everything in place just the way Brenda would have put them.”

For a minute Mama’s eyes shifted toward the bed or dressing table, I couldn’t quite tell which. Then she smiled, nodded, and stepped back into the hall. I followed.

It was almost ten-thirty when we pulled off Tootsie’s street. “Where to now?” I asked Mama.

“Styles Beauty Salon,” she answered promptly. “I’ve made arrangements to speak to Lurena Powell.”

“Lurena Powell is Stella Hope’s mother?”

Mama nodded.

“Will you be talking to her about Brenda’s accusation against her husband, Victor?”

“Yes,” Mama told me. “Why?”

“I’m not a part of the Department of Social Services,”
I told her. “I really don’t think it’s legal that I be present when you talk to her.”

Mama frowned thoughtfully. “Can you stay while I talk to her if I get her permission for you to be there?”

“If she doesn’t mind, I guess it’ll be all right. Still, you’ll need to ask her permission before you start talking about anything that’s DSS-related.”

“If Lurena doesn’t want to discuss Stella and Victor in front of you, you’ll have to sit in the car.”

“I understand,” I said.

The salon was empty except for one woman whose hair was done up in an elaborate French roll. “Candi, you’re on time,” Lurena Powell said.

“You made it clear that you wanted me in and out of here before your eleven-thirty client arrived,” Mama reminded her. “Lurena, before we start talking
I
need to make it clear that I’m here on agency business. My daughter Simone doesn’t work for DSS. If you prefer we
not
talk with her here, she can go sit in the car until we’re finished.”

“I guess it’s all right that she stays and listens. The news is already all over town. I’ve gotten two calls from clients who want to know whether or not I’m going to throw Victor out now that he’s raped Stella. It’s crazy, especially since there ain’t no truth to any of what’s being said.” She glanced toward me, then back at Mama. “Both of you, come on in the back, have a cup of coffee.”

Mama and I followed her to a small card table and three chairs placed against an empty wall. “This is my so-called office,” Lurena said, a bit of arrogance in her voice. She poured three cups of coffee from a pot heated on a hot plate.

When she finished, Lurena lowered herself onto the chair. “I don’t know how much you know about Brenda Long,” she began, “but she was a very confused girl. She had this arrogant, judgmental air about her. But Brenda wasn’t always the difficult person she ended up being. Up until about a year ago, she was bright and cheerful. I felt kind of close to her because she looked so much like her father. Did anybody tell you that me and Sonny Boy finished school together?”

“No,” Mama answered.

Lurena blushed. “For a while, me and Sonny Boy liked each other. I thought we would really get close, but somebody else came into his life. He forgot about me, left town to join the army. I met Victor through Sonny Boy. Well, not exactly, but in a way. You see, Victor and Sonny Boy were army buddies. Victor had come to town a few times before Sonny Boy died, but when he attended Sonny Boy’s funeral we started talking to each other.”

“You said that it was about a year ago you noticed a change in Brenda?” Mama asked, bringing Lurena’s thoughts back to what she was really interested in knowing.

Lurena took a deep, weary breath. “Candi, believe
me, one year ago I would have never suspected that Brenda would go to Hattie Russell with this story about Victor and Stella.”

Mama’s brow knitted. “You don’t believe your daughter was molested?”

“Victor didn’t bother my Stella. My daughter is a typical teenager who wants her way all the time. But she’s not a liar. And she swears to me on a stack of Bibles that Victor
never
touched her that way!”

“What did Stella tell you?”

“Let me tell you how this whole thing began. On Monday I gave Stella one hundred dollars to buy clothes for her class trip. She came home with two pairs of jeans and wanted me to ask Victor for more money. I told her I’d given her all the money I was going to. She’d been complaining, trying to be hard to live with, until it all came to a head on Wednesday morning. Stella started fussing because she couldn’t find the shoes that matched her outfit. Then there wasn’t anything in the house to eat. Next, her room was too small. At first Victor didn’t say anything to her but finally, as if he couldn’t stand hearing her fuss anymore, he told Stella to cut the crap and get ready for school. Stella called Victor a name. He slapped her. She left to go to school, screaming that he’d be sorry he ever put his hands on her. When Stella got to school she told Brenda about it. That evening Stella came straight to my shop from school. She pulled me back here and she told me what she’d told Brenda, that she’d thought about it and was sorry. She told me
she’d later told Brenda that she had lied but by that time Brenda had already called Hattie and an investigation was planned. When Victor got home from work and I told him, he went nuts. He stood over me when I called Hattie Russell and begged her not to go through with an investigation.”

“I’ll need to talk to Stella,” Mama told her. “If she corroborates your story, I don’t see why the whole thing can’t be dropped.”

“Lord bless you, Candi,” she said gratefully. “It’ll be good to tell Victor when he gets in from work that there won’t be any investigation. Victor’s a big-city man, he hates it that people know so much about each other’s lives the way they do in Otis.”

W
e arrived home just in time to meet my father, who was bolting out the front door. “Gertrude called me at work,” he said. “Agatha had a heart attack. I’m heading for the hospital.”

Fifteen minutes later when we walked into the hospital, we met Gertrude. My cousin works at the hospital as a nurse’s aide, a job that she loves because she’s one of the first people to know who gets admitted at the hospital. One thing Gertrude is proud of, and she doesn’t fail to let you know, is that she believes that the Lord gave her the job as a ministry to let people know when one of their loved ones has been hospitalized.

“How is Agatha?” Mama panted.

“The doctor is still with her,” Gertrude told us solemnly. “I’ve talked to the attending nurse. The
heart attack was light, they think she’s going to be okay.”

“When did it happen?”

“I’m not sure,” Gertrude told us. “Ray Raisin was driving by and saw her dog standing over a body in the little garden on the side of her house. When he investigated, he found her.”

I couldn’t help but think that if Agatha had a choice of who’d found her lying out in her garden, it wouldn’t have been the handsome Ray Raisin.

Mama grimaced. “You know, the nearest house to Agatha is three miles away and I’m not sure Agatha needs to be that far away from a neighbor.” Agatha had never married. She lived in the house where she’d taken care of her father, Uncle Chester, until he died a year ago. “There’s nobody out there to keep an eye on her.”

“I’ve tried to get her to move in with me, but she won’t have it. As a matter of fact, every time I’d mention it, she had a fit.”

Mama thought for a moment. “She’ll have to come with us for a while, don’t you agree, James?”

My father nodded.

“Agatha is a wonderful person. She’s taken care of more than one of the old folks that hang out at the center,” Gertrude remarked.

“She needs somebody to take care of her now,” Mama continued, “and I’ll be the one to do it.”

Gertrude shrugged, then turned and walked back down the hall toward the emergency room. When she
returned, there was a more relaxed look on her face. “They’re going to put Agatha in room twelve. We can wait there for the nurse to bring her.”

Fifteen minutes later, Agatha was wheeled in and transferred to the bed. She lay with her eyes closed.

“We’ve given her a mild sedative,” said the doctor who entered the room shortly after she was wheeled in. “She was shaken but she doesn’t seem to have suffered any serious harm. I do want to monitor her for the night, however. If all goes well, she should be able to go home tomorrow morning.”

Mama leaned over the bed. “Agatha, everything is going to be okay.”

Agatha stirred. “Candi?”

Mama took Agatha’s hand. “You’re going to be all right. And when it’s time to leave the hospital, we’ve decided to take you home with us,” she told her cousin.

Agatha’s dark eyes filled. “No!” she moaned.

“Yes,” Mama insisted. “I know you like your independence but until you regain your strength, it’s better that you stay with us.”

“My dog—”

“Don’t worry, we’ll bring Sunshine home too,” Mama assured her.

I’d forgotten about Agatha’s dog. It was her constant companion. Even after Uncle Chester’s death, there was something special between Agatha and her dog. Now I shook my head and wondered how my father was going to give attention to both his dog, Midnight, and the
very
pampered Sunshine.

The nurse came back into the room. “She’ll be asleep in a few minutes,” she told us.

Our cousin tried to smile, but the dazed look in Agatha’s eyes told me that she wasn’t thinking of what happened as anything humorous. “The last few hours seem like a dream,” she told us, as she dozed off.

It was eight o’clock when we’d finished supper. I’d put the last plate in the dishwasher. My father, who had picked up Sunshine, worked with both dogs in the backyard. “They need to get to know each other,” he told us. “It’ll take some time, but it’ll be fine.”

After checking with the hospital to see that it was okay, Mama and I headed to the hospital to take Agatha something to eat, since most people rightfully complain about hospital food. We were not surprised to find that Agatha had visitors. Annie Mae Gregory, Sarah Jenkins, and Carrie Smalls had already gotten the news of her attack and were settled in for a long visit.

Agatha lay in her bed, her eyes closed while the women talked among themselves. From the moment I walked in, I could tell by her twitching eyelids that Agatha wasn’t asleep.

But when she heard Mama’s voice, Agatha’s eyes popped open like a cork on a Champagne bottle. Her message was clear. She wanted Annie Mae, Sarah, and Carrie out of her room!

Mama handed me the plate that we had prepared for Agatha. “Ladies,” she said motioning to her three confidantes, “would you come out in the corridor for a few minutes? There is some important business I need to ask you about.”

The women were excited and it showed. They moved quicker than I thought possible. As a matter of fact, it was as if the call to board the train to heaven had been heralded. Agatha smiled, then reached for the food that Mama had prepared.