The Steep and Thorny Way(38)

“Where else can you search?” asked Mama in an octave almost as high as the sheriff’s. “For God’s sake, it’s been over twelve hours now.”

A floorboard creaked beneath my right shoe, and the sound reverberated through the house like a peal of thunder. The living room fell silent.

“Hanalee?” asked Mama. “Is that you?”

I wedged my teeth into my bottom lip, sidled around the corner, and came face-to-face with an unsettling tableau: Mama, Uncle Clyde, Reverend and Mrs. Adder, and Sheriff Rink, all gawking at me from our living room furniture. Cups and saucers teetered on their laps, and the smell of coffee filled the air. Everyone blinked and trembled as though their bodies buzzed with caffeine.

“Hanalee!” Mama sprang out of her chair and lunged toward me, her face a red tempest, her hair a tornado of golden tangles. Before I could even think to back away, she grabbed me by my shoulders and shook me with a violence I’d never before experienced from her. My neck popped and cracked, and the room went blurry.

“How could you do that to me?” she cried. “What were you thinking? Where did you go?”

“Let me go.”

“Where were you?”

“How could you do that to your mother?” said Uncle Clyde, suddenly next to my mother, his spectacles jumping about before my jostled eyes. “You made her sick with worry.”

“Stop shaking me and I’ll tell you!”

Mama loosened her grip, but she refused to take her hands off me.

Beyond her, Reverend and Mrs. Adder, their faces pinched and worried, set their cups aside and stood up from our sofa. Mrs. Adder’s graying brown curls quivered around her ears, and Reverend Adder—a man taller and much older than his son, with white windswept clouds for hair—wrapped an arm around his wife.

I lifted my face and stood as high as my neck would stretch. “Joe and I were plotting to elope to Washington,” I said. “That’s why I’ve been acting so peculiarly lately. That’s why I ran off.”

No one responded at first. They just stared at me with their eyebrows puckered and their lips parted, as if I’d just uttered, I’ve decided to become a Martian.

Sheriff Rinky-Dink’s mouth stretched into a grin that turned his cheeks into round dumplings. “Are you sure you’re talking about Joe Adder?”

“Yes.” I straightened my posture even farther. “We fell in love and planned to find a place to marry us. But . . . this morning . . . I s-s-started feeling guilty. I decided to return to Mama. And to apologize for my behavior.”

The gaping and blinking continued.

“But”—Mama whipped her face toward my stepfather—“last night, you swore to me, Clyde. You said Joe doesn’t like . . . that he wouldn’t want . . . that he’s a . . .”

“You and Joe . . .” Uncle Clyde placed his hands on his hips. “Y-y-you both fell in love with each other? Mutually?”

“Maybe he’s changed.” The reverend stepped forward with clasped hands. “Maybe all that time contemplating his sins in prison has put him on the path to righteousness.”

“You sure they didn’t operate on him in there?” asked the sheriff with a little less squeak, a little more growl. “Did they . . . subdue him already?”

I winced and hunched my shoulders at such questions.

“‘Subdue him?’” asked Mama, her voice rising to the sheriff’s pitch again. “Dear Lord, is that something that’s done?” Her eyes met mine, and I swore I caught a flash of understanding. Of sympathy.

The telephone rang, and we all collectively jumped.

“Maybe that’s Joe,” said Mrs. Adder, her eyes wide.

My mother arched her eyebrows at me, as if I would know the answer, and I shook my head.

“Excuse me while I answer it.” Mama strode out of the room, her thick heels echoing across the walls and the ceiling. Around the corner, in the main hall, she picked up the receiver and offered a curt “Hello.”

I smoothed down the right side of my skirt, which now felt flat and limp after I’d tucked the holster back inside the oilcloth in the log before my reluctant return to the house. Everyone else stood about and picked at their buttons and their hair and the wrinkles in their clothes, while loitering in front of Daddy’s fine line drawings mounted on the ivory and yellow wallpaper. We all eavesdropped on my mother’s telephone conversation, which primarily consisted of phrases such as “I see” and “Thank you. Thank you for telling me.”

She clicked the receiver back onto the telephone’s candlestick base and returned to the rest of us. “That was Mr. Witten.”

I stiffened.

She wrung her hands together and refused to look at me. “The twins saw Hanalee and Joe on their property this morning and were told the same story about the elopement. He said the boys came upon them . . .” She closed her eyes and swallowed with a pained expression that made me feel bad, as though I were the thing scraping away at the inside of her throat. “They found them wrapped in a blanket together, sleeping on the forest floor near the Wittens’ section of Engle Creek.”

“So, he has changed,” murmured the reverend under his breath. “Merciful God, thank you. Thank you for guiding him to the path of male and female unions.”