Mother May I(75)

The cocoa was creamy and rich, foamy from all the whisking. The real thing. “No indication where she meant to go? No thoughts about where Lexie could be now?”

“No. I’m sorry. When Lexie went into treatment, Coral Lee stayed with me for a few days, until it looked like Lexie would stick it out. Then she said she wanted to rent herself a place closer to the facility and visit every day. I told her she was welcome back anytime, and Lexie, too,” she said. “We’d taken them in before, you may know.”

“You mean the job at Funtime?” he asked.

“You have done your research! Yes. Lexie was such a cute little thing back then. I was taken with her. Hair like a buttercup, smile like sunshine. Larry and I never did have our own kids. It wasn’t in the cards for us. So I spent time with Lexie. She was sweet and quiet and neat as a pin. Loved books. I connected with her on that, but I felt bad she was so anxious about her grades. I think because her mother never was satisfied. If Lexie got an A, Coral Lee wondered why it wasn’t an A-plus. Lexie liked things peaceful, and I’m the same. As a littl’un, she would wring her hands and cry when Coral Lee got mad.”

Marshall nodded. This Lexie tracked with the girl Trey had described, confirming a corner of Trey’s story. A small corner. “Did she have any other friends at the church?”

“Not really. She’d go to Sunday school and sit quiet, listen to the lesson, make her craft. She didn’t wiggle around or whisper. A dog-mill puppy, like I said. It was why I started inviting her family up for Sunday lunch. To give Lexie a little fun. How she loved that carousel! Coral Lee can be . . . a challenge, and Lexie’s daddy was a stern man, too. But Preston was in construction, just like Larry, and they had similar politics and church thoughts, so the boys had things to talk about. After a couple years, a foreman job came up with Larry’s outfit, and Larry helped Preston get it. Two months later he was dead. Freak accident. He fell at a job site and cracked his skull open. Before Larry got him hired on, he’d been working demo for years, which is so much more dangerous! Larry felt responsible, I think.”

“So he offered her a job.” Not a question, just keeping her on track.

“Not just the job. A place to live, so she could rent her house out for some income and keep homeschooling.” She finally took a sip of her drink. He’d already finished his. “Her husband had insurance, thank God. Enough to pay off the mortgage, but she didn’t want to stay there. Hard, you know, looking every day at all those places where she’d see the shape of her husband and him not there. I understood it after Larry died. I moved right in here. Then, a couple years later, I regretted it so. All I wanted was to see his places and shapes. She must have been the same, because after a year and change she did get a full-time job and move home. Lexie was eleven or maybe twelve when she finally went to school.”

He had a sense of something she wasn’t saying or that he hadn’t understood. Something important. He leaned in. “They were living with you?”

She laughed. “No, no. A single woman? Larry said we’d look like Mormons! We let her live on the property, at Funtime. In Larry’s hidey-hole.”

He felt himself get very still. “Hidey-hole. You mean, like a bomb shelter?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. More like a cabin, but built back into the hill. It was for Armageddon.”

She was so matter-of-fact, blinking at him with those dark-bright eyes. He leached all judgment from his voice, made his tone mild and interested. “So Larry was a survivalist.”

She made a pish noise. “Not really. Just our church preached a pretty immediate Gospel. Now, mind, I wasn’t fussed myself too much about Armageddon. Jesus himself said, ‘But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.’ So why do all that math? But the folks at Christ Redeemer thought it was soon. They were bracing for a world war, and famine, and disease, and Satan ruling for a thousand years of torment. They had a whole chart with Revelation matching up to politics and world events and whatnot. That’s why we bought the property with the Funtime Gold Mine on it. Larry liked how it was up on a hill, out of all the main ways, with well water instead of being on a city system. Larry added the carousel, and he also built his hidey-hole behind it. Kept it stocked with these awful freeze-dried dinners-in-a-bag he got at Army Surplus, and he put in a gas genny and a compost toilet. He figured if things got bad, we could wait for the Rapture there, snug as bugs. But of course the Rapture didn’t happen. That was what split the church, having the day come and go.” She shrugged. “Revelation is a tricky book.”

Marshall’s heart was pounding. He could feel it in his fingers, his ears. This got him no closer to Lexie. But it might not matter. Not if he was right. “How far behind Funtime?” His voice had a creak in it. Misdirection, he was thinking. That was what Coral Lee Pine did best. Every cop hair on his body was standing straight up.

“A half a mile, if that, back through the woods, up a little trail that I bet by now is grown over. They built a new highway so no one had to pass the road to Funtime to get up to Highlands anymore. The power and such was costing more than we made. We had to close it down. We put it up for sale, too, but no one ever bought it, so there it sits. I’m going to leave it to my sister’s middle girl. She might could do something with it.”

She was off again then on another tangent, but Marshall let her go down it. His blood was singing in his veins, as if it had been heated. Nothing she’d said would get him to Lexie. It didn’t matter. They didn’t need her. He thought. He was sure. He was almost sure.