The Missing Chapter

Her colorless face was essentially the same as it had been when I saw it through the screen door in the afternoon — wide-eyed and almost totally without expression. However, I detected something that I hadn’t seen or hadn’t noticed before — fear.

“Mr. Goodwin?” she said in the same whisper I had heard a few hours earlier.

“Hello again. You have the advantage of me,” I responded, grinning and drawing the door back a few inches. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours, except that you are a Meeker, correct?”

She nodded, swallowing and making a pathetic attempt at smiling. “Yes — I’m Belinda, Belinda Meeker. Can I come in?” Her voice had a faint, almost undetectable stammer.

Standing in the shadowy glow of the overhead light outside my door and wearing a brown zippered jacket and corduroy slacks, Belinda Meeker appeared as guileless as the Holstein calf I had seen following its mother in a field along the road that afternoon. But I have a policy against letting calves or any other beings into the room where I happen to be residing at the moment unless I know them well — real well. “I’ll come outside,” I countered, closing the door behind me. “What brings you here, Belinda?”

She took a deep, shuddery breath. “Ma doesn’t know I came; I told her I had to get some stuff at the drugstore, which is mainly true, see?” She held up a bag from Mason’s All-Purpose Pharmacy. “There’s only the two motels in Mercer, and I figured you’d be staying here. It’s the best one by a long shot. Tall Tom — he’s the one who works in the office, we went to high school together — told me which room you was in. Are you angry?”

“Depends,” I told her, eyeing a redwood bench along the wall a few doors to my right. “Let’s sit over there.”

The evening was mild, with a clear sky and a breeze that smelled of blossoms I couldn’t name. It was more like late May than April, at least by New York standards. But then, this was farther south, not many miles from the Ohio River. Belinda and I sat side by side a foot apart on the bench watching cars and an occasional truck whirr by on the old highway. I knew she was having trouble getting words out, so I waited. After five silent minutes, however, I revised my tactics. “Is there anything you want to tell me?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” she answered softly. She didn’t take her eyes off the road. “Uh-huh, there is. You won’t say anything to Ma about my coming to see you, will you? I already made Tall Tom promise not to say anything, and he won’t, I know that for sure. He’s okay.” The stammer got a little worse when she became anxious.

“No, I won’t utter a word to her.”

Belinda slouched down on the bench, jammed her hands into the pockets of the brown jacket, and made a sucking noise with her lips. Then she was mute again for another two or three minutes. It was all I could do to keep from shaking her by the shoulders until her teeth rattled.

A loud sigh told me the silence was about to end. “I heard what you told Ma this afternoon, so I know why you’ve come.” Her whisper had me straining to hear her. “I think I probably know who it was.”

“Who what was?”

“The one who killed Charles.”

Twelve

It hadn’t taken me more than an instant to figure out that Belinda Meeker’s visit to my motel was hardly a casual social call, but even so, I was not prepared for her pronouncement. When it came, I kept my gaze straight ahead and nodded, as if her words were precisely what I had expected to hear.

“I see,” I responded in a voice that I hoped was unemotional. The last thing I wanted to do was scare her off, and she looked like the type that scared easily. I was mentally composing my next sentence when she saved me the effort.

“I prayed before coming to see you,” she intoned, looking at the scuffed toes of her beige cowboy boots. “I prayed for a long time — a real long time.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” I told her, still treading on verbal eggs and trying to avoid making an omelet. “The weather’s nice tonight, warmer than New York.”

“After you left our place, did you go over to see my Aunt Louise?” Belinda asked.

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Mama said you would, if you hadn’t already stopped there before you came to our place. The second you drove off, she was on the phone to Aunt Louise, telling her you was probably headed out there.”

“Your Aunt Louise was expecting me, all right,” I said with a smile.

She actually reacted with a tiny grin of her own, if only for an instant. “Yeah, I just bet she was. She’s a pistol, that one is.”

“Based on what little I saw of her, I’d have to agree.”

Belinda made a clicking sound with her tongue. “She say anything to you about Clarice?”

“No. Should she have?”

“I’da been surprised if she did, to tell the truth.” She fell silent.

Clearly, this was going to take a while. But then, time was something I had lots of. “Who’s Clarice?” I persisted.