The Missing Chapter

“My cousin — Aunt Louise’s girl. She’s younger’n me, by what, seven, almost eight years. And a heck of a lot better looking, I’ll tell you.” She smiled again, this time sheepishly.

“There’s nothing wrong with the way you look,” I said to her. “Does Clarice live with her mother?”

“No.” She studied her boots again, wiggling them. “She did up till she got married, and then again after her divorce! But she doesn’t now.”

In case you’re wondering, it had occurred to me by this point that her cryptic answers might be Belinda’s way of having sport at a city slicker’s expense, but I quickly dismissed the thought. Neither humor nor guile appeared to be in this country girl’s repertoire. “Where does Clarice live?” I asked.

“Don’t know for sure, but we all think New York.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s where Charles was,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“I see. How long has she been gone?”

“Well... over a year now, I guess it is. Didn’t surprise me one bit when she left. Both Aunt Louise and Mama acted shocked, but I really don’t think they were. They knew Clarice had to do something.”

“Why did she have to do something?” I asked, advancing the conversation only as fast as Belinda’s measured responses dictated.

She made that clicking noise again. “Quite a few unmarried girls and women around Mercer go and get themselves pregnant, but hardly any do it by their first cousin. Clarice didn’t want to stay around town and have everybody watch her get bigger, especially because people would figure out who the father was. Besides, she wanted to marry Charles, real bad.”

“How did he feel about her?”

She kept looking straight ahead at the highway. “Far as I could tell, Charles didn’t give two hoots about her. She was the one who pushed it; she was after him almost from the minute he came back to town to look after my Aunt Marian — that was his Mama.”

“You said Clarice was married before.”

“Yeah, she was, all right,” Belinda sneered. “For less than two years, to Wendell Avery. Thank the Lord they had no kids. He was a bum before they got married, he was a bum when they was married, and he’s a bum now. Drove a truck, whenever he was sober, that is. Lives in Evansville, last I heard. He left town right after they split up, which is pushing three years ago now. Far as I know, he hasn’t been back to Mercer, good riddance.”

Things were looking up. She was getting more talkative. We might not be here all night. “So when Charles stayed here caring for his mother, he and Clarice saw a lot of each other?” I asked.

Belinda made an unpleasant sound that came out as a cross between a chuckle and a cough. “Uh-huh. Like I said, she started chasin’ him the minute he got to town. Said she wanted to help look after her aunt, but before he came, she hadn’t been out to see Aunt Marian more’n maybe three or four times, if that. My mama and me, we were there almost every day, and so was Aunt Louise.”

“Did Clarice have a job?”

“Same as me, she clerked in the mini mart that’s part of the big gas station out at the Six Corners just south of town — you went right past it on your way to our place. We each worked four days a week, on different shifts from each other. Clarice always acted like she was too good for that kind of stuff, though. Wanted to be an artist. She was forever painting pictures at home, of flowers and trees and even their barn and cows, if you can believe it. Can’t tell you whether the stuff was any good or not.”

“How did you find out she was pregnant?”

“Aunt Louise told Mama. She told Mama that Clarice wanted to marry Charles and go back to New York with him. Thing is, he never asked her, though.”

I nodded. “How long after his mother died did Charles stay in Mercer?”

“Oh, maybe two weeks, maybe three. We all helped him clear out the house, and then he put it on the market. His Mama had sold the land around it to another farmer a few years back. It took at least six months before the house sold, and at that, Charles didn’t get nowhere near his asking price. Nobody does around here these days, especially the farms.” She fell silent, maybe pondering the price of local real estate, and I had just about decided we would never get to the point when she spoke again. “Anyway, when he left town, Clarice was really low. She was maybe two months along, so she didn’t show yet. And then one day, it was probably about three weeks after he went back to New York, she packed a few suitcases and was gone — just like that,”

Belinda clapped once for emphasis, but her facial expression stayed eerily unchanged.

“And you’ve never heard from her?”