Easy as One Two Three (A Flap Tucker Mystery) Read online

  “Like, last summer. Been almost a year.”

  I’d gone with her to that reunion. If you play your cards right, and train properly beforehand, you can eat enough food at a family reunion to actually choke a horse. I could go on all day about the corn bread alone. I hadn’t seen Dally’s relatives in a while myself, and it was kind of like seeing my own kith and kin: a lot of asking me did I have a real job yet, was I ever planning to get married, had I gotten enough to eat — stuff like that.

  Dally was close with her cousins on account of her being an only child. And Sissy was like her sister anyway. They looked a little alike, both with the curly auburn hair, the green eyes, and the vaguely patrician demeanor, which is a direct result, they will be happy to tell all and sundry, of being descended from the Oglethorpe who founded Georgia.

  James Oglethorpe was a British general and something of a philanthropist. He invented Georgia in 1733 as a refuge for debtors and persecuted Protestants under a special “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” charter. We were a proud colony of wretched refuse from the Mother Country’s teeming shore. Today the state’s full up with Yankee business types who, most of them, feel they’re doing you a favor by wrecking everything about the old south in the name of the aforementioned progress of business. Pretty soon there’d be no more South left, just Anyplace USA, only warmer.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  I realized we were halfway back to my apartment and I’d been absorbed in my lofty mental excursions. “Colonization.”

  She pointed. “Uh-huh. Look.”

  It was a pink dogwood just blooming. But the word pink doesn’t do the color justice. There ought to be a special name just for that color that says a volume and a half about Eastertime and rebirth, warmth and new light.

  See, this was one of Dally’s many gifts, the ability to bonk me out of a conundrum with a fairly simple wave of the hand. Or, in this case, point of the hand, I guess. If you ever need any soothing of a fevered brain, she’s the one to see.

  I appreciated the tree, then turned the same appreciative eye her way. “Thanks.”

  She nodded. She knew. “Also, bud, you get to see Mustard again — on our little sojourn.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. That’ll be swell.”

  Mustard Abernathy, big as a house, tough as a mile of new highway, was by far the nicest guy in Dally’s extended family. He worked his farm, coached the high school football team, and insisted that all his players take ballet lessons.

  That’s right. Mustard and Sissy came into Atlanta every Christmas to see the Atlanta Ballet do the Nutcracker, largely because Mustard was fascinated with the dancers’ physical abilities. “How’d they stay up in the air that long? Look at that guy lift! Like it’s nothin’. How do they get those leg muscles?” That sort of thing.

  So he made all his guys take ballet lessons, which at first embarrassed them to no end. But when they found out that there were plenty of girls in tights at the dance classes, things eased up a tad. And when they discovered that these same girls could kick the living stuffing out of any guy in leg strength, endurance, and general toughness, you couldn’t keep the football team away even with an electric fence and mad dogs. To make a long story short, as a result of this somewhat unorthodox practice, Mustard’s team won state every year. It was a source of tremendous pride for boys who had no money, hard lives, slack futures, and no way out.

  So Mustard was aces with me. Mostly what he wanted to do in life was help other people. He said it was on account of his being a Christian, but I’ve met so many of them where that’s not exactly the case that I had to believe something else was at work. Whatever. He was just fine by me.

  I looked back at the dogwood tree. “Yeah, that’ll be great, seein’ Mustard.” Then I pointed. “Look, you got a tree as pretty as this thing, don’t you think you could’ve come up with a better name than dogwood?”

  She smiled. “Well, what’s in a name?”

  “In this particular one?” I looked back at her. “There’s a dog in it.”

  4. Vistas

  Okay, the drive up into the mountains was kind of pretty after all. It was early afternoon and the middle of the week, so there was hardly any traffic. Plus, once you get into the actual mountains, it’s some mighty lot of nature going on all over the place. Everywhere there was that new green, the first green. It’s like the whole world thought it had just invented the color: “Hey, look at this. We never had this shade before — not exactly this.”

  The air got cleaner, too, and clearer. You could see all the way to Scotland or Ireland if you looked hard enough. That’s because most of the people who lived in the Georgia mountains were descended from the Scots and the Irish, who’d settled there to get away from the English in the lowlands. Never been to Scotland, but I’m told the Appalachian hills in Georgia are not unlike the ones they’ve got over there. I’d like to check it out myself one time — strictly as a matter of research.

  Dally was reading the map like it was a good book. “We could take the 575 and go up gradual like, using up a ton of gas, or get on the direct route through the mountain passes and wreck your transmission. Your choice.”

  “Which takes longer?”

  “Oh, now you want to take longer?”

  “Jeez, Dally, take a gander at this view.”

  She looked up for a second. “’Spretty.” Right back to the map. “Could go through Clarksville.”

  “What’s in Clarksville?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So …”

  She folded the map, nodded her head in the direction of the hood ornament. “Thataway.”

  Being as it was the only road around, ergo the only way to go, “thataway” was exactly the direction I took.

  The mountains got steeper and the air got cooler. There were valley passes like something out of a fantasy movie: “This is the way the world would have been if there had never been men and machines — this is the peace in the valley.” There was even snow on the tops of some of the taller peaks. I know lots of people don’t think of Georgia as having mountains, and folks from Montana and the like turn their noses up at what they call the Appalachian foothills. But what I was looking at was, as they used to say around the filling station, “a picture no artist could paint.” And buddy, they were right.

  Now, you come into the bustling community of Lost Pines before you actually realize there’s anything there. You’ve got to get up on the actual mountain if you really want to see where they all live. Down on the main road there’s just a couple of stores: Miss Nina’s, aptly named FOOD; and a very retro-looking gas station that was closed. If you keep going on past everything toward the big highway past the Wal-Mart, you get to County General Medical Center, by far the newest-looking bunch of buildings anywhere about.

  I’m convinced my car made a noise, just as it turned off, that went something like “Thank God.” Dally didn’t hear it, but she was more interested in getting inside and seeing her new little niece.

  The hospital was nice, new, bright — it was a hospital. I don’t know what I had expected, maybe something more town-doctor-living-room-y’all-come. Anyway I had the same feeling I always had in any hospital anywhere: the how-soon-can-I-leave feeling.

  We sauntered by the picture window where you can look in at the newborn tykes. They all looked exactly the same and they all looked very unhappy. I fancied they had the same hospital feeling I had, and was taken by a sudden impulse to liberate them all, take them back down the road to Miss Nina’s for some swell eats. Although I am told a newborn is nothing but a piker in the food department, and will only drink milk. Still, I was certain they would have appreciated the gesture.

  Dally spent a lot of time pointing and telling me how much Baby Girl Abernathy looked like this or that relative, and I spent a lot of time agreeing. I’ve found it’s often easier just to agree.

  When all was said and done, we had decided the nipper looked most like Dalliance Oglethorpe
, and trundled off to Sissy’s room to tell her so.

  The room was a little dark, the curtains being drawn, but Sissy was awake, and nearly blasted out of her blanket when she saw Dally in the doorway. Honest to God, Mustard had to restrain her from getting out of bed.

  Dally zoomed into the room and popped a big smack right on Sissy’s kisser. It was very heartwarming and what have you, but Mustard and I confined our own selves to a handshake.

  “Flap.”

  “Mustard. You got yourselves a cute little wiggler in there.”

  He grinned. “I reckon we’ll keep ’er.”

  Dally sat on the bed. “Got a name yet?”

  Sissy was holding Dally’s hand. They really did look like sisters. “Thinkin’ about Rose.”

  Dally approved. “Rose is nice.”

  I added my two cents. “Long as you don’t name it after her daddy, it’s all fine by me.”

  Mustard had to agree. “Girl ought not to be named after a condiment.”

  But Mustard was joshing, as he was wont to do. In point of fact he had been named after the vegetable mustard greens. When I asked him about it once, he told me that his own mother had given him such a name on account of mustard greens being so easy to plant and to grow — which Mustard had always interpreted as meaning he had been an unplanned bundle of joy.

  Dally tried out the new name. “Rose Abernathy. Sounds important.”

  Mustard nodded. “That’s the only thing I don’t like about it. Already sounds grown up. She won’t have no childish ways about her, name such as that.”

  Sissy smiled over at the big guy. “You got enough childish ways for the whole entire family unit, mister.”

  He grinned even bigger. “I believe I do at that.” And proud of it.

  Then, unexpectedly, Sissy got serious. “Okay, now Dally and Flap’s here, you’d best be gettin’ on over.”

  He sighed heavy.

  I looked at Dally.

  She patted Sissy. “Go where, sugar? Something the matter?”

  She cast a glance at her husband, who was concentrating his attentions on the very clean hospital floor. It was a silence big enough to park a car in.

  Finally he talked sideways at me. “After everything was okay with Sissy an’ the baby? I called up over at the McDonner place, tell ’em how it was me that done messed up their side corn land. …” but he didn’t know how to finish.

  She went on for him. “They didn’t think nothin’ about it, on account of they were out all night looking for their own little girl, Ginny.”

  Mustard found his voice. “They think she must have got up out of bed an’ just wandered off some kind of way.”

  Sissy helped some more. “Mustard’s goin’ over to help ’em look.”

  He looked at me. “You want to go too, bud? They could use a man that’s got your peculiar ways about findin’ a person.”

  Sissy got real quiet then. “He needs some company, Flap. We got all kind of questions about this thing.” Barely audible. “She was out playin’ in her little red jumpsuit at midnight. They say we might be the last ones that seen her.”

  Mustard nodded at Dally. “I reckon we didn’t see no Lost Pines ghost on that highway like I tol’ you after all.” He looked toward the window, where the light of day was obscured by the dark curtain. “I believe we might have seen the last of Ginny McDonner.”

  5. Mr. Snow

  It was chilly in the woods around sunset, the kind of chill that made you figure winter wasn’t quite done yet. Could come up an insult to the entire concept of horticulture: Mr. Snow, the big boss man when the sun’s going down. He freezes all the Yankees because he knows they’ve done wrong. When he comes down south, it’s strictly as a visitor. He doesn’t move in. Wouldn’t do him any good. One mint julep and a smell of magnolia and his whole raison d’etre’d get all kerflooey. Still, there was snow in the air.

  Mustard and I had been tromping through the woods for about an hour like we knew what we were doing. The leaves were just barely beginning to pop out on the trees, so you could see all through the trees and whatnot. There wasn’t a sign of the little kid, not a hint, not a whisper. We hadn’t even seen the other searchers since we’d gone down into a small hollow.

  Mustard stopped to catch his breath. The big guy’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours, and it was beginning to show.

  “Flap, I got to take a breather, son.”

  I made with the big halt myself. “I’m entirely hip.”

  We made quite the pair, I’m guessing. I looked like a fugitive from a Salvation Army thrift store — in my estimation, purveyors of classic haberdashery — and he was strictly pumpkin vine: coveralls, baseball cap, work boots made out of mud.

  He was pretty grim for an optimist. “She’s a goner, Flap. We don’ find ’er tonight, she ain’t going to make it. I b’lieve it’s going to snow.”

  I tried not looking at him. I thought it would take some of the fatalism out of the idea. Didn’t work.

  I checked the watch. “Almost six. What time’s the sun go down around here?”

  “This time of year? ’Round six or so, I reckon.”

  I looked out at the woods, the long shadows. “Did you know this kid?”

  He shook his head. “Naw. I mean, I seen ’er. Cute. They said she was real smart, too.”

  “How old?”

  Shrug. “Ten?”

  “And you don’t think she’ll make it one night out in the woods?”

  “Two nights, Flap. This’ll be her second one. And if it snows and she don’t get in? That little red jumpsuit ain’t no kind of help from that kind of cold.” He shoved himself forward and started walking again. “Doncha find it kind of amazing that just when it looks like spring, it can be winter again?”

  I followed after. “I was just thinking the same kind of thing earlier today.”

  “And ain’t it somethin’ how the human body don’t tolerate?”

  “You lost me.”

  He stepped over a big fallen pine. “Like, if your body temperature goes more than ten degrees — just ten one way or the other? Of what’s normal? You can die. Don’t seem like much room for variation.”

  And that right there is one of the many-splendored reasons I was fond of Mustard Abernathy: He was a philosophical type.

  We trudged on in silence for a while, watching the shadows stretch out like dark wolves leaning toward dinner, and he was the one to say what we were both thinking. “We better head on back.”

  Without lights or warmer clothes, we had to start back toward the dirt road where his truck was parked. Still, it felt a whole lot like giving up.

  He lowered his voice. “I don’t mean nothin’ by this, Flap — but why don’t you do your trick like you can do and get this little girl back home?”

  My trick. I didn’t really like to discuss it with anybody. It was doomed to be misunderstood. Dally had blabbed about it at the last family reunion. There’s absolutely nothing magical about it, but when you talk about it, I guess it just sounds like I’m pretty squarely off my rocker. It’s simple, really: I sit, I dream, and I see the missing pieces. I can find anything in the dream. Then all I’ve got to do is figure out the dream and bingo: success in the material world. It’s the thing that gives me an edge in the finding-things department. But …

  I shook my head. “I can’t just close my eyes and make it happen. Doesn’t work that way, pal.”

  “Oh.” I could hear him thinking. “How does it work?”

  “Like anything else. You’ve got to wander around, ask questions, gather information, seek for knowledge — then you can sit down in a nice quiet place and try to stand back while all that junk, like, assembles itself appropriately in your mind’s eye or what have you. See, there’s nothing hidden, ever. I know everything already. Just got to realize it.”

  He nodded. “A priori.”

  So blow me down, as they’d say in the funny papers. I had to take a pause on that one. Had to be blunt with the guy: “
Huh?”

  He shrugged it off. “I watch a lotta that Nova on the TV. A priori is like prior knowledge — far as I can figure.” He sniffed.

  How are you not in a position to love the guy? “Yeah, well … a priori knowledge notwithstanding, I’m saying you gather all the info, but you don’t know what it means until you quit thinking about it. That’s the trick, to quit thinking about it.”

  He grinned. “Shoot. I can do that.”

  “A lotta people think that, but it’s harder than you might imagine.”

  He walked on. “So you got to go, like, talk to the McDonners, other people that knows Ginny, an’ all?”

  “Right.”

  “So … you actually are a detective.”

  “Keep your voice down. I don’t usually like to say the word out loud.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t want anybody getting the idea that I’m a troublemaker — or mistaking me for a guy who knows what he’s doing.”

  We could see the truck. There were a few others pulled off the road close by. We could see a couple of other guys here and there giving up too. Mustard waved. One guy waved back.

  He kept his voice down very nicely. “Could you do it anyway? I don’t believe I can take the idea of lettin’ that little girl go.”

  Clearly in his voice was the new father, the one who couldn’t stand the idea that one day his own little girl might be lost in the woods, and all the men that were out to find her could be walking back toward their trucks on the edge of the wood, silent, failing, cold.

  I knew what he meant. I didn’t much care for the idea of the kid in the snow myself.

  We climbed into the truck. He cranked it up, but he didn’t move. At first I thought he was letting it warm up, but I finally realized he was waiting for an answer.

  I looked at his profile. “You really think I should do this? You know how some of these people hereabouts take to strangers asking questions. I like this jacket. I’d hate to get buckshot all in it. Makes it very hard to dry clean.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “And you know everybody.”