CHAPTER 41
By the time Graydon showed up in the morning, everybody already knew that Lydia Dale wouldn’t be there for breakfast.
A little after six, Taffy went into Lydia Dale’s bedroom, the same room she had shared with Mary Dell when they were children. She decided to sneak Rob Lee out of his crib, dress him, and feed him so Lydia Dale could sleep a little longer. But when she quietly opened the door to the bedroom, neither Lydia Dale nor the baby was there. Puzzled, Taffy went back to her room to look for Dutch, but he was missing as well.
Taffy was Methodist, born and bred, and had been raised to take a practical, measured and, well . . . methodical approach to religion. But Too Much was full of folks who took every word of the Bible absolutely literally, chapter and verse. She’d gone to school with plenty of children from those families and, as a child, had been fascinated, and sometimes frightened, by their interpretation of the scriptures. She remembered, in particular, what they’d told her about the Rapture and how, in the Last Days, the righteous would be miraculously spirited to heaven while the unrighteous would be left on earth to endure floods, famines, and other horrors.
Her pastor had never preached about the Rapture, not once in all the years she’d been going to church, but as her schoolmates had pointed out to her, it was right there in black and white, in the book of Matthew and in Luke: “Two men shall be in the field; the one will be taken and the other left behind.”
It had been a long time since Taffy had thought about this, but when she couldn’t find her daughter, grandbaby, and husband, it all came flooding back and a terrible thought occurred to Taffy—what if she’d been left behind?
She hadn’t always been the sort of woman she ought to be; she knew that. She was vain and covetous and often short-tempered with her husband. Dutch was a good man. She was lucky to have him. But . . . where was he? Where was everybody?
She scurried down the hall, her heart pounding in her ears as loudly as the kitten heels of her silver lamé bedroom slippers pounded against the Mexican tile floor. She opened the door of the catchall room-turned-bedroom that the children shared and was relieved to see two tousled heads resting on the pillows. She sighed and rested her hand over her palpitating heart.
Thank heaven! They were still there, both of them.
She suddenly felt very foolish. Of course they were still there. Where else would they be? How could she have let herself get so worked up? And Dutch must be around as well, Lydia Dale and the baby too. They couldn’t just have disappeared into thin air. Of course not.
Dutch, too impatient to wait for the coffeemaker to finish brewing, was standing in the kitchen with his cup positioned directly under the drip mechanism when he heard Taffy scream.
Leaving his cup behind, he ran toward the direction of her howls as quickly as was possible for a man missing half his left foot. Upon arriving in the living room he saw his wife, pink foam curlers still in her hair, sobbing as she stood in front of the display cabinet that held all of Lydia Dale’s old tiaras and pageant memorabilia. Or rather, that had previously held those items. The cabinet was empty.
His first thought was that they’d been robbed, but the television, the stereo, his autographed picture of Tom Landry, legendary head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, and everything else of value was still there.
Why would anybody steal all of the girls’ old pageant memorabilia? Or almost all of it? There were two tiaras left in the case, both of which belonged to Mary Dell, the only two crowns she’d ever brought home during her brief career as a beauty queen.
Dutch was about to return to the kitchen to phone the sheriff but was interrupted in his errand when Taffy emitted an even louder wave of sobbing and ran off toward Lydia Dale’s bedroom. He hobbled along behind as quick as he could, nearly stumbling when his ears were pierced by another shriek from Taffy.
“They’re gone! All gone!”
Taffy stood at the door of the cedar closet, the one she’d had him build specifically to hold the girls’ old pageant dresses. The gowns were missing—all except those few that had belonged to Mary Dell.
Taffy spun around to face him, tears in her eyes. “I don’t understand,” she said weakly. “Who would do such a thing? Lydia Dale is gone, the baby too. Where could they be?”
Dutch scratched the stubble on his still-unshaved chin, just as baffled as his bride. Taffy’s eyes grew wide with fright as a new possibility occurred to her.
“Oh, Dutch! Oh, my gosh . . . what if they’ve been kidnapped! What if someone snuck in here in the middle of the night and kidnapped them?”
Dutch looked at the window, closed tight to keep the air-conditioning in. No one had tampered with it. And when he’d let out the cat a few minutes before, the door was still locked.
“Honey,” he said. “Calm down. Our room is right next door. If somebody had broken in, we’d have heard it. There has to be some explanation.”
“Then what is it?” Taffy’s voice was high and shrill, verging on hysterical. “Where could they be? And why would their pageant treasures be missing?”
“I don’t know,” Dutch said helplessly, “but there must be—”
The sound of Graydon’s voice, coming from the kitchen and sounding somewhat urgent, cut Dutch off in mid-sentence. He headed for the kitchen with Taffy on his heels and found Graydon on his knees, using an enormous wad of paper towels to mop a pool of hot coffee from the linoleum.
“Shoot!” Dutch exclaimed, then pulled another bunch of towels from the roll and joined Graydon on the floor. “I ran off and left the cup under there when Taffy started hollering. Forgot all about it.”
“Hollering about what?”
“Lydia Dale and Rob Lee,” Taffy said in a panicked voice. “Somebody kidnapped them! And the dresses, the tiaras . . . all Lydia Dale’s pageant treasures. They’re all missing. Will you two forget about the coffee? We’ve got to call the sheriff right now!”
Graydon smiled and sat up on his haunches, the wet brown paper towels still in hand.
“You don’t need to do that, Miss Taffy. Lydia Dale got up early to run some errands. She hopes to be back by supper but wants you to go ahead and eat without her if she’s not. She asked me to tell you when I saw you at breakfast.”
“Errands?” Taffy sniffled and put her hands on her hips, her fright replaced by irritation. “She got up to run errands in the middle of the night and won’t be back until supper? And she took all her pageant treasures with her? Why?”
“She didn’t say, just that she’d be back tonight and to tell you not to worry.”
Taffy threw her hands up in the air. “Oh, she did, did she?”
Taffy delayed serving until eight, then she fed the children and sent them to bed. But in spite of what Graydon said, Taffy was worried. Everyone was. They assembled in the kitchen so they could worry together and speculate as to what could explain this very strange behavior on the part of Lydia Dale.
“It’s just not like her,” Taffy said, passing a platter of barbecued ribs down the table. “The last time she did something like this was when she ran off and got married. You don’t think . . .”
“Of course not,” Mary Dell said, dismissing the suggestion with a wave of her hand. “That’s the last thing on her mind. She’s not interested in finding another husband, now or ever. She told me so.”
Graydon choked on the lemonade he’d been drinking. Dutch gave him a look, then started pounding him on the back.
“You all right?”
Graydon nodded, then coughed. “Fine, thanks. Swallowed wrong.”