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COUSIN NANCY REMEMBERS

That Saturday was a day I’ll always remember. I’d just closed the post office and was pulling down the shades when that witch drove by going hellbent. Normally I wouldn’t have cared, but she had Summer with her and they were heading out of town.

Curious, I thought. Except for last week when she’d taken Summer off to church, I didn’t remember that child having a ride in her stepmama’s precious Chevrolet in a coon’s age. Not even when it was raining or snowing and Summer had to slog her way up the hill to go to school and back down again to go home, poor mite.

The car was a dark green, like sludge in water near a coal mine, and I’ve never liked that color or make of car since.

I wouldn’t have thought any more of it, excepting Summer didn’t drive back with her when she returned. I saw that plain as plain. And when had that woman ever left Summer off with friend or foe excepting me, and even then she did it begrudgingly.

In fact, it turned out Summer didn’t come home that night or the next—her teacher told me some story about her taking sick and not being to school for a full week, but she hadn’t looked sick in the car. And she wasn’t at home being cared for. I knew because the next day after church, I went by the house when Summer’s stepmama was out, peered in the windows since I still refused to go inside. Besides, it wouldn’t have been polite. And the door was locked tight. From the outside.

Except for seeing the top of Lem’s head as he dozed in his chair, I couldn’t spot a soul in the house. I looked in every single window. I reported this to the police. It took them days to believe me, over another week to check it out. Not that I’d ever pestered the police before. But the chief took me for an addled widow of a certain age. Mind you, I’m barely twenty-nine. Well, thirty-three on a bad day.

“She’s my goddaughter,” I said in exasperation. “She’s not thirteen yet. Not for another two months.”

It didn’t help that I called her stepmama a witch. Or that the chief, Charlie Hatfield, who’d been in my class in school and was a fat little oinker then as now, said, “Nan, everybody knows you’ve always been sweet on Lem . . .”

As if that mattered at all when a child is missing.

Then he smiled conspiratorially at me, which made his cheeks plump up even more and his eyes squint so tight, they became like slits. He looked right ready for the slop bucket, did Charlie. “Some girls run off to be with a boy when they’re thirteen,” he said, “and there ain’t a law in our whole state says we have to try and get her back.”

“She doesn’t know any boys,” I told him.

“Of course she does,” he retorted, ending the conversation.